As a seeker, I consider myself first and foremost, a Jungian, especially once I dove into his concepts of archetypes and the collective unconscious. As a novelist, the idea of the Hero’s Journey is always front of mind. His theory of the human psyche being made up of pairs of diametrically opposed states certainly jibes with good character building, both on the page and in real life. When building a robust personality, I try to figure out what would be the last thing they would ever do—then have them do it, driven either by fate, outside actors, or their shadow self coming to the fore.
The sacred writings of all cultures reflect the thought patterns inherent in human experience, and in many ways form the hidden architecture that even modern society is built upon. That said, it is easy to look around and see how the feminine anima has been suppressed in a drive to dominate; be it a landscape, an indigenous population, the twined worlds of commerce and politics, or even the hearts and minds of apostles and acolytes alike.
What is lost when one side of the story is missing, is a richness that can only be experienced through the energy created by opposing polarities. Whereas the traditionally understood masculine ego provides an analytical mindset for problem solving and world building, one misses the opportunity to access the subconscious when the opposing feminine aspect is subdued. This is certainly a shame as that is where the magic lives.
As a young person, being introduced to scripture from a patriarchal Catholic perspective, it never dawned on me that anything preceded it. The books carried over from the Torah, especially, have a dignity and gravity that would lead one to believe that they had been around forever. To learn that the Canaanites, from whom the early Israelites broke off, were polytheistic, including the goddess Asherah, who, in some circles, was considered a consort of Yahweh, was an eye-opener. Why was the feminine aspect cut out of the story?
In Genesis, a God—to paraphrase Whitman, containing multitudes, or in its own words, “the alpha and omega”—creates a human in its own image, a being containing both male and female, at least until divided in what today would be considered an upgrade, or patch: Mankind 2.0. Even that appellation, however, denotes a patriarchal dominance. Control of the narrative leading to control of the population, is surely the underlying drive.
When we imagine the story of Eve bringing the fruit from the tree of knowledge to her counterpart who had his original feminine side, his anima, removed to create her, we should think of it as a reintegration rather than a fall; a graduation rather than a banishment.
Román Leão 