“As God is your divine Father, so is the Supreme your divine Mother in whom you are nurtured throughout your lives as universe creatures.” (117:6.2, pg. 1288)
Wendell Berry once said, “The creation is not in any sense independent of the Creator, the result of a primal creative act long over and done with, but is the continuous, constant participation of all creatures in the being of God.” He added, “Nature (and here we capitalize her name) is the impartial mother of all creatures, unpredictable, never entirely revealed, not my mother or your mother, but nonetheless our mother.” (2012 Jefferson Lecture)
Those who live a life close to the earth such as farmer-poet Wendell Berry, or the more traditional American Indian cultures, instinctively understand the nurturing idea of God as a Mother, an Earth Mother.
Maria L. Von Franz, the Jungian analyst, perceived the coming into being of a fourth element of Deity. “In the manifestations of the unconscious found in our modern Christian culture … Dr. Jung often observed that there is an unconscious tendency at work to round off our trinitarian formula of the Godhead with a fourth element which tends to be feminine …” (Man and His Symbols). She saw this development in terms of new symbols of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Ghost, a renewed accord with the earth, perhaps dimly aware of God the Mother as an aspect of the Holy Spirit.
In The UB cosmology what is known as the Holy Spirit on Urantia is revealed as the Divine Minister on Satania, and “this personalized presence of the Infinite Spirit,” is “the Creative Mother Spirit of the local universe” (34:1.4, pg. 375). She is the bestower of our initial mind circuit known as the adjutant mind spirits (103:0.1; 34:5), the partner of the Creator Son, and, I believe, she is the Mother Goddess of our evolutionary religions.
We encountered the mother goddess in previous epochs of our religious evolution, long before that stage where we could grow in our consciousness of the Supreme’s ministry. The Mother Spirit was the main archetypal influence on human psychology through her gift of the mind circuit, before there was a broad awareness of the endowment of the indwelling spirit of the Father, known to us as the Thought Adjuster, and the arrival of the Spirit of the Son, the Spirit of Truth, “the mind of Christ.” Thus we see a cultural development taking place wherein the early mother goddess cult, once ascendant, is often overthrown by a male warrior or Father God cult.
Jesus observed a remnant of mother goddess worship on his trip around the ancient world: “On leaving Athens, the travelers went by way of Troas to Ephesus, the capital of the Roman province of Asia. They made many trips out to the famous temple of Artemis of the Ephesians, about two miles from the city. Artemis was the most famous goddess of all Asia Minor and a perpetuation of the still earlier mother goddess of ancient Anatolian times.” (133:6.1, pg. 1477)
The Melchizedek teachers encountered it. “Never did the Salem teachers fully overcome the popularity of Ishtar, the mother of gods and the spirit of sex fertility.” (95:1.5, pg. 1042)
The Earth Mother religions of the American Indian were also trampled and mostly supplanted by the warrior religions of the European descendants of the Andites. Among my ancestors, the Ojibway, whose creator goddess was Giizhi-go-kwe, Skywoman, there was a widespread conversion to Christianity in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Perhaps, in a sense, Jung’s theory of the fourth element of Deity prophesied the increase in consciousness of the Supreme Being, a present goal of our evolution revealed in The UB. It is a development about which The UB makes more concrete statements than have been encountered before in religious teachings.
“During the past dispensations of partial understanding, your priests and prophets failed clearly to differentiate between … the Supreme Being, and the Universal Father,” (among other universe authorities). (4:5.2, pg. 60)
Jung was more concerned with symbols and metaphors of what was developing in human consciousness, than with a real literal presence of a personal god. Universal Father is a powerful symbol in his psychology. He didn’t recognize a loving God who is real and approachable. Though psychology in general asserts that all we can know is the “psyche,” leaving us trapped within a world that exists only in our minds, Mother God, as the Supreme, emerges to nurture the realization of the reality of God, the literal, earthy presence of the divine existing beyond the borders of our perceptions. The UB reasserts the truth that we can know spiritual reality in itself, that Jung’s symbols are literal, representing concrete realities to our minds.
Scientists like Jonas Salk and Ervin Laszlo (founder of the Club of Budapest in 1993) began in the late 20th century to express the idea of humankind taking control of its evolution. The science magazine, Omni, predicted “Humanity will become deeply and creatively engaged in the process of evolution. First, we will understand the nature of our minds, and second the evolutionary purpose they serve.” As Carl Sagan observed, “We are a way for the cosmos, to know itself.”
Our partnership with the Supreme consists in the great task of achieving spirit dominance over matter-energy. “With God the Supreme … one must do something as well as be something.” (115:0, pg. 1260) In our experience with the Supreme, we are being invited to attend the great marriage of the masculine and feminine on cosmic levels of reality.
“There is no adventure ... more enthralling than to enjoy the exhiliration of becoming the material life partner with spiritual energy and divine truth,” Jesus told Anaxand, (130:2.4, pg. 1430) and what he was describing is in essence the experience of God the Supreme.
“Experiential growth implies creature-Creator partnership—God and man in association,”
(The Almighty Supreme; 116:0.3, pg. 1268) partnering in the service of our brothers and sisters and in the care and preservation of our planet.
