In our collective neurosis, we have disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction.
If we look at the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, we see something very different going on.
Essentially, their gifts made them outcasts from patriarchal society.
Their genius opened them to the collective unconscious, and their poetry is an articulation not only of their personal unconscious, but of the cultural unconscious as well.
Great poetry may be compared to big dreams in that both come directly from the unconscious and are then amplified in the waking state in order to understand them more fully.
When Blake, Shelley, and Keats were writing, they did not understand, nor did they have the means to understand, the unconscious as it was unveiled by Freud and Jung in our century.
The unifying light in creation, the Feminine that had been eclipsed particularly during the seventeenth century, began her return and made her presence known in the unconscious of these male poets.
Although the patriarchal ego prides itself on being reasonable, the twentieth century has been anything but the Age of Reason.
In our collective neurosis, we have raped the earth, disrupted the delicate balance of nature, and created phallic missiles of mass destruction.
Ironically, in our desperate attempt to keep death at bay (or prevent dissolution, from the point of view of the ego) we have brought ourselves to the brink of extinction.
So long as we deny the Great Mother and refuse to integrate her as Goddess in our psychic development, we will continue to act out neurotic fantasies and endanger our very survival as a species. ~Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames, Page 23
