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| X-ray of "Susanna and the Elders," Artemisia Gentileschi |
The following are selected excerpts of Marie-Louise von Franz's short but standout book exploring the fairy tale “The Cat,” and what is needed to redeem the feminine soul of the West.
So now we see that the cat is a shadow of the Virgin Mary. It is that part of feminine nature that the Virgin Mary did not represent but which would belong to a complete image of the feminine. Therefore you could say that the Virgin Mary herself has a cat shadow, and in our story, in eating the apples the empress penetrates into the mystery of good and evil within the feminine. The tension is not so much the tension between good and evil, but between the impersonal, collective sublime and what is personal, individual, vital and natural. It’s another polarity which is typical of the feminine realm. And Mary therefore curses the unborn girl and says she has to become a cat.- Marie Louse von Franz, The Cat: A Tale of Feminine Redemption, pg. 61
In fairy tales, the established powers – God, the Trinity, the Virgin Mary and very much also the Devil in Hell – always act against children. That means they want to block future development, and that inertia is typical. Established god-images, established religious archetypal systems and images, are liable to prevent further development and that’s why the curse of the Virgin Mary does not fall on the empress. She could have cursed the empress for having stolen the apples, but instead of that she curses her child. That means she does not want a new form of femininity to develop. And so the girl becomes the cat, which is just the new form of femininity
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The Virgin Mary has no contact with the flesh. She is never represented naked in sacred pictures. She is always well veiled and her body is not visible. Her flesh is discreetly hidden. So that is one part of the unredeemed shadow side of the feminine from the Christian standpoint. Our hero is quite naively and naturally hungry for that flesh and so far that would be easy. You could say the cat catches him by his physical desires and that, in a way, if we take it from a man’s standpoint, is natural because generally the anima first appears in a man as physical desire, for instance a sexual fantasy. Then when he goes after it, he finds it isn’t flesh but only a mirage of flesh and is actually a lot of precious stones.
It is a tantalizing situation and I’ll jump ahead now to say that we know the story from the man’s standpoint is about the assimilation of the anima, her redemption, and from a woman’s standpoint redemption of the feminine. The dead flesh is only a tease, a mirage, which the unconscious uses as bait but then takes away. We have to put the accent on the dead aspect. The anima and the feminine body is of no value if the man looks at it as being dead meat he can eat. If a man treats a woman as a good beefsteak to eat, then he misses the anima.
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“Take the serpent, and place it in the chariot with four wheels, and let it be turned about on the earth until it is immersed in the depths of the sea… And there let the chariot with the wheels remain, until so many fumes rise up from the serpent than the whole surface… becomes dry."
What is so important about the carriage is the four wheels. The carriage is a mandala with four wheels around it, and that can be compared to the chariot vision of Ezekiel. You can say that the total structure of consciousness is the carriage, because it is man-made. It doesn’t have much to do with instinct. As the structure of consciousness the carriage serves the gods. Through the vehicle of ego-consciousness the gods are incarnated or actualized. They cannot move a finger if human consciousness does not carry them. That, for instance, is the deeper reason for these processions where the gods are moved through the crowd on carriages; it is to remind people that the god is in a way banished in his temple, and he can’t do anything if he doesn’t move. He has to be carried by the consciousness of the people. That’s why in India, still today, sometimes people throw themselves under the carriage. That would be an unconscious gesture, as if to say, “I sacrifice my life to serve a consciousness that promotes the life of the gods.” That’s more or less what that gesture means. “I have to give up my ego. I sacrifice myself so that the gods can move, can go on living.”
If we are not conscious of the automonous life of the archetypes in the psyche, then they are seemingly nonexistent and, in fact, even destructive. That is why in a society where the archetypes are no longer honored in any way, believed in or taken care of consciously, you have surrogates, morbid political ideas, isms of all kinds, or drugs. You have all the destructive powers overtaking people, because the gods cannot move without humans. They are paralyzed if we don’t carry them.
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So, to come a long way back to her, if our cat is capable of calling up a fire or lightning carriage with a crack of a whip, she reveals in that moment that she’s a goddess and not just a cat. She is a goddess and she is the virgin Mary’s shadow, not a woman. And now you see more what the jewels behind the meat are. Our hero wanted the flesh and instead he fell into the jewels, the eternal or the divine. He has to realize that divine aspect of the flesh. It is not enough for instance, for a Christian who has up until now despised the flesh, to say, “now I’m going to throw my prudish prejudices overboard. I’m going to have juicy sex and enjoy it.” That would be eating the flesh. That’s nothing. If he does that he doesn’t move one inch out of the old kingdom, he’s still caught in it. He only adds the dimension of so-called sin to it. But nothing has happened. He has to realize that the flesh is a form of the divine, a divine revelation, and that sexuality is divine.
That’s what Jung fought with Freud about. He agreed completely with Freud that sex should be liberated and should be lived, not treated with prudish repression, but he wanted to say that sex is a religious experience as in Tantra. And if you live it, therefore, only with the idea, “That’s very healthy for my hormones and makes me physically better,” then you have missed the whole point. Then you have eaten dead meat, rotten meat. The redemption of the feminine means not the redemption of the flesh; it means the redemption of the divinity of the flesh, of the divine, archetypal, godlike aspect of the flesh…
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The old emperor is the old conscious Christian attitude. And if the old conscious attitude now wants to have that newly redeemed feminine for himself, that would look like Susanna and the elders, the lecherous old men; that’s a common theme of art and literature. Concretely it exists. We all know it exists. If you take it as symbolic, it’s the new wine in old bottles. The emperor symbolizes the old principle of consciousness that wants to integrate or to profit from the renewal of life that has come forth in another domain. He wants to assimilate it and would kill it if he could. The poor cat lady would be like an unhappy old hag within a year if she married the old man.
She has the intention of making [the prince] a man and forcing him to take an absolute stand against the old emperor, not just to go away from it but to really say what is what. That is absolutely on the mark of what I feel too, namely that something new must not be peacefully inserted into the old habits. There are certain new things that one must have the honesty to call new and to stand up for, because otherwise the new energy is lost.
Jung once said something to me after I had been to visit a lot of old relatives and had a catastrophic dream that night. Now consciously I thought they were all old horrors and I made fun of them and went home, but that wasn’t enough. The unconscious said, “No, this is really dangerous,” and Jung said, “Yes. If one does not constantly walk forward, the past sucks one back. The past is like an enormous sucking wind that sucks one back all the time. If you don’t go forward you regress. You have constantly to carry the torch of the new light forward, so to speak, historically and also in your own life. As soon as you begin to look backward sadly, or even scornfully, it has you again. The past is a tremendous power.” So the overcoming of the old emperor means to be absolutely inexorable, ruthless about what is different and new.
There is a sense in this fairy tale that she, the cat, is the linen which the old emperor had yearned for and sent his sons out to find. The old order knows in some unconscious or fantasy way what it lacks, and when it comes into view it wants to take it over and claim it for its own, even though a generation has come between. There one has to leave the old emperor alone. One has to leave the past to itself. “Let the dead bury the dead,” as Christ said.
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