The Feminine

Muliebre Numen

Do not be afraid of the feminine form or naturally feminine ways. You can be powerful and still feminine. Seek equality. Forget the current restrictions of sexual roles-they limit everyone. There is no need to push forcefully for what you want. Be the best you can be and attract what you need.

To the one that comes from the Goddess,

To the maiden to the wife,

To the creatrix to the seductress,

To one that bore me to life.

Clear the path for the power,

Of flowers and of seeds,

Of pull, not push,

Of wildness and of bleeds.

We humans may have venerated the Feminine Divine for longer than we have any other deity. The One that births, provides, nurtures, creates-She is both the beginning, and at the end, of everything.

In Aradia’s gospel, it was Diana, who was the primary face of the Feminine Divine. Through Aradia, Diana’s teachings encouraged women to seek gender equality in a society from which respect for the feminine was rapidly disappearing. Women of the time were quickly losing their freedoms and the personal powers that they had long held. They were no longer able to publicly practice certain healing arts, inherit easily, travel alone or often choose their own husbands. Worse still, the kind of new patriarchal religion meant that there were only male intermediaries between the new God and the people and that there were either no roles or very narrow and chaste roles for women in the worship itself. No priestesses, no powerful equal Feminine Divine, no mythos other than one of the virgin mother or the fallen woman.

We are now in a time where the Feminine Divine has made a comeback. Since the 19060s, when the movement of feminism became important and powerful, women have again sought a kind of spirituality that reflected them as women and as equal beings. The rise of the Goddess movement mirrored this rise of feminism and we now live in a time in the Western world when it is safer to worship a feminine deity (or deities) than a single masculine entity. The feminine principles of attraction, pull rather than push, collaboration, and power “together” rather than power “over” could help solve the problems of many societies today.