Mirabai Starr: Wisdom of the Women Mystics
The reason I titled my new book Wild Mercy is because, for me, the feminine embodies that paradox – actually a whole range of paradoxes – from loving kindness and unconditional forgiveness to ferocity, “subversiveness”, resistance, and wild, spontaneous creativity. All qualities that can be quite threatening when you’re trying to keep people in line with particular belief systems and ritual containers that leave no room for the actual living voice of the holy spirit to direct what’s unfolding in the landscape of the soul.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: Do you find great irony in the timing of that? I mean, you write in Wild Mercy that you were writing the proposal just before Trump was elected. Then you put it aside, telling yourself that the time of the feminine rising was clearly not now. What happened?
MIRABAI STARR: I realized that the voice of the feminine is needed now more than ever. I know that I was right to rise up out of my own cynicism and allow myself to be, as so many people are all over the world, a conduit for this rising feminine energy, because look now how urgently the qualities and attributes of feminine wisdom and heart are directly relevant to the changes that are upon us. The masculine structured, exclusive, perfection-oriented, pure oriented, kind of spiritual culture is not going to be relevant or useful in these times of creative chaos and the death of the structures that we have known. Still, the feminine will, and it is holding the space for the end and the birth that is happening in our midst.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: What is your definition of a mystic, and how would you characterize the path of the feminine mystic?
MIRABAI STARR: The classic academic definition of a mystic is one who has direct experience of the divine that is unmediated through established religious channels like religious authorities, clergy people, or prescribed prayers and rituals. A mystic has direct experience of God, or of the sacred, usually in the form of love, of boundless love, and a mystical experience bypasses the established, accepted forms and belief systems. Even that the mystic, herself, might have come from.
For instance, Teresa of Avila, my beloved Teresa of Avila, whose masterworks I’ve had the excellent, good fortune of translating, was squarely rooted in Christianity. However, she was only a first-generation Christian because she came from a Converso family, a family of Jews who was forced to convert by the Inquisition. She lived in the early 16th century in Spain at the height of the Inquisition. So, she was Jewish and Christian, although she had to deny her Jewish roots. When she had her experience of union with the one, she called “Beloved,” it was undifferentiated. It was an experience of intimate merging into the source of all love and the dissolution of any individual identity or subject/object experience or relationship.
When she returned to her so-called ordinary state of consciousness, she translated that experience through the filter of her Christianity, and it became the experience of a Christian mystic. So a mystic is someone who has that direct experience. You wanted me to reflect on the feminine version of that, in some ways, I feel the mystical experience is itself feminine because it’s an experience that defies or transcends the existing dogma, order, ideas about what spiritual means, and it invites us in to fully inhabit the realm of the heart. This is the space of the feminine. So now is the perfect time to say that when I speak about feminine and masculine, I am speaking about an energetic reality. I’m speaking about attributes and qualities that exist and abide in all of us, in women, in men, in people of all genders. People who do not identify with a particular gender at all, and yet all of us, I feel, right now, are yearning for the gift of feminine wisdom, the voice of female wisdom, and the heart space into which the feminine invites us because this is her domain.
I know plenty of women in the spiritual arena who lead with masculine qualities, who are as patriarchal as any priest, or rabbi, or imam, or shaman, or yogi, or Roshi or lama. The male kind of hierarchical definitions of what it means to be spiritual is a trap that women also fall into. Then they end up leading with very masculine qualities or perpetuating the male paradigm that has historically oppressed us.
I know many men who are voluntarily abdicating their privilege and power, even many clergy people across the spiritual traditions, who are stepping back, shutting up, and inviting women and people who sing the song of the feminine, who speak in the voice of the feminine, to take the stage, to have space to now bring this vitally needed elixir of feminine wisdom and heart into the human community. So, I’m talking about the feminine in all of us, and she’s alive and well in people of all genders just as the masculine is still doing its patriarchal thing in the form of certain women leaders.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: As we all are becoming aware of the feminine rising, how are the tapestries, the stories of lives and examples from the mystic women that you write about, across all the spiritual traditions and time frames, useful to us now?
MIRABAI STARR: I’m so glad you asked that question because I feel like a story is vitally important in these times. Story and personal, specific experiences of the human condition are what are going to lift us all up and remind us about the web of inter-being to which we belong. So that my very particular human story becomes a reflection of everybody’s story, and when you hear details of my experience walking this world, it will awaken you and welcome you home to your own experience. So, when I tell the stories of all of these different women, mystics across the religious landscape, backward in time and currently, people resonate, and we see ourselves in these wisdom beings.
Just the other day I was thinking of Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century Rhineland visionary Christian mystic, which celebrated nature and the natural world as the very dwelling place of the divine feminine in the form of Sophia, and Mother Mary, and earth Herself, she blended it all together.
Hildegard, as a young girl, was having all these prophetic kinds of experiences, often accompanied by blinding headaches, and then the voice of what she called “the living light” would speak to her. She kept trying to suppress it because the people around her seemed suspicious of her visionary experiences. So, it wasn’t safe for her to share them. So she did everything she could to repress them until “the voice of the living light” was so powerful that it almost killed her to try and keep a lid on it. It was shattering her container.
Finally, she just surrendered and said, ‘OK, I accept this prophetic calling. I will be a vessel for your wisdom and your love in this world.’ Then out of that surrender came pouring through the most extraordinary wisdom. She was indeed a Polymath. She was a musician; she was a composer.
Hildegard’s music resounds through the centuries. She was an artist who created these illuminations. She was an architect. She was a social critic. She was a healer with herbs, tinctures, stones and minerals and crystals. There were so many ways that Hildegard’s mastery manifested and comes down to us through the thousand years since she lived that is relevant right now in this time of crisis, confusion, and separation, and the call to unity that is at the heart of the deconstruction that’s unfolding right now.
SANDIE SEDGBEER: Do you think that their experiences are available to all of us? These mystic women were beings of wisdom. Would you say that it was their abilities to see and think about the world from a different perspective that inspired them to the spiritual and mystical practices, or was it the other way around? That it was their devotional aspect that brought them to the path of self-realization.
Continue to Page 3 of the Interview with Mirabai Starr
