Goddess Part 1.

On Saturday, we celebrated the first Full Moon of the New Cycle after the passing of the Blue Moon. We call this Full Moon: The Moon of Welcome or the Birth Moon. No matter how many times I’ve celebrated the Moon of Welcome in my life, it’s never repeated the same teachings or shared the same stories even though the Moon of Welcome always speaks of how we are received on Earth, by others or in the life of others as well as how we receive the world and the people around us.

“Every moon has been touched by the moon before it and will touch the moon that will come after it,” I started our women circle on Saturday, “if we want to truly grasp our feminine essence we have to return to the first mother, to the mothers who have walked before us. It’s a quest and a journey that we owe to our daughters and the women who will come after us.”

Here in Montreal, the wind was raging all through the weekend. It was so strong that it literally blew through our homes. The rafters were cracking under the roof top and the windows were shivering with every slap from the gale. Just the previous week, it had been raining and the snow melted under +10degrees Celsius. There was suddenly grass everywhere and the smell of earth replaced the icy nothingness of Winter. We were getting an early glimpse at Spring. Between the smell of earth; the unexpected rain; the violent gust of wind; and the (New Moon) cosmological influence of the Fire Keeper – it was clear that this Moon of Welcome showed a Goddess standing on a Blue Moon and mastering the elements.

There’s always been gods and goddesses in every Religion, heroes that inspire people to emanate their attitudes and attributes, and heroes who appear through dreams, visions guiding, teaching, protecting, even judging – participating in the evolution of man and creation. Carl Jung’s exploration of Shamanism brought him to explore this dimension of heroism through what he called “archetypes”. I like the words “gods and goddesses” because they imply divinity and they suggest that we can all walk alongside these Holy creatures and perhaps even aspire to be part of their world.

At the Moonlodge on Saturday, I invited everyone in our circle to reconnect to the Goddess energy. I reminded everyone that the MOONS on the Wheel speak about our human development constantly repeating a cycle from childhood to adolescence to adulthood through old age. We can unconsciously duplicate what we’ve experienced through childhood all through our life or we can awaken to our story and consciously bring about changes and grow.

“It’s a choice. It’s an exercise in FREE WILL,” I said.

For those of us who believe in reincarnation or in what we call “ancestral stories” in Shamanism -- it’s not difficult to return back in time and relive the memories of the women we once were. Like I told the women at the Moonlodge “it was not easy to live a few thousand years under a patriarchal order that believed that women had no souls.” How blessed are we today? In the last year since the last Moon of Welcome (June 2009) we were given a glance into the lives of the women of the past through historical moments. H1N1 for example allowed us to remember all of the times humanity was touched by pests and plagues. The earthquake in Haiti and the steady changes in weather through Global warming showed us how we are children of the Earth and at the mercy of nature. It certainly reminded us of the women who bared children steadily through the ages and contributed to the survival of our specie.

On Saturday, I wanted the women of the Moonlodge to connect to the ancient feminine presence of the cosmos. I didn’t want it to be an abstract concept. I wanted everyone to understand at some empirical level what it once meant to build a temple for Goddess. The Romans, Egyptians, Scandinavians, Africans, Mayans, Hebrews, Celtics and Greeks all prayed to Goddess at some point in history and for more than 50,000 years humanity followed a matriarchal order. It was practical.

“I want us to in our circle at least,” I stated on Saturday, “to reclaim the Goddess so that we can KNOW who we are; KNOW how to survive, how to be well, how to be strong, how to be ONE.”

The idea is not to worship the Goddess or to become blind to her in the same way that some civilizations have done before us; but to connect to this higher power and allow it to guide us, teach us, initiate us, hear us and perhaps even judge us at times… In these connections there are strategies of self-development that lead to growth.

Part 2 -- Goddess coming soon.

P.S: Photo from this summer's great gathering. Feminine Energy -- Moonlodge Montreal Participants.