Maleficent: Reconnecting to the Divine Feminine Cathy Pagano, M.A.

I have to admit I loved Maleficent the first time I saw Disney’s Sleeping Beauty in 1959.  She had power and a dark beauty that was fascinating.  I loved her even more when I took my daughter to see a Disney retrospective at Lincoln Center in New York City in the early 70s—before VHSs.  My 3-year-old daughter decided she loved Maleficent, was going to dye her blond curls black and then went about terrorizing the other kids at the playground by jumping up and shouting, “I am Maleficent!” 

That’s why I went to see Maleficent and I came away more enchanted with her than ever.  Linda Woolverton’s script shows a deep knowledge of the various sources of the mythic sleeping beauty motif.  Her script is an imaginative, archetypal tale that speaks to our times, finally telling the truth about our patriarchal society’s wounding and rejection of Feminine Spirit, the original wound that caused the tale to be told.

Fairy tales show us the most basic, archetypal story patterns that have shaped our human development through the ages.  Archetypal patterns are the shared instincts that make us all human. And the best way to understand them is through stories.  

Just as it is always a storyteller’s prerogative to shape the story to her tribe’s needs.  Linda Woolverton has done just that with Maleficent.  She tells a story of what was, what is and what might be if we learn to love the things we have been taught to fear.  She tells the truth about how our patriarchal society has sought to strip women of our freedom and power, just as Stefan strips Maleficent of her wings. 

Patriarchal religions have suppressed our relationship to the Earth and any knowledge of our true interconnection with it, because the ancients worshipped the Earth as a Goddess.  Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose, The Sleeping Beauty of the Woods are all tales about feminine values, Earth values, that are rejected and ‘put to sleep’ by a patriarchal society that doesn’t value the Feminine Spirit of Life or our right-brain consciousness that sees the magic and beauty of the Earth through the eyes of the imagination.  And even worse, patriarchy creates the female witch, turning and twisting our feeling, intuitive life into something harmful and evil—something we are taught to fear.  

In the Grimm Brothers’ version of the story, Little Briar Rose, we find a King and Queen who long for a child.  This kingdom needs new life.  A baby daughter is finally born to them and they name her Briar Rose. At her christening, the King invites Wise Women to come and bless his child, acknowledging that there is still wisdom in the land, wanting his child to be blessed with appropriate feminine virtues. However, the king has only 12 golden plate settings, and there are 13 Wise Women.  So he doesn’t invite the 13^th Wise Woman.  

The fact that the King leaves out this 13^th Wise Woman tells us that this tale is about the rejection of some aspect of Feminine Wisdom—the part that doesn’t fit into patriarchal expectations.  Patriarchy only wants the wisdom of the wise women when it serves its purpose. The fact that the Wise Woman or Fairy is insulted belittles the truth: in rejecting this aspect of the feminine psyche, patriarchy cuts off a woman’s wildness and freedom.   Of course there’ll be payback.

The number 13 symbolizes the ancient Moon Goddess (whose power lay in the 13 Moon cycles of the year), the feminine wisdom of change and transformation as well as sexuality and psychic power.  Since patriarchy is a solar paradigm, 12 is the number of masculine completion, but 13 becomes a number of evil.  Really?  And so we get all the stories about the evil fairy, evil stepmother, evil Maleficent!

As a mythologist and symbologist, I love the symbolism of the 13^th Wise Woman becoming Maleficent, the spirit and protector of her land.  As a young fairy, Maleficent is beautiful, kind, funny, courteous, strong, curious and powerful.  She also has an open heart, developing a friendship with Stefan because of his own original kindness to her.  

Maleficent is a unique fairy, with strong horns on her head and giant eagle wings that help her soar to the heavens.  Horns symbolize supernatural powers, the power of the soul arising from the head.  Horns are attributed to all Mother Goddesses and are often symbolized by the lunar crescent, the power of eternal change.  Maleficent’s horns are magnificent, attesting to her generative power and strong life force.  This connects her to the Moon Goddess as well as the Earth Mother.  No other fairy has them.  Her wings are another indication of her spiritual origins, for eagle wings are attributes of Wisdom and Spirit.  It’s so interesting that patriarchy turned those lunar horns into something to be feared—unless they appeared on Michelangelo’s Moses.

This Maleficent is a nature spirit who guards and protects her land from the greed and violence of the patriarchal king.  Unfortunately, Stefan desires that patriarchal power, just as the king desires to destroy and conquer Maleficent’s land.  Despite their loving connection, Stefan is willing to do anything to achieve power, most hurtfully when he goes against his love and his heart. No wonder he goes crazy!  

Stefan is the most stereotypical character in the story, seemingly a mouthpiece for the violence and madness of the patriarchal paradigm. It’s hard to have any sympathy for a mindset that only wants power.  Both Stefan and his predecessor have no connection to the feminine—we barely see Briar Rose’s mother, Stefan willingly gives his daughter over to the 3 fairies instead of defending Aurora himself, he disregards the Queen when she is dying in his madness and his fear, and when Aurora comes back to him, he locks her in a room instead of welcoming her.  Where is the concern for others?  Where is the love? Stefan is the very image of the negative father, which is what patriarchy has become.

Stefan represents a mindset where there are no redeeming feminine feeling values, creating an imbalance that needs to be rectified.   Everything is tuned to violence, and perceptions are based on fear and projection because Stefan has stolen Maleficent’s wings and imprisoned them.  He has repressed his own feeling life and his soul’s power, and now it is turned against him and his kingdom.  His power cannot last in such a state.

After Stefan’s betrayal, devastated by the loss of her wings, Maleficent makes Diaval, the Raven, her companion and her wings.  Diaval is a marvelously sympathetic character to both Maleficent and Aurora, ready with advice and concern.  In fact, Diaval is the redeeming masculine figure in the story.  He represents a new masculine energy that is aligned with Feminine Spirit.

Who would have thought that old grouchy cartoon raven would be so wonderful!  Ravens are magical birds with the ability to shape-shift—they are birds who are connected to birth and death, magic and mysticism.  Two ravens were Odin’s messengers—Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory).  Ravens are Moon birds and companions of great magicians, giving them the intuitive information they need to make decisions and create spells.  Diaval does this for Maleficent, shape-shifting to accommodate her needs.  Awakening her memories, questioning her purposes.

The scene where Maleficent arrives at Aurora’s christening has been modeled on the cartoon version, and it is well done indeed.  But when Maleficent curses the baby, she is the one, instead of the last fairy, who changes the curse from eternal sleep, giving Aurora the chance to awaken with true love’s kiss.  She does this to spite Stefan, since after her betrayal, Maleficent no longer believes in true love.   And of course, Love is the main issue in the story.  Without the nurturing power of Love, nothing grows. 

I enjoy the fact that Maleficent and Diaval find the 3 fairies and baby right away instead of on Aurora’s 16^th birthday. These fairies want to help Stefan—an apt symbol of how patriarchy uses feminine gifts for its own purposes.  The 3 fairies are dim-witted, argumentative and self-absorbed, and seemingly have very little to do with raising Aurora—another result of suppressing the feminine.  Patriarchal women often forget how to nurture life!  That is left to Maleficent and Diaval, an interesting and quite accurate archetypal transformation.  This is the beginning of the healing between Aurora, who symbolizes the new feminine feeling life, and Maleficent, who personifies Nature.  

Angelina Jolie is a perfect Maleficent, facing Aurora with a cool distain that masks her wounded love nature.  She falls in love with Aurora.  And Aurora falls in love with her.  Maleficent is afraid to love again but Aurora’s trusting nature sees Maleficent’s beauty and kindness beneath her gruff exterior.  And we see the truth of Maleficent’s love when she tries to revoke her own curse.  But to her sorrow, it holds.

As the curse takes effect, we see some role reversals from the original story—giving us a clue of what is to come.  It is Maleficent who must make her way through the iron thorns that Stefan has erected around his castle to save Aurora, braving pain and iron burns to get inside to the sleeping beauty.  She is the one who brings Prince Phillip to Aurora’s bedside to break the curse.  But how can such young ‘love’ be true love?  It is not tested yet.  It is all projection and expectation.  And so Phillip fails.  Aurora sleeps on.

True love’s kiss can only come from a complete knowing and acceptance of a person’s soul.  So it is very satisfying that it is Maleficent’s kiss that awakens Aurora, just as it is archetypally perfect that it is Aurora who frees Maleficent’s wings and brings about Maleficent’s healing.  The Divine Feminine can only heal us and be healed through our human feminine nature and consciousness.

Aurora is the vehicle of Maleficent’s transformation and healing.  When the spirit child and the human child form a bond of love, magic happens.  Aurora—the new dawn—brings about a healing in the kingdom as well, uniting both her father’s world and the world of Faerie.  

This wonderful story is about reclaiming the 13^th disregarded Wise Woman—the Wise Woman of the Moon.  I hope women everywhere reclaim our own 13^th fairy, renewing our connection with the Divine Feminine.  It will bring healing to all our lives if we do!

Maleficent gets 3 thumbs up.

Emerging Archetypal Themes: Maleficent: Reclaiming the 13th Fairy and Our Relationship to the Divine Feminine

Emerging Archetypal Themes:  Maleficent:

Reclaiming the 13^th Fairy and Our Relationship to the Divine Feminine

I have to begin this essay about the film Maleficent with praise for Linda Woolverton’s storytelling.  Her script is a beautiful, imaginative and archetypal re-telling of the mythic sleeping beauty motif.  Ms. Woolverton obviously has a deep knowledge of all the variants of this fairy tale and has come up with a splendid version that speaks to our times and is visually enchanting.  But the real impact comes from Maleficent’s symbolic layers, which show us the truth about our patriarchal society’s wounding and rejection of feminine spirit, the wounding that caused the original tale to be told.

In fairy tales, we find the most basic, archetypal story patterns that have shaped our human development through the ages.  Archetypal patterns show us the shared instincts that make us all human. Just as a King represents a dominant collective belief, a Queen represents the feelings we have about that belief.  New feelings and beliefs arise as self-awareness grows among the people, and fairy tales change to reflect the new awareness and how to achieve it.  And it’s a storyteller’s prerogative to shape the story to her tribe’s needs.  Linda Woolverton has done just that.  She tells a story of what was, what is and what might be if we learn to love the things we have been taught to fear.  

Patriarchal religions have worked to suppress our relationship to the Earth and any knowledge of our true interconnection, because the ancients worshipped the Earth as a Goddess.  Sleeping Beauty, Briar Rose, The Sleeping Beauty of the Woods are all tales about feminine values, Earth values, that are rejected and ‘put to sleep’ by a patriarchal society that does not value the Feminine Spirit of Life or our right-brain feminine consciousness that sees through the eyes of the imagination the magic and beauty of the Earth.  And even worse, patriarchy creates a female villainess, turning our feeling, intuitive life into something harmful—something we should fear.  

So this story of the Sleeping Beauty deals with what happens to our feminine feeling consciousness when it is repressed, ravaged and rejected by both our society and our own ego-consciousness.  When we reject this feeling and imaginative aspect of life, it gets twisted and becomes the negative mother—the witch who wants to kill us or curse us.  And we are left cursed with our masculine, left-brain thinking that cuts off our feminine wings and power, grounding us in a masculine reality that hates and fears the Divine Feminine’s beauty, freedom and power.   

But the negative mother doesn’t just make our lives miserable: she pushes us to become more conscious.  Her curse ultimately becomes a blessing, since it makes each of us face our fate and live our purpose.  That’s the purpose of archetypal stories—they show us a path to travel that will bring us to greater consciousness. 

In the Grimm Brothers’ story of Little Briar Rose, we find a King and Queen who long for a child.  This kingdom needs new life.  A frog hops out of the water and tells the Queen her wish is about to come true.  Frogs were known to bring the rains, to bring fertility.  So the fateful time is now.  A baby daughter is born and called Briar Rose. This kingdom needs to be infused with new feelings.  This princess symbolizes the feeling renewal of the possibilities of love as a healing agent. A briar rose has sharp thorns though, so she’s not all sweetness and light, although those are the gifts the fairies give her.  

Although in this tale, the fairies are called Wise Women and there are 13 of them.  But the king only has 12 golden plate settings, and so he doesn’t invite the 13^th Wise Woman.  This 13^th fairy symbolizes the ancient Goddess of the Moon (whose power lay in the 13 Moon cycles of the year), the feminine wisdom of change and transformation.  Patriarchy is a solar paradigm, and so 12 is the number of masculine completion. Patriarchy only wants Wisdom that serves its purpose.  

In other tales, the number of fairies varies from 3 to 7 to 9, but this version makes perfect archetypal sense.  Patriarchal thinking has a hard time with the energy of 13, the feminine Moon energy of mystery, reflection and change.  We see remnants of this kind of patriarchal thinking in the US Congress today, where ‘conservative’ men are rejecting the truths we must face about our world.  

Originally, the allotted time that this princess must sleep is 100 years.  Then it is not just the prince’s kiss that wakes Briar Rose—it is also the right time!  When this tale was first told, something beautiful and new could not enter collective consciousness because they couldn’t make room for the 13^th Fairy. This is a fairy tale that also speaks to our times.  Can women bring back the old Moon wisdom?  Later versions of the tale made it a more individual task—rather than 100 years, the princess can only be awakened by ‘true love’s kiss’.  

Love is now the key, even to Moon wisdom. 

Maleficent

I have to admit I loved Maleficent the first time I saw the Disney movie back in 1959.  I loved her even more when I took my daughter to see a Disney retrospective at Lincoln Center in New York City in the early 70s—before VHSs.  My 3-year-old daughter decided she loved Maleficent, was going to dye her blond curls black and then went about terrorizing the other kids at the playground by jumping up and shouting, “I am Maleficent!” 

As a mythologist and symbologist, I love seeing the symbolism of the 13^th Wise Woman mesh with Maleficent, the spirit and protector of her land.  As a young fairy, Maleficent is beautiful, kind, funny, courteous, strong, and powerful.  She also has an open heart, developing a friendship with Stefan because of his own original kindness to her.  

Maleficent is a unique fairy, with strong horns on her head and giant eagle wings to soar.  Horns symbolize supernatural powers, the power of the soul arising from the head.  Horns are attributed to all Mother Goddesses, often symbolized by the lunar crescent, the power of the eternal change.  Maleficent’s horns are magnificent, attesting to her generative power and life force.  This connects her to the Moon Goddess as well as the Earth Mother.  No other fairy has them.  Her wings are another indication of her spiritual origins.  And eagle wings are attributes of Wisdom and Spirit.

So we see that Maleficent is a nature spirit who guards and protects her land from the greed and violence of the patriarchal king.  Of course, as history has shown us, patriarchy won hands down on that battle.  Just look at what our patriarchal culture has done to nature and to our world.  Since the Industrial Revolution, it has raped and pillaged the land and the people, all for greed and domination.   

Unfortunately, Stefan desires that patriarchal power, just as the king desires to destroy and conquer Maleficent’s land.  Despite their loving connection, Stefan is willing to do anything to achieve that power, most hurtfully when he goes against his love and his heart. No wonder he goes crazy!  Stefan is the most stereotypical character in the story, seemingly a mouthpiece for the nastiness and craziness of the patriarchal paradigm. But it’s hard to have any sympathy for a mindset that only wants power.  Both Stefan and the earlier king have no connection to the feminine--we barely see Briar Rose’s mother, Stefan willingly gives his daughter over to the 3 fairies instead of defending Aurora himself, he disregards the Queen completely in his madness and his fear when she is dying, and when Aurora comes back to him, he locks her in a room instead of welcoming her.

This is a mindset where there are no redeeming feminine feeling values, creating an imbalance that needs to be rectified.   Everything is tuned to violence, and perceptions are based on fear and projection because Stefan has stolen Maleficent’s wings and imprisoned them.  He has repressed his own feeling life and now it is turned against him and his kingdom.  His power cannot last in such a state.

After Stefan’s betrayal, Maleficent is devastated by the loss of her wings, and so takes on Diaval, the Raven, as her companion and her wings.  Diaval is a marvelously sympathetic character to both Maleficent and Aurora.  Who would have thought that old grouchy cartoon raven would be so wonderful!  Ravens are magical birds with the ability to shapeshift—they are birds who are connected to birth and death, magic and mysticism.  Two ravens were Odin’s messengers—Hugin (thought) and Munin (memory).  Ravens are Moon birds and companions of great magicians, giving them the intuitive information they need to make decisions and create spells.  Diaval does this for Maleficent.

The scene where Maleficent arrives at the christening has been modeled on the cartoon version, and it is well done indeed.  But when Maleficent curses the baby, she is the one who changes the curse from eternal sleep, giving Aurora the chance to awaken with true love’s kiss.  But after Maleficent’s experience with Stefan, she does not believe in such things, and so she feels her revenge will be satisfied.

I love the fact that Maleficent and Diaval find the 3 fairies and Aurora right away instead of on her 16^th birthday. These fairies want to help Stefan—an apt symbol of how patriarchy uses feminine gifts for its own purposes.  The 3 fairies are dim-witted and self-absorbed and seemingly have very little to do with raising Aurora—another result of suppressing the feminine.  Patriarchal women often forgot how to nurture life!  That is left to Maleficent and Diaval, an interesting and quite accurate archetypal transformation.  This is the beginning of the healing between Aurora, who symbolizes the new feminine feeling life, and Maleficent, who personifies Nature.  

Angelina Jolie is a perfect Maleficent, facing Aurora with a cool disdain that masks her wounded love nature.  She falls in love with Aurora.  And Aurora falls in love with her.  Maleficent is afraid to love again but Aurora’s trusting nature sees Maleficent’s beauty and kindness beneath her gruff exterior.  And we see the truth of Maleficent’s love when she tries to revoke her own curse.  But to her sorrow, it holds.

As the curse takes effect, we see role reversals from the original story—giving us a clue of what is to come.  It is Maleficent who must make her way through the iron thorns that Stefan has erected around his castle, braving pains and burns to get inside to the sleeping Aurora.  She is the one who brings Prince Phillip to Aurora’s bedside to break the curse.  But how can such young ‘love’ be true love?  It is not tested yet.  It is all projection and expectation.  Phillip cannot wake her.

True love’s kiss can only come from a complete knowing and acceptance of a person’s soul.  And so it is so satisfying that it is Maleficent’s kiss that awakens Aurora, just as it is so perfect that it is Aurora who frees Maleficent’s wings and brings about Maleficent’s healing.  The Divine Feminine can only heal us and be healed through our human feminine nature and consciousness.

Aurora is the vehicle of Maleficent’s transformation and healing.  Aurora—the new dawn—brings about a healing in the kingdom as well, uniting both her father’s world and the world of Faerie. 

This is a story about reclaiming the 13^th, disregarded fairy—the Wise Woman of the Moon.  I hope women everywhere reclaim their own 13^th Fairy and renew their connection with the Divine Feminine.  It will bring healing to all our lives if we do!

Blessed Be!

Cathy Pagano

     

Living the Symbolic Life: The Pisces Challenge

                                                Pisces: The Fish

While the Sun is in Pisces, our awareness is called back to the Source, after traveling around the whole zodiac.  The ocean is an apt symbol of the womb of the Collective Unconscious—the place of memory where we find the essence of what it means to live here on Earth.  Love and anger, hardship and plenty, death and birth, family and country—it contains memories of all of life’s experiences, human and otherwise. This is where new life gestates. It is the source of the Wisdom of Life, the World Soul.  

So after flying to Aquarius’ starry heights, we are called to dive into the deepest oceans to regenerate our lives through the agency of those heavenly lights.  If we take that photo of Earthrise to heart, we need to get out of the old patriarchal story that refuses to take that image seriously.  

We can dissolve the old patriarchal story within us during the Sun’s journey through Pisces.  Like the Catholic’s Lent or Ra’s nighttime journey through the Underworld, humans need to take the time to let go of, withdraw from and dissolve what no longer serves our new vision in preparation for the new life of spring. 

Your new story of life will shape your energies this year, energies which will emerge into the world with the Spring Equinox.  So consider sacrificing and making sacred (Pisces) your daily schedule for the next month by adding some spiritual practices into your day: 

1.     Find quality quiet time to listen to your body, your heart and your mind.

2.    Meditate on letting go of old fears and patriarchal beliefs.

3.    Imagine the gift you want to give to the world.

2014 is a 7 year, a year of completion, initiation and conscious choice.  The energies are building toward a strong stellar configuration in April, so taking the time now to get balanced and centered will help you tremendously in a few months. 

If Winter Solstice 2012 was the end of a great age, then 2013 was the beginning of the next stage—the gestation of a new age.  Back in the 60s we sang about it as the Age of Aquarius.  Our vision was very idealistic and full of fun.  The Baby Boomers are the Pluto in Leo generation, and we not only want to stay young till we die, we want to give our creativity to the world.  Now that we’re becoming senior citizens, don’t you think we’re called to step into the world with wisdom and compassion to help our children bring about the changes we envisioned back in the 60s, since the same issues are confronting us once again at this turning point in the cycle between Pluto and Uranus.  

        

When we let the Cosmic Story inspire us and choose to live a symbolic life, we can more easily bring that heavenly energy down to earth. The other option is to remain caught up in the fears and illusions of patriarchy, fighting the energy of change. 

Here are some images to meditate on for Pisces.

Genevieve Cseh, Sedna, Inuit Goddess of the Sea

Sedna symbolizes some of the goddess energy of Pisces.  She sacrificed (Pisces) her fingers to create the bounty of the seas, exemplifying the need sacrifice our ego’s perceptions and open to what comes to us from the deep unconscious. When we turn our attention to our dreams, we find new life and new sustenance.  The Collective Unconscious is open to us during Pisces.  

Kali is a good example of Plutonian goddess energy with her demand that we release the old life so we can engender the new life waiting to emerge in us.  But first we have to die to the old vision. 

Christ embodies the energies of Pisces—the need to say, ‘Not my will but thine’, to surrender to the Source of Life, to sacrifice our ego desires for the good of the world.  Christ speaks to our need to become the light of the world.

These two energies—feminine and masculine—encourage us with the knowledge that sacrifice is part of our human heritage, that life is not all about our desires and needs, but about the needs we share with others.  The more compassion and imagination we bring to our own time of ‘letting go’, the more wisdom we will gain from our sojourn through Pisces.

So who will engage in the Pisces challenge with me?  The challenge involves releasing the old stories of separation, domination, and violence because we have discovered the new story that we are all one family sharing Mother Earth.  Through these times of crisis and transition, we will learn to live together in a very different way.   We will create a new civilization which is founded on absolute equality between feminine perceptions of life and masculine ones.  We will live in the mystical brain where right and left sides of the brain work together to give us a better vision of how we can live in harmony with the Earth and each other.  Let us create a world full of depth and light and beauty, where we take responsibility for our actions and treat each other and the Earth with courtesy and respect.  

Starting on Tuesday, February 18^th, when the Sun goes into Pisces for a month, create a different daily routine for yourself, one which includes playing in those creative, inner spaces where we can touch the Source and imagine a different way to live in the world.

Merry meet, and merry part, and merry meet again!  Blessed Be!

Cathy

 

Living the Symbol Life: The Archetype of Wholeness

Living the Symbol Life: The Archetype of Wholeness

    Living the symbolic life means that we inhabit an image to find its meaning.  Since meaning is rarely valued in patriarchy, we have to re-learn how to use our imaginations to do this.  So one of the first images we can meditate on is the image of Earth in the photograph called 'Earthrise'. 

Even after seeing the amazing images of our universe taken by the Hubble space telescope, it is no surprise that the picture of Earthrise is still a powerful image after almost 50 years (the crew of Apollo 8 took the photo on Christmas Eve Day, 1968).   Our universe is vast, mysterious, a bit scary as well as breath-taking, but there's something hopeful about that image of our beautiful Earth shining in the darkness of space that touches my heart and soul.  Do you feel that way too?

I've been drawn to that photo since the first time I saw it back in 1968.  I put it on the front page of our college year-book the next year; it's on the cover of my book of seasonal fairy tales, Stories of the Earth, and for me at least, it is connected with my vision of Lady Wisdom as the ‘Woman clothed with the Sun’.  Our Mother Earth is indeed ‘clothed with the Sun’ in this iconic photograph.  

     This image of our Earth evokes what the Ancients called the Anima Mundi or World Soul, the idea that there is an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body.  (Also see Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock's Gaia theory.)   When we look at this picture of our home planet, we can sense the truth of that belief.  There's only one world shining out in space.

The Western idea originated with Plato in the Timaeus.   Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related. (Timaeus:29/30)

An Eastern image of this connection is called Indra’s Net.   ‘When Indra fashioned the world, he made it as a web, and at every knot in the web he tied a pearl. Everything that exists, or has ever existed, every idea that can be thought about, every dharma and destiny that is true, is a pearl in Indra's net. Not only is every pearl tied to every other pearl by virtue of the web on which they hang, but on the surface of every pearl is reflected every other jewel on the net. Everything that exists in Indra's web implies all else that exists.’

"Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." –Alan Watts

Carl Jung called the archetype of wholeness in a person the Self.  The Anima Mundi is the archetype of wholeness for our planet. This Feminine principle manifests within us as the collective unconscious, which contains all the images and feelings and experiences of humanity throughout the ages.  Is it any wonder that this image of Earthrise speaks to us of the Wisdom that creates worlds and galaxies and conscious beings?

     Joseph Campbell felt that the image of Earthrise was a symbol of new myths arising in the future.  I believe it, because the image has worked upon my unconscious to open me to the mystery of Lady Wisdom.  There is an image of the returning Divine Feminine that shares this image of Earthrise.   

And a portent appeared in the heavens: A woman, clothed with the Sun, standing on the Moon, crowned with Stars, in labor...giving birth to the Savior.

     The Cosmic Story is calling us back to re-work the soil and tend the plants that were seeded in the 60s.  As Uranus and Pluto square (90*) each other seven times, we find ourselves at a crossroads.  Will we let the powers of repression and domination continue to shape us?

'If myth is a storied way to feel out our place in the world, then we can grasp the significance of ‘Earthrise’ by considering what it rode in on. The Environmental Movement, Ecopsychology, Systems Theory, the Internet that joins us across the globe, global structures of finance, the Goddess movement, the push toward sustainability, organic agriculture, Brian Swimme's inspiring cosmological reveries: these and other worldly-circling matters grew up in the light of Earthrise. This image did not "cause" these movements so much as announce them as they swarmed into collective consciousness.'    (Craig Chalquist, Ph.D. Earthrise: A Mythic Image for Our Times.) 

Images are not owned by any one religion or corporation.  Symbols are universal and they come to us pure in our dreams and through synchronicities in our waking life, and through true myths, music, art and stories.   Of course, patriarchy is very aware of how to use images to capture our attention, but they use it to lie, manipulate and control.  When we look at an image and let it speak to us—just as we can let this image of Earthrise or that of the Woman clothed with the Sun speak to us—we really can arrive at the wise answer to any question.

If we want to evolve, we all have to undertake a Heroine's Journey.  It is an inner journey that can free us from the patriarchal corsets and straightjackets we've been shaped by.  And the gift we receive and the treasure we bring back will be the Wisdom of the World Soul—the wisdom to find solutions to the personal and collective crisis which face the world. 

Some of those solutions involve the archetype of community.  In patriarchy, community was usually centered around the tribe, the nation, the race, the gender, the religion, the army, the family.  Usually it involved being separate from others, being special in some way, being chosen.  

When we look at this image of Mother Earth and see that we are one world, opportunities for community expands.  Our new communities are connected via the Internet—much like Indra’s Net—where we connect with like-minded individuals around the world.  These communities are based on common ideals, interests and beliefs and make no distinction between races, religious beliefs or genders.  

There are other communities being formed, much like the communes of the 60s.  Family now consists of close friends as well as blood relatives.   People feel they are citizens of the world rather than just one country. Patriarchal religions are losing ground to spiritual communities comprised of Christians, Moslems, Jews, Pagans, Buddhists, Hindus, etc.  Sports teams honor the player, not his or her race.  In this new idea of community, no one needs to be the leader, because each of us can lead when our expertise is needed.  This re-birthed archetype of community is all about equality.

Community gardens, business co-ops, and charter schools are just a few ways to be in community.  People with common skills form guilds or unions.  People with common ideals gather to stand up for what they believe in, such as the Occupy Movement.  We still have spiritual communities, although these are different from the patriarchal monastery or convent.  There is a common bond between the members of the armed forces just as there was with the ancient Irish warband called the Fianna; and of course, we have the image of the Knights of the Round Table.   

When we look at this image of our one world, we can imagine a multitude of new ways to be in community. 

We are living in a time of choice.  The Cosmic Story is supporting transformation and rebirth.  Will we stand with the Earth, with the Anima Mundi and with our souls?  Will we find new ways to be in community?

Perhaps we need to meditate on this picture of our Mother, the Earth and remember that we are indeed all connected. 

Merry meet and merry part and merry meet again!

Cathy