Restoring the Balance
Our society has nearly forgotten the myths of the Great Mother. In Catholicism, the archetype survives as veneration of the Virgin Mary. Because we have set aside the myths of the Goddess, the Great Mother archetype manifests in our collective shadow as the objectification of women. We disempower women and treat them as second class citizens while according them privileges generally denied to men. We worship them as sex-goddesses, we venerate them as madonnas, yet we devalue their work and their contributions to society.
We can heal this societal schizophrenia when we become willing to awaken to the archetypes of the Goddess: the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. These archetypes were lost when the mythology of a dominating and jealous God ousted a matricentric understanding of the cosmos. The most recent set of these patriarchal stories comes from the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Our Judeo-Christian creation myth begins with YHVH speaking the cosmos into existence (Genesis chapter 1). Thus, the earth and its inhabitants are objects created by the divine act of speaking. In essence, we are a creative writing project. The God who creates by fiat seems relatively uncommitted to His creation. When his subjects annoy Him, he curses them and sentences them to death--to avoid having to compete with them (Genesis chapter 3)! When he gets really angry, he drowns the entire planet in His rage (Genesis chapter 6). Throughout the history of His "chosen" people, He uses force and domination to maintain their allegiance and obedience.
This is a far cry from motherly behavior. The older myths of the Goddess tell of a Mother who births the earth from her own body. The mother who begets a child from her own body loves that child. When the child errs, she gently teaches him a better way. The Mother does not walk a path of dominance enforced by threats of violence. She teaches by intimacy and by nurture. She constrains when necessary, but does not dominate.
The Goddess can be seen as the symbol, the normative image of immanence. She represents the divine embodied in nature, in human beings, in the flesh. The Goddess is not one image but many--a constellation of forms and associations--earth, air, fire, water, moon and star, sun, flower and seed, willow and apple, black, red, white, Maiden, Mother, and Crone. (Starhawk, 1982, p. 9)
With both archetypes, we find a balance. A Father who sets limits and a Mother who nurtures. A Father who logically ("In the beginning was the Word" (John 1:1 NIV); (Greek: logos, the root of the English word "logic") orders the cosmos, and a Mother who births the universe from the very substance of Her being.
YHVH Spoke the World into Existence:
In the first chapter of Genesis, particularly verses 3, 6, 9, 14, 20, and 24, YHVH speaks the main components of the world into being. "And God said "Let there be light," and there was light." (Gen 1:3 NIV). YHVH's creative act is an act of speaking, an act of command.YHVH Fears the Competition of His Creation: The "Fall of Man" is detailed in Genesis 3. This is the story of Eve, the Serpent, and the Apple. The last few verses of the chapter are quite revealing of YHVH's character:
And YHVH said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." So YHVH banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3: 22-24, NIV)
YHVH Drowns a Planet in Exasperation
YHVH saw how great man's wickedness on the earth had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all the time. YHVH was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain. So YHVH said, "I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth--men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air--for I am grieved that I have made them." (Genesis 6:5-7 NIV)
Starhawk. (1982). Dreaming the dark: Magic, sex and politics. Boston: Beacon
Press.
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