In Reply to: Re: Perry: Nietzche's Geneology of Morals sounds interesting posted by Perry on December 10, 2005 at 15:59:48:
After writing my previous post, I was watching a documentary on Joseph Campbell called A Mythic Journey. The phrase "good and evil" prompted a memory of having read a book with that title, so I checked my bookshelf and sure enough, there was Nietzsche's book Beyond Good and Evil.
I read it about 10 years ago, but because of the manner in which it is written, I remembered only reading "bits and pieces" of Nietzsche. I've been skimming my highlights, and I'll definitely be giving this a reread.
Around the same time I was reading that book, I also viewed a six-part documentary by Campbell called The Power of Myth. It was those kinds of learning materials (God is Red is another I've mentioned before) that deconstructed Christianity for me and helped wean me from it.
To illustrate what I mean, here's an excerpt from A Mythic Journey, which aired on PBS recently:
"Adam and Eve were thrown out of the Garden of Unity when they knew of the pairs of opposites. The Sun does not carry a shadow in itself. When the sun sets, the light sets with the sun. It is not the sun that is in darkness, but we who are. And so the sun represents the light and energy of life and consciousness engaged in the field of time -- disengaged, absolute. In Buddhism, the light is called the mother light, the light of consciousness, the undifferentiated light of consciousness.
...
"In the East, the whole universe , the spirit of the universe, is the womb of the Goddess. And the deities, and all name and forms, are within Her bounds. The gods are her children. This is a primary mythology. This is the mythology from which all our mythologies come. This is the mythology of the Goddess. The Goddess and woman as the Initiator, opening the eye of the inner vision, vision that goes past the veil, that is spread before us by the vision of the two eyes. Opening the ear to the music of the Spheres. Opening consiousness to a trans-personal realm of experience. The opening of the wisdom-body to the voice of the wisdom of nature and the world round about.
"That serpent in the Garden, he knew where he was. He was an old, old diety who was the consort of the Goddess, and Eve was that consort. The serpent and Eve make a better pair than Eve and Adam. The serpent and Eve were at the Tree of Bliss. Adam and Eve are out there having a tough time.
"It's a terrible tradition, the degradation and denial of nature, and the serpent cursed and woman along with it. They eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and God thinks -- I mean it says so, I'm not making this up -- God thinks: "Now that they've eaten of this fruit, lest they should eat the fruit of the other tree in the Garden, the Tree of Immortal Life, and become as we are" -- Elohim [sp?] is a plural noun -- "therefore," God says, "kick them out of the Garden."
In our religious system of the West, which is based on an idea of a fallen nature, a good nature into which a negative power has infused evil, we have the idea of a conflict between good and evil. And so we are invited to stand for the good against the evil. We do not have a religion like almost everybody else in the world, putting ourselves in accord with nature.
"I think what happens in our mythology is that the symbols, the mythological archetypal symbols become interpreted as facts. I think it starts with the Old Testament. I think with the Old Testament, God is a fact, not a symbol. And the Holy Land is that place and no other. And man is superior to the beasts. And nature is fallen. With the Fall in the Garden of Eden, nature is corrupt. So we do not give ourselves to nature, we will correct nature. There is good and evil in nature and we are supposed to be on the side of the good so there is a tension -- you don't yield to nature."