Performing for the Gorgon -- Simone

As the Enchantress knows, Medusa, the Gorgon is my own personal Goddess whom as her unsung priestess, I have often extolled her virtues.

As one demonised female understands another, I have a natural bond of sympathy for the Gorgon. Medusa is one of the most slandered females of Hellenic propaganda. As my gift to the Gorgon, I speak the words of Marianne Williamson as clarion call to the feminine spirit and its spiritual gifts of magic.

"As women, we are born with a mystical purpose. We knew it years ago when we were little, but we have forgotten it.

There are women who are enchanted, living here now, as there have always been and always will be. They are bearers of the Goddess's torch, however dim its light may shine. On the inner plane, they are priestesses and queens. They are absolutely powerful; they have made it past the gates.

At every moment, a woman makes a choice: between the state of a queen and the state of a slave girl. In our natural state, we are glorious beings. In the world of illusion, we are lost and imprisoned.

Most women I know are priestesses and healers. We are all sisters of a mysterious order.

Several years ago, I found myself waking up at 4.15 every morning, my eyes popping open as if on cue. Later, I learned that in days of old, 4.15 am was considered the Witching Hour. How perfect, that seemed to me. We would all awaken at the same time and join with one another and worship and know.

It's a woman's prerogative to know of magic and to practise magic and to use her knowledge to help the world.

We are used to thinking of Friday the 13th as bad luck. In fact, Friday the 13th was teh day the witches gathered. When the patriarchal system, headed by the early church began to squelch the power of women, witches were deemed as evil. Their meeting time, then, was seen as bad luck rather than what it truly was: a time for women to gather and share energy and pray together and heal.

The collective force of the reborn feminine is rising up on the earth today. This is a time of a monumental shift from the male dominance of human consciousness back to a balanced relationhsip between masculine and feminine. The Goddess archetype doesn't replace God; She expresses the feminine face of the Divine - the Mother.

The path of recovery and personal growth is a detoxification process in which negative beliefs from the past, poison the present. We then learn to invoke the flame within us, which did not go out during our dark and difficult years. There is an ever renewable natural strength within us that still exists and is accessible now. I call that innocent place within every woman, the lost girl.

The lost girl is still within us - the girl who wasn't allowed to blossom, the girl whose natural childhood instincts were unnaturally capped at puberty, the girl who was squelched in fear of the woman she would become.

Women are not powerless. We just pretend we are. We do this in large part because we are afraid of the punishment inflicted on us when we dare to be who we really are. Women have allowed themselves to be partially de clawed. But an animal in the wild is not de clawed and an animal in the wild is a beautiful thing."
- Marianne Williamson

"Be not ashamed, woman...
You are the gate of the body,
And you are the gates of the soul."
- Walt Whitman