I have been working on this book on the Soul for twenty years and am putting some chapters onto the website. More will follow shortly. Eventually, I hope to find an Internet publishing site from which people can download this book. Obviously this material is copyright but I am happy for people to draw on it, provided they acknowledge its source. I have changed the original title of The Dream of the Water to The Dream of the Cosmos as I gradually came to understand the meaning of the “Divine Water”. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Joy Parker without whose editing skills and encouragement this book could not have been completed.

THE DREAM OF THE COSMOS
A Quest for the Soul

Preface

Hubble Image from Nasa

Without a global revolution in the sphere of human consciousness, nothing will change for the better in the sphere of our being as humans, and the catastrophe toward which this world is headed – be it ecological, social, demographic, or a general breakdown of civilization will be unavoidable.

                                                                       — Vávlav Havel, address to US Congress

To reclaim the sacred nature of the cosmos – and of planet Earth in particular – is one of the outstanding spiritual challenges of our time.

                                                                       — Diarmuid O’Murchu, Quantum Theology

Although I had begun writing this book on the soul over twenty years ago, the call to focus on it again came in a dream I had in the summer of 1998.

I am at my grandmother’s home in the South of France, walking with two friends, a woman and her husband, near the bottom of a valley. Suddenly, on our right, we see a serpent. It is about five feet long, a beautiful glowing ruby red on its bottom half and gold on its top half. It has small wings but no claws or feet. Its head is not flat like a cobra’s but is slightly bigger than its body. There is a black marking like a V on the top of its head. It is definitely a serpent or a winged salamander rather than a dragon. Its red and gold scales gleam luminously, like enamel. We look nervously at it and I say, “I hope it won’t bite us.” We walk on through olive groves and come to the furthest edge of the property. Suddenly the serpent is there, on our right. It has flown from its former place. It moves towards me and bites me on my right hand, at the base of the thumb. Its bite leaves a circle of tiny red dots on my thumb.

          It took me some days to make the connection between “right” and “write,” but when I did, I knew that I had to return to the work I had begun many years earlier. As I reflected on what form the book could take, and the difficulty of conveying ideas that are so alien to the spirit of our time, I remembered the words that the psychologist C.G. Jung had written in his last book, Man and His Symbols, “As any change must begin somewhere, it is the single individual who will experience it and carry it through. The change must indeed begin with an individual; it might be any one of us. Nobody can afford to look round and to wait for somebody else to do what he is loathe to do himself. But since nobody seems to know what to do, it might be worth while for each of us to ask himself whether by any chance his or her unconscious may know something that will help us.” (1)

The Dream of the Cosmos is the story of a multi-layered quest to understand the causes of human suffering and to re-connect with a deeper reality than the one we inhabit in this physical dimension of experience. It is written for those who are looking for something beyond the superficial values of our culture, who may be disillusioned with religious and secular belief systems as currently presented and who question the political values which are deeply mired in the pursuit of power. It is written with two voices: one the voice of a personal quest and the other which explores the historical and psychological causes that have brought into being our present view of reality.
          In it I seek to recover a very ancient image of the soul, an image that has long been lost. The soul was once imagined as an all-embracing Web of Life—not so much something that belongs to us as something to which we belong, in whose life we participate. The world is crying out for the primary values that have always been associated with soul understood in this wider sense: wisdom, compassion, justice, relationship—values which I will define further as the book proceeds.
          I hope it may make a small contribution towards healing the Wasteland—the current state of the planet and the lives of the billions of men, women and children that are blighted or destroyed by human cruelty, greed and ignorance. Centuries of conflict between nations, religions and ethnic groups have brought us to the present time when we must find a way of transcending this archaic pattern of behavior or risk destroying ourselves as a species.
           Over the course of many centuries, we have developed a formidable intellect, a formidable science, a formidable technology. But what of the soul—source of our deepest instincts and feelings? What of our visions, dreams and hopes as well as our unhealed wounds and the suffering generated by our cruelty and lack of compassion towards each other? What of our need for relationship with this unrecognized dimension of reality? The pressing need for the soul's recognition has brought us to this time of choice. It is as if mortal danger is forcing us to take a great leap in our evolution that we might never have made were we not driven by the extremity of circumstance. Because our capacity for destruction, both military and ecological, is so much greater today than it was fifty years ago, and will be still greater tomorrow, we have perhaps only decades in which to heal the Wasteland we have brought into being through our ignorance of the interdependence of all aspects of life.
          It seems appropriate to ask the question: Where have we gone wrong? The current mind-set of our culture rests on the premise of our separation from and mastery of nature, where nature is treated as object with ourselves as controlling subject. But there is a second problematic legacy from the past: the image of God shared by the three Abrahamic religions. This has defined God as a transcendent creator, separate and distinct from the created order and from ourselves. Western civilization, despite its phenomenal achievements, developed on the foundation of a fundamental split between spirit and nature — between creator and creation. Only now are we brought face to face with the effects of this split in the devastation we have wrought upon the earth.           
          Because of this split we have come to look upon nature as something separate from ourselves, something we could master, control and manipulate to obtain specific benefits for our species alone because ours, we believed, was given dominion over all others. It has come as a bit of a shock to realise that our lives are intimately bound up with the fragile organism of planetary life and the inter-dependence of all species. If we destroy our habitat, whether inadvertently or deliberately by continuing on our present path, we may risk destroying ourselves.
          The threat of global warming and the urgent need to free ourselves from dependency on fossil fuels appear to be the catalyst which is bringing about a profound shift in our values. Instead of treating our planetary home as the endless supplier of all our needs, without consideration for its needs, we are having to rethink beliefs and attitudes which have influenced our behavior for millennia—beliefs and attitudes which are deeply rooted in our religious traditions.
          Once again, as in the early centuries of the Christian era, it seems as if new bottles are needed to hold the wine of a new understanding of reality. What is the emerging vision of our time which could offer a template for a new civilization? I believe it is a vision which takes us beyond an outworn paradigm where we are held in bondage to beliefs and attitudes specific to race, nation, religion or gender, which have led us to exclude and devalue those who are different from ourselves and neglect our relationship with the earth, our planetary home. It is a vision which offers us a totally new concept of spirit as a unifying energy field — a limitless sea of being — as well as the creative consciousness or organizing intelligence within that sea or field, and a totally new concept of ourselves as belonging to and participating in that incandescent ground of consciousness. It is a vision which recognises the sacredness and indissoluble unity of the great cosmic web of life and imposes on us the responsibility of becoming far more sensitive to the effects of our decisions and our actions. It invites our recognition of the needs of the planet and the life it sustains as primary, with ourselves as the conscious servants of those needs. Above all, it is a vision which asks that we relinquish our addiction to weapons and war and the pursuit of power; that we become more aware of the dark shadow cast by this addiction which threatens us with ever more barbarism, bloodshed and suffering.
          From this perspective, the crisis of our times is not only an ecological and political crisis but a spiritual crisis. The answers we seek cannot come from the limited consciousness which now rules the world but could grow from a deeper understanding born of the union of heart and head, helping us to see that all life is one, that each one of us participates in the life of a cosmic entity of immeasurable dimensions. The urgent need for this psychic balance, this deeper intelligence and insight, this wholeness, could help us to recover a perspective on life that has been increasingly lost until we have come to live without it—and without even noticing it has gone—recognizing the existence of no dimension of reality beyond the parameters set by the human mind. It is a dangerous time because it involves transforming entrenched belief systems and archaic survival habits of behaviour that are rooted in fear, as well as the greed and desire for power that are born of fear But it is also an immense opportunity for evolutionary advance, if only we can understand what is happening and why.
         After so many billion years of evolution, it is simply unacceptable that the beauty and marvel of the earth should be ravaged by us through the destructive power of our weapons, our insatiable greed and the misapplication of our science and technology. It is inconceivable that our extraordinary species, which has taken so many million years to evolve, should destroy itself and lay waste to the earth through ignorance of the divinity in which we dwell and which dwells in us. For a tiny but rapidly increasing number of us, there is the possibility of choosing whether to continue in the patterns of the past or to create new patterns, living and acting from a different relationship with life, committing ourselves to the immense effort of consciousness we need to make to understand and serve its mystery. As we do so, we would begin to realize the Dream of the Cosmos.
          

1. C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols, Aldus Books, London, 1964, p. 10
©Anne Baring

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CHAPTER ONE
My Quest Begins

Robin Baring - Return to the Source

The living spirit grows and even outgrows its earlier forms of expression; it freely chooses the men and women in whom it lives and who proclaim it. This living spirit is eternally renewed and pursues its goal in manifold and inconceivable ways throughout the history of mankind. Measured against it, the names and forms which men have given it mean little enough; they are only the changing leaves and blossoms on the stem of the eternal tree.

                                                          — C. G Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Who can calculate the orbit of his own soul?
                                                          
                                                           — Oscar Wilde, Reading Gaol

My story begins one hot summer day in 1942 when I was eleven years old. I had been told to take a rest after lunch. Lying on my bed, drowsy with the heat, I suddenly saw an intense purple light suffuse the whole room and felt myself surrendering to an irresistible power. Then, abruptly and without warning I was expelled from my body. The bed beneath me opened as if sliced by a knife. I was pushed down into the crevice and the bed closed over me. In terror I struggled to shout for help, to move my arms and legs, to open my eyes but my body refused to respond. Then a rushing and roaring, like an avalanche, surrounded me, pressing on my ears and all about me. I shot through a tight channel and was spewed out, as if from a catapult, into a vast and silent darkness. Yet I could see that I was still attached to my body by a fine cord.
          I waited for what might come next, terrified and bewildered by the shock of losing touch with the only life I knew. As I waited in that dark immensity, I heard two words: “I AM.” I don’t know, shall never know, if more words were to follow. Overcome with terror at being alone in space with this disembodied voice, I found myself re-entering the channel and was plunged once more into that roaring, deafening vortex of sound, emerging from it to find myself lying in my bed, alive in a familiar world.
          How often have I wished that I had had the courage to stay in that silent place and listen.
          That experience initiated a lifelong quest. I had to know why I had left my body for that mysterious encounter. I had to discover the meaning of that experience, why it had happened to me, and what it was asking of me. It was so powerful, so shockingly different from any other experience I had known, that I felt I drawn to follow a path of discovery, slowly integrating into my life what was revealed to me stage by stage.

The Dream of the Water
          Soon after that experience, my mother told me about the channeled messages she had received while meeting with her sister, sister-in-law and a friend in New York, where we were living at the time. One winter afternoon in 1943, at the height of the Second World War they met to talk about the slaughter that was tearing Europe apart. Suddenly, although the windows were closed because of the cold, they heard a roar like thunder and a window was blown inwards by a powerful blast of air. Lightning flickered all around them although there was no storm. They cried out in terror, and went to shut the window, but suddenly felt a tremendous presence in the room and were overcome with awe. Then they heard a voice which told them to write down what they heard.
          The voice said, “Be sure of thy spirit as I am of being the wine and the breath of the One who is above the Fire and the Light and Foremost.” It then warned of a future catastrophe for the earth and humanity if the ways of men did not change and said that this warning should be passed on to anyone who was willing to listen. If enough people could become aware of the danger and respond to the guidance that was trying to reach them, the full force of the catastrophe could be mitigated or even averted. “From far-distant realms of the universe,” they were told, “great beings have come to your poor benighted planet to help to overthrow the tyranny of evil so that never again shall it overpower the world.”
          Filled with grief over the war in Europe, my mother found the courage to ask what they could do to help the suffering world. They were told to follow their hearts. Only through making space in their lives for listening to the guidance that was trying to reach them from another dimension of reality could they come to a deeper understanding of how they could most effectively help the world and avert the catastrophe.
          My mother and her friend continued to meet for some twenty years to receive further messages. (Her sister moved to another country and her sister-in-law was tragically killed in Italy at the end of the war). The messages warned (in 1944) of the dangers of splitting the atom because of the disintegrative effects of this on the human soul. They also told them to study the early history of Christianity, the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the Reformation. In particular, they were to study how the teaching of Christ had been distorted by the Church established in His name. Repeatedly they were urged to follow the thread of guidance that would lead them to something called the “Dream of the Water,” and to find their way to the “holy mountain”. They were also told to look for a mysterious stone “buried at the foot of the tree.”
          At first my mother and her friend took these images literally and looked for a place of refuge from the impending catastrophe (whose date was never specified), even spending many years searching for a holy mountain and a tree under which a special stone might be buried. Gradually, it dawned on them that these images were not to be understood literally but were metaphors for a state of being or state of consciousness which they needed to develop within themselves.
          To begin with, in the 1940’s and 50’s there was no one with whom to share these experiences, leaving me with a great feeling of great loneliness and isolation. Within my own family, only my American mother was the bridge to the unseen “other” world. With my English father I could never speak of these secret things. My parents’ marriage suffered from this lack of communication between them and their inability to share what was of deepest significance to my mother. My mother was a poet and an artist; my father was a soldier — one of a long line of warriors who had served their country — and a rationalist. He could not understand what my mother was talking about and built a defensive wall against her which was expressed as an unconscious compulsion to destroy her trust in herself by criticism and ridicule.
          Years later, I came to understand that because he had lost his own mother when he was a small boy, having total control over my mother was the only way he could feel emotionally secure. He therefore lived an existence dogged by anxiety. Anything which hinted at the non-rational was a threat to his security and amplified his need for control. My mother surrendered to this tyranny because her generation had no insight into the psychological roots of human behavior. Lacking any qualifications which would have helped them to earn their living, women of her background and upbringing were conditioned to stay in unhappy marriages, to tolerate and submit to their husbands’ need for total control and to devote their lives to the care and well-being of others in the belief that this sacrificial life would somehow find favour with God. All negative feelings were repressed for fear of divine punishment and social disapproval.
          At the end of the war, the family returned to England. The next years were overshadowed by the destructive relationship between my parents and by the suffering I endured at the hands of my new classmates. No one is more cruel than children to those whom they sense to be “different.” So I turned to God for help but found no comfort in the Protestant church services I was made to attend at school. I hated the damp smell of church, the freezing cold, the heavy sense of sin and guilt, the dreary hymns, the condemnatory sermons that were so lacking in joy and communion with the divine. If Christ had redeemed the sins of the world, why was there still war and suffering and why was I a “miserable sinner?” It made no sense. I dreaded Sundays and often felt so sick and faint that I had to leave the church. It all felt so wrong, but I didn’t know why. God seemed remote, oppressive and unforgiving.

The Garden of Eden
          However, there was one place where I had felt in touch with the numinous presence of the sacred. Before the war I used to spend the summer holidays with my grandmother in the South of France. I longed to return to that sun-baked earth, the clear luminosity of that landscape, the star-filled sky, the rhythmic sound of the crickets and the frogs’ croaking at night, the strong, rich perfume of thyme, lavender, pine and cypress. At the end of the war, it was again possible to revisit this early childhood paradise.
          My grandmother’s house stood on a hilltop on the site of an ancient temple to Minerva. It was called Malbosquet, meaning “evil little wood”—so named, no doubt, because the local people felt it was haunted by “spirits” and, therefore, to be avoided. It was a place of incredible beauty, a Garden of Eden, filled with the beauty of pink and white oleander bushes, tall dark cypress that exuded a delicious scent after rain, a fountain in which grew huge pink lotus flowers, orange trees that filled the air with the exquisite fragrance of their blossoms in early spring, a rich red earth planted with vines yielding sweet grapes and, everywhere, flowers. I remembered particularly the anemones that carpeted the earth in spring. The cloistered courtyard was filled with large brown pots that held camellias and masses of scarlet geraniums. In the distance to the West were range after range of violet hills, to the East the snow-capped mountains of the Alps. To the South, glittering distantly in the sun beyond a vast forest of pine and olive trees, was the Mediterranean.
          The whole land felt alive, inhabited by unseen presences. I would wake up at dawn, inhaling the fresh smell of dew-laden grass, bursting with love of the new day. I loved to walk at dawn on the wet grass, just to feel the coolness of the dew under my bare feet. Later in the day, I would go and sit in a grove of olive trees overlooking a deep shady gorge that plunged down to the roaring, fast-flowing river far below. At night, when the moon was full and everything was flooded with its soft radiance, the whole place came magically alive with invisible presences. What was so precious about these childhood memories was that there was time simply to be and to wonder. It was here that I fell in love with the beauty of the natural world.
          The trees of that olive grove seemed to bear witness to the secrets of centuries, to the great civilizations that had flourished around the Mediterranean—Egyptian, Phoenician, Cretan, Greek, Etruscan, Roman. For millennia, owls had built their nests in the hollows of the gnarled and crinkled trunks of these trees. I used to sit for hours, happy to be there among them, watching the changing light as the sun filtered through the silvery leaves. Although the war had separated me for six years from this much loved place, I had returned to it again and again in my imagination. It was the country of my soul.

The Call of Beauty
          In the late 1940’s it became possible to travel freely. The continent of Europe was again accessible, a place of sun and light to which I could escape from the grim austerity of England. In 1947, when I was sixteen my grandmother took me to Spain, driving down the east coast full of almond trees in blossom, to Granada and Cordoba, then blessedly free of tourists. In the great mosque at Cordoba I had my first glimpse of Moorish culture and in the silence of dawn and dusk I was able to sit alone, absorbed in the exquisite grace of the courtyards of the Alhambra, describing in my diary the beauty of everything that entranced me.
          Later, in Italy, my mother and I explored Tuscany and Umbria by bus, with the local people, delighted by their lively, laughing chatter, their caged, squawking chickens, and their mountainous bundles of provisions. I gazed dumbfounded at the marvel of the Baptistery in Florence, the Duomo, and Giotto’s lily-like tower; the paintings in the Lower Church at Assisi; the Siennese Madonnas; Botticelli’s Primavera and the Birth of Venus—all shine in my memory like the glory of sunrise to one who sees it for the first time. Though a teenager, I sometimes I felt like a small child gasping with delight at the sight of a new toy.
          I traveled through Italy on that indrawn breath of wonder. Each destination became a pilgrimage. At Borgo San Sepolcro, Piero della Francesca’s painting of Christ rising from the tomb burst upon my consciousness as the startling vision of an awakened and enlightened man—utterly different from the image of the helpless and suffering figure on the cross that hung above the altars of so many churches. I wondered why there were so many images of the crucifixion and so very few of the resurrected Christ.
          I fell passionately in love with the painters of the early Renaissance – above all Sassetta and Fra Angelico, and all those artists for whom rock and earth and sky and man and angel were transparent to a divine ground which sustained and permeated the physical world. I experienced this kind of painting as a praising, a loving, a longing, a communication with and a method of discovering God. I was also attracted to the figure of St. Francis, for many of my mother’s channeled messages had come from him and I had taken him as my spiritual mentor. I encountered him in the many paintings of his contemporaries, along with the great red angel who appeared to him and seemed to hover still in the Umbrian skies.
          I visited the little hermitage near Assisi where Christ had spoken to St. Francis telling him to rebuild His church. Here, as in Borgo San Sepolcro, was another radiant image of Christ, not hanging suffering on the cross. I remembered the messages telling my mother and her friends to study the history of early Christianity and how the teachings of Christ had been distorted. I felt I needed to know more and prayed to St. Francis for guidance.
          It was in Italy that I became aware for the first time of another kind of spirituality, one no longer impregnated with the heavy sense of sin and guilt that was so prevalent in the Protestant churches of my childhood, but deeply rooted in people’s age-old sense of connection with the land and with the towns and hermitages where saints had lived and taught. I responded to the incredible beauty of the landscape of Italy and felt the strong, vital sense of continuity between the present and the past. I absorbed the perfect proportions and human scale of the buildings and the climate of revelation that the very air of Italy seemed to breathe. I stood in awe before the genius of the architects, sculptors and masons who, working together, had been able to imagine and bring into being marvels like the exquisite marble façade of the Duomo at Orvieto.
          Another journey to Italy, when I was seventeen, took me further to the south, to the massive stone walls of the Etruscan city of Cortona and painted tombs with their joyous celebration of death.
          On this journey I climbed a hill on a starlit morning to attend mass and receive the blessing given to pilgrims by the renegade Italian friar, Padre Pio (later to be made a saint) and smelt the strong scent of violets emanating from him. Afterwards, the taxi-driver taking me to the station insisted that I should visit the shrine of the Archangel Michael at Monte Gargano nearby, where crusaders had knelt to be blessed before embarking on their sea-journey to the Holy Land. With bowed head and holding his hat in his gnarled hands, he led me down a flight of broad stone steps into the bowels of the mountain and the black, glistening walls of a great cave that sheltered the shrine of the Archangel. Over its entrance were the words: “This is the abode of God, the Gateway to Heaven.” I knew that St. Francis had hesitated to enter this cave, saying “Lord, I am not worthy to enter Thy shrine” and that he had probably embarked on his journey to meet the Muslim ruler Saladin from the nearby port of Bari. Astonishingly, as a result of their meeting, Saladin had twice granted permission for the Christians to enter Jerusalem and twice they had refused, preferring instead to embark on a crusade.
          In the cave there was no-one else there except an old woman rhythmically sweeping the floor and, as I knelt to pray, I burst into tears, suddenly overwhelmed by the sorrow and suffering of the world. I asked the Archangel for help and guidance for myself and for humanity. It seemed a natural thing to do in this holy place.

Preparing for the World
          My mother was determined that I should go to university since she herself had not been able to. Oxford laid the foundation for the future—giving me the opportunity to develop my mind and extend my knowledge of the past. I chose to study medieval history and also learned Italian in order to study the Italian Renaissance and renew my connection to art. The current fashion in philosophy at that time (the early 50’s) was Logical Positivism. Here I had my first encounter with a purely secular “rational” approach to life and it made no sense to me. I vowed then that one day I would find the answer to the questions that perplexed me, questions that modern philosophy could not answer and did not even ask. I became preoccupied with finding the path of spiritual guidance that would lead to a deeper understanding of life.
          Just as I was about to leave Oxford (1951), I fell in love with and became engaged to a man who was charming, intelligent and very interested in the arts. I thought I had found the ideal husband. But a few weeks later, he was arrested and accused of molesting some boy scouts near his home. Homosexuality was something that was not discussed in those days and the whole subject was socially taboo until the details of the court case erupted in the media. I was loyal to my fiancé and clung to my belief in his innocence. The trial aroused huge interest and public support. However, my fiancé was found guilty and sent to prison for a year.
          I broke off the engagement and found a job in New York working for an Austrian psychiatrist (Dr. Manfred Sakel) who had developed a method of treating schizophrenia with insulin shock treatment (as an alternative to electric-shock treatment) and was looking for someone to edit the book he had written about it. The whole experience was traumatic and profoundly affected my life because, just at the point when I was emerging into the wider world from the rather cloistered life of university, my trust in myself was totally destroyed. That winter of 1951-2 was the truly a dark night of my soul. It was my first encounter with psychology and mental illness and I fell into a deep depression, unable to help myself or to ask for help. In my distress I forgot the words of the messages and the images of the Dream of the Water; the stone at the foot of the tree of life faded from memory.

The Revelation of India and Asia
          On returning to England I took various secretarial jobs which led nowhere. But in 1956 my life unexpectedly opened out in a new direction with the opportuniity to visit India and the Far East.
          To me India symbolized the mythical destination of all explorers—an unknown, mysterious, fabulous land yet one which seemed as if it had always been with me, awaiting the moment of recognition. That journey changed the course of my life because it led to an encounter with cultures and religious traditions that offered the greatest possible contrast with my own European one and enormously expanded the horizon of my life. When I first caught sight of the great chain of the Himalayas gleaming far above the great plain of northern India I felt like Columbus discovering America. There was no time for fear because I was ecstatically involved in the discovery of a new world.
          In India I discovered the ravishing grace of men and women in their turbans and saris of dazzling yellow, lime-green, magenta and pink and the staggering size and beauty of a landscape utterly different from anything I had seen or imagined. Everywhere I went I felt the presence of a very ancient civilization and the extraordinary range of the human imagination in art and architecture, in poetry, literature, music and the creation of every kind of beauty, from the fantastic sculptures on the temple walls to the exquisite designs stamped on the saris displayed in the markets. What struck me most was the sense of timelessness, that little had changed in tens of thousands of years. It was an intoxicating time. I had no ties, no responsibilities, no fears. I could simply follow the longing of my heart, which was to enter into the soul of India, my sandaled feet reverently touched the dust of that distant soil. Traveling alone, I sought a richer, deeper, more vibrant experience of life than I could find in my own country and culture. I knew I had to return as there was so much more to discover and assimilate.
          Through contacts in Rome the following year, I had the good fortune to be offered a job collecting photographs from museums in India and the Far East for an Italian encyclopaedia of art. To choose the photographs I would have to travel from country to country, visiting the sacred sites and the museums of India, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Japan, Taiwan and Indonesia. I would also have rapidly to assimilate not only the history of each culture, but also its religious spirit as expressed in its art because art, in these cultures, was inseparable from religion. This would take me into the heart of each culture. It was a journey beyond my wildest dreams.
          It was the sheer splendor of the art, sculpture and temple architecture of India and Asia that first kindled my strong attraction to Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism. Only later was it deepened and extended through the sacred texts I studied.
          In the dark recesses of a great cavern in Taiwan where half of the Imperial Treasure taken from Beijing by Chiang Kai Chek had been stored for safety, I had my first glimpse of the Daoist paintings of the Sung dynasty and my first real encounter with Chinese art. I was struck not just by its utter difference from the art of India and the West, but by its articulation of a different perception of life—a different quality of soul.
          As I traveled to places like Angkor in Cambodia and Borobodur in Java, as well as to many sites in India, Thailand and Burma, and the museums in the capital cities, I felt myself entering into the heart of Hindu and Buddhist sculpture, deeply awed by the sculptors’ power to evoke in stone the immanent presence of spirit. In India, I saw that gods and goddesses utterly different from the monotheistic Christian image of God were not just present in images but mysteriously immanent and integrated into everyday life, still, after thousands of years, vibrantly alive in the imagination of the people. The temples were thronged with hundreds of people bringing offerings to the various goddesses and gods, obviously deeply emotionally engaged in their rituals.
          As a young woman traveling alone in 1957, I was never molested or robbed and was welcomed everywhere with curiosity and warmth. This was before the era of drugs and hippies. I was often lonely but never afraid. So many people helped me, so many kindly passed me on to friends in other countries or contacts in museums. It was only in Japan that the fact that I was a woman temporarily barred me access to the museum archives. In Tokyo no-one spoke English and the museum authorities could not believe (and seemed insulted) that a young woman had been entrusted with this job. However, eventually, I got my photographs.
          In the course of these journeys, I came across sculpture after sculpture of Mount Sumeru, the ‘holy mountain’ of Hindu mythology. In Cambodia, I discovered that many of the temples of Angkor, half-buried in the jungle, evoked this same image, for every single temple symbolized this holy mountain - the sacred heart of the universe as well as the divine ground hidden in the heart of every human being. So here at last, it seemed as if I had found the ‘holy mountain’ of my mother’s chaneled messages, some sixteen years after I had first heard of it.
          I felt that my quest for meaning had led me to discover this image carved in stone and enshrined in the mythology that was still vibrantly alive in India and much of Asia.
          I was also deeply moved by the incredible beauty and magnificence of the land and the beauty and grace of the people as I traveled from country to country. In India the sheer richness and color, the wide variety of beauty, the breadth and depth of its culture—was overwhelming. I was struck by the beauty of the designs on women’s saris, and the thronging number of people who, everywhere, despite being poor beyond any European conception of poverty, had an immense integrity, dignity and grace.
          In southern India, at Tiruvannamalai, I visited the ashram of the great Indian sage, Sri Ramana, shortly after his death and walked the nine miles around Arunachala, the sacred mountain close by which symbolized the same ‘holy mountain’- the hidden heart of the cosmos. It was here that I encountered his teaching of repeatedly asking myself the question “Who am I?” This question urged me to go further, look deeper. I had never thought about this inner dimension of myself as something which held a reality as great, if not greater than the familiar outer world of my experience. I began to connect this question with the voice that had spoken so many years before, saying only “I Am.”
          In Thailand, the abbot of a monastery invited me to stay and experience the Buddhist approach to enlightenment but I felt unable to accept his invitation, not willing to commit myself to any one path or leave behind the ties of family and my life in the West. Yet, as I traveled, I revelled in my growing understanding of a different purpose and meaning to life. The claustrophobic weight of the Western concept of a single life opened out into a great vista of lives, both past and future when I encountered concepts such as the law of karma — the belief that one’s actions affect future lives as well as this one—and the idea that we reincarnate countless times in many different bodies, gradually growing in spiritual insight and moving ever closer to reunion with a divine ground.
          Gradually my perspective grew to encompass a meaning to life beyond that of responding blindly to events as they happened or feeling constrained by the limits of a single life, however well-lived.
          I saw that in all these different times and places a rich and potent humus had been created by countless human beings over countless millennia: artists, poets, mystics, astronomers, musicians, architects, philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, and a few wise and extraordinary men like the Moghul ruler, Akbar, whose patronage had fertilised the deep sub-soil of culture. But there was also the moving vista of millions of people, so poor that they were barely able to survive, yet creating incredible beauty with their hands. By weaving, dyeing, stamping brilliantly-coloured cotton and silk cloth with ancient designs, carving wood and sculpting stone, honing and transmitting their precious skills over generations, they have reverently brought to life the gods and goddesses worshipped for millennia in the great temples of India and Asia.
          These journeys gave me a perspective on life which could only be acquired by physically traveling to far distant places. The discovery of Hinduism, Buddhism and, later, Daoism, brought release from the prison of a Christianity that I had experienced as claustrophobic, oppressive and forbidding. In these traditions I did not find the guilt-inducing sense of sin but rather the belief that suffering was due to ignorance, that humanity was unconscious rather than sinful.
          When I returned to England I put everything that had entranced my eye and evoked a response from my heart into my first book—The One Work; a Journey Towards the Self—an account of these two journeys to the East in 1956 and 1957, and of my quest to understand the quintessential message of Hinduism and Buddhism and relate this to a deeper understanding of Christianity. The main focus of the book was the discovery of a different concept of spirit—one that was the unseen ground of all forms of life rather than a creator distant from creation. Once again, as in childhood when my longing had been awakened by the messages, I felt drawn to follow the path of a spiritual quest. This desire had become more conscious and focused as I traveled.
          My life acquired a greatly enlarged perspective that encompassed a meaning beyond that of responding blindly to events as they happened or feeling constrained by the limits of a single life, however well-lived. The claustrophobic weight of a single life expanded into a great vista of lives, both past and future. I particularly liked the fact that neither Hinduism or Buddhism had a proselytising agenda. While both had spread far beyond India, neither had attempted conquest and conversion by the sword as had Christianity and Islam.
          During these travels in the East, I was made aware of the incredible difference between the lives of people in the West and those in the East. First of all, the privilege of freedom from want and access to a good education. Secondly, freedom from the indescribable poverty, misery and disease that I saw in India in particular, where there seemed to be no hope of any change for the better in the lives of tens of millions of people. Secondly, I was drawn to piece together an approach to reality that seemed utterly unknown in the Christian West and which supplied what I felt was missing there without being able to define precisely what it was. At first I was led by an attraction to certain myths and works of art, then to the texts of the Vedic, Buddhist and Daoist traditions—above all, to the concept of enlightenment. I learned that enlightenment is an immense expansion of consciousness and that it means direct experience of the hidden ground of life as well as one’s own nature.
          This was the start of a lifelong journey. I felt compelled to study the artistic heritage and spiritual legacy of the great civilizations of India, China and Japan and develop a deeper insight into life itself. It took many years to see the whole picture and to bring back this ancient knowledge into my own culture. Nor could I have written this book without experiencing the different facets of the journey I have described and will describe in subsequent chapters.

Marriage and Motherhood
           In spite of the satisfaction of writing my book about my wanderings, returning to England in 1957 after more than a year in the East, brought me down to earth with a thump. At that time, for any woman who had not specifically chosen the career path of a scientist or a doctor, there seemed to be only three career options: a secretary, an academic or teacher, or a nurse. The alternative to these was marriage and motherhood. In the 1950’s there was still a cultural split between the married and the professional woman. The immense panorama of life I had glimpsed on my travels made it difficult for me to settle down to what seemed a very restricted and restricting life. Since the teachings of the Hindu and Buddhist sages had taught me that immersing oneself in the usual concerns of the world was an impediment to the goal of spiritual enlightenment, it was extremely difficult for me to get a steady job, marry and adapt to the routine of domestic life. The call of the spirit and the life of the body seemed to oppose each other across an abyss.
           However, when I was working on my first book, a friend introduced me to a man whom I felt I could trust, an artist whose work I admired. My family was delighted, having almost given up hope of my finding the “right” man—at that time twenty-eight was considered “late” for marriage—and even more delighted that he was an artist because both my mother and grandmother were artists. We married in 1960 and a new phase of my life began, a phase of initiation into the experience of a close relationship with another human being and into the delight of finding someone who became a true friend and companion, someone with whom I could share my intense love of art and beauty and who was a kind and gentle person. But first I had to learn to cook and clean a house—skills which I had neglected to develop before I married because, with the arrogance of someone immersed in spiritual and intellectual concerns, I did not consider them to be important, let alone essential to a harmonious married life.
           After two miscarriages, we had a daughter whom I dearly loved but hadn’t the slightest instinctive knowledge of how to look after. Having lived life mainly through the mind, with scant regard for the body, I had received no preparation whatsoever for how to look after a baby. I was terrified and this terror was made worse by the fact that she was a pyloric baby—that is—the milk I fed her was immediately ejected by projectile vomiting to the other side of the room (caused by the fact that the pyloric muscle would not open). At three weeks of age, she was losing weight rapidly and had to have an immediate operation. In those days, mothers were not allowed to stay with their children in hospital. I was deeply upset by the separation from her, particularly as I wasn’t even allowed to see her for twenty-four hours. After three days she was able to come home, but I fell into a post-natal depression (unrecognized at the time as a mental state that could follow childbirth) and was totally unable to cope.
           The years of tension and unhappiness watching my mother being destroyed by my father, and my complete inability to protect her, had led (from the age of twelve) to my falling into suicidal depressions for days and sometimes months at a time. This condition was never medically diagnosed or treated because in those days depression was not recognized as an illness. In fact, it was considered shameful even to admit to such a condition because of the taint of instability and even madness. Although I had many times come close to suicide as an adolescent and young adult, I had never actually attempted it. But now that I was married, I soon realized that I had to do something about it. If I did not, I feared that it would destroy my relationship with my husband the way my father’s depression had destroyed his relationship with my mother and myself, and that it would have a negative effect on the life and happiness of our daughter. I did not want the pattern to be repeated in another generation. My husband was immensely supportive but was perplexed by my violent outbursts of rage and by my perpetual unhappiness and lethargy. My ongoing depression increased the pressure on me to take some action. By chance I met a woman who had come through a nervous breakdown and she gave me the name of the psychiatrist who had treated her, a man who was also a Jungian analyst. So began a new phase in my life—my introduction to psychotherapy and to Jung, and to my becoming aware of a mysterious and (to me) unknown aspect of the psyche called the unconscious.

Encounter with the Unconscious
           Trust in this man gradually established trust in myself and led to the eruption of a passionate longing to create beauty, the same longing that had been awakened by the colors and designs of the saris I had seen in India and the beauty of women’s clothes in the paintings of Italian and Flemish artists. These drew me to a sensory delight in the appearance and feel of beautiful materials and a desire to design clothes. I took a correspondence course in dressmaking. Suddenly the idea occurred to me that I could make evening dresses to sell—I could use beautiful fabrics and design the dresses myself. In those days (the early 60’s), women from my background living in London wore long dresses to the theatre and opera or when they entertained friends at home or went out to a dinner party.
           I found to my amazement and delight that I could design dresses that women wanted to buy because they made them look and feel beautiful. Soon I had too many dresses to keep in the house and, in 1964, I realized I needed a shop. A friend suggested Beauchamp Place in Knightsbridge (London) and I found a tiny shop to rent there. My sister-in-law suggested the name Troubadour. I liked the romantic associations to the word. On the first day I sold three dresses, which covered the week’s expenses, and from then on, week by week and year by year, my business grew until I found that I was making a great deal of money. I had two brilliant cutters to help me, one a remarkable Polish woman who had survived years in a concentration camp in Poland; the other a Spanish woman who had worked in Madrid with the great designer Balenciaga. By a stroke of incredible luck, I inherited a whole workshop of Polish seamstresses from a business that was closing down in a nearby building and these women made the dresses I designed. Each had a remarkable story of survival (under the German and Russian occupation) to tell and I became very fond of them.
           Twice a year I gathered together swatches of the finest silks, velvets, chiffons and organzas as well as materials from India and spread them out all over the surface of my work table, as a prelude to designing the evening dresses I so loved, inspired by paintings of women by my favourite Flemish and Italian artists. Once a year, in November, I traveled to the great annual trade fair in Frankfort where, walking up and down the aisles of three enormous halls, I bought many of the materials, embroideries and trimmings I needed. This experience grounded me in everyday life, helped me to earn my living well and taught me how to manage a growing business and keep the people who worked for me happy and productive.
           Meanwhile, through the Jungian analysis, I was learning the importance of paying attention to my dreams and keeping a careful record of them. In those years I dreamed of great warehouses filled from floor to ceiling with materials of unimaginable fineness and beauty; of dresses far beyond my capacity to invent or make; of racks filled with clothes that were a marvel of design and magnificence. These dreams inspired me to make ever more beautiful dresses in an attempt to come close to the ones seen in my dreams. But my own designs could never match these either in the complexity of the design or in the fineness and splendor of the material. Who, I began to wonder, was the dress designer of my dreams? Who was the weaver of these fabrics? I knew that the unconscious was sending me these images so far removed from my own capacity to create, but who and what and where was the unconscious?
           Once, I remember, I had a dream of a tiny woman with the head of a greyhound presiding over a room filled with about 100 seamstresses seated at sewing machines that filled the room with a steady hum. Each woman was busily engaged in sewing the top part of a dress to the bottom part. The meaning of that dream only occurred to me years later when I came across the work of women who were writing and speaking about the goddess and the feminine principle, connecting the historically known to the hitherto unknown, the conscious to the unconscious, the visible to the invisible, the top to the bottom.
           After twelve years, at the height of a major recession and inflation in the 1970’s owing to a huge rise in the price of oil, I felt the time had come to close the shop. The cost of wages and materials spiralled overnight and long evening dresses were suddenly out of fashion, owing to the impact of the French designer, Courrèges. I could have gone on but felt that this phase of my life had come to an end.
           My analysis had continued during this time but at this point, my analyst suggested that I should apply to train as an analyst myself. He had heard that Dr. Gerhard Adler, one of the two editors of Jung’s Collected Works, was considering applications for training. I applied for an interview and while I was waiting for a reply, I had the following dream:

I am traveling in a rocket to the moon and on landing there, see that a huge rusty iron construction shaped like the Eiffel Tower has been built on it, so huge that it towers high above its surface. The moon itself is a dead planet, all vegetation has dried up and wasted away. There are no human beings anywhere and no animals—no life at all. I travel across the moon’s surface in a train, staring out of the window at this desolate landscape that looks as if it had been blasted by a nuclear bomb or shrivelled by a terrible drought. At the end of the dream I am precipitated into a swimming pool.

           I discussed the dream with my analyst but, inexplicably, he could not fathom its meaning. When I went for the interview with Gerhard Adler, he asked if I had had a dream recently and I told him about it, saying that I did not understand it. He said he thought the dream was drawing attention to the neglected state of the feminine principle or archetype—the moon being one of the primary images of that archetype. He suggested that the dream was showing me the plight of the feminine, both in relation to my own life and to the wider culture as a whole. The iron structure was, in both cases, something that had been imposed on the deeper levels of the psyche by the rigid control of the conscious mind or ego. The water of the swimming pool suggested the water of the soul, the water of the feminine in which I needed to immerse myself. Tactfully, he suggested that more analysis was needed before I could be accepted for training. I needed to dismantle that massive iron structure and regenerate the surface of the moon. Despite the years of analysis I had already experienced which had helped me to save my marriage, earn my living in the world and open a channel for my longing to create beauty, the dream suggested that I needed now to go deeper into the psyche. So I began to work with another analyst, a woman who had worked with Jung’s wife, Emma, and who was able to initiate me into a deeper understanding of the feminine principle. After a few years of analysis with her, I was invited to embark on the five years’ training to become an analyst myself.
           I had found my way to depth psychology because of a crippling depression. Through my analysis I learned that depression can signify not only the presence of unhappy and repressed childhood memories but also a call from the unknown depths of the psyche—the unconscious—to create a relationship with those depths. The opportunity of responding to that call was the second major factor that changed the course of my life because it gave me insight into the fact that so much suffering and unhappiness arises from ignorance of our own nature. Quite apart from the development of insight, the experience of depth psychology as Jungian psychology was then called, gradually freed my ability to write and gave me fascinating subjects to write about. It widened my knowledge of history, psychology, philosophy and religion and gave me a new perspective from which to view them.
           While science had been making extraordinary discoveries in the fields of physics, cosmology and biology, I discovered that depth psychology had been exploring the vast and unknown dimension of the soul. Jung's discoveries about the nature of consciousness went far beyond Freud's because they granted a transcendent and spiritual dimension to the psyche yet, perplexingly, they were ridiculed and rejected as “mystical” by mainstream secular culture. As I learned more, I realized that they were making as significant a contribution to our understanding of life as the new discoveries in science. Jung’s contribution was so massive and significant because, as far as I was then aware, no one since Plotinus (3rd century AD) and Marsilio Ficino in Renaissance Italy had explored the soul as a living cosmic entity rather than an abstract concept.
           I knew by then that science believed that consciousness originates with and depends upon the physical brain. Because of my encounter with eastern philosophy, I could not accept this hypothesis. It was therefore an immense relief, almost a delight, to find that the important discoveries made by Jung’s researches into the psyche suggested that what we call the conscious mind rests on an immense matrix or psychic field of the immemorial experience of our species, which he called the Collective Unconscious. It had taken millennia for the conscious mind to evolve out of the unfathomable matrix of the unconscious. I learned that Jung had recognized a process of inner development that he called individuation, which could be activated and developed through analysis. With practice, experience and insight into the meaning and symbolism of dreams, he found that a relationship could be established with this vast field of consciousness, and that this relationship could radically transform our understanding of life, granting it a deeper meaning and value and healing the deep split which had developed between two aspects of our nature.

The Call of the Rose
           During the years of exploring the psyche and training to become an analyst, I continued to travel, mainly to Greece and the Greek islands, for the great civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean world held an overwhelming fascination for me. On one such visit, I have a vivid memory of going with my husband into a Greek Orthodox Church in the Peloponnese and being shown around it by an artist who was restoring the frescoes on its walls. He finally beckoned my husband to follow him into the sanctuary behind the screen. When I naturally followed them, he stopped me with his hand saying, “Women are not allowed in here.” I was too astonished to remonstrate, particularly as inside the sanctuary I could just catch sight of a magnificent fresco of the Virgin Mary. Why would I be barred from the contemplation of one of the most sacred images of my sex? Why would the most holy place in the church, sanctified by the image of the Mother of God, be forbidden territory for woman and not for man? The implication was that I, as a woman, would somehow defile the sanctuary. What historical processes underlay the Christian attitude toward woman that was reflected in this artist’s gesture of rejection? Once again, as in the church services of my childhood, I was made aware that something was deeply wrong with Christianity.  I was often haunted by the words of a poem by Walter de la Mare that I had discovered while I was at Oxford, in a book by Helen Waddell called The Wandering Scholars:

                                                                  Oh no man knows
                                                                  Through what wild centuries
                                                                  Roves back the rose

           The image of the rose and the verse above kindled such a burning passion to know more, such a longing to reach back through those wild centuries to some discovery dimly apprehended as waiting for me at the roots of time, that the memory of the day I came across those lines of poetry lingers still, across the space of fifty years. Then, I knew nothing about the Goddess, the feminine archetype, or the soul, nothing about the symbolism of the rose in Sufi mysticism or the rose’s connection with the lost tradition of Divine Wisdom. Yet the image, even the scent of the rose was overwhelmingly numinous to me and I planted many roses in the garden of our home, entranced by their ancient names.
           Galvanised by my experience in the church in Greece, I began a new phase of my journey of discovery—one that was to lead me into a deeper understanding of the soul on the one hand and an exploration of the roots of civilization and the loss of the feminine image of the divine on the other.
           I found myself drawn to return to the earliest beginnings of the growth of culture—to the time when the image of the Great Mother presided over the life of mankind. It is to this ancient time, so distant from our own in every respect, that we may look for the genesis of ideas and symbols which eventually developed into religious and philosophical systems and all the different ways in which we have attempted to define and relate to a reality that transcends our power of understanding, yet which draws us, ineluctably, to itself.

©Anne Baring

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CHAPTER TWO

The Awakening Dream

Everywhere at all times in all cultures and races of which we have record, when the greatest meaning, the highest value of life man called gods or God needed renewal and increase, the process of renewal began through a dream.

                                                                              — C G. Jung, (1)

I reflected often on the dream of the huge phallic iron tower on the surface of the moon. The Talmud says that a dream not interpreted is like a letter not read. The best we can do is to read the message coming from the depths of the psyche and ponder its meaning. Over many years of pondering, I realized that this dream was a wake-up call from my soul. Not only that, it seemed to hold a wake-up call for humanity. It carried a warning of what could happen to our planet—that it could be rendered as barren and lifeless as the moon. I remembered that one of the early channeled messages received by my mother had warned that our planet could become “another orphan wandering in space” if humanity didn’t change course.
           My dream invited me to explore the imbalance between the masculine and feminine principles in Western civilization and how this imbalance has affected the lives of every one of us. The more I thought about it, the more I saw that the phallic iron structure was an image of what human technology has imposed on nature: it reflected the hubris of the modern mind which believes it can control and exploit the resources of nature and the planet for its own ends. It showed the effects of what can happen as human consciousness becomes cut off from the matrix or depths from which it has emerged—depths symbolized by the desiccated and barren moon. I began to see how losing touch with these depths affects our values: how we educate our children; how we practice our science, medicine and psychology; how we conduct politics; the formulation of our aims and goals; all our relationships with a wider world.  
          Most important of all, the loss of connection with the depths influences our view of reality and the way we live our lives in a personal sense. I began to understand that many of the problems we now face were created by beliefs that were formed centuries, even millennia, ago, whose influence has never really been recognized and addressed. I needed to find out what historical influences had led to the erection of that iron tower—why it had come into being. I had no idea where to start but, fortunately, my dreams gave me my direction.
           Three further powerful dreams became the foundation of the second half of my life. In the first dream, I returned to the landscape of my grandmother’s house in the South of France:

I go to the edge of the deep gorge and stand looking down into it and at the stream rushing through it from the mountains to the sea. Rising out of the shadowy depths of the gorge I see the shape of an enormous cobra-like serpent with seven heads. It continues to rise until these heads, spread out like a great hood, are level with the ledge on which I am standing. I am so terrified of it that I tremble and cover my eyes. When I dare to look again I see that the serpent wants to communicate with me. I signal to it that I am listening. It offers me the choice of staying where I am or climbing a ladder, which I now become aware is behind me. With a deep bow of reverence and awe, I indicate that I choose to climb the ladder.

           From my travels in the East, I recognized this seven-headed serpent as an image of the great serpent king Mucalinda who had formed a canopy over the Buddha as he sat in deep meditation prior to the moment of his awakening. In the many sculptures I had seen in Thailand and elsewhere, the Buddha was often shown seated on the gigantic coils of a cobra whose seven hoods fan out behind him in a magnificent gesture of protection and blessing. Another image I remembered was that of the god Vishnu lying on a great serpent that personified the waters of the abyss.
           I took this dream as a call to climb the ladder of consciousness, to increase my understanding of the psyche and become aware of the power of instinct to act as a guide to this work, for it was apparent to me that this great serpent was an image of instinct. I had never before had such a clear image of the creative powers of life as a living presence in all the forms and species of nature, present as well as in the deepest, most archaic level of my own psyche. I could have studied the Jungian literature on the unconscious for years and never understood the reality of this primal energy if I had not had this dream which offered all that I needed to know in an image of overwhelming power. Nor would I have been able to identify Jung's concept of the collective unconscious with this image of the primordial wisdom of nature. Without actually seeing this gigantic archetypal serpent rising out of the gorge, I don’t think I would have understood the instinct as something so powerfully and overwhelmingly real. It was not an abstract idea that I could investigate at arm’s length, but an awesome, numinous and living Presence, exactly as the sculptors of India and Thailand had portrayed it.
           In a second dream a few years later:

I approach a tower surrounded by a narrow water-filled moat. I cross the bridge and enter the tower. I find its circular interior filled from floor to ceiling with wonderful books in white and brown vellum with gold or red lettering. The tower has two floors. Hesitantly, I go up to the second by a spiral staircase. At the top of the staircase Marie-Louise von Franz, one of Jung’s closest colleagues and friends is standing, extending her hands to me in welcome.

           I understood the tower as an image of the soul. Its treasures were being offered to me by a woman who had been a close colleague of Jung's and had written many books on the feminine principle—books that in the course of my analyses and training, I had read and treasured. I remembered a poem by Rilke which seemed to offer a commentary on this dream:

                                      I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
                                      And I have been circling for a thousand years,
                                      And I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
                                      Or a great song. (trans. Robert Bly)

The Awakening Dream
           The third dream was the most awesome dream of my life, the true awakener of my soul:

           I dream that I come round the side of a huge dolmen and enter another world, an utterly strange and barren landscape. It is lit by the brilliant radiance of the full moon. I am searching for someone I love and my longing for him is so great that I have embarked on a journey in search of him. The landscape is transformed from a desert into field after field of brilliant green corn. The moonlight is so bright that it is like daylight and the corn is the colour of an emerald. I float over this emerald sea, my bare feet skimming the surface of the corn for many miles until I come to the brow of a low hill and hesitate, wondering if I should go further. I decide to go on and come down into a valley on the other side.
           Suddenly, I find that two enormous men have caught me in a gigantic fishing net and are drawing me into the presence of something tremendously powerful and numinous. I am very frightened, yet at the same time fascinated. I lie flat on my back on the ground, helplessly enmeshed in the net and look up, half in terror, half in awe. I see the figure of a woman towering above me, filling the entire space between earth and sky. She is naked, with white skin and golden hair and is very beautiful, like Aphrodite. Yet she is not young, but ageless. In the centre of her abdomen is an immense revolving wheel that is also a rose and a labyrinth, like the one I had seen inlaid in the floor of Chartres Cathedral. Awestruck, I gaze up at her, then down at my own body which is exactly like hers, only tiny in relation to it. I too have a revolving wheel but mine is not centred; it is too far to the left. She does not speak but indicates that I am to centre my wheel, like hers.

           Visionary dreams like this one cannot be interpreted according to any known system of belief. They have to be held close to the heart and allowed to live so that, over many years, they can act as leaven in the soul. In another, earlier culture I would have worshipped this image as a goddess and perhaps built a temple or shrine to her, but in today’s world, belief and worship did not satisfy me. I wanted to reach for the relevance of this dream for the whole of humanity, not just a small tribal part of it. I needed to know why I had been given this vision. What was its intention? I felt it best not to speak of this dream to anyone, not even to my husband. But I did tell my analyst, thinking that she would be able to give me an interpretation of it. To my surprise she said she did not want to comment on it but to let it be, explaining that the danger with such dreams is identification with an archetype and a huge inflation. In time, I would come to understand it and integrate its meaning with my life.
           For years I wondered who she was. Was she Aphrodite? Demeter? Isis? Was she an angelic being of some kind? Was she the personification of nature, of the cosmos? Was this the kind of vision that people in times more open to visionary experience would have had? I knew that in Hellenistic times, in the second century AD, an Egyptian man called Apuleius had had a vision of the goddess Isis, and had recorded the words she spoke to him through the figure of Lucius, hero of his book, The Golden Ass, saying, “I am Nature, the Universal Mother, mistress of all the elements, primordial child of time, sovereign of all things spiritual, queen of the dead, queen also of the immortals, the single manifestation of all gods and goddesses that are.”(2)
           I also knew of the famous vision of the philosopher Boethius (AD 480-524) in which the figure of Divine Wisdom (Sophia) had appeared and spoken to him as he awaited his terrible death on the orders of the barbarian Emperor Theodoric. (3)
           Naked and beautiful, neither young nor old, the goddess who had appeared to me was too pagan a figure for the Christian Mary, yet she was not like Aphrodite or any of the Greek goddesses with whom I was familiar. Finally, I began to question whether she could be a manifestation of the Neo-Platonic image of the Anima Mundi—the Soul of the World or Soul of the Cosmos, first mentioned by Plato in the Timaeus and later by Plotinus in the Enneads. Again and again I returned to wondering about her and how I was to centre my wheel. What did she want of me by sending me such a vision? Why was my wheel too far to the left and how could I center it? Inspired by her numinous image, I began to explore the images of the goddess and to develop my thoughts about the feminine principle in general. As for the net, I knew that in Indian mythology such a net was connected with the god Indra and I thought that, in the context of my dream, it might signify the net of material reality in which I was caught like a fish. And the two immense male figures holding it might, I thought, represent the power of the unconscious that was drawing me into the presence of this cosmic being. Whoever they were, they forced me to look upwards, to my vision, to the cosmos.

The Goddess
           Several years later, when I had embarked on a training program to become a Jungian analyst, I made friends with Jules Cashford, a woman who was one of a group of men and women in London who also were training to become analysts. Instinctively, I felt drawn to her and, on an impulse one evening, I invited her to come to supper with me. Initially, she seemed doubtful that she could come, but she had a dream about a ruined garden that needed to be restored and in the dream was told to go and see me. She told me about this dream when we met and we began to discuss the garden as an image of the neglected garden of the soul as well as the neglected feminine archetype about which so little was known in our culture. This led to the possibility of our writing a book together about the goddess—originally the Greek goddesses—as the primary image of the feminine archetype. But as we worked on the outline of the book, we realized that we needed to go much further back to the earliest sacred images of the feminine, to the Neolithic and even the Palaeolithic era, if we were to discover the foundation of the later Egyptian and Greek goddesses—or even the Virgin Mary. The research for the book drew us further and further into the origins of the sacred image of the goddess, opening avenues we had been unable to envisage at the beginning.
           We were deeply influenced not only by a book called The Great Mother by a Jungian called Erich Neumann, (4) but also by a book called Saving the Appearances by an English philosopher called Owen Barfield. His book divided the evolution of human consciousness into three phases – (1) Original Participation, (2) Separation and (3) Final Participation. (5) This division gave us the tripartite framework for our book. We felt drawn to the earliest beginnings of culture in order to find the genesis of ideas and symbols which eventually developed into all the different myths and images through which people described a numinous reality which transcended their ‘normal’ range of experience. As Jules and I worked together, we realized that not only were we exploring the history of goddesses and gods, we were also exploring the evolution or development of human consciousness through these sacred images. With this new understanding, the larger theme as well as the title of our book began to clarify.

The Shift from Lunar to Solar Mythology
           Another remarkable book called The Roots of Civilization by Alexander Marshack opened our eyes to the importance of the moon in Palaeolithic culture and described the earliest lunar notations in Africa dating to 40,000 BC. (6) When we studied the mythology and history of earlier Mediterranean and Near-Eastern cultures, we found that there was a noticeable shift from lunar to solar imagery in Egypt and Mesopotamia ca. 2000 BC and, some 1500 years later, in Greece. This change of emphasis in mythology was accompanied by a shift of emphasis from feminine to masculine deities which finally resulted in the primacy of a single male deity—the monotheistic transcendent Father God of Judaism and, later, of Christianity and Islam. We realized that this shift had a profound effect on the development of Western civilization and that it marked a specific phase in the evolution of human consciousness—Owen Barfield's Phase of Separation. We discovered that the imagery of the divine feminine had been repressed or excluded by the three Abrahamic religions that originated in the Near and Middle East—Judaism, Christianity and Islam—over a period of some 4000 years, and that this repression was clearly linked to the shift of emphasis in the image of deity from a Great Mother to a Great Father.
           Gradually, as with the unfolding of the petals of a rose, Jules and I discovered that behind the image of the rose stood the figure of Mary, and behind her that of Sophia or Hokhmah, the Holy Spirit of Wisdom who speaks so eloquently in the Book of Proverbs as well as in the Book of Ben Sirach in the Apocrypha. We read the ground-breaking book written by the American theologian Elaine Pagels which described how the feminine imagery of God was obviously alive and flourishing in the Gnostic groups of early Christianity. (7) Later, we read the actual Gnostic texts discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi in Egypt. (8) But, we wondered, did the Christian imagery and mythology associated with the divine feminine appear out of nowhere, or did they develop from older images of the Bronze Age goddesses of Egypt and Mesopotamia—and, even further back, from the Great Mother of the Neolithic era?

The Lost Images of the Feminine
           For many years we felt like archaeologists excavating a long-buried mosaic, gathering together fragments of an image and a mythology hidden beneath the cultural deposits of thousands of years and many different cultures. At first we couldn’t see the picture clearly. We simply felt attracted to different images and ideas. The researches of Jung and Erich Neumann already had brought together many of the lost images of the feminine archetype. However, the extraordinary research of the archaeologist, Marija Gimbutas, whose earliest book was published in 1974, identified many new images of the goddess from an unknown European civilization that she called the Civilization of Old Europe and dated to the seventh millennium BC. (9) We were drawn as well to the magisterial work of the mythologist Joseph Campbell, which enlarged our understanding of mythology and its influence on the formation and growth of civilization and to that of the historian of culture, Mircea Eliade. (10) As the pieces of this mosaic began to fit together, a theme of great beauty and complexity slowly revealed itself to us, but also a story of the loss, repression and distortion of a priceless legacy from the past. As we fitted the fragments of images and texts together, this process of discovery became immensely exciting, even numinous to us.
           We wanted to find the earliest images which were of supreme importance to humanity. When, with the help of Joseph Campbell’s book, The Way of the Animal Powers, (11) we found the image of the Palaeolithic Great Mother scattered across an immense territory stretching from the Pyrenees in the West to Lake Baikal in the East, we knew we had found our beginning. As we traced the evolution and many transformations of this image from 25,000 BC to the present day, we began to understand that this feminine image in its many forms stood for a totally different perspective on life, one that has been lost. In the course of our research, we discovered such surprising similarities and parallels in the goddess myths of apparently unrelated eras and cultures that we concluded that there had been a continuous transmission of images throughout history.
           This continuity was so striking that we felt entitled to talk of “the Myth of the Goddess,” since the underlying vision expressed in all the variety of goddess images was constant: the vision of the whole of life as a living cosmic unity. More specifically, we realised that the image of the Mother Goddess inspired and focused a perception of the universe as an organic, sacred and indivisible whole in which humanity, the earth and all life on earth participated as “her children.” Everything was woven together in one cosmic web: all orders of manifest and unmanifest life were related, because all shared in the sanctity of the original source. In a modern secular culture, this mythic image of the unity of earth and cosmos had vanished from sight. It was clear to me by this time that the idea of the whole cosmos as an entity with consciousness or soul in which all life participates derives directly from the image of the Great Mother.
           What had happened to the image of the goddess? Why and when did it begin to disappear, and how could we understand the implications of this loss? Since mythic images which are part of a great meta-narrative implicitly govern a culture, what did this tell us about a particular culture—such as our modern Western one—that either did not have, or did not acknowledge a mythic image of the divine feminine? It began to seem no coincidence that our modern secular culture is one that has, above all others, desacralized and exploited nature. The earth is no longer experienced as a living and sacred entity as in earlier times. The earth is no longer a “Thou” but an “it.” We can abuse, desecrate and pollute it without any feeling of responsibility or guilt. And, we realized, we were living in a time when the whole body of the earth is threatened by one species - our own - in a way unique in the history of the planet.
           It soon became clear to us that, from Babylonian mythology onwards (ca. 2000 BC), the goddess became almost exclusively associated with nature as a chaotic force to be mastered, whereas the god assumed the role of creating or ordering nature from a “place” that was outside or beyond it. Spirit gradually came to be defined as something beyond the world, something remote, transcendent, beyond nature and beyond ourselves. Moreover, it was defined as male and paternal. Everything that the image of the Great Mother once embraced in earlier cultures—in Neolithic communities and the Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterranean area, the Middle-East, India and China—was lost, and with it the vital sense of participation in the cosmic life of an invisible entity imagined as a containing, connecting maternal being.

The Separation from Nature
           Since this separation between nature and spirit and between female and male deities had not previously existed, we felt that it could be viewed within the context of the evolution of human consciousness, which involved a progressive withdrawal from a sense of participation in the life of nature. While this had resulted in an increasing autonomy for human consciousness, it had also resulted in a growing sense of separation from the natural world and in the conviction that man had the right to master and control nature for his own benefit. Hence the belief, enshrined in the Book of Genesis, that man has been given “dominion” over nature. In The Myth of the Goddess, we summed up this primary change of consciousness: “If the relation to nature as the Mother is one of identity, and the relation to nature from the Father is one of dissociation, then the movement from Mother to Father symbolizes an ever-increasing separation from a state of containment in nature, experienced no longer as nurturing to life but as stifling to growth.”(12)
           As our collaboration deepened, Jules and I became “one mind with two outlets” as I once jokingly referred to our relationship. Often we telephoned each other to report on a significant detail we had found, only to discover that the other had come across that very same idea or piece of evidence at almost the same time on the same day. One particular instance stood out: on the same day we had each found out that the Greeks had a beautiful image to describe how the individual soul, which they called bios, hangs from the great necklace of Being, which they called Zoë. Almost simultaneously, we tried to telephone each other to communicate our excitement at this discovery. What we discovered through our researches was a revelation to us—the continuity of the image and mythology of the goddess through many centuries and civilizations. We felt we were re-assembling the pieces of a dismembered corpse that could be brought back to life, rather as Isis, in the great Bronze Age Egyptian myth, had gathered the scattered fragments of the body of Osiris and restored him to life. What the goddess had done for the masculine archetype, we were doing for the feminine. We realised that the goddess personified a certain vision of life that had been lost—the vision of a living, intelligent cosmos.

A Lost Vision of Reality
           As we worked, we felt supported by something—almost by Someone—beyond either of us. Like other women who were simultaneously discovering what had been lost, we felt the urgency of the need to tell the story of the neglected goddess and to explain why she had been allowed so little place in patriarchal culture. We wanted to know why the feminine dimension of the divine had been excluded from the Christian image of God, why deity had been formulated in the image of a Father rather than a Mother and a Father, why the Holy Spirit in Christian doctrine had been defined in male imagery. We felt it was imperative to redress the balance, to discover the reasons why something so important to the balance of Western civilization as a whole had been lost. Most important of all, we felt that the image of the goddess carried a vision of reality that needed to be recovered, a vision that had been neglected or overridden for centuries, but that had once connected us intimately not only to the life of the earth but to the life of the cosmos.
           Why did we feel that this quest for the lost feminine dimension of the divine was so important? Because we felt that it might offer an explanation of how our present culture had come to regard nature as something that could be rapaciously exploited and manipulated to the advantage of our human species without any awareness of the effect this attitude had on the balance of life on the vast organism of planetary life. It would also help us to understand the roots of woman’s long subjugation, why her voice had been effectively written out of the history of Western and indeed, world civilization, why she had suffered so much oppression in patriarchal culture for so many centuries. We had absolutely no idea when we started of the chain of misogynistic ideas which had evolved from the description of Eve’s role in the Biblical myth of the Fall and from the influential legacy of the writings of Plato and Aristotle as well as those of the early Christian Fathers.
           Ten years of research and writing led ultimately to the publication in 1991 of The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image. The book had taken us so long to write because we were at first training to be, then working as analysts and had little time or energy to spare. It led to the creation of a deep and lasting friendship between us, as if we had been drawn to each other to do this work which neither one of us could have accomplished on our own. We were determined that our book should include the images of the goddesses as well as her many stories and gathered 450 illustrations, insisting that our publisher should place them in the context of the specific text that described them. Happily, this was agreed.
           The Myth of the Goddess tells the story of how, over a period of some 20,000 years, the image of the deity gradually changed from goddess to god, and how the god came to be identified with spirit and mind, and the goddess with nature, matter and body. The image of the goddess was feared and rejected and with it women and every aspect of life that had been identified with the feminine, including, most importantly, the soul, nature and matter. As the feminine principle, personified by the goddess, came to be rejected or downgraded in relation to the masculine one, personified by the god, so spirit and nature were sundered. Mind and soul, the conscious and unconscious aspects of our nature, became increasingly polarized in human consciousness, leading ultimately to the spiritual, political and ecological crisis of the present time.
           We felt that our book had a message for our age because it showed how the loss of the feminine dimension of the divine had led to the triple loss of respect for nature, matter and woman, and how the ecological crisis of our times could be directly traced to the denigration of the feminine in the philosophy, theology and mythology of the last four millennia. In the third section of the book, we focused on the image of the sacred marriage of spirit and nature—asking that what had been separated over the course of these millennia be reunited.

The Insights of Other Women
           While we had been working on our book, other women in America and Canada were following similar lines of research, publishing the fruits of their quest to discover what had happened to the goddess, what the cultures over which she presided were like and what meaning and significance her image held for modern woman. Many books began to appear, the most important perhaps being Elaine Pagel's book on the Gnostic Gospels (13) and Riane Eisler's The Chalice and the Blade.(14) While Pagel's book recovered the lost Christian images of the Feminine that had been honored in the early Gnostic communities and miraculously restored through the discoveries made at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, Eisler's book, published shortly before ours, was a formidable indictment of patriarchal culture and the need for a change in consciousness. Some of the writers, like Pagels and Rosemary Ruether, were theologians. Others, like Jean Shinoda Bolen and Marion Woodman, were Jungian analysts. The image of the Black Madonna held a numinous meaning for some of them, in particular for Woodman, working as an analyst in Toronto. While I mention here the books of a few individual women, there were many other books that I read with deep interest and gratitude because each, in its own way, strengthened and confirmed my own quest for a deeper understanding of the Feminine. Sylvia Brinton Perera's Descent to the Goddess, published in 1981, stressed the need for modern woman to make the descent into the underworld of the soul, there to encounter, experience and redeem the powerful instinctual feelings that had been denied and repressed for so many centuries in a patriarchal culture. In the introduction to her book she wrote:

The return to the goddess, for renewal in a feminine source-ground and spirit, is a vitally important aspect of modern woman's quest for wholeness. We women who have succeeded in the world are usually “daughters of the father” - that is, well adapted to a masculine-oriented society - and have repudiated our own full feminine instincts and energy patterns, just as the culture has maimed or derogated most of them. We need to return to and redeem what the patriarchy has often seen only as a dangerous threat and called terrible mother, dragon, or witch...This inner connection is an initiation essential for most modern women in the Western world; without it we are not whole. This process requires both a sacrifice of our identity as spiritual daughters of the patriarchy and a descent into the spirit of the goddess, because so much of the power and passion of the feminine has been dormant in the underworld - in exile for five thousand years. (15)

Turning towards the World
           While I felt this movement to restore the feminine was very important, my attention also was drawn to what was happening in the world and to awareness of the suffering of people caught up in the conflict developing in the former Yugoslavia in 1992. Deeply distressed by the helpless suffering of these people, I wrote a book for children, basing it on the theme of The Conference of the Birds, a poetic Sufi text by the twelfth century Persian mystic, Farid ud-Din Attar. I had always loved this story and, although the original was written for those who were treading a spiritual path, it seemed possible to retell it for modern children and to place it in the context of the need for a fundamental change in our relationship to the earth if we were ever to grow beyond the conflicts that were devastating so many people’s lives, and to become aware of ourselves as inhabitants of the planet, rather than of a particular national, religious or ethnic group. This would offer a new image of spirituality. The book was published in 1993 with the title The Birds Who Flew Beyond Time.
           Then, I was drawn in another direction through a close friendship with Andrew Harvey whose books I greatly admired.(16) We were asked by an English publisher (Godsfield Press) to write two books together—The Mystic Vision (1995) and The Divine Feminine (1996). Once again, I found myself immersed in material I had known and loved many years ago, returning to the mystical literature of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Sufism that I had encountered on my two journeys to the East but adding to it the tradition of the Christian mystics. Together, we selected passages from the mystical traditions of all cultures, including some of the sayings of the Indigenous Peoples, such as the American Indians and the Kogis living in the remote mountains of Columbia.
           I steeped myself in these writings, my own thoughts clarifying as I struggled to articulate the essence of what the mystics have tried to communicate to us. This message, I felt, could be summed up in these words:

The mystics and sages of all times and cultures have tried to reveal to us what they have discovered: that we are in the Divine Ground like a fish in the sea, or a bird in the air, and have tried to help us dissolve the illusion of our separate existence so that we would experience ourselves here and now, in this dimension, as what we truly are—Divine Being.

The Divine Feminine
           The second book (The Divine Feminine) took me deep into the sacred literature and imagery of the feminine aspect of the divine in different religious traditions. Although I had learned a great deal in the research for The Myth of the Goddess, it seemed as if I was now asked to broaden my research to include other cultures. I began to understand the feminine archetype or principle in a deeper sense, no longer just as the goddess but as what the goddess personified—an immense matrix of hidden relationships through which spirit and nature, the invisible and the visible dimensions of the life of the cosmos, were connected with each other. I began to see that something absolutely vital had been lost in religious teaching—the concept of the cosmic dimension of soul as an unrecognised order of reality which binds together all aspects of life, both visible and invisible. I also saw that this disastrous loss in the religious sphere had been transmitted to science which did not recognize the unity and interconnectedness of the aspects of life it was exploring, let alone its sacredness.
           In 1995, while researching material for The Divine Feminine, I had another dream which at first seemed unremarkable,

I am driving to a College in Oxford University to hear a performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers of the Blessed Virgin. On the back seat of the car there is a battered old-fashioned brown leather suitcase—the kind that years ago used to be called a “revelation suitcase” because it could expand to a greater capacity than was at first apparent.

           Although I wrote it down, I didn’t think much about this premonitory dream. However, shortly afterwards, while writing a chapter on the image of the Shekinah in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, I suddenly understood who the goddess of my vision might be. She personified what the kabbalists had named the feminine face of God, the wisdom and glory and radiant immanence of the divine concealed beneath and within the forms of life. The Shekinah literally means the “Presence of God in the world.” Then I remembered the dream about the battered “revelation” suitcase on the back seat of my car. Although I had written about the Shekinah in The Myth of the Goddess, drawing on the writings of the great Jewish scholar, Gershom Scholem, I had not really grasped the full implications of what she stood for. Now I realised in a flash of illumination that the Shekinah offers one of the most complete images of the feminine aspect of spirit to have survived from the ancient past. She restores the missing connective cosmology of the soul that the three major patriarchal religions, in their repudiation of a feminine dimension of the divine, had lost. I began to sense that the feminine being who had revealed herself to me in such powerful imagery personified the soul as a cosmic entity as well as an invisible dimension of reality. I experienced this realization as a revelation; it was like discovering water in the desert. So many fragments of knowledge, so many sacred texts from many cultures, began to fall into place and, in spite of all the research I had done for The Myth of the Goddess, I began to look much more deeply into the relationship between the image of the goddess and the idea of cosmic soul.
           Suddenly, the wider, cosmic meaning of the word “soul” became intensely real, intensely alive. With a sense of shock, I understood why life is utterly sacred. I realised that the image of the Shekinah personifies the gossamer-fine web of relationships that is the invisible ground of all that we call life. Science may study the different aspects of this web of life under different headings such as cosmology, biology and micro-physics, but an image like the Shekinah unifies this diversity and, above all, invites relationship with it as something that is alive, conscious and the very ground of our own consciousness. While the image of the Virgin Mary has to some extent played this role for millions of Catholic and Orthodox Christians over the centuries, she was not an aspect of the god-head and could never, therefore, represent the innate divinity and interconnectedness of life. Nor could she represent the hidden dimension of the great web of life or the sacredness of nature. Now I understood why the great Indian sage, Sri Aurobindo, had written in his masterwork, The Life Divine: “If it be true, that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation of the divine in himself and the realisation of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aims possible to man on earth.”(17)
           Then I remembered a beautiful passage from a Hasidic rabbi, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, that I had found while compiling The Mystic Vision: “As the hand held before the eye conceals the greatest mountain, so the little earthly life hides from the glance the enormous lights and mysteries of which the world is full. And he who can draw it away from before his eyes as one draws away a hand, beholds the great shining of the inner worlds.”(18)
           I knew now that my visionary dream as well as my long quest to hold on to the memory of the earliest chaneled messages had led me to the discovery of the unrecognized divinity of life on this planet, as well as to the existence of an invisible world or dimension of reality in which all life participated, a cosmos of relationships, a magnificent, awe-inspiring web of life.
           The discovery of the image of the Shekinah was a tremendous revelation because here, clear as crystal, was the lost feminine imagery of God as well as that of the Holy Spirit. Because the tradition of Kabbalah makes the association between the feminine aspect of the god-head and the Holy Spirit, it showed me how Christianity, in its definition of the Holy Spirit as the Third Person in a male Trinity, had lost the ancient and connective mythology of spirit as a great web of life and, most importantly, the recognition that the divine was present in every blade of grass, every cell of our bodies, in fact that it was every blade of grass, every cell of our bodies.

Soul and Spirit as the Divine Ground
           I felt as if I were being given a glimpse of the great shining of the inner worlds, worlds normally veiled from our sight. I knew I was rediscovering something that seemed familiar to me, something intensely exciting which offered the metaphysical counterpart of the most advanced scientific discoveries of our time. In the form of this powerful and numinous image, I was given an explanation of why, in Blake’s words, “Everything That Lives Is Holy.” I understood that the mystical tradition of Kabbalah offers one of the major missing links between the participatory experience of the great lunar cultures of the Bronze Age and our own solar age. What we have lost and what this tradition has preserved for us is the image of a sacred earth as well as an unseen web of relationships connecting the life of our planet with the life of the cosmos. It was clear to me that our own souls, our own consciousness, belong to this greater life as child to parent—son to father or daughter to mother. My image of the soul spun one hundred and eighty degrees as I realised that the soul is not in us. We are in the soul.
           But more than this: we are of the nature and substance of soul, the nature and substance of spirit. It seemed to me that spirit and soul are not really different in kind or substance but two names, one masculine, one feminine, for the same invisible dimension that is the ground, root or source of the physical world, whose life infuses, animates and sustains the whole cosmos. This life is not only innate in every atom of our being but we participate in its life, however unconscious of this fact we may be. Suddenly, the soul became intensely real, intensely alive to me. I experienced the feminine being I had seen in my dream as a living reality with whom I could communicate, to whom I could relate. Lying at her feet, gazing up at her, I realized that I was microcosm in relation to her as macrocosm.
           I understood then that the tremendous being of my dream was indeed she whom Plato and Plotinus in their concept of psyche tou cosmou and Anima Mundi—had named the soul of the world or soul of the cosmos. It was she who had appeared in Hellenistic times to Apuleius in Egypt as the goddess Isis, and in later Christian times as Sophia or Divine Wisdom to the philosopher Boethius, as we had described it in The Myth of the Goddess (pp.634-5). Awaiting his death, he had written his famous Consolation of Philosophy, immortalising the words she had spoken to him, words that, centuries later, were to inspire Charlemagne. (19) This same figure of the World or Cosmic Soul can be identified with the image of Divine Wisdom, who speaks so eloquently in the Book of Proverbs and the Wisdom Books of the Apocrypha as well as in the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. I wondered if it was this feminine cosmic presence “fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army of banners” who speaks in The Song of Songs saying, “I am black but beautiful O ye daughters of Jerusalem…I am the rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valleys” (2:1). To me, the imagery of the Shekinah offered a startlingly complete description of the matrix of invisible spirit—the soul of the cosmos.
           Synchronistically, as if to confirm these intuitive associations, I came across this Ode from the Apocryphal New Testament from the first century BC:

                                                   I rested on the spirit of the Lord,
                                                   And she raised me on high;
                                                   And she made me stand on my feet on the Lord’s heights,
                                                   Before his perfection and his glory,
                                                   While I was praising him in the composition of his psalms.
                                                   She bore me before the face of the Lord…(20)

Notes:

1. C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, page 347, par.488
2. Apuleius, The Golden Ass, Penguin Classics
3. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. E.V. Watts, Penguin books
4. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother, Bollingen Foundation, New York, 1955
5. Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, Second Edition, published 1988 by the Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, Conn. USA.
6. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilization, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, London,
7. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London
8. Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library, Brill, Leiden, Netherlands
9. Marija Gimbutas, The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, Thames and Hudson, London, 1974 and The Language of the Goddess, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989
10. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 1-1V, Secker & Warburg, London, 1958-68
11. Joseph Campbell, The Way of the Animal Powers, Times Books, London, 1984
12. The Myth of the Goddess, p. 661
13. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels
14. Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1988
15. Sylvia Brinton Perera, Descent to the Goddess, Inner City Books, Toronto, 1981
16. Andrew Harvey, Hidden Journey, Bloomsbury Publishing Co., Ltd. London, 1991
17. Sri Aurobindo, The Life Divine, Lotus Light Publications, Wilmot WI, 1990
18. Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav
19. Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
20. The Apocryphal Old Testament, ed. by H.E.D. Sparks, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984, p.724

 

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CHAPTER THREE

The Tree of Life

Robin Baring - Mother & Child

I loved her above health and beauty, and chose to have her instead of light for the light that cometh from her never goeth out...

                                                                             — Wisdom of Solomon

My visionary dream had led me to the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah. The word Kabbalah means ‘to receive’. Legend says that when Adam and Eve were cast out of the Garden of Eden, the angel Razael gave them a book to help them find their way back into it. In the words of a modern kabbalist, “Kabbalism is the inner and mystical aspect of Judaism. It is the Perennial Teaching about the Attributes of the Divine, the nature of the universe and the destiny of man.”(1) Through some four thousand years, it has been imparted by revelation to men who devoted their lives to its contemplation.
           Beginning with its remote origins in Babylon and Egypt, a revered chain of teachers passed on the teachings orally until the 13th century when a book called the Zohar or Book of Splendor was written in northern Spain. It flourished most prolifically in Hellenistic Alexandria, where many Jews had fled for refuge at the time of the Babylonian Captivity (586-539 BC) and later, after the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70 when a new influx of refugees joined the older community long established there. Still later, it moved to Spain, at the other end of the Mediterranean. Then, with the abrupt expulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century, Kabbalism was taken back to Safed, in Palestine. It was also established in northern Europe, in particular, England (where Shakespeare undoubtedly knew of it), Poland and Bohemia. It flourished in Renaissance Italy, where the brilliant Pico della Mirandola hoped to create a fusion of Kabbalistic and Christian theology until his untimely death (possibly by murder) cut short his vision.
           I discovered that one of the oldest and most important images of Kabbalah is the Tree of Life. I felt that through my visionary dream I had been led to this tradition to which the early messages had seemed to refer: “Find the Stone at the foot of the Tree,” they had said. As I uncovered more about this tradition, it seemed to me that the Tree of Life was a clear and wonderful template describing the web of relationships which connect invisible spirit with the fabric of life in this world. At the innermost level or dimension of reality is the unknowable divine ground; at the outermost the physical forms we call nature and matter. These two worlds continually interact with each other. All is one life, one energy, one spirit. We participate in the energy which informs all these mysterious levels of reality.
            I came across a sentence in a book called The Ladder of Lights by William Gray which described the Tree of Life as “a symbolic representation of the relationships believed to exist between the most abstract Divinity and the most concrete humanity...a family Tree linking God and Man together with Angels and other Beings as a complete conscious creation.”(2) I found myself drawn to this contemplative tradition which emphasized the path to God as a process of awakening through gradual illumination rather than adherence to a specific belief or faith. I also liked the fact that, unlike evangelical Christianity, it did not proselytize or attempt to convert, instead waiting for people to seek it out and discover its treasures. Its emphasis was on the growth of insight and wisdom through contemplation and a deepening relationship with the dimension of the divine while not neglecting life and relationships in this dimension of experience. I found it striking and important that it did not split apart matter and spirit. It did not reject the body nor was it obsessed with sin.
           Imagine a Muslim culture in Europe which welcomed both Christian and Jew, where there was no anathematizing of the infidel or the apostate such as exists today in fundamentalist Islam. From the ninth to the twelfth centuries, such a culture existed in Moorish Spain and south-western France. From Cordoba, Seville and Granada in the south to Toledo, Girona, Toulouse and Narbonne further north, in courtyards filled with the scent of jasmine and the sound of water trickling from fountains on summer evenings, scholars and philosophers from three religious traditions met in small groups to exchange insights, explore mysteries, and transmit their knowledge and experience to the next generation. This was the golden Age of Islam when science, mathematics and philosophy flourished and the great Arab scientist Averroes taught in Cordoba and wrote innumerable treatises on Aristotle.
            This nurturing atmosphere produced an extraordinary flowering, not only of Islamic, but also of Jewish and Christian culture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a flowering that coincided with the diffusion of the Grail legends and the haunting songs of the troubadours. People traveled from all over Europe to renowned centers of learning such as Toledo to sit at the feet of the Muslim scholars and Jewish rabbis who presided there. The rich mixture of learning and artistic genius in Moorish Spain initiated a new cultural impulse carried by a relatively small number of individuals over a wide area of Europe, but particularly and most effectively, in south-western France.
           Then, abruptly and tragically within three centuries, the harmonious relationship between Muslim, Christian and Jew was destroyed by Christian fanaticism. There were three strands to this fanaticism. One strand was the Crusades against the Muslims who had occupied the city of Jerusalem (the First Crusade was launched in France in 1095). A second strand was the Albigensian Crusade initiated in 1208 by Pope Innocent III, which let loose an army led by Simon de Montfort on south-western France and utterly destroyed its magnificent, tolerant and flourishing culture. The third was the decision by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, under the influence of the Spanish Inquisition, to expel both Jews and Moors from Spain in the late fifteenth century, although persecution had begun earlier as Christian Spain reclaimed the territory that had been held by the Moors.
            These were the fateful and fatal elements which were to give rise to centuries of enmity and persecution between Christians, Jews and Muslims and which have led inexorably to the tragic events in which we are embroiled today. Hundreds of thousands of Jews and Muslims were brutally expelled from Spain, many of them murdered, their property expropriated. Thousands of priceless manuscripts and sacred artifacts were destroyed as they were in Sarajevo during the recent war in Bosnia. The great mosque at Cordoba had its heart gouged out and replaced by a Christian cathedral. How different the history of European culture and relations between these three religious traditions might have been if a tolerant rather than a fanatical Christianity intent on supremacy had prevailed in Spain. Christians apparently never questioned the rightness of what they were doing in the name of God. Their faith provided the justification for the most abominable cruelty and oppression that was later carried from Europe to the New World.

The Teaching of Kabbalah
           The fundamental teaching of Kabbalah was the doctrine of emanation and, because of this, the oneness or unity of all cosmic dimensions of reality. God or Divine Creative Spirit was regarded not only as transcendent and unknowable but also, through emanation, present in every particle of the visible, created world as well as in the many hidden dimensions of reality veiled from normal sight. The aim of the kabbalist was to unite the two worlds, the Above with the Below, the invisible divine world with the manifest world. Unlike other religious traditions, Kabbalism did not reject this world but saw it irradiated by the light of divinity. It taught that whatever we do in this world affects the invisible dimensions or worlds and vice-versa because everything visible and invisible is inextricably connected. The soul becomes enlightened over many lives, at first through attraction to, then contemplation of and, finally, communion with the invisible worlds. Moses de Laon, a renowned thirteenth century kabbalist living in Spain wrote these memorable words:

The purpose of the soul entering this body is to display her powers and actions in this world, for she needs an instrument. By descending to this world, she increases the flow of her power to guide the human being through the world. Thereby she perfects herself above and below, attaining a higher state by being fulfilled in all dimensions. If she is not fulfilled both above and below, she is not complete. Before descending to this world, the soul is emanated from the mystery of the highest level. While in this world, she is completed and fulfilled by this lower world. Departing this world, she is filled with the fullness of all the worlds, the world above and the world below. At first, before descending to this world, the soul is imperfect; she is lacking something. By descending to this world, she is perfected in every dimension. (3)

           Like someone emerging from a darkened prison, we cannot bear the radiant light of the divine ground all at once. As our relationship with the divine deepens, so does our consciousness expand to include awareness of the deeper dimensions of being until we begin to radiate the light and love of this hidden ground. It seemed to me that this tradition found its way into Dante’s great vision of the soul’s ascent to the Celestial Spheres as well as into the Interior Castles of St. Teresa of Avila, yet neither could have risked acknowledging such an heretical influence.

Worlds within Worlds
           Rather than presenting an image of an hierarchical descent from the invisible to the visible, Kabbalah presented the image of worlds nesting within worlds, dimensions within dimensions expanding and manifesting, as it were, from within. It was, I thought, a wonderfully illuminating template of the relationships which connect invisible spirit with the visible fabric of life. At the innermost level is the unknowable source or god-head, at the outermost the physical forms of matter. All is one unified web of life, one energy, one spirit, one entity. We are, I discovered, each one of us, that life, that energy, that spirit. Quintessentially, there is only one life. We are, all of us, participants in the life of the cosmos, atoms in the Being of God.
           I realized that the levels or dimensions of this hidden ground of cosmic soul are what Jesus meant by the kingdom of God—worlds or dimensions which are invisible to us yet which underlie and “contain” the physical world and which, if we could only see them, are spread out before us. These dimensions could gradually become accessible to our own limited consciousness. I realized too that Jesus as well as other great teachers must have taught from deep knowledge and experience of these worlds. I also began to see that the image of an invisible dimension of reality lies behind many images of the quest, in particular the medieval quest for the Holy Grail – image of a boundless source of nourishment. My visionary dream, more powerfully and immediately—and less fearfully than my early experience at the age of eleven—had opened a door to the existence of a dimension of reality which holds our own in its embrace.
As a modern teacher of Kabbalah writes:

To be acquainted with Kabbalah is one matter, but to do its Work quite another…Only those who do the  Work for its own sake are initiated. Only the individual who wants to make manifest what Kabbalah reveals  can be an initiate. This process is nothing less than to integrate the body, soul and spirit, and so become a finer  instrument whereby the inner and outer worlds can come into communion…Each time this is done, the  Universe comes increasingly into focus as a reflection of the Absolute. (4)

           Kabbalah is a living tradition, still in the process of evolution through the experiences of the individuals exploring it today. It offers the tradition and the method of developing a direct path of communion between the individual and the divine ground—mediated by a teacher transmitting an oral tradition descended from ancient shamanic experience which was developed and added to by a lineage of contemplatives extending through millennia. What attracted me to this tradition is that it celebrates the indissoluble relationship between the feminine and masculine aspects of the god-head which other traditions had either lost or repressed for centuries. If we want to understand the deep roots of our present ecological and spiritual crisis, we can find them in the loss of three important elements: the feminine image of spirit, the direct shamanic path of communion with spirit through visionary and mystical experience, and the sacred marriage of the masculine and feminine dimensions of the divine.

The Shekinah and The Imagery of Divine Immanence
           I found the imagery and mythology of Kabbalah gloriously rich, broad in its imaginative and revelatory reach and, above all, intensely nourishing to the imagination. The Shekinah as the Holy Spirit of Wisdom—divinity present and active in the world—supplies the missing imagery of immanence which has somehow been lost or obscured in the orthodox traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but which survived in Hinduism and Taoism as well as in Tibetan Buddhism. And this tradition of divine immanence brings together heaven and earth, the divine and the human, in a coherent and seamless vision of their essential unity.
           Here indeed, was the imagery and tradition of the Divine Feminine that seemed to be missing in the three patriarchal religions. Whereas the Old Testament is the written tradition of Judaism, Kabbalah offers the hidden oral tradition, wonderfully named “The Voice of the Dove”. This oral tradition of the direct path to God was also described as the “Jewels of the Heavenly Bride”. I realized that the Bronze Age imagery of the Great Goddess returns to life in the splendor of the images which describe the Shekinah, and in the gender endings of nouns which describe the feminine dimension of the divine. There were, I thought, echoes in this mythology of the ancient Sumerian lunar myth of the Descent of Inanna. Nor was this strange, since Mesopotamia was one of the original centers of the development of this mystical tradition.
           Kabbalah describes the feminine aspect of the god-head as Mother, Daughter, Sister and Holy Spirit, giving woman what she has lacked throughout the last two thousand years in Western civilization, an image of the Divine Feminine in the god-head that is reflected at the human level in herself. The Shekinah is Divine Motherhood, named as "Mother of All Living"—the title that was also given to Eve in Genesis. I wondered whether the shadowy figure of the Shekinah stands behind the figure of Eve. Now I could see, even more clearly than when writing The Myth of the Goddess, that the story of the Fall in Genesis was a successful attempt to demythologize the feminine aspect of deity and effectively banish the hated goddess. Yet the tradition of the Divine Feminine survived in this mystical tradition of Judaism. Gershom Scholem writes that the introduction of the idea of the feminine element in God “was one of the most important and lasting innovations of Kabbalism. The fact that it obtained recognition in spite of the obvious difficulty of reconciling it with the conception of the absolute unity of God, and that no other element of Kabbalism won such a degree of popular approval, is proof that it responded to a deep-seated religious need.”(5)
           The Zohar or The Book of Radiance or Splendor that appeared in Spain in 1290 was the principal text of medieval Kabbalah—the work of many individuals but authored in the name of Moses de Laon. It speaks of the Shekinah as the Voice or Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Glory of God, the Compassion of God, the Active Presence of God, intermediary between the mystery of the unknowable source or ground and this world of its ultimate manifestation. It seemed to me that the mythology of the Shekinah as the Holy Spirit offers one of the most incandescent, vivid and powerful images of the immanence of the divine in this dimension. It transmutes all creation, including the apparent insignificance and ordinariness of everyday life, into something to be loved, embraced, honored and celebrated because it is the epiphany or shining forth of the divine intelligence and love that dwells within it and has brought it into being.

The Imagery of the Sacred Marriage
           Secondly, the mythology of this tradition preserves the ancient Bronze Age image of the sacred marriage, reflected in the union of the Divine Father-Mother in the ground of being. There is not a Mother and a Father God but a Mother-Father who are one in their eternal embrace: one in their ground, one in their emanation, one in their ecstatic and continuous act of creation through all the dimensions they bring into being and sustain. From this perspective of divine immanence, there is no essential separation between spirit and nature. No other tradition offers the same breathtaking vision, in such exquisite poetic imagery, of the union of male and female energies in the One that is both. The Song of Songs was the text most used by kabbalists for their contemplation of the mystery of this divine union.
           The Zohar contemplates the mystery of the relationship between the female and male aspects of the Divine Spirit expressed as Mother and Father, and their emanation through all dimensions of creation as Daughter and Son. The essential concept of this mystical tradition expresses itself in an image of worlds within worlds. Divine Spirit (Ain Soph or Ein Sof) beyond form or conception is the Light at the root, the source. Emanating as creative Sound (Word), Intelligence and Love, it brings into being successive spheres, realms, or dimensions named as veils or robes which clothe and hide the hidden source, yet at the same time transmit its radiant light.
            The transmission of Light from the source to an outer manifest level is also described as an inverted tree, the Tree of Life, whose branches grow from its root in the divine ground and extend through invisible worlds or dimensions of being of which we are no longer aware because our minds have become closed to the possibility of their existence. As I absorbed these images, I recognized their relation to certain of the Gnostic texts discovered at Nag Hammadi. I was also struck by the similarity between this imagery of light as the ground of being and the Tibetan concept of the luminous light of the Void.
           The primal center or root is the innermost Light, of an unimaginable luminosity and translucence. This center expands or is sown as a ray of light into what is described in some texts as a sea of glory, in others as a palace or womb which acts as an enclosure for the light. From here it emanates as a radiant cascade, a fountain of living water, pouring forth light to permeate and sustain all the worlds or dimensions it brings into being. This fountain of light emanates through the ten Vessels or Powers or Attributes of the Divine (Sefiroth) which are connected by 22 paths. The first Vessel (Kether) is a state of perfect equilibrium and contains all that was, is and will be. The divine impulse towards emanation moves the energy to expand beyond the first Vessel to the second; it is then received and contained by the third Vessel. This process of expansion and containment is repeated three times until this Tree is complete and the emanating energy balanced. The process of emanation then proceeds through further worlds, and the laws or archetypes which govern each world or level of creation come into being.

The Feminine Face of the God-head
           The feminine face of the god-head is named Cosmic Womb, Palace, Enclosure, Fountain, Apple Orchard and Mystical Garden of Eden. She is named as Mother, Sister, Daughter, Beloved and Bride, the architect of worlds, source or foundation of our world, and also as the Radiance, Word or Glory of the unknowable ground or godhead. Text after text uses sexual imagery and the imagery of light to describe how the ray which emanates from the Void is sown into the womb—the Great Sea of Light—of the Celestial Mother and how she brings forth the male and female creative energies (the ten sephiroth) which, as two branches of the Tree of Life, are symbolically, King and Queen, Son and Daughter. A third branch of the Tree descends directly down the center, unifying and connecting the energies on either side.
            The Shekinah is named as the waters above and below the Firmament, the Divine Spouse, the indwelling and active Holy Spirit and the divine guide and immanent presence who delivers the world from bondage to beliefs that separate it from its source, restoring it ultimately to union with the divine ground. She brings into being all spheres or dimensions of manifestation which are ensouled by the ineffable source until, through them, she generates the manifest world we know. Once again, I was struck by the similarity between this imagery of the Shekinah and the Tibetan image of Tara. I wondered whether these two traditions, Kabbalah and Mahayana Buddhism, had perhaps encountered each other in Hellenistic Alexandria, the meeting place of East and West.
           The kabbalists call this last, tenth sphere Malkuth, the Kingdom, where the divine Mother-Father image is expressed as the male and female of all species. Humanity, female and male, is therefore the expression of the duality-in-unity of the god-head. The Shekinah is forever united with her beloved Spouse in the divine ground or heart of being and it is their union in the god-head that holds life in a constant state of coming into being. The sexual attraction between man and woman and the expression of true love between them is the enactment or reflection at this level of creation of the divine embrace at its heart that is enshrined in the words in the Song of Songs: “I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine.” (6:3) Human sexual relationship, enacted with love, mutual respect and joy, is a sacred ritual that is believed to maintain the ecstatic union of the divine pair.
           The Shekinah has been named as “Queen,” “Matronit,” “Sabbath,” yet her name was so holy that she is generally referred to as “That Woman” rather than by her ineffable names. She is described as so small that she is the ark which held Moses hidden in the bulrushes and the stone supporting Jacob's head when he dreamed of the angels ascending and descending the ladder, yet so immense that she is the great Ark of the cosmos and as measureless as the starry sea of space. Wisdom, compassion, justice and mercy are four intrinsic qualities of her being yet, like certain goddesses of Egypt (Sekhmet) and Sumer (Ereshkigal) and also India (Kali and Durga), she can be terrible in her power to destroy and her fury at our wanton desecration of her life.
           Because she brings all worlds into existence as her robes or veils, and dwells in them as divine presence, nothing is outside spirit. In the radiant light of that invisible cosmic sea, everything is connected to everything else as through a luminous circulatory system. Moreover, the Shekinah is deeply devoted to what she has brought into being, as a mother is devoted to the well-being of her child. All life on earth, all levels and degrees of consciousness, all forms of matter, are comprised of that primal fountain of light and are, therefore, an expression of divinity. The Zohar describes nature as the garment of God.
           Blue and gold are the colors associated with the Shekinah. As cosmic soul, She is the radiant ground or “light body” of the human soul - at once its deepest, essential ground, its outer “garment”—the physical body—and its animating spirit or consciousness. She is the holy presence of the “glory of God” within everyone. All of us, moving from unconsciousness and ignorance of this radiant ground to awareness of and relationship with it, live in her being and grow under her guidance until we are reunited with the source, discovering ourselves to be what in essence we always were but did not know ourselves to be—sons and daughters of divine spirit.
           There were different schools within Kabbalah. Some saw the Shekinah as separated from the god-head, in voluntary exile on earth, describing her as a Daughter cut off from her Mother, or as a Widow, until she is able to return to the divine ground, having gathered to herself all the elements or sparks (scintillae) of her being which had been scattered during the process of emanation. The blackness of the Shekinah's robe, comparable perhaps to the black robe or veil of Isis - who was also called ‘The Widow’ during her search for Osiris - signifies the darkness of the mystery which hides the glory of her Light.
           I was amazed to discover that the Shekinah was called ‘The Precious Stone’, and ‘The Stone of Exile’ which at once connects her to the image of the Grail, described as both vessel and stone. She was also called the ‘Pearl’, and ‘The Burning Coal’. To my opening eyes, she appeared as the glowing gold of the hidden treasure at the heart of life, the jeweled rainbow of light thrown between the divine and human worlds, the seamless robe which unites the manifest and unmanifest dimensions of life. Here, at last, was the crucial missing piece of the puzzle that I had sought for over fifty years. The channeled messages had told us to find “the Stone at the foot of the Tree”, and here was the Shekinah described as ‘The Precious Stone’ at the foot of the Tree of Life. I was overwhelmed by this realization, yet I knew it was important to not cling to the literal imagery but to look beyond it, into the poetic heart of the teaching.
           It suddenly occurred to me that kabbalistic imagery is woven into the fabric of many well-known fairy tales. In the story of Cinderella, for example, the Shekinah can be recognized as the fairy god-mother who presides over her daughter's transformation from soot-blackened drudge to royal bride. Harold Bailey, who wrote an extraordinary book called The Lost Language of Symbolism at the beginning of the last century, showed me that the figure of Cinderella could be understood to represent the human soul as she moves from ‘rags to riches’. (6) Cinderella’s three splendid dresses, which could be equated with the ‘robe of glory’ in certain kabbalistic and gnostic texts, are the soul’s luminous sheaths or subtle bodies—as dazzling as the light of the sun, moon and stars. Just as the soot-blackened girl in the fairy tale puts on her three glorious dresses to reveal herself as she truly is, so does the human soul don these ‘robes of glory’ as she moves from the darkness of ignorance into the revelation of her true nature and parentage.
           While I was writing about the Shekinah, these images came to me:

I stand on the shore of the world and look intently at the sea of stars, at their great patterns spread out before me. As I look, I see a ship approaching, in the shape of an ark, its prow curved back like the wings of a great bird. Closer it comes, weaving between the constellations, growing larger as it approaches me. I see that it is translucent, as if made of glass, and that it has the iridescence of an opal. Yet also, it is richly adorned with jewels that are themselves stars. Closer still it comes, and now I see that the ship casts a radiance upon the sea of space and shows me that this sea is a great web made of gossamer filaments of light; they sparkle like a spider’s web in the sun. At the points where these meet there are vortices of swirling energy. I perceive the web as a being of unimaginable dimensions who is speaking to me, saying:

“This is what I am. This is the hidden glory of My Being. This is the life you belong to. The Sea of My Being is at once ‘greater than the great’ and ‘smaller than the small,’ co-inherent with the greatest galaxies of cosmic space and with the tiniest particle of matter. Once I was named Soul or Spirit or Cosmic Consciousness or Great Mother and Father – the greater psychic reality to which your own life belongs and of which, for the most part, you are tragically unaware. Once, people imagined themselves living within My Being. Then I became distant, remote, forgotten. Now, for so many, I am lost altogether. This causes me grief for I am in exile from My people. For both of us there is great suffering and loneliness. My dream, the Dream of the Cosmos, is for you to know Me again, to realize that you live within My Being and My embrace.”

Notes:
1. Z‘ev ben Shimon Halevi (Warren Kenton)
2. William G. Gray, The Ladder of Lights, Helios Book Service Ltd., Cheltenham, 1968
3. Daniel Matt, The Essential Kabbalah, p.148
4. Z’ev ben Shimon Halevi, The Work of the Kabbalist, preface. Samuel Weiser Inc, Maine, 1986
5. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Schocken Books Inc., New York, 1954 and 1961 (paperback edition), p. 229
6. Harold Bayley, The Lost Language of Symbolism, Vol.1, Williams and Norgate, London, 1912

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Interlude
A Different Vision of Reality

Man looking beyond the known world woodcut, Augsberg ca.1500

A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
                                                                             
                                                                              — Albert Einstein

The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place. And the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources. In our most private and most subjective lives, we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch.

                                                                              — Carl Jung

Visionaries of a new holistic and ecological paradigm are themselves deemed to be neurotic. They have moved out of the society that would have protected them, and into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you have got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience - that is the hero’s deed.

                                                                              — Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

To attain peace among the nations in any dynamic or enduring form requires not simply political negotiation but a new mode of consciousness. The magnitude of this change is in the order of religious conversion or of spiritual rebirth...A change is needed in every phase of human life.

                                                                              — Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts

Inspiration is not garnered from litanies of what is flawed; it resides in humanity's willingness to restore, redress, reform, recover, re-imagine, and reconsider. Healing the wounds of the Earth and its people does not require saintliness or a political party. It is not a liberal or conservative activity. It is a sacred act.

                                                                              — Paul Hawken, Blessed Unrest

You have been telling the people that this is the eleventh hour. Now you must go back and tell them this is the hour.

                                                                              — The Hopi Elders

I feel we are living now in a mythic time of choice - a time of stupendous scientific discoveries which are enlarging our vision of the universe, shattering the vessel of our old concepts about the nature of reality. Yet the delicate organism of life on our planet and the survival of our species are threatened as never before by an ethos that seeks dominance and control of nature. This ethos reflects a brutal desire to conquer and master nature for our own purposes, shows no respect for the Earth and disregards the perils of our present interference with the intricate web of relationships upon which life on this planet depends. We are an integral part of this great web of life, and cannot survive without respecting all aspects of it.
           We live in what might be called an unconscious civilization that does not examine the ideologies and the values arising from those ideologies which direct it. Thomas Berry, in his book, The Dream of the Earth, writes that this supremely important time is asking us for “possibly the most complete reversal of values that has taken place since the Neolithic period.”(1) We cannot afford to let this moment of choice slip by and fail to respond to the urgency of this time. Acting together under the inspiration of a new vision of our role on this planet, we may, through the transformation of our own understanding, be able to influence the way the world is governed and begin to replace the deficient values that now control its governments with new values. This, as Berry rightly says, is the alchemical Great Work that is now in progress as more and more people awaken to the values which express our responsibility towards life, each other and the planet as a whole.
           This book is written in the hope that it might, in some small way, help to unite a fragmented humanity in a shared approach to the deeper issues facing us at this time. I hope it may be a sanctuary for the heart, a place of reconciliation and healing for mind, body and soul. I believe the soul is a matrix of unimaginable extent and complexity connecting an unrecognised dimension of reality with our world, connecting each one of us at the deepest level to all others and to the greater unseen life of the cosmos. My work is devoted to the recognition that we live in an ensouled world, to the recovery of our connection with the cosmos and to the restoration of the lost sense of communion between us and the “body” of the earth, and between us and an invisible dimension of the universe that is the source or ground of both. I would like to create a channel for what William Anderson in his book, The Face of Glory, called “the voice of the secret whole that sings above history.” (2)
           My own understanding has been immeasurably deepened by the work and insight of close friends and fellow authors. The friends and mentors who have helped me to articulate this vision are as precious to me as Dante's fedeli d'amore - those companions who recognize and serve the divinity of life.
           I believe that the new epoch we are now entering will see the creation of a new paradigm or view of reality incorporating:

                      · A new understanding of God or Spirit
                      · A new understanding of Nature
                      · A new understanding of ourselves

           This new understanding may help to modify the deeply entrenched belief that spirit and nature are separate and distinct and may eventually restore to us our lost sense of relationship with a sacred earth and a conscious universe.
           For the many millions of people whose lives were sacrificed to the fanaticism of totalitarian ideologies, the twentieth century was a dark night of the soul. From another perspective, however, it opened a door through which we could enter into a new understanding of life. Perhaps for the first time we will soon be able to view the whole panorama of the evolution of consciousness, to gain insight into the reasons for our suffering, our presence on this planet and our (still unrecognized) connection to the cosmos. In his visionary book, Dark Night, Early Dawn, Christopher Bache gives us this description of an experience that may be waiting just beyond the threshold of our present understanding of life:

I saw humanity climbing out of a valley and just ahead, on the other side of the mountain peak and beyond our present sight, was a brilliant, sun-drenched world that was about to break over us. The time frame was enormous. After millions of years of struggle and ascent, we were poised on the brink of a sunrise that would forever change the conditions of life on this planet. All current structures would quickly become irrelevant…Truly a new epoch was dawning. (3)

            We are living now at the end of a great trajectory - perhaps five million years or more - which has brought about the gradual separation or differentiation of our human species from the animal species and the development of a sense of self or individuality as well as a highly developed intellect - everything that we now call human consciousness. But in the process we have lost the ancient sense of participation in a sacred cosmos. This story can be described, in Richard Tarnas's words, as a heroic ascent to autonomy but, at the same time, a tragic fall from unity. Yet now, as Tarnas suggests at the end of his book, The Passion of the Western Mind, we are in the midst of a great awakening of the soul, one that could see the “marriage” of the masculine and feminine principles:

We stand at the threshold of a revelation of the nature of reality that could shatter our most established beliefs about ourselves and the world. The very constriction we are experiencing is part of the dynamic of our imminent release. The driving impulse of the West's masculine consciousness has been its quest not only to realise itself, to forge its own autonomy, but also, finally, to recover its connection with the whole, to come to terms with the great feminine principle in life, to differentiate from but then to rediscover and reunite with the feminine, with the mystery of life, of nature, of soul. (4)

           Looking back over the last two millennia, it is apparent that, during this time, conventional religious teaching did not preserve the ancient insight that nature and instinct are an expression of spirit: in splitting nature from spirit, emptying matter of soul, and contaminating the instincts with guilt and fear, an essential part of our wholeness has been lost. It is crucially important now for us to balance the masculine ethos of our culture with its emphasis on power, control and conquest by integrating the less valued aspects of the feminine archetype: nature and matter, soul and body, feeling and instinct—to create a conscious, healing and redemptive relationship with these neglected aspects of spirit, within ourselves and within the culture. What we need is not a new belief system but a spirituality grounded in self-knowledge — in particular, awareness of the power drive of the “shadow” aspect of our nature, leading to ethical responsibility towards life in all its aspects, seen and unseen. At the end of one of his most prescient books, The Undiscovered Self, Jung warned us that we did not have much time in which to accomplish this momentous task:

A mood of world destruction and world renewal has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially and philosophically... Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science. As at the beginning of the Christian Era, so again today we are faced with the problem of the moral backwardness of our species which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and social developments. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man. Is he capable of resisting the temptation to use his power for the purpose of staging a world conflagration? Is he conscious of the path he is treading and what the conclusions are that must be drawn from the present world situation and his own psychic situation? Does he know that he is on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner man which Christianity has treasured up for him? Does he realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall him? Is he even capable at all of realizing that this would be a catastrophe? And finally, does the individual know that he is the make-weight that tips the scales? (5)

            Our present problems have to a large extent arisen not only from the split between spirit and nature but from the secular belief system resulting from it which has increasingly come to dominate western culture since the seventeenth century and has increasingly separated us from nature and from soul. This belief system, usually presented today by its protagonists as incontrovertible truth, might be summarised as follows:

           · Matter is primary and gives rise to mind as a secondary phenomenon. Consciousness is therefore a by-product of the brain. Personal identity and free will are nothing more than “a vast assembly of nerve cells,” as Francis Crick described them.

           · There is no survival of consciousness after death. The death of the brain is the death of the individual.

           · The idea that there is an independently existing soul or spirit is an erroneous fiction.

           · “God” is an unnecessary hypothesis and the concept of soul an irrelevance. We can impose our will on nature to serve our needs

            · The life of the universe came into being by blind chance.

           · There is no transcendent purpose or meaning to our lives.

            This is what I would call a “flat earth” hypothesis and I often use the hedge of thorns in the story of the Sleeping Beauty to illustrate what a barrier it presents to reaching a different understanding of life. It offers no vertical or depth dimension to human existence, no awareness of any dimension of reality beyond that of the world perceived through our senses and the conscious, rational mind. But there is an alternative hypothesis to consider—one that could open a way through the hedge of thorns and reconnect us with nature and with soul, so restoring our fragmented being to wholeness:

           · Consciousness is primary and matter secondary. That is to say, the phenomenal world arises or manifests out of an invisible or transcendent dimension of reality.

           · The universe is conscious and there are many dimensions or levels to this consciousness.

           · Our human consciousness is integral to that greater consciousness, even though it is still partially developed or immature.

           · Consciousness in some form survives the death of the physical body.

           · What we have called “God” or Spirit is the creative ground as well as the process of life in the universe, our planet and ourselves. There is nothing outside or beyond “God”. All is one life, one energy. In other words, we participate in the life of “God” which is the life of the planet and the life of the cosmos.

           · The soul in its widest sense can be imagined as a vast matrix, field or web of relationships connecting finer vibrational fields with the denser field of physical reality. Our body/mind organism is intimately connected to these finer fields which together constitute the web of life.

           · The purpose of our lives on this planet is to be reunited with the source and ground of our being and to live our lives in growing awareness of that connection.

            To clarify the above further, here are these thoughtful words from an address read at the funeral of the late David Bohm, professor of theoretical physics at Birkbeck College in London—words that he himself had written for the memorial service of one of his classmates at university:

In considering the relationship between the finite and the infinite, we are led to observe that the whole field of the finite is inherently limited, in that it has no independent existence. It has the appearance of independent existence, but that appearance is merely the result of an abstraction of our thought. We can see this dependent nature of the finite from the fact that every finite thing is transient.

Our ordinary view holds that the field of the finite is all that there is. But if the finite has no true independent existence, it cannot be all that is. We are in this way led to propose that the true ground of all being is the infinite, the unlimited; and that the infinite includes and contains the finite. In this view, the finite, in its transient nature, can only be understood as held suspended, as it were, beyond time and space, within the infinite.

The field of the finite is all that we can see, hear, touch, remember, and describe. This field is basically that which is manifest, or tangible. The essential quality of the infinite, by contrast, is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word spirit, whose root meaning is “wind, or breath.” This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy, to which the manifest world of the finite responds. This energy, or spirit, infuses all living beings, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in the living being is this energy of spirit, and this is never born and never dies. (6)

            There are certain questions that people have always asked and ask ever more urgently today: What is the deeper purpose of my life on this planet? Does God exist? Why does He seem indifferent to human suffering? What is the source of evil, of suffering? Will I survive death and see my loved ones again? How can I discover my true path in life? Why is the human species seemingly addicted to destroying itself?
           Aspects of the books I have written address these questions. In this book as well as in those published some time ago I have tried to give expression in this dimension of reality to what I hold to be eternal, indivisible and holy as well as to my passionate love of life and my devotion to this planet and all the various and incredible forms of life it sustains.

Notes:
1. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Books, San Francisco, 1988, p. 159
2. William Anderson, The Face of Glory, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, London, 1996
3. Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, Suny Books, New York, 2000, p. 220
4. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, Ballantyne Books, New York, 1991, Epilogue
5. C.G Jung, The Undiscovered Self, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London 1958, p. 110-112
6. from the last page of Infinite Potential: The Life and Times of David Bohm, by F. David Peat, 1997, publisher Addison Wesley.

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CHAPTER FOUR

A One-eyed Vision

Odilon Redon the Cyclops

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different. …No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded.

                                                                  — William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1)

There is a moment in a book called A Journey in Ladakh by Andrew Harvey, where he records the words of a Tibetan monk, Nawang Tsering. Referring to this present time as Kali Yuga - the Age of Darkness and Destruction - Nawang says that the great danger for the world now is the loss of spiritual vision and that our task is to keep that vision alive, to see that it lives through these dark times:

Within this world and within man there are great powers: powers of love, of healing, and of clarity, that can lead a man to liberation. The worse the time, the more we should look for those powers within ourselves, the more deeply we should strive to obtain them and live them, for our own sake and the sake of others. Our terrible time makes the choices clear for us. We will not be able to hide from our responsibilities; we will not be able to pretend that we can go on living without taking thought for our salvation and that of others. We will have to invoke the deepest strengths of our spirit to survive at all. (2)

            For millions of people in the West, Nawang’s words may not seem to apply. But for those traumatized millions living in the Congo and Zimbabwe, in Tibet, Afghanistan, Darfur and Chechnya or any place where conflict, persecution and destitution prevail, they do. Looking at the state of the world and the helpless suffering of so many, it seems obvious that our evolution is incomplete: our current moral and spiritual immaturity threatens our very survival as a species. In the midst of this present darkness, how can we invoke the powers of love, of healing, of clear vision?
            If other more advanced forms of planetary life were observing this planet, I wonder whether they would be inspired or depressed by the beliefs which direct the modern world.
           Certain deeply held ideas or belief systems grow into meta-narratives, worldviews or paradigms of reality which can inspire, structure and influence a culture for thousands of years. There are religious meta-narratives such as the Christian or Islamic one, and secular ones, such as the current belief in material progress and scientific and technological advance. Currently, we seem to be influenced by two primary meta-narratives: the religious belief in a creator God who is transcendent to us and life on this planet and the secular one which believes that we live in an inanimate universe which is without consciousness, direction or purpose.

The Secular Worldview of Our Age
           Early in the 20th century the French artist Odilon Redon painted a picture of the one-eyed giant, the Cyclops. Its single eye gazes down on the flower-strewn expanse on which a naked woman lies in a brilliantly luminous landscape. It was painted at a time when the materialist secular paradigm that now controls our culture was already well established. To me, the image of the Cyclops reflects the constriction as well as the inflation of the modern mind which, ignorant of the vast dimensions of planetary and cosmic life on which it rests and out of which it has evolved, believes itself to be in control of nature and its own nature. It evokes the much-quoted words of Blake—“May God us keep from the single vision and Newton’s sleep.”(3)
           Yet the painting also communicates a tremendous sadness, the sadness of a one-eyed consciousness that is cut off from its ground, that has no connection with soul and with nature—personified in this painting by the woman lying on the flower-strewn ground. The rational or literal secular eye stands lonely and supreme, dissociated from the landscape of the soul.
           Over the last few centuries a secular worldview or paradigm of reality has slowly infiltrated every aspect of the modern world, dominating the media, the arts, science and philosophy as well as economic, political and educational agendas. Its origin is in the West. It views life through an increasingly utilitarian and materialistic mind-set, seeing no goal for humanity beyond the improvement of material conditions through the growth of each nation’s GDP and scientific, medical and technological advance. By excluding, rejecting and deriding so much, particularly in relation to the great spiritual and cultural achievements of the past, and to the unanswered questions of the human condition, it drastically limits the horizon of our understanding of ourselves and our place in the cosmos. Above all, it has turned its back on anything it designates as non-rational.
           It is true that science has opened up an immense and thrilling panorama: geologists and biologists have pieced together the story of the earth’s evolution; cosmologists have defined the incredible story of the birth, expansion and extent of the visible universe, although this is continually being revised in the light of new discoveries; particle physicists are penetrating the mysteries of the sub-atomic world. Extraordinary medical advances are being made. But there appears to be no unifying vision of our purpose on this planet which could take us beyond the single vision of Newton’s sleep. As Matthew Arnold put it in his poem Dover Beach,

We are here as on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

           Modern secular culture has exalted man as the supreme agent of his own triumphant scientific and technological progress but it has also reduced him to the level of a biological mechanism, subject to the programming of his genetic inheritance. It has created a society that believes in nothing beyond its own technological prowess and the omnipotent power of the human mind. It has done away with any ethical foundation for values. It does not question the premisses which direct its conclusions nor does it look at the effects of its beliefs on people living in this culture. In this sense, we live in an unconscious civilization, as the Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul describes it in his book of that title. (4)
           The most dominant belief of secular culture is the Neo-Darwinian one that life on this planet has evolved by natural selection and that we are simply the product of our biological genes and our interaction with our environment. Matter is mere mechanism. Life has come into being by chance; its biological evolution is controlled by chance. It has neither meaning nor purpose. This belief system tells us that we are the products of mindless forces operating on inanimate matter: atoms are lifeless particles, floating in a dead universe that is without consciousness, design or purpose. The body is an extraordinary mechanism that can be manipulated and controlled by the mind. We exist to improve the material conditions of our lives, to work, to consume and to enjoy what we can accumulate in the way of wealth or material things. When we die, that is the end of us.
           The most eloquent promoter of this theory is the biologist Richard Dawkins, whose “selfish gene” hypothesis suggests that the human being is no more than a gene-replicating machine.
           This reductionist hypothesis developing from a Newtonian/Cartesian/Darwinian foundation and presented as “truth” empties the entire human endeavor of transcendent meaning, purpose and significance. There is no vertical axis, nothing that might connect us to a field of consciousness that is beyond our immediate sensory experience, nothing that could provide an ethical framework for our values and our behavior. While I think it is true to say that this secular ideology and the reductionist science that has developed out of it has freed large sections of humanity from the absolute control of religious institutions, it would also seem to have replaced one rigid belief system by another. By a conviction of omnipotent self-righteousness, it suppresses a mass of data that could be of immense interest, relevance and value to our culture. One example of this is the repeated attempts to disparage and invalidate alternative approaches to healing, such as homeopathy or acupuncture, saying that because their efficacy cannot be scientifically proven, they are worthless.
           So are we the random creation of a mechanical, mindless universe as Dawkins and scientific reductionism proclaim, or do we participate in the life of a living universe that animates and orchestrates its evolution from within its own cosmic and planetary processes? How can we answer this question until we understand what consciousness is and the whole evolutionary development of the kind of consciousness we now have? We can only truly comprehend our history and ourselves through the lens of human consciousness. This lens may not yet be capable of giving us the full picture, however much empirical scientific knowledge we may have. It may be that our vision is clouded by something comparable to a giant cataract or restricted to single vision in the manner of Redon’s Cyclops. As yet, while neuro-scientists can map the brain and connect certain functions with specific areas of it, science cannot tell us exactly what this area of the brain is thinking or feeling or imagining. Nor can it answer the question of how consciousness actually arises out of matter; how, when and, above all, why apparently “dead” matter can give rise to life and, ultimately, to consciousness. Nor can it answer the question: What exactly is life?

The Great Adventure of Our Time
           Nevertheless, for a cosmologist, this is an intoxicating time to be alive, participating in the immense adventure of exploring the mystery of the universe. The night sky has become numinous, as enthralling as it was to the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, watching and noting the movement of the planets and constellations from the rooftops of their houses. One of the things that is changing our view of reality is the discovery of the immensity and age of the universe as well as the incredible beauty of the galaxies recorded by the Hubble telescope which is able to look back eleven billion years—two billion after the initial explosion of the universe and is finding layer upon layer of galaxies as far as its eye can see. Now the new Herschel telescope is going even beyond the limits reached by Hubble. All this is a marvel and it has been brought to us by science. Who in this vast universe might be looking at us as we gaze into where we have come from in that dazzlingly distant past?
           According to the prevailing theory of the Big Bang, thirteen to fourteen billion years ago as we understand time in our three-dimensional world, a stupendous explosion of cosmic energy took place, expanding instantaneously from a fireball smaller than an atom. The first second held the inconceivable energy that fuelled not only the creation of a hundred billion galaxies through billion-year paths of expansion, but also the evolution of life on this planet. Aeons later, out of this planetary life, the human species evolved and, ultimately, human consciousness—our consciousness.
           The story of the evolution of our own species streams like the tail of a comet through the darkness of ages now inaccessible to us. The life of our species is embedded in the unimaginably old life of the universe but, closer to us, in the four billion-year-old life of this planet. Complex life has evolved here through a truly extraordinary series of fortuitous developments which are only now revealing themselves to scientists. The Milky Way galaxy that we belong to with its hundreds of billions of stars is part of an immense cluster of galaxies—the Virgo supercluster—that is fifty-three million light years away from us.
           One of the questions that most fascinates cosmologists is whether there could be life on other planets. Are there people like us “out there” with whom we could communicate? Would they have developed a more advanced intelligence than our own? Are there planets with life on them that have developed a more complex kind of intelligence, a more advanced technology? Scientists think there could be up to 40,000 planets in our galaxy alone that could support life and out of these a minimum of some 350 could have the cosmic and planetary conditions which could allow complex life to emerge. Nasa has just launched a new telescope called Kepler, sent off into space in order to find planets in the Milky Way that might be capable of sustaining life (March 2009). The search will be concentrated in the area of the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra which are between 600 and 3,000 light years away. Yet the life of our planet is so extraordinary that it is thought unlikely that there could be other planets whose formation is exactly like ours. Where the conditions exist for some kind of life there could be entities like ourselves with abilities and thoughts like ours or with a consciousness so different from ours that we cannot even conceive of what it might be like. Incredibly, Kepler's lenses are so powerful thaat they can detect from space one of us turning on an outside light at night.
           Vast and still relatively unmapped as it is, our visible universe is thought to be ninety-three billion light years across, yet there is no way of ascertaining how far it may extend beyond the reach of the vision of our instruments. It may be only an island in something resembling a cosmic archipelago of universes. (5) Inside every collapsing black hole may lie another expanding universe that we know nothing about. String theorists hypothesize that there even may be other universes parallel to our own as well as other hidden dimensions to this universe. Of the portion of the universe we actually can observe, approximately four percent is visible to the eye. The rest is made up of what cosmologists call “Dark Matter”and “Dark Energy”.
           Cosmologists thought that the universe would be slowing down after its billions of years of expansion. From supernova explosions that took place ten billion years ago they have been able to calculate how fast the universe has been expanding since that time. But they found that, far from slowing down, the universe was expanding. So they wondered whether there was a force that could oppose and counter-act gravity? They discovered something which they named “dark energy”—a force that was strong enough to counteract and overcome all the gravity in the entire cosmos and impel it to expand faster and faster. They don’t yet know what it is or how it works but they do know that it is active on an inter-galactic scale and does not apparently affect our earth or solar system. Yet, with the equally mysterious “dark matter,” it has played an central role in how we came to exist. Dark matter seems to hold things together; dark energy pushes them apart. It seems that as long as these forces are held in balance, the universe survives. All this is far beyond the reach of my understanding and I am immensely grateful to the television programmes presided over by the Astronomer-Royal, Sir Martin Rees and others which have offered this information to the public.
           It is extraordinary to realize that our human consciousness is the infinitesimal spark of cosmic light that is enabling the universe to reveal itself to us. Without our capacity to imagine, observe, measure, deduce and reflect, we could not know that everything that we are, everything on our planet and in our solar system has been formed from elements of the stars that have been seeded here from great galaxies millions of light years away from us. It seems nothing less than incredible that we are the agents through which the universe is coming to know itself on this planet and that we are, in our essence, literally cosmic fire, cosmic light, cosmic energy in every cell of our being. The universe that we see and the life that we are arises from an invisible sea of being which is the deep, cosmic ground of the phenomenal world and our own consciousness. The world we know is like a minute excitation on the surface of this cosmic sea.
           All this is awe-inspiring, yet one of the most amazing discoveries is that although we are over thirteen billion years away from the apparent beginning of our universe, nevertheless we exist at the very heart of it. Every cell of our bodies as well as every star, every galaxy, is the place where the universe is continuously flaring forth into existence from the great sea of being. We do not see the source-ground—only its manifestations. Listen to these words of cosmologist Brian Swimme from his book, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos: “Even in the darkest region beyond the Great Wall of galaxies, even in the void between the superclusters, even in the gaps between the synapses of the neurons in the brain, there occurs an incessant foaming, a flashing flame, a shining-forth-from and a dissolving-back-into.”(6)
           We are not just in the universe; at the very core of our being we are an ongoing creation of the universe, participating, however unconsciously, in this continuous creation. That is surely enough to set the imagination on fire even if we feel insignificant in relation to the unimaginable vastness of the visible universe. It astonishes me to think that it took billions of years for life on this planet to evolve to the point where it could provide the atmosphere and environment that could sustain our physical organism and, ultimately, facilitate the development of the kind of consciousness we now have.            
           The fiery magma of the earth's core and the ninety-two types of atoms derived from the furnaces of the stars live within us. The chemical compounds that constitute all forms of life, from the simplest bacteria and molecules, live within the complex organism that we are. Before we evolved into humans, we were animal and plant, rock and sea and the fiery magma of the earth’s core. Each human body consists of 10,000 trillion atoms, connected to each other in ways we do not yet fully understand. Whether we are aware of it or not we carry all this cosmic and planetary evolution in the cells of our physical organism. In every cell of our being, we are star-life, star-energy.

Our Planetary Roots
           It is very moving to reflect on the immense age of this planet where, taking an hour's walk, every large step represents 10 million years. Our human species appears in the last second of this walk—the final two inches of earth or grass under our feet. And human consciousness as we know it today? In perhaps the last millimetre or even less—the width of a hair’s breadth. Our consciousness has arisen from the evolutionary experience of the earth and all species to which it has given life. Could the consciousness of our species evolve further? It is conceivable that, as the great sages of India have long taught, our species as a whole is still at a pre-conscious or semi-conscious state, with its further development unrealized because it is not envisaged. All the immense repository of knowledge we have now accumulated serves the aims of a human mind that is still not fully developed and is unrelated to a deeper cosmic ground. Thanks to the discoveries of science, we now know a great deal about the evolution of the physical aspect of life, but almost nothing about the inner aspect of both the universe and ourselves—that is to say, the consciousness aspect, only that our human consciousness has come into being very recently in relation to the time span of the earth’s evolution.
           The planet itself has survived five giant catastrophes which threatened to destroy all life on earth, the best known one being the devastating impact of a huge meteorite which wiped out the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago. But two hundred and fifty million years ago for reasons not yet fully understood, the deep ocean conveyor currents stopped moving, causing a lack of oxygen which nearly extinguished all life on earth. The oceans turned stagnant and gave out a poisonous gas called hydrogen sulphide—as deadly as cyanide. Almost every living thing died on land as well as in the sea. This was the greatest extinction in the earth’s history. Over ninety percent of all life on earth died. Yet incredibly, life survived these and other catastrophes and regenerated itself. It is truly astonishing that out of these successive extinctions and regenerations, human consciousness eventually came into being. But it is a sobering thought that, according to the biologist Sir David Attenborough, our species, if it continues on its present course, could be responsible for the sixth great extinction which could include ourselves.

The Evolution of Human Consciousness
           Exactly how our species – homo sapiens sapiens - evolved from earlier hominids is not yet completely understood. But scientists and anthropologists seem to have arrived at a consensus that our species appeared around 500,000 years ago. In order for this to happen, it was necessary for the hominid brain to triple in size and for the female pelvis to expand to allow the birth of infants with a larger skull, although there seems as yet to be no adequate explanation of what caused this enormous change. Approximately a million years ago an extra pound of neural tissue increased the size of the brain, leading to the differentiation of the functions of the two brain hemispheres—a differentiation that is unique to humans. Although animals also have bi-polar brains they do not have the corpus callosum—the dense bridge of 300 million nerve fibres which connects the two hemispheres or lobes of our neo-cortical brain. Women today have between 10 and 33 percent more of these neuronal fibres than men. This may make it easier for them to develop lateral thinking and to be able to move between the left and right hemispheres, between rational and intuitive thinking.
           During this million years the frontal lobes of the neo-cortex developed, making possible the development of our capacity to think and to reflect on our thoughts and feelings. A vastly expanded nervous system enabled speech to develop. The left hemisphere of the neo-cortex was a crucial new sense organ that facilitated the development of speech and could perceive time, sequence and duration. The human brain only weighs three to four pounds but contains a hundred billion neurons—about the same number as the stars in the Milky Way. The anatomical development of the human brain is thought to have been complete between 100,000 and 50,000 years ago.
           We know today that the right frontal lobe, which governs the left side of the body, is the oldest of the two hemispheres and the first to develop out of the actual heart of the embryo. It is fairly mature before the left lobe even comes into being. It seems that the close relationship between the heart and the right hemisphere is maintained throughout life and that this hemisphere functions through image cognition, visual-spatial perception and mediating feeling states rather than through the verbal, analytical, sequential cognition of the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere, tied in to millions of years of the evolution of the earth and of our species, is the image-making, holistic, non-verbal connective system to the older mammalian brain (see below).
            The left hemisphere which governs the right side of the body does not have the same primordial connection to our distant planetary past because it evolved relatively recently. It is apparently through the right brain that poets, mystics, musicians and scientific geniuses receive their inspiration, their intuitive flashes of insight. Einstein's theory of relativity came to him when he was sitting on a hill imagining that he was riding a sunbeam to the edge of the universe and returning towards the sun. The image came first, the theory later. Einstein himself said “Imagination is more important than knowledge: knowledge points to all that is; Imagination points to all that will be.”(7) It may be that the imagination, focused through the right hemisphere, is the illuminator of reality, the faculty which Coleridge held to be the very ground of our consciousness, of our capacity to think, to discover and to create.
           The left hemisphere gives us focus, direction, and the power to analyse, assemble facts, and direct our intentions towards a goal. But it poses a problem for us because it creates the illusion of time, taking us out of a state of “being” into a linear awareness of past, present and future. When this hemisphere is too dominant, it can shut out the perceptions of the right hemisphere and with it, the imagination and the vital connection to the heart, causing us to regress into the single vision of Newton’s sleep.
           Given how extraordinary all this is, it invites us to understand the evolutionary structure of our consciousness in greater depth. It may be a surprise to discover that we have not one but three brains: the great frontal dome of the neo-cortex—our most recently developed brain, rests on the primordial root of two older brain systems which continuously interact with each other and with the far more recently developed neo-cortical brain.

The Triune Brain
           Paul MacLean, who advanced this theory in 1974 in his book, The Triune Brain explains:

A comparison of the brains of existing vertebrates, together with an examination of the fossil record, indicates that the human forebrain [neo-cortex] has evolved and expanded to its great size while retaining the features of three basic evolutionary formations that reflect an ancestral relationship to reptiles, early mammals, and recent mammals. Radically different in chemistry and structure and in an evolutionary sense countless generations apart, the three neural assemblies constitute a hierarchy of three-brains-in-one, a triune brain…Stated in popular terms, the three evolutionary formations might be imagined as three interconnected biological computers, with each having its own special intelligence, its own subjectivity, its own sense of time and space, and its own memory, motor, and other functions. (8)

           So we carry within us the evolutionary structure of three different brain systems: the reptilian, the paleo-mammalian and the neo-mammalian or neo-cortical brain. Sometimes the second is described as the “limbic brain,” sometimes the first two together are given this name. These three brains function as a single unit even though, with great conscious effort and practise, we can become aware of which is predominant in a specific situation. We know, for instance, that the fight/flight reflexes of the oldest reptilian brain spring into action when we are faced with a threat.            
            The older brain systems have a far greater influence on the more recently evolved neo-cortical brain than the latter has on the former. Powerful primal emotions like fear, anxiety and rage—mediated through a part of the brain called the amygdala—can easily influence and even overwhelm the neo-cortical “rational” mind. We also know that adverse conditions in childhood can negatively imprint the nervous system (the older brain) and interfere with and even inhibit the development of the neo-cortical brain. A child so affected may remain fixated in the purely instinctive older brain systems, unable to develop the capacity for thought and reflection and the ability to contain and control emotions.
           All the knowledge we have gained about the evolution of our physical bodymind organism, as well as its consciousness aspect, does not acknowledge the presence and influence of the unconscious part of the psyche—what Jung called the “root and rhizome of the soul” — all the multi-layered memories of the entire evolutionary experience that we carry within us: memories of cellular life, plant life, reptilian, mammalian and, finally, human life. (9) This complex patterning of species memory as well as species form, incrementally expanding and increasing over thousands of millennia has contributed to the evolution of planetary life, the evolution of our species and, finally, the evolution of human consciousness itself. We are the only species on this planet that can speak, write, reflect, discover, create and communicate with each other in words and gestures and give expression to our imagination and our skills in beautiful artefacts, exquisite musical forms and brilliant technological inventions such as the Hubble telescope.

What is Consciousness?
           Consciousness is the ability to observe and connect with the visible world through the five senses and simultaneously to hold awareness of an invisible inner world of images, thoughts, feelings and ideas. It is also the capacity to evaluate these, to make a distinction between what is meaningful and what is not, what is safe and agreeable and what is not. The triune brain gives rise to many integrated layers or levels of consciousness that have arisen out of very archaic instincts. Over millennia, as the triune brain developed, adding in the neo-cortical frontal lobes, these primordial instincts gave rise to the possibility of cognition and self-awareness and the extraordinarily creative power of the imagination as well as to specific emotions, empathic feelings, and intuitive “flashes” of insight or associations. Beneath the “superstructure” of consciousness, the subconscious workings of the autonomic nervous system maintain the balance or homeostasis of our total physical organism, supporting the relationship between the heart and the head. What we call our “rational mind” is only one part of our total consciousness which must also include the dreaming mind. Our understanding of what comprises consciousness will need to be continually revised as we discover more. For example, Candace Pert's remarkable discovery of the “molecules of emotion” (1998) which connect every part of our organism to every other part has revolutionized our understanding of the interaction between mind and body and done away with the arbitrary separation that had been established between them. As she explains in an article that followed her book Molecules of Emotion:

In the end, I find I can't separate brain from body. Consciousness isn't just in the head. Nor is it a question of mind over body. If one takes into account the DNA directing the dance of the peptides, the body is the outward manifestation of the mind. The new science of psycho-neuro-immunology is redefining the connection between mind and body. We can no longer speak of body and mind as separate systems or entities. Bodymind - one word, no hyphen. Bodymind is a single organism pulsing with neuropeptide messengers that flow in a continuous loop from the brain to every cell in our body, giving rise to emotions and responding to emotions. (10)

           Are these extraordinary creative abilities expressions of the neurons in our brain or do they derive directly from the inner “mind” of the cosmos? Neurobiologists assume that the ability to imagine, invent and discover, to appreciate beauty and to wonder has its origin in certain areas of the physical brain and they are trying to pin-point these areas and measure the neural correlates of specific subjective states. But our highly developed physical bodymind organism could also act as a vehicle or transmitter of a greater cosmic mind. And what of the heart that we can now recognize as a “feeling” brain connected to the “thinking” one by the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches of the autonomic nervous system? What gives rise in us to the longing to understand ourselves and the life around us? Is it only a random neural cause giving rise to a random neural effect? Or do our longings originate with the soul of the cosmos itself so that these — a further development of our primordial instincts — actually embody and carry the evolutionary intention of the cosmos?

The Separation from Nature and the Longing for Reunion
           For countless millennia the potential for human consciousness was hidden within planetary life—like a seed buried in the earth. Then, very slowly, our species began to differentiate itself from the matrix of nature and develop the capacity for self-awareness. We can understand this evolutionary step of separation more easily when we observe the life of a child who, as it separates at birth from its mother, recapitulates the immense evolutionary advance of emerging from the matrix of nature, becoming aware of itself as an individual, distinct from its mother.
           Our evolutionary separation from nature means that although we may have nearly the same DNA as many other mammals we have evolved a different kind of consciousness, since we are able to communicate our thoughts and feelings through speech. This evolutionary process tore us out of nature and separated us as observer from all that we observe.
           The more our mental and technological skills have developed, giving us ever greater power to control our environment, the more estranged we have become from a sense of relationship and communion with the life around us. James Lovelock’s words are worth recalling here because they sum up the indissoluble relationship between ourselves and our environment that we have lost: “So closely coupled is the evolution of living organisms with the evolution of their environment that together they constitute a single evolutionary process.”(11)
           Indigenous cultures have always known that life is not a competitive struggle for survival but a sacred organism of connection and cooperation. In the much-quoted words of Chief Seattle, “The Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life. He is merely a strand in it.”
           Our species is living in the midst of a great trajectory—perhaps five million years or more—which has brought about our gradual separation or differentiation from the animal species and the matrix of nature. Over an immense span of time in human terms, we have developed a sense of self or individuality as well as the capacity to feel, to imagine, to think and reflect—everything that we now call human consciousness. But in the course of this evolutionary journey we have lost the ancient instinctive sense of participation in the life around us, a sense that indigenous cultures still have.
           No-one has written more eloquently about the earth and our relationship with it than Thomas Berry in his book The Dream of the Earth. No-one has evoked in such compelling language the need for human sensitivity, compassion and intelligence in our relationship with the earth and its living systems. He asks that we wake up from our mythic dream of progress and the dominance of nature and take on the role of becoming responsible custodians of the dwindling species and resources of the planet. For, as he observes, “Suddenly we awaken to the devastation that has resulted from the entire modern process…In relation to the earth, we have been autistic for centuries.”(12)
           The competitive and exhausting industrial and technological culture we have created, where so many millions of people live in huge, ugly and amorphous cities, stands like a tyrant over and against nature, over and against the earth and whatever threatens our supremacy as a species. Our human species as a part has become detached from planetary life as the whole. There is an abysmal ignorance that, as Berry points out, the earth is primary and our survival is dependent on the continued integrity and balance of the earth’s inter-related systems:

If the supreme disaster in the comprehensive story of the earth is our present closing down of the major life systems of the planet, then the supreme need of our times is to bring about a healing of the earth through this mutually enhancing human presence to the earth community. To achieve this mode of pressure, a new type of sensitivity is needed, a sensitivity that is something more than romantic attachment to some of the more brilliant manifestations of the natural world, a sensitivity that comprehends the larger patterns of nature, its severe demands as well as its delightful aspects, and is willing to see the human diminish so that other lifeforms might flourish. (13)

           Precisely because of the long experience of separation from nature, we carry a deep and unrecognised wound. Our very being has been fragmented or fractured by the separation of ourselves as observers from the life we observe and is continually fragmented by the way we have interpreted reality and by the values that direct our culture and, in particular, our science. Our conscious, rational mind has become disconnected from the part of us that, at an unconscious, instinctive level, is still bound in close relationship to the greater organism of planetary life. This inevitably creates conflict within us. The end result of this long process of separation is that in our technologically advanced culture we have lost something absolutely vital that earlier cultures still had—a sense of relationship with a sacred earth and a sacred cosmos. While indigenous shamanic cultures have retained this ancient participatory awareness, the modern industrialised world has totally lost it.
            The English artist the late Cecil Collins commented in despair, “Our civilisation is the only one in the whole history of mankind not to be based on a metaphysical reality… a metaphysical reality which is unknowable, absolute, and yet a reality which can have a relationship with us, and we with it. Our civilisation therefore can be considered abnormal.” (14) Yet, he could also see that “Beneath our technological civilisation, there still flows the living river of human consciousness within which is concentrated in continuity the life of the kingdoms of animals, plants, stars, the earth and the sea, and the life of our ancestors, the flowing generations of men and women as they flower in their brief and often tragic beauty: the sensitive and the solitary ones, the secret inarticulate longing before the mystery of life.” (15)

Astronauts of the Soul
           In a secular culture, attention has been focused exclusively on the daylight world of physical reality. There is no awareness, as there was in earlier cultures, of the existence of a dimension of reality which might be compared to the starry night sky—a dimension which can only reveal its presence when the sun's bright radiance is dimmed. But questions are beginning to be asked which could open our minds to a different concept of reality. Does consciousness originate within or beyond the brain? If within the brain, how does the brain create consciousness? If beyond the brain, is the universe conscious? And if so, can we enter into relationship and dialogue with that greater consciousness of which our own may be a still incompletely developed expression. If we could open our mind to a different concept of reality, perhaps we could play a more enlightened role in relation to the extraordinary cosmic drama in which we are involved.
            There are brilliant pioneers now exploring the sub-atomic world as well as the immensities of the visible universe revealed by the Hubble telescope but there are others whom I call astronauts of the soul who are exploring an invisible universe whose existence is not recognized or even imagined by mainstream science. Just as we have the capacity to imagine, to think and to feel — an “inside” play of thoughts and feelings within our physical form — so the universe may also have an “inside” to its visible form: an intelligence and a soul.

Notes:
1. The Varieties of Religious Experience, Longmans. Green and Co. London, New York 1929, p. 388
2. Andrew Harvey, A Journey in Ladakh, Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1983, p. 167
3. William Blake, letter to Thomas Butts, 22 November, 1802, Complete Poetry and Prose, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, p. 862
4. John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, House of Anansi Press, Canada, 1995 and Penguin Books, London, 1998
5. Sir Martin Rees, Before the Beginning, Simon & Schuster 1997, p.
6 . Brian Swimme, The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, Orbis Books, New York, 1996, p. 101
7. Einstein,
8 . Paul MacLean, The Triune Brain in Evolution, Plenum Press, New York, 1990, p. 9
9. C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 4
10. Candace Pert, Molecules of Emotion, Simon and Schuster, London 1998, passim
11. James Lovelock, Healing Gaia, Harmony Books, New York 1991, p. 222.
12. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Books, San Francisco, 1988, p. 215
13. Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Books, San Francisco, 1988, p. 212
14. Cecil Collins, Angels, p. 38
15. Cecil Collins, Tate Gallery Retrospective Exhibition Catalogue, p. 37

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CHAPTER FIVE

The Lunar Era:
Participation in Cosmic Soul

Cecil Collins - Surrealist Landscape 1945

My heart is longing for a lost knowledge, slipped down out of the minds of men.

                                            — from the Sanscrit poem “Black Marigolds,” Chaura-panchasika, 1st century AD

My life quest has been a search for lost knowledge—a lost meta-narrative which, like a precious mosaic, lies buried beneath the cultural deposit of centuries. In this quest I took as a talisman the dream about the iron phallic structure rising from the surface of the moon that I described in Chapter One and recall here:

I am traveling in a rocket to the moon and on landing there, see that a huge rusty iron construction shaped like the Eiffel Tower has been built on it, so huge that it towers high above its surface. The moon itself is a dead planet, all vegetation has dried up and wasted away. There are no human beings anywhere and no animals—no life at all. I travel across the moon’s surface in a train, staring out of the window at this desolate landscape that looks as if it had been blasted by a nuclear bomb or shrivelled by a terrible drought.

           This dream led me far back into the past in search of a lost way of relating to the world, one that had long preceded modern industrial culture and the current scientific worldview that regards nature as something to be exploited by man. It soon became apparent to me that the moon and the sun have had an immense influence on the way we perceive reality. The great myths that have arisen from our observation and contemplation of these celestial bodies have shaped whole eras. Because of their influence on us and our fascination with them, there have developed two primary meta-narratives or worldviews—one lunar, the other solar—which, over time-spans of many thousands of years, have structured and sustained great civilizations, East and West and profoundly influenced the way we think.
           We carry within us two different kinds of consciousness—possibly related to the two hemispheres of the brain, two different ways of knowing which gave rise to these meta-narratives or worldviews: an older instinctive “lunar” way of knowing and a more recent “solar” way of knowing, increasingly identified with the conscious ego and the rational mind. Over the course of thousands of years, one way of knowing replaced the other although, for many centuries, and in certain areas, they overlapped.
            This chapter and the next will explore the difference between them and why the solar worldview gradually eclipsed the lunar one until little memory of the lunar worldview survived. (1) It withdrew, so to speak, into the unconscious. The dream above describes the plight of the lunar way of knowing in relation to the solar way that was superimposed upon it. In order to understand our own time, we need to know something of these two great meta-narratives and the circumstances which led to one overlaying and eventually replacing the other.
           Why does this matter? Because if we don't know what has formed our way of thinking, we cannot step out of the frame and see what we need to do to change our beliefs and modify our behavior.

Lunar Culture and a Living Cosmos
           Once upon a time, in a past so distant that we have no memory of it, the invisible and visible dimensions of life were imagined and instinctively experienced as a sacred unity. In the far distant eras which have become accessible to us only in this century through the discoveries of archaeologists and anthropologists, the whole cosmos was envisioned as a living being and the manifest world was seen as an epiphany or showing forth of an unseen source which breathed it into being, animating and sustaining it. The air itself was experienced as the invisible emissary of that world—an “awesome mystery joining the human and extra-human worlds.” (2) It is difficult for us to imagine today what it was like to live in a time where the night sky was of supreme significance, where people studied the position and course of the stars in order to harmonize their lives with the life of the cosmos. They deduced that just as the stars emerged each night from the darkness of the night sky, so the visible universe was born from the dark mystery of the invisible. Everything - plants, trees, animals and birds as well as moon, sun and stars - was sacred, infused with divinity because each and all were part of a living, breathing, connecting web of life.
           Although this way of knowing was once experienced in many different places (and still survives today in certain indigenous cultures), Egypt has bequeathed to us one of the clearest images of this ancient worldview. The mythological imagery associated with two goddesses is of paramount significance for an understanding of the concept of the cosmos as a living maternal entity: Hathor - often interchangeable with Isis - and Nut. Hathor was Egypt’s oldest goddess, imagined as the nurturing Mother of the universe and as the creative impulse which flowed from the cosmic immensity of her being. It was she who endowed Pharoah with the divine power to rule Egypt. More specifically, Hathor was imagined as the Milky Way, whose milk nourished all life, yet she was also immanent within the forms of life, immanent in the statues that stood in her temples and in the beautiful blue lotus that was daily laid at her feet. (3) As Divine Mother, Hathor received the souls of the dead at the entrance to her sacred mountain, thought to be located behind the magnificent temple at Deir-el-Bahri that Queen Hatshepsut (1505-1484 BC) built to honor and house the goddess. Goddesses and gods were, at that time, believed to inhabit their temples. The Milky Way itself, in Egyptian as well Indian and many other ancient cultures, East and West, was looked upon as the great stellar causeway that souls took as they entered and left this world.
           The goddess Nut was the night sky, whose vast cosmic body was home to all the stars. When the Egyptians looked up at the night sky, they saw the body of this goddess, sparkling with the light of the stars. The sun god “died” into her body on his nightly descent into the underworld and was reborn from her at the dawn of a new day. Nut’s image was painted on the inside of coffin lids and sometimes on the base as well, as if to enfold the soul entrusted to her care in her cosmic embrace. There is a moving inscription to her on a fragment of stone in the Louvre:

O my mother Nut, stretch your wings over me;
Let me become like the imperishable stars,
like the indefatigable stars.
O Great Being who is in the world of the Dead,
At whose feet is Eternity, in whose hand is the Always,
O Great Divine Beloved Soul
Who is in the mysterious abyss, come to me.

           Presided over by the Great Mother, this era was characterised by a consciousness which participated, in the deepest imaginative sense, with the life of the cosmos and the life of the earth. It was a totally different way of perceiving and relating to life than the one we have now. I am not speaking here of a social system such as matriarchy nor of an imagined Golden Age or Garden of Eden. Life was as much a struggle for survival then as it is today but then it was set in the context of a participatory way of living and being that was deliberately attuned to the rhythms of earth and cosmos and was grounded in a close observation of both. This way of living could be said to be the main characteristic of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras yet it is still alive and recognizable in a modern culture such as India's - not in the cities but in the places where people still maintain their ancient relationship with the earth and with their goddesses and gods.
          Today we look back on this remote past with some arrogance and disdain as “superstitious,” thinking that we have long outgrown its “magical” approach to life and not realizing that our present consciousness has developed out of this far more ancient and instinctive way of knowing which could be described as lunar because the moon was of supreme importance in that distant time. Jules Cashford’s extraordinary detailed study of the moon and worldwide lunar culture—The Moon: Myth and Image, has helped me to understand the immense age, range of influence and significance of lunar culture. As she explains,

The essential myth of the moon is the myth of transformation. Early people perceived the Moon’s waxing and waning as the growing and dying of a celestial being, whose death was followed by its own resurrection as the New Moon. The perpetual drama of the Moon’s phases became a model for contemplating a pattern in human, animal and vegetable life, including the idea of life beyond death. It seemed that the Moon carried the image of eternity for early people, as well as the image of time. (4)

The Significance of Lunar Mythology
           The moon was our earliest teacher and the inspiration of some of the greatest myths of the ancient world: the Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris, the Sumerian myth of the goddess Inanna’s descent to and ascent from the Underworld, the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries of Greece, and the later Christian myth of the birth, crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, all carry the lunar theme of death and rebirth or regeneration. In the Christian calendar the date of Easter is still fixed in relation to the full moon nearest to the spring equinox. The moon for millennia has symbolized the mysteries of an invisible world, the mysteries of the goddess and the mysteries of the soul. The moon was the light shining in the darkness, the symbol of our own human consciousness which longs to understand the mystery of life.
           What did the moon teach us? Because of its movement through its four phases, the moon carried the image of wholeness or completeness as well as sequence. The emergence of the crescent moon from the three days of darkness that preceded it gave us the image of the visible world emerging from an invisible one, a time-bound world from an eternal one, each belonging to the other. The moon nourished the creative imagination, teaching us to observe and to wonder, helping us to understand the relationship between the Above (the invisible world associated with the starry cosmos) and the Below (the visible world)—a theme that, much later, was carried through into Hermetic philosophy, Kabbalah and Alchemy.
           Today, when we look up at the night sky, we are connected to the hundreds of generations of people who watched the circumpolar movement of the stars and the changing yet stable course of the luminous moon. Over thousands of years, they observed the connection between the cyclical rhythm of the four phases of the moon’s life and the rhythm of growth, maturation, death and regeneration in the life of the crops. As Alexander Marshack has shown in his book The Roots of Civilization, lunar notations in the Palaeolithic era were widespread and the earliest ones in Africa date to 40,000 BC. (5)
           People experienced the phases of their own lives—youth, maturity, old age, death and rebirth as woven into the rhythm and fabric of that greater life as well as the life of the earth. The constant return of the crescent moon after the three days of darkness laid the foundation for trust in the survival of the soul and hope in the renewal of life after apparent death, and may have been the original inspiration of the belief in reincarnation. As this lunar pattern was constantly repeated through aeons of time, it spoke to our imagination, giving rise to myths which endured for thousands of years. We began to perceive birth and death as a rite of passage for the soul as it journeyed between the visible and invisible dimensions of life, a journey that followed a path through the labyrinth of the starry cosmos. The ancestors were not lost to the living but were close by, available—through shamanic mediation— to counsel and guide. In lunar culture there was no final demarcation line between life and death or between death and rebirth.
           The constant rhythm of the moon's waxing and waning taught us to perceive light and darkness in relation to each other. It held them in balance because the totality of the moon’s cycle embraced both light and dark phases and, therefore, symbolically included both life and death. Light and darkness were not polarized as they were later to become in solar culture, but were phases of the total cycle, so that there was always an image of a unifying whole which included both polarities.
           Over countless thousands of years, shamanic rituals and myths kept alive the sense of connection between this world and the other invisible world whose symbol, initially, may have been the mysterious dark phase of the moon. Out of that darkness the crescent was continually reborn—symbolically associated with the regeneration of the earth’s life and, as in India, with cosmic cycles lasting hundreds of thousands of years. Poets, artists, philosophers and musicians received their inspiration and their calling from the invisible world that the Egyptians called the “Duat” and the Greeks “The Immortal Realm.” The words spoken, the music heard, the dreams and visions seen came not from “inside” us, but from the cosmos, from goddesses and gods, from daemonic beings and the spirits of animals as well as from the ancestors who were never thought of as ‘dead’ but who formed a continuous line of connection with the living. At a heightened level of perception, the natural world was perceived as luminous and beautiful, almost transparent to that other world—a theophany or showing forth of that world. Everything was alive. Everything had the ability to communicate—a stone as much as an animal, a tree or a spring gushing out of a crevice in the rock. The invisible world had the potential to reveal itself in the flight of a bird, the stirring of the leaves of an oak tree, the ripples on a lake. Shamanic wisdom and ways of “tuning in” to the natural world were passed from teacher to pupil for hundreds and even thousands of years.
           The Maori shamans of New Zealand still believe that everything has its own life force: the stone has the life force of the earth itself, the bone the life force of all living things, the shell the life force of the energy of the sea. In carving these elements of life with the patterns they observed in nature, they carried this insight into their work so that it might bring healing power to the wearer and the community. The “life” of the stone, bone or shell is never lost. Its energy lives on in the wearer of the carving and is transmitted to the observer. One modern book which describes this extraordinary transmission in relation to the world of the bee is Simon Buxton's The Shamanic Way of the Bee: Ancient Wisdom and Healing Practices of the Bee Masters. It tells the story of his initiation into this very ancient lineage.
            It is now known that the builders of the megalithic culture whose splendid monuments are strewn all over Europe and throughout the world studied the yearly movements of the constellations and specific planets and stars as well as the course of the moon and the sun. They developed precise mathematical and astronomical skills to a remarkable degree, siting their sacred buildings in relation to the position of the sun and moon as well as to a specific constellation such as Cygnus, which was believed to be the destination or ‘cosmic home’ for the souls of the dead. Avebury, for example, was thought to have been originally oriented on Cygnus. (6) The role of these shaman-astronomers was to align the life of their communities with the movements of the heavenly bodies. For many thousands of years, they journeyed into the Otherworld, bringing back what was seen and heard to help the human community to harmonize its life with the life of the cosmos.

The Great Mother
           The meta-narrative of lunar culture was primarily feminine in character—aware of and receptive to the presence of the eternal. The oldest known image of the eternal which presided over the Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras and lasted far into the Bronze Age was the Great Mother and it is her image that is, I believe, the origin of the idea of the soul of the cosmos. Certain forms such as the circle, the oval, the wavy line, the meander and the spiral are, as early as the Palaeolithic era, recognizable as her “signature.” These symbols - particularly the double or triple spiral - are found on the walls of caves, and were later engraved on the stones and dolmens, passage graves and temples of megalithic culture, such as the great temple of Newgrange in Ireland, Gavrinis in Brittany or the many temples of Malta. People identified the Great Mother with the immensity of the cosmos, with the Milky Way, with the moon, and with the life and fertility of the earth. The labyrinth and the spiral became at this early time, symbols of the connecting pathway between this world and the unseen cosmic dimension of the Great Mother's womb.
            These symbolic images tell us that at this time we were already aware of two dimensions of experience—this earthly one and the other invisible one, to which we were connected as if by an umbilical cord. Myth came into being in order to connect this world with that other one and to create a sacred space where the connection with the eternal would be kept alive through ritual, story-telling and the cultivation of the mythopoeic imagination.
            As Frederick Turner so brilliantly expressed it in his book Beyond Geography, The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, “the gigantic and general purpose of archaic myth is the celebration of Life.” And, he continues, “Living myth must include and speak of the interlocking cycles of animate and vegetable life, of water, sun, and even the stones, which have their own stories. It must embrace without distinction the phenomenal and the numinous.” (7)

The Cave
           In Western Europe in the Palaeolithic era when the magnificent paintings we so admire were created, the cave was the most sacred place, the focus of the life of the tribe. Symbolically, it represented the earthly womb of the Great Mother, the secret, hidden source of her regenerative power. It was from such mysterious places as the cave and the later megalithic temple-tomb that she was believed to bring forth the living and receive the souls of the dead back into herself for regeneration and rebirth. The cave may always have been a place where those to be initiated were taken, where rites of incubation were practised and the shamanic experience of death and rebirth evoked. The cave still symbolizes, in vision, dream and mystical experience, the deep, instinctual psychic level which gives access to revelation and communion with levels of consciousness beyond our normal range. People still seek out caves to hold special rituals for healing and communion with an invisible world.
           The approach to the sanctuary in these caves was formidably difficult, a ritual of initiation often requiring hours spent negotiating claustrophobic passageways. Imagine the people of south-western France and northern Spain, crawling and slithering through the entrails of the great caves in this area, gasping for breath with the effort, their only light in the pitch darkness coming from tiny lamps made of hollowed bone and filled with animal fat and juniper twigs. Imagine their fear that their light might go out. If it did go out the blackness was absolute. They had no means other than instinct of orientating themselves in that total darkness. Then, if all was well and they could see their path, they suddenly emerged into a huge cavern. Even now, as one retraces their path into the far recesses of a cave, awed and silenced by the weight of the darkness, one can feel what the people of this ancient time felt—one is inside the womb of the Great Mother, in the utter stillness, the darkness, at the very heart of life.
            In the furthest reach of the cave, in domed chambers, vast as a cathedral, but sometimes in narrow passages, these people painted and carved the magnificent animals we can see today. Even the image of an owl was included among the rhinoceros, felines, stags and horses in the recently discovered (1996) enormous Chauvet cave system in the Vaucluse area of France, whose date has been put at ca. 32,000 BC, nearly twenty thousand years older than the well-known Lascaux cave. (8) These images show that the mythic imagination was supremely alive and able to find expression in this art form at this early date.
           The animals, like the people who painted them, were one form of the teeming life of the Great Mother upon which human life depended. The rituals that connected the tribal shaman with the animal spirits beyond this world ensured the return of the animals and, therefore, the survival of the tribe or clan. The painted images of these caves are so remarkable because they suggest a well-developed community surviving over many thousands of years, with a continuity of mythological beliefs, images and rituals, and advanced imaginative and technical skills to express them. As far is now known, it seems that this area of France offers the earliest known examples of cave painting.
           The paintings of Lascaux are now tragically affected by mould and may not long survive. One dramatic scene which may disappear forever because it is not reproduced in the modern replica of the original cave, is painted on one wall of a deep shaft at the far end of the cave, ca.14,500 BC. It shows a dying bison transfixed by a spear standing next to a shaman with a bird’s head who lies with his arms outstretched, as if in a trance, his penis erect. A staff or pole surmounted by a bird, lies beside him. Mario Ruspoli, one of the last people allowed to photograph Lascaux describes his impressions of this mysterious painted sanctuary, eighteen feet below the main cave:

It is impossible for someone who has never descended to this point to imagine the dense, mystic, impressive atmosphere that reigns in a place so charged with occult power. One experiences a sort of metaphysical shock and begins to speak in a hushed voice…while the light travels along the vertical walls and suddenly reveals the famous scene. (9)

           Here, in an extraordinarily eloquent image, we see a man lying in an expanded state of consciousness, making a soul-journey into another dimension, his bird head and the bird on the pole indicating that he is able to fly there like a bird, perhaps even pointing to the specific stellar destination of the constellation of Cygnus, the swan. As Jules Cashford and I wrote in The Myth of the Goddess,

Shamans mediated between two worlds of human experience, and their flight into darkness took place, necessarily, in the most secret part of the cave where ordinary limits of perception could be more readily transcended.…The artist and the shaman were probably one and the same, as artists ever since have consistently claimed. Through their magical power to recreate the animal on the walls of the temple caves, they connected the tribe with the source of life that animated both human and animal, becoming themselves vehicles of that source, creators of the living form like the source itself. (10)

           This shamanic scene, the oldest so far discovered, suggests that by this time and possibly far earlier, humans had the ability to enter an expanded state of consciousness, probably with the help of an hallucinogenic plant, such as a specific mushroom. In this state, they communicated with the souls of slain animals and with ancestral spirits as well as with the source of life, as they then conceived it. These practices are now known to have existed at a very early date in Africa as well as Australia, North and South America and the Arctic circle and still exist today in indigenous cultures. Westerners now travel to the Peruvian jungle to participate in shamanic practices which open a door onto other dimensions in order to cure illness in the individual and the community. The idea of an expanded state seems alien and foreign to the consciousness we have today yet it is important that we become aware of it—as with the witness of this ancient image, because it can recall for us an innate capacity of our consciousness that, for most of humanity, has been closed down and forgotten.
           Apart from the bird’s association with Cygnus - usually the swan or goose - it is even possible that certain animals in the Palaeolithic era were associated with specific star formations, or constellations, as they were in later times. In The Cygnus Mystery, Andrew Collins describes a BBC news story in August 2000 reporting that a Dr. Michael Rappenglück of Munich University considered the cave at Lascaux to be nothing less than a prehistoric planetarium with the spread-eagled form of the bird-man described above associated with three specific stars in the constellation of Cygnus. At that time, ca. 5,000-13,000 BC, Deneb, the brightest star in Cygnus, was the pole star. He also suggested that the black dots placed next to a large black aurochs or bull represented the star-group of the Pleiades. The bull itself he thought represented the constellation of Taurus which is close to the Pleiades. (11)
           Because people’s lives were so dependent on the animals, the cave rituals respected the animals, recognizing that the sacrifice of their lives made possible the survival of the humans who hunted them. The breaking of the divine order by the slaying of an animal required a ritual honoring of the animal’s spirit in order to ensure that it would consent to return to be hunted again and this in turn necessitated a journey to the realm of spirit to request the return of the animal.

Lunar Culture and Participatory Experience
           In our modern world, fairy tales like the “Sleeping Beauty” may be the residual fragments of that forgotten participatory experience where forests were inhabited by creatures who would help or hinder us; where spirits of tree and mountain, stream and sacred spring could speak to us; where bears or frogs might be princes in disguise; and where shamans, old women, or old men living in the deep forest might offer us wise counsel, or birds bring us messages, warn us of dangers and act as guides. “Whoever denies the daemons,” wrote Plutarch in a later age, “breaks the chains that links the gods to men.” There are countless tales which describe how the hero or heroine who responds to the mysterious guidance of the animals or who helps them when others have ignored them wins the reward of the treasure and the royal marriage.
           Rituals like those of the Orphic and Eleusinian Mysteries in Greece strengthened the sense of participation in an unseen reality and gave initiates an experience of the immortality of the soul. The poet Pindar said of them: “Blessed are they who have seen these things. They know the end of life and they know the God-given beginnings.” In a culture where visionary experience was validated, people spoke with goddesses and gods in dream and vision. Birds were recognised as messengers of the invisible, very possibly because people dreamed about them in this role or even heard them as a voice speaking inside themselves. Intuitive sensibility and the ability to communicate with the spirits of plants taught people to gather, grind or distil certain herbs and plants for healing illness. Rites of incubation and healing were practised in many sanctuaries. Dreams and visions were of great importance in the diagnosis and healing of disease. Music was used to invoke the presence of an Otherworld that was the foundation of this world, and as real as this one. Everything was connected, everything was sacred. The shaman-healers who guided these cultures were trained to enter a state of utter stillness and to listen and observe what they heard and saw in an altered state of consciousness.

Cosmic Soul in Pre-Socratic Greece
           If we listen to the Pre-Socratic Greek philosophers of the sixth century BC we find that they carry forward the legacy of this lunar participatory experience and cannot be understood except in relation to it. For example, the words of Heraclitus, when he suggests that the soul is of unfathomable depth, retain the essence of that ancient perception. Thales of Miletus speaks of the “All” as being alive and full of daemons who are the agents of the one soul-substance. Anaximenes says that humanity and nature are fundamentally inseparable because both participate in the same underlying “substance” which he calls soul.(12) Pythagoras, after he was exiled to Crotona on the east coast of southern Italy, having spent forty years with the astronomer-priests of Egypt and Babylon, defined the mathematical laws which to him, embodied the intelligence, wisdom and mathematical harmony of the cosmos. He left these words to encourage us: “Take heart, for the human race is divine.” A few decades later, Parmenides (ca. 515 – ca. 450 BC), living at Velia, in southern Italy, describes his shamanic journey into the Underworld of the Goddess who takes his right hand in hers, telling him to transmit her teaching to the world of mortals. Parmenides had a great influence on his contemporaries and a long line of shaman teachers whose names are recorded on stone is now known to have descended from him. (13)
           In the West, this shamanic view of reality was most highly developed in Egypt, from whence it was transmitted to Greece through the Greek philosophers, many of whom spent years studying with the astronomer-priests of Egypt. But if we look towards the East, we find the same idea of a universal cosmic ground in the Vedic texts of India and the Taoist philosophy of China, where it is specifically associated with the image of a Mother. In Greece, Plato (429-347 BC), in his Timaeus, was the first to give a name to the image of an all-embracing cosmic entity. It was surely from the participatory experience of an earlier age that he drew his concept of the soul of the world or soul of the cosmos, which he named psyche tou kosmou and describes as a “single Living Creature that encompasses all the living creatures that are within it.”            
           He speaks of a great golden chain of being as a hierarchy of participations, connecting the deepest level of reality with its physical manifestation, where every particle of life is a manifestation of the divine ground. However, in his philosophy there is a noticeable distancing of the phenomenal world from the world of spiritual or archetypal forms. There is a fading of the feeling of participation in an ensouled world, a disjunction between rational mind and sensory experience, an objective definition of soul rather than the numinous experience of it that was so intrinsic to shamanic cultures and, above all, to Egypt.
            Plotinus (204-70 AD, who was steeped in Platonic thought, developed further the concept of a universal soul that he called All-Soul or Soul of the All (anima-mundi), but in his philosophy also there is the idea that this material world is the lowest level in the hierarchy of divine emanation. (14) Implicit in his immensely influential definition of reality is the idea that nature is “lower” than spirit, body “lower” than mind, and that animals and plants are “lower” on the scale of being than humans even though all were an expression of the divine.
            This effectively broke the immediacy of the communion of the invisible and the visible worlds because it became associated with the idea of a hierarchical descent rather than the idea of the co-inherence of the divine and the natural worlds. With this disjunction in later Greek thought, body was split away from mind and soul; sensory from spiritual experience. The Egyptians held the body to be sacred and never despised it. What culturally-imposed belief or personal trauma could have led Plato to write in his Phaedrus, “Pure was the light and pure were we from the pollution of the walking sepulchre which we call a body, to which we are bound like an oyster to its shell.” Sadly, this idea greatly influenced the later formulators of Christian theology and was transmitted to Western civilization which developed on the foundation of a radical dissociation between mind and body.
           Aristotle (384-322 BC) took this distinction further, defining matter as something inanimate - separate and distinct from spirit and soul – leading eventually to the modern idea that matter is “dead”. While Plato and Plotinus had a strong influence on the development of Christian doctrine, the mainstream teaching of Western philosophy and science followed Aristotle. His philosophy had a powerful influence on Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages. Aristotle draws a clear demarcation line between an ancient way of knowing and a new way whose emphasis is on the need for the rational human mind to distance itself from what it is observing rather than to participate empathically in the life of what is being observed. The increasing separation between these two ways of knowing was henceforth profoundly to influence the development of the philosophy, religion and science of the West. It was one of the primary factors which led to the loss of the lunar, participatory way of knowing and the formation of a new worldview.
           However, although the focus of later Christian culture was directed away from the earth and towards heaven, the sense of living within an ensouled cosmos survived until the end of the Middle Ages. St. Francis (1181-1226), on the night before he wrote the famous Canticle of the Sun, had a vision of the earth as a glowing golden orb. In his canticle, there is the recognition that the great luminaries, the moon and the sun, as well as and the life of the animals and the birds all belong to the sacredness of the life of the cosmos. This was the time which saw the great pilgrimages to the sites of the Black Madonna and the building of the soaring glory of the gothic Cathedrals, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, which were designed to reflect the perfect mathematical harmony of a divinely created cosmos interacting with this world.
            In the twelfth century, the new and sensationally different four-part polyphonic music emanating from the School of Nôtre Dame, in Paris, filled their vast interiors with the mantra-like sounds of praise and adoration offered to God. The Bishop of Chartres, listening to this new music for the first time, marveled at the beauty of its intricate harmonies and observed, “It transports the soul to the society of angels.” For the builders and composers of this time their highest calling was the praise of God and their sublime creative gifts were offered in His service.
           With the Renaissance, this ensouled worldview found new expression in fifteenth century Florence when Marsilio Ficino translated Plato and the texts of the Egyptian Hermetic tradition but, with the Protestant Reformation, the older vision of a sacred earth and an ensouled cosmos slowly faded, assisted by the growing fascination with science. It was re-animated by the Romantics in the late eighteenth century, and by Goethe in the nineteenth and is reflected in the words of the poet and artist William Blake, “Everything that lives is Holy.”

Notes:

1.The Myth of the Goddess, Viking 1991 and Penguin Books, London and New York, 1993
2. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 250, Vintage Books, New York 1996
3. Alison Roberts, Hathor Rising, The Serpent Power of Ancient Egypt, Northgate Publishers. For poems to Hathor and Nut see Andrew Harvey and Anne Baring, The Divine Feminine, Conari Press 1996
4 . Jules Cashford, The Moon: Myth and Image, Cassell Illustrated, London 2003, p. 8
5. Alexander Marshack, The Roots of Civilisation, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London 1972
6. Andrew Collins, The Cygnus Mystery, Watkins Publishing, London, 2006
7. Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography, The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, Rutgers University Press, 1983 and 1992, P. 16 &19
8. Jean-Marie Chauvet, Eliette Brunel Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, Chauvet Cave: The Discovery of the World’s Oldest Paintings, Thames and Hudson, London, 1996
9. Mario Ruspoli, The Cave of Lascaux, The Final Photographic Record, Thames and Hudson, London, 1987
10. The Myth of the Goddess, Penguin Arkana, London and New York, 1992, p. 38
11. Andrew Collins, The Cygnus Mystery, Watkins Publishing, London, 2006, p. 202
12. Gertrude Levy, The Gate of Horn, pp. 301-3, Faber & Faber, London 1958
13. Peter Kingsley, In the Dark Places of Wisdom; see also his Reality, Golden Sufi Press, California, 1999 & 2003
14. Plotinus, The Enneads, transl. Stephen MacKenna, Faber and Faber, London, 1956 and 1969

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CHAPTER SIX

The Solar Era:
The Separation from Nature and
The Battle Between Good and Evil

Pisanello - The Fight with the Dragon

The fight with the dragon is the dominant image of the solar age. As I hope to explain in the next four chapters, it presided over the split between nature and spirit and between mind and body. Ultimately this has led to the split between the observer and the observed and between the rational mind and everything it has designated as non-rational.
           

What wider cultural influences led to the loss of lunar participatory consciousness? Why, in his book Apocalypse and Other Writings (1931), did D.H. Lawrence despairingly write,

We have lost the cosmos, by coming out of responsive connection with it, and this is our chief tragedy... We and the cosmos are one. The cosmos is a vast living body of which we are still parts... What is our petty little love of nature—Nature!!—compared to the ancient magnificent living with the cosmos, and being honoured by the cosmos! (1)

           To understand why we have lost the cosmos, we have to look back some 4000 years and explore the rise of a new solar meta-narrative. From about 2000 BC, we begin to see the development of a new phase in the evolution of human consciousness and a change of focus from a lunar to a solar meta-narrative. This era, which has been equated with the “rise of civilization” actually reflects a complete eclipse of the symbolic system of the lunar age, taking over many of the older myths and stories and setting them in a new solar context. The dominant celestial body is now the sun and the dominant mythology is solar rather than lunar. The primary theme of lunar mythology is on transformation through a cyclical process of life, death and regeneration. The primary theme of solar mythology is the great battle between a hero and a dragon, symbolizing a battle between light and darkness, good and evil and, ultimately, spirit conquering nature and good overcoming evil. Whereas the focus of lunar culture is on the soul and mythic participation in the life of a sacred earth and the vast living body of the cosmos, the focus of solar culture is on the conquest and mastery of an increasingly inanimate nature, the development of the rational mind and the differentiation of the warrior-leader or outstanding individual from the tribal group. In lunar culture it is the survival of the group that is of primary importance; in solar culture the focus is increasingly on the individual.
            As this process of solarization develops, linear time begins to replace cyclical time, and a linear, literal and objective way of thinking slowly replaces the older instinctive participatory way of knowing and its symbolic, imaginal way of thinking. It is customary to think of this new era of ‘civilization’ as a progressive advance for humanity emerging from an older and more ‘primitive’ era, characterized by savage customs and ‘magical’ thinking, but I see it as a time of tragic and ever-increasing loss. A most interesting book by Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, published in 1999, details the very ancient origins—going back to the Neolithic and even the Palaeolithic era—of many of the discoveries and innovations that were thought to originate in the historical era. (2) His research, as well as Marshack’s, shows that people were capable of complex thought processes millennia before these were considered to be possible and that this reveals the profound and long-lasting connections that they made between the human community, the earth and the life of the cosmos.

The Separation from Nature and the New Image of a Male Deity
           As the human psyche draws further and further away from nature in the solar era, the predominant image of spirit changes from Great Mother to Great Father. The greater the withdrawal from nature, the more transcendent and disengaged from nature becomes the image of deity. Divine immanence, once associated with the image of the Great Mother, is lost. The mind is focused on the realm of intellectual ideas; philosophy becomes discourse on these ideas rather than relationship with an invisible reality. The lunar emphasis on the importance of the group carries through into institutionalized religion with its insistence on collective belief. Faith replaces shamanic experience of and connection with the Otherworld and the rituals which celebrated and kept alive that connection. The changeover from a lunar mythology and culture to a solar one takes thousands of years but eventually, the spirits that had once inhabited and guarded every grove and spring, river and mountain, are banished; with Judaism, Christianity and Islam, pagan rites are outlawed. These religions are not aware of what they have lost or on what ancient foundation they rest.
           There were two major factors contributing to this change: one was political, the other the impact of literacy. Around 2000 BC there was a tremendous, devastating change—like a thunderbolt in a blue sky as the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean were thrown into turmoil. Invaders bringing sky gods— “a people whose onslaught was like a hurricane”—swept into the agricultural communities and river valleys where the Great Mother had been worshipped for thousands of years. They brought with them the horse and the war chariot. Some came from the north, others from the Arabian desert. War and conquest became the theme of a new and terrifying age. Everywhere there was fear and slaughter; everywhere a great cry of terror and distress as people were murdered, enslaved, their homes and livelihoods destroyed.            
           There may have been other factors contributing to this change, such as famine in the areas from which these invaders came that made people move in large numbers into areas which could provide food. (3) Whatever the cause, Joseph Campbell describes this time as “The Great Reversal.” (4) Thorkild Jacobsen, an authority on Mesopotamian religion, writes that while the fourth millennium and the ages before it had been moderately peaceful and wars and raids were not constant, “In the third millennium they appear to have become the order of the day. No one was safe…queens and great ladies like their humble sisters faced the constant possibility that the next day might find them widowed, torn from home and children, and enslaved in some barbarous household.” (5) The terrible cruelty and massive human sacrifice that accompanied the ethnic cleansing of that time is minutely documented in the annals of the Babylonian and later, the Assyrian kings. King Sargon of Akkad (2300 BC) was the first proudly to record it. The disappearance of ten of the twelve tribes of Israel ca. 720 BC is part of this sombre story. The sack of Troy gives us graphic insight into the focus on war which dominates this era.
           In this new act in the drama of our evolutionary journey, the Great Mother moves into the wings; sky gods brought by the invaders and—ultimately—the Great Father, move center stage. In Greece the goddesses Athena, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Persephone, who as goddesses in their own right once personified aspects of the Great Mother's powers, now become daughters of Zeus. Of the Greek goddesses, only Demeter, Hera and Gaia retain something of the status of the former Great Mother. Hera was once the Great Goddess whose temple at the foot of Mount Euboia presided over the whole plain of Argos. To the Greeks of this time, her temple was like the Temple in Jerusalem to the people of Israel—the sanctuary for the whole land. (6) Now, as described in the Iliad, Hera is demoted to the jealous, nagging and manipulative wife of Zeus.
           In the Near East, the Great Father replaces the Great Mother as the creator of life. The story of the ferocious struggle between the supporters of the two mythologies is told in the Old Testament which repeatedly documents the destruction of the shrines and groves of the goddess. “But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images and cut down their groves: For thou shalt worship no other god: for the Lord, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous god.” (Exod. 34:13) This was the earliest known example of Iconoclasm or the destruction of images. All images of and references to the goddess were eradicated. King Hezekiah in 721 BC and King Josiah in 623 BC threw the statue of the goddess Asherah out of the Temple and with it the great bronze serpent that was part of her cult. In this way Judaic monotheism eradicated polytheism and with it the connection to nature. Myth was replaced by a new linear emphasis on history as divine revelation. The Hebrew language to this day has no word for goddess.

An Evolutionary Change of Focus
           It is impossible to overstate the importance of this change of focus for the future relationship between man and nature. The coming of the solar era reflects the formulation of an entirely new perception of life and with it the rise of a new meta-narrative, based on the idea of a cosmic battle between light and darkness. With the diffusion of solar mythology, hastened by the advent of literacy and the discovery of the many applications of bronze technology – particularly those related to arms and war, the earlier lunar sense of the mythic participation of communities in the continual regeneration of the life of the earth and the greater life of the cosmos gradually fades. For the next four thousand years, nature becomes something to be conquered, controlled and manipulated by human ingenuity, to human advantage. Earth, once alive with spirit, is desouled. Body is disconnected from mind and mind from soul. The Biblical myth of the Fall, dated approximately to the tenth to eighth centuries BC, describes the process of estrangement, separation and loss—a stark reversal of the participatory way of knowing that characterised older, pre-literate lunar cultures.
           The great myth of the solar era is that of the heroic individual and his battle with a dragon, monster or serpent of the underworld. The solar hero and the warrior-kings or great spiritual leaders of this era, such as the Buddha or Christ, are identified with the sun. If we relate this process of solarization to what is happening within the psyche of that time, we can read the story of the heroic human ego—the focus of our developing consciousness—striving to differentiate itself from the matrix of nature and attempting to master and control that from which it had emerged. The drama of the solar quest for light and enlightenment and victory over darkness is the drama of our own quest for consciousness and our fear of falling back into the darkness of unconsciousness. From the ego’s perspective, the darkness had to be overcome for the light to prevail, a concept utterly different from the earlier belief where the darkness was a mystery to be explored.
           The primary theme of solar mythology is empowerment, ascent, achievement, conquest. It has helped the gifted or heroic individual to differentiate himself from the tribal group, bestowing many benefits on humanity. However, ultimately, it has also encouraged the belief that humanity itself is the solar hero, standing above all other species and having the right to exploit the resources of the earth for its own exclusive benefit, leaving other species defenseless against the onslaught of its perceived rights and needs.
           This belief was enshrined in the Book of Genesis, where, in Genesis 1:28, Adam and Eve are granted dominion over the earth. “And God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’” In another fateful passage in Genesis 9:1-2, Noah and his sons are told to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps upon the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered.” The legacy of these two passages has been catastrophic, both for man and for the earth.
           In the West, solar mythology has been the driving inspiration behind the Promethean quest for freedom, justice and knowledge as well as power and control. In the sphere of religion, a major theme of solar mythology is escape from the bondage of the body and, by association, release from the bondage of mortality. As a cultural impulse, it carries with it the human longing, the human drive, to go beyond all constraints and limitations, to reach higher, progress further, discover more. But it is a linear and essentially utopian and transcendent mythology rather than one that relates us to earth and cosmos.
           Solar mythology drives both utopian ideologies and the dream of scientific progress. It is overwhelmingly male because the male psyche has been the dominant influence in the world during the solar era, and it is the achievements, discoveries and heroic actions of exceptional men which have inspired and offered a role model to other men. A strong sense of individuality and a focused ego — which ultimately came to be identified with the conscious, rational mind — can be acknowledged as the supreme achievement of the male psyche during the solar era. But the voice of women who, in the developing patriarchal cultures, were denied access to education, the priesthood and the healing profession was silenced. And the older, participatory relationship with nature and the cosmos was irrevocably and disastrously lost.
            We have developed a formidable intellect, a formidable science, a formidable technology but all rest on the premise of our alienation from and mastery of nature, where nature was treated as object with ourselves as controlling subject. Despite its phenomenal cultural and technological achievements the whole edifice of the solar age and Western civilization rests on the foundation of the separation from nature and, within the psyche, the split between our conscious rational mind and our instinctive soul. Only now are we brought face to face with the legacy of this dual separation, with perhaps sufficient consciousness to recognize and heal it.

The Fear of and Subjugation of Women
           The polarizing emphasis derived from a mythology of the battle between light and darkness, gradually created a fissure between spirit and nature, mind and body, which defined religious doctrine, cultural attitudes and social customs. During this solar phase, the male psyche identified itself with the supremacy of spirit and mind over nature, woman and body. It came to assoociate the former with the image of light and order and the latter with the image of darkness and chaos. Woman and the body began to be viewed as a danger, a threat, a sexual temptation to man. Nature, woman and the body became closely identified with each other—and for this reason all had to be subject to the will of man. Woman, identified with nature, was named as an inferior or secondary creation in the Book of Genesis and in the writings of the Greek philosophers—a belief which will be explored in Chapters Seven and Eight.
            The patriarchal religions of the solar era carry this polarized way of thinking within their teaching, wherever this is associated with the ascetic subjugation of the body, the mistrust of sexuality and the oppression and persecution of women. The unconscious identification of woman with nature was the origin of the negative projections onto her that were incorporated into the social attitudes and customs—fused with religious beliefs—that endure to this day. Where does the Taliban’s attitude to woman originate if not in this Mesopotamian directive some 4000 years old: “If a woman shall speak out against her man, her mouth shall be crushed with a hot brick.”
           Further to the East, in China, the old Taoist vision of an ensouled nature also began to withdraw, replaced by the emphasis on the minutae of social custom which relegated women to an inferior and almost slave-like position. The sages of India, with certain exceptions, turned away from the body and sensory experience and held the phenomenal world to be an illusion, placing the emphasis of their teaching on the experience of enlightenment and release from the wheel of rebirth. Here again, woman was a hindrance to and a distraction from the spiritual life. The famous story of the Buddha leaving his wife and young son and even his beloved horse reflects the influence of this new solar ideology where the emphasis was placed on spirit in opposition to nature.

The Impact of Literacy
           A second major influence leading to the rise of solar culture was the impact of literacy. The written word replaced the oral tradition that had carried forward the wisdom and insights of the older lunar culture. Some of that ancient wisdom may have been recorded in the scrolls held in the Great Library of Alexandria. But in 391 AD the Emperor Theodosius decreed that all pagan temples (including those at Eleusis and Ephesus) should be destroyed. The legendary fire which is said to have destroyed the library of Alexandria and with it many thousands of scrolls holding the precious legacy of the pre-Christian world may have taken place at this time. The older wisdom, particularly that derived from Egypt, went underground and survived in the Hermetic tradition, in the mystical teaching of Kabbalah and in Alchemy.
           David Abram has shown in his book, The Spell of the Sensuous, how the new emphasis on the written word contributed to the loss of the older participatory consciousness: “Only as the written text began to speak would the voices of the forest, and of the river, begin to fade. And only then would language loosen its ancient association with the invisible breath, the spirit sever itself from the wind, the psyche dissociate itself from the environing air.” (7)
           Another book, The Alphabet and the Goddess, written by Leonard Shlain, a brain surgeon, develops the interesting idea that literacy gave prominence to the left hemispheric brain to the detriment of the balance between the hemispheres that had prevailed in a pre-literate culture. He explains that when speaking, we use both hemispheres of the brain but when “written words begin to supersede spoken words, the left brain’s dominance markedly increased.” (8)

Writing represented a shift of tectonic proportions that fissured the integrated nature of…brain cooperation. Writing made the left brain, flanked by the incisive cones of the eye and the aggressive right hand, dominant over the right. The triumphant march of literacy that began five thousand years ago conquered right-brain values and with them the Goddess. Patriarchy and misogyny have been the inevitable result…The hand that held the pen also held the sword. (9)

           Perhaps because literacy distanced us from nature and from empathic relationship with the earth, the story of creation is now believed to be revealed in the “word” of the transcendent father god. Creation no longer emerges from the womb of the mother. This is a crucially important distinction because the unity of life is again broken: invisible spirit is expelled from nature. The earth is no longer sacred. Absolute obedience to the written word replaces direct shamanic experience of the numinous. Ancient rituals of connection and divination are forbidden. Pagan cult images are banished under pain of death. With this shift in archetypal imagery, everything formerly associated with the feminine archetype (the Great Mother) is downgraded in relation to the masculine one (the Great Father). The lunar way of knowing is subjugated to the solar way and, under the influence of solar mythology, first nature, then the cosmos, are de-souled.
            As the sun becomes the new focus of consciousness, the cultural hero is no longer the lunar shaman who ventures into the darkness, assimilating its mysteries and returning from it with the treasure of wisdom with which to guide his community, but rather the solar hero, often a king, warrior or outstanding individual, who is celebrated as the one who conquers and overcomes darkness—a darkness that becomes identified with his enemies. The emphasis is now on the triumph of the light and the repudiation and elimination of whatever or whoever is identified with darkness.

Solar Myth: the Cosmic Battle Between Light and Darkness
           Solar mythology celebrates the cosmic battle between Light and Darkness. As solar mythology becomes the new focus of consciousness, it replaces the earlier lunar mythology with its theme of transformation, death and regeneration although it survives in the main features of the Christian myth. Many solar myths celebrate a great contest between a hero-god and a dragon or monster of the underworld.
            The first story describing this mythic contest is in the Epic of Gilgamesh which may have originated as early as ca. 2300 BC, although it was only written down later. Gilgamesh, King of the Sumerian city of Uruk, defies the express warning of the gods and sets out with his companion Enkidu to kill Humbaba, the guardian of the great forest of the Goddess in what is now the Lebanon. The two heroes will not listen to Humbaba’s pleas for mercy and kill him. Soon after, Enkidu falls ill and dies. Gilgamesh, grief-stricken, sets out to find the Herb of Immortality but loses it on his way back to his city. So powerful is the description in this ancient text that, as we read the words, we can feel the intense grief of his loss.
           A later Babylonian creation myth, (ca. 1700 BC), called the Enuma Elish, tells the story of Marduk, a young god “clothed with the radiance of ten gods, with a majesty to inspire fear” who kills Tiamat, the great dragoness mother, by shooting an arrow into her open mouth which tears her belly and splits her heart. Marduk throws her carcass on the ground, crushes her skull with a blow of his mace and cuts her body in half like a shell-fish, creating the sky from one half and the earth from the other. He then creates the planets and the constellations. Almost as an afterthought, he creates humanity from the blood of Tiamat's murdered son.
           This is a new and violent creation myth, in stark contrast to older Sumerian and Egyptian creation myths, and it reflects a loss of relationship with the natural world and a harsh severance of the lunar way of thinking. The Babylonian myth was a dangerous myth to take literally for it offered the image of violence and murder as a pattern of divine behaviour and, therefore, ratified it as a model for human beings to emulate. Marduk becomes the macho ideal—the model for all conquerors to come. With this myth the cyclical lunar time of the goddess culture ends. Linear time begins, and death becomes final and terrifying. With this myth the imagery of conflict and opposition between light and darkness, good and evil is constellated. At the same time, in the context of war, the practise of wholesale human sacrifice becomes widespread.
           The story of the Enuma Elish, widely disseminated throughout the Middle and Near East, laid the mythological ground for the future polarization of spirit and nature, mind and body—the one divine and good, the other “fallen” and “evil.” This divinely sanctioned opposition led also to the idea of the “holy war”—the war of the forces of good against the forces of evil which is deeply woven into the sacred texts of the three patriarchal religions and into their behavior towards all those they identified with evil. The victory of the solar god initiated a new way of living, a new way of relating to the divine by identifying with an ideology that celebrated the hero-god and his conquest of darkness and chaos. This theme became the dominant one of all the hero myths of the solar era—from Gilgamesh to Siegfried and even the hero myth of our own time that is being played out before our eyes on the world stage in the battle against the “axis of evil”.
           This imagery pervades the Old Testament and other mythologies of the Iron Age—in India, the Mahabharata; in Persia, in the mythical conflict between Ormuzd and Ahriman. We find the same theme reflected in later Greek myths, such as those describing the sun god Apollo’s slaying of the she-dragon at Delphi, Theseus killing the Minotaur and Perseus the Gorgon. All reflect the supremacy of the new solar mythology over the older lunar one, represented by the image of the Great Mother. Already, it is possible to sense that the earth—identified with the goddess—is no longer sacred. It is a shocking thought that one powerful myth and its derivatives could alter our relationship to earth and cosmos and cast a spell that has endured for nearly four thousand years. Only now is its influence being challenged with the realization that the real battle is within our own nature and the need to shed light upon the darkness of our own beliefs and behavior.

The Glorification of War
            There is another important aspect to solar mythology—one that is focused on war and the goal of territorial conquest. It has sanctified an ethos that strives for victory at no matter what cost in human lives, and even today glorifies war and admires the warrior leader. This archaic model of tribal dominance and conquest has inflicted untold suffering on humanity and now threatens our very survival as a species.
           For over 4000 years, under the powerful influence of solar mythology, war and conquest have been glorified; victory and the spoils of war seen as the coveted treasure to be won in battle. Courage in battle became the supreme virtue in the warrior and the role of the warrior was exalted into the supreme role model for men. The archetype of the warrior still exerts immense unconscious influence on the modern psyche. As people moved to cities and cities became states, and states entered into conflict with each other, more and more young men were conscripted into armies led by warrior kings.
           The cosmic battle between light and darkness was increasingly projected into the world and a fascination with territorial conquest gripped the imagination and led to the creation of vast empires (Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Greek, Roman—to mention only those of the West). It is as if the heroic human ego, identified with the solar hero, had to seek out new territories to conquer, had to embody the myth in a literal sense. We hear very little about the suffering generated by these conquests: the widows, the mothers who lost sons, the children orphaned and the lands devastated by the foraging armies passing over them.
           In the Christian era, solar mythology fuelled a missionary zeal to conquer new lands for God or Christ, with catastrophic consequences for the indigenous inhabitants of those lands—extending the injunction in Genesis telling man to subdue the earth and to have dominion over every living thing. It fuelled the desire of the West to create new empires and it currently fuels America’s drive for supremacy and its desire to control the world and impose democracy “for its own good.” George W. Bush’s words “Those who are not with us are against us” are a modern re-statement of solar mythology.
           This celebration of conquest and supremacy begins in the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt with the conquests of Sargon of Akkad and the Egyptian pharaohs and continues with Hiroshima, Vietnam, Iraq, and the horrific nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of modern warfare. The long chronicle of conquest and human sacrifice, of exultation in power and the subjugation of enemies might truly be named the dark shadow of the solar age. Wherever today we still find the tendency to omnipotence and grandiose ambitions of empire and world domination we can discern the influence of solar mythology and the inflation or hubris of leaders who unconsciously identify themselves with the archetypal mythic role of the solar god or hero engaging in the battle to defeat the dragon of darkness and evil.

Solar Mythology and the Split between Ego and Instinct
           With the psychological insight which has become available to us over the last hundred years, particularly through the depth psychology of Jung, we can understand that this solar phase of our evolution reflects a radical dissociation within our psyche between the growing strength of the ego (the hero) and the older and greatly feared power of instinct (the dragon). As this dissociation gathers momentum, so the feeling of containment within a greater cosmic entity and the sense of relationship with nature and with an invisible dimension of reality fades and with it, the participatory consciousness of an earlier time. The legacy of the Platonic and Aristotelian emphasis on reason and the rational mind, together with the impact of literacy and the solar emphasis on ascent to the spirit, accompanied by a deep suspicion of woman, sexuality and sensual experience, hastened the demise of the lunar way of knowing and the former instinctive sense of relationship with a sacred earth and a sacred cosmos.
           In an evolutionary sense the supreme achievement of the solar era was the emergence of a strong autonomous sense of individuality (conscious ego) from the matrix of instinct and the development of the reflective, rational mind in all who had access to education. But this had a high price: firstly, the inflation of the ego as it drew away from its instinctive ground and began to assimilate a god-like power to itself. Secondly, the subjugation and repression of the instinctual, the non-rational and the feminine which, identified with each other, were perceived as threatening to the hegemony of the masculine ego.

The Danger of Utopian Ideologies: Negative Projections onto the Dark, Inferior or Primitive Races
           Solar myth continues today. It is carried in all Utopian ideologies which strive to impose the light (a new world order) and split off the darkness (anything that opposes it). It entered not only into the sacred texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam but, most significantly, into our behavior towards the “dark” and so-called primitive (more instinctual) indigenous peoples who fell victim to the race for empire of the European nations. The catalogue of horror inflicted during the course of the conquest of these “inferior” peoples, whether in South and Central America, in Africa, India or further East, has been minutely documented. As time went on, religions took on the mantle of solar mythology in a militant struggle for supremacy, particularly Christianity and Islam. The animosity between Catholic and Protestant in European history and between Shi’a and Sunni in the Islamic world may be traced to the polarizing influence of this mythology and, more importantly, to the split in the psyche that underlies it. As long as we are not aware of the fissure within our own nature, we will be driven to seek out an object on which to project our darkness. This unconscious mechanism of projection still operates today in the religio-political sphere as illustrated by the ongoing tension between the Christian cultures of the West and the Islamic cultures of the Middle East.
           Finally, solar mythology and its tendency to encourage negative projections onto others is reflected in the secular totalitarian ideologies which ravaged the last century when they separated the heroic race or ‘chosen’ people from those whom they demonized as inferior or expendable. We can see this polarizing influence at work in the Holocaust where the ‘Aryan’ race exterminated millions of Jews and others who were perceived as racially, genetically or mentally inferior. The same influence can be found in the Communist regime of the former Soviet Union, in Maoist China, in Cambodia under Pol Pot as well as, more recently, in Rwanda and Zimbabwe. These ideologies justified the elimination of racial, class or ethnic enemies, just as Christianity and Islam had justified the elimination of heretics and apostates.
           One historical example of the polarizing tendencies within religion was the decision of the Catholic Church to burn Giordano Bruno at the stake in the Campo de’ Fiori in Rome in 1600 because of his insistence that God or spirit permeated all of nature. Bruno, cosmologist, philosopher and occultist who had a great influence on his contemporaries, published a book in 1584 called On the Infinite Universe and Worlds. In it he wrote: “There are countless constellations, suns and planets; we see only the suns because they give light; the planets remain invisible, for they are small and dark. There are also numberless earths circling around their suns, no worse and no less than this globe of ours.” Anticipating the search in our own time for intelligent life in the cosmos, he also wrote, “No reasonable mind can assume that heavenly bodies which may be far more magnificent than ours would not bear upon them creatures similar or even superior to those upon our human Earth.” Bruno was rehabilitated in 2000 during the Papacy of John Paul II, when an acknowledgement of “profound sorrow” at the error of his condemnation was made.
           Islam also murdered some of its greatest mystics, among them the Persian Suhrawardi (1154-1191) who, during his short life, founded a School of Illumination. He taught a complex and profound emanationist cosmology, seeing all creation flowing through successive levels from a divine ground he named the “Light of Lights.” The parallels between his cosmology and that of Kabbalah are striking and fascinating.
           We can also recognize the polarizing influence of solar mythology at the time of the Reformation when the new religion of Protestantism sought to eradicate as much as it could of the evidence of the Catholic tradition and turned against its sacred images with savage fury—leaving thousands of churches whitewashed and unadorned. More than ninety-five percent of the artistic heritage of the Middle Ages in England was destroyed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when literally thousands of superb sculptures and wooden images of Christ, the Virgin and the saints were defaced, burnt and smashed into pieces by men who took pride in their acts of vandalism that would wipe out all vestiges of “superstition”. England has never recovered from this rape of her soul and the loss of her supremely gifted artists and sculptors who celebrated God through the creation of beauty. Some even had to endure the agony of seeing their recent creations destroyed. It was at this time that the English people were prohibited from worshipping the Virgin as they had done for centuries. Churches were instructed to “sing no more praises to Our Lady, only to Our Lord.”

A Catastrophic Loss of Soul
           From this brief survey of the era of solar mythology, it is possible to see that the belief system of scientific reductionism described earlier which has so powerfully influenced modern secular culture, can be understood as the end-result of the long-standing dissociation of spirit and nature, mind and matter but, above all, the sundering within us of thinking and feeling, rational mind and instinctive soul—the solar and lunar, conscious and unconscious aspects of our nature. It could be said that we are now perceiving reality through the linear consciousness of the left hemisphere of the brain and have lost the holistic and connective perception of the right hemisphere. Our psyche and our culture are profoundly unbalanced.
           Over the four to five millennia since solar mythology became the dominant influence on world culture, we have achieved an extraordinary advance in scientific and technological skills and their application to improving the conditions of human life on this planet, as well as a phenomenal expansion of the ability to express ourselves as individuals in myriad different fields of endeavor. But at the same time, we have suffered a catastrophic loss of soul, a loss of the ancient instinctive awareness of the sacred interweaving of all aspects of life, a loss of the sense of participation in the life of nature and the cosmos, a loss of instinct and imagination. Instinct, that we were once in touch with has now become an enemy, driving us ever more relentlessly to achieve the shallow and deficient goals set by our current worldview.
           So we come to the present time where, in a secular culture, the rational human mind has established itself as the supreme value, master of all it surveys, recognizing no power, no consciousness beyond itself. It has lost its connection to soul, not only soul in the individual sense but soul as a cosmic matrix or field in whose life we participate. In its hubristic stance, the modern mind has become disconnected from the deeper instinctive ground out of which it evolved. With all the passionate conviction of the iconoclast who cannot tolerate the existence of anything which threatens his or her belief, it denigrates and derides everything it perceives as “superstition”.
           This attitude, I think, points to my dream of the tower-like iron structure erected on the surface of the moon. It reflects the rigid stance of the mind or ego which, cut off from its roots, stands like a tyrant over and against nature, over and against the earth, over against whatever it defines as threatening to its supremacy, the achievement of its secular aims and its definition of progress. This leaves the human heart lonely and afraid and the neglected territory of the soul a wasteland as my dream of the barren and devastated surface of the moon suggested. In our world, the projected rage and despair of the long denied inner need to reconnect mind with soul confronts us in the form of the enemies who seek to destroy us and whom we seek to destroy. We struggle to contain the effects of a split psyche and a dysfunctional way of thinking—believing that ever greater power and control will enable us to eradicate the evils we have unwittingly brought into being.

The Return of the Soul
           Yet, mysteriously and fortuitously, beneath the surface of our culture, the ancient concept of soul and the unity of life is returning. The challenge of the immense problems facing us is urging us to reflect on our current understanding of reality and modify the oppositional paradigm we have inherited from the influence of solar mythology. A deep human instinct is attempting to restore balance and wholeness in us by re-discovering the values rooted in an older way of knowing. One example of this is the environmental movement which is restoring sacredness to the earth. In his introduction to Frederick Turner’s Book, Beyond Geography, The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, T.H. Watkins writes that “Our presence on this earth was not meant to be a conquest but a sharing” and suggests that we can recover this lost knowledge by re-encountering our own past: “If the environmental movement succeeds in redeeming at least some of the damage our history has done, future generations may view it as the most important social movement of all time.” (10)
           Compassion is growing for those suffering from poverty, disease and the obscene effects of war as well as anger on behalf of the indigenous peoples of the world, whose lands have been so exploited by the territorial and industrial greed of the West. Shamanic methods of healing are being recovered, among them ancient methods of aligning ourselves with the spirit of the earth such as Feng Shui. As a new image of reality struggles to be born, we are beginning to recognize that we are poisoning the earth, the seas and our own immune system with toxic chemicals and pesticides, and inviting our destruction as a species as well as thousands of others through our rapacious behavior towards the earth’s resources and the uncontrolled proliferation of our own species.
           Many individuals are now awakening to awareness that we and the phenomenal world that we call nature are woven into a cosmic tapestry whose threads connect us not only with each other at the deepest level, but with other dimensions or levels of reality and multitudes of beings inhabiting those dimensions. Beyond the present limits of our sight, an immense unseen field of consciousness interacts with our own, asking to be recognised by us, embraced by us. What is emerging at the cutting edge of science is a grand unified theory of quantum, cosmos, life and consciousness where physics is reunited with metaphysics. (11) As this deep soul-impulse gathers momentum, the “marriage” of the re-emerging lunar consciousness with the dominant solar one is slowly changing our perception of reality. This gives us cause for hope in the future. If we can recover the values intrinsic to the ancient participatory way of knowing without losing the priceless evolutionary attainment of a strong and focused ego, we could heal both the fissure in our soul and our raped and vandalized planet. In the words of D.H. Lawrence, “The great range of responses that have fallen dead in us have to come to life again. It has taken two thousand years to kill them; who knows how long it will take to bring them to life.” (12)

Notes:

1. D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and Other Writings, Cambridge University Press, 1931, p. 78
2. Richard Rudgley, Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age, Arrow Books, London, 1999
3. Steve Taylor, The Fall, O Books, Hampshire, England, 2005
4. Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology, Penguin Books, London, 1970, p. 139
5.Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness, A History of the Mesopotamian Religion, Yale University Press, 1976, p. 77
6. Karl Kerenyi, Zeus and Hera, Bollingen Press
7. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 254
8. Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet and the Goddess, Viking, New York, 1998, p. 40
9. ibid, pp. 44
10. Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography, The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, p. xxiv-xxv
11. Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos, Inner Traditions, Vermont, 2006 and Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, Viking, New York, 2006
12. Apocalypse and Other Writings, p. 78

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The Myth of the Fall
and the Doctrine of Original Sin

Tapestry showing Adam, Eve, God and the serpent Florence

The Christian separation of matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the realm of the spirit, of natural grace and supernatural grace, has really castrated nature…The true spirituality, which would have come from the union of matter and spirit, has been killed.

                                                                             — Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1)

In the light of the ideas explored in the last two chapters, I could now understand that the Myth of the Fall of Man is the most dramatic and influential myth or meta-narrative of the solar phase of Separation. If we look at it from the perspective of the evolution of consciousness, the whole myth – telling the story of Eve’s temptation by the serpent, the disobedience of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Paradise - can be read as a metaphor that describes the painful stage of our separation or dissociation from the matrix of nature—the Garden of Eden out of which we have evolved. This separation aroused the sense of duality as well as guilt and conflict because we lost the original sense of participation in a primordial and sacred unity.
           Unfortunately, even tragically, the myth was taken literally as divine revelation and the Christian psyche was imprinted with the belief that human nature was fallen, cut-off from God as a result of the ‘sin’ of Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and being condemned to exile on earth. For nearly two thousand years Christians have been taught and have believed that their only chance of redemption was the doctrines and rituals of the Church and the saving grace of the sacrificial death of the Son of God. There was no salvation for those who were not Christians.
           A second meta-narrative developing out of the myth of the Fall of Man was the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. Until recently we had only two alternatives—to believe these meta-narratives because we were told they were the revealed word of God or to reject them. Now depth psychology has given us a different perspective from which to explore their influence on the psyche and anthropologists and historians of culture can discuss the social and political conditions which gave rise to them.
           “What is the origin of evil, of death, of suffering?” This question perplexed the authors of the Book of Genesis. It perplexed the formulators of Christian doctrine centuries ago and perplexes us still today. This chapter and the next will explore the influence of the two meta-narratives mentioned above which attempted to answer this question. They are a critical exploration of what may be called the “shadow” aspect of Christianity and invite the question of whether Christianity, in giving them such emphasis, may have presented a negative, not to say a false view of life to its believers.
           The Myth of the Fall originated with the Book of Genesis but its influence continued to be diffused throughout Jewish, Christian and Islamic culture. For a very long time, it has been the primary myth which has guided religious teaching in the West. To focus on only one religion, there are some two billion Christians in the world today – nearly a third of the world’s population – who will have absorbed from it the idea that a woman was responsible for bringing death, sin and suffering into the world and that humanity carries the bitter legacy of the Myth of the Fall. These two meta-narratives, so entwined with each other, have deeply wounded the Christian soul. Above all, they have wounded woman as well as man’s image of woman and man’s image of the feminine aspect of his own nature.
            It is impossible to exaggerate the deleterious effect they have had on the Western psyche and Western civilization as a whole. I cannot listen to the harsh, condemnatory words attributed to God in the Book of Genesis (Gen. 3: 8-19) without a sense of horror as well as deep compassion for the souls—particularly the souls of children—who have been or will be burdened with its oppressive message. I am appalled that humanity has had to carry the legacy of such a cruel, rejecting and judgmental image of God and the burden of original sin . These verses are often read out at Christmas at the beginning of the story of the birth of Jesus, as if to give the explanation as to why the human race should need to be redeemed by the birth of a Savior and his sacrificial death.

The Literal Interpretation of the Myth
           The literal interpretation of the myth bequeathed to generations of Christians a legacy of sexual guilt, misogyny and fear of the instincts. The more I read the documents of the Catholic and Protestant churches which reflected this literal interpretation, the more I could see the immense harm that was done to the relationship between men and women in Western civilization. Further, it was a major cause of a profoundly negative view of life and with it, a rejection of the world and a widening of the solar split between spirit and nature, mind and body. I could see that its influence has ultimately contributed to our growing dissociation from nature and our ruthless and unconscious exploitation of the earth’s resources. Since, in this myth, the earth was designated a place of exile, punishment and suffering why should we respect it? Since we had been banished to this place of suffering, toil and death it was inevitable that we should feel justified in exploiting it for our own benefit and that we should seek to offload our own sense of guilt by punishing or blaming others.
           In relation to its effect on our own instincts, I think that it is not too much to say that the greatest sickness in Christian culture has been the fear of sexuality, the denigration and denial of the ecstatic, the repression of the instinctive delight in life, and the enforced subservience of woman. The first mistake in Christian teaching was to dissociate the body and matter from spirit and from soul. The second was the belief that in order to cultivate the soul we had to neglect, deny and even inflict suffering on the body. In the name of the spiritual life, the body was made to endure every kind of mortification, including such sado-masochistic practices as starvation, flagellation and the wearing of hair shirts and other instruments of pain. I can understand why this whole train of ideas arose but I wonder whether, in splitting nature from spirit, emptying nature of soul and contaminating the instincts with guilt and fear, Christian teaching - like Marduk in the Babylonian myth – hasn’t split the wholeness of life and the wholeness of ourselves in two.
           Taking this further, it seemed to ascribe all goodness to God and all evil to man, placing an intolerable burden of guilt on our shoulders. Following the paradigm of solar mythology, which conceived of a great cosmic battle between good and evil, the next step was to ascribe all goodness to the Church and all evil to the pagan gods or any group which offered a challenge to the Church’s power, formulating the concept of the ‘saved’ and the ‘damned’ and reserving hell and damnation for ‘unbelievers’. How, I wondered, was it possible for the soul and the values of the heart to survive and flourish in the face of a belief system which did such violence to them? The actual teaching of Christ was neglected through the centuries of hair-splitting doctrinal disputes. Did Christianity take a wrong turning when it built the whole edifice of its doctrine of salvation through the sacrificial death of the Son of God on the foundation of the Myth of the Fall and the Doctrine of Original Sin? Was this what Christ would have wanted of would he have turned in his grave at the thought of what has been done in His name? As Joseph Campbell comments:

Our story of the Fall in the Garden sees nature as corrupt; and that myth corrupts the whole world for us. Because nature is thought of as corrupt, every spontaneous act is sinful and must not be yielded to. You get a totally different civilization and a totally different way of living according to whether your myth presents nature as fallen or whether nature is in itself a manifestation of divinity, and the spirit is the revelation of the divinity that is inherent in nature. (2)

           Because these myths or meta-narratives stand at the beginning of our cultural inheritance, it is very difficult to become aware of the assumptions derived from them, let alone to disempower them. The relevance of these myths to ourselves today is that the deeper layers of the soul which, for many thousands of years had known a life of participation in the life of the earth and the cosmos through an instinctual awareness of the unity and divinity of life, were now deprived of that experience. The older lunar mythology where all creation was imagined as the epiphany of the Great Mother, born from her cosmic womb in a great web of connections, was suppressed. The various mystery religions which had flourished under the Greek and Roman Empires were suddenly declared anathema. By the end of the fourth century, pagan temples had been destroyed and pagan rites prohibited. The Platonic Academy in Greece that had flourished for a thousand years, was closed down. Although elements of the older rituals were preserved and integrated into the new rituals, the Christian Church became the major instrument which delivered the coup de grâce to the old order. Even now, incredibly, there are echoes of this old prejudice in the current belief of certain Christian priests that yoga should not be practised by Christians because it is ‘pagan’.
           The Myth of the Fall that was given prominence in the teaching of St. Paul and disastrous new importance by St. Augustine, was deeply rooted in Jewish culture. It perfectly illustrates the change of state from lunar to solar culture, from unconscious participatory unity to separation, guilt, estrangement and exile. As a myth, it movingly describes our sense of isolation, exile and abandonment as we lost touch with the older way of experiencing life and embarked on a new phase in the evolution of consciousness. There is no more striking image of this sense of exile and loss than our expulsion from the Garden of Eden at the entrance of which an angel barring our re-entry. It is worth listening to D.H. Lawrence and how he saw this tremendous change:

Isn't 'fall' and 'redemption' quite a late and new departure in religion and in myth: about Homer's time? Aren't the great heavens of the true pagans...clean of the 'Salvation' ideas, though they have the re-birth idea? And aren't they clean of the 'fall', although they have the descent of the soul? The two things are quite different. In my opinion the great pagan religions of the Aegean, and Egypt and Babylon, must have conceived the 'descent' as a great triumph, and each Easter of the clothing in flesh as a supreme glory, and the Mother Moon who gives us our body as the supreme giver of the great gift, hence the very ancient Magna Mater in the East. This 'fall' into Matter...this 'entombment' in the 'envelope of flesh' is a new and pernicious idea arising about 500 B.C. into distinct cult-consciousness and destined to kill the grandeur of the heavens altogether at last. (3)

This can be contrasted with another passage from his Last Poems, where he describes the still living participatory consciousness of the Etruscan way of life:

Behind all the Etruscan liveliness was a religion of life…Behind all the dancing was a vision, and even a science of life, a conception of the universe and man’s place in the universe which made men live to the best of their capacity. To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The cosmos was alive, like a vast creature…The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima: and in spite of one great soul, there were myriad roving, lesser souls; every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, and had its own peculiar consciousness. (4)

           As we move into Christian culture, this earlier vision of life and the participatory consciousness which gave rise to it are lost to the European cultural tradition. It still survived in the peasant communities where the older traditions connected with the rhythms and sacredness of the earth continued to be nurtured and where the ancient worship of the Great Mother was transferred to the Virgin Mary. But in the sphere of Christian theology, the repudiation of the image of the goddess and with it the significance and influence of a feminine dimension of the divine was devastating because a vital thread of connection to the past was severed. Whereas the Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek and Roman Goddesses had given both men and women clearly defined images of different aspects of the Feminine to which they could relate, Christian culture offered only three role models of the Feminine: Eve, the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. The image of the soul was carried by the Virgin Mary, the dangerous desirousness of instinct by Eve and sexuality by Mary Magdalene. There is a fundamental split between the soul personified by the immaculately conceiving and—from the declaration in the Papal Edict of 1854—the immaculately conceived Virgin Mary, and the body, represented by the carnal Eve and Mary Magdalene, the ‘fallen’ woman. It was through the far-reaching influence of this myth that we lost the wholeness of our being and the awareness that the soul includes instinct and the life of the body.

The Myth of the Fall: (put in sidebar box)
1. describes the experience of the birth of consciousness or self-awareness
as a fall from unity and harmony.
2. names Eve as the primary cause of original sin and explains the presence of suffering, death and evil in the world as the result of her disobedience to God and leading Adam into sin through responding to the temptation of the serpent, Satan.
3. offers the scriptural foundation for the misogyny of the patriarchal view of woman.
4. reflects and reinforces the dualistic split between spirit and nature, mind and body and between this fallen world and an original “perfect” world untainted by sin that we once inhabited and from which we were expelled by God.
5. associates sexuality with sin, shame and guilt.

The Demythologizing of the Goddess
           The Myth of the Fall of Man originates with the Book of Genesis. The date of its appearance is not precisely known but is thought to be between the tenth and eighth centuries BC. It may be that it was first formulated after some dire catastrophe had happened to the Jewish people — possibly the ethnic cleansing by the Assyrians of the entire population of Samaria, the northern province of Israel ca. 720 BC. Since we know that in the child, a deep conviction of guilt may be formed when some trauma has been experienced in early life, we can apply this understanding to a group of people living at a specific historical time who experienced a great catastrophe. According to the beliefs of the time, they interpreted this catastrophe in terms of a punishment visited on them by God for the sin of disobedience and the worship of false gods. The myth can be read as the story of the deliberate demythologizing of the hated goddess by the priesthood of that time into a human woman—Eve—who is blamed for bringing suffering, death and evil into the world.
           The title that Adam gives to Eve in this myth is actually the former title of the Great Mother —“Mother of All Living”— a title also held by the Shekinah in Kabbalah. It is strange and surely significant that the Genesis myth takes the life-affirming images of the Garden, the Tree of Life and the Serpent — all inseparable from the goddess in the mythology of the earlier era, and weaves them into a story about disobedience, fear, guilt, punishment and blame. The Great Mother who once contained both the living and the dead within her being now, astonishingly, as Eve, becomes the cause of death coming into the world.
           Whatever its origins and the reasons for its appearance, what we are listening to as we decode the imagery, is a complete reversal of the lunar mythology of the Goddess culture. We need look no further than this myth and the interpretation given to it by generations of theologians, priests and rabbis, not only for the ideas which led to the loss of soul but also, as I hope to show, for the misogyny which spread like a contagious virus through the three Abrahamic religions. As Jack Holland writes in his masterly analysis of the historical roots of misogyny:

The hatred of women affects us in ways that no other hatred does because it strikes at our innermost selves. It is located where the private and public worlds intersect. The history of that hatred may dwell on its public consequences, but at the same time it allows us to speculate on why, at the personal level, man’s complex relationship to woman has permitted misogyny to thrive. Ultimately, such speculation should allow us to see how equality between the sexes will eventually be able to banish misogyny and put an end to the world’s oldest prejudice. (5)

An Alternative Interpretation
           The myth says that Eve and Adam made the wrong choice, which brought disastrous consequences upon the human race and that we have been punished for that primal act of disobedience to God. The myth was interpreted literally and negatively yet we, in a later age, can understand it differently. The important idea that we have freewill and the possibility of choice as well as responsibility for the choices we make is intrinsic to this myth. So, while the myth does describe an abrupt loss of participatory consciousness, it also can be seen as descriptive of the dawning of a new phase in the evolution of human consciousness.
           As the story is currently interpreted, it is Eve’s response to the serpent which initiates the change from unity and harmony in the divine world to a state of separation and estrangement in this one. Yet her actions could be understood as a story about responding to the prompting of instinct — of which the serpent is a primary representation — to move into a new phase in our evolution, losing touch with the participatory vision of the earlier time. From my experience as a Jungian analyst, I knew that the appearance of snakes in dreams can signify regeneration, renewal and the beginning of a new phase of life or a new attitude, as an older, more unconscious state is relinquished. Yet, as a result of the traditional interpretation given to the myth, people who, over the centuries, have dreamed of snakes may have interpreted them as an image of seduction, temptation and evil — even associating them with the Devil.
           The birth of self-awareness entails the loss of unconscious and instinctive participation in an original state of unity. The separation from nature necessarily creates duality: awareness of ourselves as separate from our surrounding environment; awareness of duality reflected in all the pairs of opposites, most importantly, the opposites of life and death. The loss of the participatory consciousness of the older state creates feelings of guilt and disorientation which this myth brilliantly describes, carried in the idea that we made the wrong choice. But, in reality, there is no primordial sin, no ongoing moral guilt. We did not make the wrong choice. There is, however, tragic guilt in the sense of our having carried the burden of guilt engendered by this myth without comprehending how and why it arose nor of being able to recognize it as a metaphor which brilliantly describes, in the act of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the birth of self-awareness in our species and the separation of ego from instinct. Whether it was necessary to experience such a radical split is debatable. It may be that the myth itself created the split.

The Projection of Unconscious Guilt
           In the deep unconscious of the modern psyche, however secular our society, we may still be influenced by this Christian meta-narrative since, at the unconscious level, old beliefs and habits persist long after they are thought to have been discarded. If, over many centuries, people are indoctrinated with the idea that they are flawed or are born into a state of sin, they will try to get rid of this intolerable burden by projecting their unconscious feelings of ‘badness’ onto other groups or individuals. These ‘others’ are then named and attacked as something bad or evil who need to be punished or eliminated. Since both the guilt and the projection are held at a deeply unconscious level, whether in the individual or the collective psyche, the end result will be disconnected from the memory of the original imprinting.
            Applying this reasoning to the collective Christian psyche, it could be argued that the ‘shadow’ aspect of Christianity with its persecution of Jews, Muslims, Pagans or any group perceived as threatening to the power of the Church and its teaching could be connected with the need to offload the unconscious guilt imprinted on the psyche by the Myth of the Fall.
           Added to this burden of guilt was the inwardly-directed attack on the ‘appetites of the flesh’ practised by so many ascetics who, thinking that this would bring them closer to God, tried to suppress their sexual instincts and ward off the attacks of the Devil — in the form of women tempting them to fornication — with horrendous deprivation and self-inflicted austerities. A typical passage in Colossians iii, 5 urges people to “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.” It would never have occurred to those practicing the severe austerities enjoined on them by such texts, that the instincts they had repressed would return to attack them in the form of the obsessive fantasies that so plagued the Desert Fathers of early Christianity. To name these as “assaults of the Devil” only led to further acts of repression and greater austerities. If evil was an element in the cosmic order, its power was immeasurably increased by the repression of sexuality and all that resulted from it. I was struck by this passage in a book called Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness by Frederick Turner which sensitively explores how the pathology of the Western Christian psyche, with its disastrous focus on conquest and conversion, developed:

It seems to me that aggression against the body, against the natural world, against primitives, heretics, all unbelievers; and the vain, tragic, pathetically maintained hope of thus winning a lost belief or paradise: this is the terrific burden Christian history has to bear. It is the classic reaction of those who have lost true belief (or have been robbed of it) that they must insist with mounting strenuousness that they do believe and that all others must as well. For as social psychologists have shown, if the bereft can thus succeed in harmonizing the world with themselves, then the inward gnawing doubt might be stopped and the intolerable condition of spiritual inanition alleviated. (6)

          Even now we can see how easily negative projections can be activated in our modern society against anyone who can be designated an enemy or demonized as evil. We can see this scenario re-animated in the present polarization between “good” and “evil” on the political stage, where the conviction of moral superiority has been claimed by one group and the blame for evil fixed on another. We can see it in our compulsive addiction to ever more lethal weapons in order to deter a potential adversary or a future attack, without any apparent awareness of our own contribution to the proliferation of evil through the projection onto others of our unconscious shadow. Thousands of young men are sent to their deaths because of these negative projections. We can see these projections reflected in the bitter debates within the Anglican Church about ordaining women first as priests, then as bishops and in the determined effort of the evangelical branch of Christianity to demonize homosexuality, (because in the Old Testament it is believed to have been named a sin) reflected in the comment of a woman on the possibility of a gay priest being ordained a bishop in 2004, “That man is a beast.”
          Understanding the myth in this new sense could help to remove the intolerable hair-shirt of guilt and the need to project that guilt onto others which has been imprinted on the Christian psyche by the interpretation given to the myth by Christian theologians, both Catholic and Protestant. It was their literal interpretation of the myth rather than the myth itself which deprived us of a life of participation — in the deeper layers of the soul — with the natural world and cut us off from our instincts. To me, this is a prime symptom of the pathology of the solar age which has led man to treat nature, woman and body as something unregenerate, far removed from himself, as objects to be feared that he must control and dominate.

The Christian Fathers: the Obsession with Sexuality, Sin and Guilt
           It is astonishing to discover the effect of this myth on the early Christian Fathers: Origen, Tertullian, Clement, Chrysostom, Jerome, Athanasius, Augustine and others. What leaps out from their writings in the early documents of the church is their absolute obsession with the sin of the Fall and with sexual guilt. As I read with mounting incredulity what they had written about this myth, I said to myself “What on earth was the matter with them that they were more concerned with sexual guilt than with the teaching of Christ? Whence came their sexual neurosis?” All were brilliantly gifted men in an intellectual sense All were convinced that the sexual instinct was the main impediment to spirituality and that their sexuality had to be sacrificed in order for them to be acceptable to God. All had a phobic terror of what they called the “dark hole between faeces and urine,” the “uncleanliness of the womb” and “the parts of shame.” All, like Plato, regarded the body as the prison of the soul and identified men with spirituality and women with carnality and the “animal instincts.” Origen (3rd century AD), perhaps the most remarkable and prolific writer of them all, is said to have castrated himself. Nowhere is the pathological dissociation between soul and body in the religions of the solar age more clearly revealed than in their writings and the endless theological debates over the nature of God.
           St. Augustine (AD 354-430), a most sensitive and outstandingly gifted man as well as one who was strongly attracted to women, repudiated his partner of fifteen years, whom he dearly loved and by whom he had had a son, because of a socially desirable marriage arranged by his Christian mother: “My mistress was torn from my side, as an impediment to my marriage, and my heart, which clung to her, was torn and wounded till it bled.” (7) We don’t hear what happened to her heart or that of their son, Adeodonatus (Given to God) who, tragically, died at the age of sixteen, shortly after his parents’ parting. This sad and revealing passage was written by his father after his death:

God effects some good in correcting adults when they are chastised by the sufferings and deaths of the children who are dear to them. Why should this not happen, since, when the pain is past, it is as nothing to those to whom it happened? While those on whose account it happened will either be better men if they are corrected by their temporal disasters and decide to live better lives; or else they will have no excuse when they are punished at the future judgement, if they refuse to direct their longing towards eternal life under the stress of this life’s pain. (8) check ref.

           Within two years of his separation from his mistress, Augustine had converted to Christianity and, after discarding another mistress, had taken a vow of chastity because he believed this state would be more pleasing to God than his arranged marriage. No doubt influenced by his Christian mother, who was delighted by his conversion, he identified sexuality with sin. Converting to Christianity necessitated the renunciation of his sexuality. From then on, for the Christian soul as for the body, since the soul could take no trust or delight in the sexual expression of its life, the situation deteriorated still further as St. Augustine’s theory of original sin became a standard doctrine of the Catholic Church.
            With the Reformation, both Luther and Calvin continued to base their teaching on this doctrine and the need of redemption by Christ’s sacrificial death because of it. St. Anselm (AD 1033-1109), an Italian priest who became Archbishop of Canterbury, writes in his Meditation of Human Redemption: “A man appended to a cross suspends the eternal death impending over the human race; a man fastened to a cross unfastens a world affixed to endless death.” Those who did not belong to the Church were thought to be consigned to this endless death.
           St. Augustine, Jack Holland writes, “established the philosophical edifice that propped up the Christian view of the world, including its misogynistic vision.”

Augustine is one of the watershed personalities of history. He stands between the world of Classical Antiquity (which had endured for about a 1000 years) and that of Christian civilization. He is the first person from antiquity who revealed to us the turmoil of his interior world as recorded in his remarkable work, Confessions….At the centre of the turmoil of Augustine’s search for God is the struggle between the desire of the flesh and striving of the will, the profound dualism that Augustine will incorporate into the very heart of Catholicism using Plato’s philosophical apparatus. His cry of anguish echoes that of St. Paul, but with a power and complexity the Apostle could not match. (9)

           Augustine’s moving Confessions, begun around the year 400 AD when he was forty-six, are saturated with a profound rejection and distrust of his body. In psychological terms, the will of his conscious mind — dedicated to God — was forcibly imposed on his instincts, with disastrous consequences for himself as well as for generations of Christians. Influenced by Greek and also, perhaps unconsciously, Manichaean ideas, he now, like Plato, associated his body with the irrational “lower” instincts, believing that sexuality was in itself a mortal sin. Projecting his own profound sense of sinfulness onto the hapless body of the whole of humanity, he believed it was a mass of sin, a “massa peccati,” and that the state of original sin meant that not only do we arrive in a state of sin when we are born, but that we are incapable of refraining from sinning. He saw the whole human race as “the multitude of the damned” because of original sin. From this miserable state we can only be rescued by the grace of God and then, only those who were predestined to be so rescued. He struggled desperately to understand where evil came from and, because he believed that God must be wholly good and ‘incorruptible’, he concluded that evil must come from man, principally from his ‘corruptible’ body.
           St. Augustine was not the originator of the theory of original sin. It had existed in the Jewish tradition and was taught by St. Paul. Augustine refers to earlier Christian theologians who had expounded on it. However, the basic concept of the Augustinian version of the theory is that Adam was the originator of the fall of the human race and, as its progenitor - who carried within himself all future generations - the transmitter of the contaminated seed of sinfulness to those generations. Incredibly, he believed that every child who was born into the world through sexual intercourse arrived in a state of sin carried forward as an inheritance from its primordial ancestor. “By a kind of divine justice the human race was handed over to the devil’s power, since the sin of the first man passed at birth to all who were born by intercourse of the two sexes, and the debt of the first parents bound all their posterity.”(10)
            Sexual desire was thus transmitted like an incurable disease through the sexual act. Adam’s sin had corrupted the whole of nature and made it subject to death but the entire sorry story was initiated by Eve. In The City of God, he wrote that from the moment of the Fall, “The flesh began to lust against the spirit. With this rebellion we are born, just as we are doomed to die and because of the first sin, to bear, in our members and vitiated nature, either the battle with or defeat by the flesh.” (11) This is solar mythology at its most extreme whose polarizing effect was enormously amplified by the identification of the body with sin and Augustine’s own inner battle with his sexuality.
           From St. Augustine’s profound conviction of his sexual sin and guilt came the formulation of the Doctrine of Original Sin. Through this doctrine, the love of God and obedience to Him were placed in opposition to the instinctive life of the body. Chastity and sexual abstinence were believed to restore the lost sense of unity. “Truly by continence are we bound together and brought back into that unity from which we were dissipated into a plurality.” (12)
           It is not difficult to imagine the effect of this Christian belief on the sexual relations between men and women. Even a man’s passionate embrace of his wife was deemed to be adulterous. Nor is it difficult to understand that it was Augustine’s savage crucifixion of his own sexual instinct and his passionate nature which gave rise to his distorted view of human nature and his explanation of the origin of evil. The repudiation of his sexuality was echoed in his cruel repudiation of his mistress. The wound to her soul was not considered to be a sin.
           St. Augustine immeasurably compounded a tragic situation that was already well established by earlier Fathers of the Church. His theory of original sin became a foundation stone of Christian doctrine and has endured to this day. However, he gave this theory a new gloss: Grace is necessary for salvation since without it we remain irredeemably mired in a state of sin.
           St. Augustine’s theory of original sin and the need for grace was condemned by Pelagius (AD 354-418), who was originally a priest in the Celtic church and later a respected theologian and teacher who lived in Rome. Pelagius wanted to lift the burden of original sin from the human race and took issue with St. Augustine over his interpretation, insisting that only Adam was affected by the sin that led to the Fall. His beliefs may be stated as follows:

           · Original sin does not exist
           · Infants are born in the same state of innocence as Adam before the Fall
           · Grace is not necessary for people to be saved
           · Redemption is earned through following Christ’s example, not through His sacrificial death

            The human race has free will and the capacity for choice and moral responsibility: man was not dependent on Christ for redemption nor was divine grace essential for redemption. He insisted that human nature was innately good because created by God and denied that salvation could only come through belonging to the Church.
           Pelagius is like a breath of fresh air in the midst of Augustine’s morbid obsession with sin. The great doctrinal struggle between them gives us the image of two powerful stags locking antlers. Pelagius was declared a heretic in 417 and died a year later, but had he won the fiercely debated doctrinal battle with St. Augustine, the history of Christianity might have been very different. We might have been spared the virulent theological struggles for power and the neurotic preoccupation with sin and sexuality that have so bedevilled the history of the Christian Church to this day. We might also have been spared the Manichaean polarization of humanity into the saved and the damned — carried right through to our times in Fundamentalist beliefs about the Rapture in the End Times — when God takes to heaven those who are predestined to be saved and leaves the rest to perish. Further, we might have been spared the tortures and executions that went with the belief that it was God's will that the Church should seek out and extirpate sin and heresy wherever it could be found. This passage from a recent book by Charles Freeman called AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State, needs to be quoted at length:

Augustine’s lasting contribution to political thought lies in his justification of authoritarian regimes that see virtue in order per se, rather than in any abstract ideal such as justice or the defence of human rights, or even in the teachings of Jesus themselves. At a stroke Augustine supplants centuries of Greek thought…which viewed the government of the city primarily in terms of the well-being of its citizens. Moreover, when Church and state become mutually supportive in the upholding of order, then the punishment of heretics becomes a matter of state policy. This would be the norm in medieval Europe… Augustine’s underlying premise – that there is a single truth that can only be grasped through faith; that human beings are helpless; that God is essentially punitive, ready to send even babies into eternal hell fire; and that one has a right, even a duty, to burn heretics – challenges the whole ethos of the Greek intellectual tradition, where competition between rival philosophies was intrinsic to progress…The freedom to speculate freely as an individual had no place in his system: he was terrified by the idea that all might contribute to the finding of truth. Augustine bequeathed a tradition of fear to Christianity, fear that one’s speculations might be heretical and fear that, even if they were not, one might still go to hell as punishment for the sin of Adam. (13)

           Such was the effect of the repression (not the control) of his sexual instinct in a very brilliant, passionate and sensitive man that it was able to manifest in a complex strong enough to direct a Church for centuries and to lead to the deaths of thousands of individuals whose only “sin” was to be accused of heresy.
           The idea of heresy was first introduced by the Emperor Theodosius in AD 381 when anyone who did not comply with his edict that all must believe in the doctrine that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were of one and the same substance would be declared a heretic. The end result of Theodosius’ policy was the persecution not only of heretics but of the pagan religions and the destruction of their shrines and magnificent temples. It was at this time that the idea entered Christianity that hell and eternal punishment awaited heretics and unbelievers. Augustine himself later sanctioned the burning alive of heretics as an appropriate punishment for their ‘sin’. From this time on, the idea developed that the Catholic Church, backed by the Emperor, had to have absolute authority and control of the lives of its members. The Church simply took over the model of absolutism that had been presented to them by the Emperor, ever since it became associated with the imperial policy of the authoritarian Roman state in the reign of Constantine (ca. AD 272-ca.337).
            It is in the crucially important fourth century that the Catholic Church appears to have been deflected from the path to God as taught by Christ and became contaminated by the pursuit of ‘Caesar’s power’. It could be argued that the pursuit of power and the growing authoritarianism of the Catholic Church has led directly to the horrors of the totalitarian states of the last century. Through its six-hundred-year pursuit of heretics through the office of the Inquisition, the Church showed how a carefully thought out and minutely organized policy using intimidation, sadism and fear as its tools of power offered a model of ensuring conformity of belief among vast numbers of people. This created a precedent for the behavior of totalitarian states in the last century, a precedent made more powerful because it was practised by the highest religious authority.

The Legacy of St. Augustine
           The Doctrine of Original Sin was a catastrophe not only for sexuality but for woman who was held to be the prime carrier of the ‘lower’ animal instincts. Sexual intercourse was declared to be only for the purpose of procreation, never for pleasure. Woman was not to be regarded as the beloved companion of man but only as a kind of useful function — the bearer of his seed and provider of his meals. If possible, couples were to live in chastity within marriage. In the view of the Church Fathers, the only way women could gain men’s respect was to remain virgins. If men chose the spiritual life, they could not allow themselves to be ‘defiled’ by intercourse with women. In the fourth and fifth centuries, “Virginity was the Christian virtue par excellence.” (14)
           Because infants were contaminated from the moment of their conception by the transmission of original sin from their parents, if they died without being baptized, their souls could not be saved and were consigned to hell. One can imagine the effects of this doctrine on parents who had lost a child. From this twisted belief, the Catholic Church developed the idea which survived until very recently, that if it came to a choice of saving one or the other in childbirth, it was more important to save the life of the unbaptized infant than the life of its mother in order that the infant should receive baptism. The suffering generated by this belief is unimaginable and indefensible.
           The belief about the sinfulness of sexuality also led to the idea that a priest or deacon who serves God must be sexually abstinent and to many attempts by the Church to enforce celibacy on its clergy — most of them unsuccessful. The earliest attempts date to a council held in Spain in the fourth century when married priests were enjoined to avoid intercourse with their wives. Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604) decreed that a priest, once ordained, should “love his wife like a sister and shun her like an enemy.” Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh century called for “severing intercourse between priests and women by means of everlasting anathema.” Finally, in 1139, Pope Innocent II proclaimed that ordained priests could not marry. A few centuries later, the Council of Trent (1545-63) forbade men who were already married from becoming priests. (15)
           A sombre reflection on the legacy of St. Augustine is offered by the late Philip Sherrard in his perceptive book The Rape of Man and Nature. I am quoting Sherrard at some length because he shows how differently we might have perceived ourselves:

It is one of the paradoxes, and also one of the tragedies, of the Western Christian tradition that the man who affirmed so strongly the presence of God in the depths of his own self…should as a dogmatic theologian have been responsible more perhaps than any other Christian writer for ‘consecrating’ within the Christian world the idea of man’s slavery and impotence due to the radical perversion of human nature through original sin. It has been St. Augustine’s theology which in the West has veiled down to the present day the full radiance of the Christian revelation of divine sonship – the full revelation of who man essentially is…He deprives the element of manhood in the God-manhood reality of any genuine positive quality, and to do this is to empty the concept of divine sonship of its effective significance.

Through the Fall man and the natural order are deprived of even that extrinsic participation in grace which they possessed in their pre-fallen state. Their original and true nature is now vitiated, totally corrupt and doomed to destruction…As for the communication of grace, through which alone man and the world may be redeemed from depravity, this...was confined to the visible church and depended on the performance of certain rites, like baptism, confirmation, ordination and so on, which it was the privilege of the ecclesiastical hierarchy to administer to a submissive and obedient laity.

The magnificent scope of the Logos doctrine with its whole “cosmic” dimension – the idea of God incarnate in all human and created existence – was tacitly and radically constricted in Western thinking…The Church became the unique sphere of the Spirit’s manifestation…Everything outside the limits of the Church was secular, deprived of grace, incurably corrupt and doomed to disintegration. (16)

           From an understanding of the loss of the participatory consciousness of lunar culture, the Logos doctrine could have kept this alive in the solar era and it seems a tragedy that, in Western Christianity, this was lost.
           St. Augustine can be described as a world-denying contemplative rather than a world-embracing one. The stance he took against his own desires was agonizing for him and for generations of Christians. Yet, his struggle with himself must be seen in the context of the world of his time and the widening split between the conscious mind and the instinctive soul. In spite of my recognition of the harm he inflicted on the Christian psyche, I am always deeply moved by these words in one of the most exquisite passages to come from the heart of a lover of God: “Too late I came to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh, yea too late came I to love thee. And behold, thou wert within me, and I out of myself, where I made search for thee.” (17)
           Through my work as a therapist, I found that the belief in original sin and the profound rejection of woman, the body and sexuality that developed from it is still carried in the unconscious psyche of modern men and women, no matter how much they may have adapted to a secular culture. From a Jungian perspective, man’s anima – the unconscious internalised image of woman that he carries in his psyche - will have been imprinted with the Christian teaching on original sin. This may cause him to fall back on old beliefs of woman’s inferiority and subservience whenever he feels threatened in his relationships with women and may also be responsible for the negative view of themselves that many women hold. These old beliefs manifest in the debasement and abuse of women displayed in pornography and in rap lyrics as well as in the ongoing and deplorable domestic violence towards women. Even the current obsession with sex and promiscuity that is so much a part of the modern Western world can be seen as an unconscious compensation to the same sexual complex that led to its repression. It has inflicted a devastating wound on the Christian psyche. It is a powerful thought form or complex that has not been recognized and addressed and, therefore, cannot be transformed.
            Wherever evangelical Christianity is taken, the teaching about original sin goes with it, wounding the souls of all who are converted to Christianity. Just when it seemed as if Christians might be emerging from the stranglehold of this complex, fundamentalist branches of Christianity are regressing into it. It is hardly surprising that many people have turned against the dogmatic excesses of religion and turned with relief to science and a secular society.

Notes:
1. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, p. 197
2. Ibid, p. 99
3. Letter to Frederick Carter 29 October 1929 in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. VII, eds. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton, CUP 1993, pp.544-5.
4. D.H. Lawrence, Last Poems, The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Vol 1, p. 17
5. Jack Holland, Misogyny, The World’s Oldest Prejudice, Constable and Robinson Ltd. London, 2006, p. 11
6. Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography: the Western Spirit against the Wilderness, p. 73, fourth edition, Rutgers University Press, New Jersey, 1992
7. St. Augustine, Confessions, Book VI.15
8. formerly 35. Henry Bettenson, The Later Christian Fathers, p. 202
9. Holland, p. 91
10. Henry Bettensson, The Later Christian Fathers, p. 220, de trin.16
11. The City of God, Image Books, 1958
12. Confessions, Book X. 40
13. Charles Freeman, AD 381: Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State, p. 171-172
14. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, Eunuchs for Heaven, English translation André Deutsch Ltd., London, 1990, p. 45
15. ibid, pp. 85-89
16. Philip Sherrard, The Rape of Man and Nature, Golgonooza Press. Philip Sherrard, born in 1922, is the author of many books on metaphysical and literary themes. He has translated, with G.E. H. Palmer and Kallistos Ware, The Philokalia in 3 volumes, 1979, 1981 and 1984.
17. Confessions, Book X. 27

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CHAPTER EIGHT
Misogyny:
The Origin of Negative Attitudes towards Woman

Massacio The Expulsion

Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die (Sirach 25:24)

The Christian attitude to woman draws on earlier attitudes which are carried in Jewish commentaries on the Myth of the Fall, for they were partly responsible for laying the foundation on which later Christian writers built. In the Old Testament we find this key sentence: “Of the woman came the beginning of sin, and through her we all die.” From the Jews, the Christians took the original Myth of the Fall. They also inherited the various passages in the Old Testament, including the story of Lilith, Adam’s first wife, which presented woman as a threat to man.
           This view of woman was carried forward into Christian culture—not through the words or teaching of Jesus but through the influence of St. Paul. In his letters to the different churches, St. Paul instructed women to keep their heads covered, not to teach or speak in church and to be subject to their husbands in all things, “for man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.” (1 Tim. 2:8-14, Eph. 5:22-4, 1 Cor. 14:34-5, 1 Cor. 11:7-9)
           This was one root of the negative view of woman that was developed in Christianity. The other root was the ideas that prevailed about women in the Greek world as reflected in Plato’s Theory of Forms. In this Theory, as Jack Holland writes,

the very act of conception is viewed as a falling away from the perfection of God into the abysmal world of appearance, of suffering and death...This dualistic vision of reality denigrated the world of the senses, placing it in an eternal struggle with the achievement of the highest form of knowledge: the knowledge of God. This vision profoundly influenced Christian thinkers in their view of women, who literally as well as figuratively embodied what is scorned as transient, mutable and contemptible.”(1)

           However, apart from philosophical theories, there were also social customs. Karen Jo Torjesen brilliantly illuminates in her book When Women were Priests how the Christian Fathers absorbed their view of the different roles of men and women from the social customs of the Roman Empire and how these, in turn, were inherited from those that existed in Greek culture. It seems incredible to discover that views about women which still prevail today can be traced back to these ancient cultures. As she writes, “When women are dismissed as irrational and men are presumed to be innately logical, we can be sure these conclusions are prompted by the persistent whisperings of long-dead Greek philosophers in society’s ear.”(2)
           Torjesen writes that the Greek theory held that the human self has two aspects:

A superior, masculine self—rational, virile, masterful, and noble—and an inferior, feminine self that is irrational, sexual, animal, and potentially dangerous. Enshrined within this theory of the self are the gendered values of male honor and female shame. Masculinity, equated with sexual and political dominance, is designated “rational.” By identifying the sexual, appetitive, and “dangerous” aspects of the self as irrational, the philosophers split off the “uncontrollable” parts of human nature and projected them onto a “lower female self.” Through this gendering of the self, femaleness became the primary symbol for the irrational and uncontrollable. Women could then be labelled irrational, sensual, and dangerous because of the supposed dominance of their “lower” female nature and the weakness of their “higher” masculine self. (3)

           But, she observes,

Instead of celebrating femaleness as providing a unique avenue of access to God, or seeing in femaleness a profound expression of the divine, Christianity left the traditional cultural meanings of femaleness and female sexuality unchanged. Rationality and self-control retained their masculine cast, while passion, sexuality, and body are particularly female…Woman’s body, since it was a stark proclamation of sexuality, was not in the image of God; it represented rather the pull of those forces that drew humanity away from God. (4)

           Putting the Greek (and Roman) inheritance together with Jewish beliefs about original sin and the shame of sexuality, it is clear that this dual legacy was to have a disastrous impact on women’s psyche and women’s lives in Christian culture.
          It is therefore all the more astonishing to discover that in the first two centuries after the death of Jesus, women played a valuable and valued public role in the early Church. To begin with, Christianity was disseminated through meetings in the houses of individuals—many of them distinguished and wealthy women, well respected in their community. When they were baptized as Christians, their whole household, including slaves, was baptized with them. Women preached, taught, baptized and performed healings and exorcisms in the earliest Christian community. Women were attracted to Christianity because it gave them a freedom and a respect that they were not accorded in the surrounding culture, whether Jewish, Greek or Roman. For the first time, they had choice in the disposal of their bodies: they could abstain from marriage by remaining virgins or could choose to be celibate within marriage and even refrain from having children or more children through sexual abstinence. Marriage was for life. A wife could not be put aside. Infidelity in a man was regarded as sinful as it was in a woman.
           Jesus’ attitude towards women was truly revolutionary and, in the way he treated them, he broke with Jewish as well as Roman custom. Even his disciples were surprised and even shocked by his unusual behavior towards women, as when he spoke with a Samaritan woman (John 4:27). Women surrounded Jesus during his ministry; invited him into their houses; anointed him, as Mary Magdalene did, with precious ointment; and generally, were welcomed by him as disciples and friends. It is possible that, as a rabbi, he was married, since this was the Jewish custom at that time, and there is no reason—other than the conviction of the Christian Fathers that the Son of God had to be celibate—to exclude the possibility that he had a close relationship with Mary Magdalene, who was the first to greet him after his resurrection (Mark 16:9) and the first to bring the good news to the other disciples. Certain of the Gnostic gospels allude to the intimate relationship between them.
            In the Dialogue of the Saviour, for example, Mary is praised as a visionary, as the apostle who excels all the rest and as the woman “who knew the All.” (5) It seems that there were several women called “Mary.” In the Gospel of Philip, there is this passage: “There were three who always walked with the Lord: Mary his mother and her sister and Magdalene, the one who was called his companion. His [Jesus’] sister and his mother and his companion were each a Mary.” (6) There is also this passage: “And the companion of the Saviour is Mary Magdalene. But Christ loved her more than all the disciples and used to kiss her often on the mouth. The rest of the disciples were offended by it and said to him, “Why do you love her more than all of us?” (7)
            In the Gospel of Mary, Peter says to her, “We know that the Saviour loved you more than the rest of women. Tell us the words of the Saviour which you remember—which you know.” Andrew and Peter reject her words, saying that they do not believe them. Mary cries and Levi rebukes them saying, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered. Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries. But if the Saviour made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Saviour knows her very well. That is why he loved her more than us.” (8) (spelling as in translation)
           But to the theologians, any suggestion that the Son of God could have sexual relations or be married was inconceivable. The Saviour had to be “chaste” and “undefiled.” He could not be allowed to transmit original sin through the sexual act.
           As Church doctrine developed, particularly after the Council of Ephesus in AD 431 when Mary was declared Theotokos, or God-Bearer, it was decided that she also could not be contaminated by original sin. The fact that Jesus had sisters and brothers born before him was expunged from the record in order that Mary should be a sexually pure recipient of the Holy Spirit. For, if his mother had been defiled by sexual intercourse and Jesus born in the normal way, like his brothers and sisters, he would have been contaminated by original sin and could not have been the Son of God. The sexually explicit distinction between Mary and other women had to be clearly drawn. She was to remain a virgin before, during and after the birth of her son. The Church tangled itself in knots with endless doctrinal debates which detracted from rather than added to the teaching it believed itself appointed to transmit.
           There was a marked change in the attitude towards women in the third and fourth centuries when Christian theologians — many of them originally lawyers — began to inveigh against women holding any priestly office or even speaking out in debates in church, for by now, churches had been built to hold large congregations. Once again, as in Greek and Jewish culture, women were to be confined to the home and could hold no public office. Their primary role was to accept the rule of chastity, silence and obedience, to copy Mary’s example of humility. As Irenaeus (ca. AD 125-200) stated it: “Eve by her disobedience brought death on herself and on all the human race: Mary, by her obedience, brought salvation.” (9) The power of men to control the lives of women seems not to have been questioned.
            Tertullian, (AD160-220), a theologian and prolific writer living in North Africa, became one of the most vociferous critics of women holding priestly office: “It is not permitted for a woman to speak in the church, nor is it permitted for her to teach, nor to baptize, nor to offer the [eucharist], nor to claim for herself a share in any masculine function—least of all, in priestly office.” (10) Tertullian addressed women directly in one of the most virulently misogynistic passages that have come down to us:

By every garb of penitence woman might the more fully expiate that which she derives from Eve – the ignominy, I mean, of the first sin, and the odium of human perdition…Do you not know that you are each an Eve?…You are the Devil’s gateway; you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree; you are the first deserter of the divine law…You destroyed God’s image, man. On account of your desert – that is, death – even the son of God had to die. (11)

           Despite the fact that in the Gospels Jesus does not equate sexuality with sinfulness but, on the contrary, protects an adulterous woman from death by stoning, the idea of enmity between the higher (soul) and lower (body) aspects of human nature and the sinfulness of sexuality became, through the influence of St. Augustine and later theologians, one of the major themes of Christian teaching. Generations of Christian ascetics believed that the path to God could only be opened through the renunciation of anything to do with the contamination of woman. After his conversion, St. Augustine wouldn’t allow any woman in his house, not even his elder sister or his nieces, all of whom were nuns. (12)
           What I found endlessly repeated in the writings of the Christian theologians is that woman, because of her descent from Eve, was described in this imagery: As an inferior substance because Eve emerged from Adam; as a secondary creation because Eve was created second, out of Adam; as the ally of the serpent and the devil because she succumbed to temptation first; as the Devil’s gateway through whom the Devil or Satan is enabled to pursue his aims in the world through causing her to tempt men into sexual relations. These ideas laid the ground for the witch trials over 1000 years later when women were specifically accused of ‘consorting’ with the Devil and even having intercourse with him. The fact that Eve in Genesis is described as a secondary creation drawn from the body of Adam rather than a primary creation, led to this contorted statement from Gratian, a twelfth century theologian:

The image of God is in man and it is one. Women were drawn from man, who has God’s jurisdiction as if he were God’s vicar, because he has the image of the one God. Therefore Woman is not made in God’s image…Adam was beguiled by Eve, not she by him…It is right that he whom woman led into wrongdoing should have her under his direction, so that he may not fail a second time through female levity. (13)

           The end result of these projections was that Eve and all women were equated with body, matter and carnality and with the irrational nature of man. Adam, who got off relatively lightly as a primary creation and as a secondary rather than a primary sinner, was equated with the rational soul, following the Greek view of man. “Woman,” wrote Albertus Magnus, teacher of Thomas Aquinas, in the twelfth century, “is an imperfect man and possesses, compared to him, a defective and deficient nature. She is therefore insecure in herself. That which she herself cannot receive, she endeavours to obtain by means of mendacity and devilish tricks.” (14) No wonder it has been so difficult for women priests and women bishops to gain acceptance!
           Here are two statements from the pen of St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) who was greatly influenced by Aristotle’s derogatory view of woman:

As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from a defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even some external influence, like the south wind, for example, which is damp.

The image of God, in its principal signification, namely the intellectual nature, is found both in man and in woman…But in a secondary sense the image of God is found in man, and not in woman: for man is the beginning and end of woman; as God is the beginning and end of every creature. (15)

           The misogynistic attitude towards women that prevailed in Greek and Roman culture had distant roots in the ethos of the solar age where light and darkness, good and evil are so strongly opposed to each other. The subservient position of women in those cultures where the solar ethos prevailed was the same as it was to become in later Christian culture. It is found not only in the Semitic cultures of the Near and Middle East, and in Greek and Roman culture, but also further to the East, in cultures such as those of India and China, wherever a powerful controlling male priesthood allied to social custom enforced a subservient spiritual position and social role on women. (16)
           These ideas, which reflected and confirmed those imbibed from Greek and Roman as well as Jewish culture, entered into mainstream Christian teaching and were responsible for an enormous amount of suffering for woman whose inferior and sexual nature came to be seen as the main impediment standing between man and God. It is as if the spell was cast on the Christian psyche by the Myth of the Fall. As Torjesen writes:

The equation of woman with sexuality and body…and the exclusion of sexuality and passion from the divine opened up a chasm between woman and God. Only by repudiating her sexual identity and renouncing femaleness could this chasm be bridged. The equation of woman with sexuality meant she was both subordinated to man and alienated from God. (17)

Misogyny: an Ongoing Legacy
           So deeply embedded in patriarchal (not only Christian) culture are these beliefs about the dangerous sexuality of women that we can still find them reflected wherever women are restricted to the home, denied access to education and forbidden to take up a profession. In certain Muslim societies, women are persecuted and even murdered for daring to wear “unsuitable” clothing or for being seen outside their home with a man who is not their husband or close relative. They are even murdered by their own families for wanting to marry someone outside the family's choice of a husband. The stoning of women for adultery existed at the time of Jesus as the story about him preventing it illustrates. This custom, derived from the practices recorded in the Old Testament, still persists in Sharia law, notably in Iran and Somalia. The persecution of women under the Taliban in Afghanistan is well-known but there are many other Muslim countries such as Pakistan and even the Lebanon where these abhorrent views prevail and where women still have no rights or very limited ones. Domestic violence and absolute male control of woman is accepted as integral to social and religious custom. The recent conflicts in Iraq (post invasion) and Afghanistan have accomplished one positive thing: they have revealed to the eyes of the world the appalling suffering and degradation of women.
           From a Jungian perspective, the phobic fear of woman in patriarchal culture reflects the fear of the evolving organ of consciousness — the ego — being swallowed up by the primordial undifferentiated unity, the maw or womb of nature. For men who are deeply insecure in their masculinity, whose internalised image of woman is undeveloped because woman has never been valued for herself, but only for what service she can render to man, an independent woman will present a threat — unconsciously, the threat of castration and death.
           We can see this phobic fear reflected in the misogynistic remarks directed at Hillary Clinton on Internet web-sites during the electoral campaign of 2008. As one journalist commented: “Go into these and you are knee-deep in some of the most sexually toxic words in the English language.” One young man’s comment read: “There’s something about her that feels castrating, overbearing and scary.” The fact that this statement might be a projection of his own unconscious fear of woman rather than anything intrinsically true about Hillary Clinton, passes unnoticed.
           Generations of Christian men and women have sat in church listening to the story of the Fall, absorbing it as the word of God and as divinely revealed truth. How were they affected by it? How has it programmed man’s unconscious attitude towards woman and woman’s view of herself and all the violent patterns of behavior we still encounter, from rape, domestic violence against women, child-beating, paedophilia, pornography, and the sexual abuse of children by parents, siblings and close relatives.
           According to recent statistics (2008) posted on the Internet, in the US, four women die every day, murdered by their partners. The most conservative estimates indicate two to four million women of all races and classes are battered each year. At least 170,000 of those violent incidents are serious enough to require hospitalization, emergency room care or a doctor's attention. In the UK five hundred women a year are killed by their partners. Domestic violence accounts for twenty-three per cent of all violent crime. (18) While these figures cannot be attributed exclusively to the influence of religious indoctrination, nevertheless I believe that this has, over the centuries, laid the ground for the infliction of intolerable violence and degradation on woman. What unconscious negative beliefs about herself might woman still be carrying as a result of the silent suffering she has endured for centuries?
           Generations of children have sat in church and been imprinted with the idea that long ago, a woman disobeyed God and succumbed to the temptation of the serpent, bringing sin, death and suffering into the world and that her suffering and even her death in childbirth were a punishment for that original sin. They also learned that Eve tempted Adam to eat the apple from the Tree of Knowledge and so was to blame for his fall and his being forced to toil for his living. How, I wondered, would this myth have influenced children’s view of their mothers and fathers? And themselves? Supposing their mother died in childbirth. How would this myth have affected their memory of her? How did it influence the attitude of boys towards girls and girls’ view of themselves? It has surely contributed to women’s deep unconscious feeling of inferiority. In both men and women it would surely have set up a great conflict in their nature, making them mistrust their instincts and feel guilty about sex, believing that this vindictive, punishing, angry God demanded the repression or even the sacrifice of their sexuality as an expiation for the contamination of their inherited sin.
           Again, how has the Myth of the Fall affected our attitude towards children? Generations of children had evil beaten out of them lest they should fall into the clutches of the devil. Even in the horrific Jamie Bulger case (1993) where two ten-year old boys tortured and murdered a toddler, people wrote to the Times (in England) saying that all children were born sinful and were, therefore, likely to be programmed to do evil.
           All this seems outrageous but also sad, so completely unnecessary. As a therapist and as a woman, I have been made deeply aware of the misogyny in the culture as a whole and the guilt women carry, as well as men’s unconscious fear of and contempt for women and women’s fear and distrust of men as well as their inability to value and respect their bodies. I can see clearly that these stem at least in part from the calamitous legacy of the later as well as the early Christian Fathers, for Luther and Calvin perpetuated many of these ideas at the time of the Reformation.
           What comes through these Christian writings is a deep sado-masochism: sadism towards woman in general (which is reflected at the extreme end of the spectrum in sexual pornography and rape where woman is abused and violated); masochism because this preoccupation with sexual sin and guilt led men and women to cultivate a quite unnecessary, almost hysterical sense of sin and self-blame. It may be an unconscious sense of self-blame that still prevents women from protecting themselves against abusive and violent partners.
           The belief system engendered by the Christian interpretation given to the Myth of the Fall justified every kind of persecution of woman, from denying her the right to any property and making her subject to her husband, to the witch trials of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in which hundreds of thousands of women were tortured in order to prove their sexual relations with the Devil and died horrifically at the stake.
           “Never” writes Gregory Zilboorg in his History of Medical Psychology, “in the history of humanity was woman more systematically degraded. She paid for the fall of Eve sevenfold, and the Law bore a countenance of pride and self-satisfaction, and the delusional certainty that the will of the Lord had been done.” (19)
           The meta-narrative of the Myth of the Fall which has such deep roots in the solar age has cast a negative pall over the Christian attitude towards life in this world. Instead of helping to alleviate human suffering, it has immeasurably increased it. Culturally, it contributed to man’s contempt for woman’s “hysteria and emotionality,” and strengthened the prejudice which for centuries barred her access to education and an effective place in the world in any of the professions exercised by men, including the priesthood and the medical profession. Until very recently, it underlay the judicial opinion in rape trials that women had “asked for it.” Unsurprisingly, it has wounded man’s internalized image of woman and given him a good reason for mistrusting and dissociating himself from his own feelings as well as creating within him an obsessive need for control of his own emotions.
           In the political sphere, we are confronted by the violent history of Christianity which has contrasted so strangely with the teaching of Christ, who spoke of love and compassion and our son-ship with God — even of the innate divinity of all humanity (“Ye are gods” John 10: 34), as well as the need to love our enemies. We didn’t really need any other direction than to follow his suggestion that we should do unto others as we would be done by, and that compassion should be our guide. What happened to that luminous value in the persecution of heretics, the bloody conquests in the name of Christianity, the inquisitions, tortures, burnings and the brutal repression of any group or individual who threatened the established Church?
            Nor can we ignore the quite unwarranted sense of the moral and spiritual superiority of Christians towards other religions, their attempt to convert indigenous peoples to the “true” religion and the omnipotent control exercised by the Church over its flock. We have to recognize the long-term effects of the Crusades against the Muslim infidel which are carried right through to our own time in the catastrophe of Bosnia and Kosovo and in the unresolved tension between Christianity and Islam that lurks beneath the War on Terror.
           We need to take into account attitudes about the body and sexuality and the belief that a life dedicated to God demanded the sacrifice of sexuality and that this sacrifice was pleasing to Him. The idea of atonement and reparation for evil had long existed in the work of the Greek tragedians but no-one, until the advent of Christianity, had suggested that sexuality itself was a sin for which one had to atone. It may be this repression of an essential human instinct that has led, over the centuries and into our own time, not only to male violence against women but to the evil of pornography which so violates woman’s body and to the sexual violation of young children by paedophiles as well as by priests who were entrusted with their care.
           No one is allowed to challenge the Catholic Church’s rigid rules on contraception which it considers to be a sin. It is strange that, in a world where over-population is one of the major challenges confronting humanity, the Church still maintains its position on this issue, even in Africa where, in the face of an AIDS epidemic that is destroying countless millions of lives, it counsels abstinence rather than the use of condoms. Again, we find the control of woman’s sexuality by celibate men at the root of this shocking adherence to a literal reading of the Old Testament. Dr. Uta Ranke-Heinemann, who holds the chair for religious history at Essen University, has written a book entitled Eunuchs for Heaven. In the Introduction to this devastating critique of the Church’s hostility towards sexuality and women, she deplores how a long historical process has

transformed Christianity from what it was or should have been—a religion founded on personal experience of the universally accessible love of God, in which the body has its natural and God-given place—into a regime imposed by an unmarried oligarchy on a subordinate and largely married majority. This has perverted the work of him from whom the Christians take their name. (20)

           In contrast to the shadow aspect of Christianity described in these two chapters is the behavior of countless millions of Christians who, over two millennia, have tried to live the essential message of Christ in innumerable acts of kindness and self-sacrifice, and in the noble and courageous defense of others in the face of the threat of their own death, in attempts to establish justice for the downtrodden and oppressed, and in setting up charities to help those less fortunate than themselves. Also in contrast is the legacy of sublime art, architecture and music which arose in response to the influence of Christianity and which I came to value deeply in the course of my own quest for understanding.

Conclusion
           In conclusion, we can see how the two great religious meta-narratives of the solar age – the Myth of the Fall and the Doctrine of Original Sin - split nature from spirit and body from soul. In their attempt to explain the existence of evil, they taught generations of men and women that this world was a place of suffering, punishment, sin and death and that all effort should be directed to ensuring life after death by turning away from this world and its sinfulness and suffering. These two chapters have explored a pathology which is deeply embedded in a belief system that has existed for some 1800 years. It constitutes an unconscious collective thought form which is extremely difficult to transform and heal precisely because it is so deeply unconscious. Moreover, these meta-narratives are still being disseminated wherever Christianity is carried today. The whole edifice of Christian belief rests on the twin pillars of original sin and the consequent need for humanity’s redemption by Christ’s sacrificial death.
           It seems to me that Christianity has taken a tremendous detour under the spell of a myth and the formulation of a doctrine that has nothing whatsoever to do with the actual teaching of Christ. It has killed the poetic soul of man, numbing his spontaneous sense of delight in life, extinguishing the flickering flame of joy. No-where in Christianity do we find the celebration of the sacred nature of sexual love, as in the Indian tradition, or the recognition of the sacredness of nature. We might well wonder what would be the effect if the Doctrine of Original Sin could be expunged from Christian teaching, so freeing soul and body from the heavy burden they have carried for some seventeen hundred years. But if this were to be removed, would it undermine the doctrinal belief in Christ’s divinity and the need for the sacrifice of God’s only Son to redeem the sins of humanity?

MEDITATION

I would like to offer a meditation on the body, to restore its value and its preciousness as a temple and the physical manifestation of the soul—the vital connecting intermediary between nature and spirit:

Imagine your body as a vessel, a receiver and transmitter of light.
Thank it for everything it has done for you in your life, past and present.
Thank it for the miracle of its being.
Say to it that you are sorry it was made to suffer in the past and that you will take great care of it in the future.
Imagine love flowing from your heart into every part of it, flooding it with light.
Recognize your body as the connecting link between invisible spirit and the physical environment all round you: the earth, the trees, the plants and flowers, the food you eat, all the things you make and creatively transform with the raw materials of life.
See it as the finest transparent substance, like crystal or a beautiful jewel, such as a diamond.
See that crystal or jewel-like form irradiated by the healing light of the cosmos that flows through and sustains the whole of the manifest world.

Notes

1. Jack Holland, Misogyny, The World’s Oldest Prejudice, Constable and Robinson Ltd. London, 2006, p. 31
2. Karen Jo Torjesen, When Women Were Priests, HarperSanFrancisco, 1995. p. 180
3. ibid, p. 181
4. ibid, p. 211
5. Dialogue of the Savior 139.12-13, Nag Hammadi Library, ed. James M. Robinson, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1977, p. 235
6. NHL, The Gospel of Philip, p. 135-6
7. ibid, p. 138
8. ibid, The Gospel of Mary, p. 472 and 473
9. Tertullian, Adversus Haereses,111. xxii. 4
10 . ibid, de Virginibus Velandis 9
11. ibid, On the Apparel of Women
12 Ranke-Heinemann, p. 104
13. Gratian, Decretum,
14. Ranke-Heinemann, p. 157 quoting from Quaestiones super de animalibus, XV, q.11
15. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
16. Marilyn French, From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women, McArthur & Co., Toronto, 2002
17. Torjesen, p. 222
18 . report in the Times, July 18th, 2002 based on statistics given on www.womensaid.org.uk
19. Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology, p. 162
20. Ranke-Heinemann, introduction p. x

This myth has been explored in more detail in The Myth of the Goddess and in a book called Eve: The History of an Idea, by J.A. Phillips, Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1984. I would recommend Uta Ranke-Heinemann’s book and the recent books by Charles Freeman to the reader.

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Interlude
The Sleeping Beauty: A Fairy-tale for Our Time

Edward Burne-Jones - The Sleeping Beauty

O awaken not the Beauty until the time comes...

The greatest fairy tales are borne like seeds across the generations, carrying us with them by enchantment, connecting us to the dimension of the imagination that is so often banished from our everyday lives. Fairy tales are very old. They invite us into the landscape of the soul. They speak with the voice of the soul and carry many levels of meaning. Who can say where the story of the “Sleeping Beauty” originated and how it was transmitted from generation to generation? It may be descended from long-forgotten Bronze Age rituals which celebrated the marriage of the sun and moon, and others which mourned the annual death of the life of the earth and celebrated its regeneration in spring. The sacred marriage of king and queen, prince and princess is also an image that is woven into the rich tapestry of mystical traditions such as Alchemy, Gnosticism and Kabbalah.
            The fairy-tale tells the story of a princess who, on her fifteenth birthday, explored the unused rooms of a castle and came across a room in which an old woman was sitting, turning and turning her spinning wheel. Asking if she too could spin, she took the spindle from the old woman and pricked her finger on it. At once she fell into a deep sleep, so fulfilling the curse placed on her by the uninvited thirteenth fairy at her christening—a curse that was mitigated by another fairy who remitted that death sentence to a hundred years' sleep. The whole court fell asleep with her. A great forest of rambler roses - an impenetrable hedge of thorns - grew up around her hiding even the turrets of the castle. A hundred years passed by and many legends were told about the sleeping princess who lay hidden at the heart of the forest until one day a prince, hearing of the legend, determined to set out to find her. Many suitors had already perished in the attempt to penetrate the hedge of thorns but, so the story goes, for him the thorns turned to roses, a way through the hedge opened and he came to where she lay sleeping and awakened her with a kiss. As she awoke, the whole court came to life and preparations began for their marriage—for all the best-loved fairy tales end in marriage.
            The ancient lunar imagery of death and regeneration comes to life in the story. The dark phase of the moon is symbolized by the sleeping princess and the court and by the old crone spinning in the turret of the castle. The solar prince awakens the lunar princess - the crescent moon - to life as his bride and, as this happens, the moon reaches fullness and the whole court returns to life to celebrate the marriage of the sun and the moon.
           Could this be a fairy tale for our time? Might the deeper meaning of this story open a way through the hedge of thorns created by centuries of entrenched beliefs and habits of behavior? Might it have the power to awaken our soul, nurture our poetic voice, our true intelligence and our visionary imagination, and arouse in us a deeper capacity for relationship with each other and love for our planetary home? Finally, could it stir to life the slumbering “court” of humanity?
           Myths and fairy tales awaken and nourish the imagination. The imagination activates forgotten instincts and when this happens, the wasteland that our inner life has become may be regenerated by the deep source from which flow the waters of life. When we are not in touch with this source, it is as if a vital part of us is asleep. It cannot communicate with us, nor we with it; we cannot live to the fullest extent of which we are capable. A civilization may die because it has lost its connection to soul.
           I see this timeless, magical story as a metaphor for the urgent need for a marriage between the solar and lunar dimensions of our being; a marriage between our head and our heart, between our too-literal, analytical mind which knows nothing of a deeper ground of consciousness, and our imaginal, instinctual, creative soul. This deep instinctual part of ourselves is the matrix of our ability to imagine and create. It is through our capacity to feel and to imagine, and to give expression to these feelings and this imagination through the vehicle of our mind, our voice, our hands, and our body, to give shape and form to them, that sustains the connection to a greater reality. Feeling, intuition and the imagination put us in touch with a ground which is beyond the reach of mind and intellect, acting rather like a plug connecting us to the socket of that deeper reality. The imagination reconnects us with instincts which may have atrophied for want of use and when this happens, the arid wasteland of our neglected inner life may be regenerated by our immersion in the waters of the soul. When we are not in touch with the soul, it is as if a vital part of us were asleep: it cannot communicate with us, nor we with it. We cannot live the fullest potential of which we are capable.
            But the hedge of thorns shows what an impenetrable barrier lies between mind and soul and how difficult it is to get through it. The hedge of thorns symbolizes all the belief systems and defensive structures we have built up over hundreds, if not thousands of years: deeply rooted religious beliefs about the nature of God and our fallen and sinful human nature and scientific beliefs about a “dead” universe and “dead” matter. These beliefs, deeply imprinted on us over generations, stand between us and our soul and make it almost impossible for us to reach below the surface of our everyday consciousness and listen to the voice of the the lost dimension of the soul.
           It is difficult for us to speak to each other as people spoke to each other in the past, because of the fear of the non-rational. Because of the rejection of this aspect of life, an essential part of our being is rendered speechless, autistic. Today we live in our mind, in what we believe is the supremely conscious, most interesting and powerful part of ourselves. Soul has been left out of the picture. Yet, I believe that in the story of the Sleeping Beauty, the Prince and the Sleeping Beauty symbolize the two aspects of our consciousness which belong together as bridegroom and bride.
           The Prince personifies the solar principle of consciousness - the questing human mind which seeks to explore, discover, understand, penetrate to the heart of reality and who, in this story, is seeking the lost feminine counterpart of himself that is asleep— unconscious. Yet, as long as he remains unconscious of her existence and does not set out in search of her, as long as he does not confront and penetrate the hedge of thorns, she is condemned to remain asleep.
           The Princess carries the lunar principle of soul, and also the neglected feeling values which are undeveloped or inarticulate in relation to the rational mind, and have, so to speak, lain under a spell for centuries because of the beliefs explored in previous chapters. She also, more obviously, carries the image of woman who, for all the reasons explored in these, has not been honored for the feeling values she carried and has been unable to wake up to and claim her true feminine nature. From still another perspective, the story can be seen as a concealed metaphor of the reconciliation of spirit and nature or the reunion of the masculine and feminine aspects of spirit which have become separated during the last four thousand years.
           The story of the Sleeping Beauty says that at the right moment, for the right person, the hedge of thorns turns to roses and a way opens through it. I think we are, at the beginning of this new millennium, at the moment of breakthrough. A deep instinct is attempting to restore balance and wholeness in us by recovering the lost feminine dimension of soul personified by the Sleeping Beauty. Over the past fifty years a gradual restoration of a sense of the sacred has been taking place beneath the surface of our culture. Millions are awakening to awareness of our relationship with the greater organism of the planet and beyond this, with the deeper field of soul which unites all our lives – the great web of life that binds every aspect of life to every other aspect of it.
           This fairy tale anticipates this precious time of humanity’s awakening. Once before in the twelfth century, this was attempted in the great spiritual impulse of the quest for the Holy Grail but this quest died in the Crusades and the religious wars and persecutions which destroyed its potential for transforming Western civilization. Now, once again, the instinct to recover the lost feminine aspect of spirit is being activated. As in the twelfth century, this is a time of quest and revelation. But, to respond to this, we need to understand how our present view of reality has come into being and the great myths that have both shaped and constricted it.
          For nearly four thousand years the soul has lain under a spell; her voice has been silenced, her wisdom rejected. Beauty, grace and harmony have faded from our world. But now, she is stirring to life within the soul of humanity. What does she want from us? What is her hope. I believe she wants relationship. I see this relationship as a sacred marriage; a marriage between ourselves and the deep invisible ground of life. The soul in its deepest sense has always carried the values of the heart: the values that honor wisdom, justice, compassion and healing and the idea that all beings should live in freedom from fear and from want. Religious belief in itself has not been able to transform human consciousness nor the archaic habits of behavior that now threaten us with annihilation and the planet with devastation. Science does not recognize and honor the soul. What we need now is greater knowledge of our own nature and understanding of our need for relationship with the deeper cosmic ground that is the root and matrix of our own consciousness.
           In many fairy tales, as in this one, there is the figure of an old crone. In ancient lunar cultures she would have been recognized as an aspect of the goddess, just as the sleeping princess would have been recognized as another aspect. But Christian culture banished the triune lunar goddess and all that she stood for. In modern dreams, often appearing as a figure robed in black, she still personifies the power and wisdom of the life process which brings everything into being. She spins the web of fate; she is the womb of life, the process within nature which nurtures the seed and brings everything to fruition. In the story of the Sleeping Beauty she is the secret presence in the hidden room of the castle of the soul who brings about the events that lead ultimately to the awakening of the sleeping court and the marriage of prince and princess. She stands for the deepest stratum of our soul’s life. No one who sets out on the quest for relationship with the soul can ignore her. Sooner or later she may appear in our dreams, as she has done in mine, to awaken us to who she is and what she wants of us.
           In the past, the word soul conveyed meaning and the greatest artists, poets and mystics were engaged in keeping people in touch with their soul. Today, however, the word means nothing to a secular culture that is unconscious of the existence and the value of an inner, imaginal life. For such a culture, the soul is under a spell, held in bondage to beliefs and habits of behavior that deny us access to the deeper levels of our being. The fact that we are now on the verge of destroying the earth and each other is the direct result of living for so many centuries in ignorance of our most profound need - to know that our lives are rooted in the life of the soul.
           Our brilliant technological culture inflicts intolerable stress on us because it grants no value to feelings and allows no time for relationship with the soul, no time to awaken to the beauty and wonder of the extraordinary treasure that lies hidden within us. The rescue of the treasure which has for so long been relegated low down on the list of our priorities requires a fundamental transformation of our understanding of life: the formulation of a new worldview or paradigm of reality that will precipitate us through the hedge of thorns that holds us impaled in bondage to the past. It invites a drastic reorientation in our relationship with the planet and with each other, a reversal of what we have considered important, even vital to our survival—a putting first what we have put last. Knowledge of the holy unity of life, reverence for nature, trust in the powers of the creative imagination, in the atrophied faculty of intuition – all these are needed to help us recover that lost, instinctive relationship with life which was once grounded in our experience of soul.
           The soul does not communicate primarily through words, through language, but through feelings, intuitions, emotions, and, because of our ignorance and neglect of it, through disturbed, violent or addictive patterns of behavior. It also communicates through dreams. If we do not pay attention to these, there will be no way in which the needs of the soul can reach our surface consciousness that is focused exclusively on the external world. They will remain shut away behind a hedge of thorns. The journey in search of the soul is difficult and even dangerous because it requires that we relinquish the certainty of what we think we know and what we have been taught for generations to believe. It means surrendering the desire to be in control and opening ourselves to a journey of discovery. Many myths and fairy tales emphasize the need for surrender and trust in the strange non-rational guidance offered by animals or shamans on the quest. As the hero follows their guidance, so the hedge opens, the way unfolds. Following the guidance and wisdom of the instinct is the royal road into the realm of soul.            The Princess carries the lunar principle of soul, and also the neglected feeling values which are undeveloped or inarticulate in relation to the rational mind, and have, so to speak, lain under a spell for centuries because of the beliefs explored in previous chapters. She also, more obviously, carries the image of woman who, for all the reasons explored in these, has been unable to claim and value her true feminine nature. From still another perspective, the story can be seen as a concealed metaphor of the reconciliation of spirit and nature or the reunion of the masculine and feminine aspects of spirit which have become separated during the last four thousand years.
           The story of the Sleeping Beauty says that at the right moment, for the right person, the hedge of thorns turns to roses and a way opens through it. I think we are, at the beginning of this new millennium, at the moment of breakthrough. A deep instinct is attempting to restore balance and wholeness in us by recovering the lost feminine dimension of soul personified by the Sleeping Beauty. Over the past fifty years a gradual restoration of a sense of the sacred has been taking place beneath the surface of our culture. Millions are awakening to awareness of our relationship with the greater organism of the planet and beyond this, with the deeper field of soul which unites all our lives – the great web of life that binds every aspect of life to every other aspect of it.
           This fairy tale anticipates this precious time of humanity’s awakening. Once before in the twelfth century, this was attempted in the great spiritual impulse of the quest for the Holy Grail but this quest died in the Crusades and the religious wars and persecutions which destroyed its potential for transforming Western civilization. Now, once again, the instinct to recover the lost feminine aspect of spirit is being activated. As in the twelfth century, this is a time of quest and revelation. But, to respond to this, we need to understand how our present view of reality has come into being and the great myths that have both shaped and constricted it.
          For nearly four thousand years the soul has lain under a spell; her voice has been silenced, her wisdom rejected. Beauty, grace and harmony have faded from our world. But now, she is stirring to life within the soul of humanity. What does she want from us? What is her hope. I believe she wants relationship. I see this relationship as a sacred marriage; a marriage between ourselves and the deep invisible ground of life. The soul in its deepest sense has always carried the values of the heart: the values that honor wisdom, justice, compassion and healing and the idea that all beings should live in freedom from fear and from want.
            Religious belief in itself has not been able to transform human consciousness nor the archaic habits of behavior that now threaten us with annihilation and the planet with devastation. Science does not recognize and honor the soul. What we need now is greater knowledge of our own nature and understanding of our need for relationship with the deeper cosmic ground that is the root and matrix of our own consciousness.
           In many fairy tales, as in this one, there is the figure of an old crone. In ancient lunar cultures she would have been recognized as an aspect of the goddess, just as the sleeping princess would have been recognized as another aspect. But Christian culture banished the goddess and all that she stood for. In modern dreams, often appearing as a figure robed in black, she still personifies the power and wisdom of the life process which brings everything into being. She spins the web of fate; she is the womb of life, the process within nature which nurtures the seed and brings everything to fruition. In the story of the Sleeping Beauty she is the secret presence in the hidden room of the castle of the soul who brings about the events that lead ultimately to the awakening of the sleeping court and the marriage of prince and princess. She stands for the deepest stratum of our soul’s life. No one who sets out on the quest for relationship with the soul can ignore her. Sooner or later she may appear in our dreams, as she has done in mine, to awaken us to who she is and what she wants of us.
           In the past, the word soul conveyed meaning and the greatest artists, poets and mystics were engaged in keeping people in touch with their soul. Today, however, the word means nothing to a secular culture that is unconscious of the existence and the value of an inner, imaginal life. For such a culture, the soul is under a spell, held in bondage to beliefs and habits of behavior that deny us access to the deeper levels of our being. The fact that we are now on the verge of destroying the earth and each other is the direct result of living for so many centuries in ignorance of our most profound need - to know that our lives are rooted in the life of the soul. Our brilliant technological culture inflicts intolerable stress on us because it grants no value to feelings and allows no time for relationship with the soul, no time to awaken to the beauty and wonder of the extraordinary treasure that lies hidden within us.
            The rescue of the treasure which has for so long been relegated low down on the list of our priorities requires a fundamental transformation of our understanding of life: the formulation of a new worldview or paradigm of reality that will precipitate us through the hedge of thorns that holds us impaled in bondage to the past. It invites a drastic reorientation in our relationship with the planet and with each other, a reversal of what we have considered important, even vital to our survival—a putting first what we have put last. Knowledge of the holy unity of life, reverence for nature, trust in the powers of the creative imagination, in the atrophied faculty of intuition – all these are needed to help us recover that lost, instinctive relationship with life which was once grounded in our experience of soul.
           The soul does not communicate primarily through words, through language, but through feelings, intuitions, emotions, and, because of our ignorance and neglect of it, through disturbed, violent or addictive patterns of behavior. It also communicates through dreams. If we do not pay attention to these, there will be no way in which the needs of the soul can reach our surface consciousness that is focused exclusively on the external world. They will remain shut away behind a hedge of thorns. The journey in search of the soul is difficult and even dangerous because it requires that we relinquish the certainty of what we think we know and what we have been taught for generations to believe. It means surrendering the desire to be in control and opening ourselves to a journey of discovery. Many myths and fairy tales emphasize the need for surrender and trust in the strange non-rational guidance offered by animals or shamans on the quest. As the hero follows their guidance, so the hedge opens, the way unfolds. Following the guidance and wisdom of the instinct is the royal road into the realm of soul.
           Somewhere in Chartres Cathedral, these words are inscribed: “O Awaken not the Beauty until the time comes.” This lost dimension of soul which acts deep within our being and within all life is stirring to life now. The quest to awaken the Sleeping Beauty is the quest for greater understanding of life's mystery. Those who say there is no mystery to understand literally kill their instinctive life, their soul. The supreme value whose discovery could heal the anguish, terror and suffering endured throughout the Odyssey of human evolution is to be found at the heart of our instinctual life. The fascination with the search for treasure lying hidden beneath the waters of the sea or buried deep in the earth reflects the magnetic power of the treasure that is hidden within the inner waters, the inner earth of the soul.

           
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CHAPTER NINE
The Resurgence of the Feminine

Henry Moore 1942 Crowd Looking at a Tied-up Object

Life wants to create new forms, and therefore, when a dogma loses its vitality, it must perforce activate the archetype that has always helped man to express the mystery of the soul.

                                                                                        — C. G. Jung (1)

If ever the world sees a time when women shall come together purely and simply for the benefit of mankind, it will be a power such as the world has never known.

                                                                                        — Matthew Arnold

A drawing by Henry Moore that he painted at the darkest time of the Second World War, shows a group of people gazing up at a huge shrouded figure, their smallness dwarfed by its towering height. Beneath the shroud and the ropes which hold it in place is a feminine shape. This painting suggests that a new image of spirit, or perhaps a long-lost one, was stirring to life in the collective soul of humanity, waiting to be unveiled, waiting to be recognized and received by us. Henry Moore's greatest sculptures have the same feminine impress. His “shelter” drawings take us back to the maternal womb hidden beneath the earth—the cave-like underground passages where we sought sanctuary as bombs rained death upon our cities. Many of his sculptures and drawings focus on the image of mother and child or the monumental figure of woman. His work points to the resurgence of the feminine archetype in the human soul.
           Ever since I had the visionary dream of the cosmic woman I have wondered what her message was. Why did such an image appear to me and what was it asking of me? What, in its deepest sense, does the word Feminine mean? As I am defining it in this book it does not refer to the female sexual attractiveness that is so promoted in today’s world, nor to the qualities of caring and gentleness usually, though not exclusively identified with women, nor to the word “Feminism” and the empowerment of women in a man’s world. To me the word “Feminine” stands for a totally different way of relating to life, a totally different worldview or paradigm of reality and the very different feeling values which might give rise to that worldview. It describes the archetypal feminine principle of relationship, for the great web of life that connects us to each other and to the life around us. It stands for the values of the heart and the recognition that life on this planet is sacred and that the planet itself and all the variety of species it embraces is something to be cherished and protected by us rather than exploited for the benefit of our species alone. These feeling values have for millennia been silently carried by woman who has consistently cared for the life she has brought forth. However, since woman herself and the values she carries have not been honored by society, they have not been given the attention they merit.
           For centuries, like the Sleeping Beauty, the Feminine has been awaiting recognition and rescue. Without the guidance and wisdom of the Feminine, without going in search of the values it represents and opening our heart to its subtle guidance, we cannot understand the purpose of our presence on this planet, nor will we be able to disempower the unconscious atavistic tendencies which draw us ever closer to the destruction of our habitat and therefore to self-annihilation.
           The theme of the lost Feminine Value – carried by the figure of a celebrated woman - weaves like a golden thread through the mythology, poetry and literature of Western civilisation, waiting to be redeemed at this present time when so much is at stake. The image of the Feminine, so essential a part of the poetic vision of the creative genius of the West, is first found in Homer’s portrayal of Odysseus' long journey back to his faithful and long-suffering wife, Penelope. In the Middle Ages, we can follow the resurgence of the Feminine in the many stories of the Grail Quest and the lyrical poems of the troubadours. We can discover it in the great pilgrimages to the shrines of the Black Madonna and the Courts of Love set up by a Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter Marie in twelfth century France. Between 1150 and 1250 we know the names of some two hundred poets of whom twenty were women. What these poets celebrated was not only the beauty and intelligence of woman but the values enshrined in a new chivalrous code which challenged the misogynistic view of woman propagated by the Church and the brutal values which governed the world of that time. We find the Feminine celebrated in Dante’s great allegory, The Divine Comedy, personified by Beatrice who becomes his inspiration and guide to the highest spiritual realities. We find it brilliantly portrayed by Shakespeare in the figure of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, to mention only one of his plays. But this strong cultural impulse was all but lost during the centuries of territorial conquest and the suffering created by constant wars of religion and persecution by the Inquisition.
           Now, at the dawn of a new millennium, the long repressed feminine principle is rising to meet the masculine one in response to a deep soul impulse to balance and marry these archetypal patterns of energy within ourselves and within our culture. At the same time, there is great anxiety as old social patterns, old institutions disintegrate. There is also the rise of fundamentalism - an attempt to perpetuate the familiar control system of the old order and a desperate grasping at certainty and security.
            Dimly glimpsed through the veil of the secular focus of our culture, the Feminine is awakening. More specifically, the soul of the world is awakening. Like the magma of the earth’s molten core, the Feminine has been pushing up from below the level of our conscious lives until at last it is manifesting as a call for radical change in the way we perceive and live life, urging us to reconnect with nature, soul and cosmos and restore to wholeness what has been fragmented during the millennia of the solar age. As a result, our values and our understanding of ourselves are changing. Millions of individuals on every continent are beginning to recover the sense of connection to a sacred earth.The challenge of climate change is accelerating this process. The resurgence of the Feminine invites a new planetary consciousness where the deepest instincts of the human heart — compassion, focused intelligence and a desire to heal and make whole — are able to find expression in ways that can best be described as devotion to planetary life: not to a God or Goddess, not to a new ideology or religion, but to the planet itself and the vast variety of life it embraces.
           Christopher Bache, in his book, Dark Night, Early Dawn, describes this powerful new soul-impulse:

The great difficulty I have is in describing the enormity of what it being birthed. The true focus of this creative process is not individuals but all humanity. It is actually trying to reawaken the entire species. What is emerging is a consciousness of unprecedented proportions, the entire human species integrated into a unified field of awareness. The species reconnected with its Fundamental Nature. Our thoughts tuned to Source Consciousness.(2)

           This new phase in the story of our species could herald an evolutionary advance: we may enter into a conscious relationship and partnership with life, seeking not to control and dominate nature but to serve and protect it with insight, compassion and wisdom. Where are we to look for the specific signs of this awakening?
           Like a multi-faceted diamond, there are many aspects to the emerging influence of the Feminine. All are contributing to the healing of the long-standing dissociation between spirit and nature during the solar age and to the restoration of the sense of the unity and interconnectedness of life. Each is intrinsic to a psychic impulse which might be called the recovery of the soul – an evolutionary impulse arising from the very heart of humanity. I mean recovery in two senses. First, the sense of something that was ailing, diminished or neglected being restored to health. Secondly, the sense of something of great value that was lost and obscured being recovered. But the collective soul of humanity resists change and it is to be expected that this impulse for recovery will be fiercely resisted because entrenched beliefs and habits of behavior are so deeply established. The process of recovery is, for the most part, carried by individuals working in relative obscurity but who are now, thanks to the Internet, increasingly in touch with each other. One example of the power of collective protest is carried by an organization like Avaaz which mobilises hundreds of thousands of individuals to support specific petitions put to world leaders (www.avaaz.org).

The Awakening of a Sense of Responsibility towards the Earth
           Looking back over the last fifty years, there were specific signs which contributed to this change of consciousness. One of the most important of these was the astronauts’ journey to the moon in 1969 and the first amazing view of the earth seen from space. The very sight of the earth seen from this distance changed our relationship with it. The fact that it was the moon that was being explored — age-old symbol of the goddess and the feminine principle — was in itself significant. For the three billion or so inhabitants of earth, it was a deeply moving and awesome experience to see our home in the cosmos for the first time. It seemed so miraculously beautiful, so precious and so vulnerable. Love of this blue planet awoke in our hearts. Dr. Edgar Mitchell, on his way back from the moon, and gazing at the distant earth, said “My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity” and wrote this:

What I experienced during that three-day trip home was nothing short of an overwhelming sense of the universal connectedness. I actually felt what has been described as an ecstasy of unity. It occurred to me that the molecules of my body and the molecules of the spacecraft itself were manufactured long ago in the furnace of one of the ancient stars that burned in the heavens about me. And there was the sense that our presence as space travelers, and the existence of the universe itself, was not accidental but that there was an intelligent process at work. I perceived the universe as in some way conscious. The thought was so large it seemed at the time inexpressible, and to a large degree it still is. Perhaps all I have gained is a greater sense of understanding and perhaps a more articulate means of expressing it. But even in the midst of epiphany I did not attach mystical or otherworldly origin to the phenomenon. Rather, I thought it curious and exciting that the brain could spontaneously reorganize information to produce such a fantastically strange experience.(3)

           Later, he remembered that

…the awe-inspiring beauty of the cosmos suddenly overcame me. While still aware of the separateness of my existence, my mind was flooded with an intuitive knowing that everything is interconnected—that this magnificent universe is a harmonious, directed, purposeful whole. And that we humans, both as individuals and as a species, are an integral part of the ongoing process of creation. (3)

           The words of Gene Cernan, one of the astronauts on the last voyage to the moon, convey the marvel of that this cosmic view of the earth for the whole of humanity: “I stood in the blue darkness and looked in awe at the earth from the lunar surface. What I saw was too beautiful to grasp—there was too much logic, too much purpose. It was too beautiful to have happened by accident.”
           The kingdom of nature is a seamless robe. We are part of this robe, clothed with it, nourished and protected by it yet, at the same time, because of the unique development of consciousness in our species, we are the only aspect of life that can become aware of the great mystery in which our lives are embedded. Once, the Black Virgin or Black Madonna was the eloquent symbol of this mystery, the symbol of nature who spins and weaves the great web of life and who, in ways we do not yet understand, holds every order of life in relationship. Jonathan Schell in his book The Fate of the Earth, writes about our need to know more about nature and about the earth before we take it upon ourselves to destroy it:

The earth is a compound mystery, for it presents us with the mystery of life in its entirety. The mystery of all our thoughts and works. The reason for our ignorance is not that our knowledge of the earth is slight – on the contrary, it is extensive and has grown in this century more than in all other centuries put together – but that the amount to be known is demonstrably so much greater…Our century’s discoveries in the earth sciences have increased our ignorance in just this sense: they have given us a glimpse of how much there is still to find out. Doctor Lewis Thomas, the noted biologist and essayist, has defined this ignorance in categorical terms, saying, “We are ignorant about how we work, about where we fit in, and most of all about the enormous, imponderable system of life in which we are embedded as working parts. We do not really understand nature, at all. (4)

           Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring, Published in 1962, was a powerful agent of change. With this book, the ecological movement was born. It drew attention to the inter-dependence of the human, animal and plant orders of life and the danger of contaminating air, soil and ocean with the dangerous chemicals (DDT) that were at that time being widely and indiscriminately used to control insects. In it she challenged the scientific myth of the control of nature, born, she said, of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy when it was supposed that nature existed for the convenience of man. “It is our alarming misfortune,” she wrote, “that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.” (5) The furious anger and misogynistic contempt she provoked in the chemical companies who called her “more poisonous than the pesticides she condemned,” revealed both the abyss of human ignorance about the interrelated systems of life on the planet and also the immense power of entrenched attitudes to resist any change—one example of the hedge of thorns. Tragically, she died of cancer before the publication of her book. But long before her death she drew attention to the dangers of interfering with the balance of nature. In the preface to the 1961 edition of The Sea Around Us, first published in 1950, she warned of the effects of disposing of nuclear residues in the sea:

In unlocking the secrets of the atom, modern man has found himself confronted with a frightening problem—what to do with the most dangerous materials that have ever existed in all the earth’s history, the by-products of atomic fission. The stark problem that faces him is whether he can dispose of these lethal substances without rendering the earth uninhabitable. (6)

           Other influential books followed in the 70’s which set the agenda for a transformation of our attitude to the earth. These books were all written from the perspective of a new sense of responsibility towards the planet. In 1975, Schumacher's phenomenally influential Small is Beautiful was published. In 1972, Donella and Dennis Meadows' Limits to Growth addressed the threat to the earth from over-population—something which even now, thirty-six years later, is still not taken seriously either by governments or the major religions. In the early 80's Fritjof Capra's two books The Tao of Physics and The Turning Point focused on the need for a transformation of our attitude towards nature and matter. He grounded this in his knowledge of the science of quantum physics which was revealing life to be an indissoluble tissue of relationships where the observer was an inseparable part of what was observed. The very title of the second book was a significant pointer to a change of consciousness.
           In that decade, we also became alarmed by the threat of a Nuclear Winter which could throw humanity back to the beginning of evolution, contaminating soil and water with the residue of nuclear bombs far more powerful than those used on Hiroshima. Einstein’s prescient comment was ignored: “The unleashing of the power of the atom bomb has changed everything except our mode of thinking, and thus we head toward unparalleled catastrophes.” (7) Few governments consciously acknowledged the enormity of what they were willing to inflict on a helpless civilian population in order to secure the survival of their particular nation. Each nuclear state was prepared to annihilate millions of innocent people and pollute the earth for generations in an exchange of nuclear missiles. For the decades of the Cold War the tension between competing empires and ideologies powered the escalation of military technology and, as this developed on each side, it was extended in the Star Wars program to the race for control in space as well as on earth. Arguing that the bomb would act as a deterrent, those promoting the arms race did not acknowledge that in an exchange of nuclear missiles, there would, as Jonathan Schell commented in his book, The Fate of the Earth (1982), be no victor and no vanquished: both would be extinguished along with hundreds of millions of helpless civilians.

The question now before the human species is whether life or death will prevail on the earth…No generation before ours has held the life and death of its species in its hands…In our present-day world, in the councils where the decisions are made, there is no one to speak for man and for the Earth, although both are threatened with annihilation. (8)

           The Nuclear Disarmament Movement was founded and grew rapidly. People began to think in planetary terms, rather than national ones, understanding that we had to transcend old habits, old patterns of behaviour if we were to survive as a species and protect the earth.
           One example of this was the movement initiated in England in 1981 by Ann Pettit, which grew into the significant protest of the Greenham Common women against the American Cruise and Pershing Missiles. They called themselves “Women for Life on Earth” because, they said, “These weapons go on killing silently and invisibly through generations as yet unborn.” (9) They have now turned their attention to the missile defence shield near Harrogate in Yorkshire, England.
Increasing disillusionment with political and religious leaders was part of this awakening, together with the growing realisation that each individual carried a responsibility, however humble, for challenging the dominant ethos of the culture—a responsibility highlighted by Jung’s prophetic words: “The world today hangs by a thin thread and that thread is the psyche of man...It is not the reality of the hydrogen bomb that we need to fear, but what man will do with it.” (10) The only counterweight to the huge propensity for violence in the collective psyche and the governments of the world is the voice of the individual whose role can be compared to that of David confronting Goliath.
           These books and many others in recent years have made it clear that the fate of the human species is inseparably bound up with the planetary biosphere. No-one has written more eloquently about the earth and our relationship with it than Thomas Berry in his books The Dream of the Earth (1990) and Evening Thoughts (2006). No-one has evoked in such compelling language the need for human sensitivity, compassion and intelligence in our relationship with the earth and its living systems. He says that in relation to the earth, we have been autistic for centuries and asks that we wake up from our mythic dream of progress and take on the role of becoming responsible custodians of the dwindling species and resources of the planet.

Just now our modern world, with its scientific technologies, its industrial processes, and its commercial establishments, functions with amazing arrogance in its attitude toward the natural world. The human is seen as the supreme reality. Every other being is available for exploitation… The difficulty at present is not only that the individual nations see themselves and their own well-being as the ultimate referent as regards reality and value, but also that the human tends to establish a discontinuity between itself and the natural world. In this manner the nonhuman world is reduced to being objects to be used by humans for their own purposes, rather than functioning as participants in a single integral community of existence. Not only is the human community out of alignment with the functioning of the planet, but also the human community has become a predator draining the life of its host…(11)

           The Ecology Movement grew from the recognition of the threat to the biosphere by the industrial and chemical pollution of air, water and soil. Friends of the Earth (www.foe.co.uk) was founded in 1971. Greenpeace followed. Fifty years have seen the foundations laid for a transformation of our relationship with the earth and the emergence of many groups of individuals who are committed to trying to protect it from the effects of human ignorance and greed. These form a new planetary entity, no longer national in character but one which is held together by shared values and a shared commitment to implementing them. Paul Hawken’s book, Blessed Unrest (2007), collates the many facets of this new movement and mentions the fact that as a result of his research over fifteen years, he has identified what may be the largest social movement in human history. This movement comprises a million or more grassroots groups working to help the planet or to improve the lives of the oppressed and destitute and those, like the indigenous forest peoples of the world, whose survival is threatened by the predatory greed of the trans-national corporations. Thirty-eight organizations now exist to protect the Amazon region alone.
           In this new world-wide collaboration on behalf of people, on behalf of the ecosystem of the earth, the foundations have been laid for the development of a contemporary image of man and woman as Custodians of Life—custodians because the care of the earth is increasingly felt by many to be a sacred trust. All this has arisen out of the activation of what might be called heart values—the desire to care for life and for the planet that is our cosmic home. It is these values which are at the core of the Feminine. We are becoming more concerned to protect the delicate ecological balance of the earth, more aware that we are poisoning the earth, the seas and our own bodies with chemicals and pesticides, more aware that we are inviting our own destruction through our continued aggression towards each other and our blind exploitation of the planet’s dwindling resources.
           The naturalist David Attenborough has pointed out in his television programmes the effects of what we have unwittingly done and are still doing to the millions of species on the planet and asks whether we are to be the cause of the sixth great extinction. James Lovelock has shown the catastrophic effects of our technological culture on the planetary biosphere. (12) Both have shown how life on this planet is an interconnected web of which we are a part and which we can no longer exploit for our sole benefit. The aerial views of the planet seen from space show us beyond a shadow of a doubt the effects of over-population and our industrial expansion on the land, the oceans and the atmosphere. We can now see the shrinking glaciers, the melting Arctic and Antarctic ice, the diminishing forests, the lights at night covering vast swathes of the earth. Today we are facing a choice and the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced—a crisis that our industrialised culture and our ever-burgeoning numbers have brought into being. In 1820 the population of the world was one billion. Today it is over six billion. People may not realize that the world population has trebled since 1945 and that the population of the United States has also nearly trebled from 130 million to 320 million.
           Since 1945 we have been faced with the growing danger from four new threats which were unimaginable fifty years ago. First, the danger to the equilibrium of the biosphere described above and global warming. Secondly, the renewed threat of war and the massive loss of life and contamination of the earth that could result from the deliberate or inadvertent use of our weapons of mass destruction—which now include the new threat of the military deployment of nano-technology. Thirdly, the over-population of the planet (estimated to rise to 9.5 billion by 2050) which is already leading to armed struggles for scarce resources. Fourthly, the depletion of the amount of land available to grow food because it is being turned over to raising crops for biofuels. If the temperature of the planet should rise by 2 degrees C, it will make parts of the planet uninhabitable and drive millions to seek out diminishing supplies of food and water. Yet still governments pursue their national agendas and fail to think with a sufficient sense of urgency in planetary and ecological terms. With survival instincts now registering on high alert, many men and women are questioning the whole power-driven ethos of modern culture as well as its rampant consumerism and are searching for ways to halt the apparent headlong impulsion of our species and its unconscious political leaders towards catastrophe.

The Recovery of the Feminine Dimension of the Divine
           In the 1950’s few people outside of the Jungian community in Zurich would have connected this change of consciousness with the eruption—from the unconscious depths of the psyche—of the image of the feminine aspect of the divine that had consistently been rejected by patriarchal culture. The first sign of its immanent return came with the discovery in 1945 of the Gnostic texts hidden for nearly two millennia in earthenware jars at Nag Hammadi, in Egypt. As scholars began to translate these texts, it became apparent that certain Gnostic groups had worshipped God as both Mother and Father. Elaine Pagels’ ground-breaking book, The Gnostic Gospels (1980), told how the Gnostics had prayed to the Divine Virgin Sophia as “the mystical, eternal Silence,” as “the Invisible within the All” and as the Holy Spirit. Her book was the precursor of a flood of other books on the Goddess, of which The Myth of the Goddess was one. This was one avenue through which the sacred image of the Feminine was restored to modern culture.
           A second avenue was opened by the two Papal Bulls of 1950 and 1954 which, in response to a petition from millions of Catholics, officially named the Virgin Mary as Queen of Heaven and declared her “Assumed into Heaven, Body and Soul.” Some forty years later, in 1997, a further petition was presented to the Pope asking that Mary be declared co-redemptrix with Christ. Although he died before this later petition was assembled, Jung knew that the two Papal Bulls reflected the fact that something of great significance was happening in the collective psyche. Mythologically speaking, the feminine archetype, personified by the Virgin Mary, was being raised to the level of equality with the masculine one of Spirit, heralding the “marriage” of the two great archetypal principles that would soon begin to find expression in the collective soul of humanity. The feminine dimension of the divine, so long denied recognition in a civilization dominated by the masculine archetype, would be restored to the position it held in the pre-patriarchal world. Matter and spirit would no longer be seen as antithetical or even as essentially different in kind. A union of two primary aspects of life, so long sundered in human consciousness, could be expected.
           Jung anticipated a profound transformation of consciousness as this marriage of the two great archetypal principles became active in the soul of humanity. He believed it signified the reunion of spirit and nature, mind and soul, thinking and feeling and, in the language of depth psychology, the integration of the conscious mind and the unconscious. Familiar with the long mythological history which had led to this moment, he saw this archetypal reunion as a new image of the sacred marriage—the ancient Bronze Age ritual which had once celebrated the union of heaven and earth. He also saw it as the herald of the great event awaited in the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, the wedding of the two indissoluble but long separated aspects of the god-head—the Holy One and His Shekinah (as described in Chapter Three).
           People have been surprised by the popularity of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code and its earlier prototype, Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln. Yet the focus of both these books was the relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene — the so-called “penitent whore”— and the child or children who were the fruit of their union. Never, in the Church’s wildest dreams, could the “celibate” Jesus have been allowed to have a sexual relationship with Mary Magdalene and have her bear him a child.
           Since there can be no official recognition of the possibility of this relationship, the recognition has had to come into the culture through such books as these. From a Jungian perspective, the phenomenal sales of these two books and many others about Mary Magdalene reflect the power of a returning archetype and the unconscious longing for the union of the masculine and feminine principles at the highest level—reflected in the union, however hypothetical, of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The “child” born of their relationship signifies, in an archetypal sense, not the blood-line of Jesus but the birth of a new level of consciousness for the whole of humanity. If the missing archetype isn’t allowed in through the front door, it will enter our culture through the back door and in a literal rather than a symbolic form. Jung commented on the need for a personal representative of the feminine archetype, relating it to the new emphasis on the equality of women:

The logical consistency of the papal declaration cannot be surpassed, and it leaves Protestantism with the odium of being nothing but a man’s religion which allows no metaphysical representation of woman. Protestantism has obviously not given sufficient attention to the signs of the times which point to the equality of women. But this equality requires to be metaphysically anchored in the figure of a “divine” woman, the bride of Christ. Just as the person of Christ cannot be replaced by an organization, so the bride cannot be replaced by the Church. The feminine, like the masculine, demands an equally personal representation. (12)

A Cultural Revolution: A New Role for Women
           At the same time as these events of archetypal significance were taking place in the domain of religion, a revolutionary social movement — another facet of the resurgence of the Feminine — was gathering momentum. John Locke (1632-1704) was the first philosopher to challenge the idea of woman’s innate inferiority and subjection to man. Two years after his death, an English writer, Mary Astell (1668-1731), asked the question, “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?” The change in woman’s status was strengthened by the support of men such as John Stuart Mill in his book, On the Oppression of Women. Individual women in England and America began to speak out about social issues that deeply aroused their compassion and concern as, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which drew attention to the plight of the slaves in the Southern States of America. At the time of the devastating Civil War in America, Julia Ward Howe had the courage to speak out in 1870 against the whole ethos of war:

We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, “Disarm, Disarm!”

           In the West, as women gained the hard-won right to vote and access to education, they began to query long-established social customs and the misogynistic cast of religious beliefs. The First and Second World Wars and the arrival of contraception accelerated women’s emergence into society after centuries of seclusion and oppression, allowing them to enter many professions hitherto barred to them and to earn their living alongside men. A profound cultural revolution was initiated, shaking social attitudes to their foundations. The generation of women now in their twenties and thirties are the beneficiaries of it without being aware of what it felt like to live in a culture where women had no access to higher education and were for the most part dependent on a man’s earning power for their survival and generally regarded as the “inferior” sex, fatally compromised by their “emotionality”.
           Widowhood and the destitution of millions of young women after the First and Second World Wars as well as the need for women to work on the land and in factories while the men were away fighting, accelerated this cultural revolution, forcing them to develop survival instincts and skills they had not needed to rely on previously. Because so many men were killed, particularly in the First World War, there was a surplus of women over men and, for those young women not already married, no possibility for many of them to find husbands to support them. War widows were paid a miserable pittance—barely enough on which to survive. As these two groups of women matured and as the children and grandchildren of war widows grew to adulthood, so cultural attitudes on the relationship between men and women began to change.
            One major innovation was the presence of the father during the birth of his child. Another was a new emphasis on his participation in domestic chores and sharing the care of children in the home. A third was the social effects of millions of women going to university, earning their living and entering a world that was formerly the exclusive domain of men. Men were deeply disoriented by the disintegration of the old relationship between the genders and women found it challenging and exhausting to balance their new professional role with the domestic one of wife and mother. Children have been the greatest casualties of both parents going out to work and have suffered because their parents do not have the time or energy to focus on their emotional needs.
            Relationships between men and women have also suffered and the breakdown of marriages and partnerships reflects the tension of both going out to work and having too little time for each other. There is a danger that women are being encouraged to copy a male model of behavior by having to hold their own in a culture which is dominated by a male ethos of competition, winning and success. They are caught between a rock and a hard place, not wanting to return to the pattern of the past, where “woman’s place was in the home” yet not yet fully accepted and valued for their new contribution to society.
           In some places, the old attitudes still prevail. Many women from poorer countries in Europe, Asia, Africa and South America are being forced, for their survival, to enter into prostitution and even slavery because there is still a “market” for sex among men who see women only as sexual objects to be exploited and subjugated, thereby perpetuating the pattern of male dominance over them.
           As described in Chapter Two, as the Feminist Movement gathered momentum through the influence of its many prophets—women like Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer, there were other women in America like Riane Eisler who began to question the political ethos of male dominance and control which had presided over Western culture for many centuries. Theologians wanted to know why the image of God and the Holy Spirit had been formulated in the male gender, why there was no feminine dimension of the divine.
           In an essay on Women in Europe, part of a larger book called Civilization in Transition, Jung noted that it was the task of women to bring together what man had sundered and ended the chapter with the words, “The woman of today is faced with a tremendous cultural task—perhaps it will be the dawn of a new era.”(13) It is obvious now, even if it wasn’t sixty years ago when he wrote these words, that something has to change radically if we are to create a viable future for our children and grandchildren and the generations beyond them; something has to change radically in the soul of both men and women.
           What then is woman’s tremendous cultural task? It is surely nothing less than to free herself from oppression, persecution and marginalization so that her voice can act as an advocate for a new and better kind of civilization. Men will not be truly free until women are able to speak from their hearts and add their voice to those calling out for an end to social, religious and sexual oppression as well as cruelty, injustice and exploitation of all kinds.
           The planet needs women to find their full voice, to articulate their hopes and their needs and their feelings of distress in a culture that still pays too little attention to their greatest gifts as well as to their deepest longings and deepest fears. Their long-silenced voice is needed to awaken humanity to awareness of a great danger and a different goal and to redeem the repression of the Feminine by articulating the different values and the different attitude towards life which give expression to it.
           In many different parts of the world, individual women are speaking out with immense courage against oppression—of themselves and others. The power of one individual to change collective values is reflected in the courage of Rosa Parks who, in 1955, while travelling in a bus, remained where she was when told to give up her seat to a white man. This one act challenged America’s racial prejudice, triggered the civil rights campaign and cleared a space for Martin Luther King to make his astounding speech on civil rights and for Barack Obama to become President.
           Woman's own awakening to the realization of her value is part of the recovery of the Feminine. It is as if a momentous birth is taking place in the collective psyche of woman. This birth may be experienced as something that is deeply perplexing, difficult and even dangerous, as well as something exciting and challenging. As woman gives birth to herself, to her unique individuality, to the emerging awareness of her value as woman (not an imitation of man), the Feminine and the values that belong to it will also emerge in the consciousness of humanity which for so long has suffered from its repression and marginalization. Woman, whose essential nature responds to suffering and need, is now responding to life's own need and is experiencing herself as the vessel of transformation in which a new consciousness is being born.


The Healing Power of the Feminine
           The focus of the Feminine is not a new Utopian ideology but the values that have been obscured or incompletely developed during the solar age. These values can never be recovered by force or even by strident demand. They can only emerge as human consciousness changes and allows them to emerge. The Feminine is putting us in touch with the deep sources of our psychic life, drawing up from these depths the living waters which nourish and sustain the soul. The recovery of the Feminine may be the key to the transformation of our world culture from regression into uniformity, banality and brutality into something longed for and extraordinary.
           As long ago as Bronze Age Sumer and Egypt, records detail the charitable impulses to care for the orphaned, the widowed and the sick. Today, apart from the thousands of charities and NGO’s which have come into being to assist the millions in need of help, there is increasing pressure on governments to act ethically and with the welfare of the planet in mind. Thanks to television, we have a far greater awareness of the suffering of people all over the world and can see the plight of those threatened by armed conflict and the exploitation of the masses of the poor in India and Africa by the corporate giants of the world. We participate through witnessing the suffering of people remote from ourselves. Wherever the call to compassion goes out, there is the voice of the heart, the voice of the Feminine.
            This message was received long ago in the chaneled messages I mentioned at the beginning of this book. I record it here as it applies as much to our times as to those in which it was recorded in the midst of the Second World War.

A PRAYER OF THE HOLY MOTHER

Gather My tears in your hands
Bathe your eyes in their sweetness,
For in My tears lies no bitter salt.
Rather like honey, or like dew will you feel them
As you take them to your face and heart.
They are the tears of womanhood,
Shed for the cruelty and blindness of man,
They are the tears of Motherhood
Shed for the useless death of her sons.
Each time I see cruelty, greed or senseless destruction,
I shed these tears,
Hoping that they will melt the harshness and the greed of man.

I weep when I see the gifts of Life
So shamelessly laid to waste,
O let My tears blind those who want to shed their brothers’ blood,
Soothe those who are wounded in the battle,
Melt the heart of Cain, ever ready to murder Abel.

O listen to My voice,
And let the gentle sound of pity cling to your devoted hearts.
These I will impregnate with the gentleness of My healing powers
That I hereby bestow on your hands
If you will give your voice
To the service of My cause.

                                                              

           The resurgence of the Feminine is giving woman a voice and a value and a new image of herself. It is giving man a new image of himself as protector and preserver of life, not in the old warrior role but in a new role as advocate and nurturer of values which transcend the desire for power, dominance and self-aggrandisement and are not affiliated to any specific religious tradition. These new values have been beautifully expressed by the Prince of Wales in a paper called A Time to Heal:

As I have grown older I have gradually come to realize that my entire life so far has been motivated by a desire to heal to heal the dismembered landscape and the poisoned soil; the cruelly shattered townscape, where harmony has been replaced by cacophony; to heal the divisions between intuitive and rational thought, between mind, body and soul, so that the temple of our humanity can once again be lit by a sacred flame; to level the monstrous artificial barrier erected between Tradition and Modernity and, above all, to heal the mortally wounded soul that, alone, can give us warning of the folly of playing God and of believing that knowledge on its own is a substitute for wisdom. (14)

           This powerful evolutionary impulse, reconnecting us to our deepest instincts, is working a profound alchemy beneath the surface of our culture. Both women and men are participating in a process of transformation that is manifesting as a new cultural impulse, one whose emphasis is no longer on power and control but on a humble awareness of the interconnection of all aspects of life. The phrase “the conquest of nature” is being replaced by the realization that we need to respect and serve the planetary life of which we are a part. While, on the surface, the culture is focused on the superficial concerns propagated by the media — specifically on consumerism and the cult of sexual promiscuity, celebrity and wealth — beneath the surface a new civilization is being prepared by millions of concerned individuals.
           Woman's age-old instinct to nurture and sustain life as well as man's instinct to protect and defend it, are being extended to embrace the life of the earth. A planet which has taken three and a half billion years to evolve an organ of consciousness through which life can come to know itself may be under threat; our survival uncertain. Before too long, we may not be able to alter the course of events we have unwittingly set in motion. Yet, in response to the extreme peril of this situation we are beginning to recover the ancient feeling of relationship with a sacred earth and a sacred cosmos. We are drawing together in closer relationship with each other, working towards the goal of rescuing this planet and the lives of future generations from our unconscious and predatory habits of behaviour.
           There are immense opportunities in this time of transformation but also immense dangers, for the very transformative power of the Feminine activates reactionary forces which seek to re-assert or maintain control over people's lives. We tread a path which is on the knife-edge between the conscious integration of a new vision on the one hand and social disintegration and regression into barbarism — perhaps the virtual annihilation of our species — on the other. At the beginning of a new millennium, we are participating in the birth of a new era, one with different aims and values to those of the solar era. Mythologically speaking, this era invites the marriage of the feminine and the masculine, and of lunar and solar consciousness and the birth of the “child” or new kind of consciousness that would be the fruit of this union. It is a tremendously exciting, challenging and creative time to be alive.

Notes:

1. C.G. Jung, CW 14, page 347, par. 488
2. Christopher Bache, Dark Night, Early Dawn, p. 220
3. Dr. Edgar Mitchell, astronaut and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences. The Way of the Explorer, Putnam 1996, pp. 3-4
4. Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth, London: Pan books Ltd, 1982, page 73
5. Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, 1962, page 6
6. Rachel Carson, The Sea Around Us, OUP, 1950, preface
7. Albert Einstein, The Expanded Quotable Einstein, collected and edited by Alice Calaprice, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2000, p. 184.
8. Jonathan Schell, ibid, p.113, 116 & 188.
9. Ann Petit, Walking to Greenham, Honno UK, 2006
10. Conversations with Carl Jung (based on four filmed interviews), Richard Evans, Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1964
11. Thomas Berry, Evening Thoughts, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 2006, p. 21 & 82-83
12. C.G. Jung, CW 11, par 753
13. Jung, CW 10 par 875
14. The concluding paragraph from A Time to Heal by HRH The Prince of Wales, first published in issue 5, The Temenos Academy Review, London, Autumn 2002.

           

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CHAPTER TEN
Jung and the Recovery of the Soul

C.G. Jung the spirit above a world of war and technology

Our psyche is set up in accord with the structure of the universe, and what happens in the macrocosm likewise happens in the infinitesimal and most subjective reaches of the psyche.

                                                    — C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams Reflections p. 335

We are at this moment participating in one of the very greatest leaps of the human spirit to a knowledge not only of outside nature but also of our own deep inward mystery.

                                                    — Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth xviii

One of the great themes of ancient myth is the hero's journey into the underworld, his encounter there with a fearsome adversary and his return to the world of everyday life, bringing with him a priceless treasure. With this treasure, he is able to regenerate his culture, heal the sick, free the people from the spell cast on them by demonic powers, release the waters of life so that fertility is restored to the Wasteland. The theme of the hero’s journey, so brilliantly defined by the great mythologist, Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade, has its mythic roots in the sun and moon's nightly and monthly journey into darkness and their return to illumine our world. It is a timeless theme of life, death and regeneration and the essential relationship between the light and the dark, this world and another world, between the known and the unknown. Descending to us from Egypt, India, Mesopotamia and Greece it underlies all mythologies which suggest that we have become separated from our home in the divine world and are, therefore, exiled, fallen, lost or asleep. It tells of the need to enter the “wilderness” of the unexplored depths of ourselves in order to recover our lost connection with that world, thereby bringing about our awakening, transformation and return to the source-ground.
           Jung was one of the cultural heroes who have made the shamanic journey into the underworld and returned with a treasure that has enriched his culture. His greatest longing and his life-long task, as he saw it, was to build a bridge between the reality we see and know with our physical senses and another unseen reality. He reconnected the solar consciousness of the rational mind with the lunar consciousness of the soul, restoring to modern Western culture the shamanic, instinctive way of knowing that had been repressed and fragmented over some 4000 years. He knew that our greatest need was for connection with the transcendent, not through belief and faith, but through the experience of an invisible dimension of reality that underlies and coinheres with the world we know.
           In the field of astronomy, Copernicus revolutionized the current state of knowledge by displacing the earth from its position at the center of the solar system. Jung did the same for the psyche, displacing the conscious mind or ego from its central position by introducing the idea of a deeper dimension of consciousness to which the ego was related and from which it had emerged. He asked again the great soul questions that are so neglected today: What is the purpose of life? What is God? What is the origin of evil?
           Like many titans of innovative thought who are ahead of their time, he has been contemptuously dismissed by some as a charlatan and a mystic, and to a large extent, ignored, notably by members of his own profession of psychiatry. Jung felt that Christianity had become transfixed in its belief system and needed to be regenerated by a deeper understanding of its great myth. Belief had not helped Christians or, indeed, believers of other traditions, to understand the intention of the spirit, an intention which he defined in the following passage:

Man is compelled by divine forces to go forward to increasing consciousness and cognition, developing  further and further away from his religious background because he does not understand it any more. His religious leaders and teachers are still hypnotized by the beginning of a then new aeon of consciousness instead of understanding them and their implications. What was once called the “Holy Ghost” is an impelling force, creating wider consciousness and responsibility and thus enriched cognition. The real history of the world seems to be the progressive incarnation of the deity. (1)

          From my study of mysticism in different cultures, I believe that Jung can be placed among the great astronauts of the soul who have opened our awareness to the existence of other dimensions of reality and a deeper knowledge of our own nature. But he was also a scientist who, through observation, developed the practical tools to help us to connect with the dimension of soul and drew up a map to guide us. The terms introvert and extravert were coined by him as were the concepts of the anima and the animus—the contra-sexual components of the psyche of man and woman. Jung felt that greater knowledge of our nature was essential if we are to avoid destroying ourselves and the planet through the blind hubris of our ego and the destructive power of our weapons. In my view, our debt to him is inestimable.
           Jung opened the door to the psyche and to psychic needs which had been ignored and repressed for centuries and of which he, as a potential carrier of consciousness for the whole culture, needed to become aware. He knew through his own experience that the imagination was the key to relationship with the archetypal ground of the soul. It falls to us to create a relationship with this ground, developing insight, understanding and wisdom through listening, observation and dialogue with it. Ignorance of the tremendous power of the hidden archetypal forces which lie beyond the range of the limited conscious mind, puts us at risk for being taken over by them, falling into madness and the dissolution of our humanity—something that we can increasingly see happening at the beginning of this new millennium.
            In the prologue to his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung says: “In the end the only events in my life worth telling are those when the imperishable world irrupted into this transitory one. That is why I speak chiefly of inner experiences, among which I include my dreams and visions. These form the prima materia of my scientific work. They were the fiery magma out of which the stone that had to be worked was crystallised.”(2)
           What were these inner experiences? Jung parted from Freud in 1912 when he was thirty-seven. During the next seven years from 1913-19 when he was trying to develop his own orientation to the treatment of his patients, he deliberately withdrew from his assigned position as Freud's successor and turned towards his inner world, setting aside time to respond to a near-overwhelming eruption of visions, dreams and fantasies. He called this period his Nekyia—a Greek word which describes a descent into the underworld. It is important to note that this experience took place just before and during the First World War whose catastrophic effects he had foreseen in a series of dreams and visions during the autumn of 1913 and the spring of 1914.
           The idea of war did not occur to him at all, he says, and so he drew the conclusion that he must be threatened by a psychosis. But as events culminated in the outbreak of war in August 1914, he began to understand the meaning of these visions and dreams and to take the unconscious seriously as an unexplored dimension of reality in which all humanity participates.
           The shaman or visionary has to translate the images and words of an unseen world into the language and understanding of his time. His conscious mind, struggling to contain the overwhelming power and numinosity of the experience, will interpret it according to the level of his own understanding and the needs of the age in which he or she lives. Jung had to undergo the original shamanic experience in order to recover the knowledge that was missing in the science of his day and then to work out how to communicate that knowledge in a way that people could understand. He took great care to try and understand every single image, every item of his psychic inventory, and to classify them scientifically—so far as this was possible—and to try and embody his insights in his daily life, for he knew that this was an ethical obligation of the conscious mind towards the unconscious. (3)
            Some have seen the experience of these years as a psychotic episode and have labeled Jung schizophrenic; others, including myself, see it as a shamanic initiation into the direct experience of another order of reality. However, there are two dangers attendant on this kind of first-hand experience. One is the danger of psychosis, of being overwhelmed by the material because the conscious ego is not sufficiently strong to contain it and decipher its meaning. The other is the danger of becoming identified with the material, inflated by it, taking it to be absolute, literal truth and setting oneself up as a messiah in the manner of those individuals who have led their credulous followers to a suicidal death or who announce the imminent end of the world and the rapture of the “chosen”.
           Prior to 1945 and the discovery of the fifty-two Gnostic texts at Nag Hammadi in Egypt, there were very few texts that had survived destruction when the Gnostic sects were repressed and their books burnt by order of the Emperor Constantine early in the fourth century AD. By 1912 Jung knew of these surviving texts and was familiar with the work of the German scholars who had studied them. This enabled him to grasp the significance of the images, fantasies and dreams that presented themselves to him during these seven years. He would have known that he was writing in the Gnostic tradition of listening to the voice of the soul and that what he was experiencing was similar to what the Gnostics and Kabbalists had recorded of their visionary and auditory experiences. But—and this is crucially important—he also knew that he had to grow into the meaning of what he had heard. As a psychiatrist, he had to interpret this raw material and embody it in a form that people could understand, that could become the basis of a new and modern understanding of the soul.
          Jung recorded his experience in over 1000 handwritten pages and illustrations, many of which he later bound together in a volume that he called The Red Book, which opens with a page written in fourteenth century German script. In the top left-hand corner, there is a landscape painted inside a large initial—in the manner of medieval illuminated manuscripts. Through these beautifully worked pages, we can see how the dimension of soul is rescued from neglect and obscurity; how its life is given meaningful expression in images and words. In this way a door opens from the conscious mind into the deeper dimension of soul. These moving words record his realization that the soul was an independent living entity, something whose immense range we cannot grasp:

Then I was still utterly engrossed in the spirit of the times and thought differently of the human soul. I thought and spoke much about the soul; I knew many learned words about the soul; I judged it and made a scientific object of it. I did not consider that the soul cannot be the object of my judgement; and knowledge the object of my soul.

Therefore the spirit of the depths pressed me to speak to my Soul, to call upon it as a living and independent being whose re-discovery means good fortune for me. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul, or rather that I had lost myself from my soul, for many years.

The spirit of the depths sees the soul as an independent, living being, and therewith contradicts the spirit of the times for whom the soul is something dependent on the person, which lets itself be ordered and judged, that is a thing whose range we can grasp. Before the spirit of the depths this thought is presumption and arrogance. Therefore the joy of my re-discovery was a humble one…Without the soul there is no way out of this time. (4)

          In the course of listening to the voice of the soul, Jung encountered a winged figure whom he called Philémon, the being who became his guide to the underworld of the unconscious, rather as Virgil was guide to Dante. Philémon taught Jung that the unexplored dimension of the soul was as real as the physical world and that it sought to gain the attention of the conscious mind.
          Jung found it ironical that he, a psychiatrist, should encounter at almost every step of his experiment the same psychic material which is typical of psychosis. “This,” he says, “is the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental patient. But it is also the matrix of a mythopoeic imagination which has vanished from our rational age. Though such imagination is present everywhere, it is both tabooed and dreaded.”(5) Near the end of his life, he wrote:

It has taken me virtually forty-five years to distill within the vessel of my scientific work the things I  experienced and wrote down at that time...The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most  important in my life - in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only  supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It  was the prima materia for a lifetime's work. (6)

Alchemy and the Transformation of Consciousness
          One of Jung’s greatest legacies to us was his insight into the mythological symbolism of alchemy, whose importance was conveyed to him in two important dreams, recounted in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Most people, when alchemy is mentioned, think of men working in laboratories, trying to turn base metal into gold, but Jung understood that for many alchemists, this image was a metaphor for a process of soul-transformation and that when they spoke of the “philosophical gold” they were not referring to what they called the common gold but to the true gold of the spirit which could, through repeated “distillations,” “washings” and “cleansings,” be freed from the dross that had accrued to it in the course of human evolution.
          Today, the word myth is generally used in the sense of describing something that is false, unreal, unproven—superstition thankfully outgrown. But myth in its original sense is a great story accepted as divinely revealed truth which can inspire, contain and structure a whole culture for thousands of years. Such a myth is central to the belief systems of Christianity and the other religions of the Axial Age—Taoism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam. Alchemy is a myth which falls under Joseph Campbell’s definition of the four functions of mythology because it throws a rainbow bridge between matter and spirit, the seen and the unseen, the Above and the Below. These four functions are: (7)

· Mystical: To awaken and maintain in the individual an experience of awe, humility and respect in recognition of the ultimate mystery transcending names and forms.
· Cosmological: To render a cosmology or image of the Universe
· Sociological: To validate and maintain an established order.
· Psychological: To center and harmonise the individual

          Jung was immersed for years in extensive researches into the myths of the ancient world, as well as the Christian myth and the lesser-known myth of alchemy. He realized that these different myths arise out of the soul and are elaborated and developed over long periods of time. They manifest deep psychological truths which attempt to explain the mystery of our existence and the complexities of our lives in this dimension. They demonstrate the basic archetypal patterns and dynamics of the soul and thus give us a vital key to understanding human needs and human behavior. The mythic content is projected onto the figure of an extraordinary individual who, because of the power of this projection, takes on the mantle of an archetypal savior, redeemer or teacher which enormously increases the power of the myth and the numinosity of the individual around whom it has constellated.
            Because these great stories are not understood as metaphors of psychic processes, whole cultures may worship a savior figure for millennia, not realizing that this figure personifies a primary content of their own soul or, in a wider sense, the soul of the cosmos. Because they fail to connect their myth to an inner experience, they may fall into defending “their” revelation against those of others or splinter into many sects which are antagonistic to each other.
          Jung came to recognize in the dreams of his patients many of the symbolic images and themes that were common to older mythologies and to alchemy. He concluded that there was an unexplored substratum of consciousness common to all humanity (the collective unconscious) and that an interpretation of mythic imagery in relation to the soul could help to reconnect the modern mind with that deeper archetypal dimension. Belief and faith had not transformed human consciousness. Something more was needed. He thought that an understanding of myth as metaphor could help us to gain a deeper understanding of ourselves. He felt that the imagery of certain myths, including the Christian one, portrays both the inner landscape and the spiritual task of the soul and describes its archetypal powers which can heal, regenerate and guide. “Myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth, rather it speaks to us as a Word of God.” (8) Modern consciousness was, he felt, cut off from its roots, impoverished because of its lack of connection with them and its ignorance of the undiscovered treasure-house of the soul.
          Like the great teachers of Kabbalah, Jung knew that the evolution of life on this planet is a very slow emergence from the organic life of nature. The whole of humanity suffers because the increase of consciousness in the human species is so slow and arduous. He realized that the alchemical images he found in the texts he studied were similar to those in the dreams of his patients and that they referred to an inner process of transformation taking place within the soul of humanity as well as the soul of the individual. His task, as he saw it, was to help people to become aware of this process so they could co-operate with and assist it.

Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the  psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. In  individual cases that transformation can be read from dreams and fantasies. In collective life it has left its  deposit principally in the various religious systems and their changing symbols. Through the study of these  collective transformation processes and through understanding of alchemical symbolism, I arrived at the central  concept of my psychology: the process of individuation. (9)

           From the alchemists, Jung took the idea of the unus mundus, a unifying cosmic ground in which both matter and psyche participate and whose connecting substratum gives rise to what he called synchronicities as well as to miraculous healings, visionary experiences and sudden illuminations. I will return to these ideas later.
          Jung knew that the greatest problem facing humanity was the loss of relationship with the soul. Just before he died he said to a friend: “I am practically alone. There are a few who understand this and that, but almost nobody sees the whole…I have failed in my foremost task: to open people’s eyes to the fact that humankind has a soul and that there is a buried treasure in the field and that our religion and philosophy are in a lamentable state.”(10)  But he did not fail. The seeds sown by him are now bearing fruit, not only in the branch of psychology which has taken his name but in the culture as a whole.
          Jung asked the basic question: “Is man related to something infinite or not? That is the telling question of his life. Only if we know that the thing which truly matters is the infinite can we avoid fixing our interest upon futilities, and upon all kinds of goals which are not of real importance.” (11)
          He thought that the dimension of the soul included the two polarities of matter and spirit, the finite and the infinite. He knew that the archetypal power of Christianity to hold society together was waning and that we needed a radically different image of God, one that did not split nature from spirit; one that included all aspects and levels of life. “It was only quite late that we realized (or rather, are beginning to realize), that God is Reality itself and therefore last but not least man. This realization is a millennial process.”(12) With these two sentences he offers us a different image of God and a different image of ourselves. Through the discoveries he made and his application of them in his practice and in his books, he was able to say near the end of his life in the famous BBC interview with John Freeman in 1959: “I don’t need to believe…I know, I know.” He also warned that “The only real danger that exists is man himself ” and that “Man cannot stand a meaningless life.”

The Concept of the Unconscious
          The word “unconscious” does not mean much to most people when they first hear of it. It doesn’t conjure up a specific image that relates to something of which they have knowledge. I much prefer to use the word soul rather than unconscious because soul is a word that relates us to older cultures and mythologies but in this chapter I need to respect Jung’s terminology. Jung's great contribution to an extended understanding of ourselves is that he expanded the field of the conscious mind’s awareness so that it was able to relate to the deeper and unrecognized levels of the psyche to which he gave the name “the unconscious”. Beyond the conscious mind lay a vast unexplored hinterland – the root and rhizome of the soul as he called it - whose existence was not yet acknowledged: “Contemporary cultural consciousness has not yet absorbed into its general philosophy the idea of the unconscious and all that it means. The assimilation of the fundamental insight that psychic life has two poles still remains a task for the future.”(13)

The Personal Unconscious
          The aspect of the unconscious that is closest to us and relates to our personal experience of life he named the personal unconscious—those feelings and tendencies which may have been repressed due to parental and cultural conditioning, religious indoctrination, social and tribal custom as well as parental complexes and sibling rivalry. In this part of the unconscious that is closest to consciousness may be found feelings of fear, guilt, anxiety, unexpressed rage which have their origin in early traumatic experience, as well as creative potential—ideas and longings—which could not be given expression because they were not considered acceptable or because there was no cultural container to receive and develop them. Many people grow up utterly unaware of how complexes in the personal unconscious may direct and constrain them—perhaps with a rigid internalized parental or religious structure of control and repression which may have been passed down in their family for generations.

The Collective Unconscious
          The personal unconscious is embedded or nested within the archetypal, transpersonal or suprapersonal dimension of the soul to which Jung gave the name of the “collective unconscious”. In dreams, this may manifest as the image of the ocean. Jung referred to it as the “mighty deposit of ancestral experience accumulated over millions of years.” At other times he called it the two-million-year-old man or woman in whose house we live but whose acquaintance we have not yet made. The collective unconscious is like a vast memory field which holds the experience of all that has transpired since the beginning of our evolution as a species on this planet. But more than this, it embraces the whole of what other species have experienced—the total species and planetary memory. Because it contains all this millennial experience, it is, as Jung described it, “the source of all sorts of evils and also the matrix of all divine experience.”(14) Consciousness in the personal sense rests on this greater substratum of our psychic life and is open to influence from it—influence that can be bearer of both good and evil, both illuminating and deceiving. All of us are influenced by these largely unknown archetypal dynamics. In his writings and his practice, soul becomes not something that belongs to us but something in whose greater life we unknowingly participate. “The unconscious…is as natural, as limitless, and as powerful as the stars.”(15)

If the human soul is anything, it must be of unimaginable complexity and diversity…I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of living development and become fixed in the organism. My consciousness is like an eye that penetrates to the most distant spaces, yet it is the psychic non-ego that fills them with non-spatial images. And these images are not pale shadows, but tremendously powerful psychic factors…Besides this picture I would like to place the spectacle of the starry heavens at night, for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without; and just as I reach this world through the medium of the body, so I reach that world through the medium of the psyche. (16)

          Jung knew that the modern soul was in a state of suffering and alienation because the conscious mind knew nothing of this deeper ground and, therefore, could not grow to its full potential, its full stature, through the creation of a relationship with it, nor could the conscious mind protect itself from being possessed or taken over by archetypal elements, having no experience in how to recognize, relate to or integrate them. He defined sickness or neurosis as a state of incompleteness, and health as a state of wholeness brought about through the reconnection of the conscious mind with the unconscious through paying attention to dreams, synchronistic events and the cultivation of the art of listening to and engaging in dialogue with the soul. Just as a child develops the ability to read and thereby gains access to an immense field of information relating to the physical world, so he thought we could develop the imagination as a vital faculty that helps us to gain experience of the dimension of the soul that lies beyond the horizon of the conscious mind.
          The conscious mind can listen, interpret, assess, and apply what is discovered through that experience. It can also challenge or disagree with the content of what is brought to its attention. But if it does not accept the existence of such a dimension, it can also block access to it through ridicule, denial or overt repression. If the imagination is allowed no access to what lies beyond the current parameters of the rational mind, it is likely to degenerate into destructive, even pathological fantasies and behavior. If we seek proof of the sickness of the modern soul, we need look no further than the constant celebration of violence on our television screens, the growing arsenal of our weapons of mass destruction and the fundamentalist and polarized stance of so many who claim allegiance to a specific religion.

The Importance of the Conscious Mind or Ego
          As his understanding of the psyche deepened, Jung realized that the development of the ego and conscious mind was an incredible evolutionary achievement. A dream showed him the importance of consciousness per se:

It was night in some unknown place, and I was making slow and painful headway against a mighty wind. Dense fog was flying along everywhere. I had my hands cupped around a tiny light which threatened to go out  at any moment. Everything depended on my keeping this little light alive…This little light was my  consciousness, the only light I have. My own understanding is the sole treasure I possess, and the greatest. (17)

          It is an salutary thought that without the existence of the conscious mind, we would not be able to perceive the world, reflect upon it and interact with its reality. Looking for a myth for our time, Jung found it in the fact that, through the existence of the conscious mind, man has become “indispensable for the completion of creation:”

…he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence – without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of  millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end.  Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being. (18)

           “As far as we can discern,” he observed, “the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. It may even be assumed that just as the unconscious affects us, so the increase in our consciousness affects the unconscious.”(19)

The Loss of a Living Myth
          But the emergence of the ego and the development of the conscious mind tore us out of nature. Its coming into existence involved a great loss, the loss of the state of unconscious participation mystique with nature, the loss of a different kind and quality of consciousness and the instinctive sense of belonging to a greater whole. The Myth of the Fall in Genesis precisely describes this loss. In his last book, Man and His Symbols, Jung summarizes this loss:

As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become dehumanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is no longer involved in nature, and has lost his emotional “unconscious identity” with natural phenomena…No voices now speak to man from stones, plants, and animals, nor does he speak to them believing they can hear. His contact with nature has gone, and with it has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connection supplied. (20)

          When Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God at the end of the nineteenth century, he was describing not so much the literal death of God as the decay of a belief system and an image of spirit that was worn out, because it was no longer numinous and therefore relevant to millions of people. Jung realized that that the problems of our time are rooted not only in the grip that scientific materialism has on our culture, but above all in the loss of a living myth which would give meaning to our lives. He saw that the dissociation of the conscious rational mind from what he called the primordial or instinctual soul presented a growing and unperceived danger to humanity. The more we emphasized reason and the supremacy of the rational mind, the greater the danger that instinct—whose power we have failed to recognize—would drive, possess, delude and overwhelm us and the more we would fall victim to secular and religious ideologies and utopian goals which could ultimately lead us to destroy ourselves.
          At present the conscious mind or ego necessarily has a restricted field of vision. We cannot hold the totality of the conscious and unconscious aspects of our psyche because our field of awareness is so limited. The extent of the unconscious is as great as life itself, while the focus of consciousness is a restricted field of momentary awareness that is heavily dependent on memory.
          In relation to what is still a potential in us to be developed, the conscious mind is in what could be called a pre-conscious state, characterized by unconscious identifications and projections of every kind that arise from various personal complexes and imprinted collective beliefs. Moreover, it is still subject to the immense power of the instinctual drives of the older brain system, as described in Chapter Four. This unconsciousness is reflected in the difficulties and conflicts in our relationships with each other, whether as individuals or as nation states and in the fact that we repeat the same patterns of behavior without any apparent ability to prevent ourselves doing so or even any awareness of what we are doing.
          Jung’s concept of the process of individuation was to extend or expand the field of our awareness so that we are able to relate, at least to some extent, to the deeper levels of the complex totality of the soul. Working at this deep level for many years is like an extended meditation which connects us not only to the life of nature but to the immensity of the inner life of the cosmos—what could be called the soul of the cosmos.

The Danger of an Inflated Ego
          Jung hoped that if awareness of the fact that there are two poles or dimensions of consciousness could spread through our culture, this would mitigate the dangers of a further inflation of the modern ego, or “rational” mind, which has set up a phobic defense against anything which threatens the hegemony of its own current level of understanding. Jung developed this theme in Man and His Symbols where he writes:

Modern man does not understand how much his “rationalism” (which has destroyed his capacity to respond  to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic “underworld.” He has freed himself  from “superstition” (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively  dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has disintegrated, and he is now paying  the price for this  break-up in world-wide disorientation and dissociation…We have stripped all things of their mystery and  numinosity; nothing is holy any longer. (21)

           Nowhere is this hubris of the conscious mind more apparent and more dangerous than in the sphere of  politics and religion. And no-one was more aware of the dangers of this state of inflation than Jung when he  wrote: “We are threatened with universal genocide if we cannot work out the way of salvation by a symbolic  death.”(22) By this, he meant the death of the omnipotent stance of the conscious mind or ego. On the eve of the  outbreak of the First World War, as he recounts in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung had a vivid dream  which showed him the necessity of his consciously making this sacrifice:

I was with an unknown, brown-skinned man…in a lonely, rocky mountain landscape. It was before dawn; the eastern sky was already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard Siegfried's horn sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had to kill him…On a chariot made of the bones of the dead he drove at a furious speed down the precipitous slopes. When he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck dead… Filled with disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so great  and beautiful, I turned to flee, impelled by the fear that the murder might be discovered. But a tremendous downfall of rain began, and I knew that it would wipe out all traces of the dead. (23)

          Reflecting on the dream, Jung understood that it pointed to a problem that was being played out in the world. He realized that he had to sacrifice his unconscious identification with the solar hero personified by the figure of Siegfried, and the inflated attitude that seeks power over others. He understood that when an individual or a nation does not become aware of both the light and the dark, the conscious and unconscious aspects of his/its nature, the individual or nation may project an unconscious power drive onto an opponent and embark upon a crusade to eliminate that 'enemy'. The evil is always 'out there'. Therefore, the world is torn into opposing ideologies; walls, psychic and material, are built to separate enemies.

The Self
          Jung and the other men and women who have devoted their whole lives to the study of the psyche, have greatly expanded our understanding of the relationship between the two aspects of our psychic life — the rational and the transrational — which together constitute the wholeness of the psyche and which function as a self-regulating system, rather like the earth’s biosphere. Of crucial importance is Gerhard Adler’s redefinition of the unconscious as the greater consciousness or super-conscious. (24) The word “unconscious” might suggest that it is something inferior to consciousness whereas the true situation is the reverse. The conscious mind is unconscious of something that is infinitely greater than itself, the matrix out of which it has evolved. This redefinition aligns Jung’s discoveries with the far older tradition of the cosmic dimensions of soul that developed from Egyptian, Platonic, Gnostic and Kabbalistic roots. In India, Vedic teaching has always described seven realms or planes of reality which can become accessible to human consciousness as it deepens its experience.
          This greater consciousness or greater dimension of soul has a focus within the unconscious, functioning there as an autonomous intelligence — a dynamic, structuring, ordering and integrating principle that Jung called the Self. In his view, this deeper intelligence (even when unrecognized) initiates and oversees the alchemy of the transformation of consciousness—whether in the individual or in our species as a whole—whereby the center of gravity gradually shifts from the personal to the transpersonal or, to put it another way, where the conscious personality grows and expands through a deepening relationship with the unseen ground of life.

The Self can inform the ego of realities that have never been part of conscious reality. Thus, for example, in  the case of an individual who has been struck with a life-threatening illness, and whose  conscious attitude  toward the illness might be despair and hopelessness, it is the Self that can constellate the archetype of healing  in the individual and that may unleash a flood of dreams, some of which may point directly towards specific  healing approaches above and beyond those being employed. In some cases the Self appears to stimulate the  self-healing dynamics of the body’s auto-immune system. (25)

         In the Abrahamic religions the image of the Self has been projected onto the image of God but this image was thought of as utterly transcendent. There was the possibility of dialogue and relationship, even of a numinous experience of the Self in the form of dreams and visions, but the Self was rarely experienced as a deeper dimension or intelligence that is the ground of our own consciousness. Today, in a secular culture such as our own, the conscious ego has banished any dimension of reality beyond this physical world and there is, therefore, no possibility of dialogue and relationship with the Self: dreams, messages, warnings and synchronistic events go unnoticed. The danger of this is that people – particularly political and religious leaders – can become inflated by an unconscious identification with the Self and claim god-like powers for themselves, their religion, their ideology or their nation.
          My own visionary dream of the figure of a woman reaching from earth to heaven can be understood as an image of the Self. Her message to me was to develop and extend my consciousness, to center the wheel in my abdomen as hers was centered. Had I not been in analysis at the time, such a vision might have destabilized or inflated me. In a secular culture, I would not have known how to relate to that experience but might have either ignored it or used it for my own purposes, rather than seeking to serve it and integrate its message over many years. Nor would I have understood that my vision personified both the Self in the Jungian sense as well as the macrocosm—the vast hidden matrix of cosmic soul.
          An encounter with the Self can be both terrifying and incomprehensible as well as life-transforming. One cannot communicate the experience to someone who has never had such an experience any more than one can communicate the feeling of falling in love or the near-death experience to someone who has not had that experience. One can describe it, but to communicate the numinosity of it is almost impossible. The Self might be thought of as the archetype of wholeness, and its intention is to restore to wholeness the human psyche that has been so fragmented—even through means which appear to us to be destructive. The process of individuation is an enormous cultural task, made more difficult in a culture that shows no inclination to acknowledge the need for it. Anyone who enters onto the lonely path of individuation, through whatever door, becomes deeply aware of the suffering of the world and is drawn to respond to it.
          The general ignorance of the existence of the cosmic dimensions of soul and our lack of relationship with them goes far to answer the question of why the suffering of humanity — despite a phenomenal improvement in our health, longevity and standard of living, at least in some of the industrialized nations — appears to be ineradicable. This ignorance also sheds light on why people, despite their religious beliefs, continue to behave in such unconscious, brutal and destructive ways that injure or destroy their own lives as well as those of others. So much of this brutality springs from deep psychic wounds — many of them culturally imposed — of which people are unaware and which, therefore, remain inaccessible to healing. Religious indoctrination, such as the belief in original sin, a punishing, judgmental God, or the inferiority and dangerous sexuality of women, may inflict such wounds, many of them delivered centuries ago but still carried in the collective memory field of the transpersonal unconscious.
          In the midst of their suffering, millions have cried out, “Why does God allow these things to happen? Why does He allow us to suffer? Why can't He intervene to help us?” But Jung knew that God cannot prevent human suffering any more than He can prevent human cruelty, avarice and greed. Only insight into our own nature could change our deeply ingrained habits of aggression and therefore our suffering. As he comments:

 Individuation does not only mean that man has become truly human as distinct from animal, but that he is to  become partially divine as well. That means practically that he becomes adult, responsible for his existence,  knowing that he does not only depend on God but that God also depends on man. (26)

          Of the Self, Jung wrote, “Even the enlightened person remains what he is, and is never more than his own limited ego before the One who dwells within him, whose form has no knowable boundaries, who encompasses him on all sides, fathomless as the abysms of the earth and vast as the sky.”(27)

The Shadow
          Jung’s understanding of the shadow is one of the most important aspects of his work and will be explored in more detail in a later chapter. He was deeply aware of the need for us to become aware of the unconscious drive for power and dominance that affects so much of the way we conduct ourselves in the world and our relationships with other nations. This drive is reflected in archaic habits of behaviour which perpetuate war, oppression, and suffering. In relation to the urgent need for us to become aware of our shadow behavior he commented:

None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow. Whether the crime occurred many generations back or happens today, it remains the symptom of a disposition that is always and everywhere present – and one would therefore do well to possess some “imagination for evil”…harmlessness and naiveté are as little help as it would be for a cholera patient and those in his vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease. On the contrary, they lead to projection of the unrecognized evil onto the “other.” This strengthens the opponent’s position in the most effective way, because the projection carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly feel for our own evil over to the other side and considerably increases the formidableness of his threat. What is even worse, our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil. (28)

          Jung repeatedly spoke of our power to destroy not only our species but even the planet. One of his closest colleagues, Marie Louise von Franz, said in the film Matter of Heart that near the end of his life, Jung had a vision of terrible world destruction, and another just before his death of which he said, “Thank God, it wasn't the whole planet.”
          As long as we have no insight into shadow behavior, we run the risk of falling under the spell of beliefs that cause us to repeat old patterns. As Jung observed:

Today, humanity as never before, is split into two apparently irreconcilable halves. The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. That is to say, when the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner opposite, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn into opposing halves. (29)

          We have seen how, in the last century, psychopathic individuals were able to seize power through casting the spell of Utopian myths on millions of followers, inflicting an orgy of murder and blood-lust on the people of Europe, the Soviet Union, China and Cambodia. There is a danger that the pattern will continue to be repeated unless we become more conscious of the dangers involved in destroying an old order and instituting a new one. Nothing illustrates this better than the naïve belief that God would approve of removing Saddam Hussein from power because he was “evil” and instituting a new democratic order in Iraq. The danger, as Jung pointed out in his book, Civilization in Transition, is Utopian ideologies (whether religious or secular) that seduce people into believing that destroying an old order by violence will usher in a new and better world. As John Gray acidly comments in his book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, “Preserving the hard-won restraints of civilization is less exciting than throwing them away in order to realize impossible dreams. Barbarism has a certain charm, particularly when it comes clothed in virtue.”(30)
          If this transformation of our nature does not happen, the addiction to power, primacy and control and the struggle over territory and dwindling resources such as oil, food and water will continue as before—leading to ever more suffering, perhaps even to our extinction as a species. As long as we remain unconscious of the immense power of that addiction we are condemned to repeat the habits of the past, aligning ourselves on the side of good and believing that we can overcome evil by fighting it with the force of arms. If we can become capable of recognizing and restraining our own capacity for evil, we can rescue ourselves from this predicament, which is at the same time God's predicament, since God’s power to intervene in human affairs is dependent on the maturation of our own consciousness—the only channel through which this intervention can be expressed.
          Jung was far in advance of his time in recognising the need for a new definition of our relationship to God or Spirit. His understanding of the shadow and of our huge potential, both for good and for evil, opened for us a new avenue for psychic transformation. This is what he wrote in a letter:

We have become participants of the divine life and we have to assume a new responsibility. The responsible living and fulfilling of the divine love in us will be our form of worship of, and commerce with, God. His  goodness means grace and light and his dark side the terrible temptation of power. Man has already received  so much knowledge that he can destroy his own planet. Let us hope that God's good spirit will guide him in his  decisions, because it will depend on man's decision whether God's creation will continue. (31)  

                At the end of  The Undiscovered Self, Jung wrote:

A mood of world destruction and world renewal has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially and philosophically. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and  science. As at the beginning of the Christian Era, so again today we are faced with the problem of the moral backwardness of our species which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical and social developments. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man. Is  he capable of resisting the temptation to use his power for the purpose of staging a world conflagration? Is he  conscious of the path he is treading and what the conclusions are that must be drawn from the present world  situation and his own psychic situation?… does the individual know that he [or she] is the make-weight that  tips the scales…that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the  Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal? (32)

           In Answer to Job, he wrote: “Everything now depends on man: immense power of destruction is given into his hand and the question is whether he can resist the will to use it, and can temper his will with the spirit of love and wisdom.”(33) What Jung offered was not a new belief system but a spirituality grounded in self-knowledge—particularly awareness of the shadow, so freeing ourselves from possession by it. This could lead to a greater sense of ethical responsibility towards life in all its aspects, seen and unseen. He knew that we did not have much time in which to accomplish this momentous task because he saw the dangers of the god-like power that had been put into our hands through the development of our weapons, our fixation on scientific and technological progress and our ignorance of how the conscious mind can be directed by the power drive of the unconscious shadow.
          Jung realized that the problems of our time are rooted not only in the grip that scientific rationalism has on our culture, but in the loss of a living myth and the increasing dissociation between thinking and feeling, conscious mind and instinctive soul. This inner dissociation, magnified by the inflation of the ego and projected onto countless situations of tension and conflict in the world draws all of us closer to catastrophe.
            One recent example of ego inflation was the decision of the American and British governments to invade Iraq in 2003. So sure were their leaders that their cause was a righteous one and that they would be welcomed by the Iraqi people, that they went into Iraq like a bull into a china shop, totally unprepared for the much harder task of securing the peace. The suffering and loss of life they caused (151,000 civilian lives by 2006 and four million exiled and destitute) did not apparently matter in relation to the prize of “victory”. This is one example of how we can be taken over by the archetypal forces which lie beyond the conscious mind and succumb to an inflation of the ego.
          Jung repeatedly drew attention to the fact that the fate of the earth depends on the individual, on our capacity to create a relationship with our soul, to become aware of and to value that part of ourselves we know least — our deepest feelings and instincts which are the root of our creative imagination. This instinctual dimension of ourselves, so dissociated from consciousness, so little explored and understood, is the matrix of our creative life, and is immeasurably older and sometimes wiser than the more recently developed aspect of ourselves we call our rational mind. Becoming aware of this instinctual dimension and the immense field of relationships and experience it embraces constitutes an evolutionary advance. For, until we learn how to relate to it, how to integrate it with our more familiar, focused ability to think, we remain immature, living on the surface of life, falling prey to events which we bring into being because of our ignorance of the habits that compel us to repeat the mistakes of the past. We are then easily manipulated by political and religious leaders who think in terms of accruing power to their own particular group or ideology, rather than in terms of what truly benefits the people they are meant to serve or the wider needs of the planet itself.
          Jung revived and recovered the lost dimension of the soul for our culture. He knew from his own shamanic encounter with this dimension that the conventional view of a personal soul was too shallow to be able to hold his experience. From his first moving description of his encounter with this deeper dimension of reality, as recorded in The Red Book until his realization, after years of observation, that there must be a dimension to which he gave the name “psychoid” which underlay both psyche and matter and in which both participated—so giving rise to his concept of synchronicity, the whole focus of his work from 1913 until his death in 1960 was on the recovery of the soul.
          “We are partly fated and partly free,” he wrote, “and the measure of our freedom is our capacity to relate to our fate.”(34) We cannot relate to or comprehend our fate, let alone change it, unless we integrate the two separated aspects of our soul—the conscious mind and the unconscious. In a letter to Miguel Serrano, written shortly before he died, Jung said something which gives hope for the future, reminding us that what seems of supreme importance to one’s own life path may ultimately have value for the world as well:

In each aeon there are at least a few individuals who understand what man’s real task consists of, and  keep its tradition for future generations and a time when insight has reached a deeper and more general level. First the way of a few will be changed and in a few generations there will be more…whoever is capable of such insight, no matter how isolated he is, should be aware of the law of synchronicity. As the old Chinese saying goes: “The right man sitting in his house and thinking the right thought will be heard a 100 miles away. (35)

          In answer to the question “What can I do?” Jung said, “Become what you have always been, namely, the wholeness we have lost in the midst of our civilized, conscious existence, a wholeness that we always were without knowing it.”(36)

Notes:

1. C. G. Jung, Letters 2, p. 436 Letter to Rev. Morton Kelsey
2. Prologue to Memories Dreams, Reflections, London: Collins and Routledge & Kegan
Paul, London, 1963, p. 18
3. Memories Dreams, Reflections p. 184
4. Chapter II in The Red Book: The Re-discovery of the Soul:
5. Memories Dreams, Reflections p. 181
6. Memories Dreams, Reflections p. 191
7. Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
8. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 340
9. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 209
10. From an unpublished letter written by Jung in 1960 quoted by Dr. Gerhard Adler in Dynamics of the Self, Coventure, London 1979, p. 92
11. Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 300
12. Collected Works 11, par. 631
13. find reference
14. CW 18 par. 1586
15. Man and his Symbols, Aldus Books, London, 1964, p. 103
16. CW 4, Freud and Psychoanalysis, p 331
17. MDR
18. MDR p. 240-1
19. MDR, p. 301
20. Man and His Symbols, p. 95
21. Man and his Symbols, p. 94
22. CW 18, par. 1661
23. MDR, 173-4
24. Gerhard Adler, Dynamics of the Self, p. 129
25. Jerome S. Bernstein, Living in the Borderland, Routledge, 2005, p. 57-8
26. Letters 2, p. 316, letter to Elined Kotschnig
27. CW 11, Answer to Job, last paragraph (758)
28. The Undiscovered Self, par. 572, p. 297
29. CW 9, Part 11, par. 126
30. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Allen Lane, London, 2007, p. 192
31. C.G. Jung, Letters, Vol. 11, p. 316 - letter to Elined Kotschnig, quoted in C.G. Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul, p. 199, by Claire Dunne, Parabola Books, 2000
32. The Undiscovered Self, p. 110-112
33. Answer to Job, CW 11, p. 459.
34. passed on to me by my analyst who knew Jung personally.
35. Letter to Miguel Serrano, 1960 in Letters Vol. 2, p. 595
36. CW 10, par. 722

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