As Joseph Campbell observed, myths are society's dreams. They provide a greater context for our personal dramas, rites of passage for young people becoming members of their tribe or community, and guidance through life events based on the collective experience of those who have gone before us. While modern society promotes faster and more widespread communication, technology, and information, the study of mythology has been lost in the shuffle. It has been regarded as irrelevant and at best, academic. "One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit," Joseph Campbell states in The Power of Myth. We are forced, then, to come up with coping mechanisms to our personal and social crises on our own.

In all fairness to those of us that rejected our parents' conventions and rituals (they were rendered incomprehensible to us by the scientific/ industrial/ atomic age) we must nonetheless admit that living without a functional mythos has added to the chaos of the modern world. We may have rightly judged our belief system to be faulty and then concluded, therefore, that any mythos was irrelevant and unnecessary. Whether we realize it or not, however, we have been socialized to serve a system that is based on a rigid set of beliefs and expectations. Take, for example, our beliefs regarding love. The desire to love and be loved is a basic human drive. Recent findings in holistic and mind-body medicine point to the value of care giving. People who actively love their family, or even puppies, heal faster. Although giving love appears to be human nature, under the dominator social structure, we have instead been conditioned to grasp after getting love. This compels us to chase an elusive security based on finding a mate, and lassoing him or her into a "wed-lock". Rooted in our idealized notions of sexuality, the glorification of youth and sexual gratification are what power our consumerism. We believe in romantic love; our pop music, movies, and Gothic romance novels assure us that falling in love with the right partner will neatly tie up all the loose ends of our lives (like Prince Charming and Sleeping Beauty living "happily ever after"). By middle age most of us have crashed and burned from the high flying of such beliefs.

The archaic ethic of dutiful love and marriage does not pan out, either. The strong, emotionless man dominating the weaker, self-sacrificing woman cheats the sensibilities of both man and woman. We may not intellectually accept the dogma of sex-as-sinful, yet we can recognize we are influenced by it. We chafe under the weight of androcratic (male-dominated) society and wonder what the ancient goddess cultures must have been like, when "feminine" concerns of children, love, agriculture, healing, and making a safe home predominated.

Harkening back to ancient Greek and Roman mythology for orientation in love brings us to the story of Venus and her lover Mars. Bruce Thornton, in his book, Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality, describes how the power of love brought the pleasures of sex as well as the curses of Eros-induced insanity, violence, disease, and chaos. The vanity of Aphrodite (Venus) and Helen of Troy resulted, we are told, in the carnage of the Trojan War. Back then, Cupid was not a cute, pudgy cherub but a mischievous young man shooting real and painful arrows. We still hear the old refrain, "Love hurts." Of course, human relations became more torturesome under the dominator arrangement of the first millennium BCE. Our history books hail ancient Greece as the cradle of democracy, winking at the fact that Athens was a slave state. In addition to the lower rungs of society laboring as slaves and servants, even upper-class women were confined to the husband's or father's house, could rarely own property, and could not vote. Female children could be sold into slavery by the head of the household, the father. Zeus, the Greek archetype of the Father, beat his wives, abducted his lovers, and raped the "objects" of his desire. It is noteworthy that under such a system Aphrodite upheld a measure of dignity in her relationships. As the Greek pantheon developed, the gods gained more jurisdiction over the ever more disempowered goddesses. With the diminution of the Mother archetype, Aphrodite, as well as Athena, were said to be born without mothers. The Olympian deities, who were believed to be "real", were the role models for the society at large.

In the way that Aphrodite (Greek) became a more subdued Venus (Roman), and Ares (Greek) gained more universal appeal as Mars (Roman), a vibrant, pertinent mythos does evolve. The title of one of Campbell's books makes this point: The Transformation of Myth through Time. In Venus and Her Lover, Mars is no longer leading others onto the battlefield but now allows his warrior nature to fight the greatest battle of all: the struggle for the triumph of the true self. He willingly faces his ego and re-integrates his masculine and feminine aspects through determination and unconditional love. Venus is no longer so self-absorbed that her jealousy, anger, cruelty, and vanity dictate her actions. Her mastery of sensual love now broadens into spiritual love. It is beyond the distinction drawn by Renaissance artists of the two kinds of love: amore vulgare, Earthly love experienced by the senses that tempts one into debauchery; and amore celeste, the noble, spiritual love that leads one to Heaven. Michelangelo portrayed the former as Cupid and the latter as Venus in the painting "Venus and Cupid". He and other Renaissance painters and poets molded ancient mythological themes according to Church dogma, which further divorced the sublime experience of love from the body. The new Venus reintegrates them. She is sensual. She has no need to demurely cover her nakedness, as in the universally-recognized "Birth of Venus" by Botticelli. Her love of beauty pervades her dealings with Mars and all others. Naturally, Mars and Venus now meet in tantric relationship. Their love is honest, evolutionary, and at once physically pleasurable and spiritually transcendental.

Venus and Mars as tantricas makes the connection to another great mythological tradition - that of ancient India. Tantra, "the seventh yoga", offers an approach to sexuality that is coming to the fore in our time because it responds to the romantic questions and spiritual emptiness so many of us have in our love lives. With the ultimate goal of attaining enlightenment, the practices of tantra and kundalini yoga and the religious traditions of Hinduism, and to a lesser extent, Buddhism, have interwoven many of their symbols, vocabulary, and practices. The concept of "Goddess" fleshes out the esoteric idea of a Feminine Principle, and the Hindu pantheon of goddesses and gods figures prominently in tantra, and hence, in Venus and Her Lover. Although strictly speaking only a force of Nature, Shakti appears as an Indian high priestess in the painting and as a cascading stream in the poem, and in further works, as her Triple Goddess manifestation of Kali, Lakshmi, and Saraswati. In these forms we find ways to relate personally with the essential energies of the universe and of ourselves. It is important, however, not to confuse the symbol with the archetypal idea. When Venus appears with her lovers Mars and Adonis (in "Son of Life"), we are prompted to consider the meaning of unconditional love, possessiveness, the cycles of Nature, the temporality of life, and the reality of death. When Pele and her Prince revel in sexual ecstasy, we witness the power of creation that love can ignite. In Venus and Her Lover, archetypes appear in human form to communicate soul truths, just as they did in ancient sculptures, seals, mosaics, paintings, theater, poetry, and song.

As images of compassion and joy resonate more perceptibly within us, we can then release our grip on the strange and sadistic ghosts lurking in our psyches. These ghosts hand us our scripts, whack us with guilt when we forget our lines, and pull the strings we grip so compulsively. It is a perverse drama our mythological puppeteers have us performing. In it, life and all Creation come from men alone - without women! Odin creates the Universe with his brothers Vili and Ve. God the Father makes Heaven, Earth, and all plants and creatures. Pan Ku hammers and chisels on Creation for 18,000 years. The world is arranged in a hierarchy, with God on top of the priests or divine-right kings (or prime ministers), who are over the elite men (or countries), who are over other men (or other countries), who are over women, children, and slaves. Rule is enforced by violence or the threat of it. Zeus and Thor wield thunderbolts. Yahweh/Jehovah/Allah (or their representatives) smite offenders and nonconformists with fire or floods or other means of mass destruction (witness, for example, Sodom, Gomorrah, and Hiroshima). The ability to dominate and destroy (spears, swords, crucifixes, guns, bombs) is glorified over the power to give birth and nurture (mothering, gardening, homemaking). In the journey of the Hero - the classic storyline - the man proves his bravery by killing his enemies or a monster (often a goddess symbol). Gilgamesh kills Ishtar's bull, Zeus fries Typhon the serpent with his lightning, Herakles slays Hera's serpents, the Nemean lion, the nine-headed Hydra, and others. In one chapter of the Bible (2 Samuel 8) King David and his army crush the Philistines, Ammonites, Moabites (killing two-thirds of them), Syrians (killing 22,000), Edomites (killing 18,000) and other pagan (i.e. "Goddess-worshipping") peoples. Michelangelo's masterpiece sculpture exalts David's battle with the Philistine Goliath. King Arthur and his knights follow the sword Excalibur into battle, and fairy-tale knights slay fire-breathing dragons. Rambo massacres with his machine gun. Dirty Harry "makes his day" with the business end of a .44-Magnum ("guaranteed to blow your head clean off!"). James Bond annihilates his adversaries with deft coolness. Luke Skywalker slays the faceless storm troopers of the "Dark Side" with his light saber. Hollywood replays this brutal myth ad nauseum with progressively more graphic and gruesome body counts. We relate such stories to our children at bedtime and have them color pictures of Bible heroes in Sunday School. When our children get a little older, they themselves can practice their assassination skills via video games.

The tough guy hero, well-defended against even his own emotions, cannot risk losing control of this upside-down reality, and so must subjugate and denigrate women, and suppress anything feminine. He can maintain his superiority only as long as Woman is held down in a position of inferiority. He approaches a love affair as a conquest. Here the myth manifests as pornography, rape, white slavery and forced prostitution, and the stoning of women for the slightest infraction against fundamentalist Islamic law.

Much of our modern, technological society was built upon a Judeo-Christian mythological foundation inhabited by a misogynist, warmongering, intolerant deity. His followers were/are morally secure in their right to conquer evildoers, conquer Nature, conquer any who resist. What effect has such a moral code had on us? Take a look around. Myths may be society's dreams, but they have resulted in a nightmare for the millions of women, children, and men who are living in hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation. Many of our fellow human beings wake up every morning to dodge bullets in war zones and pick through garbage in refugee camps. Our beliefs have teeth.

Myths come to us via a long and twisted road. We have not learned about about Isis and Osiris because an ancient Egyptian has personally told us about them. Nor can we trust the many-times edited words of the apostles who wrote about Jesus Christ years after his death. Traditionally we have relied on scholars, poets, and artists. For centuries the study of mythology was the domain of patriarchal high culture - not the best source for our concept of Woman, divine or otherwise. Then, out of the stratified society of Victorian England, a crack developed in the surface of classical interpretation. Sir James Frazer, in his classic opus The Golden Bough (1890), proposed that there was originally an Earth-centered matriarchy. Robert Graves, whose volumes, The Greek Myths (1955), are still considered the standard classic reference, interpreted the myths in light of the shift from Goddess-based matriarchies to warrior-dominated patriarchies. Erich Neumann, a student of Carl Jung, elucidated the feminine archetype in his thick, illustrated book, The Great Mother (1955), in which he drew from many world mythologies. Joseph Campbell's lifetime of work [including The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) and the Masks of God series (1950's-1960's)] re-interpreted mythology incorporating 20th-century psychology, archaeology, and anthropology. Campbell related his fresh perspectives to a broad audience through television interviews with Bill Moyers (The Power of Myth, 1987). This process unearthed and dusted off female archetypal figures, but it is only recently that we have begun to extricate them from the male interpretation of their place in a dominator culture. We have also realized that early figures of the Great Mother did not come out of matriarchies per sé, but from more egalitarian, gylanic cultures.

Venus, as archetype, has always been there, but our perception of her has changed. She has become more relevant to us, notably through the work of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas (The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe, 1974), artist Merlin Stone (When God Was a Woman, 1976), psychologist Jean Shinoda Bolen (Goddesses in Everywoman, 1984), and scholar Riane Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade, 1987). Their work in de-constructing patriarchal myths and discerning their universal meanings now allows us to apply them to our own lives in relevant and meaningful ways. C.Kerényi, a classicist who loved re-telling the old mythical stories, states in Essays on a Science of Mythology(1) , "If we want to promote a real knowledge of mythology, we must not appeal at the outset to theoretical considerations and judgments. Neither should we talk overmuch of 'sources'. The water must be fetched and drunk fresh from the spring if it is to flow through us and quicken our hidden mythological talents."

We all have these talents. Not only can we take in myths to know them deeply, we can act in the world affirming a cosmic context. Mythological characters may point the way at truth, but we must find it for ourselves. Indeed, beyond the obvious correlation of Mars with Man and Venus with Woman, they invite us to experience the male and female aspects of the androgynous soul. Whether we participate in a communion ritual or a pilgrimage or a prayer of thanksgiving, these symbolic actions give us practice in how to act authentically in the manifest world, in harmony with the forces of the cosmos. We may think ourselves modern and clever to toss out a baptism ritual or a goat-foot god, but if we at the same time cease personal transformation and acceptance of grace (symbolized by baptism) or deny our wild, animal aspects (symbolized by the God Pan), then we rob ourselves of the tools we need to live life fully. Mythology gives us the means to know the unknowable - the Great Void, the Divine Order, Beyond the Beyond - from whence springs Life.

By personally identifying with the myth of a hero, a goddess, or a lover, not only can we learn from their story, but we can peer into different facets of reality. When our lives venture into a deep, dark forest, we may catch sight of monsters lurking in the shadows (fears or societal conditioning we must overcome, for example) as well as the sparkly faeries (allies, synchronicities) who bestow magic charms (lessons, empowering techniques) along the way. We can gain access to the vast sea of human experience from which these stories come. And our ego-driven dilemmas become less confusing when seen against the backdrop of our mythological heritage. Jean Houston, in her book, A Mythic Life, says, "Working with myth and archetype, we discover that we are characters in the drama of the anima mundi, the soul of the world. In this discovery we push the boundaries of our own human stories and gain the courage to live mythically and to help heal our world."(2)

Venus and Mars are re-inventing their mythic story through our artistic efforts, James and I humbly believe, because men and women are at this time bridging the gulf that separates them. Yin and yang energies at play in our world of duality have been painfully out of balance. As more and more people reject the scripts they were handed by the androcratic puppeteers - evidenced by feminism and the growing men's movement - they begin to discover their own stories, their own true expressions of themselves. Naturally then, our myths - our grander stories - must change. We all have a part to play. It is our collective idea of love that fashions a new Venus, and our collective idea of might that forges a new Mars.

Riane Eisler says in Sacred Pleasure, "There is today so much interest in both very ancient and very new myths. This is not just, as we are sometimes told, a "New Age" fad. It stems from the recognition that many of our myths are not only inappropriate for our rapidly changing world but misleading about human possibilities. Most important, it stems from the growing consciousness that how we image our personal and social paths can profoundly affect both our own lives and those of others."(3)

The Venus and Mars that have materialized before our eyes through our art were born of our tantric love partnership. This was made possible, first and foremost, because of our willingness, our openness to archetypal forces. The characters seem to have matured symbolically and physically: the paintings and poetry depict a couple that has left behind the fatuous illusions of adolescence and are in fact middle-aged. With eyes wide open to the challenges of the man-woman union, Mars and Venus explore the infinite splendors of what sacred love can be. These explorations bear offspring: modernized myths for a new age.

(1) Jung, C.G., and Kerenyi, C., Essays on a Science of Mythology – The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1973) p.1
(2) Houston, Jean, A Mythic Life – Learning to Live our Greater Story (New
York: Harper SanFrancisco, 1996) p.99-100
(3) Eisler, Riane, Sacred Pleasure – Our History, Our Future (New York:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1995) p.372-373