Freema Gottlieb: The Kabbla, Jung and the Feminine Image
Jung had access through secondary sources to many key concepts of Jewish mysticism.
Especially when it comes to descriptions of the psychic accoutrements of femininity, his entire opus bears the distinctive mark of Kabbalistic influence.
For example, in discussing gradations of consciousness, he uses a terminology similar to that employed by the Jewish mystics when touching upon such religious ideas as holiness and spirituality.
The particular language I am referring to is the vocabulary of light—and by light I mean also darkness and all nuances and shades in between.
Jung resorts to this type of language both when he is talking of fragmentation and reintegration of the human psyche as a whole, and when he is speaking of the male/female dichotomy in particular.
In regard to the latter, he admits freely, as do the Kabbalists, that the feminine anima is as often as not conventionally associated with darkness, negativity, even what we call evil.
What Jung seems to have picked up from the Kabbala is that there is something out of the ordinary, something disturbing, about femininity.
Something that, in a logical clear-cut upstanding universe, both seem to imply, one might have done better without.
And yet, without the feminine, there would be no life at all.
Therefore, a necessary evil…?
In possibly the very first manuscript of the Jewish mystical tradition, the Bahir, the Book of Illumination, written down not earlier than the third century and not later than the sixth, it says that a king (God) had in mind to plant nine masculine palm trees (Sephiroth, emanations) in His garden but realized that, if they all were of the one sex, they would not endure.
So he took the female part of the palm tree and transformed it into an ethrog (citron), a moonlike feminine shape, referred to in the Bible as the Tree of Beauty (Lev. 23:40), and then the entire orchard flourished.
So, in the Sephiroth (the realm of the emanations), Shekhinah or the divine presence, typified as feminine, was the lowest feminine kingship formed.
Jung says something similar, but a touch more derogatory to woman.
He says that originally the members of the Trinity, including the Holy Ghost, were all spiritual, and therefore all male, and that it was considered heretical to define the Holy Ghost as Sophia (divine wisdom), female.
Nevertheless, room had to be found for the feminine.
In the divine drama, there were already shades of a fourth personality, the possibility of evil, but this could be considered masculine, the sin of Adam, or the devil.
But of course it was far more convenient at once to shift the blame for sin upon the victim and to include what was palpably missing, the female, and so, with the entrance of the feminine, as necessary link between spiritual and physical, there is the implication that the way has also been opened for the possibility of evil.
Jung equates this feminine with the Shulamit of the Song of Songs, Jerusalem, the Community of Israel, who introduces herself as ‘black but beautiful’.
On this juxtaposition Jung remarks in his Mysterium Coniunctionis that the heroine ‘comes from the same category as the black goddesses such as Isis, Artemis, Parvati, and the Black Virgin’ (1963:420).
Though Judaism is supposedly a paternalistic religion, in the Kabbala we find possibly the highest compliment to the feminine paid by a monotheistic faith, and yet in this regard it is just compliments that hint at their reverse.
If the Shekhinah, the divine presence per se, is given a female typology, it is, the rabbis insist, only because the entire function of the Shekhinah is in the inferior realms, nature, the physical.
The point about the Shekhinah is that she is the spatialization of spirituality.
If not for the need of substance and square feet, she would telescope back into her Father.
Spatialization or the impregnation of the womb of creation immediately implied feminization, at least as far as the human imagination is concerned, of the divine light itself.
As soon as God required a ‘place’ for His light, the light as it were descended and became feminized.
When dealing with a lexicography of light, one might have been forgiven for believing that in the Kabbala, the Shekhinah would have been all light.
However, because the further the light travels from its source, the dimmer it becomes, paradoxically this is not so, and she is frequently depicted veiled in black garments.
Frequently the matriarchs, especially Rachel, the daughter, have to stoop to deception (the substitution under the wedding canopy of her sister Leah for herself) so that she can have children through ersatz means.
Jung also is well aware that the connotations of the feminine are often far from positive, connected as they are with the shadow side of existence, with darkness, the left, the Other Side, and the lower region.
In the Kabbala, this feminine impulse is law, restriction, form—the threatening power of the womb.
As opposed to masculine grace, generosity, and boundless desire to broadcast sperm, the female stands for the limited powers of receptivity of the natural world.
In herself only slightly darker than the heavenly light, she is not always crystalline or spiritual by any means, but also associated with earth, clay and the grosser forms of materialism.
The darkness which is her sphere is mother to all klippot (husks), shells and veils between the soul and the divine mother of all appetite for self-gratification that leads to mortality.
At this point, we can touch briefly on the notion put forward by the sixteenth-century Kabbalist R. Isaac Luria of Zimzum (a divine contraction and self-darkening).
‘Before all worlds were created’, says Rabbi Chaim Vital, a disciple of Luria, and the one who wrote down his ideas, ‘the Supernal Light…filled all existence, and there was no empty space [that was not filled with light]’ (Ashlag 1969).
Everything was light, everything was God, in fact, and there was no room for the world.
In order to create the world, God had, as it were, to draw back, as one who throws a ball bends back before throwing the ball forward.
When God created the world, His light was concentrated into a single point to form a primal space or vacuum to allow matter to come into being.
First He retracted; then He sent His light back again into the hollow thus formed, drawing out from Himself a mere thread of His infinite light which He spun and spun until ‘He stretches out Heaven as a garment’ (Ps. 104:2).
In relation to God or absolute light (male), this stream of light or divine presence (Shekhinah) and the various receptacles so filled, for example, Israel, the human psyche, the entire created world take on a female typology.
According to R. Luria’s concept of Zimzum, from all His beautiful creation God only created one new thing: ‘He who fashions light and creates darkness’ (Isa. 45:7).
God only created darkness, the darkness that permits the light to be seen, darkness having a negative and ‘feminine’ connotation.
And again, ‘in the beginning’, says the Bible, ‘God said: “Let there be light”’ (Gen. 1:3), which, according to the opening words of the Zohar, the Book of Radiance, the bible of the Kabbala, means: ‘In the beginning God created a Lamp of Darkness’ (1:15a).
Jung’s description of the ‘inferior function’ of the feminine anima within the psyche is based on the Kabbalistic notion of the Shekhinah’s role in cosmology.
She has frequently, says Jung, ‘a shady character; in fact she sometimes stands for evil itself…. She is the dark and dreaded maternal womb which is of an essentially ambivalent nature’ (Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works, vol. 12).
This female ambivalence stems essentially from the fact that the womb-type function of the female makes her a link between physical and spiritual.
If the male represents essence, the female stands for emanation, the divine urge to emanate, to create.
And yet, once one has reached the essence, is not emanation itself a rather thin spreading out of essentials?
If the enigma of the feminine is not taken as outright evil, still it is mysterious, obscure, subconscious.
Therefore, says Jung, while the conscious functions, shared between father and son, are male, the female, mother and daughter, are taken as unconscious.
In this allotment of male/female roles, there is undying hostility, says Jung, between the principles, the father and the mother, consciousness and unconsciousness, but the auxiliaries are weaker, so that it is possible for the third function—the daughter—‘to be raised to consciousness and thus made masculine.
It will, however, bring with it traces of its contamination…thus acting as a kind of link with the darkness of the unconscious’ (p. 152).
The idea borrowed by Jung of the feminine being a mediating presence between conscious and unconscious (the Holy Ghost, Sophia, Mary) is not new in the Kabbala, where, however, the contrasting spheres are between spiritual and physical.
In the case of the Jewish tradition at least the feminine is not viewed as exclusively physical and in need of any type of ‘masculinization’ in order to rise to spiritual heights.
The feminine is as at home in transcendence as in this world!
The idea is that God has, in fact, a feminine receptive part of Him, a kind of consort as the Higher Shekhinah or the Mother, who has an earthly representative in the lower spheres, Rachel, the Community of Israel, or the daughter and, just as the lower Shekhinah fares in the material realms, so fares the Higher Feminine in transcendence.
The whole reason for creation is that, through the efforts of the daughter in the world of substance, God should be reunited with His Shekhinah.
Thus in the Jewish myth, far from the feminine becoming ‘masculine’, she comes into her own by reunion with lost aspects of herself.
~Freema Gottlieb, Jung and the Monotheisms, The Kabbla, Jung and the Feminine Image, Page 53-66 [Excerpt]
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