"McVickar-Edwards, Carolyn - The Storytellers Goddess" - читать интересную книгу автора (McVickar-Edwards Carolyn)

operate out of a sense of the sacredness of life rather than fear for
my own life.

Goddess-centered morality assumes relationship. It assumes a web of
interactions in which no thing is disconnected. Because it reverences
the cyclical nature of all things, it assumes that what is spent just
takes another form; that we live with the All, even when our minds are
tempted to split our actions from their effects.

In Goddess spirituality we are not instructed by a series of behavioral
commandments. We are instead to struggle with affirming our hopes and
dreams in the context of the whole range of our feelings and in clear
sight of our own responsibilities and circumstances. If we understand
ourselves to live in a reverberating web of life, our actions become
mindful. What and how we consume and produce become spiritual
concerns. Composting and recycling become religious practices. Respect
for Earth and Her Creatures becomes reverence.

Pele (PAY-lay) Volcano Woman (Hawaii) Introduction

Pele is the Goddess who lives in Mount Kilauea on the Hawaiian islands.
Goddess of Fire in the Earth, She is Queen of the wonder and terror
evoked by the still-current and lethally beautiful phenomenon of the
Earth's turning inside out. A visitor to Mount Kilauea today may pay a
tidy sum for a helicopter ride over Her steaming mouth.

Early nineteenth-century missionaries encouraged Pele's people's
simultaneous conversion to Christianity and Her desecration through
such methods as throwing stones of defiance into Her crater. As late
as the 1950s, however, some Hawaiians still knew the chants and gifts
that would please Her and petition Her mercy. During more than one
volcanic eruption in that period, proper supplication preceded the
cessation of lava at the edge of several villages.

Mythology has it that the Hawaiian hula began when Pele asked Her
sisters to express delight through dance. To this day the hula, danced
by Hawaiians in the ongoing process of retrieving ancient ways
secularized by Christianity and the tourist industry, almost always
includes movement sacred to Pele. Powerful chants honor the history of
Her wrath, impatience, violence, and Her force in shaping the land.
Jealousy and revenge are major themes in Pele's story cycle today, as
are the magical potency of music and chanted song in love and romance.
From Pele's stories, Hula dancers today derive chants for dance
preparation and conversations between lovers or family members. Then
ankles, necks, and foreheads ringed with ferns they recreate the
movements that have doubtless honored the spirits of Earth, Fire,
Water, and Air since time out of mind.

In writing Pele's story, I struggled with how to convey the
simultaneous accessibility of Pele as Goddess Woman and Her terrible,