Book Review: The Goddess and The Shaman

As in the pure style of the Goddess world where all is interconnected and nothing is separate, this book came when I needed it most. It came just as I was painfully surrendering to what I perceived as a call from the Goddess and preparing to quit my corporate job.

I read this book in that magical period in between eclipses where time as we perceive it does not follow “normal” rules and the incursions from the Elphame (the name given by the author to the Other World) are stronger and more frequent…if we are paying attention.

So this book was a bit like a manual that had an uncanny way to unfold just as I was reading about it in the book.

It was reassuring, comforting and encouraging to read Kent’s telling of her life in discovering the Goddess and then the ability to cross over in the Elphame. So was her description of the “ontological shock” that is “the mind’s struggle to reconcile and to integrate two diametrically opposed models of reality”. I recognised many such episodes in my life…and I was currently passing through one.

It was a pleasure reading her description of the “Western Magical Tradition” and her referring to it as the “lost shaman tradition of the West”. It felt like it was a reclaiming of our roots and our own land and occult traditions without always needing to go to the other side of the world to obtain a platform on which to allow ourselves to work in and with.

What I feel it is the gift of this book to the modern reader and Seeker, is the author’s weaving in together and blending once again the Western Magical Tradition and The Great Goddess. I have always a hard time explaining to others how, since I was a child, I felt that everything was interconnected and alive. Nothing was really dead or inanimate for me, not even a stone or a computer. It was amazing to read it in a book because it felt it gave me the permission to finally fully acknowledge this innate knowledge and not perceive it as something strange or “heretical” or “insane”.

And as Kent describes in this book, coming into personal contact with the Goddess changes radically one’s life. There is a shifting of values and life purpose and the alignment of the personal will with the Divine will, which is lived in the inner sanctity of oneself without trying to convince any one of anything. That all life’s events have a spiritual purpose, a sentient being  “aware and embodied small part of a greater spiritual Truth.”

I also feel that this book has contributed a very important understanding of “mental health” which I have always felt it was “truer” to me than the concept exposed by conventional medicine. That is looking at what “caused the shattering of the self in the first place” not just popping a pill in the patient’s mouth and that is the end of the story.

Kent brings case studies to support this theory. Case studies I loved reading, not only for the clinical details and sometimes “rawness” of the episodes but because of what emerged from her case studies. According to Kent, “psychotic", “schizophrenic” or commonly known as “mad” persons, who are condemned to live on pills that take their identity away, are actually people who have a heightened sense of the Other World and periodic incursions of the Elphame in their world and do not know how to deal with it. 

In other cases the malady has its origins in the “Other World”  and pieces of the soul has been lost. Through the tools of “magical psychology” Kent was able to help these persons to, not only start living a “normal” life, but also live more happily.

I am particularly grateful for the opportunity to have been given a free copy to review. It is a book I will cherish and re-read with earnest.

A book I highly recommend to those who are on the Goddess path, healing practitioners or simply those who are just curious to hear a different bell about the reality we think we live in.

Published in March 2016 by Llewellyn 

A 100m race, Rennes-le-Château and a Ziggurat

The dream started by me fetching the car and driving up to the northern part of Italy, the Alps area, near Bolzano. I arrive to a huge athletic stadium that was situated in one of the valleys. I knew I had a 100m race trial to do that day.

As I approached the stadium, I notice that on the right hand side, high up on the mountains was the castle of Rennes-le-Château.

Oh, I murmured to myself I am in France then. I was so happy that I was near this place. So I made time to climb up slowly to the castle whilst taking photos as the day turned into night and back to day again in a very short time.

As I was there I was thinking how the heck I was going to drive down to Rome and back again the next morning for the next trails. I was discussing it with some other athletes which were all very much younger than myself. My trails, the next day were at around 8am. No way I was going to make it without risking to fail the trails.

In that precise moment Puzzy woke me up…fed him as quickly as I could and went back in bed asking the Universe if it was possible to continue the dream…And so it happened (a first I have to say).

I was back at Rennes-le-Château taking photos and basking in the calming Goddess energy I was feeling there. All of a sudden I remembered that a Maltese friend of mine had told me about a place where she stayed. I found the place and booked at room.

It was late so I went to the restaurant to eat something. Whilst I was eating in a sort of veranda, a person eating at one of the tables situated on my left hand side, died serenely whilst finishing supper. I heard people exclaiming: “What a great way to die, at peace whilst you are eating.” I saw them taking the body away.

I finished my dinner and went up to my room. The stairs that lead to my room where on my right hand side. They were carved in yellow stones, going round this square building that now seemed more like a ziggurat. 

As I went higher up the stones became narrower and narrower and night has shrouded all the valley. All I could see was darkness. I knew that if I fell that was no way I was going to remain alive.

As I turn round the last corner to the right, the stairs open to a huge roof and in front of me was in all its glory the spiral of the Milky way. I could see all the galaxies moving slowing around each other in an eternal never ending spiral. 

I stood there in awe. I felt at home and at peace.

I turned on my right and went in my room, in this huge yellow stone building. Whilst I was looking out from the window, a woman came in to take my clothes.

She said, “I take your clothes now so that they can be washed so you have clean clothes for tomorrow’s trail. But I won’t use your soap. Your soap tends to absorb the clothes colours”. She showed me my light indigo soap that has been become 1/3 blue. With that she went away and Puzzy woke me up again.

I have meditated on this dream for a whole day.

I was in Rennes-le-Château back in late April 2014. I was there when the Taurus Solar eclipse happened. So many things happened and started whilst I was there. I know I cried a lot. I felt the Earth calling, calling me back to my real values and passions.

During that Taurus Solar eclipse my partner and I both charged two Tree of Life pendants. I had been carrying mine for a long time. She had just found one at Rennes-le-Château.

I stayed in Couiza and I all could feel was that primal nurturing energy that eventually reminded me so much of Malta. Only later would I understand that it was then that the Goddess started calling.

I saw young people that had left the corporate world to go for their passion, to act as stewards of the Earth they lived on, to revive old traditions and skills.

I was already suffering from digestive problems and there it was the last time I ate meat or fish and became vegetarian.

There it was when I physically met my astrology mentor and we started working together not only with astrology but also with homeopathy.

Much later I would get to know that whilst I was visiting there, there were other two Maltese visiting the area. One of them is the one I mention in the dream and that actually was staying there in Rennes-le-Château at that time. And both are on the Goddess path…

As regards the 100m trails… I started doing sports at the age of 12 against my family’s orders. It was the only thing I did that visibly went against my family’s values. I was a woman and according to my family and culture at that time I shouldn’t be going around doing races. I had bowed my head to many things whilst I was living with my family…just for peace keeping and because my physical survival depended on them…but sports was the only thing I rebelled again. 

I remember very well that for all the races I did there was never any one of my family. I always ran alone.

As regards the Ziggurat…well that is something I fondly carrying in my heart, memories from a very distant past, perhaps a past life. The Sabian symbol for my Ascendent degree is “Moonlit fields, once Babylon, are blooming white”. The first time I heard this phrase a vision came to my heart and I wrote about it here.

I always remain in awe how without knowing but only listening to the heart, that tuning fork always finds its way back home.

My meditation spot in Couiza just on banks of the river L'Aude

Symbol photographed in Rennes-le-Chateau

Imbolc 2014

Here I am dear Goddess Brigid,

in front of you,

as the Sun,

behind the dense raining clouds,

is swiftly crossing the horizon.

I pledge for one year and a day,

to stop and listen,

to what Nature has to say.

I pledge to protect and honour Her.

Listen to Her cycles,

and learn to understand them,

not only with the mind,

but also with the heart.

I pledge for one year and a day,

to diligently study the stars,

as a metaphor of the energy within.

To trust in miracles,

synchronicities,

and Divine providence.

For those who shall ask,

they will receive.

Guidance is all I seek.

You came into my dreams,

to remind me of who I need,

the aged soul seeded in me,

A Guardian of the Sacred Fire,

A Keeper of the Ancient Traditions.

As above so below.

So may I be blessed,

in this journey to be set,

for year and a day ahead.

Brigid by JessiBeans on deviantART