Matriarchy and Patriarchy at The Heart of History (Dedicated to John Weir Perry)

One of Margaret Mahler’s most relevant contributions to child psychology is the idea that biological and psychological births do not coincide. In the child, self-awareness and the understanding of being a separate entity from the mother is a process that passes through an original symbiotic stage and culminates in the inner condition that the author defines as individuation. Infinitely far from what Jung means by individuation process (1921), Mahler locates the psychological birth of the individual in the original experience of being detached and different from the mother. After all, Mahler’s child psychology conception is superimposable on the story of the species to which we belong: we know that the earliest hominids of our strain are about two or three million years old, and although science is yet to provide us with satisfying answers about the subject, we can nevertheless state that the birth of consciousness - understood as the awareness of one’s own essence, at the time selfreflexive and dependent on nature - definitely came later. Over time, clinical experience and theoretical insights led me to believe that ontogeny and phylogeny are two parallel witnesses of the psychoarchetypal nature of our species, and also that the psychological vicissitudes of each child reflect in themselves the psychic events of human evolutionary history. Therefore, if Margaret Mahler believes that in order for psychological life to be born a child and his mother are necessary, Erich Neumann affirms that the archetype of the mother and the mythical figure of the hero are the real protagonists of The Origins and History of Consciousness. The relationship with the paternal dimension and the individual’s psychic autonomy are merely successive expressions of it. The biological mother is the expression of the archetype, and the archetype enshrines every mother.

The origin of consciousness and cults of the great goddess

Typical of the matriarchal stage of female psychology is a total or relative lack of relationship of the feminine with the masculine [2] As we anticipated earlier, there are questions in the scientific world which do not have final answers: when was consciousness born? And how? During which time period did human beings, still immersed in a symbiotic relationship with nature, begin to experience life differently from other animals and have those peculiar psychic episodes that would lead to self-consciousness? In the contest of Analytical Psychology, Erich Neumann was the person most engaged in answering these questions through the study of the oldest myths of the Mediterranean area. We are around the recent Neolithic age. Neumann, moving from a past that was cloudy and lacking any clear time references, refers anyway to a time in which consciousness manages to express a well-structured mythopoetic function. Starting from this frame, he built his psycho-evolutionary model, whose greatest protagonists were the The Great Mother Goddess of the origins and the rising consciousness of the son-hero. Following the evolution of the human psychic functioning at high level, we certainly have to admit that the creation of a myth already represents an extremely evolved moment of human consciousness: the ability to compose a complex plot line, the twine of human and divine events, the ability to envision experiences going beyond death, can only come after the original condition of participation mystique, for instance, whose main psychic feature is the perception of a deep existing relation between self and an external object [3]. As soon as men first experience participation mystique, they are merely taking the first steps towards the symbolic mythopoetic ability. That being said, we should now clarify a key concept about mitogenesis and the mythopoetic function. A cosmogonic myth refers to an origin where everything happens. Being a complex structure both on the creative and narrative plan, it clearly cannot be the outcome of the original human condition that it tries to tell. We must assume, aware that we cannot find confirmation let alone denial, that at the time of the original human vicissitudes reported in the myths, there were no psychic and expressivecommunicative capacities to generate such a complex result as any myth in fact is. Therefore, the myth is an expression of the psychic functioning and of the imaginal capacities proper to human beings at the time the myth was created, and not of the psychic functioning of the time of the events told in the myth. Although it may seem trivial, this is a key point as it underscores how man ab origin was not in possession of consciousness functions as we understand it today. If this is an established fact in the natural sciences, perhaps it is not so in other scientific fields. According to J.W. Perry, myth is an expression of collective consciousness in times not of peace and serenity, but of great turmoil and change (1987). We might add that myth is the most important evolutionary evidence of the process leading to consciousness function. As Lord Reglan (1936) asserted, following the path first taken by Elliot Smith, it is likely that in the past the spread of mythologems and myths depended on contaminations among different cultures; however, they all expressed. specific peculiarities of geographical areas and different historical moments. Let us try to set an example to be clearer: in the Old Testament, the earliest writings of which have been dated between the 9th and the 6th century calBCE approximately, it is told that on the sixth day after creation God created man and made him male and female. From the first exchanges with each other and with God, Adam and Eve are depicted as beings capable of self-reflexive functions, of dialogue, of making sense of things. As already mentioned, all this may not be a prerogative of the human being of the origins; but it is certainly the prerogative of the culture inside of which that cosmogonic myth takes shape. In other words, the man of thousands of years ago, who already possessed conscious faculties, was absolutely unable to depict himself, in earlier evolutionary times, incapable of the faculty of thinking. Three thousand years ago, man was not yet in possession of mental faculties that could let him see human phenomena in a processual way. Jewish people projected themselves in the human being of origins. From a logical- Aristotelian perspective, that is a huge mistake, but from the point of view of the evolutionary psychic process, on the other hand, it was a key step in the attempt to make sense of itself and the whole universe. Let us take another example, once again taken from Genesis: Adam’s family line, the family line of the “Goods”, lived between the week of creation and the great flood. Adam lived 930 years, set 912 years, Enos 905, Cainan 910, Mahalel 895, Jared 962, Henoc 365 (the second biblical case of untimely death after Abel!), Matusalah 969, Lamec 595 and finally Noah, who became father at age 500 and died at age 950 (Genesis, 5:3-32; 9:28 29). As we know, the Great Flood represents the image of a renewed humanity after that, in God’s eyes, men had shown such behaviors that made God regret creating them. After the Flood, there will be a new generation of, once again, extremely long-lived patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob), but the lives of the narrated characters in the Old Testament are little by little shortened up to becoming “normal”. All this being said, the question is: what is the mythneuro-psychological meaning of such long lives in the history of patriarchs? Let us try to answer this.

Adam and his descendants, who all became fathers somewhere between 300 and 500 years of age, cover a time span of less than 3,000 years. I believe that the Semitic people, in the process of structuring their own myth, through a mathematical approach, strove to create an extremely long-time span (tending to infinity for the conceptions of the time) between the origin of everything and the facts coeval with the time when the myths that have come down to us were told. An immense effort expressing the need to get to dates that could meet the needs of time consciousness, to produce times that could be counted; to summarize, to plausible theses. In Hesiod’s cosmogony, for instance, there is no trace of “mathematical” consciousness efforts like in the case of biblical Genesis, even though they both existed approximately at the same time (700 calBCE). The Hebrew myth condenses the creation of the universe into six days, thus circumscribing a defined time frame. From sidereal space to human intelligence. An operation that condenses imagination and rationality. We are not in the chaos of Hesiod’s origins.

Therefore, we have to assume that, if a myth is the expression of the human psychic experiences of a certain time, it is also an attempt of the emerging or renewing consciousness to make sense of its own story [4]. In any case, as soon as man makes his appearance in any myth of the origins, the scenario of his own evolution unfolds from the relationship with the nature in which he is immersed, as in the case of the Garden of Eden. Indeed, it is possible to affirm that, in ancient myths, the first psychic steps towards the blossoming of consciousness referred precisely to a feeling of deep connection with elements of nature. If it is true that one of the fundamental aspects of consciousness is the ability to make sense of one’s own condition, then its first expressions could only somehow concern the original condition of immersion in nature. Differentiation and domination over it would only come much later.

The mythic-symbolic ability would therefore represent an evolved psychic faculty if compared to earlier ones. As far as we know, beyond actions such as the use of tools and similar objects, the first psychic experiences would seem to have been magicalspiritual [5]. We must interpret archaic magical thinking [5] as evidence of a mental functioning that goes beyond animal senseperception and begins to construct a different dimension. Neumann himself was the one to first realize that human psychic evolution finds its roots in magical thinking, then continues in religious thinking and finally evolves into scientific thinking (1949), placing irrational thinking and rationality in evolutionary continuity. Moreover, we are aware of the fact that certain forms of magical thinking have lived through some archaic cultures but, following Frazer and Neumann’s thoughts, it is absolutely certain that all those cultures that achieved symbolic abilities expressed through the creation of myths, experienced earlier phases characterized by magical forms of thinking. In these regards, we would like to report the following statement: “The meaning of the ritual, regardless of the utilitarian purpose that man might attribute to it, is to reinforce the system of consciousness. The magical forms by which archaic man comes to terms with his surroundings are, among others, anthropocentric systems of world domination [6]”.

The Israeli author stated that Western culture, more than others, was able to enhance the potential of the individual psyche and, by doing so, to follow up the process of consciousness structuring and differentiation: “The development of consciousness as creative development was essentially the work of Western man. Creative development of the ego-consciousness means that, over millennia, the system of consciousness has assimilated, by expanding more and more, the contents of the unconscious. The creative nature of consciousness is a key component of Western cultural standards. In Western culture, and to some extent in the Far West, we may observe a steady development of consciousness over the past ten millennia, although it often proceeds in fits and starts (ibidem, pp.15, 16)”. According to Neumann, cultures that have been able to evolve are essentially those that have managed to welcome on the collective level the changes experienced at the individual consciousness level. In other words, the main evolutionary capacity of the psyche subsists in the individual’s ability to differentiate from the original symbiotic condition. If the collective embraces, an evolutionary step is taken. We are now approaching one of the key aspects of these pages: the relationship between the emerging individual consciousness represented by the male figure of the hero, and the anthropological framework of the first mythic spiritual forms, the era of the Great Mother Goddess. This is the scenario in which Neumann’s analytical psychological reflections about Ancient Egypt and Greece take place. The mythical dimension analyzed by Neumann emphasizes male psychic differentiation from the original collective psyche understood in the archetypal feminine sense. Jung (1939), in an attempt to better clarify the meaning of Archetype, uses the images of the mother to assert that there are various levels in a man’s experience of the archetype: a personal level (the mother, the grandmother, the mother-in-law, etc.); a more elevated level (the Virgin Mary, Demeter and Core, Sophia); and a broader level (the Church, the homeland, the earth, and others). Further, in the same writing, highlighting the relationship between the emerging consciousness of the child and the archetype of the mother, he affirms: “all those influences which the literature describes as being exerted on the children do not come from the mother herself, but rather from the archetype projected upon her, which gives her a mythological background and invests her with authority and numinosity (ibidem, p.84)”. Therefore Jung, on the ontogenetic level, identifies the relationship between infant consciousness and the archetype of the mother, projected upon the biological mother, as a fundamental step in psychic development towards individual consciousness. Neumann, through ancient Mediterranean myths, comes to the same conclusions on the phylogenetic level. On these pages, we would like to add a passage concerning an evolutionary stage that predates Neumann and Jung’s reflections.

As it was argued by Jung, the aspects of the Mother Archetype that precede the establishment of human consciousness concern the cycles of Nature, nurturing, all that human beings are immersed in, as well as the mysteries of birth and death and others (1915). It will therefore be the emerging consciousness to create a relationship between the Mother Archetype and the woman / mother. To use Jung’s words once again: “(the archetypes) are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form, and then only to a very limited degree. A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience (ibidem, p. 81)”. It is not possible, as of today, to agree on a period of time from which human beings saw the experience of motherhood as a phenomenon so psychically charged that it contributed greatly to the development of consciousness, but instead we have elements to date its earliest artistic-cultural manifestations. Between Palaeolithic and Neolithic, men were organised into nomadic hunter-gatherer groups that usually did not exceed 150 individuals; men were mainly devoted to hunting and protecting the group, women to gathering wild fruits

and raising children [7]. This time period came before myths began to express processes of differentiation in the psychology of sexes and before male mythic-spiritual figures made their appearance. Marjia Gimbutas was undoubtedly the author who got more involved in the understanding of the spiritual life of late Palaeolithic men. The Lithuanian-born archaeologist goes beyond Neumann’s idea that the major Great Goddess’ attribute was motherhood. The author highlights how already in the earliest matristic-tribal societal forms of Central Europe around 25000 calBCE, passing through later agricultural sedentary cultures and beyond, the domains of the Great Goddess, concerned all human vicissitudes. It is actually quite likely that the Great Goddess enshrined in herself the human spirituality of the origins. In spite of this, also Gimbutas admits that “The main theme of Goddess symbolism is the mystery of birth and death and the renewal of life not only human but all life on earth and indeed in the whole cosmos [8]”. Gimbutas hypothesized the existence of a social organization based on the belonging to the maternal line, the heart of matristic culture, with a conception of power leadership very different from how we understand it today, where there was a peaceful condition of coexistence and collaboration between men and women: “The Old Europeans… lived in (probably) theocratic monarchies presided over by a queenpriestess [9]”. Campbell, in his famous work on the cults of female deities, while focusing on the organization of power in the earliest human societies, goes so far as to question the existence of matriarchal archaic societies: “if anything like matriarch ever existed (but I doubt it), it must have been established in the early cultivation centers [10]”. I believe that Campbell meant that in the process that progressively led from a tribal dimension to a settled social organization, he never really believed in the establishment of a female-led leadership. In fact, even Bachofen, an author who had the credit of shedding light on the concept of matriarchal culture, emphasized the difference between Matriarchy and Gynocracy, giving the latter the meaning of an organized power at the apex of which women stood, and of which he bears some evidence but only in later eras. It is likely that Gimbutas and Campbell’s hypotheses might have their own merits about the fact that matristic societies functioned well organizationally without any actual leaders, with charismatic functions if anything; however, there would seem to exist no objective evidence that such societal forms were peaceful and welcoming [11]. The goriness of time suggests that even the matristic gylanic societies described by Gimbutas could express forms of violence. After all, Jung (1939) and Neumann (1956) also stressed how the archetypal manifestation of the Great Mother possessed terrifying and violent aspects. In fact, the matter to this day remains unresolved. On the other hand, on the basis of the elements we have available, we can reconstruct which were the themes at the core of the early matriarchal societies that left traces of their passage.

Gimbutas’ ideas are mainly based on archeological finds found about 9,000 years ago in Eastern and North-Eastern Europe. The myths on which Neumann’s and especially Bachofen’s ideas are based, are certainly more recent. It is now essential to recover a concept expressed a few pages back. The myths of origins referred to by Neumann and Bachofen do not seem to refer to the historical period that Gimbutas focuses on, and this is proof of the fact that myths may contemplate elements handed down orally and from ancient past history but, as already mentioned, their function is to express the collective condition of the time of their manifestation. Myths cannot be blamed for overlooking earlier historical phases, but this must have happened quite frequently. Therefore, the myths examined by Neumann and Bachofen not only pertain to more recent eras than the period focused on by Gimbutas but concern an even more evolved psychic phase. In fact, the big difference between Gimbutas on the one hand and Neumann and Bachofen on the other, concerns not only different historical periods but also and especially different areas. The latter two, in fact, were mainly based on cultures facing the Mediterranean and belonging to an already historical phase of human beings. To conclude these reflections on the matriarchy of the origins, there is one aspect that in fact represents the central hypothesis proposed here. Starting with the representations of Venus figurines, in some way, all authors who have dealt with matriarchal cultures and historical periods share the idea that, originally, the major artistic-symbolic expressions were female human figures whose major attributes are not only motherhood and fertility, but also the continuation of creation. The next step would be the deification of the feminine [12]. As already mentioned, generativity must have appeared to the man of the time as an absolute mystery and a lightning bolt. Personally, I have a hard time imagining that a creature would be psychically attracted to something that is naturally its own. This is what makes me believe that those who were impressed by the mystery of birth and who spiritually and artistically represented women in their meaning as givers of life were initially men. I find it much more difficult to imagine women exalting themselves by the fact that they themselves are givers of life. Instead, it is far more likely that, over time, they have identified with this powerful role and mana, and this psychic fact has most likely played a very important role in the social and spiritual organisation of matristic societies. There is also another aspect to consider: awareness of the relationship between coitus and pregnancy. Campbell stresses the importance of a statuette found at an archaeological site in Turkey in which a split female figure on one side embraces a man and on the other holds a child (7000 - 5000 calBCE). Campbell calls her “the transformer,” she who “receives the seed from the past and through the magic of her body transforms it into the future” Neumann, quoting Briffault, expresses a different view: “According to the conception of the primitives, the embryo is processed by the blood of the mother, the discharge of which, as evidenced by the interruption of menstruation, ceases in the period of pregnancy [13]”. Briffault published The Mothers in 1927, and the site of Catal Huyuk, in Turkey, was discovered in the late 1950s. Paradoxically, Gimbutas seems to agree with Neumann: “(Mother goddesses were) the parthenogenetic creators of ancient European religion, who created new life within their own bodies by themselves [9]”. It is profoundly difficult to believe that humans of the time on the one hand worshipped parthenogenetic deities, while on the other hand believed that making a real child also required a father. In this sense, Neumann’s words, subsequent to those given above, appear further clarifying: “Fertilisation and fertility are not placed, as we know, in direct relation to the sexual act...While sexual intercourse is not linked with evidence to fertilisation, for the primitive mentality the connection between the appearance of menstruation and the possibility of fertilisation is evident (1953, p.53)”. And again, on the original matriarchal condition in which the sentimental love experience has not yet manifested itself: “The lack of an individual love bond and the preponderance of the social situation in the choice of the marriage partner say that in the matriarchal stage of female psychology the experience of objectless sexuality, menstruation, pregnancy and birth are much more closely linked with the woman’s inner life than with the relationship with the real man (ibid., p.53)”. Despite Neumann’s clear arguments, I believe that the question about awareness between coitus and pregnancy in the late Palaeolithic also remains an open question.

According to Neumann, “The transformation mysteries of the woman are primarily bloodrelated transformation mysteries that lead her to the experience of her own creativity and produce a numinous impression on the man [13].” It is very likely that it is precisely man’s ecstatic experience of the mystery of pregnancy and birth that contributed significantly to the progressive deification of the female figure. Awareness determines the divinizing projection, and vice versa; the archetype is a principle that prescinds and includes all this. Man was not involved in the mystery of life: “The masturbatory stage of uroboric creation is, on the other hand, genital in character, and precedes the sexual stage of the World Parents, which is the stage of propagation in duality [6].” I agree with the idea that ancient matriarchal societies were organised in a circular fashion around the most important female figures. The fact that in some tombs in Western Poland (4300 calBCE) and Central Germany (3500 calBCE) family groups were buried with the oldest woman at the top also allows us to imagine the kind of organisation of the time [8] we could go so far as to imagine that the most important women were those with the most progeny or at least the greatest number of descendants, an aspect that made one nucleus stronger than others. Gimbutas herself writes “The central role of women in the family clan reflected the central role of the goddess in religion (2021, p.144).” But it is precisely this aspect that opens the door to the more complex and controversial aspect of the organisations: “women were honoured for their power to generate life,” writes Stefania Renda (2019, p.14). The power to generate life. After all, what we are going in search of through the concepts of Matriarchy and Patriarchy are precisely the forms of power, psychic first and then organised, of human cultures. At its origins, the matriarchal, matricentric, gilanic matristic or matrilineal world as it may be, offers us a perspective in which the affective bond based on consanguinity was the most cohesive element. Power, before being a form of dominance over the other, was an affective psychic state that infused energy and security. An omnipotent condition capable of producing psychic evolution. On the other hand, human mothers have been those who, more than in other animal species, have enhanced and maintained beyond the boundaries of weaning and independence their affective investments in their offspring. This is one of the major evolutionary elements of the human species. But everything changes in history. It would only be a matter of time and things would change out of simple evolutionary necessity. Whether mothers were independently imbued with a condition of inner power by the fact that they engendered life, or whether they were placed on this pedestal by men, we still come to the conclusion, even though hypothetical, that men projected immense numinous power onto women. Jung’s Analytical Psychology teaches us that, in a process leading to consciousness, projections are progressively re-introduced by the projecting subject. If we have reason to believe that ontogeny follows phylogeny, then we have reason to believe that Neolithic humans, at some point, also attributed that numinous power to themselves, and this experience opened a new phase in the evolutionary history of human beings. Around the fifth millennium BCE, stone mounds with a circular cross-section were built in the Volga Basin area of Southern Russia for burial purposes. These burials were intended for men of high social status. For the first time in history, male human beings were buried with honours that extolled their strength and courage. It is the dawn of Kurgan culture.

From the Patriarchate of the origins to the present day

Beginning in the seventh millennium BCE, first north and east of the Black Sea, then also south and west, a new form of organisation imposed itself on human culture. The Kurgan culture, with its patriarchal social and spiritual form, technological innovation of metals and the use of the horse, animated by a warlike and violent spirit, will subdue and disrupt all cultures with which it comes into contact. Krichevskij, a Russian scholar of prehistory1, had already defined the nomadic pastoral culture of the late Neolithic as an early form of patriarchal culture, dedicated to raid and war to the point of considering it as a natural form of economic evolution, more profitable and convenient. Also, the famous Australian archeologist V. Gordon Childe (1958) sees the pastoral culture north of the Black Sea, that he identifies as Koban (the culture of the ochre tumuli), as the most innovative male culture regarding the use of metals and predominating behaviours. However, and once again, I believe that it is Marjia Gimbutas who understands the importance of this cultural manifestation in an evolutionary way, so much as to state that “Kurgan Culture seems the only remaining candidate to be truly proto-Indo-European [9].” There seems to be no firm evidence to say that Kurgan culture takes its origins from European gylanic matriarchal societies of the same period. However, if we consider that the matriarchal culture described in the pages above seems to be not so geographically circumscribed. cultural manifestation but rather an original form of primitive human culture, thus an Archetypal manifestation, then we must assume the existence of a relationship between Kurgan culture and ancient European matriarchal cultures. It is possible that this relationship has produced a real rotation over time. A hypothesis is also somewhat supported by Krichevskij and Campbell. The latter, relying on archaeological finds and myths from other primitive societies, writes: “In the mythologies of various archaic societies (the Pygmies of the Congo, the Ona of the land of fire, etc.) we find legends of this kind: originally all magical power belonged to women. Men then exterminated them, sparing only the younger girls, and hoarded that knowledge without passing it on to the survivors. And indeed, in one of the large Palaeolithic habitation structures located in Southern France (in Laussell), a large number of shattered female figurines were found, suggesting that they were deliberately destroyed at some point (2013, p.19).” The Laussell site also appears relevant because it would testify the worship of female deities around the Mediterranean as early as 20,000 years ago. Gimbutas categorically rejects the idea of a relationship between the two cultures except under aggression: “the ancient- European and Indo-European belief systems are diametrically opposed. Even this fact alone testifies to the collision, that is, to the invasive character of the Indo-Europeans with respect to Europe. It is not possible that the IndoEuropean belief system developed linearly from the Ancient-European one. Just as it is not possible that Indo-European society - exogamic, patriarchal, patrilineal, and patrilocal, with strong clan organisation and social hierarchy - developed from ancient-European society, centred on the harmonious interaction of men with nature and the complementarity of relations between men and women (2021, p.136);” and again, referring to the world of the dead of the Kurgan: “the other world is subterranean, swampy, dominated by a male sovereign deity. It is gloomy, cold and barren. The journey to the afterlife involves a road or river and usually a three-day period of travel (on foot, horseback or chariot). Souls stay there and spend their postmortem existence sluggishly and passively. There is no belief in rebirth or continuity of life energy in other living beings as in ancient Europe. Therefore, it must be reiterated that the beliefs of the Indo-Europeans could have had no original breeding ground among the ancient Europeans (2021, p.140).” Perhaps, too much value judgment. The element that makes the Kurgan particularly difficult to accept is their violent and predatory attitude. On this aspect, Gimbutas hits the nail on the head. However, let us try to understand the Kurgan phenomenon through the lens of analytical psychology. First of all, Kurgan would seem like the first manifestation of masculine power. Could this have made Kurgan so allpowerful? We should begin by saying that, in some ways, magical spirituality would seem to have been of male origin even in matristic societies. Campbell writes in this regard, “The small female figurines were not found in the large painted caves, places of purely male ritual, but in the actual shelters in which families lived. No one ever lived in the dark, deep, unhealthy and dangerous caves. These were reserved for the rituals of masculine magic: turning boys into brave men and training them to hunt; making peace with beasts, thanking them for their deaths, and leading them back to the womb of the mother of all, the earth (the dark, deep, and imposing womb of the cave itself), and then bringing them back to life (2013, p.18).” Campbell thus places in the hands of male culture the empowerment of functions such as magic, courage, and male adulthood. However, we are not yet in a patriarchal mindset. We must therefore hypothesise that Kurgan culture, probably, was not a patriarchal culture in the highest spiritual sense; it was undoubtedly a masculinist culture, in which the figure of the spiritual warrior represented the first form of differentiation from the earlier matriarchy. As we tried to argue in the previous paragraph, the process of omnipotence that had previously involved the female figure must have gradually shifted to men with the attributes of strength and prevarication over the other. Not so much fatherhood as courage and strength in battle have given the male human being the opportunity to express something new compared to previous periods. But that is not all. The use of metallic weapons actually represented a key technological progress, and we know how technological innovations have always been at the centre of human interests for the conquest of the future. Like Gordon Childe highlighted, the nomadic pastoral warrior culture of ancient Europe played a key role in the transition from the Neolithic to the Bronze Age (1958). And let us not forget, however, that Hephaestus’ forge is a man’s place. Then there is an immense chapter in Kurgan development: the use of the horse. According to Gimbutas, the use of the horse played a key role in three aspects in the development of Kurgan culture: 1) the horse allowed for infinitely greater distances to be covered than nomadism on foot and thus fostered its spread (let us not forget that the Kurgan were primarily nomadic herders). 2) Greater opportunities for travel and thus more contact with neighbouring peoples were a key drive, according to Gimbutas, for the development and spread of languages of Indo-European origin. 3) The horse determined a huge advantage in battle. Let us try to look at the same aspects concerning the horse from the perspective of human psychic evolution. As it has been addressed in previous publications, the neocortex is the portion of the encephalon most responsible for human voluntary behaviours as it is deputed to the highest forms of cognitive functioning (reasoning, impulse control, planning and coordination of complex actions, communication, language, etc.) [14,15]. Before the neocortex was anatomically structured and functionally affirmed, humans were propelled forward primarily by psychic systems in which the emotionalaffective component played a key role. This would actually still happen today, but in a less instinctive and uncontrolled manner (Panksepp, &Biven, 2012). Panksepp circumscribes seven affective systems, the most important of which would be the Seeking System. All the affective systems that Panksepp discusses would have an anatomical-functional location below the cortex, often in the heart of the limbic system of the encephalon. Evolution would have produced important neuroconnections between the limbic system and the cortex, between affectivity and cognition but, according to Panksepp, it would still have been a progressive evolution with a clear direction from the affective toward the cognitive. In summary, Panksepp best structured MacLean’s idea of the tripartite brain in an evolutionaryexperimental way. In the best possible solution, the affective and cognitive systems manage to integrate harmoniously [16]. But this is a psychic process that must have been preceded by trial and error in human history. In a 2021 publication on psychoses, we devoted great importance to Panksepp’s Seeking System. In summary, the Seeking System is functionally related to many of the other affective systems. For example, it is related to the system of reproduction in partner search just as it is related to the system of anger, fear, and play. It is extremely important to emphasise how, according to Panksepp, overactivation of the Seeking System causes human beings to have a grandiose feeling of self, excessive power, a predestination feeling. In short, a grandiose state of omnipotence is profoundly similar to acute manic psychotic activation. Let us add to this an additional piece. I believe that the man of the time we are dealing with imagined riding a horse, running against the wind, traversing boundless territories, before he tried to ride a horse. Facing pitfalls and dangers. From there, little by little, he must have imagined capturing them, subduing them, taming them. In time, he managed to evolve the image into reality. Now, can we imagine what might have been the energising power of the horse-riding experience in the history of human evolution? Man riding the horse must have felt omnipotent, grandiose. He multiplied his possibilities of knowledge. He looked down on everything from far above. He felt stronger than those who moved on foot. And it was all true. But feeling better than other men is a price man has always paid dearly in history. We talked about affective systems, and how can we not finally talk about the deep affective bond between man and horse, especially if the horse you care for is your mount? The very fact that the horse was an adjunct to Kurgan expansionist success must make us imagine care, attention, a deep affective bond between man and horse, all aimed at Kurgan ventures. The bond between man and horse was so strong that they used to bury the heads of their horses together with the warriors who died in battle [9,10]. The horse was not the cause of Kurgan success. If anything, the emerging Kurgan psychic functioning found in the horse a powerful tool for growth and development. This is the way J.W. Perry looks at history: already as a young man, following the ideas expressed by Jung in his essay On the Psychological Understanding of Psychological Processes, he had hoped to overcome the “causalreductive traps” in favour of a “synthetic-constructive point of view” to understand human, individual and collective phenomena [4]. I consider Perry’s perspective, through the lens of analytical psychology, the most sensitive and inspired to understand in a psycho-evolutionary key the meaning of the transition from the Great Goddess to Kurgan culture: “As new social problems arose at the time of the Urban Revolution, mythical characters underwent radical modifications in response to the need to represent change and encourage new cultural activities. The trend toward patriarchy gave male deities unprecedented prominence, emphasising the aggressive dynamism that energised new trade, warrior activities, and the process of empire-building. The ancient gods of the seasons, once so munificent, now underwent a similar process of metamorphosis and became god-kings and god-warriors equipped with the deadly weapon of lightning, ready to strike [4].” It seems evident to me, in Perry’s approach, an attempt to look at human phenomena from a process-evolutionary perspective, outside of any emotionally based value judgments. On the relationship between cultures devoted to the Great Goddess and the emerging patriarchal manifestation, Perry states “we know that he was the same god of the seasons in the past since, paradoxically, he was still the groom of the ancient earth goddess impersonated by the sacred kings in the annual festivals of renewal [4].” According to Perry, therefore, we would not be off the mark in the assumptions of these pages: not yet a godfather, but a god-spouse. Finally, the Kurgan and death. The Kurgan and spirituality. Here is the last aspect on which. I think it is appropriate to dwell, before proceeding further into the story. According to the hypotheses expressed in these pages, the image of the Kurgan warrior carries within the mythical characteristics of the latter figure of the god-king - who will find his highest expression in Mesopotamia some millennia later, embodied in sacred kingship, - but also the son-hero features which evolved into spouse-hero, whose psycho-mythical characteristic is that of fighting in order to accomplish a feat. In this setting, it is not easy to imagine whether Kurgan mothers wished glory for their sons who left for expansionistic ventures or, on the contrary, if they mourned their worship of war and death in battle.

According to Rudolf Otto, numinous is that experience which takes place within a sacral framework correlated with deep emotional upheaval (1917). Otto considers the numinous experience to be divided into five moments. After the first moment, in which the being becomes aware of being within a numinous dimension, comes the second, that of the mysterium tremendum. The tremendum is nothing but the anguished and panic-stricken feeling that human beings experience under certain circumstances. It can take on unsettling and strongly impressive connotations in the psyche when experienced in a strongly suggestive existential dimension. Let us dwell on this second point. I believe that the tremendum electrocuted the Kurgan and that, in response to a very strong collective experience - most likely of anxiety and helplessness - the myth of courage and the experience of defying death in a heroic endeavour was born. It may as well have been an experience of emancipation from the Great Goddess, an experience to be understood in a processual sense and therefore necessary, or it may have been something that had to do with an attempt to see the experience of death differently, not to suffer it but to face it with courage. Campbell and Gimbutas insist that the Kurgan had a very strong cult of the warrior’s burial ritual and life beyond death. However, they convey an idea of it with strong negative connotations. Instead, it is possible that the Kurgan were the first to imagine the possibility of perpetual life after death, a place where they could live in eternal glory. A dimension beyond nature’s endless cycles of death and regeneration to which Eliade gave a clear chthonic meaning (1949). The violent Kurgan feats must have generated great pleasures when successful. In Kurgan culture we seem to be able to find the precursors of solar cults just as much as the pursuit of the sacral sensual experiences that would later lead to the Dionysian. Whether it was the warrior or the hero, the Kurgan identified with a strongly numinous male principle that from the heart of Europe led them to expand in all directions. Gimbutas and Campbell point out how the influences of Kurgan incursions in the last millennia before Christ significantly affected Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Greece, Italy, the Middle East, and further south all the way up to Egypt. Therefore, Kurgan culture, which seems to have expanded whilst maintaining the aspects of nomadism and predation, appears to have played a role also in the Mediterranean area. As Gimbutas hypothesised, it is likely that the Kurgan culture arrived in the South and that it also sailed the waters of the Mediterranean Sea. Once again, it is Gimbutas to hypothesise that groups of Kurgan crossed the Adriatic Sea towards Italy. This appears as a relevant aspect also because it defines the Kurgan as an expansionistic population on all levels, even the sea. If we consider that a recent research study published in Sciences Advances (2021) highlighted the genetic lineage of the Etruscans from a Euro-Asian group of the Bronze Age, it is equally possible to affirm that Kurgan played a role in the origins of Etruscan society, too. And perhaps, at this point, nuraghe too – the typical Sardinian circular stone edifices from the Bronze Age as well, whose origins are completely unknown still up to datemight be another confirmation of the Kurgan expansion in the area of the Mediterranean. Gimbutas herself has hypothesised some late Kurgan invasions in many areas of the Mediterranean, seeing in the late Pontic Kurgan invasions those “populations of the sea that invaded and inhabited the islands of the Eastern Mediterranean (Sicily, Crete, Cyprus) and the coasts (Puglia, Greece, Western Yugoslavia, Western Anatolia, Palestine, Egypt)[9]”. Let us now focus on the religious aspect. According to Marija Gimbutas, the greatest Kurgan deity would be the god of thunder and storm. If we think about the characteristics of the thunder god, it is not hard to understand why Kurgans have projected their spiritual identity on this figure: male identity, explosiveness, turmoil, attitude towards war and fighting. The thunder god was also the god of the dead, and as such he was the protector and the carrier of war casualties towards the afterlife.

However, as we shall see, the thunder god did not have a long life in his evolution towards the South. Perry points out that the main trait of Mesopotamian and Assyrian cultures was that they had a monarch identified with the thunder god. For the first time in history, a male human being identifies himself with a great god. A dazzling experience. Pure omnipotence in the hands of a single man at the top of a people’s history. The result was a disaster. The only possible outcome for any form of maximum identification of man with divinity. Let us use the words of J.W. Perry to get a clear picture of what the ruling of the storm god was, around three thousand BCE: “The main mythical figure expressing the psychology of royal character was the god-king, the divine counterpart, in the community of gods, of the earthly monarch. In the ancient Middle East, from which our Western traditions derive, this royal deity was represented by the warrior god of the storm, who possessed the most important qualities of the ego: thirst for dominance, lust for prestige, assertiveness and aggression as a stimulus to combat, ambition to extend dominance and build empires, ability to procure and accumulate wealth, and flair for technical innovations that would produce the Bronze Age. With the democratisation of royal prerogatives, the uncontrolled exercise of these characteristics initiated a ruthless process of aggression and unleashed an immense destructive force; this not only brought devastation to the aggrieved peoples but also cracked their social structures. This uncontrolled expansion resulted in decadence in Egypt and feudalism in China. The kingdoms of Mesopotamia fought each other continuously with ups and downs until Assyria bled into infighting. Crises and rapid cultural changes originated from this situation (1987, p.228).” Noticeably, the condition of omnipotence that the man of the time experienced was not yet supported by egoic instances capable of carrying that kind of inner condition; that feeling of superhuman strength that was a characteristic as much of the condition of divinity possession as of psychotic activation. Kurgan culture found its highest purest expression in the Mesopotamian royal manifestations of the last millennia BCE, and it went no further. Kurgan spirituality stopped before the conception of a godfather. It stopped being a god-warrior and identified with it in the first person. It was certainly patrilineal and patrifocal, but I do not think we can say that it conceived a godfather. In contrast, another fate befell Middle Eastern and Western contaminations. In Greece the contamination between the archetypes of the Father and the mother generated Olympian polytheism. Jung himself states this: “in Greek mythology the matriarchal and patriarchal are still mixed in equal proportions [17].” The same polytheistic dimension occurred in Egypt, but I believe that, ultimately, the greatest contribution of the Kurgan to Indo-European culture is related to collective militarisation. The image of the warrior-hero riding swift steeds most likely arose within Kurgan culture. The image of the godfather will manifest itself to man in the last millennium BCE, within the nomadic Semitic culture, and it will be the psychic “distance” between God and the human being that will ensure the development and durability of that relationship. These are Campbell’s words on the origins of the Semitic tribes, “The Akkadians and other Semitic tribes began to press into Mesopotamian territory from the South. Around 3500 calBCE, the cultivating peoples found themselves caught between two extraordinary forcesthe Semites from the desert, and the Indo-Europeans from the North. The Semites were mainly sheep and goat farmers, and over the years they became stronger and stronger. Sargon and Hammurabi gave the Semitic sphere an increasingly masculine emphasis, and the Hebrew people became the extreme point of rejection of the Goddess (2013, p.115).” The early Semites thus came from the South. They were nomadic herders but did not use horses, since this appears as a determining fact in light of the considerations of these pages. Can these few data lead us to suppose that, in origin, the Semites may not have had contact with the warrior peoples of the North? That they might have had different origins. Campbell writes further: “We now know that the Indo-Europeans arrived as marauding warriors and, in each region, threw off the preexisting civilisation. Later they absorbed its influence and from this synthesis the Golden Age of Greece was produced. The earliest civilisations belonged to the Goddess, the later ones to the gods. There is a perfect parallel with Southwest Asia, where Semites arrived in Mesopotamia, Egypt and so on, having brutal nomadic guerrilla warfare as their main interest.”

Several aspects of Campbell’s reconstruction deserve further investigation. For example: were early Semites, those who came from the South, already capable of building and using weapons as was the case in the Black Sea area? How violent and incursive could their nomadism have been in the absence of horse riding? And then, again, on the Hebrew origin myth: how is it possible that their origin myth, in fact, had no foundational female divine elements? The hypothesis that the reconstructions made have led me to make is that the Semites might have come from the West, much further west. That they might have descended from those peoples who, more than 20,000 years earlier, had lived between Spain and France, that they had already changed their attitude toward female deities long before then and that, facing the sea, they might have crossed it to North Africa and from there might have encountered other people’s moving eastward. A key difference between matriarchy and the patriarchy of origins may lie precisely in this. A culture devoted more to settledness: the former more devoted to research, and the latter displacement. It may have been the drive for knowledge and discovery of new territories that produced at the archetypal level a movement from the feminine to the masculine. The big problem with historical reconstructions is that we often wonder about broad time brackets for which we do not have precise references. The time period between the early Semitic tribes and the reign of Hammurabi, the king of Semitic origins who took power in Babylon, lasted a few millennia. It is not possible at the moment to have a clear picture, but we can still make some guesses. I do not think Jewish mythical origins can all fit within Campbell’s words. After millennia spent immersed in nature, fearing the elements and shunning evil spirits, man gradually gains self-confidence, internalises the god, places it at the foundation of his life, and strives to live fearlessly toward greater knowledge, of himself and the world. A momentous change. It is probably because of this attitude of deep trust that Jews have.

survived all adversities, always managing to have influence in every context in which they have lived. If we try to take a look at things from a contemporary clinical perspective, visionary experiences resemble acute psychosis, even when experienced on the collective level [4]. But this cannot be the key to looking at mystical and mythopoetic experiences. The neuroscientific hypotheses that place mystical-religious experiences, the psychotic delusional condition, and the activation of the Seeking System that we have discussed in the previous pages (Panksepp, 2012) in a close relationship of continuity, should be revised in light of a different scientific-evolutionary paradigm. And then, as it has already been pointed out, in moments of great change in history, what we would call today by the name of collective madness always plays a key role: the key role of charismatic leaders has always been to grasp what the masses yearn for, for better or worse [18,4]. That of the Old Testament first, and the New Testament later, is an unprecedented psycho-evolutionary operation, a lesson in resilience, in inner strength aimed at overcoming any adversity. And finally, about the Hebrews kingdoms of the origins, it has also been written that “The not a few scenes of bloodshed which it” – the sacred history, my addition - “relates, are a bearer of those times, crude and fierce; the histories of the other Oriental peoples are even more full of them, among whom the Hebrews were rather distinguished by a greater sense of humanity; the kings of Israel enjoyed a universal reputation for clemency (1st Kings, 20, 31). The relative meekness of the Hebrews derived from the legislation given to them by God through Moses (The Holy Bible, p.35).” The principle of order, of law, is one of the major contributions of patriarchal religions to human culture. Semitic culture undeniably played a key role in all of this. Let us go back for a moment to Hammurabi, whose code laid down precise rules for communal living. The laws must have been the result of the needs of the time. Most likely, Babylonian society of the second millennium BCE had reached such a level of complexity that strict laws and their observance were necessary in order to maintain social order. Of course, it would be easy from our vantage point to argue that the law of retaliation, a practice upheld by the code, was a barbaric custom. But can we for a moment imagine the historical atmosphere in which people lived at that time? Is it possible to imagine convincing men of that era armed only with good intentions and a lot of willpower? The code then guaranteed state protection for all indigents. This means as much that the state was rich as that, before that time, orphans, poor and dispossessed of all sorts, were abandoned to their own destinies. Like legalized violence to suppress other forms of cruelty. Hammurabi entrusts the tables to the God.

Samas, God of the sun and justice. The conception of the State, at its origins, is strongly related to religion. Religious and temporal power together. The dominant principle is that of the illumination of the spirit, the clarity of the vision of things. This is the ascending path of the solar deities. Nations, as we know them, all descend from a religious principle that brought together the affective bond with the female homeland and the juridical principle of the male-patriarchal social order. As we know, Semitic culture will grow and prosper through the Jewish religion. Later, it will evolve into Christianity, and the latter, through the Roman Empire, will gradually spread throughout Europe, eastward, southward and finally colonise the Americas. I hope that, at this point and in light of the principles expressed, my idea of Christianity as an evolution of Judaism will be tolerated. As Bachofen had clearly stated, the Roman Empire was the first true patriarchal culture, based on a strongly structured and militarily organised religiouslegal principle (1861). Let us not forget that Gimbutas speak of influences of Kurgan culture among the Etruscan people. It is highly probable that, through the Etruscans, the Kurgan influenced the origins of Rome. The early Roman patriarchal principle, chauvinist and bloody, found in the divine feminine of Greek origin the balancing element that determined its success and durability. Later, it espoused the Christian religion. Unpredictably, Rome disappeared, and Christianity became the dominant religion in the nascent Europe of nations. The development of European culture, subsequent to the domains of the Roman world, is not the subject of these pages. What has been proposed so far may seem like an excessive summary. But on the whole, I think it is sustainable.

On contemporaneity

Man and woman are compelled, by nature, by the masculine within them to abandon the original relationship and seek the way to the ego and consciousness; by the feminine they are then compelled to renounce even this position and tend toward a totality that embraces masculine and feminine together. [2] In contemporary Europe, the Archetypal Maternal and Paternal principles, which have always been influential in the lives lived by both men and women, seem to have undergone a process of transformation in recent decades that has profoundly changed their connotations. After rather static millennia, we have rapidly found ourselves observing profoundly new phenomena. On the one hand, fathers who change diapers and manage to be emotional reference points for their children; on the other hand, women who manage to express themselves better than men in many contexts, from work environments to international politics. But as Recalcati (2017) has argued, it seems the archetype of the father is the one most in crisis in this age of ours, perhaps due to the fact that it is losing long-held privileges and finding difficulties in its renewal process. At this point we should call in Jung’s concepts of Anima and Animus, the contrasexual parts of the psyche; but exposure limitations prevent us from doing so. However, we can mention that, as Perry reminds us, processes of social transformation are never simple or peaceful. We might, for example, consider the frequent incidents of homicidal violence by men against women as an important symptom of the complexity of the historical moment and social transformation we are experiencing, beyond a simplistic reduction to violence acted and suffered. Once again, pervasive feelings of insecurity and omnipotence together seem to lurk in the human being’s unconscious in the same psychic interactive field. When unacknowledged and integrated, the destructive potential of certain deep emotional states can be unleashed in all its bloody glory. But this, as we well know, is certainly not the only aspect of violent display in Europe today. According to Marjia Gimbutas, Kurgan warrior culture had its cradle north of the Black Sea. North of the Black Sea is the border territory between Ukraine and southwestern Russia. At this historical moment, this fact cannot leave us indifferent. It is precisely in Ukraine that the oldest tombs in the history of Europe were originally erected, intended to guard the warrior spirit of the leaders. To be even more precise, “the expression Kurgan Culture is the conventional name for nomadic tribes, dedicated to grazing and war, of Ukraine, of Southern Russia and of the Central Asian steppes [9]”. Once again, destructive violence keeping the balance not only of Europe but of the entire world was unleashed in that same region. At the XXII International Congress of IAAP held in Buenos Aires in August 2022, Olga Sorokina, a fellow Russian psychologist-analyst, with an interesting paper on the current collective psychic condition in Russia, argued that a profound collective movement, animated by a spirit of a feminine nature, would be taking place in Russia, aimed at balancing the action of the paternal archetype, which is extremely active and dominant in Russia, with a more affective and moderate principle. Olga adds that this process places Russia in an unconscious connection with many other social realities, where the feminine would be compensating for the strongly patriarchal tendency of the last two thousand years.

She dwells not only on the internal psychic issue but also addresses between the lines the issue of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine. Dwelling on the condition of Russian fighters, starting with some clinical examples, Sorokina highlights how currently the military spirit is supported by a condition of obedience to the political leadership of patriarchal stamp. It is very interesting what she writes about Lenin’s mausoleum on Red Square, the fatherhood symbol of the homeland: “An ample formulation of the recipe for immortality [19].” A mummified leader, a monumental funerary structure, the symbol of life beyond death. I believe that all this may represent a contemporary proof to the influences that ancient Kurgan culture has had in the historical evolution of Russia. Paradoxically, Kurgan origins concern Russians as much as Ukrainians. Indeed, in Ukraine, as we know well, a deep warrior spirit seems to have been awakened in the last decade. And in some ways, between a soldier and a warrior, the latter identified with the heroic act of preserving the homeland, I think there are fundamental differences: in oneon-one, warrior-hero versus soldier, the aspect of motivation to fight, of deep ideals, has always played a key role in history as much as in mythology, and this seems to be happening in this devastating international affair as well. We have already discussed how the thunder god bled into Mesopotamian and Assyrian degenerations, but it also expanded north. In a famous essay from 1936 titled Wotan, Jung dwells on the rise of National Socialism in Germany and he discusses some very interesting things about it. Unlike the common view according to which Nazi Germany fell into the hands of a madman, Jung affirms that an ancient Germanic deity of the Nordic tradition, Wotan precisely, had been reawakened and involved many Germans possessed by the all-powerful seduction of superiority of other peoples. Wotan, Odin in Norse tradition, was “the god of the storm and frenzy, the unleashed of passions and the lust of battle [19]”. Odin is the god of war that rides into battles. His son is Thor, the god of lightning and storm in Norse tradition, who fights wielding his mighty hammer. Let us not forget that the hammer was one of the oldest Kurgan fighting weapons, before the revolution that came with the use of metals [20-25]. At this point, the meeting points between the Kurgan thunder god and the major Norse deities appear in a rather evident relationship of mythical continuity. Once again, Jung highlights how “Wotan is a restless wanderer who creates unrest and stirs up strife, now here, now there, and works magic. He was soon changed by Christianity into the devil [18, 26-31]”. It really seems that, a few millennia later, the god of thunder is again imposing his presence and crying out for vengeance against those who have relegated him to the depths of the collective unconscious. In fact, the conflict between Russians and Ukrainians is taking place under the auspices of one Christian God. From a Christian perspective, we are witnessing a conflict between brothers, and this, once again, takes us back to the origins of our religious history. The myth, immediately after the expulsion from paradise, tells us of the first fraternal killing in the history of the world. But it is the law of the father that acts, and God said, “whoever kills Cain, vengeance will be taken on him seven times as much.” Perhaps, once again, it was necessary for all of this to happen. However, it would be a bad mistake not to recognize that, around the Russian-Ukrainian dispute, archetypal masculine forces of assertion and dominance are being concentrated from even far away in time and space, and that many are dangerously responding to the silent scream of the renewed storm god [32-38].

As mentioned in the introduction, in the 1950s, Teilhard De Chardin theorised a cosmic evolutionary principle that, from the inorganic to the organic, passing through the realization of an intelligent principle, the noosphere, would hold the secret of the purpose of the cosmos. That intelligent principle is us human beings, and the teleological purpose, despite De Chardin’s assumptions, is not yet clarified. On the same path, more recently, the physicist Paul Davies has come to the same conclusions in broad strokes: the universe seems to exist on the basis of a processual principle that would have a direction and would be aimed at a purpose. Perry’s work, in his The Heart of History, is nothing more than an analysis of such an evolutionary process; however, he dwells on a circumscribed historical period of the human species. With his work, Perry opened to the strand of psychic evolution within analytical psychology. As we did also in other circumstances, we took our cue from the American author and tried to amplify his thoughts. Marjia Gimbutas, in the preceding pages, has at times been criticised on method. She was especially challenged for the deterministic reductive view with which she looked at her findings. However, the archaeomythologist is to be credited with not only discovering the enormous historical importance of the Great Goddess period, with capturing a crucial historical moment in the transition from the end of Neolithic matriarchy to the dawn of patriarchy, but also with insight into the female psycho affective origins of our species. The work on the thunder god carried out by Perry took its cue from the atomic danger that was perceived in the world during the Cold War years. In those years, Perry wondered whether humanity would be able to recognise the new myth the moment it appeared. Today we find ourselves in the exact same situation. In the end, Perry was optimistic: “the history of myth leads us to conclude that the new consciousness is the result of the archetypal psyche assimilating the feminine principle and a receptive mode as it has happened other times in the past with extraordinary consequences on the great cultures [4].” We therefore remain hopeful in anticipation of the manifestation of the feminine spiritual principle, as has always happened in history. It is only a matter of time. And of consciousness. In the hope that collective consciousness can be activated before a deafening roar finally makes clear to all the return of the thunder god.

None.

No Conflict of interest.

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