Our ideas about God come from us. For approximately the last 5,000 years the West and Near East have projected our masculine archetypes—King, Warrior, Magician/Scholar, and Lover—onto a male God who is…
Our God-images originate in the psyche’s archetypal patterns. For example, we’re all born with Mother/Queen and Father/King archetypes and every culture has attributed the qualities children associate with their parents to a Great Mother Creatrix and Great Father Creator. While their myths differed from culture to culture, the same characteristics of ultimate power, knowledge and authority always appeared.
The fear of God’s retribution has haunted me most of my life. I believe it arrived at the age of 11 when my father died of his third heart attack. Since he had divorced my mother three months earlier to marry another woman, I must have concluded that death was God’s punishment for betraying Mama and leaving us.
As I’ve noted before, my grandchildren are very fortunate to attend a truly excellent school that stresses the importance of diversity and puts its money where its values are in a variety of ways. The following video about a very special Thanksgiving celebration for the third-graders is one example. It features the people and customs of the Moscogee tribe of Native Americans. I hope you enjoy it.
…there is hope. Through the centuries the symbol of the third eye has reminded all who care to see that opening our eyes and minds to God the Mother’s symbols, qualities and presence within us and the world can connect us to the fullest wisdom available to human beings.
One highlight was stepping into the auditorium and being assailed with a wave of deja vu. There in front of me was a recurring image from my dreams! The same thing happened in the corridor outside the cafeteria. I hadn’t remembered what either place looked like, yet they inspired all the auditoriums and cafeterias that have shown up in my dreams since high school. How many of our issues originate in adolescent experiences we’ve completely forgotten? Quite a few, I suspect.
Think about what vampires represent. During the day they sleep in coffins because sunlight will kill them. People with severely repressed life-energy are the same. Failure to develop one or both drives destroys our creativity and hope of enlightenment. Repression leads to depression. In the dark night of our souls we function as though dead, unable to experience the sunny warmth of meaningful work or the countless other pleasures of living, loving, being.
In response to my post, Angels and E.T’s: The Androgyne Archetype, Skip Conover wrote a comment which adds so much to this discussion that I asked him if I could republish it here. Skip is the founder of the Archetype in Action Organization. He says his first thought was to teach about Jungian Archetype, but he soon realized that *we* are the archetypes.
The civil rights movement came about in the 1950’s and 60’s because the Androgyne archetype, which presses us to integrate our inner opposites, is closing the gap between races. A historic bridge had already been built between the genders in 1920 when the Nineteenth Amendment gave women the right to vote.
Angels are a particularly intriguing manifestation of the Androgyne archetype. We see them everywhere: on television, in books and movies, on clothing, and in many personal narratives. According to most accounts angels are genderless messengers who come to point us in healing new directions. They exemplify the very best aspects of psychological and spiritual androgyny.
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