Chakra three, at the level of the navel, is called Manipura, “City of the Shining Jewel,” for its fiery heat and light. Here the energy turns to violence and its aim is to consume, to master, to turn the world into oneself and one’s own. The appropriate Occidental psychology would be the Adlerian of the “will to power”; for now even sex becomes an occasion, not of erotic experience, but of achievement, conquest, self-reassurance, and frequently, also, revenge. The lotus has ten petals, dark as thunderheads heavy laden, bearing the seed syllables dam, dham, nam, tam, tham. dam, dham, nam, pam, and pham. Its central triangle, in a white field, is the sign of the element fire, shining like the rising sun, with swastika marks on its sides. The ram, its symbolic animal, is the vehicle of Agni, Vedic god of the sacrificial fire, bearing on its back the syllable ram, which is the seed syllable or sound form of this god and his fiery element. The presiding Hindu (as distinct from Vedic) deity is Shiva in his terrible guise as an ascetic smeared with the ashes of funeral pyres, seated on his white bull Nandi. And at his side is his goddess shakti, enthroned on a ruby lotus in her hideous character of Lakini. Lakini is blue, with three faces, three eyes to each; fierce of aspect, with protruding teeth. She is fond of meat: her breast is smeared with grease and blood that have dripped from her ravenous jaws; yet she is radiant, elegant with ornaments, and exalted from the drinking of am- brosia. She is the goddess who presides over all rites of human sacrifice and over the battlefields of mankind, terrible as death to behold, though to her devotees gracious, beautiful, and sweet as life.

I think the best way to answer that is to talk about a system they have in India that describes stages of spiritual development. In India, there is a system of seven psychological centers up the spine. They represent psychological planes of concern and consciousness and action. The first is at the rectum, representing alimentation, the basic, life-sustaining function. The serpent well represents this compulsion- as a kind of traveling esophagus going along just eating, eating, eating. None of us would be here if we weren’t forever eating. What you eat is always something that just a moment before was alive. This is the sacramental mystery of food and eating, which doesn’t often come to our minds when we sit ourselves down to eat. If we say grace before meals, we thank this figure out of the Bible for our food. But in earlier mythologies, when people would sit down to eat, they would thank the animal they were about to consume for having given of itself as a willing sacrifice.

There’s a wonderful saying in one of the Upanishads: “Oh wonderful, oh wonderful, oh wonderful, I am food, I am food, I am food! I am an eater of food, I am an eater of food, I am an eater of food.” We don’t think that way today about ourselves. But holding on to yourself and not letting yourself become food is the primary life-denying negative act. You’re stopping the flow! And a yielding to the flow is the great mystery experience that goes with thanking an animal that is about to be eaten for having given itself. You, too, will be given in time.

I’m nature, nature is me.

Now, the second psychological center is symbolized in the Indian order of spiritual development by the sex organs, which is to say the urge to procreation. A third center is at the level of the navel, and here is the center of the will to power, to mastery and achievement, or, in its negative aspect, to the conquering, mastering, smashing, and trashing of others. This is the third, or aggressive, function. And as we are given to recognize in the symbolism of the Indian psychological system, the first function, alimentation, is of an animal instinct; the second, procreation, is of an animal instinct; and the third, mastery and conquest, is also of an animal instinct-and these three centers are located symbolically in the pelvic basin.

The next, or fourth, center is at the level of the heart; and this is of the opening to compassion. Here you move out of the field of animal action into a field that is properly human and spiritual.

And for each of these four centers there is envisioned a symbolic form. At the base, for example, the first one, the symbol is the lingam and yoni, the male and female organs in conjunction. And at the heart center, there is again the lingam and yoni,

that is to say, male and female organs in conjunction, but here they are represented in gold as symbolic of the virgin birth, that is to say, it is the birth of a spiritual man out of the animal man.

: And it happens-

CAMPBELL: It happens when you awaken at the level of the heart to compassion, compassion, shared suffering: experienced participation in the suffering of another person. That’s the beginning of humanity. And the meditations of religion properly are on that level, the heart level.

You say that’s the beginning of humanity. But in these stories, that’s the moment when gods are born. The virgin birth-it’s a god who emerges.

And do you know who that god is? It’s you. All of these symbols in mythology refer to you. You can get stuck out there, and think it’s all out there. So you’re thinking about Jesus with all the sentiments relevant to how he suffered-out there. But that suffering is what ought to be going on in you. Have you been spiritually reborn? Have you died to your animal nature and come to life as a human incarnation of compassion?

: Why is it significant that this is of a virgin?
The begetter is of the spirit. This is a spiritual birth. The virgin conceived of the word through the ear.
And the Buddha, with the same meaning. is said to have been born from his mother’s side from the level of the heart chakra.

Heart Chakra meaning…?

The heart chakra is the symbolic center associated with the heart. The chakra means “circle” or “sphere.”



: -The Buddha is born from his mother’s side. That’s a symbolic birth. He wasn’t physically born from his mother’s side, but symbolically.

But Christ came the way you and I did.
but of a virgin. And then, according to Ro- man Catholic doctrine, her virginity was restored. So nothing

happened physically, you might say. What is symbolically referred to is not Jesus’ physical birth but his spiritual significance. That’s what the virgin birth represents. Heroes and demigods are born that way as beings motivated by compassion and not mastery, sexuality, or self-preservation.

This is the sense of the second birth, when you begin to live out of the heart center. The lower three centers are not to be refuted but transcended, when they become subject to and servant to the heart.

Well, this is a beautiful example of the problem of the relationship of the female to the animus. And as I see the difference, a male going to and finding the place of the knife-that’s the instrument of his full power would not then have the problem of discovering the female in himself. Would not have the problem of discovering the female in himself because the feminine factor in the male life and body is slight compared with the feminine factor in your body. Do you see what I mean? It’s a greater distance from what the body has given you. And so it’s a matter of proportion.

My wife, Jean, has always said that she would have no difficulty, just as you said, in associating with the male hero, because what the male rep- resents is the agent of the feminine power directed toward a certain specific kind of functioning.

However, the male body lacks that recall to nature, to the female nature that there is automatically in the female body. Now, when I was in my twen- ties I was living with my sister Alice in Woodstock, New York. My sister was a sculptor and her friends were sculptors and so I was living with artists, many of whom were young women. I noticed that one after another, as they approached the age of thirty, the marriage problem came up, even for my sister. This mantra began to take hold of them: got to get married now and have a child and all this kind of thing. And then the divorce followed and it was all just a mess. The art goes to pieces, too, because you can’t carry seri- ously an art career unless you’re at it all day long with nothing else. Some- how, this wreckage did not happen with the men. And that’s this business -you found the knife, certainly; she found the mallet and chisel. But then the female calls. And when the female calls the male, all he does is go out and get married; that’s the female out there, where it naturally is. Do you see what I mean? This is one of the points in the female journey, I would say, that there’s a heavier load of given nature to deal with.

I remember reading a Jain text having to do with yoga. Now, Jainist yoga is extreme; the idea is really to cancel nature altogether. They call it kaivalyam being absolutely isolated from all the calls of the body. This is where vegetarianism is intended to lead, cutting out the killing, the living off of death. No killing, nothing of that kind, except of course yourself: what you’re killing is your desire to live. And the goal is to die just at the moment when you are quit of all desire for life, without resentment of anything of the kind. Well, this particular yoga is not recommended for women. There is too much life in their bodies. That just hit me: that much of a summons to life; the whole body tells you, You have disowned me. And the man does not have that problem, at least not to the same extent. Yes, a woman can follow the hero journey, but there are other calls and there is another relationship asked of you, I would say, to the nature field_   Joseph Compbell