Welcome to the debut episode of Postmugglism, the podcast that talks about magic in the post-modern age: how to thrive in decline, how to grow in the cracks, and how to echant your way to a better life and a more magical future. My name's Nate, aka Postmugglism. Thanks for listening or watching if you're on YouTube.

If you enjoy this episode, please subscribe so that you get notified when I post a new episode each week. In this episode, I'm gonna be talking about the history of the Myth of the Goddess, primarily sourcing from the excellent book by that name, by Anne Baring, and how the regenerative and feminine lifeways of our ancient past can provide a template for the better future that we so desperately need to begin building today.

I am also gonna talk about how hunter gatherers venerated the mother goddess above all other spirits until about five or 6,000 years ago when a dominator culture arose introducing patriarchy and empire to the post ice age world. And how this invasion of empire and patriarchy culminated in the extractive free for all that is Western civilization today.

For years now, I felt called to work with feminine deities, to regenerative lifeways and to feeling rather than thinking my way through life. And I don't think that I'm alone in this. I know many people who are trying to spend more time with nature in appreciation for life, in a receptive state, observing instead of acting and allowing, instead of just willing things to be. I believe that we are collectively going through some kind of a transition or maybe a transformation, moving from a way of being that is primarily aggressive, dominating, and extractive, to one that's more passive, supportive, and regenerative.

And I think that this is inevitable. It's just a natural part of our evolution as a species. I know that personally, my old forceful ways of doing things, taking charge, working harder than the next guy, challenging the status quo, fighting the man -these strategies, they just don't really serve me that well anymore.

To be fair, this is a time when it's better to bend than break. It's also a time for strategic thinking, for compromise and collaboration and those things just aren't strengths of the masculine aspect. We're watching the death of the old world order in real time. At this moment, the US is failing to enforce its will on the world for what feels like maybe the first time in my life.

At the same time, our society is backsliding into feudalism with BlackRock buying up all of our real estate. European countries are energy starved and running out of money. It seems obvious that Western Imperialism has peaked. The promise of the perpetual ascent of humanity is slowly being revealed as just another aging myth.

And here, just over the peak with a steep descent laid out before us, it's time to recognize that we need a new plan. Humanity has been engaged in non-stop domination since the beginning of the Bronze Era: domination of each other, of the Earth, and, since we've tapped nearly all of those resources, we're always looking for that next horizon to conquer. In the book Food of the Gods, psychedelic Pioneer, Terrence McKenna, theorized liberally that a violent dominator culture emerged from the east and conquered the west, enslaving and scattering the mostly peaceful nature worshiping cultures that were prevalent in the prior Neolithic and paleolithic times. Now, it's likely that McKenna's theory is overly simplistic, but still I think that it has merit and that it's at least partially true.

The details aren't important because it's undisputed that by 5,000 BCE Mesopotamia, which was the center of the civilized world at the time, was ruled by conquerors and built on violence and slavery. The gods they worshiped were angry, typically male sky gods. They demanded sacrifice, offered aid and war and inflicting destruction, and they were fickle.

They often pitted their worshipers against one another, answering prayers under different names in both sides of a conflict.. And about the same time, the peaceful goddess worshiping cultures of Neolithic Europe, far to the west of Mesopotamia, were being invaded by, as of yet unknown, conquerors from the East. In this way, both the Near East and most of Europe traded hands for thousands of years from roughly 5,000 BCE, arguably all the way up to the modern era. And this egregore of domination, though there may not be one distinct cultural progenitor, clearly existed and, it would seem, evolved into modern civilization. Yet in the context of history, this seven-ish thousand year period that I've just described is only a tiny sliver of human existence compared to our undocumented history, which stretches back hundreds of thousands of years.

The rapid rise of Earth's oceans towards the end of the Younger Dryas period, around 10,000 to 9,500 BCE, obliterated almost all traces of prehistoric civilization. But from what archeologists have uncovered about the period of history after the flood up until 5,000 bce, there is no evidence of strategic warfare, militaries, or mass enslavement.

Reading from "The Myth Of The Goddess", "There is no sign of any disruption to the culture of Neolithic Europe until the first Indo-European invasions in 4,500 BC. Before this, there is no emphasis on choosing hill sites, building massive walls, or making weapons, that would offer protection against enemies.

Indeed, the hill or mountain was chosen as the site of a shrine, not a citadel or fortified encampment". Instead of warfare, we see relatively peaceful cultures stewarding sacred natural resources and worshiping nature as the supreme being; much as we see in the hunter gatherer societies preceding the Younger Dryas. It's reasonable to assume a certain degree of religious continuity connecting the pre-flood cultures and the survivors of the Younger Dryas cataclysms. "In the painted vessels and images of old Europe, there appears to be a direct continuity with the imagery of the Paleolithic Cave paintings in southwestern France. Cave dwellers along the Danube and elsewhere were able to leave their caves as the climate grew warmer, they chose sites that were fertile, close to water and rich pasture, sheltered from the wind, and lovely to look at. There they recreated the older cosmology through the new media of pottery, weaving, and sculpture. A continuity with the paleolithic seems unmistakable, particularly in the goddess figures and in the building of shrines or temples". Indigenous cultures around the world still practice life ways nearly identical to those of their ancient ancestors, so this idea is not without precedent. And in modern times, indigenous cultures are our most authentic examples of this other way of living. And in this time of ecological, social and spiritual crisis, their wisdom carries the seeds of our own brighter, better future, and they call for an urgent return to this feminine, regenerative way of being.

Thanks so much for tuning in to this inaugural episode of Postmugglism. This is a passion project, a work of love, and it needs more love, love from people like you. If you enjoy today's episode, please subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, Apple, Spotify, whatever, or, if you like to watch, on YouTube. And of course there's always more content on my website where I keep all of my episodes, videos, articles, and everything else in on easy-to-find location, www.postmugglism.com. Some of the oldest religious artifacts ever discovered are figurines depicting an exaggerated female form designed to emphasize fertility and her role in the reproductive regenerative process. "The Myth Of The Goddess" described such a figurine known as the goddess of Lespuge from France circa 20,000 BCE. Large pendulous breasts, with her arms resting on them, merging into her full and rounded womb.

Her buttocks and thighs are disproportionately swollen as though also contributing to the act of birth". Not far from Lexpuge the oldest sculpture of a goddess ever uncovered was discovered dating 22,000 BCE. Only the head of this figurine survives, but many such depictions of the female form have been discovered from the paleolithic and neolithic periods.

They frequently featured exaggerated breasts and buttocks to emphasize the regenerative life-giving nature of the feminine aspect. Figures of various animals are also common. What is noticeably missing, however, are similar depictions of the male form -of gods. The mother archetype took several forms to prehistoric people, which is somewhat confusing to our neoplatonic sensibilities.

The Greeks assigned a God or goddess to every describable facet of the cosmos. So that's what we're used to. It seems though that our religious observations in prehistoric times were more, let's say, metaphorical and less categorical. Ancient humans worshiped the immanent natural life force of the planet during this lush and abundant time on earth. Our goddess was the earth, or perhaps life itself, and she was represented in all the many ways she appeared to us: as the elements, as the animals we hunted and domesticated, as the fruits of the field, the shelter of caves, and the cycles of life, death and rebirth. Reading again from "The Myth Of The Goddess", "We can recover the lost myth of the goddess through her images. Wherever we find the cave, the moon, the stone, the serpent, bird, and fish, the spiral, meander and labyrinth, the wild animals, the lion bull bison, stag, goat, and horse, rituals,concerned with the fertility of the earth and of animals and human beings, and the journey of the soul to another dimension. Then we are in the presence of the images that once enacted the original myth. They exist as living testimony in the human psyche to its vision of the unity. Originally imagined as the mother goddess who gives birth to the forms of life that are herself." After emerging from the protection of the caves we lived in during Paleolithic Times, the womb of the Earth, if you will, neolithic people formed encampments and later villages and cities, and eventually much of their food supply was grown in cultivated lands rather than being hunted or simply forged.

As agriculture evolved, the lifeways of these late neolithic people adapted alongside it and alongside these cultural changes, religion and spirituality evolved as well, and with religion grew government. The earliest forms of government appear primarily symbolic -as they should be- and the real power rested with the priests or priestesses. Kings were symbols of divinity on Earth, the living incarnation of the offspring of the divine mother, and were sacrificed to the goddess to preserve her favor and blessings.

The goddess was seen as eternal and her offspring as eternally regenerating, with death as a necessary part of the cycle of life. Rulers represented divine power and would be sacrificed to allow that divine power to regenerate once more as the natural world does each year with the seasons. But over time, society grew and became more complex, and the practice of regicide gradually became symbolic, and eventually a bull was sacrificed instead of the king with the transition to farmed rather than hunted foods.

The animals worshiped by people shifted from the mighty beasts of the hunt  to the domesticated animals of the farm. Cattle, then as now, were a primary source of protein for Bronze Age people and were worshiped accordingly. The fecundity of the bull was seen as a metaphor for the abundance of the natural world. A yearly cycle of birthing and later slaughter of cattle for food, coinciding with the planting and harvesting seasons, created a calendar of activity for.

And at the culmination of this cycle, just prior to the harvest, each year, a bull was sacrificed to the mother in gratitude and to perpetuate this essential tradition just as the sacrificial rulers of their neolithic predecessors. What started as the worship of nature slowly morphed into the worship of deities, who ruled over nature in increasingly complex mythologies.

First, the mother was given a son, and the son was a bull, with its crescent shaped horns a visual parallel with the crescent moon. Over time, this bull became a boy, and later a man, the first of the gods. And as time went on, these two supernal forces were further stratified to eventually become the pantheon of strong, masculine gods and soft, superficial goddesses that we recognize from Greek mythology.

Originally the male aspect's purpose was self-sacrifice for the greater good but its ambition shifted the story over time to assert dominance. And with that transition, patriarchy filled all the available space in human culture, leaving us unbalanced and obsessed with conquest, expansion and the consolidation of power, the defining characteristics of empire. Baring's hypothesis in "The Myth Of The Goddess" is that war grew from the need of this dominator culture to appease their increasingly bloodthirsty gods with ritual sacrifices. Reading now, "The apparently endless and otherwise gratuitous conquest of territory must have come to serve the ritual purpose of securing the surrogate sacrifice of the other in place of oneself or one's group. The wholesale extermination of other people became a new way magically to avoid death". It's worth considering the non-dual list possibility that this competition between feminine and masculine energies across time is somehow necessary for the balanced development of our species. That through these shifts in consciousness, we're developing our faculties towards a more mature and integrated way of being in the world.

I believe that there is a grand narrative driving these shifts and cycles, and therefore humanity is exactly where it is supposed to be during any given age, because it's fated, so to speak. This is just what's going to happen. The aggressive masculine energy that has defined humanity for the last 7,000 years likely coincides with our species adolescence -it certainly feels that way. Here at our most arrogant and most self-destructive, we've only barely begun to come into our own as a species and our potential far exceeds the runway that we've left ourselves. Clearly, something has to change if we're ever going to realize it. Humans obviously survived for hundreds of thousands of years without consuming all of our natural resources before the Younger Dryas period and we have evidence of at least several thousand years after it where we existed without engaging in strategic warfare and genocide. That there is no archeological evidence of wide scale violence prior to the Bronze Age is suggestive that this period of relative peace stretches back much, much further.

Yet in only 7,000 years hence, this egregore of domination has pushed us to the very brink of self-annihilation. What a difference a shift in worldview can make. The Paleolithic Age was our infancy and the Neolithic, our youth, as a species. During our tender years of development, we stayed close to our mother, the earth, but as is the way with humans, we separated from her in our adolescence to individuate ourselves to learn who we really are. And as humans often do, we overestimated our capacity, getting ourselves into trouble. Carrying this metaphor forward, all that's left for us to do now is to return home, to remember a regenerative way of life and to continue on in our development and better harmony with who we are and where we come from.

Looking at our current time from this perspective, it seems obvious that we're in the midst of another transition, out of adolescence, and, as a young adult species, we're being forced to come to terms with our own limitations and our role in the greater cosmos. Of course, before there can be any transcendence, there must be crisis.

So we are creating the crisis that will drive our species into the coming age. That's what's happening at the level of human beings as a species anyway. As individuals, this change is unevenly distributed. We're not all transitioning at the same pace. For our species to adapt, some of us will need to be outliers sensing this shift on the way and facilitating its emergence into our culture. And as more and more of us find coherence in natural lifeways, the rest of our species will be pulled along by the force of our momentum. Embracing the sacred feminine is equivalent to embracing natural lifeways moving into flow with the rhythms of nature and the cosmos brings us into coherence with time and fate in a way that affords us better health and prosperity as well as joy and fulfillment.

We've been programmed with the so-called rational worldview that nature is inherently aggressive, competitive, dangerous, and chaotic. But anyone who's grown a garden knows how ludicrous this is. Balance is everywhere in nature, along with collaboration and a million little harmonies that enable the greater flourishing of the system as a whole.

Of course, there are examples of predation in nature, but balance is always maintained by the system. Our fear of nature is irrational.. We watch lions taking down gazelles on the Discovery Channel and project this tiny sample of natural behavior across every potential engagement with the natural world, as if walking down the street in some urban setting is completely safe or without risk.

Life has risks for the individual, but nature carefully protects the collective. In contrast, the materialist rationalist notion of a cold dead universe promotes zero sum thiking and prioritizes the individual above the rest of the collective. Here's a definition of zero sum thinking from the Miriam Webster dictionary.

"A situation such as a game or relationship in which a gain for one side entails a corresponding loss for the other side". In contrast, Carol Sanford in "The Regenerative life", describes regenerative thinking in this way. "Regenerative work respects the autonomy and self-determination of living systems and is committed to helping them become increasingly good at accomplishing their own actualization."

The two perspectives couldn't be more diametrically opposed. Some of us choose to see life as a threatening experience in which every moment is a competition to survive. Others choose to see life as a series of engagements between ourselves and other living beings in mutual acts of world building in which individual achievement is seen as a vital contribution to the collective output.

But what's essential to recognize is that our current paradigm of materialist, rational has no greater body of evidence to support it than it's alternative. In fact, science continues to discover more and more examples of natural harmony, of living beings thriving in collaboration rather than in competition, but this has yet to soak into the collective conscious enough to shift our thinking. Yes, nature is fascinating and life hangs in delicate balance in a million little ways. But what does this have to do with the end of empire and building a better future? Well, I find it very enlightening and very encouraging that the amount of human history that we don't know dwarfs the portion that we do.

And that the evidence that we do have says two things fairly clearly. First, that no military conflict took place during observable pre-history from before 20,000 BCE E until the Bronze Age. There was violence, of course, but not the strategic, coordinated kind, no armies, no conquerors, et cetera. And second, that there is no evidence of complicated hierarchies of gods and spirits until roughly this same period.

These two shifts in human behavior, which occur more or less concurrently warrant special attention because they fundamentally change the way that our species exists in the world. If we recognize the hand of fate as a guiding principle, then this was no mistake. Think of human history like an individual human life: we're born, we grow into adulthood and eventually maturity. In our infancy and as young children, we clung to our mother the earth for protection, nurturing, and to learn. As we grew into our teens, we left the safety of our mother's embrace to individuate and self-actualize, to learn more about ourselves and our capabilities. And looking forward in time, once we've matured a little, we will return to our roots as humans do to better understand ourselves by understanding our origins. We've been programmed to think of our development as a species in purely hockey stick terms. Every day in every way, we are getting better and better... That our ancient ancestors were somehow lesser beings than ourselves because our technology is superior, and we're so learned now.

But this idea doesn't play out in practice since we've presumably never flirted with our own extinction as recklessly as we do now. I will never be convinced that the extractive and self-destructive way that we've lived for the last 7,000 years is somehow superior to the regenerative life ways that sustained us for tens of millennia. Rather than a hockey stick, history curves back on itself in harmonic resonance. Everything in life is cycles, and though history never exactly repeats, it certainly rhymea. Like the tide going in and out, there's an undertow to the current moment, pulling this along with the tides of time. What's going to happen is going to happen on a grand scale, but I do believe that we participate in the process of fate unfolding and have the power to express the spirit of the current moment how we see fit. We're antenna, and what signals we choose to broadcast are, to a certain degree, up to us.

How we feel, how we react, how we express ourselves, this is how we impact the world. Fish that swim in shallow water have their lives defined by the tide: when they eat, when they sleep, and when they watch for predators. Recognizing that our own existence is cyclical in nature allows us to benefit from knowing how to live according to where we are in the cycle.

All of this is to say that though we've been heavily influenced by the masculine aspect for the last 7,000 years, and imperialism has been its defining characteristic, it finally appears to be on the decline. We, as a species, are emerging from our adolescent phase and learning that we in fact do not know everything or have all the answers, and this revelation is gradually leading us to another.

That nature, as it turns out, is quite good at what she does, far better than we are, and that we have so much more to learn from her than we realized. The way forward is the way back, returning to our ancient roots worshiping the sacred feminine aspect, the regenerative life force from which we spring, and to which we will inevitably return in the end. Worship of the divine mother of nature, of lunar goddesses and their cycles of time, this is how we rediscover who we truly are, how we live in true sustainability, and how we live joyful, meaningful lives. This is how we re-enchant the world. Thanks for listening or watching. I'll see you in the next episode.