Here at Rockstar Priestess our Community space is called the Temple of Venus Morgana… because we are devoted to Aphrodite and Avalon! But let’s talk about the Celtic Lover Goddesses.
There are lover goddesses in every culture – and within the Celtic Myths there are many lover goddesses, some very obvious and some much more subtle.
Here is the thing about lover goddesses in Celtic myth:
They are inextricably linked with power and consent.
A Celtic Lover Goddess is in full possession of her sexuality and of the POWER of that sexuality… because a goddess’ sexuality is magic.
In Celtic myth we have a trope called the Sovereignty Goddess. This is where the land and the earth is identified as a woman, as a Goddess, and to have the ability to rule the land and take power over it, a ruler has to be in right relationship with the land…
… and in mythology, that land is symbolised by a Queen or a Goddess.
To be in right relationship, the land has to consent to the the ruler being in charge…
… and she can take away that consent any time she likes.
This union with the goddess through sex (well, marriage, but we all know marriage means sex) confers the power, and the goddess always gets to CHOOSE who she wants to have sex with.
And there are so many sovereignty goddesses – we have the Morrighan and Guinevere and Morgana and Rhiannon and many unnamed faery queens – and many very very sexy goddesses who all share their sexuality with whomever they want.
SHE ALWAYS CHOOSES.
Something about this essence of sacred sex with the Sovereignty goddess is so different from how we think about other love and sex goddesses.
We so often separate love and sex from power, from choice and from personhood – it’s someTHING we want to have, it’s someTHING we are praying for, it’s someTHING we have or we lack or we chase.
It’s not something we ARE.
Sex is often a disempowerment – demonised, or feared, or desperate, or dangerous.
With the Celtic goddesses, sex is an innate power that they all hold.
Their connection to their sexuality makes them powerful… and their sex empowers others without taking anything away from themselves.
When we connect with goddesses that hold sex as this awesome force, something that confers huge blessing and empowerment upon whoever we share it with, and is ours to do with exactly as we please, it shifts how we think about it.
For these goddesses, it’s a power they all have. It’s a fully integrated part of them – they know the power and magic of sex. They know sex is a spell, is energy, is magic incarnated. They know that sharing that with someone else is going to confer blessings and power.
And it’s a full SHARING – it’s not a taking.
You can’t take the right to rule from a goddess.
She has to gift it.
This empowered concept of sex doesn’t have the ingrained violence that so much of our modern ideas of sexuality holds; that there is a winner and a looser, that someone takes something from someone else though sex – prestige, power, pleasure – that for someone to be empowered, someone else in return has to be disempowered.
It just is.
I adore the Celtic Lover Goddesses – and I love the shifty nature where so many of them hold an element of the lover goddess within them.
And you can work with that gorgeous, sexy, lover magic too!
