From the Introduction

Who is the goddess? Who is she who sometimes replaces he in our prayers? Is Goddess any different from God in our inner pantheon or have we merely changed the nouns and pronouns? What are the attributes of the Goddess? Who is she as Mother, Virgin, Crone? How does she relate to the masculine? If we throw ourselves into the flames of desire and then dance with her in the refining fire, how will our everyday lives be changed? If we really do believe she holds the whole world in the palm of her love, how do we live with that sacramental truth at our center?

This book explores these questions concerning the unknown feminine figure who is appearing in the dreams of so many contemporary men and women. Many people dismiss dreams as speculative and anecdotal. However, for those of us who have lived in close touch with our dreams all our lives, they offer truth far beyond facts. They bring new perspectives and new understandings to our experience. Fred Alan Wolf, a theoretical physicist, claims that "dreaming is vital to our survival as a species and a necessary 'learning laboratory' wherein the self and the universe evolve. In brief, matter evolves through dreams."

This unknown figure whom so many people encounter in their sleep speaks to the psyche and to the very cells of the body. She seems to push through from the very depths of the collective unconscious like a universal force that speaks individually and culturally. Hopefully, this book will add to the pool of consciousness that is expanding around her.

Although she takes many different forms, this goddess—sometimes a Black Madonna or an Asian or Indian Madonna—always carries authority. She guides and advises and acts with absolute clarity, often with a startling sense of humor that delights in play. These moments in dreams or active imagination are filled with her compassion for our human situation. She is blunt, neither indulgent nor sentimental. She demands embodiment. Living in the creative intercourse between chaos and order, she calls us to enter into the dance of creation, "her love in her living body." She speaks to men as dearly as to women.

Both genders need a well-differentiated masculine and a well-differentiated feminine. The power structures of patriarchy have profoundly wounded both, making mature relationships almost impossible without hard psychic work. As a culture, we are presently stuck in the parental complexes. Many women have worked for years trying to find their own identity, freed from the mother and father complexes. Men, too, are working to find their own feeling values, values that are not dependent on pleasing or hating Mother and Father and all they represent. The archetype of the Black Madonna, or Lilith, or Mary Magdalene may be a way to freedom for both.

In writing this book, the authors have been very aware of the pitfalls of using the terms masculine and feminine. While these words are not synonymous with male and female, they unquestionably carry connotations that are so ingrained in our psyches that we consciously and unconsciously react to them with ancient gender prejudices. It would be a great relief to forget the words, but the fact remains that the balance of energies in the dream cannot be understood without a recognition of the interplay between the male and female figures. (The dream images are rooted in the instincts.) This interplay enacts the balance or lack of balance between the two complementary energies that are continually relating to each other within us and without, continually struggling to compensate for the one-sided world of consciousness. The Chinese yang and yin represent the two energies as two fish in a circle, each containing part of the other. The Hindus represent them as Shiva and Shakti, the universal lovers out of whose divine embrace everything is born. And in the Bible, the new paradigm is imaged as the New Jerusalem gradually taking shape throughout both the Old and New Testaments. In the final book, the New Jerusalem descends as a Bride to meet the Bridegroom in the divine marriage.

Part of the resistance to the words masculine and feminine lies in our inability to accept that each of us contains both masculine and feminine energy and that both energies are divine. We pay lip service to the concept consciously, but if we listen to ourselves, we hear the archaic, gendered, pigeon-holed thinking plop out of our mouths like an unexpected toad. For example, some men and women who accept the Goddess as equal to the God and proclaim her divinity in matter can still become angry if they hear femininity related to earth. At some unconscious level, they continue to relate femininity to earth, snake, Satan, dark, evil —all these words that keep femininity in a subordinate position, or worse, a diabolical one.

If we expand our consciousness a bit, we begin to see that our attitude to the Earth, to nature, and to our own bodies is radically shifting. In the dire consequences arising from the well-documented abuse of Earth, nature, and our bodies, we begin to see that they will no longer tolerate the tyranny of our control. They will no longer submit to the slavery to which we try to subject them. The Goddess is the life force in matter. She has laws that have now to be learned and obeyed. Her indwelling presence is the sacred energy, energy on which our egos have no legitimate claim. Confronted with this reality—a reality that is a confrontation with our own threatened survival—we realize that like Earth, nature, our bodies, we too are the vessels of an energy far greater than anything that tries to contain it. We realize that we, like the rest of nature, are participating members in the vast community of life, whose sacredness we must embrace if we are to survive. If we are ever to arrive at this expanded consciousness, we will have to surrender our ego desires to the wisdom of the Self. Masculine and feminine will have to learn to cherish each other. (It is important to note here that Self with a capital S in Jung's terminology refers to the divine within that mirrors the divine without; self with a small s refers to the individual self.)

Many times throughout the book, we have chosen to use the word transcendence referring to the masculine spirit, and immanence referring to the indwelling feminine. Neither of us is a theologian, but both of us can believe in the unknowable mystery sometimes called God, and we can see that mystery manifesting its radiance through every living form in every moment. Transcendence uniting with Immanence. If you go into your garden, you may feel yourself present in the divine embrace right there in the presence of a golden sunflower with a mandala for its center—the Immanence of the Transcendent in the flower. (If not here, where?) Each has to be separated out from the other before the magnetic pull of the opposites brings them together.

While we are clarifying words, we need also to note that patriarchy and masculinity are not synonymous. Female patriarchs can be just as domineering as males. Like their male counterparts, they live in a patriarchal ethos that operates through control over others, over themselves, over nature. We need to recognize also, that many men have a more finely honed femininity than many women. We all are the children of patriarchy and, therefore, we all have to take responsibility for a killer power shadow that would massacre the feminine and the masculine in whatever form they manifest. This book is not a defense of the feminine at the expense of the masculine. The one without the other leads to suicide or tyranny.

The historical data concerning the relationship of patriarchy to the feminine in Western culture has been well documented in other studies. The psychological implications of a few of the historical events of the past nine centuries have been included in chapter 1 in order to bring some added dimensions to the Black Madonna that lies buried in our depths. Psyche does not work on a basis of causality as history does. It does not respect temporal cause and effect patterns of everyday life. Sometimes historical facts illustrate psychological phenomena.

Historically, our Western concepts of feminine consciousness have been far too restricted to take in the Great Goddess as the majestic, empowered figure she once was. For most people today, femininity still has something to do with the social values that determine how a "lady" will act. That myopic vision makes it almost impossible for us to see the grandeur of the "thrones of wisdom" of the twelfth century. In Chartres Cathedral, for example, the great Goddess, Mary by name, sits on the cathedra, the throne of the cathedral. She is Wisdom, crowned with leaves. Enthroned on her knee is the young king, bearing in one hand the orb and raising two fingers of the other in blessing of her and the world. He is the Word made flesh, consciousness sitting on the lap of nature. Without the lap, consciousness is uprooted from its source, assuming a life of its own that can be self-devouring. It is as source that the lap is throne. The relationship between masculine and feminine is well balanced, if not on a physical scale, certainly on a psychic one.

Later, during the Renaissance, when the Christ figure became a suckling babe at the breast of the mother, the balance was dangerously upset in the direction of the tyranny of the feminine. The conventions of courtly love with its adoration of the feminine and the masculine putting itself in her service had intervened. Another aspect of the suckling babe is imaged in the pietas, in which the dead son lies in the lap of the Great Mother. History seldom, if ever, gets it right. The psyche, as a self-regulating system, yin and yang in perfect balance, is a vision that historically has yet to be realized. Even now, in the patriarchal excesses of militant feminism, we see in yet another swing of the pendulum, the failure to find the balance. In history, as in marriage, or within the individual, when a balance becomes stagnant, one or other of the energies moves out to new adventures. The spurt forces the complementary energy to move also, until a new balance is found. So the spiral moves.

In this book, we look at some of the history of the Goddess in order to orient ourselves in relation to the past. We look at contemporary dreams in an attempt to discern the quality of her energy, as it manifests today. We look at some of the recent scientific discoveries concerning the "light in matter." Because the Goddess in her virgin aspect carries the transformative energy, some of the recent findings of psychoneuroimmunology related to the transformation of energy bring new meaning to metaphors. Hopefully, new thoughts and new connections will open new eyes and new ears to what it means to worship the Goddess. Perhaps, too, by recognizing the dawning of feminine energy that is moving in the collective psyche, we may catch more of our own personal dreams and ask ourselves again, "What is conscious femininity?" What does the balance of masculine and feminine as a self-regulating system operating in both men and women look like?