Secrets of Venus and The Lost Goddess of Love

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

You are entering the realm of forbidden fruit with Maya Luna, where we question everything we've been told about spirituality and take a bite of forbidden knowledge served up by the goddess of love.

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The garden, the snake, the woman, the man, the tree of knowledge, and the forbidden fruit.

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There are seven billion people on this planet, and most of them believe that this story is true.

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Or at the very least, that it holds spiritual truth.

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It is a story that has profoundly influenced the collective psyche. No matter what religion we belong to, or spiritual beliefs we hold or don't hold. It is a story that has been printed more times than any other story that exists. Many who don't take this story literally still believe that it is a powerful symbol and metaphor. A story drenched in timeless spiritual wisdom. No matter what we believe, the narrative of Genesis has colonized the collective psyche, embedding itself deep into the unconscious realms of myth, archetypes, and symbols, and our beliefs about the nature of man and woman, good and evil, God and the devil.

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From Genesis 2, 16.

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And the Lord God commanded the man, you are free to eat from any tree in the garden, but you must never eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. For when you eat from it, you will certainly die. This forbidden fruit, this knowledge of good and evil, famously consumed by Eve after temptation by the serpent, who is Satan, ultimately leads to the fall of humanity and the couple's expulsion from the garden of so-called paradise. But why does God not want us to understand the nature of good and evil? He doesn't explicitly explain his reasoning, he simply forbids it. Knowledge of good and evil is the forbidden fruit. One would think that a loving God would want his children to understand good and evil clearly. Why does God wish to keep this information veiled from our knowing? Because Genesis is a book that so many believe contains immaculate spiritual hidden wisdom. There are many interpretations surrounding the forbidden fruit. Some say that humans couldn't handle it. Knowledge of good and evil is an aspect of God's consciousness far too immense and incomprehensible for the small human mind to understand. Others say that the nature of good and evil had to be hidden because knowledge of it would cause them to fall from unity consciousness into duality. So God was protecting them from this fall, wanting them to stay in this divine unity consciousness. Some believe that the fruit is forbidden because it is simply a test of faith and obedience. Others believe that it was an act of love and protection by the Father God to shield Adam and Eve from knowledge that could potentially corrupt them.

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But what if none of these things were true?

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What if there was a different reason why God wanted to keep the knowledge of good and evil hidden? A different reason why the fruit is forbidden. To begin unraveling this red mystery of the forbidden fruit, the first thread we must begin to pull is the story of Venus. Round, naked female figures, some of them forty thousand years old. These ancient fertility deities embody the profound regenerative and cyclical nature of the realm of incarnation. The realm of matter, a Latin word which comes from the root that means mother. Her round, naked body, a perfect symbol of divine iminence. The sex, death, birth, and impermanence. Mysterious power behind all life that moves all things from womb to tomb. That great love that birds, nurtures, and devours us in the end. She is the goddess of love, an ancient primordial god. Not a loving parent or an omniscient authority, but the deification of the presence of love that flows through incarnate reality. Many of these ancient goddesses are seen to be holding their breasts in their hands. They beckon you here to the body, to the heart, to the milk of love that flows through the body of the moment. These ancient primordial goddess figures have no recorded name. But we call them Venus. Their full reality remains a mystery. Yet strangely, later on in the human story, some thousands and thousands of years later, other goddesses appear also holding their breasts in their hands. These naked, round, breast-cradling feminine deities all belong to the lineage of the goddess of love. Though she has arisen throughout many cultures and eras, parallels between her many incarnations are woven through synchronous stories, myths, qualities, and even postures she holds with her body. She was called Asherah, Aphrodite, Ishtar, and Inanna. But there is an unbroken red thread that reaches through her many incarnations all the way back to her original ancestors. Those statues we now call Venus. This unbroken red thread speaks to an ancient mystery religion of love. And a goddess at the center, who has been profoundly misunderstood. Aphrodite, Ishtar, and Asherah, all named Queen of Heaven or Queen of Heaven and Earth. But the most concise connection exists within the goddess Inanna and the story of her descent into the underworld. Many ancient Sumerian hymns speak to Inanna as Venus, the brightest star in the sky at either sunrise or sunset. Here they call her Lady of the Morning and Lady of the evening, brightest body in the sky. From an ancient Sumerian hymn to Inanna, at the end of the day, the radiant star, the great light that fills the sky, the lady of the evening appears in the heavens. The people in all the lands lift their eyes to her. The lady refreshes herself in the land. There is great joy in Sumer. The young man makes love with his beloved. My lady looks in sweet wonder from heaven. The people parade before holy Inanna. On the platforms of the city, in the pure places of the steppe on the high roofs of the dwellings, they make offerings to her. Piles of incense like sweet smelling cedar, fine sheep, fat sheep, long-haired sheep, butter, cheese, dates, fruits of all kinds. They purify the earth for my lady. They celebrate her song. The lady of the morning is radiant on the horizon. I sing your praises, holy Inanna. A story carved into stone around four thousand years ago, is the oldest written story that exists. It is just one act within the four-part series that make up the totality of the sacred marriage between the goddess and her consort within the ancient mystery religion of love. Yet it is undoubtedly the most popular and well-known portion of the sacred marriage. There are, of course, many myths of divine masculine characters who enacted this miracle of death and resurrection, including Jesus, Horace, Krishna, and Dionysus. But make no mistake, Inanna went first. There was Inanna. Inanna who was hung on a meat hook and brought back to life in resurrection. She is the first story that we know of of a deity who dies and resurrects. In the story of her descent into the underworld, Inana wears the seven powers of creation on her body. The seven powers which are handed to her just after she is found gazing at her wondrous vulva. To descend into the underworld, she must pass through seven gates, each taking her deeper into the dark place below. As the myth goes, at each of the seven gates, she must surrender one of the seven powers represented by seven garments she wears on her body. When she reaches the bottom of the underworld, it is said that she is naked and bowed low. Bowed low before Arishkigal, the dark goddess who rules the underworld. At the bottom of the underworld, stripped of her seven powers, naked with nothing to hold on to, Inana is hung on a meat hook and crucified. She dies, is resurrected and reborn. Through this alchemical descent and resurrection, she reveals the living mystery of love, the mystery of spirited matter, illuminating the sacredness of the earth and the body as the loving source of creation, the place where the ineffable divine presence resides. She is imminence. The descending and resurrecting goddess is a deitific expression of the architecture of incarnation itself. The body of life that births all bodies and devours all bodies in the end. She is God. Birth and death is her rhythm. Her expansion and contraction is the holy orgasm at the heart of life. Impermanence is her heartbeat, enshrined in every breath we take. Her fecundity is the erotic entanglement of both darkness and light. She is the sex, death, birth, and impermanence that is divine immanence. She is the holy love that throbs from within. Yet this oldest story ever written, the story of Inanna, the story of the first descending and resurrecting deity, is also the story of the planet Venus. The Venus synodic cycle is a nineteen-month pattern in the planet that is visible to the human eye, and it exactly mirrors the story of Inana's descent. She is lady of the morning when she is descending, first star at dawn, and lady of the evening when she is resurrecting, first star at dusk. This entire process takes about nineteen and a half months. Just as Inanna passes through seven gateways into the underworld, the morning star Venus will pass through seven dark new moons. This means that on every single dark new moon, Venus and the moon occupy the same space in the sky. Each month when the sky is black and the ancient lunar queen is in her dark goddess phase, Venus passes through this dark portal. Another gateway into the underworld. Seven times this happens, seven times Venus meets with the dark new moon. For seven months, and each month she is visibly lower on the horizon. Venus descends down, just like Inana, down into the great below. Over seven months, you can observe the Lady of the Morning slowly falling down the sky as if some magnetic current were pulling her down. It is an incantation, a love song to gravity. The same gravity that pins us all down to earth, that presses us down into these bodies and stings us into mortality. After seven months, seven dark moons and seven gateways, the morning star vanishes, disappearing beneath the horizon line. Inanna reaches the bottom of the underworld. Venus disappears below the horizon. She is no longer observed in the sky. After many weeks here in the underworld, with no Venus in the sky, no lady of the morning, no lady of the evening, no brightest star in the sky passing through the dark portal of the new moon every month. She is gone. She is in the underworld. And just like Inanna, when she eventually resurrects, she has been transformed. By the alchemical mystery of the underworld. When she rises, Venus will now appear as evening star. Lady of the evening. First and brightest star at dusk. For seven months again, she will pass through every single dark moon. This time moving up the sky away from the horizon until she is fully resurrected. She lingers here, but only for a moment until the cycle begins all over again. Just as it does in the sacred marriage between Inana and her consort. This is the story of Inanna's descent into the underworld. And if this wasn't astonishing enough, every eight years, after five underworld journeys of descent and resurrection, the path between Venus' orbit with the Sun forms a perfect geometric rose. This cosmic rose, this perfect pattern. This perfect geometric rose is a sacred reminder of the heart of the goddess. She blooms through descent and resurrection, reminding us that this entire realm of impermanence, of constant, groundless change is held relentlessly by love. Her great cosmic rose of love reminds us that it is the descent down into the body, into the imminence of direct experience, into the is-ness of all that life fundamentally is, that we meet the ineffable presence of love. She is rose and thorn because life is rose and thorn. It is pleasure and pain. As Sappho, devotee of Aphrodite, declared, love is bittersweet. It is only through these dips into holy darkness, these wild initiations into the underworld, into the meeting of the dark goddess, that the rose of love blooms. This reality of the totality of all that life entails as holy, as gateways into the ineffable divine presence, as portals into love, became maligned by the religious and spiritual ideology that came within the era of patriarchy, one that would degrade immanence, the reality of the flesh, the heart, and the human experience, and view the transcendent as not only supreme, but separate from ordinary earthly life. Inana was only one deity within a pantheon of Sumerian gods and goddesses. Yet she was the most beloved of all by far. And worship of her was the longest lasting and far-reaching. Of Aphrodite, many poets and philosophers considered her to be secretly the most powerful of all the gods, simply because of her irresistible influence. There is something so alluring about this goddess who is imminence, who is God, who is holy darkness, who is matter, who is love.

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And here is where we begin to really hold the red.

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Because Venus, the morning star, was rebranded by early Christianity as Lucifer. Lucifer, which is a Latin word that literally means lightbringer or morning star. From Isaiah 14, oh how you have fallen from heaven. Oh Lucifer who rose in the morning. Lucifer, of course, is the early prototype for the devil. Just as Venus falls in the sky, as Inanna descends down to the horizon, Lucifer is called the fallen angel. He rebels against the male father God by deeming himself to be equal, which is framed as a rebellion of an organic divine order. The legend of Lucifer eventually synchronizes with the character Satan, a Hebrew word which means the deceiver or the accuser. In the Quran, Abraham or Ibrahim is said to be blessed because he first proved that Venus was not worthy of being worshipped. Both Lucifer and Satan are characterized as having a deep love for all things related to matter, body, earth, and form. Both Lucifer and Satan eventually blended to become synonymous with the devil, the anti-Christ, or the supposed opposite of God. And so the bright star of Venus, the goddess of love, original source essence of God, became Lucifer. And Satan became desecrated and fell to the new religious order of transcendence.

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The Antichrist or the supposed And so the bright star Venus.

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Within the new paradigm of transcendent, patriarchal spirituality, in all its many flavors and varieties, determined to sweep earthly life into the shadows and clamor to the top of the mountain, grasping for the light. All things belonging to the goddess of love became repackaged as evil. Originally belonged to the goddess, as there are thirteen moons and thirteen menstrual cycles in a year. In an attempt to suppress goddess worship and smear her devotees as evil, thirteen was forbidden under the new religious order, as it was deemed to be a cursed number that would bring evil fates. Let's dive in now to the nature of evil itself, as it is the primary accusation attributed to all things belonging to the lost goddess of love, and also the forbidden fruit, which God wants to remain hidden. It is the nature of evil that God wants us ignorant of. Evil is a word that's often used to describe immoral acts. But this is an incomplete and immature understanding. If we look for the nature of evil simply inside of bad or unethical behavior, it slips through our fingers and remains hidden. To try to define evil through the lens of dogmatic rules about right and wrong presents many spiritual and philosophical problems. Because there aren't many things that are so morally black and white. Morality is often ambiguous, subjective, and culturally relative. What one culture or time considers immoral is often celebrated in another. What is virtuous in one context may be harmful somewhere else. Good and bad things often end up strangely emerging out of their opposite. In this way, evil cannot be defined within a simple paradigm of right and wrong, nor can it be so easily grasped through moral judgments or dogmatic law. For this reason, some philosophical views assert that because all things are relative, there cannot be any evil in the ultimate sense. Others believe that there is no evil because everything is God. And so even the greatest horrors are the expression of some ultimate divine intelligence. Even harm is seen as part of a divine plan, even if we cannot see it. If everything is God, then everything is ultimately perfect. And therefore, there is no evil. But underneath the fog of moral relativism and divine determinism, the nature of evil remains elusive and slippery. Just as evil intends. We misunderstand evil precisely because we look for it in the wrong places. We cannot clearly grasp or define it because it is not on the surface of things. It distracts us with red herrings and draws our attention elsewhere. It is not found simply in an act itself, but in the consciousness which lurks behind it. The English word live spelled backwards is evil. This is a cliche connection, but it's also strangely fitting because evil reverses reality. It is anti-life because within the consciousness of evil, what is natural is reflected back as unnatural. What is sacred is deemed profane. What is harmful is presented as loving. Evil is double speak, where one thing is said while an opposite thing is actually occurring. Up becomes down, black becomes white. It is anti-life because it reverses what is organic and real and places a synthetic inverted reality in its place. The difference between harm and evil is not the degree or severity of harm, but the presence of this inversion, reversal, and doublespeak. Within the lie of evil, perpetrator and victim are reversed. The nature, intentions, and actions of the entity operating within the consciousness of evil are projected onto the target or another scapegoated object. Through scapegoating, projection, reversal, and the creation of a synthetic non-reality, bystanders are also unknowingly manipulated into becoming participants, reinforcing the false reality. In this way, the consciousness of evil functions not simply as one act, but as an infection, an ecosystem with multiple parts. Inside the anti-life illusion of evil, reality becomes inverted, creating a kind of alternate reality in which consciousness is trapped into a fragmentation outside of the organic whole. Worship of her was the worship of divine iminence and the mystery of love that resides within the organic reality of what is natural, real, and imminent. Stolen and rebranded as evil by the consciousness of evil that reversed an organic reality, reversing the nature of divinity itself. Under the new religious order, earth became considered a fallen realm, a devil's playground. The true divine reality, a transcendent and heavenly world of the Father. The male God became the birther of creation, who birthed man in his image. Woman was pulled out of that man's body. He gave birth to her.

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Closer than your next. This is the essence of divine eminence.

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The ineffable presence of the divine, the ineffable presence of love is within the body, the heart, the senses, the human experience, and the organic design of incarnation. The entire architecture of this earthly realm and the immense vulnerability of our human condition is the place where love is flowing. Deified as the goddess of love, God is naked, holding her breasts in her hands. She is the forbidden fruit. She is the scapegoat, the red herring of distraction, the original God who has been deemed demon. Illusion, wound, and sin. She was turned into Satan by the one who declared himself God. She was named the deceiver by the greatest deception this world has ever seen. Her transformation from divine to devil is the forbidden knowledge God didn't want you to know about. The evil He didn't want you to see. There are seven billion people on this planet. And most of them still believe in the God who deemed this fruit, who deemed this knowledge forbidden.

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She is the true light bringer, the true Christ. She illuminates the lie. And so she had to be cast down.

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The one who was called the deceiver was the truth. And yet, look into the sky. At dusk or at dawn, see her passing through the dark new moon. She is there. Venus has been here all along, as wars were waged over the goddess's body, as she was scapegoated, abused, and smeared for thousands of years as her stories and sacred realities were buried and stolen. And the tongues who remembered her name were burned at the stake as the witches. Venus has been here all along, holding the secrets of the lost goddess of love and safekeeping. Holding the secret gospel, the secret scroll of the ancient mystery religion of love in the movements of her body. From an ancient Sumerian hymn. All the lands fear her. Inana is radiant. I sing your praises, Inanna. You render a cruel judgment against the evildoer. You destroy the wicked. You look with kindly eyes on the straightforward. You give that one your blessing. Inanna, Lady of the Morning, is radiant. This episode of Forbidden Fruit was mixed and mastered by Charlie Garcia. And if you want to go deeper with me, come on over to Nakedfruit.substack.com. This is where I share more personal stories about my spiritual path with the goddess. And also share afterbite episodes for each episode of Forbidden Fruit, where I share things I didn't get to say in the podcast. And before you move on with your day, I want to invite you to just take a moment with me. Slow down inside and take a breath. Notice what you're feeling. Because you didn't just uh listen to this episode with your mind. You felt it with your body and your heart. When we make space to slow down and notice and feel the sensations, feelings, and emotions happening. We get a more comprehensive understanding of information.

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One that we can call wisdom. So I invite you to feel your feelings in this moment. Honor them. And let them carry with you as you move into your day. Thank you so much for being with me.