The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.

And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearn- ing, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed-whether she will or no. And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace.

The Arapaho girl who followed the porcupine up the stretching tree was enticed to the camp-circle of the people of the sky. There she became the wife of a heavenly youth. It was he who, under the form of the luring porcupine, had seduced her to his supernatural home.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is full of gods pursuing nymphs; the god appears as a bull or a golden shower, and suddenly you’ve got a little bundle of joy. The child then becomes symbolic of the  coordination of the opposites, male and female. Of course, this is the real mean- ing of the motif of the Virgin Birth. It represents the woman receiving inspiration for the new life through a divine visitation.

In myths of this kind, the next stage of the adventure, of course, is bearing the child and, frequently, fostering it, as Jochebed gives up Moses. Remember, however, that the child here does not represent a physical child; it is spiritual life.

So, the first stage along the road is the sacred marriage. The fairy tale always ends in that kind of thing: the couple kiss and live happily ever after. Well, as someone who has been happily married for almost half a century, I can say with authority that happily ever after is just the beginning. Like life, most myths go on from there.

The second kind of fulfillment along the road of trials is what is called atonement with the father, and this trial is definitely a male rite of passage. The son has been separated from the father; he has been living a life inap- propriate to his true heritage. Perhaps he has been living like a girl, as Achilles does, or a farm boy, as Parsifal does. Perhaps he has been taken in as a prince, but for the wrong people, as happens to Moses. As he struggles along his quest, he finds the father, who is really in the abyss beyond the mother-you might say he has to go through the mother’s world to reach the father’s.

In stories of atonement with the father, the woman becomes either the guide or the seductress that blocks the way. Now, in Indian thought, maya, the feminine principle that engenders the phenomenal universe, has both a revealing power and an obscuring power. In her obscuring guise, she becomes the witch, and in her revealing form, she is the guiding woman clothed in light, the Lady of the Lake.