Loss of The Great Mother Archetype Fueled Colonization
Dear Community,
We are about one week away from elections in the USA.
I have zero agenda for this email regarding swaying voters or suggesting a candidate.
I have had dreams about the outcome (which I won’t share publicly until after the election). As a woman, I hold the power to choose from deep intuition rather than societal normalcy as a vital liberty. As a way in which I express female leadership.
I do believe we are on the brink of a huge moment in US and global history - wherein we realize we are not up against one side or the other, but up against our personal and collective indoctrination - much of which dates back to the decentralization of female leadership, the loss of body sovereignty, and use of the mother-labor as capitalisms foundation. When we reclaim hidden histories - at the very least - bring them out of the shadow. We can choose differently.
Then we can move the grief, the gratitude for being here - and everything in between through our bodies where we store the emotional memories of shared history.
I am offering a paper today on the relationship between colonization and the systematic decentralization of female power, in the hope that we address the fears, and biases that live within us, along with exercising our power to vote.
Some might feel this is a pitch for a female candidate, of which there are multiple. It is not. It is a reminder that how we vote, how we pray, and the stories we choose to expose ourselves to - inform our actions. By seeking out mother voices, female biographies, Indigenous perspectives, and hidden histories our vision becomes more whole, and often - more accurate.
With the future generations at heart,
Jenna
Abstract
This paper brings together female indigenous scholars and diverse feminist works which address the body-based strategies of colonization and patriarchal power. It seeks to display clearly how the subjugation and decentralization of women in leadership, especially mothers, was central to the colonial project within a domination paradigm. It argues for the centrality of female leadership and Mother reverence at spiritual, cultural, familial, and political level for more egalitarian, stable societies. Specifically, for more research and critique in this area. It addresses the reintegration of the archetype of The Great Mother in the psyche - as essential to the sustainability of any decolonial, or feminist movement.
Keywords: Decolonization, Women’s Leadership, Body-Based Leadership, Patriarchal Oppressions, Domination Cultures, The Great Mother, Mother, Spirituality
Patriarchy requires that powerful women be discredited so that its own system will seem to be the only one that reasonable or intelligent people can subscribe to.
- Paula Gunn Allen
Introduction
The body and psyche of woman is a place, a sacred ground, which males in power have historically understood as a stronghold of egalitarian culture and community. The fact that 80% of women become mothers in their lifetimes (O'Reilly, 2019) and that “Motherhood, it could be said, is the unfinished business of feminism” (p.14) points to the fact that it is first and foremost the Mother which needs to be assimilated into the colonial project for the purpose of free reproductive labor and childcare. This is vitally important as the reproductive labor of the female body for a capitalist system which only acknowledges production and not reproduction as work (Federici, 2021) naturally uses the body of women, as mothers to enable the system to exist in the first place. To re-view histories from a maternal viewpoint is an act of solidarity with all marginalized persons and communities who are both commodified and stigmatized by the colonial project. In the same way that Motherhood may be the unfinished business of feminism, I posit that Women, and thus Mothers in Leadership could be the unfinished business of decolonial movements and that the decentralization of female power is the primary enabler of colonization – and I am not alone.
Lineage of Ideas, Biases and Purpose
This paper draws primarily from the works of Native Poet and Scholar Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008), Italian-America Marxist-Feminist scholar Silvia Federici (1942-present), Austrian-born American Scholar Riane Eisler (1913-present) as three authorities on the strategic decentralization of female and mother power in patriarchy. In addition, Canadian born Jungian analyst and educator Marian Woodman (1928-2018) and her co-author Elinor Dickson remain a central resource on the feminine psyche and body in patriarchy. These women and their well-informed observances of female leadership and spirituality are supported by other diverse authors offering gynocentric and decolonial feminist community psychologies. In their work Decolonial Feminist Community Psychology, Boonzaier & Van Niekerk (2019) qualify patterns of decolonial psychology as “… attitudinal orientations that affirm situatedness, marginal voices, liberatory modes of knowledge creation, ethico-reflexive praxes, non-hierarchical learning and teaching, and dialogical community engagements…to transcend the obsession with formulaic methods” (p. 428).
My personal positionality is of relevance in that I am of Indo-European descent, a first-generation college student, and never-married-mother with a background in Eastern Philosophy, and Decolonial Studies experiencing the continuation of colonization through family courts in the Adropocene (Macy, 2014). Thus, understanding systems of harm is also a Post-Traumatic Growth (Splevins et.al, 2010) strategy, helping to re-story the position of under supported mothers in a capitalist patriarchy by way of exposing hidden histories and providing more accurate context for new meaning-making. The ability to create new meanings in the wake of trauma is a core tenant of Post-Traumatic Growth Theory with has been critiqued by Spleveins et al. (2010) as rarely researched cross-culturally. I attempt to position Post-Traumtic Growth (PTG) with Participatory and Emancipatory Methodologies (Seedat, et al, 2017), in order to soften the biased, more western psychologies from where PTG originates. Instead, I aim to build context with the purport of enabling new meaning-making or PTG for survivors of androcentric, colonial violence. This has larger relevance to my dissertation in that I am building towards meta theories on healing in post-normal times (Sadar, 2010) which requires context to answer the question: healing from what, and towards what? The focus on healing from what is addressed in this paper.
First Things First: The Loss of the Great Mother within the Psyche
Paula Gunn Allen outlines four objectives that patriarchal systems must achieve to transition a culture from gynocentric, egalitarian rule to patriarchal hierarchies. She notes that “The first is…when the primacy of female as creator is displaced and replaced by male-gendered creators”, (Allen, 1986, p.41). This signals the trend of the feminine being attacked at the level of deep psyche as a precursor to more social or political losses of female power in gynocratic societies. In essence, the first order of colonization of consciousness, and people is to eradicate the Mother Creator from the heart and mind. She mentions the Hopi goddess Spider Woman, Changing Woman of the Navajo, and Keres Thought Woman as being at risk of or already having been replaced by their male god forms, in other cases she notes the Great Spirit concept as a genderless blanket over the local, and often-gendered tribal deities. Then, according to Allen (1986), the remaining three objectives of social conversion become possible: 1) the destruction tribal governing systems and the underlying philosophies, 2) land-grabs which deprive people of economic livelihood and forces end to ritual, and subsistence life, and 3) nuclear family structure (which assumes male head of household historically) over clan structure.
To highlight the way stories-create-worlds, Cherokee-Greek author Thomas King, brings back Charm as his Sky Woman in the book The Truth about Stories: A Native Narrative and highlights a Female Creator as world-shifter as the impact of her humorous creation myth of co-operation and curiosity make their way through re-tellings (2008). Her story is one of bringing chaos to harmony through interconnection and play. Her creation myth has a partnership paradigm(Eisler, 2013), and mother-centric worldview, complete with its pathway to harmony already laid out: kinship with all of creation.
To truly understand the violence of colonization in the Americas, and the role that the decentralization of female power played and plays in the continued conquest, one needs to look much further back in history. As Woodman and Dickson document, the eclipsing of the Great Mother began as early as the Iron Age when, “No longer did the king serve as a phallic consort of the Great Mother, but in keeping with the shift to monotheism, he assumed supremacy as the representation of the Sun God”, (1997, p.21). Across the planet local nature-honoring deity and female creator worship typical of gynocracies, transitioned to male or genderless mythos. Herein we see what could be the first light of supremacy itself, and it is from the male half over the female half of humanity, in psycho-spiritual myth and in social construction.
It could be said that this change at an archetypal level paved the way for the global conquest as it transitioned to Hero mythos which gained prominence by 1500 BCE (Woodman & Dickson, 1996, p. 21). To reframe histories with a maternal or female gaze, means to notice in the first place that this worldview of a Male God, complete with power-over domination hierarchies (Eisler, 2010) and individualist values, was essential to the justifications of violence, and terror enacted upon women from witch trials to Turtle Island. “The assault on the system of woman power requires the replacing of a peaceful, non-punitive, non-authoritarian social system wherein women wield power by making social life easy and gentle with one based on child terrorization, male dominance, and submission of women to male authority” (Allen, 1986, p.40).
The Opposite of Domination Culture isn’t just Partnership Culture, it is Gynocracy
Cultures that have a more balanced relationship between men and women have belief systems and art that reflects the “life-giving powers inherent in woman’s body” (Eisler, 2013, p.283). Therefore, one can also stand to recognize the deeper connection between the loss of the erotic, body-based knowing of social kinship models and a subsequent loss of essential endorphins, and connection-producing hormones (such as oxytocin) necessary for mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. At the turn of capitalism, “In pursuit of social discipline - an attack was launched against all forms of collective sociality, sexuality including sports, games, dances, festivals, and group-rituals that had been a source of bonding,” (Federici, 2021, p.75). The difference between earth-based, maternal gift-giving economies and wage-patriarchies is not only a matter of exchange, but of psychological concepts of space and time. Nourishing, communal gathering, along with cyclical ceremonies are purposefully eradicated when emergent social consciousness threatens the market in any way. Tyson Yunkaporta, in his book Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking can Save the World (2020), highlights the deep impact of the Black Death on the psyche of European people, noting that it radically traumatized people. Those people were then willing to do unthinkable things to mitigate the loss of control that came with gruesome population loss (Woodman & Dickson, 1997). Religious fervor and blame, justified by ideas of purity and a striving to model a male-creator God by expressing dominion over life started with gaining supremacy and feelings of control over the inexplicable, creative power of the female body.
As Silvia Federici explains, “...there is no doubt that in the transition from feudalism to capitalism women suffered a unique process of social degradation that was fundamental to the accumulation of capital and has remained ever since,” (2021, p.75). Within a domination configuration, women suffered gender-based disparity, normalization of power-over violence, and a cultural ranking of one half of humanity over the other. In this case “the male half over the female half” (Eisler, 2013, p.272). Because we are still living within a colonial, domination paradigm women still experience disparity, violence and inferior cultural ranking today – at the expense of all living systems. The solution is not just partnership, the solution is equity that comes from the deep psyche of the people embedded in the Great Mother archetype as seen above, and in healthy “kinship worldviews” (Jacobs & Narvaez, 2022) which center community, but never dimmish the Mother in the process.
“The child has a singular purpose when it is young – to relate. It relates completely to people and the land. It puts children at the center of the family and society, children are the ones that make relationships happen, tying everything together in a kinship system…those two together, mother and child, are the pivotal relationship of any stable society. All relationships radiate out from, and feed into, this central pair...this way of thinking uses narrative as a device to carry and transmit knowledge and memory...” (Yunkaporta, 2020, p.174-175)
The role of the mother-child bond in gynocratic cultural context is a womb-like experience which is extended into early childhood, ensuring mental, emotional and physical needs are met. They include community, relation to non-human kin while centering mother-child.
Body-Based Colonial Tactics for Usurping Female Leadership Power
Combining the work of Allen, Eisler, and Federici it is evident that, “the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism,” (Federici, 2021), and that the mother-body has been used as a tool of wage patriarchy.
Canty (2018) helps base the conversation in Thomas Berry’s four patriarchal oppressions: “rulers over people, men over women, possessors over non-possessors, and humans over nature.” (p.58). And she doesn’t shy away from the fact that, “These oppressions are associated with violent treatment of the body– murder, mutilation, beating, rape, lynching, burning, genocide and imprisonment” (p.58). When one understands that usurping female power means attacking children, raping and murdering – one can make new meaning of the genocide today. One can ask the questions that many of these female authors have been asking for over 50 years: is all oppressive violence rooted in the mission to retain male-over-female leadership structures? And what happens if we recenter female or Mother leadership? Is that an entry point to systemic change which we minimize by continuing to partition women’s studies from all other studies? How does this oppression live on covertly in court rooms and financial institutions?
Conclusion
Women’s histories have been conveniently non-central to most conversations in leadership, psychology, politics, sociology (even indigenous ones) due to both conscious and unconscious social and religious belief and fear around male superiority. The failure to accurately record American Indian histories by the leaving out of females and leaders, and thus all female leadership: “…reinforces patriarchal socialization among all Americans, who are thus led to believe that there have never been any alternative structures; it gives Anglo-Europeans the idea that Indian societies were beneath the level of organization of Western nations justifying colonization…” (Allen, 1997, p.36). By continuing to contextualize the loss of female/mother leadership as the hallmark, and even first move of the colonial project against female bodies and subsequently all bodies and the body of the earth (Canty, 2018) – conversations surrounding viable ecological futures, decolonization, and leadership may change.
Ps. Every time women gather and re-member themselves - including their personal and collective embodied power, the status quo begins to change towards co-operation paradigms. It is why we gather, to heal and uphold the world we envision. To request a free consultation about the 2025 S:he Gathering & Retreat in Costa Rica BOOK HERE.
