The mythological goddesses are not identical to the archetypes. That is, no single goddess can be said to represent a pure archetype. Yet each goddess can be seen to demonstrate aspects of several different archetypes, just as any human woman does. Furthermore, each archetype has its dark side, which can become perverted when denied. Just as human women can manifest unhealthy behaviors and attitudes, so do the goddesses.
While I generally affirm all our feminine potential, I believe the potential perversities are as important to our learning about ourselves as are the healthy ideals we strive to achieve. I do not paint female sexuality as a faultless ideal, but show that dynamism, magnetism, and erotic power permeate our lives, potentially manifesting as constructive or destructive energy, according to our own direction, our conscious choices of action.
In the circular perspective of life attributed to feminine consciousness, there are no absolute ways of seeing or being, for everything has its rightful position on the great wheel of life. To each woman reading this book, the models of feminine energy will appear in a unique way. One woman may identify with nearly all of the archetypes and their masks on a very personal level. Another may only recognize herself in a few of them. Still another may see that she has outgrown or moved through some of the types and is now constellating different ones from those she experienced at an earlier stage of her life.
Readers may also see that faces of the Great Goddess come and go in their lives, creating a kind of kaleidoscope of their own varied moods and attitudes. As they read the descriptions of the feminine images in this book, readers are likely to be reminded of other images that symbolize their personal experience. I’m sure the Great Goddess does not discourage our inventing more “masks” for Her, since every new face is simply another facet of the great limitless Universal Whole that is our common Divine Creative Source.
Some ideas in this book may feel unsettling, for they swim against the predominant current of moral tenets and religious doctrines of our time. The eight archetypes I’ve identified as informing women’s sexual wisdom and portraying women’s sexual identity, are embodied in an ancient vision of the creative deity as female, as Goddess. The imagery, the lessons, the experiences evoked by these archetypes emphasize mystical, mysterious, esoteric wisdom that contradicts much of what we have been taught to believe about women and sexuality and spirituality.
I have envisioned the Archetypal Woman in her potential perfection, to offer inspiration for all women’s lives. WE each embody different aspects of the Great Cosmic Female, but none can expect to achieve the perfect wholeness envisioned in an ideal. No one of us will relate personally to all the depictions of healthily empowered childhood, girlhood, and womanhood. None of us creates, in our life, every possible strong relationship and enlightened sexual-spiritual experience. Individual women can strive toward the mastery of certain aspects of an idealized goddess image, but none of us can, or should even try, to mirror Her totality within our single life. Goddess energy is a great mystery revealing itself to us gradually, over centuries, even eons-- of lifetimes. Yet, each person is given potential to access and incarnate some tiny portion of divine energy, to bring it forth into the world.
Together, we give form to the Goddess and bring her to life, for she exists through her Creation. She manifests as we acknowledge and honor her. In the past five-thousand years of Father-god religious domination, people have forgotten the Mother-god. Because we have failed to respect the awesome beauty of the Goddess, the power of feminine sexual-spiritual energy has become badly misunderstood, sadly denied, tragically abused. Now, at the beginning of the (sic) twenty-first century, women and men arewaking up to the world’s urgent need for the Great Goddess to come back and re-balance our daily lives.
As women reflect on the generally inadequate ways we have been taught to view female sexuality, we intuitively know ourselves to be greater. We are able to transform our inner vision of ourselves and become shape-shifters of our own souls. By learning to see our most positive potential, we influence all our future choices toward acting on this potential. As our inner picture of our self grows more loving, more beautiful, more creative, more erotically healthy, more spiritually powerful-- so we will become in our outer life.
The pantheon of archetypal goddess images can prove an invaluable resource in our quest to find, to claim, our own and all women’s erotic spiritual energy and sacred sexual power.
Worldwide, myths of the original Great Mother say she was bisexual and androgynous-- able to conceive life from within her body without the aid of a male consort. She embodies the earth and sky within herself and produces all life by breathing out, then takes it back into herself as she inhales, only to rebirth it in fresh form with her next exhalation. The oldest myths say Goddess Mother formed the universe out of herself with love, compassion, wisdom and erotic pleasure. Stories tell how her menstrual blood produced the starry heavens, her birth waters were floods on the earth that generated plants and animals, her breast milk is the rain that continues to feed all.
Throughout the world, stories of Great Mother goddesses recount the creation of life on earth. Greek goddess, Gaia, is called “the Deep Breasted One” who came out of the Void, bringing forth Heaven, Earth, and Sea. She then produced the giant race of Titans from her own body. The ancient Babylonian goddess, Tiamat, is identified with the primal ocean, called “bitter waters” meaning salty, like menstrual fluid-- a metaphor for woman’s earthy elemental creative powers. Tantric East Indian goddess, MayaShakti, was believed to have created all sentient life, and an East Mediterranean goddess, Euronyme, is said to have danced the earth into existence. Even more evocatively, Scandinavian goddess, Freya, is associated with primal sex and the universal womb. Celtic goddess, Danu-Ana had mountains for breasts, called “paps of Anu” and to her people, rivers like the Danube were her veins and arteries, caves located her genitals, and caverns formed her uterus, while great river canyons displayed her pulsing vulva
The First Rejected Mother-- Eve
The Biblical Creation Myth of Genesis presents Eve as the First
Mother-- the Mother of All Living. But we are told that she was
expelled from Paradise, with her mate, Adam, for having eaten from
the Tree of Knowledge. In revenge, God declared Eve’s creative
powers evil, accursed, and abominable. Thus women’s sexuality was
betrayed and came to be feared, damned and denied by Judeo-Christian
women and men alike.
But disguised within the orthodox version of this ancient Hebrew myth are stories older than God. In Gospel texts recovered only within the past century, we can discern another aspect of the story from the perspective of a female facet of deity.
Eve was once a daughter of the Great Mother Goddess-- one of a long line of serpent-allied goddesses. In the pre-Bible version, Paradise stands for the body of the Goddess. Only in the womb of the Great Mother-- called the “Holy Spirit”-- can all life find the perfect peace for which every creature longs. The Fruit of the Tree personifies the Great Mother’s flesh. Whether apples, figs, peaches or pomegranates-- they are breasts of the goddess. It is by eating of her flesh, that the daughter acquires the knowledge of the mother. Then the daughter can assume her rightful place of power in the world. The Serpent is the Instructor. She embodies the Wisdom of the Great Mother Goddess. The Serpent encourages Eve to eat, to partake of the Mother’s flesh and become Wise in Women’s ways.
In the biblical story, Eve has forgotten that she is a goddess, the daughter of the Great Mother, herself. Eve must disobey the Father’s rules in order to regain her creative potential and re-call her identity. She must listen to the voice of Wisdom that counsels her to eat of the forbidden fruit which opens her eyes to the Truth. Knowledge gained by ingesting the Mother’s flesh leads Eve to understand her own role as the First Clan Mother-- progenitor of future humans throughout the world.
The expulsion from the Garden turns out a blessing rather than a curse on Eve. In exile from God’s Paradise, she is free to assume her primal role as Mother of All Living. Her act of disobediance is revealed to have been an act of courage: and it is ramified in the lives of women today. When women dare disobey the patriarchal rules and eat of the forbidden fruits of knowledge we reclaim our own creative powers.
An apple, when sliced through the middle, crosswise, surprisingly reveals an exquisite five-point star of seeds, framed within a delicate outline of the apple’s former blossom-self. Mythology often portrays an apple to signify maidenhood, for it was believed that the Maiden was “core” to all; that she embodied the soul. I propose this to be the central motif-- the core image-- of the Maiden archetype: She is the pivotal hub and heart of feminine sexual-spiritual unfolding. The soul of every woman abides in the nubile innocent who resides within herself throughout life. Revealed through a woman’s eyes, her vulnerable inner child shines forth.
Maiden Goddess, Kore: the World Soul
Original wisdom of goddess-worshipping peoples taught that the soul
in all beings of Creation is feminine. Men were thought to gain
their soul through their mother. Women inherit, at their core,
the Maiden who contains their soul. Many traditions teach that a
Virgin is hidden in the heart of every mother, and within Mother
Earth, herself, resides the World Soul, a girl-child goddess who
animates all Life.
Mythology generally shows the uncorrupted, self-determined Maiden for a brief moment, just before she is abducted into the world of adult sexuality. Few myths show the true virgin maiden in her unadulterated power. But the Maiden goddess, Kore, was revered as the World Soul in ancient cultures, from Egypt to Brittany, over 5000 years ago. She later became Holy Virgin of the Greek pantheon, her name meaning “inner sould of Mother Earth.” Variations of her name-- Kar, Car, Ker, Ceres, Kara, Kher, and Core-- are widespread throughout goddess cultures, suggesting that hers is among the earliest metaphors for a Universal Feminine Spirit.
The classic Greek myth of Kore, as Demeter’s daughter, is only the latest of her legends, and, by that time, badly corrupted by patriarchal overtones. We find only hints of her more ancient virginal power in this tale, and she remains the prototypical chaste Maiden in the western pantheon. Yet, as Kore’s story unfolds, she reveals herself to be like our triple-masked Maiden-- at first her mother’s Good Girl, then the irrepressibly curious Naughty Girl, and, at last, the abducted Orphan-- initiating the first passage of feminine sexuality, from childish folly to virginal self-containment.
The great star group Ursa Major, (we call her the Big Dipper) is the Great Mother Bear whose tail points to another of the four directions at the start of each season. She circles around the Pole Star, which is in the constellation of her cub, Ursa Minor. The Milky Way, in Sumerian cosmology, was known as the Great Dragon Goddess, Tiamat. The ancient Egyptians saw it as the Holy Cow sky-mother, whose milk splashed stars into the heavens. The Babylonians saw the zodiac itself as the girdle-belt of their great goddess, Ishtar, Queen of the Heavens. On that astral belt were constellations drawn from the goddess’ menagerie: These include Draco, the serpent; Leo, the lion; Taurus, the bull; and Cygnus, the swan.
The instinctual reptilian limbic system is the oldest part of our brain. It regulates hunger, thirst, fighting and sex. In the goddess’ mythical forms as Snake Goddess, Fish Goddess, Frog Goddess, and Turtle, she reminds us of our deeply indebted kinship to the elemental creatures that we find so repellent, so offensive to our rarefied modern human sensibilities. We don’t like to be reminded of that biological bond, for we imagine ourselves greatly superior. Yet, if the Goddess herself blesses these creatures with her power, how can we humans assume such arrogance?
Ua-Zit is a great cobra goddess of pre-dynastic Egypt. She is well represented on headdresses of many a queen and pharaoh, and is also known as the Eye-- the great symbol of all-seeing, all-knowing. The snake may well be the earliest form taken by the Goddess, for it is a sacred symbol in nearly every spiritual and mystical tradition known. In Egyptian hieroglyphic sigils, the snake stands for the word “goddess” and is called “Uraeus”-- a word that means “healing.” Serpents symbolize immortality because they are known to shed their old skins and renew themselves. They are often found guarding the Tree of Life in ancient Eastern symbolism depicting Gardens of Paradise.
Large carnivorous beasts, the she-bear and lioness particularly, are associated with feminine spirituality and female deities around the world. The Wildwoman is the handler of the Goddess’ proud beasts, soothing their vengeance or releasing their virulence as situations demand.
Sekhmet and Bastet are great Egyptian cat-goddesses. Sekhmet is a fierce war deity who represents the devouring power of the sun. It is told that she was once overcome with such rabid bloodlust that she went berserk, killing thousands of humans and drinking rivers of their blood. The goddess Isis intervened by pouring beer into the river of blood so that Sekhmet finally got drunk and went to sleep. When she woke, she felt no further desire to devour the humans.
Bastet (or Bast) is of an altogether different stripe. She is a deity of play and pleasure, of festival fun and games. Yet this feline spirit is a pet of the Wildwoman as well, for her carnival antics include ecstatic dances, games of chance, and orgiastic sexual license for the revelers. Bastet is the symbol for Egypt’s thousands of venerated domestic cats-- who were so protected that anyone caught killing one was, himself, murdered on the spot.
Cybele, the Great Goddess of Anatolia, rode a chariot drawn by a brace of lions. They also flanked her throne as guardians of the great Mother, herself. The panther was a totem of the Greek god of debauchery, Dionysus. His followers, the Maenads, sometimes wore panther-skins in their revels.
The Celts of Gaul venerated Dea Artia, a bear goddess, who has connections to later Arthurian legends. The Celtic warriors wore skins of sacred bears into battle where the spirit of the bear gave them undoubting courage as vicious “berserkers” (the bearskin shirt was called a bear-sark.)
In the cold northern reaches of Canada and Finland, native tribes tell tales of bears becoming human and vice versa. Both Finnish and Eskimo legends claim their people descended from a Bear Mother. This mother goddess oversees their hunting, for which she exacts payment of the best parts as a sacred honor.
The wolf is considered sacred in many Native traditions around the world, and tales of wolves raising the young of gods and mortals are told in ancient cultures throughout the northern lands of Europe and America. This may be an indication of the fact that cave-women early established relationships with wolves and domesticated them to be protectors of their children and clan.
The inspiring energy of the Muse is a breath of fresh air, a gust of fecund vision, a clearing draft that wafts innovative ideas, opens our mind to new ways of seeing. Memory, Song, and Meditation interweave a chorus chanting the myth of our living soul, the stories by which we create our lives.
Three ancient goddesses direct and produce that opus: Mnemosyne inspires the poem of our being. Thalia composes its music. And Urania brings celestial visions to captivate our soul. Once wakened to its beauty, the soul begins to dance. In our trio of masks for the Muse Archetype, we can make some general associations to this ancient threefold Muse goddess: The Clown embodies Mnemosyne (Memory) the poet and storyteller. The Star embodies Thalia (Song) the singer and performer. The Siren embodies Urania (Celestial Vision) the captivating visionary and mediator.
The Muse gave her name to ancient temples of learning called ‘museums’ in Greece and also to music, to amusement, and to the act of musing or daydreaming. Birds that gathered in sacred learning sanctuaries, called mouseia were believed to be manifestations of the various Muses.
From time before time, Woman has been the maker of symbols. Symbols are the means by which civilization has progressed, passed on its knowledge, recorded its stories, left its marks on time. Here, in the realm of the Muse, we recognize the important role of women in this basic process of symbolizing life. With the marking of her observations of the moon’s changes in relation to her own body’s changes, ancient woman set in motion the forces that would eventually lead to writing, mathematics, calendars, astronomy, and even our modern computers. And long before these sciences came systems of Magic Numbers and their associated myths of Creation which were used by primitive sages to explain life and its natural phenomena. The Muses were the Makers behind every creation-myth’s magic system.
The Chinese “book of Changes” (I Ching) is one such system. The written wisdom of changes in China goes back to at least 2500 BCE. But the wisdom itself stretches back to matrifical per dynastic times and the myth of NuKua. She is the Chinese primordial Source Mother. She was later transformed into the Buddhist goddess, KuanYin, Universal Woman. Primal Mother similarly was NaMu for Sumerians, Eurynome for early Greeks, and MaNu, or Nut, for the ancient Egyptians. In each case, she was the goddess of the Cosmic Womb, existing prior to the beginning, and from whom all Creation transmutes.
NuKua was sometimes pictured as a woman with a fish tail, a creature of all elements. She is the powerful original of lesser mermaids called the Sirens of philosophers. Heroes of many cultures got their inspiration from a primary Muse goddess who presented challenging riddles and provided life-enhancing ideas. The very word, 'I-dea' means ‘Goddess within’