This world is already of vast extent as the world of Eros
Thus the hero’s rescue of the captive corresponds to the discovery of a psychic world.
This world is already of vast extent as the world of Eros, embracing everything that man has ever done for woman, everything that he has xperienced and created for her sake.
The world of art, of epic deeds, poesy, and song which revolves round the liberated captive spreads out like a virgin continent that has broken away from the world of the First Parents.
Great tracts of human culture, and not of art alone, spring from this interplay and counterplay of the sexes, or rather, of masculine and feminine. But the symbolism associated with the rescue of the captive goes even further.
For, with the liberation of the captive, a portion of the alien, hostile, feminine world of the unconscious enters into friendly alliance with the man’s personality, if not actually with his consciousness.
Personality is built up largely by acts of introjection: contents that were before experienced outside are taken inside.
Such “external objects,” as well as being contents of the objective world without, i.e., things and persons, can also be contents of the psychic world of objects within.
In this sense the liberation of the captive and the dismemberment of the dragon mean not merely an “analysis” of the unconscious, but its assimilation, resulting in the formation of the anima as one authority within the personality. ― Erich Neumann, Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 205
We are always other to each other — soul meeting soul, the body awakened with joy.
Pauli died in 1958 without completing his work in “micro-physics.”
What his journey was demanding of him in his work with Jung and von Franz was not merely the masculine advancement of new hypotheses about the nature of matter, but a life lived “beyond reading the notes to hearing the music.”
The unconscious seemed to be asking him to bring into life the balance of the opposites that he saw modeled in the new hypotheses.
Wolf speculates that Pauli’s death “may mean that now he really knows the truth about exis- tence.”
In this world, however, Pauli remains one of those giant male visionaries, along with Milton, Blake, Keats, and Shelley, who, despite their vision of the Feminine that inspired their best work, were at least partially bound to an oppressive patriarchy.
As a result, their unconscious projections onto the women they “loved” made genuine relationship almost impossible.
Pauli’s dreams echo other dreams presented in this book.
Dreams point toward the center, the point where matter and spirit meet and do not meet.
This is the point of the judgment of Maat.
For me the dark eternal woman in her many guises is the bridge to the Self. For women, she is the feminine part of the Self.
In both genders, she is the creative matrix that gives birth to the new order.
Here is the meeting of soul and spirit (feminine and masculine) in a new conjunctio.
From this center point, we can perceive the world in its complementarity and indivisibility, the opposites no longer in opposition.
We hold the opposites—the mystery within which the unknown is operating.
This is the point where love becomes possible.
We see the other with the eye of the heart, an eye not clouded by fear manifesting as need, jealousy, possessiveness, or manipulation.
With the unclouded eye of the heart, we can see the other as other.
We can rejoice in the other, challenge the other, and embrace the other without losing our own center or taking anything away from the other.
We are always other to each other — soul meeting soul, the body awakened with joy.
To love unconditionally requires no contracts, bargains, or agreements. Love exists in the moment-to-moment flux of life. ~Marion Woodman, Dancing in the Flames, Page 221
