The Mother of All Mothers

We've spent enough timelessness on witches, who, to the extent that they exist, must be a deviation from (or privation of) some proper quintessence or prototype; they must exist as a kind of negative archetype that is parasitic on the positive. Which reminds us of a passage in the Tao Te Ching that asks,

What is a good man but a bad man's teacher? What is a bad man but a good man's job?

Likewise, what is a miserable feminist witch but a good gal's teacher? 

And while looking up the exact wording of those quips, I found some passages that go to the deepest cosmic principle of metaphysical motherhood, which can never be strictly defined but only alluded to. Try as we might to nail down a cutandtry definition, IT'S NOT ABOUT THE NAIL!:

There was something formless and perfect / before the universe was born. / It is serene. Empty. / Solitary. Unchanging. / Infinite. Eternally present. / It is the mother of the universe.

The Tao is called the Great Mother: / empty yet inexhaustible, / it gives birth to infinite worlds.

All things are born of being. / Being is born of non-being.

The Tao gives birth to One. / One gives birth to Two. / Two gives birth to Three. / Three gives birth to all things.

There are some more passages about what to do about this Great Mother of all mothers and Womb of all Being:

I am different from other people. / I drink from the Great Mother's breasts.

Know the male, / yet keep to the female: / receive the world in your arms. / If you receive the world, / the Tao will never leave you / and you will be like a child.

All things have their backs to the female / and stand facing the male. / When male and female combine, all things achieve harmony.

Most mysterious indeed.  I can't help thinking of an equally mythterious passage from Finnegans Wake:

In the name of Annah the Allmaziful, the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her rill be rung, unhemmed as it is uneven!

Her untitled mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest has gone by many names at disjointed times.

Names such as Great Mother, Tao, Shakti, Prakriti, Maya, Ground, etc. 

This is convenient: I just read a chapter called The Divine Feminine, from Keys to the Beyond, by Patrick Laude. The first point to bear in mind is that "the Feminine takes us, in a metaphysical context, radically beyond the realm of human sexes and genders." What we know of as "masculine and feminine" down here are but reflections of 

a polarity governing the whole of creation; it is but one of the things constituting the masculine or feminine genders, which in their turn, apply to levels of existence where sexual polarity has no role, except in a symbolic sense (Hani, in Laude).

So,

while the terrestrial experience of the Feminine is a direct manifestation of Divine Femininity, the latter remains completely independent of the limitations inherent to human sexual differences (Laude).

For Schuon, Mary represents "the epitome of the Feminine in divinis," which means that he takes things a bit farther than most Christians do. Analogously, as there are high and low Christologies, one might say that he articulates a high Mariology -- or, to rejoyce what was said above, a mamafesta memorialising the Mosthighest. 

Therefore, Mary isn't just the one "chosen among all women," but an exemplar of "the Divine Essence in its super-ontological Mystery." 

Super-ontological, as in "There was something formless and perfect / before the universe was born" that gives birth even to being. In other words, the Divine Essence must be Beyond-Being. She is indeed the Everliving Bringer of Plurabilities, the O prior even to One.

Or so it seems. We'll continue up this trail in the next post.