Feminine Principle
So
matter is a living, feminine counterpart of the spiritual creator, a deity, and
not something He produced and molded according to His will.
Paracelsus
contended that matter was a living counterpart of the creating deity.
He was a dualist in that respect, for he did not share the official
dogmatic opinion that God
created
matter the way it is described in Genesis. He believed
that matter was uncreated.
These philosophers thought that in the beginning, when the spirit of God
hovered over the abysmal prima materia, she was there too and was not
created. There were two things in the beginning: the male
father spirit and the female matrix being; the chaotic matter, matter is in
increatum, a not created but equivalent principle from the very beginning.
To
aspire to perfection is, as Jung has pointed out, more characteristic of the
masculine Logos principle, while the feminine
ideal is more that of completeness in which everything is simply held
together in one unified whole. Consequently, this feminine
goddess all-Nature also possesses cunning, cruelty, wickedness, unfathomable
depths of passion and the uncanny gloom of death, the smell of corpses and
putrefaction in equal measure with the potentiality of new life and rebirth.
In practical reality every woman experiences the dark side of this power
in herself when her erotic jealousy is aroused, when her children want to leave
her, when she as a widow, abandoned, has to fight her own way alone through
life. Then the tigress in her surfaces, the whimpering bitch,
the intrigue-spinning goddess of fate, and no woman can become conscious of her
larger, greater self
without having lived these aspects of the goddess within herself.
Here
is a principal mythological role of the feminine principle:
She gives birth to us physically, but She is the mother too of our second birth
as spiritual entities. This is the basic meaning of the motif
of the virgin birth,
that our bodies are born naturally, but at a certain time there awakens in us
our spiritual nature, which is the higher human nature, not that which simply
duplicates the world of the animal urges, or
erotic and power drives and sleep.
Instead, there awakens in us the notion of a spiritual aim, a spiritual
life: an essentially human, mystical life to be lived above the level of food,
of sex, of economics, politics, and sociology. In this
sphere of the mystery dimension the woman represents the awakener, the giver of
birth in that sense. In these caves where the boys went to be
initiated, to be transformed from the children of their physical mothers into
the children of the cosmic Mother, in the womb of the Earth, they experienced
symbolic rebirth. G6