Savage Breast Book Excerpts

Introduction: A Man’s Search for the Goddess

Why on earth would a man searching for the goddess? Especially a guy like me?

“Oh, I get it! You’re getting in touch with your feminine side!” my friends say.

No, I have to laugh. It’s just the opposite. It’s my masculinity, the darkest part of it, that yearns for her, like a lost lover, like an orphaned child. It is as if a ghost touched me on the shoulder and as I turned she disappeared. Her shadow lured me deeper into the unknown than the gods of my fathers ever did. Jesus and Buddha, they urged me away from the world, taught me to resist the ways of the flesh and seek a Kingdom of God, heaven, nirvana, a higher consciousness. It’s different with her. It’s visceral, immediate, a matter of the heart, balls and belly.

Years ago I caught my first glimpse of her in India as Kali, the black goddess who for hundreds of millions of Hindus is both Mother and Destroyer. Her statues there have four arms. The upper right is raised in blessing; the lower right is extended, palm out, as if offering a gift. But the upper left holds a bloody machete and the lower left a freshly severed human head. I once asked one of her devotees how one could get the blessing and escape the machete.

"No, that's not the point," she replied fiercely. "The blessing is only won when you accept both sides of Kali, including pain, sorrow, loss and death. The real death is trying to hold your tiny ego safe from the pain caused by desire and love. Flee from the dangers of life, and you will miss her blessings too. But embrace Kali as she is, kiss her bloody tongue and feel all four arms around you, and then you have life, you have freedom. This, my young friend, is Kali's boon."

On the slum streets of Calcutta, Kali’s holy city, littered with human misery and despair, I felt those four arms embrace me once, just for an instant.

All through India I discovered a myriad of goddesses worshipped in temples and shines. As I traveled into East Asia, I found many more. In China: Kwan Yin, Bodhisattva of Compassion. In Japan: Amateratsu, Goddess of the Sun. In Tibet: the Taras, a set of female Bodhisattvas, each manifesting a distinct Buddhist virtue. In Burma: Saw Mon Hla, Queen of the 37 Nats, a group of powerful native spirits. Even on remote islands of the Indonesian archipelago, people honored male and female animist deities and ancestor spirits. So when I returned to North America after six years living in Asia, it struck me as strange that we in the West don’t worship goddesses.

It was not always so. In pre-Christian times, each ancient civilization had their own pantheon of gods and goddesses. The Greeks for example had Aphrodite, Athena, Hera, Demeter, and a host of others. So did the Romans, Egyptians, Hittites, Canaanites, Celts, even the Lithuanians—the last European nation to convert to Christianity, in 1387 A.D. Everywhere goddesses appeared as primordial creators, protectors, and powerful forces of nature and fertility right back to the dawn of writing. Thousands of prehistoric statues of women have been unearthed in excavations across Europe back to the Stone Age. Only in the past 1600 years has Western civilization embraced the religion of the Father as the one and only God. What have we lost, I wondered, when we turned our backs on the feminine divine?

Today, many women are experiencing a spiritual rejuvenation by rediscovering the goddesses of the ancient world. But why not men? These were once our goddesses, too. Why shouldn’t we men relate to a Goddess (with a capital “G”) as easily as we relate to God? How has this affected us, both spiritually, and in our relationships with flesh-and-blood women? Spiritually, for example, God the Father has traditionally been cast as a lawgiver who punishes those who disobey. Boys with authoritarian dads often grow up to walk away from God altogether. Or worse, they use God as a justification for dominating their own children. Might the feminine face of God provide us with more flexible metaphors?

On a practical level, I suspect that men’s rejection of the feminine divine may have damaged our ability to form healthy relationships with women. I believe we men have a deep need to connect with women, which for most of us feels profoundly thwarted. This vague sense that things are out of sync with the opposite sex rumbles around inside us, mixes with sexual frustration, and leads to resentment, anxiety, anger and despair. All four of the long-term relationships I had before the age of 35—including one marriage—ended not just badly, but wretchedly. As things got worse, I could feel animosity towards my partner growing at the very same time I was trying to “work” on the relationship.

How often we liken the woman we love to a goddess, and how often when the illusion shatters, we call her a bitch... “Why does it have to be so hard?” I found myself asking again and again.

One of the toughest parts of writing of this book has been facing my own repressed anger towards women which came to the surface as I confronted images of goddesses from ages past. My true feelings had been camouflaged well. To speak and write about them honestly has been difficult. Was this just me, I wondered, or was I beginning to uncover a deeper link between men’s disconnection from the feminine divine and our animosity towards women?

Shortly after I began research on this book I met with two friends at a restaurant in Toronto and told them my plans to write about the goddess. One of them, Alex, is a white-bearded urban magus, an author of metaphysical books and a master of arcane subjects such as theosophy and astrology. He leaned in close to me and lowered his voice.

“Ask yourself this, my boy,” he whispered, “What was it woman did to us that made men so afraid of them, so afraid that we tried to destroy every trace of woman’s rule, and hunted out pockets that still practiced their lore? The Old Testament says, ‘Suffer not a witch to live.’ Think of the Inquisition, the witch hunts, mere centuries ago. What was it about the magic of the moon, the chaos and the bloodshed it brings, that makes men determined to this day to keep the bitches down? Beware of the goddess, my lad. She’ll lead you into the darkness until you hit bottom, and then that bottom gives out and there will be nothing left for you. Do you want to be the mulch of her moon frenzy, churned back into the soil? Or do you want to break free of her? The secret of our escape was in the discovery that her light, the light of the moon, was merely the reflection of our light, the light of the sun. That she is the derivative; we, the originator....”

Alex’s apparent misogyny shocked me at first, especially from a spiritual teacher. But I began to hear its echo everywhere, from the lyrics of contemporary rap music to the world’s oldest story, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, which was first composed somewhere around 2,600 B.C. It recounts the mythic adventures of a historical figure, King Gilgamesh, who ruled Uruk somewhere between 2,700-2,600 B.C. At the story’s beginning, Gilgamesh has taken to deflowering every virgin and young bride in the city. Sometime later, Ishtar, the goddess of love, approaches the king and offers to marry him.

Gilgamesh asks her, “What would I gain by taking you as wife?”
“Love,” she replies,” and peace.”
He hurls back insults.
Just as you loved the lion
And gave him pits to fall in
And the horse whose back
You wounded with the whip...
Your love brings only war!
You are an old fat whore,
That’s all you are,
Who once was beautiful,
Perhaps,
And could deceive
But who has left in men
A memory of grief.
We outgrow our naiveté
In thinking goddesses
return our love...

Here, at the very dawn of literature, man’s anger at the feminine is clear to see. It’s painful to read, this womanizer’s raw hatred, so familiar to me across six millennia. It’s so easy for men to blame women, as if they are the cause of our suffering. “Civilized” man has always done so. Our myths pin it on the first woman: Eve who conned Adam into disobeying God and got them both thrown out of Eden; or Pandora who opened the jar and released all strife and woe. And it’s not just in myths and poetry. For thousands of years women have borne the brunt of this blame, taken out on them in oppression, abuse, rape, genital mutilation, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, incest, violence, and murder. A hundred or so years ago, the British “rule of thumb” was still on the books—the ‘humane’ law which forbade a man from beating his wife with a switch thicker than his thumb. In Spain wife beating was legal until the 1970s. Today in Jordan if a woman is raped it is her brothers’ duty to kill her so that the family will not be stained with her dishonor. In Nigeria, women convicted of adultery are still sentenced to be stoned to death. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, three or more women are murdered by a husband or boyfriend every day in the U.S., while nearly one in three women suffer one or more physical assaults by a partner during adulthood.

The truly strange thing is that we men don’t seem to recognize there’s a problem here. Psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein claims that “the hate, fear, loathing, contempt and greed that men express towards women so pervades the human atmosphere that we breathe them as casually as the city child breathes smog.” She concludes that most of us are so desensitized, we are scarcely aware of it at all. Before work on this book began, I suppose I too would have rejected the idea I harbored such negative feelings towards women. But in the past few years, I have seen it all too clearly in myself, and heard it in conversations with other men. I was surprised, for example, how many men hold a grudge against some woman—a mother, girlfriend or wife—that seems to taint their other relationships. We may expunge the biases against women from our laws, change the way we talk, the way we joke, share the household chores, sign up for couples therapy, but if we men fail to address this subterranean anger at its root, I believe our desire for intimate connections with women will be thwarted still.

According to Carl Jung, the problem lies in our unconscious. As he put it: “Every man carries within him the eternal image of woman, not the image of this or that particular woman, but a definite feminine image...an imprint or ‘archetype’ of all the ancestral experiences of the female.” Throughout history, these archetypal images found concrete representations in the many faces of the goddess. With the rise of Christianity, these images have been shorn from Western Civilization (except for Mary, the subject of chapter 8). As a result, Jung says, men’s anima imprints have become stunted in a way that makes a mature connection with women difficult. I think Jung was certainly on to something, linking goddesses to the anima. But would the revival of ancient goddess in the psyches of modern men really make for richer and deeper connections with women? One can hardly look to ancient Greece or modern India as examples of gender harmony.

I was wary of simplistic solutions. I wasn’t expecting to find an easy entry into a goddess’ world of sweetness and light, and that all my relationships with women would then simply fall into place. No, I remembered my vision of Kali. And I knew how dark and tangled my own feelings were towards women. What I wanted to find was the hard truths of what transpired between men and the feminine divine that put us so at odds—both in our collective history, and within my own unconscious mind.

I began by reading the incredible array of books written by feminist historians, scholars and archeologists about recovering the goddess: When God Was a Woman, The Chalice and the Blade, Language of the Goddess, The Creation of Patriarchy, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image, and dozens more. A common theme was that sometime before written history began, goddesses were powerful mythological figures, and that their power reflected greater power for women in a time before patriarchy and male domination of women began. I thought they made a good case. If indeed there were such a shift in sexual dominance in pre-history, it might be connected to this issue of male anger to wards the feminine. However I also read critiques written by traditionalist scholars (mostly male), who vehemently rejected the idea that there ever was a time in prehistory where women held more power. I even read critiques by feminists, including The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, which basically accused feminist goddess worshippers of inculcating self-delusion. There seemed to be political agendas on all sides. It seemed to me the pro-goddess camp had a plausible, though not conclusive case, which required me to keep an open mind. It was a useful perspective take into my own research. Fortunately, my task was not to settle this dispute, but rather to reconnect with the goddesses, who certainly existed as mythological figures, and then see what happened to my own male psyche.

But how can a modern man trigger the archetypes of ancient goddesses? From my earlier journeys in Asia, I had come to believe that direct, personal experience was more to be trusted than books. So I traveled to the cradles of Western Civilization, to Greece, Turkey, Israel, Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, France, Cyprus and Malta. I wanted to walk the ruins of goddess’ temples, to gaze at her statues and icons. I wanted to see if they held a resonance for me. Just as a harp string will vibrate if another instrument strikes an identical note, I hoped the images created by my ancestors could bring to life a corresponding echo within me.

To begin with I sought out the goddesses we in the West know best, the ones from Greek mythology: Gaia, Ariadne, Demeter, Hera, Athena, Hekate, Artemis, Hestia, Pandora and Aphrodite. But it soon became apparent that each of these goddesses has a hidden past. The Greek myths were just one page in a much longer story. This led me to an era of European prehistory that began more than five thousand years before Classical Greece. Here there are no names, no myths, only raw and powerful images of women preserved in pigment and stone, clay and bone.

Over the course of three years and thirteen trips to Europe, I encountered thousands of representations of the feminine divine. Facing the goddess allowed me to unleash emotions so threatening and painful I never could have imagined expressing them directly to a real woman. It opened doors that I had long nailed shut. It’s one thing to contemplate the goddess as metaphysical idea or a psychological archetype, but when the feminine divine took shape inside my psyche, she often terrified me, evoking desperate longing, hostility, fear, shame—and also incredible beauty.

Teresa, the woman I love, accompanied me on many of these journeys. She often bore the brunt of my emotional storms as these turbulent emotions came into the light. It was ugly sometimes. I have done my best to write the truth about how this story played out between the two of us. At times Teresa turned into the goddess I was searching for. At times she became the one I feared most. If sometimes I appear cruel, mean, or weak towards her, and leaving me seems the only smart thing for a woman to do, then give Teresa credit for trusting me beyond her common sense. Without her faith and love, I doubt this book would have ever been completed. That would have been a shame, because reconnecting with the goddess did change my life, and it enabled me to have relationship with Teresa that I never dreamed possible…for a guy like me.

For male readers, I hope this journey will resonate with your own experience of women. It’s my intention that this story may serve as a springboard to your own discovery of the feminine divine, each in your own individual way, and that this will enrich your relationships with the women in your lives. Some men may fear getting immersed in the goddess—that it might make them somehow womanish (my sister calls such feminized men SNAGs – Sensitive New Age Guys). For me, just the opposite took place. I was a SNAG before I began this book. Very eager to please women, but behind it was a lot of resentment and buried rage. Through encountering the goddess, and facing my own darkest fears of the feminine, I finally found my own center as a man.

Finally, it’s my desire that Savage Breast might inspire dialogue between men and women. I think more women than men are ready for this. Many of the feminist authors I have read call for building a future in which men and women share equally, and in co-creating that future together. So the invitation to forge better relations between our genders has already been sent. It is up to we men to reply. This book is my personal acceptance of that invitation. It’s a conversation sure to last a lifetime.