The Sacred Principle Project

The story of the forbidden fruit is known far beyond Sunday church sermons. Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, tempted by the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit, has been immortalised in art and music, referenced in literature, and used as a trope in mass media and mainstream culture in the Western Christian world that I know -- and surely far beyond that. What I have learned as an adult of the historic significance of this story and the profound impact it has had on the psyche shine a different light on the scenes and the dramatic "moral" of the story taught to me as a child.  There are several ways to interpret the story that can help us to re-position the messages in our collective understanding: the literal meaning, taken as the word of God and religious doctrine; the symbolic meaning of the images; and the historic-mythological meaning of what the story represents in the evolution of human consciousness.           *  Interpretation 1: L...

La inspiración del siguiente texto ha sido el llamado a escribir nuevos relatos, nuevos mitos. Como parte de este proyecto del "Principio Sagrado", el mito central es el asesinato de Tiamat por Marduk, la epopeya de la creación de Babilonia. Esta historia de creación, escrita en cuneiforme en tablillas alrededor 2000 a.C., marcó el cambio en la mitología y la conciencia colectiva de la sociedad occidental de una cultura de la Diosa, con el principio feminino de creación como central, a una ideología de un solo Dios Hombre Creador; instauró la ruptura de la humanidad con la naturaleza. El texto describe el brutal matricidio de Tiamat, diosa madre caracterizada como caos, por Marduk, un dios guerrero-salvador-creador que pone orden. Este mito todavía vive en nuestra sociedad, dentro de los mitos de creación de la cultura Judeo-Cristiana y en cada cuento de hada de un caballero matando a un dragón - y en nuestra programación patriarcal y trato de la naturaleza.  Conocido como el...

There is a story we tell every year: in the deep midwinter, a virgin mother gives birth to a son-god-king in a stable, marked by a bright star. In this Christian myth, the child who is born is the son of god, god incarnate, who came to the world to save the people from sin, a savior. The story has such influence on our current society that his supposed birthday literally marks the before and after on the calendar of the history of the world. Even those who do not believe in the doctrine of this story are still familiar with the themes. And for those who believe or not, there are elements of the story that are perhaps unconvincing, that do not quite seem to fit, that feel like they need a leap of faith to believe. So, where did this story come from? Why do we collectively need to retell it every year? And why was it set now, at the time of winter solstice in the northern hemisphere? Let's go back 20,000 years... In the Paleolithic era, from the Pyrenees to Siberia, our cave-dwelling...

   So now we know about the split. We see the impact of the death of the goddess in our relationships - to each other, to money, to land, to god, to work, to life. (See previous post, Split from the sacred ) Now we need to figure out, how do we fix this? What is the solution, to get out of these patterns of violence and patriarchy? According to Baring and Cashford in The Myth of the Goddess (1991), this current Judeo-Christian myth of a single male god is a tribal myth -- meaning it was meant to apply to a certain group of people at a time of threat to strengthen their own identity and self-interest through a negative opposite (the feminine). This myth has endured and gained power over the past 2,000 years, however, and what these authors see is that this myth got stuck, in a collective arrested development with an unresolved conflict not allowing the tribe to move into the next stage.  ** So how do we get past this conflict? How do we move from the duality, the oppositio...