A Revolutionary Guide to Renouncing the Matrix and Reclaiming the Matrice
The Matrice
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Welcome to Reclaiming the Matrice! We are a collective dedicated to living in union with the Earth. To us, this means understanding the forces of colonization and cis-hetero patriarchy that have dominated our world cultures for the last 4,000 years, so that we can make empowered and informed choices to return to a co-creative relationship with all ecosystems and beings on this planet; human, animal, plant, and earth. We are interested in finding ways to utilize aspects of the technology and human genius that exist within the Matrix of domination we live in to aid us in this transition towards wholeness and global health, but most of all we are interested in re-discovering the supportive nature of Matrice systems so we can live within the web of all life where there is enough for everyone. Most importantly we are dedicated to understanding the root of Matrix thinking and the distorted reality it creates, causing us to exist disconnected from the natural reciprocity we are meant experience within our environment and communities.
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We find ourselves on the brink of ecological disaster, with more people displaced from their homes and made refugees than at any other time in human history. Destructive tactics of cis-hetero patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism and resource extraction are threatening our human right to live in safety, health, and harmony with the Earth. There are governments, dictators, oligarchs, billionaires, the one percent, and their corporations, creating war and genocide on the planet as they have done since the rise of empires. Amid this man-made ecocide that affects all life on our planet, a revolutionary energy is rising. This energy is rising because we can see, for the first time globally, the extent of the oppression and colonization that has been the dominating reality for thousands of years. This revolutionary energy is the crux of the human spirit, and has existed in pockets of evolutionary leaps, cultural uprisings, and consciousness shifts throughout our entire history. This energy steps in when corrections are needed, and the web of life is out of balance, because it is the source of our original evolutionary momentum—it is what has guided our progress for hundreds of thousands of years before the relatively brief amount of time the forces of colonization have wreaked such havoc on our world.
The reason we feel this energy at the core of our humanness, is because we inherited this energy from the spirit of the Earth and all beings who live upon Her—through our genetics, through the animals, plants, and elements that make up her vast network of life. We inherit this energy from Her, and this energy is inherent within us--it is our metronome of homeostasis. It is our natural inclination to live in connection with all things, to experience balance and belonging in our communities and environments. This inclination is based on a shared collective memory of how we have lived together for eons before the last four thousand years of patriarchal, male dominated religion and rule has radically changed life on this planet. This spirit rises in us because it is our natural, reflexive response to protect all life, to uphold the system of growth, collaboration, and participation that is existence because we are a part of this system, this network. On a deep instinctive level, we know that what we do to the Earth, we do to ourselves. Because whole factions of humans on this Earth have forgotten this truth, this energy steps in when corrections are needed, and the web of life is out of balance. These corrections cannot be solely addressed by geopolitical analysis or human sentiment. There is a visceral response to correct and restore balance when life systems are threatened that goes beyond our temporal experience of reality, because it threatens the life of our entire planet, not just ourselves. We hear it in our being, ringing like a bell, and we must listen, and allow it to do its work. It knows what to do.
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I call this energy the Matrice. This is an existing word that has its roots in Greek, Latin, French, and other languages. There are countless concepts and descriptive words across all cultures to describe this energy that binds us altogether. I employ it now to represent the vast networks of life encompassing this Earth and the Cosmos we are all a part of. Our Indigenous relatives are holding crucial knowledge on how to come back into balance and right way with these systems of life. Part of our work now is to be allies and accomplices with our Indigenous relatives, so we can heal from the destruction of Colonialism and reclaim our rightful collaboration with one another, and our collective indigeneity to this Earth. Matrice in French means ‘womb’. In its earlier incarnations it can mean ‘mother’, ‘womb’, ‘uterus’, ‘source’, or ‘origin’. It is a vessel or container that creates a structure for something to be held within. The Matrice is a vessel that contains all of life, that is structured with systems and networks we can find repeated throughout the dimensional worlds. She moves through atomic and quantum physics, molecular structures, fractal patterns and sacred geometries. She is our bodies’ arterial and capillary networks. She is the mycelial, grass, plant, and tree root systems, kelp forests, coral reefs, ocean currents and gyres. She is the weather and storm systems, the geometric pathways the planets and stars carve in their orbits as the entire universe moves in flux. She is the interlocking substance that binds it all together; the sound and light waves that move through dark matter, the Cosmic Web of filaments that connect all energetic bodies throughout space from the farthest macro reaches of Multiverses, Galaxies, and Nebulae, to right here on our home planet, smaller still within our own bodies, and down and down into the microscopic worlds. She is the synaptic fire that animates our neural networks, she is the Infinite and the Infinitesimal.
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The Matrice is the Womb of all Life. She is the sentient spirit of the Earth, and she is also the wide and vast Cosmos. She is the Web of Life, she is the Cosmic Web. She is an amorphic container, one that cannot quite be charted because her dimensions are so broad, and the formulae of her repeated and regenerating signatures is imprinted and stamped throughout the materials that make up existence, the building blocks of the Universe. We can study and observe her evidence that exists all around us from the tiniest subatomic scale all the way up to the most inconceivably macrocosmic framework and webbing. While we can study and observe her through empirical methods, by simply living and breathing we are already perfectly participating in and mutually existing within her eternal regeneration and connection with all things. We exhale carbon dioxide, the life breath of the trees, and they exhale oxygen, our life breath. By being alive at this moment, we are irrevocably contributing to and participating in the Web of all Life. Each one of us is crucial, each one of us is needed; all consciousness, all beings, and all materials that make up our planets, stars, and Cosmos are necessary actors in the interplay of the Matrice and her life systems. The toroidal and energetic fields around our bodies exist and interact with the energy fields around every living being, creating spherical, spiraling patterns of webbing that interconnect us, feed us, and fuel us, just as the Earth herself rotates, travels in conjunction with our Solar System, Galaxy, and Universe as a whole, emitting her own vibrational frequency, her own toroidal field, or resonance, that interacts with everything in the Cosmos.
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The Matrice is a web that holds us all, interconnecting us. She is the sheath-like muscle of the heart folded in upon itself in spirals, that draws blood in and pumps it out through our capillaries, arteries, and veins. She is the spiraling notched etchings on the inside of these pathways that allows the blood to funnel through our bodies with optimal flow and reach. She is the lung cilia that dances with each inhale and exhale, transfusing oxygen into the blood. She is the tree-like webbing of tissue and veins making up the placenta, and the spiraling of the umbilical cord that connects baby to mother, she is the fascia. She is in the rootways of the trees that draw water up using spiraling centrifugal force into its trunk and branches, growing itself outward and upward ring upon ring. She is the spiraling seed structure of the face of a sunflower, she is the labyrinth of a nautilus shell, she is the molecules of free-flowing water that spiral in vortices as they pick up mica, minerals, soil, paramecium, amoeba, seeds, eggs, and other primordial building blocks, as she flows across our planet. She is the molecular structure of water and crystals that store information, just as our bodies do, the original super computers. She is the Fibonacci Sequence, she is Pi, she is the Fulcrum.
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She regenerates ceaselessly, she never ends. She is the division of cells, she is the grass that grows up through cracks in cement, relentless. You cannot stop her, life cannot be stopped. Even what we call death, entropy, decomposition, rot, and decay, releases energy that is reborn, reused, given back to the whole, and recycles again and again. The Cosmos is Her pelvic bowl that is a portal to birth and death, it is the schema through which all energy passes, renewing, dying, renewing and rewiring again, eternal. She is tireless, and she likes to grow and spread in spirals, fractals, and webs, with intermittent eruptions, implosions, explosions, and other grand gestures. We refer to her as She because she is a generating, life giving force that will never stop procreating. The energy with which she creates is not always easy, convenient, or palatable to digest, but it is accurate. She is sentient, and she knows how to correct imbalance.
The actions she takes to bring distortions of her systems back into balance are to be learned from, mark this well. Her rebalancing brings fierce reckonings. She cannot tolerate the damaging of her environment; she will flush the poison out and we will have to face the consequences. She is reframing for us what love and truth look like on this planet—love is a fierce commitment to coming back into balance, which is the true nature of existence. Love and balance are achieved by understanding the truth of our reality, even when it is difficult to hear or see. We are experiencing this environmentally and societally, through the humanitarian eco-crisis that is our current reality, which affects all living beings on this planet. Because the Matrice is the sacred interconnecting web of all existence, she makes corrections that can feel cataclysmic, to correct egregious imbalance. She is the storm systems, earthquakes, tectonic plates, she moves as one being to promote balance. She is the endless expansion of Space. She has been perfecting her Mastery and Mystery far before time was counted. She is the siren within each of us ringing, reminding us that we have been living at odds with her.
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By reorienting ourselves towards nature, by observing the rhythm of sunset and sunrise, the play of stars and moon, we can come back into her pacing. She has never left us. She in our bodies, our breath, our circadian rhythms, she is with us in every moment, but Matrix tempos can distort this connection, so that we can’t hear or feel her. The temporal reality created by Patriarchal structures on this planet is one of the most embedded, damaging collective programming we have experienced. Time is touted as linear. We are taught that we live in a construct where we are always running out of time, that we will never have enough of it to understand ourselves or be content, because we are laboring as slaves within the system of this temporal imposition. There are very deep Patriarchal obstructions in place that keep us from experiencing the multi-dimensional nature of all existence, the multiple timelines, and realities we can choose to live in, and the freedom we possess to come back into earth-based relationship. We are the actual authors of our realities, not our governments or societies. These larger Patriarchal structures of religion, empire, and capitalism have implanted millennia of conditioning within our generations, designed to neuter and disconnect us from our senses, that, when re-activated, help us to see more accurately who we are, where we are, and that we are empowered to choose our life paths and change our collective experience.
Life can be lived as a series of interconnected rituals in the present moment, daring to pause and depart from the societal/survival purposes we have been taught are our priorities, until we are living back in sync with the Matrice, and a whole new awareness of personal and collective direction may become apparent, one that moves with the tides, moves with our natural inclinations to rest, enjoy, and create. We can recall the memory of living in a different way in our ancestries. An interconnected reality where we can all experience equality, safety, and freedom on this planet is possible. A reality where we are free to feel with all our senses, mourn the truth of what has transpired, what we have lost, and set about to correcting these inequalities and imbalances so that we can live as we were meant to on this Earth. We can live woven together, a part of the multi-colored, diverse mystery, and dream a new future into existence. The truth is that there are more than enough sustainable resources on this earth to bring water, food, and shelter to everyone. We are being asked to make bedrock paradigm shifts within our reality so that everyone can experience liberation from war and genocide, suffering, slavery, and lack. And we must affect these changes for every single human being and all beings on this planet. We will not be free until every being is free.
The Matrix
The Matrix is another type of space delineated in the intellectual and physical world. As a container for numbers, it was first created in mathematics to store infinite number sequences, then later in the digital realms with its binary systems of ones and zeros that allow computation and storage of vast amounts of data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. The Matrix is also a type of container, a grid or lattice space for holding information, on paper or in the digital realm. It was originally more strictly shaped by columns, graphs, lines, squares, and rectangles, though the more sophisticated and digital it becomes the more it models itself after Cosmic Web Matrice structures—such as the advanced algorithms that are based on the fractals, branching, and root structures that occur in nature. The Matrix is a sorting system for holding massive mathematical formulae, large scale infrastructure, engineering and architectural software, 3D printing, technology of every kind from environmental to medical to interstellar, and so much more.
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In fact, these technologies are now beginning to scientifically re-‘prove’ what many Ancient and Indigenous cultures have known since time immemorial about the building blocks of the Universe; the behavior of the quantum and/or shamanic realms, to see and measure the energetic fields that exist around every being and planet and star, the ability to predict astronomical events, to make vast, accurate measurements of time/space dimensions, to observe and map the interconnection of all existence. This technology can be a very powerful tool used to create innovative solutions to the problems we are facing as a human race. It can interface with and emulate Matrice structuring, and be used to reduce carbon emissions, create sustainable free energy systems, replace our dependency on gas and electric utilities with solar technology that would power the world many, many times over. It can be used to create enzymes and mycelial fungus that will clean the oil and plastic out of our oceans, it can create sustainable and compostable building materials to replace our current depleting practices of deforestation.
It’s important to ask why this technology is NOT being immediately applied to solving these urgent issues that face us as a global population, across the board. While Matrix technology is responsible for the advances in Western modern society that make our lives more convenient, we must look at the truth that the services the Matrix provides are not available to everyone on our planet. Therefore, the Matrix is an inequitable structure controlled arbitrarily by capitalist and resource hungry corporations and nation states, that require the forced labor of a large part of our human population to run itself so that a smaller part of the human population can live well. The truth is that most of the conveniences we may enjoy are actually brought to us by another human being’s suffering and enslavement, somewhere on this Earth. The way the Matrix has always been used allows these imbalances to continue in our ecosystems and societies, by hoarding and commodifying resources for the wealthy and ruling classes, and contributing to a breakneck pace of global warming, deforestation, mining, and poisoning of the Earth’s waters.
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By comparison, the Matrice pulse of life that animates all organic structures is inherently equitable in its availability to all beings, offering clean air, food, and water as a baseline if we know how to care for our world and stop our current toxic practices. Even the damage we have done can self-correct to some degree because our ecosystems know how to heal once the attack has stopped, just as our bodies do, if we stop in time. We know indisputably, scientifically, that there are enough resources on the Earth to bring water, food, and shelter to all humans, but because these Matrix systems are built on inequality, it has become acceptable to not look after every being on the planet. How is the use of the Matrix, born out of human minds, modelled after the organic systems of the Matrice to hold new ideas and aid the advancement of technology, NOT being used for the good of all, especially when we are on the precipice of total environmental disaster? The applications of the Matrix, be it through tech, engineering, mathematics, quantum physics, space travel and discovery, are endless, and incredible. However, because of the dominant power structures of our governments, which are backed by corporations, which are backed by the few wealthiest ruling families, the value of what these technologies could offer us, and the container of human genius and inspiration that the Matrix could hold, is being controlled, censored, and manipulated.
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The main conflicts we face on the world stage are still about race, gender, religion, food and resource distribution, poverty, slave labor, and invasion/exploitation of the poorest nations because of their coveted natural resources or proximity to them. There is no designation of life as sacred. There is no protection of human life, animal life, or concern for the safety of the natural world, only the desire to acquire more; to be more powerful, more secure, and wealthier than another. Inaccurate themes of scarcity and inequality have been perpetuated to enslave the majority population of the world, us, the ninety-nine percent, with the lie that there isn’t enough for everyone, we must walk over each other and fight our way to the top, working our lives away for the carrot that is always dangled in front of us, for a reward that never comes. The Global South is being subjugated to serve the West, in a replication of the genocidal colonization programs these dominating rulers have been employing for thousands of years.
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Our technology comes from the human mind observing Nature’s brilliance, yet we reproduce her brilliance in ways that help the interests of our governments that have nothing to do with the preserving the interconnected nature of all things. These interests are for the continued expansion of capitalism and colonialism, absorbing all in its path, commodifying everything, even the sacredness of life. On one hand the Matrix is a Web made of labyrinthine, maze-like structures, bound by governmental bureaucracy and red tape, hierarchies of control where knowledge and power are wielded by few. Yet it is also the technology of the information age that allows us to become connected through the world wide web and social media to see our shared human experience, especially the most difficult areas of violence and oppression globally. There is a global search engine that allows us to ask our questions, receiving an instant response, like the synapses of one brain calling out and answering itself. It is our modern equivalent of the telepathy the ancients were said to possess, or the oracular, elemental cosmology that could once be accessed to guide humanity. It allows us to interface and sync with one another so that little by little we reach an event horizon where no one can ignore the suffering and oppression that is occurring on this planet, because we all are seeing each other’s experiences. We can no longer hide. It is all shared, published, recorded. Everyone must feel, in their bodies, the horror of war, to stop it. At the same time, this Matrix Web is being used selectively by the military industrial complex, by the academic industrial complex and the school to mental prison/actual prison pipeline, by the hospital industrial complex, by the non-profit industrial complex, and by the pharmaceutical industrial complex, to control, dominate, invade and murder, driven by motives that benefit mentally ill individuals at the top of world government, not the people, and it dares us to try and change its course. It banks on the probability that we will not.
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And so, we are faced with mass scale pollution and poisoning of the Earth’s waters and soil, invasive resource extraction of her life blood, organs, and plasma. The same entities that perpetrate such predatory ecocidal practices are also the nation states, corporations, politicians, lobbyists, white supremacist Christian, and other groups that intentionally oppress, traffic, enslave, exploit, invade, and otherwise justify abuse of our human family and natural world. They vie for geographic areas strategic to their desired accumulation of power and resources, and they prey on culturally and historically vulnerable areas, waging war and genocide for their purposes of continued expansion and control, while sowing fear, distraction, false blame, and hatred. They are the Cis-Hetero Patriarchy. They are the Colonizer. They are the Resource Colonizer. They are the operators of the Matrix. They have rejected Matrice systems and the evidence of the interconnection of all existence and are hoarding the helpful parts of our advancement for their own gains. In fact, we have all been trained to live in this system that is an empty replica of the Matrice, and knock about its hollow maze-like hallways and corridors, climb its ladders and scaffolds that promise some reward, safety, or supremacy, but that leaves us empty, disconnected, and diseased. This is because as a modern world we are living in a system of order that is not infused by life force; it only takes, it does not restore, and so there can be no other outcome but destruction of this system, for it runs against all life systems, it runs contrary to the order of things, to the natural life giving properties of the Universe. This Matrix system will, inevitably, burn itself down. Where and how we choose to position ourselves in anticipation of this eventuality is the real question.
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The Origins of the Shift from Matrice to Matrix
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The Matrix reality represents the values of the colonized world, the male dominant structures that relentlessly consume, conquer, and commodify everything that exists; the earth’s natural resources, the unique cultural and ethnic expressions of our diverse human family, and the sacredness of all life on earth which includes animals, plants, and humans. This distorted reality perpetuates a domination hierarchy of power held by men of European descent with light-colored skin, who view other races, and all women, as beneath them. Let us trace back where and when these imbalanced values first occur, within our histories.
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In Paleolithic times, roughly 70,000 to 100,000 years ago, migrations of humans first walked out of Africa and began to expand into Asia. Humans settled over the continents of Africa, Asia, the Middle East. While some humans walked out of Africa on shorter journeys, settling through Asia and the Middle East, they also began an incredible cross-oceanic migration, travelling via canoe or land bridges, down through Southeast Asia, reaching the Southern Hemisphere and Papua New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, Polynesia, and beyond. Humans arrived in Australia 65,000-70,000 years ago and formed the world’s oldest culture. Shifting sea levels changed the original land masses and ocean routes travelled by humans, and because the continent of Australia was so much farther away from other land masses, Indigenous Australians lived uninterrupted in relative isolation on their continent for up to 70,000 years, creating a sacred culture deeply connected to the earth, possessing ancient knowledge beyond what most of us could conceive of today. Their connection to their culture, oral tradition, and wisdom passed from generation to generation, uninterrupted for such a huge span of time, holds invaluable information for the world.
About 50,000 years ago temperatures warmed, allowing humans to move into Europe as glaciers melted, giving them access to this new land mass, and they adapted to be able to live in colder climates. They settled across Europe, creating their own diverse tribes spanning from Turkey to the British Isles. Eventually groups hunting bison and wooly mammoth moved across Eurasia into North and South America, boating down the coastal routes between the Siberian Steppes and Alaska, or walking across the Beringian ice sheets between the continents, around 26,000 years ago. The Indigenous Nations that populated North and South America flourished and continued undisturbed for this large span of time, creating another sacred culture with original information on how to listen to and steward the earth for generations to come that must be honored and protected, now more than ever. Wherever we went, we created communities with tools, sustainability, art, and mysticism. These communities represent the union of the human experience in relationship to the Earth, jewels of culture and tradition that have continued through time to teach us and remind us of our birthright of living in partnership with the earth.
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The ancient way of life of all these early cultures was earth-based, Matrice based. This is to say that all the early Paleolithic cultures of the world understood the connection to the Matrice lifeways we are all a part of. The feminine force of the Matrice, of all life, was represented as the Goddess, the Great Ancestress, who gave birth to all life. The worship of Mother Earth, the Goddess, our Original Mother, is the undisputed religion of all ancient earth peoples. This inclusive world view welcomed women, men, animals, elements, and the deities they represented/or who represented them, as equal participants in the fabric of life. Female, Male, Two-Spirit, and all the permutations of human identity and gender expression were welcomed by and large in our early cultures. These were accepted expression of the facets of human existence, and these variations were acknowledged as a natural part of the spectrum, part of the makeup of the natural world, of all existence. Violence, land disputes, and slavery existed, but we know that in matrifocal societies their prevalence was less, and we also know that the world had never seen warfare, genocide, or enslavement on the destructive scale we see today, until the shift into Matrix and Colonial thinking created such distortion and disconnection from our original earth-based cultures.
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We have records dating to the first early civilizations in the Fertile Crescent area of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, and Egypt where Goddess cultures reigned for thousands of years, and women who were priestesses of the Goddess held temples, land, and positions of power in society. There were long eras of peace without warfare. Archeological remains discovered from many early civilizations in the Fertile Crescent stretching all the way to the Mediterranean show that they did not possess weapons or bury war chiefs or kings with their retinue of slaves (as we later see), indicating that they were peaceful societies. Their tools were used to make art, and their art captured scenes of ritual, theatre, athletic prowess, feasting, and communal work. For thousands of years across Asia, the Middle East, into Europe, the Goddess reigned supreme. Her figurines, temples, and artifacts are scattered across the entire world, with cave paintings, pictographs, and statues telling a story of humans inextricably linked to the natural world and the shamanic realms through depictions of animism and ritual, worshipping the feminine life-giving force. These paintings reveal early human societies that had equitable relationships between the sexes.
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Around four thousand years ago, Indo-European tribes living in the Pontic Caspian Steppe area of Siberia developed a warrior culture that endured harsh conditions, bred horses, had metallurgy for making weapons, and worshipped a male God. This deity was a god of mountains, of volcanoes, that erupted with fire and retribution. Because these tribes possessed horses, were a warrior society with a penchant for travelling long distances to conquer more lands and peoples, they brought their God with them to the Fertile Crescent area, appearing in Anatolia, or Turkey, in 2300 BCE. These nomadic warrior cultures from the Northern forests and steppes of Europe began to invade the Goddess worshipping societies of the Fertile Crescent. The Northern Invaders, or Indo-Europeans, as they were called, arrived with warriors and a priesthood that told tales of a male god who was wrathful, punitive, and murderous, derived from their fearsome experiences of the volcanic destruction their male deity was capable of. They attacked the matrilineal earth worshipping systems that had been in place for so long. To gain control of the land and convert the existing populations to their patriarchal religion, they first slaughtered as many as they could who followed the ways of the Old Religion, the ways of the Goddess. They calculatedly relegated women to a lower status than men. They began a program of disempowerment that stripped them of their right to choose sexual partners, to worship the divine and nature. They began the practice of forced marriage, binding one woman to the same man for her entire life to ensure the paternity of the father and the succession of the paternal line. The matrilineal line which had always existed, and which collectively cared for all children, and ensured women’s health and safety as a collective concern, was wiped out. They burned the temples of the Goddess, stole cattle, and settled their lands. The existing populations were indoctrinated by the occupiers to believe that their new God was a masculine force who brought the world into existence through his mighty destructive powers, his intellectual thought, and his elevated position above the earth. The cosmological powers of this God created the world into being through the powers of his thought, of his intellectual mind. He was worshipped by a warlike culture that ruled with a military and priesthood that enforced the brutal takeover of new regions, in His name. His male followers were in his image, the first to receive his knowledge, blessings, power, and instruction, which gave them a supremacy over all other beings. Here we see the violent beginnings of separation from nature and the earth in the name of male dominant power over other human beings, condoned by their God.
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This male God was all powerful, residing in some conceptual place above the earth, existing in the intellect, disconnected from and not of the earth. All earthly realms connected to the old Goddess worshiping ways were denounced. The earth herself was considered beneath man. Her sacred soil was reduced to a primitive dirt made to receive the structure of man, paved over, and built with monuments glorifying the rule of men, their power, and their association with the intellect, the sky, and their dislocation from the earth. The earth, the moon, the stars, the plants, animals, and elements that had been associated with the life-giving feminine power of the Goddess (or Matrice) were now simple, lowly, relegated eventually as no longer even dangerous, but simply inferior, by the practices of men. Even the very darkness of her ritual cave spaces, of the unknown Shamanic realms, of the night, became distorted. Darkness, which in the ancient world had an entirely different significance related to transformation, mystery, ritual, and revelation, was relegated to the realm of evil.
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As the new God of Light denounced all that had been held sacred in the ancient world of the Goddess, Darkness became the enemy. This earliest delineation of Light as good and Dark as evil is the inception of all discrimination based on skin color today. Men who worshipped the male God of fire, of Light, were supreme, and they held supremacy over all that was not light, because darkness represented a connection to the old ways, and the power, equality, and freedom inherent in the old ways, that threatened their position of domination. Over millennia Supremacy of Light became White Supremacy, and Supremacy of the West. This new patriarchal, male dominated religion attacked women, and all others who did not look like them. These beliefs justified the invasion of new worlds, the enslavement and genocide of cultures of different races, different religious beliefs, and the ill-treatment of women, everywhere. Women’s sexuality and reproductive rights were harshly controlled. If this new patriarchal religion could disconnect from the earth with such violence, they could also violently subjugate women and those humans who did not look like them, regarding their value as less than men. They were meant to serve men, to raise children, to labor and cook and clean. Their oracular powers and their connection to the spirit of the Earth has always been a gift to humanity. These gifts were stamped out, for when women and all humans are in their full power, they are very dangerous to the patriarchs, to the occupying colonizer, because they remember how to create societies of inclusion for all people that can uprise, toppling the patriarchal empires.
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The evidence of women as powerful leaders and teachers in their societies needed to be erased, distorted, and hidden in new religious accounts that stigmatized women as the originators of sin, who because of their inferior nature made grave moral errors that cast humans from the paradisical Garden that was once theirs (not the result of the war-like tribes who brought power structures of brutality and violence, stamping out connection to the earth and the more peaceful ways of the Goddess worshipping societies). These are obvious manipulations of earlier Goddess cosmology designed to impose new belief systems onto the conquered populations to decimate their sovereignty. The biblical story of the tree of knowledge, the serpent, and the apple can be traced back to earlier Mesopotamian Goddess and Priestess culture. Priestesses used snakes in ritual to reach higher states of consciousness. They planted, worshipped, and made offerings of sacred trees to the Goddess, and consumed the ancient fruit Soma, which is believed to have had entheogenic mind expanding properties. The Serpent, the Tree, and the Apple all have earlier meanings and bases in Goddess culture that were intentionally distorted and retold to disconnect ensuing generations from the knowledge of their ancestors, to keep them from remembering their power and abilities as women and earth-based peoples. The new religion brought by these war-like tribes vilified women as heretics who ruined our chances at experiencing Heaven on Earth. This was an intentionally implanted belief to neuter women’s natural divining, healing, and organizing powers, our ability to lead our communities and protect our civilizations, as the potential or actual biological mothers of every living human on the planet are wired to do. Instead of being revered as the bringers of life, as channels to the divine, women were blamed for man’s ‘Fall’, which then justified their status as lower than men, burying their power in a story that held them as the original perpetrators of humanity’s discontent. It would be a laughable piece of spin if the consequences were not so dire.
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So began a long history of domination in this region of the Fertile Crescent through the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all of which arose from this shift to a male centered deity, resulting in the brutal and bloody end of earth-based matrifocal Goddess worship, and the beginning of many long wars each usurping the other in consequence and severity. We see the repetition of these early examples arise all over the world using the combination of a warrior class accompanied by a priesthood (or government backed by a military), that condones war in the name of their God, all the way to the present day.
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Judaism, which evolved around 5th or 6th century BCE is the oldest Abrahamic religion, so named because of the prophet Abraham who first spoke to God. Both Christianity and Islam followed, with stories and beliefs that stem from the prophet Abraham and others from the Old Testament, including them in the trifecta of Abrahamic Desert Religions. Christianity followed at a little over 2,000 years ago, and Islam around 1700 years ago. All three of these world religions have intricate, complex histories, and we are not attempting to define those histories here. We acknowledge the deeply embedded and meaningful ways these religions have created culture and traditions for billions of people around the world. We also acknowledge the seemingly endless wars and tendency to see others who are not of the same skin color, gender, or religion, as less than human. When we see people who are not like us as less than human it is far easier to continue to kill and conquer in the name of an ideal, a religion, or a government. It is this damage pattern we would like to shed light on by examining the influence the Empires who used the Abrahamic religions to control their people, have had on the last 4,000 years of our shared humanity. We are interested in parsing out the beauty, inclusion, and mysticism these religions contain, from the distorted patriarchal and colonial framework that warped them into domination systems.
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We believe that all the systems, religions, and governments of the world would benefit from a purging of these frameworks and have observed that not many examples exist today that are truly in alignment with values of equality or sustainability for all beings, and the earth herself. We are not exclusively criticizing the Abrahamic religions. There is a call to redefine values of collective wellbeing in almost every religion of the world, just as there is a call to create new paradigms in our global relationships with one another, addressing the Matrix and Colonial thinking that have calcified the acceptance of unethical practices regarding borders, nation states, and governments, across the board. It is all up for review. What is of note for the purposes of this Guide is that with the arrival of the Northern Invaders, Goddess culture was effectively wiped out in the mainstream, and the Invaders' Male God became the template of the God(s) of the Abrahamic Religions, which taught separation from the Earth, the devaluing of women, and all others who were not believers.
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We respect every individual’s choice of belief system and right to worship, and we recognize that there are beautiful tenets and commandments in each of these major world religions. We also recognize that the dogma, doctrine, and politics of these world religions can create belief systems that endanger the human rights of people of different skin colors, two-spirit, queer and trans relatives, and women globally. We recognize that the inception of these religions arose from an intentional separation of our relationship to the earth, and our individual ability to have a connection with the earth, cosmos, and divine. The patriarchal religions removed our connection to the divine, disconnecting us from the memory of our belonging to the earth, and instead taught us that if we wanted to speak to God, we had to speak with the priest first, who was the only one with a direct line to God, and also, we had to pay him. We also recognize that this hierarchy woven through religion and government is designed to disempower us from our collective belonging to the earth, the divine, and the truth that there is enough for everyone. This has been an intentionally disempowering value system propagated in our societies. Segregating us from our communal, collective whole into small units of the ‘nuclear family’ creates isolation, depression, disease, and has been a tactic of Colonialism all over the world. The life-giving belonging we once received from being in community, is now replaced with consumerism. We are tribal beings who need one another, and when we are removed from the whole, we are much more vulnerable to the influences of capitalist consumerism and the manifest destiny of the individual which whispers to us that we are more important than anyone else. If we keep winning, making money, acquiring power, we think we will be fulfilled, but it is a fulfillment that never comes, we can never be satiated.
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We are now in a realm of time perhaps more familiar to most readers. Yeshua, or Christ, appeared on the scene. After his death, his teachings were forbidden and went underground, preserved by early Christians, the Essenes, who were persecuted, but whose growing cult endured in secret for about 300 years. In 312 CE, Emperor Constantine of Rome converted to Christianity after receiving a vision to conquer in the name of Christ before an important battle he then won at the Milvian Bridge in Rome. Before his conversion he was also a part of the Sol Invictus Cult, the ‘invincible, unconquerable sun’, so in many ways these tenets of an all-powerful Warrior God connected to the Light and to the Sun had primed him for this belief shift into Christianity. To understand the implications of the Roman Empire converting to Christianity from polytheism is to understand that Christianity was rewritten to fit the agenda of Rome. Rome was a patriarchal, conquering society, whose ensuing ideology ‘one god, one empire’, was threaded throughout revisions of the bible and used as a mechanism to conquer as far and wide as possible, to conscript soldiers into the vast armies of Rome, and demand taxes from all those they conquered across their huge empire. The conversion to Christianity was used to gain more power, to influence as many as possible in their territories to adhere to these new beliefs, because they would more easily fall under the rule of empire.
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Rome began as a small city state on the Italian Peninsula around 500 BCE, and within 300 years had spread to conquer Greece, Spain, and North Africa, becoming a contentious empire. The conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in the 3rd century CE marks the beginning of their expansion into the rest of Europe, where they not only conquered the remaining Goddess worshipping, earth based, or pagan tribes of Europe, but converted them to Christianity to control them and amass ever larger Roman armies. These Indigenous tribes of Europe held earth-based wisdom, they had both female and male leaders and healers; they sang, danced, used instruments, drums, rattles, and psychedelic plants to connect to higher states of consciousness. They had medicinal lore, they worshipped animals, gods and goddesses that represented different aspects of the seasons and environment, and they had sophisticated cosmologies relating to the mutual and cyclical nature of existence.
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When the Romans began their conquering expansions into Europe, they discouraged, punished, and eventually erased the connection to the earth the original tribes of Europe had. Sound familiar? The Romans colonized the Indigenous tribes of Europe, violently subdued them, and made practicing their earth religions punishable by death. They imposed Christianity in its Romanized form which held men superior to women, light superior to dark, and they burned, pillaged, raped, tortured, and dominated the earth-based peoples of Europe until they had stamped out most of their earlier practices. Catholicism and the center seat of Rome persists long after the power of the Roman empire waned, and Medieval Christianity and Catholicism continued to control the populations of Europe, creating feudal power systems, an enslaved peasant class, and monarchies where power wielded by few controlled the masses. But the Goddess was not forgotten. Women and men still worshipped in the fields and forests, though superstitions, zealotry, and mass hysteria moved like wildfire through Europe in a Christian/Catholic effort to stamp out any power still associated with the Goddess, now associated with the Devil (the Darkness), and women with any knowledge of the earlier ways. This fervor of madness led to the Inquisition, and the writing of the Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches), a book that told in great sadistic detail how to identify women who were witches (read: healers, midwives, community organizers and spiritual guides) and torture them until they confessed to their evil nature. The magistrates of the Inquisition raped, arrested, tried, burned at the stake, or otherwise executed millions of women, and many thousands of men, over nearly a millennia during the Middle Ages up to the 18th century. Looking back over this millennia of colonization, racism, religious conversion, and fatal misogyny that existed because of the Roman subjugation and conversion of the earth-based tribes of Europe, we can understand the generations of trauma, repression, and mental illness that were deeply embedded in the collective consciousness of Europe when in the 15th century, Conquistadores set out from Spain to ‘discover’ new worlds. Pope Alexander V's Papal Bull proclaiming the 'Doctrine of Discovery' was granted to Spain and Portugal, quickly becoming adopted by all European colonizing nations, and later the so-called United States of America, as full legal permission to conquer and enslave far away inhabited lands that were not theirs, despite the Natives who had lived there for thousands upon thousands of years. The male and monarchical powers of Europe that adopted the 'Doctrine of Discovery' had just spent a thousand years enslaving the earth-based populations of Europe into their feudal systems, practicing this domination throughout the training ground of Europe. They were ready to bring this Colonial and Genocidal Program out into the world, to conquer new lands.
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Recall now the oceanic migration of humans across the oceans to the Southern Hemisphere, and the migration across the frozen ice between Siberia and Alaska. The Indigenous population of so-called Australia had lived on the Australian continent for 65,000 years or more before European colonizers arrived and nearly wiped out the oldest, deeply sacred culture on Earth in a horrific act of madness, ignorance, and power-hungry greed. Similarly, the Indigenous inhabitants of North and South America, referred to as Turtle Island by their Nations, developed and thrived in peace, reaching a population of over 100 million people with thousands of tribes and languages, at the time of the arrival of Europeans. Their sophisticated art and architecture, agricultural prowess, roadways spanning both continents, astronomical technology, and deeply felt belonging and inter-relationality with the earth is a treasure of world heritage. Their wisdom, traditions, and spiritual practices are precious, and sacred. The cultures of these continents and others throughout the world flourished uninterrupted for tens of thousands of years, and when Europeans invaded them, they destroyed their civilizations, spread diseases that decimated their populations, brought alcohol and the missionary madness of religious conversion, and employed all their tactics of domination they had practiced for so long in Europe. European colonization spread across the globe, enslaving, murdering, and trafficking Africans to be enslaved in so-called America and around the globe for hundreds of years, committed calculated genocide of the Native inhabitants of Turtle Island and Australia, and so much more. Across India, Africa, Southeast Asia, the story of domination, colonization, and partition continues. The loss and the brutality is unimaginable. When the Matrix attempts to destroy the cultural heritage of Indigenous people around the world, we all lose. The spiritual practices and traditions that teach us how to live in harmony with the earth must be maintained and retaught to all humans on this earth. Indigeneity is all our birthright, and if we look far enough back in our lineages, we will find the ancestors who knew how to live in balance with the earth. Some of us are much culturally farther away from this wisdom in our lineages, especially those of us of European descent, and it is time to center and support the current Indigenous struggles for freedom, reparations, and landback around the world, now. To rediscover our human genius and creativity, not mutilated and distorted by patriarchy, colonization and capitalism, but freely expressed as a reflection of all that is, is a living prayer. This is where our solutions lie. Remembering our relationship with the earth and all beings on her is the only way we will shift the outcome of this crisis point we have arrived at. Understanding that until everyone is liberated, none of us will be free.
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We have seen the World Wars of the Twentieth Century, the Holocaust, the partitions of India and Pakistan, Palestine and Israel, the Korean War, the Iron Curtain, US backed dictators across South America, the genocide of Vietnam, the South African Apartheid, the Bosnian War, the genocide of Rwanda, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Chad, Sudan, Papua New Guinea, the current genocides of Palestine, Congo, and Sudan as this is being written in 2024, and so many more areas around the world where genocide and war are being carried out. We have seen the damage caused by the strategic, self-serving, and predatory imperial domination of Western Colonial countries, and the resulting atrocities and suffering around the world. WE STAND WITH PALESTINE, CONGO, SUDAN, and the horrific cycle we seek to end, once and for all. All humans are one family, and no group, religion, or faction is less human than another. The repetition of a traumatized and oppressed people becoming the oppressor and visiting the same barbaric, inhuman tactics on another people, that they themselves have historically endured, must be acknowledged and healed, to stop. This cycle must end. We are at a pivotal moment of awakening on this planet where the truth of the last 4,000 years is finally being seen. The nightmare, the horror, and the chaos created by the Matrix of Cis-Hetero Patriarchy and Colonialism is the result of the rift that disconnected us from our relationship to the earth. We are tirelessly dedicated to bringing freedom and liberation to all beings on this planet, and we are moved and heartened by the mass awakening we see sweeping the globe as people begin to stand for the human rights of every being and mobilize to end these systems of oppression that have ruled us for so long. The Empire must burn, and the only path to freedom is to no longer tolerate such inequality and control.
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To be a revolutionary force for ourselves and others at this time on the planet is a flame that must be carefully nurtured. Many of us feel this desire for the liberation of all beings. Many of us are awakening, reconnecting with the earth, and the higher states of consciousness within us that can be accessed through stewardship and reciprocity with our natural environment. This desire for truth, self-expression, and equality, is driving us to live with our earth in a way that honors our natural connection with her. This is our fire, it animates us, and this flame can be joined with many others to create a huge conflagration that will burn these old systems of oppression down. We have the opportunity now to divest and deprogram from these past millennia of indoctrination. We can choose to protect all life. The Matrice is waiting.
For a continued conversation and collaboration around renouncing the Matrix and Reclaiming the Matrice, say hello to us at The Sacred Senses https://www.thesacredsenses.com/ , and thesacredsenses on IG. We are dedicated to reclaiming our relationship to the earth, and for the reconnection of all cultures and peoples. We lead Wilderness Quests, MidnightMoonDark, and many other community offerings.
I would like to make a few acknowledgements of soul friends, guides, and mentors who have supported me on the ever-unfolding path to liberation and the writing of this Guide.
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Thank you to Klee Benally, Rest in Power, for your life changing, transformative friendship, and for your tireless fight for liberation. Your prolific, searing, illuminating life reverberates in our hearts and minds, and guides me, always. Thank you for the well of wisdom, music, art, ceremony, fight for liberation, and Indigenous Anarchy you left us. You can support Klee’s work here https://www.indigenousaction.org/, and find him on IG at kleebenally.
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You can purchase Klee's book 'No Spiritual Surrender, Indigenous Anarchy in Defense of the Sacred', here https://detritusbooks.com/products/no-spiritual-surrender-indigenous-anarchy-in-defense-of-the-sacred.
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Thank you to Reverend Briana Lynn, for your mentorship, sisterhood, and liberation work you fearlessly bring to the world. Thank you for the ways you have facilitated me towards greater freedom, and for your strong, fierce, soft, and tender Witch’s heart dedicated to bringing liberation to the world. You can learn more about RBL’s Liberation Mystery School here https://liberation-ms.com/, The Earth Temple https://www.theearthtemple.com/ and find her on IG at rblwacause.
BOOK LIST
That greatly informed the writing of this Guide, and for your continued education
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The Great Cosmic Mother, Monica Sjöö and Barbara Moore
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The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon
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No Spiritual Surrender, Indigenous Anarchy In Defense of the Sacred, Klee Benally
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An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
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Another Day in The Colony, Chelsea Watego
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The Chalice and The Blade, Rianne Eisler