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During the fifth week of the Rise Up and Call Her Name curriculum by Elizabeth Fisher, “We honor the Outraged Ancestral Mother and the belief that the sacred and secular are one.” When I priestessed this session for my women’s circle, I was caught by the idea of the Outraged Ancestral Mother and we spent some time discussing her and the degree to which humanity has hurt our planet. The next morning while I was practicing yoga, snippets of a poem came floating to my mind. I had the distinct feeling that the Outraged Ancestral Mother was ready to speak to me. So, I went down to the woods to listen to what she had to say. After this experience, over the course of the next month, several other “Woman” poems arose spontaneously and formed a series of Womanprayer poems.  A presence that came to me dramatically, firmly and clearly was that of Shakti Woman. She offered me both a poem and this message:

As I came down from the muddy hillside, sweat dripping off my brow, my head reeled over what had just occurred. The Indian heat had certainly affected me, but I was somewhat sure the events of the past two hours were not a hallucination. Trekking up earlier in the morning, I had been greeted by two black-clad young men who beckoned me in Hindi to come. Yes, I had hesitated; but their insistence was smoothed by a sweet kindness and the sentiment offered that it was their Babaji, their “respected father” or guru, who was asking me to make the detour.

The year was 2003, and it was just after Solstice. I followed the men, two devotees of Lord Shiva in his most fierce of forms, to Babaji’s encampment on the top of Nilachal Hill. I was in Assam, and the place was called Kamakhya, abode of the lover’s dance, place where Shiva and Shakti, the eternal Female Force, joined. At this time, Devi, Goddess, bled. Her moon cycle came but once a year, and now the red earth and menstrual blood metaphor mixed in a harmonious shout out to the life Divine. I was enthralled to be there once more, my annual pilgrimages since 1998 necessary soul-felt recharges of all my mind, heart and spirit.

When mature theologians study the question without pubescent embarrassment, it is clear that there is a point at which female Goddess worship is inseparable from pornography. Try as we might to separate the sacred from the profane, and to tease out the purely biological facts of procreation from the universal hormonal urge to have a good time, we are continually faced with areas in which they become the same thing. To most spiritual Pagans, the congress of vulva and phallus is sacred - a celebration of the life-rhythms of the universe.

While reading Dianne Sylvan's latest novel this past March, I had a flash of insight that knocked me out of her Shadow World and into the timeless, space-less realm of what Ellen Dugan calls “just knowing.” The scene in the book was of a young Witch drawing down the moon – pulling the Goddess into herself. I told my empty bedroom, “She's not pulling the Goddess into her. She's awakening the spark of divinity within herself!” Cool! I thought. Then I went back into the reading.

When I first came home to the Pagan path eleven years ago, I felt very uncomfortable with the Goddess and God concepts. The Wiccan Lady and Lord felt extremely foreign and abstract to me. I was raised Buddhist, and as a teen had gone through a period of absolutely despising religion altogether, especially the Judeo-Christian religions, whom I held accountable for committing torture, rape, murder, and genocide in the name of their Lord.