[0.2] In the Beginning, God was a Woman 🌎
the evolution of human consciousness & our infinite relationship to the goddess
In the Beginning, God was a Woman
Nature, Chaos, Darkness
Then a Split -
From an Impact,
to Refraction,
the Goddess
Illuminates and
Transforms
Great Mother 🌎
Our earliest ancestors gifted us our lizard brain, our amygdala - our fear response control center of our brain. Our survival instincts.
For eons and eons, from Homo Sapien to Neandrethal to Cro-Magnon, humanity’s evolution was entirely dependent on our relationship to Mother Nature 🍃 With our minds and bodies functioning as one, we instinctually survived through our relationship to the natural world.
From our Beginning, the first ultimate and source of life is Great Mother 🌎 “An expression of simple biological dependence.”1
In this period, the Mother was the one who fed, who provided the necessities of life through plants, seeds, and animals. Caves afforded the protection of her womb, which eventually became the tomb in the cycle of life and death. She was both the nourisher of life and the destroyer. Life and death, joy, and pain, were a seamless reality.
Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness
Marion Woodman & Elinor Dickson
Then - a split.
Our minds and bodies begin distinguish themselves. Our consciousness emerges from our subconsciousness (Ego and Id).
This is the first milestone in our cognitive evolution, from Animal to Human. Our awareness, our ability to reason, to think, to imagine - all starts with this discernment between duality. And it only made us better equipped to survive the chaos of nature.
Other binaries emerge - we now feel the difference between the primal emotions of joy and pain, life and death, good and bad.
From the evolution of human consciousness 🧠 perspective, ALL spiritual traditions emerge from this Great Mother archetype 🌎
See Also: Carl Jung, the Collective Unconscioussness, the Great Mother archetype, How Does Carl Jung’s Mother Archetype influence Personality Development in Males?
“The Great Mother is the ultimate, Source, the supreme concept of divinity: oneness, creatrix of all things, the unconsciousness personification of the realm of nature.”2
From Great Mother 🌎 to Great Goddess 🌸
As our thinking brains became stronger and more creative, our first constructions of divinity, across time and culture, are beautifully imagined and articulated archetypes of the Great Goddess.
Through contemplation, prayer, movement, meditative ritual, ceremony - we are able to transced the ego, engage in self-transformation, and connect back to a feeling of archetypal Oneness and the divinity in and all around us. Instead of rejecting our Shadow, we integrate it and it becomes our source of Power.
I’m sooo excited to share with you more about one of my favorite archetypes of the Great Goddess, Maa Durga 🙏🏽🦁❤️🔥
Durga is The Supreme Goddess in Hinduism. She is a Warrior Goddess, Protrectress, embodiment of Compassion, Strength, and Justice. She is the Consummate victor of Good over Evil.
She is most often seen with her consort the Lion or Tiger, representing Courage.
She holds a number of tools and weapons that are symbols that we can turn to in our own struggle. Chakra for Righteousness, the Club for Loyalty or Love, the Sword for Discernment of Truth, Bow & Arrow for Character, the Conch for Happiness.
Her signature color is Red representing Passion ❤️🔥 The signature color worn by Hindu brides.
Many of Durga’s fiercer forms, like Bhadrakali and Chamundi, are famously goddesses of the margins, which means that they protect people who live at the edge of society. On a more universal level, Durga’s energy is often the fuel for popular uprisings and the will to fight social and political injustice.3
When I feel helpless with the state of the world, I think about what She might say or do.
But the real work for me these days is to surrender Her as a great of power, like a viscous ocean of golden honey and love I’m flowing in that is impossible for any of us to drown in because its what keeping us all afloat 🍯
Divine Feminine & Principled Violence 🗡️
Durga also represents this very common but largely not talked about theme of principled violence in Hinduism, that I learned less in traditional religion school environments and moreso through my Mom and my family’s passed down spiritual traditions.
Western yoga has co-opted the meaning of ahimsa (non-violence) and often makes loopy references to the Hare Krishna movement and the Bhagvad Gita to serve an empty love and light/“I condemn all violence” agenda.
What a lot of people don’t know is that the basic premise of Hinduism’s holiest and most universally known text, the Bhagwad Gita, is a conversation between Arjuna and Krishna while on the brink of war with Arjuna’s cousins, the Kauravas. They’ve done everything to avoid this war and the Kauravas are, well, assholes.
The divine guidance from Krishna is, yes we are compassionate and well-wishers of all living beings, we don’t ever want to cause anyone harm or suffering. But, there are divine instances where violence actually *is* the answer. From ISKCON:
Gita wisdom explains that all of us have a selfless higher nature, our spiritual side, and a selfish lower nature, our material side. Krishna wants us to triumph over our lower nature, as the Gita (03.43) urges, and thereby do good to ourselves as well as everyone else. To help us win our inner war, he shares spiritual knowledge (Gita 04.01).
But despite the best efforts, some people like Duryodhana are so bent on gratifying their lower nature that only the surgical treatment of capital punishment can redeem their lost souls. For such extreme situations, the Gita does not fight shy of recommending physical warfare.
But even while fighting such an unavoidable war, it urges us to not let animosity blind us to spiritual reality, as is demonstrated in the Gita’s call (11.55).
For most of us, this nonviolent violence doesn’t have to ever express itself as physical violence. Our relationship conflicts hardly ever warrant drastic actions like violence. For resolving such conflicts, Gita wisdom urges us to remember that we are not fighting against people, but are fighting against their lower nature.
This idea is very aligned with the politics of liberation struggles against oppressive regimes.
See: Frantz Fanon “Decolonization is always a violent phenomenon”, the Civil Rights Movement where non-violence was a strategy to provoke violence and attract sympathy to the cause, Malcolm X’s view on self-defense and non-violence, Liberation or Terrorism: Refuting the Language of the Oppressor, Huey Newton In Defense of Self-Defense
Durga inspires us to be more critical and discerning between what The System labels as violent versus the true violence The System perpetuates and denies.
When a big portion of our world is debating whether or not to stop a genocide, invoking Durga and trusting in the arc of time bending towards justice can help us stay sane, grounded, and empowered. We are dragon slayers in the time of dragons 🐉🗡️
And please remember the True Wisdom of the Bhagavad Gita next time you see a yoga studio doing something like this:
