She who was once cast into stone
buried
trampled upon
She is the Sacred Woman
who lives and moves in our psyche
She is Soul
She for whom there has been no container
and no image to behold
She is Goddess, Mother-God,
Divine Feminine,
Feminine Christ.
The Returning Goddess
The Goddess is awakening; She is returning to our consciousness from her state of exile and banishment to the unconscious. This is to be seen in the awareness of the ecological plight of our planet. There is a surge of feminine consciousness and awareness in the popular media – always a good barometer of the mass consciousness. However, She demands more than the mere awareness, the reference to Goddess every now and again or the inclusion of the word Goddess when referring to the Universal Divine.
The exiled Goddess, for the past two thousand years frozen in the image of the suffering Mary, Mother of God, carried the suffering and redemption of modern woman’s quest for wholeness of the conscious feminine. The Lady of the Moon was holding the archetypal image of a feminine deity for those who struggled to identify with and relate to a masculine god in the traditional male monotheism or to the image of the Masculine Spirit God in the mystery traditions without the receptive container of the healed feminine.
The embodiment of the Goddess is a wholly conscious feminine path to be undertaken by women at this stage in our development. This is a path to wholeness of the feminine consciousness embodied by women. The old paradigm has served its purpose. We had fallen asleep and we had forgotten the Goddess. She has not forgotten us and She is stirring in our consciousness and she is demanding that those who hear the call, answer and start the work.
The Call of the Goddess comes in various guises. If you have lived a life unconsciously of the feminine, which, by the way, you were meant to, as we have been under the spell of the sleeping Goddess, Her call usually becomes insistent in the lives of patriarchal women, caught up in their own idealized animus, at the onset of midlife. The animus dominated life is one that excludes the celebration of feminine rites, the celebrationary rite of the onset of your menses, the understanding of the sacredness of your body, the knowledge that you are in control of your body and only you have the right of ownership of your own body, the cognizance of the lunar cycles in your body and psyche. It is also the life that strives for perfection, that exudes dynamic behaviour through self-discipline, control and willpower over the natural world and her own natural self. She sends the Crone, the Goddess of Death, Destruction and Chaos to wake us up. You can expect to see the hand of the Crone in your life in the guise of burn-out, chronic fatigue syndrome or some immune system breakdown or overload. She carries many labels, but is currently prone to ones such as Insulin Resistance, Diabetes, Epstein-Barr virus, osteo-arthritis, allergies to certain foods, obesity, fybromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, to name but a few. She also arrives, cloaked in personal traumatic losses in your own life; the loss of a child or loved one, the loss of a marriage or a career. The important thing is to recognize that she is calling your name.
Women have been living in a patriarchal, white male dominated society for the past ten thousand years. During this time, the conscious feminine has been reviled, rejected, cursed, suppressed and oppressed.
Woman has learnt to do the same to their inner feminine. As women, we learnt that being too emotional is not acceptable, you are allowed to express your emotions appropriately, yes, and in the right place and the right time, preferably while you are with your female friends behind closed doors, never in public please. Our exuberant joy are judged as being mere frivolous, our wild, womanly lust and desires are demeaned as mere sluttishness. de learnt to split out feminine self into female and male. We learnt and taught ourselves to project those ugly ‘male’ qualities onto the men and have been successful in crippling many men emotionally and psychically. We project our cruelty, our need for power and dominance, our anger onto men with the physical phallic power, thus robbing ourselves of our feminine wholeness. We bury our Crone, wise self in the image of the Wicked Witch. We scare our children and our inner child with the fear of the Devouring Mother, devoid of the context of her true power and wholeness.
The complete, whole conscious feminine, contains the Virgin, Mother and Crone. She does indeed devour you, the masked self, but in order to give birth to the true you. When we never experience death, it forever locks us into the fear of its power. Only when one has experienced the power of dying to the old and being born to the new, can you trust Her process in your life.
Our society is designed to never let you die. We are promised eternal beauty and youth, eternal sexual prowess and performance, eternal material gain. The Virgin woman is idealized according to the male fantasy. Her image is used in all images of perfect health and beauty. Perfect health is idealized and you are led to believe that you should never get ill. You should always look thirty years old and should you get ill, there are many manuals that will explain to you that you are responsible for your own illness. Everything in nature changes, dies and transforms. The Goddess holds us and the earth in her perfect cycle of change and transformation.
The Mother gets revered once again as a queen of domesticity, devoid of her sexual and creative powers. These are assigned to the Virgin, created in the image of the idealized animus. The Mother should be devoted to her children, her house and supporting her husband. She is taught by society to carry the emotions of her husband. She loses two thirds of her conscious feminine self. The man in the marriage has been taught to split off his own feminine self and to project the feminine behaviour onto women or homosexual men. Thus the Madonna/whore split. Once his sexual partner no longer looks like the idealized Virgin and she has given birth to his children, he treats her like his own mother. This is not merely the case for one or two men, this takes place in generations of humanity. As long as the Mother Within and her devouring, death power is feared, the personal or projected Mother will be feared and mothers will be vilified for carrying the burden of this projection. Husbands, school teachers, coaches, are regularly heard to say ‘just do not get on the wrong side of the child’s mother, she will kill you’ vilifying the passion of the mother and turning it into a negative death clutch of over-protection and holding on. As a mother, she is not allowed certain behaviour, she is not allowed to express her creative self, as this will empower her and encourage empowered behaviour in the children which in turn will lead to upheaval and lack of obedience in the school class room.
Women are locked into the pain of waiting to be mothered by their animus orientated mothers. But an even more profound suffering is experienced when these women realize that they rejected their own personal mothers for being the weaker sex. Stifling and disempowering is the complexes that hold us locked into being our father’s daughters striving for acceptance and doing our utmost to fit in and be accepted in the male world based on male principles.
In order for the receptive container of the healed feminine to be created and strengthened we need to reclaim our feminine selves. We need to find the positive mother within. We need to mother ourselves into becoming the container for the Self-begotten birth.
The conscious feminine way of being, doing and experiencing is a complete feminine experience. The masculine is not experienced in the traditionally viewed way of the masculine. It may still use the same descriptions, such as creative, active, phallic, progressive, but it feels different, it looks different, it is She in all her terrible and beautiful feminine power. As long as you interpret, perceive and try to understand from your animus, your dominant, distorted masculine side, you will not experience. It is only through embodiment of your conscious feminine that you will heal.
(Feminine and masculine do not refer to gender.)
