In J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, there is a scene where the elf-Queen Galadriel of the Noldor tries on Frodo’s evil ring. Being a good and introspective elf she questions her abilities to overcome temptation, and sees the power of the ring to persuade as a test. And so she tries it on and yet briefly falls to its dark powers, gathering in her a vision of a terrible future as some Dark Queen cruelly ruling over the world, saying,

“…and All Shall Love Me and Despair”

She then with force of will removes the ring and tells Frodo she has passed the test. But in that one line Tolkien gives voice to a rarely used feminine archetype and it’s darker aspect, one which is so important to us as Modern readers. For today we see in movies and books an almost all-male cast of heroes. But we briefly see in Galadriel’s transformation from good to dark Queen a powerful reflection of something missing in culture today; of not just the ancient mythology of the earlier history of the Noldor and the elves in Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but of a brief reflection on the ancient Indo-European “Earth Mother” that Western Culture once cherished, but in America has almost dissolved away.

In that scene this character becomes but a mirror of the Earth Mother our ancestors once saw as the earth incarnate, the one who had, like the changing seasons, the power to change masks quickly, as the feminine fully encompassing both good and evil aspects of herself, one who held the power over birth and death equally, one which held the secret to the cycling of the sun-child in Greek, Roman, and Celtic myth.

But this character in truth is a universal Western archetype, one that lives in us all… the mask of a dark femme-fatal that still lives in us but rarely haunts our books or our entertainment. Yet she is but one of the three faces of this European deity that once filled all of our fairy tales and stories. The witch for example was a watered down form of her.

We have forgotten her power to give life and take life away. And filling all of America’s Modern Mythology with male-aspect heroes and warrior types we have lost the important and universal Trinity of the Earth Mother’s hidden form – her three faces as virgin, mother, and hag that once was secretly enshrined in the cosmology of our ancient Asian ancestors for thousands and thousands of years.

Yet Tolkien but hints at her powers and symbols in this one brief but powerful scene. It makes me wonder if Modern Writers will someday have the courage to use her image again in literature and movies?

Or shall we continue with the almost suffocating all-male, Patriarchal ideal that so dominates our religions, sports, politics, and entertainment in Western Culture today?

– the Author

Created Dec 28, 2018, 11:38 PM