Demeter, the Greek Grain Mother, almost destroyed the world when she went into mourning for her beloved Kore could be termed as “dark”. Isis, the Great Egyptian Goddess (another “mother”), showed her darker side when she poisoned Ra in order to gain his magical powers. The truth is that there is really no such thing as a specifically “dark” or even a “light” aspect of deity – Goddess or otherwise. What we refer to as “dark” or “light” are aspects to their nature that we are either comfortable with or not. When talking about the Dark Goddess, Jungian psychology is never too far away. “Dark” represents the repressed or ignored “shadow” aspect of our consciousness and as Demeter George points out, it is often our conditioning that shapes our interpretation of the Dark Goddess and what she represents: “Through cultural conditioning we have inherited negative and false images of the Dark Goddess, the dark aspect of the feminine. Distorted images of the Goddess include ‘bitch queen’, ‘outcast daughter’, ‘fallen woman’, ‘terrible mother’, ‘wicked witch’, ‘wicked queen or stepmother’, ‘domineering mother in law’, ‘bag lady’, ’ugly hag’ ….” 3 Matomah Alesha offers an interpretation from a more historical perspective: “She is a genetic, emotional, spiritual archetype that resides in all humanity. She is often pushed away or suppressed but she is never quite conquered or overcome. She is the black orb, the place where all of us collectively depend, emerge, and return to. This is symbolised as the cosmos, the dark earth, the unconscious body-mind, the world of the undead, the genetic mother Lucy, and Africa. She is all of these things and so much more.”4 Alesha goes on to state that the word “dark”, when relating to the Goddess, should be considered as a form of energy that has the power, given the right circumstance, to change its shape into illuminating light. These colours change and alter to reflect the ever-aspiring consciousness and its ever-expanding reality as they are extensions of the darkness that give birth to it and are liken to rainbows, pastels in the sky, iridescent stars twinkling in the waters. The Dark Goddess is also the story of humanity that intimidates the streamline mind of commerce and ego-identity. Within that story, however, is hidden a great spiritual mystery, a hidden truth which must be grasped for the whole story to be completely understood.
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George, Demeter, Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess (Harper Collins, 1992) Alesha, Matomah, The First Book of the Dark Goddess (Matam Press;2004)