The divine feminine

I have strayed back into the blogosphere yet again. I suppose it is because I feel the need to connect with my passions. For a while now, I have been trying to get past a very severe case of writer's block in the book I am writing about Inanna. For I have been having problems with reconciling two approaches. First, I have been striving to be as academically rigorous as I can, being very careful not to make any assertions that I cannot support from established and accepted sources. However, this has made for a very dull read. Furthermore, it does not take account of my own journey and the very personal relatinship I have with Her and why I feel she is deeply relevant to today.

So I thought perhaps it would be a good thing for a while to come back to this blog. To reconnect. To work through some stuff and become more authentic and less concerned with the judgements of putative readers. And, almost immediately, I found my ire raised and my hear pumping. I checked onto one of the most informative blogs, Medusa Coils and found a video from a group of men who expressed a love of the divine feminine.

It made me angry and I posted a comment which may or may not be approved by the blogger. So, immediately, I was reconnected with my passions. And this is good. for I am, first and foremost, passionate. I realise now as I write that what angered me the most was the total lack of any passion within these men. They spoke as the embodiment of reason. They spoke of their desire to worship but did not mention their desire to fuck. Sexual desire is not reasonable, it is messy. Within it, at least as far as I am concerned, are drives to both dominate and be dominated. Within sex, there are sweat and bodily fluids, groaning and panting. It is, above all, physical and emotional. It is the interplay of vulnerabilities and, when it is at its best, the loss of control and ego. And, most importantly, it does not depend on the union of male and female "energies" but can express itself in any configuration of genders. Desire is wholly unreasonable. It is one of our deepest drives, second only to survival.

Of course, it must be tempered and mediated by reason. There must be full consent between both, or all, parties. Without such consent, the interplays are lost. It is a game, and laughter may well occur - as well may tears. It is deadly serious, for vulnerabilities are revealed and may be exploited. On either,both, or all, sides. It is, above all, always risky. Or it should be. Pushing the participants beyond the zone of comfort into a deeper understanding of themselves. Which can, at times, be unpleasant.

None of this figured in the video. Desire was abstracted. The physicality, despite the talk of the divine nature of women's bodies, was not really there. They spoke of "woman" in the abstract - of male and female as "energies". Sure, on one level this is true, but there is also the level of a shared humanity. In sex, it is human bodies and their sensations that are involved. In the songs of the sacred marriage, Inanna does not abstract into the energetic. Rather, she calls on Dumuzzi to plough her vulva. She brings the act into the physical realm. For it is, first and foremost, a physical act.

My own puberty coincided with the Lady Chatterley trial and I remember taking the copy of the paperback, sneakily borrowed from my mother's and stepfather's bedroom, into the bathroom. It prompted my first ever ejaculation. Lawrence had many faults, but what i remember to this day was that both participants were portrayed as human. "Tha shits and tha pisses" said Mellors, "tha'rt a real woman". The divine feminine does neither.