Psychology of the Divine Feminine
Taking Masculinity Beyond It's Limits
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So many men today are looking for a positive vision for masculinity’s future. We feel a desire to hold onto masculinity, but it seems like everyone talking about this is holding onto far too much regardless of its quality. We also feel a desire to change and evolve masculinity, but it seems like everyone talking about that is blaming everything on masculinity because it’s inherently toxic. Personally I think there is wisdom in either perspective because either side holds partial truths that need to be honoured. In this essay today I’m going to chart a way through that difficulty with the masculine archetype of the Divine Feminine.
Already you might be thinking, “the masculine archetype of the Divine Feminine? Isn’t that a bit contradictory?” As I’ve discussed in other essays on this substack, myths are the stories a person uses to develop themselves and orient themselves through the world. As such, when I talk about the divine feminine here I am specifically talking about the stories men tell themselves in regards to women and femininity.
Mythologically, the feminine often represents the unknown, or that which exists beyond what you currently know. If you want to evolve masculinity then that means you need a myth, a story, about that which exists beyond what masculinity currently is, which is, obviously, femininity. I know that seems a bit strange and perhaps a bit confusing, but by the end of this essay you’ll begin to see how truly profound that is.
However, one caveat I’d like to make upfront is that the Divine Feminine isn’t about having a lovey dovey view of women as these special, innocent and pure creatures. The Divine Feminine is not about viewing women through rose-coloured glasses, but instead a better way of looking at the entire complexity of masculinity and femininity, especially in regards to your own development as a man. As I argued in my last essay “Psychology of the Succubus” you are already living in a culture defined by the myth of the Succubus. I’ll summarize all of that in a second, but I highly recommend reading that essay at some point to understand the historical evolution of that myth.
The Succubine Repression
Either way, you may be asking yourself at this point why any of this is necessary. Remember our goal in this essay is to talk about the evolution of masculinity, which means that we have to begin evolving beyond masculine conformity, or the rules and regulations that tell us how we have to feel, think, and act as men. This is called hyper-specialization, we narrow ourselves into this one, single definition, and that becomes very limiting because anything outside of that hyper-narrow role is no longer available to us. In this way then, the Divine Feminine serves as an Anima function, which basically just means that it begins to open up that narrow definition1.
The Succubus, however, is what is called an archetype or a psychological complex in regards to women from the perspective of men1, 2, 3. She defines how we as men view women and the various emotions we have in regards to women. As such, she represents the masculine conformity that currently tells us how we should treat women and how we think women should be, which obvious or not, also affects how we view ourselves as men.
As a symbol of femininity she represents all that our culture has associated with femininity and the Succubus is a seductive demonic female. She is untamed emotion and hysterical irrationality. She is the cause of the shameful sexual impulses that men have, like literally people believed the Succubus existed and was literally responsible for sexual thoughts that men had.
Such a myth is used to justify sexual repression, especially of women, in order to protect men from their sinful thoughts and feelings. The more we felt our sexual impulses the more we felt justified in repressing female sexuality. Now that porn has become so ubiquitous and easily accessible, we’ve in many ways projected our sexuality onto porn itself. The NoFap movement is little more than a succubine movement, but that may be a conversation for another time.
Due her relation to sexuality and power, embedded within the Succubus is a deep shame. She represents our rejection, demonization, and hatred of our own sexuality as men. She represents our need to use power over others in order to earn self-worth and self-love. Unless we submit ourselves to the laws of the Succubus, we feel powerless and ashamed. Through this shame she locks us in place, preventing us from developing as men.
To evolve beyond the limitations of the Succubus we would have to face this shame by challenging our masculinity, by challenging that hyper-narrowed definition, but that would make us a pussy. The need to be a powerful masculine man is living by the Succubus. We would have to challenge our desire for power but, again that would make us weak and unworthy. We would have to challenge our sexual weakness but that would require us just to admit that we’re scared of women and our own capacity for sexual violence.
Notice how with that last sentence your defenses went up. The obvious implication is that you actually have a capacity for sexual violence. I’m not trying to convince you that you do, so I’ll get to that in a minute so please just bear with me on this. It makes perfect sense if that makes you feel outraged, like who am I to say that you have the capacity for such an atrocity? But that reaction is exactly what I’m talking about. Through shame, the Succubus prevents us from ever admitting to ourselves that we could. To even think about it fills you with a perfectly expected amount of shame, like, “ugh no I could never do that, I would be so ashamed of myself” but again, that is what it feels like when the Succubus has power over you.
This is because the Succubus has a deep shadow function. Fundamentally, the “shadow” basically just means that there are threats to us, we want to be able to identify those threats, and then eliminate them1. When there are parts of ourselves that we have been taught to view as unacceptable, and should view as unacceptable, we reject those parts because we view them as threats that need to be eliminated.
The Succubus as a complex of beliefs tells us what parts of ourselves we need to reject, so we use shame in order to reject those parts, and then because of the beliefs inherent to the Succubus, we are motivated to correct for this shame by attaining more power over others, perhaps even with the adamant reassurance that we’d beat a rapist to death. However, notice that the Succubus itself is both causing our shame and telling us to cure that shame with a poison. In fact, it’s the very poison that causes the worst of men to commit assault. As a demonic sexual entity, the Succubus is already wrapped up within the sexual and within dominance over women.
Even if you aren’t capable of ever truly committing such an atrocity, the fact of the matter is that the Succubus represents a worldview in which such things are possible. There is a huge range of behaviour from assault all the way to the bear minimum for a healthy relationship, and too many of us men have engaged in behaviours beneath that bear minimum. I’ll be the first to admit that I have creeped women out, however unintentionally. If I want to evolve beyond the worldview, beyond the myth, that makes that behaviour possible, then I have to have the bravery to face my shame and confront the grey area that exists between assault and respect of women.
The Feminine Unknown
We return then, to the idea of the feminine as the unknown, as that which exists outside what we currently know. 2, 4, 6 Why exactly is the unknown feminine? If you look at many mythologies around the world this seems to be the case. My understanding of the idea is that as human beings were trying to understand their world, which means creating myths, they would look at what they saw. A woman gets pregnant, this thing grows inside of her, and then she pushes out a literal living human.
You then look around at this living universe full of life and it’s natural to think that this mysterious existence was birthed out of a woman, out of something unknown, sacred, and divine that is represented as a woman. There was a void of unknown nothingness before time and then out of her sprung everything else. Again, there are literally myths that say this. So when it comes to those unknown facets of the world or of ourselves, those things that exist beyond what our knowledge can currently tell us, we represent that as feminine.
Does that have to be the case? I don’t know. One thought I’ve had is that the feminine is conceptualized as the unknown because it’s a patriarchal society coming to know her. There are even lines in the very patriarchal Biblical creation story that seem to have God creating the world out of the feminine void, tehom, and this word is related to Tiamat, the feminine dragon that was slain by Marduk in the Babylonian creation story4. Before the advent of patriarchy though, maybe the Goddess wasn’t viewed as the unknown necessarily, but then as mythologies became increasingly male-oriented she was reframed as the unknown. From the perspective of a predominantly male religious intellectual elite the feminine is unknown.
And then, as I argued in my essay, “Psychology of the MetaMasculine,” part of how we define femininity is what is not-masculine, and vice-versa. If the feminine is unknown, then that means the masculine is the known. Mythologically the known, order, and civilization are often represented as masculine. Conscious reason is masculine and unconscious emotion is feminine.
Again, there are some questionable associations here that are outlined in the references in the description, but I think a major point we have to remember here is that these are all provisional stories meant to facilitate our own development as men. I’m not creating some absolutistic religion that must be followed to the letter. In defining certain things as feminine we are primarily doing this because our masculine conformity is rooted in a specific cultural history, and both masculinity and femininity have been defined in certain ways.
There definitely are biological differences between males and females, but we’re focused on the ways in which we can develop rather than on ways we can’t, in the ways that our biology might prevent us from doing so7. I’m not here to tell you about evolving laser beams on your head, but evolving psychologically beyond current masculine conformity that would, for example, tell you to devalue being more empathetic.
As such, breaking the cage of masculine conformity means filling in our gaps by engaging with that which is beyond masculine, and that means the feminine. From our current perspective that is a way of being that is largely unknown to us. We are not reifying anything as inherently, absolutely feminine because that’s Succubus thinking. The Succubus has us make rigid divisions between masculine and feminine, and then shames us any time we venture outside that definition. As I said, the Anima, a feminine archetype, represents what we lack given our current narrow perspective.
If this doesn’t make sense to you yet, then just think. As men we are taught to not be feminine, and so we are often taught to denigrate femininity. Don’t be emotionally vulnerable because that means you’re a pussy, be muscular and athletic because you have to be stronger and faster than the females, be successful because women will only love you if they can submit themselves to you, a better male. Hypergamy in a nutshell. All of these things are defined in opposition to femininity and then we are shamed if we fall beneath the standard. This is Succubus thinking.
The difficulty is that some of these things aren’t exactly negative. You want to be emotionally vulnerable in intelligent ways. That is something that is “feminine” that we need to learn to become better men. However, being more muscular or athletic is not a bad thing, you want to be physically fit to some degree because that’s healthy, and being successful and able to lead at times is also great. The issue is why we are doing these things. If we are doing them because we are opposed to the feminine, then any development we make as men is confined to this narrow track that leads to a rigid and, ironically, impotent masculinity.
I’ll explain more about that later, but I think I’ve made my point. When it comes to breaking out of unnecessary masculine conformity it simply makes sense for us to represent that process as the Divine Feminine. As Dr. Jordan Peterson has written4,
“the [feminine] unknown must be encountered, voluntarily … for new behavioral patterns to be constructed; … [a dead god] is tantamount to a denial of the hero.”
Say what you want about Jordan Peterson, controversial figure, but at least when it comes to development in a patriarchal culture, I think he hits the nail on the head.
Now, about the dead god. It is a denial of the hero because of the fact that we’ve represented conformity, what we currently know to be true and moral, as masculine. When this conformity becomes oppressive it has become a dead masculine god, and so the hero is meant to transcend this dead god or we deny the function of the hero. However, that’s actually part of the problem.
In patriarchal myths, the hero’s confrontation with the feminine unknown is often a battle in which he murders and tears apart the feminine unknown by the womb6. This is clearly patriarchal, and, in another ironic twist, is Succubus thinking. The Succubus is a demonic entity that we must conquer and so it reinforces the idea that as men our only solution to our problems is by becoming more powerful, more dominant, and subjecting ourselves, other men, women, nature, and existence to our will. Anything less is bitch behaviour.
The sad thing is that some will hear what I just said as motivating call to action, and to be honest, even I’m like fuck yeah DOMINATE THE WORLD! That’s a problem when that’s our only way of interacting with the world. As I explained in the last essay this is a consequence of defining power as unilateral power. This means that the more powerful you become the more influence you have over others, whether they like it or not, but also, the less influence they have over you, whether you really like that or not. This is the unintended consequence of this masculine take no prisoners mentality, we prevent ourselves from truly connecting emotionally with other people, unless it’s the unilateral conquering of a woman in bed.
In that last episode I said there was an alternative definition of power where we are still able to become more powerful, but the consequences of that greater power are actually really inspiring and beautiful. This alternative definition of power is relational power, and it defines the powerful as both those who can influence and those who can be influenced.8 This may seem like a very minor difference, but this actually as profound consequences.
To help you understand, just think about what it says about strength if your strength is dependent on not being affected. If anyone can affect you in any way at all that means you’re weak? Would it not be far more powerful to be able to bear the weight of another, to hold their suffering with empathy and compassion, be moved by them, and then choose to become more lovingly powerful because of that?
As Bernard Loomer says,
“our readiness to take account of the feelings and values of another is a way of including the other within our world of meaning and concern…it is an active openness…to be influenced by another, without losing our identity…[It] is not only an affirmation of the other…[but] also a measure of our own strength … a creative transformation of ourselves and the world…The true good is an emergent from deeply mutual relationships.”
I’m not going to go into much greater depth on this idea for fear of simply quoting the entire essay, but I truly cannot recommend this paper enough. It is an extraordinarily powerful distinction and I think it’ll take me years to extract all the juice from it. If you take nothing else from this essay, I would hope that you go read that paper and begin thinking deeply about it. It’s reference 8 below.
Either way, it is through this definition of power that we are able to fully heal from the culture of the Succubus. In my last essay I referred to the integration of the Succubus as a confrontation with the Succubus, but I actually think this is the wrong mindset to take. Instead, our integration and healing of the Succubus is a confrontation in the sense of relational power. To heal the Succubus we must open ourselves to the Succubus relationally, without losing ourselves, but in order to have a creative transformation of ourselves and the Succubus.
This is what it means to confront the feminine unknown in the sense of the Divine Feminine. Rather than perpetuating the patriarchal murder of the feminine as Dr. Peterson seems to advocate, we must fully integrate the feminine unknown, both its negative aspects and its positive aspects. This is what I meant earlier when I said we don’t want to look at women through rose-coloured glasses. The Divine Feminine is not the antithesis of the Succubus, but a synthesis that includes it.
I think what Dr. Peterson gets wrong is that he splits the feminine. Splitting is a defense mechanism where we take something and split it between the positive parts and the negative parts9. In Peterson’s analysis, the feminine is the dangerous unknown meant to be conquered4. What’s more, he projects a lot of negative aspects of masculinity onto the negative feminine. He then takes the benevolent aspects of the feminine unknown and identifies with them, or makes them a part of him. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because we also would like to learn from beneficial aspects of femininity.
However, the issue arises when we think about how the relationship between the masculine and the feminine is represented mythologically. The benevolent feminine is often represented as a princess to be wedded to the masculine hero, and subordinated to masculine order and civilization. Notice also the relationship – it is a marriage, a sexual union. The unknown is a woman to be conquered and used to benefit patriarchal culture. This is unilateral power in sexual relation to the unknown, thus to the feminine, thus to women, and thus, is a perpetuation of a Succubus myth that does violence to ourselves and to women.
In the integration of the Succubus and its transformation into the Divine Feminine we do not want to project toxic aspects of masculinity, nor do we want to frame our relationship to the feminine in a subordinating manner. Our relation to the feminine must be one that honours the feminine, whether those are aspects we seek to integrate into ourselves or merely in our relation to femininity and women. And that’s a key point to remember about these archetypes as a complex of beliefs and emotions. They not only help us widen and enhance our own perspective on ourselves, but also our perspective, and thus behaviour, toward real life women.
Integration of the Divine Feminine
With all of that being said then, I think it’s time to start talking about how we can integrate the Succubus and transform her into the Divine Feminine. Firstly, as I said above, we want to adopt the mindset of relational power. While Loomer says explicitly that relational power is not synonymous with femininity, I think we can improve by looking to those things that are stereotypically feminine. Rather than rejecting them because they’re feminine, we seek to learn from them.
Developing our capacity for empathy, compassion, and emotional vulnerability are all ways in which we can do this. However, we don’t lose our own identity, nor do we become emotionally weak by doing this. These are strategies that help us become more emotionally antifragile, which basically just means that we improve under stress rather than break under stress.10
While these are specific skills that we can seek out, I also think that the key to archetypal development is the use of ritual. I’ll be going much deeper into the purpose of rituals in a future essay, but in simplest terms, rituals create a space and a method that allows us to deconstruct negative psychological complexes and reconstruct positive. Think about funerals where we are able to put someone to rest. We’re not simply putting the person to rest, we’re putting our own grief and sense of loss to rest. We’re taking a moment to celebrate the life that this person lived and the influence they had on us11. This is the power of ritual.
Dr. Carol Christ, who has written extensively on the revival of Goddess religions, has talked about ritualizing darkness as a means of connecting with the feminine unknown6. Firstly, remember that archetypes are a schematic function1. As an archetype, the Succubus is not merely the image of a demonic seductress, but she is also schematic, she is also all that this image represents. Everything we’ve been talking about, demonized sexuality, unilateral power, the conquest of women, are all facets of the complex that the Succubus represents.
When we integrate the Succubus we are specifically healing this complex because we are learning to love our sexuality, redefining power as relational power, and learning to view women in healthier ways. By ritualizing darkness in the way I’ll describe, we are reconstructing these new ways of thinking and feeling as a new complex that is represented by the Divine Feminine. All the associations we want to have get put together so that we can then live through that perspective rather than the old perspective. Think of ritual as the oven that bakes all of these ingredients together.
So, what does ritualizing darkness actually mean? There are different methods, but the simplest that you can do today is going into the darkest, deepest, creepiest room in your house and meditating there. Okay I know that sounds ridiculous, but remember it’s the entire ritual and what it represents. The point of this exercise is that you are meant to be in a place that represents the feminine unknown. What better representation of the unknown than darkness, than the night, because what you’re likely going to feel is fear?
I’m sure you’ve all had the experience where you’re alone in a house, especially after watching a scary movie, and you shut off the light and feel this need to run to your bed. I’ve experienced this, I’ve seen memes about it, it’s okay if this happens to you. This is one of the reasons why I think this exercise can facilitate the integration of the feminine unknown through ritualizing darkness.
If you feel fear as a man who is embedded within the myth of the succubus, your natural response will either be to try to not feel afraid or to deny that you’d ever feel afraid in such a ridiculous exercise. What I’m telling you is that the best approach is to intentionally try to feel fear. Maybe that’s very easy for you, or maybe you have to use your fantasy to stoke those feelings. However, your response to that fear is what’s really important. Rather than wanting to conquer that fear, I want you to allow that fear to be within your body and to direct your attention into the feeling of that fear within your body.
This is a relational power approach. You aren’t trying to be unaffected as unilateral power would promote. Instead, you are actively trying to be affected and choosing to have the strength to fully feel that fear without needing it to go away and without needing to run away. You then respond to that fear with self-compassion. Notice if you judge yourself for being afraid. Notice if you judge yourself positively for not being afraid, do you feel a sense of pride and power because of that lack? Notice how you are celebrating yourself for being unaffected. It’s not a bad thing if you’re not afraid, but again, notice how you value being unaffected. That need to be unaffected is what is keeping you weak.
To integrate the Divine Feminine means we embrace being affected, but choose to have the strength to hold that within us and choose to take action in positive ways regardless. Now if this specific exercise doesn’t activate the feeling of fear that’s okay. There are many non-life-threatening ways we can do this, so the major point in this, is to be able to face your weakness with compassion. Not to deny or reject that weakness as “feminine” or “not masculine enough” but to hold it within you, to be affected, and be stronger for having been affected. If you want some deeper exercises then please feel free to sign-up for them here.
Dr. Vervaeke advocates for a humble wonder.12 Humility is the capacity to honour your foolishness, your weakness, your lack of knowing about yourself and the world. Wonder is our willingness to face this with curiosity and receptivity, to embrace unknowing in the process of coming to know more and to be expanded by the unknown, to wonder at the beautiful mystery of the world.
If the current masculine conformity has hyper-specialized us, caging us within a narrow definition of what it means to be masculine, then we have lost this humble wonder. We are incentivized to see ourselves as more unilaterally powerful than we really are because within this definition of power our worthiness is dependent on it. This is the opposite of humility. We are incentivized also to close ourselves off to anything that isn’t “masculine enough” because otherwise we aren’t real men, and thus, are undeserving or worthless. And to be clear, there are both men and women pressuring us today to be their own definition of a “real man”.
It is through the integrating the Divine Feminine that we are able to heal ourselves and move beyond the strict, narrow conformity of masculinity so that we can move into a more positive masculinity. However, no integration of the Divine Feminine would be complete if we weren’t able to bring that into the world. As such, I think what many of us men today really need is to engage more with women, whether that means romantically or platonically.
I’ll be talking about this in the future, but I think one of the healthiest things a man can do is learn how to meet new women. Too many of us have separated ourselves from women out of fear of rejection or resentment. This puts us at risk of toxic ideologies that tell us about women, and we cannot question them simply because we lack enough real world experience with women. And believe me when I say I have definitely fallen for this trap as well.
Instead, we have to make a commitment to do the internal work I’ve discussed throughout this essay, but also to re-engage with women, not from a Succubus mindset, but from a Divine Feminine mindset. This allows us to have a more expanded, open perspective so that when we meet women we are able to meet them as they actually are, through neither rose-coloured nor thorned glasses.
So a really important question, can you approach a woman on the street in a respectful, fun way so that she would be excited about meeting you? I’ve literally been on dates and even had a long-term relationship by doing this. If you can’t do this because you’re afraid, first of all compassionate for that, but secondly try to connect that with everything we’ve discussed in these past few episodes. If you feel that fear, can you respond with relational power? If she rejects you, can you respond to that with relational power?
There is so much more that I want to say about this, but there will be more than enough time in future essays. So, thank you so much for your time and attention. Please hit the like button and subscribe for more essays and conversations that go very deeply into masculinity, psychological development, and the cultivation of a meaningful personal mythology. Thanks again, and all the best to you on whatever journey you find yourself on.
If you’d like more, the recommended reading order is at the bottom of this essay.
References:
1 – Ellis, R. M. (2022). Archetypes in Religion and Beyond: A Practical Theory of Human Integration and Inspiration. Equinox Publishing.
2 – Ayers, M. Y. (2011). Masculine Shame: From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine (1st edition). Routledge.
3 – Cameron, W. (2024, September 7). Psychology of the Succubus [Substack newsletter]. MetaMasculine. https://metamasculine.substack.com/p/psychology-of-the-succubus
4 – Peterson, J. B. (1999). Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (1st edition). Routledge.
6 – Christ, C. P. (2016). Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (1st edition). Routledge.
7 – Sapolsky, R. (2017). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst: 9781594205071: Books—Amazon.ca. https://www.amazon.ca/Behave-Biology-Humans-Best-Worst/dp/1594205078/
8 – Loomer, B. (1976). Two Conceptions of Power. Process Studies, 6(1), 5–32. https://doi.org/10.5840/process19766126; Read here - https://www.religion-online.org/article/two-conceptions-of-power/
9 – Cramer, P. (2011). The Development of Defense Mechanisms: Theory, Research, and Assessment (Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 1991 edition). Springer/Sci-Tech/Trade.
10 – Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (Illustrated edition). Random House.
11 – Mitima-Verloop, H. B., Mooren, T. T. M., & Boelen, P. A. (2021). Facilitating grief: An exploration of the function of funerals and rituals in relation to grief reactions. Death Studies, 45(9), 735–745. https://doi.org/10.1080/07481187.2019.1686090
12 – John Vervaeke. (2023, January 9). After Socrates: Episode 2 - Socrates, The Monstrous | Dr. John Vervaeke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erxLwlk6RCQ