Woman as Power: The "Durga" Quality

Unveiling the potency of the dark feminine

Woman is perhaps best known for her feminine qualities of compassion, gentleness, and nurturance, but there is also a shadowy, enigmatic, and more primordial essence of woman, one that encompasses qualities such as destructiveness, rage, cruelty, and chaos. These qualities are often overlooked, under-emphasised, or sometimes are even wrongly attributed to the masculine. This darker aspect of the feminine, however, is at the core of its very metaphysical substance and one cannot understand woman or the feminine without understanding the nature of what we will refer to as the “Durga quality.”

The Durga quality is an element of Absolute Woman and to understand Absolute Woman, we need to understand the metaphysical dyad. It is important to note that sex exists first as a transcendent principle and then as biological categories of men and women. The reason the biological categories exist at all is because the metaphysical dyad of Absolute Man and Absolute Woman existed first, before physical men and women. The concepts of Absolute Man and Absolute Woman are derived from something divine (this is what is being referred to with terms like the divine masculine and divine feminine), and it must be stated that these “archetypes” do not derive from the “collective unconscious”, but from the transcendent. Absolute Man and Woman are not to be understood as psychological projections from some obscure nook in the psyche, but as principles that have a real and eternal metaphysical existence. The quality of the feminine that we will be describing is thus an integral part of the fabric of reality, not something that is a socially conditioned expression of gender nor something that is limited by biological categories of sex.

The general idea is that the creation of the cosmos takes place through the interaction of these two principles: masculine and feminine. Those familiar with the Seven Hermetic Principles will see this reflected in the seventh principle that “gender is in everything”. The unity of the masculine and feminine is essential for creation and so we must consider what value the darker side of the feminine holds in this regard.

The Absolute Woman, which is to say, the pure distilled feminine principle, represents the passive principle, while Absolute Man represents the active principle. The male is the form, the female is the matter. By form, we mean the ordering principle that stirs and arouses the principle of motion and directs it towards a particular pattern. The feminine is always moving, always changing, always fluid, she is the ever-dancing Shakti. By matter, we do not mean physical matter in the organic sense, but rather something that is mysterious and unfathomable. In its most primordial state, this cosmic Matter (henceforth capitalised to distinguish it from profane matter) is actually a terrifying chaos whose endless and unceasing flux would undoubtedly drive us to madness were we to look upon it without the protection of the veil of illusion that is grafted over our lives. Matter is unrealised potential. In order to realise its potential, it must be given direction and “form” by the masculine Spirit. Though Matter is inherently devoid of form itself, it can take up any form. It is a nothing that can become everything when it has been awakened and “impregnated” by Spirit. 

The perpetual motion of this chaotic flux of matter is related to the changeability of the feminine. Woman is said to be fickle, inconstant, and unsteady. These are not moral qualities to be ascribed to individuals, but impersonal, objective elements that are neither good or bad- they simply are, as part of “nature proper”. Woman is also said to be lunar, capricious as the waxing and waning of the moon, and like the moon she is reflective of light which is cast onto her but she does not generate her own. The changeability exhibited by the feminine is not the same as the type exhibited by the masculine. In the female, it arises from the material “plasticity” which is the counterpart of the static “fixedness” that occurs once the raw matter has been shaped, like a clay that was once mouldable is no longer thus once fired in a kiln, whereas in the male, changeability is linked to the “seminal”, creative, and active principle. With the male version, there is a self-directed agency, whereas with the female, it is only a reaction to an external stimulus. Sometimes the feminine principle is referred to as the wet principle, just as wetness cannot keep its form and needs a structure to contain it in order to give it any permanence. This changeability, however, is like the masque of an actor, only surface level and concealing a lack of Being (which is the quality of the masculine). On a more mundane plane, this dynamic of a plasticity that becomes rigid and fixed once given form can be seen in women’s tendency towards rigid dogmatism, which they often conceal under the guise of conformity or in a general dislike or apprehension towards change. This rigidity is the result of the passive way in which an idea was received. 

Because cosmic Matter is always in flux, it cannot ever have solidity and stability on its own. The best it can do is become imbued by a form imprinted onto it by intelligent design, but because Matter is feminine and the feminine is destructive, it also encompasses that which occurs with the decay of time: entropy. Even the form imprinted on Matter will eventually give way. Matter can never become eternal Spirit. However, eternal Spirit also cannot achieve its full potential without Matter. The masculine has no power of its own, it can only guide, direct, and shape power. And power is Shakti, a word that means both “power” and “bride”, and refers to the divine feminine. In order for Shakti to become anything other than destruction (because she represents the end of the pole that is chaos, as opposed to order, and can therefore only be thus), she must have limits and order imposed upon her, in the same way that a cacophony of noise can only become beautiful music once the rules of musical harmony are imposed upon it. Without the noise, there would be no potential for music, only total silence, and so it would not matter if one had the most brilliant set of musical rules if they cannot be applied in practice and enjoyed. But without the rules, the noise would only be deafening and dissonant.

A need for the “other”, for something external to provide form, direction, and purpose, is a fundamental quality of the feminine. This passivity and receptivity constitutes its most basic essence. Representing this are two primary archetypes of the feminine. One is Demeter, the Great Goddess, Mother Earth, the Magna Mater Genetrix. She is linked to the bright face of the Moon and to the force at work wherever there is change, alteration, and transformation— such as birth and death. The passive principle constitutes her elementary substance, as the mother who is literally impregnated to birth a child, where even the mechanics of the sperm penetrating the egg and directing it to create life are a microcosm of the heavenly interplay between the cosmic Spirit and Matter. Demeter still represents the chaotic yin quality, but in marriage, she becomes the wife whose nature is restrained by the bonds of marriage. She is purified from the raw feminine by being tied to and oriented towards form (a husband) and nurturing form (her children). 

We can think of Demeter as a similar expression of the astrological Moon exalted in the sign of Taurus, where the fixed earth quality of the sign stabilises the natural inconstancy of the Moon and gives her fertile soil with which to create life. In the Moon’s own water sign of Cancer, she is moody and tumultuous, reflecting the ups and downs of Fortuna. But when she is given some stability, then she is at her best, reaching her highest life-giving potential.

The second archetype is that of Durga/Aphrodite, another form of the Great Goddess. Durga is the best expression of the Aphroditic principle of the raw, primordial womanhood that represents the dissolving, overwhelming, ecstatic, chaotic, immeasurable force of gleaming sex, as opposed to Demetrian womanhood where that principle is limited and restrained through marriage. Durga is a Hindu goddess whose name means “inaccessible one”. She appears in multiple guises, associated with protection, strength, and motherhood in her luminous and benefic manifestations, and with destruction and war in her dark and terrible manifestations. Her myths often centre around combatting demonic forces that threaten the cosmic order. Her most well-known appearance is as Kālī. As the story goes, Durga was attacked by demons and she responded with such fury and rage that it caused her to turn dark (she is often depicted as either black or dark blue). Her bloodlust spiralled out of control and threatened to destroy the entire universe, the embodiment of time, chaos, and destruction. She is only able to stop her dance of destruction thanks to the intervention of Lord Shiva, a manifestation of the supreme masculine principle. It is this inaccessible, destructive, ruthless quality of the feminine, this “Durga quality”, that we are now prepared to explore more fully.