REVIEW by Lizi Phillps liziphillips@gmail.com
Published in The Crossroads, Issue 3, Litha 2005.
PAGAIAN COSMOLOGY:
Re-inventing Earth-Based Goddess Religion
The word ‘Pagaian’ was created by Glenys Livingstone PhD to “express a synthesis” of pagan seasonal celebration with a “scientifically-based cosmology, using female imagery1” . She describes her book as a “reinventing of a religious practice, where the Cosmos is Deity.” Pagaian Cosmology has its origins in a doctorate thesis2, and retains some of the academic tone. Nevertheless it is an engaging read and much easier to absorb than a glance at the table of contents might otherwise suggest. Charged with a genuine desire to share her own journey, and to “enable people to come more deeply into relationship with themselves and the place that they live in”, Glenys has written a book that explores new spiritual territory, with the assistance of ideas that most pagan readers will be familiar with.
For Glenys, the exploration has not just been theoretical, and for this reason the book essentially has two parts. The first part, covered in chapters one through five, carefully describes the concepts that form her Cosmology. These concepts draw extensively from the works of Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, particularly their collaborative The Universe Story, and are strongly influenced by Second Wave Feminism and Goddess Worship. In the second part, chapters six to eight, Glenys describes the rituals (in fact, she provides the scripts, current as they were at the time of writing) that she has practised, with others, for over a decade in her celebration of the Cosmos through the eight pagan seasonal Sabbats.
I was perhaps one of Earth’s most alienated of beings, and by that I mean that I did not sense belonging Here (page 1)
So begins the Introduction to Pagaian Cosmology, and Glenys’s own personal search for that sense of belonging. As a white female living in the Southern Hemisphere, Glenys found no affirmation of either the land that she lived in, nor of her own being, in the dominant cultural and spiritual paradigms.
Most of the texts and graphics explaining the Cosmos…were (and still often are) drawn from the Northern Hemisphere perspective. The Moon in her phases were “backwards”; Sun’s daily movement from East to West was described as “clockwise”; the seasons in the stories were always at odds with real experience This was never regarded as important enough to mention, yet deep within me from the beginning there was scribed the cosmic essence of disregarding one’s senses (page 1)
While at least in the Northern Hemisphere when my ancestors had lit candles and sang at the Winter Solstice, though they called it Christmas, there remained a resonance with the land, a memory of something earlier upon which this ritual was based. In the Southern Hemisphere, there was no such resonance of the religious practise of the Europeans with Earth; and the children here of this religious practise inherited a poverty of spirit, a deep divorce from Earth that few other religions in the history of Gaia have ever known (pages 2-3)
Glenys had been in search of “things of an Ultimate nature” from when she was a teenager, and at the age of seventeen she converted to Catholicism. Later, married and with a young child, Glenys travelled to the US, where her husband and she both studied Theology at the University of California. It was the late 1970s, and at that stage, being a woman and choosing to study Theology was “a big radical deal”, not only socially but personally. Glenys felt conflicted and guilty. “I didn’t really feel like I could or should. I had a child, and I thought I was supposed to be a wife and mother. I remember there was a fellow we went to visit, and he was very orthodox and conservative, and he told me straight out, that was what I was supposed to be. I wasn’t supposed to be studying. I was really upset by that.”
Nevertheless, Glenys applied to convert her Diploma into a Masters degree. Other significant events occurred at this time. One was reading Beyond God The Father, by feminist writer Mary Daly, which “really relativised the Christian religion for me”, and another was attending a women’s study course, run by Starhawk, where Glenys first encountered the word ‘goddess’ in a religious context. “That was very important, because she [Starhawk] was presenting a story and a religious practice that was an alternative, and a way out of all the male metaphor.”
Important early works such as Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe by Marija Gimbutas, and Lost Goddesses of Early Greece by Charlene Spretnak taught Glenys the importance of re-storying the Goddess. “A lot of the stories about the goddesses are told within a patriarchal context, which many of us fail to realise. To tell the stories of the goddesses within a context that values the female is quite radically different. The most important re-story, for me, has been the one of Demeter and Persephone, and I always told that story at the beginning of all my Goddess classes.
The way I heard it when I was growing up was that Persephone was raped and abducted and taken off to the Underworld. The way that Charlene Spretnak and others have told it; Persephone goes to the Underworld voluntarily. She’s a redeemer figure. She goes to the Underworld to console those who are suffering. Or, she goes for wisdom. This story has a very different sense of integrity. When we, specifically women, hear that version of the story, we are able to think of and contemplate our own lives in that light, and think of ourselves as those heroines, or heras, as I call them. We can think of ourselves in that Heraic sense.”
Glenys took a leave of absence from her studies and returned to Australia with her family. By the time she went back to the US in 1980 to complete her Masters in Theology and Philosophy, she knew what it was she needed to uncover – The Great Mother.
Pagaian Cosmology is not, however, a thealogical book. Theology is the study of gods, whereas Cosmology is “the science of the laws which control the universe3”. In Glenys’s cosmology, the Triple Goddess – Maiden, Mother and Crone – is a metaphor for a cosmic event, which Glenys calls the Creative Dymanic, after Swimme and Berry’s “articulation of Cosmogenesis and its three ‘governing themes’ ” (page 45). Cosmogenesis is the “ongoing creative activity of the Universe, the unfolding of the Universe…” (page 46), which is ceaseless and cyclical.
Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry have stated that this omnipresent Creativity will be characterised by three formats “throughout time and space and at every level of reality” – differentiation, communion and autopoiesis4. These three have been summarized as follows: differentiation – to be is to be unique; communion – to be is to be related; autopoiesis – to be is to be a centre of creativity?? (page 48)
Glenys sees these themes also in the Triple Goddess. The Maiden, or Virgin, is differentiation; the Urge to Be (page 93). The Mother, or Creator, is communion; the Place to Be (page 99). The Crone, or Old One, is autopoiesis; She Who Creates the Space to Be (page 105). “The triple metaphor is really much more than the chronological phases of a woman’s life. They are cosmic dynamics that manifest everywhere and in every being – all beings.” In re-storying the Maiden, Mother and Crone, Glenys is not aligning us with Goddess the Deity; she is aligning us with Cosmos the Deity.
We are all native to Gaia; all humans are indigenous to Her. All humans can lay claim to relationship with Air, Fire, Water and Earth and to the Mystery at the Centre of it all. We do all issue forth from the same Origin – this is not just poetic flourish, this is biologically and cosmologically true. Gaia, as I understand Her, is not only Earth; She is Cosmos…The same Creative Dynamic that flourishes in Earth is assumed to be the same Creative Dynamic present throughout the Universe. Earth-Gaia is Seed and Jewel of a larger living Organism. Earth-Gaia is our Mother, but She is Daughter too, of an essential Sentience that seethes through the Universe. Inasmuch as I am sentient, and I arise out of Her, out of Earth and Earth arises out of the Universe, the Universe-Gaia is alive and sentient (page 29)
Essential then, to this Gaian spirituality, is the development of relationship with Earth, entering into Her consciousness, expanding awareness beyond the human-centred perspective (page 30)
This fits with Adrian Harris’s definition of Sacred Ecology, which “moves beyond the cerebral to bring us to a direct experience of a wholeness rooted in the body… [I]t is not known intellectually, but through direct experience. Besides the cerebral knowledge we all possess, the words and ideas stored in our heads, there is a deeper knowledge held within the tissues of our bodies5.”
For Glenys, one of the major ways to develop and deepen the relationship with Earth is through ritual celebration of the seasonal cycle.
Glenys facilitated her first public ritual in 1988 to celebrate the Winter Solstice. Over a few years this grew to encompass all eight “seasonal moments”, and in November of this year Glenys facilitated her twelfth Beltane ritual.
The ritual celebrations of Gaia as I have scripted them are based in the Old Western European Goddess tradition, wherein there are eight annual Earth holy days or “moments of grace” as Thomas Berry has often termed the seasonal transitions… The Wheel of the Year is a yearlong celebration of the Mystery – the light and the dark, which weave though our lives, and through all existence…It is an embodiment of the Creative Principle, the Triple Goddess, like a yearlong breath. The seasonal Wheel manifests how Gaia breathes in my part of the world, and the purpose of joining in that breath is the hope of enhancing one’s journey into the awesome Creativity that She manifests, to unfold this deepest identity (pages 48-49)
Despite seventeen years of ritual facilitation, Glenys still describes herself as a novice (“when you think of people like Caitlan Matthews and others that have been doing it for decades!”), but admits to there being an advantage to feeling like a novice, in that her ritual practice has continued to develop organically and intuitively; retaining a freshness rather than diminishing into routine. She is also particularly aware “of the whole thing being developed in Australia. There was no one here to teach me or to tell me. I had to work it out.”
In her book, Glenys does not present her ritual scripts and teaching notes as a fait accompli. More accurately, they are possibilities; templates for modifying a little or a lot according to the needs of the practitioner. Pagaian Cosmology is “a catalyst for personal and cultural change…[in which the readers] can adapt what they learn in the book to their place, and their selves, in their story.”
In the beginning, Glenys felt displaced, but at this juncture in her story she has found Place, and an essential part of that sense of being, is the sense of being indigenous, of “belonging Here”. No longer a ‘foreigner’ in the land of her birth, and no longer the ‘wrong’ gender in a male-centred spirituality. Unlike many Neo-Pagan traditions in which the practitioner “doesn’t necessarily regard themselves as indigenous [to the place that the pagan traditions they choose to follow originated]…in a Pagaian Cosmology I regard myself as indigenous to this place, to this Cosmos, as ??we all are?/ actually.”
In a Pagaian Cosmology, the relationship with Place determines the practice, rather than the practice determining the relationship with Place.
Notes:
1 All quotes are taken from email discussion and a phone interview with the author, and from Pagaian Cosmology, iUniverse, 2005, unless footnoted separately.
2 ‘The Female metaphor – virgin, mother, crone – of the dynamic cosmological unfolding: her embodiment in seasonal ritual as a catalyst for personal and cultural change’, Glenys Livingstone, University of Western Sydney, 2002. It can be read here: http://library.uws.edu.au/adt-NUWS/public/adt-NUWS20030731.103733/index.html
3 Webster’s English Dictionary, 1988 edition, Budget Books Pty Ltd.
4 Pronounced AUTO-POE-EE-SIS for those of you that like to read aloud.
5 Adrian Harris, ‘Sacred Ecology’, pg 151, in Graham Harvey and Charlotte Hardman (eds), Pagan Pathways: A Guide to the Ancient Earth Traditions, Thorsons 2000.
