by Licia Berry, April 2007
There is a lot of talk these days in progressive thought or spiritual communities about the “return of the feminine” on the planet. If you type “re-emergence of the feminine” into an internet search engine, you will find endless articles and quotes about how the feminine is coming back to the earth. Where did she go? If this talk is true, it seems the Sacred or Divine Feminine left for a period of several thousand years and has now decided to return from her holiday!
The human suppression of the feminine powers has been a symptom of an era of exploration of immature masculine power. Through brute force, rape and murder, witch trials, shaming of women’s sexuality, relegation of women to second citizen status, the view of the feminine as a “weaker sex’, and the choice of women to give away their power, it can surely feel as if there is no Divine Feminine present in a world that fosters these beliefs. It is no wonder that so many have felt abandoned and betrayed by their mothers, whether Divine, planetary or biological.
The true presence of the feminine is a strong one, a presence that cannot be denied, ignored, made invisible, or rendered powerless. Where has this strong presence been? Why have we felt her absence? Why did she leave us?
She didn’t. In actuality, the Sacred Feminine has been here all along. While we have been playing out the various and important human dramas and stages of development, she has been right here with us. It is our awareness of her that has been away. The presence and integration of the Sacred Feminine into our daily lives slipped away from our consciousness for several thousand years, but now our consciousness has evolved to a point that we are becoming aware of her again.
Even though humanity has been through some pretty painful experiences as a result of the full exploration of the immature (and sometimes wounded) masculine aspects (or patriarchy), everything is in order. After several thousand years of full exploration of the feminine (the Stone Age is thought to have been matriarchal), it was time to stretch out into the opposite pole and check out the masculine for awhile. But now we have come to the time on our planet when it is all about balance.
She is not outside of us. The idea that the Divine Feminine could have been “gone” all these years is a projection onto the outer world of what is occurring inside of us; it is true that she has been absent from the collective human consciousness for a long time. And it is also a projection that she is returning in the outer world…truly what is occurring is that she is returning in our inner consciousness, and therefore we feel her in the outer world. But she has been with us all along, waiting dormant in our inner awareness until we were ready to unearth and embrace her in a deeper, more encompassing way.
As a woman, I have had my time of anger and outrage about the “plight” of women and the dominance of patriarchy in our world. I have felt women to be the victim and made men out to be the bad guys…….and I needed to fully explore that anger in order to come through to the other side of it, so I have no regrets about spending time in that place. And I will again and again. As I heal the wounds in myself, I will feel the anger anew, and more deeply, until I am cleansed and feel healed and in my power about my feminine face and ways of knowing being fully valued in the world.
However, I have grown much beyond my place of powerlessness. Now what I am finding is that the more I fully claim all of the various faces and aspects of my inner feminine, the more I see her in the world. The more I embrace ALL aspects of my inner feminine, the more I see ALL aspects of her in my life. So I see feminine faces of compassion and acceptance, I see strength and ferocity, I see softness and embracing, I see deeply and highly charged sexuality, I see raw power and I see infinite knowing. And the more I am ready to claim ALL aspects of her in myself, the more I am ready to see and claim her in the collective experience.
My feeling, sense, cellular memory and perhaps other lifetimes of experience tell me that the feminine ways and feminine power needed to go underground for the safety and survival of women as a physical gender. It was a necessary burial of our dearest treasures, much like the Tibetan monks destroyed their precious ancient manuscripts to keep them out of the hands of the Chinese. It was what we had to do. No regrets. The world was not a safe place for the daily existence of the feminine powers.
In addition, men as a physical gender buried their inner feminine. This can be seen even in modern times (although it is indeed shifting), where a man who is not physically strong or acts dominant is labeled as ‘weak” or “girly”. It has not been safe for men, either, to be softer, embracing, intuitive, sensual, accepting and wise from a deep inner sense. Can you imagine what the world will be like when the men claim and embody there inner feminine selves? WOW. Those are some men I want to get to know! I am seeing this mature feminine as well as masculine emergence in my own beloved husband; it makes him courageous and warrior-like when needed, yet intuitive, discerning, deeply wise, willing to allow instead of push, and a sweet and tender lover. Whoo baby!
Time has marched on, and humanity has evolved, and we, having fully explored the dynamics of the wounded or immature masculine in ourselves and with each other, are letting go of old concepts of the feminine and making room for larger ideas about the feminine. We are allowing the blunt edge of dominance and suppression of the feminine (both inner and outer) to fall away under the brilliant light of clarity. And this is occurring in each one of us in our own perfect timing.
It was in 1993 that Marianne Williamson wrote in her book A Woman’s Worth: “There is a collective force rising up on the earth today, an energy of the reborn feminine … She remembers our function on earth … This is a time of monumental shift, from the male dominance of human consciousness back to a balanced relationship between masculine and feminine. The Goddess archetype doesn’t replace God; she merely keeps him company. She expresses his feminine face.”
At that time, the way I read this statement was that men were going down in flames and women were going to grab their fair share of the power. I was mad as hell and thinking and acting from my own inner wounded, immature masculine and feminine aspects. My wounded feminine identified strongly with being a victim, and my wounded masculine was how I survived and made my way in the world. I thought the only way the women would ever be treated with respect again was if we acted like the men who suppressed us.
But over the years, as I grew and softened and became more myself, I began to understand the feminine ways as powerful in and of themselves. I began to open that cache of treasure that was buried in my psyche underneath all those years of heaviness. I found an endless, boundless resource of love. I understood that a truly healed, mature masculine and a truly healed, mature feminine made the perfect compliment to each other. In fact, they were beautiful together.
Woman As Stone-She Is Awakening, 2006 by Licia Berry
It is interesting to note that if we dig into the story of humanity’s past, there are many, many examples of very strong and powerful women; queens, warriors and goddesses whose names didn’t make it to the “his-story” books. It was a revelation to me to learn about and find that the strength of the feminine was even around in the physical form of actual women and that we just weren’t taught about it. Let these few names of strong women (who actually existed-this is not a complete list) reverberate in your mind and heart:
Isis (Egyptian Goddess of All of Creation)
Mawu (African Goddess of the Moon)
Songi (African Protectress of the Bantu)
Nukwan (Chinese Goddess)
Danu (Irish Goddess and Protector)
Breo Saighead (Irish Goddess)
Ix Chel (Mayan Goddess of the Moon, Healing and Childbirth)
Xbaquiyalo (Mayan Goddess)
Coatlicue (Aztec Creator Goddess)
Xochiquetzal (Aztec Goddess of music, dance and love and Patroness of women’s sacred sexuality)
Queen KuBaba (Sumerian leader of war of independence)
Trung Trac and Trung Nhi (Vietnamese Sister Queens led battle against the invading Chinese)
Boudicca (Queen of Iceni, a Celtic tribe in ancient Britain, who led rebel armies against the Romans in Britain)
Hatshepsut (Egyptian, declared herself “Pharoah” rather than Queen)
Wu Zetian (Chinese, declared herself “Emperor” rather than Empress)
And these are just a scant handful of the women whose feminine strength propelled them forward into a larger vision. Even now, consensual reality has some belief that women today are in a state of weakness and subjugation, but there are women (and men who are healing and strengthening their inner feminine) in our modern world who are changing reality every day with their strength and vision. It is the media and the immature collective consciousness that devote their energies to the message that “feminine equals Paris Hilton”. You have a choice about whether to buy into that message.
“Men are not the enemy, but the fellow victims. The real enemy is women’s denigration of themselves.”
– Betty Friedan
The more we step up and claim the inner feminine in ourselves, the more she shows up in our lives. The feminine has many aspects, some of which we recognize as docility, forgiveness, and surrender, such as we see in the Christianized Mother Mary figure. But these traits are only a small fraction of the totality of the Sacred Feminine. She is ALL, and she is not being fully expressed until we embrace ALL of her. It is wise to be alert to judgments and beliefs about what it means to be feminine or masculine. Qualities we typically associate with the masculine, such as courage, ferocity, strength, and intelligence, as well as the “softer” sides of those such as passion, sensuality, deep wisdom and intuition, are all part of the Sacred Feminine as well. In actuality, all qualities are universal, found in both masculine and feminine essences, but the ways of accessing and expressing these qualities is different in the masculine and feminine.
“Darkness precedes light and she is Mother”
Inscription in the altar of the Salerno Cathedral in Italy.
We see evidence in the collective psyche of the awareness of the “darker” aspects of feminine power in the global fascination with and re-emergence of the Black Madonna (be sure to look that up if you don’t know anything about these fabulous images of the pre-Christianized Sacred Feminine.) In the wonderful book, The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd, the presence of the Black Madonna is central to the story of personal enlightenment and reclaiming of power for a young girl. In the story, three symbols of feminine power constellate throughout: the Fist, a representation of feminine authority, voice and autonomy, fierce outrage at injustice, dignity, substance, being both level and wild, with an ability to shake things up, the Heart, a representation of profound connection to one another, the big, wide lap of the great mother, a lap so big there’s room for everybody, inclusiveness, nurturing, unity, compassion for what is lost or undervalued and left out, refuge, and deep and beautiful wisdom, and the Moon– Madonnas have been marked with moons since the origin of humanity, and is a representation of cycles, women, women’s cycles, tides, oceans, earth, behavior of animals, fecundity of plants, the body, the rhythms of death and life, fertility, creativity, earth’s aliveness and holiness. Certainly in these three symbols we see examples of the diversity that is represented in the feminine! In terms of the collective awareness of the diversity of the feminine, I have a theory that Oprah Winfrey is personification of the ancient symbol of the Black Madonna. Think of how she aids others in getting their message out, giving them permission and a platform from which to speak. Think of how she creatively successful she is, but especially in the ways that the masculine world considers successful (money, power, resources). And yet she has not appeared to lose other aspects of the feminine in her rise to fame.
“The way to true and creative life is thru the dark feminine.”
-Carl Jung
When I set an intention to fully claim my feminine power on Winter Solstice of 2006, I set in motion a process in which she has come forward in her totality, and it is blissful and amazing to feel the power coursing through my veins. In reclaiming my feminine power, I also recognized that I am the one who has been thinking like a victim and I chose to cease that habit immediately. When I cease to see myself as a victim, I stop playing that role with others in my outer world, even with men and women who may prefer to see me that way. When I stop buying into that drama, I force everyone I interact with to stop, too, even if for a moment. It is like throwing a wrench in a well-oiled machine…the machine has to stop until the wrench is removed. And if enough wrenches are thrown in, eventually the machine doesn’t work anymore. It has to be adapted to the new situation.
“You take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”
– Erica Jong
My theory is that, as humanity has evolved, we have been moving through developmental stages, just like a baby does. In the beginning, humanity as a whole was exploring pretty basic animal nature…a denser vibration of physical life. As we learned and grew, we explored a stone-age era of matriarchal worship….perhaps women were seen as all powerful because we were able to give birth. Then, we moved into a developmental stage where we grew our intellect and reason and learned ways of controlling nature to guarantee our survival. There was a time when there was a balance of reverence for women and men, a sense of some stasis and equality. Then, in the middle ages, we went deep into the age of Christianity and colonialism, defiling woman as evil and the downfall of man, as well as the earth as the mother/planet upon which we all depended for our lives. This out-of- balance approach took us crashing headlong into the industrial age, in which we developed commercialism and the credo that the one with the most toys (money, power, resources) wins. It was during this time that we explored the worship of the male aspect.
The anger we see today in our world, in both women and men, could be construed as a deep grief and rage at the seeming lack of presence of the feminine on the planet. We have fully explored the masculine aspects of power…..wounded as that masculine may be. As a collective, humanity has explored colonialism, industrialism, over-use of resources and the plundering of the planet, power-over rather than power-with, brute force instead of cooperation, and the giving away of inner power to outer sources. We have explored victimization, blame, guilt, sexuality as degenerate and dirty, shame, doing what others want us to, and belief in lack and therefore competition to get what we want.
But this is an era which is dying….we are still seeing the last throes of this dynamic as it senses it’s imminent departure, but make no mistake, it is on its way out. And now we are coming into an era of balance again, but a little higher on the vibrational scale; we will explore faces of the feminine and masculine that we have not seen before in human existence. Each time we moved up the ladder of vibration, we explored a different aspect of the masculine/feminine dynamic. We are see-sawing our way up the vibrational scale, ultimately to a perfect union of the highest aspects of each the Sacred Feminine and Sacred Masculine, the marriage of the Divine Queen and King.
I had an experience just the other day that played this out for me. I called on the strength and depth of my inner feminine, and it felt so satisfying, like taking a long drink of sweet water after being thirsty for a long, long time. As I enjoyed feeling the immense feminine in me, I saw in my mind a scene of the wild, fierce and powerful feminine aspect personified by a naked woman with long, wild dark hair. Her presence was strong, primitive, shamanic, almost animal-like, yet very empathetic and discerning. She stood before a pile of bones heaped in a corner, and I knew immediately that the pile of bones were my inner broken masculine. She stood over the bones, breathing life into them and singing to them, gathering them into her strong arms. As she breathed and sang and rocked the bones, flesh began to grow onto them. Over a few minutes, the bones had become a beautiful man with light brown hair and piercing blue eyes. She put the man down, where he stood on his own two feet, and looked at her with an illumined face. As I watched, his beautiful body became clothed in the finest splendor, and a crown of gold lay atop his head. His face shone with love and understanding as he beamed at her, my inner feminine. And I knew that they were in love beyond any limits. She had, by coming forward in her greatest strength and power, held the space for healing and embraced my masculine’s brokenness, and therefore brought forth her equal. He was already there, but a pile of bones, and through her love and desire and feminine ways of knowing, she had opened her arms and encouraged him to come into himself. The missing complete man was made whole by the love, strength, compassion and power of the woman who desired her truest partner. And now the inner feminine and the inner masculine could join together in ecstatic holy union. The two were again one.
As this scene played out, I felt energetic shifts in my body and feelings swirling around. Breathless, I watched the glorious masculine come into the flesh and meet the feminine’s gaze, and I cried with recognition and joy. I know this beautiful man! I aspire to be him, just as I aspire to be the highest aspects of my feminine self! As they embraced each other and began a long eon of passionate tangling, I wept with relief that my inner selves were indeed making love and becoming whole. It was remarkable.
Here is what I know; what we are ready to allow into our consciousness, appears. What we are ready to put our focus on suddenly makes sense to us and we begin to see more of it. What we are ready to embrace in ourselves, we are ready to embrace in the outer world.
The feminine has always been here, has never truly “gone away”….there is no “return”, but rather a remembrance and recognition of the strength of the feminine and its grace and its wisdom and it’s all-encompassing acceptance and it’s ways of power and knowing. SHE IS RIGHT HERE and has been all along. There is no tragic loss of the feminine….no departure or abandonment….it is just us humans, going though our growth process, who lost our awareness of her. Our awareness of the presence of the feminine is what went underground; our conscious knowing of ourselves is what went underground, not the feminine itself. And we are ready to internally embrace her again.
“When they are equally present, all is calm. When one is outweighed by the other, there is confusion and disarray.”
-central tenet of Taoism
