Taylor Swift’s Divine Feminine Magic in Eras
Taylor Swift in her 2023 Eras Tour, photograph: Buda Mendes/TAS23.
I entered the Taylor Swift Eras-scape almost a year late, but as soon as I did, I was moved quite literally — taking notes on my phone on a train, where I was also streaming the concert film on a seeming whim. I saw symbols and images of the divine feminine all over her show. Her lyrics, dress, dance, and stagecraft all champion or even summon, in my mind, key aspects of the divine feminine.
The super-charged-yet-vulnerable feminine icon is an empowering and magnetic force in a popular culture still so saturated by predominantly masculine representations of power, spirit, or culture. She has tremendous gifts, of course, yet I see her deep-seated resonance also as a sign of the times: there is a profound desire to recover the divine feminine as a sacred powerhouse in our repertoire of pedestaled icons, whether religious or cultural (or both).
As a cultural anthropologist, I cannot help but see Swift’s tapping into and coursing with themes of the divine feminine as part and parcel of her remarkable effect on contemporary culture and popular consciousness. To wit, the desire to write this short piece arrived almost out of the blue, as did my watching her show on the train. I’m no superfan or ardent student of all things Swift, though I have great appreciation for what she does.
I had read some recent pieces that immediately grabbed my attention, as I think so much about art, culture, and spirituality. I read Spencer Kornhaber’s piece in The Atlantic that celebrated the opening show for the Eras tour in spring 2023 as a conjuring with real magic, and I read another Atlantic piece a couple of weeks ago in which the literary critic Stephanie Burt powerfully defended her new spring lecture course on Taylor Swift at Harvard. I had seen countless other headlines about rescheduled major film release dates and moved baseball game start times, all shifted so as not to clash with Swift’s tour dates. The New Yorker ran a piece in June 2023 under the headline, “Look What Taylor Made Us Do” (alluding to Swift’s electrifying “Look What You Made Me Do” vengeance anthem), and I felt a bit the same way. I had to check this out.
The concert begins with a hand-like clock quickly approaching midnight, flanked by two digital clocks counting down from 13 seconds each. It is about the time for the veils between worlds to thin. The central clock smoothly fades into kaleidoscopic technicolor clouds and celestial mists, as her voice seems to break through the clouds like some divine call from on high. Or from below? From the stage? Does it matter?
“It’s been a long time coming…” she declares, as the lavender clouds part to reveal a purple sky, which gives way to a viewer’s sky drop down to the stage.
“It’s been a long time coming,” she continues, intoning over and over, mantra-like, as five women gracefully glide across the long stage carrying gigantic plumes or capes, aloft, in regal hues of peach and white. The scene is redolent of resplendent ocean goddesses and their processions.
“It’s been a long time coming into focus…” she sings. “And I was born in 1989!”
Toward the start of the show, while bedecked in a silver sequin wonder-woman style outfit, she asks the crowd if she can try something. As she points her left index finger in various directions, the corresponding waves of an ecstatic crowd scream and light up.
She stands still, strong, and serene, like an empress-songstress purveying her dominion and taking in a sea of violets across the stadium before sharing, “Boy, LA, you’re making me feel excellent right now! Come to think of it, let me just try something.”
Swift then looks down in wonder at her left hand, points it to her left, and that portion of the crowd screams. She eventually does a full turn and closes the circle.
“Uh oh. This is getting dangerous. This is about to start going to my head real fast. You just made me feel so … powerful.”
She then lifts her left arm in the iconic feminist strong arm and kisses her bicep, positively aglow with her charge.
Someone brings her a matching silver sequin boxy shoulder blazer, which she puts on, before she assertively takes the mic in hand and continues, “I guess what I’m trying to say is, ‘You’re making me feel like I’m the man.’”
She then launches into the pop anthem about how all her female travails would disappear in the machismo-fest auras of male stars.
Her songs continue in this honest, tumultuous, and triumphant charge across the show. Fearless is scrawled across the sky-screen in blazing golden light, followed by incandescent cascades. Later, in the evermore era, Swift emerges from the darkened nighttime woods like a mystic with multiple women walking in two joining arcs and seeming to pray or recite something. They all move in unison. When the title, evermore, appears, it glows in radiant gold script through the outlined trees. Swift emerges from the woods in a Victorian-era golden yellow gown with a dark teal blue velvet cape, matching the dress of the women behind her. All sing together in chant-like fashion from the album’s song, “willow”:
The women then encircle Swift, all raising and lowering golden orbs of fire-light, as if they are engaging in some esoteric ritual of a bygone era. As she starts to sing the song, there are plasma-like trails of light that form behind the women, as though invoked by her voice, illuminating the night. Soon after, she sings of cunning wisdom and kindness, and the need for equipoise between the aspects, in her song, “marjorie”:
In a somber song of troubled love called “tolerate it,” performed in a stage scene washed in melancholy grey and blue, she defiantly rises to serenade her man from atop the dinner table:
The divine feminine aspects of retribution and exacting karmic consequences also appear in full view, and the singing from the tabletop plays like a segue. Afterward, the lights go dark. Enormous snakes emerge and extend out over the stage and beyond, and Swift reappears in snakeskin-style, red-and-black embellishments.
“…Ready for It?” from her album, reputation, starts in full power-step with several female dancers at her side:
Not long after this, Swift slides into her thunderous revenge-and-rebirth number, “Look What You Made Me Do,” which appears on the same album. She regales us with a story of being wronged and being made to play a fool. She hails the laws of karma, sings of her perpetual rebirth, and intones recompense for injustices done to her.
“I don’t like your little games /
She speaks of dying and rising from the dead, something she does “all the time,” in even step with so much great goddess lore.
I got harder in the nick of time /
Honey, I rose up from the dead /
And yours is in red, underlined /
I check it once, and I check it twice, oh
She alludes to the common dismissals of drama as just a part of everyday life. Nothing escapes karma, she reminds.
The show time-travels some more. Swift goes back to earlier songs, including ones that she recently rerecorded and remastered as “Taylor’s Versions.” She sings of prayers, heartbreaks, triumphs, and powers. For example, in performing “All Too Well,” a 2012 song that she remastered in 2021, she sings:
When her folklore era comes, the album’s title is inscribed across the sky-screen with a full moon. Swift climbs atop the roof of a hollow house frame set against a backdrop of dark glistening woods that look enchanted. The images pop straight out of fairytales of women with magical powers and heart hymns aplenty.
From “the 1,” the lead song on folklore, she sings of transformation gained through the crucible of pain.
Toward the end of the show, she dives into a sea (or so it seems!), and a tidal wave rises, like she is one with the ocean goddesses.
Soon after, she rises into an oneiric lavender set for the Midnights album era.
When she sings “My Tears Ricochet,” from folklore, she moves in a flowing layered white dress of a priestess or goddess-like figure. Women in black sequin dresses come up out of the shadows behind her like a sacred procession, as though she’s passing back to spirit.
“I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace /
‘cause when I’d fight, you used to tell me I was brave /
and if I’m dead to you, why are you at the wake? /
As she sings these lines, a giant screen of her face appears, larger than life, with tears streaming down. Her projected tears take on movements of their own. It is reminiscent of a weeping Madonna or other divine mother figures in sacred traditions. The other women’s faces are on the screen behind her. They belong to the dancers, and they also look larger than life or even spectral.
“You know, I didn’t want to have to haunt you /
Many other sublime things happen in this dream-sequence of a show, so richly suffused with spiritual symbolism (if you ask me). She manifests a lover by writing a name in “Blank Space.” She banishes the stress from all the players and the haters in “Shake It Off”:
But let me zoom to the very end, as this Swift piece, which was totally unplanned, has taken a life of its own. She sings “Archer” in an Artemis-like fashion — solo, resolute, and with golden light either being drawn to her or sinking like quicksand beneath her feet.
screaming who could ever leave me, darling... /
As the song continues to a close, light rays or arrows funnel in around her, seeming to fall into the ground. She declares:
Then, Swift vanishes into thin air. It is the perfect magical ending to her three-hour tribute to the power of humanity and the power of the divine feminine to galvanize people’s spirits, possibly to recall or rekindle what most did not even really know they were missing. At least, that’s how I read it.
About the Author
Lauren Coyle Rosen is a cultural anthropologist, artist, and author who focuses on the roles of spirituality and creative inspiration in art, music, and culture. She is the author of The Spirit of Ani (with Ani DiFranco, forthcoming), Hannibal Lokumbe (with Hannibal Lokumbe, Columbia University Press, 2024), Law in Light (University of California Press, 2024), and Fires of Gold (University of California Press, 2020), as well as eight volumes of poetry. Coyle Rosen is currently a fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. She was a cultural anthropology professor at Princeton University, where she received the President’s Award in Distinguished Teaching. She lives in Washington, DC, and in Philadelphia with her husband, Jeffrey Rosen. She has a JD from Harvard Law School and a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.
