I stated previously that the living Earth, the super-conscious
planetary being within whose body we live and move and have our being,
is a Goddess not the Great Cosmic Goddess of Wicca, but a Goddess nonetheless.
Let me rephrase that now to define her as a Goddess to us. I seriously
doubt that the Earth thinks of Herself as a Goddess, any more than you
or I could reasonably refer to ourselves as gods or goddesses, even though
the cells and organs in our bodies might well experience us that way, without
our being rightly diagnosed as megalo-maniacs. But in the case of
our human relationship to the living Earth, Her cycles and seasons, Her
unfailing support of all life evolving within Her body, and of the super-human
majesty of Her consciousness, intelligence, com-passion and power, there's
just no other word in our human vocabulary that even comes close to describing
how we experience Her. She certainly seems "Divine" from our perspective.
In fact, pretty much all of the attributes and
character traits we categorize as "Divine" and have ascribed to just about
every goddess and god form you can think of are really projected aspects
or fragmentary reflections of the living Earth's power, and not, strictly
speaking, of that of the Great Cosmic Goddess of Wicca. Birth, life,
death, rebirth, creativity, illness and healing, sex, love, growth, war,
peace, anger, forgiveness, balance, chaos, order, time...
You are a cell within the body of the living Earth.
Unless you are an astronaut, every moment of your life has occurred within
that body. Your every experience, thought, feeling, perception, joy,
pain etc. has been of, or has been filtered through, the life, mind and
spirit of the living Earth or some fragment of Her, like another human
being. It should not surprise you, then, that your Earth-born human
brain looks first to Her when attempting to comprehend the greater reality,
or that it inevitably defines that greater reality in terms of Her.
How could it be otherwise? While all "Divine" attributes indeed belong,
in their fullest, most archetypal expressions, to the Great Goddess of
Wicca, it is their finite, Earthly manifestations in which we most often
"dress" our goddess-forms. Our Goddesses are as green as waving grass
and as red as flowing blood, as brown as fertile soil and as white as drifting
snow, as beautiful as a sunrise and as angry as a volcano because we are
Earth-evolved human beings, and, as hard as we might work to understand
the true Nature of the Great Cosmic Goddess in Her fullness, our loftiest
human efforts must always, in the end, boil down to the childlike, "She's
like the Earth only BIGGER..."
Most Wiccans successfully practice our faith as
an "Earth Religion" only, as opposed to the cosmic "Nature Religion" I
have argued it to be, because it is seldom really necessary or even significant
for most human beings, at our present state of evolutionary development,
to comprehend the Great Cosmic Goddess of Wicca in order to enter upon
and travel some great distance along Her Path. Her imminent imprint
is within us, and we play a rather indirect and distant (though still important)
role in Her life and Being, but our pragmatic spiritual evolution as individuals
and as a species begins at home, in the development of our sensual, physical,
emotional, intellectual and spiritual bond with the living Earth, that
higher being closest to us in the cosmic web, inhabiting the next full
wrung above us in the ladder of being11 .
When viewed from this perspective, it becomes clear
that the vast majority of goddess-forms manifesting at all times and places
on Earth, do not, in fact, express direct attributes of the distant Great
Cosmic Goddess of Wicca. They reflect the living Earth in all Her
many facets, aspects, powers and roles and the Great Goddess to the extent
that the Earth reflects Her Divine Being to the greatest degree that we
can hope, in our present state of development, to directly compre-hend.
The Earth is our true mother. We have adorned
Her with a thousand names Gaia, Isis, Demeter, Kali. It is She
who grants these "fleshy" egregores life, with whom we commune when we
call these "Earth Goddesses" into our magick circles. Their great
number and diversity reflects not only the varying experience and development
of human beings in different times and places in "conversation" with Her,
but the specific Goddesses we choose to call upon, the personalities of
the individual goddess-forms we select to work with in any Wiccan ritual,
grants us special power to "fine tune" our magickal appeals to the "invisible
strings" of purpose in Her body that run parallel to the ones we discerned
earlier in our own, to draw Her attention to ourselves and our needs in
precisely the same way the cells of your cut finger call out for antibodies
and coagulating agents to bring about healing, as opposed to calcium or
dopamine, which, while fine chemicals in their own right, would not be
of much assistance under the circumstances.
The living Earth has many "daughters" as well,
some of which reflect the Earth's living biosphere, the "green world" of
plants and animals inhab-iting the Earth's land and waters, which most
Wiccans view as embodying an intelligent being separate from the geologic
Earth, such as Persephone or Pistis Sophia. Other "daughters" reflect
the very real and mysterious person of Earth's one true physical daughter,
the Moon i.e. Diana, Artemis, Cerridwen, Luna.
In the great cosmic web, planets and moons and
suns and galaxies and oddities like quasars and pulsars and black holes,
as well are real physical beings like the Earth, functioning on scales
of consciousness exponentially and "Divinely" higher than our own.
We did not create them; they are not egregores. The human faces we have
put on many of them, as with the five visible planets of our solar system
Hermes, Aphrodite, Aries, Jove and Chronos, are egre-gores, conceived
in the course of human "conversation" with those intelligences. Most
Wiccans, to a greater or lesser degree, work regularly with these "aunts
and uncles" from the local neighborhood in their ritual and magick. But
mostly we work with the Earth and Moon, with the goddess-forms arising
out of our species' long and loving conversation/relationship with these
two Divine, feminine super-conscious planetary beings.
And by doing so, whether we as individual Wiccans
are aware of it or not, through the fulfillment of our loving relationship
with Earth and Moon we participate meaningfully in the lives of our solar
system and the Milky Way Galaxy, and through them, in the intimate cosmic
processes of All That Is, of the Great Cosmic Goddess of Wicca in Her fullness.