sorendreier  October 18 2013

A few months ago I started to write an article on the archetypical ‘wise woman’… the grandmother, the crone or the elder woman.

I searched online for some information about the attributes of this archetype in different cultures, and found that quite a number of people have been giving thought to this. The subject is not new to me, but getting more deeply into it has always been unappealing due to a few factors.

One is, of course, the ugliness woven through the western archetypes… I mean… who wants to line themselves up with a crone or a hag or a witch? Another is my own resistance to the ‘I’m a goddess’ thinking: of course you are but then again we all have the divine spark… so no ego elevation there. I’m imagining that the divine feminine includes all archetypes in some proportion – the youthful, maternal and elder feminine energies – and perhaps we all contain some of each, so I’ll go with that.

I realize that it’s likely due to yang dominance and religious conditioning that some cultures were unable to see what the appeal might be in the woman who is past childbearing age. Older, nature-oriented cultures seemed to take the opposite track; granting reverence to the grandmothers and giving them the final word in all major decisions. So the cultural archetypes are something to look at. What did nature-oriented peoples know that the yang mind couldn’t see?

I have asked myself some questions about what today’s grandmother would be up to, and what her natural maternal and warrior attributes would look like when they reach beyond youth and the immediate family and community.

Well… from my own experience I can say that one thing grandmothers do is they watch. They watch how things begin and how they grow, what influences the direction of the growth, what emerges from the ‘differences’ mix, what gets in the way of the flow, which inner shadows breed conflict, how women resolve conflict and how men do, and what can erode the dignity of our journey.

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