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The
Mother
“The
mother, as C. G. Jung noted more than half a century ago, is
the single most significant archetype, or energy-laden
image, we hold in our psyche. For the mother is our first
experience in the world. It is in her womb that we first
hear the sounds of the external environment. It is through
her vagina that we emerge from the relative darkness of her
body into the brightness of the outer world. It is the
warmth of her skin that we feel before anything else. It is
the milk from her breasts that satisfies our hunger and
thirst and brings us comfort. It is her soothing words or
songs that lull us to sleep. For the first few years of our
life, it is the mother who takes care of our every need, who
instructs us in being human, who nurtures and guides our
rapid growth.
Even in
our modern society, where mothering is often done by adults
other than one's birth mother, the significance of the
maternal experience is nevertheless a formative one. Our
mother image determines to a considerable extent how we
relate to other women, to other people in general, to life
as a whole, and even to our own body.
In
Jungian terms, the archetype of the mother goes beyond our
individual experience. It is anchored in the collective
unconscious, which extends beyond our personal biography.
From this perspective, even test-tube babies have an
built-in mother archetype. Jung's theory of archetypes is of
course controversial, but we need not rely on it to
understand the significance of the mother for the
overwhelming majority of people, regardless of culture,
gender, race, or creed.
The
mother "happens" to us at the most impressionable period of
our life. Similarly, when we look back upon the childhood of
humanity, the time of the paleolithic and early neolithic,
what we find in the religious or spiritual domain is an
overwhelming concern with the mother-the Clan Mother, who is
none other than the Earth Mother, the Great Female who gives
birth to humans and all other beings and things, who is
responsible for the cycles of Nature, and on whom we all
depend for our life. It is here, if we follow Jung in his
line of thought, that we must locate the origins of the
mother archetype.
Considering the primordial nature of the mother archetype,
it is not surprising that it surfaces in many, if not most,
religious traditions of the world-even those that are
pronouncedly patriarchal. Perhaps the most striking example
of a patriarchal religious tradition with a prominent mother
image is Catholicism. The Virgin Mary, who is worshipped as
the all-holy mother of Jesus and "Queen of Heaven," is a
potent archetype for millions of Christians. She is hailed
as the New Eve who brings not death, as did the old Eve, but
immortal life. Faith in Mary has in recent years been
strengthened by the Marian apparitions at Guadalupe
(Mexico), Lourdes (France), and Fatima (Portugal).
Few
Christians are aware of the strong historical and symbolic
connection between Marian worship and the veneration of
earlier, non-Christian mother-goddesses such as Isis or
Diana.
The
Divine Mother is an image that has long been blurred and
even altogether buried by patriarchal conceptions of the
ultimate Reality as Father and Creator. After Nietzsche, we
even declared the death of that patriarchal God, taking
recourse to more abstract notions of the Divine. But our
abstractions generally fail to feed us with inspiration and
hope, and so we feel peculiarly adrift and ill at ease.
Thus the
living spiritual traditions of the East, which have
challenged and enriched our Western heritage millennium
after millennium, hold a strong attraction for many of us.
It is there, and especially in the tradition of Hinduism,
that the image of the Divine Mother shines with undiminished
brightness, as it has ever since the dawn of human
civilization.
Hinduism
recognizes the existence of beings whose consciousness is
steeped in the Divine but who are yet endowed with a human
body. These great beings are the "incarnations," or avataras,
who are not simply advanced human beings, or superb mystics
who have attained union with the Divine through steadfast
spiritual discipline. Rather they are beings descended from
the radiance of the Divine, who have taken on human form to
aid the spiritual maturation of humanity.”
The
Mother
http://www.yrec.org/mother.html
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