The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam, by Shireen Qudosi

She is the Holy Spirit, Dark Mother of unseen worlds singing between the world of form.

She is the feminine aspect of God, enshrined in the tradition of the Goddess. 

She is the cavity in the heart, the womb of life, the cave of revelation. 

She is sanctuary. 

She is the primordial void before creation. 

She is of earth and of the stars, reverent and holy. 

She is ethereal life, the Dark matter between all life. 

The Black Madonna, 

She is the dark, and She is beautiful. (14)

The Song of the Human Heart: Dawn of the Dark Feminine in Islam (2023) is the first in a forthcoming series of books by Shireen Qudosi on Islam, and more broadly the crisis of civilisation, through the kaleidoscopic lens of the Dark Feminine. A writer and speaker with a focus on faith, identity and belonging, Shireen looks with the eyes of the heart at our confusing and uncertain world in order to (re)discover old/new understandings about the human experience.

The Song of the Human Heart is both a memoir and an exploration of what faith is, has been and could be, through the metaphor, and spiritual and emotive reality, of song. As she writes,

This work, this question of faith in its highest altruistic expression, is art – or at least in my opinion, it is best positioned thorough a pairing of art and inquiry versus simply a strictly political, social, academic, or theological lens. Religious inquiry is enriched by creative spiritual expression. (9)

True to this, the book is a multi-sensory and layered experience, interweaving personal history and current events with theological and mythical examination, poetic revelations as part of an unfolding spiritual journey, and, of course, music and natural soundscapes (an accompanying playlist can be found on Spotify, which features one of my favourite songs!).  

A core focus of the book is that of illusion—the curse of civilisation, the distortion of ideology—that makes it impossible to see the true wonder of reality.  

Presciently, at just four years of age, Shireen knew that she wanted to be a witch when she grew up—someone who could transform things, transform herself; someone who could see through the illusion of a curse, and break it. But the witch of folklore is also an outsider, an outlier, and in questioning exactly what it meant to be a Muslim in the years following 9/11, Shireen found that she became that too. As she remarks, ‘most people branded into a religion at birth tend not to know much about the workings of that religion … The label doesn’t diffuse the essence of the faith, no more than a piece of paper can create a marriage or cultivate a sense of citizenship’. (7) 

To her, at the surface level, Islam was grotesque: ‘A religion of beards, robes, demands, hysteria, and the force of authority’. (11) This was Man’s Islam—a distortion; an identity label devoid of actual faith. Yet by having the courage to wander in dark lands without a map, to slough off layers of false identity and assumptions, and to awaken to ‘a greater presence beyond the container of an ideology’, (9) she finally found Allah’s Islam: ‘a feminine faith rich with mystery and duality’. (11)

The modern world prides itself, for the most part, on being secular, rational and scientific, relegating religion and faith to the realm of superstition and ultimate irrelevance, at least in the fields of politics, economics, and social policy. Yet the purpose of religion—or perhaps we could call it a sacred cosmology—is to offer us a way to understand and relate to the world, thereby influencing how we live, and whether that way of life is sustainable or not. The secular world, with its lie about human separation from nature, its myth of progress, its endless destruction disguised as ‘development’, and faith in the salvation of technology, is itself composed of numerous belief systems, grown from and propagating many falsities, therefore causing how we live to be harmful and unsustainable.

Anne Baring and Jules Cashford state that ‘the sacred is not a stage in the history of consciousness but an element in the structure of consciousness, belonging to all people at all times. It is therefore part of the character of the human race, perhaps the essential part’. (My emphasis in bold; The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, 1991, 8–9) If this is the case then the question that must be asked, as Shireen says, quoting Professor Omid Safi, ‘is not do we need less faith or more faith…but what kind of faith’. (17) What sacred stories should we be telling to create a life-enhancing culture? 

Importantly, the secular world often fails to understand that 

the patterns of extremisms and cults that grew from distorted and oppressive ideologies are not exclusive to one religion or the other – they’re a part of belief systems and are surging across secularism and the cult of progress no differently than any other ideology …

… The problem isn’t religion so much that it’s broken patterning of the human mind and behavior – the curse. The curse is not a curse exclusive to Islam or any other religion. The curse is encoded into the grids we keep propelled and in working order within the prison system we call civilization. (17)

Shireen explains that if religion is a template for understanding the world, then rather than being rigidly dogmatic and imposed by force, it should be adaptable and based on playfulness, for ‘Orthodoxy leaves no room for wilderness. It leaves no room for wonderment.’ (77) Our current religions clearly lack the qualities of playfulness, wildness and wonder, but also one other crucial element: the feminine. (In this instance ‘feminine’ means that pertaining to the female, rather than any kind of sexist gender role or characterisation.) In the context of Islam this is particularly ironic as the authority ‘was only initially given to a man as a placeholder until the women rose from the earth we’ve been buried in’. (11) It was never intended to be a male-dominated faith of order, fixed symmetry, and constant illumination. Instead, the hidden reality is that, beautifully, ‘Islam is like the moon in a time-lapse of the night sky across a month, changing faces and forms as it spirals and curves in the pattern of infinity’. (12) It is nested in the natural world, and a flowing, unpredictable feminine darkness, brimming with the sacred.

Shireen’s conception of the Abrahamic faiths sees Judaism as the foundation of monotheism, Christianity as its heart, and Islam as the crown. ‘All three stem from something that knows God by an older name: the anima mundi, the soul of the world’, and at the heart of her work is a ‘devotion to how the root touches the crown’, for

What is the temple without all parts in balance, including the crown, the star atop the tree of life, and the crescent rising above the minaret? … The crown is not an entitlement or a birthright because you happened to be born into that expression – into that religion. It has to be activated. (14)

Like the chakras, the root, heart and crown of monotheism are like energy points within the body of collective human consciousness. If one is blocked there is imbalance, rigidity, and closure of the mind and soul to the wisdom we desperately need. In order to unblock and activate the crown represented by Islam, a journey into the abyss of the Dark is called for.

'La Moreneta', the Virgin of Montserrat, Spain (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Recognition of the need for darkness, of its fertile ground, of a movement downward and within, has been with me for several years now. It is fascinating how this earthy spiritual truth (including an interest in the enigmatic Black Madonnas) is emerging all over the place as an antidote to the excess of light that characterises the modern world—both literal, in the case of electric light and our ubiquitous screens; as well as figurative, in our overly ‘enlightened’ rational minds that have forgotten how to feel our way into other worlds. We are blinded by the light of civilisation and have forgotten how to see reality in all of its multi-faceted glory. The Song of the Human Heart therefore provides another unique perspective in this ongoing conversation.

We are being called to return to something so primordial that it cannot be contained, an elemental faith that remembers the world as spirit. That is how we reclaim what has been violated, murdered, scrubbed, and malformed by theorists who know nothing of the Dark. The Dark, the elemental faith, and the benevolent chaos will tear down what must not stand, especially in our own lives. And she does – the question is are we listening? (82–83)

That this perspective comes from a Muslim woman is, I think, significant, for Islam has been a focal point since the shocking events of 9/11, not just due to ongoing extremist acts, but also in regards to the fate of that religion’s women and girls. Thus, Shireen’s standpoint, beginning by questioning what Islam is, accepting the label of Muslim Reformer, then finally moving ‘toward something beyond inherited identity’(9)—as well as from the point of view of a woman and a mother with a uniquely imaginative intelligence and voice—is both needed and distinctive. 

Yet what she has to say goes beyond the question of Islam and examines the problem of civilisation as a whole. Part of her work is in the field of combatting radicalism and extremism. She defines radicalism as stemming from religious and secular ideologies that believe there is only one way to be and belong in the world; while extremism stems from the belief that the use of force (whether physical or psychological) is an acceptable way to get people to believe what you believe. (69) These terms need to be seen as distinct from being a radical, which Shireen defines on her website as ‘[thinking] like an outlier’, and therefore possessing the critical, creative and adaptive faculties that extremists lack.  

Shireen makes it clear that extremism—any war over reality—is not merely a problem of religion or the East, for the East and the largely secular West are both cultures of control, both ‘devoid of the sacred and [sharing] the commonality that in order to belong to either, you have to give up something of yourself’. (41) These problems are therefore relevant to everyone, everywhere, and urgently need to be addressed. As extremism is on the rise, manifesting in numerous new forms, I find Shireen’s book particularly timely. She says,  

Our realities are a collection of little bubbles of history and experiences that shape our world. Sometimes those realities crash, but where they overlap we have a habit of staking a flag or an identity marker: race, politics, religion, nationality, and other largely inherited and groomed dispositions. Rather than see the explosion of views and respect those views as long as they are not destroying another reality, we try to expand our bubble – mistaking our own interpretive reality with facts, and facts with truth.   

She goes on to say:

When violent separatists attack [people] who have chosen to do as they will free from influence, what they’re enraged by isn’t the freedom of expression itself; they’re fighting for what they believe is true. They are willing to annihilate the vessel of an idea (another person) so that their idea is held unblemished in the mind of the collective. In other words, it’s not enough that they believe in something; others must believe it too. It is the highest order of violation of natural law or God’s law, that honored the freedom to examine and understand the world for ourselves. (69)

There are a multiplicity of ways to be in the world, and myriad manifestations of faith. Ideas should be discussed openly and constructively, and religious beliefs should be mutable, they should flow and change as the need arises; they should spring up in different regions in different ways, as emanations of the natural world and its distinct variations of place and Spirit. Instead, we have a world in which different groups clash as confused and fearful people hold increasingly myopic and inflexible views; globalisation simultaneously attempts to homogenise everything, erasing cultural and ecological diversity; and our disconnection from the land causes us to live in progressively more virtual mindsets.

A central component of any religion, indeed any understanding of life, is the concept of Mystery, which, I believe, should provoke healthy doubt as much as awe. As Shireen states,

… the confidence of fundamentalist extremists can be dangerous. Confidence belies faith. To be utterly confident in your assumption without study, inquiry, life experience, and devotion to the spiritual world can be dangerous. Conversely, to be of faith is to have confidence in the communion between God and the world … To be of faith is to be curious and humble in the knowledge that we really know nothing … (My emphasis in bold; 67)

All spiritual traditions, and even our comprehension of what it means to be human, should be open to questioning and critical analysis, for the constantly changing cosmos, let alone our rapidly changing culture, cannot be understood in any kind of fixed or complete way. The human mind in general, and each individual, can only understand and experience a minuscule fragment of the whole. Hence, a humble openness to the as-yet-unknown and the ultimately-unknowable is needed, alongside acknowledgement that faith and personal maturation are evolving processes that continue throughout life (and perhaps beyond). Without acceptance of faith and learning as continual, as things that must be pursued and worked for and deeply considered, as a journey without a clear destination, all we are left with are empty labels and identities. We’re left with stale, senseless dogma rather than a wild and unpredictable Darkness filled with treasures, and a heart-song that fills us. 

As Shireen says, confidence—the mark of ideology and false identities—belies faith, and thus any questioning is perceived as a threat: ‘In the minds of those for whom religion [or identity] is a label, a question creates a crack in the illusion of faith. The rage we see against what is ideologically provocative is often a projection of one’s own lack of faith.’ (66)

All of this hinges on the notion of truth. ‘[L]egendary samurai, Miyamoto Musashi said: “Truth is not what you want it to be; it is what it is. And you must bend to its power or live a lie”’. (70) Truth is an attribute of foundational reality, of nature, and is largely beyond our control. It has an existence outside of our always incomplete interpretations of it. And the notion of bending, flowing, and submitting to truth leads straight back to Islam, which literally means ‘submission’. 

I remember hearing an extremist say just that—that Muslims are slaves to Allah—and obviously I found this idea of submission and enslavement to a patriarchal God repulsive. But as Shireen explains, true submission isn’t ‘submission through surrender or defeat … Faith is submission to God of free will and pure heart that trusts God wholly. There is no force, no compulsion, no war, no convincing, and no debating. It just is’. (36) For her, Allah’s Islam is a fluid faith in rhythm with nature that has ‘no interest in control, rigidity, force, or separation’. (55) Faith is not something you are, it is something you experience. It’s a relationship with the sacred that must be cultivated. 

This watery, cyclical and relational quality is particularly feminine, directly evident in female embodiment and intuition, our moon-influenced biological cycles, our movement in life from maiden to mother (biologically or otherwise) to crone. Our changeable, ungovernable female bodies are themselves a threat to systems that value order and control over anything else. The Dark Feminine, a vastness beyond any comprehension, which has always been feared and loathed by light-worshipping cultures, is also a threat.

What is most beautiful about the Dark is that She is not compliant … At this point in our human history, there is nothing greater than that which is outside artificiality and control, including the artificial control of our ideologies, our systems, and the stories that are reinforcements of the curse. The Dark, the most decadent human aspect of womanhood that would be revered as holy in other times, will seem entirely alien to many now. The first deep breath of a once-caged animal is always a threat to those who have made homes of their cages. (48)

Detail of Hallower, by Meinrad Craighead

It may seem counterintuitive to say that a movement away from recognised and fixed (if distorted) categories of knowing and identification and instead towards the unnamed and unplumbed plurality of Mystery is a movement towards truth—yet this is the paradox of faith that Shireen reveals. By going against the flow of our cultural ideologies and internalised assumptions, by moving into vulnerability, we enact a sacred rebellion, we open ourselves to the song of the heart. We need ‘The vulnerability to stay with the song through its entirety without looking for the finality of arrival. The vulnerability to allow dissolution: the dissolution of our ideas, our preconceptions, our pride, our certainty’. (73)  

In the practice of shamanism one of the core initiatory journeys is that of ‘dismemberment’, when the body/identity is torn apart in the spirit world, perhaps even devoured, before being ‘re-membered’, reassembled in a new form, hopefully free from false identities or misunderstandings of reality. Even in everyday life we endure many kinds of ‘deaths’ and ‘reconfigurations’ as we respond to life’s challenges. This process can and does occur multiple times, for our assumptions and habits are often deeply engrained and difficult to shift. In the spirit world—the Dark—the destruction of falsity and contact with truth allows the initiate to return to ordinary reality with an enduring connection with Spirit, and wisdom to share with the community. 

Ultimately then, we must find the courage to welcome the terror of complete vulnerability in order to be internally transformed before we will have any hope of transforming the external world: ‘You don’t need to preach or change anything beyond your being. You look for what changes in you. That is the song you sing. Your duty in faith if you accept it, is to find your song and sing it unashamedly.’ (16)

And if/when we find our heart-song, and no longer require external validation from culture, that is when we become dangerous to the system—sacred rebels creating a true revolution. Shireen makes clear that

In the path of the sacred feminine, you go within and reclaim, restore, and rebalance a personal connection with the outer world so that it doesn’t matter as much whether our external system is patriarchal or not, we are like water and flow around what is rigid and immovable … The sacred feminine finds the power within … (56)

This internal change is essential, because ‘how can you force a group to recognize women’s rights as human rights when they just as easily violate human rights? You can’t. You have to find a new story, a new carrier for the message, a new song’. (57) The task is to go beyond Man’s Islam into the dark underworld, where the false beliefs we destroy can be rotted down into a fertile compost that will provide the new soil to rebirth the old/new story of Allah’s Islam—‘a faith birthed in the womb of a cave [which is just] one song in the chorus of creation … one gateway to God’. (21) In the blackness of the cave, humankind’s most ancient sacred space, sheltered in the sanctuary of the primordial earth, we can find ‘Our common humanity, the source of genuine interfaith between devotees’. (59)   

I love and agree with Clark Strand’s personal motto—‘Ecology, not theology!’—so Shireen’s conception of faith being of the earth, of emerging out of a cave, and connecting everyone, resonates. She also speaks of a fully embodied spirituality, not the transcendent, disembodied theism of patriarchy, but an immanent feminine faith, interconnected and intertwined with all elements of life; and in particular a remembrance of the role of women as ‘vessels of embodied creative life force born into this world while also tethered to the world of spirit through our wombs and cycles’. (32)

The Dark Mother of all creation has been speaking to us our whole life through our bodies. She is the mother we ignored when we were conditioned or rewarded for ignoring the wisdom of our body, the medium between the spirit world and the material world … The language of the body is the first tongue that is silenced … I am a woman. We are women. We will not apologize for it, not shrink away because one ideology or another is unsettled by our presence … (50–51)

I think (hope) that perhaps the world is finally on the threshold of meaningful change because women are (re)asserting our boundaries and saying, fiercely, No more! The rage we feel is ‘a signpost of a boundary violated, sacred ground deconsecrated’. (85) Embodied truth has always mattered, but possibly no more so than now.

The activated sacred feminine is to be a woman embodied in her experience, which no man can hack into on a whim or as a passing interest. A womb-an is both a portal for the creation and the birth of life, whose intuition is beyond logic. A woman, who like the elements cannot be controlled or contained, is terrifying to a program of control. (48)

The return of the Dark augurs the return of women as guardians of the sacred; the reemergence of an ancient paradigm of natural law. Our current world is falling apart as we are engulfed by seemingly unsolvable conflicts and calamities, but Shireen maintains that the Dark Mother ‘will stop at nothing to heal what she loves, including burning the world in order to break the egg and birth us into a new world so that we may rise as the phoenix’. (51) The role of the Dark—the Black Madonna—Kali, as Clark Strand writes in Waking Up to the Dark: Ancient Wisdom for a Sleepless Age (2015), is ‘to restore balance by bringing the powerful to their knees’. (115) Through destruction will come a new creation. 

Detail of Night, by Meinrad Craighead

Importantly, Shireen’s journey has led her to discover that ‘I was the answer to my questions. I was what I needed to find’; (12) and ‘what is of the highest value to learn, what will serve you most, is what you figure out on your own’. (101) Thus, our interactions with the sacred—the anima mundi—need not occur within the vessel of any particular belief system, but should be on our own terms, according to the call of our own heart-songs. However, her claim that ‘Islam is brimming with non-linearity that, if understood and embraced, would help us break the gridlock of the static world and submerge our consciousness into a rich metaphysical reality’, (98) is intriguing. She describes this as a quantum reality, fractal and multiple, encompassing mythic time and unknown possibilities, and an entire pantheon of repressed goddesses. 

These ideas prompted me to reread Henry Corbin’s paper, ‘Mundus Imaginalis or the Imaginary and the Imaginal’ (1972), which examines the visionary narratives of 12th century Persian sheik Sohrawardi, and his concept of Nâ-Kojâ-Abâd, ‘the country of non-where’. To me this non-place seems somewhat analogous with the Dark that Shireen describes, for once the journey there has been completed,

the reality which has hitherto been an inner and hidden one turns out to envelop, surround, or contain that which at first was outer and visible. As a result of internalization, one has moved out of external reality. Henceforth, spiritual reality envelops, surrounds, contains so-called material reality. Spiritual reality can therefore not be found “in the where”. The “where” is in it. In other words, spiritual reality itself is the "where" of all things. (My emphasis in bold, 4)

This is tricky to envisage, but this hidden reality (which Corbin argues is imaginal not imaginary), once entered and related with, actually inverts and encompasses external reality. Henceforth the spiritual journeyer comes to dwell constantly within and connected to the sacred, despite also being in the seemingly everyday world. This understanding of life as immersion in the anima mundi, an animistic perception of everything alive and ensouled, has mostly been forgotten, but it desperately needs to be rediscovered. I believe that The Song of the Human Heart is the kind of visionary work that might just help us find it again.

In the end, whether we have been placed into a religious tradition or not, we are all free to pursue our own relationship with the sacred, and find our own unique path, because ‘faith is a dance with the divine that we are here to remember and invoke. We’re moving belly against the ground, skin raw, slithering, in a divine dance that is the frequency of life forever in movement toward Source, to the wellspring of Love, toward union of all parts’. (15)

Shireen Qudosi’s book is overflowing with wisdom, most of which I have only just touched upon here. I am so looking forward to reading the next book in the series, The Song of the Mystery.

The Song of the Human Heart can be purchased as a PDF from Shireen’s website, or as an ebook or paperback from Amazon.

Our Lady of the Seeds

When I said that Our Lady of the Stars (my previous painting) was showing me the way, I did not understand how precisely that was meant. She was a diversion from the work I had planned, painted simply to use up a piece of gesso-prepared paper coated in an inky blue—the remains of an abandoned attempt at painting Solitude. Yet I think I had to paint her to be able to finally manifest Our Lady of the Seeds.

The idea-seed for this painting was planted a little over a month ago by Meinrad Craighead’s work, Sacred Hearts, the form of which suggested this figure to me, buried beneath a mound of earth, only her hands protruding, with greenery sprouting from her fingers. 

Meinrad Craighead – Sacred Hearts (1990)

Though the pose, with arms raised and hands held palms forwards—often referred to as the gesture of invocation—came from an image of Hera which caught my attention in The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford (p. 312). This also gave me the design for the dress, decorated with square ‘fields’ with dots (perhaps seeds?) pricked into the middle of each one.

I also referred to this image of Thracian Kybele from Max Dashu’s visual presentation, Magna Mater / Isis of 10,000 Names. 

When I scribbled down my initial drawings I knew immediately who this figure was, and had some idea of how I wanted her to look, with a colour scheme very similar to Meinrad’s image—reddish brown earth and green-blue foliage emerging from darkness. Yet try as I might (with three seperate attempts!), I couldn’t get the paint to behave as I wanted it to. Whether this was due to my own lack of technique, or wayward materials, I can’t say. Probably a little of both. 

Yet the potency of the image was such that I knew I couldn’t just give up. So I decided to take an entirely different approach, simplifying it to a mixture of just two colours—ultramarine and burnt umber—laying a wash over freshly gessoed paper to create an initial symbolic (albeit invisible) link between the earth and the sky. 

The day after I applied the wash I read the first message of the nine-day Novena of Our Lady of Woodstock, and it inspired a sudden realisation: the sky and the earth are not separate—Our Lady of the Stars is Our Lady of the Seeds!

Sometimes I need reminding of the things I already know.

Our Lady of Woodstock said:

You believe that plants rely upon dirt for their life, but I tell you that the Dark is dirt. Darkness bears the seeds of the cosmos in Her womb, and out of those seeds—which you call stars—all things have their being and their life.

Stars and seeds are one and the same—stars seeding the cosmos, seeds seeding the earth; the dark of space and the dark of the soil the same Darkness, the same ultimate Source of Life.

Suddenly my painting had direction and I felt far more confident about what I needed to do. She emerged without too much incident or difficulty, though with a great deal of patience and attention to detail. She is not at all as I envisaged, but entirely different, entirely what she needed to be.

I feel that I may still return to this idea again at some stage, perhaps to make another attempt at manifesting her as I originally saw her. But for now I am just glad she has come through at all.

As with all of my art, she is available on Redbubble.

Our Lady of the Seeds, watercolour, gouache and gold acrylic on gesso prepared paper (2020)

Furies: A Poem

Two Furies, from a 19th century book reproducing an image frrom an ancient vase
(Source: Wikimedia Commons) 

lighting lightless eyes with fury 

that motion through emotion – anger – arrives 

teller of troubling truths, revealer of wrongs 

we’ve been told, we women, not to feel it 

certainly not to show it 

so unladylike, so inappropriate 

but we do feel it 

who can blame us? 

we are human, after all 

wilfully wronged and restrained

forced into shapes not our own 

taught no other way 

we push our anger down, hold it in 

feel it thickening in our throats 

until our voices flee 

this is what they want

rage flares within 

burns our hearts to black 

and we cannibalise ourselves 

until all that remains are empty 

silent shells 

they delight at this 

what they do not understand

– and what we are remembering – is that 

black is our colour, darkness our home 

and red blood flows through our chthonic bodies 

its own bright unlight 

we endure because life endures 

(despite hollowness and enforced silence)

by virtue of the dark 

its womblike circumference 

its still sanctuary   

and because of that pure, beautiful blackness 

they do not see 

when our shells ossify, become armour 

that protects us as we sprout 

wide shadowy wings that fly us to freedom

then we open our throats and speak truth 

singing serpent-tongued and winged

as we always were 

for it is our furies that show us the way

* * *

I’ve been thinking of anger recently, of how it is an emotion that has at times driven my writing. I seem to have so very much to say when rage is flaring in me, and it provides me with an energy I would not otherwise have.

A few years ago I read about a Canadian study by Dr. Cheryl van Daalen-Smith, called ‘Whispers and Roars: A Feminist Analysis of The Anesthetization of Girls’ Anger’, which made quite an impression on me at the time. Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find the full article again (though it is mentioned here and here), so I cannot quote from it, but it dealt with the idea of anger as a positive and useful emotion, and explored the ways in which girls are taught to suppress it, resulting in loss of feeling and authentic self-knowing.

We tend to characterise emotions as either good or bad—happiness = good, sadness = bad—yet I think the truth is that emotions themselves are neutral. It is part of being human to experience the whole gamut, from the brightest of joys to the deepest of griefs. I, for one, think that a life lived feeling only the so-called ‘good’ emotions would be a very boring life indeed. Though emotions such as anger, fear or frustration may be unpleasant to feel, they are necessary, bringers of wisdom, growth and creative fire.

Anger, in particular, is a very useful emotion, as it alerts us to when an injustice is being done to ourselves or others. It tells us when something is wrong, and, when handled well, gives us a chance to put things right. Of course, anger can be a problem when it is expressed through behaviours such as aggression or violence; but what the study made clear to me is that it is as damaging, sometimes more so, when it is not expressed. Girls are often taught from a young age that showing anger—making a scene, disturbing the peace, rocking the boat, disagreeing (particularly with a male)—is wrong, unfeminine. Above all, we are expected to be ‘nice’, and this has the terrible side-effect of silencing us, often when we most need to speak. 

Thus, instead of being shown how to express anger in healthy ways, to speak up about the wrongs done to us and to protect ourselves from harm, girls—and the women they become—tend to suppress their anger, to force it back inside, where it festers away and causes an untold number of health issues, both psychological and physical. In being taught not to acknowledge and express anger we are also being taught to distrust our own feelings, disconnecting us from those feelings, from our bodies, and our intuitions. With anger turned inwardly, we become angry with ourselves, rather than angry about the external things/people/situations that really deserve our outrage.

It goes without saying that reading the aforementioned study made me angry—for myself and for all women and girls. Anger is indeed a negative emotion when it is anaesthetised, when it is stripped of its power—just as women are stripped of our own power in a patriarchal world—but when channeled in the right way, anger becomes positive, and positively powered. 

Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in Women Who Run With the Wolves: Contacting the Power of the Wild Woman (1992):

In her instinctual psyche, a woman has the power, when provoked, to be angry in a mindful way—and that is powerful. Anger is one of her innate ways to begin to reach out to create and preserve the balances that she holds dear, all that she truly loves. It is both her right, and at certain times and in certain circumstances, a moral duty.

For women, this means there is a time to reveal your incisors, your powerful ability to defend territory, to say “This far and no farther, the buck stops here, and hold onto your hat, I’ve got something to say, this is definitely going to change.” (p. 363)

Expressing anger is something that I still struggle with, but being able to write it out is a way of releasing it from my body, so that it does not remain to build up inside and do harm. Hence, thinking of these things, I wrote the above poem.

On my journey as a writer I have discovered that I love to play with words, to double up and twist their meanings. Thus, in this context, the word ‘furies’ refers not just to the many angers that women feel, but also to the Furies (called the Erinyes in Greek), who were ancient chthonic deities of vengeance in Greek mythology. They are often described as being frightening in appearance, sometimes old hags, with black bodies, wings, and snakes wreathing their heads. The wings (whether of bird or bat) and the snakes call to mind the imagery of the Great Goddess, so often associated with birds and serpents. And of course, their black bodies and connection with the underworld, brought to mind the Dark Feminine too. Thus, the Furies in this poem represent far more than just themselves.

So, I share ‘Furies’ here, as an expression of my anger—and there are far too many things to be angry about these days—but also as a transformation of that anger, into a written creation that I hope will inspire others. It is all right to feel anger, all right to have flashing eyes and bared teeth, when needed, and to invoke the power of the Furies. Wrongs need to be righted, and if we women can learn how to harness our anger, then together we can be part of the process of change.

* * *

Addendum: Just yesterday I came across this utterly brilliant post by Trista Hendren, ‘Re-stor(y)ing Sanity’, on The Girl God blog. It is about girls/women, the anaesthetisation of rage, and Medusa—another snake-wreathed female ‘monster’. I thought it such a beautiful synchronicity that I had to tell you about it. Do go and have a read.

William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1862), detail
(Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Endarkenment

Today is the equinox, the time when the hours of light and dark are in balance; and, in the southern hemisphere, it is the mid-point of the light half of the year (or the beginning of it, depending on how you look at the Wheel of the Year). The light was born again at the winter solstice, and ever so slowly began to increase, and from now until the summer solstice, the hours of daylight will gradually begin to exceed the hours of darkness. And yet, because each season holds within it its opposite—in this case the autumn equinox in the northern hemisphere, which is the mid-point/beginning of the dark half of the year there—I have been thinking about, yearning for, the Darkness.

William Morris - Night Angel Holding a Waning Moon, 1857/1869

When I decided to write a piece in praise of the Darkness, I began to ponder what I would call it. What, I asked myself, is the antonym of ‘enlightenment’? My first thought was ‘benightedness’—and I was right. But I only had to look at the definition of the word to know that ‘benightedness’ was not what I wanted to write about.

In the West in particular, we have a fear and dislike of the Dark, which has led to darkness being seen as negative, even evil, and associated with death, in contrast to the eternally positive light, which is associated with goodness and life.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines enlightened as: ‘having or showing a rational, modern, and well-informed outlook’, and ‘spiritually aware’. Some synonyms are: knowledgeable, wise, civilised, cultured, advanced, sophisticated, open-minded, and so on.

Compare this with benighted: ‘in a state of pitiable or contemptible intellectual or moral ignorance’, and ‘overtaken by darkness’. Some synonyms are: uneducated, illiterate, uninformed, backward, simple, primitive, uncivilised, barbaric, savage, crude … the list goes on.

And here, it seems, is the problem. Darkness is so thoroughly negative in connotation that we tend to gravitate towards the light at any cost, losing the wisdom of the Dark in the process. 

Simeon Solomon - Night, 1890

Yet consider this: While the leaves of plants are ‘photophilic’, loving light, and therefore moving towards it, the roots are ‘photophobic’, disliking light, and moving away from it, down into the dark earth. The roots (arguably more so than the leaves) are what make the plant’s life possible, anchoring it in the ground, and drawing up water and nutrients, and those roots live and thrive in the dark. Moreover, the seed from which the plant grew in the first place began in the dark, germinating because of the fertile, moist darkness surrounding it, pushing out its dark-loving root, as well as its light-loving leaves.

As Glenys Livingstone writes, ‘It is in the compost, the de-composition, in the darkness, that new life is nurtured, fertility is found. It is in the acceptance of death that wisdom is gained, and life is lived more fully’. (1)

The truth is that everything begins in the Dark. It is what we emerge/d from, and what we will eventually return to—Life circling towards Death and back to Life again. Black absorbs all light, because the Darkness contains everything, including the Light; and it is in the Dark that the Light shines brightest. 

Darkness can be seen in more positive ways. Jay Griffiths, writing of the Christian/Western perception of forests being benighted places, says that in contrast, the Pygmies of the Ituri Forest of northwest Congo sing

their great song of praise to the forests: “If Darkness is, Darkness is Good.” Knowledge is mothered by darkness in the Amazon; knowledge from the “plant teachers” [is] learned at night, while the soñadores, the dreamers, find their wisdoms in the dark. In the forests, you see the tenderness of darkness, how it folds things into itself, nature nurturans, for all good things are cradled in darkness first: seeds and babies, sleep’s dreams and the heart’s love, compost and starlight. (2)

Why are we so afraid of the Dark? Because we are afraid of what we do not know? Of what we cannot see? Of what we might find there?

I suppose our fear is a natural response. And yet, we do ourselves a disservice when we ignore, devalue or mis-define the Dark (and when we do not face our fears).

Livingstone writes: ‘In Greece, perhaps as early as the Paleolithic era, the Divine Female was known as Nyx, Black Mother Night … She was the full Emptiness, the empty Fullness … Her Darkness was understood as a “depth of love”, not a source of evil as later humans named Her.’ (3)

Gustave Moreau - Night, 1880

I completely identify with this idea of Darkness as Love, for the Darkness can be a very nurturing, enclosing and safe place, particularly if I imagine myself being held in the velvety black womb of the Earth. Rebecca Solnit elaborates on this idea:

Darkness is amorous, the darkness of passion, of your own unknowns rising to the surface, the darkness of interiors.

In darkness things merge, which might be how passion becomes love and how making love begets progeny of all natures and forms. Merging is dangerous, at least to the boundaries and definition of the self. Darkness is generative, and generation, biological and artistic both, requires this amorous engagement with the unknown, this entry into the realm where you do not quite know what you are doing and what will happen next. Creation is always in the dark because you can only do the work of making by not quite knowing what you are doing, by walking into darkness, not staying in the light. Ideas emerge from edges and shadows to arrive in the light, and though that’s where they may be seen by others, that’s not where they are born. (4)

So Darkness is fertile, the place of love and creation of all kinds, and this should help us to see it in more positive ways. Yet the fact that it is dangerous, as well as linked with the Dark Feminine, is another reason why the Dark is feared and labeled evil. For the Darkness is the Old One/Crone/Hag, the Destroyer–Creator—and the reality that She requires us to face, that of old age and death (that is, change and transformation), is a reality which, in the West, we try very hard to avoid. It is true, this aspect of Goddess is indeed fearsome and confronting. She is 

primarily in relationship with All-That-is … The Crone/Old One is that movement back into the Great Sentience out of which All arises, thus she sees into the elements behind form. She is often depicted with wide open eyes; often associated with the gaze of owl or snake—and knowledge of the Dark. (5)

Yet, though the Crone is formidable and fierce, Livingstone points out that Her fierceness strengthens women, helping us to recognise our own power, and to bravely seek knowledge of our Selves. Perhaps this is another reason why the Dark is feared, for the Dark gives women the power of self-knowledge, and the patriarchal forces of this world are afraid of women’s power. 

All the more reason for all of us—women and men—to learn how to embrace the Dark, in the knowledge that there is no Light without it, just as there is no Life without Death. We simply do not have the option to accept one thing and refuse the other. While to be ‘enlightened’ may mean to be ‘spiritually aware’, no one can truly achieve that awareness unless they have embraced ‘endarkenment’ too (the descent to the Underworld, the place of Soul, and the integration of the Shadow, amongst other tasks). As Bill Plotkin says, ‘Our spiritual growth is meant to go in both directions, toward the fertile darkness and the glorious light, each of us having the opportunity to bridge earth and heaven—the underworld and the upperworld—through the trunks of our middleworld lives.’ (6)

Tree Sketch (Emergence), 2012

So, what word could we use to call ourselves lovers of the Darkness? 

While ‘photo’ (from Greek) relates to light, ‘scoto’ relates to darkness. So we could say of roots that they are scotophilic, dark-loving, rather than photophobic. I have also discovered the words ‘nyctophilia’ and ‘lygophilia’. Though none of these options are particularly memorable or attractive. Perhaps in the end we just have to remember that Darkness is Love, is Wisdom, is the womb and birthplace of everything. We should embrace it. After all, it is only when we are be-nighted that we get to see the stars.

I will leave the last word to Ursula Le Guin:

“And when you fail, and are defeated, and in pain, and in the dark, then I hope you will remember that darkness is your country, where you live … Our roots are in the dark; the earth is our country. Why did we look up for blessing—instead of around, and down? What hope we have lies there … in the dark that nourishes, where human beings grow human souls.” (7)

References:
1. Glenys Livingstone, PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, iUniverse: Lincoln, NE, 2005, p. 100
2. Jay Griffiths, Wild: An Elemental Journey, Penguin: London, 2006, p. 76
3. Livingstone, p. 82
4. Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby, Granta: London, 2013, p. 185
5. Livingstone, p. 100
6. Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft: Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and the Psyche, New World Library: Novato, California, 2003, p. 34
7. From Ursula Le Guin’s Dancing at the Edge of the World, quoted in Griffiths, p. 76