Pagan Paths

The morning sun rising in the east calls to the Bright Youth in me, and the Bright Youth responds. The full moon calls to the Muse, and the waning and dark moon to the Dark Maiden who is a part of me. The earth I touch with my fingers calls to the Mother, in both her guises, Nurturing and Devouring. The bright green shoots rising from the earth and the green leaves on the trees on my street in the spring, these call to the Stag King, while the red leaves fallen to the earth in the autumn call to the Dying God. The spring storm that rises up suddenly in the west calls to the Storm King. The night sky, the dark space between the stars, calls to Mother Night, my death come to make peace. The gods-without call and the gods-within respond.

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The Anima as Goddess

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Previously, I introduced the archetype of the Anima and Animus as the contra-gendered aspects of our unconscious selves. The Anima and Animus appear to men and women in dreams, myths, and projections.  In the last post, I discussed the Anima in dreams.  In this post, I will talk about the Anima in myth.

Joseph Campbell famously wrote that "myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths".  Thus, the gods and goddesses of myth come from the same source as the persons in our dreams: the Unconscious.  As Margot Adler explains in Drawing Down the Moon: “The Gods and Goddesses of myth, legend and fairy tale represent archetypes, real potencies and potentialities deep within the psyche, which, when allowed to flower permit us to be more fully human.”  According to Jung, the archetypes are “dynamic, instinctual complexes which determine psychic life.”  (CW 11, P 845).  These ruling powers of the psyche compel “the same belief or fear, submission or devotion which a God would demand from man.”  (CW 11, P142).  Jung writes:

“we seldom find anybody who is not influenced and indeed dominated by desires, habits, impulses, prejudices, resentments, and by every conceivable kind of complex. All these natural facts function exactly like an Olympus full of deities who want to be propitiated, served, feared and worshipped, not only by the individual owner of this assorted pantheon, but by everybody in his vicinity.” (CW 11, P143)

This is not to say that the gods are mere figments of our imagination. When we say that the Neo-Pagan gods are archetypes of the unconscious mind, this does not mean they are conscious creations.  Just as we do not create our dreams, but they happen to us, so we do not invent the gods — they, too, happen to us.  True archetypes cannot be created intentionally; they grow out of the unconscious and express themselves in dream and myth.

b2ap3_thumbnail_Athena.jpgThe goddesses of mythology, then are projections of the Anima archetype from men's collective unconscious.  The Anima appears in mythology in many forms.  She appears as the holy mother, from the Egyptian Isis to the Greek Demeter to the Virgin Mary; as the inspiring muse, from the Greek Mousai to Robert Graves' White Goddess; as the dangerous siren or seductive harlot, likethe Greek sea nymphs and the Biblical Jezebel; as the evil witch, from the Greek Circe to the Disney character in Snow White; as the terrible devourer, like the Babylonian sea dragon Tiamat and the folk tale about the vagina dentata; and in other forms as well.

In modern times, religious feminists have sought to reclaim the images of goddesses from ancient myth from their patriarchal context.  Such reclaimed images are not projections of the male Anima, but projections of the female ego or attempts to reclaim the female Shadow.  For example, in antiquity, the Greek Goddess Athena was a projection of the male Anima.  One myth tells that she was born from the head of Zeus after he ate his first wife, Metis (wisdom).  She later becomes a symbol of patriarchy in Aeschylus' play Eumenides where Athena acquits Orestes of the murder of his father's wife with the words, "I am for the father."  In contemporary times, however, Athena has been reclaimed by religious feminists, like Jean Shinoda Bolen, who writes in Goddesses in Everywoman that Athena "represents the logical, self-assured woman who is ruled by her head rather than her heart."  So, while the ancient Athena was a projection of the male Anima, the mysterious "other", the contemporary reclaimed Athena is a projection of the female ego or the female Shadow, the part of the divine women identify with or want to identify with.

b2ap3_thumbnail_cae679cd6424f9167aad52f69699e7e4.jpgConsider also, the Triple Goddess, a contemporary Neo-Pagan goddess.  The most popular formulation of the Neo-Pagan Triple Goddess is Maiden-Mother-Crone. This formulation reflects (better in some cases than others) the female life-cycle.  For women, this image valorizes the female life cycle, including the post-menopausal woman who is often ignored or shunned in real life.  

But the Triple Goddess has a different meaning for men.  Many may realize that the concept of the Triple Goddess actually originated with a man, Robert Graves, the author of The White Goddess.  Graves had a complex relationship with the women in his life, as documented by Ronald Hutton in Triumph of the Moon.  Graves did describe the Triple Goddess as Maiden-Mother-Crone in The White Goddess, but the focus of his work was on a different triunity, the Goddess as Mother-Lover-Slayer.  This is the image of the Goddess from the male perspective, as men encounter the Anima first as mother and only later as lover.  For men, the Goddess is not a projection of their ego-self or Shadow self, as she is for women, but a projection of the male Anima.  Jung recognized this when he wrote that the Kore (Maiden) archetype belongs “in man to the anima type and in woman to the supra ordinate personality, or the self.” (CW 9i).

The reverse may be true of women vis a vis the Horned God.  It certainly seems true of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God, which is a projection of the male ego, and may represent the female Animus.

In the next post, I will explain how men project the Anima onto the real women in their lives.

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John Halstead also writes at AllergicPagan.com (Patheos), HumanisticPaganism.com, GodsandRadicals.org, GodisChange.org, Neo-Paganism.com, and The Huffington Post. He was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment” (ecopagan.com), and the editor of the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans. John is also a Shaper of the fledgling Earthseed community (godischange.org). To speak with John, contact him on Facebook.

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