Failing to honour the Feminine

I strongly recommend Edward Edinger’s book The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology (Shambhala, 1994). It is full of thought-provoking explanations and arguments. In recounting the story of Jason and Medea, Edinger notes a recurring theme in Greek mythology: the hero defies death and achieves his quest through the help of a woman whom he promises to marry or honour in some way and whom he subsequently abandons. (The tale of Theseus and Ariadne is another example.) For Edinger, this tendency of the hero to exploit the anima (his intuition) for worldly ends rather than as a means to wholeness is at the root of these stories and ultimately portended the collapse of the Greek world. The hero ends up using his female saviour for his own ends, being too afraid of her power to give her her rightful place. This, according to Edinger, bespeaks a masculine principle that is fundamentally insecure.

‘The masculine could not achieve a balance with the feminine,’ writes Edinger, ‘hence the most that could be done was to exploit the feminine principle and then drop it again. The result was that the anima turned into bitterness. We may find in this an underlying explanation for the eventual fall of the ancient world….Certainly in Hellenistic times we note the development of a pervasive bitterness; a kind of rending sadness seems to run through most of Greek wisdom. Stoicism had an undercurrent of despair, and we see its ultimate expression in Sophocles, who gave vent to this prevalent feeling in Oedipus at Colonus.’ Here Edinger quotes Oedipus’s nihilistic words: “Not to be born is, past all prizing, best; but when a man hath seen the light, this is next by far, that with all speed he should go thither, whence he hath come.” If that is the ultimate wisdom of life, it is a counsel of despair and reason enough for the decline of ancient civilisation.’