from a letter by the Author to Grevel Lindop:
"... as you can appreciate, I chose my title for my trilogy deliberately; it is not “Nature and the Goddess etc” but “On Nature and the Goddess etc”. I saw my three pieces as constituting three tributary streams pouring into the very great River of this topic, which encompasses practically almost everything written over the period. I think that in the end we can only follow each of our authors through the course of his thought and bodied imagery as these involve him in an intuitive experience of these subjects. Each author approaches these subjects so differently, and yet each conceives and writes out of his unitary view of the Goddess, deep down. It is one Mother or one Goddess for each of them, or a least those authors I wrote about that write out of an intuition of Her. It would take someone with supersensible vision to establish what Goddess, or what aspect(s) of Her, each author has in mind, if it is one Goddess that underlies his thoughts. Her general association with Nature among my authors is one stable point at least, though again it is each author’s conception of what Nature is. However, I am not so sure that all this is merely the ‘invention’ of writers, as you speculate.
Nevertheless Graves has his Goddess, Keats his own, perhaps several Goddesses, Shakespeare his own etc... A certain sphere of experience dictates in each case the form the representation takes. My new collection on Shakespeare (Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity) offers a little more by way of a theory of the Goddess with central reference to Eric Neumann’s account. I wish I had known at the time of distinctions introduced by Stephen Hoeller, whom you may have heard of (he is a modern-day gnostic) between ‘pneumatic’ or spiritual, ‘psychic’, and ‘hylic’ or materially-minded, concepts of the Goddess (I present these three types to myself as the spiritually-inclined, the psychically-oriented, and the materially-minded). Hoeller offers these distinctions in his Foreword to a recent reprint (2001) of MacDermot’s translation of the Gnostic text, The Fall of Sophia. There is, also, another (little known) work, because in the arcane or esoteric sphere, which offers, to my mind, another very useful sorting out of at least three different aspects of the Goddess, but as Sophia. Robert Powell in The Most Holy Trinosophia (a very difficult book to get) speaks of the Divine Mother, the Divine Sophia, and the Holy Soul: thus Mother/Daughter/Holy Soul; Demeter/Persephone/Athena; Nature/Self/Community etc. I’m not sure if your interests extend into such spheres though I recall your saying once that you do read spiritual or occult books. My authors, or the ones I present, are clearly more into the Nature aspect and the aspect of self in relation to Nature; the aspect of community is not so strong a point among them at least in the material I cover. By Hoeller’s standard, they are also to a great extent still very much materially-minded, suggesting a relationship to the Goddess in the more material stages of Her manifestation as Neumann describes this; himself (Neumann, in The Great Mother) sees a long-term progression from this Goddess towards Herself as a more spiritually effective power as Sophia.
So the matter could be theorized further, and I do get into some theorizing about it, as I say, in my Shakespeare collection (on pp.138-139 including the endnotes to this section.) In the end, what I propose is that behind the general desire to connect to the Goddess among all these authors is actually the call of the Sophia, which is more or less directly heard, depending on the stage of development each author has reached—Shakespeare, as well as Novalis, being in a more advanced stage in relation to Her, as I have seen it, than any other authors I have read. The Sophia's claim on Shakespeare is brought out especially in my Prospero's Powers, which is reprinted in Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity. The Sophia's claim on Novalis is general knowledge, but it is not generally well-construed. Very many authors reflect the Goddess's presence in one way or another. There is the major case of Swinburne, e.g., in the later 19th century, but I see Her invoked even in more ‘discreet’ modern works like Strindberg’s Miss Julie and Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for example—which, incidentally, give us two opposite pictures of Her. In Strindberg, it is a picture of (what is conceived as) Her final ineffectuality in pretending to undo the tragic disparity between Herself and man, for which She must pay by her ‘death.’ In Woolf, contrastingly, it is a picture of the redeeming power that She yet reserves, so subtly exercised in the very midst of the many and severe injustices in man’s condition, which shows that She is effective yet.** The Goddess is invoked also in James’s The Wings of the Dove, between Kate and Milly, who represent respectively Her earthly and Her heavenly aspects, which remain in conflict with each other and have yet to be harmonized, while man finds himself in a bewildered condition, caught somewhere between these two antipodes. Both Strindberg and Woolf give us the Goddess in Her more ethereal, heavenly aspect, Swinburne in Her earthly, tellurian aspect (cf. the great sweet Mother of “The Triumph of Time”). And so on… As I put it in Shakespeare, the Goddess, and Modernity (p.335): "One would need to show how literary authors themselves reflect, in the detail of their work, the many changes and issues raised by the historical evolution of the Goddess. Some seminal attempts have been made along these lines by Robert Graves and Ted Hughes, in the latter case in his full-length study of Shakespeare and in his essay on Coleridge, on both of which I draw significantly in my work. I have myself offered a study along these lines in The Modern Debacle. However close treatment of the extensive presence and influence of the Goddess in the work of literary authors remains to this day an undeveloped area of critical study, and would appear to await some future revolution in our conception of the possible scope of cultural studies."
** Thus, confronted with Septimus’s tragic and violent suicide, Mrs. Dalloway, as the Goddess, must, as with everything else she experiences and encounters, take responsibility for it: Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace. It was her punishment to see sink and disappear here a man, there a woman, in this profound darkness. This strikes the symbolic key-note in both of these works. In Strindberg’s play, Miss Julie as the Goddess has, at last, condescended to join man in his condition, only to experience this, in her case, as a “filth into which I am sinking,” with much consternation expressed about man’s hopelessly vicious nature. In the end, it is because he is hopeless that man finds himself ‘ordering’ the Goddess to Her ‘death.’ She does not go, however, without first giving a most disturbing account of the power She reserves to do away with man as She might please (Do you think I’m so weak?), in a speech that is as powerful as any in our tragic literature. She has, in the meantime, spared him (I’m still the one who’ll have to bear the blame, She says). She will return (as Indra’s Daughter) to a world that is no happier if somewhat less inhospitable, and she will be no more effectual if freer to commiserate, in Strindberg’s A Dream Play, composed over ten years later.—JOM
***[For my own investigations into the threefold nature of the Sophia as Mother/ Daughter/ Holy Soul, see my recently published book-length study, ‘The Riddle of the Sophia’ and Other Essays (2020) chapters 3, 4, 5, and 8. Among other things, the reader shall find in this book a more extensive account of the basis of the Mother’s association with Nature (through which the Mother has traditionally cast Her shadow—the principal subject of my book, On Nature and the Goddess), as well as a further account of the additional workings out of her own supersensible sphere of the Daughter who has continued to shed Her own influence on humankind over the centuries and whose fresh “coming,” or gradually closer presence to us, since at least the 12th century, has now been formally “announced.” See in this last respect also https://sophiafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/Starlight-Easter-2020-issue-99p.pdf JOM]
*
[P.S.
Some further comments on Miss Julie and Mrs. Dalloway.
To bring Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa) into focus “as” the Goddess, one could do worse than refer oneself to the 1997 film version of Mrs. Dalloway (directed by Marleen Gorris), specifically to the scene late in the action in which Vanessa Redgrave (as Mrs. Dalloway) stands alone in a room at an open window, with much of her body stretched out beyond it, as she fully imagines herself into the whole process of Septimus’s violent plunge to death from such a perch earlier. The film is faithful to Woolf’s text almost verbatim, and Redgrave delivers her lines with great empathetic power (the effect is sustained also by having this scene interweave with the ongoing scene of the party taking place in the next room, to which we also return a few times). After an acute struggle with her own despair of surviving the human scene, which has come to a head for her here, Mrs. Dalloway comes through at last and achieves the harmonizing power she is in the position to interweave into the whole stream of human events that is taking place: A thing there was that mattered, a thing let drop every day in corruption. This he had preserved. She felt glad he had done it; thrown it away. Death was defiance. There was an embrace in death. He made her feel the beauty, made her feel—less afraid … But she must go back, she must assemble…
The reader will profit no less from a viewing of the 1999 film version of Miss Julie (directed by Mike Figgis). Early on, Miss Julie steps away from the house into an outdoor scene where, after a small gap in time (a fade out into timelessness), we see her leaning up suddenly as the Goddess against a stone wall in an area out of which a huge tree shoots up alongside Her that dominates the scene, and which is clearly meant to be the “tree of life” to which reference is made in Strindberg’s play. It is here that Miss Julie as the Goddess recounts her dream of “coming down” to man’s condition, which She is fatefully just about to do. She invites Jean, who has been watching and listening, to join Her for a walk deeper into the woods, but he is unable to cross that boundary (in Strindberg’s play, they never make it beyond the doorway of the house.) In the confusion and tension between them that follows, Miss Julie as the Goddess is literally forced down to the ground by Jean, and She is then depicted washing Her hand made dirty by Her fall. That scene establishes the Goddess for us from very early on, as in the equivalent development in Strindberg’s play; in Woolf’s novel, the build-up is incremental though, already from early on, Mrs. Dalloway’s greater identity is implicit in the preternatural power she displays of living literally into everything that is happening and has happened around Her, both big and small (Down, down into the midst of ordinary things the finger fell making the moment solemn).
We bear in mind that, of course, in the more dramatic scenes of revelation, the Goddess is suddenly embodied in Her mythic nature in characters who otherwise continue to be themselves in all their temporal finiteness. They are in this full sense scenes of great mythic resonance, and we find such scenes also in the subtle work of many filmmakers as of many series-directors of our time. In the latter case, let me cite, for example, the ending to Titanic: Blood and Steel, 2012 (directed by Ciaran Donnelly). Mark, the ship’s chief mechanical engineer, and the story’s main character and hero, has decided after much hesitation to join his beloved Sofia (yes, Sofia) who is off to America, on board ship. She is unaware that he has come on board, and in the ending he is knocking on the door to her quarters below deck. When She opens, She is, of course, all wonder at his appearance, and they embrace fully—in our knowledge that they will go down into the sea together. In that moment She has become the Goddess. It is Swinburne who comes to mind in this context:
I will go back to the great sweet mother,
Mother and lover of men, the sea.
I will go down to her, I and none other,
Close with her, kiss her, and mix her with me.
Cling to her, strive with her, hold her fast;
O fair white mother, in days long passed
Born without sister, born without brother,
Set free my soul as thy soul is free.
— JOM]