The Divine Feminine

Rising

The bowstring is tight and thick. Pulling it back requires an immense amount of energy. Holding it there requires even more. It’s painful and difficult. But the more painful, and the more difficult, the farther the arrow will fly.

A lot of people have been holding a lot of strong, heavy bowstrings back for what feels like a long time. But those bowstrings are being released, one by one, as we speak.

So let’s discuss that.

I know it’s almost Lughnassadh

It’s a big holiday among Wiccans, the first harvest held in honor of the Sun God, Lugh’s annual decline and death as the dark half of the year and the energies of the goddess rise to power during the dark half of the year. I’ve done a bunch of posts about this holiday and you can read them here and here and here and here and here.

I want to talk about something else this week.

The Descent of the Divine Feminine

There is a book I cherish called INANNA, LADY OF LARGEST HEART by Betty de Shong Meador. It is a collection of poems written more than 4400 years ago by a Sumerian high priestess named Enheduanna.

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The poems are insights into a world we can scarcely imagine, during a time of powerful transition. Women had been mighty leaders. The priestesses had influence and held sway. But this was changing as high priests began moving into the temples and taking power away from the priestesses, amassing it for themselves. During this time the high priestess Enheduanna, the first writer to put her name on her work (as far as we know) was driven from the temple by the high priest Lugalanna, as was happening on a wider scale as the sacred feminine came under attack.

That man cast me among the dead
I am not allowed in my rooms
Gloom falls on the day
light turns leaden
Shadows close in
Dreaded south storm cloaks the sun

He wipes his spit-soaked hand
on my honey-sweet mouth
my beautiful image
fades under dust

The language connection

I wonder if this was also a time when the written language of the Sumerians, one of the oldest known, was shifting.

In other cultures, Egyptian for example, language shifted from images representing things (a shape of a bird representing “bird,” for example) to symbols representing sounds. Where the b makes a buh sound and the i is the vowel and the r makes an rrr sound and the d sounds like dh, and you put them all together to get the word “bird” which your brain has learned represents the flitting, winged creature.

To me, there’s no bird energy left in the word “bird.” There’s no direct link between the bird and its symbol. Instead, there’s a link between the spoken word for bird, and the sounds that make up that word, represented by shapes that represent the sounds. The distance between the object and its symbol becomes vast.

These two methods of understanding language work in two very different parts of the brain, and there is a whole school of thought that as their written language changed from pictorial to phonic, societies changed from matriarchal or egalitarian, to patriarchal.

At any rate, during Enheduanna’s time, high priests took over the temples from high priestesses. Men took power. The tales of the gods became more important than those of the goddess. Inanna had risen from a minor deity, daughter of the moon god Nanna, to claim the crown of the Queen of Heaven. She had flattened a mountain that refused to worship her. Tales about her were everywhere, and by the mere act of being understood as a woman, Inanna represented all womankind.

But then came the shift. The blowback. And the patriarchy rose to power.

Other societies experienced the same shift at different times

In the documentary film, The Goddess Remembered, they talk about this shift in Rome, and how it’s depicted in the art from the time in images of goddesses being subjugated and conquered, and in many of their statues being beheaded and their murals, defaced.

(The Goddess Remembered, The Burning Times, and Full Circle, collectively known as The Women and Spirituality Series, was required viewing for my students when I used to teach the Craft of the Wise. Back then I had VHS tapes of them we passed around the coven. I still have them! Today, you can probably stream them somewhere, but in case you can’t, here’s a DVD with all 3.)

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How are we communicating today?

Emojis have become our shorthand.

Ads on social media are designed to have as few words as possible. Images sell better.

The icons on our car dashboards no longer have words on them that have to be changed depending on where the car will be sold. They have symbols that are universally recognized.

The use of icons instead of words has become widespread in our technology. Look at the device on which you’re reading this. I’m writing it on my laptop. Across the bottom are a dozen icons that represent Finder, Internet, Messages, Calendar, Canva, WhatsApp, Pages, Photos, iMovie, Settings, Word, Books, Vellum, Podcasts, Preview and a wastebasket icon. Across the top of the screen on which I am working, there are curvy arrows for undo and redo, a paperclip icon, a photo icon, a headset icon, a movie camera icon, a quotation mark icon. Above that in the right corner, I see a clock with a circle around it, a person’s head and shoulders, a battery, the wireless symbol, and a magnifying glass.

How about on the phone? Look at your phone. Do you see words? Nope. Images. Icons.

A large segment of our language has shifted back to glyphs in very recent times. This has really only been happening for a few decades.

Obviously, myriad other changes have occurred during the 4400 years since Enheduanna wrote her words, and those chants all are feeding into the shift that is happening in our world today.

But if the theories that the change from phonic to-image-based written language, are linked to societal change are correct, we should be seeing a rise of female power following right on its heels, shouldn’t we?

Is that what’s happening?

Hell, yes, it’s happening!

It’s all around us. And you know it’s been happening in a gradual way, with women gaining seats in government and positions of power in industry, for a while. The way we raise our girls today is entirely different. We teach them to suffer no fools, and know their own power. And I hope, to wield it with empathy, compassion, and responsibility, because it is an awesome power. We’ve barely touched its potential.

I think the seesaw has passed the point of equilibrium, and is now gaining momentum as it speeds the other way. We’ve passed the fulcrum. Look at the success and power and influence of women like Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Kamala Harris, and Ursula von der Leyen, president of the EU and arguably the most powerful woman in the world. (I suspect she might soon drop to number 2.) Look at the rise of the WNBA, and women’s soccer. Female CEOs and world leaders are on the rise all around us.

Things have changed dramatically from the nineties. The norm was still all boys will be boys, and she slept her way to the top and well, look at the way she’s dressed!

But over the past eight years or so. the rise of the divine feminine has become rapid.

You know why, right?

It’s Law of Attraction.

We’re going along in our lives, happy-go-lucky and everything is fine. We’re comfortable and have no desire to change.

This is not sustainable, though. Life is growth. Stagnation would be true death. (What we think is death is really just a shift in focus and vibration within ongoing life.)

So along comes a “problem” to shake us out of our complacency. Sometimes we ignore the problem and it grows, while its presence attracts other problems. And then we ignore those, because, after all, life is still going okay, and we fear change. And now multiple but similar problems grow, and so on and so on, until the pain of not changing is bigger than our fear of change.

So the teeter-totter is all the way down, our ass is on the ground, and we finally begin to push ourselves up. And it’s hard for a while, but eventually, we reach the center point, that point of balance, that equinox, and there’s this fleeting moment of stillness…

Then we pass the fulcrum, momentum takes over, and we rise.

That’s where I think we are as female energy in the world today. I think the momentum of the divine feminine is taking over, and carrying us upward.

It’s about energy

In spiritual circles, we used to refer to masculine and feminine energies. Modern sensitivities have us shifting to the more accurate terms for what we mean; projective and receptive energy.

We all have both kinds. My favorite analogy for these energies is the image of a broken power line, writhing and snapping, showering sparks everywhere. The electricity is the projective energy, we used to call masculine energy. It can be wild and dangerous and deadly, on its own. The power line is the receptive energy, what we used to call the feminine energy. It contains and directs the power of the projective energy, so that it can be used for the benefit of all.

In our world, projective energy has taken the form of ambition and greed, of dominance and abuse, of constant war, and a paradigm of “power-over.” It is like a snapped power line, uncontrolled and therefore dangerous.

As receptive energy rises, it will wrap around, contain, and control all that, bringing us into balance. The strengths of the projective energy will be channeled toward the greater good. Receptive energy creates a paradigm of “power-from-within.”

It was never meant to be all one way or all the other. The shifts between the two will always exist, but they can look more like a steady, shallow, lemniscate than a drastically shifting teeter-totter.

This is not about women vs. men

It’s an energy shift. It’s a paradigm shift, where the wildly snapping power line of the patriarchy is grabbed hold of by the cooling, capable hands of feminine energy. The broken line is repaired, the balance between the energies is restored, and the power can now benefit all.

Power-over will give way to Power From Within. The entire world can come into a balance of cooperation rather than competition, and that is the mans by which the other “problems” of our time will be transformed into solutions that take us further than ever before.

Every human has the genes of a female and a male within them—we’re made from our parents. We all have projective and receptive energies. It takes both to create life. This is the meaning of the Symbolic Great Rite in Wicca, the athame and the chalice.

Balance.

There can be no balance when a group of humans is subjugated by another group of humans. There must be equality.

Humans get more progressive over time

Women couldn’t vote or hold office in the 19th century, and couldn’t lead unless royally born. Interracial marriage was illegal across the US until 1967, and gay marriage until 2015. We are always, continually evolving, expanding, improving, growing. The trajectory is always toward improvement, improvement, improvement. If you graphed it, it would be a long, upward line, but it would be a jagged line. If you’re in a jagged spot in the timeline, it might feel like things are moving backward. You can’t see the bigger picture from within one small part of it. But the overall line is still going upward. Like Stan Lee and my state motto say, Excelsior!

I suspect we are in a very big evolutionary growth spurt at this historic moment in time in Europe and in the US.

The bowstring has been pulled way back

And we held it so long our muscles were quivering with the effort.

But take heart, my sisters. The arrow has been released. And just wait until you see how far it’s going to fly!

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