Risen God, Goddess Rising

  

I give thanks for the risen god
The one whose blood became poppies
The one torn apart by the boar
The one who hung himself in the world tree
   sacrificing himself to himself
The one dismembered by his women
    in the ecstasy of their love
The wild bull called to the goddess
    who faces his killer in the arena
The ones who die when the seed corn
     goes into Earth, to sprout again
The deer king who is willing sacrifice
The one whose dark twin boxed him in
     and scattered his parts
     and rose under beating wings
The beautiful shepherd sent down
     to the Underworld by his consort
     to learn all that women endure    
The one who rose from the dark cave
     in a shining body but still wears
     a crown of thorns because of all
    the wrongs that are done in his name

 

I give thanks for the goddess rising
The one who chose to go down
    to the Great Below to meet her dark sister
The one who was ripped from the daylight world
    to bring treasures out of darkness as
    Queen of the Underworld and of herself
The one who fell through a hole
    in the Earth in the Sky and danced
    a new world into being on turtle’s back
The one who is always three
    maiden, mother, crone
    endlessly recreating herself
The ones who raise their lovers as sons
   and heal the wounded warrior in man
The one who raises the dead to give birth
    to the golden child
The Great Mother of a thousand faces
   whose bounty streams like milk
The Lady of Beasts
The deep mind of Earth
The bright intelligence of stars
The Divine Feminine we need
    to repair our world
    and redeem our kind

 

I give thanks for the power to die
    and come back on any day.

Drawing "Willing Sacrifice" by RM

Risen God, Goddess Rising

Today I give thanks for the risen god
The one whose blood became poppies
The one torn apart by the boar
The one who hung himself in the world tree
   sacrificing himself to himself
The one dismembered by his women
    in the ecstasy of their love
The wild bull called to the goddess
    who faces his killer in the arena
The ones who die when the seed corn
     goes into Earth, to sprout again
The deer king who is willing sacrifice
The one whose dark twin boxed him in
     and scattered his parts
     and rose under beating wings
The beautiful shepherd sent down
     to the Underworld by his consort
     to learn all that women endure    
The one who rose from the dark cave
     in a shining body but still wears
     a crown of thorns because of all
    the wrongs that are done in his name

Today I give thanks for the goddess rising
The one who chose to go down
    to the Great Below to meet her dark sister
The one who was ripped from the daylight world
    to bring treasures out of darkness as
    Queen of the Underworld and of herself
The one who fell through a hole
    in the Earth in the Sky and danced
    a new world into being on turtle’s back
The one who is always three
    maiden, mother, crone
    endlessly recreating herself
The ones who raise their lovers as sons
   and heal the wounded warrior in man
The one who raises the dead to give birth
    to the golden child
The Great Mother of a thousand faces
   whose bounty streams like milk
The Lady of Beasts
The deep mind of Earth
The bright intelligence of stars
The Divine Feminine we need
    to repair our world
    and redeem our kind

I give thanks for the power to die
    and come back on any day,
    Especially on this day.

- Easter Sunday 2020

Drawings by Robert Moss

Lamb of the Goddess

Her face is as round as a peasant loaf. Her smile lights up the room. Her simple garments are the color of flax or of wheat. She is fair and she is vast, built on a scale larger than humans. I know her as Mother and she receives me into her arms as a mother reaches for a child.
    She tells me she will give me strength for the work I have undertaken. I must open my mouth to receive.
    I don't hesitate. I would trust her with my life.
    She produces something very small and white and fluffy. It fits inside the palm of her hand. I am amazed to see it is a lamb. Are they ever this small? She holds the lamb against my face. I smell milk and the fresh goodness of the wool, which is wonderfully soft against my skin.
    She parts the wool and holds the lamb to my mouth.
    Eat, she tells me.
    The meat is sweet. It tastes more like fruit than flesh. I bite deep and the blood pours down my throat. There is no disgust. The blood tastes like wine. I continue to eat until all that is left is a tuft of white wool.
    Now you are ready, she tells me.

I leave the scene and open the eyes of the body I left sleeping on my bed. How do I feel? I feel blessed, and grateful, and amazed.
   It occurs to me that my dream of being offered the blood and flesh of a lamb comes at the time of Passover, when Jews celebrate the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt. In the Bible story, the God of Moses sent plagues against Egypt to compel Pharaoh to let his people go. The Israelites were instructed to mark the doorposts of their homes with the blood of a sacrificed spring lamb; seeing the blood of the lamb, the disease-bearing spirit of the Lord knew to pass over the first-born in Jewish homes.
   This is also Easter Week and a Christian name for Jesus is Lamb of God. In the Book of John, when John the Baptist sees Jesus, he says, "Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world." (John 1.29) I remember chanting in an Anglican communion, eons ago,

Agnus dei
qui tollis peccata mundi
miserere nobis

I rose from my dream on Maundy Thursday, the day of the Last Supper. Have I just experienced an Easter dream? In my dream, it is the Goddess - for surely this is She - not the God, who is at the center of things. This might make the dream all the more timely in Easter Week, since Bede told us that the word Easter is the name of a goddess, the Anglo-Saxon goddess Eostre. (Jacob Grimm, in German Mythology, turned her name into Ostara.) The original meaning of Eostre, some scholars say, is "Dawn". She is also called Daughter of Heaven. She is associated with fertility and abundance; hence all those Easter eggs and bunnies. The newborn lamb she fed me might fit right in.
    Dreams set research assignments, and I'll happily accept the need to dig further in these waving fields of mythic connections.
    For now, I am happy and grateful to accept the gift of the Goddess, and with it the strength for new creative work.

Art
Top: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, "L'agneau nouveau né" (1873) 
Below: RM journal sketch 4/13/17
    

An Easter dream: The Millet Seed Sermon

In the very early hours of Easter Sunday, I woke with delight from a dream in which I was lecturing and demonstrating a simple ritual centered on millet seed. It seemed like I was giving a sermon in a light-filled space with honey-colored wood, standing at a very simple pulpit. I spoke of this tiny seed as a symbol of creation, of death and rebirth, and of the growth of the very big from the very small.
   Later that day, at our Easter dinner, I told my Millet Sermon dreamlet to a dear friend who, as a Dominican sister, is quite accustomed to giving as well as hearing sermons. 
   When I said. "I dreamed I gave a sermon on millet seed" she thought I meant that in the dream I gave a sermon while standing on top of a millet seed. Laughing, she described the vivid mental image of me as a tiny figure in a micro-world using a millet seed as my pulpit.
    I loved this mental painting, which transported us into one of my favorite themes involving the multiverse: how we may be living in one of many nested worlds, and that the universe we think is so large may be one in which the furnishings of our lives are the size of millet seeds (or vastly smaller) in proportion to universes that contain ours.

This Easter, I looked over my records of dreams on this special day, and found this report from 2009.