Let’s declare peace between the sexes.
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1. Growing and maintaining long term relationships
Goddess temples are sacred spaces within which to study and practice the arts of love. They are conducive to supporting couples through the challenges of love and family life. How much heinous drama is left unchecked within the privacy of locked domiciles? The sisterhood and brotherhood found among temple artisans helps to create constructive, safe, healthy avenues to process relationship issues.
2. Face-to-face non-commercial social space
Political activists often lament the loss of non-commercialized public space where community members can congregate and discuss local political issues. While the growth of web 2.0 technologies has facilitated virtual politicized social space, public gathering places are still needed. Whether you agree with the politics and religious philosophy of “goddess worship”, if you stretch your imagination to visualize what a balanced sacred space would look and feel like, hopefully you can imagine places of compassion and understanding where political conflicts can be addressed in a more reconciliatory manner. Does there really have to always be a dueling binary of right and wrong, left and right, one party versus the opposite party? In my experience, the answer is no. However, can we hold space for infinite reconfigurations that serve ever higher ethics? In my experience, the answer is yes, and it’s a matter of how and where the debates are facilitated.
3. Opportunities for holistic service work
It’s no wonder so many modern men’s minds are warped by depression, anxiety, and existential crisis. Fewer and fewer of us are engaged in any form of self-transcendent community service work. Those who sustain active volunteer membership in non-profit organizations have far more reasons to live, feel far more important and useful, and have access to more uplifting social interaction. Goddess temples provide opportunities to give back in service to the earthly and divine feminine. From managing the library, to sweeping the floor, to being of service as a healer, there are infinite roles and tasks that need help. There are dignifying soul building charitable works aplenty.
4. Local organic market gardening
By now there should be no strangers to the notion that local food is better, cleaner, safer, more sustainable, flavorful, etc. Wouldn’t you like to be able to participate in the local food economy as more of a producer than a consumer? What if some of the healing arts that you want and/or need to access could be earned through service work in a paradisical temple market garden? Wouldn’t you roll up your sleeves and prove your manhood by planting some trees, shoveling some compost, and harvesting some fresh produce to offer to the temple priestesses to earn their healing affection?
5. A home for a renaissance of feminine festivals and ceremonies
Not to put down our cherished sporting events, religious and national holidays, and cultural festivals and ceremonies, but trust me, there is more to be desired. If you have not yet experienced “goddess invocation”, you don’t know what you’re missing. Unfortunately this pagan practice has been murderously and systematically eradicated world wide over the last few hundred years. Luckily, some traditions have survived, and new ones are being designed. Someday soon, you will be able to earn access into a goddess invocation ceremony, and mark my words, your life will be forever changed for the better.
6. Healing and reintegration for soldiers
Soldiers coming home from battle desperately need to receive powerful waves of healing love from trained guides. Goddess temples have provided such services for millennia. It would be unconscionable in an ancient Goddess worshipping culture to neglect their spiritually and physically wounded warriors. It would be unthinkable to allow them to re-enter society without temple treatment. I’m not talking about falsely glorified prostitution, I’m talking about whole body healing touch. This involves the auric field and the whole physical body.
7. Healing and restoration for abuse survivors
As a survivor who has had to limp along spiritually for over two decades before discovering the healing temple arts and being loved on by temple goddesses, I can speak from experience on this. Survivors need whole body healing. Trauma is perpetrated against the body, mind, and soul. Distant, abstract, cold psychotherapy doesn’t really go anywhere near the actual festering wounds. Purification and disinfection of traumatic wounds on all levels of one’s being must occur for healing to even begin. Temple priestesses have the skills to perform such tasks. They have the calling to fulfill this role as healers; they often choose to be trained in a wide range of healing modalities to complement and refine their natural gifts; many are survivors themselves.
8. Initiation into the loving arts
When we’re boys approaching puberty, we need holistic sexuality education, not shaming and repression. Throughout the ancient world, rites of passage and initiation were conducted in a safe and sacred manner by priestesses at Goddess temples. As we mature into manhood, we need training. We need to learn how to transmute our erotic energy into positive, beneficial, creative works in service to humanity, the earth, and divinity. Without such guidance, it’s virtually guaranteed that our energy will be repressed, frustrated, and sublimated into harmful aggressive forms as dictated by patriarchal religious, political, and economic institutions.
9. Prevention of predation
In the modern highly urbanized and commercialized world the looming threat of sexual predation has increased to hellish proportions. Never before in the history (and prehistory) of life on earth have there been so many “sexual losers”. By that I mean, people (mostly men) who for whatever reason: be it lacking social skills, lack of stereotypical attractiveness, lack of money, etc, have been unable to access healthy consensual sexual expression with others. This population, which at times in our lives can be any one of us, typically resorts first to adult entertainment websites, then to escorts or street walkers, then in the worst cases, the rape and/or assault across a wide spectrum of victims and circumstances. When goddess temples are accepted and permitted to provide hands on whole body healing services, the priestesses are able to safely perform an invaluable community service for the public good. They are providing a pressure release valve for those who might otherwise become criminal offenders.
10. Rehabilitation for perpetrators
For those men who have crossed the line of non-consent and become criminal offenders, salvation most likely will not be found behind bars. Generally we can expect their problems to get ever worse in prison conditions where sexual predation is widespread. Goddess temples could provide measurable recidivism reduction rates by working with perpetrators to help cultivate well being for themselves and others.
So let’s get to work, learn how to kneel and bow, and start restoring the ancient glory of goddess temples world wide. Let’s declare peace between the sexes and restore the health and natural fertile feminine abundance of our garden planet. I promise you’ll feel a form of redemption you never dreamed possible, and a blissful divine love you once knew as a suckling infant.
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Photo: .:. brainsik/Flickr