Why does the psyche seek something past, buried in the collective belief of the times? Since nature is animated and the authentic nature of the psyche is seeking its wholeness, the animated life force is sacrificed for the organized cultures we live in. Culture, an eighty-thousand-year development, emerged when our ancestors began to live in large tribal societies for the advantage of working together to distinguish them from other groups with which they competed for resources.
Culture, as a human creation definer began to shift the power from a previously instinctual genetic dynamic to also include the mind’s evolutionary beliefs and began to be an imprinter on our behavior. Now, characteristics of culture acted like genes and transmit to others and affect how behavior is reproduced. Our social minds became wired with cultural beliefs.
How we define gender determines how much access we have to the full range of human capacity. Liberating gender into nature’s solar and lunar organizing principle is the first step in ending the Western culture’s suppression, fragmentation, and dissociation from out genetic integrity and empowerment.
If we strip away the gender cultural labeling from the Eros and Psyche story and experience the story in one of its original intentions as an initiation into the union of love and soul, we can begin to recover the original intention of initiation, which is “to begin a particular action of event or happening to shepherd these secrets into our lives.”
I believe that what the initiate is really seeking at the time the Eros and Psyche tale is told is access to the authentic Eros principle of love and soul, the great mystery of life then as well as now. Remember that Aphrodite, the goddess of love in our story was a raging and jealous goddess who felt that the infertility of life was occurring because a mortal was being worshiped for her beauty as opposed to Aphrodite, an archetype of love and life.
The jealous Aphrodite who appears in this story is a result already of a patriarchal male psychology. The Aphrodite in the story is not the authentic solar and lunar feminine but is birthed from the severed testicle of the original male principle in Greek culture, the Titan Ouranos, whose testicles were severed by his Titan son Chronos who then threw them into the sea. According to this interpretation the name Aphrodite means “she who shines from the ocean foam.” However, in pre-patriarchal cultures Aphrodite was a goddess of the dawn whose name meant to shine. It is in the quest to return to the authentic feminine that this initiation activates the mysteries of Isis, who personifies that spirit.
Eros in this tale is also the childlike son of Aphrodite rather than in primordial earlier manifestation of a primordial god of creation. Cults to Eros existed in pre-classical Greece where he was worshiped by fertility symbols in many parts of Greece. To speak to the power of Eros as an autonomous spirit he was also seen as the first god to come into existence in one of the earliest version of the Greek creation story.
Again, we can look at the four challenges in the tale as the way for the initiate to purify out the false Greek patriarchal contamination and return to the more authentic spirit of love and soul. Going through initiations in the modern world is more than unwieldy and will rarely happen. However, the contemporary psyche has several options to escape possession by patriarchal gender contamination. The escape leads to the solar and lunar archetypes, which are the authentic organizing principle of consciousness.
The following six-step initiation is simple, but the result can be profound if the steps are practiced as waking mediation : Quick Fix 6 Steps to discover the authentic Self.
Here is a short, to the point version of a powerful way to take off unconscious gender stamping. We will not necessarily be conscious of those dynamics so we need to discover them when they possess us.
- Step 1 : Notice negative feeling (Usually negative feeling are the result of a gap between the solar idealization and reality).
- Step 2 : Ask yourself what is the idealization that is creating the feeling. (We are usually not aware of the unconscious solar idealization)
- Step 3 : Put the idealization in an image in a balloon and pop it or put it in a fire and burn it up
- Step 4 : Capture the first thought, emotion or intuition that arises.
- Step 5 : Take some action with what comes up in Step 4. Dance it, write it, and share it with someone—some action to embody the emergent information.
- Step 6 : Do anything not to have an idealization. When aware of negative feelings go back to Step 1.
With the completion of this six-step initiation we can return to the animated spirit and get out of the cultural repression that keeps us from the authentic Joy of Love and Soul.