Mother Goddess

I really wanted to write a blog about the mother goddess and her place in Modernity (said in a really pretentious, smelly fart way). I was on the verge of doing it on Monday, then on Tuesday, then on Wednesday after class, then Today, and now I appear to be trying to do it. What I really wanted to say in so many words is that people are too caught up in the minutia of daily life, of numbers, words, and essentially, that they are an individual.

In the West, we are cut off from holistic world. And this is what the Mother Goddess really represents, a wholeness of the cosmos--we are cells making up a wider body, sand on a beach, drops of water in the ocean. The focus of our life is the single point, the head lights of our eyes, the male orgasm (now I am getting new age-y, damn). The Mother Goddess, on the other hand, is the subconscious mind (the super conscious as Alan Watts likes to put it). It's the sense of knowing something that we shouldn't, how we drive a car when we are talking to somebody, how we breath, how we beat our hearts, how we grow our hair--things we do without knowing how we do it...

The Mother Goddess is matter--the word eventually deriving to mother. She is everything and impossible to describe except through myth. William Blake wrote in his The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, "The ancient poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & numerous senses could perceive." The mother Goddess does and does not fit into this role. Whereas the other "more male" gods started deviding the universe amongst themselves, the Mother Goddess and her son (the eternal dying-and-rising god) were the universe. She is the undivided universe, a sense that Modern Man has such a hard time perceiving. The cycles, the interconnectedness, are lost in our grand cities supplied by Walmart, ConocoPhillips, and lubricated with ersatz fiat money. It's the vapid world of modernity, where nothing really makes sense. The need to reconnect with a spiritual "wholeness" is overpowering. Everyone longs to die, to return to a non-chaotic state. I read an article that said low income families are less likely to be depressed if they have a window that looks out on greenery. Another article that explores similar healing properties of nature is this one. The researchers discovered that people, "who watched the nature images scored significantly lower on extrinsic life aspirations, and significantly higher on intrinsic life aspirations, [...] like deep and enduring relationships, or working toward the betterment of society." Any sort of natural setting seems to help stressed minds. Why is this? It is nature's ability to remind us that we can just exist, that some day we will leave this chaotic condition, that we we were once in the Garden of Eden, that we were once whole. It is much easier to be a rock than a human... The Mother Goddess reminds us that we are not individuals, that we are all playing willfully in a grand illusion. Her dying son-husband (Osiris, the Green Man, Dionysus-Bacchus, Adonis) is an analogy for the seasons...

This is what myth does so well--it shows how all of it is connected in a mass framework. Shakespeare was also making his own, which Dr. Sexson was talking of in class. I think I get it.