Joseph Campbell and The Lunar Bull

JOSEPH CAMPBELL
AND THE LUNAR BULL

BOOKS BY PETER FRITZ WALTER
SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY LITIGATION
COACHING YOUR INNER CHILD
THE LEADERSHIP I CHING
LEADERSHIP & CAREER IN THE 21ST CENTURY
CREATIVE-C LEARNING
INTEGRATE YOUR EMOTIONS
KRISHNAMURTI AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVOLUTION
THE NEW PARADIGM IN BUSINESS, LEADERSHIP AND CAREER
THE NEW PARADIGM IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND SPIRITUALITY
THE NEW PARADIGM IN SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS THEORY
THE VIBRANT NATURE OF LIFE
SHAMANIC WISDOM MEETS THE WESTERN MIND
CREATIVE GENIUS
THE BETTER LIFE
SERVANT LEADERSHIP
CREATIVE LEARNING AND CAREER
FRITJOF CAPRA AND THE SYSTEMS VIEW OF LIFE
FRANOISE DOLTO AND CHILD PSYCHOANALYSIS
EDWARD DE BONO AND THE MECHANISM OF MIND
JOSEPH MURPHY AND THE POWER OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND
JOSEPH CAMPBELL AND THE LUNAR BULL

JOSEPH
CAMPBELL
AND THE
LUNAR
BULL
SHORT BIOGRAPHY, BOOK REVIEWS,
QUOTES, AND COMMENTS
(GREAT MINDS SERIES, VOL, 7)
by Peter Fritz Walter
Published by Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC
113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA
2015 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved.
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About Dr. Peter Fritz Walter

http://peterfritzwalter.com
About the Author
Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzerland

and the United States, Dr. Peter Fritz Walter (Pierre) focused upon
fine art, cookery, astrology, musical performance, social sciences
and humanities.
He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a high

school award for creative writing and editorial work for the
school magazine.
After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M. in

European Integration atSaarlandUniversity, Germany, and with
a Doctor of Law title from University of Geneva, Switzerland, in
1987.
He then took courses in psychology at theUniversity of Gene-

va and interviewed a number of psychotherapists in Lausanne
and Geneva, Switzerland. His interest was intensified through a
hypnotherapy with an Ericksonian American hypnotherapist in
Lausanne. This led him to the recovery and healing of his inner
child.
In 1986, he met the late French psychotherapist and child psycho-

analystFranoise Dolto (1908-1988)in Paris and interviewed her.
A long correspondence followed up to their encounter which was
considered by the curators of the Dolto Trust interesting enough
to be published in a book alongside all of Doltos other letter ex-
changes byGallimard Publishers in Paris, in 2005.
After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal coach,

Pierre retired as a full-time writer, philosopher and consultant.
His nonfiction books emphasize a systemic, holistic, cross-cultural

and interdisciplinary perspective, while his fiction works and
short stories focus upon education, philosophy, perennial wis-
dom, and the poetic formulation of an integrative worldview.
Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and writes

English as his 4th language after German, Latin and French. He
also reads source literature for his research works in Spanish,
Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch. In addition, Pierre has notions of
Thai, Khmer, Chinese and Japanese.
All of Pierres books are hand-crafted and self-published, de-

signed by the author. Pierre publishes via his Delaware company,
Sirius-C Media Galaxy LLC, and under the imprints of IPUBLICA
and SCM (Sirius-C Media).
Every stoic was a stoic but in Christendom,
where is the Christian?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
The authors profits from this book are being donated to charity.
Contents
Introduction! 9
About Great Minds Series
Chapter One! 13
Short Biography
Chapter Two! 21
Book Reviews
The Hero with a Thousand Faces! 22

Review! 22
Quotes! 29
Occidental Mythology! 32
Review! 32
Quotes! 40
Oriental Mythology! 48
Review! 48
Quotes! 54
The Power of Myth! 61

Review! 61
Quotes! 75
Chapter Three! 89
The Lunar Bull
Introduction! 90
The Lunar Bull! 99
Historical Turn! 110
Murder of the Goddess! 114
The Murder Culture! 132
The Spiritual Laws of Matriarchy! 138
Bull and Serpent! 143
Bibliography! 153
Contextual Bibliography
Personal Notes! 165
8
Introduction
About Great Minds Series
We are currently transiting as a human race a time of

great challenge and adventure that opens to us new path-
ways for rediscovering and integrating the perennial holis-
tic wisdom of ancient civilizations into our modern science
paradigm. These civilizations were thriving before patriar-
chy was putting nature upside-down.
Currently, with the advent of the networked global so-

ciety, and systems theory as its scientific paradigm, we are
looking into a different world, with a rise of horizontal
and sustainable structures both in our business culture,
and in science, and last not least on the important areas of
psychology, medicine, and spirituality.
A paradigm, from Greek paradeigma, is a pattern of things, a
configuration of ideas, a set of dominant beliefs, a certain way of look-
ing at the world, a set of assumptions, a frame of reference or lens, and
even an entire worldview.
While most of this new and yet old path has yet to be
trotted, we cannot any longer overlook the changes that
happen all around us virtually every day.
Invariably, as students, scientists, doctors, consultants,

lawyers, business executives or government officials, we
face problems today that are so complex, entangled and
novel that they cannot possibly be solved on the basis of
our old paradigm, and our old way of thinking. As Albert
Einstein said, we cannot solve a problem on the same level
of thought that created it in the first place hence the need
for changing our view of looking at things, the world, and
our personal and collective predicaments.
What still about half a decade ago seemed unlikely is
happening now all around us: we are rediscovering more
and more fragments of an integrative and holistic wisdom
that represents the cultural and scientific treasure of many
ancient tribes and kingdoms that were based upon a per-
ennial tradition which held that all in our universe is inter-
connected and interrelated, and that humans are set in the
world to live in unison with the infinite wisdom inherent
in creation as a major task for driving evolution forward!
It happens in science, since the advent of relativity the-
ory, quantum physics and string theory, it happens in neu-
roscience and systems theory, it happens in molecular bi-
ology, and in ecology, and as a result, and because science
is a major motor in society, it happens now with increasing
speed in the industrial and the business world, and in the
10
ABOUT GREAT MINDS SERIES
way people earn their lives and manifest their innate tal-
ents through their professional engagement.
And it happens also, and what this book is set to em-
phasize, in psychology and psychoanalysis, for Franoise
Dolto, while having been a member of the Freudian psy-
choanalytic school, has created an approach to healing
psychotic children that was really unknown to the founder
of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud.
More and more people begin to realize that we cannot

honestly continue to destroy our globe by disregarding the
natural law of self-regulation, both outwardly, by polluting
air and water, and inside, by tolerating our emotions to be
in a state of repression and turmoil.
Self-regulation is built into the life function and it can

be found as a consistent pattern in the lifestyle of natives
peoples around the world. It is similar with our immense
intuitive and imaginal faculties that were downplayed in
centuries of darkness and fragmentation, and that now
emerge anew as major key stones in a worldview that puts
the whole human at the frontline, a human who uses their
whole brain, and who knows to balance their emotions
and natural passions so as to arrive at a state of inner peace
and synergetic relationships with others that bring mutual
benefit instead of one-sided egotistic satisfaction.
For lasting changes to happen, however, to paraphrase
J. Krishnamurti, we need to change the thinker, we need to
undergo a transformation that puts our higher self up as
the caretaker of our lives, not our conditioned ego.
11
Hence the need to really look over the fence and get
beyond social, cultural and racial conditioning for adopt-
ing an integrative and holistic worldview that is focused
on more than problem-solving.
What this book tries to convey is that taking the exam-
ple of one of the greatest child psychoanalysts of our time,
we may see that its not too late, be it for our planet and for
us humans, our careers, our science, our collective spiritual
advancement, and our scientific understanding of nature,
and that we can thrive in a world that is surely more dif-
ferent in ten years from now that it was one hundred years
in the past compared to now.
We are free to continue to feel like victims in this new
reality, and wait for being taken care of by the state, or we
may accept the state, and society, as human creations that
will never be perfect, and venture into creating our lives
and careers in accordance with our true mission, and based
upon our real gifts and talents.
Let me say a last word about this series of books about

great personalities of our time, which I came to call Great
Minds Collection. The books within this collection do not
just feature books but authors, you may call them author
reviews instead of book reviews, and they are more exten-
sive also in highlighting the personal mission and autobio-
graphical details which are to note for each author, includ-
ing extensive quotes from their books.
12
Chapter One
Short Biography
I found Joseph Campbells books in 1998, through a

reference in The Great Mother (1955), by Erich Neumann.
And I studied them very much in detail. Campbell, the
great scholar, was for me a true discovery, as important for
cultural evolution as Carl Gustav Jung.
Joseph Campbell basically affirms that patriarchy is but
a form of life-denial, a collective neurosisnot a lifestyle,
not a philosophy, not a Weltanschauung, but rather some-
thing like a form of cultural insanity, a twist given to life
that perverts our nature. And ultimately, therefore, its a

refusal of true humanity. Campbell develops the theme
further with Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth (1988), p. 54,
by alluding to the Star Wars plot:
Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He's a

robot. He's a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in
terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives
that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out
and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to
make use of the system to the attainment of human pur-
poses? How do you relate to the system so that you are not
compulsively serving it?
Patriarchy, with its craving for obedience to the father,

is a sort of compulsion neurosis; not only are individuals flat-
tened out by systems that are eternal replacements of real
fathers, those that have abandoned their roles as caretak-
ers, having become troublemakers, but authority-craving
individuals also have flattened out their better halves, their
right brains, so as to serve the system even more. In this
sense, as a sentinel for attention to the signals pointing to
the coming of Orwellian times, Campbells oeuvre cannot
be underestimated. It should be read in all schools, also
because it is essentially important to train the right brain
capacities of associative, symbolic thinking from early age.
In fact, these abilities were highly developed in the great
scholar, next to his poetic ability and word magic, which is
why his books are great reading, and not dry scholarly
pamphlets. And then we might finally ask the pertinent
14
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
question: How has patriarchy come aboutand what was

before? The answer that Joseph Campbell gives is that it
all started with a murder.
The murder of the Goddess. Which is ultimately a mat-

ricide. And it became the foundation of what is called civi-
lization. It became the foundation of what is called a relig-
ion.
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) was born in White Plains,
New York in an upper-middle-class Irish Catholic family.
He was a university professor, writer, speaker, anthropolo-
gist, and mythologist. He is most famous for his work in
the fields of both comparative mythology and comparative
religion, and especially for his theory of monomyth, a term
he borrowed from the renowned Irish writer James Joyce
(1882- 1941).
This is a central concept which Joseph Campbell also
referred to as the heros journey. Joseph Campbells phi-
losophy is today typically abridged to by what would be-
come a popular phrase of his: Follow your bliss.
He attended Dartmouth College where he first studied
biology and mathematics before changing majors to switch
to humanities at Columbia University.
He eventually graduated with a B.A. degree in English
literature (1925) and an M.A. in medieval literature (1927)
respectively. He studied French, German, Japanese, and
Sanskrit at the University of Paris and at the University of
Munich. In 1924 he would meet J. Krishnamurti by chance
on a steamboat from Europe to the US.
15
This encounter kindled in him the interest in lifelong

study of Eastern thought. He would later recall that the
experience of talking with Krishnamurti had changed his
life. After the trip decided to stop being a practicing Catho-
lic.
During an extended sabbatical retreat in the woods not
too far from New York City, he spent his time reading in-
tensely for five years.
According to his friend Robert Bly, he developed at the

time a systematic program allowing him to read for nine
hours every day. He later stated that it was during that pe-
riod that he received his real education. Furthermore, it is
at that point that he began developing his unique vision on
the nature of life.
Joseph Campbell began his literary career by editing
posthumous articles of the Indian culture scholar Heinrich
Zimmer (1890-1943). He also co-wrote with Henry Morton
Robinson (1898-1961) the literary criticism work A Skele-
ton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), by James Joyce.
The term monomyth came from that late book, which
Joseph Campbell would in turn use and develop further as
a concept in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). He af-
firmed there that all myths follow the same archetypal pat-
terns. The idea of monomyth is described further in the
book in the following passage:
A hero ventures forth from the world of common
day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces
are there encountered and a decisive victory is won: the
16
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the

power to bestow boons on his fellow man.
Joseph Campbell studied the ideas of Carl Jung (1875-
1961) who had been a disciple of Sigmund Freud (1856-
1939). Carl Jung had studied under Freud and collaborated
closely for six years with him before diverging theoreti-
cally, culminating in Jungs resignation of the International
Psychoanalytical Association in 1910.
The research Joseph Campbell would do on mythology

sought to link the seemingly disparate stances of Carl Jung
and Freud, including their pivotal debate over the notion
of the collective unconscious.
Another dissident member of Freuds circle who influ-
enced Campbell was Wilhelm Stekel (1868-1940), who as it
turned was the first to apply Freuds ideas about dreams,
fantasies, and the unconscious to many fields such as an-
thropology and literature.
In a similar way as his call to follow your bliss, Joseph
Campbell himself would follow an original path. While he
agreed with Carl Jungs texts explaining psychological
phenomena by using archetypeswhich in Jungian psy-
chology are a primitive mental image inherited from early
human ancestors and supposed to be present in the collec-
tive unconsciousJoseph Campbell didnt agree with him
on everything. Joseph Campbell had his own original con-
victions. Unlike Carl Jung he did not believe in either as-
trology or synchronicity.
17
The originality of Joseph Campbells theory lies in the

fusion of received ideas and symbolism. His iconoclastic
approach was as innovative as it was radical. His position
with regard to religion can be compared with Albert Ein-
steins scientific work: the search for a unifying theory.
Campbell believed that all religions of the world, that
all rituals and deities are only masks of a single transcen-
dent truth that is elusive and ultimately unknowable. In
this way, he would describe Christs consciousness as well
as that of the Buddha as being on a level of perception
above the typical binary oppositions of good and evil.
Needless to add that many fundamentalists consider
his ideas to be heretical.
One of Joseph Campbells favorite quotes was from the

Vedas, the most ancient Hindu scriptures: Truth is one,
though the Sages know it as many. Joseph Campbell was
fascinated by what he saw as universal truths expressed in
different forms across cultures. He would seek to demon-
strate that Eastern and Western religions are the same deep
down, and that neither is absolutely right, but rather that
they both are looking for the unknown answer, which ap-
pears to be elusive ultimately. He would become interested
in various moral codes, considering them as both incorrect
and yet necessary.
Arguably, in the same way as certain postmodern rela-
tivists, he would see the notions of good and evil as highly
subjective concepts. Like postmodernists he would under-
stand that a moral system is necessary for anyone studying
18
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
in field like mythology or psychology. In this way, Joseph

Campbell managed merging modernist and postmodernist
concepts.
In his series of four books entitled The Masks of God, he

attempted to summarize the worlds main spiritual stories
to support his ideas on the unity of the human species.
This theory includes the notion that most of the belief
systems of the world have a common geographical ances-
tor.
Joseph Campbell believed that all forms of spirituality
are the search for a single unknown force, which he would
come to qualify more as eminent rather than transcendent
and which, according to him, is simultaneously inner and
outer, in contrast with being only external, and from which
all comes from. This is for him where everything exists and
in which everything eventually returns.
Joseph Campbell would refer to this force as the conno-
tation of what he called metaphor. Metaphor is the term
with which he would name the various deities and spiri-
tual objects in the world.
In this way all mythical heroes begin their journey after
a call to adventure, which always implies that the hero
leaves the environment in which he or she grew up.
The hero typically then faces a first obstacle in the

journey, which once faced usually with the help of a men-
tor or spiritual guide, allows entry into a more spiritual
world, generally represented by for example a dark forest,
19
a desert, a cave or even a mysterious island. At this point

the hero undergoes a series of tests allowing one to surpass
the mentor and finally reach the object of the quest, which
often is a reconciliation of the father, a sacred union, or a
grand finale that symbolically represents a kind of libera-
tion. The hero then returns home completely transformed
by the experience of his initiatory journey.
Joseph Campbell maintained that all mythical heroes,
regardless of the time and culture in which they live, fol-
low such path, containing at least one of the parts of this
structure.
In more contemporary works, for example the Star
Wars trilogy, all closely sticks to the archetypal pattern de-
lineated by Joseph Campbell. According to him. heroes
have a very important function in society because they can
convey universal means to liberate oneself and come to
thrive because of ones own spiritual energy, not because
of outside forces.
20
Chapter Two
Book Reviews
The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1973/1999)
Occidental Mythology (1973/1991)
Oriental Mythology (1962/1992)
The Power of Myth (1988)

The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Princeton: Princeton University Press
(Bollingen Series XVII), 1973
Review
The Hero With a Thousand Faces is one of Joseph Camp-
bells best books. It contains much of the other books, but
in terms of presenting the material, design, layout, font
quality and general presentation, this book really is well-
edited.
The headers are very comprehensive and the book in
its overall makeup is a production destined less for schol-
ars but a young and always-young audience; it has a sig-
nificant contact with present-day reality. Why?
Well, we are in the midst of the hero cult in the United
States of America, and Campbell has to be credited with
22
BOOK REVIEWS
the merit to have shown the positive sides of this rather

patriarchy-related phenomenon with its many undesirable
consequences. Contrary to the proponents of the cult of
imitation, and Anthony Robbins coaching ideal of model-
ing yourself after this or that cultural hero, Hollywood
star, millionaire or politician, Campbell makes it all clear
that, by following this idea, you miss your soul entirely. I am
saying the same, by the way, which is why I am not doing
personal coaching, but soul coaching, in my book Servant
Leadership: A Guide for Aspiring Young Leaders (2015).
Campbell can be said to be in heroic contradiction with
the hero cult, while this may sound like a paradox.
Well, the paradox finds its solution in the simple fact
that Campbell, in accordance with the oldest of traditions,
defines the hero in a different manner than current Ameri-
can popular culture.
While this may not be obvious at first sight, this and
my other reviews of Campbells books will peel this truth
out for the reader. And I may add with a certain emphasis
that my own productions share Campbells view or Emer-
sons view of heroism, as an ideal of human perfection, and
are intended to play counter to the present hubris of the su-
perhuman that pervades our media to a point of nausea and
dominates the video game scene, and hereby perverts the
soul of our young at its very root.
The books of Joseph Campbell had a strong impact on
my own books because of a similarity of concepts. My own
coaching ideal is in strong opposition to the current main-
23
stream approach to life coaching that is based on social

values and modeling, while mine is based on soul values
and selfbuilding. I have found much flesh in Campbells
books for my soul-based coaching approach, and The Hero
With a Thousand Faces is a real initiation in the mythology
of soul and its archetypes. The ex-
tended oeuvre of Carl Jung would be
another example that reveals the truth
here, and that refreshingly counters
the stereotypes the current media cov-
erage suffers from.
More than in Campbells other books,
here he takes an archetype-based ap-
proach for presenting a wealth of mate-
rial from mythology and the folk lore of olden times and of
all times, a lore that defines the hero as a basic novelty, a
unique brew of characteristics and a specific energy that
puts its mark upon the world, whatever stands in the way,
thereby creating and changing culture.
The archetypal journey of the hero is laid out in the
chapter headings, Departure (I-1), Initiation (I-2), Return
(I-3), Keys (I-4), Emanations (II-1), Virgin Birth (II-2), Trans-
formations (II-3), Dissolutions (II-4).
Campbell defines the hero as a being in transformation,

and thus open for change, flexibly intelligent, and ready to
leave behind the old serpent skins of his earlier evolution-
ary changes and personal story.
24
BOOK REVIEWS
But what really distinguishes the hero from the ordi-

nary man is that he follows but his star, to paraphrase
Dante, and that he models only his
or her own self, yet by doing so,
and here is the other paradox, sets
the personal mission on the public
stage and makes out of it what the
Romans called res publica.
Thus, the hero is defined by the

fact of overcoming not only personal limitations but also
selfish orientations, having set the stage for a transpersonal
outcome of his or her particular mission.
This paradox is what contradicts the make-believe of
value-based life coaches and their endlessly (and boringly)
self-adoring promotional discourses: it is the fact that for
bringing about transpersonal realization, not abnegation of
self is needed, but affirmation of self, not victory over self-
ish needs in the sense Stephen R. Covey uses the term, but
listening to these needs through a constant focus inside and
an open ear for our inner child, the main creative energy in
us. The ad nauseam hypocrite discourse of most of these
coaches is exposed through their own self-marketing
rhetoric that puts one aspect in the public spot: sales.
When I become a salesman of myself, I have sold my

soul long before I even started, and when I promote such
doing as ultimate success and entrain others to do the same
false game, then I am not facilitating human potential, but
25
I am manipulating human potentiality in turning peoples

attention to a neurotic obsession called making money.
Campbell puts the rebirth of the hero in
our focus, which others call second
birth and which aligns us with our spiri-
tual family, and often alienates us from
the blood family, the charmer in us who
wants to please the whole world, the
pedigree, the primal horde of home sweet
home, and the eternal and eternally devastating codependence
within the modern nuclear family that smashes the childs
striving for autonomy and self-reliance by manipulating
childrens emotional and sexual life in the name of the
child's own best. Campbell writes:
The hero is the man or woman who has been able to battle
past his personal and local historical limitations to the gen-
erally valid, normally human forms. () The hero has died
as a modern man; but as eternal manperfected, unspecific,
universal manhe has been reborn./19-20
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell puts a par-

ticular stress on using introspection as a deliberate tool for
gaining self-knowledge and strength, the unique force that
animates the hero, his creative energy:
Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic implements

of creative genius and can be employed as a deliberate de-
vice. It drives the psychic energies into depth and activates
the lost continent of unconscious infantile and archetypical
images./64
26
BOOK REVIEWS
Campbell sees the uniqueness and the power of the

hero not only in specific talents, and personal strength, or a
certain alignment with universal laws, but also in the re-
lease of a specific energy that, using cross-cultural insights
and comparisons, he identifies as the cosmic life force that
animates all sentient beings.
The human paradox is that the
specific realization of personal en-
ergy in the form of spiritual energy
is brought about not by abnegation
of self and focus on ideals, but in
the contrary through a deliberate
and long-term focus on ones specific
energy. This energy, paradoxically,
strongest is visible not in our good
deeds, but in our bad ones, and
especially in those attributed to our
shadow.
Its our shadow, our inner daimon as Socrates called it,

that most originally expresses the essence of our being, and
its by dialoguing with this instance, and not by repressing
it, that we realize our full spiritual nature. Its by integrat-
ing the demonic in us, not by slaying it, not by discarding
it out and relegating it to the underworld, or hell, that we
realize the divine energy, in alignment with the oldest of
hermetic traditions, to be found in the writings of Hermes
Trismegistos and the Eleusinian mysteries. Campbells mes-
sage is important for understanding what the true hero is
27
and what the false hero is, and as a consequence to eventu-

ally see that what is thriving today in Americas popular
culture is not heroism, but false heroism. It is not by striv-
ing to be superhuman but by accepting to being only hu-
man that we become fully human. Thus, its by accepting
our simple yet colorful humanity that we realize the spiri-
tual man and woman in us.
And for this to bring about, we have to focus on our
inner world, not on outer sense-givers. And most impor-
tantly we have to avoid those who come with instant con-
cepts for self-realization and their quick fixes. The soul ab-
hors quick fixes, and instant solutions, and it prefers the
convoluted and slow liberation from our inner maze, the
Minotaurean labyrinth.
Theseus Slays the Minotaur
28
BOOK REVIEWS
Quotes
The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings,
terrors, and deluding images up into the mind
whether in dreams, broad daylight, or insanity; for the
human kingdom, beneath the floor of the compara-
tively neat little dwelling that we call our conscious-
ness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves.
There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide:
the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that
we have not thought or dared to integrate into our
lives. And they may remain unsuspected, or, on the
other hand, some chance word, the smell of a land-
scape, the taste of a cup of tea, or the glance of an eye
may touch the magic spring, and then dangerous mes-
sengers begin to appear in the brain. These are dan-
gerous because they threaten the fabric of the security
into which we have built ourselves and our family. But
they are fiendishly fascinating too, for they carry keys
that open the whole realm of the desired and feared
adventure of the discovery of the self. Destruction of
the world that we have built and in which we live, and
of ourselves within it; but then a wonderful recon-
struction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and
fully human lifethat is the lure, the promise and ter-
ror, of these disturbing night visitants from the mytho-
logical realm that we carry within. /8
The hero is the man or woman who has been able to

battle past his personal and local historical limitations
to the generally valid, normally human forms. ... The
hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man
perfected, unspecific, universal manhe has been re-
born. /19-20
Willed introversion, in fact, is one of the classic im-

plements of creative genius and can be employed as a
deliberate device. It drives the psychic energies into
29
depth and activates the lost continent of unconscious

infantile and archetypical images. 64
It is not difficult for the modern intellectual to concede

that the symbolism of mythology has a psychological
significance. Particularly after the work of the psycho-
analysts, there can be little doubt, either that myths are
of the nature of dream, or that dreams are sympto-
matic of the dynamics of the psyche. Sigmund Freud,
Carl G. Jung, Wilhelm Stekel, Otto Rank, Karl Abra-
ham, Gza Rheim, and many others have within the
past few decades developed a vastly documented
modern lore of dream and myth interpretation; and
though the doctors differ among themselves, they are
united into one great modern movement by a consid-
erable body of common principles. With their discov-
ery that the patterns and logic of fairy tale and myth
correspond to those of dream, the long discredited
chimeras of archaic man have returned dramatically to
the foreground of modern consciousness. /255
And so, to grasp the full value of the mythological fig-

ures that have come down to us, we must understand
that they are not only symptoms of the unconscious
(as indeed are all human thoughts and acts) but also
controlled and intended statements of certain spiritual
principles, which have remained as constant through-
out the course of human history as the form and nerv-
ous structure of the human physique itself. /257
Briefly formulated, the universal doctrine teaches that

all the visible structures of the worldall things and
beingsare the effects of a ubiquitous power out of
which they rise, which supports and fills them during
the period of their manifestation, and back into which
they must ultimately dissolve. This is the power
known to science as energy, to the Melanesians as
mana, to the Sioux Indians as wakonda, the Hindus as
shakti, and the Christians as the power of God. Its mani-
30
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festation / in the psyche is termed, by the psychoana-

lysts, libido. /257-258
Therefore, God and the gods are only convenient

means themselves of the nature of the world of
names and forms, though eloquent of, and ultimately
conducive to, the ineffable. They are mere symbols to
move and awaken the mind, and to call it past them-
selves. /258
This recognition of the secondary nature of the per-

sonality of whatever deity is worshipped is character-
istic of most of the traditions of the world. In Chris-
tianity, Mohammedanism, and Judaism, however, the
personality of the divinity is taught to be finalwhich
makes it comparatively difficult for the members of
these communions to understand how one may go
beyond the limitations of their own anthropomorphic
divinity. The result has been, on the one hand, a gen-
eral obfuscation of the symbols, and on the other, a
god-ridden bigotry such as is unmatched elsewhere in
the history of religion. /258, Note 5
31
Occidental Mythology
New York: Penguin Arkana, 1991
Review
Occidental Mythology, to say it coarsely, renders the
murder culture eventually comprehensive. It is Campbells
merit to have unveiled Isis a second time, after the first veil
was torn down on her by Helena Blavatsky, in her book Isis
Unveiled, by showing how it all came about. It all started
with a murder, the murder of the Goddess, and the one
murder became the mold of all the murders perpetrated
thereafter.
And he, the scholar, politely talks about ambivalence
and inversion when the word to use was perversion when he
states that the basic symbols of the Bible address a picto-
32
BOOK REVIEWS
rial message to the heart that exactly reverses the verbal

message addressed to the brain, and that this nervous
discord inhabits both Christianity and Islam as well as Ju-
daism, since they too share in the legacy of the Old Testa-
ment.
We do have a constant rhetoric in the Bible that uses the

word love as a strange kind of balm for the wounds torn by
murder, rape and the eternal hate of the female.
There is about no other holy book around in the world,
of any other religion, that abounds of such a flagrant con-
tradiction between right and rape, or, to use a lighter pair of
opposites, between pope and porn. And yet, that perversion
was not born with man, but with patriarchal man, and pa-
triarchy was not the first egg:
For it is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of

the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-
herders from the north and Semitic sheep-and-goat-herders
33
from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world,
there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic,
vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life
that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for
whom not the patient toil of earth but the battle spear and its
plunder were the source of both wealth and joy./21
The fury of fire and sword was

later so well depicted by Riane
Eisler, in her book The Chalice and
the Blade (1995), but Campbell had
the courage to unveil the murder
paradigm long before Eisler.
The moralistic neurosis as the stiffening point of depar-
ture of patriarchy was well identified by Campbell as an
infantile thinking in opposites that typically is marked by
an almost total absence of holistic intuition, association
and synthesis.
The solar worldview, as Campbell called it, indeed is
marked by the deep hypocrisy brought about by the wor-
ship of the Yang-Good-Righteous-High-Noble-Virtuous and
the demonization of Yin-Bad-Evil-Low-Ordinary-Abject, pro-
jecting the first on the male, and the latter on the female. If
such kind of abysmal black-and-white worldview would
be a historical artifact, we could smile about it and relegate
it to the history department.
But we are not yet beyond the solar worldview; it even be-
comes popular today, with religious and political funda-
mentalism, and a widespread moralistic attitude pervad-
34
BOOK REVIEWS
ing public discussions. And one may ask why humanity

has developed hypocrisy in the first place? Campbell ex-
plains:
As the mother of all living, Eve herself, then, must be recog-

nized as the missing anthropomorphic aspect of the mother-
goddess. And Adam, therefore, must have been her son as
well as spouse: for the legend of the rib is clearly a patriar-
chal inversion (giving precedence to the male) of the earlier
myth of the hero born from the goddess Earth, who returns
to her to be reborn./30
The consumerist confusion/illusion represents exactly

this: the son-mother conflict where the son is withheld from
mating with peer girls and driven, by force of a cultural im-
perative, to love his mother erotically, which represents the
ultimate cultural perversion of natural love.
And its exactly what todays Western morality silently
conveys and wherefore I call it an Oedipal Culture.
It keeps children from mating with peers, projecting
their libido on toys and video games and their parents, as
35
love surrogates. And it has erected a myth so abysmal as

none ever existed in human culture and history, the myth
of the Oedipus Complex that erects the pseudo-incestuous and
codependent love between mother and son as the cultural ideal,
suggesting that human psychosexual growth was depend-
ent on the homosexual identification with the father and
the heterosexual fixation upon the mother.
Its this emotional, sexual, social and cultural perver-

sion of natural love that brings about all the violence in
present-day international culture and that has driven it in
the past to engage in slavery and rampant genocide.
Millions of American natives were killed, and the hid-
den reason for this genocide was that they were not obey-
ing to the oedipal perversion and lived their sexuality in a
non-sadistic and completely nonjudgmental way, as chil-
dren and adolescents.
36
BOOK REVIEWS
And Campbell long precedes Eislers reports of a ma-

triarchal reign of peace and partnership contrasting strongly
with the later murder culture, and having had its peak in
Crete, the great Minoan civilization.
See Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (1995) and Sacred
Pleasure (1996)
And Campbell, citing Martin P. Nilsson, does not hide

the impact that this difference had upon sexual mores:
The culture, as many have noted, was apparently of a matri-

archal type. The grace and elegance of the ladies in their
beautifully flounced skirts, generous dcollet, pretty coif-
fures, and gay bandeaux, mixing freely with the men, in the
courts, in the bull ringlovely, vivid, and vivacious, gesticu-
lating, chattering, even donning masculine athletic belts to
go somersaulting dangerously over the horns and backs of
bullsrepresent a civilized refinement that has not been of-
ten equaled since : which I would like the present chapter to
fix firmly in place, by way of a challenge to the claims of
those proudly phallic moral orders, whether circumcised or
uncircumcised, that were to follow. (...) And the observation
37
must finally be added that all references to sexual life, all

phallic symbols, such as abound and are so aggressive in /
numerous religionsincluding the historic religion of
Greeceare in Minoan art completely missing./62-63
When the peaceful, emotionally intelligent, wistful and

abundantly joyful Minoan Civilization was raped, ravaged
and burnt to ashes, there was a total upside-down move-
ment that Campbell well describes as a rewriting of my-
thology, that resulted in attributing to most deities the ex-
act opposite values they have had before.
I dont know any terms that better describe what today

we would call cultural brainwashing. And the rub is that
we are the result of that brainwashing, for we are the chil-
dren of that murder culture, the fruit of stupidity, and not
the breed of an enlightened and mother-loving earth cul-
ture.
That is why our morality is deeply perverted, caught in
an upside-down movement, because it was put upside
down in these olden times of terror, rape and plundering
of all those various out-groups that had strange gods
(Genesis 35, 4) and that Yahweh had decided to extermi-
nate. And the new morality that came up at that time of
early patriarchy and that is erected into eternal memory by
the Code of Hammurabi, was the fruit of that fundamental
distortion of values that went along with the total rape and
destruction of all goddess-worshippers, and it was from
that time that the female and all its attributes became de-
monized:
38
BOOK REVIEWS
The Babylonian epic of Creation is a forthright patriarchal

document, where the female principle is devaluated, to-
gether with its point of view, and, as always happens when a
power of nature and the psyche is excluded from its place, it
has turned into its negative, as a demoness, dangerous and
fierce./86
And here we see why the serpent had to become a de-

mon, and a seducer, and why todays psychedelic quest is
persecuted in most Western countries, while its truly a re-
ligious quest coming from a respectful attitude toward
mother nature and the wistful spirits of nature that it bears
and that can teach us, heal us and purify us.
This is how by studying this invaluable book by Joseph
Campbell we have the unique opportunity, informed and
enlightened about the infamous betrayal we as a culture
are the victim of, to help people get out of the cultural con-
fusion back into a culture of natural love where children
are respected, and not emotionally and sexually abused,
within an extended family instead of being imprisoned in
a nuclear family where they have no choice than to project
their libido perversely upon their parents and are often
taken as codependent ersatz mates.
Patriarchy has made of abuse an automatism! It has
institutionalized abuse. It has built abuse right in its cul-
tural and social setting. It has made abuse inevitable, and
this is logically so, as it came about by rape and abuse, by
murder and by torture, and through ravaging the children
of the enemy, as the ultimate candy and pleasure boost
39
when the strong-and-righteous were taking over the non-

believers, and as the Bible reports it so vividly And we can
even go as far as saying that patriarchy is per se a form of
ritual abuse of nature. And that is why we have to aban-
don it and not for any other, slightly less important, rea-
son!
Quotes
However, certain exclusively Occidental complications
result from the fact that, where two such contradictory
final terms as God and Man stand against each other,
the individual cannot attach his allegiance wholly to
both. On the one hand, as in the Book of Job, he may
renounce his human judgment in the face of what he
takes to be the majesty of God: Behold, I am of small
account; what shall I answer thee? Or, on the other
hand, as in the manner of the Greeks, he may stand by
his human values and judge, according to these, the
character of his gods. The first type of piety we term
religious and recognize in all traditions of the Levant:
Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. The
other we term, in the broadest sense, humanistic, and
40
BOOK REVIEWS
recognize in the native mythologies of Europe: the

Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic. /4
For it is now perfectly clear that before the violent en-

try of the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Ar-
yan cattle-herders from the north and Semitic sheep-
and-goat-herders from the south into the old cult sites
of the ancient world, there had prevailed in that world
an essentially organic, vegetal, non-heroic view of the
nature and necessities of life that was completely re-
pugnant to those lion hearts for whom not the patient
toil of earth but the battle spear and its plunder were
the source of both wealth and joy. In the older mother
myths and rites the light and darker aspects of the
mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and
together, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriar-
chal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed
to the new, heroic master gods, leaving to the native
nature powers the character only of darknessto
which, also, a negative moral judgment now was
added. For, as a great body of evidence shows, the so-
cial as well as mythic orders of the two contrasting
ways of life were opposed. Where the goddess had
been venerated as the giver and supporter of life as
well as consumer of the dead, women as her represen-
tatives had been accorded a paramount position in
society as well as in cult. Such an order of female-
dominated social and cultic custom is termed, in a
broad and general way, the order of Mother Right.
And opposed to such, without quarter, is the order of
the Patriarchy, with an ardor of righteous eloquence
and a fury of fire and sword. /21-22
The patriarchal point of view is distinguished from the

earlier archaic view by its setting apart of all pairs-of-
oppositesmale and female, life and death, true and
false, good and evilas though they were absolutes in
themselves and not merely aspects of the larger entity
of life. This we may liken to a solar, as opposed to lu-
41
nar, mythic view, since darkness flees from the sun as

its opposite, but in the moon dark and light interact in
the one sphere. /27
As the mother of all living, Eve herself, then, must be

recognized as the missing anthropomorphic aspect of
the mother-goddess. And Adam, therefore, must have
been her son as well as spouse: for the legend of the
rib is clearly a patriarchal inversion (giving precedence
to the male) of the earlier myth of the hero born from
the goddess Earth, who returns to her to be reborn.
/30
The mythic lunar bull, lord of the rhythm of the uni-

verse, to whose song all mortality is dancing in a
round of birth, death, and new birth, was called to
mind by the sounds of the drum, strings, and reed
flutes of the temple orchestras, and those attending
were set in accord thereby with the aspect of being
that never dies. The beatific, yet impassive, enigmatic
Mona Lisa features of the bull slain by the lion-bird
suggest the mode of being known to initiates of the
wisdom beyond death, beyond changing time.
Through his death, which is no death, he is giving life
to the creatures of the earth, even while indicating,
with his lifted forefoot, the leftward horn of the mythic
symbol. /56-57
For, as we know from an ancient Sumerian myth,

heaven (An) and the earth (Ki) were in the beginning a
single undivided mountain (Anki), of which the lower
part, the earth, was female, and the upper, heaven,
male. /57
And the observation must finally be added that all

references to sexual life, all phallic symbols, such as
abound and are so aggressive in numerous religions
including the historic religion of Greeceare in Mi-
42
BOOK REVIEWS
noan art completely missing./62-63 (Citing Martin P.

Nilsson).
The culture, as many have noted, was apparently of a

matriarchal type. The grace and elegance of the ladies
in their beautifully flounced skirts, generous dcollet,
pretty coiffures, and gay bandeaux, mixing freely with
the men, in the court, in the bull ringlovely, vivid,
and vivacious, gesticulating, chattering, even donning
masculine athletic belts to go somersaulting danger-
ously over the horns and backs of bullsrepresent a
civilized refinement that has not been often equaled
since : which I would like the present chapter to fix
firmly in place, by way of a challenge to the claims of
those proudly phallic moral orders, whether circum-
cised or uncircumcised, that were to follow. /62
And a contrast no less evident sets the Cretan world

apart from the kingly states of both Sumer and the
Nile. Its mythology and culture appear to represent an
earlier stage than theirs of Bronze Age civilization : a
milder, gentler day, antecedent to the opening of the
great course of Eurasian world history that is best
dated by the wars and victory monuments of its self-
interested kings. There were no walled cities in Crete
before the coming of the Greeks. There is little evi-
dence of weapons. Battle scenes of kingly conquest
play play no role in the setting of the style. The tone is
of general luxury and delight, a broad participation by
all classes in a genial atmosphere of well-being, and
the vast development of a profitable commerce by sea,
to every port of the archaic world and evenboldly
to regions far beyond. /62
I am taking pains in this work to place considerable

stress upon the world age and symbolic order of the
goddess; for the findings both of anthropology and of
archeology now attest not only to a contrast between
the mythic and social systems of teh goddess and the
43
later gods, but also to the fact that in our own Euro-
pean culture that of the gods overlies and occludes
that of the goddesswhich is nevertheless effective as
a counterplayer, so to say, in the unconscious of the
civilization as a whole. /70
Psychologically and sociologically, the problem is of

enormous interest ; for, as all schools of psychology
agree, the image of the mother and the female affects
the psyche differently from that of the father and the
male. Sentiments of identity are associated most im-
mediately with the mother; those of dissociation, with
the father. Hence, where the mother image preponder-
ates, even the dualism of life and death dissolve in the
rapture of her solace ; the worlds of nature and the
spirit are not separated; the plastic arts flourish elo-
quently of themselves, without need of discursive elu-
cidation, allegory, or moral tag; and there prevails an
implicit confidence in the spontaneity of nature, both
in its negative, killing, sacrificial aspect (lion and dou-
ble ax), and in its productive and reproductive (bull
and tree). /70
The formula here is already that of the standard Orien-

tal tyrant state, where the role of the monarch, gained
by human means, is represented as a manifestation of
the will and grace of the creator and supporter of the
universe. Piety, justice, and concern for the welfare of
the people guarantee the righteousness of his reign.
And the celestial orb to which the monarch is now lik-
ened is no longer the silvery moon, which dies and is
resurrected and is light yet also dark, but the golden
sun, the blaze of which is eternal and before which
shadows, demons, enemies, and ambiguities take
flight. /75
The new age of the Sun God has dawned, and there is
to follow an extremely interesting, mythologically con-
fusing development (known as solarization), whereby
44
BOOK REVIEWS
the entire symbolic system of the earlier age is to be

reversed, with the moon and the lunar bull assigned to
the mythic sphere of the female, and the lion, the solar
principle, to the male. /75
Such a mythology [that of the warrior gods] represents

an actual historical substitution of cult : in both these
instances, that of an intrusive patriarchal over an ear-
lier matriarchal system. And in both cases, too, the
main intention of the cosmic genealogy was to effect a
refutation of the claims of the earlier theology in favor
of the gods and moral order of the later. /76
It is an effect of the conquest of a local matriarchal or-

der by invading patriarchal nomads, and their reshap-
ing of the local lore of the productive earth to their
own ends. It is an example, also, of the employment of
a priestly device of mythological defamation, which
has been in constant use (chiefly, but not solely, by
Western theologians) ever since. It consists simply in
terming the gods of other people demons, enlarging
ones own counterparts to hegemony over the uni-
verse, and then inventing all sorts of both great and
little secondary myths to illustrate, on the one hand,
the impotence and malice of the demons and, on the
other, the majesty and righteousness of the great god
or gods. It is used in the present case to validate in
mythological terms not only a new social order but
also a new psychologyand to this extent must be
understood as in a certain sense representative not of
sheer fraud but of a new truth : a new structure of
human thought and feeling, overinterpreted as of
cosmic reach. /80
The Bible represents a later stage in the patriarchal

development, wherein the female principle, repre-
sented in the earlier Bronze Age by the great goddess-
mother of all things and in this epic by a monstrous
demoness, is reduced to its elemental state, tehom, and
45
the male deity alone creates out of himself, as the

mother alone had created in the past. /86
Remaining, for the present, with the Babylonian text,

we note, first, that the god has brought about by vio-
lence what the goddesswho is still recognized as
she who fashions all thingswould have brought
about spontaneously of herself, if let alone. /86
It [The Babylonian epic of Creation] is a forthright pa-

triarchal document, where the female principle is de-
valuated, together with its point of view, and, as al-
ways happens when a power of nature and the psyche
is excluded from its place, it has turned into its nega-
tive, as a demoness, dangerous and fierce. And we are
going to find, throughout the following history of the
orthodox patriarchal systems of the West, that the
power of this goddess-mother of the world, whom we
have here seen defamed, abused, insulted, and over-
thrown by her sons, is to remain as an ever-present
threat to their castle of reason, which is founded upon
a soil that they consider to be dead but is actually
alive, breathing, and threatening to shift. /86
And a second point to be noted is that with this turn

from the plane of the mother to that of the sons, the
sense of the identity of life and death disappears, to-
gether with that of the power of life to bring forth its
own good forms, so that all now is strife and effort,
defamation of what is alien, pretentiousness, gran-
diloquence, and a lurking sense of guilt: which is
epitomized, finally, in the myth of the origin of man-
kind from the blood of abominated Kingu, to be sub-
ject to, and of service to, the gods though God knows
(as do you and I) that Kingu had actually a greater
right to his Tablet of Destinies than the lord Marduk,
who had simply might. /87
46
BOOK REVIEWS
He is still described as two-thirds god and one-third

man; but as a tyrant, unbridled in arrogance, who
leaves not the son to his father leaves not the maid
to her mother. /87
And that is why the Serpent Power of Immortal Life,

which formerly was known as a property of man, was
taken away and now remains apartin the keep of the
cursed serpent and defamed goddess, in the lost para-
dise of the innocence of fear. /92
The world is full of origin myths, and all are factually

false. /95
In a late Sumerian myth retold in Oriental Mythology

it is declared that men were created to relieve the gods
of the onerous task to filling their fields. Men were to
do that work for them and provide them with food
through sacrifice. Marduk, too, created man to serve
the gods. And here again we have man created to keep
a garden. /103
47
Oriental Mythology
The Masks of God
New York: Penguin Arkana, 1962, reprint 1992
Review
When we want to learn what the difference is between
our culture and its patriarchal roots, so well described by
Campbell in Occidental Mythology, then we are on a path of
48
BOOK REVIEWS
synthesis, and of unification. Campbell expresses it in with

the terms The Indian point of view is metaphysical, poeti-
cal; the biblical, ethical and historical.
We could also say that the Oriental mind is better able

to tolerate opposites instead of being trapped by them as the
typical Westerner, and as a result can assume the simulta-
neous existence and non-existence of any element, god or
truth. Or, to use a modern terminology, the Eastern mind
does not need the ridiculous magic tricks of a quantum
physics circus in order to understand that life is essentially
paradox and that, therefore, the most important to teach to
children in school is paradoxical and non-dualistic think-
ing.
This is what Campbell calls the still point of eternity, as

the spiritual field beyond the dual nature of physical ap-
pearances.
From this wistful point of departure of non-dualism,
the Oriental mind fosters not opposition to nature, such as
the patriarchal Western mind, but acceptance of all nature,
including human nature. The social outflow of this world-
view is the acceptance of ones position in the group, in the
cultural and social setting.
There is in old Indian culture and philosophy, and even
still today, a strong focus upon the all-in-all, the feeling of
being inhabited by a greater scheme of intelligence as that
of the intellectual mind, and the divine is seen as inhabit-
ing non-human and inorganic life as well.
49
From this insight, a culture was created that teaches the

dialogue with self not only as a personal hygiene and relig-
ious quest, but also as a cultural imperative. In fact, the
true religion is not what we in the West have been taught,
that is, by indoctrination and the more or less stringent rit-
ual abuse of children, and true philosophy is not what we
in the West have been taught, that is debating, discussing
and hair-splitting the very content of living.
Religion is this inner dialogue that very few in the West

have heard of, and that is daily experience for Asians, dur-
ing meditation.
Campbell puts this process in very eloquent terms:
One has but to alter ones psychological orientation and rec-

ognize (re-cognize) what is within. Deprived of this recogni-
tion, we are removed from our own reality by a cerebral
shortsightedness which is called in Sanskrit maya delusion
(from the verbal root ma, 'to measure, measure out, to form,
to build', denoting, in the first place, the power of a god or
demon to produce illusory effects, to change form, and to
appear under deceiving masks; in the second place, 'magic',
the production of illusions and, in warfare, camouflage, de-
ceptive tactics; and finally, in philosophical discourse, the
illusion superimposed upon reality as an effect of ignorance.
Instead of the biblical exile from a geographically, histori-
cally conceived garden wherein God walked in the cool of
the day, we have in India, therefore, already c. 700 B.C.
(some three hundred years before the putting together of the
Pentateuch), a psychological reading of the great theme./13
50
BOOK REVIEWS
As a result, and not surprisingly so, Eastern culture has

forged, long ago, a valid set of techniques that help us
bring about this inner unity that is alignment, peace, and
inner growth, and called it Yoga. And what is meditation?
Campbell has put up a very eloquent image taken from
the observation of nature:
The analogy is given of the surface of a pond blown by a

wind. The images reflected on such a surface are broken,
fragmentary, and continually flickering. But if the wind
should cease and the surface become still nirvana: beyond
or without (nir-) the wind (vana)we should behold, not
broken images, but the perfectly formed reflection of the
whole sky, the trees along the shore, the quiet depths of the
pond itself, its lovely sandy bottom, and the fish. We should
then see that all the broken images, formerly only fleetingly
perceived, were actually but fragments of these true and
steady forms, now clearly and steadily beheld. And we
should have at our command thereafter both the possibility
of stilling the pond, to enjoy the fundamental form, and that
of letting the winds blow and waters ripple, for the enjoy-
ment of the play (lila) of the transformations. One is no
longer afraid when this comes and that goes; not even when
the form that seems to be oneself disappears. For the One
that is all, forever remains: transcendentbeyond all; yet
also immanentwithin all./28
As to the old Taoist religion from China, the oldest re-

ligion of humanity, Campbells Oriental Mythology contains
invaluable source references from age-old scriptures and
poetic works, such as the works of Chuang Tzu. In the fol-
51
lowing passage, Campbell cites Chuang Tzu, Book VI, Part

I, Section VI. 2-3:
The True Men of old knew nothing either of the love of life
or the hatred of death. Entrance into life occasioned them no
joy; the exist from it awakened no resistance. Composedly
they went and came. They did not forget what their begin-
ning had been, and they did not inquire into what their end
would be. They accepted their life and rejoiced in it; they
forgot all fear of death and returned to their state before life.
Thus there was in them what is called the want of any mind
to resist the Tao, and of all attempts by means of the Human
to assist the Heavenly. Such were they who are called True
Men. Being such, their minds were free from all thought;
their demeanor was still and unmoved; their foreheads
beamed simplicity. Whatever coldness came from them was
like that of autumn; whatever warmth came from them was
like that of spring. Their joy and anger assimilated to what
we see in the four seasons. They did in regard to all things
what was suitable, and no one could know how far their ac-
tion would go./28
I havent found a better description of the integrity of

the Taoist sages and their unifying and non-harming, re-
spectful worldview, and their true integration of nature in
all its forms and expressions. And what few have been able
to elucidate, the difference between the Indian and the
Chinese mind, Campbell has ventured into and he came
out with a quite elaborate distinction. Even more eloquent
and daring, when comparing Indian and Japanese relig-
ious customs and spiritual traditions, Campbell writes:
52
BOOK REVIEWS
These, then, are the signatures of the two major provinces of

the Orient, and although, as we shall see, India has had its
days of joy in the ripple of the waves and the Far East has
cocked its ear to the song of the depth beyond depths, never-
theless in the main, the two views have been, respectively,
All is illusion: let it go, and All is in order: let it come; in
India, enlightenment (samadhi) with the eyes closed; in Ja-
pan, enlightenment (satori) / with the eyes open./29-30
And then again comparing the religions of the Far East

with our strange and somewhat perverted Middle Eastern
religious tradition, with all its inherent strive, all its inher-
ent conflict, and all its violence, Campbell wistfully con-
cludes:
Whereas in the greater Orient of India and the Far East, such
a conflict of man and God, as though the two were separate
from each other, would be thought simply absurd./32-33
It is absurd to fight for gods, instead of fighting for good.

And what we see today in all those moral wars insti-
gated by the most morally committed country of the world,
which is paradoxically the country with the highest man-
slaughter and child abuse statistics of the entire globe, is
exactly that: fighting for the (few) new gods of the political
pantheon, instead of fighting for the good of all humanity.
God and Good have a common root, but when people
are dedicated to rooting out evil, they typically also root out
God, because good and evil, God and Devil, are one. Only
that they, in their hubristic blindness cant see what every
child knows: that only those complain in school about the
53
bad teachers who are the last on the list. An excellent stu-
dent can well go along with a mediocre teacher while a
mediocre student will hardly benefit from an excellent
teacher.
And this is what Oriental religion teaches: be yourself
your own light, and when you are, the absence of light in
your neighbor will not bother you nor instigate in you the
fervent wish to enlighten him or her. Because he has got
his own (inner) god.
Quotes
There was never a time when time was not. /3
Those who have identified themselves with the mortal

body and its affections will necessarily find that all is
painful, since everythingfor themmust end. But
for those who have found the still point of eternity,
around which allincluding themselvesrevolves,
54
BOOK REVIEWS
everything is acceptable as it is; indeed, can even be

experienced as glorious and wonderful. /3
The first duty of the individual, consequently, is sim-

ply to play his given roleas do the sun and moon,
the various animal and plant species, the waters, the
rocks, and the starswithout resistance, without fault;
and then, if possible, so to order his mind as to iden-
tify its consciousness with the inhabiting principle of
the whole. /3-4
The dreamlike spell of this contemplative, metaphysi-

cally oriented tradition, where light and darkness
dance together in a world-creating cosmic shadow
play, carries into modern times an image that is of in-
calculable age. In its primitive form it is widely known
among the jungle villages of the broad equatorial zone
that extends from Africa eastward, through India,
Southeast Asia, and Oceania, to Brazil, where the basic
myth is of a dreamlike age of the beginning, when
there was neither death nor birth, which, however,
terminated when a murder was committed. /4
To this day seven or eight hundred goats are slaugh-

tered in three days in the Kalighat, the principle tem-
ple of the goddess in Calcutta, during her autumn fes-
tival, the Durga Puja. /5
Man has been made not to be God but to know, honor,

and serve him; so that even the king, who, according
to the earlier mythological view, had been the chief
embodiment of divinity on earth, was now but a priest
offering sacrifice in tendance to One abovenot a god
returning himself in sacrifice to Himself. /7
And if man should taste of both fruits he would be-

come, we have been told, as God himself (Genesis
3:22)which is the boon that the meeting of East and
West today is offering to us all. /9
55
The Indian point of view is metaphysical, poetical; the

biblical, ethical and historical. /11
In the Indian view, on the contrary, what is divine here

is divine there also; nor has anyone to wait or even
to hopefor a day of the Lord. For what has been
lost is in each his very self (atman), here and now, re-
quiring only to be sought. /12
One has but to alter ones psychological orientation

and recognize (re-cognize) what is within. Deprived of
this recognition, we are removed from our own reality
by a cerebral shortsightedness which is called in San-
skrit maya delusion (from the verbal root ma, to meas-
ure, measure out, to form, to build, denoting, in the
first place, the power of a god or demon to produce
illusory effects, to change form, and to appear under
deceiving masks; in the second place, magic, the pro-
duction of illusions and, in warfare, camouflage, de-
ceptive tactics; and finally, in philosophical discourse,
the illusion superimposed upon reality as an effect of
ignorance). Instead of the biblical exile from a geo-
graphically, historically conceived garden wherein
God walked in the cool of the day, we have in India,
therefore, already c. 700 B.C. (some three hundred
years before the putting together of the Pentateuch), a
psychological reading of the great theme. /13
The Indian term yoga is derived from the Sanskrit

verbal root yui, to link, join, or unite, which is related
etymologically to yoke, a yoke of oxen, and is in
sense analogous to the world religion (Latin religio),
to link back, or bind. Man, the creature, is by religion
bound back to God. However, religion, religio, refers
to a linking historically conditioned by way of a cove-
nant, sacrament, or Koran, whereas yoga is the psy-
chological linking of the mind to that superordinated
principle by which the mind knows. Furthermore, in
yoga what is linked is finally the self to itself, con-
56
BOOK REVIEWS
sciousness to consciousness; for what had seemed,

through maya, to be two are in reality not so; whereas
in religion what are linked are God and man, which
are not the same. /14
In other words, spiritual maturity, as understood in

the modern Occident, requires a differentiation of ego
from id, whereas in the Orient, throughout the history
at least of every teaching that has stemmed from India,
ego (ahamkara: the making of the sound I) is im-
pugned as the principle of libidinous delusion, to be
dissolved. /15
The Chinese diagram symbolic of the tao represents

geometrically an interplay of two principles: the yang,
the light, masculine or active, hot, dry, beneficent,
positive principle; and its opposite, the yin, dark,
feminine, passive, cold, moist, malignant, and nega-
tive. () In the Sung period [1127-1279 A.D.] this dia-
gram was considered to be a sign of the phases of the
moon. () What this diagram represents geometri-
cally is the mystery of the one circumference that be-
comes two and yields, then, the ten thousand things of
creation. /24
The archaic psychological theory implied in this defi-

nition [Yoga is the (intentional) stopping of the spon-
taneous activity of the mind stuff] holds that within
the gross matter of the brain and body there is an ex-
tremely volatile subtle substance, continually active,
which assumes the forms of everything presented to it
by the senses, and that by virtue of the transforma-
tions of this subtle matter we become aware of the
forms, sounds, tastes, odors, and pressures of the outer
world. /27
The analogy is given of the surface of a pond blown by

a wind. The images reflected on such a surface are
broken, fragmentary, and continually flickering. But if
57
the wind should cease and the surface become still

nirvana: beyond or without (nir-) the wind (vana)
we should behold, not broken images, but the per-
fectly formed reflection of the whole sky, the trees
along the shore, the quiet depths of the pond itself, its
lovely sandy bottom, and the fish. We should then see
that all the broken images, formerly only fleetingly
perceived, were actually but fragments of these true
and steady forms, now clearly and steadily beheld.
And we should have at our command thereafter both
the possibility of stilling the pond, to enjoy the fun-
damental form, and that of letting the winds blow and
waters ripple, for the enjoyment of the play (lila) of the
transformations. One is no longer afraid when this
comes and that goes; not even when the form that
seems to be oneself disappears. For the One that is all,
forever remains: transcendentbeyond all; yet also
immanentwithin all. /28
[Citing Chuang Tzu, Book VI, Part I, Section VI. 2-3:]

The True Men of old knew nothing either of the love of
life or the hatred of death. Entrance into life occa-
sioned them no joy; the exist from it awakened no re-
sistance. Composedly they went and came. They did
not forget what their beginning had been, and they did
not inquire into what their end would be. They ac-
cepted their life and rejoiced in it; they forgot all fear
of death and returned to their state before life. Thus
there was in them what is called the want of any mind
to resist the Tao, and of all attempts by means of the
Human to assist the Heavenly. Such were they who
are called True Men. Being such, their minds were free
from all thought; their demeanor was still and un-
moved; their foreheads beamed simplicity. Whatever
coldness came from them was like that of autumn;
whatever warmth came from them was like that of
spring. Their joy and anger assimilated to what we see
in the four seasons. They did in regard to all things
what was suitable, and no one could know how far
their action would go. /28
58
BOOK REVIEWS
But whereas the usual point of view and goal of the

Indian has always been typically that of the yogi striv-
ing for an experience of the water stilled, the Chinese
and Japanese have tended, rather, to rock with the rip-
ple of the waves. Compared with any of the basic
theological or scientific systems of the West, the two
views are clearly of a kind; however, compared with
each other in their own terms, they show a diametric
contrast: the Indian, bursting the shell of being, dwells
in rapture in the void of eternity, which is at once be-
yond and within, whereas the Chinese or Japanese,
satisfied that the Great Emptiness indeed is the Mover
of all things, allows things to move and, neither fear-
ing nor desiring, allowing his own life to move with
them, participates in the rhythm of the Tao. /29
These, then, are the signatures of the two major prov-

inces of the Orient, and although, as we shall see, In-
dia has had its days of joy in the ripple of the waves
and the Far East has cocked its ear to the song of the
depth beyond depths, nevertheless in the main, the
two views have been, respectively, All is illusion: let it
go, and All is in order: let it come; in India, enlight-
enment (samadhi) with the eyes closed; in Japan, en-
lightenment (satori) / with the eyes open. /29-30
Greek theology was not formulated by priests nor

even by prophets, but by artists, poets and philoso-
phers /30
The mythology, consequently, remains fluid, as poetry;

and the gods are not literally concretized, like Yahweh
in the garden, but are known to be just what they are:
personifications brought into being by the human
creative imagination. They are realities, in as much as
they represent forces both of the macrocosm and of the
microcosm, the world without and the world within.
/31
59
Whereas in the greater Orient of India and the Far

East, such a conflict of man and God, as though the
two were separate from each other, would be thought
simply absurd. /32-33
Two mighty motives run through the mythologies and

religions of the world. They are not the same. They
have different histories. The first and the earlier to ap-
pear we may term wonder in one of another of its
modes, from mere bewilderment in the contemplation
of something inexplicable to arrest in daemonic dread
or mystic awe. The second is self-salvation: redemp-
tion or release from a world exhausted of its glow. /35
60
BOOK REVIEWS
The Power of Myth

(With Bill Moyers), ed. by Sue Flowers
New York: Anchor Books, 1988
Review
The Power of Myth is an extraordinary book because its
not a book, but a typescript of radio dialogues. Its the most
lively of all Campbell books and I would recommend it for
everyone who has little time to read more of the great
61
scholar, or who is a bit at pains with reading highly aca-

demic stuff. The book can be savored word for word, it can
be read aloud, it can be read in bed, as night lecture, and it
will always give a fascinating read.
I read it in an extraordinarily short time, just because I

could not stop. Bill Moyers is a sensible interviewer and he
surely had a liking for interviewing the Great Campbell;
his sympathy for him is not to be overlooked, and was
definitely conducive to bringing about a great document of
the deeper thoughts of Campbell.
And by way of doing, there couldnt be any rigid sys-
temic overview upfront, just because that would have in-
terrupted the vivid flow of the dialogue.
Campbell initiates the dialogue with a general thought
on our highly cherished split-science that still goes along,
or should I say, creeps along, in its Cartesian coat, so that
you can be sure that scientist-specialist A has no idea of
what does scientist-specialist B, except that they meet for a
glass of beer and find out about each others daily work.
Campbell notes:
62
BOOK REVIEWS
Now, the person who isnt a specialist, but a generalist like

myself, sees something over here that he has learned from
one specialist, something over there that he has learned from
another specialistand neither of them has considered the
problem of why this occurs here and also there./11
Campbell, responding to Moyers questions, illustrates

much from the material he has presented in Occidental My-
thology, perhaps because the content is so much richer in
controversial stuff, and certainly also because it bears a di-
rect link to our own culture. Somehow he expresses some
deep truths that he well mentioned in that larger book of
his, in a more stringent and convincing fashion, for exam-
ple regarding the Christian ideal of brotherhood, and how it
was applied in practice:
Now brotherhood in most of the myths I know of is confined

to a bounded community. In bounded communities, aggres-
sion is projected outward. For example, the ten command-
ments say, Thou shalt not kill. Then the next chapter says,
Go into Canaan and kill everybody in it. That is a bounded
field. The myths of participation and love pertain only to the
in-group, the the out-group is totally other. This is the sense
of the world gentilethe person is not of the same order.
/28
Campbell leaves no doubt that this myth indeed tells

us an important story about present times, and that it has
forged some of our really controversial values. They were
essentially forged through that in-group versus out-group
thinking that goes back to our Biblical past:
63
The Hebrews were absolutely ruthless with respect to their

neighbors. (...) That is to say, love and compassion are re-
served for the in-group, and aggression and abuse are pro-
jected outward on others. Compassion is to be reserved for
members of your own group. The out-group is to be treated
in a way described there in Deuteronomy. Of course, in bib-
lical times, when the Hebrews came in, they really wiped out
the Goddess. The term for the Canaanite goddess thats used
in the Old Testament is the Abomination.
Apparently, throughout the period represented in the Book

of Kings, for example, there was a back and forth between
the two cults. Many of the Hebrew kings were condemned
in the Old Testament for having worshiped on the mountain-
tops.
Those mountains were symbols of the Goddess. And there

was a very strong accent against the Goddess in the Hebrew,
which you do not find the Indo-European mythologies. Here
you have Zeus marrying the Goddess, and then the two play
together. So it's an extreme case that we have in the Bible,
and our own Western subjugation of the female is a function
of biblical thinking./215, 216
64
BOOK REVIEWS
It seems that since those early times of patriarchy, hu-

manity is entangled in one tight knot of violence, and it is our
major trinity of religions that have helped this knot to be so
tight. It is not one of these religions, but all three of them,
Judaism, Christianity and Islam that are sworn into this
kind of thinking.
However, Eastern culture and religions offer a counter-
point here, and Campbell puts it very eloquently when he
says:
Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within
us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in
the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the
worlds, are within us. They are magnified dreams, and
dreams are manifestations in image form of the energies of
the body in conflict with each other. That is what myth is.
Myth is a manifestation in symbolic images, in metaphorical
images, of the energies of the organs of the body in conflict
with each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants
that./46
When we realize that the devil we see in the out-group

is but our own shadow, we are very little inclined to go out
and kill all scapegoats in the form of ethnic, racial or sexual
minorities. And here we are again in midst of Occidental
Mythology when Moyers asks Campbell about the Chris-
tian story where the serpent is the seducer. And Campbell
to reply:
That amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradi-

tion we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural im-
pulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized.
65
The serpent was the one who brought sin into the world.
And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man.
This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent
with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist hat has been
given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of
the Fall./54
Campbells reply is highly interesting for it amounts of

saying that the biblical tradition really is founded on an
anti-life attitude, on an opposition to nature, and as a result,
an opposition of man against woman. And even more inter-
esting is the fact that when Moyers asked Campbell if he
had found this idea of woman as a sinner in other my-
thologies, Campbell declined:
No, I dont know of it elsewhere. ... The serpent, who dies

and is resurrected, shedding its skin and renewing its life, is
the lord of the central tree, where time and eternity come
together. He is the primary god, actually, in the Garden of
Eden. Yahweh, the one who walks there in the cool of the
evening, is just a visitor./54
Campbells answer is in alignment with the oldest of

traditions, that affirms the serpent to be the god of the gods,
the ultimate spiritual force of the universe.
66
BOOK REVIEWS
This is also the teaching of the old Chinese sages and of

the natives from the Americas. But to depict Yahweh as a
visitor, who walks there in the cool of the evening as just
a visitor is really an interesting idea that I have never found
elsewhere.
Campbell implicitly says in this important statement

that what Riane Eisler called the truncation of civilization
through the reversal of the symbolism after the cultural
rape of matriarchy through the patriarchal hordes, has not
really taken place, not on the level of the unconscious, not
in mythology, but only in outward reality. Campbell sug-
gests here that what he called the counterplayer to patriar-
chy, the Serpent-Goddess, is still active on the level of the
unconscious, and probably also on the level of the collec-
tive unconscious, relegating the New God to the status of
a visitor. Moyers investigates further and Campbell re-
traces the historical facts:
There is actually a historical explanation based on the com-

ing of the Hebrews into Canaan and their subjugation of the
67
people of Canaan. The principal divinity of the people of

Canaan was the Goddess, and associated with the Goddess
is the serpent. This is the symbol of the mystery of life. The
male-god-oriented group rejected it. In other words, there is
a historical rejection of the Mother Goddess implied in the
story of the Garden of Eden./55
It could not be clearer, and the principal consequence

of this rejection of the Goddess is in Campbells view an
implicit rejection of the unitary principle in nature, the unity
of all living as we find it so highly acclaimed and wor-
shipped in Hinduism and Buddhism. Campbell explains
that we deal here with a true shift in consciousness from
the consciousness of identity to the consciousness of participa-
tion in duality. As the dialogue develops, it becomes more
focused and more general, and eventually turns to asking
what myth is about, what mythology does, and what it
should do. Campbell asserts that the ancients myths were
designed to harmonize body and mind, and to bring man in
touch with nature, and the nature in himself.
Another very general question that comes up is who
rules whom in a democracy, and what that word means.
Campbell makes it clear that the rule of the majority

does not regulate our values, but only day-to-day politics,
because in thinking , the majority is always wrong.
This is a very important insight as there are many
young people today who simply over-adapt to society be-
cause of their fear to be different from the herd. Instead of
living their own life, and their own love, they ask what the
68
BOOK REVIEWS
majority does and thinks, thereby annihilating their soul

power and exposing themselves to being shunned by the
good citizens that make out all majorities of the world.
These young people would certainly profit from read-

ing Campbells books, and in addition I would recommend
them to read Emersons essay Self-Reliance.
Finally, the conversation takes a very interesting turn,
and its becoming actuality centered. Campbell, taking the
Star Wars plot as a fancy example, voices his deepest con-
cerns at what could be called the Darth Vader reality of
modern culture:
Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. Hes a

robot. Hes a bureaucrat, living not in terms of himself but in
terms of an imposed system. This is the threat to our lives
that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out
and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to
make use of the system to the attainment of human pur-
poses? How do you relate to the system so that you are not
compulsively serving it? It doesnt help to try to change it to
accord with your system of thought. The momentum of his-
tory behind it is too great for anything really significant to
evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do is to learn to
live in your period of history as a human being. Thats some-
thing else, and it can be done./178
And from here, Campbell goes to show how the schizo-

phrenic crackup comes about in many of our young people
today because they are filled with the ignorant recipes of
popular culture instead of being resourced by their own
soul reality:
69
If the person insists on a certain program, and doesnt listen

to the demands of his own heart, hes going to risk a schizo-
phrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off center.
He has aligned himself with a program for life, and its not
the one the bodys interested in at all. The world is full of
people who have stopped listening to themselves or have
listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to
do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that
they should be living for./181
This is why I am saying in my books that today psy-

chosis and collective paranoia have become staged where
Freud, about a hundred years ago, was mainly concerned
with a society that was deeply neurotic. We are at a turning
point. Neurosis is really a joke compared to the dangers of
a paranoid character structure, which is that of modern
man, and especially that of our young generations.
70
BOOK REVIEWS
And global international consumer culture really does

all it can to heat up that collective psychosis, to fire up the
cultural demons, the many shadows it creates through dis-
carding more and more behavior forms out of its official
and politically correct paradigm of living, thereby creating
miles of prison space for all those that are not exactly walk-
ing on-the-line.
A paranoid culture cannot establish real and valid rules

because it has no real and valid self-image, and its public
opinion is not worth a penny because it consists mainly of
modern myths, even though most of these myths are scien-
tifically corroborated.
In a society where more than seventy percent of all sci-
entists are funded by the military, it is absolutely no prob-
lem to get a scientific backup for the latest top-notch geno-
cide technology. But the masses of chewing-gummers run
along with their slaughter-leaders because they havent got
any real education and really dont know whats going on.
71
And thats why, as it is written, they will one day bless

their own destruction!
Despite all, Campbell passionately encourages young peo-

ple to go their own way instead of complying with the end-
less and most of the time perverse demands of their par-
ents. Campbells message is uplifting for all of us because
its positive, and because its human in a time where in-
humanity seems to get the overhand, and he shows us that
we have to find our strength inside because we all have ex-
traordinary gifts and resources:
I dont think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal.

Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experi-
ence of life. All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivate
it and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when
people speak about ordinary mortals because Ive never met
an ordinary man, woman, or child./205
When Campbell voiced his opinion that he found the

idea of God as Absolute Order simply ridiculous, the dis-
cussion took a very interesting turn.
72
BOOK REVIEWS
Moyers asks if the courage to love, in the troubadour

tradition of the dark ages became the courage to affirm
ones own experience against tradition and why that was
important for our cultural evolution? Truly, an intelligent
question. Campbell replies:
It was important in that it gave the West this accent on the

individual, that one should have faith in his experience and
not simply mouth terms handed down to him by others. It
stresses the validity of the individuals experience of what
humanity is, what life is, what values are, against the mono-
lithic system. The monolithic system is the machine system:
every machine works like every other machine thats come
out of the same shop./234
I think here we are at an angular point of our Western

tradition, if I may now look at its positive values. When I
can say that the Western system, while its moralistic in its
base setup, is not a monolithic system, then I can come up
with the daring idea, which is the Ariadne thread in all my
writings, that love, human love and desire, is a transforma-
73
tional lever not only for individual growth, but also for so-
ciety at large. Campbell affirms:
The best part of the Western tradition has included a recog-

nition of and respect for the individual as a living entity. The
function of the society is to cultivate the individual. It is not
the function of the individual to support society./239
The idea is paramount in the history of Western indi-

vidualism and here we encounter what the wisdom tradi-
tion has called The Holy Grail. What is that about? Camp-
bell explains:
The Grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that is lived

in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse sys-
tem, that carries itself between the pairs of opposites of good
and evil, light and dark./245
The individual love quest is always a manifestation of

the larger desire to become an individual, to gain true auton-
omy, to be self-reliant and powerful, and this quest, as its
not on the line of societys rules and customs, can never be
respectable, to paraphrase Krishnamurti. Campbell notes:
Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in

terms of the socially approved manners of life. That's why it
is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order./254
When we recognize that love is on a different level

than social order, we can realize our love, and logically so,
will realize it not on the lines of social order and majoritar-
ian approval, which is exactly what I am saying in all my
writings.
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BOOK REVIEWS
Quotes
Now, the person who isnt a specialist, but a generalist
like myself, sees something over here that he has
learned from one specialist, something over there that
he has learned from another specialist - and neither of
them has considered the problem of why this occurs
here and also there. /11
If you undergo a spiritual transformation and have not

yet prepared for it, you do not know how to evaluate
what has happened to you, and you get the terrible
experiences of a bad trip, as they used to call it with
LSD. If you know where you are going, you wont
have a bad trip. /18
I have a feeling that consciousness and energy are the

same thing somehow. Where you really see life energy,
theres consciousness. /18
Now brotherhood in most of the myths I know of is

confined to a bounded community. In bounded com-
munities, aggression is projected outward. ( ) For
example, the ten commandments say, Thou shalt not
kill. Then the next chapter says, Go into Canaan and
kill everybody in it. That is a bounded field. The
myths of participation and love pertain only to the in-
group, the the out-group is totally other. This is the
sense of the world gentilethe person is not of the
same order. /28
(Bombings in Beirut) Its a terrible example of the fail-

ure of religion to meet the modern world. These three
mythologies are fighting it out. They have disqualified
themselves for the future. /30
Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are
within us. This is the great realization of the Upani-
shads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods,
75
all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us. They are
magnified dreams, and dreams are manifestations in
image form of the energies of the body in conflict with
each other. That is what myth is. Myth is a manifesta-
tion in symbolic images, in metaphorical images, of
the energies of the organs of the body in conflict with
each other. This organ wants this, that organ wants
that. /46
There are certain characteristics of dreams that can be

enumerated, no matter who is dreaming them. /49
You dont kid yourself by eating only vegetables, ei-

ther, for they, too, are alive. /50
And from the Upanishads: Then he realized, I indeed,

I am this creation, for I have poured it forth from my-
self. In that way he became this creation. Verily, he
who knows this becomes in this creation a creator. /52
Moyers: In the Christian story the serpent is the se-

ducer. Campbell: That amounts to a refusal to affirm
life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is
corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it
has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the
one who brought sin into the world. And the woman
was the one who handed the apple to man. This iden-
tification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with
sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist hat has been
given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doc-
trine of the Fall. /54
Moyers: Does this idea of woman as sinner appear in

other mythologies? Campbell: No, I dont know of it
elsewhere. The serpent, who dies and is resur-
rected, shedding its skin and renewing its life, is the
lord of the central tree, where time and eternity come
together. He is the primary god, actually, in the Gar-
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den of Eden. Yahweh, the one who walks there in the

cool of the evening, is just a visitor. /54
Moyers: But how do you explain the difference be-

tween that image and the image of the snake in Gene-
sis? Campbell: There is actually a historical explana-
tion based on the coming of the Hebrews into Canaan
and their subjugation of the people of Canaan. The
principal divinity of the people of Canaan was the
Goddess, and associated with the Goddess is the ser-
pent. This is the symbol of the mystery of life. The
male-god-oriented group rejected it. In other words,
there is a historical rejection of the Mother Goddess
implied in the story of the Garden of Eden. /55
So this is the shift of consciousness from the con-

sciousness of identity to the consciousness of partici-
pation in duality. And then you are into the field of
time. /56
The Greek legend that Aristophanes tells in Platos

Symposium is another of this kind. So we all now
spend our lives trying to find and re-embrace our
other halves. /64
Anyone writing a creative work knows that you open,

you yield yourself, and the book talks to you and
builds itself. /71
Since the inspiration comes from the unconscious, and

since the unconscious minds of the people of any sin-
gle small society have much in common, what the
shaman or seer brings forth is something that is wait-
ing to be brought forth in everyone. So when one hears
the seers story, one responds, Aha! This is my story.
This is something that I had always wanted to say but
wasnt able to say. There has to be a dialogue, an in-
teraction between the seer and the community. /71
77
The ancient myths were designed to harmonize the

mind and the body. The mind can ramble off in
strange ways and want things that the body does not
want. The myths and rites were means of putting the
mind in accord with the body and the way of life in
accord with the way that nature dictates. /87
Just read what this one author has to give you. And
then you can go read what he had read. And the world
opens up in a way that is consistent with a certain
point of view. But when you go from one author to
another, you may be able to tell us the date when each
wrote such and such a poem - but he hasnt said any-
thing to you. /122
Moyers: Is the idea Thou shalt have no other gods

before me purely a Hebraic idea? Campbell: Ive not
found it anywhere else. /125
That you have to balance between death and life - they

are two aspects of the same thing, which is being, be-
coming. /134
Its amazing: one after another, you discover these

gods who are at once of death and of generation. The
death god, Ghede, of the Haitian Voodoo tradition, is
also the sex god. The Egyptian god Osiris was the
judge and lord of the dead, and the lord of the regen-
eration of life. It is the basic themethat which dies is
born. You have to have death in order to have life.
/137
Our true reality is in our identity and unity with all

life. /138
This is reflected in the medieval idea of the injured

king, the Grail King, suffering fro his incurable
wound. The injured one again becomes the savior. It is
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the suffering that evokes the humanity of the human

heart. /140
You dont have to die, really, physically. All you have

to do is die spiritually and be reborn to a larger way of
living. /141
The great sinner is the great awakener of God to com-

passion. This idea is an essential one in relation to the
paradoxology of morality and the values of life. /145
Its characteristic of democracy that majority rule is

understood as being effective not only in politics but
also in thinking. In thinking, of course, the majority is
always wrong. /146
I always tell my students, go where your body and

soul want to go. /147
Poets are simply those who have made a profession

and a lifestyle of being in touch with their bliss. /148
Then Dad would come along and say, No, you ought
to study law because there is more money in that, you
know. Now, that is the rim of the wheel, not the hub,
not following your bliss. Are you going to think of for-
tune, or are you going to think of your bliss? /148-149
Wherever you areif you are following your bliss,

you are enjoying that refreshment, that life within you,
all the time. /150
Its quite possible to be so influenced by the ideals and

commands of your neighborhood that you dont know
what you really want and could be. I think that any-
one brought up in an extremely strict, authoritative
social situation is unlikely ever to come to the knowl-
edge of himself. /176
79
Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity.

Hes a robot. Hes a bureaucrat, living not in terms of
himself but in terms of an imposed system. This is the
threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system
going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity,
or are you going to be able to make use of the system
to the attainment of human purposes? How do you
relate to the system so that you are not compulsively
serving it? It doesnt help to try to change it to accord
with your system of thought. The momentum of his-
tory behind it is too great for anything really signifi-
cant to evolve from that kind of action. The thing to do
is to learn to live in your period of history as a human
being. Thats something else, and it can be done. /178
Metaphorically, water is the unconscious, and the crea-

ture in the water is the life or energy of the uncon-
scious, which has overwhelmed the conscious person-
ality and must be disempowered, overcome and con-
trolled. /180
When Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the

blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended
his humanity and reassociated himself with the pow-
ers of nature, which are the powers of our life, and
from which our minds remove us. /181
You see, consciousness thinks its running the shop.

But its a secondary organ of the total human being,
and it must not put itself in control. It must submit
and serve the humanity of the body. When it does put
itself in control, you get a man like Darth Vader in Star
Wars, the man who goes over to the consciously inten-
tional side. /181
If the person insists on a certain program, and doesnt

listen to the demands of his own heart, hes going to
risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put
himself off center. He has aligned himself with a pro-
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BOOK REVIEWS
gram for life, and its not the one the bodys interested
in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped
listening to themselves or have listened only to their
neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they
ought to behave, and what the values are that they
should be living for. /181
That old man up there has been blown away. Youve

got to find the Force inside you. This is why the Orien-
tal gurus are so convincing to young people today.
They say, It is in you. Go and find it. /182
The influence of a vital person vitalizes, theres no

doubt about it. The world without spirit is a waste-
land. People have the notion of saving the world by
shifting things around, changing the rules, and whos
on top, and so forth. No, no! Any world is a valid
world if its alive. The thing to do is to bring life to it,
and the only way to do that is to find in your own case
where the life is and become alive yourself. /183-184
And if you simply do what your neighbors tell you to

do, youre certainly going to be nailed down. Your
neighbors are then your dragon as it reflects from
within yourself. /184
There are people like that, and we call them creeps.

Theres no life from them, no giving. They just glue
themselves to you and hang around and try to suck
out of you their life. /184
Like all heroes, the Buddha doesnt show you the truth
itself, he shows you the way to truth. /185
This, I believe, is the great Western truth: that each of

us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are
ever to give any gift to the world, it will have to come
out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own
potentialities, not someone elses. In the traditional
81
Orient, on the other hand, and generally in all tradi-

tionally grounded societies, the individual is cookie-
molded. His duties are put upon him in exact and pre-
cise terms, and theres no way of breaking out from
them. /186-187
We must constantly die one way or another to the self-

hood already achieved. /188
For the camel, the thou shalt is a must, a civilizing

force. It converts the human animal into a civilized
human being. But the period of youth is the period of
self-discovery and transformation into a lion. The
rules are now to be used at will for life, not submitted
to as compelling thou shalts. /192
You cant have creativity unless you leave behind the

bounded, the fixed, all the rules. /194
The adventure is its own reward - but its necessarily

dangerous, having both negative and positive possi-
bilities, all of them beyond control. We are following
our own way, not our daddys or our mothers way. So
we are beyond protection in a field of higher powers
than we know. /197
Freud tells us to blame our parents for all the short-

comings of our life, and Marx tells us to blame the up-
per class of our society. But the only one to blame is
oneself. Thats the helpful thing about the Indian idea
of karma. Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You
have no one to blame but yourself. /202
I dont think there is any such thing as an ordinary

mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture
in the experience of life. All he has to do is recognize it
and then cultivate it and get going with it. I always
feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary
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mortals because Ive never met an ordinary man,

woman, or child. /205
Now, the finding of the father has to do with finding

your own character and destiny. Theres a notion that
the character is inherited from the father, and the body
and very often the mind from the mother. But its your
character that is the mystery, and your character is
your destiny. So it is the discovery of your destiny that
is symbolized by the father quest. /209
Now, today there is no out-group anymore on the

planet. And the problem of a modern religion is to
have such compassion work for the whole of human-
ity. But then what happens to the aggression? This is a
problem that the world is going to have to /face - be-
cause aggression is a natural instinct just as much as,
and more immediate than, compassion, and it is al-
ways going to be there. Its a biological fact. Of course,
in biblical times, when the Hebrews came in, they
really wiped out the Goddess. The term for the Ca-
naanite goddess thats used in the Old Testament is
the Abomination. Apparently, throughout the period
represented in the Book of Kings, for example, there
was a back and forth between the two cults. Many of
the Hebrew kings were condemned in the Old Testa-
ment for having worshiped on the mountaintops.
Those mountains were symbols of the Goddess. And
there was a very strong accent against the Goddess in
the Hebrew, which you do not find the Indo-European
mythologies. Here you have Zeus marrying the God-
dess, and then the two play together. So its an extreme
case that we have in the Bible, and our own Western
subjugation of the female is a function of biblical
thinking. /215-216
In the Old Testament, you have a God who creates a

world without a goddess. Then when you come to
Proverbs, there she is, Sophia, the Goddess of Wisdom,
83
who says, When He created the world, I was there,

and I was His greatest joy. /217
The virgin birth comes into Christianity by way of the

Greek tradition. When you read the four gospels, for
example, the only one in which the virgin birth ap-
pears is the Gospel According to Luke, and Luke was a
Greek. /217
You couldnt relate at all to something in which you

did not somehow participate. Thats why the idea of
God as the Absolute Order is a ridiculous idea. There
could be no relationship to the Absolute Order. /227
So moving back toward nature will certainly bring

forth the mother principle again. How it will relate to
the patriarchal principle I do not know, because the
organization of the planet is going to be an enormous
operation, and thats the male function, so that you
cant predict what the new thing is going to be. But
certainly nature is coming back. /227
Moyers: So the courage to love became the courage to

affirm ones own experience against tradition - the
tradition of the Church. Why was that important in the
evolution of the West? Campbell: It was important in
that it gave the West this accent on the individual, that
one should have faith in his experience and not simply
mouth terms handed down to him by others. It
stresses the validity of the individuals experience of
what humanity is, what life is, what values are, against
the monolithic system. The monolithic system is the
machine system: every machine works like every other
machine thats come out of the same shop. /234
Thats the credo. You believe, and then you go to con-

fession, and you run down through the list of sins, and
you count yourself against those, and instead of going
into the priest and saying, Bless me, father, for I have
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been great this week, you meditate on your sins, and

in meditating on the sins, then you really become a
sinner in your life. Its a condemnation, actually, of the
will to life, thats what the credo is. /234
Moyers: And libido? Campbell: The libido is the im-

pulse to life. It comes from the heart. /234
In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that

was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour
idea of real person-to-person Amor was very danger-
ous. /235
And so came this movement validating individual

choice, what I call following your bliss. /236
Yes, thats the individual. The best part of the Western

tradition has included a recognition of and respect for
the individual as a living entity. The function of the
society is to cultivate the individual. It is not the func-
tion of the individual to support society. /239
And what is the nature of the wasteland? It is a land

where everybody is living an inauthentic life, doing as
other people do, doing as youre told, with no courage
for your own life. /244
What that means is that the Christian separation of

matter and spirit, of the dynamism of life and the
realm of the spirit, of natural grace and supernatural
grace, has really castrated nature. And the European
mind, the European life, has been, as it were, emascu-
lated by this separation. The true spirituality, which
would have come from the union of matter and spirit,
has been killed. /245
Spiritual life is the bouquet, the perfume, the flower-

ing and fulfillment of a human life, not a supernatural
virtue imposed upon it. () And so the impulses of
85
nature are what give authenticity to life, not the rules

coming from a supernatural authority - thats the
sense of the Grail. () The Grail becomes symbolic of
an authentic life that is lived in terms of its own voli-
tion, in terms of its own impulse system, that carries
itself between the pairs of opposites of good and evil,
light and dark. /245
The best we can do is lean toward the light, toward the

harmonious relationships that come from compassion
with /suffering, from understanding the other person.
This is what the Grail is about. /245-246
The question is an expression, not of the rules of the

society, but of compassion, the natural opening off the
human heart to another human being. Thats the Grail.
/246
One has to build up ones own system that may vio-

late the expectations of the society, and sometimes so-
ciety doesnt accept that. But the task of life is to live
within the field provided by society that is really sup-
porting you. /247
The vandalism involved in the destruction of the pa-

gan temples of antiquity is hardly matched in world
history. /248
I think the power impulse is the fundamental impulse

in European history. And it got into our religious tradi-
tions. /248
Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing it-

self in terms of the socially approved manners of life.
Thats why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do
with social order. /254
Oriental thinking, and in primal thinking, also, the

gods are rather manifestations and purveyors of an
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BOOK REVIEWS
energy that is finally impersonal. They are not its

source. The god is the vehicle of its energy. And the
force or quality of the energy that is involved or repre-
sented determines the character and function of the
god. There are gods of violence, there are gods of
compassion, there are gods that unite the two worlds
of the unseen and the seen, and there are gods that are
simply the protectors of kings or nations in their war
campaigns. These are all personifications of the ener-
gies in play. But the ultimate source of the energies
remains a mystery. /259
Moyers: Where do these energies come from?

Campbell: From your own life, from the energies of
your own body. The different organs in the body, in-
cluding your head, are in conflict with each other. /260
When you experience your god as with form, there is

your envisioning mind, and there is the god. There is a
subject, and /there is an object. But the ultimate mysti-
cal goal is to be united with ones god. With that, dual-
ity is transcended and forms disappear. There is no-
body there, no god, no you. Your mind, going past all
concepts, has dissolved the identification with the
ground of your own being, because that to which the
metaphorical image of your god refers is the ultimate
mystery of your own being, which is the mystery of
the being of the world as well. And so this is it. /262-
263
Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling all those

scattered aspects of your life together, for finding a
center and ordering yourself to it. You try to coordi-
nate your circle with the universal circle. /271
For instance, among the Navaho Indians, healing

ceremonies are conducted through sand /paintings,
which are mostly mandalas on the ground. The person
who is to treated moves into the mandala as a way of
87
moving into mythological context that he will be iden-

tifying with - he identifies himself with the symbolized
power. This idea of sand painting with mandalas, and
their use for meditations purposes, appears also in
Tibet. Tibetan monks practice sand painting, drawing
cosmic images to represent the forces of the spiritual
powers that operate in our lives. /272
This is why clowns and clown religions are helpful.

Germanic and Celtic myths are full of clown figures,
really grotesque deities. This makes the point, I am not
the ultimate image, I am transparent to something.
Look through me, through my funny form. () Hera-
clitus said strife is the creator of all great things. Some-
thing like that may be implicit in this symbolic trick-
ster idea. In our tradition, the serpent of the Garden
did the job. Just when everything was fixed and fine,
he threw an apple into the picture. () No matter
what the system of thought you may have, it cant
possibly include boundless life. When you think eve-
rything is just that way, the trickster arrives, and it all
blows, and you get change and becoming again. /275
Theres something inside you that knows when youre

in the center, that knows when youre on the beam of
off the beam. And if you get off the beam to earn
money, youve lost your life. And if you stay in the
center and dont get any money, you still have your
bliss. /285
88
Chapter Three
The Lunar Bull
Introduction
This essay hopefully helps in your quest for your find-
ing out about your inner god or goddess.
In a society with patriarchal values, the soul will keep
the counterplayer inside, hidden, and in the dark. Thus in
a solar culture, such as ours, the counterplayer is the lunar
principle, or, as it was called in antiquity, the Lunar Bull.
If you want to become whole so as to embrace your
soul values, you have to heal that phylogenetic split be-
tween patriarchal and matriarchal culture. This split was a
historical fact and it has left imprints in our soul and our
psyche.
But while this may have been so as a matter of history,
while there have been matriarchal cultures first and patri-
archal societies later, this is not how the soul has experi-
enced these matters. Recent research has corroborated that
things are really not as clear-cut as historians thought they
were. When questioned about patriarchy and matriarchy,
many people, and among them even researchers of repute,
tend to jump to quick conclusions. They take either-or po-
sitions or they question the whole dichotomy calling it a
historic bluff.
And there are those who try to find a way out of that
hide-and-seek game that leaves very important questions
open by declaring them as obsolete. There is one author
who stands out: it is Riane Eisler.
90
THE LUNAR BULL
See, for example, Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade (1995)
and Sacred Pleasure (1996).
Riane Eisler
She has not declared the dichotomy as a historic bluff,

but showed with a lot of evidence that both of these con-
cepts never have existed in a pure form, but that in a way they
are complementary. However, in a second step, that was
perhaps more important than the first, she has looked at
the basic ingredients of each of these cultural opposites
and found remarkable, if not striking, differences. There is
one main difference that she peels out and that, once you
know about it, cannot be unthought.
91
It is the discovery that, deep down, the two concepts

differ by the way they look not at one gender, but by the
way they look at both.
Succinctly speaking, Riane Eisler found that matriarchy

is predominantly a paradigm that favors partnership relations
between the two sexes and generally between all members
in a given society, while patriarchy favors dominance and
oppression, male over female, above over below, powerful
over powerless, in the sense of strict obedience-based hier-
archies.
Without knowing more, here already, with this kind of
rudimentary knowledge as a quintessence of Eislers in-
depth research, we see that there is something of an
automatism built in patriarchy. Its the automatism of abuse.
Its as if all was setup for it to occur. Its as if the cul-
tural and social framework was exactly drafted for abuse
to happen, while abuse that is so eloquently fought, in pa-
triarchal terms, as a sin and abject behavior. While matriar-
chy tolerates it and has built rape in most of its cultural
myths, patriarchy has institutionalized rape, in all its forms,
sexual, social, racial, ethnic, military and commercial. That
is the difference.
Riane Eislers amazing research has brought to day-
light that maintaining the age-old dichotomy of matriarchal
versus patriarchal is only accurate when we describe their
psychological content, but not when we describe evolu-
tionary changes in the human setup. In truth, Eisler points
out, we are dealing with a partnership-oriented paradigm ver-
92
THE LUNAR BULL
sus a dominator paradigm, the first coming close to the idea

of matriarchy, the latter more or less synonymous with pa-
triarchy.
The merit of Eislers approach is that we can get away

from extreme positions: because there never was a really
pure matriarchy or a really pure patriarchy in human his-
tory.
When we look, for example, at
the mythology of highly patriarchal
tribes, such as the ancient Hebrews,
we find matriarchal elements, and
therefore must conclude that we got
a mix rather than a pure soup. In
that mix, to rest with the example of
the Hebrews, are predominantly pa-
triarchal elements and a few matri-
archal elements, as in yang is a small
portion of yin, and vice versa. And as Johann Jakob Bachofen
found in his classical treatise on matriarchy, even in highly
matriarchal cultures there are to be found a few elements
of patriarchy.
Originally in German language, Johann Jakob Bachofen, Das

Mutterrecht (1948).
That means that when we are using the dichotomy

matriarchal-patriarchal, we are arguing not from a real-life
perspective, but rather from our ideological understanding
of patriarchy or matriarchy.
93
What counts for us within the purpose of this essay is

the spiritual significance of matriarchy as a psychological and
archetypal complex in the collective unconscious of hu-
manity not the historical or psychohistorical evolution of
humanity.
See Lloyd deMause, Foundations of Psychohistory (1982).
Regarding the evolutionary aspect, Joseph Campbell

writes in Occidental Mythology (1973/1991) p. 21):
For it is now perfectly clear that before the violent entry of

the late Bronze and early Iron Age nomadic Aryan cattle-
herders from the north and Semitic sheep and goat herders
from the south into the old cult sites of the ancient world,
there had prevailed in that world an essentially organic,
vegetal, non-heroic view of the nature and necessities of life
that was completely repugnant to those lion hearts for
whom not the patient toil of earth but the battle spear and its
plunder were the source of both wealth and joy. In the older
mother myths and rites the light and darker aspects of the
mixed thing that is life had been honored equally and to-
gether, whereas in the later, male-oriented, patriarchal
myths, all that is good and noble was attributed to the new,
heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature powers the
character only of darknessto which, also, a negative moral
judgment now was added. For, as a great body of evidence
shows, the social as well as mythic orders of the two con-
trasting ways of life were opposed.
It is not difficult for us today to see that the symbolism

of mythology bears a specific psychological scripting. In the
perspective of psychoanalysis, and even more so, of psy-
94
THE LUNAR BULL
chosynthesis, there is little doubt that the old sagas are of

the nature of dream, or that dreams are symptomatic of the
dynamics of the psyche. Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Joseph
Campbell, Otto Rank, Karl Abraham, Gza Rheim, and
many others have within the last century developed a
vastly documented modern lore of dream and myth inter-
pretation. With our modern-day discovery that the holistic
patterns of fairy tale and myth correspond to those of
dream, the long discredited ideas of archaic man have re-
turned dramatically to the foreground of consciousness.
One of those archaic symbols or archetypes is that of
the Lunar Bull, for there is a direct relationship between
mythology and astrology. It can be said that astrology uses
mythology to a large extent in order to make
spiritual energies more visually comprehen-
sive.
When explaining the nature of the
planetary energy of Moon, for example, as-
trology will use certain metaphors.
These metaphors are embodied in symbols, and the sym-
bols, as such, build a necessary vocabulary for anybody to
study who wants to practice and explain astrology. For ex-
ample, the main symbols traditionally associated with the
Moon energy are: Cancer, Bull, Female, Shell, House, Black,
Water, Shadow.
As the mythic bulls characteristics are associated with
the lunar energies, it was called, in Antiquity, the Lunar
Bull.
95
This expression is not a fancy, even today, because the

bull fighting tradition that dates from patriarchy, has put
the whole bull mythology completely upside down.
The killing of the bull that was once a ritual sacrifice

for the Goddess as the tutelary divinity of the bull was
transformed into a sport in which the stabbing of the bull
is a symbolic rape expressing the subordination of the fe-
male under the males sexual dominion.
Thus, by analogy, the modern bull, the bull that is

stabbed and killed by the Matador within the traditional
bull fighting has quite little or nothing to do with the ma-
triarchal mythic or lunar bull. The lunar bull was the object
of worship prevalent in the age when our sun was passing
through the sign of Taurus.
96
THE LUNAR BULL
What was preserved from that time were the mysteries

of Mithras. The horns of the bull were generally a symbol
of fertility and bountiful riches in many cultures for thou-
sands of years. The constellation Taurus may also allude to
the Greek story of Europa and the Bull.
Princess Europa was daughter of King Agenor. One fine

spring day, accompanied by her hand maidens, she went
to the seashore to gather flowers.
Zeus, who had fallen in love with Europa, seized the
opportunity. Zeus transformed himself into a magnificent
white bull, and as such he joined King Agenors grazing
herd.
Europa noticed the wonderful white beast, who gazed

at them all with such a mild manner that they were not
frightened. Europa wove wreathes of flowers for the beast,
and wrapped them around his horns. She led him around
the meadow, and he was as docile as a lamb.
97
Then, as he trotted down to the seashore, she jumped

onto his shoulders. Suddenly, to her surprise and fright, he
plunged into the sea and carried the princess to Crete. As
they reached the Cretan shore, Zeus then turned into an
eagle and ravaged Europa.
She bore three sons, the first of which was Minos, who
is said to have introduced the bull cult to the Cretans. He
had Daedalus build a maze in the depths of his palace at
Knossos, which became the home of Minotaur, the off-
spring of Minos wife Pasiphae, and a bull.
Seven boys and seven maid-
ens were ritually sacrificed to the
Minotaur every year, until The-
seus killed the monster.
The Minotaur
98
THE LUNAR BULL
The Lunar Bull
The mythic lunar bull, lord of the rhythm of the universe,

to whose song all mortality is dancing in around of birth,
death, and new birth, was called to mind by the sounds of
the drum, strings, and reed flutes of the temple orchestras,
and those attending were set in accord thereby with the
aspect of being that never dies. The beatific, yet impassive,
enigmatic Mona Lisa features of the bull slain by the lion-
bird suggest the mode of being known to initiates of the
wisdom beyond death, beyond changing time. Through
his death, which is no death, he is giving life to the crea-
tures of the earth, even while indicating, with his lifted
forefoot, the leftward horn of the mythic symbol.
JOSEPH CAMPBELL, OCCIDENTAL MYTHOLOGY
What does this myth tell us? Which psychological truth

does it reveal? Let us have a deeper look at this intriguing
story. We got a seducer here, we have an abduction, a rape,
and then, as a result, a child-eating monster that eventually
is killed. And we have a bull. What does this bull stand for,
psychologically?
Experts of mythology and psychiatrists agree that the
bull, despite of his phallic horns is a symbol for matriarchy,
and this because the bull cannot be seen isolated from the
Goddess that, metaphorically and from the visual depic-
tions, stands on the shoulders of the bull. This is a meta-
phor because we would not be interested in that bull if it
99
had only a historical meaning for us. We are interested in

that bull because we have its energy within us. Joseph
Campbell affirms that all the gods are within us.
Hence the bull as a sort of matriarchal god, also is within

our own unconscious, a part of our male love instinct that
can enjoy to conquer and rape, abduct and possess, enclose
and abuse.
We are used today to a psychological language that sug-
gests all these longings were abysmal and abject and we
tend to project them, as a result of our blinding them out,
onto others that we call the monsters, perpetrators, rapists
or sex offenders and that our morning papers abound of.
Yet, all this psychological hide-and-seek is useless: we are
facing but parts of ourselves when dealing with these well-
hidden issues that often are wrapped into the folder of our
best-kept family secrets.
The bull story tells us that rape desires as part of sexual

longings are not destructive per se, but become destructive
when they are enclosed, incarcerated, tightly controlled and
100
THE LUNAR BULL
discarded out of life by strict moralistic rules. The Minotaur

became a child-eating monster because it was enclosed in a
tower, because King Minos was afraid for his reputation
and wanted to hide the monster from the populace. This
may historically have been the first time when child protec-
tion thinking was to be noted in human history, and when
the results were obviously as devastating as they are today.
We have the symbolism written into the Tarot where

The Tower, the 16th Arcane, is a symbol of something that is
too tightly controlled, to a point to explode, with all that
usually accompanies those explosionsthat most of us
have gone through, once in our lives, in one or the other
way, be it a sex scandal, a public outrage, the revelation of
a family secret, an abuse story, or criminal conviction as a
sex offender.
See, for example, Sallie Nichols, Jung And Tarot (1986).
101
And then, we ask Why has this

happened?, and we are again re-
gressing in childhood longings for
autonomy that were thwarted by
over-controlling parents or educa-
tors, and we face our rageeven-
tually. The public outrage we en-
countered was but a projection of
our own repressed inner rage. It is
because we had forgotten about
that magic library with the books that can talk, and the
wizard, and magic houses that endure, the magic of our
soulful childhood!
And back where we came from, we can eventually ask

what we really want when we want to rape, to possess, to
abduct, to ravish?
And thus we gradually, very gradually, find out that,
then, we want to find unity with soul, and make the split
undone that was forced onto us by patriarchal life-denial,
by moralism, by a schizoid education that we suffered, in-
dividually and collectively. After all, to copulate means to
link! And then we might finally ask the pertinent question:
How has patriarchy come aboutand what was before?
It all started with a murder: the murder of the God-

dess. Which is ultimately a mother-rape. And it became the
foundation of what is called a culture. It became the foun-
dation of what is called a religion. Joseph Campbell ex-
plains:
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THE LUNAR BULL
[I]n biblical times, when the Hebrews came in, they really
wiped out the Goddess. The term for the Canaanite goddess
thats used in the Old Testament is the Abomination. Appar-
ently, throughout the period represented in the Book of
Kings, for example, there was a back and forth between the
two cults. Many of the Hebrew kings were condemned in
the Old Testament for having worshiped on the mountain-
tops. Those mountains were symbols of the Goddess. And
there was a very strong accent against the Goddess in the
Hebrew, which you do not find the Indo-European mytholo-
gies. Here you have Zeus marrying the Goddess, and then
the two play together. So its an extreme case that we have in
the Bible, and our own Western subjugation of the female is
a function of biblical thinking.
Joseph Campbell, Power of Myth (1988), pp. 215, 216.
It seems that when man began to preach high morality

and confessed to strive for goodness, he began to really
become diabolic. Campbell remarks that the vandalism in-
volved in the destruction of the pagan temples of antiquity is
hardly matched in world history. (Id., p. 248).
Again we may reflect on the teaching of the Lunar Bull.

Zeus married the Goddess by raping her, and that rape ul-
timately was union and creation. While patriarchy, with its
strong emphasis on the abomination of what it labels sexual
crime is exactly embodying the perversion that it so strongly
projects upon matriarchal cults, and, today, upon matriar-
chal people.
I mean the so-called pedophiles, who are put today in
the shoes of that Goddess that early patriarchy wiped out.
103
And as their ancient precursors did, the Hammurabis

of old, the darth vaders of the modern state are out to eutha-
nize those they dont understand and who disturb their cir-
cles, by questioning their culturally sanctified paranoia.
While the true abomination is of course not matriarchy
or Goddess cults, and not rape, but a cult or religion or cul-
tural paradigm that perverts nature into a total repression of the
living impulse and that puts a single male god as the creator
principle, thereby annihilating the eternal balance of polari-
ties, manifesting as yin and yang, female and male, Moon
and Sun, red and blue, cool and hot, dry and moist, and
that restricts life to a dead morality. Campbell explains:
The patriarchal point of view is distinguished from the ear-

lier archaic view by its setting apart of all pairs-of-opposites
male and female, life and death, true and false, good and
evilas though they were absolutes in themselves and not
merely aspects of the larger entity of life. This we may liken
to a solar, as opposed to lunar, mythic view, since darkness
flees from the sun as its opposite, but in the moon dark and
light interact in the one sphere.
Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology (1973), p. 27.
Many people, even in our days of large-scale feminism,

women rights and public criticism of patriarchal tradition
and values do not really grasp the implication of patriar-
chy upon our sexual mores and sexual laws. Or they are
simply afraid to question the reigning system as deeply as
that, scratching the surface with their research.
104
THE LUNAR BULL
I have been in touch with researchers from Germany

and the United States who openly unveil and criticize the
trap of patriarchy and who also defend the sexual freedom
of children. But their rhetoric has only one leg when it goes
to see what sexual freedom for children really means!
It means free partner choice. It means that a child can
also choose an adult as a partner for play, including sex play.
Eva, by Irina Ionesco
When faced with that argument, all those researchers

that from their books sound so well-bred, well-educated
and well-groomed block off. They cease to argue and sud-
denly become dogmatic and declare that in such a case we
could not speak any more of child sexuality but about pe-
dophilia, and that the latter was invariably rape, violence
and abuse.
They assert this without having anything in hand for

the backup of their unscientific rants. That is how far our
science goes, all science goes.
105
We cannot access knowledge that we are not ready to

assimilate because we are emotionally not mature for it.
These men, while they may have many letters behind
their names and while they may be accredited at famous
universities, are but anxious children who, when it goes to
open the forbidden door, shy away and declare that there
are no forbidden doors because we lived in a democratic
society. A society so democratic obviously that it incarcer-
ates people for love!
These apparently so liberal scientists would thus forbid
their child to have an adult sex partner, while they would
allow their child to have sex with a peer. What a high form
of respect indeed! A slave is forbidden to make love with a
noble while he is graciously given the right, by his master,
to love his brothers-in-fate.
What, then, is that modern childhood else than slav-
ery? And in what those liberal parents really differ from
our patriarchal house tyrants of old? What Joseph Camp-
bell calls a solar worldview, I call a worldview where stupid-
ity has become the order of the day. To deny our shadow is
suicidal, and its exactly what a solar worldview is all
about. It denies shadow.
A picture without shadows is a one-dimensional draw-
ing of life, a shallow affair. Its sketching a life that is not
worth to be lived, because all is on one level, without ups
and downs, without excitements, the shallow boredom of a
moralist who goes to Church at fixed hours or who bows to
the ground to lick the feet of his cosmic monstermind.
106
THE LUNAR BULL
In another publication I have demonstrated that all our

major civilizations or dominator cultures since Babylonian
times almost completely disregarded eight fundamental pat-
terns of living that however pre-patriarchal cultures, and
still today most tribal cultures respect.
This denial, I showed, makes for:
our high destructivity;
our judgmental and persecutory attitudes;
our schizophrenic split between mind and body;
our belief in the superiority of the mind;
our belief in the inferiority of the body;
our dysfunctional approach to living and loving;
our hypocrite in-group and out-group morality;
our disregard for the yin principle.
The terms lunar and solar world view that Campbell

uses are derived from astrology. The bull enters the books
of world mythology in both versions as the mythic bull and
the lunar bull. And in both versions, according to Erich
Neumann, the bull on which the goddess stands is the
symbol of masculinity.
See Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (1972), p. 141, with many
reproductions of ancient sculptures featuring both types of bull. See also
the recent study of Michael Balter, The Goddess and the Bull (2006).
107
The bull is also said to have succumbed to the arche-

typal mother in matriarchal incest, which is a phantasmagoric
incest, symbolizing the closeness and symbiotic aura of the
mother-son relationship.
This phantasmagoric incest that in ancient matriarchal
rituals was put on stage dance and chant as a celebration
of creation, has quite little to do with actual incest, the pro-
totypical father-daughter incest so ingrained in patriarchy.
It is not a sexual incest, but symbolizes the need of the

young male for a healthy symbiosis with his mother, if he
is to develop his full psychosexual potential.
An important detail in those old representations of the
Goddess and her Bull is that the bull is actually in a sup-
portive role: the Goddess stands on him. He thus supports
the Goddess. The male supports the female. That is the quin-
tessential message of matriarchy.
The Three Goddesses, art photo by Jan Saudek
108
THE LUNAR BULL
That does not mean hes a servant of the female. In pa-

triarchy these poles have not just be reversed. The female
is not just supporting the male, but serves the male, includ-
ing her children. That is the substantial difference.
In matriarchy, the son supports his mother, but he is
not her servant. In patriarchy, the daughter is not just sup-
porting her father, but shes supposed to be his servant. We
have that incarnated both in the household-female and the
love-female. The wife is supposed to serve her husband.
The prostitute is supposed to serve her client. Both are
in not just a supportive role, but hold actually slave roles.
That is why we can say that patriarchy has not just re-
versed matriarchy. It has distorted it to a caricature of life
in which roles are no more naturally taken by people, but
artificially forced upon people.
See Joseph Campbell, The Hero with A Thousand Faces, (1973), pp.
258, 259, note 5:
This recognition of the secondary nature of the personality of

whatever deity is worshipped is characteristic of most of the
traditions of the world. () In Christianity, Mohammedan-
ism, and Judaism, however, the personality of the divinity is
taught to be finalwhich makes it comparatively difficult
for the members of these communions to understand how
one may go beyond the limitations of their own anthropo-
morphic divinity. The result has been, on one hand, a general
obfuscation of the symbols, and on the other, a god-ridden
bigotry such as is unmatched elsewhere in the history of re-
ligion.
109
Historical Turn
If we look at the whole span of our cultural evolution from

the perspective of cultural transformation theory, we see
that the roots of our present global crises go back to the
fundamental shift in our pre-history that brought enor-
mous changes not only in social structure but also in tech-
nology. This was the shift in emphasis from technologies
that sustain and enhance life to the technologies symbol-
ized by the Blade: technologies designed to destroy and
dominate. This has been the technological emphasis,
rather than technology per se, that today threatens all life
in our globe.
RIANE EISLER
Another important historical turn, after the one in pre-

history described by Eisler that is usually associated with
the beginnings of patriarchy is the upcoming of the school
system.
If we take Europe as an example, why and how schools
came up? In the Middle Ages, when the Church tried to
gain as much power over people as possible and indulged
in human rights abuses of all kinds, monks and nuns opened
the first schools. These schools were recruitment centers
for the monasteries. From the beginning, boys and girls
were separated in different schools. From the boys classes,
the monks the recruited, from the girls schools the nuns.
110
THE LUNAR BULL
When you read history books, the Church is cited as

the great benefactor of humanity in implementing the
school system. But the Churchs intention was first of all an
effort to sustain the power of its own worldly hierarchy
and oppression system, and second, and most importantly,
direct perception of truth was going to be wiped out from
civilization from that point in history.
Before the existence of schools, children were raised by
their parents and the other adults present in the extended
family. They learned primarily by observation and direct
perception. They picked up what they needed for their later
career, from their early environment.
It is interesting to remember, in this context, that early
language learning takes place in exactly the same way. The
young child picks up whole patterns from the language
spoken around him or her.
Research during recent years provided evidence for the
fact that this form of learning is more holistic and adapted
to the passively organizing intelligence of the human brain
than any system that has so far been implemented in
schools.
Humans generally learn their mother tongue perfectly,
whereas they cripple along learning a second or third lan-
guage later in school or at college. Only relatively recent
learning methods such as Superlearning have taken seri-
ous the wisdom of nature present in every learning experi-
ence. Think tanks such as Edward de Bono have in addi-
111
tion shown us the relevance of the brains functioning as a

passively self-organizing system.
See, for example, Lynn Schroeder, Sheila Ostrander & Nancy

Ostrander, Superlearning 2000 (1997).
From his experience as a think

tank and corporate trainer, Edward
de Bono found that our usual learn-
ing processes, such as curricula in
schools, universities or, more spe-
cifically, in management training, are
awkwardly maladapted to the way
our brain organizes and stores in-
formation.
De Bono, much in the same way as Dr. Georgi Lozanov,

psychiatrist and originator of the Superlearning method,
found that only in early childhood learning, and especially
in the way young children learn their first language, we
see natures full intelligence at work. It is a well-known
fact that geniuses such as Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso
and many others never finished school, dropped out or
flew it. They knew that they knew better and followed
their inner instinct rather than an artificial learning system
which involves a considerable waste of time and resources
and which violates human dignity in the most flagrant
way. In one word, they followed their soul and thereby re-
alized their soul reality without perhaps reflecting about it.
They did not let society condition their inner mind to a
point to crush their creative impulses. They were marginal
112
THE LUNAR BULL
in just the same way as a pedophile is marginal, or as an

autistic child is marginal, and as we as creative souls are all
marginal in front of the herd of school-fed morons.
It is not a matter of research or of statistics to draw out

the human potential, and still less when we talk about the
human soul. Every soul is marginal in the sense that it
cant be measured on the lines of science, the usual white-
wash of complexity for the masses, the perennial fascist
over-up of true human genius.
113
Murder of the Goddess
For every stoic was a stoic; but in Christendom where is

the Christian?
JOSEPH CAMPBELL
The Eternal Female
Dr. Campbells research on the religious roots of culture

is not new, but for this reason it is not less a theme of the
day.
See, for example, Joseph Campbell, The Hero With A Thousand

Faces (1973), Occidental Mythology (1973), and The Power of Myth
(1988).
For it is counteracting fascism, as it shows with such

strong evidence not only how complex the human soul is,
but also that this has to be that way if man wants to maintain
114
THE LUNAR BULL
psychic health. This astounding holistic information opens

infinite insights into how to live peacefully, resourcefully
and respectfully.
The historical shift toward stupidity was a profound shift

in human consciousness, opening a deep schizoid gap that
some explain esoterically with an alien manipulation of the
human DNA. But even if we stay with the historical facts
alone and see their symbolic and archetypal content, we
must acknowledge that something went wrong at that
point in human evolution.
Riane Eisler, in her best-selling study The Chalice and
The Blade (1995) called it the truncation of civilization. It was
the unwritten historical vow of many to deny their human-
ity and follow the course of atrocious violence that began
with the slaughtering of peaceful and nature-abiding cul-
tures by the new arrogant patriarchal hordes and their vio-
lent, jealous and blood-thirsty God Yahweh, and psycho-
logically a turn from permissiveness to moralistic repres-
sion.
Wilhelm Reich called it the irruption of compulsory sex-
morality, whereas Campbell qualifies it as the power im-
pulse [being] the fundamental impulse in European his-
tory [that] got into our religious traditions.
See Wilhelm Reich, The Irruption of Compulsive Sex-Morality,

(1971) and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988), p. 248.
As Reich and other psychoanalysts clearly showed, this

power obsession, that lasts until today in our Western cul-
115
ture, was from the start a sort of cultural cancer as the result
of the denial of nature and mans arrogant claim to improve
creation and make it better, thereby destroying it. It is by
repressing primary power and breeding depression that the
thirst for power was taking big dimensions in our culture,
until this day. It was the denial of primary power that was at
the origin of this cultural perversion. Joseph Campbell ob-
served that the gravity of this historical shift was so deep
and lasting that even the mythological and archetypical sym-
bolism changed with it:
The new age of the Sun God has dawned, and there is to fol-
low an extremely interesting, mythologically confusing de-
velopment known as solarization, whereby the entire sym-
bolic system of the earlier age is to be reversed, with the
moon and the lunar bull assigned to the mythic sphere of the
female, and the lion, the solar principle, to the male.
Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology (1973/1991), p. 75.
It was the real beginning of the apocalypse, for all that

came later and that we face today as facts of life are but re-
sults and consequences of the profound shift that took
place at this time. It was the shift from matriarchy to patri-
archy or, in new terminology, the shift from a partnership
culture to a dominator culture.
The great majority of authors before the new perspective brought

up by Riane Eisler were founding their terminology on Bachofens
study Das Mutterrecht (The Matrilineal Order) that was first published
as early as in the 1920s and similar studies by Bronislaw Malinowski
and Wilhelm Reich in the 1930s. All these authors spoke from a shift of
matriarchy to patriarchy.
116
THE LUNAR BULL
Joseph Campbell acknowledges the dominance of the

patriarchal gods since then in our Western cultural para-
digm, but he considers the goddess as the counterplayer in
the collective unconscious and thus assigns her at least a
shadow role. In Occidental Mythology (1973), p. 70, Joseph
Campbell remarks:
I am taking pains in this work to place considerable stress

upon the world age and symbolic order of the goddess; for
the findings both of anthropology and of archeology now
attest not only to a contrast between the mythic and social
systems of the goddess and the later gods, but also to the fact
that in our own European culture that of the gods overlies
and occludes that of the goddesswhich is nevertheless ef-
fective as a counterplayer, so to say, in the unconscious of the
civilization as a whole.
This shadow role of the Goddess in Christianity is sym-

bolized by the Holy Virgin, and it is sexually fantasized
about as a secret wish to defile, debauch and rape virgins.
See R.E.L. Masters, Forbidden Sexual Behavior and Morality

(1951), p. 387 who observes:
It is ironic that where the desire to defile, humiliate or oth-

erwise sadistically abuse children is concerned, it is so often
the very notion of the childs purity and innocence that leads
to the violation.
In fact, how can a deity that originally stood for fertil-

ity become an eternal virgin? When we study Greek my-
thology, we see that the original mother goddess was Deme-
ter, while the Churchs virgin cult suggests that her daugh-
117
ter Persephone, a girl abducted by Hades, god of the un-

derworld, became the new, castrated, Virgin Mother.
In Greek mythology, Persephone, daughter of the earth goddess

Demeter became the queen of the underworld after her abduction by
Hades.
And Hades represents the psychologically and socially

rejected sexual longing for virgins, for little girls, that be-
came suppressed in our personal and collective underworld,
the unconsciouspowerfully invoked again by American
photographer Sally Mann in the art photo below, a photo
innocently taken of her own daughter but that comes with
a huge cultural overhead of repressed sexual wishes.
From Immediate Family, by Sally Mann
118
THE LUNAR BULL
We can thus understand that the virgin cult is a direct

consequence of patriarchy and already well present in the
Hellenistic and Roman cultures, and not an invention of
the Christians. It was not surprisingly in the Victorian Era
that the virgin cult became a real sexual obsession or ma-
nia, a cult for well-to-do and noble men to rape and defile
young girls, when those were available, for example, in the
worker classes of the poor quarters in industrialized Lon-
don and other major cities of that time of the early Indus-
trial Revolution.
The female, to become acceptable in an entirely man-
dominated world, had to be deprived of her own desire,
castrated, relegated to the role of the obedient little girl.
Without desire herself, the girl-female became undesirable

as an unconscious reflex of the superegos copulation pro-
hibition. She was no more desired as a child to be lovingly
procreated by her parents, but her birth was largely con-
sidered an accident; in many cases a man who procreated
only girls or too many girls was considered weak in An-
tiquity and even through the Renaissance.
What I am saying is that with the psychological castra-
tion of the female and the moralistic prohibition of her be-
ing desirable sexually, sexuality became forever damaged,
and perverted into a voyeuristic cult that hypertrophies
the visual and neglects the tactile: the psychological roots
of pornography are to be found in the taboo to touch a fe-
male child sexually. The more sex with female children be-
came tabooed, the more the sexual female child became a
119
haunting sex obsession for males, and led to the criminal

definition of rape, originally a property offense.
See, Florence Rush, The Best Kept Secret (1980), and Riane Eisler,
The Chalice and The Blade (1995).
Rape originally meant theft, and this can be well shown

in French, where the word for theft is vol and for rape viol.
In Antiquity, to possess a female child sexually meant
in most cases to abduct her, a fact that is well established in
Greek mythology in the story of Hades abducting Perse-
phone for enjoying and possessing her sexually.
In ancient patriarchy, the rape of a little girl was legally
speaking an offense against her father, a kind of property
damage that could be repaired by paying an indemnity to
the father, but not a crime against the person of the child.
(Id.)
From the Churchs modified goddess doctrine, its vir-
gin cult becomes understandable. While the god-mother is
a very old idea and existed long before Christianity, this
god-mother, for the Christians, had to be a virgin, and even
a Holy Virgin. Campbell writes in The Power of Myth (1988),
p. 217:
The virgin birth comes into Christianity by way of the Greek

tradition. When you read the four gospels, for example, the
only one in which the virgin birth appears is the Gospel Ac-
cording to Luke, and Luke was a Greek.
Behold, the doctrine of Immaculate Conception was only

valid for the conception of the Son of God. All other chil-
120
THE LUNAR BULL
dren were born in sin, from ordinary, non-virgin mothers. I

cant think of a greater perversion and distortion of nature be-
cause this mental construct means in fact that nature is
wrong and faulty and that the very denial of nature is right
and holy. Yet, if the Church had really been consequent in
their view, they would have needed to sanctify man-girl
love as the ultimate modification or culturalization of na-
ture.
The interesting pointe is that the Churchs dogma, seen

from this perspective, makes sense culturally. In addition,
it would have helped men to integrate their tender love for
the small female, a love every sensitive and cultured man
knows to appreciate, instead of disintegrating this tender
love and rendering it a shadow experience only to be experi-
enced through the rape, abduction and sometimes even
murder of little girls.
The Church could have codified love with little women
in its nonviolent and respectful dimension in a way that is
socially useful, and even biologically logical. This would
have had a peace-inducing effect on human sexuality and
would have prevented widespread sexual crime against
little girls. As in every yang, there is a small amount of yin,
visually represented by the yin-yang symbol, in the large
strong male there is a small weak female that the male can
unconsciously project upon little girls. And if the Church
had considered that it is important socially to integrate de-
sires so as to avoid violence, she could have declared what
121
today is called girllove a socially viable and acceptable sex-

ual and cultural phenomenon.
I believe that if the Church had integrated the small
female as a desirable love object, the consequences would
have been positive. We would not face terrible amounts of
female children raped, abducted and killed every month in
countries that follow the patriarchal dominator paradigm.
And we would not have had a raise of homosexuality in
our culture because homosexuality in my view is the result
of an unconscious blinding out of the desire for small fe-
males.
Thus, the Church, by the same token, would not have
had to invest so much energy for fighting homosexuality
during several centuries in its existence. The large fallback
into paganism today is the result of this denial of responsi-
bility of the Church to integrate human sexual desire in all
its forms. And by doing so the Church missed the sense of
the Grail.
According to Joseph Campbell, the grail symbolizes the respect

not of abstract rules and regulations (sexual or other ones) but respect of
nature, of creation.
The same can be projected for boylove, represented in

the Church as the love of the priest for the altar boy, and
the beautiful Sapphic love of adult females for little girls.
In older documentations of the Churchs annals, the
love of the priest for his altar boys was never questioned.
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As a matter of fact, the priest had to renounce females

as a matter of religious dogma, but that never implied that
priests had to live like eunuchs.
Metaphorically, we may say that the undesirable little

goddess was not less undesirable for the priest, but practi-
cally replaced by a desirable, and available, little god rep-
resented by the virgin altar boy. Only with sex repression
in modern times, and the fascist business of child protection
could it happen that all adult-child sexual relations became
a matter of social disapproval, even within the Church.
Many social tragedies were the result. The Babylonic
Epic of Creation amply demonstrates this fact. On the other
hand, Campbell reports in Oriental Mythology that in most
cultures the opposite paradigm was being in place, isolat-
ing Western Christian life-denial as something unique and
atrociously perverse in human evolution:
The dreamlike spell of this contemplative, metaphysically

oriented tradition, where light and darkness dance together
in a world-creating cosmic shadow play, carries into modern
times an image that is of incalculable age. In its primitive
form it is widely known among the jungle villages of the
broad equatorial zone that extends from Africa eastward,
through India, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, to Brazil, where
the basic myth is of a dreamlike age of the beginning, when
there was neither death nor birth, which, however, termi-
nated when a murder was committed.
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God (1962), p. 4.
123
The synthesis is to be found in what the Taoists called

The Tao and that Campbell calls the perfume, the flowering
and fulfillment of human life, not a supernatural virtue imposed
upon it.
See Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988), p. 245.
And like the Taoists, Campbell says that heaven and hell
are within us, and all the gods are within us. (Id., p. 46.)
Campbell makes his point clearly by telling us to over-
come the schizoid split so deeply rooted in the patriarchal
shift that occurred five thousands years ago and reminds is
about the myth of the Grail as a syncretic doctrine of love
allowed to grow beyond all borders:
The Grail becomes symbolic of an authentic life that is lived

in terms of its own volition, in terms of its own impulse sys-
tem, that carries itself between the pairs of opposites of good
and evil, light and dark. (Id., p. 245.)
And Campbell emphasizes that love is not expressing

itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life because it
has nothing to do with the social order. (Id., p. 254.)
Even more clearly, Thomas Moore, in his book Care of
the Soul (1994) states that [m]oralism is one of the most effec-
tive shields against the soul, protecting us from its intricacy.
(Id., p. 17). Thomas Moore pursues on pp. 239-240:
The souls complex means of self-expression is an aspect of

its depth and subtlety. When we feel something soulfully, it
is sometimes difficult to express that feeling clearly. At a loss
of words, we turn to stories and images. Nicholas of Cusa
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THE LUNAR BULL
concluded that we often have no alternative but to live with

enigmatic images. Since soul is more concerned with related-
ness than intellectual understanding, the knowledge that
comes from soul's intimacy with experience is more difficult
to articulate than the kind of analysis that can be done at a
distance. Soul is always in process, having, as Heraclitus
says, its own principle of movement; so it is difficult to pin
down with definition or a fixed meaning. When spirituality
loses contact with soul and these values, it can become rigid,
simplistic, moralistic, and authoritarian - qualities that be-
tray a loss of soul.
Reich stated this fact in similar terms in his book Chil-

dren of the Future (1950), p. 44:
Moralism only increases the pressure of crime and guilt, and

never gets at or can get at the roots of the problem.
Finally, I wish to address that senseless control para-

digm of life-denying society that has brought about the
split between so-called ers-inspired and agap-inspired love.
Reich appears to anticipate Riane Eislers research for al-
most a century when he stated, at p. 204:
The splitting of sexuality into debased sensuality and trans-

figured love, which generates entire systems of philosophy
on the problem of sexuality and eroticism is nothing more
than an expression of the dominant position of the man and,
in addition, a consequence of the efforts of distinguished
hypocrites to set themselves apart from the masses by adopt-
ing a special morality.
The moralists, however, only have eyes for what occasion-

ally, in their opinions, confirms their theory. They do not see
125
and do not even want to see that their doctrines do not apply
to the mass of young people, and they duck responsibility
for what will happen in the future if people follow their
teachings. (Id., 197)
Reich explains something very important for our quest

to reunite with natures wisdom and overcome our socially
programmed and culturally sanctified alienation, our split
existence; it is the fact that when the emotional nature of
humans is not bent and has not been thwarted early and
life, we are naturally sane, both emotionally and sexually.
To say it crudely, men and women who are sane and

natural wont abduct, rape and murder children because of
lust for child sex; hence, moralisms reasoning about the
impossible human is essentially a perception error, and so
are our sex laws and the whole body of behavior rules that
more or less implicitly assume that when people are unob-
served, and let free, they will indulge in perverse acts of all
kinds and jeopardize the friendly togetherness of the
community. Reich pursues accordingly, on p. 208:
Sexual responsibility is automatically present in a healthy,

satisfying sexual life.
It is this dependence on parental care and authority which

the Church immediately enters the fray to defend, equipped
with all the machinery of stultification and platitudes about
an avenging God, his eternal will, and his wise foresight in
its attempt to translocate marriage and family to divine re-
gions far removed from the real world. (Id., 214-215)
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THE LUNAR BULL
Reichs position is clearly for a free emotional and sex-

ual life of children as a conditio sine qua non for overcoming
the life-denying patriarchal plague:
The means which such parental homes use to bring their

children to heel consist essentially of sexually intimidating
and crippling them and making them afraid of their sexual
desires, thoughts, and deeds. (Id., 215)
When the Tao was lost, Lao-tzu wrote in the Tao Te

Ching, the schizoid spirit of dualism began to build images
of ideal substance.
Instead of recognizing substance as eternal change,

expressed in the yin-yang alternation of ever-changing evo-
lution, the schizoid thinkers began to split the world into
what they called the miserable state of the world, on one
hand, and the ideal paradise-like state of heavenly existence, on
127
the other. Despising the origin of their very existence, that

is Mother Earth or Gaia, they began to despise and fear the
essence of earth, the sparkling spirit of abundant creation,
naming it serpent or devil.
Having condemned the source of their bliss, the inhabi-
tants of a split world were making for the ground of their
profound unhappiness and paranoia.
Instead of striving for harmony and accepting all-that-
is, they transformed in their madness peaceful together-
ness into innumerable wars that they proclaim as
War-of-the-sexes;
War-for-survival;
War-against-evil;
War-against-drugs;
War-against-perversity;
War-against-abuse;
War-against-pedophilia;
and so forth.
Everyone with a minimum of brain and insight in the

history of fascism knows that these are but blindfolding
slogans that serve an agenda today called New World Or-
der, formerly called Third Reich or otherwise, an agenda
that is clearly set to gradually do away with civil rights
and make the world save for the next abusive tyrant who
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is going to wipe constitutional guarantees under the carpet

of state-ordained violence and hypocrisy.
But even if it wont get to that point, which we all hope
of course, the result is still a world full of strife, tension,
conflict, mistrust, and a perverse rat-race for material gain
and dominance. This new, and even larger, international
dominator culture is currently spreading all over the world
and our modern global consumer culture is its latest, and
most appalling, offspring.
Taoism, by contrast, teaches that the seeker of truth

does not will to consume or dominate the object of his
love. The lover of the original state of existence who stud-
ies the Tao, the spontaneous principle of creation, is a lover of
all of nature, without splitting his or her existence off in
judgments and opinions about this-and-that.
129
This was recognized in olden times all over the world,

but has been forgotten and is today carefully veiled behind
the lies of violent moralism.
This is however not a new phenomenon, as the same,

only regionally more limited, was occurring when China
became a feudal state. Lao-tzu then retired into the moun-
tains and wrote in the Tao Te Ching:
The more laws and restrictions there are,

The poorer people become.
The more rules and regulations,
The more thieves and robbers.
The wise does not discriminate between the sexes, rec-

ognizing that yin, the female principle, was first in creation
and is more encompassing than yang, the male principle.
That is why the wise man who is inspired by the Tao
will not nourish an exclusive preference for one of the
sexes nor for any specific age group when looking for a
partner because he knows that in relating only to yin, his
yang force will overflow and damage his inner yin, and
that by relating only to yang, his yin force will overflow
and damage his inner yang. As a result of this fact, and be-
cause of his self-knowledge, the sage does not reject any-
thing; he is not influenced by the split-paradigm that says
There are adults, and there are children, as if talking about
two different races.
Knowing that all things are nourished by the Tao of spon-

taneous creation and change, the wistful lover recognizes
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THE LUNAR BULL
the values of care, love and parenthood in other adults; he

does not attack the family order nor the order of the state.
The wistful lover does not reject the world, nor does he
need to make for an ideal or paradise-like state of happi-
ness. He is happy by accepting all-that-is, and the world as
it is, by not trying to do creation better than the Tao.
Art Photo by Sally Mann
We have created total confusion in our relationships,

and put the love principle upside-down, demonized what is
naturally beautiful and enriching and put up false values
that render us shallow and mean, and full of suspicion and
fear.
To justify what we see is producing still more confu-
sion and destruction, and in order to veil our millenary
stupidity, we blame nature and human nature.
131
While it is so obvious that its the perversion of nature

and human nature that has created the mess and brings
about the destruction, but not this nature herself, we go on
affirming that nature was wrong and not to be trusted and
our so-called scientific mind could correct the errors in inher-
ent in nature.
The Murder Culture

No murder can happen without being preceded by a mur-
der inside of us way before we set out to kill in the first
place.
The very desire to kill comes about through the schiz-
oid split created by killing something within ourselves.
Our past millennia of collective murder and genocide
were preceded by the killing of one of our internal oppo-
sites and thus upsetting the natural balance of yin and yang
within us: by condemning and tightly regulating sexual
pleasure or certain forms of it, by achieving to interfere with
and repress the natural emotional flow in the lives of our
children, we have distorted the natural order, and turned
upside-down the subtle energy flow, not only in the hu-
man being but, as all is connected, also in the stratosphere
of the earth, the planetary energies within our galaxy and
the intergalactic energy balance within the whole of the
cosmos.
And we had no right doing so because the bodies of

our children are not our bodies, as we do not own our bod-
ies. The human body as the whole of life cannot be owned.
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Lao-tzu said the human body is the eternal adaptability of

heaven.
Other philosophers said that the universe lends us a
body that we have to give back when we go back to the
subtle realms of existence. In fact, even the dullest of the
dull must admit that we cannot take our bodies into any
afterlife. Minutes after our spirit has left our body, this
body begins to decay and in a few days it is but a lump of
rotten flesh that is eaten up by a multitude of birds, insects,
worms, beetles and other animals and plants that mother
earth sends out to embrace back in her substance what she
has so generously granted us as a vehicle for our spiritual
advancement.
Life is created by pleasure and natural death equally is

pleasure as it opens an illuminated path into a subtle vibra-
tional existence. Killing natural attraction was the foremost
tool of dominator culture to get hold of humans and to
manipulate and control them into the literal essence of
their flesh and their bones. By the same token and with the
same goal, dominator culture repressed the truth about the
cyclic nature of birth-and-death, and invented the myth of
a linear one-time life that ended in death as ultimate shock
and destruction. The three dominator religions have coin-
cided in suppressing the teaching of natural reincarnation
that is an essential element of perennial philosophy.
There is a new culture now raising especially in highly
civilized societies that refuses to stay with analyzing and
blaming the terrible state of affairs we are in, and instead
133
practices a new way of living. While these movements are

very diverse, what they have in common is that they at-
tempt to become germs or living cells of what could be re-
alized on a larger scale within a new human, and truly
humane, society and culture. While communities were ex-
isting already in the 1960s, they were overruled by a new
wave of fascism from about the 1980s, but the basic idea is
familiar with all those who practice one or the other alter-
native lifestyle.
Young people today who subscribe to what could be

called a love culture seem to be inspired by a deep quest for
innocence. They tend to accept and understand the spiri-
tual significance of matriarchy and respect what they call
the Gaia principle, a deep veneration of Mother Earth. They
are often involved in professions that either involve art,
drama, dance and music, or the professions that deal with
134
THE LUNAR BULL
natural healing, body work, healthy diet and integral liv-

ing, or else they are unconventional psychiatrists or psy-
choanalysts, astrologers or numerologists as well as those
who engage in one or the other spiritual path such as Yoga
or Zen. But there are also people from other professions
who individually join these circles, temporarily or perma-
nently.
This brings me to explain more in detail what I exactly
mean when I am talking about the spiritual significance of
matriarchy. In Occidental Mythology (1973), Joseph Camp-
bell observes at pp. 21-22:
In the older mother myths and rites the light and darker as-
pects of the mixed thing that is life had been honored
equally and together, whereas in the later, male-oriented,
patriarchal myths, all that is good and noble was attributed
to the new, heroic master gods, leaving to the native nature
powers the character only of darknessto which, also, a
negative moral judgment now was added. For, as a great
body of evidence shows, the social as well as mythic orders
of the two contrasting ways of life were opposed. Where the
goddess had been venerated as the giver and supporter of
life as well as consumer of the dead, women as her represen-
tatives had been accorded a paramount position in society as
well as in cult. Such an order of female-dominated social and
cultic custom is termed, in a broad and general way, the or-
der of Mother Right. And opposed to such, without quarter,
is the order of the Patriarchy, with an ardor of righteous elo-
quence and a fury of fire and sword.
In simple words, whenever we face a life paradigm

that does away with the changeability of life and thereby
135
reduces the concept of living to a monistic, monolithic principle,

we are facing not human saneness, but insanity at its peak,
and the result, invariably, is violence.
All the eloquence of Biblical preachers cannot betray

the truth seekers intuition of what is naturally sane, and
the more missionaries preach and exhort, the more violent,
the more dangerous, the more genocidal they are. Human
colonial history has given abundant factual proof for that
sad psychological reality.
Ours is undoubtedly a murder culture because those
who founded it were themselves based upon murder, the
rape and extinction of their surrounding out-groups which
was, at that time of much more limited population com-
pared to today, already a mass-murder to be qualified as
genocide.
I do not know on which mountaintop todays conser-
vatives gather to pray that their actions may be founded
on goodness or were inducing goodness in people? What
goodness, the hell, comes from a worldview in which only
the in-group enjoys respect and where everybody else, in-
cluding their children, is subjected to torture, rape, murder
and genocide? It is here where the spiritual significance of
matriarchy comes in as a regulatory principle.
Joseph Campbell affirms:
I am taking pains in this work to place considerable stress

upon the world age and symbolic order of the goddess; for
the findings both of anthropology and of archeology now
attest not only to a contrast between the mythic and social
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THE LUNAR BULL
systems of the goddess and the later gods, but also to the fact
that in our own European culture that of the gods overlies
and occludes that of the goddesswhich is nevertheless ef-
fective as a counterplayer, so to say, in the unconscious of the
civilization as a whole. (Id., 70)
What has the female become under patriarchy? A virgin

to be defiled, raped, abducted and killed, on the subcon-
scious level, and a daughter of good breed, the obedient
slave-girl, at the apparent or outside level, the princess to
be married off for material riches paid to the father. An in-
vestment at best, when older, a household item. When old,
a nuisance.
Patriarchy instituted correction homes for the young,
prisons for the free thinkers and retirement homes for the
elder. All those who fall outside the in-group, which is the
20-40 majority, have to be taught that sex is a shame, and
has to be repressed. They are deprived of it as a matter of
social duty, just as prisoners are. That is the respect patriar-
chy has in front of the child and old age!
The rest is lip service and sentimentalism. The reality of
life speaks in facts, not in cathedral speeches. An old female,
once the person of highest regard and social status in ma-
triarchy, under patriarchy has become a double plague, the
plague to be a female and the plague to be old and useless
within the greed machinery of patriarchal making.
137
The Spiritual Laws of Matriarchy

The spiritual laws of matriarchy are the counterplayer in
the collective subconscious that Campbell intuits, not the
imaginative embodiment of the female in patriarchal minds
because it will be debased until the, probably catastrophic,
end of patriarchy!
But patriarchy cannot alter cosmic laws and this, and
not human wit, is what I am talking about here.
Matriarchy is based upon a whole range of laws regu-
lating the relationship between the human realm and the
animal and plant realms. Patriarchy, by contrast, is based
on the violation of these spiritual laws. It cannot last be-
cause it dethrones nature and, by doing so, debases crea-
tion itself. It is blasphemic, in last resort. And patriarchys
monotheism was born on the blood-soaked linen of raped
and massacred nations and populations that have been sac-
rificed for Yahwehs cool walk in the garden.
Thomas Moore has spent more than a decade in mo-
nastic seclusion as a Catholic monk and he finally quit re-
ligious life with all its restrictions, only to discover that life
within the busy world of modern international society can
guard and purport the same soul values and the same sen-
sitive and lucidly intelligent approach to life he once dis-
covered and implemented by spending long years in mon-
asteries. In his bestselling book Care of the Soul (1994),
Moore writes:
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THE LUNAR BULL
Moralism is one of the most effective shields against the

soul, protecting us from its intricacy. () I would go even
further. As we get to know the soul and fearlessly consider
its oddities and the many different ways it shows itself
among individuals, we may develop a taste for the perverse.
We may come to appreciate its quirks and deviances. Indeed,
we may eventually come to realize that individuality is born
in the eccentricities and unexpected shadow tendencies of
the soul, more so than in normality and conformity. (Id., 17)
Caring for our soul, being connected to all-that-is, im-

plies to pay attention to detailall detail in life. Moralism,
in last resort, is a form of shallowness, an ingrained lazi-
ness to deal with all the stuff that makes daily life, includ-
ing our oddities and difficult-to-admit perversities.
Moralism is the banner of patriarchy, and for good rea-
son it never had a stand in matriarchal cultures. Whoever
is really soulful, and spiritual, pays attention to all-that-is
139
and does not make up a phraseology of ought-tos that fills

his mind in order to put his soul at rest, so that it does not
become too virulent and inquisitive. The highest spiritual
state of mind is total attention.
The moralist does not deal at all with detail. He haugh-
tily rushes over all detail in life, declaring that little daily
matters did not count for a spiritual man, a man of word,
of honor, of principles, a man whose life was based on val-
ues.
In reality, there are no little daily matters as all matters,
as all is important for the one who pays attention to detail.
Love is detail. For the truly spiritual person, there is no
shame connected to talking about his perverse sides, fanta-
sies, longings or deeds. He knows that the energy can flow
in one direction and at times in the other direction, and
that energy can retrograde and pile up and that this brings
about perverse reactions, desires and needs. But to recog-
nize this means to be free of it.
To admit perversity means to deal with it, while mor-

alism entangles one who arrogantly wipes off the idea of
admitting perverse desires, making him a slave of his re-
pressed perversions. That is why nonjudgmental, permis-
sive cultures, which are those that are more matriarchal in
their base setup, can deal with human perversity, and con-
structively so, while human history shows with much evi-
dence that patriarchal moralism brings about emotional
stuckness that puts on stage a clean reality, while behind
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THE LUNAR BULL
the stage all the devils are playing hide-and-seek. Moore

explains:
Care of the soul is interested in the not-so-normal, the way

that soul makes itself felt most clearly in the unusual expres-
sions of a life, even and maybe especially in the problematic
ones. () Sometimes deviation from the usual is a special
revelation of truth. In alchemy this was referred to as the
opus contra naturam, an effect contrary to nature. We might
see the same kind of artful unnatural expression within our
own lives. When normality explodes or breaks out into cra-
ziness or shadow, we might look closely, before running for
cover and before attempting to restore familiar order, at the
potential meaningfulness of the event. If we are going to be
curious about the soul, we may need to explore its devia-
tions, its perverse tendency to contradict expectations. And
as a corollary, we might be suspicious of normality. A facade
or normality can hide a wealth of deviance, and besides, it is
fairly easy to recognize soullessness in the standardizing of
experience. (Id., 18)
The spiritual laws of matriarchy are of course no writ-

ten laws. They are no worldly statutes or regulations. They
are truths valid on a cosmic level, and on a soul level, but
observable in the lives of those who live in close relation
with nature: tribal peoples who maintain a living spiritual
contact with all natural forces through their shamans, and
their long-standing traditions of dialogue with natures
wistful energies.
When I talk about the spiritual laws of matriarchy, I do
not mean general spiritual laws such as the law of attrac-
tion, the law of prosperity, the law of harmony, and others.
141
I am rather talking about patterns of living, directly observ-

able in the lifestyle of wistful peoples and that are no secret
knowledge, but to be verified by any serious researcher on
shamanism. For there is no occult hermetic tradition to be
studied, as these patterns are directly applied, by tribal
peoples, in their daily life and relationships.
After several years of research on shamanism, I I came
to summarize these spiritual patterns of living.
A pattern is a set of things, a certain arrangement I can make out

in the complex scheme of reality. It is something I can observe. A pattern
can be fix or it can be changeable. It can be static or dynamic. By con-
trast, a principle typically is the beginning of a down-hierarchy. Its a
top-something in a kind of up-to-down order. It is not something I can
observe directly but only as the outcome of a conclusion I draw intellec-
tually after observing nature. A principle thus contains my observer
point or my judgment about reality.
The Eight Dynamic Patterns of Living are the result of an

observation of tribal peoples and tribal lifestyle, to be ap-
plied for a partnership oriented and systemically as well as
emotionally intelligent lifestyle and society. I found that all
tribal populations who apply these eight patterns in their
lives and societies swing in accord with the movement of
life, are healthy, happy, peaceful and productive.
I found the Eight Dynamic Patterns of Living to be valid

as a nature-loving lifestyle that concords with universal laws
and that is dynamically pro-life, favoring mental, emosex-
ual and economic health, happiness and peaceful togeth-
erness.
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Bull and Serpent

The spiritual significance of matriarchy is not just a
matter of mythology, of energies or symbols. Its meaning
goes beyond the mythic bond of humans with nature and
all the forces that have their imprint upon us and the
whole of the universe. The matriarchal laws have a direct
impact upon our soul.
I dare to say that if the soul itself obeys to certain laws,
then to these matriarchal laws or patterns of living.
Our soul is at odds with the normalcy concept that is at

the basis of patriarchal laws and their underlying morality
code. As Moore expresses it:
Care of the soul sees another reality altogether. It appreciates

the mystery of human suffering and does not offer the illu-
sion of a problem-free life. It sees every fall into ignorance
and confusion as an opportunity to discover that the beast
residing at the center of the labyrinth is also an angel. The
uniqueness of a person is made up of the insane and the
twisted as much as it is of the rational and the normal. To
approach this paradoxical point of tension where adjustment
and abnormality meet is to move closer to the realization of
our mystery-filled, star-born nature. (Id., 20)
The soul really follows the self-regulation pattern of liv-

ing; it cannot be forced to adopt other than its own rules,
and its intelligence is not rational, but the emotional intel-
ligence of the heart.
The souls major longing is balance, harmony, whole-
ness, and its major effort is the one of healing fragmenta-
143
tion. Carl Jung writes in Religious and Psychological Problem

of Alchemy (1993):
But the right way to wholeness is made up, unfortunately, of

fateful detours and wrong turnings. It is a longissima via, not
straight but snakelike, a path that unites the opposites, in the
manner of the guiding caduceus, and whose labyrinthine
twists and turns are not lacking in terrors. It is on this longis-
sima via that we meet with those experiences which are said
to be inaccessible. (Id., 541)
The soul and its knowledge about life and happiness is

indeed inaccessible if we think life, instead of living life,
applying only our left brain hemisphere and considering
only logical thought as being relevant for understanding
life and living processes.
It can be said that this kind of lifestyle, that today is

widely adopted, is lacking shadow, rendering life as a one-
dimensional drawing, a solar worldview in the words of
Joseph Campbell, where shadows are lighted away by the
sun rays of the purely rational mind. Thomas Moore ex-
plains in Care of the Soul (1994):
A neurotic narcissism wont allow the time needed to stop,

reflect, and see the many emotions, memories, wishes, fanta-
sies, desires, and fears that make up the materials of the soul.
As a result, the narcissistic person becomes fixed on a single
idea of who he is, and other possibilities are automatically
rejected. (Id., 67)
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THE LUNAR BULL
For the narcissist, all in life is about statistics. Love is

expressed in percentages and probabilities. But what is the
daily life taste of it? Never known, never seen.
The narcissist talks about principles, rules and facts: he

suggests love could be measured, quantified and scientifi-
cally demonstrated. Nay, such a thing cannot be, otherwise it
would not be love, but the media soup that today is yelled
from all megaphones of international consumer stupidity.
Love me forever! The soul knows that love is not a concept
and cannot endure according to the mind and will. It has
its own life span, and it knows its own death.
The Sad King
The narcissist flies in the air and cherishes lofty Apol-

lonian ideas. But where is their Dionysus? The truth is en-
coded in that part of them, and carefully hidden from their
public appearance. Care of the Soul, for most of us, means
145
care for the Dionysian principle in us, the Sad King, as I

called it.
Narcissism is an inevitable by-product of patriarchy,
and its etiology as wrong relating. Wrong relating to self.
Wrong relating to others. It is built on the preclusion of the
shadows of the souland thereby ignores its own shadow.
Narcissists, therefore, are tragic figures. They are tragic
in the sense that they run into the abyss without the slight-
est idea of what they are doing, as they are not grounded
and have their feet in the air, like the Fool in the Tarot. They
are lunatics, because they have not integrated their own
Luna, their Moon energy.
They are the eternal Peter Pans of sunshine movies,
and present themselves to the public smiling, broadly smil-
ing, most of the time, but in haphazard moments you see
their true face while they themselves ignore it.
Thomas Moore observes that narcissism, in our times,
is a problem that by far surpasses the individual and has
become a societal concern:
America has a great longing to be the New World of oppor-

tunity and a moral beacon for the world. It longs to fulfill
these narcissistic images of itself. At the same time it is pain-
ful to realize the distance between the reality and that image.
Americas narcissism is strong. It is paraded before the
world. If we were to put the nation on the couch, we might
discover that narcissism is its most obvious symptom. And
yet that narcissism holds the promise that this all-important
myth can find its way into life. In other words, Americas
narcissism is its refined puer spirit of genuine new vision.
146
THE LUNAR BULL
The trick is to find a way to that water of transformation

where hard self-absorption turns into loving dialogue with
the world. (Id., 62)
Narcissism is so destructive because it eternally be-

lieves in shortcuts, quick fixes and once-for-all solutions.
The soul however, and evolution in general, proceeds
in a spiraled movement, which is something like a circled
forward movement.
Thomas Moore describes it in alchemical terms:
All work on the soul takes the form of a circle, a rotatio. ()

I keep in mind the alchemical circulatio. The life of the soul,
as the structure of dreams reveals, is a continual going over
and over the material of life. (Id., 13)
The spiraled movement is more holistic than the linear

movement because it carries our base all along from here
to there. That means we do not leave our origins, but re-
147
main firmly rooted in where we came from. These roots are

essential for providing us with living energy. Its a serpen-
tine movement, the movement of a snake.
However, our quick efficiency, our stress on immedi-

acy, our lack of time, our focus on straight solutions pre-
vent us from integrating, rooting, personal evolution in the
soul. As a result, our progresses are merely peripheral and
remain at the surface of the personality.
All this, while it sounds commonplace, is the inevitable

result of patriarchal morality because it circumvents the
soul. To explain this on a mythological level, let me intro-
duce another symbol, as important or even more impor-
tant in world mythology than the bull: its the serpent.
Ralph Metzner, in the introduction to his book Ayahuasca:
Human Consciousness and the Spirits of Nature (1999), ob-
serves:
Not only among Amazonian shamans, but throughout the

world, in Asia, the Mediterranean, Australia, serpent images
148
THE LUNAR BULL
are used to represent the basic life force and regarded as a

source of knowledgethe wisdom of the serpent. The ser-
pent image is seen often as a link between heaven and earth,
and in this regard the snake is often found in association
with other images of ascent. (Id., 34)
Joseph Campbell reports two crucial turning points for

the cosmic serpent in world mythology. The first occurs in
the context of the Iron Age Hebrews of the first millennium
B.C where the mythology became inverted, so as to repre-
sent the opposite to its origin, the second is to be found in
the creation myth where the serpent who had been revered
in the Levant for at least seven thousand years before the
composition of the Book of Genesis, plays the part of the vil-
lain.
Yahweh, who replaces it in the role of the creator, ends
up defeating the serpent of the cosmic sea, Leviathan.
149
For Campbell, the second turning point occurs in

Greek mythology where Zeus was initially represented as
a serpent, but then, when the myths changed, Zeus became
a serpent-killer. From that time, Zeus was depicted to secure
the reign of the patriarchal gods of Mount Olympus by de-
feating Typhon, the enormous serpent-monster who is the
child of the earth goddess Gaia and the incarnation of the
forces of nature.
See Jeremy Narby, The Cosmic Serpent (1999), p. 66, with further
references.
It is in accordance with this reversal of symbols in my-

thology that, as I mentioned earlier, the significance of the
bull equally changed from a matriarchal to a patriarchal mean-
ing, and the Hispanic tradition of bull fighting clearly re-
flects the perverted patriarchal tradition rather than, as
some mythologists suggest, representing a matriarchal base
structure in Hispanic machismo.
While the female principle in the Babylonian epic of
creation has been devalued, we can still find it associated
with the serpent, the boa, the Great Mother, in the natural
philosophy of most tribal peoples, as reflected by shaman-
ism. The Ayahuasca reader by Ralph Metzner, already
quoted, contains a range of reports contributed by people
from all walks of life who have taken the traditional Aya-
huasca brew in order to encounter the plant teachers or
spirits of the plant. Two of them report visions of the cosmic
serpent. Raoul Adamson entitled his experience Initiation
into Ancient Lineage of Visionary Healers and writes:
150
THE LUNAR BULL
I become aware of a morphic resonance between serpent and

intestines: the form of the snake is more or less a long intes-
tinal tract, with a head and a tail end; and conversely, our
gut is serpentine, with its twists and turns and its peristaltic
movement. So the serpent, winding its way through my in-
testinal tract was teaching my intestines how to be more
powerful and effectivecertainly a gut-level experience!
(Id., 48)
Ganesha, in her Vision of Sekhmet, reports:
As I read about Sekhmet and assimilated my experience

with her, the understanding that formed in my conscious-
ness was that Sekhmet is a Great Mother Goddess, one that
spans all time. With the sun disk at her head and the snake
around it, she symbolizes the serpent power of the root
chakra having risen to the crown. Thus, she encompasses
both heaven and Earth, and demonstrates the way to unite
the heaven and Earth of our own nature, Spirit and Form,
through the awakening of the kundalini power in the mu-
ladhara chakra and its arising to the sahasrara chakra. (Id.,
83)
Raimundo D., in his The Great Serpentine Dance of Life,

writes:
The plumed serpent is masculine, involves outer impression

and show of power; the unplumbed serpent is feminine, in-
volving inner expression and statement of strength. () I
experienced my entire body being reprogrammed and rear-
ranged, even reconstituted at the deep cellular level. This
resulted in an incredible feeling of openness, solidity, whole-
ness and openness. (Id., 130)
151
We can thus summarize that the association of the ser-

pent as a matriarchal symbol for the Mother Goddess is
not only a recurring theme of world mythology, but can be
experienced, with the use of entheogens, as a spiritual vi-
sion that impacts directly on the soul and reflects truthful
images of our super-consciousness.
As it can be argued that what is seen in psychedelic

visions is but the content of the collective unconscious of
humanity, there is truth in Campbells statement that the
Goddess still today acts as a counterplayer to patriarchy, on
the level of the unconscious, and this independently of
personal beliefs or intellectual understanding of shaman-
ism or nature religions.
152
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Personal Notes

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JOSEPH CAMPBELL

AND THE LUNAR BULL

SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY LITIGATION

COACHING YOUR INNER CHILD

THE LEADERSHIP I CHING

LEADERSHIP & CAREER IN THE 21ST CENTURY

INTEGRATE YOUR EMOTIONS

KRISHNAMURTI AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL REVOLUTION

THE NEW PARADIGM IN BUSINESS, LEADERSHIP AND CAREER

THE NEW PARADIGM IN CONSCIOUSNESS AND SPIRITUALITY

THE NEW PARADIGM IN SCIENCE AND SYSTEMS THEORY

THE VIBRANT NATURE OF LIFE

SHAMANIC WISDOM MEETS THE WESTERN MIND

THE BETTER LIFE

CREATIVE LEARNING AND CAREER

FRITJOF CAPRA AND THE SYSTEMS VIEW OF LIFE

FRANOISE DOLTO AND CHILD PSYCHOANALYSIS

EDWARD DE BONO AND THE MECHANISM OF MIND

JOSEPH MURPHY AND THE POWER OF YOUR SUBCONSCIOUS MIND

JOSEPH CAMPBELL AND THE LUNAR BULL

113 Barksdale Professional Center, Newark, Delaware, USA

2015 Peter Fritz Walter. Some rights reserved.

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This publication may be distributed, used for an adaptation or for deriva-

The moral right of the author has been asserted

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About Dr. Peter Fritz Walter

Parallel to an international law career in Germany, Switzerland

He started writing essays as an adolescent and received a high

After finalizing his law diplomas, he graduated with an LL.M. in

He then took courses in psychology at theUniversity of Gene-

In 1986, he met the late French psychotherapist and child psycho-

After a second career as a corporate trainer and personal coach,

His nonfiction books emphasize a systemic, holistic, cross-cultural

Pierre is a German-French bilingual native speaker and writes

All of Pierres books are hand-crafted and self-published, de-

The Hero with a Thousand Faces! 22

The Power of Myth! 61

Personal Notes! 165

We are currently transiting as a human race a time of

Currently, with the advent of the networked global so-

Invariably, as students, scientists, doctors, consultants,

More and more people begin to realize that we cannot

Self-regulation is built into the life function and it can

Let me say a last word about this series of books about

I found Joseph Campbells books in 1998, through a

that perverts our nature. And ultimately, therefore, its a

Darth Vader has not developed his own humanity. He's a

Patriarchy, with its craving for obedience to the father,

question: How has patriarchy come aboutand what was

The murder of the Goddess. Which is ultimately a mat-

This encounter kindled in him the interest in lifelong

According to his friend Robert Bly, he developed at the

hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the

The research Joseph Campbell would do on mythology

The originality of Joseph Campbells theory lies in the

One of Joseph Campbells favorite quotes was from the

in field like mythology or psychology. In this way, Joseph

In his series of four books entitled The Masks of God, he

The hero typically then faces a first obstacle in the