Original Wound
Underworld: Below All Things, Part 3
A vision of healthy femininity and healthy masculinity is fundamental to our journeys back home. Satan, the Destroyer, dominates in the world by corrupting humanity’s relationship to feminine and masculine principles. He has led the charge to distort what those authentic ways truly are. His counternarrative, one based on discord, is woven throughout the fabric of human society and the hierarchical structures of institutions that place select men in power above all others.
Historically, the urge to dominate, control, and own has been systematized by men. Our own scriptures teach us that “it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion” (D&C 121:39, emphasis added). Observing this assumption of power over another and noting how it became established as a historical process, scholars believe that patriarchy developed from 3100 BCE to 600 BCE in the Near East and has thrived ever since. It is believed that patriarchy arose partly from the practice of intertribal exchanges of women for marriage “in which women acquiesced because it was functional for the tribe.” As the basic system of society or government in which men hold power and women are excluded from that power, patriarchy is the model of organization wherein males and all things associated with masculinity are valued over things associated with women and femininity. Patriarchy teaches that men are more valuable than women, “that productive work is more important than reproductive work, and that caregiving and nurturing are women’s work (and therefore, less valuable).”
The toxic power structure of a culture that sees primarily through a masculine lens creates suspicions and fear of what would challenge it—namely, what the rational mind cannot perceive, touch, or analyze. Hyperrationality minimizes the importance of other ways of knowing and creating meaning. It often discounts the necessary place of the ineffable in knowledge creation, the power of the unknown and unknowable. The spaces in between. The masculine striving toward achievement, production, and control becomes valued above the feminine qualities of relatedness—“relatedness to other humans, to the non-humans who share the planet with us, to nature and the rhythms of nature, as well as to the rhythms of the physical body and the stages and passages of our lives.” The complete failure of this artificial division in ways of knowing is made even more apparent by empirical research findings revealing that humans are emotional actors who respond first from intuition, and only after our response do we work overtime to find rational justification. Men often diminish women for using emotion and intuition to inform their decisions while at the same time asserting that men do not use emotions to inform theirs. Both women and men have been separated from important ways of relating to themselves and each other. The tendency to consciously and unconsciously disassociate from the more intuitive aspects of ourselves can cause real harm to our sense of reality, a harm that ripples from individuals into institutions, policies, and practices.
In the Church, we have unwittingly inherited a reading of patriarchy onto Eve and Adam’s story, beginning with the idea that Eve’s feminine way of knowing was inherently flawed. For generations, the explicit cause and effect of Eve’s choice was in our own temple language: Eve transgressed, so Adam had to reconcile Eve’s disobedience with God; therefore, God gave Adam direction to lead Eve. It took until the year 2019 for this ingrained notion and false tradition to be rescinded and dismantled, righting our theology. This allowed the truth to be known that men never were and never could be intermediaries between women and God in the temple or anywhere, ever.
We are all at different places in our understanding of the painful realities of patriarchy. Patriarchal ideology is so pervasive that many believe that following its ideals is the only way to manage societies and organizations. It is called “benevolent patriarchy” because at first glance it appears to be a natural fact of life, one that is for everyone’s good. For women who have come to grasp the effects of patriarchy in our lives, though, our experience looks something like this: We realize we’ve spent years masking the powerful parts of ourselves that challenge the stability of patriarchy. We learned how to navigate, how to speak the language of fawning and submission, how to adapt. Through stings and snubs, jokes and barbs, we learned that what we have to say is considered less valuable than what men say, and we ended up believing it is true. We discover that in patriarchy many women have not only lost their voice but also that many remain asleep to what sovereignty they have lost, having never experienced full self-determination, and thus not knowing what could be. When we begin to express ourselves by calling for moral or ethical correction in an individual, an institution, or a community, these calls are often silenced, ignored, or met with threats. We learn that the roles of women are largely crafted by men and that these roles are reductive, since it is impossible for men to accurately understand the lives of women. We are told, in direct and indirect ways, that we shouldn’t follow our dreams because we are women. We learn that our joyful bodies are a target. When we radiate our God-given sensuality, we are a target. We find visceral reminders in the news of how women’s daily existence, necessary self-protection, and resistance to control is often met with violence, overwhelmingly from their male partners. We know that the loss of women’s sovereignty is linked to the loss of Mother Earth’s sovereignty.
Part of the delusion of the patriarchal world is the belief that the masculine encompasses all of the feminine, that what it defines as feminine is merely an extension of the male world. In extreme cases of patriarchy’s influence, men have largely forgotten the feminine energy inside them and that a separate female realm exists. That even momentarily in childhood, they were a part of that realm with their mothers. Their privileged position keeps them from understanding the world of subjugated women. Under the assumptions of patriarchy—that women have no equal and independent purpose or realm—men in these systems have made women, like land, literal property under the law. Women in half of the world are still denied land and property rights despite current laws. The ways in which women continue to be seen as possessions range from the obvious trophy wife trope to more subtle and nuanced ways in which women are expected to service the needs of male-dominated institutions and cater to established social norms.
Patriarchy commodifies women and does so by removing them from any profitable realm of influence and using them to prop up its values in the one sphere in which they are somewhat allowed: the home. Because patriarchy poisons this one realm of influence with the notion that women are created to remain inside its walls, the true influence women could have in society is limited by the simple, pernicious notion that what women have to say does not apply outside the walls of the home. Nor do men see the need to create policies within society that support the life-giving work of the home. In the United States, policies that support childbirth and childrearing, contraception, and adequate maternal and paternal leave are gravely inadequate if not absent. Women’s real needs are silenced and relegated to insignificance, instead of being prioritized as a matter of life and death.
It is difficult to look at the ways in which the patriarchal structure of our Church also limits women’s involvement, but we must enter into that pain as well. Women are largely without decision-making power and leadership positions within the Church. Even a Relief Society president cannot receive revelation about who to call within her own presidency without her choice potentially being overruled by a man. Women are given many responsibilities in the Church but no authority. And we shouldn’t conflate the two. A woman does not have final say on any decision in the Church. There is little room in the system of patriarchy, inside and outside the Church, for women as whole beings, full participants, as they try to bring seats to the table.
We, Latter-day Saints, have countless opportunities to change the way we see each other as we continue to reevaluate our hearts; we are confronted with those opportunities because we are woven into the same social fabric. The integration of the realm of the feminine is vital at all levels of community and society in order to rebalance the world. This rebalancing involves respect for women, their voices, their healing powers, and their work. It also involves opening a real space for the feminine to arise in us individually. Our wrestling with the current reality of male primacy and the consequential disenfranchisement of all others will lead to massive changes in how we organize family, community, and institutions, including religious ones.
Healing Together
When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.—bell hooks
As with the root systems of trees, our identity is largely formed in the connections we make in community. We begin our lives nurtured in the soil surrounding us. It is here in this kind of tomb and womb space where we call on the collective wisdom of our ancestors and the communities who nourished them. While the traditions we inherit can be poisonous and destructive, we also have good ancestral traditions and blessings that come to us. We have spiritual ancestors who we seek to emulate—people who, like King Lamoni’s wife, climbed out of hell and touched heaven. We have to look downward and backward into that underworld to contact their stories as well.
In our need for a sense of continuity, the Divine Feminine shows us that the wisdom of our ancestors is still available, still a part of our cells. Their understanding of the complexities of mortal life—tending the land, finding patience in grief and frailty, recognizing how deeply connected we all are—is available to us through the channels of familial bonds. They call out for us to continue on the journey toward wholeness. Their offering of collective wisdom feeds our growth and ascent.
I felt this living connection to my Knight ancestors while serving as a missionary in Italy. During my first few months, I experienced something I never thought I could: a prolonged distancing from God. It was excruciating. While my testimony deepened and I progressed with Italian, I struggled every day with feeling spiritually abandoned. I had no reason to feel so tormented because of anything I had done relating to the worthiness standards of the Church. At the time I didn’t realize what was happening: that my feelings of despair were not rooted in sin but necessary for the next stage of my spiritual transformation. I kept going. I had to; there was no other way.
I shared the first lesson about the Restoration to many at that time. But in Livorno, while teaching a young Italian man whose sister was recently baptized, I suddenly, like the unexpected presence of the Spirit, felt the presence of my Knight ancestors. As I spoke of them, the distance in time and space between us collapsed. I felt them in my cells, in my heart, and in my mind. With their love of the gospel filling my whole being, the work of restoration was alive in me as their progeny and as a missionary continuing what they had begun. They were among the first converts in New York and supported the work of the early Restoration at great personal sacrifice. Their devotion to the gospel of Christ had planted in me as a child an abiding connection to the power and reality of the prophetic mantle of Joseph Smith and the vision of Zion they loved. When I remembered them in that moment, they answered the deepest longings and love in my heart for the work of my Savior. Even more tenderly for me, they answered my need to feel loved and seen in that almost impossible time.
We can call on our ancestors, our female ancestors, especially when we need help healing the wounded feminine inside us. As we heal, they heal in turn. This can look like simply accepting and setting the intention in prayer to receive what they have to communicate.
Descending into the darkness is entering into feminine territory. Perhaps only Jesus completes this descent because of the way He harmonizes the feminine and masculine powers of deity inside Him. In His atonement and death, He completely surrendered in vulnerability to the unknown. Jesus comprehends all things, and I believe He learned from His Mother how to go down into the depths and be refined by them. Adding our Mother to the equation of salvation means we choose to surrender to the mystery of becoming in its multitude of manifestations. Our path is not just one of religious demarcation, of checking off performative markers of progression, but, as Jesus taught—and as I believe He learned in unique ways from His Mother—of soul-making, of soul-expansion.
We don’t enter the underworld just once; if we remain open to our Mother’s call, we will cycle down as many times as we are asked, to generate deeper wisdom and deeper levels of trust in the divine and deeper degrees of healing the wounded feminine. The heart must break open again and again to incorporate and integrate bodily, earth-bound wisdom gathered in the cells and strata of our beings. In a world where we are consistently wounded by distortions of worthiness, this radical commitment to transformation is the way we live the profound intuition of the body and spirit to discern our reality and move in the power of divine love.
Discussion Question:
What about the realm of the roots, as described in Chapter One, speaks most profoundly to you?
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Kathryn Knight Sonntag is the Poetry Editor for Wayfare and the author of The Mother Tree: Discovering the Love and Wisdom of Our Divine Mother and The Tree at the Center.
Art by Hilma af Klint.