From Ancient Myth to Modern Healing

Themis: Goddess of Heart-Soul, Justice and Reconciliation

Pamela Donleavy, Ann Shearer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134061358
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is about the energy personified by the classical Greek goddess Themis, who brought her divine and natural 'right order' to gods and humans, and who still presides over law courts as the figure of Justice. In many Western countries today, the growing dis-ease in minds and bodies of individuals is often echoed in whole communities. Rather than coming together, they seem to split apart in anger and distress. But themis energy is equally powerful, and can work to bring together and to heal.

From the battle of the Titans and Olympians to the oracle at Delphi and the banquet of the gods, the stories of the goddess weave through these chapters to illuminate how themis energy is at work today. The authors explore psychological healing in individuals and relate this to new research in neurocardiology on the subtle interactions of body and mind. They show how the international movement for restorative justice is drawing on the same healing tools to benefit victims and offenders alike. And they evoke the extraordinary story of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which shows the world how themis energy can help transform a ravaged society.

This book deepens understanding of the psychological urge towards healing and wholeness which is as much a part of human beings as the urge to destroy. It offers exciting new insights into Jung's unique approach to the relationship between individual and collective psychology. It will appeal to psychologists who work with individuals and groups, to lawyers and others concerned with the failure of current criminal justice systems, and to people involved in religious, political and other groups that seek to build communities which can encompass and even celebrate diversity rather than rejecting it in fear.

Chapter 1
Birth of a goddess

Themis first appears in a story of how this world came into being, a Greek myth about the birth of the gods. Ever since storytelling began, such creation myths have told of how particular cultures explain their own genesis and nature. So they can give a picture of the dynamic psychological processes which initiate a new structure of governing cultural principles. Creation myths help peoples define themselves, they tell them what values are important. Across times and cultures, they have been recounted to young people as an essential part of their initiation into their tribe; their retelling has brought renewal at the start of the New Year; they have been evoked at times of crisis.¹ They may leave their more or less conscious traces in the lasting ceremonies of communities: the annual American rituals of Thanksgiving, for instance, are a reminder, however commercialized and half-forgotten, of that nation’s beginnings and the values on which these were based.

But creation myths are also about more than the making of particular cultures and defining the place of individuals within them. Ultimately, they speak to the nature and meaning of human existence itself and its relationship to the cosmos. ‘Where do I come from?’ is a question that seems to be encoded into every child, and the answers can range from the most basically biological to the most loftily speculative, carrying with them other stories about the purpose of that individual life. Creation myths are never outgrown, however much other tales of other world-beginnings may follow them. Their cultural and psychological implications remain embedded in the human psyche and, as Chapters 2 and 3 explore, can still be relived in the lives of contemporary individuals.

When creation myths are viewed through Joseph Campbell’s perspective, as stories about how cosmic energy has poured into human cultural manifestation, these myths also show which archetypal patterns have become powerful within a culture and which have not. Psychologically, they can indicate which energies are more readily available, and what has been repressed or lost. Helping to recover those lost aspects is the work of themis consciousness, as it brings together psychic contents. So first we turn to the creation myth in which Themis herself came into being, and in which so much of her Titanic inheritance was crushed by an emerging consciousness.

The poet Hesiod is thought to have written his Theogony, his own story of the birth of the gods, some time before 700 BCE, which makes it older than any known version of Homer’s great epics The Iliad and The Odyssey.² It is in the Theogony that the goddess Themis first appears. So this is where her story must start.

In the beginning, says Hesiod, there was Chaos. Just that, nothing more.

Then out of that swirling incoherence came a shape: Gaia, Mother Earth herself, already broad and strong enough for future gods to find in her a foothold. And then came Eros, that most beautiful and irresistibly mighty power of attraction, and once Eros was there, the whole business of creation could begin. Night gave birth to Day and Space. Earth gave birth to Heaven and called him Ouranos; she made him to be her own equal, to cover her and to be a safe home for the blessed gods. Next she gave birth to the hills, and the sea.

Then Earth and Heaven together started to produce great creatures. First there were the Titans – six daughters, including Themis, and six sons. Then came the Cyclopes, strong and full of craft, guardians of thunder and lightening. They were just like the Titans, except for one curious fact: they had only one eye, right in the middle of their foreheads. But that is a detail compared with who came next: three insolent, awful creatures, the Hekatoncheires, each with 50 heads, each with 100 arms which slashed about so fast that not one could be held.

From the start, Ouranos couldn’t bear his children. Every day and every night he covered Earth, and every time a child was born of this endless union he stuffed it back where it had come from, right back into Gaia’s womb. He thought this a great game, he enjoyed it. And Earth? She groaned in labour and she groaned as the burden of those children grew inside her. At last she could bear it no longer. Reaching inside herself, she drew out a piece of adamant, the toughest metal of all, and honed it into a great sickle. She took no joy in what she planned, but she could see no other way to stop Ouranos’s destruction of new life. Her sons liked it no better than she did; there was plenty to be afraid of in that huge, often-lowering father of theirs. But in the end crafty Kronos loved his mother and hated his father enough to seize the sickle. And when Ouranos came, accompanied by Night, to enfold Earth in his great and passionate embrace, Kronos crept from his hiding place and with that adamantine sickle cut off his father’s genitals and hurled them into the sea. Ouranos howled with outrage and pain and sprang back from Earth.

Immediately all those children swarmed out, blinking in the night-light, sniffing the unaccustomed air. And then creation exploded, for good and ill alike. Joyful Love and sour Blame, the ruthless Fates and whole families of laughing water nymphs, Battles and Fights and shining stars, Glory and Lawlessness, Ruin and cleansing winds and more besides than can ever be named in a single lifetime poured from parthenogenic parents and myriad matings. In among them all were the firstborn of Earth and Heaven, the Titans. So finally Themis, together with her brothers and sisters, was able to come into the world.³

This story of creation continues. But already it tells something about Themis and the world into which she arrived. She was born, finally, when Ouranos sprang back from Gaia, and that was made possible by her brother Kronos, who became known as Father Time himself. So Themis can be said to come into time, and into a specific time, when the original union of Earth and Heaven has been violently and angrily ruptured. Across times and cultures, those two great forces have come to be seen as ‘the masculine’ and ‘the feminine’ principles; most usually, as here and in, for instance, pre-Confucian China, Heaven is identified with ‘the masculine’ and Earth with ‘the feminine’. So Themis comes into consciousness at a time of strife between masculine and feminine energies. And although the contemporary Western world may seem a long way from the one into which she and her sibling Titans emerged blinking from Mother Earth, the same psychological strife is immediately still recognizable as part of its inheritance, and as a story still played out in the lives of individual women and men.

The wave of feminism that started to break in the middle of the nineteenth century, and reached a crescendo in the last quarter of the twentieth, has brought a new level of consciousness to this ancient story, not simply socially and economically, but psychologically as well. As some women claim their ‘masculine’ aspect, and some men their ‘feminine’, it is no longer possible to make an easy equation of ‘the feminine’ with women and ‘the masculine’ with men; the very meaning of the terms is up for question, and the questioning can bring anger and bewilderment. At the same time, people in Western cultures have increasingly come to lament the dominance of the masculine and the effects of the abiding enmity between Earth and Heaven, which have come to stand too for the apparently opposing forces of feeling and reason, nature and culture. Most recently, the yearning for an equal honouring of a creative and nurturing feminine energy has fuelled not only the influential perspectives of feminism but myriad ‘new’ spiritualities. The very intensity of feeling conjured by and around these movements speaks to both their psychological significance and to the enormity of the rebalancing task they serve.

The legend of her birth suggests that Themis is intimately bound up with this collective psychological struggle. Appearing at that specific time when the archetypal masculine and feminine energies split apart in enmity, Themis is also, like any child, the carrier of both. This suggests that the psychological force represented by the goddess who calls the different gods together carries an important potential for reconciliation between the two. What the ‘birth’, the coming-to-consciousness, of Themis suggests psychologically is that when there is dis-order between masculine and feminine, then the healing energy she represents also appears. Hesiod’s creation myth suggests that this dis-order is built into the unfolding of Western consciousness, part of its archetypal inheritance. But it also suggests that encoded in these mythic beginnings there is the potential to move beyond it.

Interwoven with this theme is another. Hesiod’s myth suggests that the dis-order can also be seen as a differentiation necessary to psychological development: it is when Heaven and Earth, masculine and feminine, are separated that the work of creation, until then blocked in the womb of Earth, can finally begin. This necessary separation of Gaia and Ouranos has parallels in other creation myths, which suggests its archetypal nature. In ancient Egypt, for instance, the masculine principle Geb was the fertile Earth, while the feminine principle Nut stretched herself across the starry Sky to enfold all creation. But they too had to part for the work of creation to continue, and forever, says their myth, must yearn to reunite. This necessary separation of masculine and feminine can also be seen as a stage in the age-long development from an ancient world view in which the mother goddess alone was the creative source of life, death and regeneration.⁴ These ancient collective unfoldings find modern expression, too, in the stories developmental psychology tells of the growth in consciousness of the individual child, from relationship only with the mother to a necessary capacity to differentiate between maternal and paternal energies.

So the separation of Heaven and Earth seems as vital to the continuing work of creation as their coming together. As Jung imagined it, these two mighty forces, the feminine principle of relatedness and the masculine principle of discrimination, are engaged in a perpetual cosmic dance: ‘it is the function of Eros to unite what Logos has sundered.’⁵ Yet in the unfolding of Western consciousness, that essential and equal balance has also been skewed across the generations, and creation has suffered. Hesiod’s story shows how deep this goes.

For all that Kronos had cooperated with Mother Earth to release her offspring, he finally learned nothing from his own laborious and dangerous beginnings. Once he became king of the gods, he too turned on his own children, fearful of losing his power to the creative energy they would bring. One by one, as they emerged from his sister-wife Rhea, he scoffed them down, gobbling their creative potential to keep it for himself. Once more, the feminine suffered, says Hesiod, ‘endless grief’, until Ouranos and Gaia, now reconciled, spirited Rhea off to Crete for her latest confinement, where his grandmother took care of tiny Zeus from the moment of his birth. When Rhea came home with yet another swaddled babe, Kronos didn’t even bother to look at it. So he gobbled up not a succulent little morsel but a stone. Years later, crafty Rhea brought the now glorious young Zeus home in the guise of a cup-bearer to his father. The old god, greedy as ever, had no hesitation in gulping the wine into which Rhea had mixed a powerful emetic. So he vomited up their children, and finally the next generation of gods, the Olympians, were born.⁶

But as Zeus in his turn became honoured as the father of gods and humans, once more the story of masculine dominance was repeated. Once more the father-god feared that he would be superseded by the next generation. This time, Zeus took the precaution of swallowing his pregnant wife, Metis. So the goddess Athene was born from her father’s forehead. And although her mother remained in Zeus’s belly, gestating the child until she forced her way into the world by becoming her father’s intolerable headache, for ever after Athene has been hailed as her father’s child alone. So the parthenogenic creative power of the ancient Mother Goddess becomes that of the new Father God. And a pattern becomes set, with results that reach from the realm of the gods into human lives.

As the philosopher Richard Tarnas puts it, the entire evolution of what we know as the ‘Western mind’ has been driven by ‘a heroic impulse to forge an autonomous rational human self by separating it from the primordial unity with nature’.⁷ This ‘decisive masculinity’ of the heroic Western mind has fundamentally affected all the religious, scientific and philosophical perspectives of Western culture for the past four millennia, and it has brought immeasurable benefits, both social and economic, philosophical and cultural. But what was once a necessary differentiation for the growth of consciousness has now become, for many, a tyranny. The cost of Western ‘culture’ to global nature is becoming devastatingly clear. The very word ‘patriarchy’ now conjures images of repression rather than a paternal force that guides its children into a welcoming world; for many, it has become a negative value judgement rather than a neutral description of a form of social organization.

In this inexorable development of Western consciousness, the dominant creation mythologies, which psychologically can be said to carry a culture’s profoundest sense of what human beings are about, have been of universes ruled by increasingly powerful gods. Hesiod’s version of creation arrives at a cusp. In his world, Zeus is indisputably the father who rules both gods and humankind. But the alliances on Olympus are by no means always forged along same-sex lines. There is a recognition of both masculine and feminine strengths; Hera constantly chides her husband Zeus with the reminder that she too has been a great deity in her own right. The gods and goddesses, bidden together by Themis, can still enjoy each other and the great feasts that she prepares.

Yet already there has been an important shift in Themis’s power and the relationship between masculine and feminine forces. Another ancient story looks back to a time when the Olympians were not yet enthroned, but struggling to establish their supremacy over the old deities of whom she was one. The Homeric Hymn to Apollo tells of how Themis’s ancient oracular voice at Delphi, the centre of the known world, was usurped when Olympian Apollo murdered her protective serpent Python and took the oracle for himself: the wisdom that came from Mother Earth herself was annexed by the very personification of rational mind. This story, which is explored in Chapter 5, has striking parallels with the Babylonian creation myth, the Enuma Elish, first inscribed some time before 1500 BCE. And that epic is decisive, for in it, for the first time, the great Mother Goddess who generates creation as part of herself is replaced by a god who ‘makes’ creation as something separate. More than that, creation is ‘made’ not as an expression of the life force itself, but out of inert matter: the lasting separation of the realms of mind and body begins. In the Enuma Elish, the triumphant and violent murder of the great serpent goddess Tiamat by Marduk, ‘wisest of the gods’, and his subsequent recreation of the universe out of her dead body, the dominant Judeo-Christian mythology of Western culture would find its roots.⁸

In the biblical Genesis creation myth, as in Hesiod’s, the creation of Night and Day is followed by the separation of Heaven and Earth. But from the start, the two explanations of the world’s beginnings – and so the two ideas of what human beings are about – could not be more different. In Genesis, the creative force which was once stored in Gaia, Mother Earth herself, belongs to the uniquely powerful God. Human beings are part of his great creation of the universe and all that is in it, products not of nature but of a supreme spirit. The radical differentiation between mind and matter, Heaven and Earth, ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, is there from the start, and very soon the supremacy of the first is underlined. The story of the Fall, of how the first humans forfeited the favour of God through the fault of woman beguiled by the serpent of evil, has had the most profound and lasting effect on every aspect of Western human endeavour and organization, and on individual as well as collective understandings and relationships. From that moment on, human beings were no longer an intrinsic part of the natural world, living in harmony with its laws. The opposition between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ was wound up: ‘Cursed is the ground because of you,’ God tells Adam, ‘in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; / thorns and thistles it shall bring forth to you;/ and you shall eat the plants of the field. / In the sweat of your face/ you shall eat bread’ (Genesis 3:17–19). The opposition between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ was wound up too, as God puts Eve, ‘the Mother of all Living’, under Adam’s rule. The serpent, once a manifestation of the goddess herself, is crushed: ‘Because you have done this,/ cursed are you above all cattle/ and above all wild animals;/ upon your belly you shall go,/ and dirt you shall eat / all the days of your life. I will put enmity between you and the woman, /and between your seed and her seed; / he shall bruise your head, / and you shall bruise his heel’ (Genesis 3:14–15).

From these beginnings, the earthly and material world became conflated with woman herself as the source and seat of both human weakness and human sin. St Augustine put his mighty theological seal on this understanding of the inferiority of the entire realm of the feminine in the fourth century CE, when in his City of God he chastised those who hold that God is the soul and the earth the body, with its corollary that ‘there is nothing in earth that is not part of God’. This would mean, he argues, that every time a man trod upon the earth he trod part of God under his feet, and every time he killed a living creature, he would be killing part of the Deity. He found the idea appalling: ‘I will not relate what others may think of it. I cannot speak it without exceeding shame.’ This secularization of the natural world has brought a profound and lasting legacy at many levels, from the wholesale exploitation of earth’s resources and disrespect for its laws, to understandings of the nature of woman herself. Eight centuries after Augustine, St Thomas Aquinas, the greatest medieval theologian, was teaching that woman is in her very nature and physical substance ignobilior et vilior than man, a falling away from the ‘true’, male human being who is made in God’s image, superior precisely because in him ‘the discretion of reason predominates’. The echoes of this teaching, which go back to the Genesis creation myth, have reverberated through the centuries to affect both women and men. As the psychologist James Hillman has roundly put it: ‘The psychological history of the male–female relationship in our civilisation may be seen as a series of footnotes to the tale of Adam and Eve.’⁹

What place for the Titans, firstborn of Earth and Heaven, in this fallen world? The mythic universe described by Hesiod has long been superseded in Western consciousness. But the old tales do not die: they remain encoded to tell of the wealth of other archetypal patterns, and to offer other possibilities for being. These ancient gods, which were ‘born’ before Olympian consciousness, seem to represent instinct, intense emotion, physical processes – that whole realm which would later be despised and feared as ‘inferior’ to the rational powers of mind. Their name means simply ‘Lord’, and they have their own laws, as any of us may discover each time we are swept up in a thought or action which seems bewilderingly and even frighteningly alien to our conscious mind and self-understanding. Their kingdom is that of all the powerful and seemingly irrational aspects of the body and psyche on which human nature, both individual and collective, must irrevocably rest. An ancient legend underlines this: as we shall see, some said that the human race itself was born from their ashes.¹⁰

So the psychological energies which the Titans embody remain part of the human heritage. Yet in the long development of Western consciousness, it has been consistently difficult to allow these a place. Originally, some say, there were 14 Titans, not 12, and they ruled over the seven planets, two over each, and so brought together the realms of Heaven and Earth, their own parents. But to the early Christians, keenly tormented by the opposition of spirit and matter, the Titans’ instinctual realm was anathema, and Christian doctrine denied their heavenly paternity. It often called them ‘earth-born Giants’, with all the negative connotations that would bring, and taught that it was their lustful unions with the daughters of men which had caused God to despair of his whole human project, and send his mighty cleansing flood. These ‘earth-born’ creatures were inevitably linked with the apparent grossness of the body and the material world. In the twelfth century, for instance, Bernardus of Chartres was explaining that the Giants declare war on God ‘when bodies oppress knowledge and virtue’; they are...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• 1 Birth of a goddess
• 2 The return from Tartarus
• 3 Themis calls the gods together
• 4 The language of the blood-soul
• 5 The voice of the goddess
• 6 Yearning for justice
• 7 Restoring themis energy
• 8 The road to reconciliation
• 9 Invitation to the banquet
• Notes
• Bibliography