Rediscovering the Goddess
Finding the Feminine in Feminism
Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains. These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions.
Today's topic is going to explore something that I think is drastically missing from feminism: the feminine. It’s a complicated topic that has to peel back some sensitive layers, biases, history, and politics to uncover the core of the feminine.
Introduction
To be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man.
This sentence is how I’d characterize the current zeitgeist of feminist theory pervading today’s Western culture. First-wave feminism was focused on giving women legal rights as equal persons. The Second Wave focused on achieving social equality. I believe the Third Wave has actually abandoned the feminine and treated the unique idiosyncrasies of the female as a liability.
Yes, I did just pull the pin and drop that grenade but it’s such a crucially important topic that we need to rip the bandaids off quickly and get into the mess. As background for why I care so much, I’m a father of two daughters and raising them has made me a feminist. But I’m more of a second-wave feminist because I believe we’ve currently lost focus on the value that women bring to the world.
Indistinguishable
Pregnancy places almost the entire burden of reproduction on women. Once the seed is planted, women do all the work. It’s no mean feat and it is one of the largest impediments to a woman’s ability to compete with men in the workplace. In fact, after adjusting for experience, role, and other variables, what we refer to as the gender pay gap is actually a motherhood gap. Women who don’t have children generally remain competitive with men in the workforce.
Yet this entire conversation is predicated on a gross assumption that the way men engage in the economy is, by default, the more valued.
Think about that again.
Almost everything, every profession, any position, any task, is first and foremost measured by how a man can do it and then by how women are able to meet that expectation or not.
Society has subconsciously staked a claim that anything masculine is of higher value than anything feminine. It’s something we’ve poked at a little bit in Eliminating Bias in AI/ML when we found that AI resume readers scored masculine characteristics higher than feminine and how Google’s culture is based around nerdy, white, males.
It's not that women were being intentionally devalued. It’s that everyone had just accepted that the stereotypical male behavior and culture was the measure of success. This was clearly evident by the general condemnation of James Danmore and his infamous ‘Google Memo’ that suggested women might not want to work under the same expectations as men. Everyone just assumed that was the best way.
This bias manifests in some crazy ways where we can now prevent pregnancy with birth control and we can mute the menstrual cycle through hormones. The biological difference between men and women has begun to narrow… toward the masculine.1 The narrowing is more than just biology. There’s a burgeoning pop psychology that suggests women need to embrace a ‘girl boss feminism’ that extends beyond ordinary confidence into what some call a ‘lunatic confidence’ creating a bar few women can achieve.
We push women into roles that focus on things and away from roles focusing on people while the science shows a clear preference for the reverse. A female scientist is celebrated; a stay-at-home mother never makes Forbes 30 under 30. No one complains about an overrepresentation of women in healthcare and social sciences but their reduced representation in STEM is called problematic. It boils down to what can be summarized as one very questionable value judgment: We have generally accepted that to be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man.
The Goddesses
Yet it was not always so. Throughout time and across cultures we celebrated the feminine divine; the Goddesses. These characters played a significant role in ancient myth and the Goddeses were equally the agents of all transformations. Equal but different. Joseph Campbell wrote about the character of the feminine in the book Goddesses - Mysteries of the Feminine Divine:
“The thing to note is that all these female figurines are simply naked, whereas the male figures in all the caves are represented in some kind of garment, dressed as shamans. The implication is that in embodying the divine, the female operates in her own character, simply in her nature, while the male magic functions not from the nature of the men’s bodies but from the nature of their roles in the society.
This brings out a very important point for the whole history of the female in mythology: She represents the nature principle. We are born from her physicaly. The male, on the other hand represents the social principle and social roles.”
If we measure the success of a modern woman by her ability to be undifferentiable from a man, we have abandoned the feminine divine, we have deleted her natural character and garbed her in the value proposition of the man. We have also established the expectation that a woman must manifest herself as the extreme success of the vestments and hierarchies of the masculine.
I don’t have to be much of a feminist to say that this seems like an absurd value proposition. It’s also especially self-defeating because it blindly accepts that the masculine structures are defacto not only better but the ultimate aspiration for humans. Even worse, we haven’t just devalued the feminine, we are attempting to delete it.
But women aren’t men.
And throughout history, they’ve been celebrated because of that difference. She appears as Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Persephone, Athena, Hera, Hecate, The Three Graces, the Nine Muses, the Furies, Isis, Ishtar, Inanna, Astarte, and more. Her role is aligned to Gaia - Mother Earth and as such plays a crucial role in saving cultures from the foibles that men got themselves into.
And the feminine power is incredible. Back to the book Goddesses:
In Crete, the principle divinity was the Goddess. She stands with the double-ax in each hand. The ax of sacrifice is called the labrys, after which the labyrinth itself is named. The Labrys is the prime symbol of Crete, a double-headed ax with a lunar curve — you can’t have something new unless something old is going to die. So she’s the goddess of death in the end as well as of birth in the beginning. Death and birth belong together. With the labrys in her hand, the Mother Goddess stands clearly dominant, and the blood spilled in sacrifice is the mother’s, whether it’s animal sacrifice or human sacrifice. The principal sacrificial animal was the bull — always male. One did not sacrifice female animals, as the female is not that which dies and is resurrected: she is that which carries death to resurrection — she is the transformer.
The things men build are simple. They are clear, structured, and knowable. Maybe this is what makes them easy to focus on as things to attain. Yet more time has been spent in philosophy and religion on trying to understand the feminine than any masculine structure. It’s not so neatly ordered and it’s not clear. It’s an enigma that we get but don’t get. It’s an enigma that we are completely ignoring these days. It’s much easier to just ignore the mess, hide it with hormones, psychotropic drugs, and career demands, and pretend there’s no difference.
Reclaiming the Feminine Divine
I wish I knew the answer to this. I want legal and social equality for women. Yet these past 50 years have put a value proposition in place that I just can’t accept where anything masculine is valued and aspired to and anything feminine is more often considered a liability to the former.
Even those women who are successful under that value proposition often yearn for something else. My wife,
is an Electrical and Computer Engineer and worked in aerospace before we had children. She was surrounded by strong and capable women. Yet, as her friend group began to have children, these women shifted from aerospace engineering to child rearing where they often became teachers whether paid or homeschooled. Lisa is still surrounded by these strong and capable women and each of them would agree that the masculine-dominated roles of engineering weren’t as fulfilling as what they do now.There has to be something more to this situation than the cursory, simple, yet often wrong idea we’ve come to accept. It might be more chaotic, it might challenge our preconceptions and what we’ve been told to value, but I think we are losing the feminine in our current zeitgeist.
Right now I think it’s just appropriate to name the challenge and introduce what we may be overlooking. I’m also not a woman to have a full internalization of what this means. I can say, that as a man, I’m confident that we need to reclaim the feminine divine and stop chasing the perverse illusion that masculine structures and vestiments are more valuable.
Lisa's take is more pragmatic. She sees the problem and yet has never felt compelled to chase what she doesn’t want. Why is she a stay-at-home mother? Because she didn’t want to pay someone else to raise her kids. I didn’t ask her to do this. I’ve always ensured she knows that if she ever wanted to go back nothing is stopping her. She has chosen to embrace her nature and is a strong and capable woman, mother, and engineer. (I think she’s a Goddess)
For the rest of society, I think the first step is to start with the value proposition. What do we celebrate today that isn’t masculine in nature? Are we comfortable with the nature of the feminine in who she is? Why do we constantly push the vestiments of the masculine structures on their already complete form? Does our society value the feminine divine?
If you completely disagree I also want to hear from you. This whole study is part of a journey that humanity has struggled with for millennia and so, I’m far from confident we have fully understood it.
Edit: 1/28/24 It came to my attention after this essay came out that there are other voices on this topic that should also be highlighted namely
writing. I’d be remiss to not append it here.
Edit 8/23/24: Adding another voice is
with this fantastic piece:
Rediscovering the Goddess became a foundational element in Integration: Book Two of The Singularity Chronicles as the AI try to reconcile what it means to have human emotions, experiences, and thoughts divorced from a human body.
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A fantastic example of this is from comedian Taylor Tomlinson in a clip about wanting to get off birth control “cause I’d love to meet me.” demonstrating what many female friends have mentioned when they stopped the pill after being on it from most of their post-pubescent lives.
 | A guest post by
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What a great read! And here's a piece that says essentially the same thing, by Anju Joy in her Unpopular Psychology Substack. She explains how pop psych celebrates women CEOs as the ultimate personifications of all feminist goals - yet doesn't have much to say about stay-at-home mums.
It's called Fault Feminism. https://unpopularpsychology.substack.com/p/faulty-feminism
This is spot on. I have been thinking about this for years and have noticed trends that support your idea. I am going to apologize upfront because I am not a good writer, so please let me know if something I write does not come across clearly or make sense. I tend to be a macro thinker and experiencer and my intuitive senses notice things as anomalies and then speculate about the meaning of what I notice. If you are familiar at all with Iain McGilcrist his theories propose that the modern world as we know it has become the product of a right hemispheric brain bias. The neuroscience supports the theory that right hemispheric brain activity tends to be more aligned with the masculine. It tends toward predictability and efficiency and has little room for anything contrary to its own perceptions. We experience something, and our left hemisphere jumps right in and tries to interpret it for us. The research has shown that the right hemisphere if allowed to, has a more accurate interpretation of reality. The right hemisphere is more associated with creativity and intuition and is more associated with things natural to women. An example of how this shows up can be seen in architecture. In the pre-modern world, you see beauty as central to the construction of spaces. Grand Cathedrals with very inefficient motifs were seen as an extension of the human desire to connect the human to the felt experience of a place and how that stirs the inner senses(feminine). This can be seen all through Europe to this day. If you contrast that with the growth of the West and the Capitalistic spirit, you find buildings that feel like prisons. They are cold and efficient spaces that cater to the bottom line of profit. They are not meant to inspire any deeper sense of things at all. The deeper senses that people have are studied by marketers and are considered profit centers.
In the Christian spiritual traditions, you can see this. Besides the places of worship changing and becoming more masculine, you can see it in the tradition's disappearance of the Mother of Jesus. Mary used to play a very significant role in mediating the Christian experience. Intensely dogmatic hierarchies crush the feminine and more mystical side of the tradition and tend towards control of both the system and the narrative. Things like relics, the reality of angels, the actual presence of Christ in the communion elements etc, are virtually non-existent in the Protestant world.
The flat earth movement puzzled me until I read some of the content and watched some documentaries. In reality, it was more about pushing back on material science and moving toward a world where experience of things is more important than knowledge about things. After all, we don't experience the earth as round. We experience it as flat. Many people in that movement don't care about the science and don't take themselves that seriously.
If you take your point to be true, you can also see this in how our culture is railing against masculine hierarchy and blaming men for thriving in a system suited for them. To be at the top of these hierarchical systems is seen as a high achievement. Whatever your feeling about Jordan Peterson is, he has pointed this out repeatedly. I would propose that the abuse of power and the corrupting effect of power can be equally present in women. The system itself has that effect, and in a world where virtue and character are not encouraged, you will have people who are ill-prepared to handle power and the glory that comes with high positions.
The desire for equilibrium in perception and experience will continue to trend until we achieve some sort of balance between feminine and masculine sensibilities and we are able to celebrate both equally.
The folks talking about re-enchantment have their finger on this, in my opinion.
If you take this as true, things like you are noticing start to show up everywhere.
More people will be drawn to nature and the wild feminine. The occult with rise and a trend toward more Eastern spiritual traditions that will displace Western Christianity.
Pagan earth religions and witchcraft will grow in popularity. You are already seeing this with teen girls declaring themselves to be witches.
Anyway, I suppose I carried on too long here. I have noticed many other things on this topic, but I think I have already said more than I needed to. I am very excited to see how your new book emerges. I think I need to grab the first one today and start reading it.