Maureen Murdock

This book describes contemporary woman's search for wholeness in a society in which she has been defined according to masculine values. Drawing upon cultural myths and fairy tales, ancient symbols and goddesses, and the dreams of contemporary women, Murdock illustrates the need for—and the reality of—feminine values in Western culture today.

Woman's Quest for Wholeness

The Heroine's Journey

Laura Mei

Women who have felt accepted by their fathers have confidence that they will be accepted by the world. They also develop a positive relationship to their masculine nature. They have an inner masculine figure who likes them just as they are. This positive inner male, or animus figure, will support their creative efforts in an accepting non-judgmental way.

In the underworld there is no sense of time. Time is endless and you cannot rush your stay. There is no morning, day, or night. It is densely dark and unforgiving. This all-pervasive blackness is moist, cold, and bone-chilling. There are no easy answers in the underworld; there is no quick way out. Silence pervades when the wailing ceases. One is naked and walks on the bones of the dead. To the outside world, a woman who has begun her descent is preoccupied, sad, and inaccessible. Her tears often have no name, but they are ever-present whether she cries or not. She cannot be comforted; she feels abandoned. She forgets things. She chooses not to see friends. She curls up in a ball on the couch or refuses to come out of her room. She digs in the earth or walks in the woods. The mud and the trees become her companions. She enters a period of voluntary isolation seen by her family and friends as a loss of her senses.

During the descent, a woman experiences a period of introversion or depression — a slow, painful self-pregnancy in which she scrapes away her identification with ego consciousness and goes back to a state of body-mind knowing; before there were words. She may feel an incredible sense of emptiness, of being left out, shunned, left behind, without value. She may feel homeless, orphaned, in a place of in-between. Like both Demeter and Inanna, she will bear no fruit, no product. She may feel naked and exposed, sexless, arid, and raw. She may dream images of tunnels, subways, wombs, tombs, being swallowed by snakes, or finding herself like Jonah in the belly of the whale. If she can allow the descent to be a mindful initiation, she need not become lost in the dark.

Human arrogance fails to see that we are all one and coexist along a continuum of life. Polarization leads one to view the other as an “it”. The philosopher Martin Buber describes the conflicting ways human beings view themselves and others in his book 

 attitude treats the other as a thing that is separate from self, to be measured, organized, and controlled. The 

 attitude does not recognize the other as sacred. The 

 attitude addresses the other as one and the same, as Self. Buber says that thou cannot be controlled or found by seeking. We meet thou through grace in mystery. Thou is an experience of the sacred — if I address you as thou instead of as it, whether you are human, animal, rock, or ocean and if I honor my own divinity, then I will honor the sacred within you and allow you to live your life in trust without coercion or control by me.

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