Ancient Mother Hunger

This isn’t the deep soulful yearning for Sacred Union, or for the Divine Mother. This is primal. Visceral.

I am ravenous for visual references, symbols, rituals, rites and remembrance.

I feel like I am scrabbling around blindly in the rubble for scraps of a lost culture I cannot name, searching for parts of myself like an archaeologist of the soul.

It has led me to images of prehistoric figurines, the Menhirs, the ancient ceramics of wide-hipped, full-bellied neolithic women. Goddesses formed from the earth. A Herstory gathered by brave weavers and way-showers.

I am feeling it in my body.

Parts of me returning.

I’ve been ravenously studying the work of Marija Gimbutas, who spent her life excavating the goddess cultures of Old Europe and was largely dismissed by the male academic establishment.

I am training with Vicki Noble, creator of the Motherpeace Tarot, deepening my connection with Gimbutas and Mother Goddess through her.

I am immersed in the art of Monica Sjöö and the research of Max Dashu.

I am gathering the crumbs of a Herstory that was never taught to me. That was never taught to any of us.

Share

I grew up near Dartmoor.

I walked the land of spirit and stones and ancient stories long before I knew the magic and medicine they carried.

I painted Brentor for a school art project as a teenager, drawn to it for reasons I couldn’t explain. Actually I painted the energies and light I saw running through it.

The Mary and Michael ley lines converging, twin serpents, sacred weaving of energies entering the moor through an ancient threshold.

The clues to my path were always there.

A fellow sister of the sacred, Elayne Kalila, wrote an extraordinary piece recently: What Happens When the World Is Motherless. Many of you found your way here to me and my work via that post and her kind recommendation.

She named the wound with unflinching precision, the ten thousand year erasure of the Mother, the logical and devastating endpoint of a world that removed the sacred feminine from its cosmology and called the wound normal.

I read it and wept.

I felt the hunger intensify.

Ancient Mother Hunger is the body’s response to thousands of years of absence.

It is the soul recognising what has been taken.

It is the part of us that remembers, however faintly, however wordlessly, what it felt like to live in a world where the sacred was feminine and women were sacred, where the earth was mother, where women’s knowing was honoured rather than burned.

For tens of thousands of years, in the territory Gimbutas called the pre-history, the primary image of the sacred was feminine.

We have her everywhere in the archaeological record. Carved in bone and clay.

She was Inanna. She was the Venus of Willendorf. She was the nameless figurines found in their thousands across Old Europe, placed with care in temples and homes, held reverently in devoted hands and placed respectfully in graves.

She was tended, honoured, remembered.

And then she was removed.

Ripped from the temples.

From the texts.

From our bodies

From the land.

From the very shape of the sacred.

From our understanding of what we truly are.

And we have been hungry ever since.

Are you feeling it too?

✢ Begin by listening to the ache. To the body. Breathe into it. Feel into it.

✢ Express what rises. Speak it. Paint it. Write it. Move it through you in dance, intuitive movement, or sound.

✢ Create an altar or sacred corner for devotion and remembrance, gathering images, symbols, icons. Whatever nourishes.

✢ Challenge accepted versions of history. Learn the lost Herstories.

✢ Connect with others walking this path. Sit together in circle.

✢ Take an intention into ritual, journalling, meditation or prayer, to reconnect with the Ancient Mother memory within you.

✢ Defy the erasure by embodying Her values:
Equality, right relationship, community, respect, reverence, reciprocity, and the centering of women, children, and elders.

When enough of us remember, things do shift.

When enough of us use our voices, things do change.

Kimberley Jones is a multi-award-winning Sacred Feminist Creatrix and 4th-generation Medium.

For over 25 years, she has worked with thousands of women around the world, supporting the reclamation and remembrance of their power, magic and medicine.

Now, as we navigate the final death throes of patriarchy, she is weaving memoir, art, poetry, research, symbolic pattern recognition, and mediumship, creating an evolving body of transdisciplinary mythopoetic work devoted to the restoration of matriarchal values, sovereignty, and the cultural revival of She who was erased.

Read more HERE

Share

Leave a comment