Sacred Masculinity
by Elinor Dickson
Sacred masculinity is a term gaining relevance in the 21st century, perhaps as an antidote to the spreading toxicity made evident by a crumbling patriarchal world order. Masculinity and patriarchy are not identical concepts and to understand what masculinity was meant to be, and how we got to our current impasse, we must start at the beginning—with the mythic 4000-year-old tale of Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh, the King of Urek, has a recurring dream that he takes to his mother to interpret. The dream, she tells her son, says that he will meet a stranger, a man from the wilderness equal to himself. They will become fast friends and together they will do great things. Enkidu, protector of the natural world and the feminine, hearing of the excesses of the King, particularly when it came to women, enters the city and forces a meeting. The fight is fierce but, respecting the opposites they possess, the two become fast friends. Eventually, by cultivating Enkidu’s ego, Gilgamesh convinces Enkidu to abandon his instinctual connection to life and to help him kill the Spirit of Nature and cut down the forest.
To preserve the matrilinear world rooted in nature, the Goddess Inanna presents herself to Gilgamesh in all Her beauty. She tries to seduce him but, by this time, both men rebel against the life–death–rebirth cycles of nature. The Bull of Heaven, Inanna’s powerful consort, comes to her rescue only to be killed by Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The men throw its genitals into Her face while keeping the horns, the symbol of battle, for themselves. This scene captures the great mutation from a matriarchal world to a patriarchal one. While both men free themselves from the recurring cycles of nature, fertility is exchanged for aggression. This act of separation from nature and the feminine cycle of regeneration has, however, an unexpected consequence: the death of Enkidu. With the death of Enkidu, the man of nature, Gilgamesh, and humanity, come face to face with their own mortality. Having stepped out of the natural, cyclical world and into a linear, causal world, we are left to struggle with the dualistic nature of life and death, good and evil—all the tension of opposites. Separated from our instinctual identity represented by Enkidu, Gilgamesh, in his desperate search for immortality, undertakes a journey to find the wise old couple, the survivors of the Great Flood. As they are initiating him into the spiritual realm through meditation, unfortunately, this man of action falls asleep. Still unawakened, we have not found a way to transform the dualistic world we find within ourselves. Projection has become the major method of dealing with good and evil, life and death. The differences we conjure up between “us and them” lies at the heart of all wars, and, over millennia, nature and women have carried the weight of our unresolved evil.
We can only speculate what course history might have taken if Gilgamesh and Enkidu had become integrated, if the balance with nature and feminine energy had been retained as part of the new paradigm that was taking shape. The paradox remains. While we had to step out of the unconscious pull of nature to develop a sense of our individuality, today, we realize that without consciously embracing nature’s innate force of regeneration, we have created an inner wasteland, a dry, cracked desert comprised of all the repressed vitality that connects us to life. Denied its creative expression, this repressed energy gives birth to the beast or monster that undermines us from within.
In the dreams of women who have struggled to find their true voice and break free from a male-dominated worldview, the long-repressed natural man is rising out of the dark, rich earth bringing motion and fluidity into a world thirsting for new life.
A woman dreams:
I am standing in an ancient forest grove when my eyes are drawn to a huge moss-covered stone. Suddenly, the ground begins to shake under my feet, and the stone slowly moves aside. Like coming out of a tomb, a large, earthy, man arises. I am transfixed by his numinosity.
In the dreams of other women, this archetypal male energy comes out of a deep well or from within a cave, or an earthquake splits the earth open. He emerges as from the birth canal. The dreamer is transformed by the light in his eyes, or he takes her into an embrace, and she feels all her energy being released out into the world.
This embodied masculinity, so needed in our day, is also being born in men who have honored their own feminine capacity to receive life. A middle-aged businessman having confronted his mother complex, his inner Inanna, dreams he is standing alone on a hill overlooking the village below. While at peace, he feels cut off from any real vitality. A large man whose singing seems to float in the air, comes up the path toward him. He invites the dreamer to join the vibrant life below.
Nobel prize winning physicist Wolfgang Pauli had dreams of a dark-skinned stranger, that he called the Persian, who wants to be admitted into the University. This Dionysian-like masculine energy wants to teach him the music, the interconnected flow of life, not just the notes. Pauli knew eros and logos belonged together, but in his day, in the face of scientific materialism, he was afraid of harm to his reputation. Now this repressed eros vitality is bursting forth.
A woman university professor dreams:
Out of a cast of thousands singing and dancing, a larger-than-life man emerges and begins to sing all the bravura bass arias from Messiah. “Let us break their bonds asunder,” “for he is like a refiner’s fire.” He is glorious!
Enkidu, the man of nature, is once more approaching with the possibility of making the masculine energy whole. The 12th century mystic Hildegard of Bingen saw Adam’s fall as a failure of eros—a failure to embrace the beauty and grace of creation.(1) When eros is not cultivated and honored, it turns to lust, anarchy, and all forms of chaos. Reason is easily undermined by irrational energy. From Enkidu to Dionysius, the return of this vital energy, aligned with the earth and the laws of nature, is a necessary step needed to reestablish the intersection of eros and logos, sexuality and spirituality. From the depths of the unconscious, the stage is being set for the sacred masculine to emerge.
Archetypal, sacred energy, presented as either masculine or feminine, goes beyond race or gender. It belongs to an inner reality in each of us where it must find its proper expression if we are to escape the 4000-year cycle of violence that is always ready to consume us.
Free from listening to the totalitarian voices within or without, after 4000 years, women are beginning to consciously honor their sovereign role as the creative matrix of the world and the source of regeneration. Embodied in their feminine energy, women can set aside the negative voice whispering from within, telling them they are “not equal,” and receive the sacred energy of an integrated masculine that can take their creativity and healing ability out into the world.
Equally, men are beginning to work with deep psychic courage to face their unresolved mother complex and their own repressed feminine. After centuries of being told “it’s a man’s world,” it is often difficult for men to recognize and confront the unconscious wound the hierarchical, patriarchal worldview has left in their souls. In March 2022, we witnessed this patriarchal worldview projected into the reality of mothers and babies bombed and terrorized in Ukraine—where once more, as in past centuries of war, authoritarian male energy lives out its deep-seated hatred of life itself.
The call for a sacred masculine has never been more urgent. We can imagine the qualities we want from our inner/outer masculine: strength, decisiveness, action, and empathy, qualities that support the feminine creative matrix, the interconnected vibration of love needed to move into a unified worldview. To embody this new way of relating is the challenge of humanity in our time.
In 2023, I glimpsed this service to life reflected in the face of a Ukrainian soldier evacuating elderly, frail women from a bombed-out nursing home. Respect and love were tangible in his face and in his touch. I saw women coming together and risking their lives to stand against male repression in India, Saudi Arabi, Iran, and Afghanistan. This is not only about their right to life, but these women’s voices are also pointing the way for men to embrace a more life-giving worldview. Over the past several decades, we have witnessed competent and compassionate women and men who had found their authentic voice, taking positions of leadership, ready to speak truth to power in the service of all life. Wherever you find action rooted in love you are witnessing the sacred masculine.
(1) Fox, Matthew. Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times. Namaste Publishing, Vancouver, Canada, 2012.