The Archetype of the Womb
We are held in countless containers of safety
Once there was the archetype of a nurturing womb that lived in the collective human psyche, offering comfort and assurance. This archetype was a strong and persistent one. Modern Westerners have lost this archetype. The loss of this powerful archetype leaves us with many wounds: a deep sense of isolation, alienation, disconnection, and disorientation. We are plagued and haunted by deep, primal fear. This fear drives us, continually leading us in the wrong direction — away from a return to the Archetype of the Womb.
What is the archetype of the womb?
The Archetype of the Womb, the number one in sacred geometry, is one of connectedness, interconnectedness, unity, and community. There is a birth from and return to the nurturing womb, rendering blood and darkness a sacred mystery. The mystery is held within the womb. When the universe, kosmos, is viewed as a womb, there is the awareness of a series of nested wombs held within this larger womb image — an infinite nesting of wombs within wombs. Carefully held contained space creates more carefully held contained space.
The universal womb enables the galactic womb, solar system womb, solar and earth womb, ocean womb, community and village womb, mother womb, daughter womb, cellular and quantum womb.
When this archetype has a living presence, there is an organic feeling of belonging — a constant and reliable place to return to, release to, dissolve or melt into. The womb is the place of birth and death, the before, during, and the after. There is a deep trust in knowing that the womb space holds us all — all life, all systems, all realities. There is no outside. All are held within. There is a deeply held within nested safely with within inside even more within.
The archetype of the womb in the Egyptian tradition
There is the story of Seth, the god who holds the negative or opposing force in Egyptian tradition, breaking through his mother’s womb with his impatience to be born. Perhaps this is the definition of evil: breaking this precious held space; breaking the web of connectedness and then believing that the broken web is the truth.
The loss of the Archetype of the Womb has led to a loss and devaluation of mothering energy, mothering presence, and mothers in general. I doubt any of us know what mothering energy looks like in its purest form. There are so many overlays and projections, mostly negative. Pure mother energy has fierce boundaries. We see this in the animal world. Mothers are not “nice” among birds and bears. Mothers get the job done and the main job of a mother is protection. Many human mothers in the Western world feel powerless to protect their children; rather, mothering is the experience of a slow inculcation and preparation of our young to accept the realities of life in a world of horror.
I believe if the Archetype of the Womb were present, there would be no global warming, humans would not be killing species at record rates, and there would be no war. To the mother energy who knows what it takes — the time and energy to create — life is too precious to squander. Pure mother energy also knows how each and every manifestation of life is unique, special, and essential to the whole. Pure mother energy does not need to arise only from mothers and females, but it is always a female energy.
The Archetype of the Womb is that of the container — contained space, the alchemical space within which transmutation occurs. Within this womb container all arises, transmutes, becomes, and dissolves back into the cauldron of the womb to arise yet again, again transformed, again becoming, again dissolving. A wise woman once said to me life is about transforming matter. When you are down, depressed, feeling lost, go and make something. You’ll feel better. Why? Because you will be participating with the universe in its ultimate purpose.
We Westerners envision ourselves as sitting on the outside of an unprotected planet in a dangerous solar system within a meaningless universe. Because of this, we feel acutely alone, at risk, and profoundly vulnerable, but this is not the truth of our existence.
We are held within countless containers of safety. The Earth, our mother, created a variety of systems to enclose us within layers of protection while remaining interactive with our local solar system. The atmosphere and magnetosphere are but two examples of systems created by the Earth that repel asteroids and other space debris, as well as harmful radiation, while allowing other, beneficial matter and light in. Similarly, the heliosphere of the sun encloses and holds the solar system within a contained, protected space while interacting with the galaxy as a whole, and so on. Layer upon layer of membranes that are permeable, yet protective. This more accurately describes the truth of our existence.
The archetype of the womb as the membrane
Cosmologist Brian Swimme cites the emergence of the membrane as one of the most crucial developments for the presence of life on earth.
“Really dynamic creative emergence requires isolation, removal, separation in order to articulate itself. The membrane protects complexity and creative power.”¹
I see the membrane as but another manifestation of the Archetype of the Womb. It is a womb that folds around that which has been created, to preserve and protect it, like a mother’s arms.
If you believed you were held in a within space that you shared with all the rest of life as you know it, would you consider differently how to behave?
We have lost the understanding of Source Energy, the Archetype of Connectedness.
The physical manifestations of the loss of this archetype are everywhere around us. Losing this archetype has allowed us to destroy permeable yet protective membranes. Here we are able to see how the state of our psyches directly affects physical matter. We are destroying the atmosphere, one of the layers of the womb, because we do not believe in it. Because we do not believe in it, we are losing it; we are allowing it to be destroyed. We are creating what we believe deeply. We are literally creating the reality of disconnection and alienation that we carry deep in our psyches.
Ancient bucrania as the archetype of the womb
This Archetype of the Womb has had many manifestations in human consciousness. Around 10,000 BCE it arose in the human psyche in the form of bucrania (bull head and horns). Throughout the Middle East at this time period, archaeologists begin to find the skulls and horns of wild bulls and cows buried underneath housing, embedded inside the plaster of the walls and benches, and used as a decorative motif in association with images of the Goddess. They call this image “the bull” and “male,” and mostly separate it from the Goddess images. But it is not separate and it is not male. It is yet another image of the Goddess. It is the womb of the Goddess. These bucranium are images of the horned cow, the Cow Goddess, which is a manifestation of the Archetype of the Womb.
African Hathor is a Cow Goddess. From her udders flow the milk that creates and sustains life in the cosmos. Hathor is the Goddess of Papyrus, the opener of wombs, Goddess of Love, the Mother. She is the goddess of licentiousness, ecstasy. She is also associated with the sistrum, a tambourine-type percussion instrument. Her priestesses were dancers and musicians. Her celebrations were bawdy and sexual. She is Mistress of the Vulva; wooden phalluses were left to her.
Hathor means “house of Horus”; her womb housed Horus. Horus is the level of transmutation humans aspired to in Egypt and in alchemical traditions. You need the womb within which to be transmuted. No matter how “enlightened” someone is or a tradition is, if they miss the boat on this one, it is no good. Nothing happens in isolation. No one transforms oneself — the container of your life, beliefs, and experiences transforms you. And this is held female space. We are destroying the womb container of the Earth. Global warming is nothing other than this. If we destroy the container, nothing can live, meaning nothing can transform. Womb space is generated at the core and then emanates out and around. Womb space comes from within the within, a deeply interior space which creates new deeply interior space.
Hathor is a solar Goddess. If life on earth is transformed sunlight, she is the transformer — the one who holds the space within which transmutation occurs; the vessel, container, womb. She is often depicted as a vessel. She wears a sun disc on her head between her horns. Her symbol is the mirror, which captures the sun within it and transmutes it, a reflection of the sun, herself reflecting and channeling sun. She is a Sky Goddess, often associated with Nut. She is the mother Goddess, the nurturing womb archetype.
It was Dorothy Cameron who originally pointed out that the bucrania image, so omnipresent in the cultures that worshiped the Goddess in prehistory, is a perfect replica of a human female’s uterus, fallopian tubes, and ovaries.²
We know that ancient people knew human anatomy because they engaged in the process of excarnation. Excarnation is a process where the bodies of the recently dead were left out in the open air to be exposed to the elements — sun, wind, rain, and vultures — their flesh offered up as food. The priest/priestess carrying out the service would have observed the internal organs at certain stages of decomposition; they would have seen the female reproductive organs in various stages of pregnancy. The flesh they offered to the vultures, the sun, the wind, and the air for further transmutation. The cleaned and bleached bones they carried back to their shrines or temples, placed them into clay pots or baskets, and buried them under the floors of their houses. Undoubtedly, there were rituals involving the bucrania that invoked returning them, in the form of their cleaned and prepared bones, to the womb of the Goddess for rebirth.
Bucrania images were often created out of plaster with actual horns. These carefully crafted images protruded from walls of tomb-like spaces, and adorned alters or the ends of benches. They were painted onto pots and clay vessels as well. Later, the image is stylized into the downward-facing triangle. The Egyptian hieroglyph for uterus is V.
Barbara G. Walker writes,
“Perhaps the most common manifestation of the Great Mother as Preserver was the white, horned, milk-giving Moon-cow, still sacred in India as a symbol of Kali.”³
As Lat, Al-lat, Latona, Lado, Leto, or Leda, she was known as the “milk giver”; Io, Europa, Hera, Brigid, horned-cow Goddesses all. Cow as Creatrix. In shrines uncovered in the Neolithic village of Çatal Hüyük (circa 7th mill. BCE) located in what is now Turkey, we find bucranium lining the walls, or protruding from walls underneath painted images of the large, spreading wings of vultures, being born from between the legs of the awesome frog Goddess. From Prehistoric Crete are images of bucrania and bulls, often with a labrys (double axe) symbol of cyclical nature of life/death nonduality in its head. In Sardinia (circa 4th mill. BCE) in underground, egg-shaped tombs, images of bucrania hang over doors and entryways as well as emerge from and line the circular walls within as a recurring, repeating symbol.
In an astounding image from Egypt in Saqqara — the cemetery site for early dynastic Memphis (3100–2800 BCE) 300 Bucrania surround tomb #3504, excavated by Emery. The heads are made of mud, but the horns are genuine. They must have collected them for some time. These 300 line perfectly the outer wall of the tomb complex. It is a powerful image. The idea of rebirth within the womb of the Goddess exists long before this, and worship of Hathor has a powerful and central presence in Egypt at this time, and yet in written descriptions of the tomb I find only references to the bull and the kingship.
Hathor is mistress of the West; the netherworld was located in the West. She was well known for her ability to revive the dead. She greets the dead with food to sustain them on their journey. Why is this left out of the interpretation of 300 bucrania surrounding a tomb in early Egypt?
Hathor is a midwife. She is present at birth, she is the opener of wombs, she is the one to go to when one needs help with fertility, sexuality. She is a healer. The active presence of this archetype gives way for physical human manifestations that will embody the archetype. Hathor as a midwife Goddess, a healer and sage gives way to the wise woman, the midwife, the Strega, the Curandera, the witch. Without her, there is no place for these kinds of women. Without her, women who embody these particular powers become frightening aberrations.
The swallow is the sacred animal of Hathor. Swallows are associated with the sun and fire. Contrary to most recent Goddess scholarship, which places male energy firmly with the sun and female with the moon, the Goddesses of Egypt are mostly sun Goddesses. Osiris is the Moon God, who dies and is resurrected. In the Mideast there was the tradition of the sun Goddess and her consort Moon God husband/lover/son, who died and resurrected like the moon on a monthly basis. Some say the story of Jesus was yet a continuation of this; the Moon God who was sacrificed ritually to ensure fertility and everlasting life.
Non-duality in ancient Egyptian belief
Studying the Egyptian pantheon does not allow one to make definitive statements. There is an ambiguity, an overlapping, a changeability to their Goddesses and Gods that can be confusing, but also instructional, especially for us Westerners with our often black-and-white view of the world. The Gods and Goddesses of Egypt inhabit the meaning of both. They exchange roles, names; they are at once animals, symbols, words, and opposing energies. At different times they are different elements.
One reason for this is the long time span documented of Egyptian belief. Changes in belief are mirrored in the changing roles of Goddesses and Gods. However, this changeability is also indicative of the nondual view of life that the Egyptians held, which is also revealed in their views on evil. Things were not evil as in bad or wrong, they were in opposition. They were twins, another part of the totality or whole, another side, another aspect. They embodied energies we now label as evil, but I do not believe the Egyptians saw it that way. These energies are what we now call “the shadow,” the repressed and cut-off parts of ourselves, but they were not shadows in Egyptian belief. They were out in the open, and they were revered. They were powers humans had access to.
With this in mind, it is important to move to the other aspect of Hathor, our womb Goddess, lest we get wrapped up in modern views of mother energy as only a nurturing force. Hathor is another manifestation of Sekhmet, her twin or dual/nondual aspect, and Sekhmet is the fierce Goddess in Egypt. She is a lion, fire, what some would call a destroyer Goddess — the destructive side of creation, but also, like Kali, the one who cuts through illusion to truth — the one who will kill you and cut you down to protect that which she loves, which is nothing less than all of life itself.
Sekhmet as archetype of the womb
Like Durga, the fierce Hindu Goddess who rides a lion, she is a bloodthirsty Goddess. In fact, Sekhmet’s story is very similar to Durga’s in that she is invoked to clean up the Earth when things are out of control, and that this involves the drinking of blood. Sekhmet has been given the task of destroying humans who have forgotten about Ra. Her force becomes uncontrollable once unleashed and it seems all of humanity will be destroyed. She is reined in through drinking pomegranate juice laced with beer, which she, thinking it is blood, laps up eagerly, becoming drunk and passing out.
And yet the Sekhmet in this story, the fierce murderous Goddess to be feared, is only one facet of this powerful lion. There is so much more to this Goddess that has been overlooked, most evident in the fact that she is the dual aspect of Hathor, the nurturing mother womb. Like the womb itself, with its ability to carry and create life as well as its ability to bleed and destroy life, to Hathor’s sparrow is Sekhmet’s lion. The womb is awash with life-giving blood.
Sekhmet’s name means “the powerful one.” She is the “dynamo of Divine Light and energy that drives the universe.”⁴ She too wears the sun disc on her head. The lion’s face is a reflection of the sun. Don’t get too close to either.
Intriguing to me is the fact that Sekhmet derives her name from the word sekhem. In Dreams of Isis, Normandi Ellis tells of being in the temple of Edfu and seeing an image of a lion-headed serpent, tongue thrust forward between her teeth, “Buddha-like.”
“She is the goddess of the life-force herself-Sekhmet. She is the fire that arises up in all things the way a flame leaps to a bit of wood to consume it, or the way life essence shoots up through the ground each spring.”⁵
Sekhem is the life force, the kundalini, the numen, chi. Ellis tells us sekhem literally means “the powers.” Sekhem is the life force generated in and rising out of the womb space. Mother is life force, creatrix/destroyer. This is not a passive force — a subservient, patient force. This is the magic that moves through beings and enlivens them. Mother=life energy. And life energy is a blade that cuts both ways.
If Hathor is pregnancy and birth, Sekhmet is menstruation, menopause, and puberty; the woman raging on hormones, the woman who needs some space. In our so-called modern world, the madwoman, the shadowed and split-off part.
Female lions are the hunters in that species. They know how to take care of themselves and their young. They understand protection. What is the big mystery of the Sphinx? If you were the pharaoh, would you choose anyone other to be your protectress in the afterworld? This is an awesome power and it is held in the womb matrix — the archetype of the self-contained, self-creating universe. This is the part of woman, womb, mother that Christianity and so many Western religions left out and why women are so conflicted and split, disconnected. Sekhmet is no “nice girl.” She is no doormat. Her boundaries are clear. The Archetype of the Womb is a powerhouse of creativity. Sekhmet. We have a lion in our wombs. No one ever told me that, but I knew it all the while. I experience her red liquid every moon.
Sekhmet is associated and depicted with the color red. She is called the “scarlet lady.” She is Lilith of the Red Sea; Inanna, the whore; Magdalene of the red hair and red dress. She is blood. We “see red” when we are angry. We are angry when our boundaries are violated. Sekhmet is the protective boundary of the membrane, saying “No!” We see the Hathor’s/Sekhmet’s dual/nondual nature repeated over and over again in the Eve/Lilith, Virgin Mary/Mary Magdalene relationships, to name only a couple.
Creation and destruction are dual aspects of this same archetypal energy. Revering and honoring destructive power is a way of being in relationship with it rather than hoping that by denying it, it will go away. We must dance with the fires of creativity, we must die to be reborn, we must cut through our egoic tendencies to accomplish any real work on ourselves. In the container of the womb it is the fire, the heat, which transforms.
This dual power is the womb and it holds us all. Even in death we are yet held by the womb. Since there is no outside, all is eternally present. With the presence of Sekhmet in the Archetype of the Womb, death is not bad, other, or an unexplainable horror. Death (not gratuitous violence, not war, not out-of-control rage) is essential to life. It is a gift. The dead are ever present (there is nowhere else to go). Within the womb container, death is the ultimate transformation. Ancient and indigenous people understand this; the ancestors are interacted with, held close for the good of the living. Death is a realm, not an ending.
If our psyches held the Archetype of the Womb, all aspects of it, would there be less confusion? If we honored the archetypal power of Sekhmet, would we be less inclined to rail against it? Egyptians, fearful Sekhmet would go on the attack again, were pious in honoring her. There was the belief that destructive forces can be riled or kept in line through human actions.
Restoring the Archetype of the Womb to human consciousness could do a lot toward restoring harmony on Earth.
© Theresa C. Dintino 2024
Works cited
[1] Notes from a retreat, Powers of the Cosmos, Santa Sabina Center, San Rafael, CA, October 2002.
[2] D.O. Cameron, Symbols of Birth and of Death in the Neolithic Era (London: Kenyon-Deane, 1981).
[3] 1 Notes from a retreat, Powers of the Cosmos, Santa Sabina Center, San Rafael, CA, October 2002.
[4] Normandi Ellis, Dreams of Isis (Illinois: Quest Books, 1995), 180.
[5] Ibid., 179.
