Earth-centered spirituality honors as sacred this circular pattern of death to life to death and life again. Death is not a punishment from the G.o.ddess: it is instead the culmination of a process that endlessly repeats itself on the smallest and largest scales. Paradoxically, the power of the universe that is essentially being is also in constant flux. Her patterns of light are born and disappear over the course of a day; She moves from evening to night, from dawn to morning. The baby becomes a boy; the girl begins to menstruate; the friend does not come through; the career shift is made; we lose the fantasy and adapt to the reality.
The G.o.ddess"s one constant is change. Her lore mythologizes Her perennial shape shifting in wonderful ways. When She is portrayed as the Sun, Her changes can be understood as the yearly changes that send us deep into winter caves and find us dancing on summer mountains. When She is the Moon, she is understood as continuously merging into different phases of Herself: She is New and Waxing large; She is Full; and She is Waning and Dark. As the Moon, She has three faces: Maiden, Mother, Crone.
As the New and Waxing Moon, She is Maiden or Virgin. Her territory is Herself. She strides the night of Her soul free and clear of other than self-commitment. Even when She is relational and s.e.xual with others, Her knowing comes from the pool She gazes into alone. The Virgin turns corners and travels new paths. She fiercely protects the child. The Virgin is Creator. Out of nothingness, She brings forth Herself. This is the time for wishes to take the form of affirmations and for affirmations to take action.
As the Full Moon, She is Mother, Preserver, Realizer; Her territory is transition. She is Keeper of the Mundane. Unlike the focused attention of the Virgin, the Mother"s attention is diffuse and contains the whole picture. She is knitting, laughing, talking, and baking all at once. She is abundance. She is the luminous center of the Cycle that has begun in nothing and will end in darkness. This is the time for stock taking, stock making, for rejoicing, feasting, and being in the complexity of the webs of our lives.
As the Old One, as the Waning Moon, She is the Crone, the Ancient Ender. She has birthed and buried the loves of Her heart; She has killed what needed killing. She has sat with the doomed and the usual and can let the child sob on Her lap. She tells the truth; She is the Undertaker of Dreams; disillusion is Her realm. Now is the time to let it come apart, to let go of what we once were sure we could not live without.
Everything on Earth instructs us about Her everlasting, cyclical change. We take in through our mouths and let go through our a.n.u.ses, over and over again. Our hormones peak and drop daily and monthly, manifesting energy levels and moods. Our relationships ebb and flow.
Sometimes we are productive and inspired; sometimes we lie tiny and fallow. Our gardens poke up enchantingly; they fill rebelliously with weeds;
they fashion full plants for our tables; they lie rotting and dense until we begin again. Days pa.s.s in sets of seven; months curve around us and turn into years. Workplaces shift personnel, customers, products; establishments become memories and certainties only photographs. The once young are now elders; the once little are now feeding and diapering their own. Waves of politics come and go.
Departures, tornadoes, thefts, and divorces smash our hopes, undo our routines, leave us stunned, panting, and simple to begin again.
Anyone who has chanted knows that chanting past the point of boredom deepens the imprint and power of this kind of music making. Anyone who has stared from the edge of a cliff at the waves below knows the peace that comes with endless crashings and silences. How comforted we humans are with the table set the same way for the holiday, the story told for the twentieth time, the line quadrupled in the poem. Our deepest rhythms are cyclical and repet.i.tive. In G.o.ddess spirituality, we view these returns as rhythms of the G.o.ddess. We call the Cycle sacred. Although our culture has great difficulty honoring death, depression, and despair, we humans pa.s.s our lives unable to avoid the endings that make way for beginnings. As we mature and deepen, we learn to hold the completions as sacred as the starts.
We humans are able finally to accept the endings in the context of the Cycle. Our rituals therefore are circular: we sit in circles, we create beginnings, middles, and ends, and we promise each other we will meet again. Like the ancients, we set our rituals in the context of the cyclical year. As far away as we live from the beat of agricultural life, G.o.ddess worshipers can still comprehend at least eight points in the turning of the Great Wheel of Life. Outside and inside, our year begins, like Life itself, in the dark. In the northern hemisphere, Halloween (October 31/November 1) is our New Year.
Like a seed in the ground or a fetus in the womb, our hope and joy are born of the dark. At New Year the veil is very thin between what has been and what will be in our lives. Winter Solstice (December 21) heralds light"s birth; inside our caves we nurture ourselves. At Candlemas (February 1), we emerge from our caves carrying the lights of the early blossoms and the plans we are making. Spring Equinox (March 21) honors the sa.s.sy and confusing p.u.b.erties of our projects and ourselves. Beltaine (May 1) couples us and all things with the force of Life. At Summer Solstice (June 21), the longest and the strongest of the light, we are overflowing with concerted effort. On Lammas Day (August 1), even we supermarket customers take the time to honor the abundant fruits of the farmer"s labor and our own. At Fall Equinox (September 21), we watch the yellow ness of the light turn milky in the cooling air. It is time for self-a.s.sessment. We are beginning to move into the dark that will start the Cycle once more.
Nothing we plan, say, or do has any effect on these great changes.
Earth turns always, travels Her orbit, and carries us with Her. Perhaps we singing, moving, meditating creatures are Earth"s consciousness.
Perhaps it is through the emotional perceptions and expression of Her humans that She registers Her awesome wonder and sorrow. As keeper of Her sacredness, we worship Her great process out of which we come and to which always we return.
Danu (DAN-oo) The Earth (Ireland) Introduction
Despite increasing industrialization, today"s Ireland is famed for her still-told stories of fairy mounds and little people in the gra.s.s.
Today"s tales are Earth-respecting remnants of the sagas of human-sized, magically powered queens, kings, heroes, and heroines that preceded them. These stories, in turn, recapitulate the even older tales when G.o.ddesses and G.o.ds, representing the powers of Earth, Water, Fire, and Air, peopled the world. The tellers of those ancient stories called themselves the Tuatha De Danaan, or the "Tribe of the G.o.ddess Danu." The Irish Danu, Danuna, or Dana shared Her name with forms of the Great Mother in cultures around the world, such as the Danes and the biblical Danites (called "serpents" by writers of the Old Testament). The Russians called Her Dennitsa (see the story of the Zoryas); the cla.s.sical Greeks named Her Danae; the Hebrews Dinah; and the Babylonians called Her Danu or Dunnu.
Although the ancient Tuatha De Danaan named the Earth G.o.ddess as the very source of their lives, Danu is rarely mentioned by today"s authors trying to piece together the myths from that time. Instead, most stories told today emphasize the role of Dagdu, the Sun G.o.d. A traveler to County Meath in Ireland can, for example, visit Newgrange, a beautifully preserved tomb built in the form of an underground temple in 3000 B.C.E. or five hundred years before the erection of the pyramids. The entrance stones are inscribed with giant spirals, and the damp, cool pa.s.sageway to the center is now rigged electrically to expose spirals and inverted triangles etched on the inner walls. The guide also uses an electric light to reenact the nearly miraculous once-a-year flooding of the dark center (through the window in the roof) with the light of the rising Sun on the morning of the Winter Solstice. The sense of being in a womb-like place is overwhelming. The literature provided to Newgrange visitors, however, fails to note this obvious reality. Instead, it first praises the high degree of architectural, engineering, and artistic skill displayed by this ancient crop-raising people and carefully notes the measurements and placement of roof box chambers, great circle, and surrounding standing stones of the Great Mound. The pamphlet"s author then declares that Newgrange is a monument to "no less a personage than the chief of all the G.o.ds," Dagdu the Sun.
I wrote the story of Danu the Earth after a moving visit to this underground temple. Unlike the pamphlet"s author, I had to ask myself why a people would build a monument to the Sun inside the Earth in such a way as to take the light of the Sun into its depths for only minutes each year.
I was further inspired by my visit to the bowels of Dublin"s museum in which are gathered a dozen or so of what curators call "sheila-na-gigs." Sheila-na-gigs are stone figures of squatting women displaying their sometimes red-stained v.u.l.v.as. As late as the Middle Ages, these figures were carved above church entry ways Both the churches and their startling guardians were built by medieval G.o.ddess-worshiping villagers in the process of capitulating to the Christian religion.
Danu, I have no doubt, was a figure much like the far more modern sheila-na-gigs, who almost certainly represented the womb and tomb as the single point at which meet life and death in the Cycle of the Great Mother.
In Danu"s story, I hope to spiral through time to the very center of our own stories. It is the story of Danu"s rilling the world with Her rhythm, that She might surge always in the blood tides of our bodies and hearts.
The Gift of Rhythm and Blood At the beginning of the beginning, the G.o.ddess Danu glittered tiny as a fairy in the mists. You"d scarce have seen Her, even had you been there, for the swirl of milky gray about Her gossamer self. But Danu was there, sure as we"re here: a glistening globe of possibility at the start of it all.
It was Danu"s dream time then. Asleep, Her thoughts quivered and swelled. Awake, She held Her face in Her hands, wondering and humming, lost in Her own stillness. It may well have been the dreams that caused the growing. The dreams trickled at first and then flooded in the pearly dark place between sleeping and waking, where time is like water and nothing is impossible. But whether it came from the dreaming or something else, Danu the G.o.ddess grew. Oh, it surprised Her how She grew!
It was Her legs at first. She extended them to relieve their aching and splayed Her toes. Somehow those spread toes came to hold whole bays between their peninsular lengths, and Her limbs stretched lopingly long. Hard and round and luscious they"d become with knees and thighs fair like mountains, they were so huge. Her arms shot from their sockets and came to end in gigantic slender-fingered hands in which She could suddenly see the streams and creeks of veins. The once plump little wrists took on the definition of hills and, oh! the down of Her forearms resembled meadows more than anything. Her neck, too, had lost its cushion and got a swivel to match the capacity of Her stride.
How shy this Danu, how astounded! How full of Her change She was, once wee as an idea and now enormous as the world. She had flitted once, effortlessly. Now Her movements felt tremendous and heavy. Danu mused, twirling absently a tuft of hair behind Her ear. Then She heaved Herself into the sleep of exhaustion, only to wake to even more growing.
Danu opened Her eyes to the sight of dark green sprouts on the soft triangle below Her navel. Gingerly, She fingered these spiky curling firs and then delighted Herself when they didn"t fall away. More sprang up, in the valleys under Her arms and on the lush three-sided range between Her legs, until those sweet places were most forested with trees.
And then, before She slept again, Danu"s b.r.e.a.s.t.s grew. Gone were the days when She could arch Her chest and describe a smooth bridge between belly and neck! Now that arch was soft and spilling as twin mountains tipped by ranunculi and grazed by sheep! Danu touched a ranunculus and bit Her lower lip in Her teeth.
When Danu plunged again into sleep, She dreamed this time of a great ball of fire in the sky that splintered the mists around Her as the music of a pipe and drum fill a silence. When She awoke, Her haunches felt sure and deep and She found a river of blood flowing between Her legs. Danu tasted the rosy wetness in wonder and turned Her eyes to the sky. Immediately She was sugared with a yellow warmth, and the skin of Her shoulders expanded with pleasure.
"You"re My dream!" She cried out, and Her eyes glinted in the light.
"I"m Your dream," a voice agreed.
"I am Dagdu the Sun."
Danu cast down Her eyes, and Her smile dazzled when She turned them up again.
"Do stay, Dagdu the Sun," said Danu the Earth.
"I can"t tell You how good You feel!"
"Oh, I will stay, lovely green, brown, and red Lady!" said the voice.
"I will stay."
Danu sighed and turned over. Dagdu the Sun broke all the way through the mists and beat down on the body of the G.o.ddess. She fell asleep there in the heat. Who knows how long She slept, but when She awoke this time, Dagdu was gone. Danu sat up and caught up the back of Her hair in Her hand. She looked at the silvery clouds and remembered Dagdu"s delicious warmth. Then She looked down and put Her hand on the place where the river of blood had come. How soft and good it felt there! The wetness lay in a pool beside Her, but it had ceased to flow. She moved Her hand up to the wings of Her pelvis and then dipped them again to the cave between Her legs. For surely that"s what She felt: a deep, wet cavern that nestled in the protection of the two mountains of Her bones.
How pleased Danu was to see Her Dagdu again! For in His absence, She"d begun to think of Him that way as Her Dagdu, Her wonderful Sun whose light would shine especially for Her delight. Not far from the truth, either, that way of thinking, for it happened that Dagdu Himself came to think never so clearly as when He imagined His Danu and felt never so free as when He held Her in His arms. For that"s what became of the friendship of Earth and Sun. They talked to each other; they traced each other"s noses and bit each other"s palms. They made each other shout with laughter. One day Danu told Dagdu about the dark, secret place under Her forests. Dagdu"s voice was tender when He asked if He could look inside.
It was Dagdu who told Her about the smooth, round globe at the back of Her cave that changed again and again from pale mauve to the color of wine. For Danu did finally invite Dagdu to flood Her dark with His light, and it was once in a reverie that followed a time when They had held each other in this way that Danu had Her dream of making animals and people. She awoke flushed and intense with excitement. Dagdu kissed the ridge of Her cheek when She told Him and plucked away the damp tendril of hair that clung to Her forehead.
"It"s a wonderful dream," He said.
On the evening of the day Danu followed Her dream and formed animals and people of the soft Earth of Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and the pool of blood beside Her, Dagdu told Her that She"d never looked so beautiful.
"When You pursed Your lips up like that and set the people moving with Your breath! Hmmmm! The scent of You, Danu! You are amazing," He said, and nestled His head in Her neck. The sky grew soft and pink around that comely couple while They watched the animals mew and burrow for cover and the humans sing tunes and smear their mouths purple with currants.
Perhaps an eon pa.s.sed before Danu and Dagdu had the argument. Couples will argue, you know, much as they may also please each other, for they are not one but two beings and so they are bound to see and feel things differently. But isn"t it true that the argument that makes one so cross at the time can, not so much later, be the inspiration for wonderful change? It was certainly that way with the argument of Danu and Dagdu, for out of Their misunderstanding came the very rhythm of our world.
Danu had been dreaming again, asleep in Dagdu"s embrace. She jerked awake suddenly one night, shaking with the cracked pieces of a nightmare inside Her.
"Dagdu!" Danu"s voice was sharp.
"Hmmmm." Dagdu"s voice was dim with sleep.
"Dagdu. I dreamed that My people forget Me." The G.o.d heard the pellets of fear in Danu"s voice. He lay His finger on Her lips and made hushing noises while He rocked Her against Him.
Danu may have returned to sleep, but She spoke urgently again about the dream in the morning. Dagdu was languid and toyed with Her little finger as She talked.
"What was it, darling?" He said.
Danu couldn"t remember the images. She just knew it was a terrible feeling of dread She had and this knowing that Her people had forgotten Her.
"Darling, they"re not going to forget You!" Dagdu said soothingly.