The Forbidden Fruit of Female Pagan Baptisms

It’s these kinds of places
where centuries of Witch-burnings, both figurative and literal,
do that to people
who swear they want to hear from Jesus
but wouldn’t know him
even if he were spitting in their face
through a Witch woman
who speaks tongues with the Spirit World all day long.

So, I braced myself at the God Squad Shop doors
and opened the tumblers of my life
through the handle of rolling the Biblical dice.
I smiled kindly to the clerk in the shop,
a pious woman dusting the double-standard shelves
of a Christianity soaked in the sacredness of sanctified blood.

I gloriously turned in a space filled with the depths of God,
even as I heard God and Jesus joke to themselves.
The rebelliousness of me holding and visiting with
a Shaman Jesus in their Christian space
rolled through me like Aces.

And then, I bought my medium-sized Jesus figurine,
me – a Witch woman incognito in the middle of
the Holy discipled land –
while Jesus, the light being himself,
remarked to me over my shoulder,
gently teasing, about me forgiving God.

Oh, how handy that forgiveness and loss of control eventually became . . .

I smirked and paid for his likeness and left,
only to have, one day later,
my life un-ravel in one Initiation wave after another –
This, from the ignition of the most powerful self-Baptism of my life.

My Methodist minister,
five decades back and three states between us?
Oh, he never would have recognized
the blazing light and Angels that surrounded me,
my medium-sized Jesus as witness,
as I nakedly entered my own tub,
a womb of all wombs.
A womb of quantum light surprises –
a womb where I Baptized myself like a powerful Biblical Thecla.

The fact that an Initiation called to me
after I had my medium-sized Jesus tucked under my arm,
did not surprise.
I’ve walked through a half dozen of these
spiritual gateways in twenty years.

But what I did not anticipate was the power of this one:
An Initiation that unloaded as a Cosmic Quantum Lighted Baptism
on fire in the bathtub,
erupting into the Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine,
swirling in triangles and Merkabas of God and the Divine Sophia,
Celtic knots of Jesus and Mary Magdalene, Essenes of Mother Mary and Joseph,
with Arch Angels swirling in layers of echelons above me,
all around.

The house tilted with the energy
as I came up out of my wombed bathtub,
leaving the waters of past, present and future
dripping along the way
as I wrapped myself all wet in a robe,
wondering what I’d just done.

And then, for days,
the vicariousness of Cosmic energies
volcanically erupted through my body
until it felt like the front end of time
and the back end of time
kept kissing one another
through the portal of my body, my life.
For days, I did not know where it all began or ended.
I lived in the ultimate time and space-rip of the alpha and omega.

I nakedly and anonymously turned inside out
as a Cosmic Witch with a Holy Shaman Jesus
in the forbidden land
as the fruit of a fully self-realized Holy Woman
lit to the heavens and back.

These heaving waves of Initiation energy,
shed off a Baptism unlike any other,
the power of Cosmic orgasms enjoying themselves through me,
untethered in the ends and beginnings
of my anonymous soul.

And the ironies that this happened
in the green-leafed fertile valleys
of conservative poisonous corporate farming?
Oh, they are not lost on me –
much like the sin of being a Witch Woman
in a God Squad Shop.

I am silently shattering all the rules,
all the code –
Biblical, farming, spiritual and otherwise –
without a soul here knowing.

I’m the naked anonymous human Initiation
in the depths of poisoned emerald-green fields,
where spirits of another kind – hop vines and vineyards –

are offered up to a Washington sky
to feed the souls of our hungry nation, ready to hear answers
through the lighter load of beer and wine
without ever hearing sounds of Jesus.

This is where I am breaking old code
with my body and soul –
learning how to drip like Venus,
learning the sacred secrets of Mary Magdalene, Kwan Yin, the Divine Sophia  
and all the other Goddesses of the Divine Feminine
in the weave of the Sacred Flower of Life –
even as corporate farm trucks trundle the roads outside . . .

And tonight? Tonight, as I write?
It’s surely a Friday Night Lights kind of evening,
with the local football field lit
like a birthday cake for home field advantage.
For a high school football team
that is forever playing in the middle of grapevines and beer hops.
Young men smashing against one another
as people yell into an eastern Washington sky.

And the orange light fades from a setting sun
while things keep turning here,
trying never ever to change,
even when they are.

Even as one Witch Woman,
a speaker of Divine Women,
untethers her naked soul
through the spirit vines of the fields
rising out of the poisons
of the Biblical farmland of irrationalities
all in the name of a God
we no longer recognize.

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Dana Stovern is founder and coach of The Magic of Somatic Money, and author of the blog Along the Learning Curve of Life. Even though her profession is body-based money relationship coaching, her first love is words, writing and exploring the depths of the human conscious (or unconscious) condition in body and soul development.