FREEING The DIVINE SERPENT
The key to healing my miserable love life, lay in the alchemy of reclaiming my suppressed, beauty-full, Aphroditean Goddessy nature. I took a hard look at myself in the mirror… what I saw surprised me…
I was born under a Venus morning sky. A naturally sensual little girl, I adored the feel of my toes in dark brown squishy mud after a summer rain, and the easy feel of napping in the thick arms of a large oak tree in the flowery alleyway behind our house. I had no name for my need to lie in the grass and watch a starry night sky, no concept or word for aliveness or the mysterious stirrings within me. I only knew that my body and I craved warm sun melting into our bones, running in the moonlight, and smelling damp earth after a rainstorm. There was something wonderfully familiar in the excitement of lightening flashing through the sky. I needed intimate closeness and lots of loving touches too, lots more than I was used to getting at home in my traditionally non- demonstrative family. But to speak of any of this was simply not done in my world then, and like so many of us, I began to forget my natural ways. It would be a very long time before I could connect this early loss with a lifelong adult compulsivity with lovers — about as long as it would take me to acknowledge that I am a child of Venus-Aphrodite, and remember the source of my wondrous, alive feelings.
Because so many of my sisters — both clients and friends — have shared similar experiences of heartache and confusion resulting from alienation from their own Aphrodite natures, I want to share with you a major breakthrough period of mine. Since transformation is rarely a singular experience, my breakthrough “wave” was dependent upon the momentum created by countless preceding ebbs and flows. I’ve chosen the timeframe of my 41st through 46th years and three particular movements to relate. As is frequently the case with those of us on the journey, part of the change came to me as gentle gifts from the Goddess, and the rest I struggled for.
The first movement of my five year awakening came as a result of discovering a new, more profound facet of my sexual, orgiastic and ecstatic nature. The “fire breath” or “valley” orgasm exploded through me like a mysterious serpentine force, firing jolts of electric current, and other times lulling me into oceanic bliss and private rainbow light shows. I was studying both Native American and Indian “Tantra” and these were compelling me to open up my mind, heart and body. The idea that sexuality was sacred was enhancing me, transforming my ability to creatively give and receive the powerful alchemical energies of the Love Goddess. Although I didn’t fully realize it yet, I was consciously rediscovering my wildest, erotic nature, this time as a “legitimate” part of the Beauty of my own womanly essence. From this realization the stage was set for the fullness of my unique gifts to be brought forth.
The second preliminary to my full-blown breakthrough happened in June and July of 1991. I had fashioned a piece of ceremonial art called “Woman’s Warrior Shield.” The piece is seen as either a face or a woman’s mid-body, depending upon how you look at it. It’s composed of a large collection of all sorts of recycled and found objects from owl feathers and wild animal teeth to two aluminum gas stove burner pieces that function either as breast plates or eyes, depending upon your vantage point.
I had created her in order to undertake a “vision quest” to mourn a recently lost lover. Knowing all my addictive and codependent patterns, and really desiring to be free of them and my oppressive legacy of “needing” men, I conjured the spirit of my shield. I asked for guidance and courage to overcome my fears so that I could live a free, abundant and powerful life, meaningful in its own right without a man.
The quest lasted twelve days. For ten of those days, I was miserably lonely, aware that I wasn’t having any earth shattering breakthroughs, either. To my relief, on the eleventh day, the “aha” burst through. I had prayed for the courage to face my greatest fears, and I was getting very clear that they were wrapped in the all-consuming loneliness… Now that I had faced it, I could ask what I must do differently in the future when the loneliness came upon me again.
I felt newer, wiser, closer to the bare bones. I honored my own essentials of living: my quest for awareness, my faith in the possibility for healthy loving relationships, and my need to be useful to other people each day. Finally, after my profoundly agonizing experience, I knew at last that I could emotionally survive the agony of my lifelong loneliness, whenever it came to me. Had I also known that it was Aphrodite, the Love Goddess within me that I had always been so lonely for, I might have emerged wiser yet, but I would have to wait another month to “accidentally” engage my Aphrodite self, full on.
While on Maui, I had brought along a play written by the lover I was grieving over. It was to profoundly influence my breakthrough. As the story in this play unfolds, the Divine Snake Goddess is dancing in the moonlight when a king notices her. Finding her irresistible, he aches to be with her. Entranced, he feels he must have her and make her his bride. She consents, and they are married. However, soon after the marriage vows, he becomes terrified of her mysterious powers, and perhaps of losing her as well, and he locks her in a tower where she remains.
I had certainly recognized this fear of women in the scores of men I knew. However, I had also begun to look honestly within myself, finding that I myself misunderstood and feared my own powerful nature. Thus cut off from the richness of my own feminine fullness, I was prey to the familiar pattern of believing they controlled the life-giving power I needed. I alternately feared or seductively envied them. The important men in my life did the same with me, co-creating the all-too-familiar dance of approach and retreat from intimate, close communion.
A late summer evening in my West Los Angeles home presented me with a perfect setting for what I intended to be a healing experience, but did not yet realize would be the third movement of my Aphroditean transformational journey. August 17th was a coolish evening… The breeze from the ocean two miles away perfumed my patio and home with the heady scent of night- blooming jasmine.
I had decided that this night I would create a ceremony and go on a “sacred journey”. Having newly been introduced to mind- altering substances — a conservative latecomer I was — I had secured a small tab of “ecstasy,” a compound a more experienced friend of mine called “synthetic grace.” I knew it had been researched widely with depressed patients, and was found to effect states of joy or rapture. I wanted to be done with my pain and the losses of all the men in my life, beginning with my lack of intimate connection with my father. I knew that wouldn’t happen until I had some profound insight about the real roots of my depression. Armed with a tall quart bottle of water, I had decided to take the tab and trust the powers that be to assist me. Little did I know Aphrodite was waiting in the wings as I began to set my ceremonial stage. I burned sage as incense, lighted scented candles and turned on a friend’s invention, a light-making machine that twirls a wheel of rainbow colors, making splendid splashes on my white walls. I remembered my Woman’s Warrior Shield to symbolize my recent courageous victory on Maui. “What else?” I mused out loud. “A mirror and a pillow to sit on,” said a Voice just outside my head. Having learned not to question these “voices”, I obeyed. “Now, remove your clothing and sit in front of the mirror. Take the ecstasy tab.”
I sat mirror-bound for an indeterminable time, regarding my face and all my body parts. For having just turned 46 years old, I looked surprisingly youthful to myself. Except for my eyes. There was something “awe-ful” there. Dare I look? Was it the drug? Oh well. I had conjured this, better stay alert, pay attention. I stared into my reflection. The woman there looking back at me seemed real! I was drawn to her eyes. I edged my pillowed seat up even closer for viewing, leaning over with my face almost touching the mirror. Peering into the eyes looking back at me, I saw a truth about them I’d never witnessed so clearly; there was enormous pain there. “What is hurting you so much?” I asked, tears beginning to stream down our shared eyes. “What is wrong with you?”
Wordlessly, telepathically, an answer fell on the silence surrounding us. “I’m locked in a tower,” she said “It’s so lonely here, and I’m so stifled.”
Omigod, I was looking at the Moon dancer, the Goddess that was locked in the tower! And, she was me! I was her. I stared again into our eyes, hungry to devour any information I might find there. I felt the shackled weight of her eons of captivity, the fear rounding her magic, her dance, her attractiveness, her full-bodied sensual, sexual essence! I had been suppressing her full expression all my life! I was the culprit that was keeping her locked up! I was the prison guard. I wept, grieving for what I had done.
But wait! If she was my prisoner, I must have the key to her freedom! Could I risk letting her out? Yes, yes, yes!
I was ready; the Divine Serpent began to dance me, moon dance me. I turned on my stereo to a pumping soulful rock station and began to move. I danced for four hours in hot, sexy, erotic celebration of being female. Reaching for a bottle of massage oil, I anointed myself all over, pleasuring myself in ways that echoed what I knew of ancient rites, enjoying wave after wave of orgiastic, rapturous undulation. I was alone, I was full, I was complete. I laughed out loud, realizing once and for all that I had been trying to get this experience from men my whole life! I had been looking in the wrong place. These magical, erotic, whole-making feelings had been inside me all along. I now accepted and welcomed them as the Goddess Aphrodite within, my namesake, my mentor, my own.
Since that summer’s night in ’91, I have never forgotten the fullness of my transformational experience. Like the small girl loving to squish her toes in the mud, who wondered why she was “turned on” to lightning, I will always need to dance in the moonlight and bask in the sun. I will always be awed by and grateful for the transformational changes in my life. I welcome the daily opportunities to be “love goddess”. Thank you, Aphrodite, sweet inspiration.
[Originally published in Crone Chronicles, Summer 1995]
