[Editor’s Note: This and subsequent excerpt parts are from the anthology entitled Wounded Feminine: Grieving with Goddess, published by Girl God Books (2024).]
Introduction
Claire Dorey
When state and religion collude to cement masculine power and undermine and control women it makes sense to look to a spiritual age, before patriarchy even existed, where the Goddess held the power. Here the energy is compassionate, fierce and gentle, empowering and nurturing, creative and destructive, honouring every aspect of the Feminine.
We are mermaids treading water in an unfamiliar new world with all that grief releases rising to the surface.
Grief is a broken heart making sense of love and loss. It’s milk and honey and tears of blood. It’s a detour into a labyrinth to meet the dark stuff on the ‘straight line’ of our life plan. It’s the cinematic subconscious processing difficult emotion in the Gothic shadows – Shock – Denial – Rage – whilst life goes on for others out there in the sunshine. To grieve is to feel alone.
“What cannot be said will be wept.” -Sappho
What if I told you the Goddess holds space beneath her wings for those who seek it? The collective voice is a healing voice. Inviting shared experience into the Goddess Space is cathartic for those who tell their stories and healing for recipients. Here the gentle, nurturing Siren blows a blue bubble of hope deep beneath the ocean. The yoni portal opens within the pages of a book. Words are spoken in sacred circles raising vibration. The Grief Space is a wild cocoon for magic and alchemy – a doorway to self-expression, access to the dark shadow, a catalyst for change. Cry your tears and imagine negative experiences transforming into wisdom.
It is ok to be wounded – in fact it is healthy to ‘crumble’. We all need space to retreat, go inward, free from judgement and time as a monetised commodity, to sit with emotion and find our source of internal power. When we have ‘processed’ our filter will naturally weed out what we no longer need.
We grieve the loss of what is important: loved ones, relationships, our youth, health, and our rights and freedoms because attachment is part of the human condition. Perhaps we grieve for our loss of innocence, for the person we might have been if we weren’t victim to war, abuse, and violence. Grief resonates within all of us somewhere. We all have a story to tell. There is hope to pass on.
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” -Maya Angelou
Perhaps we feel nothing. Then just when we think we are ‘over it’ grief creeps up on us. Trauma is incurred. Trauma is released. All this confusion, making sense of things – it’s a vulnerable time. Wherever the vulnerable are there will be predators. Perhaps the Banshee howl was a very vocal show of female force warning circling predators, “beware the matriarch is watching.”
As gate keepers, women were on the front line of life and death. We were the mothers, the midwives, the light worker alchemists and soul custodians, ensuring women survived birth and maintained control over their own bodies. The Three Fates were the cutters of the umbilical thread and spinners of destiny. The funerary Goddess assisted the soul to the afterlife. This was where the power was and it was in women’s hands. See now why patriarchy set about erasing women’s matrilineal power?
Where women once held the Grief Space open, capitalist patriarchy shut it down because it fears emotion in the same way Zeus feared Nyx and sailors feared the Siren, sailing on past before emotions, expressed as soulful song, dragged them down! Emotion, public displays of emotion and the emotions of others became a source of shame. Feelings were too complex to understand so they avoided them.
In the hands of the unscrupulous, the Grief Space became the Guilt Space, a place of dysfunction and propaganda, ritualised ostracism and humiliating misogyny with threats of hell and damnation. They hijacked the Goddess: in the name of Sati, they burnt widows alive. Vulnerable women have been shaved, told they are too ‘hysterical’ for funerals, buried alive, coerced into drinking the deceased’s bathwater or forced into a lifetime of mourning. Hope was replaced with solitude, bleakness, and black robes, turning sadness into loneliness, stunting a woman’s potential to grow and transform through the grieving process. How mean is that!
Cultural and historical practices vary. The collective female voice of the keening Banshees thrust death into the public domain. In India ‘crying ladies’ (the Rudaali) are available for hire and in ancient Egypt professional mourners dressed up as the Goddess Isis and Nephthys and temples thrummed with dance and music. The Day of the Dead, the dance of the pall bearers, the funerary Haka, the Jazz funeral and Vodou death rituals are a few more examples of how humanity copes with loss.
To the detriment of the entire human race, unprocessed grief can escalate to the stuff of nightmares.
“He had also war to help to relieve his sorrow.” -Tacitus, Roman Historian
War is not a cure for male depression. Patriarchy needs both men and women to be emotionless because most of the things it requires us to tolerate are quite unacceptable. The gaping hole in men stems from the loss of nurture that only a matriarchal society can give them. Subconsciously, patriarchy still grieves this loss.
“Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life.…” -Carl Jung
Goddess honours emotion and cuts through the aloneness of grief, showing us we are connected to greatness as part of a huge cosmic cycle: birth, death, rebirth. She shows us how destruction makes way for creation, all of which is governed by Mother Nature. She shows us how spirit lives on as vibration.
Goddess provides a safe space for the living to grieve. Tanit’s arms are open, so too are the wings of Isis. Cybele’s pollen-infused refuge is a source of nourishment. Sheela na gig invites us back into the womb space for some apotropaic healing. Nyx offers us the protection of darkness. Soteria offers sanctuary in her temple. Bastet heals through raised vibration, possibly enlisting the cat’s purr as part of the process.
Oizys, Goddess of misery, anxiety, grief, and depression honours these dark emotions. Nanna died of grief, illustrating its powerful grip, which validates our feelings. Medusa, herself a survivor, protects the vulnerable with her killer stare. Inanna retreats underground to visit her Dark Feminine and finds it profoundly transformative. Hekate lights the way through the darkness. She tells us we have the choice to choose our path.
“At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can.” -Frida Kahlo
Patriarchy broke the bonds between women, shrinking love to fear. They were not beyond murder in their quest for supremacy as the ‘witch hunts’ – murder of free-thinking women – illustrate. In many ways Demeter represents the generational trauma and grief of the Divine Mother as she mourns for all her daughters, whose power is so closely tied to Mother Nature. We need to hold the Grief Space open for the Wounded Feminine because demonisation of Eve and Lilith represents the demonisation of all women and the silencing of Mary represents the silencing of all women.
“Life is an unfoldment and the further we travel the more truth we can comprehend.” -Hypatia
Patriarchy’s relentless denial of emotion stems from the fear of personal growth. Toxic masculinity stole our tears, impeded our healing and denied our Wounded Feminine. We must reclaim, reframe, and contextualise the Grief Space so we can feel our feelings free of shame, tell our stories, speak our truth, let go and when we are ready, move on, knowing we are connected to a powerful and wise female lineage and support network. We can raise and align our energy and vibration to this exquisite female energy – Divine Female Consciousness.
References and links
The abolished ‘Sati Pratha’: Lesser-known facts on the banned practice –
India Today.
BURIED WITH THEIS HUSBAND – UCR Center for Bibliographical Studies
and Research.
Mourning in Edwardian and Post-War England – Edwardian Promenade.
Funeral Dances – encylopedia.com