Sometimes that fuels me in life and I am extremely passionate about is the connection we have with our Voice/throat and with our wombs.
When I spent 9 months doing my Womb Apprenticeship with Janine McDonald in Australia in 2016 each of the four women on this apprenticeship were asked to name their Superpower. Mine was:
My Voice and it’s Vibration. Transmitting the ancient sounds through the Mystery Schools and reconnecting the cords from the Throat to the Yoni. Enabling others to vibrate deeply into their bodies with their Sound and activate their Kundalini.
In ancient times the Priestess working in these ancient temples in places such as Egypt and Malta knew this connection and it is depicted in many of the uncovered tombs and statues recovered in recent times. In the pictures below we see Hathor, the goddess who personifies motherhood, fertility and abundance. She embodies the bounty of the Earth and is sometimes called Mother Earth or Earth Mother. Her ‘cow’ ears are a major indicator that she is concerned with Sound. Her face is symbolic of a womb, with her ears depicted at the level that fallopian tubes enter the uterus. A cervix and vagina are implied beneath her chin.
These symbols point to a clear connection between our Voice and our Sexuality. If you look from anatomical point of view and two pictures side by side of the throat and the yoni then you’ll see that in a woman’s body the vocal cords mirror her vagina. In a female embryo in the baby’s body the vocal cords and ovaries are one organ that later splits into two as the embryo develops.
We can see from the pictures below some clear visual similarities between a women’s Vulva and her throat.
My belief is that often if the throat is constricted so too is the Yoni and vice versa. As we allow ourselves to make sound, to open our mouths, create space, so too we allow space inside our Vagina and womb. And in between lies the heart linking the two. If we try to force something inside our mouth quickly we choke or gag. So too it is with our Yonis.
Having a background as an Opera Singer I have been fortunate to have had many years of training in opening my throat and learning to breathe deeply. When I started my journey with Sacred Sexuality in my early forties these components served me well in learning the basics using breath, sound, movement, touch and awareness. I became fascinated with the connection between my throat and my Yoni and noticed that for many in this field they struggled with making sound, opening their mouths and very often were even triggered by me making these deep powerful sounds.
As women living in Patriarchal times, we were silenced in our Power. We were killed, burned at the stake, betrayed even by our Sisters for sheer survival living in this world. It wasn’t safe to be powerful as a Women, to have a Voice because quite simply in standing up and speaking from a place of embodied Power we were denounced and humiliated not only by men but also our own sex. And for many of us this still sits in our cellular memory.
It hasn’t felt safe to be heard to speak up, to be seen, to be powerful. And so, as our Voice died, so too did the powerful force of our sexual energy.
The ancient power of the Dark Goddess’s capacity to heal, regenerate and renew was centred in her ecstatic sexuality. In the transition to Patriarchal rule, where men worshipped the new solar gods, it was necessary to turn people away from the sacred sexual rites of the Goddess. To do this the make-dominated cultures had to destroy and disassociate themselves from the power of women’s sexuality.
Feminine sexuality was then promoted as an evil temptation, the one exception being for procreative purposes within strictly defined monogamous boundaries. Women were denied sexual freedom and disempowered from expressing their instinctive sexuality. As we repressed her sexuality in ourselves and in society, we have cut ourselves off from her powers of renewal that allow our wounds to be healed so that we can become transformed and born anew. When wounds cannot heal, they fester, auto-intoxicate and weaken the entire system. These poisonous by-products distort our perception of the relationship between sex and death. The increase in sexually transmitted diseases, is the ultimate symbol of a society who fears and denies both sex and death. It is a cry of the Dark Goddess for us to re-examine and revise our attitudes and actions concerning two of the most powerful forces in our lives.
Originally the Goddess reigned supreme and alone, but the patriarchal cultures later relegated her to a position of secondary importance as the mother of the God/King, such as Isis as the mother of Horus, or Mary as the mother of Jesus. They also coerced her to accept the reversal of this process. Now the God would become her Creator, as in the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib. The goddesses were also forced to accept Gods as their husbands, without out whom they were powerless- such as the marriage of Hera to Zeus, and Isis to Osiris. They forced marriages between the priestesses of the Goddess and the leaders of the patriarchal tribes served to destroy the lineage of matrilineal succession and transfer the royal bloodlines through patriarchal descent. Priestesses who refused to marry were isolated into enforced celibacy, such as the Roman Vestal Virgins.
Lilith is a classic example of this. Legend tells her as the first wife of Adam in the Garden of Eden. Originally Adam and Lilith were created equal. Lilith insisted upon equality which Adam refused and so she left him. She chose a lifetime of exile in a desert cave on the shores of the Red Sea rather than one of subjugation and domination to Adam’s will. History has since painted her as the harlot, the wicked, the false and the black. As a demonic dark Goddess, she was then feared and hated rather than revered. Lilith lives within each man and woman and represents our primal instinctive feminine sexuality. She is free and unrestrained in her animating, pulsating, transforming sexuality that remembers and evokes the original orgiastic aspect of the Great Goddess.
The essential mystery teachings of the Goddess concern death and rebirth. The Goddess has been reborn during a transformational dark moon phase period of the processional age cycle in which massive death is pervading the earth. Everywhere the old is dying to give birth to the new. This is evidenced in the pollution and dying of the forests, soils, waters, atmosphere, wildlife, and the escalating rate of degenerative diseases in human beings. The Goddess has returned to the people of the earth at a critical time in a large-scale cosmic cycle in order to share her wisdom and vision of how best to pass through the dark corridor of death toward healing and renewal.
It is a cry of the Dark Goddess for us to re-examine and revise our attitudes and actions concerning two of the most powerful forces in our lives.
So, we are living in powerful times as humanity now stands as the cusp between the closure of the Piscean age and the dawning of the Aquarian Age. The cuspal periods spanning world ages can last for around five hundred years, and they are times of great transformation. We are currently in the dark moon phase of the Age of Pisces: and according to some astrological historians, this time period is not only the closure of the 23,000-year Piscean Age, but also of an entire 26,000-year polar processional cycle. If this is so, then we are in a most powerful dark moon phase in the history of humanity.
Today the sexuality of the Dark Goddess is taboo in our culture. Women are made to feel ashamed of their raw, instinctive sexual desires and to feel that their menstrual blood is dirty and disgusting. But as we once again start to embody and revere the Dark Goddess women are once again standing up and allowing themselves to be powerful and to be heard. As the cyclic wheel turns we try to find balance between the light and the dark, neither being given precedence, each complementing each other.
The disappearance of the Goddess during the last five thousand years of patriarchal rule might not have been due to her suppression and destruction by the patriarchy, but was in fact her natural withdrawal into the dark moon phase of her own cycle. Perhaps it was simply that the inevitable time has come in her own lunar cyclic process to let go and retreat, so that she could heal and renew herself. And now she must be re-emerging as the new moon phase of her cycle with the promise and hope that accompany the rebirth of the light.
So, as we start to embody the dark with the light, we drop deeper into our bodies. We allow the Great Mother Earth to move through us in her primal force, we feel her kundalini, we feel her rage, we feel her fire and we allow ‘All’ to be heard. Sometimes this shows up as pure, harmonious tones and sometimes it is the lions roar that will not be tamed. And this takes courage. The root of the word Courage is cor—the Latin word for heart. Courage originally meant “To speak one's mind by telling all one's heart.”
So, as we start to once again vibrate, to move, to make sound, to open our throat, our sexual energy can no longer be repressed. It wells within us; the fire once again emerges.
Through vibration we can tune ourselves to healing potent energy of Mother Earth, that is a source of enormous primal and sexual energy that gives us power to heal ourselves and realign ourselves to our original state of wild innocence.
Acknowledgement to Mysteries of the Dark Moon- Demetra George