WHEN THE GODDESSES WERE A WOMAN

The Restoration of the Symbolic Wholeness of the Feminine

 Adriana Tanese Nogueira | Psychoanalyst and Researcher of Human Nature | AELLA Institute (Founder, Brazil) adrianatns@icloud.com | @cleoadriana

When Carl Gustav Jung states that “the feminine has no representation in the parliament above,” he points precisely to this foundational exclusion. The feminine does not occupy the symbolic center from which a culture organizes its ultimate values. It appears instead as function, exception, object, or specialty—rarely as a sovereign principle. By preserving the fragmentation of the goddesses, even symbolic psychology risks confirming this absence, recognizing the diversity of the feminine while never granting it ontological authority.

This book begins from another premise. Here, the integration of the goddesses does not aim to harmonize conflicts or to produce a conciliatory synthesis. What is proposed is the restoration of the Unity of the Goddess—not as a return to an undifferentiated archetype, but as the recovery of the status of the sacred in all dimensions of the feminine, as feminine. To divinize all faces of the Goddess is to remove each one from the condition of parody of the masculine, from functional adaptation to the dominant system, or from derivative value. It is to recognize that every expression of the feminine possesses value in itself, not because it serves an external logic, but because it participates in a symbolic totality that confers meaning.

To break the spell is to name the mechanism that divided, hierarchized, and emptied the feminine—and, at the same time, to restore to the Goddess her symbolic wholeness. In doing so, women are returned the possibility of existing not as tolerable fragments, but as living expressions of a complex, multiple, and sovereign totality. The Unity of the Goddess does not eliminate differences; it holds them. It does not impose a norm; it confers legitimacy. It does not promise salvation; it restores symbolic power.

This is the central gesture of this book.

It does not play with beautiful, abstract ideas.
It is written in reference to real and historical experience.

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