Ricki Stefanie Tannen: Where Have All The Virgins Gone?
Where have all the virgins gone?
As I understand the virgin archetype, it is that aspect of the feminine, in man or woman, that has the courage to Be and the flexibility to be always Becoming. (Woodman 1985: 78)
There was a time when the archetypal energies of authority, autonomy, and agency were available for integration into a woman’s psyche.
She was called the woman unto herself and known as a virgin.
This virginal energy was repressed and disassociated from identification with women during the emergence of institutionalized patriarchy over 4,000 years ago.
It is now re-emerging through the archetypal energy of the postmodern female Trickster.
This Trickster energy can be accessed by women through the act of reading or through participation in ritual activities, such as rock concerts.
In these settings, the archaic archetypal memory is constellated as an epiphany of something long waiting to appear, an evocation of something expecting to be called (Brann 1991: 737).
It is through the imaginative cognitive act of remembering the virgin archetypal energy that the energy of the woman unto herself is being resurrected in the guise of the postmodern female Trickster.
Memory is critical to the psyche’s healthy dynamic.
Storytelling is the strategic imaginative method of implanting memory.
The power of memory was recognized in Ancient Greece by the goddess Mnemosyne, who ruled over the Elysian Fields.
The nine daughters of Mnemosyne and Zeus are the muses.
Thalia, the muse of comedy, is imaged with a Trickster’s mask as she playfully composed comedy and ironic poetry.
The muses were women unto themselves.
According to the myth, upon death a person chooses to drink from either the River Lethe or the spring of memory.
If you drink from Lethe, you forget your pain and all the lessons of your life and are reborn again on earth.
Those who choose to drink from the
ring of memory go to the Elysian Fields, where there is no strife or pain.
The myth tells us that the path to psychological integration comes from a willingness to value and interact with memory.
Those who repress memory are doomed to repeat it, over and over again.
This is what has happened in the symbolic patriarchal order—the repression of disassociation along with its grim reaper: war, slavery, and destruction of the natural world.
It does not matter whether a memory is based on temporal phenomena and lived experience or from the imaginal realms.
Both can impact a person’s daily existence.
Whether one experiences phenomena through the five senses or through the imagination, it can be nearly the same experience because neurobiology and art meet in the psyche (Ackerman 2004: 68).
Conscious memory is stored in the hippocampus.
Unconscious memories are stored in the amygdala or unconscious reptilian brain stem.
Memory retrieval from the conscious hippocampus must be alchemically mixed with those memories resident and accessible to unconsciousness.
These are the kinds of memories which, if constellated, can compensate for a dangerously unbalanced epoch.
Memory has two ancestral lines—one stretching into the temporal past and the other into a depth that is both felt and named by analogy to that past.
The imagination has the power to join these two tributaries into a popular cultural flow.
This flow can rebalance the dangerously one-sided epoch called patriarchy.
The pre-patriarchal virgin—the feminine archetypal energy as woman unto herself—is an inner attitude of a woman’s psyche.
It has no counterpart in the male psyche.
This energy is found in the fictive female sleuths already discussed, along with other postmodern virginal women such as Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City.
In the same way the woman who is virgin, one-in-herself, does what she does—not because of any desire to please, not to be liked, or to be approved, even by herself; not because of any desire to gain power over another, to catch his interest or love, but because what she does is true.
Her actions may, indeed, be unconventional.
She may have to say no, when it would be easier, as well as more adapted, conventionally speaking, to say yes.
But as virgin she is not influenced by the considerations that make the non-virgin woman, whether married or not, trim her sails and adapt herself to expediency.
I say whether married or not, for in using this term virgin in its psychological connotations, it refers not to external circumstances but to an inner attitude.
This flow can rebalance the dangerously one-sided epoch called patriarchy.
The pre-patriarchal virgin—the feminine archetypal energy as woman unto herself—is an inner attitude of a woman’s psyche.
It has no counterpart in the male psyche.
This energy is found in the fictive female sleuths already discussed, along with other postmodern virginal women such as Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, and Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City.
In the same way the woman who is virgin, one-in-herself, does what she does—not because of any desire to please, not to be liked, or to be approved, even by herself; not because of any desire to gain power over another, to catch his interest or love, but because what she does is true.
Her actions may, indeed, be unconventional.
She may have to say no, when it would be easier, as well as more adapted, conventionally speaking, to say yes.
But as virgin she is not influenced by the considerations that make the non-virgin woman, whether married or not, trim her sails and adapt herself to expediency.
I say whether married or not, for in using this term virgin in its psychological connotations, it refers not to external circumstances but to an inner attitude.
A woman who has a psychological attitude to life which makes her dependent on what other people think, which makes her do and say things she really does not approve, is no virgin in this meaning of the term.
She is not one-in-herself but acts always as female counterpart or synergy to some male.
This “male” may be an actual man, her father, or husband, or some man whose opinion she esteems very highly, or it may be some quite abstract idea of what people think, or an even more remote opinion, formulating itself as one must do this to be liked, or a girl should act thus and so if she wants to get married.
These ideas and opinions are manifestations of the male within her, her own animus, and she is related to this psychological male in much the same way as many married women are related to their husbands.
A woman with such an attitude is not one-in-herself, she is dependent upon someone or something outside her own psyche.
Her qualities and characteristics are determined by that other, just as the characteristics of the Egyptian goddess Nut were dependent on those of her syzygy Nu, or the Latin Fauna on Faunus.
The woman who is psychologically virgin is not dependent in this way.
She is what she is because that is what she is.
(Harding 1955: 125–126)
Jungian theorist and analyst Marion Woodman brings the emerging archetype of the virgin into postmodernity with her examples of Cyndi Lauper and Madonna, who does what she does … because what she does is true.
Woodman’s description of Cyndi Lauper as auto-eroticism … gypsy garb … manic energy and gentle sensitivity … the outsider reveals her Trickster nature, as does Madonna’s playing the paradox for all its worth employing a boy-toy.
Woodman sees Lauper and Madonna playing a decisive role in constellating millions of unconscious virgins, male and female … they are concretized versions of an archetype … still in the process of becoming conscious in the culture as a whole.
Emphasizing their role in carrying and releasing new energy into the culture for integration, Woodman calls them the virgin forever pregnant with new possibilities. (Woodman 1985: 76)
There it is, a definition of t
he female Trickster brought to the world through a female imagination.
The sexuality is there as well as the performance through the spectacle of theater, but humor is in the foreground.
These women are not con artist Tricksters, although some thought Madonna was one.
A con artist does not have a sense of humor pervading their persona, and both Madonna and Lauper exude a Trickster-like humor about what they are doing.
In so doing, they initiate change by asking questions and encouraging others to ask questions about their own lives.
V.I., Kinsey, Kate, and Blanche, along with Trickster artists such as Lauper and Madonna, provide an example of how an old myth grows into contemporary relevance through the imagination of the individual expressing the unconscious need of their time.
(Luke 1986: 51)
There is a strong tradition within Jungian psychology of using archaic goddess myths to heal and empower the feminine.
These stories, from so many differing sources, can be used as divination tools which encourage women to use their own imaginations to heal themselves.
It is the images and stories of these goddesses in their very human actualities—as depressives, as raging, as fearful but active in the world anyway—that inspires.
Susan Rowland in Jung: A Feminist Revision (2002) agrees that Jungian goddess feminism can be seen in a more postmodern way … as a kind of experiment in the imagination rather than as some grand theory.
(Rowland 2002: 48)
Rowland’s work is significant because she has differentiated anima–animus, Eros, and goddess feminism within the Jungian orientation.
But it is her perspective of how a reconnection with the goddesses of memory can heal which is synonymous with my perspective regarding the virgin energy returning to the postmodern world in the guise of the female Trickster.
Jungian goddess feminists reject the unifying energy posited in the self archetype and latch onto its plurality, including that of gender ….
In goddess feminism, the metaphysical feminine principle is mapped onto pre-Christian mythologies in order to seek out non-patriarchal narratives and ways of thinking.
Such feminists remain Jungian when they stay within the Jungian paradigm of theory-into-myth: psychic imagery, theorized as archetypal, is identified with a traditional mythology and vice versa.
Jungian feminists of this creed are not advocating literal goddess worship.
Their divine beings live in the human imagination in the unconscious.
A transcendent existence of goddesses actually “out there” is not considered.
(Rowland 2002: 61)
The energy of the pre-patriarchal virgin—as woman unto herself—was exiled and repressed from patriarchal consciousness millennia ago.
The memory of this kind of feminine energy has been held inchoate, but always waiting to be recalled and remembered.
Sometimes the route back is through the archaic mythological images routinely used in analysis.
Sometimes it is through a relevant new metaphor from popular culture.
Both are routes of healing which transit through the imaginal real realms, gaining energy which can be expended in terrains where bodily autonomy, physical agency, and psychological authority embodied in a female form can roam freely.
Jung said in Modern Man in Search of a Soul: an epoch is like an individual, it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment (Jung 1933: 166).
To Jung it was not important that the adjustment should result in good or evil.
The healing of the epoch or its destruction was irrelevant to the psychological collective process of compensation.
Nancy Chodorow (1978) has emphasized how patriarchy has repressed the trauma of the break from the past and therefore repressed the memory of a feminine past in order for men to beget men.
Freud and others who speak about pre-Oedipal situations obscure how critical that period is to the development of a healthy psyche.
Freud thought that the pre-Oedipal was as great a discovery as realizing that the foundation for Greek culture was to be found in the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures.
From a feminist perspective, patriarchy is a traumatic rupture with autonomous self-creation, with separation and independence as the inducement for serving patriarchal and capitalistic values and imperatives.
Masculinity from the view of the pre-patriarchal virgin is reactionary and incredibly fragile, as Martha Nussbaum’s The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (1986) elegantly demonstrates.
The compensation for the deferred gratification of patriarchal logos is an Eros of violence—not against the structure itself of patriarchy but against new growth, as symbolized by a son, whether it be Laius against Oedipus, Abraham against Isaac, or Christianity’s God the Father against Jesus.
Woodman (1985) also es how rock concerts (like carnival and Mardi Gras) can be ritual performance spaces where transformation occurs.
She sees the process of transformation inherent in the image of the pregnant virgin as dependent upon ritual—but not the kind of ritual we are familiar with in religious observance.
Woodman illustrates with reference to rock concerts and the accouterments of ritual that are there, such as masks, jewelry, tattooing, ritual garments, suggestive symbols, dance—all these held together by the insistence of the musical beat and the shriek of heavily amplified guitars (Woodman 1985: 75).
In an interview (New York Times Magazine, p. 14, April 16, 2006), Lauper says that her megahit Girls Just Want to Have Fun was not a backlash: It’s a song about entitlement. Why can’t women have fun?
Those who have reinvigorated anima–animus theory include Esther Harding (1955, 1961), Emma Jung (1957), Linda Fierz-David (1988),
Irene Claremont de Castillejo (1973), Marion Woodman (1982), Polly Young-Eisendrath (1984, 1987), and Claire Douglas (1990).
Rowland (2002) finds that this group of female Jungian theorists have, through extension and revision, dealt successfully with Jung’s problematic concept of animus and anima.
She applauds these women writers who, working from Jung’s depiction of the animus as plural and negative, have produced a revised version of an animus capable of being unitary and positive (Rowland 2002: 50).
On the role of Eros in Jungian feminism, Rowland places those who have used amplification to extend Jung’s work on Eros and the feminine principle.
She finds that this mainstream direction in Jungian feminism serves to accentuate the binary approach to gender while allowing for cultural influences in the lives of actual women and men (Rowland 2002: 54).
Rowland finds areas within the Eros sub-grouping to both praise and criticize.
Despite the theoretical severing of sex and gender from the archetypal principles, most writers see women as likely to be more attuned to the feminine principle, men to the masculine.
On the other hand, embracing the binary approach of the feminine principle does allow for profound critiques of masculine-dominated corporate capitalist existence on a social level.
I
t permits attacks upon the limitations of Christianity as over-masculine and predatory upon a nature defined as feminine.
(Rowland 2002: 55)
Rowland (2002) includes in this Eros/feminine principle school the work of Toni Wolff (1934), Erich Neumann (1963, 1994), June Singer (1973, 1976), and E.C. Whitmont and S.B. Perera (1989).
In this group, Rowland places Ginette Paris (1992), Sylvia Brinton Perera (1981), Christine Downing (1984), Linda Schierse Leonard (1982, 1993), and Nancy Qualls-Corbett (1988).
These theorists have been influential in my own work, in the way they have resurrected the images and narratives of the goddesses and thereby have encouraged women and men to think differently about the feminine than how it has been imaged and interpreted throughout the hegemony of patriarchal consciousness.
Their work is a bridge to revisioning the feminine in the same way that the fictive female sleuth is in the following ways.
Paris’s (1992) work demonstrates the feminist potential of using a non-Christian narrative to structure thinking on a deeply contentious personal, political, and social issue, that of abortion.
Perera’s (1981) retelling of the Inanna myth in her Descent to the Goddess provides an alternative to viewing dark, repressed feminine pain as an abyss of inferiority … thus reshaping depressive mental states as potentially empowering women (Rowland 2002: 62).
Christine Downing’s (1984) work shows the potential of pagan narratives to produce more plural and active forms of feminine imagery than Jung’s apparently more static images (Rowland 2002: 63).
Linda Schierse Leonard takes the demeaning stereotype of the deviant crazy female and uses it as an image of psychic empowerment. It becomes a way of understanding female rage within patriarchy (Rowland 2002: 64).
Nancy Qualls-Corbett’s The Sacred Prostitute (1988) allows men and women to imagine more plural forms of sexual practice and social codification contained in the tales of the goddesses (Rowland 2001: 64).
These Jungian writers serve up inspiration which supports my view that modern myth can reimagine the feminine as much as archaic goddess energy can. ~Ricki Stefanie Tannen, The Female Trickster: The Mask that Reveals, Page 72-77
Carl Jung Depth Psychology Blog
#AnalyticalPsychology #DepthPsychology #CarlJung #TheUnconscious #JungianPsychology #Psyche #JungianConcepts #PsychologicalType #Archetypes #Individuation