In order to address the questions of commun-ication
and intimacy with Her, however, we must now step out of metaphorical mode,
and return concretely to the issue that launched Chapter I of this book
– Wicca as Earth Religion. I stand by my assessment that the Wiccan
religion is, at its core, a Nature religion, and as such, is truly cosmic
in scope. In daily practice, however, it is, indeed, the dynamic
personality, seasonal cycles and raw natural power of the physical Earth
– and Her daughter, the Moon – that dominates the human Wiccan practitioner's
quest for communication and intimacy with the Divine.
We may intellectually entertain the notion of the
Great Goddess on the grand cosmic scale we have discussed thus far, but
it is only life on Earth that most of us know experientially. When
human beings think, "Nature," and thus, the Goddess, we most "naturally"
think of the grandeur of the living Earth, of wind and rain, of forests
and fields, of snow-capped mountains, vast oceans, lightning dancing on
rivers and full moons crowning clear, starry skies. These are the
images of Nature that move us. Nature as embodied by the Earth is
the Nature in which our species has evolved, into which we, as individuals,
were granted life and being, whose living processes we most directly and
intimately serve, and toward which we are most directly genetically program-med
to respond with religious feelings of awe, love, longing, gratitude, etc.
To meaningfully bridge the gap between the Earth
and the Great Goddess in Her cosmic aspect, we must be able to concretely
locate and understand the physical Earth, and its role in the greater scheme
of reality, in the life of All That Is.
Many Wiccans never take this step, successful-ly
and satisfyingly practicing the Wiccan religion as exactly what I have
insisted it is not – an Earth Religion only, with no greater cosmic component.
This is possible because the living Earth, as a cell within the body of
the Great Cosmic Goddess, reflects Her Divine Essence, Consciousness and
Being just as we do (As Above, So Below), but on a scale so much higher
than we exemplify ourselves that it is, indeed, tempting to establish an
intimate relationship with the living Earth and stop there. But it
is only when we make the leap to the cosmic scale, and understand how the
life of the Earth fits into the larger cosmic picture, that the true path
to communication and intimacy with the Great Goddess, and of our own spiritual
evolution toward eventual union with Her, is revealed.
The living Earth, made up as it is of tectonic
plates and oceans and continents and mountains and jungles and forests
and grassy plains and animals and humans and all sorts of things work-ing
together exactly as do the quarks and atoms and molecules and cells and
organs within the bodies of the creatures from which it is made, has a
level of conscious awareness as much higher than our human consciousness
as our conscious awareness is from that of the individual cells within
our own bodies. The Earth is a living, thinking, feeling, and, in
comparison to us, super-conscious being. Wiccan teaching and just
about everybody's personal experience tells us that that being has gender,
and that She is female. The Earth is a Goddess, the Goddess with
whom we human beings are most intimately involved on a daily basis.
She is not the Great Goddess of Wicca. She reflects the Great Goddess
of Wicca as much as do all female-gendered super-conscious planetary beings
(As Above, So Below), but no more so. From our vantage point,
however, Her immediacy is compelling. The living Earth is our physical
and spiritual Mother, the Goddess most accessible to us, in whom we literally
live and move and have our being. Our fates as individ-uals and as
a species are so intimately intertwined with Hers as to be inseparable.
We seek communion with Cosmic Deity while ignoring
the Divinity of the Earth at our own peril. This is exactly the problem
with the Middle Eastern religions so prevalent in our world today – they
have focused their affections on some far away cosmic deity, while cursing
the living Earth beneath their feet. In imagining some distant Heavenly
Father they can appeal to, they find justification for the rape and pillaging
of the physical mother that gave the human species birth, and that has
never, no matter how viciously She has been attacked by Humankind, abandoned
us. Just about everything bad you can think of in contemporary Western
culture is a direct result of this Middle Eastern religious thinking, and
has its origins in this fundamental schism, in the embrac-ing of sky over
Earth, of masculine over feminine, and the unparalleled hubris of trying
to jump straight to the top of the ladder of being while heaping unrepentant
fear, hatred and contempt on all of the creatures, however conscious, wise
or powerful, between here and the top.
In Wicca, all planets and moons and suns and the
galaxies they make up like cells within a body are recognized to be living,
intelligent beings. If the Earth is a living, super-conscious being,
and few Wiccans would argue otherwise, then there is no reason to assume
that Mars, Pluto, Alpha Centauri and the Milky Way Galaxy are not.6 In
theory, at each "quantum leap" in perspective – from cell to human being,
human being to planet, planet to solar system, solar system to galaxy,
galaxy to universe – the quality of consciousness increases exponentially,
so that, by the time you get to the Great Cosmic Goddess, you find a being
of such awesome intelligence, compassion, wisdom and power that She is
beyond ordinary human comprehension. The Great Goddess is, in Her
fullness, just too distant, too far outside the scope of our grandest human
categories of under-standing to approach directly. We do not commune
one-on-one with Her as we do every day with the personal and approachable
super-conscious intelligence of the Earth. Our path leading toward union
with the Great Goddess of Wicca is not one of projection – not physically,
mentally, astrally or otherwise. We can surely catch glimpses of
Her via these methods, but none of these paths lead to union with Her in
any permanent way. Our path toward final union with the Great Goddess
is, rather, one of slow spiritual evolution, of respect, love and ever-growing
communion with all of Her fragmentary reflections in the Natural world,
and of a gradual salmon-like return up the ladder of being.