modern psychopathy and its origins in the sequestration of the divine feminine (part I)

"in the central painting of a triptych, titled ‘Bordando el Manto Terrestre,’ were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creature, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. . . Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there’d been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?” Thomas Pynchon The Crying of Lot 49

     If one is to believe the old alchemists, tantric buddhists, or psychologists like Carl Jung, it seems that for a person to have a healthy psyche, the inner male and female aspects of our consciousness must be in balance. The Anima (or inner female) must be able to effectively express itself to the conscious persona. If this does not happen, if the anima is repressed or denied healthy expressions, the subject becomes self-censoring and coldly sadistic/masochistic and without sympathy. Or worse, the subject projects his unexpressed anima onto some female in the outer world; she becomes the icon of his divine feminine, and all his ideas of womanhood become attached to her.
     There is another, perhaps more damaging scenario, where images and projections of the divine feminine, the great mother of all, are completely censored or neutered (or replaced by a sinister decoy). My personal belief is that the psychopathic society we now live in results from a suppression of the expression of the divine feminine going back to pre-biblical times in the ancient near east. Anyone who has been in the "New Age" or religion section of a bookstore in the past decade or so is familiar with the explosion of books that deal with this subject in the form of Mary Magdalene or Gaia mysticism, but even many of these works miss the roots of the issue.
     Let's start with something really simple that most people reading this are probably aware of: the Old Testament. Huge chunks of this collection of scriptures are all about genocide and cultural warfare (both defamation and assimilation) regarding local religions that surrounded the hebrew people. Chief among these, in my opinion was the Phoenician/Canaanite fertility cults of Asherah: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asherah
To make a long story short, Asherah was Yahweh's wife. . .her legacy exists in numerous references in the old testament to the eradication of her sacred totem (the Asherah pole), as well as the highly revered concept of the Shekinah http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shekhinah which was in fact the most highly worshipped presence of yahweh among his people, residing as the centerpiece of both tabernacle and temple in the Sanctum Sanctorum (the 'holy of holies').
    The repression of the divine feminine was so intense and persistent that for millennia women have not held equal status in the Abrahamic religions because the prototype of female priesthood has been erased from memory of the popular consciousness. Carl Jung makes quite extensive commentary on this subject. I won't go into it here, because it's easy to track down for those interested, but I want to end this first part with the encapsulation of this trend in iconographic form. Here is a picture of the original "gnostic" form of the Christian cross:

and also the ethiopic/coptic cross:

notice the equal lengths of the arms. The traditional so-called "christian" cross has one of the ends distanced and lowered twice as far from the center as the top three. Why? what is the meaning of this? Some speculate that the arms of the cross represent the divine family. The all-male trinity of Father, Sun, Holy Spirit, is kept distinct from the Mother. She is only symbolized as the 3 Marys at the foot of the cross during the crucifiction. Keep in mind, also, that actually the 'holy spirit' which is present at Christ's Baptism is actually the female Shekinah (the presence of the most high), and in fact the four arms of the cross represent father, mother, son and daughter. Then consider that actually Christ's anointing is performed by Miriam of Magdala when she washes hair and feet with costly spikenard from an alabastron (which incidentally is a marriage ritual). So why is this prominent and co-equal role of the feminine not taught to children in Christianity/Judaism/Islam? In our modern age, an easier question to deal with would be why are the only female role models given prominence in youth culture are glorified sex-crazed bisexual sluts taking estrogen pills and selling their sexuality for fame and material opulence? Where are the mother archetypes in popular culture for youth? There is one. . .it is a counterfeit, actually, but that comes later.
    In the second part of this I want to analyze the use of feminine iconography in American history and governmental art and architecture.