Sekhmet, the Ancient Egyptian Lionheaded Goddess Kali-Ma, Hindu Destroyer Goddess
The goddesses of transformative wrath are markedly different from the goddesses of wisdom that we met in the preceding chapters. They come to the fore when it is time to take action to change an unacceptable situation, when enough is enough. These are goddesses who were called forth when male gods or men were not able to defeat evil and only a powerful goddess was equal to the task. The most prominent goddesses of transformative wrath are depicted as nonhuman in appearance. The Egyptian goddess Sekhmet has the head of a lion and the body of a woman. Kali-Ma, the Hindu goddess, has a frightful inhuman face and a many-armed woman’s body.
I include them as crone archetypes because they come into this phase of women’s lives. Gloria Steinem has frequently observed that women become more radical as they get older. Men are likely to be radicals in their youth, and upholders of conservatism later in life. In their personal lives and political thinking, crones appear radical when they act upon what they know and feel. They may end long-standing dysfunctional marriages. They may fire authoritarian experts and take medical and financial reins into their own hands. In the political sphere, they may look around at how men are running things and become outraged at the tolerance of evil or the indifference to suffering. Sekhmet/Kali arises in them and fuels their determination to bring about change.
These archetypes of transformative wrath are most effective when balanced by wisdom. Without wisdom, they can be destructive to the woman and others. Rage without wisdom feeds on itself and makes a woman fear she is going crazy or out of control, and some do. The abused wife who doused the marital bed with gasoline and set her sleeping husband afire and killed him, and the mother of a sexually abused son who took a gun into the courtroom and shot the perpetrator are extreme examples. It is uncomfortable to grapple with intense feelings of wrath and hostility, especially after a lifetime of accommodation and making the best of it. However, when such is the case in crone-aged women, there are other strong archetypes that can balance and contain these raw feelings.
With wisdom, the goddesses of transformative wrath are not unleashed in outbursts of rage, nor acted upon impulsively. With wisdom, anger is channeled into a commitment to bring about change, and a determination to find the best way. With wisdom, blame and shame do not immobilize or divert a woman from facing the truth or being angry. And when wise strategy and outrage come together, an older woman is transformed into a formidable crone.
SEKHMET, THE LIONHEADED GODDESS
No Greek goddess had the attributes and power of Sekhmet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of divine order. She was a protectress with the strength and ability to spring upon evildoers and transgressors. Egyptian gods and goddesses often were either visualized in an animal form or with the head of an animal, unlike the divinities of the ancient Greeks who were portrayed as idealized human beings. Sekhmet had the head of a lion and the body of a woman. She was a goddess of wrath and a goddess of peace. Her name means simply “the powerful.”
Sekhmet was one of the triad of powerful Memphite divinities with her husband Ptah and her father, the sun god Ra. Memphis had become the administrative capital of Egypt after the unification of north and south kingdoms, around 3000 B.C.E. Sekhmet was adopted by the pharaohs as a symbol of their own unvanquishable heroism in battle. As such, she was portrayed as the goddess who breathed fire against pharaoh’s enemies, expressing his wrath toward those who rebelled against him.
No other deity of ancient Egypt was represented by so many large and impressive statues. Close to six hundred were placed at Karnak, and a great many others were erected nearer the Nile at Thebes during the reign of Amenhotep III (18th Dynasty, 1411–1375 B.C.E.). Sekhmet’s statues were made of dark basalt or black granite, both igneous rocks—solidified volcanic magma—that were appropriate for a fierce or fiery goddess. In her mythology, she did not initiate or provoke conflict, but when the divine order was threatened and the gods called upon Sekhmet for help, she responded with the direct savagery of a protective lioness.
Most of the existing statues of Sekhmet are in museums. There was one, however, that I saw at the ancient temple site of Karnak in an insignificant-looking building not usually visited by the hordes of tourists who come daily. When I entered the small room in which she stands, I gazed at this statue of a standing Sekhmet and felt as if I were in the presence of a powerful and protective figure. I was traveling with a small group of women and each of us felt as though we had entered a sanctuary.
This Sekhmet was a tall figure made of dark smooth basalt stone. She stood on a base that hugged the ground; the tallest among us reached barely to her shoulder. Her lioness face was not only peaceful but kind. She wore emblems of power on her head, a large representation of a solar disk with the standing cobra (uraeus) before it. Her human body was slender with small breasts. She grasped an ankh, a symbol of eternal life in her right hand, which was at her side. In her left hand, extended immediately in front of her body, she held the stem of a tall papyrus, a heraldic plant of north Egypt. The small room she inhabited was bare of any ornamentation. The only source of light was the sun, which streamed through a small aperture in the ceiling into the dim room.
When we entered the chamber, the sun’s position overhead was such that an intense beam of sunlight fell across the front of Sekhmet. First it illuminated her face, and then, as the sun moved across the sky, the beam of light traveled down her body. One woman in our group, who learned as a child to look after herself because no one would protect her from violence in her alcoholic family, instinctively sat down at the feet of Sekhmet and leaned up against her body, and as she sat there, the beam of sunlight moved across her hair. She looked like a little girl and, in her stillness, she and Sekhmet formed a tableau. She stayed there for some time, and told us later that she had felt young and safe, and had not wanted to leave.
This was my introduction to Sekhmet. I saw her as a serene and strong feminine figure, a maternal protector, in whose presence a youngster was safe. But with the head of a lion, I could also imagine her ferocity, the attribute for which she is known best. As a goddess of divine order, Sekhmet was called upon to bring balance back into the world, to overcome the destructive and evil forces that threatened that order when no other divinity, including the most powerful male divinities, could. In Sekhmet’s most famous myth, “The Destruction of Mankind,” once this ferocity was called forth, and her wrath unleashed against evildoers, she became intoxicated by the aggression. On a rampage and overcome by madness, she could not be controlled or contained. Finally, she was tricked into drinking a mind-altering potion, which restored her sanity. The story that I retell here is found in most accounts of Sekhmet, among which Robert Masters’s version1 was the most helpful.
The Myth of Sekhmet and the Destruction of Mankind
The gods had given men powers so that they could flourish on earth and become great, but instead of gratitude for these gifts and reverence for the gods, mankind plotted to overthrow them. They blasphemed against Ra, the sun, who with other ancient divinities was present in the primeval waters before there was life. Evil priests and magicians conspired to use the very powers the gods had given them to destroy the gods. Ra heard their plans and called the gods together to decide what to do.
They decided that Sekhmet, “the force against which no force prevails,” should manifest on earth to bring an end to the rebellion. They called her forth to punish those with evil thoughts and wicked plots. So she walked among the evildoers and destroyed them. With the ferocity of a rampaging lioness, she slaughtered humans, tore their bodies apart, and drank their blood. The carnage went on. Her rage fed on itself and she became intoxicated on human blood. Then the gods realized that she had to be stopped before she destroyed all human life, but none had the power to restrain her.
So Ra had certain plants brought to him, from which powerful mind-altering drugs could be brewed, and sent them to the god Setki, who added these to a mixture of beer and red ochre. Setki filled seven thousand enormous jars with this mixture and took them to a place where Sekhmet would pass. There he poured out the contents, inundating the earth and filling the fields with what appeared to be blood. When Sekhmet came with her bloodthirst, she thought that it was blood and drank her fill, which calmed her mind. After this, she no longer was bent on destroying mankind.
Sekhmet then rejoined the company of the gods and was welcomed back by Ra, who addressed her as “One Who Comes in Peace.”
Besides her wrathful nature, Sekhmet was associated with healing and perceived as having the power to counteract illness. Her priesthood had a role in medicine. They recited prayers to Sekhmet as an integral part of medical treatment, while the physicians carried out whatever was done physically. She was an intimate of death, her presence was invoked in situations where a patient could live or die, and on the battlefield, where life and death were also in the balance as a warrior goddess.
She had a beneficent and an aggressive aspect. She was a goddess of healing and also of pestilence. She preserved order and was goddess of war. Yet it was her terrible aspect with which she is most identified. In this role, she enacts the destroyer aspect of the Great Goddess in her triple functions as creator-sustainer-destroyer. Even if no image or memory of a Great Goddess or a powerful goddess as destroyer remained in western mythology after the Greeks, the configuration was dimly kept alive in the three Fates of classical Greek mythology, who were usually portrayed as old women that held each person’s life in their hands; one spun and created the thread that represented a life, the second held the thread in her hands, until the third—as destroyer—cut the thread. The Scandinavian Norns and the three Wyrrd or Weird Sisters (from the Teutonic word wyrd, meaning fate) were very similar mysterious and mythic female figures whose power over life and death was feared. In their respective patriarchal mythologies they were minor figures, and yet they had a grip on men’s imagination.
The Great Goddess was an embodiment of the earth in its cycles rather than the moon in its phases: she was the creator who brings forth new life, the sustainer of life, and the destroyer. Women often come to know the dark destroyer aspect of the goddess, especially as they age. In their traditional roles as caretakers, women become intimately aware of the ravages of age and sickness, and of the deterioration of personality, spirit, and mind as well as the body. The older we get, the more of this reality we are likely to see. Life also exposes us to the shadow aspects of human nature, to the dark and destructive elements in others and in ourselves. We live long enough to see the damage from neglect and abuse on next generations, and realize that a lot of suffering could have been prevented. It is this longer view that can evoke Sekhmet as the outraged and fierce protector of values and of people, determined to bring about a change for the better.
If a woman is taken over by a raging Sekhmet, however, and is not balanced by wisdom or compassion, she becomes a woman possessed. It may take a potion (many psychiatric drugs can do exactly what Ra’s concoction did for Sekhmet), for her to recover. These powerful drugs can be used like a chemical straitjacket, silencing this archetype and making a woman docile; they can also help her to be in control and become a person who can feel angry and decide what to do. Some women fear that they are going crazy when they (finally) become angry instead of depressed, which is their old pattern. Friends who listen and share their own “enough is enough” stories are usually all that they need to realize that they are sane.
The more patriarchal and fundamentally religious the family, the more likely that girls and women were punished or shamed if they expressed anger or became assertive. In these circumstances, adaption supports being numb and dumb, suppressing what you perceive and how you feel, saying nothing that puts you in conflict with authority. But increasingly, there are cracks in all authoritarian institutions and keeping the lid on women is no longer easy. Sekhmet can emerge into the psyche of a crone-aged woman as a force for change.
THE HINDU GODDESS KALI
A Sekhmet-like myth is told about the Hindu goddess Kali, whose worshipers throng her temples in India to this day and revere her as Kali-Ma or Ma-Kali, the Divine Mother. She is also a fierce protectress. Her appearance is far stranger than Sekhmet’s and, to the western mind, bizarre and terrifying. Kali has black skin and white teeth or tusks, her tongue hangs out, her mouth drips blood. She has three eyes, with the third in the middle of her brow, and four arms. She commonly holds a knife in one left hand, and the severed head of a giant dripping blood in the other. Her right hands are both open. She dispells fear with one, and blesses worshipers with the other. Her body is naked except for her hideous ornaments, and she is dancing on the white body of the god Shiva. While Sekhmet is portrayed in her peaceful aspect, statues of Kali emphasize her fierce nature and remind worshipers of how Kali was created to defeat the demons and became intoxicated with blood.
The Hindu pantheon of divinities and their mythologies are complex, and like most rich mythologies with an oral tradition, there are variations and a wealth of detail in the story of Kali and the demons. My retelling draws the basic story and some details from Elizabeth U. Harding’s. Kali.2
The Myth of Kali and the Demons
The gods were exhausted from warring with the buffalo demon Mahishasura, the evil king of the demons, and his legions, who were defeating them. If Mahishasura won, the gods would be destroyed and chaos would result. The demons were winning because Mahishasura had an advantage: he was invincible, except to a woman. So the gods created Durga for the express purpose of defeating Mahishasura. This goddess was a beautiful golden woman adorned with a crescent moon. She had ten arms and rode on a lion. She was created out of the flames that came out of the mouths of the gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva. She held weapons and emblems in each of her ten hands, each one a symbol of the power given to her by a specific god.
Durga defeated Mahishasura, but even Durga was not powerful enough to defeat three other demons, Sumbha, Nisumbha, and Raktavira. Durga’s lion and a mere sound—a Hum from the lips of the goddess—destroyed armies of the demons, but when this was not enough, Durga became terrible in her anger, and from her frowning forehead came the awesome goddess Kali. Kali mounted her great lion and, armed with her sword and the sound Hum, defeated Sumbha and Nisumbha and their armies. The third demon, Raktavira, appeared to be invincible. Every drop of blood that fell from his body and reached the earth produced innumerable demons like him. Kali defeated this demon the only way possible. She held him above the earth, mortally wounded him with her sword, and drank all of his blood as it gushed out, so that none would reach the ground.
Then Kali went through the battlefield with her sword, beheading and slashing at demons, killing elephants and horses, intoxicated by the blood of her enemies. Only the god Shiva could stop her, which he did in a very unusual way. He smeared his beautiful naked body with ashes and lay down, motionless, among the corpses. Kali in her intoxicated state staggered across the dead bodies until she found herself standing on top of a whitened, perfect male body. Awed, she looked down and gazed into the eyes of her husband, Shiva. When she realized that she was touching her divine husband with her feet, she regained her mind.
In Harding’s interpretation, Kali’s bewildering and hideous appearance and her destruction of the demons are seen allegorically. The legend then represents the war that goes on within all of us, between our divine and demonic natures. Kali’s appearance and her repulsive ornaments can be intellectually understood as symbolic, but they still make identifying with her difficult.
However, a woman who has felt the raw ferocity of this archetype in her may find Kali’s inhuman and hideous appearance quite fitting. That Kali came back to her senses when she came back into relationship with her husband Shiva also rings true. When a woman is “possessed,” or taken over by Kali, she is, in Jungian terms, caught up in a Kali complex. She may need someone she cares about deeply to bring her back to herself, to help her remember that she is more and that there is more than wrathful fury, however much her outrage is justified.
In another version, which China Galland tells in The Bond Between Women, 3 Kali, as an emanation of the Great Goddess Durga in her battles with the demons, saves the world from destruction and then, when Kali is no longer needed, Durga absorbs her back into herself, and withdrew from the world with a promise: “Do not worry. If the world is ever in danger of being destroyed again, I will return.” When a woman has a fierce feminine warrior within her that she can count on to do battle, especially when enough is enough, and recall from active duty afterward, she is like Durga in this respect.
While we are likely to see Kali as hideous, she is not fearsome to the worshipers who appeal to her kindness and benevolence. To them, she is Kali-Ma, a fierce and maternal figure. They cover her basalt statues with garlands of flowers and tie prayer ribbons to the trees around her temples. To them, she is a powerful feminine devi or goddess, who knows the horrors that are in the world and is able to be ferocious on their behalf and responsive to their prayers.
THE ARCHETYPE OF KALI/SEKHMET
If the goddess Kali were a person, we might say of her, “She’s been there.” By this we mean that because of what she has been through, there is nothing too terrible or horrible that we can tell her that would be beyond her comprehension. Kali is an archetype that, once evoked and felt, even if not unleashed and expressed as rage, takes a woman into her dark side and into this aspect of others. An inner encounter with Kali is a shock, especially to a woman who has kept a lid on her negative feelings and thought of herself as a nice person, as someone better or more evolved than this. It’s deeply informative to find yourself capable of rage and fantasies worthy of Kali; not only do you discover a side of yourself you may not have known, but it gives you a better understanding of those who act on their rage. An evocation of Kali can happen at any time in a woman’s life, though one of the most common and devastating provocations often happens about the time a woman enters her third stage of life, and her husband leaves her for a younger woman.
When you are reckoning with the archetype of Sekhmet/Kali, the psychological and spiritual task is to hold the opposites of wrath and wisdom. When you are rejected or humiliated, have been badly treated, attacked physically or verbally, the immediate impulse may be to retaliate. Wisdom tempers wrath and reins in the savage lioness or bloodthirsty Kali. Wisdom realizes that tit-for-tat invites escalation. Even worse at a soul level, when you “do unto them” as was done unto you, you risk becoming just like them. You can turn into an angry, hostile, obsessed person, so taken over by rage that you become “possessed” as were Sekhmet and Kali. The task of holding it in and distilling it into purposeful action is the immediate challenge.
This is very different from either bottling up anger or directing it against yourself, which causes depression. Or from suppressing anger and even forgetting the reasons for it, which is denial and leads to codependency. Obviously, depression, codependency, and victimization are not attributes of Sekhmet or Kali, but they are the flip side of this archetype. The ferocity of Sekhmet/Kali needs to be harnessed rather than suppressed or unleashed in a blind rage. Then Kali energizes the insistence that a problem be faced and solved, and Sekhmet persists and is not diverted, and you become a force to be reckoned with. The mother who won’t take no for an answer when her child’s needs are ignored by a school system and perseveres until the situation is changed, is one example. MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) is another. In the crone, third-phase of life, a woman’s concerns often go beyond her immediate family to the larger community, where there is much to be outraged about. When she encounters the evils of incompetency, malpractice, or abuse of power, she can become a Kali with a knife in one hand and, if successful, she’ll have the head of the malefactor or perpetrator in the other.
The lioness could be the totem animal for the “exceptional patient” that Dr. Bernie Siegel described. She is the cancer patient who is an advocate on her own behalf. This woman is usually described by her physician as “difficult,” because she does not just do as she is told. She is informed, asks hard questions, wants to know why certain tests or treatments are proposed and not others. She gets second opinions and changes physicians when she perceives this to be in her best interest. She explores alternatives and makes important decisions herself. She is committed to doing all that can be done to be healed. And, Siegel notes, these are the qualities that enhance the possibility of beating the odds, of going into remission, or healing the illness.
Sehkmet was onstage and in the audience on Mother’s Day 2000, when the Million Moms March brought 750,000 people to Washington, D.C. to protest against the easy availability of guns, the appalling toll of death and suffering, and the power of the National Rifle Association to influence Congress and block legislation. Antonia Novello, M.D., a past U.S. Surgeon General, ended with the words “We are tired of taking it!” “No more!” was the rallying cry of Carol Price, whose thirteen-year-old son was killed by a nine-year-old neighbor. But the outrage of Sekhmet was most expressed by the actress Susan Sarandon when she finished her remarks with “We are pissed off!” and the audience spontaneously erupted and repeated her words, “We are pissed off!” “We are pissed off!” “We are pissed off!” in a rising crescendo of wrath and power.
ERESHKIGAL, THE SUMERIAN GODDESS
In Close to the Bone, a book about serious illnesses, I described the Sumerian goddess Inanna’s gate-by-gate descent into the underworld, as analogous to a patient’s experience of being stripped of persona and psychological defenses. I think of a life-threatening illness as a descent of the soul into the underworld, a journey into the realm of Hades and Pluto (the Roman god of the underworld, whose name means “riches underground”), which is the personal and collective unconscious. We encounter our worst fears as we make such a descent, and we also may find abandoned parts of ourselves and powerful archetypes that we have been cut off from. In the myth, 4 a humbled Inanna who was queen of heaven and earth, came face-to-face with a wrathful Ereshkigal, who is archetypally similar to Sekhmet and Kali.
Naked and bowed low, Inanna went through the seventh and last gate to encounter Ereshkigal, goddess of the Great Below, a dark goddess of death. Ereshkigal struck Inanna dead with a baleful look and hung her body on a hook to rot. After three days, when Inanna had not returned, her loyal friend Ninshibur sought help and, as a result, Inanna was restored to life. She was, however, not the same as before. She had acquired attributes of Ereshkigal—demons now clung to her skirts, ready to claim anyone she designated. On her return to the upper world, Inanna could discern who had mourned her and who had not, she could decide who would stay in the upper world with her, and whom she would turn over to the demons and consign to the underworld. She saw Ninshibur, without whose help she would never have returned, and when the demons inquired, “Shall we take her?” Inanna said, “Never!” She saw her sons in mourning clothes in grief for her, and would not allow the demons to claim them. Then she went into the throne room of her city and saw her husband Dumazi dressed in finery and lolling on the throne, obviously not mourning her. She pointed a wrathful finger at him and told the demons, “You can take him!”
When Inanna returned from the underworld, her encounter with Ereshkigal had changed her in ways that women are changed when they face the possibility or likelihood of death. Many such women have said to me, “Cancer was a cure for my codependency.” Cancer was a crisis that made them take a long look at uncaring friends, narcissistic relatives, and a lack of joy in their lives, and act with anger and clarity. Like Inanna, they realized whom to keep and cherish, and whom to cull.
The publication date for Close to the Bone was set for October 2, 1996. When I announced this in a lecture, I was delighted to learn from a woman who was born on October 2, that this date is Guardian Angel day on the Roman Catholic calendar. It seemed like a synchronicity for this book that I had written to help people to also be born on this day. Besides, I had written a chapter on prayer, in which I said that I like to think that when we pray, we are sending guardian angels to sit on the shoulders of those we pray for. Because of these coincidences, readers knew that October 2, 1996, was the publication date, and it was because of this that I received a letter from Caryl Campbell, a reader for whom this date, her menopause, cancer, and Kali were linked. She wrote:
“First, my birthday is Ocober 2. Second, I celebrated my 1996 birth date as the beginning of a transformed self following a successful journey ‘to and from Kali’s temple.’ I had just completed radiation treatment for breast cancer.
“I thought you might be interested in the metaphor that I developed to handle my experience. You well describe the shocked feeling that vigorous, fit, healthy people experience when they discover that they are very vulnerable. I describe this as an encounter with Kali. October was also my menopause, so I was already feeling a sense of transformation, when the jolt of possibly dying sooner than planned required a more urgent metaphor. I picked Kali because I had used her in previous art work, and I liked the image of a dramatic, bloody Goddess. I felt the need for a powerful expression of the dangerous line that I was walking. This was a real life-and-death situation and it called for a real life-and-death metaphor…
“I learned that initiates of the Kali temple had to enter her dreadful underworld, stay and see the face of death, and then leave as a new person. The radiation center at the hospital was underground at the end of a maze of hallways…The patients in the center seemed horrific to me, hairless, maimed, some near death—all people I was afraid of, and that I did not want to admit that I was one of. This was Kali’s temple. I decided that I needed to enter the temple, face the people there as one of them, accept the healing photons of Apollo, and walk out as an initiate into the Cancer Clan, as a healed initiate…”
As this writer describes, a descent into the dark realm of diagnosis and treatment can be transformative psychologically and spiritually. You face the dark goddess of death and wrath, transformation and healing, and if you return to the Upper World of ordinary life, you are different. Once you encounter the archetype that can be nameless or Sekhmet, Kali, or Ereshkigal, you are no longer the same person.
CROW MOTHER/MORRIGAN
Crow Mother was one among many kachina dolls on a shelf at a trading post on the Hopi reservation. When I saw her, I recognized that she was another expression of this archetype of transformative wrath. Kachina dolls are representations of the katsina, plural katsinam, the spirit beings who live among the Hopi for about six months each year. This doll wore a turquoise helmet with large, black crow wings attached on either side. The face of the helmet was a black inverted triangle outlined in white and framed by red and black stripes.
The inverted triangle is a universally recognized symbol of a woman’s pubic triangle, a shape associated with the fertility of the goddess. It was the crow wings that made me realize that she could be a crone figure. In ancient Ireland, the triple goddess was Ana the maiden, Babd the mother, and Macha or Morrigan the crone, who appeared on battlefields as the raven. Once again, as I recalled how the crow or raven symbolized the awesome destroyer aspect of the triple goddess, I was reminded how the once feared or revered names or symbols for the crone or crone goddess are all derogatory putdowns. To call a woman “an old crow” is as bad as calling her a “hag,” which once meant “holy woman.”
I asked Alph Secakuku, an elder of the Snake Clan on the Second Hopi Mesa and a kachina-doll expert, to tell me more about Crow Mother.5 Secakuku pointed out that she was carrying a bundle of green yucca whips, and that another name for her in this particular ritual role was “Mother of Whippers.” In February, when the katsinam-spirit beings are invited to appear among the Hopi, the Whippers (fearsome male kachinas) appear in the village to evaluate whether the villagers have maintained standards of morality and virtues, and to punish and bless accordingly. At this time, the Mother of Whippers and the Whippers also play a prominent role in initiating children into Hopi beliefs and culture. The initiation ceremony takes place in the kiva, a round underground chamber that is the center of the religious life of the Hopi villages.
With her supply of green yucca whips and Whippers, Crow Mother drives out the impurities or the demons. She is aggressive and full of fury I think of her as whipping people into spiritual and moral shape.
“Mother of Whippers” knows that “nice” doesn’t do it. She is the archetype in women who organize their neighbors to drive the drug dealers off the streets. She is the archetype in women who organize workers and blow the whistle on poor working conditions. She works to end genital mutilation, child prostitution, the burning of brides whose dowries were small. Crow Mother is the formidable crone in all walks of life, who says “Enough is enough!” and leads a troop of “whippers” onto the streets or into voting booths, the courtroom, or boardroom. Whether as Mother of Whippers, Sekhmet/Kali, or after lessons from Ereshkigal, when a woman decides that “enough is enough,” she discovers the inner strength and the responsibility that comes with that decision. When they were younger, these same women often assumed that men would take care of the problems. At fifty and older, women individually and collectively are realizing that if changes are to be made, it is up to them.
LIONHEARTED WOMEN
The archetypal energies of Kali/Sekhmet are expressed as “the fierce compassion of the feminine” that China Galland6 found in women who are addressing major evils in our contemporary world. They have qualities that I think of as being “lionhearted.” The fury of a lioness is that of a protective mother or a bereaved mother whose response is retaliatory. Kali rides out on a lion to defeat the demons, while Sekhmet is both a lioness and a woman. Theirs is a heart-motivated fury at evil that threatens to overwhelm and destroy what they hold sacred. To be a woman who is outraged and protests against powerful authority takes courage—a word derived from coeur or “heart.” In Argentina, for example, the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who have demonstrated every week since 1977 in spite of harassment and the very real possibility of danger, are lionhearted women. Individually and together, they are fierce in their determination to know the fate of their loved ones who disappeared when Argentina was controlled by a military dictatorship. Every one of them lost at least one child or member of her immediate family. Once a year, the Mothers are joined by the Grandmothers of the Disappeared and by members of other human-rights organizations. They have become the conscience of Argentina. Galland found that same fierceness in women whose efforts are directed at stopping the international trafficking in child prostitution.
LIONHEARTED AND WISE WOMEN
From-the-heart emotional responses and the ability to be empathic are qualities of women who are nurturers and caretakers of families and friendships; they also motivate women into action on behalf of girls being genitally mutilated or children sold into prostitution or subjected to incest, neglect, or abuse. While girls are not exclusively vulnerable to these evils, they are the primary direct victims (the families and cultures that allow this are indirectly greatly damaged for generations). Unless a woman has become callous or has armored herself against having feelings and can live in her head, it is uncomfortably easy to mentally and viscerally imagine how it feels at a body-and-soul level to be so treated, and be helpless and totally vulnerable. Bad or scary experiences enhance this: if you became lost as a child yourself, or were scared and confused when a man exposed his genitals, or were in physical pain or raped yourself, it is all too easy to imagine. Without the archetype of Sekhmet/Kali, however, brutality and vulnerability result in becoming numb, passive, and docile. To be moved to overcome such evils, women need to be lionhearted in having both empathy and courage, fury and restraint. While a dark goddess might do this alone, women need the support of each other; like the Mothers and the Grandmothers of the Disappeared, there is some protection in numbers, but whenever women protest or take action and meet opposition and resistance, it is the doing this together that makes it possible for them to not lose heart and sustain the effort.
In the history of western civilization since the Greeks, patriarchal laws and institutions have systematically enforced vulnerability in women by making women the property of men, which was so in the United States until the end of the nineteenth century. In the psyche, that which is suppressed is not allowed into consciousness and becomes feared, which helps explain why every effort toward equality for women has been achieved against strong emotional, fear-based resistance. The presence of Sekhmet/Kali in the archetypal layer of the collective unconscious may help explain why men fear women’s retaliatory anger. Women also fear becoming angry: this is learned both as a culturally enforced fear (an angry woman provoked punishment and shunning), and a deeper, vague fear of the archetype. This fear has lessened considerably.
The “enough is enough” goddesses may bear unfamiliar names and inhuman faces, but their energy and outrage are no longer foreign to us. With wisdom and maturity that are best supported by being in the company of others with these qualities, the wrath of Sekhmet/Kali becomes channeled into effective action. When women can do this, they become lionhearted wisewomen, whose wrath holds the promise of transforming our institutions and culture.