Deborah Lipp

I am divided for love’s sake, for the chance of union.
This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing, and the joy of dissolution all.
—Aleister Crowley, The Book of the Law

Different religions talk about creation in different ways. I believe that creation is an act of love.

Here is my theory. Prior to creation, we have an undifferentiated mass of matter/energy. This can be called the Goddess, or you can see it as a genderless Source of All (I see it as the Goddess).

There is tension between stasis and change, both forces have a strong pull and the dynamic between them changes the world. I recall that Alexi Kondratiev once referred to the idea that “The God is history, the Goddess is geography.” I like that. The force of stasis/geography stays, preserves, maintains, is solid, supportive, and stable. The force of change/history moves, changes, destroys-to-create, looks forward, is chaotic and exciting. Entropy and momentum.

Anyway, from undifferentiated Oneness we have our Big Bang. “For love’s sake” because it is the God’s desire to gaze upon the Goddess that causes him to separate from Her. “This is the creation of the world.” Here we see that She is the first cause, but He is the first change. She stays the same, He pulls away; change and desire, these are His.

This all came up in a discussion of my friend Fred Lamond, who wrote a book, The Divine Struggle, now out of print. Someone asked me if I could summarize the book, since she couldn’t get her hands on it.

Fred sees history as a dialectic between these two forces. He sees monotheism as creating the problems of the modern world; because we change and build and destroy without regard for preservation, stability, and peace. Modernity is all God and no Goddess. He perceives Goddess worship as a restoration of a balance to the dialectic, that can have profound consequences on pollution, war, environmental destruction, and so on.

I don’t know about Goddess worship as a call to revolution (it sounds nice and all, but…) but I do embrace the basic theory of a dynamic movement of energy, yin pulling yang, momentum pushing entropy, Lord loving Lady.

And indeed, if you’re very clever, you can see we’re talking about sex again.