The Great Mother

“If we think with the Earth spirit, our souls become populous with beauty, for we turn the cup of our being to a spring which is always gushing.” A.E.

The Great Mother sustained me at that time
Of the bare earth and the cold rime
With the purity of her clear air,
The acceptance of the seasons year by year,
The serenity of patience in her face
That soothed the heart and slowed my pace.
Wher’er I walked, by hill or field or shore,
In summer time she never gave me more.

Her calm, her majesty and powers
Strengthened me and taught me in those hours.
Under the open sky, or through the shadowed wood
New truths were given and were understood.
Vast and deep her wisdom. With her lore
Our souls are fed, perhaps as ne’er before.
In winter quiet, where frozen is the rill
Herself she gives, our emptiness to fill.

Clare Cameron

The Beauty Who Created the Beast

In 1953, Millicent Patrick designed the Gill-man creature for the film The Creature from the Black Lagoon. During promotion for the film Patrick was sent on a press tour, dubbed “The Beauty Who Created the Beast”, to discuss the creation of the creature. This was quickly changed by Bud Westmore to “The Beauty Who Lives With the Beast”, to avoid citing Patrick as the creator of the Gill-man. When she returned to Los Angeles from the press tour Patrick was informed that she no longer worked for Universal Studios, having been let go due to Westmore’s jealousy over Patrick being associated with the creation of the Gill-man.

Spellbound

Sex

Real sex is worship, not just physical performance.

Lebo Grand
Sensual Lifestyle

the darkness of nature

At its most fundamental, nature is darkness. Nature’s primary state is darkness. In stillness, formless, in the darkness, nature is whole. Yet, nature is minded: it exists within a wakefulness of its own being. Aware of itself, nature turns within itself in reflection. The essential movement of nature is the breath of existence, the sacred wind of being.

…Each moment of interaction within the darkness of nature creates a pattern, a spirit fleetingly finding form, flashing momentarily into being before dissolving back into the whole – except where interactions repeat, allowing a pattern to persist, the spirit lingering in its ethereal form.

Emma Restall Orr
The Wakeful World: Animism, mind and the Self in Nature

Goddess Sophia

Pay attention, those that meditate
Upon me, and listen well!
All of you who are patiently waiting,
Take me to yourself!
Don’t dismiss me from your mind
And don’t let your inner voices
Despise me; don’t forget me at any
Time or place; be watchful!

I am both the first and the last,
I am both respected and ignored,
I am both harlot and holy.
I am wife and virgin, mother and daughter.
I am the unfathomable silence,
And the thought that comes often,
The voice of many sounds,
And the word that appears frequently.
I have been hated everywhere
But also adored.
I am that which people call
Life and you call death.
I am called the Law
And lawlessness.
I am the hunted and the captured.
The dispersed and the collected.
I don’t keep festivals
But have many feasts.
I am ignorant, yet I teach.
I am despised, yet admired.
I am substance
And insubstantial.
I am the union
And the dissolution.
For I am the one
Who alone exists
And I have no-one
Who will judge me.

The lines above have been extracted from an old Gnostic text usually known as Thunder: Perfect Mind. It is part of a collection of fourth century texts known as the Nag Hammadi library, discovered in Egypt in 1945 though not published until 1978. They were buried towards the end of the fourth century, a time of intensified Christian Orthodoxy in the Roman Empire when it had become dangerous to own them. As well as Thunder, the collection includes the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary Magdalene and the Gospel of Philip. After over 1500 years of burial, these texts are now once again widely known and appreciated. They might not have appeared at all but for the staunch championship of C. J. Jung towards the end of his life.

Generally, Thunder is thought to be about Sophia, who despite her Greek name is a figure from Jewish tradition – a disregarded voice of wisdom, culturally descended from the dethroned Goddess of Israel. In Christian Gnostic tradition, she is partly reinstated both in the myth of Sophia as a cosmic figure and alternative understanding of Mary Magdalene as a human one. This is one of the main reasons why these texts were suppressed. Thunder goes furthest, in identifying her as supreme being and beyond judgement – unusual even in the paganism of the day. She also says, “I am the bride and the bridegroom”, calling to mind the Gnostic valorisation of the androgyne as symbol of aware wholeness.

Thunder has many themes: the Goddess and what she stands for; contested understandings of gender, social relations and religious expression; recognition and non-recognition; the vulnerability of wisdom and spiritual insight in human communities; dualities and the non-duality they are seen to be hiding. In the historical life of Thunder, one toxic duality was to be the co-arising of widespread literacy and systematic censorship. For the Gnostics, there was no redemption to be had in history – only in the transcendent light of a realised Divine identity.

James Nichol
Reflections: the image of Sophia

Ode to my cunt

O my cunt, my cunning cunt,
My slippery singing bird,
Creatrix and comforter,
I sing your praises!

To my provocative pussy,
Purveyor of pleasure,
I bedeck you with sweet scented flowers.

To my climax inducing clitoris,
Cheeky core of glistendom,
I raise up my voice and say hallelujah!

To my vivacious vulva,
Violet vixen and crimson queen,
I vow to have you ploughed whenever
You so desire.

To my luscious labia
I promise lingering licks and soporific sighs.

To my voracious and vertiginous vagina
I will offer the virile vajra of he who I love best.

To my gorgeous G spot
Long may the throngs of glitterati gild your glowing greatness.

To my secluded cervix
Inner gateway to the mysteries
I promise never to throw my cap at you again.

To the wondrous life-giving womb
Simmering cauldron and jade palace
I salute your sacred hallows.

To my honourable ovaries,
Seat of all the ancestors
And compact jewels of unimaginable possibilities
I pay homage.

To my wise old woman,
Wizened and wordless,
But deep, rich and eternal
I bow down and worship.

Hazel Loveridge

Untitled

I’ve never had a masturbatory fantasy and
now I probably never will.
Long before I masturbated with any regularity
my psychiatrist wanted to know what I
thought about when I did.
Every time I saw him he would turn to
this subject.
I thought it was a little strange, but
those days I thought everything was strange,
so I let it pass.
Now I know – I was the schizophrenic
and he was the doctor and the books
told him
if he wanted to cure me,
what he had to analyse were my masturbatory
fantasies.
If he’d only told me; I would have cooperated.
I would have gone right home,
played with my clit and
fantasized for hours.
Anything to be cured in those days.
Now when I’m coming,
if a fantasy starts to surface,
I push it back.
How could I possibly experience
anything so heavy as
THE KEY TO THE CURE OF MY MADNESS,
while flat on my back,
panting and shivering under the covers?

Bethany

protector of those who do not belong to conventional society

Shivaism has always opposed the anthropocentrity of urban society. Its western form, Dionysism, similarly represents the stage where man in is communion with savage life, with the beasts of the mountain and forest. Dionysus, like Shiva, is a god of vegetation, of trees and of the vine. He’s also an animal god, a bull god. The god teaches man to disregard human laws in order to rediscover divine laws. His cult which unleashes the powers of soul and body, has encountered a lively resistance from city religions, which have always considered it antisocial. Shiva, like Dionysus, is represented by city religions as the protector of those who do not belong to conventional society and thus symbolizes everything which is chaotic, dangerous and unexpected, everything which escapes human reason and which can only be attributed to the unforeseeable action of the gods.

Alain Daniélou
Gods of Love and Ecstasy: The traditions of Shiva and Dionysus

Longing

Desire is an appetite, quickly sated. Longing is a wound, an opening in the heart or the spirit. Whatever the cause, whatever the duration, it almost always leaves a scar.

Philip Sington
The Valley of Unknowing