[Hawai’i 2016]

by   Becca Tzigany

When the Goddess summons, you must answer. 

            So it was that even though external circumstances called me to Hawai’i to take care of business, and even though logic argued that it was an expensive, madcap impulse, I felt the call.  I understood that you always have to pay the price of admission. 

           Years of serving our Tantric art project, Venus and Her Lover, had taught my partner James and me to listen, to discern patterns and find our place in them, and to do the best action, no matter what.  When we lived on the Big Island of Hawai’i, I had worked with the transformative energy of Pele, the Goddess of the Volcano.  Throughout our world pilgrimage, James and I learned to invoke archetypes, allowing them to animate their corresponding frequencies within us, and to revere that power.  I felt Pele calling me.  I had to honor her.

            Soon after arriving on Hawai’i Island and taking care of material world details, I made the trek to the volcano. Standing at the rim of Kilauea Caldera, I beheld the sulfurous smoke billowing out of Hauma’u ma’u Crater.  I would hike to the steam vents, to make my offerings to the Earth spirits.  I had brought a rock from our home in the

Andes, from Apu Mandango, which was known as the holy mountain of our area.  Eleven years prior, I had prostrated myself at Kilauea on the hot earth, tearfully beseeching the goddess to allow my family to stay on the island, even though we had received clear guidance that it was time to leave.  She insisted: we must go.  We did.

            An hour into my hike through the vibrant green forest just below the caldera rim, I felt something pulling to my left.  I resisted and kept walking.  I had to get to the steam vents.  But wait.  I stopped in my tracks.  It still was tugging at me.  Turning on my heel, I retraced my steps, drawn by an increasing attraction the closer I got.  Finally I stepped off the trail toward the crater wall and beheld a vertical crevasse framed in ferns, overhanging branches and dripping roots.

             

            A little yoni cave.  This was the place I was to honor!  Though I searched my bag thoroughly, I could not find the rock I had brought to Pele.   Nevertheless, I laid out my other offerings:  coca leaves from my South American home, feathery red lehua blossoms (Pele’s favorite) and green leaves, Amazonian cacao.  I sat, positioning my groin squarely on the pocked, black volcanic rock at the base of the yoni cave. I closed my eyes and breathed in Earth energy, pulling it up into my womb.  Thick, red power pulsed into me, and with it, images of verdant plants springing up, insects swarming, birds swooping, snakes slithering . . . a dazzling performance of biodiversity that made my heart beat faster.  The life force of Planet Earth!  Nearly swooning, I regained my awareness with a profound sense of being held by a most fecund, invigorating mother. 

 

 

           Carried away for hours by my ecstatic communion with the Goddess, I hiked out from the volcano just before sunset, to find my rental car the last one in the parking lot, protected by a full-spectrum rainbow.

 

                 Instead of the bitter tears I had cried with Pele over her severe lessons years before, now tears of joy and gratitude flowed from my eyes.  Life cares for life.  The Mother Goddess cradled me in her assurances of support, tenderness, and an ingenuity that could provide for the survival of the life forms that teemed on Earth.

                          

 

            During my stay on the islands, I was brought to a decidedly feminine heiau, by one of the caretakers.  Mookini Heiau has rounded walls.  I sat in that womb bowl receiving further infusions of loving Earth energy.  Friend Evie and I made our offerings at the large stones in the shape of a yoni and linga ~ rough-hewn versions of the Tibetan drilbu (bell) and dorje (scepter) ~ and laughed like spunky priestesses enlivened by the Goddess and God.

             

 

            Before long, I realized that while it may have been Pele, the fiery Goddess of Transformation, who called me back to Hawai’i, the invitation had been to kneel before her mother, Haumea.  Haumea, Mother Earth, the Creative Force.

            A Polynesian Triple Goddess in one, Haumea, according to myth, would seduce young men to impregnate her, give birth to children, and with the passage of years when everyone got older, she would turn herself young again to continue mating with her offspring and birthing humans.  Categorically, she was the embodiment of fertility. Midwives supplicated her, as she was the deity who taught women how to push out their babies.  Life thrived under her influence.

            On the island of Kaua’i, I paid my respects to the mountain Kalaleia.  Invited by my friend Joseph, who knew how to get us onto private land on the slopes of the mountain, we climbed to a glade with large black boulders.  At the sacred stones there, I placed the rock from Apu Mandango (which suddenly reappeared in my bag), declaring the reweaving of the connections – Lemurian, Atlantean, Pacific, Andean, plant spirits, land creatures and humans.  I honored Haumea.  I honored life.

            No more harsh lessons.    Now was my time to bask in the blessings, and to buoy up the survival of organic life on Earth – not through my fretting over its destruction, but through my adoration of its beauty.

The word that comes to mind is effusive.

 

  effusive

1. expressing feelings of gratitude, pleasure, or approval in an unrestrained or heartfelt manner.
2. (of igneous rock) poured out when molten and later solidified;  relating to the eruption of large volumes of molten rock from a volcano.

There is no substitute for the effusive unconditional love of the archetypal Mother.  In these times when Transhumanists try to convince us that we can be so much more by becoming less human, that Artificial Intelligence can do our thinking for us, and that Nature is for conquering, I remember where I came from. 

            Haumea, Pachamama, Gaia, Prakriti . . . the Creative Force that birthed us all. 

 

 

               ʻĀina hoʻowaliʻia e Haumea                    The Land, made fertile by Haumea