Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Pagan Portals - Seeking the Primal Goddess
    Pagan Portals - Seeking the Primal Goddess
    Pagan Portals - Seeking the Primal Goddess
    Ebook110 pages2 hours

    Pagan Portals - Seeking the Primal Goddess

    By Melusine Draco

    1/5

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Using archaeology, archaeo-mythology and mitochondrial DNA we can chart the mass migrations of people throughout the ancient world and follow the footsteps of the beliefs of Old Europe. But if the concept of the Old Goddess is at odds with current popular thinking, how will we feel if we discover that the Great Mother of contemporary Paganism bears no similarity to the primal Great Goddess of the Old European world? Is there a ‘magico-spiritual’ gene that could be traced back to those distant ancestors who actually worshipped the forebears of the various deities to whom we claim allegiance today? Are there time-honoured things about us all as individuals that are bred deep in the bone? Are we what our roots (our DNA) claim us to be? Perhaps, even though we are now scattered all over the globe, we cannot escape those ancient racial memories of where we originally came from.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJohn Hunt Publishing
    Release dateJan 31, 2020
    ISBN9781789042566
    Pagan Portals - Seeking the Primal Goddess
    Author

    Melusine Draco

    Mélusine Draco is an Initiate of traditional British Old Craft and originally trained in the magical arts of traditional British Old Craft with Bob and Mériém Clay-Egerton. She has been a magical and spiritual instructor for over 20 years with Arcanum and the Temple of Khem, and has had almost thirty books published. She now lives in Ireland near the Galtee Mountains.

    Read more from Melusine Draco

    Related to Pagan Portals - Seeking the Primal Goddess

    Related ebooks

    Anthropology For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Goddesses Of Summer

      Jun 8, 2021

      Goddesses Of Summer
      1 min read

    • Article

      Witching Hour

      Jan 19, 2021

      The powerful Norse goddess Hel governs the dark recesses of the underworld where the souls of the dead can be found. Daughter of the trickster god Loki, she’s a mighty force and one of the old gods. Her world, known as Niflheim. is divided into sever

      2 min read

    • Article

      FULL MOON, ESBATS & MAGIC

      Mar 27, 2020

      FULL MOON, ESBATS & MAGIC
      1 min read

    • Article

      Your October ritual

      Aug 31, 2021

      Your October ritual
      1 min read

    • Article

      Sanctuary

      Aug 14, 2019

      Sanctuary
      1 min read

    • Article

      Witchy Ways To Prepare For Autumn

      Aug 4, 2020

      Tudorbeth is a hereditary practitioner of witchcraft and has written over 40 books on the subject. Her latest book, A Spellbook for the Seasons, is complete with over 100 spells on the seasons and their magical blessings. Here, she shares some of her

      5 min read

    • Article

      Claim To fame?

      Oct 6, 2023

      Claim To fame?
      8 min read

    • Article

      “Magic Is A Really Important Strand Of What It Means To Be Human”

      Jul 9, 2020

      Ellie Cawthorne: Your new book surveys a vast array of magical beliefs throughout human history. How do you define magic? Chris Gosden: My definition of magic is a human openness to the universe. And a universe’s openness to people. Let me give you

      9 min read

    • Article

      Why Monster Stories Captivate Us

      Sep 5, 2019

      I was 13 years old when the movie Alien was released. It scared me into a month-long spell of anxiety. The hair on the back of my neck was perpetually up and I had the jittery demeanor of a combat veteran. While the full-grown xenomorph alien was chi

      7 min read

    • Article

      Why Are So Many Monsters Hybrids?

      Oct 19, 2017

      I was 13 years old when the movie Alien was released. It scared me into a month-long spell of anxiety. The hair on the back of my neck was perpetually up and I had the jittery demeanor of a combat veteran. While the full-grown xenomorph alien was chi

      7 min read

    • Article

      “Ghosts Were Taken For Granted As Part Of Everyday Mesopotamian Life”

      Oct 28, 2021

      Ellie Cawthorne: You argue that “most, possibly even all, human beings everywhere truly believe in ghosts”. Why do you think humans are inclined to believe that the dead might return to exist among us? Irving Finkel: In the modern world, ghosts have

      9 min read

    • Article

      The Transcendent Brain

      Dec 5, 2022

      The Transcendent Brain
      15 min read

    • Article

      A Language Beyond Reason

      Feb 27, 2020

      I grew up in a scientific family. My grandmother Irene was the daughter of the physicist Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum mechanics and was a close friend of Albert Einstein. She was herself scientifically well educated and h

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Classical Werewolf

      Nov 4, 2021

      Daniel Ogden Oxford University Press 2021 Hb, 280pp, £25, ISBN 9780198854319 Daniel Ogden has established himself as the go-to academic for scholarly, text-based surveys of supernatural motifs in the Ancient World, into which context this book fits a

      8 min read

    • Article

      Why We Still Need Monsters

      Oct 19, 2017

      It doesn’t seem enough to call Stephen Paddock, who killed 58 innocent people in Las Vegas this month, a monster. The term has lost its power to evoke the unimaginable. The beasts that terrorized the mental lives of our ancestors have been tamed by r

      11 min read

    • Article

      Our Most Effective Weapon Is Imagination

      Apr 28, 2021

      In his Theaetetus, Plato remarks to Socrates: “This pathos is proper to the philosopher: It is the thaumazein. And philosophy has no other point of departure than this.” The word, which contains the root thauma, the same that appears in thaumaturgy,

      9 min read

    • Article

      Why Do Some Brains Enjoy Fear?

      Oct 31, 2013

      This time of year, thrillseekers can enjoy horror movies, haunted houses, and prices so low, it’s scary. But if fear is a natural survival response to a threat or danger, why would we seek out that feeling? Dr. Margee Kerr is the staff sociologist at

      6 min read

    • Article

      Bodies of Knowledge

      Aug 27, 2021

      Bodies of Knowledge
      19 min read

    • Article

      Why We Still Need Monsters

      Oct 25, 2018

      It doesn’t seem enough to call Stephen Paddock, who killed 58 innocent people in Las Vegas in October 2017, a monster. The term has lost its power to evoke the unimaginable. The beasts that terrorized the mental lives of our ancestors have been tamed

      11 min read

    • Article

      A Compendium Of Cryptids

      Mar 21, 2024

      A Compendium Of Cryptids
      11 min read

    • Article

      Lives Of The Great Occultists

      Sep 10, 2020

      Personally, I blame that Aleister Crowley. If my memory serves me well (which, these days, it seldom does), Hunt Emerson and I more or less drifted into creating ‘Lives of the Great Occultists’ after I told him a couple of my favourite yarns about th

      7 min read

    • Article

      Gods, Saints And Spellcraft

      Mar 27, 2020

      Gods, Saints And Spellcraft
      6 min read

    • Article

      Deep Dives Into The Unknown

      Apr 20, 2023

      Jack Hunter, ed. August Night Press 2023 Pb, 409pp, £17.99, ISBN 9781786772244 August Night Press is an imprint of White Crow Books, the publisher of a substantial catalogue of titles arguing, generally, that we are more than “animated meat”. These i

      3 min read

    • Article

      Reassessing The Miraculous

      Nov 5, 2020

      Miracles in an Age of Disbelief Michael Grosso Anomalist Books 2020 Pb, £12, 228pp, ISBN 9781949501131 A new book about miracles might seem a throwback, conjuring up a boringly predictable debate about why God is willing to annoy rationalist material

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Pagan Portals - Seeking the Primal Goddess

    1/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Pagan Portals - Seeking the Primal Goddess - Melusine Draco

      present’

      Chapter One

      Nature, Nurture or Nemesis

      Belief is possibly one of the least tangible and yet, at the same time, the most tangible of human faculties. Belief can be rock solid or a crumbling edifice; it can be a deep-rooted family faith or a recently discovered Path with all its mysteries intact. In the 21st century it is no longer a foregone conclusion that many of the current generation will be following the faith and beliefs of their forefathers. In fact, with the exception of the fundamentalist faiths, that which was once inflexible has become extremely flexible indeed.

      The advent of social media has advanced the growth of Paganism across the globe and highlighted the fact that millions of people are now identifying with ancient cultures to which they have no obvious racial connection. And although poor old Carl Jung’s core concepts of synchronicity, archetypes and the collective subconscious are dismissed as out-dated, they still strongly resonate with those of a magical-mystical persuasion. In fact, one of the earliest criticisms of Jung’s work was that it was ‘anti-scientific in its intentions as well as its content’ - but much the same could be said about magic, which is, in itself often considered to be an amalgam of science and art. Jung’s view of the functions of symbolism in dreams led to his isolation from the mainstream psychiatric community, and as he put it, ‘My book was declared to be rubbish; I was a mystic, and that settled the matter’, since his view of symbolism appeared to undermine the ‘scientific’ status of psychology.

      Yet symbols and sigils have long been the language of magic and mysticism, particularly in the realms of divination and esoteric Qabalistic writings. While in The Power of Images, David Freedberg, a Professor of Art History at Columbia University, opined some eighty years later that there has been a very definite relationship between images and people throughout history. There were certain kinds of response – psychological and behavioural – that had appeared to have been observed throughout history and across cultures whether ‘civilised’ or ‘primitive’. According to the Professor they were not usually addressed because they were unrefined, basic, pre-intellectual, raw – and, well ... primal:

      They were too embarrassing or awkward to write about. But I kept encountering them, by chance and haphazardly, in a wide variety of ethnographic and historical sources, and they seemed to be constantly and consistently figured in commonplaces and metaphors ... What follows deals with the sort of behaviour that rational positives like to describe as irrational, superstitious, or primitive, only explicable in terms of ‘magic’. I would in fact, be happy if the long-standing distinctions between objects that elicit particular responses because of imputed ‘religious’ or ‘magical’ powers could be collapsed ... Indeed it seems to me that we should now be prepared to remove the evidence of phenomena like the animism of images from discussions of ‘magic’, and that we should confront more squarely the extent to which such phenomena tell us about the use and function of images themselves and of the responses to them.

      Jung thought of his archetypes as primordial images within the basic structure of the human psyche that have appeared repeatedly in myths, symbols, and personified forms throughout human history. The similarity of the motifs and themes in these myths and symbols of many different cultures suggested the existence of a collective unconscious shared by all human beings. A vaguely similar train of thought to David Freedberg’s but Art obviously had no fear of rushing in where Science feared to tread.

      Jung’s interest in mysticism and occultism has frequently been dismissed by ‘rational-minded’ scholars as historical curiosities and/or primitive superstitions. Those who believed that the scientific and technological achievements of the West proved the superiority of its culture over all others were understandably offended by Jung’s notion that the West’s one-sided emphasis on progress needed balance or compensation similar to Eastern modes of thought. Unfortunately, from a scientific point of view, Jung failed to explore how Gnosticism and the Eastern systems functioned within their own specific historical and social contexts, and tended to assign all of them equal value and relevance. Then again, Jung had never been schooled in the various esoteric disciplines ... but neither had his detractors.

      In psychology, genetic memory is said to be a memory present at birth that exists in the absence of sensory experience, and is incorporated into the genome over long spans of time. It is based on the idea that common experiences of a species become incorporated into its genetic code with a readiness to respond in certain ways to certain stimuli. According to psychologist Dr. Darold Treffert, genetic memory, simply put, ‘refers to complex abilities and actual sophisticated knowledge inherited along with other more typical and commonly accepted physical and behavioural characteristics’. In magical practitioners, however, this esoteric ‘chip’ comes factory installed and relies on certain external imagery or stimuli to activate it, but once exposed to the mysterious world of symbol and sigil, analogy and metaphor, the recipient instinctively begins to understand its ‘hidden’ language.

      Esoterically speaking, this stimuli can be said to come from our own personal daemon or guardian. In the ancient Greek religion, daemon designates not a specific class of divine beings, but a peculiar mode of activity: it is an occult power that drives humans forward or acts against them. Hence daemon is the veiled countenance of divine activity, a spiritual being who watches over each individual, and is tantamount to a higher self, or guardian angel.

      Daemons scarcely figure in Greek mythology or Greek art: they are felt, but their unseen presence can only be presumed, with the exception of the agathodaemon - personal companion spirits comparable to the Roman genii, who ensured good luck, health, and wisdom – who were honoured first with a libation in ceremonial wine-drinking, and represented in iconography by the chthonic serpent. In a wider sense, from the Roman perspective and perhaps in a mote truly animistic sense, the genius was the spirit that dwells in man, as a spirit that dwelt in the hearth. The symbol of the genius was the ‘house-snake’, a sacred inhabitant whose recognition goes back into a very primitive past. [Phases in the Religion of Ancient Rome]

      Throughout history, writers and artists of esoteric material typically (and often annoyingly) use allegories such as these as literary or visual devices to convey these semi-hidden or complex meanings. Through the use of symbolic figures, actions, imagery, or events, these can be interpreted to reveal a hidden moral, magical or mystical significance not immediately obvious to the casual onlooker. For example, the serpent, or snake, is one of the oldest, most widespread and powerful mythological symbols in the world and has been associated with some of the oldest, most sacred rituals known to humankind. In some cultures, snakes were fertility symbols, while in others the creature symbolised the umbilical cord, joining all humans to Mother Earth, the Great Mother, or the primal Great Goddess.

      While the snake is possibly the most provocative symbol associated with female archetypes, for its suggestive shape and its association with death and rebirth, the underworld, the supernatural, and the generative powers of nature; other common forms taken by the anima and mother archetypes are the feline and the bird. With the feline, we depart from the stygian depths of the unconscious or underworld of the mind, and inhabit the terrestrial surface in daylight. Yet, we find that however remote from the unconscious/underworld these sky goddesses appear to be, many of them have an intimate relationship with the underworld, without which they would not be complete. [The Archetypal Female in Mythology and Religion: The Anima and the Mother of the Earth and Sky, Dr. Joan

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1