Celebrating the Sacred Marriage – Take 2
Bringing voice to Sarah and remembering Inanna
Wild Wisdom One, Saturday 20th February 2016
I find myself struggling once again to write a journal article two and a half weeks after the weekend ended, if only I would sit and scribble straight away… but then that would be making life too easy for myself and I’m not very good at doing that!
Since the weekend, many conversations have been provoked, for good or worse, insightful or challenging, around the divine feminine and the sacred marriage. So where I am now is in these conversations, and not so much in the weekend itself. I look back at the journal post I wrote this time last year (found here) and I read the very deep revelation I had of meeting an unfamiliar and ancient story through a story of great familiarity – that being the story of Inanna and Demuzi through Sarah and Abraham. In fact it seems the biggest revelation was simply to hear something more of Sarah than only ‘Abraham’s wife’, which is how she is normally portrayed in the Bible. I am 
reminded through reading this of why it is important to be putting voice to the divine feminine, even though since the weekend I have been finding the term challenging for its risk of becoming conceptual and disembodied. As a female growing up in the Judeo-Christian world – particularly actually being brought up a Christian – it is easy to unconsciously take on the view that women are inferior. How can you not if all the stories you hear are about men who live interesting and full lives, and have important spiritual insights to share, while women are simply their wives? Not to mention the glaring fact that a male pronoun is used to refer to God, and male images to depict ‘Him’. Regardless of whether we have more female priests these days, if these priests are still telling the same stories, then we will still live the same old stories. For me, hearing the voice of Sarah was incredibly moving and inspiring because it reflects something to me – something about the stories of women being of value, being worthy enough to be in God’s house, being worthy enough to be remembered by us.
Who will make offerings at the altars and enact the sacred marriage that unites heaven and earth and keeps the land and its people fertile?… Sarah knows the old ways, secrets passed down from mother to daughter. So Sarah listens… and she remembers Inanna’s story…
Inanna’s descent to the underworld – a fierce and wild story and one that I relish with delight for all its curves and crevices, and motifs not acceptable to the present day image of the feminine. She is very very different to our quiet and unassuming Mother Mary, and I relish the contrast. What I love about mythology, as my experience grows, is the developing mosaic of images that these stories offer. I no longer only have one image of being a woman, rather I now have multiple images reflecting the multiple ways of womanhood – images of anger, of passion, of intimacy, of rejection, of joy, of lust, of love, of violence, the list could go on. They all speak to me on some level, and I feel more whole as a result. That doesn’t mean that I want to mimic the behaviours represented in mythology – who would do that?! But I feel more in touch with the different dimensions of myself, and more awake to how they manifest in relationship to the world around me. In the myriad representations of women in these stories, the wholeness of womanhood is acknowledged and honoured. The dark and the light are in relationship with each other. For me, this mosaic is very helpful to me as a human being trying to navigate this turbulent ocean of life.
This is only my perspective however. The lively discussion ensuing after Sam’s telling of Inanna showed how each 
experience of mythology is totally unique, and that really is the beauty of mythology. It doesn’t present us with a singular truth – ‘the moral of the story’ if you like. Mythology invites us into relationship, and no two relationships are ever going to be the same. The question is how we work with our different experiences as a group and as individuals… and that perhaps is a question at the core of Wild Wisdom School. Can we hold safe space for each other to journey along challenging paths and in these stony paths reap the collective wisdom? It’s certainly not easy, but the journey is fascinating to me.
I’m surprised I’ve actually managed to write something… as always I am saying to myself ‘next time, please try to write sooner so I can actually remember what happened’.
Written by Beth
Photos by Sam
