God Save the Queen: On The Art of Not Being Disappeared
We need to reinvent the Triple Goddess to reflect the current reality of women in their 50's and 60's – who're running the world (behind the scenes of course). With great thanks to Ursula Le Guin.
It is disorienting being an eldering female in Western society. I have no comparisons of course, because we – older women – are summarily disappeared. I imagine in other places, places where there is a more in-tact human ecology operating somewhere in the soup of the culture, getting older as a female is a thing that is well represented. A thing that has a distinct place on the map of what it means to be human in the grand ecology. But according to Western society, I do not exist. Strange, because I don’t think I’ve ever felt more alive.
Yet I can find no vital or true reference for who and what I have become. My Paleolithic foremothers didn’t live long enough to run into this dilemma.
According to current socioeconomic data, women in Western society will earn most of their money and be most productive in this stage of our lives. A stage when we’re wise enough to know what’s important (and equally, what is NOT), vital enough to devote ourselves to it with all our might, and powerful enough to achieve whatever it is we put our minds and hearts to. Thanks to the fact that females are living longer and have become more politically and economically powerful (despite the ever-increasing, stealth and cunning faces of misogyny), it’s no longer true that there are merely three stages of a woman’s life. No longer is the Maiden/Mother/Crone Triple Goddess sufficient to describe the modern woman’s experience of maturation. We need a Quadruple Goddess: Maiden/Mother/*Queen*/Crone. This may sound like some spiritual bologna only relevant to those who believe in the tarot and that sort of thing. But actually, what I’m describing is a socio-cultural phenomenon, the miracle of which is likely the only reason humans still exist on the planet. The stages of life I’m referring to (Maiden, Mother, Queen, Crone) are actual ecologically necessary roles, without which the world as we know it would completely fall apart. More specifically, because of the unique set of attributes true about the Queen, she is likely largely responsible for most of the hard work.
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