The Age of the Goddess and the End of Free Will

In our little Utica Temenos group we have an “assignment” to tell our individual stories. We took this on as an “elder” activity, taking off from Robert Bly’s list of “qualities of the adult” at the end of The Sibling Society (“…an adult is able to organize the random emotions and events of his or her life into a memory, a rough meaning, a story.”)

I think I understand why Bly used the adjective “rough.” Although for many people, seeing a meaning or pattern in their lives is an almost inconceivable challenge, never before attempted, others have too much tendency to see everything that happens as having had the hand of Providence guiding it. Excessive uncertainty on the one hand, and a surplus of certainty on the other!

The question I see emerging, for all of us in this group, is how far we are going to take the notion of being “divinely guided,” the idea that we serve something greater than ourselves (and what does that mean in our post-death-of-God world?) We can’t help the fact that we grew up in a liberalized, post-vertical (to use Bly’s term) collective consciousness, that we’ve known from childhood on we could take what we wanted from the certitudes presented to us and “leave the rest.” This was especially true in my case, growing up in a liberal, secularized home in which the barely churched adults served no power or reality beyond themselves. But even strictly raised Catholics in those days had to be aware that there were choices, in behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, etc., even if they dared not choose until the time came for breaking away from the parents. So the notion of having no choice is foreign to us. Like everyone else, our tendency is to act in all matters as if we were free to do and to choose what we want. In that way, we live as if we would live forever, as if we had all the time in the world.

Thus, though we are drawn to archetypal/transformational and eastern spirituality, the idea that we would bend or surrender our will to “Spirit” may not even occur to us. The idea that there was a “plan” for us, a trajectory for our lives, just does not fit with the freedom of will we were taught that we have. Dreams, or other transmissions from the spiritual realm have fascination for us, and we recognize them as communications from our soul, but even they do not suggest the kind of binding force that would oppose our personal freedom. What does it mean that we are given significant, suggestive dreams? Is there anything to give us pause in our enjoyment of these treasures from the unconscious?

In our Temenos group, I am in the minority in that I had a St. Paul-type falling off the donkey experience in relation to “non-ordinary reality.” My “breakdown,” back in the mid-nineties was an unambiguous experience of finding myself in relation to forces or powers far greater than my own, that could swallow me up and spit me out at their leisure. My inner furniture got drastically rearranged because, in my view, up to then I had refused what mythologist Joseph Campbell refers to as “the call to adventure” for too long. As Campbell says in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, “the refusal (of the call) is essentially a refusal to give up what one takes to be one’s own interest.” Further he says, once one has refused the call, “the divinity itself becomes one’s terror; for obviously if one is oneself one’s god, then God himself, the will of God, the power that would destroy one’s egocentric system, becomes a monster.” My second birth, with “the hound of heaven” gnashing at my heels, did not feel optional.

But even for me, and maybe for St. Paul too, after a period of time, the sense of urgency lessens, and the “illusion” that I have choices returns. Because of modernity, the time and place in which we live, the question reappears as to what place this “spirituality” has in one’s life. There is no political or religious force great enough to “make me” do anything against my own will. I’ll draw down on myself no public censure unless I do something considered bad by conventional morality, but my soul can burn in hell – or starve in abandonment - without a remark from anyone. In this modern context, though we still recognize the motivational power of guilt, we do not recognize the necessity to a meaningful life, of conscious surrender. Especially we do not recognize the necessity of conscious surrender to the Immanent voice of the Goddess to become the full flowering of our particular, individual being.

I don’t really believe in signs, but on this Good Friday just past, I received what could be perceived as one by somebody who does believe in them. Even to me, it is worth looking at. Each year, the inter-faith Living Stations of the Cross takes people on a walk outdoors that includes stops at various places of significance in the crumbling inner city of Utica. This year the walk concluded with a ceremony invoking the names of the “saints” from various traditions who have stood up for truth, justice and love for humanity. The group of us stood in the Copernicus park in a large circle. The idea was we’d be given one of these names, we’d speak it, and than all would say together “Presente.” When the basket of names came around to me, I was handed “Mary, mother of Jesus.” Orin whispered to me, ”Wow – the Goddess!” If he had not done so, I might not have bothered to even notice, or to ponder this interesting coincidence.

But if you have dedicated the past 20 years of your life to transformational spirituality, and the past 2 years to bi-weekly honoring of the Divine Feminine specifically, as I have, one can imagine a connection even if one is not quite willing to assign the “coincidence” to the hand of Providence. And Mary, remember, was she who was stunned by the news that she had been chosen to give birth to the godhead. Just put yourself in those shoes!

I mean it: put yourself in her shoes. For this is still our story. Even for those who reject or have outgrown Christianity, the story retains its power to speak to us directly as a confrontation with the Goddess/God nature within. What are we to do when we are likewise called to give birth to+ God? If we are really listening, we will do as Mary probably did – check to see if there isn’t some mistake. Seek a clarification. Attempt to strike a bargain. The offer feels more like the announcement of death than birth, and the immediate reaction is to run like hell for the hills.

There is no way to give birth to God without changing one’s life utterly, without surrender to a power beyond one’s own. When we play at the edges of goddess consciousness we play with a serious reality. In the book we are reading in our group, Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess and the Transformation of Consciousness, the authors discuss the mind-body connection using a description written by C.G. Jung in 1954 as “two cones whose apices, meeting in a point without extension,- a real zero point – touch and do not touch.” Jung’s intuitive insight has received support in recent years from neuroscience which posits in the mind both a “physical substrate, which is the body and the brain, and…another immaterial substrate that has to do with information moving around.”

The authors continue to say that “in the imagery of the Feminine, this midground between spirit and body, the subtle or metaphorical body, is the place of the Virgin…Like the virgin forest that carries all the potential of new life, within her is the seed of the new consciousness that may be quickened by the spirit and brought into life.” Specifically what is nurtured and brought into life according to Christian mythology is the “Bridegroom,” the “masculine energy strong enough to partner the Virgin.” This ultimate “wedding” of archetypal energies is the realization of the transformational or individuation process.

On the one hand, it is true to say that we have a choice (i.e., to accept the seed of the new consciousness or not). Mary has a choice. “It’s my life and I’ll do what I like,” as the Animals sang it back in the 60’s. Modern life is defined by our having more choices, at all levels, than ever before in history. We can marry whom we please, or not marry. We can choose to not give birth to children, through contraceptives and legal abortions, or we can choose to have children with or without the father in the picture, with or without a personal “father” at all. We can prolong the dying process by keeping the body alive even when spirit has all but flown away, we can divorce without serious censure, we can change jobs, move to Boulder, reinvent identities over and over. Given the amount of choice we have compared to our ancestors, it is far more difficult to imagine anything in relation to which we are not free.

But what that is, simply, is a failure of our imagination, for our bodies, our beings in nature, dictate that we are not free. For beginners, we are not free of aging, disease, death, decay, dissolution. We are not free of our utter dependence on earth, water, air, plants and animals. In fact, the purported free will is an illusion cooked up by overexcited 18th century rationalists, aided and abetted by various technological innovations and the enormous riches of industrial and post-industrial civilization. The illusion of freedom we’ve enjoyed for the last couple of centuries has led to the unparalleled destruction of the planet and must now be relinquished. Freedom of choice must be re-examined. In the absence of what Robert Bly calls “the vertical,” in the absence of hierarchical absolutes or of biological determinism, if we are to avoid the rigid, dogmatic and oppressive interpretations for society and social roles coming from the right, we have to choose our limitations and our bonds.

The guidance for following these chosen limitations is mainly inner and intuitive, for God had shifted in our era from heavenly transcendance to bodily immanence. There will be no 10 commandments carved in stone to transmit body-centered wisdom. It will be learned by each individual as she comes to terms with her real and painful limitations, her non-optional needs for community, for beauty, for meaning, for lasting, committed relationships that represent the hard limitations of natural life. It will be learned as she lives with awareness of the mortal life span, its cycles, births, deaths and rebirths. As the authors of Dancing in the Flames express it, the Virgin who mediates between body and spirit, who accomplishes the work of transformation of consciousness “seems to know that our place of wounding is where she will come in, where we will meet others in love, where we will celebrate our planet in love.”

Notice that in talking about these matters, I rely entirely upon metaphoric, mythological language. We will know that we are no longer playing at the edge of Goddess consciousness when our dependence upon metaphor becomes apparent, when, after too many hours of being “productive” or answering demands, or otherwise justifying our existence, we can feel starved for the “nonproductive” language that puts us right in that midpoint place between body and soul and containing both.

In his discussion of the mythological motif of the refusal of the call to adventure, Campbell refers to the story of King Minos. Minos refused to make the sacrifice of the divine bull (i.e., to answer the divine call ), for reasons of economic advantage. Minos achieved his “empire of renown,” but with disastrous consequences. To return for a moment to another metaphor, that of the virgin birth, mentioned above, and of the birth of the “Bridegroom,” which Woodman and Dickson make equivalent to the “masculine energy strong enough to partner the Virgin.” Here is the ultimate surrender for a woman of our age taught to serve other peoples’ interests before her own, to make herself likeable out of the perpetual fear that she will offend. Such a woman will not be released to her full being by following the conventional path to success (i.e., money, status, material possessions) offered by the culture, anymore than Campbell’s King Minos was. Inasmuch as she has not wedded with her own masculine energy – the power to manifest her own specific nature (destiny) in the world, she will continue to serve the dominant culture and to “serve” the ongoing catastrophe.

The demand of the Goddess is that each individual make her own full expression, her own contribution to the community and the world that is in keeping with the limitations and the abundance of nature. Is this demand negotiable? Can we ignore this call? Can we behave as if we have forever to make up our minds, to give up our half-stepping lifestyles of co-dependently making sure that we are liked, and respond to the inner call to a very humble sort of greatness? Put another way, can we forever refuse our differentness, which is to deny the Goddess? For She is only interested in genuine diversity, a diversity in which each individual, plant, animal or human, is fully present as itself.

As for me, I take the fact of my freedom as a priceless good and an even greater aspiration. But as an individual of my place and time in history, I have learned vastly more from the effort to live consciously within my limitations. The most difficult limitation of all may not be death, but the limitation of my own particular (Goddess) nature, acceptance of which is a most demanding discipline.