The Storytellers Goddess Part 16

The man at the spigot on the mountain threw his whole weight into the hammer blow that turned the giant faucet. Again and again he hammered, and then the water began to flow. A trickle at first and then a roar of white and blue filled the coppers and silvers of Athena's great plumbing tapestry.

The people began to dance in Athena's streets.

Athena held Her fists in the air.

Inside the buildings, the sounds of flus.h.i.+ng and splas.h.i.+ng gurgled forth. Dishes sparkled and babies patted hands into warm baths.

"Never forget, never forget," patted the babies' hands.

Outside the buildings, the carts moved to and fro on the crisscross streets.

"Never forget," squeaked the axles.

"Never forget," fluttered the birds.

"Never forget," hummed the people at the vats at the edge of the sea.

"Never forget," dreamed the waves and the fishes and the long green hair of the plants at the bottom of the sea.

Bridget (BRIDGE-it) Inventor of Writing (Ireland) Introduction Impossible to banish, the Great G.o.ddess Danu (see story) later took the human-divine form of the G.o.ddess Bridget and finally accepted the status of sainthood, conferred on Her by Pope Gregory I. The pope told Augustine in the sixth century C.E. to co-opt rather than destroy the pagan sites and customs of the newly evangelized Celtic peoples. The church thus added the new Saint Bridget to the nativity scene, calling Her midwife to the Virgin Mary. They changed the name of Her Holy Imbolg, February 1, to Candlemas, only thinly disguising with the trappings of Christianity its pagan reverence for the union of light and land.

But Irish writers, refusing absolutely to diabolize their G.o.ddess or even fully to accept Her "sainthood," insisted on calling Her Queen of Heaven, and they identified Her with the Christian Mother of G.o.d.

Certainly their Bridget, Triple G.o.ddess of the Celtic empire of Brigantia, which included parts of the British Isles, Spain, and France, was once known as Mother of All Life. Identified with the Changing Moon and a.s.sociated with ox (a later nativity scene prop), boar, and ram, Bridget also personified the entire kingdom. She conferred prosperity on a king only when She ritually accepted him as Her spouse. Her sacred count was nineteen, the number of years it takes for the New Moon to coincide with the Sun's Winter Solstice. Her priestesses, too, numbered nineteen; for centuries their generations kept Her sacred fire burning in Kildare, Ireland.

To this day, the custom of fas.h.i.+oning Bridget's cross is widespread. In honor of Her fertility, people in the Gaelic-rooted parts of the isles weave, of rushes or straw, three- or four-armed crosses on the first day of spring, the time of preparation for the first planting. Though its precise meaning is lost in antiquity, the cross may well symbolize the sacred union of the powers above and below.

Adored of poets and giver of medicine, smith craft and writing, Bridget, Queen Earth Herself, wears the cloak of Catholicism with regal nonchalance. Her story is adapted from the one told in Ancient Mirrors of Womanhood by Merlin Stone.

I call on Bridget on February 1 or 2 when the first bright weeds have burst through the ground after winter rains. I pot a new house plant every year at this time in honor of the project or quality I have resolved to make part of my life in the next year. I also feel Her presence when I drink two cups of mug wort tea midcycle each month to bring my blood easily.

Queen of the Four Fires

A long time ago, at the first crack of pink in a young morning, the G.o.ddess Bridget was born. Out of Her head rose a column of fire that stretched to the very sky. While the Nine Sisters who had helped to birth Her crooned and swayed in a circle around Her, Bridget broke off a flaming plume from Her column of fire and dropped it on the circle of ground before Her. It blew big and red there on the hearth.

Then Bridget reached both hands into the crackling heat, took a piece of the fire, and swallowed it. The fire She ate went straight to her heart.

There stood the G.o.ddess Bridget, fire leaping from Her head, licking up inside Her heart, shooting from Her hands, and dancing on the hearth before Her.

About Her hearth, Bridget built a chimney of brick. About the chimney, She built a roof of thatch and walls of stone. In that way the G.o.ddess made Herself a house, and in it She keeps Her great fires, which have served Her people forevermore.

From the fire on Bridget's head came writing and poetry. From the fire in Bridget's heart came the warmth of compa.s.sion. From the fire on Bridget's hands came the craft of bending iron. And from the fires of Bridget's hearth and the waters of Her magic well came the healing teas.

Word of Bridget's fire gifts spread far and wide. People flocked to learn from Bridget the secret of using fire to soften iron and bend it to the shapes of their desires. Bending iron was called smith craft and the people made wheels, pots, and tools of iron and clucked their tongues at the wonder of it all.

Bridget collected in Her house all the medicine plants of the Earth.

With them, She made healing teas, for which the people begged the recipes. In huge iron pots Bridget boiled the waters from Her well on Her hearth fires. When the bubbles were high, She'd take the pots from the fires, add the special leaves and barks and roots, and cover the pots to steep out the herbal powers.

She gave a boy with bad teeth the tea of the dandelion root to make his teeth strong. She gave a young woman raspberry leaf tea to help her womb carry its child. When an old man gasped with pain at Her house, a cane in each hand to help him walk, Bridget gave him wintergreen bark for the pain and black cherry juice for the healing. To a little girl with a broken leg, She gave comfrey to knit her bone sound again. When a grandmother said, "I'm drying up, Bridget. It hurts to get old,"

Bridget brewed motherwort, licorice root, and dried parsley.

"Cup a day for you, Grandmother," said Bridget, giving the woman the tea and a basket of eggs.

Once two men with the terrible sores of leprosy came to Bridget.

"Bathe yourself in My well," said Bridget to the first man. At every place Bridget's waters touched, the man's skin turned whole again.

"Now bathe your friend," said Bridget. But the newly healed man could not bear the sight of his friend. Repulsed, he backed away.

"I cannot touch him," he said to Bridget.

"Then you are not truly healed," said Bridget. And

She gave the first man back his leprosy and healed the second man.

"Return to Me with compa.s.sion," She said to the first man, putting Her hand on his heart.

"There find your healing."

The people wanted to tell everyone about Bridget's wisdom and Her medicines.

"But we can't remember which plants You use for which sicknesses or where You gather them or how long You steep them," they told Bridget.

Bridget took a blackened stick from the fire and began to make marks with it on a flat piece of bark.

"These are the talking marks," She said.

"They are the way to remember what you don't want to forget." The fire on Bridget's head blazed up as She wrote.

Every year at midwinter the people stop to give thanks to Bridget.

"Thank You, Queen Bridget, for the talking marks. Thank You for compa.s.sion. Thank You for the smith craft Thank You for Your fires of head, heart, hands, and hearth."

Shakti (SHOCK-tee) Queen of the Cosmos (India) Introduction

The G.o.ddess Shakti's name translates as "Cosmic Energy." In India's Hinduism, She is the dominant force of the universe. (See stories of Devi, Maya, and Kali, other forms of the Shakti.) She alone has the power to move the dormant male force to action, and a G.o.d without His Shakti is helpless. The Shakti is time, the cosmic tension and activity that brings the corpse of eternity to life over and over again. s.h.i.+va, Her consort, is that Eternal Dancer who comes to life in Her arms. It is in relations.h.i.+p to Her that the G.o.d s.h.i.+va expresses the essence of His character. He creates, maintains, destroys, conceals, and favors, all at Her will, multiplying Himself into endless actors, like vapor, coming to pa.s.s, to flow, and to vanish. Tantric Hinduism wors.h.i.+ps the s.e.xual principle as a metaphor for life itself.

Life's energies of water, Earth, and snake are embodied by the Shakti's Yoni, or sacred v.u.l.v.a. The s.h.i.+va's Lingam, or sacred Phallus, embodies the energies of fire,

Sun, and eagle. As in the Central American G.o.ddess Mayahuel's relations.h.i.+p to Snake-the-Wind (see story), this mythology poses none of the West's opposition between snake and Sun (Devil and G.o.d), but instead it honors the union of differences as the ultimate power of the universe.

The Shakti and Her s.h.i.+va together enable the dance at the center of the universe. This center is within each human heart. The Western mystical system called alchemy, which concerns itself with the substance and transformation of the soul, honors this same universal heart center, and uses extensive s.e.xual imagery. The chant om or aum, made popular in the United States by students of the East in the 1960s and 70s, recapitulates the spectrum of worldly states represented by the Tantric G.o.ddess and Her Consort. A is the state of waking consciousness in the world of gross experience. U is the state of dreaming consciousness. M is the state of dreamless, blissful sleep; undifferentiated non experience The pause of silence that follows aunt is the ultimate un manifestation of divine reality.

The dance of the G.o.d s.h.i.+va is far better known than the inspiration of His Shakti. Discovering the Shakti gave me great satisfaction. I wrote the story of the Shakti in order to invoke the tremendously private feeling I have about these two cosmic forces.

The Shakti and the s.h.i.+va at the Center of the Human Heart I took my sister. I took my son. I took my lover. I took my friend. But in the end I had to go alone to the center of my heart. At first I said, let's not waste time. And anyway I am afraid. I want a hand to hold.

But I had to go alone. I went alone, I'm telling you. Yet when I got to the center, I was not alone. For the Shakti and Her s.h.i.+va were there.

Past the teachings and the wis.h.i.+ngs I went, under the corrections and the rules. I moved through the kaleidoscope of my world. The wind brushed my ears; the sun colored me hot. The rains came. I traveled past the jeweled elephants and the purple curtains of principles and politics. I turned through the spiral of peac.o.c.ks and calves, under the castle entwined with roses and long green rice. I swam under the fan of the lotus into the warm black mud of the roots. I floated. I floated down to the deep.