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Bringing It All Home
Richard Tarnas
The masculinity of the Western mind has been pervasive and fundamental, in both men and women, affecting
every aspect of Western thought, determining its most basic conceptions of the human being and the human role in the world...it
has always been “man” this and “man” that—“the ascent of man,” “the dignity
of man,” Man’s relation to God,” “man’s place in the cosmos,” “man’s struggle
with nature,” “the great achievement of modern man,” and so forth.
The crisis of modern man
is an essentially masculine crisis, and I believe that its resolution is already now occurring in the tremendous emergence
of the feminine in our culture: visible not only in the rise of feminism, the growing empowerment of women, and the widespread
opening up to feminine values by both men and women, and not only in the rapid burgeoning of women’s scholarship and
gender sensitive perspectives in virtually every intellectual discipline, but also in the increasing sense of unity with the
planet and all forms of nature on it, in the increasing awareness of the ecological and the growing reaction against political
and corporate policies supporting the domination and exploitation of the environment, in the growing embrace of the human
community, in the accelerating collapse of long-standing political and ideological barriers separating the world’s peoples,
in the deepening recognition of the value and necessity of partnership, pluralism, and the interplay of many perspectives.
It is visible also in the widespread urge to reconnect with the body, the emotions, the unconscious, the imagination
and intuition, in the new concern with the mystery of childbirth and the dignity of the maternal, in the growing recognition
of an immanent intelligence in nature, in the broad popularity of the Gaia hypothesis. It can be seen in the increasing appreciation
of indigenous and archaic cultural perspectives such as the Native American, African, and ancient European, in the new awareness
of feminine perspectives of the divine, in the archaeological recovery of the Goddess tradition and the contemporary reemergence
of Goddess spirituality, ... in the widely noted spontaneous upsurge of feminine archetypal phenomena, ... and transpersonal
psychology, ... in scientific theories of the holonomic universe, morphogenetic fields, dissipative structures, chaos theory,
the ecology of mind, the participatory universe—the list could go on and on.
As Jung prophesied, an epochal
shift is taking place in the contemporary psyche, a reconciliation between the two great polarities, a union of opposites:
a hieros gamos (sacred marriage) between the long-dominant but now alienated masculine and the long-suppressed but
now ascending feminine.
.... But why has the pervasive masculinity of the Western intellectual and spiritual tradition
suddenly become so apparent to us today, while it remained so invisible to almost every previous generation? I believe this
is occurring only now because, as Hegel suggested, a civilization cannot become conscious of itself, cannot recognize its
own significance, until it is so mature that it is approaching its own death.
Today we are experiencing something
that looks very much like the death of modern man, indeed that looks very much like the death of Western man. Perhaps the
end of “man” himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome—and fulfilled,
in the embrace of the feminine.
RICHARD TARNAS is a cultural historian and professor of philosophy and depth psychology
whose first book, The Passion of the Western Mind became both a bestseller and required reading at many universities.
A graduate of Harvard University, he is the founding director of the Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness graduate program
at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. He is also adjunct faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute
in Santa Barbara, California, and was formerly director of programs and education at Esalen Institute. His recent book is
COSMOS AND PSYCHE.
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