The serpent said: “Look there’s an interesting thing about this tree. Don't mind that old buzzard—have a taste and you will really know something.” Well, she had a taste, and when Adam came along, she said, “Look, this is okay.”
So, he had a taste, and then God, who walked in the cool of the evening in the Garden, saw the pair of them wearing fig leaves, and he said, “What’s this? You’ve got leaves on.”
The female activates the male;
then he is the action,
and she has to take the results.
They told God what happened, and that ran the usual way: the man blamed the woman, and the woman blamed the snake. God then cursed the lot of them in increasing degrees. Man got it fairly easy: all he had to do was to work and sweat. The woman had to bring forth children in pain, and the serpent had to crawl on his belly for the rest of his life. God kicked them out of the Garden and put at the gate two cherubim, door guardians, with a flaming sword between them. And that’s the explanation of why we’re out here in the cold and not in the Garden.
Christianity and Judaism
are religions of exile:
Man was thrown out of the Garden.
It seems impossible today, but people actually believed all that until as recently as half a century or so ago: clergymen, philosophers, government officers and all. Today we know—and know right well—that there never was anything of the kind: no Garden of Eden anywhere on this earth, no time when the serpent could talk, no prehistoric “Fall,” no excl-sion from the Garden, no universal Flood, no Noah’s Ark. The entire history on which our leading Occidental religions have been founded is an anthology of fictions. But these are fictions of a type that have had—curiously enough—a universal vogue as the founding legends of other religions, too. Their counterparts have turned up everywhere—and yet, there never was such a garden, serpent, tree, or deluge.7
The serpent
was the wise one in the Garden.
Adam and Eve
got thrown into the field of time.
“…in the beginning this universe was but the Self in the form of a man. He looked around and saw nothing but himself.…
“He was just as large as a man and a woman embracing. This Self then divided himself in two parts; and with that, there were a master and mistress.—Therefore this body, by itself, as the sage Yajnavalkya declares, is like half of a split pea. And that is why, indeed, this space is filled by a woman.—He united with her, and from that mankind arose.…
“She became a cow, he a bull and united with her; and from that cattle arose. She became a mare, he a stallion; she an ass, he a donkey and united with her; and from that solid-hoofed animals arose. She became a goat, he a buck; she became a sheep, he a ram and united with her; and from that goats and sheep arose.—Thus he poured forth all pairing things, down to the ants.”—Bṛhadāranyaka Upaniṣad8
Marriage is reconstruction
of the androgyne.
If you marry only for the love affair,
that will not last.
You must also marry on another level
to reconstruct the androgyne,
to make the perfect whole,
male and female.
…consider the allegory in Plato’s Symposium, where it is said by Aristophanes—playfully, yet in the form of the same myth—that the earliest human beings were “round and had four hands and four feet, back and sides forming a circle, one head with two faces looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainders to correspond.” According to this Platonic version of the great theme, these original creatures were of three kinds: male-male, male-female, and female-female. They were immensely powerful; and since the gods were in fear of their strength, Zeus decided to cut them in two, like apples halved for pickling.… “After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and threw their arms about one another eager to grow into one, and would have perished from hunger without ever making an effort, because they did not like to do anything apart… : so ancient is the desire of one another which is implanted in us, reuniting our original nature, making one of two and healing the state of man. Each of us when separated is but the indenture of a man, having one side only like a flat fish, and he is always looking for his other half.9
When seeking your partner,
if your intuition is a virtuous one,
you will find him or her. If not,
you’ll keep finding the wrong person.
How does one talk about whether or not there is a destiny between couples? I feel it, but I don’t believe it. In my case, at Sarah Lawrence College I was teaching all these beautiful girls, and there were certain classes when I’d feel a little hopped up. It took me six months to locate the one who was responsible for this, and when I did, I knew I was gone.
When I first saw the woman who is now my wife, I felt like that and didn’t know it. She was in the class, and I was hopped up—who the hell is doing this? Then I finally located who she was, and there was a whole constellating of relationship that I didn’t let her know about until I gave the mildest sign: she was about to leave school, so I gave her a book: Spengler’s Decline of the West. It was a little present, but a loaded one.
There was something behind that projection of mine. Why does this projection come out of me instead of someone else? Because it’s based upon my deep life experiences, and that’s where one’s destiny is. It is structured by your own life. It is my life that put the projection that way—experiences that I’ve had of the female, even in my infancy.
So that’s what destiny is: simply the fulfillment of the potentialities of the energies in your own system. The energies are committed in a certain way, and that commitment out there is coming toward you.
The projection-making factor [in the male] is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima. When-ever she appears, in dreams, visions, and fantasies, she takes on personified form, thus demonstrating that the factor she embodies possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a feminine being. She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous product of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute figure for the mother. On the contrary, there is every likelihood that the numinous qualities which make the mother-image so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype of the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child. —Jung 10
The woman’s body
is the first world to the newborn.
The child’s projections of anima
will be of her from then on.
Just as the mother seems to be the first carrier of the projection-making factor for the son, so is the father for the daughter.…Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit.…when anima and animus meet, the animus draws his sword of power, and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). —Jung11
You know about your anima or animus
by your response to the opposite sex.
There’s a fundamental image in the old Babylonian mythology of the God Marduk, the great sun god, the shaper and creator of the world. What does he create the world out of? His grandmother, Tiamat, who comes as a monster, and he carves her up.
She would have cut herself up anyhow, but she lets him become the agent of this deed, because one has to have that kind of confidence in action out there in order that the world can live. So, this is a generous woman, who lets the little boy think he is doing the job, when she could have done it herself.
That’s the way the animus is: it is a projection of something the female could do but instead allows the male to do for
her. Though not half so vital a presence, he is a machine with a body that’s specialized, so he can do these things. The realization that the power is within you is one thing; but to realize that the action implied by that power is more adequately rendered by the male than by you as a female is to recognize relationship.
When a woman realizes that the power is within her, then the man emerges as an individual, rather than just being an example of what she thinks she needs. On the male side, when a man looks at a woman and sees only somebody to go to bed with, he is seeing her in relation to a fulfillment of some need of his own and not as a woman at all. It’s like looking at cows and thinking only of roast beef.
Falling in love is nature coming in.
It starts with being carried off
by the opposite sex.
It is amazing, but our theologians still are writing of agape and eros and their radical opposition, as though these two were the final terms of the principle of “love”: the former, “charity,” godly and spiritual, being “of men toward each other in a community,” and the latter, “lust,” natural and fleshly, being “the urge, desire and delight of sex.”12 Nobody in a pulpit seems ever to have heard of amor as a third, selective, discriminating principle in contrast to the other two. For amor is neither of the right-hand path (the sublimating spirit, the mind and the comm-nity of man), nor of the indiscriminate left (the spontaneity of nature, the mutual incitement of the phallus and the womb), but is the path directly before one, of the eyes and their message to the heart.
There is a poem to this point by a great troubadour (perhaps the greatest of all), Guiraut de Borneilh:
So, through the eyes love attains the heart:
For the eyes are the scouts of the heart,
And the eyes go reconnoitering
For what it would please the heart to possess.
And when they are in full accord
And firm, all three, in the one resolve,
At that time, perfect love is born
From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.
Not otherwise can love either be born or have commencement
Then by this birth and commencement moved by inclination
By the grace and by command
Of these three, and from their pleasure,
Love is born, who with fair hope
Goes comforting her friends.
For as all true lovers
Know, love is perfect kindness,
Which is born—there is no doubt—from the heart and eyes.
The eyes make it blossom; the heart matures it:
Love, which is the fruit of their very seed.13
Troubadour love was born
with the meeting of the eyes.
The eyes are the scouts of love.
If it is a gentle heart, love is born.
At the moment of the wakening to love, an object, apparently without, “passes [in the words of Joyce] into the soul forever.…And the soul leaps at the call. To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life!”14
Love is not only a life experience,
but also a mystical experience.
In courtly love, the pain of love,
the impossibility of fulfillment,
was considered the essence of life.
For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass.15
The distance of your love
is the distance of your life.
Love is exactly as strong as life.
The loss of a love and the pain of a broken relationship is an overload of projection. That’s all it is. In youth, your whole life is this wonderful dream that “This is It”: this relationship is the fulfillment of my fantasy and I can’t imagine life otherwise. No argument can quell this feeling of total projection, of everything in the other one. I guess we can all recall an episode of an adolescent relationship that seemed to be the all-in-all and then went to pieces for some reason.
When a relationship breaks off, it takes a person a little while to settle and find a new commitment. It’s after the breakoff, when there is no new commitment and life has been divested of all of its potentials, that this painful reaction takes place. For some people this is a dangerous period.
The psyche knows how to heal, but it hurts. Some-times the healing hurts more than the initial injury, but if you can survive it, you’ll be stronger, because you’ve found a larger base. Every commit-ment is a narrowing, and when that commitment fails, you have to get back to a larger base and have the strength to hold to it.
Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life,the idea came to him of what he called “the love of your fate.” Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, “This is what I need.” It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment—not discouragement—you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.
Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes.
The dark night of the soul
comes just before revelation.
When everything is lost,
and all seems darkness,
then comes the new life
and all that is needed.
Jean and I have been married for forty-six years, and we have a kind of back and forth of feelings and intelligences, so that we’ve experienced “the one that is two and the two that are one.” We do not have to theorize about it, we know what the hell it means. It’s what Goethe calls the “Golden Wedding,” and it is beautiful when that feeling becomes a fact in your life.
Mythology helps you to identify
the mysteries of the energies
pouring through you.
Therein lies your eternity.
It is nice to know enough about mythology to realize how beautiful such an experience can be. A lot of people could have the experience and not know they had it. One of the wonderful things about these age-old realizations that are constellated in the mythic images is that they let you know what it is you are experiencing.
Mythology is an organization of images
metaphoric of potentials of experience, action, and fulfillment of the human spirit
in the field of a given culture at a given time.
The goal of the Golden Wedding is implicit in the first moment of a relationship. Old age is implicit in the generation of a child: the child’s old age is there waiting. Similarly, the older you get, the more you realize that you are still a kid, and your early experiences are the ones that are now just opening out. It is one system all the time.
This is one of the big themes in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He has this image of the heroine, Anna Livia Plurabelle, as being the personification of the River Liffey that flows through Dublin.
The River Liffey rises in the hills south of Dublin as a little girl, those dancing little rivulets that are going to form the river. Then it flows north to a lovely suburban area, where you have the mother with her family: the mid-point of life. The river is the same river. Then it turns and runs through Dublin and becomes an old, dirty, city river, carrying all the rubbish of the city back to the ocean, the Father Ocean. The sun then brings the vapor up to the cloud, and it’s now a little
cloud in the Mother Womb of the blue sky. It floats over the hill and discharges the rain on the mountains.
The first half of life
A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) Page 2
