Update on the Temple of Sekhmet

I'm delighted to have been given a residency at the Temple  of Sekhmet   in Nevada (not far from Las Vegas) on the 17th to 26th of April.  

I'll be teaching a Masks of the Goddess mask making weekend workshop there for women.  (I love especially doing workshops where the participants can stay overnight, and "incubate" the work together).  

Looking forward to meeting the people at the Temple, which is also a major center for Peace Activism, and meeting the Goddess of the Desert.

Image of "Sekhmet" courtesy Abbi Spinner McBridge

  "Om Sekhmet" Invocational Music  by Abbi Spinner McBride

Urgent: Stop Censorship of the Internet before 1 - 24

We've seen many erosions of our democracy in the past decade. And to control the media and transmission of information is THE most significant way to control people.  Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S. Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Please take the time to understand how misleading these bills are, and how they could be used to control and censor the Internet in disatrous ways   before it is too late.  Here's where you can sign a petition sponsored by Google:

https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/
  
Supporters of PIPA and SOPA:

RIAA, MPAA, News Corp, TimeWarner, Walmart, Nike, Tiffany, Chanel, Rolex, Sony, Juicy Couture, Ralph Lauren, VISA, Mastercard, Comcast, ABC, Dow Chemical, Monster Cable, Teamsters, Rupert Murdoch.........and more "major brands"...........

Opponents of PIPA and SOPA:

Google, Yahoo, Wikipedia, craigslist, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, eBay, AOL, Mozilla, Reddit, Tumblr, Etsy, Zynga, EFF, ACLU, Human Rights Watch........


 Here's how you can sign a petition by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU):

https://secure.aclu.org/site/Advocacy?cmd=display&page=UserAction&id=3859 

And here's from the staff of  Craig's list:  

STOP PIPA and SOPA

S968 and HR3261 are threatening CL and the rest of your Internet. Most of the web sites you use strongly oppose these bills. Find out why, and how you can help put a stop to this madness before it's too late!

★ ☆ ★ ☆ ★ ☆ ★ ☆ ★   about SOPA:

Corporate supporters of Senate 968 (PIPA) and HR 3261 (SOPA) demand the ability to take down any web site (including craigslist, Wikipedia, or Google) that hurts their profits -- without prior judicial oversight or due process  -- in the name of combating "online piracy." PIPA and SOPA authors and supporters insist they'd only go after foreign piracy sites, but Internet Engineers understand this is an attempt to impose "Big Brother" controls on our Internet, complete with DNS hijacking and censoring search results. Incredibly, many Congress Members favor this idea.


Tell Congress you OPPOSE Senate 968 "Protect IP Act" (PIPA) and H.R. 3261 "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA):

• Phone your Member of Congress via nifty Progressive Change app
• Contact Senators who are refusing to meet with constituents about PIPA.
• EFF Action Center - Strike Against Censorship - Congressional Emailer
• ECA Congressional Emailer - Don't Censor Our Internet!
• OpenCongress Congressional Emailer - Oppose SOPA
• Generic Congressional Emailer (You'll need your Zip+4)
• Petition Congress - Protect Innovation, Dump SOPA (Progressive Change )
• Outside the US? Sign Petition Opposing US Censorship of Global Sites (EFF)

Where does your Member of Congress stand on PIPA and SOPA?  PIPA and SOPA Are Too Dangerous To Revise.....they Must Be Killed Entirely .
Congress needs to hear from you, or these dangerous bills will pass - they have tremendous lobbying dollars behind them, from corporations experts say are attempting to prop up outdated, anti-consumer business models at the expense of the very fabric of the Internet -- recklessly unleashing a tsunami of take-down notices and litigation.   Don't believe it? Monster Cable has labeled craigslist a "rogue site," earmarked for blacklisting and full-takedown under PIPA .

**(Note:  Are we ready to lose Craigslist so Monster Cable can improve its profits?)

There is still time to be heard. Congress is starting to backpedal on this job-killing, anti-American nonsense, and the Obama administration has weighed in against these bills as drafted, but SOPA/PIPA cannot be fixed or revised -- they must be killed altogether.   Learn more about SOPA, Protect IP (PIPA), and Internet Blacklisting:

• Growing Chorus of Opposition to PIPA and SOPA
• Open Letter against SOPA from 83 Prominent Internet Engineers
• Why SOPA and Protect IP (PIPA) are Bad, Bad Ideas (Techdirt)
• Piracy not a problem, PIPA and SOPA are unnecessary (Tim O'Reilly on GigaOM)
• PIPA and SOPA News (Google News)
• PIPA Wikipedia entry ::::: SOPA Wikipedia entry
• SOPA FAQ (CNET)

As Bill Moyers has famously pointed out (you can see him speaking about Media and Democracy on Link TV at:  http://www.linktv.org/programs/special_moyers) democracy is not possible without freedom of information and speech.  Below is an excerpt from his  2007 speech on media and propaganda.

Temple of Sehkmet in the Desert

There's a Temple dedicated to the Egyptian Lioness Goddess Sekhmet in the Nevada desert.........a wonderful place that  offers retreat and ritual. 

The Temple of Sekhmet was built in 1993, and continues to thrive.  Candace Ross is the resident Priestess, since 2007.

There is a lovely song dedicated to Sekhmet, and to the Temple in Nevada, by Abbi Spinner - the link below will take you to it:

  "Om Sekhmet" by Abbi Spinner McBride

As an aside, as I was browsing for contemporary devotees of Sekhmet (after, of course, Wikipedia) I ran across this:

'This is an Informational/Devotional site concerning what the ancient Egyptian lion-headed Goddess Sekhmet–as the Goddesss of Synchronicity–is doing during THIS Space/Time."

From All Things Sekhmet

The Goddess of synchronicity............hmm........I hope to learn more about this Goddess and her temple in the desert!

 
Try our slideshow creator at Animoto.

Andrew Harvey and the Goddess

"Hands" by Lorraine Capparell

"At the end of his life, the great Indian mystic Aurobindo said, “If there is to be a future, it will wear the crown of feminine design.” Unless we awaken to the mystery of the sacred feminine, and allow it to glow into, irradiate, illumine and penetrate every area of our activity,  we will die out and take nature, or a large part of it, with us. Unless we come to know what the sacred feminine really is — its subtlety and flexibility, but also its extraordinarily ruthless, radical power of dissolving all structures and dogmas, all prisons in which we have sought so passionately to imprison ourselves — we will be taken in by patriarchal projections of it. The Divine Mother, the fullness of the revolution that she is preparing, will be lost to us. We must understand that comprehending the sacred feminine is a crucial part of surviving the next terrible stage of humanity."

 Andrew Harvey

I'm preparing to work on a new series of Masks of the Goddess, and will do some fundraising for the time and materials I'll need to finish the project this year, and I also just proposed a paper for the conference held by the Association for the Study of  Women and Mythology.  I've been thinking about this for a while, and have had so many requests for the masks, that I feel it's time to make another collection, and hold them in trust for any who may wish to use them to explore and tell these important, worldwide stories.  Whew........big project, but it's time.   And because I conceive of the masks as not just for theatre, but as tools for invocation, for changing consciousness, I need to do some serious preparation internally before I can begin the process.  There's a kind of collaboration going on here, a clearing out and inviting in. 

As a student of mythology, I'm not sure it's possible to separate theology from mythology, or sometimes to separate mythology from "magic", which Starhawk defined as "the art of changing consciousness at will".  We conceive of what is sacred, or not, through symbol systems, the play of the  archetypal powers in the country of myth.  The sacred speaks to us continually, but is translated through story and image.   We personify ideas, personalize the Divine in order to experience the Divine......our artwork, our meditations, our prayers, activate the gods.  And as we experience them, they experience us.  I know this sounds strange, but I don't know how to express it.  As Jung wrote, the archetypes have their own collective lives within the collective consciousness of humanity.  There is reciprocity.

So, as we in-voke  the Goddess, She joins with us to shape and change us.    I agree with  Andrew Harvey , whose mysticism I greatly admire, that now is the time when the Dark Goddess is needed, the one who reveals the shadow that illuminates the light.  So much of my own empowerment in the past few years have been "shadow work", the often painful process of uncovering what is below the surface.  One thing important to remember about the Black Madonna, for me, is that She is pregnant.  She is no gentle mother, but she does carry within the new birth, the child of the future, the embryo.  Like Kali, She is the one who clears away and reveals, in no easy way, that which must leave in order for this birth, this new generation, to come into the world.   So I think that will be the first mask I make.

Theologian Andrew Harvey has written passionately about in the sacred feminine. the Dark Goddess,  in this crucial evolutionary time, which is now 2012. 

Black Madonna (2005)

"There's another kind of crucifixion going on (today): crucifixion of purpose and hope. Everybody is totally bewildered. They know that the world is potentially on the brink of  apocalypse. There's a tremendous danger that as people wake up to the horror of what is going on, they will run into political extremism or into fundamentalism of one kind or another.

So it's extremely important that the wisdom of the 'dark night of the soul' gets across, because if people understand the necessity for this crucifixion, and understand that it's preparing a resurrection and empowerment, then they will be prepared to go through it without too much fear, trusting in the logic of the divine transformation.

The Benedictine monk Bede Griffiths shared with me his experience of the dark night of the soul. He said he was sitting outside his hut one day when he felt as if a hand hit him on the right side of his being. He had suffered a massive heart attack that destroyed what he described as his
patriarchal mind and gave him access to a much deeper elaboration of Oneness with all things.

He said, "It's a very strange thing, but when I thought of surrendering to the Mother I of course thought of Mary--I often say the 'Hail Mary'--but it was Mary as the Black Madonna that came into my mind. She is the mother of the earth as well as heaven, of the body as well as the soul, the mother of the subconscious, the hidden, of all those powers that the 'masculine' mind represses; the Mother of the sacred darkness. In Her the Western Christian vision of the Divine Mother and the Eastern one merge and meet; you can think of her as both Mary and Kali, both preserver and destroyer. From that time on, I have turned to Her again and again.
Invoking Her strength and grace, I find, makes the 'birth' go so much faster and more cleanly."

  from BLACK MADONNA RETURNS, by Andrew Harvey

The Virtues and Vices

"Generosity"

 
I'm in a show next week at Raices Teller Gallery, and the theme for the show is "Virtue and Vice".    According to the dictionary, the 4 traditional cardinal virtues are prudence, justice,  temperance, and fortitude, which are derived from Greek philosophy.   The Church added faith, hope, and charity.  The 7 Deadly Sins are Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Wrath, Greed, and Sloth.  If you want to know more about them in particular, there's a handy website called Deadly Sins.com, which informs me that "you probably commit some of them every day without thinking about the rich tradition of eternal damnation in which you're participating."*

That's enough to cause me to pause as I reach for that 4th chocolate chip cookie.

"There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil— a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome."  

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

But the show has me thinking about what virtue and vice actually mean to me.  Often without thinking about it, we predicate much of our judgement of others, and ourselves, on externalized and internalized ideas of what are virtues or vices. And virtues and vices vary from culture to culture and individual to individual in their importance or lack thereof.  And, unlike the world of  Jane Austen, so full of moral certainties which gave a comforting "backbone" to the lives of her characters, our is a time of tremendous confusion.  I've been thinking about what my own thoughts on virtue and vice are in these strange times, so forgive me if I ponder them for a little while.  

HONOR

Although it's not on the "big list" of Virtue, what I find myself thinking about a great deal is HONOR.  And it's diminutive expression, COURTESY.  Honor..........The circulation of goods in a local economy is obviously not the same as the massive, impersonal world of Wall Street. Capitalism as we experience it is based on manipulation of others, with little regard, if any, for the moral consequences.  In fact, people get advanced degrees in how to manipulate the market and people to buy things they don't really need.

When was the last time you saw something for sale for $1.00?
$5.00?  $10.00?  Long ago someone figured out that if something is priced at $1.99, people can be manipulated into buying something because is seems to be $1 and not what it really is, which is one penny short of $2.  So absolutely everything has a 99 on the end of it - this dishonesty and lack of respect for those who engage in the exchange of money for goods is written into virtually every mercantile exchange we make.  It's worth thinking about what that means in terms of the notion of honor, and business.

Here's something else we take for granted as "the way things are".  We have labor unions to protect the workers, to provide fair wages, pensions at retirement.  We have laws that protect against child labor, hours that are unfair, and that protect the environment.  All the way it should be - but very little is made in the U.S. anymore.  Every time you go into Walmart you are participating in a hypocrisy.  There's a chance that that tee shirt, or beaded bag, was made in a sweatshop by a 14 year girl working 13 hour days in an environment that spews toxins into the local river with impunity.  And we're paying for it big time.  I think of how many sad, impoverished,  abandoned down towns I've driven through, whether Herkimer, New York, or Beatrice, Nebraska, or Lordsburg, New Mexico......and on the outskirts of each, the Big Box stores. If money is the basis for what we value, and how we determine worth, then honor falls by the wayside, or moves to the outskirts of town, sucking up the prosperity that should be at the center, and giving little back.



Anyway, the hour is getting late, and I must ramble on virtue and vice later........


______________________
*  They have an excellent, updated section called "The People's Choice: Nominate a New Deadly Sin".  I admire them for their efforts to keep up with the times.

Evolutionary Humor

My friend Charlie comes up with some funny ones........

"Thrive" Movie

Here's an interesting movie that a friend recently passed on information to me about (thanks Joyce!).  I haven't seen it fully, so can't really comment about it, but plan on seeing it soon.

The author of the movie, Foster Gamble, begins his introduction with the question "What happened?  What can account for the staggering deprivation and suffering on this planet?"  ..... he has his own conclusions, and conversation, within the movie.  I can't help but add my own comment, which is to say, I do believe the first solution arises from a profound understanding of inter-dependency, that on virtually every level, socially, environmentally, psychically, energetically..........we are all related, and interdependant.  From that much can be accomplished.  If we can evolve to internalize such a basic truth.