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.

Reviving Matriarchal Consciousness

“You can’t purchase soul; it isn’t a commodity doled out at toney workshops. It doesn’t come in a jar of high- end supplements. There’s no greater supply of it in Rhinebeck, NY or Denver or Nepal than right here….” Orin Domenico

“…The Black Goddess Kali, the terrible one of many names, difficult of approach, whose stomach is a void and so can never be filled, and whose womb is giving birth forever to all things….” Joseph Campbell


In my experience, people love to hear the “good news” that what is chiefly wanted of us in this life is to fully become ourselves. Our souls rejoice at this message, voiced in all the major religious traditions (I think of “Jesus loves me,” and of a rabbinic tale I heard at a bar mitzvah once that conveyed this message that we are loved as individuals and that what God wants of us is that we be who we are.) When they hear this message pronounced, our souls leap in hope that we, their earthly caretakers, will actually take the project on seriously. .

Like most profound messages, however, this one gets fairly well misconstrued, misheard, and/or ignored, in our culture of shallowness, wherein the project of “being ourselves” gets mixed up with the culture’s idealization of youth, of slender body types, of happiness measured materially, of freedom from constraint, and all kinds of media blather. In fact, in a culture based upon the individual’s being a replaceable worker, passive consumer, “mass man and woman,” banal and opinion-less, what we learn best is self-hatred. In particular, we learn to hate our bodies, and the inner knowledge for which the bodies are the medium. Far from having cause to rejoice, our souls are the first thing to be jettisoned in order to make a “fit” with the culture; they, and the “young feminine” by which the soul is archetypally represented, are left outside to starve. Thus there is precious little information in the mainstream that refers to this business of “becoming who we are.” The phrase is used to sell things, as is the young feminine body. By teen age, most of us are enjoined in the culture’s fear and hatred of the feminine; we are, in effect, the enemies of our very souls, counter-insurgent forces against the now become revolutionary goal of “becoming who we are.”

At the last gathering of our Temenos group, we discussed what the role of people like us might be in our community and world. I had brought up the fact that we are a group, being “Divine Feminine-centered,” whose traditions have been lost, wiped out significantly during the witch burnings of the 16-17th centuries. The “crones” of that day, those women who had achieved, in terms of wisdom, experience, and psychic autonomy, an embodiment of the crone aspect of the Goddess in their lives, were exterminated.

This is a profound loss to all women today of which we are at best, dimly aware. For the most part, we have never even been taught to acknowledge, let alone to grieve, let alone to understand that somehow we must regain essential knowledge that was lost, never to be passed down generationally mother to daughter ever again. Realization of what was done to us centuries ago can help us to appreciate those wounded, partial women of the 1950’s who were our mothers. It can help me to appreciate the difficult gap between my daughter and myself; to the extent that she is a child of the culture in which the feminine archetype (goddess) is effectively banished, how can I ever communicate to her knowledge that can be useful to her in her development of her own goddess aspects, her own inner strength, power, creative expression? Not necessarily the knowledge itself, since that can only be gained experientially, but the awareness, the blessing, for which I as her mother am the first representation (and perhaps also the primary obstacle) in her life? Is there anything we can do to prompt the initiations of younger women, so painful to watch as they collide with, and imbibe, the culture’s toxic hatred of the feminine?
(Some might object to my use of the word “hatred,” and prefer I use a word more nuanced, such as “ambivalence.” Hatred, as my students would say, is so blunt. Okay. To be more balanced, I will correct myself: there is love for women as well; but the destructive culture will not be transformed by this love until the hatred is consciously acknowledged. That is my completely biased opinion.)

The initiation I am speaking of, the development of “goddess aspects,” the true process of “becoming who we are,” is also the passage into genuine adulthood. The distinction must be made between what passes for adulthood in our modern culture and what I am calling “genuine” adulthood, because the dominant culture seeks to keep individuals infantilized as passive consumers and powerless citizens. Initiation, on the other hand, accomplishes a change in consciousness into fully individuated, self-responsible, discerning, generative adults. As far as the dominant culture is concerned, it is quite okay, preferable in fact, that individuals retain their memberships in their families of origin, never venturing beyond that limited, socially constructed consciousness into the deeper consciousness made possible through the “second birth.” The avenue to this deeper consciousness, the “hero’s journey” or transformational process, was taught and practiced, we conjecture, in matriarchal traditions, and is available today via the process of intensive psychotherapy.

If the diaspora had not occurred, the genocide against our kind, I’m guessing our culture would impart to us awareness of the Goddess’s gift of genuine aliveness, and therefore of how to become who we are.. However, according to Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, authors of Dancing in the Flames, the Dark Goddess and the Transformation of Consciousness, we actually do know the Goddess but being “sons and daughters of patriarchy,” (i.e. of the diaspora, of the post-witch-burning era) we are “locked in fear of her judgments.” She is perceived, the authors say, as a negative mother who could destroy [us]; therefore we wish either “to please her or to dominate her.” This tendency to either placate or dominate can be seen in the most fundamental ways men and women of today have of relating to each other and to the world. Furthermore, if we are tempted to say that it has been patriarchy’s approach - and many men’s within patriarchy - to dominate, might we say that women’s approach to the Goddess is to placate?

Just the other day, in the group of women I meet with monthly, we addressed the topic of “what would our relationships be like if we knew we were completely loved by everyone?” The immediate response given by several of the women was that they would be free, they would have more energy, because they would not have to give so much of it away in the effort to make themselves likable. This was a remarkable admission from well-educated, intelligent, relatively successful women. And how is it that the world has become for them an “other” which stands ready to judge, destroy, devour them if they fail to make themselves pleasing first? Surely this fear is not attributable to the fear of men, since it is generalized and demands a generalized response to the world. This generalized fear-based attitude is like the mentality of a slave, whose personality has been warped to fit into the social reality of domination by the white man. It is a projection of the fearsome, devouring “Teeth Mother,” the dark aspect of the goddess, upon the world.

As long as the fear is misplaced, displaced “out there” and attributed to the very world we live in, then our project of “loving ourselves as women,” of becoming “who we are,” will only go so far, not far enough for those of us who truly desire a kinder society, more harmonious relationship to the earth, a better world for our children and grandchildren. How do we become women and men who can steadfastly contribute to the better world, a world safe for our individual passions and for compassion, no longer allowing it to be the case that, in the words of Yeats, all the “passionate intensity” is expressed only by “the worst?” That projection has to be seen for what it is, if we are to regain our full and rightful measure of creative power as women (and this is also true for men).

As long as we do not take back this projection, own it as our fear of our own innate goddess power, we remain sitting ducks for that which daily erodes our integrity as it destroys the earth, one species after another, one indigenous culture after another. If we won’t give up our ego position, which, for many women, clings to a deep identification with worthlessness, we cannot say no to any technological enhancement sold without discussion to the masses, nor to the commodification of the world (which gives us a false sense of power over it), nor to the dead end of materialism. If we cannot make our way back to the source of archetypal spiritual energy – which is the power to change - we will have none; our lives will be embodiments of the death we fear.

In other words, the Goddess does her work whether or not we are in conscious relationship to Her. But in relationship to her, we are in relationship to Nature itself, to the life-death-life cycles that keep us within nature’s limits. In relationship to her, open to her archetypal energy, we can switch from unconscious complicity in the destruction of the earth to conscious participation in divine creative energy through our art, our work, our loving relationships

Conscious awareness of the Goddess is so difficult because it is a gift that can only be “opened” by individuals. To receive it, one must let go of the authority one has transferred to others, to society and its institutions, to “the world” in general and expect it to come only from within. Unlike the rewards of the culture, it cannot be received by “masses,” or “consumers” nor by replaceable employee units. It does not serve to distinguish “high” from “low.” Only at the level of the individual can Goddess-change happen, and here, in this most local of localities, is where it must happen. Fortunately, the individual and the particular, the great variety and specificity of nature, happen to be the Goddess’s agenda. She who is divine spirit immanent in all living things, pushing everything and everyone toward greater consciousness is par excellence the champion of particularity and cheerleader for presence. In the form of nature, she has produced the incredibly intricate and diverse biology of the planet. And she has produced that variety and diversity in the human part of creation as well, which is why each of us is enjoined to be fully who we are. Destiny, in matriarchal terms, is not a facile explanation for why bad things happen, like attributing them to “ God’s will.” It is that acorn destiny, inborn in me and in you, which can only be known from within the organism, through the medium of the body itself.

This is the precious, dangerous, astonishingly “blunt” message which was lost in the witch burnings and successively buried under the rise of nation states, industrialism, and global corporations, all extensions of the patriarchal power drive, unchecked by feminine concern for balance and relationality (peace and harmony based in mutual respect) among all living things. Now we are in a period of planetary crisis, when all the old political and reform-type “solutions” have lost their mojo, and can be perceived, by everyone who cares to look, to be inadequate for the radical, systemic change that is needed, and when hope itself seems like another illusion. We are left either with clinging obstinately to fundamentalism of right or left, or of allowing our very selves to be changed, by time-honored well tested processes known to the mystical wings of the major religious traditions, and in esoteric, wisdom traditions, all of which teach from the inside out. Only individuals in the privacy of their own hearts and souls can receive this message; it is up to individuals to hear and respond, or to resist and deny the call to change. No institution can address, publicize, promote, or impede this change because they, by their “nature,” are part of the old paradigm. Each individual is left free to be a pioneer of the spirit, or, if you will, a Mary, faced with the prospect of becoming Mother to God, surrendering to the unwanted and terrifying divine call to give birth to new life within.

Because the inner journey is inherently frightening, and because our culture conspires in a thousand ways against our hearing, let alone responding to the call (think cell phone, video games, internet, 500 cable TV channels, food and process addictions and all the other lures of banality) few will make the journey who are not driven by their pain. And as pharmaceutical companies make even pain negotiable, the odds against consciousness grow even greater.

Happily, in the call to this kind of change, numbers do not matter, for this call cannot refer outside itself – at least, not to the dominant culture - for confirmation or encouragement. Beyond inner confirmation, it can only be confirmed in the experience of heroes who have taken the journey themselves, such as hidden heroes at local AA meetings who have surrendered to the cosmic call for their real presence through entering recovery. Or it can receive encouragement from the works of those poets, mystics, scholars and spiritual adventurers who have escaped the binds of literalized, dualistic thinking and stepped on to the Goddess path of spiritual transformation. Men and women who have been willing to defy the accepted truths of their times, who were willing to be prophetic fools for their visions, who stood by their opinions against the hegemonic, even at the cost of their lives, can provide nourishment for the difficult journey. ( I here omit the list of heroes whose genius was in the area of making money, which is a paradigm we know well enough.)

But even the heroes do not remove that very tough requirement for inner, personal assent, nor the need to continuously translate the message for oneself, into one’s own local (personal) idiom to address the relationships in one’s own particular life and circumstances, and to the culture and the world. And what does it mean to address the dominant culture from the perspective of inner transformation?

There is some confusion here. More and more, I am clear that surrender to the transformational process is a surrender not only to a “nice” Goddess saying “you go girl”, but to a terrible one as well. To face her, to face Nature, to face death, entails a recognition of that which we most reject. For many post-feminist women, myself and those I have observed, that which we reject spontaneously and unreflectively is all we associate with patriarchy and the so-called masculine. At some level we hold on to our anger at men, and our self-righteousness in relation to men. In this area of relationship we continue on in the old paradigm; perhaps we have not fully left our home of origin, ruled over by its archaic gods, at all. And where I see this clinging to old gods most clearly is in the refusal among women of their “grandiosity,” their steadfast persistence in being “ego-less,” in never, ever pursuing seriously their own expression as though it were as serious as accepting knighthood. (If the Queen offers you knighthood, do you refuse, and on what grounds?)

Many women still accept patriarchy’s version of womanly virtue to the extent that we feel our own expression unworthy of being that which we place at the center of our purpose and our devotion. We adhere privately to the belief that suppression of expression is more virtuous than “dominating the conversation,” and those who do dominate, often men, we resent. Plain and simple, this refusal of our inner Queen is refusal of the goddess, tantamount to acknowledging that we are keeping our bets on the old patriarchal guy-God we love to hate. For it doesn’t matter what we say about goddesses or fairy tales or archetypes, or how many yoga classes we attend, or how natural our diet, or how much spiritual knowledge we have attained if we still refuse our grandiosity, our “know-it-allness,” our right to stand up for that which has no other advocate: that is, our own soul. The assertiveness that matters does not end with landing the great job but with bringing out, baldly and yes bluntly, our own individual, philosopher’s stone of truth. To achieve this may be the project of a lifetime, but such, it seems to me, is a worthy life, and a lifetime well spent.

In the end, the fear of grandiosity, of being “too much,” is groundless. The crone, so long missing from our pantheon and at such great cost to individual psyche and to the anima mundi, is not a “diva.” I take a diva to be a woman who has become a “goddess icon” of her age, but not the Goddess. The Goddess points back to the crowd of common people, to ourselves, common as dirt, and enjoins the goddesses in us all to her great work of abundance and diversity. Our highest work and the only nobility is in sacrifice; the Queen herself gives back of her Highness to her community; from our wholeness we give back our art, our creative expression, our sturdy and elaborated opinion, our service in a priestly/prophetic role. The fear of being “too much,” passed on through our fear-bound mothers, is false and can no longer be heeded for in heeding it, we turn away not from false pride but from the call to humbly serve Her Immanence.