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Chapter 7. No way to treat a Lady: Attempts to suppress the Dynamic Feminine.
To the degree that Inanna personifies (albeit in projection) the imperative to Individuation, the account of Her treatment provides a phylogenetic story of Western Europe's attitude towards the Individuation process; which, unless we are conscious of it, will now be re-enacted ontologically in each of us.
She has always been determined. She epitomises goal-directed behaviour, aggressive assertiveness. She is spirit as much as She is soul. The other gods did not understand Her. Because they thought and acted regressively, they underrated Her. She is the Goddess of evolution, of some new way. Not anima as a sprite or nymph leading humanity astray. That's our problem, not hers, because we fall into error by failing to recognise Her and hence relating inappropriately to Her. If there is one consistent theme in all her mythology, it is Her ceaseless drive to expand human consciousness, i.e. the Imperative to Individuation, hence civilisation.
She's actually the most
pragmatic of all the archetypes. In particular, She acts in defiance of the
pseudo-intellectual air God Enlil, and His master, An. When She wants the Bull
of Heaven, (in Gilgamesh) She brings just enough pressure to bear, but only threatens
to open the gates to the underworld. When Enlil cautions Her against attacking
Ebih, (a.k.a. the Dragon of Kur) She just does it! She uses big battering rams
for large targets, small battering rams for lesser obstructions. She is
strategically sound. Her work is well done; efficiently! And of course She
succeeeds. "Nature is not fair, but nature is precise." There is a
lesson for us here somewhere. Far from needing to look beyond what the
"anima" says, to find the wise old man, both men and women need to
consider more carefully what the dynamic feminine urges us to do herself. We
don't need any wise old men: we need to hear what we're told; by the celestial,
earthy Queen of Heaven and Earth; vir unus, the soul and spirit of
humanity, Inanna!
Her religion, (and thus the weltanschauung of Her adherents) had two major disadvantages compared to those of Her competition.
- Nothing was cut and dried. Zaroastrianism, Judaism, and its two daughter religions described a world of absolute good and absolute evil, constantly at war; ego and shadow. The Lady reflected more a biological view of the world, where good and evil were perceptions of reality, not reality itself.
- She was not a parental protective Goddess. She challenged; and if approached appropriately, was an invaluable partner and inspiratrix, as Sargon well knew. But She shows none of the "there, there, it will be all right," characteristic of the Great Mother or Great Father cults.
Her opponent was the Great Mother and her partner, the Son-Lover: puer aeternus! Three strategies have been used in an attempt to subvert what She epitomises.
The Jews diabolised Her.
The Greeks split her.
The Christians suppressed Her.
(The Egyptians simply added Her to their extraordinary polytheistic pantheon, and with tireless good humour, worshipped and enjoyed Her as Bast and Sekhmet for over two millennia, until those cults were suppressed by the Romans. There's something very decent about Egyptians.)
Given that we are the heirs to these three major influences, their activities in regard to this impulse to Individuation may be mandatory, if we are to see where we came from, and guide us to where we go.
Jewish Diabolisation:
Why bother? Certainly there was a political component in Israel's denunciation of the (by then) Great Goddess of the Babylonians. The "Captivity" which many of the Old Testament prophets complain, lasted about as long as the British Raj in India, and had rather similar effects. A group of stern, unsophisticated people were subjected to the influence of the most advanced culture of its time. Given that, instead of their dark patriarchal critical paranoid deity with His doctrine of the "good" God and hence of "bad" humanity, suddenly the Israelites were exposed to a sophisticated and still quite sexually egalitarian society whose Patron Goddess was totally amoral, as much a deity of prostitutes as She was of priestesses or kings. No archeologist has yet dug up the walls and the barbed wire entanglements that stopped these people simply walking home. It's the same distance as from Melbourne to Sydney. Who'd want to?! Joseph Campbell did point out that when Cyrus of Persia invaded, he "sent" (sic) the Jews home. One hardly gains the impression that they were actually clamouring to go.
Nor have many scholars of Judaism pointed out that, at the time of the "captivity" there were already about a quarter of a million Jewish soldiers, traders and families living in Mesopotamia, so it seems like a fairly selctive captivity.
The guts of their problem with Inanna seems to be their fascination (and ours) for the archetype of giving form. We have an intrinsic love of order, predictability, and solidity; so much so that we are prepared to make a god of it. But that's only one sort of god, and only transitional at that, until we become advanced enough to recognise the value of evolution. It seems that this god-figure of formation, substance, and static permanence, may be what attracted the Romans to this, of the vast number of different religions to which they were exposed.
The consequence of that haunts us even now. Rome, the "Eternal City" still has cultural and religious influences far outliving its military hegenomy over Western Europe. And Jerusalem? When did it ever rule Europe? A cynic might say, "When didn't it?!"
The Greeks: Split the Goddess.
The trial of Paris, where he was asked by the Olympians to decide which of Athene, Hera or Aphrodite deserved the golden fruit, sphere, or whatever else it was that symbolised a person's self; that trial epitomised the Homeric Greeks' problem with a Goddess too big for them to comprehend in one piece. Inanna has three aspects: Love (Aphrodite), War and Wisdom (Athene), and She is the Queen of Heaven (Hera.)
Newcastle (NSW) University's Charles Penglase has written a masterly and scholarly study of some influences of Sumerian mythology and religion upon that of the Greeks. However, he has restricted those possible influences to cultural diffusion, and paid virtually no attention to the archetypes involved. That is, he has ignored the tendancy for archetypal symbols (projected as deities) to turn up everywhere at all times, as spontaneous creatures of the human mind.
"Symbols are not allegories and not signs: they are images of contents which for the most part transcend consciousness" (CW5 p77, 114)
"Symbol as striving of a complex for dissolution in common totality of thought" and analogy-making. CW5 p141, 201&203) ####
To clarify the time scales somewhat, let us remember this. The Homeric Greeks of 500 BCE lived two and a half thousand years before us. Sumerian civilisation was two and a half thousand years before them! So yes, the Greeks were influenced by Sumer, just as we are influenced by Greece. But that is far from the only influence.
Einstein might say that "God does not play dice," but that is only one sort of god. There's another one, Hermes; and not only does He play dice: He does so with none other than Ishtar's partial heiress, Aphrodite! If you want troubles, what better combination could you ask for?
The Greeks' problem for a long time has been syncretism, and they have become very good at it, incorporating incoming peoples' deities into the pre-existing pantheon. That's fine, but it is an ego function, which, if carried too far, replaces spontaneous archetypal images with artificial quasi-human constructs which rob the initial image of its numinosity.
When the Dorians, with their sky gods Zeus and Apollo, invaded Greece in about 1,000 BCE, they had to come to terms with a well-established cult of Hera and her quasi god-like consort Heracles. They dealt with Hera by adopting the Egyptian Isis-Osiris model of a sister-wife relationship, and relegated Heracles to the role of a son of Zeus, persecuted by the (now shrewish) Hera. ( #### Woolger ref.) He underwent the characteristic twelve labours, corresponding to the twelve houses of the Zodiac, and eventually achieved immortality. So the archetypal image underwent transformation in characteristic fashion until it returned to where it was before it got played with by left-brained stupidity.
Significantly, Hera shows an archetypal reaction to an early attempt to relegate the Great Non-Maternal Goddess to a Maternal role. When Heracles was brought to suckle Her breast, She threw him away, and Her milk squirted out as the Milky Way. Clearly the unconscious was already reacting negatively to the feminine being simplified as no more than a mother.
Aphrodite predictably did not make herself so amenable to masculine influence. Only one third of Inanna may She be, but no man ever told Her what to do: well not successfully anyway!
Again the Greeks tried to depotentiate Her by marrying Her off to Hephaestos, which seems strange until we note that Hephaestos was earlier a consort of Athene. (Both these deities were craft deities.) But by Homeric times, they had only a partial sexual relationship where Athene rebuffed Hepaestos' advances, so he ejaculated on her leg. (The PerOneal nerve serves the leg. The PerIneal nerve serves the perineum.)
Here we detect political influence. Sparta, Aphrodite's city, saw Her as more close to the Inanna archetypal image: Venus armata. The Athenians had Aphrodite split even more, by making Her lover bear Her warlike tendancies, in the form of Ares. But again the archetype seemed to say, "Not right." Ares got to be rather like the swaggering coward Il Capitano in Commedia dell'Arte, first being caught in bed with Aphrodite, then being roundly defeated whenever he and Athene competed, and even being trapped in a bronze jar, from which Hermes had to help him escape. If he was ever a proper god, he was an amazingly awful one, and that has to accentuate the possibility that he was an ego construct, and never a proper deity at all. His ego nature is further exemplified by Paracelcus' contention that he was a form-giving god. This raises interesting Qabalistic questions, given that Chesed and Geburah are the ana and lysis aspects of existence.
But Aphrodite as Ariadne (She was called by both names in the Greek Islands from early Mycenaean times) betrays another archetypal attribute with Her other triplets in Her assistance to Theseus in defeating the Minotaur, symbol of an adolescent's acquisition of maturity by defeating the Static Masculine, whether seen as Father, or as Mother's animus. Here again, as in Hera before, and Athene to follow, we have these offspring of Inanna demanding heroism, and assisting it once it shows. No mothering, no easy roads. Humans (egos) do it: the Goddess helps. There are no archetypes for cleaning your teeth and wiping your bum: those are human problems. Archetypes look after the big issues.
Even Theseus' "abandonment" of Ariadne on the beach at Naxos had an archetypal dimension. As a result of an agreement between Artemis and Dionysos, Ariadne was taken to Olympos as a consort of Dionysos, the Bull-god, identified with Hades and the underworld (the unconscious, the world of Persephone and Ereshkigal, shadows of Aphrodite and Inanna) by Hesiod. The Greek mind does its trick again. Split off a characteristic of Inanna, and make it a consort. Remember Jung's assertion that Siduri Sabitu, the wine-maker by the sea in Gilgamesh, was an aspect of Inanna.
Dionysos was the least masculine of the Greek gods. But his power to cause madness, was considerable, as was Hera's. He was friendly to women, so much so that Christine Downing personified him as a woman's perception of masculine sexuality. The present writer will let that pass with a polite concession that Ms. Downing may hold such views as befit her experience.
The Greeks' attempts to split, then degrade/subordinate to the masculine, the components of the dynamic feminine, are fundamental to our present day thinking, and perceptions of psychological reality. If we take the view that the Renaissance was partly or mainly due to Greek influences reaching Medieval Europe as a result of Marcilio Ficino's translation of Greek texts, those texts represent a major component in our perceptions of how we relate to the inner and outer worlds.
Empedocles:
(Note: This material is extracted from Barnes, J. Early Greek Philosophy Penguin Classics. Pp 160-201. Unless otherwise stated, all page references are to that book.)
Empedocles lived from 495-435 BC approximately. His model of the universe included:
1. Four roots or influences, "fire and water and earth and the endless height of air" Empedocles' description of these "elements" bears no comparison to modern ideas of elements. He even equates the four with gods;
"Hear first the four roots of all things:
bright Zeus, life-bringing Hera, Aidoneus,
and Nestis, who waters with her tears the mortal fountains."
2. Two fundamental forces which brought these four together or separated them: Love and Strife. And, just as painters
"take the many-coloured pigments in their hands,
and, harmoniously mixing them, some more, some less,
Make from them shapes resembling all things,"
everything arises from the interplay of these two upon the four elements.
"In Anger they have different forms and are all apart,
but in Love they come together and are desired by one another.
For from these comes everything which was and which is and will be -
trees sprang up, and men and women
and beasts and birds and fish that live in the water,
and even gods,..." (p 170)
He specifically names Love as Aphrodite or Cypris, but only hints at Strife being Ares, her lover or Hephaestus, her husband (who, incidentally was consort to Athene in earlier times. But he is quite clear that Aphrodite should be considered conceptually.
"Her you must regard with your mind: do not sit staring with your
eyes.
She is thought to be innate also in the limbs of mortals,
By whom they think thoughts of love and perform deeds of union,
Calling her Joy by name and Aphrodite,
Whom no-one has seen whirling among them -
No mortal man." (p 166)
1. An influence superior even to these two - necessity.
"There is an oracle of necessity, an ancient decree of the gods,
eternal, sealed with broad oaths." (p 195)
Necessity is the relentless drive behind the whole process, as inevitable as Namtar (Fate.)
2. A recognition of the conservation of matter and energy.
"from what does not exist nothing can come into being,
and for what exists to be destroyed is impossible and unaccomplishable -
for it will always remain wherever anyone may fix it." (p173)
3. Constant cyclical evolution from a perfect unmanifest sphere to imperfect but manifest world, and back again. Barnes says (at p 168) that Empedocles hints at a double world, one intelligible, divine and paradigmatic; the other perceptible, mortal and manifest. The former is where Love predominates, and the latter the result of Strife. But this is precisely the distinction made between the archetypal world of forms and the conscious world of objects. So a goddess encompassing both powers would truly be Queen of Heaven and Earth.
"In turn they come to power as the circle revolves,
and they decline into one another and increase in their allotted turn.
For these themselves exist, and passing through one another ...
Now by Love coming together into one arrangement,
Now again each carried apart by the hatred of Strife,
...but insofar as they never cease their continual change,
to that extent they exist forever, unmoving in a circle." (p 171)
He even noted the splitting into opposites after we are born (become conscious.)
"there were Earth and far-seeing Sun,
bloody Discord and soft-faced Harmony,
Beauty and Ugliness, Speed and Slowness,
Desirable Truth and black-eyed Obscurity." (p 197)
And what better symbol of the unity of the Self as origin and conclusion could one request?
There are no two limbs branching from its
back,
no feet, no swift legs, no generative organs:
it was a Sphere, equal to itself from all directions ...
a rounded Sphere, rejoicing in his pleasant rest."
Viewed in metaphor, as he explicitly demanded when considering Aphrodite, Empedocles has depicted the splitting of consciousness from unconscious unity with remarkable insight. Whatever one may say of his understanding of natural sciences, he clearly intuited the fundamental, all-pervading and everlasting influence of Love and Strife, Inanna's two great powers.
"For they are as they were
before and as they will be, nor ever, I think,
will boundless eternity be emptied of these two."
In essence, for reasons we must investigate soon, the Greeks had a major influence in arrogating Inanna's powers to the masculine, by splitting, marrying off, or giving to consorts those intrinsically feminine qualities. And the most outrageous, yet characteristically most charming and elegant example of all time was the Goddess Athene.
To see how a daddy's girl (par excellance) could hold such fascination over so many, then as now, is our next task.
Athene has been represented as the result of masculine jealousy at one feminine ability which cannot be arrogated: child-bearing. In this writer's experience, most men who have seem women giving birth have no desire to do likewise at all! Athene has often been described as having a parthenogenetic birth, but this ignores the facts. Zeus tricked Metis into making herself small enough so he could swallow her; and it was only after doing so that he had an insufferable headache, relieved only when Hermes and Hephaestos cut his head open, and Athene ascended from it, fully armed and fully developed.
Viewed psychologically, this is a more likely masculine fantasy. Just as the ego can be considered as an 'animus' given birth by the feminine unconscious (as Hillman mentioned in Anima) so anima can be seen to have been given birth by the masculine imagination. In actual fact this is an illusion. Dynamic (non-maternal) feminine pre-exists any human being of either gender. All sexual beings behave as if the contrasexual exists as a goal, demanding union with the organism involved. We may be able to talk about it, but that is the only difference.
Removal of Mary Magdalene from the canonical scriptures deprived Christianity of the apparatus necessary to deal with and integrate the phenomenon of the Dynamic Feminine. The end result has been splitting of this powerful psychic force into two components of a quaternio, neither of which adequately depict it; i.e. the Holy Ghost as an aspect of God the Father, and the now Mary as a sort of Great Mother purportedly filling the role of Queen of Heaven. To hope that the archetype represented by Inanna can be dealt with in such inadequate terms is about as sensible as defining the Christians' God in terms of a mixture of the Great Mother and Hermes.
"But Sparta, ruling every
nation,
Be still our Queen's time-honoured throne.
There, in your single powers residing,
Rejoice in wealth, as in her sight;
And, at her feet, seek faith-abiding
Authority and law and light." (Faust II p 193)
