“On the deepest level, men seem largely unchanged by history — they are the same soldiers, shamans, and duffers now as five, ten, or fifty thousand years ago. Women are the ones who are changing, struggling against millennia of male domination and negative programming. The transformation of the instinctual and intuitive feminine current is yet another process that is quickening in our time. According to the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, ‘Sexually awakened women, affirmed and recognized as such, would mean the complete collapse of the patriarchy.’ In order to accomplish this, to bite deeper into the apple, ‘she’, the archetypal feminine, embodying Shakti energy, requires recognition, permission, and affirmation from the masculine Shiva principle of ordering consciousness. She needs to know herself for what she is, and could be. She — the feminine daimonic — will continue to wreak havoc until she gets what she wants in the way that she wants it, which may have little to do with current societal values, moral codes, and sexual stereotypes. When this is achieved, Kali will, with the faintest trace of a Mona Lisa smile, retract her fangs, pull in her tongue, and liberate her victims. The goddess will return, and this time around, the apple will be eaten down to the core.”
From Daniel Pinchbeck, 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (New York: Penguin, 2006), pp. 325-6.
January 25, 2008 at 1:44 pm |
Great post!
“The goddess will return, and this time around, the apple will be eaten down to the core.” – I guess it is happening right now.
January 26, 2008 at 1:13 am |
I love how in stuff like this “Woman” is always a unitary category — as race and class are unimportant. Of course, what’s really important is women’s sexual power — incidentally, the only power, it seems, acceptable (or titillating enough) to hold over men. I’m not even going to call attention to his monster metaphor-apparently-unfettered woman a cross between wolverine, Medusa, Madonna (the holy one) and a vampire (Fangs indeed!).
What this should really be titled is “Barefoot Goddess in a Kitchen Holding an Apple Pie Wearing a Hooters Shirt While Listening to Really Bad New Age Music”.
January 26, 2008 at 1:13 am |
P.S. If I didn’t know any better I’d think you were trying to flirt.
January 26, 2008 at 1:23 am |
Axinia: Well, maybe not right now. But eventually. After football. :)
Uberfrau: You have a way of encapsulating the universe that is altogether, well, you. It’s really the only reason I bother keeping this blog going…
January 26, 2008 at 1:25 am |
P.S. You know I think you’re a sexy beast. Am I still allowed to say that kind of thing in the current political “climate”. You know, like, “It’s getting hot in here…”.
January 26, 2008 at 7:39 am |
Necromancer: To contrast Shakti with Shiva is missing the point that Shiva is often depicted as the Ardhanareeshwar (Ardha = half, Naree = woman, Eshwar = God). He is only complete when both his halves unite.
(Sorry, I may not practise much the religion I was born into, but I am passionate about defending Hindu mythology against reductionist and oversimplified generalisations by dabblers.)
By the way, the book author’s Wikipedia entry mentions substances such as LSD and his advocacy of them. May explain some of the stuff…
January 26, 2008 at 7:50 am |
Shefaly: Well, his esoteric approach means that “canonical” interpretations at times fall by the wayside. I’m fairly aware of Pinchbeck’s biographical details (I wrote a post about it a while back you can find by clicking on his name above…). In some respects, he’s an early 21st century amalgam of Castaneda and Leary. Intriguing, but definitely not the final word.
January 28, 2008 at 11:56 am |
I can’t believe you’d seriously quote someone who spent the latter years of his life trying to harvest the energy of his orgones in an aluminum foil box in the desert. I think the guy also believed he could stop rain. Just because something is published doesn’t make it valid, Sparky.
Thanks for the note.
January 28, 2008 at 12:28 pm |
You’re welcome. And Wilhelm Reich is an under appreciated revolutionary figure — his influence on the 68ers in Paris, for example, has long been overlooked. Sure, he was a bit of loon, but there is some wisdom there — he certainly didn’t deserve to have his books burned by the U.S. government. Pinchbeck largely echoes this earlier view, which in a sense is a form of vitalism. All anti-establishment to the “core”.
February 4, 2008 at 7:12 pm |
Interesting passage…I am a woman and do not consider myself “struggling against millennia of male domination and negative programming.” I do however appreciate all the efforts and struggles “my kind” have went through…
On some level I do not think women and men are different, we are all the same…Even with children being on equal mental ground…Can the “mind” be described as a sex…Can the soul?
February 4, 2008 at 10:57 pm |
The soul is all about individuality and unity — there’s no archetypes. Still, within us all there are aspects of what we understand as the female and male — not in the realm of mind, but in the larger realm of the social (or, more precisely, cultural). A zeitgeist rather than the specifics of a fixed gender. I see this as parapsychological — not simply psychological…Or maybe a better word is meta-psychological.
Yeah, rambling…