Tristan brought news of Isolde, Ireland’s greatest beauty, to King Mark back in Cornwall. The king was so impressed with the account that he sent Tristan back to fetch Isolde as his wife. Isolde’s mother, a famous witch, gave her a potion to drink with the king on their wedding night so that they would have love. On the return journey Tristan and Isolde drank the potion and at the meeting of their eyes they fell in love.
Isolde’s maid said to Tristan “you have drunk your death” and he replied “if you mean the feeling of being lost in this person then I accept that, or if you mean that King mark will kill me then I accept that, but if you mean I will burn in the fires of hell then I also accept that." This feeling was bigger than God. Told in the 16th century this was a declaration of war on imperial Roman Christian church’s God’s authority. It was the assertion of an individual’s own impulse to being experienced as amour. This attitude fed into the protestant reformation’s shift of the 17th century from obedience and to church and it’s political leadership to a focus on individual’s own works. Victory was declared 400 years later by Nietzsche when he proclaimed ‘god is dead, and we have killed him’.
Joseph Campbell tells a story of three kinds of love; amour, agape and eros. Amour, from Latin via old french described above is personal, the meeting of the eyes, the self dissolved into a particular other. In ancient Greek language; agape and eros describes significantly different aspects of human feeling when relating. Agape is the love of God and all things and is impersonal, the dissolution of the self into the universe. Eros is lust. Eros is the biological impulse responding to the culturally learned fertile curves of the body. Orion,[1]an older deity than Zeus, is the hunter god who tried to rape one of the Pleiades Sisters. He was banished to the stars by Gaia in punishment and you can see him to this chasing both Taurus and the seven sisters through the sky. The seven sisters in Australian mythology are also fleeing a rapist, this is a shared narrative with roots deep in our prehistory. Man relating to woman as a hunter frames relationships for sexual predators to this day and before Zeus came along, this behaviour resulted in banishment, not becoming king[2].
There are two superficially similar but substantially different elements of relating being considered here. One is on individuals relating to other individuals and the other element is on the nature of how we conceptualise the universe.
Do we relate by connectedness into something greater than ourselves or by objectification and consumption to satisfy our desires? This goes beyond gender binary relevance as personified in some myths. The switch in the character of the universe from a goddess, associated with connectedness, fertility and rebirth, to a tribal war god, associated with conquest and domination was mentioned in the essay on alienation. In the Greek mythology Zeus imposes domination over the goddess in all the accounts nymph seduction. In the biblical version the goddess is banished entirely and branded ‘the abomination’[3]. The winners have not only written history, but they have conflated it with mythology and deny that there is any other way to be. In the case of the patriarchal war god cultures the shift from the creative regenerative essence of the earth to dominating and conquest has blinded them to what it means to be a social species in a natural world. It does not need to be this way, Indra is the war god equivalent to Zeus in the Indian system, and he is put back in his place[4] by Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, the fundamental deities with both male and female incarnations.
As a scientist[5] I use the word universe where some may use God or Brahma. An understanding of the dance of evolution through geological time and living ecosystems frames existence as a creative not domineering process. Reductionism without connectedness when building knowledge is as naïve, destructive and incoherent as a religion[6] built on divisiveness. There is a creative tension between duality and non-duality in our existence and to deny either of them seriously undermines life’s potential.
The Goddess is a nourishing personification of the mystery of being as it orients us towards connectedness not obedience. The most common first human experience of connectedness is in motherhood through pregnancy and breastfeeding. For those lucky enough to grow up in a safe environment, the sense of wonder and connection extends out through diverse relations. The first truth on which being is built is of our at-one-ment not the divisions of a tribal god into good and evil, duality not nonduality. The Goddess conception connects through love, the God conception relies more on obedience and fear. Without a sense of genuine connectedness redefining our sense of self to include others, alienating narratives like the Karpman drama triangle[7] are traps waiting for someone’s insecurity to spring.
This gendered framing can still compute in a world of fluidity beyond the thought structures built from the boxes of duality, beyond good and evil. Take whatever presumed dimensions of masculinity and femininity you derive from nature and nurture and put them on a mixing desk adjusted for each of us. This is a modern mythic image to retrofit onto a monotheistic conception of the universe where all we talk about is if it is a god or goddess. We can do better. How many psychological insights were discarded with polytheism, where gods always exist in relation to one another? Mythologies are the accumulated wisdom of a culture’s evolution and can include all the subtle dynamics of relating to one another and the world we live in. Many of the old deities of our ancestors would be quite disoriented reincarnated into the modern world but with a little reinterpretation there is a rich pallet available for reinterpretation.
So we need not limit ourselves to stories perpetuating mechanistic obedience to the systems of empire where we are only a means to its end. What do we value in the narratives that help us grow and learn how to relate to the world? If a mode of being does not harm others we can relax and let it be part of the beautiful diversity of being but when it comes to relating to one another, we should drop objectification relating to others as means to our own ends way down in the mix. We can provide plenty of learning opportunities that this is how it is, and banishment should await those who refuse to learn. Life is better for all spent dancing in love creating together rather than hunting and caging birds, each of us alone and afraid of greater predatory powers. Choose gratitude for the relationship in the meeting of the eyes. The dynamic of sustained shared creation. The dance. No interest in gods’ authority just life’s creative impulse. The dance of shiva. The birth of spirit in the feminine. Language, as playful as it can be beyond rationalised dualities, does have its limits. The time comes to shut up and dance.
[1] Charles Bergman - Orion's legacy. [2] The stories of Zeus's sexual conquests of nymphs can be read as the subjugation of local encryption actions of the earth goddess. [3] Eg see 1 Kings 11:5 [4] Indra and the ants [5] Science is often conflated with reductionism. It is true that career paths in academic institutions predominantly dive down wormholes of detail but reductionism is just one method in the scientific tool kit that also includes more holistic conceptions of relatedness. [6] Religion etymology is ‘link again’ [7] See Narratives & aesthetics in this series.
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