Once, in a distant past, there was woman of unprecedented beauty and wisdom in my life that ignited the true love for the known truth in me. And, although or rather because I acted like an unhelpful hunter, I lost her after a violent pursuit. As Apollo by the love of a nymph, raised by an arrow of Eros, haunts her through the woods until she was turned into a bay tree by the river god Peneus, whose help she had called upon.
Who was this woman, the other, this embodiment, of the journey, of the soul, as she frequently appears in the ancient Greek myths, with Pallas Athens, Artemis or Aphrodite or all in one purpose? They are the goddess of war and peace and philosophy and wisdom, the goddess of hunting, wild nature and birth, a goddess of light and the goddess of love, beauty and fertility. As with Dante Alighieri Beatrice in his Divine Comedy, she and they are the embodiment of a man's journey when he returns to his inner world after he has projected his anima on a woman in his surroundings.
It is the desire of the man, or the woman in the man, to the eternally unattainable, the ultimate truth, which he cannot know with his mind but can only experience in silence in love generated by beauty. Love that silences him, paralyzes his actions and causes him to rise into his inner world of experience in a journey to the far depths of his soul and hopefully eventually the way up to the light. Unfortunately, this woman, at least in the eyes of that man, is eventually a fickle, incalculable queen, who ultimately falls from her pedestal to his Hekate, another Greek goddess, mistress of magic, the spirits, the moon and the night. Eventually she turns into a bay tree.
It is clear that this makes the search for the man in the making very difficult and there are probably many who stop. I know I did after 20 stormy years. I started a new life more focused on material matters and finally started earning my living as an interior photographer. However, a few years ago, during corona, work dried up. I sat at home and started reading, especially Jung and Chinese philosophy. So it came that fate called on me to deepen myself into my inner world and to become more spiritual. So far this trip has been much more even and it is a nice floor of the happy life I have with my current girlfriend.
