The Twelve Wild Swans

by Starhawk

  Years ago, driven by a life-threatening illness to seek spiritual help, I first began to cautiously investigate the Goddess tradition. I found a woman who was willing to help me in my search, Pandora O’Mallory. It turned out that she was one of the early members of the Reclaiming Collective. I remember telling her that I couldn’t be a real Witch, or I wouldn’t feed my little daughter hotdogs, which seemed to me like the opposite of what a real Witch would do. A real Witch would probably feed her children freshly picked, magic, organic vegetables from her own garden and homemade yogurt.

  Pandora listened patiently and then set me the task of memorizing the Charge of the Star Goddess. She knew that I needed to stop evaluating my relationship with my Creatrix by comparison to any person or any image or any prejudice outside myself. I needed to learn to look within for my answers. On some of those dark days, all that kept me going was Pandora’s faith that I could find everything I needed from the divine powers by a gentle, persistent search within myself.

  As we work with stories and images and symbols of the Goddess, over years of seeking we each find our own way to the source of her power, her healing, her multiplicity, her joys and terrors. The Charge of the Star Goddess reminds us to direct that search within, for if we do not find her here, we will never find her without. If we want to be able to “change consciousness at will,” we must each develop our own ways to approach deity through Younger Self. We need to find songs, gestures, images, meditations, stories, combinations of color, flavor, and smell, that evoke her power for us.

  We seek deep alterations of consciousness, the ability to hear the voices of all life-forms, to live in sustainable harmony with nature, to respect and care well for ourselves and others. These abilities all flow from our certainty that each and every part of nature, including our sweet selves, is immanent deity, is holy. And the image of deity that enlivens and strengthens one person and fills her life with purpose may be meaningless or one-dimensional to another. We each have the right and the obligation to passionately pursue our connection with deity.

  Gwydion’s Opening to Deity Exercise

  Gwydion Logan is a Reclaiming teacher who describes himself as “queer and a science geek.” I asked him why he calls himself queer when that word has been used so often as an insult. Gwydion replied, “It’s important to claim the power in words that have been used as epithets. Queer is inclusive, and it implies a spectrum of sexuality.”

  For Gwydion, invocation of deity is not a matter of reading or memorizing a safely scripted invocation. “Scripting,” says Gwydion, “can leave the invocations feeling empty.” Instead, he recommends stepping back from Talking Self and opening to Younger Self and Deep Self. He says we must “create a stillness inside to allow new things to enter, and see what comes.”

  Opening to Deity

  In sacred space, begin by reconnecting to your grounding and feeling the energy of earth and sky moving through you. Breathe deeply, and call on the deity either by name or by qualities, Trickster or Mother or Opening Bud or Lady of the Wild Things, whatever you have need of. Without judgment, allow a stream of images and sensations and emotion to flow through your awareness in answer to your call. Pick out one or two of the more visceral images—the less abstract, the more powerful. If you are working in a group, express these images in words or sounds or movements, so that others can pick up on them, and soon the whole group will be doing a powerful invocation together. Gwydion says, “Take a risk and be vulnerable. Let it flow within you. The invocation is a way of honoring deity, and remembering this can help us get beyond performance anxiety and self-consciousness.”

  Gwydion tells the tale of how, one Winter Solstice night, Morgan Le Fay, a Reclaiming priestess, invoked the laboring Earth Mother: “She had a pillow under her dress, and she looked very pregnant. She squatted down in the center of the circle in the labor pose and began breathing and groaning like a laboring mother. Soon other voices joined her, women and men who had experienced the difficult passage of labor. Chills ran down our spines, and our hair stood on end, as an unearthly, powerful sounding arose. We really felt the Goddess arrive that night.”

  Calling Deity of Many Ancestries

  There is a particularly tricky issue that arises when we look at the invocation of deity in our multicultural society. I’ve known many Witches over the years who were attracted to the stories and powers of a deity from a tradition different than that of their own ancestors. In fact, if I look around my own altar room, I find Quan Yin in the west, Willow Woman, the healer from the shady side of the stream. Around her feet are my homeopathic remedies and herbal tea bundles. In the north, Krishna, playful, sexy blue boy, raises his arms to play the flute while Radha, the most beautiful of the cow-herding girls, offers him a lotus with a mysterious smile. In the east stands the Venus of Willendorf, the great-breasted, great-bellied Goddess of Neolithic Europe, with kernels of corn, grain of the Americas, scattered at her feet. And in the south, there’s a photo of a California live oak, holy to the California first people, rising from a hillside with its amazing antigravity architectural limb structure.

  By what right do I burn candles for these deities from cultures that would be strange to my own ancestors, make offerings to them, meditate on their stories, and pray for their assistance? How can I be sure my devotions are deeply respectful when I have no traditional teachers? And to what deities would I have the right, those of my British ancestors who were small and dark, or those of my tall, blond Saxon ancestors, who probably did their best to murder and rape the ancient Britons? In any case, the traditional teachers of those cultures are long gone into the earth.

  These questions are particularly troubling in cases where some of my ancestors may have oppressed, robbed, disrespected, even murdered or enslaved the peoples whose deities and symbols I now invite into my devotions and onto my altars. I must take great care not to mirror these acts in my magic by ripping off or disrespecting any part of those cultures. If I take, I must give back, preferably three times.

  In a recent article, Starhawk wrote an inspiring response to these questions, which trouble many modern Pagans and Witches. She wrote, “In the midst of my own wrestling with these issues, I ran into an old, wise woman in trance who simply shook her head and said, ‘Forget about your ancestors, child. It’s the children that I care about.’

  “As I write,” continues Starhawk, “three of my Goddess daughters are up in the loft giggling. Their ancestry includes English, Irish, African, Jewish, Native American and probably many others, but two of them look ‘white’ and one looks ‘black.’ I know that in spite of all our efforts to eradicate racism, their lives will be shaped differently because of that fact.”

  We long for the day when a child of color will never for a moment see her skin color or the texture of her hair as anything but beautiful, where every opportunity she craves will be open to her, where prejudice, racism, and slavery will seem as incomprehensible and archaic as the metallurgy tools of a Bronze Age culture. We want her to know that she is the Goddess and that the Goddess is black, brown, red, yellow, white; fat, thin; old, young.

  To create that world for her, it’s imperative that she see images of the Goddess that resemble her. We don’t have the luxury to ask, “Do I have the authority to put African Goddess images in my home?” We need to have them, for her sake, and to know something about them if we are to fulfill our responsibilities to her.

  But what about a European-American child? We want her, too, to see herself as the Goddess, as beautiful, as able to do anything she wants to do. And we want her to know that the Goddess is also black, brown, red, yellow, and white, thin and fat, old and young, and that deity comes in all genders and forms. Is it not equally important that she grow up surrounded by a multiplicity of figures and images?

  And is it not important for the grown-up children we all are to also see a multiplicity of images of deity? First, so that we truly know that we are welcome whatever our heritage may be. But also so that we w
ho live in a deeply divided, racist world remind ourselves again and again, in sacred space, that deity comes in all colors and that all of us are valued.

  How do we do this without falling back into superficiality and cultural appropriation? And without losing or diluting traditions and connections that are dear to us? These are not simple questions, and each one deserves a longer discussion than we have room for here. But here are some guidelines we might begin with:

  BE HONEST: Don’t pretend to be what you’re not or to speak with authority you haven’t been granted.

  MAKE ROOM: Conceive of the Goddess tradition as a garden big enough for many different kinds of beds. Make room for people to express their heritage, to sing in their own language, and to call on the deities and symbols they are deeply connected with.

  DEFINE OURSELVES DIFFERENTLY, OR MAYBE REFUSE TO DEFINE OURSELVES: We can acknowledge that we are more like jazz or rock music, a synthesis of many influences. We can call ourselves an earth-based tradition without limiting our roots to one continent or one heritage.

  DEEPEN OUR KNOWLEDGE: Truly learn and study the traditions that call to us. Take lessons on that drum, from a continent your ancestors would have found strange. Learn about the rich musical heritage it comes from. Don’t just pick a name out of a book; devote real time and effort to developing an indepth knowledge of both a deity and its surrounding culture. Moreover, learn about the history and present-day struggles of the people.

  ASK PERMISSION: This one isn’t always easy, because we don’t always know whom to ask permission from or who has the authority to speak for a tradition. But sometimes it’s clear; if someone teaches you a song they wrote or a story, ask permission to pass it on, and give credit where credit is due.

  INTERRUPT OPPRESSION: Speak out when you hear insensitive, racist, homophobic remarks. Don’t put the burden on the target group to confront attacks. If a culture has fed you, defend it.

  GIVE BACK: If we are fed by symbols, stories, or deities of a particular people, we have an obligation to give back something to that community and to participate in their real-life, present-day struggles. This may mean doing political work or supporting cultural events. It might mean teaching what you know in that community or giving back generously with money or work exchange for teachings you receive there. It might mean visiting a friend in the hospital and entertaining him with a tale from his own culture that he doesn’t know. It might mean giving back money; if you hit platinum with your recording of a Latvian folk song, you tithe back to that community. In practice, because everything is interconnected, giving back also means working on the global economic, social, and environmental issues that affect us all.

  LOVE ALL THE CHILDREN: If we are nurtured and inspired by a tradition, we can worry less about who our ancestors are and start to think of ourselves as the ancestors of the future, taking on responsibility for the lives and well-being of the children of that culture and for creating the world we want all the children to grow up in.

  Center: The Goddess

  And so in the center of our circle, we find deep within ourselves the Goddess of many faces, many genders, many colors, many ages. We find her in every human being, in every living thing, in every act and mood of nature. Her shape shifts and blurs in the firelight; she appears first in my face, in my voice, and then in yours. And so a kiss is passed around the circle: “Thou art Goddess, thou art God.” And as we gaze into one another’s eyes and see ourselves reflected there, we know that there is no end to the circle and that its center lies in each of our hearts.

  The Inner Path

  Now Rose must take her magic spell out of her wild green life and back into community and family. She has learned how to live in her forest cave while spinning soul for her wild brothers, but now she must do the same in the king’s castle. She experiences love and loss and faces jealousy. She must continue being herself and hold on to her core worth even when she is misunderstood, shamed, and slandered. Because she knows herself, she is able to keep weaving, keep spinning, and keep sewing.

  Those of us who walk the Inner Path can take this opportunity to follow Rose. We will learn some meditations to illuminate our own loves and conflicts, and we will learn how to anchor ourselves firmly to our core worth.

  At the beginning of our story, Rose also lived in a castle. That was the castle of family secrets, where Rose was never told the truth. She was the youngest and the least, living out a fate that had been determined for her by other, more powerful figures. But through the course of the tale she has broken free of her situation, passed many tests, and completed many challenges. When she returns to the castle this time, she is not a little girl, but a queen. She is no longer helpless when she steps back into the complex relational field of the family.

  Whenever I read or tell this part of the tale, I always secretly think, “Don’t do it, Rose! Stay in the green, in the shamanic solitary life of the mountain cave!” However, if I were eighteen or nineteen, I know I’d be up on that horse in a hot second.

  It is love and longing for human companionship that draw her back to the castle, and so it is with us. As thrilling as the lessons of the wild—self-love, guidance, freedom, flight, weaving—have been, we are drawn back into the human world by love. It is a horseback ride with the young king, and the sexual love that is implied, that completes Rose’s transformation to powerful, fulfilled adulthood.

  In the story, this horseback ride is shared by a young woman and a young man. Bless their hearts! But in our own lives, mature, fulfilling love that powers us into full adulthood can be found between people of many ages and genders. There are many forms of love between people, and there are also those who have found an internal source of love power, in solitary delight with their art, or service to others, or devotion, or just plain joyful living. And there are those who are sexually active in joy, respect, and pleasure with many partners.

  Yet in some way, in some form, love completes us. Like Rose, we go to the wild to free our souls, to learn to change our consciousness at will, and then we return to the human world to love and to do our living, strengthened by the skills and insights we have gained. We are drawn back into the human world by longing, by the deep intuitive knowledge that we can each express only part of what it is to be human. To experience humanness in all its richness, we need other people, and so we long to be close to them.

  In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates listens to Aristophanes, a comic playwright, describing human beings as creatures who formerly were physically joined with one another, woman to man, man to man, and woman to woman. We were very happy this way, in constant connection with one another, until our hubris, our disrespect of the Gods, caused the Gods to split us from one another. Now we wander the world searching for our other halves, clasping one another, trying to rediscover that primal state of connectedness.

  There is something deeply resonant about this story, which still rings true twenty-five hundred years later. The search for an answer to the universal human feeling of longing is a mystery of human life that was old when Socrates was young, listening to Aristophanes’ story and lusting after one of the young men at a dinner party. We humans come from a species that is polarized in many ways, gender being only one of them. And attraction and longing between lovers seem to fall into patterns of similarity and opposition. Often a dreamy, sensitive person will form erotic bonds with a practical, no-nonsense person, or a glamorous outgoing personality will be attracted to a strong, silent type. These lovers will have many similarities as well, maybe shared social values or artistic tastes. Love relationships seem to thrive on just the right mix of polarity and identity.

  And whether we are involved in a twenty-year partnership, or are inflamed by the solitary longings of the hermit or artist, or are taking many lovers, we are all moved by love and longing that is ultimately powered from within. When we first began to grow in our mother’s womb, we held the potential of all human qualities and of both genders. Through our lives, our bodies have grown i
nto male or female bodies, and we have become distinct in character also, shy or outgoing, physically adept or awkward, visionary or practical, and so forth. Our gender expression, our “butch” and our “femme,” are included in this list, because they represent just one of the ways we’ve learned to put ourselves forward in the context of our culture. But we have deep soul yearnings for the parts of ourselves that are not expressed, the opposites of our own expression. It is part of Witchcraft to develop a relationship in the Otherworld with a self, or a version of ourselves, that expresses the opposite qualities to the ones we’ve developed in this lifetime. We call this the Companion Self.

  We try to seek and strengthen the connection, love, and longing for our Companion Selves in meditation. The Companion Self we meet in trance may or may not bear any resemblance to actual lovers in the “real” world. But the power of the attraction between ourselves and the Companion Self, and the love and respect and care we can offer one another in the Otherworld, completes a circuit in our own souls and teaches us to deepen our love and connection to the people in our “real” lives, who are always different than us.

  Companion-Self Trance

  In sacred space, prepare yourself for trance. Using whatever trance induction you prefer, go to your personal place of power. Greet each of the directions, casting a circle around yourself in your place of power. In the center of your circle, find a pool of water. Lean over it, and see your own reflection. Take a moment to exchange love, appreciation, and care with your double, your mirror image. Acknowledge the qualities in yourself that you value highly, and also your own mystery. Say, “Thou are Goddess.”