The earth is not a Buick. We can’t hunker under the hood to fix what’s broken, we can’t cross our fingers and pray for a service station around the next bend. The earth encloses us, defines us; harm the earth, and we disfigure ourselves. Valerie Andrews, whose book A Passion For This Earth will be published in the fall by Harper & Row, argues that we have so brutalized the earth that our disfigurement is all but complete. In refusing to recognize ourselves in the earth, we approach the day when we will fail to recognize ourselves at all.
In the following excerpt, Andrews explores some of the ways previous cultures struggled, through myth and ritual, to insure the individual’s bond with nature; she goes on to suggest it may be time to initiate rituals of our own.
— T.L. Toma
The land is the key to our inner nature, its beauty and violence a mirror of the light and shadow in the soul. Landscape, then, is a revelation of the Self, a key to our moods and inner changes. “Each landscape asks the same question,” says novelist Lawrence Durrell. “I am watching myself in you — are you watching yourself in me?” The earth contains a blueprint of the human psyche, a map of our character. It is as accurate an indicator of who we are as the narrow-ribboned chromosomes which determine our intelligence and genetic sensitivities. Durrell tells an intriguing story about a group of Chinese immigrants who came to San Francisco in the 1940s. Within the space of two generations, this group had ceased to look like “home-grown” Chinese. He is quick to point out that they did not intermarry. They were transformed by the land which exerts its own kind of magnetic pull upon the body and the soul. This story reminds us that there is a profound relation between the human and the earth; we are transformed by a continual exchange of energies.
In my earliest memory, my mother is bending over me in the half light of the bedroom, her face round as a moon. She takes me from the crib and cradles me in her arms, then begins to hum a gentle lullaby. I am surrounded by her sounds, her body and her breath, secure in the belief that our contact will be continually renewed. A few nights later, I cry out for her and am met only by the darkness. I yell louder. When she finally appears, her smile is distorted, her face no longer round and smooth. The hands which used to open and receive me are now tightly clenched. In an instant, my mother turns into the enemy. From then on I do not know which face to expect: the one that destroys and annihilates or the one that nourishes and provides for me. This is the memory we all have — the moment we realize there is no guarantee of safety in the body of the mother or the body of the world.
In childhood, the mother is an extension of nature and is endowed with all its awesome power. We see her not as a mere human, but as the World Mother who represents the poles of life and death. We fear losing ourselves in her eternal round. The Nirvana Tantra states that in the beginning all was feminine energy: “Compared with the vast sea of the being of Kali, the existence of Brahma and the other gods is nothing but such a little water as is contained in the hollow made by a cow’s hoof. Just as it is impossible for a hollow made by a cow’s hoof to form a notion of the unfathomable depths of a sea, so it is impossible for Brahma and other gods to have a knowledge of the nature of Kali.”
This Mother appears in many cultures as a two-sided figure capable of both creation and destruction, of nurturing and annihilating. When we give ourselves over to the Mother we have no individuality, no consciousness.
Tribal cultures know that the dark side of the feminine can overpower us. Anthropologist Mircea Eliade describes the separation rites of one Australian tribe, in which a boy is literally dragged away from the mother’s hut by two men:
These guardians prepare his food, bring him water, and instruct him in the traditional myths and legends, the powers of the medicine man and his duties to the tribe. One night a great fire is lighted and the guardians carry the novices to it on their shoulders. The novices are told to look at the fire and not to move, no matter what may happen. Behind them their mothers gather, completely covered with branches. For ten or twelve minutes the boys are “roasted” at the fire. When the chief medicine man considers this first ordeal has lasted long enough . . . the bull-roarers are sounded behind the row of women. At this signal the guardians make the boys run to the sacred enclosure, where they are ordered to lie down with their faces to the ground and are covered with opossum skins and rugs. Soon afterward the women are given permission to rise and they retire a few miles away where they set up a new camp. The first initiation ceremony, comprising separation from the women and the ordeal by fire is thus completed.
The “roasting” burns away the protection of the mother and allows the boy freedom to pursue his own identity. After the women are sent away, the boys begin to grow “a second skin”; they enter the world of the fathers and learn to live as men.
In some tribes young boys are even permitted to strike their mothers and to manhandle them in a show of ritual aggression. Later, the adult males of the tribe open their sub-incision wounds and the boys must drink this blood from the phallus. The boys have come from the blood of the mother and were sheltered in the womb; now they are born from the blood of the father and at this point, the men instruct them in the mysteries of creation.
These rites take place at the stage when young boys are growing conscious of their sexuality and increasingly fascinated with the body of the mother. Incest taboos aim at releasing this energy and redirecting it toward the good of the whole community. The wish to possess the parents no longer dominates eros.
A young man must learn to seize his own kind of happiness. If not, he will remain part of a conspiracy between mother and son where each helps the other to betray life. The unconscious mother sees nothing wrong with this: she ruthlessly pursues her need for union. It is no wonder that in tribal rites, the young man’s energy must be literally stolen by the men.
This separation is not any easier in modern times. The most educated and rational men may remain stuck in the mother and continue living out this symbiosis. Indeed, analyst Marie-Louise von Franz warns that their apparent “reasonableness” may be a trap. “A man cannot escape possession (by the mother) by intellect alone,” she says. “We have only to remember Oedipus. He cleverly answers the riddle of the Sphinx, sure he has outwitted the eternal feminine. But in the end, he marries his mother anyway.”
Many of us are sure that we have broken free, yet our achievements in the outside world only mask our true dependency. We may be enmeshed in Mother-Institutions — in Mother-Corporation or Mother-Church, and then retire to the safety of the Mother-Wife. The point of the Oedipus myth is that there are no quick routes to release. We try to recreate this union; a part of us still wants to be nourished and protected. When we feel fragmented and alone we fantasize a return to Eden, to the paradise of the earth-womb. Otto Rank has written, “At the back of the Oedipal saga there really stands the mysterious question of the origin and destiny of man. . . . Oedipus’s blindness represents a return to the darkness of the womb, and his final disappearance through a cleft rock into the Underworld expresses once again the same wish to return to the Mother Earth.” This desire is regressive because we want others — whether human beings or institutions — to create this paradise for us. What is the key to redemption? We must break from the personal mother, reverse the tide of longing, and redirect it toward the living world.
Initiation rites help us to move away from the mother and the dissatisfactions of childhood. We need these ceremonies if we are to leave behind the disappointments of the past, and learn to take our nourishment from life itself. Without this kind of grounding, we put more and more pressure on relationships. We ask others to provide us with the basic sense of security and self-worth. We remain in our infantile dependency and seek our own meaning in and through the lives of others.
The family provides us with our first connection to the generative powers of the cosmos. Beyond that, there is a universal family we must recognize as we learn to take our mothering and fathering from a deeper source.
Tribal cultures are much better at this, and they routinely honor the “world parents” in many different ceremonies. A particularly beautiful one is performed by the Laguna Pueblo to bless the building of a home. As one elder explains: “The Laguna tribe has always understood this earth to be its mother so we relate everything back to it (in the construction of a home). A request is first made to White Hands . . . a religious person who prays all day long prior to making his assignment of a home. After White Hands has blessed the site, the whole family gets together to pitch in and help. These buildings are sacred and we treat them as such. The four walls represent the four seasons as well as the four corners of the earth. Like the Plains Indians, my people treat the home as a woman because it is made from Mother Earth.”
Men and women share in the construction so that the creative powers of the World Mother and the World Father will be equally represented. In this way the tribe takes care to balance male and female energies. Parents serve as “transitional objects” which bring the child into full relation with the living world. The Pueblo are not afraid to lose the mother and father, for they find them once again in the body of the earth.
In our society this initiation fails to occur, and so we project fury onto the natural world. We naturally expect to receive these teachings from our parents and our culture. When we don’t, we begin to treat the environment with hostility and contempt. In our narcissistic rage, we destroy the mother planet and yet preserve our own inventions.
We cannot expect the world to cope continually with our aggression. The earth is not the proper target; in fact, she is the only safe mother because she makes no personal demands.
One of the main goals of psychotherapy is to help repair our bond with the feminine and nature. The British writer and counselor John Rowan speaks candidly about the rage and anxiety triggered by the feminist movement in the 1970s. Men felt overwhelmed by women and saw the Devouring Mother everywhere. Rowan describes what happened in his own life:
In 1975 a whole new dimension appeared in my relationship with feminism. I had been working in my therapy on various aspects of a horrible female figure I called Big Granny who was full of hate for me. In April I had a long therapy session where I quite spontaneously went back to my own birth and relived it, discovering that I had hated being born, hated being weaned, and hated my mother for separating from me. I had decided to get revenge on my mother. . . .
. . . My need for revenge spread until it included all women and all men, too. In reality I hated everyone. But in particular, and most of all, I hated my wife.
When men are not reconciled with the Mother, any woman can trigger their suspicion and mistrust. Men must remember that they are not dealing with a flesh and blood female, but an archetype. The Terrible Mother is not personal, but a destructive energy which permeates the world.
What happens when our culture forgets about the feminine altogether and suppresses its dark powers? In the motion picture Aliens, we see how the negative mother attacks when we are least aware of her destructive energies. The alien of the title is a giant insect, a negative mother who uses human bodies to incubate her eggs. When the embryos are born, the host is brutally destroyed. There is a ripping of bones and flesh as the insect head bursts through the chest cavity, puncturing the stomach and lungs. Significantly, these are two areas that are always affected by the mother complex. Breathing and digestion are impaired when the mother suffocates us and deprives us of the nourishment we need.
The earth knows so little about these destructive energies because it is run by unimaginative, cost-conscious bureaucrats; there are no more nations, just one massive institution called “The Company” that is comprised almost totally of men. They refuse to believe that the Alien exists because it is too “irrational.” They insist there are no demons, that the universe has been made safe and sterile for all time.
This film suggests that the Evil Mother must be recognized — or else we will be unable to cope with our surroundings. The material world will be devalued; we will run the planet like a warehouse. In many ways, we are like the executives of The Company who do not want to face the possibility of death and destruction. Through “reason,” we insulate ourselves from life. We try to reassure ourselves that the world has in fact been made safe forever.
The real villain in this movie is not the Insect-Mother, but The Company. The Insect is a purely instinctual form of life and we must come to grips with it. The Company asks us to shut down our awareness. We cannot protect the earth if we act from greed and self-interest. True to character, a Company officer wants to bring the alien embryos back home and market them. He does not care how dangerous they are; he thinks about a profit-making scheme to mass produce them, though such an act could bring about the destruction of the universe.
It is possible to oppose the negative mother, to stand our ground and protect our creation. We can emerge on the side of life and birth. But first we must overcome our cultural denial. We can no longer depend on the blind assurances of The Company.
In fairy stories and folk tales, the negative mother appears as the Old Woman or the witch. Throughout, the crisis is the same: the old woman tries to steal our energy; she demands more and more until she drives us to distraction, or death. She wants — and gets — transformation or extinction. If we stand up to her, she yields a portion of her power. If we cave in, she destroys us.
Today, the witch is far from dead. Indeed, she is behind much compulsive behavior, from eating disorders to addictions. Longings for food, alcohol, or the perfect love relationship are essentially longings for the primal state of unity with the good mother.
Food cravings have to do with our longing for the feminine. We want to open up and use our bodies in a sacred way. And we want to reconnect with the Great Mother, that goddess with broad hips who has the ability to contain men and babies and the energies of life. Most women I know have, at some time, used food as a substitute for this kind of nurturing. I have even done so in my dreams:
I am attacking a large box of chocolates filled with small square candies. At the center are two large pieces shaped like breasts. I have eaten all the others, yet these are the ones I really want, and there is no way to get hold of them.
The chocolates aren’t important; I want the big dark woman with round breasts. She is a variation of the World Mother: the comforter, provider, and protector. This is the positive energy we must learn to celebrate.
Ironically, our culture conjures up the negative mother by asking us to live in disembodied ways. Note the fears of the anorexic: the negative mother will destroy her body by bloating it, fattening it, and making it unattractive. In a very literal sense, the victim is forced out of her body and up into her head. The negative mother emerges when there is no room left for spontaneity and we ignore the natural rhythms of our bodies and the earth. She is a warning that we are starving for real and immediate contact with the Mother and the body of the world. She attacks us because we live too mechanically. We become vulnerable to the negative mother when we lose contact with the earth. Like the bureaucrats in The Company, our lives become abstract. We move too far out of our bodies, become too disconnected from the source of life.
Conscious rituals help us to heal. We learn to be more aware of food and to bless the preparation and the eating. I recall the story of one overweight woman who began to kneel before the refrigerator and bless every morsel she put in her mouth. In a similar way, we need to stop and be aware of the energy we are taking in. Does it belong to the Good or the Terrible Mother? We are aligned with the Good Mother when we can affirm that every moment is an act of self-creation.
Tribal cultures understand the link between our creativity and the creativity of the land. If we harm the earth and strip it of its reproductive powers, we will suffer. We must be grounded in a place, just as a woman must be grounded in her body.
The African Ndembu believe that we must live according to our inner nature. They say a woman is infertile because she has come too close to masculine energy and lost her sense of balance. The “cure” for this is a ritual that reconnects a woman with the Great Mother and with the cycles of the earth. First she is sent back to her own village; there her husband builds her a special hut where she remains until she “regrows her womanhood.”
To the Ndembu, to be barren is to “slip out of place” and forget one’s attachments to the feminine and to the land. It is then that a woman is vulnerable to hostile spirits, especially the Mvweng’i, who presides over the initiation of young boys. The Mvweng’i represents a dangerous concentration of male energy and “the strings of his costume are believed to ‘tie-up’ feminine fertility.”
The Ndembu proceed with a special ceremony to restore a woman to her self. First they choose a site near the mouth of a river. Moving water must be found, for it represents the flow of life. Next, they dig a hole, signifying the womb which must be opened to give birth. In this way, the woman identifies with the regeneration of the natural world.
Modern women need rituals to connect them with the source of all creation. Without them we walk about with our energies dangerously uncontained. This lack of grounding affects every aspect of our lives, not just childbearing. If we do not develop our capacity to receive, we never wholly open ourselves to the process of creation.
Our culture fails to honor the feminine and the earth. There is only one solution — and that is to abandon what we have been taught and begin to recreate ourselves. Novelist Margaret Atwood writes: “Above all, refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that, I can do nothing. I have to recant, to give up the old belief that I am powerless. The word games, the winning and losing games are finished. At the moment there are no others. They will have to be invented.”
