It is the first day of May, and for the first time this year, we’ve had our first *properly* warm weather in my neck of the woods. Couldn’t be more fitting.
It’s the time of year where you look out the window and see bird couples cosying up to each other like a newlywed couple on their honeymoon. Despite the start of winter being labelled ‘cuffing season’ where people try to couple up to seek companionship and warmth in the cold months, it is this time of the year that is most aligned with romantic love and sexuality. Traditionally, young couples would go into the woods together on May Eve to make love and come back with flowers.
In some of the modern pagan religions who take their inspiration from ancestral Celtic myth and lore, this is the time we acknowledge the marriage of the Sovereignty Goddess, Goddess in the aspect of Lover-Queen, and the divinely anointed King. The Goddess chooses the King who is right for the land, making him Her chosen Lover, Champion and Protector. He is an absolutely necessary part in fulfilling and executing Her visions. To quote Caitlín Matthews in her illuminating Mabinogi companion King Arthur & the Goddess of the Land:
The king’s union with the land, the Goddess of Sovereignty, is a very special one characterised by an exchange of energies and powers: the king swears to uphold his land and people and to be true to them, while Sovereignty gives him otherwordly gifts enabling him to keep his oath. At its base, the Celtic concept of Sovereignty is related to the Middle Eastern concept of wisdom as Sophia, who consorts with kings as the creative and wisdom-bestowing mystic woman appearing in the form of either an angelic presence or an earthly woman. Solomon and Sheba are the prime example of this king-Sophia paradigm. In British symbolism, Arthur and one of Sovereignty’s representatives, such as Gwenhwyfar, exemplify the similar king’s paradigm.
This dynamic is hotly debated. I have read some hardcore reconstructionists and feminists alike caution against romanticising it too much as they believe it is nothing more than a patriarchal construct in which patriarchal monarchy is validated through claiming the Goddess gives them the right to conquer a land. And sure, we can’t know for sure that it wasn’t that, but we can’t know for sure that it was, either. To me, this seems very obviously an example of a time where patriarchal civilisation/order cracks and underlays the matriarchal, dare I say gynocentric foundations it is based upon. The masculine may rule in the outer realms, with our society being patriarchal for much of history, but the feminine rules the inner realms. In fact, many Celtic tribes were matrilineal, and while it was men who were the regnant rulers, the right to rule, the literal ‘divine right of kings’, was passed through the female line, meaning the king’s nephew through his sister, not his son, would inherit the crown (which potentially is what the struggle between Arthur and Mordred is referencing). To quote Caitlín Matthews once again from the same book:
Sovereignty is not merely a passive archetype, some kind of negative cypher whose sole purpose is to empower kings and heroes. As a goddess and through her human representatives she exists in her own right and actively promotes, obstructs, or dismisses her chosen candidates. She and her elect continually modify and develop their relationship; as the essential quality of the land personified, Sovereignty has the right to change her mind and frequently does so. Even Arthur himself is not exempt from her strictures.
And…
Throughout the course of our study of the relationship between Sovereignty and her champion, we note that the Goddess is not submissive, mild and biddable; rather, she is a powerful force armed with subtle skills and deep wisdom.
I’ve talked the ear off anyone who will listen to me ramble about this topic but there has been an obsession in the new age spirituality community (and its branch-off- the polarity dating coach scene) for a while to exalt ‘feminine submission’ and to push the narrative that the true ‘nature of the divine feminine’ is to submit to a powerful man. I’m aware that some people’s definition of ‘submission’ is different from my own, but following the dictionary definition, that term does not refer to most divine feminine figures I am aware of. New age spirituality is often just evangelical Christianity cosplaying as paganism or esoterica and I’m getting quite sick of it. It’s no reason why so many of them end up reverting back to Christianity (which I have no problem with in and of itself) and immediately start denouncing their previous path as demonic and evil. There is a very clear pipeline, and the misogyny found in both movements is very much the same. Whether this has been a feature of the new age movement from the beginning or has been a subtle takeover from the ‘alpha male’ dating coach bros, I don’t know, but I’m tempted to say it’s a combination of both, perhaps. But ‘divine feminine’ does NOT mean ‘divinely ordained Abrahamic patriarchal gender roles’, it means the power of the Goddess, that lives in everyone and everything, though women are the most direct embodiment of Her power on earth. We ourselves are not goddesses (Caitlín has recently written about this on her Substack– I highly recommend subscribing or grabbing the free trial so you can read it and its follow-up posts yourself) but we certainly are Her hands upon the earth, and if the Goddess herself is not submissive, why would we be?
Certainly there is a time and a place to let a man lead, make decisions, etc. Many women in the modern day feel burned out. Women are overtaking men in many areas of public life, but as a result of this they feel overworked and exhausted. Many feel the need to compete with men in the workforce to ‘prove’ they can ‘do everything a man can’- and that’s no good either. Your work ethic should come from you, not some desire to prove a point and it should not come at the expense of your emotional, mental, physical and spiritual wellbeing. Furthermore, many women in the dating scene, myself included, have expressed frustration with male passivity at the moment. Men are too frightened to initiate anything with women they’re attracted to and refuse to lead in anything. Just look at the comments in any video of Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift interacting to see how much many women, even feminist/liberal ones, find it attractive when a man is able to lead, be protective and masculine. But this doesn’t make every women at the receiving end of this inherently ‘submissive’. She leads in her own way, through setting the emotional, spiritual, sexual and romantic tone of the relationship. Through being the divine power source of masculine executive action. She plays the role of the Sovereignty Goddess. She is leading in the subtle, otherworldly, divine realms.
I have seen it said that the role of femininity is to support, amplify and nurture the masculine’s vision and power, but as a Goddess-worshipping Celtic pagan I can’t help but laugh at this because whilst it may be true in the sense of Abrahamic-traditionalist relationship structures, it is ignoring that this is mirrored in many pagan traditions where the role of the masculine is to support, protect and execute the visions and power of the feminine. It really depends on which angle you’re approaching it from and in which sense you’re actually talking about.
That’s not to say there aren’t times when the Goddess appears passive and submissive in these stories, but it is usually against Her will. In the fourth branch of the Mabinogion, Blodeuedd is created as the perfect, biddable, pliable, submissive wife for Lleu Llaw Gyffes. It is not until Lleu is away and she falls in love with the hunter Gronw Pebyr that she breaks free from this spell, initiated into decisive feminine sexuality that allows her to choose who she’ll love- and she chooses Gronw. Some pagan scholars have interpreted this as a seasonal allegory. The Sovereignty Goddess switches between a King representing Summer/Order/Light and a King representing Winter/Chaos/Darkness in order to hold the seasons in balance. I have talked about this here this time last year. There is a misinterpretation that the Winter King/Summer King narrative was invented by Robert Graves, but he only created a modern framework for a very old pattern in Celtic mythology. We see this same thing with Creiddylad as she is kidnapped by Gwyn Ap Nudd when she is due to be wed with Gwythyr. Gwenhwyfar, also, in many early Arthurian stories, is abducted by men in a similar fashion. Interestingly enough, with both of these stories there have been interpretations that these ‘abductions’ are actually rescue missions- the man that represents the Otherworld rescuing an Otherworldly faerie woman from her Christian captors and taking her back home. When the French got a hold of Arthuriana, they create Lancelot, and the abduction becomes a consensual love story. Lancelot is associated with the Lady of the Lake, and thus represents the Otherwordly Champion aspect of the divine masculine to Arthur’s Solar Hero.
Other goddesses/figures I consider to embody this Sovereignty Goddess (both in the Celtic tradition and otherwise) archetype are:
- Olwen
- Elen Luyddog
- Rhiannon
- Modron
- Morgan le Fay
- Elaine of Corbenic
- Macha
- Áine
- Isolde
- Mary Magdalene
- Sophia
- Inanna
- Helen of Troy
- Isis
And many more.
I am currently reading a book on courtly love- a medieval literary genre that influenced gender roles in the medieval court. Because of courtly love, women went from being seen as temptresses and the embodiment of evil, to the driving force behind all great masculine action, mediatrices between God and man, embodiments of Venus, and yes, the Sovereignty Goddess. Women hold the Power of Love, which transforms and initiates the masculine, as seen in the Heroes Journey. After all, what does a man getting on one knee to propose represent if not this? This ontological view throws a wrench in the submissive woman and ancillary femininity paradigm. In the courtly love dynamic, the feminine is the centre, the masculine is the protective rim that moves around her. I’ve talked about similar ideas to this in other posts. My path is extremely Goddess focused, but that does not mean I reject divine masculinity. Without the direction and executive powers of the masculine, the raw creative power of the Goddess would have nowhere to go. He carries out Her mission. In spiritual matters, the divine feminine leads, and so my spiritual path is divine feminine focused. In the physical, every day realm, I want a man who can step into his divine masculinity to lead in the physical. It’s not inaccurate to say neither of us are submitting to the other but actually I’d say we both are submitting to each other. And, of course, even if we are more feminine or more masculine we should each seek to integrate our animus/anima and incorporate aspects of both in order to lead the most fulfilled lives and not rely entirely on the opposite sex to embody all of the other traits for us (still working on this myself).
Ultimately, for me, Beltane is a celebration of all of this, and the most important festival in my personal observation of the Wheel of the Year. For most pagans it seems to be Samhain, for me it’s Beltane. I named my blog Idylls of the Queen for a reason, a play on Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. There is a whole feminine realm to Arthuriana that has gone over a lot of people’s heads until very recently, thanks to the work of the Matthews’, Dion Fortune, pioneers of the Avalonian branch of the Goddess movement, and many others, and much of it concerns this idea of the divine feminine as the true power driving the events of the stories: NOT the Christian god. In order to acknowledge divine feminine power, we need to look beyond the material, the exoteric, the obvious. We need to pull back the veil, go beneath the surface, read between the lines.
The Devil isn’t in the details, the Goddess is.
Further study:
- Blodeuwedd: Welsh Goddess of Seasonal Sovereignty by Jhenah Telyndru
- Rhiannon: Divine Queen of the Celtic Britons by Jhenah Telyndru
- Ladies of the Lake by Caitlín and John Matthews
- Courtly Love: The Path of Sexual Initiation by Jean Markale
- Priestess of Avalon, Priestess of the Goddess by Kathy Jones
Idylls of the Queen 