Joseph Campbell - Meeting with Godess/Woman as Temptress

There exists a very general association on the one hand between the notion of mind, spirit or soul and the idea of the father or of masculinity; and on the other hand between the notion of the body or of matter (materia - that which belongs to the mother) and the idea of the mother or of the feminine principle. Pg 113
Professor Flugel

Kali as balance, fear of death, comfort of life.

Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know.

By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.

Cupid & Psyche

The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero's total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of
realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he know that he and the father are one: he is in the father's place.

Every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness.

The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero's passage is that it shall serves as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale.

Acknowledgement of the darkness of humanity, inherent in our very body, causes revulsion of life, and woman in particular as the great symbol of life.

Demonification of the female, transcending earthly planes, embracing the spiritual through chastity.