Yoga Journal’s archives series is a curated collection of articles originally published in past issues beginning in 1975. This article about the Divine Mother first appeared in the July-August 1993 issue of Yoga Journal.

The mother, as C. G. Jung noted more than half a century ago, is the single most significant archetype, or energy-laden image, we hold in our psyches. The mother is our first experience in the world. It is in her womb that we first hear the sounds of the external environment. It is through her that we emerge from the relative darkness of her body into the brightness of the outer world. It is the warmth of her skin that we feel before anything else. It is the milk from her breasts that satisfies our hunger and thirst and brings us comfort. It is her soothing words or songs that lull us to sleep. For the first few years of our life, it is the mother who takes care of our every need, who instructs us in being human, who nurtures and guides our rapid growth.

Even in our modern society, where mothering is often done by the childhood of humanity, the significance of the maternal experience is nevertheless formative. Our mother image determines to a considerable extent how we relate to other women, to other people in general, to life as a whole, and even to our own body.

In Jungian terms, the archetype of the mother goes beyond our individual experience. It is anchored in the collective unconscious, which extends beyond our personal biography. Jung’s theory of archetypes is of course controversial, but we need not rely on it to understand the significance of the mother for the overwhelming majority of people, regardless of culture, gender, race, or creed.

The mother dominates our consciousness at the most impressionable period of our life. Similarly, when we look back upon the childhood of humanity, the time of the paleolithic and neolithic, the religious or spiritual domain reflects an overwhelming concern with the mother—the Earth Mother, the Great Female, who gives birth to humans and all other beings and things, who is responsible for the cycles of Nature, and on whom we all depend for our life.

Considering the primordial nature of the mother archetype, it is not surprising that it surfaces in many, if not most, religious traditions of the world—even those that are pronouncedly patriarchal. Perhaps the most striking example of a patriarchal religious tradition with a prominent mother image is Catholicism. The Virgin Mary, who is worshipped as the all-holy mother of Jesus and Queen of Heaven, is a potent archetype for millions of Christians. She is hailed as the new Eve who brings not death, as did the old Eve, but immortal life. Faith in Mary has in recent years been strengthened by the Marian apparitions at Guadalupe in Mexico, Lourdes in Mother Meera France, Fatima in Portugal, and Medjugorje in Yugoslavia.

Few Christians are aware of the strong historical and symbolic connection between Marian worship and the veneration of earlier, non-Christian mother-goddesses, such as Isis and Diana.

The Divine Mother is an image that has long been blurred or even buried altogether by patriarchal conceptions of the Ultimate Reality as Father and Creator. After Nietzsche, we even declared the death of that patriarchal God, taking recourse to more abstract notions of the Divine. But our abstractions generally fail to feed us with inspiration and hope, and so we feel peculiarly adrift and ill at ease.

Thus the living spiritual traditions of the East, which have challenged and enriched our Western heritage millennium after millennium, hold a strong attraction for many of us. There, especially in the tradition of Hinduism, the image of the Divine Mother shines with undiminished brightness, as it has ever since the dawn of human civilization.

Hinduism recognizes the existence of beings whose consciousness is steeped in the Divine but who are yet endowed with a human body. These great beings are the “incarnations,” or avatars, who are not simply advanced human beings or superb mystics who have attained union with the Divine through steadfast spiritual discipline. Rather they are beings descended from the radiance of the Divine, who have taken on human form to aid the spiritual maturation of humanity.

Some of these extraordinary beings embody the maternal aspect of the Divine. They are the “mothers” (matajis), whose purpose is to draw us toward the Divine through their boundless love and nurturing with hearts as large as the cosmos itself. Indeed, their palpable love can be experienced by anyone. They mesh, if we allow it, with the mother archetype within us, becoming singularly potent carriers of meaning and personal transformation. Reality is always larger than any conceptual net we may cast over it.