Persephone’s zodiac: The sacred mystery of the fertile year
Persephone’s Zodiac: The Sacred Mystery of the Fertile Year
Sep 11, 2024
Part One
Introduction: The State of the Goddess, now
I cannot invoke the Goddess in good conscience without attempting to impart as full as possible understanding of who and what it is that we are invoking, and why we must do this now.
This is a reckoning, an apocalypse in the true sense.
The Goddess will be revealed.
She is always being revealed to those who have the eyes to see, the ears to hear and all senses attuned to Her.
She is the Mystery. She is ever-changing and always will be a Mystery.
Mystery, in this case, is not simply the unknown. It also refers to an ancient set of drug rituals that bring us through a death experience to help us understand life. To make us fearless and whole.
The drugs used for these rituals were important, but for our purposes we don’t need to take this literally. All of the Goddess’ creation has effects that alter our consciousness, whether it is through intoxicants or poisons, meditation, privations, exercise, sex or the quality of the air we breathe.
Unlike the Millenarian Christians who anticipate a sudden, earth-shattering and inevitable Rapture, a Second Coming revealing the Kingdom of God, the followers of the Goddess can expect no such thing.
We don’t get a one-time upload of Goddess consciousness that we can write down in Scripture, which we can then canonize and follow dogmatically.
Sorry.
Not sorry.
We are left the delightful and joyous work of attuning ourselves to the Great Mother, work that begins with a recognition that religious dogma truly does not work.
Personal experience of the Goddess does work. It alters us profoundly.
Clearly, there is a profound psychological need for humanity to embrace the divinity of the material world as it is.
The material world is the Mater. It is our Mother. Everything comes from the Mother, and everything returns to Her in time.
It seems self evident that people of the western world at least are desperately out of touch with the divinity of the planet.
In the Ancient Greek language, one could not speak of our material existence without invoking Gaia.
The Goddess.
Modern materialism and scientism have institutionally removed the Mystery from the world as we know it.
Needless to say, this is a useful fallacy.
These ideologies are at a polar opposite point compared to the ancient foundational understanding of Gaia as a living and conscious entity of which we are a part.
Many people feel bereft of the loving Goddess. They are trying to find a new way to bring Goddess consciousness into their lives.
We have become accustomed to a hallowed, otherworldly and untouchable sense of divinity. A divinity that can only be found through ascetic privation and self-flagellation, a divinity that can only reside in massive stone churches with beautiful but bizarrely homoerotic and tortured art, and through dusty manuscripts translated and retranslated into empty dogma that only the Chosen Cross dressing Priest Class can interpret.
A sense of divinity that we are told begins when we admit we are essentially evil sinners.
This has its place in the heavenly realm of misogynistic Sky Gods and their Cup Bearers, but the divine nature of the Earth Goddess is imminent, sublime, mysterious and yet ordinary. We easily become inured to Her majestic and ever-giving nature.
We can touch the Goddess. We can take lascivious pleasure in Her beauty, Her tastes and smells, as She awakens our passion and longing…
And our pain, our grief and our sense of limitation as physical beings.
She is absolutely precious, yet we must tread upon Her, we must use and consume Her Flesh and drink her Blood, and also not take any of it for granted.
This yearning for the everyday Goddess is an extraordinarily important step towards a psycho-spiritual wholeness.
But many people are experiencing this visceral opening without any awareness of what is happening, much less the magnitude of the Goddess and all that She brings. Our passion for the Goddess is coming to the surface in ways that are sometimes pathological, immature or reflect our psychological malaise and compromised beliefs about the world.
When we are not conscious in our beliefs, we cannot be conscious in our actions.
Many modern social movements are either overtly or covertly seeking the return of the Goddess. Some are religious and spiritual in nature, and some of these are more spiritually awake than others; some are fraudulent and cultish to one degree or another, many prey upon the our desire for the Goddess to exploit us sexually and financially.
Some of those seeking the Goddess are secular, and totally unaware that they have adopted Goddess consciousness of one sort or another.
Proponents of contemporary popular environmentalism are mostly in this category.
When environmentalism manifests in positive ways, life is better for all of us. When environmentalism truly values, conserves and protects the body of the Goddess, our lives are much richer and healthier in all respects.
There are those who are truly embracing this genuine reverence for the Goddess.
But for a large part, that’s not what we are experiencing.
Our media and educational institutions have popularized a deeply compromised, greenwashed version of environmentalism that preys upon our love of the Goddess, and twists it into something very self-negating and self-destructive.
It is also based on pseudo science. Pseudo science is a sure sign that the Goddess is not being honored.
In order to achieve genuine Goddess consciousness, we must attain an awareness that we ARE the flesh of the Goddess, and not some sort of parasitic or demonic infestation upon Her Body, nor are we an alien race bent on destruction.
The concept that humanity is an alien race separate from the Goddess or Gaia also reaches deep into our intellectual history, back to the Gnostic sects that competed with the doctrinaire sects that eventually turned into the monolith of the Catholic Church.
Make no mistake: we have often failed in our relationship to Gaia. This stems mostly from aberrant and toxic world views.
However, the guilt and self-loathing we have internalized for past and present institutionalized environmental rapaciousness actually thwarts most of our attempts to correct our relationship with the Goddess.
Most environmentalists have consciously or unconsciously internalized this guilt and self-hatred. Many now espouse eugenics, asceticism and even economic collapse in one form or another as a necessary foundation of their platform to “save the planet”.
Needless to say, this is ill advised.
We are children of the Goddess, though our ignorant worldviews can make us behave like some sort of aliens.
When we see ourselves as essentially colonizers and exploitative consumers by nature, the pendulum can very easily swing towards excessively Saturnian restriction and regulation. This has an extremely feminizing and emasculating effect upon our collective and individual creativity and productivity.
A commitment to finding the balance between conservation and productivity has to be the first step in the embrace of Goddess consciousness.
That balance is always changing. It is a mystery, but one we must always pursue.
When we speak of balance, we must remember Persephone.
Persephone IS Gaia. All Goddesses are ultimately One. But we must speak of Her many faces and aspects to begin to truly grasp Her mysterious and changing nature .
The Goddess wants humanity to thrive. The Goddess provides her Flesh and Blood for us to be able to live in comfort and peace.
We can speak of Persephone when we want to express Her dual nature.
Persephone can manifest both as Goddess of fertility and joy as well as the Goddess of destruction and death. And she will embody the needed archetypal figure when the time is right, in the right season. We do not need to invoke this punitive archetype, we only need to be aware and reverent of Her imminent presence.
Ideology is the enemy of the Goddess.
Ideologies such as Communitarianism, Communism, covert Fascism and socialism have risen dramatically in recent years, and this is an attempt by opportunistic power brokers to harness false Goddess consciousness. These ideologies prey upon the maternal instincts we have to take care of one another. They promise a return to the womb, empowering the nanny state to guarantee an equality of economic and cultural outcome for all people.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Hell, of course, didn’t mean to worshippers of the Goddess what it now means to those influenced by Christian beliefs.
The economic devastation and cultural destruction imposed by Corporatist, Fascist, Communitarian, Communist and Socialist regimes does not serve the Goddess. These ideologies are rooted in hatred of the self and nearly always result in extreme corruption, inefficiency, groupthink and herd mentality that is stifling at best and lethal at worst.
The Goddess is not served by utilitarianism nor by the dulling of individual expression.
It is crucial that we recognize the dark side of the Goddess. She is often revealing Herself through negatives, in the sacred path of apophasis.
The impulse to achieve “safety” at all costs, to smooth over differences and homogenize cultures, the seemingly unstoppable reign of hedonistic behavior, the desire to immerse oneself in the herd and sublimate oneself to a “greater good”- these are some of the symptoms of the unconscious desire for return of the Goddess.
To remain blissfully ignorant of the Dark Goddess is not optional. Religious faith and propitiation will not make the symptoms go away.
Again, we may be accustomed to saying Hail Mary until the Priests are satisfied, but Goddess consciousness is based in Reality. Contrition may sometimes be helpful, but the Goddess speaks to all of us, not only Men in Dresses.
The invocation of Persephone could not be more timely and relevant.