In the Beginning

The Great Goddess was the All and her son represented the self-realized human, male or female. Women were thought to be able to access the power of the Goddess more easily because they could more easily identify with Her. In these early days, women were the mediators between the Goddess and the tribe. Later the masculine force became imbalanced by the male need to overcompensate and relegate women to a lower class. Such imbalance may have been caused in part by men's fear of women's magic -- particularly the ability to give birth, the blood, and her intuitive gifts.

Before science explained away the mystery, women seemed magical, almost frightening. Women bled in sync with the phases of the moon. They bled in sync with each other and, to the awe of men, did not die. Women bore the babies and from their breasts flowed milk to sustain life. While the men went out to hunt, women explored, gathered food, and gained knowledge of medicinal herbs. They were the healers who produced magical cures for snake bites. Women were privy to divine wisdom. The Delphic oracles listened to pythons, while Eve took the sage advice of a serpent. Woman's "innate" ability to tune into the Goddess was facilitated by her knowledge of herbs, including perhaps, psychoactive botanicals that produced visions.

When God was definitively female, women had the edge. It was thought necessary for a man to go through a woman in order to achieve contact with the Deity. Male devotees of the Great Goddess would offer gifts, undergo painful or humiliating preparatory rituals, wait years, fast, and give just about anything for the opportunity to be initiated by a Sacred Whore. In doing so, they attained the power of the Great Goddess, as well as the opportunity to contact what some modern mages or witches refer to as the True Will, Higher Self, or Holy Guardian Angel.

She of the Temple Tower

Priestesses devoted their lives and their bodies to the Goddess. Herodotus wrote that Babylonian brides were required by law to prostitute themselves at the temple for seven days prior to marriage in order to appease the Goddess, who disapproved of monogamy. Spending time as a holy whore blessed the maiden. The profession also became a refuge for women who wished to keep claim of themselves and their rights. In Hellenic Greece, courtesans maintained a social status legally and politically equal to men, while wives were reduced to servants.

The idea that a man needed a woman in order to attain apotheosis, or give birth to the potential God/Goddess hidden within himself, still lives between the lines of many patriarchal religious texts. Crowley had his Scarlet Woman, Simon the Mage had his whore, and Jesus, Mary Magdalene. In fact, Magdalene means "she of the the temple-tower."

Beauty/Beast Duality

The patriarchal entity is a tyrant who feeds on control, or "power over." The Holy Whore is a manifestation of "power with, power shared, and power for all." Think of the Strength card in Tarot: A woman holds the lion's mouth open. In this image, woman has identified and taken control of her sexual and creative power, symbolized by the lion.

Despite his unsavory reputation, Aleister Crowley was one of the first male occultists to embrace the goddess. Crowley switched the traditional order of Strength and Justice tarot cards and changed the name of the Strength card to Lust. Crowley wanted to give Lust (11) the same numerical value as the High Priestess (2), which some Tarot scholars interpret as the holiest card in the deck. Many other decks, including the popular feminist deck MotherPeace, have also incorporated this numerical change. In this Crowley acknowledged the power of the feminine Beauty/Beast.

The word lust is derived from the words luster or light, and originally meant "religious joy." Strength, Light, Lust, and Holiness were originally all one. Crowley's Lust card depicts a rather zaftig and sexual woman -- the much-maligned Whore of Babylon -- riding a multi-headed lion from the Bible's Book of Revelations. In the commingling of beast (indicating our animal nature) and Babylon (indicating the sexual force of the great tripartite goddess), a great power is realized.

In "Beauty and the Beast," the character Beauty can be seen as the Sacred Whore. She has gone to live with the Beast to save the life of her father. The Beast woos Beauty, painfully and pitifully. Ashamed of his ugliness and his animalistic traits, he pines away, stepping towards death. When Beauty sees beyond his mask, she sacrifices her ego and goes to him. When she gives herself to him with a kiss, he is reborn as a gorgeous prince, symbolizing the bliss of the union of Spirit and Nature. This tale is saying that it is within our power to change the state of civilization by the power of our sex. This sentiment is echoed in Deena Metzger's poem, "The Women Who Slept with Men to Take the War Out of Them." The Goddess' way is power with, not the patriarchal power over.