Capitoline Temple of
Juno, where money was minted. Because of this, one
of Juno's titles, Moneta -- "The Goddess Who warns," gives us our word
"money." Note the unusual round shape of
the temple. Vesta, Goddess of the Hearth, another exceedingly ancient
Roman Goddess, also had a round temple.
As Lucina, Juno gives us our
first glimpse of light at birth. She is also identified with
the New Moon.
Juno's color is white; her symbols the cookoo and the peacock with its many eyes.
Marriage
of Hera & Zeus.
In Greek Mythology, Hera and Zeus instituted marriage; theirs was the
first. Hera was first and foremost the watchful "Eye Goddess,"
mother and queen. She remained the patroness of marriage, and June
remains the traditional month for weddings.
Some scholars believe that Zeus's many paramours were originally local
names and titles for the most prominent Earth or grain Goddess. As
these stories were collected and woven together, accounts of Hera's
jealous response were concocted by poets.
While the Romans identified Jupiter with Zeus and Juno with Hera, their
own mythology did not dishonor Her, and She was more prominent in the
religious life.
In Roman mythology, Juno was
part of the Trinity, along with Jupiter and Minerva. Roman marriage
offered far better terms for women.
A meditation on Lucina:
We see Her
in the candle's flame,
in the lantern,
in our child's brave nightlight,
in the humor of
dancing neon,
in the corona of our mother sun.
By Her blessed light
we see ourselves.
We see what is around us,
too.
When we are enlightened,
we "see the light."
Walk
through shadowed valleys
with Lucina,
find a mirror and look at
yourself.
Hooray for the day!
With Her, we see!
--- excerpted from Barbara Ardinger,
Goddess Meditations (St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1998).
Used with permission.
TO JUNO Thomas Taylor, transl.
The FUMIGATION from AROMATICS.
O Royal Juno of majestic
mien,
Aerial-form'd, divine, Jove's blessed queen,
Thron'd in the bosom of cærulean air,
The race of mortals is thy constant care.
The cooling gales thy pow'r alone inspires,
Which nourish life, which ev'ry life desires.
Mother of clouds and winds, from thee alone
Producing all things, mortal life is known:
All natures share thy temp'rament divine,
And universal sway alone is thine.
With founding blasts of wind, the swelling sea
And rolling rivers roar, when shook by thee.
Come, blessed Goddess, fam'd almighty queen,
With aspect kind, rejoicing and serene.
The Mysteries of Juno By Christa Landon,
M.A., D.Min.
It is the lovely
month of June, sacred to the Goddess Juno. And Juno offers us the
sweetness of life, not only in ephemeral strawberries, but also in the
most lasting satisfactions. She holds for Her devotees a great gift.
What is the secret of joy?
It was a happy philosopher who answered,
"Work as if you don't need the money;
Love as if you have never been hurt,
And dance as if nobody is watching!"
How many of us wish we could hold these truths to be self-evident! But we fear poverty and sell our souls for a mess of pottage. We fear love's intimacy as much
we fear loneliness. And the cruel laughter of what neighborhood bully still keeps us from dancing 40 years
later. Thus, all too often we flee what we most need and desire.
And so, instead of working passionately, loving deeply, and dancing out our joy and pain, we fill our lives with the busy struggle to do more, know more, and have more until we cannot feel our own
emptiness. When would we do enough, know enough, and have enough to be content?
At first, the goal is just before us, when I graduate from college, when I get the good job, when I get married, when I buy a house, then when I can change careers, when I can get divorced, when I can go back to grad school, when I retire. We race like hamsters in a cage towards ever retreating goals. We are entranced by the illusion that contentment and meaning depend on what we own, what we control, or a time and condition in the future. Ironically,
the chronic busyness that leaves no room for feeling empty also leaves no
room for true intimacy and joy.
And yet, happiness has little to do with one's possession, appearance, or even health. Even in youth-addicted America, studies indicate that most adults grow more content as they age.
Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist who survived the Nazi concentration camps, discovered that those most likely to survive were people who had a reason to live. In the final analysis, "He who has a sufficient "Why" can endure almost any "How."
Commitment to another person is a lifeline. Some can extend their dedication beyond the circle of family to their tribe or to include all humankind, and find an immortality through the good they do. Even in isolation, you can receive inspiration and sustenance from feeling yourself being used for a great and worthy purpose.
I've had the privilege of working with couples who are planning their
weddings, handfastings, and Ceremonies of Holy Union (UU ceremonies for
same-sex couples), and they've deepened my own understanding of Juno's
mysteries. The month of Juno is still the season of weddings, so it seems
an especially appropriate time to share with you how joy comes from commitment to a living relationship. The living relationship which inspires your life may be a person, a community, a profession, an ideal, a God, a cause.
The ancient Pythagoreans taught that everything is relationship; from this basic principle they developed mathematics and acoustics, the science of sound. Building on this foundation, they sought to discover the equitable laws by which human societies could sustain harmony.
The simplest relationship is the dyad: opposites in relationship.
Modern Western culture tends to see opposites as enemies, and their relationship is a zero-sum game. One must be the victor, the other, the vanquished. The Battle of the Sexes then seems inevitable. But humans have also seen things differently. The Chinese spoke of Yin and Yang, opposites which shaped and carried one another. Starhawk describes the dance of opposites
this way:
The Goddess is the Encircler, the Ground of Being.
The God is That-Which-Is-Brought-Forth, her mirror image,
her other pole.
She is the earth;
He is the grain.
She is the Wheel;
He is the Traveler.
His is the sacrifice of life to death that life may go on.
She is Mother and Destroyer;
He is all that is born and destroyed.
What kind of relationship between opposites is sustainable?
Oppression is inherently unstable.
The zero-sum game isn't worth playing.
In a sustainable relationship, no one wins at the expense of the other. Instead, opposites yield alternately to one another in season, each giving and receiving, each is committed to the survival and blooming of the other.
Relationship is inescapable.
Breathe in, and you incorporate into yourself the breaths of plants around the world; breathe out, and you send to them the sustaining carbon dioxide. We are in relationship.
We are mammals, born after months of hearing mother's heartbeat. Dependent on adult care for many years, and never completely independent of others, never able to raise our young without some cooperation from other adults. Millions of years of evolution have shaped our mammalian brains; we are made for relationship.
The pleasures and hopes of love bind two souls together. And then -- if they
are brave enough to hold together, the dance of opposites begins, in turns delicious and difficult.
We face our own fear and shame, or we flee to the familiar safety of an endless repetition of the first few steps of the dance, changing partners until novelty itself is boring.
There was a time – I DO remember the 60's – when many of us thought that freedom was the opposite of commitment. We believed we were free until we made choices, and so many of us lived very fast, but not very satisfying lives.
Some Pagans believe that "free love" is the only sexual
lifestyle which is "truly Pagan." So it is, if by
"free" we mean voluntary, rather than "without
cost." There is ALWAYS a cost in any choice, an opportunity
cost. When each is always on the look out for something better, what
kind of trust can be established?
Purely recreational
sex assumes that physical intimacy has no real power to bind souls
together, no emotional meaning. Surely impersonal sexual encounters
build calluses on the soul. If you kiss enough frogs, it shouldn't
be surprising that you start feeling pretty froggy yourself.
In any case, even cursory research into ancient Pagan cultures and modern
polytheistic cultures demonstrates that faithful marriage has had an
honored place in our tradition. (Juno, patroness of marriage is featured in the Virtual Temple feature this
month.)
After a decade or two
(or sometimes 3), most of us children of the 60's learned that being without a commitment is like traveling around and around from Route 494 to 694 to 494 and so on, never committing to an exit. Freedom is not in being AT choice; freedom is choosing, and then commitment and discipline means remembering what you most want.
It's true, every choice has its cost. Life is full of package deals. Without
commitment, there is no freedom. And without commitment, how can
lovers develop the trust which transforms a relationship into a reliable
foundation on which to build a life?
"The sharing of joy,
whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual,
forms a bridge between the sharers
which can be the basis for understanding
Much of what is not shared between them,
and lessens the threat of their difference."
Real relationship depends on the existence of real difference, real tension between desires, and an
enduring commitment to seek resolutions which are faithful to all parties.
And it is when we are mutually committed, to support and sustain one another, as we work together to promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, that we find our joy, our sustenance, our true selves.
Now it may be that your sacred commitment is not to a partner, but to a
child or elder who depends on you. Your primary commitment could be to a
profession, a religion, or a cause. Human beings do little, if anything completely alone, and so your commitment
will have a social dimension: you can choose whether your relationships will be sustainable ones. You can choose to be a partner rather than a predator.
And so I hope that these reflections have some value for you, too. Apply the
allegory as you will. Whatever your commitment is, you have realized your freedom in making it YOUR CHOICE.
Your work then becomes the Great Work, the means by which you are serving
the Beloved.
When you see your own reflection in the eyes of someone who knows you well, and loves you anyway, you see yourself differently. And when a partner, a parent, a friend or a mentor holds us in a steady gaze, recognizing our limitations, and loving us as we are, we grow and bloom, like a flower that has finally found unobstructed sunlight.
If both parties are ready to make a commitment, they will ask themselves and each other,
"What hopes do we share? What are we willing to promise one another to fulfill our hopes?
How shall we treat one another along the way?"
Mutual agreement on shared purpose draws people into partnership, our promises give the partnership
form. But the future of a relationship depends on the daily practice of love: knowing, respecting, caring for one another, forgiving one another, bringing out the best in each other.
What is the discipline of love? By what regular practice can we grow in love and wisdom?
The spiritual path of committed partnership is simple to understand, but hard to achieve. It is remembering or re-building your wedding vows. It is saying to your
partner something like this:
I love you.
Day by day, I will try to understand you better.
Day by day, I will try to give you the loving care you need.
Day by day, I will dare to trust in your love a little more, and share more completely my thoughts and feelings and decisions with you.
Whatever challenges, joys, and heartbreaks we face in the future,
we will face them together as partners.
Commitment grows slowly, consolidating its gains. It takes time to learn that love is possible, and worth it. It takes time for wounded hearts to mend and grow strong. Without commitment, a relationship is like the bone we never trusted our weight
on.
After a parent, no one has so much power to bless or to curse us as a spouse. You'll note that in most fairy tales, a curse can be removed only by love. If we keep working at our marriages, if we are lucky, something magical can happen: Two ordinary people, with all their psychic wounds and dusty imperfections, can learn to love each other in a way that heals both of them. Love really is the only power that can break a curse.
Only from each other can we learn to be compassionate for ourselves, forgiving, and being forgiven for, the stubborn lacks and failures which all of us have in different ways. Nearly two centuries ago, Transcendentalist Rev. Theodore Parker wrote,
It takes years to marry completely two hearts,
even of the most loving and well-assorted.
A happy wedlock is a long falling in love.
Young persons think love belongs
only to the brown-haired and crimson-cheeked.
So it does for its beginning.
But the golden marriage is a part of love
which the Bridal day knows nothing of.
Tom and I have been married
just less than 21 years, so we're still newlyweds. I still find myself surprised at how good he is to me and how I keep falling more deeply in love with
him.
Whatever your primary commitment: to your partner, your best
friend, a child or elder who depends on you, your profession, your art, or
your religion -- the same principles apply. And while I have spoken
of married love, I invite you to re-read this in terms of YOUR primary
commitment.
Barbara
Ardinger,
Goddess Meditations (St. Paul: Llewellyn, 1998).
Jean Shinoda Bolen, Goddesses in Every Woman (NY: Harper
Colophon, 1984).
Christine Downing, The Goddess: Mythological Images of the
Feminine (NY: Crossroad, 1981), pp 68-98.
Patricia Monaghan, The Goddess Path. (St. Paul: Llewellyn,1999),
pp.57-68.
Phillip Slater, The Glory of Hera. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968).
This insightful book explores family structure in ancient Greece, and
how it affected the psychology of men and women, as reflected in myth.
Visit other wings of the Pantheon,
our virtual temple.
Updated August 9, 2004
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