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