The gynocentric scenario is mythically involved in connotations of Lesbianism, of women too close as a bound sisterhood to surrender their virginal condition. Virgin—parthenos in Greek—designates simply a female who has not accepted matrimony. They could have children, but they refuse to abandon the sisterhood. Their offspring were called bastards, which in Greek is the ‘offspring of virgins.’ The best exemplar of this is the troop of confirmed virgins who accompany the virgin goddess Artemis. One of them is Callisto. Zeus disguised himself as a female in order to engage her in sex.
Callisto was transformed into a bear and transported among the constellations as the Great Bear, Ursa Major—the Big Dipper. Her son, who was a bear, became the constellation Ursa Minor, the Little Bear. The visualization of the constellation as a bear can be traced back at least 13,000 years. This antiquity is obviously a result of oral mythical traditions since it requires a considerable amount of imagination to see the group of stars as a bear.
From Greek, ‘virgin’ designates a female who has not accepted matrimony because she refuses to abandon the sisterhood.
The seven stars of the constellation were seen as a pathway for the focus of spiritual energy from the empyrean back to the human race. The special prominence of the Great Bear constellation derives from the fact that two of its stars point to the north polar star (Polaris), which appears to be the immobile axis of the cosmos, around which the other constellations rotate. The pole star was imagined as the gateway through to the empyrean. In cultures that visualize the constellation differently, the mythic traditions indicate the same symbolic identification as a celestial psychoactive gateway. The Dipper, for example, derives from an African visualization that came to the Americas with the slave trade and implies a psychoactive potion that is drunk from the dipper. In Celtic lore, the constellation is the wheel of Arthur’s Wain that will transport one to the empyrean. The pole star as the axle of a rotating wheel of metaphysical transport immediately suggests the gilled underside of a mushroom.
The seven stars of the constellation were seen as a pathway for the focus of spiritual energy from the empyrean back to the human race.
In contrast to the gynocentric sisterhoods, the various male mystical brotherhoods, such as the corybants and the Cabiri, are implicated in male homoeroticism and the birthing of non-physical Gnosis, the outcome of Platonic love. This persisted into the Zoroastrian religion assimilated into the Greco-Roman world as Mithraism, which in Greece was interchangeable with the cult of the hero Perseus. Mithraism admitted only male initiates and valued procreativity without the agency of female physicality.
The Danaïds who killed their husbands were condemned to death, and in the netherworld they forever attempt to fill a basin with water for their prenuptial bath, but it will never take place. Either they must gather the water with sieves or the tub to contain it leaks the water away. Perseus’s mother could have taken after these powerful, independent women, or she could have been like the single ancestor who spared her husband instead and accepted matrimony and the male dominance of the androcentric scenario.
For this dual ambiguity about the mother’s role, we employ the label of turncoat. Danaë could have been a turncoat to her own family heritage, which is italicized as the second item in our enumeration of motifs, the turncoat mother.
The hero thus has two sets of parents, corresponding to the two scenarios. His parents are either Zeus and Danaë or Proëtus and Danaë, with the mother having a pivotal role of two possibilities, either the androcentric turncoat—the female who has changed sides in the battle to lend her support to the androcentric scenario, or the woman true to her unredeemed gynocentric heritage.
The hero has two sets of parents—either Zeus and Danaë or Proëtus and Danaë, with the mother having a pivotal role of two possibilities.
This produces two antithetical identities for the hero. If there are two, do they have different names? Yes, there are two, the motif of the two names—again italicized as the third in our enumeration of motifs. There is Perseus and his double, a mysterious figure called Chrysaor, who came into existence when Perseus successfully liberated him from confinement in his mother. Entrapment in the female is the gynocentric scenario.
When Perseus harvested the head of the Medusa, Chrysaor emerged triumphant from the severed neck, along with the magical flying horse Pegasus. He is named as the ‘Golden Pluck,’ consubstantial with the plucked head, which could also be metaphorically called the golden fruit cut from a sacred tree. Similarly, he is named as the pommel of the sword that Perseus meant to pluck when he plucked the mushroom at the site of Mycenae. The pommel of a sword was called its mushroom. The erect penis was also called a mushroom.
The two names motif also yields two ways of interpreting the hero’s name.
The two names motif also yields two ways of interpreting the hero’s name. Perseus has either a matrilineal name in the gynocentric scenario, derived from the mermaid Perse, who was the mother of the great witch Circe, who turned men into boars; and of the Cretan Pasiphaë, who lusted for the bull and who mothered the Minotaur; and of Aeëtes, who was the father of the witch Medea and the owner of the Golden Fleece. As a mermaid, Perse is essentially a doublet for the Gorgon Medusa.
The other possibility is that in overcoming the threat of the Medusa, he has mastered her power. In this case he has the ability to smite, strike, and ravage derived from the root that yields ferio in Latin. Thus, instead of being ‘Perse’s man,’ he could be seen as the one with Perse’s power to wield as a weapon to ‘smite’ his enemies.
There is still another possibility. He has an analogous identity as Bellerophon of Corinth. He is the only other hero to ride on the Medusa’s son, the flying horse Pegasus. He is obviously a hero from an analogous way of telling the story. With this name, the hero is called the ‘Slayer of Baal.’ Baal—Ba’al—means ‘Lord’ and was the title of various deities in Anatolia, where the major part of Bellerophon’s heroism takes place. Ultimately, Ba’al is merely the male attendant of the Lady Ba’alath in the gynocentric scenario, consort of the Canaanite goddess.
Pharaoh with emblems of shamanic empowerment, wearing the mushroom-shaped White Crown of Upper Egypt.
One of the names attested for that Canaanite goddess from a 7th Century BCE divinatory temple at Ekkron, just 35 kilometers southwest of Jerusalem, was Pitryh (pronounced pet-ree-yah), PTR, Hebrew for ‘mushroom,’ with the final syllable a suffix indicating divinity, as in the name of Yahweh. The patriarchal revisionism that resulted in the canonic Old Testament understandably considered Ba’al a false god. Ba’al was called Ba’al Zebub, ‘Lord of the Flies,’ an attribute hard to disassociate from the folkloric traditions of the fly-agaric mushroom, the Amanita muscaria. Christian demonology identified him with the fallen angel of the illumination, Lucifer. He was thought to materialize as a toad, enthroned upon his toadstool. Christian hagiography turned PTR into Peter, the crucified saint and first of the popes, the ‘rock’—Greek petros—upon which the Vatican stands.
A bronze figurine of Ba’al from the 14th-12th Century BCE found at ancient Ugarit depicts him with an elongated mushroom cap, in the style of the White Crown or hedjet of Upper Egypt—southern Egypt, upstream of the Nile—worn by the pharaohs. It is elongated, tapering to a knob on top, producing the characteristic shape of a bowling pin. The mushroom shape of these crowns is so obvious that Joussef Abubakr, who wrote the definitive study of the Egyptian crowns, described the Pharaoh Sesostris’ version as “pilzartige Form” or mushroom-shape.
He did not realize, of course, just how appropriate his characterization of this crown was or the reason for the crown’s enigmatic shape. It strongly suggests that the pre-dynastic ancestors of the Egyptian pharaohs were shamanic herbalists who came to believe that they were divine and immortal through pharmaceutical rituals. Shamans traditionally dress with the emblems of their empowerment.
Thus Bellerophon, like his doublet Perseus, is also consubstantial with a mushroom, and associated with a goddess in a cult of the mushroom. His name as the ‘Slayer of Ba’al,’ indicates that Bellerophon’s other name would have been Ba’al. In the same way, Hermes, as the Olympian androcentric deity, had an earlier identity in the gynocentric scenario as Argos. Thus he could be called the ‘Slayer of Argos’ or Argeïphontes. Perseus gave one of his daughters a similar name as Gorgophonë.
These are the recurrent motifs of the monomyth: two fathers, a turncoat mother, and two names. We now add a fourth, the motif of botanic consubstantiality. Bellerophon and Perseus both have characteristics that suggest a fungal anthropomorphism that they share with their Ladies, the ‘Queen’ Medusa and the Lady Ba’alath.
There were, moreover, two possible outcomes from Perseus’s encounter with the Medusa in her cave confinement. She could have turned him into a phallic pillar of stone, so that he never separated from her. Such phallic stones or priapic pillars may have been employed in the gynocentric scenario to stimulate the virginal orgasm considered necessary to initiate the meiosis of the ovum. Perseus would have merged totally with her as her masculine entity, like Shiva—lingam— and Parvati—yoni—in the Cave of the hermaphrodite. This is a symbolic pattern that can be traced back to the Paleolithic mushroom pillars or dolmens and the sacred caves of initiation.
The other outcome was that Perseus liberated himself as Chrysaor from the confinement of her body, the successful plucking of the mushroom’s head. In the Paleolithic scenario, traversing the permeable magic of the rock paintings to escape into the empyrean enacted such an outcome. In this version of the Perseus myth, the magical horse, the steed called Pegasus and named for the spring with its entheogenic waters, emerged along with Chrysaor from the severed stipe or neck. The horse represents acquiring the shamanic empowerment conferred by the entheogen.
Merely for convenience in labeling the two possibilities, the former could be called ‘descendent’ and the latter ‘ascendant,’ as directions along the cosmic axis through the volcanic mountain from the alchemical crucible to the fiery empyrean. These labels imply no value judgment. They simply reflect the prejudice of the chauvinism implicit in the evolution of the Classical male-dominant tradition.
The flying winged horse is the vehicle for his shamanic transport. On its back, with the golden pluck securely stored in his herbalist sack—which is what a kibisos is, a kind of lunch bag that Hermes lent him—he escapes from the cave and from the pursuit of the Medusa’s Gorgon sisters. Among the Medusa’s zoomorphic attributes was her horse characteristic, and both Chrysaor and the flying horse Pegasus are her children. Liberated now from confinement in the mother and with the head of the Medusa as his empowerment, Perseus flies through the doorway to his identity as the male who is dominant over the female in the androcentric scenario.
Thus he spies the maiden Andromeda chained to a pillar of stone. As her name indicates, she is a double of the Medusa and of himself as the pillar imprisoned in her cavern-womb-vulva. Andromeda means ‘Male’ (andro-) ‘Ruler’ (meda-, medousa). With the power of the harvested head of the mushroom entheogen, he liberates the maiden as his wife and flies off to turn all the marriage guests at the wedding feast for Hippodamia into pillars of stone. The bride is named as the ‘horse-dominant-female.’ There are various tales about her, but in all the myths, she is merely an epithet of the Medusa. Freud recognized that the Medusa represented the emasculation of the male.
The flying winged horse is the vehicle for shamanic transport.
In displaying the Gorgon head at the wedding feast, Perseus has enacted the complete reversal of what he would have been if he had never separated himself from his mother, or if he had never soared from the Cave. This is the tale of the transcendent or ascendant version of his dual identity. It is the story of Perseus, whose name means the ‘one who smites,’ and of Chrysaor, the hero whose heroic power resides in his successful harvest of the golden pluck.
Since there are two personae, however, or two names with a different set of parents, there is another way of telling the tale, with a completely opposite outcome. This is the decadent or descendent version.
Perhaps Perseus wasn’t the child of Zeus and the turncoat mother. Suppose Danaë hadn’t succumbed to the androcentric pattern of divine birthing, and Proëtus was his actual father—Proëtus, who is the weakling male dominated by his Lady, the ‘strong cow.’ The decadent potential of Proëtus as the hero’s father had begun even two generations earlier, since as Danaë’s uncle, he was the twin brother of her father Acrisius. The two brothers had begun fighting each other while they were still in their mother’s womb.
This is how the tale is told in its decadent version. Perseus showed up at the citadel of Proëtus, and in a dispute over entheogens, his half-sisters, the daughters of his stepmother Stheneboea, metamorphosed into a Gorgon sisterhood, mooing like cows in estrus. They turned into mushrooms, with scabby red skin, and plucked him, tearing him limb from limb. Instead of empowering him, the entheogen and its metaphoric mythic complex overpowered him.
The terror of the Medusa is thus a terror of castration.
—Sigmund Freud
The Medusa’s Head
The recurrent motifs enumerated thus far are the two fathers; two types of mother, with one perhaps a turncoat to her own dominant lineage; two names; and botanic consubstantiality. Since there are two versions of the liminal hero in the doorway, there are two scenarios for his career enacted, one in each world on either side of the threshold, the transcendent—ascendant—and the decadent—descendant.
The motif of the two names can also be enacted in the birthing of dissimilar twins or warring brothers or sisters. Such was the case with the Dioscuri, and also their twin sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra. In the myth of Hercules, he was born as the son of Zeus, while his twin brother Iphicles was born from the seed of the mortal Amphitryon, with their mother playing a dual role as turncoat or not, in the androcentric and gynocentric scenarios.
There are two more motifs to complete the repertory of themes. These are the figures that help the hero, the enablers, in the transcendent tale, or the figures who disable him in the decadent version.
Enablers help the hero in the transcendent tale and figures disable him in the descendant.
Perseus had allies to guide his trip. Typically, there are two, the motif of the helpers, one male and one female, the inspiring winds for the journey of the soul, an animus and anima. The metaphor of the wind indicates the role of the entheogen, since ‘inspire’ means ‘take or put in wind.’ Both Latin words signify essentially a ‘wind,’ but one is grammatically masculine, and the other feminine. Thus they conveniently can name the male helper or friend and the female helper.
An anima leads a woman into a deeper understanding of her femaleness. An animus leads a male to confront the darker aspects of his masculinity.
We are proposing a somewhat broader interpretation than Jung’s use of these terms, since he assigns an anima to a male and an animus to a female. Both males and females have both a male and female guide, inasmuch as all humans are basically hermaphroditic, with one sexual identity dominant over the other, but still present. An anima would lead a woman into a deeper understanding of her femaleness; it is limiting to assume that a woman needs only to access her masculine nature, and a male his female. An animus would lead a male to confront the darker aspects of his masculinity.
The negative potential of the Medusa is her power to inanimate, to suck the wind out and make one into the inanimate pillar locked in her cave. These helpers, the animus and anima, are the male and female aspects of the very monster blocking the doorway or lurking in the worlds beyond, transmuted and pacified—if they act as helpers. Rejected, they revert to enemies and play the role of disablers in myth. In the same way, the entheogen can be either mastered or mastering and overpowering.
In many of the hero tales, the female helper is the pacified Medusa, the mirror image of her dominant power. This pacified transmutation is the goddess Athena, who wears the plucked Gorgon head as a commemoration of her former self.
Hermes, whose iconography and myth indicate his former identity as a phallic pillar, plays the role of male guide. He could be represented merely as a male pillar, and even when completely anthropomorphized, he often is represented attached to a pillar. This pillar is an essential item in his iconography and is not needed as a support to allow the statue to stand upright. Both the anima and the animus are the enemy who has been transmuted into a guide or enabler for the heroic event.
It is a reciprocal dependency, however, since Athena needs the hero to pluck the Medusa’s head, in order for her to be Athena, instead of the Gorgon. The same is true of Hermes. It was he who lent the hero the flying sandals for his journey to the doorway and the herbalist sack in which to deposit the plucked head.
Hermes, with pillar support, School of Praxiteles, known as ‘Antinous Belvedere.’
Freud was aware that he was acting as a soul guide for his patients into the repressed and darker aspects of their personae. In the course of evolving his therapeutic procedure of psychoanalysis, he gathered a collection of little figurines of ancient deities on his desk, using them as his guides. His favorite was a bronze of Athena, which he often fingered in the course of the consultation. It was perfect, he said, except that it had something missing. A missing part is never really missing, it is somewhere else, a perfect symbol for the journey of the unilateral figure across the threshold to find its missing other half.
The hero’s conquest of the numinous power dwelling within the entheogen creates the particular iconographic persona of the deity. The consubstantiality of the trio, the human, the plant, and the deity, is the compact man makes with the divine. This is a compact that must be continually reenacted through ritual and the prescribed herbal procedures for addressing the entheogen.
Otherwise, the compact is undone, and Athena reverts to the Medusa and hinders, instead of helping. She did this, for example, to the hero Ajax, who expressly stated that he would accomplish his heroism on his own without any help from her. Instead of being empowered by the ecstasy that he ‘harvested,’ he plucked the madness, in which state he thought he was being a hero, but he saw only the delusion of his heroism and did the opposite of his potential dual identity. The metaphor of ‘harvesting the madness’ is the way that the tragedian Sophocles described the event.
Freud, who pioneered the journey of the soul, had a pantheon of little deities on his desk. His favorite was a bronze statuette of Athena, which he would often hold as a guide in his psychoanalytic sessions. He particularly loved it since it was broken, the missing part providing a link to another world where it must still survive. During his analysis of H.D., he picked it up and handed it to her. ‘This is my favorite,’ he said. ‘She is perfect . . . only she has lost her spear.’
—Hilda Doolittle
Tribute to Freud
A version of the helper animus of the dichotomous hero on the shamanic quest is the motif of the shadow friend or companion. This brings us back to where we began with the theme of the Doppelgänger. It is responsible for some of the most profound works of literature. The best-known occurrence is the pairing of Achilles and Patroclus—Patrocles—at the Trojan War. The basic theme of the Iliad is the proxy death of Achilles in the persona of his beloved cousin, which temporarily satisfies the fated identity of Achilles as a hero born to fail. The death of Patrocles frees him to have his moment of glory in a battle that is finally put to an end by the gods since Achilles’ potential victory threatens the stability of the world over which the gods preside. As an oral poem, the Iliad is the product of centuries or even millennia of evolutionary modification, making it an expression of perfected motifs of shamanic and psychological origin.
The Greek hero Ajax has rejected Athena’s help and in retaliation she has driven him mad. In his deluded vision, when he first sees her, he says: Oh Athena, hail, thou full of grace. How right it is that I see you now!
—Sophocles
Ajax
The Sumerian cuneiform epic of Gilgamesh preserves the same motif of the shadow companion in the figure of the king’s friend, the wild-man Enkidu, whose death triggers the journey of Gilgamesh to the underworld to learn the secret of eternal life. Since the poem was recorded from various sources and was not the product of a single performance, as was the case of the Iliad, it has themes extraneous to the purified shamanic nucleus, but it is not difficult to recognize the anthropomorphized equivalent of the Gorgon Medusa’s fungal identity in the episode of Humbaba, the guardian of the Cedar Mountain, where the gods lived. The civilizing king and the friend from the wilds form an obvious antithetical dichotomy. The king needs his beloved friend from the woods in order to confront the monster in the wilderness.
Humbaba is often depicted as just a head with staring eyes and flowing beard and wild hair. Like the Medusa, his head was harvested and placed in a sack. Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk, and his wild-man companion Enkidu, the primordial Adam, formed from clay—there could not be a better portrayal of the hero and his animus mediator with the monstrous fungal Humbaba, guardian of the cedar forest that is home of the gods that fruit as the mushrooms symbiotic on the roots of the cedars of the Lebanese mountains
Humbaba is often depicted as just a head with staring eyes and flowing beard and wild hair.
Humbaba is probably the Anatolian goddess Cybele or Kubaba, her male consort or hermaphroditic persona, like the Greek Hermes. The depictions of Humbaba as the decapitated head show a face emerging from a labyrinthine complex representing the entrails of the sacrificial bull/cow as the digestive pathway to transcendence, often analogous to the womb markings on the belly of the goddess.
In Greek mythology, the same motif of the hero and mediator companion is represented as Hercules and his nephew Iolaüs—Iolaös. The nephew accompanies the hero on many of his heroic tasks, all of which are metaphoric for encountering the goddess and her zoomorphic toxins. The antithetical version of Hercules was born as his twin Iphicles: Hercules from the seed of Zeus, and Iphicles from the seed of the mortal father Amphitryon. Iphicles’ son Iolaüs, the nephew of Hercules, represents a pacified mediation with the opposite twin.
The shadow companion can be added to the enumeration of recurrent motifs. It is a special type of animus or anima, differing in that the helper is not a deity, but a human. The same motif can be seen in the paring of the hero Theseus with his friend Pirithoüs. Pirithoüs comes from the tribe of Lapiths of Thessaly and is usually depicted as a horseman. The two collaborated in battling the drunken centaurs at Pirithoüs’s wedding to Hippodamia. The ‘horse-dominant’ name of the bride is the same as in the Perseus story, and the horseman companion helping to battle the centaur horsemen indicates again that the shadow companion is playing the same role as in the animus motif.
The Medusa mythic configuration was too powerful to die with the conversion of the Greco-Roman world to Christianity and the purported demise of paganism. It stretched back to the Paleolithic dawn of consciousness and resurfaced in the medieval period where she was assimilated as an aspect of the Virgin Mary. The hero Hercules confronted her way back in mythical history as the nymph of Scythia, and his Scythian descendants commemorated her mushroom consubstantiality by wearing golden fungal caps as ornaments on their belts in battle.
As we have seen, in addition to being a sow, cow, serpent, bird, and horse, the Medusa was also a fish. She was a mermaid. Among the zoomorphic transmutations of the mushroom is the fish, so that the spore-bearing structures beneath the little creature’s cap are called gills. She comes by this naturally in being a terrestrial version of the aquatic sponge. Medusa is a common name in Greek for the jellyfish. Jerome misinterpreted the etymology of Mary’s name in Hebrew and endowed her with the epithet of Star of the Sea, Maris Stella. In doing this, the great scholar, who translated the bible into Latin, was probably misled by the mythical configuration of the ancient goddess and her association with springs and the waters of the sea.
In this aquatic manifestation, she surfaced from rivers and springs throughout medieval Europe as Melusina, the Mother of Light, a fairytale mushroom who empowered the dynasties of the ruling elite, including both the Valois of France and the Plantagenets of Burgundy and England. She granted infinite wealth and dominion to her chosen knight, on the one condition that he not see her on one special day of the week, when she bathed, revealing that her lower half was a serpent or a fish.
She granted infinite wealth and dominion to her chosen knight, on the one condition that he not see her on one special day of the week, when she bathed, revealing that her lower half was a serpent or a fish.