The Heart of the Goddess
“We are people of all races, genders, classes, and religions who aspire to be what the ancient Taoists called True Humans. How do we become True Humans? Part of the path involves bringing ourselves back into balance, reclaiming the lost feminine deep within ourselves and sharing that wisdom and power with the world.” ~From the Introduction to The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth, and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine by Hallie Iglehart Austen
The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth, and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine
Written by Hallie Iglehart Austen
The Goddesses are universal and timeless. Today, we can look around and see the Goddesses reflected in contemporary life, sometimes in surprising ways. For instance, the 6,000-year-old Egyptian Bird-Headed Snake Goddess, along with some other ancient Goddesses, uses the same pose as the qigong practice that helped author Hallie Iglehart Austen reclaim her health and life. In 2017-2018, Dior made a fashion sensation with a complete line featuring the Goddesses of the Motherpeace Tarot. The 1,000-year-old Guanyin from China comes from a time when this deity transitioned from male to female, manifesting androgyny and gender fluidity. We also see the Sacred Feminine and the fiery Goddesses making their power felt all around the world, most dramatically with the Goddess Pele of Kilauea—the Goddess of fire, lightning, wind, and volcanoes and the creator of the Hawaiian Islands—who continues to transform the Big Island.
Hallie believes we need the wisdom of the Goddesses now more than ever. We have reached a crossroads that appears to be either the end times or an opportunity for rebirth, and she suggests it’s up to us to determine which it will be. “We humans have created this situation and we humans can heal it.” She created The Heart of the Goddess to help midwife the rebirth—in the hope, it will be a source of inspiration in our personal, collective and planetary healing.
We are challenged today to simultaneously be present to what is going on in our world, keep our hearts open, and to act from love. We all wish the world was not suffering so much and yet it is—and we are here now. For the survival of our planet, our own species and all beings, we are called upon to grow beyond our individual selves and unite in oneness. We are called to become our wisest, most loving and courageous selves, to expand even more our limited sense of self beyond our egos and attachments into wholeness. We are called to become individually whole, balancing our cultural values of feminine and masculine, for our own happiness and for the well-being of everyone.
One of the best ways Hallie knows to do this is to contemplate gifts of art, myth, and music, receiving messages from our global family. Especially those who know the Sacred Feminine, along with the Divine Masculine, and see them all as human first—not separating them in the ways Euro-Western culture has come to do. To become whole, we must shine the light on and celebrate that which has been denied and suppressed.
OM Times and Hallie Iglehart Austen invite you to “receive these messages from near and far away in time and space. Gaze on these images, live with them, sing their songs and praises, tell their stories and wait; wait and see what inspiration they have for you, right now, today.”
Ixchel the Weaver
Ixchel is the Mayan Goddess of the changing moon, weaving, prophecy, sexuality, healing, and childbirth. She was revered throughout Southern Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula and most of Central America, primarily from about 600 to 1500 c.e. She is still known as The Queen, Our Grandmother, Our Mother, and The White Lady. For centuries, women have made pilgrimages to her holy places, including Isla Mujeres, the Island of Women.
In an early myth, Ixchel is the spider at the center of the world’s web. Similarly, an Iroquois myth sees the lunar waxing and waning as the work of an old woman who sits in the moon, eternally creating and recreating a weaving. In Indonesia, a spinning spider represents the soul of the moon, and in Borneo, the moon in the form of a spider creates the world. Yet Ixchel is also honored as a human woman, just as Navajo women weavers feel that they are directly inspired by Spider Woman’s original act of manifestation.
In this terracotta statue, Ixchel sits at her loom with her ever-present bird companion, the nest weaver, who is associated with the Goddess throughout the world. Ixchel sits easily and with great presence, for she is the bliss of creativity, weaving the fabric of life itself. Each of us is a thread in her great pattern. Singing, spinning from her deepest being, she carefully smoothes the substance of every soul between her great fingers. She then chooses her color. Perhaps it is a clear red, or a peaceful blue, or a vibrant earth brown. Whatever color each of us is—whatever body, personality or character—we are purposefully created by the Goddess to make the Great Fabric of Life as it is meant to be.
Having chosen carefully, she takes a deep breath of eternity, exhales the life force into each being and begins to weave. And so, your life, and all lives begin. Sometimes choosing contrast, sometimes complementary, picking the textures and colors which best suit one another, the Goddess weaves us together.
Feel the Goddess’s selection in you, and her pattern in your life. Feel where you, and others, might have tried to interfere with the Great Weaver’s design—where you tried to impose a “man-made” pattern onto Nature. Which is Ixchel’s weaving? Which is yours? Where can a harmonious blend be made? Work to unravel the synthetic fibers from the fabric of your life and the life of the Earth. Help her to sort out the strands of the past and weave them into a new, brightly colored future.
Spider the Creatrix
Spider, an important being in many Native American mythologies, is represented in this shell gorget from Spiro burial mound in Oklahoma. The swastika in the center probably represents the four winds, directions, and elements; the bands might be those of the snake, while the hands are a universal symbol of manifestation, blessing and healing.
A weaver like Ixchel, Spider is a symbol of the universe and of concrete manifestation. Primal cultures all over the world esteem spiders, who are protectors of sacred places. Myths and legends associate these tiny beings who miraculously weave their webs from their own bodies with the Creatrix and light, and with kind old women and weaving. Native American myths, including those from the Cherokee and Kiowa, honor Spider Grandmother as the only one of all the creatures who were able to bring back light from the land of the Sun People. She created our sun and gave us fire, an act immortalized in her web’s sunray-like design.
Spider’s web is also mirrored in the pattern of sound waves, and the sound is one of her tools. In author, Merlin Stone’s recounting of a North American Keres Pueblo myth, Spider-Woman, Sussitanako, is the great darkness of the Original Womb Void. She spins her web in the four directions and sings her two daughters into being. These children, Ut Set, mother of the Pueblo people, and Nau Ut Set, mother of all others, create the moon and sun from iridescent abalone shell, turquoise, and brilliantly colored rocks. With red, yellow, white and black clay, Spider-Woman makes the people of the four races. Over each of us, as effortlessly and patiently as the spider spinning her web, she weaves a mantle of wisdom and love. She then attaches a strand of her web to the doorway at the tops of our heads—a psychic connection echoed by the ! Kung of southern Africa, who say that their spirits fly to the sky along threads of spider silk when they are trance dancing. If we let this opening close and forget about our connections to Spider Woman, we lose our way. Yet we can keep this door open by chanting, and thus call on the universal wisdom of Spider Woman.
Continue to Page 2 of The Heart of the Goddess
