Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Age of the Great Goddess Ancient Roots of the Emerging Feminine Consciousness by Marija Gimbutas El Espejo Gótico. La era de las grandes diosas (Age of the Great Goddess) es un libro de investigación de la arqueóloga Marija Gimbutas -autora de: El lenguaje de la diosa (The Language of the Goddess) , Las diosas vivientes (The Living Goddesses) , La civilización de la diosa (The Civilization of the Goddess) y Dioses y diosas de la vieja Europa (The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe) -, publicado en 1992 bajo el título: La era de las grandes diosas: raíces de la emergente consciencia femenina (Age of the Great Goddess: Ancient Roots of the Emerging Feminine Consciousness) . La era de las grandes diosas examina la cultura y la sociedad de las civilizaciones gobernadas por lo femenino , es decir, por las diosas de antaño. En cierta forma, Marija Gimbutas intenta recuperar la herencia sagrada de aquellas deidades prácticamente olvidadas. El misterio de las antiguas diosas prehistóricas de Europa revela un perfil de sociedad pacífico, sin guerras culturales, firmemente afirmado en la vida y la prosperidad siguiendo un sistema asombrosamente igualitario. La era de las grandes diosas. Age of the Great Goddess , Marija Gimbutas. Material relacionado: The Great Mother. As the conscious mind began to differentiate itself from the matrix of nature, the sacred image was like an umbilical cord connecting us to the deep ground of life. For some 25,000 years, possibly far longer, the image of the Great Mother presided over distant eras which have only recently become accessible to us: the Palaeolithic, the Neolithic and the great civilizations of the Bronze Age. The earliest images of the Great Mother known to us are the small and in some cases, exquisite figurines of a goddess carved from stone and bone and ivory some 25,000 years ago (goddesses of Lespugue, Laussel, Willendorf). The Goddess in all her manifestations was the symbol of the unity of all life in Nature… Hence the holistic and mythopoeic perception of the sacredness and mystery of all there is on Earth.” – Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess. Long ago, and in many different cultures, the whole cosmos was envisioned as a maternal being and this world was seen as the manifestation of an unseen source which breathed it into being, animating and sustaining it. The unseen world of spirit was seamlessly interwoven with this phenomenal world so that the two were essentially experienced as a unity. The air itself was an “awesome mystery joining the human and extra-human worlds.” Just as the stars emerged each night from the darkness of the night sky, so the visible universe was born from the dark mystery of the invisible womb of the Great Mother. She was the starry cosmos, she was the earth and all life on earth and she was the unseen dimension of the world of spirit which underlay the visible world. People felt connected to her as to a great cosmic being. Everything was infused with divinity because each and all were part of a living, breathing, connecting web of life: plants, animals, man and woman — all these were her ‘children’. The animals painted on the walls of the great Palaeolithic caves came forth from her womb and returned to it, to be born anew. Overawed by the immensity and grandeur of nature, and sensing the presence of the unseen dimension of spirit within its forms, people felt they lived within a Sacred Order, however harsh the conditions and the brevity of their lives. The Mother, Womb and Origin of All. Whether we look to Neolithic Europe, or to India and China, or to any people that has managed to retain its ancient traditions, like the Kogi Indians of Colombia, we find the cosmos imagined as a Mother, the womb and origin of all, the bringer of life and death, holding within her being the three dimensions of sky, earth and underworld. It is her ancient presence that was transmitted to the Great Goddesses of Bronze Age Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia and Anatolia. Further east, in China, we find her in the Goddess Kwan Yin, in Tara, The Great Mother was the primary experience of spirit, just as the mother is the primary experience of life for the infant and small child. the Divine Mother of the Tibetan tradition, and the goddess Kali in India. This image of the Primordial Mother emerged at different times in different cultures and endured for different lengths of time and was worshipped with different rituals, but it is possible to say that the Great Mother was the primary experience of spirit, just as the mother is the primary experience of life for the infant and small child. We may ask why the image of the Great Mother was so important. To answer this question, we need look no further than our experience of birth into the world. First of all, there is the experience of the embryo and foetus in the womb, the experience of union and containment within a watery, nurturing matrix. After the sudden and violent expulsion from this matrix in the traumatic experience of birth, the prolongation of the earlier feelings of close relationship, safety and trust, is absolutely vital. Without the consistent and loving care of the mother in early childhood, the child has no trust in itself, no innate power to survive negative life experiences, no model from which to learn how to nurture and support itself and care for its children in turn. Its primary response to life is anxiety and fear. It is like a tree with no roots, easily torn up by a storm because its instincts have been traumatized. With the love of the mother and trust in her presence, the child grows in strength and confidence and delight in itself and in life. Its primary response is trust. Extrapolate this to the small, isolated communities struggling to exist in different areas of the world and it is easy to understand why the image of the Mother was so important for their survival. The terrible Aspect of the Great Mother. The “terrible” aspect of the Great Mother is documented in almost every early mythology. The powerlessness of humanity in the face of nature’s terrifying power to destroy everything that it has built up is deeply imprinted on the memory of the race, the most feared memory being that of the Great Flood when climate change caused the oceans to rise, burying coastal settlements. Volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, devastating floods — everything that can destroy life in a few brief moments is carried in the image of nature as the “Terrible Mother” who abandons and destroys her children. Fate has always been imagined as a goddess. I think it is possible to say that the idea of the whole cosmos as an entity with consciousness or soul, in which every aspect of life is related to every other, grew out of the mythology surrounding the image of the Great Mother and that she is also the ultimate origin of the image of the Shekinah explored in the last chapter. The Great Mother is the earliest name we gave to an immeasurable cosmic entity that was imagined in a way that may be almost incomprehensible to us now. Life at that time was lived in the dimension of the Mother, in participation and accord with the cosmic rhythms of her being, and this kept people in touch with their instincts and was the foundation of their fragile trust in life. We have lost the awareness that we live within a greater cosmic dimension, which, like the Great Mother, spins and weaves the extraordinary web of life through which we are connected to each other, to all life on earth and to all cosmic life. Life at that time was lived in the dimension of the Mother, in participation and accord with the cosmic rhythms of her being, and this kept people in touch with their instincts and was the foundation of their fragile trust in life. The primordial experience of the Great Mother is the foundation of later cultures all over the world. She is like an immense tree, whose roots lie beyond the reach of our consciousness, whose branches are all the forms of life we know, and whose flowering is a potential within us, a potential that only a tiny handful of the human race has realized. As a small child lives within the mother’s field of consciousness and draws its life from it, so we, at this time, were held in the field of the Great Mother, who drew together all orders of life in a seamless web: everything was related because all shared in the primacy of the original source. She was the invisible patterning of orders of life whose relationships were defined and explored in ways that will be explained in the next chapter. She was experienced as an immutable Law, which the whole of life reflected and obeyed in the way it functioned, from the circumpolar movement of the stars to the behaviour of the tiniest insect. The image of the Great Mother reflected something deeply felt — that the creative source cares for the life it has brought into being. Between 25,000 and 3000 BC. Between 25,000 and 3000 BC The image of the Great Mother is slowly differentiated into three specific forms related to the realms of sky, earth and underworld. As Bird-Goddess, she was the Sky and the life-bestowing water, which flowed from her breasts, the clouds. She was the Goddess of Earth and from her body were born the crops that nourished the life she generated. She was Goddess of the Underworld and the waters welling up from beneath the earth as springs, lakes and rivers. Her symbol as ruler of the Underworld was the serpent, image of her power perennially to renew life. She was also the sea on which the fragile boats of the Neolithic explorers ventured into the unknown. Whether we look to the extraordinary goddess figures of Old Europe or further East, to Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley, the basic mythology is the same. In the Bronze Age (from c. 3500 BC), she still has the same essential forms, only more defined and specific, as well as a complex mythology as the ‘Mother of All’ that would one day become the title of the Shekinah and of Eve in the Book of Genesis. In relation to human consciousness at that time, the image of the Great Mother was numinous and all-powerful. This was the phase in human evolution when rituals were devised to keep the community in harmony with her life: to propitiate her with offerings that would bring protection and increase, and ward off her power to destroy. People learned to pay attention to unusual signs or events; to look and to listen at a level beyond the routine experience of life; to notice correspondences and draw analogies, to follow their intuition and respond to their imagination. Womb-like caves, rounded mountain tops shaped like breasts, groves of trees on the tops of hills, deep natural crevices in the earth with water gushing from them – all were sacred – worshipped as signs or manifestations of the Great Mother. They became the focus of shamanic rituals through which the shaman connected the clan or tribe with the invisible dimension of the spirit-world. Our culture has dismissed these rituals as primitive superstition, not understanding how much wisdom and knowledge, gathered over millennia of observation, was contained in them. There are still places all over the world where pilgrimages are made to these sacred sites. Deeply buried in our psyche we carry ancient memories of the sacredness of the earth, and of the earth as Mother. Deeply buried in our psyche we carry ancient memories of the sacredness of the earth, and of the earth as Mother. In the later Bronze Age one of the three dimensions of the Great Mother’s being was still the underworld, symbolically the cave, the tomb, the realm of the ancestral dead. There was always a guardian at the entrance to this realm — a lion or serpent or lion-headed bird which stood at the entrance to her temples. In the throne room at Knossos in Crete two magnificent griffins (part lion, part bird, part serpent) symbolizing sky, earth and underworld – the three-fold realm of the goddess – guarded the exquisitely sculpted throne where the priestess presided over the rituals which celebrated the immanent presence of the goddess. We have inherited all the images related to Great Mother as an invisible flow of energy which brings life into being, sustains and transforms it, and withdraws it into a hidden dimension for rebirth or regeneration. It is from the Neolithic era that we have inherited all the images related to Great Mother as an invisible flow of energy which brings life into being, sustains and transforms it, and withdraws it into a hidden dimension for rebirth or regeneration. Rhythm is a primary characteristic of the Great Mother, reflected in the ideogram of the wavy line. The movement of the moon, sun and stars, the seasons of the earth, and water all reflect the underlying rhythm of life. All have specific rhythms which affect the rhythm of our own lives: each moment we inhale and exhale; each night we withdraw into darkness to be regenerated for a new day. Our birth and our death reflect the same rhythm. We have come to recognize the rhythm of the earth’s movement around the sun and the sea’s rhythmic response to the moon. Astronomy charts the rhythm of the movement of the planets through our solar system, but what of the greater rhythm of galaxies which have only recently been discovered or the rhythm of the galaxies of sub-atomic particles? Marija Gimbutas (1921–1994) Getting To Know The Goddess Series Film screening & Discussion for Women’s History Month… Signs Out of Time: The Story of Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas. 60 min. 2008 Groundbreaking linguist and archaeologist Marija Gimbutas dedicated her career to studying the female and goddess-centric civilizations of "Old Europe."Signs Out Of Time examines the life and work of groundbreaking world-renowned archaeologist Dr. Marija Gimbutas. Drawing from her extensive knowledge of mythology and linguistics, Lithuanian-born Gimbutas uncovered the life-affirming and goddess-worshipping civilizations of pre-historic "Old Europe." Her work in mythology has long been considered a worthy companion piece to the famed theories of colleague Joseph Campbell; Gimbutas's theories on prehistoric gender roles continues to influence contemporary scholars as well as the modern-day "women's spirituality" movement. Our Goddess Series is hosted by Linda Webster. Linda has been a member of the First Unitarian Universalist Women’s Spirituality Group since 1985, facilitating women’s circles, rites of passage, and rituals for pagan holidays. Linda is also a Veriditas-certified labyrinth facilitator. Location: Street: 5501 N Lamar Blvd Additional: #A-105 City: Austin, Province: Texas Postal Code: 78751-1029 Country: United States (added from IndieBound) … (more) “All Beginnings are Dark! Womb Dark! “… the Old European sacred images and symbols were never totally uprooted; these most persistent features in human history were too deeply implanted in the human psyche. They could have disappeared only with the total extermination of the female population.” This assertion is from Marija Gimbutas in her book The Language of the Goddess.1. Our ancient sacred symbols surround us every day… All beginnings are dark! Womb dark. Life begins in a woman’s body. “For just as the child is conceived in the womb and there takes shape, so time begins in darkness, when the leaf gives up the ghost and the seed dreams in the ground and each night is longer than the last. All beginnings are dark. The world was without form and void and darkness brooded over the deep.”2. I now believe my own deep, dark motherline extends back thousands of years into the extensive cultures of Old Europe and Old Anatolia. My roots on the North American continent are relatively shallow. My female ancestors lived on the group of islands now known as the British Isles. My bloodline, as is your bloodline, is ancient. Some women, like me, have been disconnected from our ancestral roots. We are seeking a spiritual tradition and lineage directly connected to our ancestral birth line. I have reason to believe that my own bloodline reaches back to this world described by archeologist and anthropologist Marija Gimbutas. “The woman’s body was regarded as parthenogenetic , that is creating life out of itself. This ability was celebrated in religion. In Neolithic times and earlier in the Upper Paleolithic, religion centered on the feminine power, as shown by the abundance of female symbolism. Just as the female body was regarded as the goddess creatress, so too the world was regarded as the body of the goddess, constantly creating new life from itself. The imagery of Neolithic art is overwhelmingly feminine: the female body, and particularly the generative parts–vulva, uterus, or womb—are predominant. These symbols appear not only on figurines or larger sculptures of goddesses, but also on vases, cult equipment, and in tomb and temple architecture. The goddess is nature and earth itself, pulsating with the seasons, bringing life in spring and death in winter. She represents continuity of life as a perpetual regenerator, protectress, and nourisher.”3. Our lives are guided by the symbols we hold dear whether we acknowledge this fact or not. As Z Budapest, witch, tarot card reader, hereditary priestess, and one of my early teachers declared, “Religion controls inner space; inner space controls outer space.” Patriarchal religion and the other patriarchal institutions seek control of all the symbols we build our lives around from designer labels to business logos, from academic credentials to sports team loyalties. Please consider the possibility of reclaiming the term religion from the patriarchal versions we know all too well! Margot Adler reminds us in her 1979 book Drawing Down the Moon , the root of the word religion “means ‘to relink’ and ‘to connect’, and therefore refers to any philosophy that makes deep connections between human beings and the universe.”4. Claiming the ancient goddess religion as my own As a consequence of my deep engagement with the women’s liberation movement, which I embraced in the early 1970s, I became a woman seeking an authentic spiritual tradition connected to my own ancestral birth line. How to start such an enormous undertaking? One inspiration came during the 1978 keynote address by Carol Christ at the Great Goddess Re-emerging Conference, Santa Cruz, CA. This astute observation from Carol struck me, “Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, defeat or bafflement.” I’d already begun my own self-education learning to love women and to reclaim the history of women’s resistance erased by the institutions of patriarchy. The clarity of these directions and the warning that our minds “will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, defeat or bafflement” has echoed in my consciousness for decades! I find it interesting how our intuitive selves are drawn to symbols before our “knowing” mind catches up. When I look around my decorated house today I see multiple depictions of reindeer, both large and small. In late December, I happened upon Judith Shaw’s article about the reindeer goddess of Northern Europe where my paternal line originated in Denmark. Shaw wrote, “The Reindeer was a sacred animal to our ancient ancestors of Northern Europe. The doe was seen as the giver of light and life. Their horns were associated with the tree of life and often times they were depicted carrying the sun, the giver of life, in their horns.”5. One of my favorite parts of the article: “Reindeer are the only members of the deer family whose females have horns and are stronger and larger than the males. The males shed their antlers in winter, leaving it to the Deer Mother to fly through the long, dark night of Winter Solstice. The Reindeer was a sacred animal to our ancient ancestors of Northern Europe.”6 Please visit here for more discussion. We are now a week past the winter solstice. That longest night of the year births the short days of midwinter (at least in the northern hemisphere). Life begins in the dark interior of a woman’s body. The vulva, our external genitalia, is seen “as the concentrated life-producing part of the Goddess in her birth-giving functions”. This symbol of the Mother Goddess is encountered by archaeologists on rocks around the globe including an engraving on a one-and-a-half ton limestone rock at Abri Castanent, a collapsed rock shelter in France dating to about 37,000 years ago (reported in Archeology Magazine January, 2013). Respect for women and respect for the earth cannot be separated. Vulva, uterus, womb are the essential source of human life. Pornographic representations of women and our genitalia deny this basic reality. Disregard for our interconnections, the web of life on planet earth, is yet another pornographic lie. Other women, and people living in other cultures, especially native cultures and indigenous cultures, have not been disconnected from their ancestral roots and ancient homelands allowing them to claim their spiritual traditions and their understandings about the central place of women in “the processes and patterns of continuous creation”. I value and respect the knowledge these indigenous women are willing to share. I can glimpse my own past in their present. Katsi Cook shares her vision as a midwife.7. “In my vision as a Mohawk midwife, reproductive justice and environmental justice intersect at the nexus of women’s blood and voice; at the very centrality of woman’s role in the processes and patterns of continuous creation. Of the sacred things that there are to be said about this, woman is the first environment; she is an original instruction. In pregnancy, our bodies sustain life. Our unborn see through our eyes and hear through our ears. Everything the mother feels, the baby feels, too. At the breast of women, the generations are nourished. From the bodies of women flow the relationships of those generations, both to society and to the natural world. In this way our ancestors said, the earth is our mother. In this way, we as women are the earth.”7. “…we as women are the earth.” Those ancient cave drawings found in different areas of old Europe and Old Anatolia and around the world appear to be expressing the same understanding. A community of women and their clan gathered to press their hands along the rocks of mother earth. This simple, yet complex, understanding existed in our ancient ancestors who learned to honor and cooperate with mother earth. ‘Woman is earth’ is deeply implanted in the human psyche both yours and mine. Goddess Ink Blog. Sharing the Divine Feminine in Books, Classes and Sacred Tours. The Great Bear Mother: A Journey with Brigit to the Ancient Dawn of Imbolc by Jude Lally. My sense of Brigit has always been timeless, her roots stretching back past saint and Celtic goddess. This idea began to take form when I encountered the work of Irish scholar Séamus Ó Catháin, suggesting that Brigit was the great bear mother, venerated in early bear cults. Alongside this interest lay a question: “Does the source of the new consciousness required by our modern world lay in an ancient spirituality?” This journey took me to the earliest Imbolc, to the bear emerging from hibernation: a symbol of renewal, sacrifice, and ritual. Coded themes within myth revealed a very different Imbolc from the one of the Celts—familiar motifs representing something hidden, taboo, whose roots stretch back to a far older time. The theme of regeneration emerges throughout, and employing Joanna Macy’s work in examining our modern sense of self expands who we are when we consider our ecological self. Brigit reminds us of our creativity, our ability to remember, revision, and reclaim, as if she herself morphs and changes to meet our needs. In his seminal book, The Festival of Brigid: Celtic Goddess and Holy Woman, Ó Catháin suggests that the folklore associated with Brighid shows a continuous link stretching back to shamanic practice 4,000 years ago to early bear cults. The stories he searched within Nordic, Celtic, and Germanic folklore hold the same knowledge, which exists within the layers of our unconscious as ancient folk memory. The bear wasn’t just a biological entity to our ancestors; Shephard, Sanders, and Snyder contend that she represented both the physical and magical qualities early bear worshipers observed. She was a wise teacher, a loving mother who was fiercely protective of her young. Each fall, ancient peoples observed the bear going into hibernation, and in the heart of winter she would have appeared dead, her heartbeat slow and her breathing barely noticeable. To observe the same bear coming back from the dead would suggest magical powers, that she was a communicator with the otherworld. Emerging from the dead, bearing new life in the form of cubs, she also emerged bearing life to the land itself. She breathed life into the dead of winter, which lost its grip as the stirrings of spring radiated throughout the soil. All of these qualities fed our ancestors’ spiritual beliefs, creating myths, ritual, and practices to live by, which also marked the great cycle of the seasons. Marija Gimbutas, in her archaeological work, unearthed what may be evidence of bear cults in the form of figurines, possibly representing the bear as birth goddess. Small figurines from Eastern Europe 5,000 BCE have been discovered and called “bear nurses,” which depict human figures wearing bear masks. Similarly, we find “bear madonna” figures dating from 6,000 BCE that depict human female figurines wearing a bear mask while holding a bear cub. The existence of such ancient figures shows the importance and variation of the image. The idea of the bear cult, however, has flourished in popular culture, quite possibly owing its success to evoking our ancient memory. Gimbutas offers linguistic evidence to illustrate the connection of the bear with birth. The Proto Indo-European root bhere refers both to the bear and also to the ability to give birth. This is reflected in the Germanic beran (to bear children or to carry) and the Germanic barnam (child), as well as being present in the Old Norse burdh (birth.) Circumpolar societies associate the bear with supernatural qualities, although this similarity of beliefs is not related to a common ancestral belief system, but one that each culture developed separately due to revering the bear above all other creatures. From ancient Siberia, Shepard et al illustrate a practice of sacrificing a male bear, which was seen as essential in maintaining the order of the shamanic worlds. Within early myths, Ó Catháin notes the symbolism of shamans using the psychedelic mushroom Amanita muscaria (fly agaric , which he color codes as“white speckled”), linking its use to rituals undertaken at Imbolc. McIntosh speculates that Imbolc could have been an ancient magic mushroom festival celebrating the essence of spring with the new life as it dawns, radiating out across face of the northern hemisphere. muscaria use was likely at this cycle of the year to facilitate communication with the otherworld, ensuring the return of spring to the land and the survival of life. Laurie and White highlight one reason why the role of psychoactive mushrooms in Celtic mythology has been overlooked: with the demise of the old growth forests in Ireland, A. muscaria is rare in the Ireland of today. While it is likely that it grew in such forests, dried A. muscaria could have been easily obtained from the filidh’s (poet-seer’s) Celtic neighbors. While A. muscaria use is documented in numerous cultures throughout Europe and Asia, there are only obscure references to it within Celtic culture. Celtic legends are full of sleep-inducing berries and apples as well as magical hazelnuts and salmon. These were selected by the filidh as magical foods, yet there is nothing psychotropic about the foods that would allow them to produce inspiring and prophetic visions. The Roman historian Laertius recorded that Celtic Druids and bards spoke in “riddles and dark sayings,” and it seems many taboo subjects were referenced in obscure and coded ways. Motifs of such magical foods could be explained as being metaphoric references to A. muscaria, as it is probable that direct referencing was taboo due to its sacred qualities, argue Laurie and White. Inspiration and divination was fundamental to the filidh, and Brigit, as patron of poets, would have been invoked in rituals undertaken to inspire ecstatic poetry and induce prophetic visions. Brigit was a fire goddess, and instances throughout her life associated with pillars of flames around her head could have been an ancient coding for A. muscaria , which produces a pronounced heating of the head. While possible A. muscaria references were coded, so too were Brigit’s associations with speckled cow and snake, both having otherworldly origins. Her association with the snake is well known, and Scottish and Irish folk references refer to A. muscaria as the speckled snake. There is a possible link to Saint Patrick who, in banning certain pagan rituals as well as banishing snakes from Ireland, was actually attempting to wipe out an A. muscari cult, claim Laurie and White. Later agricultural communities celebrated Imbolc as a time when Brigit brought the new life to the land; with milk being so important to the Celtic diet, the celebration also anticipated the lactation of the pregnant ewes. Ó Catháin notes that, when anyone complained of the depleted winter’s store, they were met by reassurances that, ‘‘it won’t be scarce very long now as Saint Bridget and her white cow will be coming ‘round soon.” With the loss of such rich mythology, our sense of self has undergone a shrinking; once capable of shape-shifting, that self is now reduced to a mere shadow. Statistics abound with graphs showing sharp rises in the use of antidepressants alongside our insatiable hunger for consumerism. This, in part, explains our reaction to an unconscious feeling of loss, partly due to the urgency of the overwhelming array of issues vying for our attention. The root of this great change lies in the destruction of tribal Europe and the worship of the great goddess, where our sense of self was drawn from each other, our non-human family, and the land. Salomonsen explains that these early matrifocal and matrilineal cultures, which laid down the foundation for our civilization, were eventually conquered by worshipers of a male warrior god, which lay the foundation for patriarchal and oppressive societies in Europe. The overthrow of the goddess by a male god, whose reign is removed from the earth, brought about an epic change in thought, which is still in place and dominates cultural thinking that places women, animals, and the earth as second-class citizens. As we adapted to this new myth, our notion of self changed. The founding principle of the myth of progress is self-destruction. It views our race as apart and separate from nature, concerned only with economic growth and material accumulation. In Celtic culture, it was the role of the bard, devoted to Brigit, who kept the myths—the stories of the people—alive. McIntosh explains that this poetic power was eroded away by repressive laws such as the 1609 Statutes of Iona in the Highlands of Scotland, which suppressed Gaelic culture. Clan chiefs were required to send their eldest son or daughter south to learn English. Bards were outlawed and chiefs were no longer allowed to entertain them, with the threat of being punished or banished. Similar laws were replicated throughout the ancient Celtic world, repressing the bard’s role in maintaining cultural and ecological awareness, and were replaced by the power of money and the adoption of values of commerce. The crisis currently unfolding on our planet is a spiritual one whose roots stem from a dysfunctional and pathological notion of the self. Could the loss of the bear, in Scotland and Ireland—the loss of ancient forests, of habitat, of indigenous belief—be the reason for the shrinking of our notion of self? With each loss, we are losing aspects of ourselves. Joanna Macy’s work centers around accepting the pain we feel in facing the overwhelming issues in our current world, before it develops into grief and denial, so we are able to turn our feelings into effective action. In defining ourselves, we naturally adopt different notions of self to meet different needs. While we are free to select our boundaries—whether they end at our skin, our family, our tribe, our non-human family, the mountains, the oceans, the planet, ancient goddesses and gods, or they extend to the very universe—Macy envisions that a return to this ecological self will bring us into kinship with other forms of life, and ultimately bring us new reserves of strength. Reconnecting is one route to wholeness, to reassembling our missing parts. The method employed does not lie outside; instead, it is a journey inwards, deep into our bones, our blood, our cells, our DNA, where remnants of ancient memory have been passed down through the generations. This was my journey in rediscovering Brigit, resonating with her as bear mother. Myths are the language of the soul, and the essence of a myth only comes alive when it resonates in the soul of the recipient. Just because the bear no longer roams in the Celtic lands of Scotland and Ireland, this does not mean that the same psychological needs that brought about the veneration of the bear are no longer relevant. As Brigit regenerated the land, her regenerated spirit becomes meaningful again. She offers us the inspiration to envision a future which values our nonhuman relatives and the earth in our natural relationship of interconnection. Rather than accepting a future borne out of fear and helplessness featured in films that feed us horrors of ecological destruction, we must join in creating an empowering vision in which technology serves us in renewable ways, and empowers us to create sustainable futures right now. Brigit spans the existence of humankind, offering the deep well of wisdom to those who seek her. In rediscovering her symbols, hidden in layers of myth and accumulated in tales told over the years, her symbols, which might at first seem obscure, produce a powerful picture once they are reassembled. Brigit is the great mother bear who returns the energy to the land after winter. As she regenerates the land, her regenerated spirit becomes meaningful again. She is the great mother who midwives our continual rebirth, her flame the transforming fire that burns within us. She is the fire of inspiration that the Druid filidh invoked, the fire that ignites our heads to dream new dreams, burns in our heart as compassion, and warms our hands in the work we carry out. Condren, M. T. 2002. “Brigid: Soulsmith in the New Millennium.” Irish Journal of Feminist Studies 4 (2): 34–39. Cork, Ireland: University Press. Gimbutas, M. 2001. The Language of the Goddess . London: Thames & Hudson. Laurie, E. R., and T. White. 1997. “Speckled Snake, Brother of Birch: Amanita Muscaria Motifs in Celtic Legends.” Shaman’s Drum 44. McIntosh, A. 1998. “Deep Ecology and the Last Wolf.” United Nations Biodiversity Proceedings: Cultural and Spiritual Values of Biodiversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Macy, Joanna. 2007. World as Lover, World as Self: Courage for Global Justice and Ecological Renewal. Berkeley, CA: Parallex Press. Ó Cathain, Seamus. 1995. The Festival of Brigid: Celtic Goddess and Holy Woman . Ireland: DBA Publications. Shepard, Paul, Barry Sanders, and Gary Snyder. 1992. The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth and Literature. New York: Viking Press. Jude is an artist, writer and ritualist. Her work focuses on the wise women ways, of women’s mysteries and employing shamanic tools to heal the damaging split modernity has created between nature and ourselves which only exists in our mind. She describes her work as walking the Ancestral Soul Path weaving through women’s circles, ritual and ceremony she builds ways to approach our ancestors with sacred intention and lets those insights and inspiration flow through us in creative ways allowing it to nourish us and fostering it to root it in our lives, our circles and communities. Originally from Scotland Juse is currently residing in Asheville NC where she runs her Celtic Soul School as well as offering a series of workshops, online courses and retreats to Scotland. For online courses, workshops and to activate your free membership in her Celtic Soul School visit http://www.celticsoulcraft.com or find her on Facebook. For details of her Ancestral Mothers of Scotland Retreat visit www.judelally.com. Additionally, Jude teaches Weaving the Protection of Brighid- A Goddess Activation Course . Editor’s note: This essay originally appeared in Brigit, Sun of Womanhood, edited by Michael McDermott and Patricia Monahan, published by Goddess Ink.