The Christian deity is one in three persons.
In Eastern symbolism the square—signifying the earth in China, the padma or lotus in India—has the character of the yoni: femininity. A man’s unconscious is likewise feminine and is personified by the anima.
The anima also stands for the “inferior” function66 and for that reason frequently has a shady character; in fact she sometimes stands for evil itself.
She is as a rule the fourth person (cf. dreams 10, 11, 15; pars. 136, 147, 162).
She is the dark and dreaded maternal womb (fig. 74), which is of an essentially ambivalent nature.
The Christian deity is one in three persons.
The fourth person in the heavenly drama is undoubtedly the devil.
In the more harmless psychological version he is merely the inferior function.
On a moral tamen in corpore occultatam Evam sive foeminam suam secum circumfert”
(As the shadow continually follows the body of one who walks in the sun, so our hermaphroditic Adam, though he appears in the form of a male, nevertheless always carries about with him Eve, or his wife, hidden in his body).
valuation he is a man’s sin, a function belonging to him and presumably masculine.
The feminine element in the deity is kept very dark, the interpretation of the Holy Ghost as Sophia being considered heretical. Hence the Christian metaphysical drama, the “Prologue in Heaven,” has only masculine actors, a point it shares with many of the ancient mysteries.
But the feminine element must obviously be somewhere—so it is presumably to be found in the dark.
At any rate that is where the ancient Chinese philosophers located it: in the yin.
Although man and woman unite they nevertheless represent irreconcilable opposites which, when activated, degenerate into deadly hostility.
This primordial pair of opposites symbolizes every conceivable pair of opposites that may occur: hot and cold, light and dark, north and
south, dry and damp, good and bad, conscious and unconscious.
In the psychology of the functions there are two conscious and therefore masculine functions, the differentiated function and its auxiliary, which are represented in dreams by, say, father and son, whereas the unconscious functions appear as mother and daughter.
Since the conflict between the two auxiliary functions is not nearly as great as that between the differentiated and the inferior function, it is possible for the third function—that is, the unconscious auxiliary one—to be raised to consciousness and thus made masculine.
It will, however, bring with it traces of its contamination with the inferior function, thus acting as a kind of link with the darkness of the unconscious.
It was in keeping with this psychological fact that the Holy Ghost should be heretically interpreted as Sophia, for he was the mediator of birth in the flesh, who enabled the deity to shine forth in the darkness of the world.
No doubt it was this association that caused the Holy Ghost to be suspected of femininity, for Mary was the dark earth of the field
—
“ilia terra virgo nondum pluviis irrigata” (that virgin earth not yet watered by the rains), as Tertullian called her. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 192
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog