PATRIARCHAL DEITIES AND THE REPRESSION OF THE FEMININE

In our Western Judeo-Christian culture we have been dominated by a masculine, heavenly God. In the Judaic tradition there is an avenging God who banished us from paradise. The God of wrath of the Old Testament was replaced by a Christian God of kindness and love. In the figure of Christ, the Christian God was incarnated, but then ascended from the cross back to his heavenly father. Furthermore, the Old Testament God of wrath remained in the Christian tradition in sermons of hell-fire and the emphasis on human failings and sinfulness. Over the last centuries Puritan and Victorian morality engraved fear rather than love into our religious culture, stressing human inadequacy and leaving a trail of repression and neurosis. How much has this image of a remote and wrathful deity influenced our relationship to the divine?

The masculine divinity belongs to the heavens. Under the dominance of a masculine god, we have developed science and the ability to control aspects of our environment. But we have become separate from the sacred interdependence of creation and no longer live in a daily relationship with the divinity of all forms. Once when my teacher was giving a lecture, she used the term “God’s feet.” A member of the audience asked, “How can the Absolute have feet?” She responded, “How many feet has a spider, how many feet has a horse?” If God is totally elevated to the heavens it is easy to lose touch with Him in everyday life. We come to know Him only as a distant authoritarian father. Our present culture resonates with the feelings of alienation and individual impotence that reflect the remoteness of our masculine God. We easily feel uncared-for and unprotected, isolated, no longer an integral part of the great wholeness of life.

The sacred wholeness of life belongs to the feminine aspect of the divine, the Great Goddess. For Her every act is sacred; every blade of grass, every creature, is a part of the Great Oneness. In contrast to His awe-inspiring transcendence, She embodies the caring divine presence. The American Indians, among other tribal cultures, honored this aspect of the Great Mother:

The Great Spirit is our father, but the earth is our mother. She nourishes us; that which we put into the ground she returns to us, and healing plants she gives us likewise.(2)

Like the American Indian, the mystic is familiar with the caring, all-embracing aspect of the divine. Experiences of oneness, which are so central to the mystical path, include every atom of creation; every leaf of every tree is experienced as sacred.(3) One of the first mystical experiences is often a sense of divine presence, and the knowledge of the Beloved’s tenderness and closeness grows with our devotion and practices. Like Zuleikha in her love for Joseph, we seek and find our Beloved’s name in everything. The practice of the presence of God is essential work for the wayfarer, who shares every activity with her Beloved. Cooking, we stir the pot with Him; walking, we feel Him accompanying us. In difficulty we talk to Him, in delight we praise Him. Repeating the dhikr we constantly remember His name with love. We bring Him whom we love into every corner of our life.

In our meditation and our daily life we come to know what our culture has forgotten. We hear the sacred song of divine presence in the marketplace and in our hearts. But we also feel the sorrow of a society that is dominated by a collective sense of divine absence.

Banishing God to the heavens, we lost touch with the sacredness of the earth and its many forms of life. We are slowly becoming conscious of this imbalance and the danger caused by the rejection of the Goddess. We see how our whole planet is suffering from the abuses of masculine technology. At the same time, many patterns of the repression of the feminine have surfaced. Women have had to confront both individual and collective experiences of abuse. The masculine power principle has been recognized as responsible for tremendous feminine suffering, to the individual and to the ecosystem. In response to this deep and dangerous imbalance, the feminine aspect of the divinity, the Goddess, has begun to be reinstated. Reinstating the Goddess means restoring the sacredness of a nurturing, all-embracing divinity. God’s masculine omnipotence and transcendence need to be balanced by the feminine aspects of care and nearness.

But we are wrong to restrict our image of a transcendent deity to the patriarchal power-drive. Reinstating the feminine, all-embracing Goddess should not mean denying our instinctual awe for His omnipotence. Nor should the feminine’s fear of repression and abuse result in rejecting His majesty. Intimacy and awe are two aspects of God’s oneness. The divine is both far and near, as expressed in the hadîth qudsî, “My heaven and My earth contain Me not, but the heart of My devoted servant contains Me.”

© 1996 The Golden Sufi Center

FOOTNOTES

Chapter 2: Intimacy and Awe
2. Bedagi, a member of the Wabankis Nation, quoted by T.C. McLuhan, Touch the Earth, P. 22.
3. Because of the nature of these experiences, some mystics (for example Ibn ‘Arabî) are often mistakenly labeled pantheists.