The Great Mother

The beginning before the beginning.

Maybe you're wondering why The Great Mother lives here, within the Dark Goddess Chamber.

For me, it begins with something very simple:

Before there was light, there was dark.

We can understand that literally, metaphorically, emotionally and symbolically.

Before the seed breaks through the soil, it begins in darkness. Before we enter this world, we are held within the darkness of the womb. Before an idea becomes form, it exists somewhere unseen. Before we know, there is the unknown.

Darkness does not inherently mean evil.

Sometimes darkness is where something is becoming.

And this is where I have begun to understand the Great Mother.

The more I study this archetype, the more impossible she becomes to contain within the image of the loving, nurturing Mother alone.

She is that. And she is more.

She is the womb and the tomb.

She is the seed and the soil. The plant and its decay. She births, nourishes, protects and holds—and she challenges, destroys, releases and receives everything back again.

She is life.

She is death.

And she is whatever mysterious transformation happens between the two.

The Great Mother is the paradox embodied.

She Is Not One Goddess

The Great Mother is not one particular Goddess with one mythology or one historical lineage.

I understand her as something larger: an archetypal current that humanity has encountered and expressed through countless faces, stories, symbols and relationships with the living world.

Earth.

Water.

Blood.

Moon.

Night.

Animals.

Plants.

Caves.

Vessels.

Birth.

Death.

Transformation.

Different cultures have understood these symbols in their own distinct ways, and I don't believe those differences should be flattened into one universal story.

But I am deeply interested in what happens when we place them beside one another and ask:

What are humans continually trying to understand through the image of Mother?

Perhaps there is something we recognize in her because there is something of her already within us.

A memory.

A knowing.

An ancient recognition of creation, destruction, transformation and return.

Primordial. Primeval.

She continually brings us back toward the beginning.

The Great Mother & The Divine Feminine

Working with the Great Mother has also changed my understanding of the Divine Feminine.

For a long time, I struggled with the religious stories I inherited. I kept wondering:

Where are the women? Where am I within the Divine?

And even now, outside of traditional religion, I sometimes see the Feminine reduced to another tiny box.

Softness.

Ease.

Receiving.

Rest.

Flow.

Peace.

And yes.

AND.

The Feminine can be soft, but she is not synonymous with softness.

The Great Mother showed me a Feminine vast enough to hold contradiction.

She is gentle and ferocious.

She receives and creates.

She rests and births.

She nourishes and devours.

She is ordered and chaotic.

She holds on and lets die.

She is not asking us to choose which half is more sacred.

She carries all of it.

This archetype has helped return me to a Divine Feminine that feels enormous again.

And within my own spiritual understanding, it has opened an even bigger question about the Divine itself—about God, the Universe, creation, and why I experience the source of life as profoundly feminine.

That is something I will explore here rather than ask you to believe.

The Temple is a place for questions that are big enough to change us.

We Are Vessels of Transformation

One of the ideas that has deeply affected me comes from Erich Neumann's The Great Mother.

Neumann spends considerable time exploring the symbolism of the vessel and what he calls the elementary and transformative characters of the Feminine.

The womb holds.

The earth holds.

The cave holds.

The vessel holds.

And within that containment, something changes state.

A seed becomes a plant.

Food becomes nourishment.

A body forms within a womb.

Life becomes death, and death becomes material for life again.

And I keep coming back to this:

We are vessels too.

We are not fixed beings.

We are constantly receiving, releasing, creating, destroying, metabolizing, feeling, shedding, becoming.

Quite literally, our bodies are changing every moment.

Emotionally, energetically and symbolically, we are changing too.

Maybe transformation was never something we were supposed to achieve.

Maybe transformation is something we are.

The Great Mother reminds me that I am not required to remain the same woman from year to year, day to day—or even moment to moment.

I can contain contradiction.

I can hold grief and joy.

Power and tenderness.

Certainty and mystery.

Creation and destruction.

I am allowed to be the paradox incarnate.

And so are you.

The Faces of the Mother

The Goddesses you find within this part of the Temple will not all be Goddesses historically classified as manifestations of a singular “Great Mother.”

That distinction matters to me.

Instead, I am building an archetypal and spiritual framework of my own.

I am interested in the Goddesses who, to me, carry different expressions of this vast Mother current:

creation.
destruction.
cycles.
nature.
death.
birth.
flow.
liminality.
protection.
transformation.
paradox.

Some connections will come from historical mythology.

Some will come from archetypal psychology.

Some will come through the body and the natural world.

And some will be connections we explore and create here within the cosmology of The Rose Legacy Temple.

I don't want to collapse these Goddesses into one another.

I want to meet their differences.

Because perhaps no single Goddess could ever contain the entirety of the Great Mother.

Maybe we need many faces to begin comprehending something this vast.

My Return to the Mother ( my voicenote or video)

And THAT is where you can say the messier, deeply personal thing:

I was raised with Father, Son, Holy Spirit. And I kept wondering where the women were.

Where was my body? Where was the Mother? Where was feminine power that wasn't defined in relation to a man?

Then talk about how you initially experienced that as absence, but your work with the Goddesses and Great Mother shifted the question: perhaps feminine divinity wasn't absent from human spiritual history at all. Women, goddesses, female sacred figures and Mother imagery have existed across many traditions, even though their roles and prominence changed dramatically across cultures and periods.

And THEN you can say your personal belief plainly:

“I believe God—the Universe, Source, whatever word you use—is female.”

Not history proves God is female.

I believe.

That's yours. You don't need a footnote to have a spiritual belief.

And the next sentence could be beautiful:

But I don't need you to believe that to explore this with me. I want you to get curious about what changes when we allow the Feminine to become vast again.