Numinous Experiences of the Feminine: in Conversation with Anne Baring

by Anne Baring & Faranak Mirjalili

This dialogue between Anne Baring and Faranak Mirjalili dives deep into the mysticism of the Feminine, and what the importance is of experiencing the Godhead as ‘She’ in a time when the emergence of the feminine principle is of vital importance.

Books mentioned and recommended in the talk:

Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God Vol. 3, by Joseph Campbell (1964)
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy by Victor Watts (trans.) (2000)
Sophia: Aspects of the Divine Feminine Past and Present, by Susanne Schaup (2004)

TRANSCRIPT

Faranak:  Dear Anne, let’s dive right in and start with definitions. How would you define a spiritual or as Jung would say a ‘numinous’ experience?

Anne: It is something that happens unexpectedly, unusually, out of the blue. It may happen in a dream. It might be a visionary dream or it might be something that just happens to people as they're walking along the street or cooking their lunch or whatever.
A sudden insight comes, a sudden opening of the door into another dimension. And then they may hear a voice or they may even speak with that voice, whatever it might be, or it may be a message, a direct message telling them to do this or that. I can't really define it because it's very broad. There are many kinds of spiritual experiences that people have had. 
Many people have them when they go out into nature, in the woods. Like David Attenborough, he says, "go and just sit in nature and you will hear and see things that you didn't hear or know before." So on many levels, you get this experience of a deepening consciousness or an opening consciousness to another reality or a deeper reality than the one we're living in or seeing deeper into this reality, perhaps.

Faranak:  In your book The Dream of the Cosmos, you share your dream of the cosmic woman as a profound dream and guiding experience for your life's journey and research. Would you say this was a numinous, or sacred experience? Can you tell us a little bit more about this?

 Anne:  Yes, absolutely, no question about it because it was. I've never had a dream like that before or since. It was definitely something coming to me from the universe, which I took as a message telling me what I needed to do. And it had nothing to do whatsoever with the religion, with Christianity which I was brought up in.
It was a vision of a cosmic woman, possibly the way people in the past have had a vision like Apuleius had the vision of Isis, for example. It was that kind of experience completely out of the ordinary, completely revelatory, and visionary. It was a vision.

Faranak:  What would you say gave this experience a numinous feeling, compared to other dreams or experiences of a feminine figure that may have inspired you? Could you define the difference?

Anne:  The difference is that it was a vision of a woman that I couldn't associate with any specific goddess. I thought; is this Demeter, is it Aphrodite? Is it Isis? But none of those fitted what I was seeing. So it came absolutely unexpectedly out of the blue. And eventually, I associated it with the feminine aspect of God, not in the Christian tradition but in Kabbalah.
Because I was led to that tradition and the Shekinah of Kabbalah was the only image or the only word that fitted the power of that experience. It wasn't a goddess. It was something far beyond a goddess, it was the universe itself speaking in feminine mode.

 Faranak:  So it did in a way eventually lead you to a lost or hidden religious tradition one could say?

Anne:  Well, it isn't really lost but it's one that isn't very well known in the West. In the West, we're more familiar with Christianity. I think Jewish people know of it possibly if they're interested, if they're drawn to the mystical aspect of their own religion, they will know about it. And it's taught all over the world. And I had a teacher in England called Warren Kenton years ago, whom I studied with. So it's not something that's unknown but it's something that isn't well known, put it that way.

Faranak: In your book, you show the reader throughout the book how the loss of the lunar ‘participation mystique’ and this shamanic connection to nature and the feminine has damaged the very fabric of life and the World's Soul. Do you think that this disrespect and violence against the feminine and nature has also distorted and ruined the inner images of feminine deity and our ability to experience Her in these more numinous or divine images?

 Anne:  Well, I think that Christians have the Virgin Mary to fulfil a certain aspect of the divine feminine but they certainly have lost the feminine aspect of deity; all the patriarchal religions have lost that. And it was that that connected us to nature, because the ancient goddesses, particularly goddesses like Isis and Artemis of Ephesus, represented not only nature but the whole of the cosmos. And this is something we completely lost.
We have no connection with the cosmos. We may have a connection through the Virgin Mary with an image but she is not a deity and she's not the feminine aspect of the divine as far as I can understand. Although she has been raised to that in the Catholic religion in 1950 and 1954; she was raised to the level of the male deity but people don't know about that.
They don't know about the Papal Bull in 1950 and the Encyclical of 1954 which made her "Queen of Heaven." So she has had restored to her the ancient title that Isis held; Queen of Heaven and also Inanna before her was Queen of Heaven. So that does help but still, a big thing is missing which is the connection to nature. And also the sacredness of nature that has gone completely and needs to be brought back.

 Faranak:  Because in the Christian thought there's still the elevation of the heavens above nature. So when she is put up into the heavens the question is, is she then detached from earth and seen as above it?

Anne:  Well, she was taken up body and soul so the body was included there, but not the whole of nature. So you'd really have to go into the theology of it I think to understand it better. But on the other hand, Pope Francis in his Encyclical of 2015, absolutely rescued nature from the oblivion in which it has existed for a very long time. He restored it to its sacredness and that was a tremendous thing to do.
And I'm really tremendously grateful to him for doing that. It's a long Encyclical but it's full of wisdom and full of reproach that we have neglected our relationship with nature and haven't treated it properly. So he understands at a deep level what's happened.

Faranak:  What I wonder is if I look at the experience that you had and other experiences of contemporary women, like the ones I've had with the Persian Goddess Anahita is; do we need these documentations so that we are able to even perceive Her? Let me ask it in this way: if all the images have been wiped out, where does our imagination find space to receive these images of Her? Has the wiping out of her sacred texts and her temples also damaged our imagination and ability to perceive Her in the imaginal realm?

Anne:  Yes. I think I would absolutely agree with that. It has damaged the imagination. That's a very good phrase because we have no image that we can connect with which brings nature and the cosmos into one figure, one divine figure. So we haven't got anything that we can start with as it were. We have to go just finding as I have with these ancient descriptions of visions that people had, that have been a great help.
And I put them into my book, The Divine Feminine, I brought the vision of Apuleius of Isis. And of course, people did have visions and many more visionary experiences. The Egyptians certainly did, the Greeks certainly did, the Sumerians did. So really we're a culture that is bereft of visionary experience. It's missing. So there isn't anyone who can say, "Oh, so-and-so had a vision of something the other day, we can all discuss this and share it and pass it around through the internet."
There is in Marion Woodman's work, there are dreams that she brings of the Black Madonna that people have had. So that was something Jungians would know about for instance, but nobody outside the Jungian circles would know that people were having these visions of the Black Madonna. And if I hadn't put my vision into my book, nobody would know of my vision. It is a tremendous vision that changed my life, absolutely.

Faranak:  So these images of the feminine that are retrieved and restored and shared, they actually can start to heal the damaged imagination.

Anne:  They could and possibly if we listen to children who might have visions of the Virgin Mary which indeed they've had, they have been paid attention to, and the visions of Fatima in Portugal and Medjugorje in Yugoslavia they've been recorded. So there has been something but it hasn't spread beyond the Catholic population.

 Faranak:  This brings us to the second part of the interview which I've divided into three parts. It's about the importance of experiencing God or deity as feminine. So firstly, what do you think the importance is for a woman to experience God as feminine?

Anne:  Well, I think it's very important because then she can understand, as I did, that she is made in the image of the divine feminine. She can see her body as a manifestation of the divine feminine in this material dimension of experience. So I think it would be a tremendous help if she had one as I did, or other women have had them, perhaps we don't know. It's a tremendous anchor in a world where we really don't know what we're doing, why we're here.

Faranak:  Yeah. And what do you think the importance is for a man to experience this feminine side of deity?

 Anne:  I think it's equally important for a man because men have been brought up with the monotheistic image of God for nearly 3000 years or two and a half thousand years if you include the Judaic tradition, that's a long time to be imprinted with the image of only a male God or the male aspect of deity. So I think it's absolutely essential that men also have this experience with the feminine aspect of deity and that it is numinous for them.
It will be almost shocking that this is something that they've neglected and they haven't realized that they carry this feminine aspect of life within their own nature, what Jung called the anima, they have the anima within their nature.

 Faranak:  So when you say shocking, why do you say shocking?

Anne:  Well, it would be a shock to many men to discover that this is a sacred image and they had never thought of it before in that way, possibly. And so it's shocking in the sense that it's unusual, strange, different.

Faranak:  That it evokes something.

Anne:  And it will stir something in them or get them to ask questions possibly, or make a relationship with this image and ask that image what it wants of them, why is it appearing to them.

Faranak:  There have been men in the past, as you shared with me before that have had these experiences. Would you like to talk about one of them in particular that has touched you?

Anne:  Well, they've all touched me really. First of all, there's a very ancient one, 2000 BC of a King in Sumeria who had a dream. And he went to the temple of the goddess and asked the goddess to give him the explanation of the dream. And she gave it to him and she told him that he was to build a temple. And in the dream, he had an image of a donkey carrying material for building and she said the donkey is you. You're carrying the material and you have to go and build a temple to my brother, the God Ningirsu.
So that was a lovely dream to come down all this time. And that's recorded in Joseph Campbell's book; Occidental Mythology. He's a fantastic chronicler of history so one always finds something there. And then there was Apuleius' vision of Isis and Apuleius was an Egyptian that was living in the second century of the Christian era. Who lived, I think in Rome, who was is an initiate the Mysteries of Isis. And he writes this, such a beautiful description.

 He writes: "The apparition of a woman began to rise from the middle of the sea with so lovely a face that the gods themselves would have fallen down in adoration of it. First the head, then the whole shining body gradually emerged and stood before me poised on the surface of the waves. Her long thick hair fell in tapering ringlets on her lovely neck and was crowned with an intricate chaplet in which was woven every kind of flower. Just above her brows, shone a round-disc like a mirror or like the bright face of the moon which told me who she was.
Vipers rising from the left hand and right-hand partings of her hair supported this disc, with ears of corn bristling beside them. Her many-coloured robe was of the finest linen; part was glistening white, part crocus yellow and part glowing red. And along the entire hem, a woven bordure of flowers and fruit clung swaying in the breeze. But what caught and held my eye more than anything else was the deep black lustre of her mantle.
She wore it slung across our body from the right hip to the left shoulder, where it was caught in a knot resembling the boss of a shield. But part of it hung in innumerable folds, the tasselled fringe quivering. It was embroidered with glittering stars on the hand and everywhere else and in the middle, beamed a full and fiery moon. On her divine feet were slippers of palm leaves, the emblem of victory. And these are the words that she spoke to him.”

 "I am nature, the universal mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are. My nod governs the starry heights of heaven, the wholesome sea breezes and the dreadful silence of the world below. Though I am worshipped in many aspects and known by countless names and propitiated with all manner of different rights yet the whole round earth venerates me."
Now that was something, if you had a vision like that, what would you do?

Faranak:  I know…this is mind blowing on so many levels.

Anne:  Yes. And she speaks as a cosmic…

Faranak:  Authority, really.

Anne:  Authority, total authority, "the whole round earth venerates me." She's no mean little tiny goddess there.

Faranak:  And she's not bound to the earth. She is the axis of the entire creation here.

Anne:  Exactly, she is. She speaks from the divine centre of the universe. And what it did to him, it's very funny what she told him to do because he was in the form of an ass at this time when he had the vision. And he was very worried that he'd never go back to his human form. And she told him to go and stand in the procession and to watch the high priest who would be carrying a garland of roses. I think he had the vision after he had been changed back from an ass into a man, not before, so this paragraph needs changing a bit.
And Apuleius was to rush up to the priest and take a big bite out of the garland of roses. And if he did that, he would be changed back into his mortal form. So he did this and of course, he changed back into a completely naked man. And he had to be covered with a cloak but he describes the bliss of chewing these rose petals and feeling himself changed back from an ass into a human being, into a man.
I mean, that was so thrilling and so exciting and described so beautifully in his book that one can't help laughing because it must've been a very funny spectacle. The high priest was horrified and shocked and then amazed at what was happening in front of him. And all the people in the crowd were stunned….what an experience for everybody!

Faranak:  The sense of humour says something about the nature of the goddess…

Anne:  It's very grounded, absolutely grounded.

Faranak:  I was also wondering what you thought about the description of the goddess; ‘the finest linen, the glistening white, the crocus yellow’ it's all very sensuous.

Anne:  It is, and very vivid and you could almost touch it. You can feel the quality of the robe in the finest linen of the robe and then her black over mantle.

Faranak:  Exactly and that really, this evokes the senses really. It brings the senses and the imaginations to life when one reads a vision like that. It does something to the senses internally as if flowers are popping out of one's imagination.

Anne:  Yes, I think absolutely. And with the vipers supporting this disc above the head and everything, and that's very brilliant imagery, very careful description really. And it's exciting for the body to be included because it's about the bodily form of the flowers and nature, everything is included there. Nothing is left out and she's even got glittering stars on the hem.

Faranak:  I think that if we speak of loss of images and the damage that is done to our imagination if the senses, the body and the earth have always been condemned as a place of evil, whereas if you read this, there's nothing evil about this.

Anne:  No, there is nothing fallen, nothing sinful, nothing bad about this at all. This is glorious!

Faranak:  Exactly.

Anne:  And that really excites the imagination because the imagination is part of all of this  — to be able to describe what is coming from this man's imagination. And he's seeing it with his imagination if you like. And I think there's a wonderful alchemical saying; “Imagination is the star in man”— a beautiful saying. 
It really is our starry body possibly, the imagination.

Faranak:  Yes, beautiful. Let’s continue with the next historical experience you wanted to share with us.

Anne:  The next one is quite different. It comes from a wonderful scholar called Boethius, who lived at the beginning of the sixth century of the Christian era. And he had been taken prisoner by a barbarian emperor called Theodoric. And he was waiting in the cell for his execution. He was very depressed as you would be if you were waiting for your execution and he was crying I think, and mourning that his life was coming to an end. 
And then suddenly he says this in the manuscript that was called The Consolation of Philosophy. And God knows how it got out of that prison cell intact because it's five whole books of writing…it's a lot of writing. Anyways he says this, "while I was quietly thinking these thoughts over to myself and giving vent to my sorrow with the help of my pen, I became aware of a woman standing over me.
She was of an awe-inspiring appearance, her eyes burning and keen beyond the usual power of men. She was so full of years that I could hardly think of her as my own generation. And yet she possessed a vivid colour and undiminished vigour. It was difficult to be sure of her height. For some time, she was of average human size while at other times she seemed to touch the sky with the top of her head. And when she lifted herself even higher, she pierced it and is lost to human sight.
Her clothes were made of perishable material of the finest thread woven with the most delicate skill. And later she told me that she had made them with her own hands. Their colour was obscured, however, by a kind of film as if with long neglect like statues covered in dust. On the bottom hem, could be read the embroidered Greek letter Pi and on the top hem, the Greek letter Theta. Between the two, a ladder of steps rose from lower to the higher letter.
Her dress had been torn by the hands of marauders who had each carried off such pieces as they could get. And there were some books in her right hand and in her left hand, she held a sceptre. Tears had partly blinded me and I could not make out who this woman of such imperious authority was. I could only fix my eyes on the ground, overcome with surprise and wait in silence for what she would do next.
She came closer and sat down on the edge of my bed and I felt her eyes resting on my face, which was downcast and lined with grief.” And she began to speak to him at great length explaining things that were perplexing him really going deep into philosophy, and explaining why evil exists, for example. 

I can't go into it, it's too long because there are five books but this book had a tremendous influence on the  so-called dark ages. And his book was particularly valued by Charlemagne, in Charlamagne's court. So this is another visionary experience just when he perhaps expected nothing, except the jailer coming to fetch him for execution.
And he had this marvellous vision, which was so powerful that it influenced 300 or 400 years of people who were searching for wisdom themselves. And she was called ‘Philosophia' but really she is Sophia or Divine Wisdom—that's who she was speaking to him.

Faranak:  Extraordinary vision, again, amazing images.

Anne:  A very powerful vision. And again, it says that her dress had been torn by the hands of marauders. So his time, nobody really bothered anymore with Wisdom.

Faranak:  Covered in dust.

Anne:  Covered in dust, like statues covered in dust and yet her robe was woven with the most delicate skill. So there again, you get the imagination working and you'll get the physical image on the touch of the material almost like you did in Apuleius' vision. It's very real, very present. And many artists did pictures of it which got into the Books of Hours and things like that.
I've always loved that. I've known about that since I was 20 and I've looked over my bookshelves for it, for the book. And it's a very small penguin book that looks like this.

Faranak:  That's an image of the vision. Yes. Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy.

Anne: . I found it on one of my shelves finally, after about two hours of looking because I hadn't looked at it for many years until you asked me to bring up these visions.

Faranak:  Thank you. It’s extraordinary. I think I was wondering what you thought of what he meant by the fact that “she made her garment with her own hands”…that was so touching. 

Anne:  Well, she would do if she is 'Divine Wisdom', she would be making the fabric of life including her own robe. Yes, she would be doing that.

Faranak:  I like that because if we think of the idea of God as a male ‘creator deity’ who created the creation including the feminine—this vision goes against that as she says “I created it with my own hands".

Anne:  Yes, exactly.

Faranak:  It does go counter to that idea of God, the creator, here we see the goddess as the creatrix, even of her own robe.

Anne:  Of her own robe. Yes. That's very clever that you should pick that up.

These are tremendous visions and they lasted for a very long time. I think Boethius had his about 300 years after Apuleius, not very long really. And then we have a great gap really. And right away we have Hildegard of Bingen in the Christian tradition. And we have the people like the Beguines; people who had withdrawn from society and were really mystics.
And we have Jacob Boehme who was an incredible visionary and whose work I learned from.

Anne:  Yes. I didn't know until I listened to the Embassy of the Free Mind, to a very brilliant woman who I think is in charge of the books explaining what happened to Boehme’s works, that they were rescued by a man in the Netherlands who copied the manuscript's word for word and manuscript by manuscript and saved all his work, which would have been destroyed. So it was thanks to a man in the Netherlands. I can't remember his name, I think it began with a B who rescued Boehme’s great works. And imagine him copying them day after day, month after month. 

Faranak:  That's kind of ‘taking the dust off the forgotten images’, isn't it?

Anne:  Absolutely. Yes, and he had a vision of Sophia. That was the great focus of his writing, again the feminine aspect of divinity, although he may not have called her that. I really don't know enough about Boehme to say that.

Faranak:  I wanted us for a moment to look at these images and experiences your shared in a historical framework, perhaps in a more playful way as these are obviously not the experiences humanity has had of the Feminine deity but they are interesting that you’ve chosen to share with us also because of these specific historical moments. For example the last one we just discussed of Boethius is where her image is already in decline, it’s in the dust so to say, there is a grief that comes over him. We could say that this is where the Feminine, Sophia was in decline, she was already ‘fallen’ so to say. When we go back to Apuleius and the vision of Isis, she is in her full glory really, there is nothing sinful or fallen about her. This also goes for the first one you shared of this great King which shows the authority of the goddess; it wasn’t out of the ordinary to receive a vision of the goddess. It wasn’t for everyone, but it was also not something to question I can imagine.

 Anne: Yes. It was expected and anticipated that people would have these visions and that he would be told to build a temple in the dream.

Faranak:  Later with Apuleius she's really in one of her most glorified images. And that might've been around the tipping point…what era is that again?

Anne:  It was about the second century of the Christian era, probably around 180, something like that. 

Faranak:  So that would be the time that the image of the feminine deity starts to decline, really?

 Anne:  Well, probably because it began to be covered up by the Roman gods and goddesses and also by Christianity.

Faranak:  I would like to continue the interview with a next question: What do you think that the importance of experiencing this feminine side of the deity is on culture as a whole or on a specific era?

Anne:  Well, for instance, I'm thinking about the Cathars of the Southwest of France in the 12th and 13th century, their guiding image was Sophia. I don't know whether they had any visions of her but the church was called The Church of the Holy Spirit which is the church of Sophia. And the Troubadours took that teaching all over Europe in the 12th century to every country in Europe because, at the beginning of the 12th century, nobody had heard of the Grail for instance.

And at the end of the century, nobody existed who didn't know about the Grail. So they took the Grail which was a symbol of The Church of the Holy Spirit which gave out love to everyone, gave out the food that was needed by everybody to everybody. So that was a small cultural phenomenon if you like because it was wiped out by the Catholic Church and by the Inquisition.
And the Catholic Church had such power right away from then until the 20th century really, or the 19th century, that it was able to keep this tradition of Sophia absolutely underground. Because it came up again with Boehme, it came up again with the Rosicrucian Enlightenment in the 17th century. You can follow the thread right away from the 13th century up to the 18th or 19th century but the whole thing was underground because of the Inquisition.
It couldn't be brought up into the full consciousness of the culture. So Christian culture has been missing the divine feminine from the point of view of the Godhead, right the way through and that I think is an utter tragedy and is responsible for the mess that we're in now.

 Faranak:  Yes, and we might oversee the importance of keeping alive the existence of the feminine deity that these hidden traditions did. It really is almost like an underground museum keeping the images alive, even if it were a few people who still would be part of the movement. I think that is also really important.

Anne:  Yes, and also the alchemists were part of this whole underground movement because their guiding divinity was Sophia also. So they took that on from the Cathar Church and it carried on right the way through European history. And that came out later on in what came in Hildegard of Bingen for instance, but she couldn't speak the full truth because it would have been heresy to say what she might've seen in her vision but she couldn't actually speak about it. She had to keep it to herself.
But we have the great vision of wisdom that she had there in the Scivias . And then we come on to the Russian Sophiologists which are very interesting, which I really didn't know about until I read this book called Sophia, by someone who's become a friend of mine: Susanne Schaup.

Anne:  Yes. She wrote this marvellous book which I recommend to everybody. And she brings the Russian visionaries which I didn't know about before, who were quite extraordinary really. And one of them, here again, it's coming back. The Russian church has always worshipped Sophia, has always had an image in the great churches and in the icons of Sophia, as a great angel in some of the churches. She's shown as the angel of the apocalypse.
And  this man; Solovyov who lived from 1853 to 1900 had a vision of Sophia at the age of 9. And again, at the age of 20 in the British Library when he was looking at books, he suddenly had this vision of her again. And a final one in Egypt where he went out into the night distress looking for her and fell asleep or fell unconscious and had a vision of her while he was lying there.
And she revealed to him, he says “the abundance of the Godhead, the eternal one” and that vision was never to leave him. And later he described his three visions of Sophia in a long poem, and he paid homage to her as his Eternal Friend, the Mistress of the Earth. It's a lovely title, Mistress of the Earth, the Woman of the Apocalypse and the Queen of Heaven. But then you have a trilogy of marvellous images of Sophia and I wish we could bring Sophia back into our lives really as guiding us now in our return to nature and our return to respect for the life of the planet.

Faranak:  She's also connected there, interestingly to the apocalypse.

Anne:  Yes. She's the woman with the sun with a circle of stars around her head.

Faranak:  What a powerful Trinity; Mistress of the earth, the Woman of the Apocalypse and the Queen of Heaven. 

Anne:   He saw her really as Apuleius saw Isis; as the feminine principle guiding the whole cosmos. She is present within the whole cosmos as the life of the cosmos.

Faranak:  Here, again, the importance of being brought up with images as he has been, in Russian churches, seeing ‘angel Sophia’. We see how important it is that she is represented, even if it's marginal.

Anne:  Yes, I agree. Yes, absolutely because every church he went into, he would have seen her and he would have had perhaps sung hymns to her and things like that, with the priests and with beautiful music.

Faranak:  Exactly. Even if it serves as even a small anchor for these visions to sort of find us or hit the note within us when we do receive her guidance. Because I think that a great loss of these images also creates— instead of revelations of the goddess—perhaps creates neuroses and psychosis for many people instead of being able to receive her.

Anne:  Yes because it's completely shut out. And this ghastly scientific belief that has been guiding Western culture for 300 years says that the whole thing is without any meaning, that the universe has no meaning, no consciousness and that everything starts with our physical brain that has been a disaster for the imagination. It really has, although we've had marvellous images of the cosmos from the Hubble telescope. We have that, thank God which has stimulated the imagination and put us in touch with the cosmos again but we have no image of deity connected with that. And that is a tragedy really. And also we have no image of deity connected with the earth, with mother earth, as the Indigenous people have always retained the image of mother earth. And they pray to her and speak to her as a feminine image.

Faranak:  So there's a question that relates to that and I had written down is; what do you think the influence on the psyche is and cultures when God is referred to as "He" with capital 'H' and perhaps only as "She" with capital 'S' when it's spoken as earth or nature. Because in your vision, you experienced the cosmic woman in the starry cosmos, in the heavens, and the heavens have traditionally been this place of Him, the bearded man sitting on a cloud.
I know in my own experience, as well as the women in my practice that when they have a vision of the feminine in the cosmos, the feminine being—the "She" with capital 'S' in the sky—it makes a huge impact on them to have the heavens not occupied by a Father but by a Mother image. It’s a huge difference for the psyche.

Anne:  Yeah, well, it's very interesting that the "Our Father" prayer was originally an Aramaic one and Jesus or Yeshua as he was called in Aramaic would have spoken the words which were to the Mother-Father of the cosmos, not the Father. In Aramaic, the word used to address the deity was Mother-Father. And of course, Mother got lost.

So we've come down to "Our Father which art in heaven" instead of our Mother-Father or our Father-Mother whichever way you would want to put it. We've lost that feminine element right there in the very biggest, most important prayer. And in Aramaic, it would have been utterly different because the feeling would have been different and the imagination would have been different. The image would have been utterly different.

The Aramaic language is very rich and it goes on for much longer than the Lord's Prayer, — the actual prayer in Aramaic. And it's full of the imagery of nature and the cosmos and everything else really, it included everything. And it worries me a bit that earth is associated with the mother as earth only, instead of the cosmos.

Faranak:  Exactly.

 Anne:  Because it excludes the All and the entirety of the All and this is what Solovyov understood that she revealed to him the Eternal One, which has both male and female. And this is what we have to get back somehow. Susanne Schaup in her book makes this important conclusion in regards to this problem:

  "As long as the feminine is not located in the Godhead itself, as long as it is subservient to God, the creator Sophia cannot act from divine empowerment in her own right. The sacred wedding has to take place within the deity as Hildegard saw but dared not say."

So there we have it really, that is the key to everything. We have to restore the image of both deities to deity.

 Faranak:  Otherwise, she will still remain submissive to 'He' as the ultimate Godhead and 'She' is just creation or just the earth.

Anne:  Exactly, yeah. Going to be associated with the created world but not with the invisible world, the divine world.

Faranak:  Yes. And I think that is really disempowering for the feminine.

Anne:  It is, you're right. Absolutely, dead right, it's disempowering. In my work, it has been to bring back the feminine and yours is as well. So, you know, we're working together on this same goal as it were. Actually, I had a dream last night.
It was about a man and woman who had come to stay bringing a baby with them and they were in a sort of guest suite. And they got up earlier than when I was ready to receive them. And then they were in a car later on, the father had gone off shopping. I was there with the mother and the baby and the woman handed me the baby which was wrapped in swaddling clothes almost completely covered and put it on my left arm.
And I looked down at the baby, it was a little girl. And I said to it, "what a beautiful baby you are." So maybe this is the feminine coming back, it's still infant, you know, it wasn't more than a month old.

Faranak:  Oh, that's sweet image.

Anne:  And she left me for a minute, she'd gone out as well and said, "can you hold the baby while I just go and do something, I'll be back in a minute." And I was worried that I would be left holding the baby and she wouldn't come back for it. That ties in with today's talk without question so it's a lovely dream.
A baby girl and dressed in white with lots of coverings, several layers of white coverings with just her little head buried in the coverings so to speak like a hood.

Faranak:  It's almost like a cocoon.

Anne:  Yes, exactly like a cocoon. That's right. That's the image to go with our talk today.

Faranak:  So going back to our problem and where I wanted to go with my previous question. If humanity is needed in this process, let’s say the final stage of Rubedo; ‘redeeming the cosmos ’, or redeeming the Godhead itself. So humanity needs the Godhead but the Godhead also needs humanity to experience itself, to know itself….

Anne: That’s right, this is what Jung said. The human being needs the god-head but the god-head needs the human being to know itself. Jung understood that God needs man’s help to understand who He/She is.

Faranak:  So perhaps if the Godhead can experience itself as Her, then maybe that will as your friend Susanne writes in her book Sophia, maybe that can restore the incredible imbalance that we have and are experiencing. Because it's the Godhead itself that is missing this experience or that has lost the experience. 

Anne:  Yes. I think that you put your finger on a very, very important point. And I hope this comes through because if that's missing—if a the Godhead doesn't know herself and himself to be the wholeness that we hope He-She could be, how on earth are we going to change anything on the planet?

Faranak:  Exactly, yes. So it brings us back again to this idea—it’s what I live by, as we say in Sufism: “it’s not for us, it's for the sake of the beloved”. So for the sake of the beloved which is also the sake of this world and everything in it, we retrieve this experience of the Godhead itself as feminine so that everything may come into balance. 

Anne:  Yeah, it's important to restore the balance. That's the most important thing and Jung saw this as enantiodromia: when the pendulum has swung too far one way, it's got to come back to the middle. This is what we need to do, bring it back to the focus of the centre.

Faranak:  Yes. So maybe we should be calling the divine feminine not Goddess per se, but God as Her, the divine as Her - to bring back this language that has been one-sided.

Anne: Well, it’s difficult because in other languages you would have the ending of ‘naan’, which in English we don’t have. In French you would say ‘la déesse’ which is a feminine noun.

Faranak:  Yes, we’ll see how the language will want to shift. But I do think it is important because I know personally when I read a book and God is constantly referred to as ‘He’, I get annoyed…it can get under my skin.

Anne: Yes, it’s a habit. It’s a 2000 year-old habit and it can be changed. Because it was changed before into what we have now. We can do the sacred unity, the sacred marriage which is the most important idea to hang on to.

Faranak:  Yes, Him-Her. Well…I think we have come to the end of our interview.

Anne:  Okay. Well, thank you so much for inviting me. It's been most interesting for me to have somebody to share my thoughts with and to listen to your thoughts. Thank you so much. 

Faranak:  Thank you so much. And I'm sure this is going to be of help to many men and women who are in search of this balance in their experience of the sacred. Thank you so much.

END INTERVIEW