CHAPTER SIX

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

The cosmic battle between Light and Darkness, Good and Evil, reflected in the hero's fight with a dragon, monster or serpent, is the dominant myth of the solar era. As I hope to explain in this and the next two chapters, it presided over the split between nature and spirit and between mind and body. It gave rise to the idea that man is engaged in a great battle to subdue and control nature. Ultimately this led to the split between ourselves as the observer and the whole field of what we observe 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 around 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 participatory worldview 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 the battle between light and darkness, good and evil and, ultimately, man conquering nature and the triumph of good over 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 outstanding individual although the group maintains its importance.
            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 or ascent 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. 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.” (3) 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, as in the time of Parmenides and the Pre-Socratic philosophers, 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 practices and 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 foundations 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. (4) Whatever the cause, Joseph Campbell describes this time as “The Great Reversal”. (5) 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.” (6) 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 proclaim 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 and all subsequent ones.
           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. (7) 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. At approximately the same time, approximately from the tenth to the eighth century BC, the Myth of the Fall in the Book of Genesis was formulated, probably by the priests who served Yahweh. This myth effectively demoted the Goddess into the human figure of Eve. 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 Myth of the Fall describes the process of estrangement, separation and loss—a stark reversal of the participatory way of knowing that characterised older, pre-literate lunar cultures. Above all, as Jules and I observed in The Myth of the Goddess, “Nature is no longer experienced as source but as adversary, and darkness is no longer a mode of divine being, as it was in the lunar cycles, but a mode of being devoid of divinity and actively hostile, devouring of light, clarity and order.” (page 298)
           The great myth of the solar era is that of the heroic individual engaged in 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 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 entered and explored.
           The primary theme of solar mythology is empowerment, ascent, achievement, conquest, carried through to our own day in Bronowski's famous documentary television series in the mid-sixties, The Ascent of Man, which aimed to show the whole spectrum of discoveries and inventions that revealed “man’s ability to control nature, not to be controlled by it”. Solar mythology 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. This is when we “lost the cosmos”.
            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 in the evolution of consciousness, the male psyche identified itself with the supremacy of spirit and mind over nature, woman and body. It came to associate 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 woman. 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 directive from the earliest Mesopotamian codification of law, c. 2350 BC: “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, surviving in the Hermetic tradition, and in the mystical teaching of Kabbalah and 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.” (8)
           Another book, The Alphabet and the Goddess, written by the late Leonard Shlain, who was chief of laparoscopic surgery at California Medical Center in San Francisco, 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.” (9)

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. (10)

           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 and methods of healing with which to guide and help 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 increasingly 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.
            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 still 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 interwoven with the sacred texts of the three patriarchal religions and with their behavior towards those enemies 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 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. The glorification of war and conquest and the exaltation of the warrior is a major theme of the solar era – still with us today in George W. Bush’s words: “We will accept no outcome except victory”. this call to victory echoes down the centuries, ensuring that hecatombs of young men were sacrificed to the god of war. 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 were 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 as 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 as opposed to those of India and China). 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 has fueled America’s drive for supremacy and its desire to control the world and impose democracy “for its own good”. George W. Bush’s much quoted 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) that was identified with nature. 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, hastens the demise of the lunar way of knowing and the former instinctive sense of relationship with a sacred earth and a sacred cosmos. During this era, the left hemisphere of the brain begins to assume a position of dominance in relation to the right. The more literacy spreads, the more this tendency develops.
           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 behaviour 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 and it still continues in places like the Amazonian and Indonesian rainforests. As time went on, religions, particularly Christianity and Islam, took on the mantle of solar mythology in a militant struggle for supremacy. 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 and attack an object on which to project our darkness. This unconscious mechanism of projection still operates 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 to 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 materialism described in Chapter Four 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.Consequently, 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 endeavour. 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 rational 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 suggests. 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.” (11)
           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, industrial and commercial greed of the West. Shamanic methods of healing are being recovered, among them ancient methods of aligning ourselves with the spirit of the earth. 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. (12) As this deep soul-impulse gathers momentum, the “marriage” of the re-emerging lunar values with the dominant solar ones is changing our perception of reality. This gives us hope for 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.” (13)

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. The Myth of the Goddess, p. 661
4 . Steve Taylor, The Fall, O Books, Hampshire, England, 2005
5 . Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology, Penguin Books, London, 1970, p. 139
6 .Thorkild Jacobsen, The Treasures of Darkness, A History of the Mesopotamian Religion, Yale University Press, 1976, p. 77
7 . Karl Kerenyi, Zeus and Hera, Bollingen Press
8 . David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous, p. 254
9 . Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet and the Goddess, Viking, New York, 1998, p. 40
10 . ibid, pp. 44
11. Frederick Turner, Beyond Geography, The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness, p. xxiv-xxv
12. Ervin Laszlo, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos, Inner Traditions, Vermont, 2006 and Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, Viking, New York, 2006
13. op. cit. p. 78

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