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by Anne Baring (see credits)
This is one seminar from a course of twelve devoted to exploring
and healing the soul. We publish it here with permission of the
author.
Where
did the idea of soul originate? To answer this question we have to go back
25,000 years and trace the image of the Great Mother or Great Goddess from the
Palaeolithic era onwards, following it through to the civilisations of the
Bronze Age and onward to our own time. This image of the Great Mother is the
root of the concept of cosmic soul. One of the greatest difficulties in
understanding the concept of soul is that for almost three thousand years in
Judeo-Christian civilisation the image of God - the creator of the universe -
has contained no feminine dimension. This means that everything which the image
of the Great Mother embraced in earlier civilisations - most importantly the
feeling that spirit was immanent or present within the phenomenal world - was
lost. Spirit gradually came to be defined as something beyond the world,
something infinitely remote, transcendent, beyond nature and beyond ourselves.
Moreover, it was defined as male and paternal. Everything that the image of the
Great Mother once embraced in earlier cultures - in Neolithic communities and
in Bronze Age Egypt, Mesopotamia, Crete and Greece - was lost and with it the
vital sense of participation in the life of an invisible entity imagined as a
containing, connecting maternal image.
We
are living now at the end of a great trajectory - perhaps 5 million years or
more - which has brought about the gradual separation or differentiation of our
human species from nature and the development of a sense of self or
individuality as well as a highly developed intellect - everything that we now
call human consciousness. But in the process we have lost the ancient sense of
participation in a sacred cosmos. This story can be seen both as a heroic
ascent to autonomy but at the same time a tragic fall from unity. The story
does not end here, however; the finale is still to come and we are beginning to
live it now as we enter a new millennium. Richard Tarnas has graphically
described the history of the last two and a half thousand years as a series of
births which have forged Western consciousness and Western civilisation. In his
Passion of the Western Mind he writes:
The driving impulse of the West’s masculine consciousness has been its
quest not only to realise itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally,
to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great
feminine principle in 1ife, to differentiate from but then to rediscover and
reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul.
The Great Mother
When
Jules Cashford and I began to write The Myth of the Goddess, we felt we
had to go back to the beginning of the recorded image. We wanted to find the
earliest images of what was of supreme importance to humanity and we wanted to
discover where and why the sacred image of the Feminine Principle had been lost
or discarded from Western culture. When we found the image of the Palaeolithic
Great Mother scattered across an immense territory stretching from the Pyrenees
in the West to Lake Baikal in the East, we knew we had found our beginning. As
we traced the evolution and many transformations of this image from 25,000 BC
to the present day, we began to understand that the figure of the goddess stood
for a totally different perspective on life that has been lost. She personified
a vision of life as an organic, living and sacred whole.
The Myth of the Goddess tells the story of how, over a period of some
20,000 years, the image of the deity gradually changed from goddess to god, and
how the god came to be identified with spirit and mind, and the goddess with
nature, matter and body. The image of the goddess was feared and rejected and
with it women and every aspect of the feminine value. Soul and nature had
always been imagined in feminine imagery. So, as a result, spirit and nature,
mind and soul became divorced and polarised in human consciousness, leading to
the spiritual, political and ecological crisis we face at the present time.
But
now, at this crucial stage in our evolution the great archetype of the Feminine
is returning. Through vision, dream and intuitive perception as well as
scholarly research, the soul is being restored to the position it once held. As
we recover it, we are becoming increasingly aware of the sacredness of life, of
the earth, of matter. Our image of reality and our relationships with the
planet and each other are being transformed. The impact of the return of this
lost aspect of spirit has the force of an earthquake, shaking us to our
foundations, insisting on a radical transformation of all our beliefs and
perceptions.
For
nearly 4000 years the soul has lain under a spell. Her voice has been silenced;
her wisdom rejected. Beauty, grace and harmony have faded from our world. But
now, like the Sleeping Beauty, she is awakening from her sleep, stirring to
life within us and within our culture. What does she want from us? What is her
hope? I believe she wants relationship. I see this relationship as a sacred
marriage; a marriage between us and the Divine ground of being.
* *
*
Human
consciousness has developed infinitely slowly out of the deep instinctual
ground that we call nature. It has taken billions of years for life on this
planet to evolve to the point where it could bring forth the kind of
consciousness we now have. Before we knew ourselves as human, we were animal
and plant, rock, and sea. We were the fiery magma of the earth’s core and
long before that we were the substance of the stars All this experience is
carried in the cells of our body. The ability to reflect upon our actions, to
think, to reason, is a very recent development in relation to the thousands,
even millions of years of human evolution. For countless millennia the
potential for human consciousness was hidden within nature, like a seed buried
in the earth. Then, very slowly, it began to differentiate itself from nature,
from what Jung called “the root and rhizome of the soul.” This
separation was increasingly experienced by us as a state of disharmony and
disunion and from it has come our present dualistic, fragmented consciousness
and the fears and anxieties that torment us. But the memory of the experience
of union we once knew lives on in us as a longing for reunion, the
longing to belong once again, to that greater other. We have created all kinds
of myths to explain the human condition and to re-connect us to the whole. We
can understand this immense evolutionary step more easily when we look at the
life of a child, who recapitulates in its separation from its mother the huge
evolutionary step of becoming aware of ourselves first of all as a species,
different from the life around us, then as individuals, separate from the
tribe.
As
consciousness evolved, the sacred image was like an umbilical cord holding us
in touch with the roots of the soul. The first image we created to connect us
with these roots was the Great Mother. For some 18,000 years, the image of the
goddess as Great Mother presided over the far distant eras which have become
accessible to us only in this century: the Palaeolithic (40,000-10,000 bce),
the Neolithic (10,000-3500 bce.) and the great civilisations of the Bronze Age
(about 3000-1500 bce). The image of the Great Mother stands for the whole
instinctual network of relationships that we call life. She was both
transcendent and immanent, both beyond and within the forms of life. She was
present within her manifest forms, continually regenerating them in a cyclical
process that was without end. She was imagined as the womb of life, the great
web of life, the rhythmic pulse of life: The life of the One was the life of
All. The moon, sun, stars, the plants, trees, animals, human beings - all these
were her children. She unified within her being the three dimensions of sky,
earth and underworld. As a tiny child lives within the mother’s field of
consciousness and draws its life from it, so we, at this time were held in the
field of the Great Mother’s being.
The
most important image associated with the Great Mother was the moon. The moon
was the light shining in the darkness; the symbol of our own human
consciousness which longs to understand the mystery of life. The moon was born
out of darkness as the slender crescent. It grew to fullness like a pregnant
woman; it waned again into darkness like an ancient crone. The earliest lunar
notations are known to date to 40,000 bce. The moon gave us an image of life as
changeless yet ever-changing and a cyclical pattern of death and regeneration
which ruled all aspects of’ creation. With the passage of’ countless
millennia, we came to trust in the reappearance of the crescent moon, and to
recognise that darkness was a time of transition between an old and a new phase
of life.. We came to apply this insight to ourselves and to believe that, with
death, we would be taken back into the womb of the Great Mother and reborn like
the crescent moon. (The belief in reincarnation may have come from this lunar
observation.) The life of the Great Mother was eternal, like the moon; the life
of the earth’s vegetation and our human life waxed and waned like the
phases of the moon. Out of this long lunar experience evolved the capacity to
imagine, to feel , to think. to reflect, to create - the inexhaustible
creativity of humanity. The mythology, astronomy, architecture and the
principal of divine law active in all life, which reached such brilliant
expression in the civilisations of the Bronze Age, may have arisen from this
primordial observation of the moon.
Long
before the paintings we so admire were painted, the cave was the most sacred
place, the focus of the life of the tribe. Symbolically, it was the actual womb
of the Great Mother, the secret, hidden source of her regenerative power. It
was from here that she brought forth the living and received the dead back into
herself for rebirth. The cave still symbolises, in dream and mystical
experience, the deep, instinctual psychic level which gives access to
revelation and communion with levels of consciousness beyond our normal range.
The
approach to the sanctuary in these caves was formidably difficult, a ritual of
initiation into the mysteries of the Great Mother, often requiring hours
negotiating narrow passageways. Imagine yourselves crawling and slithering
through these entrails, gasping for breath with the effort, your only light in
the pitch darkness coming from tiny lamps made of hollowed bone and filled with
animal fat and juniper twigs. Imagine your fear that your light might go out.
Suddenly you emerge into a huge cavern. Even now, as one retraces their
path, often terrified by the immensity of the darkness, and the fear that
one’s light will go out, one can feel what the people of this ancient time
felt - one is inside the womb of the Great Mother, in the utter
stillness, the darkness, at the very heart of life. In the furthest reach of
the cave, often in a domed chamber, vast as a cathedral, they painted and
carved the magnificent animals we can see today. These animals were the teeming
life of the Great Mother on which our life depended. The labyrinth and the
spiral became at this early time, symbols of the connecting pathway between
this world and the unseen dimension of the Great Mother’s womb. These tell
us that at this time we were already aware of two dimensions of experience -
this earthly one and another invisible one, to which we were connected as by an
umbilical cord.
Between 25,000 and 5000 bce. the image of the Great Mother begins to evolve
into three specific forms. She is imagined as the sky, and her epiphany or
manifestation here is the bird. She is imagined as the earth, and her
manifestation is the animal - particularly the lioness and the leopard, but
also many smaller animals such as the doe, the pig, even the hedgehog. She is
imagined as the waters of the earth - the waters that fall from her breasts,
the clouds, and the waters of the underworld welling up from beneath the earth.
The symbol of her waters is the serpent. Thousands of years later, she still
has the same essential forms, only more defined, as well as a whole mythology
of the feminine principle as the Mother of All. Because she was present or
immanent in the forms of life, she was accessible to human beings. People
learned to pay attention to unusual signs or events; to look and to listen at a
level beyond the routine experience of life; to notice correspondences and draw
analogies, to develop their intuition and their imagination. Caves, rounded
mountain tops, groves of trees or deep natural crevices in the earth all became
sacred. They became the focus of shamanic rituals. Water, rocks, trees, plants,
animals and birds were living presences. People could speak to them and listen
to the messages they heard. Today the interest in dowsing, the attraction to
sacred places and even the passion for gardening and cooking carries that
ancient feeling of relationship with nature.
But
the Great Mother was also an unseen place or dimension which could only be
reached by treading the labyrinthine pathway between this world and the source
or womb-world. So someone sculpted a figure (about 4500 bce.) with a door and a
labyrinth pattern drawn on her body to show the door or gate and the pathway
through which we enter and leave this world for the other.
The
Neolithic is the time when agriculture and animal husbandry were developed; now
the old lunar mythology was experienced in relation to the cycle of the crops,
where people saw the light and dark phases of the moon reflected in the fertile
and barren phases of the seasons. The invisible seed planted in the darkness of
the earth’s womb became visible as the green shoots of corn and then as
the crop that was harvested and transformed into food by the labour of men and
women. The Great Mother was worshipped throughout the entire Neolithic world.
Everything that was of the earth, whether rock or spring, tree or fruit, grain
or herb, was sacred because it carried the life of the Great Mother, offered
for the nourishment of her children. No species was superior to any other.
Some
of the remarkable temples built by these people still survive: Stonehenge,
Avebury and Silbury hill in southern England, New Grange in lreland, Carnac in
Brittany were some of the most sacred sites of that ancient time, whose
structures and meaning are still little understood. The greatest ceremony of
the year was the marriage between heaven and earth which, in the beginning, may
have been experienced as two aspects, male and female, light and dark, of the
Great Mother. To call the sun a god and the moon a goddess is to “fast
forward” too quickly. However, there is no doubt that the sacred marriage
between the sun and the earth was celebrated at New Grange where a ray of the
sun at dawn at the winter solstice penetrated the furthest reach of the dark
interior of the womb-like temple. At Avebury (in early May) and at Stonehenge
(at the summer solstice) a long triangular phallic shadow cast by a tall stone
enveloped another stone which represented the mother goddess. Skilled
architects, astronomers and engineers built these stone temples as places where
people could assist the process that was believed to initiate the fertilisation
and hence the future fertility of the earth. These sacred places show that the
focus of life at that time in Western Europe was ritual rather than the need
for defence against attack. The rituals must have been incredibly numinous to
experience.
Women
in the Neolithic era were closely bound to the rhythm of sowing and harvesting
the crops because they participated in the mysterious process whereby life grew
in the darkness of their womb and was reborn as their child, and so they were
believed magically to assist the fertility of crops, trees and animals. They
were the guardians of life, the healers of life, skilled in the use of herbs
and ointments and in the art of making and decorating pottery. A complex
symbolism linked thc lunar rhythm in women’s bodies with the lunar mystery
of life’s continual regeneration.
About
4500 bce. the image of a young god begins to appear. At this point the
masculine began to be defined. Rituals developed, lasting even into this
century, which identified him with the corn or the crops that yearly died and
yearly were reborn. Later a tremendous mythology developed round him. In
Babylonia he was called Tammuz, in Egypt Osiris. One of the many names given to
him was “The Green One.” The ruler of the land was identified with
this young god. (Pharoah) Later, in European cathedrals and churches he was
sculpted on roof bosses and choir stalls as “The Green Man” - image
of the creative spirit hidden in nature.
As we
move further on into the Bronze Age, which began about 3500 bce., the Great
Mother continues to preside over many Mediterranean cultures but now, although
she still, as Gaia, for example, is “Mother of All”, she is also
differentiated into many named goddesses who personify aspects of her powers:
in Egypt lsis, Hathor, Nut and Maat; in Mesopotamia Inanna and Ishtar; in
Greece, Demeter, Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hecate and Persephone .
One
great myth is told in different cultures: it is the story of the goddess who
has a son who grows up to become her consort. He personifies the life of the
vegetation, the life of corn or fruiting tree. His marriage to the mother
goddess unites earth with heaven and regenerates the life of earth. In
Mesopotamia as Tammuz, he dies a sacrificial death and the goddess Ishtar goes
in search of him, descending into the underworld to awaken him from sleep or to
bring him back from death. ln Egypt the goddess Isis gathers the fragments of
Osiris’s body and brings him back to life. ln Greece, Demeter descends
into the underworld in search of her daughter Persephone. As the son or
daughter or consort return, the corn sprouts, the tree blossoms and fertility
is restored to the earth. Isis and Ishtar were named as Virgin Queen of Heaven
and Earth. Their virginity did not symbolise sexual innocence, as it does in
our culture, but the inexhaustible creativity of life whose union is
within itself and which expresses itself as all instinctual processes.
The titles of the Great Goddess at this time were “The Green One”,
“ The Light of the World,” “Holy Shepherdess” and
“Righteous Judge”.
In
Egypt Hathor carries the sun disc between the lunar horns that take us back to
the figure at Laussel, nearly 18,000 years earlier. To the Egyptians she was
The Milky Way, imagined as a great cow which nourished the world with her milk.
Isis bears the great wings of her Neolithic predecessor and, like her, presides
over the burial chambers of the dead (Tomb of Tutenkhamun), for death is still
imagined as one aspect of life’s totality, one aspect of the total
being of the Great Mother. The goddess Nut each night receives the sun into her
body and at dawn gives birth to him. She is the starry vault of heaven and she
receives the souls of the dead into her embrace. A beautiful inscription on a
sarcophagus in the Louvre reads: “O my mother Nut, stretch your wings over
me. Let me become like the imperishable stars, like the indefatigable stars. O
Great Being who is in the world of the Dead, at whose feet is Eternity, in
whose hand is the Always, O divine beloved Soul who is in the mysterious abyss,
come to me.”
Turning to Greece, Athena inherits the snake imagery of the older Neolithic
goddess and also her bird imagery. In the Odyssey there are many stories of
Athena appearing to Odysseus as a bird, as the swallow or sea-eagle, guiding
him back to Penelope. The owl, in particular, was sacred to her. (Haghia Triada
sarcophagus). All these associations derive from a time when there was no
separation between the Great Mother as Source and as the manifest forms of her
life. So there is no creator beyond creation. The creator is both the life
of nature and the great powers of the cosmos personified now as goddesses and
gods. Can you feel how life as spirit and life as nature are unified
through these images? Can you sense the deep sense of participation there was
between ourselves and the life around us? I think these images show why life
was felt to be one and sacred.
Thousands of women in the Bronze Age served as priestesses in the many temples
of the goddess and even in those of certain gods. But the only culture which
has given us a clear image of what woman’s life might have been like at
this time is the Minoan Age in Crete, prior to the great earthquakes and tidal
waves which destroyed it in 1450 BC. We know there were women poets in Sumeria,
Egypt and Greece because we can now read their poems; there were undoubtedly
artists, healers, and those who could travel in trance or in dream to bring
back messages from the other world.
By
the end of the Bronze Age the feminine principle in the image of the goddess
was clearly defined. First of all the goddess was the great matrix of
relationships in which all aspects and forms of life were connected to each
other. Although not named as cosmic soul, this was what she represented.
Secondly, she stood for the principle of justice, wisdom and compassion.
Thirdly, and most importantly, she was the unseen dimension beyond the visible
world - sometimes called “The Underworld”. (see In the Dark Places
of Wisdom (Peter Kingsley) and the description of Parmenides’s journey
into the dimension ruled by the Goddess Persephone).
The
greatest ceremony of the year during the Bronze Age was the Sacred Marriage
which symbolically united heaven and earth, moon and sun, mother-bride and son
lover. In a magnificent ritual goddess and god were united in sexual union -
she represented by the queen as high priestess and he by the king as high
priest This marriage symbolically united heaven and earth, moon and sun,
invisible and visible dimensions. so renewing the life of earth. The ecstatic
poetry and sexual imagery of the early Egyptian, Sumerian and Babylonian
marriage hymns were bequeathed to later Canaanite culture and then to Hebrew
culture. The exquisite imagery of the Song of Songs has come down to us from
Sumeria and Egypt. In these ceremonies, the bride was always the mother and
sister of her bridegroom, and he was both the son and brother of his bride;
hence the words: “Thou hast ravished my heart, my sister, my spouse.”
The nearest thing to convey the sense of importance this ceremony held for the
people in that far off time to us today is the interest and excitement
generated by a royal marriage or an eclipse (see eclipse as marriage of sun and
moon).
So to
sum up: for some 20,000 years until about 2000 bce. the Great Mother is an
image of overwhelming numinosity and fascination. She is the source of life:
one life manifesting as the life of each and all. Sexuality is the vital
expression of this life, a sacred, ecstatic impulse reflecting life’s own
creative impulse eternally to renew itself. The image of the divine at this
time is an instinctual flow of life. Everything has come forth from the womb of
the Great Mother. Everything has meaning through relationship with the Great
Mother. So relationship or connection came to be understood as the essential
quality of the Feminine principle. We felt connection as an instinct, in
exactly the same way that a child feels connected to its mother. Within our own
psyche, the newly developing elements of consciousness and the power of
self-reflection were held in relationship to the older, instinctual layers
through the image of the Goddess and through rituals that connected people to
the life around them. Owen Barfield (Saving the Appearances) called this
phase of human evolution “Original Participation.” This experience
and the image of the Great Mother and the goddess were the foundation for the
later idea of cosmic soul or the soul as containing matrix that developed in
Platonic and Neo-Platonic philosophy (Anima-Mundi).This mythology did
not split off natural life and human experience from participation in divine
life but was rooted in the ancient knowledge that “Everything that lives
is holy.” (Blake) We carry that knowledge deep within us. We are
recovering it now as the image of the soul returns to us.
The Father God
Now I
come to the second part of this story. About 2000 bce. there is a tremendous,
devastating change - like a thunderbolt in a blue sky. The Middle East and the
eastern Mediterranean are thrown into turmoil. Invaders bringing male gods -
“a people whose onslaught was like a hurricane” - swept into the
river valleys where the goddess had been worshipped for thousands of years.
They brought with them the horse and the war chariot. War and conquest become
the theme of a new and terrifying age. Everywhere there is fear and slaughter,
everywhere a great cry of terror and distress as people were murdered,
enslaved, exiled from their homes. Joseph Campbell describes this time as
“The Great Reversal.” The terrible cruelty that accompanied the
ethnic cleansing of that time is minutely documented in the annals of the
Babylonian and later, the Assyrian kings. King Sargon of Akkad (2300) was the
first proudly to record it.
In
this new act in the drama of our evolutionary journey the Great Mother moves
into the wings; the Great Father moves centre stage. In Greece the goddesses
(Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, Persephone) who once represented aspects of the
Great Mother’s powers now become daughters of Zeus - all except for
Demeter and Gaia who retain the status of the former Great Mother. In Hebrew
culture, the Great Father replaces the Great Mother as the creator of life. The
story of the ferocious struggle between the supporters of the two mythologies
is told in the Old Testament. All images of and references to the goddess were
destroyed. The Hebrew language to this day has no word for goddess.
Why
did this happen? What deep forces produced this enormous change? Did we need
the image of the Father God at this time to develop a more focussed kind of
consciousness, to develop the technological skills to transform and harness the
environment for our own expansion and growth? Was it needed to help the
individual to separate from the tribe? Why was woman’s evolution held back
and man’s accelerated? Did the movement of consciousness away from the
earth and nature and the rituals of the Great Mother help to develop the
analytical mind and strong sense of individual self we have today? Was it
necessary to have this mind? Or was it all a deviation from our natural
evolutionary path? Was the terrifying social disruption of this age a causative
factor which made us lose trust in the Great Mother?
Whatever the answer, the result was a great acceleration in the development of
the autonomous self reflected in the image of the hero. The focus is henceforth
on exploration; of the world, the cosmos, and the development of an immense
range of mental and physical skills. Mind becomes supremely important; mind
that is above nature, identified with the Father God, mind that is increasingly
able to affect and control the environment through ideas and technological
inventions. Psychologically, this new phase is about building a strong,
focussed ego.
Men
are the primary carriers of this new consciousness. Women stay closer to the
older vision. As the patriarchal beliefs gain ground, so everything to do with
the Feminine value is repressed, devalued. Women’s role as the bearer of
life is devalued in relation to men’s role of conquering, ordering,
controlling it. Women become part of what is controlled by men. Henceforth,
with few exceptions, their contribution to civilisation is written out of the
history of Western civilisation. This situation only began to change in this
century.
The
story of this phase begins with the myths which speak of the separation of
Earth and Heaven. In Sumeria the god Enlil separates his parents An and Ki to
make Sky and Earth. In Egypt the god Shu separates his parents Nut and Geb. In
the second and third chapters of Genesis the story of the Fa1l has the same
theme of separation. All these myths reflect an immense change in human
consciousness, the beginning of an entirely new perception of life, one where
nature becomes something to be controlled and manipulated by human ingenuity.
From now on the head rather than the heart is the focus of consciousness,
perhaps related to the development of the left hemisphere of the brain. At the
same time the heroic individual becomes the focus of mythology. The danger of
this phase is that the human ego, breaking away from its source in nature and
the cosmos, becomes dissociated from them and begins to acknowledge no power
greater than itself. Human beings alone are seen as having a special
relationship with the deity and are enjoined to exercise dominion over nature.
This would have been unthinkable in the earlier phase of participation.
During this phase, we lost the older participatory awareness which held us in a
state of instinctive communion with our environment and with an invisible
dimension felt to be all around us. The discovery of writing was a watershed
between one way of living and another during the course of which the older
participatory awareness began to fade and we began to experience ourselves as
separate from nature (see diagram). Through learning the new skill of writing,
we began to think in a linear, sequential way, and to lose the capacity to
imagine as if we were part of nature, with an imagination as prolific
and limitless as hers. We began to see ourselves in a heroic role as having to
stand against nature, overcome nature, conquer nature. Slowly we identified
ourselves with a hero god killing a dragon.
Synchronistically, the disruption of the agricultural communities in the great
river valleys of the Fertile Crescent occurred at roughly the same time as the
development of the ability to read and write (about 3000 bce.) A new book,
written by a surgeon with a long observation of the two hemispheres of the
brain, (The Alphabet versus the Goddess, Viking 1999) puts forward the
hypothesis that the invention of writing led to the over-development of
left-hemispheric linear, analytic thinking over the more imaginative,
participatory awareness of the right-hemisphere. This gave supremacy to all who
had access to education, to men over women, to male gods over female ones,
ultimately to the Great Father over the Great Mother. Wherever writing took
root, conquest, domination, slavery and the hierarchical organisation of
society followed. The ability to write was developed by the scribe and priestly
classes and confined to about 2% of the population. Women were not taught to
read and write. For 5000 years, he says, “The hand that has held the pen
has also held the sword.”
‘The focus on left-hemispheric, linear consciousness meant that the
former, more balanced relationship between the two hemispheres of the brain was
lost and the right-hemispheric way of perceiving reality through relationship
and participation was downgraded. Judaic culture was the first in the world to
banish images as a way of communicating with the sacred. Until the invention of
writing, wisdom and truth had been transmitted orally but now, wisdom and truth
were seen to reside in the written word, the word of God. Our present
ecological crisis can be understood as deriving from a long-forgotten change of
consciousness some 5000 years ago which marked the transition between the
Bronze and Iron Ages.
The
focus for the next 4000 years is on exploration, expansion, discovery, conquest
and above all, on the idea of human progress, on reaching a goal. The power to
think, the power to do and to harness the power of nature becomes
overwhelmingly fascinating. The male image of the supreme deity enormously
strengthened men who were the primary carriers of this new consciousness. Women
stayed closer to the older vision, closer to participatory awareness and
relationship with nature. Regarded as inferior, they were socially downgraded,
virtually enslaved, becoming chattels of their husbands. Judaism and
Christianity banished priestesses with the goddess. We have recently witnessed
what a struggle it has been to reinstate women in a sacred role. Greece
retained priestesses but banished women from participation in public life and
social relationship with men. One of the greatest Greek philosophers,
Parmenides, recommended to the rulers of Athens that if they wanted the state
to flourish, they should treat their women better. They did not listen to him.
As the new beliefs gain ground, so everything to do with the Feminine was
repressed, devalued. Women’s role as the bearer and nurturer of life was
devalued in relation to men’s role of conquering, ordering, controlling
it. Women become part of what was controlled by men. lt is essential to
realise that no-one can be blamed for this process. The need or desire to
apportion blame is one of the features of that phase of separation or phase of
duality which is now being superseded by a new phase of reconnection. Men as
much as women carry the wound and the unconscious programming of the phase of
separation.
One
particular hero myth, dated about 1700 bce., tells the story of what happened
in mythological imagery. In this Babylonian myth called The Enuma Elish,
Marduk, the young solar god, kills Tiamat, the great dragoness mother, by
shooting an arrow into her open mouth which tears her belly and splits her
heart. Marduk throws her carcass on the ground, stands on it and cuts it in
half like a fish, creating the sky from one half and the earth from the other.
He then creates the planets and the constellations. Then, almost as an
afterthought, he creates humanity from the blood of Tiamat’s murdered son.
This
is a new and violent creation myth, in stark contrast to the older Sumerian and
Egyptian ones of the separation of earth and heaven and it marks the beginning
of the loss of relationship with the natural world. Marduk’s slaying
of’ the mother Goddess offers an image of violence and murder as a pattern
of divine behavior. Marduk becomes the macho ideal - the model for all
conquerors to come - right down to the present day. With this myth the cyclical
time of the goddess culture ends: linear time begins; death becomes final and
terrifying. With this myth creation has a beginning and will have an end. The
conflict between light and darkness, good and evil is constellated and this
imagery pervades the Old Testament and other mythologies, in India as well as
the Near East. (Mahabharata). The myth sets the paradigm of duality and
opposition between spirit and nature, light and darkness -for the next 4000
years. This paradigm still controls our own modern culture with its emphasis on
the conquest of nature, of space, of disease, of our enemies.
The
story of the Enuma Elish was to lay the ground for the polarisation of
spirit and nature, mind and body into two parts - the one divine and good, the
other “fallen” and “evil.” Gradually, the “male”
aspect of life became identified with spirit, light, order and mind - which was
named as good, and the “female” aspect of life became identified with
nature, darkness, chaos and body - which was evil. This divinely sanctioned
opposition led also to the idea of the “holy war”- the war of the
forces of good against the forces of evil. The Babylonian myth was a dangerous
myth to take literally for it offered the image of violence and murder as a
pattern of divine behaviour and therefore ratified it as a model for human
beings to emulate. The victory of the solar god creates a new way of living, a
new way of relating to the divine by identifying with the god’s power of
conquest - the victory over darkness that the sun wins each dawn. And, indeed,
the theme of conquest becomes the dominating theme of all the hero myths of the
Iron Age and so it is to this day.
Over
the next 2000 years, Marduk was transformed, via Assyrian and Persian culture,
into the transcendent Father God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Creation
was now from the word of the Father, no longer from the womb of the Mother. The
creator was beyond creation. This is crucially important. The oneness of life
was broken. Nature was dissociated from spirit. The feeling of the sacredness
of the earth was lost. With this myth the cyclical time of the goddess culture
ends; linear time begins; death becomes final and terrifying, A fundamental
polarisation was born between spirit and nature and between the rational and
the instinctive aspects of the human psyche. The profound dissociation
within the soul is projected onto tribial conflicts. Conquest and
blood-sacrifice in a tribal context are defined as good. The enemy is named as
evil. Woman is raped and desecrated in war as she still is today. And, in the
religious sphere, deviation from belief in the tribal religion is named as
heresy and extirpated as evil.
Because this mythological history is not generally known, it is not realised
how deeply religion and science have been influenced by it nor how unstable is
the foundation on which the whole structure of Western civilisation rests. It
is a structure which has rejected the feminine principle and as a result, it is
radically unbalanced, tilted to one side, like the leaning tower of Pisa.
This
one myth, had a huge influence on later Greek, Hebrew, Persian and Christian
cultures. Not understanding what was happening, the human ego began to identify
itself with the god, increasingly losing touch with the instinctual matrix out
of which it had evolved. It turned in fear and anger against the mother goddess
and against nature. The Christian Church struggled to eradicate animism and
feared the return of the goddess. Unregenerated nature and the feminine in
general began to be identified with darkness, the unknown, the chaotic, the
infernal that must be conquered, subjugated, controlled. The final stage of
this chronicle of control has led to the present belief that there is no
intelligence, consciousness or dimension beyond our own consciousness. ln a
personal sense this also applies to the dimension of our feelings and instincts
that unconsciously came to be associated with what is female, dark, chaotic and
dangerous. (Hysteria and emotionality of women.) Men and women have both been
deeply affected by this mythology. Both equate what is feminine with what is
inferior and exalt “rational” mind over “non-rational
feeling.” This has given the masculine archetype or principle far too
great a power within the human psyche as well as in the culture.
With
the appearance of this myth, war and violence become endemic. Simultaneously in
different places there is a growth of the desire for power which accompanies
the rise of the warlike leader. There is massive social and political change:
the movement to cities and the growth of populations; the rise of the citystate
and centralised control; the rise of bureaucracies; the transformation of
farmers into serfs; the enslavement of prisoners of war and the ethnic
cleansing of conquered populations. The role of the warrior is exalted into the
supreme model for men. Men who could not or who did not wish to live this role
must have suffered terribly from shame and humiliation. This process beginning
in the third millennium bce. with the conquests of Sargon of Akkad ends with
Hiroshima, Vietnam and the horrific nuclear and biological weapons of modern
warfare. The media still broadcasts the theme of conquest (the conquest of
space; the conquest of disease etc.) Politicians still unconsciously use the
archaic language and imagery of confrontation and conquest. It has become
intrinsic to male psychology. (Evangelical Christianity as conquest.)
The
mythology of conquest also lies at the root of modern science with its
mechanistic view of matter, its belief that we can use and manipulate it as we
choose, whether for good and for evil, without any feeling of relationship with
it. It directs bio-technology with its predatory desire to “conquer’
genetic territory for huge commercial profit. The idea of relationship with
nature is ridiculed. The idea that nature has consciousness or that the
resources of the planet might need protection from our ruthless exploitation of
them is dismissed as sentimental or hysterical. This ”objective" attitude
to life, which might be characterised as “macho” is not truly
masculine because men, when they are in touch with their feelings, seek
relationship with life, seek to protect it and are not driven by the need for
power over it. The great medical and scientific discoveries as well as the
articulation and support of values which respect life have been made by men
deeply concerned by the plight of suffering humanity. The danger comes when
mind becomes split off from a sense of relationship with what it observes and
is then driven by a pathological desire for power and control.
Rediscovering the Feminine Aspect of
Spirit
This
seminar has attempted to give some idea of the long process whereby our human
self slowly emerged from nature or planetary life. But the price paid for this
emergence was the gradual emptying of the world and the cosmos of meaning and
divine presence. The creator withdrew further and further from His creation
until eventually He was declared irrelevant and “dead”. The human
mind became the only source of meaning and the cosmos was perceived as
lifeless, devoid of intelligence and subject to mechanical laws.
However, the last fifty years of this century have seen an immense change in
preparation. A quest has been undertaken by thousands of individuals seeking to
find what has been lost. Their efforts have recovered for us the hidden
mystical and shamanic traditions that had to go underground during the long
centuries of persecution. Like the magma of the earth’s molten core, the
rejected feminine principle has been pushing up from below the level of our
conscious lives until at last it is emerging into our awareness. As a result,
our values and our understanding of ourselves and our relationship with the
planet are changing. We are beginning to recover the lost sense of
participation in a sacred universe.
There
seem to be five main aspects to this impulse. All five are contributing to the
healing of the dissociation between spirit and nature in our culture and to the
restoration of a sense of the oneness of life. These five aspects are: the
restoration of the missing feminine aspect of God; a new awareness of the soul;
the resacralisation of nature; the revaluation of women; and finally, a change
of attitude towards matter and the physical body. These cannot really be
separated from each other because each is intrinsic to a psychic impulse which
might be called the recovery of the feminine principle. I mean recovery in two
senses: first, the sense of something that was ailing, diminished or crippled
being restored to health, and secondly, the sense of something of great value
which was lost and is now being recovered. However, this impulse is still for
the most part active at an unconscious level and is carried by only a handful
of individuals.
The
recovery of these five aspects of the lost feminine value and their integration
with the established masculine one is causing a tremendous upheaval: the
breakdown of beliefs, the disintegration of the hierarchical institutions of
church and state, the undermining of traditional relationships between women
and men, the changing ideas about God and nature and our own human nature. The
growing attraction to the mythic, the spiritual, the imaginal, the non-rational
and the immense expansion of opportunities for women to play a greater role in
the culture is releasing creative power that has been blocked for centuries.
There are immense opportunities in this time of transformation but also immense
dangers. The opportunity is for us to choose to create a new relationship with
our environment , to formulate a new concept of God and to bring into being a
different understanding of nature and matter. We tread a path which is on the
knife-edge between the integration of this new vision on the one hand and
social disintegration and regression into barbarism and perhaps
self-annihilation on the other. At the threshold of the millennium, we are
participating in the birth of a new era, one with diffèrent aims and
values to the old, outworn, one. It is a tremendously exciting time to be
alive.
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