Thou Art That

we listen and look carefully, however, we discover ourselves in the literature, rites, and symbols of others, even though at first they seem distorted and alien to us.

If we speak of “The Emergence of the Goddess,” we refer really to the “The Emergence of the Heroine.” A person is a hero or a heroine when he or she is functioning in the interest of values that are not local to the person but are of some greater force of which the person is a vehicle. The woman becomes a heroine as she becomes a vehicle of a force that brings forth life.

Myth has many functions. The first we might term mystical, in that myth makes a connection between our waking consciousness and the whole mystery of the universe. That is its cosmological function. It allows us to see ourselves in relationship to nature, as when we speak of Father Sky and Mother Earth. There is also a sociological function for myth, in that it supports and validates a certain social and moral order for us. The story of the Ten Commandments given to Moses by God on Mount Sinai is an example of this. Lastly, myth has a psychological function, in that it offers us a way of passing through, and dealing with, the various stages from birth to death.

Kennedy: You have written of the difficulty of one mythological system’s being able to speak to a world which has become so varied. The agrarian and hunting myths that once spoke to everyone no longer apply quite so easily. But you have also said that, with some reflection, we can understand that the ancient stories of heroes and their adventures are the same as our contemporary search for meaning.

The moon sheds its shadow as the serpent sheds its skin. The serpent also plays a role as the symbol of this same principle of the life that is reborn from its own death. In traditional mythologies, the sacrificial bull, too, is associated with this symbolism of death and rebirth. The horns of the moon are rendered in the horns of the bull. The sacrifice of the bull is symbolic of the sacrifice of that mortal part in us which leads to the release of the eternal.

middle, so to say, like the Tree of Life in the garden, where the rivers flow in four directions; or like the point of intersection of the two beams of the cross, behind the head of the Savior, crowned with thorns.

to be released from this limitation one must in some sense die to the laws of virtue and sin under which one lives in this world, opening oneself to a circulation of energy and light through all four of the functions, while remaining centered in the

Marriage, as I said, is not a love affair; it is an ordeal. If you think of it as that you will be able to go through with it. The ordeal consists specifically in sacrificing ego to the relationship. And ego is always coming up, you know, saying, “Oh, poor me. Nobody’s doing my typing for me,” and that sort of thing. By the way, I know one great scholar who went through three wives until he got the one that would not only do the typing, but could do it in Greek and Latin as well.

A life governed by prudent forethought may be undone by the upsurge of feeling, just as one swayed by feeling may, for a lack of prudent forethought, be carried, one day, to disaster. (“Never go out with strangers!”)

You cannot have light without the shadow; the shadow is the reflex of the figure of light.

So Passover, and Easter, and the resurrection of Adonis are all symbolic of the birth of the self-image out of the earlier darkness.