not two, not one - center for integral wisdom · not two, not one the sacred marriage of masculine...

© Sacred Centers - www.SacredCenters.com 415.234.6338 No portion to be duplicated without permission from Anodea Judith - [email protected]

The dance of masculine and feminine lies deep in our psyches – nearly as old as darkness and light or emptiness and form. A basic polarity in the universe, yin and yang fuel the agony and ecstasy of our external longings as well as our internal dynamics. Some say they make the world go ‘round.

In their various costumes, masculine and feminine archetypes have twirled across history’s dance floor as predominant influences ruling major stages and epochs. This ever-evolving dance has brought us through the twists and turns of humanity’s childhood to where we are now– a time of adolescent initiation, where the song of evolution is calling us to a dance of adult partnership – with recognition that we are interdependent pieces in this grand puzzle we are trying to solve together.

On the way to the dance hall, we spend time in men’s or women’s groups with the express purpose of moving deeper into the polarity of male and female mysteries. It seems that time spent with our own gender helps us to see ourselves better – by exploring what may be intrinsically masculine or feminine away from definition (or seduction) by the opposite sex. Men’s groups call their brother’s into higher integrity and awareness, and channel competition into brotherly support. For women, it is a chance to be in a feminine field, so precious in our masculine world.

Without knowing who we are intrinsically, through a deep intimacy with our unique interiors, we cannot hope to have true intimacy with another. And without understanding another’s interior, we cannot combine these differences in service of something larger. More solid in ourselves, we can better hold our unique shape in the challenge of relationships. Only by playing with a full deck -- with input from both genders --can we create wholeness in our world.

NOT TWO, NOT ONEThe Sacred Marriage of Masculine and Feminine

-By Anodea Judith, Ph.D.

The Black Brunswicker: by Sir John Everett Millais

No

t Tw

o, N

ot

On

e: T

he

Sacr

ed M

arri

age

of

Mas

culi

ne

and

Fem

inin

e


The Sacred Marriage

Evolutionary partnership is calling for a new level of synthesis—the Sacred Marriage that not only balances, but integrates opposite polarities. Our challenge is to come together again as men and women while still maintaining our distinct integrity. Even so, these archetypes and all they represent are evolving as well. Whether this plays out in our personal relationships (of any persuasion, gay or straight), in the workplace, or in politics, our old roles and definitions no longer suffice. New ones are evolving through us. -- discovered more by internal exploration than external norms. They are still tender and fragile.

As a higher synthesis, the Sacred Marriage can only be found through elements that have found both their difference and their commonality. Without maintaining our distinctions, we become an undifferentiated mush. Without finding our commonalities, we remain forever competitive, isolated, and alienated, even oppressive to each other.

The Sacred Marriage of masculine and feminine is not just about romantic relationship, however, but about balancing the intrinsic values that (for better or worse) have been assigned to them: mind and body, light and dark, heaven and earth, spirit and soul, rational and mythic, individuality and community, to name but a few. Western culture has put higher values on what we commonly associate (rightly or wrongly) with the masculine side of things: mind, light, heaven, spirit, individuality, and rational thinking. Such unequal weight takes us out of wholeness and balance. As our world teeters on the brink of multiple disasters, we find ourselves tipping back toward what has been rejected: valuing the earth and the body, the quiet retreat of darkness and simplicity, the soul’s nourishment and longing for community, and the need for guiding myths to give us meaning. It is not that these rejected virtues are better, or that the so-called masculine values are faulty – it’s just that they are out of balance with each other and poorly integrated.

If there is an emerging myth, I hope it is a love story. One where we rediscover what has been lost and treasure it anew, forging a relationship from greater awareness. Where people come back down to earth and fall in love with the planet with both scientific understanding and spiritual wonder. Where we find awe for the journeys we have all taken to get here, and cultivate the best that each polarity has to offer.

Artwork by Andrew Gonzalez: Alchemico d’Amore “Amore” 2002

No

t Tw

o, N

ot

On

e: T

he

Sacr

ed M

arri

age

of

Mas

culi

ne

and

Fem

inin

e


Carl Jung said a mark of maturity is the ability to hold the tension of opposites. This is the essence of Tantric teaching, to reach new heights of differentiation and weave these polarities into a higher synthesis. Such heights bring us to the threshold of the Divine—a revelation that beckons us into a deeper mystery. Yet we can only sustain these heights when we are grounded, just as a plant can only sustain the sunlight when it has roots in dark and damp soil.

The challenge to being witnessed as Divine is to truly access the Divine within ourselves. But also to know that the Divine is not a static concept but something that is evolving along with us, even through us. As gendered beings, the expression of the Divine evolves through our own bodies as men and women, yet is not bound to our standard definitions or associations.

The Dance til Now

We scarcely know what it means to truly meet and see each other as Divine. Given the history of our long, checkered past, this is understandable. We have been growing up through many stages of childhood ignorance in preparation. Like the baby of the king and queen who’s fate is to be sent down the river, in ignorance of its true heritage, our evolution is the long pathway back to realization of our identity as young Gods and Goddesses. Humanity’s power in the world is reaching the scale of gods: the power to change the climate, alter the gene pool, or blow ourselves to bits. But do we have the maturity of Divine consciousness to balance this level of power?

In the past, humans have seen themselves as children of God, with the Divine as some kind of parent. In our earliest beliefs, (as far as we can tell), humans worshipped an archetypal Mother. Birthed from the primal womb of nature, she nourished us from her breast of forests and fields. We were infants in her garden, eventually learning to cultivate our own food, soon to crawl across the land in our teeming toddlerhood.

This was the era of the Static Feminine – nurturing and supportive, but so constant there wasn’t much change or evolution. We were only infants after all. We were naive about the world, didn’t have influence over our destiny and lived short lives with relatively little change. The only animals with fire, we could barely make it warm when it was cold or bring light when it was dark.

The Static Feminine is one of four archetypal valences, first described as psychological stages

No

t Tw

o, N

ot

On

e: T

he

Sacr

ed M

arri

age

of

Mas

culi

ne

and

Fem

inin

e

Ar twork by Ian Szymkowiak from Waking the Global Heart


Static Feminine

by Gareth Hill in his book, Masculine and Feminine: The Play of Opposites in the Pysche. This first and foundational stage is symbolized by Hill as a circle. Think of the pregnant belly, the round breast, the cyclic seasons of the earth. The Static Feminine holds us and sustains us, yet it’s limited. We cannot go beyond the confines of the circle and still survive. An infant cannot leave the nourishment of the mother and is never far out of her sight.

As the archetypal Mother had babies -- both boys and girls -- we began to see the Divine as Mother and Father, Goddess and God. Riane Eisler has postulated this as a partnership society, but it was more like our parents were the partners, and we were the children. We were still young and powerless, living in supplication, centered around the magic of our prayers as petition for their bounty. The Divine was outside of us and we were its dependents.

Even in our toddlerhood, we lived under the Static Feminine, centered around the fixed cycles of nature. Within this stability, the masculine was growing up, finding its power and expression. The standing dolmens of Stonehenge and other sacred sites show we were reaching upward, to the heavens, to stand tall and straight, with phallic images reaching out of the ground.

As we grew, the masculine asserted its power and overthrew the Mother, as children tend to do. Her worship was plowed into the underworld of the collective, deep beneath the earth that was her domain. In the violent domination that began roughly 5000 years ago, we entered the phase of the Dynamic Masculine. The tables were turned and all values turned to their opposite. Heaven was good, earth was bad. Light was good, dark was evil. Men ruled and fought with glory, leaving home for months or years at a time, while women stayed home. Women were seen as inferior: powerless, controlled, even traded like cattle. At best, women were reduced to the status of submissive daughters and the masculine raised to the archetype of Father.

No

t Tw

o, N

ot

On

e: T

he

Sacr

ed M

arri

age

of

Mas

culi

ne

and

Fem

inin

e

PositiveSustainingStableCyclicWholenessUnifiedGroundedGood Mother

Negative

DevouringRestrictive

BoringInfancy

UnconsciousLimited

Bad Mother


Dynamic Masculine

The symbol of the Dynamic Masculine is an arrow. Here the masculine moves in the opposite direction from the previous Static Feminine: the circle becomes a line, what was contained becomes unlimited. We forged outward in a new direction. The rate of change picked up pace, freed from our previous constraints and ignorance. (Put together, the arrow moving away from the circle is the symbol for male and the fiery planet Mars .)

Under the Dynamic Masculine, we built cities, forged disparate villages into empires, developed writing and mathematics, and fought ever bigger battles. Over time, we rejected our past infusion with Nature, saw our mythical beliefs as fairy tales of a younger time, and continued to grow up through the middle years of childhood –with the genders leading separate lives in vastly different realms – men in the workplace or battlefield, women in the home.Once the Dynamic Masculine seizes power, the next step is to maintain that power. Thus the

dynamic impulse becomes static. The new Father archetype was a stern parent who could forge a burgeoning humanity into some semblance of stability, following the violence and force with law, order, and reason. We developed rational thinking and scientific knowledge. We built the Industrial Revolution and woke up to our individuality.

The symbol of the Static Masculine is a cross: two lines that make distinctions between above and below, left and right, masculine and feminine. No longer were we undifferentiated blobs, but now we had logical discernment, reason, rationality. But we were divided within ourselves and between polarities. Heaven and Earth, science and religion, rational and intuitive, men and women, were no longer connected. We spent more time making distinctions than seeing the whole. This division became accepted as normal and we forgot what had been rejected.

PositiveAssertive

Commanding

Adventurous

Powerful

Transformative

Heroic

Innovative

Differentiating

Static Masculine

No

t Tw

o, N

ot

On

e: T

he

Sacr

ed M

arri

age

of

Mas

culi

ne

and

Fem

inin

e

Negative

Dominating

Violent

Reckless

Tyrannical

Destructive

Egotistical

Disrespectful

Negating

PositiveStable

Ordering

Systematic

Detached

Sets Standards

Benevolent

Intellectual

NegativeRigid

Controlling

Bureaucratic

Dissociated

Disempowers

Punishing

Heady


We’ve now gone through the dynamics of the Great Mother and her supplicating son, and the Great Father and his dutiful daughters – as dialectic stages of our collective childhood. Meanwhile, we have been growing up all along, learning about the world, developing technology, finding ourselves and our purpose, evolving. It is time now, as Steve Baerhman has said, for us to stop being children of God and start becoming adults of God.

Like adolescents taking our first forays into romantic relationships, we have largely played in separate realms until now, when men and women begin working together in jobs and in the home. And like adolescents, we still barely know who we are, let alone how to retain the best of our differences while coming together in creative partnership. But relating as mature archetypes is the new challenge of our time -- not as child to parent, but as co-creative aspects of the Divine within each other, budding Gods and Goddesses, realizing our own and each other’s divinity.

Of course we have a long way to go to achieve this parity. Women are still hugely oppressed in the world, in some places struggling for the simple right to drive a car or get a basic education without getting acid thrown in their face. Even in America, women have only had voting rights for less than a hundred years. The political and financial worlds are still highly male dominant and it shows.

To make headway we must learn from each other. The fourth and final stage that allows us to complete the four archetypes is the Dynamic Feminine. The Dynamic Feminine is characterized by non-linear dynamics, by returning to internal authority, direct spirituality, and co-creative emergence. It requires spiraling out of our linear stasis in curvaceous beauty. It completes the Hero’s journey, (that began with a dynamic impulse) with the return home, to community again. But we return older and wiser -- not as passive recipients sitting in pews while a male figurehead lectures to us about our sins, but as priests and priestesses reigniting the sacred in co-creative exploration of what is dynamically real and relevant.

A static system is good for stabilization but resists change. A dynamic system brings change but can be chaotic. Evolution requires both: an ability to change and embrace the unknown, and the stability to embrace change without collapsing into chaos.

Artwork by Ian Szymkowiak fromWaking the Global Heart

No

t Tw

o, N

ot

On

e: T

he

Sacr

ed M

arri

age

of

Mas

culi

ne

and

Fem

inin

e


Evolve the Best and Leave the Rest

The Dynamic Feminine is not a domination of other stages, but one that is just now emerging. It is not that it’s better, but that we must come through all four stages to enter maturity and balance. Each has its pros and cons, as the included charts demonstrate. Like the stages of Spiral Dynamics, a truly integral perspective sees that all are necessary, all have their place, and yet we move in a logical fashion through each in our evolutionary journey. The point is to embrace all four in their particular gifts, to use when appropriate, and to be aware of each of their pitfalls while doing so.

The Dynamic Feminine is not exclusive but inclusive. Both men and women are exploring its realms together. It breaks down the arms of the cross that separate and returns to the spiral that unites. But unlike the Static Feminine circle, it is not limiting, but expanding. We still need male linearity, logic, separations, and distinctions. But when lines and curves are mixed together, the architecture gets far more interesting. We have agency and community, strength and softness, courage and compassion, stability and change.

In a dynamic universe, static forms will eventually break down and evolve to something larger and more inclusive. Let us paint with a full palette of colors, all notes on the scale, and pull together within ourselves and our communities a true integration of the various polarities that comprise the Sacred Marriage. Then perhaps we will experience Heaven on Earth and know what it means to be whole. From this place, what will it be like to love?

Anodea Judith

Dynamic Feminine

No

t Tw

o, N

ot

On

e: T

he

Sacr

ed M

arri

age

of

Mas

culi

ne

and

Fem

inin

e PositiveTransformativeCreativeEroticPlayfulEgalitarianInclusiveHolisticImaginativeFree

Negative

ChaoticUndisciplined

IndulgentIrresponsible

IndiscriminateBoundary-less

UndifferentiatedUnrealisticUnfocused


This ar ticle and the enclosed char ts were excerpted from Anodea Judith’s book: Waking the Global Heart: Humanity’s Rite of Passage from the Love of Power to the Power of Love.

Anodea Judith, Ph.D. is an evolutionary philosopher, former psycho-therapist, and workshop leader who teaches worldwide. Her best-selling books on the chakra system, marrying Eastern and Western disciplines, have been considered groundbreaking in the field of Transpersonal Psy-chology and used as definitive texts in the U.S. and abroad. Her recent book, Waking the Global Heart, won two literary awards for Social Change and Mind-Body-Spirit. With ten published works, and transla-tions in 15 languages, her books have won her the reputation of solid scholarship and international renown as a dynamic speaker and work-shop leader. For more info, go to http://www.wakingtheglobalheart.com or http://www.sacredcenters.com.

About the Author

No

t Tw

o, N

ot

On

e: T

he

Sacr

ed M

arri

age

of

Mas

culi

ne

and

Fem

inin

e

not two, not one - center for integral wisdom · not two, not one the sacred marriage of masculine...

Documents