The Deconstruction of "Femininity" Begins Here

IN THE BEGINNING, SHE WAS EVERYTHING.

The Venus of Willendorf from The Collector

Before the divine was divided, before light was split from darkness, there was only the feminine. She was never the passive “other” imagined by philosophers... she was the generative ground and the original pulse of existence. Across pre-patriarchal cosmologies, the feminine was the totality: birth, death, creation, and dissolution held in a single, breathing continuum.

In the earliest sacred systems, she appeared as presence: embodied, immediate, and whole. The feminine governed both life and law... both fertility and ferocity. Her image was carved into stone long before gods had names. In the Cretan caves, the painted walls glowed with her forms, serpentine... cyclical... sovereign. In the river valleys of Sumer, she emerged as Inanna, the morning and evening star, ruler of both pleasure and war. In Egypt, she rose as Isis, mother and magician, whose wings gathered the dead back into life.

Merlin Stone’s When God Was a Woman (1976) remains one of the most crucial excavations of what patriarchal theology tried to bury: that long before "the father" reigned in the heavens, cultures across Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Crete, and Egypt worshiped the Mother as the living law of regeneration. Stone reveals how early human societies oriented divinity around rhythm... the moon’s waxing and waning, the flooding of rivers, and the menstrual and agricultural cycles that marked the passage of time. Creation was repetition made sacred. These goddess traditions held no divide between nature and spirit, or between creator and creation. The Goddess embodied both. She governed the harvest and the womb... the return of the sun and the descent into darkness.

Stone calls these figures “living symbols of continuity” because they linked every process of decay to its eventual renewal. Within her order, death became transformation. The divine expressed itself through nourishment, through rot, and through return. The Mother’s power emerged through sustenance and reciprocity. Over time, patriarchal religions flattened this circular cosmology into linear time: a heaven above and an Earth below, each ruled by hierarchy instead of exchange.

In The Great Cosmic Mother (1987), Monica Sjöö and Barbara Mor continue this genealogy, presenting the Goddess as the original cosmology of life itself. They describe what they call “the cosmic mothering principle,” a theology of wholeness in which blood, milk, rain, and soil form one continuous circulatory system. Within this matrix, creation neither begins nor ends; it unfolds in cycles of giving and return. Everything nourishes something else. Matter and spirit flow within the same weave, vibrating at different frequencies of the same living pulse.

Sjöö and Mor understand this cosmic mothering as an ancient science of balance... a knowledge system predating division. To honor the Mother is to recognize that the body and the planet share one rhythm, and that to tend to one is to sustain the other. Creation, within her framework, is participation in the sacred exchange between form and formlessness. The feminine embodies unbroken law... the regenerative force that governs both growth and decay. Within her, destruction and creation belong to the same continuum, each sustaining the other through rhythm. This theology unsettles the inheritance that confines vitality to the masculine. It restores the feminine as the generative power of motion itself... the intelligence that keeps existence breathing, expanding, and whole.

The Mother is not governed by divine order; she is the order through which divinity moves.

Centuries later, Clarissa Pinkola Estés retrieves this lineage through the psyche. In Women Who Run With the Wolves (1992), she writes of the wild feminine as the instinctual memory of the species: the one who dreams, heals, and remembers. Her work translates the ancient Goddess into a living psychology, showing how this archetype survives in story, gesture, and the body’s intelligence.

For Estés, the wild woman represents the pulse that modernity tried to quiet; the rhythm within women that moves through intuition, creativity, and care. She understands that knowledge lives in sensation and that to feel deeply is to participate in divine intelligence. This mirrors the ancient principle of cosmic mothering: knowing as communion, healing as remembrance, and creation as reciprocity. The wild feminine carries continuity in her bones. She teaches that intuition is a form of awareness, that emotion bears information, and that creativity is a sacred dialogue between body and cosmos. Through her, the feminine extends beyond an idea and into an experience, one that lives, breathes, and renews itself endlessly.

To live within her cosmology is to understand that divinity moves through the world, never above it. The Goddess is the pattern by which existence sustains itself... life and afterlife, soil and sun, the keeper of opposites who sees no need to divide them. This is the world patriarchal philosophy inherited and then fractured... the living whole reduced to hierarchy. As people were colonized and empires rose, the sky was rewritten to mirror their order. The masculine ascended; the feminine was fixed below. Spirit drifted from matter; light was lifted from the body that birthed it. The sun became an emblem of reason; the moon, a mirror of emotion. Before this separation, there was only rhythm. The feminine moved through both luminaries, the pulse beneath every transformation. She was the origin and the orbit... the breath that carried the dawn into being.

How Patriarchal Philosophy Rewrote the Cosmos

For most of recorded history, we’ve been taught that the sun is masculine and the moon is feminine, a binary so deeply embedded in language and ritual that it feels ancient and unquestionable. Yet, despite what one might have you believe, this pairing is not cosmic truth; it is philosophical projection.

Greek and Roman thinkers gendered the heavens according to the hierarchies they upheld on earth. Aristotle described the masculine as active and divine, while the feminine was described as receptive and imperfect. Plato’s ideal forms mirrored this same hierarchy: spirit over body, reason over emotion, man over woman. The cosmos became an allegory of order, its structure reinforcing social rule.

In Christian theology, these associations deepened: the sun was cast as Christ, the perfect source of light, while the moon became Mary, luminous only through borrowed reflection. Over centuries, these metaphors hardened into doctrine, sanctifying subordination as natural law. Outside that lineage, however, the sky tells a different story; one where the feminine does not reflect light, but carries it.

Across pre-colonial, Indigenous, and ancient cosmologies, the feminine was never confined to lunar reflection. In the Tiwi traditions of northern Australia, the Sun is a woman, Wuriupranili, who rises each morning, lights her fire, and carries a torch of stringybark as she traverses the sky. Her light is not symbolic of reason or dominance as the masculinized version would have you believe, but of care and constancy... a cyclical renewal of life through motion. In other Aboriginal narratives, such as the Sun Woman Bila, the feminine embodies radiance itself, the animating principle that transforms darkness into dawn. In these worlds, she is the origin, not an echo.

The same cosmological pattern repeats elsewhere. In the mystical texts of Gnosticism, Sophia (Wisdom) emanates from divine fullness and gives birth to the visible cosmos. Her descent is not a fall in the traditional sense of descending, but rather, an offering: creation emerging from compassion. Sophia embodies the same creative principle that animates the earth: luminous intelligence expressed through love and motion. Within her, the divine is neither masculine nor feminine but whole; her radiance births both.

In the Baltic and Slavic worlds, this wholeness appears through Saule, the radiant sun goddess who rides across the heavens in a chariot of fire. She is mother, protector, and judge, her light nourishing crops, people, and souls alike. In the Celtic imagination, Sulis presides over healing waters at Bath, her springs shimmering with the same solar energy that burns above: fire and water merging as a single creative current. The Norse knew Sól (or Sunna) as the driver of the sun’s chariot, her endurance a sacred act of devotion... the divine feminine expressed through rhythm and resilience.

Across the African continent, these truths deepen further. The supreme being Nana Buluku births the twin deities Mawu and Lisa (moon and sun, feminine and masculine), whose balanced union sustains the universe. Yet Nana Buluku herself precedes them both, the primordial mother whose breath animates the dualities that follow. Her myth reminds us that light & rhythm and sun & moon, arise within the feminine, not apart from her. In Egypt, the Eye of Ra, embodied by Sekhmet, Hathor, or Bastet , carried the sun’s creative and destructive potential through feminine form: the light that heals and the flame that protects. These goddesses were not appendages of masculine divinity; they were the solar current made flesh.

Even across the Atlantic, in Mesoamerican lineages, we find solar deities who transcend gender altogether. The Zapotec sun was both father and mother, radiant creator and nurturer of fields. The Aztec goddess Xochiquetzal, whose beauty and fertility radiate like light, embodies solar force as sensual intelligence: the power to create and to delight in creation.

When read together, these cosmologies reveal a shared memory that predates philosophical division. The sun and moon were never enemies, never assigned to opposing genders, and never ordered as superior and subordinate. They were movements of the same rhythm... radiance & reflection... energy & return. The feminine carried both.

Patriarchal theology fractured what these earlier worlds held as whole. As empire rose, this symmetry was severed: the sun claimed by the masculine as a symbol of dominion, the moon confined to passive reflection. Light itself was politicized, no longer a shared element of creation but a weapon of hierarchy.

Feminist, Spiritual, and Archetypal Reinterpretations

The rediscovery of the feminine sun began quietly, as women scholars, poets, and theologians reached back through myth to recover what had been buried beneath centuries of theological erasure. Their work resurfaced an ancient remembering... a worldview where the cosmos is cyclical, regenerative, and alive with creative reciprocity. Through this remembering, the language of light returned to its maternal root.

Patricia Monaghan’s O Mother Sun! (1994) gathers fragments of solar myth from across the world and listens for their shared pulse. From the Baltic Saule to Japan’s Amaterasu, from the Celtic Sulis to the Aboriginal Bila, she traces the living thread that binds them: the sun as a feminine principle, luminous, creative, and life-giving. Her writing moves like invocation, calling the lost warmth back into consciousness. Within her cosmology, the sun’s energy is maternal: a fire that sustains without consuming and an illumination that gives without needing to possess. “The principle of creation,” she writes, “returns to its true source — the mother’s fire.” That fire burns through matter and myth alike; it is the breath of continuity that animates both star and womb. Through this return, Monaghan restores the feminine to her original place as the heart of the universe’s motion... the one through whom vitality circulates and turns radiance into relationship. In her hands, the sun becomes less an object in the sky and more a consciousness of offering, a warmth that underwrites existence itself. What theology once abstracted into order, she restores to devotion... a cosmology where energy is not command but care and where light serves as covenant between creation and creator.

Two decades later, Stephanie Woodfield extends that current through her own work, Drawing Down the Sun (2015). Writing from within modern pagan and goddess traditions, she urges women to awaken the solar force within in order to remember that vitality is sacred and that shining is an act of communion. For her, the over-association of femininity with lunar quietude has diminished the full spectrum of woman’s creative power. Through ritual and reflection, she calls for a renewal of that lineage: a reclamation of brilliance as inheritance... of courage as divine expression. In Woodfield’s theology, illumination is not performance. She views it as intimacy. The sun’s brilliance becomes a gesture of kinship... the meeting of self and source. When she describes radiance, she does not speak of dominance but of devotion, the kind of glow that nourishes rather than blinds. To shine is to participate in the ongoing act of creation. The feminine sun collaborates with the moon’s rhythm, fusing steadiness with surrender... reason with rapture. Their relationship becomes a choreography of cosmic breath: exhale into fire, inhale into reflection.

Becca Tarnas brings this dialogue inward. In her 2017 essay “Solar and Lunar, Feminine and Masculine,” she writes not of celestial bodies but of psychic ones. The solar and lunar become languages of consciousness, each an essential aspect of human wholeness. Radiance and reflection, emergence and repose; every being holds both. Her work returns astrology to its psychological roots, showing how the sky mirrors the soul’s movement toward balance. For Tarnas, integration is the central labor of being. The solar illuminates while the lunar listens; the lunar attunes while the solar clarifies. Each depends upon the other for coherence. Within the psyche, the solar feminine embodies creative emergence, clarity, vision, and expressive presence, while the lunar masculine offers steadiness, discernment, and containment. Together they produce a rhythm of consciousness that is luminous without losing its depth. In her framework, astrology, psychology, and myth are simply dialects of one truth: that the universe is within us, mapped across psyche and star alike.

Carolyn Merchant widens that field to include the Earth itself. In The Death of Nature (1980), she identifies the historical wound at the root of modernity, that is, the moment when the living world was stripped of its animacy and redefined as resource. As mechanistic science took hold in early modern Europe, nature was recast as machine, its rhythms reduced to predictable motion, and its mysteries to measurable cause. The sun’s vitality was reinterpreted as masculine reason, while the Earth, long personified as mother, was recoded as matter to be mastered. Merchant traces how this metaphysical shift became ecological violence. When the Earth ceased to be regarded as kin, reverence gave way to control. Rivers once seen as arteries became channels of commerce; forests once regarded as lungs became timber. The language of the sacred gave way to the language of extraction. She shows that theology and ecology are never separate! How we imagine creation determines how we treat it. The eclipse of the feminine divine was both a spiritual loss and an environmental one. Through her lens, the restoration of the feminine is also the restoration of the planet’s soul. To see the world as alive again... to regard matter as participant rather than property... is to recall the sacred continuity that ancient cosmologies once understood. Her call is for sustainability and for reverence: a return to perceiving the Earth as an extension of the same creative intelligence that once animated the Goddess herself.

Across these thinkers, Monaghan, Woodfield, Tarnas, and Merchant, a single remembrance unfolds. Each, in her own way, reawakens the feminine principle as the generative pulse of existence: radiant yet rhythmic... expressive yet attuned. Their work forms a bridge between the ancient and the immediate, revealing that divinity was never lost, only forgotten. The sun and moon remain kin: luminous mirrors of one continuum.

The feminine does not borrow light; she generates it. The masculine does not command; he sustains. Creation does not ascend from hierarchy; it moves through harmony. To return to this awareness is restoration and a remembering of what was always whole.

The Fall of the Divine Feminine

If the heavens were rewritten to mirror hierarchy, the Earth was reshaped to enforce it. What began as a philosophical abstraction (masculine light above, feminine reflection below) descended into history as an economic and theological order. The exile of the feminine from divinity became the precondition for her subordination in society.

In Caliban and the Witch (2004), Silvia Federici names this transformation directly: the body of woman became the new terrain of conquest. As Europe moved from feudalism to capitalism, the sacred knowledge once held in the hands of women, such as midwifery, herbcraft, birth, and healing, was recast as heresy. The witch trials were not isolated outbursts of superstition but the organized machinery of dispossession. Through accusation and fire, women were stripped of the lands they cultivated, the commons they governed, and the crafts that sustained their independence. What had been collective stewardship became private property, and what had been embodied knowledge became crime. The Church and the emerging capitalist state conspired to transfer the generative power of the feminine, biological, spiritual, and ecological into the hands of patriarchal control. The enclosures that fenced the countryside also enclosed the womb: both were rendered productive for men’s profit. The feminine ceased to be the field of creation and became the labor of reproduction. Her body, once the measure of continuity, became the mechanism of accumulation.

And in the expansion of empire, that labor was racialized. The exile of the feminine from divinity did not unfold evenly; it was mapped onto flesh, pigment, and geography. The colonization of the Earth mirrored the colonization of women’s bodies, particularly those of African, Indigenous, and brown descent. What had once been the cosmic Mother was rewritten as the “savage,” the “heathen,” the “witch,” the “slave,” each iteration a projection of patriarchal imagination designed to justify control. As Europe set sail under the banner of divine right, it carried with it a theology of hierarchy: white over Black, man over woman, and spirit over matter. The Earth, once the living body of the Goddess, became “virgin land,” a metaphor for possession. The womb became the plantation’s engine. The Black and Indigenous woman became both soil and seed... both producer and product.

The sacred laws of reciprocity that governed pre-colonial worlds (offerings to the river, gratitude for harvest, and the cyclical stewardship of land) were replaced by the logic of extraction. Silver, sugar, and bodies were mined with the same theological fervor once reserved for prayer. As Sylvia Wynter later wrote, modernity’s “Man” emerged through this dual erasure: the divinization of reason and the dehumanization of the racialized feminine. She was stripped of subjecthood so he could claim it.

In the Americas, Africa, and the Caribbean, women carried the memory of the divine feminine in the very practices empire tried to destroy. The conjure woman, the midwife, and the herbalist were all criminalized precisely because they preserved what Christianity had exiled: immanent power, relational knowing, and embodied creation. In Medical Apartheid, Harriet A. Washington documents how the same body once revered as life-giver became the site of medical experimentation. The “wild woman” became the “unruly slave.” The “Mother Earth” became “the Dark Continent.” bell hooks once wrote that “to name the world as sacred is to resist domination.” Within enslaved and colonized communities, naming became survival. Hoodoo, Candomblé, and Santería were not mere syncretisms but acts of resurrection... ways to keep the Goddess breathing under new names. Yemọja became Mary; Oshun, Our Lady of Charity. Through these masks, the solar feminine endured, her light smuggled across oceans in hymns and recipes, in hair-braiding patterns that mapped escape routes, and in whispered prayers to rivers that remembered.

The old Goddess traditions, which had imagined divinity as cyclical and embodied, gave way to a theology of transcendence. The divine was relocated beyond matter; holiness was severed from the body. Where the feminine once signified the world’s living pulse, she was now the symbol of its temptation. In Simone de Beauvoir’s words, woman became “the Other,” the mirror through which man measured his transcendence. Her mystery, once sacred, was pathologized; her cycles, once cosmological, were deemed impure. The seventeenth century’s new sciences of reason and order completed the conversion. Francis Bacon described nature as “a woman to be bound into service,” her secrets to be extracted through experiment. Descartes declared matter inert, the living world redefined as mechanism. In Speculum of the Other Woman (1974), Luce Irigaray observed that this mechanistic turn did more than redefine knowledge; it quite literally redefined the knower. To be rational became to be male; to be embodied became to be female, and therefore lesser. The split between mind and matter, heaven and earth, and masculine and feminine, was no longer metaphorical. It was structural.

This fracture reverberated through every realm of being. Theology recast Eve as origin of sin; medicine classified the uterus as hysteria; philosophy imagined the soul as disembodied reason. In each of these disciplines, the feminine principle, once understood as the pulse of regeneration, was reduced to reflection, reproduction, or risk. As Carolyn Merchant observed, the death of the Goddess was not symbolic: it marked the literal death of the living world. The forests felled in the name of progress, the rivers redirected, and the bodies disciplined, each act carried the same cosmological residue.

Over time, this severance produced a substitute, a domesticated spirituality that could function inside the very hierarchies that destroyed the Goddess. The divine feminine was reintroduced, but emptied. She was repackaged as “femininity,” softened for consumption and stripped of her communal and cosmological roots. What had once been a theology of reciprocity became an aesthetic of performance. Her power, once collective and ritualized, became privatized through the self-help marketplace: “softness,” “surrender,” and “attraction” replacing embodiment, responsibility, and spiritual intelligence.

The ideas now marketed as “divine feminine energy” carry remnants of older traditions (African, Caribbean, Indigenous, South Asian) where power moved through intuition, land, memory, and relation. In those lineages, the feminine was never passive; she was presence. Authority was spiritual stewardship, not ornamentation. Western culture inherited fragments of those cosmologies, tore them from context, and translated them into lifestyle. Once uprooted, the sacred became slogan. And in the colonial West, “femininity” was racialized. Its ideal form was modeled on white womanhood, delicacy, purity, and desirability, attributes denied to women of color whose bodies had been cast as laboring, dangerous, or excessive. Black, Indigenous, and brown women were excluded from the category of “feminine” even as their cosmologies and aesthetics were mined to sustain it. The divine feminine became the mask that concealed her own theft.

When the internet critiques “feminine energy,” it often attacks this hollow version... an already distorted reflection of a reflection. The irony is that the ridicule continues the same extraction: mocking the replica while ignoring the ritual it came from. What is dismissed as frivolous or shallow is, in its truest lineage, the residue of something sacred. This is the danger of "reclamation" without remembrance. The fractured feminine becomes a brand. The language of healing becomes commodity. What once named a relational ontology becomes a personality script, optimized for engagement. Every new distortion widens the distance between practice & origin, lineage & performance, and divinity & display.

To deconstruct femininity, then, is to remember what was taken. I do not mean the ornamented softness of cultural gender, but the principle of continuity itself. The feminine, in her original sense, was never fragility or passivity; she was the architecture of renewal. She governed decay and birth as twin gestures of creation. She was the logic of the seasons, the language of breath, and the rhythm of return. Modernity severed her from this lineage and replaced her with image: virgin, mother, muse, witch. Each form carried a fragment of her old power, stripped of its wholeness. The task of our time is not to return to those archetypes but to reanimate the consciousness beneath them... to see the divine feminine not as persona, but as the principle of relational being itself. To deconstruct is to return through remembering... to understand that before she was symbol, she was system; before she was myth, she was method.

---

A Living Reading List

Instead of formal citation, I offer a you the highly requested reading list; all of the works that breathe beneath this essay. What I write is not citation so much as continuation. Each of these texts is a door... a mirror... a companion even. Together, they trace how the feminine was divided, disciplined, and remembered again. Read them in rhythm, origin, fracture, exile, and return.

I. Origins of the Divine Feminine

The world before division — where the feminine was law, rhythm, and source.

• Merlin Stone, When God Was a Woman (1976)

• Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth (1987)

• Patricia Monaghan, O Mother Sun!: A New View of the Cosmic Feminine (1994)

• Anne Baring & Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (1991)

• Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype (1992)

• Helen Luke, The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Feminine (1990)

II. The Fracture: Theology, Empire, and Control

How the feminine was redefined from creation to reflection.

• Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (2004)

• Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980)

• Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949)

• Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1974)

• Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father (1973)

• Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1975)

• Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale (1986)

III. The Colonized Body and the Racialization of the Feminine

Where the sacred feminine meets empire, slavery, and survival.

• bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981)

• Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (1984) and “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (1978)

• Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992)

• M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005)

• Layli Maparyan, The Womanist Idea (2012)

• Diana L. Hayes, Hagar’s Daughters: Womanist Ways of Being in the World (1995)

• Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987)

• Cherríe Moraga & Gloria Anzaldúa (eds.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981)

IV. Restoration and Re-membering

Texts that return the body, Earth, and cosmos to their living intelligence.

• Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess (1979)

• Becca Tarnas, “Solar and Lunar, Feminine and Masculine” (2017)

• Stephanie Woodfield, Drawing Down the Sun: Reawakening the Solar Feminine (2015)

• Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her (1978)

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013)

• Clarissa Pinkola Estés, The Gift of Story (1993)

V. Contemporary Resonance and Cosmic Reconstruction

The feminine beyond gender — energy, wholeness, and relational becoming.

• adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (2017)

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dub: Finding Ceremony (2020) and M Archive: After the End of the World (2018)

• Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (2022)

• Gloria E. Anzaldúa & AnaLouise Keating (eds.), This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (2002)

• Valerie Mason-John, Detox Your Heart: Meditations for Emotional Freedom (2005)

• Bayo Akomolafe, These Wilds Beyond Our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (2017)

• Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression (2018) — reclaiming the feminine and racialized body from digital colonization.

The work of restoration demands that we return to her as both principle and presence. It is an act of repair... a reweaving of what the modern world unspooled. Healing begins in imagination, where spirit and matter are no longer estranged and where cosmos & body recognize themselves as kin. The feminine remains the pulse beneath history, steady and luminous, waiting to be named again.