Female Condition or Condition of the Feminine? A Change of Perspective

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When we are talking about female condition it seems obvious to think about women and about their centuries-long battles for gaining equal dignity and rights from men. Let us not take into consideration those sometimes appalling news coming from far countries, now reporting sensational neglect of women’s integrity, of freedom, health and civil and social rights. Though it is worth remembering, at this regard, how centuries of masculine supremacy have segregated women into subordinate positions even here in Europe. Women were in recent past compared to children and weak-minded subjects; they were considered emotionally unstable and unreliable and got kept out of the places of power, of the highest grades of education and of the “manly” careers.

Women’s emancipation, hard, late and never fully accomplished, allowed those women to play a less marginal role in the society and to get more independent and important places. Endless abuses suffered by women for thousand years; degrading treatment in their working places; deprivation of their freedom of choice; depreciation of their social role and intelligence; inequality they were subjected to, that were experienced with a sense of injustice and resentment; repression of their inner qualities; ongoing humiliation; constriction to obedience, to self-denial and submission to the family: all these are heavy and prejudicial legacies that are maintained and preserved by the collective memory. We all carry them inside us, as a genetic, familiar and social memory. We bear behind us grandmas, great-uncles, great-grandfathers, ancestors from uncountable generations far in the past who have been subjected to rapes, violence, oppressions of every kind: people who have sacrificed themselves for their sons, who have turned themselves down, who had to subordinate themselves, who had to adapt, to give up, to tolerate injustice, debasement, abuse of power, negation of rights.

So even when it is unaware, genetic memory is working in the depth of ourselves and establishes the unconscious heritage of the experiences we come to birth with; we constantly make use of it in order to cope with our everyday life, marking the set of our free and voluntary actions. But, putting a more careful glance on this: the female condition brings about a reflection on the condition of the Feminine. This is not the same thing: condition of the Feminine doesn’t correspond to women’s condition. The former is connected to the state of sorrowful repression of the spiritual feminine principle that worries everybody, men and women, even those women who are emancipated and free: all of them are the descendants of a maternal genetic line and all are members of a culture, hence bearing the experienced legacy of all previous generations. This is a heavy and oppressive heritage: it makes us weak, unbalanced and unaware of the huge potentialities of our nature. It forces us to preserve the model of an interior cleft, of the opposition between male and female, which is indeed the break between the two sides of our spiritual Consciousness.

In fact, even without wanting and knowing about it, we keep inside us the sense of injustice, failure, helplessness, frustration, grudge, fear, rage, fault and sacrifice coming from our foremothers; by doing so, we are running out of our lives and prevent ourselves from fulfilling our whole being. It doesn’t matter whether we are males or females: we all have a mother and bear it inside us. Even if humiliated and overwhelmed, the Feminine survives inside us, waiting to be freed. Women’s debasement has brought as result the suppression of everybody’s Feminine and an enormous harm to our integrity as well. By humiliating the woman, man has absurdly humiliated the half of himself. By degrading his own inner Feminine he has further depreciated women’s Feminine and established an unbearable world. Many men depreciate in women what they repudiate in themselves. Subjected to such humiliation women have lost contact with their spiritual Masculine and have quenched their interior Feminine. The quest for supremacy between Feminine and Masculine turns out to be a useless victory against oneself.

Everyone of us needs in his/her own way integrity and sincerity. Women get certainly an easier access to Feminine (provided it hasn’t been completely oppressed) like men do to the Masculine: yet both require the other half in order to be themselves, that is divine beings and not weak and passive epigones of the kinship’s past. But since the condition of the spiritual Feminine still is for both genders painful, we do have to start from that point. Rebis comes to birth exactly with this purpose: reawakening and regenerating the spiritual Feminine in order to make possible to everyone of us the recovery of all energies and potentialities that have gone lost during a devastating and absurd clash. A clash that is depriving and delivering us to the mechanics of our animal mind. Where there isn’t any spiritual Consciousness, in fact, only our animal human side still operates and freedom and consciousness are fading out.

It is crystal clear that the reawakening of the Feminine (a spiritual, not an animal one) will be needed for reshaping a better world in any field of social life. This holds for politics, where indisputable laws of domination, violence and suppression, so typical of the animal Masculine, are effective. It holds even for economics: here the spreading of the neoliberal ideology is aiming at the struggle of the rich and mighty classes instead of aiming at the commonweal: it has infected the minds with the germs of individualism, competition, law of the strongest, all these also typical of the animal Masculine. Finally it holds for mass media and even for education: here highest care is being provided for filling drowsy minds with a standardized knowledge, suitable for maintaining a low level of consciousness and behavioural patterns that are contrary to principles of ethics, responsibility and justice, which are quintessential to the spiritual Consciousness.

In a society that recognizes the spiritual Feminine, there is room for cooperation, equity, integrity, awareness, participation, culture, environment, commonweal, beauty and for the most elevated values. This is not an unpleasant perspective, nor is it abstract, since what we do to other people we do to ourselves, independently from our will. It is just a matter of making sense of it and of becoming well-rounded beings so as sovereign and aware citizens. There will be, after all, no way out for rescuing ourselves, neither as individuals nor as humanity. Sabotaging ourselves over and over again will bring us to self-destruction. Therefore it is worthwhile to engage everybody for clearing up the filth of the past and leave it beyond us once and for all. So, bringing back the Feminine again will mean finally recovering ourselves and returning on our lost path to home.

Patrizia Scanu
Rebis creator

Translation by Paolo Genta