As a Feminist, it is often difficult in to read the literature surrounding my religion because of the depiction of The Mother. She is appears as the Idealized Woman and weirdly, the receptacle of the energy of The Man - The Mystery of the Container and the Contained. It is difficult to avoid.

In the Tarot, The Empress/III (The Earth Mother) is often pictured as a pregnant woman seated in a field of flowers. She is Idea in transition – the thing that sits and waits to be revealed. I hope that the Ancient Writers, the people who defined the Tarot and Qabala and esoteric thought, saw through that limitation. But, but, but…

“In the physical world, nature in labor, the germination of acts, which must hatch from the will. Remember, then, son of earth, that to affirm what is true and will what is just, is already to create it; to affirm and will the contrary is to vow oneself to destruction. If Arcanum III should appear in the prophetic signs of they horoscope, hope for success in the activity which fecundates, to that rectitude of mind which will make they works bear fruit.” – The Sacred Tarot, C. C. Zain

I try to see through it. When people talk of Mother Nature, I try to hear the reverence that they intend. But, but, but…

“THIRTY-TWO PATHS OF WISDOM:  The fourteenth Path is the Illuminating Intelligence, and it is so called because it is that Brilliant One which is the founder of the concealed and of their fundamental ideas of holiness and of their stages of preparation.” – Qabalistic Tarot, Robert Wang

The activity, which fecundates, the founder of the concealed – it is too close to "you are vital because of what you give birth to instead of what you are.” It is difficult. There must be more to the Mother than the potential to give birth.

The tarot deck that I use did not go the route of the pregnant receptacle. Rather, it is an Empress seated on the throne much like its companion card The Emperor. She holds an ankh cross. According to Wang, she holds the cross “over her womb” and it is a symbol of her as the door or gateway to the creation. He does grant that as this doorway she rules both heaven and earth. So there is that.

It was not until I began to understand The Three – Maiden, Mother, and Crone – that I began to see through some of the language. Of The Three, the mother seems the least defined and most mysterious to me still, but she is more than just there to give birth. She is the learned one who has suffered and made sacrifices and has emerged wise and calm. She is the healer and teacher. And when The Three are depicted as The Fates, the Mother is the one who takes the thread that is each person’s life and measures it out and weaves it into the tapestry of creation. She creates the Form that is each life.

As I came to understand that we create The Gods with our images, with the earthly things that make sense to us, I can see our need to use The Mother in our understanding. Wang also calls her The Limiting Intelligence. She is the thing that creates a Form from the (male) Formless Energy. It is still vaguely sexist, but I think I can see the need for it. We need a Form to see things. Energy needs to be limited and contained to become an individual, to become something that we can see and study and come to know.

And the idea of The Mother is perhaps the only way we humans can really understand the actuality of the Creation. There is energy that is from Outside – Qabalah teaches us that the energy of The Gods comes into the creation through a single point. Once the energy is present, it is meaningless to us until it is contained, until is it organized into a form that can evolve and move through the creation as a real thing. This Organizing Force, Binah, rules over life and death, first giving life by creating a form to contain the energy and, ultimately, limiting the time that the form will exist before it returns to pure energy again. She if often called The Great Sea – another fitting metaphor for the place that life on earth began.

Spring is here, and each Springtime I get to contemplate my favorite of the Mother and Daughter myths – Demeter and Persephone. The cold winter, caused by the separation of the two of them while Persephone spends time in the underworld with her husband, comes to an end. Spring comes as Persephone returns to the surface world. The joy that Demeter feels seeing her daughter again causes the flowers to bloom and the food to grow and the warmth of summer comes. There is no avoiding the evidence for that Earth Mother metaphor, so I will simply step outside in the cool of the evening and look up and give thanks to The Mother.

Blessed Be.

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Biography – Troy lives in Sacramento with the cat Roxy and three redheaded Scorpios – Jess and The Twins, Julia and Jackson. He can be reached at citywhich@sbcglobal.net.