exclusive unhinged 'and so, with these masculine semitic mythologies, we have for the first time a separation of the individual from the divine, and this is one of the most important and decisive motifs in the history of mythology: that the eternal life and oneness with the universe are no longer ours. we are separated from God, God is separated from his world, an is turned against nature, nature is turned against man. you do not have this separation in the mythologies of the Great Mother. now, there's an interesting thing about the semitic mythologies: all other mythologies that i know have as their primary divinities those representing nature - the gods of the heavens and of the earth, and the powers of nature, which are within us as well as out there. and in those mythologies the tribal ancestor is always a secondary god. in the semitic mythologies, this situation is reversed. the prime divinity in all the semitic traditions is the local, ancestral divinity... and so we have a pattern of exclusivism here; we have a pattern of social emphasis or social laws, and we have an antinature accent. the whole history of the old testament is yahweh against the nature cults. the goddess is called the abomination, and she and her divinities are called demons and they are not given the credit of being divine. and divinity is out there. the attitude of prayer now is outward, whereas in the old days it was turning inward to the immanent divine. after this change, how do you get to the divine? by means of this particularly endowed social group: the tribe, the caste, the church. now this is the masculine emphasis against the goddess emphasis; when this occurs in individual psychology you're overemphasizing the father role: you repudiate nature, you repudiate women. this is what nietzsche calls the hamlet experience, bowing to the father and saying, 'ophelia you can go drown yourself.' 'oh, that this too sullied flesh would melt' - one hates one's body, one hates nature, one wants to get away from it. this is completely opposite to the attitude of the goddess cults. in the biblical tradition, which is the last great tradition of the semitic line, there is not even a goddess in the tradition. here's a father god with no mother goddess - a very strange thing. what happens to the mother goddess? she is reduced to the elemental level. she is the cosmic water; that's where god's spirit hovers, above the water. he is given the human personification, and she is not. the chaos is exactly tiamat, the goddess of the abyss, who now has been deprived even of her personality. this places a terrific stress on our culture. then you realize also that within the jewish tradition, the covenant is symbolized by the circumcision. you can see that the woman is out altogether. and so we have the radical split here in the history of civilizations and mythologies anywhere between the masculine principle, which is given all the power, and the female principle, which is deprived of it, and her world of nature and its beauty is impugned. even beauty is rejected in this tradition as a distraction, as something seductive.' - joseph campbell !!!! 201017 ... lemon_soda Joseph Campbell is great. They use him in alot of newbie lectures at The Temple of the Jedi Order. Also, Alan Watts 201019 ... unhinged i just discovered him. i am definitely late to the party, but my independent research into goddesses after my self_imposed tara immersion led me to him. he's an interesting combo of many subjects that interested me in my undergrad 201019 what's it to you? who go blather from