Aspects Of The Feminine Quotes

In the case of our fair maiden, we have overlooked two very crucial aspects to that myth. On the one hand, none of us ever really believed the sorcerer was real. We thought we could have the maiden without a fight. Honestly, most of us guys thought our biggest battle was asking her out. And second, we have not understood the tower and its relationship to her wound; the damsel is in distress. If masculinity has come under assault, femininity has been brutalized. Eve is the crown of creation, remember? She embodies the exquisite beauty and the exotic mystery of God in a way that nothing else in all creation even comes close to. And so she is the special target of the Evil One; he turns his most vicious malice against her. If he can destroy her or keep her captive, he can ruin the story.

Every aspect of myself was analyzed as either “masculine” or “feminine.” There was no in-between and nothing outside of these two options.

There are three aspects of the feminine element of being in the Jungian approach. The first one is being grounded within one’s own nature. The second one is the capacity to then be truly related to another person and to other people. And the third aspect, which is another aspect of eros, is how personally related we are to life.

In order to reclaim our full selves, to integrate each of these aspects through which we pass over the course of our lives, we must first learn to embrace them though our cycles.

Woman's fear of the female Self, of the experience of the numinous archetypal Feminine, becomes comprehensible when we get a glimpse - or even only a hint – of the profound otherness of female selfhood as contrasted to male selfhood. Precisely that element which, in his fear of the Feminine, the male experiences as the hole, abyss, void, and nothingness turns into something positive for the woman without, however, losing these same characteristics. Here the archetypal Feminine is experienced not as illusion and as maya but rather as unfathomable reality and as life in which above and below, spiritual and physical, are not pitted against each other; reality as eternity is creative and, at the same time, is grounded in primeval nothingness. Hence as daughter the woman experiences herself as belonging to the female spiritual figure Sophia, the highest wisdom, while at the same time she is actualizing her connection with the musty, sultry, bloody depths of swamp-mother Earth. However, in this sort of Self-discovery woman necessarily comes to see herself as different from what presents itself to men -as, for example, spirit and father, but often also as the patriarchal godhead and his ethics. The basic phenomenon - that the human being is born of woman and reared by her during the crucial developmental phases - is expressed in woman as a sense of connectedness with all living things, a sense not yet sufficiently realized, and one that men, and especially the patriarchal male, absolutely lack to the extent women have it. To experience herself as so fundamentally different from the dominant patriarchal values understandably fills the woman with fear until she arrives at that point in her own development where, through experience and love that binds the opposites, she can clearly see the totality of humanity as a unity of masculine and feminine aspects of the Self.

Our fascination with feminine beauty is elemental. It is said that men wish to possess the princess and women wish to be the princess, but I believe that is only part of the truth. We are drawn to extraordinary beauty mindlessly and purposelessly; we flutter on dusty moth wings toward the effulgence with no understanding of why we do it. Perhaps when we see a woman with the aspect of an angel, our souls are tricked into following her, mistaking her for a guide to paradise. The opposite, of course, is also true.

Lillian moved forward to meet her, studying her with curiosity. They had met before, on infrequent occasions, and she found it strange to see Dagny Taggart wearing an evening gown. It was a black dress with a bodice that fell as a cape over one arm and shoulder, leaving the other bare: the naked shoulder was the gown’s only ornament. Seeing her in the suits she wore, one never thought of dagny taggart’s body. The black dress seemed excessively revealing – because it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulder were fragile and beautiful, and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.

There is a danger in the repudiation of the feminine when the daughter who rejects the aspects of the negative feminine embodied by her mother also denies positive aspects of her own feminine nature, which are playful, sensuous, passionate, nurturing, intuitive, and creative. Many women who have had angry or emotional mothers seek to control their own anger and feelings lest they be seen as destructive and castrating. This repression of anger often prevents them from seeing the inequities in a male-defined system. Women who have seen their mothers as superstitious, religious, or old-fashioned discard the murky, mysterious, magical aspects of the feminine for cool logic and analysis. A chasm is created between the heroine and the maternal qualities within her; this chasm will have to be healed later in the journey for her to achieve wholeness.

There is no religion and no philosophy that can give us a comprehensive answer to the whole of our problems, and the abandonment and isolation of the individual who is given no answer, or only inadequate answers, to his question lead to a situation in which more and more cheap, obvious solutions and answers are sought and provided. As, everywhere and in all departments of life, there are contradictory schools and parties, and an equal number of contradictory answers, one of the most frequent reactions is that modern man ceases to ask questions and takes refuge in a conception that considers only the most obvious, superficial aspects, and becomes skeptical, nihilistic, and egocentric. Or, alternatively, he tries to solve all his problems by plunging headlong into a collective situation and a collective conviction, and seeks to redeem himself in this way.

All women are a reflection, a mirror of the Goddess. Remember… you are the Universe figuring itself out. So of course you are identical to the female aspect of divinity.

There are aspects of traditional femininity, from home-making to empathy, that should belong to men too. If we move away from biological determinism we enter a world with more freedom, not less, because then those behaviours traditionally associated with masculinity and femininity could become real choices for each individual.

As women, we can embody all aspects of the Triple Goddess simultaneously (Mother, Maiden, Crone) at every stage of our lives. The elements of feminine mystique, giftedness, and strength are available to us through the spirit as much as the body.

The archetypal image of the redeemer serpent is certainly placed here in opposition to the serpents of evil that battle with it. But why do they both have the same form if there is only oppositIOn between them? What does it mean that they both dwell in the same place, the depth of the great abyss? Are they not possibly two aspects of the same thing? We know this image of the redeemer serpent not only from Gnosis and from the Sabbataian myth, but we know of the same serpent rising from below, redeeming and to be redeemed, as the Kundalini serpent in India, and finally from alchemy as the serpens Mercurii, the ambiguous serpent whose significance was first made clear to us by Jung's researches. Since Jung's work on alchemy we know two things. The first is that in its "magnum opus" alchemy dealt with a redemption of matter itself. The second is that pari passu with this redemption of matter, a redemption of the individual psyche was not only unconsciously carried out but was also consciously intended. As we know, the serpent is a primeval symbol of the Spirit, as primeval and ambiguous as the Spirit itself. The emergence of the Earth archetype of the Great Mother brings with it the emergence of her companion, the Great Serpent. And, strangely enough, it seems as though modern man is confronted with a curious task, a task which is essentially connected with what mankind, rightly or wrongly, has feared most, namely the Devil.

At the human level, in Jungian terms – the Goddess whispers to a man’s anima, his buried feminine aspect, and the God speaks out loud to his male emphasis; while the God whispers to a woman’s buried male animus, and the Goddess speaks out loud to her female emphasis.

Shabbat is about harmony. It’s about restoring balance—the balance between the masculine and feminine aspects of our own souls and the balance of power between women and men. It’s about building community and remembering our interdependence with each other and with the Earth herself, taking responsibility for our habits of consumption and allowing ourselves to rest and recharge. Shabbat is about forging a direct relationship with the Shekinah, the feminine face of God. It’s about taking refuge in her arms. Her time of exile is over now. We do not need to keep sending her away. We are called now to reinstate the feminine to her rightful place in our lives, in our relationships, and throughout creation. She belongs here and it’s time to celebrate her presence, draw on her strength, drink in her consolation, and let her guide us in repairing the world.

The human soul needs a divine mother, a feminine aspect to balance out the masculinity of God, and yes, Mary had carried it off the best she could.

...and the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.

There is something exciting about this. Peter still doesn't want to have sex with Mizzy, but there is something thrilling about downing a shot of vodka with another man who happens to be naked. There's the covert brotherliness of it, a locker-room aspect, the low, masculine, eroticized love-hum that's not so much about the flesh as it is about the commonality. You, Peter, as devoted as you are to your wife, as completely as you understand her very real worries on Mizzy's behalf, also understand Mizzy's desire to make his own way, to avoid that maelstrom of womanly ardor, that distinctly feminine sense that you will be healed, whether you want to be or not. Men are united in their commonness, maybe it's as simple as that.

Feminism has both undone the hierarchy in which the elements aligned with the masculine were given greater value than those of the feminine and undermined the metaphors that aligned these broad aspects of experience with gender. So, there goes women and nature. What does it leave us with? One thing is a political mandate to decentralize privilege and power and equalize access, and that can be a literal spatial goal too, the goal of our designed landscapes and even the managed ones -- the national parks, forests, refuges, recreation areas, and so on.

it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulder were fragile and beautiful, and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.

I think maybe at some level it would be good if feminism was about raising up women but also femininity, no matter where it is. Sometimes it’s the delicate and the weak and the yielding aspects of life that are the most important.

[Carl Jung] was convinced that the culture of the West, and Christianity in particular, ignored the most important aspects of spiritual salvation - the feminine element and the so-called "evil," by which he meant the destructive aspect.

When Paris is asked to judge the three goddesses, says Jane Harrison in her wonderful book Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, it amounts to a male put-down of the Goddess. For here were the three major classical goddesses, the three aspects of the one Goddess who is manifested in these three modes, and here is Paris, a languid young man, judging them as though in an Atlantic City beauty contest! And they are vying for his vote by giving him bribes and promises.

Coming face-to-face with an individual who has crossed class barriers of gender or attractiveness can help us recognize the extent to which our own biases, assumptions, and stereotypes create those class systems in the first place. But rather than question our own value judgments or notice the ways that we treat people differently based on their size, beauty, or gender, most of us reflexively react to these situations in a way that reinforces class boundaries: We focus on the presumed “artificiality” of the transformation the subject has undergone. Playing up the “artificial” aspects of the transformation process gives one the impression that the class barrier itself is “natural,” one that could not have been crossed if it were not for modern medical technology.

Artemis, along with Selene and Hekate, was one of the Greek triads representing the Old European three-bodied or triune aspect of the Goddess. We can see this represented in this figurine (Fig. 72) of Artemis as part of three-fold Hekate. First you have the pillar—the goddess mother is the axis of the universe herself. Round about are three representations of the Goddess, including Artemis, and Hekate, who represents the chthonic underworld—the magic aspect of the Goddess—and then dancing in a relaxed, fluent manner around about we see the three Graces. Artemis is the giver of abundance: Our Lady of the Wild Things, and the All-Mother of the many breasts, who bears the totality of the entities of the natural world. This is something very, very different from the image of the virgin goddess and the mere huntress that we have normally associated with her.

The individuation journey — the psychological quest for wholeness — ends in the union of opposites; in the inner marriage of “masculine” and “feminine” aspects of the personality that can be symbolized by the image of yin and yang contained within a circle. Said more abstractly and without assigning gender, the journey toward wholeness results in having the ability to be both active and receptive, autonomous and intimate, to work and to love. These are parts of ourselves that we come to know through life experiences, parts that are inherent in all of us. This is the human potential.

The animal-like aspect of body hair, to a very refined sensibility, and the fact that women under detention were denied their razors, undoubtedly led a pioneer criminologist of the nineteenth century named Cesare Lombroso to propose that the body type of the female offender was characteristically hirsute.

We can pretend all we like that women are equal, ut as long as men and women are continually encouraged to supress the broad aspects of their humanity that we decry as "feminine", we're all screwed. Because it's those things qe celebrate as "other" that make us truly human. It's what we label "soft" or "feminune" that makes civilization possible, It's our empathy, our ability to care and nurtureand connect. It's our ability to come together. To buld. To remake. Asking men to cut away their "feminine" traits asks them to cut away half their humanity, just as asking women to supress ther "masculine" traits asks them to deny their full autonomy.

For a young woman today, developing femininity successfully requires meeting three basic demands. The first of these is that she must defer to others, the second that she must anticipate and meet the needs of others, and the third, that she must seek self-definition through connection with another. The consequences of these requirements frequently mean that in denying themselves, women are unable to develop an authentic sense of their needs or a feeling of entitlement for their desires. Preoccupied with others' experience and unfamiliar with their own needs, women come to depend on the approval of those to whom they give. The imperative of affiliation, the culture demand that a woman must define herself through association with another, means that many aspects of self are under-developed, producing insecurity and a shaky sense of self. Under the competent carer who gives to the world lives a hungry, deprived and needy little girl who is unsure and ashamed of her desires and wants.

After years of research, depth psychologists and others argue that each sex carries both the psychological and physical traits of the other. No man is purely masculine, just as there is no purely feminine woman. Jungian psychologists call the feminine characteristics of the male psyche the Anima; the female psyche's masculine characteristics they the Animus. Both the Animus and Anima develop in complex fashion as the personality grows to maturity. Neither men nor women can reach psychological maturity without integrating their respective contrasexual other. A man's female elements enhance his manhood, just as a woman's male aspects enhance her womanhood.

As I understand the virgin archetype, it is that aspect of the feminine, in man or in woman, that has the courage to Be and the flexibility to be always Becoming. Rooted in the instincts, the virgin has a loving relationship to the Great Earth Mother. But she is not herself the Great Mother. Men and women who can consciously relate to this archetype do not make mothering synonymous with femininity, nor are they hampered by unconscious material from their own personal mothers. They have been through the joy and the agony of the daily sorting of the seeds of their own feeling values in order to find out who they authentically are, and they continue to do so. They are strong enough and pliable enough to surrender to the penetration of the Spirit and to bring the fruit of that union into consciousness.

What is of a higher order is always depicted in myths and sagas as a female figure. In Goethe's Faust it is indicated in the words of the Chorus Mysticus: 'The eternal feminine draws us upwards and on.' Various peoples have depicted a person's inner striving towards a higher consciousness as a union with a higher aspect of the being that is seen as feminine. What is depicted as a marriage is a person's union with the cosmic laws that permeate and illumine his soul. For example, in ancient Egypt we see Isis, and as always the female figure that is looked up to as the higher consciousness has characteristics that correspond to those of the particular people. What a people feels to be its real essence, its true nature, is depicted as a female figure corresponding to this ideal — a feminine aspect with which the individual human being becomes united after death, or also while still living.

No aspect of the human psyche can live in a healthy state unless it is balanced by its complementary opposite. If the masculine mind tries to live without its “other half,” the feminine soul, then the masculine becomes unbalanced, sick, and finally monstrous. Power without love becomes brutality. Feeling without masculine strength becomes woolly sentimentality. When one side of human nature grows out of balance with the other, it becomes a tyranny in the soul.

The dissolving, uniting forces combine what to us have been incompatible: attraction with repulsion, darkness with light, the erotic with the destructive.  If we can allow these opposites to meet they move our inner resonance to a higher vibratory plane, expanding consciousness into new realms.  It was exciting, through my explorations some of which I share in later chapters, to learn firsthand that the sacred marriage or coniunctio, the impulse to unite seeming opposites, does indeed seem to lie at the heart of the subtle body’s imaginal world. One important characteristic of the coniunctio is its paradoxical dual action.  The creative process of each sacred marriage, or conjoining of opposites, involves not only the unitive moment of joining together in a new creation or ‘third,’ but also, as I have mentioned, a separating or darkening moment.5 The idea that “darkness comes before dawn” captures this essential aspect of creativity.  To state an obvious truth we as a culture are just beginning to appreciate.  In alchemical language, when darkness falls, it is said to be the beginning of the inner work or the opus of transformation. The old king (ego) must die before the new reign dawns. The early alchemists called the dark, destructive side of these psychic unions the blackness or the nigredo.  Chaos, uncertainty, disillusionment, depression, despair, or madness prevails during these liminal times of  “making death.” The experiences surrounding these inner experiences of darkness and dying (the most difficult aspects were called mortificatio) may constitute our culture’s ruling taboo. This taboo interferes with our moving naturally to Stage Two in the individuating process, a process that requires that we pass through a descent into the underworld of the Dark Feminine realities of birthing an erotic intensity that leads to dying. Entranced by our happily-ever-after prejudiced culture, we often do not see that in any relationship, project or creative endeavor or idea some form of death follows naturally after periods of intense involvement.  When dark experiences befall, we tend to turn away, to move as quickly as possible to something positive or at least distracting, away from the negative affects of grieving, rage, terror, rotting and loss we associate with darkness and dying. As

It wasn’t the fluidity that stymied the crew—that was common enough—but they had trouble getting used to the meteorological aspect of Jerico’s personal system. Having been raised in a place where such things were the norm rather than the exception, it never even occurred to Jerico that it could be an issue, until leaving home. Some things simply made a person feel feminine; other things made a person feel masculine. Wasn’t that true of everyone regardless of gender? Or did binaries deny themselves the things that didn’t fit the mold?

As time went on, I would grasp how deep such wounds go. For we carry not only our own wounding experiences, but the inherited wounds of our mothers and grandmothers, if we are women, Virginia Woolf said. This statement is not mere poetry. We carry something ancient inside us, an aspect of the psyche that Carl Jung called the collective unconscious. Containing river beds of collective experience. the collective unconscious is the place where preexisting traces of ancestral experience are encoded. Thousands of years of feminine rejection reside there, and it can rise up to do a dark dance with our conscious beliefs.

It wasn’t the fluidity that stymied the crew—that was common enough—but they had trouble getting used to the meteorological aspect of Jerico’s personal system. Having been raised in a place where such things were the norm rather than the exception, it never even occurred to Jerico that it could be an issue, until leaving home. Some things simply made a person feel feminine; other things made a person feel masculine. Wasn’t that true of everyone regardless of gender? Or did binaries deny themselves the things that didn’t fit the mold? Well, regardless, Jerico found the faux pas and overcompensations more humorous than anything else.

The “solar wheel is activated” means that everything that is peripheral is submitted to being directed by the center. This is why in this case movement is just another word for master. It is to tour oneself, to delimit oneself so that, under the direction of the center, entry is gained into all aspects of the personality. This amounts to designating self-knowledge as self-incubation. And in the end the sequence of images takes us to this archetype of the complete man that Plato drew as a perfectly spherical being—that is, total and complete, reuniting in himself both masculine and feminine (the essential elemental body awaiting resurrection in the land of Hurqalya).

In the Middle Ages, long before the physiologists demonstrated that by reason of our glandular structure there are both male and female elements in all of us, it was said that "every man carries a woman within himself." It is this female element in every male that I have called the "anima." This "feminine" aspect is essentially a certain inferior kind of relatedness to the surroundings, and particularly to women, which is kept carefully concealed from others as well as from oneself. In other words, though an individual's visible personality may seem quite normal, he may well be concealing from others--or even from himself--the deplorable condition of "the woman within

The Graces are three aspects of Aphrodite; she’s the prime goddess related to Apollo—his śakti—and the Graces are her inflection as the moving powers of the energy of the world. Euphrosyne is the Grace representing the joy of the radiance that flows out to the world through the qualities of the nine Muses. Aglaea, whose name means “splendor,” represents the energy returning to the deity. Thalia, whose names means “abundance,” unites the two. This is the process of rendering into the world the radiance of the Apollonian consciousness. The central figure is the great serpent whose tail is Cerberus, the three-headed dog who guards the underworld. Thalia is also the name of the ninth Muse, so she is both below Cerberus’s head and she is also the central Grace above

The problem is that we who are badly wounded in our relation to the feminine usually have a fairly successful persona, a good public image. We have grown up as docile, often intellectual, daughters of the patriarchy, with what I call ‘animus-egos.’ We strive to keep up the virtues and aesthetic ideals which the patriarchal superego has presented to us. But we are filled with self-loathing and a deep sense of personal ugliness and failure when we can neither meet nor mitigate the superego’s standards of perfection. But we also feel unseen because there are no images alive to reflect our wholeness and variety. But where shall we look for symbols to suggest the full mystery and potency of the feminine and to provide images as models for personal life. The later Greek goddesses and Mary, Virgin Mother, and Mediator, have not struck me to the core as have Innana-Ereshkigal, Kali, and Isis. An image for the goddess as Self needs to have a full-bodied coherence. So I have had to see the female Greek deities as partial aspects of one wholeness pattern and to look always for the darker powers hidden i their stories—the gorgon aspect of Athena, the underworld Aphrodite-Urania, the Black Demeter, etc. Even in the tales of Inanna and other early Sumerian, Semitic, and Egyptian writings there is evidence that the original potencies of the feminine have been ‘demoted.' As Kramer tells us, the goddesses ‘that held top rank in the Sumerian pantheon were gradually forced down the ladder by male theologians’ and ‘their powers turned over to male deities. This permitted cerebral-intellectual-Apollonian, left brain consciousness, with its ethical and conceptual discriminations, to be born and to grow.

It is frightening to step off onto the treacherous footbridge leading to the second half of life. We can’t take everything with us on this journey through uncertainty. Along the way, we discover that we are alone. We no longer have to ask permission because we are the providers of our own safety. We must learn to give ourselves permission. We stumble upon feminine or masculine aspects of our natures that up to this time have usually been masked. There is grieving to be done because an old self is dying. By taking in our suppressed and even our unwanted parts, we prepare at the gut level for the reintegration of an identity that is ours and ours alone—not some artificial form put together to please the culture or our mates. It is a dark passage at the beginning. But by disassembling ourselves, we can glimpse the light and gather our parts into a renewal.

A group of women can constellate a Mother morphic field when we gather together in a sacred circle. We create a 'temenos,' which means 'sanctuary' in Greek. In a women's circle, every woman in the circle is herself and an aspect of every other woman there as well. There is no vertical hierarchy in a circle, and when a circle is a temenos, it is a safe place to tell the truth of our own feelings, perceptions, and experiences. For a women's circle to work as a spiritual and psychological cauldron for change and growth, we need to see every woman in the circle as a sister who mirrors back to us reflections of ourselves. This means that whatever happened to her could have happened to us, that whatever she has felt or done is a possibility for us, that she is someone toward whom we feel neither superior nor inferior nor indifferent. These are not just concepts but the emotional reality that comes from listening to women tell the truth about their lives. Additional depth comes from the psychological awareness that strong reactions to another woman may occur because she represents something in ourselves that is psychologically charged; our reactions are not just about her but about us. Perhaps we can't stand her because she expresses experiences we have repressed; maybe we find her difficult because we react to her like we did to our personal mother or some other significant figure; maybe we are drawn to her because she embodies a potential in ourselves and the positive qualities we so admire in her are growing in us; maybe we avoid her because we fear our own addictions, dependency, or neediness. In this way, we are symbolic figures for each other that we need to understand as we would symbols in a personal dream.

Once the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her "mysterious and exotic darkness" inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this "dark" side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over "marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth." The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality. Connecting to this archetypal image may result in dreams of a huge serpent, mysterious, cold­blooded, inaccessible to human feeling. Seen as an appendage of the negative mother, it is the phallus stolen from the father and used to guard inviolate purity. Yet this same snake, when seen in relation to the moon, symbolizes the dark, impersonal side of femininity and at the same time its capacity to renew itself. The daughter who can come out from under the skin of the negative mother will not perpetuate her but redeem her. The Black Madonna is the patron saint of abandoned daughters who rejoice in their outcast state and can use it to renew the world.

In the ego's world, power means having the ability to control circumstances to your benefit, to manipulate or dominate people in order to get your own way. If what you want is the greatest good for everyone, ego has little to say. The kind of strength that is giving, selfless, devout, trusting, and patient is decidedly feminine. It belongs to saints and mothers. By affirming this kind of strength, you are demonstrating faith that there can be power without aggression, domination, and control. Is there real power in the feminine aspect? Certainly there is, and even though the ego has exercised control for a long time, spiritual power has always been in charge. Spiritual power pervades every aspect of life as the intelligence that nurtures and organizes all forms, atom to cosmos. This power is yours to tap into. It comes from inside, and nothing can stop it once you have found its source in the true self.

Beginning on the left, first comes a standing figure whose name is Iacchos—Iacchos is the word that was shouted in greeting to the young Dionysus when he appeared in birth, and was the cry that was shouted at the moment of revelation. Personified as the deity Iacchos, he would represent that moment of the illumination that comes at the high point of the mystery drama. The tree behind him is a laurel, a tree that has the apotropaic power of warding off evil. Daphne was turned into a laurel tree, and there’s a place called Daphne on the way from Athens to Eleusis. So this is a threshold where we leave the secular world to enter a protected, sacred space, and the first figure that meets us is an aspect of Dionysus. Next on the way in we encounter the two goddesses: Demeter is holding her torch upward and purifying the upper air, while Persephone, her daughter, is holding her torch downward, purifying the lower, chthonic region.

Sadhana The higher possibilities of life are housed in the human body. The physical body is a platform for all possibilities from the gross to the sacred. You can perform simple acts of eating, sleeping, and sex as acts of grossness, or you can bring a certain dimension of sanctity to all these aspects. This sanctity can be achieved by bringing subtler thought, emotion, and intention into these acts. Above all, remember that the grossness and sanctity of something is largely decided by your unwillingness and unconsciousness, or your willingness and consciousness. Every breath, every step, every simple act, thought, and emotion can acquire the stance of the sacred if conducted recognizing the sanctity of the other involved—whether a person or a foodstuff or an object that you use. Of all the loving acts that two human beings are capable of, the simple act of holding hands can often become the most intimate. Why is this so? Basically, because the nature of the hands and feet is such that the energy system finds expression in these two parts of the body in a very singular way. Two palms coming together have far more intimacy than the contact between any other parts of the body. You can try this with yourself. You don’t even need a partner. When you put your hands together, the two energy dimensions within you (right-left, masculine-feminine, solar-lunar, yin-yang, etc.) are linked in a certain way, and you begin to experience a sense of unity within yourself. This is the logic of the traditional Indian namaskar. It is a means of harmonizing the system. So, the simplest way to experience a state of union is to try this simple namaskar yoga. Put your hands together, and pay loving attention to any object you use or consume, or any form of life that you encounter. When you bring this sense of awareness into every simple act, your experience of life will never be the same again. There is even a possibility that if you put your hands together, you could unite the world!

But, the Hermetic teaching does not imply a real duality — THE ALL is ONE — the Two Aspects are merely aspects of manifestation. The teaching is that The Masculine Principle manifested by THE ALL stands, in a way, apart from the actual mental creation of the Universe. It projects its Will toward the Feminine Principle (which may be called "Nature") whereupon the latter begins the actual work of the evolution of the Universe, from simple "centres of activity" on to man, and then on and on still higher, all according to well-established and firmly enforced Laws of Nature. If you prefer the old figures of thought, you may think of the Masculine Principle as GOD, the Father, and of the Feminine Principle as NATURE, the Universal Mother, from whose womb) all things have been born. This is more than a mere poetic figure of speech — it is an idea of the actual process of the creation of the Universe. But always remember, that THE ALL is but One, and that in its Infinite Mind the Universe is generated, created and exists.

All children in Madagascar were raised genderless and forbidden to choose a gender until reaching adulthood. Even then, many didn’t choose a single state of being. Some, like Jerico, found fluidity to be their nature. “I feel like a woman beneath the sun and the stars. I feel like a man under the cover of clouds,” Jerico had explained to the crew when assuming command. “A simple glance at the skies will let you know how to address me at any given time.” It wasn’t the fluidity that stymied the crew – that was common enough – but they had trouble getting used to the meteorological aspect of Jerico’s personal system. Having been raised in a place where such things were the norm rather than the exception, it never even occurred to Jerico that it could be an issue, until leaving home. Some things simply made a person feel feminine; other things made a person feel masculine. Wasn’t that true of everyone regardless of gender? Or did binaries deny themselves the things that didn’t fit the mold? Well, regardless, Jerico found the faux pas and overcompensations more humorous than anything else.

Instead of ascending to enlightened states of being that involve the denial of the self, we have discovered that ours is a journey of descent: we look deep within to reclaim forgotten aspects of ourselves. In our descent, many of us rediscover “Sophia,” which is the Greek word for wisdom. She is a feminine aspect of the divine found in the Hebrew Scriptures. Her presence in the male pantheon of gods has been obscured, but not completely eradicated. In the Gnostic writings, considered heretical by the “orthodox” church, Sophia was present at creation and escorted Adam and Eve toward self-awareness. Women are reclaiming Sophia as a representation of their own inner wisdom. No longer is “god's will” imposed from outside of their lives—wisdom unfolds from within them and is in sync with their own natural gifts and capacities. No longer available to turn their lives and wills over to gods, gurus, and experts, they’re refusing to surrender except to Wisdom's urgings. No longer abdicating responsibility for their lives, they are employing their own willfulness in harmony with Wisdom's ways.

I have never ceased to be fascinated by feminine beauty. In a man, beauty, if it exists, is usually simple; a complete harmony of physical qualities and behaviour all acting together as a whole. The slightest flaw causes it to disappear. In women, beauty is more complex. Often, in my experience, the impression of beauty is created by a single aspect of a woman and from that aspect beauty appears to spread outward through every part of them, rendering them beautiful in their entirety. Sometimes such beauty comes from a smile. Sometimes from a lovely pair of eyes. Sometimes from an attitude, or a form of movement, or a sentiment of goodness or happiness which reveals itself in a single expression. Sometimes it is the curve of a body from which beauty spreads, sometimes a tone of skin, or a river of glossy hair that catches the light and seems to shine like silk. Yet were that aspect removed and not replaced by something else, so too would the beauty it had brought to light disappear. Less often, beauty comes from several sources in the same person, all working together to increase the impression of overall beauty. If one of these aspects were to disappear, unlike a man, the woman would remain beautiful, though changed.

Occasionally, you will come across a wise crack by a pseudoliberal who will refer to God as "she," as if that is the most revolutionary idea known to man, that God could be feminine. Never in such a context is the history of the sexuality of God elucidated, as if it was so obvious to all that God could only be masculine, until the author came along and declared by fiat its femininity. In fact, there did exist matriarchal societies extending from the unknown past into the early historical period. It appears they existed along the "highland zone" which is the foothills extending along the mountainous region from the Pyrenees to the Himalayas. These matriarchal societies influenced the early Sumerian civilization and to a large extent the Minoan civilization, which was one of the few, if not the only matriarchal civilization. These societies were largely overrun and dissipated by invasions of the northern, patriarchal groups but these latter groups did incorporate some matriarchal aspects which exist to this day. For example, although the chief deities of Greece and Rome were masculine, there continued to be a panoply of feminine gods. Or take for example, the history of the Basque people of SW France. Also, when masculine Judaism moved from the Levant to Rome via moderate Christianity and the reconciling Paul, it eventually grafted in the idea of Virgin Mary the Divine. A distant version of this idea stands in New York harbor with her head and torch held high, neither bull dyke nor whore, but La Parisienne. Protestantism, with its northern flatland patriarchal extremism, initially rejected this idea of divine femininity at first but now seems to be coming around.

Questioner: In the tradition, we were always taught to be reverential towards God or the highest aspect. So how to reconcile this with Mirabai or Akka Mahadevi who took God as their lover? Sadhguru: Where there is no love, how can reverence come? When love reaches its peak, it naturally becomes reverence. People who are talking about reverence without love know neither this nor that. All they know is fear. So probably you are referring to God-fearing people. These sages and saints, especially the seers like Akka Mahadevi, Mirabai or Anusuya and so many of them in the past, have taken to this form of worship because it was more suitable for them – they could emote much more easily than they could intellectualize things. They just used their emotions to reach their Ultimate nature. Using emotion and reaching the Ultimate nature is what is called bhakti yoga. In every culture, there are different forms of worship. Some people worship God as the master and themselves as the slaves. Sometimes they even take God as their servant or as a partner in everything that they do. Yet others worship him as a friend, as a lover, or as their own child like Balakrishna. Generally, you become the feminine and you hold him as the ultimate purusha – masculine. How you worship is not at all the point; the whole point is just how deeply you relate. These are the different attitudes, but whatever the attitude, the love affair is such that you are not expecting anything from the other side. Not even a response. You crave for it. But if there is no response, you are not going to be angry, you are not going to be disappointed – nothing. Your life is just to crave and make something else tremendously more important than yourself. That is the fundamental thing. In the whole path of bhakti, the important thing is just this, that something else is far more important than you. So Akka, Mirabai and others like them, their bhakti was in that form and they took this mode of worship where they worshipped God – whether Shiva or Krishna – as their husband. In India, when a woman comes to a certain age, marriage is almost like a must, and it anyway happens. They wanted to eliminate that dimension of being married once again to another man, so they chose the Lord himself as their husband so that they don’t need any other relationship in their lives. How a devotee relates to his object of devotion does not really matter because the purpose of the path of devotion is just dissolution. The only objective of a devotee is to dissolve into his object of devotion. Whichever way they could relate best, that is how they would do it. The reason why you asked this question in terms of reverence juxtaposed with being a lover or a husband is because the word “love” or “being a lover” is always understood as a physical aspect. That is why this question has come. How can you be physical with somebody and still be reverential? This has been the tragedy of humanity that lovers have not known how to be reverential to each other. In fact the very objective of love is to dissolve into someone else. If you look at love as an emotion, you can see that love is a vehicle to bring oneness. It is the longing to become one with the other which we are referring to as love. When it is taken to its peak, it is very natural to become reverential towards what you consider worthwhile being “one” with. For whatever sake, you are willing to dissolve yourself. It is natural to be reverential towards that. Otherwise how would you feel that it is worthwhile to dissolve into? If you think it is something you can use or something you can just relate to and be benefited by, there can be no love. Always, the object of love is to dissolve. So, whatever you consider is worthwhile to dissolve your own self into, you are bound to be reverential towards that; there is no other way to be.

C’est à Ibn ‘Arabi que l’on attribue le rôle le plus éminent dans cette interprétation de plus en plus approfondie du principe féminin. Pour lui non seulement la nafs [âme] est féminine – comme c’est le cas généralement – mais aussi dhât, « essence divine », de sorte que la féminité, dans son œuvre, est la forme sous laquelle Dieu se manifeste le mieux (…) cette phrase savant exprime, en effet, parfaitement le concept d’Ibn ‘Arabi puisqu’il écrit au sujet de sa compréhension du divin : « Dieu ne peut être envisagé en dehors de la matière et il est envisagé plus parfaitement en la matière humaine que dans toute autre et plus parfaitement en la femme qu’en l’homme. Car Il est envisagé soit comme le principe qui agit soit comme le principe qui subit, soit comme les deux à la fois (…) quand Dieu se manifeste sous la forme de la femme Il est celui qui agit grâce au fait qu’Il domine totalement l’âme de l’homme et qu’Il l’incite à se donner et à se soumettre entièrement à Lui (…) c’est pourquoi voir Dieu dans la femme signifie Le voir sous ces deux aspects, une telle vision est plus complète que de Le voir sous toute autre forme par laquelle Il se manifeste. » (…) Des auteurs mystiques postérieurs à Ibn ‘Arabi développèrent ses idées et représentèrent les mystères de la relation physique entre l’homme et la femme par des descriptions tout à fait concrètes. L’opuscule du soufi cachemirien Ya’qub Sarfi (mort en 1594), analysé par Sachiko Murata, en est un exemple typique ; il y explique la nécessité des ablutions complètes après l’acte d’amour par l’expérience « religieuse » de l’amour charnel : au moment de ce plaisir extatique extrême – le plus fort que l’on puisse imagine et vivre – l’esprit est tant occupé par les manifestations du divin qu’il perd toute relation avec son corps. Par les ablutions, il ramène ce corps devenu quasiment cadavre à la vie normale. (…) On retrouve des considérations semblables concernant le « mystère du mariage » chez Kasani, un mystique originaire de Farghana (mort en 1543). Eve, n’avait-elle pas été créée afin que « Adam pût se reposer auprès d’elle », comme il est dit dans le Coran (sourate 7:189) ? Elle était le don divin pour le consoler dans sa solitude, la manifestation de cet océan divin qu’il avait quitté. La femme est la plus belle manifestation du divin, tel fut le sentiment d’Ibn ‘Arabi.

The Artist His gift is the ability to deeply see a woman. There are men who truly see women and men who see only what they want in women. The latter don’t get a lot in return. If you see only a body or a shell when you look at a woman, what would inspire her to share the gift of her innermost self? Remember, a woman thrives on being seen and known; a void of this reflection and caring leaves her feeling empty, unfulfilled, and resistant to you.  The Poet His gift is his capacity to give voice to what he sees. You might see a woman’s feminine essence, her unique beauty, and her inner beauty; but if you aren’t able to convey that to her, she won’t know or feel the depth of your love and desire. When you do choose to see and express who a woman is (at her essence) in words, you offer her a gift she cannot give to herself. Sure, she can know and cherish herself, but her feminine desire to be celebrated is different. “To be celebrated, honored, and valued with language and gesture” is a gift she cannot give herself. Note: The Artist and the Poet are clearly intertwined. Seeing and celebrating a woman are practically one in the same. And yet, one without the other leaves a void. Animate the Artist and the Poet together and feel inside you how deeply seeing a woman and being emotionally expressive with her unlocks your love and your power, and opens her. The Director His gift is the gift of direction – taking a woman somewhere she cannot take herself. The Artist and The Poet give shape to your loving, but without the forward motion and focus of the director, your relationship will lack directionality. The director takes a woman somewhere, sometimes literally, and sometimes within herself. Yes, a woman can direct herself; she has a masculine aspect. But your gift of directionality opens doorways, experiences, and feelings a feminine, flowing woman may never access on her own. Note: The Director and The Poet are natural partners. Giving voice to what you see and know about a woman builds trust. She relaxes. The Poet opens a woman’s desire to let go and turn herself over to a man’s directionality. Without this, The Director will meet with resistance. Remember, following is a choice. Letting go with you is a choice. A woman follows a confident dancer; she resists a weak one. Let her know you see and understand her, and she will open to your lead.

Yin is the feminine aspect of all things and is associated with that which is expansive, open, and receptive, while yang is the masculine aspect of all things and is associated with that which is precise, active, and specific. Every person has both yin qualities and yang qualities,

Furthermore, their sexual oneness had been eroded by the natural duality of the planet, causing them to accentuate one aspect of their sexual forces (male or female) and subdue the other (the respective male or female opposite). No longer were they united, androgynous beings; they were now either predominantly masculine or feminine in their appearance and energy. Physically, then, their new Earthly form would need to reflect these changes by being either male or female. Asamee and her fellow "double-sexed" companions began the work of creating forms for these souls, male and female, separating their double-sexed natures into single-sexed physical projections, Amilius being the first to completely achieve this.

The imagination, as a subset of the lesser “irrational,” has been rejected and devalued by our culture to the point that we acknowledge its existence, if at all, as a deviation from psychological health and normalcy. To get a taste of our cultural prejudice, just look at these synonyms for “irrational”—unsound, untenable, absurd, foolish, inane, silly, crazy, demented, insane, and mad. What about the wonder, awe, Eros, creative pulsing, energetic vitality, and meaning brought forth by the irrational aspects of the psych? We continue to face a poverty of language that limits our experience when we try to speak of these faculties that have been marginalized for so long.

White contains a balance of all colors in the spectrum, representing both the positive and negative aspects of all colors. Given it’s properties and undeniable associations with purity, white tends to amplify and reflect other colors and textures in it’s path. This is probably why I’m often asked to design white on white florals for marketing initiatives. The blooms add a delicate and feminine touch to the brand message, while allowing the product or idea to stand tall and look high-end.

A woman’s sensuality far surpasses all the functional aspects that, traditionally, were meant to confine her.

Awakening humanity one person at a time seems like a tall order. Balancing your masculine and feminine aspects is one specific guidance for how to do this. First, you acknowledge that you have both a feminine and masculine aspect, regardless of your gender or gender identity. We are all both. You just wear different outfits. Until you as individuals have the balance within you to love and honor and cherish each part of you, you will not reach the love and peace that humanity needs to achieve. Then, you can do a practice to balance your masculine and feminine energies. I experienced this reconciliation process for myself before hearing that message. It was an incredible process that left me in a state of profound peace and bliss. You can explore balancing your masculine and feminine aspects if it is right for you with this channeled practice. Practice knowing yourself through meditation if you wish. Sit quietly and ask for the masculine and feminine parts of you to come forth. They will come forth. Let them introduce themselves to you. Become familiar with the male part of you and the female part of you. Make peace with both parts because through time with your own experience, one is stronger than the other, or the human part of you fears one or the other. Practice becoming aware of those parts. And if you bring those parts forth, let them talk to each other while you observe. Journal about your experience with this exercise. The synthesis of different parts of us is not a new concept. Robert Assagioli created a process to integrate various aspects of ourselves, called psychosynthesis.38 This work aims to integrate the different aspects of ourselves into a purposeful personality, connect to our higher self, and realize the spiritual self, moving from self-identity to a transpersonal understanding of oneself (Hastings 1991, 89). Because this is the most common channeled content category, you will likely receive specific or general guidance and personal messages for living your life through your own channeling or from others. Awakening humanity, our true nature not being limited by our physical bodies, and balancing our masculine and feminine aspects are just a few topics in this channeled content category.

Consistency between Dionysos-type godforms is also demonstrated in five minor attributes, which fluctuate in degree depending upon the particular norms, standards, and values of a given culture. These attributes are: 1. Unsurpassed viciousness toward those who would harm the followers of the god. When this aspect of Dionysian godforms is aroused, they are what has been termed “Hunters of Men.” 2. These Deities are lawgivers who, very often, figure in literal or symbolic acts of human sacrifice, whether this sacrifice occurs because of the breaking of laws, as part of worship, or for the granting of special favors to a community at large. Paradoxically, these same godforms ultimately do away with all requirements for human sacrifice. 3. Such archetypes are portals between upper, lower, and middle worlds: Bridges between the realms of life and death, they are gatekeepers, or the companions of gatekeepers, and masters of altered states of being. 4. Godforms of this type are often portrayed as adherents or defenders of the divine feminine, and can often be found in the company of female worshippers, goddesses, or their own mates, without whom they are incomplete, and upon whom they rely in order to fulfill their multiple roles of Divine Child, Bridegroom, Father, Savior, and Reborn One. Sensuality, too, is a Dionysian trademark: This is usually a paradoxical sensuality, at once childlike and ravaging, remarkably androgynous yet undeniably masculine in its expression. 5. Bewitching is an acceptable description of Dionysos-syncretistic Deities; many are unsurpassed in the powers of discrimination, response, wisdom, healing, fertility, prophecy, and magic in general. When Dionysos was invoked or worshipped by the ancient Greeks for his command of the powers listed above, he was considered agathos daemon, or “the good demon”: Demons, to the pagan Hellenes, were not necessarily wholly evil forces of the kind espoused by the Christian faith. They were seen as demigods capable of bringing either wealth and happiness or pain and suffering to mankind, of appearing in any sort of theriomorphic form — including no form at all — and of interceding between the supreme godhead and mankind.

We have re-examined the goddesses through several millennia, and we have seen a radical change in how the divine feminine has been viewed, first by the goddess-centered societies of the Neolithic, then by the assimilated societies made up of male-centered Indo-Europeans and the more equalitarian folk whom they conquered; and finally by modern societies, many of which worship no personification of the feminine at all. There is a lack of balance in much of modern religion, an imbalance of the character of the divine. This imbalance reflects upon the wellness, in all of its aspects, of our world.

We all begin with the question “What am I, really? What is my work here?” The Yaga teaches us that we are Life/Death/Life, that this is our cycle, this is our special insight into the deep feminine. When I was a child one of my aunts told me our family’s legend of “The Watery Women.” She said that at the edge of every lake there lived a young woman with old hands. Her first job was to put tüz—what I can only describe to you as souls or “soul-fire”—into dozens of beautiful porcelain ducks. Her second job was to wind the wooden keys in the ducks’ backs. When the winding-keys ran out, and the ducks fell over, their bodies shattered, she was to flap her apron at the souls as they were released and shoo them up into the sky. Her fourth job was to put tüz into more beautiful porcelain ducks, wind their keys, and release them to their lives.... The tüz story is one of the clearest about exactly what it is the Life/Death/Life Mother does with her time. Psychically, Mother Nyx, Baba Yaga, the Watery Women, La Que Sabe, and Wild Woman represent different pictures, different ages, moods, and aspects of the Wild Mother God. The infusion of tüz into our own ideas, our own lives, the lives of those we touch, that is our work. The shooing of the soul to its home, that is our work. The releasing of a shower of sparks to fill the day, and creating a light so we can find our way through the night, that is our work.

Are all these ladies midwives?” I asked. “Look closer,” said Amelia. “Tell me what you see.” I have to say that there are certain aspects of femininity that I admit to being less than familiar with—shall we say, the earthier, more family-orientated aspects? But even I could see that some of what I’d taken for stoutness was something else entirely. “I see,” I said. “Many of these ladies are…um, ah…with child.” “Well done, Gussie,” said Amelia. “They bring food, money, occasionally jewellery as a down payment on a safe delivery.” “Offerings,” I said. “But to whom?” “I suppose you could say the midwives,” said Amelia. “In a collective sort of way.” “Does it work?” Amelia shrugged. “Who knows?

Alix wonders at herself for taking comfort from this, wonders at herself and her values and every last aspect of herself as she has done constantly for the past week. Who is she? Why is she? What has she done? What should she do? Is she a good mother? Has she been a good wife? Good sister? A good friend? A good woman? Does she deserve what she has? Is she shallow? Is she irrelevant? Does she want to be relevant? Is she a feminist? Or is she just feminine?

The black dress seemed excessively revealing – because it was astonishing to discover that the lines of her shoulder were fragile and beautiful, and that the diamond band on the wrist of her naked arm gave her the most feminine of all aspects: the look of being chained.

Elizabeth might revere Waldo Emerson as an oracle of truth, but Waldo held Elizabeth in high esteem too. Her 1830 translation of de Gérando’s Self-Education inspired him, and her manuscript translation of the French mystic Guillaume Oegger’s True Messiah had provided “good things” as well. At this formative time in his life, Waldo Emerson found in Elizabeth Peabody both a woman who knew the ins and outs of the publishing world—she would advise him on dealings with their mutual publisher, James Munroe—and a raconteur with the “authority of a learned professor or high literary celebrity in her talk.” For the most part, as Elizabeth had intuited, Waldo was able to disregard the less compelling aspects of her personality that, to a man whose feminine ideal was still the nineteen-year-old invalid bride he had lost to tuberculosis, were inclined to “offend,” and accept her as a fellow being of “infinite capacity.” In

In Tenochtitlan, Tezcoco and other cities there were groups of wise men known as tlamatinime. These scholars carried on the study of the ancient religious thinking of the Toltecs, which Tlacaelel had transformed into a mystical exaltation of war. Despite the popularity of the cult of the war-god, Huitzilopochtli, the tlamatinime preserved the old belief in a single supreme god, who was known under a variety of names. Sometimes he was called Tloque-Nahuaque, “Lord of the Close Vicinity,” sometimes Ipalnemohuani, “Giver of Life,” sometimes Moyocoyatzin, “He who Creates Himself.” He also had two aspects, one masculine and one feminine. Thus he was also invoked as Ometeotl, “God of Duality,” or given the double names Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, “Lord and Lady of Duality,” Mictlantecuhtli and Mictecacihuatl, “Lord and Lady of the Region of Death,” and others.

women who choose to make it big financially, must also pay attention to certain aspects in the creating of feminine success. I like to call it “feminine pit holes” and “feminine virtues.” Once you get to know and recognize them, you will make very quick progress.

A Warrior, a Healer, and Tao The leader can act as a warrior or as a healer. As a warrior, the leader acts with power and decision. That is the Yang or masculine aspect of leadership. Most of the time, however, the leader acts as a healer and is in an open, receptive, and nourishing state. That is the feminine or Yin aspect of leadership. This mixture of doing and being, of warrior and healer, is both productive and potent. There is a third aspect of leadership: Tao. Periodically, the leader withdraws from the group and returns to silence, returns to God. Being, doing, being… then, Tao. I withdraw in order to empty myself of what has happened, to replenish my spirit. A brilliant warrior does not make every possible brilliant intervention. A knowing healer takes time to nourish self as well as others. Such simplicity and economy is a valuable lesson. It deeply affects the group. The leader who knows when to listen, when to act, and when to withdraw can work effectively with nearly anyone, even with other professionals, group leaders, or therapists, perhaps the most difficult and sophisticated group members. Because the leader is clear, the work is delicate and does not violate anybody’s sensibilities.

Early July 2012 True to his words, questions from Dr. Arius continue to arrive as quickly as I responded to his queries. In one of his emails he wrote: Dear Young, You are certainly diligent in answering my questions. Like you, I had similar experiences with my father in that we had a love/hate relationship. If I am not mistaken Andy’s relationship with his dad was very much the same, am I correct? According to my analysis after years of psychiatric research in the field of homosexuality; close to 80 percent of gay boys had or continue to have love/hate relationships with their fathers. It is often the patriarch who has difficulties accepting the feminine aspect of their own machismo attributes. Patriarchs are often threatened by the effeminine energies that co-exist in all human beings. As is usually the case, when confronted by a gay son/sons or lesbian daughter/daughters, it upsets the traditional supercilious male dominance in the animal hierarchy; thus throwing the father figures off the balance scale. Some dads choose not to deal with their own fears which they unconsciously project onto family members closes to them, especially their homosexual children. On the other hand for those fathers that choose to reject their gay children; disowning their flesh and blood, they are on many occasions afraid to face their own fears head-on. In the majority of cases, throughout my research dads or parents with conventional religious background also have difficulties accepting their homosexual children due to religious indoctrinations. Although we are currently living in a more enlightened moment in the history of mankind, age old customs and traditions continues to exist in conjunction with new ideologies. I believe your stories will assist to further enlighten our society and culture, propelling us humans towards a new dawn to understanding the future. As the saying goes; “It is a necessity to learn from the past to live in the present, in order to choose where we want to go in our future.

Today, many of us are trying to understand just what male and female energies are, since we are calling old rigid stereotypes into questions. There is a risk of replacing such stereotypes with even more politically correct rigid stereotypes. The destructive aspect of the masculine has been emphasized in recent years, but both the feminine and the masculine have destructive sides. (The evil witch in fairy tales is an example of the destructive feminine.) Love is the ultimate nature of everything; it is not just the feminine that is loving. We tend to think of female energy as nurturing because it is undirected—it includes everything—but perhaps one could say that the feminine loves and nurtures in a being way, and the masculine does so in a doing way. We are each capable of loving in both ways.

For instance, being ‘confident’, ‘carefree’ and ‘unconcerned about one’s appearance’ are now central aspects of femininity in their own right—even as they sit alongside injunctions to meet standards of beauty that ‘only a mannequin could achieve’ (Kilbourne, 1999 cited in Gill, 2008, p. 440).

Jewish literature further teaches that the highest form of prayer fills a lack in the Shechinah, traditionally an expression of the feminine aspect of God.

By figuratively “stepping into the shoes” of these different figures, you can start experiencing and strengthening different aspects of your feminine self and observing how the different character traits feel in your body. Though there are many archetypes present in the psyche, the following six are my favorites. The Six Archetypes

The basic tenet of Tantrism is that matter, and therefore the body, is also a manifestation of S'akti power, that is, the power emanating from the feminine aspect of Divine Reality.

one of the most fascinating aspects of this case must be the question of what constitutes “visual evidence” and how racialized femininity impacts and alters that assumption.

The practice was steeped in worship of the Old Gods. A feminine aspect of the Wild, the Hunt, the Moons, called Fiáin. But the Holy Church beat the paganism out of the Ossians over time. A few traditions survived. Women fought in wars beside their men. Women had the rule of the hearth. But instead of Fiáin, local worship shifted to the Mothermaid after the Wars of the Faith. There were more churches and abbeys devoted to her in the Ossway than anywhere else in the empire.’ Gabriel leaned back, sipped at his wine. ‘It was only in the most remote corners where the ancient ways truly lived on. Old World religion. Worship of Fiáin. Wild Hunts. Fae witchery. All rare enough to be considered folklore by most. But the silversaints knew better.

Thus we find that myths are not just delightful yet idle stories of gods and goddesses, heroes or demons, from a forgotten time; they speak of living psychological material and act as a repository of truths appropriate to an individual's inner life, as well as to the life of the community. At these deep "layers" of the psyche, individual uniqueness gives way to autonomous functions, fields of psychic energy, which become increasingly collective; that is, they are inherent in humankind throughout history. Jung called this kind of psychic energy an archetype.

Loss and death, unrequited love and abandonment, are all part of Aphrodite's realm. Indeed, only by these dark shadows does her golden brilliance become a complete creation, smiling its immortal smile as well as looking on death with immortal eyes. Permanence is of Hera's world, not Aphrodite's. What belongs to her is a deep acceptance that passionate love does not last forever; and an equally deep acceptance that man is made to love. All the myths of these goddesses emphasize the pain, the grief and the mourning they experienced over the death of the son-­lover. We know the range of this goddess' emotions—joy and pleasure, yet also pain and grief. Emotions engendered by love's process are an integral part of her being.

The woman who comes to know the goddess grows in the understanding of that divine aspect of her feminine nature that is part of the Self, the archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the personality. She is not contaminated by external circumstances or overly affected by criticism. The woman conscious of the goddess cares for her body with proper nutrition and exercise and enjoys the ceremonies of bathing, cosmetics and dress. This is not just for the superficial purpose of personal appeal, which is related to ego gratification, but out of respect for the nature of the feminine. Her beauty derives from a vital connection to the Self. Such a woman is virginal. This has nothing to do with a physical state, but with an inner attitude. She is not dependent on the reactions of others to define her own being. The virginal woman is not just a counterpart to the male, whether father, lover or husband. She stands as an equal in her own right. She is not governed by an abstract idea of what she "should" be like or "what people will think.

A symbol is the best possible expression for something essentially unknown. Behind its objective, visible meaning there is an invisible, more profound meaning. The symbol is thus a "nucleus of meaning" and is charged with energy. As a psychic product, a symbol carries similar energized contents across boundaries of time and space. Charged with internal psychic energy, it is projected onto the external world where it finds its reflection in a living form; it may even be projected into an abstract form such as an ideal, something suprahuman, as was the goddess. When we are in love we do feel radiant and beautiful, and we love to laugh. When the archetype breaks through to consciousness, a characteristic numinous effect is experienced. It is awe­inspiring, bigger than life, and, writes Jung, "may be said in the long run to mould the destinies of individuals by unconsciously influencing their thinking, feeling, and behaviour, even if this influence is not recognized until long afterwards.

The transformative, active side of the feminine principle accents the dynamic elements of the psyche that urge change and transformation. This active side of the feminine is similar to that divine madness of the soul described in Plato's Phaedrus, which invokes primeval forces that take us out of the limitations and conventions of social norms and the reasonable life. Eros in this sense produces ecstasy, a liberation from the conventions of the group. . . . Ecstasy may range from a momentary being taken out of oneself to a profound enlargement of personality.

The devaluation of woman represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity, for it is not upon her positive value but upon man's weakness that her prestige is founded. In woman are incarnated the disturbing mysteries of nature, and man escapes her told when he frees himself from nature.

The strength of the goddess lies in the capacity to give up that which is most precious, in order to ensure growth and regeneration; transformation can only take place when old attitudes and values give way to new ones. Hers is not a cold, calculating strength, denying all emotion; on the contrary, she feels the deepest emotions and does not restrict her mourning. This is perhaps the most difficult aspect of the goddess to comprehend and certainly to integrate, for it goes against our cultural teachings. The active, dynamic aspect of feminine nature, that which promotes change and transformation, counterbalances the static, elemental aspect, the maternal, which, although it provides for growth, is essentially conservative and protective. Both are equally important in psychological development.

The stranger who came to the temple to worship the goddess of love in intercourse with the sacred prostitute was in ancient times viewed as an emissary of the gods, or even the god in disguise. The stranger is typically one who is uninvited, unexpected and of foreign nature. He comes from an other­worldly place and instigates change. A numinous aura surrounds him. This is the essence of the stranger in the context of the initiation rituals enacted by the sacred prostitute: he facilitates her transition from the innocence of maidenhood to the realization of her full feminine nature. Psychologically, in a woman, it is a stage where the masculine principle breaks through. Whatever she undertakes, she does so with confidence, without regression, submissiveness or a feeling of inferiority to a patriarchal system. The woman who has come to know the presence of the masculine power within is her own authority and stands constant to her feminine nature. She may not be able to change the patriarchal system which surrounds her, but, more importantly, she doesn't allow the system to change her.

The sacred marriage is an archetypal motif, and for this reason we find many examples of it in literature, legends and world religions. Common to many fairy tales is the royal wedding in which a prince and princess, each from a different country, are brought together by fortuitous circumstances and then united in marriage. The stories repeatedly involve a long search or heroic deeds, full of perils and fraught with hardship and despair. Psychologically, the sacred marriage symbolizes the union of opposites. It is the coming together, in equal status, of the masculine and feminine principles, the conjoining of consciousness and unconsciousness, of spirit and matter. This psychic process, writes Jung, brings about "the 'earthing' of the spirit and the spiritualizing of the earth, the union of opposites and reconciliation of the divided.

On the transpersonal level, the sacred marriage extends beyond the boundaries of human understanding. One is united with the divine, the source and the power of love. Through the mystical union a portion of divine love is received and contained within oneself. In the act of sacrifice to a greater authority, earthly values, such as ego desires or identification with power, are transformed into a capacity to love on a plane which surpasses human reasoning. Instinctual nature, embedded in the body, carries this wisdom; the head cannot comprehend what the heart knows. Instinctual nature is not only the vehicle for biological processes but it also conveys the emotional feeling­tones of life in a way that could well be described as the language of the soul. Esther Harding provides the following description: "The ritual of the hieros gamos is religious. Through the acceptance of the power of instinct within her, while at the same time renouncing all claim to possessiveness in regard to it, a woman gains a new relation to herself. The power of instinct within her is recognized as belonging not to herself but to the nonhuman realm, to the goddess, whom she must serve, for whom her body must be a worthy vessel." From the union of the human and the divine, the Divine Child is born. The Divine Child is new life—life with new understanding, life which carries an illuminating vision into the world.

The dominant images in the Western world are those of power, wealth and technical knowledge—these are the "gods" we currently honor. We no longer worship the goddess of love; consequently we have no container for sexual ecstasy, the numinous state where the inner core of the individual is awakened and revealed to self and other. Paper hearts and baby cupids hardly suffice; they are symbols of a sentimental romanticism which merely fulfills ego desires. Cupid, the Roman counterpart of the Greek phallic god Eros, has been reduced to a roly­poly, cute cherub with an infantile penis—an image far removed from the potent phallic god who was the consort of the goddess of love. As the potency ascribed to the phallic god has been reduced or negated, so has the image of the goddess of love fallen into limbo. How can we restore her to life?

A perfection of the goddess Astarte, for no man could look at her provocative form without seeing in her the sublime representation of fertility. She was a girl whose purpose was to be loved, to be taken away and made fertile so that she could reproduce her grandeur and bless the earth. As ancient civilizations such as Urbaal's were destroyed, their clay images buried under ruins for eons, so were the gods and goddesses who protected and insured their growth. No longer did the sacred prostitute, the human woman who embodied the goddess, dance in the temple to excite the communication of body and soul. The temple of the goddess of love, no longer vital, went underground. Who was "the sacred prostitute"? And what happened to the developing consciousness of humankind when people no longer venerated the goddess of love, passion and sex?

The proliferation of substance dependency, physical abuse, sexual promiscuity, and living on the fast track in order not to feel the emptiness of one's life—all point to the loss of a vital element in life. Contemporary men and women, unlike Urbaal of ancient times, no longer have the opportunity to hold tenderly the little image of the goddess or become awe-­inspired while viewing the sacred prostitute dancing in the temple, her beautiful body the representation of joy and passion. Without benefit of direct experience, we can know of the sacred prostitute only through reading deciphered cuneiform tablets or ancient manuscripts describing her rituals. The archetype, as a psychic entity, is surrounded by energy which has the ability to activate and transform conscious contents. When the archetype is constellated, that is, activated, the release of that specific energy is recognized by consciousness and felt in the body through the emotions. Thus, for example, when the archetype of the goddess of love is constellated, we are imbued with the vitality of love, beauty, sexual passion and spiritual renewal. Jung writes that the loss of an archetype gives rise to that frightful 'discontent in our culture'. Instead of digging deep in the earth to recover hidden treasures, I would "dig" in the dark, mysterious spaces of the unconscious to bring those dormant images to the light of consciousness.

While contemplating the possibility of healing the split between sexuality and spirituality through connection with the sacred prostitute, modern men and women need also to contemplate the dangers. We are not at the same place in the evolution of human consciousness as were the ancient sacred prostitutes. Centuries of splitting spirit from matter have left us far from either the understanding or the experience of matter as sacred. Daily the earth is raped. Daily the wisdom of the human body is ravaged by the mind. So long as we are unconscious of the divinity inherent in matter, sexuality can be manipulated to fulfill ego desire; the sacred prostitute is not present, nor is the Goddess being invoked. Instead of manifesting as a transformative power that can mediate between wounded instinct and the radiance of the divine, the Goddess is called upon to justify lust and sexual license.

of beginning various psychological initiation processes with initiators who have not completed the process themselves. They have no seasoned persons who know how to proceed. When initiators are incompletely initiated themselves, they omit important aspects of the process without realizing it, and sometimes visit great abuse on the initiate, for they are working with a fragmentary idea of initiation, one that is often tainted in one way or another.4 At the other end of the spectrum is the woman who has experienced theft, and who is striving for knowledge and mastery of the situation, but who has run out of directions and does not know there is more to practice in order to complete the learning, and so repeats the first stage, that of being stolen from, over and over again. Through whatever circumstances, she has gotten tangled in the reins. Essentially, she is without instruction. Instead of discovering the requirements of a healthy wildish soul, she becomes a casualty of an uncompleted initiation. Because matrilineal lines of initiation—older women teaching younger women certain psychic facts and procedures of the wild feminine—have been fragmented and broken for so many women and over so many years, it

In the realm of spiritual philosophy, where the sacred and the mundane converge, where the mystical dances with the ordinary, there exists an enchanting archetype that beckons us to explore the depths of our souls—the Divine Rabbit. This ethereal creature, a symbol of fertility, rebirth, and spiritual illumination, invites us to embark on a profound journey of self-discovery and transcendence. The Divine Rabbit, with its gentle countenance and nimble grace, embodies the essence of the divine feminine, representing the nurturing and creative aspects of existence. It is a messenger of the cosmic forces, whispering ancient wisdom and guiding us towards the realization of our true nature. With each hop, it traverses the sacred landscapes of our consciousness, leaving in its wake the seeds of transformation and spiritual awakening. This mystical creature, adorned with the symbols of abundance and growth, teaches us the profound truth that spirituality is not confined to lofty realms or esoteric knowledge, but is deeply rooted in the tapestry of our everyday lives. The Divine Rabbit invites us to cultivate a sense of presence and mindfulness, to embrace the magic of the present moment, and to recognize that every breath we take is an opportunity for divine communion. In the Divine Rabbit, we find a profound reflection of our own spiritual journey. Like the rabbit, we too navigate the maze of existence, encountering both obstacles and opportunities along the way. The Divine Rabbit reminds us to approach these challenges with grace, agility, and an unwavering trust in the divine plan. It teaches us that even in the face of adversity, we possess the innate resilience to overcome, to rise above our limitations, and to embrace the boundless potential that resides within us. The Divine Rabbit also serves as a catalyst for profound transformation and rebirth. Just as the rabbit sheds its old fur to make way for new growth, we too are called to release the layers of conditioning, limiting beliefs, and attachments that no longer serve our highest good. The Divine Rabbit encourages us to step into the fullness of our authentic selves, to embrace our innate gifts and talents, and to allow the light of our divine essence to illuminate the world around us. Moreover, the Divine Rabbit invites us to honor the interconnectedness of all beings and the sacredness of every living creature. It teaches us to tread lightly upon the Earth, recognizing that our actions have far-reaching consequences. The Divine Rabbit reminds us of the importance of compassion, kindness, and love towards all beings, for in their eyes, we catch a glimpse of the divine spark that resides within us all. As we embark on our spiritual journey, let us heed the wisdom of the Divine Rabbit. Let us cultivate a sense of wonder and curiosity, allowing ourselves to be guided by the synchronicities and signs that pepper our path. Let us embrace the cycles of life and honor the sacredness of both beginnings and endings. And above all, let us remember that within the heart of the Divine Rabbit resides the eternal flame of our own divine essence, waiting to be kindled and expressed in all its radiant glory. May we follow the path of the Divine Rabbit, awakening to the depths of our being, embracing our divine nature, and embodying the transformative power of love, compassion, and spiritual illumination. In doing so, we dance in harmony with the rhythm of the universe, honoring the sacredness of life, and fulfilling our highest purpose.

Progressive women have grown accustomed to not only allowing the government to decide what is best for their children and their families, but they actively engage in protesting for more aspects of life to be overseen by elitist experts —many of whom do not even have children themselves.

Sometimes he was called Tloque-Nahuaque, “Lord of the Close Vicinity,” sometimes Ipalnemohuani, “Giver of Life,” sometimes Moyocoyatzin, “He who Creates Himself.” He also had two aspects, one masculine and one feminine. Thus he was also invoked as Ometeotl, “God of Duality,” or given the double names Ometecuhtli and Omecihuatl, “Lord and Lady of Duality,” Mictlantecuhtli and Mictecacihuatl, “Lord and Lady of the Region of Death,” and others.

Among the many aspects of Wicca that distinguish it from other, more widely recognized religions is its emphasis on the feminine, as symbolized by nature, the Earth, the Moon, and feminine deities (or goddesses). The masculine is also represented through deity and is particularly associated with the Sun, but there is none of the patriarchy often found in other Western faiths.

Now the author will consider the third name, and perhaps the most outstanding of all: al-Dhât. This word, in Arabic, is also feminine. Allâh is Beyond the Beyond, higher than any action, manner or condition, and any thought that any being may have. This transcendence of all qualities denotes the Divine Feminine. The renowned Sûfî master Najm al-Din Kubra wrote of the Dhât as the "Mother of the divine attributes." On this makam or "level of existence", femininity corresponds to interiority and masculinity to manifestation. The ancient Celtic Druids would perform a strange rite after two people married. The Druid would go into the house in which the marriage was consummated and reappear dressed in the bride's gown. He would do this to demonstrate the balance between the masculine and feminine aspects within himself. The Druids were ancient Celtic priests, shamans and philosophers.

The left hemisphere (controlling the right side of the body) is spoken of as ‘masculine, profane, active, intellectual, analytical, linear, sequential and causal.’ The right hemisphere (associated with the left side of the body) is considered to be ‘feminine, sacred, receptive, intuitive, holistic, non-linear, simultaneous, spatial and acausal.’ And, of course, contemporary human consciousness is regarded as an integration of both modes, each occupation or discipline involving the dominance of some aspect of one or the other. In fact the two vital aspects of this dichotomy are that the reflection into consciousness of the Senses of the Body which serve the intellect, take place in the left lobe; while the Senses of the Spirit which serve the soul, occur in the right. The craftmasons of the Middle Ages were aware of supersensible realities to which the physical senses are blind. In this manner they were able to perceive the spiritual background of physical existence. In this respect they regarded the right hemisphere of the brain as a counterpart of the left hemisphere with which man reflects with intellec tual faculties upon the three-dimensional world in which he lives. For they conceived the right hemisphere as the framework for the spiritual faculties through which man orientates himself within the higher dimensions of the spiritual world visible to the senses of the spirit.