Anu Sent Me a Litha Dream

I’m taking a break from priestessing Litha this year, and I’m loving it. No planning meetings! No subcommittees! No invocations to write or trance journeys to stress over! I get to just show up, even bring my daughter if she’s up for it, and enjoy the ride!

The most interesting part is that I have no idea what’s being planned for the ritual. Usually I can recite the ritual outline by heart by the time the doors open, but this time, I know which deities we’re working with and that’s about it.

But the control freak in me also finds that a tiny bit nerve-wracking, so of course I had a dream about it.

In the dream, the shop at which we hold our rituals had turned into some kind of mansion, with a large hall decorated in deep reds and burgundies and velvet curtains. Very womb-like. After I settled into the audience, music started up and dancers in dark red costumes began to perform. Wow, they’re really good, I thought, impressed with the organizers. Where had they found these people?

I watched the dancers for a few minutes. Then–I love this–everyone in the audience started necking.

Just as I was thinking that this was the best ritual I’d ever attended, I woke up. The dream followed me, though, in that way that dreams have of bleeding into your waking life: as I opened my eyes and found myself in my bedroom, I realized that the dancers had been singing. The words “Love! Anu! Love! Anu!” echoed in my mind–ending, with a conspicuous emphasis, on “Anu.”

Well. Sometimes you can’t quite tell if a god is talking to you; other times it’s pretty cut and dry.

My main takeaway from the dream was fairly simple, but easily forgotten. The dream explicitly connected Anu with love, which made sense, considering her role as fertility goddess. But Anu isn’t a goddess of romantic love. Anu isn’t interested in courtship or ballads or Valentine’s Day cards. Anu–and the Morrigan in other guises–is a goddess of primal love: the deep, pheromone-driven love that makes us pine for our coworkers, Facebook-stalk our roommate’s girlfriend, make fools of ourselves for one slim chance at getting laid. Anu is the crush, the infatuation, the dizzying turn-on. Anu is the pheromone-driven force that makes us procreate and multiply. Anu is the bunnies fucking in the field, the flower beckoning bees to fertilize it, the apple tree laden with fruit. She’s more, too–she’s a mother goddess, an earth goddess, a personification of nature–but, the dream told me, she is also a sex goddess. During a significant moment in my dream, while everyone was kissing each other on the neck, I thought about kissing someone on the lips and laughed. In the dream, such a practice seemed impossibly funny. Why would anyone do that?

(If we approach her this way, as the sacred embodiment of our limbic systems, it’s not a great leap to the Morrigan’s other extreme, is it? Our will to survive can swing us towards love or violence.)

This is why the Goddess of the Land as a goddess of sex is so ubiquitous. Think, for example, of Inanna. Sex is life. I’m not talking about rape. Or sexual assault. Or domination that uses sex as one of its tools. I’m talking about real, enthusiastic, consensual, love-driven sex.

But is love, in this sense, the same as lust? Yes. No. Absolutely. Of course not. If the question bothers you, just think about that moment when you finally get to touch someone you’ve admired from afar. When your skin touches theirs, are you thinking about that funny joke they told two months ago or the fact that they like Game of Thrones as much as you? Probably not.

Of course, the dream left me with one unanswered question: why Litha? Why now, and not Beltane? Maybe Anu is giving me a heads-up that our Litha ritual is going to turn into a giant orgy. Whoo hoo! Or maybe the “womb” in which our ritual took place was the Goddess’s womb, pregnant with a Horned God already dreaming of meeting his consort.

In any case, happy Litha! I hope yours is full of pleasure and abundance, whether you’re sexual, asexual, or anything in between.

(And for those who are perennially inclined to thump the lore or get worked up because my experience with the Morrigan doesn’t match up with theirs…chill, okay? Your practice isn’t threatened by some random blogger who had an interesting dream.)

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