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By Root 5319 0

people' to defend themselves against their enemies, notably the Philistines, but also those neighbouring civilisations which twice took them into captivity, the Egyptians and the Babylonians. The other is how their rigid, legalistic morality rested ultimately on the unyielding masculine principle of the lex talionis: the idea that a crime must be paid out by identical retribution, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. There is little place in the `ruling consciousness' of this people for the softer feminine values of compassion, mercy and understanding. Where women do play a significant role in these stories, they tend to be presented negatively (e.g., the Temptress Delilah, the raging virago Jezebel) or in an `active' masculine fashion like Deborah, portrayed as tough matriarchal leader of her people in the Book of Judges, or Esther, wife of the Persian emperor Xerxes, who saves her Jewish compatriots from a treacherous massacre through her brave ingenuity. There are exceptions, as in the Book of Ruth, where the widowed non-Jewish heroine movingly insists on accompanying her mother-in-law back to Judaea (where she marries a Jewish husband); and the Song of Solomon where, untypically, the feminine is mystically portrayed in her full, inspiring anima role as the soul of man.14 In general, however, the picture we are given by their storytelling is of a people outwardly dominated by the hard masculine values of strength and order. The most important defining characteristic of their individual identity was their membership of the tribal group, set apart from all others. In archetypal terms, they had thus become a people whose stern, unrelenting `Father God' represented not so much the Universal Self, of equal relevance to all mankind, but more an expression and sanctification of their own collective ego-identity, giving rise to a profound example of `ego-Self confusion'.

Man becomes god

The Jews were not the only people whose storytelling reflected a bias towards masculine consciousness. When the Romans took over their pantheon of gods and much of their mythology from the Greeks, it is noticeable how the role the Greeks accorded to the feminine became less prominent. The most famous city of the Greek world may have been named after the goddess of wisdom, but when the Romans renamed Athene as Minerva she became markedly less significant in their collective life. Much of the subtlety with which the Greek mythology had personified the dynamic forces in the human psyche becomes blurred over. In making Neptune their sea-god, the Romans lost sight of that hugely important role played by his predecessor Poseidon as symbolic of the `Dark Father'. The role of Jupiter, as the incarnation of masculine power and authority, becomes markedly more dominant and less open to challenge than that which the Greeks had given to Zeus. The role of Mars, equating to Ares as god of war, also becomes more prominent. On all sides we see a shift of the masculine-feminine balance in favour of the masculine, and this can be seen clearly reflected in the greatest single Roman poem, Virgil's Aeneid, their equivalent to the Odyssey.

The Romans evolved two quite separate stories to explain the origins of their city. One was the legend of how the orphaned twin babies Romulus and Remus had been suckled and brought up by a she-wolf. This obscurely recalled the primordial emergence of humankind from the state of nature; and Romulus eventually grew up to found the city which took his name. The other `national myth, so powerfully developed by Virgil, told how the Romans were really descended from the Trojans, and how their city had been founded by Aeneas after he had escaped from the smoking wreck of Troy. There had been no subtler element in the Odyssey than the contest between Poseidon and Athene. One is the hero's chief antagonist, trying to prevent him reaching home, the other his chief ally, putting him in touch with the self-knowledge which eventually enables him to reach his goal. In the Aeneid, the hero's chief antagonist is Juno, queen of the gods, the