I have been really triggered by the #MeToo movement. Just like so many women, this has brought things to the surface that I haven’t fully dealt with, or really dealt with at all. It’s made me relive several traumas, it’s made me get really angry, feel really hurt, cry my eyes out, feel proud of women everywhere, feel strong, feel sad for women everywhere, and pretty much anything and everything in between. It’s been several months now and the movement shows no signs of letting up or being stuffed back into the genie bottle from which it exploded forth. Good. This is a sacrificial bull that we have gutted and we are still gazing at the hot, steaming entrails to see what this will mean for our future.
Like for so many of us, it has given me a real chance to do some serious introspection and healing, even though often it’s felt like confronting the Bogey Man hiding behind the closet door or the serial killer lurking downstairs in the kitchen. It hasn’t been easy. Other than being cat-called, discriminated against, harassed, bullied, having my butt pinched, touched, stroked in public, forced to go down on men just so they would leave me alone (Hey it was better than letting them have sex with me, right?), I was also rufied and raped on a family vacation in my early twenties. The messed up thing is that I blamed myself for just partying too much and being out of control for that last one. I was so subjugated by the deluge of anti-respect for my womanhood that I took that upon myself as my own responsibility and it wasn’t until a little over one year ago that I could even say the word “rape” out loud and have it apply to me.
I’ve done a lot of work over the last few years in regards to this. I have fibromyalgia and I know so much of my pain is the physical embodiment of all of this energy. My pain when the #metoo movement started was through the roof and my body was crying out for me to hear not only all of the injustices that had been done to her but to everyone else coming forward with their suffering too. It was intense to say the least. But serious pain has always been one of my roads to healing and I have just upped my therapies, my meditation, taking time for myself, getting in rhythm with my lady cycle, getting in rhythm with the moon, calling in the Goddess in all of her forms, using crystals and divination to ground, and performing rituals to crack open and hone my crazy-good intuition that I am just getting in touch with. Yeah. It’s been a real evolution.
Right as I started taking witchcraft more seriously and actually calling myself a witch to others, something kinda crazy happened. My cat had eaten a rather long piece of Christmas ribbon and we were at the vet trying to determine how bad it was. I thought she had only eaten a small chunk. Little did I know at the time. Poor Chichibu was in agony and utterly miserable. The vet was poking and prodding her guts and she was growling like a little tiger. The vet left the room and I was standing behind my cat. I had a strong intuition that I shouldn’t touch her right then, but thought, nah, and reached for her to pick her up. Sure enough, she wheeled around and bit me, hard, on my right hand, my dominant hand, the hand I do art with. Still latched on and finally hearing my voice saying her name, she realized it was my hand in her vice grip and not the vet’s and she went limp, whimpered, and let go. She was very sorry, but it was too late. I ended up in the hospital for the next four days because it was so infected. Chichibu also was in the hospital having ribbon extraction surgery at the same time. My husband was going back and forth visiting his unhappy ladies the whole time and we just kept saying how bizarrely synchronous the whole thing was.
Even as it was unfolding, it felt like I was getting some strange initiation. Chichibu and I are very connected psychically now and I can’t touch any of my craft or divination tools without her appearing right next to me. But what I had to heal for quite some time was my right hand. At the time it felt like a healing of my creative force (which definitely needs healing – I will write about that later). And while I still feel like that is accurate, there was something else that I was feeling but couldn’t put into words yet.
Then two weeks after that debacle I ended up in the hospital again because I developed an allergic reaction to new medication I was taking. Luckily no extended hospital stay this time, but oddly the thing that has taken the longest time to heal from that is my right foot and ankle. The medication caused my throat to close, gave me hives and severe chills, and made my joints, especially my ankles and feet became really swollen, so much so that I couldn’t walk. My right ankle and foot are still messed up despite all my other symptoms having gone away just days afterward. Living and working in the symbolic realm for the last while, I knew it had something to do with all of this. My right hand, and now my right foot? And since my right foot and ankle have been off, my right hamstring and hips have been screaming too. Something is massively out of alignment.
Feeling into this for the last several days, a shadow of an idea began to take shape. I did a tea leaf reading to see what my future child would be like and I got that he’d be a boy. I felt a huge reaction rise up in me. I have no idea how to deal with a boy! Little boys are evil and and pull your hair, yank chairs out from underneath you, chase you every day during recess, and stab you with pencils – at least that was much of my childhood experience of them. My husband said something to the effect of, “Well, you gotta get clear with that energy or the Goddess is going to make you get clear.” And it hit my like a ton of bricks and it has been crashing over me like the rising tide of a giant tsunami for the last several days. I have a terrible relationship, perhaps not even a real relationship at all, with the Sacred Masculine. In fact, I have only a toxic relationship with the Masculine energy principal and I have literally no relationship with my own animus (the internal masculine energy every woman has. Men have an anima, the feminine). The most insane thing is that when I try to picture the Sacred Masculine I can’t do it. I see something for a second and then all of the bad things that men have done to me for so many many years just floods over the image.
Thinking of an adult man was problematic because of all of the triggers and trauma that are still looming in my psyche. So I tried to go back to adolescence or even to childhood to picture a being, a boy even, that could be a pure representation of the Masculine in all of it’s goodness, power, and promise. I had to go back pretty far. There was a time when me in my power was equal to that of a boy in his power. It was in preschool. I had a magical summer where I would organize a game of unicorn pegasuses and about a half a dozen little boys played with me every day. But I also was enlisted in playing Rambo with them equally as often and it was glorious. That was before things got weird. That was the last memory I have that I can recall that isn’t plagued with mistrust, fear, anger, hatred, disgust, sadness, and a whole host of other complicated emotions. Ok, so I have an image of a 5 year old dressed as Rambo with giant Pegasus wings and a unicorn horn as one aspect of the Sacred Masculine.
However kind of great that is, he isn’t a full embodiment of the God. Even the word “God” is problematic because it dredges up all of the terror that has been enacted in His name. Our cultural evolution has just been an ongoing over-inflation of the masculine principles and searching through mythology, ancient and contemporary, I was having a hard time finding a well-rounded individual who frankly, wasn’t a dick. Because what is the Sacred Masculine anyway? How do I even answer that?
I am firmly rooted in what the Sacred Feminine is. Daughter, Seductress, Mother, Warrior, Queen, Princess, Priestess, Crone, Wild Woman, and so many more archetypes that have a cornucopia of meanings folded within them. She is the light and the dark, birth and death, young and old. And so is the Sacred Masculine. He is light and dark, impregnation and death, young and old. He is the naughty Pan. He is the wise Old One. He is the consort, the seed, the yang. He is the sky of equanimity and the burning sun. He has a ferocity to create as much as a ferocity in destruction. He has a strength to protect but also a strength to harm. And sadly we’ve really only known the Sacred Masculine as a testosterone junky God of War, blood pulsing through his engorged member, raping and conquering all before Him.
It’s obviously not just me that has no real relationship with the Sacred Masculine. I do not mean that there aren’t men in your life that are awesome. I am talking about the Masculine Principle here, an archetype, an essence, a multi-faceted truth that exists in another realm. I have the world’s most amazing man as my husband and I still can’t reconcile these archetypes. As I see it, humanity as a whole has a toxic relationship with the Sacred Masculine and it is coming to a head. When school shootings have become the norm and are an ejaculatory response to hatred reaching uranium’s melting point in a man’s mind; where the powers of the world are engaging in a “mine is bigger than yours” nuclear size comparison; when the grey-haired Boomer’s midlife crises is spending billions on virility, gun lobbies, and disbelieving climate change, it is obvious that things are very far off center. Our historical memories don’t extend far enough back to remember a time when this wasn’t the case. We can feel that it wasn’t always this way, but it’s like trying to remember a memory from childhood. It feels good, but it’s very fuzzy and very distant. Yeah. Sacred Mama wasn’t always taken advantage of and we remember being held in her loving embrace, but it’s a distant memory. For far too long Daddy’s been on an unpredictable power drinking binge and it hasn’t been good for any of us.
Just as the Sacred Feminine has been abused and neglected, the Sacred Masculine has been over indulged and let run wild. Neither one is fully in their power. The one thing this truth bomb of a realization has shown me is that I cannot invoke the Goddess alone. It’s like when Frodo gives Galadriel The One Ring and she sees how it could make her an all-powerful queen. She becomes so beautiful that she becomes unbelievably terrifying and that doesn’t solve anything either. Granted, right now we are dealing with Sauron as our Masculine principle, but installing an equally over-inflated Goddess next to Him would create chaos, not equal each other out.
As artists, healers, witches, meditators, thinkers, and practitioners, we visualize the Goddess in her many aspects. We have to. Bringing her back to life by paying her homage is definitely one way to change the world we live in. The #MeToo movement is proof of this. The Sacred Feminine is waking up in all of us and getting out-paid, groped, and bullied by Sauron on steroids and Viagra is just not an option any more. Enough is enough. Yet we need to equally imagine the Sacred Masculine, a healthy, virile God that protects, that guards, that saves, that doesn’t indulge in his power but is even more powerful because he practices restraint. We need to visualize the God, pay homage to the aspects of the Sacred Masculine that need to wake up, just as much as the Goddess within us all.
And what does He look like? Well, to me, he looks like my beautiful, faithful, true, strong, sexy gay friend with a virile set of antlers upon his head. He looks like Shining Armor from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. He looks like Shiva. He looks like a little boy dressed as Rambo with a unicorn horn and giant Pegasus wings. This is enough for me to start with. It’s enough that visualizing these aspects of the God don’t trigger me but instead, inspire me. These images of the Sacred Masculine for me will grow, change, and add complexity and just become more nuanced as I continue to work with them. This I know.
We can create a better tomorrow, but first we have to actually envision what that will actually look like. We all have to start somewhere. What does He look like to you? Start simple. Start safe. He has to be something that feels good to think about and if the first few images you get don’t feel good, keep backing off until you find one that is so pared down that it does. Start there. And when you call to the Goddess, because please, DO NOT STOP calling to the Goddess, call to the God and picture whatever version of the Sacred Masculine you can muster. And perhaps, hopefully, He will grow, change, and gain as many aspects as the Goddess and become Her true partner. Then, and only then, can the Sacred Masculine and the Sacred Feminine step into their full power, filling us up with their endless aspects. And as these archetypes achieve balance, we can step into our own power as full Beings, capable of love for not only one another, but a deep true love for ourselves.