Flashes of Insight

Aphrodite and Oshun/Imbolc and Beyond
 

I like to celebrate the coming of the Sacred Love Goddesses starting on Feb 2 with Imbolc,Candlemas,Brigid’s Day and so on.
Mainstream culture likes to deify St. Valentine and give this bloodthirsty slayer of women the one day of the year that Love is supposed to Rule. How totally bizarre  and how the hell did he manage to grab that gig? I could research but let’s just chalk that up to the  badass patriarchy.
This just does not work for me at all so for years, I have celebrated  the time between Imbolc and Feb 14 or so as the Feast of Aphrodite. During this time one can delight in all manner of love rituals [as long as they are non-manipulative] and generally pump up your love groove. (read on…)

Around the early seventies it became apparent to me that my lesbian feminsim also needed a spiritual path that was congruent. I had been reading and studying about Witchcraft and for everything that I read this seeemd to fit my more anarchistic ways. Not a lot of rules there and they honor a Goddess hmmm sounded good to me and yet I was yet to have a real circle of women who believed as i did and I longed for that.
I remember that I first heard of Z when she was arrested in LA for reading Tarot Cards, or so they said. At the time I was also making my living on the East Coast reading Tarot Cards and starting women’s Kozmic Consciousness groups beacuse I didn’t think they would buy Coven’s just yet.

Sept 1975 NYC in the loft of artist Carol Clemments, I actually met Z and we shared Tarot readings on the floor over boxes.By this time,Z had become my Hera for standing up against the establishment to try to actually have Church status like the other religions and not have to pay taxes, she was very savvy and that was of course why they came down so hard and what led to her First US Tour to market The Feminist Book of Lights and Shadows..hence my meeting her in NYC.

(read on…)

How Far Out of the Broom Closet and into the Streets

Part of my “outness” is just me being me and if that helps another to be themselves more then part of my job is done whether as a witch,a lesbian,a feminist,,whatever closet you inhabit, I suggest that you feel around for ways to be more comfortable,more you whatever that is, , to test those boundaries and expand them and bust out as much as is comfortable and then in time push a little further.

My job is being a Priestess and that for me is my full time job which includes Divination, Astrology, Sacred Stones, Vibrational Healing,Animal Communication, teaching playing music and on and on so I am fortunate to love all that I do and not need to occupy a closet for any of these things.

Of course at times I have paid a price for my freedom and this was my choice to make.

(read on…)

Flash Silvermoon Interview..for Pagan Pathways
Date: 10/2/2007 8:36:01 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Thank you so much for agreeing to share with us! Please do tell us about yourself and feel free to be as in depth as you like!We would love to print your picture too!

ok I will pick a couple for ya

Where were you born and raised and what are some of your earliest memories?

I was born in the presence of my mother on March 18, 1950, in Jersey City, NJ. I am quite sure that my room must have faced the Statue of Liberty because I have been a freedom fighter for as long as I can remember. They tell me that after singing Happy Birthday to me on my first birthday, I smiled and put my fist through the cake!

My first Feminist action took place in kindergarten at 4 yrs of age. I had been participating in the rhythm band for a couple of weeks just waiting for my turn to play the snare drum. I had clicked the claves and clanged the triangle but that magic moment when my sticks would strike the skin of the DRUM was awaiting me that morning or so I thought. I was not raised to think that girls were inferior to boys so imagine my surprise when I had the sticks taken from my hands and was told that girls could play anything but this and that I could go to the back of the line again.

My little egalitarian heart was breaking but I screwed up my courage to tell the teacher that this was unfair and was there something else that I could do during this time as I didn’t want to be a part of something so unfair. She told me that I could fingerprint and so I stood in the corner for the rest of the year and finger-painted during the rhythm band time.
This theme and connection with the drums has followed me all the way through adulthood and today am appreciated as an accomplished percussionist. (read on…)

Moonhaven Mystery School:Our First Class Sept 29 1-4pm

The initial purpose for starting the long awaited Moonhaven Mystery School was to create a vehicle to share the wisdom and magic that we as Elders in the Womanspirituality Movement have accumulatd over years and years of practice and service to our communities.

These are THE SECRETS,to coin a popular theme that has hit the Mainstream..and these Secrets have always been kept by the wisewomen of the communities.

These are not the times for hoarding information that can serve and possibly save the world. These are times to break open Pandora’s Box of Women’s Mysteries and demystify and share in positive, safe healing spaces where the coming generations can build on what we know, that these Secrets do not die with us, that the younger or newer ones needn’t reinvent the Wheel!

It is clear to me that this is part of the Mission that I was sent here to complete and I never launch anything BIG unless I get a direct communication from the Goddess, and I got the Word so it is with great honor and joy that I present the Moonhaven Mystery School,may she open doors for women wanting to understand and delight in their own magic as well as that of sweet Mother Earth. Bring us to her Breast for Nurturing and deep Wisdom. Blessed be.
Flash Silvermoon -Priestess and Founder of the Moonhaven Mystery School (read on…)

from J Marie, Guest Blogger:

Hello Sisters,

I just wanted to take a moment to share with you all the awesome spiritual experience of Autumn Equinox at MoonHaven. We met at the mystical home of our priestess, the esteemed Crone, Flash Silvermoon and shared a feast and stories. Some of us knew each other some had never met and all connected.

My partner, SallieAnn told stories of LW, her ex-husband from 1974 who showed up on her door step a year ago and we laughed until our sides ached. I am there when these vignettes unfold and the recounting in Sallies inimitable, irreverent style just reduces me to helplesss giggles.Maybe I’ll write a little of the stuff after this post.

Following the “dinner show” we retired to the chapel in this Goddess blest cathederal. The chapel is a gazebo home of Goddess avatars and crystal grids and esoterica that herself understands but I do not……..Yet.

(read on…)

A Tale of 2 Decks:The Wise Woman’s Tarot /Rider Waite Smith

I started reading cards with the Rider Waite Tarot and it is a good primer, used it for years and was only going to write a good “how to book” for it’s use when the Goddess took control and turned my few pages called “Visions for a New Deck” into a 25 yr. lifework called The Wise Woman’s Tarot.

I definitely was influenced by RWaite but I felt like I wanted to create images that were relevant to all races and that were also very Goddess oriented.

Some people have used the Tarot as a way to offer Feminist rhetoric but I have found to my delight that no one need put such an overlay on the Tarot because feminism, and a woman-centered magical philosophy was already present if one wold but look more deeply,which is exactly what I did. (read on…)

I have often described myself as a woman who walks inside her Spirituality everyday. It is like my skin and involves and encompasses everything that I do.

I would also say more accurately, that I live the life of a Dianic Priestess. My work is about as traditional as you can get for a Priestess as I use Divination, Vibrational Healing for people and animals,Astrology,Music, Crystal Healing, Ritual and much more witchy things in my practice.

On any given day, I am as likely to read a clients cards, find a missing cat, treat a tiger for Grief and Loss, help a couple heal their relationship through the use of a Composite Astrological Chart, sell some stones, make a Gem Elixir, play a concert for Gay Pride, lecture at the University of Florida on Women’s Spirituality, create and lead a ritual or just love my land and critters and encounter the magic of the wild things, plants and trees that live here with me at Moonhaven.

(read on…)

I have definitely been in my share of “Infamous Circles” so I will turn on the time machine to share space with you so to speak regarding a ritual referred to in Margot Adler’s Drawing Down the Moon.I forget now exactly what the chapter was called, but it was the first pages of a chapter about a circle in Staten Island NY,might have been called New Witches or Pagans.

Anyway it was a most steamy summer night and it was a Full Moon if memory serves so I decided that we should do a bathing ritual as the women’s home had a beautiful big old bathroom with clawfoot tub. One by one ,crones first we each in turn got into the warm tub filled with flowers and aromatic oils to be adored and cleansed by our sisters. I was probably only 27 then or even younger. It was soooo beautiful and I remember my then lover Pandora playing her flute standing on the toileet seat, Kate Millett who was part of this first NYC Coven, The Amelia Earhardt Coven,initiated the first dip into the lovely waters and marvelled on how exotic it all felt.

(read on…)