The Mystery of Money © Bernard Lietaer
65
October 2000
This bias toward heroic masculine archetypal energy is at the same time a cause and a result of the repression of the feminine in general and the Great Mother in particular. The net effect is that in our Western cultures there is now formally no Goddess myth and no feminine dimension in the collective image of Photo 2.21 a ½ page the divine. It justifies the comment by Adrienne Rich: “I know of no woman virgin, mother, lesbian, married, celibate - whether she earns her keep as a housewife, a cocktail waitress or a scanner of brain waves - for whom the body is not a fundamental problem.”126 The Hero battling a fierce dragon, with a defenseless maiden almost invisible in the In the Paleolithic, background. (You may need a magnifying glass to find her…) (Altdorfer engraving) Neolithic or Cretan myths everything was considered to be alive, animated, sacred, with soul and purpose; and this made possible a totally
Photograph 2.21 of MARDUK VANQUISHING TIAMAT Baring &Cashford pg 277 full page (Moreno Tomasetig).
Marduk represented as a dapper looking sky god in royal attire, holding thunderbolts in both hands, vanquishes the Sumerian Great Mother Tiamat. She still has the cow horns but is otherwise changed into a monstrous animal. After killing her, Marduk will fashion heaven and earth from her dead body, her ‘carcass’. This initiates the core metaphor in the Western worldview of a necessary separation from and domination by - spirit over matter. (Original drawing by Moreno Tomasetig from Assyrian relief 9th century BC, British Museum).
126
The Problem with Heroes #2: The Problem for Himself Masculine heroic identity asks us to tolerate pain in silence, or even to deny its existence. “The dreaded truth of the soaring male is that in his attempt to get above the pain of life, he has succeeded in not feeling - not even really experiencing - either the painful aspects of life or its real joys. The horror of this condition, however, can’t really register, because he has short-circuited even the pain of being cut off. Thus, there is a vicious circle, a ‘Catch-22’ set up that the male can’t escape.”127 This is how - once split - the body remains split off from the mind, the cosmic from the individual, spirit from matter. And the first one to loose something important is the Hero himself. He has lost the taste of life itself.
different view of the body than our Modern view. Such beliefs are still common in what we call “primitive” societies, it is even the reason why we call them primitive. Five thousand years of patriarchal supremacy have shaped the modern view, which pushes to its extreme the separation between spirit and nature, mind and matter, or soul and body.(sidebar).
Rich, Adrienne: Of Woman Born: Motherhood in Experience and Institution (New York: Norton & Co, 1976) pg. 236. 127 Mazis, Glen The Trickster, Magician and the Grieving Man (Santa Fe: Bear & Co, 1993) pg 44.