Scapegoating the Goddess

I had to study my fair share of Greek plays in college, so I became all too familiar with a device called deus ex machina (god from the machine). It was how the Greek playwrights dealt with a seemingly irresolvable plotline to bring about a happy ending. An actor playing the role of a god would descend onto the stage (with the help of a crane) and set everything aright again, ensuring a satisfied audience.

Amidst all of the impassioned rhetoric flying around on social media, I noticed some comments accusing the Goddess of being silent and even complicit in bigotry and white supremacy. (Just let that sink in for a minute). Thus, in times like these, people seem to want a deus ex machina—and they want Her right now. As a writer who has devoted a lot of text toward helping women and men reconnect with the Divine Feminine, I felt the need to address those accusatory remarks.

First of all, why cast blame upon the Goddess, the Creatrix, for what can only be attributed to human failings? It is scapegoating on a grand scale. Secondly, though humans may still desire a deity that will intervene and resolve all of our complex problems at once, the Goddess doesn’t work that way. She never has, and She never will. She works through us. If things are out of kilter, it is because humanity has lost that vital connection to the loving, nurturing qualities of the feminine and the cosmic womb. She has never distanced Herself from us. We have distanced ourselves from Her, and just look at the fallout. If blame is to be cast anywhere, let’s cast it upon a worldwide patriarchal system that has allowed and encouraged division and intolerance to continue.

For years, I’ve seen memes like “The Goddess is Rising” or “God is coming, and boy is She pissed!” Both are equivalent to “Jesus is coming soon” in my view. They all allude to the desire for payback to be meted out by one’s chosen deity at some undetermined date. None acknowledge the cold reality that humans have created this tangled forest of thorns and brambles, and humans will have to find the way out or the way through. That’s exactly where we are right now. The Goddess is not asleep, and she hasn’t been on vacation. She is our hands and our hearts. She is revealing the work that is needed to dismantle old paradigms, but She will not do the work for us.

I can’t tell you exactly how to respond to current events, dear reader, nor will I tell you how to feel. I trust that you can search your own soul and find those answers for yourself. Only you can know what you are capable of doing within your own sphere of influence.

Time and again, through all of life’s confounding questions, I come back to those last lines in Starhawk’s adapation of Doreen Valiente’s poem, Charge of the Goddess:

Let there be beauty and strength, power and compassion, honor and humility, mirth and reverence within you.

And you who seek to know Me, know that the seeking and yearning will avail you not, unless you know the Mystery: for if that which you seek, you find not within yourself, you will never find it without.

For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am That which is attained at the end of desire.

May we all look within for the Goddess, for She is eternal, unchanging, and as close as our breath. As we find Her, may we work together to create a world completely devoid of hate, greed, and oppression.

So Mote It Be