Nyx in the House of Night

communication, and trust. The important part is that everyone involved in a polyamorous relationship—whether it’s between a man and two (or more) women, a woman and two (or more) men, or any other combination—is okay with it. If so, who are the rest of us to judge?
    The House of Night series and Zoey’s juggling act have modernized ancient mythology and the history of our species, reaching back to our matriarchal past and using it as a tool to empower women of all ages. I am not asking you to run around being in relationships with multiple men at the same time, or encouraging anyone else to. I just want women to stop judging each other and stand together. If men can pat themselves on the back, so can we.
KRISTIN CAST is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author who teams with her mother to write the House of Night YA series. She has stand-alone stories in several anthologies, as well as editorial credits. Currently Kristin attends college in Oklahoma, where she is focusing on attaining her dream of opening a no-kill dog rescue shelter in midtown Tulsa.

{ She Is Goddess }
    GODDESS WORSHIP IN THE HOUSE OF NIGHT SERIES

    Yasmine Galenorn
    SHE IS Goddess. She is the moon overhead, full and ripe in the sky. She is the ground under our feet, pungent and ripe with promise. She is the huntress in the woods, fleet of foot, and the washerwoman at the stream, washing bloody garments predicting deaths to come. She wears a triple face: Maiden, Mother, Crone. She is gigantic—the 24,000-year-old Venus of Willendorf, and she is lithe—Eos, the goddess of dawn. She is Kali, she is Artemis and Athena and the Morrigan. As Gaia, the planet, she provides the sustenance that keeps us alive. As Hel, she walks us into the Underworld at our death. Eternal and cyclic, she is Goddess, the primal source of life and death.
    Throughout history, the divine feminine has been worshipped and loved, reviled and vilified, adored and feared. She has been exalted, and she has been defiled. As the patriarchal religions rose, the Goddess went from being the soul of the world on which we walked to wearing the face of Eve, who fell from grace and brought down mankind. She began as Lilitu, an ancient and powerful goddess, and was disempowered and twisted into Lilith, a demoness devouring children.
    She is every color. She is every size. She is every age. She is life, and she is death. She is also vast—so enormous that no single essay can ever hope to encapsulate her history.
    The subject of the Goddess and her worship is so large that, in this essay, I’m going to attempt to narrow down the topic to focus on how P.C. and Kristin Cast have used aspects of Goddess-worship studies—both past and current—to create their own vision of Goddess worship within the House of Night series. We will take a look at various aspects of history and myth, and then examine how they play out in Zoey Redbird’s story.
    A FEW DISCLAIMERS
    In the interest of full disclosure, I admit that I come at this subject not from an academic standpoint, but from that of a modern Pagan, a priestess, and a shamanic witch. I’m a bestselling author—yes. I also love technology and adhere to a good deal of modern scientific teachings—but in my faith, I’m a shamanic witch. I’m not Wiccan, and I believe in multiple gods/goddesses (most Pagan religions do not view any god as omniscient or omnipotent).
    I started as a solitary witch over thirty years ago. I’m self-taught, and eventually went on to lead and work with groups of people. But my personal path has evolved over the years to a very specific focus and, as I did earlier in life, I now prefer a solitary path for most of my workings/rituals, except for certain holidays.
    This is the way I choose to practice, but it is not the way all Pagans practice. Among modern Pagans, worship and belief is as variable and flexible as the number of adherents, for most Pagans practice reconstructed versions of what the older rites must have been like—we can never truly know what went on back then.
    While it’s been suggested in some academic circles that there may have been a single worldwide matriarchal Goddess cult, there isn’t enough solid evidence to prove this. Thousands of goddesses existed, and even though they often overlapped because of cultural assimilation, each was worshipped and viewed in her own way. However, much of that worship and ritual has been lost through time, and there are so many academic