“The healthy woman looks a lot like the wolf: vigorous, full of energy, great life force, capable of giving life, ready to defend the territory, inventive, loyal, wandering. Yet the separation from the wild nature makes the woman’s personality poor, thin, pale, ghostly.” —CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS

In recent centuries, women have believed that their role is passive by nature and men deserve a more active role. A woman is made to love, to feed, to heal, to cradle, to listen. Isn’t that right?

There is a truth that they have hidden from us (or have we forgotten it?): the woman is made to protect and defend, like the wolf, precisely, or the lioness, or the bear.

When a lioness wants to defend her cubs, she doesn’t do it passively. She attacks the predator without fear and with all her energy, no matter if the predator is a group of hyenas or the male lion itself.

We have long forgotten what the true nature of woman is. We must seek knowledge and inspiration in the past, in ancient matriarchal societies. And you know? There are some even in our times.

Ancient matriarchal societies

In our remote past, God was female. Throughout the Paleolithic, the primary divinity was female: In Europe and Asia, anthropologists found the so-called Venuses, abundant and pregnant women, symbols of regeneration and nourishment. The first sculpture of a goddess dates back 35,000 years; it is a pendant of ivory of mammoth, found in the cave of Hohle Fels, Germany. The figurine represents a fat woman with oversized breasts, large buttocks and an accentuated vulva.

In Neolithic times, and during the megalithic civilisations, again the chief divinity was female. Obese female deities were found among the Megaliths of Malta, where a civilisation built temples using large blocks of stone, in the 4th millennium BC. The megalithic settlements had no fortifications, a sign that the war was almost unknown. And they are not only found in Malta but also in today’s Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Central and Eastern Europe. Therefore, in old Europe, and not only that, there was a great civilisation before the Sumerians and the Greeks. A civilisation of women, equal, peaceful, who believed in a mother goddess.

The historian Johann Jacob Bachofen (1815-1887) assumed the past of humanity was matriarchal. He claimed that some Greek myths, for example, the Amazons or the story of Medusa, were not the result of psychological problems with the opposite sex, but the memory of real social conflicts, which then led to patriarchy (i.e. the domination of the male over the female). Bachofen believed that patriarchal society won when men took possession of the spiritual power reserved for women.

Dozens of ethnicities are still matriarchal today. For example, the Mosuo of Chinese Yunnan, the Bemba and Lapula of the forests of Central Africa, the Cuna Indians “isolated” off the coast of Panama, the Trobriandesi of Melanesia. And especially the Minangkabau of Sumatra, about 4 million people who still live today basing their society around the values of care and the needs of the community. The core of their organisation is life, not power.

How to recover this now forgotten ancestral bond?

We must retrieve the warrior within us. If we allow ourselves to meet the inner ego, to understand who we are, to harmonise the forces within us (male and female, active and passive), then we will respect our nature, and we will be able to live more authentic relationships.

We must dig within ourselves and understand, reveal, bring it to the surface. It is a complicated, painful, but powerful introspective work. Eventually, it will not only benefit ourselves: by rebalancing ourselves we induce men and society as a whole to do the same. In every woman, there is a warrior, and her most potent weapon is her inner energy. Let’s learn how to get it out.

“La profezia della Curandera”, by H. H. Mamani is a book that I read recently and that helps to understand and exploit this energy.

“A woman’s most powerful weapon is the inner energy that protects her and everyone she loves,” continued Mama Maru. “It is for this reason that you will have to learn to enter your inner world: only when you discover your true essence, you can use all your inner energy. You are strong and endowed with a lot of energy, which is why you belong to the group of women who can move the world. And yet you have a limit: you don’t know yourself yet, and as a result, you don’t accept yourself.” (H. H. Mamani)

The power of women is to respect and protect life while maintaining harmony between humankind and nature. The path to recovering this truth is complicated, but we can start by following seven teachings from “The Double Goddess: Women Sharing Power”, by Vicki Noble.

1. Respect your body and yourself

The soul is directly connected to the body and communicates through it. When we pollute and poison the body with chemicals and lousy food, or with negative images, or distorted ideas of women, we lose contact with the soul and get trapped in the physical cage of our body. A healthy body is naturally beautiful. At all ages. And it is our best ally in the search for the divine.

2. Challenges are the transformative path to rebirth

In life, we all go through some transformative experiences; often, these episodes are unpleasant or fearful. For example, the loss of a loved one, the loss of a job or an illness. If we let go, we change. This is transformation. It means living as conscious actors and not as spectator-victims of events.

3. The power flows through your hands

“All artists experience, to some extent, contact with the realm of the invisible during the process of artistic creation, and call it muse or inspiration.” Let’s learn to create: a song, a drawing, a dress, a cake, a blog post, a dance; the important thing is to follow the inspiration. It is an intuitive, authentic creative process that nourishes the Warrior Woman, the Woman-Wolf that is within us and that demands our attention with a loud voice.

4. Free your sexual energies from dogma

One of the main characteristics of the ancient female figurines found in archaeology is the evidence of their sexuality, which assumes it was both sacred and actively expressed. In modern society, women are defined primarily as sexual objects and/or reproductive machine; therefore, any process to transform a woman into a subject (not an object) questions her sexual role. Let’s get rid of stereotypes.

5. Intuition and instinct are parts of you: get to know them

Not listening to our intuition is a serious mistake: our instinct allows us to avoid dangerous situations and deceptive people and, above all, it guides us to find our way, to understand who we are and what “labels” do not belong to us.

6. Know the mysteries of the menstrual cycle

The menstrual cycle is ‘sacred’, not sinful. To awaken our feminine power, we need to regain contact with our menstrual cycle, know the mystery of the synchronicity between woman and Moon and the power of the tides and nature. Let’s not ignore it, let’s not hide it, let’s not blame malaise or irritability on crazy hormones. If we listen to our body, we will discover many surprising facts.

7. Responsibility, awareness and action as key points

We need to get in touch with our essence, our inner depth and our ability to act effectively in the world. The world will never be balanced until women can rediscover themselves, respect their nature, express themselves and take actions with freedom and awareness. Let’s take actions.

To free ourselves from the stereotypes and cages imposed by society, we have to learn, improve and release our creativity. To be very practical, today, the digital economy offers us the opportunity to express ourselves following (or finding) our passion.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
La profezia della Curandera, by H. H. Mamani
The Double Goddess: Women Sharing Power, by Vicki Noble