The Divine Feminine
Letter from Mexico | December, 2001
THE DIVINE FEMININE
Here in Mexico we are preparing to celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, spiritual patroness of the country. The feast commemorates the day in 1531 when a "Lady from Heaven" appeared to a young Indian man at Tepeyac, a hill northwest of Mexico City, and left an image of herself imprinted miraculously on his tilma, a poor quality cactus-cloth, which should have deteriorated in 20 years but shows no sign of decay almost half a millennium later and still defies all scientific explanations of its origin.*
From the tilma to the burka, the "divine feminine" continues to reveal herself in our own time. Reports from Taliban-liberated Afghanistan are saying that Afghan women are coming out from behind the burka (body veil). I expect that burkas soon will drop throughout the Islamic world as suddenly and as miraculously as the Berlin Wall fell, exposing the sublime faces and bodies of Muslim women and ushering in a new phase of our spiritual evolution.
LIFTING THE VEIL
A few years ago, when I was living in Santa Fe, a magazine assigned me to write an article about the small Muslim community at Abiquiqu in northern New Mexico, a village best-known as home to the reclusive painter, Georgia O'Keeffe. I was to interview a Hispanic man who was a convert to Islam. When I entered his house, a flurry of activity arose as his women (I could not differentiate between his wives, his mistresses, and his daughters, all living under the same roof) ran to don their veils. My eyes fleetingly met the eyes of his principle wife, a graduate of UC Berkeley in Political Science, I learned later. I will never forget those eyes: they seemed to say, "Help me!"
I recalled that incident the other day as I was listening to a report on the BBC about the unusually high mortality rate of Afghan women by accidents in the street (80% to 20% for men) because the required burka, with only two small holes for the eyes, prevented women from seeing oncoming cars and trucks.
THE ANIMA
What kind of culture demands that women hide themselves under body veils? A male-dominated culture that fears the power of women, I suppose, and is petrified at the prospect of being overwhelmed by it.
Dr. Jung would say that a culture of veiled women is a culture denying its anima, the "inner feminine side of a man."* To deny the feminine is to deny softness, art, refinement, civilization, sweetness, imagination, beauty, sensuality, creativity. Ironically for a culture obsessed with religion (which is identified with the male principle), denial of the anima is also a denial of spirituality. What is left is something dry and brittle, sour and violent — violent enough to lash out in rage, to attack, to murder.
Exclusion of women from the culture smacks of a destructive male adolescent fantasy. The Daily Telegraph in the UK reports on a harrowing Osama Bin Laden terrorist recruitment video, "His most impressionable recruits are of the same age and sex as MTV's loyal following: alienated teenage boys, full of the resentment, hyperactivity and maddening sense of impotence that typify that age group in any country."* The video is so disturbing, says the reporter, that "the scholar who has spent weeks translating the film, tells me that he can no longer sleep."
Hilary Clinton, putting two-and-two together, writes in Time magazine this week: "There is an immoral link between the way women were treated by the oppressive Taliban in Afghanistan and the hateful actions of the al-Qaeda terrorists. Under the Taliban, women in Afghanistan were forbidden to attend schools, to access health care, to work and even to appear in public unless hidden behind the head-to-toe burkas. Long before the Taliban was at war with the civilized world, they were at war with half their population. The mistreatment of women in Afghanistan was like an early warning signal of the kind of terrorism that culminated in the attacks of September 11."*
EMERGENCE OF THE FEMININE
If ever there was a doubt that we are living in New Time, the sight of the women of Afghanistan and elsewhere lifting their veils to reveal themselves dispels it.* A new energy is coming upon the planet, and it has a feminine character.
I believe we are witnessing the beginning of a great cosmic shift to this feminine energy and that The Event of September 11 announced its arrival. Our own culture, with its too-male emphasis, appears to be part of the grand scenario. The attack on the World Trade Center (male misuse of money) and the Pentagon (male misuse of power) by religious zealots (male misuse of spirit) cracked open a door for the planet's anima to begin expressing herself. In that crucial moment, the out-of-balance male energy that had held sway for so many centuries of our history and had become corrupt, went into self-destruct.
INTEGRATING THE ANIMA
As I write this, both Osama Bin Laden and Vice President Dick Cheney are holed up in underground caves.* At the moment when women are coming out of hiding, the symbolic leaders of two warring male-dominated cultures have gone into hiding. Three months into a new age motivated and activated by feminine qualities, we are beginning to see and feel its effects.
Eventually, as we continue to integrate the anima into our collective psyche, these planetary polarities will come into balance and we will make heaven of earth. As individuals, we appear to have a choice between resisting that brave new world, as many of our leaders are doing, or welcoming it — and helping to creating it.
On eve of the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, all of us at the retreat center send you our affectionate regards,
Joseph Dispenza
LifePath
San Miguel de Allende
Mexico
NOTES
|
