Music. My name is Bea Gonzalez, and I am a writer of mostly novels. And I'm Jay Rettelsperger, a singer-songwriter. We began a conversation on Twitter some time ago about Carl Jung, art, and the creative process, and we decided to share our discussion with all of you. Music. So, Jay, hi. How are you doing? Hi, I'm fine. How are you? I am good. And I was thinking about a holiday. Is it a holiday? A day we both really like, which is Valentine's Day, which is coming up.
You know, it was a friend of mine who pointed out, a member of my group, that the Valentine that we celebrate actually had his head cut off. And that seems to me a really good metaphor for what this whole Valentine's Day might be referring to, right? So when you're in love, your head disappears. In other words, you become less of a thinker, shall we say, and you're taken over by other forces. But what we're going to talk about today is not Valentine's, but a myth.
A myth that I'm particularly fond of, and a book that is associated with this myth. And a movie that came out that matches the myth, and that is The Myth of a Nana. And the book we're referring to here is a book by Jungian analyst Sylvia Brinton Pereira. It's called Descent to the Goddess. us. And I just want to say this book is great. One of the things that I'm going to take issue with the book, though, is that it talks about the feminine journey, and it often refers to women specifically.
And when I read it, I thought it was more about just the feminine journey, which can be for all of us, right? She is speaking to a certain, I mean, the examples she uses are often of women clients in all sense. But I think I'd rather talk about how this is is the journey that the feminine takes in both male and female. I don't know how you feel about that, but I think that's important to point out. Yeah, I totally agree that the feminine journey doesn't just belong to women.
Good. Just like the masculine just doesn't belong to men. And I think this is where we always get to a top. We always have to go back to it. But anyway, that's the book we're going to be looking at. We're going to make our way through it. So how about, and the connections to what I will try to bring in is the connection to Venus, how about we start with a myth?
Why don't you give us a sort of a very summarized view? And And before you do that, let's just point out that there are many versions of myths that are picked up from different places. So you're going to give us sort of a bare bones, you know, called from various sources and one that most people agree with. So this myth is from the Sumerian civilization that was in the Mesopotamia, you know, fertile crescent Mediterranean area, what's now Iraq.
And so Inanna is the great goddess of heaven and she lives in the realm of the sky. But she is called basically to visit her sister, who's the queen of the dead in the underworld, Arishkigal. And Inanna is dressed in her finest clothing. She has her gown. She has her scepter, the Rod of Power. She has a golden ring and a breastplate. So she's got all of this stuff adorning her that's protective.
And just before she enters the underworld, she gives Nisubur, her faithful servant and advisor, instructions instructions how she would fail to return if she went down into the underworld. So when she enters the underworld, Inanna knocks loudly, and the gatekeeper asked her who she is, and he asked her why she would wish to enter the land from which no one returns. And she said that she's come to witness the funeral rites of her brother-in-law, who's known as the Bull of Heaven.
And so the The sister, upon hearing from Inanna, instructs the guard to bolt the seven gates of the underworld against Inanna and let her in, one gate at a time, requiring her to remove at each step her royal garments at each gate. So gate by gate, she loses the crown, then she loses the ring and the breastplates, the scepter, and even her clothing. So she's she's this is a big point of the myth at this point is she's completely naked.
And so when she enters the room naked and bowed low to her sister. The judges of the underworld surround her and they pass judgment on her and they turn her into a corpse where she's left basically hanging upside down, rotting for three days. So so how how would you connect that to Venus. Well, okay, first of all, so Inanna becomes Ishtar, becomes Venus. So this is the transformation of a goddess into something as it goes through various cultures.
So Sumerian, then Akkadian, and then you get to the Greek. And it's connected in that this is very much connected to the cycles of Venus, which were tracked from, you know, very, I guess, right to this time that we have any kind of written form.
But we know that they were being tracked by the priests of the time, And because Venus is the brightest thing in the sky next to the moon, and it has a very particular cycle involving every eight years, it returns to the place it was in the sky and begins its retrograde cycle. Retrograde meaning, from our perspective on Earth, minus two days. It's every eight years, minus two days. The ancients were totally aware of this because they did track it.
And it has a specific cycle that is really fascinating. Demetra George is particularly good at explaining how it works. But basically, there's two Venuses, one that goes, and the way it happens is that, well, the two Venuses are the same, they're expressions of the same archetype, but in different forms. So when she goes into the underworld, right, that's where she's on the west, you see her on the western horizon, just as the sun goes down, then she goes down.
And then when she comes out in the into she disappears and then comes out and rises in the east. It's kind of the young Venus. It's associated with the Venus who is the warrior Venus. Now, most people today will not would not associate and this is going to be very important would not associate Venus with a warrior kind of. What would you say? They would not associate Venus with a warrior, right?
They would associate Venus with love and with all the other things that we have, and beauty and art and all sorts of things. The morning Venus, and if you're looking at where you're born, for example, the idea is archetypal astrologers will say, well, if you're born and the Venus is ahead of the Sun, then you've got a Venus who's young and very warrior-like and almost masculine, and it goes out there and it conquers everything.
And in fact, if you look at the iconography, there's kind of interesting interesting things for that Venus. And in some of the iconography, she has a beard, you know, so she's got breasts and a beard. So it almost, it's a very androgynous kind of representation. And then there's one that I particularly like where you can see her with her foot on a lion, and she's got kind of spears in her back, and you can tell she has conquered that.
And anyway, as she comes and rises at the point that she is the brightest, she starts descending. And then for a while, what's really interesting is that in both her retrograde cycle as a morning and an evening star, she will disappear from view when she gets too close to the Sun, so you can't see her.
And in the earlier cycle, she will only disappear for a couple of days, but actually in the later cycle, when she's growing and becoming a mature Venus, so setting in the West, it's actually a lot longer. I think it's about, could be like as much as, I can't remember, but anyway, a longer cycle. And so what do you make of this, the two Venuses, the morning Venus and the evening Venus?
They understood there was the same planet. In fact, what's really interesting about this is is that this is tracked by not only Western or Mediterranean, it's also in practically every culture they could track. And what it does in the sky is so beautiful because it paints a pentagram, basically, the orbit does. If you can just sort of trace it. And this has been associated with the feminine, right? The pentagram itself.
And, you know, you see this in a kind of a. How would you put this in a very negative and brutal expression when in the Middle Ages you start to persecute women who are called witches and, you know, the pentagram is drawn on their houses, inside their houses, inside their dwellings. So it's almost like even if they didn't know this, somehow that archetype was associated with that symbol, which is fascinating.
And I think what's interesting about it is it really talks about how the perception of the feminine, if you're going to associate the feminine with Venus, changes from a hybrid androgynous, which involves both the masculine and the feminine, somehow gets separated, right? So you have a Venus, which by the time you get to the Greeks is all about love and connection, and it has all the qualities we associate with Aphrodite, which is more, you know, she's still competitive.
I mean, Aphrodite is central to the Trojan War story, but it definitely doesn't have that masculine warrior energy anymore. So something happened between the Enheduannas and Heduanna, which is a poet who put down the story first. I think it's called Exaltation of Venus. Venus. There's something that happens when you hit the epoch of Gilgamesh, which is a bit later, which is at this point, the Venus story, or Venus, or sorry, Ishtar, is suddenly, she's demoted fundamentally.
In other words, Ishtar basically wants to couple with Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh fears her because she tends to destroy her lover. So he says no, and she puts the bulb of heaven on him, and they basically, him, Gilgamesh, and Nenka do defeat the bull of heaven. So something happens there, right? And because of this, she's punished, and she's no longer able to confer kingship.
So she's demoted in some way. So you have this weird change in the archetype, which then completely changes by the time you get to the Greeks. So I'm really interested in, and I'm interested because of what's going on today. And I'm interested because I just watched Barbie today, the movie everybody watched, and I didn't get around to watching until today.
And there was a writer, and I can't remember her name right now, but I'll put it in the notes, who wrote a piece saying that the Barbie movie is basically the anonymous story. And if, you know, spoiler alert, but I think everybody's watched Barbie except me today. Maybe you haven't watched it, but most people have. And I think just from the amount of money it took in. And it's interesting to me why that resonates so much. Now, I have not heard her being interviewed.
Nobody has been able to find any proof that this is the anonymous story, but it sure looks like it, you know? Basically, Barbie starts getting thoughts of death and then ends up in the underworld, which is LA. Basically, she gets kicked out of this Barbie perfect world and has to cope with reality. And reality is the underworld, because when you get into reality, I think we can argue, it can be pretty grim. And it's certainly pretty grim for her.
And like in the myth of Inanna, when she finally makes her way back up, what's happened is Ken has followed her into the underworld and has seen that men are really powerful in the underworld, whereas in Barbie land, it's all the Barbies, the female, not the Kens. So he decides, Well, he goes back and he says, wait a minute, I can totally... The patriarchy is great. Let me just take this over, and we'll make it Ken's. We're not going to be on the Supreme Court. They're going to be president.
They're going to change everything. And when she comes back, she realizes her partner has taken over, just like what happens with the inanimate, because you stopped her when she's hung upside down. But then her consort, Dumuzi, who's the shepherd she was married to, when she gets back into the upper world, because her servant gets her back, she finds he's taken her throne. He's been sitting around, you know, having a great time while she's been in the underworld.
And, you know, this precipitates rage as it would be. And so the story is really, really aligned. line. And the first thing that jumps out to me is how an archetypal story updated, which would seem absurd, right, to Barbie land, somehow is really resonating, not only with women, but with some men too. I certainly know men who have gone to see it and said, hey, this is kind of interesting. It goes beyond politics. And I'll explain why in a second.
And so these big archetypes. And so I guess what we're going to talk today is about why is this story so powerful that it can both both resonate, you know, 4,000 years ago and still today in a new form, still sort of impact us. And my argument, let's see what you think about this, is that we are probably going through a phase where that whole androgyny is being brought back into the conversation in a big way.
And this is very threatening to a whole bunch of people who are reacting in crazy ways down to, you know, making crazy comments about singers like Taylor Swift or whatever. But at the heart of it is this bearded Venus is kind of coming back in because the younger generation, not all of them, but they're certainly much more comfortable with a type of feminine masculine that really maybe an older generation isn't. But within even that generation, there's a huge backlash against it.
And I'm wondering, I don't know what you think about this, but I'm wondering if this is why you're getting so much of the culture or a part of the culture so loud and so hateful about, you know, a whole bunch of issues that actually make no sense, that should anger you so much. But if you're looking at it from the perspective of power dynamics, then maybe that's what's happening here.
Am I making any sense on this? Because I've been thinking about it today and I'm kind of, you know, it's all muddled maybe. Right. You're talking about an archetype being activated or being more prominent or kind of switching into a new kind of a little bit of a new face on it. And people are reacting to that new face because it is threatening.
It's, it's outside, you know, I don't know how long the previous phase would have been, but so that's why you have a lot of reactionary stuff right now, such as, I don't know, just almost this hyper masculinity that's, uh, that's a good, yeah. Yeah. It's interesting because I have a couple of young men, my sons, who both watched it. And my younger son, who's total Gen Z, he had a really interesting comment when I talked to him today about it.
I said, what did you think of this? This film really centers on a speech given by the actress America Ferreira, who plays the mother who's living in the real world.
And you know she talks about it's actually been quoted everywhere about how hard it is to be a woman you're supposed to be thin you're supposed to be perfect but not too perfect and all the contradictions but he looked at me and he said you know mom the thing is that's how i feel as a young man as well and i thought that's really interesting it doesn't just apply and so it when we put it to gender when we talk about gender it
kind of excludes the fact that this is a universal issue where and especially i think for that generation that has been raised on on things like instagram where they have to look perfect and men and men and women you know they're at the gym all the time except to look at a certain way or and yeah at a certain point i don't know i don't know when.
That changed but it seems like it changed sometime in really changed sometime in the 2000s where it really felt like men's like men's bodies were beginning to be looked at as women's bodies are had been for, you know, I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. And, and so it's, It's very interesting. So I can completely see how a young person could say that. And I would even say, even through my generation, I felt that some too.
And even with the Super Bowl, there's a picture of one of the quarterbacks, a picture taken in the locker room, and it's been shared all over social media, people making comments about his dad bod. I don't think they were doing things close like this in the 1950s, but I could be wrong. Okay, well, the whole concept of a dad bod, I don't think even existed. Yeah, it's interesting. And I think it's because we're more visual. We're exposed a lot more, and a lot of us are exposing ourselves.
But, you know, I mean, in terms of our image, we have less control over our image, or we want to put our image out there. But I think what, and in fact, part of the movie is really about Ken also having to find his own way and his own identity, which is part of the whole story. Let's go to the descent thing, because I want to link it to the Sylvia Brinton Pereira book, which I think is very, very powerful.
And let's talk first about descents and why that might be associated so much with the feminine journey as opposed to the masculine journey, which is, I think, much more oriented towards the outer world, the going out there. But if you look at, I don't know how you feel about this, but if you look at this actual Inanna myth, it seems exactly like the other, the elder myth is just working on an interior level. She's still going out and on an adventure.
She's being stripped low. Now that's interesting because stripped low means you do have to be vulnerable, which is I think a quality that, but that also happens in the masculine journey. Often you're being stripped of your power in some way or another, and you have to find other ways or other means to be able to get to where you
need to get to. so in a way it just seems like it's a reflection of the outer journey because often there's this argument I don't know how you feel about this but I kind of. Kind of tired when people say, well, you know, the hero's journey doesn't appeal to the feminine journey. Well, I mean, first of all, the masculine journey is available to men and women. So to divide it like that is silly. But I think that this may be the hero's journey, just in an introverted sense.
Does that make sense? Well, it makes total sense. And, you know, I have always looked at the hero's journey on two levels. I've looked at it at both.
I've actually interpreted it as you know even if you do interpret it more you lean more on the outer journey part that the outer journey transforms the inner just as the inner can transform the outer life and that so there's two there's two things happening at once no matter how you look at it right so i i don't i disagree with you know that assessment of it yeah i know i know it's this constant thing i I know by quoting Joseph Campbell,
I have from time to time received a kind of an angry response. Well, this is all great, good and well for men. And I'm thinking, well, no, you're again mistaken. We've talked about this so many times. You're mistaken men, you're inflating men with the masculine journey. The masculine journey to me is just an outer expression and the feminine journey is just an inner descent, right? So to me, that's one of the things that comes out.
The other thing is the word patriarchy. I had this actually happen to me in a recent meeting that I held about what does does that mean? Marian Woodman was very clear that patriarchy is something women participate in, but often again, and of course, of course. Power is still largely in the hands of men. There's no question about that. I'm not arguing that. But patriarchy in itself is a system of power.
And I don't know how many times you have to say this, which everybody participates in, sometimes against the will, a lot of times against the will. But the fact is, it cannot be limited. And patriarchy within that word, of course, we are talking about a masculine form, masculine, not male, but masculine form of domination that has been established over centuries and is the dominant way we look at it. but women do participate in it. And so I guess I'm saying that, you know.
Well, women can excel. Women can really excel in it. Yeah, they do. They can and they do. They absolutely do. You see this, there are many examples of this. And they can be as exploitative in that scenario as any man. So the reason you want to, and this is where we really get hung up on words, but, and because this is, by the way, I mention it because it does show up in a big way in the Barbie movie as well. Patriarch, yo, he discovers patriarch and he brings it back to Barbie land.
But the fact is, it's a form of domination. And you could argue, well, yes, it was happening before, and just other people were holding on to it. So here's something I thought, because I was thinking of the Venus myth and how we look at it archetypally, and there's a sort of an evolutionary process that's going on. From the original anonymous, okay, to the moment that it hits the epic of Gilgamesh, and you get the story, but you get like this, the characters start changing a bit.
It is possible. You can almost trace the beginning of a much more male-dominated, masculine, not male, but masculine-dominated system to the epic of Gilgamesh. Maybe we needed that. Maybe as an evolutionary step, we needed to develop that part of consciousness as a whole, right, to get to develop the kind of societies we did. People can argue against that. They have no proof of it. I'm just saying it's interesting that our myths keep telling us exactly where we are in an evolutionary.
Sense in terms of consciousness. So perhaps what's happening is, and I think Jung really pointed to this, is that we've reached a point where that doesn't work so well anymore. And so you're getting change. And at the same time, you're getting reaction to change, which is often extremely aggressive because, you know, people don't like change. And if you've been holding on to power and somebody's going to be left behind and all sorts of things.
And so I'm wondering if that's also what's happening here with all this kind of weird eruption of just anger, you know, from so many different levels and people throwing it at each other on issues again, which seem like often what I see is really odd is why are you worried about other people's sexuality?
Like what is it in other words why are you trying to control that you know i don't even remember that when this movie was released we had the i think was is it ben shapiro you know basically burning the movie or i don't know what he was doing some crazy thing where he was hangry uh yeah do you remember this whole thing yeah again okay why why are you talking about barbie yes yes.
Yes why would you need to go to this level like i'm trying to understand do i try to be a bit compassionate here what could possibly push you to be that reactive over this whole issue like have you kind of made sense of this yeah i can make sense of this like i could with with personal experiences because sometimes those of us that are in a way left behind in in a descent when But when the culture or whatever archetypes are at play or more active and culture or society starts going through that,
then there'll always be some kicking and screaming on the way down. And that's what's important about the anonymous is that she submits herself completely to it. And what you are seeing are, I believe, the last gasps of, you know, maybe a paradigm or at least suddenly suggesting some type of paradigm shift, which is all about archetypal stuff anyway. But that's that's kind of how I feel is these are these are people kicking and screaming.
They're going to get taken down into the underworld and they're fighting it. Right, right. So I think the key word, yeah, the key word you said, which really jumps out at me, which is so central to the myth, is submission. And the way we look at submission. In our culture, that's a weakness, it's a loss, and yet in the inanimate, it is the ability to actually take your trappings of power, which is what she's
doing, and becoming vulnerable to some new situation that allows her entry into the underworld. world. And I think that's the key. I think the fear around the dissent, because the dissent really is a fearful thing, right? Is so great that you will try to arm yourself very aggressively against any kind of personal dissent. But of course, what you're doing is you're projecting it out into the world. And so you start attacking anything that you think may take you there.
And of course, you and I both know, when we hear these men, you know, burning things and, you know, talking about how Barbie is, you know, the equivalent of the Antichrist, what's really really happening is that they're really arguing against their own feminine they can't stand their own feminine they can't stand the idea it hurts so much that they are weak because they don't understand the power of that inner journey like i think anybody who's been forced into a descent and that's the other
issue that's encoded in here through suffering sometimes through their own work through inner work sometimes that goes any kind of descent has been frightening but the general idea is that once you are if you're able to survive and emerge with the help of your helper that you told before hey come and get me if we're able to do that there is strength and being able to have got or having gone through that and coming out on the other end and something's been gained too some understanding
some way of approaching the world right but the fear of going down you know robert bly talks about this quoting antonio machado who's this spanish poet you know the fear of going down is the fear that man most that is present in everyone and it's so like we got to to stay above. Sometimes you can't. Sometimes you're forced now. What do you think of that? And when I was referring to personal experience, that's exactly what I was referring to.
I mean, the experience of going kicking and screaming sometimes, you know, so I can speak to that. The other thing that's kind of ironic about this is, you know, we're talking about archetypes and myth and story and how, you know, this same story takes different shapes over the years, over the millennia, over, you know, over centuries. And here we are, a culture in the West that, for the most part, the biggest part, has adopted Judeo-Christian ethics and the Bible as its main religious document.
In the whole time that this is going on, there's a story, the central story in that religious text is the Anana story. It's a very feminine story. Christ is male, but Christ is an example, I mean, in a myth. If you want to see it in a myth of a man undergoing a feminine journey, then Christ is it. Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, for sure. For sure. Sure. Why do you think that can't be?
I know that people don't look at that story metaphorically. Obviously, you come from a tradition where the idea of this scene metaphorically is not going to work. But how do we get to a point where we can get people to see that this is a feminine journey, not what you naturally associate with a much more masculine, outward kind of warrior? I mean, he could be a spiritual warrior. I can see that as well. But a spiritual warrior is still an inner journey, a submission.
Right, an inner warrior, you know, an inner warrior. Yeah, I don't know how... You get people to see that. But I do think, you know, when you see the relationships, and that's a great example of actually what an archetype is. It moves through like the same archetypes that were present 6,000 years ago are present today. And they just, they wear a new costume or a new face or have a slightly different meaning or connotation.
And so that part i don't think you can deny and so you know that's just kind of my thoughts about it i when you see that pattern and even what is it with ananas in the underworld for three days christ goes to hell for three days right you know i mean you just yeah hangs up in a hook dead she's dead for three days this is again these motifs that keep reappearing and then say well they're They're totally original to this.
No, I mean, every motif will reappear and in a new, like you say, in a new costume. And that's what makes it interesting because you realize, well, actually, these are encoded in our psyches. They're actually, we're sort of born with it, just like we're born with, you know, specific body parts. It's just part of its own. But again, it's internal. And I think it's like anything that can't be seen and made material, people have great suspicions about because they don't know what to do with it.
On the one hand, you have the people that deny that these archetypes even exist and and don't even speak to these stories because the stories just seem silly and mythological and they miss the deeper meanings that are encoded in there, which are powerful. And, you know, all about how vulnerability we have Brené Brown, for example, who has, who has incredible following just speaking on the power of vulnerability.
Right. And she's not only speaking to women, she's speaking to men as well, how in the act of being vulnerable, so much changes. And instead we're getting like the back, the other side, which is, well, you know, you get all these groups that say you'd never submit, you know, and.
Here's here's what's funny to me because i think our model is is the right now is the inverse of anana and instead of like instead of going down to hades you are scaling mount everest and they're both hell mount everest is not fun either yeah you know so i mean the way i see it it's you're going to go through hell one way or another yeah i guess i guess you are but first you have to even accept that there are two paths there right and i don't think the inner paths even
i mean i think it is clear that that's the path when you're forced into it but let's talk about ways you can do this that you know don't necessarily take you there through grief or through loss or through you know the through addiction all the things that can take us into the underworld very very much so until we submit and actually we think about it even something like addiction isn't the one of the powerful things that can happen with addiction is the moment you
submit and say i am addicted i accept that this is happening otherwise if you're not accepting it it's pretty hard to start getting better am i right on that or have a misunderstood the proverbial you know hitting bottom yeah yeah i that's what that's what inanna is right yeah she's basically hit buzz you can't go any further i mean she's basically in hell and dead in other words yeah But also on the process of transformation, which is what's on the other side, if you can somehow manage it.
And that's actually, by the way, when it's made, Barbie was made into a movie, and it's a comedy, and it's a musical. It has some moments of deep truth, for sure. But it's, at the end of the day, a lighthearted look at something that is really powerful, with a lot of tears and a lot of actual moments of, oh, okay, this is a little bit heavier than the average comedy.
Comedy so how would you if you're counseling someone because you've been thrown into the dark night just like i think everybody has at some point in their lives but yours, you can we can only speak to our own experiences if you're trying to say to someone or trying to counsel someone you counsel younger people how do we manage it how can we have that experience without being thrown in there by by tragedy or by loss or by addiction is there a safe way do you you think,
to try to do this journey or a safer or more? Yeah. I do. I think first thing, you know, especially when you're talking to, when I'm talking to young people is explaining that what they're experiencing is part of a process. And that alone, I think, opens the mind in a new way. Like with the idea of cycles, that it's part of a process and that there are tools that can use that can be used to, you know, kind of ease your way.
And, you know, breath work or certain mindfulness techniques are kind of, I don't want to necessarily call them armor, but they are something that help you.
Accept whatever circumstances you're in and and and you by breathing into them metaphorically you're you're facing them and you're accepting them fully and that's to me that's why the breath is so powerful is because you are you know you're you're looking into death in in a way yeah every moment is a death yeah for sure right that's where you're taught meditation i think the other thing is what we talk about here today which is the the whole engagement with the inner world through the
dreams or active imagination exercises or allowing the inner voice to speak in some way. I think dreams are particularly powerful. What I found with my group in that they're unmediated by consciousness. So they show up and then if you work with them, they do change. They change, which means you're conscious and you're unconscious of both changing, which is quite a trip. But I mean, that's actually what Jung said as well. And so following that, you can see the changes.
You can track that something is definitely moving to another place. That's a way just by paying attention. I mean, even the words pay attention.
Seemed to me a feminine thing because in in an active principle we're not we're moving we're moving forth let's just take a step and we actually do need to do that from time to time but this is much more reflective it's like okay stop stop moving start going inward but turn the gaze inward and yeah that for the way that we set up our culture is really difficult because if we do that you know people don't understand it's not fitting the paradigm the dominant paradigm which is get
get things done and get status and you know and achieve and all the other things that That often, you know, when it's not balanced by the feminine, it's really life depleting. And I think what happens, or maybe one thing can happen. So I talked about, you know, looking at how you look at the hero's journey as both an outer and inner. People can have a consciousness of both worlds.
People can be, I believe, people can start, I believe, whenever someone goes through a descent, a really intense descent, then I think what happens is something's activated where you're not as sealed off from that descent as you were in the past. And because of that you have now you walk through life in your in the outer world with more awareness of the underworld because you've been there now yeah and you know the power of it.
Sure. You know, I wanted to quote directly from Sylvia Pereira's book, Brinton Pereira's book, which I think really speaks to what you just said about the integration of both those things. She says, Because Inanna shows us the way, and she is the first to sacrifice herself for deep feminine wisdom and for atonement. She descends, submits, and dies. This openness to being acted upon is the essence of the experience of the human soul faced with the transpersonal.
It is not based upon passivity, but upon an active willingness to receive. I really like the way she says it, based on an active willingness to receive. And there you see the integration. It's not just like sitting there, go out, let life do whatever it wants with me. It's you're actively participating in that journey by saying, I accept. And I think one of the last words in that film was actually yes, which is really interesting because yes, yes, yes is something that shows up
in James Joyce's Ulysses. It's a central with Molly Bloom at the end. It's the acceptance as life shows up as opposed to what you want it to be or how you think it should have been. And because I think that's where resentment and unhappiness centers. When you think you were owed something and it didn't work out, and then you get very resentful. But if you say, look, you're actively participating in it, but not making it into the story that makes you into a victim of a different type.
Now, there's a whole bunch of things that are unacceptable. There's no question about it. So it's also not about accepting everything that comes without fighting it. I think, again, you have to have both. And that's really hard. And I think this is why this is a particularly strong myth.
But I think what's interesting to me, because I've always been interested in this story, is, you know, I've always wondered, do our stories and the way the archetypes are showing and the stories are changing, are they telling us something about our own evolution? And I keep thinking back to the early 20th century and what Jung said. What did he say was the most important thing that had to come back online? It was this feminine part, this inner world, this submission.
Active submission to something that we had not, you know, before. You didn't even, I mean, until the 19th century, the word unconscious doesn't really come even online. So there was an understanding because the Greeks certainly showed it, but not in a codified kind of, oh, I recognize this could be happening. And so, what was it? I think just I'm reading that. I can't remember his name now, but he's not the only person that said it.
So it doesn't really matter. But one of the things that's often said is that depth psychology had to come because we had completely divorced ourselves from any understanding of the world that included an inner connection, in the West anyway, by the 20th century. There was no connection, even through theology, through whatever.
We just basically disconnected, and then so depth psychology reconnects us back to a sense that we are made up of many different parts, that they are very archetypal, and that everything is evolving. So I want to actually finish, well, we're going to finish with your song at the end, but before we get there, I wanted to finish with why I think the Venus story does match in on and why it's so powerful. And that is, this is Michelle Covissier who made this, I think, an incredible observation.
The thing that makes Venus really super interesting, if you love the planets, is that she's the only planet that shows up once every, I think, seven years. in the northern hemisphere, it's usually around March, she will show up one day and you can see her in the morning and you can see her in the evening, okay? She's basically there all day without going into the underworld, right? And so she put this together by saying, of course, the ancients knew this. This is a big moment.
If it's not cloudy, I think next time it happens, I think it's March 18th, 2025, so next year. And what she connected, which I thought was beautiful, is that that means that the only planet that survives death, that doesn't go into the underworld at least once every seven years or so is Venus. And all of our myths are tied to the idea that Venus, love, survives death. That's the only thing that survives death. Mars doesn't survive death.
Jupiter doesn't. That's the king of the gods. Somehow they all have to go into the underworld. But this one planet for that one day manages to do that. And I thought, wow, I mean, if you think of all our stories, right?
And so I would like to leave everybody with the idea that maybe that's a better story than the Valentine's Day story, story because at the end of the day valentine's you know is based on the story of a person that's cut off this is a much more powerful i think a way to look at the world which is why i also think it is so interesting to be able to connect things with a living sky that that is part of our heritage just to be able to see the stories
that are encoded there and which by the way have kind of given us the myths we have what do you think of that do you like that story yeah i do i think you He said, well, what am I supposed to say now? You say, isn't that much more powerful though? Yes, I think it is. I think that's rooted in something that I find. Much more real. That's the best way that I can put it. No, no, it is. It is much more real.
It is the thing because anybody, any of us who've lost parents or family members know that the person may be gone, but the love doesn't end. That's the thing. And that is the point of that myth that some, and things die, but that feeling that you had connected to that person never dies. And that's what's powerful about it. And that's why people have written stories over thousands of years.
That's always central to the whole whole storytelling thing thing i'm not sure that's the right word but you know what i mean anyway so we're going to leave everybody with a song that we'll run right through so that i think is appropriate just for on a lighter note because we're going from uh it's a pretty heavy heavy story of hanging upside down and uh you know whatever to maybe a letter a note but i think it's totally appropriate so jay introduce
the song and tell me a little bit about it The name of it is What You Say. I wrote it back in 2019. In 2019, I started going through a big creative surge, was getting flooded with songs all the time. And so I was getting really into the swing of things when I wrote this and what I was doing at the time, because I was getting so much creative energy coming and, you know, just pretty much flowing through me that I would just record myself with my acoustic guitar. guitar on my cell phone.
I've got a room with decent acoustics in it. And I would only record these mostly because I had just written them so they're super fresh. I recorded them mostly so I would have them in the case that I were going to do an album. And so I wouldn't forget them. That way, I could move on to the next song and start working on it. But in the process, sometimes I would share some of them. But this is an actual live recording on my cell phone. All right. Well, let's see what people think.
Music. If you like Jay's music and would like to support the creation of more, follow the link to the GoFundMe page in the show notes. You can support my work by buying my new novel, Invocation, at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through many booksellers across the world. For now, until next time.