[UA] Quarduple Goddess?

[Greg Stolze]

I was thinking about the old triple goddess thing yesterday -- Maiden,
Mother, Crone -- and considering it in light of the other great western
culture female diad -- Madonna and Whore.

Clearly there's overlap.  The Madonna figure has elements of the Mother,
but she's often a strangely unsexual mother.  (The Blessed Virgin Mary is
the more obvious example.)

The Whore archetype is the outsider, the rejected other, the Mother's
shadow -- the woman who welcomes as a positive good the sexuality that is,
for the Mother, a duty or a necessity.  In a lot of the more priggish
paradigms, the Mother is ideally a woman who went from Virgin to Mother by
having sex ONCE.

So what you MIGHT toy with here is the idea of Whore as liminal role.  To
get to the next stage -- from Virgin to Mother -- you have to brave the
perils of sexuality (which were, remember, substantially more perilous in
mythic times).  You have to go into the darkness.

That idea seems pretty solid to me, actually.  Now, the question is -- can
a similar construction be used where the Whore is the 'switching station'
between Mother and Crone?  It takes a little more work, but I'm thinking
that the first transformation is sort of the Whore's positive side: At the
very worst, an ugly necessity and, hey, the Virgin MIGHT enjoy it.  Going
from Mother to Crone may involve a trip through the Whore's worse side --
regret, bitterness, ostracization.

So, instead of a Triple Goddess, you get a Quadruple Goddess -- the three
visible and accepted roles, and the unacknowledged fourth.

In UA terms... er, well, uh, I haven't got that completely worked out.  I
certainly think that each of the four roles (Virgin, Crone, Mother, Harlot)
is prevalent enough to be an archetype.

-G.

As it turns out, my memory is far less detail-oriented than my imagination.

www.waylay.com
www.thehungersite.com



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