And so we learn the Mystery: the feared Shadow, the Guardian of the Threshold, is none other than the God, who is named Guardian of the Gates, in his aspect of Death.
You’re moping because you aren’t all you once were,” she’d snapped. “Well, get over it. We’re none of us what we once were. We all get old. We lose the use of our knees, or our faculties. But you know what? Life goes on. And there’s still plenty of it to enjoy.
As feminist scholar Carol Christ points out, “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, bafflement, or defeat.
The symbolism of the Goddess is not a parallel structure to the symbolism of God the Father. The Goddess does not rule the world; She is the world. Manifest in each of us, She can be known internally by every individual, in all her magnificent diversity.
The image of the Goddess inspires women to see ourselves as divine, our bodies as sacred, the changing phases of our lives as holy, our aggression as healthy, our anger as purifying, and our power to nurture and create, but also to limit and destroy when necessary, as the very force that sustains all life. Through the Goddess, we can discover our strength, enlighten our minds, own our bodies, and celebrate our emotions. We can move beyond narrow, constricting roles and become whole.
Love is not only an energizing force, but an individualizing force. It dissolves separation and yet creates individuality. It is, again, the primal paradox.
When we cast a circle, we create an energy form, a boundary that limits and contains the movements of subtle forces.
I don’t believe that everything in our lives is a matter of choice. In New Age circles, I often hear people say, “We create our own reality.” That’s a shortsighted and simplistic misunderstanding of how reality works. We don’t choose all of our circumstances, or our range of choices. The poor don’t generally choose to starve, nor do the oppressed choose their oppression, and the casualties of war don’t choose to die. But we can choose how we respond to the circumstances we’re presented with.
In the Craft, we do not believe in the Goddess – we connect with Her; through the moon, the stars, the ocean, the earth, through trees, animals, through other human beings, through ourselves.
The love of the Goddess is unconditional. She does not ask for sacrifice – whether human or animal – nor does She want us to sacrifice our normal human needs and desires. Witchcraft is a religion of self-celebration, not self-abnegation.
His image is poemagogic: It both symbolizes and sparks the creative process, which is itself a Quest.
A spell is a symbolic act done in an altered state of consciousness, in order to cause a desired change.
The Sabbats are the eight points at which we connect the inner and the outer cycles: the interstices where the seasonal, the celestial, the communal, the creative, and the personal all meet.
Instead of closing our eyes to meditate, we need to open our eyes and observe. Unless our spiritual practice is grounded in a real connection to the natural world, we run the risk of simply manipulating our own internal imagery and missing the real communication taking place all around us.
And you who seek to know Me, know that the 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.
Each of us embodies the divine. Our ultimate spiritual authority is within, and we need no other person to interpret the sacred to us. We foster the questioning attitude, and we honor intellectual, spiritual, and creative freedom.
While she couldn’t deliver a comic routine to save her life, she had a well-developed ability to look blank and confused, and she found to her surprise that she enjoyed the laughter.
When young people ask me for advice today, I generally say, “Decide what is sacred to you, and put your best life energies at its service. Make that the focus of your studies, your work, the test for your pleasures and your relationships. Don’t ever let fear or craving for security turn you aside.
The Judeo-Christian heritage has left us with the view of a universe composed of warring opposites, which are valued as either good or evil. They cannot coexist. A valuable insight of Witchcraft, shared by many earth-based religions, is that polarities are in balance, not at war.
You don’t have to be a black-flag-waving anarchist to be outraged by this shortsightedness. Anyone who loves capitalism should be especially maddened – -because solutions and alternative sources of energy do exist that could enable us to transition swiftly from our fossil-fuel-based economy to one that runs on clean, renewable energy sources that don’t contribute to global warming.
This is how it works: Someone has a vision that arises from a fierce and passionate love. To make it real, we must love every moment of what we do. Impermanent spirals embed themselves in asphalt, concrete, dust. Slowly, slowly, they eat into the foundations of the structures of power. Deep transformations take time. Regeneration arises from decay. Si, se puede! It can be done.