The God and Goddess

In a swirling spiral of gas, heat, and light, a tony grain of dust that was Gaia's seed danced and swirled. Throbbing and pulsing with an electric passion, she drew to her other grains, other seeds, until together they formed a ball, spinning and dancing in the lens of radiance that was to become the sun. The dancers flung out their arms, swirled their skirts, bumped up against each other, and fused. Growing larger and larger, spiraling and dancing faster and faster, they were drawn toward each other by the passionate pull of gravity, at times colliding in a fiery death, at other times in a mating union, until at last the planets congealed into their orbits, circling a fiery sun. Gaia was hot, her surface erupting in plumes and rivers of fire, her face bombarded by missiles of rock that left her pockmarked with craters and seeded with ice and the chemical properties of life. Slowly, slowly, she cooled down. On her surface, packets of energy frozen into form combined and recombined. Waves rolled to shore and retreated; the soup of energy was boiled and cooled, crystalline strands of frozen energy, organized in a radically new way; a way that conveyed information, which communicated instructions from reproducing itself. The double helix of DNA was life's first great creative leap, the one that allowed others to follow. Life was born. The Pagans honor a Moon Godess. She is known as the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. To describe her would be difficult. Different people think different things. She is the Great Mother. Every man must strive to understand the Goddess within, every woman the God. The Divine is immanent in Nature: the Divine is present throughout the Universe, the Divine is manifest in all things, all things contain the Divine Essence. Nature is holy, for it is the visible form and manifestation of the divine. Pagans teach that harmony with Nature, and its cycles and seasons, is the way to harmony with the Divine; and this is reflected in the fact that the Ritual Occasions of the Pagan are determined by the of the seasons, and the phases of the Moon. The Goddess of the Pagans is the Great Goddess. She is the Ground of Being, the Mother of All Living;the Creatrix, and the Destroyer. Shis the Eearth Mother, and Lady of the Moon, the Star Goddess, the Queen of Summerland and Queen of Earth. She is the Great Lady. She is the Goddess. Besides the Moon Goddess, Pagans also honor the Horned God. He is the Moon Goddess' lover and Consort. He is the ancient God of Fertility, the God of the forest, flock and field and also of the Hunt. He is Lord of Life,yet He is also Lord of Death and Resurrection. The Horned God is not only the Hunter, He is also the Hunted; He is the Sun by day, but He is also the Sun at Midnight; He is Lord of Light, but He is also the Lord of Darkness: the darkness of night, the darkness of the Shadows, the darkness of the depths of the forest, the darkness of the depths of the Underworld.