Vicki Noble Quotes

The Goddess of all Things rose naked from Chaos and found nowhere to place her foot. Separating the sea from the sky, she brooded over the waters until she gave birth to life-Herself.

The Feminine, in my version, was fiery and substantial, taking up real space with her real expression of self and demanding to be encountered rather than imagined.

All women are twins. All women are fundamentally two in one, our most essential structural feature being our bipolar nature entrained with the ceaseless rhythms of the 'inconstant Moon,' to quote Shakespeare's Juliet. Each one of us, for much of her adult life, moves monthly between the light and dark poles of hormonal and emotional fluctuation-from ovulation to menstruation. At one point expanded, then introverted; reaching out and going within; we descend to depths of unfathomable complexity and return to the world empowered and ready to begin again. Unlike the linear, one-pointed man, women (and the ancient religions of the Goddess) flow with the cyclic rhythms of the waxing and waning Moon, with its birth, death, and rebirth.

One night, while studying Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God series, I read for the first time that the Garden of Eden story was the retelling of a much earlier motif in which the woman, the tree, the serpent, and the garden formed an emblematic expression of the highest spiritual quest. I was absolutely stunned, as though an explosion had gone off within me. At that moment, I realized I was not wrong, as a small child, to yearn to become Eve―not the biblical Eve, but the one who is simultaneously the tree as axis mundi connecting earth and sky, the serpent of death and regeneration, and the garden as the matrix of all life. I asked myself: What ground am I standing on? The answer came in a flash: that my feet had been cut off and I was planted with my bloody stumps on the desiccated ground of the Punitive Father. At that moment, I knew I had to find the Sacred Ground under my own feet, and to recover this ancient female lineage within myself. - excerpt from Foremothers of the Women's Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries, edited by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble

Most of us these days find ourselves less than fully well, physically or mentally – somehow out of balance. We can feel our dis-ease, but don’t ordinarily know the solutions to it. If we knew how to make ourselves well, we would almost certainly do so. The great gift of the Goddess is such a healing. To the individual, she brings personal well-being and an experience of fully living. To humanity, she could bring the harmony that comes with a recognition that we are all connected in spirit to this planet. We depend upon it for survival and we owe it the gift of life.

When we remember the Goddess and the old earth-based religion, we come back into contact with cycles and the eternal return that lets us face death without fear. It wasn't until 400CE that the Christian church declared that there were no cycles, no reincarnation. Until that time, everyone knew the obvious, that there certainly it life after death, and it is not only in the eternal realm. One of the joyous reclaimings that accompanies our re-membering is that we get over the insidious fear of the Death Goddess and realize she is only the other face of the Mother. In surrender to her, we leave the problem in her hands; in allowing ourselves to be used in the healing of the planet, we become part of the solution.

Internally

When I was five years old, my mother took me to a Baptist Sunday school, where I first heard the Garden of Eden story. I was shocked to learn that Eve, the first woman, was created as an afterthought by God out of Adam’s rib and that she was responsible for all of the sorrows of the world. Eve had listened to the serpent and persuaded Adam to join her in eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. I was humiliated by the message that all females share the guilt of Eve’s original sin. At the same time, this knowledge resolved my deep confusion about why my daddy was so mean to my mother and to me―why we were always being brutally punished. Suddenly I realized that my father―who was male, just like God―could kill us and it would never make up for our sin of being female. I began to pray every night to become Eve so I could somehow reverse the curse so that there would be no more pain and suffering in the world. - excerpt from Foremothers of the Women's Spirituality Movement: Elders and Visionaries, edited by Miriam Robbins Dexter and Vicki Noble

The work of seizing back what has been taken from within us by centuries of female repression and early, often brutal childhood conditioning is a long, laborious process, requiring faith and vigilance and the willingness to learn by trial and error. It is our female-animal instincts that have been denied and suppressed then replaced by false, externally imposed rules and ideas about ourselves and the world. We have lost the instinctive knowing that belonged to us by biological birthright in the millennia that preceded the development of patriarchal culture and male dominance. It is not a question of returning to the past but one of reawakening the instinctual senses and the empowerment needed to act on what our bodies know to be true.

I know that when the kundalini moves in me, she is sacred and not dangerous; she is alive and so am I. My sexuality, my healing prowess, and my abundant energies are all part of the same gift of the Goddess in my sacred body. The body is more than a sensual receptor, more than a physical vehicle, it is an instrument of superconscious awareness with a direct line to the soul.

There is energy released from within that carries with it the power to heal. First destruction, then creation… The fire burns through the old structures eradicating them, transmuting their energies to a higher vibrational level. Then the creative energy released from the destruction allows for the cure of whatever ails the body.

A woman shaman, like a spider spinning, must learn to lead from the womb. To move our attention from the head to the belly, from the mind to the body, a woman must learn to read the signals and to trust them. Otherwise she’ll never be sure about the difference between her intuition and those fearful little voices in her head that tell her to be cautious, stop, don’t and so on.

For a woman to actually repossess herself and to centre there is a monumental task, taking years of difficult, painstaking work…. Once a woman has done the work of re-membering herself, she is much more able to change the world effectively.

In India they say the Great Goddess Durga is a Warrior Goddess present always in the eternal but who manifests in the physical when the demons get out of hand. Today’s resurgence of interest in shamanism and a return of the Goddess is our version of Durga making her presence felt. Goddess as shaman is manifesting to rid the planet of the evil forces, and the obvious way she can take form is through women- her embodied priestesses- and all people behaving in a feminine way. Women as a group are re-membering. It seems that because we have nothing to lose and everything to regain, we are able to open these memories and access this available information as it arises from the center of our psyches. As we do this, if we are willing to stand our ground and refuse to have it co-opted or compromised by established values and paradigms, sooner or later men will also hunger for these changes, joining us in the creation of a world from this memory