What is the EarthDreaming tradition?
What is a tradition?
What is paganism / Goddess worship?
What is a witch?
What is a coven?
What is a family circle?
The Goddess
The God
The Land
The Pathways of Transformation
The EarthDreaming tradition offers a unique blend of
o an understanding of Goddess, magic and the gods which is inherited
from the earth-based spiritual traditions of Europe and the Middle East,
and
o a commitment to attuning to and working with the seasonal cycle,
energies and spirits of the local landscape of Perth.
The tradition sprang from a vision of a future in which the children of migrant peoples are born into a spiritual relationship with this land and into a way of life in which the Sacred has been restored to the centre of daily activity.
The Pathways of Transformation, adapted from the Creation Spirituality tradition, provide a model for how we, as adult members of the tradition, can open ourselves to the ongoing personal and communal process of growth and healing which is the embodiment of our deepening relationship with Goddess and the Land.
The EarthDreaming tradition is practiced in covens and family circles
- small, self-organising grass-roots groups. (See below.)
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Some Premises of the EarthDreaming tradition 1. That it is possible to experience direct personal relationship with the Divine (Goddess, the God), with the Land and with non-physical beings such as our Ancestor Spirits (Snake, Frog and Magpie) and the spirits of this Land. 2. That it is possible and desirable to consciously cultivate and deepen such relationships over time, particularly through ritual and magic. 3. That there is benefit in being part of a group with this shared intention - eg.. group synergy, personal support... 4. That there is value in participating in a tradition - ie. leverage on accumulated collective experience, passing on a gift for the future. 5. That decisions are generally best made by the people who will
have to live with them. Therefore :-
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To be part of a tradition is to place ourselves within a continuum that joins the ancestral past to the unborn future.
A spiritual tradition provides a shared framework for making sense of the mystery in human experience. At its best, it enhances our individual sense of meaning, pattern and purpose in our lives.
The power of any tradition lies in repetition. A tradition is the collective wisdom born from lived experience - a collection of tried and true ways of doing things. For tradition to continue, this accumulated body of wisdom needs to be maintained and passed on to those who come after.
A living tradition is one which is able to evolve and adapt in response to changing circumstances. For the most part, the evolution of tradition is an incremental process of adjustment - a gradual refinement. However sometimes a deeper cycle of transformation may be required, involving a full death and rebirth as a paradigm-shift occurs, and the tradition as a collective entity moves to a new kind of understanding.
There is an inherent tension here - between the need for conservation and the need for evolution. To survive, a tradition needs both its wisdom keepers and its visionaries.
This century, a new interest in returning to the older pagan ways began to surface. It began to be felt by those who moved in occult circles during the 1930s & 40s, emerging into wider public awareness with the publication of Witchcraft Today by Gerald Gardner in 1951. Gardner claimed to have been initiated into a surviving traditional coven of witches in 1939 CE. Whether his claimed initiation is historical fact or the spinning of a foundation myth remains in question. None the less, he was clearly in tune with the spirit of his times, and most of modern Wicca has direct or indirect lineage connections to his original explorations.
By the 1960s, the pagan revival was booming, with practioners creating or recreating traditions inspired by what was known of the pre-christian religions of Europe (eg. historical druidry) or even works of science fiction. What they had in common was a reverence for nature and a vision of the Earth as sacred.
In the EarthDreaming tradition, we are heirs not only to these beginnings of the pagan revival, but perhaps more importantly, to the women's spirituality movement which grew out of the feminist movement of the 1970s.
Many women in the feminist movement realised that in order to experience wholeness they needed to experience the Divine as feminine and Women's Spirituality Groups mushroomed. The belief of these groups was that the personal, the political and the spiritual were one. So as well as having a personal interaction with Her in their regular spiritual practice, they invoked the Goddess at political rallies and held rituals to Her in prison when they ended up there after the rallies. There were covens formed but the heirarchical format of the Gardenerian and Alexandrian covens was rejected and new models aimed at empowering all participants were favoured. People created new rituals communally and power was shared. Huge personal and communal transformation flowed from these groups.
Within the EarthDreaming tradition, spirituality is understood as both personal (touching upon our sense of self) and political (touching upon our power in the world) and as inherently transformational. The purpose of our spiritual practice is to become more fully who we are - expressions of Goddess in her immanence.
Consequently, those who join a coven are, by definition, engaged in an ongoing process of self-tranformation. Participation in the coven provokes both subtle and obvious changes in a person's understanding of self and in their way of being in the world, as they grow in wisdom and personal creative power. The role of fellow coven members is essentially one of High Witness, to see and celebrate this growth even when the person in question cannot.
The coven also carries a shared responsibility for the ongoing life of the tradition, and for sharing its fruits with the wider community. As it is an evolving tradition, this implies ongoing co-creative effort, the sharing of wisdom already gleaned, and the passing on of fundamental understandings, values and skills as building blocks for the next generation. Ways of doing this include opening seasonal festivals to the wider community, and hosting extended 'family circles' to make the tradition accessible to children and others who are not able to participate in a coven.
Over the long term, intimate bonds tend to develop between coveners as a consequence of working and worshipping together over a number of years - through the inevitable struggles, the satisfactions of successful co-creation and the witnessing of each other's unfolding spiritual journey.. For this reason, covens are sometimes compared to families.
A family circle will meet regularly (often monthly) to tune into the seasons, to teach our children the foundations of our spiritual tradition, and to celebrate a simple ritual of connection with that which we hold sacred. Along the way we honour and provide a spiritual context for the transitions of growing up and family life.
Adult members of the circle may also members of a coven. Three times a year we all come together to celebrate the public festivals of Coming of the Rain, Flowering Earth and Rain Buckets Down.
Since the dawn of time humans have known and worshipped the Great Goddess in her many aspects. Many of the earliest creation myths tell of a female being who self fertilised and created the universe from herself. In time and different cultures the Great Mother took on many names and aspects. The male principle was her consort, son, lover, brother whom she had created along with everything else. The Goddess was not seen as seperate from her creations, she was the Earth, the Moon, the Stars.
In the EarthDreaming tradition, our primary spiritual relationship is with the Great Goddess, who we understand as both as transcendent creator and as immanent within all of creation including ourselves. She is understood not as an 'archetype' or 'the feminine principle', but rather the ultimate spiritual reality which informs our existence. The Sufi says "la illaha il Allah" (- sometimes translated 'there is no reality except the One'), the EarthDreaming witch says "Everything is Goddess" and touches the same underlying reality, albeit with a distinctly different flavour!
Although Her being transcends our own, we are able to experience a direct and personal relationship with Her, often mediated through one or more particular aspects or expressions of Her total being. Dion Fortune wrote "All the Gods are one God and all the Goddesses are one Goddess and it is in each man by virtue of his manhood to be a priest and in each woman by virtue of her womanhood to be a priestess." In the EarthDreaming tradition we are comfortable calling upon Her by any of Her many historical or contemporary names and titles, although She is perhaps most commonly addressed as "Goddess", "Great Goddess", "Mother" or "Great Mother".
EarthDreaming covens practice the ancient rite of Drawing Down the Moon. This is a ritual, enacted at the full moon, in which the Goddess in her lunar aspect possesses the body of Her priestess enabling Her worshippers to interact with Her in embodied form. Ideally, the moon priestess is able to completely surrender her consciousness to the Goddess. In practice, however, full trance possession requires significant preparation and experience.
Loving and accepting the Goddess in all her aspects means accepting and reverencing the cyclical nature of our own lives. In the EarthDreaming tradition, sexuality, birth, death are all celebrated. The wisdom of old age is honoured equally with the strength and fertility of youth. Children, women and men alike are encouraged to perceive embodiment as a gift, to be treasured and cared for.
Like the Goddess, He too was complex and mirrored in cycles of nature. He was the Divine Child, the bringer in of the new, symbol of hope and inspiration. He was the God of love and ecstacy, consort and lover of the Goddess, the fertile seed, Lord of the Forest, Lord of the Animals, Lord of the Vine, Lord of the Dance. He was the dying and sacrificed God, who brought about rebirth and renewal by his own sacrificial death. He was the Lord of Death and the Underworld.
In the EarthDreaming tradition, we recognise and honour the Earth God
of our pagan forebears. We see in Him a life-affirming expression
of maleness, one which can assist us in finding our way back to balanced
co-existence with the Earth and our fellow creatures. We recognise
too the need to heal the damage created by the patriarchal shadow which
He has worn for centuries.
Whilst rejecting the dominant focus upon male-female polarity practiced
by our Wiccan counterparts, we nonetheless believe that the spirituality
of the future will be one which celebrates the dynamic interaction of Goddess
and God.
In the EarthDreaming tradition, we understand the Land as a living being, a dynamic interaction of the landscape and its interconnected community of plants, animals and spirit beings.
Recognising that we are migrants and the children of migrant peoples, we seek permission from the Land and its guardian spirits to live and practice our spirituality here. We regularly ask the Land and its resident spirits to guide us in the ongoing evolution of our tradition.
Our relationship to the Land and its cycles is mediated through a growing
mythology, and in particular through three totem spirits or 'Ancestor Beings'
specific to the EarthDreaming tradition known as "Snake", "Frog" and "Magpie"
(see below). As our tradition grows, so our understanding
of the Land and its cycles continues to deepen.
"All the Powers of the Dreaming Earth"
The EarthDreaming mythology and cosmology begins with the creation
of the cosmos from the love-making of three Primal Powers - SunRadiance,
EarthForm and WaterFlow. These three are themselves the product of
the first splitting of the original unity of Goddess.
From their union are born the three Ancestor Beings - Snake, Frog and Magpie - whose interactions shape the living Land.
The creation of our tradition mythology is an ongoing incremental process. It draws upon ancestral memory, pre-existing totemic energies of this land, and a great deal of divine inspiration. The creative energies set in motion with the birth of the EarthDreaming tradition continue to unfold on the 'inner planes' as well as within our consciousness. Mythic presences, such as the the three Ancestor Beings take time and interaction to ripen to a point where they are able to communicate directly with us.
Today the Ancestor Beings each have their own distinctive energetic presence, can enter the consciousness of an individual unsummonsed, and are able to communicate with us. Our experiences convince us that they do indeed have a reality independant of our own, and that their primary purpose is the unfolding of our tradition and relationship with this Land. A fuller description of each can be found in the middle section of this book in the segments about Coming of the Rain (Frog), Flowering Earth (Magpie) and Dry Earth (Snake).
From the shamanic traditions of northern europe, we have inherited the World Tree, whose branches reach up towards the stars and whose roots lie deep within the earth. Snake lives beneath its roots, and is associated with the Underworld, home of human ancestors and the faery folk. Magpie lives in its upper branches, and is able to travel to the realm above (sometimes called the Other or Upper world), the home of the star people and the spirits of the unborn. Frog lives on and around the trunk of the tree, and is at home in the Land, the realm of our embodied existence or 'Middle Earth'.
We would like to acknowledge here our debt to Matthew Fox for the framework of the four paths as a model for the spiritual journey. The four paths, as described by Fox in his books Creation Spirituality and Original Blessing, represent four connected pathways to union with the Divine.
"The creation-centred spiritual tradition considers compassion rather than contemplation as the fulfilment of the spiritual journey that takes one back to one's origins in renewed ways. It considers justice to be absolutely integral to the spiritual journey." [M. Fox, Original Blessing]
In the EarthDreaming tradition we work with the four Paths of Transformation as part of an annual cycle of worship, personal and communal healing and evolution.
Each of the four paths has it's own distinctive characteristics and themes.
During the 'Via Positiva' or Path of Celebration, we celebrate Goddess within all things. This pathway is a way of affirmation, thanksgiving and ecstacy, which involves embracing our physical existence and our experience of relatedness. "The Via Positiva is a way of tasting the beauties and cosmic depths of creation, which means us and everything else" (Original Blessing, p34). In our tradition, covens walk this path to Goddess for three months each year, beginning at the summer solstice.
During the 'Via Negativa' or Path of Surrender (which we walk from autumn equinox to winter solstice), we embrace the experience of seperateness, emptiness, silence and letting go. This pathway gives us the opportunity to delve into our shadow, and to discover the Goddess in the places where we thought She was not. Silent contemplation and scrying, both of which involve passive opening to awareness of whatever is there, epitomise the journey of this pathway.
The 'Via Creativa' or Path of Co-creation follows (from winter solstice to spring equinox). Here we find ways to birth the treasures which we discovered in the darkness of the previous path. This pathway involves the celebration of the human imagination as a reflection of the divine creative power which created the universe. Our creativity is born from the union of our 'Positiva' and 'Negativa' experiences. In partnership with our own deepest selves, we create our world anew, allowing our own creative process to take us closer to Goddess.
The final pathway is the 'Via Transformativa' or Path of Compassion
in Action (Spring Equinox to Summer Solstice). At this stage
on our cyclical journey we are challenged to integrate all previous experiences,
and use them to fuel our compassion. This final pathway in our cycle
involves a willingness to share the fruit of our journey with others, to
work for justice and to speak out for what we believe in. "Compassion is
the goal, the fullest energies of the human/divine marriage in the creation-centred
spiritual tradition. Our creativity in all instances is to be put
to the use of compassion. ... " (Original Blessing, p247)
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Matthew Fox describes the interconnectedness of the Paths Celebration & Surrender
Celebration, Surrender & Creativity
Bringing in Compassion
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