Lisette Thooft is a Dutch writer, speaker and freelance journalist.

She calls herself  a mythosofer.

Mythosofy is the study of the wisdom in myths and fairy tales. Stories are symbolically understood and interpreted, a bit like one would try to understand a dream. Myths and fairy tales are seen as collective dreams, sprung forth from the collective unconscious.

 For example: the story about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden tells us that woman was the first to become conscious of her sexual nature. This process of waking up threw mankind out of the paradisical state of unconsciousness. In prehistoric times women must have dominated men, at least sexually and emotionally.
 

 Man-woman vision

The interaction between man and woman has propelled mankind out of its animal state. This primordial tug-of-war has always fuelled, and still fuels, our social evolution.

Purely from a physical point of view, for the female the impulse is a movement that draws the other into herself. The womb is a hollow that needs to be filled: 'Get it in!'

For the male the most elementary impulse is to project himself onto the outer world. The testicles are full and tense and need to be emptied: 'Get it out!'

 

But looked at from a spiritual viewpoint the feminine impulse strives for connection, for love - and the masculine strives for freedom. Love and freedom are the two basic qualities that any person needs to develop in order to become fully human. They may seem contradictory, but ultimately will need to be fused within the individual. This is the 'hieros gamos', the holy marriage of the soul.

 

But either side can only reach their own goal when they incorporate the goal of the other. For as long as a woman wants connection only, without freedom, her love is strangling, suffocating. She is a dragon, trying to devour what she loves.

And if a man wants freedom without love, he ends up superrich but all alone. He is like a robot, shrewd and rational but empty inside, soul-less, heart-less and basically absent.

 

In the old times mankind strove to overcome its animal nature, which was projected onto woman. This fight was symbolized in countless mythical stories about heroes fighting dragons.

The myth of our times is the great fight between man and cyborg, robot or machine. It symbolizes that we now struggle with 'supernature', our masculine egotism, the inclination to sacrifice humanity to technological progress and profit.

 

Work

Lisette Thooft developed her mythosofical views in several non-fiction books, three of which have been translated into German.

She is also a freelance journalist for a range of spiritual magazines and websites in the Netherlands.

She is often invited as a public speaker on subjects like gender and sexuality, spirituality and menopause.