On the Return of the Divine Feminine.

Often when I talk about the Divine Feminine, people will automatically assume that I’m a feminist.  When they hear this term, they think of the return of some “matriarchy” with women in charge.  There has never been a society with a “matriarchy” in the West, though the ancient European Pagan world had a much higher view of women than the Christian era.  Men, due to strength and intellect have always been the leaders of society in various institutions.  Women were also leaders but rather in philosophy, education, the arts, and especially in the spiritual practices of the Pagan world as the High Priestess.   Philosophers like Aspasia and Hypatia were women and were held in the same esteem as men. 

            Though women were not property owners and could not vote, they held considerable power in the Greek and Roman worlds.  In the Nordic-Germanic cultures, women were queens and priestesses and also fought with men in battle.  Christianity and Islam regulated women to second class citizens in the cultural sphere and took away their role as the Priestess in the religion.   In the Greek mysteries, women were the High Priestesses of Demeter, the goddess of the Harvest.  The Priestesses of Hecate presided over feminine sorcery involving the menses.  The Roman culture also had an equivalent spiritual practice.

            In the Nordic-Germanic mysteries, the Divine Feminine had its most popular form in Freyja, the Goddess of Love and War.  Freyja taught Odin magick.  She is also the goddess of presides over the Cult of the Seid, the feminine mysteries of the Northern Tradition.  Freyja is often called upon to bless marriages, harvest celebrations, and births.  She is also a warrior goddess who takes the warriors who are not slain in battle to Folkvanger.  Odin takes those who are slain to Valhalla.

            When the Christian religion codified itself in Nicea after spreading throughout the culture, persecutions began against “heretical” and Gnostic sects that retained elements of the Pagan pantheon, especially the Greek Goddess of Wisdom Sophia, who was assigned as the Holy Ghost of the new Gnostic Christian system of mysticism.  The newborn church eliminated the Divine Feminine from the religion and relegated it to human characters in the New Testament such as Mary mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.  The virgin/whore archetype, once combined into singular godforms such as Isis, was now is split into two distinctly mortal females.  This has led to a slow-motion psychological collapse for men and women in our culture for the last 1700 years or so.

            Goddesses such as Isis in the Egyptian world signified the energies of the moon, and unifies both the virgin and the mother aspect.  She is the goddess of magic, fertility, love, and eternal life.  In the mystical system of Thelema, the name ISIS is used as an acronym for Infinite Stars and Infinite Space, signifying her role as not just the goddess of the moon, but the goddess of the Cosmos itself.  In the Egyptian pantheon, the goddess Ma’at, who navigates Ra’s sun barge, is the wife of Thoth-Hermes.  Her name means “Truth” and she is associated with justice and judgement in legal matters.  She also is the feminine aspect of the sun.  In this she is related to Horus, and is sometimes thought of as his sibling in the Thelemic mythos.   

            Isis and Ma’at have their equivalent in the Greek pantheon as Sophia, which was sometimes thought of as the goddess of Wisdom.  In the pre-Christian Gnostic pantheon, she was seen as the feminine half of the Christos, and the mother of the Universe who gave birth to the demiurge Ialdabaoth, who is associated with the Greek Harpocrates, (Hoor-Paar-Kraat or Harpakrati in the Egyptian pantheon.)  She is seen as the Holy Ghost and the Word of Wisdom.  In essence she is the feminine aspect of the Logos.  In the Judaic Tradition, Sophia is called Shekinah.  According to Caitlin Matthews, in the mystic aspect of Judaism “the Shekinah has become the female hypostasis of God, his holy spirit and paredros, but nit a goddess in her own right.  This narrow avoidance of heresy within Judaism has kept its mysticism awash with the waters of Sophia.”  (“Sophia: Goddess of Wisdom, Bride of God,” Caitlin Matthews, pg. 106.)

            The ancient Gnostic Tradition which was the original Christianity had the Divine Feminine.  However, the church fathers removed this archetype, and for the last 1700 years or so, it has been absent from our spiritual life.  This has caused a great deal of psychic trauma for those in the West.  The removal of the Goddess has made men weak and women passive aggressive and neurotic.  There is no duality or balance in the Christian and Islamic Traditions, only a theology tilted toward the masculine, but a weaker version.  Men in Traditional Pagan cultures that had a goddess were masculine and warrior-like.  In the modern West, men are emasculated.  Women are forced to be like men and deny their true nature.  Also, both men and women rebel from their spiritual roles and become androgynous or transgender.  In our modern West, the corrupt Christian church will blame modern “paganism” for the transgender movement rather than looking in the mirror. 

The removal of the Divine Feminine by Nicene Christianity is the cause of the Dark Age or Kali Yuga.  It is the reason why Communism has taken over the West, and the reason why the church is a detrimental force, creating the problems between men and women that it rails against.  Caitlin Matthews writes that “the peoples of the book yearn toward the mercy of Sophia, each in its own way, though the hierarchies and theologians still monitor the orthodox boundaries, discouraging feminizing trends.  At the same time, within the world enantiodromia that feminism represents, the Divine Feminine stands in danger of being appropriated afresh- this time as the exclusive concern of women.  The return of the concept of the Divine Feminine among us as engendered the ardent response of women to spiritual forms that include goddesses and female spirits.  But the sacred feminine is not just for women; it is for the benefit of all beings.  There are indeed women’s mysteries just as there are men’s mysteries, but the sacred cannot be colonized as spiritual territory.” (Caitlin Matthews, pg. 359.)

            Modern feminism is Marxist and anti-male and occasionally appropriates religious symbolism of the goddess as a way to fight the “patriarchy.”  Again, this “patriarchy” is a Marxist concept rather than a spiritual one and is a materialistic and anti-biological blank-slate theory of sociology.  It blames social structures inhabited by men and cultural symbols and rituals for the subjugation of women.  Their diagnosis of mental and spiritual crisis blames society rather than one’s inner self and connection to the Divine.  The removal of the Divine Feminine and its hijacking by the Marxist feminist movement is another symptom of the psychological distress in the modern West.  Caitlin Matthews continues by saying that “when spiritual colonization happens, invariably the spirit of Sophia evaporates from the religion or group, rejecting it as a house inappropriate for her dwelling.   Extreme and separatist feminism, in an attempt to distance itself from the authoritarianism of revealed religions, frequently errs by its exclusive appropriation of female forms of the Divine.” (Ibid.)

            This has unfortunately resulted in many viewing the return of the Goddess or Divine Feminine as a Marxist, liberal phenomenon rather than the spirit of Tradition.   This is unfortunate for the complexity and superior power of the Divine Feminine is the anchor of all spiritual philosophical thought.  (Note the Greek philosophia, which combines philo (love) and sophia (wisdom) meaning “the love of wisdom.”)  Without the Divine Feminine we retard our spiritual growth in the West. 

            The two spiritual paths I follow, Thelema and Astaru are under the aegis of the Divine Feminine.  I can attest to the spiritual nourishment given by offering one’s Ego to the Wisdom of Sophia.  It is my hope that this Tradition returns to the West to put an end to this Dark Age.  The modern chaos and all the ideologies contributing to the destruction of the West; Nicene Christianity, radical Islam, Communism, Intersectionality, Marxist gender ideology and sociology, and radical feminism- all of it is of the Cult of Osiris, the Dying and Resurrecting God, which defeated the Cult of Typhon and the Divine Feminine of Serpent Power.  This is an ancient war, but the victory of Wisdom (Sophia) is nigh with the coming age.  I am in service to the revival of the Goddess.