wotan14

In the process of re-elevating feminine materia -- of which marriage, chivalry, and Romanticism are examples -- negative and devouring aspects of femaleness must be retarded from consciousness, although the unconscious, both individual and collective, know very well of their existence and potency. All these processes are also simultaneously regressions to the psychological stage of gender dynamic which held sway for the longest portion of human social development -- the feminine, and female, as deity. Romanticism is a hearkening-back by the masculine to the female as inviolable, omnipotent goddess, to matriarchal states in which the feminine and earthly were indistinguishable from divinity.

That�s why, a few paltry millennia ago, males looked to the sky � the only place not owned by the feminine � and sought their own divinity in brotherhood and oneness with the Father, the black hole, secret source of universal energy.

Most popular music prior to the mid-Sixties illustrates the point -- the attitude of the minstrel, whether medieval troubadour or modern balladeer, is not of the reciprocity of equals, but of worship, of homage. Men get on their knees to propose marriage. The only sure laugh in any American �romantic comedy� inevitably involves physical violence by women against men. Females striking males in the testicles � the wound of the Grail King -- is as central to the psychological plot of romantic comedies as explosions in �guy� films. Females commonly lay hands on males during casual conversation � this is an unconscious, regressive assumption of ownership, the attitude of the mistress to the slave. Males do not nonchalantly lay hands on females in America. The male body is considered a tool, the female body considered holy and inviolable.

The assumption that females can touch or even brutalize males recapitulates, and reinforces, the domination by the female of the male body and spirit under matriarchy. Contrary to popular �progressive� scholarship, the matriarchies were neither non-violent nor egalitarian. As with the �mystery� of SIDS, female violence is almost always covert. Smothering, poisoning, starvation and whipping leave little or no evidence in the fossil record. Feminine violence is usually cloaked in deniability.

However, the evidence remains intact in the psychological and mythological record, and to lesser degree in the historical record. In matriarchal Sparta � which, typically, we moderns consider �patriarchal� -- boys were routinely and ritually whipped in public by order of the local women. We don�t hear about this from the American academy. What occurs in romantic comedies is a variant of this practice, and it is appealing because it returns the individual and collective consciousness to the psychological security of the matriarchies, when consciousness itself -- and masculinity -- were in infancy, as today they are adolescent. The physical and psychological abuse of males, especially boys, by females is perhaps the most singular characteristic of gynocentric culture, and is a sure sign of collective regression.

But the raising of matter is a very delicate process, exposing individual and collective femininity to inflation, naivet�, overprotection, and abuses of power. When the collective feminine is elevated en masse, as in America in the past forty years, recapitulating matriarchal conditions, many elements of the feminine, both in individuals and groups, will seize the moral and social high ground, establish themselves as conscience, judge, jury, and executioner, and gleefully begin the re-ordering of the beehive, hoping to re-establish the glory days of dominance, which remain very firmly entrenched in the unconscious of the individual and collective psyche.

With the culture committed to elevating the feminine at any cost, no check of feminine will-to-power is possible. Dialogue is censored, moral certainty is assumed, institutions become rigid and punitive, and society turns inward and begins to ingest itself. Scapegoats are paraded out, whipped, and led to desolation, imprisonment and slaughter. Decisions are made on the assumption that Mother always knows, and does, best.

Then the Empowered Witch ascends the throne, unconscious of the fact that she is not yet equal to the Shekinah, the Queen of Heaven -- that in fact, for all her certainty, she is still largely an unconscious being, astute in the animal ways of power but spiritually an infant. The Empowered Witch is an old, old entity, but her recent reincarnation in the West is as American as Mom, the flag, and apple pie -- and the apple is a tree mythologically associated with the Great Goddess.

There has always been an element of the feminine which is fiercely hostile to masculinity, still full of resentment from the imposition of the primal wound, the sundering of male ego-consciousness from the matrix. Part of this is inherent in the antagonism of duality and the counterbalances that swing the pendulum, and part is a result of more specific causes, prominent among them the insistence upon duality itself by the masculine -- without which there would exist no masculine, no fatherhood, no consciousness. But the whip falls most freely when a culture is in the midst of elevating the feminine collectivity, as for example during the troubadour movement, the Romantic movement, or the Catholic dogma of the Assumption.

Naming Mary as Queen of Heaven was an extraordinary, desperate elevation of matter and Nature for the modern Church fathers, and speaks to the same problem Carl Jung addressed � the schism between female and male, matter and spirit, earth and heaven. During such elevations restraints on the negative elements of the feminine are lifted, and criticism is prohibited or repressed. The very process of elevating the feminine constellates the Empowered Witch, who turns with rage and vengeance upon the entire masculine, especially vulnerable boys.