The Divine Feminine: The Great Mother - by Anne Baring and Andrew Harvey

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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 Great Mother

 

Human consciousness has developed infinitely slowly out of nature.

Before we knew ourselves as human, we were animal and plant, stone

and water. For countless millennia, the potential for human

consciousness was hidden within nature, like a seed buried in the

earth. Then, very slowly, it began to differentiate itself from

nature. Deep in our memory is the whole experience of life on this

planet: life that has evolved over the four and a half billion years

since its formation; life as hydrogen, oxygen and carbon; life as the

most minute particles of matter; life as water, fire, air and earth;

life as rock, soil, plant, insect, bird, animal; life as woman and

man evolved from this aeonic experience. Finally the point was

reached where planetary life evolved a brain which enabled us to

speak, to formulate thoughts, to communicate with each other through

language, to endow sounds with meaning, and invent writing as a way

of transmitting thoughts. Over these billions of years life on this

planet has evolved from undifferentiated awareness to the self-

awareness of our species. All this can be described as an instinctive

process, each phase blending imperceptibly into the next.

 

Self-awareness and reflective consciousness as we know it now is a

very recent development, yet consciousness as genetic patterning

present in plant and animal and human life, consciousness as

awareness or instinctive reflex is carried within us as part of the

reptilian and mammalian brain system that took many millions of years

to evolve. From these have come the highly differentiated

consciousness of the neo-cortex that we call rational mind. The

ability to think, to reason, to reflect, to analyse, to store

information and be able to retrieve it through memory, is itself a

development of the older brain systems, and is interdependent with

them, but our conscious awareness is focused in the most recently

developed part of ourselves and is out of touch with the roots from

which we have grown. And what are those roots? Does our consciousness

originate in the greater consciousness of the cosmos? Is our brain a

vehicle, just as all planetary life is a vehicle, of that cosmic

consciousness? Is the cosmos the ultimate source of our thoughts, our

feelings, our fertile imagination, our creative ideas, our musical

genius? These are questions to which science as yet gives no answer

but older traditions from ancient civilizations, do offer answers.

 

As consciousness evolved, the sacred image was like an umbilical cord

connecting us to the deep ground of life. From about 25,000 BC.,

perhaps far longer, the image of the goddess as the Great Mother was

worshipped as the fertile womb which gave birth to everything , the

great cave of being from which she brought forth the living and into

which she took the dead back for rebirth. To this day, the cave is

still, in dream and mystical experience, the place of revelation and

communion with the unseen ground of being. The earliest images of the

Great Mother known to us are the figures of the goddess carved from

stone and bone and ivory some 22,000 years ago. The Great Mother was

imagined to carry within her being the three dimensions of sky, earth

and underworld. She was the great pulse of life reflected in the

rhythm of the moon, the sun, the stars, the plants, trees, animals

and human beings. All these were her children and she was the

numinous presence within her manifest forms, continually regenerating

them in a cyclical process that was without beginning and without

end.

 

----- This primordial experience of the Great Mother is the

foundation of later cultures all over the world. She is like an

immense tree, whose roots lie beyond the reach of our consciousness,

whose branches are all the forms of life we know, and whose flowering

is a potential within us, a potential that only a tiny handful of the

human race has realized. In these earliest Paleolithic cultures of

which those of the First Peoples today are the descendents, she was

nature, she was the earth and she was the unseen dimension of soul or

spirit. People were connected through her to nature as to a great

being and to the great vault of the starry sky as part of this being,

imagined as a great web of life. She was the invisible patterning or

formations of energy whose intricate and interdependent system of

relationships were respected even though they were not understood.

She was experienced as a law, a profound patterning which the whole

of life reflected and obeyed in the way it functioned, from the

circumpolar movement of the stars to the tiniest insect. The image of

the Great Mother reflected something deeply felt - that the creative

source cares for the life it has brought into being in the way that

an animal or a human mother instinctively cares for the life of her

cub or her child.

 

--the Neolithic, a deep relationship was formed with the earth

through the rituals of sowing, tending and harvesting the crops, and

breeding domestic animals for food. The images of the Great Mother as

a profoundly experienced life process of birth, death and

regeneration develop and proliferate around many different images of

the goddess. Sky, earth, and underworld were unified in her being. As

bird-goddess she was the sky and her life-bestowing waters fell as

the rain from her breasts, the clouds; she was the earth and from her

body were born the crops that nourished the life she supported. As

serpent-goddess she was the darkness beneath the earth - the

mysterious underworld - which concealed the hidden sources of the

water which became the rivers, springs and lakes and which was also

the home of the ancestral dead. She was the sea on which the fragile

boats of the Neolithic explorers ventured into the unknown. She was

the life of the animals, trees, plants and fruits on which all her

children depended for survival. Whether we look at the goddess

figures of Old Europe or those of Çatal Huyuk in Anatolia, or further

East, to Mesopotamia and the Indus valley civilization, the basic

forms are the same. It is hard for our modern consciousness to

imagine how life in that time was lived in the dimension of the

Mother, in participation with the rhythms of her being, or how these

images of her kept people in touch with their instincts, and were the

foundation of their fragile trust in life.

 

----- This was the phase in human evolution when magical rituals were

devised to keep the community in harmony with her deeper life: to

propitiate her with offerings that would bring protection and

increase, and ward off her power to destroy. In relation to human

consciousness at that time, the image of the Great Mother was

numinous and all-powerful. The discoveries in the territory of Old

Europe and at Çatal Hüyük in Anatolia and the Indus Valley show

cultures as early as 7000 BC. with a deep sense of relationship with

the mother goddess, where women were engaged in all kinds of creative

work that was focused on her worship, where shrines and temples to

her abounded, filled with the beautiful pottery, cloth hangings and

sculptures and the baked offerings that were made in her honor. It

was in the Neolithic that mountains, hills and groves became sacred

and that springs and wells became places of healing. There are still

places all over the world where pilgrimages are made to these sacred

sites. Deep in the psyche we carry ancient memories of the sacredness

of the earth, and of the earth as Mother. This Neolithic vision was

transmitted to the poetry and traditions of the First Peoples who are

helping us now to recover our lost sense of the sacredness of the

earth.

 

----- The Paleolithic and Neolithic eras give us the earliest images

of the Great Mother but we hear no words. It is only in the Bronze

Age that we begin to hear the human voice; for the first time we can

listen to the hymns addressed to the great goddesses of Sumer and

Egypt. The voice of the Divine Feminine comes alive, speaks to us,

reflected in the words addressed to the goddess which are inscribed

in hieroglyphs on the walls of Egyptian temples or on the sun-baked

clay tablets of Sumer. These reveal a rich mythology of the Divine

Feminine which may already be millennia old. It is in the Bronze Age

that the feeling for the sacredness of life is clearly expressed in

words - a feeling that is transmitted through the hymns and prayers

to the goddess or where she herself speaks in the great aretalogies

that have come down to us from Egypt and Canaan and the remarkable

early Christian Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi. In these she

announces herself to be the source, ground or matrix of all forms of

life; the fertile womb which eternally regenerates plants, animals,

human beings; the life-force which attracts the male to the female;

the power which creates, destroys and transforms all forms of itself.

The goddess speaks as the source and embodiment of all instinctive

processes. She is the life force which is nurturing, compassionate,,

beneficent and also the terrifying and implacable force of

destruction which can nevertheless regenerate what it has destroyed.

 

----- With the Iron Age, which begins about 1200 B.C., and the

development of patriarchal religion, the story of the goddess becomes

more difficult to follow as the god takes her place as the supreme

ruler of sky, earth and underworld, yet in the West, the great

goddesses of the Bronze Age are still worshipped as late as Roman

times and the Greek and Roman goddesses, as well as moving closer to

the concerns of civilization in their patronage of human skills and

the creative arts, still bring through the cosmic dimensions of the

older Great Goddess. Now they embody wisdom, truth, compassion and

justice. They reflect the divine harmony, order and beauty of life.

Inanna, Isis, Cybele, Demeter were the focus of mystery religions

which gave access in the cultures over which they presided to a

deeper perception of life than that which prevailed in the popular

religions of the day. The magnificent lunar myth of Inanna's descent

to and return from the underworld may be the foundation of the later

image of the Shekhinah that emerges in the mystical tradition of the

Hebrew religion. Through the celebration of the great festival in

honor of Demeter, the Thesmophoria, and the rites of her temple at

Eleusis, women and men were given a vision of eternal life and the

mysteries of the soul. -----

 

The legacy of the Divine Feminine in Western culture lies

in the great mythological themes of the Quest which direct us toward

the roots of consciousness, the source or ground of being: the

goddess Isis gathering the dismembered fragments of her husband,

Osiris, Odysseus returning home to Penelope under the guidance of the

goddess Athena; Theseus following Ariadne's thread through the Cretan

labyrinth; Dante's journey into the underworld and his reunion with

Beatrice; the medieval quest for the Holy Grail - all these

marvellous stories define the Feminine as immanent presence and

transcendent goal.

 

----- Further to the East, in India, while the Vedic sages expressed

with extraordinary clarity their vision of the divine ground in the

sublime poetic imagery of the Vedas and the Upanishads, the ecstatic

poets whose traditions belonged to a culture which existed long

before the Aryan invasions, sang of their passionate devotion to the

goddess, while to the north, the mountain people named their great

mountains in her honor and worshipped her as the dynamism of the

creative principle, locked in the bliss of an eternal embrace with

her divine consort. Still further to the East, the wise masters of

the Taoist tradition never lost the shamanic understanding that

relationship with Nature was the key to staying in touch with the

source of life. They never followed the ascetic pratices of other

religions which sacrificed the body for the sake of spiritual

advancement. They were never in a hurry to reach the goal of union

with the divine or to renounce the world for the sake of

enlightenment. Of all the religious traditions, with the exception of

those of the First Peoples, they were the only ones not to split body

from spirit, thinking from feeling, so losing touch with the soul.

They never became lost in the mazes of the intellect and its rigid

metaphysical constructions but, through patience and devotion, were

able to realize the difficult alchemy of bringing their nature into

harmony with the deeper harmony of life. They did not lose sight of

the One.

 

----- Looking back over the past at the evolution of human

consciousness, it seems to fall into three main stages. During the

first stage, broadly defined as the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras,

humanity lived instinctively as the child of the Great Mother, in

magical harmony with her body - creation - and knew life and death as

two modes of her divine reality. Then this primordial experience

began to fade as we gradually developed the capacity for self-

awareness and reflective thought and with this, the power to develop

technology and control of the environment. During this phase human

consciousness becomes differentiated from the matrix of nature and

nature is imagined as a great dragon - something to be struggled

against, overcome and controlled.

 

----- During this phase of separation, there is a shift of focus from

the goddess to the god and a radical split between spirit and nature,

dividing the oneness of life into a duality. The god gradually

becomes identified with spirit, light, creative mind, and good; and

the goddess with nature, matter, darkness, chaos and evil. Men and

women were part of this process of differentiation. Men

(unconsciously) aligned themselves with the creator god and the

principle of light. They associated women with nature because of

their closeness to instinctual processes and regarded them as an

inferior creation, as Plato does in the Timaeus. Mythology and

religious teaching began to portray the opposition between light and

darkness, good and evil, spirit and nature, mind and body. For nearly

three thousand years in the three patriarchal religions that evolved

from the Middle East, there has been no image of union and

relationship between goddess and god, no feminine dimension to the

godhead to lend balance and wholeness to our concept of it. This loss

of the Divine Feminine has endangered civilization and is clearly

reflected in the emphasis on conquest and the drive for power over

nature which is the ethos of modern culture.

 

----- Yet, it is important to understand that this division of life

into two aspects is rooted in the dissociation in ourselves between

the conscious, rational mind and the deep, instinctual matrix of soul

out of which, over millennia, it has developed. It is because of this

dissociation, so difficult to see and understand until the present

century, that we have come to divide life into two aspects: spirit

and nature, mind and matter. We are now discovering that this is an

arbitrary division based on the evolutionary experience of the

separation from nature which has been a painful but necessary phase

of our evolution. We need to recover our lost relationship with

nature and with soul and this may be one reason why the image of the

Divine Feminine is returning now.

 

----- Why is the image of the Divine Mother so important? To answer

this question, we need look no further than our experience of birth

into the world. First of all, there is the experience of the embryo

in the womb; the experience of union or fusion and containment within

a watery, nurturing matrix. After the traumatic experience of birth

and the sudden and violent expulsion from this matrix, the

prolongation of the earlier feelings of close relationship, trust and

safety is absolutely vital. Without the consistent and loving care of

the mother in early childhood, the child has no trust in itself, no

power to survive negative life experiences, no model from which to

learn how to nurture and support itself or to care for its children

in turn. Its primary response to life is anxiety and fear. It is like

a tree with no roots, easily torn up by a storm. Its instincts have

been traumatized and damaged. With the love of the mother and trust

in her presence, the child grows in strength and confidence and

delight in itself and in life. Its primary response is trust.

 

----- Without this experience, life becomes threatening, terrifying.

Without it the effort of living exhausts and dispirits. Intense and

constant anxiety means that there is no resting place, no solace for

loneliness, no feeling that life is something to be trusted, enjoyed;

that it loves, helps, guides and supports us. Without this positive

image of the feminine, fear, like a deadly parasite, invades the soul

and weakens the body. Those cultures which have no image of the

Mother in the god-head are vulnerable to immensely powerful

unconscious feelings of fear and anxiety, particularly when the

emphasis of their religious teaching is on sin and guilt. The

compensation to this fear is an insatiable need for power and control

over life. How hungry the human heart is for an image of a Divine

Mother that would, like an umbilical cord, re-connect it to the Womb

of Being, restoring the lost sense of trust and containment in a

dimension which may be beyond the reach of our intellect, yet is

accessible to us through our deepest instincts.

 

----- Those who, for centuries have been the transmitters of the

patriarchal traditions may not appreciate how deep this need and this

longing are; as acutely felt by men as by women. In endowing the

transcendent and remote Father with the attributes traditionally

associated with the Mother, they have to some extent acknowledged

this human need. But just as it is the presence of the mother that

comforts and reassures the child, so it is the image of the Divine

Mother that heals and consoles, sustains and encourages; the image

that awakens the feeling of trust and containment because it reflects

our personal experience of our containment in the womb and our

earliest human relationship.

 

----- This is why the image of the Divine Feminine is returning to us

now, to help us recover not only our sense of trust in life but also

the relationship with a dimension of consciousness that we have, in

our drive to be in control of life, ignored. We ourselves are amazed

by the treasure we have brought together in this book and hope that

it may open people's awareness to the beauty and power of the texts

gathered from all over the world. Because a knowledge of the symbols

which the soul uses in dreams to communicate its guidance and its

wisdom is essential to an understanding of ourselves, and the greater

dimension in which we live, the next chapter will explore some of

these although it is impossible to do justice to them in a few pages.

The work of Carl Jung, Erich Neumann and Marija Gimbutas can amplify

the small contribution this chapter can make.

 

The Divine Feminine: The Great Mother

Anne Baring and Andrew Harvey