Dreaming with the Goddess

She has a thousand faces. She is virgin, mother and crone. She is creator, preserver and destroyer. She gives birth, endlessly.  Her womb is the gateway of death and rebirth. She is Queen of Earth and Heaven. She fell through a hole in her world and danced our world into being on turtle’s back. She hid the sunlight from the world when she was abused by men and could only be lured back when shown her radiant face in a mirror. She is lover, warrior and shaman. She is the one who repairs the broken soul and raises the god in man with her breath.

      Men tried to confine her to limited roles, to force her into wedlock with despotic gods, before the Church sought to bury her. But the Goddess returned as Mary, and now she is loose again, asking us to honor and embody her in the forms that please her. 

    I am only a man, but I serve the Goddess. When I was fourteen, she claimed me in one of her most fearsome forms, and from that dark night I wrote a cycle of poems titled Creatures of Kali. I have met the Goddess in the deep loamy earth, in molten lava, in the waves of the sea, as Spider Woman and Reindeer Queen and as Great Mother Bear. I feel her robe swirl in the shifting stars. I have received instruction from ancient priestesses, communicating across time, and from wise women of many cultures in our present world.  I am conscious of walking in the footsteps of Marija Gimbutas, the great Lithuanian scholar of the Goddess, and it was in her native country that I made an indelible connection with the oldest living Goddess tradition in the Old World.

Photo of the Eyes of the Goddess in the Traxien temple, Malta, by Joan Marler.