Throughout the long history of our planet there have been stories told about the spiritual journey of humankind. We call these stories myths. When they occur as the stories of the gods and goddesses of tribes other than our own, we say they are false. None are. They are the true picture of the inner life of the human mind, the soul, the spiritual connection that humans have to what C.G. Jung called the ‘Collective Unconscious.”

Since the time about 6000 years ago when humans began to write down their stories, there has been an increasing violence between cultures on our planet.  In his book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess noted neurosurgeon Leonard Shlain describes this as the consequence of increasing left brain dominance, occurring as a result of the development of language, math and science. He calls the left brain the masculine “hunter killer brain.” In the course of attempting to overcome our enemies with the force of the developing technology of war, we have lost the balance of the right brain, what Shlain calls the feminine “gatherer nurturer brain.”

What has been missing to balance the striving, competitive masculine spirit on our planet is nothing less than a functioning prefrontal cortex of the right hemisphere of the brain. Neuroscientists are discovering that individuals who lack sufficient integration of right hemispheric activity, lack the feminine attributes of empathy, compassion, kindness, an ability to ‘read’ others’ behavior and intentions, or in other words, they lack emotional intelligence.

In the last fifty years we have seen a rise in concern for our planet’s ecosystems, the survival of species of plants and animals, even efforts to aid endangered people. We stand at the threshold of creating a more balanced world culture that embraces feminine values, as well as it makes use of technology to heal the wounds inflicted by centuries of war and greed.

In archetypal terms, we can see the emergence of a newly powerful feminine presence, an embracing of the divine feminine as more than virgin, mother or whore. We see her as Gaia returning to life as the soul of our planet, as the heart and conscience of our collective humanity. Archetypal symbols are the language of the right brain, they speak a language of images, feelings and kinesthetic impressions. They drive our behavior, while remaining relatively unconscious in our present culture. With the integration of the masculine and the feminine within the human psyche we become more conscious, more able to solve our many dilemmas, and more in love with the life we create individually and as the human collective.

The paintings in this series begin with the spiral energy that I feel in dance and song. They are meditations on the integration of the masculine and the feminine in the spiral journey of human consciousness.  They express, for me, a growing awareness of the rejoining of the masculine and feminine archetypes after a period of extreme separation in the many cultures of our planet. It has not been easy to bring these polar opposites together in this series of paintings, but finally they meet and fall into LOVE.

- Elsa LaFlamme