The Wider Feminine Dimension

If and when we marry, we gain a second mother. In secular language the added phrase, “in law,” signals that we live in an Age of the Contract in which the state, enforcing the secular nature of its culture, demands the right to permit us to marry. But in the greater realm, thinking now of Genesis (2:24), marriage makes man and woman “one flesh.” (I note here that that phrase is retained in all but two versions of every Bible I own; the Jerusalem Bible renders it as “one body,” which is equivalent; the Living Bible shifts the ground into the abstract and says “one person.”)  If we are one flesh, however, doesn’t the spouse’s mother also become our own?

This somewhat cumbersome beginning, however, is not really my subject. I’m just a tracing how I got to my theme. A post on Ghulf Genes and some commentary on it brought the Sibyls of old to the fore, again, and every time that happens, I always think of my second mother, as it were. Now this wondrous lady, long since departed, was as modern as any, a practicing dentist, married to an eminent economics consultant, an enterprising person who, in the chaos that followed World War II formed a business to make a living for her family. She came from the high middle class, with real wealth in her background. And yet… And yet she was also a strange sort of person with peculiar gifts, so much so that, ever since I got to know her—and the occasions were few because she lived in the then barricaded East Germany and we rarely saw her—I always thought of her as sibylline, oracular, chtonic, and original.

Now today my memories of Mom Elvira—and of the Sibyl of Cumae and her predecessors and her followers, of whom I view St. Hildegard of Bingen (the “Sibyl of the Rhine”) as one—reminded me of my (these days) entirely incorrect conviction that women and men are different. Not under “law,” mind you, not in the sphere of contracts. But in reality. And particularly in the religious realm, the feminine perception is altogether more encompassing, holistic—but largely influential above and below the huge but narrowly mechanical noise produced by the masculine approach—heavy on intellect, law, rules, dogmas, sin, trial-judgement-punishment-reward, heresies, fatwas, and all the bloody rest.

With the rise of the Age of Contract, the feminine dimension came under attack—so that the Reformation dethroned and banned the Virgin Mary—as also it got rid of images, colors, decorations in the churches and the temples—a basic expression of the feminine soul. It was Robert Graves, I think, who said that first the success, and then the endurance, of Catholicism had everything to do with Mary’s superintending presence over the Church. Women hold things together, men are ever at war—so that the Reformation produced an endless scattering differentiation until the Whole was thus no more. (Yes. The root of that word, catholic, is the Greek kata, meaning “about,” and holos, meaning whole. It is. It is about the Whole.) Yet, of course, the feminine is always inclusive. And in that process of inclusion, conflicting details need to be harmonized; and where the conflicts are particularly gritty, they must be transcended by love—even if that demands that intellectual precision is sacrificed to the greater cause of Unity.

Now the religious urge in us is really, fundamentally, about love. And when religion comes to mean conflict, be sure that the masculine drive to power has hi-jacked something and, the moment that drive succeeded, the holy changed into something else.

Among the males the poets know this. They have been blessed with souls in which something of the nature of their mothers has managed to rise enough to celebrate the Goddess.