Prometheus and the Great Goddess

Edward C. Whitmont's The Alchemy of Healing: Psyche and Soma

Mythological awareness tells us:
One of the conditions for Prometheus' release from bondage to the rock of materiality was that he reveal to the gods a vital secret upon which the continuity of the world depended, that only he, the representative of mankind, not the gods, knew about. This secret referred to the need for having the Great Goddess joined in marriage to a human mortal, not to another god; the transpersonal must connect with the individuating human consciousness.

For the person, the difficult and often painful, "nearly too difficult" assignment of becoming what one potentially "is" includes alternating phases of illness and healing, of experiencing guilt and redemption, egotism and sacrifice, and thereby integrating one's separatist or destructive drives into the "formal order of the cosmos." (221)

Organic Resonance: The Language of the Magical Landscape

 David W. Kidner's Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity

The metaphor of resonance is a fundamentally integrative notion, since resonances occur between things, expressing relation rather than independence, interaction rather than autonomy, and dynamism rather than stagnation, as in Michael Taussig’s (The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 167-168) depiction of Aymara culture:

The enchantment of nature and the alliance of its spirits with mankind form an organic resonance of orchestrated social representation. The organization of kith and kin, political organization, use of ecosphere, healing, the rhythm of production and reproduction—all echo each other within one living structure that is the language of the magical landscape. (305)

A Positive Vision

David D. Kidner's Nature and Psyche: Radical Environmentalism and the Politics of Subjectivity

A positive vision of a future natural world contributes to our own psychological survival. Joanna Macy has written of the despair frequently experienced by environmental activism, a despair that is entirely authentic and understandable given the speed with which the natural order is being demolished, and our apparent powerlessness when faced with overwhelmingly powerful interests. However, as Erik Erikson pointed out, one cannot adequately define one's sense of identity by what one is not. While promoting a positive vision integrates and heals one, devoting one's life purely to opposing what one is against is an act of nihilism in which the culmination of one's own success is self-destruction. (285)