I worship the Goddess. Yes, I said worship.
It’s a word that tends to make Neopagans and Unitarian Universalists a bit nervous, in no small part because of the long history of the term describing a form of bowing-down, fearful obsequiety that I personally think all religions should cast aside. I suppose if I wanted people to feel comfortable I could say I am devoted to Her, but I’ve decided I’m old enough not to care about making people uncomfortable with my truth.
The word “worship” breaks down into “the state of being worthy of glory, honor, or renown.” It wasn’t used in the sense of paying reverence to a divine or other supernatural being until the 14th century. Nowadays the actual dictionary definition is “the feeling or expression of reverence and adoration for a deity,” with the secondary definition basically devoting that same reverence and adoration to a person or principle in the same way you would a deity, ie, “I worship Tom Ellis’s glorious booty.”
The thing is none of that tells you what worship is like. It doesn’t say how to worship. “reverence or adoration” can take all sorts of forms. The way you were raised to relate to Deity is not the way you, as an adult, have to do. You have the right and the ability to change your relationship with the Mystery.
The reason I use the word is that while I do believe all of creation is Divine, I don’t consider myself equal to Deity. Maybe She’s not omnipotent but I’m way, way less powerful than She. That Divine spark that is Her soul sets electrons to spinning, gravity to pulling, poles to attracting. She is the ultimate cause and reality is the effect. I’m just one round woman with a bad back trying to get my own individual shit together! Really, it’s not even the individual face that I worship, it’s the nameless genderless Force within and beyond all things, but I can’t connect with that on an emotional and spiritual level, so my subconscious gave Her a face and more or less a gender.
(I say more or less because there have been times that She has morphed into something more like a He, and I have a name for that aspect too; we meet occasionally so I can learn more about working with said subconscious and creativity on a deep level. So far he’s shown up as a literary/TV figure, but I know that’s my brain drawing on the meaningful characters in my memory and imagination.)
While I treat spellcraft as a sacred art that involves my connection with Deity, there are other ways we connect that aren’t quite so needy on my part. The three primary avenues I traverse are Devotional Ritual, Prayer, and Meditation. I’ll go into each of these in more depth in its own post, but here is a quick summary.
Devotional Ritual
I wrote about this quite a bit in The Circle Within way back when, and in fact I still use some of the methods I talked about. I distinguish ritual from prayer because for me prayer is much simpler, but for my purposes both of them have the same basic function.
A devotional ritual is one whose primary focus is on celebrating or honoring the natural world or the Goddess Herself. This can overlap with other sorts of ritual and also with the other categories, but for me what distinguishes a ritual from prayer or a spell is complexity. A ritual is made up of more than one smaller ritual – I can sit and pray, but if I also cast a Circle and make an offering, it becomes a full on ritual. A ritual has a defined beginning, middle, and end.
Prayer and Meditation
These aren’t exactly opposites but they are two sides of the same coin. Both can take many forms but the simplest definition I use is: Prayer involves talking to Deity, meditation involves listening to Her. (There are of course many kinds of non-devotional meditation as well.) These two can flow into each other or combine, so, I tend not to draw too many hard lines between the two. Really, it’s more about the “flavor” of what I’m doing than the actual literal words or actions.
Since you’ ve read this far, allow me to reward you with a picture of my cat, as is the purpose of the Internet.
