which is a way of pain.
A woman has only to be.
In my twenties, I lived with artists, many of them women. I noticed that when they approached the age of thirty, the marriage problem came up with each one. “I have to get married now and have a child.” When the female within calls the sculptress who has found her instruments of power, the mallet and chisel, her art falls apart, because she can’t carry a serious art career unless she is at it, and nothing else, all day long.
This wreckage doesn’t happen with men. When the female calls the male, all he does is go and get married, because the female is out there, where she naturally is. I would say that this is one of the points in the female journey: there is a heavier load of given nature to deal with. It starts with the girl being overtaken by the menstrual moment, and then she’s a woman.
That much of a summons to life is the problem that you ladies have that we men don’t. Your whole body tells you that you have disowned it. A man does not have that problem. A woman can follow the hero’s journey, but there will be other calls and another relationship that’s asked of her, namely, to the nature field of which she is the manifestation.
It took me a long time to get around to marriage, principally because I felt that women always wanted to have fun, and that was not my interest at all. It would interfere with my reading. That’s really the truth. But another reason was that every time I would get really involved with a woman, I’d have the feeling of weight: life was heavy. And pretty soon I’d just get fed up with that heaviness, with that feeling of everything being so goddamn important and all these little bits of things becoming mountainous problems, and—Jesus!: “I’m out.” And then, a little while later, here it is again.
I have taught hundreds of young women, many of whom have gone into the arts, as did Jean, who went into classic dance. But many of the others had husbands who would not stand for that. Each of these women had to make a choice, and if she chose to knuckle down to what her husband wanted, that ended her adventure. It really did. Everything else then became a substitute. But the objective is to have your own adventure, not a substitute, and it is not by any means an easy thing to do.
When I was teaching these young women, I wasn’t thinking of turning them into philologists or historians. So what was I giving them this stuff for? Most were going to get married, have children, and give them-selves to daily chores—comparable to my daily chore of teaching them, which, after the first excitement, was no fun either. But there are many ways of using the material, and my thought was this: they will have their families, and then, when they are fifty and their families have been launched, there they’ll be. And it was my intention to give them this spiritual message of how to read the world in the second half of life’s journey. That was a long time ago. I still know many of these women—twenty, thirty, or forty years later—and I hear unanimously, that my approach worked, that I gave them something that is now feeding this aspect of their lives.
It’s interesting that in traditions like the Japanese or the old Oriental, and this goes all the way back to Greece in Plato’s time, the housewife was one kind of woman, and the courtesan was another. The courtesan was the woman proficient in the arts, in literature, and in talk. It was a different type of human life from that of the housewife, and in those traditions, the woman was fulfilled in that role.
Then there’s another woman’s role in literature, but one I have never seen, that of the woman who appears as an Amazon. There is one such story about the daughter of the King of France, who’s been kidnapped by the Muslims. After she and a Muslim fall infinitely in love, she is rescued by her family and brought back from Islam. Her Muslim lover follows, recaptures her, and now, as they are running to escape from this military group of brothers who are trying to take her back, she says to him, “How good are you with your sword?” He says, “No good. I’m just good in bed.” “Well,” she replies, “you go on then, and I will take care of this bunch.” It is a wonderful story, one of the best in the world, and it’s worth looking for in the Arabian Nights.
Joyce speaks of the woman as the one who is the link between: between nations, between people. The ability women have to marry men of totally alien cultures and find themselves at home with them is more than what happens when men marry women of alien cultures. Woman is the link between. Another thing that Joyce brings out in Finnegans Wake: a woman has three or four sons: one is a great son, another is a poor son. She loves them all. She is not evaluating in terms of achievements or anything of the kind. She represents a human-to-human relationship.
Where male power dominates,
you have separation.
Where female power dominates,
there’s a non-dual, embracing quality.
Having taught young women, I’ve been amazed to see how competent they are in understanding their hus-band’s job, if they are in a marriage that’s really going. She never studied that stuff, but she’s right in there with him, because any failure on the part of either member ruins the duad. In my own case, everything that I write I read to Jean, who gives me the criticism and support that my work requires. The man might feel sometimes as though he does not need cooperation, but he does. There is a big difference between a man operating with a woman behind him and one out there alone.
When we were first married, and I was driving the car, it didn’t matter what the hell I did, Jean went along with it. Then there came a time when I realized there would been a psychological transformation, that some-times she was critical of the way my driving was done. There then came a stage where she was directing, And all of that was acceptable: it had to do with changes in her thinking. First, she thought, “Anything he does is great.” Then, when she had learned a little more about me, her uncritical acceptance went away. Finally, after she had learned still more about me—and it always goes like this—now, she is the boss. I know the feeling of turning a car over to someone and just having to say, “If we run into something, that’s okay. Here we go, Dear.” And you find that she manages very well. It’s different, that’s all. It is the Perilous Bed.
A knight, in full armor,
approaches the Perilous Bed.
Whenever he tries to settle into it,
the bed jumps and bucks and moves.
The Perilous Bed represents
the female temperament.
If the male can just hold on,
if he can endure,
the bed will settle down,
and he’ll get the reward.
Some time ago, I had a sabbatical and spent the whole year traveling, mostly in India and Japan, but I was also in Thailand, Ceylon, Burma, and Taiwan. My impression was that, in anything, the women in these cultures were more competent than the men. Perhaps I had to go abroad to see something that is also a fact back here, but I was tremendously impressed by the vigor and authority of Oriental women.
I was a long time in India, and since I had already published the Zimmer books, I saw every department of India that one could ask to see, including the house of Nehru. His younger sister took me as her person-to-go-to-parties-with, so I met the whole bunch. Indian women look so darned humble with their saris and all, but they are nothing of the kind. They are potent. In Japan, however, it is a different situation, because those men are really strong men. But when you see a Japanese couple in a restaurant, who pays the check? The woman. She has the money.
The principle characterization of Athene is as the guardian of heroes, as a patroness, like Lakṣmī, the Indian goddess who isthe supporter of the king or of anybody who then becomes her hero. We find Athene depicted in art as the protector of heroes: she is there when Perseus takes the head of Medusa, and she is the one who initiates the young man into his heroic career. In the Odyssey, she tells Telemachus to go find his father. She is present when Odysseus lands on the island of Scherie and meets the Phaeacian princess Nausicaa, and she is again present at the meeting of father and son. So, we can think of her as the guardian o
f heroes.
Athene is also the protectress of the Acropolis, the fortress of the city. Athene relates to the father, not to the mother. Her mother was Metis, but when Metis was pregnant, Zeus swallowed her, so she gave birth to her child in Zeus’ belly, and Athene emerged from his head. That’s what Freud calls a transfer to above—the birthplace of the male creation—and she comes forth from there. In societies with such traditions, as I see it, the mother is the mother of our nature. The child is born of the mother and is the little nature object. The father is the parent of one’s social maturity. Hence, in the boy’s initiation, he goes from the mother to the men’s camp, and they initiate him.
Father is the separator.
Mother brings together.
Hera is the consort of Zeus, who represents royal rule, the justice that governs the world, so she is matron of the household. This role is different from that of Athene, patron of the heroic adventure. In the contrast between seductress and wife, Hera is the wife, and the seductress role goes to Aphrodite. Aphrodite, however, is more than just the seductress. She is the goddess of all love, a tremendously powerful figure, for love can overtake a person as seductress, but it is also the supporting love of life.
The Ouranian Venus is the one who gives the inspiration of the muses that is the inspiration of the spirit. She feeds not only the body but the spirit as well. The way she pours life into the world shows that this one life is the one truth of all things. That’s why I think that the woman as artist is in a field which furnishes not only physical life but spiritual life as well—the spiritual life at once the revealing power.
I have noticed that the way women look at children is different from the way men do. There are two ways of looking at a little kid in an airplane toddling up and down the aisle: one is the way the woman looks at the child; the other is the way the man does. That’s why I say that the prime female power and virtue is compassion: the lack of egoistic isolation , the opening to participation. Even in sex, the man is aggressive, but the woman opens. The opening to that ubiquitous presence which is the ground of us all is compassion. Recognizing that spontaneous feeling, embracing it, and manifesting it in action is the female power.
In my book The Mythic Image, I have a wonderful story about Kuan-yin, one of the personifications of the great Mahāyāna Bodhisattva Avalokiteśvara, the embodiment of compassion.121
It seems that Kuan-yin realized that in a certain part of China, out in the rural areas, nobody had ever heard of enlightenment. They were all interested in horse racing and all this macho stuff. So she turns herself into a gloriously beautiful girl, comes into town with fresh fish from the river to sell, and when her basket is empty, she disappears. Early the next day, this beautiful fish-selling girl is there again, and then once again she disappears. This daily pattern continues, and soon all of the men have become enchanted by her.
One morning, when she appears, about ten or twenty of them surround her and say, “You have to marry one of us.” “Well,” she says, “I cannot marry twenty men, but tomorrow morning, if one of you can recite by heart the Sūtra of the Compassionate Kuan-yin, I will marry that man.” The next morning, a dozen men know the entire sūtra by heart, so she says, “Well, I cannot marry all of you, but I will marry the one who can interpret this sūtra to me tomorrow.”
The next day, there are four men who can interpret the sūtra, so now she says, “I am only one woman, and I can’t marry four men, but if one of you has experienced the meaning of this sūtra three days from now, then I will marry that man.”
Three days later, there is but one man waiting for her. Now she says, “My little house is down by the bend in the river. Come there this evening, and you will be my husband.”
So that evening, he goes to where the shore bends and comes to a little house. An old couple is standing outside, and the old man says, “Oh, we’ve been waiting a long, long time for you. Our daughter is inside.” But when he goes into the room, it’s empty. She isn’t there. So he looks out the window and sees footprints, which he follows down to the river, where he finds a little pair shoes at the water’s edge, but no girl.
Then, as he’s standing there, with the reeds blowing and so forth, he realizes that all the reeds and everything else is she. Through her allure and charm, which is what the female figures represent in these Mahāyāna images, he realizes the nirvāṇic grace of beauty in the universe. Having understood the sūtra, he knew what he was experiencing, and he received illumination.
Dante realized something of this kind at the end of The Divine Comedy. He had followed the allure of Beatrice, who had guided him through the heavens to the very throne of God, and when he got there, she was there, together with the Trinity and the angelic forms. Behind the three persons of the Trinity, he saw three circles of flame and light, which represented the non-personal aspect of the god. He said that he was wondering how the personified forms and non-personified illumination could be the same, when suddenly he under-stood that the whole world was of the love and grace of God: the love he’d first experienced in Beatrice.
When it’s all love,
all must be love.
Nothing must interfere:
love conquers all.
[Discuss]
Living in the Sacred
NOW the Indian term for “illusion,” māyā—from the verbal root mā, “to measure, to measure out, to form, to create, construct, exhibit or display”—refers to both the power that creates an illusion and the false display itself. The art of a magician, for example, is māyā; so too the illusion he creates. The arts of the military strategist, the me-chant, actor, and thief: these also are māyā. Māyā is experienced as fascination, charm; specifically, feminine charm. And to this point there is a Buddhist saying: “Of all the forms of māyā that of woman is supreme.” 122
Let’s say we have the world of that which is no world: the Garden of Eden before the world of duality, the transcendent mystery. Then we have the world of things: the world of duality and multiplicity, of māyā, where we’ve lost connection with the transcendence.
Māyā is that power
which converts transcendence
into the world.
As a cosmogenic principle—and as a feminine, personal principle, also—māyā is said to possess three powers:
A Veiling Power that hides or conceals the “real,” the inward essential character of things; so that, as we read in a sacred Sanskrit text: “Though it is hidden in all things, the Self shines not forth.”123
The first stage, the veil, manifests from the fact that you don’t see the white light. This is what is called the māyā veil. The image that’s given is of white light broken into the colors of the rainbow by a prism. This prism is the Goddess. With the veiling power, the obscuring power, the white light can’t get through.
A Projecting Power, which then sends forth illusionary impressions and ideas, together with associated desires and aversions—as might happen, for example if at night one should mistake a rope for a snake and experience fright. Ignorance (the Veiling Power), having concealed the real, imagination (the Projecting Power) evolves phenomena. And so we read: “This power of projection creates all appearances, whether of gods or of the cosmos.”124
With the projecting power, the forms of the world come through. The prism is the veil, but it is also the projector: what stops the white light and what projects the colors of the rainbow. In this second stage, the white light shows through the forms of the world. If you put a number of colors on a disk and spin it, you’ll get a white spinning disk—that’s the revealing power.
These first two powers, concealing and projecting, can be compared to those properties of a prism by which sunlight is transformed into the colors of the rainbow. Arrange these seven colors on a disk, spin it, and they will be seen as white. So too, when viewed a certain way, the phenomena themselves may reveal what normally they veil; which demonstrates:
The Revealing Power of māyā, which it is the functio
n of art and scripture, ritual and meditation: to make known.125
It is the function of art to serve
the revealing power of māyā.
The old voice of the ocean, the bird-chatter of little rivers,
(Winter has given them gold for silver
To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)
From different throats intone one language.
So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without
Divisions of desire and terror
To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger- smitten cities,
Those voices also would be found
Clean as a child’s; or like some girl’s breathing who dances alone
By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.
—Robinson Jeffers126
Fear and desire
are the problem of the artist also.
We need more poetry that reveals
what the heart is ready to recognize.
…the first function of art is exactly that which I have already named as the first function of mythology; to transport the mind in experience past the guardians—desire and fear—of the paradisal gate to the tree within of illuminated life. In the words of the poet Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”127 But the cleansing of the doors, the wiping away of the guardians, those cherubim with their flaming sword, is the first effect of art, where the second, simultaneously, is the rapture of recognizing in a single hair “a thousand golden lions.”128