An Excerpt from Chapter One of  ~
Lady of the Sea: The Goddess Who Births the New Age

 
Chapter One - Mother Night

In the beginning was the Darkness. Limitless Darkness. She was vast and full of potential. No empty darkness here, but rather, fullness, unexpressed. She brooded, like the vast sky over the vast sea. Over time she began to feel, and what she felt was a longing, a pulling, a movement. And as she noticed this, became aware of it, it pulled away from her. It moved outward and came into manifestation as another. It was He, her other self, her Divine Twin.

This first movement of energy, this longing, pulling, as well as her awareness of it, constitute the first manifestation—the Other, the He—coming into being. Light, Limitless Light—the Bright One—born from the Vastness of Dame Dark, the primeval and ever-veiled Chaos or Field of Possibilities.

As He came into being they became aware of each other, and a longing for reunion occurred. They merged—as separate beings—making love. Their lovemaking created huge waves of energy, from which all life was eventually sparked into being.

Their first children were the clouds of great, beautiful, magellanic stardust. These stardust clouds spun and danced with the joy of life—swirling, glowing, spiraling— finally coalescing into Stars Beings. These Star Beings often clustered together in great star-swirls called galaxies, and sometimes many galaxies clustered together as families.  The stardust and Star Beings also gave birth: to comets, to solar systems, to planets—including our own dear planet—and other celestial beings.

Some of these Star Beings had special tasks given them by Dame Dark and her consort, the Bright One. These particular Star Beings are those we now sometimes refer to as Angels and Archangels—terms which mean messengers and high messengers. They were messengers because by performing the specific creation tasks assigned to them—in the language of light, sound, and structure—they were carrying forth the message of the Divine Parents. Some call these beings the Lords of Flame and the Lords of Form, though they were, of course, beyond gender, containing both. So perhaps we should call them the Lords and Ladies of Flame and Form. Or perhaps, we should just call them angels.

Angels go by many names and have many very specific jobs. It is said that there were several whose particular job was to assist in humankind’s evolution into beings who possessed the fire of mind. These angels have, in legend, been referred to by many different names, among them the Watchers, the Grigori, the Sons of God, and the Annunaki, a Sumerian/Babylonian word whose roots mean “heaven and earth.”

But...from the One came the Two...and from the Two, the Many. From Dame Dark came the Bright One, the Light—and then, all other manifestations of life.

Our star, the Sun, gave birth to our planet, our planetary system, and all life within it. Reaching out, its long arms streaming forth light and energy, it enveloped and embraced our planet Earth, its star-sparkling arms of light flashing streaks and streams of lightning within Earth’s aura/atmosphere. And in a twinkling of stellar time, the body of the Earth responded to this embrace. Microscopic life forms were sparkled into being as beams of starfire touched the Earth’s surface and reached down deeply into the heart of the planet. Earth’s starry core responded to this touch, reaching upward in mutual embrace.

* * *

Life is everywhere in the universe. Beings floated to Earth on comet tails, they came in on the space winds, on the solar winds. The star-children, tiny living beings of all kinds —water vapors, gaseous vapors, star-sparks—speeding through space in their tiny arks of metallic ore, vapor, and stardust. They met and mingled with the tiny beings which had arisen on and in the Earth. They joined, and became one family.

From the dance of the elements and the streaming of stars came forth many creatures on the Earth, including, eventually, humanity. And humanity, knowing that all life is born from a mother, recognized both Earth and Sky as Mother. And in the night sky’s thick band of stars, many saw the nourishing milk of the Sky mother, who is also the Star Mother—the Mother of the Stars—and so it became known as the Milky Way.

* * *

The Oldest Story

The story is told ‘round the world and with characters of different names. But the story is remarkably similar in all the places it is told.

We came from the sky—the great vast sky. We came from the depths of space down to this planet we call Earth; from the Otherworld into this one. We came from the No Thing into the Some Thing. Beams of starlight from the vast darkness of space, we came falling from the darkness into the light, from non-being into being, from the sky to the Earth.

There are many versions of this story, many shapes that it takes. The details may differ but the basic story is the same. No matter how strong our love and bond to Mother Earth, the mysterious and beautiful starry night sky is also our home. We gaze up to it in admiration and longing. We make up stories about it, set our heroes and heroines in it, imagine it to be our true home—the place to which we will go after we die.(1) This great longing for our true origin and home, for the place of beginnings, is, in actuality, a longing for our own source—our God/dess, our Mother-Father, our Divine Source.

The divine energies are androgynous until they polarize in the process of manifestation. For the last two thousand years humanity has had plenty of interaction with God the Father, but not nearly so much with Goddess the Mother. So we begin here our story of the Mother of the Universe, the Goddess of Sea and Stars, who, in her most primal form is Mother Night.

The Dark Mother

Who is this Great Dark Mother from whom all else is born?

In ancient Egypt, the vastness of sky was seen as the star-covered body of the Goddess Nuit arching protectively over her husband, Geb, who was the earth. She was the darkness of night, and the stars were born from her body and adorned her gown of sky. Each night she swallowed the sun and each morning gave birth to him again.

Or perhaps she was Neith—great creator goddess who birthed Ra, the sun, from the watery primeval vastness of Nun, and then wove the world into being.

Nun, the great primeval watery abyss itself, was depicted as having both female (Naunet/Nunet) and male (Nu/Nun) aspects, and from Nun arose the Ogdoad—the eight primal forces of creation personified as deities.(2) Mut, whose very name means “mother,” was a title sometimes used for Naunet/Nu, she who later was perceived a deity in her own right.

In ancient Greece the primordial Sea of Nothingness was called Chaos. From Chaos arose Nyx–the goddess and embodiment of the darkness of night, and Erebus–the god and embodiment of the darkness of the Underworld. From these two came forth Brightness of both sky and day, and many other offspring as well—the rest of creation.  From Chaos (the nothingness which is full of everything) comes Cosmos—the disorganized “everything” now woven into harmonious, well ordered form. The act of creation was seen as organizing and structuring the primal Chaos, bringing it into a useful order.

In ancient India she was called Aditi, which means unfettered, limitless, boundless, and she was goddess of the unlimited vastness of space. She was the mother of Agni, god of fire, the sun god Mitra, and Varuna, the god in charge of celestial order and lord of the sea. Aditi was also mother of the twelve Adityas, divine beings who were connected with the months of the year—thus bringing in the element of measurement, or Time. Aditi was sometimes depicted as a cow. Cows were, of course, highly important in India, signifying nourishment and wealth in a very real way. This reference to Aditi as a cow is important and we will return to it later.

In Norse mythology the great void was known as Ginnugagap (which means “gaping gap,” or “seeming emptiness”) and the first being to emerge was the primeval cow mother, Audumla, whose milk nourished the first of the giants, Ymir, from whose bodythe rest of the world was eventually constructed.

Mother Ocean

The earthly equivalent of the Great Sea of Space is the watery deep of the sea which covers the great majority of our planet's surface. It is Mother Ocean who is the source ofall life and all beings on this planet. Fertilized by the divine fires of sun, lightning, and volcanic magma, life came forth from her great watery womb; it grew, transformed, evolved, and after aeons, found its way ashore. Life, in all its complexity, is born ofMother Ocean’s bounty, and carries within it the Star Ancestry of the planet.

That is important to remember. We are children of both earth and sky, and both fire and water. All life comes from the stars of the great sea of space. In a very real way, "we are all made of stardust."

In his seminal work, The Lost Language of Symbolism, Harold Bayley tells us that the “conception of the Sea as the Great Mother of all creation is common to ancient cosmogonies. Whether this universal belief arose because physical life was known to have originated in water, or whether the sea was symbolically employed because of innumerable analogies between Water and Wisdom, is a point that it would be futile todiscuss: it cannot, however, be questioned that from the remotest ages the Spirit of Truth or Wisdom has been typified by Water and the Sea.”(3)

Goddesses and Gods of the sea are found in many cultures, and the great watery abyss is found in many creation stories.

In the early Sumerian culture it was Nammu, the primeval sea, who was the Primal Mother of all, giving birth to heaven, earth, and the first gods. In the later Babylonian, Akkadian and Assyrian traditions of Mesopotamia, Tiamat was the Primordial Sea Mother Goddess who, through mingling her salt waters with the sweet waters of her mate Apsu (the abyss), brought forth the earliest and most chaotic form of the world. Their early intermingling then separation brought forth Mummu, the mist between the waters above and the waters below. The legends tell us that Tiamat’s grandson, Marduk, battled with her and killed her, creating the earth from the parts of her body—a form of a mythological motif that speaks of the “pieces” of creation arising from the  breaking apart of an original wholeness.

There are echoes of Tiamat in the Hebrew creation story found in Genesis, which begins with the primordial waters of “the Deep” over which the Ruach Elohim, or spirit/breath of God, moved to initiate the process of creation. The Hebrew word for this and means the same thing—the deep watery abyss, the original sea of chaos. And just as Marduk in killing Tiamat created the earth from her body parts—bringing order out of chaos—so did the unnamed Hebrew God (although elohim is plural, so the word gods might be more accurate) begin “his” creation of the world by dividing the waters to create sea and sky. The Bible says, “He separated the waters that were above from the waters that were below.” The breath of God, the Ruach Elohim, seems roughly equivalent to Mummu of the Babylonian tale. (4)" 

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