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"The challenge is to flower as individuals, neither as biological archetypes nor as personalities imitative of the male.”
Joseph Campbell, Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine (xiii)
Myth, religion, and gender
For over a decade beginning in the 1970s, Joseph Campbell waded into the murky waters of gender, sex, and myth through a series of lectures on historical goddesses. Dr. Safron Rossi has collected these lectures for us in a compilation entitled Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine. Up to that point, it wasn’t as if Campbell avoided the subject or was not inclusive in his work. Rather, during this time he decided to discuss this archetype separately with more care and intentionality.
Perhaps this undertaking was due to the powerful undercurrent of second wave feminism—built upon the philosophies of people like Simone de Beauvior, Betty Freidan, and Gloria Steinem. These writers inspired and documented a movement which would lead to the Equal Pay Act of 1963, crystallizing the economic rights of women in the United States. A year later, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would prohibit discrimination by employers based upon race, religion, sex, or national origin. And nearly a decade later when Campbell was to begin speaking on the goddess, bell hooks was releasing her first writings broadening the feminist movement to include social topics other than economics such as race, love, and sexuality.
While we cannot definitively know what inspired Campbell to take on this project, the evidence would suggest that he found himself (along with most people of that time) staring headlong into more than one existential crisis—who are we, who am I…better yet, what am I?
And what better tool does our species have than myth to address such amorphous, sensitive, albeit confusing topics such as gender and sexuality?
What better tool does our species have than myth to address such amorphous, sensitive, albeit confusing topics such as gender and sexuality?
The two “traps”
Throughout this essay, we are mindful of at least two “traps” for us to fall into and traps which Campbell had to navigate in his lectures. The first trap is that of the fundamental attribution error. To paraphrase Bertram Gawronski, a social psychologist, the fundamental attribution error is a bias humans are prone to express in which we underemphasize situational and environmental factors to explain someone's behavior, while over-index on things like their personality or disposition. In other words, when we study social history (in this case, historical mythology) we are prone to make meaning of events in the past using our interpretation of personality factors rather than the environmental factors which led to individual choices.
The next trap is adjacent to the first—this is the tendency to assume that ancient peoples’ social and cultural experience with things like gender, sex, and roles is similar to our own. True, homo sapiens 30,000 years ago were the same as homo sapiens 2,000 years ago, which are the same as homo sapiens today. What was different in each of those periods, however, were the norms and expectations socialized among any given people at any given time.
In other words, while we cannot make the mistake of assuming that ancient people were somehow less intelligent, evolved, or capable as we are today, we must also respect that we cannot naturally intuit the social values they held about things like gender and sex, for example. Rather, this takes work, documentation, and evidence gathering as Campbell does in the book Goddesses.
War killed the goddess
In the Goddesses we discover early on one of Campbell’s more forceful opinions on the subject of the goddess. He believes that the goddess finds herself a second class citizen of many of the world’s myths. Campbell asserts, “All I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are. And it is a future—it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it" (263).
He argues that the primary driver of the devaluation of the woman (and by extension the feminine and the goddess) is rooted in the evolution of war during the Bronze Age–more specifically the developments from the Indo-European warrior cultures to the Semitic-speaking patriarchal cultures. These two warrior cultures differed greatly in the way they approached war and winning. The Semitic-speaking peoples tended to favor annihilation, countering the Indo-European custom of assimilation. To put it another way, war killed the goddess.
When considering this development Campbell questions,
One is moved to ask why the [ancient Semetic speaking peoples]...turned their backs so resolutely on the goddess and her glorious world … A completely contrary understanding and attitude is presented in the mythological system of the other great complex of warrior tribes … Like the bedouins of the deserts, they too were patriarchal herding folk, and their leading gods were gods of war, finally subject however, to the larger powers of nature. (xxiv)
In other words Campbell argues that the Semitic-speaking tribes of the Bronze Age greatly challenged the norms of assimilation with annihilation. This threat of male violence, of patriarchy annihilating the divine feminine—first by separating or “othering” the feminine and then destroying her—is a legacy whose impressions remain to this day. In some respects, the very act of “othering” by separating and classifying is itself the defining behavior of patriarchy. At its core, these particular warrior tribes introduced an idea that man is superior to nature in so many ways. Suddenly the idea emerges that there is only one god, and that god is inherently gendered, and that gender is male.
Perhaps the counter force to the warrior death-cults of the Bronze Age is the non-dualistic god of Rome, Janus. Janus stands at the gate–at all gates–with two heads or eyes pointing in opposing directions. One eye looks to the future while the other to the past. Janus is the liminal, the in-between, the doorway from this place to the next. Similarly, in one of the oldest cities on earth called Çatalhöyük, modern excavations have uncovered at the gates of temples and homes alike two felines which gaze at all who enter. One must enter the “in-between” space, under the watch of both this and that. Campbell suggests in his lectures that one of these is a lion and the other a lioness, as if sex, the dualism of male and female, is the gateway to the divine.
The liberation of the goddess (or how the goddess liberates us all)
The error of patriarchy, then, is that of a logical fallacy. Patriarchy mistakes the symbol of gender for the reference. It is akin to religious fundamentalism in that it only manages to identify the most basic interpretation available. As Campbell quips in Goddesses, “My definition of mythology is ‘other people’s religion’” (pg. 14). Unlike the Roman god Janus looking forward and behind or the two felines discovered around Çatalhöyük, the modern world appears increasingly challenged at holding non-dualistic perspectives. Perhaps we have forgotten how to see the world before it was carved up and fought over. Perhaps we have grown accustomed to seeing gender as a fact and less as itself a myth, a story which helps us cope with our psychology.
After reflecting on these lectures by Campbell, we believe it’s possible that we as a culture have mistaken the symbol for the reference and forgotten that the goddess is an archetype available to us all—for our wellbeing, for our liberation, and for our hope. Because, like Ranier Maria Rilke so famously captured in his famous poem “Widening Circles” (as translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows):
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
If the hero has a thousand faces, would it not be true that some of them are feminine, some masculine, and others something entirely different? Our myth is only as great as our courage and our imagination, and as Campbell reminds us, “The challenge is to flower as individuals, neither as biological archetypes nor as personalities” (Goddesses, pg. xiii). Perhaps the goddess, in the underworld of oppression all these years, has returned with a boon which she gives freely to us, if we only have the courage to listen.
MythBlast authored by:
Kami Hope is a designer, entrepreneur, creative, and myth enthusiast. Growing up in a part of the US which taught religious fundamentalism, Kami has enjoyed exploring art, science, and myth in adulthood in order to navigate the realities of life and better enjoy the world around her. She lives with her partner Matt in Nashville Tennessee along with their two young children—though they are currently relocating to London, England. There she hopes to dive deeper into design and art by taking advantage of iconic museums, culture, and history.
Matt Malcom is a writer, public philosopher, and investor currently living in Nashville Tennessee. He studied philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point and was an Army Officer before joining the NGO world. During the pandemic, Matt expanded his work in public philosophy by launching a multi year project called The Pocket Philosopher. Now a global community spanning 5 countries, the mission remains focused on increasing public access to philosophical ideas. Today, he works in investment management focusing on ESG integration and is relocating to London at the end of 2024 to further this pursuit. He lives with his partner, Kami and their two young children. Kami and Matt enjoy long discussions about life, love, politics, and philosophy.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 5, and Goddesses
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This bonus episode contains a short lecture that Campbell gave at Westerbee Ranch in Sonoma in 1987 on the "Symbology of the Tarot". It is a "slide" lecture meaning that Campbell was speaking to a curated set of slides, which he often did. Even though we cannot see the slides, his discussion and interpretation of the Tarot deck is worth a listen. This lecture was recorded in the same year as Campbell's death. One can hear him clearing his throat often. He was being treated for esophageal cancer.
This Week's Highlights
"All I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are. And it is a future—it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it."
-- Joseph Campbell