Category: Parential Alienation-Child Abuse

“Winter Solstice has been celebrated as the birth of the God, and in Christian tradition as the birth of the Saviour. But there are deeper ways of understanding what is being born: that is, who or what the “saviour” is. In the Gospel of Thomas – which was not selected for biblical canon – it says: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.” This then may be the Divine Child – the “Saviour” – the new Being forming in the Cosmogonic Womb, who will be born. We celebrate the birth of the new Being, which/who is always beyond us, beyond our knowing … yet is within us, burgeoning within us – and within Gaia. What will save us is already present within – forming within us.

Birthing is not often an easy process – for the birthgiver nor for the birthed one: It is a shamanic act requiring strength of bodymind, attention and focus of the mother, and courage to be of the new young one. Birthgiving is the original place of “heroics” … many cultures of the world have never forgotten that: Perhaps therefore better termed as “heraics”. Patriarchal adaptations of the story of this Seasonal Moment usually miss the Creative Act of birthgiving completely – pre-occupied as they often are with the “virgin” nature of the Mother being interpreted as an “intact hymen”, and the focus being the Child as “saviour”: Even the Mother gazes at the Child in Christian icons, while in more ancient images Her eyes are direct and expressive of Her integrity as Creator. In Earth-based religious practice, the ubiquitous icon of Mother and Child – Creator and Created – expresses something essential about the Universe itself … the “motherhood” we are all born within. It expresses the essential Communion experience that this Cosmos is, the innate and holy Care that it takes, and the reciprocal nature of it.”

-Glenys Livingstone, PhD,, PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, excerpted in Songs of Solstice: Goddess Carols

Art: “Tlazolteotl” by Hallie Iglehart Austen, from her book, The Heart of the Goddess: Art, Myth and Meditations of the World’s Sacred Feminine, also shared in Songs of Solstice