Women’s unease with Masculine archetypes

Photo: Geoffrey Dunn

Something that has become quite present in my work with women in recent times is the unease around Masculine archetypal energies. At the outset it is important for me to clarify what I mean by the words Masculine and Feminine in this reflection.

We live in times where there is much turmoil about masculinities and femininities. Here I focus on the archetypal dimensions of these terms. In these dimensions, Masculine-Feminine is a polarity that must be resolved in a movement of dissolution. Ancient ritual dances were these movements of transformative dissolution. In dance we do not simply balance this polarity, rather we allow for the emergence of an embodied intelligence that is other and beyond the polarities. This emergence is conditional upon the ongoing dance of dissolution. In other words, it is not a conclusion or a destination.

In archetypal invocations there are many dimensions to Masculinity and Femininity. They do not always reflect the simplistic dual paradigms of popular culture. The Masculine is the energy of the horse—powerful in body, thrusting into the world, which enjoys manifesting and expressing, graceful in its power, speedy, and endowed with intense embodied intelligence. The Masculine is the brilliant Deity that stands guard at the Goddess’s cave, the Guardian of the door (Dwarapalaka, Doorkeeper). He shines like the sun, and is the ferocious, unpredictable, warrior who wields the spear (or arrow) that pierces Earth.

This fearsome and beautiful, sensuous, and raw, wild and free, Deity is devoted to the Goddess whose cave He lays down His life to protect. It is His love and longing for Her that propels Him into the cave, navigating its darkest darkness, hurtling Himself into the labyrinthine bowels, seeking to knock at Her door and to make love to Her.

The Feminine is the cow who is hidden in the deep recesses of the caves. She is the Goddess behind the door in the heart of the labyrinthine tunnels. She is reclusive, elusive, and seductive. She is primordial lust from which all matter manifests and which renders Reality meaningful. She is entropic suction, like the heart of a Black Hole. Like Her own menstrual movement, She holds disintegration as the basis of creation and birth. Like Her childbirth, She holds propulsive emergence as the movement of manifestation and expression.

Manifest Reality is the lovemaking between the Doorkeeper and the Goddess. However, this union is a sacred, ritual, and ceremonial constellation.

The Doorkeeper must bring His Yearning, connected to the movement of the seasons and the stars. In other words, He must be body-led for it is through the Body that we connect to its responses to Nature. It is through this connection that our Body is mapped in the constellations (as ancient astrology mapped archetypes in the heavens).

So also, the Goddess must be aroused before the union. She must be asked what it is that She desires. She must become moist so that the union meets desire on both sides.

The Body or Earth is the terrain of this union. It is Body that renders the union not only real in the sense of material manifestation, but also as an alchemical movement. Central to the alchemy is the surrender of all instrumentality. The lovemaking is an abandonment to their Yearning for each other. Nothing more and nothing less. To hold any other intention is to render the movement intentional. In the instant of intentionality, the Goddess exits. One of the ancient Vedic ritual invocations of the exiting Goddess presents exactly this conundrum of the Exiting Goddess.

The tenderness of arousal is manifested in the dance movement of piercing which is like a needle falling into the Earth. The fiery, powerful, energy of the horse transforms into the delicate, precise, deliberate, tender piercing of the needle into the Goddess’s receptive body. Without the energy of the horse, there is no possibility of travelling into the cave, nor of knocking at the Goddess’s door. However, at the moment of the union, that unbridled power of the horse transforms into the attentive and skillful piercing of the needle. Many Doorkeeper deities are holders of the spear, trident or arrow—all weapons which pertain to the mastery or skill of piercing.

When I work with women, many of them are resistant to the “macho” masculine energies of the Doorway deities. And this is very understandable. The Masculine, rather crudely defined as dominating, thrusting without ceremony, ritual, or Yearning, entitled and unregarding of female desire, has been destructive for all of us in these times. Therefore, it is only to be expected that those of us who aspire to be sensitive and spiritual must reject the whole domain of the Masculine and look at Masculine archetypes with suspicion and even alarm.

The separation of Masculine and Feminine has perhaps led to the prominence of “Mother” as the feminine divinity. The mother invocation removes desire from the picture. Which deletes the ancient intelligence of union as a body-led, desire-fueled, ritualistic dance. It removes passion, including both its entropic and integrating expressions. It also removes sensation and Body which is Earth, the terrain of our life.

The Mother invocation also infantalises the one who wants to enter the Goddess’s cave. We become helpless children, asking Her to take care of us. Rather than the warrior maddened with love, desire, Yearning and tenderness and ready to sacrifice His life to meet the Goddess.

The ancient Goddess asked for sacrifice because She sacrifices. Every union brings forth the seed which She holds in Her womb. It is the disintegration of Her womb that explodes the seed into tree. Every expression, every dance of this union is coloured with the blood of Her sacrifice. Every birth happens in a bed of blood.

And what the Doorkeeper sacrifices is His head. It is His Hubris, the accumulation of what He has collected as knowledge, His narratives of Reality, His conclusions about His power and His capabilities. It is dire to venture into the cave without this sacrifice.

This sacrifice is Yagna or Death in dance. Dance begins with Yagna. It is the Death of story, word, thought, knowledge, including presumed knowledge about the Goddess Herself. What is left, if anything, is the tantalizing taste of ancient mystery, an invitation from the deep recesses of Time, a Yearning without an object, an ocean of tears that has no floor…

We cannot invoke Yagna without the Masculine archetypes that support us with their ferocity, power that is of body, and wildness. We need all the help we can get to accompany us in our abandonment to our Yearning with no roadmaps, no templates, no promises—not even of fulfilment, nay not even of life itself. We must become that warrior that can behead himself without a glimmer of doubt, in our journey to meet the Goddess. And we must do this without any promises on Her part.

The mechanistic interpretations of archetypes of Masculine and Feminine have been tragic for everyone. For women this has seen an exclusion from the constellation of union and desire which is at the heart of ancient archetypal intelligence about Consciousness. How can women desire the Goddess and seek union in lovemaking in context where labels define the parameters of the object of one’s desire? I have heard women say to me that they cannot desire the Goddess because they are not attracted to women. This is not at all the same as saying something about same sex attraction—of course that is an important and valid consideration of its own.

Here the invitation is the possibility of Body to manifest, experience and sense the spectrum of energies from the Masculine to the Feminine and indeed beyond and other than this dichotomy. Ancient dance invited and held the intelligence of this fluidity which is central to connecting us with the fluidity and multiplicity of Reality itself. These are the energies that allow us to taste the nature of Reality that is diverse yet whole, divergent yet united, and passionate, explosive, emergent and expressive. When we discount any part of this constellation, Reality remains unavailable to our intelligence. And we live in our own creations of Reality until, and inevitably, Reality overwhelms our fantasies as the Great Flood or other apocalyptic movements of Consciousness.

The exclusion of women’s desire from ritual intelligence has created distortions of ancient Goddess traditions where men have focused on the male desire for the Goddess. At the same time as these traditions call themselves Goddess-centred, in practice women are led by men, they become passive and instrumental. They are far from the ferocious Goddess who demands the sacrifice of the Head of Her lover even before He begins His journey of following His Yearning.

Women’s honouring of the Masculine archetypes requires care, sensitivity, and openness. The confluence of ferocity and almost childlike tenderness is masterfully invoked in archetypal dance traditions. The experience of this must perforce be of the Body for the mind cannot bring such polarities together. Very often, the Doorway deities are associated with animals like the boar, wild dogs, lions, and the bull. What is available in these animal invocations is exactly that confluence of ferocity and innocence. An animal kills instinctively for its survival. There is a simplicity, elegance, and truth in this experience. These kinds of embodied invocations allow us to taste how power, ferocity, energy, vitality, strength of body, can be held without our accultured prejudices.

It is when women can manifest the energy of intellect, aspiration, desire, and the drive for expression, and infuse this energy with the vitality and speed of the horse, that propulsive creative expression is birthed. Without this, we continue to inhabit the duality, living without fluidity, movement, and flow. Most importantly, the emergent Truth of Reality remains unavailable to us so long as we avoid, reject, and demonise orgasmic union as the dance of Consciousness.

This dance is generously available to us in archetypal invocations. All we need as women is to claim the Doorkeeper dimensions of our Consciousness and unashamedly and unconditionally follow our desire for the Goddess into Her labyrinthine caves.