Girl God Books

01/01/2025

"Our assumptions about human nature, in particular our beliefs about the capacity of human beings to live in harmony with the rest of nature and to shape a peaceful world, are crucial to whether or not we can actually create a better way of being. If we hold that human beings are and always have been primarily hunters and warriors, then we are more likely to overlook evidence to the contrary and conclude that war-like aggression is innate. No evidence has been found that Palaeolithic people fought each other. It is then moving to discover that our Palaeolithic ancestors have something to teach us, specifically about the way we have misinterpreted their art, and so their lives, by pressing them into a world view belonging to the twentieth century."

- Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image

Art by Debra Hall

01/01/2025

"Women (and the people who love us) must dig deep into our souls to liberate the questions that have been locked away in our time capsules. We must traverse the annals of history to unearth the sacred sites that have been violently gentrified by white patriarchy. We must find the Divine Truth that cannot be claimed, contained or tamed. What better place to start than at the beginning with Lilith, the world's first woman."-Christena Cleveland, Ph.D., in her Preface

01/01/2025

01/01/2025

Art by .valeur

01/01/2025

“At the heart of PaGaian Cosmology is the re-storying and expression of Goddess metaphor for the sacred: it was She who called me – into Her, to learn of Her, to find a way to speak of Her. This cosmology is originally a study and embodiment of Goddess in three qualities – often known commonly as “Virgin, Mother and Crone,” but globally She has been named and praised in various terms: such as possessing the three qualities of ‘preserver/protector,’ ‘creative power,’ and ‘destructive power’ (Kali in India); or in other ancient depictions the three qualities are represented perhaps with grain, sword and snake (Hecate in Greece); perhaps with grain, throne and scorpion (Anatha of Egypt); perhaps as poet, physician and smith-artisan as in the case of Celtic Brigid. Sometimes She has been represented as three matrons (Germany and Italy). In East Asia, there are many triplicities and triads: in Korea Mago, the Creatrix, is identified with Samsin (Triad Deity) and also Goma is referred to as one of the “Three Sages.” In South America, the Goddess Chia is known as a triple goddess.

In our times She and Her multivalent dimensions have rarely been understood, and frequently Her triplicity has been re-configured as three sages or kings; and in some religions She has been replaced with an all-male trinity. Yet many continued to seek Her.”

-Glenys Livingstone Ph.D., A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos: Celebrating Her within PaGaian Sacred Ceremony – Girl God Books

Art by Lauren Raine

31/12/2024

"We call upon the ancestors, the ones that we hold dear
They’ll guide you on your journey with knowledge you can trust
Fire, feast, and celebrate
Burn leaves of gold and rust
The New Year is upon us, so raise your voice in song
Sing with your father’s father, you’ve waited all year long
Dance with your mother’s mother and join in ritual rhyme
We honor all their wisdom, passed down through all of time.”

~ Susan Reynolds

Art by Dee Mulrooney

31/12/2024

My New Year's wish for all the world.

Art by Lucy Pierce

31/12/2024

Understanding trauma is liberating. Healing trauma is revolutionary. Speaking about trauma is political. Women and their bodies are no longer willing to be silent to or be the secret store of patriarchal abuse, control, and power. Goddess is showing the way, cell-by-cell, emotion-by-emotion, sensation-by-sensation. Healing trauma is a portal for freedom and a gateway to societal and collective change.

Re-Membering with Goddess is an anthology of women's experiences of trauma—trauma as a result of patriarchy; trauma perpetuated by patriarchy; and how through personal healing of trauma the Goddess is re-membered, re-embodied and resurrected.

As repeating loops of trauma restriction release--in the mind, body and nervous system—Goddess is re-embodied and rises... and the patriarchy falls.

31/12/2024

"Symbols of the Goddess would be systematically co-opted and later destroyed, to be replaced by symbols of her destruction. Cúchulainn is represented killing the Serpent in several myths and images, St. George kills the dragon, and in Ireland St. Patrick is credited with banishing the reptiles. The Goddess was one of the hardest images for Western culture to eradicate, and it can be said that only by killing the Serpent, severing the natural cycle of life and death, could dualistic patriarchal culture come into being.

Killing the Goddess as such was not what was important. More critical was the destruction of those symbolic, political, familial, and religious sources of power traditionally associated with women. This would be the precondition for the new society to take root, a society where men would take it upon themselves to give birth; where women would be firmly under control; and where kings, warriors, and priests would develop elite forms of power, effectively abolishing or superseding the power structures of the clan systems.

Crushing the Serpent/Goddess, therefore symbolized the overthrow of those societies, together with their religions, which were matricentered."

~ Mary Condren, "The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland"

Art by Jess Merrow

31/12/2024

"We have reached a place of deepest emptiness and sorrow. We look at the destruction around us and perceive our collective poverty. We see that everything truly needed by the world is too large for individuals to give. We find we have only ourselves. Our experience. Our dreams. Our simple art. Our memories of better ways. Our knowledge that the world cannot be healed in the abstract. That healing begins where the wound was made.

Now it seems to me we might begin to understand something of the meaning of earnest speaking and fearless listening; something of the purpose of the most ancient form of beginning to remake the world: remembering what the world we once made together was like."

-Alice Walker, The Way Forward is With A Broken Heart

Art by Lauren Raine

31/12/2024

"The deities of these people, as Eisler has noted, carry no spears, swords or thunderbolts, nor are there any lavish chieftain burials suggesting a hierarchical organization of society with powerful leaders and a submissive population. There are no pictures that celebrate or even depict war. Rather, the myriad images from nature attest to their feeling for the beauty and sanctity of life. The primary purpose of life was evidently not to conquer, pillage and loot, nor was the relation with the divine one of fear and obedience."

- Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image

Art by Debra Hall

31/12/2024

"In order to enter A Poiesis of the Creative Cosmos, begin the night before. Go out under the stars and let their beauty soak into you. Bring to mind the 320 million Earth-like planets sprinkled throughout the Milky Way galaxy and imagine there are other beings out there who are, simultaneously, trying to imagine us. As you climb into bed, reflect on the stunning truth coming from both the ancient ones and the contemporary scientists, that you are at the center of the universe, at the very center along with everyone else. After a deep sleep, you will be ready to enter the PaGaian wheel of ceremony which has taken Glenys an entire lifetime to create. She has had to struggle out of the unconscious arrogance and profound ignorance of industrial society in their dismissal of the wisdom embedded in Goddess-based cultures. Working with other poets of the cosmos, she has constructed a spiritual practice that enables us to root ourselves in place and celebrate the sacred annual journey about the sun. By releasing ourselves into the wisdom of her ceremonies, we find our creative energies reinvigorated as we set forth to give poetic expression to the divine presence in which we live. Glenys Livingstone, the author of this cosmological poetry, is a planetary treasure."
-Brian Thomas Swimme, Author of Cosmogenesis