So anyways, there's this snake that's underneath the surface, and it's, you know, no joke that thing it's big, and it's ancient.
It's always been there, and what happens if you look at it?
It turns you to stone. Right? It paralyzes you. Well, that's the more-that's the Gorgon that's Medusa.
The woman with the head of snakes, and if you look at her it paralyzes you. What does that mean? Well,
You're walking through the jungle and big snake appears. What do you do?
You freeze and no bloody wonder because
you're a prey animal and that's what they do when they see things that are going to eat them.
And so,
the snake,
well, lots of people still die from snakebite and,
our ancestors were-and I mean our ancestors like
you know tens of millions of years ago, when they were living in trees and weren't very big-
They made a nice snack for a snake, and there's a woman named Lynn Isbell who's an anthropologist at UCLA who's correlated the presence of
carnivorous snakes
with the acuity of primate vision and what she found was that the more snakes around the better the primates could see.
So-
and we're particularly good at picking up patterns like snake
camouflage in the lower half of our visual quadrant.
You know and people generally don't like snakes. You can learn to handle them
but snake fear appears to be innate.
It's innate in chimpanzees, and it tends to increase as you age rather than decreasing you can overcome it, but.
Well my daughter had snakes and one day her snake bit her it-was a fairly big snake.
And she hadn't paid attention to it for a while so it nailed her, and
from then on she had very difficult time grabbing the snake. It was like bitten once,
you know, shy?
Permanently. She also told me years later, she had nightmares about snakes all the time when she had a snake in her room.
It's like-you know and I think it was probably the smell.
So anyways.
So, Harry Potter decides he's going to go after the Basilisk, right.
He's going to go out there and face the thing that he's most afraid of.
So he does that.
Way down in the depths, so it's like Jonah going down into the depths.
And he faces the basilisk and
It bites him. And you know that's a that's right because if you go down into the depths
you can get bitten, like it's no joke and this is a hero story
But the thing about the hero story is it's actually real the thing that you're facing is actually dangerous and even though
facing it voluntarily might be your best bet-
and is likely your best bet because that's the central story of humanity-that doesn't mean you're going to succeed.
It's the real thing. So anyways he gets bitten, right? And he's gonna die. Now, he's rescuing Ginny.
So that's the St. George story if you go after like dragon. Dragons like to capture virgins.
God only knows why.
I think it's because-
I think it's because one of the things that male humans have done from the beginning of time is
chase the damn predators away
and I suspect that the males from
God only knows how long ago who were particularly good at that
were
rewarded with female attention, and why the hell not?
So it's deeply rooted inside of us that idea of
facing the unknown and freeing the woman so the idea there is that if you-it's a male idea and in large part
I can talk about the central female myth, and I will as we proceed-the idea is that if you're the sort of person
who can stand up against the unknown and the
frightening then you're also likely-if you develop into that sort of person-
then you're also likely to develop into this sort of person that other people will find attractive.
So
you know and that's why Jung believed that inside the shadow was the anima, which is like a female figure and
so his idea was something like-
You know if you look-watch movies. There's always this beta male guy, if they're romantic movies, and he's a nice guy,
and he's the friend and, you know, the woman tells him everything, but she doesn't like him a bit.
She likes the guy who's like got an edge and
and who's capable of, I would say mayhem, but at least of
aggression.
You know that doesn't mean she wants him to be aggressive,
but what it does mean is that she wants him to be able to be aggressive!
That would be good! And so he's the romantic target.
And so he's the person that's incorporated the shadow, and he's someone that is respectable, and perhaps useful, and so,
Well, that's a very old story.