Where
did the idea of cosmic soul originate - psuche tou cosmou -
as Plato called it? To answer this question we have to go back 25,000
years and trace the image of the Great Mother or Great Goddess from
the Palaeolithic era onwards, following it through to the civilisations
of the Bronze Age and forward to our own time. The image of the Great
Mother is the root of the concept of cosmic soul. One of the greatest
difficulties in understanding this concept of soul is that for almost
three thousand years in Judeo-Christian civilisation the image of God
- the creator of the universe - has had no feminine dimension. This
means that everything that the image of the Great Mother embraced in
earlier civilisations - most importantly the feeling that spirit was
immanent or present within the phenomenal world - was lost. 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 in
Bronze Age Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Crete and Greece - was lost,
and with it the vital sense of participation in the life of an invisible
entity imagined as a containing, connecting maternal being.
-----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 matrix of nature 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.
The philosopher Richard Tarnas describes this story as both an heroic
ascent to autonomy but at the same time a tragic fall from unity. He
views the history of the last two and a half thousand years as a series
of births which have forged Western consciousness and Western civilisation
but which has, at the same time, severed our sense of relationship with
nature and cosmos. We are now embarked on the process of reconnection,
of rediscovering that lost sense of participation. In his Passion
of the Western Mind he writes:
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. (see Booklist
for details)
-----When
Jules Cashford and I began to write The Myth of the Goddess,
we felt we had to go back to the beginning of the recorded image. We
wanted to find the earliest images which were of supreme importance
to humanity and we wanted to discover where and why the sacred image
of the feminine archetype or principle had been lost or discarded by
Western culture. When 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 the figure
of the goddess stood for a totally different perspective on life that
has long been lost. She personified a vision of life as an organic,
living and sacred whole.
-----
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 the feminine value. Despite this,
since Greek times, soul and nature have always been imagined in feminine
imagery. However, as the goddess came to be rejected or downgraded in
relation to the god, so spirit and nature, mind and soul - the conscious
and unconscious aspects of the psyche, became divorced and polarised
in human consciousness, leading to the spiritual, political and ecological
crisis we face at the present time.
-----
But now, at this crucial stage in our evolution the archetype of the
Feminine is returning. Through visionary experience, dream and intuitive
perception as well as scholarly research, the soul is being restored
to the position it once held. As we recover it, we are becoming increasingly
aware of the inter-connection of many different aspects of life, of
the sacredness of life, of the Earth, of matter. Our image of reality
and our relationships with the planet and each other are slowly being
transformed as we assimilate the implications of this new understanding.
The impact of the return of this lost aspect of spirit has the force
of an earthquake, shaking us to our foundations, insisting on a radical
transformation of all our beliefs and values.
-----
For centuries 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, like the Sleeping Beauty, she is awakening from her sleep,
stirring to life within us and within our culture. 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 us and an invisible
dimension of reality.
* -----*-----
*
Human
consciousness has developed infinitely slowly out of the deep instinctual
ground that we call nature. It has taken billions of years for life
on this planet to evolve to the point where it could bring forth the
kind of consciousness we now have. Before we knew ourselves as human,
we were animal and plant, rock and sea. We were the fiery magma of the
earth's core and, long before that, we were the substance of the stars.
All this experience is carried in the cells of our body. The ability
to reflect upon our actions, to imagine, to think, to reason, is a very
recent development in relation to the thousands, even millions of years
of human evolution. For countless millennia the potential for human
consciousness was hidden within nature, like a seed buried in the earth.
Then, very slowly, it began to differentiate itself from nature, from
what Jung called "the root and rhizome of the soul". This separation
was increasingly experienced by us as a state of disharmony and disunion
and from it has come our present dualistic, fragmented consciousness
and the fears and anxieties that torment us. But the memory of the experience
of union we once knew lives on in us as a longing for reunion,
the longing to belong once again, to that greater other. We have created
all kinds of myths to explain the human condition and to re-connect
us to the whole. We can understand this evolutionary step more easily
when we look at the life of a child, who recapitulates in its separation
from its mother the immense evolutionary advance of becoming aware of
ourselves first of all as a species, different from the life around
us, then as individuals, separate from the collectivity of the tribe.
-----
As consciousness evolved, the sacred image was like an umbilical cord
holding us in touch with the roots of the soul. The first image we created
to connect us with these roots was the Great Mother. For some 18,000
years, the image of the goddess as Great Mother presided over the far
distant eras which have become accessible to us only in this century:
the Palaeolithic (40,000-10,000 BC), the Neolithic (10,000-3500 BC)
and the great civilisations of the Bronze Age (about 3000-1500 BC).
The image of the Great Mother stands for the whole instinctual network
of relationships that we call life. She can be imagined (as she was
in these eras) as both transcendent and immanent, both beyond and within
the forms of life. She was present within her manifest forms, continually
regenerating them in a cyclical process that was without end. She was
imagined as the womb of life, the great web of life, the rhythmic pulse
of life. The life of the One was the life of All. Moon and sun, stars
and constellations, plants, trees, animals, human beings - all these
were her children. She unified within her being the three dimensions
of sky, earth and underworld. As a tiny child lives within the mother's
field of consciousness and draws its life from it so, at this time,
we were held in the field of the Great Mother's being.
-----
The most important image associated with the Great Mother was the moon.
The moon was the light shining in the darkness; the symbol of our own
human consciousness which longs to understand the mystery of life. The
moon was born out of darkness as the slender crescent, imagined as a
young girl. It grew to fullness like a pregnant woman; it waned again
into darkness like an ancient crone. The earliest lunar notations (found
in Africa) are known to date to 40,000 BC. The moon gave us an image
of life as changeless yet ever-changing and a cyclical pattern of death
and regeneration which ruled all aspects of creation. With the passage
of countless millennia, we came to trust in the reappearance of the
crescent moon, and to recognise that darkness was a time of transition
between an old and a new phase of life. We came to apply this insight
to ourselves and to believe that, with death, we would be taken back
into the womb of the Great Mother and reborn like the crescent moon.
(the belief in reincarnation may have come from this lunar observation).
The life of the Great Mother was eternal, like the moon; the life of
the earth's vegetation and our own human lives waxed and waned like
the phases of the moon. Out of this long lunar experience evolved the
capacity to imagine, to feel, to think, to reflect, to create - the
inexhaustible creativity of our species. The mythology, astronomy, architecture
and the concept of divine law active in all life, which reached such
brilliant expression in the civilisations of the Bronze Age, may have
arisen from this primordial observation of the moon.
-----
Long before the paintings we so admire were painted, the cave was the
most sacred place, the focus of the life of the tribe. Symbolically,
it was the actual womb of the Great Mother, the secret, hidden source
of her regenerative power. It was from here that she brought forth the
living and received the dead back into herself for rebirth. The cave
still symbolises, 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.
-----
The approach to the sanctuary in these caves was formidably difficult,
a ritual of initiation into the mysteries of the Great Mother, often
requiring hours negociating narrow passageways. Imagine yourselves crawling
and slithering through these entrails, gasping for breath with the effort,
your only light in the pitch darkness coming from tiny lamps made of
hollowed bone and filled with animal fat and juniper twigs. Imagine
your fear that your light might go out. Suddenly you emerge into a huge
cavern. Even now, as one retraces their path into the far recesses of
a cave, often terrified by the immensity of the darkness, and the fear
that one's light will go out, 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, often in a domed chamber, vast as a cathedral, but
sometimes in narrow entrail-like passages, they painted and carved the
magnificent animals we can see today. These animals were the teeming
life of the Great Mother on which our life depended. The labyrinth and
the spiral became at this early time, symbols of the connecting pathway
between this world and the unseen dimension of the Great Mother's womb.
These tell us that at this time we were already aware of two dimensions
of experience - this earthly one and another invisible one, to which
we were connected as by an umbilical cord.
-----
Between 25,000 and 5000 BC the image of the Great Mother begins to evolve
into three specific forms. She is imagined as the sky, and her epiphany
or manifestation here is the bird. She is imagined as the earth, and
her manifestation is the animal - particularly the lioness and the leopard,
but also many smaller animals such as the doe, the pig, even the hedgehog.
She is imagined as the waters of the earth - the waters that fall from
her breasts - the clouds - and the waters of the underworld welling
up from beneath the earth. The symbol of her waters is the serpent,
image of the power of life to renew itself. Thousands of years later,
she still has the same essential forms, only more defined, as well as
a whole mythology of the feminine principle as the Mother of All. Because
she was present or immanent in the forms of life, she was accessible
to human beings. People learned to pay attention to unusual signs or
events; to look and to listen at a level beyond the routine experience
of life; to notice correspondences and draw analogies, to develop their
intuition and their imagination. Caves, rounded mountain tops, groves
of trees or deep natural crevices in the earth were held to be and became
the focus of shamanic rituals. Water, rocks, trees, plants, animals
and birds were living presences. People could speak to them and listen
to the messages they heard. Today the interest in dowsing, the attraction
to sacred places and even the passionate interest in gardening and cooking
carry that ancient feeling of participation in the life of nature, the
life of the earth.
-----
But the Great Mother was also an unseen place or dimension which could
only be reached by treading the labyrinthine pathway between this world
and the source or womb-world. Someone sculpted a figure (about 4500
BC) with a door and a labyrinth pattern drawn on her body to show the
door or gate of entry into another dimension and the pathway through
which we enter and leave this world for another.
-----
The Neolithic is the time when agriculture and animal husbandry were
developed; now the old lunar mythology was experienced in relation to
the cycle of the crops, where people saw the light and dark phases of
the moon reflected in the fertile and barren phases of the seasons.
The invisible seed planted in the darkness of the earth's womb became
visible as the green shoots of corn and then as the crop that was harvested
and transformed into food by the labour of men and women. The Great
Mother was worshipped throughout the entire Neolithic world. Everything
that was of the earth, whether rock or spring, tree or fruit, grain
or herb, was sacred because it carried the life of the Great Mother,
offered for the nourishment of her children. No species was superior
to any other.
-----
Some of the remarkable temples built by these people still survive:
Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury hill in southern England, New Grange
in Ireland, Carnac in Brittany, the Hypogeum and temples in Malta were
some of the most sacred sites of that ancient time, whose structures
and significance are still little understood, because the modern mind
cannnot experience nature in the same way. The greatest ceremony of
the year was the marriage between heaven and earth which, in the beginning,
may have been experienced as two aspects, male and female, light and
dark, of the Great Mother. To call the sun a god and the earth a goddess
is to "fast forward" too quickly. However, there is no doubt that the
sacred marriage between the sun and the earth was celebrated at New
Grange where a ray of the sun at dawn at the winter solstice penetrated
the furthest reach of the dark interior of the womb-like temple. At
Avebury (in early May) and at Stonehenge (at the summer solstice) a
long triangular phallic shadow cast by a tall stone enveloped another
stone which is thought to represent the mother goddess. Skilled architects,
astronomers and engineers built these stone temples as places where
people could assist the process that was believed to initiate the fertilisation
and hence the future fertility of the earth. These sacred places show
that the focus of life at that time in Western Europe was ritual rather
than the need for defence against attack. The rituals must have been
incredibly numinous to experience, particularly at sun-rise and moon-rise.
-----
Women in the Neolithic era were closely bound to the rhythm of sowing
and harvesting the crops because they participated in the mysterious
process whereby life grew in the darkness of their womb and was reborn
as their child, and so they were believed magically to assist the fertility
of crops, trees and animals. They were the guardians of life, the healers
of life, skilled in the use of herbs and ointments and in the art of
making and decorating pottery. A complex symbolism linked the lunar
rhythm in women's bodies with the lunar mystery of life's continual
regeneration.
-----
About 4500 BC the image of a young god begins to appear. Rituals developed,
lasting even into this century, which identified a young god with the
corn or the crops that yearly died and yearly were reborn. Later a tremendous
mythology developed round him. In Babylonia he was called Tammuz, in
Egypt Osiris. One of the many names given to him was "The Green One."
Later, in European cathedrals and churches the image of the "Green
Man" was sculpted on roof bosses and choir stalls - the image of
the creative, regenerative spirit hidden within the forms of nature.
-----
As we move further on into the Bronze Age, which began about 3500 BC,
the Great Mother continues to preside over many Mediterranean cultures
but now, although she is still, as Gaia, for example, "Mother of All",
she is also differentiated into many named goddesses who personify aspects
of her powers: in Egypt - Isis, Hathor, Nut and Maat; in Mesopotamia
Inanna and Ishtar; in Greece - Demeter, Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis,
Hecate and Persephone.
-----
One great myth is told in different cultures: it is the story of the
goddess who has a son who grows up to become her consort. He personifies
the life of the vegetation, the life of corn or fruiting tree. His marriage
to the mother goddess unites earth with heaven and regenerates the life
of earth. In Mesopotamia as Tammuz, he dies a sacrificial death and
the goddess Ishtar goes in search of him, descending into the underworld
to awaken him from sleep or to bring him back from death. In Egypt the
goddess Isis gathers the fragments of Osiris's body and brings him back
to life. In Greece, Demeter descends into the underworld in search of
her daughter Persephone. As the son or daughter or consort return, the
corn sprouts, the tree blossoms and fertility is restored to the earth.
Isis and Ishtar were named as Virgin Queen of Heaven and Earth. Their
virginity did not symbolise sexual innocence, as it does in our culture,
but the inexhaustible creativity of life whose union is within itself
and which expresses itself as a vast network of interconnecting processes
and relationships. The titles of the Great Goddess in Mesopotamia at
this time were "The Green One," "The Light of the World," "Holy Shepherdess"
and "Righteous Judge."
-----
In Egypt the goddess Hathor carries the sun disc between the lunar (cow)
horns that evoke the figure of the goddess at Laussel, nearly 18,000
years older. To the Egyptians Hathor was the starry river of the Milky
Way, imagined as a great cow which nourished the world with her milk.
Isis bore the great wings of her Neolithic predecessor and, like her,
presided over the burial chambers of the dead (Tomb of Tutenkhamun),
for death was still imagined as one aspect of life's totality, one aspect
of the total being of the Great Mother. The goddess Nut each night received
the sun god into her body and at dawn gave birth to him. She was the
starry vault of heaven and she received the souls of the dead into her
embrace. A beautiful inscription on a sarcophagus in the Louvre reads:
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 divine beloved Soul who is in the mysterious abyss,
come to me.
-----Turning
to Greece, Athena inherits the snake imagery of the older Neolithic
Great Mother and also her bird imagery. In the Odyssey there are many
stories of Athena appearing to Odysseus as a bird - as the swallow or
sea-eagle - guiding him on his journey to reunion with Penelope. The
owl, in particular, was sacred to her. (see the Haghia Triada
sarcophagus in Crete). All these associations derive from a time when
there was no separation between the Great Mother as Source and the manifest
forms of her life. There is no creator beyond creation. The creator
is both the life of nature and the hidden powers of the cosmos now personified
as goddesses and gods. Life as spirit and life as nature were unified
through these images. There was a deep sense of participation between
ourselves and the life around us. Visionary experience was much more
common than it is now and the veil between two dimensions of experience
less opaque. These images show why life was felt and experienced
to be one and sacred.
-----Thousands
of women in the Bronze Age served as priestesses in the many temples
of the goddess and even in those of certain gods. But the only culture
which has given us images of what woman's life might have been like
at this time is that of Minoan Crete, prior to the great earthquakes
and tidal waves which destroyed it c. 1450 BC. We know there were women
poets in Sumer, Egypt and Greece because we can now read their poems;
there were undoubtedly artists, healers, and those who could travel
in trance or in dream to bring back messages from another dimension.
-----
By the end of the Bronze Age the feminine principle in the image of
the goddess was clearly defined. First of all the goddess was the great
matrix of relationships through which all aspects and forms of life
were connected to each other. Although not named as cosmic soul, this
was what she represented. Secondly, she stood for the principle of justice,
wisdom and compassion. Thirdly, and most importantly, she was the unseen
dimension beyond the visible world - sometimes called "The Underworld".
(1)
-----The
greatest ceremony of the year during the Bronze Age was the Sacred Marriage
which symbolically united heaven and earth, moon and sun, mother-bride
and son-lover. In a magnificent ritual goddess and god were united in
sexual union - she represented by the queen as high priestess and he
by the king as high priest. This marriage symbolically united heaven
and earth, moon and sun, invisible and visible dimensions, so renewing
the life of earth. The ecstatic poetry and sexual imagery of the early
Egyptian, Sumerian and Babylonian marriage hymns were bequeathed to
later Canaanite culture and thence to Hebrew culture. The exquisite
and passionate poetry of the Song of Songs has come down to us from
Sumerian and Egyptian ritual. In these ceremonies, the bride was always
the mother and sister of her bridegroom, and he was both the son and
brother of his bride; hence the words: "Thou hast ravished my heart,
my sister, my spouse." The nearest thing to convey the sense of importance
this ceremony held for the people in that far off time to us today is
the interest and excitement generated by a royal marriage or an eclipse
(see eclipse as marriage of sun and moon).
-----
So to sum up: for some 20,000 years until about 2000 BC the Great Mother
is an image of overwhelming numinosity and fascination. She is the source
of life: one life manifesting as the life of each and all. Sexuality
is the vital expression of that life, a sacred, ecstatic impulse reflecting
life's own creative impulse eternally to renew itself. The image of
the divine at this time is an instinctual flow of life. Everything has
come forth from the womb of the Great Mother. Everything has meaning
through relationship with the Great Mother. So relationship or connection
came to be understood as the essential quality of the Feminine principle.
People felt connection as an instinct, in exactly the same way
that a child feels connected to its mother. Within their psyche, the
newly developing elements of consciousness and the power of self-reflection
were held in relationship to the older, instinctual layers through the
image of the Goddess and through rituals that connected people to the
life around them. Owen Barfield called this phase of human evolution
"Original Participation." (2) This lost quality
of participatory experience and the image of the Great Mother or Great
Goddess were the foundation for the later idea of cosmic soul or the
soul as containing matrix that developed in Platonic and Neo-Platonic
philosophy (Anima-Mundi). This ancient mythology did not split
off natural life and human experience from participation in divine life
but was rooted in the ancient knowledge that "Everything that lives
is holy." (Blake) We carry that knowledge deep within us. We are recovering
it now as the image of the soul returns to us.
* -----*-----
*
Now
we come to the second part of this story. About 2000 BC there is a tremendous,
devastating change - like a thunderbolt in a blue sky. The Middle East
and the eastern Mediterranean are thrown into turmoil. Invaders bringing
male gods - "a people whose onslaught was like a hurricane" - swept
into the agricultural communities and river valleys where the goddess
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 become the theme of a new and terrifying
age. Everywhere there is fear and slaughter; everywhere a great cry
of terror and distress as people were murdered, enslaved, exiled from
their homes. Joseph Campbell describes this time as "The Great Reversal".
The terrible cruelty 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.
-----
In this new act in the drama of our evolutionary journey the Great Mother
moves into the wings; the Great Father moves centre 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 - all except for Demeter and Gaia who retain
the status of the former Great Mother. In Hebrew culture, 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. All images of and references to the goddess
were destroyed.. The Hebrew language to this day has no word for goddess.
-----
Why did this happen? What deep forces produced this enormous change?
Did we need the image of the Father God at this time to develop a more
focussed kind of consciousness, to develop the technological skills
to transform and harness the environment for our own expansion and growth?
Did famine drive these nomadic people into the fertile territories of
the agricultural peoples? Was this phase needed to help the individual
to emerge from his unconscious identification with the tribe? Why was
woman's evolution held back and man's accelerated? Did the movement
of consciousness away from the earth and nature and the rituals of the
Great Mother help to develop the analytical mind and strong sense of
individual self we have today? Was it necessary to have this mind? Or
was it all a deviation from our natural evolutionary path? Was the terrifying
social disruption of this age a causative factor which made us lose
trust in the Great Mother?
-----
Whatever the answers to these questions, the result was a great acceleration
in the development of the autonomous self reflected in the image of
the hero. The focus is henceforth on exploration; of the world and the
cosmos, and the development of an immense range of mental and physical
skills. Mind becomes supremely important; mind that is above nature,
identified with the Father God, mind that is increasingly able to affect
and control the environment through ideas and technological discoveries.
Psychologically, this new phase is about building a strong, focussed
ego.
-----
Men are the primary carriers of this new consciousness. Women stay closer
to the older vision. As the patriarchal beliefs gain ground, so everything
to do with the Feminine value is repressed, devalued. Women's role as
the bearer of life is devalued in relation to men's role of conquering,
ordering, controlling it. Women become part of what is controlled by
men. Henceforth, with few exceptions, their contribution to culture
went unrecorded and has been deleted from the history of civilisation.
We can see this is China, India, Africa, the Middle East, in the former
Soviet Union and in Europe. This situation only began to change in the
latter part of the twentieth century.
-----
The story of this phase begins with the myths which speak of the separation
of Earth and Heaven. In Sumer the god Enlil separates his parents An
and Ki to make Sky and Earth. In Egypt, the god Shu separates his parents
Nut and Geb. In the second and third chapters of Genesis the story of
the Fall has the same theme of separation. All these myths reflect an
immense change in human consciousness, the beginning of an entirely
new perception of life, one where nature becomes something to be
controlled and manipulated by human ingenuity and spirit is projected
upon a distant deity in the sky. From now on the head rather than the
heart is the focus of consciousness, perhaps related to the development
of the left hemisphere of the brain and the art of writing. At the same
time the heroic individual becomes the focus of mythology. The danger
of this phase is that the human ego, breaking away from its source in
nature and the cosmos, becomes dissociated from them and begins to acknowledge
no power greater than itself. Human beings alone are seen as having
a special relationship with the deity and are enjoined to exercise dominion
over other species. This would have been unthinkable in the earlier
phase of participation.
-----
During this phase, we lost the older participatory awareness which held
us in a state of instinctive communion with our environment and with
an invisible dimension experienced as all around us. The discovery of
writing was a watershed between one way of living and another. Through
developing this new skill, we began to think in a linear, sequential
way, and to lose the capacity to imagine as if we were part of nature,
with an imagination as prolific and limitless as hers. We began to see
ourselves in a heroic role as having to stand against nature, overcome
nature, conquer and control nature. Slowly we identified ourselves with
a hero god killing a dragon. The disruption of the agricultural communities
in the great river valleys of the Fertile Crescent occurred at roughly
the same time as the development of the ability to read and write (about
3000 BC) A book written by a surgeon with a long observation of the
two hemispheres of the brain, (Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet versus
the Goddess, Viking, London and New York, 1999) puts forward the
hypothesis that the invention of writing led to the over-development
of left-hemispheric linear, analytic thinking over the more imaginative,
participatory awareness of the right-hemisphere. This gave supremacy
to all who had access to education, to men over women, to male gods
over female ones, ultimately to the Great Father over the Great Mother.
Wherever writing took root, conquest, domination, slavery and the hierarchical
organisation of society followed. The ability to write was developed
by the scribe and priestly classes and , for many centuries, confined
to about 2% of the population. Women were not taught to read and write.
For 5000 years, he says, "The hand that has held the pen has also held
the sword."
-----
The focus on left-hemispheric, linear consciousness meant that the former,
more balanced relationship between the two hemispheres of the brain
was lost and the right-hemispheric way of perceiving reality through
relationship and participation was downgraded and lost. Judaic culture
was the first in the world to banish images as a way of communicating
with the sacred. Until the invention of writing, wisdom and truth had
been transmitted orally but now, wisdom and truth were seen to reside
in the written word, the word of God. Our present ecological
crisis can be understood as deriving from a long-forgotten change of
consciousness some 4000 years ago which marked the transition between
the Bronze and Iron Ages.
-----
The focus for the next 4000 years is on exploration, expansion, discovery,
conquest and above all, on the idea of human progress, on reaching a
transcendent goal. The power to think, the power to do and to harness
the power of nature becomes overwhelmingly fascinating. The male image
of the supreme deity enormously strengthened men who were the primary
carriers of this new consciousness. Women stayed closer to the older
vision, closer to participatory awareness and relationship with nature.
Regarded as inferior, they were socially downgraded, virtually enslaved,
becoming chattels of their husbands. Judaism and Christianity banished
priestesses with the goddess. We have recently witnessed what a struggle
it has been to reinstate women in a sacred role. Greece retained priestesses
but banished women from participation in public life and social relationship
with men. As the new beliefs gain ground, so everything to do with the
Feminine was repressed, devalued. Women's role as the bearer and nurturer
of life was devalued in relation to men's role of conquering, ordering,
controlling it. Women become part of what was controlled by men. It
is essential to realise that no-one can be blamed for this process.
The need or desire to apportion blame is one of the features of that
phase of separation or phase of duality which is now being superseded
by a new phase of reconnection. Men as much as women carry the wound
and the unconscious programming of the phase of separation.
-----
One particular hero myth, dated about 1700 BC, tells the story of what
happened in mythological imagery. In this Babylonian creation myth called
the Enuma Elish, Marduk, the young solar god, 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, stands on it and cuts it in half like a fish, creating the sky
from one half and the earth from the other. He then creates the planets
and the constellations. Then, 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 the older
Sumerian and Egyptian ones of the separation of earth and heaven and
it marks the beginning of the loss of relationship with the natural
world. Marduk's slaying of the mother Goddess offers an image of violence
and murder as a pattern of divine behaviour. Marduk becomes the macho
ideal - the model for all conquerors to come - right down to the present
day. With this myth the cyclical time of the goddess culture ends; linear
time begins; death becomes final and terrifying. With this myth creation
has a beginning and will have an end. The conflict between light and
darkness, good and evil is constellated and this imagery pervades the
Old Testament and other mythologies, in India (The Mahabharata)
as well as the Near East. The myth sets the paradigm of duality and
opposition between spirit and nature, light and darkness for the next
4000 years. This paradigm still controls our own modern culture with
its emphasis on the conquest of nature, of space, of our enemies.
-----
The story of the Enuma Elish was to lay the ground for the polarisation
of spirit and nature, mind and body into two parts - the one divine
and good, the other "fallen" and "evil." Gradually, the "male" aspect
of life became identified with spirit, light, order and mind - which
was named as good, and the "female" aspect of life became identified
with nature, darkness, chaos and body - which was named as 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. 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. The victory of the
solar god created a new way of living, a new way of relating to the
divine by identifying with the ideology of conquest - the victory over
darkness that the sun wins each dawn. And, indeed, the theme of conquest
and overcoming evil becomes the dominating theme of all the hero myths
of the Iron Age and so it is to this day.
-----
Over the next 2000 years, Marduk was transformed, via Assyrian and Persian
culture, into the transcendent Father God of Judaism, Christianity and
Islam. Creation was now from the word of the Father, no longer from
the womb of the Mother. The creator was beyond creation. This is
crucially important. The oneness of life was broken. Nature was
dissociated from spirit. The feeling of the sacredness of the earth
was lost and with it the participatory consciousness characteristic
of the earlier time. A fundamental polarisation is born between spirit
and nature and between the rational and the instinctive aspects of the
human psyche. The profound dissociation within the soul is projected
onto tribal conflicts. Conquest and blood-sacrifice in a tribal context
are defined as good. The enemy is named as evil. Woman is raped and
desecrated in war as she still is today. And, in the religious sphere,
deviation from belief in a specific tribal religion is named as heresy
and extirpated as evil.
-----
Because this mythological history and its effects on culture is not
generally known, it is not realised how deeply religion and science
have been influenced by it nor how unstable is the foundation on which
the whole structure of Western civilisation rests. It is a structure
which has rejected the feminine principle and as a result, it is radically
unbalanced, tilted to one side, like the leaning tower of Pisa.
-----
This one myth, had a huge influence on later Greek, Hebrew, Persian
and Christian cultures. Not understanding what was happening, the human
ego began to identify itself with the transcendent deity, increasingly
losing touch with the instinctual matrix out of which it had evolved.
It turned in fear and anger against the mother goddess and against nature.
The Christian Church struggled to eradicate animism and feared the return
of the goddess. Unregenerate nature and the feminine in general began
to be identified with darkness, the unknown, the chaotic, the infernal
which must be conquered, subjugated, controlled. The final stage in
this chronicle of control has led to the present belief that there is
no intelligence, consciousness or dimension beyond our own mind, our
own kind of consciousness. In a personal sense this also applies to
the dimension of our feelings and instincts that gradually came to be
associated with what is female, dark, chaotic and dangerous. (hysteria
and emotionality of women). Men and women have both been deeply affected
by this mythology. Both equate what is feminine and female with what
is inferior and exalt "rational" mind over "non-rational feeling." This
has given the masculine archetype or principle far too great a power
within the human psyche as well as in world culture as a whole. This
mythology lies at the root of the hysterical fear of women that manifests
in the psyche of the religious fanatic with such tragic consequences
for women who live in places there this kind of man is in a dominant
position..
-----
With the appearance of this myth, war and violence become endemic. Simultaneously
in different places there is a growth for the desire for conquest and
power which characterises the warlike leader. There is massive social
and political change: the movement to cities and the growth of populations;
the rise of the city-state and centralised control; the rise of bureaucracies;
the transformation of farmers into serfs; the enslavement of prisoners
of war and the ethnic cleansing and mass removal of conquered populations.
The role of the warrior is exalted into the supreme model for men. Men
who could not or who did not wish to live this role must have suffered
terribly from rejection, shame and humiliation. Perhaps only the skilled
artisan or craftsman could hope to escape rejection. The only other
refuge was the priesthood. This process began in the third millennium
BC with the conquests of Sargon of Akkad and ends with Hiroshima, Vietnam
and the horrific nuclear and biological weapons of modern warfare. The
media still broadcasts the theme of conquest (the conquest of space;
the conquest of disease etc.) Politicians still unconsciously use the
archaic language and imagery of confrontation, conquest and control.
It has become intrinsic to male psychology. Even evangelical Christianity
and Islam adopted the terminology of conquest.
-----
The mythology of conquest also lies at the root of modern science with
its mechanistic view of matter, its belief that we can use and manipulate
it as we choose, whether for good and for evil, without any feeling
of relationship between the observer and what is observed. It directs
bio-technology with its predatory desire to "conquer" genetic territory
for huge commercial profit. The idea of relationship with nature is
ridiculed. The idea that nature has consciousness or that the resources
of the planet might need protection from our ruthless exploitation of
them is dismissed as sentimental or hysterical. This "objective" attitude
to life, which might be characterised as "macho" is not truly masculine
because men, when they are in touch with their feelings, seek relationship
with life, seek to protect it and are not driven by the need for power
over it. The great medical and scientific discoveries as well as the
articulation and support of values which respect life have been made
by men deeply moved by and concerned with the plight of suffering humanity.
The danger comes when mind becomes split off from a sense of empathy
with what it observes and is then driven by a pathological desire for
power and control.
* -----*-----
*-----
*
This seminar has attempted to give some idea of the long process whereby
our human self slowly emerged from nature or planetary life. But the
price paid for this emergence was the gradual emptying of the world
and the cosmos of meaning and divine presence. The creator withdrew
further and further from His creation until eventually He has been declared
irrelevant and "dead". The human mind has become the only source of
meaning and the universe is now perceived as lifeless, devoid of intelligence
and subject to mechanical laws.
-----
In his late work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung wrote that the
"ultimate fate of every dogma is that it gradually becomes soulless.
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." (par. 488) The last fifty years
of the twentieth century have seen an immense change in preparation.
A quest has been undertaken by thousands of individuals seeking to discover
what has been lost, neglected or excluded from our cultural tradition.
Their efforts have recovered for us the hidden mystical and shamanic
traditions that had to go underground during the long centuries of persecution.
Like the magma of the
earth's molten core, the rejected feminine principle has been pushing
up from below the level of our conscious lives until at last it is emerging
into our awareness. As a result, our values and our understanding of
ourselves and our relationship with the planet and the cosmos are beginning
to change. We are beginning to recover the lost sense of participation
in a sacred universe. There
are immense opportunities in this time of transformation but also immense
dangers. The opportunity is for us to choose to create a new relationship
with the great organism of the planet, to formulate a new concept of
spirit and to bring into being a different understanding of nature and
matter. We tread a path which is on the knife-edge between the integration
of this new vision on the one hand and social disintegration and regression
into barbarism and perhaps self-annihilation 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 the old, outworn, one. It is a
tremendously exciting time to be alive.
-----
1.
In the Dark Places of Wisdom by Peter Kingsley which gives the
description of Parmenides's journey to his encounter with the Goddess
Persephone. See booklist.
2.
Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry, Wesleyan
University Press 1988, Connecticut, USA.
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