Feminine

Hail to Inanna, Queen of Heaven

On October 30th, 2011, a group of pagans gathered in Lafayette Square in front of the White House to honor the feminine divine and support religious freedom. We were motivated partially by the malefic prayers of NAR, but mostly out of our love for the goddesses of our various traditions. Here is my speech, my invocation and my prayer from the ceremony.

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In September of 2001, many of us felt overwhelmed and filled with emotions from fear to rage, from shock to grief, and from numbness to action.

For those of us who study mythology, we too felt all those same feeling, but we felt something else at work beneath the surface. And here I must quote the late Dr Maggie Macary in her inaugural blog of November of 2001.

“I felt paralyzed along with the rest of the world, wondering how to move forward in life in the face of so much death and destruction. In the days that followed, further news of terrorist acts and death confounded me, leaving me at a loss for words. I have felt locked in a liminal, in-between state since September, betwixt and between what once was and what will soon be. Now, during the darkest days between the Autumn Equinox and the Winter Solstice, I feel lost in the Underworld, trying to remember: how does life go on in the face of death?

As always, I return to my solace: the myths of life, death and rebirth, those timeless stories of darkness and light, despair and hope. ... In studying these stories of death and descent, I am reminded what the ancients knew so wisely: that all transformation, all initiatory experiences, must first begin with a death. The ancients understood this instinctively, basing their rituals, the same rituals that appear disguised over and over again in our own modern lives, on a cosmogonic cycle in which a retreat to Chaos is required before a new world can be created. This Chaos is the end of a “mode of being,” a death to the old life in preparation for the new. In our modern lives, we forget that death is the beginning of renewal, a time to dismantle the old in preparation for the new.

It is this forgetting of the old patterns, the loss of our retelling the old tales, the forgotten reenactments of initiatory and cosmogonic rituals, that causes us to feel despair at so much death and destruction. In these tales and rituals humans have found a spiritual comfort that transcends the literal tragic events of life. These tales and rituals allowed people to experience the rebirth that comes from the darkest places of death. Without the retelling, life begins to lose its sense of spiritual meaning and the unconscious steps forward to create its own destructive patterns. ...

It is conscious re-mythologizing of the old tales that becomes important for healing to occur.

... We are not the authors of the stories, we are the re-tellers, the ones who once more take up the ancient myths and through our imaginations, make these stories our own. In the process, we will find a healing that revitalizes our lives.

...Let us rekindle the hearth fires and gather around to re-tell the old stories. Let us hold tight to one another through the long dark nights ahead, and remember that, as always, the light will soon return.”

I savor her precious wisdom, but unlike Dr Macary, I am not only a mythologist, I am also a pagan priestess. So I do not just retell the old stories, I honor the gods within these precious remnants of our ancient human heritage.

And for me, the stories of descent not only lead me toward healing and transformation, they bring me into the presence of many of the old gods. And it is important to honor them all, but today we are here to honor especially Inanna, the Queen of Heaven.

And it is during times of darkness, despair and confusion, that many shrink from the transformative work, clinging instead to forms and structures that are falling apart, creating orthodoxy from past nostalgias and even resisting the turning of the great wheel.

It is at times like these that folks clinging to the status quo demonize the old gods. It seems far easier to denigrate the Queen of Heaven than to follow in her footsteps.

And so the New Apostolic Reformationist have deliberately focused on demonizing the Queen of Heaven. Even today as we gather to hold up Columbia, herself a very American goddess, they seek to dislodge her from her perch because in their eyes, she is an aspect of the Queen of Heaven.

But I am here to say that if our American Goddess, Columbia is an aspect of Inanna, then we will hold them both up for devotion, honor and worship. Because that means that Columbia, like Inanna has the power to transform, the power to heal and the power to guide us towards the new world that is coming into being all around us.

And so today, we honor Inanna, Columbia, and a host other goddesses with prayers and songs.

And in the words of Doctor Macary ...

“Let us rekindle the hearth fires and gather around to re-tell the old stories. Let us hold tight to one another through the long dark nights ahead, and remember that, as always, the light will soon return.”

So mode it Be!

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Invocation

*Our Lady of the Morning is Radiant
She looks down upon us from Heaven

We sing your praises, Holy Inanna
Radiant on the horizon (2x)