I lit shabbat candles at sundown, which I can do again now that I'm alone and things are peaceful again. In ancient times shabbat was Goddess Day, and 13 was the most sacred number -- 13 moons, 13 menses. This is illustrated in the oldest cave art on earth, up until 7th century B.C.E. when a king got pissed at a priestess oracle for correctly predicting his downfall, and sought revenge by burning all the priestesses and making Goddess worship illegal, and synonymous with "idolatry." But there's a reason only women light shabbat candles, and Judaism is still inherited via matrilineal descent. The kohenet (priestesses) were killed and male "Kohens" were invented to take their place. And things have sucked ever since.
My dad revealed that when observing me as a very small child he thought I'd be a religious leader someday. I was surprised to hear this, because he doesn't know that I had more followers than Muhammad's army when I had a Goddess history blog.
I don't really tell him about how I seem to often know and predict things I shouldn't be able to know or predict, via dreams -- and sometimes while awake, like when I had a terrifying experience in the woods up north and felt something terrible happened there because my pounding heart told me so, and later researched and learned a genocide happened there against all the women and children of an indigenous tribe who were alone without men that night, 162 years ago. I too was alone without men that night, so maybe I was sensitive somehow to that. Maybe it was the trees who told me. I have no idea.
I still can't explain the intense fear I felt and I still can't find a scientific explanation for why a ticking clock might speed up suddenly and get stuck between two notches and start rapidly flitting back and forth while I laid frozen in the dark, afraid to breathe or move an inch, until about 30 minutes passed and I finally mustered the courage to take the battery out. The owners of the cabin sold it the very next year.
I wasn't able to find a historical map of the massacre until one week ago, and there it was, a little triangle quietly confirming the exact location where hundreds of women were murdered in the middle of the night, the same place where I froze in fear as if my own life was in immediate danger, heart pounding, clock hand speeding up (or was I slowing down?) I learned, after the incident, that all shamans were women in that tribe. I don't know why or how I felt what happened there was bad, but what I felt turned out to be factual. It wasn't the first time. It happens regularly. I think I might be what people call "sensitive."
Maybe my dad noticed the way I'd stare at leaves or observe the bees for hours when I was small before I knew about the bee priestesses of Minoa, or how I sought solace under ancient oaks to heal me long before I knew trees had historical significance in the original religion of the world. Maybe it was because I'd spent hours alone by the abandoned ancient spiral petroglyph carved by the native tribe that once occupied the area near my house. An archaeological site no one in our small rural town seemed to know about except me.
My dad doesn't know the books I read, or the significance of the ancient imagery that adorns my walls to make me feel that I'm where I should be, reminding me of some long forgotten place that feels familiar.
I waxed poetic to N about oak trees and my elderly drag queen friend until midnight when I finally collapsed to sleep, voice hoarse from an unusually busy and intense day of being a grief-healer, which is apparently my new profession.
I am bad at numbers but good at words. My dad is bad at words but good at numbers. I told him no one is good at everything because we're a collective consciousness, we are fragments of a far larger organism, but when we put our brains together, we multiply our power. Two brains are better than one. A collective brain fills in all the gaps we have as individuals.
I keep speaking sermons. In childhood I craved wisdom and guidance so badly that I gave up looking outside of myself for it and attempted to create it in myself by piecing together every fragment of wisdom I could find, collaging together the woman I wished I had in my life, the rabbi or priestess or goddess I so badly needed to look up to for advice. I wanted to be holy, to know the meaning of life. I wanted to make a career of asking questions and of learning.
I'm trying to figure out how these parts of me fit into modern society. How I can make use of these urges. How I can live a life that feels sacred, meaningful. How I can connect to that which is larger than myself.
Oracles and shamans aren't so revered and common as they were prior to patriarchal conquest, but that doesn't mean they disappeared. The world still has women after all. For centuries men in power flipped the script and told us our gift wasn't intuition but hysteria. That we were abnormal because we are not men. I first doubted this around age 7 when I asked everyone why the first words of the bible said "THEY created the heavens and the earth." They? My teachers used "He/Him" pronouns, but it seemed the creation story didn't align, and all the propaganda in the world wasn't enough to hide the original intent. Not from me at least.
7:49 a.m. - 2022-12-10