Throughout history, women have represented life. Nature religions worshipped goddesses who brought the harvest. In the Greek tradition, Demeter was the goddess not only of the harvest but also of motherhood itself. Her grief over the loss of Persephone explained winter and the dying of the earth. Persephone embodied rebirth, seasonal renewal, and the cyclical return of life. Aphrodite was the goddess of sexuality and beauty, but she also represented the power of attraction—the very force that draws life together. The goddess Hera was the protector of marriage, women, childbirth, and lawful family continuity. And Artemis was the protector of childbirth and young life.
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There were other traditions, of course. Venus, the goddess of beauty and fertility in the Roman world; and Isis, who was the goddess of healing, motherhood, resurrection, and protection of life. In the Mesopotamian tradition, Ishtar was the goddess of fertility and cosmic vitality, and in the Norse tradition, Freyja was the goddess of fertility and love.
In the Christian world, Mary becomes the “New Eve.” She represents both birth and new life, spiritual motherhood. In ancient Byzantium, she was the great Protector of the Empire, prayed to as often as her famous Son. In fact, in the Christian tradition, Mary has a direct participation in the redemption of humankind itself.
For most of human history, women were seen as the givers of life, the preservers of continuity, the transmitters of culture, guardians of children as well as the mediators of both memory and tenderness. In a healthy family, what child does not look back on their mother with both gratefulness and adoration?
And so, if you want to look at the cause for what ails Western civilization, look no further than the demonic spiral in which we now find ourselves. We wonder why we are living in a culture now that celebrates sterility, fragmentation, the rejection of inherited meaning, and hostility toward family and especially motherhood. We live in a world where modern feminism celebrates not life, but death and darkness. It celebrates the dissolution of the family, the negation of life through their dark sacrament of ending the life of a child, and treats the dissolution of the marital union as a triumph of female personhood. Modern feminism preaches that women become women through the negation of life, through denial of empathy, and through rage rather than rational and pacific strength.
Women become women today through negating their primal spirit and can only achieve fulfillment through imitating a gross caricature of the male. But, for men who want to be true heroes, only cartoonish dimwits act like a “boss babe.” Men who are small-minded and selfish have never been celebrated. Homer taught us that Achilles’s petulance not only diminished him, but his childish behavior also brought ruin on the Greeks and his friend Patroclus. Odysseus, the hero of the Odyssey, does not behave like a selfish buffoon. In fact, he forsakes living alone on an island with a goddess madly in love with him to take a perilous journey to reunite with Penelope. Buddha, Jesus, and Gandhi are all heroes not because they maximize their pleasure, but because of the otherworldly nature of their sacrifice. Men do not admire self-obsession; they admire sacrifice—even if it costs the hero his life. This is what men, deep down, are called to do: preserve and protect. Failing at this makes us less of a man.
So why must we suffer the feminist illusion that the ideal female acts like a wholly insufferable male—selfish, loud, rude, overly ambitious, and completely consumed with themselves? How is the negation of life, the negation of our inheritance, the negation of transcendence, and the negation of the future of the species somehow tied up with the ideal heroine? How is abortion a moral sacrament of autonomy—as if unlimited autonomy is even a laudable goal for either the man or the woman? On what planet is it that the ideal male walks out on his wife and children to pursue his selfish desires? What man, deep down, believes that this is a noble pursuit?
We are born with the instinct that the noble man is the unselfish comrade, the loyal partner, the ally in the foxhole, the hero who charges into battle to save his friends, the emperor who loses his life fighting the invaders—not the fool who turns and runs. What cretin believes this is bravery for a man or noble behavior for a woman?
Unfortunately, this base instinct is not unknown to us. From the Garden of Eden to Lady Macbeth, to Goneril and Regan of King Lear and Lucrezia Borgia, poisonous treachery is not unfamiliar. It is only recently—in the post-modern world—that selfish and manipulative narcissism has been treated as somehow liberating or admirable. Because the goal of postmodernism is to annihilate our civilization, a civilization that adheres to its tenets is not long for the earth. And post-modernism is nothing new. It is the disease that ends civilizations, and history is littered with such examples. Postmodernism not only celebrates this moral inversion but also defines it as absolute. The result for us has been predictable: hasty civilizational decline, dissolution of the bonds that hold men and women and families together, and neutralizing the natural instinct to leave our children a better world than what we found.
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This is all illustrated in the lack of concern for the debt and the chaos that we leave behind. But it is even more illustrated in the fact that we have lately become too selfish to have children at all. Throughout the West, “experts” are befuddled as to how birth rates have dropped so precipitously. We are too myopic to understand that a culture that celebrates radical individualism at the expense of others, which lauds the death of a child as a liberating act, shrugs off child trafficking by our political class, opens our borders to predators who push drugs and violence into our cities, and allows criminals to terrorize the population may not be long for this world.
The miracle of the feminine, since the dawn of time associated with birth, nurture, continuity, and protection, has now been replaced with existential negation: the rejection of motherhood, the dismantling of inherited structures as “oppressive,” and demographic collapse as welcome. The perverse forces that celebrate this in our universities, in our corporations, and in our public schools praise the rejection of motherhood as empowering and incredibly celebrate working for a faceless corporation or bureaucracy as noble. Motherhood is now diminished beyond all recognition and is delayed, medicalized, commercialized, and treated as a lower form of achievement compared to driving to an office and working in a cube. What nonsense.
Our civilization is dying because our actions in the West are designed to destroy the power of the divine feminine. Women have been forcibly detached from their true superpower. They are humiliated for wanting to participate in their life-giving and civilizational role. For centuries, it was women who built and preserved culture and men who were charged with the responsibility of defending it. Now, we do neither. What perverse serpent has pitted man against women, praised chaos over reason, and degraded the importance of beauty?
The tragedy is not that women became educated, ambitious, or intellectually capable. This only adds to their greatness. The tragedy is that modern civilization has detached feminine power from its life-giving and civilizational role and redirected it toward negation.
For centuries, men and women formed the living bridge between past and future. But a civilization that teaches its daughters to despise motherhood and its sons to flee sacrifice severs itself from the very source of its renewal.
The ancients understood something we have forgotten: civilizations survive only when they love life enough to continue themselves. And when a culture teaches the guardians of birth, continuity, and tenderness to see life itself as a burden rather than a gift, the death spiral becomes almost impossible to stop.
No civilization survives long after it declares war on its own future.
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This article was originally published on June 1, 2026, on Substack. Spyridon (Don) Andrews is a Greek American writer, lawyer, and lifelong jazz musician. In his writing, he draws on his Hellenic roots, as well as his love of Renaissance Humanism. A graduate of Harvard, he writes works that blend history, travel, philosophy, and comedy. Most recently, he wrote Manuel and Me: Looking for the Soul of America in the Heart of Italy.
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