Goddess Tradition, Part 2

Circle Round: Raising Children in Goddess Traditions
by Starhawk

(Page 2 of 2)

Magic

Pagans practice magic. That doesn't mean we can just wave a wand and turn mice into horses. We wish we could! If you listen to the word magic, it sounds a lot like imagine. Magic is a way of training our imagination to make pictures and sounds and feelings and even smells in our minds that are so clear they almost seem to be real. When we say we practice, we're not kidding, because it takes a lot of practice, just as it does to become a good dancer or baseball player. Luckily imagination is something kids are naturally good at, better even than grown-ups.

Magic can't turn straw into gold. But with magic, we can change the way we feel about things, and sometimes that can change things outside us too. Magic can change the energy around us, and when energy changes, new things can happen. And magic can help us remember that we are part of the Goddess, that we are important and sacred and loved.

We use magic for healing, and for helping things go better in our lives and in the world around us. We believe that using magic to harm somebody is not only wrong but stupid. Whatever you send out with magic, whatever you create, that same kind of energy will return to you three times over. So if you use magic for good, for helping and healing, good will come to you. But if you use it to gain power over others, or in harmful or greedy ways, you are asking for harm to come to you.

The Elements

The four elements - air, fire, water, and earth - are especially sacred, because they are the things all life depends on. We all need air to breathe. Even the fish who live underwater need oxygen to survive. We all need water to drink. All life and growth on earth feeds on the sun's fiery energy. All our food, the minerals, and solid parts of our bodies come from the earth.

Whenever we begin a ritual, we call on the four elements because we know that everything depends on them. Each element goes with a different direction. Air is in the east, fire in the south, water in the west, and earth in the north. Where we live, on the west coast of California, the elements fit those directions very well, but your family may arrange them differently to fit your land and climate.

There is a fifth element, too, which is found in the center. We call that element spirit. You can't see it or touch it, but you can feel it inside, just as you can feel when somebody loves you.

Creation: A Story for Small Children
by Diane Baker

Circle round, and listen how we came to be. . .

The Goddess, alone in emptiness, felt the stirrings of love in her heart, love for a partner, love for a child, love for a friend. As love filled her heart, she became filled with swirling heat. She spun the heat into a great spiral, where it became the stars, including our own sun, making light. Delighted with her work, she laughed, and from this laughter formed the God, her partner and child. Now, knowing joy and life, she shared her gifts.

From our sun she blew great arms of fire that shot out into space, becoming swirling clouds that grew heavier and thicker, forming planets. The earth was one of these. Spinning around the sun, the earth grew denser, her surface covered with pale water and rock.

The Goddess, who holds within her the spark of all living things, found this planet mild enough for life, and scattered life's pieces across the earth in dense puddles.

She breathed upon these pieces. Tiny bits clumped together and made cells, each the tiniest quivering little piece of life, able to make itself again and again.

Life calls to life, and life comes from life. These bits jumped, bumped, and collided. Some learned how to turn sun and water into food. Some ate each other. Others sucked up minerals, dissolving rocks into soil.

Bits of life fused together, joined by seed and pollen, by egg and sperm. Others just divided themselves in half. Some groups became animals, some became plants. Their breath sweetened the air and their bodies fed the new soil.

Life grew abundantly, always growing and dying, nourishing itself until the earth sang. Some creatures grew big, others stayed tiny. Water bloomed with plants and fish. Air filled with birds and insects. Floating seeds and pollen covered the land with plants, and roaming animals grazed and preyed. Some of them thrived, some disappeared. Eventually, walking on two feet and flexing ten fingers, people came, carrying babies and making tools.

All life knew the Goddess, and people did, too. The first people fashioned her image from clay and stone. We drew her picture as we imagined her. We molded her image with clay. With words we wrote poems, with music we made songs, with our bodies we danced.

And now when we worship, when we journey toward the Goddess with our dance, our music, our songs, our drums, when we travel to our quiet places or our wild places, we feel her breath in our cells, that tingle of life we share.

The Goddess Dances the World Awake: A Creation Story
retold by Starhawk

Long ago, before anything was, the Goddess awoke alone in the vast dark and emptiness. She had as yet no name and no form, but she felt an urge to move. She stretched, she rocked, she began to dance. Whirling and twirling, she wheeled and spiraled through space.

Her dance set in motion a great wind that followed her, playing catch, trying to caress her. The Goddess danced with the wind, and the wind took form, becoming the God in the shape of a great serpent, Ophion. Ophion wrapped his coils around the Goddess, trying to become one with her, loving her with all his being.

Suddenly the Goddess felt something stirring inside her, as if her dance had come alive. Something wanted to be born. She reached out, and her arms became wings. As a giant dove, she flew aloft while Ophion coiled himself into a nest for her. She settled onto his back and laid a huge, huge egg.

Ophion guarded the egg, sheltering it from below as the Goddess brooded it from above. At last the egg cracked open and the whole universe fell out - suns and stars and galaxies, planets and moons and the green living earth, all spiraling and spinning, whirling and twirling through space in the Goddess's dance.

So that's how the world came to be. And the whole universe is still spiraling and spinning, whirling and twirling to this very day, in the dance of life!

Copyright © 1998 by Miriam Simos, Diane Baker and Anne Hill.

About the Author

Starhawk, author of The Fifth Sacred Thing and Walking to Mercury, lives with her husband, step-children, and Goddess-children in San Francisco, where she works with the Reclaiming collective. Diane Baker, a writer, attorney, and co-founder of the Reclaiming collective, lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband and two daughters. Anne Hill, a teacher, writer, and musician, works with the Reclaiming collective and lives in Sebastopol, California, with her husband and three children.