Whatever you do, in waking or sleeping, consciously or involuntarily in the cycle of your flesh to the accompanying music of your soul; whatever you do as your body builds and destroys, absorbs and excretes, breathes and procreates, or bestows joy infringing on the limits of rage and pain—all this is a mere gesture of the Great Mother, jaganmayi (consisting of all worlds and beings), who unremittingly does likewise with her world body in endless thousands of forms.…To see the twofold, embracing and devouring, nature of the goddess, to see repose in catastrophe, security in decay, is to know her and to be saved.…She is the perfect figuration of life’s joyous lures and pitiless destruction: the two poles charged with the extremest tension, yet forever merging.—Zimmer115
Also, in Hinduism, the sun is female and the moon is male: he is born of her, dies into her, and is born of her again every month. Śiva, this great power, is the moon god. Pārvatī, his consort, is the sun power. And although the worship in the masculine-oriented action systems in India is directly to Śiva, it’s to the goddess Kālī, that the worship finally goes. So that, actually, in India, Kālī is the great divinity.
…the Hindu goddess Kālī…is shown standing on the prostrate form of the god Śiva, her spouse. She brandishes the sword of death, i.e., spiritual discipline. The blood-dripping human head tells the devotee that ”he that loseth his life for her sake shall find it.” The gestures of “fear not” and “bestowing boons” teach that she protects her children, that the pairs of opposites of the universal agony are not what they seem, and that for one centered in eternity the phantasmagoria of temporal “goods” and “evils” is but a reflex of the mind—as the goddess herself, though apparently trampling down the god, is actually his blissful dream.116
The Goddess
gives birth to forms
and kills forms.
It’s interesting that in the North, in the European systems—and in the Chinese system, where one hears of yang and yin—the man is the aggressor, the active principle, and the woman is the receptive and passive aspect. It’s just the opposite in India. The Hindu position is that woman is the śakti, the serpent power that comes up the spine, the life-energy principle. She’s the activator, and the man just wants to be left alone. The man, psychologically, is interested in other things, but when this power field goes by, he’s activated. As Joyce writes in Finnegans Wake, “With lipth she lith-peth to him all to time of thuch on thuch and thow and thow. She he she ho she ha to la.”117 And wouldn’t it be nice to sthart the world again? And he thinks, “My god, yeah, it would.” And that’s it, he’s gone. He gets involved that way because she’s the whole damned energy in any of it’s aspects.
Similarly, in the mythological systems of what we call, basically, the Bronze Age, the female was the great divinity and the source of all power. For instance, in the Egyptian image of the Pharaoh on the throne, the throne being what gives him his authority, the throne is the goddess Isis. The same mythic image comes up in Byzantine iconography of the Virgin and the Christ: the Christ Child sits on the Virgin’s knee just the way the Pharaoh sits on the throne: she is his power. He is called the world ruler, but she’s behind him all the way. Likewise, in old pictures of Presidents of the United States, one usually sees the President’s wife standing behind him. She’s Isis, and he’s the child on the throne.
There is a Pygmy dance where the woman ties the whole male community up with a rope. They stand there completely immobilized and one of them says, “She has made us all silent.” Then she loosens them, and as each one is loose, he sings. They know this basic, basic mythological stuff that we’ve lost.
Her womb is the field of space, her heart the pulse of time, her life the cosmic dream of which each of our own lives is a reflex; and her charm is the attractive power, not of a yonder shore, but of this. In short: in Biblical terms, she is Eve; or rather, Eve extended to be the mother, not only of mankind but of all things, the rocks and trees, beasts, birds and fish, the sun and moon and stars.118
The male power comes in with the Semites and Indo-European Aryans, masculine-oriented societies of herding peoples for whom the specific function of the energy was to control the animals on the plains. Then you have the problem of the relationship between male and female mythologies.
Where agriculture
is a main means of support,
there are earth and goddess powers.
Where hunting predominates,
it’s male initiative
that empowers the killing of animals.
In the Semitic tradition, the goddess is wiped out, and a prominent feature of that orthodoxy is a masculine fear of the female body, the prime anthropomorphic symbol of Nature’s allure and power. This went to such extremes in Christianity that nuns were not even allowed to look at their bodies. In Islam, the most male-oriented of the modern religions, a woman is nothing but a vehicle for producing sons, and the male function is, in large part, the protection of the women. I was in PakistanI for only a few hours, but what I saw! Those women were going around in tents! Even their eyes were covered with cheesecloth, so you did not know if it was an old hag or a glorious goddess walking around. And you can’t respond to a tent.
Male = social order.
Female = nature order.
The male’s job is to relate to life.
The female’s job is to become it.
The prime function of the male is to set up an eco-logical situation in which the woman can give birth, to prepare the field so that the female may bring forth the future, because she is the life. She is the totality. He is a protecting factor, the agent of her power. If a woman loses her husband, she has to take over a male role, but it is a mistake to regard that as something foreign to her own energy. The animus function is in every woman, but it is usually delegated to somebody.
What I think has happened now—with so many women, left without husbands, being thrown into the field of male achievement—is that women have been sold a bill of goods—perhaps not intentionally, but actually. With our strong emphasis on such dramatic and conspicuous male activities as building cities filled with skyscrapers and sending jet-propelled rockets to the moon, women have come to believe that only the aims and virtues of the male are to be considered, and that male achievement is the proper aim for everyone, as though that is what counts. No indeed.
Women used to know how to run the world, but when they move into the secondary energy position of doing the job of the man—who is, in fact, just the agent of the female power—women lose their real power and become resentful. Spengler said, in a telling sentence that got into me when I read it: “Man makes history. Woman is history.” She’s what it is about, and the man fashions the field within which she can produce history and be history.
The man’s function is to act.
The woman’s function is to be.
She’s “It.” She is Mother Earth.
So, the female is “It.” When you say the woman brings forth children, that’s part of just being, fulfilling a role that is already there in the very body itself. And the production need not be children. It can be in represent-ing that power, that quality, that being in life which the woman represents. This is why the woman’s beauty or quality of character is so important in mythological tales, which does not mean that a woman who’s not physically beautiful does not have this power. It’s right there in the female presence.
The mythological figure of the Universal Mother imputes to the cosmos the feminine attributes of the first, nourishing and protecting presence. The fantasy is primarily spontaneous; for there exists a close and obvious correspondence between the attitude of the young child toward its mother and that of the adult toward the surrounding material world. 119
When Heinrich Zimmer, a great devotee of the Goddess, was trying to find his place in America, he was helped by the old ladies of the Jung Foundation. They were getting him jobs, helping his wife to find a place and so forth. He said, “When I look into those eyes, I say, ‘I see you
there.’” So, she’s operative in every woman in a way that the god is not operative in a man. I’ll never forget that wonderful twinkle in his eye when he said, “I see you there.”
Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world. 120
A little girl has a golden ball. Now gold is the in-corruptible metal, the sphere is the perfect sphere, and the circle is her soul. She likes to go out to the edge of the forest, the abyss, and sit beside a little pool, a little spring, the entrance to the underworld, and there she likes to toss her soul around: toss the little ball and catch it, toss the ball and catch it, toss the ball and—bing!—she misses it, and it goes down into the pond.
She starts to weep. She has lost her soul. This is depression. This is loss of energy and joy in life. Some-thing has slipped out. It is the counterpart of Helen of Troy being stolen in the classic story of the Iliad: Helen of Troy was stolen, so they want to get her back.
So, the little golden ball has dropped, her soul has been swallowed by the wolf of the underworld. Now, when the energy goes down like that, the power that’s at the bottom of the pool, the inhabitant of the under-world, comes up—a dragon, or in this case, a little frog. He says “What’s the matter, Little Girl?” And she tells him, “I’ve lost my golden ball.” And he says, “I’ll get it for you.” And she says, “That would be very nice.” And he says, “What will you give me?”
Now, she has to give up something, there has to be some kind of exchange, so she says, “I will give you my golden crown.” He says, “I do not want your golden crown.” “I’ll give you my pretty silk dress.” “I don’t want your pretty silk dress.” “Well,” she demands, “what do you want?” “I want to eat with you at the table, be with you as your playmate, sleep with you in your bed.” So, underestimating the frog, she says, “Okay, I’ll do that.”
The frog dives down and brings up the ball. Now he is the hero who is on the adventure. She, without so much as a thank you, takes the ball and goes trotting home, and he comes flopping after her, saying, “Wait for me.” He’s very slow.
She gets home, and that evening, when the little princess and King Daddy and Queen Mother are having dinner, doing very nicely with their meal, this green creature comes flopping up the front steps: plomp, plomp, plomp. The girl goes a bit pale, and her father asks, “So, what’s the matter? What’s that?” And she says, “Oh, just a little frog I met.” And he says, “Did you make any promises?”
Now there’s the moral principle coming in; you have to correlate all these things. So, when she answers, “Yes,” the king says, “Well, then, open the door and let him in.” So, in comes the frog, and he’s down on the floor, and then he says, “I want to be on the table. I want to eat off of your golden plate.” Well, that spoils dinner. The dinner is finished, and she goes up to bed. He comes flopping up the stairs after her and bangs against the door, saying, “I want to come in.” So she opens the door and lets him in. “I want to sleep in your bed with you.” Well, that is more than she can take.
There are several ways of ending this part of the story, but the one I like best is where she just picks up the frog and throws him against the wall. The frog cracks open, and out steps this beautiful prince, with eyelashes like a camel. It seems he had also been in trouble: he had been cursed by a hag into the condition of a frog. Now that’s the little boy who hasn’t dared to move on into adulthood. She is the little girl who is at the brink of adulthood. Both of them are refusing it, but each now helps the other out of this dilemma, and it’s a beautiful, beautiful experience.
Then, the story says, the next morning, after they had been married, a coach comes to the front door. It was his coach. He was a prince, after all, whose kingdom had been in desolation since his transformation into a frog. So he and his bride get into the coach, and as they are driving away, they hear a loud sound: Bang! He says to the coachman, “What’s the matter, Henry? What’s happened?” And Henry says, “Well, ever since you have been gone, my Prince, there have been four bands of iron around my heart. One of them has now broken.” As they ride further, there are three more “Bangs,” and then the heart of the coachman beats properly once again.
The coachman is symbolic of the land that requires the prince as its generating and governing power. He’d failed in his duty and gone down into the underworld, but down in the underworld, he found his little bride.
I like that story particularly, because both of them are in trouble, both are at the bottom of the pond, and each rescues the other in this funny way. Meanwhile, the world up there has been waiting for its prince to return. So that is one example of the hero journey.
THE question that comes—always, always, always—is: “What about the woman’s journey?” The woman’s life, if she is following the biologically grounded norm, is that of life in the world, in one relationship or another to a family. Then when the retirement time comes, the normal passage is into the stage which can be pictured as the Grandmother, of giving advice to the new life coming along. One can be in a position of being a grandmother to the grandchildren of the world. One is in a role, then, of mature, life-fostering advice. The woman brings forth life in one way or another, either biologically or socially, and then, in the latter stage, is life-fostering and life-guiding. The man is more inward than the woman in that last stage.
The relationship of age to childhood, it seems to me, is a very sweet thing. There is a sweet, amusing picture of Ida Rolf and a little child looking at each other, west to east, across the distance of life: the whole, historically conditioned stage between is missing, and there’s just one eternity looking at the other. If you can be in some kind of social relationship that enables that principle of the eternal experience to look at the eternal innocence and foster it, that is really archetypal.
In cases throughout history, however, where there have been inadequate responses to what the woman is doing—that is to say, she is doing what nature and society expect, but it’s an arid and bad situation—this is what I would term a “call to adventure.” And if a woman engages in the man’s task of entering the field of achievement, then her mythology will be essentially the same as that of the male hero.
The heroine will, of course, encounter difficulties and advantages which are not those that the male meets, but whether one is male or female, the stages of the inner journey, the visionary quest, are the same, even though the imagery is going to be a little different. For instance, the central image in a man’s mandala is often some radiant jewel, or gem, or something like that, but the central image for a woman might be of her holding a child in her arms, the child of her spiritual birth, since the imagery of biological commitment is translated even to the spiritual forms.
My wife, who is anything but the housewife, has no trouble in seeing the male hero as the counterpart of the female hero, if the woman is engaged in the kind of task that has traditionally been seen as a male task; that is to say, if she is engaged in achieving something, rather than waiting in solitude to be achieved, which is the woman’s normal role. Jean is an artist, richly fulfilled in an active role, and her crises are essentially the same as a male’s crises. The women we know with whom she has worked are also not typical house
wives. They have achieved fulfillment in the realm of the arts, which is the only place I know of—except, perhaps, for academe—where women can have this unconventional way of life. In my own work, I have known a lot of women in the world of “the head trip,” but they never seemed to me to be as richly fulfilled as the ones that went into the arts. Their fulfillment was more in the way of achievement, whereas the artists’ fulfillment was in doing what the artist does, and that is a different thing.
In all of literature there is very little of the woman’s adventure because she is already “It,” and her problem is the realization of that. There are quite a few adventures of little girls in Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and most of them have to do with the hesitation before moving into the threshold of accepting womanhood—the sleeping princess, and all that sort of thing, and then the waking. When women dream, often their active aspect appears in male form.
What the male represents is the agent of the femi-nine power directed to a specific kind of functioning. In the male body, however, there’s not the recall to female nature that there is automatically in the female body. Consequently, a male going forth and finding the place of, the instrument of, his full power would not have the problem of discovering the feminine factor in himself, for it is quite slight compared with the feminine factor in the female body. It is a greater distance from what the body has given you. It’s a matter of proportion.
A man must do.
He must disengage from the mother
and find his way of “doing,”
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living Page 17