Home to Her: Walking the Transformative Path of the Sacred Feminine

By Liz Childs Kelly

Home to Her takes us on a journey, personal and collective, through time and place, to remember and reconnect with the lost and stolen wisdom of the Sacred Feminine, an ancient Divine force known intimately by ancestral peoples around the world. While in some cultures She remains a vibrant, living force, in the West Her wisdom and tradi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Womancraft Publishing
• Release date: Oct 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781910559796

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Titlepage

Copyright © 2022 Liz Childs Kelly

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Published by Womancraft Publishing, 2022

womancraftpublishing.com

ISBN 978-1-910559-79-6

Home to Her is also available in print format: ISBN 978-1-910559-80-2

Cover design, diagrams and typesetting by Lucent Word, lucentword.com

Cover art by Arla Patch.

Womancraft Publishing is committed to sharing powerful new women’s voices, through a collaborative publishing process. We are proud to midwife this work, however the story, the experiences and the words are the author’s alone. A percentage of Womancraft Publishing profits are invested back into the environment reforesting the tropics (via TreeSisters) and forward into the community: providing books for girls in developing countries, and affordable libraries for red tents and women’s groups around the world.

Praise for Home to Her

This is a lyrical and honest evocation of the sacred feminine, and Liz Childs Kelly’s writing hums with the authentic passion of the feminine creative force. It’s a timely reminder that our inner navigation system, our intuition, is calling out to us as a wayfinder in these times. Across the world this guiding light has often been known as a feminine energy.

Seren Bertrand, author of Spirit Weaver, co-author of Womb Awakening & Magdalene Mysteries

Journey with Liz Childs Kelly on a sacred pilgrimage back to the loving arms of the Great Mother. Kelly’s warmth, inclusivity, and gentle prodding are the perfect guide back to your innately holy wisdom. A compelling and poignant read, I wholeheartedly recommend Home to Her.

Trista Hendren, creatrix of ‘Girl God Books’

Home to Her is essential and inspiring reading for all those who hear the call to walk the path of the Sacred Feminine and reclaim the divine from the suffocating grip of patriarchy.

As more and more people are asking ‘what happened to Goddess the Mother?’ after these few thousand years of ‘God the Father’, Home To Her shares answers to this question while offering us healing medicine and a spiritual path rooted in the sacredness of all of life and the truth of your body and soul.

A fascinating and soul-nourishing book!

Stella Tomlinson, priestess and author of Cycles of Belonging

As I began reading Home to Her, I was transported back to my own experience in discovering the presence of the Goddess when she emerged in my consciousness and stirred in my blood and bones about twenty-five years ago. It was a time of void in my life, when the structures of my previous thoughtforms had collapsed. Somehow, I knew enough to not fill in the space, but to stay with the discomfort of the emptiness. It was in this emptiness I that began to hear a new voice from within: gentle, whispering, magnificent...and female. Like Liz Childs Kelly, my growing awareness of the sacred feminine was completely transformative for me, and like Liz, I knew I had to share the healing power of the experience with others – I had to share Her. Like Liz, I owe debt of gratitude to the women who came before me and opened important doors to our understanding of the sacred feminine historically and today.

Now, my heart soars to enjoy a new voice. Liz so beautifully shares her own journey with the sacred feminine in an illuminating, authentic, guided way that will be life-changing for her readers. She is indeed like the Pacific Island wayfinders she writes about – offering insights, reflections and exercises to guide readers in opening up to Her and all that She brings. In sisterhood, I send abundant, heartfelt blessings to Liz, as we join together and with others in sharing the healing message of the Goddess to a world that so needs Her.

Dale Allen, UNCSW NGO, In Our Right Minds, award-winning filmmaker (producer, director, presenter), author including best-selling co-author of Womb to Thrive, host of ‘The Core with Dale Allen’ ranked in the world top 10% of podcasts

Liz Kelly’s riveting feminist awakening takes her on a journey from her patriarchal Protestant upbringing to a series of astounding personal encounters with the Great Mother. Traveling through history and around the world, Kelly reclaims the Sacred Feminine both for herself and for readers who are sure to be both captivated and informed by this wise and inclusive spiritual primer.

Perdita Finn, author of Take Back the Magic and the co-founder with her husband Clark Strand of ‘The Way of the Rose’

In Home to Her, Liz Childs Kelly navigates a journey through fire and water, through history, imagination, the personal and political to ask: What if all the wisdom we need comes from the depths of our own hearts?

In her pursuit of a Divine Feminine, Childs Kelly interrogates both femininity and divinity to present readers with a healing medicine – acknowledging an intuitive knowledge and ability that lives within us all.

Amy Torok, co-author of Missing Witches: Recovering True Histories of Feminist Magic, and co-host of the ‘Missing Witches’ podcast

Home to Her is a compelling narrative at once personal, herstorical, mystical, and exploratory. Liz’s voice is both gentle and fierce, weaving an engaging book that draws from personal experience - both mundane and mystical - family and ancestral experience, and the work of other foremothers, wayshowers, and theorists from years gone by.

Willing to wrestle with complex topics such as the legacy of colonialism and European appropriation of indigenous land, voices, stories, and traditions, Home to Her skilfully guides the reader across a multifaceted landscape of experiencing, questioning, exploring, and coming into relationship with the divine in our lives and our world.

Home to Her is a love song to the Sacred Feminine, in her many forms and faces, past, present, indwelling, and strong.

Molly Remer, MSW, D.Min., priestess, creatrix of #30DaysofGoddess and author of Womanrunes, Walking with Persephone and Whole and Holy

Reading Home to Her is like sitting down to a feast offered in reverence to the Sacred Feminine known by many names. Author Liz Kelly writes a refreshing, reflective, and well-researched account that illuminates the origins, suppression, and diverse expressions of that which connects us with the flow of life aka the Mothers of the Deep. Kelly shares her personal journey with uncovering ancient wisdom, while highlighting a variety of voices and perspectives, and ultimately inviting the reader to deepen their experience with an immanent presence of creative power.

April McMurtry, founder of ‘THE MOON IS MY CALENDAR’

You know the feeling of coming home from a long trip to settle into the arms of someone you love. That is the feeling I had when I picked up this book...a deep feeling of recognition and homecoming. So many moments in Liz Kelly’s Home to Her gave me chills of remembrance of what it felt like to be truly held by the Divine Feminine, the Mother of us all. This book brought Her more deeply home to my heart. If you have felt like something has been missing spiritually through centuries of Her being written out of the script of your life as a woman, come Home to Her embracing arms with this beautiful welcome!

Ariel Spilsbury, mystic, author, founder of the ‘13 Moon Mystery School’

Home to Her is an extremely informative, awakening and fascinating account and history of the Sacred Divine Feminine, the Great Mother Goddess and her different forms, even for people like me who have been studying, researching and experiencing the Cosmic Mother as Mary and the Black Madonna for many years. The book provides an accurate research and new insights.

I found that Childs Kelly shared deep and powerful healing information about the truth and where we really come from, the source: one Divine Sacred Feminine and Dark Cosmic Mother, always there for us to support us with her unconditional love. As Childs Kelly shows, She has different names but She is strong and present in all cultures around the world, even if patriarchy tried to suppress her.

Let’s invoke Her through this powerful, beautiful book to bring humankind peace, harmony and healing of the collective subconscious, remembering the womb that gave us life.

Alessandra Belloni, world-renowned singer and percussionist, and author of Healing Journeys with the Black Madonna

Liz has written a compelling and evocative account of one woman’s journey to discovering the Sacred Feminine, in culture, history, nature and herself. Weaving together the many paths that led her, in a book that is both well-researched and intimate, Liz’s story gives us a sacred roadmap for how to find our own way Home to Her.

Iris Eve, musician, poet and creatrix of ‘She: On the Tip of Her Tongue’

For my motherline: Millie, Katie, Kate, Ava, Adeline, Elizabeth, and all who came before them;

And for my children, Claire and Brendan, and any descendants yet to come.

This is for all of us.

Land Acknowledgement

This book was written on land taken from the Saklan (Saclan) tribe, often referenced as part of the larger Miwok Tribe, located in the East Bay of California, as well as on land taken from the Monacan Nation of central Virginia. Both the Miwok Tribe and Monocan Nation are federally recognized tribes with documented histories of continued, ancestral presence on the land prior to the arrival of European colonizers.

When my time comes around

Lay me gently in the cold dark earth

No grave will hold my body down,

I’ll crawl home to her.

– Work Song, Hozier

Take up the sword and drink from the cup, and remember all of who and what you are. This is the message of the Goddess, for to Remember is to Know.

– Sharon Paice MacLeod

Intro

Several years ago, I came across a thoughtfully worded op-ed, penned by a rabbi, in the New York Times. In it, he made an assertion that might have felt wildly provocative for some: In the Jewish faith, God is dual-gendered, and the earliest adherents of Judaism would have known and embraced this.

I loved this perspective for lots of reasons, not least of which was seeing a religious man assert that God might be something other than an old, stern white guy who’s ready to dole out judgment from on high – and via a prominent U.S. news source to boot. The rabbi’s suggestion also flew in the face of everything I had learned about God as a kid. I grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and while most of the talk was about Jesus and how He represented love, I had enough exposure to the Old Testament version of God (plus the viewpoints of those in my religious community) to know full well that He damn sure wasn’t a woman. To suggest that He was a She would not have been simply silly or foolish, it would have been straight-up, heathen heresy.

But the op-ed also reminded me – again – of questions that had been bubbling up for me with increasing frequency at the time. Certainly, anyone who’s had a truly transcendent, spiritual moment, no matter how fleeting, knows that God is much larger than any of our limited notions of gender. But if God really contains both genders, then why is it considered normal to only discuss the male version of Him, or for more progressive folks, to hopscotch over the entire issue of gender and simply declare God gender-neutral? Why is it still so rare that we speak of the divine specifically as a She?

I posed these questions in an article I wrote for Human Parts, an online magazine published by Medium, and the responses indicated that clearly, I’d struck a nerve. While many were supportive, one man told me, I sense you have an agenda fueled by your desire to break free from your feeling of being dominated by men and wishing that women could rise to dominance. He went on to explain that women have always been dominated by men, even in prehistoric times (duh! it’s science!) and that trying to switch pronouns on God was just courting unnecessary controversy because we all already know that He means everybody.

Another man quoted Pope Benedict XVI to me, who apparently said, We are not authorized to change the Our Father into an Our Mother. One man told me that If we start calling God ‘She’ then we might well end up with the current situation in reverse, an unbalanced emphasis on the feminine rather than the masculine (given our history, I’m willing to take my chances). And still another man challenged me to show him even one modern Christian who believes in sexism. One. That last one actually rendered me speechless.

In a way, some of these responses were funny, but they still stung. From the very beginning, my deep interest in understanding the Sacred Feminine, learning Her sacred stories and generating conversation about them has always felt like a profound calling. This might seem like a gift, but it brings with it intense vulnerability. It’s hard to stand up and be seen as an unabashed advocate for conversations about the sacred, let alone the still controversial notion that it’s acceptable to discuss God in female form. And it’s still hard for me to share views that I know go against the grain of much conventional thinking, no matter how much historical evidence of the Sacred Feminine I’ve amassed over the years.

And yet I keep doing it. It’s almost like the Sacred Feminine stoked a long dormant flame in me years ago, and that flame has been desperate to find fuel so that it can grow and grow and grow. I live for those moments when I tell someone that I research and write about women’s sacred histories, and see reflected back at me not a glazed look of discomfort, but a spark of hungry recognition that matches my own. In those moments, I find myself reverting back to a childlike state, so eager to connect with anyone else who might be a kindred spirit that I can barely get the words out fast enough (my apologies to any of you who’ve been on the receiving end of this).

Does this passion for the Sacred Feminine come from a deep desire for balance that I believe the Western world desperately needs, or for a healing of old wounds I received by only being given a depiction of the divine as male? Or does it represent something even older? Once, sitting across from a beloved sister in a Sacred Feminine-inspired ceremony, I had a profound flash of remembrance that I can barely explain. Just for a moment, she and I were transported to another place, another time, and there she was, her clear gaze meeting mine, as we enacted the exact same ritual.

I don’t know where the passion comes from; I only know that since that flame was first lit by Her, it has sought out fuel. It has pushed me to speak even when I feel afraid, to write words that I know might invite criticism, to hold space for community about Her, to invite others to speak to me about their experience of Her, and to spend years researching and writing this book. I can only assume that She wants the flame to grow, for others to see Her sparks and for their individual flames to glow brighter, hotter and be more visible to all, too.

I hope this book stokes your own flame of Sacred Feminine remembrance. I hope it shows you, unequivocally, that She is a real, historical, living and powerful force with great relevance to our world today. Above all, I hope it shows you that it’s always OK to call God a She, and introduces you to the incredible transformation that is possible when we do.

Chapter 1

In the Beginning

Who is She? She is your power, your Feminine source. Big Mama. The Goddess. The Great Mystery. The web-weaver. The life force. The first time, the twentieth time you may not recognize her. Or pretend not to hear as she fills your body with ripples of terror and delight. But when she calls you will know you’ve been called. Then it is up to you to decide if you will answer.

Lucy H. Pearce

She found me at a women’s business conference in the spring of 2014. I was sitting alone, one woman in a crowd of 5,000 attendees, wearing a professionally tailored, red dress and thousand-dollar shoes.

Other than the events of the day, it’s the shoes I remember the most. They were, and still are, spectacular: pointy-toed, kitten-heeled, red and tan patent leather, with three ankle straps covered in shiny metal studs. They were ridiculously showy, conversation starter, ‘look at me’ shoes. And that was the point, of course. I wanted to be noticed, and in exactly the right way.

It was a cool spring day in San Francisco, and I was attending this conference for the first time. I was a little fish with my own communications consulting company, trying to stand out in a sea of women representing large corporations, and I was there for a very specific reason. I was hoping to snag what one of my business mentors referred to as a whale – a large, corporate client that could serve as an anchor and a steady stream of revenue for my small business.

I’d owned my company for six years at that point, pouring most of my time and all of my creative energy into growing it. I’d started it as a true labor of love, alone, in the tiny one-bedroom loft apartment that I shared with my husband, Tom, and our dog in San Francisco, and in some ways, I was immensely proud of what I’d accomplished. I led a mostly female team of employees whose work ethic and skills had given the company a strong reputation for high-quality work. I had also joined the board of a women’s nonprofit and began funding a scholarship program for Oakland girls to help offset the cost of college tuition. I believed I was the best advocate for women that I could possibly be, and by pursuing success in the business world – an option not readily available to my mother’s generation – I also believed I was being the best feminist I could possibly be.

But I never felt good enough. I secretly worried about my credentials, my knowledge, and my right to claim any success I’d already had. I had crippling anxiety before virtually every meeting or speaking engagement, something I constantly tried to hide. I was terrified of not having the right answers or being seen as an imposter. These fears never eased, even as the years passed, and I never thought to question the environment in which I was operating; I just assumed there was something defective about me. That’s why the shoes I was wearing that day were so important. If I didn’t feel comfortable in my own skin, I could at least look the part.

Something else was going on that day, too. I was four months pregnant with my second child, and I was determined not to let that be a distraction or even a talking point of the day, which is why I’d chosen a dress that artfully concealed my waistline. And the shoes would draw attention away from my belly, I hoped.

I didn’t end up meeting a single other person at the conference. Instead, I experienced something remarkable that ultimately changed the course of my life.

I snagged a seat in the back of the main hall for the opening session, which flowed along uneventfully until a beautiful, seemingly ageless woman appeared on stage. She wasn’t the keynote speaker – that was business and media mogul Arianna Huffington, who would appear later. I could barely see this woman from my seat in the back, but her radiance lit up the giant screens framing the stage. Her name was Dr. Elizabeth Kapu’uwailani Lindsey, and as an anthropologist and National Geographic Fellow, she had spent years studying the wisdom traditions of different cultures around the world. In a lilting, hypnotic voice, she spoke at length about the navigation techniques of sailors from the Pacific Islands.

Wayfinders. That was what she called these master navigators. With the guidance of thousands of years of teachings, mostly passed down orally, they could navigate between islands using only their intuition and their ability to interpret the wind, stars, birds, and the ocean itself. They found their way by listening and watching, she said, so much so that they could sail thousands of miles just by observing the way the waves broke across the front of the boat.

She kept talking, but I could no longer hear her. Something strange was happening to me. My whole body began tingling, and heat began rising from the soles of my feet, neatly encased in their designer shoes, all the way up my body. It was not at all unpleasant; in fact, it felt like a slow, delicious burn, as if I were being gently licked by imaginary flames. As the heat reached the top of my head, the room around me appeared to shimmer and recede. I felt as if I were in a vortex of sorts, still fully present in the giant conference hall, but somehow in a different dimension at the same time.

In a daze I turned to look at the woman next to me, unspoken questions reverberating in my brain: "Are you hearing this? Is this information having the same effect on