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Embracing the Inner Goddess
By John Nutting and Jill Spring with extracts from The Shadow King by Dr Sidra Stone and Growing Awareness by John Bligh Nutting.
The Inner Goddess is not just another inner self. Rather she is a special partner of the Self Aware Grown Up adult. She embraces spirituality, femininity and sexuality in a positive and balanced way (and a way that males cannot fully understand). She may well be the most powerful of all personal energies and certainly in full flight is above any male self, including her arch rival the Inner Patriarch, hence the Inner Patriarch’s reaction to her - a reaction that includes fear and anger, more usually over-riding control and sometimes a patriarchal desire to totally suppress or destroy her.
Who is the Inner Patriarch?
Dr Sidra Stone, defines him as “the force which holds women back”. Both Hal and Sidra define him as another inner self but we prefer to unmask him as a “carried self”. Sidra regards his role as both positive and negative and speaks of “balancing” him. For us, those positive male qualities which Sidra speaks of as representing the Inner Patriarch’s attempts to protect, we see as already residing innately in women, in much the same way as the ancients represented them in the goddesses of their mythologies.
In dialoguing with the Inner Patriarch we have found that, unlike the other inner-selves, his presence and role have nothing to do with protection or reducing vulnerability; he has no concern for the female inner child and holds her in contempt. Frequently he expresses his willingness to see her suffer. His raison d’etre is his own, punitive power. John, when dialoguing with an Inner Patriarch recognises him as a “real” entity within the psyche, detectable almost by smell and certainly by the different energy he projects. Jill agrees that he resides in the psyche but perceives him as a more “cognitive” entity which has become lodged in women’s psyche through millennia of patriarchal systems.
We have found that before we can truly release the Goddess we need to deal with the Inner Patriarch. Since he is an interloper who does not belong in the village of protective sub-personalities or inner-selves we believe that banishment is the only effective sentence which can be passed.
The Goddesses or Archetypal Selves which Balance the Inner Patriarch
Writing on the Inner Goddess in The Shadow King Dr Sidra Stone lists several of the ancient goddesses as archetypal selves which the aware adult woman calls upon to balance the power of the Inner Patriarch.
From western mythology, Hera, the only married goddess on Olympus and wife of Zeus, derives her power from her marriage to the most powerful male. This power is highly acceptable to the Inner Patriarch. Hera knows the value of a powerful male and while she is unhappy about her husband’s infidelities she tolerates them. She fights to preserve the status quo and the power it gives her. History is replete with examples of Hera in action, perhaps most recently those of Jackie Onassis and Hilary Clinton.
Hestia is a virgin goddess yet she carries traditional feminine qualities. She is the goddess of comfortable, safe and happy home life. Yet she chooses not to marry and balances the Inner Patriarch by giving women independence and control over their lives in a feminine, home-oriented manner.
Athena, daughter of Zeus, sprang fully-formed from his forehead. Not surprisingly she is the Goddess of wisdom, reason and strategy and gives her name to the city, still upheld as centre to the most advanced socio-political system in the ancient western world. Athena does not form sexual or emotional relationships with men but she can talk with them in their own language and deal with them on their own terms. Because of her rational power the Inner Patriarch is satisfied to let her handle matters on her own.
Artemis, the virgin huntress, carries the “natural” woman’s primal power, as outlined in Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola-Este. She is wild, undomesticated, instinctual and unsubservient to male rules, living as she does by her own. She is the protector of the animal world, virginity and women in childbirth. She possesses skills of cool objectivity, planning and focused implementation. She accesses her own immense power but is not unfeminine. The Inner Patriarch is quietened and leaves her alone.
From India comes Kali, the supreme mother goddess. She also possesses the power to destroy what she has created, hence her visual representation with her necklace of human heads, smiling as she dances upon the dead or drinking blood from a human skull. Hers is the power which offers women strength to assert their right in owning decisions over their own bodies. Unleashed, she makes no deals with the Inner Patriarch; she over-rides him.
The Meta-Goddess - Aphrodite
We have devoted a special section for this goddess since we view her as a meta-goddess balancing all the goddess energies. She is quintessential woman and in ancient Greek mythology the goddess of beauty, attraction,sexuality and love. She expects to be honoured and worshipped but never used by men. She will not tolerate exploitation. We have seen her depiction in Greek statuary, in paintings by so many artists from Leonardo da Vinci, Goya, Picasso to Norman Lindsay and in possibly her most spiritual evocation, Rodin's Eternal Idol. She embodies the essence of female power at its most potent. She is most feared by the Inner Patriarch and the outer patriarchy. For her, there is no need for deference to either. She is the Inner Goddess.
The knowledge, experience and wisdom carried by this Goddess goes back far, far into time, to the earliest days of civilisation, to a time when woman was probably the more powerful of the species in terms of her sexual and spiritual energy and her understandings of the mysteries of the female psyche. Within her she holds great magic. Her combined spirituality and femininity can be quite overwhelming and can terrify males who try to face her in a struggle for power.
Hal and Sidra Stone refer to the Inner Goddess by her mythical Greek name ‘Aphrodite’ as we do also. They also recognise that as part of the balance between all energies there is an inner female self in most males.
However, the inner female energy in men is not the same as that of the Inner Goddess. Rachel Swift in Women’s Pleasure suggests that part of the Goddess’s mystery lies in the fact that woman is one of the few species to experience female orgasm and perhaps the only species in which the female is capable of serial or multiple orgasms. At the dawn of civilisation this would have added to her power over the male and suggests a reason why males came to fear the sexual side of the Inner Goddess.
The history of the Inner Goddess, at least since the fall of the Celtic and Mayan civilisations, certainly shows suppression by males. Mary Jane Sherfey in The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality takes this idea further hypothesising that female sexual and spiritual superiority was originally the norm in tribal societies. This was seen by men as a direct threat to their ascendancy to their intended position as the more powerful of the species and as society developed, every aspect of female power, including the Goddess was seen as a disruptive influence and ruthlessly suppressed.
Perhaps the saddest outcome from this is the typically patriarchal belief that if a female has a different spiritual energy to that of a male, there must be something ‘not right’ about it. Yet it stands to reason that a woman having so many other different energies might also find her spiritual energy, and her connection with a Higher Self including some additional strengths that males do not possess.
However, if a female’s spiritual or Goddess powers proved greater than a male’s, in the past, the standard male answer was to declare those spiritual powers ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ and to force her, instead to embrace the male’s spirituality. Refusal to do this, in many cases, meant death.
The Inner Patriarch is the one self most concerned with the disowning of the Inner Goddess, and after some 10,000 years he has been more than successful in this task.
Dr. Sidra Stone, in The Shadow King talks of the many ways an Inner Patriarch can set about stifling signs of Goddess energy, early in the life of a young girl and ensuring that it never develops. She explains how, if the girl’s mother has an active Inner Patriarch, then it too will help with the work.
Before long the girl’s own Inner Patriarch is born, ready to work from within, helping her to disown her Goddess, using fear, shame and guilt, the Goddess’s greatest enemies and ready, when she has children of her own, to pass the same negative judgements about the Goddess on to the next generation.
Dialogue with an Inner Goddess
Although the Inner Patriarch is intent on controlling the Inner Goddess she can never be fully suppressed. The most he is able to achieve is her exile.
Sidra Stone describes the rich experience for women who have maintained connection or been reunited with their Inner Goddess, the Aphrodite self:
If a woman truly knows her Aphrodite nature, she has had her birthright returned to her. She will be able to enjoy herself as a woman. She will feel good about her body and enjoy the sensual pleasures of life. She will attract others to her and enjoy this attraction . She will not be apologetic.
We agree that she is not apologetic since we see her as supreme in her power and above the dictates of men.
Voice dialogue offers a golden opportunity to work with clients who have maintained a connection with their Inner Goddess. However, she cannot be “facilitated” in the normal way.
Frankly, she doesn’t ‘need’ anyone to interview her. However, if she has been seriously disowned by a strong self like the Inner Patriarch, a facilitator can certainly play a part in restoring her to her place beside the aware adult.
When facilitating any disowned or hidden self, a facilitator must ensure that the environment is safe. So it is during an “audience” with the Inner Goddess. In a group setting, all Inner Patriarchs in the room need to be under the control of their Self Aware Grown Up adults before the process begins. Very importantly, a facilitator must be free of any agendas or judgement, particularly male bias. Only then can the richness of the moment be enjoyed as facilitator and group meet her face-to-face.
While the Inner Patriarch may have controlled the Goddess, he has never succeeded in fully suppressing her. She may have been exiled but she has never lost her power. Many people feel that the next few years in this new millennium will mark the return of the Inner Goddess to her true position of power in the world.
It is our hope that others in all of our socio-political systems will recognise the gifts she offers. To this end, Jill has insisted the voice of John Nutting be heard as an injunction for all men to stand with him when she is returned:
I for one will welcome that and stand ready to dance with her, embrace her and worship her, as is her due.