In my Youtube lectures on Mythopoeia I cover the secret meaning of Christmas and Western holidays. In that lecture I make the case that Christmas celebrations (and the Birth of Christ) is not just an ancient relic of European and Celtic celebration surrounding the Winter Solstice and the changing seasons, but also a period of sadness and mourning for the death of the Sun and the taking of that figure by the mother who birthed him on the Winter Solstice (Dec 25th). This figure represents the Eternal Feminine or Earth Mother of Western Indo-European belief that now lies buried deeply in American, Indian, and European culture.
In modern faith today, Christ has fully replaced the death celebration of the sun with a Shining Figure representing rebirth of the Sun. And so we easily have adopted both symbols into our Modern celebration. But the art of this shining child’s birth and death, and the ancient mother behind this drama lives on through the ages though few see it in our Modern Symbols.
In my book Phantammeron Book One I intentionally embedded the concept of the Earth Mother or Eternal Feminine in the story and meaning of the book in celebration of not just her presence but in her archetype and how she still exists in our psyche and Modern Culture today. In Book One of the Phantammeron you will notice that the Creation Myth portrayed in the beginning is made up of an all-male cast, patterning the Judaeo-Christian belief (Old Testament) cycle of the Paternal powers that forged the earth and its first children. That is no accident. It was to me an idea that rests on what Tolkien did with Illuvatar in the Silmarillion, his singular example of mythopoeia which he left to the world (there presently are no others in fiction).
But in the Phantammeron I also hinted at the Mother or rather Great Mother mentioned in my novel…..the one who dreams like Shiva in Hindu faith, the Mother born unto the Seas of Eternity who forever fills the empty spaces and weeps for eternity as she sees and dreams of future worlds yet to be. But the Masculine reigns in my books in the first half of the novels for a reason. For that Animus is the psychology of all Western People; that in your subconscious the Eternal Father archetype lives. But it also lives in modern culture too, in our stories, our movies, in our Western democracies, in our corporate structures, and in men who become fathers. However, as the Phantammeron progresses, the story of the Feminine rises to slowly “consume the book”. In Book One the all-mother An of the Dreaming Seas gives birth to Ana, she who will carry the Sacred Waters to the sacred garden that calls her. In the end she releases those waters, yet is also the garden’s destroyer.
So I show in my stories how the Earth Mother is truly portrayed in Western Thought…..she is the Earth that gives life, yet the dark waters that can take life away. She is in control. She undermines everything the male persona might think they control in mythology. She is the Virgin in Spring on May Day and the Hag at Halloween that devours the world. Yet the true Essence of the Eternal Feminine is as the Earth Mother: The Universal Mother that gives birth…..gives life to the Shining Son which in Western ancient myth symbolizes the life giving Sun that returns to give life to all things through is rays.
This was the secret of the Earth Mother and her relationship to the Sun to the Indo-Europeans long before the advent of Christian thought, belief, and symbology. And so we have photos here of Michelangelo’s beautiful statue of Mary and Christ. The Pieta is the perfect representation of the Earth Mother and her Shining Sun as they should be, her only son perishing on the Winter Solstice, the darkest day of the year in Celtic, Irish, English, and European calendars.
What does this mean? The statue of the Pieta is a magnificent work of art. But it also shows us the anthropomorphic representation of ourselves and our connection to life and the earth as the Female and Male archetypes our ancestors worshiped through myth: The Earth and Sun. But it also represents the cosmological Mother and Son that lives, dies, and is reborn in us, in our psyche.
In the Phantammeron the male personas dominate at the beginning on my stories, but at the end of the novel they all but perish, tragically, either by their own decisions or the work of an evil they know they must face. The Heroic-Masculine is always a part of Western religious belief , yet a sacrifice driven by the feminine so that the cosmological order is maintained….like Christ to the betterment of Mankind was slain on a cross.
That is not a Christian story alone, however, but an ancient tale of the taking of the Sun from the sky, his death attributed to his mother, the Earth, who must look over his demise so she can take his spirit back to the womb on the Winter Solstice on December 25th to be reborn as a Sun returning as a baby on January 1st of each new year. You see this same story in the Viking Myth of Frigga and Balder, for example, where the mother has the secret knowledge of the mistletoe that will slay her son who represents the returning sun in the spring on Beltaine.
In the Phantammeron when Ana releases the waters inside her back to the world, she alone does not die, though her boyfriend Ama dies as does her father Agapor. The male figures all perish, even the shadow, paterning the Western Earth Mother Myth. All the female figures survive in my book: The Shade, An, Ana, and the witch Anissa. For the Feminie is Eternal, she is the circle or cycle in Celtic myth, both light and dark figures, the mother, the virgin, and the hag, all which are “masks” of the one Eternal Feminine that lives forever in the world, in our Western Culture, in our art, in our faith, and in ourselves.
Until we as reader and writers of story in 2020 fully grasp the depth and magic and importance of the Earth Mother and the Eternal Feminine in our Modern Culture we will be eternally lost.
– the Author, August, 2020
