Sophia's Children

Epiphany Gardens, Lilith, 'Dark Nights' & More...

Greetings, Sophia-Lovers!

I've got epiphany, Lilith, 'dark night', and more for you, coming right up.

I justed posted "Epiphany: Ditch the 'same old' and cultivate an Epiphany garden" in the Priestess in Blue Jeans blog. Between it being Epiphany, a new year, a new moon, and just post Uranus-conjunct-Jupiter, it's an Epiphany-friendly time. You can check it out here.

And coming soon here in the Sophia's Children blog: more on the gifts of the Feminine, and a look-see into Lilith and the ancient Juicy-Wild Feminine that just did NOT cooperate with the oppressive, violent Patriarchal finger-wagging, dour-and-sour-puss agenda.

Yes, Lilith got a seriously bad rep for that act of peaceful noncooperation, and she offers us some juicy inspiration and guidance now. It's way-time to reclaim that Mojo.

Also on the Muse's Table: more on the Dark Night of the Soul, aka Initiation into the Deep Feminine.

(Join me in The Feminine Mojo Mystery School for more on reclaiming your Femme Gifts & learning more about the Initiation 'dark night' into the Feminine, or schedule individual Mojo Tune-Ups).

And there will be more, of course. You just never know what's going to grow in the Divine Mother's lush, ever-evolving garden.

Lots of love,

Jamie

Image Credit: a Sumerian tablet featuring Lilith-Elat-Inanna, the timeless Great Goddess

Reclaiming the Wild Child & Naughty Girl

[Upon request, and because it's coming up again for me as well, I'm re-posting updates of several previous Sophia's Children entries on Lilith & other 'naughty girls' -- 2011 is a year to shine authentically, and that means reclaiming the Wild Child! Enjoy.]

Most women, thinking back to childhood, remember clear 'lessons' and messages about the difference between 'good girls' and 'bad girls'.

Most were taught to be 'good girls' by having 'bad girls' pointed out as examples. The bad girl was a cautionary tale. Just like Lilith. And like Lilith, the story we were told about 'bad girls' was never quite accurate, and often far from it.

Giving the benefit of the doubt, these childhood lessons were well-meaning, in that they were designed to protect us from the horrors of non-conformity that are visited upon the creative, the sensual, the wild, the unique, and the 'different'. And of course, naughty girls -- like any others who went outside of the designated lines or wore colors other than the approved shades of gray and beige -- did not conform to the cultural rules for good girls.

But in that slow and often painful march to conformity, so much gets killed off or suppressed. But it never really dies; it just burrows deeper and deeper within, finding some dark, quiet corner of our beings where it can live without being found out.

And it sits there, waiting for us to awaken from the deep sleep of forgetfulness that takes so much of our essential nature with it. It hibernates in that long, cold winter, waiting for a Spring that comes only to the fortunate, and only to those courageous and determined enough to seek it out, cultivate it, and love it back to life.

And in that winter of conformity, while the Wild Child and Naughty Girl sleep, the good girl follows the rules, but soon learns that though the rules seem few and very specific, they are, or seem, always just beyond our reach. We're never 'there'; we never gain the hoped-for approval, the gold star, for being the Good Girl, because any such moment would be fleeting. There are always new levels to the rule, always higher standards to meet.

In striving to be the good girl, while at the same time silently rebelling, most become perfectionists, reflecting the cultural standard for the Perfect Good Girl.

Marion Woodman, the renowned Jungian analyst and voice of what she calls the 'Conscious Feminine', writes, "Perfection massacres the feminine," and "Perfection does not allow for feeling."

Speaking in terms of the archetypes of Feminine and Masculine, perfectionism would be considered an extreme expression of a Masculine trait -- very exacting, specific, conforming, non-emotional, externally oriented. It allows no space, no deviation, no creativity, no spontaneity, no receptivity. It's well-armored and always at war with itself. It never rests, or hibernates.

This charade of Good Girl Perfectionism has its high cost, of course. As Emile Zola wrote, "When truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it." And that's often what happens until the True Self, the Essential Self, the Whole Self is recognized, reclaimed, re-embodied. This is, of course, as applicable to men as it is to women, since men also inter core parts of themselves in order to conform.

To become whole, and indeed to experience the depths of joy, grace, heartfulness; and to express the greatest and most beautiful gifts belonging to unique purpose, we need to go searching for and welcome home the Wild Child, the Naughty Girl, or whomever else buried herself alive in the coffin of conformity.

Outside of the coffin, there is life. There is Spring awaiting the rousing of the too-long-dormant but most living parts of us.

Awaken the Wild Child and call to the Naughty Girl and welcome back their creative and vibrant gifts.

The Dark Goddess, Sophia -- whose season this is (though she needs no season and knows no such boundaries, being Everywhere) -- can show you how. Sophia can light the way back to your own Lilith -- she who has never parted from Essential Wholeness, though she flew into exile for a time.

FeMojo Blessings,

Jamie

Join me in the Feminine Mojo Mystery School (or other Feminine Mojo Projects) to explore & reclaim your Lost Gifts of the Feminine -- your Light to shine brightly in the world.

Image Credits: Famed naughty girls, Evelyn Nesbit & Tallulah Bankhead

Lilith & Changing Stories

At a recent gathering, a woman was sharing her story of her 'dark night of the soul' -- a series of several transformation cycles over several years, in which her previous conceptions about herself disintegrated, moved into chaos, and were slowly being reborn or recreated anew.

Some of the things she shared found a common root in reclaiming her true essence, the center-point of her innate creativity and sensuality.

Lilith came immediately to my mind, and out of my mouth. "Lilith!" Having come from a Jewish background, she said, "Isn't Lilith the demon-prostitute?" Her response was just another reminder about how a conquering culture or 'replacement paradigm' shift the pre-existing culture and 'old ways' by controlling the stories.

One culture's gods and goddesses become the conquering culture's 'lesser gods' or demons.

At first, the new stories are told and maintained or enforced through fear. Ultimately, both the new story and the underlying association with fear are like seeds that find their place not just in the collective consciousness, but also in the very cells of the body.

The Power of Our Stories

This experience highlights the power of stories on and within us, including the stories that we're not even aware of, that run themselves as part of our 'below the radar' programming.

These are the programs and stories that we live by, and thus live into. Matter follows mind; reality follows the dominant story line. Change the story, or stories, and you change the reality, whether it be culture, experience, individual or group mind.

And yet there are also, still living within us and within the deeper collective remembrance, the other stories -- the ones from before the 'edits' occurred or the new stories were planted, and the ones that, if you believe in the holographic Universe, have yet to be told but are 'remembered' by future generations!

Lilith's Story

In the case of Lilith, it's true that the 'replacement story' reshaped her as a villain, a she-demon who preyed upon the poor fellas who found themselves at the mercy of the desire-nature.

Of course, this was determined to be not their responsibility, but rather projected upon the 'she-demon' whose fault it was.

That Lilith became a demon to be feared was a story that carried a more subtle plot-line which was also intended to create a new balance of power from the previous one. It's shared in another post here, but let's revisit the Lilith story:

The name 'Lilith' is related to the word for 'night'. Lilith was allegedly the first wife of Adam, as the story was told in Genesis 1. God created them in his image, male and female he created them. Equals. Yin and Yang. Complements, neither of which was of lesser or greater important. Both sacred halves of the Great Whole.

Then, Adam's ego got the best of him, he copped an attitude, and wanted to be superior and thus to make Lilith inferior. He fell out of Sacred Union.

According to the story, Adam always wanted Lilith to be beneath him during sexual intercourse -- yet another story of how sacred sexual union can be maligned by ego into a power game and an expression of ego-based dominance rather than a sacred, other-respecting prayer.

Lilith refused -- that wasn't the original deal, by which they were created equal, one male, one female -- and she chose to exile herself from paradise for the wilder hillsides and mountains. Because Lilith didn't 'fall' into duality by forgetting her true nature, she remained immortal.

In Genesis 2, God then created another mate for Adam -- Eve, a supposedly more passive female, who eventually gained knowledge of her own immortal nature. You know: the tree, the apple, the snake. And the story goes on. Eve turned into a 'bad girl', too, according to the Patriarchs.

But this suggests that Lilith's story had older and far more different roots.

Who was Lilith before she was demonized by fearful and fearsome Patriarchs who wanted to downplay Feminine power, sacredness, and independent expression, and ingrain a fear of women, sexuality, sensuality, the unknown, the mysteries of life and death that they perhaps wanted to control?

What is it to regain the original story of Lilith -- to remember it and retell it anew for new times when Lilith's 'whole Feminine' is desperately needed and no doubt desperately sought by the Sacred Masculine searching for his true, whole "other half"?

This is just one example of the importance of remembering -- RE-MEMBERING -- and embodying and sharing these reclaimed, more whole stories. It's time to plant new seeds and cultivate those that are healthy and whole, so that the common garden is revealed once again as Paradise.

Until next time...

Love,
Jamie

Stir your remembering in The Feminine Mojo Mystery School - explore and step into your Feminine mojo!

Image Credits: Lilith in a Sumerian stone relief; a detail from The Temptation of Adam and Eve, by Tommaso Masolino da Panicale (1427)

Lilith: Reclaiming a jewel in the dark

Greetings to each of you.

Though this surely isn't a new subject of musing and insight-querying for me, recent reading on Lilith brings the issue into a fresh, new and yes, somewhat raw, perspective for me.

My friend Jodi Flesberg Lilly told me about a book by Kelley Hunter called Black Moon Lilith -- about the archetype and myth of Lilith used in astrology. So I did some web-wandering and reviewed various articles I'd filed away about Lilith, and find that a common insight or perspective comes to mind once more.

According to Demetra George in her book, Mysteries of the Dark Moon, Lilith's earliest appearance in recorded history is as the 'beautiful maiden' who, in service to Inanna, "the Queen of Heaven", brings men in from the fields to participate in the sacred marriage rites.

George says that as the forces of Patriarchy take hold, the peoples' connection to the powers of the Goddess -- and their self-image as independent, equal, and sexually free -- must be shifted in favor of the Solar 'sky god' and the hierarchy that favors men.

In later stories, after the power of the Goddess had been supplanted by the Very Masculine Solar God of invaders,  Lilith is relegated to demonology, and is referenced as the first woman created as partner to Adam.

The story that was shaped through the eyes of Patriarchy said that Lilith refused to submit to an inferior position to Adam (quite literally!) and chose to head for the hills, remain independent, share herself with demons, seduce men, and kill innocent children.

Again, this is how the independent Lilith has had her story rewritten by the Patriarchs who found her example threatening, and used the rewritten story as a warning to all women who might express their independence and powerful sexuality.

These themes play out again and again in the cases of Mother Goddesses, wise women, priestesses, etc. who were eliminated, demoted or recast as harlots. Patriarchal 'fathers' reducing the great Goddess Ishtar to the 'Whore of Babylon', for example; or the Mysteries-adept and spiritual teacher, Mary Magdalene, to a prostitute; or Mary the mother of Jesus becoming a nonsexual 'virgin' (most people assuming that 'virgin' meant one who had not been 'despoiled' by sex, whereas there are esoteric interpretations of 'virgin' meaning pure-hearted, adept, etc.).

When the Lens is Distorted

Most contemporary references look at Lilith through the lens of the old-fogey (and misogynistic) Patriarchs, which means very distorted, and even outright lie. If we're going to use the archetypes, whether in astrology or psychology or art, they must be made whole and reclaimed, not simply used to perpetuate a distortion that keeps women (and men) fragmented.

Yes, since both men and women have access to the energies of Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine, the distortions of Lilith and Isis and others are as harmful to men, who cannot see their Sacred Masculine when the Sacred Feminine has been buried or distorted. It's like trying to see an accurate reflection of yourself in a mirror that's been shattered and covered with mud-spatter.

In the case of Lilith, like these other Goddesses and wise women, there is another, more whole story, some of which can be found by diligent research and some of which must be remembered and retold via other means, such as analeptic memory.

My brief research led me to an essay on Lilith by astrologer Antonia Langsdorf. Like a few others, Antonia begins to reintegrate Lilith ... to see another side to the 'dark Feminine' that harkens back to the era when women -- and Wise Women -- were revered, respected, appreciated and seen as equal to their Masculine counterparts.

When 'Darkness' was Revered

To the ancients, 'darkness' was not automatically associated with evil or devilry, as became the case post-Patriarchy. In the darkness, the void, a deep wisdom was held; creativity took shape; universes were gathered; mysteries were guarded. It was through the 'dark night' or the 'night sea voyage' that the initiate attained a much greater, deeper, higher, fuller, richer understanding ... a gnosis ... about the great mysteries of Life and the connection of all things in the One Intelligence, the Beloved.

In the darkness was a fallow time in which seeds prepared themselves and took root. In the darkness was the brightest light of all -- Eros and Phanes. And the Feminine powers of intuition, instinct and other Luna and body wisdom 'powers', are sourced in the 'darkness' because they can't be seen with the eyes of the Body -- they must be felt, seen with the inner eye.

Reclaiming our Lilith-Gifts

To me, it is vital to reconnect with Lilith -- this vibrant, wild, independent, beautiful, sensual, whole woman who said to Adam, "Are we not created equal?" and who defied the invader god' by refusing to slip into an unhealthy, dysfunctional dynamic that put the Goddess and the Feminine as lesser to the God and the Masculine, thus taking the divinity, Sacredness, and wholeness out of each.

Lilith means so much more, I'm sure, as do all of the stories and archetypes that restore the fullness and amazing brilliance of both the Sacred Feminine and the Sacred Masculine.

She -- they -- want us to find them, to remember them, to bring them through us into a restored and perhaps rejuvenated fullness of expression. The restoration and remembrance of the full Divine Feminine, in all of her fullness, fierceness, power, and equality, is vital to creating the shift in the world that is so needed now.

Listen, do you hear them speaking across the pathways of deep time and the frequencies of the Heart? What do they tell you?

This is a continuing conversation for me, so sign on to follow the Musings...

Love and blessings,
Jamie

Join me in the Feminine Mojo Mystery School - explore and step into your Feminine Mojo. Learn more...

Image Credits: Lilith, from John Collier.