The Absent Anima

Being interested in the World (the green one, the dream one, the Anima Mundi), inner, outer and other, I often scan the alternative newswires for information and detail usually missing from the mainstream infotainment fodder. In a recent trawl I spotted and read with interest the Carolyn Baker and Shepherd Bliss articles (Shepherd Bliss… some great images conjured by that name, or is that just me?) on Energy Bulletin.net, addressing the peculiarly male and masculine dominated discourse around issues often identified as ‘peak oil’ and ‘climate chaos’ and these started a train of thought.

I think there is enormous need for the feminine (and more people in female bodies) to engage with and express in new forms responses to and approaches for the Great Turning (as Joanna Macy frames it). If peak oil is actually in some sense just one aspect of the zenith of a wider cultural phenomenon, call it ‘Peak Patriarchy’, then the clear and timely expression of the full-force of the feminine (through women, men and life itself) is utterly necessary, it seems to me.
No one ever got enlightened, achieved happiness or connected with their own deepest, fullest purpose through one polarity alone - we need balance, a Joanna Macy for every Kunstler, a fiery red Dakini for every grey-suited senex in power somewhere, a Persephone for every Apollo… indeed, a tantra of multi-levelled energy change…

…and as the feminine is more present, more visible and included, then the masculine energy can also become itself more fearlessly, released and allowed to be in its authentic place rather than distorted and twisted out of shape into the brutal acting-out of the too-late capitalist violence we know all too well.

If the post energy descent world is to be an attractive, enhanced one and if it is to be experienced as such by humanity, then it will manifest as that through the inclusion of the feminine - no more the worship of Moloch as the endlessly entropic ‘growth economy’, but the growth of consciousness and culture grounded in sustainable and life-affirming ways on the Earth. Culture over civilization every time.And if the exclusion and distortions of the feminine energy continue unabated in all their forms, be it environmental degradation and exploitation, the conditioning of young women into uber-consumers and self-harmers, or the rape of the mind and body in violence and dominator hierarchies, then we had all better watch out for the ultimate wrathful expressions of that same feminine energy - in the oceanic swallowing and super-tempests of climate change, in Kali dancing, in the murderous rage of the slighted Great Mother.
Hell hath no fury… Perhaps this is the nascent warning James Lovelock is currently whispering at the moon, as even this rational man of science and conscience feels the need to unlock the only force that could serve and save, the love his own name contains, the Romantic inheritance itself, as an invocation, an appeal, a prayer before the tipping point of Gaia’s revenge.

kh 7.6.06

IMAGE: 'Anima Mundi' from the Quinta Essentia, Leipzig: 1574