Holle, Hell, Holy

At the beginning of December, I wrote about synchronicities in the form of songs or phrases one can find oneself singing or thinking about, without any apparent reason for it.  Often they can be quite funny and ridiculously banal.  I had found myself singing (actually, I still am, darn it) a sixties song called "Lady Godiva" - and came to the conclusion that this unlikely song, lodged somewhere in the convoluted  recesses of my unconscious and choosing to erupt with annoying frequency had something to do with "Lady God" and "Deva" - the Goddess and the divine.  


Since then, I've thought deeply about how I've been losing touch with my spiritual life.  I've been passionate about the healing of the collective human psyche by "the return of the Goddess" for pretty much the past 35 years.....and possibly before that, but I lacked the literacy to conceptualize these ideas.  I feel, the more I meditate on my "waking dream",  the Goddesses are drawing me back into the rejuvenating, healing landscape of mythic mind and mythic time.


I'm grateful to Robur, a cyberspace friend who is very knowledgeable about gardens, myth and magic, and writes two fascinating blogs that explore these themes : http://roburdamour.blogspot.com.  His comments about "Lady Godiva" revealed a lot I didn't know about the legend, and helped  to further inform meanings of  my own  "synchro" language.  

Here's Roburs  article about Lady Godiva: 

http://weavingandmagic.blogspot.com/2011/01/lady-godiva-and-her-priest-king.html 
  

Lady Godiva  rode through the streets of Coventry.   "Coventry" , I learned, is a fitting metaphor for "Lady God"'s ride, in that the dictionary defines the  word "Coventry" as:

"the state of being banished or ostracized (excluded from society by general consent); ie,  "the association should get rid of its elderly members--not by euthanasia, of course, but by Coventry"**

Thus, "coventry" is the opposite of "coven", "covenant", or "to convene", which means to bring together.....a fitting term for what happened in the course of the Church and the Middle Ages to the former Goddess as May Queen.  And although the contemporary dictionary meaning of "Coventry" has come to mean banishment,  perhaps a more ancient layer to understanding the origins of the town's original name also comes from Robur, who writes that

"The official etymology of Coventry is that it means Cofa's tree. A tree owned by Mr Cofa!  A very early spelling, 1050, is Couaentree.  I found, by chance, a reference to Coventry as bring a rebus for 'a coven round a tree'. Well, it is undeniably a rebus. But that doesn't mean anything conclusive.  There was a widespread practise for dancing round a tree on May Eve, which is the maypole. Perhaps there really was a tree, that was used for festivities."

"The story that Lady Godiva was protesting against taxes is untrue.  Apparently, at the time the procession dates from, Coventry was a village, and there were no taxes.  The procession is actually a May-Eve fertility procession, many of which are found across Europe. There is even one at Southam, just a few miles from Coventry, which is no longer celebrated.  What happened at Coventry, was that there was a Benedictine monastery there. The Christian monks did not approve of people watching the fertility procession, and so put some 'spin' on the procession, and invented this story about taxes. "

 The 1966 pop song  by Peter and Gordon (lodged in my brain until further notice or I finally get it, apparently)  is about "Lady Godiva" becoming a porn star, thus trivializing the story of Lady's Godiva's ride and turning the Lady into a kind of prostitute -  which has so often been  done to the Goddess in the course of patriarchal mythology, and continues well into the present.

Last, and thanks once more to Robur's scholarship, I've also become fascinated with a bit of information he passed on  about another  "Godiva Procession" that occurred close to Coventry in a town called  Southam, in which, according to Robert Graves (The White Goddess) two figures, one black and one white, were carried, symbolizing Holda and Hel.  I was struck to imagine the May Queen, riding to the Maypole or World Tree, accompanied by effigies representing the Nordic/Germanic Goddess as  both Life and Death.
  
Holle is very much associated with Yule, and with the hearth and home, especially in the winter.  But she is known throughout northern Europe, an ancient goddess that predates the advent of Christianity. ** Also known as Holda or Hulda, and she is a  triple goddess,  embodying the passages of life.  In some myths, she is "the ash girl", her face half black with soot and half white.  This comes from a story of how in order to marry the God of Winter she had to come to him neither naked nor clothed, and neither in light or darkness.  As the Mother goddess, she protected the forest and was often shown among trees.  Holle in old age  is Winter's Queen, and Mother Holda is the source of  "Mother Goose"  legends, because the snow flies when the she shakes the feathers from her down bed.  In Holland, they still says that 'Dame Holle is shaking her bed'. 

"Frau Holle, as she is known in Germany, was called The Queen of the Witches. The brothers Grimm tell a story of step-sisters who both go to visit Frau Holle in the 'nether realms'. They begin their journey to her by falling in a well............Holle's name is linguistically related to the word Halja, which means "covering", and is the ancient Teutonic name for Hel, the Norse land of the dead. Holle is sometimes called the Queen of the Dead, and resides in the 'nether' regions. She possibly lent her name to the country Holland, 'the land of Holle', which is also called the Netherlands because many parts of the country are below sea-level."   

Sandra Kleinschmitt

So in this long journey to Lady Godiva's ride and a silly song playing mysteriously over and over in my mind,  I find at last my way to Goddess, to the May Queen, and to the netherworld of (wholly and holy) Holle as well, who is both light and dark, young and old, light and shadow.

And who is Hel, the ashy side of Holle's face?  Besides being the origin of the word people use daily as a swear word, and millions of Christians have a mighty fear of going to, without knowing anything about where the concept originated from?  People no longer remember that once "go to Hell" meant to die.

"Hel" by Susan Seddon Boulet


I take the liberty of copying a wonderful description from Rowen Saille of the Order of the White Moon,

"Hel (Hell)  has been used by the early  church as a scare tactic to frighten the masses into “righteous” acts. To get the real story, we have to go back to the early Nordic people and look this death Goddess in the face. 

Hel is cast into the netherworld and becomes the ruler of that underworld to which souls who have not died in battle will depart. As thanks for making Her ruler of the netherworld, Hel makes a gift to Odin. She gives him two ravens, Huginn and Muninn (Thought and Memory). Ravens are messengers between this realm and the next, opening pathways to death’s realm.

Her realm is named for her, Hel or Helheim. Because She accepts all to Helheim, she also becomes the judge to determine the fate of each soul in the afterlife. The evil dead are banished to a realm of icy cold (a fate that the Nordic people found much worse in telling than a lake of fire). Unlike the Judeo-Christian concept, Helheim also served as the shelter and gathering place of souls to be reincarnated. Hel watches over those who died peacefully of old age or illness. She cares for children and women who die in childbirth. She guides those souls who do not choose the path of war through the circle of death to rebirth."

 Johannes Gehrts

"Hel governs the world beyond that of the living. In magic, she makes thin the veil between worlds. Seidhr [SAY-theer] or Nordic shamans call upon Her protection and wear the helkappe, a magic mask, to render them invisible and enable them to pass through the gateway into the realm of death and spirit."

 ..................................

** For anyone who may wonder where the "flying broomsticks" of witches (or Harry Potter) comes from, Dame Holda may be the source.  Because of her association with the hearth and home, the Broom was both symbol and magical tool.  Folk traditions of "sweeping away evil from the hearth" are very ancient throughout Europe.

Santa's Raindeer & Magic Mushrooms?

Couldn't resist posting this.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkCS9ePWuLU&feature=player_embedded

Solstice - Pax Gaia

 

"Only now can we see with clarity that we live not so much in a cosmos (a place) as in a cosmogenesis (a process) -- scientific in its data, mythic in its form."  

~ The Universe Story by Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry  

The Winter Solstice was perhaps the earliest universal holy day, celebrated in different ways  throughout the world from the earliest days of human culture. When language was young, when even the gods and goddesses had not yet taken human forms in the human imagination, but ran instead with deer in the forest, flew with the wings of crows, or were glimpsed nameless from the awed depths of every numinous pool........ even then, this was a holy day, a day of celebration. 

This is an extraordinary Solstice, with a full lunar eclipse.  

Long ago ancestors lit fires to welcome the "shining god" who was the sun returning from mysterious underworld depths. They built stones or made circles or created doorways to be aligned with the sun's pathway. They lit fires as sympathetic magic, fires to light and imitate the Sun's passage (which is why we still light candles, and Christmas lights, today). 

Photo by Lewis Meyer (2010)

Welcoming the Sun, they left offerings of food to show their gratitude, and invented songs or danced throughout the longest cold night, encouraging, helping the Sun on its  difficult journey to the promise of new life.

I remember today that holy days begin among our most ancient, instinctual roots, taproots that reach down, deeply entwined within the visible and invisible web of  Gaia's life. Planet Earth turns her face toward her star again, circling in brilliant orbit, bearing every evolving, responsive, living, infinitely intertwined be-ing within her fragile, exquisite azure skin on her long journey.   

Perhaps we sense, as the sun rises,  that pre-verbal, instinctual knowing, found hidden beneath the pages of any book written with five fingered hands, beneath each inscribed layer of words, signs, hieroglyphs, pictures in jet or ochre or sepia, luminous beneath the oldest pages.  A veneer peels away, revealing a pentimento, an ancient heartbeat, shared again with all beings that keep vigil on the long night of the winter Solstice.  

The light is returning again.  
(2009)

Here's from a recent entry from Macha's Blog  about what her community does  at the Solstice:

"In my tradition, we gather on the beach at sunset on the longest night of the year, and as the Sun goes down over the waves, we all plunge into the ocean as a ritual purification; then return to warm up at the big waiting bonfire in the sand.

Later we return to homes, often lots of us in one home, where we sing Yule carols, light candles, drink hot brews. We feast and eat Sun cookies the children have baked. We gather near the fireplace telling and listening to stories, playing games, perhaps doing divination.

As dawn approaches, we go outside and gather in the high places around the Bay Area and sing and sing and sing up the Sun – often in the rain, but always we can see the lightening skies.

When we perform these acts – when we sing the carols, trim our trees, light candles – we reenact the things our ancestors did, we reconnect with them, and we honor our heritage. Celebrating Midwinter together allows us to reaffirm the continuance of life."

I pledge allegiance

to the soil of Turtle Island,

and to the beings

who thereon dwell

one ecosystem in diversity

under the sun

With joyful

interpenetration for all.

Gary Snyder

Amaterasu and the return of the Sun

Mana Youngbear  (2004)

 

Hail and Awake!
Children of the blue, brown and green Earth
I have come from my shining abode in Heaven
I am Amaterasu Omikami  - Great Woman Who Possesses Noon

Here is a gift for you:
A mirror, to draw you from your cave of sleeping
To see yourself in all your wonder:
Allow me to introduce you - to yourself!

Mary Kay Landon

A wonderful story for the Solstice comes from Japan, the tale of Amaterasu,  Goddess of  the Sun.

Angered by her vulgar, violent brother Susanowa,  god of storms,  Amaterasu Omikami fell into despair about the ugliness and the ignorance of the world.  She retreated to a cave, and refused to  come out. And so, deprived of her warmth and light, the world began to die.

All the deities and spirits came to the mouth of her cave, and begged the goddess to come out. But Amaterasu Omikami, withdrawn into her dark musings,  would not, and all the pleas of those gathered could not persuade her to return to the world.

At last, the little goddess Uzume placed a mirror at the entrance to the cave.  Then Uzume, known for her high humor, began to dance. Her dance was so bawdy, so absurd.......that everyone gathered had to laugh, in spite of their dire circumstances. They laughed and laughed and laughed!

At last, with so much raucous laughter, even Amaterasu's dark thoughts were interrupted with sheer curiosity.  She opened the cave door just a crack, and peeked out.  And at that moment, her radiant,  face was reflected in the mirror. At that very moment, she saw how beautiful she was - and rememberd how much joy and laughter there still was in the world.  And that is how Amaterasu left her cave of dark despair, forgot about her anger and disillusionment, and joined the dance, shining again in all of her glory.  

There are caves of darkness into which we all retreat. For a day, a month, too many years, perhaps a lifetime. Sometimes, we have to be tricked away from abysses of the heart in order to see how beautiful, how valuable, how important the light in each of us really is.   Then we find the the will to rejoin the hilarious, heartbreaking dance of life - and once again,  be the Sun.

 

Laura Janesdaughter (1999) 

A Poem for Light

The Solstice is about the return of the light and so I thought I'd find poems, stories, and images that talk, one way or another, about Light.

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

“Make of yourself a light,” 

said the Buddha,
before he died.

I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal – a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.

An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.

The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.

No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.

And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire –
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something 
of inexplicable value.

Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

~ Mary Oliver ~

Elemental

I'll be reading a paper again at the annual Conference on Pagan Studies at Claremont School of Theology in January - I always leave so inspired by the people I meet there.  I wish that the Pagan movement was not so marginalized by our society, because every time I go, I remember how very urgent the work of re-weaving our spiritual identity back into not only human community, but the  community of Gaia, Mother Earth, really is. When I think of it, most of my numinous and magical experiences happened in the wild, within the Great Conversation.

EARTH, WIND, FIRE AND WATER

Stone, rounded in my hand
tell me your story - the secret waters
that shaped you,
veining and coursing into darkness
humming their songs
of bones, pottery shards,
stones smoothed past memory or telling  
be my teacher.

Hawk,  tell me what you see. 
Small on the ground, I am blind. 
In widening circles you write an
incantation for the far journey
in the sky.  Be my teacher.

Fire, speak, if you will.
Illuminate the shadows
filling this careful house of sticks
I have built.  Burn me empty and full,
teach my feet to dance.
Fire, you be my teacher.

Rain, tell me.  I am listening.
Your voice is a multitude, 
your story grows
in the telling.  Into the mouth
the mouth of the ocean,
this song you sing. 
Rain, you will be my teacher.

(1993)

    ~My help is in the mountain~

    Where I take myself to heal
    The earthly wounds
    That people give to me.
    I find a rock with sun on it
    And a stream where the water runs gentle
    And the trees which one by one give me company
    And so I must stay for a time
    Until I have grown from the rock
    And the stream is running through me
    And I cannot tell myself from one lone tree.
    Then I will know that nothing touches me
    Nor makes me run away.
    My help is in the mountain
    That I take away with me.

    Earth cure me.  Earth receive my woe.
    Rock strengthen me.  Rock receive my weakness.
    Rain wash away my sadness.  Rain receive my doubt.
    Sun make sweet my song.
  
      ~Nancy Wood~

White Tara (2)

Om Tare, Tu Tare,
even in the darkest prisons, you offer your hand
Your touch cools hatred and grief.
From you, the demons of delusion fly
Praise Tara, whose fingers adorn her heart
Light radiates from a wheel in Your hand.

Valerianna mentioned Jewell in her recent comment, which is magical, as I had just written this entry which talks about energy work Jewell facilitated.   I've been reading "Journey of Souls" by Michael Newton recently, and I felt like sharing a very important vision I had in 1997, a vision that became the inspiration for all the masks I made dedicated to the Goddess Tara.  It was a profound gift.

In 1997 I was finally divorced, and all ties were severed between us.  The ending of the marriage did not bring out the best in either of us, and I felt a great deal of remorse, emotional confusion, and grief.  In my effort at growth that summer, I went to a well known energy healer in Massachusetts,  Jewell.  She put me on her table, and I went almost immediately into a trance state.

I found myself watching what seemed like a "clip"  from a movie - each scene was rapidly replaced by another scene.  I still remember some of these "vignettes" vividly - a ceremonial room decorated with thousands of orange marigolds;  an emaciated old black woman lying on a dirty bed;  a heavyset white man with glasses, bundled up in a kind of fur parka;  African drummers, drumming with passiona around a fire, and more.  Gradually,  I felt myself "pulled back", so that I seemed to be watching these scenes from a greater distance, as if they formed a patch-work quilt.  I remember thinking how incredibly beautiful it all was from that perspective, a work of art.

Then I became aware of an immense energy - a being that radiated (there's no other way to describe it) tremendous compassion.   She had no form, just white light.  The only thing that seemed identifiable was that I felt the Being was female;  and I felt she was communicating something like "Don't take on so, Lauren, look at all of this.  You'll meet again.  You can move on now."  I might add that she also radiated an equally huge sense of humor;  I felt  like a child getting a hug from an angel.  If that makes any sense........

And then I came to on Jewell's table.  After we spoke, I learned that Jewell often began her sessions with a prayer from the 21 Praises to Tara, a Tibetan prayer to the Goddess Tara.  To me, that visitation was White Tara, Goddess of Compassion, manifesting to help me move forward to a new stage of life.  I've revered her ever since.

Manna Youngbear as "White Tara" (2004)