Is it too late for the Great Mother archetype?
Over recent weeks I have been watching over 50 interviews on Post-Doom on YouTube. Michael Dowd has interviewed climate scientists, young leaders in the eco-anxiety space, systems thinkers, journalists, ecologists, spiritual leaders, authors and researchers of all descriptions. Many have degrees in up to three disciplines and almost all can think across disciplines. Between them they have studied books about the collapse of civilisations, abrupt climate change, consciousness, peak oil, energy and environmentalism.
All are facing up to the reality of our current global predicament. They are not taken in by the happy chapter at the end of Al Gore’s film or any number of dissertations after describing the mess we have got ourselves into as a species. They don’t blindly obey the cultural imperative to be optimistic and not scare the punters.
I was delighted to listen to Barbara Cecil, a woman who has coached women leaders. She commented that, at the time of the 50 minute interview (2019), there were four trends. First there is the movement towards totalitarianism; second the desecration of the Earth and a headlong rush into an unliveable planet. Third was the subjugation of women. She noted that in India in 2019, 5 million women had joined in a protest across the nation against violence, and the United Nations was using the new word, femicide. (think of the pain in today’s Afghanistan). Fourth was the genocide of indigenous rainforest.
She noted that the resistance against this these issues was not working. From there she said what we need is an amplified vibration the type that can break a glass with the singing of Ella Fitzgerald or can break up a kidney stone. She asked, “Where is the source of the feminine energetic?”
- There must be a deep listening for the interior impulse.
- They must be right placement. By that she means a relationship to others being the right distance from each other and Inbetweeners these fields are where the deep feminine is.
- There must be attention paid to and respect for cycles. You must do beginning is born out of silence and do endings at the appropriate time you must tune into the natural cycle and be patient.
There is power when enough people doing it. She said the feminine creative universal force is badly needed. And she left it there.
This led me to thinking about money systems and the writings of the late Bernard Lietaer. You may think this is a strange transition but in my mind I recalled a lot of writing about the worship of the goddess in different ages. Lietaer had studied the Black Madonna and had concluded that the worship of a Great Mother happened to coincide several times in history with a just and sustainable society. He attributed this successful and sustainable society to the fact that there were dual currencies operating at the time, a yin currency and a yang currency. The yin was abundant, the yang scarce. There was no monetary monoculture as there is today.
The interview finished on the theme that the feminine creative universal force is badly needed at a time when we have seen the Earth our Mother as an “it” to be exploited rather than a Goddess to be worshipped.
Bernard Lietaer and Stephen Belgium in their 2005 book New Money for a New World explain that Jung’s four archetypes, warrior, sovereign, magician and lover needed a fifth. They suggested the missing archetype is the Great Mother.
“The Great Mother was honoured and active over tens of thousands of years and over vast geographic areas. Her presence has been documented from the earliest times of human consciousness. Image has been carved in mammoth ivory, in reindeer antlers, and on stone at the entrance of sacred caves. Great Mother effigies were the most common figures of the upper-Paleolithic period (30,000 to 9,000 BC). Her predominant importance in ancient times is illustrated by the fact that four times more feminine than masculine prehistoric figurines have been uncovered.”
“Archeologist Marija Gimbuta’s Great Mother is the symbol of unity of all life in nature. The power was in water in stone into tomb and cave in animals and birds snakes in fish hills trees and flowers hence the holistic perception of the sacredness industry of all that is on Earth.”
The Great Mother archetype maybe what has been missing from our civilisation. But is it just too late? If so, it must surely be part of the culture of any civilisation that emerges from the Sixth Extinction.
As transition engineer Nathan Surendran recently wrote on an email group, “To me, our job is to ready people for the consequences of not having found a “route to a peaceful but profound transition” in 40 plus years of ‘trying’. We’re so far into overshoot that it is a wholly unrealistic and naively idealistic aim to suggest we can plan for anything other than civilisation ending collapse. Resource depletion and environmental effects are the two blades of the scissors that Gaia will use to castrate our ambitions to avert this logical, fact based and data supported conclusion.”
It is therefore no coincidence that those who have worked on finding ways to reverse climate change like the huge team of Paul Hawken’s Drawdown Project has done, put the education of women and family planning at numbers 3 and 6 in order of importance. Paul Hawken has in a 17 September 2021 lecture, concluded that when you put these two together, “empowerment of women and girls is the number one solution to climate change.”