Can the Sacred Feminine Be Found in the Past?

Lately, I’ve found myself captivated by the Substack writings of two powerful women spiritual leaders whose words feel like lanterns lighting the path forward—Marianne Williamson and Meggan Watterson. Their recent work has stirred something in me, something ancient and unnameable, something not found in the past.

Meggan’s Mary Magdalene Revealed was water to my parched soul. Her bold exploration of the Divine Feminine gave language to what I had long felt but struggled to articulate. And Marianne, ever the torchbearer for the heart’s wisdom, has launched a new seminar for women over 50 called The Magnificent Crone. She calls this phase “a new spiritual frontier… a presence within us waiting to come forth, meant to be a blessing on us and on the world.”

Yes. A blessing—and a calling.

This week, Meggan published a powerful post on Substack titled The Words That Never Name Us, confronting the binary trap of the “virgin/whore” split. She references Marion Woodman, the Jungian analyst whose books The The Pregnant Virgin and Addiction to Perfection I inhaled over twenty years ago. Meggan names the split for what it is: “tendrils of control rooted in fear.” This split, these words, never truly described us; they were designed to limit us. Their power fades as we see them for what they are.

Historically, women’s spiritual and psychological development has been mapped through the triple goddess archetype: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. These stages reflect our evolving consciousness—our becoming, our generativity, and finally, our deep inner knowing. Yet something in this model has always felt incomplete to me.

Recently, a fourth archetype has begun to rise in conversations among women writers and teachers: the Queen. She who embodies sovereignty, visibility, and leadership. She who stands in her power not only for herself but in service to others. Mary, the mother of Jesus, has been called Queen of Heaven, Queen of Peace and Queen of Hearts. But she too has often been polished so clean, it’s hard to relate to both her divinity and her humanity.

The more I listen—to my clients, my women’s circles, my own heart—the more I realize that the figure who is emerging now cannot be found in old stories, old archetypes, or old words.

“I just can’t quite describe this feeling I have that I’m more,” she says.
“I want to stop crying and healing and start creating.”
“I can’t quite see where I’m going.”

She isn’t rooted in the past at all.
She is new. She is now.
She is The First Flame.

We won’t find her in texts or traditions that have long suppressed the Divine Feminine. We won’t name her with words soaked in fear. She is not gendered, but she is deeply embodied. She lives in the psyche of all beings—whispering, singing, roaring:
You are powerful beyond measure. You are more than you’ve been told and believed.

She is not in the embers of who we were. She is the first flame of who we are becoming.

I call her Luminara—the living flame rising in the hearts of women and men alike. She is unlike previous feminine archetypes: wild, creative, nonlinear, not age-specific, setting the world on fire in a controlled burn, fueled by love, empathy, and compassion.

She is a force.

She reveals herself not through history, but through presence. Not in roles, but in the mirror—yes, the one we gaze into each morning, but also the deeper one: the mirror of the soul. There, if we dare to look, we might glimpse the emergence of something astonishing.

She is the mewl of a newborn idea, and the fire of a truth long denied. Her voice is sometimes faint, sometimes fierce. But she is here. And she is rising.

Where does she flicker in you?
What are you burning to be?
In what way will your love set the world on fire?

She is stirring in all of us.
It’s time to stop waiting for the right words.
Time to write her, paint her, dance her, live her.
Time to speak her into form—with courage, with clarity, with love.