I don’t know how I missed until now reading the following book published in the mid-1990s, but there you go, fascinating texts can slip through the cracks! The book is “The Body of the Goddess: Sacred Wisdom in Myth, Landscape and Culture” by the well-known Tarot expert Rachel Pollack. The back-story is that I was watching Jules at Pandora Portal (on YouTube) where she talked about the re-release of Pollack’s “Shining Tribe Tarot”. That Tarot has been on my back-burner for a while; the art doesn’t really appeal to me even though the essence of it does. However, anyone who has read my blog tabs “About” and “Gaia” will already know that I’ve been on the Goddess path for nearly thirty years. What’s intoxicating is that I’m always learning, exploring, and finding new relationships with the Goddess in Her many guises and energies. Yet, I’ve also noticed through the years that for all the times I felt I came ‘full circle’, it was less a circle than a spiral because I arrived at different layer or level than the one I was previously in; Pollack mentioned this as well:
“The Goddess religion itself is not linear. But neither is it simply a circle, not int he sense of something static that repeats itself over and over without change. Its cycles are those of a spiral procession, moving away and back again. … She has suddenly returned to us at this most unlikely of times. Though part of this return involves those discoveries of archaeology and the decoding of ancient texts and images, She is not the same as the Goddess of thousands of years ago. A religion based on the divine body is a religion of change, of that spiral movement turning and opening into new experience.”
I appreciate how at the very beginning Pollack gives full measure of gratitude to the exhaustive work of mytho-archaeologist Marija Gimbutas who, against tremendous academic push-back, brought us four brilliant tomes on Old Europe’s prehistoric Goddess figurines.
A fascinating side note for me was that Pollack said: “Originally I conceived of this book as a series of journeys to sacred places. I would visit the Greek Temples, and the prehistoric caves in France, and describe the places and their significance.” This reminded me of my own pilgrimage to Greece, the island of Crete specifically, which I wrote about in my memoir titled “Minoan Messages.”
Needless to say, I’m eager to sit down and thoroughly immerse myself in Pollack’s journey!
Barefoot On The Gaia Path 