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The Dark Goddess
The Dark Goddess is no lightweight. She promises trouble, an end to form as we have
know it, the death of the ego. Her mythology suggests that she is venomous, wrathful,
outraged, awake and on fire. She is impersonal, yet she erupts form deep within the
human psyche with unexpected passion and rage. She is transformation in the
extreme, and her power is regenerative and healing. Like a trickster, she frees us from
the trappings that bind us to your tiny personal worlds; like a knife she cuts away all
that is inessential and untruthful. She shatters structure, disintegrates the personality,
destroys form. She liberates and saves, heals and frees.
There is an inherent problem with the reappearance of the Dark Goddess in the
world today, and more personally in women's individual lives. When she was
repressed, and her priestesses disempowered, she was also "demonized" by the new
ruling elite. What had always belonged to Her was the power to interpret and carry
out "natural law" in individual and community lives. The powers of life and death
were hers, and we humans approached her with awe and respect. When female roles
were replaced by male priests and shamans and temples became places where rules
and regulations were made and held as 'commandments', the Dark Goddess was
maligned and made evil.
Women carry this malignant definition of female power in our cells today. When the
Dark Goddess begins to erupt in us, instead of rage at the wrongs that have been
done, many women feel guilty and ashamed, as if something 'demonic' were
awakening within them. What is this terrible force that makes a woman scream at
her lover, rage at the authorities, and rail at God? When the Dark Goddess enters into
the lives of even the most 'ordinary' women, She turns them into troublemakers.
Certainly the world around us defines Her presence as demonic and destructive. Little
old ladies march for abortion; mothers and housewives leave the fold and take up
with 'uppity' women; women of all ages and types stop being 'nice'. If ever there was
a revolutionary deity, the Dark Goddess is it!
I love the Dark Goddess – worship her, pledge allegiance to the changes She would
bring in my life and others – yet when She visits my life, I feel as if I am in an
earthquake, a volcano, a tidal wave of terrible proportions. And through Her
visitations come the ability to "feel" – on a visceral level, in the body – the creative
power and expression of the earth itself. As She says "no no no!" no to what was; and "yes yes yes!" yes to
what isn't quite yet, She forces us to jump the inevitable gap between the past and the
future.