[paypal_donation_button border=”5″]
The Dream of Poliphilo by Linda Fierz=David
The inner development of women takes a course parallel to that of men, and their inner situation today is very like that of the men.
Their intense participation in the collective consciousness of our time comes out most clearly, perhaps, in the fact of woman suffrage.
There is certainly no obvious reason why women should not vote, just like the men, since the contents of their consciousness and their unconscious implications coincide very largely with those of the men.
The “other side” of women’s life is governed by the animus instead of the anima, and manifests itself in preconceived opinions and fanatical activities.
As in the man, there stands behind it the archetypal image of a psychopompos such as appears most clearly, for instance, in Greek mythology in the figure of Hermes.
An analysis of that divinity-in its phallic aspect, as god of the winds, as servant and messenger of the gods, as robber, cheat, and thief, as god of trade and speech, as inventor, as the guide of souls and the dead, as protector of heroes and saviour of divine children, and as god of dreams and sleep-might be instructive for the comprehension of the male element in women.
As the anima incorporates the breath of the man’s soul, watery and cloudlike, the animus incorporates the ghostlike mind of women.
Those emotions and passions which are, in a sense, the “outriders” of every content of the psyche, are often much more distinctly visible in women than in men.
That is why the “mana personalities” appearing in the world attract with peculiar force their passionate adoration or equally passionate hatred.
But the passion is not really for the man in question, but for the archetypal image projected on to him.
We might say in a general way that women, even when they are very independent (or at any rate feel very independent), tend to transfer spiritual leadership to a man.
Because their spiritual activity lies more in darkness, they let men act for them.
By mysterious machinations they foment men’s illusions, and when a man is borne aloft in some premature apotheosis, we shall often find, on closer inquiry, that it is a woman who has sent him up there.
We might e\ren wonder whether the extraordinary power and greatness in which the image of the Leader has appeared all over the world of today has not been occasioned mainly by the secret, quite unconscious action of women.
They really need a leader if they are to find their way out of the world of a flattened and dissipated consciousness.
But the source of renewal, for them as for men, cannot lie in the outer world.
For the woman too, the only legitimate way out of the slavery of one-sidedness is individuation.
It leads through the uneasy and slippery region of the shadow, behind which there stands a daemon with a magic wand, possessed
of great knowledge and smiling a kindly, crafty smile, the messenger and servant of the gods. ~Linda Fierz David, The Dreams of Poliphilo: The Soul in Love, Page 242-242
