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By Root 5301 0

`dark feminine' fury, and she arranges that Paris shall be paid out for his folly by falling in love with the wife of one of the greatest of the Greek kings, Menelaus of Sparta, and abducting her back to Troy. The Greeks all join together to win her back, and we thus see in the essential story of the Trojan war that all too familiar archetypal scenario which shows a group of heroes setting out to challenge a 'dark power' which has in its grip the shining feminine, the anima, the spirit of life. As they lay siege to the monster's citadel, it is to be a long and fiercely fought struggle. But the Greek heroes have one ultimate advantage. Their protective deity is Athene, the goddess of wisdom. It is she who in the end, after all their direct assaults on the city have been in vain, guides them to realise that the only way to win this war is through cunning. They trick the Trojans into accepting the gift of the wooden horse, so that the Greek warriors concealed within it can win access to the city. Within a short time, thanks to their `feminine' guile, all they have failed to achieve by mere masculine heroics has been delivered up to them. Troy lies in ruins, its brave defenders slain. Helen, the `eternal feminine; has been liberated from her imprisonment.

But this is not of course the end of the story. So curious was the Greek intelligence that, as we have seen, they were always wanting to know what happened before the beginning of a story, and what came after it ended. That central legendary event of their history, the Trojan war, gave rise to a host of ancillary tales. Some of these described events which took place in the run-up to the great siege, such as those featuring the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigenia. Even more described the fate of the various heroes on their return from the war, such as that which befell Agamemnon on his return to Mycenae, when he was murdered by his adulterous wife Clytemnestra, then avenged by his son Orestes. This particular cycle was to end when Athene, as goddess of wisdom, was called in to rule that Orestes had finally expiated his crime. But the greatest of these stories was that describing the return home of Odysseus. And of course this, like the story of the war itself, ends in a last great battle to liberate the anima from the deadly grip of the dark power.

One of the most striking features of Greek mythology was the way it, for the first time, gave a central place to the `feminine value', personified above all in that goddess of wisdom who was revered so highly that she gave her name to the foremost city of Greek civilisation, and whose greatest temple, looking down over that city from the mighty rock of the Acropolis, remains alongside the pyramids of Egypt as the most famous single building of the ancient world. In myth after myth we see the release of the `eternal feminine' from the grip of darkness as the moment of ultimate fulfilment, when the true hero reaches the state of wholeness.

Such was the power of this body of stories that when the civilisation centred on Athens achieved its finest flowering in the fifth century BC, it continued to shape many of those tragedies which represented the first great written literature of the Western world. The Greeks looked back to that dawn-time when the gods mingled with those legendary heroes who had created their world centuries before, and found in these ancient stories, like those of Orestes or Oedipus or Medea, the themes of human folly and redemption which could provide them with catharsis: that purification of the emotions and the soul described by Aristotle, which comes from watching the acting out in a theatre of the most profound psychological patterns in human life.

But in some quarters there was already a sense that there was something archaic about this way of looking at the world; that all this profusion of mythical beings belonged to a former, more primitive age. Already, more than two centuries earlier, the poet Hesiod had portrayed the history of mankind as having unfolded through four ages, Once, in the beginning,