The Great Father
In my last note, I talked about “The Great Mother” and her role in my life. And in response my dear and old friend Christian posed this question:
I wonder who the Father is in this "Goddess" scenario. If there is none then calling her "Mother" is like calling an amoeba before it splits a "mother" as well. This is not meant to a challenge. I've just never in my eavesdropping in on Pagan philosophy heard what role the male aspect plays in the larger scheme of things. Perhaps you can clear it up for me.
And so now I am going to do my best to answer it.
How to begin. I guess It would have to start by describing the difference between my relationship with the Great Mother and the Great Father.
Since my first meeting with the Great Mother, I have rarely perceived her as an externalized Vision. For me she has been someone who I have been lucky enough to share consciousness many times in my life.
Now this sharing of consciousness differs significantly from the experiences I have heard described by people who allow a diety to take command of the bodies while they travel to their temples on the astral plane, or as in some African traditions I know of are simply ridden by their Gods or Orishas.
Whenever the Goddess has wanted to use my body she has always taken me along for the ride. And I have always felt safe in knowledge that if I didn’t want to go where she was leading that she wasn’t going to force the issue.
Not only that, even when she has not been in the drivers seat, she has, as far as I can remember, always been a presence within my mind. An Observer of Sorts. And not always a quiet one, when she see’s me doing something that has been against my own best interests. And louder than a cat in heat, if I think about doing something that will bring harm to another.
And while I may have wished sometimes that that Observer had stopped me when I made some of the choices I did, despite her Good Advice. I value the fact I have always had my freedom, even to be a fool.
Now the God on the other hand, I have always perceived externally. This most often has manifested as a whisper in my ear. In fact this relates directly to how I chose the name Raven as my moniker. I had heard the tale of Odin and his pet raven’s Hunin and Munin. They were said to travel around the earth all day. Watching what was going on in the World and at night would return to him and regale him with tales of the people below.
Now arguably, It may seem that I got the symbolism backward in choosing the name. But often for me I see things as though I were looking in a mirror.
So why is this important? Because unlike the Goddess whom I have gotten to know through the direct sharing of experience. The God I know only though interaction with.
So let me share with you the first time I heard the God. It was back around the same time as I met the Goddess. I was sitting in Church with my parents and the sermon of the day had to do with the Garden of Eden, and the Apple, and the snake and well, most of you know the rest of that story.
And I, in my most impertinent mental voice, demanded to know, “What kind of so called loving God, is going to hold against me, something my great, great, great,……..gran
dmother did?” And as clear as day I heard “Not Me!” ring through me ear in response.
Nothing More. No explanations. No lingering presence. Just “Not Me!” Well I can tell you, I didn’t know, what to make of that. But as true as day that voice would return every time a teacher or priest would make some ridiculous claim that I could not reconcile with the idea of a Good and Loving God.
I still remember a time in class, (I was sent to Catholic School until grade 8) when they were teaching us about Hell, Purgatory, Limbo and all the other strange places God was supposed to send you to suffer, forever, if you pissed him off. Or as in the case of Purgatory, maybe just a few Millenia if enough people were to sit around praying for you.
And again came the question. “Why would a Good and Loving God, want to torture you forever, just for making a mistake.” And that same voice answered “I don’t!” Except this time I was left with a lingering lingering impression that God did not get angry with those that did bad things, that it was more like he was gravely disappointed.
These moments of revelation have continued throughout my quest, but never more intensely than the 9 years that church and school tried to indoctrinate me into beliefs I could not accept.
Now that having been said. During those very same years, I was also taught the parables and saying of Jesus. And that was like hearing the flip side of the record.
“Do unto others“, The tale of the Good Samaritan, and “Yea who have not sinned…..” along with the story of the money changers and his willingness to spend time with the outcasts of society, still resonate well within my heart.
And Paul’s letters to the Corinthians, still contains one of the most powerful and moving speeches about love that I have ever heard.
So where was this all leading?
Well by the time I had finished my “Catholic Education” I was certain that the God that I knew was not the one they were talking about. And to be fair, I began my journey outside of those teachings by first reading as much of the Bible as my mind would tolerate.
I tended to skim over the Begats and I was horrified by not only his authorization, but instructions to engage in the wholesale slaughter of men women and child in a town he wanted them to have. I didn’t get the Jealous need to hold onto power that led to destruction of the Tower of Babel and the flood, well if that was supposed bring the end of human corruption………
Not to mention how many times he Instructed Abraham to tell the rulers of cities he visited that Sarah was his sister instead of his wife. So that when they took her as lover, he could righteously call on heaven for their destruction.
So as you can imagine that led to another dead end.
But still I was determined. I thought I might still find within the familiar ground of Christianity a community that honoured God as I understood him. And while I must admit some where a lot less fire and brimstone than others. I never met one that did not teach that there was only one way to escape the fires of hell. And that was through a Christian Baptism of some sort or another and an almost Blind Obedience to the will of God as they taught it.
The one exception to this in Christian based faiths, was the Unitarians, though at least with the ones I’ve met, while they had the mind, somewhere the heart was missing.
I went on to explore other faiths, on paper at least, including buddism, Hinduism, and bits and pieces of some of the more obscure ones, for which, at least then, there was little to be found written about them.
I even had an early direct encounter with Hinduism, which went terribly wrong, when after enjoying a brief tour in which we were introduced to the deities, an hour or more of singing the Hare Krishna Chant, in which I could feel a not only my own levels of consciousness change, but a lovely feeling of unity with all the others who had joined in it.
This all changed, quickly and abruptly for me, when I heard, I don’t know what to call him, but the person who was giving information to the crowd. Begin to talk about how there were no guns in the attic, and how they were being persecuted.
Now I will admit, that the Hare Krishna took a lot of Flack in those days. And there may have been nasty rumours being spread about them to discredit them. That they chose to speak to people about them wasn’t my problem. My problem was that they were bringing up the subject and telling people over and over again that it wasn’t true, after they had spent more than an hour of chanting, which had induced a low level trance and a heightened level of suggestibility.
I remember leaving angry and thinking that if they had talked about this before, the services had begun. Or even afterwards if they made an effort to bring folks back to normal consciousness, I would have happily listened. But I was deeply offended that they had tried to place these thoughts in my mind while I was hypnotic state.
Well that did not put me off the ideas presented in Hinduism. I must admit it did frighten me away from the practice. I realize now that it was an unfortunate introduction to a faith that has as many different ways of being practiced as any I have encountered. But at the time my alarm bells had gone off. And I was too young to realize that I was only dealing with an individual congregation and not a faith system as a whole.
Then for a considerable time I took a break from visiting churches, temples and places of worship in order to find folk I could share my faith with.
And it wasn’t till my daughter, Kathleen was born that it even occurred to me that I wanted to. And it was a rather traumatic reaction on my part to an ordinary physical anomaly that led to my decision.
You see what had happened was that after the Cesarian section I had to wait until they sewed me back up and wheeled me into the recovery room before I got a chance to hold her and get a good look at her. So when the nurse brought her to me she was all red from crying except for perfectly round pale spot in the middle of her forhead. And when I asked the nurse what it was, I thought she told me it was a silver birth mark, that they tended only to show when a baby was red from crying, and that it would most likely fade before her first birthday.
Well I am not entirely sure what came over me. But for the next hour or more the both of us were crying, and the only thin I could think of, was “Thank Goodness, these aren’t the burning times.” The sense of relief was mixed with a terrible grieving for all those who had been burned because the had a mark or mole that someone declared was a devils kiss. And somehow I was certain, if this was another time and place, neither Katie nor I would have escaped the evil hand of the Witch Hunter who collected a bounty for everyone he could make others believe was a “Witch”, a consort of the devil.
That was the only reason, that as soon as I was recovered enough, to pack up newborn baby, carry her across town on public transit and walk into a room where, though I was familiar with the ideas of Wicca, I still truly did not know what to expect.
I’ve described what happened the first night in my previous note. But being a Major Feast, and designed to accommodate 3 to 4 times the number of folk who regularly attended Sunday night rituals. I would learn later took a somewhat different form than the more typical, Sunday night gatherings that were held in the temple in the back of the apartment the kept above their shop.
So it was not until the second night that I had the opportunity to see Richard and Tamara perform the symbolic version of the “Great Rite” a variation of which is commonly used in rituals that are open to the public and also from my understanding, a fair number of closed covens and solitary practitioners.
And I must admit at that point in the ritual, I was so overwhelmed by the newness of it all. And simply trying to follow what was going on. That I did not make out the words the first time round. So when It became time to bless the wine, and Tammara took the cup and Richard, the athame (a ritual knife used by most Wiccans) and the knelt across from each other, she holding the cup between them and he slowly lowered the knife into the wine as they recited the words. Witch in their most basic form goes:
As the Athame is to the Male
So the Cup is the the Female
And conjoined they be one in truth.
But which in the version they usually used in the Odyssian Tradition went on into a long and beautiful description of the nature of being.
I was overcome by a feeling that I had only ever encountered before with a few people who had shared with me they had had made love in the most incredible way.
I mentioning this feeling to Tammara afterword and being met with the most incredulous look, which softened immediately when she realized that despite the baby in my arm, I had never actually made love.
Sure I had had sex before. And her father was not my first partner. And I had even tried a threesome with a couple I found attractive. And even at that I hadn’t done it very often.
Until Jack the last man I dated before, meeting Katies father, intercourse was an incredibly painful thing. And I will always thank him for taking the moment to step back when he realized that something was wrong and helped me to understand that I needed to relax.
That had made things easier for me. But it would be much later in my life before I would experience the feeling of making love for myself.
It happened once with Katies father when he tried to stop me from leaving the first time. Then not again until I was with Anne.
And so Tammara patiently told me that what I had witnessed was a symbolic representation of the God and Goddess in the act of love making.
I was flabbergasted. I have seen that rite many times since. And when the priest and priestess are in tune I have experienced that feeling once again. But never like that first time, when I did really know what I was feeling. Just that it felt Good.
Now I know that some Wiccan Traditions, and a fair few other forms of paganism give a greater due to the Goddess than they do to the God. Which I believe comes as much from the need to reconnect with a diety that that has either been hidden from view, or kept at arms length by a faith that was long ago corrupted into being a tool of patriarchal politics.
And Christian as I mentioned to you in the comments of the last notes. Shiva, whispered in my ear. And I think it was interesting that you mentioned in response Shiva Ardhanarisvara, his hermaphroditic form.
I once read a story, that may have been anecdotal and not part of the scriptures. But it told of how he came to take that form.
According to the tale, at one of the great temples. It was the practice of the priesthood to honour Shiva and his wife Pavarti by walking around them while saying their prayers to them. Well it seems that their came a time when the priesthood began having leanings to a more patriarchal world view. And they began to only walk around Shiva and failed to honour his wife. Well this angered Shiva and when the priests persisted in the practice, he pulled his wife so closely to him that they became one, so that they could not honour one without the other.
I have always loved this story, and I believe that It’s time for people, no matter what their spiritual path, “That one without the other is incomplete.
And before I receive angry comments from folk who prefer making love with their own gender exclusively. Remember that each of us has both male and female within us. If only because it took both a male and a female to give us life. And it is my belief that when people truly make love. The male energy reaches to the female energy in the other just as the female energy reaches toward the male in the other. And if it is really good, all the energies reach together.
Well I am sure there is much more that could be said. But I suspect I am already testing the limits of how many words one of these notes will hold before they explode.
I hope that begins to answer your question
Stumble!