In certain pre-Christian pagan traditions, there are teachings about the role of the sacred feminine, expressed through stories of goddesses or oracles. These are associated with wisdom and knowledge. This is what is called Gnosis in Greek which stands at the source of all esoteric truths. These tales are often shrouded in secrecy, concealed and so considered to be hidden occult teachings. Yet always, the Goddess, and the other forms of the sacred feminine are held sacred, esteemed and zealously honored as the object toward which desire is rightly directed, and particularly desires expressed by masculine polar principles.
While the masculine seems always focused on what is useful and material, concealed in its marital and patriarchal tendencies is always the ideal of beauty and pleasure. These are held in the greatest reverence. It is the feminine that the ideal masculine seeks to serve. In fact, wars have been fought for the sake of feminine ideal. The medieval notions of knightly chivalry and the songs of the court troubadours elevated the feminine to the highest levels, while at the same time, the instruments to state and the Church always sought to force the submission of this feminine and to indoctrinate society with an original sin if sexuality as a way to control this vast erotic power and influence of the sacred feminine and ensure patriarchal dominance over Christian society. And so, women have been excluded from many aspects of life, and yet also are held sacred at the same time in our culture. The result being that both men and woman were subjected to a systematic repression of their sexual natures which in more ancient times were the basis of sacredness. And this often parodied in literature and drama by persons like Shakespeare and Chaucer.
And yet, it is for the sake of the secret and sacred power of the feminine that the goddess principle has remained deeply concealed within all esotericism, and expressed most notably in the renaissance study of Alchemy. This literature openly spoke in allegory and metaphor what was forbidden to be said directly in the times of inquisitions and witch burning by the patriarchs of both the Catholic and Protestant churches in Europe and later in the new world. The European Christian theocracy, and its royal elites collaborated to brutally terrorized the expression of the ancient feminine source for wisdom that was once contemplated and delivered by the sacred oracles of the pagan Greeks and Egyptians. The greatest expression of this was the Albigensian Crusades and the genocide of the gnostic Cathars as well as the brutal repression of the Knights Templar under accusations of heresy. The Templars refused to participate in this terrorism directed by church and state authorities. It was not long after that they we the target of this same inquisitions, as their independent powers and knowledge of ancient sacred matters, including the nature of the sacred feminine in the gnostic and pagan roots of the ancient world were a threat to the theocracy.
Nevertheless, despite the brutal repression of the theocratic Christian state, the masculine labored like worker bees serving their queen bee. Throughout all this period, the noble and chivalric masculine has sought out the blissful idealized state embodied by the feminine, fully cognizant of the lack by which they measured their own capacity for bliss as compared to the fully natural polarity of embodied Feminine consciousness. This is in no small part separate from the vastly greater orgasmic potency that women enjoy by their anatomy, for which they have been shamed by all the Abrahamic religions, yet which was universally revered in ancient pagan cultures. Because of its lack of similar potency, the masculine polarity can never give up on this search for the divine feminine. It persists regardless of the form the sacred feminine takes; that of virgin mother, sacred whore, amazon warrior, wise crone or any of the other mythologies that have captured the imagination of the patriarchal civilization of the last several thousand years.
Now we are still trying to recover our lost sacred past. Both men and women have lost our way and access to what the ancients knew and understood about sacred sexuality. And so we are disconnected in modernism from our Pagan and Judeo-Christian roots, and suffer the persistence of the sexual repression that we inherited from the medieval past. The truth that we seek has been hidden at all costs from us is the fact that consciousness of human sexuality is the actually the highest spirituality. It is God and Goddess which are embodied within us. In this century some of us are trying during our post-postmodern times, despite all of our deconstructions, to recover the most ancient of traditions, is if we could invent it newly. That is, a rediscovered Traditionalism from the ancient world that could truly liberate our soul and spirit as a species, civilization and as individual men and women with a restoration of truly sacred sexual nature.
© Copyright 2021 Robert Fertman, All Rights Reserved
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