Masking the Masculine Within

The Goddess Cybele, was a Roman Goddess who was celebrated by the people parading through the streets, carrying pine boughs, to honor the God  Attis’ death.  As our Spring moves in, the reason to wear masks has taken some of the joy out of this new season.  We can still be a Cybele in spite of it.  Cybele was the Roman Goddess referred to as Universal Mother, the Great Mother, Mother Earth.

She was such an interesting Goddess in that she was said to be a hermaphrodite, and so was both god and goddess.  The people were so afraid of her, they caught her and castrated her.  When they threw the organ on the ground, an almond tree sprung from it.  Cybele happened upon the grown almond tree and ate some of the nutmeats.  Suddenly she became pregnant.  The baby was name Attis and she fell in love with her own child.  She made the child promise to only ever love her but he took the daughter of the king of Asia \minor for his daughter to marry. 
During the wedding, Cybele masked herself and got into the wedding celebrations.  She threw an absolute fit and drowned the wedding party and all the guests except Attis.  Attis was so bereaved for having betrayed his promise to Cybele, that he went out into a grove and castrated himself.  Of course, he fell where he did the deed, against the trunk of a pine tree, and died.  When Cybele searched and found him, she thought he had killed himself in grief for his wife and guests.  She misunderstood.  She eventually begged Zeus to forgive her and Zeus made a proclamation that Attis’ body would never decay.    The pine tree became his sentinel and from that day onward, the pine tree was sacred.  This act and the honor of the pine tree has stood as a reminder that Cybele would forever guard soldiers and those at war.    This spawned a cult where the priests would castrate themselves and act as feminine as possible.  They were known as the Galli, and their celebrations included loud music, hallucinogenic herbs, and dressed themselves in pine boughs and pine cones.  It must have been quite the madhouse during their celebrations.  

How often do we remove the masculine aspects from ourselves?  Do we hide our masculine aspects?  Jung believed that we have both feminine and masculine aspects in the lives of men and women.  And, somewhere along the historical line we, women, tried to hide the masculine aspects within, or society forced us to deny it.

We have come to believe, so many of us, that the Masculine within was a shadow side of self.  We have become unbalanced.  We see women who abhor anything masculine.  There were historical reasons for this.  First, males were afraid of the creative powers of women and they sought to degrade and disempower the gifts of the feminine.  We continued being conditioned throughout history.  

Society equated the masculine with authority, with oppression, with greed, prejudice and corruption.  The Witch hunts were perpetrated by males and genocide of feminine creative powers and sixth sense were demonized.  Subjugation happened and the residuals continue on through today as women struggle to find the balance of feminine and masculine.  Some of us are trying to tear the masks off ourselves and take back our own authority, build our self-confidence, be more critical thinking, find emotional balance of reason and logic, and reconnect to the warrior within.  We are learning to balance the masculine within by setting stronger boundaries, being more assertive, improve self-discipline and taking on positions of feminine power within a masculine world. 
Many of us carry masculine wounds and we need to take a long look at our brothers and how we might have been wounded by them and how we might heal that part of ourselves with our inherent healing of femininity.  We need to come to a place and space where we honor all that is masculine within and without.  It is time to take off our masks and allow our warrior spirit to rise.  We have been conditioned to do elsewise.  

Young boys continue to be conditioned not to cry, not to show weakness by expressing emotions other than anger.  We still see men as head of the household, that is still pushed by religions.  

We continue to understand that we are right and left brained and each side represents the masculine (left) and the feminine (right).  Each side of the brain represent abilities that might be stronger in one gender than another.  The masculine expresses itself in sports, war, protector, dominations, aggression and in muscle-building.  We have been taught, as females, that these areas should belong to men, not women.  But, after the chaotic mentality of feminism’ s beginnings, we tend to be taking back some of our places and spaces of the masculine. Some of us have given up the hostilities of feminism against men and are taking off the mask of what we sensed as victimization and simply becoming balanced human beings.  Some of us acknowledge that we, ourselves, perpetuated the imbalance in many ways.  To achieve equality, we have many masks to remove. Including our prejudice against males and our rebellion against masculine things of math, of authority, of rule-makers, of all the things the left brain organizes and perpetuates.
 
We take back the term “assertive” since, when women displayed assertive aspects of self, it was called; aggressive’.  Our quiet strength becomes a way of balancing masculine and feminine aspects of Self.  We are beginning to assert ourselves, yes, but sometimes, when we are first dealing with the emotional war of honoring the masculine within, we may see that we take on negative aspects of the masculine.  We are learning to acknowledge and define our need and getting better and better at it.  We are getting braver at stating our opinions.  We are becoming more aware of how we project the feminine (weak, vulnerability) aspects of self that falls back in line with women being quiet and baby-makers, and old crones, that carries an age-old suppression by masculine societies.  We are carrying ourselves with more positive strength and self-secured ways.  We are giving up our passiveness towards inequality and taking on life as balanced feminine.  We are stripping of the masks of being quiet, hushed, societal appropriateness that threaded through our past.  Being balanced means to be whole.  We need to strip off the masks of our submissiveness.  Yes, we must find the balance.

As |I began this piece, I was intending to merely show personal safety of wearing masks to protect others from us.  I cut out a template, from craft sticky-backed foam.  I wanted the curls of hair, the eye mask, to reflect similar shapes to tie the portrait together.  I used a small circular pot to gain this.

I added curlicues to the circular shape to print the hair.

I printed the shapes on to deli paper, to cut out.

 

I cut out two shapes to use as frames for eye mask.



I had some thin red woven material that I cut out to fit over the mouth.

I did some writing that would become ghost writing as I covered the background.
 

Then, I began the work on the face.  

I glued down the glass frames and the mask onto the face. 
 

I did a base color of the eye mask and painting eyes beneath it.  

I used some of my Staedler fiber-tipped marks to define and outline.
 

I added the hair by printing, painting, and definitions.  And, in the end, I grew to love this portrait.



Right now, masks are our safety.  But, maybe it is time for us to consider the other masks we wear, and why, and how to strip off the ancient societal protocols of women hiding their masculine aspects, for when the social isolation ends and we can, again, walk barefaced in the light.

Carol Desjarlais 4.20.20