By Embreis23
Note: Athens Area Pagans Inc. is open to all paths, ways, and practices. The following is the author’s opinion and is not intended as a statement of opinion, theology, ideology, or faith on the part of AAP.
Introduction: The root of the English word “essay” means “to attempt,” which is appropriate: what follows is the first of a series of attempts to describe and communicate the experiences I have had with entities that I choose to call Goddesses or Gods, and also with other spirits. Sometimes I just call them “Those Ones.” I do not claim to be a prophet, or anointed one, or designated revelator of any deity. I am not privy to any information that could not be learned by anyone who is reading this.
I will be writing to describe my experiences, filtered through historical myth and poetic expression. I know some will be annoyed that I freely mix deity names and stories from different languages and cultures. I don’t apologize for that. Those Ones we call the Gods have always been there, and we humans have encountered and tried to explain them, all of us in our own languages and in stories (myths) that reflect our own experiences. Some of these words and stories were passed down as stories we told and some were written down in books.
I am just an ordinary man, but having been born in the 20th Century in the Southern United States, I had access to books (and films and magazines and songs and comics, eventually blogs and streaming videos) and through all that, the old names and stories became part of my personal culture. Everything useful goes into my trick bag and from it I can pull Magick.
So in this effort, I’m not really concerned about historical authenticity or claims of cultural property, or scholarly niceties. The following does not contain ancient secrets known only to the chosen few or shared by the hidden ancient authorities. I am not, nor do I aspire to be, a prophet, pope, high priest, anointed one, cult leader, epopt, or lord high anything. I have been fortunate in that I learned young to trust the evidence of all my senses, including the senses that I was taught to ignore, and blessed, perhaps, that a Goddess took some slight interest in me. This is only a record of my experiences, though. Because that is the foundation of everything I think I know. What can you know, except by experience?
When I speak of the Gods, I necessarily use metaphors and poetic imagery, because one experiences their reality in times and places and using senses that do not easily translate into ordinary language. But I am not speaking of archetypes, or psychological states, or dwellers in some airless otherworld; Those Ones of whom I speak are, to my understanding, PHENOMENA. Just like stars and stones and your own too solid flesh, they have arisen from the interaction of the countless vortices of nothingness that make up Chaos1, and organize themselves into the world. The Goddesses and Gods I speak of are the oldest things to emerge from Chaos, and are most akin to Chaos, but as real as rocks and dirt.
I write these things, in part, because one feels a compulsion to express, but also to be what I was taught in my Southern Baptist childhood to call my Witness. This is my Witness: the universe is inhabited by many consciousnesses, some older and some younger, some faster and some slower, some larger and some smaller, but none greater and none lesser than I. The real gods are with us, in our blood, in the dirt beneath our feet, and in the stars and in the void. When we come to know them, we must love them because they are beautiful, and graceful, and even terrible. But we are neither their property nor their slaves, although we may sometimes be their prey. To know them and reach them is ecstasy, even if it’s sometimes a painful ecstasy.
Also, I write to be sure that you, whoever you are reading this, know that you too can know Those Ones, and know that beauty and terror if you want, that you, too, have the senses you need, even if someone taught you you don’t. You also have your own trick bag; take what you find useful and put it in, then make your own Magick.
I. She Who Must Be Adored
The first goddess I truly knew came into my life like a tornado comes into a house, or like a lion bringing down an antelope. I had invited her into my life, and for that, she tore me to pieces and put me back together again.
But that’s not where it started, nor where it ended, but the middle of the story, the crisis.
It began when I was a child, I think. Looking back, she was always around, in my lifelong fascination with the moon, in the strange feelings I got in some places in the woods behind the house and creek that followed near, in my occasional encounters with spectral critters and things that might be UFOs, my knack for knowing what people were feeling even when they were hiding it and when I always knew if they were lying.
And there were the books. I think she left them for me as bait, as a hunter leaves corn for the deer. Because, somehow, she was always a hunter; she stalks her prey because she loves the game; she drives her prey until it turns and gives itself to her.
So there were books that led me to places my parents and my culture meant to keep me away from, books that would turn up under my hand when I wasn’t looking for them, sometimes in places they had no place being. But that’s a story for another day.
I first met her face to face when I was 18. I grew up a Southern Baptist in Georgia, and, until about that age, I had been dutiful and even devout. My father taught Sunday School and was a deacon. I attended church, and Vacation Bible Schools, sang in the choir. I was even a Royal Ambassador for Christ (which is like being Boy Scout, but only for Baptists).
Nonetheless, by the end of my high school years, I had begun to have doubts. I had noticed the chasm between the message of Loving God and Jesus and the actual social attitudes of the Good People of the First Baptist Church. I had come to doubt that the stories in the Bible were true. Mostly I had come to abhor the idea of Hell, and feel disgust that anyone could believe the world was the creation of the same mind that invented Hell.
But at 18, as I was finally extricating myself from my years of indoctrination, I had a dream: I dreamed that I was standing on Calvary looking up at someone hanging on the cross, presumably Jesus, but this person was dressed in a hooded robe. This crucified person suddenly stepped away from the cross, moving easily, without effort, walking toward me as if descending an invisible staircase that came to earth just in front of me. There, the figure threw back the hood and revealed her face, for it was a woman. Then she opened her robe and I saw her perfect naked beauty, no blood or wounds to be seen. And she smiled at me, in a way that both somehow managed to be sweet and mocking at the same time.
Nearly half a century later I can clearly see the smiling woman standing in front of me with the empty cross behind her and the moon rising.
It would be neat, I suppose, if at that moment I had dedicated myself to Paganism and the worship of the Goddess, but that isn’t what happened. I woke up from that dream with the spell of my church-haunted childhood broken, and I became an atheist. Atheist with a capital A: the most annoying kind of atheist. For the next few years, I rejected any form of religion, any form of spirituality, any kind of occultism or metaphysics. I dismissed all the weird and apparently psychic experiences of youth and I dedicated myself studying analytic philosophy2 to purge myself of all the ghosts in my head.
I learned a lot from that. Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned is that, if you pursue skepticism to its real ends, the certainties of scientific materialism begin to look just as fuzzy as the certainties of the religious.
I read the Tao Teh Ching of Lao Tse3 along the way, and that changed me again. I began looking into Eastern religions, then joined a Zen Buddhist meditation group. For about a year, I called myself a Buddhist
But SHE was still around, dropping breadcrumbs on the path to lead me to her gingerbread house. I wound up reading Graves’ The White Goddess4 for a modern poetry seminar; a student in my freshman English class wrote an essay on becoming a witch; I picked up a copy of Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance5 at a rummage sale in a box marked “anthropology/archaeology.”
And so on.
But I had decided at that point to be respectable: I would enter my father’s business, follow in his footsteps, find myself a girl to show me what laughter means, and live a quiet sensible life.
But it wasn’t working for me as I finished my 28th year. One night that September, the night of the full moon, I decided on an experiment, influenced in part by having read Graves’ translation of the Golden Ass6, and partly by the Spiral Dance, and partly by Appendix Lamed of the Illuminatus Trilogy7. I decided I would invoke a goddess to help me. I was probably a bit drunk and did not enter into this really expecting anything. It was partly ironic art and partly desperate boredom and despair.
What happened next is, even 40 years later, hard for me to talk about. It was 20 years before I even tried to talk about this to anyone else. A couple of years ago, I wrote a poem about the experience, and I don’t think I can do better than that in trying to tell you what happened. So:
She did not come gently but with sharp shafts,
With claws and fangs and rough flint knives, tore me
In pieces and shook me all night long, bound
My bloody bones on sticks and there I hung
A thousand years screaming, while all her beasts
In frenzies danced around my rotting meat.
But then she stitched me back together, not
so rough this time. My scattered bones she wed,
Re-forged my heart, my flayed skin darned so well
The scars no longer showed. She filled my veins
And breathed into me to open my lungs.
Then she gave me back my eyes. She said
“It’s time to wake up. We never left you.
“The gray-faced priests in bad suits and shiny shoes,
“They laid a curse and taught you love of death
“And blinded you. But now your sight is healed.
“Look: still the world lives and all is holy.”
Then I awoke in an old world now made new,
Now hearing the great solemn chords the stones
And stars play, watching the intricate dance
Of water and fire and air, at last home,
Never alone, in this world thick with gods.8
But, in a way, that’s all fake. I came to myself sitting alone in my bare suburban apartment. The world did seem different to me and my heart was pounding, but I don’t think anyone observing would have understood why it was different. There were no bloodstains; nothing was broken. The neighbors, who once complained about me playing Black Flag records too loud, did not notice any screaming. If the colors were a little brighter and the air smelled different, no one but me knew.
That’s how it always is, though: when we perceive such beings, we do with senses that people don’t use in ordinary life, and so our ordinary language doesn’t have words to describe them. We reach for myths – stories that may not be factually true, but illustrate that which is true – and poetic metaphors. Or we make new myths. One strives to make the experience real to others, and to find out if the experience of the others somehow harmonizes
I first called Her Isis, under the influence of Apuleius as translated by Graves9, seeing her as the universal Hellenic Goddess. But, She was, as I had seen, a hunter, in the nature of Artemis or Diana.
She could also be Nuit, the Great Mother Goddess of some Egyptians and of Aleister Crowley. And she is certainly, in the words of the Charge of Goddess, “that which is attained at the end of desire.”10
She is in some ways like the TAO, as described by Lao Tse, but not in all ways.
And so now I call her the Mother of All Things, The End of Desire, or She Who Must be Adored.
In that first time, I invoked her as the Moon, but she isn’t the moon. Rather she is the grandmother of the Moon.
It was she who danced on the Chaos ocean before time began, whose beauty brought forth Eros, who was impregnated with all the gods and critters and manifest things.
She is the form of all creation, not the creator. Her beauty caused Desire to arise from the Chaos Ocean, and Desire made necessary all the other deities. For love of Her, they created the gifts that are the whole sensuous world.
She gives no commands. She does nothing, but through her all things are accomplished. She is not your judge; she is your Mother and the womb of all your births. She demands no sacrifice, for her love is poured out upon the earth.
She is the Mother of All Living: the Mother of roses and lovers and graceful deer and mighty lions, but also, the Mother of scorpions and rattlesnakes, cockroaches and plague. As the Womb of Rebirth she is also the tomb of this life. She is the Old Sow That Eateth Her Own Young, and her consort is called Death. She is The Great Whore; every lover’s cry of joy is on her lips also, and every experience penetrates her. She cleanses all things with wind and water, but also with fire and salt. She does not judge, but forces you to judge yourself.
She can seem hard, because no lies or falseness or frauds can survive her touch. Seek Her when you have the courage to be purely and entirely yourself.
This is meant to be the first in a series of at least 8 and possibly more weekly essays. Next time, Chaos and Eros.
- I will discuss Chaos at length in the second installment ↩︎
- That is to say I was reading 20th Century philosophers like Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Rudolph Carnap, who sought to eliminate all irrational and unscientific discourse by rigorous analysis of language.
↩︎ - If you have not read this, you should. I first read it in a translation by Jane English and have read it in several other translations. If, like me, you don’t read Chinese, do try to check out different translations. The Aquarian Tabernacle Church has been publishing excerpts on its Facebook page lately: https://www.facebook.com/ATCIntl
↩︎ - The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth was first published in 1948. It was influential on many Modern Pagans, although this drives “serious” scholars crazy.
↩︎ - The Spiral Dance: a Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess was first published in 1979. Its author, Starhawk, is the founder of the Reclaiming Tradition of Witchcraft.
↩︎ - Lucius Apuleius, a Roman aristocrat born in North Africa in the 2nd Century, wrote a novel which he called the Metamorphoses of Lucius, but which is commonly known as The Golden Ass. It has been translated into English several times. Robert Graves’ translation was published in 1950
↩︎ - The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Published in 3 volumes in 1975, but See page 854 of the Dell omnibus edition for the passage I’m referring to.
↩︎ - From “Witness: September 1985,” in my yet unpublished manuscript A World Thick with Gods: Poems, Songs, Spells, and Rituals of Embreis 23. ↩︎
- See footnote 6. The passage in question is in Chapter XVII “The Goddess Isis Intervenes,” beginning on page 262 of the 1950 edition.
↩︎ - The Charge of the Goddess was first revealed or compiled by Gerald Gardner, the founder of Modern Religious Witchcraft, AKA Wicca. It exists in several versions including two versions by Doreen Valiente. Here is a link to the Valiente’s later version https://sacred-texts.com/bos/bos058.htm
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