The Lost Mother

The Divine Feminine Lost and Found

Cinderella by Frederick Hall

For centuries in the Western world, fairy tales were symbolic representations of the psychic world, the mythos, of European humanity. Along with the great archetypal stories of the Arthurian myths and the Grail legends, fairy stories and folk tales communicated an atmosphere of mystery, magic, and enchantment through symbols common to ordinary folk.

What could be more ordinary than a girl spinning at a wheel? But insert a mysterious goblin who wants to strike a perilous bargain, and you have an atmosphere of the psychic terror of evil followed by the sudden victory of the good.

European folk myths are filled with spirit beings who operate by their own laws of justice and punishment—sometimes capricious and cruel, at other times surprisingly benevolent. Goodness, faithfulness, and obedience are frequently rewarded, while greed and various other forms of moral evil are punished mercilessly. A fairy never forgets to repay her debt with magical assistance, but the minute one breaks the rules of the bargain, pain, sorrow, and regret are not far behind.

The psychological symbolism and significance of these tales has been explored in great depth by Jungian analysts and other symbolists, so I will not belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that folk myths and fairy stories offer a rich treasure trove of symbols and archetypal images to be experientially explored and worked with.

One striking theme in many European folk tales worth noting, however, is the absence of a mother figure. Usually, as in the case of Cinderella, the mother has died, or is simply not mentioned. Even more tragically, she is, more often than not, replaced by a cruel stepmother who holds no love for the hero of the story.

The theme recurs frequently enough in stories like Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Rapunzel, and many more obscure tales that it is undoubtedly significant.

While a Jungian analyst will have a cogent explanation for this as it relates to the layers of the psyche, I’d like to offer another interpretation: that we have lost touch with the Divine Feminine in the West. We are orphans without a Mother.

The Lost Mother

For centuries, starting with the high Middle Ages and continuing into the Englightment, the Masculine, in the form of the dominating intellect, has been on the rise. We have been hell bent on a perverse mission: to conquer and subdue Nature (the feminine Natura), revealing all her secrets and submitting her to our will.

Francis Bacon famously summarized this masculine subjegation of nature as follows:

“My only earthly wish is to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man's dominion over the uiniverse to their promised bounds... nature will be bound into service, hounded in her wanderings and put on the rack and tortured for her secrets."

Is not the world in which we live a fulfillment of this perverse desire to deflower (literally) and conquer nature?

Sterile, lifeless, coated in concrete, sprayed in pesticides, bathed in the cold glare of fluorescent lights, and drowned in a forest of billboards and advertisements. The soul-life, the realm of qualitative meaning, is in such a world almost entirely extinguished. We are buffered from nature in a cocoon of artificiality.

Womanhood, too—especially motherhood—has been degraded and trampled on at every opportunity, with the pseudo-masculine values of competition, conquest, violence, and achievement held up as the ideal for both sexes. The only “feminine” that is allowed is that of women denuded, degraded, and subjegated in pornography.

In sum, not only must the modern woman be a power-wielding “badass”, she is told the only dimension of the feminine that she is allowed to embrace is the seductive. Her only feminine value the pleasure she can provide as a soulless object of enjoyment. Despite the supposed progress of women in the last hundred years or so, it’s still very much a man’s world.

Marian Devotion as the Foundation of Western Culture

But things have not always been this way, and the Western world was once nothing but a great garden of the Mother.

Indeed the great flowering of Western culture in the Middle Ages was due in large part to the presence of Marian devotion. Great monasteries and cathedrals soared heavenward, shrines were erected, religious orders founded, hospitals established, lay movements begun, great masterworks of art and music created—all in the name and under the patronage of Mary, Queen of Heaven and Earth.

Saint Bonaventure, in the introduction to his mellifluous Psalter of Mary, articulates well the Marian spirit of the Middle Ages:

Expand the bosom of your mind to serve [the Virgin Mary], prepare your heart to praise and glorify her, loose your tongue, and with swift service hasten to please her. For there is no doubt that from her nearness to you, you will become more devout, from contact with her you will grow more pure, from her embrace you will abound more in grace and be more resplendent in purity.

That I may give you an occasion of obtaining such great gifts, I send you the Psalter of this most Holy Virgin, put together and composed indeed by my feeble intelligence, but with her grace and help; by means of it you will praise her with divers hymns, now her virginity and chastity, now her fecundity and sanctity, now her clemency and bounty. You will be able to salute her as full of all grace, or as filled with all knowledge, or as illumined by all understanding and wisdom.

St. Bernard of Clarivaux and countless others as well echo such overflowing devotion and love for the Divine Mother, with the motto de Maria nunquam satis—of Mary there is never enough—emblazoned over every endeavor. All that was beautiful and good in Medieval Europe, even the greatest achievements of human intellect and skill, was imbued with a Marian spirit, a childlike love for the Blessed Virgin Mary.

But it is striking to note that the fading of Marian devotion in the West, accelerated by the Reformation, was simultaneous with the rise of technocracy and the subjugation of Nature. And in our days, as I have said, the hatred for the feminine and for motherhood and the despising of Nature (or the denial that it even exists) is the culmination of the forgetting of the Blessed Mother. She has faded from our consciousness even as we have raped and pillaged the earth.

Awakening to the Mother

Yes, it is true that the West has succumbed to the masculine, to the dominating, grasping power of the psyche. And yet, it is clear to those who attend to the heartbeat of humanity that a new awakening is occurring to the Divine Feminine. For Mother love is no less essential than Father love, and it is impossible for us to be orphaned and without a Mother for long before our hearts again seek her.

“A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet and a crown of twelve stars on her head,” Saint John reveals to us in the Apocalypse. And so it is happening even now.

The Sufi Mystic Llewyn Vaughn-Lee, who speaks of the importance of the feminine throughout his work, comments on this recovery of the feminine principle:

The feminine, whether the feminine principle or women themselves, holds the secret of creation, which is the light hidden in matter. It is very important to understand that if one is to do any real spiritual work at this time of global and ecological crisis because the feminine holds the unique understanding of the sacredness in matter and how we need to reawaken that aspect of life… I think both the feminine principle (the receptive quality in consciousness) and individual women in particular, have a unique role to play.

It is the feminine that understands all the interconnections in life. And what we are suffering from at the moment is a very fragmented culture, very isolated, very insular, and as I have been shown there is this whole oneness that is emerging into the consciousness of humanity, which needs to be midwifed into our collective consciousness — to understand that ecologically we are one, economically we are one, and of course in the deep spiritual sense we are all one expression of the divine oneness that is inherent within everything. The feminine understands those connections that hold that together — Indra’s Web — that is behind creation and is present within creation. (Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee quote from Goddess Radio Santa Fe Interview)

Yes, the divine Feminine, the Mother, is rising again—the Woman clothed with the Sun is appearing. And with her comes a new awareness of the sacredness of all life, the connections (matrix, the womb) between all things, an awareness of the beauty of motherhood and a the emergence of a truer feminism that affirms the sacredness of femininity as opposed to merely envy of men. It is the dawning of a new civilization defined by loving and conscious relationship, of community, and not simply competitive hostility.

Fr. Bede Griffiths writes of this awakening to the feminine and the emergence of a new world:

We can envision the emergence of a new world culture as the present materialist and mechanistic system breaks down under the continued crisis of economic, social, and political conflict. One of the characteristics of this new culture would be its feminine aspects….We have now reachedd the limit of this masculine culture with is aggressive, competitive, rational, analytic character. We are moving into a n age where the feminine principle will be valued, the yin in contrast to the yang….

The feminine will sooner or later begin to take its proper place with its characteristics of intuition, empathy, and cooperation, and with its holistic approach. The Christian religion has developed an entirely masculine concept of God. We always speak of God as Father and of the incarnation of the Son. Even the Holy Spirit, which is neuter in Greek but masculine in Latin, we have conceived in normally masculine terms….And so we may expect therefore a corresponding development in Christian theology recognizing the feminine aspect of God… (A New Vision of Reality, pp. 88-95)

Within Catholicism, a renewal of Marian devotion, too, has been propagated by great saints and sages of modern times, their message being that Christ’s second coming must be preceded by a return to loving devotion to the Divine Mother, the Virgin Mary.

Saint John Paul II, the great Slavic pope, who promoted Marian devotion intensely throughout his pontificate, writes of Mary’s universal mission in our times, and the great struggle against evil:

And so, there comes into the world a Son, "the seed of the woman" who will crush the evil of sin in its very origins: "he will crush the head of the serpent." As we see from the words of the Protogospel, the victory of the woman's Son will not take place without a hard struggle, a struggle that is to extend through the whole of human history. The "enmity," foretold at the beginning, is confirmed in the Apocalypse (the book of the final events of the Church and the world), in which there recurs the sign of the "woman," this time "clothed with the sun" (Rev. 12:1).

Mary, Mother of the Incarnate Word, is placed at the very center of that enmity, that struggle which accompanies the history of humanity on earth and the history of salvation itself….Thus, throughout her life, the Church maintains with the Mother of God a link which embraces, in the saving mystery, the past, the present and the future, and venerates her as the spiritual mother of humanity and the advocate of grace. (Redemptoris Mater/Redeeming Mother)

But as she rises, “another sign appeared in heaven: an enormous red dragon with seven heads and ten horns and seven crowns on its heads.” The forces of evil are rising against the Mother, and the evidence of this is all around us in the countless polarizations and mutual hatreds that define our time. But in the end, the Woman will triumph.

Mary-Sophia, Ora Pro Nobis

Another great prophet of the divine feminine in our time was Valentin Tomberg, who in his works revealed the existence of a Divine Feminine Trinity (or Trinosophia) of Mother, Daughter, and Holy Soul, that complements the Masculine Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is through the union of these two trinities that creation comes into existence and is sustained.

While many great mystics have seen the existence of a World Soul and a Divine Feminine principle, this revelation of the feminine Trinosophia is the fullest and most complete revelation of the relationship between the Masculine and Feminine in the Divine thus far.

Much more could be said about this Divine Feminine Trinity, but suffice it to say that the increasing awareness of “Mother Earth,” the sacredness of the feminine, the relationship between matter and spirit, the rise of ecological awareness, the new honoring of the sacredness of womanhood and motherhood, and many other similar signs, are no accident, but rather point to the fact the Divine Feminine is rising in human consciousness.

The world, and the Church, are being prepared for the revelation of the Holy Trinosophia. Let us then pray and work for the recovery of the feminine and the increase of loving awareness of and relationship to Our Mother, adopting as our own Valentin Tomberg’s Our Mother prayer:

Our Mother, thou who art in the darkness of the underworld,
May the memory of the holiness of thy name shine forth,
May the breath of the awakening of thy kingdom warm the hearts of all homeless wanderers,
May the resurrection of thy will enliven eternal faithfulness, even unto the depths of corporeal substance.
Receive this day the living remembrance of thee from human hearts,
Who implore thee to forgive the debt of forgetting thee,
And are ready to fight against the temptation in the world which has led thee to existence in the darkness,
That through the deed of the Son, the immeasurable pain of the Father be stilled,
Through the freeing of all beings from the tragedy of thy withdrawal
For thine is the homeland, and the all bestowing greatness, and the all merciful grace, for all and everything in the circle of all.
Amen

I will conclude with the words of St. Maximilian Kolbe, the great Franciscan missionary during the darkness of World War II , who describes the coming of a world imbued with the spirit of Mary-Sophia, the Divine Mother:

Rekindle love and trust in Mary Immaculate everywhere and you shall soon see tears flowing from the eyes of the most hardened sinners. You shall see prisons emptied, the ranks of honest workers increased; while home hearths will be redolent of virtue; peace and happiness will destroy discord and pain, for it will be already a new era. (The Writings of St. Maximilian Maria Kolbe – Volume II – Various Writings, 1069).

So may it be!