Happy a to say that the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids published my poem Brig in Touchstone Issue 305. This poem discusses the goddess Brig or Brigid, a goddess who blends the lines between Celtic goddess and Catholic Saint. According to Celtic studies scholar Jennifer Paxton, the goddess Brig was spread across the entire map of Europe and was preserved in the name Britain. It’s possible that Saint Brigid was a pre-Christian deity re-cast as a Christian saint. Indeed, her biographies depict miraculous abilities such as raising the waters of the river.

Brigid went on to found the monastery at Kildare, under a sacred oak tree, which came to be know as the Church of the Oak. Folklore dictates that a crooked cross should be woven from straw and placed above the rafters of one’s home for the goddesses blessings, particularly around the Celtic Fire Festival of Imbolc or Saint Brigid’s Day. I like to think of this goddess as an example of how paganism and goddess worship continued to thrive until the modern era incorporated directly into Christianity. It is often believed that Paganism was entirely eradicated, but I would argue that Celtic culture shows us the deep syncretism between the two worlds and gives us a glimpse into how goddess worship survived the heteropatriarchy of Christian imperialism.

As Tūtū Pele encroaches upon the Pōhakuloa Training Center, Hawai’ians are celebrating. Mauna Loa is erupting, and with it Tūtū Pele brings change. The goddess takes the Land Back, nothing can stop her. And in it, we can hear Dr. Huanani Kay Trask shouting, we are not American, we are not American, we will die as Hawaiians. Kū e, kū e, kū e.

My family comes from an auspicious marriage between a British privateer, Captain a George Charles Beckley and the Hawai’ian Chiefess Ahia, five generations ago under the auspices of King Kamehameha himself. My grandmother was Ramona Joy Kanoelani Beckley, the daughter of George Charles Beckley and Elizabeth Kanoelani Nalua’i, a royal woman indeed. Growing up hapa in California led me to be very disconnected from my lineage, and made me question the very idea of our connection to the Ali’i. A Hawai’ian with white skin is a thing to observe indeed, but I pray to the gods to show me the way.

Not far from the Pōhakuloa Training Center, beneath the long shadow of the mountain, and under the gaze of the goddess Poli’ahu, I proposed to my wife near a tree littered with animal bones. The spirits of those creatures lingered there, we could feel their eternal prescience haunting the land like wistful specters, benevolent and natural. They lived amongst the barrack like structures of the Mauna Kea Recreation Center, a different type of haunting ghost that litters the land like bullets.

We had taken a tour to sky gaze on Mauna Kea, but the sky was closed. The snow goddess turned us away. Our guide was a haole, he insisted the thirty meter telescope should be built there to bring jobs to the Hawai’ian people. For science. For the economy, he said. We knew better, we kept our voices silent, but our kūpuna knew our hearts. The overthrow of the Hawai’ian monarchy was an international crime, a coup to solidify the grip of the American empire in the Pacific.

When we our powerless, our goddess steps in to protect us. Tūtū Pele speaks for us now where we remained quiet. We utter our sacred pule to the goddess, ever so silently under the stream of media, the pundits that bark in the news, as our people speak of hope.

Nevertheless, I felt rejected by the goddess of the snow. I wanted to propose on the peak of the mountain, Mauna Kea, the birthplace of the Hawai’ian people and the tallest mountain on earth from the bottom of the sea to the top of the sky. In the tour ride down to Hilo, we held a dual sense of joy and disappointment: we were engaged, but in a manner different than I had imagined. Under the spattering of warm Hilo rain, I meditated upon the mountain. I asked the goddess for recourse, I wondered why she had rejected me. Why was I not allowed to see the snow covered peak of Mauna Kea, the birthplace of our people?

In my silent contemplation with the goddess, she told me to visit her sister Tūtū Pele at Kilauea first. Poli’ahu would reveal herself only after I sought the guidance of her sister. We ventured out for our morning coffee in the foggy rain, and stumbled upon an Oracle deck in the Hilo shops called Mana Cards: The Power of Hawaiian Wisdom. Skeptical, I did a card pull and sure enough She arrived, I pulled the card for Pele.

We took a night venture to the volcano through the rainy jungle air, playing Gabby Pahinui and Mark Kealiʻi Hoʻomalu, to my Auntie’s chagrin at the latter. She is a kumu hula, a teacher of the old traditions and ways of thinking. We entered Kilauea National Park, a curious sight to see Ranger hats guarding something that doesn’t belong to them, making sure that Kanaka have to pay the state to see their gods.

We drove past vents of steam rising from the ground, going toward the heavens where the Pueo flies with eternal grace. The caldera opened before us as we stepped out to greet Her. The night sky fell upon the volcano, and that’s when she began to dance. The goddess writhed in the red glow of flame, the magma caldera holding the most sacred woman in a plume of heat. She rose a hundred feet above the ground, glowing in the ember of the moon. I imagined my people sitting on that path watching intently as the goddess gave church, her sermon of the wild way under the guidance of the stars and moon. We chanted to her in call and response, words whose meanings I do not understand. But these words have informed my life since I was a child, cooking with my family during my auntie’s luau’s.

We drove over the mountain pass, and the peak evaded us still. We were married on a beach in Kona with five people as witnesses. The sea turtles beached beside us, the conch was blown, and we exchanged rings. I called upon our ancestors to witness our union something new and something sacred. Our child Koa Malulani was born many months later, carrying the torch of his grandmother. He was likely conceived in Hilo, under the slow pattern of rain drops falling from the misty ocean sky.

In the morning, the sky opened, the sea fog was swept out to the ocean. And the peak stood bare and snowy in the light of the island sun. The goddess revealed herself. And in ignorance I thought her revelation was complete. There was a sense of awe and wonderment at the sight, mixed with the deep confusion of witnessing the metal telescopes standing tall there on sacred ground. Their round domes looked like the bent backs of men who feel shame for what they had done.

It was time to go home. After all there are more Hawai’ians living in California than on the islands. Tourism is the economic model of the illegal state of Hawai’i. Hawai’ians are priced out of their own homes, banished from their ancestral homeland to live abroad like ghosts in a house where they don’t belong.

Once again we drove over the mountain rode. We saw the shacks of the mountain protectors, erected in protest as a home away from home to prevent the building of the thirty meter telescope. I saw the altar that they erected there and made an abrupt u-turn to the surprise of my passengers. The altar was erected in lava rock, bedecked in ti leaves, mangos, and flower leis. I offered obeisance and bowed in reverence. The Ki’i stared menacingly, daring any wrong doers to enter that place with ill intention. I noticed a banner caught on its wooden stave. I reached up to unfurl the banner, and then the goddess showed her stormy face.

The sleet of hail poured down on our heads, dropping rocks of snow like ice upon us in torrents. The hail pelted us as we ran back to our car. Poli’ahu had made herself known to us in that moment. She did not let us on the peak, but she let us into hear icy hearth fire. My journey on the island was complete, I saw the dueling sisters Pele and Poli’ahu, their dance of ice and fire in the glory of the Hawai’ian islands. And the Big Island became a new home, a place of refuge, a place where I experienced the goddess as an animating consciousness like no place I had ever seen before.

And as Tūtū Pele erupts from Mauna Loa, I offer my humble obeisances to her new plan. I pray that she melts down the bullets and the bombs of that land and covers them with earth. The earth does not belong to men, it belongs to Her. She decides how it will grow and evolve, who will live and who will die. She is the goddess, the animating principle, and Her magma moves to cover the land, building new islands as it cools. We cannot control Her. Our only hope is to surrender, to pray, and to observe the wonderment of Her manifestation as the consciousness of the very Earth itself.

Woman of the Snow

On the Hilo side, the island
smelled like never ending rain
falling like quarters tossed
Into a lovely Koi pond,
little fins erupting from the surface

Well I was stunned by orchid lei
I prayed to Poli’ahu
Can I see the snowy mountain
Without the thirty meter telescope?
A white man told me
The scope was good for jobs,
But my Mother tells me no.

I proposed under that mountain
Obscured by fog
Near the tree of bones
Littered with remains.
There, the snow woman
Turned me from the peak
And back down to the rain

The tarot told me Pele
And we took the night ride
To Kikauea
Singing Ho’omalu and Pahinui
On the way

My Mother danced there
Made of magma fire
And we chanted her names in flame
Mai Kahiki ka wahine, o Pele,
Mai ka aina i Pola-pola,
Mai ka punohu ula a Kane,
From the red cloud of Kane,
From the red cloud of Kane
In the church of rock and steam
Mother may I meet your sister
The goddess of ice and snow?

In the morning the cloud parted
I could see the snow there,
from ocean floor to mountain top
Mauna Kea, our holy birth place,
where the ocean floor touches the sky
the Ti leaves rustle in the wind

We took Pu’eo’s road to Kona
Her protectors lived there
in shacks of metal and scraps.
We stopped to give obeisance
to the alter of magma rocks
Ki’i, ti leaves, and mangos

The banners blew in the wind,
the Union jacks and mountain flags
I unfurled a banner
trapped upon its stave,
and She came there in torrents of sleet,
the hail poured its ice upon us
Poli’ahu, woman of the snow,
I have seen your face in the clouds
And I see you Nana, too, Kupuna
Grandmother in the Sky.

The Zubaan Books Poster Women project depicts ordinary women involved in the struggles of day to day life in the iconography of the goddess. The poster above reads:

No ten armed female Goddess ever toiled as I do for free
Yet insults, biting sarcasm and the stick, seem to be my only destiny.

SACHETNA, 31, Mahanirban Rd. Kolkata-700029

I believe this project is important because it strives to generate indigenous feminist narratives. Or more specifically, it generates narratives about feminism that are not informed purely by white feminist ideologies. It frames the struggles of Indian village women in iconographies that are familiar to India. Take the image below for example,

“How many hands will I have!
How much work will I do!”
Women should have equal rights in each sector

(South Orissa Voluntary Action) SOVA

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality forces us to look at the intersections of race, class, gender, and ability; and how those summate into various legal or structural ramifications that are more severe when grouped together. For example, the structural issues faced by a Black transgender man differ from the structural issues faced by a white female feminist.

This allows us to move away from the trite cultural appropriation of Kālī as “a badass goddess,” to the a culturally sensitive and indigenous feminism that interprets Kālī as Divine Mother who not only governs the universe but actually is the universe itself, The Creatrix. Seeing the sex worker Ramani, Ramakrishna declared “Mother, I see that you are in that form too.” Therefore, it’s not that Kālī is just some external source of power to be identified as “badass,” but Kālī is an internal power, the Goddess is the ordinary woman.

In my master’s thesis work, I theorized that a novel feminist theory could be derived simply from Kālī-bhakti, based on Vrinda Dalmiya’s work with Ramprasad Sen:

Consequently, through Kali-bhakti, the devotee–anyone who chooses to be a devotee–can access philosophical truth through a lived relationship. Kali-worship can thus bring together the metaphysical, the epistemological, and, as I shall argue (in the last two sections), an ethico-political vision

https://www.embodiedphilosophy.com/loving-paradoxes-a-feminist-reclamation-of-the-goddes-kali-2/

I recently submitted my master’s thesis for publication. So hopefully there is more of this to come!

In the Great Courses lecture, Hans-Freidrich Mueller, PhD comments on the comparative theology between these two seemingly distant pantheons of the ancient world

Other gods of interest include Varuna, who, like Greek Poseidon and Roman Neptune, was a god of waters, earthquakes, and justice. Surya, god of the sun, may be compared with Greek Helios and Roman Sol; Chandra, god of
the moon, with Greek Selene and Roman Luna. Vedic Vishwakarma was like Greek Hephaistos and Roman Vulcan; the Aswins were like the twins Castor and Pollux (also known as the Dioscuri). Ganesha has been compared to Janus; Balarama with Bacchus; Kartikeya with Ares and Mars; Durga with Hera and Juno; Sarasvati with Athena and Minerva; Sri with Aphrodite and Venus;
and Kama with Eros and Cupid.

I can only imagine a world in which western Paganism was not eradicated by Christianity. This world would probably be somewhat like India, home to a handful of the worlds extant major religions, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Sikhism. India’s ancient and medieval tolerance of religion was markedly different from the medieval world of the west. Though there’s little truth in the Wiccan sentiment of continuity between Pre-Christian paganism and modern Wicca, the idea of the “burning times,” is an interesting setting in which Western paganism was almost totally lost. Many times, the only surviving texts to reference, such as Snori’s Poetic Edda, are actually Christian reflections on Paganism that situate the Pagan world in a Christian cosmology. Unfortunately today, India appears to be losing some of that tolerance that it once held. But perhaps many Hindus see this as a method of survival, in the face of the eradication of Paganism by the monotheistic traditions. I would hope a spirit of religious plurality survives, but not at the sake of losing the gods.

I crafted this Venus of Willendorf just before my child was born for our birthing shrine this year. In a recently published paper, Weber et al. (2022) placed the Venus at ~30,000 years old. She was rediscovered by Szombathy et al. in the Danube in Willendorf/Lower Austria in 1908. According to Weber et al. (2022), the depiction of the Venus “represents a symbolized adult and faceless female with exaggerated genitalia, pronounced haunches, a protruding belly, heavy breasts, and a sophisticated headdress or hairdo.” Vandewettering (2015) states that hundreds of these types of “Venus” figurines were discovered “across Eurasia from Southern France to Siberia,” and that these figures varied greatly in material. Further, Vandewettering groups scholarship on the purpose and function of the Venus statues into themes, “sex, fertility and beauty; religious functions and matrifocal societies; and representations of actual people with practical functions” (2015). Though many sources question the validity of the Venus as a symbol for fertility, a recent paper (Johnson, Lanaspa, & Fox, 2015) affirms that, “Because survival required sufficient nutrition for child-bearing women, we hypothesized that the undernourished woman became an ideal symbol of survival and beauty during episodes of starvation and climate change in Paleolithic Europe.” The problem with ancient goddess traditions is that we understand very little about what those cultures actually practiced in their day to day lives. So we are left with assigning modern meaning to ancient custom. Whether the Venus of Willendorf represents divine goddess or mundane woman, I think we can assert our own goddess theology here and recognize the divinity in all women.

The Metamorphosis of Apeluis, dubbed the Golden Ass by Augustine, written in the 2nd century AD, details Lucius Apeluis’ encounter with the Goddess,

“When I had ended this orison, and discovered my plaints to the Goddesse, I fortuned to fall asleepe, and by and by appeared unto me a divine and venerable face, worshipped even of the Gods themselves. Then by little and little I seemed to see the whole figure of her body, mounting out of the sea and standing before mee, wherefore I purpose to describe her divine semblance, if the poverty of my humane speech will suffer me, or her divine power give me eloquence thereto. First shee had a great abundance of haire, dispersed and scattered about her neck, on the crowne of her head she bare many garlands enterlaced with floures, in the middle of her forehead was a compasse in fashion of a glasse, or resembling the light of the Moone, in one of her hands she bare serpents, in the other, blades of corne, her vestiment was of fine silke yeelding divers colours, sometime yellow, sometime rosie, sometime flamy, and sometime (which troubled my spirit sore) darke and obscure, covered with a blacke robe in manner of a shield, and pleated in most subtill fashion at the skirts of her garments, the welts appeared comely, whereas here and there the starres glimpsed, and in the middle of them was placed the Moone, which shone like a flame of fire, round about the robe was a coronet or garland made with flowers and fruits. In her right hand shee had a timbrell of brasse, which gave a pleasant sound, in her left hand shee bare a cup of gold, out of the mouth whereof the serpent Aspis lifted up his head, with a swelling throat, her odoriferous feete were covered with shoes interlaced and wrought with victorious palme. Thus the divine shape breathing out the pleasant spice of fertill Arabia, disdained not with her divine voyce to utter these words unto me: Behold Lucius I am come, thy weeping and prayers hath mooved mee to succour thee. I am she that is the naturall mother of all things, mistresse and governesse of all the Elements, the initiall progeny of worlds, chiefe of powers divine, Queene of heaven! the principall of the Gods celestiall, the light of the goddesses: at my will the planets of the ayre, the wholesome winds of the Seas, and the silences of hell be diposed; my name, my divinity is adored throughout all the world in divers manners, in variable customes and in many names, for the Phrygians call me the mother of the Gods: the Athenians, Minerva: the Cyprians, Venus: the Candians, Diana: the Sicilians Proserpina: the Eleusians, Ceres: some Juno, other Bellona, other Hecate: and principally the Aethiopians which dwell in the Orient, and the Aegyptians which are excellent in all kind of ancient doctrine, and by their proper ceremonies accustome to worship mee, doe call mee Queene Isis. Behold I am come to take pitty of thy fortune and tribulation, behold I am present to favour and ayd thee, leave off thy weeping and lamentation, put away all thy sorrow, for behold the healthfull day which is ordained by my providence, therefore be ready to attend to my commandement.”

Lucius Apuleius, The Golden Asse, trans. William Adlington (Apple Books, 1566), 433.

Though a work of fiction, the goddess theology apparent in this text remains germane today. Compare this with the theology of the Devī Māhātmya of the Indian subcontinent. The great goddess multiplies Her forms when slaying a host of demons, and encountering the demon Śumbha, He declares,

“10.3 ‘O Durgā, who are corrupt with the arrogance of power, do not show your pride here, for though you are haughty, you fight depending on the strength of others.’

Kali, Devadatta. Devimahatmyam: In Praise of the Goddess. Berwick, ME: Nicolas-Hays, Inc., 2003.

To which the Great Goddess responds,

“10.5 ‘I am alone here in the world. Who else is there besides me? Behold, O vile one! These are but projections of my own power, now entering back into me.’”

Kali, Devadatta. Devimahatmyam: In Praise of the Goddess. Berwick, ME: Nicolas-Hays, Inc., 2003.

Although we cannot necessarily come to the conclusion that there was a comprehensive and global goddess cult in the ancient world simply from this comparative theology here, we can at least note that goddess theology has a recurring theme: (1) The goddess has a singular great form, and (2) the goddess multiplies her names and forms across time and place. This establishes a sacred cultural window by which the goddess touches the mundane world and reaches to Her devotees in the form that they understand best. Or as Ramakrishna said so beautifully,

“The mother cooks different dishes to suit the stomachs of her different children. Suppose she has five children. If there is a fish to cook, she prepares various dishes from it—pilau, pickled fish, fried fish, and so on—to suit their different tastes and powers of digestion.”

Mahendranath Gupta, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, trans. Nikhilananda (New York, NY: Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center, 2007), 127.