Da Vinci Code Revisited
The success of The Da Vinci Code has triggered new interest in the sacred feminine. No, I'm not endorsing Dan Brown's tiresome view of the sacred feminine being preserved through earth-rituals involving the deification of Gaia, Mother Earth, Mother Nature, paganism, Wicca, druidism, etc. The true concept of the sacred feminine, indeed our very need of it, is bigger and more beautiful than any of these.
Humor me. Zip with me back to Genesis chapter one where God says, “Let us make man in our own image…” In the following verse we read, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him;” but that's not the last of the sentence. It ends by saying, “male and female he created them.”
Wait a minute. Females were also created “in the image of God?” The God of Genesis is both masculine and feminine? Gee, I don't think that's taught in most churches. Americans tend to speak of God in exclusively masculine terms. But a God who embodies both masculine and feminine outlooks would certainly explain why we are taught justice (a masculine value) and mercy (a feminine value) in equal measure throughout the Bible. It would explain why God gave each of us a left brain (masculine) and a right brain (feminine). It would explain the attraction of the ancient Chinese to the polarity ofYang and Yin, Jewish scholars to the polarity of theTorah andKabbalah, American schools to the polarity of science and art, and the Catholic attraction to both Jesus and Mary.
The name Carl Jung gave to a man's projection of the sacred feminine was “Anima.” But in the Iliad, Homer called her “Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships.”
In James Michener's 937-page epic novel, Hawaii, (1959) we hear rip-roaring, red-blooded, hell-raising, whaling captain Rafer Hoxworth tell his favorite grandson, “…what a man's got to discover is that there's no gain in loving a particular woman, it's the idea of woman that you're after.” Three pages later, at the exact tipping point of this 937-page book, where yin touches yang and the pendulum of time stops in mid-swing, we read the conclusion of the old man's instructions. “There was a moment of silence, and then Rafer said, 'When Noelani's mother died, she weighed close to four hundred pounds. Your great-grandmother. And every day her husband crawled into her presence on his hands and knees, bringing her maile [flower] chains. That's a good thing for a man to do.'”
A few hundred pages later in that same book we read of a pivotal moment in the life of Rafer Hoxworth's grandson's grandson, “…and as the palms toward the shore dipped toward the lagoon, Hoxworth Hale had a strikingly clear intuition: 'From now on whenever I think of a woman, in the abstract… of womanliness, that is… I'll see this brown-skinned Bora Bora girl, her sarong loosely about her hips, working coconut and humming softly in the shadowy sunlight. Has she been here, under these breadfruit trees, all these last empty years?' And he had a second intuition: that during the forthcoming even emptier years, she would still be there, a haunting vision of the other half of life, the womanliness, the caretaking symbol, the majestic, lovely, receptive other half.”
No, Dan Brown was not the first novelist to discover the sacred feminine.
Tom Hanks may have said it best on that ocean raft in Joe vs. the Volcano as he looked up at a fabulous full moon and said, “God whose name I do not know… I forgot how BIG you are.”
When we see only the masculine side of God and not the nurturing, merciful side, I think perhaps we've all forgotten how big God really is.
Roy H. Williams
PS – Make plans to attend the AcadGrad Reunion and Wizard Academy Open House at the new, 21-acre Academy campus site. Everyone is invited. So mark your calendar to be in Austin Saturday, October 2, 2004, from 10A to 10P. We'll provide the food.