Resolving the Unresolved

The greatest influence on me as a male child growing up in the 1950’s and 60’s was naturally, my mother. She was my a ‘perfect woman’. To Jungian psychologists, this is the ‘anima’ upon which is modelled the feminine aspect of the male psyche.

But there is also a hidden, darker side to the male’s anima. Ideally hidden from child’s view, it was available in films, newspapers and magazines more openly than it is today. There was a ‘sexual revolution’ going on in the teenage generation above me and all was sex, drugs and rock and roll. ‘Flower (femininity) power’ countered the male Patriarchal aggression of the two world wars. Women were ‘burning their bras’.

Psychologists might view this as a healthy revolt against conformity through open expression of emotion. The mind bending drug culture and sexual freedom of that generation erupted and continues to this day.

The dream goes back to the Garden of Eden and the myths of Christianity. Adam and Eve were exposed to their own nudity and felt shame for the first time; their mutual feelings of new found lust moved into era of ‘covering up’, but the fig leaf was nowhere near big enough. The characters in the Old Testament carried out a lot of begetting and smote-ing. The Ancient World was like the Wild West and it needed a Sheriff to calm things down – Moses.

In the New Testament, Jesus’s mother, Mary, had to be ‘free of original sin’ meaning starting afresh. But how could the mother of the new Christ reproduce without being associated with the shame and guilt of sex? The answer was simple, sophisticated and a mind bender; the mother of Christ is a virgin.

Another convenient proof – after the fact – was provided. Mary’s husband, Joseph, was too old to be a father; so confirming Mary’s ‘immaculateness’. In Renaissance paintings of the Virgin Mary, her guiltless face looks lovingly down upon the infant Jesus, suckling at her breast. All was neatly explained.

The problem is; femininity isn’t like that. There is more than a hint of ambiguity in the archetypal feminine, because it is dark as well as a light; a destroyer as well as a creator.

The church fathers cleverly wrote this contradiction into the script and they did it by depicting ‘Mary Magdalene’ as a prostitute. If Mary and Joseph didn’t ‘do it’, then Mary Magdalene certainly did and according to the Catholic Church, she did ‘it’ plenty. But we might regard this depiction of Mary Magdalene as suspect, not least because the word ‘prostitute’ does no appear in the Bible and because Magdalene or Magdala sported the uncompromising title; ‘The apostle of the Apostles’.

How much should we go along with this dichotomy of femininity? Was Jesus in his later life, such a bad character as to keep company with a ‘fallen woman’? The fiction survived until 1969 when the Catholic church declared the Magdalene was not a prostitute after all. But was the damage to women in general irreparable? What were the consequences of this unjustified denouncement of womanhood – ergo the Divine Feminine – by the Patriarchy?

Most frustrating of all about the Magdalene lie is that there had always been another version of her in the Gnostic Gospels or Nag Hammadi Library of the Essenes. In ‘The Gospel of the Saviour’ Jesus describes her as ‘the woman who knows the All’. Jesus must have had many female disciples and it appears that he initiated Mary Magdalene to the highest level. In contrast, the male disciples come over in the Gospels asking dumb questions; you cannot raise the consciousness of those who are not ready – too much ego.

Even Simon Peter was in denial of his faith when asked. In my view Simon Peter, might have been nick named the ‘Rock’ by Jesus because he was spiritually calcified. The Roman Catholic Church in building itself upon the character of Simon Peter, has certainly reflected much of Peter’s stiffness through the centuries.

Mary Magdalene on the other hand was not bland and serves our understanding better as a complementary female counterpart to the male Christ figure. Her wisdom represents that part of the Divine feminine which men find hard to understand. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, she, ‘takes…aches…fakes…just like a woman…with her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls’.

If a further example of the positive anima was needed, then the figure of ‘Joan of Arc’ serves well. She was a saintly virgin with the Creator speaking in one ear and King Charles VII in the other. Joan’s knightly armour represents the code of chivalry brought back by the male knights during the Crusades, a code that held women in the highest esteem and made men bend at the knees in their presence, literally and metaphorically. Joan of Arc was a gender reversed version of knightly chivalry and the reverence owed to perfect womanhood. As a Christ–like heroarchetype, she had to suffer an early martyrdom in the hands of the Judas figure – the traitorous Duke of Burgundy. The character of St. Joan, you might feel, is just too goody goody. She needs less fire and more earthiness, more representative of the daily and nightly amours of the common man and woman. In a word; balance.

A more healthy expression of gender roles and spirituality can be found in sculptures of Indian Temples. The depictions of Tantric sexual intercourse in the statues must have made the Victorian missionaries blush. This was not the ‘virginal’ forbidden fruit that created so much male hypocrisy in Victorian society; from Royalty to the gutter creepers. In India we see an understanding and embracing of the spiritual power of sexual energy and an aspiration to achieve immortality through it, for both parties.

The two versions of femininity could not be clearer. Whilst the creation of the Raj was believed to be a ‘civilising’ of India and it’s people, the reverse could have been true. The depiction of sacred male and female sexual energy was brought back to Victorian England between the covers of the Kama Sutra and Arthur Avalon’s, ‘Serpent Power’. But their enlightened texts failed to remove the curtains from the legs of pianos of society’s ‘well to do’. Such sexual repression, psychologists now know, creates destructive, unconscious fantasies in the male psyche. A contemporary expression of this was the so called ‘Jack the Ripper’ who murdered prostitutes in Victorian London as readily as the Church burnt ‘witches’ in Mediaeval Europe; probably for the same reasons.

In Jungian symbology, the negative anima in men is likened to a Vampire that sucks a man’s life blood and by implication, their very Soul; dangerous territory. The term for such a woman in 1930’s, 40 and 50’s was appropriately a ‘Vamp’. Her picture adorned many a barrack room wall. As an aside it is interesting that in the eponymous film, the God-fearing General George E. Patton angrily tore down a soldiers pin-up of Lorraine Bond with the words, ‘this is a barracks not a brothel!’

The evolution of the internet and instant ‘view in private’ pornography, has pushed images of the negative anima onto a new generation young, vulnerable males apparently without consideration of consequences. The pornography and sexual violence on view is far more mentally poisonous than those penny-slot machine Edwardian ladies undressing before voyeuristic butlers. The United Kingdom is currently considering a law to ban the under 16’s from social media, and Australia just dropped the idea.

In 1950’s Britain, the main stream media exploited the saucy postcard ‘seaside’ style of humour, ripe with sexual innuendo. In a sort of uniquely British way, sexual ‘goings on’ were laughed off socially as a bit of ‘slap and tickle’. The ‘Carry On’ films had audiences falling off their seats. Sex and gender jousts were fun and funny.

In this vane, Alec Guinness starred in a 1953 film called ‘Captain’s Paradise’. His character was the Captain of a ferry working between Gibraltar and Spanish enclaves in Morocco. The gag was that he had a wife and mistress with opposite and (for him) complementary characters. In Gibraltar his English middle class wife played by Celia Johnson, spent her days engaged in housework and domestic trivia, in preparation for her husband’s return. In the mid point of the ferry voyage, the Captain always turns his domestic wife’s photograph around in his cabin. Once the reverse side is a photo of his exotic lover played by Yvonne de Carlo. She is by nature a hedonistic, sexually alluring young woman who loves to drink and dance the nights away with her sea Captain. In the end it all goes wrong but the point is clear. Men idealise a particular woman who is a projection of both their negative and positive male anima.

It should be acknowledged that the female anima in the male psyche has an equivalent in women which Jung called the animus. The reader is invited to study this yin yang polarity. Let it be enough to know that the sacred dance in the affairs and affairs of men and women is one that can and should be, vital to their individual spiritual transcendence.

As a summing up and because I like an answer of any kind, I quote Joseph L. Henderson in ‘Man and His Symbols’ p. 157;

“Any of us can see, of course, that there is a conflict in our lives between adventure and discipline, or evil and virtue, or freedom and security. But these are only phrases we use to describe an ambivalence that troubles us, and to which we never seem able to find an answer.

There is an answer. There is a meeting point between containment and liberation, and we can find it in the rites of initiation that I have been discussing…

…Initiation is, essentially, a process that begins with a rite of submission, followed by a period of containment and then by a further rite of liberation. In this way every individual can reconcile the conflicting elements of his personality: He can strike a balance that makes him truly human, and truly the master of himself.”

In highlighting the two Mary’s the ‘unresolved’ feelings within males needs such resolution. The Christian religion includes these processes in it’s rites of passage; (submission – mass) reconciliation (confession) and liberation (priesthood) but few ‘initiates’ become masters of themselves because, in my view, St. Peter keeps the key to himself. No gnostics may enter!

For me, the ‘sea captain’ of within, cannot and should not, keep up the charade. The individual needs of the women who are subject to anima projection, rightly demand their own initiation path.

The unresolved in worldly affairs takes place in order to illuminate and help us work through the contradictions within us all.

This ‘fight’ – which scales down in simplest of terms to ‘evil and virtue’ – is indeed hard to reconcile and much of the world’s greatest literature and other forms of expression, unpeels this angst before our eyes.

May we all sail on calm seas.