THE GODDESS DOES NOT LOVE US ANYMORE!

Robert Bly and Marion Woodman, The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine (New York: Henry Holt, 1998) ("Mankind has begun now to sanctify pop culture. The pop culture pin, especially as transmitted by television, has caused a great sleep, so deep that many college students can no longer deal with Shakespeare's intensity. The Christian Science Monitor reported in January 1997 that fewer and fewer U.S. colleges now ask students to take a Shakespeare course, because their attention span has become too shortened. Interestingly, teachers who are allowed to teach Shakespeare in those colleges that still require such a course sometimes ask to be relieved of the task, because the resistance the students feel to any complicated language produces so much sadness in the teachers." Id. at 26. "If we receive from our mother all the good things that we need, we tend to remain infants all our lives: and it is life, food, comfort, nourishment, courage, support, and praise we want from her. [] But if all we see when we think of the Mother is the Abundant Mother, then we will never grow up. So the image of Kali as an Eater helps people to become adults. Many observers notice that people in the West, by contrast, are becoming more and more childish, not to say infantile. [] The consumer culture we live in promises an abundance almost inconceivable in earlier centuries. The Mall of America in Minneapolis is the largest mall in the world, and it has a statue of Snoopy taller than any statue of Christ in Minneapolis. If we replaced Snoopy with a statue of Kali, with her fangs, her bloody cleaver, her necklace of skulls, her long tongue hanging out, we would see the true face of mall culture. Everyone who saw it would be a tiny bit more adult. They might notice also that our abundance implies insatiable hunger elsewhere in the world." Id. at 68-69. "The secret us out. 'There is a Goddess who doesn't love you anymore.'" Id. at 88. "[T]he subordination of the feminine to the masculine, outwardly enacted as the subordination of women to men, is a horrendous lie. For at least three thousand years women have carried, whether consciously or unconsciously, their culturally determined role in relation to men, an inferior role that has left their masculinity wounded by patriarchal training. As a result of the inferior role assigned to the feminine, men are culturally and personally crippled by a weak feminine every bit as disabling as the weak masculine in women. As complementary energies, masculinity and femininity require each other for natural balance in relationships. A weak feminine in men produces a distorted, one-sided masculine--the militarist, the corporate robot; a weak masculine in women produces a distorted, one-sided feminine--the baby doll, who pretends to be everything any man imagines her to be, or a Gorgon, who reduces others to stone." Id. at 129-130. "The loss of connection to the positive mother is at the core of ... emptiness. [] Without the security of feminine love that trusts life in the body and is, therefore, open to trust life, we learn to fear life itself. [] We are a society famous for our greed. Without a loving connection to the Great Mother, we literalize her. Mother becomes mater. We accumulate mounds of matter in an effort to blind ourselves to our own yearning for the Divine mater. Ironically, we are materialists, essential a matriarchal society worshipping the Golden Cow at the center. In the absence of the natural mother, the greed of the stepmother, including sexual greed, takes over." Id. at 133. ).