What Every Woman Who is Hungry For Liberation Must Understand about History
My entire life I have been a seeker of Truth.
This sometimes ephemeral, unable to fully grasp virtue has led me to lands far and wide in my own psyche and in the world. In my teens in led me to breaking up with multiple seemingly perfect boyfriends who wanted to marry me, it led me to drop out of college twice, it led me to leave the church, it led me to leave my small hometown and family of origin and take a public stand against my abusive father, it led me to spiritual psychosis, it let me to injecting frog venom in my leg in the middle of the jungle, it let me to my knees, it led me to my own shattering and power, it led me to question absolutely everything I have been taught about reality, about God, about my own identity and place in the world as a woman.
Most strikingly, it has driven me to needing to understand the Truth about God, about how religion was formed, and why we as a human race have certain belief systems about church, about what is regarded as sacred, about the power of women.
For years, this incessant need to understand, to know, drove me to isolation. Every spiritual tradition that I studied never sat right in my bones. I’d hear people speak of God The Father with no mention of the feminine face of God and all I’d hear is someone who is brainwashed. Someone who has no idea. As I too, had no idea.
I kept seeking.
Coming from someone who developed a true relationship with Jesus Christ throughout my years in the church, in my seeking I found myself completely disillusioned, angry, and jaded.
Not because of Jesus. But because of how the world, more specifically America, still widely believes that Christianity is the holy grail, and that The Bible is the only true text sharing the only true word of god.
Little to my knowledge, I would never be satisfied until I discovered the feminine face of The Divine and how it was suppressed - or really - until I had shaken off enough of my church programming to hear her voice and no longer be afraid of it or associate it with satan.
Who knew that the DEMON! WOMAN! inside of me was actually my liberation.
Who knew that the room they had locked away and told me to never go inside of held everything I needed for my salvation.
Minoan Snake Goddess
Knossos, Crete
c. 1600 BCE
My seeking led me to understand that there are religions and civilizations that predate the birth of Jesus by tens of thousands of years.
I already knew this intellectually.
But now, I really knew this. Down to the marrow of my blood.
More specifically, there is much archaeological evidence that many of these ancient civilizations worshipped The Goddess, and that the power of the feminine was regarded as equal, or in some cases, was held with higher influence than that of men.
This Goddess was referred to as The Queen of Heaven, The Mother of The Universe, The Mother of All Deities, among thousands of other faces and names.
The difference between mere information and knowledge is the degree to which it transforms us and reshapes our worldview.
In the book “When God Was A Woman,” author Merlin Stone writes
“Though buried deep beneath the sands of what was once Canaan, statues of the female deity have been continually unearthed in archaeological excavations. These images of The Goddess, some dating back as far as 7000 BC, offer silent testimony to the most ancient worship of the Queen of Heaven in the land that is today most often remembered as the birthplace of both Judaism and Christianity.”
Could it be that before the birthplace of the very same religion of Christianity that has historically made the power of women monstrous, the feminine was once worshipped, revered, and exalted?
It seems to be the case.
Why This is Life Changing Information for All Women
When we dissect what was omitted from mainstream history and imagine a time and culture where The Goddess was worshipped, we realize that this reality is not something that lives in a distant past. It is a current of ancestral myth and memory that is alive inside of our bones now, whispering to us, waiting to be remembered, waiting for us to descend into its dark oceanic abyss.
The Church has taught us for thousands of years now to fear these whispers - to regard what poet Maya Luna calls the Deep Feminine Current within us as demonic, of satan, or sinful.
How curious it is to know that the name Lucifer in Latin means “bringer of Light.”
Knitted in our flesh and blood and bone has always dwelled this ancient reality, this Truth, this pulse of the feminine within us as the most powerful force on the planet.
They taught us to fear the dark because they fear the unknown, the stark, cold reality of death, the black void within the body of woman that we all came from, and will return to.
This scares men with small minds who seek to control at all costs.
But you, we, are of no small mind. Our power comes from knowing that control is an illusion.
We know the mysteries of Death are the mysteries of Life, the bringer of the Thunder like power of woman.
It is time to remember.
To no longer fear her call.
To stamp on the neck of anything that keeps us from this current, from our rightful current.
To reclaim our Heritage as women, as humans, as a Planet.
“When feminism exploded into my life, it gave me a vision of the world totally different from everything I had assumed or hoped. The concept of a feminist literature offered the possibility of pride in my sexuality. It saved me from either giving up writing entirely, or the worse prospect of writing lies in order to achieve some measure of grudging acceptance. But at the same time, Feminism destroyed all my illusions about Literature. Feminism revealed the city as an armed compound to which I would never be admitted. It forced me to understand, suddenly and completely, that literature was written by men, judged by men. The city itself was a city of Man, a male mind even when housed in a female body. If that was so, all my assumptions about the worth of writing, particularly working-class writing, were false. Literature was a lie, a system of lies, the creation of liars, some of them sincere and unaware of the lies they retold, but all acting in the service of a Great Lie — what the system itself labelled Universal Truth. If that truth erased me and all those like me, then my hopes to change the world through writing were illusions. I lost my faith. I became a feminist activist propelled in part by outrage and despair, and a stubborn determination to shape a life, and create a literature, that was not a lie.”
-Dorothy Allison
-Goddess Seal of Ancient Crete, believed to be a Matriarchal Society approx 1600-1500 BCE (Before Christ)