Goddess For
Our Times:
The Social, Psychological and Spiritual Relevance
of the Feminine Aspect of Divinity
Jessica North - O’Connell
This essay was originally prepared as part of a
panel presentation
for the “Goddesses” Art Exhibit,
For me the Goddess represents the multitudinous aspects of
woman and the essence of the Feminine expression of the larger universe, which
is mirrored within both women and men. She is the affirmation of our inherent
creativity and mother of the manifest realms, the word - or logos - made visible. We are her issue
and all that we know, perceive and suspect about the nature of reality is the
evidence of her existence, for she is immanent--that is, pervading all creation.
Hold the earth’s soil in you hands, hug a child or loved one, gaze up in wonder
at the sky, sniff the air, feel the warmth of the sun or passion coursing
through your body, taste a cool refreshing glass of water, regard your own
image in a mirror--and you have direct experience of the Goddess. Likewise, be
moved by the pain of another, feel your own anguish, suffering, loss or grief
and these also confirm her existence, for she is the sum total of the human
condition as well as our inestimable potential. Above all, the nature of the
Goddess is cyclic as well as all-inclusive.
The re-awakening of Goddess consciousness as we are
currently experiencing it is happening at a time of humanity’s extreme need to
re-emphasize and re-integrate the feminine and maternal qualities of human
nature. While some cultures have never wholly abandoned their awareness of the
Divine Feminine, all patriarchal or sky-god religions, (the predominant
religions of the so-called “civilized world”), have sought to subdue and ultimately
to eradicate the older Goddess or earth-based traditions, using methods as
subtle as appropriation and propaganda and as brutal as torture, dismemberment
and ultimately death by means as diverse as mass genocide and individual
immolation. Modern psychology has indicated that aspects of our humanity which
we refuse to acknowledge or which we suppress, in this case represented by
awareness of and reverence for the immanent Divine Feminine, will manifest
nonetheless, often in a perverted form. The history with which most of us were
raised, of an omnipotent ever-existing, wrathful, vengeance-seeking male
deity--evidently hostile toward his human creations, evolving into a being who
can only be approached through a sacrificial intermediary, also male, both of
whom emphasize beyond the shadow of a doubt our separateness and alienation
from the Divine--is one illustration of this syndrome.
Our collective experience of soul loss, spiritual
deprivation and the devaluing of all life resultant from the devaluing of women
in general, arises directly from the suppression of the holistic image which
the Goddess represents, and though many no longer hold sacred even the concept
of an omnipotent male sky-being, human nature still seeks to uphold a force
which it deems greater than itself. For
many in this culture that force manifests itself as the drive to acquire money
and material goods, at whatever cost to the self, humanity at large, the
environment, or the planet herself. As the awareness of the Divine Feminine has
been swallowed up by her progeny and hence his ideologists, (for indeed it is
always the female who births the male), so does her suppressed shadow self, via
our negation, threaten to indiscriminately devour our very existence. When we
do not observe and honor her immanence--the divine feminine presence which we
embody--our innate, uniquely human sense is disrupted, rendering our lives
seemingly senseless or devoid of meaning, and we are unable to access the
profound state of ecstasy which is our birthright and our calling. (Ecstasy
means “movement out of stagnation”).
As we collectively begin to move beyond such a limited and
painful self-identification, it is natural to gravitate toward a re-integration
of those aspects of the self which we have suppressed or attempted to disown.
As we re-access our humanity, we become capable once again of activating our
creative potential. This is a primary function of the returning Goddess
consciousness.
We cannot underestimate the importance of the Goddess for
women, especially for those of us who live in male-dominant rather than
egalitarian or matrilineal societies. In
the words of Gynne Stern, “all over the world, the female was seen and still is
seen as the fundamental spiritual originator of all life, just as woman is
known as the biological originator of the human baby.” With this knowledge
genetically-encoded, women are struggling to regain our rightful position in
our respective cultures. As we embrace Goddess religions and ideologies, and
re-acquaint ourselves with her many guises, we are able to re-affirm for
ourselves our own myriad aspects and expressions--some of them uniquely
female--and to then facilitate the enlightenment of our brothers, thus also
enabling them access to their own inner feminine selves and the implications
thereof.
One such tool of education is Art. Being the daughter of a
visual artist and intimately involved with the arts myself, I consider Art to
be the mediating language of the soul, and its purpose that of informing,
inspiring, exploring and celebrating the manifest realms of which humanity is a
part. Through the ages, the Goddess as muse has inspired us to tap the larger
body of our creative potential. Art can also be a form of therapy for its
originator, depending upon how deeply the artist is moved to explore her or his
own inner landscapes. The artist may also assume the role of psychic messenger
by depicting for us configurations of our collective soul. And, even reaching back into pre-history, Art
has been an expression of humanity’s recognition and reverence of the Divine or
sacred presence. One of the oldest-known baked clay figurines of European origin
dates back 25,000 years and is readily identified as a full female figure. There
are many such figurines from the ancient world now gracing the interiors of our
museums. These Mother Goddesses or Earth Goddesses are our legacy from times
little-known and long forgotten, except that the Divine Feminine presence
represented in human form is apparent. Many of these artifacts are explicit in
their sexuality, honoring the gateway to physical life and celebrating our
fertility--the fertility of woman as well as Mother Nature. Many of the
figurines show female forms combined with animal features--the body of a woman
with a bird’s head, for example, or like the mysterious sphinx, the body of an
animal with the head of a woman. If I were to make no other comment on this
phenomenon, I would have to say that the relationship of humanity to the rest
of the natural world is implicitly stated in these artifacts: all Nature is
one.
Far fewer in number, though no less significant, are the
representations of the masculine principle, usually as an erect phallus,
sometimes incorporated into a single figurine which also has female features. The
rudiments of what later grew into the more sophisticated mythologies of
resurrection may well have arisen (no pun intended) from our predecessors
observing the cyclic rise and fall of the phallus!
Archeologists have also unearthed figurines of bull-men and
goat-men dating back to between 5,000 and 4,500
The Goddess, because of her immanence, also has a
pronounced identification with animals, they being representative of her
various aspects: the goose, the owl, the hare, the serpent, the sow, the bee,
the cow, the dove, the lynx, the bear, the frog, the spider, the butterfly, the
mare, the fish, the vixen, the eagle, the peacock, are but some of her icons
and totems. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for serpent also means Goddess.
The cow jumping over the moon in the nursery rhyme is an allegory for the
Goddess’s lunar aspect, and Mother Goose herself is none other than one of the
oldest images of the Earth Mother. Many cultures recognize the sow as
representative of the Goddess’s fertility and generosity. The Goddess’s affiliation
with the non-human aspects of nature does not end here, for she is also
depicted via flowers and many other forms of vegetation. And her reputation
with regard to the forces of nature is, of course, legendary.
The Goddess is immanent and because of this our highest
acknowledgement and celebration of her must of necessity be the acknowledgement
and celebration of ourselves, for this is the avenue through which our healing
and ultimate enlightenment will occur. For as Doreen Valiente’s Charge of the Goddess states: “let my worship be in the heart that rejoices,
for behold-- all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.”
BIO: Jessica
North-O'Connell is a founding Priestess of