Page:What Men Want - Initial Thoughts on the Male Goddess Movement.pdf/4

Rh self-identified as bisexual and that much of his premarital sexual experience was homosexual. John first encountered the Goddess in his early teens when he was learning to meditate. He detailed how he was initially drawn to Buddhism, but his practice was marked with a recurring vision of a female goddess figure whom he identified as the essence of the Earth. In his twenties and thirties he had become involved in a Gardnerian Wiccan coven in Southern England.

John detailed how the coven supported him following the death of his wife. In particular he spoke of the way in which coven elders encouraged him to take refuge in the mythopoetic male archetype of the Horned God as a way of coping with widowhood through a show of masculine strength and stoicism. However, John came to realize that he was losing contact with feminine divinity and, by his mid-thirties, he became disillusioned with his Wiccan practice. He eventually drifted into solo ritual work, still marked by his Wiccan initiation, but increasingly shaped by newfound inspirations in neo-shamanism and Celtic mythology and much more centred around feminine representations of the divine. In particular, he spoke of masturbatory rites in which he would imagine Goddess archetypes whilst, as he put it, ‘sacrificing my seed to the feminine divine.’ He pointed to a small roughly hewn stone set beside the fireplace – a so-called Sheela na gig –, a grinning female figure holding open with her hands a swollen vulva – as emblematic of this feminization of his spirituality. John discussed the way in which this marked an important turning point in his spiritual and sexual life. Spiritually, he talked about a deepening bond with Mother Earth through his ritual practices which had led him to lead a more ecologically responsible lifestyle. Sexually, John discussed his increasing bisexual orientation after his wife’s death. He became interested in Tantra, even undertaking some training as a Tantrika in India with some of the insurance money he received after his wife’s death. Sex became an important expression of his spiritual practices with sexual magic becoming ever central to his sexual practices and identity. Female sexual partners brought him closer to what he termed ‘sources of feminine power’. The energies raised in the sexual act were 308