The
Bubble Deity
Beneath the
apple tree:
There I took you for My own,
There I offered you My hand,
And restored you,
Where your mother was corrupted.
(St John of the Cross, ‘The Spiritual Canticle’)
The dream
She is thinking about visiting her mother, in
the country she left long ago. She is
considering this not because she misses her
mother (she does not, to her acute shame) but
because she has to – she is supposed to, isn’t
she? But when she imagines herself embarking a
plane she feels sick in her stomach. She sees
herself walking in an Asian airport halfway
there, waiting for the next, final plane to her
destination. Her emotions are identical to those
of someone who has been kidnapped or raped, “Why
did not I chose another street, why did I not I
run away when my intuition was screaming
“run!”?” She is sitting, frozen, only her mind
is rushing in circles “What is this, why this
awful fear? – It is my mother, she is not a
murderer – she loves me! And I have always loved
her. I am mad.” Eventually she books the ticket.
Before her trip she has a dream: an
all-powerful, enormous female deity kills her
husband in order to devour her. The dreamscape
is the dry land, cracks in the soil, orange
smoky fires here and there against the totally
black sky. On the dry ground, around the deity
are small dry human skeletons. Black, yellow,
bloody red colours dominate the apocalyptic
landscape. The all-powerful deity is her mother.
The mother
Her mother is a little girl about five years
old, emotionally abandoned almost seventy years
ago, when she was born. All her life this girl
has been longing for a mother – a warm,
comforting, protective loving mother, one which
picks up, holds, soothes, talks, smiles at her,
whose eyes would reflect her as she herself
wishes to be: a good, much loved, confident
pretty girl with high aspirations. The mother of
her dreams has never happened so she gave up her
dreams until her own daughter was born. The
daughter was to give her what her mother did not
– unconditional and self-sacrificing maternal
love. For this a child must be made into a
parent.
The relationship: a role play
It is given that a child cannot fulfill a
mother’s role and be a mother for her own mother
even if she tries very hard. The most damaging
demand placed on her is of complete
self-sacrifice, complete adjustment to her
mother’s needs. A child cannot sacrifice herself
in a noble, adult meaning of these words
(assuming that the Self grows through a
consciously chosen sacrifice) because she has no
developed Self yet; in fact she needs her mother
to help her to develop her Self first. Therefore
she instinctively conforms to her mother’s needs
which are the unfulfilled needs of a child and
are very similar to her own; she must give up
her own needs to satisfy the child inside her
mother. In such a situation there are two
children, mother-child and daughter-child or
more correctly mother-child-growing backwards
and daughter-child-growing forwards.
The older grows the daughter the more infantile
becomes the mother but the growth of the
daughter is not normal. A daughter does not just
simply become an adult unnaturally fast. First
of all, her Self, being deprived of essential
maternal support, grows not as a straight tree
in free space but as a twisted bonsai filling in
the gaps which her mother allows her to fill.
Second, although she was given the
responsibilities of a mother she was not given
the power of a mother – her mother retains the
power of control. This mother exercises absolute
parental power when the daughter does not
readily comply with her demands. Should
disobedience or a mistake occur a mother
punishes – and in an act of a punishment a
seeming normality is established: the real
mother punishes a real daughter. In this reality
however the mother is punishing her own mother,
that elusive mother who did not give her love
and into whom the daughter, the third
generation, was made. Her punishment is nothing
more than the scream of a frustrated unattended
baby. When her daughter repents and complies her
crime is immediately forgotten and she is
restored to her role as a surrogate “all-good”
mother.
Prehistoric fear
The behaviour of such mothers is extremely
contradictory and often bizarre: they can be
very loving and very cruel, very noble and very
mean, very forgiving and very vindictive. It is
impossible to understand them without keeping in
mind that behind their formidable façade hides
an abandoned baby: a prehistoric landscape, all
members of the tribe have gone and the mother
with them, a baby was left behind as a burden, a
helpless victim-to-be of wild beasts. It is
irrelevant that a real baby suffered “only” an
emotional abandonment because the absence of a
mother, whether emotional or physical, as deemed
by her creates the all-consuming fear of
abandonment that is the threat of death to be
re-experienced during all her life. A baby was
not eaten but she will always scan for beasts,
even after she grows up; worse still, any
significant emotional attachment will activate
her prehistoric fear. It is understandable then
why such people scan for possible abandonment by
those to whom they are much attached. If they
leave them – screams their severely damaged by
the primary abandonment brain – they will die on
the spot. They believe it and experience pangs
of death every time they perceive the real or
imaginary signs of abandonment, of theirs
daughters having a date without them or their
husbands staying at work later than usual.
The birth of the Bubble Deity
It is simple: any disobedience of a primary
attachment figure, a daughter, must be crushed
by any means to prevent her leaving me because
if she does “I will die”. The mother, severely
punishing her daughter for being late after
school because she lost track of time playing
with her mates does it not out of pointless
cruelty – she is only saving her own life.
Her daughter must learn to deal with the most
frightening, for a child, transformation.
Being activated, the primary abandonment
experienced a mother before and against which
she is defending using her own daughter as a
shield, turns her into a fearsome ruthless
deity. Indeed she is a deity for her not yet
grown up daughter who has now an impossible task
of reconciling two mothers. One is “good” i.e.
loving and agreeable as long as the daughter
complies with her emotional needs. The daughter
here plays the role of a perfect new mother: she
must learn to predict her mother’s wishes and
needs so the mother would remain “good”; to
achieve it she must forget about herself. The
daughter is only technically a daughter but
truly a mother to her technically a mother but
truly a needy infant who screams and cries if
her heeds are frustrated even slightly. However,
as soon as the daughter fails to satisfy “the
infant-mother” quickly and fully enough she
turns into the opposite of the infant, Mother
the Terrible who possesses all the power over
her now suddenly shrunk to the state of an
infant, daughter. Here the primary human
relationships are distorted as in a crooked
mirror: a daughter-mother is demanded to be a
true mother but is refused the very power which
a real mother has – the power to decide and
chose. Thus the daughter is completely powerless
and the mother is all-powerful: she has the
stolen from her daughter need of a baby to be
comforted and still retains her power of a
parent.
Such a mother lives in two segregated worlds:
one is a deeply infantile – her private source
of strength, the relationship with her daughter;
another is a normal adult world of often
successful work, cycle of friends and
acquaintances, etc. A normal adult world is
feeding on an infantile attachment. [This is a
parody of normality when an adult is deriving
her strength from what was given to her by her
parents and what was successfully integrated
into her psyche and became a part of herself.]
In a sense the mother is sucking her daughter’s
milk.
Confined to a womb
Naturally, the daughter does not want to see an
all-powerful deity – a moody, mocking, vicious,
somewhat sadistic parody of her good mother so
she tries hard to prevent the transformation
[for which she blames herself]. Worse of all,
Mother the Terrible’s favourite punishment is
complete withdrawal – no single word for hours,
days, weeks and a daughter experiences it very
much like that unfortunate prehistoric baby left
to die to be devoured by the wild beast. To the
daughter mother’s withdrawal means death; an
overwhelming fear of abandonment is passed to
the next generation.
Out of this fear [and a growing guilt] the
daughter gives up herself entirely and becomes
totally engulfed by her mother. Paradoxically,
she now embodies her mother’s secret desire – to
return to her own mother’s womb; at least she
experiences the situation like this with the
difference that it is not her who sits in her
mother’s belly receives the food but her mother
derives the vital juice from her while having
complete command over the situation. The
daughter’s will is paralyzed; at that point her
Self successfully filled up the caverns of the
space which her mother left to her. As a
consequence she, just like her mother, is
convinced that she cannot survive on her own.
Out
Several years later the daughter, now in another
country, is making her way out of her mother’s
womb. Step by step, year by year she is digging
out her Self. Eventually she is free – scarred
but free, first time in her life. She recalls
her last visit to her mother with a preceding
apocalyptic dream not with the terror and anger
like before but with the pain and resignation.
She now has to live with the pain of knowledge
of her mother’s abandonment of her but it is the
past, it is finished. The fear of abandonment
which poisoned most of her life is hugely over.
The return of the deity
She is praying. Going deeper in contemplation
she reaches the point when she feels the
presence of God. This is the point when she
knows she must give up, let go, and she feels
awful, paralyzing fear of death so she abruptly
stops.
She tries again, with the same result. Ever
since she began the process of un-digging her
Self she frequently experiences a fear of
impending death. “It is funny, I am now alive
but have this awful fear of death; before I was
dead but did not have this fear at all.
Perhaps it is so exactly because I was dead? No,
I remember now – I did have this fear, before,
when I thought I was about to be abandoned. Is
this a fear of abandonment? – No, God cannot
abandon and the fear is not exactly it. Then
what?”
She decides to let go: to let go of reason and
to continue her self-analysis – something she
learnt to do a lot during her un-digging.
“I am praying, there is a… space, I am thinking
about Jesus Christ but… a fear of death – she is
here, the Bubble Deity! The Mother Goddess!”
Stunned, she continues and sees that the figure
of Jesus Christ is somewhat diminished but the
Bubble Deity is growing.
“I am afraid that the mother deity will kill
Christ and then, before finishing me off, will
laugh “See stupid girl, you thought He would
protect you!” – she blurts out.
She understands that it is her prehistoric fear,
a fear of engulfment which she experiences as
suffocation and death, standing between her and
God. The Bubble Deity is the Goddess of
Engulfment, ever-pregnant and ever-eating her
own children and their lovers.
To her astonishment, her major fear now is that
God the Father will be swapped with the Bubble
Deity and Christ will be murdered by her. This
fear contradicts all her knowledge of theology
and personal beliefs and yet she has it.
Implications for a spiritual practice
It is indeed astonishing to pray to Jesus Christ
and encounter the prehistoric fertility goddess
from the times when parents would sacrifice
their children to the Mother Goddess. I tend to
think that in this case the experience of own
mother formed the image of the prehistoric
deity, not the “collective unconscious” of Jung.
What is noteworthy here is that the features of
the ancient Mother Goddess and of “Mother the
Bubble Deity” are identical. This may sound
strange to those who think of “the Mother
Goddess” along the lines of the neo-pagan cults
but their version of the goddess is simply very
far from the original.
The real Mother Goddess has little to do with
the benevolent motherly all-loving eco-type
adored by hippies whose longing for her is very
much an unconscious longing for a all-forgiving
mother and a lover in one. The domain of a real
Mother Goddess is nature, fertility,
destruction, and underworld – all unconscious
forces I would add. Broadly speaking, it is life
and death, where life is understood not as
victory over death but as the endless and
pointless dichotomy of creation and destruction
in which the creator is not actually a creator
separated from his creation but a parent who
physiologically produces various living things
out of herself and then is destroying them at
will, often feeding on their death. It is also
fitting to define the deep waters of the ancient
cult of the Goddess as a cult of Eros and
Tanatos, with all possible combinations of those
terms, completely devoid of any idea of
transcendence of the dark eros into the ideal
love in which erotic desire and spirituality are
entwined. It is natural then that the ancient
cult of Cybele (one of her many names) included
animal and human sacrifices, and also orgies.
Some of her cults are still practiced in its
true ancient shape, for example the cult of
Durga. The Mother Goddess is an embodiment of
the unrestrained female power which produces
abundantly and just as abundantly destroys. Her
children are her property to be used, abused, or
killed. She is violating any boundaries between
herself and others or perhaps, being barely
conscious, she is unable to see them. Such deity
is very fit to be the deity of all engulfing and
destroying mothers.
The Christian God has been considered to be a
complete opposite of the Mother Goddess, by her
adepts and by Christians likewise but for
different reasons. The Christian God is indeed
entirely different, but not as a symbol of an
unrestrained patriarchal rigid power over the
female principal as He is often depicted by
non-Christians. He is oddly combining in Himself
unconditional love (female stereotype) and
rationality (male stereotype). He does not
change or renounce His own words or promises,
does not abandon, does not engulf and wants
those who believe in Him to be independent and
even to become… gods. He does not sacrifice
humans but sacrificed Himself for them (the
argument that He sacrificed His Son, not Himself
comes from the ignorance of the doctrine of the
Holy Trinity). He is God of the living, not the
dead as the Goddess of underworld is. He is
perfect parent, mother and father in one, but at
the same time He is everything that is good,
including Eros, about the supposed absence of
which in Christianity much is said and written
by the ignorant. Being Love, the Christian God
is also madly in love with His creation and
desires its response to Him, as the Scriptures
explicitly state and the countless Christian
mystics confirm. The bold expressions of the
Eros of Christian God can be easily found in
Christian mystical literature so I will refrain
from quoting; it is sufficient to say here that
it has been traditional for the Christian
writers to express the relationship between God
and a soul in quite straightforward spousal
terms. All the colours of human love are present
there – desire, longing, passion, fulfillment
but they are purified from everything dark; a
human soul is purified and set free from the
pollution of cruelty, imprisonment, torture and
death. Here lies one of the most important
differences between the Eros of the Mother
Goddess and the Eros of the Christian God: the
former is feeding on dark primary instincts,
fears, engulfment, and death and the latter
expels them. Nothing of the original human
nature including passionate love is dispelled in
Christianity but purified and raised to God.
I deliberately made this brief comparison for
the purpose of showing how difficult it is for
those who were brought up by the Bubble Deity
and turned to Christ to trust God. God is
everything that the Bubble Deity is not. As soon
as the escaped from the Bubble Deity daughters
begin relating to God their fears will be
activated by God’s very otherness (any personal
relationship stirs their fears; the relationship
with God is particularly potent in this respect
because of it is the most primary of all
relationships). The fear of death (which is the
deceptive mask of the fear of abandonment and
fear of engulfment), rising during encounters
with God may be mistakenly taken for something
produced by God but not by their psyche. Even if
they intellectually understand the goodness of
God their fears pull them away from Him. The
fear of abandonment can be overcome relatively
quickly by the experience of the constancy and
steady love of God. The much more elusive fear
of engulfment tends to prevent a person from
moving into deeper waters of prayer and
contemplation for much longer. It typically
rises up in the moments when the longing of a
believer is about to meet the loving response of
God. The fear of engulfment creates its source
swapping God with the Bubble Deity and that
which could become an act of mutual love stays
in the consciousness as a moment of horror
barely escaped. A believer is left with a
double-faced God, God the Father and a wrathful
Mother Goddess, somewhat similar to the
double-faced gods of the past and also to the
symbolic representation of the endless fight of
two equal forces, good and evil of Manichaeism
and also to her “all-good” and “all-bad”
mothers. The second hypostasis of the Holy
Trinity, Christ in her mind can be destroyed
just as easily as her.
Christ
Stuck with the ridiculous image of the Bubble
Deity, knowing that she does not exist but
sensing her presence anyway she turns to Christ
the Son of God of her intellectual knowledge.
She is quite depersonalized at that point so she
does not attempt to pray but looks at His icons
instead. Before the threatening deity was
all-real and Christ shrunk to the size of some
unfortunate earthly man about to be expelled by
her mother, now He is the only person who is
present – the deity shrinks, fades, falls into
separate tiny bubbles and disappears. The
eternal reality of Christ is so evident that she
cannot understand how she could think otherwise.
Christ and the Bubble Deity
Perhaps the lack of vulgar conventional
sexuality (read misogyny) in Christ can explain
why women of His time so readily followed Him
and remained faithful to Him even on Golgotha
when all but one his male disciples ran away. I
suspect that the most shocking thing about Him
in relation to women was His manner of dealing
with them as equals. This not my speculation:
one can just open the Gospels and read His
words. Perhaps in Him women saw themselves as
non-oppressed, un-crooked daughters of God. By
no means am I implying here that simple
egalitarian treatment was the major reason for
women to follow Christ. However, since He is
Salvation the equality he showed must be part of
that Salvation. “There is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither bond nor free, there is neither
male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ
Jesus” (Galatians 3:28-29).
I am not going to expand here on how the role of
women in the Church has often reverted back to
the acceptable as dictated by a misogynistic
society. It certainly happened and we still reap
the fruits but this article is concerned only
with the private relationship of a woman with
God and with how her relationship with her
mother influences her relationship with God. It
is enough to establish that the Son of God (and,
logically thinking, God the Father) does not
exhibit the slightest hint of misogyny. Further
more, Christianity calls all human beings (males
and females) to grow up into deification which
is effectively the state of Christ outlined
above. Expanding on the words of the apostle
Paul, there is neither male nor female in Christ
but more than just a male and more than just a
female.
As for the Bubble Deity or the Mother Goddess of
ancient times, being a woman she is not
benevolent to women. She does not help a woman
to grow and transcend the limitations of her sex
(I mean limitations set for her by her society
as strict gender rules, expected behaviour and
so on), in fact she does not help her in
anything but makes her into her slave via the
destruction of her psyche. Ultimately the Bubble
Deity initiates her into the process of becoming
Herself for the purpose of propagating the chain
of mutually enslaved generations. This is very
much like the so-called original sin which is of
course not about eating an apple but introducing
evil and corruption into one’s genetic make-up.
It is quite puzzling to see the current growing
popularity of the neo-pagan cults of the Mother
Goddess while our society is so concerned with
the equality of women. One explanation for this
phenomenon is that her officially propagated
version is very far from the original; the
original may also be attractive for those
females who engulf or are engulfed, abuse or are
abused. Another explanation is that the Orthodox
Church (to which I belong), shamefully, fails to
maintain the attitude of Jesus Christ towards
women in many areas. Women are often treated as
eternally guilty and somewhat deficient whose
inherent sin of eating the apple first must be
redeemed by their subordination to men (a very
unsound doctrine which comes dangerously close
to compromising the dogma of the Atonement and
also the role of St Mary, Our Lady, in the
salvation of the humankind). I will not try here
to provide the necessary argument for the idea
but I am convinced that the patriarchal rigid
ideal with its extremes where females are
despised and subdued is nothing more but the
crooked male reflection of the Bubble Deity.
Both are about gender power, both feed on
prehistoric fears, both are completely
instinctive and irrational, both are about
renouncing the freedom given by God and,
ultimately, inspired by evil.
What is so unique and difficult to accept about
Christ is that he liberates but the liberation
does not come for the price of other human
beings, only for His own. Woman, you are a
daughter of God but it does not mean that that
man is worse than you; man, you are son of God
but it does not mean that that woman must serve
you. Children, respect your parents but it does
not mean that you should be slaves to them and
destroy yourselves for their satisfaction. The
common logic of compensation “this or that”, “up
– down” does not work here but everyone is
liberated, lifted up and included in the divine
reality providing that they want to, otherwise
“let the dead bury their own dead”.
Christ
She is looking at the photo of the mosaic in
Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. The lavish cloak of
deep sky-blue, the red tunic – the red is almost
overwritten by the energetic rays of gold, the
streaming gold of the cross on the halo, the not
so fluid slowing down gold of the Gospel, the
mingling gold of the background. He is clothed
in fire, Pantocrator, “He who keeps the whole
world in His hand”, definitely Man but much more
than a man. His eyes are too gentle and
forgiving to belong to an earthly man; they are
more of a womans eyes, not an earthly woman but
of a transcendent female principal, God’s idea
(logos) of a woman. Or perhaps they are female
and male principal both. The same can be said
about every aspect of His human nature: whether
they are male or female they are much more than
male and female. He is Son of God in whom the
balance of male and female qualities is achieved
not by their suppression but by their
transcendence. And yet, despite all these
complexities He is Man and this is why she is
not frightened by Him. It also helps that the
female qualities are so transcendent in Him that
she cannot recognize them as the earthly ones
she is used to, those which are much heavier.
“…all things have been created through Him and
for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all
things hold together.” (Colossians 1:16-17) He
is the One who sacrificed Himself for her and He
can be everything to her; in fact He is
Everything even if she does not feel it fully
yet.