Man is a contradictory being and the depth of his soul is fathomless. Only a small part of it is illuminated by the light of consciousness while the chasm of the unconscious from which dreams come to light and myths emerge and where secret mechanisms controlling our desires, thoughts and actions operate, are too dark and immeasurable. The human unconscious is rooted in the biological, natural basis. The forces hidden there are akin to the forces of nature they are similarly powerful and no less blind, equally indestructible and all-devastating. And similarly to nature there is no place for good and evil in the dark basements of our unconscious. It is hard to overcome the ocean of one's passions, it is difficult to keep the rational part of one's brain lucid and calm, it is difficult to follow the way of good once a storm is raging on the ocean. Mythology, religious teachings and ritual practice are the means which have been worked out for centuries to help us to overpower our unconscious, to control the elemental forces of one's own soul.

Eros is one of the most profound forces. It is not by chance that the ancient Greeks called him "the fairest of the deathless gods" who conquers the souls "of gods and earthly people and deprive them of reason". It was not by chance that he was thought to emerge in the Universe one of the first, after Chaos, as all-winning creative force of nature. Together with Gaea-the Earth and Tartarus-the Underworld the "sweet-languishing" Eros emerges before Light and Darkness, before Night and Day, and before the Starry Sky Uranus, the father of gods. (Hesiod, Theogony, 119_130).

Not only the myths of the ancient Greeks, but also many other mythologies which existed in human history used the image of the union of male and female halves as a pattern for the creation of the Universe. The male god procreates and the female goddess bears other gods which personify various life phenomena, various parts and aspects of the Universe. Thus, Eros attracting gods and goddesses to each other, turns out to be a truly cosmic power creating the world. But the element of Eros is contradictory it can similarly contain loving attention and aggression, creativity and destruction. And similarly dubious are the ancient images of the great Mother Goddesses Ishtar, Ibis, Cybele, Demeter, Artemis of Ephesus, Gaea and Durga. The image of the Mother Goddess is associated with the earth and female creativity. It is contradictory because it is essentially integral it personifies life in all its complexity and wholeness, in all its variety successes and failures, joys and griefs, delights and sufferings. The Mother Goddess grants life, but it is also she who takes it away; she is benevolent and good-willing, but she can also be cruel and demanding and while in fury she is terrible and violent. The image of the goddess, both integral and contradictory, began to fall apart and differentiate in the course of time. Her different aspects turned out to imply various qualities and functions. Thus, we know Demeter as the goddess of agriculture, productive soil, fruitfulness of mankind and animals, and guardian of marriage. The goddess favours people she taught them ploughing and sowing after her sacred marriage on the thrice-ploughed field in Crete with the real god of agriculture (as a result Plutus, the god of riches and wealth, was born).

But also worshipped was the goddess Demeter Erinys, who personified the features of unbridled and wild aspect of the Great Mother. The sea god Poseidon married her when she changed herself into a mare, in the guise of a powerful stallion. However, after a purifying washing in the river the "furious and vengeful" Demeter acquired her positive aspect once again. Next to the Mother Goddess we often meet the image of a male god. He is also non-homogenous, double-sided he is either a suffering, dying and then resurrecting god like Attis, Adonis and Tammuz or a powerful god-creator like Zeus and Shiva.

The cults of the Mother Goddesses, as known from historical evidence, are dark and orgiastic, connected with wild ecstatic frenzy, evil charms, sexual outbursts and, on the contrary, with abstinence and self-castration.

But the most archaic ideas were connected, probably, with the weak awareness and expression in myths of the power and elemental force of sexual attraction as such. These notions related not only to real people, men and women, but mainly to mythological creatures totemistic first ancestors and other creatures which lived in the mythical eras of the creation. Replete with primitive eroticism are the myths of the Australian aborigines, who belong to the most archaic peoples inhabiting the Earth. These myths narrate about the travels and deeds of their ancestors of the Dreamtime, about their daily occupations hunting and fishing, conflicts and quarrels ending sometimes in injuries and murders, relations among different generations and between different sexes, including sexual pursuits of women. In some myths both man and his penis are equally participating characters.

Force, health and luck and that is qualities making up one's vitality were the most essential and highly esteemed features in archaic cultures. One of the forms in which these qualities, regarded as the manifestations of benevolence of ancestors or other mythological characters, were revealed was a heightened sexual potentiality.

We know little about the Stone Age mythology, because no written evidence has reached us from these remote eras, but a sign of the female sex, a vulva triangle, is present in the earliest cave drawings in combinations with an animal figure. Perhaps ancient hunters believed that the female genital organ would attract a beast in the same way as it attracted themselves.

Further on, during the Ancient Stone Age, the various images of naked women with emphasized genitals were spread practically all over Europe. These included realistically carved statuettes of stone and mammoth ivory, stone bas-reliefs, more schematic and conventionally executed drawings and engravings on the walls of caves, on stone slabs and on bone plaquettes. It is difficult to decipher what kind of message these representations had but one might surmise that, like in a previous period, sexual power and women's attraction seemed to be related to beasts too, and probably these representations could be connected with the image of the Mother or Mistress of animals. It is not by chance that in many surviving archaic mythologies the goddess of hunting is a woman and it is she who bestows happiness and luck upon the hunter in his game-shooting inducing him to make a sexual intercourse. It is noteworthy that just the opposite was very frequent in real life sexual abstinence before and during hunting.

Such are the archaic notions of people about the elemental power of Eros which were reflected in myths and fine arts.

Christianity opened up and asserted a sublime, spiritual love, caritas. The human soul became aware of the problem of the struggle of good and evil and the path to perfection through love and making good has been revealed. The human spirit spared no pains to ascend to the higher level trying to pursue the principle of general love in the cruel conditions of real enmity, as a fulfilment of the demand to "love your enemies, do good to them which hate you" (Luke 6: 27), whereas in that period even the declaration of these principles put the life of a Christian believer in danger. Christianity, in its theory, amassed within it all that was good, bright, radiant with love (Civitas Dei) and opposed itself to the outer world which was declared evil, dark and hateful. The great mission of Christianity is the assertion of the very idea of great and absolute love, the assertion of the necessity of active love to God through love to man, of the necessity to make good, to reveal mercy and self-sacrifice.

However, natural forces, which were esti mated negatively, remained beyond the borders of the Civitas Dei, outside the Ship-Church the Nature itself, including man's own nature, his flesh, was not accepted. Only human spirit was admitted to the Civitas Dei. Eroticism and sex were regarded by Christianity as something base and shameful. The mortification of the flesh, asceticism, the celibate of priests and monastic principles all this is an integral and essential part of Christian practical life.

And nature, unsanctified and neglected, took vengeance for itself. In reality man is integral and his sexual urges would not disappear when suppressed or despised they would rather tend to take the misshapen forms of erotic ecstasies, beliefs in witchcraft and a contemptuous attitude towards women: "Woman is the incarnation of sin", "The evil itself is nothing in comparison with woman", "Woman is the gate leading to hell." Of the same origin are various sexual perversions which had place in monasteries and convents and the breaches of celibacy by priests.

If Christianity split, so to speak, human nature, sanctifying only its spiritual part and encouraging one to struggle with the elemental forces of one's soul by suppressing them, the religions of the East, Yogic and Buddhist practices preserved the integrity of human nature and curbed Eros by putting it as a means of the spiritual ascension of man, of the amplification of man's consciousness.