m.starbird
For over 2000 years, the
symbol of the trinity has been represented by a male deity. And it
is through this trinity that many women have looked for direction in their
spiritual lives, not knowing of any other way. But recently,
another tradition has re-emerged-one that predates the patriarchal view
of the spiritual journey by thousands of years. This ancient
tradition is that of the Great Goddess, whose three aspects-maiden, mother,
crone-represent the natural cycles of the Earth and all its creatures.
Many women seeking a spirituality that embraces and honors the feminine
principles of creation and natural balance have claimed the Goddess for
their own.
D.J.Conway
The Egyptian Goddess Maat is often depicted as a giant bird who holds the entire world in perfect balance, while at the same time holding a feather with which she could tip the scales to one side or the other. Unfortunately, over the last four millennia on our planet, the scales have been tipped in favor of the masculine, causing the equilibrium to be destroyed at all levels. In this new era, perhaps the water-carrying principle, the feminine, will have enough influence to put out the fires kindled by two thousand years of male Logos orientation and to begin to heal the desert.
The imbalance of our fundamental institutions reflecting a father God at the peak of an all-male trinity, has had a devastating influence on the Western world. With the accelerated pace of events due to scientific advances in the last three hundred years, and especially in the last fifty, the fracture in Western society and in the human psyche has become more and more apparent. The pollution of our planet Earth and the flagrant abuse of her children are closely related to this fundamental flaw.
The feminine might have been established from the beginning as an equal partner of the male deity. Feminine preferences and attributes would have been honored equally through the centuries, and the resulting integration in the psyche of individuals would have spread to their families and communities. The denial of the feminine as partner and friend has robbed us of ecstasy. The wounded male, seeks his lost ecstasy in all the wrong places-violence, power, materialism.
Our worship of an exclusively male image of God is both distorted and dangerous. Male preferences and male domination cause society to form institutions based on a "male" model, with power concentrated at the top and the exploited masses imprisoned at the bottom.
Where the feminine is not valued, a man has no real intimacy with his counterpart. Deprived of his equal opposite because the feminine is viewed as an inferior object, the frustrated male causes burnout:"where the sun always shines, there's desert below." Forests wither, streams dry up, the earth cracks. The wasteland ensues.
The hierarchical model of patriarchal institutions, where all decisions and power rest with the autocratic ruler or oligarchy at the top, is losing its vitality in the wake of the powerful feminine consciousness being expressed in our modern world.
This resurrection of the feminine has allowed the things that women traditionally care most about - the education and nurturing of children and the enhancement of the quality of life - gradually to become visible on the agenda. Under the influence of this resurgent feminine principle, there is hope that the peoples of Earth may yet become enlightened, cherishing the unique gift of life of which this "water-carrying" planet Earth is custodian.
Long forgotten in Western civilization, there was a mandala honored in the oldest cultures of the world. It was based on the archetypal symbols of male and female.
From their sacred Cosmic
Dance of the Opposites, which symbolizes the interplay of the positive
and negative forces of energy, harmony spreads into all aspects of
the life of people. This harmony is reflected in the wellbeing
of the community and in the fertility of its crops and herd.
Margaret Starbird
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The Way of the Warrior