The Rising of the Great Mother Through the Process of Dismemberment

Written By Erin Touponse

I was recently in meditation when Mary Magdalene came through as a guide. I am not particularly bound by any formal religious structure; in fact, I have often found myself resistant to organized doctrine, particularly where it has been shaped by patriarchal structures. And yet, I found her compelling.

There was something about her presence that invited me to dig deeper—not necessarily into religion, but into the mysteries of the Divine Feminine and an ancient pattern that seems to repeat itself across cultures:

Origin. Descent. Dismemberment. Re-membering. Rebirth.

Let's begin at the beginning.

For those of you who know me, I have been working with the Celtic goddess Danu for some time now. She is associated with the ancestral mother, the land and the waters—the mysterious source from which the Tuatha Dé Danann emerge.

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Máthair na talún agus na n-uiscí, coinnigh sinn i do sholas agus i do shíocháin. (Mother of the land and the waters, hold us in your light and in your peace.)

Danu asks us to remember where we come from—the land, the waters, the ancestors and our belonging.  She represents the Origin.

If Danu is the Origin, Inanna/Ishtar represents the Descent.  Through her, we enter what has been hidden.  In the ancient story of Inanna's descent into the Underworld, she passes through seven gates. 

At each gate, something is removed from her.

• At the first, her crown—authority.

• At the second, the beads from her neck—adornment.

• At the third, the beads from her breast—status and protection.

• At the fourth, her breastplate—sexuality and desire.

• At the fifth, her ring—power.

• At the sixth, her measuring rod and line—judgment, order and control.

• And at the seventh, her royal garment—identity itself.

By the seventh gate, there is nothing left for her to hide behind.  Inanna does not simply visit the darkness. She cannot enter it while remaining fully identified with the person she was in the world above.  Everything she has used to define herself is stripped away.

This is the dismemberment of the self and perhaps this is something many of us recognize.  In Tarot, this would be the Tower card.

There are moments in our lives when the identities we have constructed can no longer carry us forward. The roles, beliefs, relationships, protections and stories that once told us who we were begin to fall away.

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We descend. We become scattered.  And somewhere within that scattering begins the possibility of remembering.

Or perhaps more accurately—  re-membering, putting the members back together.

And this is where Isis enters.

In the Egyptian myth, Osiris is dismembered and his body scattered across the land. Isis searches for the pieces, gathers them and restores what has been torn apart.  She does not prevent the dismemberment, she gathers what remains.

Through Isis we encounter healing, devotion, magic and restoration. She becomes the archetype of the one who walks among the scattered pieces and patiently brings the fragmented self back together.  Not necessarily into the person we were before, but into someone capable of being born from what remains.

Danu gives us the beginning.
Inanna/Ishtar  takes us into the descent.
Isis teaches us how to re-member.

And then Mary Magdalene appears.  She is the Witness.

She stands at the threshold between death and resurrection. She remains when something has ended and she is there to recognize what emerges in its place.

Magdalene represents devotion, inner knowing and the ability to recognize transformation when it appears before us, because after we have descended, after the pieces have been gathered and the self has been re-membered, there is still one final act: 

We must recognize who we have become and then we must carry that wisdom back into the world.

Perhaps this is the rising of the Great Mother—not the story of one goddess moving unchanged through different cultures, but an ancient pattern of feminine wisdom that continues to reveal itself in different forms.

Danu — Origin.
Inanna/Ishtar — Descent.
Isis — Re-membering.
Mary Magdalene — Witness.

Origin.

Descent/Dismemberment.

Re-membering.

Resurrection.

The deepest mystery is that we do not rise despite having been broken apart, we rise because we have learned how to gather the pieces differently.

And perhaps this is why Mary Magdalene came to me, not to lead me toward religion or doctrine, but to remind me of something much older—the sacred cycle of becoming.  We come from something, we descend, we are stripped of what we thought defined us, we break apart, we gather the pieces and we rise. 

But we do not rise as the person who first entered the darkness, we rise re-membered.

Perhaps the Great Mother has never belonged to one name, one religion or one story. Maybe she has always been there—in the land and the waters, at the gates of the Underworld, gathering the scattered pieces, standing beside the empty tomb…. waiting for us to recognize her…waiting for us to recognize ourselves.

Perhaps Mary Magdalene did not come to show me who she was, but to ask me who I am becoming.

What within you is ready to be re-membered?