Thunderstorm on the Grindelwald glacier, Caspar Wolf

“Generation is the mystery by which divine spirit unites itself to matter, by which the Divine becomes human.” - Papus

The lightning bolt of the Magician hits the primordial sea of the Priestess and something new is brought into the world, the Empress, the archetypal Mother Goddess Creator. She is a child of nature as well as nature itself, in all it’s mysteries.

She is the Great Mother, but not always the good mother. Goddesses are not all Venuses bringing fertility and prosperity, but also death wielders. She is birth, growth, nourishment, and inspiration. She is action and completion, bringing something new into the world. She is also earthquakes, floods, overgrown weeds in your garden, evil step-mothers and devouring goddesses. She is the creative inspiration that birthed airplanes and rockets and the gravity that pulls them to earth. She sows, nurtures and reaps.

Nine thousand years ago, she was the focus of a primordial attempt to understand and live in harmony with creation.

“...a religion in veneration of the universe as the living body of a Goddess-Mother Creator, and of all the living things within it as partaking of her divinity— a religion, one immediately perceives, which is in contrast to that of Genesis 3:19, where Adam is told by his Father-Creator:

"In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return".

In this earlier mythology, the earth out of which all these creatures have been born is not dust but alive, as the Goddess-Creator herself.”

-Joseph Campbell

We call her “Mother Earth” for a reason. From her, life is born and to her we return.

God-Mother from Nina Paley on Vimeo.