Articles by Jane Meredith

• "Straying towards the Underworld"
• Once, long ago, in the realms before Time had settled itself down, there lived a beautiful maiden and her loving mother. They lived in a land where it was always summer, for this mother was the goddess herself, the bountiful Demeter. Wherever she went the trees burst with flower and fruit both, the grains in the fields ripened beneath her gaze and everything was plentiful. And her daughter Persephone went everywhere with her mother and listened to her in all things.

• "Honouring the Dark Goddess"
• For me the Dark Goddess is the child-slayer, she is famine and rape and the woman who steals my lover, she is despair and loneliness and madness. And I know that she needs my friendship, desperately needs it, but it is mainly a formal friendship that I am able to offer her; respect, honour, empathy, compassion, service. Maybe the world’s problems would be solved if I could fling my arms around her and kiss her on the cheek and laugh with her and settle down for a good chat. It sounds great, but I know that those seconds of grace where such a thing is possible are rare. Compared with the other times.

• "Dark Goddess"
• Last night I lay on the sand at Broken Head Beach near my home in Australia, and looked up at the stream of the milky way across the sky. It’s the time of the dark moon and the stars are torrents of light. They are the drops of milk from her breasts, as she sustains and nourishes us in this fragment of time on the earth. And she is the Dark Goddess, her body wrought from the night sky, more vast than the universe, cradling within herself the infinite spirals of light and dark, time and space.

• "Sacred Marriage"
• At the Summer Solstice the Goddess in her fullness meets the God at the height of his powers and they join together in the Sacred Marriage.....
• Dying or dead he falls from the tree into Her arms. Or his blood soaks into Her land, as an offering. He walks onto the battlefield, knowing that in death he will meet Her embrace. This is the sacred marriage.....
• As the leaves fall from the trees and the Goddess descends into her yearly retreat of the Underworld, the energy of the dark god is stirred into rising and, hidden from all, they perform the rite of the Sacred Marriage.....
• It is the moment of the Winter Solstice, when the age-old goddess gives birth to the god of the new year and as he passes through the gate of her flesh the possibility of sacred marriage is born.....

• "Goddess Article"
• The waves crash against me as I stand in the edge of the surf. The sun is hot, though it is still early morning. The water is cold and filled with the churning of millions of tiny pieces of seaweed, big clumps of which lie washed up in the tide. The salt in the water sticks to my skin, the sand under my feet shifts and shapes itself. As the waves rush out, I see a tiny, rounded shell exposed for a moment, it burrows quickly downwards. Is this goddess? This shell creature, this tide, this body of mine? I think so.