Friends, soul writers, mystics, witches, and lovers of prayer,

This week has brought me and everyone I know to a shocking halt. On June 24, the United States Supreme Court took away my fundamental right as a woman to decide what happens in and to my own body—and the bodies of all my sisters now and in the dread to come.

As bad as that is, there’s something even more horrible in their ruling.

In making this decision, the court did something it’s never done before. In the past, when the court made a radical shift, it was always in the direction of expanding rights.

This is the first time it made a decision to take away rights.

If this comes as news to you, please start reading and following the brilliant historian Heather Cox Richardson. You can get her substack letters Letters from an American for free. If you’re on facebook, watch her weekly live videos on what’s happening and the history behind it.

Women—and good men—were shocked. But the loss of the constitutional right to abortion was just the earthquake. The aftershocks were actually worse.

In its final rulings this session, the radical conservative majority—three of whom you must remember were selected by a man who will hopefully soon be under indictment for sedition, witness tampering, instigating a violent mob, and plotting a coup to destroy the government. Oh, and treason. Let’s not leave out treason.

Two massive aftershocks are:

1. narrowed the government’s ability to regulate climate-changing pollution—just the single most important issue on the globe
2. blocked liberal states and cities from barring most of their citizens from carrying concealed weapons outside the home—at a time when gun violence is destroying the country

I should be hysterical. Devastated. Weeping. Yet I’m not.

I wondered why. I had to ask myself in deep soul writing, why I wasn’t falling apart at the seams. As I wrote, I realized I’ve been exploring and experimenting with how to live a beautiful mystical life for 25 years.

That search began in 1997, when I stumbled upon deep soul writing. At the time, I wrote to “Dear God.” It never crossed my mind to address the divine any other way. Although I used the word “god,” this voice on the page didn’t feel like the law-giving, punishment-doling god I grew up with. This god seemed kind and loving. I felt heard and led and guided and comforted. I trusted this voice and I followed where it led.

Conversations with this loving voice on the page made me want to know more about mystics and mysticism. I started the only place I knew: Christianity. And I did discover some profound Christian mystics like Meister Eckhart. But also a lot of terrifyingly dogmatic ones. Aside from Thomas Merton, I felt an impasse in trying to find a home in Christian mysticism.

I decided to branch out.

I fell head over heels in love with Islamic mystics like Hafiz and Rumi and Ibn Arabi. Oh, how I love mystical poetry. Slowly I began to read about the Vedic texts, a bit on Buddhism, and A Heart Afire, a beautiful introduction to the confluence of Jewish mysticism and Islam by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Netanel Miles-Yepez.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the real mystics—the ones who abide outside dogma and theology—are all speaking the same language.

But, looking back, I see that almost everyone I read and studied was male. Yes, there’s Hildegard and Rabia and a few others, but 99% of the famous mystics of all religions have been men.

Mind you, I didn’t question that they were all male at the time.

I was focused on the ideas, not who was writing them.

It was only when Beloved Vibration of Sophia! landed full force on my deep soul writing pages on December 26, 2014, that my eyes flew open and I realized I knew nothing—nothing—about the ancient and eternal Sacred Feminine.

She has been the center of my life ever since. And the more I find Her, the more I love Her. The more I read and study and learn about the Goddess, the happier I get. For tens of thousands of years, long before any male gods showed up with all their laws and punishments, She was revered. And crowned.

She and She alone bore the epithet, Queen of Heaven and Earth.

So, you might be wondering, what does the Queen of Heaven have to do with the courts taking away women’s right to dominion over their own bodies.

Everything.

It’s right there in Genesis.

No one knows for sure when Genesis was written. Or who wrote it. Scholarship points to 4 different authors or groups of authors writing somewhere between the sixth and third centuries BCE.

The book opens with “in the beginning,” but that’s a lie. Sixth century BCE was not THE beginning.

Anthropology and archeology clearly show that humanity worshiped the Goddess long before Genesis, going way back to the Neolithic and Paleolithic eras.

Goddess worship was anathema to the new patriarchs who demanded we believe there is only one god and he is male and warlike. (And white of course, although no one says that, but just look at the pictures.)

And this male god will have no Goddesses before him.

Did you ever wonder about that commandment? Now you know.

His people were forbidden to tolerate any Goddess worship. In dozens of horrifying scenes, this male god demands his people cut down the sacred groves and massacre any man, woman, or child who worships the Feminine.

All of which leads me to the Supreme Court ruling.

Yes, the justification is right there in Genesis in that appalling scene in the garden. Even if you weren’t raised Christian, you know the story. God creates a paradise and tells the couple they can have anything they want but they are forbidden to touch the Tree of Knowledge.

The fact that it’s a TREE is right away a signal we’re talking about the Goddess. A tree with a bird is a symbol of the Goddess. A serpent shows up. Huge Goddess clue. SNAKE is Her most sacred symbol.

The woman isn’t stupid. She takes fruit from the tree. For this, she should be applauded. A woman who wants knowledge? My kind of girl!

But no, male god is angry. He throws them out of the garden but only blames her. Never mind that the man ate the fruit too. Like an ancient version of a modern TV commercial, the guy is feckless and useless. He has the nerve to say to god, “she made me do it.”

Now we get to the part that shows up in the Supreme Court ruling. Listen to this. Carefully.

“To the woman he said, I will greatly multiply your pain and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children, and you shall be dependent on your husband, and he shall rule over you.” Genesis 3:16

I added the italics. Did you know this? Were you taught this in school? I sure wasn’t. I remember being taught the pain part. But not the conception part. In fact, I just looked it up and that word is not in my Catholic bible! But it is in the original.

Do you understand what this is saying?

Clearly prior to the sixth century BCE, women knew how to give birth without excessive pain AND clearly they controlled their conception.

Controlled their conception.

Of course they did. Wise women have always known how to use plants and herbs and barks to create tinctures and ointments and medicines. Everyone in the community revered our knowledge, our wisdom, our healing abilities.

There was one other horrific time in history when healing women were condemned by patriarchal religions. The witch hunts. The burning times.

It’s not an accident that in the ruling, Samuel Alito actually has the audacity to quote Matthew Hale a 17 century jurist who condemned women to death AND ruled that there was no such thing as marital rape because a man owns a woman’s body and he can’t rape himself. How’s that for convoluted patriarchal logic.

If you weren’t fuming mad before, I trust you are now. And I trust you will be very careful where you travel, the organizations you support, the companies you buy from, and, it goes without saying, who you vote for.

But there is something even more important to do. Something that not only will change your life, but everyone’s in the ancient future just ahead. I use that phrase purposefully.

The ancient future. Just ahead.

The ancient future is the future we can—and must—create as we remember who we really are and how we want to live. As we remember the world before the gods created a world dependent on domination, control, battering, and abuse.

Somewhere in your bones you remember that world. You remember how to live in harmony and equality. That world is, as Arundhati Roy says, “not only possible, she’s on the way.” And she will arrive when we commit to create a world that makes truth, justice, safety, beauty and love visible for every body. Every female body. Every LGBTQ body. Every indigenous body. Every child. Every person who honors the Goddess. Every witch.

How do we begin?

By acknowledging who we really are: beloved daughters and sons of the Queen of Heaven and Earth.

Here’s what I wrote in soul writing yesterday. Perhaps it will inspire you.

I have a sense of strange freedom
as I realize there is no institution,
no church, no organization
that can or will protect me.

I am now cut free
from political control, religion control,
family control, medical control.

I come home to myself.
My body. My intuition.
My knowing. My remembering.

As I come to myself,
feel the feelings—
the blood-curdling feelings of rage and betrayal.

I choose

I choose
what I will believe
what and how I will worship
what and who I am devoted to
how I will pray
what I will think
what I will say
what I will do

I find my self
my sovereign self
my original self
my holy self
my sacred witch self

I remember who I am
who I have always been
and who I have always been
now re-members me

_________________________

This is the deep remembering we are sharing in Re-membering the Songlines of the Witches.

Registration is still open, but will close at the end of July. I doubt I will repeat this mystery school. The time is now.

Re-membering the Songlines of the Witches

to finding our sovereign selves

Janet

website: janetconner.com

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