The divine feminine
The divine feminine is the idea that within each of us a feminine force exists. This isn't limited to those who identify as women, since it's believed that every person carries both masculine and feminine energy within them. It's a subject that keeps surfacing more and more: a reconnection to the notion of the Goddess, a reclaiming of the human story, our true history, her story.
How can we connect more deeply with our feminine power? One ritual, described in the book Magdalene Mysteries, teaches that the left hand is the pathway to the feminine mysteries. Left corresponds to the moon, the lunar, the yin, the night, while right corresponds to the masculine, the sun, the solar, the yang and the day. Together, it's said, they form the perfect balance of the universe. Seren Bertrand and Azra Bertrand write that we connect to a magic door within ourselves where we activate our own Mary Magdalene essence, and that this initiation opens a portal to the feminine Holy Spirit known by many names: Sophia, Tara, Isis, Yennoja, Kali, Kwan Yin, Bridget.
Tara, Isis and Kali
Tara is a female deity honoured in both Hinduism and Buddhism, offering compassion and salvation from rebirth and death. She is said to have been born from empathy for the suffering of the world, and one origin tale holds that she emerged from the tears of the bodhisattva Avalokitesvara as he wept over that suffering. Devotees recite her mantra, Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha, as a praise and a request for swift help in emergencies, and in the Tibetan Book of the Dead she is called upon to guide the soul toward peace. Balancing masculine and feminine energy in the body, living our soul path and speaking our soul voice, even simply finding the courage to ask for guidance, are all forms of the divine feminine at work.
Isis is the Egyptian goddess of magic, fertility and motherhood, known by many names including Queen of the Heavens, Star of the Sea and Giver of Heaven. Raised as a priestess in Hathor's lineage, she was renowned for her gift of high frequency alchemical magic and her ability to receive and transmit the teachings of Mother Earth. Isis was powerful enough to bring her husband Osiris back to life and conceive their son, Horus, before Osiris descended to rule the underworld. She is often shown wearing the symbol of an empty throne, representing the seat of the Pharaoh's power, and carries the ankh, the hieroglyph of eternal life. One of the few goddesses portrayed with wings, her worship endured until the rise of Christianity between the fourth and sixth centuries CE.
Kali is the goddess of chaos, the slayer of ego, often depicted with raging red eyes, a lolling tongue, a garland of severed heads and a skirt of severed arms, dancing atop a peaceful Lord Shiva. Some say this shows that even a powerful force like Shiva is inert without Kali, or Shakti. Her fearsome image isn't a call to imitate her literally, but an invitation to be fiercely unapologetic and rebellious against the norms that society and modern culture project onto us.
Beyond Beauty
No one is here to be mere decoration. There is power in being pretty, but the deeper power lies in embracing the weird and unpolished parts of ourselves too. Imagine a world where beauty was irrelevant to our self esteem: supernatural gifts might flourish while mental health struggles declined, and people would boast of their talents and creations rather than how young they look. Too much focus on appearance, on how our lives look in photographs, causes us to miss our own gifts entirely. Embracing every part of ourselves, the dark, unseen, gnarly and awkward parts, and pushing back against the polished image sold on social media, is itself an act of the divine feminine. The Sophia Code claims this is the age of the divine feminine awakening, describing the holy quality of Sophia as a thread of spiritual DNA inherited at the immaculate conception of the soul, ushering in a golden age for awakening divine feminine consciousness on our planet.
Kwan Yin, whose name means one who sees and hears the cries of the human world, is among the most frequently honoured deities on altars in Chinese temples. She hears our prayers, cares for the suffering of the underworld and is invoked in burial rituals to free the soul from torment. It takes real courage to stay in touch with emotion the way Kwan Yin does, to operate from a vulnerable, heart centred and divinely feminine place. Emotions are unpredictable and honesty can feel exposing, yet embracing both is how we heal. Perhaps it's through our prayers, our vulnerability and our willingness to ask, that we connect most directly with the divine feminine.
A Suppressed Legacy
Could the legendary power of these goddesses have been suppressed along the way? Patriarchal society has, over centuries, subjugated women and stripped away their equal rights and their power. Women and femininity are still largely portrayed in the media as people pleasing, slim and pretty, rather than fearless, nurturing and powerful.
In Celtic culture, one of the oldest grail myths, the Elucidation, tells of the Well Maidens being violated by a king and his men, after which the sacred, life giving waters of the otherworld stopped flowing through their wombs, birthing a curse upon the land. A similar story is told of the grail womb of the mermaids, and across many cultures the priestesses and sacred women of the global sisterhood disappeared following waves of persecution in the patriarchal era.
Three copies of the Gospel of Mary have survived, containing material left out of the Bible, two in Greek and one in Coptic. It names seven powers that bind us: darkness, craving, ignorance, craving for death, enslavement to the physical body, the false peace of the flesh and the compulsion of rage. One passage warns, in essence, to be on guard against anyone who tries to redirect us from our own inner source of truth. The Gospel of Thomas echoes this, describing a return to love as what frees us from the grip of the ego.
Magdalene, the Moon and the Womb
We can also connect to the legacy of Mary Magdalene, she of a thousand roses, through the old craft of potions, ointments, oils and aphrodisiac drinks, once known as love potions. It was believed that the medicinal properties of certain plants could awaken the womb magic within women. The Druids favoured vervain for divination, gathering it under the dark moon beneath Sirius to cleanse and purify the sacred temple of the body. The plant later became associated with Magdalene and Christ as well. The rosary, described in the book The Way of the Rose as the oldest practice of all, guides us back to the divine mother in each of us, held quite literally in our hands.
It's said that a moon priestess once practiced the menstrual mysteries of rebirth, and that each cycle carried the power to cleanse a woman of her burdens, in body and in soul. Diana and Hekate were honoured as goddesses of the old magic, and covens of priestesses were said to gather in circles at the full or new moon. Even today, sitting in circle, speaking our truths and listening to one another, can feel like that same kind of transformation. Lynn Picknett described these gatherings as a way to illuminate mind and soul and open both body and psyche to the holy light. As the seat of all divine feminine power, the womb space rewards our attention: staying in sync with our cycle, tending our wounds and reconnecting with our intuition may be part of the key to unlocking the divine feminine within.
As far back as 2000 BCE, priestesses were recorded taking an oath of honour and devotion to their own bodies, a ritual documented among the Sumerian holy women as an act of respect for the womb. Many of us grew up treating our first period as something hushed and private, when in some cultures it is instead marked with a joyful ceremony known as Menarche. Reconnecting with the divine feminine might begin simply by honouring our own cycle and the quiet, monthly creativity of the body.
Remembering and Reclaiming
Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the witch trials across Europe and colonial America saw thousands of women accused of devil worship and executed. Many of these women were simply living in their truth, perhaps alone, landowning, capable and unmarried, and that difference alone was treated as dangerous. Those injustices still echo today as a kind of inherited scar, a quiet pressure not to stand apart from the norm. Though the Witchcraft Act was repealed in 1735, the wounds of that era remain woven into all of us. To be free, we're called to live in our truth, to trust our own magic and to release the fear of our inner power, aligning instead with the ultimate divine feminine force: nature itself.
Mermaids and goddesses, forgotten gospels, witches and so called sinners: however you read these stories, the divine feminine cosmic energy is always at work, birthing new galaxies, pushing new shoots through the soil, weaving mycelium ever further underground. As one writer put it, the moon will go on pulling the tides and the blood in our bodies, month after month, vanishing and returning, always there and always real. And when we look honestly at what has been done to the earth, forests felled, rivers run dry, land paved over for profit, it mirrors what has so often been done to women too.
Let's start writing herstory, and healing the earth, through the divine feminine that already lives within each of us. It's simply up to us to become aware, to live our truth, and to step into the unlimited potential and freedom that awaits all of humanity there.