A Conference of Goddesses

A Conference of Goddesses
Excerpts From a Red Notebook
By Annie Finch

“What we are doing has great historical significance. Never underestimate the significance of what you are doing,” says Ann Cook, official photographer of the Glastonbury Goddess Conference for all of its 30 years. The crowd of reddish-garbed Goddesses/Goddess-lovers—each with her own unique personal take on this year’s color family, from red to pink to peach to purple, signifying the year’s theme of “Sacred Union”— soaks in her words, some in hushed appreciation, some with exuberant cheers.

Ann will be 90 years old in December, and nine decades of kindness, humor, and wisdom were evident in each word she spoke on the first morning of the conference; tears poured down my cheeks and those of many others during our red-and-pink standing ovation. As Mary Mackey’s wonderful novels about Old Europe show, our ancestors’ matriarchal societies held the eldest among women in the group as spiritual and social leaders. In every goddess gathering I’ve been part of, this same respect for the eldest women has arisen as joyfully and inevitably as the colors of a sunset sky.

It’s been a month since I returned from Glastonbury, yet the numerous beauties of the GGC continue to influence all of the Five Directions that guide my own life with their intertwining embrace.  There is Will, the intensification of passion and creative life through the shared urge towards the divine feminine that permeates everything at GCC. There is Mind, a trove of rare, precious knowledge and new ways of thinking garnered through talks, presentations, and conversations.  There is Body, a fantastic wealth of unique experiences for taste, sound, touch, smell, and sight. There is Heart, flowing through the weavings and connections among 200 of us singing to each other, catching each others’ eyes, holding space for each others’ laughing and weeping and dancing and growing. And Spirit, manifesting in all the other Directions and beyond, embodied in the Priestesses, in the nature around us, in the shared energy among us, and in the wonder felt by each of us alone.

If I were to name one central takeaway from the numerous gifts showered on me during GCC, it would be this: the freedom of multiplicity with love. Above the Great Hall hung some of the over 300 Goddess banners created by artist Lydia Ruyle, a constant reminder—as if we needed reminding there, among the glorious multiplicity of women!--- that each of us, left free to flourish in the freedom of the Goddesses, comes to flower in her own completely unique way.  To bask in this exquisitely tender knowledge leads me to an entirely different trajectory of reality than does “normal” life amid the uniformity, rules, and hierarchies of patriarchy. Considering the huge array of Lydia’s Goddesses— just a tiny sliver of the hundreds of thousands of Goddesses worshipped in every corner of the world, large and small—is a reminder that Goddesses came first, and can still come first, in each of our lives!

Here is a dripping handful of living water from the ocean of notes, poems, and reflections I wrote in my red notebook, all during this miraculous week of immense herstorical significance for my life — those of so many others! —that sang and hugged, danced and sobbed, laughed and grew around me. 

EXCERPTS FROM A RED NOTEBOOK

Katie Hoffner -- Talk on "The Girls

Katie is talking about her Aunt Lydia creating “the girls” –the banners hanging above us, so important to the herstory of this Conference—the central image I had in mind all the years I’ve wanted to come here! A great artist. Remembering the Vatican last winter—the chilling realization of the key role of art there. Crucial to bring our art to the highest level!  Katie announces the launch of a new website devoted to “the girls.” That will spread Goddess awareness so much more widely. Lydia would love it!  I can imagine her now, always in her flowered crown, weaving through the crowd at ASWM [Association for the Study of Women and Mythology], sharing her sweetly pointed, focused smile . . .so generous every time we spoke. . .

Dancer Sophis Blanton, one of the Nine Priestesses helping guide the conference, walking with her Banner of the Center towards a ritual at Chalice Well

Bee Helygen -- Talk on the Goddess Cerridwen:

For 38 years Bee has been a priestess of Cerridwen—

“like a good marriage it gets better and better,” she says

Bee was on a committee doing an edition of The Mabinogion, and when she suggested a few edits to make the text less violently sexist, the men on the committee said in horror, “but you can’t change the text!” So ironic, said Bee, in light of the thousands of years during which the patriarchy twisted and destroyed entire cultures worth of Goddess myths, turning them into stories of rape and torture (Patricia Monaghan’s The Red-Haired Girl From the Bog has good material on this)…

Annie Finch and Bee Helygen at the Temple of Cerridwen, Glastonbury

Nicole Pemberton — Talk on healing through the feminine

“In our culture, the feminine is celebrated for being in the masculine, and the masculine is punished for being in the feminine”…

But we can redefine this to bring in the feminine, says Nicole! We can celebrate! She brings us into our bodies as a way to bring us into our spirits!

Idea

Make a 5 directions notebook to bring next year! Color-code the sections! 

Laura Murphy — workshop on sacred Irish poetry

“Dan” in Old Irish has many meanings including: “poem, gift, skill, destiny, soul”

There were never snakes in Ireland. “St. Patrick drove out the snakes” means Christian missionaries made it illegal for poets to do the sacred practice of “imbas” which involved kundalini-like snakes of energy (and —I think—imbas must have, must have involved meter . . .and discover later that there was even a meter named “imbas—” maybe a cognate with the Greek metrical foot “Iambus.”

Annie writing poems after Chalice Well ceremony during the Conference

Wild Thoughts on Goddesses & Meter

Of course! How else would the poets have found their fountains of inspiration?

Brigid is the Goddess of Imbas, says Laura. I think of my Brigid mask, and my mother naming her little writing shack The Brigid . . .

It seems there are two Goddesses of meter, Brigid in Ireland and Cerridwen in Wales. Are there Goddesses of meter all over the world? ”Meter” and “mother” have the same Proto-European root…

Verse written in Laura’s workshop book

“O Muse of the cave where the Goddess’s womb

Opens to the shaft that brings life from the tomb,

Fill us with passion to mistress the crafts

That our foremothers birthed to gift power and laughter,

Strength and protection and insight and love!

Muse of the cave, be with us as we move!”

Kaya Thomas — Chance Conversation re Frau Hölle

A friend from Germany I meet as we walk home from Chalice Well ceremony . . .she tells me that Frau Hölle, connected to Freya, and her cats spend winter in a certain cave near where Kaya lives—-the cats transform into women every spring!

Does this surprise any woman? I, for one, was a cat every Halloween for a decade.

Translator/poet Jennifer Sundeen with Conference Director Katrinka Soetens

Katinka Soetens — Talk on Sacred Union

Such a powerful talk jam-packed with images of spiritual sexuality, sexual spirituality.

A stone yoni In Fontainbleu . . .one horse painted in each thigh, one horse coming in and one horse going out . . the yoni becomes wet and drips when it rains

“The dance of Her kundalini is the sacred force unveiled”

“If you have to think of a word for the masculine, it is sweetness.” (I love this! Such a neglected truth!)

Toplessness is key to our liberation, I think, looking at the gorgeous images she is sharing in the slideshow. Did that ever happen here at Glastonbury Goddess Conference, I wonder? Maybe it was started too late. I remember the woman in her 80’s named Rainbow and a couple of her generation at Where Womyn Gather. They were the only generation that went topless there—they had been doing it since the 1970s!!  I want to live to see it be common again in all women-centered spaces! How to start?

In the Glastonbury Goddess Temple

I visit the Glastonbury Goddess Temple. I am moved to tears. In India I was moved similarly by the Kali temples but they are controlled by male priests. This is a temple by and for women. In the Rhiannon room I see a painting that I recognize as by Monica Sjöö—just hanging there on the wall! I am in total awe. Our great art is here already. The depth and urgency of all those women who have felt all this before comes washing over me. They felt it as much as I do. The art attests it. The temple attests it. The conference attests it. I’m not alone. We are not alone. We will make it.

Rhiannon by Monica Sjöö hanging on a red wall in Glastonbury Goddess Temple

Mutima Imani  — Chain of Generations

In the temple, I run into Mutima Imani, and we end up having lunch. She tells me that she started as a therapist and wanted to help more people so she became a social justice warrior.  Her focus is so inspiring.

I attend the beginning of her workshop in the Temple and witness her beautiful opening celebration of the generations of women, inviting space for women from each decade to share their wisdom with the other generations, ending with the oldest ones.

Labyrinth Ritual — Poem Written on a Sheepskin

Poems keep streaming through me; every event is so moving I am compelled to record it. Here is a bit of a long thin poem in falling rhythm that came streaming through as I saton the floor, mesmerized, during the Labyrinth Ritual until almost the last person had gone through….

Find Her easy

And unspoken

As your sisters

Walk before

And behind you

And around you

In the holy

Goddess floor.

Every footstep

Is an offering

And a prayer

Of gratitude,

Every turning

Is admission

That the journey

Is the food . . .

From unpublished poem, “Labyrinth” 

Fragment of an Aftermath: Community Name Change

I will be processing all of this, and I’m sure posting more about it and podcasting about it when the podcast gets going, for a long time to come, probably for the rest of my life . . .It has already led to my finding, after many years, a name I have been searching for for years for my online community. Poetesses and Priestesses. 

For indeed, I am a priestess—a simpler way to say a poetry witch. My next two books of poems are already full of Goddessness, and the inspiraton will flow on!  After Glastonbury, I understand so much more both how and why this is the path of my life.

Sacred Union Altar in the Great Hall