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January/February 2006 Featured Stories
Drawing Sustenance from the Well of Woman's Psyche:
What this will mean for a world in transition.

by Jean Houston

Jean Houston

We are standing attendant at a phenomenon that is too deep to be denied, too necessary to be negated. As the earth quickly approaches her saturation point in human density, fifty-two percent of the human race is about to join in as full partners in the business of human affairs. An exclusive preoccupation with child-bearing and -rearing has reached its completion, and women's roles must necessarily be expanded in all fields of endeavor as they were in the old partnership societies, both to allay population growth and to make women available for the complex requirements of the emerging planetary culture.

The "Noosphere" of Teilhard de Chardin may be more real than mythic. The global mind-field may be closer than we think. And essential to its happening is the rich mind style of women, now ready to emerge after centuries of gestation in the womb of preparatory time. In perhaps the most important event of the last five thousand years, "Herstory" --rich and fecund – is coming to light, and its consequences may well have an immense effect on cultural evolution. The emergence in our time of the genius and dimensionality of female sensibility and potential is as critical to the issue of human survival as it is confusing to the traditional styles and standards of most cultures.

There is no turning back from the fact that women are now joining men in full partnership across the entire human agenda. As this new partnership develops, it spirals back and gathers in the achievements of the earlier partnership culture of the late neolithic age. The evidence seems to indicate that these were basically non -patriarchal partnership societies, with descent and inheritance passed through the mother, and with women playing equal roles in all aspects of life and work. This affected every aspect of the culture. For example when we discover remains of the art of the period we find that it is non-heroic; indeed there were no representations of heroes, conquests or captives--that came much later.

Instead the art abounds with scenes and symbols from Nature, with sun and water, serpents birds and butterflies, and everywhere shrines, votive offerings, images, and figurines of the Goddess. The artistic evidence gives the impression of a gentle, high culture – nurturing, playful and pacific. This culture was exported to Crete where it flourished in populous well-organized cities, multistoried palaces, networks of fine roads, productive farms, an almost modern system of drainage and irrigation, a rich economy with high living standards, and the lively and joyous artistic style. These gentle civilizations which extended far beyond Europe into other continents as well eventually perished at the hands of marauding bands of raiders and nomads.

These conquerors not only imposed their own rigid rules but shattered the finely wrought symbiosis among humans, nature, culture, and spiritual realities. The invaders were both fascinated and frightened by the complexity and artistic brilliance of the high civilizations in which they found themselves. Thus, they armored themselves against the enticement of its sensualities, and violated the places and persons who bore witness to the ongoing communication between the seen and the unseen orders, which they themselves had lost. They married their male gods to the goddess, and made her the docile wife or the holy terror; they did away with the ancient rights of women, and completely destroyed the partnership role in favor of an exclusive patriarchal position.

The rise of the Magdalene is a potent symbol for the return of the ostracized, and the necessary advancement of the feminine archetype. Among other things, not only will men be released from the old polarities of gender that force them into limited and limiting roles, but qualities of intelligence will be added to the human mind-pool that will render most previous problem solving obsolete. Linear, sequential solutions will yield to the knowing that comes from seeing things in whole gestalts. Cultures in which the feminine archetype is powerful emphasize being rather than doing, deepening rather than producing and achieving. Philosophically, in the reality structure of the feminine archetype, Great nature is just as important within as it is without. The feminine principle expresses itself as an unfolding of levels of existence, not as conquest of facts.

In the supreme dialectic between logos and eros, the feminine reveals a movement towards eros. Logos, the principle of ordering and mastery, traditionally a more masculine principle, is essential to the creation and sustenance of civilization. Today, as we advance to the stage of the planetary society, it is essential to avoid the domination of one principle over the other. If eros is rising it is as a necessary corrective to the tyranny of logos. Dominated by logos, eros becomes stalemated in obsessive sexuality and desire. Conversely, dominated by eros, logos is stalemated in dogmatic, habituated patterns of social order and ritual. The creation of a new reality, in both its social and personal forms, must manifest a new blending and rich interplay of eros and logos. Then eros can become a deepening, unifying principle, granting us resonance with larger fields of life, leading us to become planetary persons, and bringing true global and psychic interdependence. Logos can then grow in kind and become a more sensitive regulating principle, subtly guiding the interchange of psyche and social order toward the flowering of a world civilization that preserves human difference and wide variation in cultures, partners the planet, and engenders the soul.

Many of us in research and clinical psychology have for the past several decades witnessed in our research subjects and clients a remarkable activation of images of female principles, archetypes, and goddesses on a global basis. The "rise of the goddess" of which the Woman at the Well archetype is critical, may be the outward manifestation of what is happening on depth levels. Whether the movement has evolved because the crisis of the eternal world is calling for the rise of the goddess to restore the balance of nature, or because the release of women into full partnership demands a similar release of its archetypal principle, or even because, in the cosmic cycle of things, the time of the goddess has come around, we cannot say. But all the evidence indicates that the feminine archetype is returning. The renaming of the earth by scientists with the ancient name of the earth goddess, Gaia, is the signal that Herself and her herstory have come round at last.

Denied and suppressed for thousands of years, or, what is almost as bad, sanitized and given only mercy jobs by wary male theologians, the goddess archetype returns at a time when the breakdown of the old story leaves us desperate for love, for security, for protection, for wisdom, for meaning. It leaves us yearning for a nurturing and cultivation of our whole being, that we might be adequate stewards of the planetary culture.

Now, because of the technological cords that link us to all other nations, because of our need to join with these nations to preserve the earth's remaining resources, we are on the brink of the planetary person. This person is both the consummation of where we have been and the next stage of the spiral of cultural evolution. As such, she is our hope, our dream, our beckoning evolutionary vision.

The vision of the planetary person is confluent with the vision of the possible human. We are citizens in a new cosmos in which all of the currents of history are present. We yearn for meaning and deal with trivia. We are swept in currents over which we have no control. Government has become too big for the small problems of life and too small in spirit for the large problems.

We are the ones who have the most profound task in human history--the task of deciding whether we grow or die. To recall Thomas Paine's words in Common Sense, "We have it in our power to begin the world over again. A situation similar to the present hath not happened since the days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand." In our time, the challenge is, if anything, more profound. We must begin to think in terms of a whole new order. Yet we do not have the social system to sustain even the present imagination. When we look back at capitalism or communism-- all the old -isms and -ologies--what we're seeing is the last stand of several very powerful fundamentalisms confronting each other. In the end, they are not going to suffice.

The sheer intensity of present reality has caused us to turn a corner. The ecological crisis alone is doing what no other crisis in history has ever done -- challenging us to a realization of a new humanity and a new way of dealing and working with our world. The rise of women the world over to full partnership with men in the whole domain of human affairs after millennia of subjugation is providing a whole new chapter in Herstory. In fact, the rise of women may be the most important thing to have happened in the last 3000 years, and will have the most extraordinary effects on changing human consciousness and the ways in which we do things.

An holistic perspective and understanding is emerging -- an ecological ethic, along with a new partnership between men and women, in which the human acts in concert and in partnership with Nature to bring about more symbiotic ecological relationships. It provides, too, an organic basis for interdisciplinary and intercultural coordination.

Above and beyond all of this, what is occurring is the widespread availability of the planetary person. This involves a new vision based on perspectives of global interdependence and cross-cultural learning of what it means to be human. It involves the discovery of ways of making noninvicious comparisons of culture, so that different societies and their perceptual-cultural bases can be seen as complementary to each other. As Alberto Krygier, president of the World Management Council says, "I am thoroughly convinced that the most important phenomenon in this period of history is neither the collapse of Communist ideology nor the emergence of a global economy nor the presence of Japan as a decisive world force, but the degree of cultural connectivity in the world today." No longer can a single society try to overwhelm all others with the presumed "rightness" of its religious, economic, or political ideology. We need the full complement of known and unknown human capacities if we are to respond to the problems and complexities of our time. And it is only in the tapestry of cultures that we begin to gain any notion of the range and variety of these capacities.

The threads of the new tapestry are woven upon the loom of the renewed and deepened partnership between men and women, for there is no question but that the new emergent Earth story is herstory as well as history.

Dr. Jean Houson is a Senior Consultant to the United Nations Development Programme and has worked with leadership all over the world. She has developed a number of programs, seminars and intensive work as well as a graduate degree program to educate, train and develop social artists prepared to create a better society. For more information on Jean's work go to  www.jeanhouston.org and www.socialartistry.com.

Jean Houson will be speaking at the 14th Annual Women of Wisdom Conference: "Return to the Well" on February 23-26, 2006 in Seattle, WA. Information at: www.womenofwisdom.org or 206-782-3363.