of the Tarra tradition, and I think it made it a lot more refined than it historically has been. Describe your work. I think it made it more refined than it has been historically. Historically it's a very, well we would say more bizarre, primitive, to use an ethnocentric term. It doesn't have the rhythmic quality of at least the film that I saw of it, which had a lot of pageantry in it. Did it have the ritual dance of the priest in the one that you saw?

[01:02]

If so, very briefly. Most of it was just showing the faces of the robbers as they were acting and dancing and performing it. Did the film that was shown go into the color symbolism? Yeah, I think it did. Joe, you saw that film. There was something about the colors in it, but you didn't go into it. I don't think it did so much descriptions of the parts of it, but just as the parts of the ceremony. I don't remember anything in the color descriptions. What do you mean of the four different colors? The green and the red and the white? The yellow. The yellow. I don't remember that. I think it was mentioned, but I don't think it did. Because this is a green, and I did a little looking because people came and asked me what's a green tar, and I wasn't able to find one.

[02:16]

I don't remember that answering my question. Okay, well, it'll be answered in the evening. Okay. Okay. But what it ties into is what in all the alchemical and esoteric tradition is the table of correspondences, the various levels within the person, within the cosmos, the various levels, like in Hinduism, of gross to subtle body, and all the rest. So that's more of what I'll go into in a little bit. Only one person gets that pretty picture?

[03:18]

Only one person gets a pretty picture like that? I thought we might all. I think Barbara's going to give them to everybody, huh? Yeah, I'll give everybody a pretty picture with an autograph. Well, let's see. Shall we? Shall we? Dance? Well, if you play the piano, we can dance. That's the fun of it. Could we move closer together? Yeah. Yeah, as long as we don't have the master's here, why don't we just give all the presenters a shout? Let's move the table. Let's move down here. Let's step over that way. Oh, okay. You want to move the... Well, actually, it's the blackboard. That's okay. We'll get back. That's the only problem.

[04:25]

It gets hard to see. We can turn that light on. Okay. All right. Away we go. Oh. How are you? Can you tell me that? I see. Okay. I think that... Okay.

[05:38]

And in our first session today, go into some of the anthropology and cultural setting of the feminine component in the spiritual life, and for that matter, in the psyche in general, and move to more specific forms in art. I have some prehistoric figures that might serve to do the job graphically, and I also have a statue of Marduk, the Babylonian hero war god, which I'm about to bring, and it's guarding the house. And since Marduk is so ferocious, he does a good job of doing that. So we'll be Marduk-less. Now, last time I pointed out the traditional Chinese yin-yang view that reached its culmination in Taoism and goes back to prehistoric days of China.

[07:31]

And in oral tradition, it's found in the I Ching, in written form, at some unknown date, when it was written down by Confucian scholars. The I Ching, the Book of Changes, as you may know, is a book of all the possible forms of hexagrams of straight lines and broken lines. The straight lines are yang, the broken ones are yin, and they represent the masculine and the feminine. And reality, as the Lie Chi, is seen as a world in motion in which these two forces are in active interplay. Most of the translations of the I Ching, including even the one by Richard Wilhelm, that is the most commonly used version, translate interchange as opposition.

[08:49]

And put a whole baggage of Western hardware upon the concept that doesn't belong there. The Chinese tradition, despite the social form of male-female relationships in China, in its essential background, doesn't speak of opposition but interpenetration. So that when we see reality as, so to speak, half yang, half yin, and a yang component in the yin and a yin component in the yang, we should note that this is in motion, each one engulfing the other. So that reality is an interplay of these forces, not an opposition, but an ongoing process of transition in which balance occurs when one is beyond the battlefield.

[10:15]

And each one of the change goes along with it, participates within the world. For example, if there are wars, famines, if there is hunger, if there is ignorance, whatever may be the case, that one exists within the world which may have a dominance of various lopsided ways at any given point. Within all of the transactions that take place, one maintains the state called wu-wei. Now wu-wei is non-action action. And it's expressed as a philosophy of life simply as wei-wu-wei, the action of non-action action, which is best demonstrated by what in Zen is called transmission mind-to-mind rather than verbally.

[11:37]

Wei-wu-wei is the very active role of the bamboo that sways in the wind and is flexible and maintains equanimity, not by being rigid and fixed like the Greek Stoics who maintained a very rigid and fixed moral code in the face of anything that went on in the world, but by bending and flexing, bending and flexing because it's quite proper to be green in a green world, to be lopsided in a lopsided world. What other color is present in a purple room but purple? And so aphorism best describes the philosophy of the action of non-action action.

[12:39]

And it goes back to ancient traditions, as I said, that reached written form in the I Ching. You may be interested in how these symbols came about. The tortoise in mythology is considered to be a very unique creature because it links together the earth and the depth. It's a water creature, it's a land creature, it's out and it's in. And it has many other features that reflect a number of the multiple levels of the universe. In one of the early Hindu Vedic hymns of creation it speaks of the churning of the sea by the gods, inverting a mountain as a pivot, and what was the fulcrum of the pivot but a tortoise.

[13:48]

So the tortoise or the voice of the turtle, the tortoise is a symbol of many different dimensions of reality. And ancient sorcerers in China would toss the shell of a tortoise into the fire and it would crack. They would interpret the cracks for divination, just as the ancient Romans would sacrifice a beast and observe its entrails and thereby get to the guts of the matter regarding the future. So at any rate, it's a gutsy issue, but at any rate that was the origin of it. And when we reflect upon the elemental forces of nature itself,

[14:50]

we find within our pulse the diastolic and systolic portions of the heartbeat, the seasons of the year, the realities of the sun, the moon, the moist, the dry, night, day, passive and active. As you can see they were not very much on feminism in those days, and so the feminine was regarded as the passive component and the masculine as the active. But the words should not be taken literally. And this again is where we put hardware upon language systems that we cannot translate. I'm one of those people who would claim that we cannot translate from Chinese into English.

[16:00]

We can only render, we can only point in the direction of meanings, because the linguistic scope of the Sinitic language family and the Indo-European language family that we speak do not have sufficient correspondences. And so the word non-active, which is really the better term, non-active is not regarded as static, fixed and rigid, but rather as having a dynamism that inhibits the movement of a force placed against it. And so what they call passive and what we call passive are two very different things.

[17:07]

What they call passive is the resistant. Now those of you who will be at the pre-Socratic classes that will begin on Tuesday evening will find that several of the pre-Socratics divide the world up into exactly these components, permanence and change, rigidity in the sense of fixed or active. And there are some who will say, well, what is real is that which does not change or resists change. Others will say, what is real is that which is changing and dynamic. This will be the differentiation between Parmenides and Heraclitus. And obviously Parmenides was closer to a yin point of view, Heraclitus to a yang.

[18:14]

Now, so it does not mean passive in the sense of nothing happening. It refers to that which is less yielding as opposed to that which is more yielding. Because after all, what is yielding? A stone is not very yielding when you stub your toe upon it. In fact, I know of a Unitarian minister who was very proud of never using the name of the divine being in any shape or form in his church except one time when he stubbed his toe on the way to the pulpit. But you see now, on the other hand, take the stone's step, lift up the piece of granite,

[19:22]

and precisely because it is so unyielding when you go plunk and hopefully your toes are out of the way, it shatters, it splinters into many, many pieces. And so precisely because it is so totally yang in the dynamism of the process of change of reality, its exact opposite occurs at the right moment. And so at the right moment, the most resistant becomes the most non-resisting. And of course, this Taoist philosophy is the background of the martial arts in which essentially you utilize the force of the other person's energy against yourself

[20:30]

to complete the cycle of that person's thrust in ways that he does not anticipate by removing yourself and exerting pressure at his weak spot. And so the martial arts are an example of the wei wu wei philosophy at work. And so you see, passive or even non-active is a very poor translation of what is meant. Now, I can think of a much better English word that would describe the yin and its proper relationship to yang. Can anyone? Anyone? Can anyone suggest a better word than passive or non-active or resistant?

[21:42]

Embracing? Embracing? That's a good active. Inertia, that's, yeah, that's a good way of putting it. How about dormant? It's my own concoction, so it may be a terribly poor way of looking at it. But I like dormant. Maybe it's my background in kundalini yoga and I think of the dormant power of the shakti that is slumbering but is there waiting to be aroused. Or how about Aristotle's term, potential, as opposed to actual. So I would say that dormant potencia, or again using Aristotelian terms, becoming and being.

[22:58]

The forces of being, the forces of becoming. And by the way, we see here the background of the famous Hegelian dialectic of history. That change occurs by a three-part process of dialectic, of thesis, antithesis and synthesis that Marx borrowed from Hegel and the Marxists blew up into a substitute for religion. But they believe that everything contains within itself its opposition and that out of the battle, in the western sense, we think in terms of battle, while the east thinks in terms of shift. Out of the battle of the thesis and the antithesis will arise a new force, the synthesis,

[24:08]

such that out of agrarian society there grew a mercantile class. That agrarian society, that feudalism needed for its own development and so it contained within itself the seeds of its own destruction since the agrarian class and the mercantile class collided. And a new class, capitalism, was formed out of that. A new synthesis was formed, which in turn became the thesis of a new dialectic of history that capitalism contains within itself, in turn, the seeds of its own destruction. Namely, it requires the proletariat, the working class, and the working class being downtrodden will rise inevitably. There's a lot of hidden religion in Marxism. So much use of words like inevitability and all the rest. This thing has to happen, just like a Jehovah's Witnesses battle of Armageddon.

[25:14]

Why, there will be a new synthesis, the classless society. Well, this is where it all goes back. Hegel read about it in Voltaire and other Frenchmen who studied Chinese, some much better than Voltaire did. And Hegel meditated upon it, came up with his dialectic of history and tied it in with a conservative economics and political philosophy, Marx with a radical. Well, it is a Western development and Western distortion of an Eastern perspective. But where the Eastern perspective is organic, rhythmic, the Western equivalent is literally black and white, antithetical,

[26:19]

opposition, opposition, opposition, opposition. Because the basic root connection to primitive, simple realities of nature are gone. Now, so we see what balance is. But note, from this perspective, balance, which includes or means a fusion of the masculine and feminine components, can be expressed in two different ways. You say, which is it? Which is it? Well, here, it's a balance in which yin has been overtaken by yang.

[27:26]

And here, it's a balance in which yang has been overtaken by yin. And so, it requires the perspective of the situation in life to determine what the balance is. If, for example, a person has been through a very outrageously expansive energetic period of life and goes into a more moderate phase, that's very different from going from a very quiet, lethargic phase of life into a moderate one. And would you say that one is more balanced than the other? Of course you wouldn't. You couldn't. And so, what is balance? Is balance relative? Is balance absolute?

[28:32]

What is balance? Well, it's neither relative nor absolute. Again, if we put it in terms of whether it's relative or absolute, we are applying a conceptualization that isn't even possible in the language in which these terms were formulated. Terms like relativism and absolutism are inexpressible in Chinese. Chinese have to learn German, French, English, Russian to talk that way. What it is, is, I would say, and again we're at my bias, dynamic. It is dynamic. It is absolute because it is a hidden harmony that is always present

[29:34]

and that even in a world which is totally lopsided, like this or like this or like this, whatever, by going with it, by flowing with it, you maintain the balance and you have equanimity in a sense much simpler and much happier than the sourpuss Stoics. But, so therefore it would be absolute perhaps because it is ever present, it is ever present to be in equanimity regardless of what is going on. But the way in which you are in equanimity and the way that it shows itself is relative to the situation,

[30:35]

so it's also relative. So that you cannot moderately scold yourself or be in pain, although you can say, well, I've been in more pain, less pain, but essentially you're either in pain or you're not in pain, in pleasure or not in pleasure, although there are degrees. But it's sort of like the relief you have when someone is banging you over the head with a rubber mallet and suddenly stops. And on the one hand you have all the pain of being banged on the head so much and the pleasure of it stopping. Well, what is moderate in that situation to say, wow, all the whacks I've taken, or, whew, thank goodness I'm not getting my head pounded anymore,

[31:39]

or both. Perspective is the all-important factor. So it is what I would call a dynamic term and words like relative and absolute are hardware that should not be applied to it. Now the same applies to what is culturally defined as masculine and feminine behavior among plants, animals, even among the two-legged primates that Aristotle was stupid enough to call the wise man or as Linnaeus put it, homo sapiens. We primates, what is masculine? Is a crew cut, haircut masculine?

[32:40]

Well, what would one have said about that in the age of Louis XIV? Is the use of makeup feminine? How about a Papuan or Amazon tribe in which a woman would be killed if she dared to put any paint on her body because only men paint their bodies and their faces especially. And so a woman is very, very masculine if she puts on cosmetics. So what is masculine behavior? What is feminine behavior? Well, looking at animals isn't much of a help. Among birds or tropical fish it's more often than not the males who are more multicolored

[33:46]

and flashier than the females. That wouldn't sit too well with Anita Bryant. She wouldn't like that one bit. Now if someone knocked on the door of her crusade office in Florida and said, Hi, Anita. And the guy who knocked on the door was wearing a chartreuse shirt, pink trousers and orange shoes. I don't think Anita would be very happy. But what if he said to her, but Anita, I'm a guppy man. I sell guppies. And I feel that the best way to sell guppies is to dress like one. And being a male, I have to have all these colors on. Well, Anita wouldn't be too impressed. She would whack him over the head with a Bible as a sign of Christian love

[34:48]

and have him put into jail. From there the mental hospital and given enough electric shock that he'll do the perverted thing called making love to women. So, you see, where is the masculine? Where is the feminine? Women during the Victorian era, the more helpless they were, the more feminine they were. With hoop skirts, many, many layers of skirts, underskirts and bloomers under bloomers and all the rest. On the other hand, an image of femininity is Susie Chapstick. On skis, going down the mountainside. And now there's George Chapstick too. And Catfish Chapstick or however that goes with Catfish Hunter.

[35:51]

But, you see, Susie Chapstick, Susie Chappie, is a very feminine person, isn't she? Wearing a uniform. Selling something that has no color to it. A lip balm that isn't a lipstick or anything of the sort. In fact, it's interesting, the different varieties of Chapstick are flavor and not color. So, where is it that the at is at as to what is externally masculine or externally feminine behavior? The stereotype of the West which has been breaking down in the industrial age is that in the happy family the daddy goes out to work and the mama stays home and raises the kiddies.

[36:52]

Well, in the United States, 13% of the family entities fit that pattern. Only 13% of American family units have stay-at-home mamas, working daddies, and children. So, although that was a norm and an ideal of a demarcation of masculine and feminine roles, why it has no relevance now. Or the women's liberation movement. Notable to me is that like so many social movements in history, it follows rather than precedes the basic changes that it itself wants. As more and more women have been in the workforce, in the professional force,

[37:56]

accepted in the arts, accepted in the sciences, in business, only then did a women's liberation movement come about. Consciousness usually accompanies social change rather than causes it in the first place. Now, compare the problems of a woman in a traditional marital relationship in America with the case of a woman in China. Now, the Chinese Revolution took place in 1949, not very long ago, 30 years ago. And yet, there is hardly any healthy woman in China who doesn't work, regardless of the salary or status of her husband. It would be regarded as a non-productive disgrace.

[38:58]

And she would be regarded as betraying all that it means to be a Chinese woman if she were a slug on society. She wouldn't have anyone to talk to. The only women who don't work are either very disabled or very aged. And the aged ones would have contempt for her, and the disabled ones would have contempt for her because they have what the society defines as a good reason for doing unfeminine behavior, which is to not work. So equality of opportunity and experience on those levels is a Western and not a contemporary Chinese problem, which isn't to say that they don't have many other problems,

[39:59]

but ironically, this is not one of them. Now, the thing that I'm driving at is that there are two perspectives at work with regard to antipodal or polar phenomena of the observation of life. One is that poles are drawn tightly, rigidly, and antagonistically, or the other that they reflect dynamic, changing motifs. Now, it's interesting to note how this has been personified in different ways that correspond fairly well to the evolution of society. And again, by evolution of society,

[41:01]

I'm not talking about any stage-by-stage necessary development, but a general observation anthropologically. In nomadic societies, you usually find that the deities are masculine. You usually find that the deities are a god of war or a god at times of the sun, because life depends upon tribal coherence, tribal cohesion, tribal cohesion. Let's take an extreme example. The Eskimos or nomadic peoples in Central Asia. A sudden sandstorm can occur. Everyone must immediately pitch in

[42:03]

and follow the authority of one person. There is no time to question, to doubt. Well, don't you think we should do this, or don't you think we should do that, or have a committee meeting? If the tents are up and the flock is scattered, there isn't the time when the sandstorm approaches to hold a discussion. Or if there's a sudden ice storm or snow, you can't have committee discussion. Nomadic society depends upon command and command performance and strength. And this is reflected in the religious values of nomadic people and especially in the personifications of deities that they have.

[43:05]

Their deities are almost always masculine. Why? Because since the cohesion of the society depends upon commandment and the way to enforce commandment is by physical power of one person keeping another person in line, by coercion, then the strongest, the fiercest person usually is the tribal chief. Very much like the elk, the moose, the bison of the American plains, and the elephants, seals, walruses, all through nature, wherever there have been herds as a form of social organization, and among animal life,

[44:07]

animals are territorial nomads. They move about within given areas and return, move about and return. And so, military power on the part of the male as the stronger of the sexes physically is the demarcating factor in the religion. So the religion is one of tribal priests, kings, tribal rulers, in which submission on the part of virtually everyone is the rule. And again, since life depends upon physical prowess, that is, that males have to a greater extent on the average than females,

[45:10]

then the hunting and other functions are done by the males, and the females take care of household chores. Nancy and I lived in the Smoky Mountains for a period of time, and it was quite interesting to see how among the hill folk, the woman would plant the little patch of tobacco and do all of the hard work in the fields and then do housework at people's homes in the towns and then cook, and every year another child, another child, another child, and the men would drink and go a-hunting and a-fishing. But that was the way ancient nomadic society was, and in a fairly sustenance-level economy,

[46:13]

as has been the case in the Smoky Mountains, you have a somewhat analogous situation, not totally analogous, since they have a cash crop as well, but no, the woman ties into the earth, and we'll be getting to Mother Earth pretty soon. Now, so you see, man the sky, woman the earth, Mother Earth. Now, even among nomadic people, because they usually traveled at dawn and at dusk when they could follow the stars. It's interesting that the magi follow the stars to the manger, because that is in every ancient Near Eastern mythology from 4000 B.C. onward, from the earliest ones onward.

[47:14]

But the following of the stars is part of nomadic tradition. And so feminine deities came into being in a limited way, insofar as they were embodied in stars. In Semitic form, Ishtar, which though Babylonian, Astarte in Greek form, contains the root of our word for star. Or the word Tara, I'm laying the cat out of the bag and giving you an early nibble. The word Tara literally means star in Sanskrit. So, you see,

[48:15]

insofar as there were feminine deities, they were secondary, and yet they were guiding forces that one followed. One followed the star, one followed the moon. And so within nomadic society, there was what we might consider a dormant feminine component. In the religious life, that was deeply subordinate to the masculine preponderant perspective, but came in through the back door at twilight and at dawn. So that, for example, even among the early Vedic Hindus, before they settled into the Indus Valley

[49:20]

and gave up nomadic ways and became agrarian and urban, there was the goddess Ushas, the dawn, which is linguistically related, even though it's another language family, Indo-European, to Ishtar and then Astarte. And it probably relates to the morning star being the evening star. But this component was there subordinatedly as the star goddess or as speech, that which goes forth in many cultures is feminine. So that, for example, among the nomadic Vedic Indo-Europeans

[50:23]

before they settled in the north of India, there was the goddess Vak, V-A-C, which is the root of our word for voice, vocal, and so on. Vak, speech. Oftentimes, in ancient Egyptian art, you see the goddess of speech coming out of the mouth of the pharaoh. And so the goddess of speech, the goddess of wisdom, is the promulgation, the putting forth of wisdom. Wisdom. Now, we see antipodally wisdom and knowledge. Wisdom and knowledge.

[51:26]

The masculine and the feminine. Wisdom and knowledge. It's interesting that in one culture they are reversed in their placement. Among the Hebrews, in the Kabbalah, wisdom is masculine and knowledge is feminine. And thereby they reversed their ancient desert tradition that is reflected many times in the Bible because the Hebrew word for wisdom, zedek, is feminine. And it's interesting that, for example, in the 6th century B.C., there was a Hebrew temple built at Elephanta in the far south of Egypt, which has two goddesses on either side of the entrance to the temple.

[52:28]

Zedek and Shalom. Wisdom and peace. Now, Buddhism, interestingly enough, merges these two with the goal of the intuitive and cognitive life, which includes pulling the two together and raising them into something greater than facts or feelings, and that is higher wisdom, prajnaparamita. So that, for example, I'll be referring quite a bit to this Tibetan thangka, but this is a thangka of prajnaparamita, the greater divine wisdom, which is a book with a pillow and cushion above it, which indicates that you should sit upon it,

[53:30]

not open and read it, but go through it. In fact, this is what is considered to be a visualization thangka, in which you visualize, we'll see that the directions are somewhat skew-hard, with the red being in the north, but that's because of special features of the thangka that I'll go into later on. But the prajnaparamita occurs by utilizing the intuitive function, utilizing the intellectual function, and going beyond them, and to anticipate whom do you think is the embodiment of prajnaparamita in the Buddhist tradition? Our gal, Tara. So you see, this is integrative.

[54:40]

This is integrative. To be integrative in this sense is not to be both masculine and feminine, or both filled with wisdom and filled with knowledge, as it is to be beyond them, just as in weiwu wei, one is both within and beyond a situation at any given time. Or to put it in Hindu terms, that samsara and nirvana are one, the world of change and the world of enlightenment are one, or in Zen terms, satori is now, that there is a transcendent function

[55:44]

that goes beyond these differentiations, that utilizes them, but abandons them in the sense of being lifted up to a nonverbal level in which the bounds of culture and language and tradition are all overcome. In fact, I'm going to betray where most of my training in European philosophy lies, and German philosophy, but in Hegel there's a word which is so incredible and incredibly hard to translate. Aufheben Aufheben

[56:45]

Hegel speaks in the first portion, in the introduction to his Phenomenology of the Spirit, of being, of what it means to be an attained person, an arrived person. It means to be lifted up, to be gone beyond, to be passed through and over to have cast away and to have exalted, all of which are innuendos in his particular use of the term Aufheben, which in all those sense we can say to lift up, to exalt, but it also can mean to obliterate and eradicate. And we will see how important this is

[57:46]

when we discuss the forms of Tara. To change is to build and to destroy, and out of building and out of destroying is rebuilding new structure. And I don't remember if I mentioned last time an analogy to this perspective in the Byzantine liturgy of the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church and in the Eastern Rite insofar as it's used in the Roman Catholic Church. When the priest consecrates the elements, he says, And Lord, take these elements from the altar upon earth and exalt them to your altar in heaven so that what we may partake of

[58:47]

is celestial nourishment raised and exalted by your will. Well, this uplifting, transforming, changing, going beyond. If you notice in the theology of the Mass, what was is no more. It has the appearance of bread and wine, but it is not bread and wine. Bread and wine as substance has been destroyed, and out of its destruction, remaining the case only in external appearance, is a new synthesis, a higher form, an elevated reality in which we participate. And this is what is gotten after by, in very concrete-minded Chinese terms, Wei Wu Wei,

[59:47]

or Satori, or phrases like Samsara and Nirvana are one, that there is an uplifting, an exaltation that takes place when components are no longer either or, but the wholeness of reality in all of its dimensions is raised into a new, higher potential that is beyond name, beyond term, beyond form, beyond conception to the ordinary mind. Now, pursuing the historical analogy, though, to, ironically, what we call futuristic and integrated,

[60:51]

but yet, ancients with acute perception saw, and were as futuristic as the most futuristic of us today. But agrarian society, well, here is the triumph of Mother Earth. In agrarian society, insofar as the agrarian society was not oriented around town and village life, but farming community life, these were the great days of the rise of female deities as supreme. I made a reference last time to Bachofen, the anthropologist who wrote a book, Das Mutterrecht, the Law or the Rite of the Mothers, which is a very lopsided distortion of history,

[61:53]

but contains some very good points in which Bachofen says that in early agrarian society, lineage was through the mother. The name of a person was through the mother, son of the mother, as opposed to, later on, son of the father, as one would be called son of Jane or Anne, as opposed to son of Jack or Mac. And matrilinear law and tradition with a veneration of the generative power of the earth and Bachofen went really

[62:56]

nutsy cuckoo over suggesting as a proven fact, although there were no tape recorders in Neolithic antiquity, that the mystery of how life occurred, that he contended that Neolithic and post-Neolithic men did not know that the act of sexual intercourse led to the birth of children. And he was very sure of that. And I don't think one could be very sure of that, to put it mildly, because man's IQ presumably was the same then as now, and a couple of months' time is enough for people to establish causal connections, that it takes two to tangle. But at any rate, Bachofen went wild with that idea

[63:58]

as only a pedantic German can do. Get a good idea and run like crazy with it, so crazily that nobody pays attention to what you're saying. Nobody today reads my precious Hegel because he didn't think he could be profound if he wrote in simple language. Or Heidegger, who to me is the leading thinker of the 20th century. If you're simple, you're stupid. Well, I feel just the opposite way. Well, at any rate, meanwhile, back to Bachofen, he noted, though, and this shows his accurate perception, that almost all of the Neolithic art

[65:00]

to come down to us deals with female sexuality. Here are some pieces from the Indus Valley from 3,000 to 4,000 BC. And this is what an anthropologist would call the Great Mother, or what Erich Neumann, in his incredible study of the role of the female in psychology and religion, oops, wrong book, the Great Mother. This would be the Great Mother, with an emphasis upon her generative raw. And the great holidays and festivals would be ones in which

[66:00]

at full moon, when the female power of the moon is at its greatest. That particularly was the time for sexual intercourse. And, for example, among the Canaanites, the so-called threshing floors that the Hebrew prophets called abominations, where great abominable acts took place, were places at which the temple so-called prostitutes would have intercourse with the faithful at full moon every 29 days in order to promote fertility by correspondence on earth as in heaven, as in Mother Earth,

[67:03]

one reality. That's the meaning of sympathetic magic. You stick pins into an image of someone and correspondingly, if you say the right incantations, he will get bursitis, or trichinosis, or the heebie-jeebies, or anything else that you wish him to have. Maybe even get all a Twitter. So, at any rate, by correspondence and by analogy, the fertility of the sexual act on the threshing floor would promote fertility in the soil and the harvest. But, as agrarian tradition shifted into tribal and urban, when, among other things, nomadic peoples knocked out the agrarians by invasion and conquest, as, for example,

[68:04]

when the nomadic Hebrews were their masculine gods like El, Eloy, Yahweh, and a whole jillion others, Baal, could go on and on with different male deities that were the tribal deities of different tribes. Or take the tribe of Daniel, which is to say, Danie is our El, our god. But this isn't, of course, in Hebrew origins. But, anyway, when, as a result of, in part, the attacks of nomadic peoples upon agrarians who tended to be the losers in the long run, tribal urbanization occurred

[69:06]

in which agrarian life based upon village structure became the norm. And in his brilliant but somewhat silly work, Bachofen suggests that this is where patrilinear naming took place, naming after the father's line and not the mother's, and yet vestiges of it remained as, for example, in Spain in which both family names are maintained and in a few other places in Europe and in the rest of the world. But, essentially, patrilinear descent, patrilinear inheritance, masculine deities became the case. Well,

[70:09]

where tribal agrarianism took place, because of nomadic conquest, they tended to liquidate the feminine component. And so, in the Hebrew tradition, the feminine component always has appeared as a virtually subversive element, like the divine wisdom, the feminine side of God, like what good language study of the Hebrew scriptures would show are changes in word structure, in spelling, in pronunciation, in glossing over, in rewriting of texts and all the rest to deny the feminine component. So that

[71:13]

where tribal development took place in agrarian life, there was a tendency for it to be masculine dominance. Where it took place by internal changes, then there tended to be a balance of the two. But that was rare. For example, in Mesopotamia, you see the shift very dramatically in the Babylonian scriptures, in which, for example, the great mother goddess, Tiamat, who pre-exists before the world and out of whose thought and experience

[72:21]

emerge other deities, is herself slain by her own son, Marduk. And in the slaying of Tiamat by Marduk, Tiamat's body arches over so that if we imagine her legs and torso and then her abdomen at the top and then her shoulders, head and legs down here, out of her body is created the universe. And so the stars, the firmament on high is the upper part of the body of the slain goddess. The earth is the lower part and the region below the watery void,

[73:25]

below the depth, is the reality in which we live. And so we live according to this mythology, which in documentation we have in cultures as diverse as the ancient Egyptian, ancient other African, then Egyptian cultures, Canaanite, Ugaritic, Syrian, Palestinian, pre-Hebrew Palestinian traditions, Babylonian, Assyrian, ancient Persian ones, another cultural group. The world is the body of the goddess slain by the victorious male god. Or, with a lot of this mythology lost, you have vestiges of it in Homer's Odyssey.

[74:30]

You have vestiges of it in the Odyssey and in Hesiod's Theogony, in which Cronus, father time, is displaced by a battle of the gods in which the mother goddess is destroyed and the victor is a new god, Zeus, Zeus Pitar, which reflects the conquests of the agrarian Greek society by Indo-European nomads, some of whom went down to India, where they called their father god Dios Pitar, and some of them went as far as Greece, where it's Zeus Pitar. So it reflects the dominance

[75:36]

of a tribal group by a nomadic, ferocious group whose god is pictured as destroying their goddess and their early father god, and mythology recapitulates what happens on the face of the earth and the new structure of things. Now, in the development of, first of all, the Western tradition, there has always been an immense ambiguity about God. How to approach the divine reality? For example, if you go to some of the ancient Byzantine churches, you look at restored portions of

[76:40]

Saint Sophia's in Istanbul, you see frescoes of Jesus Christ, the lawgiver, Christus Pantocrator, Christ the lawgiver, stern, forbidding, right there glaring out at you with that heavy book of life in which everything is recorded, all set to go. Oh, you think you're going upstairs? Well, whammy on you! And sends you downstairs. You know, a picture like this with a book? Well, God the Father took a powder. He started things going, but he's bye-bye. The Son is making up for being mistreated by being stern to other people. So how are you going to get anywhere?

[77:42]

How are you going to get to first base? Well, this is so yang that out of both the unconscious and into the religious tradition comes a negligible factor in its history in the early days. The Virgin Mary. You cannot approach the lawgiver without being judged and condemned. So you say, Hail Mary. And so on. Blessed art thou. And so on. Pray for us now and in the hour of our death. So we call for Mary to intercede on our behalf to put in a plug for us, a gentler force, an approachable force.

[78:45]

So that when the masculine is highly dominant, the feminine component is seen spiritually as soft and gentle and the approach to the masculine God. On the other hand, when the masculine gods are seen as close and protective, the mother goddess or the female goddess is seen as vengeful. When the male is passive, the goddess figure is vengeful. Like Kali

[79:50]

or in India, Rangda in Indonesia, who has fang teeth and does a dance upon the prostrate corpse of her husband and rejoices in the death of the male and at times the sexual dismemberment of the male. And so the same feminine component, one thinks of the term mother as being soft and gentle. But there is another side and all of us know about mothers yelling and screaming and screeching. And I saw an instance that was a good embodiment of ancient mythology in the supermarket yesterday. There was the kid over there

[80:52]

and there was Mama and yelling at the little guy and wow! He was littler than ever. So you see, whenever there is a psychic disparity, psychic in the psychological sense, not in the sense of Ouija boards, whenever there is a psychic disparity of too much softness on the masculine component, the feminine is vengeful. Whenever the reverse occurs, the corresponding opposite takes place. When the masculine is vengeful and harsh, the feminine is soft and approachable. Well, consider, for example, one of the classic instances

[81:54]

of mother's love is a very ironic situation. The Pieta of Mary holding the body of Jesus. What must she be saying other than, if you didn't stray away, you bad guy, this wouldn't have happened to you. The Pieta is regarded as a statue that depicts compassion of the early four. Michelangelo did four Pietas, but whichever one of the four you choose. And yet when you reflect upon it, she is holding a corpse. And one cannot give compassion to the dead, only to the living. And so the early imagery

[82:55]

of Mary especially was along the lines of the Pieta. But as Christianity developed more and more masculine-dominated religion of priests and law and priests and law, then the feminine component became expressed in an ever softer, more approachable way. And so when things were really tough, you would make your approach to the Virgin. Or if to a male saint, we might as well say deity, to a nice guy like Saint Christopher who is the friend of travelers. So you see there is always a law of equity

[83:56]

in the psyche that says that when there is lopsidedness in one direction, there will be a corresponding lopsidedness in the other. And so again, the yin-yang, the yin-yang in which there is the process of compensatory becoming always going on. So then you see, at times in the esoteric tradition in Judaism, for example, so harsh, so stern, no place for women, women having to sit apart at worship, never participate. It became necessary in the esoteric tradition to boost wisdom,

[84:57]

to boost the feminine components so that it wouldn't be utterly lopsided. And for the mother at home to take on the role of the priest by doing the rituals of religion at home, lighting candles and things of that sort. And so there tended to be a compensation for that lopsidedness. Now, whatever the historical and cultural factors involved, I would like to point out, as I hinted at last time, some of the consequences of lopsidedness. Because when one would talk about a creative, integrated or futuristic approach that goes beyond

[85:58]

polarities and differentiations, then one must consider that this is not the same thing as would be the result of maintaining differentiations or even overcompensating a differentiation. Let's take the case, for example, of a male who denies their feminine component. Males who deny wind up either as brutes or as sissies. It's interesting that

[87:05]

males who have trouble over their feminine component and its place in an integrated psyche wind up either super macho or super ineffectual and very often living in their head, to use the cliche that's so rampant today, intellectualizing life. Now, let's take the instance of females who deny or have an imbalance of their masculine component. They are either

[88:06]

hyper-aggressive or they are good word for ninnies or ninnies doesn't somehow sound right. Silly. They are silly. A synonym for this is bitchy. A synonym for this is bastardly, to put it in colloquialism. And I think the colloquialisms well describe the traits that result from these denials. A woman who does not have a harmony within herself of these differentiations either

[89:09]

overemphasizes the masculine component or denies it altogether and in either case is a person in shackles just as the man who is either a brute or a sissy denies his whole being, his whole nature. Now, many psychologists have suggested that a harmony and balance between these two is the goal. And there are many books written on sexuality and the masculine component and females, the feminine component and males and so on which tell you exactly what is a harmonious balance of the two. And the problem is that it usually winds up

[90:12]

being the photograph of the author or a mirror reflection of his own or her own fantasies and goals. Precisely because harmony and balance again of these sexual polarities is neither an absolute term nor a relative term but it rather reflects the appropriate balance

[90:52]

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