Introduction
The psychological matriarchate is the period in which the unconscious is dominant, in which consciousness has not yet gained independence…In this phase a man, not yet centered in ego-consciousness, lived like an infant in the unitary reality
– Erich Neumann
In my books Atlantis and Disciples of the Mysterium I consider the effects and after-effects of the so-called Age of Catastrophe. I show that what we experience today as ego-consciousness is the outcome of ancient trauma, and that no understanding of our modern world is possible until we seriously accept that every human being, from infancy on, suffers not only deep-set trauma but historical amnesia.
One of the effects of the trauma is dissociation. That is, we have collectively blocked out the memory of the universal terrestrial cataclysms that disaffected our ancestors about thirteen or so thousand years ago. Nevertheless, as I show in my work, despite our penchant for dissociation the trauma continues to cause subliminal anxiety which in turn impairs not only our relationship with ourselves, but our relationships with nature and the society in which we find ourselves. It leads to the cocktail of existential troubles that so many people experience on a day to day basis. Consequently, we will not be in a viable position to heal the surface anxiety or subsurface trauma until we reinvestigate how modern ego-consciousness began and what must be done in order to return to a psychically hygienic state.
In this book I again take up the all-important question of ancestral trauma in order to show how ancient cataclysm set off a chain of events that undergirds and conditions the mother-child relationship. The nature of this relationship is of course vitally important. Every child grows to adulthood bearing the emotional complexion determined by his or her mother in the days and weeks after conception. Since she, like all humans, bears within herself on an unconscious level the disturbance of bygone days, it goes without saying that her child will likewise inherit the traumatic condition. What is more, if she – during her own pre- and post-infancy periods or in utero – suffered emotional or physical abuse at the hands of her parents, it is unlikely that her offspring will grow up to be psychically whole beings. I believe that this is the situation that persists throughout the modern world. This problem beset our forebears who survived cataclysms but it persists and worsens as a problem today.
From what I’ve said it follows that healing can’t occur unless women become aware of this problem enough to do something constructive about it. This inevitably means an upgrading of self-knowledge and psychological insight. I speak of women’s responsibility because the average child doesn’t come under the direct psychological influence of their father until much later in its mental and emotional development, after the damage has already been done. Moreover, the father is himself a male whose consciousness is the outcome of his prenatal and postnatal relationship with his own mother. Therefore unless his mother was a composed self-loving person, and unless he is himself an exceptionally grounded insightful man, he will not be in a position to significantly reconfigure the fundamental structure of his child’s consciousness. And let us not doubt that this is his duty as a father. This is not to say that he has no effect at all. Of course he has. But the seeds of his child’s temperament were laid and undernourished long before his influence comes to bear. The child’s psychic orientation, character and perception of self and world are already formed. Exposure to and modification by a father’s interpretation of the external world can certainly help acculturate to a degree, but cannot hope to radically adjust a consciousness misshapen in natal and prenatal years by a mother with a malignant relationship toward herself and the world, a situation made worse by the effects of ancestral trauma operating at the root of her psyche.
In other words, if both parents are not aware of their innate trauma and anxiety, and the subsequent psychic dissociation at work, they will not be able to raise a psychosomatically healthy child. Consequently they are bound to raise the unhealthy child who goes on to have a malignant relationship with the world of people just as emotionally arrested as himself. Since trauma exists at the root of his being, boiling like lava, he is bound to regard nature as something threatening. He’ll do as his traumatized forebears did, and build walls - both psychic and physical - to keep nature out. After all, nature shook up the human race in the past, wiping out millions of species and sinking continents. The umbilical cord was cut and nature won’t be trusted again. Men don’t think this consciously. No, their antipathy to nature is unconscious. But it is deadly, since antipathy toward nature is ultimately antipathy toward oneself. And it is this deficient self-image that disturbs the fetus in the womb. Crucially the symptoms of this attitudinal malignancy is to be witnessed in the world around us. Each and every sociopolitical crisis is rooted in it, as is each and every interpersonal psychosomatic complex and syndrome. Essentially, the experience of pain and trauma occurs right from the off, from the moment of conception. We shy away from this fact and erroneously think it is only after birth that they become a reality. If only this were the case.
In this book I deal directly with the trauma problem, emphasizing the preconscious relationship between mother and child that so crucially determines characterological development and moral orientation.
To assist in this investigation of the pre-Oedipal phase of development, I introduce the reader to the work of the brilliant Jungian psychoanalyst Erich Neumann. His text The Child, walks us through the early stages of infant development, revealing just how dependent an infant’s consciousness is on that of its mother. This remarkable book was not published in Neumann’s own lifetime and is barely known today either to Jungians or the general public. This is a great shame, and it is therefore the secondary function of my book to reacquaint the world with the outstanding work of Erich Neumann on the fascinating process of child-development. This is not to say that I am in complete agreement with every assessment Neumann makes about either the embryonic period or later stages of development. My text therefore offers a penetrating critique of certain key ideas found throughout Neumann’s work, some of which were inherited from his mentor Carl Gustav Jung.
In later chapters I address what Jung called the “Shadow Archetype,” and describe what I believe constitutes Shadow Work. Although my ideas on this subject acknowledge aspects of what Jung himself taught, I prefer to describe the Shadow-Self in a manner more consistent with the teachings of Wilhelm Reich. This is because Reich, like Georg Groddeck before him, expertly deconstructed Freudian and Jungian conceptions of the psyche and its divisions – id, ego and superego. As far as Reich was concerned, the Shadow, as it is called, is nothing more or less than the human body and its autonomic processes. I ask you to be aware of the somewhat conflicting descriptions about the Shadow, given that I address the subject from both a hard Jungian and Reichean perspective.
As far as Freudian paradigms are concerned, you will find several revisions to Freud’s central ideas herein. This is partly because of my preference for the perspectives on child-development of Erich Neumann and Otto Rank. It is also because I do not wholeheartedly accept the Freudian explanation of how the image of the mother splits into opposing halves. How she becomes both a good mother and a bad mother at the same time, in the eyes of her child, is more involved than most Freudians and Jungians acknowledge, and is a process which occurs for deeper reasons than her competence as a breast feeder or toilet trainer after birth.
I present a more controversial theory to account for the cause of the dichotomy between the loving and terrible mother images that shape the consciousness of every infant. I also prefer Neumann’s theory about the origins of the superego or center of morality. The classic Freudian belief is that our moral sensibility is primarily shaped by the introjection of and identification with the father’s sense of what is right and wrong. However Freud underestimated the role of the mother in the formation of the moral center. Neumann does not make the same mistake. His work shows how both morality and immorality have their roots in pre-Oedipal situations which commence, in most cases, before the role of the father comes to bear. I also revise Freud’s ideas about the supposed father-son rivalry and on the emotionally incestuous relations that occur between mothers and sons.
Although Freud was the first thinker to address the question of childhood trauma, my alternative reading of his central ideas helps us to better explain the actual reasons for a child’s attachment to a particular parent, as well as for “penis envy,” autism, tantrums, sibling rivalry, hyperactivity, learning disorders, delinquency and homosexuality, etc. I devote Appendix Three to a more detailed assessment of Freud’s classic ideas.
In this book I have deliberately kept things simple and non-technical. It is important that every reader easily digests the subjects raised here so that radical change can occur in their lives. As we know there have been so many attempts at coming up with solutions to the world’s problems, but none deal with the legacy of ancestral trauma and its psychological ramifications. It was the great Immanuel Velikovsky who, in Mankind in Amnesia, had perceptive things to previously say on the subject. Since his time the subject has barely been mentioned in regards consciousness, and never in a meaningful context. If we do not understand the past, we are doomed to repeat all the error made in the past. In fact that is what we appear to be supremely good at. Little of the wisdom gleaned in humankind’s past is found being applied by the present generation. No, but we are neck-deep in humankind’s historical error and folly. It follows us like a perpetual shadow, with no amount of light banishing it. This book explains why this is and what can be done about it.
As said in previous works, we are in the early stages of healing from ancestral trauma. Historically speaking the Age of Catastrophe occurred a short time ago, so it is not surprising that we are still so emotionally immature. We have taken refuge behind the high thick walls of science and technology, and erected psychic barriers to boot. Indeed as psychologists admit, the ego is a mass of defenses. Fundamentally, when it comes to the genesis of trauma, one’s sex is largely immaterial. Sex is also relatively unimportant when we deal with pre-Oedipal phases of development. What is important is that both sexes suffer the effects of trauma in the deepest layers of their unconscious. If the foundations of the ego are shaky and weak, as they certainly are for most people, something must be done.
Despite the work of many great philosophers and psychologists, the human situation in existential terms is getting steadily worse. The average person not only victimizes themselves by way of regression and dissociation, but by immersing themselves in the Crowd, and the manifold distractions provided by a gadget-fixated world fast losing its humanity. By refusing to look within and examine ourselves, perceptively and dispassionately, we condemn ourselves to perpetual psychophobia or self-hate and self-sadism. We fail to renew our communion with nature in a holistic manner, treating nature instead as some kind of decoration to our urban incarceration or recreational theme park. We thereby lose the chance to bring ancient trauma to the present and deal with it proactively in deliberately chosen natural settings. Unlike initiated Shaman we don’t open communion with nature, or realize that in doing so we open a deeper communion with the Imperial Self.
If it turns out to be true, as I know it to be in most cases, that our relationship with our mothers was not sufficient to introduce us holistically to the archetypal wisdom of nature, then it is up to each person to do the work for themselves, despite the lateness of the hour. It is the purpose of this book to delineate the manner in which this is to be accomplished.
The return to nature is a return to the core of one’s being. But it is for the most part a deconstructive process, which means it is unfamiliar to most people in the world. We are not taught apophatically, and have no idea how to transcend the subject versus object opposition. Unlike our pre-traumatized forebears, we do not know what it means to be phenomenologically present. Indeed we normally act obliviously to the mediocrity of our daily lives. And although we are predisposed to think that psychological work is arduous and indistinct, we’ve immersed ourselves in a welter of Self-Help books and teachers, allowing other people to sell us superficial techniques to quickly lead to authenticity.
The plethora of works on self-development, mindfulness, yoga and exotic meditation indicate that dissatisfaction exists with what is normally experienced in life. Something more real is being sought by an increasing demographic. But again, none of these books and teachers, adept as they may be in certain areas, deal with the all-important question of ancestral trauma. Even the great works of philosophy and psychology do no justice to the subject. This is a critical oversight, since as I show in this book, personal trauma derives from parents who probably experienced trauma from their parents who were also traumatized by theirs. This vicious cycle of pain, grief, anger and defilement, has a very long etiology. This is why the problem of present personal trauma cannot be considered independently of ancient collective trauma.
Patterns of mothering are passed down from mother to daughter through the specific amount of care given and received. When the daughter of a monkey becomes a mother herself, the amount of contact she had with her mother precisely predicts the amount that she bestows on her own daughter – Oliver James
In general, the earlier a negative pattern of experience occurs in our childhood, be it sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, lack of adequate nutrition…parental divorce or separation, parental mental illness or parental financial misfortune, the greater the likelihood of it still affecting us in adulthood – ibid
In my opinion, the cycle of hand-me-down trauma and anxiety must be broken if any kind of progress is to occur existentially and socially. By addressing the question of trauma we deal with the roots and fortitude of the Imperial Self. Therefore shortcuts that merely remove the dust from the lens of the ego will not suffice to enhance our experience of life or set our offspring on the right course toward individuation. Nor will the comforting words of great minds ultimately get to the roots of the psychosomatic maladies that attended us as we are catapulted into the chaotic world made by others before us. The problems found throughout our world got there by way of psychically deranged people who avoided Self-work before we were born. A good many of these people persecuted and marginalized sane hygienic types who knew what was wrong with the psyche and the world. They then passed on leaving wayward descendants to clean up their messes. So much for our parents.
Okay, since this is our lot, let’s get on with the cleanup job. To do so we must start from scratch. We must investigate the roots of consciousness and understand that terrestrial trauma had the most devastating effect upon it. Unless we are able to bring that trauma into the light and deal with it holistically, we will never succeed in setting things aright. It is this rot that must be uncovered and healed. The starting place is not earth’s history, but our own, beginning with our relationship with our mothers. If she was a Self-aware, Self-loving individual, we have nothing to worry about. If she was, however, a terrible mother – lost to herself and infected with self-hate, father-hate, mother-hate, world-hate and/or nature-hate, we have everything to worry about.
Deciding to radically change this situation is a virtuous act. However the process of healing begins not with others or with the world. It begins with ourselves and the children we raise and teach. This is the manner in which ancient and modern – mythic and the stereotypical – worlds interrelate. We are each eternal mothers and fathers bearing scars of the past but also the means of healing them. We are free to make bad situations better or good situations worse. It is not a cliché to say, therefore, that the future of humanity lies in our hands.
– Erich Neumann
In my books Atlantis and Disciples of the Mysterium I consider the effects and after-effects of the so-called Age of Catastrophe. I show that what we experience today as ego-consciousness is the outcome of ancient trauma, and that no understanding of our modern world is possible until we seriously accept that every human being, from infancy on, suffers not only deep-set trauma but historical amnesia.
One of the effects of the trauma is dissociation. That is, we have collectively blocked out the memory of the universal terrestrial cataclysms that disaffected our ancestors about thirteen or so thousand years ago. Nevertheless, as I show in my work, despite our penchant for dissociation the trauma continues to cause subliminal anxiety which in turn impairs not only our relationship with ourselves, but our relationships with nature and the society in which we find ourselves. It leads to the cocktail of existential troubles that so many people experience on a day to day basis. Consequently, we will not be in a viable position to heal the surface anxiety or subsurface trauma until we reinvestigate how modern ego-consciousness began and what must be done in order to return to a psychically hygienic state.
In this book I again take up the all-important question of ancestral trauma in order to show how ancient cataclysm set off a chain of events that undergirds and conditions the mother-child relationship. The nature of this relationship is of course vitally important. Every child grows to adulthood bearing the emotional complexion determined by his or her mother in the days and weeks after conception. Since she, like all humans, bears within herself on an unconscious level the disturbance of bygone days, it goes without saying that her child will likewise inherit the traumatic condition. What is more, if she – during her own pre- and post-infancy periods or in utero – suffered emotional or physical abuse at the hands of her parents, it is unlikely that her offspring will grow up to be psychically whole beings. I believe that this is the situation that persists throughout the modern world. This problem beset our forebears who survived cataclysms but it persists and worsens as a problem today.
From what I’ve said it follows that healing can’t occur unless women become aware of this problem enough to do something constructive about it. This inevitably means an upgrading of self-knowledge and psychological insight. I speak of women’s responsibility because the average child doesn’t come under the direct psychological influence of their father until much later in its mental and emotional development, after the damage has already been done. Moreover, the father is himself a male whose consciousness is the outcome of his prenatal and postnatal relationship with his own mother. Therefore unless his mother was a composed self-loving person, and unless he is himself an exceptionally grounded insightful man, he will not be in a position to significantly reconfigure the fundamental structure of his child’s consciousness. And let us not doubt that this is his duty as a father. This is not to say that he has no effect at all. Of course he has. But the seeds of his child’s temperament were laid and undernourished long before his influence comes to bear. The child’s psychic orientation, character and perception of self and world are already formed. Exposure to and modification by a father’s interpretation of the external world can certainly help acculturate to a degree, but cannot hope to radically adjust a consciousness misshapen in natal and prenatal years by a mother with a malignant relationship toward herself and the world, a situation made worse by the effects of ancestral trauma operating at the root of her psyche.
In other words, if both parents are not aware of their innate trauma and anxiety, and the subsequent psychic dissociation at work, they will not be able to raise a psychosomatically healthy child. Consequently they are bound to raise the unhealthy child who goes on to have a malignant relationship with the world of people just as emotionally arrested as himself. Since trauma exists at the root of his being, boiling like lava, he is bound to regard nature as something threatening. He’ll do as his traumatized forebears did, and build walls - both psychic and physical - to keep nature out. After all, nature shook up the human race in the past, wiping out millions of species and sinking continents. The umbilical cord was cut and nature won’t be trusted again. Men don’t think this consciously. No, their antipathy to nature is unconscious. But it is deadly, since antipathy toward nature is ultimately antipathy toward oneself. And it is this deficient self-image that disturbs the fetus in the womb. Crucially the symptoms of this attitudinal malignancy is to be witnessed in the world around us. Each and every sociopolitical crisis is rooted in it, as is each and every interpersonal psychosomatic complex and syndrome. Essentially, the experience of pain and trauma occurs right from the off, from the moment of conception. We shy away from this fact and erroneously think it is only after birth that they become a reality. If only this were the case.
In this book I deal directly with the trauma problem, emphasizing the preconscious relationship between mother and child that so crucially determines characterological development and moral orientation.
To assist in this investigation of the pre-Oedipal phase of development, I introduce the reader to the work of the brilliant Jungian psychoanalyst Erich Neumann. His text The Child, walks us through the early stages of infant development, revealing just how dependent an infant’s consciousness is on that of its mother. This remarkable book was not published in Neumann’s own lifetime and is barely known today either to Jungians or the general public. This is a great shame, and it is therefore the secondary function of my book to reacquaint the world with the outstanding work of Erich Neumann on the fascinating process of child-development. This is not to say that I am in complete agreement with every assessment Neumann makes about either the embryonic period or later stages of development. My text therefore offers a penetrating critique of certain key ideas found throughout Neumann’s work, some of which were inherited from his mentor Carl Gustav Jung.
In later chapters I address what Jung called the “Shadow Archetype,” and describe what I believe constitutes Shadow Work. Although my ideas on this subject acknowledge aspects of what Jung himself taught, I prefer to describe the Shadow-Self in a manner more consistent with the teachings of Wilhelm Reich. This is because Reich, like Georg Groddeck before him, expertly deconstructed Freudian and Jungian conceptions of the psyche and its divisions – id, ego and superego. As far as Reich was concerned, the Shadow, as it is called, is nothing more or less than the human body and its autonomic processes. I ask you to be aware of the somewhat conflicting descriptions about the Shadow, given that I address the subject from both a hard Jungian and Reichean perspective.
As far as Freudian paradigms are concerned, you will find several revisions to Freud’s central ideas herein. This is partly because of my preference for the perspectives on child-development of Erich Neumann and Otto Rank. It is also because I do not wholeheartedly accept the Freudian explanation of how the image of the mother splits into opposing halves. How she becomes both a good mother and a bad mother at the same time, in the eyes of her child, is more involved than most Freudians and Jungians acknowledge, and is a process which occurs for deeper reasons than her competence as a breast feeder or toilet trainer after birth.
I present a more controversial theory to account for the cause of the dichotomy between the loving and terrible mother images that shape the consciousness of every infant. I also prefer Neumann’s theory about the origins of the superego or center of morality. The classic Freudian belief is that our moral sensibility is primarily shaped by the introjection of and identification with the father’s sense of what is right and wrong. However Freud underestimated the role of the mother in the formation of the moral center. Neumann does not make the same mistake. His work shows how both morality and immorality have their roots in pre-Oedipal situations which commence, in most cases, before the role of the father comes to bear. I also revise Freud’s ideas about the supposed father-son rivalry and on the emotionally incestuous relations that occur between mothers and sons.
Although Freud was the first thinker to address the question of childhood trauma, my alternative reading of his central ideas helps us to better explain the actual reasons for a child’s attachment to a particular parent, as well as for “penis envy,” autism, tantrums, sibling rivalry, hyperactivity, learning disorders, delinquency and homosexuality, etc. I devote Appendix Three to a more detailed assessment of Freud’s classic ideas.
In this book I have deliberately kept things simple and non-technical. It is important that every reader easily digests the subjects raised here so that radical change can occur in their lives. As we know there have been so many attempts at coming up with solutions to the world’s problems, but none deal with the legacy of ancestral trauma and its psychological ramifications. It was the great Immanuel Velikovsky who, in Mankind in Amnesia, had perceptive things to previously say on the subject. Since his time the subject has barely been mentioned in regards consciousness, and never in a meaningful context. If we do not understand the past, we are doomed to repeat all the error made in the past. In fact that is what we appear to be supremely good at. Little of the wisdom gleaned in humankind’s past is found being applied by the present generation. No, but we are neck-deep in humankind’s historical error and folly. It follows us like a perpetual shadow, with no amount of light banishing it. This book explains why this is and what can be done about it.
As said in previous works, we are in the early stages of healing from ancestral trauma. Historically speaking the Age of Catastrophe occurred a short time ago, so it is not surprising that we are still so emotionally immature. We have taken refuge behind the high thick walls of science and technology, and erected psychic barriers to boot. Indeed as psychologists admit, the ego is a mass of defenses. Fundamentally, when it comes to the genesis of trauma, one’s sex is largely immaterial. Sex is also relatively unimportant when we deal with pre-Oedipal phases of development. What is important is that both sexes suffer the effects of trauma in the deepest layers of their unconscious. If the foundations of the ego are shaky and weak, as they certainly are for most people, something must be done.
Despite the work of many great philosophers and psychologists, the human situation in existential terms is getting steadily worse. The average person not only victimizes themselves by way of regression and dissociation, but by immersing themselves in the Crowd, and the manifold distractions provided by a gadget-fixated world fast losing its humanity. By refusing to look within and examine ourselves, perceptively and dispassionately, we condemn ourselves to perpetual psychophobia or self-hate and self-sadism. We fail to renew our communion with nature in a holistic manner, treating nature instead as some kind of decoration to our urban incarceration or recreational theme park. We thereby lose the chance to bring ancient trauma to the present and deal with it proactively in deliberately chosen natural settings. Unlike initiated Shaman we don’t open communion with nature, or realize that in doing so we open a deeper communion with the Imperial Self.
If it turns out to be true, as I know it to be in most cases, that our relationship with our mothers was not sufficient to introduce us holistically to the archetypal wisdom of nature, then it is up to each person to do the work for themselves, despite the lateness of the hour. It is the purpose of this book to delineate the manner in which this is to be accomplished.
The return to nature is a return to the core of one’s being. But it is for the most part a deconstructive process, which means it is unfamiliar to most people in the world. We are not taught apophatically, and have no idea how to transcend the subject versus object opposition. Unlike our pre-traumatized forebears, we do not know what it means to be phenomenologically present. Indeed we normally act obliviously to the mediocrity of our daily lives. And although we are predisposed to think that psychological work is arduous and indistinct, we’ve immersed ourselves in a welter of Self-Help books and teachers, allowing other people to sell us superficial techniques to quickly lead to authenticity.
The plethora of works on self-development, mindfulness, yoga and exotic meditation indicate that dissatisfaction exists with what is normally experienced in life. Something more real is being sought by an increasing demographic. But again, none of these books and teachers, adept as they may be in certain areas, deal with the all-important question of ancestral trauma. Even the great works of philosophy and psychology do no justice to the subject. This is a critical oversight, since as I show in this book, personal trauma derives from parents who probably experienced trauma from their parents who were also traumatized by theirs. This vicious cycle of pain, grief, anger and defilement, has a very long etiology. This is why the problem of present personal trauma cannot be considered independently of ancient collective trauma.
Patterns of mothering are passed down from mother to daughter through the specific amount of care given and received. When the daughter of a monkey becomes a mother herself, the amount of contact she had with her mother precisely predicts the amount that she bestows on her own daughter – Oliver James
In general, the earlier a negative pattern of experience occurs in our childhood, be it sexual abuse, physical abuse, neglect, lack of adequate nutrition…parental divorce or separation, parental mental illness or parental financial misfortune, the greater the likelihood of it still affecting us in adulthood – ibid
In my opinion, the cycle of hand-me-down trauma and anxiety must be broken if any kind of progress is to occur existentially and socially. By addressing the question of trauma we deal with the roots and fortitude of the Imperial Self. Therefore shortcuts that merely remove the dust from the lens of the ego will not suffice to enhance our experience of life or set our offspring on the right course toward individuation. Nor will the comforting words of great minds ultimately get to the roots of the psychosomatic maladies that attended us as we are catapulted into the chaotic world made by others before us. The problems found throughout our world got there by way of psychically deranged people who avoided Self-work before we were born. A good many of these people persecuted and marginalized sane hygienic types who knew what was wrong with the psyche and the world. They then passed on leaving wayward descendants to clean up their messes. So much for our parents.
Okay, since this is our lot, let’s get on with the cleanup job. To do so we must start from scratch. We must investigate the roots of consciousness and understand that terrestrial trauma had the most devastating effect upon it. Unless we are able to bring that trauma into the light and deal with it holistically, we will never succeed in setting things aright. It is this rot that must be uncovered and healed. The starting place is not earth’s history, but our own, beginning with our relationship with our mothers. If she was a Self-aware, Self-loving individual, we have nothing to worry about. If she was, however, a terrible mother – lost to herself and infected with self-hate, father-hate, mother-hate, world-hate and/or nature-hate, we have everything to worry about.
Deciding to radically change this situation is a virtuous act. However the process of healing begins not with others or with the world. It begins with ourselves and the children we raise and teach. This is the manner in which ancient and modern – mythic and the stereotypical – worlds interrelate. We are each eternal mothers and fathers bearing scars of the past but also the means of healing them. We are free to make bad situations better or good situations worse. It is not a cliché to say, therefore, that the future of humanity lies in our hands.
