Join the Lightbringer Brigade
Or: Modern-day insight from Mesopotamian goddesses, 2020 election anxiety & rebranding the devil
Almost five years ago now, I watched with horror along with (most of) the rest of the world as Hillary Clinton lost the presidential election to Donald Trump.
That night, I had a dream. Deep in an ancient forest, I received a seedling.
Dream Hillary pressed it into my hands, wordless & exhausted, her fingers cold. I saw myself as one does in a dream, nurturing the tree, allowing it to grow, caring for it, and witnessing as it flourished, growing strong and setting fruit as hours shifted to days and months and years.
I saw myself potting up this tree’s descendants, pressing them into the hands of other people, over and over again, until the canopy of those trees grown over decades covered our country from California to Maine.
The light shifted; it became night. In the darkness, the trees were radiant, bathing the continent and then the world in holy golden light.
The next morning, I woke to the first day of Trump’s America. My face was wet; I started planting.
We have been living in Trump’s America for four full years now, and the growth that took but moments in dreamland has been agonizingly slow among the land of the waking.
But like a seed, the feeling of that dream has germinated within me, and after four very long years, we now find ourselves on the precipice of another election.
I want Joe Biden to win; I hope that he will. But I know that this coming election, no matter how it goes, is the beginning of an era, not the end of one. Biden does not solve our nation’s problems. His election allows us to get to work.
And ultimately, I believe this is all about a lot more than the next presidential election. The roots of this moment run deep, and this story is bigger than me, or you, or America.
The more I have learned, and grown, and watched, the more I have come to understand that we’re living out a series of fundamental narratives that have more to do with our collective humanity than they have to do with any of the specifics of this modern moment.
This is not a story of a few of us. It’s the story of all of us; we all matter here, and we all have work to do.
And I don’t know how this story ends. If I’m being honest, I suspect that there are a multitude of endings, one for each of us, and more besides. Even though I do not know what is going to happen, I do know I want to have a stake in the story.
And I believe we all do have a part to play; that’s why there were millions of trees in my dream, and not just one.
But just like this story we’re living right now has many endings, it also has lots of beginnings, some only years ago, some lost to the sands of time.
Here is one of them.
Over 4000 years ago, ancient Mesopotamians worshiped the goddess Innana, a figure connected with the planet Venus.
Because Venus orbits between us and the sun, the planet, which was called a “star” by many ancient civilizations, has an unusual pattern as it moves throughout the sky.
For 263 days, Venus is visible in the evening sky. Then, it disappears for 50 days as it passes between us and the sun. Finally, it reappears in the morning, where it is visible for another 263 days before the cycle repeats.
This strange, notable, natural cycle was the ancients’ inspiration for the goddess that became Inanna.
Inanna was associated with love, beauty, sex, war, justice, and political power, and her disappearance from the evening sky was explained as a journey through the underworld, where she underwent trials in order to gain access to wisdom before returning triumphantly to the morning sky.
While variations on this myth and this pattern have appeared in the stories of countless civilizations across the globe, our contemporary retelling of this ancient archetype tells us a lot about how human perception has changed over the last four thousand years, not to mention the last four.
In fact, you might find this particular synonym of "lightbringer” familiar: Lucifer.
In ancient times, the archetypical lightbringer was the feminine morning star, triumphant from her successful navigation of the trials of the underworld and radiant with wisdom, power, and allure.
Today, the modern lightbringer is best known as the Christian devil.
Stripped of her femininity and her radiant power, this ancient metaphorical guide through the labyrinthine, feminine—and very real—struggle of sourcing wisdom from our own shadows has become a tempter of all that is good and holy and the ultimate trickster, ruling over the damned.
The underworld has shifted from a place of mystery to a place of unmitigated evil. The temporary journey through the painful deep dark became eternal punishment by hellfire, and the act of sourcing wisdom from our own shadow has been branded folly, or witchcraft—or heresy.
What was once a strong archetypical presentation of the mutability of feminine power has become a representation of temptation and evil. And the act of looking within for answers, or tapping into the mystery of human existence, has become overculturally linked with the crazy and the condemned.
No wonder we find it so difficult to reckon with—and learn from—our own shadows.
Watching for it, I see the way this plays out in our country ever day. We are asked over and over again to divorce ourselves from our own power, to deafen ourselves to our own wisdom, and to shutter our light.
Trump’s America is a country where there is one source of “truth”: his. But the reason that this works, the reason that we’re here, is not because some of us are fools and some of us are wise.
It’s because our society no longer tells us the stories where we learn the to recognize and honor the wisdom sourced through our own deep, and sometimes painful, experiences.
We’re no longer encouraged to do the hard work of looking within and moving through the pain of that reckoning, no longer bolstered by the story of the divine woman who has undertaken, and survived, this journey before us.
It’s because our society instead tells us that in order to gain salvation from above, we must listen, and follow, and behave.
It’s because we tolerate this same pattern in small ways, in work, in relationships, and within ourselves. We become passive, and compliant, and small, and when we refuse to battle that untruth between individuals, we create fertile ground for it in the narrative of our country and our society.
We forsake ourselves to belong, to get along, instead of acknowledging our lived experience, and when we do, it makes us susceptible to all sorts of pain and distortion and untruth.
This is not a problem that is unique to Republicans.
These patterns live inside of all of us, even though the symptoms are different. These patterns live in me. They’ve lived in humans for generations and throughout the ages. These patterns are part and parcel of being alive, and we have been grappling with these fundamental truths for at least as long as we’ve had the tools to write about them.
And in engaging with them, in using story and allegory and metaphor to understand ourselves and our history, we each have incredible power to shift our own individual experience and shift the patterning of the world.
Somewhere along the way, we humans have forgotten much of what we’ve already known.
But that knowledge and that wisdom is encoded for us in the stories we tell, the way we make meaning, the artifacts and writings of those who lived before, and in the patterns of the earth and nature, the source of every cycle that shapes human life.
This newsletter is an effort to reclaim that what we once knew, rebirthing ancient wisdom and synthesizing it with present-day perspective and current events in order to create a tolerance for the discomfort of changemaking and inspire collective (and individual) action to challenge the status quo.
I believe we must all become our own lightbringers in order for things to change.
There is no litigation that can usher in the change that we are seeking in America right now. We have to do this ourselves. But we don’t have to do it alone.
If you, like me, want this world to be different, let’s work for that change together. And if you’re already working for that change, perhaps my perspective can help bolster your own.
We don’t have to do it understanding the same things, wanting the exact same outcome, or working towards it in the same way. You don’t have to agree with me, or feel called to the sacred and the unknown.
But we do need to each carry our own lantern into the deep darkness with the light held high, just as Inanna once did, illuminating as much as we can.
I have so much to share about this, so much I want to say. I want to hope that the way I see things can help at least some of us make a way out of what seems like no way, as John Lewis has encouraged us to do.
However, I cannot show you your way.
I believe the fundamental truth of this moment is that we have to reawaken to our own inner guidance. Just as in the Arthurian legend, we all must find our own way through the primeval forests to the fabled holy grail at the center.
And I can bolster you with love and permission, share insight from my own journey and the journeys of others, and connect you to the primal wisdom of archetype, allegory, and myth as you find your own path through the dark woods to the wellspring of magic and wisdom within.
And then, once you’ve returned from your own trials, it’s my hope that the community of lightbringers we might gather together here can support you in some small way as you do the difficult work of sharing what you’ve learned with others.
After all, many small lanterns burning bright together makes a staggering amount of light. And that collective illumination affords each of us a tremendous amount of power, power to change ourselves, and power to collectively change the world.
Change is hard. But it is not impossible. Together, we can bend this arc towards justice.
Together, we can each step into the archetype of the lightbringer, transmuting our hard-won insight into wisdom in a new era—and healing thousands of years of intentional misunderstanding about what it means to bring the light in the process. ☀️
- Brenda
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My editorial and coaching work has been on hiatus for the duration of 2020, but I will be taking a limited number of editorial projects & coaching clients next year. If you’re interested in working together in 2021, reply to this email and tell me a little bit about your project.