Goddess Temple Budapest

Thankfully there are now a number of Goddess Temples across Europe, the Americas and Australia. After a very busy few months it was a joy to visit the city of Budapest, meet wonderful friends and visit the Goddess Temple in the heart of Pest. The Temple is spacious, beautiful and filled with Her presence. The seed sown at the Temple's opening in Autumn 2006 had clearly taken root and grown strong. A peaceful sacred space where it is easy to be touched by Her love. The Mother Goddess image from the one-time Hungarian region of Transylvania is especially evocative.

In August I visited the exhibition of Goddess's from Old Europe at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Many of those images were lovingly crafted in the Danube valley five and a half thousand years ago. Such archetypes never go away and now once again the Danube has a Temple.

Glastonbury in January

For the first time ever I drove to Glastonbury in January. One of those crazy things I occasionally find myself doing. Five hours down the motorways with the temperature hovering between -4ºC and -2ºC. An overnight stay in a motel and five hours back. Now I must confess that I hate driving on our overcrowded motorways so I have to have a really good reason for such madness. This was an invitation from the Goddess Temple to a supporters' day and an opportunity to visit the recently purchased Goddess Hall. 

I arrived in Glastonbury in ample time to spend a while in quiet meditation in the Temple. It is such a beautiful space filled with love and abundant atmosphere. A place where prayer and meditation come naturally. A place to light a candle for my daughter with a prayer that her unborn daughter may arrive safely and grow in love, wisdom, creativity and magic. I then walked up to another favourite place, Chalice Well Gardens, arriving late in the afternoon with the setting sun low in the sky. I have never seen the Gardens in the light of a January sunset. They looked utterly magical bathed in a golden red. As I sat taking in the sheer beauty of it all a robin flew down and landed just in front of me. I noticed a plate of seeds had been set ready on the ground by my side and wondered whether to gently get up and move away so that the robin could feed. However, it looked me in the eye for a moment and then came right up to feed.

The following day was spent in the new Goddess Hall which now provides much needed space for ceremonies and functions. Over the last few months a very great deal of work, love and sheer artistry has been put in to make it a place of beauty and honour for the Goddess. I am sure it will be a place of blessing. I certainly came away feeling abundantly blessed and glad to have been able to renew fond acquaintances.

Balancing on Air

My local paper has been covering the closure of a number of churches in the area. Each church has its own unique history. Each has faithful people who have invested a great deal of emotional and spiritual capital in the living community that makes up the local church. It is obvious that a church cannot be closed without breaking a chain of history and hurting a lot of people. We should all be sad at their loss. Those in authority need to be blessed with more than their fair share of tact and sensitivity when they are faced with closing a church.

In the days when churches were normally open and anyone could enter freely at any time of day I would often spend time in one. To leave a busy city street and enter a church is to enter a different world where history matters, where the veil between the living and the dead is thin, where silence prevails, and where prayers spoken through the ages hang like magic in the air. To enter a country church you usually have to pass the graves of our ancestors who encircle the building in an embrace of love. Their presence reminding us of our debt to them and our duty to honour them.

Our historic churches have become part of the landscape and now appear as benign and beautiful as the trees. Walking into their peaceful interior spaces it is easy to forget that this was not always true. Indeed most historic cathedrals and churches were designed and built as much as symbols of power and authority as places of worship.

The gracious Norman cathedrals of England were a potent sign of Norman power and superiority, built strong, huge and impressive to remind a people that they had been conquered. Within decades of their construction there were expulsions of Jews from England, France and Spain and legislation against homosexuals was enacted across Europe. Many town churches were built to proclaim the power and prosperity of craft guilds that actively worked to exclude women from membership. Rich and powerful men filled cathedrals and churches with their tombs and memorials and stained glass displaying their coats of arms. Military flags festooned the ceilings. Special pews were installed for the local gentry, the rich rented seating at the front and the poor were sent to the back.

I mention this because Geraldine Charles has written an excellent article entitled, ‘Balancing on Air’ for the current issue of Goddess Pages. In this incisive article she addresses the question, "Yeah, but what about balance?" She writes:

"It should hardly need to be pointed out that a Goddess Temple exists for a reason – in part to redress, in a very small way, thousands of years of complete imbalance ... On the right hand I will put the x thousand years of patriarchy that affect my every thought in ways I cannot begin to enumerate, particularly as many of them probably aren’t even conscious. On the left – how shall I symbolize the deliberate decision to have no representation of the god, the male principle, in a small, one-roomed Goddess temple in an English country town?"

For me, discovering the Goddess Temple in Glastonbury was an absolute revelation. It is beautiful, peaceful, prayerful, overflowing with love, alive with creative energy and totally devoid of hierarchical power and authority.

In a world obsessed with power and dominion this small, one-roomed Goddess temple points to a better way.

In a world where fundamentalist, creationist leaders proclaim that only a God powerful enough to create an entire universe in six days is worthy of worship; it points to Goddesses who are present in a grain of corn and the hum of a bee’s wing.

In a country that spends £34 billion pounds on offensive capability and sells the means of death to nations around the world; it proclaims the true beauty of life, produces a riotous flowering of creativity and reminds us that we are all divine.

Our human society is desperately imbalanced. In England a small church closes and people are hurt and feel powerless in the face of authority. Not everyone has a car, buses are infrequent on a Sunday and some will find it hard to travel 2 or 3 miles to the next church. In Africa a woman regularly walks 15 or 20 miles to church in the tropical sun.

The Goddess Temple is 260 miles from my home and I know many who travel that distance and more just to be in this special place. When we cannot travel our hearts are our temples and the Goddess inspires all the choices made to work towards a better world.

Blessed Lammas

A very blessed Lammas. Time to pause, take time out for oneself, time to give thanks for the first fruits of the earth. The beginning of a month of warm days and summer vacations. Time too for the Glastonbury Goddess Conference. I just thought I would take time out to post photos. And a blessed Imbolc to all friends in the southern world.

Lammas Goddess

Priestesses on the Temple steps

Conference Welcome Circle

Midsummer madness and a tag

It seems a while since I last posted. As you know I took a three week vacation in May to celebrate some significant life events. I usually don't take anyway near so long at once and, of course, returned to a large backlog of work. Also this time of year I have the joy and great privilege of designing and printing the programme and other material for the Lammas Glastonbury Goddess Conference which takes up quite a lot of time. And, if all that is not enough, I finally took the plunge and signed up for an Irish Gaelic summer school at a local college.

Since I last posted Medusa has written a very good article entitled, Why Goddess Temples. Sadly I live a five hour drive from the Glastonbury Goddess Temple so my visits are quite limited but when I am in Glastonbury I always make a point of spending quality time there. So here are three reasons why the Temple is important. Firstly, the very fact that the Temple is means that there is a living community attached to it. The priestesses and priests, the melissas who keep the Temple open, the artists and craftspeople who grace it with their beautiful creations, those who see it as their spiritual home, the madrons who help pay the bills... This community is a place to be, a place to grow, a place to give, a place to receive... Secondly, the Temple is a focused sacred space graced by the presence of the Goddess and the practice of those who use it. It is one of the few places I know where it is possible to spend two or three hours in personal spiritual practice with consummate ease simply because the atmosphere is so conducive to it. Thirdly, but not finally ! a Temple open to all regardless of race, creed, gender, etc. is a sign to all that the Goddess is very much alive in our land.

Thinking about the Temple and midsummer; Domnu, Queen of the Deep and Lady of the Springs and Wells is one of the Goddesses honoured there at the Summer Solstice. I am delighted that Caroline Probyn, one of the Temple artists, has given me permission to place her beautiful image of Domnu at the head of this post. Thank you Caroline.

June in the North of England has been a very wet month 280% above average. In fact where I live it is not only the wettest June since records began in the mid-nineteenth century, it is also the wettest month since records began - beating even the records for traditionally very wet months like October. On several days more than a month's rainfall has fallen in a few hours resulting in widespread floods. Now, of course, there have always been floods. The climate in Brigid's Isles has always been variable and unpredictable. However, climate model predictions are showing that very intense rainfall is going to become much more common here. I recently read that a one degree rise in average global temperature results in a 6% increase in water trapped in the atmosphere, all of which has to fall as rain somewhere. Here we have been treating our Mother very badly, demanding of Her more than three times as much as Her wonderful bounty can provide and yet we still talk about growth and demand more and more. Maybe a Goddess Temple is a small public stand against the psychosis of patriarchy and the insanity of looking for rapture, a saviour or a prophet but we have to begin somewhere.

On a lighter note it was a delight to join a group of Goddess loving people in Nottingham to celebrate the Solstice and give honour to Domnu.

On Saturday I was tagged by Terri Moore in Johannesburg. Here are the Rules: Players start with 8 random facts about themselves. Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

Now I am not sure I can play simply because I have not been blogging long enough to tag 8 other people who have not already been tagged themselves. But I hope this does not preclude me from providing 8 random (and probably useless facts) about myself for Terri's delight.

1. I am never happier than when I am in a liminal place close to water. I love the outer isles of Brighid's Isles particularly the Outer Hebrides and Orkney.

2. I worship the Chocolate Goddess especially if She is Fair Trade.

3. I have never been south of the equator although I have been 15 miles north of it.

4. I have been using computers since the 1970's and would find it really hard to give up my Apple Macs.

5. I am a great lover of myth and story and delight in spinning a good tale.

6. I really appreciate silent starlit nights.

7. The hearth is the centre of my home and my altar.

8. I am very good at mathematics and very bad at sport.

Now just to play along a little I tag Nichole and Pammy

Glastonbury

I am in Glastonbury for a few days meeting old friends and spending quiet time in the Goddess Temple. I Just couldn't resist posting these photographs I took this morning of the Temple arrayed in Beltane glory. The beautiful evocative painting over the altar is by Dorrie Joy. I can hardly express what an utter joy it is to be back in this very special space.