Antonella Adorisio
Anima Mundi and the Sunrise Goddesses
The long-standing separation in our culture between mind, body and spirit has broken our connection with our roots and with our sense of continuity with the earth as a living organism.
The suffering which the Earth endures due to our constant exploitation of her resources has led to even greater suffering in the Anima Mundi.
Where has the soul of the world gone?
Has she perhaps withdrawn into a cave like the Sun Goddess, Amaterasu?
Or has she been abducted and raped by Hades, like Persephone?
Has she been deprived of her solar, loving, creative and luminous qualities, and as a result, withdrawn to the center of the earth where she continues to pulsate and to rotate as she awaits an awakening of our consciousness?
Or has she withdrawn into the center of our hearts and solar plexus?
We’ve forgotten.
We have lost our roots and our wings, our contact with that ancient, female spiritual energy that radiates from the nucleus of the Earth towards the most distant stars; a female energy that was already a form of consciousness from the time of our origins.
A tactile, intuitive, interconnected consciousness, just as the Anima Mundi is.
We have learnt to see spirit as masculine and matter as feminine and we have grown up under the illusion that these are two distinct realities.
Male spirit is associated with light, consciousness and sun while the female body is associated with darkness, the unconscious and the moon. Unfortunately most psychological theories continue to be based on these separations. And yet in many parts of the world the solar divinities were originally feminine while the lunar gods were masculine.
Marinatos has recently shown that the main deity of the Minoan pantheon was a goddess of the emerging sun of the horizon that rises from the sea. Her main symbol was the double axe.
Kings and queens were at the same time priests and priestesses who officiated the rites.
Images inscribed on seals illustrate ecstatic dancing in which the Queen, as priestess of the Goddess, participates.
Others show images of incubation. In some pictures one can see the Queen dancing between a woman bent over an oval boulder and a man shaking a tree. The woman whose head rests on the stone is listening to divine messages since the stone was where the voice of the divinity could be heard. Likewise the rustling of the leaves after shaking the tree carried prophetic messages.
The Queen performed divinatory and prophetic activities through the movements of her body.
Janet McCrickard has studied solar myths in various countries in which the sun goddess travels across the sky driving a golden chariot drawn both by horses and aquatic birds. The goddess opens the gates of her underground palace in the east as she rises from the depths of the sea or the earth; she cyclically repeats her journey to the west only to enter once again her invisible dwelling.
Might the shining saffron goddess of Akrotiri (Santorini, second millennium B.C.) with a fantastic griffon beside her be a manifestation of the Sun Goddess? I believe so.
Eos, the sunrise goddess of classical times, could well be her heiress, since she drives her chariot, drawn by winged horses, across the sky and wears a saffron coloured gown which reminds us of the colour of the sun.
By approaching the psyche with a fresh perspective, we can release the light of the primordial goddess, bearer of a new and yet ancient consciousness, an evolved consciousness which, in contact with the body and the Soul of the World, can allow us to rediscover these forgotten origins which set in motion the possibility of regeneration.