X is for XXX – Pagan Blog Project 2013

And so we come to X. As an Anglophone who doesn’t have much to do (if anything) with Aztec, Mayan, Chinese (maybe) or Greek deities, the X prompt gives me pause. So much so that it apparently stopped my in my tracks last year.
Okay.
 
But this year, I think I can manage at least one entry on the subject of “X” or, in this case, “XXX”. Much to my surprise, I have a goddess of sexworkers in my pantheon.
People who know me, or who read my other blog, maybe won’t think this is all that surprising, but back when I sent out my all-call for deities (this was just over ten years ago, if I think about it), I was a staunch anti-porn feminist and it was only much later – like “when I got divorced” later – that I realized that I’d done something Funny with my Goddess Job Descriptions.
 
Earth Goddess Job Description: Hearth, home, abundance, growth, parenting, food, cooking, shelter, pregnancy.
 
Sun Goddess Job Description: Passion, dance, wealth, money, careers, courage, overt sexuality.
 
I had split my understanding of “abundance” and, in my case, “the purpose of my ovaries” into two parts (or three parts, if you bring Maia – with her queerness, creativity, peer-to-peer attachment bonds, and midwifery – into the equation). One of them had (and has) a lot in her jurisdiction that is very much the socially-approved-of realm of The Wife, even though (to my knowledge) Mattaer has never had a spouse of any kind. (I might be wrong about that. She’s just never mentioned anyone to me, is all). The other was… all the stuff I was afraid of, that I felt were things that happened *to* me, that would be done *to* me, rather than *by* me.
 
A year after that, I was in a romantic relationship with a woman who was involved in various areas of the sex industry, and it was only when she had a really bad night[1] one New Year’s Eve that I realized that one of my Goddesses – with her courage, her sexuality, and her career/money work – was exactly the deity to be praying to under those circumstances.
 
Much, much later, after that relationship had ended, I got asked to perform for the AGM of the local sexworkers rights organization, and I wrote the following poem for that set.