Myth and Human Consciousness
My class in The Evolution of The Great Goddess could be called ‘Feminism and Evolution’ or ‘The Evolution of Consciousness in Symbol, or simply, ‘How the Fuck Did This Happen?’
Myth describes the psyche of a people. Symbols are an alphabet of the metaphysical. Rituals are compressed stories. The eternal-return is an ancient pattern, and symbols of the spiral, the labyrinth, & the meander, were sacred ways to approach invisible dimensions.
We are moved by archetypal patterns and representations, across time and space, into a deep memory-tracing, to articulate spontaneously recurrent images. The characteristics are constant—they point to an essential resonance in the hearts and minds of all people.
The Sacred Dimension—When studying Myth and the Great Goddess, first we need to understand Joseph Campbell’s insistence that the sacred dimension of human consciousness is not a stage that we passed through in our early tribal evolution, but an elemental part of our deepest psyches. The great mythic theorist, Carl Jung agrees. “The Sacred is embedded in the structure of human consciousness.” Sacred images of The Goddess go back, far into our past, to a time when humans saw themselves as children of nature, as part of the whole, and living on a sacred Earth, in relation to all things.
Images of giving birth, being nourished, and receiving the dead back to her womb for rebirth occur 20,000 years ago in the Paleolithic, 10,000 years later in the Neolithic, 5,000 years after in the Bronze Age, and today through Mary and a rebirth of the Goddess/Pagan spirituality. The continuous eternal wisdom cycle of coming from nothing and returning to nothing have always been represented by women, the moon, and the snake. All these were seen as miraculous and inter-connected transformations. Even in Catholicism we see the icon of the great mother who stands on the horned moon, stars haloing her, and awaits the rebirth of the world.
Lunar Religion
In the Paleolithic, the cave symbolized the womb, the most sacred place where Life brought forth babies and took back the dead. Looking out from their cave homes, Paleolithic people watched the moon’s journey, night after night. Abstract thinking can first be seen in humans’ understanding of the moon’s phases. The dark of the moon was (and is) the 4th dimension—implied, but invisible to our eyes—where new life is gestated, and from which the old moon is reborn as the new. Our awareness of moon cycles is the start of humanity’s imagining of sequence, patterns and time. Seasonal recurrence comes from lunar recurrence, and through intimate observations of the moon, humans learned to recognize analogies between different dimensions of life.
Our assumptions about human nature are crucial to our behaviors, beliefs, desires, motivations, actions—if we believe humans are essentially dominating and aggressive, then we will be. But we weren’t. Not for a long, long time. We need to know, not only what humans were, but also what we can become. Our history IS our future.
The Story Making Animal—
Rituals tell stories, myths are analogies—still in modern language we hear a constant repitition of the annoying phrase,“It’s like..”. It seems that our current habitual pattern of speech is our unconscious, but essential attempt to communicate in symbolic, mythic terms. This is like that. It’s the oldest story in any book. Telling compressed stories in rituals re-connected us with animals and plants, re-enacting the bonds that were broken when consciousness caused the human psyche to separate from the whole, the unity, the dance of Life.
We can see these as stories told by humanity at different stages of its evolution, which explore different ways of being in the world. In the modern world, we call “Myth” other people’s religions. Today, most of our culture only knows this male god, and only presents this duality— life/death, dark/light, good/evil. The original unity is gone, lost to patriarchal consciousness. Lost through endless war, through trauma, through domination, and deliberate acts of erasure and burial by conquerors, we were forced to forget, and move on into a brutal separation from the truth of what we are, and perhaps, what we are for.
The images and stories of the Bible, the Koran, Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism all come from Egypt and Sumeria, as do the myths of the Greeks and Romans. Sumeria was only excavated 150 years ago. Here, the area around Basra, where Iraq and Iran meet, was the genesis of this civilization. The story of Sumeria’s transition from peaceful co-existence to rivalry and war recounts historical chronicles of terror. The warrior, Hammurabi led the Babylonians to conquer the peaceful Sumerians. The conquerors kept the language and myths of Sumer and transmitted them through Turkey and Canaan in the next 2,000 years. The loveliest parts of the Old Testament are full of the beautiful Sumerian images and language of the Goddess worshippers—Inanna, Isis, and Astoreth—but the goddess is nowhere to be found.
Later stories demonstrate the historical inversion of the Goddess, from the Mother of Everything, to a wife or daughter, to virgin or whore, to gone-from-the records entirely. This inversion indicates what is perhaps the most significant event of the time, which affects us still, so deeply—human consciousness moving from participation in the cosmos to precise observation of the skies. From being just one part of the universe to a deliberate separation as spectators and dominators. This shift leads to humans honoring transcendence over immanence—what is not physically here—the new sky gods reflecting some heavenly order. And the long-ago priests’ translations, biased in their misogyist interpretations and lust for ultimate power, eventually led us to science and technology, and the violent exploitation of both nature and women.
Unity Consciousness—Our thinking is stuck in the either/or of polarities now. Once it was a UNITY. And psychologists have discovered that this polarizing is evidence of a lower or less developed stage of cognitive and emotional evolution.
There is a heightened complexity in Holistic thinking when compared to Dualistic thinking. In our original situation of holism, we find Unity over separation, sharing over zero-sum winner-takes-all conclusions, pleasure over fear, connection over abstraction, participation over the consumer spectacle, belonging over alienation. These later thought forms became our modern values, but they originated from centuries, millennia, of terror and of war.
Today, the conqueror has replaced the nurturer. The power to give and grow was at the center of nomadic life—the shared bond between mother and child. In her book, “The Chalice and the Blade”, Rhiane Eisler speaks of the Partnership Model vs. the Dominator Model. Qualities of caring, compassion, and sharing were what marked matrifocal cultures. Women did NOT dominate men; these were societies in which difference was not equated with inferior or superior. Difference WAS but it was NOT ranked. Not until patrairchy, who’s entire foundation is the ranking of difference, and violence against that difference.
All the modern movements for social justice can be seen as one part of an underlying yearning and action for the transformation of our culture from dominator to partnership. All over the western world, waves of invaders smashed the gentle Goddess cultures and buried them under layers of hierarchies. This led to the last several thousand years of elite human males transforming symbols, and re-writing myths.
“Man”—said man—“hads always been the natural creator of the earth.” in 800 BC, the Greeks announced, “History will now begin”, and destroyed 25,000 years of matri-focal history. The rise of militarism led to all these patriarchal societies of warrior cults creating massive death and patriarchal social systems. But it’s imperative to know that these vast changes to our psyches all stemmed from cultural, political, and economic choices made at the time.
For 25,000 years at least, our ancestors found power in unity and cooperation, some of the feminine attributes patriarchy now despises. As a result of this split, we modern humans have inherited two opposing cultures—warlike, aggressive, mobile, male and agricultural, sedentary, egalitarian and peaceful. We can see by looking at modern history how white men in charge still treat indigenous, tribal people, who are the ones that still manage to support a lifestyle that is, on balance, more egalitarian, peaceful, and female.
Bios and Zoe—The notion of Immanence means The Goddess moves from within, humans feel safe, connected to nature’s cycles, and immortal in the vision of continual renewal clasped within the eternal image of the whole.
The opposing notion of Transcendence means a male God who moves from above. He is not here on earth, instead he is watching all from the sky. Humans begin to feel afraid and judged—death becomes final and life becomes tragic.
The Goddess Mother is ZOE — the eternal source, represented by images of immortality, the moon’s cycles, the thread, and the myth of the Goddess. She represents wholeness, continual renewal—the eternal-return—found in lunar cycles, unity consciousness, and the instinct for relationship and co-creation. The Goddess moves from within—we say She is immanent.
The son/lover of the Goddess is BIOS — he represents just one part of experience—the daily life in time, one phase of the moon, one bead on the thread. He is the myth of the hunter, and later the warrior. Through him, duality is normalized. He represents individuality, war, defense and domination. Like him, his Patriarchal Sky God moves from above—we say he is transcendent.
We find an opposition between the original Lunar Myths and newer Solar Myths. The myth of the goddess can contain the myth of the hunter or warrior. But the myth of the hunter/warrior cannot contain the myth of the goddess. This is because the upstart myth isn’t large enough, because Bios is just one part of the great story of human consciousness, which is continually rupturing the unity so we can live the daily, mortal world of time. Solar myths revere the light and condemn the darkness while lunar myths accept both sides of our experience.
The union of Zoe and Bios—the two dimensions of life—regenerates the earth and balances the giving of life with the taking. The essential distinction between the whole and the part, the thread and the bead, the cycles of the moon and her totality, coexist in this mythic union, and were brought together in agricultural rituals, fairie tales, in The Sacred Marriage of the Goddess and the King, and echoed in our current ceremony of marriage.
Sacrifice—Representing the ritual sacrifice of the god or later, the king, this mythic practice is found everywhere. The king, or a victim who represents the god, dies—a sacrifice of the one for the many. He represents the life energy that was both divine and human. His death insures that the forces of decay will be arrested, and life will be renewed for the whole community. Festivals such as those celebrating The Green Man, Burning Man, and the symbolism of New Years’ Eve, are examples of this in our modern world, as is Shirley Jackson’s short story, The Lottery. The killing of the god is also seen as a step to his revival in a better form, taking us all with him to redemption—Ramadan, Easter, Passover, and the host in Catholicism are also ceremonies of this rebirth.
Eventually, animals, mostly lambs and goats in the ancient world, began to replace humans in ritual sacrifice. Later we find that concept embodied in the form of “the scape-goat”—Jews in Nazi Germany, immigrants, gays, and people of color in the modern world. The custom of expelling sins from the community in the form of individual people became combined with that of the god’s sacrifice—since he had to die anyway, he may as well take the sins with him. War, capital punishment, witch hunts, all these justify this sacrifical practice of murder. This was new in patriarchal religions. When the Goddess brought death in her crone aspect, all was resolved with Her.
In the Bronze Age, the older agricultural rites of earth fertility were still practiced, and the king personified the life of the community— (Bios/time/mortality), and the life of vegetation (Zoe, divine/immortal). Slowly, people began to live in a state of mythic identification with the king, instead of the Goddess, and the surrogate sacrifice was an ominous extension of the Neolithic idea of a necessary renewal of the world order.
Rituals of sacrifice tried to heal or appease the unity to magically restore what was lost/taken—for example: animals die because of our need for their lives as our food. First, in the early myths, the mother lost her son or daughter to the underworld, (which symbolized the dark of the moon’s journey). But, in the finality of the sky gods’ vision, when the object of fear became the non-specific IDEA of death as an abstraction—that moment of our material undoing. In this, the original signal of loss was distorted, confusing individual death with Death itself. War and conquest serve the purpose of securing a surrogate sacrifice in place of oneself or ones’ group. Murder of “the enemy” became a new sacrifical method to magically avoid the concept of death,a terrible projection born of this inchoate fear.
The myth of the Goddess expressed the moral vision of humanity until the Bronze Age (2,000BC) when the part broke away from the whole, and the goddess became relegated to the unconscious psyche. We still see her though, still, arising in rituals, archetypes, symbols, myths and fairy tales.
In the experience of Mythic Inflation, the part forgets it’s only a PART and appropriates to itself the ordering of life. Bios confuses itself with Zoe. This is what is happening in our modern world. Mythic Inflation is a symptom of the radical disorder of the psyche in which the tribe claims for itself the powers of deity. “God bless America” was everywhere on bumperstickers after 9/11. Every American president in modern history has ended every speech with that phrase. It is an unconscious defense against fear. If we look outside for the image of the whole that reunites the parts, the wound remains unconscious and projected onto external images. Instead, we must look for and find it within our sacred selves in that the sacred dimension of human consciousness.
Immanence and Transcendence— Humanity’s awareness of itself as a mere spectator to the show of Life, or the belief that we’re separate from nature, ruptures the wholeness of the divine order and splits consciousness into Self and Other—subject and object, a perceiver and a perceived.
The image of the unity that was The Goddess did not survive the bitter experiences of fear and the PTSD that has followed us for 4,000 years, and ultimately a radical transformation of human consciousness took place. Life and death and rebirth became split into life (hope and joy) and death (terror and despair). The holy goddess-ruled waters beneath the earth shrank to a barren underworld of darkness. The experience of totality became an experience of opposition. What was inextricably entwined became a fundamental rupture.
A new image appears in The Bronze Age—The Goddess of War. She drinks the blood of her victims who were formerly her children. She becomes a servant of the king’s will to power, and to the act of war itself. A symbol of the glory of war. This is a clear example of myth serving political and economic purposes, as it changes the very experiences and culture. Fortresses and the security state emerge at this time. The need to achieve immortality while living becomes urgent, because death was so vivid. Fear was amped-up to the breaking poing for people’s psyches. The hero was one response to the finality of death-without-redemption.
The Hero represents the triumph of light (good) over darkness (bad), according to the dualities of patriarchy. He is the solar myth that imitated the sun’s conquest of the night, who’s target was the same dimension of the old order of the lunar goddess. The focus shifted from the goddess to her son, from Zoe to Bios, from the cosmos to humanity. In that light, we can see Jesus as a two thousand year old hero of our culture. He “takes away our sins with his own sacrifice”. As do Batman, Spiderman, Superman, James Bond. While they may not die per se, they are shown battling forces of evil and suffering to save us all. It’s all weapons and machinery for these dudes, not a moon or a tree in sight.
In the new myth, the hero stands alone, supported by his invisible father in heaven, against all opposing forces. This is so different from the old myth of the goddess and her son/lover, where the drama was one of ever-shifting and ever-returning cycles/phases of relationship, based on our original, primary experience of the moon and the seasonal recurrences which goverened early human’s lives.
The Seen and the Unseen—Another duality that becomes apparent when we study the evolution of the human psyche, is between the seen and the unseen. Manifest and un-manifest. What is apparent with our human senses, and what is beyond. Earliest religious images show pregnancy, birth and nurturing as the numinous, magical state. There is no trace of a father figure in any of the Paleolithic. If the magical mystery of creation is the origin of religion, it’s to the woman that we must look for the phenomenon of unseen power. Menstruation. Birth. Nursing. These are all magical acts. Pre-historic humans lived in a culture organized around women and children.
Our assumptions about human nature and our place in the world are crucial to our behaviors and desires and motivations. Assumptions rule our lives, consciously and unconsciously. We base our experiences on them. If we believe that humans are essentially aggressive and warlike, then we will act that way. We will glorify that aspect. But we weren’t always like that, and we were egalitarian and peaceful for a long, long time. It’s just that this history was totally expunged from the fabric of our consciousness. And it’s not as if we can go backwards. Evolution only moves forwards, but knowing what humans were shows us what we can become.
Our history connects us to our future. This class is about remembering who we are. It wasn’t until the monotheistic sky gods conquered the goddess, perhaps 4,000 years ago, that we fell into the boiling cauldron of time that is war without end. For all this human time, the life giving, ever-regenerating female deity, and Nature herself, have been excluded from our world view.
All religion is about the mystery of creation. What is unseen, but fertile with possibility. The central theme of the Goddess symbolism is the mystery of birth and death, and the renewal of all the life of the cosmos. (Where did we come from? Where do we go?) All religion strives to recieve answers to these existential questions. For example, one of this cultures’ main religions— Christianity—centers itself around the mythical death of the hero, Jesus. But in the 30,000 years of the before-times, the Goddess was the single source of all life in cyclical—not linear—mythical time.
So much about our pre-history is unseen. We have very little surviving physical evidence, or written stories of this time. All that we have as evidence of our once- peaceful lives is art and archetecture to ground us in these humans’ beliefs. But, Goddess-centered art, with its striking absence, for 30,000 years, of warrior images and symbols of male domination, reflects a social order of women being equal and venerated, and culture being matrilineal. We’ve found no fortifications around dwellings that would indicate war. No weapons or mass graves.
The original transformational mystery is primordial birth, which men can only imitate. The machine is man’s transformation ritual—his magical uterus of mass production. Men’s original rituals were imitations of the female mysteries of menstruation and childbirth. World-wide, priests and shamans must always dress as women to take on women’s original magic. Still, Catholic priests wear skirts, and men sanctify bloodshed through violence or sacrifical rituals to imitate the unachievable power of women.
Under patriarchy, there are so many taboos against women who are menstruating. It’s said that women on their periods are “unclean”. In many tribes, Native American women are fobidden into the sweat lodge when they’re menstruating. In the Hindu religion, bleeding women are forbidden to enter the temple. Orthodox Jewish law insists that women bleeding are unclean, and must not be touched by a man. In many religions, women bleeding must be secluded—(in the Red Tent)— They must not cook or eat food with others. Consider how still today, we avoid men’s discomfort with bloody pads or even the mention of our periods. My mother believed that women bleeding shouldn’t ever touch a houseplant, or it would die. But, the real reasons for these prohibitions is not hygeine, but that she is a living Goddess at that time. Not impure, not unholy, but aligned with the moon’s cycles, and her own power. The jealous and paranoid priests decreed this separation to punish and supress women’s great power, and to further support the superiority of men.
The genesis of our Western heritage is a religion in veneration of all living things. The universe as the living body of a Mother-Goddess-Creator of an earth that is alive and returns life, continually. The pictorial script of that primordial attempt to understand and live in harmony with creation describes, in archetypal symbols, is nothing less than a philosophy of human life that’s in every aspect contrary to the manipulated symbols that conquered and that still prevail within us. The discovery of an age of peace and harmony preceded this nightmare from which it is now certainly time for us to awake.
The Meta-Language of Myth— The evolution we’re studying is not just about a gender change in god, but a paradigm shift in the nature of all our values, all our drives under a world-wide patriarchy. We can see the mythic stories told by humanity at different stages of our evolution, which explore different ways of being in the world, but our present culture only knows the male part, the god part, and only presents duality. The original unity is gone, lost to patriarchal consciousness.
Archeologist, Maria Gimbutas, discovered a meta-language that reveals the basic world view of a pre-literate people. The goddess religion crosses the boundaries of time and space—throughout the disparate cultures of the Near East, the Mediterranean, central, northern and western Europe, and India—and is a cohesive and persistent ideological system that far outlasted anything else. Its powerful images have been superimposed onto Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Hindu, and Christian myths, leaving an indelible imprint on the human psyche.
The Great Goddess is not just a mother, she is much more. She is a life and death wielder, a regeneratrix, as well as a creatrix. What’s striking in the study of Her images is not the metamorphosis of the symbols, but the continuity from the Paleolithic on. The killer aspect of the goddess—‘The Terrible Mother’, emerges into our consciousness because she controls the life cycle. She’s not punishing, merely doing her cosmic duty. Not terrible any more than vultures are terrible—with Her, regeneration starts at the moment of death.
Renowned archeologist, William Irvin Thompson, has written—“Because we have separated humanity from nature, subject from object, values from analysis, knowledge from myth, and universities from the universe, it is enormously difficult for anyone but a poet or a mystic to understand what is going on in the holistic and mythopoeic thought of Ice Age humans. The very language we use to discuss the past speaks of tools, hunters, and MEN, when every statue and painting we discover cries out to us that these people had a culture of art, the love of animals, and WOMEN.….gathering is as important as hunting, but only hunting is discussed. Storytelling is discussed, but the storyteller is a hunter rather than an old priestess of the moon. Initiation is imagined, but the initiate is not the young girl in menarche, about to wed the moon, but a young man about to become a great hunter”
This, despite the fact that, among all contemporary and historic hunter-gatherer tribes, 75-85% of the food comes from women’s food gathering activities. This despite the known fact that the oldest tools ever found are women’s digging sticks. This despite the fact that women were the first potters, weavers, hide tanners, textile dyers, the first to gather and study medicinal plants. The first doctors, the first astronomers, the first to teach humans how to count and measure. Mothers raising children created language. The first calendars were women’s lunar markings, and the only God-image ever painted on rock, sculpted in clay, or carved in stone from the Paleolithic to the Mid Neolithic—30,000 years—was the image of the human female. The symbols of this religion still resonate in modern religions. The first god was female. Nothing could be more relevant at this stage of our evolution than remembering this.
In the meta-language of myth, extremely complex ideas were expressed through the symbols of the moon, labyrinths, spirals, snakes, & meanders. The Goddess/the Unity has moved into the unconscious psyche of modern people, but her images live on—the cave, the moon, the spiral, wild animals, wilderness, and the journey of the soul through other dimensions are all connected to that original religion. Animals and plants were once seen as sacred beings, relations in the circle of life. They embodied divine powers and diverse expressions of the goddess. Today, the ecstatic reunion of human and animal nature comes to us in dreams, trance, ritual dances, hallucinogenic journeys, and these are interpreted as dangerous, or as madness by the dominant culture.
For instance, the symbol of the snake embodies the energy of ancestors, as they regularly slough off their skin and are renewed. They also move between the underworld (darkness) and the above-world (light), which is seen as potent magic, and they hibernate in the earth and awaken in springtime. The snake incarnates life energy. The snake is a great symbol for immortality, one link between the living and the dead. In our world, we’re taught to hate and fear snakes—we jump back when we see one. We’re told this is an evolutionary remnant, or becasue some snakes carry poison. But, Patriarchy made snakes the enemy of humanity because of their close association with the Goddess. The animism of primitive people is seen as childish or barbaric by modern machine-age patriarchy, or evi by orthodox religions. In fact, this animism is a profound, experiential perception of the evolutionary relation between all life-forms as manifestations of the original One.
Thousands of stone and bone pieces, marked with long and complex sequences of engravings recording lunar calendars, have been excavated. Lunar calendar sticks marking the lunar year and noting the times of rituals date from 50,000 BC, and these images are the source of the magician’s wand. The owner of this wand is not the mighty hunter, but the midwife. It was her job to know exactly when babies were due to be born. Human life begins with birth and human culture and intelligence do too.
Women were the first observers of the basic rhythms of nature, upon which all later scientific observations were made. Women could predict the seasons of the year, the phases of the moon, the annual migrations of animals, birds, and fish. The word, Matter means Mother. “Mathematics” comes from the root word “mother wisdom”. Women taught men to measure, because they had to estimate how much stored food would feed how many people through the lean months of the year, as they were responsible for the next generation, and also for the gathering of 80% of that food.
The process of seasonal awakening—growing, fattening, and dying, were seen as connecting humans with plants and animals. Fertility was not sexuality, it was multiplication, growing, flourishing. With the image of the goddess, the division of old and young, mother and daughter was symbolic of seasonal rising and dying.
Goddess Returning—How might our lives have been different if we knew ourselves completely, no part left out, disgraced, or forgotten? How might our lives have been different if there was a holy place for women? There once was, with no distinction between the Primordial Goddess, the Earth, and the Earth’s daughters—Women. When the human race, awed by this nameless force, watched plants grow from the body of the earth and life spring from the body of women, it/we could only venerate this magical power possessed by the feminine body and spirit.
The mission handed down from a male deity to the forefathers of history was a Command to Control. A compulsion. A coersion. A bombing mission, a phallic outward thrusting explosion from one source. The history of this world today is weighted down with this burden of violence, this ranking hierarchy, this separation into oppositions, separate and at war with Nature and with Others. The message of women’s culture is a mutual sending, not a mission, but a process of Cosmosis. The cosmos is where power, justice, and love meet.
The technology of the blade is going to ruin us. Technology gives us destructive, gigantic brawn and mastery over Nature, who is so often despised by patriarchal religions. (When the earth is destroyed, The Lord, God will return. This destruction of nature is longed for, death is longed for in this life-hating, woman-hating religion.) We’ve brought the technology of killing further than any animal or any human culture. We need to move on from rape to reciprocity and an ever more conscious participation in the community of being. The earth is with us, not for us. Life does not begin or end— life is always here. Life does not emerge from us—we emerge from life.
The rebirth in our time of a Goddess spirituality reminds us of the integrity of bleeding without injury, and of our own blood’s relationship to the moon and the sea tides. Remember our own majesty as newborn, as little girl, young woman, leader, lady of the beasts and plants, spirit bearer, life giver, protectress, priestess, magician, dancer, athlete, musician, politician, elder, visionary poet, pathfinder, teacher, healer, explorer, adventuress, sister, friend, daughter, lover, huntress, ritual maker, death wielder, crone, goddess, the oldest of the old.
“The goddess is first of all Earth. The dark, nurturing mother who brings forth all life. She is the power of fertility and generation, the womb and also the receptive tomb, the power of death. All proceeds from her, all returns to her. As Earth, she is plants, trees, the grains and herbs that sustain life. She is the body, and the body is Sacred. She is the egg and the seed of the world. She is the beauty of the green earth and the white moon among the stars and the mystery of the dark waters. She is the soul of Nature that gives life to the universe. She is Queen of the Night, guide to the lost traveler, and pathway to the underworld.” (Starhawk)
A return to the goddess is not focused on transcendence, on leaving the ground behind for the sky, but on the embodiment of the sacred, here on earth, in Life and in relationships. This is a return to the unification of striving into being, a movement back into accord with the Dance.
“We say the time of waiting is over. We say the silence has been broken. We say there can be no forgetting now. We say, listen…”. (Susan Griffin)
“We need a god who bleeds now, not wounded, but who bleeds to life. A god who’s wounds are not the end of anything.” (Ntozake Shange)
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