A Promise Kept

I kept my promise. I assembled a small shrine to the Goddess in the spare bedroom. I'm not going to photograph it because- well- a photograph would only show what it looks like, not what it means.

What it looks like is an empty fireplace with things arranged around it and along the mantlepiece.

The central object on the mantlepiece is a flint I picked up on the beach about twenty years ago. It leans against the wall, looking a little- only a little- like a human figure in a cloak.

Alongside it- lined up along the shallow ledge- are a glass jar for burning candles in, a brass cobra, a chalice which came from a shop in Glastonbury and a wooden pot with dried corn in it.

Oh, and a trading card image of the actor Jacqueline Pearce. This arrived on the day I was setting things up- a gift from my friend Judy. I always liked Jacqueline Pearce. There's a fabulous scene in Plague of the Zombies where she climbs out of her grave looking all wicked and Andre Morrel chops her head off with a spade.

The fireplace serves as a niche for a terracotta statuette of the Andean Goddess Pachamama.  Beside her is a framed postcard from St Mary, Deerhurst- a church we visited last Sunday. It shows a medieval, stained glass image of St Catherine of Alexandria with her wheel. You can see it on the church's website.  I take St. Catherine to be a Christian adaption of one of my favourite Goddesses- the Roman Fortuna.

Leaning against the fireplace is the sword we used to use in our coven. It has a name which I think should remain a secret. Hanging on the wall to one side- from a nail that happened to be already there- is our coven's white handled knife.

Over the fireplace is a small mirror. This too was already there- by happy accident.  I've incorporated it in the scheme by hanging the vulva pendant I bought in Glastonbury from the same nail.  We used to use a mirror in our Wiccan initiations. The candidate is asked to face the one "who judges truly". The cords are untied, the blindfold whipped off-  and she sees herself.

Walsingham

Here's a poem from back in the day, written around the time I first found the Goddess- or She found me. I wish I had a picture of Walsingham to put with it- but I don't.

                                   WALSINGHAM

 

                                    Renaissance England hardly missed her.

                                   

                                    Cromwell broke the great stone wheels,

                                    Trod their glass to coloured grit

                                    And gave her lands to the fallow deer.

                                    An early sun through clear windows

                                    Lit the beds of their married bishops.

                                    The winter of the King's Bible

                                    Was spiced with Galilean spring.

 

                                    England forgot the tall girl

                                    In summer blue whose fingers made

                                    Bright wheels in the knot gardens.

                                    Queen of Heaven, she filled the dark

                                    Hawthorn lanes that smell of death

                                    With circling stars and the crescent moon.

 

                                    And when I came to this shrine of lights

                                    In witchy Norfolk I was unhappy

                                    Kneeling to what my Protestant conscience

                                    Told was a pagan image-

                                    Isis or Proserpina.

                                    But my true self was heart-sick

                                    Of preachment without empathy,

                                    Held back from self-forgetting prayer

                                    By fear of the Sistine Chapel god,

                                    And I loved her, as I still do,

                                    Mistress, mother, my wise sister,

                                    Walsingham Mary whose garden is

                                    That fearsome wheel of coloured fires.

The Project

I've just rewritten part of my LJ Bio. It now goes like this:

I've been an Anglican priest, a Pagan and a Wiccan High Priest and then, for a while, I was nothing in particular. Now I'm trying to be all those things at once.