Dr. Joan Relke
Honorary Associate
Studies in Religion
School of Classics, History, and Religion
University of New England
Photo 1: Gaia (1)
Abstract
For decades, Carl Gustav Jung treated many thousands of patients and explored many of the world’s mythologies and religions. His empirical and scholarly research led him to conclude that all humanity shares an instinct to produce images and concepts based on universal themes. These themes he termed archetypes, and the commonly shared instinct he called the Collective Unconscious. Of these many themes, two female archetypes, the anima and the mother, are explored in this two-part discussion. Part 1 (Relke, 2007) appeared in Vol 3, No 1 of Europe’s Journal of Psychology, and Part 2 appears below.
PART TWO
As detailed in Part 1, the anima and mother figures feature in various mythologies over time and distance. The anima, in orthodox Jungian terms, is the image of woman in the male unconscious, and its counterpart in women is the animus, a male figure. The anima often appears as a part animal, part human creature – a therianthropic figure – signifying its mediation between the human and otherworldly dimensions. It appears in cultural mythologies and personal dreams and fantasies as a compelling force which seeks to unite the conscious ego with the unconscious forces of the wider Self.Part 1, explains how the anima can be active in both men and women, and concurs with James Hillman (1985, pp.53-55) that the anima can operate in the personal and archetypal unconscious of both sexes and that perhaps the animus is something completely different and co-existent with the anima (Hillman 1985, pp.89-91).
The mother archetype, to Jung relevant for both men and women, is far easier to understand, and expresses itself culturally and personally in the roles of the real mother and various mother goddesses and spiritual figures. Often the anima and mother archetypes conflate into one mythological character, such as Sedna, the Inuit fertility goddess, and Eve, the ‘mother of all living’ from the Hebrew testament.
This study divides the anima and mother archetypes into three realms, each with its own characteristics: underworld, earth, and sky. Part one discussed the anima and the mother archetypes as they manifest as underworld figures, concerned primarily with the non-rational forces of the unconscious – supernatural knowledge, sexuality, the enthralling mother, and the anima’s personification of the “chaotic urge to life”. These underworld figures often take the forms of snakes or serpents and fish or sea creatures, such as Sedna, Tiamat, the Pythia, and Eve.
Part two moves on to the animas and mothers of the earth and sky. Here, in Jungian terms, we enter the realm of consciousness – the corporeality of life on earth and the spirituality and transcendence of the sky. Here it is daylight; the sun shines and the air is clear.
Mothers and animas of the earth are often both creative and destructive, such as Kali and Gaia, while mothers and animas of the sky, such as Isis, Mary, Ishtar, and Athena, are often saviour goddesses, mediating between the high gods and humanity. But however benign the sky goddesses might be, they still have an intimate relationship to the underworld, and this is explored in relation to Athena, Inanna/Ishtar, and Isis.
The Earth
While the snake is possibly the most provocative symbol associated with female archetypes, for its suggestive shape and its association with death and rebirth, the underworld, the supernatural, and the generative powers of nature, other common forms taken by the anima and mother archetypes are the feline and the bird. With the feline, we depart from the stygian depths of the unconscious or underworld of the mind, and inhabit the terrestrial surface in daylight.
The most enigmatic of the feline projections is the Sphinx of Greek myth, a therianthropic creature with a woman’s face, a lion’s body, a serpent’s tail, and a bird’s wings. “The Sphinx is a fear-animal…and shows clear traces of a mother derivative” (Jung, 1952b, p.181). Its intimidating and monstrous appearance is a manifestation “of the ‘terrible’ or ‘devouring’ mother whom the Sphinx personified” (Jung, 1952b, p.181). In the Oedipus myth, the Sphinx presents a riddle which, if answered correctly, would free the people of Thebes from her strangle-hold, for literally her name, Sphinx, means “the strangler” (Guirand, 1968, p.305). The king of Thebes offered the crown to anyone who could solve the riddle.
The Sphinx asks, “What is it that has one name that is four-footed, two-footed, and three-footed?” Oedipus answers, “Man…for as an infant he does upon four feet; in his prime upon two; and in old age he takes a stick as a third foot”. He answers correctly, causing the Sphinx to release the Theban acropolis, of which Oedipus then becomes king as promised (Graves, 1960, Narrative 105e; Guirand, 1968, p.305).
Jung says that Oedipus’ tragic fate, to kill his father and marry his mother, results from his inability to realise that “the riddle of the Sphinx can never be solved merely by the wit of man” (Jung, 1952b, p.182). This suggests that the riddle is like Zen koan – a non-logical puzzle which, when solved, opens one to the deeper meaning of life. Oedipus’ answer is a Buddhist-like teaching. The nature of life inevitably passes through three stages, the last comprising old age, infirmity, and death, three of the Four Passing Sights that led the Buddha to renounce family and riches and seek the true meaning of life. In Jungian terms, the deep realisation of one’s impending mortality at about age 40 precipitates the mid-life crisis. Prior to that, human beings usually feel immortal, death is an intellectual concept, and the end of life is not yet visible. Answering the riddle is a conversation with the anima, not just being strangled in the enthralling grip of the negative mother. The Sphinx is a chaotic figure (human, animal, and bird), with a superior knowledge of life’s inexorable laws (Jung, 1954a, pp.30-31), in this case the inevitability of death.
While the lion also often manifests as a symbol of male power, as in the Egyptian Sphinx with a man’s head and a lion’s body, it frequently assumes female form, as a lioness, as in the above example of the Sphinx of the Oedipus myth. Four significant goddesses, sometimes mother, sometimes anima figures, come to mind: Inanna, Durga, Cybele, and Sekhmet, lioness goddesses of ancient Mesopotamia, India, Anatolia, and Egypt, respectively.
Inanna tames a lion and uses it as her mount. In the form of a lioness, Inanna slays a great demon serpent, and at times is herself the great serpent or dragon (Bardi, 1997; Jacobsen, 1976, p.136). Sometimes she is the coy, sexual, provocative anima; at other times, she is the destructive or, alternatively, loving, mother, and refers to herself as the mother of humanity, even noting the contradiction in herself over her role in bringing about the great flood, in which she laments having destroyed her own children (Sandars, 1972, p.110).
Durga also rides a feline – a tiger or a lion. As the virgin warrior goddess of India, she slays the great buffalo demon, Mahishasura, and saves the entire assembly of gods and the world from destruction. Durga is called ‘the mother’, but in some myths she is formed by the cumulative power of all the male gods – a collective anima – whom they equip with their own weapons (Doniger O’Flaherty, 1975, pp.238-249). She is also depicted holding a snake, with which she strangles the demon.
Cybele, a mother goddess from Anatolia, sits on a throne flanked by two lionesses. She is reputed to have sprung from the earth. She loves the god, Atis, and drives him to such madness that he castrates himself and dies. She is most famous for her priests, who reputedly castrated themselves in a wild trance while worshipping her (Morford & Lenardon, 2003, pp.179, 364), and for her initiates, who were washed in the blood of a sacrificed bull and thereby born into a new life (Morford & Lenardon, 2003, pp.180, 364). According to Morford and Lenardon, the myth “depicts the destruction of the subordinate male in the grip of the eternal and all-dominating female, through whom resurrection and new life may be attained” (2003, p.180).
Sekhmet, alter ego of the Egyptian birth goddess, Hathor, is the destructive side of the mother archetype. Hathor, identified with the cow, is the gentle mother, the lover of Horus, and protector of women in childbirth. When women die, they go to Hathor, while men go to Osiris (Bleeker, 1973, p.45). The opposite of gentle, bovine Hathor, is the lioness Sekhmet. Fond of the taste of blood, she is used by Re to destroy humanity in his fit of pique. When he becomes appalled at her bloodthirsty rampage, he changes his mind, and orders the preparation of red beer, on which she gets drunk, mistaking it for blood, and forgets her mission.
There is no shortage of information about the antics of these various goddesses, as easily demonstrated by a quick search on the internet. What is significant about them is their ambivalence towards humanity: at one time loving, protecting, and inviting; at another fierce, destructive, and violent. The ambivalent mother archetype is projected in infancy onto the actual mother, who is both loving and protective, and at the same time, all-powerful, and this relationship endures until the end of life:
the mother is the first world of the child and the last world of the adult. We are all wrapped as her children in the mantle of this great Isis. (Jung, 1954c, p.94)
The “parental imago” develops in the first four years of life, and at this stage, the parents are elevated to a divine level, later to become a source of disappointment (Jung, 1954b, p.66). Should the mother fail to nurture and protect, as she invariably does to a lesser or greater degree when she feels the need to punish, the demonic side of the archetype is activated. In order to mature, an individual eventually must withdraw the projection of the archetype from the living and fallible mother in order to be released from her encompassing influence, or her “thrall”, as Jung describes it (1954c, p.95).
For Jung, men in particular must overcome their Oedipus complex, and ‘kill’ their mothers in order to become fully mature:
In the morning of life the son tears himself loose from the mother, from the domestic hearth, to rise through battle to his destined heights. Always he imagines his worst enemy in front of him, yet he carries the enemy within himself – a deadly longing for the abyss, a longing to drown in his own source, to be sucked down to the realm of the Mothers. His life is a constant struggle against extinction, a violent yet fleeting deliverance from ever-lurking night. (Jung, 1952a, p.355)
The Oedipus complex is most starkly mythologised in the story of the Earth Mother Gaia (see photo 1) (1) and her son, Cronus. Gaia’s husband, Uranus, imprisons their children, and Cronus devises a plot to castrate his father during sexual intercourse with Gaia. By hiding within Gaia’s body, he is able to castrate his father during the act. Here the son ‘kills’ his father for possession of his mother (Morford & Lenardon, 2003, p.63). For Jung, this son needs to find a life of his own, to tear “himself loose from”, or ‘slay’, his mother.
Photo 2: Gaia (2)
For Jung, the transition from unconscious life to conscious life in the development of humanity and the individual is mirrored in the separation of the child from the mother: “the first creative act of liberation [of the unconscious] is matricide” (Jung, 1954c, p.96). For art and mythology, this means the projection of this “first creative act” into the slaying of the dragon, the symbol of the unconscious and animal sides of our nature, and to some extent the control of the “chaotic urge to life”, the anima. This stygian beast takes the forms of Leviathan, the Behemoth, the Chimaera, the great serpent, Tiamat. Any association of the anima/mother with these creatures demonises or transforms them into something evil, for example the Biblical serpent, the Pythia, and Medusa.
Jung confesses that he gives far more time to the mother complex in men, claiming that the mother archetype in men is always mixed with the anima, and hence never “pure” (Jung, 1954c, p.94). But disappointment with the projection of the divine mother onto the actual mother is inevitable for daughters, too. One pitfall for women, according to Jung, is the overdevelopment of the eros, creating a marriage wrecker, resulting largely from a:
reaction to a mother who is wholly a thrall of nature, purely instinctive and therefore all devouring. Such a mother is an anachronism, a throw-back to a primitive state of matriarchy where the man leads an insipid existence as a mere procreator and serf of the soil. (Jung, 1954c, p.95)
On the individual level, for women, too, the separation from the mother is necessary in order to become independent adult women and mothers, themselves. Since no mother is perfect, the influence of negative mother is always present, and in maturation, is the “thrall” from which women must extract themselves (Woodman, 1982, pp.34-45, 60-69, and passim). Even Persephone must leave her mother in order to fulfil her mature function as spring, emerging from the underworld annually. Even the Great Mother Goddess, Demeter, like all mothers, must learn to let her child go.
So for Jung, the archetypal mother represents something that we must pull away from, something with which we were once united, allowing us no individual identity. The necessity of separating from the real mother and moving into independent consciousness is projected into myths about the destruction of the divine mother, who, if not destroyed, as a “thrall of nature” threatens to devour and destroy us by keeping us unconscious. In Jung’s world, the divine mother, and to some extent, the anima, tie us to our unconscious origins: to our animal instincts for bodily survival and procreation.
This bleak picture, understandably, the feminist movement has chosen not to adopt. It is also an outdated picture, for the myth of the matriarchal origin of civilisation has undergone some serious revision in the last thirty years or so. In anthropological and archaeological circles, it is seriously doubted; in feminist circles, it is regarded as superior, not primitive and inferior, to the patriarchal system that replaced it. Feminists emphasise the Great Goddess in her benevolent, nurturing, caring aspect, and would see in Jung’s attitude a reflection of the patriarchal fear of the feminine, which they claim prevailed as prehistoric matristic cultures succumbed to the authoritarian, war-like patriarchal cultures of the historic ancient world, doing a great disservice in recasting the goddesses in a negative light.
Politics aside, the mother archetype in myth does display an ambivalent or dual nature. Demeter rages, cursing the earth with drought until Persephone is released. Kali drips with the blood of her devoured children. Gaia, through her son, castrates her spouse; the priests of Cybele castrate themselves in a religious frenzy; Isis curses and nearly kills the great god Re; the Sphinx strangles Thebes. However, nothing is so tender as the image of the Madonna and child in the forms of Mary and Jesus, Isis and Horus, or Parvati and Ganesha. The Great Mother delivers and cares for us all, even though in the end, she destroys and subsumes us into her “thrall”.
The fearsome aspects of the goddesses are left behind when we ascend from the underworld and the terrestrial spheres to the air and sky and encounter the therianthropic goddesses combining human and bird attributes.
The Sky
Many animas and mothers combine celestial attributes with human and animal earth-bound forms: the wings of the Sphinx, Isis in bird form as a kite, winged Inanna as Ishtar or Astarte, and the fairies and angels of nursery rhymes and folktales. Or they can depart entirely from the earth, as does the holy ghost of Christianity. In the form of a white dove it is sometimes conceived as female, from rûah (spirit) in Hebrew, which is female (Sheridan, 2006). Here, in the sky, we are more likely to encounter less terrifying forces, leave the world of death and fear, and find ourselves protected and comforted by the shielding owl wings of Athena and the enfolding hawk wings of Isis and her sister, Nephthys. Yet, we find that however remote from the unconscious/underworld these sky goddesses appear to be, many of them have an intimate relationship with the underworld, without which they would not be complete. This demonstrates that the unconscious, instinctive nature can never be eliminated or transcended. The following discusses three goddesses – Athena, Isis, and Inanna/Ishtar – in their roles as sky goddesses, each with a unique relationship to the underworld.
If any Greek goddess conforms to the classical anima archetype, present in the male unconscious, it is Athena, who, as described in Homeric Hymn 28 (Homeric Hymns, 2004, p.59), sprang fully formed from the head of Zeus. Athena is the anima of the high god, who is born directly from the male psyche without having to go through the intermediary and polluting experience of birth from a female body. Her birth is divine, not sullied by the mess, indignity, and pain of mortal birth. She does not even have to endure the humiliation and dependency of infanthood and childhood – spewing and mewling. Much like Jesus and Buddha, who display adult wisdom and abilities early in childhood, she is spared the indignities of dependency, and emerges into myth as an adult: powerful, wise, and masculine (Morford & Lenardon, 2003, p.158).
As war goddess, she is born fully formed, and fully armed, and is the protector of heroes (Homeric Hymns, 2004, p.59). In her first appearance in the Iliad, she descends from the sky to stay the hand of Achilles, who is about to slay Agamemnon (Homer, 1951, 1: 194-222). In the Odyssey, she is Odysseus’ constant guide and counsel. She is a-sexual, a companion to her father, interested in ships, chariots, horses, and war (Homeric Hymns, 2004, 5.8-14, pp.42-43; Morford & Lenardon, 2003, p.167). She is the ideal anima/daughter as she is a faithful companion to her father. She will not leave him for another man and shares the stereotypical masculine interests – war, sport, and cars. She protects all heroes without undermining their masculine power through sexual attraction and conquest. She is most certainly a male fantasy – no sidelong glance from her feminine eyes can drag a man into the murky, uncontrolled depths of his unconscious libido, unlike the glance of the nixie or Lorelei. Rather she protects men when at their most threatened – in battle.
But, there is another, darker side to Athena, although I don’t know how much darker one can get than war. Athena’s mother is thought (Metis) and she herself is wisdom, having sprung from the head of the high god. However cerebral, she is deeply disturbed by Medusa, one of the three Gorgon sisters, a beautiful mortal woman with lovely hair, who is seduced in Athena’s temple by Poseidon, Athena’s rival (Ovid, IV 791-803). So outraged by the desecration of her temple, Athena curses Medusa, turning her beautiful hair into snakes. (Why she attacks Medusa rather than the offender, Poseidon, is puzzling.) Thus she turns Medusa into an underworld figure, and thereafter, should a man glance at Medusa, he turns to stone. Medusa, as did Kore, becomes an anima of the underworld (see photo).
Photo 3: Medusa
Not satisfied with turning beautiful Medusa into a feared and ugly monster, Athena then sends Perseus to behead this Gorgon and bring back her head. To avoid looking at Medusa, Perseus sights her in Athena’s polished bronze shield, using it as a mirror. He cuts off Medusa’s head and takes it back to Athena, who puts the snaky head on her aegis (goatskin shield) in order to ward off enemies. Perseus, a heroic figure who slays the demon, can be interpreted also as Athena’s animus, in that he mediates between her conscious ego and the underworld of her unconscious.
Using Athena’s bronze shield as a mirror turns Medusa into a mirror image of Athena – the Looking Glass image, or the opposite. Athena is consciousness (the mind, thought); Medusa is the unconscious (instinct, feeling, body). Medusa’s qualities are non-rational, not within the control of the conscious mind, and can threaten to destroy/disturb the integrity of or paralyse the conscious mind if not incorporated in the right way.
Looking straight into the face of the opposite is crippling, as Psyche finds out when she turns on the light and looks at Eros (Morford & Lenardon, 2003, p.195). Psyche and Eros get along well until she shines a light on the unconscious drive, and then it becomes crippled, or at least wounded, and the relationship founders. These myths imply that the non-rational has a life of its own and cannot be controlled by the conscious intellect without negative results, but should be left alone to complement the conscious attitude.
The configuration of Athena with Medusa’s head on her aegis suggests the conjunction of the conscious with the unconscious, of intellect or ego with the feeling, intuitive, instinctive, hidden aspect of the psyche. Athena was born fully formed and fully armed from the head of Zeus. She is the daughter of Metis, thought. She is therefore the product of the mind or intellect. “Medusa” means “female wisdom” (de Vos, 2003), and traditionally, “female wisdom” means the wisdom of the body, instincts, emotions: the anima’s “chaotic urge to life” and wisdom of “a hidden purpose which seems to reflect a superior knowledge of life’s laws” (Jung, 1954a, pp.30-31). The myth of Athena and Medusa suggests that Athena, the masculine war goddess, has an anima – Medusa. Together they form a whole. Medusa can be seen in a compensatory relationship to Athena: Athena is the ultra-conscious, intellectual, rational sky goddess; her unconscious counterpart is the snaky-haired, sexually-charged “monster” goddess of the underworld – her thwarted, wounded anima, or soul (2).
Many contemporary Jungians are not so kind to Medusa as I am. Therapist Marion Woodman sees Medusa in her female analysands as the unconscious cravings of addiction (Woodman, 1982, pp.8-9), the negative mother (Woodman, 1982, pp.67-69), a petrifying force creating within a negative masculinity (Woodman, 1982, pp.178-181). Michael Vannoy Adams is kinder, but still sees her as a negative force which terrifies (petrifies) men (Adams, 2001, pp.25-26). If we accept that the sky gods of the nomadic Indo European herders, who migrated into the Middle East and Mediterranean between 3000 and 2000 BCE, usurped and subjugated the pre-Indo European agricultural deities of Greece which were predominantly female (3), then we might see Medusa as an agricultural goddess of fertility (snakes), and Athena’s appropriation of her head as an attempt to integrate and liberate her own unconscious, pre-patriarchal femininity (Shearer, 1996, pp.60-73). The curse on Medusa is not Medusa’s doing, but the curse of an ‘animus-ridden’ woman. Athena, identified with her patriarchal, Indo-European father, Zeus, tries to recapture what Zeus, the masculine principle, in her has denied and destroyed.
In our contemporary society, Athena can be interpreted as a highly masculinised woman who curses and mutilates her own femininity and then wears it on her chest to repulse male advances. Or in pan-religious iconic terms, Athena as an owl captures and devours Medusa as a snake. The bird and snake relationship is archetypal in itself, and forms the basis of many myths about the union or complementary/compensatory relationship of opposites (Mundkur, 1983, pp.95-109). In China, the dance between the stork and the snake forms the inspiration behind the moves of Tai Chi (4).
In teasing out multiple meanings of the Athena vs. Medusa myth, Medusa seems to be a Kore, demonised by the intellect’s rejection of feminine beauty and sexuality, and persecuted by the conscious intellect, with its a-sexual, non-instinctive, ideals – the Apollonian as opposed to the Dionysian principle (Paris, 1986, pp.25-32; 1990/2003, pp.22-24). In the ancient world, Apollo represented the pagan logos, Dionysus the instincts. Athena, therefore, is a female version of the Apollo principle – logos, mind, reason, intellect. These are the qualities of the sky, divorced from the chthonic world of instinct and non-rational human nature – without soul, hence Athena’s struggle with and ambivalent relationship to her own anima, Medusa.
The goddess Isis of Egypt is far removed from the battle-loving or sex-denying Athena. First, she is a wife, then a mother, and then a universal mother who nurtures and protects her son, Horus, and her human devotees. She suffers along with all women, as they nurse and protect their children from snakes, scorpions, and life’s vicissitudes. Her wings and hawk image place her in the sky, as a mediating deity between humanity and the highest god, Re, over whom she has considerable influence, having cured him of snakebite in exchange for knowing his name. In a sense, she can be seen as Re’s anima – conniving, tricky, imperious, powerful.
While Isis fiercely defends her son Horus, as Demeter fiercely protects Persephone, Isis does not inflict suffering on humanity, as the earth goddesses often do. Isis protects, heals, and intervenes with fate and the actions of higher, often hostile powers (Corrington, 1989, p.397). She is renowned for healing snake and scorpion bites, curing her young son of bites, scalds, burns, other afflictions, and defending him against threats to his person and status. Isis lactans, the nursing mother, is portrayed in sculptures, and was worshiped in shrines, and petitioned by suffering and worried mothers (5). C.J. Bleeker describes her as a saviour goddess – one who bridges the cleft between the human and remote divine worlds, suffers with them, exhibits human feelings, and offers victory over death (Bleeker, 1963). Where sky goddess Athena protects warriors, Isis protects the common people: “It was assumed that Isis knew every spell which could avert danger and make life prevail over death” (Bleeker, 1963, p.5).
Like Athena, though, Isis has another dimension, and like Athena, this dimension is her involvement with the underworld. Isis gives birth to Horus, who is the infant king – the human Egyptian king is the incarnation of Horus on the Throne. Unlike Athena, she does not deny her sexuality, but like Athena, the locus of her sexuality is in the underworld. For Isis, the source of her power also comes from the underworld.
Isis’ husband and brother is Osiris, who contests Seth for the Egyptian throne. Seth wins the battle and dismembers Osiris, strewing his body parts across the land. Grieving Isis, supported by her sister Nephthys, gathers up her husband’s remains, puts them back together, brings them back to life in the embalming chamber, and positioning herself above him, impregnates herself on his erect phallus, engendering their son, Horus. Osiris, however, never returns to the world of the living, and instead, remains king, but king of the underworld or afterlife. Isis spends her remaining days defending the right of Horus to his father’s throne against the claims and attacks of Seth.
Isis is a mother goddess, but a mother goddess of the sky. She displays no anima sexuality; she is devoted to her husband and couples with no being, divine or human, after he dies. In many ways, she can be compared to the Christian Mary, a mother with a divine child, but not a sexually-charged being. Although Isis is a sky goddess, she mediates between humanity and the underworld – consciousness and unconsciousness. Looking at the Isis story in this light brings a fertile flood of possible meanings: the conscious and unconscious energies united in Horus, who governs humanity; Isis defends this union against the attack of the ambitious ego as personified by Seth; Isis represents wholeness, the union of opposites, victory over unconsciousness but the integration of conscious and unconscious forces. Like the earth mothers, she is uncompromising and ferocious in defence, but unlike the earth mothers, she does not catch the innocent in her fury.
Mesopotamian Inanna/Ishtar represents another kind of sky anima/mother. While in the Epic of Gilgamesh she claims to be the mother of humanity (Dalley, 1989b, p.113), she is anything but a mother. She never has a child, seduces many lovers, bringing about their deaths, and renews her virginity every year. Her most known image is an Akkadian winged war goddess with horns, although the earliest Sumerian images of her depict her as an agricultural deity – an earth rather than sky goddess. But even as an earth goddess of fecundity, she is no mother. She is more the seductive anima, luring men to their demise, like the Lorelei or nixies of the underworld, and as the Akkadian sky goddess of war, she is even more lethal.
In the Epic of Gilgamesh we learn that Inanna expects to marry this future king. However, he knows her character, refuses her, comparing her to “a draughty door”, a leaky “waterskin”, “a shoe which bites into [the foot]” (Dalley, 1989b, p.78). He goes on to list the men she has married and destroyed, one way or another. Insulted and enraged, she goes to her father, An, the Sky God, to demand that he release the bull of heaven in order to destroy Gilgamesh, otherwise she will smash the doors of the underworld and let out the dead (Dalley, 1989b, p.80). One can understand why Gilgamesh turned her down. She is the ultimate femme fatal – the ultimate anima.
However, she is the Queen of Heaven and a sky goddess, and as such, she has a benign side that ensures the fertility and fecundity of life. Each New Year, she regains her virginity, couples with the King and renews life. After the great flood and the destruction of humanity, she promises never to allow such a catastrophe to happen again, and gives her lapis lazuli necklace (rainbow) as proof of her promise (Dalley, 1989b, p.114). In this myth, she seems to undergo a transformation from the unpredictable, chaotic anima to the protective, caring mother. After she completes this transformation, Gilgamesh returns from his adventures to marry her. They have both matured, and together they rule their people: he as the terrestrial king, she as the nurturing, fecund sky mother.
Like the other two sky goddesses we have discussed – Athena and Isis – Inanna/Ishtar also has an intimate relationship with the underworld. It seems these goddesses just cannot do without it. Not satisfied with being Queen of Heaven and Mistress of all Things, Inanna decides to visit her sister Ereshkigal, Queen of the Underworld, some say with the intention of usurping her position and taking control of the Underworld as well. The famous poem, “Inanna’s Descent to the Nether World” (Kramer, 1961 [1944], pp.83-96), describes Inanna’s visit to her sister(6). Unexpectedly, Inanna is forced to undress in seven stages until she reaches her sister, completely naked. Ereshkigal, outraged at the intrusion, hangs Inanna on a meat hook and refuses to release her until she supplies a substitute. In some versions of the myth, Inanna is allowed to return to the world of the living to obtain this substitute, and when she finds her husband, Dumuzi, enjoying himself rather than lamenting her loss, she sends him to the underworld in her place. In other versions of the story, Dumuzi’s grief-stricken sister offers to replace Dumuzi for six months of the year. This is another example of the frequently found myth of the dying agricultural god, but told in a way which can be interpreted as the fateful engagement with the archetype of the anima – the relationship Gilgamesh initially refused.
In engaging with the underworld, Inanna also connects the underworld to the world of the living. Like Demeter, she establishes the rhythms of the seasons, in which the world of fecundity renews itself annually. Every year she renews her virginity, and the power of the king, expressed as her counterpart, Dumuzi, is renewed annually. Inanna’s character is complicated by her dual anima/mother role. While she displays the typical ambivalence and ‘bi-polar’ nature of the anima, in her role as mother, she matures from a fearsome, unpredictable earth-type mother goddess, who destroys her children, into the nurturing, protective sky goddess, who jointly rules with the king, and like Isis, exercises much of her motherly power through the throne.
The common theme in these stories of sky goddesses who appropriate the underworld is Jung’s union of opposites: not so much as a syzygy (Jung, 1954b, p.59; 1959), through their union with entities of the opposite sex, for Athena is an eternal virgin, but through their embrace of the underworld by appropriating an underworld entity, such as Medusa, coupling with an underworld king, such as Osiris, or trying to usurp an underworld deity’s throne, such as that of Ereshkigal. The most conscious of the deities unites with the unconscious or subconscious to create a whole. This union can be symbolised by the union of male and female, the syzygy, but takes place within the individual, where unconscious contents are brought into consciousness and incorporated – the union of the rational with the non-rational, the intellect with the emotions and instincts, for Jung, the process of individuation which results in wholeness. The union of opposites is an archetypal theme played out in the lives of individuals and the mythical behaviour of the gods.
Conclusion
I feel I have barely touched the surface of this subject. Every culture has its myths, legends, and religious stories, and this study, both Part 1 and Part 2, draws from a limited group of mythologies in order to illustrate briefly the application of Jung’s categories of the archetypes of the anima and the mother. Dividing the archetypes into three realms – those of the underworld, the earth, and the sky – is convenient but encounters the usual problems with categories, that is, they often overlap. But in this case, the overlaps parallel the permeability of the three levels of consciousness explored by Jung – the unconscious, the ego, and the Self, the Self being the whole mind rather than the limited, conscious ego.
In exploring these female archetypes, we see the interrelation of the three realms. The mother is both conscious protector, spiritual guide, and nurturer, while at the same time the unconscious forces of birth and death, life and destruction. The anima lurks in the unconscious, wielding her supernatural power to drive our lives either towards mystical knowledge, consciousness and individuation, or towards oblivion in sensual urges. The sky mothers and animas can transcend the body and ego, but in so many myths, they crave balance through the experience of the underworld, the unconscious drives of the instincts and the non-rational, and through this unity, express a balanced whole. For Jung, these myths and entities express the complex reality of the individual self, incorporating the unconscious mind and the conscious ego, mediated by archetypal soul forces in the psyche, which try to unite them. The interrelationships between the archetypes represent the unity and interdependence of the parts of the Self that make up a whole.
Notes
(1) All sculptures and photos are by the author. More examples can be seen on:
http://www-personal.une.edu.au/~rrelke
(2) Jungians will also see Medusa as Athena’s shadow, an archetype which personifies in the unconscious as a figure of the same gender. It contains the opposite qualities to the ego, especially those qualities that the ego sees as unattractive or negative. The ego casts a shadow, made up of repressed negative qualities, which are then projected onto the eternal world as undesirable or evil people, ideas, or objects. Or Medusa may be the shadow of Athena’s anima, in a similar manner to Adam’s suggestion that the “terrible” mother is the shadow of the Great Mother (Adams, 2001, p.210).
(3) The discovery of thousands of Neolithic figurines, predominantly female, in this and other areas of the Near and Middle East, suggest rituals focused on women or the belief in important female spiritual entities (Relke, 2002, pp.69-81).
(4) Anyone familiar with Tai Chi will know the movements of “snake creeps down” and “stork spreads its wings”.
(5) For a succinct summary of the myths of Isis, see Anthes (1961, pp.68-85) and Watterson (1984, pp.89-131).
(6) Also translated as “The Descent of Ishtar to the Underworld” (Dalley, 1989a, pp.154-162).
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