Andrew Harvey - The Return of the Mother

Copyright 1995 Andrew Harvey. All rights reserved. No portion of this book, except for brief review, may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwisewithout the written permission of the publisher. For information contact North Atlantic Books.

Published by
North Atlantic Books
P.O. Box 12327
Berkeley, California 94712
Cover photograph, Our Lady of La Salette,
France, September 1994, Eryk Hanut
Cover design by Paula Morrison

The Return of the Mother is sponsored by the Society for the Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a nonprofit educational corporation whose goals are to develop an educational and cross-cultural perspective linking various scientific, social, and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view of arts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and to publish and distribute literature on the relationship of mind, body, and nature.

North Atlantic Books publications are available through most bookstores. For further information, visit our website at www.northatlanticbooks.com or call 800-733-3000.

eISBN: 978-1-58394-820-0

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Harvey, Andrew, 1952
The return of the mother / Andrew Harvey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 1-883319-07-2
1. Femininity of God. 2. GodMotherhood. I. Title.
BL215.5.H37 1995
291.2114dc20

95-30833

v3.1

For Eryk, my husband:

And his banner over me was Love.

My deepest thanks to:

Marianne Dresser, my friend and editor, for her extraordinary devotion, diligence, encouragement, and unwavering support. This book could never have been completed without her.

Eleonora Raducanu, beloved friend, who saved Eryks and my life, at considerable danger to her own.

The California Institute of Integral Studies, for supporting me and my work and for being loyal to me.

Robert McDermott, for his goodness and balance.

Anne Teich, for her always loving help, her belief, her example.

Rina Sircar, for helping Eryk and myself by her love and wisdom.

K. P. Sircar, for his tolerance and compassion.

Sandra Mosbacher Smith, whose love is one of the most precious things in my life, and whose help I shall never forget.

Doug Smith, for his friendship, his concern, his good faith.

Angie Theriot, for her unfailing warmth and delicacy of heart.

Rose Solari, who believed, and fought, and witnessed, and gave Eryk and I hope when we badly needed it.

Anne Simpkinson and the editorial board of Common Boundary for bravery under fire.

Catherine Ingram, for her gifts of loyalty and clarity.

Rick Fields and the editors of Yoga Journal for their willingness to print what I said and their encouragement of radical dialogue.

Lela Landman, who witnessed and stood for Eryk and myself when few others would.

Carol Ricotta, for telling the truth publicly when no one else who knew was brave enough.

Stanley Arcieri, master letter-writer and defender of the underdog.

Lauren Artress, who married Eryk and myself, and whose simplicity sustained us.

Jeannie Trizzino, who transcribed the original talks with exemplary finesse.

Harriet Fields, for her wonderful loyalty.

Dorothy Waters, for seeing the truth and defending it.

Diane Golden, for her kindness, doggedness, and acumen.

Sara Forster, for always loving and supporting.

Leila and Henry Luce, for their loving wise concern for me and my husband, for always believing in and encouraging us both tenderly, and for their boundless hospitality.

Monique Bezencon, who witnessed.

All those friends, too numerous to mention here, who prayed, helped, encouraged, testified, learned.

O Divine Mother,

In this extreme danger,

when we and all sentient beings

and nature,

herself,

Your glorious body,

face unprecedented misery and destruction,
inaugurate in fierceness and tenderness
the splendor of

Your Age of Passionate Enlightenment.

Bring us into the fire of Your sacred passion for reality,
rejoin the severed mandala of our being,
infuse our bodies, our hearts, our souls, our minds,
with the calm and focused truth of Your highest illumination
that brings each of those things into mutual harmony.
Engender in the ground of all of our beings
the sacred marriage,

that union between masculine and feminine
from which in each of us the Divine Child is born,

that Child that is flesh of Your flesh,

heart of Your heart,

light of Your light,

That Child that is free from all dogma,

free from all shame,

free from all false divisions

between holy and unholy

sacred and profane,

free to burn out in love,

free to play in love,

free to serve in love,

as love

for love

in the heart of Your burning ground of life.

Teach us, O Divine Mother, directly

at every moment in this hour of apocalypse

the appropriate action that heals

and preserves

and redeems

and transforms.

And then I saw a new heaven and a new earth,
for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.

Revelations 21:1

T HE LECTURES THAT form the basis of this book were delivered in the California Institute of Integral Studies between early April and late June of 1994. They spring from the most spiritually transformatory period of my life, that followed my definitive break with Meera in January of that year and my marriage with Eryk Hanut in April. The fierce and liberating lessons learned in that period inform this book throughout, and I deal with the break with Meera and what it taught me about the Divine Mother in several of the Question and Answer sections that follow many of the chapters. At the end of the book are reprinted two interviews which deal in detail with material arising from my repudiation of Meera and the guru system.

Freed by the Mother from the need to project her onto any human figure, and so free to claim her presence in myself and in all other beings, I feel infinitely closer now to the one who is, and is in, all things and all life. I offer this book, in love and great hope, to all beings on the Way. May they come to know the joy of the direct path to her and in her! May they open to the Divine Mother in the ground of their ordinary lives! May they be led forward normally, naturally, and astonishingly, as I and countless others before me have beenand are beingto insight after insight and an ever more grounded happiness!

Everything, I believe, now depends on how the human race imagines and relates to the sacred feminine and the Mother. Inadequate imagining of her in the old waysor in the exaggerations of some of the newwill result in a blocking of her sacred force, with disastrous, potentially fatal, consequences.

The churches, religions, and systems of transmission are all revealing their bankruptcy in the face of the catastrophe we are enduring. Kali is dancing and trampling down all illusions of every kind. But where Kali destroys, she also creates; in this worldwide rubbling of authority in all its forms there are essential opportunities for freedom which this book is dedicated to exploring.