The Name of the Female Principle is Thought

The last couple of months have been a bit of a whirlwind of writing and then editing and promoting my essay series, Asymmetrical Re-worlding, on Medusa Rising, alongside plenty of fatigue, procrastination and mind-numbing distractions to pass the time. Chronic illness and nervous system dysfunction make life particularly complicated. I can be amazingly productive for a while, but then will crash and perhaps take weeks/months/years to get back to a somewhat normal (for me) functional state again.

But as I have gained a few new followers I thought I’d jot down some further thoughts about what I wrote in that long piece, and a bit more about myself, because I’m feeling thoughtful and nostalgic.  

In my very first post on this blog, way back in 2016, I said that illness, in its strange way, has been a gift, which ‘allows me to spend time working on my own development, to read much and widely, and to pursue creative and spiritual work. It has led me to follow a certain winding and wonderful path, and for that I am grateful.’ I explained how living with chronic illness means that I live on the edge of society looking in, which gives me a unique perspective—very limited in some ways, but actually so far outside of the realm of the ‘normal’ that I see the world differently to most people. 

I also said that the blog would have an emphasis on ‘the feminine’—a word I would not choose to use nowadays, because it is so misunderstood (though I reluctantly made use of a capitalised ‘The Feminine’ in my essay, which I hope I made clear was based on the material embodiment of sex, not on the stereotypes of gender—the ‘female principle’, not some airy-fairy, frilly ‘femininity’).

I have changed a great deal since I wrote that first post here. No doubt I’d want to alter some of what I wrote back then, because as it happens 2016 turned out to be a big turning point, as a few months after launching my blog I was thrust into a sudden confrontation with the problem of transgenderism (which I wrote about at length in Finding the Bedrock in 2023). It’s a thorny issue, but my stance is hardline, because it is based on compassion and a respect for natural limits. What we do to the Earth we do to ourselves; what we do to ourselves we do to the Earth. 

Though the (hilarious) irony of transgender ideology, which is a backlash against the gains that women have made (and a dangerous denial of embodiment as our very human natures are colonised by biotechnologies, amongst other things) is that it has spawned a re-emergence of radical (materialist) feminism, which is sending out Medusan, snaky tentacles everywhere. It certainly was the catalyst that prompted me to begin reading more feminist literature in search of the kind of sense-making that only women (and some non-sexist and ecologically-minded men) can provide.

My thinking has developed in expansive ways since then, though of course I am, and will always be, merely a student of feminism. Circumstances mean that I feel unable to walk my talk as I would like, and imposter syndrome visits occasionally. But if reading and synthesising insights and feelings in writing and art is all I can do (however sporadically), then it is what I will do, and it will be enough. 

When I first began drafting what became Asymmetrical Re-worlding I had initially titled the document play, because that is what it felt like I was doing. I was deep in the flow of creative, interconnected, nourishing, witchy thought and writing, and though progress each day was slow (my fatigued bodymind doesn’t work all that efficiently), the piece had a direction all of its own. I just had to have the patience to follow it to its eventual conclusion.

Of course, after writing an essay like that the usual thing happens—I discover yet more references and quotes I could have added, and I begin to follow other lines of inquiry that I wasn’t able to pursue.

One consideration is the crucial challenge and often lifelong process of coming to feminist consciousness: becoming ‘woman-identified’—meaning prioritising women and girls/children, and de-centring men. It’s obvious that the ‘postfeminists’ I was refuting in my essay series are still very much male-identified. ‘In complicity women embody patriarchal definitions of the feminine self; in co-optation women embody patriarchal definitions of the normative self (i.e., man’s)’, says Catherine Keller. ‘Both produce “male-identified” women, but in the first instance through complementarity, in the second through imitation’. (1) Postfeminists are doing the former, being the complicit complement to patriarchal men. Feminists aim to do neither. We are Virgin: one-in-ourselves. (2) (And no, that doesn’t mean we prize independence over interdependence, or that we can’t have relationships with worthy men.)

From PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, by Glenys Livingstone

Additionally, the lack of critique of the system—just the argument that women shouldn’t participate in it (because only big strong men can do that without having an attack of the vapours, I guess) and should be dependent on men, is endlessly frustrating because it reveals a very limited understanding of women’s history (along with the destruction and unsustainability of civilisation itself). As Maria Mies argues, in terms of the polarity between men and women (and Man and Nature) which still influences female-male relations today, we need to look to the tragic legacy of the witch hunts (along with the development of capitalism), which eliminated all the real ‘bad women’ so a new construction of an artificial ‘good woman’ could replace them:   

It seems that real living, strong and independent women had first to be physically destroyed and subdued before the men of the new bourgeois class could create a new romantic ideal of womanhood. An ideal in which the frail, submissive sentimental woman, one dependent on the man as ‘breadwinner and protector’, woman as the epitome of the world of feelings rather than of reason, plays the main role. As Sheila Rowbotham remarks, throughout the nineteenth century and even until today this romantic ideal of womanhood has been the ‘desired space’ for men’s longings and still largely determines the man-woman relationship. This ideal of womanhood was the necessary complement to the strong, enterprising, bourgeois white man who began to conquer and colonize the world for the sake of capital accumulation. (3)

 

As Carolyn Merchant writes in The Death of Nature, ‘female economic dependence [was] brought about in the seventeenth-century transition from subsistence to capitalist modes of production’. (4) The new economic order had ‘at its ideological core … the concepts of passivity and control’, which meant that ‘middle- and upper-class women would gradually lose their roles as active partners in economic life, becoming passive dependents in [the spheres of] both production and reproduction’. (5)

This construction of the submissive, sentimental and passive woman is, of course, a fantasy, a projection of the male mind that cannot define itself except in opposition to what it is not. Once women were socialised away from strength to frailty, independence to dependence, and knowledge to ignorance, they were much easier to control and to be the mirror to Man that men required them to be. ‘[T]he rise of man was based on the descent of woman.’ (6) Women went from being an essential ‘economic resource for their families’ subsistence to a psychic resource for their husbands’. (7, my emphasis) (And take note: this was the ideal of womanhood for the bourgeoisie, not the working class whose women always had to work and couldn’t afford to be delicate and sentimental. Not to mention women in non-western cultures who usually did, and still do, the majority of farming work. Mere housewives they are not.) 

It’s especially heartening that Mies essentially draws the same conclusion that I do in terms of what is required of men within a totally new conception of culture: 

The present sexual division of labour [has] to change. Men and women alike would have to share responsibility for the production and maintenance of life in its broadest sense: to care for children, the aged, the sick, to look after the household, to provide emotional support would not be the task of women alone but that of men too. (8)

The male/female polarity that is propagandised by the postfeminists, neo-conservatives, and some new ageists cannot be maintained in the ‘economy of Life’, in which care for needs would take priority, as this must replace the unsustainable ‘economy of capitalism’. In such an economy, based on subsistence,

men would have less time for destructive activities, such as war games and so on. If men had to share full responsibility for maintaining life they would eventually also have to change their identity. The present upsurge of an aggressive, militarized, Rambo-image of masculinity would become obsolete, and this would be of the greatest benefit to women and children. Because as long as maleness is identified with Ramboism and machoism, women and children will be the first — but only the first — victims of men's wars against women, nature and other peoples. (9)

The male identity can be quite a flimsy thing under patriarchy, so brittle that the least challenge to it precipitates fits of rage. This is because it is based on opposition, on dualism. Patriarchal Man is merely not-woman and not-Nature. He is empty of genuine selfhood. But I hope I made it clear in Asymmetrical Re-worlding that this is a socialised identity, not an innate one, and therefore it can be changed. To claim that men are naturally dominant is offensive to men, just as it is misogynistic and offensive to women to claim that we are naturally submissive. As Glenys Livingstone puts it:

"Masculinity" and "femininity" are largely cultural developments—developed over time by story, belief systems, even the foods each sex have been allowed to eat in some cultures, the activities they each have been allowed, so that certain styles, physical and psychic, have been bred into and out of maleness and femaleness to suit the mindframe. "Maleness" and "femaleness" on the other hand may be something quite different and more like a physical kaleidoscope … (10)

What also strikes me is that these categories of dominant man and submissive woman are so rigid we could define them as a form of fundamentalism, and fundamentalism—like all patriarchal manifestations—is about control. But that’s just it—we’re not in control—and nor does such a polarity even make sense within the creative multiplicity of Life and the Cosmos. Livingstone again:

"Wholeness" does not have to be understood in terms of a "feminine" plus "masculine" equation, and nor does it serve us. The Universe was not necessarily formed by "female" plus "male" energy, as is often loosely asserted even by those whose work could otherwise be considered helpful to gaining wholeness. This dualism is not essential to the Creativity of the Universe. Creativity required such qualities as are stereotypically associated with "male" energy, long before the advent of the male, and even before the advent of the biosphere—the first cell. The so-called masculine attributes didn't suddenly appear in the Creativity of the Cosmos when the male appeared. Differentiation for instance is a quality innate to all being, and is primordial. The advent of gender and meiotic sex was an enormous leap for Cosmogenesis, enhancing the Cosmic project of Creativity, a major catalyst and immensely alluring one as far as I and many are concerned but it is not required for “wholeness". (11)

The ‘female metaphor’, as Livingstone terms it, and as I have conceived of it via the asymmetry of the inyo in my essay series, is ‘a complete and whole unity of Creativity’. (12)

Here are a couple of screenshots from a lecture by Dutch primatologist Carel van Schaik on the invention of gender inequality. As you can see, the overlap of the distribution of differences between women and men can change based on socialisation, i.e. cultural conditioning (which, as I said at the beginning of Part 5 of Asymmetrical Re-worlding, is that powerful that it can even determine how women experience the pain of childbirth!). Less gendered socialisation and expectations means greater overlap, which should mean better relationships between women and men because we are no longer split away from each other into different mentalities and modes of (dis)embodiment. We could relate more intimately with the greater commonality of our humanness, while also enjoying our bodily sexual differences and diverse personalities. The second screenshot also points out a number of fallacies that we need to be wary of if we’re not to fall into certain conceptual traps.  

We, as humans, are so malleable (and even other species can change in quite radical ways if circumstances warrant it). Ultimately, there is no formula for life. It’s a process that has so many variables and wild possibilities that much of it remains beyond our understanding. This doesn’t mean that the universe is merely chaos lacking any sense of order, but simply that it is so much bigger than us wee humans. We need to have a lot more respect for what we do not know, and for the wealth of possibilities within Earthly limitations.

I used to think there was some kind of overarching Truth, but in fact there is an entire ecosystem of interwoven, interacting truths, that overlap and sometimes even contradict each other, because everything is contextual and continually changing. These truths are not always easy or pleasant; sometimes they ask a lot of us. ‘Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more—also because the status quo depends on it’, said Andrea Dworkin. ‘[B]ut love depends on self-knowledge, and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.’ (13)

As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy says in her brilliant book Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, which overturns so much of what we tend to think about females and motherhood:

For millions of years male reproductive success has depended upon viewing females as individuals to be coerced, defended, and constrained. Changing such ancient attitudes does not come easily to men …

Long socialized for subordinate roles, women may be more inclined to look at the world from more than one perspective, male as well as female, dominant as well as subordinate. For those accustomed to the perquisites of patriarchy, however, it would less often be useful to see the world from the point of view of those female subordinates whose reproductive potential they sought to coopt for their own ends. And few men—without guidance and extra effort—seem eager to do so. (14)

Women, with our potential for double-consciousness, can see both sides: the malestream world, and our own deeply held women’s knowing; men tend to only see their own side of things, which is a very limited perspective, and they need to make the effort to develop new ways of seeing, new values, if they are to evolve into the nonpatriarchal men they have the promise to be. 

It’s not up to women to refrain from participation in the patriarchal system and to withdraw into the ‘beneficent paternalism’ (15) of the postfeminist fantasy of the domestic realm—to give up our rightful freedom as human beings to be ‘protected’ by men. It’s actually up to men to withdraw from their own system, to become traitors to it, and to become more like us, so that women and children no longer require ‘protection’, and to enable a totally new way of life to come into being. Men have to evolve. They need new identities.

I am immensely proud of what I wrote in Asymmetrical Re-worlding. It was never just a response to postfeminism, but also an exploration of ideas I’ve been researching and pondering for several years. 

I agree with what Iain McGilchrist says in this conversation with Dougald Hine—that the world is not a problem that can be solved; it’s a predicament with no solution. We must just live through what is coming. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do. Yet as Mies says, ‘women will not eternally be the Trummerfrauen (the women who clear up the ruins after the patriarchal wars)’. Instead, men ‘must give up their involvement in destructive commodity production for the sake of accumulation and begin to share women's work for the preservation of life’. (16) We expect much more of men, and will not continue to let them get away with the perpetuation of dominance culture. 

Will the needed change happen? Perhaps not. But if we don’t at least imagine it, and start talking about it, and believing in the actualisation of gynocentric possibilities, then we truly are doomed. 

We’re all complicit in civilisation. I love books and music and art supplies, and don’t want to be without them, and I will at some point probably be dependent on medication. If the collapse occurs in my lifetime, I will die because of it. But I live with these contradictions, and to some extent welcome them. Life is, can be, beautiful despite the horrors. I’m not going to just bow down to falsities merely because it is easier than facing the many truths, complexities and wonders of human life on this planet we call home. I will forever be learning and expanding my understanding, which requires thinking, because that’s what humans are supposed to do, and what too few people are really doing with any depth these days.

Thought—reasoning, which is so much more than just abstract, rational thinking, including experience, intuition, imagination, memory and more—is not out of step with our embodiment. It’s integral to who we are as humans. ‘Thought: the brain’s bone’, as Robert Bringhurst says in his poem ‘A Quadratic Equation’. (17) Or, as Paula Gunn Allen writes, ‘It is as the old ones have told: the name of the Female Principle is “Thought,” and she is more fundamental and varied than time and space.’ (18) 

She is everything, and She is lusciously fertile.

From Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life, by aurora linnea

References

1. Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self (Beacon Press: Boston, 1986), p. 16

2. Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, HarperOne: San Francisco, 1987/1991, p. 158

3. Maria Mies, ‘White Man’s Dilemma: His Search for What He Has Destroyed’, in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, Bloomsbury: London, 1993/2014, p. 134-5

4. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, 40^th anniversary edition, HarperOne, 1980/2020, p. 196 (ebook page number)

5. Merchant, p. 180 (ebook page number)

6. Mies, ‘Self-Determination: The End of a Utopia?’, Ecofeminism, p. 223

7. Merchant, p. 186 (ebook page number)

8. Mies, ‘Liberating the Consumer’, Ecofeminism, p. 257

9. Mies, ‘Liberating the Consumer’, Ecofeminism, p. 257

10. Glenys Livingstone, PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, iUniverse, Inc.: New York, 2005, 2008, p. 61

11. Livingstone, p. 60

12. Livingstone, p. 60

13. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Basic Books: New York, 1987/2006, p. 63

14. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, Ballantine Books: New York, 1999, p. 497

15. Jane Clare Jones, ‘Feminism, Liberal Individualism, and Collective Political Action’, THE RADICAL NOTION, Issue Eight (Autumn/Winter 2022), p. 122-3 – available here: https://theradicalnotion.org/

16. Mies, ‘The Need for a New Vision: the Subsistence Perspective’, Ecofeminism, p. 321

17. Robert Bringhurst, Selected Poems, Jonathan Cape: London, 2010, p. 6

18. Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, 1993, p. xx

Asymmetrical Re-worlding, Part 5: Let’s Get Metaphysical!

At long last we reach the end of my essay series on Medusa Rising, in which the concept of the ‘phenomenologically feminine’, via Esmée Streachailt, and the concept of asymmetry and symbol of the inyo, via Iain McGilchrist, provide a new, tangible way to look at the relationships between women and men, and humans and the Earth. The Feminine (by which I mean the ‘female principle’, not any kind of ‘essence’ or stereotype) is the union that holds division and union within, and enfolds us back into the arms of Evolution. 

A big thank you to Esmée for helping me edit this piece and make it much better (albeit over 3500 words longer!).

Here are some featured quotes:

Feared and Revered: Feminine Power Through the Ages

I recently went to see the exhibition called Feared and Revered: Feminine Power Through the Ages, at the National Museum of Australia (on loan from the British Museum).

I left it feeling glad that I had made the effort to go, and I would have liked to have spent some more time there, to really soak it all in, but I also had mixed feelings. As others have mentioned, many of the objects in the collection were of course stolen, so there is that uncomfortable legacy of British imperialism to grapple with; but the narrative provided was also flawed, at least in part. 

The title itself is a thorny thing. Are ‘feared’ and ‘revered’ suitable words to describe how women and the divine are/were understood? Reverence is apt, at least in a pre-patriarchal cultural context, though aspects of it did extend well into patriarchal times in some instances. But I wonder whether the notion of fear (in the cultural, not the individual, sense) is a more recent interpretation, stemming from the very times that began to lose that reverence for women and the Earth. It seems that either word could cancel out the other—a culture of reverence can have no real cause for fear; a culture of fear can have no real feeling of reverence. Though ultimately I think both terms do have relevance, and many goddesses do have fearsome aspects.

It’s the ‘feminine power’ of the subtitle that proves to be more controversial. I would have preferred it to be ‘female power’, or better yet, ‘female (cultural/spiritual) authority’. ‘Power’ is a loaded term, and easily misconstrued, especially when it comes to the kind of authority that women once wielded; but the use of ‘feminine’ instead of ‘female’, to my mind, suggests that the exhibition was less to do with women, or the fact of femaleness, whether human or divine, but more about an abstract idea of femininity. The opening commentary on the wall mentioned how some artefacts combined ‘multiple gender identities’ or ‘transcend gender entirely’—and I found myself rolling my eyes (as I’m sure many other women did too). Was it too much to hope that the regressive contemporary concept of ‘gender identity’ would not be mentioned, let alone imposed anachronistically upon past ages? Thankfully, I didn’t notice it cropping up again, but it left me with the sense that despite being a display full of images of the female body, actual women were sneakily and subtly being sidelined (just in case anyone was offended).

As for the notion of power/authority/strength, it was evident—though it has to be noted that the majority of the display was firmly ensconced in the patriarchal period in which the conception of the female divine (and of women themselves) was already, or was in the process of being, degraded, eroded, and redefined to suit a male-dominated narrative. The section titled ‘Passion and Desire’ was a good example of this, especially as two Greek painted vases seemed to deal almost exclusively with male sexual behaviour, which was inappropriate given the theme. The ‘Magic and Malice’ section also had the usual portrayals of women as witches and demons, without explaining that such depictions were usually the result of (often Christian) distortions of earlier earth-based practices and beliefs that did not split ‘good’ from ‘evil’. 

The only real exceptions to the patriarchal era (but only just) were the Cycladic figurines, the earliest of which was dated to c. 2800 BCE in the early Bronze Age. Being the oldest pieces, derived from an earlier neolithic tradition, and incredibly beautiful, these were the highlight for me, but they do indicate the temporal limitations of the exhibition. Feminine power through the ages should look back even further than the Bronze Age.

What’s more, the vague commentary for these three figurines said: ‘Their meaning is unclear, but their abundance suggests that women or femininity were culturally or spiritually significant for these early societies’ … It’s as if Marija Gimbutas never existed.

‘Through the ages’ did, however, mean that there were numerous contemporary pieces, which I was not expecting. Some of them were entirely suitable, like the yawkyawk (water spirit) pieces made by indigenous women from the Northern Territory; others were a little jarring, such as Kylie Minogue’s Aphrodite tour costume (though I did like the headdress; it’s in the background of the statue of Demeter below); but one, a series of images by a Muslim artist depicting the names of Allah via black and white abstract patterns, was entirely beside the point—not a trace of the female to be seen, as if the category had simply evaporated.

I’ve always struggled a little with the museum experience, finding it can be mind-numbing and generally exhausting to be constantly standing, looking, and reading tiny snippets of information. Perhaps it is due mostly to my own health issues, but I wonder whether it is also in part to do with the decontextualisation of the artefacts. Cultural ‘objects’, whether stolen or rescued from oblivion, end up completely abstracted from their original settings, and therefore partially devitalised, like wild animals are devitalised by being kept in captivity. The Russian icon of the Virgin Hodegetria (She Who Shows the Way) had clearly lost some of Her magic by being placed behind glass. I feel sad for her.

Overall, I wanted to know more about the lived context of the pieces: Where were the objects/images from? Where did they originally stand (a temple, a church, a private room)? Most importantly, how did people interact with them? Were they really feared and/or revered? I also wanted more enquiry into the meaning of things, and what this meant for women themselves, but in an exhibition that tended towards abstract ideas, a genuine appraisal of embodied culture and women’s place in it, then or now, was always going to be missing. (Though perhaps the accompanying book would fill in more of the details.) 

Despite my misgivings, it was still a great privilege to see the pieces in this collection, so I am grateful for the opportunity. With artefacts from six continents—from Egyptian Sekhmet to Mexican Cihuateotl, Indian Parvati to Inuit Sedna—it was diverse, culturally and aesthetically. Apart from the elegant Cycladic figurines, other highlights—and definite beings of reverence—were the Mesopotamian clay relief of the Queen of the Night (Inanna/Ishtar; also sometimes identified as Lilith), c. 1750 BCE, and the Irish Sheela-na-gig, 1100–1200 CE. 

And my pick for the most fearsome goddess was definitely Chamunda (the most terrifying manifestation of Kali), with her corpse-like aspect and those uncanny extra arms. But even she, as ‘the destroyer of the ego and of maya (illusion), the false distinction between opposites, including the mind and the body, the self and the universe’, as the commentary put it, ‘symbolises compassionate guidance.’ When we see beyond her frightening appearance, we find that she is just the other half of the beautiful Parvati. They are one.  

If Isis’s words from Apuleius’s Metamorphoses were understood as a spiritual truth about the nature of Earth and Cosmos, if we remembered that reality is a who rather than a what, and if women truly were venerated, what a different world—of much more reverence and far less fear—we would live in. 

A few more images can be seen on Instagram here and here.

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.