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alchemy
May 2008 
21st Century Spirituality: Scared Feminine to Sacred Feminine
Posted on Feb 3rd, 2007
by 
evelyn
evelyn
I've been reading and stretching myself on Julian's ponderings on 21st century spirituality.
I'm not sure what exactly 20th century spirituality was. Mostly because I wasn't that interested in spirituality in the 1900s myself.
I really got into spirituality in earnest through a serendipitious way at the turn of the century, but that's a long story maybe for another day.
I found going to the Catholic church of my Cuban parents' upbringing rather boring.
Follow rules, no questions please, just read this book -- this is the Word (well, thankfully, I've met many Christians today who intimately know the Word is the dynamic, living, breathing Holy Spirit).
No heart please.
No spirit either.
So if I had to characterize 20th century spirituality, and 21st century religion, I'd guess I'd say it was rote.
I think we've delved in the Age of Enlightenment far too long.
Yet I'm not advocating checking our intellect at the door (heck, you're talking to a straight-A student and BSEE graduate and ex-chief technology officer), but I sense more of an integration of the disavowed feminine aspects of the divine occuring in the 21st century.
As I spoke once in my other blog, I see a shift from the scared feminine to the sacred feminine.
There is so much to say on this topic that I see now that's what I'm devoting this entire blog to: the exploration of the sacred feminine and the enchantment of enlightenment.
I'll leave you with the words of Sufi master, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (of the Golden Sufi Center in Inverness, CA) from his article, Anima Mundi: Awakening the Soul of the World:
"Plato understood that “the cosmos is a single Living Creature which contains all living creatures within it.”(2) While this tradition was carried on by the Gnostics and later the alchemists, the Church fathers imaged a world that was neither divine nor sacred. A transcendent divinity was the source of all creation, and humanity lived in exile from heaven in a state of sin. This doctrine created a split between matter and spirit, causing the world to be seen as separate from its creator.
The understanding of the world as sacred resurfaced from time to time over the next centuries. In the Gothic revival of the twelfth century, and later in the Renaissance, the created world was briefly seen through the image of the World Soul. In their cathedrals the Gothic architects reflected their vision of a sacred order within creation that belongs to this feminine divine principle. The World Soul animated and formed nature according to divine proportions, which the architects, masons, sculptors, and stained glass artists imaged in their creations. (3)
Again during the Renaissance nature was briefly seen as a living spiritual essence:
The Renaissance left us great wonders of art and the imagination. It was a brief flowering, however. The orthodoxies of the Church re-established the split between matter and spirit, and the rise of science began to image the natural world as a machine whose disembodied workings human beings could rationally understand and master. The magical world of creative mystery infused with divine spirit became a dream belonging only to poets and the laboratories and symbolic writings of the alchemists. "
And so I am an alchemist, and so I am a poet.
image Jia Lu's Lattern Guardian
I'm not sure what exactly 20th century spirituality was. Mostly because I wasn't that interested in spirituality in the 1900s myself.
I really got into spirituality in earnest through a serendipitious way at the turn of the century, but that's a long story maybe for another day.
I found going to the Catholic church of my Cuban parents' upbringing rather boring.
Follow rules, no questions please, just read this book -- this is the Word (well, thankfully, I've met many Christians today who intimately know the Word is the dynamic, living, breathing Holy Spirit).
No heart please.
No spirit either.
So if I had to characterize 20th century spirituality, and 21st century religion, I'd guess I'd say it was rote.
I think we've delved in the Age of Enlightenment far too long.
Yet I'm not advocating checking our intellect at the door (heck, you're talking to a straight-A student and BSEE graduate and ex-chief technology officer), but I sense more of an integration of the disavowed feminine aspects of the divine occuring in the 21st century.
As I spoke once in my other blog, I see a shift from the scared feminine to the sacred feminine.
There is so much to say on this topic that I see now that's what I'm devoting this entire blog to: the exploration of the sacred feminine and the enchantment of enlightenment.
I'll leave you with the words of Sufi master, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (of the Golden Sufi Center in Inverness, CA) from his article, Anima Mundi: Awakening the Soul of the World:
"Plato understood that “the cosmos is a single Living Creature which contains all living creatures within it.”(2) While this tradition was carried on by the Gnostics and later the alchemists, the Church fathers imaged a world that was neither divine nor sacred. A transcendent divinity was the source of all creation, and humanity lived in exile from heaven in a state of sin. This doctrine created a split between matter and spirit, causing the world to be seen as separate from its creator.
The understanding of the world as sacred resurfaced from time to time over the next centuries. In the Gothic revival of the twelfth century, and later in the Renaissance, the created world was briefly seen through the image of the World Soul. In their cathedrals the Gothic architects reflected their vision of a sacred order within creation that belongs to this feminine divine principle. The World Soul animated and formed nature according to divine proportions, which the architects, masons, sculptors, and stained glass artists imaged in their creations. (3)
Again during the Renaissance nature was briefly seen as a living spiritual essence:
In the Renaissance the World Soul was understood as a spiritual essence within creation, guiding the unfolding of life and the cosmos. In the words of the Renaissance philosopher Gideon Bruno, the World Soul “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.”(5) The World Soul was also the creative principle that the Renaissance artists sought to channel in their work. Their art was based upon the same sacred proportions they saw in nature, and they understood the imagination as a magical power that can “lure and channel the energies of the anima mundi.”If medieval theology had removed God to a wholly transcendent sphere, to the Renaissance Platonists nature was permeated by life, divinity, and numinous mystery, a vital expression of the World Soul and the living powers of creation. In the words of Richard Tarnas, “The garden of the world was again enchanted, with magical powers and transcendent meaning implicit in every part of nature.”(4)
The Renaissance left us great wonders of art and the imagination. It was a brief flowering, however. The orthodoxies of the Church re-established the split between matter and spirit, and the rise of science began to image the natural world as a machine whose disembodied workings human beings could rationally understand and master. The magical world of creative mystery infused with divine spirit became a dream belonging only to poets and the laboratories and symbolic writings of the alchemists. "
And so I am an alchemist, and so I am a poet.
image Jia Lu's Lattern Guardian
Access: Public
I'll open by saying briefly, that I love what you are doing with your writing and explorations. There is just so much here! It's a beautiful thing…
I am fascinated by a number of the same things that you are, in the case of this post it applies to things dealt with both directly and indirectly. You talk about the idea of the spirituality of the 20th century being “rote”, and I couldn't agree more. How much of our “spiritual life” came to us via our parents and/or the expectation that we should put in an appearance at our local church of choice? And what a hollow existence…
I think throughout the world the walls of so many religious institutions are decaying due to the fact of the shallow emptiness they contain. They don't live, they don't breathe… The walls of most of these institutions are like petrified lungs straining under the pressure to breathe… and so they decay. Many are walking away from these institutions while still others are hanging on for dear life in the belief that they are somehow immutable and therefore filled with “truth”.
Their decay to me, is part of the real “good news”…
And so faced with the decay, and the emptiness of the walls of these institutions, I think for the first time in I don't know how long, people are looking to fill themselves with living breathing ideas which resonate with their spirits. And as a result, we are coming to know the “trueness” or “rightness” (using these words in the loosest possible sense) of spiritual beliefs, via experience.
How many of us have that over our parents and grandparents. So many of them, particularly in American society got theirs from their parents. Our generation inherited them and found them to be empty, contradictory and hypocritical at best. And so we've been forced to look elsewhere, both inward and outward toward traditions marginalized or forgotten entirely. But again, in that search so many of us are able to align our beliefs based around the life and the experience of them. The building blocks are not only alive, but they are more solid and realized at the very least within our own worlds. For so many it is either a holistic approach derived from the search or it is the discovery of other holistic approaches which resonate with us. Many of us also realize that just because our spirtual method “works” for us, that it doesn't need to for anyone else… Nor should it. It is pure ego to think that it should, however I think people are starting to realize that there are reasons to respect all traditions.
I tend to think that this New Era which we are emerging into is the next Renaissance, and that this New Era will be far larger, wider reaching, far deeper and sweeping. For me it has moved beyond a sense, though the evidence is really just beginning to present itself.
I'm not even going to start getting into that here… I've started some on my blog, but so much of what I sense is still swimming around in a sea of observation and I am still busy connecting the dots.
Pardon me if this note has been somewhat of a stream-of-consciousness exercise, but these past couple of weeks, that is where my brain has been.
Evelyn, I love your sense of exploration and I look forward to what you continue to reveal in your search!
Namaste,
–D.