The Great Goddess

Since early humans began to cast their gazes to the vast sky above and began to realize there was more to life than the daily battle to survive, they watched and eventually tracked the heavenly bodies and their movement throughout the year along with the changing seasons. The way the stars moved almost begged the humans to name them and the associated constellations and develop legends around them which would help the early watchers remember the patterns and associated times of year. This understanding was then used to predict the seasons which became very important as people began to establish settlements and develop agriculture. Those that understood the heavens and were able to make predictions played a critical role in the survival of their people, and this often became a position that was passed on to an initiate who came of age and was selected by the master as someone to train and pass their knowledge to.

The characters and legends used to remember and explain the patterns and movement of the heavens reflected life on Earth with male and female aspects as well as animals all developed to make sense of the nightly show above. The watchers noticed that death came in the winter on Mother Earth when the sun was weak, and her new life sprang forth as she warmed in the Spring when the sun regained his strength with the resulting harvest bounty culminating in the late Summer or early autumn months. The great cycle of life was repeated annually on Mother Earth and those in the know often performed rituals to assure the male deity, the sun, would begin his return to the north in midwinter, while other rituals encouraged sacred Mother Earth to produce bountiful crops and game. From these legends and rituals, the first Deities were born in early civilizations and the homage and rituals paid to them was all considered a delicate dance necessary, they thought, to avoid a disaster such as drought or flood which would result in famine.

Early on, civilizations such as the Egyptians recognized many deities, both masculine and feminine, and those associated with animals or combinations of such and at some point they began to assign certain purposes to them. For example, the God Osiris, who was what we modern humans now call the constellation of Orion, was the God responsible for the souls of the dead and their eventual resurrection. His consort was the Goddess Isis, now known by us as the star, Sirius. As it turns out, as the sun gradually made his way across the sky rising and setting further and further south on the horizon in the autumn, reaching the furthest point south on the morning of the winter solstice on or about December 21, where he appears to stand still for three days, and then begins to return north each morning culminating with the summer solstice. In the time of the Egyptians the Goddess, Isis as Sirius, was on the horizon at that point where the sun rose on the winter solstice, giving the appearance that the sacred femine saved him from certain death. We believe this gave rise to the Egyptian notion that a female, a wife, was necessary to legitimize a Pharaoh and his position. Was it because of the astronomical movements that humans elevated the sacred feminine above the male deity? It certainly could be so. Eventually, the star Sirius moved as a result of precession and she no longer appears on the horizon with the sun on the winter solstice. Did this give rise to the notion perpetrated by the Romans that the masculine is all powerful and the feminine subservient to him? There can be no doubt that what occurs in the heavens directly influenced the development of religion by humans and still to this day is the basis for many of the stories and legends in Holy books of the major religions of the world. And it also means that there were holdovers who chose to maintain and preserve the rise of the sacred feminine, the Great Goddess who was the object of their true faith, secretly continued to revere Her in spite of the threat of death by the Roman Catholic Church in medieval times. We now call them the Venus families.

The Venus Families and the Great Goddess

The persecuted Knights Templar and the families they were members of were what we now collectively call, the “Venus families”. Why Venus? The planet Venus has always been considered the manifestation of the Great Goddess in the heavens since humans first began to watch and track the celestial bodies in the night sky. Venus is the third brightest body after the sun and the moon and moves in ways that makes patterns such as the five-pointed star or pentagram if tracked over its eight year cycle, a symbol long associated with Goddess ideology. These families and the Templars kept alive an ancient faith where the sacred feminine was considered critically important, at the very least She was an equal to the male God and maybe even paramount.

Because this flew in the face of the controlling Roman Catholic Church in medieval times which actively pursued and burned at the stake anyone not practicing the dogma of the Church, the Templars needed to keep their reverence for the sacred feminine carefully veiled so as not to endanger themselves or their critical plans. In fact, we find that there is reason to believe the Templars and associated families had a Covenant with the Great Goddess that had to do with helping them finding a new safe place to live, bring their treasure, their families and worship as they wished, a New Jerusalem, away from the monarchs of Europe and the Catholic church in exchange for keeping the sacred feminine aspect of their faith alive and well, yet carefully veiled, in perpetuity.