The Empress is the symbol of the Great Mother, and the Great Mother is the Earth. It’s her body. The rivers, lakes and oceans are her blood, the mountains are her bones, the rolling hills are her breasts, belly, and buttocks, and the wind is her breath. Every pagan knows this. But knowing something intellectually is not the same as knowing it with all your senses.
I learned this lesson several years ago in Enna, Sicily as I stood on The Rocca di Cerere (Rock of Ceres) and looked out over a checkerboard of miles and miles of newly planted wheat fields. It was the Mediterranean growing season. Persephone had returned from the underworld and Demeter’s love and joy were pouring out of the earth. Magic swirled up out of that rock and tap-danced through my body. I felt like a flash drive that was plugged into the Mother Computer, downloading file after file of nourishing knowledge that would take years to assimilate.
The town of Enna covers the flat top of a small mountain that rises up out of a fertile plain—a truly impregnable site. The only times it’s been conquered have been by treachery. Human nature being what it is, Carthage, Greece, Rome, Byzantine Greece, Spain, the Moors, and the Normans have all occupied the city, frequently enslaving and/or butchering its inhabitants.
The Romans occupied Enna in 258 BC during the First Punic War against Carthage and turned Sicily into a gigantic wheat farm, the “Bread Basket of Rome”. The city became the center for the thriving cult of the earth goddess Ceres/Demeter. “We learn from Cicero that there was a temple of Ceres of such great antiquity and sanctity that (worshipers from all over the Mediterranean) repaired thither with a feeling of religious awe, as if it were the goddess herself rather than her sanctuary that they were about to visit.” (Enna entry in Wikipedia)
We found a shallow well, similar to “The Well of Demeter” at Agrigento, Sicily, carved into the top of The Rock—a gateway into the earth, a path to the goddess.
Legend has it that a huge statue of the goddess, ancient and not carved by human hands, existed at the site. I like to imagine that Mother Nature herself sculpted her image in the cliff face so she could gaze out over her fertile fields.
The temple is gone and the cliff face has fallen, but the reason they were there still remains.
2 thoughts on “The Empress, The Goddess, and The Earth”
I had not noticed her face in the rock, excellent!!
Truly a place of the Empress.
It definitely was her spot!
Thank you for being there.