10 - Conclusion

Summary

Joseph Campbell has argued for a recognition that ‘the interplay and mutual spiritual fertilization of the sexes’ are a profoundly formative influence on the ‘metamorphosis of myth’: ‘So that even where the woman may seem to have disappeared from the scene – as, for example, in the patriarchal Aranda and Hebrew images of the first days of creation – we must realize that she is there, even so, and watch for the ripple of her presence behind the curtain.’ The divine feminine has, in fact, rarely remained behind the curtain in Western culture. If Diana and Isis were to leave the stage with the growth of Christianity, the Virgin Mary was also to make her entrance. The Protestant rejection of Mariology created a divine realm that was overwhelmingly masculine in tone, but this was compensated in some circles by the introduction of another manifestation of the divine feminine, Sophia. As Barbara Newman has observed, ‘In the Protestant world, where the divine Father and Son were no longer counterbalanced by the figure of Mary the Mother and Ecclesia the Bride, sapiential theology took on more esoteric and heterodox forms, becoming bolder in its statements of divine androgyny.’ At the most general level, Behmenist thought on gender can thus be regarded as a response to a need to conceive the divine in both male and female terms.