The Return of the Dark Goddess
Humanity has long sought to escape what we can't control. Now, what we cannot control may be our truest salvation.
Humanity has been on a fool’s errand for the past several thousand years. We have been immersed in a mythology of “progress”, imagining ourselves to be the crown of creation, destined to overcome and transcend the limitations of the body, of nature, and of the Earth. Underlying this multi-millennia quest for transcendence has been an underlying fear of all that is chaotic, wild, or unpredictable. We have viewed nature as dangerous. We have viewed the body (particularly in its sexuality), as impure and contemptible. We have viewed even our own deep impulses as irrational—something to be controlled by the wise rational consciousness.
Perhaps there was a good reason our species took this evolutionary turn—turning our gaze away from the Earth and instead looking up towards the heavens. Perhaps there was some sort of crisis in humanity that seeded a deep distrust of nature. Perhaps this is what initiated the ages-long habits of control, colonization, and extraction. One can imagine our ancestors' agony during long, bitter winters that killed many friends or family members. One can imagine the horror of the volcanic destruction at Pompeii. The Black Plague of Europe wiped out over one-third of the people. With these and countless other disasters, it is perhaps understandable that humanity came to distrust the Earth, Nature, and all that is unpredictable and wild.
Though with our present distance from such disasters, perhaps we can see them in a greater context. Could these crises have been an initiation for us—akin to a baby bird's initiation when his/her mother pushes them from the nest? It was in the centuries after the black plague, for example, that the philosophy of science gained traction and we began our deep exploration of the cosmos. Perhaps we would never have made such a transition if not for our desperate quest to understand the plague.
There is abundant anthropological evidence that the earliest peoples worshipped a Great Mother or a Goddess who was imminent within the Earth. Deep within her bosom, we thrived for many years. We could have lived indefinitely in her abundantly warm embrace. Though in the cycles of nature in which we were bound, the idea of growth was hardly conceivable. It was only after we began to embrace linear time and worship the Sun God in the sky that we began to become what we are now.
Personally, I don’t think this was a mistake of evolution, but a part of some greater design. Through the Mystery of Nature, we were jettisoned from her womb and forced to find a way to stand on our own two feet.
The story of Civilization is the story of our species' bid for our own independence. We have imagined ourselves as totally separate from Nature, destined to bring Her under our own control. Untold advances have occurred during this relatively brief period. Though like a tower built upon quicksand, Civilization has engineered its own defeat.
In more ancient times, it was the chthonic forces of nature that most threatened our species: famines, floods, disease, natural disasters. This is certainly not the case today. It is not nature that we most fear these days, but the horrific image of ourselves.
In just this past century, we have witnessed unimaginable atrocities that have desecrated life in its very sacredness. We have endured countless forms of slaughter in the form of several attempted genocides. We have seen entire populations enslaved or decimated by their very own governments. Less than a century ago we faced the possibility of total annihilation by the nuclear weapons of our own design. Today, we again face the possibility of extinction, wrought by the ecological disruption that we engineered.
There was a time in human history when Nature was our greatest threat. Through the increase of our technical prowess and the exertion of control, we are far less threatened by Nature than we once were. Now, it is our own control itself that threatens to strangle us all. Where we once sought liberation from Nature through the exertion of control, we must now turn to Nature for liberation from our own ill-fated designs.
The time has come for us to complete a ten thousand-year cycle. What we once sought liberation from is now our only hope.
Ancient cultures venerated sexuality and the Dark Goddess—the one connected with the cycles of life and death, bound within the Earth. The chaotic forces which she governed were recognized as the very stuff of life. Even death was venerated—for there is no true life without it. We had sought to escape the death she carries, but we have undermined life in the process.
The powers of the Dark Goddess have never left us, despite our delusions to the contrary. While we thought we were transcending natural laws, we have been beholden to them all along. In fact, she has supported us continuously as we have sought to separate ourselves from her. It is only now that ecological systems collapse that we can see that this was always so.
The only thing that can rescue our species from the destruction wrought by our own design is that very same life force we had sought liberation from. We need the unpredictable cycles that visit periods of rain and dryness upon the land. We need the life in the oceans that inspire such vivid primal fear within all of us. We need the countless untraceable functions of the Earth and of Nature to thrive without our incursion. These were never against us, they were for us. They sustained us all along.
More intimately, we need our own personal transformation. We need to turn to the unpredictable elements of our own souls. We need art, we need poetry, we need music that inspires the depths. We need our baffling and chaotic dreams that can summon possibilities that narrow reason cannot. All our attempts at control have strangled the land and they have strangled ourselves—created a vacuum of meaningless that threatens to swallow us up even if we do survive our created calamity.
We need all our best-laid plans to be broken. They lead squarely to a dead end.
We need those chaotic forces. We need that Dark Goddess.
In the one hand she carries life force, in the other, she carries death.
May we be visited by the death of all that we thought we are.
For in death lies transformation.
New life is on the other side.
Oh yes 🔥