Secret Garden of the Feminine

           Kicked out of the Garden

Awareness of our mythological connection to the Goddess is vital to the survival of the planet and all its children–the different species (plant, animal, and human). For too long we have lived with a creation mythology that has disconnected nature from humans. Our primary creation mythology in the West is one that expels us from the Garden and charges us with the task of dominating nature rather than being the caretakers of the earth. Western society is unique in that it is the only society given this divine edict–to dominate rather than care for our Mother, our planet. This same mythology also initiated the concept of hierarchy (including both sexism and racism) with the mandate of placing woman "under" man, and separating the light from the dark (a scripture often quoted by Ku Klux Klan members to justify separation of the races).[1]

This Western creation mythology is startling compared with findings that verify the existence worldwide of creation mythologies based on the Goddess that connect all of life and hold it sacred rather than separate and disparage life. "The Mother Goddess, wherever she is found, is an image that inspires and focuses a perception of the universe as an organic, alive and sacred whole, in which humanity, the Earth and all life on Earth participate as `her children.'  Everything is woven together in one cosmic web, where all orders of manifest and unmanifest life are related, because all share in the sanctity of the original source."[2] 

The cosmology that envisions all of life as connected like the strands of a web has been validated by the emergence of the new sciences; "for, beginning with Heisenberg and Einstein, physicists were claiming that in subatomic physics the universe could be understood only as a unity."[3]  For many people, the Goddess is now conceived not necessarily as inherently female, but in terms of what that feminine expression has embodied: the concept of life as a whole intricately woven together in sacred unity. This vision makes environmental activism not only desirable, but necessarily a religious responsibility. We were not kicked out of Gaia's garden; rather, we were given the charge to be caretakers of this amazing place we call Earth.

While ancient earth-loving societies can be termed matrifocal (social groups organized around women) and can certainly be classified as matrilineal (relationships descending through the female line), there is no evidence that they were ever matriarchal, that is, dominated–governed and ruled–by women. The womb, by virtue of its ability to birth both male and female, provides its own checks and balances of power. (When a woman, in a gender-healthy society, spends nine months gestating and growing a baby, then gives birth and nurses that human life from her own body, she does not then divide the genders and make one more valuable than the other.)  The early Goddess-worshiping, matrifocal societies therefore differ greatly in their values, ideals and relationships from the conquering, dominator societies that came later, those who worshiped warlike male deities.