Sex and the Goddess: An Intimate Exploration of Woman’s Erotic Spirit and Sacred Sexual Power in Myth, Legend, Life, and History (Volume One)

By Karin E Weiss Ph.D.

It has been over twenty years since the full manuscript of my book was edited for publication in 1998. I had begun writing it in the previous decade, the 1980’s... a period of flourishing women’s liberation movements against the patriarchal status quo. Books about women’s sexuality and spirituality were flooding the bookstores, and many writers were producing profound studies of the untold heroism of women throughout history.
I was a pioneer in the burgeoning field of Sex therapy and education at the University of Minnesota Medical School’s “Program in Human Sexuality.” In addition, I conducted women’s self-enrichment groups and workshops in my private practice... “Woman’s Discovery Institute” ... where I also gave professional Astrology readings and classes.
This rich mix of psychology, philosophy, spirituality, and a knowledge of the cyclic patterns of life shown by astrology created within me an avid interest in researching women’s unsung heroism throughout history. It brewed in me a heady fascination to stitch it all together in a circle montage that connects all women and all aspects of our multi-layered lives. I based my theory on the lunar cycle, which is eternally linked to women’s menstrual, emotional, and psychic cycles. With a friend, I created a series of workshops for women to celebrate their many-faceted selves and gain confidence to pursue their goals.
Yet for various reasons my book manuscript remained in my own bookshelf, never getting published. Until now... the times again call for women to claim their autonomy and gain equality in an overly male-dominated and viciously callous world. I am blessed to find in Xlibris a publisher ready to take on the project with me.
I am thrilled to finally see my “Life’s Masterwork” in print. You will find many divergent ideas in these two volumes. No single woman encompasses all that are described, but as you read and recognize these characters in yourselves and your friends, I hope it will help you gain a full appreciation of your own awesome erotic spirit and sacred sexual powers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796072860

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Copyright © 2019 by Karin E Weiss, Ph.D.

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-7960-7288-4

                            Softcover                          978-1-7960-7287-7

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Rev. date: 11/20/2019

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE

MOTHER FIRST MASK: MOTHER EARTH

MOTHER SECOND MASK: DIVINE MOTHER & CHILD

MOTHER THIRD MASK: GRANDMOTHER

THE MAIDEN ARCHETYPE

MAIDEN FIRST MASK: THE GOOD GIRL

MAIDEN SECOND MASK: THE NAUGHTY GIRL

MAIDEN THIRD MASK: THE ORPHAN

THE WILDWOMAN ARCHETYPE

WILDWOMAN FIRST MASK DAME NATURE

WILDWOMAN SECOND MASK: THE MAENAD / MADWOMAN

WILDWOMAN THIRD MASK: THE WHORE

THE MUSE ARCHETYPE

MUSE FIRST MASK: THE CLOWN

MUSE SECOND MASK: THE STAR

MUSE THIRD MASK: THE SIREN

FOREWORD TO 2019 TWO-VOLUME EDITION OF

SEX AND THE GODDESS by Karin E Weiss

PUBLISHED BY XLIBRIS

It has been over twenty years since the full manuscript of my book was edited for publication in 1998. I had begun writing it in the previous decade, the 1980’s… a period of flourishing women’s liberation movements against the patriarchal status quo. Books about women’s sexuality and spirituality were flooding the bookstores, and many writers were producing profound studies of the untold heroism of women throughout history.

I was a pioneer in the burgeoning field of Sex therapy and education at the University of Minnesota Medical School’s Program in Human Sexuality. In addition, I conducted women’s self-enrichment groups and workshops in my private practice… Woman’s Discovery Institute … where I also gave professional Astrology readings and classes.

This rich mix of psychology, philosophy, spirituality, and a knowledge of the cyclic patterns of life shown by astrology created within me an avid interest in researching women’s unsung heroism throughout history. It brewed in me a heady fascination to stitch it all together in a circle montage that connects all women and all aspects of our multi-layered lives. I based my theory on the lunar cycle, which is eternally linked to women’s menstrual, emotional, and psychic cycles. With a friend, I created a series of workshops for women to celebrate their many-faceted selves and gain confidence to pursue their goals.

Yet for various reasons my book manuscript remained in my own bookshelf, never getting published. Until now… the times again call for women to claim their autonomy and gain equality in an overly male-dominated and viciously callous world. I am blessed to find in Xlibris a publisher ready to take on the project with me.

I am thrilled to finally see my Life’s Masterwork in print. You will find many divergent ideas in these two volumes. No single woman encompasses all that are described, but as you read and recognize these characters in yourselves and your friends, I hope it will help you gain a full appreciation of your own awesome erotic spirit and sacred sexual powers.

~Karin E Weiss, Ph.D. October 2019

SEX AND THE GODDESS

Women’s Erotic Spirit and Sacred Sexual Power

INTRODUCTION

BEGINNING THOUGHTS ON GODDESS SEXUALITY

AND

FEMININE ARCHETYPES

INTRODUCTION

Beginning Thoughts on Goddess Sexuality and Feminine Archetypes

This book has been over ten years in its birthing. The Goddess Wheel was revealed to me in a flash of insight in 1986 while I was conducting the first of many groups in which women came together to explore the connections between sexuality, spirituality and creativity in our lives. In the years since then I have reworked, revised, and fine-tuned the manuscript at least a dozen times, but the basic circle of women’s psychospiritual qualities called archetypes has remained constant. In the many workshops and women’s circles where I have presented this model of the varied facets of a woman’s inner self, women always seem to get it instantly.

The feedback these women give me runs along these lines: I liked the non-judgmental tone of the naming of various aspects of womanhood. It helps me understand myself better, to realize that my sexuality is such a big part of who I am. I see that sexuality is not only about what I do in bed with a partner or how I dress and look physically. It is also about what I feel and think about life overall, and how I express my creativity, and how I find happiness. Seeing how the Goddess Wheel includes all these different faces helps me start to accept parts of myself which I always felt were somehow bad or wrong. It has helped me understand and feel more kindly toward other women who are different from me sexually. I really liked the ideal that women should be encouraged to act freely and express all their inner self. I really like the challenge of exploring sexuality and spirituality together as integral in my life.

Why I Wrote This Book

I had been a sex therapist and educator for fourteen years by the time I began writing this book. I had listened to hundreds of women and men describe their concerns about sexuality and intimate relationships. I learned of the rich diversity and great potential that women’s sexuality holds in the world. I also learned how women have been taught to deny or feel ashamed of their real sexual power. I learned, too, that most of us have grown up judging our female sexuality almost entirely from the perspective of a male sexual model, and we tend to define ourselves on the basis of how we think men view us. I saw that men have just as many doubts and questions about sexuality as women do, and that many men are hungry to learn about sex from a woman’s perspective.

In working with my clients I perceived how we’ve all assimilated an incomplete and imbalanced view of human sexuality. In other words, over many years of counseling women and men and couples about sexuality, I discovered that many people do not have a clue about how sex infiltrates throughout every aspect of their lives. Moreover, I came to see that many people are afraid of their sexual power because they have learned to think of it as something dirty, dangerous, and sinful. But as I worked on this book it was gratifying to find that many women and men are receptive to the Goddess’ message of sacred sex and erotic spirit because they realize that sex has been presented all out of kilter for centuries.

Meanwhile, in my personal life I experienced a profound spiritual awakening when, through reading, travel, study and talking with friends and colleagues, I learned about the long hidden history of a female face of god. My religious upbringing had been in a traditionally devout Christian home. But my parent’s religion was not rigidly or exclusively defined. They taught me to be open-minded and, with their diverse circle of friendships, my parents modeled a nonjudging acceptance of different faiths. Therefore it was no great leap for me in my own questioning of the church’s teachings to adopt and integrate an image of a female deity.

The Goddess has guided my personal spiritual quest for the past twenty years or more and I’ve found Her imminence in my life empowering and liberating. I have learned that the Goddess includes so much more than merely a feminine approach to god, that Her lessons encompass all of nature, the universe, and creation. Moreover, these lessons do not exclude the masculine, but advocate a true balance between male and female sexual energies in all of our lives.

Thus I came to write this book in an attempt to portray the intimate intermingling of the divine with the mortal, the sacred with the profane in all aspects of our lives. This is no easy concept to grasp, and I do not claim to have a solid handle on the idea. I remain a seeker even as I aspire to teach what I’ve learned to others. For twenty-five years I’ve been a sex therapist and educator, doing counseling and teaching folks about this most elemental, personal area of life, our sexuality. But, long before I led my first sexuality discussion group in 1970, a compelling fascination with the elusive mysteries of sex had inspired in me a series of strong convictions about the importance of sexual energy to our health and well-being. Since these themes form the foundation of this book, I’ll mount my soapbox to present them immediately in a nutshell so you’ll know of whence I come.

This is What I Believe

It’s my premise that women’s sexual nature undergirds, pervades all aspects of our lives, is intricately linked to our creative energy and inseparable from our spiritual nature. I believe sexuality for women is central to our sense of identity, to our awareness of being connected to the earth and to all its creatures spiritually. Furthermore, through our sexual energy, I believe we intuit a greater relationship to the very stars, to cosmic patterns, to the rhythms of the universe. I propose that our sexuality is the generating force of our true power and that we need to reclaim this power, use it joyfully to enlighten, to enrich, to heal.

To spell it out more specifically: First of all, I’m convinced that sex is sacred energy that permeates our lives. I perceive that there is something of the erotic to be found in every aspect of our human existence in the world, particularly in that of living in a physical, mental and emotional body. Secondly, in my work I’ve come to believe that, for women, sexuality is central to our sense of identity and inextricably connected to our self-esteem. But we’ve become alienated from our inherent erotic nature, mistrusting its appearance as a dangerous or forbidden aspect of ourselves because sex has been defined in terms that empower males and disempower females. I believe women need to reclaim our sexual power as equal to that of men, both in our personal relationships and in the larger society.

Thirdly, mounting examples of the denial, denigration, and damning of girl’s and women’s sexuality are demonstrated by the legal systems, governments, health systems, schools, churches, and financial institutions that influence all our lives. I’m convinced that an empowered healthy feminine sexuality is a key to worldwide healing at both the spiritual and the profane levels of civilization. Finally, I believe this healing can be achieved by both men and women through a rebalancing of the feminine and masculine energies in ourselves and our relationships. I hope that by re-visioning positive symbols for the feminine, by re-telling our myths and stories to affirm both men and women, and by re-imaging our sexuality united with our spirituality, we can together bring about the balance needed to save the world for future generations.

What’s It All About?

This book offers a potpourri of concepts related to women’s sexual energy and creative spiritual power. The organizational structure of this book is based on the cyclic nature of feminine consciousness symbolized by the phases of the moon. Like the ever-changing faces of the moon, women’s lives unfold in cyclic rhythms and repeated patterns to round out the wholeness of our being. In my writing, which is grounded in psychotherapeutic experience and ancient spiritual tradition, I’ve tried to clarify, in a mythopoetic way, the complexity of our sexuality as women.

This book weaves together mystical and symbolic ideas, scientific facts, mythological and fictional legends, fantasy stories, and real-life examples of women’s experience of sex and sexuality, soul and spirituality. I intend it to be a ramble over an ever shifting vista of images of Woman, an instinctive exploration of our sexual and spiritual metamorphosis, an eclectic mix of female faces blending in a colorful throng. I’ve improvised on the original goddess traditions purposely in order to bring them forward into the lives of women today. I have attempted to interweave the larger myths of woman with the stories of women’s real lives in a lyrical blend of fact and fiction.

In this book I offer the reader some mental soul-food. I invite you to enter the search, to wander the pathways and gather varied perspectives, to select for yourself from among different ideas, and to blend your own story-flavors with those of others rather than passively ingesting the pre-cooked fare dished out by some authority. My hope is that on reading SEX AND THE GODDESS you will gain encouragement to visualize yourself as sexually strong, erotically healthy, regardless of your chosen lifestyle, regardless of the intimate relationships you do or don’t have with others. Men reading this book will hopefully gain increasing respect for the complexity of their own feminine nature as well as for the women in their lives.

I wish to make it clear from the start that while the archetypes discussed in this book are of women, the lessons they have to teach us about human sexuality can enlighten people of both sexes. The feminine aspects of sexuality are available for men to experience just as women can experience the masculine. We all need to better understand female sexual energy, both in ourselves and others. Likewise, of course, a better understanding of male sexual energy is needed. But, except in that the feminine throws light on the masculine, I will leave the male’s story for my brothers to write. In this book the descriptions of childhood and adolescence are drawn from a girl’s perspective, which may sometimes reflect that of her brother, but which is generally different from his. This is a book about female and feminine aspects of sexuality, so I hasten to remind the reader that the male experience will not be discussed except in as much as it impacts women’s experience.

Moreover, the ancient images of feminine power show how every aspect of ourselves holds light and dark energy and, like the sun and moon, both are necessary. I will describe female sexual-spiritual experience showing both its positive and negative potentials. I want to impart a sensuous and stimulating sense of pleasurable eroticism permeating all of life. Yet I also want to invoke the dark, mysterious, and dangerous aspects of vital sexual power.

It’s About Sexuality As A Vital Force

First and foremost, this is a book about sex. Sex is a subject with many sides, some of which are (in the words of one editor) rather purple for sex is sensuous and flowery. It is sometimes raucous, racy, raunchy, ribald, and yes, often vulgar. Such language describes the essence of sexual energy whether or not we like to admit it. Further, I’ve purposely written juicy passages, erotic descriptions, explicit depiction into the text occasionally. My reason for this is to elicit the nonrational, visceral, sensory experience of being a sexual person__ to give the reader not simply an intellectual exercise of ideas, but also an emotional recognition of understanding, a sense of being there. This is also my reason for including occasional passages of personal reflection__ to share my story, not because I assume it’s common to all women, but because it may help stir the reader’s own memories, encourage women to share their stories with each other.

People have forgotten that female sexual energy is as potent as male sexual energy because human sexuality has been defined solely in male terms for nearly 5,000 years. While, like men, women can enjoy the physical performance of erotic techniques, this is only half of the picture of human sexual expression. The other half, an internalized experience of psychic emotional connections, of ecstatic body responses, has been denied women and men since patriarchal religions separated the spirit from the body. While sex and the erotic dimensions of spirituality pervade our daily lives we’ve learned to deny this truth, in denying it we’ve created a world where violence masquerades as eroticism, and where sex is used as a means to convey and hold power over others.

It’s About the Suppression of Female Sexual Power

Because women’s sexuality is the essence of our power, the sacred feminine has been badly maligned. It’s been all but lost amid distortions of history based on masculine supremacy. Male god religions teach people to separate the body from the spirit: they teach that the flesh is unclean, sinful, to be despised; while the spirit is pure, holy, to be upheld. I believe it’s a travesty to teach such division of self from self, and evidence throughout the world shows that it’s women who suffer the torture of this split of body from spirit most grievously. I am convinced that the Goddess is never so torn for she teaches us to engage our body with our spirit. She entreats us to love with our mind and our soul.

In telling the tale of female sexuality and spirituality, its opposite must be acknowledged. In doing so, I refer frequently to factors in history and mythology and religion and culture which have been devised in the dominant male format, ignoring or denouncing women’s input. I write about these things, not to bash men, but to tell the part of the story that has been left out. Deliberate denial of the female’s equal participation and contribution in the creation of our world, both sacred and profane, lies at the heart of the problem I address__ the imbalance between male and female sexuality. Women’s voice has been silenced to the detriment of everyone. This book is one attempt to make that voice heard again.

At times I include information about cultures that are matriarchal (women-led) and matrilineal (heritage traced through the mother) and I contrast those with their counterpart, patriarchal (male-ruled) culture. Many people have rightly become sensitized to a kind of female chauvinism that has grown out of certain quarters of the feminist movement in the past few decades which loudly denounces the patriarchy. I do not advocate such reverse sexism. I am not anti-men, but I do hold the male-dominator society at fault for the imbalances we all struggle to right. It is a fact that Western society has been constructed around an androcentric bias that has largely excluded female input for the past several thousand years.

My purpose, my hope, is to evoke thoughtful argument. I want to elicit a fresh look at the unquestioned, unheeded, unspoken issues hidden for thousands of years within the shadow of all traditional law and religion as regards a special sacred female experience of sexuality. Since the Bronze and Iron Ages, both Western and Eastern religions have cast women and sex in league with the devil. We’re conditioned to react with fear, to make judgments against any who suggest there’s healing light within those deep shadows.

But many have observed that the devil, as an evil power, is actually a relative newcomer on the mythological scene. They say he is possibly a construct of misogynist (woman-hating) men who have invented the devil to cover up fear of their own sexual vulnerability. As Karen Armstrong¹ explains, sexuality was one of the dark aspects of themselves that medieval men couldn’t accept, so they repressed their own sexual urges and projected them onto an evil force they blamed on women. Yet, I’m reminded that evil spells live backwards and I’d make a guess that the devil must once have lived in the light. In this book both dark and light are acknowledged as equally essential to our creative spirit and sexual power.

It’s About Goddess Spirituality

Some ideas in this book may feel unsettling for they swim against the predominant current of moral tenets and religious doctrines of our time. The eight archetypes I’ve identified as informing women’s sexual wisdom, as portraying women’s sexual identity, are embodied in an ancient vision of the creative deity as female, as Goddess. The imagery, the lessons, the experiences evoked by these archetypes emphasize mystical, mysterious, esoteric wisdom that contradicts much of what we’ve been taught to believe about women and sexuality and spirituality.

Feminist historians, sociologists, anthropologists and archeologists are bringing to light important new evidence that shows very clearly that women’s sexuality, women’s creative powers haven’t always been denigrated. In fact, what’s being disclosed by recent investigative research is quite the opposite of what we’ve been taught. A long concealed historical truth reveals that humankind once held great reverence for Woman as a divine creative force who is at all times a strong sexual being.

The pantheon of goddess figures being revealed to us by scholars, such as Marija Gimbutas² seems endless. The ancient female images appear without limits as to their erotic energy, beauty, profound creativity, and their more awe-full qualities of destructive, transformative power. But it remains difficult to find the original versions of Goddess lore behind centuries of androcentric revisions, under layers of misogynist defamations. So we’ll need to revive, reconstruct the old stories, retell them in our own way and add to them our own.

I believe most women feel a longing in our bones to be at one with our souls. It feels unnatural for us to cut off physical sensations and responses in lieu of mental perceptions and ideals. As many feminist writers, such as Susan Griffin³ have observed. Woman feels in her body what she knows to be true. Her mind and her senses are intimately linked. The emotional responses that flow through physiological, neurological channels of her fleshly form are but signals sent by her innate spirit, messages of the unseen soul. Body and soul are one in the earthly life. It’s our special gift of birth to have the physical form in which to experience this material existence. Our body is our sexual energy brought to a heightened awareness. These are messages sent us from the realms of Goddess.

Forty Thousand Years of The Goddess

Despite all efforts to obliterate it from our memory, woman’s creative power and sacred sexual energy was acclaimed and celebrated for at least forty thousand years, and it seems that, as Merlin Stone⁴ writes, all over the world God was originally Female.⁵ According to legends throughout the world, life first arose from the primordial oceanic wombs of Great Mother goddesses such as Gaia. Mother Earth of the ancient Greeks, and Spider Woman of the Pueblo and Navaho peoples in North America. The African Creatrixes Oshun and Oya are revered still as the pulsing vibrant sexual source, the force of life, by Black peoples throughout the world.

Thousands of sculptures, figurines, cave paintings, rock carvings of female figures dating from the Paleolithic periods and earlier Stone Age have been found throughout the European continent. Temple priestesses of archaic Mediterranean cultures taught and practiced sacred rituals, which included sex, in order to consecrate the body, honor the Goddess. Practitioners of the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece performed secret rites to learn mystical teachings of their triple goddess Demeter / Kore / Persephone.

In India, Hindu temple dancers called devadasis sang and danced daily to honor feminine Shakti power until they were outlawed by the colonizing British in the 1950’s. The Buddhist’s continue to worship Shakti as the innermost soul that’s feminine, animating both man and god. In Tibet, the dakini still represents untamed feminine spiritual, sexual energy believed to awaken people to the spontaneous powers of chaos and play. The hetaeras of ancient Greece, the courtesans of Renaissance Europe, the geishas of Japan were women who held great prestige, enjoyed uncommon economic freedom in their respective societies due largely to their skills in the arts of sex and romance.

Jewish Kabbalistic mysteries taught that Shekinah was the feminine soul of God without whom he couldn’t exist. Sophia was the name given the highest idea of Wisdom by early Gnostic teaching, said to be God’s mother, symbolized by a dove, eventually transcripted into the Christian’s asexual Holy Ghost . Some Gnostic Christian cults worshipped the so-called harlot, Mary Magdalen, whom they knew to be High Priestess of the ancient Semitic goddess, Mariamne. Even more astonishing, some scholars site evidence that Mary Magdalen was the lover and wife (feminine soul) of Jesus who gave full meaning to his life, although this record was entirely obliterated from the Christian cannon by the early church fathers.⁶

In the first century AD, Celtic Warrior Queens of the British Isles, Germany, and France were said to wield a fierce strength equal to that of their male comrades at arms, and were reputedly more lusty than any man. Tales of Amazons preceded them throughout the classic world, telling of fierce fighting women who rode magnificent horses bareback, carried magical shields, wielded the double-headed ax for their weapon, and loved each other. Native American Medicine Women were the originators of a healing wisdom, the magic arts practiced by male shamans and medicine men to this day.

And the great body of knowledge regarding human mysteries of sex, birth, death, and rebirth revealed through the Wiccan Craft of the Wise in Old Europe has its roots in the earliest Goddess cultures dating to Paleolithic times, four hundred centuries ago. This sacred feminine knowledge of healing was nearly obliterated in a church-inspired holocaust, the Inquisition, that lasted nearly three hundred years, from the late 1400’s into the early 1700’s AD, when millions of women were sexually mutilated, burned at the stake, and otherwise obscenely persecuted, tortured, banished or murdered as witches throughout Europe and in the New World colonies.

What Happened to the Goddess Cultures?

In the late Neolithic and early Bronze ages, from the fifth millennium through the third millennium BCE, Proto-Indo-European tribes migrated from the steppes of south Russia. They traveled in waves southeast to India and Iran/Persia; west to Anatolia; southwest to Greece and Italy; west into Central Europe; northwest into Britain, Ireland, and Wales; and north to Latvia and Lithuania.⁷ These tribes of nomadic pastoralists infiltrated the lands of indigenous goddess-worshipping tribes bringing with them horses, wheeled vehicles, weapons of war, and a variety of male-god religions. The Indo-European were a patriarchal tripartite society with classes divided hierarchically into priest-lawgivers, warriors, and nurturers.⁸

Local goddesses were assimilated into Indo-European pantheons to sanction and give energy to men’s activities. Some were to bestow energy for rulership, others to bestow energy for war. All were to bestow energy of fertility and nurturance. Mortal women were valued according to the degree they bestowed energy by bearing and raising children to fill the ranks of priests and warriors.⁹ Old women, however, were divested of any useful role. Since their energy was of no value to men, their wisdom was labeled anathema and old women became outcasts.

Women Scholars Unearth Ageless Secrets

Today, inspired writings by numerous feminist scholars¹⁰ re-collect for us the secrets of the Great Cosmic Female. These writers present compelling evidence of our ancient feminine divinity as the deepest mystery, the farthest vision. The ancient lore tells how in the goddess’ lunar light we’re conceived, fed, nurtured to grow. Her solar light awakens us to act, to become who we are to be. She’s ever creating, destroying, renewing. Life courses around and around in her circling spiral of sexual energy__ now ebbing, now flowing, now rising, now falling. To escape her engulfing, swallowing, smothering wholeness is not possible for we’re each within her, a part of who she is, and she within us, our spirit, our soul. There is no need to fear her, for what we fear in her is really our own power, our own sexuality, our own consciousness, our own life. Yet we often dread the responsibility of living our small tedious lives. We yearn to return to paradise. Here, we discover that paradise can exist in our earthly lives when we revision ourselves healed and whole. When women claim our individual and collective heritage as strong Daughters of the Goddess.

Key Concepts Explained:

Some key ideas need to be explained before we can delve into the complex store of feminine sexual lore and wisdom.

Archetypes versus Stereotypes

According to Jungian psychology, archetypes are universally recognized energy patterns that have been present throughout human experience and that manifest themselves in the collective consciousness of evolving civilizations through various character roles played out by their members. In every culture people access the archetypal qualities by acting out different energy patterns, choosing from among various qualities those that suit their needs, rejecting others that feel less appropriate.

Historically in each culture particular manners of expression evolve, styles of behavior develop that are repeated, become familiar, are given labels, and are ultimately judged good or bad, right or wrong. These become the social stereotypes we often fight to overcome.

While stereotypes tend to be limited by narrowly defined, superficial characterizations of social roles, the archetypes offer an enduring and unlimited range of possibilities for our lives. Yet both stereotypes and archetypes can prove to be our friends, our allies, in a process of self-discovery.

We need not fear the archetypes as hidden powers, we need but pay them respect by acknowledging their existence within us. Neither need we disdain the stereotypes, but simply recognize them as they manifest in our daily lives, as they reflect different aspects of our true selves.

By learning to communicate with these different parts of ourselves, learning to understand the relationships between them, we can become conscious of many new options, can discover untapped resources for living fulfilled lives. We can free ourselves from society’s limiting, demeaning judgments as we project who we are through a wider lens that reveals the Goddess’ rainbow within.

Women’s Cycles and the Phases of the Moon

The phases of the moon have symbolized the cyclic nature of feminine consciousness in goddess religions throughout time.¹¹ My own understanding of the eight phases of a monthly lunar cycle derives from my lifelong study of astrology, which is essentially a study of the cyclic patterns of life and of the relationships between one energy form and another.¹²

The ever-changing faces of the moon appear as it circles the earth in relationship to the sun. Thus we see that the magical quality of the moon, our long fascination with its cycle, is partly due to the fact that it represents an archetypal cycle of relationship with the sun. As a universal archetype, the relationship between moon and sun reveals deep mysteries of our own changing patterns of interaction with the world around us.

I believe women are especially attuned through our bodily and emotional rhythms to the great universal cycles of the heavens, and from this natural affinity grew our earliest spiritual understandings of life, sex, death, and rebirth. In this book eight feminine archetypes are arranged to correlate with eight phases of the lunar cycle, depicting an ongoing dance of sexual, sensual, erotic, life enhancing energy.

As I’ve drawn them, each archetype presents some key ideas about feminine sexuality and spirituality as idealized qualities, exemplified in history and our own lives. Three intra-archetypes within each main archetype represent layers of its unfolding in women’s experience and are like masks which may be more or less stereotypical images of the feminine found in society. The masks introduce variations on the main theme of each archetype, demonstrating how it can manifest in us, how it might impact us, how it plays out in our daily lives.

Goddesses Are Not Archetypes

The mythological goddesses are not the same as the archetypes. That is, no single goddess can be said to represent a pure archetype, but every goddess can be seen to demonstrate aspects of several different archetypes, just as any human woman does.

Each archetype has its dark side which can become perverted when denied, can manifest in unhealthy behaviors and attitudes. While I generally wish to affirm all our feminine sexual potential rather than judge any specific qualities good or bad, I believe the perversities are as important to our learning about ourselves as the healthy ideals we strive for. The picture I present doesn’t paint female sexuality as a faultless ideal, but shows women’s dynamism, magnetism, and erotic power permeating our lives, potentially manifesting as constructive or destructive energy according to our direction, our consciousness, our choices of action.

What You Can Discover By Reading This Book

In the circular perspective of life attributed to feminine consciousness, there are no absolute ways of seeing or being, for everything can be given its rightful position on the great wheel of life. To each woman reading this book the models of feminine energy will appear in a unique way. One woman may identify with nearly all of the archetypes on a very personal level, another may only recognize herself in a few of them, still another may see she’s outgrown or moved through some and is now constellating different ones.

Readers may also see that faces of the Great Goddess come and go in their lives, creating a kind of kaleidoscope of their varied sexual, spiritual moods. As they read the descriptions of the feminine images in this book, readers are very likely to be reminded of others that symbolize their personal sexuality. I’m sure the Great Goddess doesn’t discourage our inventing more masks for Her, since every new face is simply another aspect of the great limitless Universal Whole that is our common Divine Creative Source.

A Weaving Of Women’s Lives

This book is a kind of weaving, a tapestry of the multiple and varied potentials of our feminine spiritual power and female sexual energy. Throughout the chapters we find threads linking the eight archetypes and their triple masked aspects with each other. Goddess stories intertwine throughout the book, each chapter reaching back and drawing strands from previous chapters to connect, cross, and overlap their themes. For example, themes of youthful curiosity, playfulness, and innocence may be highlighted in chapter two, The Maiden, but will reappear in several later chapters; themes of aged wisdom and the power of postmenopausal women occur with the Grandmother, in chapter one, and other Crone aspects found under various archetypes, but are especially focused on in chapter eight, The Wise Women.

Each mask is demonstrated by a number of different figures from life or fiction to remind us of the endlessly varied appearance of the goddess’ energy in our personalities, its continued renewal or revival throughout our lives. None of the archetypes or their masks are strictly limited to a chronological age, for they essentially represent different energy patterns, moods, attitudes available to us at any stage of our lives. However, I’ve correlated the sexual lessons of several of them with a typical age or phase in life