The Goddess is Rising… And We are Rising with Her
Some years ago, the then current incarnation of my Clear Mountain Apprenticeship Circle gifted me with an exquisite buffalo skin drum that I was deeply honored to receive!
A week or so later, the drum “taught me” (gave me/inspired/evoked) a sacred chant that I have sung with others many times in the years since.
Here are the words to the song:
The Goddess is rising
She’s rising, she’s rising
The Goddess is rising
She’s rising
She is
She’s rising in you
She’s rising in me
She’s setting us free
How we’re meant to be
The Goddess is rising
She’s rising, she’s rising
The Goddess is rising
She’s rising
She is
She’s rising in me
She’s rising in you
Can you feel her too?
Can you feel her too?
I sang it for the first time on Winter Solstice a few weeks later, along with the children and adults who were participating in a candle-lighting ritual in a loft in Tribeca in NYC. We were overflowing the loft, the drum was sounding, our voices were joined together in love and it was truly magical!
Now it is nearly spring equinox in this part of the world and the plants are rising, our energy is rising, and the Goddess is rising, too. She has been returning to us, or rather to our conscious awareness over at least the past half century, though of course She never actually left. She just went underground for a while (“a while” being a few thousand years). There are numerous places on the planet where she was never “lost”, but she is returning to all of us now, in our time of greatest need, this time of enormous necessity and opportunity for the conscious evolution of humanity for the sake of all our lives.
Just as the plants rise out of the Earth, especially in springtime, we are rising in this moment of chaos that is also a time of profound evolution. We are growing into our entelechial promise, becoming beings of love and light, regardless of how long it takes us to transform. And when it’s time for an archetypal energy to arise, to re-enter the world of form in order to help us, it does—so all the old myths and tales that point to universal truths have told us. And it is time for the Goddess, for She who reconnects us in kinship, in relationship to one another, and to the truth that we are inextricably woven into the web of Earth’s ongoing transformational cycles of birth, death and rebirth.
One depiction of the Goddess Ninkasi.
I look around my writing nook and the Goddess is everywhere. The Goddess Ninkasi is directly in front of me. The sacred arts of brewing and fermentation were originally dedicated to Ninkasi in Mesopotamia. (You will soon hear directly from Ninkasi, the Goddess of beer, when my new novel finds the perfect publisher to help me birth this labor of love that I’ve completed! I can hardly wait!!! If you’re that publisher, please call me!)
On a shelf up on my left is a clay goddess holding a crescent moon, next to her is a brass statue of the snake goddess from the Minoan era in Crete, and on a small, half-moon table to my right is an African goddess made of wood with her hands raised high to the sky, and whose spine is an undulating snake; it is likely that the snake represents the serpent energy rising through her chakras. Kwan Yin’s serene smile beams with compassion nearby. Behind me is a framed photo of vibrant Asherah, goddess from the mid-east, dancing ecstatically with her goats as she waves sheaves of wheat, reminiscent of the Greek goddess Ceres/Demeter. The asteroid Ceres features prominently in my astrological chart, and given my green witch herbalist’s focus on healing through nourishment, that makes perfect sense, as well as matching my ancestral Jewish mother/grandma roots! Ceres, also holding sheaves of wheat, is depicted on a beautiful plaque in my living room.
The Greek Goddess of the Harvest, Demeter.
Finally, behind me is a bookshelf that holds large bottles of infused herbal oils. A terra cotta statue of Ix Chel and her sacred hare live here. Ix Chel, the Mayan maiden/mother/crone goddess is a midwife, healer, and rainbow weaver. She first called me to her, and to Mexico, in a lucid dream. Dragonflies are sacred to Ix Chel and they are allies of mine, too. Connections abound when we look through the eyes of our hearts, and when we have respect and appreciation for Mystery. The hare is a universal symbol of fertility and spring. In this depiction, he is her consort and sits close beside her, looking mischievous!
Some of the many iterations of Ix Chel.
The goddess is rising! In Ridgewood, New Jersey, a few towns over from where I grew up, a few years ago a magnificent sculpture of two goddesses, Ceres and Liberty, was discovered, abandoned, under a tarp! The sculptor Gaetano Federici made them in his famed studio in Paterson, NJ and they had lain unseen for decades. But you can’t keep a good woman down, nor a Goddess, much less two of them! They are being restored and I look forward to learning where they will be placed so I can come visit and welcome them back with simple, sacred offerings to let them know we are grateful for their returned presence!
When I read about that discovery, it made me think about a memorable night decades ago when my Moon Magic and Meditation class was meeting in my apartment in Manhattan. We were sharing experiences of our moon meditations when Margaret R. told us the following story:
She said that the goddess Diana/Artemis came to her in her meditation and said: “I’m in a place where thousands of people pass over me each day. Get me out of here!!”
We all got goose bumps, or “truth bumps” as Seneca wise woman Twylah Nitsch taught me to think of them. We all had the feeling this was a genuine visitation, a communication from the Goddess herself. It haunted me until I did some research and a many-layered story unfolded.
These days Wikipedia has an extensive entry about all of this. Here are some of the key points I want to share:
First version of Diana in the foundry of the W. H. Mullins Manufacturing Company, Salem, Ohio, 1891.
A Diana statue, that turned out to be the first one, was commissioned by architect Stanford White in 1891 to be a weather vane atop the original Madison Square Garden at 26th Street and Madison Ave in NYC. Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens created her, and she was built by the W. H. Mullins Manufacturing Company in Salem, Ohio. But, the statue was too large and heavy to rotate properly, at 18 ft tall and 1800 pounds! Not only that but her nudity offended moral crusader Anthony Comstock and his New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, who organized a protest.
Second version of Diana with her copper foulard.
In one part of the story I find especially funny, Saint-Gaudens draped the figure in “cloth” to placate them and to increase the likelihood of the statue catching the wind (see picture above), but the cloth (copper foulard) blew away! The goddess will not be hidden!
And so it was taken down less than a year later. She was shipped off to Chicago for the 1st World’s Fair, with plans to have her placed atop the women’s pavilion, but again, her nudity brought out a few protestors, specifically the Women's Christian Temperance Union. These self-appointed voices of morality demanded the controversial nude figure be clothed. (Hmm... sounds like the present day, unfortunately!)
Instead, she was placed atop the agricultural exhibit building, pictured below.
First version of the Diana atop the Agriculture Building,
World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893.
Meanwhile, a second Diana statue had been commissioned and she stood atop the tower of Madison Square Garden from 1893-1925. She was sometimes called: Diana of the Tower and had been completely redesigned by Saint-Gaudens – with a more elegant pose, a different thrust to the body, a thinner figure, smaller breasts and a more graceful angle to the leg. To better fit the proportions of Madison Square Garden's tower, the statue's height was scaled down to 14.5 feet and made of hollowed copper, and weighed 700 lbs.– more than 60% less than the first version – light enough to rotate with the wind. As Saint-Gaudens originally envisioned, the figure was balanced on her left toe atop a ball. The statue was hoisted to the top of the tower on November 18, 1893.
During the day, the gilded figure caught the sun and could be seen from all over the city and as far away as New Jersey. Electric lights, then a novelty, illuminated it at night; it was the first statue in history to be lit by electricity!
Madison Square Garden was slated to be demolished in 1925 to make way for construction of the New York Life Building. Diana was removed and put in storage. A seven year search to find a place for her In NYC proved futile. Finally, the statue of the goddess was given as a gift to the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1932. In 2014, the statue was restored and now stands in a place of prominence in the Great Stair Hall.
Second version of Diana (restored, 2013–14),
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The Diana statue made this the tallest building in New York City at the time!
I’ve kept newspaper clippings of the restored Diana and of the discovered Ceres and Liberty statues taped to my desk for years now. They give me hope.
But what of the first Diana? What happened to her? Well, it seems that no one actually knows. This is what I read on Wikipedia: “The original Diana does not survive. In June 1894, eight months after the exposition's closing, a major fire tore through its buildings. The lower half of the statue was destroyed; the upper half survived the fire, but was later lost or discarded.”
I don’t believe the goddess is lost, she knows exactly where whatever part of her that survived is being held. And she wants OUT! She cannot be discarded, that is for sure.
So, whether or not we eventually search for her and find her in a crate nearly a century old in storage underneath the current Madison Square Garden, or somewhere in Chicago, the part of her that survives can thrive if we honor the goddess here and now by living her principles of kinship, cherishing all ages and stages of life from baby seedlings to elder plants falling back to the earth, dying to regenerate the soil.
Her wisdom and power are available to all of us and she is inviting us to remember who SHE is and who WE are. Diana/Artemis in particular inspires us to take aim and focus on what we want and need. We are co-creative beings and we’re woven into the web of love and abundance meant for all to share. In forgetting the goddess, we’ve forgotten our goodness. Death cults have taken over bringing us war and environmental degradation and all the intolerant patriarchal inspired “isms” of our time.
But She is Rising and so are We.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a few different videos
on the Diana statue. Click Here or on the picture above to view them.
The Charge of the Star Goddess
I who am the Beauty of the Green Earth and the White Moon among the stars and the mysteries of the waters, I call upon your soul to arise and come unto me. I am the Soul of Nature that gives life to the universe.
From me all things proceed and unto me they must return. Let my worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold— all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.
Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.
And you who seek to know me, know that your seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold— I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.
[Traditional Goddess Blessing]
Green Blessings and Love!
~*~
Robin Rose
POSTSCRIPT:
A monumental statue of the goddess Berehynia, holding up an arch of guelder rose flowers, tops the victory column in Independence square in Ukraine. She was built in 2001 to honor the tenth anniversary of Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union. May her presence help protect the people of Ukraine and help restore sanity and safety to that land. She is connected to both water spirits and to a Scythian Earth-goddess, and seen as a protector of hearth and home.
Diane Paxson, writing in Issue 97 of Sage Woman magazine, suggests channeling our prayers for the people of Ukraine through Berehynia and through another prominent goddess statue in Kyiv, the Motherland Monument, locally known as the goddess Batkivshchýna-Máty.
