Incubating Reindeer Goddess & Baby Blue

This is Blue. He is the first wild reindeer born in England since the ice age! He was born on May Day (May 1, 2010). See his story here.
Photograph: Adam Gerrard/SWNS





"Reindeer Stone with Flying Reindeer Over the Moon"

Click here to see part 1 and here to see part 2 of this story.

I apologize for not posting sooner. It seems that following the Reindeer Goddess is nothing less a task than going to the moon. I have been digging through academic texts, mythology, the internet. I have traveled to the Arctic, Alaska, Mongolia, the Russian Steppes, Scotland--- mentally, of course. The story of the Reindeer Goddess is at least 18000 years old. This means the stories are not spelled out for us. We have to perform nothing less than an excavation of the mind stream of the human race. Indeed, during this process I have dreamt of rich earth incubating life in a "mind/mine shaft". (Psyche loves puns and riddles!)

I have tried active imagination, engaging the image that came to me before the 2004 Sumatra Quake and resulting axis shift. "Keep digging." she says. "Incubate, grow this image." she replies.
I have found very little said about this mythic image. In desperation, I turned to words like "stag", "hind", "deer" and "antlered" in texts on myth, religion, Jungian Psychology, art history, and archetypes. The Scythians had an abundance reindeer/stag images on petroglyphs, clothing, gold crowns, gold pins & golden statues. But why?, I ask.

I have found that Christianity has not been kind to the Reindeer Goddess. Theories about her are not popular among academics. I do know that what little evidence there is regarding her existance shows that reindeer people of all countries were originally matriarchal. Whatever practices her priestesses had were taken over by the males shamans. (Shamanism as we know it originated in Siberia.) We have alot of writing about shamanism these days... I want to know more about what came before shamanism. Hints are left to us in the Nordic myth of Freya: she was the source of seidr - the powerful tradition of Norse magic. She gave the teachings to Odin.

There are clues to this ancient deer goddess tradition in Tibetan Bonpo teachings. From the Indus Valley we find remnants of an ancient priestess-hood that left us images of the horned goddess as tree of life. These images show us the roots of vedic alchemy, as well. Priestesses called yoginis, dakinis, and yakshas gave the sages the secrets of herbal medicine, and teachings of human transformation. After the Brahmins (a male dominated system that denigrates woman to this day) took over, these wise women were called witches, untouchables & whores. I am grateful to have encountered some of these ancient teachings in the Nyingma (Ancient Ones) texts that my own lama gave me. Of course,at the time I received the teachings and the empowerments (formal ritual of receiving) for the teachings, I had no idea where they would lead me!

In a prior post, I quoted a prophecy from Lapland. Reindeer Goddess gave humanity a warning: not being in harmony with nature will lead to our destruction. In spite of her fierce warning, there is also also the promise of regeneration. The antlers... they bear the tidings of new birth. I will talk about this more in a future post, after I incubate.