Reference: Cat hate = misogyny?

So, I just ran across this on Facebook:

roach-works

hey so, as a man who works with other men, here's a quick relationship tip: if he doesn't much like cats, that might just be a personal preference. if he hates cats, if he tells you he hates cats as soon as he hears that you have a cat and love your cat, he's an asshole. he's telling on himself.

every guy i've ever worked with that makes a point of telling me how much he hates cats as soon as i mention that i have a cat and love my cat, is always someone who is regularly cruel for fun and who laughs in the breakroom about the mean things they do for fun to their girlfriends and children

--------------------

luscious-theomorphic

I wish I could articulate all the ways this makes sense and why it makes sense and stuff but it's just like... something something misogyny something something resentment of creatures that don't need you and don't hang on your attention and approval all their lives.

As Marie-Louise von Franz says:

The cat, in contrast to the dog, has never sold its soul to man. It has a kind of egocentric reserve. The cat says, ‘You may stroke me and you may serve me,’ but it never becomes your slave. And if you annoy it, it just walks out on you. In women's dreams, therefore, the cat often is an image of something feminine, independent and sure of itself, just what modern women so often lack. That's why the cat goddess comes up in women's dreams as a positive model of feminine behavior. It is not brutal; it does not display any masculine features. It is feminine and, at the same time, very firm, very identical with itself. The cat is not very amiable, but very true to itself.

(The Way of the Dream)

Also, drawing a connection to serial killers and cult leaders; these brutes hate nothing more than independence in those they're trying to control. For centuries, during the middle ages, women were accused of witchcraft and murdered if they showed affection to animals. This same time saw some of the most horrific torture and murder of cats, and a fear and hatred of them. If someone doesn't like cats that's one thing, but if they hate cats, maybe you should GTFO of there.

The anima of the animus

Whenever you have a Bluebeard, you have a witch standing behind him, and whenever you have a witch, you have a Bluebeard. A woman who is possessed by the witch, either in her persona or in her shadow, is the prisoner of the man eating troll or the evil magician, and vice versa.

It's fairly clear if a woman is possessed by the witch because of her aggressive, power-hungry behavior, but if the woman doesn’t normally express the witch (except when she “acts out of character"... but in character for the anima behind the animus), then the witch is her shadow. The man who is possessed by Bluebeard, either in his persona or in his shadow, is the captive of the evil witch. And standing behind the troll or the witch is the witch or the troll. The four characters - passive Kore/evil Witch, ineffectual Son/brutalizing Bluebeard - form a prison. So long as we simply take up one role or another, we do nothing more than send back the other half of the syzygy into the shadows of the unconscious. We remain imprisoned.

The Bluebeard animus is as much a captive of the witch as the woman is of the animus, and vice versa. That’s why women act out the witch; they’re possessed by the power-driven animus. That’s why it’s important for women to admit this about themselves - both when it starts criticizing the woman as well as making nasty judgments about others - and just let it go. But the animus wants to hold onto his grievances and his anger, just as the anima wallows in a man's black mood of self-hatred.

Maybe what Eckhart Tolle says about the pain body applies here; Tolle says the pain body, the thing that tortures us, wants to live, and since it feeds off pain it does everything it can to cause us suffering. Maybe the negative animus (and negative anima) are the similar; the animus feeds off anger, so it’s always finding things to rage about. For men, the anima cuts them down, tells them they will never amount to anything so they might as well give up. It seems as if the negative animus and anima, like Tolle’s pain body, feeds on us to perpetuate its own existence.

Women can escape the Bluebeard animus by agreeing with the animus and then leaving emotionally, just as we often humor and then deflect the Bluebeard men in our outer lives. “Yes, yes, you are absolutely right. Yes, that’s awful. I’m awful. You are absolutely right.” And then leave, let go.

The negative anima is a poisoning witch. If a man’s anima is masculine, he’s leaving to Her to act assertive, and has nothing left for himself. If a woman is aggressive, she’s leaving to the men in her life to live out her inner passivity (the negative of the anima). By refusing to feed the negative anima or animus, we free ourselves to get in touch with our strengths as women and as men. I suspect that we also free our significant others to find their strength, as well.

The Animus can torture a woman, feeding her ruminations and thoughts about failure. To step out of this internal conflict, the best way is to say to the Animus, “Ah, you are right, it is too late, I am a failure, so let’s not speak about it anymore”. This allows the energy to move forward and not to dissipate in the internal conflict and the woman is left alone to try her hand at whatever she is doing anyway.

When the Animus is arguing and criticizing, the right approach to deal with this, is to say to the Animus, “Since you are so opinionated about what is wrong with others, let’s look at my shadow”. These two opposing forces, the shadow and the Animus, results in consciousness. This consciousness allows her to discern what her own ideas and opinions really are, and the difference between her feminine ego and masculine Animus.

Animus Possession: Are you a ball busting bitch?

When the man finds himself lost in ambiguity and at a loss on what to do, he needs to act. The Anima is an expert on implanting doubt. He must step into life to get out of this trap. He needs to act in some way. He must escape the repetitive pattern of getting excited about ideas and then discussing it to death until he is totally uninspired. He needs to develop a disciplined consciousness for solutions and directions. The correct attitude is to accept that it may not work, or that it is possibly not the right thing to do, but taking action anyway. One must take action based on the knowledge and understanding available at that point in time. Overcoming the Anima is through experiencing reality and the unknown, not talking about it.

Anima Possession: Are you a spineless wimp?



Links:

When the Pain-Body Awakens, Eckhart Tolle

The Tall Man

I’m working on another symbolism post – this time on the Parrot – but I’ve had some interesting dreams relating to the animus lately so I wanted to write a quick post about it.

I had an incident at work, where I felt a great deal of shame, and like I was a failure. My usual way of dealing with negative feelings is to sit with them and move into them. First off, this allows the emotion to slowly dissipate. But I’ve also found it to be a great method of “firing up” the furnace that burns away the ego. But then, a few days ago, I had the following dream:

Something about a hard world (post-apocalyptic? or just a hard, dangerous world?); it’s a barren wasteland. I wash/rinse myself with water running down a wall or hill or something outside. The water is actually really dirty; it’s toxic, and if the residue stays on me it will make me sick. I think to myself that I need to find some clean water to wash myself with, to rinse off the black, toxic particles but there’s no water anywhere. I try to think of other solutions, maybe find the water in other things (like plants?)

Interpretation:

I think this fragment in particular was speaking to what I’m going through, but I don’t know what else to do other than sit with my feelings. It seems to be saying to try to find the water in other things, but where???

So maybe not all emotions are good, all the time. Right now my dream seems to be saying that there’s good “water” (water that cleanses) and bad water (water that just makes you sick). This may be related to my repeated dreams of bathrooms, urine, and feces. But I don’t know what to do, or where to look. I’ve spent years – decades really – learning these techniques of staying in my emotions. But it seems to be making me sick.

This sounds like the disease of extroverted feeling: excessive judgment. We extroverted feeling types (even though EF is my inferior function) are extremely judgmental, but we're never more judgmental of others than we are of ourselves. Maybe this dream is saying that this aspect of extroverted feeling is harmful and is making me sick. But what is the cure? Does it have to do with the head (the bit about my nice hair, and the fragment about the cat’s head sticking out of the cage)? Maybe what it’s saying is that I need to use my strength (my mind) when I fall into these emotional quagmires?

After a lot of musing the last few days, agonizing even, over this question I had these dreams last night:

A very tall man asks somewhat judgmental, demanding questions. My impression now that I’m awake is that he’s pale and cold. He’s very, very tall, like almost twice as tall as I am. I kind of fob him off, answering with a deflecting answer. I walk away from him. I don’t think he follows, I think my answer was good enough.

And:

I’m with a bunch of women at an exhibition or a counter of some kind. They all have these tiny keys on their key rings and ask me why I don’t have mine. I say I don’t even know what they are. They explain that they’re something that they got from the authorities or the train station or something. All women get them but I don’t have one. The keys are used by women to get into safe rooms when they’re attacked by men. I think I go and try to get a key.

I interpreted these dreams in the following way:

Tall man: Definitely an animus figure. I immediately felt that he was a) related to the negative animus/brute (he seems to be a development of this figure); and b) related to the dirty water from last night’s dream. He’s very judgmental – very lofty – and cold (unemotional). What is the difference between me/J (my aunt) and Grandma (my Italian-American paternal grandmother and J’s mother)? It’s the judgmental, German animus. It’s definitely from Grandpa... or at least his side of the family (probably Great Grandma, from all the stories I’ve heard). Also, this figure may have something to do with giants, particularly frost giants (which are also Germanic!). Giants have no hearts; they kill mercilessly. You have to destroy them by finding and crushing their hearts. It looks like, by not accepting his dirty water judgment, I've escaped him, although this may only be temporary.

Safe room keys: I didn’t think I could get a lot out of this fragment but now that I've re-read it after doing the interpretation I think this may actually be a KEY part of the dream (lol). A large part of this (and last night’s) dream is about dealing with cold, brutal, dangerous men (the Tall Man). This dream is telling me how to do it: go to the safe room. The key to the safe room is received from an authority through... a spiritual authority? It’s related to the train (travel/ journey). Could this be the Self? The Self is the journey’s guide, the (train) conductor so to speak. There are two authorities: the Tall Man, and the train authority. There are two kinds of water: the dirty, toxic water, and the clean water, the water that comes from plants (that I was looking for at the end of the dirty water dream last night). The first authority is the brutal, rigid, righteous, but cruel and destructive (he reminds me of the torturer priest in Berserk). The other authority is quiet, still, natural, dispassionate. I think this may be the train authority. I can get the key to the safe room from him; this is the key that women have to protect themselves from the brutal animus, the Tall Man.

Safe house

(Image from: Frog Machine (Deviant Art)



The images in this post are from the Japanese manga Berserk. I'd like to do an interpretation of this story - there's a lot of deep symbolism in it - but at the very least I'm going to do a couple of posts on the man (who reminds me of The Tall Man), the priest Mozgus, and the master of the green house in the image above, the nature witch Flora. They shed a lot of light on the themes of this post. In addition, I will be posting an excerpt from Marie Louise von Franz's interpretation of the Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body, which is also related.


See also:
The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body
Mozgus
Flora

Anorexia Mirabilis

The head of St. Catherine of Siena

We’ve been taught so effectively to loathe fat people, and especially women who refuse to make themselves small and convenient, that not even the endless drive for profit can convince some of the world’s most enthusiastic capitalists to consider them a priority.

- Amanda Mull, "Why Aren’t Fashion ‘Disruptors’ Serving Plus-Size Customers?"



First, blog news: It’s been pretty quiet here at 2Biat, and that is because I’ve been studying for my final exam. And there's also all the holiday madness that happens every year at this time, so there’s a short hiatus happening. However, I had a little brainwave today that I wanted to share to this blog.

One of the things I’m studying about is eating disorders. This is something I have a very personal relationship with. It’s been a long time but for years I hated myself, and hated my body in particular. It took a long time to heal all those wounds. And this is, sadly, a very common problem.

We have a history of starving the body, everything from sages in the desert to the tradition of girls fasting to show how close to God they are. Modern anorexia is basically the same thing as this religious anorexia. Both are hateful towards the body, carnality, desire, and anything perceived of as “weakness,” especially moral weakness. Both are attempts to destroy the feminine within the body.

To love a large, curving, ample female body is to love the flesh. To hate the flesh is to hate the feminine Goddess that lives within the flesh, in our body. This is sharpest in anorexia but the societal obsession with small, spare, hungry bodies – bodies from which all the soft, warm animal comfort has been carved away – is in itself hatred toward the feminine because the body, the animal, is the feminine principle.

The way out of the pit of self-hatred is self-love. When we can finally acknowledge the tremendous work our bodies do, keeping us alive and bearing the burden of our abuse and contempt, then we can finally become friends with ourselves. And more, we can finally literally start to embody the missing sacred feminine back into the world, through our soft, fragile, but amazing and resilient bodies.

… 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…

- The Cat: The Virgin's shadow



Further reading:

Anorexia Mirabilis and the Fasting Girls (Megan, cvltnation.com)
The Cat: Redeeming the feminine


[Image from Anorexia Mirabilis and the Fasting Girls]

"Baba Yaga and the Challenge of Darkness. Or, I Love the Smell of Manflesh in the Morning"

A little late for Halloween, but here's something interesting:

She is more than a witch. She is a great nature goddess, possessing the power of both life and death like nature herself. She is an image of the Divine Feminine, that which is capable of ruthless destruction and loving nurturing. She is the folklore equivalent of other bivalent goddesses such as Kali. In this sense, it isn’t correct to categorize Baba Yaga as evil, any more than it would be to describe nature itself with this word. Nature is amoral, sometimes fantastically destructive and cruel, and other times just as life-giving and nurturing. Jung explores this theme in his famous essay “Answer to Job.” In it, he makes the case that Yahweh is unconscious, and therefore amoral. “This is I, the creator of all the ungovernable, ruthless forces of Nature, which are not subject to any ethical laws. I, too, am an amoral force of Nature, a purely phenomenal personality that cannot see its own back.” Evil can only exist where there is consciousness.

Baba Yaga’s grotesqueness and power are illustrative of the problem of dealing with these dark, primordial psychic contents. All of us contain this kernel of darkness. We manage to hide it away from ourselves for the most part, remaining naïve to our own capacity for evil and destruction. What happens when we do confront it? Sometimes, it can destroy us, overwhelming us and turning us into the very monster we sought to overcome. This is a story of the ego’s hubris, the imperial belief that it can colonize and rule over the contents of the unconscious. When consciousness does not approach the archetypal energies within the collective unconscious with sufficient humility, it will be vulnerable to being devoured or corrupted by the darkness therein.

- "Baba Yaga and the Challenge of Darkness. Or, I Love the Smell of Manflesh in the Morning", Lisa Marchiano (The Jung Soul")


Links:
Vasilisa the Beautiful


See also:
Crone
Death

What women want

I'm continuing to post amazing quotes while I work on other stuff. The below is from a highly recommended podcast of interviews with Jungian analysts by Laura London. This particular interview is with Russ Lockhart, one of my new Jungian heroes. Enjoy!

Russ Lockhart: (Said to Esther Harding at a party) "Freud asked the question 'What do women want?' and I want to know your answer."

And she was quiet for a bit, then she looked at me and then she put her hand on my shoulder and she said "Women want men... But there are so very few."

So that was like a one of those lightning bolts that go through one, you know? That pierces you and you know that that is a truth. And you’ve really got to take that into account, you know? Where are the men? What’s happened to the men?

Laura London: Well what do you have to say about that?... What did that comment mean to you?

RL: Well, it’s meant a lot to me in a lot of different things over the years. Certainly when I did the Jung lectures that became Psyche Speaks there’s a lot of material in that book that was prompted in a way by her comment. Later, as I thought more and more and more about it, it relates to this problem of power and how so consumed most men are with power. And the near absence of any real consideration we’re taking into account Eros. By Eros I don’t just mean females, I mean the genuine principle of relatedness is not very big on most men’s radar. Power is.

LL: What are they looking for in pursuing power?

RL: The solution or the cure for inadequacy.

LL: The solution or the cure for inadequacy.

RL: Yes.

LL: And they’re not finding it there. Or are they?

RL: No. No. They find all kinds of things, of course. There’s so much that reinforces that collectively and in the way other people respond to power that people enact, whether by rejection of that power (by the way rejecting power is not the same as Eros). Not having power is not the same as Eros. So Eros in that sense is not quite the opposite of power. The opposite of power is powerlessness. Eros is a completely different realm.

You might think of power as vertical, and if you think of power as vertical then there’s obviously all the symbolism of verticality is male oriented. Eros is horizontal. Much of the symbolism of the horizontal is feminine. So vertical power tends to be the enclave of the male. I’m not even going to say masculine, because I don’t feel like you can have a truly masculine quality or presence unless you have a relationship with Eros. And that’s what Esther Harding was saying.

Speaking of Jung podcast #16: Russ Lockhart, (1:11:40)

Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.

- Jung, "On the Psychology of the Unconciousness"

Symbolism: Cat

"Playing Cats" Takahashi Shotei

(Image from Etsy store ArtPink)

Re-post number 6 from Queen of the Night:

Cat symbolism

As with owls, cats are often associated with the night – both animals hunt at night, both are characterized by their ability to see well when we ourselves can’t. And since the unconscious is like the unknown night, how you feel about the unconscious will generally be reflected in how you feel about animals of the night, whether you hate and fear them or find them fascinating and helpful.

In keeping with their connection with the unknown and unseen, one idea that often crops up with cat’s is invisibility:

Albertus Magnus, the teacher of Saint Thomas Aquinas, insisted that a man could become invisible by wearing on his thumb the ear of a black cat, boiled in the milk of a black cow. Apparently the recipe was never tested; or if it was, the negative results were ignored."

The Arabs assigned very peculiar properties to such a stone [tiger’s eye]. They believed it could make its wearer invisible in battle. They also believed it could prevent an adulterous wife from conceiving children by her lover, provided her husband made her drink milk in which the stone had been dipped, before he went away on a journey. Perhaps the stone, perceived as an eye, was thought to affect various phenomena of vision and watching.”

http://www.wisdomportal.com/Cats/CatSymbolism.html

All of this is pretty obvious I think and not super interesting, the whole black cat thing and everything. The first interesting thing I found about cats was Marie Louise von Franz's description of the cat and how it often symbolizes a kind of independent femininity:

“The cat in our country stems originally from Egypt, where it was once a divine animal. There, they had a cat goddess who was the goddess of music, sexuality, pleasure in life, and life-embracing feminine fertility. The cat, in contrast to the dog, has never sold its soul to man. It has a kind of egocentric reserve. The cat says, ‘You may stroke me and you may serve me,’ but it never becomes your slave. And if you annoy it, it just walks out on you. In women's dreams, therefore, the cat often is an image of something feminine, independent and sure of itself, just what modern women so often lack. That's why the cat goddess come up in women's dreams as a positive model of feminine behavior. It is not brutal; it does not display any masculine features. It is feminine and, at the same time, very firm, very identical with itself. The cat is not very amiable, but very true to itself.

(von Franz, Marie Louise, The Way of the Dream)

Cats are usually thought of as female... which makes it a bit weird for me because most of my cats have been boys. People are always asking me how “she” is doing, even though I've told them repeatedly that “she” is a he. There's just something about cats that people intuitively feel is feminine, and, this is just based on a very small sample but my impression is that people who don’t like cats often generally don’t like “girly” things either. Cats are Aphrodite-like animals; sensual, associated with pleasure, fertility and drinking (not just Bast but Sekhmet, Bast’s blood-thirsty sun-lion twin, was only appeased by alcohol mixed with blood). Bast’s temple in Egypt was described as small but beautiful, surrounded by water on three sides (very Aphrodite).

Another god associated with cats and alcohol is Dionysus, the god of drink, who’s usually portrayed wearing a leopard skin. The Dionysus man is sensual and fascinating, like a leopard, and also as dangerous emotionally. Cats have that Dionysus quality of sensuality but without the danger. Maybe that’s what people who hate cats really hate; the desire for sensual pleasure which refuses to be controlled. That independence and refusal to be controlled is an integral part of the cat:

This calm, cool exterior bleeds over into the Tarot to convey a sleek mood of secretiveness and obscurity. The cat is an ultimate authority of its own inner realms. It needs no permission to behave in one way or another - therefore the cat must be given full reign to rule as it sees fit.

http://www.tarotteachings.com/cat-symbolism-in-tarot.html

It makes sense that under Christianity cats would fall out of favor; cats are sensual animals, animals of Aphrodite (pleasure) and Dionysus (ecstasy). Body-negating and full of hatred for earthly pleasures, such a religion would hate animals that symbolized pleasure. (“Christian: Satan; darkness; lust; laziness.”) (http://www.wisdomportal.com/Cats/CatSymbolism.html)

All these ideas of connection between human and animal were more or less diabolized under the Christian system, which regarded animals as soulless or demonic, or at the very least devoid of any feelings that needed consideration. Men, jealous of women's propensity to make pets of animals and treat them with love, soon found ways to condemn women for sensual, affectionate relationships with their dogs or cats. A woman seen fondling or talking to her pet fell under suspicion of witchcraft. Even a woman who spoke to any animal, as one might say "Hello there" to a squirrel or a bird, could be considered a witch. During the centuries of persecution, women were often burned for keeping cats, or nurturing lambs, or talking to frogs, or raising colts, or even for having mice in the house or toads in the garden.

What really surprised me about the cat symbolism in my own dreams is my sudden realization that, for me, they’re one half of a split animus complex. This may be why they’re always male in my dreams (I’m sure the fact that my cats are all boys has something to do with it… or it may be that my cats are always boys because of my complex??) I read the following recently and a bolt of realization hit me:

The animus in the dreams of a woman in psychotherapy often displays an even sharper split, appearing again as two quite different ego-projected complexes. One is the dominating, judgmental, condemning side, personified as a patriarchal father, dictator, judge or menacing animals such as a tiger or bear. These animus personifications seem to attack the woman dreamer, corresponding to involuntary thoughts that may attack her in waking life, saying, "What good are you? What could you accomplish? All you do is worthless."

In the same woman, a complementing ego-projected complex may be weak, helpless, or impotent. He may be an oversensitive artist; a deformed, crippled, or crazy boy; a distant, indifferent, or frigid man unable to love; or a weak, helpless animal.”

(Donald F. Sander & John Beebe, Psychopathology and Analysis, from Murray Stein’s Jungian Analysis, p. 312)

This is true, for me at least. In all of my dreams, whenever cats have appeared, they’re always in danger. I always have to protect them and keep them out of danger. Or if it’s not a cats it’s another weak, helpless animal. I always thought these weak animals were my inner little girl but it may be that they’re really images of the weak, helpless half of a split animus. I do know that at least part of my animus is cruel, domineering and, at least until recently, degrading. Are these cats and other helpless animals the other half of my animus? It seems so to me, right now at least.

One final facet of the cat that I’d like to explore, one which is particularly appropriate in light of the way cats are in my own unconscious: the role they play as protectors. Cats, at least in Egypt, are actually seen as protectors of the Pharaoh. Cats kill not only grain eating vermin but also snakes and scorpions. In Egyptian mythology cats were protectors of the Pharaoh; the cat goddess Bast fought Apep, the snake god of evil, and killed him: “[I]n other myths, it was the cat goddess Bastet, daughter of Ra, who slew Apep in her cat form one night, hunting him down with her all seeing eye” (and here again is the association with vision and night-sight.)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apep)

Cats are, in an obvious way, associated with sensuality and pleasure, independence and the night. But they’re also warm-blooded protectors against that which is poisonous, or that which would devour the nourishment the unconscious depends on for life. Perhaps the independence and joy in earthly pleasures is one way of protecting ourselves from these things in our lives.

Posts:

The Cat: Redeeming the feminine

Cat hate = misogyny?

Symbolism: The Devouring Mother (the Negative Mother Complex)

Bhadrakali - The Ever Hungry Goddess

Re-post number 5 from Queen of the Night:

The hungry mouth

I get the neck of the chicken;

I get the plate with the crack.

I've been dealing with the parental wound lately; the lack of mother love. It's funny but what the ups and downs of my relationship with G have been leading me to is not my animus but my Mother. I've come to realize that the great, big, gaping hole in me - the one that howls like a starving, half-crazed wolf - is Mother Hunger, hunger for love and nourishment, acceptance. Hunger for Home.

So I've been reading books and scouring the internet for info on this particular kind of negative mother complex (there are several varieties apparently.) Some strike a chord in me... or maybe it's more accurate to say, they struck a wound.

Others suffer all their lives from a sense of their own inadequacy and inferiority; they feel that they are inevitably unacceptable, they are doomed to be outsiders debarred from normal companionship, whatever they do will be wrong, whatever they desire will be forbidden. They are accursed, alienated from God and man, and not least from themselves.

These are the individuals who have never had an adequate experience of mother-love. In childhood they felt they were not wanted, and consequently in them the image of Mother is of a demanding and destructive power. But the archetypal pattern of Mother as the source of life, that Jung described in the passage quoted above, is not, for that reason, obliterated in them, but inasmuch as it has not been activated by their actual human experience, it remains in the unconscious, latent, not even appearing as an image, nor is it capable, in the most injured persons, of being projected to some mother substitute, an aunt, grandmother, nurse or schoolteacher. This positive image, however, does manifest itself, even in the most deprived individuals, as the expectation of Mother. The reciprocal of child is mother, his weakness and dependence being the obverse reflection of her strength and care. And so in these individuals, the absence of the mother-image is felt as a lack - the deprivation is felt but not the possibility of fulfillment. The child wanders in the wilderness, and remains not only deprived but actively hostile to everyone and everything, and not infrequently in his despair he becomes self-destructive as well.

(M. Esther Harding, The Parental Image, pp. 15-16)

Mothers, in many cultures, are expected to be accepting and nurturing. A woman I know has received a minimum of nurturing from her mother and has developed an intense fear of being abandoned. Thus, she has an "abandonment complex" intertwined with her negative mother complex. Her fear keeps her in a state of anxiety. Because of her over-eagerness to be accepted, she tends to drive away friends and lovers.

(Matton, Mary Ann, Obstacles & Helps to Self-Understanding)

"Obstacles & Helps to Self-Understanding" (VoidSpace.org)



Most of the things I found - and there's surprisingly little on the internet about this specific form of negative mother complex - were in this vein, but then I stumbled upon this site which contains author and analyst Jules Cashford's amazing essays (I've only read the one referenced in this post - there are many more to savor once I finish this post!) Below are (rather lengthy) excerpts from her piece on Hansel and Gretel, and the process of defeating the inner Evil Witch and restoring peace and fertility in one's life.

What struck me was the motif of the devouring mother, or the hungry mouth (the Evil Witch in the story.) I never thought of myself with a devouring mother, quite the opposite in fact as I had an absent mother, the lack of a mother. But, it seems, when the Mother archetype is wounded, she becomes the hungry maw that seeks only it's ever elusive satisfaction.

Neumann points out that ‘the destructive side of the Feminine, the destructive and deathly womb, appears most frequently in the archetypal form of a mouth bristling with teeth' (The Great Mother, p.168), as in the myths of the North American Indians, Egypt, Greece, some parts of Africa, and the Aztecs. In Aztec mythology, a gigantic open mouth is the hungry and all-consuming earth, and the death goddess is drawn with many knives and sharp teeth.

...That primary sense of life as a source of nourishment is missing.

Hansel and Grettel (Jules Cashford.com)


So what to do? For many years I thought that nothing could be done about it; certain wounds could never be healed, just managed. But the very fact that I've been lead here must mean something. So I poked around and this is what I found. The whole process of transforming the Devouring Mother into the inner source of nurturing appears to be a long and complex one, but does seem possible. I guess it's important to remember that Jung said that we never solve our problems, we just outgrow them. Continuing with Cashford's essay, let's take a look at what that might look like.

First off, there's the relationship between Logos and Eros, the mind and the heart. Originally, it's the mind that keeps us safe, but at some point we must rely on our feelings and instinct.

Hansel, who as the boy images that aspect of the new life or the Self which is the more conscious, logos-oriented way of solving this problem, manages to outwit the step-mother's particular plan the first time, but fails to follow through the implications of what she intends: that life is not safe at home. It is only when his strategy is itself outwitted by the birds that he can be, as it were, tricked into facing the problem at a deeper level. The story moves towards an intensification of the original situation for the bread house with sugar windows and a witch inside is an image at this deeper level of the sweetness of any home with any kind of mother inside, and points to the danger of fantasizing the missing aspect of the archetype. The need for the mothering that was originally withheld is both appeased and perpetuated in fantasies about the original mother, and, more subtly, re-enacted in the search for a symbolic substitute in any experience. This creates a person predisposed to dependence on the other, hungry (to return to the metaphor in the story) for love while fearful of being starved or detoured (rejected or overwhelmed) by the imagined source of it. It would seem, then, that the first stage of growth would require a distinction between the good and the bad in the actual mother, and between good and bad mothering in general - what one has a right to expect - and, more fundamentally, between the Good and the Bad Mother in the Great Mother Archetype.

So looking at the fairy tale more closely as an image of the ‘anatomy' of the psyche, what can it tell us about this stage of separation? For the children to survive with all the odds apparently against them, so we have to follow what they do and what ‘happens' to them as a model for the instinctive responses that are right for this specific situation. It then appears that the deliberate, purposive working out of the matter, which Hansel adopts, is necessary to start with, but has to be suspended at the crucial transitional point in order for the more feeling, less conscious impulses of Grettel to take over.

In the beginning Grettel can only weep and must be comforted by her brother, who provides the ‘temenos' in which she can feel safe: ‘"Be comforted, my dear little sister, and go to sleep"', and he crams his pockets with the white pebbles that glitter in the moonlight. The way he drops these signposts for their return is instructive for, apparently unnecessarily, he stands still and looks back at the house each time he drops a pebble, pretending he is looking at his kitten waving him farewell, an image, possibly, of the magnetic power of the complex. Jung writes that a ceremony is magical so long as it does not result in effective work but preserves the state of expectancy' (VIII, 46), and in Hansel's ritual we could see a reluctance to give up the former expectations from his home. The first time his plan succeeds, but it does so only to lead them back to the original situation with nothing changed, pointing to the circularity of conscious solutions to problems of feeling. The second time there is a famine, the step-mother argues still more forcefully, and this time the door is locked against Hansel's ingenuity and they are taken still deeper into the forest, ‘further than they had ever been in their lives before'. This tells us that left alone the complex gets worse. They are more lost than last time, and they have half as much bread, for Hansel has to take from his own portion to feed his strategy, the dropping of crumbs that are picked up by ‘the thousands of birds that fly about in the woods'. The beauty of this image already implies that the failures on the side of the good, that reason, ‘the ratio of what is already known' (Blake), must fail in order to call forth from a deeper level of the psyche that which is not yet known, but which knows. "Never mind", said Hansel to Grettel, "you'll see we'll still find a way out"; but all the same they did not'. This ends Hansel's effective leadership, and for three days, the time of the moon's disappearance, Jonah in the whale and Christ in hell, things get darker than ever before. Once consciousness is unable to operate, however, as in all fairy tales, the unconscious is free to surprise us with its magic, and into this gap, this desperate need for help or else they would surely perish, comes ‘a beautiful little snow-white bird sitting on a branch, which sang so sweetly that they stopped still and listened to it'. Like Orpheus, the song enchants them, end they are distracted from their hunger and their longing for a way out of the forest - their own sense of what help is needed - and when the song is finished the bird flies in front of them and leads them directly to the witch. It is obvious that the bird does not belong to the witch even though it perches on the roof of the house she has made to lure them inside, so here we see a deeper impulse in the story.

[W]hen the snow-white bird brings the children to the witch, and obliges them to confront irrevocably that which they would have avoided had they known, we can see at work the fundamental directing agency of the Self. For the superior wisdom of the Self brings together the fantasy and the reality of the mother in the children, given in the image of the fantastic house of food on the outside and the child-eating real old woman on the inside; which is to say that the Self brings together the superficial conscious attitude adopted to the deprivations suffered from the mother - that it didn't really matter - and the interior unconscious feeling - possibly, that it hurt so much it's impossible to break the spell and get away from her. For what is a witch to a child except a figure whose power is so absolute, so all-containing, that escape is unthinkable? And when the imagination fails then the spell is cast.

What is the meaning of this psychologically? Two comments of Jung are particularly relevant here: ‘A complex can be really overcome only if it is lived out to the full. In other words, if we are to develop further we have to draw to us and drink down to the very dregs what, because of our complexes, we have held at a distance' (IX, i, 99). Also, ‘A neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering' (XI, 75). So the children must go inside the sweet-tasting house and fully experience the evil of the witch within. They must suffer emotionally to the extent of imagining being boiled alive, roasted and consumed in what they had tried to avoid feeling too deeply because it hurt. Fire is traditionally a symbol of the heating up of feeling, the intensification and concentration of the whole being so that the inessential is burnt away and only the essence remains. The alchemists insisted that the fire be kept forever burning beneath the retort lest the heart falter and become distracted.

One of the things that strikes me about the above is how the mind helps us deal with things. It's the mind that schemes and helps us avoid being truly thrown "to the wolves." Of course, the problem is that Hansel - the mind - can only bring us back to the problem, never lead the way forward. For that we need the white bird, the symbol of the Self. It's only when we follow the bird that we finally break free of the endless cycle of suffering. Of course, originally it's to more intense suffering, but it's our legitimate suffering. Unlike the neuroses that we escape to - and are trapped in - when we try to avoid our problem, this suffering is ours. It belongs to us, as ugly and as horrible as it is.

Now that the witch can be seen for what she is, what can she tell us about the way the negative mother complex works? The story says that ‘witches have red eyes, and cannot see far, but, like beasts, they have a keen sense of smell, and know when human beings pass by'. This suggests that the complex acts relatively blindly, automatically, crudely, without differentiation and can be discerned whenever the person ‘takes things literally', recalling the literal imagination of the step-mother, who could not ‘see through' Hansel's strategy, supposing each time he was mistaking what he said he saw for the morning sun glittering on the chimney. On the other hand, she can smell like a hunting animal, which suggests her power is in the unconscious which is where she must be faced. On the surface, though, she is ‘apparently friendly', and her house likewise is a temptation to overlook what it contains, to take it literally for what it pretends to be, which is what the children do. They respond to it as though under a spell; they don't ask questions - whose house is it, will they miss the roof? Even when a shrill voice calls out from inside ‘who's nibbling my house?' the children answer: "Tis Heaven's own child, The tempest wild', and go on eating ‘without putting themselves about'. Because of their great hunger she gets them in her power, the extreme longing to be loved creates the dependence.

However, once Hansel and Grettel see the woman to be a witch, their relation to each other and to the problem change places. Hansel, as the carrier of the more conscious approach of the self, is locked up in the stable, and it is up to Grettel, the feeling powers hitherto dormant in the self, to take the active role. At first, like Cinderella, she has to serve the witch, is held in thrall to her, called a lazybones and starved of anything but crabshells, while Hansel, the imprisoned leader, is to fatten up to be eaten. Perhaps this is the testing time that is so difficult to predict. Who will win.

The tale tells us that trickery wins, that the trickster archetype is what is needed here. Both Hansel and Grettel play the witch's game, only they play it better than she does. Hansel pretends that he is thinner than he is, knowing she wants to fatten him, and holding out a bone instead of his finger, gains them time. Grettel pretends she is as helpless as she used to be - ‘I don't know how to do it; how do I get and shoves the witch in the oven instead of herself. That Grettel does to the witch exactly what the witch would have done to her may suggest that feeling must accept some identification with the dark aspect of the mother imago personified in the witch, maybe in the form that it is a greed for life's inexhaustible possibilities that contributes to the fear that they may not manifest themselves... At any rate, with the witch and Grettel before the open oven, ‘from which fiery flames were already issuing', it is not the time for moral deliberations, and we cannot but think that Grettel acts spontaneously rightly. But where does this usually weeping girl get her strength from? It seems from a combination of awareness and intensity of feeling. We are told that ‘Grettel perceived the witch's intention', and it is perhaps this moment of awareness that transfers the power of the witch to Grettel by releasing the energy trapped in her fear. At the point of immanent death she gathers enough strength, rebellion and even ferocity of feeling to say No to being devoured and this tips the balance and the negative complex is, as it were, burnt up. As with the stepmother, the witch's literal reaction to Grettel's pretense is no match for the dual perspective of awareness. Perhaps what this means is that the person trying to deal with the ‘witch' in himself or herself, since, while the witch may play a different role in the male and female psychology, there is a level at which the need for freedom from this complex is the same for both), must somehow trick the witch within, that is, withhold the habitual, automatic reaction in order to allow the feeling to deepen to an intensity that gets its power to respond from a hidden, previously submerged level of the psyche. As the trouble with this complex is that the instincts themselves have become distorted, it would seem necessary to, as it were, distort the distortion, do what feels wrong, to reach that last instinct of survival common to all animals when even a zebra will fight a lion to protect her young. It may be that in human animals this instinct has its parallel in the instinct of individuation.

Grettel flies straight to Hansel, crying: ‘Hansel, we are free; the old witch is dead', and we are told that ‘Hansel sprang like a bird out of a cage when the door is opened', a wonderful image of ‘the release of the dove'. Now appears the treasure of the Self, the pearls and precious stones disclosed in the other rooms of the house which they are free to explore once the fear has gone. Here are the jewels of the life renewed - joy, fearlessness, purpose, affection all that immersion in the waters of life makes possible. Leaving the ‘witch's wood' they come to a big lake with no bridge or ferry-boat, but just a white duck swimming in the water. The ‘crossing of the return threshold' is the hero's last trial in the hero myth (Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, p. 210-243), in which he is set the task of reconciling the truths won in the inner world with the actions he undertakes in the outer, public world. Here, some period of adjustment or some effort at translation is obviously indicated in the absence of any predictable way to cross the water to find the familiar part of the wood they came from. It is significant that at this point Hansel is the one who decides they can't get over because there is no bridge, and Grettel who sees the white duck and asks her help. The renewed feeling of the self can now for the first time exercise power for the care of life, for Grettel, sensitive to the duck's needs as well as their own, overrules her brother: "No", she answers, in total contrast to her submissiveness at the beginning of the tale, "we should be too heavy a load for the duck: she shall carry us across separately". The logos and eros of brother and sister are now in harmony with each other, such that each takes the lead when it is appropriate, and thus the original imbalance in the family is redeemed. Implicitly the story says that the killing of the witch is the death of the step-mother, for when the children run to ‘their father's house' and fall upon his neck, we are told simply: ‘but the woman had died'.

The restoration of the nourishing and healing aspect of the Mother archetype is shown in the emergence of the big lake with the bird now swimming upon it, an image of unity between nature and spirit which puts the duck, as Hermetic ferry-bird, in loving service. For the duck, white again as was the snow-white bird who led them deep into the unconscious, here ‘returns', in touch with the newly discovered waters of life to lead them back again. The treasure of the witch vanquished will buy them food to withstand any hardship, and so they are released from complete dependence on the Great Mother. But nothing is heard of the former famine in the land, and it is as though the confrontation with the reality of the bad personal mother which frees them from the negative mother complex within, activates at the same time the potency of the good mother archetype, so that from now on life may be trusted:

'Thus all their troubles were ended, and they lived happily ever after'.

Hansel and Grettel (Jules Cashford.com)

Ok, I'm kind of stuck here. Everything up to the examination of Gretel shoving the witch into the oven makes sense to me. Part of it is that I'm still pretty early in the process (basically at the point where I'm exploring the nature of the witch), but part of it is that this explanation doesn't resonate with me. This is just speculation, but my feeling is that Gretel pushing the witch into her own fire represents "burning" the witch - the hunger and desire - in it's own "fire." In other words, cooking in one's own juices. This is, in fact, the dragon's fire that I wrote about in an earlier post on snake symbolism:

[It] is hard to accept: the fire has to burn the fire, one just has to burn in the emotion till the fire dies down and becomes balanced. That is something which unfortunately cannot be evaded. The burning of the fire, of the emotion, cannot be tricked out of one’s system; there is no recipe for getting rid of it, it has to be endured. The fire has to burn until the last unclean element has been consumed, which is what all alchemical texts say in different variations and we have not found any other way either. It cannot be hindered but only suffered till what is mortal or corruptible, or, as our text says so beautifully, till the corruptible humidity, the unconsciousness, has been burnt up. That is the meaning, it is the acceptance of suffering.

(Marie-Louise von Franz, Alchemy.)


The house is a spun sugar fantasy of a relationship. It's not a real house, it's a fantastical house. When we've been driven from "home" (nurturing) by a mother who cannot give us the mother-love we need, we end up lost in the woods. And what we come upon is this faux house; it's not only not a real house, it's pure temptation. It's everything we thought we wanted, we are fed after we've starved for years (the years of famine.) But inside the house is the witch, the demonic caricature of the murderous stepmother. Something else to consider is that it's the Self itself that brings us to this deadly situation, because this is exactly what we need in order to truly resolve the problem at home. It's in the witch's house itself that the treasures of the Self reside.

Another thing is Gretel; this whole experience with the evil stepmother makes her completely helpless. When we are denied this mother-love our feelings can't function; we feel like we can't let ourselves feel, like it's all too much for us, leading us to rely on logic and reason. This can keep us out of trouble for a while but by itself it's incapable of finding a way out of the situation. The problem is that Gretel - our feelings - can't find her power until we're actually in the witch's house, i.e. the middle of our tumultuous emotional drama.

What does this mean? Is it that being in the situation with the witch puts the mind under lock and key forces us to rely on our feelings? Or is it that being in this situation allows us to bring some of the witch into us (Gretel doing to the witch what the witch had planned to do to her)? In either case the empowerment of feeling is part of the healing process as Gretel becomes more active, until at the end she tells Hansel they can't both ride on the white duck.

Gretel, as the female child, is the renewal of the feminine instincts. In the stepmother and the witch, and the presence of the famine in the land, the current female instincts (emotion, instinct) are wrong, turning them into the opposite of the nurturing mother into the destroyer. But, as with many stories of "evil" older women, their actions instigate the confrontation and change needed for renewal. The white dove is a symbol of the Goddess, and the white duck at the end is also female; with one hand the Mother Goddess drives us to wholeness with her terrifying side, and with the other she lures us to the same with her angelic side. All of this is in the service of pushing the young feminine, represented by Gretel, into her own power.


(Image from Exotic India)

Symbolism: Owl

Owl of Athena

Here's the second re-post from Queen of the Night:

Owl symbolism

[T]heir general meaning has to do with the scary/mysterious night-time knowledge, regardless of culture (with the exception of the Japanese, but that has to do with the fact that the Japanese word for owl is close to their word for good fortune, and therefore owls are associated with fortune in the Japanese culture, but that's really a one off.)

Following are the various meanings of owls from around the world.


Owl symbolism from around the world

The owl is sacred to the Greek goddess of learning, Athena and is even depicted on some Greco-Roman currency as a symbol of status, intelligence and of course, wealth. In ancient Egyptian, Celtic, and Hindu cultures the symbolic meaning of owl revolved around guardianship of the underworlds, and a protection of the dead. In this light the owl was ruler of the night and seer of souls. A misunderstanding of this necessary relationship gave the owl some negative associations with death. It should be clear that the owl was honored as the keeper of spirits who had passed from one plane to another. Often myth indicates the owl accompanying a spirit to the underworld - winging it's newly freed soul from the physical world into the realm of spirit.

A quick-list of owl symbolic meanings:
Wisdom
Mystery
Transition
Messages
Intelligence
Mysticism
Protection
Secrets

Native Americans associated the meaning of owl with wisdom, foresight, and keeper of sacred knowledge. This may largely be due to the fact that the owl is a great foreteller of weather conditions. Also its ability to see at night is legend among the Native Americans, and this attribute would be invoked during ceremonies when an oracle of secret knowledge was required. Similarly, West African and Aboriginal Australian cultures viewed the owl as a messenger of secrets, kin to sorcerers, as well as companions to seers, mystics and medicine people.

During medieval times in western and central Europe it was fabled that owls were actually priestesses (witches) and wizards in disguise. To this day the owl is considered a witch's familiar (an animal soul-spirit linked to a spiritual person via a unique, communicative bond).

What's Your Sign

Africa: Among the Kikuyu of Kenya it was believed that owls were harbingers of death. If one saw an owl or heard its hoot, someone was going to die. In general, owls are viewed as harbingers of bad luck, ill health, or death. The belief is widespread even today

The Americas: In the culture of the Uto-Aztec tribe, the Hopi, taboos surround owls, which are associated with sorcery and other evils. The Aztecs and Maya, along with other Natives of Mesoamerica, considered the owl a symbol of death and destruction. In fact, the Aztec god of death, Mictlantecuhtli, was often depicted with owls. There is an old saying in Mexico that is still in use: Cuando el tecolote canta, el indio muere ("When the owl cries/sings, the Indian dies"). The Popol Vuh, a Mayan religious text, describes owls as messengers of Xibalba (the Mayan "Place of Fright"). The belief that owls are messengers and harbingers of the dark powers is also found among the Hočągara (Winnebago) of Wisconsin. When in earlier days the Hočągara committed the sin of killing enemies while they were within the sanctuary of the chief's lodge, an owl appeared and spoke to them in the voice of a human, saying, "From now on the Hočągara will have no luck." This marked the beginning of the decline of their tribe. An owl appeared to Glory of the Morning, the only female chief of the Hočąk nation, and uttered her name. Soon afterwards she died. People often allude to the reputation of owls as bearers of supernatural danger when they tell misbehaving children, "the owls will get you."  Also, in the native Cherokee culture, as well as many other Native American cultures, owls are a very bad omen. It is said that if you are outside in the broad day light and an owl flies over your head a family member or loved one would die within the coming week.

Middle East: In Arab mythology, owls are seen as bad omens

Western culture: T. F. Thiselton-Dyer in his Folk-lore of Shakespeare says that "from the earliest period it has been considered a bird of ill-omen, and Pliny tells us how, on one occasion, even Rome itself underwent a lustration, because one of them strayed into the Capitol. He represents it also as a funereal bird, a monster of the night, the very abomination of human kind. Virgil describes its death-howl from the top of the temple by night, a circumstance introduced as a precursor of Dido's death. Ovid, too, constantly speaks of this bird's presence as an evil omen; and indeed the same notions respecting it may be found among the writings of most of the ancient poets." A list of "omens drear" in John Keats' Hyperion includes the "gloom-bird's hated screech."

In France, where owls are divided into eared owls (hiboux) and earless owls (chouettes), the former are seen as symbols of wisdom while the latter are assigned the grimmer meaning.

Wikipedia


As is pretty clear, owls are overwhelmingly associated with death and misfortune. This is probably because they're associated with the night-time "otherworld." Jung, in his autobiography, describes a trip to Africa where he spent some time with a people he felt were some of the most natural he'd ever seen. During the day, everything was good, everyone was happy. Even when pressed "What about when something bad happens," they always responded that everything was good. This changed dramatically when the sun went down which, being close to the equator, was an almost instantaneous event. Then, the world was filled with evil.

People with less less differentiated and developed ego's (like the people Jung met in Africa) and even those with highly differentiated ego's but a resistance to the unconscious (like extroverted sensation types) have problems with the things the owl, a predatory creature of the night, represents. Distinguished by it's enormous eyes and near invisibility and soundlessness, it can see and hear you but you can't see or hear it... until it's too late! This gives it the uncanniness that's often associated with highly efficient night time predators.


Owls, crones and goddesses

Something that stood out to me is how I often I was reminded of the Praying Mantis. Both are pure predators that rely on patience and an ego-less invisibility rather than flash and speed. And both have a strong association female power.

The modern West generally associates owls with wisdom. This link goes back at least as far as Ancient Greece, where Athens, noted for art and scholarship, and Athena, Athens' patron goddess and the goddess of wisdom, had the owl as a symbol. Marija Gimbutas traces veneration of the owl as a goddess, among other birds, to the culture of Old Europe, long pre-dating Indo-European cultures.

Wikipedia

The word "cailleach" in the Scottish-Gaelic means old woman! "Coileach-oidhche" is the word for owl, believe it or not it means "night-cockerel"! These birds were most often associated with the Crone aspect of the Goddess. The owl is often a guide to and through the Underworld, a creature of keen sight in darkness, and a silent and swift hunter. It can help unmask those who would deceive you or take advantage of you.

The White Goddess


And in Hinduism, with it's symbolically rich mythology, owls are associated with the goddess Lakshmi, one of the forms of the eternal female goddess Shakti.

Lakshmi is the Hindu goddess of wealth, prosperity (both material and spiritual), fortune, and the embodiment of beauty

Lakshmi in Sanskrit is derived from its elemental form lakS, meaning "to perceive or observe". This is synonymous with lakṣya, meaning "aim" or "objective".

In India, the male principle is spiritual and static, while the earthy feminine principle is active and passionate.

Shakti from Sanskrit shak – "to be able", meaning sacred force or empowerment – is the primordial cosmic energy and represents the dynamic forces that are thought to move through the entire universe in Hinduism. Shakti is the concept, or personification, of divine feminine creative power

Wikipedia entries on Lakshmi and Shakti


What this all seems to boil down to is that the dream about the owl is a kind of continuation of the praying mantis: both are feminine symbols of power, both have to do with the spirit realm, and both are distinguished by their ability to see.


(Image from The Tattoo Hut)

Symbolism: Praying Mantis

Praying Mantis, 1916

This and the next few posts are re-posts on symbolism from my previous blog, Queen of the Night; I thought it would be a good idea to bring them over here as I'm planning on making symbols a big focus of 2BiaT. Here's the first one, on the Praying Mantis.


Praying mantis symbolism

Lately I've been obsessed with praying mantises. One showed up in my dreams and it felt incredibly significant and, of course, during the course of researching the symbolism thoughts keep rising and making me even more obsessed.

In the dream I open a door and see a giant praying mantis with golden claws, which scares me and I try to run away from, but it follows me. Then I notice that it's been hurt because my cats were playing with it, and then I feel bad and want to protect it and I put it on my right shoulder.

Cats, like all warm blooded animals, represent the instinctual, emotional self, specifically the instinctive feminine. Cats are like small lionesses, the animal I associate with the hot, primitive childish emotions that I keep deep down inside me, which have been boiling over uncontrollably since this whole thing with G has started. So my instinctive, emotional self, particularly the feminine part of myself, has been wounding what is represented by the praying mantis, which at first I run away from but eventually I not only stop running away, I actually put it on my shoulder.

When you put an animal on your shoulder it's not like keeping pet dog or a cat, or a parakeet in a cage. An animal that rides on your shoulder is a companion, a familiar. It's your animal soul, almost like the "daimons" of Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass. It may even have something important to say, as if it's a part of you and can see or know things you can't.

Plants often symbolize the Self, a Self which has developed to some degree and gained a certain inner unity, when the riotous animal passions have calmed enough that all the parts of the personality can pull in one direction, that of growth. To Jung insects weren't "real" animals, who we can communicate with and are like us in their emotions, but more like plants that could move. Insects have so little sense of themselves that they'll eat parts of their own bodies if wounded.

On the one hand, it's my animal emotionalism that let's me feel sorry for the mantis, but on the other there's obviously something that I need to learn from it's impersonal, detached patience. I need to protect it, and not only protect it but carry it with me. In Jung's autobiography, he wrote about Personality No. 2, a personality that was different from the Jung who was a child at that time, had been born a certain year in a certain place, had to go to school and obey grown ups that was Personality No. 1. Instead, Personality No. 2 was an impatient, somewhat cantankerous old man, who was interested in alchemy and the occult and had very definite views about certain grown ups' stupidity. He also wrote about Personality No. 2's that he saw in others, and this had me wondering where my Personality No. 2 was, or if I even had one. I certainly never remembered having an experience like the ones he wrote about (although Jung was singular in the power and significance of his visions and experiences.) But maybe I don't have a Personality No. 2 in the sense that Jung did, but rather an animal Spirit Guide. I always wondered if the Lioness was my animal, but that doesn't feel right - I identify with her and love her, but she's not my guide. The Lioness is less a symbol of my Self and more "myself", my real self, the primitive but pure emotional self I hide deep inside myself, but the Praying Mantis just might be my guide. To the San Bushmen, the praying mantis is a manifestation of God, the "voice of the infinite in the small."

"The !Kung call themselves zhu twa si, 'the harmless people,' in contrast to non-San, whom they call zosi, 'animals without hooves,' meaning they are as dangerous as predator animals... They believe the praying mantis is a divine messenger and when one is seen, diviners try to determine the current message.

http://orvillejenkins.com/profiles/kung.html


Following are three main areas of focus in the surprisingly wide range of things that the praying mantis can represent. Each section is just made up of those quotes that felt meaningful to me at this point in my life; following these three sections I'll go into a discussion/musing about the mantis.



Zen Warrior

• Patience and balance, mindful movements.
• Fighter/warrior. Top of the food chain.
• Zen/Taoist qualities of patience, unassuming stealth, imitates nature, calm yet deadly, total focus.

Praying mantis symbolizes patience and balance, among other things. "[I]n China, the mantis has long been honored for her mindful movements...

The mantis is a predator and is at the top of the food chain within the insect world...

"Seisan" a karate technique teaches how to get inside the opponents attack while developing a strong foundation (a characteristic of a fighting mantis). In fact, the Mantis has been known to take on much larger creatures and defeat them using these described abilities. It is very understandable when observing the mantis that it is revered by the Orient, as well as, all over the world. These hunting and fighting methods have Zen/Buddhist/Taoist like qualities: of patience; unassuming stealth; imitating nature; calm yet deadly posturing; and total focus.

The Power of the Dark Moon

• Part of the cycle of life, yin/yang, the Tao. Specifically, the predatory, violent side.
• Women's power.
• Autumn. Also the cycle of life, the season of the harvest.
• The necessity of violence: it serves to protect the sustenance which is important for life. Part of maintaining harmony.

Concept of Yin/Yang

Asian Cultures strongly emphasize the connectivity of all living things and their societies are built upon this concept. The circle of life is the relationship of life and death, implying without one you can't have the other. This interrelationship is Yin and Yang... Without the predator/prey relationship there could be no environmental or world harmony...

Immortality

We can even take this a step further through deductive reasoning to state that the circle of life in essence equals immortality. After all, the continuation of the life cycle means that we are achieving immortality. However this can only be achieved with a balanced relationship. If there becomes an imbalance, then the cycle is interrupted. Thus, it is in the nature of Japanese culture to remain in harmony.

Women Power

Most western cultures associate the mantis with women power. In nature, the female mantis has been noted to eat the male mantis if he hangs around after copulation. While in practical terms that also ensures the circle of life by providing nutrients for the next generation, this threatens the western man as a symbolic reference to women having power and using it to undo man.

Autumn

...In Japanese symbolism, the Mantis represents the season of autumn. Kobayashi Issa, one of the four prominent forefathers of haiku, used the mantis as a symbol of autumn in his poems... [W]hen we see a Mantis with these other autumn symbols, we see the circle of life being represented, in particular, Autumn, the season of harvest.

[Mantises] dine on insects that may be harmful to what you are growing... In nature, the mantis's role is protecting the crops, thereby, protecting the farmer and protecting an important ingredient in the circle of life sustenance... [W]ithin the circle of life, the Mantis requires violence of action in order to maintain that harmony.

"The Voice of the Infinite in the Small"

• Mantis as God; the unblinking eye (similar to the fish eye).
• Mantis shows the way.
• The one who teaches.

The praying mantis is the oldest symbol of God: the African Bushman’s manifestation of God come to Earth, "the voice of the infinite in the small,"* a divine messenger. When one is seen, diviners try to determine the current message. In this culture they are also associated with restoring life into the dead. "Mantis" is the Greek word for "prophet" or "seer," a being with spiritual or mystical powers.

Meet the eye of a mantis and feel the presence of God. Interspecies communicator Sharon Callahan says, "the I of me, and the I of the creature became one and we rested on the breath of God." She notes that a praying mantis appears sometimes in person, other times in a dream or even in an object of art, but always with the "shiny conscious eye ~ God looking at me through the eye of the Mantis.

The praying mantis shows the way. In the Arabic and Turkish cultures a mantis points pilgrims to Mecca, the holiest site in the Islamic world. In Africa it helps find lost sheep and goats. In France, it's believed that if you are lost the mantis points the way home.

Also, there are many references to the Creator taking the shape of the Praying Mantis and teaching humans language and fire.




Is the praying mantis in my dream related to the girl with long white hair? Blind girls often show up in myths paired with the Wise Old Man; they represent Eros, blindly falling in love. The two are a pair: youth and age, male and female, wisdom and folly, detachment and complete and utter attachment. Since I'm a woman I suppose the symbol of the Self which has detached wisdom is the detached but powerful female Mantis. Like the snake/child pairing they too must be two sides of the same coin. When I drew a picture of the mantis, the blind girl was there. She may be blind but the mantis, who was perched on her head, has a gaze that never blinks. She is in fact the Eye of the Goddess, which sees everything clearly and without emotion, without compassion but also without judgment.

The Praying Mantis is woman power. Contrast her to the Cat, who's feminine instinct and passion, and the blind girl, who's young and powerless. Like a plant, the Mantis is at one with Herself, capable of doing great violence with calm and dispassion. As women age, and they change from Girl to Crone, they stop caring what people think of them and start acting like the Mantis. This may be why such powerful women tend to terrify men, as black widows and praying mantises do. A man's story is different; he has to confront the black widow, or the mantis; he has to confront the devouring snake side, without fear, without destroying life - and without letting himself be destroyed - and come into himself as a man. But a woman has her own story; she has to become the independent Mantis/Crone, without running away from life, but to preserve it. Life needs the dark side as well as the light.

Without Atropos to cut the thread of life which had finished it's course the entire web of creation would be threatened. But in order to mature into the Mantis, a woman has to develop the qualities of the Wise Crone: insight, detachment, a vision of the bigger picture, and the ability to destroy that which threatens the greater harmony of life. And in order to do so a part of her has to remain outside the sticky mess of personal feeling, not by running away from it but by living it, learning from it, and eventually being able to step back from it. As the I-Ching put it, "Retreat is not the forced flight of a weak person but the voluntary withdrawal of a strong one."

We can only become strong by living life, not by running away from it. I think the reason I'm going through all of this crazy emotional shit is because I avoided it for so long in order to protect myself. So I'm getting a really intense education in emotional upheaval and heartbreak... but this is having an effect on my Mantis. As with men and their Wise Man and Blind Girl, I have to balance the Mantis and the Lioness (also the Blind Girl): I need to stay with the relationship but not be consumed by it.

And yes, I do think the Mantis just may be my Spirit Guide; no matter how crazy I've gotten, something in me has always been dispassionate and clear eyed. But until now, it's been paired with the sour bitterness of an unlived life. I guess now by God I'm living it...


References

"Animal Symbolism of the Praying Mantis" by Avia Venefica [http://www.whats-your-sign.com/animal-symbolism-mantis.html]

"Praying Mantis" by Souled Out (Swan Raven & Co.) [http://www.souledout.org/earthday/mantis/pm.html]

"Pray for the Preying Mantis" By Ken Wilson[http://www.freewebs.com/kamakiriken/symbolupload.htm]

Praying Mantis in Totem Library [http://spiritlodge.yuku.com/topic/958#.T9K8sr8wLww]


(Image from Creatively Different Blinds)

The Feminine World

Sitting next to my co-worker A., I’ve really come to understand what Marie Louise von Franz talks about in her books when she describes a world in which the feminine principle predominates. In one book (I can’t remember where – I will look for it) she contrasts a cold, brutal, excessively male world with one in which the female is overly emphasized: the women are fat, happy, and lazy; the men are impoverished; and a kind of general intellectual stupidity reigns. I always felt this was a little excessive, maybe a bit of the self-hatred typical in who women managed to achieve intellectual success at that time.

So now I’m sitting next to A., and I’ve been thinking about her and my other co-worker B., who sits on the other side of me. A. and B. are polar opposites when it comes to work; where B. takes enormous pride (too much, really) in her work, and goes above and beyond in most of the things she does (particularly if others are watching), A. does the minimum possible… and generally sloppily and half-assed at that. At the same time, she bristles furiously if anyone makes any sort of comment about her work.

A. is a friendly middle aged woman; she loves to talk, especially about other people (B. in particular offends her, because, quite honestly, B. kisses up to superiors and often tries to make everyone else look bad in order to make herself look good.) She especially spends a lot of time on the phone with her college aged daughter, as the two of them complain about everyone in the daughter’s life - selfish boyfriends, rude coaches, mean friends – they are literally on the phone every single day. She takes everything personally… EVERYTHING. Everything is personal, whether for good or bad. Any criticism is seen as a personal attack; “real friends don’t do things like that to each other!” and “I did all of that for you and THIS is how you treat me?????” And every belittlement has to be hashed over and over again with everyone she knows, in the most emotional way possible.

A. also has serious problems with willpower; she absolutely cannot say no to herself. In the year we’ve been sitting together, she’s basically been “on a diet” the entire time… but she can’t manage to go two days without breaking her diet. And she’s not dieting for vanity, just to look better, but for health reasons. She’s pretty much incapable of doing anything that challenges her in any way. She doesn’t really seem to be bothered by this either, except in the most lukewarm way.

Everything is deeply personal with A.; the guy who always cuts her off in the cafeteria at breakfast is “scrawny and probably doesn’t have a girlfriend,” and she voted for Trump basically because she liked him better than Hillary Clinton. She is a person who almost completely operates on personal feeling; she’s pretty much completely lacking in any sort of principles or morals, in the sense of “things one does because they’re correct.”

What’s important to A. isn’t whether she’s adhering to some abstract notion of right and wrong, good and evil; what’s important are people and her relationship with them. A. may not give a fig about doing an excellent job at work, but she will always make sure that you feel welcomed and included. She’s proud of the fact that she’s raised her kids to not do anything that would make someone feel left out. She’s also vocal in her disapproval of young people who are cliquish and unkind, and of her disgust in their parents, who failed to “raise their kids right.” (At the same time, she will indulge in that very same behavior but in a hidden way, but that has more to do with her neuroticism and general unconsciousness than anything else.)

Sitting with A. has been enlightening; she’s one of the most purely “female” females I’ve met. Many women (and men) are in touch with our contrasexual side, to a greater or lesser degree. For example, while B. has a motherly aspect when she’s dealing with superiors and inferiors (or, more accurately, motherly and concerned with people she deems “valuable and worthy,” and like a regal, kindly queen with those she deems her inferiors) she’s competitive with those she considers to be at her same level. She has definite notions of right and wrong, and operates largely from a combination of pride and efficiency. A., on the other hand, operates almost completely from her feminine side; she values personal relationship above all else, and everything else, including her work, is second to that.

So... It appears that, once again, MLvF knew exactly what she was talking about! A one sided world, or personality, which is completely lacking in the masculine side is happy but pretty much lazy and lacking in any kind of rigor; moral, intellectual, or otherwise.


To sum it up, the feminine world would be characterized by:

Positively
Relationship
Connection
Feeling
Caring
Pleasure

Negatively
Laziness
Carelessness
Lack of self-control
Intellectual poverty
Over emotional


A quick contrast of the masculine world is (think something like a boy’s school…or Reddit):

Positively
High achieving
Principled
Disciplined
Impersonal

Negatively
Brutal
Cruel
Unfeeling
Impersonal (can be good or bad)