“Dylan and the Divine Feminine”
By Rebecca Slaman
The Divine Feminine is a buzzword today, used to invoke a “secret power” women possess, one that has been lost under the patriarchy. It’s been mostly appropriated into our hyper-individualist media landscape from non-Christian traditions under the embrace of white liberal feminism. But the Divine Feminine is actually an ancient concept that has been rekindled and reformed throughout many cultures and poetic traditions. Bob Dylan’s songs often rely on a strong relationship to this powerful muse, informed by his songwriting, cultural, and personal influences. In turn, his relationship to this powerful divine muse can tell us of his own insecurities and identities as a songwriter and a man. In looking at this relationship, a few stock characters emerge: (1) magical, mystical women, (2) mythical women, and (3) religious (mostly Christian) women.
How can we find and define the divine feminine in Dylan’s songs? Defining “the Divine Feminine” is tricky; we tend to think in binaries. The qualities of femininity have been contentious: we want to create a substantial definition of it and avoid Simone du Beauvoir’s ire by not saying “anything other than man.” But the qualities of contemporary divine femininity tend to be seen as sweet, soft, motherly, caring. This is just a version of western ideal womanhood: the wife, the mother, under another name. What one lacks, the other has. Dylan does tap into this definition a bit, but where he’s coming from when speaking of these women is a more ancient context, as well as the context of his time.
Dylan came of age during Second-wave feminism, a period when these ideals of womanhood broadened. In this movement, “witchy” women represented a rejection of these ideals of beauty, of power, of relation to men. As Robin Morgan writes in her 1978 memoir, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist,
In the late 1960s feminist political activists in the United States began to employ the witch as a symbol of frightening and “deviant” womanhood.Halloween 1968 marked the beginning of WITCH, an acronym for Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell. A group of New York women dressed up as witches and launched a full day’s programme of dramatic political action at sites including the Federal Reserve Treasury, the New York Stock Exchange. One Chase Manhattan Plaza, massage parlours, a beauty parlour, a men-only bar, arestaurant frequented by sixties “beautiful people.” (Morgan 1978:71-77)
They occupied a space that traditionally only men were allowed, or where women of a certain beauty standard were permitted only as accessories. WITCH was chosen as the group’s name for its symbolic value: it grabbed people’s attention and offered theatrical opportunities for protest activities.
It must be clarified: “The women were not interested in witchcraft for religious reasons, and performed rituals only as public performances because of the crowd-pulling attention they brought to political protests” (Rountree 1). Though they were not religious, this same movement did eventually birth the religious movement Wicca. The political became religious in the same way Dylan himself eventually did.
These political ideals were certainly being talked about in the circles Dylan ran in. The women in his life would have been influenced by this imagery and perhaps participated in its reclamation. Similarly “Goddess feminism,” coming about in the late 60s, marked a difference between Dylan and his folk heroes, making him more contemporary to the social trends of the time. “Consciousness-raising” social events, where women would gather and debate the role of feminism in society going forward, employed these symbols of female power. Though perhaps idealistic, they needed these goddess figures as role models for women to feel comfortable taking power in work and relationships. This similarly turned into its own religious practice: priestesses of goddess feminism worshiped their own patron goddesses. In time, Dylan became a priestess himself.
For Dylan, a clearly foundational text – so foundational in fact that he lists it on his website – is The White Goddess by Robert Graves. Dylan mentions the book in Chronicles, Volume One when describing his first winter in New York: “Invoking the poetic muse was something I didn’t know about yet. Didn’t know enough to start trouble with it, anyway. In a few years’ time I would meet Robert Graves himself in London … I wanted to ask him about some of the things in his book, but I couldn’t remember much about it” (41). Dylan may be downplaying his engagement with the book, as many people cited him carrying it around everywhere like it was a religious text. It’s the basis for more than just his relationship with women, but his identity as a songwriter.
The book is an exploration into the divine female muse as a longstanding figure in mostly Celtic cultures. Graves emphasizes the genuine magic of ancient poetry that has a relationship with the White Goddess, and thus, why it was suppressed by the patriarchal religions. According to him, “the reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem, is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust – the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death” (Graves 20). The female muse’s power is paramount to her, and she can be represented by any woman – Graves uses examples of John Keats: Fanny Brawne was a human inspiration to project the muse, but there was also a metaphorical inspiration, the threat of death Keats wrote under. Christian and classical tradition squashed the divine female muse in favor of patriarchy. Graves makes a distinction between poets who subscribe to patriarchy and those who rightly address the muse’s power. “The Classical poet, however gifted and industrious, fails to pass the test because he claims to be the Goddess’s master – she is his mistress only in the derogatory sense of one who lives in coquettish ease under his protection” (Graves 21).
This idea directly influences the muse in Dylan’s early songs. In his famous 60 Minutes interview in 2004, Dylan says “Those songs were almost magically written.” Dylan romanticizes his own early songwriting by entering himself into this canon of “true” poets. He makes a similar distinction to Graves: “It’s not a Siegfried and Roy kind of magic, it’s a different kind of penetrating magic.” It’s not something constructed by humans, but something beyond. Both Dylan and Graves are talking about something real. Whether the muse was moving through him in a literal or metaphorical way, we do see his relationship with women change throughout his career. With this, he goes through phases of suppressing the muse. His songwriting moves from living in fear of her, to attempting to claim power over her. Eventually, the muse is under the power of the masculine God through the vessel of Dylan.
Take “My Back Pages” as an example of this early influence:
Girls’ faces formed the forward path
From phony jealousy
To memorizing politics of ancient history
Flung down by corpse evangelists unthought of though, somehow
In this autobiographical song, Dylan is talking about his personal history of how he’s come to love the humanities. He was motivated to impress girls, and his method was to seem smart. In the context of the song, he’s admonishing himself for being foolish, dismissing the reason for him wanting to learn as childish. However, we do see women and love of history linked. He compares women in his orbit to historical women in a positive light. We can also think of tales of women, Helen of Troy, for example, being a catalyst for major events in history, and the personal drama of the gods being the explanation for historical events. This is the history of storytelling. He implicates himself in this history by being a songwriter himself, and he often references the classics.
In other cases, Dylan uses the Divine Feminine in a positive context, saying a woman is like the muse. Notice the purely positive connotations: “And your saintlike face and ghostlike soul”; “Bow down to her on Sunday”; “You remind me of something that used to be / Somethin’ crossed over from another century”; “You got me under your wing, the way you walk and the way you talk, I feel I could almost sing”; and lastly, about from Chronicles about Joan Baez: “she looked like a religious icon, like somebody you’d sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God.”
In the contemporary religious sphere, the theme of sacrifice invokes Jesus, or the messiah. But Dylan is talking about sacrifice as an ancient religious rite. Bob is like the priestess of goddess feminism. “When I Paint my Masterpiece” likewise, is a great example of this: a mortal woman who represents the conduit for the muse. She’ll be with him when he paints his masterpiece. Dylan associates her with a historical symbolism. In one version of the song, he uses the character of Botticelli’s niece, another personal connection to ancient history.
Dylan doesn’t always embrace this power the muse has over him. As he continues to write, the muse’s power becomes a complicated feeling for him as a man. When he describes her in these examples, the power is simply a fact he’s stating as the storyteller, like he is the victim of a spell could love or hate and it wouldn’t matter. In “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,” Dylan sings:
Is it really any wonder the love a stranger might receive
You cast your spell and I went under
I find it so difficult to leave
It doesn’t sound like he particularly wants to leave, but the witch casting her spell would have ensnared him even if he did. He is like a willing servant to her.
In “Isis,” Dylan plays with the power dynamic and seems to be in denial over the power he did have in the relationship. Throughout the epic story, he switches back and forth between claiming any fault in the relationship. At first, “I could not hold on to her very long” suggests her free will, more powerful than his. Then as we go on, we see it may have been his truancy that led her to leave, not her power over him. “She thought I was so reckless” suggests his flightiness, therefore his own free will. “What drives me to you is what drives me insane” suggests forces even bigger than this literal goddess, such as the force of love itself. In playing with these ideas, Dylan no longer follows the literary pattern set by Graves. He takes the poetic tools that Graves has given him, and context that society has given him, and internalizes those to make mythic art about his experience in relationships with real human women.
When Bob Dylan converts to Born-Again Christianity, we see gender dynamics change from more Eastern and Celtic origin, as in the White Goddess, to Abrahamic, Patriarchal, and Classical. The shift in the female muse begins within “Wedding Song.” First, the speaker aligns with the goddess figure:
You breathed on me and made my life a richer one to live
When I was deep in poverty you taught me how to give
Dried the tears up from my dreams and pulled me from the hole
Quenched my thirst and satisfied the burning in my soul
She has bestowed good fortune upon him; she has saved him. This idea of salvation intermingles the Abrahamic religions with this Celtic/Eastern concept of the goddess. But then, the speaker subverts her power later in the song when he begins talking about a higher power commanding them to be together.
Oh, can’t you see that you were born to stand by my side
And I was born to be with you, you were born to be my bride
The hands of fate or a higher power are in charge, not this all-knowing goddess who can save him. Dylan has consistently given up the idea that he has power in these relationships, but now he insists that neither does she.
We can find many interesting parallels between the first half of “Wedding Song” and the concept of salvation in “Shelter from the Storm.” Dylan mentions his “crown of thorns,” the adornment that society has given him that is a burden to him. The thorns constitute his earthly struggles, but although he is invoking the Jesus metaphor for himself, she is the one who gives him salvation. She is an equal to God. In performance, his delivery of “lethal dose” has a cheeky tone to it, as if the goddess is so powerful she doesn’t know her own strength.
When we get into the Christian era, we don’t totally leave these ideas of divine womanhood behind. One of the most fire-and-brimstone songs is also a love song that invokes the Divine Feminine muse. “Precious Angel” describes a woman who delivers him to the grace of God. The speaker specifies this is a fate he wouldn’t be able to come to himself. Interestingly, he uses witch imagery to admonish his non-Christian pals who has spent time with up until this point. “My so-called friends have fallen under a spell / They look me squarely in the eye and they say, ‘All is well’. Curiously, the speaker doesn’t claim he’s not also under a spell, since he credits the addressee of the song as swaying him in the right direction. He also calls her a divine being, an “angel,” which harkens back to “You Angel You” from Planet Waves, though the content of the song is different. Even when turning from any non-Christian mythology or religion, Dylan can’t let go of the essence of the White Goddess.
Dylan leaves divine women behind after the Christian era. As the preaching fades, women take on much more earthly features. It seems the magical facade is really gone this time, with songs such as “Seeing the Real You at Last.” It’s hard to find anything positive about women for a period, let alone divine ones. This is until “Under Your Spell” on Knocked out Loaded. It’s tricky to parse what happens in the song, which may be because it’s co-written with Carole Bayer Sager. But it’s back to basics with the power struggle with Dylan’s speaker and the muse. He seems tired of the fact that this struggle is something he hasn’t escaped, and maybe never will. The song describes the speaker as stuck in purgatory after a run-in with his lover.
I’d like to help you but I’m in a bit of a jam
I’ll call you tomorrow if there’s phones where I am
Baby, caught between heaven and hell
But I will be back, I will survive
You’ll never get rid of me as long as you’re alive
The “fault” of the troubled relationship goes back and forth between the speaker and the subject, as in “Isis.” If she’s the one casting the spell, why does she need to get rid of him? It seems the speaker wants to seek vengeance on the deity that controls him in any way possible. This dynamic is representative of the vibes towards female subjects in this post-gospel era.
When Dylan starts looking back on his life and career in Rough and Rowdy Ways, the presence of women and the muse must have loomed large. When he returns to the muse, he has no more fight left in him. Rather than running or being unwillingly commanded, Dylan embraces the muse and addresses her directly. He speaks to her as a force, rather than in the form of a woman. In doing so, he gives up the one power that he ever claimed to have, which was storytelling. In “Mother of Muses,” Dylan sings,
Show me your wisdom – tell me my fate
Put me upright – make me walk straight
Forge my identity from the inside out
He could tell their stories all day, but he asks the Muse to do it for him. She’s bigger than the storyteller– she’s the driving force of his whole life and identity. He lists the great men who have been influenced by her: Elvis, Martin Luther King Jr., historic military generals, and he does so with respect and acceptance of her power. The muse moves through their lives and then through himself to tell those stories.
Works Cited
Dylan, Bob. Chronicles Vol. 1. Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Graves, Robert. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. Edited by Grevel Lindop, Faber and Faber, 1999.
Rountree, Kathryn. “THE POLITICS OF THE GODDESS: Feminist Spirituality and the Essentialism Debate.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, vol. 43, no. 2, 1999, pp. 138–65. JSTOR http://www.jstor.org/stable/23166525. Accessed 8 Sept. 2024.
Morgan, R. Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist. New York, Vintage Books. 1978.
