Sacred Message - Quest for Love & Wholeness

0:00Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, my dear friends, fans and colleagues, no matter where you are and when you're listening. I just want to say welcome back to Voices of the Sacred Feminine, the longest running Sacred Feminine podcast we have been airing since 2009. And today I have a sacred message for you. I am going to be doing a few of these sacred messages during the month of March. And if you like what you hear, I would refer you to my book, God is Calling, which has a lot of inspirational sacred messages as well as meditations of the Sacred Feminine. So today the sacred message is something I call quest for love and wholeness. And it goes like this.

1:02Many often consider the question, is the divine male or female or both? Or is deity beyond gender altogether? The many answers to these questions have been caused for much argument, conversation, friction and oppression across the globe as women, transgenders and gays are diminished within patriarchal Abrahamic religions. Looking back into the past of many cultures, we see the divine source embodied both the masculine and feminine. Omit total and in drunkenness as tech creator deity embodied the principle of the divine masculine called Omit, Omit to cutely alongside the sacred masculine was the sacred feminine. Or there was also Omit Qadal. We often see images of the Hindu goddess Pavarti and the god Shiva embodied within one statue

2:05and Shiva himself often depicted having very endroge in his features. We've discovered statues of Aphrodite and Ishto are with male genitalia. The Greek goddess Metis started out as a female, then becomes bisexual, a hermaphrodite, as in her asbapt, as metis, phanus, a creator and begetter, all in one body. If these deities are any example, it's clear gender exists in many forms as to human beings. That's quite a spectrum, I'd say. Examining deities perhaps a bit more familiar to us in the west, we take a closer look at Aphrodite and Eros, or Cupid. Eros is sometimes thought of as the son of Aphrodite, but he's really an enigma. He's first mentioned as an early creation god appearing alongside Gaia and Chaos. He said to be hatched from the egg of night and the force that separated the two haves

3:08of the cosmic egg, or heaven and earth. Similar to Aphrodite's appearance at the birth of creation, she and Eros are placed at the moment of disunion of the cosmos. They are depicted as hermaphrodite beings, descended from the moon, sliced in half by Zeus, after which each half yearns and searches for the other half to be complete. Their wholeness denied. I was reminded of the dichotomy of love and disunion again as I walked through the Louvre Museum in Paris and gazed upon the famous statue of hermaphroditis. Imagine for a moment you're in the city of lights, certainly imbued with the essence of the feminine. You're standing in the vast courtyard of the Louvre about to descend beneath the glass pyramid that marks the entrance to this world-renowned museum one would call a sacred site. As you walk through the galleries of statues one in particular catches your eye.

4:12At first glance, one might easily miss the full potency of what the statue represents and the deeper meaning it might tend to convey. When you approach hermaphroditis from her backside, she appears to be a beautiful woman lounging naked on a divane. Walking around the piece looking from the front view, you see the woman also has male genitalia. Hermaphroditis never fails to elicit staring and whispers from museum goers, with most never really learning the story behind this work of art or thinking beyond their immediate titillation. Hermaphroditis was the son of Mercury and Venus. When the boy was 15, he and the nymph, nymph, salmasis, were so in love with one another that they prayed they would never part. Hearing their plea, the gods took action and when the pair embraced, the two became fused as one with a body, both male and female. That's just one of the stories.

5:14While some just see this as a simple story of two young lovers, there are varying ways to look upon this in the aforementioned myth. If we want to mind the depths of the symbols in meaning within these ancient love stories, of course some may think this was punishment for their lust and desire. Some see the joining of hermaphroditis and salmasis as simply a reflection of every man and woman, or they might imbue their joining with deeper meaning and see them as embodying divine order and balance. Still, they might represent the ultimate symbol of perigamas or sacred marriage. The divine mystery of procreation, our life force, later deemed corrupting taboo or as sin in the Bible. The joining of salmasis and hermaphroditis like Pervarti and Shiva, Aphrodite and Eros are almost cutely and almost coattled. Could be looked upon as representative of the true

6:20and natural essence of the divine source, which embodies both the divine masculine and feminine together as the one. Taking that a step farther, both woman and man, whether joined together in their divine separateness, were both equally created in the image of the supreme being. Only the Judeo-Christian patriarchs conveniently omitted half of the spiritual equation from their creation myths, as they sought to elevate man above woman and unbalance the natural order within creation. Patriarchy's choice of disunion and disharmoning is seen by many as the catalyst creating the chaos and negative reverberations, heaped upon us today for having swept the sacred feminine from the world stage and from so many human psyches. On a personal level, the stories of Aphrodite and Eros and salmasis and hermaphroditis certainly remind me of a great deal of each person's continual yearning for love and their burning desire to be enveloped

7:24within love's womb of warmth. This seeking might be referred to as unrequited love or the search for our soulmate or other half. These bisexual and hermaphrodite deities certainly give us much food for thought, as they reflect many ideas and challenge the dogma of society and religious institutions. They speak to the necessity for each of us to not just find love or completion from another or outside ourselves, but that all-important source of self-love where it lives within, even if it might be buried deep. It reflects the importance of embracing wholeness, sometimes referred to as the balance of masculine and feminine within ourselves, and in doing so means giving ourselves permission to be fluid in our masculinity and femininity. That realization would allow humankind to follow their heart and embrace their most authentic self without society seeing a masculine woman or a feminine boy as worthy of ridicule.

8:29It might mean looking upon persons born or hermaphrodite or transgender as just another divine ingredient in our sacred humans stew rather than an abnormality or abomination. After all, some cultures see transgender persons in their unique and close association with both sexes as closer to the divine source. These deities, inviting both genders and partnership with themselves, challenge the religious dogma of sexism, homophobia, and discrimination. Recognizing these deities as role models or archetypes no longer would attribute the myth of feminine as being considered less than weak or devalued, and by association neither would women or effeminate men. Just one consequence might lead to women never again being denied their calling to spiritual authority because of their genitals. Quite simply, if one can see virtues

9:35of equality, partnership, inclusiveness, wholeness, acceptance, tolerance, and love, embodied in these deities who are both masculine and feminine with all the attributes associated with each gender, is it not the challenge of humanity to find these qualities within ourselves? Then, after embodying these values in ourselves, being truly comfortable in our own skin, is it not our human responsibility to look outside ourselves and strive to have empathy and love for another? Okay, hope you enjoy that, and you can find it in my book, Dotty's Calling, Inspirational Messages and Meditations. So, I'm going to wrap it up today. I appreciate all of you who come back each Wednesday when a new show drops. I appreciate your listener loyalty, because I know you're listening from all around the globe, and that warms my heart.

10:40So, I will leave you with this idea from the New York Times columnist Nicholas Christoff. The dominant moral challenge we faced in the 21st century is gender inequality. Thank you, folks. I'd love to hear from you. If you have any feedback, you can always reach me at Quarantate108 at Yahoo.com. I hope you'll go to my website, Quarantate.net. You can always email me from there as well. All right, that about does it for me today, folks. Until next week, bye for now.