Searching for the Divine Feminine
In the West, the Divine Feminine feels like a silent echo drifting farther and farther away. "What is the role of women," some ask. "Which wave of feminism is best," others ponder. The Bible serves as a source for many to answer to these questions. But what is the Truth?
As blasphemous as this may sound, Christianity, as a religious institution, may be blocking the way to such answers. Three of the most important thinkers in the exploration of the Divine Feminine, Carl Jung (psychologist) Joseph Campbell (author) and Reverend & Mrs. Moon (religious leaders), along with the Bible and every culturally-defining creation myth, conclude that the Divine Feminine is an equal, yet different, part of the Dual-Being Creator of the Universe. By design, human beings are supposed to positively embody the Creator at the level of the individual and the family.
Yin and Yang
The Yin and Yang symbol provides the most detailed understanding of the harmonious union of the Divine Masculine and Divine Feminine. It, all at once, expresses the fundamental nature of the Creator of the universe as a Dual Being with the Dual Characteristics of Male & Female, Internal & External, Being & non-Being, Order & Chaos, and positive & negative.
Notably, the Yang is light, with a shade of dark, and the Yin is dark, with a shade of light. This indicates that, every man has a latent femininity, and every woman has latent masculinity. Carl Jung expresses this idea of Dual Characteristics psychologically with the anima and animus: "The feminine belongs to man as his own unconscious femininity, which I have called the anima." (Carl Jung, Collected Works, Volume 5). The animus is the same in a woman, with Jung noting that it is "... reasonable to suppose that an equivalent archetype must be present in women" and that " for just as the man is compensated by a feminine element, so woman is compensated by a masculine one" (Carl Jung, Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self).
Jung, in conjunction with the idea of Yin and Yang, notes that the anima. the latent femininity in a man, and animus, the latent masculinity in a woman, as parts of the unconscious, can manifest positively once acknowledged in a person. This is because, in the case of a man, acknowledging and recognizing his femininity allows the contents of the unconscious (since most men often repress their latent femininity) to make manifest. Together, the anima & animus, become "yoked-together" as a syzygy, "the integration of the anima and animus into the conscious self" (Lexicon of Psychology). If not integrated, the anima often appears in dreams and fantasies, with the same occurring with a woman's anima.
Jung and Moon, based on the Yin and Yang symbol, both describe the union of masculinity and femininity as essential for the human condition. However, Moon goes one step further than Jung and states that this model but also be completed on the family level through Origin-Division-Union Action. Exposition of the Divine Principle explains that "out of God, the Origin, two entities are separately manifested and reunited in oneness." (EDP 24-25). The Yin and Yang, tied in oneness, must discretely manifest its two aspect in two opposite partners in order to create something new on a higher level. For human beings, this happens when a man and a woman come together in union-the Second Blessing-to use Moon's terminology.
By modeling the Origin--complete unity between male and female, being and non-being, anima and animus--a man, as integrated yang, is supposed to find an integrated yin. In that case, the man and woman together complete the model of the yin and yang, and become a syzygy on the family level. Jung and Campbell describe the syzygy as a sexual and parental archetype for this reason. Reverend Moon explains that it is specifically sexual energy, the purest and most powerful form of love, that created the Universe. The family level requires not symbolic or even psychological unity and integration, but a substantial one involving one fully integrated man and one fully integrated woman.
Dual Characteristics in the World's Creation Myths
The world's creation myths, as highlighted by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, describe the Origin as having Dual Characteristics. In the Judeo-Christian creation myth, Genesis 1:27 states that "God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." Additionally, some Jewish mythology tells of Asherah, the wife of God.
In early traditions of Hinduism, Golden Embryo, or Egg, cracks into two to create the Sky and the Earth. The Egg is described as the unity between Being and non-Being, and in some traditions, even has a creative counterpart by which the Egg is born by, and births, at the same time. For example, in the hymn of the Primal Man Purusha, "From him Viraj was born, From Viraj Man again."
The 3-Stage Cycle to Restore the World
The messianic tales that develop in ancient religious literature all follow a similar pattern of the Cosmogonic Cycle (in Campbell's terms), Individuation (in Jungian terms), and Origin-Division-Union Action (in Reverend and Mrs. Moon's terms). These thinkers describe a similar 3-stage unfolding at different levels of analysis, all of which are pertinent in understanding the manifestation of the Divine Feminine.
Stage 1: The Origin
The first stage according to Campbell is the superconscious. It is the motif of the Cosmic Egg (Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces) and the Origin that Reverend and Mrs. Moon describe. For Jung, the first stage is the archetype of the syzygy within the Conscious part of the psyche. Apsu and Tiamat, when joined together by the waters, represent syzygy and the united conscious and unconscious.
Stage 2: Descent Into the Unconscious
The second stage according to Campbell and Jung is descent into the unconscious. In narrative, it is when evil enters the world. While good and evil are not a duality within the Yin and Yang, positive & negative and conscious & unconscious are. In the thought of Jung, evil is a representation of the Shadow: the unintegrated part of the Self: the union of conscious and unconscious. Campbell notes how the villain in many narratives often mirrors some unacknowledged part of the hero (Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces). Notably, each major archetype and motif (with regard to creation myths) have both a positive and negative expression. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson in his book Maps of Meaning details these expressions of Jungian archetypes. Besides Urbos (pre-cosmogonic chaos, expressed as the waters that exist before even the Creator deity), the Yin, or unknown, is represented as either the creator or destroyer. The Yang, the known, is represented as either order & culture or totalitarian order. The messianic figure, or the hero, not just represented as a messiah, but an anti-type (Satan, Qingu, etc).
When the masculine side of a woman is not fully developed, her unconscious manifests negatively as the animus until she acknowledges it and integrates it (the same is true for a man's anima). After the elder gods kill Apsu, Tiamat goes into a mad rage, turning from the archetype of life into one of destructive nature. The syzygy is broken, and the animus is manifested in an evil male deity, Qingu. A similar event occurs in the Brahmanas texts concerning the Golden Egg, where Prajapati creates the devas (good gods) and the asuras (evil gods). Eventually, Prajapati (Indra in later traditions), defeats the asuras, restoring goodness to the world.
Genesis and the Descent into the Unconscious
The Book of Genesis features the descent into the unconscious in a unique manner. Genesis 1 features the Creator God moving upon the Urbos as a fully integrated Consciousness as represented by Perfect Yang and Perfect Yin. Towards the end of the story, the perfect conscious is projected onto two archetypical, imperfect characters: Adam and Eve, who are created in the image of God. They are then given the mandate to "Be fruitful, multiply, and have dominion" (Genesis 1:28) over the created universe. To be fruitful, or mature, from a Jungian perspective, means to complete the process of individuation and integration of the Self. Adam and Eve, as projections of the perfectly integrated Conscious, must grow and complete the process of individuation. The second and third mandates actually expand the mandate for individuation beyond the individual level and into the family and societal level. Reverend and Mrs. Moon explain how, for human beings, this process requires a growing period in which they choose, of their own free will, to follow this divine mandate.
In Genesis 2 & 3, Adam and Eve are represented as substantial, yet immature, images of God. This is similar to the Brahamas scriptures, where Prajapati is represented as an immature Being who grows to maturity over the course of a year. Likewise, Adam and Eve are also purely archetypical characters, with Adam representing Order and the masculine part of God, and Eve representing Chaos and the feminine part of God. Since the universe was created in the image of the Creator, the growing period is found within God the Creator. Destined to be husband and wife, Adam and Eve were to grow to maturity before fulfilling the mandate of multiplication and dominion.
According to Reverend Moon, the descent into the unconscious occurred prior to the completion of Adam and Eve's growing periods. As soon as the serpent tempted Eve and she ate the fruit, "Adam...failed in his duty as a brother, and Eve failed in her duty as a sister." Furthermore, "When the archangel tempted Eve, Eve should have checked with Adam and Adam should have asked God. However, because they acted on their own, they went the way of the Fall" (Moon, Sun-myung, tparents.org). He also stated that "Adam and Eve became enemies" because "the archangel[serpent] and Eve together bringing her husband to ruin" (Ibid). Once Adam and Eve's relationship was disunited, even a little, the descent into the unconscious begun. From Reverend Moon's perspective, Eve broke from Adam and joined the serpent, identified as Satan in later biblical writings, just as Tiamat joined Qingu in the Enuma Elish. From an internal point of view, Satan killed Adam, the representative of Order, to turn Eve from the bringer of life to the bringer of sin into the world. Adam, meanwhile, descends into the tyrannical man.
Stage 3: The Messianic Figure
The third stage of the cycle involves a return to the Conscious through the integration of the shadow, or more broadly speaking in Campbell's thought, a return to the superconscious. In all four thinkers' thought, this is done through a messianic figure. The Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, and countless other peoples have the messianic figure come in the story: Marduk defeats Tiamat and Qingu, Horus defeats Seth, and Indra defeats Vrita. From that point on, the rituals and practices of the religion, in large part, imitate in symbol the creation myth, particularly the course of the messianic figure.
The Symbolic Messiah vs the Substantial Messiah
Judaism, through the Book of Genesis, breaks off from this pattern of concluding with a messianic figure. In Exposition of the Divine Principle, the Messiah in symbol comes with the building of the Tabernacle and later the Temple standing as representatives of Jesus and His Bride. Both objects of faith were built with the purpose of showing the ideal of the messianic figure so that, if and when the Israelite leaders turned faithless, the people could stay on the path of faith through a relationship with the object of faith. Yet, before this time, the oral, and later written tradition of the Israelites and later Jews did not contain a story of a messianic figure. However, soon before and for decades after the destruction of the Temple and the exile into Babylon, prophets such as Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, and Malachi issued prophecies about a coming messianic figure. Exposition of the Divine Principle offers a radical explanation: a shift was occurring from the world of symbol into the world of substance was occurring.
400 years after Malachi's messianic prophecy, Jesus of Nazareth comes to the world in the Gospels as a is a living, historically documented human being who can return humanity back to the superconscious, fully integrate the Self, and, as Revered and Mrs. Moon said on the basis of Jesus' teachings, to allow human beings to embody God. For this reason Jesus is describe as the Word of God and God Himself.
This extremely radical shift in all human spirituality completely transformed the world. However, Christianity at the same time made a critical error in it development as a result of Jesus' death on the cross. Jesus came as the complete embodiment of the Yang of God, but not the Yang and Yin of God. Every creation story, including Genesis, is clear: God is One Being with Dual Characteristics, and one of these dualities is male and female: Yang with latent yin, and Yin with latent Yang. For all of humanity to go through the process of individual and family level integration as, in Jesus' words, children of God, Jesus needed a Bride. Otherwise, only a substantial embodiment, beyond symbol, exists for the Yang and masculine part of the Creator. While Reverend and Mrs. Moon teach that Jesus did not fail, and that he was failed by those around him, this was a critical part of Jesus' mission he wanted to accomplish before dying on the cross. For this reason, Mrs. Moon elaborates on the Bride's role as the Only Begotten Daughter, the embodiment of Yin with latent Yang-the feminine characteristic of God.
Substantial Yin and the Heroine's Journey
In the Jewish tradition, the Holy Spirit was considered feminine, with femininely-connotated pronouns in Hebrew. The energy of the Spirit was clearly described as feminine love, or Eros. Yet, Jesus' declaration that "He who has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9), was not seen in this, by this point in Jewish history, lesser stream of Jewish mythology and theology. God, for the Jews, was a loving master. Whether Jesus said God was His Father or Mother, his words were seen as blasphemy.
Although the messianic figure is male in most religious myths and stories, the heroine's journey, as Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has discussed , is exemplified in Beauty and the Beast, where Bell liberates her father from the dungeon of the beast, and "tames" the beast in order to save him and allow him to live to his full potential. Rather than seducing the man towards negative behavior as the anti-heroine, she helps makes the man a better person as the positive expression of the creative, life-giving mother. For this reason, Reverend Moon describes the Bride as the True Mother, and the Book of Revelation describes an anti-type to the Holy Spirit: the Whore of Babylon.
However, since no such figure appears in the Gospel narrative, the Christian tradition, lacking the heroine's journey, looked for a mother figure in the image of the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus. For Jung, the image of Mother & Infant is critical to the survival of any culture. Such images, in his view, must be held as sacred. In the early history of Christianity, certain groups also settled on the figure of Mary Magnaline, with "Gnostic" Gospels going so far as to insinuate that Mary Magnaline and Jesus were in some kind of romantic relationship. Such views were eventually rejected, but Reverend Moon in fact interpreted her role as the to-be Bride of Christ prior to his crucifixion.
Substantial Yin Must Come on Earth
Mrs. Moon offers a profound insight : although Jesus described the Bride and that he must return to hold the marriage supper of the Lamb, because Christians believed the godhead was only male, the Bride had to be something else: the Church. In the earliest parts of Reverend Moon's ministry, he wrestled with these understanding of the Bride. Many times in his sermons he talked about members of the congregation becoming the brides of Christ (Sermons of the Reverend Sun Myung Moon). However, he also said very clearly, also expressed in Exposition of the Divine Principle, that Christians must graduate from the age of the Bride, and that the Bride must be born as a child on earth: they [Christ and His Bride] will form on earth a perfect Trinity with God and become True Parents" (Eu 172). He even echoed Mrs. Moon's crucial teachings that the Bride is the Only Begotten Daughter of God.
After the death of Jesus, despite looking for someone to serve as the embodiment of the Divine Feminine, Christians could not help but only looking at Christ, their Savior. They could not have realized that the feminine was lacking since Jesus was, to them, God Incarnate, and thus made the entire Godhead male. However, every religion, and even fields of psychology, clarify the need for the Divine Feminine on an individual and family level. Reverend and Mrs. Moon clarify that Jesus was talking about his physical Bride, not the Church. Due to this belief, any worship of the feminine was slowly deemed as pagan and heretical by the Christian Church.
Unificationism: The Final Key in Finding Universal Truth
The Bible says a lot about the role of women. However, it is of a symbolic, meaning internal embodiment of Yin with latent Yang. The embodiment of Yin must come to earth in the same manner as the embodiment of Yang did with Jesus Christ. Jesus marked a complete transition from symbolically reenacting religious myths to substantial embodiment on the level not just of the individual, but of the family. Christ returns to earth to complete this profound mission.
It is Reverend and Mrs. Moon who, on the foundation of key thinkers like Campbell in the writing world, Jung in the psychological world, and all the religious scriptures make up human spirituality, that found the missing key in unlocking the true meaning of the Divine Feminine. That is why Unificationism, in my belief, is the thought that can reach every religion and bring an understanding that all scriptures myths tell a universal story with universal Truth, based on universal principles that everyone can live by.
Works Cited
Bible Gateway Passage: Genesis 1 - Revised Standard Version.” Bible Gateway.Hyo-won, Eu, Exposition of the Divine Principle (Seoul: Family Federation for World Peace and
Unification, 1996)
Joseph Campbell, 3rd edition, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Novato: New World Library,
2008), 219
Sproul, Barbara, Primal Myths: Creation Myths Around the World. Harper Collins Publishers (1991).
Joseph Campbell, 3rd edition, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Novato: New World Library,
2008).
Jung, Carl, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Volume 9.
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