Yin, Yang, and Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Examining mythological gendering of chaos

What unites most thoughtful critics of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a mixture of concerns: that he promotes a naive brand of individualism, or that his worry toward collectivism outstrips its influence. His stance on gender provokes particular heat. Isolating any light from this heat first demands dissecting his position.

For Dr. Peterson, mythology reveals two primal categories of human existence: chaos and order. This discussion will examine his claim that chaos — in its positive or negative guises — “is represented by the feminine” ¹. His parallel claim on order and its masculine symbolism goes largely ignored by critics. While it will be necessary to consider feminine symbols of order, this silence also deserves brief notice. The negative connotations of order are less evident than those of chaos. Perhaps reflecting an enlightenment tradition esteeming reason over emotion. The — much older — mythic tradition invites us to see these forces in balance. To not condemn chaos per se or order per se, but the excess of either.

Consulting Peterson’s first book, Maps of Meaning, his case is phrased a little more carefully; that chaos is generally, not exclusively, represented by the feminine. This hedging invites us to gauge not just how many exceptions exist, but also their significance.

One such exception is the Chinese mythic being, Hundun. Hundun represents the notion of ‘precosmogonic’ chaos, a “chaos comprising the original state” ². Lao Tzu describes “the ancient cosmogonic theme of chaos (hun-tun) as a totality resembling an egg.”³ This primordial unity, ‘Hung t’ung’, described with the condition of an “uncarved block”, “formless and nameless”⁴, is understood to be without gender.

Yet, it takes a pattern of exceptions to undermine a rule, and the entirely different pattern to which Hundun belongs needs unravelling. Precosmogonic chaos becomes intelligible in light of what follows it, much as chaos itself is revealed by order. Maps of Meaning is helpful in deciphering this chronology, providing historical and psychological context. Peterson asserts that these beings should not be seen as naive attempts at describing “the ‘objective’ world constructed by the post-empirical mind” ⁵ but as subjective experience, meaningfully abstracted.

The Yin-Yang Symbol ⁶

Scientism is “the belief that the methods of natural science, or the categories and things recognized in natural science, form the only proper elements in any … inquiry”⁷. In a textbook example, describing the subjective as meaningful is treated as a kind of heresy. Flaunting conviction that any rationale in this domain is arbitrary. In Peterson’s case, for instance, with the charge that he “finds in [myth] the lesson that he wanted to teach anyway.”⁸ When symbols prompt disparate interpretations, one can fairly become concerned with such a bias. A cross-cultural analog of Hundun, the ouroboros, stands out for such memetic potency. It has been implicated in varied epiphanies: from the organic chemist August Kekulé in his daydreams of the structure of benzene⁹, to the developmental biologist C. H. Waddington’s thoughts on the field of cybernetics¹⁰. One commentator warily notes:

The popularity of this motif in the ornamentation and jewelry of many peoples worldwide needs no elaboration, but it is doubtful that it signifies anything more profound than that use is made of a well-known animal whose body form is as eminently appropriate for purely decorative purposes as for esoteric ones. It is therefore proper to mention … the facile claim of some psychoanalytic psychologists that the ouroboros is a fantasy image so primordial that it provides “the foundation for constructing … a unique history of the evolution of consciousness, and at the same time representing the body of myths as the phenomenology of this same evolution” ¹¹

Yet, being distracted by such an extreme claim endangers this commentator to the trap of false dichotomy. In this case, missing the yawning divide between the ‘purely decorative’ and the ‘esoteric.’ A divide populated by what is useful, and evinced by what survives — both naturally and culturally. Consider how mathematical constructs manifest in the physical world. Fibonacci sequences in flowers¹². Prime numbers in the life cycles of cicadas¹³. Platonic solids in the structures of viruses¹⁴. As much as one must admit no certain future for what has been durable in the past, one must also concede that what survives isn’t arbitrary.

What cause is there to assume that culture abides by fundamentally different constraints? The claim that Peterson shows confirmation bias only stands if his bias can be distinguished from the bias inherent in natural and cultural selection. This discussion focuses on patterns across mythologies. It should be briefly noted, however, that these do not exhaust Peterson’s stance. The stance would be easier to dismiss if they did. Which is why he marshals findings from various disciplines to make his arguments robust; a consilience approach, as popularised by the biologist E. O. Wilson¹⁵. Summarising the selection pressures on stories, Peterson states:

We categorize diverse things in similar manners, across cultures, because we share perceptual apparatus, motivational drive and emotional state, as well as structure of memory and physical form, manifested in observable behaviour. The imagination has natural categories, dependent for their existence on the interaction between our embodied minds and the world of shared experience; into these categories fall particular phenomena in a more or less predictable manner.¹⁶

It is not surprising that the speed of modern advance would undermine confidence in the enduring, but even that which ultimately changes humanity must first reflect humanity to be accepted.

The Egyptian gods, Ra and Osiris in the underworld, united in one body; head and feet encircled by the “earliest example of the ouroboros motif.” 14th Century B.C.¹⁷

Peterson is more restrained about the significance of the ouroboric motif, stating simply that “precosmogonic chaos tends to take metaphorical form as the uroboros”¹⁸. If mere compatibility of traditions lives up to this statement, then that form’s echoes in the Chinese yin-yang symbol should be noted. Plato’s Timaeus describes the first living animal being “at unity with itself … [and moving] in a circle turning within himself” which — though commentators connect it with the ouroboros — takes spherical rather than explicitly serpentine form¹⁹. Looking globally, we find more congruent imagery. The primary example Peterson gives is the Mesopotamian “dragon of chaos, primordial goddess of creation”²⁰ Tiamat. The Ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead shows ouroboric renewal, in its sun-god Atum emerging “from chaos-waters with the appearance of a snake”²¹. Watery chaos is a motif “from which in innumerable myths life is born.” ²² Commonly held among “indigenous people of the tropical lowlands of South America [is] that waters at the edge of the world-disc are encircled by a snake, often an anaconda, biting its own tail.” ²³ For Haitian Vodou tradition, Ayida Weddo “[in] the beginning… was a vast serpent, whose body formed seven thousand coils beneath the earth, protecting it from descent into the abysmal sea.” ²⁴

Precosmogonic chaos served as photographic negative to myth’s primary realm: subjective experience. Peterson introduces more specifically the “constituent elements of experience”, the categories of the imagination mentioned earlier:

The eternal unknown — nature, metaphorically speaking, creative and destructive, source and destination of all things. … The eternal known, … culture, defined territory, tyrannical and protective, predictable, disciplined and restrictive, cumulative consequence of heroic or exploratory behaviour … [, and the] eternal knower… the process that mediates between the known and the unknown — …the knight who slays the dragon of chaos, the hero who replaces disorder and confusion with clarity and certainty, the sun god who eternally slays the forces of darkness, and the “word” that engenders cosmic creation.²⁵

Like words in various languages, the characters embodying these categories are often gendered. In Chinese mythology, Hundun gives rise to the feminine yin (earth, darkness, chaos) and masculine yang (sky, light, order). From the “chaos comprising the original state” emerges the “chaos defined in opposition to order” ². This latter chaos — the unknown, as experienced — is that which Peterson claims is generally ascribed an “affectively ambivalent feminine character.” ²⁵ The traditions drawing his primary focus follow the schema laid out above explicitly, with deities tied in marriage through a sexual ritual known as hieros gamos. It is from this creative union that the pairing of chaos and order earn the designation “world parents”.²⁶ In other cited representations, chaos — the unknown — is more implicit in its relation to order.

Tiamat and Apsu

The Mesopotamian Enuma Elish conflates primordial chaos, and chaos as it is experienced, in the goddess Tiamat. In creative union with Tiamat is her consort, Apsu. Peterson notes that Apsu isn’t well-described in the Enuma Elish, and in what is perhaps the riskiest claim in Maps of Meaning:

The “masculine” consort of the “goddess of the unknown” is inevitably the “god of the known” or his “progenitor” and dependent, the knower).²⁷

This may indeed be inevitable, but is also far from self-evident. Peterson sees in the killing of Apsu the loss of protection from the forces of the unknown. His analysis finds support in this passage by Eliade:

Tiamat is no longer merely the primitive chaotic totality that precedes any cosmogony; she ends by proving to be the producer of countless monsters. Her “creativity” is thus wholly negative. As it is described in the Enuma elish, the creative process is very soon endangered by Apsu’s wish to annihilate the young gods, that is, in the last analysis, to stop the creation of the universe in the bud. … The killing of Apsu opens the series of “creative murders,” for Ea not only takes his place but also begins a first organization in the aquatic mass….²⁸

Marduk, the heroic sun god, would be the one to manifest Tiamat’s chaotic potential, “split[ting] her skull, and cut[ting] the corpse in two; one half [becoming] the vault of the sky, the other half the earth.”²⁹

The influence of the Enuma Elish reaches the creation story of Genesis, where the Hebrew words for the void (tohu) and the depths (tehom) are said to be cognate with Tiamat.³⁰ Peterson notes that despite surface differences between such stories, we see through metaphor their deep historical and psychological connections. This may be even more true of the complex web of stories out of Egypt.

Isis and Osiris

Egyptian mythology is very rich, and also exceptional. It flips the typical gender of the sky and earth deities³¹. More importantly for our purposes, it contains multiple deities one might identify with chaos; and similarly with order. That Peterson identifies chaos with Isis and order with Osiris might therefore seem tendentious. One could argue — by similar standards, even — that the goddess Nut or the goddess Hathor could attract the same label. All three have been credited with mothering the hero, Horus (and symbolically, therefore, the pharaohs)³². All three have a role in death and rebirth³³. For the purposes of this discussion, the choice matters little, all three being feminine. Seth, however, stands out as a possible exception.

Seth is indeed described elsewhere as a god of chaos³⁴. As compared to the candidates above — or even other traditions’ exemplars — the attribution seems weak. He murders the self-described ‘Master of Order’³⁵, Osiris, but for the purpose of usurping him. After his own defeat by Horus, he is neutered, taking the form of a boat that ferries his victim Osiris on the Nile.³⁶ By such measures, he is a poor fit for Peterson’s definition of chaos. Before overthrowing the model, however, it is worth considering Peterson’s analysis of Seth. In this, Seth doesn’t represent the unknown itself, but plays the role of a literal anti-hero, “the mythic ‘hostile twin’ or ‘adversary’ who eternally opposes the process of creative encounter with the unknown”.³⁷ If the hero is accepted as an aspect of experience distinct from both chaos and order, so must be its negation.

Attributing order is more interesting. Peterson considers Osiris to represent order, but only after also discussing Re. We should do the same.

The sun god Re was, like Tut-ankh-Amon, said to have “put order (ma’at) in the place of Chaos.” Ma’at is translated as ‘truth’ but is generally understood as ‘good order.’³⁸ Pharaohs were said to incarnate ma’at. If indeed its counterpart Isfet was thought to be embodied by Seth³⁹, this would be the strongest case for thinking him an exception. One of Re’s offspring took on the name Ma’at, and personifies the concept.⁴⁰ Neumann refers to her as the goddess of justice, and likens her to the Greek figure of Sophia — Wisdom — in the schema presented later.⁴¹ Unlike with precosmogonic chaos, for which it is trivial to find masculine examples, she is the first challenger we encounter to the male dominion over order.

Isis embodies chaos — mostly, unlike Tiamat, in its positive aspect. Osiris is her husband. In an unusual hieros gamos, after Osiris’ killing by her sibling Seth, Isis recovered Osiris’ dismembered phallus, and magically made herself pregnant. Her son Horus avenges his father by attacking his uncle. Ultimately triumphant, he recovers his eye ripped out during the battle, and travels to the underworld to reanimate his dead father. Both father and son are identified with the pharaoh: the deceased pharaoh “insur[ing] the prosperity of the kingdom ruled by his son”, and the new pharaoh⁴². Osiris, in Peterson’s view, represents at once a wise and fair ruler, but also reveals “the tendency of a (static) ruling idea … no matter how initially magnificent or appropriate — to become increasingly irrelevant with time … [and] the dangers that necessarily accrue to a state that ‘forgets’ or refuses to admit the existence of… [immortal evil].” Paralleling the creative potential exemplified by the Mesopotamian Tiamat, the disintegrating of this old order — its “descent into chaos” — can give rise to something new.⁴³

Isis may further affirm her husband’s embodying order through her very name. Literally “the seat,” “the throne,” she finds common ground with throne cults, which worship the symbol as the “seat of the godhead.”⁴⁴ As with many mythic phenomena, symbolic significance is reflected in etymology: here, the German “sitzen, ‘to sit’, besitzen, ‘to possess’; Besits ergreifen, ‘to seize possession’; and besessen sein, ‘to be possessed.’” The symbol’s connection with the feminine also comes through in Indian coronation rituals: “The king is made to sit on a throne which represents the womb.”⁴⁵

Why Egypt is unique in its varied gendering is mysterious. The frequency of female pharaohs may be relevant, though probably not a precondition. Less mysterious is why Isis and Osiris are primary in Peterson’s reading. They are most influential historically, both within and without Egypt.⁴⁶ Judging how profoundly stories resonate with humanity as a whole carries Darwinian logic — survival across time and space signals meaning. The sources of this meaning, we finally turn to.

A Method to the Madness?

Just as he noted some constraints for the stories that survive, Dr. Peterson suggests context for how cultures have represented chaos, the unknown as experienced — and specifically why these representations would tend to take feminine character.

The unknown, he says, is the matrix “from which determinate forms are borne.”⁴⁷ And since the female embodies this matrix for biological being, it thus serves meaningfully in metaphor as a ground to everything, nature itself. Female genitalia, being hidden and simultaneously a gateway to a source of creation, evoke the unknown and the novel. These promise and also threaten, as creation of a thing and transformation or destruction of another are entwined: themes that are recapitulated by the trauma and danger of birth, and the provision of milk. A child’s early dependence on the mother is echoed in adult subjection to the vicissitudes of nature.⁴⁸

Erich Neumann presents the following schema, useful for matching such embodied themes to cultural exemplars:

Recreation of ‘Schema III’ in Neumann, E. (1963, 2015), p. 82.

The aspects of containment and transformation in this schema manifest worldwide. In the pattern of hun-tun and Hundun, ma’at and Ma’at, they are concepts that permeate language, and symbolism that shapes deities.

Sometimes, individual deities possess the affective ambivalence Peterson described; as in the the cases of Isis and Artemis⁴⁹. The view here across many traditions reveals chaos’ ambivalence more definitively.

Instead of the order and chaos of Peterson’s description, Neumann is aligned more with psychoanalytic tradition, using the subtly different, less precise notions of consciousness and unconsciousness. Neumann indicates consciousness as generally, “in both sexes”⁵⁰, having a masculine symbolism as a result of life’s trajectory away from childhood dependence on the mother — with consciousness growing and unconsciousness receding⁵¹.

Besides the goddesses at the negative poles, Neumann also notes the more primitive figures. On the negative M pole, “such negatively demonic figures as the Erinyes, Furies, and lamias, the Empusae, witches, and so on.” At the negative A pole, “the alluring and seductive figures of fatal enchantment…; some specters like Lilith, the Lorelei, and others; and some, like Circe and Medea, personalized forms of primordial goddesses.” He contrasts these largely anonymous pluralities of the unconscious with the “consciousness-promoting” personages of the upper area⁵².

Reverence of the Feminine

Describing the promoting of consciousness as positive, Neumann’s model draws focus to the outcome. Peterson, characterising the same themes as conveying the unknown — with its emotional significance of both promise and threat directing exploratory behaviour — attends to the process.

Peterson is therefore more conceptually rigorous about — but Neumann expresses more vividly — the dangers of, to borrow Peterson’s language, excess order. Whereas Peterson in recent times diagnoses an excess of chaos, Neumann was earlier concerned with overbearing order:

It is “merely of the soul,” “merely” the highest form of an earthly and material development that stands in opposition to the “pure spirit” that in its Apollonian-Platonic and Jewish-Christian form has led to the abstract conceptuality of modern consciousness. But this modern consciousness is threatening the existence of Western mankind, for the one-sidedness of masculine development has led to a hypertrophy of consciousness at the expense of the whole man. Consequently the knowledge distilled by the abstracting collective consciousness of man — the knowledge of matter, for example — resides in the hands of earthly representatives of masculinity who seem by no means suited to incarnate the “pure incorporeal solar principle.” And, on the other hand, the character of wisdom and light belonging to the Archetypal Feminine ought not to be designated as “merely of the soul.” ⁵³

Such surveys of worldwide mythologies as Neumann’s suggest a reverence for the feminine. This valuing of the materia, he says, has diminished with the gnosticizing religions such as Christianity and Islam, with unnatural symbolic distortions — say, Eve taken out of Adam — being characteristically patriarchal. Peterson mentions the Vierge Ouvrante, a motif showing Mary in a superordinate position, as agreeing with a mythical, but contrary to a classical Christian view.⁵⁴ Some of this reverence, of course, was sexual. In a study of fertility cults of the ancient Near East, Allegro indicates that these cults’ attractiveness to women stemmed from their regard for her sexual power, as much as it provoked the later Church’s suspicion. That the telepathic, controlling power known worldwide as ‘the evil eye’ came from the same facility.⁵⁵ Neumann, like Peterson, claims that these myths arose from genuine experiences of the nature of the feminine, and were not merely male projections.⁵⁶ Such perspectives may carry a measure of golden age thinking. They also, through these traditions’ survival, earn serious attention.

Changing Wombs

The basic symbol of the ‘elementary character’ Neumann describes is the vessel. With both the womb and the breasts its metaphorical referents. This symbolism surfaces in the abstract, the substantial, and the ritual.

The most substantial being the earth itself. Its fertility is bound up with feminine fecundity, and as a result is assimilated to the womb. The mystery of Mother Earth is the mystery of the origin of life, its preservation through the food supply, death, and rebirth. Reflecting the experience of the rhythms of vegetation. Giving birth by herself, she is echoed in Olympian mythology, with Hera conceiving Hephaestus and Ares alone. Especially after the use of the plow, agriculture is tied to the sexual act. “Born of the Earth, man, when he dies, returns to his mother. ‘Crawl toward the earth, thy mother,’ the Vedic poet exclaims (Rig Veda 10. 18. 10).” ⁵⁷

The water of the earth or the womb preserves life and fosters growth, as does the milk of the breast. The baptism ritual to this day relates water with rebirth. Wisdom becomes the milk of wisdom.⁵⁸ Milk-giving animals such as the cow become sacral, both upon and above the earth⁵⁹; in early Egyptian beliefs, the Mother Goddess, taking the form of a cow, suckles the celestially reborn.⁶⁰ The first patera, or bowl, was — according to Greek tradition — modelled from Helen’s breast.⁶¹

Death

Just as pottery making has — from early traditions — been largely the domain of women⁶², so too has the administering of both medicines and poisons⁶³. Both qualities of containment and transformation place the feminine in relationship with death. Pandora, with her jar, brought fascination and death.⁶⁴ The terminal transformation brings us to the realm of the underworld.

Neumann poses an interesting question:

the anguish, horror, and fear of danger that the Archetypal Feminine signifies cannot be derived from any actual and evident attributes of woman. But since we find these negative psychic reactions so often related to the Terrible Mother, we must ask, What is the basis of this primordial human fear and how is it to be interpreted? ⁶⁵

Peterson’s analysis is again on firmer footing here. He doesn’t rely on the vague ties Neumann draws between the schema’s lower half and the unconscious. Instead, Peterson recognises — to borrow Neumann’s language this time — that anxiety can also be ‘consciousness promoting.’ Recognises the evolutionary advantage to having a sense of the hell to avoid.

The womb is the keystone in the metaphorical bridge connecting humanity to the underworld. The child is born of the mother’s and ultimately returns to the earth’s womb. For the sun or the hero, it is the liminal space between death and rebirth.⁶⁶ Neumann mentions that the cave and the gated entrance to it are often assimilated to the image of the underworld, and its role as a containing vessel. Both are important to the story of Izanami, the Japanese goddess of creation and death.⁶⁷ The cave is also captured, for example, in German etymologies:

Höhle, ‘cave’, Hel, the Germanic goddess of death; hohl, ‘hollow’, Halle, ‘hall’; Hülle, ‘covering’; Hülse, ‘husk’ or ‘pod’; and Helm, ‘helmet,’ [all deriving] from the root hel, ‘shelter.’ ⁶⁸

Egyptian burial practices, likewise, express the containing character of the feminine. Sarcophagi floors present the goddess Nut — of rebirth and also death, in her character Nuit — embracing the dead.⁶⁹

Like the sirens luring sailors with their song, myth reveals the magnetic quality of metaphor. Birds of the dead also respond to this pull. The vulture, the crow, and the raven, are frequent symbols of goddesses. The vulture is a symbol of the Egyptian mother goddess Nekhbet. The crow, the Celtic enchantress-goddess Morrigan. And the raven — in Old English called waelcēasig (corpse-choosing) — with the Valkyrie, waelcyrge.⁶⁹

Conclusions

In the presence of any spectacle like that of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, it is healthy curiosity to draw back the curtain in search of substance. This is the genesis of meaningful debate. Prematurely dismissing the subjectively grounded derails this effort. For the progressive as much as the conservative, the value in tradition comes not so much from the details but its attracting our attention to them. Not their idiosyncrasies but their relationship with each-other and with today. With us. With our language, our psychology, our biology.

Peterson’s work attempts to bridge these levels of analysis. This discussion has tried to inspect the bridge and some of its foundations. With a cross-section focus on feminine symbolism. Regarding Ancient Egypt, we can see reasonable people disagreeing about how exceptional Seth and Ma’at are locally. But placed on the world map outlined in this discussion, they are outliers. Supporting rather than refuting Peterson’s claim that chaos is generally represented by the feminine.