The Sacred Feminine Today

Dan Brown's hugely popular, terribly controversial suspense thriller The Da Vinci Code takes as one of its themes the idea of the "sacred feminine": from the earliest times in human culture, the mythic representation of the Mother Goddess, symbolized through images and events connected with fertility and reproduction.

Brown's novel contends, counter-factually, that Jesus of Nazareth married Mary "Magdalene" and fathered a daughter, the truth of whose existence was suppressed by the Early Church. Jesus's putative wife and daughter, as vessels of ongoing human devotion to the sacred feminine, had to be blotted out from history by a church bent on establishing a patriarchal male priesthood and clamping down on female sexuality, not to mention sexual freedom in general.

The facts of history are all against Brown. Jesus had no wife and daughter, the church did not hide them from the eyes of the world, Leonardo Da Vinci coded no secret information about the sacred feminine in his paintings, and no one buried in Westminster Abbey — neither Sir Isaac Newton nor anyone else — was in on this secret. And, whatever the Holy Grail was, it was not a stand-in for the fruit of Mary of Magdala's fertile womb.

Still and all, the sacred feminine has been and remains a real desideratum of human spirituality, which I expect partly explains the massive impact of The Da Vinci Code despite its odious historical errors. Never has the vaunted "willing suspension of disbelief" been more willing on the part of millions of Brown's readers — myself included.

These thoughts cross my mind as I ponder the thrust of Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion, the new book by Stuart A. Kauffman, implications I first dealt with in Reinventing the Sacred, Part 1. Kauffman's stated mission is to establish a new scientific paradigm, that of emergence. Emergence lies "beyond reductionism," which is the longstanding assumption that nothing in the universe is really real but the fundamental particles of physics — or, below them, the theoretical "strings" of string theory — along with, of course, the particles' or strings' motions and interactions.

Emergence recognizes, above and beyond the dance of particles, the hard reality of higher-level entities that somehow arise from that dance. These realities include life itself, on earth and possibly elsewhere, plus abstract realities such as functions, actions, and intentions; agency; consciousness; values and meanings.

It also recognizes the ceaseless creativity of the cosmos, endlessly moving from the "present actual" into the "adjacent possible" ... and the next, and the next, and the next, on and on and on. Each "salient" or bubble at the edge of advancing actuality spawns new items to be added to the list of "furniture" of the universe, items whose advent was impossible to have predicted in advance.

This ceaseless creativity has nothing to do, says Kauffman, with the Creator God of Abrahamic tradition, whether Jewish or Christian. I'm not all that certain of that, but I still find Kauffman's ideas about reinventing the sacred compelling.

When I put Kauffman's ideas together with what little I know about the sacred feminine as alluded to ceaselessly by The Da Vinci Code, I have to think that what Kauffman means when he extols "reinventing the sacred" might in fact be a renewal of devotion to the sacred feminine.


I do know that the late explainer of myth Joseph Campbell taught that ancient cultures personified gods as masculine father images and goddesses as various feminine incarnations of the Earth Mother Goddess.

Every mythic hero figure, Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, has to undertake a perilous journey outward/downward to unknown realms and back again home with some sort of material or spiritual boon in tow, a precious prize or elixir that will feed his needy people.

During the course of the adventure, between his departure and his return, the hero typically undergoes an initiation. Two of the six canonical parts of the hero's initiation, not all of which are necessarily present in any particular hero myth, are his "meeting with the goddess" and his "atonement with the father."

In the former, there is "a mystical marriage ... of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World" (p. 109, in my edition of the book) — a personage who may be seen as gentle and benign, or hostile and castrating. In either case, the hero typically succeeds in passing her test:

The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity. (p. 118)

Yet the initiation, at least in some hero myths, is as yet incomplete. The hero must still achieve atonement with the male personage who represents his father figure. If Stuart Kauffman would like to reinvent the sacred, he must accommodate not only the Mother Goddess but also the Heavenly Father. In the Abrahamic religions of Judaism and Christianity, Yahweh, the Creator God whom Kauffman does not believe in, fills this role.

Usually the mythic hero's biological father is unknown to him, having disappeared from the scene prior to, or not long after, the hero's birth. At some point the now-grown hero begins to ask, Where is my father? No one really can answer his question, and so his mythic journey, full of peril, is motivated specifically as a father hunt.

If on this journey there is along the way a sacred marriage between the hero and the Queen Goddess of the World, it is merely a preparatory step for his ultimate encounter with the Father who lives outside the world and is fully transcendent of it. Clearly, in these father-quest myths, the hero's difficulty in going to his transcendent, supernal Father patterns with his inability to find and be reconciled with his actual, biological father.

The questing hero, of course, finds his path inevitably leads him to his transcendental father's house — the difficulty in finding it having proved surmountable — where he has no choice but to seek admission if he wants to complete his journey. But the father rebuffs him, demanding that he perform certain impossible feats first.

Here is where the imagery Campbell alludes to — "the arrow, the flames, and the flood" (p. 129) — take a decidedly Judeo-Christian, Old Testament turn. The supernal father first appears to the hero as a wrathful ogre bent on punishing him for (among other things) having succumbed to the blandishments of "woman as the temptress," the stage of the initiation process that canonically comes between "the meeting with the goddess" and the "atonement with the father."

Some of the ancient hero myths involve the hero's failure to satisfy the unapproachable father, in which case the hero must turn trickster and steal the father's elixir, so to bring it home to his, the hero's, expectant community as the requisite boon.

Other myths have the hero properly perform the set tasks — often with the mother-wife-goddess's secret or not-so-secret aid. In succeeding in performing the tasks the hero can be said to be, in words familiar to Christians, born again:

The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology there is an umbilical point, an Achilles tendon which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knowledge has been impaired. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate the key knot of his limited existence.

The problem of the hero going to meet his father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands — and the two are atoned.

To be born again at the end of a father quest is to attain atonement ("at-one-ment") with the father. Of course, the mythic hero is a stand-in for all of humanity: for each one of us, whether male or female.

Accordingly, Campbell (who was a lapsed Catholic) sees Jesus Christ as a consummate hero whose death and resurrection brings the boon of his own perfect at-one-ment with his heavenly Father to each of us. To be born again is, for the Christian, an act by which we recapitulate Jesus' trials and accept this boon.

So, whether from the Jewish or from the Christian point of view, Yahweh/God represents an essential piece of the human spiritual puzzle: the yearning for atonement with a distant and/or judging father figure. The real question is, How can we harmonize devotion to the Earth Mother (which Kauffman's reinvention of the sacred puts on a scientific footing) with the equally important need to locate and be reconciled with an at-first-missing (because he transcends the physical world) Heavenly Father.


Campbell finds throughout his writings that the monotheistic religions we have today descend from incursions starting around 2400 B.C. into the Fertile Crescent — the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers — by Semitic tribes originally from the Syro-Arabian desert to the south. Among the monotheistic religions that originated with the Semites in the Near East are Judaism and Christianity.

These religions differ in their foundational mythology from those of other prehistoric cultures. In the late Paleolithic and early Neolithic periods prior to the invasions, in the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere in Europe and Asia there lived the earliest sedentary humans. These people were agrarian, depending for their livelihood on planting, not hunting or slaughtering animals. To them, the primary deity was the Goddess.

The invaders and, ultimately, conquerors who came into the Fertile Crescent from the south were nomads whose lifestyle depended on animals for both transport and food. Their main gods were tribal deities whose principal function was to support the tribes in conquest. By contrast, the Goddess of the conquered agrarians was a universal deity whose principal function was to bring all humans into harmony with the natural forces inside themselves, as well as in the external world.

In Transformations of Myths Through Time, Campbell shows that ancient gods were indeed of two orders, ones representing the universal powers of nature that operate externally and internally within each of us, and ones that are "specific patrons of the tribe" (p. 54). With the coming of the Semite conquerors, then, the latter became preeminent over the former ... and the latter were the principal gods of a "patriarchal warrior people," while the former were "earlier mother goddess systems."

Complicating the mythological history of the human species, however, is a third ancient system of mythic understanding: the Indo-European. In the same general time as the one in which the Semites were mounting their incursions into the domains of settled farming communities in the Fertile Crescent, the Indo-Europeans (sometimes referred to as Aryans) were moving into and taking over the agrarian settlements from the north.

The Indo-Europeans, like the Semites, were nomads dependent on animal-derived energies rather than on sustenance derived directly from plants. They were hunters and domesticators of the horse — while the Semites domesticated the dromedary/camel and slaughtered the goats and sheep they herded for food, rather than hunting wild animals as the Aryans did.

The Indo-Europeans, like the Semitic tribes, no longer worshiped the Earth Goddess as their principal creator deity, owing their primary allegiance instead to a male god who was held to be the direct source of supernatural power.

While the Semites were responsible for generating the monotheisms of the Near East, the Indo-Europeans were influencing what would become the classical cultures of Greece and Rome, and also shaping the religious atmosphere of India, the continuing home of Hinduism and the original source of Buddhism.

The Indo-Europeans and the Semites were alike in having moved the Mother Goddess out of the limelight in favor of a male gods or God. But they differed in terms of the ways in which, once the male deities' preeminence was established, they allowed (or refused to allow) the Goddess back into the picture.

The flavor of the discrepancy can be gleaned from an essay by Campbell, "Of Harmony and of Discord," which appeared in his book The Mythic Dimension: Selected Essays 1959-1987. (The essay may be read here.) In the essay, Campbell alludes to "the Heroic Age":

... those centuries of barbaric invasions and wiping out of cities that we find celebrated in the Indo-European Iliad and Mahabharata, as well as throughout the Old Testament, [in which] there were brought onto the historic stage two sorts of nomadic, herding, and fighting peoples bearing analogous, though significantly differing, sociologically oriented systems of mythology inspired by notions of morality wherein the high concern was not of harmony with the universe in its mystery but of the aggrandizement and justification of some local, historical tribe or cult. The whole character, as well as function, of mythology was thereby transformed; and since the myths, ideals, and rites of the new orders of justified violence overlay wherever they fell the earlier of an essential peace at the heart of the universe, the history of mythology in a great quarter of the world for the past three thousand years has been of a double-layered continuum. In some parts, notably India, the mythology of the Goddess returned in time to the surface and even became dominant.

In India we have an example of a culture in which the Indo-European mode of re-harmonizing the primordial Goddess with the usurping male deities established a preference for harmony rather than discord as a way of life. The same sort of thing happened in ancient Greece. But in the Near East, the cultures influenced by (or constituted by) the Semites produced a negative take on the rightful place of Goddess worship. Thus, per Campbell, we read in 2 Kings 23 in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament of the "very good King Josiah of Judah (ca. 640-609 B.C.), when he":

... deposed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places at the cities of Judah and round about Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Ba'al, to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations, and all the host of the heavens.

Deposing "idolatrous priests" who "burned incense to Ba'al, to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations, and all the host of the heavens" was a way of not coming to terms with the Neolithic Great Goddess whose place (or places, plural) Yahweh usurped.

Campbell summarizes:

As a consequence of ... truly unspeakable violence and barbarity over an immense part of the already civilized portion of Europe and Asia (only Egypt on its desert- and god-protected Nile remained through those millennia unbroken), what the historian of mythologies everywhere uncovers, from the British Isles to the Gangetic Plain [the area of the River Ganges in India], is a consistent pattern (retained in religions even to the present day) of two completely contrary orders of mythic thought and symbolization flung together, imperfectly fused, and represented as though of one meaning.

The first and elder of the two orders of mythic thought is that of the Great Goddess who embodies "the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of life itself as motherhood and as birth, as growth and as transformation terminating in a return to the mother in death, out of which source appears new life."

Campbell does not in this essay completely characterize the follow-on orders of thought, whether Indo-European or Semitic, in which the Great Goddess was succeeded by a male deity ... and then found her way back into the mythic traditions in positive and negative, overt and hidden forms.

In fact, Campbell seems bent on showing how, even in the Near East where the worship of the Goddess was officially deprecated by the Hebrew champions of the male God, Yahweh, the Goddess reasserted herself in various ways:

Thus the force of the underlying layer, even where officially suppressed or apparently forgotten, worked its influence, often in subtle ways; as for example, in the instance already recognized, of the number 86,400 concealed in the length of years of the biblical antediluvian age.

(Apparently, 86,400 was a number associated in some way originally with the Goddess cult.)

On the other hand, in The Power of Myth Campbell makes clear how odd the religions of today that bring forward the early monotheistic orders of myth — principally Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — are with respect to the religions of the "perennial philosophy" whose antecedents are more in the Indo-European, rather than Semitic, mold.

Responding to a question from his interviewer, Bill Moyers, about the (Judeo-)Christian idea of the Creation and the Fall, Campbell said (p. 66):

I once heard a lecture by a wonderful old Zen [Buddhist] philosopher, Dr. D.T. Suzuki. He stood up with his hands slowly rubbing his sides and said, "god against man. Man against God. Man against nature. Nature against man. Nature against God. God against nature — very funny religion!"

Our "very funny religion" has a creation myth of Adam, Eve, the Garden of Eden, and the Fall, in which Adam's temptation by Eve (after Eve was tempted by the Serpent) is the root source of sin. It is not likely that such a religion would easily come to comfortable terms with the Great Goddess whom Eve is the stand-in for.

In my own analysis — I have no reason to be sure Campbell would have agreed with this — I come to the conclusion that we in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition are heirs to the ancient Hebrews' designation of the fecundity of the female womb as being the property of male humans — fathers, brothers, husbands, the male community in general — and ultimately of the male deity, the Lord God of Hosts, Yahweh.

Female fecundity is, of course, the focus of Goddess worship, what devotion to the Goddess was all about. When the energies of the female side of the cosmic equation reappear in a specifically Christian guise, they revolve around the Virgin Mary, whose son Jesus was the Son of God ... and was himself God.

Campbell in The Power of Myth shows how Mary's virginity ought to be interpreted, in his estimation: as a model of sacred (re)birth out of the physical body and into the life of the spirit. The question of how Mary physically got pregnant is of no importance here.

Campbell compares this idea of the Virgin Mary's instrumentality in all sacred birth and rebirth with ideas found in India about the spirit's ascent, above the bodily centers associated with physical urges and desires, to the level of the compassionate heart. Here again are found images of being "born again of water and the spirit," just as in Christianity.

In fact, Campbell has ways of harmonizing just about all the images and symbols of Christianity with the underlying images and symbols that derive, often stealthily, from modes of myth less inimical to the Great Goddess, for whom Mary becomes, again, the stand-in.

For Campbell, it is possible to map Christian and Jewish (not to mention Islamic) symbology back to that of the "perennial philosophy" of the rest of the world and thus rescue monotheism as we know it from being a "very funny religion."


A case in point is found in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in the chapter titled "The Keys." In the pre-Vatican II rites of Holy Saturday in the Catholic Church — the book was published in 1949 — are found, says Campbell, echoes of the making of fire in the belly of the whale, a motif found in hero myths around the world.

The hero is consumed by a monstrous whale and enters the realm of the dead. In Christian belief, on the day before Christ's resurrection, Jesus descends to hell and rescues the souls imprisoned there. The resurrection is Easter. The vigil on the Holy Saturday preceding Easter Sunday commemorates Christ's final victory over hell and death.

In the canonical belly-of-the-whale legend, the hero brings about the whale's death and his own release by making a fire in the gut of the monster, using two sticks (see p. 248). He rubs together a socket-stick, which represents the female sex organs, with a phallic spindle-stick. The flame which is thereby sparked "is the newly generated life," and the motif as a whole is "a variant of the sacred marriage."

So when on Holy Saturday the Catholic priest blesses and lights a paschal candle, then carries it to the baptismal font whose waters he blesses and makes holy, the fact that he touches the candle to the "immaculate womb of the divine font" three times and thrice calls the "virtue of the Holy Ghost" to come into and inhabit the symbolic womb echoes the spindle-and-socket pattern of all fire-making myth. Here, Jesus Christ is the male hero who slays death ... with the transformation attendant upon baptism in blessed water, a symbol of the waters of the female womb.

Similar symbology is found in India, where the male organ is represented ir religious symbology as the lingam and the female as the yoni. But in Christianity, "the popular interpretation of baptism is that it 'washes away original sin,' with emphasis on the cleansing rather that the rebirth idea" (p. 251). The latter idea brings too close to the surface of awareness the realization of the paschal candle as a phallic symbol and the font as a womb symbol.

Since The Hero with a Thousand Faces was written some sixty years ago, our culture has striven mightily to rid itself of such overweening delicacy. Indeed, we have grown not just frank but coarse. Meanwhile, the life of the spirit has become a closed book to many of us, partly in consequence of our incessant "keeping it real." A hefty minority, meanwhile, is fighting a rear-guard action against anything which threatens the old-time religion ... with its core values that, at the extreme, demand that we denounce whichever of the Teletubbies happens to be gay.

Somewhere in the middle, between cynicism and fundamentalism, most of the rest of us find ourselves. We long to reinvent the sacred, we yearn to participate in the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of regeneration and rebirth that our Earth Mother teaches and embodies, and we also struggle for atonement with our Heavenly Father.

Stuart Kauffman's Reinventing the Sacred can help us here. Though it's not yet clear to me how his viewpoint might foster atonement with the Father, it does seem to furnish a ready antidote to this gloomy pronouncement by Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces:

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science or history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

Only a few years after Campbell wrote that, Watson and Crick discovered DNA, and human characteristics seemed to be reduced to genes. Now Stuart Kauffman gives ample reason to look beyond that reductionism (and to believe that DNA and genes were latecomers to the party of life). In a universe that ceaselessly creates itself through the processes of emergence, there is more to reality than the dance of particles. There is life, consciousness, value, meaning. On our way to atonement with our transcendent, supernal Father, we need to enter once again into sacred marriage with our eternally fertile cosmic Mother.