Goddess of the Week

Amaterasu is the Japanese Sun-Goddess; She represents order and civilization. She is said to have invented weaving and rice cultivation, and is still honored today as the foremother of the Imperial line. She came up here just around the time of Samhain here in the northern hemisphere.

I keep thinking of the theme of opposites, of both the dark and the light. Maybe it's just that the weather here in New England has not felt much like summer, being uncommonly cool and rainy, but I have had this craving for Yule and for the dark. And Amaterasu, here, as I've shown Her, is meant to be a rising Sun, one just coming out into the world again after the winter solstice.

Now of course it is not the middle of winter here, rain or no; but it is the middle of winter in the southern hemisphere.

I don't know if it's just me, but lately I think these cards have been picking up on a theme of a certain kind of balance, on a world-wide scale, balance of a whole, entire kind; at any one moment in time taking the earth as a whole there is both night and day, dark and light, winter and summer. Not balance as in one after the other, or each in their own time, a point of view one necessarily has as a creature who can only be in one place at one time; but a global, bigger than ourselves, and/both, big picture, paradoxical, almost, kind of balance. This is about both brilliant light and the deepest dark at once. And for some reason it seems important at this time that we are able to hold both the dark and the light in our minds simultaneously.

Now, in this picture I have drawn Amaterasu as the rising sun, the sun of increase and growing brightness, the sun coaxed from Her hidey-hole in a cave and coming out to discover Her own beauty. So I would usually interpret this card as increase, growing, growth, the pull upward towards the light; but I think this time given all that talk about balance we must be aware also that there is a pull in the opposite direction as well. Rather how the tide is not only a swelling in the ocean on the side of the Earth which faces the Moon, but a swelling on the opposite side as well (and I'm going to guess mathematically an ellipse, like an orbit). This week it may feel like we are being pulled in two directions at once; but consider that it may be a deepening, a broadening of horizons and experience.

(I can see Her. She is all in white, very brilliant, black black hair flowing like water, face chalked in white like in a Heian painting; there is a light behind Her and She is nearly too bright to look at.)

So I ask, as always, What do You have to say?

I am glory and brilliance; I am the sudden flash of your own beauty and brilliance seen in the mirror. Do not be ashamed to look, nor afraid. I am intelligence; I am very bright, after all, of light and of mind.

I challenge you to recognize your own brilliance.

My gaze is piercing, my insight keen, my ability to find the truth very great. Sunshine is the best disinfectant, is it not?

I watch from the sky. I have more pull than the moon on water. As I rise, as I grow in strength so do the plants rise and grow. It is a longer cycle to be sure; do not make the mistake of thinking it applicable only to Gods, or men, the male; after all I am a Goddess, a female. And I am an ancestor, a great ancestor; my line continues even today, and is known and honored as mine.

I bring justice and balance, and, and this is important, rest. Rest in the heat of day. Even I had to cease from my relentless work and rest in the dark and the quiet for a time. If it is too bright, go someplace dark. This is balance, this is justice.

She is very strong, certainly, and very very very smart. Brilliant, in fact.

I am finding I am having a difficult time articulating this idea of balance as a whole; I think I need to go back and review the past entries in the Goddess of the Week feature to see, maybe, a larger pattern.

What do you think of all this?