Читать книгу The Holy Wild - Danielle Dulsky - Страница 11
ОглавлениеIn the beginning, there was She.
She was nature’s primordial pulse, the pan-elemental alchemy of birth; the fertile void of death; and the mysterious, enduring, and numinous cosmic infinite. All was She, and She was all. Her power pervaded the totality of existence and veiled all potential worlds in the name of holy manifestation. Her steady, purposeful rhythm pounded on, in, and through the stellar fusions, the planet building, and the great galactic swell. The universal dawn was a quantum prayer to Her, and She was dancing for us long before humanity’s blessed inception, long before the glow of the primal feminine was eclipsed by modernity.
While the rhythm of Her hallowed drum has slowed and quieted to a barely audible, near-whisper beat, while humanity’s spiritual landscape has been overbuilt and hums with man-made hymns, She can never be silenced. She is our elemental nature, the stuff of our souls, and we are She embodied. Every one of us could hear Her if we only listened, for She has sought safe harbor in our very marrow. She lives in us, and with Her genesis came our mandate to wholly and emphatically embody Her in the wake of the feminine’s historical denigration. If we only put our ears to the ground, we would hear the promised pulse of Her return not as She descends from a gold-and-diamond heaven but as She claws Her way up so ceremoniously through rock and stone, destined to erupt from beneath the very structures built to keep Her contained.
Our language is insufficient when describing the shape-shifting majesty that is She, but I will call this force that both enlivens and enraptures us all — this beastly feminine dark that calls us to look not up toward the ethereal clouds but down to the muddy loam from which we were born, down to the Holy Wild — the ever-dying, ever-birthing dance of all that is. She is what many have willed us to forget, and She is the homegrown medicine for the spiritually starved soul. The depth of human experience precludes any universally relevant spiritual path, but She is the one, single universal truth: All of us were born here on Earth, and all of us will meet our ends on the same blessed planet.
This book is a five-part ode to Her, to you, and to the yet-to-be-rebuilt bridge between our spirituality and our lived, embodied experience. What you will find here is hearty home-cooked nourishment for the nature-hungry spirit, seasoned with a good deal of feminine ire and served hot. What you will find here is an invitation to descend into the dark with me, to gather up pieces of ourselves we have forgotten, and to rise. The wilds of nature will always be our ancestral home, no matter how long we wander or how far we stray from our roots, and what I offer you in these pages is a fervent call to come home to the truth of who you are, to take your rightful place in the circle of wise ones who came before you.
RISE UP, HEATHEN PRIESTESS: SHE LIVES IN THE WILDS
Our human divinity is bone-deep, lit by the red light of our souls’ truth and sourced straight from the cosmic womb. I have an insatiable hunger for Her fierce mother-love, as I believe all members of our global collective do, and I am calling out and calling on all wild Priestesses of our world to join me in Her resurrection. I am howling from the dark depths of every forest, and I am crooning a siren’s song from every body of water I can find. I am seeking you out, the wild woman who is through making apologies for her own divinity, the Witch who is handcrafting her own religion stitched from her own truth, and the blessed incarnation of every human being who can still feel Her. I will speak to you directly, for you are a Wolf-Woman of my bloodline and we share the same language, the heathen Mother Tongue of the wild word.
I hereby vow to validate your experience, your spiritual autonomy, and your magickal agency as we walk this misty and uncertain path together, and I will not ask you to sacrifice anything you know to be sacred. I do not assume that your life matches mine, and it is the uniqueness of our lived experiences of Her that will truly nourish the divine feminine in us all, rather than the bland and bleached homogenization of the Goddess experience.
I will speak to you directly, for you are a Wolf-Woman of my bloodline and we share the same language, the heathen Mother Tongue of the wild word.
As women of the wild, we deserve our own holy books, our own teaching tales, and our own venerable verses of validation. The spiritual wisdom of the feminine has always been born of lived experience, and the hooded Crone in all of us knows that her truth, her cyclical ways, are unique to her and her alone. The her-stories I offer here have merit only in their meeting with your own life; they do not stand alone as immutable truths or a step-by-step path toward any lofty and permanent healing goal, nor do they assert any secret mysteries that I alone am privileged to know. Without their soul-specific relationship with your memories, passions, woundings, and core values, Priestess, these verses are only words. Without your willful exploration of how the feminine archetypes I discuss in this heathens’ bible live and breathe within your own psyche, their names remain merely the default teaching tools used by outmoded traditions that have long required feminine shame to survive.
The women who have been locked inside the books they called good deserve liberation from their externally imposed immorality. We must unlock the cages in which they have been contained for so long, trapped behind the iron bars of judgment and dismissal. We women of this evolving world are tasked with their redemption, for they are we. We share the scars of every woman who has been condemned to ever be spiritually imprisoned, and, in these pages, I offer all the primal feminine technology this Witch has in her toolbox to dismantle the indoctrinated beliefs that continue to limit our spiritual autonomy; divorce our bodies from our spirits; and fence in what is, by nature, untamed, heathen, and wild.
The roots of the word heathen run far deeper than its derogatory, godless connotation; it is believed to come from the Germanic word meaning “dweller on the heath, one inhabiting uncultivated land.” To be heathen means to belong to the wild, to take our lessons from the natural world, and to be nourished by what we fundamentally are rather than what we are told we must be. Let me distinguish here between Heathenry, a polytheistic neo-Pagan religion for which I have much reverence but to which I do not belong, and the eclectic pre-Christian landscape of our ancestors. To be heathen is to remember the rawest essence of our worth, what is most authentically human about this flesh-and-blood body we find ourselves in, and what is left when our most carefully constructed psychic temples, those long-held belief systems that once served us so well, crumble into dust. Every one of our bloodlines is rooted in an Earth-based tradition if we only follow our lineage back far enough, and every one of our souls longs to come home to the wilds.
FIND HER IN THE DARK: THE FERTILE SHADOWS OF THE FEMININE PATH
Heathen Priestess, your bejeweled crown is the same size as mine. I am neither above nor below you, and the round table of the Holy Wild has no structured hierarchy. I have no authority mandated by any great spiritual institution, and my truest church has long been the forest-covered mountains of my childhood, where no one has ever called me master or queen. Resistant am I, however, to the dilution of the diversity of the feminine spiritual experience. A lack of hierarchy does not demand sameness, and it is the living, breathing variety in our her-stories, in our ever-broadening relationship with Her, that must be nourished and protected.
My story is no more significant than yours, and my hope is that you drink in the poetry, feel nourished by the ceremonies, and complete the myths I begin here while constantly affirming your own authority and your own spiritual agency. The Holy Wild is a feminist terrain that you autonomously walk, standing at innumerable crossroads along the way and wielding your discernment like a sharp-edged weapon against the would-be predatory mentors, elite abusers, apparent beacons of manipulation masked as wise ones, and salacious gurus who claim to know better than you. This is your wild home, and you decide who is worthy of being your guest, who has earned the privilege of hearing your heroine’s tale of the wild feminine lost and the wild feminine regained.
You are flawed to perfection, and, regardless of the precise nature of your wounds or your identity, you know Her. Whatever you have been told of your body’s value or the merit of your art and work, your mud-caked soul is no less beauteous than your bright spirit light, and I will stand arm in arm with you while we reclaim our wild worth as divine beings who are of this Earth as much as we are of any ethereal heaven. She is still beating out Her rhythm for us, my love, and She will not be trapped in any pink, glittery, ineffectual shape, even one we may call Goddess. It is not the soft and passive feminine that has been socially suppressed, after all, for this form of the sacred is easily molded, controlled, and commodified. Sister, we do not always find Her in the light. Sometimes, we find Her in the dark.
Sometimes, we find Her in the dark.
We find Her in the places that terrify us, and we find Her in the places they told us not to look.
WALKING A WILDER PATH: SEEKING OUT THE FRINGES
You have many names, my love. In this book, I will call you a Priestess to validate your authority over your own spiritual journey. A Priestess looks within for direction and listens to the whispers, whimpers, and guttural groans of her inner wise woman. A Priestess is an elder. A Priestess is a woman who, regardless of linear age, has done the work and earned the right to say who she is and what she believes. She bows to no one except her own raw soul, and, while she is unquestionably an eternal student, she does not need external approval for her spiritual progress.
I will call you a Witch to affirm your birthright as a holy healer, to vindicate those socially rejected women who were hunted — who still are hunted in many parts of the world — in the name of not only patriarchy but also institutionalized racism, classism, and persistent imperialism. I will call you Witch to give a fierce nod to our stolen feminine spirituality and to give your wisdom a real name. Witches live on the edges of what is permissible, continually seeking out the fringes and brewing up the secret recipes of the Holy Wild, as have countless Earth-based religions and nonsystematic spiritual traditions. Your inner Witch remembers how to get home to those liminal places between honored guest and social outcast, between queen and freak.
This path is wild because we cannot possibly predict where it will lead us. We cannot know, amid the chaos, precisely where the global collective’s evolution is leading. We can assure ourselves that we are doing our part, living our purpose, and honoring our human birthright as complex, sensual, creative, loving, and spiritual beings. We can repeatedly examine the extent to which we are truly working to achieve the vision of equality we say we seek. Here and now, with the body, skills, and other resources we have been given, we are charged to embody Her, in all Her light-and-shadow majesty, as fully as possible in the time we have been given. In these pages, I will call this wild path the Red Road, the always-spiraling, unmapped route toward a woman’s spiritual home.
READ WILDLY: OURS IS NOT A ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL PATH
This heathens’ bible offers you verses, rituals, and magick framed within five books and rooted within a wild and untamed spirituality. The Book of Earth will call you toward the underground world of soul, revisioning the story of Lilith and honoring the merit of necessary rebellion. The Book of Water begs you to swim in the wild waters of erotic sensuality, emotional ebbs and flows, and joyous creativity, revisioning the story of Salome and highlighting our right to feel deeply. In the Book of Fire, we explore righteous rage, radical hope, and feminine ire as change agents, working with the Mother of Babylon’s transformational energies and honoring women’s collective strength as a powerful fuel for social justice and communal activism. Revisioning the story of Mary Magdalene and working with the Mother-Healer archetype, the Book of Air focuses on our most meaningful relationships, our partnerships, and our generative work as alchemical teachers housing the greatest lessons of this life of ours. Finally, the Book of Ether honors our inner Crones, revisioning Queen Jezebel’s story and exploring the many-layered teachings of the Dark Goddess archetypes, the long-lost wisdom of our grandmothers.
All five elements are integral to the Holy Wild, and I will hold space for you not only to discover, explore, and integrate them all in a personally relevant, soul-true spiritual craft but to own how they are already embodied by the heathen Priestess that is you. The verses chapters highlight the her-stories of historically shunned women; personal mythwork for you, the reader, to write your own sacred tales of feminine wisdom; and prayers and incantations for working with that particular aspect of the Holy Wild. The rituals chapters offer ceremonies and practices for invoking the elemental power and honoring our most pivotal past experiences, and the magick chapters contain spellwork and pathworking meditations for moving forward, enacting change, and divining our feminine futures.
Set aside all you know about scholarly study, my love, and read wildly. Wander through this book as you would explore the shadows of a haunted fairy-tale forest — curiously, cautiously, and sensually. Walk with bare feet, and be open to new ways of knowing yourself and your world. Scribble your own poetic verses on these pages as you would scrawl your name in the mud to keep from getting lost in the midst of the ’twixt and ’tween. Move in spirals if you are called, and feel no need to read linearly. Be a curious scout in this majestic wilderness you have discovered; then be the stealthy, aged guide who knows the secrets of the land and knows them well. This spiritual terrain is yours, and you alone know the route your soul has taken or where it might be headed.
Wild spirituality is a wily shape-shifter, just like nature and the divine feminine Herself. I ask you to consider each element to be a paint color on your sacred palette; you may be drawn to the red and ruddy earth much more than the blazing yellows of fire, and the aesthetic of the painting you might birth tomorrow may diverge significantly from the one you create today. Ours is not a one-size-fits-all path.
Ours is not a one-size-fits-all path.
This book asks you to handcraft your own spirituality not just from the inspiration offered here but from your own Witch’s truth. Wild spirituality is a fluid embrace of divine selfhood, and it is nothing if not entirely personal. There is no book so holy that you should be made to feel choiceless in its mandates, and this is certainly no exception.
BEYOND THE PALATABLE GODDESS: NAMING THE DARK HOLY
We have heard their names, but we have not heard their stories. No story is true unless it is told by the one who lived it, and their sullied names have been used and abused in the service of a false morality for so long that we can scarcely remember the sound of their voices. Priestess, if you are so called, breathe life into their names to give them justice: our Lilith, our Salome, our Mother of Babylon, our Mary Magdalene, our Jezebel, and countless other women who have been denigrated and forced to pin bright-red letters on their bare chests. In this holy book, I reframe these women as archetypes of the sacred, forgotten feminine and liken them to other Goddesses from many cultures, importantly not to encourage their appropriation but to honor the wildest faces of the feminine as they have existed, and indeed persisted, throughout time.* The love of a deity is a deeply personal experience, and I am in no position to direct your devotion. This book is grounded in nature and affirms your kinship not with individual deities but with the elements themselves and the myths and her-stories that reflect your own experience back to you.
The elemental archetypes I offer here, like you, deserve liberation from the stories that have confined them for so long. They are archetypal benedictions to your own wild worth. Sing their names, infuse their memories with breath and body, and know I am singing with you. Too often, women who are coming home to the feminine divine will search for Her most palatable faces, Goddesses of compassion and love who undoubtedly deserve our devotion and respect, Goddesses who seem exotic and easily appropriated by those of other cultures, and Goddesses who seem to be accessible tools to be wielded during ritual more than hearty incarnations of all that is. The Goddess is not an inanimate object to be used, and to do so merely perpetuates the same wounds that have been affecting the divine feminine for more than two millennia. We do not search for the Goddess in order to own Her. We search for the Goddess to name holy those parts of ourselves we know are real, those parts of ourselves that the more accessible religious paths may not accept. I discuss Goddess archetypes here as holy, energetic, heavily guarded gateways to true, embodied divinity, and their stories matter.
A woman cannot know herself as holy while still seeing the Goddess as superficial or optional, and it takes work to dismantle layers upon layers of belief about who She is and who She is not. If we look to the Goddess as a sacred collective of energy nourished and enlivened by human belief, prayer, and ritual, we can see how She is fundamentally born of the elements, how we have never really lost Her.
Ask yourself, over and over again, where Her energy meets yours, how Her story is your story, and constantly work to blur the lines, those rigid boundaries drawn by someone else’s hand, between Goddess and Self. In many ways, the quest for Goddess is simply the quest for a deeper kinship with nature, the constant long-armed reach for the unconditional love of Her, the Holy Wild. We need not seek to own what we cannot possess, what is not ours to claim, and we need not all necessarily have deified names in our practice other than simply earth, water, fire, air, and ether.
LOOK TO THE SHADOWS, AND RECLAIM THE HEATHEN CROWN
Know that every human being embodies the sacred masculine and feminine, and gender is a social construction that has nothing to do with true divinity. Someone who identifies as male may live very close to the feminine, while a woman may have significant masculine energy. More importantly, it does not matter whether you label the disempowered aspects of our society as feminine or with another name, for it is ultimately the liberation of our holy sensuality, environmental reverence, emotional integrity, generative creativity, magickal agency, holistic relationship, authentic voice, intuition and psychic power, understanding of the spiral nature of time, and inborn spiritual autonomy that we are after. Call them what you will, but I will call these suppressed characteristics the wild, heathen feminine.
We all need Her, for we all are She. We are all change agents at this pivotal time in human history. This is the time of the Wild Rising, and we are setting the table for Her homecoming banquet. Everyone is invited. Exclude no one who truly wants to come, for the decisions we make now are our proclamation of the principles on which we want our children’s world to be based. She, despite the pronoun I have chosen to use to designate the feminine, is positively and irrefutably pan-gender. Eventually, yes, we will all sit at this table together. For now, the untamed woman is tasked with digging up her psychic dirt, igniting her shame on a funeral pyre, facing her most gruesome shadows, and enacting within the microcosm of her own spiritual journey all that she hopes to see accepted and empowered in greater society.
Consider this holy book an ode to your coronation. You may have called yourself Witch, Priestess, or wild woman for some time now — but, in these pages, I ask you to claim your heathen crown, to know yourself as an embodiment of not only the feminine divine light but also the feminine divine dark. I am placing it on your head now, Priestess. Can you feel the weight of it? You are She who is returned, and this is your sacred text because much of it will be written by you. These verses call you to burn your fear at the stake and build your own temple of the Holy Wild out of mud and stones, tended by your ancestors and named sacred by you. Keep a fire burning for Her there, as She has always kept one softly crackling for you. Arch your back and listen closely for Her drumbeat, for it grows louder with every Priestess who joins you, who spits on the instruments of spiritual oppression, continually examines whether her beliefs are truly her own, and reclaims her hard-earned, holy heathen crown. This temple is ours, built by the hands of the heathen and attended by the countless Priestesses of the Holy Wild.
* Please see the Additional Resources section for books written by women of color about the Goddesses Kali, Lalita, Oshun, and Oya.
