I am surrounded by wolves. I feel them running around me, pushing me forward, their bodies hard and breath hot on my skin. I am not frightened, because one of my animal guides, Lobo, runs with them, close by.
Lobo is a wolf who entered my dream a couple years ago and has helped me to recognise unpleasant and difficult aspects of myself. Though he is now dear to me, a companion, Lobo is not the sweet-faced, metaphysical symbol of femininity, or peace and love that one finds all over the internet. He is like the “growling wolf within, the iron grim” described so well by C.G. Jung's colleague, Marie-Louise Von Franz. I wrote about that in my chapter of the book, Psychological and Philosophical Studies of Jung's Teleology: The Future-Orientation of Mind, edited by Garth Admunson, from which the following passages are taken.
" “The wolf … often represents a capacity which is very closely connected with people who have a wolf problem, namely, a general, all-devouring greed ….. the wolf is always the victim of his hungry stomach. When that gets the better of him, he loses all intelligence ….. In his paper on the transference …[Jung] says the very often such a terrific greed awakes in people that they want to eat everybody and everything - for example, to eat their analyst completely. It is not even on the level of a sexual transference, but on an even more primitive level, for it is to “have” the other: to have everything…… This great desire to eat everything is very often the result of great frustration in childhood, which had built up a kind of bitter resentment on one side, combined with the greedy desire to have and eat everything. The “grim” then is a kind of sulky resentment because one can’t have the thing. …. They get caught in a kind of vicious circle of cold resentment and greed, which is often fittingly symbolised by the wolf” (von Franz, 1990, pp. 202-203)."
She was describing an aspect of me, that part of the inner child who still felt that resentment and insatiable longing. Continuing:
".....Wolf is also an "initiating animal; he has this significance in Canto I of Dante's Inferno" (1970b, P.39, p. 141). In his mid-life and a 'dark night of the soul,' Dante finds himself in a dark forest looking for "the straightforward pathway," and thinks to take a mountain path that seemed to lead up to the light. But "almost where the ascent began," he finds his way blocked by a panther, then a lion, then "a she-wolf, that with all her hungerings Seemed to be laden in her meagreness… brought upon me so much heaviness…Which, coming on me by degrees Thrust me thither where the sun is silent.""
(art: Antonello Vinditti)
"The shade of the poet Virgil appears, full of harsh words about the wolf that blocks the way upward and offers to guide Dante along another road down through hell (Dante, The Inferno, Canto 1). Only by going into the dark place of the unconscious where he will encounter the shadow side of humanity and himself can Dante climb to the light.
"At first we cannot see beyond the path that leads downward to dark and hateful things," writes Jung ".. but no light or beauty will ever come from the man who cannot bear this sight" (Jung, 1955, p. 215). So must we all who want to redeem our lost souls go into the dark shadow, not voluntarily but pushed onto that road by fear or heaviness of spirit or desperation.
"Virgil reviled the she-wolf that blocked the mountain path, but she was a helper, forcing Dante onto the path he had to go, as Lobo pushed me to where I would rather not go."
and here I am, being pushed again in this inner life, towards I know not what.
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