verbava все записи автора Sylvia Brinton Perera – Descent to the Goddess

Unfortunately, all too many modern women have not been nurtured by the mother in the firs place. Instead, they have grown up in the difficult home of abstract, collective authority--"cut off at the ankles from earth," as one woman put it--full of superego shoulds and ougts. Or they have relation to the identified with the father and and their patriarchal culture, thus alienating themselves from their own feminine ground and their personal mother, whom they have often seen as weak or irrelevant.

***

It is precisely a woman who has a poor relation to the mother, the one through whom the Self archetype first constellates, who tends to find her fulfillment through the father or the male beloved.

***

Constricted, the joy of feminine has been disintegrated as mere frivolity; her joyful lust demeaned as whorishness, or sentimentalized and materialized.

***

Too often there is no distinction felt between the unmothered woman's need for the mother and her need for a male partnership. Perhaps because so many women were nourished by the patriarchal animus of the caretaker, or because they found their brothers and fathers warmer or more valuable, they continue to seek strength and mothering from men and their own animus, even devaluing feminine nurturance when it is available for themselves.
Ereshkigal's stake feels the anti-receptive emptiness of the feminine with feminine yang strength. It fills the eternally empty womb mouth, and gives a woman her own wholeness, so that the woman is not merely dependent on male or child, but can be unto herself as a full and separate individual.

***

Our culture has clearly discouraged women from claiming impersonal feminine potency. The concept is considered monstrous; thus women are encouraged to be docile and to "relate with Eros" to sadistic paternal animus figures, rather than to claim their own equally sadistic-assertive power.

***

All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imagination are models of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.

***

We can see from this myth that the original scapegoat had nothing to do with a sin offering. Ethics were not involved; only the necessity that exists under the natural law of the conservation of energy to maintain the balance of energy in the overall system of life. Nothing changes or grows without the food of some other sacrifice. This is the basis of women's experience of childbearing and of all blood mysteries that create and maintain life. It is known to matriarchal consciousness and to modern physics.

***

Both putrefaction and extraction of the soul are symbolized by undressing, for clothing is the flesh of incarnation and death is the taking off of the mortal vestment. Undressing for human beings--already incarnated in body-egos--is a disincarnation mode, the end of one form of body-ego and the revelation of the hidden Self.

***

This, the myth tells us, is part of the law of the underworld: those who descent must disrobe.

***

Being the beloved hurts the most because it means being known and knowing the other's complexes in their depth. There are inevitable moments of "evil fate" since the intimate one opens the deepest wounds, and lovers, thus, become enemies. And they are also beloved enemies, since the woundings create separation across which fresh passions leap. Often, when we are meant to develop psychologically, we find ourselves choosing an intimate who will rub our noses in out worst complexes for just that purpose.
Perhaps, indeed, we only bother to hurt when we hold the other as dear as the necessity of speaking our own truth--when there is a genuine (albeit sometimes feared) equality.

***

Only after the full, even demonic, range of affects and objectivity of the dark feminine is felt and claimed can a true, soul-met, passionate and individual comradeship be possible between woman and man as equals.

free_readings