Marriage of humanity with Nature must precede any marriage between humanity and

[Guest guest]

Marriage of humanity with Nature must precede any marriage between between

humanity and the Divine

 

" Our exile has not only been from the Goddess, but also from Nature.

It is not surprising, considering that most Westerners live apart

from their environment, protected by concrete roadways, consuming

machine-processed foods and filled with media information to the

detriment of the experience of our own senses. The seasons go by

unnoticed, we seldom touch the earth, eat fresh food or observe the

world personally — media input and journalism provide our

informational diet. The sacred is a forgotten dimension in our

society which we ignore at our peril.

 

Earth-honoring is an integral part of the native traditional

religions, who have never deviated from a vision of the whole of

creation as sacred. As we begin slowly — perhaps too slowly — to

assess this primal nurture, we realize that the native traditions

have much wisdom to teach us, and this may, in turn, stimulate our

own.

 

Maybe the return of the Goddess among us heralds the marriage of

humanity with Nature, the necessary resacralization which must

precede any marriage between humanity and the Divine....

 

The current ecological trend has alarmed many traditionalists who see

it as endangering the real business of spirituality — that of saving

the soul. Let them be assured: global restatement of the earth's

holiness can only enhance the human spiritual vocation.

 

The native spiritualities of the world point the way in which we

might approach our earth-honouring and make relations of the whole

creation. In 1890, 153 native Americans gathered together to perform

a Ghost Dance to gain a vision of a world healed of the evil works of

white civilization. Their massacre is remembered by white Westerners

as the Battle of Wounded Knee. One hundred years later, a group of

white people of assorted spiritual allegiance gathered outside the

U.S. Embassy in Grosvenor Square, London, to re-enact the Lakota

ceremony of `Making of Relatives', in memory of Wounded Knee. At the

ceremony's heart was this invocation:

 

Grandmother Earth, hear us!

The two-legged, the four-legged, the winged and all that move upon

You and Your children.

With all beings and all things we shall be relatives; just as we are

related to You, O Mother, so we shall make a peace with one another

and shall be related to them.

May we walk with love and mercy upon the path which is holy!

O Grandmother and Mother, help us in making relatives and a lasting

peace here!

 

This is truly the work of the New Isis — the Sophianic re-assembling

of earth-wisdom, scraps of whose garment blow about the world in rags

and tatters of glory. We may be privileged to live through this time

and see, if not Sophia unveiled, a glimpse of her doxa. The native

traditions teach us that without a whole view of the world, we can be

both presumptuous and stupid — the complete reverse of wise. "

 

Caitlín Matthews, Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom,

The Aquarian Press, 1992, p. 326-27.