If you find yourself shaking your head at this point,
thinking, "Your Wicca is too hard, too distant, too impersonal for me,"
don't despair. Real Wicca has always been, and must continue in the
21st Century and beyond to be, a path with heart, as famed Yaqui Indian
sorcerer Don Juan Matus labeled the magickal path in the books of Carlos
Castaneda.
The Great Goddess of Wicca, in all Her distant
glory, is surely an object of tremendous intel-lectual stimulation.
It literally "blows our minds" to attempt to comprehend Her, as we have
done so far in this treatise. But human beings are not designed to
be moved by purely intellectual concepts, however lofty. We are not
computers. We are not Vulcans or the robots of science fiction.
We are living cells within the body of the living Earth, blessed to be
built from earthy flesh and blood and bone and gristle, of fiery hungers,
lusts and passions, turbulent swirling rivers of emotions, held together
by the effervescent golden glow of spirit.
The "air" of intellect is in us, yes, air being
the elemental ruler of thought, language and written expression, and we
must, of course, skillfully apply our rational minds to "reading the map"
of the journey that lies before us, to understanding the course of the
path of spiritual evolution we, as Wiccans, are called to follow.
But only love can spur us to set out upon that path with vigor and courage,
and only love will keep our feet squarely on that path when it intersects
with life's more difficult lessons.
It is no better to embrace thought over feeling
in the course of our Wiccan journey than it is to seek sky at the expense
of Earth. Like our bodies and minds, our emotions are a gift from
the Goddess, an accurate reflection within us of Her Divine Being, and
they reveal as much or more to us about Her Nature than our reasoning minds
will likely ever grasp. For we human beings, as passionately alive
as we are, as deeply emotional as our experience of life on Earth is, there
can be no other way. In the course of our evolution toward union
with Her, we reach for the Goddess from the deepest yearning of our hearts,
or we do not reach for Her at all.
But isn't She distant? Incomprehensible?
Remember the "cosmic web" The Great Goddess of
Wicca, the Cosmic Universal Goddess in Her totality, may well be directly
incompre-hensible from the far corner of that web we call home. But
however tiny our role in Her life and evolution, we are, each one of us,
individually and all of Humanity as a whole, inextricably linked with Her.
We are inside Her body, Her mind, Her spirit. We are cells within
the body of the Earth, who is a cell in the body of the Milky Way Galaxy,
who is itself a cell within the Great Goddess of Wicca.
So, like a hologram, in which every fragment of
a photographic image contains enough information to reconstruct the whole
picture, or the DNA inside our own bodies, where each cell contains the
full coding of our being, we each contain a full imprint of the Great Cosmic
Goddess of Wicca within us. We may presently be stuck trying to "read"
that imprint with the underdeveloped perceptual equipment imposed on us
by our distant location from Her in the cosmic web, and our own lack of
psychic development, which is a handicap we can, with work, overcome, but
we can rest assured that it is there, that She is with us, within us all.
And, since we are living cells within cells within
the universe that is Her body, She can rest assured that we are with Her,
as well. She is within us, and we are within Her. Every individual
living being in all of the cosmos and the Great Goddess of Wicca are personally
coiled together at all times, as intimately joined as a mother and her
nursing baby, the child wholly cradled in its mother's arms, tucked tight
against her body, the mother's DNA in the baby's every cell, her blood
in its veins, its belly filled with her milk. Separate, yet one,
like the Taoist Yin Yang, in which the heart of the white teardrop is black,
and the heart of the black is white, forming together one inseparable circle.
Each contains the other. This is our relationship with the Great Goddess
at every moment of our lives, whether we are consciously aware of that
relationship or not. Becoming aware of and participating consciously
in the benefits of this loving relation-ship is one of the chief goals
and rewards of living a Wiccan life.
But we have slipped once again into the realm of
metaphor, painting an emotional picture of our relationship with the Goddess
by comparing it to memories stored deep inside our own minds of our early
experiences with our real human mothers7. There is nothing wrong
with this approach the truth revealed through emotional exploration of
Her Nature is every bit as valid and important as the intellectual quest.
Both intellectual and emotional exploration is
necessary in order to achieve real understanding of the Goddess, or anything
else, for that matter. But did you notice the difference in the two
approaches? When we considered the Great Goddess intellectually,
we divined truths about a being "out there" somewhere, separate from us.
We saw where connections must surely lie, if our reasoning is correct,
but those connections were more than a bit theoretical, and hard to grasp
as concretely real. But when we turned our emotional faculties on
that very same being, we immediately uncovered a powerful relationship
connecting us to Her, personally, across all the great physical and intellectual
gulf between us.
Human beings require relationships, of each other,
and of the Divine. We will happily, and non-committally, chase pretty
thoughts all day long, but for us to invest ourselves in anyone or anything,
we justly demand, as a part of the bargain, the right to love and to be
loved by the object of our commitment in return. All human commitment,
whether it be to another human being, to a religion or to Deity in any
form, is by definition a deeply emotional and personal act.
Historically, and currently, in most of our lives,
the "Holographic Imprint Goddess" inside each of us, though closer to our
hearts, remains a bit too distant, too conceptual a notion to really move
most of us to commitment. It's a lovely thought, but to invest our-selves
in Wicca, to declare ourselves honest-to-Goddess goddess worship-pers,
we demand reciprocal, loving relationships with visceral, visible, fleshy
goddesses, goddesses like ourselves, with feelings we can share, with beauty
and strength we can admire, motivations we can recognize, advice we can
trust. We want powerful "human" goddesses we can talk to, who understand
our needs, desires, frustrations and joys, and who have the power to influence
our world and personal circumstances for the better.
Great Cosmic Goddesses, super-conscious planetary
beings and Holographic Imminent Imprint Goddesses are all fine and dandy,
from an intellectual perspective, and archetypal mother memories feel great,
for sure, but when it comes to making a commitment, to finally one day
casting that circle and dedicating ourselves for life to the Wiccan religion,
we don't want to get stuck invoking nameless conceptual deities to witness
our resolve.
We want goddesses with names. We want goddesses
with faces. We want goddesses who look and act like us.
This is an ancient and universally human desire,
one arising not out of any deficit in our characters or some latent human
narcissism, but rather directly out of Her imminent imprint within us.
Our desire to see Her, to invoke Her by name, to see Her in ourselves and
ourselves in Her is a direct microcosmic reflection of Her macrocosmic
desire (As Above, So Below) to know us personally, individually, one-on
one, by name. Our yearning for personal connection with Her is proof
of Her parallel longing for communion with us, and in our mutual yearning
is revealed a mechanism buried deep within Nature itself by which that
connection is made possible in the real, physical world. She longs
for us as we long for Her, and it is a magickal truth inherent in both
of our natures that we enjoy the power to meet halfway, to intertwine our
mutual desires and establish relationship through the energetic mech-anism
of goddess-forms.
The following is an expert from Lady Maeve Rhea's
profound little book, "Summoning Forth Wiccan Gods and Goddesses"8
Imagine that Divinity is an infinite
incomp-rehensible jewel with an infinite number of facets through which
the energy of the Divine is refracted in innumerable ways. In the
course of human existence, human beings come into contact with aspects
of life that manifest Divinity; its creative power, wisdom, caring.
Whether or not they are conscious of it, humans are effected by, and effect,
this Divine energy. Then they shape the energy according to their
needs hunting, healing, fertility and child-birth, coming of age, growing
old, and finally death all the things that are basic to human life...
... The powers of the natural
universe the sun, moon and stars, the wind and rain, the ice and the
Sea were also made comprehensible by being shaped into gods. For
while Divinity is not knowable, the forms placed on the Divine facets are
knowable, and through knowledge comes under-standing, growth, healing and
self-control...
... All of these processes can
be better understood and dealt with if there is a way to tap into the Divine
energy behind them. Accordingly, what I mean by a God[dess]-Form
is the humanly made and defined shape through which a particular aspect
of Divinity is made comprehensible to the human mind...
That goddess-forms, or their masculine count-erpart,
god-forms, are "... the humanly made and defined shape through which a
particular aspect of Divinity is made comprehensible to the human mind..."
should not be mistaken to imply that the specific forms in question are
unreal, ineffective, illusory, a self-deception or any of the other common
reductionist epithets Wicca's critics hurl toward the goddesses we adore.
To think in this way is to dramatically underestimate the power of both
human beings and the Great Goddess of Wicca.
Goddess-forms become real because She who is so
distant in Her fullness moves willingly to inhabit and speak through the
fragmentary forms we create to reflect Her many aspects, just as an actor
in an ancient Greek drama might bring to life a specific god or goddess
by speaking through a finely-crafted mask. A goddess-form that survives
the test of time9 can be seen as a carefully-crafted perfect vehicle, chosen
as much by the Great Goddess as by human beings, for expressing a particular
fragmentary facet of the Great Goddess's personality, for bridging the
gap between the Goddess's desire to share Herself with and know us personally,
and our equivalent yearning for conscious communion with Her. In
one sense, all the goddess and god-forms, taken together, form a kind of
living language in which She speaks to us, and through which we can com-municate
with Her.10 But on the level of personal experience, goddess and
god-forms are concretely real entities, with distinct personalities, powers,
areas of expertise and concern, quirks of character, etc. In the practice
of Wiccan magick, these entities are called egregores. An egregore
is a human projection onto the Divine that, over time, becomes real.
It is a kind of living answered prayer.
There is a need among the People. Someone
imagines a goddess-form that successfully addresses the need, and that
strongly appeals to the People among whom she is called to manifest.
Perhaps she is based on a cultural heroine, a real woman who once lived
in the flesh. Perhaps she emerges from a dream. Perhaps she
is the creation of one person's imagination. Her source is irrelevant
it's the process, and what it leads to, that matters. The goddess-form
is presented to the People. Stories are told of her exploits, fantasies
that develop into a full blown myth-ology. People hearing the stories
are inspired to devotion, and the egregore begins to take real shape in
the astral realm. Enthusiasm builds for the new Goddess. The
People love her. More and more personal psychic energy, desire, devotion
and love are invested into her being. Temples are built, rituals
scripted...
If this looping of human psychic and emotional
energy into the egregore continues for long enough and with sufficient
intensity, the new goddess-form eventually reaches a stage of development
in which She so accurately reflects the needed fragmentary aspect of the
Great Goddess, or of lesser goddesses within the cosmic web, that She becomes
inhabitable, a worthy vessel to contain and reflect a true aspect of the
Great Goddess of Wicca. When that occurs, a sliver of the Great Goddess's
divine energy enters the egregore like fingers sliding down into a glove,
and the new goddess-form takes true and real life. We are not talking
mere puppetry here whatever the Great Goddess of Wicca lends Her energy
to becomes real. A new and living God-dess is born.
This should be understood as a two-directional,
wholly mutual process. Using the metaphor of goddess-forms as language,
the creation of a new goddess-form is better viewed as a conversation than
a human monologue to which the Great Goddess eventually responds.
As blatantly human as most pagan goddesses and gods are portrayed to be
in their appearance and behavior, by no means are they creations of our
human minds, hearts or imaginations alone. She is imminently present
and participating at every stage of the process at the recognition of
the need, in the human visionary's first imaging of the egregore, in the
creation and telling of stories, etc. working as hard as the humans involved
to ensure that the final representation of the aspect of Her being that
is being called forth mirrors Her true reality as accurately as possible.