The Archetypal Mother is the matrix of a woman's capacity and power to conceive, birth, sustain, and renew life and give death. It is the Mother energy that initiates us into sacrifice (from the Latin, to make sacred), surrender, transformation, and transmutation.
Among other things, Mother initiations call us to the healing of our own mother wounds, to look at ourselves as mothers, and to learn to let go into its own life that which we have birthed and nurtured. The Mother calls us to our bodies, to discover the joy of full embodiment, to nurture our physical life and the life of the planet. Encounter with the Dark Mother, Kali, the goddess who shreds the fabric of illusion, is the core of all initiation. Through Mother initiations, we learn to love all aspects of Life, to open to what is, as it is. We also come to realize that the root of our suffering is in wanting things to be different than they are.
The Archetypal Amazon is the feminine warrior priestess who serves Life. This energy calls us to integrity, to be in alignment with something greater than our own egoic wants and needs. We are in Amazon mode when we can take stock of our internal and external boundaries with people, food, money, time, energy, etc., when we can be strategic, make a plan, and carry it out. The Amazon challenges us to be scrupulous in our inner work, to aspire to trust and be in alignment with our own heart, to speak the truth, and be truly devoted to living and acting from consciousness and compassion. The Amazon is committed and willing to meet fear, shadow, and the inner masculine, as well as the utmost vulnerability of the wounded child within us. The Amazon brings clarity, assertiveness, decisiveness, honesty, responsibility, and courageous. She empowers us to learn skillful means for negotiating life in the world, including relationships, and being utterly faithful to ourselves. Amazon initiations teach us not to abandon ourselves.
The Archetypal Lover is the High Priestess of Eros, the feminine principle of relatedness. The Lover seeks relationships, union, and communion everywhere and with everything. When our Lover is invoked, our emotions, creativity, playfulness, sensuality, sexuality, relationship to self, body, other people, nature and the divine are the playground for exploration, healing, and discovery. She tends the garden of earthly delights. Beauty is her vocation, serving the Divine Beloved is her devotion. Lover initiations challenge us to confront the illusions that keep our hearts closed. We are given many opportunities to love freely and passionately, to be compassionate, especially with ourselves, and to live in the present moment. Lover initiations encourage embodiment and the healing of a wounded self image. The inner Lover can help a woman to transmute shame about her body to delight, as well as heal the wounds of sexual, physical, and emotional abuse.
The Archetypal Medial archetype awakens our desire for wisdom, knowledge, and the unknown, and fans the fires of search for all kinds of knowledge, from the practical to the most esoteric and mystical. Medial initiations usually take us into our fear of the unknown, where we must deal with ego's need for control and the fear of surrender. We come to realize that our fear of the unknown is really a fear of our thoughts about the unknown. The Medial energy invites us to descend deep into the depths of our own unconscious as well as to explore other dimensions of reality. These initiations dissolve our ideas about what we think we know, and who we think we are. Medial initiations call us to address issues of healer-ship, right use of spiritual powers, legitimacy, internal spiritual authority, and visibility in the world as a Medial Woman. This work opens us to our place in the world as a healer, and awakens us as priestesses and ritual makers.
The Queen archetype is the axis mundi, the archetypal center which Jung called ‘Self’, toward which our heroine’s journey is constantly spiralling. She embodies our full potential as human women whose essential nature is pure awareness, alive and awake in our own human woman body. Each initiation in all of the four other archetypal domains brings a woman greater awareness and embodiment of this Queen within who is awake, loving, compassionate, and increasingly free of her human conditioning, even as Life continues to bring to her door its imperfections, in-completions, and impermanence. She is the embodiment of all the other archetypes, and her visibility is the expression of all of her initiations. She calls us to live authentically, to open to the truth of what is as it is, and live our devotion.
