For a long time now, Lady Wisdom, adorning our public buildings as the Greco-Roman wisdom-goddesses, Minerva and Pallas Athena, could only be channeled through a masculine, left-brained mode of perception if women wanted to be taken seriously in our culture. Women who go into politics, law, medicine, science and finance — considered masculine professions — find they have to toe the patriarchal line every day. While they use their intuition and feeling whenever possible, they have to fit their feminine perceptions into an already structured reality.
But the world is changing. Women are healing our inner wounds, and learning to express our feminine being without fear or shame. Women have a need to get to know ourselves, after long centuries of being subjugated and twisted by patriarchal expectations. When women look within and acknowledge our strengths and recognize our weaknesses and wounds, we begin to untwist ourselves. We stand up for ourselves, our feelings and our beliefs. We stop trying to become a man’s perfect fantasy. We become our own fantasy! The woman we always wanted to be. We stop being afraid to excel, and since we’ve learned to listen within to our own wisdom, we find solutions to our problems. We remember that we are here on Earth to be whole, not perfect, as is so often expected of each of us.
As women heal the wounds inflicted on our feminine being, we become living examples of new ways of being for our children and men. Feminine consciousness within men is just as twisted and wounded — maybe even more so, since the patriarchy looks down on men who are in touch with their feminine soul. While there are many women who still uphold the values of patriarchy and will defend them to their deaths, there are also men who have reclaimed their feminine consciousness and are examples of the new masculine King who works in harmony with Feminine Spirit.
Our culture has not served us well. By devaluing the feminine aspects of life, we created an out-of-control life-style that is killing Earth, and killing us. And so, it is most especially women’s purpose, our unique purpose, to achieve our inner freedom and learn to embody wisdom, helping to create a new society that equally values and respects both women and men, feminine and masculine consciousness and most especially soul and spirit.
As women regain and express our feminine powers, and become wise women, we need an archetypal image that allows us our shadows as well as our light. Women have learned to understand the bright light of Sun, for we have been Father’s Daughters, daughters of the patriarchy, for a long time now. We are unique individuals as much as any man. But still…we sense that we can be more.
There are many ancient forms of the divine feminine, goddesses that women can learn from, and in turning to these ancient powers, women have become more comfortable with our innate feminine powers. We need to discover an image of the divine feminine that can help us find our unique purpose in these tumultuous times of change, one that embodies the returning goddess energy so many people are feeling.
The Woman Clothed With The Sun
In the many cultural stories that speak about the changing of the ages, it is always Feminine Spirit that brings about the transition to new life, for Feminine Spirit knows the rhythms of life, death and rebirth and is the “opener of the way.” Living in a world of duality, we must allow masculine and feminine energies to inhabit their unique attributes. Our job is to understand how these different energies work together and how to best use them. In times of cultural transformation, our right-brain, feminine consciousness is our best guide, for it opens us to the creative imagination, the realm of possibility.
The return of Goddess awakens the transformative energy that births the changing of the ages. While other cultures understand this divine feminine energy through their own mythological traditions, we westerners have lost touch with our mythological roots. Largely ignored in the western religious story of the changing of the ages is an image of Lady Wisdom, who mediates this transformation to a new world age.
In this story of world-wide spiritual transformation, there is a powerful image of Conscious Woman, an image of the archetypal Feminine Spirit who transforms the old world and gives birth to this new age. I am drawn to this archetypal image because I believe it speaks to our modern sensibilities and gives us instructions for opening to and incarnating wisdom.
This image of the awakening Feminine Spirit is an image of Cosmic Woman: A woman, clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, crowned with stars, who is in labor, giving birth to a savior. In earlier times and different traditions, this archetypal image was understood as Lady Wisdom. Today I feel this goddess image of Conscious Woman can be incarnated by women everywhere. This woman clothed with the sun is Lady Wisdom, who calls all women to become her daughters.
Our times are the forerunner of a new world age, and the times call on us to honor Lady Wisdom, who in Gnostic Christianity is the equal partner of Christ. But Lady Wisdom is not associated with any one religion. We find her in all traditions. Lady Wisdom is the image of the anima mundi, the world soul (Earth’s consciousness) and the source of the collective unconscious, the library of our collective memories and skills. As such, she belongs to all of us and is within all of us. I believe she is calling women out of the Father’s House so we can give birth to a new collective paradigm, a new way of doing to match her deep being that embraces partnership over domination, love over power, unity over divisiveness, peace over war, and our collective benefit over individual profit.
In leaving the Father’s House, women are not rejecting the masculine energies of life, but by re-connecting to our own unique feminine gifts, we are re-integrating both feminine and masculine energies at a newer, higher level of consciousness. Women are learning to re-balance the two lights in our sky — Earth’s bi-polar consciousness — Sun and Moon. Perhaps we will entrain with Earth once we learn to use both sides of the brain fully. We are becoming this woman clothed with Sun, finally able to access our feminine wisdom freely and consciously. This wisdom gives us the insight to make life-enhancing decisions, to understand complex situations and to consciously co-create new directions for our culture. This wisdom gives us spiritual insights into life.
We are called to be social artists, people who use our creative vision to enhance and strengthen our common lives, our one world. Our job now is to bring this knowledge and wisdom into the public arena. But we have to face the fact that our womanly wisdom is still viewed with suspicion by the patriarchy, and how deeply afraid patriarchal men are of sharing their power and privilege. Our most powerful institutions, which control our civilization, are still solidly entrenched in this kind of patriarchal thinking.
We live with an unbalanced perspective on life, one that often disregards feminine qualities and values, or else uses them to support our culture’s masculine values. We live in a dying paradigm that disregards Feminine Spirit. And it has led us to the brink of global annihilation.
What The World Needs Now Is Wisdom
The truth is: wisdom is what we most need right now in our world. Women, in breaking away from the patriarchal structures and strictures of life, are recognizing our gifts and re-discovering our wisdom. Wisdom itself is encoded in both our physical and soulful DNA, and is available to us within our own bodies, minds, souls and spirit. Wisdom belongs to all humanity, and yet the truth is that women and feminine consciousness connect most easily to it.
That is why I believe wisdom is women’s gift to the world. That is why it is so important for women to leave the Father’s House — leave behind the rules and expectations of being a proper wife, worker, mother, friend, as well as the rebellious roles we play out against those rules — being wild, irresponsible, addicted, promiscuous, stupid, angry, or crazy. We need to step outside our collective expectations and heal ourselves, so we can learn Lady Wisdom’s ways and incarnate it in our lives.
We need to step outside our collective expectations and heal ourselves, so we can learn Lady Wisdom’s ways and incarnate it in our lives.
To leave the Father’s House means to leave behind the old rules and perspective of patriarchy, to take responsibility for our own life and find meaning in what we do; to learn to understand our feelings instead of being overwhelmed by them or repressing them; to learn to listen to and trust our intuitions instead of ignoring them; to search for our personal visions and meaning in life instead of buying into the prevailing collective story of desire, power and consumption; to open ourselves to love in whatever form it comes to us, instead of continuing to get lost in the misery and need to possess and control love; to rediscover our creativity and give it to the world, whether it is our children who grow into conscious adults or our artistic creations that open others to healing and consciousness.
These are the gifts women find once we leave the Father’s House behind. We find our own talents, our own patterns of life; we find the source of the wisdom we need to live securely with our Mother, Earth. The yin and yang of cosmic interchange is Earth’s bi-polar energy, and we all need to bring them into balance within and without. Coupled with the masculine values of action, rationality, individuality, creative genesis and discipline, feminine values empower the imagination, love and compassion, endurance and compromise. Wisdom encourages intelligent and fruitful dialogue over issues and opens us to think with our hearts, to love in a way that allows for our imperfections while demanding greater consciousness, to use our imaginations for life rather than profit. Wisdom takes the whole into account, while still honoring individuality. What wonders could we achieve here on Earth if we all asked for the gifts of Lady Wisdom?
In most traditions, the archetype of Wisdom is female. It is not only the Hebraic wisdom that is feminine, but also the Gnostic, the Greek, the Native American, the Celtic. Men and gods desired Lady Wisdom, just as King Solomon desired the Queen of Sheba, who was the incarnation of Lady Wisdom for him. So, it makes sense that when women search for our life’s purpose, we discover our connection to Lady Wisdom within ourselves.
Excerpted with permission of the author from Wisdom’s Daughters: How Women Can Change the World by Cathy Pagano.
Cathy Pagano is a Jungian-trained psychotherapist, astrologer, certified women’s coach, dream worker, author, mother, and grandmother. Drawing on decades of study and practice in psychology, mythology, astrology, dreams, symbolic language and women’s spirituality, she helps individuals reconnect with the wisdom of the soul and discover deeper meaning, purpose, and personal transformation. www.cathypagano.com
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