sexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates even
into what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape to
natural desire. In order to achieve proper balance in
interhuman interaction, we must find ways to change
ourselves from culturally defined agents into naturally
defined beings. We must find ways o f destroying the
cultural personae imposed on our psyches and we must
discover forms o f relationship, behavior, sexual being
and interaction, which are compatible with our inherent
natural possibilities. We must move away from the perverse, two-dimensional definitions which stem from sexual repression, which are the source o f social oppression, and move toward creative, full, multidimensional modes o f sexual expression.
Essentially the argument is this: we look at the world
we inhabit and we see disaster everywhere; police states;
prisons and mental hospitals filled to overflowing; alienation o f workers from their work, women and men from each other, children from the adult community,
governments contemptuous o f their people, people
filled with intense self-hatred; street violence, assault,
rape, contract murderers, psychotic killers; acquisition
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gone mad, concentrated power and wealth; hunger,
want, starvation, camps filled with refugees. Those
phenomena mark the distance between civilized man
and natural man, tribal man, whose sexual and social
patterns functioned in a more integrated, balanced
way. We know how it is now, and we want to know how
it was then. While we cannot reconstruct the moment
when humans emerged in evolution into recognizable
humanness, or analyze that person to see what existence
was like, while we cannot seek to emulate rituals and
social forms of tribal people, or penetrate to and then
imitate the dynamic relationship primitive people had
with the rest of the natural world, while we cannot even
know much of what happened before people made
pottery and built cities, while we cannot (and perhaps
would not) obliterate the knowledge that we do have
(of space travel and polio vaccines, cement and Hiroshima), we can still find extant in the culture echoes of a distant time when people were more together, figuratively and literally. These echoes reflect a period in human development when people functioned as a part
of the natural world, not set over against it; when men
and women, male and female, were whatever they were,
not polar opposites, separated by dress and role into
castes, fragmented pieces of some not-to-be-imagined
whole.
In recent years, depth psychologists in particular
have turned to primitive people and tribal situations
in an effort to penetrate into the basic dynamics of
male and female. The most notable effort was made by
Jung, and it is necessary to state here that, admirable
as his other work sometimes is, Jung and his followers
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have carried the baggage o f patriarchy and sexual dualism with them into the search. Jung describes male and female in the absolute terms native to the culture, as
archetypes preexistent in the psyche. Male is defined
as authority, logic, order, that which is saturnian and
embodies the consonant values o f patriarchy; female is
defined as emotional, receptive, anarchic, cancerian.
Matriarchy preceded patriarchy because patriarchal
values (particularly the need for complex organization)
inform advanced societies, whereas female values inform more primitive tribal societies. As far as individual men and women are concerned, the male psyche has a
feminine component (the subconscious) which is anarchic, emotional, sensitive, lunar, and the female personality has a male component (the conscious, or
mind) which can be defined as a capacity for logical
thought. O f course, biological women are ruled, it
turns out, by the subconscious; men are ruled, not surprisingly, by the conscious, mind, intellect. One might imagine a time and place where intellect is not valued
over anarchic, emotional, sensitive —looniness?: but
that would be the most gratuitous kind o f fantasy. Jung
never questioned the cultural arbitrariness o f these categories, never looked at them to see their political implications, never knew that they were sexist, that he functioned as an instrument o f cultural oppression.
In the book Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem,
M. Esther Harding, a lifelong student o f Jung and a
Patron o f the C. G. Jung Institute, applies Jungian ontology to a study o f mythology. Taking the moon, Luna, as the patron saint o f women (ignoring any masculine imagery associated with the moon, and this
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imagery is substantial; ignoring any feminine imagery
connected with the sun, and this imagery is substantial),
Harding ultimately identifies the female with the demonic, as did the Catholic Church:
But if she will stop long enough to look within, she
also may become aware of impulses and thoughts
which are not in accord with her conscious attitudes
but are the direct outcome of the crude and untamed
feminine being within her. For the most part, however,
a woman will not look at these dark secrets of her own
nature. It is too painful, too undermining of the conscious character which she has built up for herself; she prefers to think that she really is as she appears to be.
And indeed it is her task to stand between the Eros
which is within her, and the world without, and
through her own womanly adaptation to the world
to make human, as it were, the daemoniac power of
the nonhuman feminine principle. 1
Eros, the subconscious, the flow of human sexual energy— described as the witch burners described it, “the daemoniac power of the nonhuman feminine principle. ”
Harding is absolutely representative of the Jungian
point of view.
It is a natural consequence of this dualistic stance
that male and female are pitted against each other and
that conflict is the dynamic mode of relationship open
to male and female, men and women, when they meet:
These discrepancies in their attitudes are dependent
on the fact that the psychic constitution of men and
women are essentially different; they are mirror opposites the one of the other.. . . So that their essential nature and values are diametrically opposed. 2
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These male and female sets are defined as archetypes,
embedded in a collective unconscious, the given structure o f reality. T hey are polar opposites; their mode o f interaction is conflict. T hey cannot possibly understand each other because they are absolutely different: and o f course, it is always easier to do violence to something Other, something whose “nature and values”
are other. (Women have never understood that they
are, by definition, Other, not male, therefore not human. But men do experience women as being totally opposite, other. How easy violence is. ) T here is, because Jung was a good man and Jungians are good people, a happy ending: though these two forces, male
and female, are opposite, they are complementary, two
halves o f the same whole. One is not superior,
one is not
inferior. One is not good, one is not bad. But this resolution is inadequate because the culture, in its fiction and its history, demonstrates that one (male, logic, order,
ego, father) is good and superior both, and that the
other (guess which) is bad and inferior both. It is the
so-called female principle of Eros that all the paraphernalia
of patriarchy conspires to suppress through the psychological,
physiological, and economic oppression of those who are biologically women. Jung’s ontology serves those persons and institutions which subscribe to the myth o f feminine
evil.
T he identification o f the feminine with Eros, or
erotic energy (carnality by any other name), comes
from a fundamental misunderstanding o f the nature o f
human sexuality. The essential information which
would lead to nonsexist, nonrepressive notions o f sexuality is to be found in androgyny myths, myths which
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describe the creation of the first human being as male
and female in one form. In other words, Jung chose the
wrong model, the wrong myths, on which to construct
a psychology of male and female. He used myths infused with patriarchal values, myths which gained currency in male-dominated cultures. The anthropological discoveries which fueled the formation of his theories
all reveal relatively recent pieces of human history.
With few exceptions, all of the anthropological information we have deals with the near past. * But the myths which are the foundation of and legitimize our culture
are gross perversions of original creation myths which
molded the psyches of earlier, possibly less self-con-
scious and more conscious, peoples. The original myths
all concern a primal androgyne —an androgynous godhead, an androgynous people. The corruptions of these myths of a primal androgyne without exception
uphold patriarchal notions of sexual polarity, duality,
male and female as opposite and antagonistic. The
myth of a primal androgyne survives as part of a real
cultural underground: though it is ignored, despised
by a culture which posits other values, and though
those who relate their lifestyles directly to it have been
ostracized and persecuted.
With all of this talk of myth and mythology, what is
myth, and why does it have such importance? The best
definition remains that of Eliade, who wrote in Myths,
Dreams, and Mysteries:
*
It is estimated that the time space between 70 0 0 b . c . (when people
began to domesticate animals'and make pottery) and 1 9 7 4 a . d . is only 2 percent of the whole o f human history.
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What exactly is a myth? In the language current during the nineteenth century, a “myth” meant anything that was opposed to “reality”: the creation of Adam,
or the invisible man, no less than the history of the
world as described by the Zulus, or the Theogony of
Hesiod —these were all “myths. ” Like many another
cliche of the Enlightenment and of Positivism, this,
too, was of Christian origin and structure; for, according to primitive Christianity, everything which could not be justified by reference to one or the other
of the two Testaments was untrue; it was a “fable. ”
But the researches of the ethnologists have obliged us
to go behind this semantic inheritance from the Christian polemics against the pagan world. We are at last beginning to know and understand the value of the
myth, as it has been elaborated in “primitive” and
archaic societies — that is, among those groups of mankind where the myth happens to be the very foundation of social life and culture. Now one fact strikes us immediately: in such societies the myth is thought to
express the absolute truth, because it narrates a sacred
history; that is, a transhuman revelation which took
place at the dawn of the Great Time.. . . Being real
and sacred, the myth becomes exemplary, and consequently, repeatable, for it serves as a model, and by the same token, a justification, for all human actions. In
other words, a myth is a true history of what came to pass
at the beginning of Time, and one which provides the pattern for human behavior. 3 [Italics added]
I would extend Eliade’s definition in only one respect.
It is not only in primitive and archaic societies that
myths provide this model for behavior —it is in every
human society. T he distance between myth and social
organization is perhaps greater, or more tangled, in
advanced technological societies, but myth still operates
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as the substructure of the collective. The story of Adam
and Eve will affect the shape of settlements on the moon
and Mars, and the Christian version of the primitive
myth of a divine fertility sacrifice saturates the most
technologically advanced communications media.
What are the myths of androgyny, and how do we
locate them behind the myths of polarity with which we
are familiar? Let us begin with the Chinese notions of yin
and yang.
Yin and yang are commonly associated with female
and male. The Chinese ontology, so appealing in that
it appears to give whole, harmonious, value-free description of phenomena, describes cosmic movement as cyclical, thoroughly interwoven manifestation of yang
(masculine, aggressive, light, spring, summer) and yin
(female, passive, dark, fall, winter). The sexual identifications reduce the concepts too often to conceptual polarities: they are used to fix the proper natures of
men and women as well as the forces of male and female.
These definitions, like the Jungian ones which are based
on them, are seemingly modified by the assertions that
(1) all people are composed of both yin and yang,
though in the man yang properly predominates and in
the woman yin properly predominates; (2) these male
and female forces are two parts of a whole, equally
vital, mutually indispensable. Unfortunately, as one
looks to day-to-day life, that biological incarnation of
yin, woman, finds herself, as always, the dark half of
the universe.
The sexual connotations of yin and yang, however,
are affixed onto the original concepts. They reflect an
already patriarchal, and misogynist, culture. Richard
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Wilhelm, in an essay on an ancient Chinese text called
The Secret of the Golden Flower, gives the uncorrupted
meanings o f yin and yang:
Out of the Tao, and the Tai-chi [“the great ridge
pole, the supreme ultimate”] there develop the principles of reality, the one pole being the light (yang) and the other the dark, or the shadowy, (yin). Among
European scholars, some have turned first to sexual
references for an explanation, but the characters refer
to phenomena in nature. Yin is shade, therefore the
north side of a mountain and the south side of a river.
. . . Yang, in its original form, indicates flying pennants
and, corresponding to the character of yin, is the south
side of a mountain and the north side of a river. Starting only with the meaning of “light” and
“dark, ” the principle was then expanded to all polar opposites,
including the sexual. However, since both yin and yang
have their common origin in an undivided One and
are active only in the realm of phenomena, where yang
appears as the active principle and conditions, and yin
as the passive principle is derived and conditioned, it
is quite clear that a metaphysical dualism is not the
basis for these ideas. 4
Light and dark are obvious in a phenomenological
sense —there is day and it slowly changes into night
which then slowly changes into day. When men began
conceptualizing about the nature o f the universe, the
phenomena o f light and dark were an obvious starting
point. My own experience is that night and day are
more alike than different —in which case they couldn't
possibly be opposite. Man, in conceptualizing, has
reduced phenomena to two, when phenomena are
more complex and subtle than intellect can imagine.
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Still, how is it that it is the feminine, the sexually
female, that is embodied in yin? Even patriarchy and
misogyny began somewhere. Here I can only guess. We
know that at one time men were hunters and women
were planters. Both forms o f work were essential and
arduous. Both demanded incredible physical strength
and considerable knowledge and skill. Why did men
hunt and women plant? Clearly women planted because they were often pregnant, and though pregnancy did not make them weak and passive, it did mean that
they could not run, go without food for long periods of
time, survive on the terms that hunting demanded. It
is probable that very early in human history women
also were hunters, and that it was crucial to the survival
of the species that they develop into planters — first to
supplement the food supply, second to reduce infant
and woman mortality. We see that the first division of
labor based on biological sex originated in a fundamental survival imperative. In the earliest of times, with no contraception and no notion of the place of the
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