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One of the deepest pleasures in my life is parenting my three daughters; two of them having reached the rank of "young woman" in their own right, while the third is still in the precious budding stages. These three glorious beings, including all of the wonderful young women in the world, have the potential to embody the new archetypes of women in the shifting millennium. We are at a time of great expectations, but the effects of our past mistakes haunt our culture, particularly our youth. In as much as our past effects the likes of both young men and young women, I would like to focus on young women; our youthful goddesses, as they come to age in a culture abundant with crises and opportunity. As usual, I will borrow the lens of the Tarot to address this issue.
Along the royal road of the Major Arcana, we discover that the embodiment of humanity is not only a physical phenomenon, but a spiritual one as well. At birth we are invited into the vessel of human form, which, we are told from the scripture of many religions, is a divine gift. Birth is celebrated, for it commemorates Humanity. This revelation is best understood through the Tarot as the Empress, card number three of the royal trumps. At birth, a divine miracle has occurred, where upon the Magician and the High Priestess have fused together the ethers of the heavens to create the first form; the beautiful Goddess. She is the vessel of birth, abundant in her form, and is called The Creative One.
In recent history, the path of the Empress has been tarnished and littered with society's ignorance on many levels. Young women have are demoralized through a male-centered cultural mentality in which they become the object of and fantasy and projection. What about the actual person with a real body? The depths of this imbalance are evidenced by the increasing number of young women who suffer from a variety of eating disorders. This is not a new phenomenon, yet the number of women affected continues to rise.
What profound issues must we tackle as a humanity in order to delve deeply into the healing of this issue? What lies at the core of a young women's refusal or inability to love her body as the Empress once did? What unconscious longing causes them to target their own personal shrine (body) with starvation and abuse in the name of perfection? Answers do not come easy, especially in a society that refuses to accept this problem and deal with it head on. Most insurance companies do not provide coverage for treatment of eating disorders, stating that it is not a real illness. What could be more real than the thousands of young women who are retarding their menstruation, threatening their fertility, and loosing the luster and form of the feminine?
Women are not to be blamed or shamed. Women suffering from this painful disorder are mirror the culture in which they ar born. We have created an ideal of perfection; an image of the goddess which is false and unattainable. Young women are ravaged as their authentic inner and outer beauty is devalued through media images of this distorted perfection. What are young women to do? Who can heal them? Where do they turn?
This is a long and arduous path for all women. However, the hope and fate of the future partly rests on the shoulders of the elders and the mothers. If we, as the older women, and as a collective, dare to take responsibility and change our own consciousness by loving our own bodies, we may begin to heal the scars of this perilous illness, demonstrating to our young initiates how to love and live as the Empress. The wheel is shifting slowly toward the feminine, and the liberation of the Goddess is immanent. However, this cannot be done without the health and welfare of the "body of women" who birth the new maidens and daughters of the Earth.
This task is impossible without the re-emergence of Soul as a focal point in society. If women are reduced to half their weight, thinned to the bone and masked with despair, what is the crucial question we need to ask? Are women trying to go as deep as they can, to the bare bones, in order to discover a missing piece, or clue, that can identify the lost identity of woman? Clarissa Pinkola Estes, in her best selling book "Women Who Run With The Wolves", has a chapter entitled "Skeleton Woman". This is a story that reveals a powerful clue. We learn that memory and wisdom are stored in the bones; and that they tell us our stories.
Young women, caught in a turbulent force such as an eating disorder, may truly be suffering from a lack of meaning in their culture, and thus, in their own lives. Perhaps they want to find their own bones so that they can search for meaning and depth; the kind that will connect them to an inner God or Goddess. If bones do hold a message, might we find a healthy and meaningful way to initiate our women into the mystery, helping them to reclaim the depths of their souls, while they honor the sacred body of the Empress. We must find a way to usher Soul into education and back into the home and we must invite the Empress back into society, our lives, and in our heart. She can guide our way home and show us how to inspire and save the young Goddesses of the future.
Card: The Empress as expressed in the "The Lover's Tarot" by Jane Lyle. "The Empress is abundance and fertility incarnate. Golden and glorious, she stands amidst the ripening corn in a landscape vibrant with life. Queenly, yet definitely loving and approachable, The Empress guides all who seek to create and celebrate beauty."
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