The Head of the Medusa — Chapter 15: Love, smarts and achievements; examples, not greed and plunder

Perseus flew onward, borne by the winged sandals of Hermes until he arrived at the Medusa’s lair. Thanks to the helmet of invisibility he flew down, unobserved and found Medusa and her sisters sleeping. Courageously he advanced, holding the polished shield and remembering to look only at the image reflected in it.

Now we must look back again at the images from our past. Here in this medium, under the polished shield of Athena we can think the unthinkable thoughts. We are safe from her gaze. Here in this mind, we can turn our thoughts into ideas, our ideas into words and our words into action.

As a man thinks, so does he become. Every man is the son of his own words.

—Cervantes.

Gaea – the Greek goddess of the Earth is very much with us today in the form of Gaia the form resurrected by the influential scientist James Lovelock in his ‘Gaian hypothesis’ – the analogy that the Earth is a living Eco-system. Lovelock’s hypothesis was extremely valuable to our view of our planet coming as it did on the wake of the triple development. The image has helped us to understand the vulnerability of our world and the damage being done to it, but this allusion to the ancient Greek female goddess had nothing to do with feminism. It was though, another convenient mask for the monster to hide behind. This re born image also arrived in the human psyche at roughly the same time as the Medusa did and they have become linked in the collective subconscious of the modern mind.

Feminization and the Earth Goddess have assaulted even the Christian religion. Both have conspired to oust the established faith of the western world. The planned ‘New World’ is not big enough for the both of them. The ordination of women as priests has done nothing to strengthen a declining faith. In fact, it has created another analogous schism within the church that has hastened its demise just as Feminazism has torn apart of the rest of human society. The destruction is ignored and justified here also. All must be sacrificed to the Goddess no matter what the cost – even at the cost of destroying the religion itself. So it is with our society.

Female Rabi and female priest - united in the Sisterhood above their faith - a publicity picture from the American lesbian supremacist National Organization of Women - NOW

The rise of Paganism and New Age religions based on the old Mother Earth Goddess are indicative of the same malaise. Even people with the most secular of outlooks are caught up this confusing void and pay homage to the Goddess in turning to alternative lifestyles and the tawdry gift shop trappings of New Age occultism, Earth mysteries, UFO’s, psychics and unexplained phenomena. These are the new myths that people have bought into. People are lost, confused and seeking guidance from these new myths, but they are false trails to be following. The old myths can show us so much more if we take the trouble to look and listen.

The parallels between the Greek creation myth and the Medusa myth are evident. Like King Acrisius, Chronos tried to stop the inevitable, but time cannot be stopped any more than human nature. Those that seek to change either do so at their peril and in the sure knowledge that their efforts are ultimately - a waste of time. Such selfish and destructive behavior continues though and in real life, just as in the Chronos myth it is the children who are swallowed up again and again.

In losing our grasp on our mythological heritage, we are losing our grasp on reality. What these myths can tell us again and again is that both men and women are guilty of a dysfunctional, abusive power relationship. Just as the children of such a relationship can be bound to the wheel of their parent’s dysfunction, so to can the human race as a whole be so enslaved.

Human history can be seen as a constant struggle between the genders – matriarchy versus patriarchy. This struggle was in a way, analogous to the natural and beneficial power structures inherent in human relationships, but as we now know, these structures are rendered obsolete by the triple development. However, there are ways to transcend this unhappy state of affairs. Human history has been changed irrevocably since the triple development. We have to learn to adapt to these changes. Every species must, as we know, adapt to survive, if they do not, then they fall by the wayside on the road of evolution. If we do not adapt we are also finished. Humanity will join the dinosaur and the dodo. We will become extinct.

All you need is love. All you need is love. All you need is love, love. Love is all you need.

All You Need Is Love -The Beatles.

People who know love - whatever their gender, are secure in their knowledge of it. They have no political or any other agenda that cannot be viewed, explained, or even acted upon within its limitless structure. It's that simple. This is true both for individuals and can be also for the human race as a whole. To our enemy, the personal is political though. Love is not love - it is power according to the creed of the dysfunctional.

Under patriarchy, no woman is safe to live her life, or to love, or to mother children.

Under patriarchy, every woman is a victim, past, present, and future.

Under patriarchy, every woman's daughter is a victim, past, present, and future.

Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

— Andrea Dworkin, Liberty

We are being ruled and governed by those who have no concept of love. They deny its existence or dismiss it as a patriarchal tool of enslavement. Love does not enslave anyone - it frees them. Anyone who does not understand this does not know love. Any parent who loves their child knows that they have to let them go. Any human being who loves another knows that love is not a method to hold and control. That is power, the structure that is so often misinterpreted by the dysfunctional as love. This has been one terrible result of the schism. Those who have these twisted feelings are to be pitied. Not from any moralistic ivory tower, but with compassion as a fellow human being who has been blessed with the capacity to give and receive that which another has, for whatever reason, been denied. They have been robbed, beaten and left by the wayside. The very essence of life has been taken from them. It is a famine that has always afflicted this world, but never more so than today in our own time. This plague devastates our race just as surely as lack of food and water. We can be mal-nourished in another way. We do not live by bread alone.

There is hunger for ordinary bread and there is hunger for love, for kindness, for thoughtfulness and this is the great poverty that makes people suffer so much.

— Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

The wrinkled little woman who uttered those words died at the same time almost as another woman who received far more acclaim and infinitely more homage. Her life and words were given far more attention.

One woman was given a simple cremation - the other was interred on an island surrounded by a sylvan lake like some heroic pre-Raphaelite queen. She was worshipped by millions as a Goddess and her devotees and pilgrims paid extortionate sums to file past her resting place in their thousands. These two women who seem worlds apart are connected. There is a reason that this has happened.

One woman died penniless after spending her whole life helping the sick and the dying in a city that is known by its inhabitants as the ‘armpit of the world’. She owned two saris and a bucket. The other was a young, attractive divorcee, who had a multi-million pound divorce settlement and was on her way from a party in a luxury hotel in the early hours of the morning in a chauffeur driven limousine – her lover - a prince’s son at her side.

One woman is now almost as forgotten as the thousands of unfortunates that she helped to die with some scrap of dignity. The other has been raised to the status of Goddess. Her face an icon of consumer grief that stares from every news stand, gift shop, CD label and magazine cover - even from a lottery scratch card.

There is also a reason for this.

Millions thronged the highways as her cortege traveled to its last resting-place in the Avalon of avariciousness that awaited her. A nation was sycophantically consumed with consumer grief. Millions of plastic credit cards were drenched with oceans of dysfunctional TV tears. Truly a Goddess has been laid to rest. Yet one was also reborn.

Her name, appropriately, was Diana.

For those who thrive on the creation of the new myths, the death of Diana – ex wife of the Prince of Wales was a heaven-sent opportunity to ram home the wonders of the New World vision that she herself is now portrayed as being so much a part of. Her dysfunctional high priests have already been engaged in remodeling us culturally through education and media pressure for the last thirty years. Pretty soon they will be modifying what is normal, natural heterosexual behavior genetically.

She is symbolic for another reason and it is no coincidence that her death coincided with that of a woman who was the very antithesis of all she represented.

Like so many, in increasing numbers, the dispossessed of love are a growing indication of the plague that is eating up human society like a malignant cancer. They are indeed the terminally ill and they are infecting everyone else around them with their 'dis-ease'. As the homosexual anthem of a former dead Goddess rung out from every radio station (proceeds exempted from VAT), who nurses them on the streets of their cities of despair?

The dysfunctional were triumphant in the death of the Goddess. They have all touched the hem of her gown and she has made them all virtuous. We were told that we must all embrace her vision of a caring, more compassionate world. As the money rolls in and even more adventurously nauseating ways of celebrating the life and death of the Goddess are formulated in the minds of the necromancers - on the streets of that other city, in the hearts of the people the little old woman spoke of, nothing has changed.

Our world is full of such analogies. They scream out warnings and explanations to us but in the darkness we do not see them. Another terrible disease afflicts humanity. It is transmitted by what should be an act of love. It is for millions now an act of death. It appeared and spread out into our world at the same time as the triple development. AIDS is a disease that destroys human immunity to infection. It is, in a sense, a physical manifestation of the disease that afflicts us culturally. Those who grow up without the potential for love in their lives are deprived of their immunity against the ravages of the Medusa’s petrifying gaze.

But, believe it or not - there are still millions of men and women who are not yet afflicted. There are those who are resistant to the disease. There are also millions of fortunate men and women who heal themselves or are healed. We don't need to get in bed with the contagious to make us whole. We don’t need to make pilgrimage to a fashion icon or a mass-produced media Madonna. We don’t need to embrace yet more dysfunction to make us whole. We don’t need to sacrifice to any Goddess or grieve for the death of anyone. We need to look to our own lives. It is for ourselves we should grieve and for our children.

When a woman reaches orgasm with a man she is only collaborating with the patriarchal system, eroticizing her own oppression...

— Sheila Jeffrys

We need to promote good health and have compassion and understanding for those who don't. We cannot enforce love anymore than we can substitute it with power. We need to teach it by example. We have been quiet and respectful about our gifts, as if it were sacrilegious to speak of them; as if the Goddess will take them from us, but by remaining quiet about our greatest human treasure we have allowed the purveyors of evil to shout their credo from the rooftops. They have sung the praises of their dysfunction and proclaimed it as truth. If they were right, then we would be living in a saner, cleaner happier world surely. Are we?

Did the oceans of blood that were sacrificed make the sun shine any brighter?
If we look around do we see that the Goddesses legacy has done anything to stop the decline into anarchy?
Is there any more love in the hearts of those whose hearts are empty?
Is there any more wealth in the pockets of those who need it most?

The priests and priestess of the Goddess know the answers to these questions.

Those that truly know love need to look no further than each other’s eyes to know the truth about anything.

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

—William James.

Individuals can, with hard work, willingness, hope and above all, love, cast the bonds of their dysfunctional heritage aside. Whether it comes from their own parent’s example or from the institutionalized cultural roles that have been fostered upon us. Our children have the right to be free to make their own way. We all do. When this is done something miraculous can happen. The deep, dark places can become transcended and filled with light. The schism within can be healed. The very things that are the cause of dysfunction can be transformed into wonderful gifts, gifts that can benefit us as individuals and as a species. Just as this can happen in individuals, so it can happen to us as a species. When - and if - humanity is so transformed, what miracles may the future hold in store for us?

We would all surely agree that children should not have to bear upon their shoulders the sins of the father or the mother. They have the right to make their own mistakes, if they should choose to do so. So it should be with the human species collectively. Our past roles and balances of power are gone now, never to return. There never was a golden age of the family or of anything else. Paradise does not lie in the past or in the future, it lies in our hearts. We have the capability to build it there and we must build it there first if we are ever to build it in reality.

Life can only be understood backwards. It has to be lived forwards.

—Kierkegaard

There are those who are telling us that the roles were unequal, that the power was unbalanced by the oppressors over the oppressed, yet this was clearly not really the case at all. Now, we are indeed seeing imbalance and oppression on a magnitude never imagined. Now, we are seeing the disharmony and the dysfunction of the ‘parents’ destroying the rights of the child to develop free and unblemished by their own selfish wranglings. In their angst and their selfish power machinations, the parents seek to ‘protect’ their offspring, but this kind of power, this kind of control is not protection and it certainly is not love, though it so often masquerades as such.

This is what is happening on a wider human scale. The turmoil in the lives of individuals is a microcosm of the wider human conflict that rages. It has been brought about by the triple development – a natural evolutionary event, which has been manipulated and hijacked by the darkest of forces. If we do not recognize that this has happened. If we fail to see the angel of the apocalypse within the schism then we, as a species are dead.

In the myth, Perseus took up King Acrisius’ challenge to save his mother from a marriage she did not want, a marriage that was to be forced upon her by the selfish monarch. Now in our time, mothers are indeed being forced into wedlock with the State. Can we allow this?

Are we men, born to protect and defend life?
Are we women born to nurture and sustain life?
Can we each of us be heroes once more?

Never in all the history of humanity was there such a need for heroes. Will we take up the gifts we have been given and use them with the courage of heroes? Will we have the courage to use the very weapon that has been used against us to kill this monster - or will we allow the ultimate dysfunctional marriage - the marriage of woman and World State to take place? If we fail to do this, the marriage will take place. Already the bride is being prepared for her wedding. Her dark handmaidens lure her to the altar of our own oblivion.

For our future – for our children - we must act like heroes now.

To Chapter Sixteen

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Posted 2000 04 19
Updates:
2000 09 11 (reformated)
2006 10 31 (reformated)