LEAD ARTICLE: the sacred marriage of goddess and god: the reunion of nature and spirit

by Anne Baring and Jules Cashford

 

reprinted from The Myth of the Goddess. Evolution of an Image, Penguin Arkana, 1993 by permission of the authors

O sweet spontaneous
earth how often have
the
doting fingers of
prurient philosophers pinched
and
poked

thee
, has the naughty thumb
of science prodded
thy beauty . how
often have religions taken
thee upon their scraggy knees
squeezing and

buffeting thee that thou mightest conceive
gods (but
true

to the incomparable
couch of death thy
rhythmic
lover

thou answerest

them only with spring)
e e cummings

I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the
Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination –
What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth
John Keats

The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?
Joseph Campbell

This book has tried to tell the story of the mythic images that themselves tell the story of the evolution of consciousness. And if it is true that one way in which humans can apprehend and know their own being is by making it visible in the image of their goddesses and gods, then it may be through such images as these that consciousness tells its own story.

The myth of the goddess has moved through several stages of diminishing influence from the Palaeolithic Age to the present, and these have registered the way humanity looks upon itself and its world. In Western culture there is now formally no goddess myth and so no feminine dimension in the collective image of the divine. This means that contemporary experience of the archetypal feminine as a sacred entity is no longer available as an immediate reality in the way that it used to be. Although the myth of the goddess partially survives in the figure of Mary, the Virgin, as intermediary, it is still ultimately excluded from the prevailing myth of the god. If we review the historical stages of the demise of the goddess myth, we can gain some perspective on where we stand at this particular point.

In the beginning the Great Mother Goddess alone gives birth to the world out of herself, so that all creatures, including the gods, are her children, part of her divine substance. Everything is living, animate –with soul– and sacred. Today’s distinctions between ‘spirit’ and ‘nature’, ‘mind’ and ‘matter’ or ‘soul’ and ‘body’ have no place, for humanity and nature share a common identity. This was the myth that prevailed in the Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age Crete. It is still found in what is called (probably for that reason) ‘primitive’ societies and, of course, in poetry.

Thereafter the Mother Goddess unites with the god –once her son, now her consort- to give birth to the world. Here the distinction is made between the eternal womb and its temporal phases (whether of the moon or the seasonal life of vegetation), and the focus of the myth is on the relationship between the Mother Goddess and the god, her ‘son-lover’. Everything is still alive and sacred, but the duality of that which endures and that which changes – zoe, the eternal and inexhaustible source, and bios, its expression in time– prepares the way for the distinction between energy and form, later to become that between ‘nature’ and ‘spirit’. This was the myth of Inanna and Dumuzi in Bronze Age Sumeria, Ishtar and Tammuz in Babylonia, Isis and Osiris in Egypt, Aphrodite and Adonis in Greece and Cybele and Attis in Anatolia.

In the next stage the Mother Goddess is killed by the god, her great-great-great-grandson, who then makes the world from her dead body, and the human race from the blood of her dismembered son-lover. This was the late Bronze and early Iron Age Babylonian myth of Tiamat, the mother goddess whose corpse was split apart into earth and heaven by the superior wind-and-fire-power of the sky-and-sun god Marduk. Creation is now dissociated from the creative source, and the world is no longer a living being and a sacred entity; on the contrary, it is seen from Marduk’s perspective as the inert and inanimate substance that we call ‘matter’, which can be shaped and ordered only by ‘spirit’. The considerable implication here –which mythically underlies much destruction of the earth as well as the ‘holy’ wars against other human beings– is that the conquest of matter releases spirit.

Finally, the god creates the world alone without reference to the Mother goddess, either through self-copulation (the Egyptian Atum) or through the power of the Word. This was the Bronze Age myth of the Egyptian Ptah, whose tongue translated the thoughts of his heart, and the Iron Age myth of the Hebrew Yahweh-Elohim, who made heaven and earth in the beginning and saw that it was good. In the popular version Adam is made of the clay of the inanimate earth and comes alive only when spirit is breathed into him, and Eve is derived from Adam. Here, the world is set still further apart from its creator and cannot share in the sanctity of the original source. The creator is transcendent to creation, not immanent in creation as was the mother goddess before him. The transcendent god –Pure Spirit– creates nature and then, in addition, transfers some of this spirit (or, breathes His spirit) into the body of the human being(s), but not into the bodies of animals, plants, soil and stones. After the expulsion, when the earth is cursed to dust and thistles, Nature itself (not Herself) becomes a punishment for the inevitably inferior spiritual ‘nature’ of humanity. In the Hebrew creation myth, inherited by the Islamic and Christian traditions, there is no relation whatever to the Mother Goddess, who is no longer even an enemy and has disappeared from view.

One way of understanding the long historical process of the replacing of the myth of the goddess by the myth of the god is to view it as the gradual withdrawal of humanity’s participation with nature. This process brings with it the corresponding emptying of animate life from nature and the transference of that life into humanity, which is then cast in a relation of opposition to nature. If the relation to nature as the Mother is one of identity, and the relation to nature from the Father is one of dissociation, then the movement from Mother to Father symbolizes an ever-increasing separation from a state of containment in nature, experienced no longer as nurturing to life but as stifling to growth. Historically, this process can be described as one in which humanity has discovered itself to be progressively independent of the natural phenomena among which it lives, increasingly capable of differentiation and selection, and so, in theory, more and more able to shape and order the world to its own ideas. From the perspective of the god myth, then, the perception of differences that leads to the setting apart of pairs of opposites –spirit and nature, mind and matter, transcendence and immanence, reason and instinct, good and evil, life and death, male and female– is an obviously life-enhancing activity, without which (to think again in opposites) life would fall into inchoate chaos.

Since we are the inheritors of the mythic and social system of the god for over 4,000 years, it would be difficult for us to disagree. One of the results of the god myth is that consciousness has already evolved by gathering the numinosity once experienced in (or as) natural phenomena into itself. It is often assumed that the next stage of evolution will take the form of the last one, and achieve an even greater freedom from the given conditions of life in order to transform them still further. Yet it is not hard to see that the conditions of life have changed over the long duration of the god myth, not least in the way that consciousness now looks upon itself. It would be strange indeed if a tribal myth that arose so long ago, in so small a territory, were able to relate to people of the entire planet.

In this last century three major and apparently unrelated discoveries have undermined the value of continuing the direction of the last 4,000 years, and it is significant that they all point to the same conclusion: the need to comprehend the world as one whole. The most obvious is the splitting of the atom, whereby humanity has achieved sufficient distance from the substance and structure of the material world to restructure it so that it –and the human race along with it– no longer exists. Einstein’s own conclusion from this was that ‘with the splitting of the atom everything has changed save our mode of thinking, and thus we drift towards unparalleled disaster’ (1).

The second discovery, addressed in this book, comes from the studies of archaeology, anthropology, comparative mythology and archetypal psychology, all of which show the people of the earth not only as sharing in the common human condition of how to understand life, but also as attempting to understand it in similar ways. It has not been possible before this century to study the myths and legends of different cultures and to read them together, so we have been ignorant of their extraordinary resemblances to each other. This common bond between widely differing cultures and times cannot but call for a fundamentally new image of the human race as a unity, however much humankind appears to differ in its secular detail.

The third discovery –made, as it were, by consciousness about itself– is that the earlier scientific model of consciousness as entirely independent of what it sees and does cannot stand. Participation (to come full circle) cannot be finally eradicated. In subatomic physics the absolute distinction between mind and matter, made first by Aristotle and more recently by Descartes, which implies the distinction between the observer and the observed, cannot be sustained. This means that, in the end, we can never speak about nature without at the same time speaking about ourselves (2). The frame of mind of any investigation –which includes the beliefs, values and unconscious assumptions of the investigator– is, then, not just an essential component of what is discovered, but actually creates dynamically ‘what happens’ in ways yet to be fully understood. Relationship is again the fundamental reality within which the two terms –observer and observed, subject and object– are brought into being together.

The same kind of conclusion also follows from studies of the unconscious mind in Depth Psychology, in which the conscious mind has been found to be not only answerable to other levels in the psyche, but also, to a greater extent than was ever realized, to be actually dependent for its finest expressions upon these deeper levels, or at least upon a harmonious relation with them. Add to this the common knowledge, upon which psychosomatic medicine draws, that unconscious ‘thoughts’ are registered in the body, that we cannot ‘think straight’ when we are sick or tired or hungry, and Psyche and Soma emerge as ultimately unseparate. How can we then finally distinguish conscious from unconscious, mind from matter and spirit from nature, except as a linguistic definition of a range of experience, whose purpose is to interrupt the continuum at certain points for particular reasons that have nothing to do with the things in themselves? In the language of mythology this is to say that the myth of the goddess is not absent from the collective psyche just because it is disregarded. In fact, it is exactly where we might expect to find it –in the collective unconscious of the race.

These discoveries, separately and together, point to the need for the new mode of thinking for which Einstein calls, where life is experienced as a living whole, in which humanity participates in a relation of mutual dependence along with all the other creatures of the earth. This, ironically, is precisely the genius of the old goddess myth, even though originally that vision was bound into the constraints of worshipping a personalized image: the Goddess. However, no vision depends upon the literal terms of its earlier manifestation, so the question that arises here is how can the ‘new’ myth of the Earth as one harmonious being be disengaged from the old form of the myth, which was imagined as a recognizably human figure elevated to divine status, but frequently limited by the same recognizably human traits of character as her worshippers?

The issue for our purposes, then, is whether there can be a ‘goddess myth’ without a Goddess; or, to put it another way, can we have a ‘goddess’ without having to believe ‘she’ exists as a literal divine being? Can the vision of nature as a sacred, living unity, in which the human race is experienced as one whole and consciousness belongs to all life whatever form it takes, exist without a belief in ‘the Mother’ immanent as creation? And could it co-exist with a belief in ‘the Father’ transcendent from creation? Or do both Mother and Father, Goddess and God, have to be dissolved as literal personified realities so that they may reappear as symbolic realities of two essential ways of comprehending what Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas calls ‘the All’? (3) Then both of these kinds of understanding life, or ways of experiencing the numinous, can be seen to be necessary and true, and both, therefore, require each other to become whole. In the literal language of the old myth this union was the Sacred Marriage of Goddess and God; in the symbolic language of the new myth it is the ‘sacred marriage’ of ‘god’ and ‘goddess’, images that can be translated into the more prosaic but more negotiable terms of the reunion of transcendence and immanence, spirit and nature, soul and body, in order to make possible a new mythic vision –the ‘child’.

Before these terms can be reunited in a new myth, they have to be brought into balance with each other; from our point in history, this is effectively the question as to how the goddess myth can be brought back into consciousness so that its values may again become available and complement (not replace) the prevailing myth of the god. It may be more difficult than we envisage to regain that mode of being that the long debased goddess myth originally expressed. D. H. Lawrence, writing of the Etruscans (c. 1000-300 BC) as he perceived them through their art, offers a poetic image of the participating consciousness that the goddess myth at its best affords:

The natural flowering of life! It is not so easy for human beings as it sounds. Behind all the Etruscan liveliness was a religion of life . . . Behind all the dancing was a vision, and even a science of life, a conception of the universe and man’s place in the universe which made men live to the best of their capacity. To the Etruscan all was alive; the whole universe lived; and the business of man was himself to live amid it all. He had to draw life into himself, out of the wandering huge vitalities of the world. The cosmos was alive, like a vast creature . . . The whole thing was alive, and had a great soul, or anima: and in spite of one great soul, there were myriad roving, lesser souls; every man, every creature and tree and lake and mountain and stream, was animate, and had its own peculiar consciousness. (4)

Not as easy as it sounds, and especially after centuries of being dismissed as pantheism by orthodox religion, or as childish fantasy by Baconian and Newtonian science and Cartesian philosophy. Yet a myth does not simply vanish from the world of the collective psyche any more than an event of great moment in the past is irrevocably lost to the individual psyche; and especially not a myth that existed for at least 20,000 years before the myth that superseded it. Rather, it changes its aspect, disguises its mode of operation and reappears in another form. But, like any less than fully conscious attitude, it cannot simply be summoned at will; it has to be sought, elicited, tracked in the shadowy underworld of subliminal image and symbolic implication; discerned in innuendo, pause, juxtaposition, contradiction; and persuaded to re-emerge in the gaps between what we call rational thinking. We might expect to find it disguised as the implicit structural image of a scientific hypothesis, or as the hidden impulse within ‘alternative’ culture; it might be what is intended by ‘new’ in today’s ‘New Age’. Yet as long as it is not fully conscious, it may mislead us with over-simplified dogma or confuse us with claims of its innate superiority, or it may merely fail to make its own voice heard because we are listening in the wrong place. For instance, we may talk of the desacralization of nature and the laying waste of the earth; or the need to transcend the opposites of spirit and nature, mind and matter, thinking and feeling; or the importance of dissolving the boundaries of our country, race, customs and theirs –but we can forget that the very oppositional language of our enquiry prevents us from experiencing what we talk about.

Perhaps the first step is to call into question the language and current patterns of thinking that we unreflectively employ as a solution to any problem –those methods that reflect an imbalance since they derive from the prevailing mythic and social system of the god without the goddess; in other words, an excessively dissociated point of view. We might expect, then, that our mode of inquiry would be too rational, too conceptual, too ideal; that it would tend to concentrate on differences and exclude similarities, that it might undervalue the intuitive response, the feeling, the image and the symbolic framework that accord meaning to the endeavour and the energy for carrying it through (5). Above all, we could anticipate that our habit of thinking in opposites might have dulled us into assuming that they are absolutes in themselves and not provisional distinctions of inseparable terms belonging to one underlying unity, distinctions that are justified only by the increase of consciousness and expansion of life that they make available.

**************

When was it in the Western tradition that oppositions became fixed and lost their relation to the whole that renders them aspects of a larger entity? The first occurrence of a mythic image that was drawn in absolutely negative terms was the Babylonian mother goddess Tiamat, who was pictured as a life-threatening dragon in relation to the sky god Marduk, where the relation was one of combat, shown, as it were, from Marduk’s point of view. There are no pictures of Tiamat on her own (or none that survived), so the original mother who gave birth to all the gods was no longer a living reality. She had become only the ‘Terrible Mother’, who kills life –quite literally ‘red in tooth and claw’ (6)– and who, it followed, must be killed herself for the sake of life. She was called Evil and Marduk was called Good.

However, this was the late Bronze and early Iron Age, a time of colonial invasion and conquest, when, apparently coincidentally, predictable planetary cycles observed in the heavens offered an objective image of order that did not have to depend on some mysterious and invisible power. The sky and solar gods that the invaders brought with them were set apart from the earth, and their repeated and unchanging cycles suggested planning and intelligence, in the light of which the spontaneous creations of an all-encompassing mother nature appeared dark, chaotic and full of menace. It was also a time of transition, when the god myth of the nomadic conquerors was being imposed upon the goddess myth of the settled agricultural communities, with their seasonal rites and lunar orientation. With historical hindsight, the wholly negative image of the mother goddess can be seen to be also an image in transition and not an absolute statement, valid for any situation.

The relevance of this age to ours might seem questionable, but mythically it was the last occasion (with the exception of aspects of Greek mythology) when the goddess was central to the drama, and when the opposition of the god to the goddess was consciously and publicly registered. Subsequently, through the influence of Babylonian on Hebrew mythology, the conquest of the goddess by the god was an assumption of such proportions that it was no longer formally mentioned, even though it frequently broke through the official myth in poetic asides. The defeat of the goddess (the withdrawal of participation from nature) was, at that time, the condition for the beginning of civilization. That is to say, the ties with blood and soil, where humanity felt itself to be personally involved in the living rhythms of nature, which therefore limited and determined the freedom of human nature, were seen as a threat to the creation of a way of life that depended more on organization and conceptualization.

The image of opposition –of the heroic consciousness banishing chaos to create and order the world– became the model for the way of thinking by which civilization was sustained, and so it entered Judaeo-Christian thought as the basic structure through which the world was perceived and the quality of life was ensured. It is the dramatic focus of the story in Genesis: the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden, and Death outside it. Somewhat inevitably, this paradigm of thinking in opposites, which was the language of tribal consciousness, has remained unchanged.

If we analyse the image of opposition enshrined in the battle of Tiamat and Marduk, we find that what is imagined is the heroic moment of victory over the old order when the new order is established. As such, the image parallels the initial rites of any new stage of consciousness, where what is to be left behind has to be opposed by what is to come into being in order that the habitual hold of the past be relinquished. But once the new stage of consciousness has been achieved, there is no further need for the challenge of an ‘enemy’, and both terms –victor and vanquished, order and chaos, god and goddess– may be dissolved and reunited at a higher level. If, however, this transitional stage is not left behind when it has served its purpose, then the growth of consciousness is arrested at this point of its development, with the result that what was originally simply relative is abstracted from the larger framework in which this dynamic process took place. It is subsequently regarded as an absolute– a composite statement, in this case, about the threat of the indigenous goddess culture, the inherent chaos of nature, and the incipient dangers of participation. Here the political needs of the conquering nation –what we might call ‘survival’ or ‘tribal’ thinking– have infiltrated the ways of thinking about how to live beyond survival (the debate on the quality of life), and then the tribal orientation on its world has become the unconscious exemplar for the ‘triumph’ of conscious thought.

This is what we are suggesting has happened to all the so-called oppositions we have inherited –goddess and god, nature and spirit, and so on– but extending to the way we think ‘tribally’: that is, in terms of my self or our group, community, country (and god), where the customs and values of one specific ‘tribe’ are held to be of intrinsically greater worth than those of another ‘tribe’, in disregard or ignorance of their ultimately mutual dependency as members of the human race. These ideas then enter our discussions with fixed definitions and attributes, and the most damaging of these is the supposedly inherent conflict between them. This predisposes us to see them oppositionally and hierarchically and not as complementary terms within one underlying identity, which is what they are seen to be as soon as the phase of conflict is past.

In individual psychology a radical and permanent split in the psyche between ‘good things’ and ‘bad things’ is generally interpreted as a sign that the natural growing of the psyche has been arrested by something that could not be accepted as it was nor placed in a wider framework that would render it intelligible and so tolerable. Then a way is sought to heal the split, so that the intolerable feeling that conflicts with the established view of the world is not repressed into unconsciousness and subsequently projected and discovered outside in the figure of a person or a group of people who are seen as an enemy threatening the conscious position. In collective consciousness, also, perhaps we should see the habit of thinking in absolute and fixed oppositions as a symptom, a sign that something is out of balance. There seems to be no reason why we should not talk of a collective complex as well as an individual complex, where a complex is defined as an unconscious and unresolved conflict that cannot move into the next stage of growth. In an individual the complex is the point at which that person cannot relate to others, since he or she is drawn to project the unconscious image outwards upon others, rather than to respond genuinely to who is actually there. Similarly, taking a transitional, and so provisional, division of a unity into two opposing aspects for an absolute definition about the opposing nature of the two aspects –seeing all life finally in dualistic terms– also prevents genuine relationship with what is actually ‘there’.

If we apply this analysis to what has been called ‘the Problem of Evil’, a phrase that implies that Evil ‘exists’ as an intrinsic force in the universe, or even as a dimension of the deity itself, then ‘evil’ becomes not a terrifying metaphysical abstraction but a linguistic opposite to ‘good’, both terms requiring a context to render them intelligible at all. When the context is supplied –this act was good, this act was evil– we are back to the human realm of specific value judgements, which cannot be abstracted, generalized and subsequently concretized in some supersensible realm without profound distortion.

Ultimately, therefore, we are suggesting that consciousness, as it has evolved through the god myth, has become confused with tribal consciousness, which, at least in its initial formative stage, tends to demand an opposite to secure its own identity and to project the unresolved conflicts of its own tribe on to ‘the other’. This other, the alien, then becomes ‘the enemy’ to be sacrificed –the ‘evil’ to be cast out for the ‘good’ of the tribe:

Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out
May waste the memory of the former days. (7)

Such is the last pragmatic advice given by Henry IV to his wayward son, Harry, who, on succeeding his father in the following play, declares in full conviction: ‘No King of England, if not King of France’ (8).

By contrast, mythic or sacred themes and images, as we have seen, are not confined within tribal and cultural boundaries, but cross all the borders of the ancient and modern world. To reiterate a point made in Chapter 1, ‘the sacred’ is not a stage in the history of consciousness that people grow out of or into, but it is at least an element in the structure of consciousness, belonging to all people at all times. (Even if, as many would prefer, this statement is reversed to read that the structure of consciousness is but one form of the sacred, the point is that one way or the other it is always there.) As an essential part of the character of the human race, then, it is unquestionably required for a perspective on that other aspect of being human: that is, born into a specific family within a specific tribal group at a specific time. For in the same way that an individual’s ‘tribal’ nature – where he or she acts not morally but out of self-interest– can be forgiven when it is seen as a reaction to a wound and an attempt to restore wholeness, so, possibly, can the tribal character of the race be analogically placed in the context of the unclosed wound of our specifically human consciousness –that original separation from nature, when good and evil, eternity and time, life and death, fall apart into apparently irreconcilable opposites. Here is Rilke:

Death is the side of life averted from us, unshone upon by us: we must try to achieve the greatest consciousness of our existence which is at home in both unbounded realms, inexhaustibly nourished from both . . . The true figure of life extends through both: there is neither a here nor a beyond, but the great unity in which the beings that surpass us, the ‘angels’, are at home . . . We of the here and now are not for a moment hedged in the time-world, nor confined within it … we are incessantly flowing over and over to those who preceded us . . . We are the bees of the invisible, Nous butinons éperdument le miel du visible, pour l’accumuler dans la grande rûche d’or de l’invisible. [We deliriously gather the honey of the visible, to accumulate it in the great golden hive of the invisible.] (9)

NOTES
1. Albert Einstein. We regret that we have been unable to find the source of this quotation.
2. See Fritjof Capra, The Turning Point, London, Wildwood House, 1982.
3. Gospel of Thomas, Logion 77, The Gospel According to Thomas, Coptic text established and translated by A. Guillaumont et al., Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1976.
4. D.H. Lawrence, ‘Last Poems’, in The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Vol. I, p. 17, Vivian De Sola Pinto and Warren Roberts (eds.), London, Heinnemann, 1972.
5. See Jung’s essay ‘Two Kinds of Thinking’, in Collected Works, Vol. 5, Symbols of Transformation, paras. 4-46, eds. Sir Herbert Read et al., trs. R.F.C. Hull, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957-79.
6. ‘In Memoriam’, lvi. Tennyson’s description of the unadorned state of nature, following Darwin’s description in the Origin of the Species.
7.William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Pt.2, IV, iv.
8.William Shakespeare, Henry V, II, iv.
9. Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke, 1910-1924, trs. Jane Bannard Green and M.M. Herter, NewYork, Norton, 1947, pp. 373-4

published 3 April 08