Newsletter January 2007


Greetings dear sisters!

I hope you have all had a loving and peaceful start to the new year. My own solstice-tide was a rich and full one, bringing with it a definite deepening in the quality of the blessings which I am working to ground through the Daughters of Ishtar.

2007
Building the Temple of the Goddess, One Ceremony at a Time

Summer solstice is often a high point in the cycle of my Goddess-year. The sun, my ruling ‘planet’ astrologically speaking, is at the height of her power, as we celebrate the bright Queen of Heaven and Earth and enthrone her in our hearts and lives. This year was no exception… (see below for a fuller account)

The Daughters of Ishtar theme for 2007 is “Building the temple of the Goddess, one ceremony at a time”. So without more ado, here are the dates for 2007 as I currently have them...

Ishtar Mysteries Cycle for Women

Venue: In 2007 the Goddess mystery cycle ceremonies will take place at Sheik to Sheik bellydance studio in Lefroy Rd, Beaconsfield.

Timing: The venue will be open from 6pm, and everyone is welcome to join us in the sacred work of setting up the temple space. Arrive by 6:30pm for a prompt start to the ceremony at 6:45. We need to be packed up and out of the space by 10pm.

Cost: Entry is by donation. These ceremonies are at the core of my work as a priestess, and I choose not to put a specific price on them. Instead, I invite women to give as generously as their spirit prompts and their circumstances allow. The money you donate pays for the various expenses such as advertising, venue hire, materials, etc, and (hopefully!) enables me to continue to devote time to developing and deepening this work for the whole community.

~ Chalice Ceremony ~
A space for remembering and reconnecting

The weekly Chalice Ceremony continues at 6pm on Mondays
in the small sanctuary at the back of the Sun, Moon & Star
Spiritual Centre in White Gum Valley.

These ceremonies are open to men as well as women – whoever seeks the Goddess is welcomed here.

If the women’s mystery ceremonies are high holy feast days, the chalice ceremony is the nourishing bread and juice of everyday life. Where in the mystery cycle much is spontaneously guided and there are never two ceremonies alike, the Chalice Ceremony originally came to me in the form of a written liturgy – a series of beautiful prayers and invocations which are repeated each week, and gradually become intimately familiar, a cyclical marker in the grand spiral of time.

I have made a personal commitment to hold this space on an ongoing basis as part of my own spiritual practice, and I welcome any who feel drawn to join me, whether on an occasional basis or more regularly.

Once again, entry is by donation.


Women's Goddess Mysteries Retreat
~ Coming Home to Ourselves ~

I'm planning a winter weekend retreat for

30th June
to 2nd July
2007

More details as the year unfolds...

 

This slogan, or perhaps I mean mantra, popped into my head the day of the ceremony as I found myself with my electric jigsaw in my hands, busily constructing banner stands upon which to hang our four beautiful Ishtar temple banners.. I’m going to get a small number of bumper stickers printed with this message – so if you’d like one or two, please contact me to put in your order.

Volume 3, No.1


"There I was, shining and dancing.."
from Babylonian Songs of Inanna

In this issue:-

2007 Ishtar Ceremonies

Friday 9th February
Mystery of desire, discovering the Lover and the Beloved within us

Friday 23rd March
Goddess angels, openness, surrender and the mystery of conception

Friday 4th May
T he quickening of our inward pregnancy, connection to the ancestral realm

Friday 22nd June
Birthing mystery - we connect with the power of the Birthing Mother and give birth to ourselves/our visions

Friday 3rd August
The communion of the breath – connecting us to the starry/spirit realms, and to the body of our mother the Earth

Friday 21st September
In the lap of the mother, we are held and suckled in the arms of the Star Goddess

Friday 2nd November
D aughterhood, the threshold mystery of our cyclical bleeding, growing towards autonomy

Friday 14th December
S tepping into our red power, enthroning the Queen of Heaven in our own hearts.

(We celebrate the summer solstice a little early because it is such a busy time of year.)

 

About
the Chalice Ceremony

The ceremony gives us the opportunity to give thanks for the many blessings bestowed upon us.

At the heart of this ceremony is the intention to pray and work energetically to bring healing for the wounded or out-of-balance aspects of our planet, our culture, our communities. And also for the inner landscapes and communities of our own body and psyche.

The primary symbols used in the ritual are a bowl of grain, a chalice of commingled water, juice and wine, and a small round loaf of damper or unleavened bread.

Anyone for
a Film Night?

I recently purchased a copy of the documentary "Signs Out of Time" - about the life and work of Marija Gimbutas.

If others are interested in viewing it I'll organise a showing one Friday evening in February..

"This video is a biographical glimpse of the Lithuanian-born, late, eminent archeologist, historian, scientist and linguist, Marija Gimbutas, whose work on Old European Neolithic cultures (6500-3500 BCE) will one day be seen as brilliant, when the current backlash against her washes away in the cleansing waters of time. Indeed, the current misaligning of her work can only be happening now because her work is threatening to the status quo of patriarchy -- that which insists on domination and power-over."

from a review by Leslene della Madre for Awakened Woman e-zine

The film was a joint project by author/activist Starhawk and film-maker Donna Reed.

Reflections on the Solstice experience:-

Deepening in the Mysteries – the Power continues to Grow!

Our December women's mysteries ceremony was indeed a special experience. Twenty women joined me at the Harem Lounge for a night of ceremony in honour of the Great Goddess, and we danced and sang our way into the heart of the solstice mystery, stopping along the way to shed all obstacles to the full realisation of our creative authority as women. Twenty women’s voices raised in song to invoke the Great Goddess with spontaneous harmonies is an experience I won’t forget.

Her Labyrinthine Ways

With help from my priestess-sisters Adriana and Karuna-Noor, I was able to realise my vision of creating a labyrinth in the front garden of my home at Inanna’s House just in time to perform a small blessing ceremony on the eve of the solstice. Digging up all that lawn was a sizeable project, so I was and am intensely grateful for their assistance. The hours that we spent together digging were enormously satisfying, both in terms of the physical results and also of the deepening sense of connection.

The labyrinth is an ancient technology for centering and connecting which is becoming increasingly popular in the modern world. Walking the labyrinth is a dynamic meditation which can help bring insight and understanding to our life-journeys. The single winding path which sometimes appears to be taking us further from our goal rather than closer to it, nonetheless eventually leads us into the centre.

Here we can stop, connect with stillness, with the sensation of the earth beneath us and the sky above. Here, in the sacred centre, in the womb of the Mother, we may drop into that deeper space in which intuitive knowing arises, in which inner guidance comes in response to a question we have been walking with. And then comes time to find our way back out, bringing with us the gifts of stillness, connection or insight, to walk our truth in the wide world.

The Inanna’s House labyrinth is open to all who approach her with respect, so if you should find yourself in the neighbourhood, you are most welcome to set your feet to the path and take some time to slowly wind your way in. Our labyrinth is constructed with a tree at the centre, a tall pot of water at its base, inspired by the holy wells I experienced on a visit to Ireland a few years ago. You are most welcome to place an offering at her feet or twine it into the branches…

Sharing the Blessings

On the Friday of the actual solstice, fourteen years on from that first ritual in which I originally dedicated myself as a priestess of the Goddess, I was privileged to be able to share and pass on the womb-blessings of my beloved Goddess in a very special way. My priestess-sister Adriana chose to deepen her commitment to her Goddess path through seeking formal initiation into the Ishtar Mysteries. The day was doubly blessed, as, after many years of connection, I was given the opportunity to honour and affirm the Ishtar priestess within my dear friend Trisha through the gift of a red priestess belt and amber necklace.

I have known from the outset that this mystery system held the possibility, for those who sought it, of an initiatory path towards deepening relationship with the inner mysteries of the Goddess. And I have been slowly working my own way along this path, hopefully opening the doors as I do so for others to follow.  So to have been graced with opportunities to witness and affirm the priestess calling in other women’s lives, as I have been in this past year, and to be able to share and pass on these fragrant blessings.. I feel supremely gifted and am deeply grateful to the One who shapes my life.

In my last newsletter ...

Why the Goddess mysteries matter for women and the future of our world
– Final

As a dedicated priestess of the Goddess, I find as a move more deeply into my personal vocation, I must rely more and more on the support of others within my community, so that I can fully give myself to the work that seeks to be done through me. In return, I aspire to make myself available to be of service to those within my community who seek the healing and transformational power of the Goddess. It is my desire to make myself more and more useful and available as a ‘spiritual midwife’, so that I may bring the blessings of the Goddess to all those the transitional passages in the human life-journey - from birthing to dying.

There is much we can and will do for ourselves. And yet interdependency is the essential nature of the human animal. There are times when we each of us need to be spiritually ‘held’, to have someone else bear witness to our wholeness as human beings, sometimes in the face of the surface appearances to the contrary. There are times in our journey when we feel lost, confused or temporarily overwhelmed by the apparent chaos of accelerated growth and change. At such times, it can be helpful to have somewhere we can turn for fresh perspective, practical support, a renewal of trust. When we encounter the great mysteries of life, it is helpful to be able to draw on the strength and wisdom of others who may have been down similar roads before us.

It is the role of a spiritual tradition to provide a flexible structure that can hold us in our dance with the great mysteries of life. A living tradition honours the uniqueness of each human experience, while connecting us with larger universal energies and themes that put our experiences into perspective.

One aspect of this is physical places of retreat, places where the blessings of the tradition are grounded into the earth. Such spaces are imbued with particular energetic qualities that facilitate our own reconnection with centre, with the sense of a spiritual reality greater than our small selves. Whether created by nature or by human hands, the more people are drawn to them, the more such sacred spaces will require the ongoing attention and energy of human custodians. All over the 'western' world, women - and men too - are experiencing the strong call to recreate sacred spaces dedicated to the Feminine Divine. In such places, we women are sensually reminded of our ancient heritage of beauty, strength and wisdom, of being created "in the image of the Divine". Then we can authentically stand in our own truth and beauty, and do a fuller, more satisfying job of holding up our half of the sky.

In a generic sense, the Goddess mysteries are ancient, and yet, in this particular contemporary re-flowering, they are still embryonic. My own culture lost its priestesses a long time ago when the older pagan folkways were subsumed or overlayed by institutional Christianity. In the last one hundred years we very nearly lost all the traditional midwives from our communities as well. In the process, those quintessentially feminine mysteries of life - the ones related to the female creative processes of conception, gestation, birthing, suckling, knowing when to cradle and protect our offspring and when to let them go - all these more or less dropped out of our collective line-of-sight or became a technologically mediated fear-zone. The Goddess mysteries give them back to us, giving us a symbolic feminine language of embodied spirituality with which to explore and deepen our perceptions of ourselves and the world. Beginning from lived experience, these mysteries open doorways to a deeper spiritual reality, within, behind and beyond the simple physiology of a woman's body.

I believe that one gift the Goddess mysteries hold is a 'spiritual technology' to assist with fertility/conception (and childbirth and motherhood) as we head into a future where these become less and less able to be taken for granted. Returning to the ancient understanding that the cosmos is alive with subtle energies flowing, interacting and connecting us to each other and to all living beings, we will become increasingly skilful in working with ritual and energetic healing modalities to release blocks and imbalances which might otherwise hinder a consciously chosen path into biological motherhood.

In using the term "feminine mysteries" I am not wanting to imply a simple dividing of the spiritual world by gender roles. When these women-centred mysteries are neglected or dishonoured, things go out of balance and the whole culture suffers, men as well as women. Its like trying to paint the world with only half the rainbow - we none of us, male or female, have ready access to express the full spectrum of our innate human potential. I distrust the over simplification of dividing all things into pairs of polar opposites - masculine qualities and feminine ones. The Goddess in her mystery is much vaster and more complex than that. Yet I am a woman, in a woman's body, and so this embodied experience becomes my starting place.

In this three part article I have attempted to sketch out some of the gifts that the Goddess mysteries offer to women and the contemporary world. There is one more that I have not yet touched on. The Goddess mysteries bring us back into spiral time, gently reminding us that life is cyclical, that we are connected through time to all who have gone before and all who will come after.   The Ishtar mystery cycle with which I am presently working provides a spiritual framework which links the annual cycle of the earth around the sun with the cycles of our inner and outer lives as women. This sense of rhythm and cyclicity helps deflect some of this sense of whizzing towards impending doom which is gradually overtaking the culture at large, and helps restore to us a sense of belonging within the natural world rather than being outside and alienated from it.

When we come together as women in the name and resonance of the eternal and everchanging Goddess, we are making ourselves available as mothers and midwives for the rebirth of Her mysteries within our communities. My own experience with the unfolding Ishtar mysteries leaves me in no doubt that this is life-giving, soul-renewing work which is urgently needed at this time for the future of our culture and of the whole Earth. In the words of the chant that came through spontaneously in our summer solstice mystery ceremony we are finding our way

"To the heart of the Goddess, to the heart of our power.
For we are the people, and now is the hour!"

Catherine Ishara de Garis, January 2007

The Daughters of Ishtar pledge:-

We, the Daughters of Ishtar, do lovingly begin the work of restoring sacredness to our embodied experience as women, affirming that it is in each one of us, by virtue of our womanhood, to be Her priestess.

This we pledge out of love for ourselves, our sisters and She Who Is, Was and Shall Be - so that the blessings of Her life-giving juices may flow, restoring the world in beauty and bringing healing to the Earth and all Her creatures.

AMENTI
Questions or comments? Email me at ishara@ishtarsdaughters.com or phone 08 9314 5973
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