Below is an edited excerpt from Chapter 10 of A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony Glenys Livingstone Ph.D., (Girl God Books, 2023).

The story of the universe may be described as “a story of majesty and beauty as well as of violence and disruption, a drama filled with both elegance and ruin.”^[i]

The process of evolution may be named the “Transformation-of the-Ages”: it is a name I give to the Old One/Crone. Transformation may be understood as a power of the universe, as cosmologist Brian Thomas Swimme speaks of it.^[ii]

 Another term that I have used to describe the poiesis of this Season of Lammas is “All-Nourishing Abyss.” It is Brian Swimme’s term for the mystery at the base of being,^[iii] and it is a term I use to speak of the Dark Source to whom the Old One returns us (can They be distinguished?)^[iv]The All-Nourishing Abyss is both generative and infinitely absorbing, a power out of which particles spontaneously emerge and into which they are absorbed, not just thirteen point seven billion years ago, but in every moment.^[v] We may imagine this Power as the Great Receiver, the Old Compassionate One, complete forgiveness, Transformer, Depth of Love. Swimme says that “the foundational reality of the Universe is this unseen ocean of potentiality.”^[vi] He speaks of it as “nonvisible” (as distinct from “invisible”): that is, as “that which can never be seen.”^[vii]  I have used the term “manifesting” reality to speak of this dark, from which the “manifest” emerges, and into which it is absorbed.^[viii]Swimme says that “the appropriation of the new cosmology depends upon an understanding of the reality and power of the nonvisible and nonmaterial realm.”^[ix] As Swimme describes: “All-nourishing abyss then is not a thing, nor a collection of things, nor even, strictly speaking, a physical place, but rather a power that gives birth and that absorbs existence at a thing’s annihilation.”^[x] So, is my understanding of the Womb of Space we inhabit, and to whom we return.

Lammas celebrates the beginning of dismantling, de-structuring, cutting the harvest, after the peaking and ripening of Summer Solstice. There are many such moments in the evolutionary story which could be specifically remembered, including our present ending of the Cenozoic Era, as Swimme and Berry describe the present extinctions and planetary destruction.^[xi]  Gaia Herself has done a lot of this de-structuring, it is in Her nature to return all to the sentient “Soup,” for creative purpose, for never-ending renewal. 

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NOTES:

^[i] Swimme and Berry, The Universe Story, 47.

^[ii] in his DVD series The Powers of the Universe, Program 8, “Transformation.”

^[iii] Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, 100.

^[iv] I contemplate and discuss this question in “Contemplating Triple Goddess as Creative Triad, a Depth of Love”: https://www.magoism.net/2017/08/essay-contemplating-triple-goddess-as-creative-triad-a-depth-of-love-by-glenys-livingstone-ph-d/.

^[v] Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, 100.

^[vi] Ibid.

^[vii] Ibid., 97.

^[viii] As noted in the Introduction to this book, along with references.

^[ix] Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, 97.

^[x] Ibid., 100.

^[xi] Swimme and Berry, The Universe Story, 241-250.

REFERENCES:

Livingstone, Glenys. A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony. Girl God Books: Bergen, Norway, 2023.

Swimme, Brian. The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos. Video: Center for the Story of the Universe, 1996.

Swimme, Brian. The Powers of the Universe, DVD series, 2005.

Swimme, Brian and Berry, Thomas. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era. New York: HarperCollins, 1992.