The Divine Feminine: Introduction - by Anne Baring and Andrew Harvey

[Guest guest]

The Divine Feminine

Exploring the Feminine Face of God throughout the World

Godsfield Press UK and Conari Press USA 1996

Anne Baring and Andrew Harvey

 

The Eternal Feminine is our Guide - Goethe

 

-This book is a celebration of the Sacred Feminine, the feminine face

of God as it has been expressed in different cultures all over the

world. The Divine Feminine is initiating a crucial new phase in our

evolution: urging us to discover a new ethic of responsibility toward

the planet; bringing us a new vision of the sacredness and unity of

life. Wisdom, justice, beauty, harmony, and compassion are the

qualities that have traditionally been identified with the Divine

Feminine, yet it is also the irresistible power that destroys old

forms and brings new ones into being, the inspiration of the love-in-

action that is so needed to transform a culture radically out of

touch with its soul. The Divine Feminine is this unseen dimension of

soul to which we are connected through our instincts, our feelings,

and the longing imagination of our heart. Soul is not limited to our

own psychic life. Soul is invisible nature, the immense web of

relationships that is concealed beneath the veil of matter. It is

something both inconceivable and immeasurable to which we belong, in

which we live - an intermediate dimension between our physical world

and the deep unknowable ground of being.

 

----- For many hundreds of years, in the fascination with the

development of mind and the technological skills that have given us

the power to control nature, the emphasis of Western civilization has

been overwhelmingly focused on power, control and conquest rather

than relationship. Now, to balance this one-sided emphasis, the image

of the Divine Feminine, together with the mythological tradition that

belongs to it, is returning to consciousness. It is reconnecting us

to the dimension of the instinctual soul that has been shut away,

like the Sleeping Beauty, behind a hedge of thorns. The power and

numinosity of the Divine Feminine are needed to arouse the will and

energy to act on behalf of life and to restore wholeness and balance

to our image of God and so to ourselves. It is awakening us to a new

ethic of responsibility, focused beyond tribal and national concerns

toward the needs of the planet.

 

----- The Divine Mother is asking us to trust and protect life, to

work with her in all we do, opening our understanding to the

knowledge that we are not separate from herself but an expression of

her being. The unknown dimension of soul is our conduit to the

Divine. Cut off from soul, the mind becomes impoverished, rigid,

dogmatic, and inflated. In compensation for this loss of relationship

with soul, it becomes driven by the need for ever more power and

control. The journey in search of the unknown dimension of soul, back

the way we have come, toward nature and the ground of our own nature,

is difficult and even dangerous because it asks that we relinquish

the certainty of deeply held beliefs, both religious and scientific.

It means opening ourselves to discovery.

 

----- The Grail of the Feminine is urging us to open our minds to a

new vision of reality, a revelation of all cosmic life as a divine

unity. For those awakened to this vision, to be born a human being is

not to be born into a fallen, flawed world of sin and illusion, cut

off from the divine; it is to be born into a world lit by an

invisible radiance, ensouled by Divine Presence, graced and sustained

by incandescent light and love. Our book is a celebration of this

vision.

 

The Divine Feminine: Introduction

Anne Baring and Andrew Harvey