Facets of a Diamond - Blog

Photograph by John Diamond, M.D.

According to the archaeologist Miranda Green, the most interesting recurrent feature in goddesses from ancient times to modern, both within the European tradition and outside it, is their ambivalence: “they could help or harm, cure or curse, promote life or destroy it,” she writes.*

It’s our image – our imagination, our fantasies – of the goddesses that is ambivalent because we are ambivalent about our own mothers. We love them, and we fear them.

The answer, as always, is to go Deeper, beyond ambivalence: to her Soul, the Mother she always yearned to be.

* “Introduction,” in The Concept of the Goddess, ed. Sandra Billington and Miranda Green (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 7.