PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion
by Glenys Livingstone.

PaGaian Cosmology brings together a religious practice of seasonal ritual based in a contemporary scientific sense of the cosmos and female imagery for the Sacred. The author situates this original synthesis in her context of being female and white European transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere. Her sense of alienation from her place, which is personal, cultural and cosmic, fires a cosmology that re-stories Goddess metaphor of Virgin-Mother-Crone as a pattern of Creativity, which unfolds the cosmos, manifests in Earth’s life, and may be known intimately.

PaGaian Cosmology is an ecospirituality grounded in indigenous Western religious celebration of the Earth-Sun annual cycle. By linking to story of the unfolding universe this practice can be deepened, and a sense of the Triple Goddess—central to the cycle and known in ancient cultures—developed as a dynamic innate to all being. The ritual scripts and the process of ritual events presented here, may be a journey into self-knowledge through personal, communal and ecological story: the self to be known is one that is integral with place.

PaGaian Cosmology may be used as a resource for individuals or groups seeking new forms of devotional expression and an Earth-based pathway to wisdom within.

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PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion by Glenys Livingstone.

I was perhaps one of Earth’s most alienated of beings, and by that I mean that I did not sense belonging Here. My cultural context was such that I had no sense of relationship with my earthly and cosmic habitat. Cultural circumstance and story built over millennia converged to create a human who did not know her Place much at all – this included the place within my own skin, as much as the place in which I dwelt. Both were objects, things – inert matter of little cosmic significance. Apparently there are many humans in these times who are of such a tribe of alienated beings – albeit within many greatly different contexts. The religious stories, the cosmology of my cultural context did not include my place of being and dwelling in any particular way – did not include my “Place”, this Earth, this Material, as significant.

I was born in the Southern Hemisphere – in the Great South Land of Australia – and as a white Western European girl child. Most of the texts and graphics explaining the Cosmos to an Australian and white child were (and still often are) drawn from the Northern Hemisphere perspective. The Moon in her phases were “backwards”; Sun’s daily movement from East to West was described as being “clockwise”; the seasons in the stories were always at odds with real experience. This was never regarded as important enough to mention, yet deep within me from the beginning there was scribed the cosmic essence of disregarding one’s senses.

I was raised as a Protestant country girl in a land being colonized by the people of my blood-line. I was fortunate to spend my babyhood and some toddling years on a farm – eating lots of red dirt as I imagine it. I have later realised that this red dirt may have been part of the best cultural education I received in early years. The rest of my childhood and early adolescence was spent in a small country town. I never went into native bush although my brothers did; a girl would have been too vulnerable. In any case, the Earth/Nature itself was devoid of real consequence; it was human activity upon it that was of consequence. Humans made the best of it by growing gardens and crops, but even then they had to control its waywardness with sprays and fertilizers. It was a big dead ball of dirt upon which we played and travailed, and from which we would be saved by “God” eventually.

I had no understanding of the ancient land upon which I dwelt, or of the stories of its indigenous people. The new authorities to this ancient land had named the piece/”State” marked out as “Queensland”, for their nominal divine representative. The white Europeans found themselves trying to make a living. My parents were the children and grandchildren of pioneers, but they themselves no longer had a vision, a reason, for being here in this “new” place – they just were. They were not even conscious of it being “new” any longer, as far as I could tell. My spiritual heritage was in contrast to, and at odds with, the rich red soil in which I played as a toddler. The spiritual heritage of both my parents, was largely unspoken – my mother was a “bush-Catholic” (that is, baptized a Catholic, but not instructed), and my father of Scottish descent was a nominal Presbyterian. It was the paternal lineage that held sway in the way things were understood. At the centre of the cosmology that I was handed, was a harsh father-god, who was no Poet; his creation of the cosmos in seven days was literal. He was a Mechanic, and the Universe was a machine, and he was definitely a male. He – this god, and indeed most of us white Europeans, were products of a long history of humanity in another part of the planet, and in more recent centuries, of events in Europe such as the Reformation and the witch-burnings; but now, these were no longer conscious.

There was also now for these people in this new place, no visible memory of something that had been even earlier – some kind of ceremonially expressed relationship to the other-than-human world. These Europeans were Reformed Christianized people transplanted here from the Northern Hemisphere, with no sense of their historical roots, who knew no synchronicity of the religious festivals that they continued to pay homage to, with the seasons of Earth. Here in the South land, the supernatural Christian drama of God and Jesus was completely unrelated to place. It was a particularly cerebral religion, and in that sense barren – devoid of ritual recognition of the fertile Earthbody1. While at least in the Northern Hemisphere when my ancestors had lit candles and sang at the Winter Solstice, though they called it Christmas, there remained a resonance with the land, a memory of something earlier upon which this ritual was based. In the Southern Hemisphere, there was no such resonance of the religious practice of the Europeans with Earth; and the children here of this religious practice inherited a poverty of spirit, a deep divorce from Earth that few other religions in the history of Gaia have ever known. Continued...


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