Last year, I think it was, I dreamed I was on a ship and a strange-looking woman with orange wildly flyaway hair and the protuberant eyebrows one often sees in old men was helping me dress for dinner.
Later in that dream, she was going downstairs hugging a man in a black jacket (I never saw his face, but she turned to me with a very mischeivous smile), and I got the impression that they were interconnected, that he and she were one person. God knows why, but I thought of the goddess Athena who was never so outlandish or playful, as far as I know.
In my youth I was strongly drawn to Athena who represented for me the clear thinking, practical, creative aspects of woman. I came to see her as a level-headed aspect of men’s anima that advises and guides a man who is open to her influence, a guide that keeps Odysseus from becoming yet another egoistic, war-loving, glory-seeking hero, that appreciates his loving relationships with his wife and son, his love of home, and of wisdom.
Yet I wonder whether this particular goddess could also represent a positive aspect of a woman’s inner masculine energy, her animus, my animus, one that could ameliorate or balance the negative animus that has exerted such a big influence over me.
She is for me, after all, a mix of masculine and feminine, born jumping fully armed out of Zeus’ head, child of the Alpha male deity with logos, creativity, ingenuity, rationality, detachment, toughness, and also of mother Metis, goddess of wisdom, creator of crafts, with feminine qualities. Can a being with both male and female qualities serve as the animus in a woman's psyche, I wonder? Must the animus always be male?
Early in life, I came to devalue femininity - its softness, loving, desiring intimate connection and deep feeling aspects - in favour of male qualities that I strove to develop. Girl, woman, lover, mother, I was possessed by a negative animus that told me to be highly suspicious and distrustful of Eros in all its forms, ashamed of my deep feelings, embarrassed by my hidden unexpressed longing for connectedness and intimacy, and see worth only in my intellect and intellectual acheivements. It has taken years of inner work to be able to finally recognise the necessity of Eros and to surrender to its energies.
But now, the negative animus is making itself felt again as a strong, judgmental resistance to the Eros energy that I have finally embraced and am working with. This negative animus speaks as an inner critic, a ‘voice of reason,’ sarcastic, derisive, fear-promoting, blaming, and some days, I find it very hard to ignore.
Marie-Louise von Franz in The Way of the Dream has been helping me to see its action on me more clearly “The negative animus mainly manifests as an opinionated resistance against having feelings of love,” she says and “The worst about it is that she experiences it as if she thinks it herself…. It thinks in her.”
So. That criticism is not my inner wisdom talking, as I had once thought, because my inner wisdom is telling me in all ways to embrace Eros, whatever it brings - positive and negative. It is the archetype thinking itself in me: I do not have to accept what it says.
Now what would Athena say?
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