This invocation poem was written for the summer solstice ritual marking Earth Activist Training's 20th anniversary and Starhawk's 70th birthday.

Regeneration Poem

Spirit of Regeneration

This paper was presented at the "Women’s Ancestral Wisdom, Witches, and Spiritual Connections to Nature" panel during the Women Rising! New Visions for a Post-Patriarchal World Conference (San Francisco, CA, October 12-14, 2018).

Remantling Serpent Energies for the Healing of Post-Patriarchal Possibilities for the Body, Intimacy, and Futurities

Abstract:

Many feminist and women’s spirituality scholars have been asking how we may make ourselves more available to an imagination that orients us better to becoming post-patriarchal subjects of post-patriarchal moments.

Centuries of living within societies of domination has left our bodies, nervous systems, wills, and histories with accumulated trauma which, we have found, acts as a limitation upon—or wars upon—the arc of the possible. This trauma must not only be discharged to make us more available to ourselves, our promise, and each other: it must be transformed in a way that the energy released contributes to the liberation of all life. Engaging primarily the traces of serpent reverence found in South Asian religious, folk, and nondominant traditions, my paper suggests that the medicine of snakes holds keys for our safer embodied being, relationships, and resilience. Being in this moving condition of safety orients us to ways of relating that center instead of othering, include instead of excluding, vision and become instead of fearing.

I argue that a partnership with ancient serpent energies can assist with individual, collective, and intergenerational healing. I will be examining oracular traditions as well as findings and claims from complexity theory, neurobiology, and epigenetics to propose a multi-pronged framework of remantling serpent energies to work with us. Which snake practices found in tradition may be reclaimed in keeping with an ethic of care and reciprocity, and which of them need to be decolonized? I explore how to call on and reconnect with serpent energies in a way that rebuilds our ancient solidarity with the Earth, as well as bridges across the borders of coloniality and modernity/rationality. 

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(Image Credit: "Snakes and Earth" by Bhajju Shyam, who says: "The earth is held in the coils of the snake goddess, so a snake symbolizes the earth.")

Talk: Remantling Serpent Energies for Healing Possibilities for the Body, Intimacy, and Futurities

KALI 

Kali, Supreme Mother, Dark Mother

There is nothing to fear—has never been

We are circles moving 
within circles
Every circle emanating from You
returns to You

There is nothing to fear—has never been
 
Mother of Time 
Past, present, future suckle from your breasts

You birth every form 
from dark, unto the beginning 
return us all 

There is nothing to fear—has never been

Your love—beyond 
compassion, dispassion—
perfuses us with love

Teach us, Kali, to dance with duality,
not knowing

To attend to the pulse of life
	within everything

Fiercely 
slay
what divides us 
	from ourselves, each other

There is nothing to fear—has never been


—Monica Mody

(This work is available under a Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Kali, an invocation

This talk was given at the 2020 Conference of the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology, “Rivers of Change: Prophecy and Possibilities,” held in Santa Ana Pueblo, New Mexico (March 13-14, 2020).

*

We live in a world where the problems before us signal no straightforward solutions. Biological systems are breaking down, forests and other living species are imperilled, oceans and soils are being poisoned—and far right regimes are displaying unspeakable cruelty against peoples they label as “other”. We urgently need new configurations of being.  

Such a time may be unprecedented in human memory, but it is not out of the reach of visionary memory—where pasts, presents, and futurities fold into and emerge out of each other. Accessing and bringing to the fore—for their community—knowings from this cosmic womb was the charge given to ancient seeresses and prophetesses. In certain cultures and periods, the same persons held both prophetic and poetic functions. 

Patri-kyriarchy and colonialism have sought to graft their rationalist, disenchanted ideologies upon these mantic cultures. Yet, not all modes of sibylline and creative flow have been subjugated. Throughout myth, literature, and history, prophetic women and poets have posed challenges to structures of domination, at times radically restaging history through their interventions.    

Bearing this context in mind, this presentation explores how the visionary/poet today may listen to what is dying, what has died, what is emerging, and what wants to be known. It asks how the healing of the visionary/poet might tie in with the healing of the world. It considers how she may stay with the trouble, and how she may weave the disconnection within our webs into threads of connection.

Staying With the Trouble, Reweaving the World: A Speculative Manifesto for the Visionary/Poet

This invocation to Vac/Vak, the primordial creative power of word, was my offering for the 41st Annual Reclaiming Spiral Dance (as part of the deity invocation).

Invocation to Vac

​Vac, goddess of speech
You cascaded on to Earth, irrepressible as rain--
filled with the power of creation--
naming--
bringing to life, filling with life, flow of vital expression--
May we craft through words, silence, and their weaving
justice and cosmic balance.   
Show us that language, like water, is fluid
with possibility.  
Make our tongues supple enough to call out Truth.  
To name and make it so.
Flow wisdom into us, gift of intuition, power of perception.
Open our sight to insight—help us see what we must see,
bring wisdom and peace as siddhis in the world.  
Show us how to imbue with dignity 
everything we perceive and name.
Through our words, restore
balance on Earth, mysteries of harmony.

Monica Mody

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