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Psyche, Eros and Aphrodite

Psyche was a mortal woman born long ago to a King and Queen of Greece. Although not immortal, she was the most beautiful child in the land, and as she grew into her teens, every man that saw her was amazed by her beauty. But instead of courting her, men idealized her and worshipped her. Her earthly beauty was too bright to touch, and no man felt worthy of her. So Psyche was lonely and in her loneliness, wondered why no young man would let her know him. Because she was young and inexperienced, Psyche was innocent in the ways of the world and men, and thought her loneliness was her fault.

The Goddess of the Kingdom was the Great Goddess Aphrodite. Aphrodite watched Psyche grow up with mounting jealousy of her beauty and in her thoughts wanted to humble the young beauty. So when the King and Queen, disturbed by their daughter's lack of
courtiers, went to her Oracle for a "seeing" about who Psyche should marry, the Goddess spoke through her Oracle saying that Psyche should marry Death.

The Goddess's Word was Law, and so the King and Queen prepared Psyche for her marriage. They carried her to the top of a mountain, chained her to a rock, and left her to be ravished by Death. Because Psyche's fate was to meet Death, the mood of the marriage procession was somber and more like a funeral than a celebration. So she was taken up the mountain in her beautiful dress and left alone in the darkness to meet her mate.

Aphrodite watched this terrible ceremony with satisfaction. And wishing to inflict even more suffering on the young bride, directed her young son, Eros, to go to the mountain top and pierce the maiden with one of his magic arrows. Eros was her young son by Zeus, and was not viewed favorably by the assembly of gods, causing unending
trouble with his mischievious darts. Anyone pierced by Eros' arrows would fall madly in love with the first being they saw, and Aphrodite wanted Psyche to fall in love with the monster Death as a final insult and torture. But when he surreptiously approached the chained Psyche, he was startled at the Earthly beauty of the young
woman, fumbled with his arrow, and accidentally pricked his own finger on the arrow. So Eros fell in love with Psyche.

Not wanting Psyche to be the bride of Death, Eros secretly asks the West Wind pick the young woman up and float her gently into a nearby valley where she will be safe. The valley is a paradise and, carried gently down into the valley, Psyche is very grateful at being saved from her fate. But she has no idea who has saved her.

Eros comes to her at night, hiding his face, fearing that his powerful mother will discover his betrayal. In the dark of night, he tells Psyche that that he is someone who loves here, but he can come to her only at night. He insists that she must never ask him questions nor ask to see his face. Each night he comes to her and she sleeps beside him, wondering about him, who he is, where he has come from. But Eros steadfastly refuses to tell her who he is or why he must hide his face from her.

Psyche had two sisters, who were not particularly beautiful. They too grew up alongside Psyche, but being ordinary became ever more jealous of their beautiful sister. After her disappearance on the mountain top, they started searching for her to discover what had happened to her. They soon discovered her living in the valley, but could not get down to her. So they stood on the heights and talked
to her.

Eros warned Psyche against her sisters, saying that their questions would cause trouble. If she honors his request to ask no questions and allow him to remain unknown, she will bear a son who will be immortal. But if she insists on asking questions or disobeys him,her child will be a mortal daughter. If she disobeys, he will be forced to leave her.

Psyche promises to honor his request, but is lonely for her family. So she begs Eros to allow her sisters to visit her in the valley. He finally relents.

Her sisters scheme to destroy the happiness of their more beautiful sister by plotting to deceive her. They see that Psyche is living in a fantasy about her lover, and they wish also to destroy her happiness. So when they come to visit, they tell Psyche a lie, saying that her suitor is a serpent, a monster, who is deceiving her, and that when she bears its child, it will consume her. In her confusion and innocence, Psyche believes her sisters. That night, she secrets a lamp beside her bed and a knife under her pillow. When he falls asleep, she plans to light the lamp and cut off the head of her monster lover.

But once he fell asleep and she lit her lamp, she saw that her lover is a god—more, he was the god of love—the most beautiful male god on Olympus. Aghast at her mistake, she dropped her knife and stumbled, pricking her finger on one of his arrows. She is suddenly deeply in love with him. But the hot oil from the lamp in her other hand spilled onto his shoulder.

Eros awakes and sees the one he loves standing over him in the lamp light. She has betrayed him! Being a winged god, he leaps up into the air, but Psyche clings to him. As he flees from her, she is dragged out of the valley and falls onto the barren slopes of the mountains around the secret paradise. Eros returns to the House of his Mother.

Psyche is emotionally destroyed. She first thinks about committing suicide, but after awhile goes within herself to attend to her chaos. After a period, she walks to a nearby river. Here, she meets the cloven-footed god, Pan, who is sitting beside the flowing water holding Echo in his lap. Soon, Psyche is coaxed into telling Pan her sad tale. She asked him what she must do to find Eros again to ask him to come back.

Pan tells Psyche that she must pray to the god of love, the god who understands when someone is inflamed by his arrows. Of course, the god of love is the very god she loved and lost. She must humble herself before her lover.

In order to find Eros, Psyche must confront the terrible power of Aphrodite, the mother of Eros. But Psyche fears the Goddess and does not want to confront her, so she goes first to all the other temples to ask other gods to intervene. None will for all fear the wrath of the Goddess. So finally, Psyche gives in and goes to one of Aphrodite's Temples. There she is confronted by the powerful Goddess, who totally humiliates Psyche, reducing her to a scullery maid and demeaning her until she is in tears. But because Psyche asks to see her son in a sacred way, she gives Psyche four tasks to test her.

For the first task, Aphrodite shows Psyche a huge pile of assorted seeds. To accomplish the first task, she must sort these seeds into separate piles before nightfall. If she fails, she will be put to death. Aphrodite leaves. At first, Psyche thinks of suicide, but then she is approached by an ant in the chamber. They talk and the ant agrees to help with her task. Shortly, an army of ants comes to her rescue and helps Psyche sort the seeds. Aphrodite returns at nightfall, sees the task has been accomplished, and grudgingly admits that the good-for-nothing Psyche did tolerably well.

For her second task, Aphrodite tells Psyche she must go to a field nearby and gather golden fleece from the rams gathered there. She is to be back by nightfall, on pain of death! Again, Psyche despairs and thinks of suicide, but by the river she is addressed by the reeds on the bank of the river, which tell her not to go near the rams during the daytime hours for she would be battered to death. Instead, she should go to the meadow at dusk and find the fleece which the rams have lost on the brambles and branches of their meadow. This way she can retrieve what she needs without directly confronting the dangerous rams. At nightfall, she returns to the Temple and gives Aphrodite the fleece. Again, Aphrodite is surprised by the achievement of the young woman.

For her third task, Aphrodite tells Psyche that she must fill a crystal goblet with the water from the River Styx. With this task, Psyche faces certain death, for the Styx is a circular river which tumbles from a high mountain, disappears into the Earth, goes down into the depths of Hell, and circles back up within the Earth to the top of the world. Psyche collapses, overcome by the impossibility of the task. But when Aphrodite leaves, the eagle of Zeus drops out of the clouds and, alighting beside her, asks to the goblet. Clutching the goblet, the eagle flies to the waterfall and fills it with water. Returning, it presents the filled goblet to the shaken Psyche. This time, the great Goddess is astonished at Psyche's resourcefulness!

For her fourth and final task, Psyche faces her most difficult task—a task impossible for a mortal. She is to go to the Underworld and ask Persephone –goddess of the Underworld and Queen of Mysteries—for a cask of her beauty ointment and to return it to Aphrodite. Psyche, again despairing, goes to a tower from which to hurl herself to her death. She knows that she cannot do this task unaided. A spirit in
the tower, though, stops her and promises to help her. She must find the breathing hole of the Underworld and entering into the cavern, follow the tunnels down into the Earth. She is to carry two pieces of barley cake in her hands, two halfpenny coins in her teeth, and sufficient fortitude to pass several difficult tests. She is warned not to help anyone, for in the Underworld, her energy will constantly be drained away. If she does not care for herself, she will not be able to make it back to the world of the living!

Psyche finds her way to the cavern, and follows the "pathless path" down into the Earth. She reaches the River Styx, and there, meets a lame man driving a lame donkey laden with sticks of wood. Some of the sticks fall to the ground. Despite what she has been told, she stops to help the lame man pick up his wood, giving some of her
precious energy away.

Then, she comes to the ferry man, Charon, with his patched boat. He demands one of her coins to carry her across the river. During the passage over the river, a drowning man calls out to her for help, but she remembers the spirit's instructions and refuses. The man drowns.

Now in Hades, Psyche walks on towards the palace of Hades and Persephone. Shortly, she meets the Three Fates weaving the strands of fate on a loom. For the price of a barley cake, they offer Psyche an opportunity to weave on the loom herself, but she remembers the spirit's instructions and walks by, refusing to weave her way out of
her task.

Next, Psyche confronts the guardian three-headed dog of Hades, Cerberes. To escape this terror, she throws one of her two barley cakes off the path and while the three heads of Cerberes fight over the bit of food, she slips by and goes on up the path.

Finally, she reaches the Hall of Persephone, the Queen of Mysteries, and is invited to participate in the feast. She knows that eating the food of Hades will bind her to these realms however, so she refuses gracefully. She approaches and asks Persephone for the cask of her beauty ointment. Persephone agrees to gift her the cask without asking any questions, but tells Psyche that the cask she will carry with her "carries a mysterious secret."

Then, Psyche retraced her trip back out of Hades. She uses the second barley cake to pass by Cerberes and the second coin to buy her passage back across the Styx.

In sight of the light of the world, she pauses, remembering the unearthly beauty of Persephone and wondering what the box might hold. Tempted, she stops to open the box, but within was nothing at all! The nothing issues forth and she falls into an infernal and deadly sleep. She falls onto the path, in sight of the light, in a senseless sleep.

At this point, Eros, her young lover, comes back into the picture. Eros had, after awhile, escaped from the imprisonment of his mother, Aphrodite. He learns of Psyche's distress and flies to her side. He wipes the deadly sleep from her face and puts it back into the cask; awakens her with a prick of one of his arrows; and admonishes her for having succumbed to her curiosity, which nearly killed her. He then leaves her to her task of taking the cask to Aphrodite.

Meanwhile, Eros flies to Olympia and approaches his father, Zeus, to plead the cause of Psyche. Zeus reprimands Eros for his poor behavior, but finally honors him as his son and promises to help. All the gods are called together, and Hermes is sent to bring Psyche to the court. Zeus announces to the assembled gods that Eros' tyranny of love has gone on long enough, and that it is time that he settles down. He is to be married to Psyche that they may grow together. Zeus gives Psyche a goblet of immortality and instructs her to drink from it. This brings her immortality and the promise the Eros will never again be parted from her.

The marriage was held with all the pomp and ceremony that the gods are known for. Even Aphrodite relented and felt well about her son and new daughter-in-law.

In time, Psyche bore a daughter, who was named Pleasure.

*******************

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The Legend of Sisyphus

Legend has it that the gods condemned Sisyphus to Hades, where he had to ceaselessly roll or lift a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought, with some reason, that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. So what was this myth all about?

If one believes Homer, Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals. According to another tradition, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman. Sounds a bit like Mercurius!

Opinions differ as to the reasons why he became the futile laborer of the underworld. To begin with, he was accused of a certain levity in regard to the gods. One story goes that Egina, the daughter of Esopus, was carried off by Jupiter. The father was shocked by the kidnapping and complained to Sisyphus, who knew of the abduction, and offered to tell about it on condition that Esopus would give water to the citadel of Corinth. (Unimpressed by the possibility of retaliation by the gods, he was willing to tattle for the gift of water for his city). Of course, he was punished for this in the underworld.

Homer also tells us also that Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Hades, god of the Underworld, could not endure the sight of his deserted, silent empire. So he dispatched the god of war, who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror. That story goes this way:

It is said that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted to test his wife's love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body into the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the underworld. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no longer wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, lead him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for him.

You may have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth. Nothing is told us about Sisyphus in the underworld. Myths are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this myth, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the huge stone, to roll it, and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one sees the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two earth-clotted hands. At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space and time without depth, the purpose is achieved.

Then Sisyphus watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit. He goes back down to the plain. It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.

If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that can not be surmounted by scorn.

If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. Again I fancy Sisyphus returning toward his rock, and the sorrow was in the beginning. When the images of earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call of happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy arises in man's heart: this is the rock's victory, this is the rock itself. The boundless grief is too heavy to bear. These are our nights of Gethsemane. But crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus, Edipus at the outset obeys fate without knowing it. But from the moment he knows, his tragedy begins. Yet at the same moment, blind and desperate, he realizes that the only bond linking him to the world is the cool hand of a girl. Then a tremendous remark rings out:

"Despite so many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well." Sophocles' Edipus, like Dostoevsky's Kirilov, thus gives the recipe for the absurd victory. Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism.

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. "What!---by such narrow ways--?" There is but one world, however. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd. It happens as well that the felling of the absurd springs from happiness. "I conclude that all is well," says Edipus, and that remark is sacred. It echoes in the wild and limited universe of man. It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction and a preference for futile suffering. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.

All Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory's eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one's burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

---Albert Camus---

What Kinds of Gods Have We?

Two mythologies are found in the story of the Flood. One is that of the planting culture, the old-city mythology of cyclic karma—of the ages of gold, silver, bronze, iron, during which the world’s moral condition deteriorated. The Flood then came and wiped it out to bring about a fresh start. India abounds in flood stories of this kind, for the flood is a basic story associated with this cyclic experience through what we might term a year of years.

The second mythology is that of a God who created people, some of whom misbehave. He then said, “I regret that I have created these people. Look at what I have done! I am going to wipe them all out.” That is another God, and certainly not the same God as in the first mythology. I emphasize this observation because two totally different ideas of God are involved in the word “God.”

The latter God is one who creates. One thinks of that God as a fact, That we say, is the Creator. We conceptualize that God as an IT. On the other hand, in the impersonal dynamism of the cycles of time the gods are simply the agents of the cycle. The Hindu gods are not, therefore, creators in the way that Yahweh is a creator. This Yahweh creator is, one might say, a metaphysical fact. When he makes up his mind to do something, it is promptly accomplished. This one of the mythologies of God in the Bible was brought in by the nomads who, as herding people, had inherited the mythology of the hunting process in which God is considered out there. The planting people have a mythology of God in here as the dynamism that informs all of life.

To give a sense of the real meaning of this agricultural mythology, one must examine the actual number of years it takes for the spring equinox to pass through all the signs of the zodiac. Called “the procession of the equinoxes,” it takes 25,920 years to complete a cycle of the zodiac. Divide 25,920 by 60, and you get 432. This number, as we shall see, provides the link between the agricultural mythology and the actual cycles of time.

Some years ago, a friend of mine gave me a book, Cooper’s Aerobics, that told how many laps a man would have to swim every day in order to stay healthy. A footnote read: “A man in perfect physical shape, at rest, has a heartbeat of about one beat per second.” At sixty seconds to a minute, and sixty minutes to an hour, in one day of twenty-four hours the heart beats 86,400 times. Divided by two, it is 43,200. The heartbeat matches the beat of the universe; they are the same. That coincidence of rhythm was the point of the old cosmic mythologies. The latter envisioned this microcosm, or little cosmos, and the macrocosm, or the Big Cosmos, as resonating to the same beat. When a person tells the doctor “I’ve got a fever,” the doctor takes his pulse to see if it registers in harmony with the 43,200 beats—that is, to find out if the patient is in tune with nature.

These numbers, anchored in the Sumerian discovery that the order of the universe can be discovered mathematically, are found almost everywhere. In the Hindu sacred epics, the number of years calculated to the present cycle of time, the Kali Yuga as it is known, is 432,000, the number of the Great Cycle (mahayuga) being 4, 320,000. In the Icelandic Eddas, one reads of the 540 doors in Othin’s (Wotan’s) hall, through which, at the end of the current cycle of time, 800 divine warriors would pass to battle the antigods in the “Day of the Wolf” to mutual annihilation [i.e. the end of the world: duality!]. Multiplying 540 by 800 equals 432,000.

An early Babylonian account, translated into Greek by a Babylonian priest named Befrossos in 280 B.C., tells us that 432,000 years passed between the time of the rise of the city Kish and the coming of the mythological flood (the biblical story derives from this earlier source). In a famous paper on “Dates in Genesis,” the Jewish Assyriologist Julius Oppert, in 1877, showed that in the 1,656 years from the creation to the Flood, 86,400 weeks had passed. Divided by two, that again produces 43,200.

That is a hint, buried in Genesis, that two notions of God are to be found in its pages. The first was the willful, personal creator who grieved at the wickedness of his creatures and vowed to wipe them out. The other God, in complete contrast, is found hidden in that disguised number, 86,400, a veiled reference to the Gentile, Sumero-Babylonian, mathematically cosmology of cycles, ever recurring, of impersonal time. During this cycle, kingdoms and peoples arise and recede in seasons of the multiple of 43,200. We recall that the Jewish people were exiles in Babylon for half a century and could, indeed, have absorbed these notions that, exquisitely hidden, provide a subtext of recurring cycles of time in their scriptures.

The mysterious procession of the night sky, then, with the soundless movement of planetary lights through fixed stars, had provided the fundamental revelation, when mathematically charted, of a cosmic order. The human imagination reacted from its core, and a vast concept took form: The universe as a living being in the image of a Great Mother, within whose womb all the worlds, both of life and death, had their existence. The human body is a duplicate, in miniature, of that macrocosmic form. Throughout the whole a secret harmony holds sway. It is the function of mythology and relevant rites to make this macro-microcosmic insight known to us just as it is the function of medicine to keep us in harmony with the natural order.

These old mythologies, then, put the society in accord with nature. Their festivals were correlated with the cycles of the seasons. That also put the individual in accord with the society and through that in harmony with nature. There is no sense of tension between individual and society in such a mythological world. The rules as well as the rituals of such a society put persons in accord not only with their social world--the world of nature without--but also with their own human nature within.

In the course of the second millennium B.C., a strange thing occurred in the Near Eastern realms, “the great reversal,” as I term it. As you know, when you have people who think the world is heating up, their subjective reaction is to want to cool it off. At that period, one observes the beginnings of meditation, the effort to disengage the self from the world. Another reading of this reversal reveals the spirit of Jainism, which is based on the ideals of nonviolence. The familiar question, “How can one live and be nonviolent?” has a familiar answer, “You can’t.” So, the law of Jainism is to die. And not come back. This is a radical pullout from an increasingly overheated world.

Yet another reading may be found in the mythology of the Zoroastrians, those associated with Zoroaster, whose date we do not know. One view is that he lived about 1200 B.C. and another that he lived six hundred years later, about 600 B.C. He is roughly from the same period as Homer and perhaps, like him, should be regarded as symbolic of a tradition rather than as an individual person. Zoroaster was the prophet of the Persians, the people who restored the Jews to Jerusalem, the same Persians who later gave rise to the Chaldeans. The basic idea in Zoroaster’s teaching is that there are two Gods, one good, the other evil. The good God is a God of Light, of Justice, of Wisdom, who created a perfectly good world. His name is Ahura Mazda, “First Father of the Righteous Order, who gave to the sun and stars their paths.” The mazda bulbs were named after this God of Light. Against him, stands a God of Evil, Angra Mainyu, “the Deceiver,” who is the god of lies, darkness, hypocrisy, violence, and malice. He it was who threw evil into this good and well-made world. Thus the world in which we live is a mixture of light and darkness, of good and evil. This worldview is the mythology of the Fall. In its biblical transformation, it is the Fall.

There is then a nature world that is not good and one does not put oneself in accord with it. It is evil and one pulls out or away in order to correct it. From this view arises a mythology with this sequence: Creation, a Fall, followed by Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), who teaches the way of virtue that will bring a gradual restoration of goodness. On the last day, after a terrific battle known as Armageddon, or the Reckoning of Spirits, Zoroaster will appear, in a second incarnation, the evil power will be wiped out, and all will be peace, light, and virtue forever. This mythology is surely familiar to all.

When the Dead Sea Scrolls and the other desert scrolls were unearthed at mid-century, scholars discovered that one of these early Jewish writings, called “The War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness,” was sheer Zoroastrianism. The Zoroastrian influence, particular on the Hebrew community, is represented in the work of the Essenes. We have, therefore, in the Bible itself, this concept of the world as wrong. Consequently throughout the Old Testament one reads of the kings who, in the sight of Yahweh, do well to wipe out the nature religions. These stories represent a tension between two totally different mythologies. One is of the goodness of nature, with which individuals try to harmonize themselves. That is considered a virtuous and healthy and humanly sustaining act. The other sees nature negatively and the person’s choice is to say “no” to it, and to pull away from it. [The first is the spirituality of the so-called Goddess religions and cults, who worships the Great Mother under an assortment of names. The second is the spirituality built around a God, arising from several patriarchical nomadic/tribal cultures of the Middle East mostly, who referred to the Great Mother as “an abomination” and called Her priestesses “harlots.” Those religions were, of course, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity.][1]

Metaphor is the language of myth that remains as we have observed, a still widely misunderstood term. Even many so-called well-educated people think that myth’ means something that is false—that is, a lie or distortion about some person or event.

But that misunderstanding arises, as we know, only when we misread metaphorical language. All of our religious ideas are metaphorical of a mystery. It is vital to recall that if you mistake the denotation of the metaphor for its connotation, you completely lose the message that is contained in the symbol.

God is a symbol. The connotation of the symbol lies beyond all naming, beyond all numeration, beyond all categories of thought. One often asks, “Is God one, or is God many?” These, however, are categories of thought and do not serve well in talking about what is beyond all speech.

Jesus dies, is resurrected, and goes to Heaven. This metaphor expresses something religiously mysterious. Jesus could not literally have gone to Heaven because there is no geographical place to go. Elijah went up into the heavens in a chariot, we are told, but we are not to take this statement as a description of a literal journey.

These are spiritual events described in metaphor. There seem to be only two kinds of people: Those who think that metaphors are facts, and those who know that they are not facts.

No good is accomplished by throwing the message out. All the messages of myth, from the period of the agricultural people on, are talking about that which constitutes the values of one’s life, and of all lives. Finally, the message is right there, in this very thing that seems to be blocking you because it is taken literally instead of metaphorically. Then, especially as all the different horizons within which myth has grown up are broken, we realize that, since we are all together on one planet, we must begin to read our own mythology as something that refers not just to us, but, as in conjunction with all mythologies expressed through metaphor, to everyone.[2]

Footnotes:
****************************************************************
[1] Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That (New World Library: Novato, California, 2001), pp. 43-47.
[2] Ibid, pp. 48-49.

Understanding the Handless Maiden

The Handless Maiden is a story about the taking of power from women by their fathers and husbands and about men's insensitivity to woman's need to be free to be themselves.

The Devil's Bargain is the bargain fathers make to take their daughters power-to-do by over-protecting them or by choosing their own priorities over the very different needs of their wives and daughters. They expect their daughters and wives to be "little princesses," and to do women's work, but not to have any real control over their lives. Men should make the important decisions, they too often believe.

In this story, the daughter attempts to break free of her father--who has disempowered her--to go into the forest (her solitude and naturalness)--to find herself and learn how to do for herself. But of course, she soon encounters her "prince" who also sees her as beautiful, pathetic and powerless. Like a knight, he "rescues" her by marrying her and expecting her, like her father, to conform to his needs.

She finds herself confined again and denied the ability to do as she pleases, right back under the control of a man and expected to meet his needs. In the end, she takes her baby--who also symbolizes her own innerchild--and plunges back into her solitude, running away from those who control her life. Unable to get her husband to understand that she needs control over her life and that her naturalness lies in thenatural things of the Earth rather than society's wealth and power, she at last chooses her self over her life with her husband and saves herself by retreating again into the forest alone. Here she realizes her own power-to-do and comes to love herself enough to live her life her way without others telling her what to do. Complete and whole at last, she does not give her power over her life back to her husband or to society, but lives in her naturalness (the forest) alone but free. Freedom is always won at the cost of aloneness. Feeling lonely is the price of being human.

Understanding the Fisher King

The Wounded Feeling Function within the Masculine.

Introduction.

Myths tell important stories about mankind in the same language as dreams--through symbols. Both dreams and myths emerge from the Collective Unconscious--that part of the psyche of mankind that constitutes a higher level of our mind; a level that we do not know because we are not conscious of what goes on there. Yet the Unconscious is known to be the "bedrock of our existence." It holds the greater part of who we are and from it we are birthed. Our conscious egos bob along on the surface of this vastness like a canoe on the ocean. In our daily lives, we see and focus on only what lies above the surface, but beneath us lie vast depths of the Unknown, and we are primarily That.

Both dreams and myths form stories that reveal imbalances in our lives. Our personal dreams tell us that our conscious lives are out of balance with our "ground of being"--who we are in actuality. Myths speak of imbalances lived out by the species of Man. The Myth of the Fisher King therefore speaks to us of a major imbalance in the thinking, attitudes and behaviors of all men and women.

Myths in the time of Ancient Greece described how the gods were constantly embroiled in the affairs of mankind, to mankind's constant regret. In the days of ancient Greece, the great thinkers recognized and accepted that mankind was not in control of his individual fate. As the gods acted within human affairs, each person "acted out" the same grand stories over and over again--no matter which culture, nation, religious background, or race. With the advent of the Renaissance, mankind seized upon the idea that rationality could solve all our problems, and we've continued that perception ever since. Today, we still hold to the belief collectively and individually that we can, we should, and must, individually be in control of our lives in order to be secure, and that reason is the key to that control. This is the quandary of Man's existence: that he must accept responsibility for his own life, and yet, at the same time, be substantially unconscious of the very forces which guide his choices in life.

In fact, it is the Unconscious that guides us in our evolution, just as before, and not our rationality. Our rationality has not solved our problems, but having lost the mystical belief that Mankind is more than it perceives and that our lives are guided by forces beyond our understanding, it seems to those of us who have staked everything on reason to be all we have that might save us. So rather than accepting our lives and what happens to us as "fate" as did the Greeks, we Westerners resist our changing fates with our minds, our emotions and our bodies.

We constantly struggle to find security and happiness and then try to hold onto it. Consequently, most of the time, we stay caught in "not enough", not happy, not secure, not liked, not satisfied states of mind and emotions. Rather than accepting our lives as they are, and ourselves as we are, we keep trying to change things. As a result, suffering is our normal state, and we don't know how to do anything else. We keep thinking, if only I could find a better job, a better income, a better car, a better girl or boy friend, and so on, I would be happy. But we are wrong. We are unhappy because our whole approach to life is wrong. And we don't recognize that this is because of our culture and its assumptions about life and how to live it.

The Wounded Feeling Function

First, consider the possibility that the word "feeling" does not mean what you assume it to mean. English is a miserable language for clear expression of some concepts, and "feelings" is one of those terms where English fails. The English speaking peoples in fact are not by and large "feeling" people. And the impoverishment of our language in its capacity to distinguish among different shades of meaning of feelings demonstrates this poverty. Sanskrit for example has 96 words for love. Persia has eighty. The Greeks had three. Americans have one.

So consider this. By "feeling", we do not mean happy, sad, depressed, angry, guilty, shameful, fearful, stressed, envious. Nor do we mean enthusiastic, proud, or any of the other positive emotional feelings that we might name. This "feeling" is not any emotion at all although it is an enabler of positive emotions.

This "feeling" performs the same function as "thinking" but it does so without facts or reason. It is a sensation or urgency that one experiences in the body. "Thinking" is grounded in left-brained reason. "Feeling" is grounded in a right-brained, but bodily sensation of rightness and value.

Without a healthy feeling function, a man is left without a sense that he has value or without a feeling of rightness about his life. He feels a coldness in his relationships, a feeling of separateness and loneliness that he cannot broach through any mentally-based relationship. Such a man is "mental" and some might say, "heartless." He who is wounded in this way will be denied an enduring "happiness," although this is the result of the wound and not the same thing as the wound.

Our thinking function is grounded in our left-brain consciousness. Our "feeling function" is grounded in our right-brain, and it guides us to conclusions and choices directly without reliance upon reason, without reliance upon the linear thinking processes of the left brain. "Feeling" is not intuition, but it is often mistaken for intuition. Through "feeling", one "knows" without knowing how he knows. Someone who is strong in this function, feels the rightness of a choice, without facts, without logic. In fact, through the feeling function, the Unconscious Mind--or psyche--gives us guidance directly. To go to our facility of reason immediately stops the feeling function as well as intuition.

Western Culture has emasculated its Feeling Function. Not understanding what it is, it derides this gift of its own psyche, wrongly associating it with emotionality. And so it presses every child so gifted into a world view and an education which unbalances it and denies it its natural gifts and inheritance.

Comments on The Fisher King Story

The story of the Fisher King is the story of the wounding of Western man. Increasingly, as women enter the work force and take on the values and activities of wounded men, they too take on the wound. Like any myth or dream-story, this story should not be read as a normal story, but for what it says about the imbalance between men and women's conscious attitudes and behaviors and their naturalness. Oftentimes, dreams are only fragments of stories, and so too is this story seemingly incomplete. And like dreams, this story has more than one level to it, holding different meaning for different people as well as different lessons for our own lives. Remember, too, that each person and thing in a dream, or myth, is an aspect of the dreamer. This is especially important in this myth.

The young prince spent his time in the Woods, symbolizing his connection with the Unconscious. This connection, when young, gave him his naturalness and innocence as a child and young male, with all the spontaneity, natural warmth, lovingness, and openness which characterizes youth. His wounding, when it came, was by fire, symbolizing spirit, as he tastes a piece of salmon, symbolizing wisdom and knowledge. The fire (of spirit) is encountered within the woods. And like Adam and Even, the knowledge (the salmon) the prince experienced in the Unconscious caused his fall from innocence.

In the language sometimes used by the mystery traditions, the Prince "stood too close to the fire." His wound was in his sex organs, symbolizing the loss of his ability to create. Few of us have personal encounters with the Divine in our left-brained, rational material world. Instead, the Divine is encountered through occurrences of the irrational, the unexplainable, the Unconscious. The force and power of such encounters are often overwhelming. In ancient times, such an experiences were referred to as "Standing too close to the fire," and these occasions have led to fear and insanity, as it did for Neitzche, so modern man fears control by his own unconscious, which he experiences as a manifestation of Divinity.

The wound of the young prince drives him away from the fire and wisdom of the Divine in fear, repelling him as well from the one object which might heal him, the Grail, which symbolized the love of God which is poured out for him. His inability to approach the Grail keeps him separated from God and constantly cold, or without feelings. His inability to accept his Unconsciousness-based feeling function separates him from his own Divine origin and source.

The only past time which relieves the Fisher King of his pain was fishing in the lakes and coves near the castle, symbolizing seeking in the unconscious for understanding and help. No help comes. Time is suspended, and the King and his whole Land lose their substance as they become less material as life ebbs away for them. They are near death for much of their existence, yet cannot die. So, the people of the Grail Castle await a savior.

Our savior is a young innocent named Parsifal, whose name means "Innocent Fool." The young man comes from a family in which all the men have "gone into the business" of knighthood--defending the Faith with their swords and lances--fighting for Right and Goodness against the Wrong and Evil. All died. The mother tries to keep her son innocent--holding him against his wishes to find out what the Real World holds for him. Alas, she can hold him only a short time, and he soon leaves his home in the Woods to seek his fortune. Soon, he too enters the ranks of young squires training to be a knight.

Fate brings Parsifal to the lake where he encounters the Fisher King fishing, and is directed to the Castle, which he finds quickly by turning left--which is to say, turning towards his own Unconscious depths (turning right would be turning towards his reason). At nighttime, he witnesses the elaborate procession and the healing of the sick. But inexperienced and lacking confidence in himself, he does not ask why the King does not receive healing nor what the Grail was or how it could heal.

And so the next day, too late, he realizes his mistake and must spend his next twenty years fighting battles. By mid-life, he realizes that the way he had lived his life had all been a mistake. Now turning gray with age, he understands that those he had battled and killed all his life for king and faith were much like himself and his children--also fighting for their king and faith, survival and illusory causes. At this point of personal crisis, he must face the waste in his past life and the needless suffering he had endured and imposed upon others. Finally, he is ready to ask himself the most important question any of us can ask of ourselves: How is Life to be lived? What is it that gives life meaning and purpose and beauty?

It is at this point of crisis that fate intervenes to bring him to the Fisher King again. He is again invited to the Castle (into the King's heart), and this time speaks his question: Who does the Grail serve? He wants this time to know what might stop his own misery, as well as heal the King's wound, and give his life meaning. And he receives his answer. Serve the Grail King! Serve something greater than yourself.

Modern Man and the Wound of the Fisher King

In modern life, the loss of creativity is one of the losses stemming from the Fisher-King wound. The lesson here is that creativity is a gift of the Unconscious--not reason. Imagination and inspiration are not reason. It was imagination and dreaming, said Albert Einstein, that led him to his discovery of his famous Theory of Relativity. In fact, he reported that he dreamed the theory.

The coldness experienced by the King is the attitudinal characteristic of the Fisher King-wounded man; the man who has consciously chosen coolness, objectivity, rationality, and factuality as the man he must be. In fact, the Castle of the Fisher King symbolized the fortress he erected around his heart: hard-heartedness. The cost of that choice is that Western man is often unable to express warmth, tenderness or relatedness to others--even to his wives and lovers.

The wound also separates man from Nature, causing him to have an exploitative attitude towards the Earth and her bounty. The natural, unwounded male on the other hand knows that Nature is a part of his own Unconscious psyche and that he is connected to it in some mysterious way. He is connected to his body and is totally natural in expressing his natural sexuality, warmth and tenderness in his relationships.

The wound of the Fisher King divides spirit from matter, mind from heart, and spirituality from sexuality. Such men think of themselves as their mind, expressing their spirituality woodenly and in a manner divorced from earthly life--if at all--and often find natural sexual expression uninteresting. Many exploit nature or other men and women in type-A careers, seeking to experience life through seeking power or wealth.

The wound of the Fisher King costs a man his feeling of being vitally alive and his feeling of being of value to others. As the life force leaked out of the King for example, the life bled out of the Land around him. And as he grows colder, the Fisher King-wounded man draws the life out of the people around him. Others are repelled by his coldness and "unfeelingness", and he is left alone. His ignorance of his own self keeps him from accepting healing by serving others and the cost is a vast loneliness and feeling that life has no meaning.

The story is telling us that a dreadful mistake occurred when our culture took the view our security must be attained through an economic system which exploits Nature and denies man's essential instinctual nature. This tells us that a man's true masculine nature is accomplished by the power of his instincts--not his intellect. The Fisher King wound can often be seen on the faces of nearly every man who one passes on the street; the ache of life, the anxiety, dread, loneliness, the corners of the mouth pointing down--all speak of the would of the Fisher King.

Modern man's most pernicious wound is the wound of the Fisher King: its cost is the loss of feeling of value. No outer things--income, wealth, cars, homes--can heal the wound. It is a wounding of the very capacity for feeling.

However, modern man's Fisher-king wound--its pain--is also our teacher, for it prepares us for awakening to our mistaken way of living. We will not escape the pain so long as we are exploitative, overly rational, unfeeling, power-hungry and selfish. When we are weary enough of the pain, we too, like Parsifal, will ask ourselves the key question: Whom does the Grail serve? What will it take to stop this pain? What am I doing wrong? And , like him, we will see that the Grail serves the Grail King. In order to heal ourselves of our own wound, we too must serve something greater than ourselves.

Each of us is the Grail, the Fisher King, and Parsifal.

We are the Healers who must heal ourselves. We are the Seekers of Wisdom and Knowledge who must face our own fear of what we are and grant ourselves Love and Unconditional acceptance. And we are the Innocent Fools who must blunder through life, learning by mistake after mistake, until we recognize that the way we all see ordinary life is an illusion and filled with pain.

It is We ourselves who have the power to heal ourselves, and we have only to ask the question: Who does the Grail Serve?

Woman's Journey: The Legend of the Handless Maiden

Once upon a time there was a miller. For years, he had been patiently serving his family and community by grinding out flour from grain brought to him by his neighbors and in return, earned an honest living. His horse pulled the great stone wheel around and around and slowly the corn was ground into soft, white flour. For many years, he lived in peace and harmony with his wife and innocent young daughter.

One day the Devil appeared at their door and told the miller, "For a fee, I will show you how to grind your grain with much less effort and much faster." The miller, intrigued, made a bargain with the devil, thinking, "anything that takes less work and gives greater out-put would make our lives much easier."

"What is your fee?", the miller asked.

"That which stands behind the mill," replied the Devil.

Recalling that the only thing which stood behind the mill was an old tree, the miller quickly agreed.

The Devil then showed the miller how to build a water wheel, create gears, and build the supporting infrastructure so that the flowing river did the work of turning the heavy grinding wheel. The delighted miller found that he could easily grind much more flour than before and the wealth of his family increased. Life was so much easier and all his family members had more leisure time to enjoy their lives. Neighbors all admired the creativity and resourcefulness of the miller for his new invention, and he recognized how he had become so much more important in the community.

One day soon after, the Devil appeared again at the miller's door and demanded payment of his fee. Together, the two walked through the mill, passing through the back door to the mill. There, the miller encountered his young daughter standing beside the old tree. The Devil, to the miller's horror, claimed the daughter as his fee. The miller was disconsolate, but was unwilling to give up the expanded productivity of his mill or his important new status in the community, so he reluctantly gave his daughter to the Devil. The Devil chopped off her hands and carried them away. His daughter stood and said nothing.

For some time, the handless maiden was content with her situation and did not complain. After all, all her needs were met and everything was done for her. There was enough money to have servants in the household, and she did not have to do anything that would require hands. Gradually however, she grew unhappy, depressed and withdrawn. Her mechanically served life became less and less pleasant, until finally, she began to weep and could not stop. Her parents could not see what she had to complain about; they now had their work and community projects and felt life was definitely better.

Finally, one night while her parents and all the servants were sleeping, she slipped out of the house and fled into the forest. Deep in the forest, scratched by the briars and bruised by her flight, she began to learn how to survive on her own. Gradually, she learned how to care for herself and at last found peace and solitude in the quiet naturalness of the Woods.

One day, during her daily walk through the Woods, she encountered a swamp. Struggling through the mud and pools of still water, she stumbled upon a beautiful landscaped garden. Hungry and weary from her struggle through the wasteland, she sees within the garden a pear tree. Without hands, she was only just able to reach one pear with her teeth and satisfy her hunger. Feeling she should not take more than she needs, she ate only one. Tired by her journey however, she stayed in the garden for several days, eating one pear a day to survive.

Unknown to her, her beautiful garden was the king's garden. One day, the king's gardener noticed that someone had been eating pears from the tree and tells the king. Both men then waited in hiding nearby to see who was taking his pears. The two saw the pathetic sight of the handless maiden struggling to eat her single pear of the day, and the king fell head over heals in love with her.

The king took the handless maiden home with him and made her his Queen. She implored him that she could not possibly be his Queen without her hands, but he assured her that he will take care of her and she will not need her hands.

She found nevertheless that it was very difficult to be Queen without her hands. She had to at least be graceful and beautiful, and greet and entertain guests at royal occasions. So the king called his magicians and commanded them to create a pair of silver hands for his queen. With her new silver hands, she became the talk of the court, and the fame of her grace and beauty spread throughout the land. But within the heart of the Queen, something was deeply wrong; she found that she felt isolated somehow, alone, purposeless, useless. She felt that other people lived, but she did not; she only watched from a distance.

In time, the Queen bore the King a son. Without real hands of course, the Queen could not care for the infant, but with all the servants, there was really no need for her to work. As she watched the servants care for her child, the Queen began to weep and could not stop her tears. She wanted to care for her own baby, but could not. So silently, in the dark of night, she wrapped her arms about her baby and slipped back into the forest.

During her flight through the forest, the Queen found that she must ford a rapidly flowing stream. In crossing, she faltered, and her baby slipped from her metal hands into the water. Panicking, she cried to her servants to save her child, forgetting for an instant that she was alone. But realizing that there was now no one else but herself to save her baby, she plunged her useless silver hands into the stream to grasp at the child. Somehow she found the strength to hold the child, and when she drew the child from the water, she saw that a miracle had occurred. Her useless silver hands had been transformed into hands of flesh and blood! Her heart broke, and she held the baby and cried throughout the night, washing the lost years of mechanical living away with her tears.

The Queen never returned to live at the King's castle, but remained in the Forest, living her life close to the Earth. The King, still loving her, built for her a lovely cottage, respecting her preference to do for herself and her need to be true to the simple, natural things of life. Here, close to nature, she found her own true self and the freedom to live as she pleased. And so, he lived the life he needed to be happy, and she did as well, each being true to their own natures and needs.