The Masks of the Goddess: New Slide Show

I will be giving a Salon Presentation next week with the Association  for the Study of Women and Mythology, and put together a new, improved Slide Show!  Here it is below, and the Slide Share link - and I'm most grateful to Slide Share for making their wonderful service available.  And since I'm also doing a kind of "retrospective" here as I  wait for the heavy hand of Bloggers "new look" which may make it rather difficult to access my older posts, I copy below an article I wrote about the "Mythos" of the Goddess, and the creation of masks.

https://www.slideshare.net/laurenraine/the-masks-of-the-goddess-2020

The masks of the goddess 2020 from Lauren Raine

MYTHOS
The Multi-cultural  Divine Feminine

"Western civilization has been overshadowed by the Father archetype, to the exclusion of the Mother archetype.  By suppressing the feminine, we have done enormous damage to our individual and collective psychic health, ​ to say nothing of the health of our planet."   

Jennifer Barker and Roger Woolger, THE GODDESS WITHIN
​

​In 2002, just before the invasion of Iraq, I directed an event with the Masks of the Goddess collection devoted to peace in Oakland, California.   I   remember a conversation I shared with one of my collaborators,  Dorit Bat Shalom, an Israeli artist who brought Israeli and Palestine women together in “Peace Tents” to share their stories in the 1990's.   

Dorit asked: "How can there be peace in the Middle east without the Shekinah?"  The Shekinah is the feminine aspect of God in Judaism.  Dorit explained "The Shekinah has been driven away from the holy lands. We cannot heal without her."

I never forgot her comment.  Because  indeed, endless strife does takes place in the very heart of what was once the fertile homeland of the ancient Great Mother, of Inanna, Astarte, Isis,  Asheroth, and the Shekinah.   Artists are mythmakers - and myths are the templates of dream, art and religion, the templates upon which both civilizations and individuals name what is sacred, and what is profane. I think the question Dorit raised is profound:  how indeed can there be peace, in the Mideast or elsewhere, when deity, and values, are personified and polarized as almost exclusively male? 

 A mythos that denies “the feminine face of God”, and degrades or belittles the sanctity of feminine experience - has left us a humanity divided against itself.

At the closing of our event participants and audience approached a masked “Sophia”, who held a mirror over her heart. As they drew near the stage, each saw themselves reflected in the mirror, the “heart of Sophia”.  The name of Sophia, the feminine face of God in early Gnostic Christianity, means "wisdom".  Ultimately, to "know Sophia" means to "know thyself". In all our complex diversity, male and female, dark and light, old and young.  The "mirror of Sophia" represented the Gnosis necessary to become true peacemakers.

The Goddess of antiquity and world culture, as well as in contemporary women's spirituality,   has a thousand faces - maiden, mother, wise crone, teacher, warrior, healer, destroyer, lover, nurturer of new life or the flame of creativity. She is found throughout world religions and mythologies, with names like red Kali, Inanna Queen of the stars, Quan Yin the compassionate, suffering Sedna Ocean mother to the Inuit, Aphrodite the capricious goddess of love, and Mary, the Virgin. To me, most of all, she is Gaia, Anima Mundi, the feminine “World Soul”.  As the collective power and voices of women rise now so does the Goddess, often hidden and underground, rising now from the buried past.  

I've found, with many others, that re-discovering and re-inventing these universal stories is important to empowering women.  They are also important on many other levels:  to restore the balance within the fragmented soul of humanity, which includes reverence for nature and the sanctity of embodied existence, and for the affirmation of women’s experience.  It's been my privilege to share some of that telling through the use of masks, dance, ritual and theatre.

SACRED MASKS AND DANCE

When I studied mask making in Bali, I realized the Balinese had no understanding of our western discourse on art....art, to them, is a way to commune with the deities of their Hindu religion. Everyone in one way or another assists in the daily practice of their beliefs,  from creating offerings for ritual events, dancing in performances, participating in Ketchak performances, or many other activities associated with festivals and ritual dramas. Every village has its collection of Temple masks, preserved for specific events, such as the seasonal battle between the Barong (light) and the witch Rangda (dark).   For the Balinese the Temple masks are not "art objects" - they "belong to the Gods", and are imbued with special meaning and energy, just as the telling of their stories is more than entertainment.

"Theater" comes from the same Greek word as "theology" - Theos, or "god". In traditional cultures, masks, drama and dance are about contacting the divine, and refreshing the mythologies that inform their cultures... Masks are never made lightly. Animated by the body, masks are threshold tools that mediate between this world and the realms of spirit. There are many procedures to be followed, including choosing the right materials from the right place, asking ancestral spirits what kind of mask is required for specific ceremonies, and consecrating the finished work. A great deal of preparation was necessary, and masks were activated and de-activated with great respect.

As psychologist Stephen Larsen commented in his 1996 book The Mythic Imagination:

"The primary function of the mask is to unite the indwelling wearer (and the observer) with a mythic being, or as Jung would say, 'an archetypal power'. The mask, as we have found in our own work, becomes a transformer of energy, a medium of exchange between ego and archetype. Thus in traditional societies one finds taboos surrounding the mask, its recognition as a power object.”

Among natives of central Mexico, masks used for corn and rain dances were destroyed after a number of years, because they believed they accrued too much power over time. This sensibility is found in Japanese Noh Theatre. Noh masks are created according to traditions that go back many generations to represent personae that have firmly become animated by the mask. Actors will often sit for days with a mask, creating fusion with the character. An artist I know once told me of an African mask at the Museum of Art in Milwaukee that, legend had it, sweated. She said she went to view it over a number of days, and sure enough, there it was, if carefully observed, sweating away. Unnoticed by hundreds of people, she commented, magic is literally on display. 

"We're really praying" Drissana Devananda, a Tantric dancer, said of her dance practice. "It's a devotional practice. We're not bodies seeking the spirit, but spirits seeking bodily experience. Dance is about remembering to function from our whole bodies, the "body mind". That is the place we remember the Goddess." 

The intent of sacred performance thus is to give movement and voice to multi-dimensional being. What happens when we invite the archetypal powers, the Goddesses and Gods, into our "magic circle"? The answer is, "If you build it, they will come."  I believe there is a magnetic field the dance practice engages, a field of synchronicity and relatedness we step into.

 "When you create within a sacred paradigm", playwright Elizabeth Fuller said "you find a strange thing. You are communicating with, and being fed by, sources you know are within you, but have a much greater reflection somewhere else. You are in touch with something timeless.”

CIRCLE ART

As the group becomes a strong container, it generates energy that flows to the audience and beyond, an expanding circle. "Circularity" is the foundation of evolving Women's Spirituality.   The wheel of the elements, the wheel of the year, circulates. Water and wind move across the landscape like a sinuous snake. All things circle and wind and spiral. So does our creativity as we interact.

Masks are also about circles. To me, masks are an impeccable metaphor for the personae that encircle our souls.

Who are we, really? In the course of our lives we inhabit a noisy council of selves. The metaphor of the mask leads perfectly into that essential inquiry:  “Is this me? Or this? Can I wear this mask, become it for a while, express its unique qualities, feel it in my body, and find its story?  Can I take this mask off, have I become too identified with this mask to my detriment?"

We become, in my opinion, more compassionate beings when we can witness, embrace, and celebrate this "circle of self", from dark to light, mundane to divine, fragile to strong, young to old - as the integral being each of us really is. Not as an abstract concept, but as an authentic experience to be had within our spontaneous, creative imaginations, and in the sensory, visionary immediacy of our bodies. One way to do that is to use the mask consciously - putting on and taking off these many "faces", becoming self-aware shape shifters.

Each mask has its reserve of energy. Women and men exploring mythology with masks and storytelling may chose to work with an archetype for specific reasons; sometimes to call back something they feel has been lost. A woman named Turquoise who participated in a ritual drama in 2001, for example, told me that she discovered a joyful opportunity to reconnect with "the instinctual woman"  she had been in her youth when she worked with the  Artemis/Diana mask.

"I found", she wrote, "renewed love for the animals, the trees, for all living things. I saw my surroundings illuminated with light, the light of nature.  That is the domain of Artemis."

Some may find themselves drawn to a Goddess because she affords them an opportunity to explore something they need to discover.  Enacting the myth of Inanna’s descent to meet her dark twin Ereshkigal has been powerful visioning into the "underground" of the psyche for many who have created ritual events based upon this ancient Sumerian myth. Dwelling in the underworld, Ereshkigal may be understood as the “shadow self”, difficult to meet, necessary to not only know, but to cherish and integrate. The descent of Inanna is among the most universal myths of death, fragmentation, and psychic integration ever told: the shamanic "journey of the wounded healer".  Enacted in ritual theatre, it can represent initiation into mature empowerment; and it is also an enactment of the universal cycle of death and rebirth in the natural world.

The Goddess can also manifest in many intimate or contemporary ways. I remember making three masks for three young women who wished to create a performance about the Biblical Lilith, the "first wife of Adam" who was cast out of Eden because she would not submit to him.    They represented her as three aspects: a dark winged, elemental Lilith, a suffering Lilith cast out of Eden, and finally, Lilith as she appears today - a vamp.

"Mystery" derives from a Greek word, myein, which means "to keep silent". There are Gnostic experiences that cannot be spoken because they are, simply, larger than any word can express. They exist on multiple levels of meaning, and seem to cast us into the field of a consciousness that is greater than our individuality. 

Their expression belongs to dreams, art, myth and ritual. To too literally "describe" them is to diminish them and their potency. That was surely one of the reasons why the Eleusinian rites of Greece and Rome, which endured for 2,000 years, were called "Mysteries".

Ann Weller, an artist and community activist in California, took on the difficult task of invoking the "Dark Goddess" for a community ritual theatre event in 2000. At the approach of the millennium, their purpose was to symbolically transform the violence of the past century into a more just, evolved consciousness. As Ann described her process:

"The Dark Goddess is found in many cultures by many names, and is not aspected lightly. The work calls forth an internal capacity for psychic empowerment, an energy not easy for our limited ego selves to encompass. Because the work is, I believe, ultimately, impersonal. I was a brief vessel for an immense archetypal intelligence manifesting within the drama we created. And yet, the experience did bring personal change. You can't work with sacred theatre and not be changed in some way. I was being re-constructed, whether I was aware of it or not, to better serve Her. I found myself confronting aspects of myself that were just not useful any more. Which meant better serving myself. That's how I look at it. The little overlay of how I imagined myself, which had never been very effective, was now utterly obvious to me. My authentic power began to manifest."

In 1999 and 2006 it was my privilege to see the entire collection of masks used for the Spiral Dance, created by the Reclaiming Collective, in San Francisco. By offering to "aspect" a Goddess, each woman who wore her mask, and entered the Circle that night, was providing a blessing for all gathered, allowing the power of each Goddess to radiate into the world. This practice of viewing masks as “vessels for deity” - the gods and goddesses, the animal powers, the ancestral spirits - is a concept found in virtually all indigenous and early cultures, including the origins of Greek theatre.

There is a way of knowing that we are the artists of our lives, a way of seeing our creative process as participation in a conversation we are having with an infinitely conversant world. We’re dancing the future into the world by the stories we tell: like the web of the Native American creatrix Spider Woman, the threads of myth are spun far behind us, and weave their way far into the futures of those not yet born. May we dance empathy instead of despair, may we tell the stories that make life sacred and loving, profound and reverent.

 Photographs are by courtesy of:  Jerri Jo Idarius, Ileya Stewart, Thomas Lux, Peter Hughes, Ann Beam and Lauren Raine

References:

Bat Shalom, D. 2002:   "The Peace Tent", interview with Lauren Raine.
"The Masks of the Goddess - Sacred Masks and Dance", self-published  with  Blurb.com,  (San Francisco, California), 147 pages, 2019
.
Devananda, D. 2001:  interview with Lauren Raine. Unpublished  manuscript.

Fuller, E.  2001:  Interview with Lauren Raine, "The Masks of the Goddess - Sacred Masks and Dance", (2008) self-published  with  Blurb.com (San Francisco, California), 147 pages, p.87.

Larsen, S. Ph.D. 1996:  The Mythic Imagination: The Quest for Meaning Through Personal  Mythology,   Inner Traditions (Rochester, Vermont),  P. 178

Raine, L. 2008:   "The Masks of the Goddess - Sacred Masks and Dance", (2008) self-published   with  Blurb.com,  (San Francisco, California), 147 pages. 

Raine, L. 1999:   Performance, "The 20th Annual Spiral Dance", The Reclaiming Collective, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco, California, Oct. 31, 1999. Community performance of annual event. 

Raine, L.  2004:  Performance, "Restoring the Balance",  Muse Community Arts Center, Tucson, Arizona, April 4, 2004.  Community performance, directed and produced by Lauren Raine. 

Raine, L.  2004:   Performance, "A Thousand Faces",  Black Box Theatre, Oakland,  California, October, 2002.  Community performance, directed and produced by Lauren Raine.  

Darling, D. 2000         Performance,  "Masque of the Goddess", Sebastopol Community Hall,  Sebastopol, California,  May,   2000.  Community performance, directed   and produced by Diane Darling. 

Smith, T. 2001     Correspondence with Lauren Raine.

Weller, A.: 2001:     Interview with Lauren Raine, "The Masks of the Goddess - Sacred Masks and Dance", (2008) self-published  with Blurb.com  (San Francisco,  California), 147 pages. 

New Mask: Persephone

Persephone  is truly the Goddess of the Equinoxes, because She is both symbol  of spring and life's renewal when she returns to her mother Demeter at the turning of the seasonal Wheel, and she is also Goddess of death, wife of Hades, and Queen of the Underworld in the ending and dormant times as the Wheel turns.  

Having said this,  I allow myself here to move out of the great universal language of archetype, and will get a bit personal.  The truth of life in nature is that everything is changing, everything dies to become something else, or at least, make way for something else.  As beings embedded in nature, this is true of us as well, whether we like it or not.  The summer ends, and as we feast on the delightful fruits and breads of the harvest, we barely notice, indeed, we find ingenious ways to deny, the slow creep of winter.  And yet that beautiful, or horrific, or both, Leveler is already advancing over the horizon, implacable and indifferent.   Both Demeter and Hades have jobs to do.  

This is true of nature, this is true of biological life, and  it's true of our psyches as well.  When Persephone calls, I listen to what She has to say, whether it occurs in the flowering fields, or is a painful cry echoing from caverns deep in the Underworld.  And that is the point at which Hecate may appear with her torch (but that is another story).  

We all love the Song of Persephone in the spring, the song that tells us "this is the time to BE", to feel the honey sun on your shoulders, to love, to move away from the lonely tunnels of the mind and into the great Conversation of the fields, of the planet.

When Persephone calls from the caverns, not so easy.  Recently I had a meltdown from out of seemingly "know where".  All of a sudden, I couldn't sleep, found my face full of tears that would not emerge from my eyes, was angry, very angry, and having just completed a massive project  wanted nothing more than to jump into my car and just keep going, free.  I didn't, but I really, really wanted to.    You try to discover the language and content of that dark song too, what you need to know to become more fully human, what the soul is trying to tell you.  You don't "transcend" the nighttime  voice of Persephone, you listen and change,  you ultimately mature, you keep on moving.

We are approaching (again) the Vernal Equinox.  This is the liminal Goddess  Persephone's  time, the poised moment of Balance.  Which moving away from psychological jargon simply means realizing that we must, somehow, say "yes" to all of it, and keep moving, keep dancing the light and shadow dance.  Persephone will dance with us, will educate, if one can  accept this Moving Point of Balance.   

We are all, in the final analysis, Wanderers.

"Pesephone II" 2016

Persephone the Wanderer
by Louise Glück,

In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is
consistent with what we know of human behavior,

that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:

we may call this
negative creation.

I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
“home” to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?

You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.

Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise

the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.

You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?

White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—

It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says

Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn’t know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?

She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion—
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother’s
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?


“Persephone the Wanderer” from Averno by Louise Glück.
Copyright © 2006 by Louise Glück.

The Butterfly Woman Mask

Another new  mask, this one based on the Native American (Pueblo) stories of the "Butterfly Woman".  She is often represented among the Hopi people as an older woman, solid and experienced:  because the work of a Pollinator is no work for an inexperienced, naive young girl.  It is the hard work of pollinating the seeds of a new year, a new generation, a new world.  

The story below is not really based on the wonderful traditions of the Hopi,  rather, it kind of emerged from me some 20 years ago, when much was changing in my life.  But wherever  "La Mariposa" disappeared to, I am certain she has joined her tribe in order to continue the great work of the Pollinators...............

LA  MARIPOSA

Once upon a time, in a dusty village like any other village, a  village with  three good wells,  fields of blue and yellow corn,  a white church, and a cantina, there lived a woman who was neither young, nor old.  She was brown of skin, and eye, and her hair was as brown as the sandy earth, and her clothes were  brown and gray as well. She was neither beautiful nor ugly, neither tall nor small, and she walked with a long habit of  watching her feet.

One day, she saw a tree alight with migrating butterflies.   Their velvet wings fluttered in the wind of their grace, and one circled her, coming to rest upon her open hand.  She thought that her heart would break for the power of  its fragile beauty, and she held her breath for fear of frightening it.  La Mariposa  was as orange and brilliant as the setting sun falling between indigo  mountains, as iridescent, as black and violet as the most  fragrant midnight.  At last the butterfly lifted from her hand to rejoin its nomad tribe, and its wings seemed like a whisper,  "Come with us, come with us..."

The next morning they were gone.  She held her hand out to the empty tree, as if to wave farewell, and saw that where the butterfly had rested, there remained a dusting of color, yellow, like pollen, the kiss of a butterfly wing.  And she thought  something had changed.

She went to the well to draw water, and saw her face reflected there.  She was not the same -  there were now minute lines, hairline cracks, along the sides of her face, at the corners of her eyes.  Later, she noticed  little webs of  light beneath the sturdy brown skin of her hands,  barely visible except in the dim  twilight.

This was a frightening thing.  She drew her  skirts more closely around herself, pulled her scarf over her eyes.  But as time went on,  there was something that kept emerging, something that would not be denied.  She was peeling open.  At first, it simply itched, like a rash, like pulling nettles.  As  weeks went by,  what had been easily born, could be endured,  became painful,  became an agony.  Try as she might, as tightly as she wrapped herself in her cocoon of shawls and skin and silence,  the comforting  routines of her life,  colors emerged from her hands, spilt from her mouth, colors and tears, deep waters that seeped from within,  washing away the dust of her life.

Soon, sleep became impossible.  Standing by her window one day, shivering,  she shook  with fear.   A beam of sunlight fell across the floor of her little room like honey.  "Please help me", she cried, "I'm not the same".   Then she noticed a beam of sunlight that fell across the floor of her little room like honey.  Motes of dust gathered in the golden light, becoming  a flurry of butterflies dancing through an open window into a sky as blue and vast as forever.   And La Mariposa  opened her arms, took the gift of wings, and rose.

When her neighbor came to walk with her that evening, she found only a dusty shawl and an old brown skirt upon the floor, the early stars glimmering through an unshuttered window.

Hecate (2018)

I have  made a number of paintings throughout my life that portrayed myself as Hecate  It wasn't until later that I began to realize that I was invoking the aid of the Dark Goddess Hecate,  asking for the inner guidance I needed as I moved through  through menopause into old age, calling on Her aid as I became a caretaker for members of my family as their lives ended, calling on Hecate who stands, with her two Torches, at the crossroads of life and death, at the crossroads of time.

So when I made this sculpture in my "Our Lady of the Shards" series, it was not possible to personify Hecate rising from the broken pieces of the past to confront us again........without making Her a Trilogy.  She encompasses all aspects of the cycle of life, the Maiden, the Mother, and at last the Old Woman at the liminal point of life.  
 
Hecate is the Underworld aspect of the Triple Goddess.  The "power of three", the sacred Triad, is very ancient indeed, with roots that go back and back and back into prehistory.   The Triad represents the eternal cycle of nature, the Earth  which the most ancient of human beings seem to have universally revered  as  "Mother Earth".  Early peoples observed that the Earth, like women, gave birth, nurtured, and finally "took back" life into some mysterious spiritual underground realm (Womb/Tomb)  to return again in the springtime.   The Triad or Trilogy was  co-opted by later patriarchal cultures and religions that sought to diminish or replace the Great Goddess, among them Christianity (Father, Son and Holy Ghost)  and Hinduism with Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva (Creator, Sustainer, and Destroyer).

The earliest known  paintings were of animals.  But the earliest known paintings (or sculptures)  of human beings (not animals)  are of  vulva symbols.  These female symbols  occur in cave paintings - the one on the right is over 30,000 years old, one of the oldest paintings in the cave.  The bull was apparently painted over it at a later time.   It might be said that very ancient people understood the vulva as the  crucible of entry into this world, and to honor the Earth Mother in caves, along with the animals  early people hunted and revered as spiritual beings as well.....was to enter the womb of the Great Mother, and thus prepare, sacrifice,  and  pray for a good rebirth.  The cycle of life/death/life was recognized as arising from the body of the Earth Mother, and returning to the body of the Earth Mother.

"Hecate's Wheel" 

Associated with Hecate is a peculiar icon called "Hecate's Wheel",  which shows three loops suggesting a labyrinth  turning around a wheel, symbolizing an  eternally transformative movement.   The Wheel of the Triad moves through conception and birth, sexuality and motherhood, and finally death, the return to the Underworld, incubation and return.   The Three Goddesses are really One Goddess, each a manifestation in a different phase.  

Hecate  lives at the crossroads between conscious and unconscious, dream and waking, life and death.  She stands at the apex of the  liminal zones.  It was  Hecate who   heard the cries of the naive maiden Kore as she was carried by Hades into the underworld, and it was Hecate who bore a torch for Kore as she evolved into the mature Persephone, Queen of the dead and also Queen of life's rebirth.  Hecate is the guide of souls through deep, unfathomable places of the psyche. When the time is ripe, Hecate stands quietly at the threshold with her two torches, unseen until She hears the soul-cry of those who ask Her to light the way. 

I  take the liberty of copying a wonderfully insightful and well researched  article by  Danielle Nickel - for further insight, visit her site 

Hekate:  Moving Through Darkness
by  Danielle Nickel 

Hekate is primarily a goddess of the Underworld, holding dominion over death and rebirth. This is meant both in the literal sense and in the metaphorical as well. For life is filled with many deaths and rebirths aside from that of the flesh. Because of this the Dark of the Moon especially is her time of the month, since it is a time of endings and beginnings, when what was is no more, and what will be has yet to become. 

Hekate guards the limenoskopos (the doorstep), for she is a goddess of liminality and transition. Of being on and crossing boundaries. This includes not only the boundary between life and death, but any boundaries, such as those between nature and civilization, waking and sleep, sanity and madness, the conscious and the subconscious minds. Indeed, any transition can be said to be her domain. As such she is also goddess of the crossroads, where the paths of one's life fork and a person must choose which future to embark upon. In ancient times these were believed to be special places where the veil between the worlds was thin and spirits gathered.

Hekate is also the goddess of psychological transformation. Her Underworld is the dark recesses of the human subconscious as well at that of the Cosmos. Many have accused her of sending demons to haunt the thoughts of individuals. What they fail to understand is that the demons are not hers, but their own. By the light of her twin torches Hekate only reveals what is already there. These are things which the person needs to see in order to heal and renew. However, if they are not prepared for the experience of confronting their Shadow then it can truly feel like they are being tormented. Hekate is not motivated by cruelty, nor is she seeking to harm. But her love can be tough love. She will prompt a person to face the things that they must, whether they like it or not..........Hekate goes with them. While she may not be the deity many people would like, she is the one whom they need. Because of this I believe that she comes to those who require her, whether or not they were looking for her.

In modern Neo-Pagan practice Hekate is typically identified as an aspect of the Crone, and as such is most often portrayed as an old woman. This is in contrast to ancient vase murals which depict her as being an adult woman in her prime. As with many things about this goddess, this is a perception that has changed over time. However, the Crone aspect of the modern Triple Goddess is not truly defined by her age, but rather by the powers her age represents (that of wisdom, magical potency, annihilation, and the transformative journey through the Underworld), and those indeed fall under Hekate's domain. So while perhaps not historically accurate, this is not a demotion or devaluing of her, but rather the way in which modern Neo-Paganism fits her into its philosophy (this difficulty with integrating her into their cosmology is something that we will see Neo-Pagans share with the Ancient Greeks as well).

Hekate is more often than not portrayed as carrying two torches and is known as "The Torch-Bearer". She carries these because of her role as a guide through the transition of the Underworld. One torch shows a person where it is they currently stand, the other where they might go. In this manner she reveals the mysteries of transformation to those who enter her realm of darkness. 

.......Hekate is also associated with a wheel shaped design, known as Hekate's Wheel, or the "Strophalos of Hekate". It is a circle which encloses a serpentine maze with three main flanges, that in turn are situated around a central, fiery spiral. The symbolism refers to the serpent's power of rebirth, to the labyrinth of knowledge through which Hekate could lead humankind, and to the flame of life itself: "The life-producing bosom of Hekate, that Living Flame which clothes itself in Matter to manifest Existence" (according to Isaac Preston Cory's 1836 translation of the Chaldean Oracles). The three main arms of the maze correspond with her being a triple goddess, as well as goddess of the three ways, and that she has dominion over the earth, sea, and sky.

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A Goddess of Crossroads and Transitions 

As earlier stated, Hekate is a guide for people who are in transition. While she is most famous in her role as a psychopomp, guiding the spirits of the dead in their journey through the Underworld, she also aids those who cross boundaries or otherwise travel from one condition to another, particularly when that crossing involves danger.........For more than anything else she is a deity of liminality.

She is a goddess of the crossroads for this reason. In the ancient world a crossroad was a point where three roads met to form a "Y"-shaped intersection. It was believed to be a place where spirits gathered, including those of the Underworld and those of Fate. It is also a metaphor for the divergence of possibilities in an individual's future. Their life will bring them to the crossroad along one of the roads, and they will be met with a branching, where they must choose one path or the other to continue onward. As goddess of transitions, Hekate rules this place where the roads separate and differing futures are possible. 

However, it is important to remember that Hekate is a guide. She points out where a person is currently heading and where else they might go if they change their path instead. She does not choose a person's fate herself. That is always left to the person to decide. She is a torch-bearer because of this illumination she sheds upon one's life. That is also one reason she is a lunar-deity, for while a torch brings light to the darkness of night, so too does the moon on the grandest possible scale. This reflects both her link to the night-realms and to her role as an illuminator of ways.. 

Hekate is often portrayed as  three torch-bearing female figures standing in a circle looking outward, with their backs joined so that they are in fact one being. This exhibits her dominion over the triple-crossroads and her ability to see in all directions simultaneously. The road a person had come from, and the directions they might take in the future. These hektarion (or hekataion) were placed at crossroads. Their earliest forms consisted of a pole upon which three masks were hung, with one facing each road. In more recent times these became statuary, sometimes of three figures standing with their backs to a central pillar, other times a similar portrayal without the column in the center.   The Romans knew Hekate as Triva, which means "where the three roads meet".

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Hekate Triformis - The Triple Goddess

Hekate is a triple-goddess, serving as the Crone aspect in more than one triumvirate of deities. Perhaps most commonly we see her partnered with Kore-Persephone and Demeter. Where Kore takes the role of the Maiden (indeed, the word kore means "maiden" in Ancient Greek), Demeter the Mother, and Hekate the Crone. This triumvirate plays a central role in the myth of Kore's descent into the Underworld and her re-emergence as Persephone. 

This myth appears to have been the basis for the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which initiates relived the experience of Kore and like her returned forever changed, reborn with a new understanding of the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

 In the earliest tales, Kore willingly descends into the Underworld, while in the later and more well-known versions she is kidnapped by Hades. The latter being indicative of the rising patriarchy of Ancient Greece. In either version, her mother Demeter - who is the goddess of agriculture -  withholds her blessings from the Earth and causes the first winter to come about. It is Hekate who spies Kore within the Underworld and guides her back to the surface to be reunited with her mother. She emerges not as the maiden Kore, but as Persephone, a powerful woman in her own right, and with her comes the warmth and promise of spring. Persephone however, has become inextricably tied to the Underworld and returns there for four months every year, one for each pomegranate seed she ate while there. Her leaving is accompanied by the onset of winter, and while she holds her court in the Underworld she is joined by Hekate. In this myth we not only see a metaphor for rebirth, but also of coming of age and into one's own power and place in the world.

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The Invincible Queen Of The Dead

While Hekate is a versatile deity, she is best known as a goddess of death and the Underworld. However, it is important to remember that her Underworld is not the place of terrible suffering popularized by patriarchal Greece and later Christianity.*** Rather it was a place of divine transformation, like the cocoon where the caterpillar becomes the butterfly. This was the primordial Underworld, the place from which all life ultimately derives. Death and Birth stand back to back in the great spiral of existence, while Hekate and her Underworld lie between the two. 

Our ancient ancestors saw that many things sprang from the earth, not just plants, but animals such as snakes, bears, rodents, and others as well. Even the sun and moon appeared to rise from the earth and later sink back down within it every day and night. To their eyes, it seemed that something magical was taking place in the darkness below the ground. This idea was further reinforced when they learned that plant life originates from seeds buried within the earth. They saw that if a person kept a seed in - for example - their pocket, it would never grow into a plant. It had to be buried in the soil. Our ancestors reasoned that something magical must take place down there. Some transformation hidden away from the eyes of people and the rays of the sun. 

This was their Underworld. A place of renewal and rebirth where buried seeds sprouted into life. Because they saw the generative power of the Underworld, they buried their dead deep within the earth so that they too could transform into new life, just as a seed does into a plant. Being thorough people, they also dyed the bodies with red henna to symbolize menstrual blood (and in some cases did use menstrual blood), in order to capitalize upon the regenerative power believed to exist in that as well.  

This is why how so many Pagan deities such as Kali, Hekate, Freja, et al. are associated with both death and life. Our ancestors saw that death and birth were interconnected, standing back to back in an ever-turning spiral. In this manner Hekate is both child-nurse of all life as well as harbinger of death, and thusly it was to her that the ancients prayed to ensure both long life and eventual rebirth. Interestingly enough it is also in this manner that Hekate might be considered the goddess of compost. For it is the decomposition of plant and animals that insures the fertility of the earth, which in turn ensures the creation and nurturing of new life.

These views of the Underworld would change as religion became politicized, a tool for power. The Underworld became a place of terror in order to frighten people into obedience. So too were its denizens altered in public perception to become the monsters such a place needs to be populated with. This is one of the dynamics by which Hekate was increasingly negatively portrayed............ 

Keeper of the Unconscious

As Goddess of the Underworld, Hekate is not only the guide to the spirits of the dead, but also the keeper of each individual's own personal Underworld, the benighted territory of their unconscious mind. She lives within each of our inner worlds, and is there to guide us as we transition from inner to outer realms of consciousness. When accepted, her blessings enrich our lives with vision, healing, inspiration, and magic. She brings light to the darkness and empowers us with creativity, confidence, and strength. However, when we deny her it manifests in our Shadow-Self. She holds the key to both the treasures and terrors of the unconscious mind.......

Hekate is the light that reveals the Shadow, like the light of the moon at midnight. Her goal is not to destroy, but rather to illuminate. However, it is no accident that we have buried these things so deeply within our psyches. We are often not ready to face them when revealed. In such cases it may indeed appear that Hekate is bringing demons to terrorize us. We must remember that the demons are ours and reclaim them as our own. For with that revelation we also take back our power over them. That is the only way in which the Shadow can be truly defeated. By accepting it as our own. Learning that is the key which turns the lock of the person's emotional healing and rebirth. Hekate is there as a guide to help us, her twin torches shining our way through the darkened recesses of our unconscious.........

.............We must come to understand that Hekate and the darkness she exemplifys are not terrible, but rather natural forces within us and the world around us which are necessary components in the process of healing and regeneration. We must trust to her as our guide and give ourselves over to our journey through the Underworld, rather than resist the sacrifices we must make in order to grow. For one can only heal by moving through darkness. This requires courage and insight on our parts, but thankfully she is there to show us where to find both these qualities within ourselves as well.

"Hecate" (1997)

**Judith Anderson has passed away, and her powerful work is not well known.  She was an extraordinary artist whose prints emerged from the depths of the sacred Earth and the realms of the Soul.  For an excellent article about Judith Anderson:  http://www.crosscurrents.org/Madsen2.htm

***This is true as well of the Nordic Goddess Hella (also part of a triad), Underworld Goddess whose name became the source of the Christian "Hell".

Lilith, and new Book Endeavor

I began my new archival book "The Goddess Suite".  While many wonderful scholars, like Patricia Monaghan and Max Dashu, Anne Baring, Jennifer Barker Woolger, Jean Shiboda, and others have written extensively about the historical, and archetypal, importance of the "Woman with A Thousand Faces"..........still, I feel I need to archive the stories that have come from the women and men I've been privileged to know over the years of working with masks of the Goddess.  What I really want is to share are the many performance excerpts from those years, and most importantly the techniques we developed to work with masks  devoted to the divine feminine for healing, re-discovery, empowerment, and, of course,  community ritual  theatre.  A lot of magic happened, and I keep trying to pass that on.  So I may repeat myself many times in the course of this blog..........for any who may read this, forgive me.

For some reason, I began with  Lilith, and I reflect on the little garden magic going on right now, the quite miraculous repeat bloom of the "Night Blooming Cereus".  Well, surely that is Lilith's flower, because her name means (more or less)  "Night", her domain is the liminal night landscape, and her gift is  night vision. 

I found the excerpt  below, which I wrote for a short performance piece some 15 years ago, I had completely forgotten about it.  This was around the same time I did the fascinating  interview (below) with David Jeffers, an artist and musician in San Francisco  I greatly admired: 

"Lilith as Dream Guide"

This is a famous painting by the British artist John Collier.  Like Blake, I believe Collier was intuitively tuned into something not very well articulated in his time.  His sensual Lilith is unapologetic, and she is  embraced by the Serpent, which is the serpentine Kundalini force, rising from the Earth, and through her body. 

I think that painting might have been the  beginning point of my Lilith piece - unapologetic as well, she is "herself", unbroken, elemental, and sympathetic.

LILITH

There are times  I find myself drawn to him.
Or he draws me, in his dreams, his lonely sleep.

There are times
I'm pulled by a past so lost I can no longer even invent it.

We were innocent then.  Wandering a newly risen world
it's seedlings and sproutings, it's empty waters and warm sun.
He and I, I and him, one being really, in two bodies, rolling together
in the sweet and simple mud, rain and sun and light and dark

Before the words, and shapes and endless dividing of things.
The logic of fragmenting and naming,
and then breaking again, and again, and again,
each piece
smaller and harder and denser and slower.
And colder.  Colder.

You see, I grew enraptured by the ferocity of  World.

Her vast generosity, Her dangerous spiral mysteries.
Stars reflected in dark tide pools,
vines that curled eager tendrils around the curious finger,
fragrance of hyacinth and hyenas calling across the night.

But Adam wanted to make the world into his own measure.  I was his first attempt.

So I grew wings.

The more he tried to seize me,  the farther I flew into azure skies,
elemental passions, deep black waters,
empty deserts, bone yards and jungles,
the more I hungered for the moon.

He demanded his way
Or no way. 

And when his tantrums failed, he made for himself
a womanless and jealous  God
who would have no other.

I rose!  I flew!
Not for any price.....not for  bread or any ease.
Not for any price
would I be anything less than what I am,

Damned if I do and damned if I don't!

So I left  and found another lover.

Ah, Samael.....his hot wings and volcanic heart,
his sweet and terrible kisses.
Samael, who comprehends neither sin nor virtue,
only the splendor
of the ever changing moment. 

What soarings we had!
What flights, what heat, what progeny!

Adam, and his quiet,  frightened wife
placed amulets at his door
painted their bed with magic words and  self-imposed
shame, invocations to his cold-eyed God
who made of me a demon

I still remember him
when the whim  or the wind takes me
I kiss his sleeping lips
when he calls me in his dreams.