Dark Beauty Magazine
In preparation for our New Moon in Virgo ♍, the Woman Unto Herself, on September 5th, the sacred wild force of Lilith is making her appearance in our lives as an invitation for us to open to and include the whole of who we are in our new moon self renewal vows. She is asking us to not just make them to our solar self and bright shadow, which we worked with over the Leo cycle. Lilith’s presence is calling us to include Her… those aspects of our wild dark feminine which She represents and who we have exiled to the furthest reaches of the shadows in our psyches, our bodies, and society.
Lilith reveals Herself in the waning cycle of the Moon which we are presently in. She lives in the waning Moon cycle in our bodies (blood cycle) as pms and the ‘bitch’ who seeeeeeeeees and expresses uncomfortable truths and desires her aloneness. She lives in the larger waning cycle of a woman’s fertility cycle during peri-menopause and menopause, when Women are fully initiated into her Dark Lilith powers and returned Unto Herself.
Lilith was seen in the display of wild woman sexuality on MTV this week. The outcry over a woman expressing herself sexually while male musicians regularly express their raw sexuality on stage and are not even noted, reveals how exiled Lilith continues to be. The performance was almost a caricature of Lilith rather than her full gnarly erotic expression, as experienced in Lady Gaga’s performances. A mocking “in your face to the older generation” and its values which so many young people love to do. Yet the outcry by the status quo is a direct attack on Lilith’s and our own wanton ways.
Lilith is rising as a sacred wild force within my own psyche, adamantly making Her claim for me to take a stance for the sacred wild ways of nature at the cost of serious divide with others:
Our Bodies and Matter, this Earth, are sacred unto themselves without needing a God or Spirit to make them so. The sacred powers I embody are not sourced from my spiritual nature, other dimensions and ascended masters, but from my soft animal body, my blood, my vagina, my womb, my bones… and the sacred wild forces of the earth, moon, sun, ocean, winds and the wild criaturas who roam.
This is the reclamation of Lilith and the exiled feminine’s reemergence. And right in the nick of time! When we realize the sanctity and inescapability of our bodies and earth, we will choose to care for them in the ways that are required for our flourishing. As long as we think we can escape in an afterlife and that our flesh is worthless and will be dropped at the end anyway, or that the earth is a big mess from which hopefully we have balanced enough karma and don’t have to return to, we will not treat ourselves or the earth with the sanctity which is required to love and protect it.
Even if you don’t believe this, pretend that it is true and watch how differently you begin to respond to your life and to this earth. The Mysteries of your Body and the sacred wild forces of nature will begin to reveal their secrets to you, and you will find yourself daring to live with a courage you’ve never known in the face of the full catastrophe of Life.
For those unfamiliar with Herstory… Lilith has appeared in many myths. The most often cited is the Hebrew myth of Adam and… Lilith.
She was Adam’s first wife, fashioned out of the same earth as he by Yahweh, the Hebrew god of the Bible. They were made equal in power, yet Adam felt the need to control and demanded Lilith lay beneath him in sex. She refused. He was outraged! And so Lilith left the Garden of Eden to live in the Wilds. Yahweh sent angels to convince her to come home. She would not unless Adam accepted Her power as being equal to his. God knew Adam wouldn’t agree to this, so he made another woman, Eve, this time from the rib of Adam… so she would know her place was beneath him. It is said that the Serpent who returned to “tempt” Eve and bring Adam to his demise was none other than Lilith Herself, returning to Eve (and ultimately Adam) her split off powers of sexuality and embodied wisdom.
John Collier, Lilith. 1892
Needless to say, this part of the myth didn’t make it in the good book.
Lilith’s earlier appearance is in the Sumerian myth of the Goddess Inanna, first as the Snake and Bird who inhabit the sacred Tree Inanna has her marriage bed made from. And then as the exiled feminine, Ereshkigal, the Dark Sister Goddess of the Underworld, who Inanna must descend to face, submit to and through the Initiation of Death of the identity of her old self, integrate her split off powers.
As many of you know, all myths originate in actual socio-political events. The gods and goddesses reflect whole cultures. Goddesses represent ancient matriarchal cultures, and the Gods, patriarchal warring-conquering cultures (most of them) who overpowered the Goddess cultures.
“The Hebrews came into the Sumerian and Babylonian lands, where the Venusian goddesses Inanna and Astarte were celebrated as the embodiment of love in a sacred marriage ritual between priestesses and kings. In these cultures and as well as in the Celtic culture, it was the goddess who gave the king his power through her love and favors. The religious transition to masculine gods made these love rites blasphemous.
“As the Great Mother-Lover of the goddess-oriented cultures became split into higher/lower, life-giving/death-bringing aspects, sexuality likewise became split: procreative sex was necessary for life, but sensual sexuality was condemned and demonized. Lilith became an image of denied sexual desire, repressed and projected on to woman, who thereby became the seducer.”
(from Black Moon Lilith, by Kelley Hunter)
Yet it is not only our sexual powers which were split off in that myth. Nature’s sacred powers embedded within the human were exiled as well. This was the moment when the sacred was split from matter, named as spirit and made better than it. This was the dramatic moment in human consciousness when we shifted from knowing that the human is sacred unto itself to believing that matter is dark and evil needing God to redeem it and make it sacred. The patriarchal masculine was deified, the feminine, demonized. Lilith was turned into a Demoness. Not just an exiled woman, but the devil herself.
This is the crux of the wound women and men continue to carry today. This wound is revealed in our inherent sense of unworthiness as human beings, our self loathing for our wild instincts, our dissatisfaction and even hatred for our bodies, fear of our own sexual nature, fear of death, fear of the dark forest. It plays out on the socio-political levels as inequality, violence, and the rape of our bodies and our earth.
Many women and men have fought hard to liberate themselves from these social issues. Yet what most do not realize is how subtle this attitude toward the feminine is and how it plays out in the most hidden place: in our mind as our thoughts.
The self hatred and loathing most hold towards themselves is hidden deep within and believed to be one’s own thoughts and rational conclusions. They are not. They were seeded “in the beginning” as the conditioning we inherited from our parents, our ancestry, our culture, and the whole human collective HIStory.
This image reflects the gnarly edged truth of Lilith: Our wild, sexual, and powerful sacred nature, in women and in men, has been brutally crucified and hung on the cross for thousands of years. It continues to be brutalized today.
The greatest act we can alllllllll do to liberate this sacred wild force of nature and support her revolution is to liberate ourselves. To dig down and into the dark recesses of our minds and conditioning, dig down into our shadows and reclaim this exiled One.
You will find Her roaming the edges of your guilt, shame, unsatisfied sexuality, repulsion of your body, rage, terror of the dark earth, animals, wilderness, and loss of the sense of the sacred. SHE is attempting to break through. Invite Her in…
Seek Her! Call her Home! She holds some of your greatest powers and wholeness.
Let me know what has been stirred in you from reading this piece… and share anything you wish to have witnessed as you call into awareness this dark side of the sacred wild nature of Lilith in preparation for your commitment ceremony Unto Yourself which Virgo’s New Moon offers to us all.
If you are interested in participating in a formal ritual with me and the women of SHE of the Sacred Wild Ways I am opening this ritual webinar to the public for free. Let me know if you wish to join us in the comments below, or find me on facebook or write me directly.
And… I invite you to check out my membership program SHE of the Sacred Wild Ways. If you feel called, please join us in our exploration and embodiment of the sacred wild forces of nature.
In devotion to Lilith and the Altar of the Dark Feminine whom I serve…
I bow.