Woman as the Temptress - Campbell

II - Initiation
     3 - Woman as the Temptress

"The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is.  Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell.  Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, al the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some unpleasant someone else.
     But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to pure, the pure, pure soul....The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond her, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.
          For a God called him - called him many times,
          From many sides at once: "Ho, Oedipus,
          Thou, Oedipus, why are we tarrying?
           It is full long that thou art stayed for; come!"
     Where this Oedipus-Hamlet revulsion remains to beset the soul, there the world, the body, and woman above all, become the symbols no longer of victory but of defeat.  A monastic-puritanical, world-negating ethical system then radically and immediately transfigures all the images of myth.  No longer can the hero rest in innocence with the goddess of the flesh; for she is become the queen of sin."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Campbell her quotes the play Oedipus Coloneus.