Myths are rich sources of psychological insights. Great literature, like all great art, records and portrays the human condition with indelible accuracy. Myths are a special kind of literature not written or created by a single individual, but produced by the imagination and experience of an entire age and culture and can be seen as the distillation of the dreams and experiences of a whole culture. They seem to develop gradually as certain motifs emerge, are elaborated, and finally are rounded out as people tell and retell stories that catch and hold their interest. Thus themes that are accurate and universal are kept alive, while those elements peculiar to single individuals or a particular era drop away. Myths, therefore, portray a collective image; they tell us about things that are true for all people.
This confusion concerning the narrow definition of reality may be illustrated by the thinking of a small child after a nightmare. A parent may say, to be comforting, “It was only a dream; the monster was not real.” But the child is unconvinced, and rightly so. To him it was real, as alive and real as any outer experience. The monster he dreamed about was in his head and not in his bedroom, but it had, nonetheless, an awesome reality, with power over the child’s emotional and physical reactions. It had an inner reality for him that cannot and should not be denied.
The difference between these two births, if properly understood, reveals the different natures of the two feminine principles. Aphrodite is a goddess born of the sea: she is primeval, oceanic in her feminine power. She is from the beginning of time and holds court at the bottom of the sea. In psychological terms, she reigns in the unconscious, symbolized by the waters of the sea. She is scarcely approachable on ordinary conscious terms; one might as well confront a tidal wave. One can admire, worship, or be crushed by such archetypal femininity but it is extremely difficult to relate to it. It is Psyche’s task, from her human vantage point, to do just that — to relate and soften the great oceanic, archetypal feminine. This is our myth.
Aphrodite’s mirror is symbolic of a most profound quality of the goddess of love. She frequently offers one a mirror by which one can see one’s self, a self hopelessly stuck in projection without the help of the mirror. Asking what is being mirrored back can begin the process of understanding, which may prevent getting stuck in an insoluble emotional tangle. This is not to say there are not outer events. But it is important to realize and understand that many things of our own interior nature masquerade as outer events when they should be mirrored back into our subjective world from which they sprang. Whenever one falls in love, sees the god or goddess-like qualities in another, it is Aphrodite mirroring our immortality and divine-like qualities. We are reluctant to see our virtues as our faults and a long period of suffering generally lies between the mirroring and the accomplishment.
When a woman mediates beauty and grace to the world, often it is the Aphrodite or Venus energy at work. But when Aphrodite is confronting her daughter-in-law she is jealous, competitive and determined to set our hurdles for Psyche at every turn. This drama of mother-in-law and daughter-in-law is acted out in every culture and is one of the psychic irritants which can contribute so much to a young woman’s growth. For a young woman to cope with her mother-in-law’s power system is to attain feminine maturity. She is no longer that dewdrop which came so naively into the world and into her marriage.
Much of the turmoil for a modern woman is the collision between her Aphrodite nature and her Psyche nature. It helps to have a framework for understanding the process; if she can see what is happening, she is well on her way to a new consciousness.
Psyche’s nature is so magnificent, so innocent, so unworldly, so virginal that she is worshipped; but she is not courted. This is an utterly lonely experience and poor Psyche can find no husband.
In this sense, there is a Psyche in every woman, and it is an intensely lonely experience for her. Every woman is, in part, a king’s daughter, too lovely, too perfect, too deep for the ordinary world.
If a woman is beautiful, the problem is compounded. Marilyn Monroe is a touching example; she was worshipped far and wide and yet had great difficulty relating closely to any one person. Finally she found life intolerable. Such a woman is the carrier of a goddess-like quality, an almost unapproachable perfection that finds no place in the ordinary human realm of relationship.
The father of the bride is angry at that fellow who is audacious enough to snatch his darling away from him; the father of the groom is triumphant at the supremacy of the males of the community; the mother of the bride is horrified at the beast who is carrying away her child; the mother of the groom is angry at the vixen who has seduced her son away from her.
One of Aphrodite’s characteristics is that she is constantly regressive. She wants things to go back where they were; she wants evolution to go backward. She is the voice of tradition, and ironically, it is this very tendency that carries our story forward in its evolution.
Eros comes to Psyche, and even beautiful as he is, he is death to her. All husbands are death to their wives in that they destroy them as maidens and force them into an evolution toward mature womanhood. It is paradoxical, but you can feel both gratitude and resentment toward the person who forces you to begin down your own path of growth. The oracle was right; a man is death to a woman in an archetypal sense. When a man sees an anguished look on his partner’s face, this is a time to be gentle and cautious; it may be that she is just waking up to the fact that she is dying a little as maiden. He can make it easier for her at this moment if he will be gentle and understanding.
She may look at her husband in horror one day because she realizes she is bound in her marriage as he is not. She is even more profoundly bound if there are children. She may resent this, but not to be caught in this way by life is even worse death.
Marriage is a very different experience for a man than for a woman. The man is adding to his stature; his world is getting stronger, and he has risen in stature and position. He generally does not understand that he is killing the Psyche in his new wife, and that he must do this. If she behaves strangely, or if something goes dreadfully wrong, or there are many tears, he usually doesn’t understand that marriage is a totally different experience for her than for him. A woman takes on a new stature in her marriage but not until she has been through the Death mountain experience.
There is something in the unconscious of a man that wishes to make an agreement with this wife that she shall ask no questions of him. Often his attitude toward marriage is that it should be there for him at home but it should not be an encumbrance. He wants to be free to forget about it when he wants to focus elsewhere. This is a great shock to a woman when she discovers this attitude in her man. Marriage is a total commitment for a woman; it is not so all encompassing for a man. I remember a woman who told me she cried for days when she discovered that their marriage was only one aspect of her husband’s life though it was the primary fact of hers.
All paradise fail. Each one has a serpent in it that demands the opposite of the peace and tranquility of the Garden of Eden.
A woman is likely to go through a bewildering series of relationships with her partner. He is the god of love, and he is death on the top of the mountain; he is the unknown one in paradise, and he is the censoring one when she demands consciousness. And finally he is the god of love at the summit of Olympus when she comes to her own goddesshood.
A woman often lives some part of her life under the domination of a man in outer life, and if she is alert enough to avoid this she may then fall under the domination of her inner man, her animus.
Light is always the symbol of consciousness.
Much of a man’s mute yearning for a woman is his need for her light to show him — as well as her — his true nature and godhood. Every woman holds this terrible-wonderful power in her hands.
At his best, a man know who he is, and he knows he has a god, a magnificent being, somewhere within him. But when a woman lights the lamp and sees the god in him, he feels called upon to live up to that, to be strong in his masculine consciousness. Naturally he trembles! Yet he requires this feminine acknowledgement of his worth. Terrible things happen to men who are deprived of the presence of women — inner or outer — for usually it is the presence of a woman that reminds each man of the best that is in him.
Most men get their deepest conviction of self-worth from a woman, wife, mother, or if they are highly conscious, from their own anima.
A man depends largely on woman for the light in the family as he is not well equipped at finding meaning for himself. Life is often dry and barren for him unless someone bestows meaning on life for him. With a few words, a woman can give meaning to a whole day’s struggle and a man will be so grateful. A man knows and wants this; he will edge up to it, initiate little occasions so that a woman can shed some light for him. When he comes home and recounts the events of the day, he is asking her to bestow meaning on them. This is the light-bearing quality of a woman.
The touch of light or consciousness is a fiery experience and often stings a man into awareness; this is partly why he fears the feminine so much. A huge proportion of man’s bantam rooster behavior is a futile effort to hide his fear of the feminine. It is mostly the woman’s task to lead a man to new consciousness in relationship. It is almost always the woman who says, “Let’s sit down and talk about where we are.” The woman is the carrier of growth in most relationships. A man fears this but he fears, even more, the loss of it.
To love someone is a human experience bonding one in a human way to another being. It is seeing that person truly, and appreciating him or her for the ordinariness, failures, and magnificence of human personality. If we can ever cut through the fog of projections in which we live so much of our life, and look truly at another person, we can perceive an ordinary creature as magnificent. The trouble is that we are blinded by our own projections; we rarely see another clearly in all of his or her depth and nobility.
Falling in love is the experience of looking through that person and seeing the god or goddess who stands behind. No wonder we promptly become blind when we fall in love. We walk right by the real person and focus on something greater than any ordinary human being. Psychologically speaking, this is saying that prior to the time of our myth, if you touched an archetype, you were simply obliterated. When mere mortals undergo an archetypal experience, they may survive it, but will be radically changed by it.
Asian people do not have a tradition of falling in love. They go to their relationships quietly, undramatically, untouched by the arrows of Eros. Marriages are arranged. Traditionally the man does not see his bride until the ceremony is over and the garlands of flowers are lifted. Then he takes her home and follows a carefully prescribed pattern for newly married couples. He keeps the energy we experience as in love for the temple where the gods and goddesses bear this great power for him
It is ironic that the moment you fall in love with someone, you must acknowledge that person’s utter uniqueness and thus their separateness. Then we become immediately aware of the distance, the separation, and the difficulty of relationship. There is generally a terrible feeling of inferiority in both men and women when they find that their companion is a god or goddess. Loneliness and isolation follow quickly.
Both are expelled from the paradise garden and set firmly into human proportions. This can be a fine moment because people make much better humans than they do gods or goddesses. But it does cause emotional suffering.
When a man makes love to a woman, he gives her seeds in vast number. She has to choose one and begin a miracle of birth. Nature in her Aphrodite character produces so much! Woman in her sorting capacity must choose one seed and bring it to fruition.
Most cultures try to eliminate this sorting and ordering through custom and law. They stipulate what a woman shall do and this saves her from having to sort. Monday is for washing, Tuesday is for ironing, etc.
One may view a marriage as two people standing back to back, each protecting the other in a particular way. It is the feminine task to protect not only herself but her man and her family from the dangers of the inner world; moods, inflations, excesses, vulnerabilities, and what used to be called possessions. These are things a woman’s genius can manage much better than a man’s. Usually he has his own task in facing the outer world and keeping his family safe. There is a particular danger in the modern attitude in which both people face the outer world, both spending their time in outer things. This leaves the inner world unprotected and many dangers creep into the household through this unprotected quarter. Children are particularly vulnerable to this unprotectedness.
If you wish to give your children the best possible heritage, give them a clean unconscious, not your own unlived life, which is hidden in your unconscious until you are ready to face it directly.