An Interview With Vicki Noble
(Interviewed by Connie Hill)

Vicki Noble is a professional astrologer and co-creator of the round Motherpeace Tarot Deck, and is author of Motherpeace Playbook and Shakti Woman. Her new work The Double Goddess, looks at the history of early women as leaders, warriors and healers recent archeological evidence and her own intuition.

CH: Hi Vicki. In your new book you talk about Amazons which brings to mind Wonder Woman and Zina. I think of them as fictional. What is the significance of Amazons?

Vicki: In 1996 I heard archeologist, Jeanine Davis Kimball lecture at UC Berkeley. She's the author of Warrior Women. Jeanine participated in archeological digs collaboratively with Russian archeologists near Kazikstan. In her lecture she talked about warrior women and priestesses and that fit right in with my double goddess idea. She described Amazons as having ruled in dual queenship. I was fascinated to hear her use words like priestess because most American archeologists don't use that word, but the Russians do. Since the wall came down Russian and central Asian archeology is available for Westerners to read and participate in. The Russian anthropologists, who have been digging old sites for 50 years actually refer to the burials of these warrior women, priestesses and Amazons. Jeanine's work is well known around the world. She's been invited to participate in excavations in China and Mongolia and has been part of several Nova programs.

Second, this whole subject is so much more interesting than fiction. I've always been very interested in what happened to the ancient goddess cultures. I've imagined and written that those ancient cultures migrated to other places. The last five years brought corroboration to those intuitions. So in Double Goddess I look at burials of high status women who wore gold crowns and headdresses, gold clothing and who were buried as high ranking priestesses in the 3rd and 2nd Millennium in Turkey, in the Cycladic islands, Crete and along the Silk Road and I begin to see the migrations of my intuitions.

CH: I found that working with Demetra George's Asteroid Goddesses, in which she talks about the asteroids as goddesses had a big influence on me.

VN: Did you know that she and I have lead trips together to this area? She would run the charts with all the asteroids that had any relationship namewise with any of the places we were going and then each woman on the trip would have her own personal connection. We always had our final ritual in the cave above Delphi. It was very fun!

CH: For years I have looked at all that is going on in my life as symbolic, from illnesses to other problems. I was wondering about the symbolic meaning of the double goddess.

VN: I got to the symbology myself seeing double goddess figurines all over Europe. My first take on it was that nobody has talked about these profound images. What do they mean? When I got into the images I began to understand that the ancient cultures were working from the lunar menstrual model and that everything was organized around the function of the moon and sun and how they relate. I went back to Eric Neuman's The Great Mother. He put together two intersecting axis. One was the physical great mother: she's about everything relating to birth, death and life on the physical plane. The other axis was the transcendent function which he ascribed to the moon. It ruled psychic powers, intoxication, ecstatic visionary qualities and so on. That's exactly what I'm looking at in The Double Goddess. But I'm anchoring it with female menstrual cycles. I'm pulling it through anthropology and looking at ancient lunar calendars, which have been identified as menstrual calendars. Then I'm looking at how ancient people worshipped the earth mother and moon goddess.

Then I realized that the biggest differences between human females and chimps is that we don't have estrus, the bloody show that signals males for fertility. Human females bleed when we are not fertile and pheromones during ovulation signal males that we are fertile. So we have this figure eight going on that is quite distinctive. And this figure eight cycle is synchronized to the moon exactly.

The thing that is so basic here is that the whole tribe of women would have menstruated together until recently. Only electric lights have changed that. When women lived together in non-nuclear family arrangements they would bleed and cycled together. Rituals in the tribe were organized around that. It's a huge shift to isolate individual women in individual houses with a man and children. It is a huge shift to isolate people in these one family dwellings and to give up that collective ritual based religion that we had for so long. It was really key to our evolution. So I look at the double goddess as a symbolic representation of early people's religion and social organization. They understood life to be a double goddess in it's representation or symbology. These early people organized themselves in relation to the bi-polar experience of reality that we have here on earth, in other words, day and night, winter and summer, the northern hemisphere and the southern. Everything is organized that way. My leap is to say that women governed ancient societies based on this model of one woman being the mother of the physical plane and the other, the religious mother. I really think it is true, I think we are looking at a model of female government and then finally to come back to your original question, it's very much a model for each woman of sovereignty. Ruling over ourselves, belonging to ourselves.

CH: So what is the place of men in this model?

VN: First of all, one of the ways this relates to us now in terms of everybody is understanding again the damage that is done to women when the whole culture is organized around male functions and characteristics. If you have an entire system, as we do today, that is organized around a male linear model of what is normal, what that means is that the male gender has been universalized. It is the norm. Maleness is taken as if it is the model for being human.

So what you see is that the whole population of women is being diagnosed as being bi-polar. And I'm saying in my book that we are normally bi-polar and that is not the issue. Everything, from the tides, the diurnal cycle, everything on this planet is actually organized around this polarity. The bottom line is that men fit into that. Nature didn't make a mistake. Culture made a mistake. Men will benefit enormously in ways we haven't even anticipated by an acknowledgment of the natural state of polarity that we all live in. We all have to deal with day and night. In Jerry Mander's book In the Absence of the Sacred he suggested that for millions of years we evolved in relation to nature and made our mutations and adaptations in relation to nature. He says we now live inside of a technological bubble and are making our mutations and adaptations to technology instead of nature. And it is transforming us in horrific ways that could be the end of our species. So there is an urgency in the double goddess model that I didn't even go into in this book because it's not really an environmental book. The urgency is that we've got to return to natural cycles or the planet is threatened. And we know the planet is threatened.

CH: What else would you like to say?

VN: Well, when I'm here in September I'll talk more about the double goddesses, show slides of some of the many pictures I've have of double goddesses, read passages from the book and talk about the overriding concepts. Saturday, I'll be leading an all day Motherpeace astrology workshop using the deck. It is quite intuitive. All levels of astrological knowledge will benefit-professional or novice. And using the Motherpeace deck anyone can come at any level. The Sunday morning ceremony is so exciting! It is an adaptation of a Tibetan Dakini practice that I'm doing in English for Western women who are not necessarily Buddhist. This practice will transform your life and return each woman to the center of her life.

CH: Thank you, Vicki.

Interviewed by Connie Hill, who is in charge of events and the website at New Renaissance Bookshop.She is a local astrologer. She can be reached at 503-291-8229, ext. 2 or gmnite@yahoo.com.