Witches Brew

It was shortly after my forty-ninth birthday when I sat up in bed one morning and said, “I was made in the image of my Goddess!” That was almost nine years ago. –And that Goddess was the Willendorf Venus….but I had been searching for a path for some time. I no longer connected with God the Father and could not make the intellectual jump to God the Mother…even though I could see Goddess energy rising all around me. I had been feeling the pulse of Goddess energy in Disco and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The Egyptian Goddess Hathor had been speaking to me for several years but I had consigned her to “mythology.” Like Xenia, Warrior Princess, she was an archetype of the righteous, kick-ass babe who was energizing young women at the end of the last millennium. I could not make a deep, soul connection to the living Goddess.

And then that alarm clock went off in my soul at dawn that morning, and I sat up out of a sound sleep and knew I belonged to God the Daughter.

This feeling of “coming home” is a common experience for Pagans who were raised in a Judeo-Christian community. Most had felt out of place in their birth religion. They had felt alienated by the “hypocrisy” of their elders, pious on Sunday, rapacious on Monday. They were dreamers and tree-huggers from a young age, drawn to classical mythology and to the call of Nature. The “call” to Paganism, when it came, was an awakening to their oldest, deepest, wisest selves.

Lately, however, I have been hearing a new version of the “coming home” story. Pagans in their middle years are being awakened by their children. Mom finds a book in her teenager’s bedroom, sits down in some alarm to investigate, and finds out “This is me! This is what I have always believed!” One daughter, newly returned to the family nest, off-handedly told her outsdoorsman father, “You have always been a Druid!” “What do you mean?” he asked in surprise. She handed him a book on Druidism, and he found his life laid out in its pages.

It was much the same in my mother’s life. Three decades ago she picked up my books on reincarnation and found the strength and courage to meet her own death from cancer. So while, Christians worry about Pagans trying to “convert” their “innocent” children, it frequently happens the other way around: questing children, rejecting the narrow beliefs of their community, bring spiritual freedom to their parents!