Goddess Inspiration Oracle
introduction excerpts
Inspiration. The word itself is expansive. It brings to mind the invigorating intake of air into lungs, filling us with energy. It suggests a world charmed with possibilities, unfolding in a sudden flash of light. Haven’t we all heard someone say, “I had no idea what to do next. Then out of the blue, I had an inspiration. It was like magic.”
When most people think of inspiration, they usually connect it to the mysterious activities of artists and poets. Though inspiration is primarily associated with creative endeavors, it is much more than that. It opens us to possibilities beyond what our rational mind can perceive. In some cases, it takes the form of intuition, an internal knowledge that often keeps us safe and protected. But most of all, inspiration allows us to practice an invaluable skill I call “flexible thinking.”
Flexible thinking is the ability to think outside the box, so we may find a solution to a dilemma when there appears to be none. It is nonlinear in form, arriving in flashes of images and ideas, instead of neatly packaged within an obvious answer that can be deduced empherically. Flexible thinking allows us to be receptive to possibilities instead of limited, to listen before we act. It encourages us to bend like a willow tree in the wind, instead of shattering into pieces when confronted by adversity.
If we use the standard wisdom that the feminine represents the receptive principle (or yin), and the masculine is active (or yang), then flexible thinking is feminine in nature—divinely feminine, if you will. The same equation can be written of inspiration itself.
As representatives of the Divine Feminine, goddesses have been honored through the ages for their capacity to encourage inspiration. In ancient Greece, the Muses were praised for their ability to breathe life into scholarly and artistic works. The Celtic goddess Brigit was invoked for the spark of creativity. Her sacred holiday of Imbolg, celebrated every February first, included rituals designed to increase creativity. The oracle of Erda, the Norse goddess of the earth, invited mortals to find inspiration within nature’s blueprint; divine will could be discerned by watching the patterns of waves, or the movement of clouds across the sky.
These are only three examples in which goddesses provide us with the inspiration we need to transform our lives. Within the Goddess Inspiration Oracle you will find an additional seventy-seven—a total of eighty deities who represent essential aspects of the Divine Feminine.
About the Divine Feminine and Oracles
The Goddess Inspiration Oracle presents the wisdom of the Divine Feminine in a manner meant to spark inspiration in you. Oracles bear the double duty of being both the message as well as the vehicle in which to communicate this message.
In the ancient world, the term “oracle” referred to the sacred place where prophecy was received as well as to the person channeling it. One famous example is the Oracle of Delphi, located on Mount Parnassus in the heart of the Greek empire. It was sacred to the deities Apollo and Gaia and served by numerous priestesses known as the Pythia. Pilgrims would travel far distances to consult the Oracle of Delphi, granting great import to the communications offered there. Today, many consider an oracle the message itself; to paraphrase media critic Marshall McLuhan, the medium is now the message. The knowledge granted by the oracle offers necessary information from a new source, hopefully bypassing human fallibility. The oracle may be predictive in nature. Or it may simply provide us with an objective mirror in which to observe a situation.
Whichever definition you prefer, the function of an oracle remains the same: Oracles offer information. How we choose to interpret this information and what we decide to do with it is up to us. They often provide us with an experience of synchronicity, a term created by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung to describe a series of seemingly random events that connect within us to gain a deeper meaning.
In the case of an oracle, our personal experiences synchronistically connects with it, thus creating a message unique to our situation. By doing so, the oracle helps us release information we already possess deep within our psyche. It frees us to see with new eyes.
About the Goddess Inspiration Oracle
From time immemorial, oracles have been used to gain inspiration from the goddess. It is my fervent hope that the Goddess Inspiration Oracle continues in this tradition.
To create the Goddess Inspiration Oracle, I took inspiration from the more than one hundred goddesses I have described in art and words during much of my professional life. From these, I chose eighty goddesses who represented a wide variety of a women’s concerns. As I worked, inspiring messages organically emerged from their stories and my paintings. These messages offer creative solutions, comforting reassurances and, most importantly, a new point of view to consider. They are intended to act as a catalyst for change.
Though I had previously created a deck devoted to the Divine Feminine—the Goddess Tarot—the Goddess Inspiration Oracle it is intended to offer this wisdom to all women, not just to those who work with tarot. It presents a portrait of the Divine Feminine that expands beyond the wonderfully rich archetypes of the tarot.
I believe that we are surrounded by divine inspiration, that it often appears in mundane forms in our everyday life to tell us what we need to hear. People of ancient times also believed this. The oracle of Erda, which I described earlier, reminds us that the natural world can provide us with sacred messages from the goddess.
Another beautiful example of goddess inspiration is described in Homer’s The Odyssey. Throughout Odysseus’s long journey home from the Trojan Wars to his wife Penelope, the goddess Athena mysteriously appears incognito to help the warrior when he is most in need. Sometime the goddess disguises herself as his trusted friend Mentor; other times she takes on the form of a stranger who happen to be at the right place at the right time. As such, the goddess grants Odysseus and his allies the exact information they need to know at that moment without disclosing her divine stature.
These types of fortuitous interactions happen more often than we realize. We receive the divine inspiration we need to transform our lives, but simply don’t recognize it in its disguised form. In a novel or film, such convenient coincidences might be belittled as examples of deux ex machina, god—or goddess—in the machine. And they are, in the best possible sense of the expression.
The Goddess Inspiration Oracle was created to help you become more receptive to these experiences and, by becoming more receptive, to encourage them. It is intended as an instrument for inviting the inspiration of the Divine Feminine into our lives when we most need it.
We are meant to be filled with joyful inspiration, to spill over with exuberant spirit. May the Goddess Inspiration Oracle animate your life with inspiration, providing you with an intimate experience of the Divine Feminine.
—Kris Waldherr
Text excerpted from the Goddess Inspiration Oracle, written, illustrated and designed by Kris Waldherr. Reproduction is strictly forbidden without express written permission from the author. The Goddess Inspiration Oracle deck and book set will be published by Lllewellyn Publications in October 2007.
learn more about THE GODDESS INSPIRATION ORACLE
purchase THE GODDESS INSPIRATION DECK from amazon.com
