Rise of the Feminine
Page 15, "The Search for The Beloved - Journeys in Mythology and Sacred Psychology" by Jean Houston.
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The Rise of The Feminine
The patriarchy's time has run out. What new cultural pattern will secure for humanity a new lease on life on Earth ?
(Edward C. Whitmont, "Return of the Goddess", New York:Crossroad. '82, p. viii)We are standing attendant at a phenomenon that is too deep to be denied, too necessary to be negated. Fifty-two % of the human race is about to join in as full partners in the business of humans affairs. An exclusisve peroccupation with child-bearing and -rearing has reached its completion as the earth quickly approaches her saturation point in human density.
If the earth is indeed a living organism and its nervous system is nearly in place, then women's roles must necessarily be greatly expanded in all fields of human endeavour, both to allay population growth and to make woman available for the complex requirements of the emerging planetary culture. The "noosphere" of the Teilhard de Chardin may be more real than mythic. The global mind-field may be closer than we think. And essential to its happening may be the rich mind style of woman, now ready to emerge after centuries of gestation in the womb of preparartory time. This emergence is perhaps the most important event of the last five thousand years, and its consequences may well have an immense, unimaginable effect on cultural evolution. The emergence of the genius of female sensibility and potential is a s critical to the issue of human survival as it is confusing to the traditional styles and standards of most cultures.
There is no turning back from the fact that women are now joining men in full partnership in the domain of the human agenda. As this parnership develops, not only will men be released from the old polarities of gender that force them into limited and limiting roles, but qualities of intelligence will be added to the human mind-pool that will render most previous problem solving obsolete. Linear, sequential solutions will yeild to the knowing that comes from seeing things in whole gestalts, in constellations, rather than in discrete facts. The appreciation of PROCESS will be celebrated along with the seeking of end goals.
Cultures in which the female archetype is powerful emphasize being rather than doing, deepening rather than producing and achieving. Such cultures are nonheroic; they tend to make things work, cohere, grow. If for a hundred thousand years you've been stirring the soup with one hand holding the baby with the other, kicking off the woolly mastadon with one foot and rocking a cradle with the other, watching out for the return of the hunters with one eye and determining with the other on which cave wall you will paint a magic bison, then you are going to develop a very complex consciousness. This is a consciousness that is extraordinarly well adapted to orchestrating the muliple variables of the modern world.
Philosophically, in the reality of the feminine archetype, Great Nature is just as important within as it is without. The principle of the "unus mundus", the unified reality stream, is operative here, the realm of inwardness has much ontological status as the external world has. The feminine principle expresses itself as an unfolding of levels of existence, not as the conquest of facts."