The Goddess and the Lion

Photo: Durga and the lion by Barbie Robinson

The archetype of the lion is considered an invocation of the heart. Today we experience the lion-heart in tropes of power, kingship, domination, and mastery. However, the ancient invocation of the lion was a multi-dimensional constellation where the Goddess played a central role. This Goddess-centred lion-heart is necessary for us to trust the feminine capability to manifest a different and hitherto unknown Reality.

I grew up in a familial context where significant women around me manifested narcissistic personality traits. Some of them were in caring roles. It took me many years to recognise the dynamics of that past, including in the predictable ways in which we replicate those narcissistic dynamics in other intimate relationships throughout our lives.

I also grew up in a culture where patriarchy is enmeshed with cultural and spiritual philosophies. This means there are hardly any spaces to garner a reflexive perception of the patriarchal dynamics. I sensed that the behaviour of women I saw around me was in no small part the result of their own experiences in a patriarchal milieu. It was their way of harnessing power and affirmation within their social and domestic contexts.

Even when I offered female-centred spaces I found that it was difficult to maintain “sisterhood” other than in the most superficial of ways. Women inevitably and understandably found their safety in complying with existing power dynamics. Because not complying could risk their lives.

I have seen similar superficial dynamics even in western contexts. So much of what we call Divine Feminine in the west seems rather limpid and non-threatening. They are often offerings of respite, an escape from the very masculine and mind-dominated paradigms of competition, hierarchy, and domination. I am not dismissing the value they offer as friendship and community gatherings, however in my view they do not question or challenge the status quo. Indeed, their very success is a result of the fact that they are not seriously counter-cultural offerings.

Then there are offerings that appear counter-cultural. They may be focusing on those domains that are considered taboo. They may shock or create outrage from a mainstream perspective. However, for me these are also participating in the very dynamics of what sustains the current paradigms—the seesaw of duality where taboo is the oppositional expression of convention. In a way they reinforce each other in this eternal seesaw.

Add to this that many of them are cultural appropriations. And this contributes to the watered-down limpidness of the offerings. The rigour and discipline of some cultural traditions are cherry-picked for the easy and accessible. In that process much of the intelligence of that tradition is unavailable. We have made it familiar and the same as everything we already know. It is just packaged in exotic wrapping.

Where I am getting to with all this is that I have a healthy aversion to most of the domain of the Divine Feminine as it exists in our times. And I also contend with the inquiry about how much of this is a result of my own difficulties with the feminine expressions around me in my past. Trust and betrayal by women that I could expect to trust means that my very foundation of trusting and depending upon the feminine is shaky.

Ironically my life in dance has been devoted to working with women all over the world. I sense the profound challenges women face in the question about trust—trust in their own power, trust in the power of the feminine to endure, and trust in other women to be at their side. None of these domains of trust come without perplexity. Whether you had a narcissistic experience or not, it is not simple for women to trust the ideologies of agency they are offered.

So how can we then trust the Divine Feminine? In such a cosmos of distrust, how do we encounter archetypes of feminine divinity? Do they also become victims of the dualities of feminine and masculine and thereby simply strengthen existing paradigms?

In the dualistic invocation of the feminine, there is no possibility of real trust in radical metamorphosis. I was listening to someone the other day speak of the difference between transformation and metamorphosis. In the second, there is no obvious connection between what was and what it has become, as in the caterpillar and the butterfly. A feminine that is caught in the seesaw simply offers transient moments of transformation. And this builds no real trust in invoking the feminine as divine.

Even though I have spent my life in inquiry into the Divine Feminine, I am only beginning to realise the real challenges of this invocation in the times in which we live. In psychological, social, political, economic, and spiritual domains, the feminine continues to be under siege. When we must base the Divine Feminine as a continuum from this besieged feminine, it is doomed.

I consider patriarchy as a lens on Reality which is linear, hierarchical, and verbal. It is an approach to Reality that has no intelligence or place for mystery and Body, and the languages that are about these domains. It is asphyxiating for everyone and everything in its throes. It is the lion without the Goddess, roaring its domination, hubristically unaware of the fact that it is in a zoo and not in the wilds of its forest kingdom.

The lion returned to the wilderness is the Goddess-centred lion. In one of the most ancient invocations of the Goddess and the lions/tigers (lions and tigers were used interchangeably in these archetypal expressions), the Goddess holds two tigers by their necks with Her bare hands as She stand in the centre of both. The Goddess is the ferocious balancing energy in the lion-heart.

I have written much about the loss of ferocity in spirituality in general and in Goddess invocations in particular. Returning ferocity to spirituality and to the Divine Feminine is vital to their ability to truly offer an-other way of experiencing Reality. I do not mean ferocity as anger or rage. Not that I have a moral lens on either of these sensations.

Ferocity here is the state of being which is necessary to tackle a multi-dimensional approach to Reality, one that is not of the paradigms of duality and hierarchy. This ferocious feminine is not simply the oppositional intelligence to patriarchy, rather it is something completely other. The invocation of Goddess, when held in the sensation or Rasa of ferocity, enables a truly Body-led intelligence. The female Body offers the archetypal import of birth, and material experiences of time as cyclical and nonlinear. This does not mean this wisdom is exclusive to female bodies- in ancient ritual traditions everyone was invited into this inquiry guided by those who had direct material experience of the archetypal invocations.

Death and Time are the seminal deities in most ancient traditions. Death is intricately connected with Birth. They are both essentially Body-led events. Many Deities of Time are destroyers of Time, like Mahakala. They are connected to Death as that is the ending of Time. They symbolize the dissolution of linear Time, which underpins our experience of Reality as chronological. These invitations, like birth itself, require ferocity on our part if we are to accept them.

It is ferocity that renders the Divine Feminine the centre of a leonine expression. The feminine is not an impractical and ethereal intelligence, on the contrary, it is of Body, birth, death, and the everyday truth of matter. Indeed, it is our disconnected and Hubris-drenched linearity that is impractical and untruthful, and ungrounded in matter.

We live in times when it is difficult to unravel the feminine from the very dynamics it seeks to alleviate. So long as we swirl around in the arenas of competition, profiteering and self-interest that pervades what we identify as patriarchy, we are inevitably tainted by those very attributes. This is why I feel it is necessary to inquire into the easy ways in which we create a continuum from the expression of the feminine within the patriarchy to the archetypal expressions of the Divine Feminine.

Perhaps the earliest “war” Goddesses simply revealed that everythingness, which is the essence of multi-dimensional Reality, is worth the battle. A battle is not a random and iconoclastic event. It can be a strategic and intelligent action and may even be directed at ending anarchy. For me the Goddess holding the lions is a reminder that we do not look within the patriarchy for the Divine Feminine. She lurks at the outskirts of our narratives, emerging from the forest, and holding lions in both hands.