CHAPTER NINE

The Resurgence of the Feminine
          

The world will be saved by western women

                                                                            — His Holiness the Dalai Lama (Vancouver 2009)

If ever the world sees a time when women shall come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a power such as the world has never known

                                                                            — Matthew Arnold

I can see as clear as daylight that the hour is coming when women will lead humanity to a higher evolution

                                                                                    — Hazrat Inayat Khan                 

A drawing by Henry Moore that he painted at the darkest time of the Second World War, shows a group of people gazing up at a huge shrouded figure, their smallness dwarfed by its towering height. Beneath the shroud and the ropes which hold it in place is a feminine shape. This painting suggests that a new image of spirit, or perhaps a long-lost one, was stirring to life in the collective soul of humanity, waiting to be unveiled, waiting to be recognized and received by us. Henry Moore's greatest sculptures have the same feminine impress. His “shelter” drawings take us back to the maternal womb hidden beneath the earth—the cave-like underground passages where we sought sanctuary as bombs rained death upon our cities. Many of his sculptures and drawings focus on the image of mother and child or the monumental figure of woman. His work points to the resurgence of the feminine archetype in the human soul.
           Ever since I had the visionary dream of the cosmic woman I have wondered what her message was. Why did such an image appear to me and what was it asking of me? What, in its deepest sense, does the word Feminine mean? As I am defining it in this book it does not refer to the female sexual attractiveness that is so promoted in today’s world, nor to the qualities of caring and gentleness usually, though not exclusively identified with women, nor to the empowerment of women in a man’s world. The recovery of the feminine principle is the key to the transformation of our world culture from decay and disintegration and increasing regression into uniformity, banality and brutality, into something longed for and extraordinary. To me the word “Feminine” stands for a totally different way of relating to life, a totally different worldview or paradigm of reality and for the feeling values which might give rise to and be confirmed by that worldview. It describes the archetypal principle of relationship and interconnection, expressed as the great web of life that connects each one of us to all others and to the life around us. It stands for the values of the heart and the recognition that life on this planet is sacred and that the planet itself and all the variety of species it embraces is something to be cherished and protected by us rather than exploited for the benefit of our species alone. These feeling values have for millennia been silently carried by woman who has consistently cared for the life she has brought forth as well as by men who have fought for justice and freedom against every kind of injustice and oppression.
           For centuries, like the Sleeping Beauty, the Feminine has been awaiting recognition and rescue. Without the guidance and wisdom of the Feminine, without going in search of the values it represents and opening our heart to its subtle guidance, we cannot understand the purpose of our presence on this planet, nor will we be able to disempower the unconscious atavistic tendencies which draw us ever closer to the destruction of our habitat and therefore to self-annihilation.
           The theme of the lost Feminine Value weaves like a golden thread through the mythology, poetry and literature of Western civilisation, waiting to be redeemed at this present time when so much is at stake. The image of the Feminine, so essential a part of the poetic vision of the creative genius of the West, is first found in Homer’s portrayal of Odysseus' long journey back to his faithful and long-suffering wife, Penelope. In the Middle Ages, we can follow the resurgence of the Feminine in the many stories of the Grail Quest and the lyrical poems of the troubadours. We can discover it in the culture of the Cathars in south-western France, in the great pilgrimages to the shrines of the Black Madonna and in the Courts of Love set up by Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter Marie in the twelfth century. Between 1150 and 1250 we know the names of some two hundred poets of whom twenty were women. What these poets celebrated was not only the beauty and intelligence of woman but the values enshrined in a new chivalrous code which challenged the misogynistic view of woman propagated by the Catholic Church and the brutal values which governed the world of that time. We find the Feminine celebrated in Dante’s great allegory, The Divine Comedy, personified by Beatrice who becomes his inspiration and guide to the highest spiritual realities. We find it brilliantly portrayed by Shakespeare in the figure of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, to mention only one of his plays. But this strong cultural awakening died in the brutality of the Crusades, the devastating impact of the Black Death and the suffering created by centuries of religious wars and persecutions which ravaged Europe and destroyed the potential of the Feminine to transform western civilization.
           Now, at the dawn of a new millennium, the long repressed feminine principle is rising to meet the masculine one in response to a deep soul impulse to balance and marry these archetypal patterns of energy within ourselves and within our culture. Educated and articulate, women everywhere are awakening to a new role as advocates of justice for their gender and also of the emerging values which are so desperately needed. New worldwide organisations that bring women together are being founded (www.gatherthewomen.org.)
           Dimly glimpsed through the veil of the superficial focus of our culture, the Feminine is awakening. More specifically, the soul of the world is awakening. Like the magma of the earth’s molten core, the Feminine has been pushing up from below the level of our conscious lives until at last it is manifesting as a call for radical change in the way we perceive and live life, urging us to reconnect with nature, soul and cosmos and restore to wholeness what has been fragmented during the millennia of the solar era. As a result, our values and our understanding of ourselves are changing. Millions of individuals on every continent are beginning to recover the lost sense of connection with a sacred earth. The challenge of climate change is accelerating this process. The resurgence of the Feminine invites a new planetary consciousness where the deepest instincts in both men and women — compassion, focused intelligence and a desire to heal and make whole — are able to find expression in ways that can best be described as devotion to planetary life: not to a God or Goddess, not to a new ideology or religion, but to the planet itself and the vast variety of life it embraces.
           Christopher Bache, in his book, Dark Night, Early Dawn, describes this powerful new soul-impulse:

The great difficulty I have is in describing the enormity of what it being birthed. The true focus of this creative process is not individuals but all humanity. It is actually trying to reawaken the entire species. What is emerging is a consciousness of unprecedented proportions, the entire human species integrated into a unified field of awareness. The species reconnected with its Fundamental Nature. Our thoughts tuned to Source Consciousness. (2)

           This new phase in the story of our species could herald an evolutionary advance: we may enter into a conscious relationship and partnership with life, seeking not to control and dominate nature but to serve and protect it with insight, compassion and wisdom. Where are we to look for the specific signs of this awakening?
           Like a multi-faceted diamond, there are many aspects to the emerging influence of the Feminine. All are contributing to the healing of the long-standing dissociation between spirit and nature during the solar age and to the restoration of the sense of the unity and interconnectedness of life. Each is intrinsic to a psychic impulse which might be called the recovery of the soul — an evolutionary impulse arising from the very heart of humanity. I mean recovery in two senses. First, the sense of something that was ailing, diminished or neglected being restored to health. Secondly, the sense of something of great value that was lost and obscured being recovered. People fear change and it is to be expected that this impulse for recovery will be fiercely resisted because entrenched beliefs and habits of behavior are so deeply established. The process of recovery is, for the most part, carried by individuals working in relative obscurity but who are now, thanks to the Internet, increasingly in touch with each other. One example of the power of collective protest is carried by an organization like Avaaz which mobilises hundreds of thousands, even millions of individuals to support specific petitions put to world leaders (www.avaaz.org).

The Awakening of a Sense of Responsibility towards the Earth
Looking back over the last fifty years, there were specific signs which contributed to this change of consciousness. One of the most important of these was the astronauts’ journey to the moon in 1969 and the first amazing view of the earth seen from space. The very sight of the earth seen from this distance changed our relationship with it. The fact that it was the moon that was being explored — age-old symbol of the goddess and the feminine principle — was in itself significant. For the three billion or so inhabitants of earth at that time, it was a deeply moving and awesome experience to see our home in the cosmos for the first time. It seemed so miraculously beautiful, so precious and so vulnerable. Love of this blue planet awoke in our hearts. Dr. Edgar Mitchell, on his way back from the moon, and gazing at the distant earth, said “My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity” and wrote this:

What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of the universal connectedness. I actually felt what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me. And there was the sense that our presence as space travelers, and the existence of the universe itself, was not accidental but that there was an intelligent process at work. I perceived the universe as in some way conscious. The thought was so large it seemed at the time inexpressible, and to a large degree it still is. Perhaps all I have gained is a greater sense of understanding and perhaps a more articulate means of expressing it. But even in the midst of epiphany I did not attach mystical or otherworldly origin to the phenomenon. Rather, I thought it curious and exciting that the brain could spontaneously reorganize information to produce such a fantastically strange experience. (3)

           Later, he remembered that

…the awe-inspiring beauty of the cosmos suddenly overcame me. While still aware of the separateness of my existence, my mind was flooded with an intuitive knowing that everything is interconnected—that this magnificent universe is a harmonious, directed, purposeful whole. And that we humans, both as individuals and as a species, are an integral part of the ongoing process of creation. (3)

           The words of Gene Cernan, one of the astronauts on the last voyage to the moon, convey the marvel of that this cosmic view of the earth held for the whole of humanity: “I stood in the blue darkness and looked in awe at the earth from the lunar surface. What I saw was too beautiful to grasp—there was too much logic, too much purpose. It was too beautiful to have happened by accident.”
           The intuitive awareness is growing that the kingdom of nature is a seamless robe. We are part of this robe, clothed with it, nourished and protected by it yet, at the same time, because of the unique development of consciousness in our species, we are the only aspect of life that can become aware of the great mystery in which our lives are embedded. Once, the Black Virgin or Black Madonna was the eloquent symbol of this mystery, the symbol of nature who spins and weaves the great web of life and who, in ways we do not yet understand, holds every order of life in relationship to every other. Jonathan Schell in his book The Fate of the Earth, writes about our need to know more about nature and about the earth before we take it upon ourselves to destroy it:

The earth is a compound mystery, for it presents us with the mystery of life in its entirety. The mystery of all our thoughts and works. The reason for our ignorance is not that our knowledge of the earth is slight – on the contrary, it is extensive and has grown in this century more than in all other centuries put together – but that the amount to be known is demonstrably so much greater…Our century’s discoveries in the earth sciences have increased our ignorance in just this sense: they have given us a glimpse of how much there is still to find out. Doctor Lewis Thomas, the noted biologist and essayist, has defined this ignorance in categorical terms, saying, “We are ignorant about how we work, about where we fit in, and most of all about the enormous, imponderable system of life in which we are embedded as working parts. We do not really understand nature, at all. (4)

           Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, Published in 1962, was a powerful agent of change. With this book, the ecological (environmental) movement was born. It drew attention to the inter-dependence of the human, animal and plant orders of life and the danger of contaminating air, soil and ocean with the dangerous chemicals (DDT) that were at that time being widely and indiscriminately used to control insects. In it she challenged the scientific myth of the control of nature, born, she said, of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy when it was supposed that nature existed for the convenience of man. “It is our alarming misfortune,” she wrote, “that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.” (5) During a talk given in the same year called Of Man and the Stream of Time, she said, “Man has long talked somewhat arrogantly about the conquest of nature - now he has the power to achieve his boast. It is our misfortune - it may be our final tragedy - that this power has not been tempered with wisdom, but has been marked by irresponsibility; that there is all too little awareness that man is part of nature, and that the price of conquest may well be the destruction of man himself...Instead of always imposing our will on Nature we should sometimes be quiet and listen to what she has to tell us.”
           The furious anger and misogynistic contempt she provoked in the chemical companies (among them Monsanto) who called her “more poisonous than the pesticides she condemned,” revealed both the abyss of human ignorance about the interrelated systems of life on the planet and also the immense power of entrenched attitudes to resist any change—one vivid example of the hedge of thorns. Tragically, she died of cancer two years after the publication of her book. But long before her death she drew attention to the dangers of interfering with the balance of nature. In the preface to the 1961 edition of The Sea Around Us, first published in 1950, she warned of the effects of disposing of nuclear residues in the sea:

In unlocking the secrets of the atom, modern man has found himself confronted with a frightening problem—what to do with the most dangerous materials that have ever existed in all the earth’s history, the by-products of atomic fission. The stark problem that faces him is whether he can dispose of these lethal substances without rendering the earth uninhabitable. (6)

           Other influential books followed in the 70’s which set the agenda for a transformation of our attitude to the earth. These books were all written from the perspective of a new sense of responsibility towards the planet. In 1975, Schumacher's phenomenally influential Small is Beautiful was published. In 1972, Donella and Dennis Meadows' Limits to Growth addressed the threat to the earth from over-population—something which even now, nearly four decades later, is still not taken seriously either by governments or the major religions. In the early 80's Fritjof Capra's two books The Tao of Physics and The Turning Point focused on the need for a transformation of our attitude towards nature and matter. He grounded this in his knowledge of the science of quantum physics which was revealing life to be an indissoluble tissue of relationships where the observer was an inseparable part of he was observing. The very title of the second book was a significant pointer to a change of consciousness.
           In that decade, we also became alarmed by the threat of a Nuclear Winter which could throw humanity back to the beginning of evolution, contaminating soil and water with the residue of nuclear bombs far more powerful than those used on Hiroshima. Einstein’s prescient comment was ignored: “The unleashing of the power of the atom bomb has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and thus we head toward unparalleled catastrophes.” (7) Few governments consciously acknowledged the enormity of what they were willing to inflict on a helpless civilian population in order to secure the survival of their particular nation. Each nuclear state was prepared to annihilate millions of innocent people and pollute the earth for generations in an exchange of nuclear missiles. For the decades of the Cold War the tension between competing empires and ideologies powered the escalation of military technology and, as this developed on each side, it was extended in the Star Wars program to the race for control in space as well as on earth. Arguing that the bomb would act as a deterrent, those promoting the arms race did not acknowledge that in an exchange of nuclear missiles, there would, as Jonathan Schell commented in his book, The Fate of the Earth (1982), be no victor and no vanquished: both would be extinguished along with hundreds of millions of helpless civilians.

The question now before the human species is whether life or death will prevail on the earth…No generation before ours has held the life and death of its species in its hands…In our present-day world, in the councils where the decisions are made, there is no one to speak for man and for the Earth, although both are threatened with annihilation. (8)

           The Nuclear Disarmament Movement was founded and grew rapidly. People began to think in planetary terms, rather than national ones, understanding that we had to transcend old habits, old patterns of behaviour if we were to survive as a species and protect the earth.
           One example of this was the movement initiated in England in 1981 by Ann Pettit, which grew into the significant protest of the Greenham Common women against the American Cruise and Pershing Missiles. They called themselves “Women for Life on Earth” because, they said, “These weapons go on killing silently and invisibly through generations as yet unborn.” (9) They have now turned their attention to the missile defence shield near Harrogate in Yorkshire, England.
           Increasing disillusionment with political and religious leaders was part of this awakening, together with the growing realisation that each individual carried a responsibility, however humble, for challenging the dominant ethos of the culture—a responsibility highlighted by Jung’s prophetic words: “The world today hangs by a thin thread and that thread is the psyche of man...It is not the reality of the hydrogen bomb that we need to fear, but what man will do with it.” (10) The only counterweight to the huge propensity for aggression in the collective psyche and the governments of the world is the voice of the individual — David confronting Goliath.
           These books and many others in recent years have made it clear that the fate of the human species is inseparably bound up with the planetary biosphere. No-one has written more eloquently about the earth and our relationship with it than the late Thomas Berry in his books The Dream of the Earth (1990) and Evening Thoughts (2006). No-one has evoked in such compelling language the need for human sensitivity, compassion and intelligence in our relationship with the earth and its living systems. He says that in relation to the earth, we have been autistic for centuries and asks that we wake up from our mythic dream of progress and take on the role of becoming responsible custodians of the dwindling species and resources of the planet. In Evening Thoughts, he writes:

Just now our modern world, with its scientific technologies, its industrial processes, and its commercial establishments, functions with amazing arrogance in its attitude toward the natural world. The human is seen as the supreme reality. Every other being is available for exploitation… The difficulty at present is not only that the individual nations see themselves and their own well-being as the ultimate referent as regards reality and value, but also that the human tends to establish a discontinuity between itself and the natural world. In this manner the nonhuman world is reduced to being objects to be used by humans for their own purposes, rather than functioning as participants in a single integral community of existence. Not only is the human community out of alignment with the functioning of the planet, but also the human community has become a predator draining the life of its host…(11)

           The Ecology Movement grew from the recognition of the threat to the biosphere by the industrial and chemical pollution of air, water and soil. Friends of the Earth (www.foe.co.uk) was founded in 1971. Greenpeace followed. Fifty years have seen the foundations laid for a transformation of our relationship with the earth and the emergence of many groups of individuals who are committed to trying to protect it from the effects of human ignorance and greed. These form a new planetary entity, no longer national in character but one which is held together by shared values and a shared commitment to implementing them. Paul Hawken’s book, Blessed Unrest (2007), collates the many facets of this new movement and mentions the fact that as a result of his research over fifteen years, he has identified what may be the largest social movement in human history. This movement comprises a million or more grassroots groups working to help the planet or to improve the lives of the oppressed and destitute and those, like the indigenous forest peoples of the world, whose survival is threatened by the predatory greed of powerful trans-national corporations. Thirty-eight organizations now exist to protect the Amazon region alone and ever more strenuous efforts are being made to save the rainforests from destruction.
           In this new world-wide collaboration on behalf of people, on behalf of the ecosystem of the earth, the foundations have been laid for the development of a contemporary image of man and woman as Custodians of Life—custodians because the care of the earth is increasingly felt by many to be a sacred trust. All this has arisen out of the activation of what might be called heart values—the desire to care for life and for the planet that is our cosmic home. It is these values which are at the core of the emerging Feminine. We are becoming more concerned to protect the delicate ecological balance of the earth, more aware that we are poisoning the earth, the seas and our own bodies with chemicals and pesticides, more aware that we are inviting our own destruction through our continued aggression towards each other and our blind expropriation of the planet’s dwindling resources.
           The naturalist and biologist Sir David Attenborough has pointed out in his television programmes the effects of what we have unwittingly done and are still doing to the millions of species on the planet and says that we are becoming the cause of the sixth great extinction unfolding before our eyes. James Lovelock has shown the catastrophic effects of our technological culture on the planetary biosphere. (12) Both have shown how life on this planet is an interconnected web of which we are a part; we can no longer exploit it for our sole benefit. The aerial views of the planet seen from space show us beyond a shadow of a doubt the effects of over-population and our industrial expansion on the land, the oceans and the atmosphere. We can now see the shrinking glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau and the Andes, the melting Arctic and Antarctic ice, the diminishing rainforests, the lights at night covering vast swathes of the earth. Today we are facing a choice and the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced—a crisis that our industrialised culture and our ever-burgeoning numbers have brought into being. In 1820 the population of the world was one billion. Today it is nearly seven billion and by 2050 is expected to rise to 9 billion. People may not realize that the world population has trebled since 1945. The population of the United States has nearly trebled from 130 million to 320 million. Yet people are still having three or four or more children without a thought for the future well-being of those children or the needs of the planet.
           Since 1945 we have been faced with the growing danger from four new threats which were unimaginable fifty years ago. First, global warming or climate change and the creeping acidification of the oceans. Secondly, the renewed threat of war and the massive loss of life and contamination of the earth that could result from the deliberate or inadvertent use of our weapons of mass destruction—which now include the new threat of the military deployment of biological weapons and nano-technology. Thirdly, the over-population of the planet which is already leading to armed struggles for increasingly scarce food and water resources. Fourthly, the depletion of the amount of land available to grow food because it is being turned over to raising crops for biofuels. If the temperature of the planet should rise by 2 degrees C, it will make parts of the planet uninhabitable and drive millions to seek out ever-diminishing supplies of food and water. Yet governments still pursue national agendas and fail to think with a sense of urgency in planetary and ecological terms. With survival instincts now registering on high alert, many men and women are questioning the whole power-driven ethos of modern culture with its rampant consumerism and emphasis on perpetual growth and are searching for ways to halt the apparent headlong impulsion of our species and its unconscious political leaders towards catastrophe. The situation briefly summarised is this:

We are running out of land to accomodate and feed ever-increasing numbers of people

We are running out of fresh water. Rivers are depleted as the glaciers that feed them diminish

We are running out of energy and the reserves of oil and gas to support our industrialised culture

We are causing the sixth great extinction of species of this planet. The previous five were caused by external factors like an asteroid but we are the cause of this one. Extinction rates have increased a thousand-fold

We are running out of time to correct the mistakes which have led to these problems

All these are making us wake up to a danger and a challenge that we have never had to face.

The Recovery of the Feminine Dimension of the Divine
In the 1950’s few people outside of the Jungian community in Zurich would have connected this change of consciousness with the eruption—from the unconscious depths of the psyche—of the image of the feminine aspect of the divine that had consistently been overlooked or rejected by patriarchal culture. The first sign of its immanent return came with the discovery in 1945 of the Gnostic texts hidden for nearly two millennia in earthenware jars at Nag Hammadi, in Egypt. As scholars began to translate and comment on these texts, it became apparent that certain Gnostic groups had worshipped God as both Mother and Father. Elaine Pagels’ ground-breaking book, The Gnostic Gospels (1980) brought these discoveries to a wider public. Her book was the precursor of a flood of books on the Goddess, of which The Myth of the Goddess was one. This was one avenue through which the sacred image of the Feminine was restored to modern culture.
           A second avenue was opened by the two Papal Bulls of 1950 and 1954 which, in response to a petition from millions of Catholics, officially named the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven and declared her to be “Assumed into Heaven, Body and Soul”. Some forty years later, in 1997, a further petition was presented to the Pope asking that Mary be declared co-redemptrix with Christ. Although he died before this later petition was presented, Jung knew that the two Papal Bulls reflected the fact that something of great significance was happening in the collective psyche. Mythologically speaking, the feminine archetype, personified by the Virgin Mary, was being raised to the level of parity with the masculine one of spirit, heralding the “marriage” of the two great archetypal principles that would soon begin to find expression in the collective soul of humanity. The feminine dimension of the divine, so long denied recognition in a civilization dominated by the masculine archetype, would be restored to the position it held in the pre-patriarchal world. Matter and spirit would no longer be seen as antithetical or even as essentially different in kind. A union of two primary aspects of life, so long sundered in human consciousness, could be expected.
           Jung anticipated a profound transformation of consciousness as this marriage of the two great archetypal principles became active in the soul of humanity. He believed it signified the reunion of spirit and matter, mind and soul, head and heart and, in the language of depth psychology, the integration of the conscious mind with the unconscious. Familiar with the long mythological history which had led to this moment, he saw this archetypal reunion as a new image of the sacred marriage—the ancient Bronze Age ritual which had once celebrated the union of heaven and earth. He also saw it as the herald of the great event awaited in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, the wedding of the two long separated aspects of the god-head—the Holy One and His Shekinah (as described in Chapter Three).
           People have been surprised by the popularity of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and an earlier book —Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Yet the focus of both these books was the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene — the so-called “penitent whore”— and the child or children who were the fruit of their union. Never, in the Church’s wildest dreams, could the “celibate” Jesus have been allowed to have a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene and have her bear him a child.
           Since there can be no official recognition of the possibility of this relationship, the recognition has had to come into the culture through such books as these. From a Jungian perspective, the phenomenal sales of these two books and many others about Mary Magdalene reflect the power of a returning archetype and the unconscious longing for the union of the masculine and feminine principles at the highest level—reflected in the union, however hypothetical, of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The “child” born of their relationship signifies, in an archetypal sense, not the blood-line of Jesus but the birth of a new level of consciousness in the whole of humanity. If the missing archetype isn’t allowed in through the front door, it will enter our culture through the back door and in a literal rather than a symbolic form. Jung commented on the need for a personal representative of the feminine archetype, relating it to the new emphasis on the equality of women:

The logical consistency of the papal declaration cannot be surpassed, and it leaves Protestantism with the odium of being nothing but a man’s religion which allows no metaphysical representation of woman. Protestantism has obviously not given sufficient attention to the signs of the times which point to the equality of women. But this equality requires to be metaphysically anchored in the figure of a “divine” woman, the bride of Christ. Just as the person of Christ cannot be replaced by an organization, so the bride cannot be replaced by the Church. The feminine, like the masculine, demands an equally personal representation. (12)

A Cultural Revolution: A New Role for Women
At the same time as these events of archetypal significance were taking place in the domain of religion, a revolutionary social movement — another facet of the resurgence of the Feminine — was gathering momentum. John Locke (1632-1704) was the first philosopher to challenge the idea of woman’s innate inferiority and subjection to man. Two years after his death, an English writer, Mary Astell (1668-1731), posed the question, “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?” In 1792, sixty-one years after her death, Mary Wollstonecraft published her Vindication of the Rights of Women, a year after Tom Paine had published his influential Rights of Man. In it she proposed the unthinkable idea that women should have the same legal and political rights as men. The change in woman’s status was strengthened by the support of men such as John Stuart Mill in his book, On the Oppression of Women. Individual women in England and America began to speak out about social issues that deeply aroused their compassion and concern as, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which drew attention to the plight of the slaves in the Southern States of America. At the time of the devastating Civil War in America, Julia Ward Howe had the courage to speak out in 1870 against the whole ethos of war:

We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”

           In the West, as women, led in England by the remarkable Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, gained the hard-won right to vote and access to education, they began to query the misogynistic cast of religious beliefs and long-established social customs. The First and Second World Wars and the arrival of contraception accelerated women’s emergence into society after centuries of seclusion and oppression, allowing them to enter many professions hitherto barred to them and to earn their living alongside men. A profound cultural revolution was initiated, shaking social attitudes to their foundations. The generation of women now in their twenties and thirties are the beneficiaries of it without being aware of what it was like to live in a culture where women had no access to higher education and were for the most part dependent on a man’s earning power for their survival and generally regarded as the “inferior” sex, fatally compromised by their “emotionality”.
           Widowhood and the destitution of millions of young women after the First and Second World Wars as well as the need for women to work on the land and in factories while the men were away fighting, accelerated this cultural revolution, forcing them to develop survival instincts and skills they had not needed to rely on previously. Because so many men were killed, particularly in the First World War, there was a surplus of women over men and, for those young women not already married, no possibility for many of them to find husbands to support them. War widows were paid a miserable pittance—barely enough on which to survive. As these two groups of women matured and as the children and grandchildren of war widows grew to adulthood, so cultural attitudes on the relationship between men and women began to change.
            One major innovation was the presence of the father during the birth of his child. Another was a new emphasis on his participation in domestic chores and sharing the care of children in the home. A third was the social effects of women going to university, earning their living and entering a world that was formerly the exclusive domain of men. Men were deeply disoriented by the disintegration of the old relationship between the genders and women found it challenging and exhausting to balance their new professional role with the domestic one of wife and mother. Children have been the greatest casualties of both parents going out to work and have suffered because their parents do not have the time or energy to focus on their emotional needs.
            Relationships between men and women have also suffered and the breakdown of marriages and partnerships reflects the tension of both going out to work and having too little time for each other and too little time to devote to the emotional needs of their children. There is a danger that women, drawn to follow a male model of behavior by having to hold their own in a culture which is dominated by a male ethos of competition, achievement and success. They are caught between a rock and a hard place, not wanting to return to the pattern of the past, where “woman’s place was in the home” yet not yet fully accepted and valued for their new contribution to society. There is another danger, the tendency of imitating men instead of finding a way of bringing different values into the culture.
           In some places, the old attitudes still prevail. Many women from poorer countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America are being forced, for their survival, to enter into prostitution and even slavery because there is still a “market” for sex among men who still see women as sexual objects to be exploited and subjugated, thereby perpetuating the pattern of male dominance over them. Women in some Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Sudan, suffer brutal oppression by their fathers and husbands and by tribal custom which condemns them to a diminished life. In the current repressive regime in Iran, it may condemn them to an atrocious death by stoning or hanging as in the tragic case of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. The whole Islamic world suffers from the silenced voice of women.
           As described in Chapter Two, as the Feminist Movement gathered momentum through the influence of its many prophets—women like Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, there were other women in America like Riane Eisler who, in her groundbreaking book The Chalice and the Blade, questioned the political ethos of male dominance and control which had presided over Western culture for many centuries. Theologians wanted to know why the image of God and the Holy Spirit had been formulated in the male gender, why there was no feminine dimension of the divine.
           In an essay on Women in Europe, part of a larger book called Civilization in Transition, Jung noted that it was the task of women to bring together what man had sundered and ended the chapter with the words, “The woman of today is faced with a tremendous cultural task—perhaps it will be the dawn of a new era.”(13) It is obvious now, even if it wasn’t when he wrote these words, that something has radically to change if we are to create a viable future for our children and grandchildren and the generations beyond them; something has to change radically in the soul of both men and women.
           What then is woman’s tremendous cultural task? It is surely nothing less than to free herself from oppression, persecution and marginalization so that her voice can act as an advocate for a new and better kind of civilization. Men will not be truly free until women are able to speak freely from their hearts and add their voice to those calling out for an end to social, religious and sexual oppression as well as cruelty, injustice and exploitation of all kinds. Only then will the Feminine be fully fledged in our culture and the values it enshrines fully recognized and articulate.
           The planet needs women to find their full voice, to articulate their hopes and their needs and their feelings of distress in a culture that still pays too little attention to their greatest gifts as well as to their deepest longings and deepest fears. Their long-silenced voice is needed to awaken humanity to awareness of a great danger and a different goal and to redeem the neglect and repression of the Feminine by articulating the different values and the different attitude towards life which give expression to it.
           In many different parts of the world, individual women are speaking out with immense courage against oppression—of themselves and others. The power of one individual to change collective values is reflected in the immense courage of Rosa Parks who, in 1955, while travelling in a bus, remained where she was when told to give up her seat to a white man. This one act challenged America’s racial prejudice, triggered the civil rights campaign and cleared a space for Martin Luther King to make his astounding speech on civil rights and for Barack Obama to become President.
           Woman's own awakening to the realization of her value is part of the recovery of the Feminine. It is as if a momentous birth is taking place in the collective psyche of woman. This birth may be experienced as something that is deeply perplexing, difficult and even dangerous, as well as something exciting and challenging. Women in Afghanistan, for example, risk death by speaking out about the terrible suffering they endure in their oppressive culture. As woman gives birth to herself, to her unique individuality, to the emerging awareness of her value as woman (not an imitation of man), the Feminine and the values that belong to it will also emerge in the consciousness of humanity which for so long has suffered from its repression and marginalization. Woman, whose essential nature responds to suffering and need, is now responding to life's own need and is experiencing herself as the vessel of transformation in which a new consciousness is being born. One of the most striking as well as moving examples of the power of the Feminine, is the world-wide protest over the proposed stoning to death of an Iranian woman (Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani) for the alleged crime of adultery and murder.

The Healing Power of the Feminine
The focus of the Feminine is not a new Utopian ideology but the values that have been obscured or incompletely developed during the solar age. These values can never be recovered by force or even by strident demand. They can only emerge as human consciousness changes, facilitating their emergence. The Feminine is putting us in touch with the deep sources of our psychic life, drawing up from these depths the living waters which nourish and sustain the soul. The recovery of the Feminine may be the key to the transformation of our world culture from regression into uniformity, banality and brutality into something longed for and extraordinary.
           As long ago as Bronze Age Sumer and Egypt, records detail the charitable impulses to care for the orphaned, the widowed and the sick. Today, apart from the thousands of charities and NGO’s which have come into being to assist the millions in need of help, there is increasing pressure on governments to act ethically and with the welfare of the planet in mind. Thanks to television, we have a far greater awareness of the suffering of people all over the world and can see the plight of those threatened by armed conflict and the exploitation of the masses of the poor in India and Africa by the corporate giants of the world. We participate through witnessing the suffering of people remote from ourselves, even the suffering of individuals like Sakineh in Iran or Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma. Wherever the call to compassion goes out, there is the voice of the heart, the voice of the Feminine.
            This message was received long ago in the chanelled messages I mentioned at the beginning of this book. I record it here as it applies as much to our times as to those in which it was recorded during the Second World War.

A PRAYER OF THE HOLY MOTHER

Gather My tears in your hands
Bathe your eyes in their sweetness,
For in My tears lies no bitter salt.
Rather like honey, or like dew will you feel them
As you take them to your face and heart.
They are the tears of womanhood,
Shed for the cruelty and blindness of man,
They are the tears of Motherhood
Shed for the useless death of her sons.
Each time I see cruelty, greed or senseless destruction,
I shed these tears,
Hoping that they will melt the harshness and the greed of man.

I weep when I see the gifts of Life
So shamelessly laid to waste,
O let My tears blind those who want to shed their brothers’ blood,
Soothe those who are wounded in the battle,
Melt the heart of Cain, ever ready to murder Abel.

O listen to My voice,
And let the gentle sound of pity cling to your devoted hearts.
These I will impregnate with the gentleness of My healing powers
That I hereby bestow on your hands
If you will give your voice
To the service of My cause.

                                                              

The resurgence of the Feminine is giving woman a voice and a value and a new image of herself. It is helping her to recover the courage that was so overlaid by fear during the centuries of her persecution and oppression. It is giving man a new image of himself as protector and preserver of life, not in the old warrior role but in a new role as advocate and nurturer of values which transcend the desire for power, dominance and self-aggrandisement and are not affiliated to any specific religious tradition. It is helping us to widen the circle of our compassion to embrace the huge suffering of the world, to move from a culture based on the values which serve power and greed to those which serve humanitarian concerns and address the suffering billions whose lives are blighted and cut short by hunger and disease. These new values have been beautifully expressed by the Prince of Wales in a recently published book (2010) called Harmony, A New Way of Looking at our World. In a paper called A Time to Heal, he writes :

As I have grown older I have gradually come to realize that my entire life so far has been motivated by a desire to heal to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soil; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind, body and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame; to level the monstrous artificial barrier erected between Tradition and Modernity and, above all, to heal the mortally wounded soul that, alone, can give us warning of the folly of playing God and of believing that knowledge on its own is a substitute for wisdom. (14)

           This powerful evolutionary impulse, reconnecting us to our deepest instincts for connection with each other and with the life of the planet, is working a profound alchemy beneath the surface of our culture. Both women and men are participating in a process of transformation that is manifesting as a new cultural impulse, one whose emphasis is no longer on power and control but on a humble awareness of the interconnection of all aspects of life. The phrase “the conquest of nature” is being replaced by the realization that we need to respect and serve the planetary life of which we are a part. While, on the surface, the culture is focused on the superficial concerns propagated by the media — specifically on consumerism and the cult of sexual promiscuity, celebrity and wealth — beneath the surface a new civilization is being prepared by millions of concerned individuals.
           Woman's age-old instinct to nurture and sustain life as well as man's instinct to protect and defend it, are being extended to embrace the life of the earth. A planet which has taken over three and a half billion years to evolve an organ of consciousness through which life can come to know itself may be under threat; our survival uncertain. Soon, we may not be able to alter the course of events we have unwittingly set in motion. Yet, in response to the extreme peril of this situation we are beginning to recover the ancient feeling of relationship with a sacred earth and a sacred cosmos. We are drawing together in closer relationship with each other, working towards the goal of rescuing this planet and the lives of future generations from our unconscious and predatory habits of behaviour.
           There are four great questions that challenge us now:

1. How do we recover our lost sense of being part of something totally sacred?
2. How do we develop respect and compassion for the life of the Earth in all its forms?
3. How do we find ways of meeting the deepest needs of the human heart for love, relatedness and connection?
4. How to we relinquish the beliefs and patterns of behaviour that have been so damaging to the soul as well as to the planet?

           There are immense opportunities in this time of transformation but also immense dangers, for the very transformative power of the Feminine activates deep fear of change and the reactionary forces which seek to re-assert or maintain control over people's lives. We tread a path which is on the knife-edge between the conscious integration of a new vision on the one hand and social disintegration and regression into barbarism — perhaps the virtual annihilation of our species — on the other. At the beginning of a new millennium, we are participating in the birth of a new era, one with radically different aims and values to those of the solar era. Mythologically speaking, this era invites the marriage of the feminine and the masculine, and of lunar and solar consciousness and the birth of the “child” or new kind of consciousness that would be the fruit of this union. It is a tremendously exciting, challenging and creative time to be alive.

Notes:

1. C.G. Jung, CW 14, page 347, par. 488
2. Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, p. 220
3. Dr. Edgar Mitchell, astronaut and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. The Way of the Explorer, Putnam 1996, pp. 3-4
4. Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth, London: Pan books Ltd, 1982, page 73
5. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962, page 6
6. Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, OUP, 1950, preface
7. Albert Einstein, The Expanded Quotable Einstein, collected and edited by Alice Calaprice, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2000, p. 184.
8. Jonathan Schell, ibid, p.113, 116 & 188.
9. Ann Petit, Walking to Greenham, Honno UK, 2006
10. Conversations with Carl Jung (based on four filmed interviews), Richard Evans, Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1964
11. Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 2006, p. 21 & 82-83
12. C.G. Jung, CW 11, par 753
13. Jung, CW 10 par 875
14. The concluding paragraph from A Time to Heal by HRH The Prince of Wales, first published in issue 5, The Temenos Academy Review, London, Autumn 2002.

 

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