Father, Mother, Child
It takes the normal individual 20 or 30 years to find out that his parents are ordinary sized mortals and not Napoleons, saints or devils, and some people never find this out, but carry these images with them throughout their lives.
~Carl Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, Page 146.
Our parents in the Garden of Eden also found the apple a prelude to something unpleasant, that is to doing some work. ~Jung, Modern Psychology, Vol. 2, 180.
Parents must realize that they are trees from which the fruit falls in the autumn. Children don't belong to their parents, and they are only apparently produced by them.
In reality they come from a thousand-year-old stem, or rather from many stems, and often they are about as characteristic of their parents as an apple on a fir-tree. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 217-218.
May love be subject to torment, but not life. As long as love goes pregnant with life, it should be respected; but if it has given birth to life from itself it has turned into an empty sheath and expires into transience. ~Carl Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Page 327
I speak against the mother who bore me, I separate myself from the bearing womb. I speak no more for the sake of love, but for the sake of life. ~ Jung to his Ego, Liber Novus, Pg 327.
Marriage is indeed a brutal reality, yet the experimentum crucis of life. I hope you learn to endure and not to struggle against the suppressing necessities of fate. Only thus you remain in the centre. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 172-173.
This perfect being is a conception of an optimum of life, and it is symbolically represented as the all-round being. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture 10, Page 81.
The coniunctio in alchemy is a union of the masculine and feminine, of the spiritual and material principles, from which a perfect body arises, the glorified body after the Last Judgement, the resurrection body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 159.
Frida Kahlo
On Children
Kahlil Gibran
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
The child's psyche is unconscious, an animal psyche if you like to express it that way, and very gradually a conscious condition develops. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 213
The individual experience is woven in to this tissue, so it is of vital importance, where we come from, who our parents are, and what our early surroundings were.
We say that a person has such and such a character, but one is born with a form which can only be changed with the greatest difficulty. ~Jung, ETH Lecture XII, 1Feb1935, Page 179.
We make the great mistake of thinking that children are born a tabula rasa, but this is not the case. They are born with a vast inherited memory which contains a subjective content to meet everything which they contact externally. ~Carl Jung, Lecture V 25May1934, Page 108.
This [psyche] disproves the theory that a child's mind is a tabula rasa, for it shows us that the unconscious is no empty surface, but a prepared ground; the brain is complete with the history of the world and every child is born with an unconscious assumption of the world. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Pages 27.
There is no escape from this psychic background with which we enter life, it can only be accepted, we are bound to see the world through our own inborn temperament. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture V, Pages 27.
What remains of the father?
On the subject of the father psychoanalysis has written pages more intense from different angles. Even in recent years the reflections are not lost in the various schools of thought, converging on mitologema of " absence " with a contribution of particular success editorial. The absence of the father " sells "! In Italy has distinguished himself the job psicostorico and socio-analytical of Luigi Zoja, translated into different languages (" The gesture of hector. Prehistory, History, Topical and disappearance of the father ") As well as the personal success of the maximum lacaniano recalcati that the theme of the absence of the father has dedicated Ben two books!! (" What remains of the father? Fatherhood in the era ipermoderna ", 2011 and " the complex of telemaco. Parents and children after the sunset of the father ", 2014). To these reflections has not been deducted James Hillman, that starting times not suspects, he wrote words strong and, in my opinion, extremely significant, inquadrandole always on a background legendary and archetypal.
These words of Hillman deserve a particularly careful reflection and worth riproporle:
" when the father is absent we seek more easily the arms of the mother. And the father really miss. God is dead. And we can't go back by supporting the religion of the senex. The Father is not missing my or your father staff but the father absent from our culture, the senex vital that proxy not the daily bread but the ' Spirit ' through the meaning and the next. The Father missing is the God of the dead that it offered a focus for things spiritual. Without this focus we are heading to the ' dreams ' and the ' instead of ' oracles to prayer, to the code, the tradition and the ritual. When the mother replaces the Father Magic Replaces the ' logos ', And the children-priests contaminating the spirit of the puer. Unable to go back and Resurrect The Dead Father of tradition, we go down, in the mothers of the collective unconscious, in search of an understanding that covers everything. We are asking for help to pass through the cramped, strettoie without damage; the son wants the invulnerability. Give us protection, precognition; take care of us love. Our prayer is addressed to the night why give us a dream, or a love because we understand, to a small rite or an exercise to reach a moment of wisdom. But, above all, we want the insurance, through a vision in advance, that everything is going to end well. Here again the reason of protection, and a protection of a specific type: Invulnerability [not vulnerability, not feribilità], Precognition, guarantee that everything will be fine, it does not matter what ".
Apparently God the Father is thought of here as the soul, the anima mundi, which is the centre of the world, and which at the same time enfolds the whole world, or rather the universe including the starry heavens. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 198.
Love between subjectivity and identity.
I pondered on the extraordinary fresco of Piero Della Francesca, " The Madonna of childbirth ", Dating from between 1455 and 1465 and stored in the museum of monterchi (arezzo). But my reflection was not so much on the amazing beauty of this Madonna in foal, how much instead on the sense of the relationship between identity, subjectivity and love, which I consider to be a sort of triptych of the manifestations of being creative and somehow mentioned by the identity of the subjects in flux, Paintings in the fresco. " know yourself and you will know the universe and the Gods " is written on the frontone of the temple in delphi. The exhortation socratica they tried to give an answer very many characters of Greek mythology. I think for example of oedipus that deeply troubled and tormented by the crucial question, approached the delphic pythia do to ask you: " who am i?". Now the answer to this question, in order to be the subject of knowledge and made operational, cannot that arrive from the same seeker, from each of us. He says fine Annick De Souzenelle about it: " the true master leads the disciple to find the light inside of itself. She invites him to scortecciare his question, like the would break the shell hard under which rests a ripe fruit in order to seize and eat. The request into the record of a man is always the emergence of a concrete hidden treasure until that moment, that asks to make itself known. The honey can only come from the person who is in possession... The Tree That's the man is essentially tree of knowledge. The identity of the man he discovers insofar as salt the sap of his tree. The Master outside can just fertilize the earth, and sarchiarla inaffiarla, but " God only makes it grow "! And the strength of this growth is that of eros ", Of love...
Image: " the Madonna of childbirth ", Piero Della Francesca, Fresco, 1455, size 260 × 203 cm
Susan Waitt commission, Malta, 4'x6'
The Sacred Masculine ~
In the last few decades we have started to see a re-awakening of our awareness of the Sacred Masculine. This consciousness is not confined to men - although men are the group in our society who are often out-of-touch with their spiritual essence. In the same way that both men and women have a feminine aspect to their conscious make-up, so too do both genders have a masculine aspect.
For over two thousand years many cultures have ascribed or assigned the male gender to their gods. The Divine is most often referred to as 'He'. We have become accustomed to thinking of God as male. Yet the Divine Feminine has also had a strong presence throughout history. The Goddess takes many forms and names: Isis, Diana, Gaia, Yin, Hecate, Brigid, Venus, Moon, ... to name just a few.
This introduction to the Sacred Masculine explores some of the ways in which male spirituality is now being understood and experienced. In a recent book on the subject, Matthew Fox asserts: "When the Sacred Masculine is combined with the sacred feminine inside each of us, we create the 'sacred marriage' of compassion and passion in ourselves."
The Sacred Masculine is most often presented through archetypes, metaphors and images. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette were pioneers of the modern-day men's movement. They identified four classic archetypes of the man in touch with his sacred self, that they named King, Warrior, Magician and Lover.
~The King archetype is the fully conscious male commanding leadership with respect. He is associated with authority, order, law and direction. He has two shadow 'wings' identified as the Tyrant and the Weakling. The immature boy version of the King is the Divine Child that can also be a child-tyrant or a weakling.
~The Warrior archetype is the holy campaigner or activist. He has courage, persistence and devotion. He has two shadow aspects of the Sadist and the Masochist. His immature boy version is the Hero, that can descend into the bully or the coward.
~The Magician archetype is full of consciousness, growth and transformation, often associated with our 'third eye' of insight and intuition. His shadow side can be exposed as the Manipulator or the denying Innocent. His immature boy version is the Prococious Child, that can descend into the trickster or the dummy.
~The Lover archetype is sensual and delightful, appreciating goodness, truth and beauty. His shadow sides include the Addicted Lover and the Impotent Lover. His immature boy self is the Oedipal Child, that can descend into mama's boy or the dreamer.
These archetypes are offered as the classic expressions of male figures of sacred spirituality. In traditional cultures, all four archetypes were found, and all four are needed for balance within the healthy community. Increasingly, our present-day communities are dominated by men demonstrating the unhealthy shadow sides of these archetypes. It is interesting to review a book/film such as Lord of the Rings to see just how these archetypes play out in such clear roles. Eventually Strider / Aragorn emerges into his true manhood as the fully conscious King of the third book. What we lack today are real, true King figures. How many can you name that exhibit the characteristics of the healthy, conscious, self-aware King that includes aspects of at least one or two other archetypes? Nelson Mandela, Ghandi, Martin Luther King come to mind ... but then we start to struggle.
Another pioneer advocate of male spirituality is Fr. Richard Rohr. He argues that one of the main reasons why male spirituality has become lost is that we no longer initiate adolescent males into the adult world; the traditional rights-of-passage for manhood have been abandoned and without this teaching and mentoring, young men have lost touch with their role and their function.
Rohr charts the male spiritual journey in two halves. The first stage of ascent occupies the first 40 years of life and involves making and keeping promises to grow. Most of this time is spend in the Heroic Journey involving idealism, power, potential, love, responsibility, self-control and sacrifice. This leads to Self-Identity - an awareness of personal boundaries and an eventual willingness to let go of the self. This progression depends on satisfactory male initiation as the boy enters manhood. Without such initiation, the Angry Young Man never gets to experience his own power or goodness satisfactorily, starts to act out negatively, and becomes the Young Fool.
The second stage of descent starts somewhere between ages 35 and 50 where the conscious man "needs to rest in God's promises and model the wholeness/holiness for others". Some men don't develop from Self-Identity and just become the Old Fool. Others do continue to develop and face the Crisis of Limitation (the mid-life crisis) sensing a loss of inner meaning and potential failure arising from their own limitations and paradoxes. The heroic virtues don't work anymore, and humility, honesty and a surrender to God's control start to emerge. Some men become Embittered: they confront these challenges but without reaching enlightenment or acceptance. Others enter the Wisdom Journey, letting go of their old form with spiritual guidance, surrender, patience and acceptance; the time of sacrifice is replaced by mercy. The end of the Wisdom Journey is reached by the Holy Fool - the mellow grandfather able to live with paradox who returns to simplicity and humanity.
I strongly recommend the Men's Rites of Passage, created by Richard Rohr and others, if you would like to explore this journey further
Most recently, in 2008, Matthew Fox has created a wonderful exploration and synthesis of sacred masculinity. He too argues that male spirituality has become hidden and unacknowledged through fear and disconnection. He seeks to reconnect us with ten powerful metaphors for the sacred male:
-Father Sky - the cosmic view of father above and mother (earth) below.
-The Green Man - the original eco-man of oneness with nature represented in so many images
-Icarus and Daedalus - the classic father/son relationship engaged in creativity and invention as well as rebellion and flight
-Hunter-Gatherers - the traditional male role of providing that requires ritual, intelligence and creativity
-Spiritual Warriors - the community leaders both ancient and modern providing guidance
-Masculine Sexuality and Numinous Sexuality - human diversity as seen through the variety of sexual expression and the cosmic wonders of DNA
-Our Cosmic and Animal Bodies - rediscovering the amazing human body with its energy centres and amazing capacity for evolution and reproduction
-The Blue Man - the 'blue light' in everyman's heart and our awareness of expanding consciousness
-Earth Father - the role and value of the paternal heart and how we use it
-Grandfather Sky - the grandfatherly heart and the contribution which this wisdom can make, including our understanding of death.
This is a truly profound exploration of how reconnecting with our Sacred Masculine can help us all to grow in awareness and spiritual consciousness as human beings.http://www.timpickles.com/sacred-male.html
Just as the father represents collective consciousness, the traditional spirit, so the mother stands for the collective unconscious, the source of the water of life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 71.
To a man the anima is the Mother of God who gives birth to the Divine Child. To a woman the animus is the Holy Spirit, the procreator. He is at once the light and the dark God -- not the Christian God of Love who contains neither the Devil nor the Son. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Pages 31-32.
But no matter how much parents and grandparents may have sinned against the child, the man who is really adult will accept these sins as his own condition which has to be reckoned with. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 117.
"Know that the sun is your father,the moon your mother. The wind bears you in its womb and the earth nurses you. You are more than your body, more than your emotions, and more than your mind. You are something else. From you will come the golden flower, the alchemical essence. Of this no man may speak. Such matters must be transmitted in mystical terms like employing fables and parables. The purpose of life is to square the circle. The four, the three and the two must become one. From the marriage of the opposites, the royal marriage of king and the queen, is born the philosophers stone, the fifth essence." - Carl Gustav Jung
I, your soul, am your mother, who tenderly and frightfully surrounds you,
your nourisher and corrupter; I prepare good things and poison for you.
I am your intercessor with Abraxas.
I teach you the arts that protect you from Abraxas.
I stand between you and Abraxas the all-encompassing.
I am your body, your shadow, your effectiveness in this world, your manifestation in the world of the Gods, your effulgence, your breath, your odor, your magical force.
You should call me if you want to live with men, but the one God if you want to rise above the human world to the divine and eternal solitude of the star. ~Carl Jung; The Red Book; Appendix C; Page 371.
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The Great Mother is the nurturer. The Great Mother appears in your dreams as your own mother, grandmother, or other nurturing figure. She provides you with positive reassurance. Negatively, they may be depicted as a witch or old bag lady in which case they can be associated with seduction, dominance and death. This juxtaposition is rooted in the belief by some experts that the real mother who is the giver of life is also at the same time jealous of our growth away from her.
When, in the development of this child, the great amnesia will have obscured the Bardo world with its primeval images, such a dream will shine like a spark from the lost paradise, and remind him that he, who lives down on earth, also has an immortal, versatile soul of divine nature. ~Carl Jung, Children's Dreams Seminar, Page 290.
Children are in the collective unconscious until they acquire a small consciousness of their personality, until they say "I," or "me," or their name. They are rooted in the collective unconscious and are uprooted from it by the flood of impressions from the outside. They know everything, but they lose the memory of it. ~C. G. Jung, Emma Jung and Toni Wolff - A Collection of Remembrances; Pages 51-70.
“The greatest tragedy of the family is the unlived lives of the parents.” -JungHe who stems from two mothers is the hero: the first birth makes him a mortal man, the second an immortal half-god. ~Carl Jung (Cited in Segal 155-156)
By "Thy Will" one person may mean only what his unconscious dictates, while another may disregard all his thoughts and aspirations and fatalistically accept all that happens in his outer life. To some people we must say, “You must choose your own way; you must act.” Others have to learn to refrain from acting. Few take both into account, which is why Deus et home is so important.” ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 39.
The spirit of this time of course allowed me to believe in my reason. He let me see myself in the image of a leader with ripe thoughts. But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child: This dictum Was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 235
The parents are like Gods to the child. God as Father or Mother is an archetype.
Whether you call the principle of existence "God” "matter," "energy," or anything else you like, you have created nothing; you have simply changed a symbol. The materialist is a metaphysician.
Faith, on the other hand, tries to retain a primitive mental condition on merely sentimental grounds. It is unwilling to give up the primitive, childlike relationship to mind-created and hypostatized figures; it wants to go on enjoying the security and confidence of a world still presided over by powerful, responsible, and kindly parents.
Faith may include a sacrificium intellects (provided there is an intellect to sacrifice), but certainly not a sacrifice of feeling. In this way the faithful remain children instead of becoming as children, and they do not gain their life because they have not lost it.
Furthermore, faith collides with science and thus gets its deserts, for it refuses to share in the spiritual adventure of our age. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Religion, Paragraphs 762-763.
To a man the anima is the Mother of God who gives birth to the Divine Child.
To a woman the animus is the Holy Spirit, the procreator.
He is at once the light and the dark God -- not the Christian God of Love who contains neither the Devil nor the Son. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung; Pages 31-32.
A woman is oriented towards the animus because it is the son of the unknown father, the Old Sage, whom she never comes to know. This motive is hinted at in the Gnostic texts where Sophia in her madness loves the Great Father On the other hand a man does not know the mother of the anima. She may be personified, for example, in Sophia or the seven times veiled Isis. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 30.
Ordinary men make their bodies through thoughts.
The body is not only the 7 ft. tall outer body.
In the body is the Anima.
The Anima, having produced consciousness, adheres to it.
Consciousness depends for its origin on the anima.
The Anima is feminine (Yin), the substance of consciousness.
As long as this consciousness is not interrupted, it continues to beget from generation to generation, and the changes of form of the anima and the transformations of substance are unceasing. ~Richard Wilhelm, The Secret of the Golden FlowerJung on the Animus
The power operating through the animus emanates specifically from the self, which is hidden behind it, and from its mana.
According to my view the animus can be either positive or negative.
He is like a dragon guarding the bridge trying to prevent us from reaching the other bank.
If we do not try to evade him, but go on courageously he becomes transparent and we can pass through without any harm.
If we run away because the dragon seems too powerful we lose some of our vital energy and become soulless.
Many people go on being soulless for a long time but the bill is presented in the end.
If a woman does not follow her animus she loses both the direction and capacity for development.
A particle split off from the mother's animus can enter her children and act like an evil spirit.
As soon as the mother integrates this animus side of her soul, her children are freed. The animus which is not realized by the
mother is like a part of a soul with a relative existence of its own.
When a mother attempts to live consciously through her animus her son has a chance to avoid becoming a puer aeternus.
If she does not, her animus forces the son to think for her. He is seduced to spiritual heights, finally falling to his death.
When the woman experiences the mystery of creativeness in herself, in her own inner world, she is doing the right thing and then no longer demands it from the outside -- from her husband, her son, or anyone else close to her.
A woman should in some way harness herself to the animus (yoga).
She should take care that her animus does not escape because if it gets away from her unnoticed and falls into the unconscious, it can be destructive.
A woman should constantly control the animus: by undertaking some intellectual work, for example: if the woman is an analyst I do not just mean the work she does with her
patients, but some other work that she does on her own.
Writing an article or giving a lecture can be helpful.
A woman's climacteric is a time when one part of the psyche tries to leave the body whilst another part wishes to remain.
One part clings and the other runs away.
If this part falls into the unconscious it becomes a part of the animus.
Hildegard von Bingen transcended the animus; that is one woman's service to the spirit.
A woman is oriented towards the animus because it is the son of the unknown father, the Old Sage, whom she never comes to know.
This motive is hinted at in the Gnostic texts where Sophia in her madness loves the Great Father.
On the other hand a man does not know the mother of the anima. She may be personified, for example, in Sophia or the seven times veiled Isis.
When a woman feels she is "understood", caution is indicated.
When a woman has a very strong animus she can do terrible things.
Many a woman has been driven to disaster by her animus.
If we try to make clear to such a woman, for instance, that the man she wants to marry has been divorced three times and she is not likely to be happy as his fourth wife,
she just remains animus-possessed.
She is sure she is right, because she believes she is an exception.
She thinks she can exert her will upon life and so she runs headlong to disaster.
Some destinies must be fulfilled whatever happens.
When a woman realizes her shadow the animus can be constellated.
If the shadow remains in the unconscious the animus possesses her through the shadow.
When she realizes her animus, mystical generation can occur.
Sarah was Abraham's legitimate wife, but Hagar, the dark one, had the procreative animus.
Out of darkness the light is born.
If a woman dreams of a superior role she wants to assume in the world, it is best to advise her to write an article or an essay about her wishes, or to read some pertinent books and make an abstract.
She must be taken seriously so that she can keep her animus busy.
She can then see where she stands and what is lacking in order to carry out her plans.
Knights in the Middle Ages paid their "minne" homage to "The Lady Soul."
A woman's service to a man has a spiritual aspect; a man's to a woman has an emotional one.
The erotic aspect that emerges from both is only the undifferentiated outer aspect, the primitive outer coloring, the vehicle, the base of the relationship.
The higher aspects of the man's and the woman's service to each other are in the clouds. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Pages 29-31.
Since the relation of the ego to the self is like that of the son to the father, we can say that when the self calls on us to sacrifice ourselves, it is really carrying out the sacrificial act on itself.
We know, more or less, what this act means to us, but what it means to the self is not so clear.
As the self can only be comprehended by us in particular acts, but remains concealed from us as a whole because it is more comprehensive than we are, all we can do is draw conclusions from the little of the self that we can experience.
We have seen that a sacrifice only takes place when we feel the self actually carrying it out in ourselves.
We may also venture to surmise that insofar as the self stands to us in the relation of father to son, the self in some sort feels our sacrifice as a sacrifice of itself.
From that sacrifice we gain ourselves - our "self" - for we have only what we give.
But what does the self gain?
We see it entering into manifestation, freeing itself from unconscious projection, and as it grips us, entering into our lives and so passing from unconsciousness into consciousness, from potentiality into actuality.
What it is in the diffuse unconscious state we do not know; we only know that in becoming our self it has become human. ~Carl Jung; "Transformation Symbolism in the Mass"; CW 11, par. 398.
The power operating through the animus emanates specifically from the self, which is hidden behind it, and from its mana.
According to my view the animus can be either positive or negative.
He is like a dragon guarding the bridge trying to prevent us from reaching the other bank.
If we do not try to evade him, but go on courageously he becomes transparent and we can pass through without any harm.
If we run away because the dragon seems too powerful we lose some of our vital energy and become soulless.
Many people go on being soulless for a long time but the bill is presented in the end.
If a woman does not follow her animus she loses both the direction and capacity for development.
A particle split off from the mother's animus can enter her children and act like an evil spirit.
As soon as the mother integrates this animus side of her soul, her children are freed. The animus which is not realized by the
mother is like a part of a soul with a relative existence of its own.
When a mother attempts to live consciously through her animus her son has a chance to avoid becoming a puer aeternus.
If she does not, her animus forces the son to think for her. He is seduced to spiritual heights, finally falling to his death.
When the woman experiences the mystery of creativeness in herself, in her own inner world, she is doing the right thing and then no longer demands it from the outside -- from her husband, her son, or anyone else close to her.
A woman should in some way harness herself to the animus (yoga).
She should take care that her animus does not escape because if it gets away from her unnoticed and falls into the unconscious, it can be destructive.
A woman should constantly control the animus: by undertaking some intellectual work, for example: if the woman is an analyst I do not just mean the work she does with her
patients, but some other work that she does on her own.
Writing an article or giving a lecture can be helpful.
A woman's climacteric is a time when one part of the psyche tries to leave the body whilst another part wishes to remain.
One part clings and the other runs away.
If this part falls into the unconscious it becomes a part of the animus.
Hildegard von Bingen transcended the animus; that is one woman's service to the spirit.
A woman is oriented towards the animus because it is the son of the unknown father, the Old Sage, whom she never comes to know.
This motive is hinted at in the Gnostic texts where Sophia in her madness loves the Great Father.
On the other hand a man does not know the mother of the anima. She may be personified, for example, in Sophia or the seven times veiled Isis.
When a woman feels she is "understood", caution is indicated.
When a woman has a very strong animus she can do terrible things.
Many a woman has been driven to disaster by her animus.
If we try to make clear to such a woman, for instance, that the man she wants to marry has been divorced three times and she is not likely to be happy as his fourth wife,
she just remains animus-possessed.
She is sure she is right, because she believes she is an exception.
She thinks she can exert her will upon life and so she runs headlong to disaster.
Some destinies must be fulfilled whatever happens.
When a woman realizes her shadow the animus can be constellated.
If the shadow remains in the unconscious the animus possesses her through the shadow.
When she realizes her animus, mystical generation can occur.
Sarah was Abraham's legitimate wife, but Hagar, the dark one, had the procreative animus.
Out of darkness the light is born.
If a woman dreams of a superior role she wants to assume in the world, it is best to advise her to write an article or an essay about her wishes, or to read some pertinent books and make an abstract.
She must be taken seriously so that she can keep her animus busy.
She can then see where she stands and what is lacking in order to carry out her plans.
Knights in the Middle Ages paid their "minne" homage to "The Lady Soul."
A woman's service to a man has a spiritual aspect; a man's to a woman has an emotional one.
The erotic aspect that emerges from both is only the undifferentiated outer aspect, the primitive outer coloring, the vehicle, the base of the relationship.
The higher aspects of the man's and the woman's service to each other are in the clouds. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Pages 29-31.
For a man the archetype of service to a woman is overpowering;for him it is a strong spiritual symbol.
This was understood and cultivated in the Middle Ages.
For a woman the animus is an image with a natural aim; she wants marriage , a child and a home. But a man takes a more religious attitude to this.
A man motivates a given situation in a very different way from the woman on whom he has projected his anima.
A woman usually experiences the situation quite differently.
A man frequently has a beautiful picture of his anima, but if the woman on whom he has projected his anima spoke and revealed her motivation, a very different picture would appear.
The man thinks she is heavenly, a ravishing Mother of God, because he is fascinated and a little intoxicated.
But he has not completely grasped the image of the woman if he has not also seen her icy darkness, her cruelty, her plots, her cold serpent-like blood, her capacity
for robbery by stealth.
When a woman sets her sights too high and asks too much of herself we are tempted to ask, "What does she want to escape from?"
She puts herself on a very high level to escape from the dark plans she would really like to execute.
She must be given a cold shower to bring her down to earth from her presumption.
Thoughts from the animus always lead one away from human relationships.
A woman needs to discover the love which clothes sin.
We cannot deliberately sin; we have to be in love in order to sin. Power dominates where love does not rule.
The anima is the handmaiden of the male principle.
The animus must not be allowed to be a possessive demon but must be taken in hand by the woman.
Then it will lead her to her destined wholeness and her self will emerge from it. "God must be repeatedly reborn in the soul."
To a man the anima is the Mother of God who gives birth to the Divine Child.
To a woman the animus is the Holy Spirit, the procreator.
He is at once the light and the dark God -- not the Christian God of Love who contains neither the Devil nor the Son. Primeval history is the story of the beginning of consciousness by differentiation from the archetypes. It leads to the fire whose origin lies in a crime. A man on this earth carries the flame of consciousness within him. Individual existence is the crime against the gods, disobedience to God, the peccatum originale.
Out of this projection of spiritual fire is born the anima. The coldness of the psyche is in opposition to the warmth of the fire. The anima comes out of an emotional act, taking place in darkness, the compensation for the crime against the fire; the anima is the compensating element that must be extracted from matter.
It must be begotten by a creative act to compensate for the rape of the fire. A man needs to be hostile to woman in order to free himself from the "Baubo" that he sees in his mother.
When the Primeval Mother is overcome the anima can become a world consciousness; she must be chiseled from the essence. The seed of the anima is only productive when man can subordinate his libido to the female principle.
If he does not succeed the anima runs away and the man turns to violence to find himself -- to the tormenting of those around him or the boasting of self-importance.
It naturally makes a great difference in practice to a woman whether a man projects a positive or negative anima on to her , but psychologically speaking they are equivalent projections. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung.
'Woman is the molder of time, the molder of space and of man: the man of tomorrow, the child; the man of today, the husband, and the men of yesterday, the ancestors. The entire society, in theory and in reality is based on the spirit of the woman.' - Yogi Bhajan
A mother-complex is not got rid of by blindly reducing the mother to human proportions. Besides that we run the risk of dissolving the experience “Mother” into atoms, thus destroying something supremely valuable and throwing away the golden key which a good fairy laid in our cradle. That is why mankind has always instinctively added the pre-existent divine pair to the personal parents-the “god”father and “god”-mother of the newborn child-so that, from sheer unconsciousness or shortsighted rationalism, he should never forget himself so far as to invest his own parents with divinity.
“Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” (1939) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious P.172
The Mother Archetype:
Like any other archetype, the mother archetype appears under an almost infinite variety of aspects. I mention here only some of the more characteristic.
First in importance are the personal mother and grandmother, stepmother and mother-in-law; then any woman with whom a relationship exists—for example, a nurse or governess or perhaps a remote ancestress. Then there are what might be termed mothers in a figurative sense.
To this category belongs the goddess, and especially the Mother of God, the Virgin, and Sophia. Mythology offers many variations of the mother archetype, as for instance the mother who reappears as the maiden in the myth of Demeter and Kore; or the mother who is also the beloved, as in the Cybele-Attis myth.
Other symbols of the mother in a figurative sense appear in things representing the goal of our longing for redemption, such as Paradise, the Kingdom of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem.
Many things arousing devotion or feelings of awe, as for instance the Church, university, city or country, heaven, earth, the woods, the sea or any still waters, matter even, the underworld and the moon, can be mother-symbols.
The archetype is often associated with things and places standing for fertility and fruitfulness: the cornucopia, a ploughed field, a garden.
It can be attached to a rock, a cave, a tree, a spring, a deep well, or to various vessels such as the baptismal font, or to vessel-shaped flowers like the rose or the lotus.
Because of the protection it implies, the magic circle or mandala can be a form of mother archetype.
Hollow objects such as ovens and cooking vessels are associated with the mother archetype, and, of course, the uterus, yoni, and anything of a like shape. Added to this list there are many animals, such as the cow, hare, and helpful animals in general.
All these symbols can have a positive, favourable meaning or a negative, evil meaning. An ambivalent aspect is seen in the goddesses of fate (Moira, Graeae, Norns).
Evil symbols are the witch, the dragon (or any devouring and entwining animal, such as a large fish or a serpent), the grave, the sarcophagus, deep water, death, nightmares and bogies (Empusa, Lilith, etc.). This list is not, of course, complete; it presents only the most important features of the mother archetype.
The qualities associated with it are maternal solicitude and sympathy; the magic authority of the female; the wisdom and spiritual exaltation that transcend reason; any helpful instinct or impulse; all that is benign, all that cherishes and sustains, that fosters growth and fertility.
The place of magic transformation and rebirth, together with the underworld and its inhabitants, are presided over by the mother.
On the negative side the mother archetype may connote anything secret, hidden, dark; the abyss, the world of the dead, anything that devours, seduces, and poisons, that is terrifying and inescapable like fate.
All these attributes of the mother archetype have been fully described and documented in my book Symbols of Transformation.
There I formulated the ambivalence of these attributes as “the loving and the terrible mother.” Perhaps the historical example of the dual nature of the mother most familiar to us is the Virgin Mary, who the mother archetype is not only the Lord’s mother, but also, according to the medieval allegories, his cross.
In India, “the loving and terrible mother” is the paradoxical Kali. Sankhya philosophy has elaborated the mother archetype into the concept of prakrti (matter) and assigned to it the three gunas or fundamental attributes: sattva, rajas, tamas: goodness, passion, and darkness.
These are three essential aspects of the mother: her cherishing and nourishing goodness, her orgiastic emotionality, and her Stygian depths.
The special feature of the philosophical myth, which shows Prakrti dancing before Purusha in order to remind him of “discriminating knowledge,” does not belong to the mother archetype but to the archetype of the anima, which in a man’s psychology invariably appears, at first, mingled with the mother-image.
Although the figure of the mother as it appears in folklore is more or less universal, this image changes markedly when it appears in the individual psyche. In treating patients one is at first impressed, and indeed arrested, by the apparent significance of the personal mother.
This figure of the personal mother looms so large in all personalistic psychologies that, as we know, they never got beyond it, even in theory, to other important aetiological factors. My own view differs from that of other medico-psychological theories principally in that I attribute to the personal mother only a limited aetiological significance.
That is to say, all those influences which the literature describes as being exerted on the children do not come from the mother herself, but rather from the archetype projected upon her, which gives her a mythological background and invests her with authority and numinosity. The aetiological and traumatic effects produced by the mother must be divided into two groups:
(1) those corresponding to traits of character or attitudes actually present in the mother, and (2) those referring to traits which the mother only seems to possess, the reality being composed of more or less fantastic (i.e., archetypal) projections on the part of the child.
Freud himself had already seen that the real aetiology of neuroses does not lie in traumatic effects, as he at first suspected, but in a peculiar development of infantile fantasy.
This is not to deny that such a development can be traced back to disturbing influences emanating from the mother.
I myself make it a rule to look first for the cause of infantile neuroses in the mother, as I know from experience that a child is much more likely to develop normally than neurotically, and that in the great majority of cases definite causes of disturbances can be found in the parents, especially in the mother.
The contents of the child’s abnormal fantasies can be referred to the personal mother only in part, since they often contain clear and unmistakable allusions which could not possibly have reference to human beings.
This is especially true where definitely mythological products are concerned, as is frequently the case in infantile phobias where the mother may appear as a wild beast, a witch, a spectre, an ogre, a hermaphrodite, and so on.
It must be borne in mind, however, that such fantasies are not always of unmistakably mythological origin, and even if they are, they may not always be rooted in the unconscious archetype but may have been occasioned by fairytales or accidental remarks.
A thorough investigation is therefore indicated in each case. For practical reasons, such an investigation cannot be made so readily with children as with adults, who almost invariably transfer their fantasies to the physician during treatment—or, to be more precise, the fantasies are projected upon him automatically.
When that happens, nothing is gained by brushing them aside as ridiculous, for archetypes are among the inalienable assets of every psyche.
They form the “treasure in the realm of shadowy thoughts” of which Kant spoke, and of which we have ample the mother archetype evidence in the countless treasure motifs of mythology.
An archetype is in no sense just an annoying prejudice; it becomes so only when it is in the wrong place.
In themselves, archetypal images are among the highest values of the human psyche; they have peopled the heavens of all races from time immemorial.
To discard them as valueless would be a distinct loss. Our task is not, therefore, to deny the archetype, but to dissolve the projections, in order to restore their contents to the individual who has involuntarily lost them by projecting them outside himself. ~Carl Jung; Four Archetypes :Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster
III. The Syzygy: Anima and Animus
What, then, is this projection-making factor? The East calls it the "Spinning Woman" Maya, who creates illusion by her dancing. Had we not long since known it from the symbolism of dreams, this hint from the Orient would put us on the right track: the enveloping, embracing, and devouring element points unmistakably to the mother, that is, to the son's relation to the real mother, to her imago, and to the woman who is to become a mother for him.
His Eros is passive like a child's; he hopes to be caught, sucked in, enveloped, and devoured.
He seeks, as it were, the protecting, nourishing, charmed circle of the mother, the condition of the infant released from every care, in which the outside world bends over him and even forces happiness upon him. No wonder the real world vanishes from sight!
If this situation is dramatized, as the unconscious usually dramatizes it, then there appears before you on the psychological stage a man living regressively, seeking his childhood and his mother, fleeing from a cold cruel world which denies him understanding.
Often a mother appears beside him who apparently shows not the slightest concern that her little son should become a man, but who, with tireless and self-immolating effort, neglects nothing that might hinder him from growing up and marrying.
You behold the secret conspiracy between mother and son, and how each helps the other to betray life.
Where does the guilt lie? With the mother, or with the son? Probably with both.
The unsatisfied longing of the son for life and the world ought to be taken seriously.
There is in him a desire to touch reality, to embrace the earth and fructify the field of the world. But he makes no more than a series of fitful starts, for his initiative as well as his staying power are crippled by the secret memory that the world and happiness may be had as a gift from the mother.
The fragment of world which he, like every man, must encounter again and again is never quite the right one, since it does not fall into his lap, does not meet him half way, but remains resistant, has to be conquered, and submits only to force.
It makes demands on the masculinity of a man, on his ardour, above all on his courage and resolution when it comes to throwing his whole being into the scales.
For this he would need a faithless Eros, one capable of forgetting his mother and undergoing the pain of relinquishing the first love of his life.
The mother, foreseeing this danger, has carefully inculcated into him the virtues of faithfulness, devotion, loyalty, so as to protect him from the moral disruption which is the risk of every life adventure.
He has learnt these lessons only too well, and remains true to his mother. This naturally causes her the deepest anxiety (when, to her greater glory, he turns out to be a homosexual, for example) and at the same time affords her an unconscious satisfaction that is positively mythological.
For, in the relationship now reigning between them, there is consummated the immemorial and most sacred archetype of the marriage of mother and son.
What, after all, has commonplace reality to offer, with its registry offices, pay envelopes, and monthly rent, that could outweigh the mystic awe of the hieros games?
Or the star-crowned woman whom the dragon pursues, or the pious obscurities veiling the marriage of the Lamb?
This myth, better than any other, illustrates the nature of the collective unconscious.
At this level the mother is both old and young, Demeter and Persephone, and the son is spouse and sleeping suckling rolled into one.
The imperfections of real life, with its laborious adaptations and manifold disappointments, naturally cannot compete with such a state of indescribable fulfilment.
In the case of the son, the projection-making factor is identical with the mother-imago, and this is consequently taken to be the real mother.
The projection can only be dissolved when the son sees that in the realm of his psyche there is an image not only of the mother but of the daughter, the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess, and the chthonic Baubo.
Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man.
It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life.
And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya and not only into life's reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another.
Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it.
This image is "My Lady Soul," as Spitteler called her.
I have suggested instead the term "anima," as indicating something specific, for which the expression "soul" is too general and too vague.
The empirical reality summed up under the concept of the anima forms an extremely dramatic content of the unconscious.
It is possible to describe this content in rational, scientific language, but in this way one entirely fails to express its living character.
Therefore, in describing the living processes of the psyche, I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.
The projection-making factor is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima.
Whenever she appears, in dreams, visions, and fantasies, she takes on personified form, thus demonstrating that the factor she embodies possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a feminine being.
She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous product of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute figure for the mother.
On the contrary, there is every likelihood that the numinous qualities which make the mother-imago so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype of the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child.
Since the anima is an archetype that is found in men, it is reasonable to suppose that an equivalent archetype must be present in women; for just as the man is compensated by a feminine element, so woman is compensated by a masculine one.
I do not, however, wish this argument to give the impression that these compensatory relationships were arrived at by deduction.
On the contrary, long and varied experience was needed in order to grasp the nature of anima and animus empirically.
Whatever we have to say about these archetypes, therefore, is either directly verifiable or at least rendered probable by the facts.
At the same time, I am fully aware that we are discussing pioneer work which by its very nature can only be provisional.
Just as the mother seems to be the first carrier of the projection-making factor for the son, so is the father for the daughter.
Practical experience of these relationships is made up of many individual cases presenting all kinds of variations on the same basic theme.
A concise description of them can, therefore, be no more than schematic.
Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint.
This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit.
The animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros.
But I do not wish or intend to give these two intuitive concepts too specific a definition.
I use Eros and Logos merely as conceptual aids to describe the fact that woman's consciousness is characterized more by the connective quality of Eros than by the discrimination and cognition associated with Logos. In men, Eros, the function of relationship, is usually less developed than Logos. In women, on the other hand, Eros is an expression of their true nature, while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident.
It gives rise to misunderstandings and annoying interpretations in the family circle and among friends.
This is because it consists of opinions instead of reflections, and by opinions I mean a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth.
Such assumptions, as everyone knows, can be extremely irritating.
As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are tight.
Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima.
With them the question becomes one of personal vanity and touchiness (as if they were females); with women it is a question of power, whether of truth or justice or some other "ism" for the dressmaker and hairdresser have already taken care of their vanity.
The "Father" (i.e., the sum of conventional opinions) always plays a great role in female argumentation.
No matter how friendly and obliging a woman's Eros may be, no logic on earth can shake her if she is ridden by the animus.
Often the man has the feelingand he is not altogether wrong that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary power of persuasion.
He is unaware that this highly dramatic situation would instantly come to a banal and unexciting end if he were to quit the field and let a second woman carry on the battle (his wife, for instance, if she herself is not the fiery war horse).
This sound idea seldom or never occurs to him, because no man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima.
Anyone who still had enough sense of humour to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, cliches from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain-splitting lack of logic.
It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all the languages of the world and always remains
essentially the same.
This singular fact is due to the following circumstance: when animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction.
The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight).
The language of love is of astonishing uniformity, using the well-worn formulas with the utmost devotion and fidelity, so that once again the two partners find themselves in a banal collective situation.
Yet they live in the illusion that they are related to one another in a most individual way.
In both its positive and its negative aspects the anirna /animus relationship is always full of "animosity/' i.e., it is emotional, and hence collective.
Affects lower the level of the relationship and bring it closer to the common instinctual basis, which no longer has anything individual about it.
Very often the relationship runs its course heedless of its human performers, who afterwards do not know what happened to them.
Whereas the cloud of "animosity" surrounding the man is composed chiefly of sentimentality and resentment, in woman it expresses itself in the form of opinionated views, interpretations, insinuations, and misconstructions, which all have the purpose (sometimes attained) of severing the relation between two human beings.
The woman, like the man, becomes wrapped in a veil of illusions by her demon-familiar, and, as the daughter who alone understands her father (that is, is eternally right in everything), she is translated to the land of sheep, where she is put to graze by the shepherd of her soul, the animus.
Like the anima, the animus too has a positive aspect.
Through the figure of the father he expresses not only conventional opinion butequally what we call "spirit," philosophical or religious ideas in particular, or rather the attitude resulting from them.
Thus the animus is a psychopomp, a mediator between the conscious and the unconscious and a personification of the latter.
Just as the anima becomes, through integration, the Eros of consciousness, so the animus becomes a Logos; and in the same way that the anima gives relationship and relatedness to a man's consciousness, the animus gives to woman's consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation, and self-knowledge.
The effect of anima and animus on the ego is in principle the same.
This effect is extremely difficult to eliminate because, in the first place, it is uncommonly strong and immediately fills the ego-personality with an unshakable feeling o lightness and righteousness. In the second place, the cause of the effect is projected and appears to lie in objects and objective situations.
Both these characteristics can, I believe, be traced back to the peculiarities of the archetype.
For the archetype, of course, exists a priori. This may possibly explain the often totally irrational yet undisputed and indisputable existence of certain moods and opinions.
Perhaps these are so notoriously difficult to influence because of the powerfully suggestive effect emanating from the archetype. Consciousness is fascinated by it, held captive, as if hypnotized.
Very often the ego experiences a vague feeling of moral defeat and then behaves all the more defensively, defiantly, and self-righteously, thus setting up a vicious circle which only increases its feeling of inferiority.
The bottom is then knocked out of the human relationship, for, like megalomania, a feeling of inferiority makes mutual recognition impossible, and without this there is no relationship.
As I said, it is easier to gain insight into the shadow than into the anima or animus.
With the shadow, we have the advantage of being prepared in some sort by our education, which has always endeavoured to convince people that they are not one-hundred-per-cent pure gold.
So everyone immediately understands what is meant by "shadow," "inferior personality," etc.
And if he has forgotten, his memory can easily be refreshed by a Sunday sermon, his wife, or the tax collector. With the anima and animus, however, things are by no means so simple.
Firstly, there is no moral education in this respect, and secondly, most people are content to be self-righteous and prefer mutual vilification (if nothing worse!) to the recognition of their projections. Indeed, it seems a very natural state of affairs for men to have irrational moods and women irrational opinions.
Presumably this situation is grounded on instinct and must remain as it is to ensure that the Empedoclean game of the hate and love of the elements shall continue for all eternity.
Nature is conservative and does not easily allow her courses to be altered; she defends in the most stubborn way the inviolability of the preserves where anima and animus roam.
Hence it is much more difficult to become conscious of one's anima/animus projections than to acknowledge one's shadow side.
One has, of course, to overcome certain moral obstacles, such as vanity, ambition, conceit, resentment, etc., but in the case of projections all sorts of purely intellectual difficulties are added, quite apart from the contents of the projection, which one simply doesn't know how to cope with.
And on top of all this there arises a profound doubt as to whether one is not meddling too much with nature's business by prodding into consciousness things which it would have been better to leave asleep.
Although there are, in my experience, a fair number of people who can understand without special intellectual or moral difficulties what is meant by anima and animus, one finds very many more who have the greatest trouble in visualizing these empirical concepts as anything concrete.
This shows that they fall a little outside the usual range of experience. They are unpopular precisely because they seem unfamiliar.
The consequence is that they mobilize prejudice and become taboo like everything else that is unexpected.
So if we set it up as a kind of requirement that projections should be dissolved, because it is wholesomer that way and in every respect more advantageous, we are entering upon new ground. Up till now everybody has been convinced that the idea "my father," "my mother," etc., is nothing but a faithful reflection of the real parent, corresponding in every detail to the original, so that when someone says "my father" he means no more and no less than what his father is in reality.
This is actually what he supposes he does mean, but a supposition of identity by no means brings that identity about. This is where the fallacy of the enkekalymmenos ('the veiled one') comes in.
If one includes in the psychological equation X's picture of his father, which he takes for the real father, the equation will not work out, because the unknown quantity he has introduced does not tally with reality.
X has overlooked the fact that his idea of a person consists, in the first place, of the possibly very incomplete picture he has received of the real person and, in the second place, of the subjective modifications he has imposed upon this picture.
X's idea of his father is a complex quantity for which the real father is only in part responsible, an indefinitely large share falling to the son.
So true is this that every time he criticizes or praises his father he is unconsciously hitting back at himself, thereby bringing about those psychic consequences that overtake people who habitually disparage or overpraise themselves. If, however, X carefully compares his reactions with reality, he stands a chance of noticing that he has miscalculated The fallacy, which stems from Eubulidcs the Megarian, runs: "Can you recognize your father?" Yes. "Can you recognize this veiled one?"
No, "This veiled one is your father. Hence you can recognize your father and not recognize him," somewhere by not realizing long ago from his father's behaviour that the picture he has of him is a false one.
But as a rule X is convinced that he is right, and if anybody is wrong it must be the other fellow.
Should X have a poorly developed Eros, he will be either indifferent to the inadequate relationship he has with his father or else annoyed by the inconsistency and general Incomprehensibility of a father whose behaviour never really corresponds to the picture X has of him.
Therefore X thinks he has every right to feel hurt, misunderstood, and even betrayed.
One can imagine how desirable it would be in such cases to dissolve the projection.
And there are always optimists who believe that the golden age can be ushered in simply by telling people the right way to go.
But just let them try to explain to these people that they are acting like a dog chasing its own tail.
To make a person see the shortcomings of his attitude considerably more than mere "telling" is needed, for more is involved than ordinary common sense can allow.
What one is up against here is the kind of fateful misunderstanding which, under ordinary conditions, remains forever inaccessible to insight.
It is rather like expecting the average respectable citizen to recognize himself as a criminal.
I mention all this just to illustrate the order of magnitude to which the anima/animus projections belong, and the moral and intellectual exertions that are needed to dissolve them.
Not all the contents of the anima and animus are projected, however.
Many of them appear spontaneously in dreams and so on, and many more can be made conscious through active imagination.
In this way we find that thoughts, feelings, and affects are alive in us which we would never have believed possible.
Naturally, possibilities of this sort seem utterly fantastic to anyone who has not experienced them himself, for a normal person "knows what he thinks."
Such a childish attitude on the part of the "normal person" is simply the rule, so that no one without experience in this field can be expected to understand the real nature of anima and animus.
With these reflections one gets into an entirely new world of psychological experience, provided of course that one succeeds in realizing them in practice.
Those who do succeed can hardly fail to be impressed by all that the ego does not know and never has known.
This increase in self-knowledge is still very rare nowadays and is usually paid for in advance with a neurosis, if not with something worse.
The autonomy of the collective unconscious expresses itself in the figures of anima and animus.
They personify those of its contents which, when withdrawn from projection, can be integrated into consciousness.
To this extent, both figures represent -functions which filter the contents of the collective unconscious through to the conscious mind.
They appear or behave as such, however, only so long as the tendencies of the conscious and unconscious do not diverge too greatly.
Should any tension arise, these functions, harmless till then, confront the conscious mind in personified form and behave rather like systems split off from the personality, or like part souls.
This comparison is inadequate in so far as nothing previously belonging to the ego personality has split off from it; on the contrary, the two figures represent a disturbing accretion.
The reason for their behaving in this way is that though the contents of anima and animus can be integrated they themselves cannot, since they are archetypes.
As such they are the foundation stones of the psychic structure, which in its totality exceeds the limits of consciousness and therefore can never become the object of direct cognition.
Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition.
Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind.
This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation.
The unconscious as we know can never be "done with" once and for all. It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys.
The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these clangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided.
It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensation works with entire success.
The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts.
His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature.
Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work.
Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are.
Both these archetypes, as practical experience shows, possess a fatality that can on occasion produce tragic results.
They are quite literally the father and mother of all the disastrous entanglements of fate and have long been recognized as such by the whole world.
Together they form a divine pair, one of whom, in accordance with his Logos nature, is characterized by pneuma and nous, rather like Hermes with his ever-shifting hues, while the other, in accordance with her Eros nature, wears the features of Aphrodite, Helen (Selene), Persephone, and Hecate.
Both of them are unconscious powers, "gods" in fact, as the ancient world quite rightly conceived them to be.
To call them by this name is to give them that central position in the scale of psychological values which has always been theirs whether consciously acknowledged or not; for their power grows in proportion to the degree that they remain unconscious.
Those who do not see them are in their hands, just as a typhus epidemic flourishes best when its source is undiscovered.
Even in Christianity the divine syzygy has not become obsolete, but occupies the highest place as Christ and his bride the Church.
Parallels like these prove extremely helpful in our attempts to find the right criterion for gauging the significance of these two archetypes. What we can discover about them from the conscious side is so slight as to be almost imperceptible.
It is only when we throw light into the dark depths of the psyche and explore the strange and tortuous paths of human fate that it gradually becomes clear to us how immense is the influence wielded by these two factors that complement our conscious life.
Recapitulating, I should like to emphasize that the integration of the shadow, or the realization of the personal unconscious, marks the first stage in the analytic process, and that without it a recognition of anima and animus is impossible.
The shadow can be realized only through a relation to a partner, and anima and animus only through a relation to the opposite sex, because only in such a relation do their projections become operative.
The recognition of anima or animus gives rise, in a man, to a triad, one third of which is transcendent: the masculine subject, the opposing feminine subject, and the transcendent anima. With a woman the situation is reversed.
The missing fourth element that would make the triad a quaternity is, in a man, the archetype of the Wise Old Man, which I have not discussed here, and in a woman the Chthonic Mother.
These four constitute a half immanent and half transcendent quaternity, an archetype which I have called the 'marriage quaternio.
The marriage quaternio provides a schema not only for the self but also for the structure of primitive society with its cross-cousin marriage, marriage classes, and division of settlements into quarters.
The self, on the other hand, is a God image, or at least cannot be distinguished from one. Of this the early Christian spirit was not ignorant, otherwise Clement of Alexandria could never have said that he who knows himself knows God. ~Carl Jung, Aion
Baphomet, Vierling
Origins & History of Consciousness, Erich Neumann
The mythological theory of foreknowledge also explains the view that all knowing is “memory.” Man’s task in the world is to remember with his conscious mind what was knowledge before the advent of consciousness. In this sense it is said of the saddik, the “perfect righteous man” of Hasidism, the mystical Jewish movement dating from the end of the eighteenth century:
The Saddik finds that which has been lost since birth and restores it to men.
It is the same conception as Plato’s philosophical doctrine of the prenatal vision of ideas and their remembrance. The original knowledge of one who is still enfolded in the perfect state is very evident in the psychology of the child. For this reason many primitive peoples treat children with particular marks of respect. In the child the great images and archetypes of the collective unconscious are living reality, and very close to him; indeed, many of his sayings and reactions, questions and answers, dreams and images, express this knowledge which still derives from his prenatal existence. It is transpersonal experience not personally acquired, a possession acquired from “over there.” Such knowledge is rightly regarded as ancestral knowledge, and the child as a reborn forebear.
The theory of heredity, proving that the child has the ancestral heritage biologically in himself, and to a large extent actually “is” this heritage, also has a psychological justification. Jung therefore defines the transpersonal - or the archetypes and instincts of the collective unconscious - as “the deposit of ancestral experience.” Hence the child, whose life as a prepersonal entity is largely determined by the collective unconscious, actually is the living carrier of this ancestral experience.
A man often makes a decidedly infantile resistance to a woman and therefore at the same time to his own unconscious side. Women and the unconscious are, to him, closely connected and he believes he must save himself from both of them, sometimes in panic.
A man also has a secret fear of a woman's opinions.
Men are rarely split off from sexuality, because it is too evident for them, but what they lack is Eros, the relational function. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams Seminar, Page 313.
Yahweh had this fear of Sophia and yet she helped him to create the world; he took on too much, without moderation.
A woman is more likely to acknowledge her own duality.
A man is continually blinded by his intellect and does not learn through insight.
A woman is necessary to force a man to live in the concrete world. If he has a relationship with a woman he is no longer only an intellect whose wings hover over everything.
When he marries he becomes concrete, is the husband of this particular woman in the world, and has a real address and specific responsibilities.
Love between male and female is only the compensation for the enormous tension between the two principles.
This contrast between male and female is expressed cosmologically in India through Shiva and Shakti.
Shakti creates Maya to make Shiva visible; the female principle builds reality.
The greatest darkness is always felt through the opposite sex.
A woman thinks, for instance, "If he were only different."
But her supposed vis-a-vis is only her own projection.
There are women who believe that man will deflect them from their goals and men who often believe that women want to keep them from their work; yet the real causes
are either fear of the other sex or of one's own unconscious.
A marriage is more likely to succeed if the woman follows her own star and remains conscious of her wholeness than if she constantly concerns herself with her husband's
star and his wholeness.
A man would not think of following his wife's star because this function of relationship is not developed in him. He thinks of his own star and of his own work.
The woman must think of herself and although she may be more advanced in wholeness than her husband she must not look back at him, for only then is the way clear for him to follow her.
She must not cling too closely or he will feel like a baby being fed oats.
The wrong kind of behaviour by the woman, can prevent the man's growth.
When an erotic relationship comes to an end, a woman can lose her mind; but a man can also look at other women.
I am not saying this just because I am a man, but because I often hear women complain, saying that their husbands are so true and attached to them.
The woman's intention is to hold onto the man, as this is inherent in the breeding instinct.
But it is not interesting for a man to be harnessed to one woman; he wants freedom.
Evidently Nature has arranged the female psyche accordingly.
Women who live by their instincts only find a man interesting if they are not quite sure of him, if he might possibly run off; such a man is far more interesting to them
than one paralyzed by fidelity.
Nature is not foolish and means the woman to exert all her charms in order to hold the man.
Many women unfortunately make terrible mistakes once they are married; they put all their efforts into keeping the house and not into the erotic sphere.
The woman often plays with the hope that the man she loves will fall ill, so that he is no longer able to escape and is completely at her mercy.
In a marriage neither partner sits on a throne.
When there is infidelity and one despairs and believes that life is impossible without a relationship with the partner, fate has demonstrated that one is not grown up and is not yet mature.
It implies an extraordinary maturity for one to be able to renounce the support given by a relationship.
We must be careful not to give up our existence; we must be able to exist alone.
In such a situation the attitude of the person to the supra-personal is decisive and the problem of the religious decision becomes the determining factor. We can only adjust to the will of God.
We must not establish a power complex of superiority; the important and only problem is how to confront the conflict one self, not what the other person does. All of nature goes along with a man when his decision in answer to his great problem is right.
All grain means wheat; all ore means gold. The only thing that matters is what a man does with his problem -- what he himself does for himself. Only when the people involved are dull, or when there are serious material needs, is a marriage free from certain difficulties between the man and the woman.
When culture and differentiation are present, marriage immediately becomes more problematical. There are some women who unconsciously desire their husband's death and this wish can actually kill -- it only needs a chair that tilts or a rug that skids.
Everything that vitally concerns us but is suppressed and not acknowledged, whether it is good or evil, will be pursued without our knowing -- and this can lead to murder. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Pages 51-54.
_______________________________
A man often makes a decidedly infantile resistance to a woman and therefore at the same time to his own unconscious side. Women and the unconscious are, to him, closely connected and he believes he must save himself from both of them, sometimes in panic. A man also has a secret fear of a woman's opinions.
Yahweh had this fear of Sophia and yet she helped him to create the world; he took on too much, without moderation. A woman is more likely to acknowledge her own duality. A man is continually blinded by his intellect and does not learn through insight. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 53.
Mother World:
splitting, integration & evolution in the mother archetype Whore of Babylon, Russian engraving, 19th Century, US Public Domain
Recently, I have been writing on the aims and instincts of the human soul. Carl Jung speaks of the human soul’s “longing to attain rebirth through a return to the womb, and to become immortal like the sun” (CW5, para. 312). In biblical terms rebirth is associated with entrance into Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the holy city, as image of the holy mother.
Jung says, “the Old Testament treats the cities of Jerusalem, Babylon, etc. just as if they were women” (para 303). While Jerusalem is an image of the holy mother, Babylon is the unholy mother. In Jung’s words: “Babylon is the symbol of the Terrible Mother” (Jung, para 315). In Revelation 17 it is written:
17:1 And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: 17:2 With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. 17:3 So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. 17:4 And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: 17:5 And upon her forehead was a name written a mystery: Babylon The Great, the mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth.
And in Revelations 18:
18:1 And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory. 18:2 And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. 18:3 For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies.
In these passages we meet the whore of Babylon. Babylon is “a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.” Carl Jung says: “the birds are soul-images.” He notes that in these passages the birds represent “the souls of the damned and evil spirits” (CW 5, para 315). Here, we see the relationship between the terrible mother and the damned of the underworld: “Thus the mother becomes the under-world, the City of the Damned” (ibid).
The Whore of Babylon is the “mother of all abominations” (Jung after Revelation, CW 5 para 313). She is “the receptacle of all that is wicked and unclean” (ibid). The mother as receptacle for all that is wicked is reminiscent of the work of psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. Klein postulated that the infant splits the mother image (as breast) into good and bad aspects which then become internal representations (or objects) within psychic life. Hanna Segal discusses Klein’s view:
“The child attacks his mother’s breast and incorporates it as both destroyed and destructive — ‘a bad persecuting internal breast’. This in Melanie Klein’s view is the earliest root of the persecuting and sadistic aspect of the super-ego. Parallel with this introjection, in situations of love and gratification the infant introjects an ideal loved and loving breast which becomes the root of the ego-ideal” (Segal, p.4)
From a Kleinian perspective, the infant splits the mother image into two primitive forms: a ‘bad and persecuting’ form and a ‘loving and gratifying’ form. These two representations are internalized and become part of the psychic world. The particular ways in which the infant splits the mother into good and bad aspects shapes the development of personality. A predominance of ‘envy and greed’ leads to further splitting in an infant. In the presence of ‘love and gratitude,’ raw need and greed find sufficient solace to integrate and resolve enough splitting for the child to grow. The growing, integrating child (or adult) is able to handle more tension and more experience without splitting.
The splits of humanity are so deep and so common at the personal and social levels that we, together as a social body, form mass delusions that trap us in their rigid forms. Our collective perceptions, and fate, become determined by enthrallment to and dominance of a split condition– under the sign of a negative mother image, under the Whore of Babylon. Our biblical tradition reflects this split in the mother through images of the good and the terrible mother. The biblical traditions also reveal a split between the good father God and the bad father devil. It seems rather clear that an inability to tolerate contraries, to integrate the splits, are the root of many of our collective delusions.
Idealization of greed, envy, aggression, and war may stem from a mono-valent attitude in which we collapse the dialectical tension of opposites inherent in the lifeworld, as Mother World. We split ourselves and our world; we idealize one half and diminish the other. We idealize the beautiful virgin and diminish the whore. We pray to a heavenly father for protection and flee from an evil persecutor, never realizing such forces dwell within the human heart.
Nevertheless, life is what it is and our fantasy, our collective delusions, are capable of affecting and altering our relationship to life– as mother, as Mother World. If we, collectively, have a predominant surplus of ‘envy and greed’ over ‘love and gratitude’, our Mother World will be projectively seen as a Whore to be diminished and raped.
Our relationship to the Mother World is ever evolving. This evolution in our relationship is reflected in the history of the use of symbols and archetypes. If we, collectively, have a surplus of love in our hearts then we will feel gratitude for the offerings and gifts bestowed by our Mother World. It is this very capacity for love and gratitude that allows for integration of the splits in the mother image, into a vision of the Mother World as a generative, forgiving holding environment for both our creative and destructive tendencies.
If we take the perspective of Hegel (and Jung), we might say that the relationship between the contraries proffers a dialectical tension that resolves to a telos of the soul, here as world soul. The dialectical tensions inherent in the contraries of psychic life proffers a force or tension that resolves only as the forward movement of history. Hegel says: “contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality” (Science of Logic, 1816).
The forward movement of history, and of psychic life, takes place through the tension and the unfinished resolution of contraries. Through struggling with the dialectical tensions we may come into the capacity to hold bivalent tensions. Hegel adds: “The grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative … is the most important aspect of the dialectic.” (ibid) Jung worked with a similar notion which he called the transcendent function. It is my contention that the transcendent function leads to a realization of immanence: “the divine spirit of life.” (Jung, CW 14, para 623). In this view, the realization of immanence is a teleological aim of the soul. Such a realization is a revelation, a revealing, of our ever evolving dwelling within the Mother World. In alchemical terms this is a revealing of the “virtue of generation and the preservation of things [that] might be called the Soul of the World” (Rosarium, cited in Jung CW 14 para 623).
It is here, in an attempt to understand our relationship with the Mother World that we must move beyond the purely transcendent aims of a Hegelian view. It seems to me that while Hegel is a genius of dialectical reasoning, his dialectical movement only takes us in one direction, the absolute transcendence of singularity. From a Hegelian perspective the ascent of spirit culminates an idealized image of a limit point of absolute knowing. This perspective leads to the somewhat grandiose and arrogant views of a technical life that is superior to human life, and an evolutionary cosmology which sees ‘pure mind’ evolving to the point that it is no longer dependent on the Mother World. Here, I might briefly reference Ken Wilber’s Atman Project as such a theory of transcendence. In this view, we see an unarticulated fantasy of surpassing the Mother World, of leaving the mother’s body and entering into a pure realm of Father Mind. Such a view may be seen as an ultimate transcendent perspective arising out of the paternal monotheism that has dominated the last few thousand years. Such a view leads us to an existential pinnacle, a turning point in which we may glimpse a view of our collective fantasies of transcendence: of escaping the womb of life, of leaving the mother’s body. From one perspective such fantasies may be a necessary part of infantile development.
In order to understand the evolution of consciousness, we may liken the collective social body of civilization to an infant, attempting to birth itself out of the Mother World, out the womb of life. From an immanent perspective this is only a fantasy, there is no realm that exists beyond the Mother World. To believe so is only to partake in fantasies that might seek to denigrate and destroy the Mother. The truth is: we need this world, we need a connection to the ‘Soul of the World.’
Carl Jung opens a space for the realization of immanence, a realization of the psychical immanence of spiritual (archetypal) forms. We need only make one further shift in perspective to realize the full nature of ‘immanence.’ Here, I am not speaking of a Deleuzian immanence, but a Jungian immanence. This realization is not so much about a ‘pure plane of immanence’ (Deleuze), but a realization of ‘withinness.’ This realization is deeply related to images of the Mother World and of rebirth.
In biblical terms, we must come into a relationship with the Whore of Babylon as psychically immanent, an image of our own greed and envy. The images of revelation point to end of the line, the end of history. All images which demarcate the forward arrow of time point to a revealing, a Revelation: the archetype of vision, a seeing of something previously unseen. This revealing does not to point to a transcendent ‘outside,’ but to a revelation of that which has always been here, waiting to be seen and known.
Jung is very aware of the forward arrow of time, both in the telos of the individual and the collective. One of Jung’s greatest realizations was that “symbols act as transformers, their function being to convert libido from a ‘lower’ to ‘higher form.” … “It is able to do this because of the numen, the specific energy stored up in the archetype.” This conversion of libido may be the true meaning of transcendence, as a symbolic movement within, not a literal aim toward an ‘outside’. Symbols guide the flow of libido ‘upward’: sublimation, sublimation. Symbols are characters of sacred numen which guide the soul, or world soul, from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ forms.
But, where there is progression there is also regression. The Whore of Babylon “leads the people into whoredom with her devilish temptations and makes them drunk with her wine” (ibid). Wine is “a libido symbol” and an offering of temptation into “fornication” (Jung, para 315). Such fornication is an image of a symbolic unity with the mother of origin. Jung explains the psychic facts of the relationship:
“The symbol-creating process substitutes for the mother the city, the well, the cave, the Church, ete. This substitution is due to the fact that the regression of libido reactivates the ways and habits of childhood, and above all the relation to the mother; but what was natural and useful to the child is a psychic danger for the adult, and this is expressed by the symbol of incest.
The incest taboo warns against such a regression to symbiosis.”
Jung continues:
“Because the incest taboo opposes the libido and blocks the path to regression, it is possible for the libido to be canalized into the mother analogies thrown up by the unconscious. In that way the libido becomes progressive again, and even attains a level of consciousness higher than before. The meaning and purpose of this canalization are particularly evident when the city appears in place of the mother: the infantile attachment (whether primary or secondary) is a crippling limitation for the adult” (para 313).
Jung’s argument would seem to indicate that libido must proceed away from the mother of origin. To regress back to the mother is to participate in an incestuous symbiosis. In collective terms any movement backwards to original symbolic unity is an entering into the dark caverns of the mother’s body, intoxicated by the wine of the Whore’s breast. Oceanic pleasure states of a collapsed unity free from subject-object distinction are the cave of the Whore.
The transcendent aims of civilization call us forth toward freedom from such seductive enmeshment, offering clarity and distinction between a subject and its object world. Yet taken too far, we find ourselves lost in a new delusion. A delusion that we are so independent that we may escape, and free ourselves completely from the Mother World. Without Mother, we are only bands of brothers struggling toward the pure realms of a technical Father Mind. With this banding together of the brothers in search of a pure technical world comes the denigration of the Mother World, in the form of a hatred for the passionate living soul of life.
Along with the Whore of Babylon, Revelations offers another mother image: the mother bride as holy city. Revelations is an ungainly text, full of strange images and overwhelming forms, breaking the bounds of sense. Yet read with a telos in mind we find that revelation reveals a deeper logic– expressing the aims and instincts of the soul. The holy mother/city is not the regressive mother, not the mother of symbiosis, but the divine mother as bride. Revelation 21:9 invites us into a sacred marriage:
“One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues came and said to me, “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.”
Union with the mother bride is sacred union, hieros gamos. Two become one, not by collapsing distinction, but by realizing bivalent unity. Revelations continues:
“And he carried me away in the Spirit to a mountain great and high, and showed me the Holy City, Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God.”
Union is with the bride as Holy City, as Jerusalem. A city is a place of habitation. Habitation is the “act or fact of dwelling.” Through union we begin to dwell; we realize the divine mother as the place of dwelling. Jerusalem as mother, as wife, proffers herself as place for dwelling. Here, there is a relation to the meaning of immanence, in manere: “I remain within” or ” I dwell within.”
The soul’s teleological aims point to the primordial image of wholeness, of containment– of hieros gamos, a dwelling, a withinness. In an image from the 14th century we see the holy mother city in the form of a mandala. Mandalas are archetypal forms of wholeness, of dwelling, of unity capable of containing multiplicity. The infinite may be held within this circle. Hermes Trismegistus tells us: “God is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere” (Book of the 24 Philosophers). The holy mother emerges as a circumference that is everywhere, center nowhere– infinite centers, infinite sets form the ever-evolving lineaments of her form.
This image of a city and her inhabitants reveals a view of our Mother World: as a sacred container, as a vessel, for our spiritual evolution and growth. This evolution is teleological, expressing the soul’s instincts and aims. While we may not be able to ascertain the ultimate aims of the forward arrow of time, we can begin to understand the ways that biblical time reveals the ends and means to our personal and collective development. Revelations ends with the Mother, with a holy marriage to the Mother Bride. If nothing else, this can be seen as an archetypal message of divine Self to the personal and collective self: the aim of the soul is not pure mind existing alone for eternity, but of mind in a sacred marriage with the Mother World. This is an image of an evolved consciousness in a sacred union with the Mother World as Bride: a hieros gamos of psychic life. http://pathofsoul.org/2014/06/22/splitting-integration-and-evolution-in-the-mother-archetype/
Mapa Jeruzaléma, 12th Century. US Public Domain.
References:
By Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattar, What Is Philosophy?
G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit
Carl Jung, Cw 5, Symbols of Transformation (in US Pubic Domain, first published 1912)
Hanna Segal, Introduction to the Work of Melanie Klein
Child Archetype
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_%28archetype%29To remain a child too long is childish, but it is just as childish to move away and then assume that childhood no longer exists because we do not see it.
But if we return to the "children's land" we succumb to the fear of becoming childish, because we do not understand that everything of psychic origin has a double face.
One face looks forward, the other back. It is ambivalent and therefore symbolic, like all living reality. ~Carl Jung; Psychology and Alchemy (1944). CW 12; Page 74.Mother Archetype
Small children are very old; later on we soon grow younger.
In our middle age we are youngest, precisely at the time when we have completely or almost completely lost contact with the collective unconscious, the samskaras.
We grow older again only as with the mounting years we remember the samskaras anew.~Carl Jung, The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga, Appendix 1, Page 74.
THE MOTHER ARCHETYPE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Mother
FATHER ARCHETYPE
http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=father%20archetype
CHILD ARCHETYPE
http://www.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=child%20archetype
The Wise Old Man Archetypes
There are 4 main male archetype figures that fall under the Wise Old Man archetypes category. For each figure, there is a negative corresponding figure. They are as follows:
The Father : The Ogre
The Prince : The Wanderer
The Warrior : The Dictator
The Priest : The Black Magician
The Father
The Father is the authority figure representing law and order. He is very masculine, a provider and a protector. He is often depicted as the King in literature.
The Ogre
The Ogre is the oppressive and cruel father who threatens his children with rigid discipline and severe, often fatal punishment.
The Prince
The Prince is the youth and the seeker. He is the hero and literally the prince in literature. It is he who must take the archetypical journey.
The Wanderer
The Wanderer is only slightly different from the Prince. He shuns the commitment and responsibility of the journey; therefore, he does not realize his full potential and cannot become the prince until he does so. He is the evil but often gorgeous or charming villain in literature.
The Warrior
The Warrior is bold and daring. He is successful, ambitious, strong, brave, and relentless. Often the prince and the warrior are one in the same.
The Dictator
The Dictator, on the other hand, is aggressive and blinded by his own ambition and ego. His emotions are severely repressed and neglected.
The Priest
The Priest is wise and knowledgeable and able to commune with the gods and spirits.
The Black Magician
The Black Magician at first appears to use his power for good, but is revealed to be evil and a trickster.
The Great Mother Archetypes
There are 4 main Female Archetypical Figures that fall under the category of The Great Mother Archetype. As with the male figures, each female figure has a corresponding negative side. They are as follows:
The Mother : The Terrible Mother
The Princess : The Fatal Siren
The Amazon : The Huntress
The Priestess : The Witch
The Mother
The Mother is protective and maternal, she loves and nurtures her children.
The Terrible Mother
The Terrible Mother wants to possess and smother, devour and destroy. She is angry and jealous, enslaving her husband, lovers, and children.
The Princess
The Princess is an eternally youthful child-woman and a flirt. She has the power to attract people and people are attracted to her.
The Fatal Siren
The Fatal Siren is the bad girl. She is not at all interested in marriage, home, or family. She has quite another agenda; she is a home wrecker, every man's erotic fantasy. Her mission is to steal the Prince away from the Princess.
The Amazon
The Amazon is the successful career woman who is perfectly able to compete with men.
The Huntress
The Huntress may be successful in her career but this is due to the fact that she hounds and despises men.
The Priestess
The Priestess is filled with intuition and instinct. She can speak to and interpret the will of the gods and spirits. She interprets signs and omens; she is at peace within herself.
The Witch
The Witch (or Sorceress) is in touch with the gods or spirits, but she is trapped in her own world using her power for evil. She appears in dreams and symbolizes the negative aspects of womanhood.
“Every Mother contains her daughter in herself and every daughter her mother and every mother extends backwards into her mother and forwards into her daughter.” ― C.G. Jung
“The word ‘matter’ remains a dry, inhuman, and purely intellectual concept… How different was the former image of matter—the Great Mother—that could encompass and express the profound emotional meaning of the Great Mother.”(Man & His Symbols, Pages 94-5)
"From a barren list of names we learn who were the fathers or mothers, or more distant progenitors, of the select few, who are able to trace what is called their descent from antiquity."
Studies of the possibilities are highly variable in the quality of their research. Many, if not most, of the DFA-related publications widely used by amateur genealogists are essentially worthless.All European royal families can trace their descent from Charlemagne, as can many other people who are able to trace their descent from European nobility. While such a link possibly existed, extant sources do not permit reconstructing it with any degree of certainty. -Wiki
So when man is born in the literal sense, he is not really born at all. He merely exchanges the biological womb of the mother for a second womb, the spiritual womb, the amniotic sac of the mind, images, and meanings. Man is not born directly into the environment. He is “born” into his being mind and soul. Much as astronauts do not really venture into outer space but stay in their spaceships or spacesuits that protect them from outer space, so man, even when literally, biologically born into the environment, is logically not directly exposed to the environment like an animal, but enters the environment only safely encapsulated in the space-suit, or should we say environment-suit, of his images, ideas, concepts, words.
--Giegerich, http://www.junginstitute.org/pdf_files/JungV6N1p1-66.pdf
THE DNA BRIDGE: Paternal & Mitochondrial Dragon DNA explains the importance of the female decent. Mitochondrial DNA is passed only through the female line. Mitochondria is a living sentient and separate life form from ourselves. The mitochondria are dependent on us for life; we live in a symbiotic relationship. Mitochondrial DNA can live 15 generations. 15 generations of living mitochondria live inside you. Your 15 generation grandparents living cells are in you. A mutant mtDNA will drift to fixation in a human matriline in 15 generations. Recently an attempt was made to estimate the age of the human race using mitochondrial DNA. This material is inherited always from mother to children only.
By measuring the difference in mitochondrial DNA among many individuals, the age of the common maternal ancestor of humanity was estimated at about 200,000 years. It remains implausible to explain the known geographic distribution of mtDNA sequence variation by human migration that occurred only in the last ~6,500 years. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) (by virtue of its maternal, nonrecombining mode of inheritance, rapid pace of evolution, and extensive intraspecific polymorphism) permits and even demands an extension of phylogenetic thinking to the microevolutionary level. Many species exhibit a deep and geographically structured mtDNA phylogenetic history. Study of the relationship between genealogy and geography constitutes a discipline.
Guido of Siena, Nativity– 1270s Louvre Museum us Public Domain
Divine Child; Soul's Fulfillment
We are in deep winter: days short, nights long. Father sun seems so far away, mother earth lonely. All the creatures mourn in winter. They burrow in their little holes and mourn the lost days of sun. Mother nature proffers so little in winter. The animals seem to know that. They go within and await her spring, her bosom, her blossom. All the world will rejoice when light and earth rejoin in their holy union. It is then, that life will burst forth in divine celebration. The animals frolic, make love, build their little nests, hatch their eggs– life is born of union.
But we, us human souls, are on another cycle. While our bodies may follow such creaturely cycles, seeking union in bodily form, our souls follow a different cycle entirely. In the depths of winter the divine child is born. On the darkest of days we celebrate the birth of the divine child.
What is the divine? How might we know it? Carl Jung provides a unique perspective. The divine is a divine couple: mother and father of souls. In Symbols of Transformation, Jung speaks to the soul, leading us on a path of soul. This is not your normal everyday path. God is not some distant icon, some idealized figure in the sky. This is a phenomenological path: the soul comes into form insofar as it lives and knows. This is Gnosis. And what are we to know? Many things, but first we shall start with our divine parents.
The first parent we shall meet is God the father: God is “love.” God is there for us, loving us, guiding us from the beginning. But Jung warns us that we need to be careful of any overdetermined images this idea might provoke:
“The language of religion defines God as “love,” there is always the great danger of confusing the love which works in man with the workings of God” (para. 98)
To know God we must move beyond God as image. We must know God, see God, feel God. It is through this act of knowing that the soul is born. For the “God-concept is not only an image, but an elemental force”… a “primitive power”…(para. 89). God’s love is a “creative force” (para 198). God’s creative force is love, bringing forth the soul through love. Jung says:
“the procreative urge– which is how love must be regarded from the natural standpoint– remains the essential attribute of the God (para.87).
And it is on the darkest nights of winter that God’s creative urges wells up to give birth to his child: the divine child. Christ is God’s child. But God is not alone. God is always with the mother, through she may be hidden or transparent. Jung says:
“The God-image is a complex of ideas of an archetypal nature, it must necessarily be regarded as representing a certain sum of energy (libido) which appears in projection. In most of the existing religions it seems that the formative factor which creates the attributes of divinity is the father-imago, while in the older religions it was the mother imago… In certain pagan conceptions of divinity the maternal element is strongly emphasized.” (para. 89)
At times culture favors the father, at times the mother. But nevertheless, they together are the two ‘formative factors’ of psychic life. Jung says:
“How am I to be creative? Nature knows only one answer to that: Through a child (the gift of love).” (para 76)
The child is born, ‘the gift of love.’ Nature births us into world. The divine couple births the soul into the eternal. In the Christian myth, the divine child is born from the virgin womb of the mother Mary. In 431 the Council of Ephesus said that Mary is Theotokos: “God-bearer”, “Birth-Giver of God”, “the one who gives birth to God.” God and the mother are the two ‘formative factors’ within psychic life.
The divine couple births us into divine world. These are psychic facts. Jung says: “God dwells in the heart, in the unconscious” (para. 89). In the footnote Jung adds: “The psychic fact “God” is a typical autonomism, a collective archetype.” The two Greek words, “auto-nomos”, speak to a God which lives by his/her own rule. God is within the unconscious, and yet autonomous, living by his own rule within our hearts.
Here, within our hearts, God procreates with the Mother, the divine vessel, giving birth to a possibility: call it the divine child, the potential of the soul. This divine birth within is no easy task. There is something within us that wants to kill it off, a murderous instinct within psychic life. The revelation of the divine child is so disastrous, so threatening to the old guard, that it must be killed. According to the Gospel of Matthew 2:16–18, Herod ordered the execution of all babies in Bethlehem, desiring to assure the death of the divine child.
[Herod] “gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old or under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi.”
The divine child must outlive the murderous instincts of the superego. Our soul must survive the murderous rage of the envious tyrant who seems to rule the inner world. The murderous superego does not believe in the potential of our own soul. He does not trust in the good, in the enduring. He cannot see the soul’s potential: the child of the divine mother and father. It is our spiritual labor to protect the child. To be like Joseph, listening to the angels, protecting the child.
When they had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up,” he said, “take the child and his mother and escape to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him.”
So he got up, took the child and his mother during the night and left for Egypt,where he stayed until the death of Herod. And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.” (Matthew 2:13–15)
Joseph sees the angel of the Lord, and the angel says that he must flee Egypt, symbol of tyranny. We must leave behind the tyranny of Herod ruled by fear, finding a place for the soul’s birth, and protecting the soul so that it may grow.
http://pathofsoul.org/2013/12/25/divine-child-symbol-of-the-souls-fulfillment/
MATERNAL ANCESTRY:http://www.oxfordancestors.com/content/view/35/55/
A person’s maternal ancestry is traced by mitochondrial DNA or mtDNA for short. Both men and women possess mtDNA, but only women pass it on to their children.
So we all inherit our mtDNAs from our mothers, but not from our fathers. Your mother inherited it from her mother, who inherited it from hers, and so on back through time. Therefore, mtDNA traces an unbroken maternal line back through time for generation upon generation far further back than any written record.
Research at Oxford University and elsewhere over many years has shown that all of our maternal lines are connected at some time in the past and that these connections can be traced by reading mtDNA. One striking finding was that people tended to cluster into a small number of groups, which could be defined by the precise sequence of their mtDNA. In native Europeans, for example, there were seven such groups, among Native Americans there were four, among Japanese people there were nine, and so on. Each of these groups, by an astounding yet inescapable logic, traced back to just one woman, the common maternal ancestor of everyone in her group, or clan.
For our MatriLine™ service, we read a section of your mtDNA, about 400 base pairs long, and compare its precise sequence to the many thousands of others from all over the world that we have in our database. That way we can not only give you an exact readout of your DNA sequence, but also discover to which of the clans you belong, and from which ancestral mother you are descended. For many of the ancestral mothers, and there are about 36 world-wide, we know whereabouts they lived and how many ten of thousands of years ago. DNA changes very slowly over time and this is what we use to calculate how long ago the clan mothers lived. By studying features of the geographical distribution of their present-day descendants, we can work out where they lived as well. To emphasise that they were real individuals, we have given them all names and, using archaeological and other evidence, we have reconstructed their imagined lives.
Everyone in the same clan is a direct maternal descendant of one of these clan mothers and carries her DNA within every cell of their body. Your mtDNA actually helps cells use oxygen – so you are using your clan mother’s mtDNA every time you breathe. However, not everyone in the same clan has exactly the same mtDNA, because DNA changes gradually over the generations. From your precise DNA result, we are able to assign you a place within the genealogy of the clan, which will be shown on your “Seven Daughters of Eve” or “World Clans” certificate.
The clan mothers were not the only people alive at the time, of course, but they were the only ones to have direct maternal descendants living right through to the present day. The other women around, or their descendants, either had no children at all or had only sons, who could not pass on their mtDNA. And, of course, the clan mothers had ancestors themselves. Amazingly, their genealogies have also been discovered. They show how everyone alive on the planet today can trace their maternal ancestry back to just one woman. By all accounts, she lived in Africa about 150,000 – 200,000 years ago and is known as “Mitochondrial Eve”. On your “World Clans” certificate you will see how you and your clan mother relate to all the others in the human family and to “Mitochondrial Eve” herself.
THE EUROPEAN CLANS – The Seven Daughters of Eve
The clan of Ursula(Latin for she-bear)
is the oldest of the seven native European clans. It was founded around 45,000 years ago by the first modern humans, Homo sapiens, as they established themselves in Europe. Today, about 11% of modern Europeans are the direct maternal descendants of Ursula. They come from all parts of Europe, but the clan is particularly well represented in western Britain and Scandinavia.
The clan of Xenia
(Greek for hospitable)
is the second oldest of the seven native European clans. It was founded 25,000 years ago by the second wave of modern humans, Homo sapiens, who established themselves in Europe, just prior to the coldest part of the last Ice Age. Today around 7% of native Europeans are in the clan of Xenia. Within the clan, three distinct branches fan out over Europe. One is still largely confined to Eastern Europe while the other two have spread further to the West into central Europe and as far as France and Britain. About 1% of Native Americans are also in the clan of Xenia.
The clan of Helena
(Greek for light)
is by far the largest and most successful of the seven native clans with 41% of Europeans belonging to one of its many branches. It began 20,000 years ago with the birth of Helena somewhere in the valleys of the Dordogne and the Vezere, in south-central France. The clan is widespread throughout all parts of Europe, but reaches its highest frequency among the Basque people of northern Spain and southern France.
The clan of Velda
(Scandinavian for ruler)
is the smallest of the seven clans containing only about 4% of native Europeans. Velda lived 17,000 years ago in the limestone hills of Cantabria in northwest Spain. Her descendants are found nowadays mainly in western and northern Europe and are surprisingly frequent among the Saami people of Finland and Northern Norway.
The clan of Tara
(Gaelic for rocky hill)
includes slightly fewer than 10% of modern Europeans. Its many branches are widely distributed throughout southern and western Europe with particularly high concentrations in Ireland and the west of Britain. Tara herself lived 17,000 years ago in the northwest of Italy among the hills of Tuscany and along the estuary of the river Arno.
The clan of Katrine
(Greek for pure)
is a medium sized clan with 10% of Europeans among its membership. Katrine herself lived 15,000 years ago in the wooded plains of northeast Italy, now flooded by the Adriatic, and among the southern foothills of the Alps. Her descendants are still there in numbers, but have also spread throughout central and northern Europe.
The clan of Jasmine
(Persian for flower)
is the second largest of the seven European clans after Helena and is the only one to have its origins outside Europe. Jasmine and her descendants, who now make up 12% of Europeans, were among the first farmers and brought the agricultural revolution to Europe from the Middle East around 8,500 years ago.
The clan of Ulrike
(German for Mistress of All)
is not among the original “Seven Daughters of Eve” clans, but with just under 2% of Europeans among its members, it has a claim to being included among the numerically important clans. Ulrike lived about 18,000 years ago in the cold refuges of the Ukraine at the northern limits of human habitation. Though Ulrike’s descendants are nowhere common, the clan is found today mainly in the east and north of Europe with particularly high concentrations in Scandinavia and the Baltic states.
King, Warrior, Magician, Lover:
Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine
by fallenAngel
“King, Warrior, Magician, Lover – Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine” is a C. G. Jung based interpretation of masculine behavior and personality in the light of social context mythology, poetry and art. This book describes what it takes for a man (and boy) to grow up, what C.G. Jung defined as individuation process. The book presents those four archetypes and asserts that men need to embraces or control their positive and negative elements (shadows). C. G. Jung believed as depth psychologist that evolutionary and cultural roots manifested in archetypes to form our unconscious experience. The authors describe the potential in contemporary us and how to access those archetypes and utilize there energy within us.The book is organized in two major parts, the archetypes of boys and the archetypes of men and four subchapters the respective archetypes. All four representations of the archetypes have one positive (right amount) and 2 negative poles (deficit or surplus). For example, the positive lover archetype embraces the world with passion whereas the negative poles are the addicted lover and the impotent lover. Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette see every man (or boy) somewhere between these three extremes. C_G_JUNG_MOORE_MALE_FEMALE_ARCHETYPES
- The King is the life giver and the most important responsible for the safety and well being. The book quotes from history and art that every society must have king or leader who is entrusted with guiding his people to success and comfort. The benefits and virtues of the king are many, but the responsibilities are many as well. And if the king fails in his duties he is traditionally disposed. The shadows sides are tyrant and the weakling.
- The Warrior is today the most controversial of the archetypes, because of the cruel acts perpetrated by its shadow side. Yet aggressiveness is a highly needed characteristic responsible for our personal achievements and those of our culture. The authors suggest that properly accessed, the Warrior can do a great deal to empower us to live our lives, provide self-discipline, and protect. The two shadow sides are the Sadist and the Masochist. The Warrior is a destroyer who destroys the enemies and clears a space for renewal and change. The prototype of the warrior is the soldier.
- The Magician, represents Logos according to Jung a masculine principle, is the archetype behind a multitude of professions like, lawyers but also engineers, scientists and priests. He sees the unseen. He is the mediator and communicator of secret knowledge, the healer, technologist, teacher, and spiritual. The Magician always has a tendency to abuse his power, being the negative Magician, the manipulator.
- The Lover like the feminine principle Eros manifests energy and fertility of the nature. The gendering of Eros and Logos and synergy is a consequence of Jung’s anima/animus synergy. Lovers are at easy with our own deepest and most central values and visions, and with others. And only through union of the feminine and the masculine our culture and personality prospers and grows. The “me- society” of the impotent is sterile and without compassion and the sex addict destroys any spiritual dimension.Gillette and Moore’s book asks valid questions and does right again on the misunderstood and suppressed aspects of masculine life.
The book asserts also, that in former time these roles could be fulfilled by on person. The shaman as a holistic archetype has the King’s capacity to care, the Warrior’s capacity to fight and the Lover’s capacity to value someone or something enough to fight.
There is much to contemplate in these books which can be mapped with political, mythic and culture examples. The self- evidence of this interpretation and its usefulness is overwhelmingly convincing. The book can be used for understanding history, analyzing the state of your society, for self reflection or spiritual exploration. For example, look at your politicians: Does one of them have the virtues of those positive archetypes? As a man look into yourself or ask your family – are you a good King, a good Lover, a good Warrior and a good Magician? I re-read this book after a monk, who not coincidently is also a trained Jungian, used it as guideline line in a weekends treat at a monastery.
The Realm of the Mothers Faust’s Dream, by Luis Ricardo Falero- 1880. Sotheby’s. US Public Domain.
In the Introduction to the Second Section of Symbols of Transformation (SoT), Carl Jung speaks of and quotes a section of Goethe’s Faust. In the story, Faust descends to the realm of the Mothers. Faust’s influence on Jung is particularly important for our reading of SOT.
In the story, Mephistopheles gives Faust a key. He says: “The key will smell the right place from all others; Follow it down, ’twill lead you to the Mothers.” With this Jung begins his gradual contemplation of “the realm of the Mothers,” a contemplation which will culminate in his last chapter on “The Sacrifice.” Understanding the nature of the ‘Mothers’ requires the ability for creative imagination. One has to ‘dream on’ the Mothers, to contemplate the Mothers. And in doing so, a whole new field of knowing opens: a field of the soul, of the creative potential of the ‘feminine principle.’ This feminine principle is vital to transforming both ourselves and the world. It is the principle of creative regeneration and rebirth.
In order to begin to work through this principle I am including an extended section from Faust. The discussion which follows includes Carl Jung’s views on the ‘realm of the Mothers.’,’ as well as a conversation between Eckermann and Goethe taking place in 1830 which addresses the ‘the Mothers.’
Mephistopheles. I praise you, truly, ere you part from me,
Since that you understand the Devil I can see.
Here, take this key.
Faust.That tiny, little thing!
Mephistopheles. Seize and esteem it, see what it may bring!
Faust. It’s growing in my hand! it flashes, glows!
Mephistopheles. Will you see now what blessing it bestows?
The key will smell the right place from all others;
Follow it down, ’twill lead you to the Mothers.
Faust [shuddering]. The Mothers! Like a blow it strikes my ear!
What is that word that I don’t like to hear?
Mephistopheles. So narrow-minded, scared by each new word?
Will you but hear what you’ve already heard?
Let naught disturb you, though it strangely rings,
You! long since wonted to most wondrous things.
Faust. And yet in torpor there’s no gain for me;
The thrill of awe is man’s best quality.
Although the world may stifle every sense,
Enthralled, man deeply senses the Immense.
Mephistopheles.Descend, then! I might also tell you: Soar!
It’s all the same. Escape from the Existent
To phantoms’ unbound realms far distant!
Delight in what long since exists no more!
Like filmy clouds the phantoms glide along.
Brandish the key, hold off the shadowy throng.
Faust [inspired]. Good! Gripping it, I feel new strength arise,
My breast expands. On, to the great emprise!
Mephistopheles. When you at last a glowing tripod see,
Then in the deepest of all realms you’ll be.
You’ll see the Mothers in the tripod’s glow,
Some of them sitting, others stand and go,
As it may chance. Formation, transformation,
Eternal Mind’s eternal re-creation.
Images of all creatures hover free,
They will not see you, only wraiths they see.
So, then, take courage, for the danger’s great.
Go to that tripod, do not hesitate,
And touch it with the key!
Mephistopheles is the image of the devil, but Goethe describes him as the “part of that power which would Ever work evil, but engenders good.” Mephistopheles “puts into Faust’s hand the marvelous tool,” the “key.” Jung says:
“What he is describing here is the libido, which is not only creative and procreative, but possesses an intuitive faculty, a strange power to “smell the right place,” almost as if it were a live creature with an independent life of its own (which is why it is so easily personified). It is purposive, like sexuality itself, a favorite object of comparison” (para. 182).
This ‘key’ will lead Faust down to the ‘realm of the Mothers.’ Jung describes this realm as being related to the creative power of the unconscious:
The ‘realm of the Mothers’ has not a few connections with the womb, with the matrix, which frequently symbolizes the creative aspect of the unconscious” (ibid).
We can further understand the nature of the ‘Mothers’ by turning to a conversation between Goethe and Eckermann. In 1830, Eckermann spoke with Goethe regarding the mother. The conversation is as follows:
“This afternoon, Goethe afforded me great pleasure by reading the scene in which Faust visits the Mothers. The novelty and unexpectedness of the subject, and Goethe’s manner of reading the scene, struck me so forcibly, that I felt myself wholly transported into the situation of Faust when he shudders at the communication from Mephistophiles. Although I had heard and felt the whole, yet so much remained an enigma to me, that I felt myself compelled to ask Goethe for some explanation. But he, in his usual manner, wrapped himself up in mystery, as he looked on me with wide open eyes, and repeated the words --
” « Die Mütter ! Mütter ! ‘s klingt so wunderlich/ “
The Mothers ! Mothers ! nay, it sounds so strange.
” I can reveal to you no more,” said he, ” except that I found, in Plutarch, that in ancient Greece mention was made of the Mothers as divinities. This is all that I owe to others, the rest is my own invention. Take the manuscript home with you, study it carefully, and see what you can make of it.”
I was very happy while studying this remarkable scene once more in quiet, and took the following view of the peculiar character and influence, the abode and outward circumstances, of the Mothers : --
Could we imagine that huge sphere our earth had an empty space in its centre, so that one might go hundreds of miles in one direction, without coming in contact with anything corporeal, this would be the abode of those unknown goddesses to whom Faust descends. They live, as it were, beyond all place; for nothing stands firm in their neighbourhood : they also live beyond all time ; for no heavenly body shines upon them which can rise or set, and mark the alternation of day and night.
Thus, dwelling in eternal obscurity and loneliness, these Mothers are creative beings ; they are the creating and sustaining principle from which everything proceeds that has life and form on the surface of the earth. Whatever ceases to breathe returns to them as a spiritual nature, and they preserve it until a fit occasion arises to come into existence anew. All souls and forms of what has been, or will be, hover about like clouds in the vast space of their abode. So are the Mother’s surrounded, and the magician must enter their dominion, if he would obtain power over the form of a being, and call back former existences to seeming life.
The eternal metamorphosis of earthly existence, birth and growth, destruction and new formation, are thus the unceasing care of the Mothers; and, as in everything which receives new life on earth, the female principle is most in operation, these creating divinities are rightly thought of as female, and the august title of Mothers may be given to them not without reason.
All this is, indeed, no more than a poetic creation; but the limited human mind cannot penetrate much further, and is contented to find something on which it can repose. Upon earth we see phenomena, and feel effects, of which we do not know whence they come and whither they go. We infer a spiritual origin— something divine, of which we have no notion, and for which we have no expression, and– which we must draw down to ourselves, and anthropomorphize– that we may in some degree embody and make comprehensible our dark forebodings.
Thus have arisen all mythi, which from century to century have lived among nations, and, in like manner, this new one of Goethe’s, which has at least the appearance of some natural truth, and may be reckoned among the best that was ever devised.”
The realm of the Mothers is an archetypal representation of ‘the female principle,’ of ‘creating divinities’ or creative divinity. The key that will take us toward the realm of the Mothers is libido. Libido is the passionate creative power of the living soul. Through ‘Uniting.. with it,’ we come in contact with creative divinity, and thus accomplish our ‘life’s work.’ Jung explains:
“This libido is a force of nature, good and bad at once, or morally neutral. Uniting himself with it, Faust succeeds in accomplishing his real life’s work, at first with evil results and then for the benefit of mankind” (ibid).
Through entrance into creative realms of being, one may consummate the ‘royal marriage.’
“In the realm of the Mothers he finds the tripod, the Hermetic vessel in which the “royal marriage” is consummated. But he needs the phallic wand… The insignificant-looking tool in Faust’s hand is the dark creative power of the unconscious, which reveals itself to those who follow its dictates and is indeed capable of working miracles” (ibid).
The sacred marriage occurs upon the union of the libidinal aspect (the ‘key’) with the vessel. This image represents the hieros gamos of psychic life. We will see this theme of union again and again in archetypal symbolism: creative power in union with the creative vessel (as soul, as unconscious, as the mother). Creative union guides the path of soul!
References:
Carl Jung, Cw 5, Symbols of Transformation (in US Pubic Domain, first published 1912)
Conversations of Goethe with Eckermann and Soret -1850
Goethe Faust, Part II
Let’s take a look.
