.

Introduction

.

Greek myth has in the past few decades provided many in the occupation of psychology with their models for human behavior. "Archetype" is a term coined by the great psychologist, Carl Jung, for the deeply held patterns of behavior emerging from the Unconscious Mind of Mankind and defining how instinctual needs create both negative and positive motivations and behaviors within human society. These patterns "live" in the Deep Psyche Jung called the Collective Unconscious, and without people realizing it, determine their feelings, emotions and behavior as they encounter certain obstacles or opportunities to expression.

.

On the occasion of reading Michael Washburn’s book Embodied Spirituality in a Sacred World, it became clear to me that the myths of Ouranos and Gaia, Kronos and Rhea, and Zeus and Hera were related in a way previously not widely noticed by the psychological literature. We already know that the Homeric poets who careful crafted all these myths in their latest incarnations must have known of these linkages because their writings in fact provided one of the foundations for the study of psychology. They reveal great insight into the behavior, weaknesses and strengths of mankind itself, not to say our gods. The Homeric poets wrote their works for presentations as high drama, and as drama the characters and their tragedies presented situations with which their audiences could identity. They told epic stories in tragedies, comedies and farce. In short, audiences could find in these mythic characters motives and behaviors with which they could personally identify and relate as humans.

.

While there is a clear tradition in pagan spirituality about the existence of a tripartite goddess, there is no such attention given to a tripartite god, although it is clear as well that males experience the same three stages of life as do woman. If one looks at the literature on the goddess, there are many personifications of a Moon goddess: a Great Mother goddess who is tripartite (has three faces). For example, the first face of the goddess the Maiden, who represents enchantment, inception, expansion, the promise of new beginnings, birth, youth, and youthful enthusiasm; she is associated with the waxing Moon. The second face of the goddess is the Mother, who represents ripeness, fertility, sexuality, fulfillment, stability, power and life. This aspect of the goddess was associated with the Full Moon. And thirdly, there is the Crone, representing wisdom, repose, death, and endings; this aspect of the goddess was represented by the waning Moon.

.

In Greek myth, one of the most prominent of the Great Mother goddess figures was Hekate Triformis, a pre-Olympian goddess worshipped in Thrace. While she was largely known in the West as the Crone or witch goddess who lived in caves beneath the earth, she was earlier a Great Mother figure with three faces. Porphory wrote: "The Moon is Hecate…her power appears in three forms." Statues of this goddess often depict her as three female figures, or crowned with a triple turreted head dress, or with three heads. Her three faces represent her dominion over heaven, earth and the underworld. Her three ‘persons’ were known in some Greek myths as Selene, the Moon in Heaven; Artemis, the Huntress, on Earth; and Hekate, the Destroyer, in the Underworld.

.

Many tribes in Europe and around the Mediterranean had similar tripartite goddesses by different names.

.

Psychologically, it is not much of a stretch for a woman who was taught "the mysteries of life" to identify with her three goddesses at the turning points in her life because each of these goddesses held dominion over specific stages in her life. As a child and young woman, she would pray to Artemis, the Virgin. As a mother, she would pray to Selene, the Mother. And as an elder, she would invoke Hekate or any of the other wise goddesses protecting those approaching their later years.

.

But as I’ve noted, there is no mention in subsequent pagan literature of a tripartite god. Rather in Greek myth we have three brothers: Zeus, Hades, and Poseidon, who rule the Heavens, the Underworld and the Ocean. It probably would not have occurred to aging men to pray to grim faced Hades, although sailors certainly might pray to Poseidon for safe passage at sea. Zeus resided on Mount Olympus, far above the earth, and was a dangerous war god of thunder and lightning. Many other mythic gods of the last thousand years before Jesus was born were seen as far more friendly to mankind than Zeus, who was a god imported from the steppes of the Caucasian range by barbaric, marauding tribes.

.

In psychology, the Unconscious Mind is symbolized by the images of Zeus’ two brothers…Hades and Poseidon‘s domains. Zeus symbolizes the Superconscious Mind. In order to represent the earthly level of ordinary consciousness, the myth makers and Homeric poets turned to Hercules, a son of Zeus by an earthly woman, who in psychology represents the "ego."

.

In studying Michael Washburn’s book (please read my article here in Journal form entitled "Waking up at Midlife" before continuing here on this article), I observed a match between the dynamics of the stages in a person’s life psychologically and the myths of Ouranos, Kronos and Zeus, if taken as a series of archetypes affecting a man serially through his lifespan. And it finally made sense to think of the three myths as being a form of tripartite god in the sense that Ouranos symbolizes the behavior of the human child from birth through the end of its oedipal stage of development, Kronos symbolizes the behavior of the growing child from the end of its oedipal stage through mid-life, and Zeus symbolizes the elder who has experiences a transformative experience of awakening and individuation. The Three-in-One God…or Great Father…is Ouranos, Kronos and Zeus. Or, as will be seen, if a person turns back from his crisis at the Crossroads at mid-life, he will finish his life as Kronos, without stepping into the power of the final archetype.

.

Just as there is a powerful Great Mother archetype that guides the growth of women through her life, there is also a Great Father archetype that was expressed as a tripartite Father God in ancient Greek myth and that guides the development of men as they go through their own changes in life. What I want to begin here is a discussion of these three myths as they denote human experiences in individuation. As Carl Jung clarified this process, the individuation process is itself an archetype. So in examining these three myths as one process of development, I am describing Jung’s individuation process as a three stage, archetypal transition. The final transition into the Zeus archetype is, unfortunately, generally blocked by cultural or personal issues and may not occur in the majority of cases in the West.

.

It is a reasonable question to ask whether the Homeric poets and their precedants saw these myths in this way or not. Perhaps some did. But as psychologists often say, the Psyche has a way of expressing its Voice through men who are not aware of what they are speaking or writing. These archetypal energies have been know to do such things before.

.

At any rate, let’s look at these three myths now to see whether they appear to fit the theory that they represent our stages in male individuation.

.

.

The Myths

.

One Myth we might use to illustrate this principle is the story of young Kronos and his Father, Ouranos. Another is the myth of young Zeus and his Father, Kronos. In both stories, the elder King ruled with an iron hand and lay with his Titaness wife, who symbolized the Earth. Ouranos’ wife was Gaia, who grew to hate him. Afraid of his Titan children, he would not allow Gaia to birth any of his Titan children into the world. So in her anger at her husband and her pain, she plotted with her son, Kronos, to kill her husband.

.

Using a flint sickle (symbolizing the Moon) given to him by Gaia, Kronos castrated his sire one day when he lay with his wife and threw the severed genitals into the sea. Ouranos faded out into the sky from which he had come and was never heard from again. From the blood and severed flesh falling into the sea arose Aphrodite, goddess of Love, from the foam; the Erinyes, the fates who hound those guilty of patricide; the Gigantes and Meliae . The Gigantes were sons and daughters of their castrated father. They later protected Kronos’ son, Zeus, from his dangerous father while he was growing up on the island of Crete. The Meliae were nymphs of the Ash tree who bore the third Bronze Age race of mankind. This race were all killed in the Great Deluge of the Age of Zeus.

.

After the overthrow of Ouranos, Kronos became the King of a Golden Age of Mankind, and began to begat children on the Titanness, Rhea, who also symbolized the Earth. But Kronos was warned by a prophecy by Gaia that in time, one of his own sons would rise, kill him and take his place. Therefore, anxious to avoid this fate, he insisted on swallowing each and every son and daughter Titan as it was birthed by Rhea. With Rhea, he sired the Titans Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus, but everyone but one went down his throat where they were kept from growing up. Zeus escaped and Chiron was fathered on a nymph Kronos raped in the form of a stallion.

.

Rhea finally became desperate to preserve her children and allow them into the world, so when her child Zeus was born, she brought a large rock wrapped in swaddling clothes to her husband, and he swallowed that.

.

The child Zeus was born to Rhea in a cave in Crete, where he was suckled and watched over by the Melaei nymphs. Kronos however, in time discovered the deception, and sent assassins to murder him. The young Zeus was torn to pieces and killed, but he was resurrected by his Mother and continued to grow in power and experience, protected by the Gigantes. In time, Zeus challenged his Father and defeated him in a great battle, supported by the other Titans, especially the Titans Prometheus and his brother Poseidon. Finally beaten, Kronos was sent into permanent exile in Tartarus, an Earth-realm deep beneath Hades, where he was guarded to prevent him from escaping.

.

Because of his great strength, Zeus took Lordship of the Universe and his brothers Hades and Psoidon became Lords of the Underworld and the Oceans. The gods moved to the top of Mount Olympus, where they looked down on the Earth and the business of Men. And the other dangerous Titans were exiled to Tartarus, deep beneath the Earth.

.

.

The Child Ouranos

.

It is our tentative hypothesis that Ouranos represents the infantile stage of a man’s life through the end of his oedipal stage of development around 5 or 6 years of age. Ouranos was the child of Gaia, and "became her husband." Actually, he "lay" with her, as might an infant might upon his mother’s breast in bed. Like Oedipus who "fell in love with his own Mother and married her" the oedipal child experiences his first love for his mother and becomes a very demanding lover.

.

Ouranos was reputedly a tyrant, as many small children become as they enter the "terrible twos", and prevented his mother from bearing other children. Any mother who has experienced the tirades of her small son questions whether she even WANTS any more children, but in her exhaustion, she is less sexually active with her husband than she had been as a newly wed. With the demands on her time and energy, she has less time for herself, for her own growth and development as a person, and for her other children.

.

In other words, she has symbolically had to swallow her own goals, her own dreams, and her own frustrated creativity in order to care for her small son. And so her experience mirrors Gaia’s, who had to hold any unborn children within her womb and not give birth to them while her infant-terrible "husband", Ouranos, instinctually bore her down with his demands.

.

The sexual connotation of Ouranos’ attentions to Gaia are not unfamiliar and are similar to the flooding of the mother and pre-oedipal child by the energies of the Dynamic Ground in Washburn’s theory. That energy in fact IS pre-libidinal energy and is by far more powerful.

.

.

The Man Kronos

.

In time, Gaia was able to give birth to her hopes and dreams, and among those hopes was her son, Kronos. And so it is that every mother hopes that her sons will grow up onto a powerful, worldly and wise man. Kronos was her idea of who her son ought to be, and so she began to train her growing infant at a certain point to become that man.

.

She did this by castrating her terrible-two. The act of castrating Ouranos in myth is depicted literally as Knonos cutting the testicles from his "father Ouranos" with a sickle. But psychologically, a woman "castrates" a man by denying him his will and transforming him into a female-dominated, submissive man. She of course would see this in terms of "gentling him" and making him meet his responsibilities to herself, her children and society.

.

In the case of a small child, the child reaches the age that he is old enough that he can be "made to behave", punished, and denied the constant love and attention that he narcissistically desires. And then the mother begins to use attention, rewards, and punishment to shape her son’s behavior into a model son.

.

Kronos uses a sickle to "do the deed." The sickle is actually the symbol of the New Moon, which symbolizes the immaturity of a young mother. New mothers don’t understand how powerful they can appear to their tiny babies nor how traumatizing their displeasure can be. The rage of a woman is a fearsome thing, not only to a tiny baby but to their husbands as well. And when they use anger, shaming, blaming, and guilt to enforce older behavior standards on a small child, these become weapons of castration…not physically castrating, but psychologically and ultimately spiritually castrating.

.

The Kronos archetype is the next stage of the growing child after passing its oedipal stage of development, and it lasts through mid-life. The four "Ages" of Man represented historic periods and, perhaps, stages in a man’s life as well. Kronos’ Age is described in this way by one authority:

The first age to arise was one of gold. There were no lawyers because without need of laws every man worshipped faith and righteousness by his own will.

Source: The Metamorphosis by Raphael Regius (died 1520)

In myth, there were four or five such "Ages of Man", depending on the authority quoted, described as Kronos/Saturn’s "Golden Age" and followed by the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age…although some inserted an "Age of Heroes" between the Bronze and the Iron Age. The Age of Heroes is said to be the time, about 1200 BC when the great conflict between Agammemnon’s armies and the City of Troy VI was said to have occurred. Each age was associated with the evolution of a particular race of man. Hesiod was one of the earliest mythologists to write of these times.

.

Michael Washburn writes in his book of evolutionary stages of the stages in a child’s development following the end of his oedipal stage. Those stages include stages of latency, puberty, adolescence, and young adulthood. Therefore, we MIGHT consider the four ages of Mankind to parallel the four stages of development in a person‘s, here a man’s, life. Or, if we prefer the five stage model, there is the fifth stage of life beyond the crisis at the Crossroads. In his psychology, Kronos as a young man is himself ’castrated’ and tamed. In the terror and anger of his narciscism however, he tosses his ‘father’s’ genitals over his shoulder and they fall into ocean waves (they fall into his unconscious).

.

From the foam of the ocean, unknown to him, arises the most beautiful of the goddesses, Aphrodite, who is the goddess of love, creativity, the joy of life, and sexual fulfillment. In effect, in giving in to his mother to behave himself and to become the man Kronos, Ouranos the Child sacrificed his unrestricted instinctual and sexual needs and his potential creativity without realizing it. The myth is implying that the power of the instincts among young men is so powerful and difficult to contain that they must be tamed through humiliation and conditioning love and protection on "good behavior". Otherwise they can not be trusted to be gentle husbands and responsible providers. But that sexual energy that is to be repressed contain many creative potentials that are likely forever lost to society and himself.

.

In Washburn’s terms, Ouranos suffered the ‘splitting of his personality and his world. That splitting, called in literature "primal splitting" was subsequently tamed through the "primal repression" which in Washburn's view "puts back together self-concept, mother, and the outside world into manageable concepts. However, the dynamic ground is not restored, but is split and repressed, to take the form after puberty as libidinal and psychic energy.

.

This is all about the wounding of the male to tame him to society’s purposes. These events begin during the pre-oedipal stage of life and continue through the end of the oedipal stage when a more stable stage known as "latency" is reached.‘ Metaphorically, Ouranos experienced the split of the Great Mother into the Good Mother and the Terrible Mother, the split in the Garden of Eden into the Outside World and the Fearsome World, the split in his self concept into the Good Boy and the Bad Boy, and the split in the Dynamic Ground that converted the plenipotent powers of the Dynamic Ground into libido and psychic energy.

.

In surrendering to his mother’s will that he become Kronos, he surrendered the possibility of ecstatic physical love, creativity, and sexuality that his natural needs entitled him to. Kronos "repressed" his natural needs and his own will to be true to himself. He did so to be loved, accepted, approved of, and safe under his mother’s protection.

.

He would need these energies for more productive purposes, and he would have to repress his own needs and dreams to fulfill these responsibilities. His tribe and culture needed him to make this sacrifice for their economic security, health, and safety in the world.

.

Kronos himself, in time, became a tyrant of his wife, Rhea, and his children. He did so, presumably, because as he fitted in and conformed to others demands and expectations, he began to like a harnessed stallion who could never escape his burdens. He began to feel locked in and controlled by the burdens of his responsibilities and lack of spontaneity in his life. And he wanted more out of life than he could experience. Not finding more, he began to feel rage, and his rage turned gradually into physical abuse of those around him.

.

Warned by a prophecy from Gaia that one of his children would in time kill him, Kronos began to "swallow" his children as soon as they were born, and so each child as it was born from his wife Rhea (also a Great Mother symbol in the ancient world) went down his throat. His children included the gods and goddesses Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus. Chiron the Centaur was also called a son of Kronus.

.

The phrase "swallowing one’s children" is metaphorically the act of denying one’s children parenting by distancing ones self from them and not fulfilling the role of fathering. As any parent knows, the role of the father in raising healthy and well adjusted children is vital.

.

The reader is referred to Patricia Reis’ book Saturn’s Daughters for a detailed discussion of how the father’s swallowing of his children affected each of his goddess children and to James Hollis‘ book Under Saturn‘s Shadow for a similar discussion of the effects of absent or distant fathers on the psychological health of sons. Reis deals with the effects of paternal mis-imprinting by examining the archetypes of Hestia, Demeter, and Hera, and tracing the impacts on their life of their own fathers‘ "swallowing" them. Each god and goddess archetype provides an pattern of pathological behavior and neurotic neediness stemming from the lack of an involved, caring and guiding fatherly authority-figure in their lives.

.

On another level, each of these "children" of Kronos provide a metaphor for the archetypal sub-personalities residing in the unconscious mind of each man. Demeter represents men’s inner mother, who nurtures him and demands he make something of his life. Hestia represents our need for a partner who "looks after him" and lends her feminine touch to his home and life. Hades represents his "dark, grim side" that comes out when man‘s gives in to his violent, controlling nature to commit rape and spousal abuse. Poseidon represents his moodiness and periods of rage against the unfairness and painfulness of life. Chiron represents the split between mental ego and physical body, the overemphasis upon his logical or rational mind in navigating through life, and the agony visited upon the mind of a man by ideals which unground him from his body and physical life on earth; but which animate him to work until he drops. An examination of each of their myths can reveal much to men about men’s needs, naturalness and inner natures.

.

However, in the myths Rhea at last rebels and when Zeus is born, she wraps a rock in a blanket and delivers it to Kronos, who immediately swallows it. She then secretly sends Zeus off to the Island of Crete to be raised by the Melaei nymphs. Of course, Knonos discovers her deception and sends assassins to Crete to murder his son. They succeed in tearing the young god in fragments, but his mother puts him back together again. And in time he grows up to challenge his father and depose him. Zeus negotiates with his brothers Hades and Poseidon for rulership, and they agree among themselves to give overall rulership to Zeus, the Underworld to dark,, grim Hades, and the Oceans to Poseidon.

.

Symbolically and psychologically, this myth is saying something quite different than its literal storyline.

.

.

Zeus - The God Who is Awakened

.

Zeus archetypically represents the growth of a man from his Kronos stage of life and into someone quite different. A man approaching his Crossroads experience, according to Washburn, will often try desperately to maintain his life as it is. He may feel a loss of meaning and the quality of his life, and even recognize the existential nature of the world strongly. He may have experienced the decline of love and passion in his marriage and recognized the meaninglessness and lack of creativity that had come to characterize his career. He may have felt and accepted the end of his dreams of living a life of excitement and special achievements. And he may even have intuited that, in a moment of rage and despair, he might be tempted to give it all away and walk away.

.

Yet to lose everything he’d accumulated and built because of a mental or emotional breakdown at mid-life is a frightening thing. And so, most men will deny they need to make a change. They will hold on to that job they hate. They will stay with the wife they have stopped loving. They will keep making payments on things they no longer care about and keep busy in the yard cutting the grass and the hedges they no longer care about. They will block the rising anger and depression that comes every night. And they will stay who they are. They will fight to keep from "dying" (symbolically) and fight to repress the rising energies of transformation seeking to rebirth them into a new stage in their lives.

.

Symbolically, this rejection by a man of his need to change and find a new identity in this world is Knonos killing Zeus and tearing the new potentials within themselves seeking to be born. Zeus' resurrection is the metaphor describing the arousing of the kundalini energy up the spine and re-vitalizing of the body, ego and world of the awakening one. Kundalini is known as the "earth energy", and was called by Washburn "the Great Mother" in his book. The roles of the Melaei and the Gigante in parenting the new god and protecting him bring to mind Jung's tales of the daimons who awoke with his fantasies and guided him through his own personal inner journey after he suffered his breakdown. They also bring to mind the creative potentials and other affective responses of the psyche referred to by Washburn. In short, in this dangerous transformation from Kronos to Zeus, each man has "helpers and protectors" who arise from the Deepest levels of the psyche to assist bringing him back into wellness and to his new potentials.

.

Interestingly, it is Rhea’s role in preserving the possibility of a rebirth in her husband that points to the critical importance of an understanding wife in opening the way for the continued growth and maturity of her husband. For it is Rhea who saves his potential for the future by slipping away to the island of Crete to bear his son, Zeus, in secret. And then she arranges for the Melaeni and the Gigantes to raise and protect him from his father’s hostility. The wife who waits and supports her husband in crisis through the transformation that awaits him is the true partner and psycho pomp in his life. The wife who rages and demands he stay the same is his demon. In this sense, Rhea fulfills the role of Kronos’ anima, the image of his soul who acts as intermediary to the contents of his unconscious mind. The animus is the subconscious intermediary for a man to his unconscious mind. For more information on this, see my journal article "Dreaming the Goddess: the Anima".

.

Zeus’ brothers ultimately symbolize alternate faces of his ultimate potential as well, but only if Kronos can make the transformation into his son, Zeus, by being reborn. Zeus here represents the highest "archetypal level of development in a man…the Higher Self" But in order to reach that level, a man acting out the patterns of Kronos must pass through a transformative catharsis in which he regurgitates his inner children (as did Kronos when his wife, Rhea, slipped him a drink which forced him to vomit), which in Washburn’s thesis are literally the return of the full instinctual and creative matrix of motives and needs of the Dynamic Ground in all their original power.

.

Remember, Ouranos surrendered these powerful instinctual needs and creative potentials in order to be loved and kept safe by his Mother/Wife. In so doing, he became the repressed and castrated Kronos. Kronos became king and father by becoming civilized and manageable by wife, employer and the other gods. He got the job done. He was responsible, limited, contained predictable and made things happen in his social responsibilities. Now, in accepting the danger of the crossing at the Crossroads in his life, Kronos would again experience the terrible upwelling of all those old instinctual needs and impulses. He realizes that he could lose his mind and experience a ‘breakdown’ that disable him. He could be left pathologically ill by the chaos he will have to pass through. The passage is ‘dangerous" and not everyone who meets his crisis at the Crossroads makes the passage and survives. He wants to avoid this possibility at all costs, and to do so he will kill whatever "inner children" get lose. If they escape, he will ‘lose it.‘

.

For a few men in our society, Kronos does lose it. They suffer the breakdown that will overthrow all they have done and become. As they pass through the transformation into the Zeus archetype, they become "unmanageable", rebellious, angry, throw tantrums, throw lightning bolts at people, have affairs with younger women, and go off and do things they want regardless of what others around them think. They want to discover "their true self" and all that implies for disturbing the equilibrium of the lives of those around him. Perhaps they even buy a Cadillac convertible and start wearing Hawaiian print shirts and a gold ear ring. Their families and friends will think they is totally out of control and trying to live their second childhood. In a sense they aare. They are undergoing a "regression in the service of Transcendence", which is the term used by Michael Washburn for this transformation.

.

It is not for nothing that some spiritual authorities have referred to such crises as "the night-sea journey." All the denizens of his mental Underworld come storming up out of the darkness of Hades' and Poseidon's domains. And it is only a ordinary, uncertain man who will have to deal with them and placate them…not a King…but a scared and lost child. Sometimes, in his confusion, when his wife looks at him, she will be reminded of him when he was Ouranos, needing unconditional love and yet feeling lost and abandoned. All his repressed anger and rage, depression and self-denial, shame and grief, fear and loss will emerge from that darkness, and they must be faced and reconciled with his life as it is. Accepted and forgiven.

.

As an fully individuated man, the man who comes to embody the Zeus archetype has three faces. Hades symbolizes Zeus’ rulership over his subconscious mind, and Poseidon symbolizes Zeus’ rulership over the Collective Unconscious as well. Zeus himself represents the super conscious mind or Higher Self. The Higher Mind, the Subconscious Mind and the Collective have come under the rulership of the Higher Self. Such a man has completed the integration of all three levels of mind and has become "whole."

.

What does a man who attracts this Zeus archetype do when he makes the transformation? He begins having affairs with all the gods and goddesses and nymphs in the kingdom. The rising energy of the Dynamic Ground revitalizes him sexually, and he expresses that vigor in the form of affairs and increased sexuality. These "affairs" need not be actual sexual liaisons; they may take the form of using that energy for creative endeavors and new achievements. He is no longer satisfied to just "have a job." Instead, he seeks meaning in his life by "identifying with something greater than himself." He is spiritual, but knows he is an embodiment of his God living life on earth as a human being. He therefore embodies the goals and consciousness of his higher self.

.

He is intellectually the superior of all the other gods because his mind has been rendered super intelligent by the power of the kundalini which has risen up his spine into the mind. He is super strong because his body has been refreshed and is now capable to doing what he wishes. The Dynamic Ground has revitalized his personality and given him the Power to speak his Word with authority and charisma. He is listened to whenever he speaks. He radiates power and authority.

.

In the luminosity of the rising Ground, a man who is making the Kronos-Zeus transformation has recognized in his transformation the power of the Divine Will, which has launched him on his ascendancy. He has a new spirituality that advocates emotional, physical, mental, spiritual, and sexual wellness itself. And so, he chooses the Mountain of Olympus as his new home. Henceforth, he will dwell in the clouds on the top of the Mountain, far above other men and Titans. He calls the other gods and goddesses to him, and they come to live there on the Mountain top.

.

Symbolically, what this is saying is that the mind of Kronos has been transformed from the earthly mind of a crafty, cunning and treacherous Titan into the Higher Mind of an Olympian. Kronos has left his old ego and ordinary consciousness behind to access the super consciousness of the Higher Self. He is now ruling as his own Higher Self, and at those vibratory levels, his thoughts are no longer mundane but beneficent, wise and just. Ego has transformed into something less selfish and conceited. He is sage and Will itself. The other "gods and goddess" are symbols of Zeus’ wills, gifts, powers and needs, his creativity, and his overwhelming power.

.

Jung and other psychologists have spoken about the archetypal traits of the masculine and the feminine. Among their conclusions were that the feminine is portrayed as by far the more grounded and less conscious of the twain. We see those contrasts in the myths of the Tripartite Goddess and in the myth of Zeus as well. Hekate, for example, lives in a cave, which is a symbol of the Unconscious realms of mind. She lives in the Earth, and there is no better way to express her grounding. She is a creature who lives "in her body", and her spirituality is expressed in her Freedom to do as she pleases under the rule of Zeus, who gave her power over the Underworld, earth and all of Heaven. She is known at the counselor and advisor of Zeus in all that transpires below. In this way, we see that She too has all the spiritual power as He, but she knows to live life and her spirituality in her physical form on the earth. She knows that She IS Spirit in a feminine body living life on the Earth, and she brings up all the terrible power of the feminine to him.

.

.

Zeus and Hera

.

In the wake of the in migration of the people of the Caucasian Mountains who moved into Greece, bringing with them the new male thunder and lightning god, Zeus, the poets wedded the Great Mother goddess Hera to Zeus. From the pinnacle of power of the Gret Mother image, Hera was demoted to a role as the goddess of the hearth, marriage and birth. In this ‘forced marriage", Hera suffered a personality shift with this loss of power and prestige. This transformation mirrors the diminished role and power of women in the new, patriarchal religion and society that was emerging at this time in history.

.

Hera grew bitter and angry at the infidelities of her powerful husband whose power was attracting women and honors. She had the reputation of pursuing and murdering the mistresses and children of her husband. She arranged for the Titans, for example, to murder the child Dionysos and was responsible for the insanity and death of his care takers as well. In the end, Dionysos was driven insane by Hera’s animosity, confused about his manhood and sexuality. She in fact, established the archetypal pattern of dominating and frustrated mothers who took their anger at their mates out on their sons. Dionysos' fate illustrates the consequences for the sons of such mothers even unto the modern age.

.

Hercules too was pursued by Hera. And many another myth of innocent nympth and human woman features the anger and hostility of Hera. In these myths, the image and power of women were being downtrodden. The wise Queen of the Gods, the Great Mother still worshipped in the hills and valleys of Europe and around the Mediterranean was being debunked and made into a shrew and harpy. Together, the pair combined represent the patriarchy whose shadow acts as "Terrible Mother", as did the Church during much of its reign of power in the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church fathers of those centuries aspired upward towards heaven while spreading death and destruction with their armies and wars throughout Europe.

.

Zeus is less grounded than either Hera or Hekate, as generally a male is less grounded in his spiritual beliefs and ideals than is a woman. Men seek to ascend. Women ground themselves in life itself and in their families. Men lose themselves in their ideals and lofty principles, while women choose service and family.

.

Zeus of course is a god image, living high above the earth and ordinary mortals, and they say that as he progressed in knowledge and experience, he calmed down and eventually abandoned his physical form to become the Holy Spirit. Curious that, like Ouranos as a child who… when he lost his freedom to become himself…drifted off into the sky and was never seen again…Zeus too lost his form in the last years before the birth of Jesus and disappeared…all his Temples abandoned and his great statues lost.

.

But then, even today in Eastern religions, Spirit and Breath are said to be synonymous.

 
HESTIA

Hestia is one of the three Great Goddesses of the first Olympian generation: Hestia, Demeter and Hera . She was described as both the oldest and youngest ^[4] of the three daughters of Rhea and Kronos , the sisters to three brothers Zeus , Poseidon , and Hades . Originally listed as one of the Twelve Olympians , Hestia gave up her seat in favour of newcomer Dionysus to tend to the sacred fire on Mt. Olympus . Every family hearth was her altar.

Of the Olympian gods, Hestia has the fewest exploits "since the hearth is immovable Hestia is unable to take part even in the procession of the gods, let alone the other antics of the Olympians," Burkert remarks. ^[5] Sometimes this is assumed to be due to her passive, non-confrontational nature. This nature is illustrated by her giving up her seat in the Olympian twelve to prevent conflict. She is considered to be the first-born of Rhea and Kronos; this is evidenced by the fact that in Greek (and later Roman) culture ritual offerings to all gods began with a small offering to Hestia; the phrase "Hestia comes first" from ancient Greek culture denotes this. ^[6]

Immediately after their birth, Kronos swallowed Hestia and her siblings except for the last and youngest, Zeus, who later rescued them and led them in a war against Kronos and the other Titans . Hestia, the eldest daughter "became their youngest child, since she was the first to be devoured by their father and the last to be yielded up again" (Kereny 1951:91) — the clearest possible example of mythic inversion, a paradox that is noted in the Homeric hymn to Aphrodite (ca 700 BCE):

She was the first-born child of wily Kronus — and youngest too.

Poseidon, and Apollo of the younger generation each aspired to court Hestia, but the goddess was unmoved by Aphrodite's works and swore on the head of Zeus to retain her virginity . The Homeric hymns, like all early Greek literature, are concerned to reinforce the supremacy of Zeus, and Hestia's oath taken upon the head of Zeus is an example of surety. A measure of the goddess's ancient primacy—"queenly maid...among all mortal men she is chief of the goddesses", in the words of the Homeric hymn— is that she was owed the first as well as the last sacrifice at every ceremonial assembly of Hellenes, a pious duty related by the mythographers as the gift of Zeus, as if it had been his to bestow: another mythic inversion if, as is likely, the ritual was too deep-seated and essential for the Olympian reordering to overturn. There are theories (by modern neopagans among others) that Hestia, as goddess of "home and hearth", was one of the most ancient of all gods later worshipped as Olympians; as a maternal goddess of humans finding safety and homes in caves around a fire, worship of Hestia, by other names, may literally be hundreds of thousands of years old and has continued through Classical Greek times to the present day.

Hestia, not wanting to be involved in the gods' quarrels, decided to leave Olympus to tend to her sacred hearth. She became a lesser goddess in the same ranks of Pan and Dionysus , the latter of whom later rose to the place of Olympian when Zeus chose him to take Hestia's place

.
The earliest human cultures, stretching back perhaps two to four million years, were hunter-gatherer cultures. These cultures of small groups of humans lived a timeless existence compared to modern man. Nothing changed for 100,000’s of years! The only visible indications of time were the cycles of the moon and the cycles of the year. Women’s menstruation matched the monthly cycle of the Moon. The hunting seasons and gathering seasons repeated the same every year. The seasons…Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter…came around regularly…the same every year.
.
It was the predictability of the seasons and the abundance and bounty that Nature provided that gave humans a chance to exist and evolve. To early humans, the Powers of Nature were evidence of the beneficent nature of “the gods”, and Nature taught man about the nature of Reality. These forces of Nature were themselves soon seen as Divine Powers. Among them, the Moon and her cycle were the silver Queen of the Sky, the Goddess Herself, who ruled fertility of the women, sexuality, joy in life, pleasure, nurturance, home and hearth, the instinctive needs of the body-mind, the balance of life in Nature (the Law of Predator and Prey), and Life and Death.
.
Since only women in these indigenous cultures could bear young, they took on some of the numinous quality of the Goddess. Women’s roles in tribal cultures embodied the Goddess in human life, and so Women were accorded respect by Males on a spiritual level. Their specific roles in their cultures were the gifts of the Goddess: the nurturing of children, sharing in group activities, holding their extended families together, homemaking, cooking, gathering food, and being lovers for and givers of pleasure to their men. Families were large and extended, with multiple generations living together and supporting one another. Men were hunters and warriors, defending their homes and families. The Women grounded their cultures in the fertility and abundance of the Earth, while the work of Men was to protect and support their Women and Children.
.
The qualities of the feminine were recognized as associated with the Goddess: intuitiveness, receptivity, creativity, groundedness, cycles, love, nurturing, feeling, emotions, physicalness, relationships, and community. Their spirituality, and that of the Goddess, was of the Earth Herself, as the wise women and medicine women communed with the Earth and the spirits of the Plants. Males in their roles, on the other hand, tended to be individualistic, less grounded, focused upon efficiencies and doing, active, tough, unemotional, and aggressive. They had to hunt and kill game and be prepared to fight hostile tribes and animals. Their spirituality tended to the realms beyond the physical, involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs and communion with the ancestors and the spirits of the animals.
.
The people related to their Nature gods, accepting the harshness of life and finding meaning in life. The Goddess was the goddess of not only birth, but death and war. She took some. She left some. But she gave the women babies too. Life was lived in cycles…just like the crops, the animals, the Sun (which was born and died each day), and the Moon Herself as she passed through Her own cycles in the sky. In order to survive, each person in the tribe had his or her role and was valued, was needed. Each person found meaning in their life and their role in the tribe. The old died and became the tribe’s ancestors, who protected the land and the living. The tribe was bonded to their past through their ancestors and appealed to their gods for good hunting, healthy babies, and mild weather.
.
This pattern of living survived for hundreds of thousands of years even before the development of cultivation of the land, herding animals, and living in cities. And this pattern remains in the genes of humanity as an archetypal way of life that lends stability and emotional support to life.
.
This timeless era, living by the cycles of the Moon and the Seasons of the Year, is today called “The Eternal Round.” It is characterized by peaceful acceptance of the cycles of life…birth, growth, maturity, and death…and the feeling that life has meaning, that the experience of the body is deeply sensuous, pleasurable, joyful, without guilt or shame. This is living life from instinct and not ego. It is not a state of becoming or seeking, exploration or expansion of consciousness. It is a state of Being and contentment with simply living and meeting basic needs...hunger, sex, community, belonging, and comfort. This is, of course, Lunar consciousness. Lunar conscious is a state of mind in which the person lets go of their sense of self, or ego, and comes present in their life. They let go of the past and the future and focus on what is happening right now. The mind grows quiet and thoughts subside. They align with the Reality of this Moment, without striving or worrying about their futures or agonizing about their past. So we see that without the possibility of lunar consciousness, there is no possibility of happiness in life.

.

Solar consciousness is expansive, but on the other hand involves struggle and seeking, striving and failure, and separation from the state of peaceful acceptance of ordinary life. The ego is engaged, and a person can easily become lost in thoughts or emotional turmoil of insecurity, fear, feeling excluded, feeling unimportant etc.
.
In these early cultures...both hunter-gather and agricultural...myth and spirituality were identical. The oral stories told by the elders to tribal young held their myths of creation, the birth of the gods, the making of mankind, and the nature of the relationship between men and his gods. The wisdom of living of the tribe was also held in these tales. Animals and the tribe’s gods were featured actors of these tales as well as humans. There were many gods; each connected with some facet of nature…the wind, the fire, the earth, the waters, the thunderstorms, the rivers, trees and spirits…Nature IS the face of the Goddess. And life is good.
.
About 12,000 years ago, some tribes in Asia Minor and the Middle East began staying in one place and cultivating the rich soil of the rich alluvial plain of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Cities emerged here in this green and growing land, and people began specializing in the ways they earned their living. Hierarchies and government were invented. Religions centered on the Goddess and her “dying son/husband god”, symbolizing the death of crops in the winter, started up with female priesthood. Time began to assume a linear character. The seasons still ruled agriculture, but storehouses kept the grains available years around, and trade began to move goods and food among regions. People living in the cities of this rich plain began to live in a different concept of time, freer from the cycles of the Moon and the seasons and freer from the lifestyles of the past 4 million years. Nature began then to become a thing to be exploited and not a living spiritual presence.
.
The hold of the Moon, the Goddess and the Eternal Round began to decline as Time began to assume a more linear character and the cycles of the year became less important because mankind learned to control their environments to protect themselves from the extremes of Nature; and trade, storage and preservation of foodstuffs were developed. Mankind could not control Nature, but we began to learn to “use” nature to build wealth and control some of the issues that came with being at the effect of Nature: death and sickness, cold or heat, floods, water for the crops, and so forth. Nature became less a spiritual power that determined Man’s fate and more a “resource” to be exploited for power or wealth.
.
These agriculture-oriented tribes were harassed by other nomadic tribes of the deserts and steppes which chose to become horse cultures or herders of cattle, sheep and goats. These nomadic tribes had to find grazing areas for their animals, and so often migrated into the settled areas of the fertile crescent. When they did, they brought a threat to the survival of the cities, because these desert tribes were warlike and often violent. These tribes lived in harsh environments beneath an open sky. Their nature gods were fierce and merciless, and thus their religions tended to be severe and unforgiving. And as the land upon which they grazed their crops was often dry and wild..masculine in character--not lush and green and feminine as the fertile river valleys...the gods of these places were given masculine identities. It was from these cultures that the fierce and unforgiving patriarchal religions began to grow.
.
Through the past 12,000 years, mankind has experienced many traumatic changes to its lifestyle. Through the 10,000 years until the Birth of Jesus Christ, war and tragedy stalked the striving civilizations of the Middle East, Europe, the Mediterranean, Persia, India and China. Life was unsure, short and brutal. Death by plagues carried by traders and invading armies swept across the planet killing millions each year. And then, during the 2,000 years following the birth of Christ, humans in Europe endured the stasis and dominion of the Catholic Church and other religious movements, including Judaism and Islam, while plague and armies again stormed across the land. Humankind began to look to the Sky Gods to rescue them from the suffering of life on earth.
.
Man’s connection to the cycles of the year and the Moon over these thousands of years was lost, and many began to experience life as never-ending struggle towards Divine forgiveness and escape from life on Earth. Only the Church, Temple or Mosque and the traditions of feudalism promised salvation and escape. Endurance of life’s tragedies and suffering would be rewarded by an eternity in Heaven. Religion and living obediently within the protection of some feudal lord became the means to the only security in life. However, that religion now was patriarchal…not matriarchal.
.
First, the heavenly Father had to be placated, absolutely obeyed, and one’s sinfulness forgiven. And the price of that was good behavior as defined by the Church. Good behavior required that the natural instincts of the human being be denied, repressed, and replaced by the ethical rules and ideals of a dogmatic church theology.
.
These patriarchal religions made the Goddess and what she symbolized a symbol of sinfulness and denial by the Sky God. It was Eve who disobeyed God and tempted Man into disobeying God in the Garden, for example, in the Christian Book of Genesis. In the Christian myth of Original Sin, a wound was given to humanity that even today remains as a source of the loss of love of the body, the sacredness of sex and pleasure, the love and respect of Nature, the cycles of time and the meaning they brought to life. Birth became the doorway to a world of suffering. Death ended the suffering. But suffering on earth was rewarded with a Heavenly home for good behavior and believing in the theology of the Church. The result was a never-ending motive to seek within Western society. This wound drove man out of the Eternal Round, out of peaceful abiding on the Earth, out of unconsciousness. This wound drove Mankind towards a more conscious future...but at the cost of peace of mind, acceptance of self, and the ability to relax into life on the earth and stop striving.
.
Modern western society has passed through several revolutions in roles for men and women…but especially women. Today, women’s labor force participation rate rose dramatically in the 20th Century from only about 15 percent during the 1800’s, extended families and tribal groupings began to break up and be replaced by two parent families and even single-parent with child families. Children began to spend more time alone, without supervision or nurturing. More and more began to be taken care of by hired nannies and babysitters. Focus within the family shifted from the Mother’s role to the wealth building and labor market activities of the adults. Individualism supplanted community and communal activities.
.
In this transition, over thousands of years to a more patriarchal society, much has been lost to Western societies. From community and intimate relationships with ones tribe, we have moved to a society in which the individual is largely isolated and has few close friends and more superficial relationships. Our families must be mobile, like those nomadic tribes in the old days, and we follow the work opportunities. But moving increases our isolation and reduces our access to the support of extended families. Greater emphasis is therefore placed upon young adults, who have little parenting experience, less life wisdom, and little time to devote to parenting, to support one another and their children.
.
Greater stress has been placed upon women in marriages and partnerships as they have moved out into the work place seeking the fulfillment of careers. They not only have to support their husbands’ needs, but they pursue their own and try to maintain home and families. Less time is available for traditional feminine roles of nurturing and spending time with their children.
.
With less time in the home, Western food habits have changed. Now, most spend a large portion of their income on commercially prepared food. Families now spend far less time together and less often eat together or spend time talking about their days or problems.
.
The end result of these changes has been a tremendous increase in stress and deprivation; too many people living without nurture, without the guidance and support of experienced elders, without community, without real intimacy, without guiltless physical pleasure, without the grounding of the feminine center to mankind’s lifestyle. This stress has lead to pathologies, to psychological and spiritual unwellness in society.
.
The two great elements of the Monomyth, the archetypal process of psychological and spiritual healing in the psyche are the Quest (or Hero’s Journey) and the Eternal Return. But without the spiritual and psychological recognition and honoring of the Goddess, the power of the Moon, the importance of the cycles of time in our lives, both men and women find themselves on a perpetual quest without fulfillment, without peace, without end, without self discovery…because they must always continue on to the next issue, the next goal, the next achievement.

Neither men nor women today can relax into the present, stop struggling, stop accumulating wealth, stop seeking power, stop seeking security, stop seeking for something that might give life meaning, because there is no place of peace and meaning to reach any more, no stopping the Quest. As soon as we try to stop, our restlessness, sense of guilt or shame, our feeling of unworthiness, our unfulfilled need to feel special (egotism), drives us on seeking adventure, power, love, or security again.

In fact, the seeking process itself fragments and shatters the psyche. The guilt and shame associated with our needs to experience life physically, through sensation and pleasure, have stolen from us our peace, our innocence, and our ability to stop the struggle for love, safety, and self worth. For it is only through our bodies, and our instinctual nature, that the ecstasy of being alive can be felt, that we can feel alive, that we can stop struggling, and that we can experience life as pleasure.
.
The lost treasure is the Eternal Return: the timeless realm of community life, life in the body, the joy of family and tribal wisdoms, respect for Nature and the pleasures of the flesh, family, relationships, meaning to life that is found outside the mindless accumulation of wealth and neverending busyness of the mind, being at peace with one’s gods and not living in fear of spiritual damnation, and peaceful acceptance of the cycles of life…birth, growth, decline, death, life as it is. All of us need to get back in touch with the Moon.
.
There is nothing else to find on our Quests for Meaning but a state of peace, wellness and grounding, where life can be experienced as pleasure, joy and abundance…the realm of the Goddess, the rulership of the Moon. We are constantly called to engage with our instinctual nature, to be well. But life constantly calls us on Quests, to maintain our egoic nature, to test our wills, to re-engage with our sense of self and personal power. We may find new meaning, but we stretch ourselves away from our peaceful state of unconsciousness, of routine and family life. We need to come back to it, periodically, to rest and wait until life calls us outside our selves once again.

Life lived simply and directly, in relationship and community, fulfills us. But it is no longer enough for modern Mankind. We constantly make ourselves unwell by our ambition and seeking, driven by insecurity, fear and need for love.

 .

While the descriptive term “Celtic” is commonly used to describe a tribal culture emerging in Ireland and Scotland and some parts of Europe, the idea that there was a single widespread tribal group which can be labeled as Celtic has been discredited. In fact, the earliest mention of any group with such a name was by the Greek historian Hecataeus in 517 BC, who wrote about a Germanic tribe he referred to as Keltoi. The influence of this pagan culture apparently was by far the most dominant in the region because their language and culture spread to other tribal groups until use of the language and acceptance of its spiritual tenets was widespread.

.

The descendents of these people living currently in Ireland and Scotland attribute their source to the city of ancient city-state of Miletus in modern day Turkey. Miletus itself was supposedly established originally by inhabitants of Crete—the ancient Minoans who seeded Greece itself with its spiritual and cultural foundation. And some modern archeologists point to Persia as the source of the ancient Minoan culture.

.

However, current research does not suggest a widespread migration of “Celtic” peoples and that the term is misleading, no more (or less) meaningful than "Western". Rather than being a common racial stock, the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland became Celticized by the time of the Roman arrival, mainly through spread of culture rather than a movement of people.

.

Nevertheless, the culture did bring a distinctive spiritual and political character to the region. This was a warrior culture, accompanied by a sacerdotal class of mystical wizard-like counselors termed Druids, who brought order into the system of kings and clashes between tribal groups. Kings were required to accept guidance from their Druid counselors, and their Druid counselors had to perform their Kings’ requests. The two were thus bound together and ruled together. At the same time, there is clear evidence that this system was primarily tribal. Druids of one tribe fought beside their King against other tribes, whose King and Druid also stood together. Druids provided magical support in battle for the warriors going to battle.

.

Although certainly not homogeneous in ability or application, the Druids were organized, having teaching centers located in the forests, and often cooperated in guiding others into the craft. Among the skills attributed to these forest sages were wisdom teachers, philosophy, law makers, judges, musicians, bards, doctors, priests, soothsayers, seers, prophets, oracles, shape shifters, and weather witches. They seemed to combine the talents of the earlier ages of the shaman with the agrarian age’s needs for priestly diviners and wisdom keepers.

.

The Celtic culture was a mythic one, in that their history was recorded in the form of epic poems describing battles among men and their gods. The gods, and there were several, guided, and men could only follow and the Druids were the intermediaries. Death was a fact of life, but as in Scandinavian cultures, death in battle was glorified; heroes went not to an Underworld but to a veiled dimension alongside ordinary reality where the Tuatha de Danaan lived in the burial mounds scattered across the land.

.

The pagan gods of this culture were similar in some ways to the gods of the Romans, with a Jupiter-like Sky God named the Dagda; a Mars-like Warrior god of the Tuatha de Danaan who were the paired gods named Nuada (King of the Tuatha de Danaan) and the Ogma or Ogmios (who was a Hercules-like warrior); a Celtic Minerva-like goddess of three faces called Brigid; a Mercury or Hermes-like god named Lugh; and select other gods and goddesses, including the Stag-headed god, Cernunnos. The Little People of Faery also were a part of the mythology of these people.

.

With the coming of the Romans to Great Britain however, the Celtic culture deteriorated rapidly. Although the Romans did not forbid the worship of the pagan gods or the practice of local religions, they did forbid the teaching of the Druidic arts and closed the colleges where the culture could be safely learned. The Romans replaced the system of local Kings and Druids with a system of Roman Administrators, but made all locals eligible for Roman citizenship. This move effectively brought about the end of the Celtic warrior culture and political structure. And third, the Catholic Church began converting pagans to Christianity, using the sword when necessary. The measure of the effectiveness of the combined Roman and Catholic de-culturalization effort was that Druids were among the first converted to Christianity, coming within the Church system where they continued to provide the spiritual rituals and intermediary services for the people to their Roman administrators. Finally, Druids steadfastly adhered to the ancient shamanic practice of an oral teaching tradition, refusing to write their knowledge down. As a result, by the third or fourth century A.D., the tradition of druidism had dwindled to a shade of its previous prowess.

.

In essence, the Druidic period was a colorful and powerful period in the history of the Celt language-speaking peoples, but it was relatively short-lived. Today, many scholars and enthusiast are attempting to bring this lost wisdom back. To many, this appears to be a romantic affection. But is it? Can the wisdom of the Druids be retrieved from the Land, and those other dimensions where the Tuatha de Danaan yet reign? Are the ancient pagan gods still here, waiting for the fickleness of Men to abide? Are there lost records or druidic centers hidden from modern eyes yet operating in the world?

These days, Westerners find themselves, like Alice in “Through the Looking Glass”, running faster and faster only to stand still. We spend our first quarter of life preparing to live, our second quarter of life attempting to build “the good life”, the third quarter of life wondering how the good life became a nightmare, and the fourth quarter wondering what we did wrong and, perhaps retreating from the world.

.

In the press of that second quarter of earning our living, making a family, raising quarrelsome kids, and struggling to keep a good face on, we don’t have the time or the energy to reflect on what is going wrong. When things go wrong, we try harder; if that doesn’t work, we believe that we just aren’t enough…not tough enough, not smart enough, not wise enough, not loving enough, not unselfish enough…to overcome such a hostile world.

.

When we first begin our young adulthoods, we assume that if we do what everyone else is doing, we’ll be fine. We do what our parents did. Work hard. Speak the truth. Give an honest days work for our pay. Be honest. Keep your word. It isn’t until mid-life, usually, that we discover that we’ve been following the wrong rules and that something is wrong with the assumptions we made about how life worked. But we don’t stop until we are forced to, until our body breaks down, we become ill, or until our mind stops thinking because we’ve burnt out, or until our spouse walks out on us.

.

Sometime around mid-life for a lot of us, we realize our life has become a prison and that we are held in place working like a fly in a spider’s web. We find we’re working harder and harder just to keep what we have, to keep the house maintained, the lawn mowed, the children busy, the spouse happy, the job secure. But we think in our private momentes that our life has become a trap, and we can‘t step out of it without the whole house of cards coming down around us.

.

Too often, our marriages have become loveless and exhausted. Our children hate us and run away blaming us for their troubles. We face each day on the job with a sense of fatigue or dread. One more day with that tyrannical boss. One more day trying to do both your own job and all the housework and meet the kids needs without support from your husband. One more day working yourself to death for low wages. One more day of trying to hold everything together without a spouse to help you deal with the world or help you fight the loneliness and impersonality of our lives.

.

Through the ages, many people have experienced this same issue and, in the midst of their daily lives, sought for ways to live their lives in a more meaningful way. Religions, especially, have served the purpose of helping people to raise their eyes higher, to see a purpose in the world and in their lives, to accept suffering as a part of life and to find courage and meaning in even the simplest things here on earth. But over the centuries, our churches have become…in too many cases…empty of meaning as well.

.

Robert A. Johnson, in his book Living Your Unlived Life, asserts this:

.

When a religious institution no longer contains satisfactory answers, then we are forced to go on “the quest” utilizing symbols that arise from our own unconscious.

This is the “turn within” that mystics and scholars have written about for aeons. When the rules and beliefs one has followed all ones life cease to have meaning or to work for you, you realize that looking without for answers isn’t going to solve your problem. There is only one thing to do, and that is to begin watching ones dreams and daydreams for insight into what needs to change. This “quest” is not a search without for information or wisdom…that never works; it is a search within ones self for answers to the problem of how to live and how to resolve this issue of meaningfulness in life!

.

Johnson continues, The quest involves listening to your interior intelligence, taking it seriously, staying true to it, and approaching it with a religious attitude. In Jungian psychology, this quest is known as “individuation”--discovering the uniqueness of ourselves, finding your purpose and meaning. It relates to wholeness, not some indiscriminate wholeness, but rather your particular relationship to everything else.

.

Before the Age of Christ, there was a long period when poets and mystics taught their students to live a life with symbolic meaning: serve in one’s life something greater than ones self, respect the gods and see your life as personifying some great principle of Life itself. This was called “living the symbolic life.” In the old days, myth spelled out the themes of human life in the lives of “the gods”. In the ancient art of theatre and poetry of Homer, in the myths of the gods Zeus, Apollo, Demeter, Kore, Aphrodite, Mars, Kronos, Gaia and others, the reasons for the “way things are” were given, and the meaning of tragedy, chaos, loss and gain were deeply explored. Man’s place in the Universe was explained. The laws under which life was expressed and expanded were sounded. And everyman and woman could see in his or her own life the ways in which these themes resounded on a personal or individual level. Each man could see that he lived his own myth, his own “great story”. Each woman could find in her own personal experience the themes embodied by her gods or goddess. He or she could see that, in the ordinary details of life, the great themes of Life resounded and took form. They could see their lives on more than a literal level. They could find significance for their lives on a metaphorical or symbolic level.

.

Johnson relates:

.

When we learn to live our lives symbolically rather than literally, new vistas open to us. This world, the world of ordinary life, once again becomes ensouled, mysteriously interconnected, meaningful and fascinating.

.

Only the symbolic life can express the need of the soul…And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this awful, grinding, banal life in which they are ‘nothing but.’

One of the tragedies in the history of Western Religious history was when the early Catholic Church began to insist that its followers believe in the literal historic truth in its sacred texts and discount the mythic nature of spiritual teachings. The early Church made it a test of belief and salvation that its followers accept the teachings as literally true rather than metaphorically true, not accepting that That Which Cannot be Described was contained in its historical descriptions of the history of Jesus and ethical rules. Subsequently, followers of Christianity began increasingly trapped in literal descriptions of historic events rather than reaching beyond themselves towards the non-physical realms or towards personal spiritual experience.

.

One way to step out of literalness is to relearn to live a symbolic life, to view your life from a poetic or symbolc perspective.If you are interested in learning to live in a new way, consider these references as a beginning to your search:

.

Robert A Johnson Living Your Unlived Life

Chiron is a planetoid in our solar system having a peculiar orbit between Uranus and Saturn. It has for some time been included in horoscopes because it plays the unique role of identifying the character of the soul’s wound and healing needs. Chiron also is key in bringing on the process of individuation in the form of a “shamanic journey“…an archetypal psychological experience characterized by a near-death experience, followed by a long psychological illness and restoration, in the end, of sanity. The experience may leave the soujourner strange and eccentric, and possessing odd sensitivities or talents.

.

Chiron in myth was a Centaur…the son of the god Kronos and a nymph, Philyra, who…seeking to escape the god’s amorous pursuit...changed herself into a horse. Kronos nevertheless had his way with her, by changing himself into a stallion. She became pregnant as a result of the rape and bore Chiron. The new baby was half man, half horse. In horror, Philyra sought forgetfulness and sought help from Zeus. Zeus changed her into a Linden tree where she might live out her appointed time dreaming.

.

Taught his lessons by Apollo…god of Light and Reason…, young Chiron was guided away from his instinctual side and towards reason. Psychologically, this metaphorically describes the process of “repression” in which the ability to feel one’s emotions and body are sublimated and lost in our “unconscious” as we are educated to value the mind and spirit over the body. With no connection to our instinctual side, we too are not grounded in our bodies, symbolizing the fate modern man has been dealt as a result of our historic denial of our animal side.

.

Chiron is known as the archetypal “shaman” healer, and his influence is to serve us as our inner teacher when we are called into an internal “shamanic journey” of individuation to heal this inner split. This “wounded healer” is sometimes able to heal others but not himself.

.

Chiron’s psychological theme is the combination of a negative rejecting mother and an absent or weak father and is the common psychological theme of our time, creating in our children a loneliness and sense of isolation. This intergenerational heritage creates basis for the archetypal Parsifal hero’s birth, leaving our psyche wide open to the imaginal realm and hindering ego formation. The result is often a increasing emphasis on a rarified spirituality with repression of instincts ( a flight from pain) and an early sense of destiny and urgency to develop ones own individuality.

.

The result of Chiron’s wound was the creation of a repressive barrier between his personality and his instincts. He possessed an extremely fine mind, but could not feel himself, his animalness or his emotions. This loss is Chirons first wound. He became the mediator of Apollonian ideals in a ancient culture of harmony and order set against the instinctual. In effect, Chiron epitomizes the humanity of the early agricultural society. He became a wise man, prophet, physician, teacher and musician; mentor in leadership; healer, and scientist. Such were his skills that his students often surpassed even him in ability or fame, such as the physician Aesclepius and the hero Jason..

.

Later in his life, Chiron was mortally wounded in the leg by one of Hercules’s arrows which had been dipped in the poisonous blood of the Hydra, symbolizing the wounded animal aspect/instinctual side of humanity. This was Chiron’s second wound...one he could not escape because, being the son of a god, he was immortal. After his injury, he lived in constant, terrible pain. In the end, Chiron asked to be allowed to take the place of the suffering Prometheus in Hades and to die. Chiron thus became man’s teacher in facing and accepting death.

.

Some of the life issues associated with Chiron include:

.

• Homoeopathic healing , heal by exaggerating the compulsions to repeat certain lives, experiences, needs.
• Where ever Chiron is in the chart often it represents things we can do well for others but not so well for ourself.
• Subpersonalities in the psyche may constellate around Chiron’s place in a chart as the archetypes of victim, the persecutor, and the rescuer
• Missionary zeal is associated with Chiron.
• Chiron’s story “underlines” the need for acceptance of our woundedness in order to be healed.
• Acceptance of and compassion for ourselves and our suffering
• The Wounded Healer Archetype IS the archtype of the Self!
• Seeking for Meaning to life is driven by the suffering of your woundedness

.

Like Chiron, each of us has a soul wound that drives us into seeking for answers and meaning, and from which we cannot escape. This pain drives us into yearnings, compulsions and addictions that causes us to seek ends which cannot be attained. Our dreams are filled with images and archetypal forms. We are often driven to depart our ordinary lives to seek for who we are and our own uniqueness. The journey sometimes takes the form of an emotional or mental breakdown, followed by a long period of recovery. We are tempted to take up causes and spiritual burdens on this journey. But the purpose of each journey is not to make us into priests or healers, but to help us heal the trauma we experienced as small children, to learn to stand alone in this world, to speak our own truths and stand upon our own authority; in other words, to become psychologically and spiritually mature.

.

The energies of transformation one encounters on these personal journeys are extremely powerful and can possess us. Most of us must not get caught up in these images or archetypes, for they cause ego inflation and fanatical seeking rather than healing. In time, we must stop the ego inflation that comes with possession by these archetypal energies, stop the seeking, the messianic preaching and Questing, and come back down to live life as it is in humility.

.

Stressful placements of Chiron might point to wounds, limited understanding, dogma, self-doubt, or spiritual unrest.

.

By understanding the archetypes which try to possess us and denying them our life, we are like Prometheus rebelling against "the gods"--stealing fire from the gods. The story of Prometheus has been linked to Aquarius (where Chiron currently is transiting).

.

Through the process of the shamanic journey, we learn to live and to:

.

• Give the gods their due respect
• Uphold human values, maintain individuality, stand in our uniqueness, and don’t give into authority
• Accept the limits of our individual make up, the society we live in, the relationship we have, and the lives we lead

.

Chiron stresses the shamanic journey as a means of healing and/or transforming and unites the body and mind, the intellect and instincts.

.

A prominent Chiron in ones chart indicates the potential to be an educator or healer…one who challenges limited views. But not necessarily. It may simply be the archetype driving one’s individualization.

.

Chiron is the Inner Teacher. This archetypal journey into the shamans worldview, into an “expanded awareness”, brings a shift in philosophical perspective to balance the prevailing feelings of powerlessness and victimization…not to make each person into a shaman or healer. Any transformational journey set off by our woundedness is likely to be marked by an archetypal return to Ouranic consciousness, Nature and instincts…a state of participation mystique with Nature. The purpose and goals of each person this happens to may be unique, but it can result in the recovery of a lost sense of self and a subsequent need to feel well again.

.

The shaman and the hero must surrender to this process. The hero returns to his life. The shaman becomes possessed by the process and serves others.

.

With the completion of our journey, we move into a new sort of relationship between mind and body that restores individuality without necessarily repressing instinct. Communication lines are opened to be well. The personality is strengthen and the feeling of personal empowerment is restored. The personality adjusts to become more intuitive, sensually oriented, and more open to bodily needs.

.

The shaman performs a religious function in reconnecting people with life…visible and invisible…to experience and feel ones connection to divine agencies. When traditional religion loses its ability to do this and take people off into institutional but not experiential forms of religious experience, there is no feeling of love, support that one gets from ceremonial forms of worship /Dionysian experiences.

.

Chiron’s sign shows where this traumatic search is likely to occur in our own lives.

.

Chiron’s house represents an area of life that is initially blocked, wounded or functioning poorly. This is the Cave where he lived.

.

Planets in aspect to Chiron tell us something about the terrain of our journey, foes we will meet, and the monsters we may meet, befriend or be devoured by.

.

Chiron’s death psychologically is our return to life. He goes back into the Underworld.

.

Associations: Horses, shamans, spiritual warriors

.

Psychology: Immune system, thighs, genitals

.

Past life blocks: Personality splits, roles as victim or scapegoat, unhealed wounds, fears.

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.

Possibly the first modern scientist to realize that myth affected people on a personal level was Carl Jung. Following his studies in psychology, he went to work in a clinic treating psychotics who were predominantly schizophrenics. As he worked with these people, he began to notice that they related not to the outside world but to a world within themselves in which mythic themes repeated. His patients were caught in a view of reality which reflects ancient themes of behavior reminiscent of Greek and other culture’s mythic themes. It was apparent that these mythic themes were rising from the Unconscious realms of the minds of his patients and ‘possessing their thoughts and emotions.’ As a result, Jung began to study mythology so he might begin to recognize the stories his patients felt themselves to be living.

.

The Purposes of Myth

.

His experiences soon lead Jung into a shamanic experience of “falling into the Unconscious” where he himself experienced what it felt like to be possessed by a myth. Shamanic traditions have spoken about what it felt like to experience this moment of crisis: it has been called “the Knock of the Spirit” in some traditions. Modern psychology would refer to it as an emotional or mental breakdown as the conscious mind loses control and something beyond one’s consciousness catches hold of you and begins to guide your actions.

.

In old videos of tribal ceremonies, this experience has been documented again and again. Ritual calls forth these same energies. Religious experience calls for these same energies. The individual is caught up in a powerful experience in which he or she is moved by power. On the positive side, these experiences gave each individual a sense of the Presence of the Divine—of being a part of something guided by the Divine. These experiences integrated each individual into the myths of his tribe, culture and world. They created a sense of meaning and purpose to the life of each individual. They justified their needs as being a part of something beyond themselves and in fact divine in need. They made “all right” life’s painful experiences, suffering and finally even one’s death as religious, ‘right’, in alignment with the Laws of Creation.

.

The experience of being caught up in a myth is an extremely powerful experience. It is the primary source of religious experience. In fact, Jung referred to these experience as ‘numinous,’ and having experienced them, Jung knew what he was talking about. Once experienced, an individual is ‘hooked,’ for nothing read in a book or heard in a sermon can compare with the feeling of contact with these mythic energies.

.

Living in a Mythic Universe

.

Before the coming of the Renaissance, people lived by worldviews that were widespread. These were widespread belief systems, usually founded in religious theologies. Thus, myth became associated with religious needs and told the stories of the relationships between mankind and his gods. The combined worldviews of so many humans in the world created in the collective memory images and story lines which continued to affect people long after the original belief systems had subsided. Today, schizophrenics and other psychotically ill individuals continue to react to ancient Greek mythic themes arising in their minds, influencing their worldview and their behaviors.

.

The Loss of Myth in Everyday Life

.

As a result of the loss of belief in the old religions and the new ‘theology’ of reason and science, the mythic themes of the old religions have lost a lot of coherency. The myths and stories which once swayed large numbers of individuals have been forgotten as modern religions and academic institutions have dropped these stories of life and the grand themes of mankind’s relationships with his ‘gods.’ The stories, however, remain in the energies of Mankind’s Collective Unconscious. They still come to us in dreams and, occasionally, by the Knock of the Spirit.

.

Today, man largely pushes those themes away as he rushes to secure a life for himself based upon secular views of the Universe. He no longer sees the Earth as a Living Presence. He no longer views the gods as being in his life and as accessible. He no longer admits his needs for them. The arising of monotheism has eliminated the gods of nature and spirits of plants, brooks, springs, and forests from his theology. Man no longer feels the presence of the Divine as he walks through forest paths or departs on travels in ships on the ocean. Instead, he perceives inanimate, impersonal, even unloving things everywhere around him. The animals are no longer his brothers and sisters. The plants no longer demonstrate the innocence and goodness of divinity. Man has become a user of all other life, without respecting it, without honoring it.

.

Modern man has paid a high price for his worldviews. To feel secure, he kills everything which he feels threatened by. He pollutes his world and his own body without thought because he cares more for his own ‘standard of living’ than for the life all around him. He has no respect for life at all, other than his own. He has closed himself off from the Divinity of the Earth. And yet all the Earth is within himself. Although he does not realize it, he is the Earth, and all that he does to the Earth and its other worlds, he does to himself.

.

Psychological Consequences

.

Psychologically, man hides from the darkness within his own mind. Instead of being guided by mythic themes, man has lost himself in issues of right versus wrong or good versus evil. He represses thoughts his religions tell him are ‘wrong’, yet his dreams are filled with his own fear and violence against life and himself, and so he forgets his dreams, takes drugs to dull himself, and refuses to think about the way he poisons Earth’s life forms and his own body. He avoids the unpleasant, the insecure, the painful, seeking “rightness”, happiness, security. And when the individual fails to achieve these ideals, he feels that the world has turned against him or that he isn’t good enough to achieve what everyone else is clearly enjoying.

.

He has no sense of myth which would reassure him of his own relative unimportance in the scheme of things and that misfortune can come into anyone’s life. He has discarded the understanding that life is a mystery, and bought into the idea that the only thing that is keeping him from being a success at anything is a good plan and some clever thinking. So modern man has no humility. He has no myth that centers him within his culture, shows him who he is, reassures him that life has meaning, legitimizes his natural needs, shows him what right and wrong is in his culture, guides boys into manhood or women into womanhood, or gives meaning to his death. Instead, in modern cultures, the ego—or conscious subjective mind—is left on its own to grapple with these needs. The individual is thus easily overwhelmed by modern life. Without the guidance provided by myth and the contact with the Divine provided by myth, the individual is adrift in chaos, holding on while he tries to understand why he is always living for tomorrow and never present in his life, why he feels so alone in society and so without support from his God and others, why in spite sometimes of material success, he feels so desperate and unhappy.

.

The Modern Personal Myth

.

Jung and later, Joseph Campbell, resolved these issues for themselves by asking themselves, ‘what myth am I living?’ And they delved into mythologies until they found the one myth that steered their lives. They found that, in the midst of the most powerful and meaningful portions of their lives, they were unconsciously living ancient mythic themes. Subsequently, they described in their writings how it felt to be guided by their personal myth. First, being in the grip of a myth begins with the experience of awe. Campbell, in his book Pathways to Bliss, describes this experience:

.

Now, it’s not always easy or possible to know by what it is that you are seized. You find yourself doing silly things, and you have been seized but you don’t know what the dynamics are. You have been struck by that awakening of awe, of fascination, of the experience of mystery—the awareness of your bliss. With that, you have the awakening of your mind in its own service. The brain can enable you to found a business in order to maintain your family and get you prestige in the community; given the right mind, it can do these things very well. But the brain can also impel you to give all that up because you become fascinated with some kind of mystery.

.

Survival, security, personal relationships, prestige, self-development, Campbell wrote, are exactly the kinds of values that a mythically inspired person doesn’t live for. “Mythology begins where madness starts. A person who is truly gripped by a calling, by a dedication, by a belief, by a zeal, will sacrifice his security, will sacrifice even his life, will sacrifice personal relationships, will sacrifice prestige, and will think nothing of personal development; he will give himself entirely to his myth,” Campbell told us.

.

The ordinary needs of a man or woman in the grip of his/her myth no longer hold him. He is in the grip of a mystery that consumes him, leads him to fulfill the role destiny has brought upon him.

.

The beginning of a mythic world is a seizure—something that pulls you out of yourself, beyond yourself, beyond all rational patterns. It is out of such seizures that civilizations are built. All you have to do is look at their monuments, and you’ll see that these are the nuttiest things that mankind every thought of. Look at the pyramids. Just try to interpret them in terms of rational means and aims or economic necessities; think of what it meant in a society with the technology of Egypt—which is to say practically nothing—to build a thing that massive. The cathedrals, the great temples of the world, or the work of any artists who has given his life to producing these things—all of these come from mythic seizure, not from Maslow’s values. That awakening of awe, that awakening of zeal, is the beginning, and curiously enough, that’s what pulls people together.

What has happened to modern Western man is that he has lost his myths. Now it is terror that drives us together rather than inspiration. It is fear that controls us rather than Divine guidance which steadies us. And so we in the West are divided, while among those who attack us, there is mythic unity.

.

In the Absence of Myth, Life becomes Existential

.

That is what has happened in the United States today. Suspicious, paranoid, consumed by our worldview that all conflicts are win-loss in character, we project our shadows out upon terrorist killers. We withdraw inward defensively and become aggressive invaders of countries we perceive as an “axis of evil.” Those terrorists, of course, are living their myths, and in their zeal and passion for their causes, they cheerfully give away their lives for their causes to give us pain. In martyrdom and death, they find meaning because there is nothing else they can do to escape their despair over their lives.

.

As individuals, Americans can do little about this. We are caught up in a conflict between cultures which are mythically inspired and our own which has no unifying mythology. Fundamental Christianity is attempting to impose a unifying mythology on our country based upon its interpretation of our 2,000 year-old Bible, but diversity in culture and religion is increasing in the United States—not diminishing. There is no one myth guiding mainstream America any longer. There are many myths and religious traditions that pull at us. There is no one myth or religious tradition to pull us together through inspiration other than the original vision of our founding fathers. Only fear remains as a negative unifying force, and when this happens, fear awakens a military response to all perceived national threats and power defines all international relationships.

.

But while a new national myth has yet to emerge in this country, the individual can seek out his own myth to give meaning to his own life, for as both Jung and Campbell made clear, we each have a personal myth. Our myth may emerge from our past traditions or religious training, or may simply arise out of the Collective Unconscious. Man’s needs include these issues, and where these needs for religious experience have been unmet, we become sensitized to numinous symbols-images which evoke awe and mystery within us. We constantly seek these symbols as we live each day, often unconsciously, but often with a sense of lack, emptiness, or an unmet for love and meaning.

.

How to Regain Myth in our Lives

.

As individuals, we must conscious seek out these symbols and meditate upon them; let them ‘work on us.’ Our myths are first encountered in our childhood years. There, when we go back to our childhood years in memory or dream, we find again the symbols and stories, the enthusiasms, which moved us to excitement, to intense interest, which awoke needs in us that were all consuming. But in growing up, most of us lose those images and put them aside as ‘unrealistic’ or childish. In repressing them, we lost that energy, that passion for life we felt as children. We become lost in the demands of lower needs for economic security, accumulation, sexual expression, relationship, prestige, and other lower needs. In those lost images and forgotten needs of childhood lie our forgotten myths. In those forgotten needs is our own True Self. They lie just below the veil of consciousness, waiting to be remembered and recalled into our lives.

.

Next, study comparative mythology: read, join internet discussion groups, and subscribe to mythological journals. Search for the mythic stories which light up your heart and fire your soul with meaning.

Third, begin paying attention to your dreams, for in dreams the myths live. Begin learning dream interpretation and begin journaling your dreams and thoughts as you go through each day. Your myths are constantly trying to break through into your conscious daily life, and it is only your busyness of mind and pre-occupation with mundane issues which block them. Begin asking for your myth and guidance before you go to bed. Begin to pray and reach out to the numinous, whatever you conceive the Divine to be.

.

Fourth, study Jungian psychology and read books written by Jungian psychologists about the process of individuation and becoming whole. Read books by Joseph Campbell and other mythologists about the mythic journey. Learn about what has happened to others as they sought to uncover their personal myth.

.

Finally, expect these activities to cause a disruption of your existing life. For to engage in these ritual activities of “seeking your true self,” such as asking “Who am I?” invokes a response from the As Above which brings one into crisis. This event can be profoundly unsettling. It is not a journey to peace! It is more like the proverbial “Dark Night of the Soul.” If you are one of those who doesn’t wish for their life to be changed by these experiences, then don’t seek your personal myth and don’t become a seeker of your True Self, for evoking this issue breaks the barrier between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind and the contents of the unconscious ‘flood in.’ That flood, like the ancient legend of Noah’s Ark, sweeps the old world and old life away.

.

Jung did this and experienced what his colleagues called “a nervous breakdown,” but that his students and historians have since recognized as a ‘shamanic journey into the Unconscious.’ He had to stop work for years. But he began living his myth, and it became the most important and meaning experience of his life.

.

The breakdown comes because one has to give up trying to be the person one has tried to be one’s whole life. Normally, this event is scheduled for midlife. This is the mid-life crisis. The persona, or false self, has to be given away. Personal weaknesses have to be confronted. Lies one has told oneself one’s whole life have to be given away. And new ways have to be slowly put together to live one’s life in a new way.

.

Living one’s personal myth means a total revision of one’s life and way of life. The experience is both destructive and creative. What must be destroyed are all those facets of life which stand in the way of one living their life as who they really are. And then a new way of living life must be created, often from scratch, so that one can go on with life in a new way by living the personal myth.

.

The lesson of the Sun in Taurus is learning that using power must be tempered by selflessness and sexuality by judgment. Earthly power used in the service of the ego and personal gain leads to tragedy and suffering. Its user becomes a tyrant. Sexuality is also a power, that when misused, can be destructive of relationships and self-respect. The Taurian must solve the paradoxes of allowing the expression of these powerful human needs while containing the power of human instincts to comply with social and ethical mores.

.

The Myth

.

One myth that might illustrate this lesson is the story of king Minos of Crete and his insult to the Sea god, Psoidon. Minos, a son of Zeus himself, was one of three brothers contending for the throne of Ancient Crete. But he called to Psoidon, god of the Oceans, to send a bull out of the sea as a sign that he was the one chosen to be king. If the sign was granted, he pledged to sacrifice the bull to the Ocean god. Psoidon complied and sent him a bull from the sea. But upon seeing the magnificent animal, Minos was taken by greed, and decided to instead sacrifice the best bull of his herd and to keep the Bull from the sea for his own herds.

.

The selfish act angered Psoidon, and he retaliated by asking Aphrodite to have Minos’ wife, Pasiphae, fall into lust for the bull. And she, in turn, prevailed upon the master craftsman, Daedalus, to build her a wooden cow within which she might “receive the bull”. The mating occurred, and Pasiphae subsequently delivered a child. But the child had a horrible bull’s head. Thus, was the Minotaur born. As he grew up, the Minotaur proved so ungovernable and terrible that Minos had Daedalus built a labyrinth into which the Monster was placed. There he was fed young men and women in the darkness, for human flesh was what he demanded for his food.

.

Minos was known far and wide in his day for his wealth, which was based upon sea power. Yet at the heart of his empire there was a horror in the darkness of the labyrinth, and his empire stagnated.

.

The Journey of the Taurian

.

The Seeker on his Hero’s Journey, like Theseus who himself was sired by Psoidon and eventually killed the Minotaur, must travel into that dark place where he meets the Minotaur--the dark, bestial form of his own Father and the Terror waiting at the center of the dark labyrinth of the mind. Like Theseus, each of us must redeem that aspect of ourselves, Minos, who sinned against god by choosing to use his earthly power to benefit himself rather than by honoring his responsibility and debt as a servant of that Oceanic Power.

Taurus is ruled by Venus, the planetary version of the goddess Aphrodite, and it was--after all--Aphrodite who laid the curse upon Minos’ wife. Goddess of Love that she is, there are aspects of the goddess who carry darker import than others, for only Aphrodite and the daimon Eros were able to “possess“ humans.

.

Aphrodite was unique among the Greek pantheon for she was open to carnal love with both mortals and gods. The body is sacred to Aphrodite. Thus, she is often portrayed naked. She is actively sexual, assertive, and confident. She is the image of relative sexual equality and was the goddess of courtesans. Conjugal satisfaction, procreation, desire and satisfaction, adornment and culture, beauty and the erotic arts all belong to her. She links instinctual sexuality and the cultural arts of love. But she is in no sense a wife, although her arts belong to all wives.

.

Her list of powers would seem to be uniformly positive, but her arts are double-edged for when irresponsibly employed or undisciplined, the results can be tragic. And in this case, Aphrodite’s arts lead to a bestial mating that produced a monster and a tragedy for Minos’ kingdom.

.

The Sigil of the Bull

.

The image of the Bull, the sigil for Taurus, is an ancient symbol of the King and Queen conjoined, united in passion. It has both masculine and feminine aspects. The Bull is the manifestation of powerful instinctual drives within humanity, including the instinct to power and sexuality. The Bull is not evil in itself, but when out of control, it can be deadly, violent and destructive--for it represents animal passions.

.

Sexual activity in itself is not evil either, but when not regulated within relationships and social contracts, it too can produce tragic consequences. Women born under Venus-ruled Taurus have to be careful in employing their arts of love, for these arts can prove destructive in relationships and life as well as joy-producing. For Taurus is a very instinct-driven sign. Sexuality is a key element of their needs and drives. Giving in to these instinctual drives outside of social conventions or relationship agreements can prove destructive, as it did for Pasiphae and Minos. Even when not discovered, the person will find deep within herself--in the labyrinth of her unconscious mind--a monster that, in time, will devour her life and the happiness of her kingdom.

.

The masculine aspect of the Bull is reflected, perhaps, in Aphrodite’s husband, Hephaistos, the Divine but ugly craftsman of beautiful things. He is the creative aspect behind Aphrodite, the beautiful goddess. While he is unlovely, he creates beauty. And from the masculine, although sexuality may not possess the allure it does within the feminine form, the sexual impulse can take the form of creativity and the development of beauty in life. But a delicate balance must always be maintained between the uncontrollability of the sexual impulse and its procreative and cultural manifestations. Whenever the beast gets out of control in someone’s life, tragic consequences can occur.

.

The Seeker must solve the paradox of the Bull: the attraction and joy in the sexual impulse balanced against the need to control and discipline the impulse and channel it into creative and sexual expression. Too harsh a repression of one’s sexuality, and the mind splits from the body, and pathology results. The person becomes overly intellectual and uncreative, and in the darkness of the unconscious mind, a monster grows from these unmet sexual needs. Too profligate an abandonment to sexuality or the creative impulse, and the person can lose herself and her self respect in bestial affairs or in his art.

.

Each of us must learn to “dance with the bull” as did, perhaps the Cretan Bull Dancers of long ago, vaulting over the horns of charging bulls and lightly landing, balanced in their devotion to the good of themselves and others.

.

The Task of Taurus

.

The task of Taurus is to find that balance in one’s life and hold it, to find peace, serenity, and tranquility. Taurus is so very physical and sensual. She seeks to touch and be touched. She longs to touch the earth, the branching trees, to walk barefooted in the grass. She revels in sensuousness.

.

Many Taureans are called into Nature, seeking Silence and Peace. And Nature, in her wildness, is extraordinarily sensual. Escaping the crowds of humans and never-ending noise is their greatest wish. There, without thoughts or sound, they can just be. When they can find that silent place and hold to it, they can control the beast within and live in balance.

.

The weakness of Taurus is a need for security and human instinct is often inclined to seek safety and security. When Taurus give in to the need to feel secure, they can be seduced into an accumulation of Things. Materialism is a trap. The search for security and the accumulation of things can prove a lure into stagnation, for growth virtually always demands a choice step outside self interest and into the Unknown. Confronted by their withdrawal into materialism, many become stubborn and defensive, not desiring to surrender their safe, rich, comfortable lives or control of their lives. At some point, Taurus will have to choose: stagnation in the search for security and things versus choosing change and transformation in one‘s life. If they choose stagnation, as Steven Forrest says, “All is lost!”

.

Bibliography

.

Steven Forrest, The Inner Sky (Seven Paws Press: 1988).

.

Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate (Samuel Weiser: York Beach, ME, 1984).

.