[Author’s Note: This and the next sequel are from my talk for Humanity Rising, delivered on August 11th, 2020].
I would like to offer an archetypal overview of why the current crisis has come into being; showing when, where and how the masculine and feminine archetypes – reflected in the image of a God or Goddess – became separated, and why this separation has had such a deep impact on Western civilization. I am not speaking only of the pandemic but the far greater challenge of climate change.
We live in a world that has been governed by the masculine archetype for some 2,500 years, with no feminine archetype to balance it, with no sacred marriage between them. As a result, world culture and the human psyche are now dangerously out of balance, out of alignment with the Earth and the Cosmos. Forty or so years ago I had a visionary dream of a Cosmic Woman. Since then, my life has been focused on the recovery and restoration of the feminine archetype — the archetype that stands for our relationship with Nature, the Earth and the Cosmos. It also stands for a totally different perspective on life, a perspective which recognizes that we live on a sacred planet; that our human lives participate in a Sacred Cosmic Order and that our role as humans is to care for the life of this planet.The Feminine stands for the soul, for the heart, and for compassion and justice — the two primary values which protect and serve life. It is summed up in this statement by a Council of the Indigenous People of North America:
“All Life is sacred. We come into Life as sacred beings. When we abuse the
sacredness of Life we affect all Creation.”
Today we are faced with a choice — a choice that will determine whether or not we survive as a species. Through ignorance, hubris and the belief that we could dominate nature to the advantage of our species alone, we have interfered so disastrously with the organism of the planet, that over the last 50 years, our growing numbers and our mindless exploitation of its resources have brought about not only the destruction of 60% of all species but also the crisis of climate change.
We have somehow to change our attitude to life, to relinquish the false myth of growth, progress and consumption we have been living by, and cease our ongoing assault on the life and resources of the planet.
This is a time of great peril, but also of unparalleled opportunity. Never before in our species memory has there been this collective opportunity to change course before it is too late. We need to understand why we have lost touch with nature and why we have learned so little from our spiritual traditions that we are prepared to destroy God’s creation with our nuclear weapons, whose very existence pollutes the Earth.
Two thousand years ago this prophecy was recorded in the Fourth Gospel of the Essenes. This Gospel, and three others, were discovered by Edmund Szekely in the secret archives of the Vatican and translated from the Aramaic by him:
“But there will come a day when the Son of Man will turn his face from his Earthly Mother and betray her, even denying his Mother and his birth right. Then shall he sell her into slavery, and her flesh shall be ravaged, her blood polluted, and her breath smothered; he will bring the fire of death into all the parts of her kingdom, and his hunger will devour all her gifts and leave in their place only a desert.
All these things he will do out of ignorance of the Law, and as a man dying slowly cannot smell his own stench, so will the Son of Man be blind to the truth: that as he plunders and ravages and destroys his Earthly Mother, so does he plunder and ravage and destroy himself. For he was born of his Earthly Mother, and he is one with her, and all that he does to his Mother even so does he do to himself.”
Every word of this prophecy has come true. Believing ourselves to be separate from nature and above nature, and having no idea of why we are on this planet, we have grossly interfered with the harmony of the natural world and are bringing disease and possible extinction upon ourselves.
In the words of an American philosopher, William Ophuls, “What the impending ecological crisis forces us to confront is that we have sacrificed meaning, morality, and almost all higher values for the ‘sordid boon’ of material wealth and wordly power. To keep drinking from this poisoned chalice will bring only sickness and death.”[1]
In order to transform our present view of reality we need to understand the ideas and beliefs that have created it. When did we lose the awareness that all life is sacred? Why did we lose the feminine archetype that connected us to nature?
Owing to the researches that I and a number of women have made over the last 40 years, we now know that in the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras, the principal deity worshipped was the Great Mother. In this forgotten cosmology, there was no Creator beyond creation. Creation emerged from the womb of the Great Mother. All species, including our own, were her children. Everything on Earth and in the Cosmos was connected through relationship with her.
Then, around 1,500 BC, there was a change so great that its repercussions are still felt today because it has been the major influence on Western civilization. This change was the replacement of the Great Mother by the Great Father, preceded by a period when there were both goddesses and gods. As the monotheistic Father God brought creation into being as something separate and distant from himself, so nature became split off from spirit and was no longer sacred. Simultaneously, the rise of powerful city states in the Middle East led to the creation of a succession of vast empires, territorial conquest and war. The theme of conquest and the pursuit of power laid down so long ago continues to this day with the leaders of the current great empires — China, Russia and America.
Although the architectural, artistic and literary creations of these empires were extraordinary, the suffering created by them was appalling. Millions of young men lost their lives and died in atrocious pain. Millions of women and children were raped and sold into slavery in the same way as the tragic Yazidi women were raped and sold by Islamic State. Deep traumas were created in the collective psyche of humanity that are unhealed to this day. During these thousands of years of war, we forgot about nature and our relationship with her. Gradually, we developed the idea that we were above nature, entitled to control and dominate her for the benefit of our species alone. To summarize, the change in the image of deity was a primary factor in separating nature from spirit. It led to a polarizing dualism that henceforth formed our concept of reality.
There was a second factor that contributed to the loss of the sacredness of nature; a forgotten event that has had a devastating influence on patriarchal culture, the oppression of women, and our relationship with the planet.[2]
What happened was this: the Jewish people once worshipped both a Goddess and a God, a Queen and a King of Heaven, who together created the world. But in 621 BC under a king called Josiah, a powerful group of priests called Deuteronomists took control of the First Temple in Jerusalem. They removed every trace of the Goddess Asherah, the Queen of Heaven, who was worshipped as the Holy Spirit[3] and Divine Wisdom and also as the Tree of Life — a Tree that connected the invisible and visible worlds, and whose fruit was the gift of immortality. The shamanic rituals of the High Priest which had honoured and communed with the Queen of Heaven as the Tree of Life, Divine Wisdom and the Holy Spirit were replaced by new rituals based on obedience to Yahweh’s Law.[4]
But the Deuteronomists didn’t stop there. They also created the Myth of the Fall with its punishing God and its grim message of guilt, sin, suffering and the banishment of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.[5] They demoted the Goddess – whose title was Mother of All Living – into the human figure of Eve, giving her the same title as the former Goddess and placing two Trees in the Garden of Eden instead of one. They blamed Eve for the sin of disobedience that brought about the Fall and for bringing sin, suffering and death into the world. Henceforth, all women would be contaminated by Eve’s sin and would have to be under men’s control lest they create further disasters. I cannot begin to tell you the catastrophic effects of this myth on Christian civilization. From it there developed the idea that the whole human race was tainted by original sin, punished for a primordial act of disobedience. The created world was no longer a manifestation of the Tree of Life but was viewed as contaminated by the Fall, no longer sacred. Woman’s long oppression, even persecution, stems directly from this myth. Her voice was silenced for millennia.
Yahweh was left as the sole transcendent Creator God: The Divine Feminine aspect of God was deleted from the image of deity. The only place where the concept of the sacred marriage survived was in the mystical Jewish tradition of Kabbalah, known as the Voice of the Dove.[6] The Divine Feminine was not only banished from Judaism, but also from Christianity which took its image of God from Judaism. Islam also had a sole male creator god. The end-result of this new polarizing cosmology was that life on earth was split off from the divine world; nature was split off from spirit. Men came to be identified with spirit and women with nature. Body was split off from mind and mind from soul. Sexuality was sinful. Woman’s only role was to obey and serve man and carry his seed. All this was a complete reversal of the earlier cosmology focused on the Great Mother.
(To be continued)
Notes
[1] Ophuls, William, Apologies to the Grandchildren, 2018 Independently published, p. 21 See also Plato’s Revenge: Politics in the Age of Ecology; and Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail
[2] See Kovacs, Betty C., Merchants of Light, 2019, The Kamlak Center, Claremont CA
[3] This loss of the Holy Spirit was repeated at the Council of Nicaea in 325 ce when the Hebrew feminine noun for the Holy Spirit – ruach – was translated first into the Greek word pneuma which is genderless, and then into the Latin spiritus sanctus which is masculine. The Christian Trinity was rendered entirely masculine and the former feminine gender of the Holy Spirit was permanently lost to Christianity.
[4] The books of the Old Testament Scholar, Margaret Barker, give the facts of this story in detail.
[5] Genesis 2 & 3
[6] See Baring, Anne, The Dream of the Cosmos, Chapter Three