As Above, So Below
How a Goddess Pulls Herself Together
On a soul level, you are here to piece yourself together.
CAROLYN MYSS
A few steps along this provocative path, you have now met Feminine Genius and discovered how to align with her powerful energy. You have learned how to navigate the waters of your personal underworld, your dark. But before you splash fully into your light, allow me to detain you for a few chapters. There is a particular energy within your body that I want you to meet. Often misunderstood, it is an energy that you, like most of us, have likely learned to fear, use recklessly, or thrust into the shadow realm. As potent as fire, this energy can burn you if you don’t know how to handle it. And you may indeed have been burned, perhaps painfully. Yet, it is an energy you truly cannot live without.
Just as we humans learned to harness the awesome power of fire, so too we can learn to harness this energy, the energy of Eros. Eros — sensual love and desire — can help you retrieve your lost parts and refine your inner guidance. Eros can help transform your confusion about your sexual power into embodied confidence and wholeness. Eros can offer you intimate communion with the Beloved, whether in divine form as God or in human form as another person, or — most importantly — as your own self. Eros can blur the line between the sexual and the spiritual, and has the power to bring heaven to meet Earth. Eros can help you become embodied and ensouled. Erotically empowered, you are destined to feel happy in your skin, spiritually authentic, fully expressed, and vibrantly alive.
To help you wrestle the brilliance of this energy back from the dream world of our collective psyche where it has been shut up for too long, let me offer you a fragment of a myth.
The goddess Isis is floating, adrift in a little boat in the River Styx, her hand trailing in the tourmaline water. She is heartbroken and near death because her beloved, Osiris — her flesh-and-blood lover and her metaphoric “other half” — has gone missing. Her trailing hand meets something in the water, and she pulls it up to get a better look. It is a leg, a human leg, with its foot still attached. Surprised, she reaches into the water again, and retrieves an arm, another leg, a torso, a head. She piles them in the boat with her, seeing them for what they are: the pieces of her beloved.
Isis keeps plunging her arm into the River Styx, that powerful waterway that, in death, helps all souls travel from this world to the other world. Trembling and triumphant, she drags the lost pieces of her beloved up from the depths and brings them home to her little boat. Isis re-members the disjointed limbs, organs, and appendages into an entire human body that is complete, shining, and whole. She reassembles her beloved who has been torn apart and cast into the underworld.
This complete and intact body looks achingly familiar, stirring something in her psyche. She is remembering what it feels like to have all her own once-fragmented parts reassembled as one glorious whole. She is remembering that the body of the beloved always wears the face of the Beloved. She is remembering that the Beloved also wears the face of the Goddess.
In this myth, Isis reminds: Remember, you yourself are the Beloved.
ISIS, MARY, AND THE VIRGIN: THE POWER OF GODDESS ARCHETYPES
If you haven’t met her yet, the goddess Isis was one of the most important deities of ancient Egypt around 3,000 BC. Revered as the creatrix of all life, she was seen to wield the power of the Divine Mother and oversee the cycles of death and rebirth, creation and destruction, nature and magic. For many, Isis is one of the most familiar archetypes of empowered, complete, and sovereign femininity.
An archetype is a symbolic image or concept that is sourced from humanity’s collective culture and psyche. A goddess, a fairy, a femme fatale — all are archetypes. However, our day-to-day lives have been nearly stripped of archetypes of women who are empowered, complete, and sovereign. As author Marian Wright Edelman puts it, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” If you don’t have models of empowered, complete, and sovereign women to look to, it is difficult to see yourself as powerful, whole, and free. By introducing you to the archetypes of the goddess Isis, Saint Mary Magdalene, and a virgin or two, I plan for you to get to see afresh some parts of yourself that may have been torn apart and cast into the underworld.
In the myth I just retold, the lover — and brother — of the goddess Isis is the god Osiris. As unusual as it may sound, the connection between Isis and Osiris is not incestuous. Rather, it’s symbolic, a representation of the mystical union of opposites, of the masculine and feminine aspects of divine life-force energy uniting in one body. I see Isis’s re-assembling of her beloved’s body parts as her re-assembling her own self, the parts of her that sank into her own swampy shadow. In order to feel fully herself, and to honor the power of her body, she must re-member all parts — self and other, lover and beloved, sister and brother — inside herself. She can then see herself as the Beloved, the feminine flavor of God.
The joining together of a goddess and a god in this mystical symbolic union is sometimes called the sacred marriage, or hieros gamos. In the sacred marriage ritual, humans represent the deities. Through their sexual union, they merge the physical and spiritual worlds in an effort to spark the fertility that brings forth life. The sacred marriage is an important archetypal concept, whether or not it is consummated as an actual physical ritual. It is found not just in ancient Egypt with Isis and Osiris, but also cross-culturally in ancient Greece with Aphrodite and Adonis, in Hinduism with Shakti and Shiva, in Buddhism with Tara and Avalokitesvara.
As a concept (and as a practice), the sacred marriage recognizes Eros as a holy energy. It elevates Eros from a force that debases our humanity to a force that reunites us with divinity. In her book Sacred Pleasure, Riane Eisler confirms,
The mystical or ecstatic state is said to provide those experiencing it a sense of indescribable inner peace, bliss, and even access to healing powers, along with a sense of unity or oneness with what mystics through the ages have called Divine Love. . . .There is strong evidence that sexual ecstasy was once also an important avenue to mystical or ecstatic states.1
Erotic energy, which is often assumed to prevent humans from knowing God, can actually allow mere mortals to embody mystical, divine love.
I see the existential drive of Eros as one that can balance the Divine Masculine and Feminine energies within you and can help you feel communion with the Divine within your earthly body. Whether experienced between you and God, you and another, or between you and you, erotic energy has the power to reveal sacred energy.
As a champion of sacred sexuality, Isis urges you to pull together the pieces of yourself that you may have cast aside because you couldn’t fit them inside a downsized definition of woman. As an archetype, Isis urges you to remember that erotic energy is an essential part of the magic of birth, death, and rebirth. So that what is erotic need not be illicit, but can instead become devotional. So that you know your body is not only physically powerful but also metaphysically powerful. So that life need not be mundane, but can also become mystical. As in heaven, so on Earth. As above, so below.
oh, yes
you can have sex with soul
The archetype of Isis — at once a mortal and a deity, at once sexual and sacred — lives on in the more contemporary mythology of Saint Mary Magdalene. In case you don’t know her well, Mary Magdalene is a figure from the Christian Bible, most known as a fallen woman, but also recognized as the thirteenth disciple, a spiritual companion of Jesus, and the first to see Christ rise from the dead. Some believe she is pictured in the painting The Last Supper. Isis was seen as a goddess from the get-go, but for Mary Magdalene, despite her canonization (or sainthood), it has taken the dominant culture several thousand years to recognize her as a true saint, not just as a repentant sinner.
I first encountered the connection between Isis and Mary Magdalene in Elizabeth Cunningham’s book, The Passion of Mary Magdalen. Inspired by the apocryphal Gospel of Mary — Mary Magdalene’s firsthand account of the story of Jesus Christ that was recovered in 1896 — Cunningham asserts Mary’s connection to Isis, and re-imagines Mary’s life and her meeting with (and even marriage to) Jesus Christ.
But, hold on. Let me not get ahead of myself here. Mary Magdalene’s marriage to Jesus Christ? Yes, indeed. In spite of her reputation as a whore, she is recognized by scholars Tom Kenyon and Judi Sion as a high priestess of hieros gamos and other erotic alchemical arts as passed down from followers of the goddess Isis. In their partially channeled book, The Magdalen Manuscript: The Alchemies of Horus and the Sex Magic of Isis, Kenyon and Sion offer the provocative idea that Mary Magdalene and Jesus Christ united in sacred marriage in part to fortify Christ’s soul so that his body would be strong enough to embody his message and follow through with his work in the world.
Rather than a sidekick with questionable morality, as she has been portrayed for thousands of years, I see Mary as the leading lady in the story of Jesus Christ: his wife, companion, confidante, other half, and even tutor. Whether she was also, as I believe she was, an initiate in sex magic and the wife in sacred and literal marriage to Jesus Christ, we will likely never know for sure. After all, history is told by those with the pens with which to write it — or not write it — and they adjust it as they see fit.
Why I’ve asked Mary Magdalene to come make a cameo appearance in these pages is not only because she, like Isis, asks that the human body be held as sacred and that erotic energy be treated as holy, but also because Mary Magdalene asks us to remember that inner knowing — an intimate conversation with the Sacred — is possible on one’s own without the middleman of established religion or convention.
It is important to note that the Gospel of Mary is part of the Gnostic gospels. Gnostics — another unruly band of mystical upstarts — generally believe in self-knowing. They believe that the answers to spiritual questions are to be found within ourselves, not outside ourselves. The word gnostic comes from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge,” which is often used in Greek philosophy in a way that aligns with the English words insight and enlightenment. The archetype of Mary Magdalene asks us to remember that we don’t need an intermediary to speak with the Holy One; we can strike up the conversation with our own little ol’ mouths. She asks us to see that enlightenment — a direct realization that we are not (and never were) separate from the Divine — can be experienced through our own little ol’ bodies.
Like the Gnostics did, Mary Magdalene asks you to view your physical body as materialized and concentrated soul. This is a radical departure from the tenets of asceticism, which were highly influential and pervasive at the time of early Christianity, and viewed the body — and especially the body of a woman — as sinful and impure. I see asceticism, the doctrine that says that you can reach elevated spiritual states through extreme self-denial, self-mortification, and pleasure-avoidance, reaching its tentacles into some aspects of modern culture and into some psyches of modern women. After all, for many of us, what are perfectionism and superwoman-itis if not attempts to reach elevated states through extreme self-denial, self-mortification, and pleasure-avoidance?
However, inspired by such a Gnostic as Mary Magdalene, you are invited to wake up and see that your corporeal impulses of erotic energy, desire, sensual delight, and pleasure can actually exalt your consciousness rather than limit it, can actually fortify your soul rather than tarnish it, and can actually light your modern, mystical path rather than obscure it. When you have lost the concept of yourself as the Beloved, Mary Magdalene invites you to pull yourself together to again feel whole, a child of the Universe, and divinely at home in your body.
But Mary’s is a radical invitation. After Isis’s heyday and during Mary Magdalene’s time, the culture at large had one lens through which to view a woman, a lens that we are still struggling with thousands of years later: that women are inherently inferior, unclean, sinful temptresses, and — unless carefully controlled — whores. The more sexually empowered the woman, the more likely she’d be designated a slut, and the less likely she’d be considered spiritually wholesome. Chances are that to some extent or another you too look at women and yourself through a (slightly more subtle) version of that lens — or struggle against being seen through that lens.
Most major world religions have been recorded, codified, and passed on mainly by men, and many do not hold women as physical or spiritual equals, with exceptions here and there in the more mystical branches such as Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Sufism, and Tantra. And collectively, our culture has taken so, so many pointers from the world’s major religions. To this day, one of the biggest and most instantly effective slurs to a woman’s value and trustworthiness is to accuse her of being a whore. And to this day, there is nothing like being called a whore to get your story discredited, distorted, and devalued. It is no wonder that you might find yourself conflicted about whether to embrace the power of your body or avoid it, to embody your sexuality or revile it, to directly know God in yourself or accept someone else’s word for it. So, Mary Magdalene’s story floats like a specter in our collective psyche.
However, only a couple of thousand years after the fact, Mary Magdalene is beginning to get her reputation back. In June 2016, the Catholic Church officially recognized July 22 as the feast day of Mary Magdalene and gave her the official title of Apostle of Apostles.
A woman, who believed that the body was a portal rather than an impediment to God, arm-in-arm with the Son of God? A woman, whose genius is the erotic, hooking up with the son of man? A woman, who presumed that it is natural to access the kingdom of heaven within, elevated as queen to the king of kings? A woman, who knew her way around the death/rebirth cycle, who may have taught our lord and savoir a thing or two? Whether actual history or powerful parable, it is pretty thought provoking, don’t you think? You know what they say: behind every great man is a great woman. Or, as author Virginia Woolf put it, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.”
Isis of ancient Egypt, Saint Mary Magdalene, and you, the modern goddess; each married sacredly to the Beloved and to herself. Radical, I know. But as one of my mentors, Regena Thomashauer, says, “A woman does not even begin to come alive until she is pressed up against the edge of what is radical for her.” So here we are, sister, at the edge of radical.
Jump in with me.
The Temple Virgins
It would seem there are few words more damning for a woman than whore.
Certainly, the words whore and prostitute — two out of the impressive 220 words for a sexually promiscuous woman — have disparagement and damnation at their roots. The Old Norse hora means “adulteress”; the Middle English hore means “physical filth, slime, moral corruption, sin”; the Polish nierządnica means “disorderly woman”; and the Greek porne is related to pernemi and means “to sell” and likely referred to a female slave who was sold into prostitution. (Which compels me to ask, sold by whom, to whom? Morally corrupt according to whose rules? Promiscuous and disorderly by whose standards? Filthy and sinful as perceived through whose lens?)
But listen to this: way back in its English and Germanic roots, the word whore meant “one who desires.” And if you trace back to other languages, in Latin, for example, whore is carus, which means “dear”; in Old Irish cara means “friend”; in Old Persian kama means “desire”; and in Old Sanskrit kamah means “love, desire.” As you may know, the Kama Sutra is an ancient Hindu text on the philosophy of love, desire, and virtuous living, including poetry, sexual positions, and advice, named for the Hindu god of love, Kama.
So it would seem that the word whore has not always been entirely pejorative. In fact, it originally described a woman who was wise in the ways of love and desire, not bound by convention — perhaps even a minister of sacred marriage. As the standards of acceptability for women have changed, and as the divide between sexuality and spirituality has grown, so has the meaning of whore. We as women must write new endings to these fallible fables. We must take our remembering to the edge of radical. We can’t wait two thousand years to have our sainthood confirmed.
No better women to help us with this than the temple priestesses and the virgins. The temple priestesses were young women who lived many thousands of years ago who got the opportunity to leave their homes before marriage and live in a temple and become masters of the arts of sex and love. It was understood that after a time serving in the temple, these young women would be considered “purified” for marriage.
Although they were experts in the erotic arts, the temple priestesses were considered to be virgins. The original meaning of the word virgin is “whole,” as in, complete unto to one’s self. As Marilyn Frye writes in her book, Willful Virgin, “The word ‘virgin’ did not originally mean a woman whose vagina was untouched by any penis, but a free woman, one not betrothed, not bound to, not possessed by any man. It meant a female who is sexually and hence socially her own person.”2 In contrast to how too many of us girls and women even today regard our bodies and our sexuality — as commodities to trade for love, acceptance, security, and belonging — the concept of the virgin temple priestess is quite striking.
Thousands of years ago, it was understood that if you were lucky enough to make love with a virgin or a temple priestess — like an Isis or a Mary Magdalene — you could hope to experience divine union and divine love. As Nancy Qualls-Corbett explains through her research and her book, The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine, the root cause of our present-day misunderstanding, confusion, and great suffering around sex is because we have lost the temple priestess and the virgin from our individual and collective psyche — the actual women themselves as well as the archetype of the erotically empowered, complete, and free woman that they represent. We must remember that sexual energy can be a vehicle for spiritual ecstasy, and that a woman’s body, especially when held as sovereign and sacred, is particularly designed for this.
Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex.
AUDRE LORDE
Try this on for a moment. Put down the inherited lens you may have been looking at women through, and try on a new and different one. A lens though which someone like Isis, Mary Magdalene, or a temple priestess would have viewed women, as equal in value and in trustworthiness to men. You will begin to see that your enlightenment, your waking up, comes not through an arbiter, but through your direct self-knowing. And that feeling one with the Holy One is something you can do in your very body, not by leaving your body.
Refocus the lens and resist looking away, resist any discomfort, because what will come clear is this: the energy that we use to make babies, erotic energy, is the same energy that God uses to make life itself. Regardless of whether you choose to create new human life or not, it will start to become evident that erotic energy is the ultimate creative force, is the creative energy of life itself, and is thus the ultimate connection to the ultimate Creator.
Now, try this. While still looking through this radical lens, pan back a little and imagine a Feminine Genius walking around in her daily existence. You do not need to worry that she would suddenly become unable to hold down a job, change a diaper, be faithful to her partner, drive a car, tell a good joke, take the bar exam, do neurosurgery, write her novel, get to the meeting on time, keep a secret, meditate, or bring you soup when you have the flu. Just because she is at home in her body, in command of her erotic energy, and in communion with her voice, does not mean she is in danger of becoming untrustworthy, unsafe, a flake, or a prostitute. In fact, she is now in considerably less danger of selling herself out.
I know I just said a mouthful. Thirty mouthfuls. Thirty highly unorthodox mouthfuls. I just said that your erotic confidence can lead you to exalted consciousness. That erotic energy can reunite you with the natural magic of birth, death, and rebirth. That Eros can offer you greater strength, vitality, and integrity in your body so that you can walk your talk while you walk your path, so that you can fulfill your missions and follow your passions while here on Earth.
I just said that you are the Beloved. That pulling pieces of yourself out of the muck can help carve a path to your wholeness as a woman. That the more you feel whole, the more you can speak fluently with Eros. That you can make love with whomever, whatever, and however you call God. (And, no, this does in no way require you to enter into hieros gamos or become a member of the oldest profession, I promise).
I just said that not only can you walk hand in hand with God, but you can also speak with God yourself. No go-between needed, and we are talking speed dial. That you can feel erotically alive, spiritually alive, and virginal, all in the same body. And that you can wake up, here and now, in your body — and that you must.
If you jump into this upcoming section with me, and I hope you will, you will receive a sex re-education that I wish all women and girls could have received. You will learn why your body cannot lie, as well as an astounding reconfirmation of your body’s intelligence. You will learn the language your body uses to communicate with you and why that language is the native tongue of your soul.
So, pull yourself together, goddess, and I will show you exactly where, in your wise body, is your direct line to the Divine.
as above, so below