CHAPTER TWO

The Awakening Dream

Everywhere at all times in all cultures and races of which we have record, when the greatest meaning, the highest value of life man called gods or God needed renewal and increase, the process of renewal began through a dream.

I reflected often on the dream of the huge phallic iron tower on the surface of the moon. The Talmud says that a dream not interpreted is like a letter not read. The best we can do is to read the message coming to us from the depths of the soul and ponder its meaning. Over many years of pondering, I realized that this dream was a wake-up call from my soul. But beyond, its personal message, it seemed to hold a wake-up call for humanity. It carried a warning of what could happen to our planet—that it could be rendered as barren and lifeless as the moon. I remembered that one of the early channeled messages received by my mother had warned that our planet could become ‘another orphan wandering in space’ if humanity didn’t change course.
           My dream invited me to explore the imbalance between the masculine and feminine principles in Western civilization and how this imbalance has affected the lives of every one of us. The more I thought about it, the more I saw that the phallic iron structure was an image of what human technology has imposed on nature; it reflected the hubris of the modern mind which believes it can control and exploit the resources of nature and the planet for its own ends. It showed the effects of what can happen as human consciousness becomes cut off from the matrix or depths from which it has emerged—depths symbolized by the moon, ancient symbol of the Feminine. I began to see how losing touch with these depths would inevitably affect our values: how we educate our children; how we practice our science, medicine and psychology; the conduct of government; the formulation of our aims and goals; all our relationships with a wider world.
           Most important of all, the loss of connection with the depths influences our view of reality and the way we live our lives in a personal sense. I began to understand that many of the problems we now face in the field of relationships between nations and cultures, as well as between men and women, were created by ideas and beliefs that were formed centuries, even millennia ago, whose influence has never really been recognized and addressed. I needed to find out what historical influences had led to the erection of that iron tower—why it had come into being. I had no idea where to start but, fortunately, my dreams gave me my direction.
           Three further powerful dreams became the foundation of the second half of my life. In the first dream, I returned to the landscape of my grandmother’s house in the South of France:

           I go to the edge of the deep gorge and stand looking down into it and at the stream rushing through it from the mountains to the sea. Rising out of the shadowy depths of the gorge I see the shape of an enormous cobra-like serpent with seven heads. It continues to rise until these heads, spread out like a great hood, are level with the ledge on which I am standing. I am so terrified of it that I tremble and cover my eyes. When I dare to look again I see that the serpent wants to communicate with me. I signal to it that I am listening. It offers me the choice between staying where I am or climbing a ladder, which I now become aware is behind me. With a deep bow of reverence and obeisance, I indicate that I choose to climb the ladder.

From my travels in the East, I recognized this seven-headed serpent as an image of the great serpent Mucalinda who had formed a canopy over the Buddha as he sat in deep meditation prior to the moment of his awakening. In the many sculptures I had seen in Thailand and elsewhere, the Buddha was often shown seated on the gigantic coils of a cobra whose seven hoods fan out behind him in a magnificent gesture of protection and blessing. Another image I remembered was that of the god Vishnu resting on the great serpent that personified the waters of the abyss.
           This dream shocked me into awareness of instinct as a primary expression of the soul. I understood that this serpent personified the power and wisdom of instinct as well as the power and wisdom of nature. Without actually seeing this archetypal serpent rising out of the gorge, I don’t think I would ever have understood instinct as something so overwhelmingly important and numinous—something that is at the very root of life. Nor would I have been able to assimilate the fact that it might be the mysterious medium through which each one of us is connected to all others and to the life of the planet and, beyond even that, to the life of the cosmos. Even more than this, it helped me to become aware that this gigantic serpent personified the instinctive intelligence active and innate within every aspect of the life we have explored and are currently exploring: active within the whole evolutionary process on this planet and the archetypal patterns or fields which give rise to the specific forms and DNA patterning of different species and, ultimately, to the evolution of consciousness in our species. In a more personal sense, it represented the profound intelligence carried in the cells of the body and specifically, the heart. Moreover, I could clearly see that this instinctive consciousness wanted to communicate with me and was asking something of me.
           Shamanic cultures would have perfectly understood the apparition of the serpent in the sense just described, even though they might not have had the words I have used to describe it. The kind of consciousness they had, described as participation mystique by Levy-Brühl and others gave them a sense of kinship with all creation. It was an instinct for relationship and connection rather than a concept or an idea. People in shamanic cultures knew that the spirit entities they saw in dream and vision manifest and express the deepest wisdom of nature. Serpents spoke to them in their dreams, perhaps warning them of danger or acting as guides to the spirit-world and instructing them in the healing properties of plants and trees.
           I took this dream as a call to climb the ladder of consciousness, to increase my understanding of the soul and become aware of the power of instinct to act as a guide in this work, for it was apparent to me that this great serpent was an image of instinct. I had never before had such a clear image of the creative powers of life – a living presence in all the forms and species of nature – present as well as in the deepest, most archaic level of my own soul. I could have studied the Jungian literature on the unconscious for years and never grasped the reality of this primordial energy if I had not had this dream which offered all that I needed to know in an image of overwhelming power. Nor would I have been able to relate Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious to this image of the innate primordial wisdom of nature. Without actually seeing this gigantic archetypal serpent rising out of the gorge, I don’t think I would have understood the instinct as something so powerfully and overwhelmingly real. It was not an abstract idea that I could investigate at arm’s length, but an awesome, numinous and living Presence, exactly as the sculptors of India and Thailand had portrayed it.
           In a second dream a few years later:

           I approach a tower surrounded by a narrow water-filled moat. I cross the bridge and enter the tower. I find its circular interior filled from floor to ceiling with wonderful books in white and brown vellum with gold or red lettering. The tower has two floors. Hesitantly, I go up to the second by a spiral staircase. At the top of the staircase Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest colleagues and friends is standing, extending her hands to me in welcome.

I understood the tower as an image of the totality of the psyche or soul. Its treasures were being offered to me by a woman who had been a close colleague of Jung’s and had written many books on the feminine principle—books that in the course of my analyses and training, I had read and treasured. I remembered a poem by Rilke which seemed to offer a commentary on this dream:

                                            I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
                                            And I have been circling for a thousand years,
                                            And I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
                                            Or a great song. (trans. Robert Bly)

The Awakening Dream
The third dream was the most awesome dream of my life, the true awakener of my soul:

           I dream that I come round the side of a huge dolmen and enter another world, an utterly strange and barren landscape. It is lit by the brilliant radiance of the full moon. I am searching for someone I love and my longing for him is so great that I have embarked on a journey in search of him. The landscape is transformed from a desert into field after field of brilliant green corn. The moonlight is so bright that it is like daylight and the corn is the colour of an emerald. I float over this emerald sea for many miles, my bare feet skimming the surface of the corn, until I come to the brow of a low hill and hesitate, wondering if I should go further. I decide to go on and come down into a valley on the other side.
           Suddenly, I find that two enormous men have caught me in a gigantic net that stretches the whole width of the valley and are drawing me into the presence of something tremendously powerful and numinous. I am frightened, yet at the same time fascinated. I lie flat on my back on the ground, helplessly enmeshed in the net and look up, half in terror, half in awe. I see the figure of a woman towering above me, filling the entire space between earth and sky. She is naked, with white skin and golden hair and is very beautiful, like Aphrodite. Yet she is not young, but ageless. In the centre of her abdomen is an immense revolving wheel that is also a rose and a labyrinth, like the one I had seen inlaid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral. Awestruck, I gaze up at her, then down at my own body which is exactly like hers, only tiny in relation to it. I too have a revolving wheel but mine is not centred; it is too far to the left. She does not speak but indicates that I am to centre my wheel, like hers.

Visionary dreams like this one cannot be interpreted according to any known system of belief. They have to be held close to the heart and allowed to live so that, over many years, they can act as leaven in the soul. In another, earlier culture I would have worshipped this image as a goddess and perhaps built a temple or shrine to her, but in today’s world, belief and worship did not satisfy me. I wanted to reach the relevance of this dream for the whole of humanity, not just for myself. I needed to know why I had been given this vision. What was its intention? I felt it best not to speak of this dream to anyone, not even my husband. But I did tell my analyst, thinking that she would be able to give me an interpretation of it. To my surprise she said she did not want to comment on it but to let it be, explaining that the danger with such dreams is identification with an archetype and a huge inflation. In time, I would come to understand it and integrate its meaning with my life.
           For years I wondered who she was. Was she Aphrodite? Demeter? Isis? Was she an angelic being of some kind? Was she the personification of nature, of the cosmos? Was this the kind of vision that people in times more open to visionary experience would have had? I knew that in Hellenistic times, in the second century AD, an Egyptian man called Apuleius had had a vision of the goddess Isis, and had recorded the words she spoke to him through the figure of Lucius, hero of his book, The Golden Ass, saying, “I am Nature, the Universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are.”(2)
           I also knew of the famous vision of the philosopher Boethius (AD 480–524) in which the figure of Divine Wisdom (Sophia) had appeared to him in his cell in Pavia and comforted him as he awaited his terrible death on the orders of the barbarian Emperor Theodoric. (3)
           Naked and beautiful, neither young nor old, the goddess who had appeared to me was too pagan a figure for the Christian Mary, yet she was not like Aphrodite or any of the Greek goddesses with whom I was familiar. Finally, I began to question whether she could be a manifestation of the Neo-Platonic image of the Anima Mundi—the Soul of the World or Soul of the Cosmos, first mentioned by Plato in the Timaeus and later by Plotinus in the Enneads. Again and again I returned to wondering about her and how I was to centre my wheel. What did she want of me by sending me such a vision? Why was my wheel too far to the left and how could I centre it? Inspired by her numinous image, I began to explore the images of the goddess and to develop my thoughts about the feminine principle in general. As for the net, I knew that in Indian mythology there was a cosmic net connected with the god Indra but I thought that, in the context of my dream, it might signify the net of material reality in which I was caught like a fish. And the two immense male figures holding it might, I thought, represent the power of the unconscious that was drawing me into the presence of this cosmic being. Whoever they were, they forced me to look upwards to my vision, upwards to the cosmos.

The Goddess
Several years later, when I had embarked on a training program to become a Jungian analyst, I made friends with Jules Cashford, a woman who was one of a group of men and women in London who also were training to become analysts with the Association of Jungian Analysts. Instinctively, I felt drawn to her and, on an impulse one evening, I invited her to come to supper with me. Initially, she seemed doubtful that she could come, but she had a dream about a ruined garden that needed to be restored and in the dream was told to go and see me. She told me about this dream when we met and we began to discuss the garden as an image of the neglected garden of the soul as well as the neglected feminine archetype about which so little was known in our culture. This led to the possibility of our writing a book together about the goddess—originally the Greek goddesses—as the primary image of the feminine archetype. But as we worked on the outline of the book, we realized that we needed to go much further back to the earliest sacred images of the feminine,back to the Neolithic and even the Palaeolithic eras, if we were to discover the foundation of the later Egyptian and Greek goddesses—or even the Virgin Mary. The research for the book drew us further and further into the origins of the sacred image of the goddess, opening avenues we had been unable to envisage at the beginning.
           We were deeply influenced not only by a book called The Great Mother by a Jungian analyst called Erich Neumann, (4) but also by a book called Saving the Appearances by an English philosopher called Owen Barfield. His book divided the evolution of human consciousness into three phases — (1) Original Participation, (2) Separation and (3) Final Participation. (5) This division gave us the tripartite framework for our book. We felt drawn to the earliest beginnings of culture in order to find the genesis of ideas and symbols which eventually developed into all the different myths and images through which people described a numinous reality which transcended their ‘normal’ range of experience. As Jules and I worked together, we realised that not only were we exploring the history of goddesses and gods, we were also exploring the evolution or development of human consciousness through these sacred images. With this new understanding, the larger theme as well as the title of our book began to clarify.

The Shift from Lunar to Solar Mythology
Another remarkable book called The Roots of Civilization by Alexander Marshack opened our eyes to the importance of the moon in Palaeolithic culture and described the earliest lunar notations in Africa, dating to 40,000 BC. (6) When we studied the mythology and history of earlier Mediterranean and Near-Eastern cultures, we found that there was a noticeable shift from lunar to solar imagery in Egypt and Mesopotamia ca. 2000 BC and, some 1500 years later, in Greece. This change of emphasis in mythology was accompanied by a shift of emphasis from feminine to masculine deities that finally resulted in the primacy of a single male deity—the monotheistic transcendent Father God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We realised that this shift had a profound effect on the development of Western civilization and that it marked a specific phase in the evolution of human consciousness—Owen Barfield’s Phase of Separation. We discovered that the imagery of the divine feminine had been repressed or excluded by the three Abrahamic religions and that this repression was clearly linked to the shift of emphasis in the image of deity from a Great Mother to a Great Father.
           Gradually, as with the unfolding of the petals of a rose, Jules and I discovered that behind the image of the rose stood the figure of Mary, and behind her that of Sophia or Hokhmah, the Holy Spirit of Wisdom who speaks so eloquently in the Book of Proverbs, as well as in the Book of Ben Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) in the Apocrypha. We read the ground-breaking book written by the American theologian Elaine Pagels which described how the feminine imagery of God was alive and flourishing in the Gnostic groups of early Christianity. (7)
           Later, we read the actual Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. (8) But, we wondered, did the Gnostic imagery and mythology associated with the divine feminine appear out of nowhere, or did they develop from older images of the Bronze Age goddesses of Egypt and Mesopotamia and, even further back, from the Great Mother of the Neolithic era?

The Lost Images of the Feminine
For many years we felt like archaeologists painstakingly uncovering a long-buried mosaic, gathering together fragments of an image and a mythology buried beneath the cultural deposits of thousands of years and many different cultures. At first we couldn’t see the picture clearly. We simply felt attracted to different images and ideas. The researches of Jung and Erich Neumann had already brought together many of the lost images of the feminine archetype. However, the extraordinary research of the archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas, whose earliest book was published in 1974, identified many new images of the goddess from an unknown and remarkable European civilization that she called the Civilization of Old Europe and dated to the seventh millennium BC. (9) We were drawn as well to the magisterial work of the mythologist Joseph Campbell and to that of the historian of culture, Mircea Eliade, both of whom enlarged our understanding of mythology and its influence on the formation and growth of civilization. (10) As the pieces of this mosaic began to fit together, a theme of great beauty and complexity slowly revealed itself to us, but also a story of the loss, repression and distortion of a priceless legacy from the past. As we fitted the fragments of images and texts together, this process of discovery became immensely exciting, even numinous to us.
           We wanted to find the earliest images which were of supreme importance to humanity. When, with the help of Joseph Campbell’s book, The Way of the Animal Powers 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. (11) As we traced the evolution and many transformations of this image from 25,000 BC to the present day, we began to understand that this feminine image in its many forms stood for a totally different perspective on life, one that has been lost, buried, hidden for millennia. In the course of our research, we discovered such surprising similarities and parallels in the goddess myths of apparently unrelated eras and cultures that we concluded that there had been a continuous transmission of images throughout some twenty-five thousand years or even longer (see note 11).
           This continuity was so striking that we felt entitled to talk of ‘the Myth of the Goddess,’ since the underlying vision expressed in all the variety of goddess images was constant: the vision of the whole of life as a living unity. More specifically, we realized that the image of the Mother Goddess inspired and focused a perception of the universe as an organic, sacred and indivisible whole in which humanity, the earth and all life on earth participated as ‘her children’. Everything was woven together in one cosmic web: all orders of manifest and unmanifest life were related, because all shared in the sanctity of the original source. In our modern secular culture, this mythic image of the indivisible unity of earth and cosmos had vanished from sight. It was clear to me by this time that the idea of the whole cosmos as an entity with consciousness or soul in which all life participates derives directly from the image of the Great Mother.
           What had happened to the image of the goddess? Why and when did it begin to disappear, and how could we understand the implications of this loss? Since mythic images are part of a great meta-narrative which implicitly governs a culture, what did this tell us about a particular culture—such as our modern Western one—that either did not have, or did not acknowledge a mythic image of the divine feminine? It began to seem no coincidence that our modern secular culture is one that has, above all others, desacralized and exploited nature. The earth is no longer experienced as a living and sacred entity as in earlier times. The earth is no longer a ‘Thou’ but an ‘it’. We can abuse, desecrate and pollute it without any feeling of responsibility, regret or guilt. And, we realized, we were living in a time when the whole body of the earth is threatened by one species — our own — in a way unique in the history of the planet.
           It soon became clear to us that, from Babylonian mythology onwards (ca. 2000 BC), the goddess became almost exclusively associated with nature as a chaotic force to be mastered, whereas the god assumed the role of creating or ordering nature from a ‘place’ that was outside or beyond it. Although sometimes defined as omnipresent, spirit gradually came to be defined as something beyond the world, something 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 the Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterranean area, the Middle-East, India and China—was lost, and with it the vital sense of participation in the cosmic life of an invisible entity imagined as a containing, connecting maternal being.

The Separation from Nature
Since this separation between nature and spirit and between female and male deities had not previously existed we felt that it could be viewed within the context of the evolution of human consciousness, which involved a progressive withdrawal from a sense of participation in the life of nature. While this had resulted in an increasing autonomy for human consciousness, it had also resulted in a growing sense of separation from the natural world and the conviction that man had the right to master and control nature for his own benefit. Hence the belief, enshrined in the Book of Genesis, that man has been given ‘dominion’ over nature. (Gen. 2) In The Myth of the Goddess, we summed up this primary change of consciousness: “If the relation to nature as the Mother is one of identity, and the relation to nature from the Father is one of dissociation, then the movement from Mother to Father symbolizes an ever-increasing separation from a state of containment in nature, experienced no longer as nurturing to life but as stifling to growth.”(12)
           As our collaboration deepened, Jules and I became ‘one mind with two outlets’ as I once jokingly referred to our relationship. Often we telephoned each other to report on a significant detail we had found, only to discover that the other had come across that very same idea or piece of evidence at almost the same time on the same day. One particular instance stood out: on the same day we had each found out that the Greeks had a beautiful image to describe how the individual soul, which they called bios, hangs from the great necklace of Being, which they called Zoë. Almost simultaneously, we tried to telephone each other to communicate our excitement at this discovery.
           What we discovered through our researches was a revelation to us—the continuity of the image and mythology of the goddess through many centuries and civilizations. We felt we were reassembling the pieces of a dismembered corpse that could be brought back to life, rather as Isis, in the great Bronze Age Egyptian myth, had gathered the scattered fragments of the body of Osiris and restored him to life. What the goddess had done for the masculine archetype, we were doing for the feminine one. We realised that the goddess personified a vision of life that had been lost—the vision of a living, intelligent, conscious cosmos in which all aspects of life were related to each other.

A Lost Vision of Reality
As we worked, we felt supported by something — almost by Someone — beyond either of us. Like other women who were simultaneously discovering what had been lost, we felt the urgency of the need to tell the story of the neglected goddess and to explain why she had been allowed so little place in patriarchal culture. We wanted to know why and when nature had been so emptied of spirit that a great split had developed between them; why the feminine dimension of the divine was missing in the Christian image of God; why in the patriarchal religions, deity had been formulated in the image of a Father rather than a Mother and a Father and finally, why the Holy Spirit, the third aspect of the Trinity in Christian doctrine had been defined as male when, in the magnificent passages in the Apocrypha, it was obvious that a female voice is speaking as the Holy Spirit of Wisdom. We felt it was imperative to discover the reasons why something so vitally important to the balance of Western civilization as a whole had been lost. Most important of all, we felt that the image of the goddess carried a vision of reality that needed to be recovered; a vision that had been neglected or overridden for centuries and that had once connected us not only with the life of the earth but with the life of the cosmos.
           Why did we feel that this quest for the lost feminine dimension of the divine was so important? Because we felt that it might offer an explanation of how our present culture had come to regard nature as something that could be rapaciously exploited and manipulated to the advantage of our human species without any awareness of the effect this attitude had on the balance of life or on the organism of planetary life. It would also help us to understand the roots of woman’s long subjugation, why her voice had been effectively written out of the history of Western and indeed, world civilization, why she had suffered so much oppression in patriarchal culture for so many centuries. We had absolutely no idea when we started of the chain of misogynistic ideas which had developed from the description of Eve’s role in the Biblical Myth of the Fall and from the influential legacy of the writings of Plato as well as those of the early Christian Fathers.
           Ten years of research and writing led ultimately to the publication in 1991 of The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. The book had taken us so long to write because we were at first training to be, then working as analysts and had little time or energy to spare. It led to the creation of a deep and lasting friendship between us, as if we had been drawn to each other to do this work which neither one of us could have accomplished on our own. We were determined that our book should include the images of the goddesses as well as her many myths and stories and gathered 450 illustrations, insisting that our publisher should place them in the context of the specific text that described them. Happily, this was agreed.
           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 life that had been identified with the feminine, including, most importantly, the soul, nature and matter. As the feminine principle, personified by the goddess, came to be rejected or downgraded in relation to the masculine one, personified by the god, so spirit and nature were sundered. As this divisive process intensified, conscious mind and instinctive soul, head and heart, became increasingly polarized in human consciousness, leading ultimately to the spiritual, political and ecological crisis of the present time.
           We felt that our book had a message for our time because it showed how the loss of the feminine dimension of the divine had led to the triple loss of respect for nature, matter and woman, and how the ecological crisis of our times could be directly traced to the denigration of the feminine in the philosophy, theology and mythology of the last four millennia. In the third section of the book, we focused on the image of the sacred marriage of spirit and nature—asking that what had been separated over the course of these millennia be reunited.

The Insights of Other Women
While we had been working on our book, other women in America and Canada were following similar lines of research, publishing the fruits of their quest to discover what had happened to the goddess, what the cultures over which she presided were like and what meaning and significance her image held for modern woman. Many books began to appear, the most important perhaps being Elaine Pagel’s book The Gnostic Gospels (13) and Riane Eisler’s The Chalice and the Blade. (14) While Pagel’s book recovered the lost Christian images of the Feminine that had been honoured in the early Gnostic communities and miraculously restored through the discoveries made at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, Eisler’s book, published shortly before ours, was a formidable indictment of patriarchal culture and an endorsement of the need for a change in consciousness. Some of the writers, like Pagels and Rosemary Ruether, were theologians. Others, like Jean Shinoda Bolen and Marion Woodman, were Jungian analysts. The image of the Black Madonna held a numinous meaning for some of them, particularly for Woodman, working as an analyst in Toronto. While I mention here the books of a few individual women, there were many other books that I read with deep interest and gratitude because each, in its own way, strengthened and confirmed my own quest for a deeper understanding of the Feminine. Sylvia Brinton Perera’s Descent to the Goddess, published in 1981, stressed the need for modern woman to make the descent into the underworld of the soul, there to experience and redeem the powerful instinctual feelings that had been denied expression for so many centuries in a patriarchal culture. In the introduction to her book she wrote these memorable words:

 The return to the goddess, for renewal in a feminine source-ground and spirit, is a vitally important aspect of modern woman’s quest for wholeness. We women who have succeeded in the world are usually “daughters of the father” – that is, well adapted to a masculine-oriented society – and have repudiated our own full feminine instincts and energy patterns, just as the culture has maimed or derogated most of them. We need to return to and redeem what the patriarchy has often seen only as a dangerous threat and called terrible mother, dragon, or witch...This inner connection is an initiation essential for most modern women in the Western world; without it we are not whole. This process requires both a sacrifice of our identity as spiritual daughters of the patriarchy and a descent into the spirit of the goddess, because so much of the power and passion of the feminine has been dormant in the underworld — in exile for five thousand years. (15)

Turning towards the World
While I felt this movement to restore the feminine was very important, my attention also was drawn to what was happening in the world and to awareness of the suffering of people caught up in the conflict developing in the former Yugoslavia in 1992. Deeply distressed by the helpless suffering of these people, I wrote a book for children, basing it on the theme of The Conference of the Birds, a poetic Sufi text by the twelfth century Persian mystic, Farid ud-Din Attar. I had always loved this story and, although the original was written for those who were treading a spiritual path, it seemed possible to retell it for modern children and to place it in the context of the need for a fundamental change in our relationship with the earth if we were ever to grow beyond the conflicts that were devastating so many people’s lives, and to become aware of ourselves as inhabitants of the planet, rather than of a particular national, religious or ethnic group. This would offer a new image of spirituality. The book was published in 1993 with the title The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time.
           Then, I was drawn in another direction through a close friendship with Andrew Harvey whose books I greatly admired. (16) We were asked by an English publisher (Godsfield Press) to write two books together: The Mystic Vision (1995) and The Divine Feminine (1996). Once again, I found myself immersed in material I had known and loved many years ago, returning to the mystical literature of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Sufism that I had encountered on my two journeys to the East but adding to it the experience of the Christian mystics. Together, we selected passages from the mystical traditions of all cultures, including some of the sayings of the shamanic Indigenous Peoples, such as the American Indians and the Kogis living in the remote mountains of Columbia.
          I steeped myself in these writings, my own thoughts clarifying as I struggled to articulate the essence of what the mystics have tried to communicate to us. Their message, I felt, could be summed up in these words:

The mystics and sages of all times and cultures have tried to reveal to us what they have discovered: that we are in the Divine Ground like a fish in the sea, or a bird in the air, and have tried to help us dissolve the illusion of our separate existence so that we would experience ourselves here and now, in this dimension, as what we truly are—Divine Being.

The Divine Feminine
The second book (The Divine Feminine) took me deep into the sacred literature and imagery of the feminine aspect of the divine in different religious traditions. Although I had learned a great deal in the research for The Myth of the Goddess, it seemed as if I was now asked to broaden my research to include other cultures. I began to understand the feminine archetype or principle in a deeper sense, no longer as the goddess alone but as what the goddess personified: an immense matrix or web of hidden relationships through which spirit and nature, the invisible and the visible dimensions of the life of the cosmos, were connected with each other. I began to see that something absolutely vital had been lost in religious teaching: the concept of the cosmic dimension of soul as an unrecognised order of reality which binds together all aspects of life, both visible and invisible. I also saw that this disastrous loss in the sphere of religion had been transmitted to science which did not recognize the unity and interconnectedness of the aspects of life it was exploring, let alone their sacredness.
           In 1995, while researching material for The Divine Feminine, I had another dream which at first seemed unremarkable,

           I am driving to a College in Oxford University to hear a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. On the back seat of the car there is a battered old-fashioned brown leather suitcase—the kind that years ago used to be called a ‘revelation suitcase’ because it could expand to a greater capacity than was at first apparent.

Although I wrote it down, I didn’t pay much attention to this premonitory dream. However, shortly afterwards, while writing a chapter on the image of the Shekinah in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, I suddenly understood who the goddess of my vision was. She personified what the kabbalists named the feminine face of God, the wisdom and glory and radiant immanence of the divine ground concealed beneath and within the forms of life. The Shekinah literally means the ‘Presence of God in the world’. Then I remembered the dream about the battered ‘revelation’ suitcase on the back seat of my car. Although I had written about the Shekinah in The Myth of the Goddess, drawing on the insights of the great Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem, I had not really grasped the full implications of what she stood for. Now I realized in a flash of illumination that the Shekinah offers the most complete image of the feminine aspect of spirit to have survived from the ancient past. She restores the missing connective cosmology of the soul that the three major patriarchal religions, in their repudiation of a feminine dimension of the divine, had lost. I began to sense that the feminine being who had revealed herself to me in such powerful imagery personified the soul as a cosmic entity as well as an invisible dimension of reality. I experienced this realization as a revelation. It was like discovering water in the desert. So many fragments of knowledge, so many sacred texts from many cultures, began to fall into place and, in spite of all the research I had done for The Myth of the Goddess, I began to look much more deeply into the relationship between the image of the goddess and the idea of cosmic soul.
           The wider, cosmic meaning of the word ‘soul’ became intensely real, intensely alive. With a sense of shock, I understood why, from this new perspective, life is utterly sacred. I realized that the image of the Shekinah personifies the gossamer-fine web or field of relationships that is the invisible ground of all that we call life. Science may study the different aspects of this web of life under different headings such as cosmology, biology and micro-physics, but an image like the Shekinah unifies this diversity and, above all, invites relationship with it as something that is alive, conscious and present as the very ground of our own consciousness. While the image of the Virgin Mary has to some extent played this role for millions of Catholic and Orthodox Christians over the centuries, she was not an aspect of the god-head and could never, therefore, represent the innate divinity and interconnectedness of life. Nor could she represent the hidden dimension of the cosmic web of life or the sacredness of nature. Now I understood why the great Indian sage, Sri Aurobindo, had written in his masterwork, The Life Divine: “If it be true, that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.”(17)
           Then I remembered a beautiful passage from a Hasidic rabbi, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, that I had found while compiling The Mystic Vision: “As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full. And he who can draw it away from before his eyes as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds.”(18)
           I knew now that my visionary dream as well as my long quest to hold on to the memory of the earliest channeled messages had led me to the discovery of the unrecognized divinity of life on this planet, as well as to the existence of an invisible world or dimension of reality in which all life participated, a cosmos of relationships, a magnificent, awe-inspiring web of life.
           The discovery of the image of the Shekinah was so deeply meaningful — a revelation even — because here, clear as crystal, was the lost feminine imagery of God as well as the Holy Spirit. Because the tradition of Kabbalah makes the association between the feminine aspect of the god-head, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit, it showed me how Christianity, in its definition of the Holy Spirit as the Third Person of a male Trinity, had lost the ancient and connective mythology of spirit as a great web of life and, most importantly, the recognition that the divine is present in every blade of grass, every cell of our bodies, that it is every blade of grass, every cell of our bodies. This understanding, so intrinsic a part of the teaching of the Vedic seers of India as well as those of Kabbalah, is what we have lost and what we need to recover now.

Soul and Spirit as the Divine Ground
I felt as if I were being given a glimpse of the great shining of the inner worlds, worlds normally veiled from our sight. I knew I was rediscovering something that seemed familiar to me, something intensely exciting which offered the metaphysical counterpart of the most advanced scientific discoveries of our time. In the form of this powerful and numinous image, I was given an explanation of why, in Blake’s words, “Everything That Lives Is Holy.” I understood that the mystical tradition of Kabbalah offers us one of the major missing links between the participatory experience of the great lunar cultures of the Bronze Age and our own age, whose difference I will explore in later chapters. What we have lost and what this extraordinary tradition has preserved for us is the image of a sacred earth as well as an unseen web of relationships connecting the life of our planet with the life of the cosmos. It was clear to me that our own soul, our own consciousness, belongs to this greater life as child to parent: son to father or daughter to mother. My image of the soul spun one hundred and eighty degrees as I realized that the soul is not in us. We are in the soul.
           But more than this: we are of the nature and substance of soul, the nature and substance of spirit. It seemed to me that spirit and soul are not really different in kind or substance but two names or two aspects, one masculine, one feminine, of the same invisible dimension that is the ground, root or source of the physical world, whose life infuses, animates and sustains the whole cosmos. This life is not only innate in every atom of our being but we are participants in its life, however unconscious of this fact we may be. Suddenly, the soul became intensely real, intensely alive to me. I experienced the feminine being I had seen in my dream as a living presence with whom I could communicate, to whom I could relate. Lying at her feet, gazing up at her, I realized that I was microcosm in relation to her as macrocosm.
           I understood then that the tremendous being of my dream was indeed she whom Plato and Plotinus in their concept of psuche tou cosmou and Anima Mundi had named the soul of the cosmos or soul of the world. It was she who had appeared in Hellenistic times to Apuleius in Egypt as the goddess Isis, and in later Christian times as Sophia or Divine Wisdom to the philosopher Boethius, as we had described it in The Myth of the Goddess (pp. 634–5). Awaiting his death, he had written his famous Consolation of Philosophy, immortalizing the words she had spoken to him, words that, centuries later, were to inspire Charlemagne. (19) This same figure of the World or Cosmic Soul can be identified with the voice of Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit, who speaks so eloquently in the Book of Proverbs and the Wisdom Books of the Apocrypha as well as in the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. I wondered if it was this feminine cosmic presence “fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army of banners” who speaks in The Song of Songs saying, “I am black but beautiful O ye daughters of Jerusalem…I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valleys.” (2:1). To me, the imagery of the Shekinah offered a startlingly complete description of the Soul of the Cosmos.

Notes:

1. Jung, C. G. CW14 (1963) Mysterium Coniunctionis, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., London, par. 488
2. Apuleius (1950) The Golden Ass, Penguin Books Ltd.
3. Boethius (1969) The Consolation of Philosophy, trs. E.V. Watts, Penguin Books Ltd.
4. Neumann, Erich (1955), The Great Mother, An Analysis of the Archetype, Pantheon Books Inc., New York
5. Barfield, Owen (1988) Saving the Appearances, A Study in Idolatry, Second Edition, the Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn. USA.
6. Marshack, Alexander (1972) The Roots of Civilization, Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd., London
7. Pagels, Elaine (1980) The Gnostic Gospels, Weidenfeld and Nicholson Ltd., London
8. Nag Hammadi Library (1977) ed. James M. Robinson, E.J. Brill, Leiden
9. Gimbutas, Marija (1974) The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 6500–3500 BC, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London
                                 (1989) The Language of the Goddess, Harper & Row, San Francisco.
An exhibition called The Civilization of Old Europe (2010) in New York, Zurich and Oxford  has shown many  of the magnificent artefacts that Gimbutas described, which have survived from 5000-3500 BC and are now housed in the museums of Romania and Bulgaria.
10. Campbell, Joseph (1958-68) The Masks of God, Vol. 1-1V, Secker & Warburg Ltd., London
11. Campbell (1984) The Way of the Animal Powers, Times Books Ltd., London. In 2008, the tiny figure of a woman was found in a cave in Germany – the oldest known sculpture of a human figure – dated to 35-40,000 BC.  
12. Baring, Anne & Cashford, Jules (1993) The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image Penguin Arkana p. 661
13. Pagels
14. Eisler, Riane (1988) The Chalice and the Blade, Harper & Row, San Francisco
15. Perera, Sylvia Brinton (1981) Descent to the Goddess, Inner City Books, Toronto
16. Harvey, Andrew (1991) Hidden Journey, Bloomsbury Publishing Ltd., London
17. Aurobindo, Sri (1990) The Life Divine, Lotus Light Publications, Wilmot WI, p.4
18. Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1981), from Edward Hoffman, The Way of Splendor: Jewish Mysticism and Modern Psychology, Shambala, Boulder, Colorado, p.117
19. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy

         ------ ------