Divine Feminine
ANIMA MUNDI
Below: Werner Hornung, Enter to Grow in Wisdom
As in Goethe's Faust, here too it is the feminine element (Eve)
that knows about the secret which can work against the total
destruction of mankind, or man's despair in the face of such a
development.
Perhaps someday there will appear a poet courageous
enough to give expression to the voices of the "mothers."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 386-387
On the one hand the anima is an allurement to an intensification of life, but on the other she opens our eyes to its religious aspect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 423-424
The anima is a representative of the unconscious and hence a mediatrix, just as the Beata Virgo is called "mediatrix" in the dogma of the Assumption. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 423-424
The soul has its own peculiar world.
Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self, he who is neither in events, nor in men, nor in his thoughts. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, 240.
Thus the erotic relationship, no matter how unconventional it may be, would have to be understood as an opus divinum, and the perhaps necessary sacrifice of this relationship as a thysia, a "ritual slaughter." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 409-410.
that knows about the secret which can work against the total
destruction of mankind, or man's despair in the face of such a
development.
Perhaps someday there will appear a poet courageous
enough to give expression to the voices of the "mothers."
~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 386-387
On the one hand the anima is an allurement to an intensification of life, but on the other she opens our eyes to its religious aspect. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 423-424
The anima is a representative of the unconscious and hence a mediatrix, just as the Beata Virgo is called "mediatrix" in the dogma of the Assumption. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 423-424
The soul has its own peculiar world.
Only the self enters in there, or the man who has completely become his self, he who is neither in events, nor in men, nor in his thoughts. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, 240.
Thus the erotic relationship, no matter how unconventional it may be, would have to be understood as an opus divinum, and the perhaps necessary sacrifice of this relationship as a thysia, a "ritual slaughter." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 409-410.
I hope you will find time to commit your plant counterparts to the earth and tend their growth, for the earth always wants children-houses, trees, flowers-to grow out of her and celebrate the marriage of the human psyche with the Great Mother, the best counter-magic against rootless extraversion! ~Jung, Letters Vol. II, P. 320
t is a structural element of the psyche we find everywhere and at all times; and it is that in which all individual psyches are identical with each other, and where they function as if they were the one undivided psyche the ancients called anima mundi or the psyche toukosmou. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 398-400
ANIMA MUNDI
The world soul (Greek: ψυχὴ κόσμου, Latin: anima mundi) is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body. The idea originated with Plato and was an important component of most Neoplatonic systems:
Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.[1]
The Stoics believed it to be the only vital force in the universe. Similar concepts also hold in systems of eastern philosophy in the Brahman-Atman of Hinduism, the Buddha-Nature in Mahayana Buddhism, and in the School of Yin-Yang, Taoism, and Neo-Confucianism as qi.
Other resemblances can be found in the thoughts of hermetic philosophers like Paracelsus, and by Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Friedrich Schelling and in Hegel's Geist ("Spirit"/"Mind"). Ralph Waldo Emerson published "The Over-Soul" in 1841 which was clearly influenced by the Hindu conception of a universal soul. There and are also similarities with ideas developed since the 1960s by Gaia theorists such as James Lovelock.
"Search the anima mundi means to me across the world as a tribal hunter ... a gold digger. Means to scrutinize everything carefully and 'divine' as it says, the specific genius loci. To do this we must be sensitive to the representations of the world ... " (James Hillman, The pleasure of thinking)
"Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street." ~James Hillman, “Anima Mundi,” Spring, 1982
NUMINOUS & LUMINOUS PSYCHE: Anima Mundi, the feminine principle or mode of Being was historically considered the "soul of the world," the fertility of human, animal and plant life. Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno said the World Soul “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.” She is the magical world of creative mystery. Our geocentric understanding of ourselves has expanded to the realization that we are an intrinsic part of Cosmos. The Universe is also literally within us. No longer limited merely to our planet, Anima Mundi is the personification of the whole natural world – the Universe. This light, the dynamic reality of the energy field, is within us as within everything. Embodied nature is the link between the archetypal and formative worlds, the hyperdimensional matrix of eternal patterns with sacred proportions and unique manifestations. She is also infinite potential, the possibility of bringing creative ideas to birth, to manifestation. In the deepest sense, she is the universal wave function, the unmanifest ground of our being, spacetime and the radiant light of virtual photon fluctuation, which underlies all matter and manifestation.
http://ionamiller2009.iwarp.com/whats_new_37.html
Global emphasis on urgent ecological awareness implies a reflowering of the Neo-Platonic and alchemical notion of ANIMA MUNDI the Soul of the World. Anima Mundi is not an archetype, but an archetypal way of seeing -- seeing through the world. Our narcissistic tendency is self-absorption, over-valuing individual subjectivity at the expense of the real problems of the world. The language of Anima Mundi includes beauty, aesthetics, depth, inner life and political activity -- psychological practices of larger groups.
We are all engaged in making the world soul even as she shapes us. We have a drive to love the world, even an erotic desire for anima mundi. She invites us into a relationship of intimacy with the world and its objects and processes. The psychic reality of the world soul is available to all in images and imagination. We cannot separate our souls from the souls of others and the environment.
Care of the soul doesn't mean isolating ourselves from the reality of the world and its phenomena -- experiences, substance and objects. Soul makes images that add a depth dimension to concrete life, that go beyond literalness to psychological metaphysics that expresses our legitimate need to go further, even beyond mythical fictions through imagination to speculative freedom.
Thus, anima mundi is the field of infinite meanings, created from metaphors of different places, points of view, and narratives. New understandings arrive with new images at the surprising edge of things, new expressive forms that arise of their own accord.
- Plato ( 428-348 BC) in the Timaeus says: " Therefore, according to a probable thesis , it must be said that this world was born as a human being really has a soul and intelligence in accordance with the divine will ."
This vision is refined later in the Alexandrian and Neo-Platonic thought and finds wide success in the Hellenized Egyptian thinker , Plotinus of Lycopolis ( 204-270 ) .
- Plotinus in the Enneads (IV , 4, 45 ) writes:
" ... It is clear that every being that is in the universe, according to its nature and constitution, contributes to the formation of the universe with his action and his suffering, in the same manner in which each part of the individual animal , in reason of his natural constitution , cooperate with the body as a whole , making the service that competes with its role and its function. Each part also gives and receives from its other , as his receptive nature allows. "
He also states that the simple is what is the basis of life . This is because the soul of an organism and is worth much more than all the parts put together : every body is a unit , an indivisible whole , something extraordinarily simple at first glance while being composed . This "simple" that is the basis of the compound can not be a material entity , because no matter what material may be designed or divided in half , even only conceptually . The multitude of souls in the world is itself intelligible only on the assumption that they all have a common origin. This unit is what explains the meaning of the Anima Mundi . Nell'Anima the world postulated by Plotinus there were also the deities of pagan polytheism and therefore the Greek mythological tradition . These were not seen in contrast with the idea of One, being an expression of the same nature . The One remained transcendent itself and the individual deities were conceived as immanent forces of creation , as we would say today energies , and were , therefore , partakers of the same Spirit of the World that becomes a summation and archetypal energy .
Plotinus says , in fact, that ( Enneads , II, 3:16) : " ... the opposites are reconciled , and without them the universe is not such, and so is the other living beings ."
For Dionysius the Areopagite ( fifth-sixth century ) , the Anima Mundi , just like the One of Plotinus and the Holy Spirit Christian, it is life-giving and " distributing itself is not divided ." As, indeed , the idea that the Trinity is not affected indeed strengthened in comparison with the previous and the widespread propensity to triad recovered from Pythagoreanism , Neoplatonism and by Proclus .
William of Conches (1080-1145 AC) , one of the greatest exponents of the Platonism of the famous school of Chartres, in his : Glosses on Timaeus of Plato, says, " The Soul of the World is a natural energy beings for which some have only the ability to move , the other to grow , others to perceive through the senses , others to judge . The question is ... what is that energy. But, as it seems to me natural that energy is the Holy Spirit , which is a benign and divine harmony that is that from which all realities have to be, to move, to grow , the feeling, the experience , the judge. »
Marsilio Ficino argued , in his Platonic Theology , that the soul " is the greatest of all miracles of nature. All other things are under God always be a single soul on the other hand is all things together "..." the nature center , the middle term of all things , the chain of the world , the bond and the seam of the universe , the face of everything. "
Always Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)
- In his Platonic Theology , Book III , Chapter I, states that the Anima Mundi is the mirror of divine realities , the life of those mortals and the nexus of both.
- And in the De vita says: " The Soul mundi ... according to the Platonic oldest , by means of his reasons , he has built in the sky, beyond the stars , the astral figures and parts of figures , such that they themselves become figures, and impressed in all these figures certain properties ... And specifically, it has no place in heaven forty-eight figures universal , twelve in the Zodiac , thirty-six out of the Zodiac. »
- ... it was the scholar, philosopher and priest Marsilio Ficino arendere syntonic his Neoplatonic reading of the Anima Mundi with the Christian vision . He understood the fact comeanello junction between the upper and the lower world . Ficino departed from the field and gradually climbed up the form, then the Soul , and then the Angel of God The Soul stood in the center , and it was the junction point between the physical and the spiritual. For this Ficino called the Anima mundi et copula and that is the Soul as a node between the physical reality and the intelligible and therefore " copula " or union of the world with another dimension . In its Platonic Theology of immortalitate animarum , Marsilio Ficino defines the soul as " Centrum naturae , universorum medium mundi series Voltes nodusque et omnium copula mundi ." Therefore raises the Soul in the middle of nature. He sees it as what mediatra nature and the universe , understood in its plurality of planetary epiphanies , but also as a node of all things , in the sense of what holds together the infinite parts of the world. Defines it as the face of all things and " copula ", ie union , the world itself with the divine - . (taken from the book: La Primavera di Botticelli, cosmic mystery of the Anima Mundi , Vincenzo Guzzo and Gaspare Licandro ) .
In the sixteenth century , the notion that the most vital vitalistic Soul of the world emerged especially in Giordano Bruno , who conceived the presence of the divine in nature in a vision closer to pan- enteismo that pantheism to which he was burned alive , and then Tommaso Campanella , according to which all the elements of reality are sentient beings and therefore have a kind of consciousness.
In the following centuries the idea of Anima Mundi was almost forgotten , and where affiorasse was severely hampered by the spread of the mechanistic conceptions .
Descartes with the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa deprived the Nature of the Soul and the Soul of its vital relationship with the Whole.
With Goethe's concept of Anima Mundi Schelling made a mental note and then shooting the Neoplatonic conception that sees the intelligent principle already present in embryonic form in nature or potential . The nature , for Schelling , is a ' " dormant intelligence ," a "spirit of power" and could not evolve to produce the man if he had not already within themselves the divine spirit . The organizations below are only minor aspects or limitations of the only universal in the human body is fully realized . The soul of the world in fact become fully self-conscious only in man, that is so over the top, the point of transition from nature to God, which is reflected in it . In nature there is therefore purposive intentionality , which is specified in organisms gradually more complex starting from a principle , however, simple and absolutely unified .
Schopenhauer , then , stated that the individual souls of individuals are an expression of the will of a single life , however, operates in an unconscious manner , and only humans can become self-conscious .
The idea of Anima Mundi emerges so cogent in Carl Jung, the concept of the collective unconscious and especially James Hillman (1926 - 2011) , one of the largest and the original followers of Jung, who re-evaluates the validity of the idea of Psyche Member of the mind , not as mere rational , but as Anima ( more correct translation of the original meaning of the word Psyche ) and enhances well the ideas and the valuable role of the philosophers of the Renaissance as regards the way they represent the Anima Mundi .
We are souls who choose life ... who have chosen to exist. And in my opinion, to exist is to choose to love and to be loved in spite of and , above all, open to our relationship with the world ... We are in a sense just the relationships we have with the world, because they are made of our own imaginal substance . We share the same Unus Mundus. --Eldo Stellucci
Notes to the anima mundi Theo Eshetu (edited by Lucia Porcelli )
"The last echo of the soul of the world in the modern age , or the age of its sunset announced the development of the natural sciences , has echoed in Schelling , and in particular in its idealism ' aesthetic ' . Yet the soul of the world , as spirit , breath of life and intercessory power . again the art ... * Kosmos become " ordered universe " only when it is meant a higher "intelligence" universal . language in the pre- philosophical , the word simply meant ' order ' .In the Homeric poems the ranks of soldiers are said to be "en kosmo " simply " in order." In greek thought the ordered universe is also nice, that is balanced , harmonious and clean. In this sense, the Latin translation mundus is twofold: namely ' world ' , but also ' clean ' , sorted . Kosmos is , in Heraclitus, the shining orderly arrangement of all things . And lightning, fire, sun , and even a child's game . Glowing in the game universe, the universal light of the fire is the force that system and identifies things in the world , and she gives birth and vanish . The universal game has no place in the world, does not occur . It is not " phenomenon " is not placed among the things in the world, because it amounts to give, give in time and place , rather than appearing in the data . The world is not as hard as it could last aWhat in the world , and the world lasts at most as the world itself , I mean the world is not ' object ' in the sense that we have never faced . How then can it be under-stood , conceptualized and , as such , represented ?* If the world is not an object , then the world can not give any images, especially based on the thought of a relationship between two things in the world . But it happens sometimes that a thing can shine in its inherence in the world and return to the universal whole : a fragment of the world can shine the light of the world, will become clear in the light of the world. In this transparency it is not canceled , but rather leaves look more clearly as a product and work force individuatrice completely universal , where the light suddenly shines . Things ' transparent 'who allow themselves to go through the light of the world acquire a cosmic depth . See the whole thing finished grooming, but not as a reference to another thing in the world. The thing that shines the power of the world has become a symbol . So every finite thing can become a symbol , ' representative ' of the universe, where everything appears and shines in it , as a consequence, the world can not become a symbol just as in things finite meets its ownimage and reflected in the symbol itself. * So symbol , image, origin , but also ritual, form, light, and what in the language and practice of art by Theo Eshetu means the art . The soul of the world as a mediating force , life-giving and life refers to the life-world of art. "
The soul of the world, life and death. In the dense network in which everything and everyone we connect (Anima Mundi?), sharing the idea that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed, and knowing that the immensity of the Mystery embraces everything that we intended to Soul and understand it, we have no reason to feel far away or lost the stars disappeared on our horizon. We ourselves are neither close nor distant than everything disappears but these, like all of our deceased loved ones are to us. Atoms and galaxies are One and the transition from the phenomenon of becoming the idea of being constantly and occurs with simultaneous reciprocity, constancy and love in the heart of the mystery in which everything is where everything becomes. - Vincenzo Guzzo.
t is a structural element of the psyche we find everywhere and at all times; and it is that in which all individual psyches are identical with each other, and where they function as if they were the one undivided psyche the ancients called anima mundi or the psyche toukosmou. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 398-400
ANIMA MUNDI
The world soul (Greek: ψυχὴ κόσμου, Latin: anima mundi) is, according to several systems of thought, an intrinsic connection between all living things on the planet, which relates to our world in much the same way as the soul is connected to the human body. The idea originated with Plato and was an important component of most Neoplatonic systems:
Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.[1]
The Stoics believed it to be the only vital force in the universe. Similar concepts also hold in systems of eastern philosophy in the Brahman-Atman of Hinduism, the Buddha-Nature in Mahayana Buddhism, and in the School of Yin-Yang, Taoism, and Neo-Confucianism as qi.
Other resemblances can be found in the thoughts of hermetic philosophers like Paracelsus, and by Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, Friedrich Schelling and in Hegel's Geist ("Spirit"/"Mind"). Ralph Waldo Emerson published "The Over-Soul" in 1841 which was clearly influenced by the Hindu conception of a universal soul. There and are also similarities with ideas developed since the 1960s by Gaia theorists such as James Lovelock.
"Search the anima mundi means to me across the world as a tribal hunter ... a gold digger. Means to scrutinize everything carefully and 'divine' as it says, the specific genius loci. To do this we must be sensitive to the representations of the world ... " (James Hillman, The pleasure of thinking)
"Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street." ~James Hillman, “Anima Mundi,” Spring, 1982
NUMINOUS & LUMINOUS PSYCHE: Anima Mundi, the feminine principle or mode of Being was historically considered the "soul of the world," the fertility of human, animal and plant life. Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno said the World Soul “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.” She is the magical world of creative mystery. Our geocentric understanding of ourselves has expanded to the realization that we are an intrinsic part of Cosmos. The Universe is also literally within us. No longer limited merely to our planet, Anima Mundi is the personification of the whole natural world – the Universe. This light, the dynamic reality of the energy field, is within us as within everything. Embodied nature is the link between the archetypal and formative worlds, the hyperdimensional matrix of eternal patterns with sacred proportions and unique manifestations. She is also infinite potential, the possibility of bringing creative ideas to birth, to manifestation. In the deepest sense, she is the universal wave function, the unmanifest ground of our being, spacetime and the radiant light of virtual photon fluctuation, which underlies all matter and manifestation.
http://ionamiller2009.iwarp.com/whats_new_37.html
Global emphasis on urgent ecological awareness implies a reflowering of the Neo-Platonic and alchemical notion of ANIMA MUNDI the Soul of the World. Anima Mundi is not an archetype, but an archetypal way of seeing -- seeing through the world. Our narcissistic tendency is self-absorption, over-valuing individual subjectivity at the expense of the real problems of the world. The language of Anima Mundi includes beauty, aesthetics, depth, inner life and political activity -- psychological practices of larger groups.
We are all engaged in making the world soul even as she shapes us. We have a drive to love the world, even an erotic desire for anima mundi. She invites us into a relationship of intimacy with the world and its objects and processes. The psychic reality of the world soul is available to all in images and imagination. We cannot separate our souls from the souls of others and the environment.
Care of the soul doesn't mean isolating ourselves from the reality of the world and its phenomena -- experiences, substance and objects. Soul makes images that add a depth dimension to concrete life, that go beyond literalness to psychological metaphysics that expresses our legitimate need to go further, even beyond mythical fictions through imagination to speculative freedom.
Thus, anima mundi is the field of infinite meanings, created from metaphors of different places, points of view, and narratives. New understandings arrive with new images at the surprising edge of things, new expressive forms that arise of their own accord.
- Plato ( 428-348 BC) in the Timaeus says: " Therefore, according to a probable thesis , it must be said that this world was born as a human being really has a soul and intelligence in accordance with the divine will ."
This vision is refined later in the Alexandrian and Neo-Platonic thought and finds wide success in the Hellenized Egyptian thinker , Plotinus of Lycopolis ( 204-270 ) .
- Plotinus in the Enneads (IV , 4, 45 ) writes:
" ... It is clear that every being that is in the universe, according to its nature and constitution, contributes to the formation of the universe with his action and his suffering, in the same manner in which each part of the individual animal , in reason of his natural constitution , cooperate with the body as a whole , making the service that competes with its role and its function. Each part also gives and receives from its other , as his receptive nature allows. "
He also states that the simple is what is the basis of life . This is because the soul of an organism and is worth much more than all the parts put together : every body is a unit , an indivisible whole , something extraordinarily simple at first glance while being composed . This "simple" that is the basis of the compound can not be a material entity , because no matter what material may be designed or divided in half , even only conceptually . The multitude of souls in the world is itself intelligible only on the assumption that they all have a common origin. This unit is what explains the meaning of the Anima Mundi . Nell'Anima the world postulated by Plotinus there were also the deities of pagan polytheism and therefore the Greek mythological tradition . These were not seen in contrast with the idea of One, being an expression of the same nature . The One remained transcendent itself and the individual deities were conceived as immanent forces of creation , as we would say today energies , and were , therefore , partakers of the same Spirit of the World that becomes a summation and archetypal energy .
Plotinus says , in fact, that ( Enneads , II, 3:16) : " ... the opposites are reconciled , and without them the universe is not such, and so is the other living beings ."
For Dionysius the Areopagite ( fifth-sixth century ) , the Anima Mundi , just like the One of Plotinus and the Holy Spirit Christian, it is life-giving and " distributing itself is not divided ." As, indeed , the idea that the Trinity is not affected indeed strengthened in comparison with the previous and the widespread propensity to triad recovered from Pythagoreanism , Neoplatonism and by Proclus .
William of Conches (1080-1145 AC) , one of the greatest exponents of the Platonism of the famous school of Chartres, in his : Glosses on Timaeus of Plato, says, " The Soul of the World is a natural energy beings for which some have only the ability to move , the other to grow , others to perceive through the senses , others to judge . The question is ... what is that energy. But, as it seems to me natural that energy is the Holy Spirit , which is a benign and divine harmony that is that from which all realities have to be, to move, to grow , the feeling, the experience , the judge. »
Marsilio Ficino argued , in his Platonic Theology , that the soul " is the greatest of all miracles of nature. All other things are under God always be a single soul on the other hand is all things together "..." the nature center , the middle term of all things , the chain of the world , the bond and the seam of the universe , the face of everything. "
Always Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499)
- In his Platonic Theology , Book III , Chapter I, states that the Anima Mundi is the mirror of divine realities , the life of those mortals and the nexus of both.
- And in the De vita says: " The Soul mundi ... according to the Platonic oldest , by means of his reasons , he has built in the sky, beyond the stars , the astral figures and parts of figures , such that they themselves become figures, and impressed in all these figures certain properties ... And specifically, it has no place in heaven forty-eight figures universal , twelve in the Zodiac , thirty-six out of the Zodiac. »
- ... it was the scholar, philosopher and priest Marsilio Ficino arendere syntonic his Neoplatonic reading of the Anima Mundi with the Christian vision . He understood the fact comeanello junction between the upper and the lower world . Ficino departed from the field and gradually climbed up the form, then the Soul , and then the Angel of God The Soul stood in the center , and it was the junction point between the physical and the spiritual. For this Ficino called the Anima mundi et copula and that is the Soul as a node between the physical reality and the intelligible and therefore " copula " or union of the world with another dimension . In its Platonic Theology of immortalitate animarum , Marsilio Ficino defines the soul as " Centrum naturae , universorum medium mundi series Voltes nodusque et omnium copula mundi ." Therefore raises the Soul in the middle of nature. He sees it as what mediatra nature and the universe , understood in its plurality of planetary epiphanies , but also as a node of all things , in the sense of what holds together the infinite parts of the world. Defines it as the face of all things and " copula ", ie union , the world itself with the divine - . (taken from the book: La Primavera di Botticelli, cosmic mystery of the Anima Mundi , Vincenzo Guzzo and Gaspare Licandro ) .
In the sixteenth century , the notion that the most vital vitalistic Soul of the world emerged especially in Giordano Bruno , who conceived the presence of the divine in nature in a vision closer to pan- enteismo that pantheism to which he was burned alive , and then Tommaso Campanella , according to which all the elements of reality are sentient beings and therefore have a kind of consciousness.
In the following centuries the idea of Anima Mundi was almost forgotten , and where affiorasse was severely hampered by the spread of the mechanistic conceptions .
Descartes with the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa deprived the Nature of the Soul and the Soul of its vital relationship with the Whole.
With Goethe's concept of Anima Mundi Schelling made a mental note and then shooting the Neoplatonic conception that sees the intelligent principle already present in embryonic form in nature or potential . The nature , for Schelling , is a ' " dormant intelligence ," a "spirit of power" and could not evolve to produce the man if he had not already within themselves the divine spirit . The organizations below are only minor aspects or limitations of the only universal in the human body is fully realized . The soul of the world in fact become fully self-conscious only in man, that is so over the top, the point of transition from nature to God, which is reflected in it . In nature there is therefore purposive intentionality , which is specified in organisms gradually more complex starting from a principle , however, simple and absolutely unified .
Schopenhauer , then , stated that the individual souls of individuals are an expression of the will of a single life , however, operates in an unconscious manner , and only humans can become self-conscious .
The idea of Anima Mundi emerges so cogent in Carl Jung, the concept of the collective unconscious and especially James Hillman (1926 - 2011) , one of the largest and the original followers of Jung, who re-evaluates the validity of the idea of Psyche Member of the mind , not as mere rational , but as Anima ( more correct translation of the original meaning of the word Psyche ) and enhances well the ideas and the valuable role of the philosophers of the Renaissance as regards the way they represent the Anima Mundi .
We are souls who choose life ... who have chosen to exist. And in my opinion, to exist is to choose to love and to be loved in spite of and , above all, open to our relationship with the world ... We are in a sense just the relationships we have with the world, because they are made of our own imaginal substance . We share the same Unus Mundus. --Eldo Stellucci
Notes to the anima mundi Theo Eshetu (edited by Lucia Porcelli )
"The last echo of the soul of the world in the modern age , or the age of its sunset announced the development of the natural sciences , has echoed in Schelling , and in particular in its idealism ' aesthetic ' . Yet the soul of the world , as spirit , breath of life and intercessory power . again the art ... * Kosmos become " ordered universe " only when it is meant a higher "intelligence" universal . language in the pre- philosophical , the word simply meant ' order ' .In the Homeric poems the ranks of soldiers are said to be "en kosmo " simply " in order." In greek thought the ordered universe is also nice, that is balanced , harmonious and clean. In this sense, the Latin translation mundus is twofold: namely ' world ' , but also ' clean ' , sorted . Kosmos is , in Heraclitus, the shining orderly arrangement of all things . And lightning, fire, sun , and even a child's game . Glowing in the game universe, the universal light of the fire is the force that system and identifies things in the world , and she gives birth and vanish . The universal game has no place in the world, does not occur . It is not " phenomenon " is not placed among the things in the world, because it amounts to give, give in time and place , rather than appearing in the data . The world is not as hard as it could last aWhat in the world , and the world lasts at most as the world itself , I mean the world is not ' object ' in the sense that we have never faced . How then can it be under-stood , conceptualized and , as such , represented ?* If the world is not an object , then the world can not give any images, especially based on the thought of a relationship between two things in the world . But it happens sometimes that a thing can shine in its inherence in the world and return to the universal whole : a fragment of the world can shine the light of the world, will become clear in the light of the world. In this transparency it is not canceled , but rather leaves look more clearly as a product and work force individuatrice completely universal , where the light suddenly shines . Things ' transparent 'who allow themselves to go through the light of the world acquire a cosmic depth . See the whole thing finished grooming, but not as a reference to another thing in the world. The thing that shines the power of the world has become a symbol . So every finite thing can become a symbol , ' representative ' of the universe, where everything appears and shines in it , as a consequence, the world can not become a symbol just as in things finite meets its ownimage and reflected in the symbol itself. * So symbol , image, origin , but also ritual, form, light, and what in the language and practice of art by Theo Eshetu means the art . The soul of the world as a mediating force , life-giving and life refers to the life-world of art. "
The soul of the world, life and death. In the dense network in which everything and everyone we connect (Anima Mundi?), sharing the idea that nothing is created and nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed, and knowing that the immensity of the Mystery embraces everything that we intended to Soul and understand it, we have no reason to feel far away or lost the stars disappeared on our horizon. We ourselves are neither close nor distant than everything disappears but these, like all of our deceased loved ones are to us. Atoms and galaxies are One and the transition from the phenomenon of becoming the idea of being constantly and occurs with simultaneous reciprocity, constancy and love in the heart of the mystery in which everything is where everything becomes. - Vincenzo Guzzo.
Anima Mundi, 24x36, by Iona Miller from Psychogenesis
"ANIMA MUNDI: Soul-Filled World"
By Iona Miller, 2009
“God redeems humanity, but nature needs to be redeemed by human alchemists, who are able to induce the process of transformation, which alone is capable of liberating the light imprisoned in physical creation.” ~Stephan Hoeller, Sufi Journal, Issue 67, Autumn 2005
"Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street." ~James Hillman, “Anima Mundi,” Spring, 1982
NUMINOUS & LUMINOUS PSYCHE
Anima Mundi, the feminine principle or mode of Being was historically considered the "soul of the world," the fertility of human, animal and plant life. Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno said the World Soul “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.” She is the magical world of creative mystery.
Our geocentric understanding of ourselves has expanded to the realization that we are an intrinsic part of Cosmos. The Universe is also literally within us. No longer limited merely to our planet, Anima Mundi is the personification of the whole natural world – the Universe. This light, the dynamic reality of the energy field, is within us as within everything. Embodied nature is the link between the archetypal and formative worlds, the hyperdimensional matrix of eternal patterns with sacred proportions and unique manifestations. She is also infinite potential, the possibility of bringing creative ideas to birth, to manifestation.
In the deepest sense, she is the universal wave function, the unmanifest ground of our being, spacetime and the radiant light of virtual photon fluctuation, which underlies all matter and manifestation. Kabbalist Azriel of Gerona claimed "faith" meant entering into a relationship with one's "nothingness" and the "unknown" of the infinite, the ultimate ‘yin’ of non-existence that is the mother of all form.
In ancient times Anima Mundi declared her impenetrable mystery by reiterating that "I am Isis; no man has lifted my veil." This Muse of superconsciousness is bathed in the Light and concealed by it. Thus she alludes to herself as dazzling Solitaire in her virgin nature, that sense of wholeness within oneself, which is the Feminine source of wisdom, magic and meaning.
The natural light of the soul is illumination, embodied in the pineal light of the “spirit molecule,” DMT. Likewise, alchemists seek the divine spark, the light hidden in matter. To work creatively in the world, the Light of Nature needs to be released through inner alchemy. Our own light or divine spark is part of the light of the World Soul, so we can understand the mysteries of creation and the secrets of nature. The tools of inner transformation help Anima Mundi reveal her divine light.
Whether called Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Demeter/Persephone, Mary, Great Mother, White Goddess or any cultural variant, Anima Mundi is the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form. She is personified internally as a soul guide or Initiatrix and externally embodied as the Soror Mystica. Glimpsing inspiring inner workings of our soul helps us realign our lives, our hopes and our dreams.
ANCIENT & CONTEMPORARY MODELS
Spiritual alchemy has long been informed by depth psychology. Carl Jung’s work in this area is well-known. Less known is that of the main proponent of archetypal psychology, James Hillman who places Anima Mundi as center of his psychological theory. This archetype of the psyche is inherent in the prima materia. It fosters the return of psychological subjectivity to the outer.
Alchemy works in just this projective, animated manner with a deeper level of participation. Phenomenology is the art of dissolution, a natural alchemy, learning how to see again, a way of being in the world between thinking and perceiving. In this aesthetic paradigm, Hillman asserts that images derive autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Gods and goddesses are an intrinsic part of Hillman's archetypal psychology, as they are in alchemy. In mythical perception, gods, metals, plants, minerals, animals, scents, colors, planets and more correspond with one another through the Doctrine of Signatures. Different forms share the same essential nature.
The symbolic nature of metals is the skeleton of spiritual alchemy. The word ‘metal’ means ‘search,’ strongly suggesting the nature of our alchemical work. We don’t seek a natural metal but the virtual metal, it’s essence. The lunar metal of Anima is silver and the white earth (albedo). Jung said, “Earth and moon coincide in the albedo.” (CW14, para. 154)
Silver is washed into veins in faultlines in the earth, and we can take advantage of the analogous process in our psyche. It takes place in that egoic illusion called “mine.” We can mine our own psychic faultlines. Silver is found in lead-silver vein mineralizations, sometimes with gold and zinc. Silver, the seed of the moon in the earth, is refined from the dross of lead-silver concentrate into the silvered mirror of the mind. Solutions emerge from our puzzlement. Reflection gives shape to the imaginal.
MINING THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
Insights can tarnish, losing their shiny clarity. Just as silver is prone to blackening, this phase of the Great Work can be derailed by Saturn’s depression, the destructive illusion of separation. But the depression is the mine. Albedo emerges from blackness, transpersonal release, and emotional relief from the nigredo of personal identity. But the urge to white is not an escape from black – a whitewash -- since there is no soul without body.
Each object or body is also an imaginal image. We can extract silver moments from our leaden body – motions and emotions that regulate the neurochemistry of the body. Alchemical silver can be mined for many rich metaphorical associations (aha moments), just as silver requires polishing for reflection. Friction leads to clarified reflection. Shame is washed away.
Without shadow, whiteness becomes blankness. Shadow that is built into psyche’s body becomes transparent. Shadow is built into the nature of whiteness, as all colors unite disappearing into white. The world becomes an alchemical dream – the terra alba of anima inspiration.
Imaging itself is a mode of mining silver, psychical facts and essences, sometimes by speculation, resonance and artful listening. We may temporarily become a bit of a “lunatic” in the transmutative process The mysterium coniunctionis is moon-madness combined with solar brilliance.
It takes intense heat, intense introspection in the depths, to refine our inert nature. Then the luminous consciousness of the worked on soul arises. Dissolved by desire from its old ground for fusion in the dissolution of gender, anima no longer is exclusively feminine. Passive fantasy becomes transcendent active imagination, revealing the images within nature, the secret heart of nature.
IT IS BUT IT ISN’T
Virtual places, phenomena, and experiences can be just as “real” as material perceptions. The brain responds to the virtuality as if there is no neurological difference between imaginal and externally stimulated imagery. In this sense, imagination is reality. We perceive the sensate world through the non-linear imaginal world, its enfolded imaginal potential.
Anima Mundi embodies the pandemonium of all forms in external and internal perceptions. She bridges our perceptions of the world by stimulating the imaginative faculty. Yet, being attached to materialistic images is not the same as being attached to Mater, matter and earth.
As alchemists, we have to build a relationship with the very essence of the world. Being in soul is a continuous intentional process. The Astral Light is synonymous with the alchemical Anima Mundi. Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious as the treasure house of fluctuating imagery is a modern description. This light represents the immanence of the world-soul. She dwells in us and we are enlivened by her Being.
Aristotle conceptualized soul as the form, or essence of any living thing, not a distinct substance from the body it inhabits. Only possession of soul (of a specific kind) makes an organism an organism. The notion of a body without a soul, or of a soul in the wrong kind of body, is completely unintelligible. Soul mediates between mind and body, idea and matter, actualities and the Beyond.
James Hillman (1975) observes that soul, “refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second the significance of soul, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relationship with death. And third…the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”
Paracelsus thought the soul was beyond the individual, beyond our control. Plotinus saw all individuals as one soul. Gerhard Dorn said the third degree of the alchemical coniunctio, the most mature phase of individuation, is the personal realization of communion with an original unitary reality. Grounded intuition of a centered sphere of soul opens a microcosm that mirrors the Cosmic macrocosm: "As Above, So Below.”
PSYCHOLOGICAL FAITH
We need a new cultural proving ground, a new paradigm for the energetic potential of the bodymind and the culture for which it is the ground. In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it have come to represent the lost Feminine element of deep interior processes.
We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the mechanistic mind/body split, which is also non-relativistic. We talk a good game about 'wholeness' but don't really connect as much as nostalgically yearn for it.
Spontaneous imagery soulfully joins spirit and body. It doesn’t solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. Direct engagement, meditatio, with images for soul-making deepens us through personal experience.
No longer divided against thinking, imagination becomes the ground of certainty. Direct knowledge, gnosis, is demanded by the silvered mind so the soul can understand itself. Conjunctions come when we no longer focus on opposites or meaningful coincidences or conjunction. Imagination is as elusive as the goal of the alchemical process itself.
Through illumined senses we can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Things become transparent, shine and speak. Signs echo within us. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves, perhaps even into delusional lunacy.
The wounded-healer typically passes through a period of madness. Is it avoidable? Perhaps only by educating the psyche with alchemical training, giving it a silvered voice and attentive ear to avoid clinical literalism, paranoid delusion, vitrification, and dissociation. Even then, there is no guarantee lunacy can be avoided.
POESIS
Anima Mundi is NowHere…the very spirit of life, the ethereal angel of our destiny, the animated archetypal ground and individually the radiant subtle body. More than just the life-spirit, the sacred field body is a natural force, the cosmic energic principle of primordial Consciousness, implicate order – the essence of being and sacred embodiment.
Primordial mankind saw everything as saturated with meaning, both human and cosmic. We, too, can see ourselves as full participants with the interior life of the natural world and cosmos. Not only signs and symbols can be read in the multidimensional environment, the metaphorical nature of symptoms – ours and the world’s – can be discerned. Fantasies open to one another in resonance, recognition, insight, and astonishment.
Alchemy is a poetry-science whose language and experimentation has a naturally therapeutic value. This poetic art and science of experientially reclaiming this relationship and worldview raises conscious recognition of anima mundi. Let the images come into your body. Tuned responses receptively embrace the image. This art is not separate from life, but is infused with life. The substance of the insubstantial is what makes psyche matter. And it is an intrinsic part of alchemical method.
Ancient philosophers proclaimed the world soul, a pure ethereal spirit, is diffused throughout all nature. The notion of soul as imaginative possibility, in relation to the archai or root metaphors, is what Hillman has termed the “poetic basis of mind.” Whitening into psychic reality is embodiment of spirit and inspiriting of body, eliminating oppositional tension.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESONANCE
In alchemy, Anima Mundi acts as the soul-guide to our heights and depths. Beauty is simply manifestation, the display of phenomena, the appearance of the anima mundi. Union with her is consciousness of our primal existential self, and our deepest ecological self, right down to the virtuality of the Void – the primordial field.
Beneath the alienation from nature, which our culture has created, lies a deep resource we can tap which is fundamental wisdom about the unity of life. We are embedded within that seamless fabric of Cosmos, the Feminine source of wisdom. The importance of the present depends on its effect in the realization of a specific future. An experience is important if it suggests or fulfills visionary sight.
Anima Mundi is the secret powers of nature. We need those powers to heal and transform. The intentional use of imagination and image building is a foundation of mysticism. This wisdom is deep ecology, which reveals the way of living in balance through intuition. She is the dark of the Void and the natural Light of the Soul--illumination. She bridges our perceptions of the world by stimulating the imaginative faculty.
Alchemy is a meditation science and art that purposefully cultivates a human relationship with Anima Mundi. To experience psychic reality means to be in soul, in the realm of the imagination, as if interacting with its inhabitants and locales. Inner visionary experience, be it wrathful or beatific, is an expression of soul. Through images the unconscious affects our worldview, health and relationships. Imagination not only conditions our reality, it is our reality. Soul is the middle world between gross materiality and the spiritual world.
This is a psychological approach to art and life--giving voice to soul, living life as art. It means the return of a subjective feminine eye on reality. It means the enlivening of our bodies and the world of nature with imagination. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle and direct relationship with Her. The point is not to dissect her soul, but celebrate her body.
LIGHT OF THE SOUL
The soul generates images unceasingly, purposefully ordering our lives. Artists are able to capture and express some of that ceaseless flow. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Physical reality becomes psychic and psyche becomes real. It "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and Outer worlds are real. They are One World. Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. They are integrated with feeling, mind, and imagination through wonder and awe. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality.
When spirit as energy and matter as form are in balance, the body becomes the living "Temple of the Spirit." A sense of immortality deepens the sacred dimension of life. Soul’s immortality is sensed in direct experience of non-spatial, non-temporal, nonlocal, four-dimensional reality. Real alchemical work is for the sake of the whole of which we are a microcosm.
REFERENCES
Hillman J. (1977). Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper Perennial.
Hillman, James (1980). “Silver and the White Earth, Part I.” Spring, 1980, 21-48.
Hillman, J. (1981). “Silver and the White Earth, Part II.” Spring, 1981, 21-66.
Hillman J. (1982). “Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World.” Spring, 1982, 71-93.
Hillman, J. (1985). Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Dallas: Spring Publications.
Jung, C. G. (1963). Mysterium Coniunctionis. Collected Works, Vol. 14. Princeton N. J.: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C.G. (1968) Psychology and Alchemy. Collected Works, Vol. 12. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.
"ANIMA MUNDI: Soul-Filled World"
By Iona Miller, 2009
“God redeems humanity, but nature needs to be redeemed by human alchemists, who are able to induce the process of transformation, which alone is capable of liberating the light imprisoned in physical creation.” ~Stephan Hoeller, Sufi Journal, Issue 67, Autumn 2005
"Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street." ~James Hillman, “Anima Mundi,” Spring, 1982
NUMINOUS & LUMINOUS PSYCHE
Anima Mundi, the feminine principle or mode of Being was historically considered the "soul of the world," the fertility of human, animal and plant life. Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno said the World Soul “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.” She is the magical world of creative mystery.
Our geocentric understanding of ourselves has expanded to the realization that we are an intrinsic part of Cosmos. The Universe is also literally within us. No longer limited merely to our planet, Anima Mundi is the personification of the whole natural world – the Universe. This light, the dynamic reality of the energy field, is within us as within everything. Embodied nature is the link between the archetypal and formative worlds, the hyperdimensional matrix of eternal patterns with sacred proportions and unique manifestations. She is also infinite potential, the possibility of bringing creative ideas to birth, to manifestation.
In the deepest sense, she is the universal wave function, the unmanifest ground of our being, spacetime and the radiant light of virtual photon fluctuation, which underlies all matter and manifestation. Kabbalist Azriel of Gerona claimed "faith" meant entering into a relationship with one's "nothingness" and the "unknown" of the infinite, the ultimate ‘yin’ of non-existence that is the mother of all form.
In ancient times Anima Mundi declared her impenetrable mystery by reiterating that "I am Isis; no man has lifted my veil." This Muse of superconsciousness is bathed in the Light and concealed by it. Thus she alludes to herself as dazzling Solitaire in her virgin nature, that sense of wholeness within oneself, which is the Feminine source of wisdom, magic and meaning.
The natural light of the soul is illumination, embodied in the pineal light of the “spirit molecule,” DMT. Likewise, alchemists seek the divine spark, the light hidden in matter. To work creatively in the world, the Light of Nature needs to be released through inner alchemy. Our own light or divine spark is part of the light of the World Soul, so we can understand the mysteries of creation and the secrets of nature. The tools of inner transformation help Anima Mundi reveal her divine light.
Whether called Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Demeter/Persephone, Mary, Great Mother, White Goddess or any cultural variant, Anima Mundi is the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form. She is personified internally as a soul guide or Initiatrix and externally embodied as the Soror Mystica. Glimpsing inspiring inner workings of our soul helps us realign our lives, our hopes and our dreams.
ANCIENT & CONTEMPORARY MODELS
Spiritual alchemy has long been informed by depth psychology. Carl Jung’s work in this area is well-known. Less known is that of the main proponent of archetypal psychology, James Hillman who places Anima Mundi as center of his psychological theory. This archetype of the psyche is inherent in the prima materia. It fosters the return of psychological subjectivity to the outer.
Alchemy works in just this projective, animated manner with a deeper level of participation. Phenomenology is the art of dissolution, a natural alchemy, learning how to see again, a way of being in the world between thinking and perceiving. In this aesthetic paradigm, Hillman asserts that images derive autonomy and operate according to their own will, similar to gods.
Gods and goddesses are an intrinsic part of Hillman's archetypal psychology, as they are in alchemy. In mythical perception, gods, metals, plants, minerals, animals, scents, colors, planets and more correspond with one another through the Doctrine of Signatures. Different forms share the same essential nature.
The symbolic nature of metals is the skeleton of spiritual alchemy. The word ‘metal’ means ‘search,’ strongly suggesting the nature of our alchemical work. We don’t seek a natural metal but the virtual metal, it’s essence. The lunar metal of Anima is silver and the white earth (albedo). Jung said, “Earth and moon coincide in the albedo.” (CW14, para. 154)
Silver is washed into veins in faultlines in the earth, and we can take advantage of the analogous process in our psyche. It takes place in that egoic illusion called “mine.” We can mine our own psychic faultlines. Silver is found in lead-silver vein mineralizations, sometimes with gold and zinc. Silver, the seed of the moon in the earth, is refined from the dross of lead-silver concentrate into the silvered mirror of the mind. Solutions emerge from our puzzlement. Reflection gives shape to the imaginal.
MINING THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON
Insights can tarnish, losing their shiny clarity. Just as silver is prone to blackening, this phase of the Great Work can be derailed by Saturn’s depression, the destructive illusion of separation. But the depression is the mine. Albedo emerges from blackness, transpersonal release, and emotional relief from the nigredo of personal identity. But the urge to white is not an escape from black – a whitewash -- since there is no soul without body.
Each object or body is also an imaginal image. We can extract silver moments from our leaden body – motions and emotions that regulate the neurochemistry of the body. Alchemical silver can be mined for many rich metaphorical associations (aha moments), just as silver requires polishing for reflection. Friction leads to clarified reflection. Shame is washed away.
Without shadow, whiteness becomes blankness. Shadow that is built into psyche’s body becomes transparent. Shadow is built into the nature of whiteness, as all colors unite disappearing into white. The world becomes an alchemical dream – the terra alba of anima inspiration.
Imaging itself is a mode of mining silver, psychical facts and essences, sometimes by speculation, resonance and artful listening. We may temporarily become a bit of a “lunatic” in the transmutative process The mysterium coniunctionis is moon-madness combined with solar brilliance.
It takes intense heat, intense introspection in the depths, to refine our inert nature. Then the luminous consciousness of the worked on soul arises. Dissolved by desire from its old ground for fusion in the dissolution of gender, anima no longer is exclusively feminine. Passive fantasy becomes transcendent active imagination, revealing the images within nature, the secret heart of nature.
IT IS BUT IT ISN’T
Virtual places, phenomena, and experiences can be just as “real” as material perceptions. The brain responds to the virtuality as if there is no neurological difference between imaginal and externally stimulated imagery. In this sense, imagination is reality. We perceive the sensate world through the non-linear imaginal world, its enfolded imaginal potential.
Anima Mundi embodies the pandemonium of all forms in external and internal perceptions. She bridges our perceptions of the world by stimulating the imaginative faculty. Yet, being attached to materialistic images is not the same as being attached to Mater, matter and earth.
As alchemists, we have to build a relationship with the very essence of the world. Being in soul is a continuous intentional process. The Astral Light is synonymous with the alchemical Anima Mundi. Jung’s idea of the Collective Unconscious as the treasure house of fluctuating imagery is a modern description. This light represents the immanence of the world-soul. She dwells in us and we are enlivened by her Being.
Aristotle conceptualized soul as the form, or essence of any living thing, not a distinct substance from the body it inhabits. Only possession of soul (of a specific kind) makes an organism an organism. The notion of a body without a soul, or of a soul in the wrong kind of body, is completely unintelligible. Soul mediates between mind and body, idea and matter, actualities and the Beyond.
James Hillman (1975) observes that soul, “refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second the significance of soul, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relationship with death. And third…the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”
Paracelsus thought the soul was beyond the individual, beyond our control. Plotinus saw all individuals as one soul. Gerhard Dorn said the third degree of the alchemical coniunctio, the most mature phase of individuation, is the personal realization of communion with an original unitary reality. Grounded intuition of a centered sphere of soul opens a microcosm that mirrors the Cosmic macrocosm: "As Above, So Below.”
PSYCHOLOGICAL FAITH
We need a new cultural proving ground, a new paradigm for the energetic potential of the bodymind and the culture for which it is the ground. In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it have come to represent the lost Feminine element of deep interior processes.
We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the mechanistic mind/body split, which is also non-relativistic. We talk a good game about 'wholeness' but don't really connect as much as nostalgically yearn for it.
Spontaneous imagery soulfully joins spirit and body. It doesn’t solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. Direct engagement, meditatio, with images for soul-making deepens us through personal experience.
No longer divided against thinking, imagination becomes the ground of certainty. Direct knowledge, gnosis, is demanded by the silvered mind so the soul can understand itself. Conjunctions come when we no longer focus on opposites or meaningful coincidences or conjunction. Imagination is as elusive as the goal of the alchemical process itself.
Through illumined senses we can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Things become transparent, shine and speak. Signs echo within us. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves, perhaps even into delusional lunacy.
The wounded-healer typically passes through a period of madness. Is it avoidable? Perhaps only by educating the psyche with alchemical training, giving it a silvered voice and attentive ear to avoid clinical literalism, paranoid delusion, vitrification, and dissociation. Even then, there is no guarantee lunacy can be avoided.
POESIS
Anima Mundi is NowHere…the very spirit of life, the ethereal angel of our destiny, the animated archetypal ground and individually the radiant subtle body. More than just the life-spirit, the sacred field body is a natural force, the cosmic energic principle of primordial Consciousness, implicate order – the essence of being and sacred embodiment.
Primordial mankind saw everything as saturated with meaning, both human and cosmic. We, too, can see ourselves as full participants with the interior life of the natural world and cosmos. Not only signs and symbols can be read in the multidimensional environment, the metaphorical nature of symptoms – ours and the world’s – can be discerned. Fantasies open to one another in resonance, recognition, insight, and astonishment.
Alchemy is a poetry-science whose language and experimentation has a naturally therapeutic value. This poetic art and science of experientially reclaiming this relationship and worldview raises conscious recognition of anima mundi. Let the images come into your body. Tuned responses receptively embrace the image. This art is not separate from life, but is infused with life. The substance of the insubstantial is what makes psyche matter. And it is an intrinsic part of alchemical method.
Ancient philosophers proclaimed the world soul, a pure ethereal spirit, is diffused throughout all nature. The notion of soul as imaginative possibility, in relation to the archai or root metaphors, is what Hillman has termed the “poetic basis of mind.” Whitening into psychic reality is embodiment of spirit and inspiriting of body, eliminating oppositional tension.
PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESONANCE
In alchemy, Anima Mundi acts as the soul-guide to our heights and depths. Beauty is simply manifestation, the display of phenomena, the appearance of the anima mundi. Union with her is consciousness of our primal existential self, and our deepest ecological self, right down to the virtuality of the Void – the primordial field.
Beneath the alienation from nature, which our culture has created, lies a deep resource we can tap which is fundamental wisdom about the unity of life. We are embedded within that seamless fabric of Cosmos, the Feminine source of wisdom. The importance of the present depends on its effect in the realization of a specific future. An experience is important if it suggests or fulfills visionary sight.
Anima Mundi is the secret powers of nature. We need those powers to heal and transform. The intentional use of imagination and image building is a foundation of mysticism. This wisdom is deep ecology, which reveals the way of living in balance through intuition. She is the dark of the Void and the natural Light of the Soul--illumination. She bridges our perceptions of the world by stimulating the imaginative faculty.
Alchemy is a meditation science and art that purposefully cultivates a human relationship with Anima Mundi. To experience psychic reality means to be in soul, in the realm of the imagination, as if interacting with its inhabitants and locales. Inner visionary experience, be it wrathful or beatific, is an expression of soul. Through images the unconscious affects our worldview, health and relationships. Imagination not only conditions our reality, it is our reality. Soul is the middle world between gross materiality and the spiritual world.
This is a psychological approach to art and life--giving voice to soul, living life as art. It means the return of a subjective feminine eye on reality. It means the enlivening of our bodies and the world of nature with imagination. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle and direct relationship with Her. The point is not to dissect her soul, but celebrate her body.
LIGHT OF THE SOUL
The soul generates images unceasingly, purposefully ordering our lives. Artists are able to capture and express some of that ceaseless flow. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Physical reality becomes psychic and psyche becomes real. It "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and Outer worlds are real. They are One World. Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. They are integrated with feeling, mind, and imagination through wonder and awe. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality.
When spirit as energy and matter as form are in balance, the body becomes the living "Temple of the Spirit." A sense of immortality deepens the sacred dimension of life. Soul’s immortality is sensed in direct experience of non-spatial, non-temporal, nonlocal, four-dimensional reality. Real alchemical work is for the sake of the whole of which we are a microcosm.
REFERENCES
Hillman J. (1977). Re-Visioning Psychology. New York: Harper Perennial.
Hillman, James (1980). “Silver and the White Earth, Part I.” Spring, 1980, 21-48.
Hillman, J. (1981). “Silver and the White Earth, Part II.” Spring, 1981, 21-66.
Hillman J. (1982). “Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World.” Spring, 1982, 71-93.
Hillman, J. (1985). Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion. Dallas: Spring Publications.
Jung, C. G. (1963). Mysterium Coniunctionis. Collected Works, Vol. 14. Princeton N. J.: Princeton University Press.
Jung, C.G. (1968) Psychology and Alchemy. Collected Works, Vol. 12. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press.
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. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 32.
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. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 182.
The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives. ~Carl Jung; Special Phenomenology; Part IV; Psyche & Symbol.
Those born after the flesh are opposed to those born after the spirit, who are not born from the fleshly mother but from a symbol of the mother. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Para 313.
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. ~Carl Jung, CW 5, Para 182.
The sea is the favorite symbol for the unconscious, the mother of all that lives. ~Carl Jung; Special Phenomenology; Part IV; Psyche & Symbol.
Those born after the flesh are opposed to those born after the spirit, who are not born from the fleshly mother but from a symbol of the mother. ~Carl Jung; CW 5; Para 313.
Earth Mothers, Ancestral Mothers,
Pioneering Mothers, & Mother Collectives;
Anima and World Soul
Mothers & Maidens:
http://www.pinterest.com/wakanlady/archaeology-~-mothers-maidens/
Mercury is the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and entered matter as an emanation of God, and since then it is concealed in it. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 180.
No doubt the anima has a very important aspect as a giver of wisdom. She is the femme inspiratrice par excellence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 498-499
"Every life, if it is going to be fulfilled, is a journey. It is a journey from one state of being to another. It is a journey through the death of an old way of life into a new one. It is a journey that parallels a woman’s giving birth—we must go with the pain, for to resist it, increases the tearing and hinders the birth. This kind of journey, which is no stranger to suffering, becomes one of transformation, healing, growth, and the realization of a life that is beyond what we could have imagined or planned.
"[We] return to our past many times in order to pick up the different threads we left behind because of our pain, carelessness, or lack of awareness. And, let’s face it, all of us would like to simply put painful or unpleasant experiences behind us and move on with our lives. But doing that would make us shallow and disconnect us from our deeper selves and the human family. So we have to go back and weep the tears we didn’t weep, feel the grief we denied when we suffered losses, and greet our younger selves with the compassion and love they really need. We may also have to revisit some of our past accomplishments, letting ourselves take the pride and delight in them that we were too modest to experience at the time."
— Excerpted from Chapter 10 of Into the Heart of the Feminine by Massimilla Harris, Ph.D and Bud Harris, Ph.D.
The man’s Eros does not lead upward only but downward into that uncanny dark world of Hecate and Kali. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 186.
When the Primeval Mother is overcome the anima can become a world consciousness; she must be chiseled from the earth. The seed of the anima is only productive when man can subordinate his libido to the female principle. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 32.
Below - Ernst Fuchs
Pioneering Mothers, & Mother Collectives;
Anima and World Soul
Mothers & Maidens:
http://www.pinterest.com/wakanlady/archaeology-~-mothers-maidens/
Mercury is the anima mundi, the soul of the world, and entered matter as an emanation of God, and since then it is concealed in it. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 180.
No doubt the anima has a very important aspect as a giver of wisdom. She is the femme inspiratrice par excellence. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 498-499
"Every life, if it is going to be fulfilled, is a journey. It is a journey from one state of being to another. It is a journey through the death of an old way of life into a new one. It is a journey that parallels a woman’s giving birth—we must go with the pain, for to resist it, increases the tearing and hinders the birth. This kind of journey, which is no stranger to suffering, becomes one of transformation, healing, growth, and the realization of a life that is beyond what we could have imagined or planned.
"[We] return to our past many times in order to pick up the different threads we left behind because of our pain, carelessness, or lack of awareness. And, let’s face it, all of us would like to simply put painful or unpleasant experiences behind us and move on with our lives. But doing that would make us shallow and disconnect us from our deeper selves and the human family. So we have to go back and weep the tears we didn’t weep, feel the grief we denied when we suffered losses, and greet our younger selves with the compassion and love they really need. We may also have to revisit some of our past accomplishments, letting ourselves take the pride and delight in them that we were too modest to experience at the time."
— Excerpted from Chapter 10 of Into the Heart of the Feminine by Massimilla Harris, Ph.D and Bud Harris, Ph.D.
The man’s Eros does not lead upward only but downward into that uncanny dark world of Hecate and Kali. ~Carl Jung, CW 9i, Para 186.
When the Primeval Mother is overcome the anima can become a world consciousness; she must be chiseled from the earth. The seed of the anima is only productive when man can subordinate his libido to the female principle. ~Carl Jung, Jung-Ostrowski, Page 32.
Below - Ernst Fuchs
Great Mother, Neumann
Sophia (σοφία, Greek for "wisdom") is a central idea in Hellenistic philosophy and religion, Platonism, Gnosticism, Orthodox Christianity, Esoteric Christianity, as well as Christian mysticism. Sophiology is a philosophical concept regarding wisdom, as well as a theological concept regarding the wisdom of the biblical God.
Sophia is honored as a goddess of wisdom by Gnostics, as well as by some Neopagan, New Age, and Goddess spirituality groups. In Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianity, Sophia, or rather Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), is an expression of understanding for the second person of the Holy Trinity, (as in the dedication of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople) as well as in the Old Testament, as seen in the Book of Proverbs 9:1, but not an angel or goddess.
Sophia is honored as a goddess of wisdom by Gnostics, as well as by some Neopagan, New Age, and Goddess spirituality groups. In Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christianity, Sophia, or rather Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom), is an expression of understanding for the second person of the Holy Trinity, (as in the dedication of the church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople) as well as in the Old Testament, as seen in the Book of Proverbs 9:1, but not an angel or goddess.
Bruneel, Das Reingold
Carl Jung: The “Eternal Feminine” in Faust is the Sapientia Dei, who is this same Sophia
To Albert Jung:
Dear Colleague 20 May 1947
The interpretation of the figure of Sophia, in the context in which I mentioned it, can only be done with the material handed down from antiquity, and there the interpretation is very simple.
She is the Sapientia Dei, as she appears in the wisdom of Solomon.
To this Sophia is dedicated the Hagia Sophia of Byzantium.
From the proper name Sophia are derived the names of saints, among them the so-called ”Wicked Sophie.”
The Hagia Sophia or Sancta Sapientia has of course nothing to do with witches, but Wicked Sophie can probably be connected with the witch-hunts, for the inclemency of the weather was frequently attributed to witches.
Sophia cannot be brought together with Eve, since Eve has nothing to do with magic, but she probably can with Adam ‘s first wife, Lilith.
The “Eternal Feminine” in Faust is the Sapientia Dei, who is this same Sophia.
It cannot be doubted that since such figures always have a shadow, Sophia has one too.
This shadow would be a perversion of the divine into the dark and magical.
Naturally this is the witch, or the arch-sorceress Hecate, who, three-headed and three-bodied, represents the lower equivalent of the Trinity (psychologically, the lower function
triad ).
You will find a description of these curious Trinitarian over-lappings in my Eranos lecture, “Die Psychologie des Geistes” (Eranos-Jahrbuch 1945).
Permit me a perhaps indiscreet question concerning your name: are you related to Dr. A. Jung, the gynaecologist in St. Gallen?
He was a student friend of mine.
With collegial regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung [Letters Volume 1; Page 462.]
To Albert Jung:
Dear Colleague 20 May 1947
The interpretation of the figure of Sophia, in the context in which I mentioned it, can only be done with the material handed down from antiquity, and there the interpretation is very simple.
She is the Sapientia Dei, as she appears in the wisdom of Solomon.
To this Sophia is dedicated the Hagia Sophia of Byzantium.
From the proper name Sophia are derived the names of saints, among them the so-called ”Wicked Sophie.”
The Hagia Sophia or Sancta Sapientia has of course nothing to do with witches, but Wicked Sophie can probably be connected with the witch-hunts, for the inclemency of the weather was frequently attributed to witches.
Sophia cannot be brought together with Eve, since Eve has nothing to do with magic, but she probably can with Adam ‘s first wife, Lilith.
The “Eternal Feminine” in Faust is the Sapientia Dei, who is this same Sophia.
It cannot be doubted that since such figures always have a shadow, Sophia has one too.
This shadow would be a perversion of the divine into the dark and magical.
Naturally this is the witch, or the arch-sorceress Hecate, who, three-headed and three-bodied, represents the lower equivalent of the Trinity (psychologically, the lower function
triad ).
You will find a description of these curious Trinitarian over-lappings in my Eranos lecture, “Die Psychologie des Geistes” (Eranos-Jahrbuch 1945).
Permit me a perhaps indiscreet question concerning your name: are you related to Dr. A. Jung, the gynaecologist in St. Gallen?
He was a student friend of mine.
With collegial regards,
Yours sincerely,
C.G. Jung [Letters Volume 1; Page 462.]
". . . the mother stands for the collective unconscious,
the source of the water of life. . . ."
--Jung, "Individual Dream Symbolism . . ." (CW 12: §92)
The "anima rationalis" is the reasonable mind of man, which is really the highest form of the human psyche, worthy of immortality. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 96.
The alchemists returned in matter to the mother, the first carrier of the feminine unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 117.
the source of the water of life. . . ."
--Jung, "Individual Dream Symbolism . . ." (CW 12: §92)
The "anima rationalis" is the reasonable mind of man, which is really the highest form of the human psyche, worthy of immortality. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XI, Page 96.
The alchemists returned in matter to the mother, the first carrier of the feminine unconscious. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 117.
Goddesses, Io Miller
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.
Therefore the trans-substantiated wine, which becomes the blood of Christ in the Mass, is the anima, that is the soul, of Christ. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 189.
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.
Therefore the trans-substantiated wine, which becomes the blood of Christ in the Mass, is the anima, that is the soul, of Christ. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 189.
"Anima with Crown of Light "
The anima is a messenger bringing new light.
The blue radiance of the spirit shows on her head, whilst she looks inward.
This radiance consists of many germs of light, for the self (spiritual totality )
is both one and many in one.
Gerhard Dorn, the alchemist, points out that by meditating on the
image of God little by little he ( the Adept ) will come to see with his
mental eye a number of sparks shining day by day and more and more
and growing into such a great light that thereafter all things needful to him
will be made known. ( De Speculativa Philosophia , Theatr. Alchemicum
1602 Vol I p. 275 ) --Peter Birkhäuser 1966, from his book " Light from the Darkness"
The anima is a messenger bringing new light.
The blue radiance of the spirit shows on her head, whilst she looks inward.
This radiance consists of many germs of light, for the self (spiritual totality )
is both one and many in one.
Gerhard Dorn, the alchemist, points out that by meditating on the
image of God little by little he ( the Adept ) will come to see with his
mental eye a number of sparks shining day by day and more and more
and growing into such a great light that thereafter all things needful to him
will be made known. ( De Speculativa Philosophia , Theatr. Alchemicum
1602 Vol I p. 275 ) --Peter Birkhäuser 1966, from his book " Light from the Darkness"
Eros…might well be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself. ~Carl Jung; Memories Dreams and Reflections; Late Thoughts; Page 353.
An understanding heart is everything, in a teacher. ... One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. ~Carl Jung; "The Gifted Child,"1942.
An understanding heart is everything, in a teacher. ... One looks back with appreciation to the brilliant teachers, but with gratitude to those who touched our human feelings. The curriculum is so much necessary raw material, but warmth is the vital element for the growing plant and for the soul of the child. ~Carl Jung; "The Gifted Child,"1942.
This Feminine Divinity is the Anima Mundi, or Soul of the World, the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form. This dynamic has been known as Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Demeter/Persephone, Mary.
The over development of the maternal instinct is identical with that well-known image of the mother which has been glorified in all ages and all tongues.
This is the mother love which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate, 'joyous and untiring giver of life-mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead.
Mother is mother love, my experience and my secret.
Why risk saying too much, too much that is false and inadequate and beside the point, about that human being who was our mother, the accidental carrier of that great experience which includes herself and me and all mankind, and indeed the whole of created nature, the experience of life whose children we are?
The attempt to say these things has always been made, and probably always will be; but a sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail and fallible human being-so deserving of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness-who was our mother.
He knows that the mother carries for us that inborn image of the mater nature and mater spiritualis, of the totality of life of which we are a small and helpless part. ~"Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious P.172
Anima/Animus
http://www.american-buddha.com/lit.jungaion.3.htm
The over development of the maternal instinct is identical with that well-known image of the mother which has been glorified in all ages and all tongues.
This is the mother love which is one of the most moving and unforgettable memories of our lives, the mysterious root of all growth and change; the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends. Intimately known and yet strange like Nature, lovingly tender and yet cruel like fate, 'joyous and untiring giver of life-mater dolorosa and mute implacable portal that closes upon the dead.
Mother is mother love, my experience and my secret.
Why risk saying too much, too much that is false and inadequate and beside the point, about that human being who was our mother, the accidental carrier of that great experience which includes herself and me and all mankind, and indeed the whole of created nature, the experience of life whose children we are?
The attempt to say these things has always been made, and probably always will be; but a sensitive person cannot in all fairness load that enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail and fallible human being-so deserving of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness-who was our mother.
He knows that the mother carries for us that inborn image of the mater nature and mater spiritualis, of the totality of life of which we are a small and helpless part. ~"Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" (1939) In CW 9, Part I: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious P.172
Anima/Animus
http://www.american-buddha.com/lit.jungaion.3.htm
Honeycomb, by Julie Dillon
http://www.amazon.com/Female-Ancestors-Christ-Belford-Ulanov/dp/3856307052
The spiritual power of the Feminine shines forth in this psychological study of four Old Testament heroines from Jesus’ family tree. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba are the only women mentioned by name in the Gospels’ genealogies and, for Ann Belford Ulanov, this indicates that they impart something essential to the lineage of Christ. By exploring their brave and unconventional lives, she demonstrates how salvation enters the world in the feminine mode of being human, through these women’s embodiment of such powerful and deeply feminine qualities as ingenuity, audacity, determination, compassion, seduction, and devotion.
http://www.amazon.com/Female-Ancestors-Christ-Belford-Ulanov/dp/3856307052
The spiritual power of the Feminine shines forth in this psychological study of four Old Testament heroines from Jesus’ family tree. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba are the only women mentioned by name in the Gospels’ genealogies and, for Ann Belford Ulanov, this indicates that they impart something essential to the lineage of Christ. By exploring their brave and unconventional lives, she demonstrates how salvation enters the world in the feminine mode of being human, through these women’s embodiment of such powerful and deeply feminine qualities as ingenuity, audacity, determination, compassion, seduction, and devotion.
Summer Night, Moore
Emma Jung wrote that when we reject the Divine feminine we reject Nature and seek to dominate it with masculine intellect and technology.
Painting by Leilani Bustamante
Black Madonna
Black Madonnas in Art & Transformation
The Archetypal Divine Mother
According to Carl G. Jung, the "Mother Archetype" is dual in nature. ...
The Black Madonnas perpetuate the pre-Christian symbolic blackness of the goddesses ...
"This goddess may take many forms [in our dreams]. Usually she is black or oriental or simply dark. She may appear as a proud gypsy, a dancer in a tavern, a sacred prostitute, a Mary Magdalene. Always she is outside the collective value system of the dreamer's conscious world...and carries immense potential for new life." - Marion Woodman
BLACK MADONNA: Symbolic & Literal
https://theartoftransformations.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/the-black-madonna/
The Black Madonna embodies a great Mystery. To say she is only this or that, literal or symbolic, is to impose a false limitation on her transcendent being, the immanence of the sacred. The Black Madonna phenomenon is a continuing enigma in the study of Medieval life. They appear in churches from Eastern Europe to Spain, no different than other statues of the Madonna and Child except that they are inexplicably made of black or dark brown material.
But this Madonna is also a mystagogue - one who initiates others into mystic beliefs, an educator or person who has knowledge of the Sacred Mysteries. Another word is Hierophant. In ancient mystery religions, a mystagogue was responsible for leading an initiate into the secret teachings and rituals of the cult. The initiate would often be blindfolded, and the mystagogue would literally "guide" him into the sacred space. The Black Madonna guides us through our inner darkness.
In alchemical lore Nicolas Flamel’s definitive pilgrimage found him traveling to a site in Spain where one of the icons of the Black Madonna is venerated. The origins of these icons abound, from the mundane idea that these are merely standard depictions of the Madonna having lost their original patina, or that were simply carved from materials that were black and left as is, to a whole host of esoteric explanations regarding secret cults and heterodox visions of the Divine.
https://theartoftransformations.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/the-black-madonna/
We can view the Black Madonna both symbolically and literally. There is genealogical evidence of Black lineage in the Petran/Aethiopian lines of Mary Magdalene (ref. Hugh Montgomery) that parallel and supersede purely symbolic interpretations of cultic worship of the Black Madonna, as dark goddess and divine mother, or the "original Mary", Isis -- immortal life. Some researchers refer to Mary Magdalene as the Black Madonna. She had a cult following in France. They believe that she came to the shores pregnant. When they say the Holy Grail, they mean the Holy Blood, the Blood Royal in her body, Jesus’ baby and subsequent lineage. Some scholars believe this.
http://www.topix.com/forum/news/weird/TPV52DDV51ODP4N1N
According to legend, soon after the crucifixion and Resurrection, Mary Magdalene and her family were expelled from the Holy Land, set adrift on the Mediterranean Sea and made their way to this region, particularly the area around Southern France and Northern Spain. At this time in history, aside from the already established Celts, many Greeks, Arabs, Jews and others lived and travelled in this area. There was even a Jewish city known as Glanum Levi whose ruins can be found today in Provence.
In the midst of this cosmopolitan confluence of cultures, along with the exchange of goods there must have been an exchange of philosophical and religious ideas. It is very possible that during this period many spiritual and symbolic links were discovered between these diverse peoples and their traditional belief systems that stretched back to the temples of Egypt. Before her arrival in Les Saintes Marie Sur Les Mere, France was riddled with Isis cults. The name Paris etymologically can be linked to the pre-Celtic ParIsis, the grove of Isis. Clearly this region was fertile ground for Mary Magdalene’s mission.
Following her arrival in France, she was said to have travelled the land, preaching the authentic Gnostic gospel of Jesus, which had been directly transmitted to her during his time on Earth and in mystic visions after his return to the more subtle dimensions of light. French religious literature from the Middle Ages is filled with legends and stories of the life of Mary Magdalene from this period until her death. Tales abound of her miraculous healings, her performance of the ritual of baptism, her aid in fertility and childbearing and even her ability to raise the dead. There are even reports of a secret tradition of the healing arts that exists today in France and traces its roots back to Mary Magdalene. Besides being a fundamental symbol of French (and later British) monarchy, the fleur-de-lys is one of the central symbols found in the Church of Mary Magdalen at Rennes-le-Chateau.
http://www.gnostic.info/rose_Mary%20Magdalene.html
“The details of the separate kingdom of Septimania were erased from history books; but the descendant bloodlines were apparently the “heretical Royal Bloodlines”as : Dukes of Aquitaine, Dukes of Lorraine, Dukes of Guise; Counts of Barcelona, Counts of Toulouse, Counts of Auvergne; Counts of Razes. (HBHB, pp 368-371) And it was precisely a Duke of Aquitaine who founded Cluny! Thus, Septimania now becomes extremely important, for now Urban II, descendant of the Eudes of Septimania and Cluny Prior, is the pope who will call the first Crusades resulting in the crowning of a direct lineal descendant of Guillem de Gellone, named Godfroi de Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine , as King of Jerusalem! Aquitaine is so-named on maps of Second Century Roman Empire and comprised then, the whole area from Languedoc, South France, to Poitou and Anjou. Septimania was the area that was later known as the Languedoc.
Gnostic Cult of the Black Madonna
Several researchers speak of an "Underground Church of Mary Magdalene," which existed in the South of France at the time of the Cathars and Gnostics. No one has specified with certainty what these cults were about or how they came to be. We do know that they had been condemned as heretical and eventually eradicated by the Crusaders
and the Roman Catholic Church, but studies show that indeed an important cult of unorthodox character dedicated to Mary Magdalene and the cult of Black Madonna's existed in the Middle Ages in the South of France, and still today, Mary Magdalene has a considerable cult following in the South of France. Many of the finest Gnostic writings are of Alexandrian inspiration or origin. Alexandria is also the main source of Gnostic works linking Jesus with Mary Magdalene.
The Cosmic Cycle is incorporated in the Christian Holy Trinity though in completely masculine terms, with God as heavenly father, heavenly Holy Spirit and the divine son made of earthly matter. This was enabled through the coupling of the male Holy Spirit and the “living” Virgin Mary. In Egyptian mythology, the living Isis only conceives her son Horus after the death of Osiris. He procreates from the spiritual world, when he becomes God of the Underworld.
This can be explained in alchemical terms, with the masculine Osiris, the black virginal prima materia and fixed male, uniting with the black, volatile, female, spirit of Isis his wife, conceiving and producing the Divine child Horus, the Earthly representative of his father Osiris. The serpents have devoured one another, the Ouroboros is realized and so the Cycle continues. The Black Virgin is, like Osiris, the father and the divine, male essence. The Black Mother is, like Isis, the mother and the divine, female essence, and the product of their union is the Ouroboros, Horus – the Christ. The Black Madonna could be another representation of the All, the trinity – and an esoteric Christian symbol of the Cosmic Cycle.
The Black Madonna, the womb of divinity, is always pregnant with multidimensional numinous meaning. The dark mother is both a living reality and an archetypal construction. Jung defined archetypes as primal patterns of human behavior. Jung said, "Who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakens." The pregnant virgin symbolizes a process of change akin to the metamorphosis of caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly -- an awakening to a transformed state and an inspirational symbol for restoring the lost hands of women's spirituality. The image of the Sacred Prostitute and the Royal Marriage, the image of the Black Madonna holds a key to the integration of the feminine and a feminine historical narrative anchored in the heart, gnosis or Knowledge -- "The Woman Who Knows All."
Gnosticism placed primary value on the feminine qualities of receptivity, intuitive perception, visionary experience and the art of healing. It was a teaching of love, selflessness, harmony and communion. The mystic experience of, and communion with, the essential grace and majesty of Divinity, lay at the heart of Gnostic transmission. Like a brilliant flash of light arising from the darkness, this understanding arises in the individual as a bright lucid awareness – an intuitive realization of the pure essence, nature and energy of Divinity as it flows within oneself, the luminous realms and all of creation. From the Gnostic viewpoint, the answers to all of life’s mysteries can only be found when one “opens oneself to this divine current and allows oneself to be penetrated by it to the point where one is fully transformed and illuminated by it.”.
DARK MOTHER, DARK MATTER
The Black Madonna is the manifestation of God in Matter -- the healing power of Earth. At this time of huge global upheaval "Our Lady of the Dark Forest", the Black Madonna is appearing in many dreams and body/soul rhythms, perhaps even genetic memory which is embodied in our structure. Like the virgin forest, she is full of the seeds of possibility, utterly in touch with nature. At the point of wounding, the Black Madonna may appear in our dreams and take the rejected soul in her arms and rock her with her head against her heart. This “Black Madonna” archetype symbolizes the matriarchal soul, and it is related to the fate of the earth itself. It also represents our own virginal souls subject to the experiential sorrows of embodiment, dying into soul. It has alchemical overtones:
So what is the rose in the fire all about? It is about perceiving the soul's suffering in the fire of physical pain and passion. It is about the anguish of spirit descending into physical limitations and opaque matter ascending toward spiritual aspirations and the conflict of those two opposing realms producing consciousness in the soul, which belongs to both time and timelessness. It is about perceiving light in matter. Most of us try to let our bodies and psyches function instinctively until we are ravaged by disease or neurosis. Then we realize that the body/psyche cannot function naturally in the concrete, concretized world in which we live. Metaphorically the body becomes a machine to be driven or a garbage dump to be avoided. At the same time, the magnificent Mother in whose womb we live is mindlessly poisoned and raped. Surely our insane denial has to be perceived and acted upon. The Great Mother is sending us many messages warning us that her immune system is breaking down. If we are to save her, we must first embrace our own soul in our own flesh. What we are doing in body/soul work is contacting her light in our own depths, becoming aware of our own subtle body (the body perceived through imagery). Dreams make it quite clear that, until the subtle body is connected at the deepest instinctual level (the base chakra), and until it is strong enough to act as a conscious container, the spiritual energy related to the third eye (the spiritual centre in the forehead) must remain veiled. Body/soul work is preparation for the divine marriage in which the light of soul opens to the light of the spirit. The rose burns in the fire of love, a love that pierces to the very heart of our own self-destruction and self-creation. There we can weep for what others have done to us and for what we therefore have done to ourselves and others. There we meet the others in our mutual imperfections and forgive. At the heart of matter we find the mystery, the presence in which we are all one.
http://www.humanehealthcare.com/Article.asp?art_id=263
She guides and advises and acts with absolute clarity, often with a startling sense of humor that delights in play. These moments in dreams or active imagination are filled with her compassion for our human situation. She is blunt, neither indulgent nor sentimental. She demands embodiment. Living in the creative intercourse between chaos and order, she calls us to enter into the dance of creation, "her love in her living body." She speaks to men as clearly as to women. Men, too, are working to find their own feeling values, values that are not dependent on pleasing or hating Mother and Father and all they represent. The archetype of the Black Madonna, or Lilith, or Mary Magdalene may be a way to freedom for both -- the mythological unconscious. The sensuous feminine power of the body knows instinctively how to be born, give birth, and how to die.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/37977053/Dark-Goddes-in-the-Transformation-of-Consciousness
It was through the Black Madonna that Christianity retained Sophia’s connection with nature. The Black Madonna was sometimes called the lady of the caves where her statues were often hidden. The blackness there may have been related to the fact that she had been rescued by the locals after being burned as “pagan” by the church. Her darkness, however, could reflect earlier times, for Isis and Cybele were black of skin. The Black Madonna is sometimes known to worshippers as 'Our Lady of the Underworld'.
The Black Madonna became the Mary of indigenous people and is still found in Poland, Spain, Mexico. While Christianity basically ignored nature, or saw it as sinful, it is important to recognize that some mystics of the Christian church retained the integration of nature and spirit: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and Jacob Boehm (1575-1650) spoke of their love for the beauty and importance of the natural world as an expression of God. They believed our spirit’s journey was vitally intertwined with the earth. Many writers also felt that the Sophianic message went into the essential teachings of Jesus. Jung wrote in “Answer to Job” that Sophia softened the Old Testament Yahweh and helped the Old Testament God remember compassion.
The fundamental challenge of Sophia and our relationship to nature , however, resurfaces in recently discovered esoteric texts. Of particular note is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, written in the 2nd century but not found until 1896 (with fragments published in the western world in 1996). Mary Magdalene is described here as an intimate of Christ, mentored by Him and recognized as one who supported and taught the apostles. Early tapestries illustrate this prominence and relationship. This gospel records further teachings of Christ, such as:
“All that is born, all that is created and all the elements of nature are interwoven and united with each other.” And then Christ goes on to say: “all that is composed will be decomposed.” This is the fundamental Sophianic challenge: to view ourselves as a process unfolding within nature. Such a view places us beyond religious dogma, and opens us to on-going Creation.
What wisdom awaits us here? Man’s deep fear of illness and death informs his pervasive need to control nature. The Black Madonna is the Mother of Death. Certainly, our innate intelligence is here to cure illness and provide palliative care for the dying. What we have not done is penetrate further into how fundamentally we are interwoven and united with nature, and how she provides the cog-wheel of our evolution.
We honor the Black Madonna's historical and mythopoetic aspects necessary for feminine initiation from a Jungian Psychological perspective. Jungian analyst Marion Woodman suggests that the Black Madonna is the new myth for the coming age, a female redeemer. Living within, she speaks in archetypal dreams, intuition and the wisdom of the body.
The image of the black virgin holds a prominent place in alchemical symbolism - the dark mother giving birth to Christ child - equated in alchemy with the solar gold. Hence 'out of darkness commeth light'. Jungian, Marion Woodman does an excellent job of contemporizing the archetype of Black Madonna in her two-part audio set, "DREAMS: Language of the Soul".
http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=810&Itemid=40
Symbolically, he Black Madonna is one facet of the chthonian Goddess who images the maternal paradox of She who can remake what, as 'dis-integrating' Nature, she has destroyed through death: so Isis remakes Osiris. Persephone, the Greek mirror of the Black Madonna, is sometimes imaged as monstrous in form, with fangs and Gorgon eyes, like the Hindu Kali, but she is also nurturing Dark Mother to the depths of soul, an underworld aesthetic that's soulful in extremis. The myth of Psyche also comes to mind, since her journey reflects soul's painfully initiating and endlessly returning path -- renewing the wasteland.
'She is black because she is the gateway and symbol of everything we could know in the apparent blackness beyond visible sight; because she represents all those forces that surround us which are not perceived (by our senses), but which extend from the visible spectrum into unexplored modes of being. She is also black because she is the goddess of clairvoyance and the second sight. The Black Madonna has been called Notre Dame de Lumiere - she is black light, Mary Lucifer - Mary the Light Bearer.'
http://www.greenspirit.org.uk/resources/BlackMadonna.shtml
Some Black Madonnas clearly reveal the artist's intention to portray a pitch black mother and child: the faces and hands of both are black, while the clothes are brightly colored. With others it is not at all clear whether someone wanted to craft a "Black Madonna". Often it seems that the faithful proclaimed her "black" quite independent of the artist's intentions. Some are Byzantine icons whose complexion is usually dark, approximately in accordance with the actual skin color of Palestinian Jews of the 1st century. Some statues are dark because they are sculpted out of dark wood or cast in a dark metal; skin and clothes are all the same color, though the statues are often draped in bright cloth clothes, which accentuates the darkness of the material.
She is the heiress of the thrones of the pre-Christian goddesses. She is the bride of the Christian God, the bride in the Song of Songs, who represents all souls seeking union with the Divine and says: "I am black but beautiful." (1:5) She is a rebel against the establishment, a heavenly therapist, a spiritual guide. As the Dark Mother archetype she is a symbol of our inner shadow-self when properly integrated. As a black woman she is a friend to the oppressed and reconciler of all races. She is a healer of all dis-ease, a guide and companion at the time of death. She is the helper of Christ, turned black by carrying our sins with him. - All these roles are worth investigating. http://www.interfaithmarianpilgrimages.com/pages/blackmadonna.html
An Annotated Bibliography for Books on Black Madonnas
http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/resources/BlackMadonna_bib.html
Black Madonnas in Art & Transformation
The Archetypal Divine Mother
According to Carl G. Jung, the "Mother Archetype" is dual in nature. ...
The Black Madonnas perpetuate the pre-Christian symbolic blackness of the goddesses ...
"This goddess may take many forms [in our dreams]. Usually she is black or oriental or simply dark. She may appear as a proud gypsy, a dancer in a tavern, a sacred prostitute, a Mary Magdalene. Always she is outside the collective value system of the dreamer's conscious world...and carries immense potential for new life." - Marion Woodman
BLACK MADONNA: Symbolic & Literal
https://theartoftransformations.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/the-black-madonna/
The Black Madonna embodies a great Mystery. To say she is only this or that, literal or symbolic, is to impose a false limitation on her transcendent being, the immanence of the sacred. The Black Madonna phenomenon is a continuing enigma in the study of Medieval life. They appear in churches from Eastern Europe to Spain, no different than other statues of the Madonna and Child except that they are inexplicably made of black or dark brown material.
But this Madonna is also a mystagogue - one who initiates others into mystic beliefs, an educator or person who has knowledge of the Sacred Mysteries. Another word is Hierophant. In ancient mystery religions, a mystagogue was responsible for leading an initiate into the secret teachings and rituals of the cult. The initiate would often be blindfolded, and the mystagogue would literally "guide" him into the sacred space. The Black Madonna guides us through our inner darkness.
In alchemical lore Nicolas Flamel’s definitive pilgrimage found him traveling to a site in Spain where one of the icons of the Black Madonna is venerated. The origins of these icons abound, from the mundane idea that these are merely standard depictions of the Madonna having lost their original patina, or that were simply carved from materials that were black and left as is, to a whole host of esoteric explanations regarding secret cults and heterodox visions of the Divine.
https://theartoftransformations.wordpress.com/2011/08/24/the-black-madonna/
We can view the Black Madonna both symbolically and literally. There is genealogical evidence of Black lineage in the Petran/Aethiopian lines of Mary Magdalene (ref. Hugh Montgomery) that parallel and supersede purely symbolic interpretations of cultic worship of the Black Madonna, as dark goddess and divine mother, or the "original Mary", Isis -- immortal life. Some researchers refer to Mary Magdalene as the Black Madonna. She had a cult following in France. They believe that she came to the shores pregnant. When they say the Holy Grail, they mean the Holy Blood, the Blood Royal in her body, Jesus’ baby and subsequent lineage. Some scholars believe this.
http://www.topix.com/forum/news/weird/TPV52DDV51ODP4N1N
According to legend, soon after the crucifixion and Resurrection, Mary Magdalene and her family were expelled from the Holy Land, set adrift on the Mediterranean Sea and made their way to this region, particularly the area around Southern France and Northern Spain. At this time in history, aside from the already established Celts, many Greeks, Arabs, Jews and others lived and travelled in this area. There was even a Jewish city known as Glanum Levi whose ruins can be found today in Provence.
In the midst of this cosmopolitan confluence of cultures, along with the exchange of goods there must have been an exchange of philosophical and religious ideas. It is very possible that during this period many spiritual and symbolic links were discovered between these diverse peoples and their traditional belief systems that stretched back to the temples of Egypt. Before her arrival in Les Saintes Marie Sur Les Mere, France was riddled with Isis cults. The name Paris etymologically can be linked to the pre-Celtic ParIsis, the grove of Isis. Clearly this region was fertile ground for Mary Magdalene’s mission.
Following her arrival in France, she was said to have travelled the land, preaching the authentic Gnostic gospel of Jesus, which had been directly transmitted to her during his time on Earth and in mystic visions after his return to the more subtle dimensions of light. French religious literature from the Middle Ages is filled with legends and stories of the life of Mary Magdalene from this period until her death. Tales abound of her miraculous healings, her performance of the ritual of baptism, her aid in fertility and childbearing and even her ability to raise the dead. There are even reports of a secret tradition of the healing arts that exists today in France and traces its roots back to Mary Magdalene. Besides being a fundamental symbol of French (and later British) monarchy, the fleur-de-lys is one of the central symbols found in the Church of Mary Magdalen at Rennes-le-Chateau.
http://www.gnostic.info/rose_Mary%20Magdalene.html
“The details of the separate kingdom of Septimania were erased from history books; but the descendant bloodlines were apparently the “heretical Royal Bloodlines”as : Dukes of Aquitaine, Dukes of Lorraine, Dukes of Guise; Counts of Barcelona, Counts of Toulouse, Counts of Auvergne; Counts of Razes. (HBHB, pp 368-371) And it was precisely a Duke of Aquitaine who founded Cluny! Thus, Septimania now becomes extremely important, for now Urban II, descendant of the Eudes of Septimania and Cluny Prior, is the pope who will call the first Crusades resulting in the crowning of a direct lineal descendant of Guillem de Gellone, named Godfroi de Bouillon, Duke of Lorraine , as King of Jerusalem! Aquitaine is so-named on maps of Second Century Roman Empire and comprised then, the whole area from Languedoc, South France, to Poitou and Anjou. Septimania was the area that was later known as the Languedoc.
Gnostic Cult of the Black Madonna
Several researchers speak of an "Underground Church of Mary Magdalene," which existed in the South of France at the time of the Cathars and Gnostics. No one has specified with certainty what these cults were about or how they came to be. We do know that they had been condemned as heretical and eventually eradicated by the Crusaders
and the Roman Catholic Church, but studies show that indeed an important cult of unorthodox character dedicated to Mary Magdalene and the cult of Black Madonna's existed in the Middle Ages in the South of France, and still today, Mary Magdalene has a considerable cult following in the South of France. Many of the finest Gnostic writings are of Alexandrian inspiration or origin. Alexandria is also the main source of Gnostic works linking Jesus with Mary Magdalene.
The Cosmic Cycle is incorporated in the Christian Holy Trinity though in completely masculine terms, with God as heavenly father, heavenly Holy Spirit and the divine son made of earthly matter. This was enabled through the coupling of the male Holy Spirit and the “living” Virgin Mary. In Egyptian mythology, the living Isis only conceives her son Horus after the death of Osiris. He procreates from the spiritual world, when he becomes God of the Underworld.
This can be explained in alchemical terms, with the masculine Osiris, the black virginal prima materia and fixed male, uniting with the black, volatile, female, spirit of Isis his wife, conceiving and producing the Divine child Horus, the Earthly representative of his father Osiris. The serpents have devoured one another, the Ouroboros is realized and so the Cycle continues. The Black Virgin is, like Osiris, the father and the divine, male essence. The Black Mother is, like Isis, the mother and the divine, female essence, and the product of their union is the Ouroboros, Horus – the Christ. The Black Madonna could be another representation of the All, the trinity – and an esoteric Christian symbol of the Cosmic Cycle.
The Black Madonna, the womb of divinity, is always pregnant with multidimensional numinous meaning. The dark mother is both a living reality and an archetypal construction. Jung defined archetypes as primal patterns of human behavior. Jung said, "Who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakens." The pregnant virgin symbolizes a process of change akin to the metamorphosis of caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly -- an awakening to a transformed state and an inspirational symbol for restoring the lost hands of women's spirituality. The image of the Sacred Prostitute and the Royal Marriage, the image of the Black Madonna holds a key to the integration of the feminine and a feminine historical narrative anchored in the heart, gnosis or Knowledge -- "The Woman Who Knows All."
Gnosticism placed primary value on the feminine qualities of receptivity, intuitive perception, visionary experience and the art of healing. It was a teaching of love, selflessness, harmony and communion. The mystic experience of, and communion with, the essential grace and majesty of Divinity, lay at the heart of Gnostic transmission. Like a brilliant flash of light arising from the darkness, this understanding arises in the individual as a bright lucid awareness – an intuitive realization of the pure essence, nature and energy of Divinity as it flows within oneself, the luminous realms and all of creation. From the Gnostic viewpoint, the answers to all of life’s mysteries can only be found when one “opens oneself to this divine current and allows oneself to be penetrated by it to the point where one is fully transformed and illuminated by it.”.
DARK MOTHER, DARK MATTER
The Black Madonna is the manifestation of God in Matter -- the healing power of Earth. At this time of huge global upheaval "Our Lady of the Dark Forest", the Black Madonna is appearing in many dreams and body/soul rhythms, perhaps even genetic memory which is embodied in our structure. Like the virgin forest, she is full of the seeds of possibility, utterly in touch with nature. At the point of wounding, the Black Madonna may appear in our dreams and take the rejected soul in her arms and rock her with her head against her heart. This “Black Madonna” archetype symbolizes the matriarchal soul, and it is related to the fate of the earth itself. It also represents our own virginal souls subject to the experiential sorrows of embodiment, dying into soul. It has alchemical overtones:
So what is the rose in the fire all about? It is about perceiving the soul's suffering in the fire of physical pain and passion. It is about the anguish of spirit descending into physical limitations and opaque matter ascending toward spiritual aspirations and the conflict of those two opposing realms producing consciousness in the soul, which belongs to both time and timelessness. It is about perceiving light in matter. Most of us try to let our bodies and psyches function instinctively until we are ravaged by disease or neurosis. Then we realize that the body/psyche cannot function naturally in the concrete, concretized world in which we live. Metaphorically the body becomes a machine to be driven or a garbage dump to be avoided. At the same time, the magnificent Mother in whose womb we live is mindlessly poisoned and raped. Surely our insane denial has to be perceived and acted upon. The Great Mother is sending us many messages warning us that her immune system is breaking down. If we are to save her, we must first embrace our own soul in our own flesh. What we are doing in body/soul work is contacting her light in our own depths, becoming aware of our own subtle body (the body perceived through imagery). Dreams make it quite clear that, until the subtle body is connected at the deepest instinctual level (the base chakra), and until it is strong enough to act as a conscious container, the spiritual energy related to the third eye (the spiritual centre in the forehead) must remain veiled. Body/soul work is preparation for the divine marriage in which the light of soul opens to the light of the spirit. The rose burns in the fire of love, a love that pierces to the very heart of our own self-destruction and self-creation. There we can weep for what others have done to us and for what we therefore have done to ourselves and others. There we meet the others in our mutual imperfections and forgive. At the heart of matter we find the mystery, the presence in which we are all one.
http://www.humanehealthcare.com/Article.asp?art_id=263
She guides and advises and acts with absolute clarity, often with a startling sense of humor that delights in play. These moments in dreams or active imagination are filled with her compassion for our human situation. She is blunt, neither indulgent nor sentimental. She demands embodiment. Living in the creative intercourse between chaos and order, she calls us to enter into the dance of creation, "her love in her living body." She speaks to men as clearly as to women. Men, too, are working to find their own feeling values, values that are not dependent on pleasing or hating Mother and Father and all they represent. The archetype of the Black Madonna, or Lilith, or Mary Magdalene may be a way to freedom for both -- the mythological unconscious. The sensuous feminine power of the body knows instinctively how to be born, give birth, and how to die.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/37977053/Dark-Goddes-in-the-Transformation-of-Consciousness
It was through the Black Madonna that Christianity retained Sophia’s connection with nature. The Black Madonna was sometimes called the lady of the caves where her statues were often hidden. The blackness there may have been related to the fact that she had been rescued by the locals after being burned as “pagan” by the church. Her darkness, however, could reflect earlier times, for Isis and Cybele were black of skin. The Black Madonna is sometimes known to worshippers as 'Our Lady of the Underworld'.
The Black Madonna became the Mary of indigenous people and is still found in Poland, Spain, Mexico. While Christianity basically ignored nature, or saw it as sinful, it is important to recognize that some mystics of the Christian church retained the integration of nature and spirit: Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and Jacob Boehm (1575-1650) spoke of their love for the beauty and importance of the natural world as an expression of God. They believed our spirit’s journey was vitally intertwined with the earth. Many writers also felt that the Sophianic message went into the essential teachings of Jesus. Jung wrote in “Answer to Job” that Sophia softened the Old Testament Yahweh and helped the Old Testament God remember compassion.
The fundamental challenge of Sophia and our relationship to nature , however, resurfaces in recently discovered esoteric texts. Of particular note is the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, written in the 2nd century but not found until 1896 (with fragments published in the western world in 1996). Mary Magdalene is described here as an intimate of Christ, mentored by Him and recognized as one who supported and taught the apostles. Early tapestries illustrate this prominence and relationship. This gospel records further teachings of Christ, such as:
“All that is born, all that is created and all the elements of nature are interwoven and united with each other.” And then Christ goes on to say: “all that is composed will be decomposed.” This is the fundamental Sophianic challenge: to view ourselves as a process unfolding within nature. Such a view places us beyond religious dogma, and opens us to on-going Creation.
What wisdom awaits us here? Man’s deep fear of illness and death informs his pervasive need to control nature. The Black Madonna is the Mother of Death. Certainly, our innate intelligence is here to cure illness and provide palliative care for the dying. What we have not done is penetrate further into how fundamentally we are interwoven and united with nature, and how she provides the cog-wheel of our evolution.
We honor the Black Madonna's historical and mythopoetic aspects necessary for feminine initiation from a Jungian Psychological perspective. Jungian analyst Marion Woodman suggests that the Black Madonna is the new myth for the coming age, a female redeemer. Living within, she speaks in archetypal dreams, intuition and the wisdom of the body.
The image of the black virgin holds a prominent place in alchemical symbolism - the dark mother giving birth to Christ child - equated in alchemy with the solar gold. Hence 'out of darkness commeth light'. Jungian, Marion Woodman does an excellent job of contemporizing the archetype of Black Madonna in her two-part audio set, "DREAMS: Language of the Soul".
http://www.cgjungpage.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=810&Itemid=40
Symbolically, he Black Madonna is one facet of the chthonian Goddess who images the maternal paradox of She who can remake what, as 'dis-integrating' Nature, she has destroyed through death: so Isis remakes Osiris. Persephone, the Greek mirror of the Black Madonna, is sometimes imaged as monstrous in form, with fangs and Gorgon eyes, like the Hindu Kali, but she is also nurturing Dark Mother to the depths of soul, an underworld aesthetic that's soulful in extremis. The myth of Psyche also comes to mind, since her journey reflects soul's painfully initiating and endlessly returning path -- renewing the wasteland.
'She is black because she is the gateway and symbol of everything we could know in the apparent blackness beyond visible sight; because she represents all those forces that surround us which are not perceived (by our senses), but which extend from the visible spectrum into unexplored modes of being. She is also black because she is the goddess of clairvoyance and the second sight. The Black Madonna has been called Notre Dame de Lumiere - she is black light, Mary Lucifer - Mary the Light Bearer.'
http://www.greenspirit.org.uk/resources/BlackMadonna.shtml
Some Black Madonnas clearly reveal the artist's intention to portray a pitch black mother and child: the faces and hands of both are black, while the clothes are brightly colored. With others it is not at all clear whether someone wanted to craft a "Black Madonna". Often it seems that the faithful proclaimed her "black" quite independent of the artist's intentions. Some are Byzantine icons whose complexion is usually dark, approximately in accordance with the actual skin color of Palestinian Jews of the 1st century. Some statues are dark because they are sculpted out of dark wood or cast in a dark metal; skin and clothes are all the same color, though the statues are often draped in bright cloth clothes, which accentuates the darkness of the material.
She is the heiress of the thrones of the pre-Christian goddesses. She is the bride of the Christian God, the bride in the Song of Songs, who represents all souls seeking union with the Divine and says: "I am black but beautiful." (1:5) She is a rebel against the establishment, a heavenly therapist, a spiritual guide. As the Dark Mother archetype she is a symbol of our inner shadow-self when properly integrated. As a black woman she is a friend to the oppressed and reconciler of all races. She is a healer of all dis-ease, a guide and companion at the time of death. She is the helper of Christ, turned black by carrying our sins with him. - All these roles are worth investigating. http://www.interfaithmarianpilgrimages.com/pages/blackmadonna.html
An Annotated Bibliography for Books on Black Madonnas
http://campus.udayton.edu/mary/resources/BlackMadonna_bib.html
Mothers in the Iron Age
The mothers influenced all aspects of life and were equally relevant to both men and women.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqd14dWDMsA
The mothers influenced all aspects of life and were equally relevant to both men and women.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yqd14dWDMsA
Goddess Vortex
Kinuko Y. Craft
"Compassion is the deepest form of memory." --Eve Ensler
The grandmother speaks out in public to announce the baby, just as it might be today. It is a grandmother who apparently knows the secret of renewal and redemption.The spiritual dimension, the intuitive realm, had spoken through an angel; but here is the first voice of the Sacred Feminine in the earth dimension telling the story of renewal. A baby represents the continuous cyclic renewal of life on symbolic and physical planes. Cyclic renewal is the philosophy of the Goddess religions
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Here is Christ's Great-Grandmother with her tree and her book of wisdom in a statue from 1515-1530. Emerentia carries a mythic pattern of the Goddess in her story of giving birth to Anne. It was known through vision at the Mystery School at Carmel that her child would be spiritually significant. Emerentia had six lovers with whom nothing was conceived. Seven being the mystical number of cycles and patterns of the Goddess was the one that brought her into harmony with her destiny....and Anne was born. http://blog.marymagdalenewithin.com/
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Sidney Meteyard. 'Venus and Adonis'
Maiden – Introverted / Active / Physical / XVII The Star XVII The Star - Ushas
Like a tiny acorn, this archetype represents the part of the Divine Feminine that contains within itself all potential and possibility. The Maiden is beholden only to herself and not dependent or reliant upon another. She is the uncorrupted spirit, and her dreams, desires and goals are self-led. She is ever-virgin, always renewing, just as our own hopes and optimistic dreams constantly shift to embrace new possibilities. The Maiden is illustrated in XVII The Star card of the Tarot’s Major Arcana, a card of rejuvenation, healing, optimism, dreams, and self-contained vitality. In an immature form, the Maiden becomes the “Flower Girl”, bringing transient distraction and beauty; her shadow forms take the role of the impoverished potential: Cinderella.
The Maiden can be found in the Vedic Goddess of dawn, Ushas. Ushas dances across the night sky with every new day, chasing away the darkness with her sunrise-skirts and hair. She is called in the Rig Veda “ever-young”, as she is renewed every dawn, in turn renewing the light of the earth and the lives of her priests. In Graeco-Roman myth we find the virgin huntress Artemis/Diana, who remains unmarried and unreliant upon any other person or deity for her needs. Although she is paired with her brother Apollo their relationship is not one of dependence. She is queen of the hunt in her own right, and she remains untouched by sexual desire, allowing her to focus instead upon her skill and goals. The archetype of the Maiden is found repeatedly in fairytales, since it is a far more human role than a divine one: the princess or young girl embarking upon a quest, either as Red Riding Hood or Gerda from Hans Christian Anderson’s “Snow Queen”. However, the Maiden is often twisted into the Victim archetype.
Mother – Extroverted / Passive / Emotional / III The Empress III The Empress - Xochiquetzal
This archetype is concerned with relationships with others, both in a loving manner and a nurturing one. She creates – she is the giver of life – and she maintains – she is the protector of life. The Mother is our creative urge and our need to care for another; she is supportive and co-operative, and often sacrifices herself and her own needs for those of others. The Mother is also the Lover, fully actualizing her sensual nature and expressing beauty and sexuality. Her immature aspect is that of the ingénue, focused more on relationship for relationship’s sake rather than a caring role. Her shadow aspects manifest as the martyr, completely giving herself up to the needs of others, and the smothering-mother, the one who protects too much. In the Tarot, the Mother archetype is found in III The Empress, both a ruling queen, a lover, and a mother. She is the door to creation, giving manifestation to raw energy, and urging us to create and love.
The Mother is expressed in the Aztec figure of Xochiquetzal, the patron Goddess of arts and childbirth. She watches over all men of skill in their work, and midwives and women in labour. She brings birth not only to children but also to great sculptures, architecture and expressions of beauty. In Peru the Mother is Pachamama, “Earth Mother”, the Goddess who protects and maintains the natural world around us and feeds and nurtures the creatures living on it. She is the Goddess of agriculture, helping sustain her worshipers, and like the expectant mother’s womb provides all the nutrients and environment needed for her unborn child, so Pachamama’s earth-body provides everything needed for human survival. In the Greek story of Demeter we find this idea of the Earth Mother again, but also the aspect of the smothering-mother. Demeter gave mankind agriculture and crops, and when her only daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades, in her anger she blighted the crops and allowed nothing new to grow.
Crone – Introverted / Passive / Mental / II High Priestess XIV Alchemy - Cerridwen
With the Crone we find an archetype of understanding, wisdom, and letting go. Usually depicted as an older woman, even a hag in more negative lights, she has travelled the weary world and now possesses the kind of wisdom usually doled out by our Grandmothers. Her wisdom is hard won but freely given, and she sees the cycles necessary for life to continue. She faces her fears and inner demons and offers transformation to those who can do the same. Sometimes she is a Fairy Godmother, gently leading others towards realization, and sometimes she is the face of death itself confronting us with truth. Her immature form is expressed as the Know-it-All: all knowledge and no understanding, keen to advise but lacking wisdom. In her shadow form she manifests as bitter old maid or wicked witch, using her power and wisdom to hinder and manipulate others, jealous of those who possess what she does not (youth, beauty, etc.) and cannot let go of. She is often in a state of refusal to let go and embrace her age and experience – in fairytale literature she often targets the heroine because of her beauty, youth, innocence and opportunity. In the Tarot the Crone is depicted as II The High Priestess, seated at the threshold of the temple of wisdom, bearing a scroll on her lap, and allowing silence to speak what words can no longer express.
Welsh myth offers a Crone in the form on Cerridwen, who creates a magical potion to bestow upon her ugly son the gift of wisdom. The boy she hires to stir the potion for a year-and-a-day inadvertently consumes a single drop of the potion, and receives the magical power of wisdom, prophecy and bardic skill. She proceeds to give chase to the boy, and both shapeshift into various animals; eventually she consumes him in her form as a hen with he as grain of wheat, and gives rebirth to him as the great Bard Taliesin. In the lesser known story of Copper Woman, from the Nootka Native Canadian people, Copper Woman is the grandmother of all the different races of the earth; but as she gets older her wisdom allows her to know when the time is right to leave her “bag of meat and bones”. After death her spirit lives on in the elements, the ocean, and all other life, until she finally enters into the womb of her granddaughter and is reborn. Finally, in Gnostic Christianity we find a Crone focused on wisdom and silence: Sophia. Her name means “Wisdom”, and she is not only wisdom of skills and facts, but also inner wisdom of true “Gnosis”. She exhorts mankind to search in earnest for her, and when they find her they find only silence.
Queen/Seductress – Extroverted / Active / Spiritual-Integrative / VIII Strength I The Magician - Isis
The Queen archetype is one of full integration and expression of capability and skill. She is at once an authority and harmonizing force between others, and the epitome of the previous archetypes combined. She is the powerful, resourceful, controller of a situation, and she is also the benevolent, caring establisher of order. As Seductress she performs a similar role, integrating the otherness of the previous archetypes into herself. She has the ingenuity and energy of the Maiden, the nurturing and loving qualities of the Mother, and the wisdom and understanding of the Crone. In her immature form she is the Princess, still working towards the goal of unity; her shadow self manifests as the control queen or usurping wicked stepmother, using her power and skill to control others for malefic reasons rather than benevolent ones. The Queen archetype is expansive and communitarian; her shadow selves are ego-centric and self-serving. In the Tarot, the Queen is found in VIII Strength, the woman taming or controlling the beast, integrating into herself the very qualities that it possesses.
In Egyptian myth Isis is the queen of everything! Her cult was wide and expansive even to the British Isles, and her myths grant her immense powers of magic, trickery, knowledge, birth, death, rebirth, law, herbalism, childbirth, and skill. She uses her powers to gently guide the other Egyptian Gods, bring her husband back from the dead, and give her son back the land that is rightfully his. A similar figure is found in Sumerian mythology, in the Goddess Inanna, called the Queen of Heaven. She is the a Goddess of life, love, luxury, sensuality, war, childbirth, healing, marriage, the home, rebirth, animals, and victory. Not only does she rule Heaven and earth, but she also descends to the Underworld and experiences rebirth there, taking on some of the powers of her Underworld sister. She is also given the me by the God of wisdom, Enki – the me represent attributes of civilization, power, order and status.
Fairytales, myths and legends give us many other archetypes – the Siren, Amazon, Wife, Crazy Cat Lady – that demonstrate the vibrant and manifold expressions of the Divine Feminine archetypes. Most of them fall into the main four archetypal categories, or bridge the gap between two. We all embody these feminine archetypes to varying extents. Each has qualities that are desirable for a fully socialized individual, but each also bares a warning, and therefore guidance on retaining individuality at the same time as acknowledging the Other in our relationships, friendships, and communities. http://pistissophiatarot.com/queens-of-heaven-and-earth-archetypes-of-the-divine-feminine/
Like a tiny acorn, this archetype represents the part of the Divine Feminine that contains within itself all potential and possibility. The Maiden is beholden only to herself and not dependent or reliant upon another. She is the uncorrupted spirit, and her dreams, desires and goals are self-led. She is ever-virgin, always renewing, just as our own hopes and optimistic dreams constantly shift to embrace new possibilities. The Maiden is illustrated in XVII The Star card of the Tarot’s Major Arcana, a card of rejuvenation, healing, optimism, dreams, and self-contained vitality. In an immature form, the Maiden becomes the “Flower Girl”, bringing transient distraction and beauty; her shadow forms take the role of the impoverished potential: Cinderella.
The Maiden can be found in the Vedic Goddess of dawn, Ushas. Ushas dances across the night sky with every new day, chasing away the darkness with her sunrise-skirts and hair. She is called in the Rig Veda “ever-young”, as she is renewed every dawn, in turn renewing the light of the earth and the lives of her priests. In Graeco-Roman myth we find the virgin huntress Artemis/Diana, who remains unmarried and unreliant upon any other person or deity for her needs. Although she is paired with her brother Apollo their relationship is not one of dependence. She is queen of the hunt in her own right, and she remains untouched by sexual desire, allowing her to focus instead upon her skill and goals. The archetype of the Maiden is found repeatedly in fairytales, since it is a far more human role than a divine one: the princess or young girl embarking upon a quest, either as Red Riding Hood or Gerda from Hans Christian Anderson’s “Snow Queen”. However, the Maiden is often twisted into the Victim archetype.
Mother – Extroverted / Passive / Emotional / III The Empress III The Empress - Xochiquetzal
This archetype is concerned with relationships with others, both in a loving manner and a nurturing one. She creates – she is the giver of life – and she maintains – she is the protector of life. The Mother is our creative urge and our need to care for another; she is supportive and co-operative, and often sacrifices herself and her own needs for those of others. The Mother is also the Lover, fully actualizing her sensual nature and expressing beauty and sexuality. Her immature aspect is that of the ingénue, focused more on relationship for relationship’s sake rather than a caring role. Her shadow aspects manifest as the martyr, completely giving herself up to the needs of others, and the smothering-mother, the one who protects too much. In the Tarot, the Mother archetype is found in III The Empress, both a ruling queen, a lover, and a mother. She is the door to creation, giving manifestation to raw energy, and urging us to create and love.
The Mother is expressed in the Aztec figure of Xochiquetzal, the patron Goddess of arts and childbirth. She watches over all men of skill in their work, and midwives and women in labour. She brings birth not only to children but also to great sculptures, architecture and expressions of beauty. In Peru the Mother is Pachamama, “Earth Mother”, the Goddess who protects and maintains the natural world around us and feeds and nurtures the creatures living on it. She is the Goddess of agriculture, helping sustain her worshipers, and like the expectant mother’s womb provides all the nutrients and environment needed for her unborn child, so Pachamama’s earth-body provides everything needed for human survival. In the Greek story of Demeter we find this idea of the Earth Mother again, but also the aspect of the smothering-mother. Demeter gave mankind agriculture and crops, and when her only daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades, in her anger she blighted the crops and allowed nothing new to grow.
Crone – Introverted / Passive / Mental / II High Priestess XIV Alchemy - Cerridwen
With the Crone we find an archetype of understanding, wisdom, and letting go. Usually depicted as an older woman, even a hag in more negative lights, she has travelled the weary world and now possesses the kind of wisdom usually doled out by our Grandmothers. Her wisdom is hard won but freely given, and she sees the cycles necessary for life to continue. She faces her fears and inner demons and offers transformation to those who can do the same. Sometimes she is a Fairy Godmother, gently leading others towards realization, and sometimes she is the face of death itself confronting us with truth. Her immature form is expressed as the Know-it-All: all knowledge and no understanding, keen to advise but lacking wisdom. In her shadow form she manifests as bitter old maid or wicked witch, using her power and wisdom to hinder and manipulate others, jealous of those who possess what she does not (youth, beauty, etc.) and cannot let go of. She is often in a state of refusal to let go and embrace her age and experience – in fairytale literature she often targets the heroine because of her beauty, youth, innocence and opportunity. In the Tarot the Crone is depicted as II The High Priestess, seated at the threshold of the temple of wisdom, bearing a scroll on her lap, and allowing silence to speak what words can no longer express.
Welsh myth offers a Crone in the form on Cerridwen, who creates a magical potion to bestow upon her ugly son the gift of wisdom. The boy she hires to stir the potion for a year-and-a-day inadvertently consumes a single drop of the potion, and receives the magical power of wisdom, prophecy and bardic skill. She proceeds to give chase to the boy, and both shapeshift into various animals; eventually she consumes him in her form as a hen with he as grain of wheat, and gives rebirth to him as the great Bard Taliesin. In the lesser known story of Copper Woman, from the Nootka Native Canadian people, Copper Woman is the grandmother of all the different races of the earth; but as she gets older her wisdom allows her to know when the time is right to leave her “bag of meat and bones”. After death her spirit lives on in the elements, the ocean, and all other life, until she finally enters into the womb of her granddaughter and is reborn. Finally, in Gnostic Christianity we find a Crone focused on wisdom and silence: Sophia. Her name means “Wisdom”, and she is not only wisdom of skills and facts, but also inner wisdom of true “Gnosis”. She exhorts mankind to search in earnest for her, and when they find her they find only silence.
Queen/Seductress – Extroverted / Active / Spiritual-Integrative / VIII Strength I The Magician - Isis
The Queen archetype is one of full integration and expression of capability and skill. She is at once an authority and harmonizing force between others, and the epitome of the previous archetypes combined. She is the powerful, resourceful, controller of a situation, and she is also the benevolent, caring establisher of order. As Seductress she performs a similar role, integrating the otherness of the previous archetypes into herself. She has the ingenuity and energy of the Maiden, the nurturing and loving qualities of the Mother, and the wisdom and understanding of the Crone. In her immature form she is the Princess, still working towards the goal of unity; her shadow self manifests as the control queen or usurping wicked stepmother, using her power and skill to control others for malefic reasons rather than benevolent ones. The Queen archetype is expansive and communitarian; her shadow selves are ego-centric and self-serving. In the Tarot, the Queen is found in VIII Strength, the woman taming or controlling the beast, integrating into herself the very qualities that it possesses.
In Egyptian myth Isis is the queen of everything! Her cult was wide and expansive even to the British Isles, and her myths grant her immense powers of magic, trickery, knowledge, birth, death, rebirth, law, herbalism, childbirth, and skill. She uses her powers to gently guide the other Egyptian Gods, bring her husband back from the dead, and give her son back the land that is rightfully his. A similar figure is found in Sumerian mythology, in the Goddess Inanna, called the Queen of Heaven. She is the a Goddess of life, love, luxury, sensuality, war, childbirth, healing, marriage, the home, rebirth, animals, and victory. Not only does she rule Heaven and earth, but she also descends to the Underworld and experiences rebirth there, taking on some of the powers of her Underworld sister. She is also given the me by the God of wisdom, Enki – the me represent attributes of civilization, power, order and status.
Fairytales, myths and legends give us many other archetypes – the Siren, Amazon, Wife, Crazy Cat Lady – that demonstrate the vibrant and manifold expressions of the Divine Feminine archetypes. Most of them fall into the main four archetypal categories, or bridge the gap between two. We all embody these feminine archetypes to varying extents. Each has qualities that are desirable for a fully socialized individual, but each also bares a warning, and therefore guidance on retaining individuality at the same time as acknowledging the Other in our relationships, friendships, and communities. http://pistissophiatarot.com/queens-of-heaven-and-earth-archetypes-of-the-divine-feminine/
Kirsty Mitchell 'Wonderland' Series...
Roberto Ferri - Anima Mundi
Queen, Mother, Wise Woman and Lover:
Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Feminine
This article complements the concepts explored in my article “Archetypes of the Mature Masculine” and applies them to the other half of humanity—women. In doing so I apply the same principles, not in a mechanistic way, but in the spirit of Jung’s archetypes and their rationale. Lets start with a few words of C. G. Jung himself where he talks about the Anima.
Male Shadow Triangle Thomas Moore and Douglas Gillette adopted and extended Jung’s approach in their exploration of the masculine psyche by using the collective archetypes of the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover. Obviously those four male archetypes can be translated and mapped in female clusters of virtues, specific attributes associated with four major female archetypes: the Queen, the Mother, the Wise Woman and the (female) Lover found in history and myths. This has been done before.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian psychiatrist, published in 1984 “Goddesses in Every Women: A New Psychology of Women came up with seven feminine archetypes based on ancient Greek mythology. Each Goddess represents a primordial image for women’s personality; they are: Hestia, Athena, Demeter, Aphrodite, Hera, Artemis, Persephone. Jennifer Baker and Roger J., Woolger in 1989 included only six of the Goddesses taking away Hestia. I think that is still a bit inflationary, narrow and not powerful enough. I get lost on the many fairies and goddesses and I miss the most powerful female Archetype - The Mother – of which C.G. Jung had written at great length.
Toni Wolff, colleague and presumable lover of Carl Jung, identified four feminine archetypes: Mother, the Amazon, the Hetaira, and the Medial. Wolff at the first glance comes closer, but her model is a male-centered quadruple (male Anima structure) instead a male-female archetype symmetry: This is most evident in Wolff’s definition of the Amazon, who represents more a female in good contact with her Animus, furthermore the semi-divine Queen is missing, while her Hetaira is not quite a full lover.
Emma Jung, the wife of C.G. Jung, wrote two very concise papers about Animus and Anima. Those two functional complexes represent symmetrically the personality component of the opposite sex and, at the same time the image of the opposite sex. By their fundamental nature, Animus and Anima symbolize primal masculinity and and femininity in general. In other words, the Anima figures represent the archetype of the feminine. Emma Jung gives various narratives of the Great Mother like Cybele, the Prophetess and the Love Goddess and animal or mixed human-animal semi-goddess motives like the swan-maiden in the Edda. Emma Jung refers to her husband, stating the male archetype is the one of meaning and the female archetype primarily of life. And indeed, life as such to me is about birth and death – between is wisdom, spirituality and individuation (redemption), if one is unlucky only staring at the Dow Jones.
To me the reproductive Mother archetype is not only neatly symmetrical to the destructive warrior archetype, it is definitely a primary one. No individual is completely masculine or feminine though, good or evil, right or wrong. Tyrants and Weaklings for instance represent an imbalance, a shadow or missing quality of power, a failure to employ virtues, and a negative female Archetype drains away all male energy. Female in myths representing the Anima appear often in multiples e.g. three or nine like the Nordic Valkyries. Quadruple qualities, however, take later in account the important (particularly for C.G. Jung) number four. A quadruple seen by C.G. Jung might be thought of as the cross, a mantra or cardinal points that must be balanced in the fully realized being.
Archetypes C.G. Jung distinguished himself from Sigmund Freud and most of his colleagues in that he recognized the existence and admitted the significance of religion and intangible elements of the psyche—what many previous thinkers, from Plato to the early Christian philosophers, have called soul. Jung’s own approach to religion was complex, unorthodox, and open to fresh insights ranging from affinity to Catholicism and Eastern thoughts to gnosis and alchemy. He recognized and valued collective cultural patterns (archetypes) but also individual enlightenment or at least development to find a person’s whole being (individuation). He felt those were dismissed by modern positivistic science and political systems which recognizes only the material world and denies or claim any spiritual dimension (totalitarian systems with personal cult).
The acceptance of the spiritual dimension allows us to understand holistic a person, society cooperation —the complex of (conscious and unconscious) beliefs, attributes, and virtues that defines that entity. Key to this understanding is Jung’s concept of the archetype. According to Jung, “The concept of the archetype is derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the religious myths and fairy-tales of world literature contain many symbols which are manifestations of those archetypes. There is a good book from his former assistant Jolande Jacobi. about archetype, symbols and complexes to clarify Jung’s slight ambiguity using those terms over his lifetime.
Proposed set of female Archetypes Significantly, female in myth and art can serve as vehicles for both the understanding and the modeling of these female archetypes. Jung’s theoretical framework of the human psyche follows Taoist principles and is remarkably symmetrical; the extrovert is balanced by the introvert; the material outer world by the inner world, the masculine principle—the Animus (Yin)—is balanced by the feminine principle, the Anima (Yang). Jung als favored strongly the number four and following Jung’s idea of the complementarity of opposites, a similar foursome archetypes can be identified and used to provide a foundation for the understanding of the unique qualities that characterize the female psyche.
All four representations of the archetypes have one positive (right amount – fullness) and 2 negative poles (deficit or surplus). For example, the positive lover archetype embraces the world with passion whereas the negative poles are the seductive (or promiscuous) lover and the frigid (or selfish) lover. One can see every woman (or girl) somewhere between these three extremes.
http://stottilien.com/2013/02/01/queen-mother-wise-woman-and-lover-rediscovering-the-archetypes-of-the-mature-feminine/
C_G_JUNG_FEMALE_ARCHETYPES
Despite the visible presence of males in political power and economic power in various cultures social and hidden political power has been disproportionately exercised by females. Western culture, which evolved within a predominantly Christian context, has its religious sources in the Jewish-Semitic Middle East and the Greco-Roman political and philosophical traditions, all of which were distinctly patriarchal on the outside but quietly influenced by women. This means that in the political, religious, and economic spheres the majority of leaders have been male. In those cases where women have been called upon to lead countries, they have until today exercised male-like leadership. Nonetheless, Western, Eastern and Orthodox civilization has not been entirely dismissive of the female psychic energies. Hindu and Buddhist cultures are also dominated by men in the political sphere but women’s leadership roles in the family are highly regarded. Indian societies, despite the predominance of the male Warrior archetype, have developed a complementary matriarchal social system. All of these cultural complexes afford surprisingly equal powerful symbolism of gender complementarity afforded by the Chinese Ying-Yang icon, and the uninhibited creative sexuality of many Hindu goddesses, and honor and respect for Holy Mary in Christianity. However. another major civilization, such as those that evolved in a predominantly some Muslim context, have been much more restrictive of female freedom and have arguably developed distinctive social pathologies and economic disadvantages precisely because of this.
The Queen – Power The Faerie, the Goddesses—The Great Mother, the Wise Woman and the female Lover are found with the secondary C.G. Jung literature and in feminist and/or New Age books Goddesses are everywhere. Not so the the Mother and only as a recent addition the Queen. As is the case with her male counterpart, the King, the Queen is the most complex and mature of the female archetypes. But also the most simple to map to the Moore model. There have been weak and evil Queen and Kings at all times. The image of Queen and Ling serves as a center for the mature ordering of things includes and transcends the other archetypes of the Feminine. Ideally, all “leading” human would , to a greater or lesser degree, embody the ideal King or Queen.
The Queen
One example, born in the 15th century BC, Hatshepsut, daughter of Tuthmose I and Aahmes, both of royal lineage, gained the throne upon the death of her father. To have a female pharaoh was unprecedented. Although there were no wars during her reign, she proved her sovereignty being a master politician, and an elegant stateswoman with enough charisma to keep control of an entire country for twenty years. In all, Hatshepsut accomplished what no woman had before her. She ruled the most powerful, advanced civilization in the world, successfully, for twenty years. Another example, the mother and the father of a family would model them. In those not so rare cases were women become leaders of nations, the archetypical Queen may take visible form, wise or foolish, caring or cruel. Just as the King is not born as a King, but must start life as a Prince, the Queen begins life as a Princess. A powerful embodiment of this archetype is the Great Goddess or God like in Egypt were those roles merged. This cosmic image is the equal to that of an all-powerful God, the source of complete cosmic power, but at the same time is more accessible, less menacing. As is true of her male counterpart, the Queen is the symbol for the leader of a nation, but the archetype itself, symbolizes leadership on a much grander, cosmic scale. However, all the essential attributes of the archetype of the Queen are present in a real woman who plays a leading (if only herself) role, regardless of the scope her real responsibilities—be she queen of a nation, a clan, or her own family.
The Mother – Creator This is the one archetype that is distinctly different for male and female development. Just as the Warrior is the most natural complement to the King and embodies a set of virtues that are necessary to defend the Kingdom, the Great Mother is the most natural complement to Queenship - and the King. The explosive destructive energy of the male Warrior archetype is balanced by the reproductive energy of the female Mother archetype. This is most evident in Kali-Ma the terrible mother. The Hindu religion has a myriad of Gods and Goddesses and the most revered Goddess is Kali. She is usually pictured wearing a necklace of skulls and girdle of human hands, dancing on the body of her consort, Shiva. In many attributes the Mother clearly complements the Warrior. Wagner’s Valkyries, those tough maidens who took worthy fallen warriors to Valhalla also served as sources of inspiration for heroic action. Just as the Warrior appears most fully when he gives himself over to death in an act of self-denial, the Mother appears most fully when she gives birth. Warriors take life, Mothers give life. This is the source of her power. Both place them outside any human’s power even; thus, she has the power to inspire, to create. Kali, in this aspect is said to be “The hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses.
The great and cruel mother
But the Mother archetype is also the symbol of all that is fair, all that is beautiful, all that transcends material existence. These concepts are not merely ornamental niceties but are at the very center of Being. Indeed, in their mythological thinking, the Ancient Greeks recognized the importance of Skills in their concept of the Nine Muses—each the inspiration and source of such humane gifts as poetry, music, and history. In their philosophical thinking, the Greeks recognized Beauty is an essential attribute of the Absolute Good. The Mothers’ virtues are intangible and ethereal; they often had been be self-sacrificial. Consider the holy Mary and the real-life women who have embodied legions of Virgin-Martyrs venerated by the early Church attest to the power of the self-sacrificing, inspirational but unreachable mother. As a powerful archetype the “feminine” aspect the Mother come up in the Christian quadruple conception of the Holy mother.
Like all archetypes, the Mother can appear as shadow, the distant and cruel mother. Like any any shadow, the cruel mother is not bad or evil. The cruel mother energy links links it to the male archetype counterpart the warrior. Both are associated with death and destruction – actual physical death. For instance the Hindu goddess Kali embodies a cruel mother, whose destruction is in service of creation.
The enigmatic chief queen Nefertiti (Neferneferuaten) of Akhenaten’s (Echnaton) is the most mysterious and interesting of all the ancient Egyptian queen and an example of a possessive mother symbol. Little is known about her and his overpowering mother Tiye influence on the androgynous pharaoh, who brought down the Egypt empire with his daring cultural and religious revolution (see here). After a few loving years, in which the couple celebrated publicly family life with six children, they went on different ways. Close to her end she reacted again, as it is believed that Nefertiti sent a frantic letter to the Hittite King Suppiluliumas after Tutankhamun died, begging the longtime enemy of Akhenaten and Egypt, for a marriage with one of his sons.
The Wise Women –
Spirituality I like to think that psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein a woman in the shadow of C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud (see here), resembles the archetype of the Wise Woman or Queen (in exile). The archetype of the Wise Women inhabits not ethereal regions where all appears as bright and luminous, the Wise Women inhabits like the magician the shadows. She is at home near the earth, even inside the earth, inside the dark, moist, primordial womb, the source of all fertility. The Wise One is no longer young. She is mature, rooted. She is likely to be old. Like a priest she may have even loved, but she has now transcended all sexuality and reproductivity and has reached a state of superior wisdom.
The Wise Women In contrast also to her male counterpart—the Magician— a non spiritual mind seeks not to penetrate beneath the surface of things and probe the mysteries of nature, rather, she looks inward into the mysteries of Being. This earthly knowledge extends to the body and more specifically to the very distinct realities of the female body, with its mysteries of fertility and procreation. Women who knew this much were much respected and feared.. This is the knowledge of the Sybil, of the Oracle of Delphi, of the forest spirits. In later centuries, patriarchal institutions resented and persecuted this source of feminine power because it lay out of their control and it dealt with many topics which were not well understood and stigmatized because of their inherent feminine nature. Many Wise Women were accused of being “witches” and were cruelly tortured and put to death.It is natural for both Wise women and Magician to seek separation from her sisters who toil in the world. Their quest for special knowledge requires long hours of solitude for study and reflection. Most often, both become a seer, an adviser. The Queen of Sheba, the counterpart to Solomon—the Magician King—illustrates this type of leadership.Perhaps the most powerful and inspiring embodiment of the archetype of the Wise One is the gnostic Figure of Sophia—Wisdom.
Sophia__Wisdom .As a powerful Christian archetype the “feminine” aspect the Wise Women come up in the Christian Trinitarian conception of the Holy Spirit. Who is Sophia? Literally she is Wisdom, because the Greek word Sophia means “wisdom” in English. More than that, she has been revered as the Wise Bride of Solomon by Jews, as the Queen of Wisdom and War (Athena) by Greeks, and as the Holy Spirit of Wisdom by Christians. Solomon was considered to be married to Sophia. One of the many layers of symbolism attributed to the Song of Songs (also known as Song of Solomon or Canticle of Canticles) is that it speaks of Solomon’s marriage to Holy Sophia. Sophia surfaced in the Eastern Christian tradition with the construction of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople (converted to a Mosque 1453 and today a Muslim museum in Istanbul). Sophia has survived in the West today in the form of Gnosticism. Sophia plays a very active role in Jung’s Answer to Job (Hiob), where she also completes Quaternity.
Lover – Eros The fourth archetype of the mature feminine is the Lover. Even more that in the case of its male twin, the female Lover archetype poses a problem when overwhelming. The Lover embodies the unrestrained embrace of the life-force, of Eros, or in this case, of Aphrodite, of pleasure, of life itself. It is a life-affirming and creative archetype but one that eschews order, sacrifice, and rational knowledge. It is not easily reconciled with the orderly world of the Queen, and is suspicious of the knowledge of the Wise One, because she has transcended this phase.
The Lover
The powerful Ishtar/Astarte/Aphrodite/Venus mythological complex is a strong archetypical current that runs deep from the appropriately named Fertile Crescent through the foundations of Near Eastern and Western Civilizations. India has equally powerful images of female generative power in Shakti, and her three avatars or embodiments of Lakshmi, Sarasvati, Parvati. The Chinese Ying-Yang symbol represents in graphic form the classic Jungian mysterium conjuinctionem. Thus, the Lover intrudes powerfully into humanity’s collective consciousness and enthusiastic, connects with followers inspiring them to accomplish the difficult deeds. The intoxication of love opens an alternate reality with its own truths which separates those in the grip of the Lover from mundane concerns. Thus, as is the case with the male Lover, the female Lover gains enormous powers of transcendence but she, and he, are subjected to “the other” and therefore lack the freedom of the other archetypes. This is the power and limitation of the hierosgamos—the cosmic marriage of opposites. Without Jesus our life would be meaningless, incomprehensible; Jesus explains our life. Joan of Arc whose last recorded words before she was burnt at the stake were: “I pray you, go to the nearest church, and bring me the cross, and hold it up level with my eyes until I am dead. I would have the cross on which God hung be ever before my eyes while life lasts in me. Jesus, Jesus!” It appears again that the Lover archetype is essential. Of course there is also the dark story of Salome, the infamous daughter of Kind Herod, has fascinated many for centuries painters. Paintings of her equally infamous dance with John the Baptist’s head evoke a sensual, evocative atmosphere.Salome’s story first appears as a fragment in the New Testament Gospel of Mark, where she dances in exchange for the head of John the Baptist on a silver charger, at her mother’s behest. In the Gospel version, the burden of wickedness thus falls upon Salome’s mother, Herodias, and Salome’s virtue remains ambiguous.
Salome dances as femme fatale for her stepfather, Herod Antipas, defying Herodias. The beheading of the Baptist is Salome’s own idea, for which she will pay with her own ghastly death. Nevertheless, John, the Evangelist, come to prepare the way of Messiah with a new gospel of love, succeeds in coaxing the Judean princess to a personal epiphany, for the soul of Salome is not the same fetid sink as her mother’s. “Speak again,” Salome exhorts him, “Thy voice is as music to mine ear…. Speak again…and tell me what I must do.” But just when a prophet’s wisdom might have done some good, John is out of ideas, saying: “I will not look at thee. Thou art accursed, Salome….”
Conclusion What can we learn from the examination of the archetypes of the mature feminine ? First, female like male, in order to fulfill their wholeness properly, would do well to embody the best qualities represented by all of the archetypes. When men and women do this, they model these archetypes inspires both of them on the path of virtue and spirituality. The archetypes are viable because they furnish us with a short-cut, an intuitive way to grasp the essence of a group of attributes that connects directly with the unconscious mind. Instead of patient intellectual analysis of each individual attribute of leadership, the ethos of each archetype is immediately accessible through a complex of cultural pattern which are instantly recognized even trans-cultural. These archetypes are emotional and spiritual pictures that have an immediate effect on individuals and groups. This effect is readily apparent when one compares the phrase “The Good King” with “a King who is good, strong, wise,etc.” The first phrase is incomparably richer in context and seems “alive” compared to a listing of adjectives to describe a particular King. It evokes an instant visual image that has an immediate appeal. This is why the old Greek epics, the Bibles stories and Wagner’s opera are so powerful. Archetypes are, by their very nature, universal and indestructible. The complementarity of opposites assures us that, even in patriarchal cultures that are hostile to the feminine, feminine archetypes cannot forever be suppressed. Archetypes are not irrational forms of thought; rather they are supra-rational, beyond the parameters of logical thought and if we accept the idea of the “collective unconscious” as an image for the deep cultural models common to humanity, they are universally present—hence their power to move, to affect, to influence. There is much to contemplate in this archetypes which can be mapped with political, mythic and culture examples. The self-evident interpretation and its usefulness is overwhelmingly convincing.
The women should be aware of her animus and thus with the aspects of the four male archetypes and for men to mature they must meet and integrate their anima and learn from the four female archetypes. How does it look in your family or relationship? Suppression of an archetype only results in denial of attributes and spiritual resources that we, as humans, need. If one comes to terms with the Shadow and the Soul, one will encounter the enchanted castle with its King and Queen. This is a pattern of wholeness and individuation. The opposites of the outer and the inner life are now joined in marriage. Great power arises from this integration. Be aware of pretended or real archetypes in the public realm. For example, look at your (male or female) politicians: Does one of them have the virtues of those positive archetypes?
Do we still have Divine Couples (Syzygy) and Divine Triads in the spiritual realm? Pharaoh and Queen, Christ and the Church, God and Israel are syzygy images. The believer who aspires to be the “bride of Christ” is modeling his or her experience in response to the syzygy archetype. Where is our hope from the Child Archetype is a pattern with a promise for new beginnings. It promises that Paradise can be regained symbolized in the golden ring and the golden ball and most flower and circle related images. The birth of the Christ Child who unites Heaven and Earth, Man and God, is one of those powerful archetypal event. So is the Mother Archetype which joined the trinity to a Quaternity.
https://stottilien.com/2013/02/01/queen-mother-wise-woman-and-lover-rediscovering-the-archetypes-of-the-mature-feminine/
Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Feminine
This article complements the concepts explored in my article “Archetypes of the Mature Masculine” and applies them to the other half of humanity—women. In doing so I apply the same principles, not in a mechanistic way, but in the spirit of Jung’s archetypes and their rationale. Lets start with a few words of C. G. Jung himself where he talks about the Anima.
Male Shadow Triangle Thomas Moore and Douglas Gillette adopted and extended Jung’s approach in their exploration of the masculine psyche by using the collective archetypes of the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover. Obviously those four male archetypes can be translated and mapped in female clusters of virtues, specific attributes associated with four major female archetypes: the Queen, the Mother, the Wise Woman and the (female) Lover found in history and myths. This has been done before.
Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian psychiatrist, published in 1984 “Goddesses in Every Women: A New Psychology of Women came up with seven feminine archetypes based on ancient Greek mythology. Each Goddess represents a primordial image for women’s personality; they are: Hestia, Athena, Demeter, Aphrodite, Hera, Artemis, Persephone. Jennifer Baker and Roger J., Woolger in 1989 included only six of the Goddesses taking away Hestia. I think that is still a bit inflationary, narrow and not powerful enough. I get lost on the many fairies and goddesses and I miss the most powerful female Archetype - The Mother – of which C.G. Jung had written at great length.
Toni Wolff, colleague and presumable lover of Carl Jung, identified four feminine archetypes: Mother, the Amazon, the Hetaira, and the Medial. Wolff at the first glance comes closer, but her model is a male-centered quadruple (male Anima structure) instead a male-female archetype symmetry: This is most evident in Wolff’s definition of the Amazon, who represents more a female in good contact with her Animus, furthermore the semi-divine Queen is missing, while her Hetaira is not quite a full lover.
Emma Jung, the wife of C.G. Jung, wrote two very concise papers about Animus and Anima. Those two functional complexes represent symmetrically the personality component of the opposite sex and, at the same time the image of the opposite sex. By their fundamental nature, Animus and Anima symbolize primal masculinity and and femininity in general. In other words, the Anima figures represent the archetype of the feminine. Emma Jung gives various narratives of the Great Mother like Cybele, the Prophetess and the Love Goddess and animal or mixed human-animal semi-goddess motives like the swan-maiden in the Edda. Emma Jung refers to her husband, stating the male archetype is the one of meaning and the female archetype primarily of life. And indeed, life as such to me is about birth and death – between is wisdom, spirituality and individuation (redemption), if one is unlucky only staring at the Dow Jones.
To me the reproductive Mother archetype is not only neatly symmetrical to the destructive warrior archetype, it is definitely a primary one. No individual is completely masculine or feminine though, good or evil, right or wrong. Tyrants and Weaklings for instance represent an imbalance, a shadow or missing quality of power, a failure to employ virtues, and a negative female Archetype drains away all male energy. Female in myths representing the Anima appear often in multiples e.g. three or nine like the Nordic Valkyries. Quadruple qualities, however, take later in account the important (particularly for C.G. Jung) number four. A quadruple seen by C.G. Jung might be thought of as the cross, a mantra or cardinal points that must be balanced in the fully realized being.
Archetypes C.G. Jung distinguished himself from Sigmund Freud and most of his colleagues in that he recognized the existence and admitted the significance of religion and intangible elements of the psyche—what many previous thinkers, from Plato to the early Christian philosophers, have called soul. Jung’s own approach to religion was complex, unorthodox, and open to fresh insights ranging from affinity to Catholicism and Eastern thoughts to gnosis and alchemy. He recognized and valued collective cultural patterns (archetypes) but also individual enlightenment or at least development to find a person’s whole being (individuation). He felt those were dismissed by modern positivistic science and political systems which recognizes only the material world and denies or claim any spiritual dimension (totalitarian systems with personal cult).
The acceptance of the spiritual dimension allows us to understand holistic a person, society cooperation —the complex of (conscious and unconscious) beliefs, attributes, and virtues that defines that entity. Key to this understanding is Jung’s concept of the archetype. According to Jung, “The concept of the archetype is derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the religious myths and fairy-tales of world literature contain many symbols which are manifestations of those archetypes. There is a good book from his former assistant Jolande Jacobi. about archetype, symbols and complexes to clarify Jung’s slight ambiguity using those terms over his lifetime.
Proposed set of female Archetypes Significantly, female in myth and art can serve as vehicles for both the understanding and the modeling of these female archetypes. Jung’s theoretical framework of the human psyche follows Taoist principles and is remarkably symmetrical; the extrovert is balanced by the introvert; the material outer world by the inner world, the masculine principle—the Animus (Yin)—is balanced by the feminine principle, the Anima (Yang). Jung als favored strongly the number four and following Jung’s idea of the complementarity of opposites, a similar foursome archetypes can be identified and used to provide a foundation for the understanding of the unique qualities that characterize the female psyche.
All four representations of the archetypes have one positive (right amount – fullness) and 2 negative poles (deficit or surplus). For example, the positive lover archetype embraces the world with passion whereas the negative poles are the seductive (or promiscuous) lover and the frigid (or selfish) lover. One can see every woman (or girl) somewhere between these three extremes.
- The Queen is the semi-divine leader and the most important responsible for the safety and well being. History and art has shown that every society must have not only a wise leader who is entrusted with guiding his people to success and comfort but navigate in unknown territory towards redemption. The responsibilities of the Queen are mainly on the unconscious side,but worldly benefits and virtues must be many as well. And if the Queen fails in her duties she is traditionally disposed and evil prevails. Her shadows sides are tyrant and weakling both disposing male energy.
- The Mother is like the Warrior today the most controversial of the archetypes, because of ideological former and current stereotypes. The two warrior (male) shadow sides are the Sadist and the Masochist. The Mother is a live giver who maintains humanity as the warrior clears the space for renewal and change. The prototype of the mother is, well – the mother. But there are shadows here too – the careless and the devouring mother.
- The Wise Woman, represents Logos according to Jung a feminine principle, is the archetype behind a multitude of professions like, doctors but also lawyers, teachers and priests. She sees the unseen. She is the prophetess, mediator and communicator of secret knowledge, the healer, counselor, teacher, and spiritual. The Wise Woman always has a tendency to abuse her power, being the negative , the witch.
- 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 ease with our own deepest and most central values and visions. 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 destroys any spiritual dimension.
http://stottilien.com/2013/02/01/queen-mother-wise-woman-and-lover-rediscovering-the-archetypes-of-the-mature-feminine/
C_G_JUNG_FEMALE_ARCHETYPES
Despite the visible presence of males in political power and economic power in various cultures social and hidden political power has been disproportionately exercised by females. Western culture, which evolved within a predominantly Christian context, has its religious sources in the Jewish-Semitic Middle East and the Greco-Roman political and philosophical traditions, all of which were distinctly patriarchal on the outside but quietly influenced by women. This means that in the political, religious, and economic spheres the majority of leaders have been male. In those cases where women have been called upon to lead countries, they have until today exercised male-like leadership. Nonetheless, Western, Eastern and Orthodox civilization has not been entirely dismissive of the female psychic energies. Hindu and Buddhist cultures are also dominated by men in the political sphere but women’s leadership roles in the family are highly regarded. Indian societies, despite the predominance of the male Warrior archetype, have developed a complementary matriarchal social system. All of these cultural complexes afford surprisingly equal powerful symbolism of gender complementarity afforded by the Chinese Ying-Yang icon, and the uninhibited creative sexuality of many Hindu goddesses, and honor and respect for Holy Mary in Christianity. However. another major civilization, such as those that evolved in a predominantly some Muslim context, have been much more restrictive of female freedom and have arguably developed distinctive social pathologies and economic disadvantages precisely because of this.
The Queen – Power The Faerie, the Goddesses—The Great Mother, the Wise Woman and the female Lover are found with the secondary C.G. Jung literature and in feminist and/or New Age books Goddesses are everywhere. Not so the the Mother and only as a recent addition the Queen. As is the case with her male counterpart, the King, the Queen is the most complex and mature of the female archetypes. But also the most simple to map to the Moore model. There have been weak and evil Queen and Kings at all times. The image of Queen and Ling serves as a center for the mature ordering of things includes and transcends the other archetypes of the Feminine. Ideally, all “leading” human would , to a greater or lesser degree, embody the ideal King or Queen.
The Queen
One example, born in the 15th century BC, Hatshepsut, daughter of Tuthmose I and Aahmes, both of royal lineage, gained the throne upon the death of her father. To have a female pharaoh was unprecedented. Although there were no wars during her reign, she proved her sovereignty being a master politician, and an elegant stateswoman with enough charisma to keep control of an entire country for twenty years. In all, Hatshepsut accomplished what no woman had before her. She ruled the most powerful, advanced civilization in the world, successfully, for twenty years. Another example, the mother and the father of a family would model them. In those not so rare cases were women become leaders of nations, the archetypical Queen may take visible form, wise or foolish, caring or cruel. Just as the King is not born as a King, but must start life as a Prince, the Queen begins life as a Princess. A powerful embodiment of this archetype is the Great Goddess or God like in Egypt were those roles merged. This cosmic image is the equal to that of an all-powerful God, the source of complete cosmic power, but at the same time is more accessible, less menacing. As is true of her male counterpart, the Queen is the symbol for the leader of a nation, but the archetype itself, symbolizes leadership on a much grander, cosmic scale. However, all the essential attributes of the archetype of the Queen are present in a real woman who plays a leading (if only herself) role, regardless of the scope her real responsibilities—be she queen of a nation, a clan, or her own family.
The Mother – Creator This is the one archetype that is distinctly different for male and female development. Just as the Warrior is the most natural complement to the King and embodies a set of virtues that are necessary to defend the Kingdom, the Great Mother is the most natural complement to Queenship - and the King. The explosive destructive energy of the male Warrior archetype is balanced by the reproductive energy of the female Mother archetype. This is most evident in Kali-Ma the terrible mother. The Hindu religion has a myriad of Gods and Goddesses and the most revered Goddess is Kali. She is usually pictured wearing a necklace of skulls and girdle of human hands, dancing on the body of her consort, Shiva. In many attributes the Mother clearly complements the Warrior. Wagner’s Valkyries, those tough maidens who took worthy fallen warriors to Valhalla also served as sources of inspiration for heroic action. Just as the Warrior appears most fully when he gives himself over to death in an act of self-denial, the Mother appears most fully when she gives birth. Warriors take life, Mothers give life. This is the source of her power. Both place them outside any human’s power even; thus, she has the power to inspire, to create. Kali, in this aspect is said to be “The hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses.
The great and cruel mother
But the Mother archetype is also the symbol of all that is fair, all that is beautiful, all that transcends material existence. These concepts are not merely ornamental niceties but are at the very center of Being. Indeed, in their mythological thinking, the Ancient Greeks recognized the importance of Skills in their concept of the Nine Muses—each the inspiration and source of such humane gifts as poetry, music, and history. In their philosophical thinking, the Greeks recognized Beauty is an essential attribute of the Absolute Good. The Mothers’ virtues are intangible and ethereal; they often had been be self-sacrificial. Consider the holy Mary and the real-life women who have embodied legions of Virgin-Martyrs venerated by the early Church attest to the power of the self-sacrificing, inspirational but unreachable mother. As a powerful archetype the “feminine” aspect the Mother come up in the Christian quadruple conception of the Holy mother.
Like all archetypes, the Mother can appear as shadow, the distant and cruel mother. Like any any shadow, the cruel mother is not bad or evil. The cruel mother energy links links it to the male archetype counterpart the warrior. Both are associated with death and destruction – actual physical death. For instance the Hindu goddess Kali embodies a cruel mother, whose destruction is in service of creation.
The enigmatic chief queen Nefertiti (Neferneferuaten) of Akhenaten’s (Echnaton) is the most mysterious and interesting of all the ancient Egyptian queen and an example of a possessive mother symbol. Little is known about her and his overpowering mother Tiye influence on the androgynous pharaoh, who brought down the Egypt empire with his daring cultural and religious revolution (see here). After a few loving years, in which the couple celebrated publicly family life with six children, they went on different ways. Close to her end she reacted again, as it is believed that Nefertiti sent a frantic letter to the Hittite King Suppiluliumas after Tutankhamun died, begging the longtime enemy of Akhenaten and Egypt, for a marriage with one of his sons.
The Wise Women –
Spirituality I like to think that psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein a woman in the shadow of C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud (see here), resembles the archetype of the Wise Woman or Queen (in exile). The archetype of the Wise Women inhabits not ethereal regions where all appears as bright and luminous, the Wise Women inhabits like the magician the shadows. She is at home near the earth, even inside the earth, inside the dark, moist, primordial womb, the source of all fertility. The Wise One is no longer young. She is mature, rooted. She is likely to be old. Like a priest she may have even loved, but she has now transcended all sexuality and reproductivity and has reached a state of superior wisdom.
The Wise Women In contrast also to her male counterpart—the Magician— a non spiritual mind seeks not to penetrate beneath the surface of things and probe the mysteries of nature, rather, she looks inward into the mysteries of Being. This earthly knowledge extends to the body and more specifically to the very distinct realities of the female body, with its mysteries of fertility and procreation. Women who knew this much were much respected and feared.. This is the knowledge of the Sybil, of the Oracle of Delphi, of the forest spirits. In later centuries, patriarchal institutions resented and persecuted this source of feminine power because it lay out of their control and it dealt with many topics which were not well understood and stigmatized because of their inherent feminine nature. Many Wise Women were accused of being “witches” and were cruelly tortured and put to death.It is natural for both Wise women and Magician to seek separation from her sisters who toil in the world. Their quest for special knowledge requires long hours of solitude for study and reflection. Most often, both become a seer, an adviser. The Queen of Sheba, the counterpart to Solomon—the Magician King—illustrates this type of leadership.Perhaps the most powerful and inspiring embodiment of the archetype of the Wise One is the gnostic Figure of Sophia—Wisdom.
Sophia__Wisdom .As a powerful Christian archetype the “feminine” aspect the Wise Women come up in the Christian Trinitarian conception of the Holy Spirit. Who is Sophia? Literally she is Wisdom, because the Greek word Sophia means “wisdom” in English. More than that, she has been revered as the Wise Bride of Solomon by Jews, as the Queen of Wisdom and War (Athena) by Greeks, and as the Holy Spirit of Wisdom by Christians. Solomon was considered to be married to Sophia. One of the many layers of symbolism attributed to the Song of Songs (also known as Song of Solomon or Canticle of Canticles) is that it speaks of Solomon’s marriage to Holy Sophia. Sophia surfaced in the Eastern Christian tradition with the construction of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople (converted to a Mosque 1453 and today a Muslim museum in Istanbul). Sophia has survived in the West today in the form of Gnosticism. Sophia plays a very active role in Jung’s Answer to Job (Hiob), where she also completes Quaternity.
Lover – Eros The fourth archetype of the mature feminine is the Lover. Even more that in the case of its male twin, the female Lover archetype poses a problem when overwhelming. The Lover embodies the unrestrained embrace of the life-force, of Eros, or in this case, of Aphrodite, of pleasure, of life itself. It is a life-affirming and creative archetype but one that eschews order, sacrifice, and rational knowledge. It is not easily reconciled with the orderly world of the Queen, and is suspicious of the knowledge of the Wise One, because she has transcended this phase.
The Lover
The powerful Ishtar/Astarte/Aphrodite/Venus mythological complex is a strong archetypical current that runs deep from the appropriately named Fertile Crescent through the foundations of Near Eastern and Western Civilizations. India has equally powerful images of female generative power in Shakti, and her three avatars or embodiments of Lakshmi, Sarasvati, Parvati. The Chinese Ying-Yang symbol represents in graphic form the classic Jungian mysterium conjuinctionem. Thus, the Lover intrudes powerfully into humanity’s collective consciousness and enthusiastic, connects with followers inspiring them to accomplish the difficult deeds. The intoxication of love opens an alternate reality with its own truths which separates those in the grip of the Lover from mundane concerns. Thus, as is the case with the male Lover, the female Lover gains enormous powers of transcendence but she, and he, are subjected to “the other” and therefore lack the freedom of the other archetypes. This is the power and limitation of the hierosgamos—the cosmic marriage of opposites. Without Jesus our life would be meaningless, incomprehensible; Jesus explains our life. Joan of Arc whose last recorded words before she was burnt at the stake were: “I pray you, go to the nearest church, and bring me the cross, and hold it up level with my eyes until I am dead. I would have the cross on which God hung be ever before my eyes while life lasts in me. Jesus, Jesus!” It appears again that the Lover archetype is essential. Of course there is also the dark story of Salome, the infamous daughter of Kind Herod, has fascinated many for centuries painters. Paintings of her equally infamous dance with John the Baptist’s head evoke a sensual, evocative atmosphere.Salome’s story first appears as a fragment in the New Testament Gospel of Mark, where she dances in exchange for the head of John the Baptist on a silver charger, at her mother’s behest. In the Gospel version, the burden of wickedness thus falls upon Salome’s mother, Herodias, and Salome’s virtue remains ambiguous.
Salome dances as femme fatale for her stepfather, Herod Antipas, defying Herodias. The beheading of the Baptist is Salome’s own idea, for which she will pay with her own ghastly death. Nevertheless, John, the Evangelist, come to prepare the way of Messiah with a new gospel of love, succeeds in coaxing the Judean princess to a personal epiphany, for the soul of Salome is not the same fetid sink as her mother’s. “Speak again,” Salome exhorts him, “Thy voice is as music to mine ear…. Speak again…and tell me what I must do.” But just when a prophet’s wisdom might have done some good, John is out of ideas, saying: “I will not look at thee. Thou art accursed, Salome….”
Conclusion What can we learn from the examination of the archetypes of the mature feminine ? First, female like male, in order to fulfill their wholeness properly, would do well to embody the best qualities represented by all of the archetypes. When men and women do this, they model these archetypes inspires both of them on the path of virtue and spirituality. The archetypes are viable because they furnish us with a short-cut, an intuitive way to grasp the essence of a group of attributes that connects directly with the unconscious mind. Instead of patient intellectual analysis of each individual attribute of leadership, the ethos of each archetype is immediately accessible through a complex of cultural pattern which are instantly recognized even trans-cultural. These archetypes are emotional and spiritual pictures that have an immediate effect on individuals and groups. This effect is readily apparent when one compares the phrase “The Good King” with “a King who is good, strong, wise,etc.” The first phrase is incomparably richer in context and seems “alive” compared to a listing of adjectives to describe a particular King. It evokes an instant visual image that has an immediate appeal. This is why the old Greek epics, the Bibles stories and Wagner’s opera are so powerful. Archetypes are, by their very nature, universal and indestructible. The complementarity of opposites assures us that, even in patriarchal cultures that are hostile to the feminine, feminine archetypes cannot forever be suppressed. Archetypes are not irrational forms of thought; rather they are supra-rational, beyond the parameters of logical thought and if we accept the idea of the “collective unconscious” as an image for the deep cultural models common to humanity, they are universally present—hence their power to move, to affect, to influence. There is much to contemplate in this archetypes which can be mapped with political, mythic and culture examples. The self-evident interpretation and its usefulness is overwhelmingly convincing.
The women should be aware of her animus and thus with the aspects of the four male archetypes and for men to mature they must meet and integrate their anima and learn from the four female archetypes. How does it look in your family or relationship? Suppression of an archetype only results in denial of attributes and spiritual resources that we, as humans, need. If one comes to terms with the Shadow and the Soul, one will encounter the enchanted castle with its King and Queen. This is a pattern of wholeness and individuation. The opposites of the outer and the inner life are now joined in marriage. Great power arises from this integration. Be aware of pretended or real archetypes in the public realm. For example, look at your (male or female) politicians: Does one of them have the virtues of those positive archetypes?
Do we still have Divine Couples (Syzygy) and Divine Triads in the spiritual realm? Pharaoh and Queen, Christ and the Church, God and Israel are syzygy images. The believer who aspires to be the “bride of Christ” is modeling his or her experience in response to the syzygy archetype. Where is our hope from the Child Archetype is a pattern with a promise for new beginnings. It promises that Paradise can be regained symbolized in the golden ring and the golden ball and most flower and circle related images. The birth of the Christ Child who unites Heaven and Earth, Man and God, is one of those powerful archetypal event. So is the Mother Archetype which joined the trinity to a Quaternity.
https://stottilien.com/2013/02/01/queen-mother-wise-woman-and-lover-rediscovering-the-archetypes-of-the-mature-feminine/
Vierling
The Love Letter by Gabriel Ferrier
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on all graphic and written content.
If you mirror my works, pls include the credit and URL LINK for reference.
[email protected]
http:ionamiller.weebly.com
Fair Use Notice
This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.