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Prayer of the Underworld Goddess Returned: My Muddy Wings Are Wide
Dearest Dark Goddess who is me,
I have come to a point in my healing, my ascent, where I will no longer apologize for who I am or who I used to be. My black demoness wings are wide, and I have risen against the sandstorm of those who think me wicked. I have erupted from the ground like a newborn phoenix covered in an afterbirth of mud and ash.
This is me, and I have survived my birth by fire. My hair is knotted, and my cheeks are stained with the tears of lost innocence and bitter disdain. I am untying the knots that kept me tethered to a life I did not want, to names I did not want to be called, and to the notion that a woman is an unchanging, steady touchstone for all who need her.
My name is Lilith, and I am not a teaching tool. The forbidden fruit was seductive truth contained in fine apple skin, and I have sucked every bit of succulent juice from that gift. I have looked into the snake’s shiny scales and scried my future. I have been called every shameful name ever spit from the lips of a bully, and I have let those labels roll from my back like water on feathers.
My name is Inanna, and I am still alive. These are not the musings of a whimsical poetess. These are the hellish hymns I learned from the ancients, and I speak the Mother Tongue of the anguished feminine. I know the way down, but I’ve learned to love the feel of sunlight on my bare breasts.
My name is Persephone, and I will not be dragged into my depths; I go there willingly, wearing my protection totems and singing my own praises. I go there to lead others out, and I am the holy healer returned, righteous, and resurrected. I am the primal feminine dark, the unruined Maiden, and the Priestess of fertile ground.
Blessed be my infinite worth, and blessed be the Holy Wild.
Parable of Eden’s Lost Heroine: Revisioning Lilith
For all her wisdom, Lilith could not understand why this precious garden, this manicured and flawless landscape that once dazzled her with its fairy-tale beauty, now appeared so fake and fragile. She was sure the brilliant-green grasses were painted and artificial and the flowers were paper and scentless. How had she not noticed this ruse before now?
She knelt at the knotted base of the Tree of Knowledge, the only tree in the garden that smelled of primal bark, blessedly bitter leaves, and dirty roots, the only growing thing she was sure was absolutely real here in this carved-up land. She drank in the heady, earthen scent and caressed the bark, suddenly starved for untamed nature and uncultivated ground. She yearned so deeply for far-reaching trees and soft-bodied creatures; she was homesick for a wild place she had never seen. She knew it existed. She glimpsed this many-colored wilderness in her dreams, but her conscious mind did not yet know the way. Each morning, she woke and wept in the underworld-garden, suffocating under the weight of a life she never chose and hungry for the hearty sustenance of the feminine divine.
Pressing her face to the bark, Lilith whisper-prayed to a Mother Goddess for salvation: “Bless me, Mother, for I will most certainly sin against this too-small life. I yearn so much for a freedom I know I deserve that my belly burns with the wanting. My blood is raging under my skin, willing me forward, and yet I do not know which path to take. I dream of a blood-red road, but I know not how to find it. Mother, show me the way out! I will die if I must stay here, if I must waste more of my precious life among mere fabrications of what I love, if I must obey rules I did not write, spending my days conforming to someone else’s notion of perfection. I am consumed by an ache I have no name for, and all I know is that I must leave before this sickness-of-desire ends me.”
So consumed with anguish this Wild One was, so certain of her belonging to a wilderness she had never seen, that she failed to notice when a snake slid up her bare back and coiled around her neck. So broken was she, so blinded by a dark and demanding restlessness, that Lilith did not see the gift of the forbidden fruit when it fell to the ground. She did not see it with her eyes, but she felt it in her blood. There was a certain ecstatic electricity buzzing from beneath the apple’s red skin that crooned to her like a warm maternal lullaby to a shivering orphan.
The snake continued spiraling around her neck, and Lilith wiped her tears. This soul-food was not fit for feminine consumption, she had been warned. She was breaking one of the rules of this place by simply being here. To eat from the Tree of Knowledge was to know too much, to commit an egregious sin against a wrathful God, but the snake’s cool scales were reassuring. She did not look over her shoulder to see whether she was being watched. In that moment, she cared little for what laws had tried to contain her. She hoped quite fervently that she would be seen as she wrapped her shaking fingers around the apple. Heaven help her, she hoped some vengeful deity was looking down as she sunk her teeth deep into pure, sweet passion. She was defiant in the face of her continued captivity, a rebel heathen who was no longer content to stay in this unholy Eden. In this moment, Lilith would risk it all, everything she knew herself to be, for just a taste of the Holy Wild.
“Yes, my serpentine Sister,” Lilith hissed. “I beg you forgive the fear that kept my lips from this righteous fruit for so long, that keeps me tethered to a Garden of Lies out of a bone-deep resistance to loneliness. They called me evil, and I believed them. They promised salvation from my sinfulness, and I waited for redemption. All the while, the skeleton key that could unlock every vine-wrapped cage, the sharp blade that could slice through these thin-growing binds of mine, was blooming and bearing beauteous fruit.”
This one small meal was Lilith’s instantaneous descent into the red realm of soul, a particular and empowered individuality entirely her own. Every time the gritty marrow of the fruit touched her tongue, she caught a glimpse of her destiny. With every hearty swallow, she saw the rainbow shades of her liberated life. This garden-hell, this too-small life, was now completely colorless, devoid of fiery purpose and sensual majesty, but she had not realized it until this moment. Never before had she so clearly known the way out of this lifeless cage, and, sucking the juice from the core, Lilith vowed to seek out a wilder home.
She stood in her own power for the first time since she had been brought to this place, and she howled into the depths of the garden, calling any other living creature to join her in her escape. Uncoiling her scaled companion and looking it square in its black-diamond eyes, Lilith offered the creature heartfelt gratitude and a bone-deep affirmation: “Thank you. We don’t belong here.” Spreading her black wings wide, Lilith kissed the Tree of Knowledge before taking to the ever-spiraling Red Road, the escape route that had been there for her all along, the homeward path to the wilds.
BLESSED BE THESE MANY GARDENS: WHERE SHE RIPPED UP HER ROOTS
Blessed be our many gardens. Without such confinements, we would not have known the bliss of wilder ground. The mechanisms of feminine suppression are pervasive and stealthy, and, within the garden that houses a Wild One’s too-small life, these limiting forces are the primary shapers of her perception for a time. The rules of the garden may not seem unjust until the awakening begins — but, like Lilith after she tastes the forbidden fruit, a wild woman will refuse to settle for a colorless way of being, viscerally rejecting it, after she has seen the brilliance of a better, brighter way forward.
We are always busting open and out of the worlds we outgrow, the circles, partnerships, and safe spaces we once held so dear but which now, for various reasons, do not command our respect or deserve our allegiance. My love, I ask you to consider
