The Earth is our Seat of
Power
There is one more image of the
Feminine Wisdom of the Earth that is important to acknowledge. This is the reality of Feminine Wisdom as Throne.
All mother goddesses share this aspect of being the throne, or the seat
of power. We see numerous statues of
the Mother and Child: Isis and Horus, the Virgin Mary and the Christ
Child. In Celtic mythology, the Goddess
of the Land is the Throne of the King; that is, the king assumed his power by a
symbolic marriage to the Land, from which he gets his power to rule. What can we say about this aspect of the
mothering power of the Earth, this throne-like quality? What does it mean to be seated in the lap of
the Goddess?
The
seat of power. What relevance does
this image hold for us? I feel that
there is both a literal and an imaginative meaning to this symbol. There are literal spots on the Earth where
each of us feels most at home. For some
of us, it is the mountains; for others, it is the ocean; still others, fields
of growing grain. Or perhaps it is
forests, rivers, gentle rolling plains, valleys or deserts. These places strike a responsive chord in our
hearts. The combination of height,
depth, breadth, light and temperature, as well as the peculiar beauty of each
landscape, makes us feel something special about the world and ourselves. These places are our power spots, for they
refresh and nourish our spirits. They
seem to draw out our innermost selves; they make us feel most alive!
The feeling that you get when you
are connected with the Earth in this manner can become a seat of power within
you. You know the feeling whenever and
wherever you encounter it again - in another place where the land is similar,
in a dream landscape, or even in a relationship. In recognizing this feeling as an essential
part of your being, you can nourish it and be nourished by it. The image and the feeling that you get from
the land will lead you deeper into your life.
The Native Americans knew this about the land: the land shapes you to
itself.
Connected to the symbol of the
throne is the Celtic idea of Sovereignty.
The King and the people whom he represented gave Sovereignty to the
Goddess of the Land. This meant that
they gave Her pre-eminence in recognition of Her power and efficacy. This can mean, for us, giving sovereignty to
the Earth and Her mysteries; it can mean giving sovereignty to the promptings
of the soul, which is the spark of divinity and creativity within each of us;
and it can mean giving sovereignty, or authority, to our feminine, imaginal
consciousness that forms our primary relationship to the world.
As the story of The Marriage of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell suggests, we have to
learn to live with the fact that the Earth as well as women are
shape-shifters. Besides taking on
animal shapes, Dame Ragnell or Lady Sovereignty could appear to be the ugliest
old hag or the most beautiful woman, depending on the question She poses to us.
The same goes for the unique individuality of our souls. Our feelings, thoughts and beliefs shift and
change because that is their nature – that is the Soul's nature. When our ego consciousness is cut off from
our soul, we experience life as the Hag, chaotic and brutal. When we wed our Soul to Spirit, Life does
become the 'most beautiful'. We
obviously need new strategies for living once we face our unconscious feminine
side and listen to its perspective. The
question of feminine sovereignty is still being posed to the masculine
world. It will never be understood until
our collective consciousness embraces the feminine wisdom of the Earth.
The story promises that once we do
accept this wisdom and this wedding, we will make joy out of mind. What a wonderful thing to really know
that divine Spirit lives within our bodies.
What a blessed reality when we experience how Spirit helps our body,
mind and spirit develop to their fullest potential. That same Spirit manifests as the natural
laws of the Earth. Once we remember that
our souls incarnate onto this Earth to evolve through learning the spiritual
lessons of the material world, especially about the nature of Love and Union, we will honor the Earth and our bodies as Temples
of Spirit. This is the healing of the
passion of matter. This is something
that Feminine Wisdom can teach us if we give over our ego's standpoint for its
larger purpose, which always serves life.
Over the past two thousands year,
humanity developed a type of ego consciousness that has given rise to the
greatest Light as well as descended into utter Darkness. But in the past few
hundred years, that ego consciousness has been split off from the feminine
unconscious and therefore from the Self.
When people turn to listen to their unique feminine wisdom, and pay
attention to their unconscious, working to re-learn its language, we transform
and enlarge our consciousness to encompass our loved ones, our community's
needs, and the Earth.
We can no longer ignore the fact
that the environment is being ravished by our corporate economy to the point of
no return. Global warming is a
reality. At some point in the future,
our fresh water supply will dwindle - the corporate takeover of water supplies
is already underway. Americans
consistently say that we value the environment and yet many of us are unwilling
to take on the inconvenience of changing our lifestyle to stop the waste and
destruction it generates. People need
stories to help them see why a change of perspective is necessary. We have to search for those new stories for
ourselves and our world.
Maybe we need to consider giving
women, imaginal feminine consciousness, and the Earth, our Mother, sovereignty
once again. It would mean honoring these
feminine images and stories. The Earth
Mother poses the question, "What is our true nature?" She gives birth to all of us, just as the
Self gives birth to us as individuals.
If we gave sovereignty to imagination and soul, to Earth as the vessel
of transformation, and (dare I say it,) to women, we might find our way to a
different vision with which to see the world, and to a new way of integrating
the different facets of our lives. If we
dare to express our own creativity, that creativity can form new patterns of
life. When we turn to the things in life
that really matter to us, to the matter - mater/mother - of our lives, we will
allow life's imaginal dimensions to enrich the context of our lives in this
world; concrete lives made rich and meaningful by this sacred context.
EARTH’S WISDOM: The
Serpent of Wisdom
While all animals live in harmony with
the Earth and their ecosystem, there is one animal that has represented Earth’s
Wisdom since ancient times. The Snake or
Serpent is a symbol of the wisdom of the energies of life and death within our
bodies. Because the snake sheds its
skin, it is a potent symbol of change.
Yet, we have come to associate snakes with evil and the Devil in
Christianity, and so women’s bodies and sexuality have been vilified by
association. It all began in the Garden
of Eden.
This one story has been used to
subjugate women throughout Western history.
The snake tempted Eve, and by her sin, we are all fallen from
grace. But what exactly was the
temptation? The serpent tempted Eve to
eat of the Tree of Knowledge, of good and evil.
Now that we know that there were matriarchies before the patriarchy
gained power, the knowledge of good and evil already existed. Women had this knowledge. Women have always had this knowledge. It’s bred in our bones. To grow, to change, to evolve, to become a
conscious human being, each of us must have this knowledge of good and evil. We have to learn to make choices and exercise
our free will. And we do this by
listening to our bodies and our feelings and then using our minds to make
choices. This ancient knowledge is part
of our feminine heritage.
And it is Snake who offers us this
wisdom. Ancient priestesses are
represented with snakes twinned around their arms, symbolizing their ability to
act on their instinctive knowledge.
Snakes were found in goddess temples, especially those like Delphi where prophetic insight was sought. All cultures venerated the serpent, and all
cultures acknowledge the wisdom, subtly and healing powers of the snake. In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh’s crown was
comprised of the uraeus, the cobra
which represented divine wisdom and power. And if we look at most world
mythologies, there is always a serpent coiled around the Tree of Life.
Serpents symbolize complex energies,
both male and female. Serpents represent
the transformative energies of death and rebirth, and they shed their skins as
examples. They travel underground, and so bring back hidden knowledge. Their
coils echo the cycles of manifestation, the ebb and flow of life. The Ouroboros, the serpent which eats its own
tail, opens us to possibilities of return and renewal, the infinite powers of
creation and destruction. When it coils
around the Tree of Life, the serpent brings the dynamism of growth. As a symbol of self-creative manifestation,
it is both light and dark, good and evil, healing and poisonous, preserver and
destroyer. It is only in the West that
the serpent has come to be associated with only the dark aspects of this
energy. And so we have heroes fighting
the serpent: Zeus and Typhon, Apollo and Python, Osiris and Set, Marduk and
Tiamat. These are psychological stories
of the hero ego trying to overcome the Unconscious. Our Western religions could never contain
the contradiction of opposites – when things are in opposition, they are meant
to complement each other, not cut each other off. Because of its inability to unite the
opposites, Christianity’s version of the serpent and its wisdom of life is the
Devil, the negative, malevolent, destructive, deceitful and cunning adversary
of God. The Tempter. But that’s only half the story.
Hermes’ caduceus has two snakes
twinning around a central staff. These
double serpents represent the opposites which ultimately have to be united –
the union of opposites which finds a third, transcendent function that mediates
between the two. In medical symbolism,
these two snakes represent healing and poison, illness and health – the twin
forces of life and death. Earth’s Wisdom
is that all these opposites are really united.
Like the Kundalini energy in the body, this serpent power is the energy
of life. Once the Kundalini rises up the
spine through the body and the charkas, it brings us to higher states of
consciousness.
The wave-like undulations of snake as
it travels echoes the energy and light waves we know of from science. Snake reminds us that all is energy. We can travel to the future on these waves in
dreams, or we can raise this energy up our spine for greater awareness. When snake sheds its skin, it reminds us that
we live in the midst of constant change, the transmutation of
life-death-rebirth. On the physical
plane, this energy creates passion, sexuality, desire and vitality. On the emotional plane, it engenders our
creativity and dreams. In the mind it
creates our personal power and intellect.
When this energy reaches into the spiritual planes, it brings us Wisdom,
wholeness and a connection with Divinity.
Powerful stuff indeed.
Snakes and serpents appear in dreams
all the time. When there are many snakes
crawling around, like Indiana Jones we get ‘freaked out’ by them. All that energy with no place to go. A woman dreamed that she was holding a party
for her family, but there were many snakes in the room, which symbolizes undifferentiated
and uncontrolled life-force. She and
her family have lots of energy and power, but they don’t use it well. Especially when the family gets together, the
energies run wild. They have no
container for it, and so it becomes dangerous.
Another woman dreamed of snakes, but
these snakes gave her power. She
dreamed: My husband and I are headed into a forest sanctuary. I yell at him to watch out, for a golden
snake comes down out of a tree, mouth open, fangs out and bites him in the
neck. I go to help him and I grab a cake
knife. One golden cobra flings itself
into the air at me. It is so golden it
looks like it’s covered in jewels. This
cobra flings itself down to bite me on the head and as I wake up, my arms and
legs are energized.
The dream story describes a real shift
in energy between this couple. The
husband is now working on his feminine energy and the wife has taken back her
power and freedom. The husband is
listening with respect to her ideas and learning to understand his own feelings
and intuitions.
As I mentioned earlier, one of my
first dreams in Jungian analysis had to do with the birth of a golden
dragon. Symbolically, serpents and
dragons are often interchangeable in myths.
The dragon, especially in the East, represents the highest spiritual and
supernatural powers, as well as wisdom, strength and the cycles and laws of
life. In our Western mystery traditions,
the dragon lines were energy paths on the earth, paths that could be followed
and used for drawing up earth power.
Dragons are the guardians of treasure
and secret knowledge. The winged serpent,
a combination of bird and serpent, is an attribute of Quetzalcoatl, the
Feathered Serpent, the great culture hero of the Aztecs. The golden color of my dream dragon implies
that it is a spiritual energy, like the golden auras around the heads of
saints. This dream was both a task and a
promise to me: my job was to become conscious of the treasures of the
Collective Unconscious, the ancient knowledge and wisdom of the Earth.
Earth’s wisdom is available to each
and every one of us. We receive this
wisdom through our dreams and our instincts, and through visions and feelings
that come to us when we go out onto the land.
We can communicate with our Mother, the Earth if we want to. We can go to ancient sacred sites and feel
the energy lines that flow beneath the earth’s surface. We can go outside our
homes and find places of power and energy.
We can once again establish a relationship with the Earth if we are
willing to listen and learn.
This is the gift that our mother, the Earth,
wants us to use. Isn’t it time we did?
Do
you have a good relationship with your body?
Are your senses fine-tuned? What kind of relationship do you have with
our Mother, the Earth? Go out into
Nature and speak with some trees, the land, the sky. What is Nature telling you?
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