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Here with Dittany Flower Essence begins the description of a precious and paradigm shifting collection of Flower Essences from the island of Crete, nestled in the middle of the Mediterranean south of the Greek mainland, north of Libya and Egypt and west of Turkey and Lebanon.
Ben Sheehan and Miriah Wall gathered these Flower Essences on Crete in March of 2018. I thank them and the Flowers, Angels and Elementals of Crete who have shifted my experience of life with this Flower Essence collection. Please, if you can, read what these Flower Essences have to share.
Dittany from Crete- Origanum dictamnus
Dittany Flower grows only in the most inconvenient places in sunny outcroppings on the sides of mountain cliffs. Dittany is one of a number of Flowers in this collection that originated on Crete. When transplanted it becomes a less vibrant expression of itself, so Dittany grown off island does not hold the vibrational wisdom of Dittany on Crete.
Cretans consider Dittany the most powerful of herbs. For at least ten thousand years, Dittany has been held sacred as a panacea cure all and magical herb of health. For this and many other reasons, the Angels describe Dittany Flower Essence as the keystone of our Cretan Flower Essences.
Dittany Flower Essence is a foundation Flower Essence holding the template of the very best we can be. It holds a template for excellent health. It holds the template for embodying our most evolved selves. It holds a template for love without thought of self. It also holds the template for each of us to return to the values of matriarchy and matriarchal community. Matriarchal community is both something that flourished on the island of Crete for many thousands of years and something that will flourish again worldwide as a natural upwelling of us individually anchoring in our inner light, love and Divinity.
Crete’s Precious Legacy
Ben and Miriah returned from their Flower Essence mission to Crete with 23 Flower Essences. As I got to know each Flower, I unexpectedly learned much about humanity’s way forward and the journey we are embarked upon to leave patriarchy behind and find a new way to live together.
Crete and its Flowers embody a different model of being than the patriarchal one we have been told is, “the way things are and always will be.” Crete’s history reveals that patriarchy is a system of dominance that CAN be dismantled, because it wasn’t always the existing framework of humanity. Tools of patriarchal domination include war, slavery, subjugation of women, accumulation of wealth through taking advantage of other less powerful people and manipulation of spirituality into religious dictates that subjugate others; all these tools of patriarchy can and will be dismantled, and ancient Crete and its Flowers can help us do this.
Why? Because Crete and its Flowers still vibrate a model of a different way of being. From 7000 BC to 1450 BC Crete was a vibrant and harmonious matriarchal culture. This makes Crete and its Flowers extremely helpful and illuminating vibrational role models of matriarchy for an evolving humanity.
What is Matriarchy?
One prevalent misunderstanding of matriarchal cultures is that they involved powerful warrior women subjugating men. This is not what matriarchal cultures are or ever were. Matriarchies were not about preferential treatment of women or anyone else. Any community, including those run by women, in which all citizens are not treated as equals is a patriarchy.
Matriarchies were communities that lived by the values of motherhood: love, caring and generosity. In matriarchies these were the values held to be the most important values by both sexes. Matriarchal cultures lived from the experience of our inherent equality as children of God/Goddess. Matriarchies honored mothers as the earthly bearers of new life and the values of motherhood as paramount, but they did not translate this into a hierarchy enforced by war, subjugation or violence. There were no structures around the notions of defense, superiority or power. Instead, matriarchal cultures were participatory democracies governed by consensus. Wealth was shared through structures of gift giving and other tools for sharing resources.
How did Matriarchy do this?
Matriarchal cultures didn’t “do” anything, instead they experienced themselves as whole and lived from this truth. Matriarchal cultures experienced God/Goddess as within us. Matriarchal cultures understood each of us to be a perfect and unique expression of Divinity. Matriarchies flourished through a recognition of the truth that each child comes from God in perfection and nothing can alter this wholeness. In matriarchal cultures, each person’s life unfolded in a celebration of this wholeness. Life was about expressing purpose from a state of completeness never about striving to prove one’s worth through doing or fixing or making ourselves better than others.
In patriarchy the Divine origin of each of us is lost in a pervasive fear we are not whole or enough. A child in patriarchy comes into life to be given the immediate message that he or she is in need of improvement. A child raised in patriarchy is programmed to think he or she is what he or she possesses and what she or he does and what other people think of him or her. The key erroneous belief of patriarchy is that each of us is separate from God so we must strive to become something valuable, whereas the child of matriarchy knows he or she is one with God/Goddess and lives as an expression of God/Goddess with worth never under discussion.
Since we all currently live in patriarchy of some form or another, it is very hard to imagine what it must have been like to live in matriarchy and have one’s life flow from God through oneself in an expression of Divinity. Sometimes we taste this flow, but it’s hard to imagine living like this all the time.
In our world we get constant reinforcement that we must control our experience and become better. We get little if any support to let go and let God. May these Flower Essences release all of us into knowing our wholeness. May they help each of us sink into matriarchy to be set free and to live in a flowering of happiness. May we all experience a release from patriarchy soon, and may these Flower Essences do their best to help us with this release.
Back to History
Most communities of Old Europe (6500 BC- 3500 BC) were matriarchal. These pre- patriarchal Neolithic cultures were settled, agricultural, artistic, peaceful, egalitarian cultures worshipping the Goddess and celebrating birth, death and the regeneration of all life. We look to Crete as a role model for matriarchy, because it had the most long lasting matriarchal culture in the Mediterranean basin and Europe and existed as a particularly beautiful expression of these values. Crete’s matriarchy survived the longest because it was the last to be invaded by warring nomadic tribes from the north. This happened in 1450 BC after over 5,000 years as a radiant, joyful matriarchal society. Archeological remains reflect Minoan matriarchal experience of oneness with Divinity in that there are no ruins of defensive systems, buildings or weapons.
Mistaken History
One of the reasons Flower Essences are so helpful is because they remain in their vibrational truth even when described incorrectly or inaccurately. This comforts me as we experience an era of “alternative facts.” The vibration of a Flower Essence cannot be tampered with by language or branding. Each Flower Essence is what it is, and people and animals recognize each Essence as either sharing something helpful or not.
Even though Flower Essences can survive the assault of manipulative language, it is still important for us to try very hard to use descriptive language about Flower Essences accurately. This is true of everything, as everything deserves to be described with sincerity so that all things can shine in untarnished and beautiful truth.
The erroneous way ancient matriarchal Crete is described is a case in point. Take, for example, the famous Minoan building complex in Knossos. This complex was a sacred center that embodied the wisdom of living from divine oneness, egalitarian love and the generosity held so sacred by the Minoan civilization.
However the archaeologist who “discovered” the structures in 1900 AD described these buildings through his patriarchal lens of the separation mindset of power and wealth inequality. Instead of describing the building complexes correctly as community gathering places where communal food was stored, art and other sacred objects were made, and spiritual and cultural events were celebrated, archeologist Arthur Evans described the structures as the palace of a warrior King. In choosing to define the compound as one man’s palace, he assumed the site reflected the post Minoan patriarchal values of violently taking more than one’s share then proving one’s value with a very splashy palace.
The sharing of resources and the generosity of Minoans is so opposite this description. In ancient matriarchal Minoan Crete, resources were shared in a system of generosity and gift giving to ensure all could thrive. When you know you are from God and so is everyone else, there is no impulse other than sharing with each other.
This Minoan acknowledgement of our oneness and great generosity of spirit survives intact in Crete even after 3500 years of invasions by different patriarchal societies from Myceneans to Nazis to the current Russian oligarchs who are buying up the island. To this day, events in a Cretan community such as weddings are “come one, come all” celebrations with everyone welcomed and well fed. Travellers to Crete, including Ben and Miriah, report how people constantly give strangers free food, welcome them into their homes and go out of their way to be open hearted and generous. Ben and Miriah noticed that every stray animal was treated as an appreciated part of the community with food offered and a gentle welcoming of any cat or dog into restaurants or shops. What an incredibly strong vibration the matriarchy of ancient Crete must have that it survives in these acts of generosity and inclusion after 3500 years of patriarchal invasions.
Why this Discussion?
So why does this matter to us? First of all, it is vital for us to understand that patriarchy is not a given. Patriarchy can and will become a cultural structure we leave behind. Most historians and people in power tell us we have always had institutionalized war and oppression and always will have this. This is not true. Patriarchy is not a permanent reality. We have lived in harmonious cooperative community before patriarchy, and we will do it again. This shift is underway right now. Knowing this is very empowering. It helps us leave behind despair and live in hope.
The ancient Minoan civilization of Crete is a touchstone as we go forward to imagine and co-create a world in which we are all treated as equals and where tools of patriarchy are abandoned, never to subjugate others or suppress our expression of our true selves again. This ancient matriarchal civilization and the Flower Essences of Crete help us re-imagine and co-create our world into a place where we are not afraid to send our kids to school, where resources are shared and where we live free in the values of Divine oneness, equality, caring and generosity of spirit.
Our world moves forward on the truth that we can evolve beyond patriarchy and go forward to matriarchal societies that respect all life as equal in its oneness with Divinity. Each Cretan Flower Essence helps us in this.
More about Dittany Flower Essence
Dittany Flower, endemic to (meaning originally found only on) Crete, knows we can make this shift. It is both a promise and a tuning fork, supporting us in our efforts to find our way to a matriarchal re-flowering on Earth. It supports all those who live from different values than patriarchy. It helps us know with every fiber of our being that the values of care, love and generosity are not naïve, silly values but are the life giving, life preserving, life restoring way forward for humanity.
Dittany supports us to hold true to our essential nature as the way our world is to be reborn. It helps us stay strong through the last tired patriarchal assaults on our loving nature and bolsters our confidence that our essential nature of goodness and light will prevail because it is stronger than anything patriarchy can throw at us.
Dittany also helps us anchor this truth in others, so if we are teachers, leaders, parents or role models of any kind, working with Dittany helps us hold this vibrational template for those in our care.
Dittany fills us with the knowledge that the despairing belief that we will always be a patriarchal planet is not fact. The patriarchal culture of war, societal and resource inequality, enslavement and disharmony is a piece of history, now passing, and not an eternal verity. Humankind can and will re-find cooperative community based on the values of egalitarian generosity and oneness with all creation. AND THE FLOWERS WILL HELP US DO THIS!
Dittany finishes this description by sharing its I AM affirmation.
I AM the only real thing. I AM LOVE.
