By Anne Baring and Faranak Mirjalili
PUBLISHED IN SPRING 2021
https://www.kosmosjournal.org/kj_article/dismantling-the-patriarchy-within/
We sat down to speak about the feminine psyche, both individually and collectively, and we also sat down to discuss the challenges that we are facing in this time. We often hear these days, that the time of patriarchy is over. However, if we are to survive as a human species, and most importantly as a whole earth species, we need to come into a better understanding and balance between the feminine and masculine principles. Both these principles need to be equally honored, respected and lived.
But what does this really mean when patriarchy has reigned for more than 4,000 years. How do we define the feminine? How do we know what our feminine qualities are and what does it even mean to be a woman in a time of global climate catastrophe? Are we doing enough as women to stand up against tyrannical political leaders? Is it enough to stand up in protest and even to say no to that which we no longer accept? Are we doing enough to dismantle patriarchy through our outer actions?
Women have had to obey for 4,000 years. They’ve had to obey the voice of the church, and now they have to obey whatever the cultural norm is or how the media says they should behave. They’re not really free until they’re really happy to be who they are and have no sense that they have to be more in order to be acceptable.
The instinct and the connection to the animal body and soul is an essential part of feminine power and it is exactly this relationship that patriarchy has severed over the past thousands of years. It is in the instinct that we find our connection to the earth that can not only help heal, nourish and sustain us, but also the larger ecology of which we are part.
Through being rooted in her instinctual wisdom women can stand up and say no to that which harms life. They can stand up against the tyranny of the negative animus within, or the patriarchy without for that matter.
Through reclaiming and healing their connection to their instinctual self, women can also reclaim their inherent stewardship and guardianship of the natural world.
One has to really look at the whole position of the instinct and how it was treated, right the way through these three patriarchal cultures. The body was despised, cut off, which means that the instincts were cut off. They were looked down upon as inferior, something threatening to the spiritual aspirations of men and therefore they were persecuted. That is reflected in our persecution of animals today. The way we use animals for experiment, for drugs, for developing drugs for our use; the way we don’t think about the suffering of the animals that we sacrifice to our needs; that’s one aspect.
Another aspect is the way we treat matter in the whole atomic energy scenario when we split matter in 1945 in order to develop the atomic weapon that now threatens all of us. The matter we have persecuted now threatens us with destruction. This is something terribly important to know and realize that we cannot treat matter the way we do or the body, the way we do or life, the way we do without there being really, really serious consequences, which are coming at us now in the form of climate change and the threat of nuclear attack.
It shows what’s been happening to the instinct that, had its head cut off. This could apply to the whole culture, because pretty well, everyone is unconsciously driven by the instinct because we’ve, so to speak, cut off the head at of the instinct. We pay no attention to it. We don’t know anything about it and so it takes possession of us in the form of anger, rage, greed, aggression towards other people, which are acted out in all the conflicts in the world, because the instinct is out of control. It has gone back to its most primitive way of behaving, much worse than the animals.
Most importantly, what has that woman allowed to be done to her own instinct? What has she, as it were, decapitated in herself—her creative life impulse?
