Bolen: I think that everyone has had numinous moments—awe-inspiring experiences of divinity, ineffable, maybe transcendent, maybe of the body, maybe auditory, maybe in a dream too soon forgotten, because there is little support for remembering these. Human beings are born with a natural sense of wonder. It is activated when we are emotionally and spiritually moved, when we feel awe and are drawn toward worship, prayer, or art; when we’re moved to gratitude. Although every single person is capable of feeling and experiencing this, what often happens is that certain of these experiences—Abraham’s for example—get written down as if in stone, and then, forever after, people are supposed to forget about having their own numinous experience and believe in someone else’s experience, and the lessons drawn from it.
For people to reconnect with their own numinous experiences and treasure them can be part of connecting with the divine feminine—because she’s the aspect of divinity who loves all her children even if they’re different. More than that—it can reconnect you to the wonder of being a part of this amazing universe and the divinity that pervades all of it.
We live in both a visible and an invisible world at the same time. Native American people talk about this as the Great Mystery. The ancient Chinese spoke about the Tao. Jungian analysts talk about synchronicities—something that appears to happen randomly, but that is so precisely timed and meaningful that you are moderately awestruck—and which can only happen if there isan underlying oneness we cannot see or explain. All of these terms refer to experiences of the sacred, which inspires awe and gratitude. When we have a sacred experience we’re filled with gratitude at being part of something bigger; something divine. Those numinous experiences are not usually categorized as either “divine feminine” or “divine masculine,” because the need to categorize into “either, or” is very much a left-brain, male requirement. It is an intellectual construct, not an experience of wholeness.
If you realize that everyone who’s ever had a deep religious experience has tried to explain them with the vocabulary of the culture in which they lived, you understand that those who lived in a culture where God was always and only male, you’d have to say “He.” However, if you grew up in a previous culture that described the divine as feminine, you’d say “She.” That doesn’t change the nature of the divine; it just reflects the words in your vocabulary. The need for bringing in the sacred feminine is to make it possible for us to have an experience in which the divine can be both, because the divine encompasses all.
At a very deep level, it’s important for everyone to have a sense that the divine can look like them—whether that means male or female, light-skinned or dark-skinned. Images of the divine that look and feel like us are helpful to us. And, conversely, images of the divine that only look like the dominant culture—a white male in our case—help the dominant culture stay that way.
The MOON: Do you think the divine feminine is being resurrected?
Bolen: I think the term, “the divine feminine,” has become widespread throughout our culture, so in that sense, she’s re-emerging. Images of divinity as feminine are slowly coming into our culture—in addition to Mary, the mother of Jesus, we see the Black Madonna; we see Hindu, Buddhist, and ancient Greek and Roman goddesses being portrayed more often…
I hesitate to use the word “resurrected,” but maybe it is appropriate because she lives in the collective unconscious of the human psyche—when God was a woman. But you were in real trouble if you remembered her, so the memory stayed suppressed. Maybe a collective resurrection is in process and that term is appropriate. There was a very famous conference in 1993 by an interfaith Protestant group. The conference was called “Re-Imagining: A Global Theological Conference By Women: For Men and Women,” and it brought together more than two thousand people—most of them clergy—representing sixteen dominations. The point of the conference was to encourage churches to address injustices to women worldwide and promote equal partnership with men at all levels of religious life. Presenters—all of whom were women—pointed out how male-dominated language and images have often stifled and hurt women. Organizers chose “re-imagining” as the theme and asked participants to consider how the theme applied to God, Jesus, church, creation, community, and the world. The conference basically dared to ask Protestant clergy to entertain the divine feminine on equal footing with the divine masculine. It got royally denounced. One Presbyterian minister I know, found graffiti on her garage door, which said: “Burn the Witches!”
That’s what happens when you start to reimagine the divine—at least at first. But once words enter the culture people start individually to imagine things that they wouldn’t have otherwise. They take the words into their own experience and there’s no stopping that process. You start valuing your own gender; you start examining the history of your own religion; you start to compare what you’ve been taught with the nature of your own experience. That’s what women are doing now. When they perform a ritual, when they sit in a circle, when they remember Hestia—the goddess of home and hearth, who made home and hearth a sacred place—and put a candle in the middle of their circle, they are remembering goddess energy. So yes, the divine feminine is re-emerging; I like that term better than “resurrecting.”
The MOON: A lot of people who read The MOON are likely to have a personal relationship with a God they think of as masculine, who might have a son by the name of Jesus. You, yourself, also had—and perhaps still have—the same personal relationship. Can these people also have a personal relationship with a feminine face of God—or Yahweh—and, if so, are the two in conflict?
Bolen: The answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the second question is not necessarily. They’re certainly not in conflict in me—I think of myself as having a personal relationship with both, and get laughs when say that I consider myself “an Episco-Pagan.” At first people hear what they are used to hearing, which is “Episcopalian” but the “Pagan” part is every bit as important. I wrote Crossing to Avalon: A Woman’s Journey to the Sacred Feminine,” where I told of how God and Goddess came together in my heart center in the ruins of Glastonbury Cathedral, standing on the grass that had once held the high altar.
Another image that comes to mind is of Michelangelo’s Pieta, which depicts Mary holding her son, who’s been taken down, dead, from the cross. She represents the Sacred Feminine as the archetypal mother who knows suffering and mourns the death of her son. I also think of the respect I have for Jesus—who exemplified a very rare and powerful type of courage. He followed his mission when even his fans and followers misunderstood it. He entered into Jerusalem on what became Palm Sunday amidst huge popular rejoicing and celebration; the Jews really thought he was going to overthrow the Romans and liberate them politically. But he knew that was not his story; that he had a mission that didn’t resemble the Messiah the people were imagining. By Good Friday, he’d been betrayed and arrested; the disciples had abandoned him; and being crucified may have turned out to be much harder than he ever dreamed it was. He went through that entire ordeal and now stands for a really exceptional kind of courage: to be humiliated, rejected, tortured, and killed, yet never deviate from what you believe is yours to do. He does it, and in the Christian story he is resurrected.
After his death, Mary Magdalene finds an empty tomb, and is the first to recognizes a resurrected Jesus Christ. Later, two followers on the road to Emmaus walk with Jesus, and like Mary Magdalene, at first they don’t recognize him. After this we hear of the Feast of Pentecost, in which all attending were imbued with the Holy Spirit. Each of these people were transformed in response to a numinous experience of such power and conviction that these ordinary people then set out to spread the Good News, which began the Christian era.
It’s an amazing story that changed the arc of history. The Christianity that was based on Jesus’ life, death and resurrection was a personal, mystical religion, tracing its lineage back to Abraham, yet bringing a message of a loving Father; not just a wrathful one. Although theologically or archetypally speaking, I don’t see a Mother Goddess sending her only daughter to the cross to be crucified as a means of reconciling with humanity, nevertheless, Jesus and the early Christians are examples of people who had a destiny, who were imbued with spirit, who brought a mystically based religion into the Roman world, and most significantly, it was a religion in which love and afterlife were emphasized.
The Christian message was similar to that of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Greek religion in which initiates had an experience which made them no longer fear death. The Eleusinian rites were a goddess religion, in which a divine daughter—Persephone–rather than a divine son, returned from the realm of death. The meanings of these two mystical religions are identical, in my mind; only the genders of the divinities has changed. I also truly believe in the message both convey: that death is not the end. This is the archetypal message that underlies virtually all mystical religions, whether they are about ancestors who continue to look after us, or the shamanistic view of spirit beings on the “other side” who help those of us incarnated ones on “this side,” or the Buddhist view of souls entering a bardo stage after death and either reincarnating back into bodies again or finally becoming pure spirit. The genders of the characters in these stories don’t matter to me. As I’ve said, they’re simply reflections of the culture that told the story. The gender of the divinity, as we know it, has been male for several thousand years. With the re-emergence of the sacred feminine, I hope we are moving toward a divinity that can be both-and. The “And” is the mystery.
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