| The Modern Witches or the Persuit of the dethroned Goddess |
 May 23rd 2007 // by Krešimira GojanovićThe word “witch” bears many negative connotations in our culture. This is indicative of the fear and reluctance of the patriarchal understanding of the world to accept, and furthermore, incorporate the archetype of a strong, creative and intelligent woman - a woman who, in a self-aware and emancipated manner, like the male “creators”, creates magical spiritual worlds according to her own free will and design. To be able to understand the primal causes of this fear, we have to look deeper into the past, into the ancient, pre-Christian cultures. Those cultures worshipped female divinities, often in the form of a tri-fold goddess who symbolized the three aspects of woman and of nature, with which the woman was equated with.
The second aspect is incarnated in the goddesses of love and fertility (the Sumerian Innana, the Phoenician Ishtar, the Greek Aphrodite, the Roman Venus, and so on). It is symbolized by the full moon as the principle of ripe femininity, realized to its full potential. The woman is not reduced just to the role of a mother and a passive housewife, she is also sexual and creative, and often (like Innana, or the Greek Athena) the protector of the warrior skills, and also the “mistress of the wild beasts”, the phrase used in the ancient Greece to describe Aphrodite. In those cultures, the woman was in no way subdued and castrated in her urges, in her sexuality and natural aggressiveness, as she will become later within the framework of the monotheistic religions.
The modern witches are rediscovering the image and the paradigm of the tri-fold goddess, guided by their desire to re-establish certain principals of balance and equality which have been lost during the rise of the hierarchy of male divinities and their sons, as well as the prophets. In the spiritual sense, to the modern women and to the followers of different streams of the new spirituality it is perfectly unacceptable that women are evicted from the realm of spirituality – that they are not allowed to be priestesses, nor bishops, nor Popes, but at the same time they are expected to make voluntary donations to the church, which still wants to keep them in the state of blind obedience! Although the institution of the Holy Inquisition was abandoned long ago, in many societies today women’s attempts at achieving spiritual independence are frowned upon – women are not supposed to question the quality of beliefs of the official Church, which had during the 16th and 17th century burned millions of women alive, and which today still insists on supervising the methods of birth control and interfere with women’s right of choice.
This maternal archetype from the pagan myths does not have much in common with the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus, who is in a social and creative sense completely inactive. To the modern and self-aware women the way of her conception poses a problem – no normal earthly woman can conceive a child without having a sexual intercourse with an earthly man, unless some method of artificial insemination or genetic manipulation is employed. The overemphasizing of the ideal of the “sinless” mother by the patriarchal culture is in fact an attempt to degrade the female sexuality, which, in the pagan cultures, used to be a rich source of joy and personal power. Because of this cold, unobtainable ideal of female “purity” which is imposed by the Church as a symbol of castrated sexuality, women often suffer from different frustrations and sexual neuroses – especially those women who were raised in the cultures where the ideal of the Virgin and the “immaculate” conception is heavily worshipped.
The modern witches movement, as a reaction to the patriarchal religions, has started to uncover and redefine the spirituality of the old cultures that worshiped female divinity and in which the woman and the whole female principle was far more respected than today. The modern witches do not deal with some “ominous black magic” – they are, in most cases, creative, smart women of predominantly left-wing political orientation who are bitterly disappointed with the official, traditional religious systems which do not deal with the problems of the modern world in an appropriate way. The modern witches cherish the principle of non-violence and respect for all life, especially human. They believe that no ideology and no religious idea should be allowed to become an excuse for killing other human beings – every expression of violence is in fact a disguised incompetence to resolve the conflict in a peaceful, intelligent way, through the female assertiveness, instead of male aggressiveness. They also advocate tolerance and peaceful coexistence of all the living things on the planet, because all of the creatures are in fact manifestations of the metaphorical planetary goddess and also her children.
Once we are finally able to comprehend all this, the symbolic “dethroned goddess” will become the light and shining soul of the planet, and the “witches” will be her playful and magical fairy priestesses, the heralds of the new age and the better times for planet Earth.
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The modern witches
do not believe in some “transcendental” god, the one who is
invisible, incomprehensible and detached from his creations, just
like they do not believe in a god who ruthlessly punishes his
children. Instead, they insist on the principle of personal
responsibility; the energy that you send out will be returned to you
– the good will yield the good, and the bad will yield the bad!
From this point of view, the humans alone are responsible for the
consequences of their actions – no goddess will give them
“absolution from sin”, nor will anyone promise them Heaven, after
they have so carelessly and ruthlessly ruined the heaven on Earth!
The goddess should be sought and found within, in our hearts and
beliefs, as the principle of the indestructible and transforming
motherly soul of the world, inside of which all of us are still
connected on a higher level of consciousness, by an invisible network
of interrelations, within which new worlds and creations get
incessantly designed and dissolved.