Trapped in the Minotaur’s Labyrinth: The Mythopoetics and Underworlds of Kairos (2023)

Part I of II. Warning: Contains Spoilers and Sexual Content.

And now they are sitting side by side, bending over the wounded minotaur along with the rest of the gallery who have come to watch the dying monster, women prominent among them.

[…]

Katharina: He’s given up the struggle, he’s acquiesced in his death.

Hans: And so have the women who’ve paid money to watch him die.

Katharina: There’s only one exception, she’s reaching out her hand to help him.

Hans: Maybe it’s Ariadne.

Katharina: The one with the thread?

Hans: Yes, she’s half sister to the minotaur.

Katharina: Ah, I get it.

Hans: Her mother preferred a bull to Ariadne’s father, her own husband.  Unfortunately, it showed in the kid.  Ariadne begged her father to spare the life of the little monster, then a few years later she betrayed him when she told her lover Theseus the secret of how to track and kill her half brother.

Katharina: Not a nice story.

Hans: Maybe times have changed.

[…]

Katharina: Actually, […] it looks in the early drawings as though the minotaur stabbed himself and then dropped the knife.  Look, […] he’s even holding it here.

Hans: But why would he kill himself in the arena?

Katharina: Attention seeking?

Hans: But it hasn’t worked, those women look bored.

Katharina: Here, in the last sketch, […] they’re not even looking at him anymore.

Hans: So his death is in vain.

Katharina: His dying is the labyrinth he’s locked up in.

Hans: That’s the way the cookie crumbles […].  Whatever the identity of the vanquished, dying is a lonely affair.

“Paradise Circus” by Massive Attack

Kairos (2023), written by Jenny Erpenbeck and translated by Michael Hofmann, sets a May-December romantic relationship between nineteen-year-old Katharina and fifty-three-year-old Hans against the backdrop of the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).  A political reading of Kairos interprets Hans as an allegory for the dictatorship’s Janus-faced rule – on the one hand, principled, artistically and intellectually nourishing, and committed to the greater good; on the other hand, paranoid, abusive, and tyrannical.  Katharina represents the good citizen under the GDR who, gaslit and indoctrinated to accept the blame, internalizes and justifies her mistreatment, consenting to increasing psychological torture and intermittent physical abuse, until political collapse coincides with the dissolution of their romance. 

To parse through what Kairos reveals about Hans, Katharina, and their experience of life during the GDR, I would like to employ a Jungian and mythopoetic reading of the text.  I will provide a quick summary of Jungian terms and include a glossary at the end, so please consult those if necessary.  Kairos infuses Katharina and Hans’s story with a rich mythopoetics, which has several effects.  First, the mythopoetical tropes transcend the reductionist intellect and materialistic worldview by which we might ordinarily evaluate the characters’ experiences, thwarting prejudices and opening us up to new aspects of their lives.  The mythopoetical elements instead reclaim a spiritual (or magical-imaginal) worldview, which Charlene Spretnak[i] defines as a “sense of the sacred – our human perception of the larger reality, ultimate mystery, or creativity in the universe.”  Kairos uses mythopoetics to explore the deep, soulful inner lives of Hans and Katharina and their repressed archetypal energies, elucidate the embattled soul of the GDR, and complicate our dangerously oversimplified historico-cultural narratives. It challenges readers to deepen and develop ourselves through reconnection to the invisible realms of the mythical and the numinous.  Archetypal psychologist James Hillman defines mythopoetics as soul-making by way of engaging with the poetry and archetypes[ii] of myths. The numinous is the spiritual, or the world of spirits.  One recurring trope that I hope to trace is the diverse underworlds of the text and what they reveal about world of Kairos.

A Brief Overview of Jungian Depth Psychology (skip if familiar).

My summary of Jungian terms and concepts, which I employ throughout my essays, is lifted from a few introductory sources, which I will cite in my Jungian glossary at the end of the essay.

Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung developed a theoretical framework to understand the mind and a set of practices to help individuals improve their psychological health and wholeness.  For Jung, the psyche, both mind and soul, has three components: 1) consciousness – our field of awareness; and a dual/bipartite unconscious, which is subconscious – subliminal, or below the threshold of conscious perception, and includes everything we repress, disregard, and banish from consciousness. The two parts of the unconscious are the 2) personal unconscious – all of our repressed experiences, desires, and perceptions; and 3) the collective unconscious – a deeper level of the unconscious that contains repressed universal or cultural traits and instincts, expressed in dreams, myths, and visionary art. Think of your brain like an iceberg (it’s relevant here to note that Jung was a student of Freud).  The visible part is consciousness, the invisible part is the personal unconscious, and down in the dark depths resides the collective unconscious.

The collective unconscious cannot be perceived directly; they can only be apprehended indirectly through archetypes. Archetypes are expressions of the collective unconscious – evolved cognitive structures that provide a mental map or schema of the unconscious traits that we are repressing.  Archetypes are culturally or universally shared, as we are products of millennia of biological, psychological, and collective/social evolution.  Archetypes manifest through symbols, images, and other phenomena.  They are symbolic tropes that unconsciously influence our thoughts, feelings, and behavior.  Myths are one symbolic language for expressing archetypal truths.

For Jung, the goal was self-actualization or self-realization– the individual reaching his highest potential and developing towards ever-greater heights of psychical health, wholeness, and fulfillment.  Jung called the process of self-development and maturation individuation.  Individuation is an iterative and circumambulatory process of achieving self-knowledge, meaning that in order for the individual to mature, he must confront the hidden (unconscious, repressed) parts of his psyche, called the shadow, and bring the shadow to light.  The shadow is comprised of dark shadow and golden shadow.  Dark shadow is everything inside us that’s dangerous, evil, and destructive which needs to be transformed, sublimated, or healed through confrontation.  Golden shadow traits are not bad; they’re our untapped potentials and creative energies.  They’re all the good and generative parts of ourselves that we haven’t discovered yet, that remain to be actualized. 

In shadow work, an integral part of the process of individuation, the individual must bring his unconscious desires and predispositions into the conscious realm in order to appropriately assimilate, channel, and sublimate them.  Individuation requires unifying the psychological opposites: safely and healthily integrating all the unconscious, unrealized dark parts of the self in accordance with virtues and morals. Myths, dreams, spiritual and mystical practices, awareness of syncronicities, the arts, and divination are all important ways of accessing archetypes in order to do shadow work and promote healing, wholeness, and self-actualization.  If an individual does not confront his unconscious and unify opposing forces through shadow work, he will be stuck in deindividuation, enslaved to the shadow’s darker (evil) forces.  Individuation leads to harmony and balance.  Failure to individuate properly results in psychological dissonance, fracturing, or disturbance.  Most people get stuck at various stages of the individuation process.  Often people over-identify with their personae, their social masks, or the socially acceptable roles that they conform to.  Having a persona, or many personae, is not the problem; the problem is when the mask fuses to one’s face, prohibiting one from removing it to try on other personae or to explore one’s authentic self, free of the confines of social molds.  When one confuses one’s Self with one’s limiting persona, he voluntarily imprisons himself and stifles his potential for growth and change.  The Self is the totality of one’s psyche when one is on the path to individuation and self-realization.  When one does not consciously engage in shadow work and explore the depths of his own psyche, he may project his shadow onto others and attribute negative traits onto them, scapegoating them.

Goddess in Captivity: Suppression of The Dark Divine Feminine.

Framing the rest of the novel, Kairos’s initiatory mythopoetical scene, which occurs when Hans and Katharina make love for the first time, epitomizes the cosmological conflict between Hans’s mythology focusing on celestial, patriarchal deities and Katharina’s matricentric, chthonic one.  In a hierarchal cosmos, the chthonic deities populate both the worldly and the underworldly realms and are excluded from the heavenly ones, and Kairos and Hans both associate Katharina with the archetypal chthonic Dark Goddess (or dark Divine Feminine).  For instance, Hans plays Mozart’s Requiem during foreplay and lovemaking with Katharine, and for Hans, the music transports them to the storyworld of the Christian Day of Judgment.  He narrates the music to its intended Christian eschatology myth, but she, in an almost trance-like, oracular state, contradicts him and offers a counter-mythology.

But now those called in their graves bestir themselves, they gather up their shrouds to cover their bare bones, they are about to go to heaven […].  The dead go trembling up to heaven, while the two human bodies turn themselves into landscapes that may not be seen, only grasped, contours tracked with innumerable paths, where one may not run away; you know, he says, the next section is the Dies irae, the day of divine fury, no, she says, shaking her head as though she knew better, you’re wrong, and she pulls him even closer to her.  God, who dwells in the ether, rolls up the heavens like a scroll.  And on the divine earth the whole varied heavens will fall, and on the sea.  And the fire’s inexhaustible fury will consume all the earth and the seas and the axis of heaven and melt the days and all creation.  Do all the assembled horns, bassoons, clarinets, timpani, trombones, violins, violas, cellos, and organ serve her will?  Night will be all around, long and unyielding, for all, for rich and for poor.  Naked we leave the earth, and naked we will return to it.  The guilt of the world will be winnowed by fire, but what if there is no guilt? (21-22).

When Katharina rejects the Christian eschatological narrative, she supplies a vision in which the heavens will collapse into the chthonic realms (the seas are underworldly or liminal), fire will consume the earth, and night will reign eternally.  What counter-mythology does she supply?  A clue appears when Hans and Katharina are listening to the GDR’s national anthem together, and he quips, “Odd, really, the anthem of a Socialist country starting with the most Christian word there is: Resurrected,” to which she responds, “I don’t think it’s odd […].  It’s just the way it is.  You can only make something new after some thoroughgoing destruction” (44).  Katharina’s avowed belief in cycles of birth, death, and rebirth and her subordination of the celestial to the chthonic and underworldly realms, which will nevertheless perish in a holocaust of fire, indicate that she is countering Christian the eschatological vision with the Stoic mythos: “The Stoics […] endorsed a strong view of cyclical time and eternal return. They argued for the periodic destruction and rebirth of the world by fire, which they called the ekpyrosis” (Christopher Star, “How the ancient Greeks and Romans imagined the end of the world, and what we can learn from them today about catastrophe,” Psyche).  Further, Katharina declares that night, “long and unyielding,” will reign.  Instead of invoking Divine Light, the God in the ether, she is worshipping Primordial Darkness.  Redirecting Katharina’s summoning of fire and darkness towards the Christian Hell, Hans chooses to interpret her words to concern guilt and sin so that he can repress Katharina’s chthonic myth and revert to the Christian one in his mind.

Moreover, during foreplay, Katharina bites Hans: “kyrie eleison, Lord, take pity, she whispers to him and smiles up at him before sinking her teeth in his flesh, what is she doing, crazy woman, biting a piece out of him” (21).  Here she suggests the archetype of the dark Divine Feminine by conveying a dangerous sensuality that combines violence and pleasure, evoking cannibalism, blood oaths, the transgression of bodily boundaries, and the link between sex and death.[iii]

“Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem – Trap Remix by Apashe

In Greek mythology, the battle between the chthonic Titans and the celestial Olympians, known as the Titanomachy, raged for ten years.  Hans and Katharina study its depiction on the Pergamon Altar in their local museum, in which Gaia tells her sons to dismember her body in order to produce weapons for their cause (91).  Gaia, Mother Earth, sacrifices herself for her children; the Divine Feminine is committing assisted suicide.  Resulting in the subjugation of the chthonic deities to their celestial opponents, the war allegorizes the ascendance of patriarchy, which has come to demean, devalue, and demonize the feminized material/earthly.  In juxtaposition to demonic, sensuous femininity, masculinity is equated with abstraction, with Logic and Reason, and with the immortal soul (rather than the filthy prison of the body).[iv] 

Later, Katharina and Hans are looking at “Picasso’s contribution to the day of [Hans’s] birth” (51), three drawings on the death of the minotaur, as well as some of his other paintings, inviting the reader to connect Katharina and Hans’s story to the myth of the minotaur and Ariadne.  Again we find the Dark Goddess lurking in the shadows.  Feminist depth psychologist Christine Downing develops Ariadne’s repressed archetypal meaning in her lecture, “Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth.”

According to Downing and others, such as Mary Naples in “Loves of the Lady of the Labyrinth: Ariadne, Powerful Minoan Goddess,” the Greek version of the Ariadne myth that we receive through Homer and Hesiod is actually a cipher, or secret code, bearing traces of hidden earlier Ariadne myths and religious practices related to the Great Goddess.  Unlike her patriarchal Greek counterparts – Olympian goddesses Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, Demeter, Hera, and so on – the Great Goddess is not a secondary or lesser deity, and she does not suffer fragmentation or reduction to one or two defining characteristics.  In further contradistinction, the Great Goddess – closer to Ancient Near Eastern figures like Innana, Astarte, and Asherah (Lilith doesn’t count) – does not assert the primacy of the rational and the just.  On the contrary, the Great Goddess, as both Creator and Destroyer, embodies all possibilities and potentialities.  She presides over the living cosmos and the underworld, with their seasons and infinite cycles of birth, death, and rebirth.  She symbolizes order and chaos, war and peace, good and evil. 

Ariadne is merely an alias for her true, occulted identity: the Great Goddess.[v] Since the Greek myth alters and rearranges the symbols to reflect patriarchal Greek beliefs and social practices, it becomes necessary to excavate the ancient origin story from Minoan civilization in Bronze Age Crete.  According to Naples, “Ariadne’s origins beckon from the primordial mist of Bronze Age Minoan Crete where she was the overarching mother goddess in the Minoan pantheon—the all-important fertility goddess who is believed to have answered to such titles as goddess-on-earth, weaver of life and mistress of the labyrinth.”  Naples continues,

In some ways Ariadne is analogous both to [Demeter,] the goddess of the harvest—and her daughter Persephone—queen of the underworld. Predating patriarchy, the mother goddess’s role was paramount—in agricultural societies religion was centered on fertility and everything was centered on religion. Because Minoan Crete was a matrilineal society with women leading lives of independence, like all goddesses in the Minoan pantheon, Ariadne ruled alone without a male consort. Toward the close of the Minoan civilization—with the Mycenaeans’ influence keenly felt—Ariadne began to be accompanied by a young male consort. Her insignia, the labyrinth—a square or circular structure with multiple circuits spiraling to the center and back again—figures prominently in her mythology and is believed to have been a place of initiation where mortals moved from one realm to another with the bull-god—the Minotaur (Hades-like)—occupying its deepest and darkest center.

Regardless of the historical accuracy of this account, it provides an archetypal schema for Ariadne that more closely approximates the submerged matricentric context of her origins that patriarchal retellings obfuscate.  My guess is that Ariadne represents the Minoan Mother Goddess, the minotaur represents her ceremonial consort and the sacrificial sacred bull (as does Dionysus, Ariadne’s husband in the Greek myth), and the labyrinth represents the double-ax of Minoan civilization as well as the womb, the tomb/underworld, and the mysteries associated with the divine feminine.  I interpret the Ariadne myth an allegory for ancient rites that involved blood sacrifice, goddess worship, and initiation into the sacred knowledge surrounding birth, sex, mystical ecstasy, death, and rebirth.  The Ariadne myth may also have a hidden relationship to the ancient mystery religions, such as the Eleusinian and Dionysian mystery cults.

“Despoina: Mistress of the Eleusian Mysteries” by Brigid Burke of Chthonia

What does this have to do with Katharina and Hans? Katharina represents Ariadne – the debased, subjugated, and sanitized version of Ariadne that we know through Greek mythology.  Embodying the archetype of the goddess whom the patriarchal order has repressed and suppressed for millennia, Katharina’s wings have been clipped, her divinity transmogrified into the demonic. To the world, Katharina instead shows the antithesis of this archetype: the weak and codependent Lover persona, who defines herself only in relation to her male lover.   For Katharina to realize her potential as Ariadne, Christine Downing relates, would mean to become “a woman in relation to her own powers, not defined by relationships with others, and not afraid of her own sensuality and of her own capacity for ecstasy.”  She would reclaim her comprehensive role as Mistress of the Labyrinth – Goddess of the Underworld and of the ordered Cosmos, Goddess of liminality between worlds, Goddess of the womb and the tomb.

While Katharina represents the repressed divine feminine who manifests as the codependent Lover archetype, Hans represents not only the GDR’s total rule over her psyche but also the rapacious minotaur and the Ruler archetype, the dark archon who struggles with his own authoritarian and destructive impulses. His fear of awesome feminine power compels him to banish it to Katharina’s shadow (unconscious), where it remains unintegrated into her consciousness.  The patriarchal order has desecrated the labyrinth, the primeval temple of the sacred feminine, transforming what was once Ariadne’s domain into her prison.  One essential question of the text becomes whether Katharina overcomes her “Hans complex”: does she ever resume the process of individuation and self-actualization, which requires confronting her shadow and integrating her repressed goddess traits?  Or does she end up psychically fractured and disturbed?  More on this question in Part II.

Chthonic Deities, Katharina, & Nazis: A Shadow Network.

Unconsciously, Hans and Katharina connect her with the dark Divine Feminine.[vi]  The symbolic relationship between Katharina and the chthonic, dark feminine divine begins when they make love for the first time – when she bites him and narrates an earthly eschatology, and it recurs when they look at Picasso’s minotaur-themed artwork together.  Further cementing this association, when Hans returns after tying Katharina up for sex and leaving her, she “involuntarily remembers the hand of the giant, seeking help at the knee of the goddess Doris, his opponent” (98).  Katharina subconsciously – involuntarily – associates herself with the defeated Titans, the overthrown chthonic deities.  Perhaps, too, Hans is tying up Ariadne, the majestic Minoan Goddess, to dominate and incapacitate her and to diminish her divine power.[vii]

We witness Hans’s similar internalization of the Titanomachy before he enters Katharina’s parents’ house for the first time.  Standing on the corner, he watches Hitler’s bunker across the street and broods on the haunted past.  For Hans, Hitler’s bunker symbolizes “the indestructible colossus, in place of veins it has rat runs inside, in place of guts an inner life of stone.  […] Is he dead, now?  Or playing dead, and in fact just waiting for the next war?  The giant Pallas turned to stone when Athene held up to him her shield with Medusa’s head on it” (95).  Hans expresses worry that the bunker will come back to life – that Nazism and fascism will rise again, and then he compares the bunker to the Titan Pallas in the cosmic Titanomachy.  Hans seems to have developed an entrenched set of subconscious (shadow) associations around the Titans and Olympians that not only feminize the former (locating Katharina there) and masculinize the latter but also overlay the Nazis onto the chthonic deities, which would allegorize the anti-Fascist Communists as the Olympians.[viii] To Hans, the divine feminine, embodied in the chthonic deities, represents all that is wild and primal: chaos, endless war, bloodthirst, madness, rapacity, unbridled lust – in Jungian terms, the shadow, all of the traits that society represses and punishes.  Corroborating this theory, Hans also has some major mama trauma; when Hans is six or seven, his mother tries to teach him how to swim by leading him out into the ocean and abandoning him to drown, and his grandmother has to save him (57).  His mother chastises him for crying and shows no remorse.  Thus, the divine feminine also represents the wanton, capricious, and cruel infanticidal mother.  After all, Cronus, father of the Titans, devours his own children to prevent one from rising up against him.  With all these historico-cultural associations in mind, it makes sense, in a way, that Hans links Nazism to the chthonic.  The Nazis also famously rejected the Judeo-Christian tradition in favor of an Aryan mythology based on Norse mythology and neo-paganism.

Because Hans unconsciously associates chthonic divinity with both Katharina and the Nazis, I wonder if part of his relentless Stasi-style investigation and denunciation of her is because of this subconscious (shadowy) web of connections.  Much of Hans’s psychology can be explained through his unresolved trauma from the Nazi era and his motivation to protect Germany from what he fears most, the resurrection of Nazism.

For more on the psychology of Hans, see Part II.

Encounters with the Numinous: The Search for Arcadia.

Kairos creates a thoroughly mythopoetical environment, suffused with charged spiritual elements, to allude to the various layers of Katharina’s and Hans’s experiences: the multitudes they contain, the hidden depths they explore, and their abiding spiritual longings.  For barely grown Katharina who is just embarking on her psycho-spiritual and sexual awakenings, the combination of sexual pleasure and transcendent, quasi-mystical experiences in exploring aesthetics and mythopoetics with Hans becomes intoxicating and irresistible.  The text sprinkles so many mythical elements into their world.  Hans and Katharina meet regularly at the Café Arkade, evoking Arcadia, the ancient Greek concept of paradise on earth and home to gentle woodland spirits.  Even in the mundane world of the everyday, they encounter enchantment and transcendence in the numinous and the invisible realms, which they may honor in conscious or unconscious ways.  Naming paradise as their meeting place in the text also indicates that, though the GDR is oppressive and abusive, the telos, or ultimate goal, of the place incubating them was noble – to approximate paradise on earth, and Hans and Katharina have been receptive to and nourished by that contingent socio-cultural vision, situated in time and place.

The text incorporates many other mythopoetic references.  Katharina, whose name means “pure” in Greek, has a friend named Sibylle, also the name of female Greek oracles or prophetesses.  In general, I feel like Hans and Katharina, especially together, move through the world more like the ancients did.  Rather than living in a spiritually arid and disenchanted world of rationality, they live in an animated cosmos filled with wonders. Particularly, the text is rife with divination: specifically oneiromancy, dream interpretation (182); cartomancy, divination through cards (playing cards or tarot, for example) (182); hypnagogic visions / hallucinations (195); and incubation  (the ritual of sleeping in a sacred space for curative medicinal or spiritual purposes.  It would be enriching to discuss these occasions of divination in a book club setting (I’m mildly obsessed with them and would love to discuss them, actually), but at the very least they demonstrate that Katharina and Hans enjoy a rich metaphysical experience in their East Berlin context and are receptive to signs from the universe that transcend the narrow confines of the intellect.  I’ll return to Katharina’s incubation “between the paws of the sphinx” (282-285) in Part II.

Hans and Katharina constantly seek direct experiences with the divine and transcendent through aesthetic encounters, most notably through the arts – music, drama, poetry, writing, painting, etc.  This is completely aligned with the Athenians, who birthed theatre out of the Cult of Dionysus as an ecstatic, epiphanic, and cathartic collective experience that reenacted sacred dramas of the gods and initiated humans into their invisible realm.  I viewed Katharina’s internship at the theatre (142), art school matriculation, and internal poetry recitations (76) through the lens of her mystical practice.  Perhaps Hans only experiences the arts in this way in relation to her, or this attitude may predate her, but Katharina believes that he is initiating her into the beautiful mysteries: “Without a word of greeting, Hans takes Katharina by the hand and leads her around.  She has stood here two or three times already in her life, […] but only now does Hans open her eyes to what she is seeing” (91).  For him, Katharina’s presence seems to catalyze such encounters. 

In mythological terms, Katharina and Hans are each other’s psychopomps, each leading the other to the underworld, the realm of the numinous.  In Jungian terms, they are each other’s soul guides, termed the anima for the female and the animus for the male. Their goal is to seek gnosis (spiritual knowledge) in accordance with their own genius (Thoreau’s use of the term, from the Roman adaptation of the Greek daimon, or guiding spirit).  This does not preclude their relationship from strife, however; Hans becomes a major obstacle to Katharina’s individuation / self-realization process, and Katharina must dissolve their bonds in order to develop a healthy psychospirituality (more on this in Part II).  Ultimately, infusing the text with spirituality honors the depth and multiplicity of Hans and Katharina’s experiences and explains their connection to each other. In Part II, I hope to answer the question of whether Hans and Katharina are finally able to resume their journeys of individuation.

Read Part II and the Glossary of Jungian Terms here.

Some Sources for Basic Jungian Theory

“Introduction to Carl Jung: The Psyche, Archetypes, and the Collective Unconscious” by Academy of Ideas

“Carl Jung, the Shadow, and the Dangers of Psychological Projection” by Academy of Ideas

“Dreams and the Hidden Realm of the Soul with James Hillman and Carl Jung” by Third Eye Drops

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[i] Spretnak, C. (1991). States of grace: The recovery of meaning in the postmodern age. San Francisco: HarperCollins. Quoted in this article.

[ii] For Jung, archetypes are evolved cognitive structures, which unconsciously influence our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.  They can be apprehended indirectly through myths, symbols, and other phenomena (“Introduction to Carl Jung: Individuation, the Persona, the Shadow, and the Self” by Academy of Ideas; see also “Introduction to Carl Jung: The Psyche, Archetypes, and the Collective Unconscious” by Academy of Ideas).

[iii] This scene reminds me of Exodus 4:25, when Tzipporah circumcises her son to spare him from God’s wrath and places the bloody foreskin at Moses’ feet, crying, “You are a bridegroom of blood to me!”  Walter Beltz believed that this “bloody husband” scene was a vestige of an earlier rite of blood sacrifice with matriarchal elements, which transmuted into circumcision.  In this scene, Tzipporah symbolizes the archetype of the primordial dark goddess of birth, death, and rebirth – both the fertility goddess or Great Mother who creates life, and the goddess of the Underworld who causes death and requires blood oaths and ritual sacrifice.

[iv] Filthy prison of the body refers to the soma/sema concept in Platonic philosophy, the body as prison for the immortal soul. This gender-coded Platonic dualism is developed by the Middle Platonists, Christian Gnostics, and Cathars, until it becomes, in varying degrees, the dominant Western epistemology.

[v] Alternately known as the Great Mother.

[vi] The Chthonic Earth deities, as represented by Gaia and the Titans, or the Goddesses of the Underworld, as represented by the Great Goddess and the archaic Minoan Ariadne

[vii] I also regard his corruption of her by showing her degrading pornography (143, 183) as a way of poisoning her mind to make her internalize the debasement of women / the desecration of sacred femininity and of eros, sexual love.

[viii] A product of millennia of Western patriarchal psychological and ideological constructs, Hans may take comfort in associating the defeat of Nazism with the restoration of the traditional order, symbolized by the patriarchal Judeo-Christian tradition with its concepts of mercy, justice, reason, love, kindness, and order.  The Judeo-Christian tradition, in turn, is dynamically influenced by Greco-Roman patriarchal philosophies, so the Olympians are archetypically interchangeable with Christian representations of divinity.