II - Initiation
2 - The Meeting with the Goddess
"The goddess guardian of the inexhaustible well...requires that the hero should be endowed with what the troubadours and minnesingers termed the 'gentle heart.' Not by the animal desires of an Actaeon, nor by the fastidious revulsion of such as Fergus, can she be comprehended and rightly served, but only by gentleness: aware ("gentle sympathy") it was named in the romantic courtly poetry of tenth-to-twelfth-century Japan."
"....The meeting with the goddess (who is incarnate in every woman) is the final test of the talent of the hero to win the boon of love (charity: amor fati), which is life itself enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.
And when the adventurer, in this context, is not a youth but a maid, she is the one who, by her qualities, her beauty, or her yearning, is fit to become the consort of an immortal. Then the heavenly husband descends to her and conducts her to his bed - whether she will or no. And if she has shunned him, the scales fall from her eyes; if she has sought him, her desire finds its peace."
Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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