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.

Avatar thoughts

Hollywood, Gaia, and the Shadow?

I saw the movie Avatar last night, and of course, walked out amazed by the state of the art technology and beautiful artistry displayed within this movie. The creation of the imaginary planet Pandora, with it's amazing attention to detail, including a whole botany of phosphorescent, glowing night plants, was fantastic. The colors and patterns of the life forms of "Pandora" were in harsh contrast to the grey machine world of the human invaders. From a mythic perspective, one hopes the "Pandora's box" unleashed within this film are actually the angels of a paradigm shift.

Having spent so much of my life learning about indigenous (and contemporary) Earth-based spirituality, shamanism, and myth, I loved the tribal forest people and their World Tree, their Axis Mundi. I also loved the inclusion of the idea that these people could "speak with the ancestors", and with Tewa, the collective being of their world. Gaia theory is invoked in this fantasy creation of an "indigenous people" who live in recognition and attunement to the universal organism of their planet. "All energy is borrowed" the hero learns, "and eventually you have to give it back".

They even had enough anthropological understanding to include the hunter who prays over the body of the fallen prey, offering thanks for the gift of its meat - this is, indeed, what native peoples universally did in both myth and in practice, recognizing and honoring that the animal has sacrificed its life to sustain the life of the tribe. Most Americans do not equate the hamburger they buy with an animal that has lost its life, let alone do they comprehend a spiritual system that respects the exchange of life force and energy that has taken place. What a wonderful concept to introduce to the young people who watched the movie.

Avatar also includes a Rambo, one-dimensional military commander, who is bound to destroy everything, being unable to "see" the value of the world around him other than a product to be exploited. We also learn that Earth has been devastated, "there's no green at home", and it's suggested that the invaders represent a culture that has long ago forgotten how to "see the green world". What the Navi "see" is a "green vision" of inter-connectedness, the "synapse between the trees" that Sigourney Weaver's character seeks to study.

As someone who once wrote a novel (with my former husband, Duncan Eagleson: The Song of Medusa ** about an ancient sibyl of Old Europe who could "talk with the Earth Goddess" by going into sacred underground caves, I especially loved the part where the blue people connected to "Tewa", the world soul or "the Mother", at their "tree of souls".

Great mythos here, re-invented and re-told by hugely ambitious storytellers.

Hollywood has been talking about the conflict between the technological/corporate/patriarchal/ paradigm and an emerging paradigm of a Gaian, wholistic consciousness for a long time. I've complained about the violence, vulgarity, and propaganda machine of Hollywood, but now offer applause as well. The not-so-independent film industry has been making the Shadow of our world visible for a while.

In the computer animated science fiction film of 2001 Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within the world was besieged by the ghosts of a planet destroyed by war; the protagonists desperately strive to heal the "Gaia - World Soul" of that world while trying to protect the "Gaia" of their own from another military commander. I think of the "heart of the elder elves", the tree city of Lothlorian in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. There the wise guardians of Middle Earth live in gigantic trees and confront a Dark Lord whose minions lay the world to waste. In the 80's Emerald Forest, an Amazon tribe steals away an American child to save him from the "Termite People" who are clear cutting the rain forests.

I actually had a Big Box Theatre revelation while recovering from this film extravaganza, and I'm somewhat at a loss to write about it. I'll try.

Viggo Mortensen is a brilliant actor, so I next visited The Road, currently showing. Here was another "road warrior" imagined future where society has broken down, and Mortensen's character travels with his son through a horrific world of rape and cannibalism. I reflected, leaving this truly grim film, on how this motif of a world survived only by the violent (and almost exclusively, violent men).........has occurred over and over and over, and offers a desperately nihilistic view of the human capacity for compassion and for cooperation.

"How I hate the scribblers, who only write of war,
and leave the true glory of the past all unsung."

......Robin Williamson

The patriarchal paradigm is based upon competition and hierarchy, and founded upon preoccupation with military might. This is our overwhelmingly predominant cultural mythos, reinforced again and again and again by endless variations on the same theme.

History is taught from the vantage point of wars fought and lost. Events like the development of art, philosophy, agriculture, religion, architecture, and medicine are almost noted as a sideline, secondary peripheral events that managed to occur between wars of conquest and defense, in spite of the rise and fall of empires. This view of history reflects an inability to see that the developments of creation and nurture, of peacemaking and trade, of sharing and cooperation, are more truly the true wealth and foundation of a civilization than the forces that destroy. Notions of violence are so universal that it is utterly underwritten in our cultural mythos. War is regarded as inevitable and even desirable: how else can one be a "warrior" without a war?

Even in the realm of new age spirituality I find myself struck with the popular idea of the "spiritual warrior". How about "spiritual peacemaker"? A teenage friend recently told me it was kind of a wimpy* sounding word. But why do we need to bring the concept of war even into the concept of creating peace?

Guns and swords are virtual talismens in our culture. We have a vast military complex in the United States, an atomic arsenal that is as terrible as any science fiction writer could have dreamed up. Even in the midst of economic meltdown and urgent news about climate change, our goverment continues to pour huge resources into a futile war. And although I grew up with the specter of nuclear annihilation, there is still no "Department of Peace" . Young people flood to careers in the military, careers that encourage enlistment with the ultimate idealism, pomp, and mythos of the noble warrior - yet, to the best of my knowledge, there are no specific career tracks for "peacemakers", "consensus makers", and "conflict resolvers".

Last March I stumbled serendipitously (and literally) into the dark vision of a movie (soon to be released) called "The Book of Eli". It was a synchronicity for me, because I went to Corrizozo, New Mexico, to visit a friend who was working on a forthcoming group show. As it turned out, the entire main street of little Corrizozo, N.M. had been rented, and made into a dark, post-apocalyptic movie set. Complete with ruined buildings and overturned buses, chain gangs of "slave" extras listlessly strode by, black smoke spewed from armored cars, and the sounds of snipers came from set windows. It was fun to watch the filming, and the detail was astounding.

The irony was that, after the movie was shot, the desolate veneer of the set was gradually peeled away by the crew, to reveal again the old street with its art galleries and studios. And when all was renewed in the spring light of April, my friends had their show, about the return of the Goddess, appropriately titled "The Return of the Mother". I like to think it was a good omen, that the dark future of war lords and slave masters, killing each other over (ultimate irony - the "book of Eli is the Bible)...........should be vanish like a film set or a dissolving water color, to reveal beneath the surface the bright hope of The Return of the Mother.

Now that is a living metaphor; what author Paulo Coelho calls "a sign"; I like to think it is a hope for the future.

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* "Wimp" is an old English word that originally meant "young woman". "Wimpy" means cowardly, weak - there's a whole his-story of disrespect for the feminine right there, if you stop to think about it.

**

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the "Book of Eli"

The Goddess and the Book of Eli (1) (photo by Georgia Stacy)

Corrisozo, N.M., set of "The Book of Eli", filming 3-2009. (Photo by Georgia Stacy)

I had a wonderful 4 day adventure into the "outback" of New Mexico, visiting a group of women artists who will be putting on a group show in Carrizozo, New Mexico called "The Return of the Mother". It will be opening on April 11th at Gallery 408 in Carrizozo. It was such a pleasure to meet these amazing women, among them sculptor Georgia Stacy, and fabric artist Karen Smith, who is creating a Sanctuary for the Divine Feminine called Kindred Spirits Sanctuary in the mountains of her beautiful home (she also has a labyrinth!).

"The Black Madonna and the Book of Eli"
(composite photo with G. Stacy)

Inanna Champagne had been invited to speak to groups in the area about her work, and I was also invited to bring along my dvd about the Masks of the Goddess project. As we sat having coffee in prior to departure, Inanna and I both noticed that (this is the honest to goodness truth!) a tiny spider had slowly come down on its thread to hang eye level between us. We observed it move up a bit, and then down a bit, and then up a bit......back and forth for over an hour. At last, when we were ready to leave, I took it by the thread and placed the latest envoy of Spider Woman on my altar. We felt well aspected and blessed on our journey, and indeed, so we were! I may talk about a "webbed vision" in the abstract, but when these kinds of little syncronicities happen, well........the mystery of the divine has a great sense of humor. And our lives are always full of everyday Milagros.

Arriving at Carrizozo, which is a small town in central New Mexico, one drives through vast reaches of blond Georgia O'Keefe landscapes with brooding blue mountains in the distance. We saw that we were in time for the town's major attraction - the filming of a motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Denzel Washington. An entire downtown street (where the Gallery my friends' show will be) had been converted into a post-apocalyptic, "Road Warrior" type set, complete with rusting automobiles, foam core burned out buildings, and sad little "cubby holes" where, presumably, desperate children of the apocalypse lived. Dirty, dread-locked young people (extras) milled about, while armored cars raced up and down the street, and the sounds of "snipers" guns echoed in the crisp, windy New Mexico air.

Joyce, a local visionary, was our tour guide. She had been there since the beginning of the town's transformation, watching the sets being built over facades of the existing buildings. They took 2 months to create, and next week it will all come down, revealing again the gallery where "The Return of the Mother" will be in April, after the foam core and plaster is peeled away.

There is a splendid metaphor in here! It was weird to see this contemporary nightmare made so vivid that I could actually walk around in it. Life and art are sometimes seamless.

To read about the movie see THE BOOK OF ELI . I don't think they have a trailer yet......... Try also this link: Book of Eli, which describes the movie as:

"A post-apocalyptic Western, in which a lone man fights his way across America in order to protect a sacred book that holds the secrets to saving humankind."

It's interesting that there are two post apocalyptic movies scheduled for release ( the other is The Road, with Viggo Mortenson) within the next year. Like the "Road Warrior" of the '80's, our world has a fascination with images of a future in which all that remains of our civilization is a grim landscape of warlords shooting it out with each other, grimly pre-occupied with power, guns, and unceasing violence. That's the mythos of a dominator, hierarchy culture.

Yet in reality, many people right here in New Mexico live in a world of enormous cooperation and generosity. That is also a part of the human spirit, the future's challenge and potential. I know many, many communities all over this country who participate in a "webbed" life-serving consciousness, envisioning sustainable futures. Cooperation, negotiation, and a collective means is actually the basis of any civilization.

We are capable of enormous violence, yes. Perhaps, the ultimate violence. But we are also capable of enormous, vast, cooperation. As we approach 2012, we approach the next evolutionary step for humanity, wherein we must understand and participate in the larger life of our planet, of Gaia the Mother, or we will face the possibility of extinction.

I am saddened to think so many are conditioned by the media to think that a violent world is our only possibility. How poorly what Gloria Steinam has called the "Cult of Masculinity" prepares us for the real challenges of the future. Because our survival can only be achieved through cooperation. But I doubt we'll see a movie about the "end of days" wherein heroic people get together to vision quest where the best place is to settle might be, or gather to share their food supplies, or figure out a way to dig a new community well, or for that matter, hold healing rituals and prayer circles. And yet, that is what people do together, all over the place.

So, I am pleased (and amused) by the synchronicity of a show called The Return of the Great Mother rising from the ashes of the movie set, a bright alternative to the current paradigm's dark vision. Georgia saw a Goddess shape in one of her photos of the Book of Eli set, and I couldn't help but play with the images myself a bit. Artists are myth makers.

We're weaving the future with the stories we tell. So what are they?