Into Me I See: The Sacred Torch of Feminine Heat by Jsabél Bilqís – Feminism and Religion

There’s that throbbing again! In the slit center of me. Spreading vehemently, devouring, insatiable, red like blood and warm like body. They say I’m Jezebel because I like it when she purrs.

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‘Now you can get pregnant.’

I became a woman but all my mother saw was a dirty girl. Like the wombs before and around me, scorched by estranged origins, I got in bed with shame and became disembodied, found myself in hell.

‘Virgin or Harlot?’, they asked me at the gates.

Sensing my fullness, I looked Illusion in the eyes.

‘Both.’

Engulfed in the flames, I chose all of me and it purified every thing that was not free.

There I met Baubo, the ancient Goddess of Obscenity. I saw her speak from between her legs, saw the mirror of her vulva-mouth, how everything that came from her inspirited all of life. I saw our other self, Sheela-na-gig, seeding new worlds from her SECRETionS, spreading wide in self-favor. I saw Corn Woman in the fields, skirt lifted and legs wide, chanting, dancing, blessing all the crops. And I knew that I had that power too.

I saw all of this, how the sacred and profane share a border, and found that Hell is just a cauldron after all.

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Much more than the beat of my sex, my undulating urge is just one feature of this force with many faces. Desire, intrigue, ecstasy, yes, and also the swelling of perspective or the crackle of epiphany. Sensual, psychic, mutual, creative — this all-generating feminine principle of relating spurts whole worlds from its yearning, kindles environments fecund for bringing forth more of a woman’s vastness.

I feel into my fire and become more of my self. Deep in the fleshy embers of me I feel a rising, an auguring of what’s next, of what wants to be seen. Flames with different faces, at times the inflamed bloat of warning, a blaze of courage. She pulls at me when something wants my hands to bring it to life. Sometimes she is fantasy, sometimes dream. Always, she is enchantment coming alive as symbol and story, asking me to pay attention to reality underneath, for some piece of myself is waiting for me there.

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We’ve got a special type of womanspeak, me and my erotic self. Every month, she fires up the hearth and I’m ovulating in celestial sap, soaked in the mana of the life currents, psychic quickenings. Ah! What am I pretending to not know? She seeds more and more of me and then she cleanses the cauldron at bloodtide, the liquid flame scrying in the Mother’s crimson tongue. I ride all the currents, and she orients me toward what’s real. They’ll never tell you that your drip is a divining rod, charting maps only you can claim.

Etymology of the word ‘hearth’ originates from the Latin ‘focus’. Getting closer to the truth — is that not how life moves forward? — is the sacred function of a woman’s heat. The surge and the spark, my fire is a mirror in that it recognizes its own essence in other forms. Into me I see, ah yes! I’m making love from life. Psyche and soma working together, living the question ‘Where is the soul?’.

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‘Virgin or Harlot?’

It is by design this glimpse of the force bears a desecrated face. They’ll never tell you that a woman in heat is a woman in charge. Who profits when you’re not in touch with yourself? The forces of life coursing through the very summer of her, the fruits of a woman’s fire cannot be negotiated. This is an inconvenience to the overculture. So they profane her power. Estrange her from her origins. Cheapen it.

But to diminish a woman as simply sexual is to lose grip of the much grander meaning of her libidinal energy. This heat of mine is no different than the heat of the earth, the heat of the cosmos. A petal trembling open, a spring gushing from the ground, a star singing in climax before burst — generative and generous, it’s all a holy happening.

Why would I ever be ashamed?

I am Nature frolicking in the inexhaustible. Fleshy anima — pulsing hot urgency for more life! — ready to become again and again.

BIO: Jsabél Bilqís writes about women living in deep relationship with the Eternal Feminine from the spiraled lens of body, myth, symbol, and nature. She is an independent scholar and ordained reverend with a master’s degree in Metaphysical Science and holds credentials in parapsychology and thealogy. When she’s not writing, you’ll most likely find her at an art gallery or somewhere in nature with her husband and son.