“The return to the goddess, for renewal in a feminine source-ground and spirit, is a vitally important aspect of modern woman’s quest for wholeness. We women who have succeeded in the world are usually “daughters of the father”– that is, well adapted to a masculine-oriented society – and have repudiated our own full feminine instincts and energy patterns, just as the culture has maimed or derogated most of them. We need to return to and redeem what the patriarchy has often seen only as a dangerous threat and called terrible mother, dragon, or witch.
The patriarchal ego of both men and women, to earn its instinct-disciplining, striving, progressive, and heroic stance, has fled from the full-scale awe of the goddess. Or it has tried to slay her, or at least to dismember and thus depotentiate her. But it is towards her – and especially towards her culturally repressed aspects, those chthonic and chaotic, ineluctable depths – that the new individuating, yin-yang balanced ego must return to find its matrix and the embodied and flexible strength to be active and vulnerable, to stand its own ground and still to be empathetically related to others.”
Video by @buttrflyshadow ft. @cryjiko
Text excerpt from “Descent to the Goddess”
Introduction by Sylvia Brinton Perera