MythBlast | Mysteries of the Feminine Divine
Six years ago I was literally elbow deep in the Joseph Campbell archives, retrieving dozens of audio cassette tapes on whose delicate ribbons were etched hours of Campbell talking about goddess myths. Between 1972 and 1986 he gave over twenty lectures and workshops on goddesses, and so it was from these tapes that Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine was born. We could say that this volume was incubating for decades, waiting for the right moment to emerge from the archives, and I had the privilege of being able to act as its midwife.
I taught at a women’s college for nearly four decades, and as I said to my students, all I can tell you about mythology is what men have said and have experienced, and now women have to tell us from their point of view what the possibilities of the feminine future are. And it is a future—it’s as though the lift-off has taken place, it really has, there’s no doubt about it. And it’s been one of my great pleasures teaching at Sarah Lawrence all these years instead of teaching a classroom of anonymities, to have had these person-to-person conferences with one woman after another. The sense of individuality that I got from that is something that makes all this general talk about women and men mean nothing to me at all. There is something that the world hasn’t really recognized yet in the female, something that we are waiting now to see. And so, with Goethe’s old line ‘the eternal feminine is what draws us on,’ (Faust II, having been drawn on for thirty, what is it now, eight years, I watch it to go on its own and go back into a sort of observant rather than teaching role, watching the marvel of this ascent into heaven of the Goddess.
Safron Rossi, Ph.D., has spent her life steeped in literature, religion and mythology, fields in which she holds her degrees. She is Core Faculty at Pacifica Graduate Institute in the Jungian and Archetypal Studies program. For many years she was Curator of the Joseph Campbell, James Hillman, and Marija Gimbutas manuscript collections at Opus Archives and Research Center. Safron edited Joseph Campbell’s Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine (2013) and co-edited Jung on Astrology (2017). She has published articles in Jungian, archetypal, and astrological journals, and she has lectured across the US and in Europe, South America, and Australia.
Safron is also a consulting archetypal astrologer. Her work in this area can be found at www.thearchetypaleye.com
