Rituals of the Dark Moon Everyone is familiar with the image of Witches performing rituals under a Full Moon. Mysterious but not frightening, the Dark Moon (the night before the New Moon) is lesser known but equally powerful. This guidebook reveals the hidden wisdom of the Dark Moon Path. It presents the thirteen Dark Moons of the year by the zodiac sign in which they fall, along with rituals designed to help you experience and learn from their energies. You'll explore the Dark Moon lessons of: • The Unseen in Aquarius • Risk in Leo • Time in Pisces •Silence in Virgo • Identity in Aries • Descent in Libra • The Body in Taurus • Intuition in Scorpio • Knowledge in Gemini • Creativity in Sagittarius • Emotion in Cancer •Power in Capricorn • The Dark in Arachne (a spirit sign) Deepen your understanding of the Moon as the Goddess as you experience the intuitive and deep healing powers of the Dark.

Beginning with the myth of Inanna's descent to the Underworld, rendered in breathtaking poetry, Betty de Shong Meador sets forth on a journey of the feminine in five stages--poetry, essay, and prose tying together her study of feminine initiation across time and culture. Her description of a Blessingway Sing reveals the balance of feminine and masculine achieved in the Navajo culture. A critique of Doris Lessing's novels captures the felt sense of descent and discovery. Research on a Greek women's ritual--the Thesmophoria--and a survey of recent archeological findings from the ancient goddess cultures add history and substance to the ideas of the feminine. A clinical study of the relationship between female therapist and female client demonstrates one contemporary mode for such exploration. Thus we learn that there are many routes for exploring the lost initiations of women into the progress of their souls and the ways of the Goddess.

Bringing a feminist perspective to contemporary findings of geneticists and archeologists, Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, cultural historian, points out that the oldest veneration we know is of a dark mother of central and south Africa, whose signs-ochre red and the pubic V-were taken by african migrants after 50,000 BCE to caves and cliffs of all continents. The oldest sanctuary in the world was created in 40,000 BCE by african migrants in Har Karkom, later called Mt. Sinai, foundation place of judaism, christianity, and islam.Lucia documents the continuing memory of the dark mother and her values in prehistoric images of the dark mother, in historic black madonnas and in other dark women divinities whose sanctuaries are on african paths. She tracks the memory in rituals and stories of her sicilian grandmothers, in persecution of dark others in patriarchal Europe and the United States, in the rise of nonviolent dark others since the 1960s,in the banners of the 1995 world conference of women at Beijing, and in art. She finds the dark mother's values-justice with compassion, equality, and transformation-in everyday and celebratory rituals of the world's subaltern cultures-and suggests that the image and values are in the submerged memories of everyone.

Who is She, this Sister from Below? She's certainly not about the ordinary business of life: work, shopping, making dinner. She speaks from other realms. If you'll allow, She'll whisper in your ear, lead your thoughts astray, fill you with strange yearnings, get you hot and bothered, send you off on some wild goose chase of a daydream, eat up hours of your time. She's a siren, a seductress, a shapeshifter . . . Why listen to such a troublemaker? Because She is essential to the creative process: She holds the keys to the doors of our imaginations and deeper life the evolution of Soul.

Some call the imaginal the realm of the archetypes, the home of the gods and goddesses, the land of the daimon, or the source of creativity. Others simply call it the soul. The daimon of the imaginal world facilitate the incarnation of soul into the physical body, and transforming these dark energies allows us to progress as spiritual beings, to live life from a more conscious view. Sandra Dennis suggests that attitudes devaluing the erotic, feminine, instinctual energies particularly those of sexuality, and destructiveness and the marginalization of bodily sensation itself, block these daimonic soul images from incarnating. She discusses our tendency to block these transforming forces and offers suggestions on how to embrace and reclaim them to allow for a more integrated existence. She explains sensations associated with daimonic imagery fragmentation, rage, anxiety, pain, also the other side ecstasy, bliss, orgasmic release understanding that all of these sensations form the basis for profound change in the sense of self. Bibliography. Index.

A provocative book that reminds us that our soul's primary longing is for love and then explores that longing. Goodchild explains that our most important task is the growth of our consciousness and that this cannot be accomplished apart from an awareness of the complexities of love and its shadows. It takes the us into that domain where eros' arrows thrust us into those shadowy depths where our keenest vulnerabilities and woundings--and our deepest imaginings and longings-are hidden.

Journey to the Dark Goddess will lead you on a powerful, healing path. In the stories of ancient Goddesses you will hear your own soul, calling out to you. The Dark Goddess is the creatrix of healing, change and renewal. She offers connection with the core of yourself. If you have been unable to shake off depression, or fear its return; if you have inexplicable ‘blank patches’ in your life, if you know that something is missing, or something is calling to you, if you seek the source of women’s power – it’s time to journey to the Dark Goddess. The for this journey to the Dark Goddess exists in ancient myth. Weaving the stories of Inanna, Persephone and Psyche with self-enquiry and sacred ritual we learn to journey internally, creating maps in our darkest places and return enriched, integrating our deepest understandings. Meeting the Dark Goddess we see a mirror of our own soul.