defined as emotional, receptive, anarchic, cancerian.
Matriarchy preceded patriarchy because patriarchal
values (particularly the need for complex organization)
inform advanced societies, whereas female values inform more primitive tribal societies. As far as individual men and women are concerned, the male psyche has a
feminine component (the subconscious) which is anarchic, emotional, sensitive, lunar, and the female personality has a male component (the conscious, or
mind) which can be defined as a capacity for logical
thought. O f course, biological women are ruled, it
turns out, by the subconscious; men are ruled, not surprisingly, by the conscious, mind, intellect. One might imagine a time and place where intellect is not valued
over anarchic, emotional, sensitive —looniness?: but
that would be the most gratuitous kind o f fantasy. Jung
never questioned the cultural arbitrariness o f these categories, never looked at them to see their political implications, never knew that they were sexist, that he functioned as an instrument o f cultural oppression.
In the book Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem,
M. Esther Harding, a lifelong student o f Jung and a
Patron o f the C. G. Jung Institute, applies Jungian ontology to a study o f mythology. Taking the moon, Luna, as the patron saint o f women (ignoring any masculine imagery associated with the moon, and this
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imagery is substantial; ignoring any feminine imagery
connected with the sun, and this imagery is substantial),
Harding ultimately identifies the female with the demonic, as did the Catholic Church:
But if she will stop long enough to look within, she
also may become aware of impulses and thoughts
which are not in accord with her conscious attitudes
but are the direct outcome of the crude and untamed
feminine being within her. For the most part, however,
a woman will not look at these dark secrets of her own
nature. It is too painful, too undermining of the conscious character which she has built up for herself; she prefers to think that she really is as she appears to be.
And indeed it is her task to stand between the Eros
which is within her, and the world without, and
through her own womanly adaptation to the world
to make human, as it were, the daemoniac power of
the nonhuman feminine principle. 1
Eros, the subconscious, the flow of human sexual energy— described as the witch burners described it, “the daemoniac power of the nonhuman feminine principle. ”
Harding is absolutely representative of the Jungian
point of view.
It is a natural consequence of this dualistic stance
that male and female are pitted against each other and
that conflict is the dynamic mode of relationship open
to male and female, men and women, when they meet:
These discrepancies in their attitudes are dependent
on the fact that the psychic constitution of men and
women are essentially different; they are mirror opposites the one of the other.. . . So that their essential nature and values are diametrically opposed. 2
Androgyny: The Mythological Model
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These male and female sets are defined as archetypes,
embedded in a collective unconscious, the given structure o f reality. T hey are polar opposites; their mode o f interaction is conflict. T hey cannot possibly understand each other because they are absolutely different: and o f course, it is always easier to do violence to something Other, something whose “nature and values”
are other. (Women have never understood that they
are, by definition, Other, not male, therefore not human. But men do experience women as being totally opposite, other. How easy violence is. ) T here is, because Jung was a good man and Jungians are good people, a happy ending: though these two forces, male
and female, are opposite, they are complementary, two
halves o f the same whole. One is not superior, one is not
inferior. One is not good, one is not bad. But this resolution is inadequate because the culture, in its fiction and its history, demonstrates that one (male, logic, order,
ego, father) is good and superior both, and that the
other (guess which) is bad and inferior both. It is the
so-called female principle of Eros that all the paraphernalia
of patriarchy conspires to suppress through the psychological,
physiological, and economic oppression of those who are biologically women. Jung’s ontology serves those persons and institutions which subscribe to the myth o f feminine
evil.
T he identification o f the feminine with Eros, or
erotic energy (carnality by any other name), comes
from a fundamental misunderstanding o f the nature o f
human sexuality. The essential information which
would lead to nonsexist, nonrepressive notions o f sexuality is to be found in androgyny myths, myths which
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describe the creation of the first human being as male
and female in one form. In other words, Jung chose the
wrong model, the wrong myths, on which to construct
a psychology of male and female. He used myths infused with patriarchal values, myths which gained currency in male-dominated cultures. The anthropological discoveries which fueled the formation of his theories
all reveal relatively recent pieces of human history.
With few exceptions, all of the anthropological information we have deals with the near past. * But the myths which are the foundation of and legitimize our culture
are gross perversions of original creation myths which
molded the psyches of earlier, possibly less self-con-
scious and more conscious, peoples. The original myths
all concern a primal androgyne —an androgynous godhead, an androgynous people. The corruptions of these myths of a primal androgyne without exception
uphold patriarchal notions of sexual polarity, duality,
male and female as opposite and antagonistic. The
myth of a primal androgyne survives as part of a real
cultural underground: though it is ignored, despised
by a culture which posits other values, and though
those who relate their lifestyles directly to it have been
ostracized and persecuted.
With all of this talk of myth and mythology, what is
myth, and why does it have such importance? The best
definition remains that of Eliade, who wrote in Myths,
Dreams, and Mysteries:
*
It is estimated that the time space between 70 0 0 b . c . (when people
began to domesticate animals'and make pottery) and 1 9 7 4 a . d . is only 2 percent of the whole o f human history.