Unearthing the Goddess in Leadership

‘Nyx’ by Amanda Clark

For the past while, I’ve been stewing and swirling in the design of the Sovereignty Goddess Incubator. For me, a critical component of this programme is to explore how the earliest human cultures worshipped the godhead as the Great Mother who through sacred union would become an expression of both divine feminine and divine masculine. 

One of the greatest travesties of the evolution of western monoculture is that we are missing the image of the mythical feminine in our collective consciousness. For many, she remains only in the memory of the collective UNconsciousness.

In Ireland for over a thousand years now, the overculture has seen and placed value on God or masculine, without Goddess or feminine.

‘Psyche and Cupid’ by Elihu Vedder, 1836–1923

The dangers of this cannot be understated as this affects how we lead in our work, our communities, our national arenas, and our global collective.

Mythic images have a tremendous impact on our cultural psyche. To lead from the feminine we have to be able to dream, to imagine from a feminine place. We have to see her image in nature, in the cosmos, and most crucially within ourselves and our own bodies. We have to speak to her and allow her to speak to us without fear of perceived insanity. 

The reality is, I simply cannot be a feminine leader without her. 

‘Cuchulain in Battle’ by J.C. Leyendecker, 1911

Despite our having so many rich stories of goddesses, the prevalent mythic image in Ireland has been the male hero warrior. In Irish children’s books, in Irish schools, the person who everyone knows is Cú Chulainn (Hound of Culann) - the almighty, all-conquering, lone hero who’ll sever your head if you look at him sideways. 

I say this in jest but the cult of the warrior has filtrated down through time into modern leadership. There are always exceptions but for the most part, traditional leadership has been hierarchical, individualistic, top-down decision-making, focused on the gain of the few, making sacrifices at the expense of others (usually the vulnerable) in order to win because the end always justifies the means.

And yet long before Christian monks recorded the exploits of Cú Chulainn, our ancestors built great megaliths in honour of the goddess, the Great Mother. Monuments like Newgrange attest to this. A tomb womb which for most of the year lies in darkness until the winter solstice when it is fertilized by the light of the rising sun regenerating the sleeping remains of the forbearers and waking the goddess from slumber so as to bring new life with the promise of longer days. 

It was from the cosmic womb of the goddess that we were birthed and it was back to her we went after we died in an eternal regenerative cycle of birth, life, death, and rebirth. 

And so, the mythos of the feminine as divine Creatrix, as leader of the community must be reclaimed if we are to infuse and disrupt dominant leadership models with feminine values. 

She’s not lost. She exists in the sea of the unconscious, under the overtones of the Christian scribes, you can see her everywhere on the land. And she is calling us.

My heart quivered in affirmation recently when in a recording I heard pioneering archaeologist Marija Gimbutas say:

“We have to reinvent the human species—or perish. We must reexamine history and start putting back some parts that we have left out—namely, the earth, the body, the feminine, and the unconscious.”

This is the calling of the Sovereignty Goddess Leader - to reclaim our history, our Great Mother earth, our bodies, the mythic feminine, and our co-creative relationship with the Otherworld - making that which is unconscious, conscious. 

I have a final couple of spaces available on the Sovereignty Goddess Incubator, my 6-month leadership programme beginning this Samhain.

Do you hear her call?