—another, as old as the ancient Greek understanding of their goddess, Themis, “Right Action”, disregarded in the highest echelons of American commerce. [I am following here the scholarship of John A. Sanford, Fate, Love and Ecstasy: Wisdom from the Lesser-Known Goddesses of the Greeks, 1995] Themis was equal to the spirit and will and voice of Mother Earth, the embodiment of justice. Disregarded and offended, She now exacts her payment. Her boundaries and limits are to be observed by all living creatures, the right order. The concept of “themis” was a personified abstraction in those ancient days. She had three daughters, (1) one of custom, law, and justice, (2) one of good order, and (3) one of peace. Nemesis, or just retribution and vengeance, joined Themis in supervising human affairs.
Follow Themis and good fortune can be expected. Or else, the original sin of the human race, hubris, becomes instilled in the human mind by an exaggerated sense of personal pride and importance and leading to wanton violence and destruction for personal gain. I call it the blunt force trauma of excessive wealth, the major cause of the isolation of some beings from the society of people not so traumatized.
Modern forms, archetypes of those ancient mythological creations, live in our collective consciousness. They had the concept of the “spiritual eye” that saw the beautiful, the just, the reasonable, the concept of an active conscience, what I call a sense of the ideal self. My recent studies would similarly affirm the capacity of an inner narrative that is healthy or ill. Self awareness, sense of knowing thyself in comparison or contrast to one’s fellows. Therapy would require the re-development of that lost awareness. What clouded or darkened that “spiritual eye” was hubris, bringing on a person’s ruin.
Re-education, re-training our leaders of manufacturing and financial enterprises who have failed millions of the victims of their hubris must be some powerful chastisement that gets their attention. I have a sense that they indulge in horrible grumblings, when they congergate, about their sorry lot in having to “suffer” the humiliation of interrogations by Congress and the press, and riding public transportation to their dates with their executioners in th town square, with Mme de Farge clicking her needles while the heads roll.
