By Tara Kimes
Tara wrote the following in response to Brent “Mage” Hanvey’s October 22, 2021 article as part of our ongoing conversation on the Divine Masculine / Divine Feminine balance—and the healing and cooperation required to build the New Earth together.
I feel especially drawn to Brent’s article, Divine Masculine: Accountability as a Radical Act of Compassion, specifically because I’m working with the Justice tarot card this year, which is all about accountability. Brent’s words clarified and expanded on a message that I’ve been deciphering for a while now while working with personal growth in the areas of trust-building, respect, telling the truth, and saying no. And he summed it up so well with one word - accountability!
First, I’ll describe the Justice tarot card and give some detail about its meaning. Then, I’ll refer to some of Brent’s points and elaborate on them/share my own self-discovery around his ideas and what came to me after contemplating the journal questions he offers in his article.
Justice Card Meaning
In the Justice card, we see a woman in a position of power, looking straight ahead with discernment. She holds a sword in one hand and scales in the other. It’s as if she’s deciding in the present moment - what about this is worth my attention and what about this needs to go? She’s first weighing the problem, then cutting off the excess with her sword - either giving herself freedom from it or sacrificing a part of it to keep the rest.
It takes a huge amount of self-responsibility to admit that we’re carrying dead weight (drama, projections, baggage of the past, fixations on the future) and detach from fantasy land. It also takes accountability to hold the weight of what we’ve said or done and examine it truthfully, weighing the consequences. There may be a need to apologize, to sacrifice one’s ego in order to sustain a relationship. Alternatively, there may be a need to remove a relationship altogether to sustain one’s mental health. These are all things Justice has to decide consciously - with full accountability.
Accountability as Divine Masculine/Trust
Brent’s article referred to accountability as a Divine Masculine trait, which I agree with. However, in the tarot, Justice is known as ‘Lady Justice’ and is most often depicted as a woman. So an important observation can be made here - that the Divine Masculine exists within women too (as does the Divine Feminine in men). How exactly is accountability a Divine Masculine trait?
In the tantra yoga tradition, the masculine principle is seen as pure consciousness, or what holds everything in place and gives structure - like the four walls of a room, or legs of a table, or the unchanging space that holds fickle sky, clouds and weather.
This also plays out in humans. For example, the more divinely masculine person is the one who can be trusted to hold space for unpredictability/chaos. If we have a strong inner masculine, we can hold space for our own internal/emotional chaos, which leads to self-trust. I like how Brent uses the word ‘accountability’ to describe this kind of self-trust, which also leads to gaining the trust of others. Accountability is a kind of awareness that functions to help us evolve.
I really had a huge breakthrough with accountability, embodying my inner masculine and the Justice archetype in the last few years when I started having the courage to say no. Saying no has built a tremendous amount of safety into my nervous system and helped me open deeper to saying yes to the things I really want, and to trust the Universe will follow through on these. Unfortunately, this wasn’t always the case. There have been times when I said yes to things I didn’t really want to do - subtly lying to myself - and then later disappointing the people around me, unable to fulfill my end of the deal. It was only when I stopped leading people on that I started becoming a true leader and felt big surges of energy and increased self-esteem. Since that time, my perception of ‘accountability’ has changed. I used to feel numb or cringey hearing the word. Now I feel grounded and freed by it.
This is the gift of the Divine Masculine, to provide us such a secure and strong foundation that we feel safe enough to jump, to trust where life may take us. I believe truth plays a huge part of this, as telling the truth is half the battle in accountability. The other half is self-acceptance, fully owning your part in something without self-denial, self-dismissal, or self-abandonment. Then we have the opportunity to evolve this feeling into self-compassion, so much so that we start lovingly asking for and giving ourselves what we deserve, unabashedly petitioning the Universe to help us fulfill our most heartfelt longings.
Accountability and Relationships
Brent talks about how accountability improves our relationships. He refers to it as “a starting point in the process of seeking justice, equality, and/or healing.” He says it has to do with listening from a neutral place instead of jumping in to defend ourselves. I like to imagine that Lady Justice totally gets this and embodies it. For example, her straightforward glance is symbolic of being fully in the present, not caught up in the future or past…simply neutral. In that state, she can listen and more clearly discern the wisest, most peaceful, diplomatic solution. Also, she holds scales which are symbolic of weighing in on something - listening/paying attention intently and examining both sides of it. There’s a carefulness here…one could even say a tenderness. This reminds me that I don’t have to rush my no, that it can be a process of feeling into a decision and taking my time with it. I can simply say, “Thank you for the offer. I’d like to take a few days to think about it”, then be present with it and notice how it feels in my body, trusting the right decision will come.
