The Other Mother Is Not Only A Whore

We’ve got it wrong when we talk about the Madonna/Whore complex, that feminine polarity of self sacrifice vs self serving. There is no polarity there at all.  The two are only on the same scale, even archetypically, in so far as some whores are mothers and vice versa. Playing to this dynamic – in ritual, in sex, in pursuit of empowerment, in the way we raise our children is playing the game of the patriarchy.

In the Christian mythos you are either the mother; selfless, nurturing, giving, holding, pure, obviously miraculously virginal. Or you are the whore: selfish, lusting, filthy, greedy, promiscuous, a social outcast. Or maybe you are the selfless, nurturing, whore? Or the mother who dares to enjoy sex with multiple partners? Maybe your whoredom is also healing or you mother in exchange for a nice car and tidy roof over your head? These are intersections, not polarities.

The power of the mother is the power of creation. The polarity is in destruction. Time consumes matter as an aspect of Mother. The mother disciplines, structures, and devours just as much, if not more than, she holds, creates and protects.

The Empress holds court at the intersection of death and destruction.

I am a mother because I created life within my body, had it cut from my bleeding flesh and brought screaming and alive into this world. A soul was surgically severed from my being and as much as I celebrate her life, I will always grieve the loss of her as an ensouled part of me. In giving birth to life I have never walked so close to death. That was my initiation into Mother.

That is the primal polarity. Creation with Destruction.

The further question women have to ask isn’t about how much pleasure we are allowed to take for our own (and still be worthy and good). Take all the pleasure without question. Take all the money in exchange for pleasure.  Take pleasure from receiving the money, please! Don’t let the parameters of your archetypal awareness and personal mythology be defined by Christian, patriarchal conditioning.

What demands your attention, however, is the repository of power that rests in  the dark, destructive, yearnings of Mother – she whose every creation, just like her, must always perish. Do not let any aspect of your power to create and destroy be undermined by the conditioned assumption that you must walk the line between self sacrifice and self pleasure. Yours is the driving force behind the essential human journey from cradle to grave.

I have heard that the majority of women experience the loss of a pregnancy either through still birth, abortion or miscarriage. I can’t cite any exact figures, because these things are so rarely spoken of, let alone analytically studied. However, taking this figure into even metaphoric consideration shows how closely entwined the beginning of life is with the end of it. Consider then, how grief is the continued dying of creative possibility between the thing that still is and the thing that is no longer.

Life giver vs life taker. We mother both life and death. We nurture and give just as much as we cut and cull. Mothers give and we discipline. We mothers carry swords with which we protect, divide, excise and penetrate. We are warriors and savages. This is bloody, filthy, work; and you will know us, not by the trail of snotty noses wiped, but in the cemeteries filled to the brim with our creations.

Don’t pretend it isn’t so.