Very pleased with this conversation I had in LITTLE GIFTS Podcast in May, with the wonderful grandmother and granddaughter team of the extraordinary artist Sue Ellen Parkinson and her amazing granddaughter Savannah Wonderwheel.
We talked about, well, what I mostly talk about: the Goddess, masks, magic, and healing in a difficult world. And I love that the conversation spans generations! Thank you to both of them!
"As a Jungian analyst and a historian, I would like to offer an archetypal overview of why the current crisis may have come into being; showing when, where and how the masculine and feminine archetypes – reflected in the image of a God or Goddess – became separated, and why this separation has had such a deep impact on Western civilization. I am not speaking only of the pandemic but the far greater challenge of climate change."
I take the liberty of posting this important article by psychologist and mythologist Anne Baring Ph.D because it so eloquently and succinctly describes how Western culture evolved patriarchy, how we forgot that God was ever also a woman, and why patriarchy's values must end and the Goddess must return to the world, if we, and our fellow Beings on this beautiful planet, are going to continue.
A personal note: I keep intending to make this Blog more "autobiographical". But each time I sit down to write, I am struck with the increasing tempo of the great world crisis, and I remember the voices of such great thinkers, philosophers, herstorians, theologians, and activists as Dr. Baring; and suddenly, my story just merges in my mind with the greater collective story.
"Asherah"
ERASURE OF THE FEMININE
Ann Baring
Owing to the research that I and others have conducted over the
last 40 years, we now know that in the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, the
principal deity worshiped was the Great Mother. In this forgotten cosmology,
there was no Creator beyond creation. Creation emerged from the womb of the
Great Mother. All species, including our own, were her children. Everything on
Earth and in the Cosmos was connected through relationship with her.
Then, around 1,500 BC, there was a change so great that its
repercussions are keenly felt in all aspects of Western civilization. This
change was the replacement of the Great Mother by the Great Father. As the
monotheistic Father, God brought creation into being as something separate and
distant from Himself, so nature became split off from spirit and was no longer
sacred. Simultaneously, the rise of powerful city states in the Middle East led
to the creation of a succession of vast empires, territorial conquest, and war.
Although the architectural, artistic, and literary creations of
these empires were extensive, the suffering created by them was also
widespread. Millions of young men lost their lives to war and died in atrocious
pain. Millions of women and children were killed, raped, or sold into slavery.
Deep traumas were created in the collective psyche of humanity that are
unhealed to this day. During millennia of war, we forgot about nature and our
relationship with her. Gradually, we developed the idea that we were above
nature, entitled to control and dominate her for the benefit of our species
alone.
Another event contributed to the loss of the sacredness of
nature—a forgotten event that also had a devastating effect on women and the
planet.[1]
The Jewish people once worshiped both a Goddess and a God—a Queen
and a King of Heaven—who together created the world. But in 621 BC, under a
king called Josiah, a powerful group of priests called Deuteronomists took
control of the First Temple in Jerusalem. They removed every trace of the
Goddess Asherah, the Queen of Heaven, who was worshiped as the Holy Spirit[2]
and Divine Wisdom, and also as the Tree of Life—a Tree that connected the
invisible and visible worlds, and whose fruit was the gift of immortality. The
shamanic rituals of the High Priest which had honoured and communed with the
Queen of Heaven were replaced by new rituals based on obedience to Yahweh’s
Law.[3]
But the Deuteronomists didn’t stop there. They also created the
Myth of the Fall with its punishing God and its grim message of guilt, sin,
suffering, and the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.[4] They
demoted the Goddess—whose title was Mother of All Living—into the human figure
of Eve. They blamed Eve for the sin of disobedience that brought about the Fall
and for bringing sin, suffering, and death into the world. Henceforth, all
women would be contaminated by Eve’s sin and would have to be under men’s
control lest they create further disasters. From it there developed the idea
that the whole human race was tainted by original sin, punished for a
primordial act of disobedience. The created world was no longer a manifestation
of the Tree of Life but was viewed as contaminated by the Fall, no longer
sacred. Woman’s long oppression, even persecution, stems directly from this
myth. Her voice was silenced for millennia.
Yahweh was left as the sole transcendent Creator God; The Divine
Feminine aspect of God was deleted from the image of deity. The only place
where the concept of the sacred marriage survived was in the mystical Jewish
tradition of Kabbalah, known as the Voice of the Dove.[5] The Divine Feminine
was not only banished from Judaism, but also from Christianity which took its
image of God from Judaism. Islam also had a sole male creator god. The
end-result of this new polarizing cosmology was that life on earth was split
off from the divine world; nature was split off from spirit. Men came to be
identified with spirit and women with nature. Body was split off from mind and
mind from soul. Sexuality was sinful. Woman’s only role was to obey and serve
man and carry his seed. All this was a complete reversal of the earlier
cosmology focused on the Great Mother.
There is one further factor that needs to be included in this
story: the deliberate decision by the Roman Church to wipe out all trace of
Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene. Think what it would have meant for the
development of Western civilization if the union of Jesus and Mary Magdalene
had been celebrated by the Church founded in his name. Had their marriage been
recognized and Jesus not turned into the celibate Son of God, Christianity
would have had a totally different history without a celibate male priesthood
and without the terrifying persecution of women in the witch trials that
scarred Europe for five centuries. We might have been spared the disastrous
association of sexuality with sin and the misogyny and mistrust of women that
affects our culture to this day.
Because of this history, we have been on the wrong path for more
than two thousand years, out of alignment with the Earth and the Cosmos. It has
led us to this time of crisis and of awakening, and to the need for a new, yet
very old story that tells us we are the life and breath of the Divine in human
form and that all life is infused with Divinity.[6]
Materialist or reductionist science is built on the flawed
foundation bequeathed to it by patriarchal religion and has dispensed with both
God and the soul. It tells us that the universe is without life, purpose, or
meaning. When the physical brain dies, that is the end of us. The highest
authority is the rational mind. We are separate from the world around us. The
master story is technological progress and unlimited growth.
I think this explains why, in a worldwide culture influenced by
the secular philosophy of science, we have come to believe that it doesn’t
matter what we do to matter—that nature and matter are not sacred, that we are
not part of that sacredness. This is why there is no foundation for morality in
our relationship with the Earth. What we think we need, we take.
from "The Red Book"
Jung could see the dangers of this materialist philosophy and
commented:
"As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become
dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer
involved in nature and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with
natural phenomena… No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals,
nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has
gone.[7]"
Once, long ago, the world was experienced as alive with spirit.
Nature was part of a sacred cosmic whole. In spite of horrendous persecution,
Indigenous peoples of the world have kept alive this awareness of the
sacredness of nature and the idea of our kinship with all creation.
The new story emerging in quantum physics tells us that the
universe is a unified field. Our lives are part of a cosmic web of life which
connects all life forms in the universe and on our planet. Every atom of life
interacts with every other atom, no matter how distant. A new vision is
struggling to be born—a vision of our relationship with an intelligent, living,
and interconnected universe.
We are called to a profound process of transformation that is
manifesting as a new planetary consciousness: a consciousness which recognizes
that we are part of a Sacred Web of Life. We need a science and a technology
that does not seek to dominate nature but works with nature, humbly respecting
its harmonious order. We need women who truly embody the Feminine to guide
us,[8] working with enlightened men, to restore the values and the practices
that can transform our relationship with the planet into one of love and care.
This pandemic carries an urgent message for us to wake up to the
small window of opportunity we have to change course before it’s too late. This
means change in every sphere of life: change in the very concept of what it
means to be human and living on this extraordinary planet—change above all, in
our relationship with the Divine Feminine. We tread a path which is on the
knife-edge between the conscious integration of a new vision on the one hand,
and the virtual extinction of our species on the other. Which path will we
choose?
[1] See Betty Kovacs, Merchants of Light (Claremont: The Kamlak
Center, 2019)
[2] This loss of the Holy Spirit was repeated at the Council of
Nicaea in 325 CE when the Hebrew feminine noun for the Holy Spirit—ruach—was
translated first into the Greek word pneuma which is genderless, and then into
the Latin spiritus sanctus which is masculine. The Christian Trinity was
rendered entirely masculine and the former feminine gender of the Holy Spirit
was permanently lost to Christianity.
[3] The books of the Old Testament Scholar, Margaret Barker, give
the facts of this story in detail.
[4] Genesis 2 & 3
[5] See Anne Baring, The Dream of the Cosmos, rev. ed. (UK:
Archive Publishing, 2020), chapter 3.
[6] See my talks on Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity
[7] Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (New York: Random House,
1986), p. 95
[8] By this, I mean women who are not taken over by the will to
power.
ABOUT ANNE BARING
Anne Baring b. 1931. MA Oxon. PhD in Wisdom Studies, Ubiquity
University 2018. Jungian Analyst, author and co-author of 7 books including,
with Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image; with
Andrew Harvey, The Mystic Vision and The Divine Feminine; with Dr. Scilla
Elworthy, Soul Power: an Agenda for a Conscious Humanity. Her most recent book,
The Dream of the Cosmos: A Quest for the Soul (2013, updated and reprinted
2020), was awarded the Scientific and Medical Network Book Prize for 2013. The
ground of all her work is a deep interest in the spiritual, mythological,
shamanic, and artistic traditions of different cultures. Her website is devoted
to the affirmation of a new vision of reality and the issues facing us at this
crucial time of choice. www.annebaring.com
After studying sacred
mask traditions in Bali, I was inspired to create a Collection of 35 multi-cultural masks, which I dedicated as “Temple Masks” to the many faces of the worldwide
Divine Feminine. The Collection travelled to communities throughout the U.S.A. in
collaboration with Priestesses, Dancers, Storytellers and Ritualists for over
20 years, bringing the Goddesses to life through the magic of Invocation and
Theatre. The Project was concluded in 2019 with an Exhibit at Her Church in San
Francisco.
I was, indeed, a privilege to collaborate with so many people dedicated to the Return of the Goddess. No artist could ask for more.
