We Need More Angry Women
Jan 16, 2025
We need more angry women.
Actually, let me be more accurate.
We need more clear, strong, direct, unafraid women, who are willing to call things as they see them.
We need women who actively work to shed and release the conditioned fawn response that causes us so much harm, usually for the sake of preserving fragile male egos.
We need women who feel their blood boiling and recognize that energy as the same intelligence which fuels fires and volcanoes.
We need women who feel themselves tremble with rage and know that the earthquake within them is as powerful as those on Earth.
We need women who know that their torrents of tears, the hot angry tears which spill forth, unceasing, when harm has been done, are the same salt water which covers the planet, the same fluid as the womb and the sea.
We need women to reclaim anger, because our fate is to wield it for the protection and benefit of Earth and humanity.
[Art Credit: Pele by Eric Ta]
The Truth of Anger
The word anger has its roots in old Norse; it comes from angr, which means “to grieve, vex, and distress.” Often, women don’t realize that our healthy anger arises from our wildly intelligent bodies encountering something that grieves, vexes, and distresses our spirits. In Untie the Strong Woman, Clarissa Pinkola Estes writes:
“Each soul has to pry their unconsciousness out of the primal ooze and develop consciousness - to allow The Mother of the Heart of the World to take their hands, heart, and head in order to lead them to enact these new life attitudes and practices for themselves out of mercy for others.”
Our hearts grieve, our soul is vexed, we find ourselves distressed, and anger is the development of consciousness which helps us embody the great mother and discern what righteous action to take. The truest purpose of anger is to drive righteous action. It’s a sign that something has offended our spirit, that wrong has been done.
It's Not Nice to Be Angry
Yet all too often, women are disconnected from healthy anger because of societal conditioning that teaches women it isn’t nice to be angry, and the greatest currency of women (aside from beauty and sexuality) is niceness.
This belief is one of the most insidious perpetrators and perpetuations of dominator culture and patriarchy; in teaching us that our worth and value is enmeshed with how nice we are, women are not equipped to tap into our most important role and responsibility to be keepers, caregivers and protectors of Earth and our children.
“Never underestimate the power of an angry woman, because when it’s her time to take action, even the devil takes notes.”
The devil, Lucifer in Judeo-Christian mythos, is a fallen angel, cast out by God for wanting to be like Him: omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient. Though fallen, Lucifer is said to have dominion over Earth just as God has dominion over heaven. When an angry woman acts, her power is so great that even one who supposedly ‘rules the Earth’ takes notes.
There’s a deeper story here, one that reveals itself in mythology and religion from throughout history and across various cultures. Women’s rage is so meaningful that it is often personified in a form of the Goddess.
[Art Credit: Medusa by Edoardo Erfini]
Faces of the Angry Goddess
Medusa, from Classical Greek mythology, is a symbol of wrath, cursed with an evil gaze that turns those who anger her into stone. She is pictured with bared teeth, a mane of writhing serpents, and a severed head pouring blood, her ‘ugliness’ meant to represent how unattractive her anger made her.
But do you know how Medusa became cursed with such a gaze; do you know why she was so angry? It was because of rape. Medusa was once a beautiful young maiden, the only mortal of three sisters known as the Gorgons. Her beauty caught the eye of the sea god Poseidon, who proceeded to rape her in the sacred temple of Athena. Furious at the desecration of her temple, Athena transformed Medusa into a monster with the deadly capacity to turn whoever looked upon her face to stone.
This story weaves the patriarchal lies that the beauty of one woman is a threat to another, that sexual violence is justified by women’s beauty, and that women should punish each other for the crimes of men.
In ancient Egypt, Sekhmet, with her fierce lion head, symbolizes the destructive force of anger and serves as the protector of justice. The twin face of Hathor (loving mother God), Sekhmet is the force Hathor took to serve justice. Called ‘the bloodthirsty’, Sekhmet was known for being a loving mother, ruthless foe, and powerful healer. She was the one who plagued humanity with disease, at the behest of her father Ra, but she was also the one who carried the medicines to heal.
The Celtic goddess Morrigan is often portrayed as a warrior and is connected to death, war, and fate. Some tales speak of her in three forms: Badb, a shapeshifter who takes the form of a crow and is a harbinger of war and death; Macha, a fertility goddess known for her strength and determination in childbirth and mothering; Nemain, goddess of chaos and confusion associated with the frenzy of battle.
One of the origin stories of Kali, Vedic goddess of birth and death, is that she exploded from the forehead of mother-Goddess Durga during battle with Mahishasura, a demon who’d petitioned Brahman (father-God) for immortality, but received the ‘next best thing’ - he couldn’t be killed by a man or God, only a woman. This demon tortured humanity until in fighting him, Durga’s rage grew so powerful that Kali sprung from within her and went wild, attacking and eating every demon she encountered. Each time a piece of Mahishasura was dismembered, new bodies of him grew from a droplet of blood - so as she fought him, Kali licked up each drop of blood that flew. In another origin story, Kali is said to have arisen from the triplicity of God (Brahma - Vishnu - Shiva) when they could not defeat Mahishasura. In either story, she appears out of necessity, during a critical time when the powers of neither man nor God could drive out the evil being enacted upon humans. Kali, like Sekhmet, holds the power to destroy and annihilate, but she is also a Goddess of life, childbirth, and Mothers.
[Art Credit: the Morai Fars by Paleothea]
Fates, Furies & the Balance of Life
Perhaps my favorite thread to weave here (pun intended) is that of the Fates and Furies, six faces of the Goddess found in Greek mythology. Together they are creators, responsible for weaving the world and the web of life (Fates) and destroyers, tasked with karmic fulfillment for crimes against humanity (Furies).
The Fates were the daughters of Nyx (Night, the formless void, the uncreated realm), three sisters who spun the thread of life, determined human destinies and affected the paths of all of the universe. Clotho, The Spinner, spun the thread of destiny which a person followed over the course of their life. Lachesis, The Allotter, determined the amount of life granted to each soul by giving them a fixed amount of days and nights upon the Earth. Atropos, The Inflexible, was responsible for cutting the thread of life when the allotted days were fulfilled - with no hesitation, no questions, and no second guessing. The Fates were weavers of Life.
The Furies, on the other hand, were daughters of Gaea (Earth), conceived by Her with the blood of her mutilated (castrated, actually) spouse Uranus (ruler of sky / heaven). Uranus had declared himself ‘ruler of the universe,’ and imprisoned Gaea and her children, which was a great injustice against the older way, in which Earth was not under domain of the sky God, but belonged to Herself and Her children. She sent her son Cronus to castrate Uranus and birthed the Furies from his blood.
[Art Credit: Orestes Pursued by the Furies by William Adolphe Bouguereau]
These sisters were born to serve as guardians and protectors of the natural law, when the powers of ‘man’ (like the government had not yet intervened or when appropriate laws or rules for protection did not exist - such as when the offense was a crime of ethics rather than written law. They were a promise of unceasing, grudging retribution for harm against Earth and her children.
Alecto the Unceasing is the keeper of righteous anger and punisher of moral crimes. Her compass for what is right and wrong is perfect. Megaera the Grudge is the punisher of crimes of bitterness and jealousy in families and relationships. Her intelligence is knowing when a heart has gone astray from divine love. Tisiphone the Retribution is an avenger of blood crimes like rape and murder and an issuer of karmic justice.
A victim seeking justice could call down the curse of the Furies upon the criminal, the liar, the unethical, and those sisters would get to work as tormentors and pursuers of unpunished evildoers, relentlessly hounding lying, cheating, unethical men.
[Art Credit: Earth Goddess by Praphul Garg]
Women's Ancient & Intelligent Anger
What I find most interesting in the parallels of these mythologies is that the angry women arise out of need, when justice is not being served, to protect Earth and humanity. Yet they are never solely goddesses of destruction, they are also always keepers and bringers of Life. And in many of the stories, they are the only ones who can transform the suffering humans are experiencing, because they are the bridge between blood, life, and death.
We need more strong, angry women to recognize that our anger exists because it knows injustice through the intelligence of our bodies of Earth, and our body of Earth has a calling to generate, preserve, and tend both life and death.
We are stewards of the balance and harmony of Earth, and frankly, it’s always been our job to get angry so that true justice, the justice of natural law, prevails.
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