Divine Feminine Consciousness, Celtic Rose Priestess

Remembering trinity Consciousness

The Goddess speaks in sacred geometry. The Bee, the Rose, the Chalice, and the Spiral are some of her sacred symbols. Her wisdom serves to expand consciousness so that we may embody Christos-Sophia, the divinely balanced human consciousness.

The story below is a remembrance gifted to me by the land.

The Celtic trinity consciousness, or what you could call the Gnostic Sophia wisdom path, is found in the womb tomb. A sacred hill in the Boyne Valley known as Loughcrew is where I met the spiritual essence of The Cailleach, the Great Sovereignity Goddess of the Celtic lands.

Read Below…

In the Temple of the Mother Goddess of Ireland

I couldn’t seem to leave. The hill had captured me. I had booked into the hostel in the foothills below for three nights, which turned into a week, which turned into two more days. I’d grab a coffee in the hostel cafe, then wander the hill until closing time before popping back in, “I’d like to book two more nights please. Actually, make it three.” The next day, “Can I stay for one more week?” Three weeks later I was still there, plotting a way to build a permanent structure under a gorse bush.

I was at the 6,000+ year old Sliabh na Cailleach, the Hill of the Cailleach, in Boyne Valley, Ireland.

The Cailleach, whoever she was, seemed to call me to her each day. No matter my energy levels, I ran up the hill, pausing involuntarily with reverence before entering the gates that surround her great cairn. I knew that there was a subtle energy here, an essence that spoke of a wisdom long forgotten. This was clearly what is referred to as an anima loci, a place of soul in the earth, where the veil between the worlds is thin.

I came here seeking to witness the spring equinox sunrise from a stone circle. Where that lark had come from, I don’t know. All I knew is that what I was seeking was also seeking me, for the moment I stepped onto the hill a voice deep within promised, “You’re home.”

It was as if I had been here for eons. Everything was familiar. I lay down, curling up on the soft hill. The white tails of hopping hares disappeared under gorse bushes with their yellow blooms. Mama Earth cupped me in her palms, and I slip into a warm green bath of bliss, protected and loved. Fading into the Earth, I dream of the forming of my being from clay. My soul is wind blowing through hawthorn, my hair made of heather, my skeleton built from sapphire deep below. In my eyes are planted emeralds, my belly a ruby dripping blood. I wake up and stand upright, alive again. I feel my true role on Earth rising up with certainty through the green moss into my body: I was her watchdog, her protector, her daughter and priestess.

I walked down the hill, disoriented, to the cafe. “Where are you visiting from?” Confusion clouded my thoughts for a second, what do you mean? Haven’t I always been here?

“Elsewhere”, I murmur, brushing off the question. How do you explain soul homes, spirit sanctuaries.

The Cailleach, who was she, really, and why was I so drawn to her? She was also known as the Veiled One, and it would take a renewed imagination to uncover her secrets.

As I wandered the hill by day, by night she spoke to me in dreams. The indigenous spiritual understanding of ancient Irish life was about as far from the current system of thought as possible, and the mythology of the Cailleach was something I didn’t quite understand, but I would soon find out that I was connected to her.

The Cailleach is known as the Hag or Crone Goddess, and the great stone seat which graces her cairn at the top of the hill is known as the “Hag’s Chair’. I shrunk from the word, until brief research into the etymology showed that “hag” actually comes from a word meaning “holy wise woman”. Slaibh na Cailleach is also known as the Hill of the Witch, a word for female power which comes from the Anglo-Saxon ‘witan’, meaning one who knows, or one who sees.

I tried to be a hollow bone for an intuitive understanding of these sacred places, for they were built by an indigenous astrological society, during a time when human wisdom was passed orally. This was the era of the Neolithic Goddesses. It was a time of bards, poets, seers, and diviners who wandered these lands before the Druids. They saw the land as a Mother Goddess, and Goddess as a triplicate of maiden, mother, and crone. The Goddess was life, death, and rebirth. She was the waxing, full, and waning moon.

Of great importance in understanding these hills is the reverence the feminine principle was given. Indigenous Irish spirituality focused on the feminine. The old belief was that the land was feminine and the most powerful spirits are female. Eireann, the Gaelic for Ireland, means “the land of the goddess Eriu’, and the oldest name for Ireland is Banba, literally meaning the Land of Women.

Out of all of the goddesses that represented Ireland, the great Cailleach was the supreme being. The Cailleach is more ancient than any other remaining trace of goddess, for before the first Celts arrived in Ireland, the Callieach was already known. As a famous Irish poem goes, “There are three great ages; the age of the yew tree, the age of the eagle, the age of the Cailleach”. She was the representation of Mother Earth, the giver of fertility, but also of death. She was the womb, and the tomb, of all life.

The Goddess was seen as both a life and death bringer. Jack Roberts, in his book Sheela na Gigs, explains: “It could be assumed that the goddess was only life giving, however this dualistic way of thinking is not at all in keeping with the way in which the Celts usually embraced both sides of a meaning. Rather it appears that the goddess was considered the source of both life and death and as such were an even more powerful, magical force than mere weapons. The goddess of life was also the goddess of death, as both life and death are mutually intertwined and vital aspects of each other.”

The Goddess was the creative principle, the animus Mundi, the ecological driving force behind the creation of life; she was the winter that brings the spring. The earth mother knows when to let things come into being, as well as when to let things die. She was responsible for destructive disintegration, the way dead tree limbs nurture, with the help of mushrooms, the soil fertility that ensures new life can arise again in spring. In death she endlessly renews life.

The indigenous Irish felt that this creative, transformative feminine principle was worth deep reverence, and they went to great lengths to build earthen temples that demonstrated this principle.

All over the Boyne Valley are great spherical stone structures on the top of the hills. Known in Irish as ‘teamhair’, or spiritual sanctuaries, the cairns are shaped like wombs themselves, each with a tunnel entrance leading to an inner chamber within. Inside are stones carved with intricate art in the shape of spirals and waves. At specific astrological moments during the wheel of the year, the sunlight enters each chamber in a ray of precision, illuminating the carved stones, telling their story.

I walk to the top of the highest Hill of the Cailleach to look out over the landscape. Gazing over the rolling landscape as the ancients would have done, I imagine the sun traveling through the wheel of the year, passing through the temples on each hill, illuminating them briefly for a moment in time. I see with new eyes; a giant earthen landscape calendar, voluptuous, curvy and undulating like waves. I see the land as mother, her curves accepting and embracing the penetrating rays of the father sun, taking life into her.

These were a peoples, I felt sure, that understood the divinity of the womb.

The ancient wheel of the year was divided into eight major phases: the four solstices and equinoxes, and the four fire festivals in between. Imbolc, between winter solstice and summer equinox, means ‘in the belly”. It was in the early days of February, when life first started to stir in the bellies of the ewes and cattle, and the very first buds of spring appeared, that marked the end of true winter and the start of new beginnings. Beltaine, in between spring equinox and summer solstice, means ‘mouth of the fire’. It marked the point when it was warm enough for the livestock to be put on land. With their animals grazing freely, the people had more time for each other, and it was on Beltaine, or May Day, that they chose mates for themselves. Two fires were lit, one masculine and one feminine, and after purifying their animals and themselves between the fires, they would combine them; creating one fire to symbolise unity.

Between summer solstice and autumn equinox is Lughnasa. Here the tale goes that Tailtu, the foster mother of the sun god Lugh, died from exhaustion after clearing the fields for harvest. In a metaphor for the sacrifice the Earth makes each autumn as the final harvest is gathered, the “foster” mother of the sun, Mother Earth, cares for his growth that year briefly, before her fertility ends, and the green fades in time for Earth’s winter slumber. At Samhain, the closing veil on the year, between autumn equinox and winter solstice, the final harvest was reaped, and respect for the dead and the ancestors was given. When Imbolc came back around after the next winter solstice, nine months after Beltaine, the animals and people would now be pregnant, brimming with new life, starting the whole cycle once again.

The Irish ancestors seemed to embrace the different energies during the eight festivals of the Celtic year, viewing them as a dance of light in darkness in the cosmic cycle, understanding the opposites that ultimately create unity. Winter’s dormancy was absolutely essential for summer to exist; cycles of death and decay were necessary for the land as well as for the human psyche. The central role played by death in the life-death-rebirth continuum of existence was honoured. The rational minded, logos-driven Western world, with its reliance on left-brain consciousness, sees Death as an end, and as such, it is greatly feared. The ancient Irish, on the other hand, saw Death as merely another transition, a type of birth.

The Cailleach rules this darker, dying half of the year, the time when life goes underneath the surface and waits to be reborn. Her reign starts at autumn equinox and continues until spring equinox. Her domain is the realm of women’s wisdom. It is the realm every woman must traverse, risking entry through the gates of death to bring forth new life; her body becoming sacrificial just as Tailtu, the Earth Mother, sacrifices herself for the harvest.

The Goddess of Celtic mythology represents both life and death, but more importantly she represents the cyclical, regenerative, transformative principle behind the great wheel of life. The Goddess was, above all, a force of transformation. While pondering the meaning of the Cailleach, it was all too easy to allow fear of the dark to creep in. Witch, hag, crone — these are all words laden with fear.

But why, I wondered, should I fear an old woman who lives under a hill?

The crone ways of the deep archetypical feminine have been cast into shadow, cast out of society and placed in the margins of collective consciousness. Yet there is great spiritual potency there. It is the domain of the seer, the holy woman, the wise woman. One who sees in the dark. It is a different way of knowing.

“To nourish the creative spirit and spiritual essence within the human heart, it is necessary to validate the gifts present in the divine feminine and honour its cyclical, rhythmic way of perceiving reality”, writes Dolores Whelan in Ever Ancient, Ever New, “The fullness of wisdom revives the inclusion of the Cailleach; the winter wisdom, the slower, quieter knowing of the heart. To access this realm, we must be open to the knowledge that can only emerge in the softness of twilight and the stillness of the natural world. Here lie abilities that will lead us into deeper realms of life.”

Perhaps, I realized, this was exactly why I was drawn here, to open myself to the possibility of letting the old within me wither and die, creating fertile ground for rebirth.

I wander the hill, drumming. I close my eyes, lay back on the green, and go deep within, riding on the drumbeat. It was as if in my desire to peer behind the veil, the hill had heard, and awakened my imagination into ecstatic expression, for visions began to explode in my mind’s eye.

The drumbeat transforms into a white mare galloping over the hills. She leaps over a flaming threshold within my third eye and the doors of perception swing open. I am taken to Gaia, the Tree of Life. She holds me lovingly in a curve of her tree limb, letting me drink water pooled in her trunk. “You are my daughter” she whispers, shimmering with love. Then, her branches pierce me, impaling me. I disappear, my arms turn into tigers, my legs into two dolphins, my hair into birds. “Look what I can do!” she says gleefully. A tornado of animals emerges from the tips of her branches. Walking creatures, furry, winged, swimming, and scaled. She uses all the elements of the Earth to create her endless forms. They spread out over the land.

She sits back, smiling at her creation.

I was entering Tir na nOg, the Celtic otherworld, the mundus imaginalis. “This otherworld is not an archetype produced by the unconscious mind, nor is it a product of fictional imagination” Dolores Whelan explains, “As many myths tell us, it is a dimension of reality that exists within the world and within the psyche or soul. To access this world, a person must vacate the rational mind and move into the realm of intuitive knowing. One must step outside the linear space-time continuum and left-brain consciousness. Outside the logos, and into the muthos. It requires a journey from the head to the heart, where all things past, present, and future, exist in the eternal now.”

This logos-driven world with its rational, analytical way of knowing excludes the muthos way of knowing (the Greek word from where we derive “myth”). The root of this word is ‘mu’, whose meanings include silence, secrets, hidden, and arcane. Muthos is related to the ancient oral tradition, and behind this muthos way of knowing is the mystery in the story and the secret hidden there.

Memories I’ve never lived flooded my veins, ancient memories, memories of oracles, diviners, healers, and shamans. The things I need to know come to me. Why do I want to dance? Because in ancient times, Cretan and Minoan ecstatic dancers went into a labyrinth, and danced until they reached trance. Why do I want to drum? Because Ancient bee priestesses of Malta, the Mellisae, drummed to the the primeval goddess at the original House of the Bee. Lost feminine archetypes came streaming into my third eye. I saw priestesses learning the teachings of alchemy in Brigit’s ancient Mystery School in Kildare. Truths lost to memory, shrouded behind the veil.

Reaching trance, drumming and thrumming in the stone circle on the hill, I see a circle of translucent ancestresses dancing, laughing joyfully at my remembering.

I had begun the descent. The Cailleach had pulled me into her realm.

A snowstorm hits the hill after Imbolc. It’s morning, but snow is blowing blindly into a milky white fog, clouds swirling around the stones. I sludge and trudge up on slick mud to the giant cairn, the Cailleach tugging on my spirit. My footsteps take me dutifully up. All I hear is the crunching of frost under a great big silent sky. Why am I so drawn here? I felt helpless. Truth is, I struggled with this. I craved for these truths at the root of me to remain hidden, to be kept quiet. It’d be so much easier. I didn’t want to be drumming on hills alone in Ireland, seeing visions. I felt isolated, alone. An outcast. I wanted tribe, I wanted sisterhood; I wanted to fit in. I could find no place for this muthos way of knowing, which felt so familiar, so right.

Yet, my life kept flowing, continually unraveling towards a truth at the very core of my being: the Great Goddess was rising, and I was one of her priestesses. I walked the green land, wrestling with ancient memories behind the veil. Drumming in the February snow, the chambers whistled with wind like healing sound baths, reminding me of a frequency I once knew. The stones make me feel better. I lean against them, whispering as if a grandmother was in there. I could only speak my truth to her.

It came rising up from deep in my belly into my throat: Nothing will stop me worshiping you, I would die to keep worshipping the Goddess, I confess to the cairn. “You already have,” it answers back. “You’re walking on the bones of your former self.”

I see myself tied to a stake, ash logs and kindling around me. A priest lights the fire, and I burn. My spirit goes up in smoke. The last thing I see is a smile on the priest’s face. Humiliation sears through my soul.

I ride up on the smoke, into a circle of eight shining women wearing silvery blue gowns, holding pitchers of moonlight. They hold their hands out to me. My spirit joins them, completing the circle. I see my body suspended in the centre of our circle, burning.

A shining one pours her pitcher of liquid moonlight over me, and puts a cloak made of silver stars over my shoulders. It soothes. She dresses me in a white gown to meet Death. The priestesses eyes glow green, luminescent. They stare at me, and I feel a liquid diamond appear in my mind, burning an imprint into my forehead. “You see.” Her eyes burn into mine, glowing green. I see my current incarnation on the hill in Ireland, alive, and cold.

“Go back,” she says, “and try again”.

I open my eyes. I’m shivering. The snow is blowing, settling on the rocks. The Cailleach is still. The snow melts and drips.

I stamp my feet into the frosty soil in front of the Hag’s Chair. I want to be anywhere other than on the top of this fucking hill, alone, knowing this truth. Why?! I scream. I was angry. There was more to the goddess than love, light, and fecundity. She is also the dark void. She doesn’t shy from rage. She demands all on the altar of truth. She demands a descent to retrieve the lost parts.

I remember the spiritual potency of woman in ancient civilizations, working as mystic, prophetess, oracle, diviner, herbalist, midwife, seer. Those in service to the great mother, using their spiritual intuitive gifts of healing. Something within sighs with recognition. This is what I remembered being, what my soul had hungered for. But at the thought of risking exposing my spiritual gifts, huge waves of fear threaten to envelop me.

There was nowhere to go for reassurance. No answers are to be found written, because the goddess was pre written word. This would require a deep dive into feminine intuition and surrender; the very things I’d been told were ‘inferior’ to logic. The sacred rage burned. There was feminine wisdom more archetypical, more metaphysical and astronomical, a metaphor written in the cosmos, that was long forgotten. A mystery hidden, locked away in secret. Far from inferior, it contains the wisdom of the cosmos. An unraveling had begun in me, and now that I had tasted her truth, I would hunt the source of the thread down, like a lioness on her prey.

Pussy. Hag. Witch. I have been taught, I understood with stunning clarity, to fear my own self.

I walk back down the hill, the blackbirds look at me knowingly from their nests in the ash branches above. I felt the Cailleach’s bony hand on my shoulder, pressing me into the earth. I had gone too deep in. She intended to strip me of my persona until I was raw. I was lost in a dark wood, tangled with briars, and the only way out was through.

“The great and good wild force of our own psyches means to place its paw on our shadows”, Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes in Women Who Run with Wolves, “and in that manner she claims us as her own. Once the wild woman snags our shadows, we belong to ourselves again. She is symbolised by the flowering apple tree, this is her homeland at last, the place where her fiery and flowing soul regains its roots.”

I descended into the woods, into the raging sea, into the wilds, of nature as well as psyche. Wandering in the forests of initiation into a mystery yet unknown, the fragrance of woodfire intermingling with shadows and smoke. I hear piper music, a doe, and wolves. I see a great flowering orchard of apples and beyond, an ash grove; things that exist only in liminal spaces, in the deep luminosity that can only be found in mist. The nine priestesses were there, chanting, drawing down moonlight. Here live the ones who revere the goddess, who have kept her alive through the collective unconscious.

Women have been taught to deeply fear our primal feminine nature. For millennia this fear of women’s power has been projected as suppression to our bodies, our sexuality, our magic, our voices, and our primordial connection to the force of the natural world. We remain in disassociation from the source power we need to truly be the sovereign creatrix of our lives.

“Every woman possesses and projects the power of a mother”, Simon de Beauvoir writes in Women of the Celts, “Every woman is both life and void. Thus the woman mother has a face of shadows: she is the chaos whence all have come and whither all must one day return; she is nothingness. since everything exists only through its negation, we return to the dialectic cycle. Woman becomes the absolute mistress of riches which are, however, hidden, difficulty reach, and dangerous.”

Paternalistic culture denies the divinity of the Womb. If man denies the womb, he denies his own existence. Man could not exist without the womb. A woman is the feminine creator source energy that allows him to exist. The indigenous Irish in their wisdom extrapolated this outwards to view the Earth as a whole as mother, and therefore revered her. To denigrate the womb is, even from a purely logical standpoint, absurd. To denigrate the origin of one’s existence.

Words are powerful, and they have shaped an untruth that has kept the archetypical wise and wild woman in shadow, blocking primal feminine power from being realised. Her sexual, magical and mystical powers so feared they were burned.

A medicine woman in the Amazon once said, “Do you know why they are really cutting down the rain forest? Because it is wet and dark and tangled and feminine.”

But she’s back.

I try to sleep in the hostel next to the hill, but at midnight I hear the stones calling. Call me mad, but they’re singing the old songs. I follow, to go dance the old dance.

I approach the Hag’s Chair, and bow before it, greeting the stones under moon glint. The cairn looms in the night sky.

I pause, fear grips me suddenly. I don’t want to go face the cairn entrance. I breath, swallow. I approach the entrance slowly, like I’m approaching an entity, a strong powerful presence. Standing at the chamber, I take my flashlight out. I try to flick it on, but it’s gone mysteriously dead. The Caillach at night prefers her anonymity. I will have to face her in the dark. I take a deep breath and turn to stare into the dark entrance.

I see the stark white bony hands of death reaching out. I brace myself not to shrink back. I touch the stone. “I believe in you. I want you to come back to power”, I tell her. Tears fall on the stones. Who am I speaking to? I doubt myself for a moment, then it turns into a knowing. “I’m lost in the dark, Cailleach” I sob. “I’m listening.”

She doesn’t give up her secrets easily. She protects herself, as the guardian of the mysteries. She tests and challenges; she is the Sphinx. But approach with a pure heart, and her chamber opens. Like the tale of a young prince who, when courageous enough to kiss the hag, watches her turn into a beautiful woman. I feel the Cailleach’s velvety embrace, she’s the new moon turning full. She’s not to fear; she is omnipotence.

She asks us not to fear Death, for in Death there is rebirth and new life. No life can be begotten without the corresponding decay. Staring deep into the shadows, the depths of feminine wisdom contains something much more fearful, much more terrifying to modern consciousness. For to enter into that void again is to risk annihilation. But the loving goddess shows that it is not an annihilation that will kill you, but one that will rebirth you, the way the winter gives birth to spring. A truth hard to accept, a truth of the Goddess. Darkness is fertile ground for alchemy, for in the dark you must learn to see from the light within.

I trail my fingers over the spirals. The goddess seems to speak in symbols. In glyphs. An energetic language. If words are powerful, symbols are condensed potency of communication; a language that bypasses the conscious mind, and goes with a straight shot to the primordial psyche. I drummed, beating out a rhythm. The spirals vibrated in response. The sound exploded into the night like a train chugging along backwards down my DNA, uncoiling it, rewriting it, returning to a place far in the recess of my mind.

There is an ancient and primordial truth that doesn’t need to be written down or debated with the mind because it simply IS. You can see it in the spiral, the dance, in the song. The divine feminine vessel is the living temple we all come from, and to where we all return. She’s life, annihilation, then rebirth. The womb of all. The voice of the divine feminine is the voice of creation. She loves all her creation, because she is creation.

Alone in the lonely hours of the dark night, I knew I was pulled to this place as surely as an acorn is pulled by the future oak it is meant to be. I was thousands of miles from where I was before, but suddenly I was home. I touched the stones, they touched me back, their energy entering into my heart, “Thank you, ancestors”. They took time to carve these symbols, and the wisdom in the simplicity touches me.

I feel a nautilus shell forming around my body. The goddess pours liquid silver moonlight that fills each chamber, filling every last empty place, all the last remains of dark fears, with silver light of love. As the chambers fill, she grows me in wisdom. A world opens up, inside my heart, a torus field flooded with a rainbow. Cosmic consciousness streams in, and I know with certainty in that moment that the Neolithic ancestors had a consciousness far more advanced than ours. My shell forms, the same way it first formed a billion years ago. All I can see is Beauty everywhere, from the smallest to the grandest scale. I am a daughter of Earth, ever ancient, ever new. Nothing more, and nothing less. A member of a gossamer web of light and life.

The Cailleach gently reminds me, I too, will turn to dust after a short Earth Walk, my bones disappearing into the breeze as quickly as a gust of wind disperses the pollen of a dandelion. In the blink of an eye I shall be back in the great cosmic sea, back into the void.

In the meantime, she says, dance the old dance. Dance to the songs in the wind with ferocious love.

I thank her for the chance to participate in creation. For the beauty of living in the luminous spaces, if only briefly, and only for a glimpse of the mystic’s view.

The shakti life force from the core of the earth below my feet rises up my spine into my womb, filling it with light, flowing up to my heart, bursting in my pineal gland with the elixir of life, of seeing, of knowing. A river of awareness flows up through me, beginning from back deep in prehistory, from herstory, from psyche’s memories dormant in DNA, ancient as the ancestors. Up on the hill at midnight, under a luminescent moon, I feel the ecstatic joy of being a vessel for the divine dance to flow.

The role I had sought to remember comes to me: a priestess is a woman who lives in two worlds at once, who perceives life on earth against the backdrop of a vast, timeless reality. I am only a channel, a conduit for archetypical forces from the cosmic stream to flow.

I understood that the divine feminine is nature. She readily accept the cycles of the year, the crops growing and dying, the continuum of life constantly rotating on its cyclical axis, the same as the earth constantly rotating around the life-giving sun. She accepts the cycles of her own life, living devotionally as her body is a living temple to which all are born and nursed. The priestesses were working with Love energies. They used their hearts to fall in love with Earth.

I saw her truth flowing like liquid light through everything. I heard her voice from the cosmos, and from within the cosmos in my own womb. My heart expanded into the sense of home I once sought, blooming into being like a thousand petalled lotus. She had led my way back to the source of my Self; the sacred heart.

The Paleolithic mother goddess cultures that roamed around her banks knew this holistic truth. It is She who holds the true knowledge and power in the secrets of animating creation itself, the divine Sophia spark that breathes eternal life into form.

The Sufi teacher Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee writes in The Return of the Feminine and World Soul, “The feminine is the matrix of creation, gifted with omnipotence. This truth is something profound and elemental, and every woman knows it in the cells of her body, in her instinctual depths. Out of the substance of her very being life comes forth. She can conceive and give birth, participate in the greatest mystery of bringing a soul into life. And yet we have forgotten, or been denied, the depths of this mystery, of how the divine light of the soul creates a body in the womb of a woman, and how the mother shares in this wonder, giving her own blood, her own body, to what will be born. Our culture’s focus on a disembodied, transcendent God has left women bereft, denying them the sacredness of this simple mystery of divine love.

What we do not realize is that this patriarchal denial affects not only every woman, but also life itself. When we deny the divine mystery of the feminine we also deny something fundamental to life. We separate life from its sacred core, from the matrix that nourishes all of creation. We cut our world off from the source that alone can heal, nourish and transform it. The same sacred source that gave birth to each of us is needed to give meaning to our life, to nourish it with what is real, and to reveal to us the mystery, the divine purpose to being alive.”

I feel deep sadness. The denial of this beautiful knowing, this voice of cosmic love that emanates and shimmers from everything. How we’ve lost her. Ever since the removal of the Goddess from her place in the web of life, the knowledge of harmonies, in psyche, society, and in the cosmos, have been lost. We’re all hurting without the divine feminine. We live in a world that has lost its soul.

“The word ‘Feminine’ stands for the Soul which is a word which describes this unseen cosmic Web of Life that connects each one of us to all others as well as to the life of the planet and the greater life of the Cosmos.” Anne Baring writes, in Awakening to the Divine Feminine, “It stands for the recognition that we live within a Sacred Order and that we have a responsibility to protect the life of the planet and all the variety of species it embraces instead of exploiting them for the benefit of our species alone. In sum, the word ‘Feminine’ stands for a totally different perspective on life, a totally different paradigm of reality and for the feeling values which might reflect and support that worldview. It stands for a new planetary consciousness and the arduous creation of a new kind of civilization grounded in different values.”

The goddess loves her creation; you can see it in the beauty all around us. She weaves a web out of thin air, from out of the vesica pisca, out of nothingness, into Beauty. That is an act of pure love. A sacrifice that only a mother could make.

To the indigenous Irish, the divine feminine was always represented by Nature. She was the rivers, the hills, the green blowing grass, and the snow falling on bare trees. She was all; the animus mundi, the driving, creative force that animates spirit into matter. If God is creator, Goddess is creation.

The feminine soul is done being burned. She is rising up, propelled by forces far greater than herself; archetypical forces embodied in deities like the Cailleach in Ireland. The voice of the divine feminine is the voice of cosmic love. It comes pouring in through open hearts. Feminine energy is innately tuned into this mystery, the womb wisdom of creation from formlessness into form. The feminine divinity sees beyond a horizon, beyond the illusion, into the cosmos. While the masculine energy excels at steering the boat through the ocean, the feminine IS the ocean.

In ancient Ireland, the king, in order to serve his people, had to enter into a ritual marriage with the local sovereignty goddess. It was only if he treated her justly and with due respect that she would provide the people with abundance and would be deemed fit to rule. In the Book of the Cailleach she is described as the personification of the territorial sovereignty queen. She is the female matrix of sovereignty and fertile power that is as vast and as untameable as the wild, wide landscape, and yet just as nurturing and fruitful for human existence.

I see this era becoming known as the Dark Ages of Consciousness. The time when consciousness allowed itself to be shrunk into an overly masculine, rational, material view of realty, until it surrendered, breathed open, and allowed and received in the light of spirit. A great courageous opening of the doors of perception. The ancient wisdom of the Goddess is essential to healing ourselves and the earth. She is our medicine.

Descent into more ancient truths is to begin the journey inward, home into the heart. It is only by allowing the feminine qualities to come to the fore of the psyche that the creative answers can emerge. Nothing new can be birthed without the feminine principle. A disembodied male creator in the sky is nonsensical, and goes against the very blueprint of creation. We are all divinity, the blueprint of creation is inside of us.