The Virgin : Sacred Daughterhood

As we focus on the dynamic nature of femininity, we explore and embrace archetypes through energy awareness and through the body. This process reveals deeper healing potential, within our self and within our lineage. When we tend and integrate these parts of ourself, the collective benefits every time. We shift the meaning we give to these concepts and change the way we move through the world.

The Virgin, the daughter. The free, sovereign and disentangled feminine part of self is deeply misrepresented and misunderstood, and she is calling to be fully seen in her beauty.

The energetic and embodied aspects of the Virgin, like so many esoteric and real parts of ourselves, have been co-opted, repackaged and forced upon women by colonial powers such as religion, government and patriarchy. In shorthand, most anything that is widely agreed upon in the dominant over-culture deserves a deeper questioning as to its origins. We see this process specifically with the Virgin, the most common depiction in the West being: discussions and identity related to sexuality as well as the Virgin Mary, la Virgen de Guadalupe, and Catholic representations of Virgin worship. Octavio Paz (El Laberinto de Soledad, 1950) reveals, a deep colonial process of robbing indigenous goddesses and transforming her into a whitewashed and puritanical woman who serves the power structures of the greater church and established politic in post-colonial Americas. He centers a feminine archetype that results— a passive, violated mother figure: ‘la chingada.’ Paz’ illuminates how the pathway from Virginity to a “fucked mother” is the dream and ideal of colonial domination over the woman.

We will go deeper into the mother & la chingada at a later time. Today, lets dive into a more esoteric embodiment of the Virgin— looking at Artemis, the wild woman & midwife, and Pallas Athena— daughter, guardian of healing and craft arts, goddess of war by way of establishing peace & prosperity.

Artemis, huntress, woman of the wild, is a Virgin by nature of her chastity, not by way of youth, ignorance or control of her parents. She is free, under the moonlight, to listen and learn from the wild animals that surround her. She chooses, to dismiss the confines of motherhood. In her power, she says no. This I believe many modern women relate to. By seeing the weight and limitations that mothers experience by raising their young, an Artemesian woman declines, yet powerfully respects birth— as she is the midwife, the protector of mother and baby as they make passage through the birth portal, most often under moonlight.

Paradoxically, even as mothers, when we reject the confines of being a ‘good mother’ or a ‘good woman’ as it relates to societal expectations, we may receive wisdom, freedom and transformative power within our fortress of motherhood. More than we could have fathomed—something beyond.

Any time any woman is boxed in by a particular standard, expectation, she slowly crumbles. Her compulsory conformity is her downfall.

This leads us to consider the feminine part of ourselves who is akin to Pallas Athena. While her mainstay identity is ‘daughter of Zeus’ her mission and action are multifaceted, and her identity as goddess pre-dates Zeus chronologically (Noble, 1994). By rejecting motherhood, rather than her role be of pro-creation, she is creation itself. Athena gives us presence to relate to the daughter identity— a challenging and nuanced role to carry. Being a daughter is often overlooked, the expectations, the associations with your parents, and the drive toward your own independence, freedom, and expression. As daughters, we are first seen as Virgins. While not only a sexual association, it indicates our leap from childhood into the contributing authority of young womanhood. Initiated by menstruation, fully woman, fully creative, fully belongs to herself.

Wild women, are you feeling this? What has daughterhood felt like at the various phases of the feminine unfolding of life? Where have you been trapped? Where have you been free?

Athena presides over the healing and creative arts. Spinning thread, handicraft, embroidery and the act of making both beautiful and useful creations—the magic of femininity. The Virgin is embodied in the space of our sovereignty, the space of our creativity. She has taken reigns of her life, of her personality, and rather than become entangled in the aura of another, answering and risking her co-dependence, she practices patience, limits and restraint.

So what does this look like to a mother? To a daughter? To a woman who has chosen not to marry or bear children? The magic is available to us all. When we seek to embody an archetype within ourself— first embrace wherever, whatever state she is in. When working with the energy of Virginity, we likely encounter pain that we have taken on from our lineage, from spiritual or religious dogma, or from society at large. Virginity has long been weaponized and eroticized through the sexual shadow of repression, reducing a woman, at any point in her sovereign journey, to be an object of desire.

In practical ways, Vicki Noble writes in her tarot guide Motherpeace (1994) we integrate the Virgin part of ourselves by acknowledging the endless balance we seek between our work & our relationships, our friendships and our solitude, our ego and our soul, our femininity and creativity. To take it a step further, we seek to balance our responsibilities as mothers and women to those in our lives, their needs and expectations, and our sovereign capacity to say no, to run to the wild and hunt under the moon, or to isolate within our cozy creative home and embroider beauty to the edges of everything we do.

Transforming the Virgin requires us to acknowledge, first, the accumulated pain she carries from the past colonial era (about 500-2500 years) and to reclaim her beauty, her power and her embodied sensuality, whether she decides to share this outwardly or not.