There are many hero myths the world over, but they tend to share common features. In Greek mythology and epic, there was an earlier, greater generation of heroes before the Trojan War heroes. The exploits of Perseus, the first of these.

The warrior hero is only one type of hero, one that some people dislike. But historically there have been other models of the heroic: spiritual heroes, romantic heroes, artistic heroes. The tension between the elegiac view that the age of heroes is past and a sense of the heroic as an always-possible idea.

The Bible (unlike medieval Christianity) is not obsessed with sexual sin. The worst sin in the Bible is “idolatry,” which really means the worship of power instead of love. This is unfortunately symbolized by a female figure, the harlot. A typology of female figures in the Bible: ideal, fallen but redeemable, and demonic.

Ovid explores the feminine psychology of love. Loss of the mother in the tale of Demeter and Persephone. Female narcissism. Women alone: Artemis, Diana, the Amazons. Incestuous love: Myrrha seducing her father.

A typology of human erotic psychology in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The feminine male, including the feminine gay male: Adonis, Orpheus (after Eurydice), Ganymede, Hyacinthus. Self-love: Narcissus. Feminine psychology: the mother-daughter relationship. Demeter and Persephone.

Ovid’s interest in erotic psychology led him to the pattern of the inaccessible object of male desire, seen in the myths of Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx, Jove and Io, Atalanta and Hippomenes, Tereus and Philomela. Men’s irrational yearning and sometimes misogynist anger over the lost feminine, which was originally the mother.

For us, Ovid is still relevant for his exploration of the psychology of love. The non-Ovidian story of Oedipus reflects the unconscious longing for the mother, but Ovid explores how other mythological males pursue inaccessible feminine objects of desire. Apollo and Daphne.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is organized in 3 ways: (1) thematically, according to the theme of metamorphosis, or change; (2) chronologically, from Creation to Ovid’s own time; (3) psychologically, according to a typology of human desire, based on the paradigm of the inaccessible object.

The Fall interpreted psychologically was the shattering of the unity of all things, in which the subject or self is alienated from a whole objective environment. This leads to two fallen attitudes: fear and hate, resulting in aggression; and desire to pursue and reunite. Ovid: the poet of fallen desire, the Bad Boy of the Classical tradition.

The forbidden tree in Genesis is identified with Christ’s cross, but the image is echoed in Odin’s hanging on the world tree, in the sacrificed vegetation deities called dying gods. The water of death is the Flood, the Red Sea, also Leviathan, identified with Jonah’s fish. On a symbolic level, we are drowned, like Atlantis.