Sin, Women and Spiritual Violence

A thought piece sparked by
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. 30 min read.

I just watched Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein on Netflix the other day, and I was so surprised by how much it affected me. Honestly, I thought I would be watching half the movie through my fingers, asking my boyfriend every few minutes to mute the volume to save me from a horror-induced heart attack. “Muting the volume” has been our little trick for years so we can watch scary movies together. I have always found it hard to resist a good ghost story, and I do love psychological thrillers and mysteries, but horror is not my cup of tea. Still, since those genres are often mixed together, it is easier to handle the scary scenes through the fingers, or over a pillow, and without sound. I’m sure many of you will relate!

But this movie was so different from what I thought it would be. It was deep, layered, and unexpectedly moving. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a Frankenstein film before, actually (yes, I know! Shocking), and I’ve never read Mary Shelley’s book. So when we pressed play, I still held that cartoonish childhood image of Frankenstein in my mind: of a ghoulish, unspeaking monster, stitched together from corpses and brought to life by lightning. I had absolutely no idea how the real story goes. 

In fact, I always thought Frankenstein was the name of the monster, or the “Creature,” as he is called in del Toro’s movie, not the name of his creator, the scientist Mr. Victor Frankenstein. Only a minor misunderstanding of the entire premise. Though, in my defence, the monster did rather steal the name. 

Hey, notice how “creature” and “creator” are nearly spelled the same? Love that. This wordplay actually reminds me of a philosophical idea I once read which is very important to me today: what if it is the creation that creates the creator, not the other way around? So what came first, the chicken or the egg? Just for the sake of philosophizing, for a few seconds, think about the concept of God from this point of view. Interesting, right? 

Something within me shifted after wondering about how the creation itself might create its creator. It makes everything come alive somehow. Rounder. And a new understanding emerged which has often served me well since. Whenever I’m working on a new idea, I let myself breathe a bit more with the vision than I did before. I do not try to force my will upon it, nor the process. Instead I respect it as energy with a life wave of its own. I sense our dance as a movement between the intangible idea and the tangible form of myself, and how in that liminal space of manifesting, we are co-creating, weaving pulsing threads into something new together. 

I think the same dance applies between an art piece like Frankenstein and the watcher. There is the weaving of something new taking place, of a feeling arising, of a revelation unfolding, the weaving of a thought piece like this one into an article. It’s the ripple effect created between the yin-like receptivity of the audience and the yang-like creative expression of the movie. 

The Mother in Red 

Throughout Frankenstein, a string of symbolic scenes, motifs, and lines of dialogue caught my attention and produced a reaction within me. 

Victor and his mother in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, 2025.

The almost sensory symbolism began instantly. The vivid cinematography was palpable right from the moment Victor’s mother appeared in a scene from his childhood in fiery red, the color burning bright in stark contrast with the background. 

Yet, the fabric was light, see-through and flowing. Very soft and sensual. Very physical. The strength of life and nurturance in one. The power of blood and heartbeat — the Red — portraying the mother as the feminine earthly God, who, upon receiving a sperm cell, has the natural ability to grow a fetus into a baby inside of her own body, and then birth a new human into the world, and nurture it into an independent individual. In this context, the blood red I see as symbolizing The Sustaining Creatrix, the Cosmic Mother incarnated on Mother Earth. That was my take on this powerful portrayal of the mother, and it was almost in silent, yet visually striking defiance of Victor’s violent and overbearing father. 

He was, by contrast, portrayed in a dominant, oppressive light which made me see him as symbolizing oppressive societal structures, the patriarchal God, the power-over principle, that for millennia has given men power over women for no reason whatsoever — systems that have made women feel unsafe and unworthy. And as a result of this imbalance of male and female energies, we’ve had, and still have in many parts of the world, societies and families that beget and nurture megalomaniacs like Victor, who through their relentless ambition force their will and ways upon others. While women, by nature’s hand, have the sustaining Creator Power of God in their own bodies, and therefore seem not to be as driven or hungry for claiming power over others, as seems evident when we look at history. Theirs is a silent, profound, innate power indeed, which, some argue, is the very reason why women’s life force has historically been oppressed by male-dominant societies and religions. 

Please allow me to omit the whole “not all women are benevolent, and not all men are violent” disclaimer. In all earnestness, I simply don’t have the energy for it anymore. And I mean, really? Do we always have to point that out when discussing these themes? It’s getting a bit boring. Let’s continue. 

Our Original Medicine 

“Okay, something very deep is happening here.” 

The pivotal moment, when I realized I for sure wasn’t watching yet another blockbuster movie, visually striking, but often lacking psychological depth, came when the character of Elizabeth — an inquisitive young woman, both spiritually sensitive and scientifically curious — wondered about the spiritual significance of the Creature out loud to Victor: 

“What if, in being anew, the spirit that animates him is simpler, purer? Purer than that of the common man? What if, unstrained by sin, our creator’s breath came into its wounded flesh directly?” 

The contemplative scene from del Toro's Frankenstein that sparked this thought piece.

This haunted me for days. In truth, an array of spiritual, philosophical and even societal themes for discussion could be drawn from only these few words. They have their specific symbolic place within the full context of the movie though, of course. But taken on their own — and considering that I, like Elizabeth, grew up in a Christian society — her spiritual wonderings had the power to move me into my own spiritual contemplations. 

Though her religion was Catholic and mine was Protestant, the idea of original sin was, and still is, a big part of the doctrine of my former Lutheran faith, as Adam and Eve’s disobedience is the very ground the Christian myth grows from. That’s why I could sense in my bones where she was coming from — especially as I’m also a woman — an Eve, who grew up in a male-oriented society like Elizabeth. Even though Iceland has become a fairly liberal and secular society today, much like the other Nordic countries, it has grown from roots enmeshed with the patriarchal views of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, our national church.

Living as a woman in the Nordics, and in modern times, I know my experience is, of course, vastly different from Elizabeth’s — or more correctly, from that of women living in the mid-1800s, when the film is set. But even though women’s empowerment movements have been hugely successful over the last century or so in righting, to some extent, the imbalance between the sexes and making living circumstances much better for women, at least in the majority of countries, male dominance in the world, and within its religions, still stands to this day — and is therefore part of our present-day lived reality, even hundreds of years later. It seems we don’t evolve psychologically in a very hurried manner. So her questions about the purity of the sinless Creature made me wonder deeply about us warm-bloods, and our complex and multi-faceted human nature.

I’ve always been fascinated by the “nature vs. nurture” phenomenon, and especially the negative vs. positive conditioning that happens through the “nurturing” umbrella term. The common man Elizabeth speaks of is simply us, human beings. Layered and complicated. Each of us with our own unique characteristics, yet also shaped by the world, the times and the geography we are born into: the societal structures and expectations for men and women, the laws and the literature, and both the fantastical discoveries and the fear-inducing dogmas. 

No matter the era we live in — most of us have always felt like we’re quite complicated creatures, living convoluted and oftentimes messy lives. Again, I think a lot of that has to do with the interplay between our innate nature and how we’re “nurtured”, or molded by the  environment. There seems to be a constant creative tension between the nature we are born with and the outward personality we’ve grown into. From childhood, we’ve grown a persona through how our inborn attributes have reacted to environmental factors and stimuli. 

This begs the question: Why, out of the two genders, the two halves that make a baby together, why is it the women’s half that has historically been suppressed for no reason by the other half?

Eve, Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer, 1896.

Back to Frankenstein’s Creature. It, or he, is different from us mortals. He is not born biologically. He is not born into any doctrine of “sin” and has no genetic lineage. He arrives fully grown. He has no childhood, no inherited traumas, no early imprinting. His animating force has fewer obstructions. So in that sense, yes — the spirit inside him gets to be simpler, purer. Not morally purer, not “better than,” but less layered. The Creature is a simpler form. He has no accumulated psychological baggage nor the urge to project it outwards. 

How different would our existence be if we could meet life without projecting our accumulated conditioning, inherited beliefs, our generational wounds and suffering, our expectations and judgments onto ourselves, others, and our environment? What lives underneath all our layers? That is the Great Question, with a capital G and a capital Q. 

For the record, and for clarity, it’s important to share with you that I stand outside any formal religion today. I’m no longer registered with the National Church of Iceland, which as mentioned before is Evangelical Lutheran. It is remarkably liberal in many respects, but original sin is still part of its Lutheran theological inheritance, and I don’t resonate with the underlying premise that we enter human life already marked by sin.

Yet my life is deeply spiritual.

I just don’t care for the Christian concept of original sin when not taken symbolically.

When seen symbolically, however, as an allegory for us human beings, I find something quite different there: an understanding and acceptance that being human means we have a psychological dimension to us that includes the capacity for moral failings and harmful behavior. That potential to “miss the mark,” which apparently is one of the original meanings of the word sin, is inherent from birth. 

The capacity to harm or to heal is built into us from the beginning. It is nothing to feel shame or guilt over. It doesn’t make us unclean, or unworthy. It is part of being human, a fact about our species, which, when integrated, helps us mature and see ourselves in full view. Not perfect. Certainly with flaws, but whole: energy in motion and maturation, of both matter and spirit, heaviness and lightness. A human being with the potential to grow throughout a lifetime into a person with a peaceful heart or into a person who sails blindly into oblivion, who succumbs to numbing and dumbing down, who falls prey to harmful habits or hate. Or the potential to see a wholesome pivot through, leaving apathetic woundedness or victimhood behind, often with the help and support of other human beings. A human being with the potential to experience the strengthening of her character through hard work and honesty. Or one who simply dies in the darkness. 

Usually we exhibit and experience an eclectic mix of the above throughout our lifetimes, and live through multiple chapter breaks and new beginnings. One thing is for sure. As adults, we now know, without a shadow of a doubt, that our actions have consequences, for better or for worse. It has become crystal clear to us that we certainly reap what we sow. That seems to be the modus operandi of life. Not that we are judged by an overseeing almighty power, who for some weird reason has personality traits, even a personality disorder in some tales, who either punishes us or rewards us for our deeds. 

The Snake Charmer, Henri Rousseau, 1907.

From another point of view, that unseen power could simply be Life, without a personality, simply a natural law by which all actions have consequences. 

This is why I believe the whole journey of being human is to mature in spirit — to listen, to heal, to create, to become more compassionate, to become more consciously all of us as we age. That we integrate our different parts so they work together in harmony. I believe that kind of evolution, if you will, is a potential inherent within us humans as a species. But, as I say, it is only potential. It is not guaranteed, it is not a chore, it is perhaps something that simply happens on its own, in time according to the blueprint of the seed. 

I love the Three H’s slogan of many associations and organizations — Head, Heart, and Hands. It says it all. Integrating our different parts. Could that also be one of the hidden messages in the movie? The creature is all stitched together, and has to learn how to synchronize his different parts. 

Jane Goodall said: “Only when head and heart work in harmony can we attain our true human potential.” I love that.

The Sine Wave 

When we look at the concept of sin through a more harmonious lens, where head, heart and hands are working together, we are shown the sine wave. And the sine wave makes me really excited! When we add a metaphysical lens to the scientific lens we’re looking at the sine wave through, sparks begin to fly. The sine wave is one of the most fundamental recurring forms we find in nature. It appears throughout our descriptions of light, sound and matter, and across music, language and medicine. In that context, “sin” is simply the reality of being bound to physical form, to the oscillation that creates earthly life. The sine wave is the very essence of action and reaction.

If the physics feels abstract, just think of your heartbeat on a monitor, the tide coming in and out. Rhythm and oscillation are everywhere. All movement. All natural.

Now picture a snake moving through a desert. Its movement is driven by wiggling sine wave motions on different axes of the body. Do you know any stories depicting a snake, actions and consequences? Just sayin’.

The Serpentine Rhythm, AI-generated with a prompt from me.

If you’re interested in science, nature, spirituality, and metaphysics, I highly recommend exploring the sine wave. It’s a rabbit hole for sure, but a fascinating one.

Metaphysically, sin can thus be seen as describing our descent from pure consciousness into matter — which parallels the Christian idea of The Fall — the consequence of Adam and Eve’s disobedient actions in the Garden of Eden. Adam, the man with the sperm. Eve, the woman with the egg.

Of course Adam and Eve “fell” into matter. Male + female is precisely how matter keeps making more matter.

And seen through a metaphysical lens, “the fall” can simply be interpreted as incarnation. The soul entering density through biological means. Not sin as in we’re born inherently sinful and need salvation through faith in Jesus, and Jesus alone. Nor the more fundamentalist version that we’re all born with wicked hearts. It’s just the rhythm of becoming human.

This difference — between symbol and literalism — is crucial when trying to understand life, and our religions and reality. Because when metaphor becomes law, harm follows. Through manmade spiritual laws, horrors have been inflicted upon human beings with devastating consequences.

In Our Bones

Biology has now produced interesting studies suggesting how we may, in a sense, inherit the effects of old wounds, with epigenetics offering one possible mechanism. And the undeniable fact is that spiritual and religious structures have, in many ways, shapes and forms, dehumanized, dominated, silenced, and psychologically colonized human beings, especially women, for millennia. In our own bones lives the cruelty of missionary coercion, the violence of forced dogma, the psychological abuse of spiritual superiority, and the insanity of literalist fanaticism. 

After millennia-long religious wars, men taking ownership of people’s inner worlds, and the subordination and objectification of women, we are still witnessing bodies being controlled, voices silenced, and human spirits, young and old alike, shamed into submission. We still see women hidden behind veils, and entire cultures trembling before the threat of eternal damnation. Children are still raised to fear their own thoughts. Men are still taught that dominion is divine, and women are still taught that obedience is holy and that their bodies are not theirs. 

Somewhere along the way, woman, serpent, sexuality and sin became entangled in our collective imagination. Eve reaches for the fruit. The serpent whispers. Woman becomes temptress. Sexuality becomes dangerous. Curiosity becomes disobedience. And this imagery has travelled far beyond the pages of Genesis, seeping into art, theology and culture — and into the ways women themselves have learned to understand their bodies, their desires and their spiritual nature.

What an extraordinarily powerful story to place so close to the roots of how our culture learned to imagine woman.

Sin (Die Sünde), Franz von Stuck, 1893.

We still live in a world of spiritual violence, but we are afraid to call it that. The phrase is reserved for the Crusades or the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, for fundamentalist Muslims, or for a Netflix series about a spiritual cult and its deranged leader. And now more recently for the far-right Christian Nationalists in the US. We don’t realize that even fairly secular societies are steeped in internalized spiritual conditioning from the old days, which we built our hierarchical structures on. 

The Bible and the Power of the Psyche

I do not believe that the truth of the nature of the Divine is to be found in the Bible. I believe the books in the Bible are a human construct, descriptive of belief, not prescriptive of truth. I believe the God in the Bible is made up of people’s projections of their inner lives at the time. Inner lives shaped greatly by their external environment. Therefore, I believe the violence commanded by God in scripture reveals the psyche of the people during that era in human history — not the nature of the Divine.

When ancient holy texts say “God commanded,” what I hear is how the psyche of the people of that era experienced, justified, and symbolized its deepest forces — fear, survival instinct, aggression, longing for order, and meaning.

I believe the nature of the Divine is sensed in aliveness, in breath, in the here and now. Not in the Bible, or the Quran, or any other holy scripture where the God of that faith commands violence. I don’t believe the nature of the Divine is found in doctrine, but in the living, breathing relationship we have with ourselves, each other, and the world around us.

Highlighting all the beauty and wisdom in the Bible while bypassing its horrors, and simply nestling one’s head softly in Jesus’ lap for salvation, may be comforting. But comfort cannot be allowed to absolve us from looking honestly at what is there.

Despite all its merit, the Bible has been used to frighten, subordinate, and dominate laypeople, and especially women, for ages. It is one of the clearest examples of how spirituality can be used as a weapon in the pursuit of power and dominance.

When the Sacred Is Weaponized 

“Break a person’s spirit and he is yours to manipulate.”

The oldest violence we know in our so-called civilized era is not the violence of the fist or the sword. It is the violence committed in the name of God. It is spiritual violence, committed through violating our psyche. 

For millennia, religious institutions have taken the shimmering metaphors of ancient stories, like that of Adam and Eve, and hammered them into rigid doctrines that have sown seeds of fear and left no room for breath. And once a doctrine hardens, it becomes a weapon. A blade disguised as holy scripture. A leash disguised as salvation. 

Adam and Eve (Adam und Eva), Franz von Stuck, c. 1920.

This is the violence of robbing you of your own truth. Severing the bond you have with your own inner self. This is the serious violation of taking someone’s direct, intimate relationship with the sacred, with the Divine, with life itself, and declaring ownership over it. Like saying: “You do not belong to yourself. Your soul is not yours. Your inner sanctum is ours to enter. Your relationship with the Divine is ours to define. We will tell you who you are. We will tell you what is sacred, what is sinful, what God asks of you. We will stand between you and the Divine. In the name of God.” 

This fact of worldwide institutionalized indoctrination and violence throughout the ages is crucial when trying to understand life today, our modern reality and our religions, politics and governance, because the energy of the old structures lives on in our bodies. Literally. It’s inherited through our genes and internalised through cultural norms from one generation to another.

Watching how inhumanely Victor treated the Creature, how he took ownership over his life and life force, made me clearly see him as the monster of the film. And I saw all the horrible violence committed in God’s name by religious institutions and fanatics through the ages and to this day reflected in Victor’s character and dominant nature.

Both Victor and the spiritual abusers holding up the banner of God, Jesus, Allah, or another have blood dripping from their hands and ambition in their hearts.

One a fanatical scientist. The others spiritual fanatics. Living deranged lives through their emotional and psychological fluctuations between their inferiority and superiority complexes.

Some have pathological delusions of grandeur, believing wholeheartedly that they know better, or best, who or what God is, and will fight wars or bully others through missionary work to satisfy their agenda.

The cruelty of taking ownership over another being’s essence enrages me. It sets my heart on fire, and breaks it open. I become angry, vulnerable, and raw. Yet clear.

Victor Frankenstein’s tragedy is not that he created life, but that he believed he had the right to own it.

He never paused to consider who this being he created was. He didn’t ask about soul. He sought power and dominion. In one scene he is asked by his brother: “Victor, did you ever ask yourself — of all the parts that make that man, which one holds the soul?” He replies: “No, I didn’t.”

Of course he didn’t.

He wasn’t listening for soul. He only wanted power.

In his megalomaniacal pursuit, he simply wanted ownership of a living, beating heart. He even kept “his Creature” chained. In his pursuit, he ignored that being’s sanctity and sovereignty over himself.

Sound familiar?

This essay is called Sin, Women and Spiritual Violence, for a reason.

Whose Hands Hold Your Heart?

I’d like to begin this chapter with a story, in an attempt to weave together the themes of this essay, and why they matter so deeply to me: sin, the made-up unworthiness of women and their subsequent silencing and spiritual violation, the consequent layers of accumulated conditioning on us humans, and our projection of those layers onto others, and the world. 

Penitent Mary Magdalene, Natale Schiavoni, 1852.

Just before Christmas in 2021, I lay in my hospital bed, reading a book about Chopin. I was receiving one of my chemo rounds for my acute leukemia. A chapter about Chopin’s death and his funeral at La Madeleine — the Church of Saint Mary Magdalene in Paris — revealed disturbing facts which, when I read them, actually made me physically sick. Obviously the drugs had a lot to do with the queasiness, but my reaction came from a much deeper source — the Ancient Great Woman Wound, which is lodged deep in our ancestral DNA. The misogyny and the ridiculousness you are about to hear just might make your stomach turn too. 

On his deathbed, Chopin is said to have requested that Mozart’s Requiem be performed at his funeral. The Requiem has major parts for female voices. But there was a problem. At La Madeleine, where his funeral was to be held, women were not permitted to take part in the musical performance. This was in 1849. 

Therefore, when the time came, the Archbishop of Paris forbade the planned performance. While Chopin’s most powerful friends, and the vicar of the church himself, pleaded the case before the Archbishop, Chopin’s body lay in the church, embalmed, waiting for the issue to be resolved. This ridiculous misogynistic circus took nearly two weeks!

Finally, when the Archbishop agreed, he did so on one condition: that the female singers would remain hidden from view behind a black velvet curtain. Imagine! To add even more weight to this already sad and deeply disturbing true tale, one of the female soloists was a very good and dear friend of Chopin’s, the mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot.

The absurdity of the whole scenario, which was based on the deep-seated and cruel misogyny of the Church at the time, and the contempt and disregard toward women, made me feel so angry. I could feel the spiritual violation toward women throughout the world and throughout time flood my body, and my female form reacted with revulsion.

And the irony!

The irony is almost painfully sharp.

Here stands a church dedicated to Mary Magdalene — a woman who, in early Christian tradition, was not only one of Jesus’ closest disciples but the first witness to the Resurrection, the bearer of the most foundational message of Christianity — and yet, within her own house of worship, living women were deemed spiritually inferior, therefore inappropriate to be seen participating, through their singing, in the religious service!

They could lend their voices, but only if erased from view. Present, but hidden. Holy (Mary Magdalene), but not embodied (women).

Women. Inferior?

There is something deeply symbolic here: the black velvet curtain becomes a metaphor for centuries of theological discomfort with the feminine as visible, authoritative, and sacred. To honour Mary Magdalene as a saint in name for her role as a devoted follower of Jesus and the first witness to and proclaiming his resurrection while veiling women in practice is not just historical irony — it reveals how deeply the Church separated spirit from body, holiness from womanhood, and voice from visibility.

Mary Magdalene, Donato Creti, 18th century.

Mary Magdalene’s story is complex and layered, with historical, mythological and spiritual threads woven together into mystery. Whether she truly walked this earth in human form, whether she was Jesus’ disciple, lover, wife or consort, we may never know for certain. But one thing we can finally lay to rest: Mary Magdalene was never the penitent prostitute history made her into.

The Vatican itself has now explicitly acknowledged this. That story was placed upon her. It came from conflating Mary Magdalene with the unnamed “sinful woman” in Luke, and probably a few other women too.

In my view, the injury wasn't that history associated her with women who sold sex. Absolutely not. I'm pretty sure that in those days selling sex might often have been the only thing between staying alive or dying from hunger. The injury was that it turned her into the archetype of “the penitent whore” — the morally degraded, sexually stained, impure and fallen woman — only to be saved by a man, Jesus. And then it attached that identity to her for centuries. The Apostle to the Apostles herself. Isn’t that a bit… suppressive?

Mary Magdalene has been venerated as a saint for centuries, as a powerful witness to the mercy of Christ, the hope of redemption and the joy of the Resurrection. Even though her image as the repentant prostitute saved by Jesus has now been “debunked,” that version of her stubbornly persists to this day. I suppose it has to, as it makes the sinner-to-saint story much juicier.

Hail Mary

There is one Mary, though, the most venerated woman of them all, whom the Church — especially the Catholic Church — has always loved and idealized. The sanctified version of woman.

The Virgin Mary. Mary, the mother of Jesus.

The Virgin Mary Immaculate, Genoese School, 17th century.

I do not adhere to the way she has been depicted by religion though. If she historically walked this earth, I do not believe she was a virgin. To do that to the central woman of the Christian faith feels cruel to me. Especially if she was a living woman of flesh and blood. It’s akin to castration. Woman sanctified and idealized through virginity, purity and motherhood. The feminine permitted sacredness after being stripped of sexuality and earthiness. It kind of makes me queasy. It’s not natural.

What a polarity for women to have been given to relate to within the same faith: on one side, Mary Magdalene, the feminine made too sexual, stained, fallen, “the whore.” Female sexuality associated with sin and degradation. Then saved. By a man. On the other, Mother Mary, the feminine made sexless, pure, sanctified. The most exalted woman in Christianity, revered as a virgin. Yet her holy role: to bring the Messiah into the world. A child God. A man. Without sexual intercourse.

~

It reminds me of something I read recently about Holy Roman Empress Matilda, the fierce and indomitable almost Queen of England. She died in 1167, and her epitaph reads: “Great by birth, greater by marriage, greatest in her offspring: here lies Matilda, the daughter, wife, and mother of Henry.”

As if her own life — her battles, alliances, political manoeuvring and sheer determination — were merely a footnote to the lives of the men who surrounded her. Her father, husband and son.

They were all called Henry.

And there is another strange contradiction here, one we all recognise, especially when it comes to women in power: women have historically been subordinated to men, while simultaneously being held to a higher standard.

In Matilda’s case, interestingly, older accounts called her things like proud, arrogant, harsh, inflexible and uncompromising. Maybe she was all those things. But perhaps self-belief, intelligence, firmness of mind and self-reliance in women were traits simply viewed more negatively through the old patriarchal glasses.

Our flaws and mistakes are somehow less forgivable. We’re seen as inferior, historically. Apparently. Yet somehow expected to be better.

It’s like we women, especially in roles of power, are expected to be more virtuous, more responsible, more selfless, and simply more perfect.

I’m actually seeing this reflected in Iceland today, where there has been a rise in women in positions of power. It is striking how harshly some of them are being judged compared with their male predecessors. It’s as though, because they are women, they are supposed to be these faultless creatures.

And I wonder whether Vigdís, our beloved former president, has something to do with it. I almost wrote “our wonderful Vigdís” just now. So look, I did it too. I idealized our faultless creature. Because that is how I think of her. She became enormously loved by the nation after the fight it took for her to get there — and fight she did. And even today, she is still greatly loved and admired, though her presidency ended almost 30 years ago. She feels almost like a queen, but without the royalty. Regal in her ordinariness. A Mary, even.

Perhaps the standard itself for women in positions of power became almost archetypal after Vigdís: the unifying, peaceful woman at the heart of the nation. But it’s hard, and frankly unrealistic, for other women in positions of power to step into those archetypal shoes when their daily work consists of political battles left and right. Politicians, in the fray, in the thick of it, are bound to disappoint people. Whether male or female. You cannot possibly remain perfect. Even though you are a woman.

~

Mother Mary, to me, is a spiritual mother, the Cosmic Mother. She symbolizes an energy I sense and have a relationship with. She emanates protection and nurturance. When I see her image with Jesus in her lap, I see the Cosmos holding Humanity. That is my visceral interpretation of her energy.

I love Mary. Dearly. As I write this, I have her right here on my desk, a beautiful statue of her just a few inches from my hands. She is always in my heart.

Her image was the only external depiction of the Divine I had with me in the hospital. I loved how she held me.

The Virgin Nursing the Child, attributed to Pompeo Batoni, 1760–1780.

What is perhaps most important to me about my relationship with Mother Mary is that when I look at her statues and images, wherever I travel and go, I experience her as a reflection of the Divine in me. Her image becomes a mirror of my own inherent wholeness, reminding me of my spiritual essence — my grace, pure potential and compassion in human form. She then reminds me that my humanness matters. That my sacredness and my humanness are the two wings of my life. I need both to be whole and alive. Neither needs to be sacrificed for the other.

These religious constructions of the Marys belong to a much larger and ancient pattern in which women have not been fully allowed to be whole, embodied human beings in the fullness of our womanhood. To fully inhabit our sexuality. To be earthly and as such, sacred. Women have somehow been regarded as inferior to men — and yes, even spiritually inferior, when viewed within the broader context of the Abrahamic religions. I believe these ideas slowly seeped into the cultures shaped by them. And our long-standing global patriarchy has unfortunately provided fertile ground for misogyny to take root and flourish all over the world.

I reject that premise entirely. We are not inferior to men. Never have been, and never will be. Period.

Woman, simply as embodied woman, is spiritually whole and authoritative in her own right.

Spiritual Violation Is the Deepest Form of Violence 

Obviously, much has changed for women in recent years. But misogyny is still present within all Abrahamic religions, to a lesser or greater degree. Horrible oppression and violence against women is still with us. In parts of the Muslim world, for instance, suppression and control of women remain rampant and are, horrifyingly, on the rise.

We’ve always known that spiritual fanaticism is utterly dangerous. And, in my view, spiritual fundamentalism too. That is why it is of crucial importance today to speak openly about these issues.

Internalized misogyny within our societies is entwined with the conditioning handed down through our religions for millennia. I’m not saying its roots lie in religion. Misogyny is much older, but it has been deepened and upheld by male-dominant religions.

To this day, it’s hard for me to fathom how anyone can be a religious fundamentalist. It seems so cruel.

How can it be considered humane — to read and interpret the Quran, the Bible, or other sacred texts in an entirely literal sense? To read passages containing cruelty, domination, punishment, misogyny or violence and decide that because they are sacred scripture, they must therefore be defended literally as God's will? It seems you have to be deeply disturbed to be able to do so.

I sometimes say that sacred texts should come with a warning label:

WARNING: Literal interpretation may cause judgmental thinking, intolerance and bigotry. May cause the mistaking of ancient cultural beliefs for universal truth. Read with care and an open mind.

Read metaphorically. Read between the lines. Bring an eye for the metaphysical. Look for insight about life and living in their metaphorical and esoteric language rather than turning ancient scripture into literal instructions for how other people should live.

You might find these words harsh, but this is my truth: I think it is deeply cruel to take dogmatic ownership over somebody else’s sacred center, their purest essence, whether through ideology or action. To me it is akin to spiritual violence. And because spirituality concerns one’s essence — one’s core nature as a human being — spiritual violence ripples from the center, where the violation took place, into all other dimensions of the human being: her body, her psyche, her emotional life, her relationships, her sense of self.  

Our human sanctity, our spiritual center, is both where our potential for vulnerability — for being bullied and victimized spiritually — is strongest, and where our potential to mature in resilience and empower ourselves through clarity and compassion is strongest. Therefore it is of utmost importance that we take good care of our own spirituality, that we self-preserve, and that we honor and respect the sanctity of each other’s personal spirituality.

 

Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist, Luca Signorelli, 1499–1502.
San Brizio Chapel, Orvieto Cathedral, Italy. Photo: Sailko, CC BY 3.0.

Please, to the religious fundamentalists and Evangelical Christian missionaries who use fear to convert others: hear this.

Please don’t frighten people into your faith.

Please don’t use fear-inducing beliefs and imagery as tools of conversion.

Don’t frighten people with Satan, hell, eternal damnation, or the idea that they are being deceived by the Devil, only to then offer Jesus as their sole path to salvation.

Please find it in your heart to see that frightening another person into your beliefs is a form of force. And forcing another person spiritually is a violation. 

My deepest wish for Humanity is that one day the people of Earth have left behind all religious wars, spiritual bullying, or persuasive missionary work. I believe that would save us all.

We have the sole right to ownership of ourselves. Anything else is a violation of our sanctity. 

Therefore, spiritual violence — or spiritual oppression and fear propaganda through spiritually oriented messaging and missionary work — is actually the deepest form of violence in my opinion. Everything can be taken away from a person; their physical abilities, their freedoms, their external life. But what remains is our sense of our innermost essence. It is our heart of hearts. Our personal connection to the grandness of Life, our inner grounds where we cultivate peace and a relationship with the greater cosmic order. Whatever your vision of that may be. 

Just imagine, when you e.g. become mentally or physically disabled, when you are in isolation, when you are hospitalized like I was, when your absolute freedom of movement is no longer available for some reason — in those extremely difficult situations, if you have a strong center, a strong connection to your God or the Divine or Life as a whole — something you are personally connected to, on your own terms, a benevolent life force that sees and understands all — you may very well survive your harsh circumstances.

Mary Magdalene, Alfred Stevens, 1887.

During the fever phase following my last chemo round, I got COVID. Therefore I finished my last hospital stay related to my blood cancer, in isolation on the COVID ward for 10 days. It was tough. Really tough. And I can be completely honest here. What got me through it was my strong psychological connection with myself, and the Divine in my own heart — The Love and Compassion. This connection vivifies one’s appreciation for Life, and is what connects us with All-There-Is.

My strong connection with the Divine in my own heart is what carried me through the toughest 10 days of my life. 

To take dogmatic ownership over someone’s sacred center — to claim that you know more about their essence or their faith, or their connection to the Divine than they do — is therefore a deep violation in my opinion.

What is most sacred to a person is her core.

What is most sacred to you is your heart. Your essence.

Your essence is your lifeline.

Your essence is your doorway into freedom.

A Few More Rabbit Holes

I’ll leave it here, though honestly I could keep going. There are so many ways to interpret Frankenstein through spiritual, societal and philosophical lenses. After a bit of Googling, it’s clear that del Toro’s film is not a perfectly faithful adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, but the broad strokes are there — and del Toro, who loves humanizing monsters, brings his own artistic approach to the story.

I should probably say here that I have no idea whether del Toro intended any of the symbolism I’ve written about in this piece. These are simply the connections that arose in me as I watched the film, and the thoughts and ideas they stirred in my own mind.

In fact, I deliberately avoided looking up what symbolism del Toro himself may have intended, or reading interviews with him about the film. I wanted my own wonderings to remain my own while I wrote this.

This thought piece was dedicated to the concepts of sin and spiritual violence, as those topics hit a soft spot in me. I am sensitive to them, and they make me utterly human, raw and vulnerable. All my brittle humanness comes through, and anger rises in defence, and I feel a warrior, a spiritual activist, rise in me. Right after I watched the movie, those issues burned the brightest for me. So I wrote about them specifically.

But just for fun, I’ll list a few other themes worth visiting.

1. Frankenstein as God the Master of the Universe 

For instance, one could argue that Victor Frankenstein symbolizes the familiar Father-Creator image of God. The Creature calls him “Father,” and Victor is “the Creator,” a word often attributed to God. And no one can deny that life — for all its beauty — is riddled with suffering. The Creature, Victor’s creation, suffers and suffers.

2. Reincarnation 

You can also interpret the film through the lens of reincarnation. What torments The Creature most is that he cannot die. Reincarnation, anyone? And he’s made from the bodies of many different men — symbolic of many past lives, perhaps? The great intelligence of Life, which keeps everything cycling through death and rebirth, galaxies forming and dissolving, clearly knows the human experience is full of suffering… yet we keep coming here. To learn… Love? 

A tender moment between Elizabeth and the Creature in Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein (2025).

3. Creation Without Soul 

Victor could be seen as representing the modern world: head without heart, invention without reverence, intellect without humility. The crisis of innovation divorced from meaning. It is not creation that is dangerous — it is creation without consciousness. 

4. Spiritual Literalism 

Victor’s dissection of life could mirror what fundamentalism does to spirituality: it reduces mystery to mechanism. It insists essence, and salvation, must be found through the dogmatic lens of religion, not by listening deeply to the aliveness of the Universe. 

5. The Creature as the Symbol of the Exiled Self. Victor as the mask. 

The Creature can symbolize the part of ourselves we exile — the raw, unprotected soul, longing to be seen. The soulful person is often punished for simply being, existing, witnessing and absorbing life, and wanting to be a part of society, family, as his authentic self. His outer appearance, which doesn’t make sense to people, makes him marginalized, ostracized. He is not wanted, and therefore experiences social alienation. He is punished for his innocent, inquisitive nature. Whilst Victor becomes the persona we hide behind: the striving, controlling, “managing” part. The doer. Applauded for ambition, and his wilful nature. When we disconnect from the alive sacredness of life, of soul — in creation, religion, or within ourselves — oppression and violence usually follow.

The Creatrix 

Reading about Mary Shelley’s life, it becomes easier to understand the shadows and questions inside Frankenstein. She was young, just eighteen, when she began writing the story. It was during that infamous “haunted summer” of 1816 in Switzerland, where she was joined by her soon-to-be husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron and his young physician, John Polidori.

Villa Diodati, where Byron stayed and the Shelleys gathered, 1816.
Edward Francis Finden, after William Purser, c. 1833.

There is something irresistibly romantic about imagining that little group gathered on the shores of Lake Geneva, talking art, philosophy and ghost stories beneath dark and stormy skies.

But those skies were no romantic backdrop. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia the year before had disrupted the climate across the globe. Crops failed. Food prices soared. Famine and disease followed. Switzerland was among the hardest-hit regions in Europe, and hungry people took to the roads in search of food. While Frankenstein was being imagined into existence at Villa Diodati, people were starving only miles away. It’s not unlikely that something of that misery found its way into the macabre atmosphere of Mary’s story.

People eating grass from hunger, probably during the Swiss famine of 1816–17. Artist unknown.

Mary's life with Percy was emotionally turbulent, deeply creative, filled with friendships, philosophies, and painful tragedy. They had already lost one child before she began writing Frankenstein and they would lose two more children before Percy’s death in 1822, when he drowned at sea at age twenty-nine. 

She was surrounded by genius, by suffering, by loss, by a world of ideas cracking open around her. And somehow, inside all of that, she wrote a story that has lasted for over two centuries.

The title page of Frankenstein’s first edition, Volume I, published in 1818.

 

Mary and Percy Shelley’s hands together on pages of the Frankenstein manuscript, 1816–17. They frequently read, revised and helped each other with their writing.

Mary and Percy during their love affair in 1814, painted by William Powell Frith in 1877. Frith carefully studied their portraits in preparation for their likenesses.

Mary mourning Percy.
After Henry Weekes’s monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1853.

Mary Shelley's etched image from inside Tales and Stories, 1891.

What was an absolute goosebumpish surprise to me was finding out, toward the end of writing this thought piece and doing my research, that Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an English writer and philosopher best known for her advocacy of women’s rights. Her most notable work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), became a foundational feminist text, arguing for women’s education and equality and challenging the idea of women as mere domestic ornaments.

Wow!

Here I am, at the very last sentences of this essay — Sin, Women and Spiritual Violence — and in walks Mary’s mother. Another Mary. A woman who spent her life arguing for the dignity and freedom of women.

Title page from the first edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1792.

Both Mary’s parents were writers and radical philosophers, actually. Her father, William Godwin, was a social philosopher, political journalist and religious dissenter whose writings advanced atheism, anarchism and personal freedom.

Mary never really knew her mother. Wollstonecraft died only days after giving birth to her. But Mary grew up deeply connected to her mother’s memory and fierce writings for the freedom of women. Her father is even said to have taught her to read by tracing the letters of her mother’s name on the gravestone. 

From childhood into her teenage years, she would visit her mother’s grave in the churchyard of St Pancras in Camden, London, and retreat there with her books to sit and read. There is something about that image that moves me deeply. A daughter sitting beside the grave of the mother she never got to know.

And then, the circle of life continues. Love makes the world go around. A girl meets a boy, a boy meets a girl. It was there, in the cemetery, that Mary began meeting secretly with her lover, Percy Shelley. She was only sixteen and he was twenty-one. Gosh, both so young. He was already married and a father, but estranged from his wife, who happened to be pregnant with his second child. Such drama! They would soon elope together, and two years later, on December 30th, in that same fateful year of 1816 when Frankenstein was conceived — and after Percy’s wife had tragically taken her own life — Percy Bysshe Shelley became the husband of a pregnant Mary.

~

There has been a strange, delightfully mysterious and cheeky, yet deep and healing Mary thread weaving itself through this whole piece, without me consciously putting it there.

Mary Magdalene. Mother Mary. Mary Shelley. Mary Wollstonecraft.

I couldn’t think of a better energy to end this essay with.

I believe the sacred does not ask us to sacrifice our humanness. Healing begins where nothing within us has to be exiled.

With warmth,

༄ Sóley