Towards Integration for a New Story
Abstract
Anne Baring’s “Long journey to a new story” seminars have been a terrific opportunity to look at the journey of evolution of our collective consciousness from a childhood of innocence and magic through the turbulent times of adolescence and to realize that, today, we may stand right at the threshold of adulthood.
Following Baring’s reflections on the traumatic transition between the matrilineal, peaceful civilization models of the Bronze Age and the patriarchal, warrior-like cultures of the Iron Age, I will suggest that one of the fundamental aspects of a collective shift into adulthood is recovering the feminine values and energy from the exile they have been pushed into in the last four millennia of our history.
In approaching an exploration and reclamation of the feminine values, I will focus also on the darker, denser aspects of the Goddess: her apparently destructive energy, her raw power, and her erotic charge, arguing that these qualities represent disowned energies of our own psyche that we absolutely need to rescue from their exile.
I have used the archetypal and mythological character of Persephone to symbolize these darker aspects of our psyche, and I will suggest that, both collectively and individually, we need to journey down into the underworld, meet Persephone, and ask for her help and support. Only by bringing her back can we hope to restore an integrated consciousness, one that can usher in the next stage of our civilization.
Infancy: the Lunar Era
Watching the series of seminars by Anne Baring and reading The Dream of The Cosmos (Baring, 2013) is like taking a shamanic journey through time and space, following the development of our consciousness from its infancy to the present stage. This journey spans a period of roughly forty thousand years, divided into three chapters: the lunar era, covering the last part of the Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and the Bronze age, until approximately 2000 BC; the solar era, from 2000 BC to our present time; and the “stellar era,” the new civilization and state of humanity that we can sense but has not fully actualized yet.
Although supported by archaeological and anthropological insights, the focus of Baring’s work is the development of human consciousness from its first embryonic stages to the highly refined, individualized and differentiated state of our times. Like an opera in three acts, this chronicle is full of plot twists, adventure, discoveries, but also violence and sorrow: we watch consciousness as it struggles to emerge from the primordial womb of life, but we also observe it denying and vilifying the instinctual matrix that it arose from. This is a tale of separation, conflict, and eventually, perhaps, reunion and integration. It is one of the most dramatic stories ever told.
As we venture into the mists of the past to explore the lunar era, we are taking a look back in time, to the age where the culture we currently live in started taking its shape and form. But at the same time, we are looking into the less familiar parts of our psyche, those deep waters that rarely get illuminated by the light of our awareness. Because, as we will see, we all carry within us a holographic, miniaturized version of the journey that our collective consciousness has made.
According to Baring (2013), in the lunar era we lived in a state where the veil between the inner world of meaning and values and the outer world of perception was thin if it existed at all. We inhabited a universe full of meaning, where anything relevant for our life (animals, landscape, natural events) was perceived to be alive and animated by a spirit. We also lived in harmony with the environment, reading the signs of nature, feeling at one with the whole of creation. Nowadays, we can still savor the essence of that magical reality in fairy tales, myths, and legends, where we move through enchanted forests, where trees and animals can speak, where waterfalls and caves are the entry points to a magical, hidden universe. Most of us feel moved by such magical stories because we have largely lost that sense of union with nature and life.
The name “lunar era” itself points to one of the main characteristics of those times: our consciousness was mesmerized by the moon. Looking at the moon in the starry sky, we would see much more than a rocky satellite. Unlike the sun, the moon has easily observable cycles, and her appearance changes dramatically enough during the course of a month to elicit wonder and curiosity. For this reason, the lunar cycle was a source of inspiration and suggestive of powerful analogies with other cyclical aspects of nature and life.
The lunar phases, cycling through waxing, full, waning and new moon constituted an observable and visually evocative story that directly correlated to the cycle of life from birth to death (Baring, 2013, p.69). This may have naturally suggested to us that life, just as the moon, was cyclic: after three days in darkness, the moon emerges again like a newborn, so why would one not be born again after death? We can speculate that during the lunar era we regarded death as part of the natural cycle of plants, animals and even celestial objects like the moon, and that we did not live in terror and avoidance of death as we often do today.1
Microsoft Word – Bringing Back Persephone – Raffaello Manacorda.docx
The observation of the cycle of the moon would eventually give rise to the many myths of goddesses going into underworld journeys of death and rebirth. Inanna in ancient Sumer, Isis in Egypt and Persephone in the Greek world are some of the main goddesses of the lunar era, and their journey into the underworld was not a sign of weakness but rather the source of their mysterious and magical power.
And indeed the lunar era was populated by powerful goddesses: Inanna, Kybele, and the Egyptian goddesses (Isis, Maat, Nut, Sekhmet) just to name some of the most well-known. On a psychological level, these goddesses represent potent forces of the Feminine2 in both her life-giving, nourishing, compassionate, aspects and her life-taking, wild, destructive aspects. The feminine energy was thus honored and celebrated in both her light and dark forms of expression; in the Egyptian pantheon, for example, Nut represented the Feminine as darkness embracing both the stars in the heavens and the souls of the dead. Isis, by contrast, stood for a personification of the feminine aspect of creation, nourishment, and protection (Baring, 2013, p. 75). Of all these feminine divinities, I will dedicate special attention to Persephone, as she symbolizes some aspects of the Feminine that have been the most neglected and ignored, and that we may be most resistant to embracing again.
The lunar era represents the infancy of human consciousness, with all its magic and mystery of childhood. And just like childhood needs to give way to the often troubled and intense times of adolescence, the lunar era was destined to end. Around 4500 BC, young male gods started appearing in a pantheon heretofore populated mainly by feminine goddesses. The appearance of the male gods gave rise to myths of marriage between the masculine and the feminine principles, enacted in the sacred marriage rituals of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Greece. From the reunion of the masculine and feminine energies ensued a regeneration of life, restoring fertility on Earth (Baring, 2013, p.72). On a psychological level, in the appearance of the young male gods we can sense the masculine archetypes, still juvenile and immature, making their way into the collective psyche. In the following centuries, their rise would be unstoppable and, to a certain extent, violent, until eventually the male gods would take over the mythologies and relegate the goddesses to a subordinate position.
While this passionate drama was going on in the heavens, something similar was happening on Earth. People had been looking at the moon as a source of inspiration for thousands of years. Around 2000 BC, the focus of attention moved from the moon to the sun, that would soon become the prominent symbol in our collective awareness. The feminine archetypal qualities of wisdom, intuition, and unity with nature, that had been the main driving force of human culture for thousands of years, were about to go into a long journey into the underground, while the masculine values of independence, courage, and conquest would take over.
Our consciousness was about to enter its troubled teenage years.
Adolescence: The Solar Era
According to Baring (2013, p.109), around 2000 BC a profound shift starts to happen in the history of Western culture: our consciousness sets on to differentiate itself from instinct and separate itself from the matrix of life and nature. The sun replaces the moon as the key symbol in human consciousness, and the solar hero, usually a king, warrior, adventurer, substitutes the shaman as the cultural point of reference (Baring, 2013, p. 111). These changes mark the dawn of the solar era, an age of conquest, military expansion, enormous intellectual development, and exceptional refinement of our consciousness—but also a period of separation from the feminine values mentioned above.
If, in the lunar era, the moon cycles had inspired a core myth of death and rebirth or regeneration, in the solar era the sun inspired a central myth of opposition and war between darkness and light. The feminine goddesses that had reined for the past thousands of years were forcefully substituted by male gods. These new male gods were courageous, independent, violent adventurers: heroes, in other words, poised to fight against the forces of darkness that were often represented by a serpent or dragon.
The Sumer and Babylonian civilizations of Mesopotamia produced the first recorded examples of solar heroes with the myths of Gilgamesh and, later on, Marduk, the male god of the Babylonian mythological saga Enuma Elish (circa 1700 BC). Marduk slays Tiamat, the creator Goddess associated with salty water and the ocean, and proceeds to become the undiscussed leader of the Babylonian pantheon, commanding over all other deities. (Baring, 2013, p. 113)
In terms of the evolution of our consciousness, these turbulent events define the solar era as the theatre of a forceful, even traumatic separation of consciousness from the womb of instinct (Baring, 2013, p. 394). Consciousness was reaching the stage where it could pull itself free from instinct and the senses, and develop the capacity to observe the world from a distance. In the next few centuries, man would make astonishing discoveries in all the fields of knowledge. But the conqueror spirit would also bring violence, destruction, and the forceful negation of all that had been before—the holistic world of unity with nature and with the body.
On a collective psychological level, a newly developed aspect of the psyche, the rational, wakeful consciousness, was desperately trying to differentiate itself from the matrix it came from. It only managed to do so with tremendous effort and violence. This troubled, painful process of differentiation is the psychological background to the myths of the solar heroes fighting with dragons, serpents, and other creatures representing the instinctual unconscious.
The echoes of these battles are still present in our modern European religious folklore. In the Irish tradition, for instance, Saint Patrick frees Ireland from the snakes in order to make it a safe and sacred ground where Christianity can develop and flourish. The ancient, lunar wisdom of the druids had to be chased away to make space for the new solar religion of the Cross.
A similar process happened all over the Western world. Fear of all the aspects of the Feminine spread everywhere and the new patriarchal power structures justified and enacted all sorts of aberrations against those that represented the feminine wisdom, often called “witches.” The horrors of the Inquisition are just an extreme version of a war against the Feminine that has permeated the solar era from its inception to the modern day.
During the approximately four millennia of the solar era, enormous efforts were made in religion, society, and culture to shun the feminine aspects of our culture. The great religions of the solar era created powerful, elaborate myths centered on the battle of light versus darkness, good versus evil and, eventually, male against female. Just like a teenager can emerge from childhood through opposition and resistance to his parents and everything they represent, so we collectively emerged out of the lunar era through denigrating, downgrading and even destroying its values and rites.
Ultimately, though, the attempts at putting an end to the lunar era were unsuccessful. The lunar era has never ended, because we still carry it within us, in the most instinctual parts of our psyche and, on a neurological level, in parts of our complex brain (Baring, 2013, p. 197). In our inner world, we have both solar aspects of consciousness, ego, will, purpose, and lunar aspects of emotions, instincts, sexual urges, feelings. Similarly, the traumatic split between lunar and solar era is recorded in our psyche as a collective trauma, and it manifests as a painful split between mind and body, ideas and emotions, spirituality, and sexuality.
But precisely because we carry within us a recapitulation of the cultural history of humanity, we also have the opportunity to contribute to the healing of our collective trauma by gradually integrating the lunar and solar parts of our own psyche. This work of integration requires us to go down, into the underworld, where the Feminine has gone into hiding, and from where it is waiting to re-emerge. It requires us to follow the footsteps of Persephone, entering the realms of the shadow, where psychic contents go into exile.
Persephone in the Shadow
Carl Gustav Jung, one of the fathers of depth psychology, taught that when we attempt to eliminate psychic content from our conscious mind, it does not disappear; instead, it descends into the underworld of the psyche, into the unconscious, becoming part of what he called “shadow” (Baring, 2013, p.267). Something similar happens in our collective consciousness when we try to forcefully remove a collective psychic creation, such as an archetype, from it: it goes into the collective subconscious, where it keeps operating in the shadow. This was precisely the destiny of some of the feminine qualities and archetypes with the advent of the solar era, which delivered a massive death blow to the feminine archetypes. However, the emerging patriarchal political and religious structures allowed certain “purified” versions of the Feminine to survive and, under certain conditions, even showered them with reverence. The Virgin Mary, for example, incarnates the “light” aspects of the Feminine: she is nourishing, infinitely compassionate, full of grace, tender, and merciful. The archetype of the Virgin Mary has lost most of the denser, darker aspects, such as wildness, erotic expression, connection to death, and emotional intensity.3
Some of the most ancient goddesses went through a similar process of purification and “sanitization.” Artemis, for example, originally one of the Anatolian mother goddesses, a goddess of fertility and childbirth, took on more and more the attributes of the virginal hunter, while her sexual power went into the shadow (Baring, 2013, p. 79). During the Middle Age, the idealized, light version of the Feminine became the inspiration for poets and troubadours and their celebration of courtly love, while the mysterious, chthonic power of the Feminine was stigmatized as witchcraft and persecuted with implacable fury.4
Under such enormous pressure, the darker aspects of the Feminine had no choice but to go into the shadow, just like Persephone had to go into the underworld. But just as a psychic content doesn’t become less powerful by going into the unconscious, Persephone became the queen of the shadow realm she was forced to inhabit. Today, those who have heard about Persephone’s myth generally think of her as a maiden-like character that gets abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld, while she’s plucking flowers—a classic tale of a damsel in distress kidnapped by a powerful dark male character. But Peter Kingsley, who dedicated much of his work to studying the initiatory rites of pre-Socratic times in Europe, has a different story to tell. In Kingsley (1999), we find a representation of Persephone as an enormously powerful goddess that reigned over the underworld as the spouse and rightful companion of Hades.
Persephone, according to Kingsley (1999, p. 94), was the primary guardian of the secret wisdom of the underworld, and she was the one that greeted those who dared to make the initiatory “journey down” into the underworld. In the Archaeological Museum in Heraklion, Crete, I found a beautiful representation of Persephone with Hades and Cerberus, the guardian hound of the underworld (Fig. 1). Not only does Persephone pose as the equal female companion to Hades, but she also has the attributes of Isis, the most powerful and revered among the Egyptian goddesses. In Western mythology, Persephone is one of the noblest, most influential and most complete representations of the dark aspects of the Feminine in all her magic, depth and mystery.
If it is true that the Feminine has not entirely disappeared from our lives, it is also true that, just like Persephone, she still needs to operate from her exile into the underground. We still consider emotionality to be inappropriate in the places of power, the offices, and the meeting rooms; meanwhile, in the shadow, spin doctors and marketing experts know exactly how to move the emotions of the masses with the most skillful, sophisticated means. We still consider sexuality to be an inappropriate topic of conversation in most respectable living rooms; but in the shadow, sexuality moves billions of dollars and influences our lives in an often disproportionate way. Entire countries are founded on constitutional charters of values based on pure rationality and intellect, while their governments wage ethnic wars based on unprocessed collective anger and fear (Baring, 2013, p. 319).
My point here is that because we still live in the aftermath of the war waged upon the feminine attributes and values during the solar era, the feminine power is still largely operating from the shadow of the underworld. Was that war part of a necessary process of evolution in human consciousness? Could consciousness have developed itself and separated from the matrix of instinct without such violence, terror, and pain? We do not know. But we do know that as a result of the repression of the Feminine, today we live in a world with a “one-eyed vision,” as Baring eloquently puts it (2013, p. 181).
Bringing the Feminine back into the light of consciousness, then, may be our only chance to restore an integral vision, to create a new civilization that is wholesome and integrated. But bringing back the Feminine doesn’t only mean reconnecting and appreciating her lighter, softer aspects such as compassion, empathy, and grace; it also means opening our consciousness to the full force of the emotional body, restoring a sacred relationship with death, and acknowledging and understanding the wild, innocent power of our erotic expression.
It means making a radical personal commitment to integrating all aspects of our psyche, and daring to not just make the journey towards Spirit and consciousness, but also the journey down into matter, into emotions, and into our bodies. It means meeting our individual and collective “dragons,” and recognizing them for what they truly are: disowned parts of our psyche that are waiting for us to come back to them with love and presence.
The Burning Dancefloor of Integration
Reconnecting with psychic content that has been exiled, on both an individual and collective level, is no walk in the park. Those energies and aspects that we have violently repressed may show up with resentment, anger, and a whole range of explosive emotions. How can we give space to those parts in a sensible, sustainable way?
One of the best tools I have found is sharing circles. A sharing circle happens when a group of people sits together with the only intention to create a safe space where whoever has something real and alive to share can step into the circle and be witnessed in their rawness, transparency, and vulnerability. The sharing may happen through words, sounds, movement, dance, tears, laughter, or any other form of expression that is safe for the person who shares and those who witness.
Sharing circles may or may not be facilitated, meaning that one or more people are appointed a role where they can intervene and support the person in the middle to drop more into authenticity. Whether or not there is facilitation, the most potent element in a sharing circle is the opportunity to be witnessed by the whole group as we unpack and reveal some of our inner voices. Particularly for communities where people establish strong interpersonal bonds and deep connection, the opportunity to take frustration, anger, sadness, but also joy and celebration “out in the open” in the middle of the sharing circle is a great chance for individual and collective well-being.
Sharing circles are one way that we can safely bring our full emotional range into our lives without letting them become destructive or take over all of our attention and energy. Ultimately, whether it is through sharing circle or other deep transformational processes, we need appropriate tools if we are to create a world that gives space to the emotions, the instincts and the bodies of people and not only to their ideas and values.
Bringing back the wisdom of the body and the instinct, and integrating it with our developed consciousness is, in my view, an important part of what Ubiquity University is doing. It is also a pivotal point in the work of ISTA, the International School of Temple Arts,5 where I serve as lead faculty. Because of my role, I have spent most of the last ten years in transformational groups, whether in the form of seminars, workshops, or conscious communities. In my experience, most people come to these transformational experiences with some kind of split, or inner conflict, that reproduces on an individual scale the traumatic transition between lunar and solar eras.
Frequently, this inner conflict takes the form of an internal “gender war” between the masculine and feminine aspects, the lunar and the solar parts of one person. A man, for example, may be unconsciously at war with his own emotions, judging them to be “too feminine” to have a place in the conscious image he is presenting to himself and the world. A woman may have an inner conflict towards authority, including her own, as she unconsciously judges it to be a masculine trait and thus part of the oppressive structure that has kept her submitted. I have noticed that when individuals are given space to express their inner conflicts in a safe and non-judgmental space, they express conflicts that are collective if not altogether universal.
But spending much of my time at the forefront of organizations that are involved with healing the terrible conflict between masculine and feminine has also allowed me to appreciate how difficult it is to follow through with our good intentions. I’ve often perceived a veneer of hypocrisy amongst those that advocate the return of the Feminine, and I have even found that hypocrisy in myself. It is one thing, for example, to say that the world is badly in need of more acceptance of the emotions, and a healthier relationship to the body—but it is another thing to include body and emotions in our daily life and make them part of our decision-making, give them priority, and honor them.
We may be quick to say that we want to bring back the wisdom and the power of the shamans, who were at one with nature. But at times, we are apt to forget that they were also connected to their body, their emotions, and their sexuality. We may sincerely desire for the archetypal forms of the Feminine in men and women to be held in more respect and consideration, but we may forget that those forms have to do with traits of our humanness that we often find uncomfortable and don’t want to show to other people.
To illustrate what I mean, imagine that you were attending a conference. The speaker begins his speech by openly sharing their emotions, what is going on in their intimate life, and the challenges they are going through in their intimacy. How would you honestly react to that? And what if the speaker undressed and shared vulnerably about their relationship with their body, the shame, challenges, and celebration they experience about their physical form?
My observation is that most of us still carry a tremendous amount of resistance to certain aspects of the Feminine, particularly those that have to do with emotions, the body, and sexuality.6 That is not to deny that focusing all of our attention emotions, sexuality, and the physical body can be limiting and even dangerous. A truly integrated consciousness, both on an individual and collective level, must be capable of holding both emotions and thoughts, the raw energy as well as the immovable presence of which every human being is innately capable.
In Evolutionary Love Relationships, Andrew Harvey states that “passion needs space to really flourish.” (2016, p.50). My own inner journey and my practice as a facilitator have showed me that passion and space, emotions and presence, feminine and masculine attributes need to coexist in order for us to taste a truly integrated human experience, and that failing to integrate these two apparently opposite poles results, once again, in a “one-eyed vision.”
At its best, our life can become a dance, a dynamic balance between opposites that is capable to birth the next level of embodied consciousness we are all calling in. Kabir, the mystic and poet of 15th century India, expresses this dynamic balance with unparalleled strength and passion:
My Father is the Transcendent Absolute
And my Mother is the Embodied Godhead
And I am their Divine Child
Dancing for them both on their burning dance floor. (Harvey, 2016, p.39)
I consider myself fortunate to have found both ISTA and Ubiquity University, as they are schools and communities where this delicate, dynamic balance between Masculine and Feminine is a theme of constant investigation and exploration. It is through the work of such organizations that we can hope to usher in the next step in our collective evolution.
The Times Ahead: Adulthood or Arrested Development?
Few things are as rewarding and, in a certain sense, liberating as having a bird’s-eye view of the big drama of the evolution of human consciousness. Although any perspective on such a colossal story must by necessity be partial and limited, I still find that investigating the journey of consciousness as expressed through human beings is one of most fulfilling ways to spend our time.
Such an exploration of the bigger picture also has a moral component to it: seeing our own individual existence in the context of the vaster adventure of humanity elicits a sense of responsibility around our choices and their impact on that adventure. For all these reasons, following Anne Baring’s breath-taking pace, taking leaps of hundreds and sometimes thousands of years, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself in hearing and studying this “long journey to a new story.”
Now, the time has come to look into the future, and envision a possible new story that we can write together. What can we learn from our journey through the lunar and the solar era and the powerful, traumatic transition between the two? What new world-vision do we want to create, based on what we have discovered from this exploration? We might not be ready yet to imagine a new civilization in all of its aspects; but since every new culture expresses a new state of consciousness, we can and should start envisioning a new stage of our awareness, a new way of looking at things. Whatever name we want to give to this new upgraded version of our consciousness, some of its traits are already starting to emerge.
In my view, the new consciousness will be one that values and includes the totality of the human being: the mind, the body, and the emotions. A consciousness that acknowledges the Masculine and the Feminine, the lunar and the solar, in people of all genders and sexual orientations. A consciousness that cherishes the unique individuality of each person, while accepting that everyone has the same unquestionable rights and deserves to be respected beyond any differences.
In Harvey (2016, p.132), Andrew Harvey and Chris Saade speak about “romancing the soul,” as an essential healing practice. They note that when somebody is not recognized for their uniqueness, the natural power of their soul withers, causing depression. If we want to build healthy societies, we need to develop a consciousness and a culture that values universal principles while fully honoring the irreducible distinctiveness of each person.
It is also clear to me that the what we are ushering in is not a return to the lunar era, and not even simply a return of the Feminine. Looking back at the lunar times as a “golden age” that we hope to go back to is an insidious detour that we need to watch out for as we struggle to find a way out of the current crystalized, overdue solar era. While it is essential to recover and integrate the wisdom of Feminine, I do not believe going back to the lunar era is feasible or even desirable. At this stage of our evolution, we cannot go back into the arms of the great Mother any more than we can project our sense of security onto a masculine Father up in the heavens. Just like young adults, we need to emancipate ourselves from our parents and recognize that both ultimate power and ultimate responsibility live within us.
Not surprisingly, though, growing up is not a comfortable business. The evolution of our consciousness out of infancy and adolescence into adulthood carries with it enormous risks, one of them being the tendency to disown or try to suppress our past. This is precisely what has happened in the last few centuries of the solar era, and the results are under the eyes of everybody. By forcing the emotions into the shadow, we have created a world with frequent outbursts of uncontrolled anger and irrational, meaningless violence on a wide scale. By repressing and denying our sexuality, we have created a world where the natural sexual impulse is twisted into violence and mercantilism. By repressing our own inner Feminine, we have created a culture of abuse towards women. And by suppressing our natural instincts, we have installed a predatory relationship with nature, treating her as a commodity, probing her with prying eyes, uncovering her secrets in non-consensual ways.
Besides the risks of suppressing our past, I also believe that our growing up entails an inevitable loss of innocence. We cannot expect to mature as a species while still unconsciously believing that an external entity will solve our problems—be it God or Goddess, Spirit or Nature. As our collective power grows, so does our responsibility, and we can experience a sense of vertigo, bewilderment, even fear, at the realization that the cosmic consciousness we are all dimly starting to sense is our own consciousness, looking back at us through our own eyes.
However painful or risky growing up may be, however, the main danger for our consciousness is to crystallize into an unhealthy arrested development. For us as for any other life form, growing up is not optional. We are on the brink of a huge, momentous change, when a new state of collective consciousness, a different way of looking at life and the Universe, and eventually a new civilization is being downloaded through the souls, minds, hearts, and bodies of more and more men and women every day. It is our moral imperative to support the new step in evolution, knowing well that every new civilization will have its rise, stasis, and fall.
Until next civilization change. Until the new story becomes the old one, and we embark on another long journey to a new story.
References
Microsoft Word – Bringing Back Persephone – Raffaello Manacorda.docx
Baring, A. (2013). The dream of the cosmos: a quest for the soul. Dorset, England: Archive Publishing.
Harvey, A. & Saade, C. (2016). Evolutionary love relationships: passion, authenticity & activism. Acton, Ontario: Enrealment Press.
Kingsley, P. (1999). In the dark places of wisdom. Inverness, Calif: Golden Sufi Center.
Notes
1 One inspiring reflection in Baring (2013, p. 495) is that the modern belief that we have only one life to live generates an unconscious fear of death which makes us cling to this life with exaggerated emphasis. This fear would then be one of the reasons for the endemic violence that afflicts humanity.
2 Throughout this paper, I will use the capitalized expression “the Feminine” to refer to the totality of attributes, archetypes and energies that were represented by the different female deities of the lunar era.
3 Interestingly enough, however, according to Kinglsey (1999, p. 100) most of the imagery for the Catholic version of the Virgin Mary comes from Persephone herself.
4 One of the most infamous testimonies of this relentless fury is the Malleus Maleficarum, the “hammer of the witches.” This book, published in 1487 by a Catholic clergyman, is a compendium of inquisitorial methods and torture practices to be used against witches and heretics. This book had an enormous influence on the royal courts of Europe and became a sort of handbook for the prosecution of witchcraft (Baring, 2013, p.166)
5 More information about ISTA can be found at http://ista.life
6 It is not my intention to simplify the issue of dealing with nudity, emotions, and sexuality, especially in the public and collective sphere. I do not deny that a certain balance is desirable between the freedom of expression of the individual and being in synergy with society and its norms. But I do encourage the questioning of which part of our attitude towards the naked human body amounts to upholding reasonable social conventions, and which part comes from accumulated shame and guilt towards the body and, by extension, the Feminine.