The Goddesses’ War
CHAPTER 0 | THE ASH GIRL
“Athena flinched, not at the argument—that she would win. She was the embodiment of strategy and domination; winning was her nature. No, it was Artemis’ hands that made Athena recoil. They were pale and smooth, tainted red with the blood of the massacred cow, hovering motionless over the bow. Artemis had slammed them down so hard that her hands left hollow tracks in the petrified wood of the table and now she couldn’t move her fingers. As much as she detested what Artemis stood for they were born of the same father and that counted for something. Her half-sister understood what it meant to have the power they had and be powerless too. Now she was dying. Athena, for the first time in her fabled history, didn’t know what to do. So the Goddess of Justice finished her argument.”
What if all of the goddesses (every goddess ever named in any myth or story anywhere) began their own war to reclaim what has been lost and bring the worlds back into balance? What if Athena, given her nature as warmonger, strategist and embodied wisdom was their leader? And what if all that we are experiencing now, the rise of extraordinary events in nature—tsunamis, hurricanes, plagues—the rise of women, the un-gendering movement, ancient methods of healing finding its healers, ancient ways of seeing finding its muses, was the effect of The Goddesses’ War? And what if you were a part of the prophecy written in the cards? Would you want to know what it was? Who you were born to be? Would you live into your life differently? Even if that called for extraordinary measures—sacrificing a way of life that you have come to believe is a part of your nature?
Twenty years ago the Harris | Crowley Thoth Tarot came to find me. Something unnamed came true in that moment, a part of my story I had no access to prior. As I explored the deck, first with my eyes—the beauty of the paintings arrested thought—then academically, what did the scholars of tarot and Crowley have to say? What is the system of belief embodied in the Kabbalistic Tree of Life this deck is structured around? What aspect of human experience and laws of the universe does each card represent? How is it Jungian? How does it try to express the elusive workings of quantum physics?
And I practiced. I laid the cards according to maps made by ancients and remade by Anthropologist, Angeles Arrien. I traced my own deepest impulses, desires, predilections, and way of being in my own skin onto the card that the numbers declared my soul symbol. The revelation started to free me of the cruel self-talk about not being what my family needed, what people expect in a friend; explained the (selfish, unkind) amount of time I need to myself sinking into the bottomless world of my mind as my gift of seeking answers to the biggest questions and sharing what I find. A gift, not a brokenness, if used for good.
The Ash Girl began as tarot readings for myself that I interpreted through free writing in my journals. I had returned the previous spring from a life dream trip to Africa—had come face to face at 2am with a hyena that was hunting our voluntour group, all lined up like midnight snacks in our sleeping bags under the starry starry sky in the bush. My father died slowly that summer. A dry November husk shriveled and blown away too early in the wet heat of August.
The princess of disks the princess of disks the princess of disks. It happens that way. A card keeps coming up. Speaking to you.
The journal entries turned on a dark january day. I became She.
She stood on a ledge.
Gathering the courage to walk off the edge. A beginning that starts with the end and nothing to see of the future. Only a voice.
Leap.
The Ash Girl is the work uncurling still from this long-dormant seed.
The Princess of Disks, all of the tarot princesses, all of the royalty cards and the major arcana cards (like VIII | ADJUSTMENT pictured), are archetypes. For years the Princess of Disks showed up in my readings, wrote her story in my hand. I assumed she was claiming me. Reclaiming me from that wild little girl I once was who spent her days prowling the woods, talking to animals, feeling no boundary between myself and the light and the mud and the animals and the wood. But another part of my mind (the other stories I tell myself, writing is impractical, who are you to, tarot is voodoo bullshit, get back to real work) was and is always at war with that girl.
I haven’t learned to balance the Princess of Disks, my Artemis self, with my Athena—the aspect of us all that makes reality of the stories we tell. Yet.
I have a crazy thought. If we could learn to be all of our selves, making little adjustments in every moment with a focus on moving our gifts for good in the world, could we save it all? Settle the pendulum of our human dynamic back into some more shapely and beautiful orbit? Win the Goddesses’ war?
What if writing The Ash Girl and moving it out of my hands and in to the world is exactly what I need to reclaim my center of gravity? What if reading it helps you reclaim yours?
Won’t know until I hit ‘post’.
Leap.
