Archetypes / C.G.Jung / Gnostic / History / Philosophy / Religion / West

Queen, Mother, Wise Woman and Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Feminine


This article complements the concepts explored in my article “Archetypes of the Mature Masculine” and applies them to the other half of humanity—women. In doing so I apply the same principles, not in a mechanistic way, but in the spirit of Jung’s archetypes and their rationale. Let’s start with a few words of C. G. Jung himself, when he talks about the Anima.

Feamaland Male Shadow Triangle

Male Shadow Triangle Source: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette

Thomas Moore and Douglas Gillette adopted and extended Jung’s approach in their exploration of the masculine psyche by using the collective archetypes of the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover. Obviously those four male archetypes can be translated and mapped in female clusters of virtues, specific attributes associated with four major female archetypes: the Queen, the Mother, the Wise Woman and the (female) Lover found in history and  myths. This has been done before.

Jean Shinoda Bolen, a Jungian psychiatrist, published in 1984 “Goddesses in Every Women: A New Psychology of Women”. She came up with seven feminine archetypes, based on ancient Greek mythology. Each Goddess represents a primordial image for women’s personality; they are: Hestia, Athena, Demeter, Aphrodite, Hera, Artemis, Persephone. Jennifer Baker and Roger J., Woolger in 1989 included only six of the Goddesses taking away Hestia. I think that is still a bit inflated, narrow and not powerful enough. I get lost on the many fairies and goddesses, and I miss the most powerful female Archetype – The Mother – of which C.G. Jung had written at great length.

Toni Wolff, colleague and presumable lover of Carl Jung, identified four feminine archetypes:  Mother, the Amazon, the Hetaira, and the Medial.  Wolff at the first glance comes closer, but her model is a male-centered quadruple (male Anima structure) instead a male-female archetype symmetry: This is most evident in Wolff’s definition of the Amazon, who represents more a female in good contact with  her Animus, furthermore the semi-divine Queen is missing, while her Hetaira is not quite a full lover.

Emma Jung, the wife of C.G. Jung, wrote two very concise papers about Animus and Anima. Those two functional complexes represent symmetrically the personality component of the opposite sex and, at the same time the image of the opposite sex. By their fundamental nature, Animus and Anima symbolize primal masculinity and femininity in general. In other words, the Anima figures represent the archetype of the feminine. Emma Jung gives various narratives of the Great Mother like Cybele, of Prophetess and the Love Goddess and animal or mixed human-animal semi-goddess motives like the swan-maiden in the Edda. Emma Jung refers to her husband, stating the male archetype is the one of meaning and the female archetype primarily of life. And indeed, life as such to me is about birth and death – between is wisdom, spirituality and individuation (redemption), if one is unlucky only staring at the Dow Jones.

To me the reproductive Mother archetype is not only neatly symmetrical to the destructive warrior archetype, it is definitely a primary one. No individual is completely masculine or feminine though, good or evil, right or wrong. Tyrants and Weaklings for instance represent an imbalance, a shadow or missing quality of power, a failure to employ virtues, and a negative female Archetype drains away all male energy. Females in myths representing the Anima appear often in multiples e.g. three or nine like the Nordic Valkyries. Quadruple qualities, however, take later in account the important (particularly for C.G. Jung) number four. A quadruple seen by C.G. Jung might be thought of as the cross, a mantra or cardinal points that must be balanced in the fully realized being.

Archetypes

C.G. Jung totally differs from Sigmund Freud and most of his colleagues in that he thought (wo)men as “homo religious”. Freud’s deep fear of spiritualism was rooted in his urge, to establish psychoanalysis as science. Jung’s own approach to religion was complex, unorthodox, and open to the speculative ranging from affinity to Catholicism and Eastern thoughts to gnosis and alchemy. He recognized and valued collective cultural patterns (archetypes) but also individual enlightenment or at least development to find a person’s whole being (individuation).  He felt those were dismissed by modern positivistic science and political systems which recognizes only the material world and denies or claim any spiritual dimension (totalitarian systems with personal cult).
The acceptance of the spiritual dimension allows us to understand holistic a person, society, cooperation —the complex of (conscious and unconscious) beliefs, attributes, and virtues that defines that entity.  Key to this understanding is Jung’s concept of the archetype. According to Jung, “The concept of the archetype is derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the religious myths and fairytales of world literature contain many symbols which are manifestations of those archetypes”. There is a good book from his former assistant Jolande Jacobi about archetype, symbols and complexes to clarify Jung’s slight ambiguity using those terms over his lifetime.

Proposed set of female Archetypes

Significantly, female in myth and art can serve as vehicles for both the understanding and the modeling of these female archetypes. Jung’s theoretical framework of the human psyche follows Taoist principles and is remarkably symmetrical; the extrovert is balanced by the introvert; the material outer world by the inner world, the masculine principle—the Animus (Yang within the Yin) — is balanced by the feminine principle, the Anima (Yin within the Yang). Jung also favored strongly the number four and following Jung’s idea of the complementarity of opposites, a similar foursome archetype can be identified and used to provide a foundation for the understanding of the unique qualities that characterize the female psyche.

All four representations of the archetypes have one positive (right amount – fullness) and 2 negative poles (deficit or surplus). For example, the positive lover archetype embraces the world with passion whereas the negative poles are the seductive (or promiscuous) lover and the frigid (or selfish) lover. One can see every woman (or girl) somewhere between these three extremes.

  • The Queen is the semi-divine leader responsible for the safety and well being. History and art have shown that every society must have not only a wise leader who is entrusted with guiding his people to success and comfort but navigate in unknown territory towards redemption. The responsibilities of the Queen are mainly on the unconscious side, but worldly benefits and virtues must be many as well. And if the Queen fails in her duties she is traditionally disposed and evil prevails. Her shadow sides are tyrant and weakling both disposing male energies.
  • The Mother is like the Warrior today the most controversial of the archetypes, because of  ideological former and current stereotypes. The two male (warrior) shadow sides are the Sadist and the Masochist. The Mother is a life giver who maintains humanity as the warrior clears the space for renewal and change. The prototype of the mother is, well – the mother.  But there are shadows here too – the careless and the devouring mother.
  • The Wise Woman, represents Logos according to Jung a feminine principle, is the archetype behind a multitude of professions like doctors, but also lawyers, teachers and priests. She sees the unseen. She is the prophetess, mediator and communicator of secret knowledge, the healer, counselor, teacher, and spiritual. The Wise Woman always has a tendency to abuse her power, being the negative , the witch.
  • The Lover like the feminine principle Eros manifests energy and fertility of the nature. The gendering of Eros and Logos and synergy is a consequence of Jung’s anima/animus synergy. Lovers are at ease with our own deepest and most central values and visions. And only through union of the feminine and the masculine our culture and personality prospers and grows. The “me- society” of the impotent is sterile and without compassion and destroys any spiritual dimension.

All these roles could be fulfilled by one person. The shaman as a holistic archetype has the King’s capacity to lead, the Mother’s capacity to care and the Lover’s capacity to value someone or something enough to fight.

C_G_JUNG_FEMALE_ARCHETYPES

C_G_JUNG_FEMALE_ARCHETYPES Copyright @fallenangel, permission to mirror on fair usage policy with reference to owner.

Despite the visible presence of men in political power and economic power in various cultures, social and hidden political power has been disproportionately exercised by women. Western culture has its religious sources in the Jewish-Semitic and the Greco-Roman political and philosophical traditions and of course Christianity. They were distinctly patriarchal on the outside, but quietly influenced by women. The success of Christianity was mostly based on  reaching out to females essentially with ancient female archetypes. Christianity entered the drama of ancient life—and, in particular, Roman urban culture—rather late in the play. Savvy architects with great insight —not to mention foresight— understood  ancient female archetypes as critical success factor for the spectacular growth rate of Christianity. If you look at the gospels and apocrypha  and the early church, you find little patriarchy at all. I have written here in my “Jungian journey through a land of heretics and Mary Magdalene” how vivid the archetypes of lover (Mary Magdalene), mother ( Holy Mary)  and wise women were.

In the Western, Eastern and Orthodox political, religious, and economic spheres, however, the majority of kings has been male. In those cases, where women have been called upon to lead empires, they have exercised male-like leadership, even literally assuming a male role. Nonetheless, most cultures, including Hindu and Buddhist regarded women’s roles in the family highly. Tribal societies, of course dominated by the male Warrior archetype, have integrated the original matriarchal social system in parallel. All of these cultural frameworks employ both powerful male and female symbolism. Honor and respect is not enough. However. It is quite ironic, that in such a geographic proximity, there were major civilization, one as Egypt, which thrived on freedom for women for almost two thousand years, and others, predominantly some Muslim context, because having been much more restrictive of female freedom, have arguably suffered distinctive social and economic disadvantages, but gaining now not only demographically for this very reason.

The Queen – Power

The Faerie, the Goddesses—The Great Mother, the Wise Woman and the female Lover are found within the secondary C.G. Jung literature and in feminist and/or New Age books Goddesses are everywhere. Not so the Mother and only as a recent addition the Queen. As is the case with her male counterpart, the King, the Queen is the most holistic and temporal (worldly) of the female archetypes. But also the most simple to map to the Moore model. There have been weak and evil Queens and Kings at all times. The image of Queen serves as a center for the mature ordering of things; it includes and transcends the other archetypes of the Feminine. Ideally, all “leading” human would, to a greater or lesser degree, embody the ideal King or Queen. Now it  is evident, that the “Good King” in the temporal realm is an archetype of a good statesman. But recently we have many female leaders of the state. The acceptance is with ease, but they reflect more often an archetype of the Mother than of the Queen. One female politician’s nickname is even  “mom” and this is uttered in the context of the cold cruel mother. Why those symbols can be created so easily? Because, as we see below, all this female archetypes were here for thousands of years. Tell me what calendar (lunar, solar, event) you have and I can tell in which archetypical context you live (open or hidden). As societies moved from pre-historic to complex civilizations, their calendar system adopted from nature and weather calendars to direct observation and lastly to calculated calendars (see here). In these transitions, the switch from lunar calendars to solar calendars (pure solar, lunar-solar or solar-lunar) represented changing dominance of male or female archetypes (see here).

The Queen

The Queen

In former times, the worldly Queen was also a priest, warrior and mother – sometimes even the ultimate archetype, the Self or goddess. It was rare, but did happen. One example, born in the 15th century BC, Hatshepsut, daughter of Tuthmose I and Aahmes, both of royal lineage, gained the throne upon the death of her father. To have a female Pharaoh was unprecedented. Although there were no wars during her reign, she proved her sovereignty being a master politician, and an elegant stateswoman with enough charisma to keep control of an entire country for twenty years.  In all, Hatshepsut accomplished what no woman had before her. She ruled the most powerful, advanced civilization in the world, successfully, for twenty years. Another  example, the mother and the father of a family would model them. In those not so rare cases where women become leaders of nations, the archetypical Queen may take visible form, wise or foolish, caring or cruel. Just as the King is not born as a King, but must start life as a divine child, so does the Queen. A powerful embodiment of this archetype is the Pharaoh, like in Egypt were those roles merged. Another example is Nefertiti, who oversaw the first semi-monetheistic attempt. Here the Queen Nefertiti and the Heretic Pharaoh Akhenaten became a mediator to an all-powerful God abstraction, the source of complete cosmic power – the sun (see here) and below.  As is true of her male counterpart, the Queen was the symbol for the leader of a nation as divine couple. However, all the essential attributes of the archetype of the Queen are present in any real woman wherever she plays a leading (if only herself) role, regardless of the scope her real responsibilities—be she queen of an empire, a nation, a clan, or her own family.

The Mother – Creator

This is the one archetype that is distinctly different for male and female development. Just as the Warrior is the most natural complement to the King and embodies a set of virtues that are necessary to defend the Kingdom, the Great Mother is the most natural complement to Queenship – and the King. The explosive, destructive energy of the  male Warrior archetype is balanced by the reproductive energy of the female Mother archetype. This is most evident in Kali-Ma the terrible mother. The Hindu religion has a myriad of Gods and Goddesses  and the most revered Goddess is Kali. She is usually pictured wearing a necklace of skulls and girdle of human hands, dancing on the body of her consort, Shiva. In many attributes the Mother clearly complements the Warrior. Wagner’s Valkyries, those tough maidens who took worthy fallen warriors to Valhalla also served as sources of inspiration for heroic action. Just as the Warrior appears most fully when he gives himself over to death in an act of self-denial, the Mother appears most fully when she gives birth. Warriors take life, Mothers give life. This is the source of her power. Both places them outside any human power; thus, she has the power to inspire, to create. Kali, in this aspect is said to be “The hungry earth, which devours its own children and fattens on their corpses.

The great and cruel mother

The great and cruel mother

But the Mother archetype is also the symbol of all that is fair, all that is beautiful, all that transcends material existence. These concepts are not merely ornamental niceties, but are at the very center of Being. Indeed, in their mythological thinking, the Ancient Greeks recognized the importance of Skills in their concept of the Nine Muses—each the inspiration and source of such humane gifts as poetry, music, and history.  In their philosophical thinking, the Greeks recognized Beauty is an essential attribute of the Absolute Good. The Mothers’ virtues are intangible and ethereal; they often had been be self-sacrificial.  Consider the holy Mary and the real-life women who have embodied legions of Virgin-Martyrs venerated by the early Church attest to the power of the self-sacrificing, inspirational but unreachable mother. As a powerful archetype the “feminine” aspect the Mother come up in the Christian quadruple  conception of the Holy Mother.

Like all archetypes, the Mother can appear as a shadow, the distant and cruel mother. Like any shadow, the cruel mother is not bad or evil. The cruel mother energy links  itself to the male archetype counterpart the warrior. Both are associated with death and destruction – actual physical death.  For instance the Hindu goddess Kali embodies a cruel mother, whose destruction is in the service of creation.

The enigmatic chief queen Nefertiti (Neferneferuaten) of Akhenaten’s (Echnaton) is the most mysterious and interesting of all the ancient Egyptian queen and an example of a possessive mother symbol. Little is known about her and his overpowering mother Tiye  influence on the androgynous Pharaoh, who brought down the Egyptian empire with his daring cultural and religious revolution (see here).  After a few loving years, in which the couple celebrated publicly family life with six children, they separated. Close to her end, she reacted again, as it is believed that Nefertiti sent a frantic letter to the Hittite King Suppiluliumas after Tutankhamun died, begging the longtime enemy of Akhenaten and Egypt, for a marriage with one of his sons.

cybele

cybele

In one of the oldest cults imported into Rome, the Great Mother Cybele’s major attributes was, that she protected people at war and, as such, was often shown wearing a crown of city walls symbolizing the defense she offered adherents. Also, as an earth-mother deity in origin, she bestowed fertility and governed creatures of the wild—ancient portraits show her riding in a chariot pulled by lions—and in both aspects she appealed to the Roman public whose lifestyle was still, for the most part, agrarian. Besides that, her powers included the ability to cure disease and predict the future, making Cybele an all-purpose deity if ever there was. I have written here about the  clash of male and female Archetypes in classical Rome. She was an ancient fertility goddess whose worship is thought to have spread from Anatolia to Greece in the Archaic period (c. 800-500 BC) and mysterious rites were performed in the name of Cybele — as they were for the other earth mother type goddesses, like Demeter and Isis. It is worth to note the ambiguity, which makes it possible to align many female mother archetypes with the lover and the warrior but not the queen.

The Wise Women – Spirituality

I like to think that psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein a woman in the shadow of C. G. Jung and Sigmund Freud (see here), resembles the archetype of the Wise Woman or Queen (in exile). The archetype of the Wise Women inhabits not ethereal regions where all appears as bright and luminous, the Wise Women inhabits like the magician the shadows. She is at home near the earth, even inside the earth, inside the dark, moist, primordial womb, the source of all fertility. The Wise One is no longer young. She started as precious child, but is mature now, rooted. She is likely to be old. Like a priest, she may have even loved, but she has now transcended all sexuality and reproductivity and has reached a state of superior wisdom.

The Wise Women
The Wise Women

Also in contrast to her male counterpart—the Magician— a non spiritual mind seeks not to penetrate beneath the surface of things and probe the mysteries of nature, rather, she looks inward into the mysteries of Being. This earthly knowledge extends to the body and more specifically to the very distinct realities of the female body, with its mysteries of fertility and procreation. Women who knew this much were much respected and feared. Mary Magdalene might be one of the wise women, Kassandra was one and in a way every midwife. Male resented them and worldly institutions persecuted this source of feminine power because it lay out of their control.  Antigone was one The mortal daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta she openly defied her evil uncle King Creon to bury her brother, Polydices. Creon sentenced her to be buried alive. Many Wise Women were later  accused of being “witches”.Saint Augustine of Hippo, the most influential Christian theologian argued around 400 AD that, neither Satan nor witches had supernatural powers and only pagan can believe this. In 1208, however, Pope Innocent III opened an attack on Cathar dualistic heretics who believed in a world in which God and Satan, both having supernatural powers, in a perpetual war. Many adherents of this secret dualistic sect had migrated into Germany and the Savoy where the first witch hunt started. It was natural for both Wise women and Magician, to seek separation from the world, but being a single woman – especially with low status and without children, was a major source of suspicion. Their quest for special knowledge requires long hours of solitude for study and reflection. Most often, both become a seer, an adviser. The Queen of Sheba, one of the most famous figures in the Bible visited King Solomon in Jerusalem after hearing of his great wisdom. According to legend, King Solomon was not only the wisest man in the land, but he also had magical abilities and could command demons. The Queen of Sheba tests Solomon’s wisdom, asking him many questions and giving him riddles to solve. He answers to her satisfaction and then he teaches her about his god Yahweh and she becomes a follower. The two most famous queens of Egypt Hatshepsut and Nefertiti  were also high priests and Wise One’s. Another powerful and inspiring embodiment of the archetype of the Wise One outside Christianity, is the gnostic Figure of Sophia.

Sophia__Wisdom
Sophia__Wisdom

As equally powerful Christian archetype the “feminine” aspect the Wise Women come up in the Christian Trinitarian conception of the Holy Spirit. Who is Sophia? Literally, she is Wisdom, because the Greek word Sophia means “wisdom” in English. More than that, she has been revered as the Wise Bride of Solomon by Jews, as the Queen of Wisdom and War (Athena) by Greeks, and as the Holy Spirit of Wisdom by Christians. Solomon was considered to be married to Sophia. One of the many layers of symbolism attributed to the Song of Songs (also known as Song of Solomon or Canticle of Canticles) is that it speaks of Solomon’s marriage to Holy Sophia. Sophia surfaced in the Eastern Christian tradition with the construction of the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople (converted to a Mosque 1453 and today a Muslim museum in Istanbul). Sophia has survived in the West today, in the form of Gnosticism. Sophia plays a very active role in Jung’s Answer to Job (Hiob), where she also completes  Quaternity.

Lover – Eros

The fourth archetype of the mature feminine is the Lover, or Eros. The Lover is a life-affirming and sometimes hedonistic archetype which dislikes rigid order and sterile knowledge. But without love, without compassion those are nothing. I would argue that self-sacrifice belongs there too. The lover energy, arising as it does from the Oedipal child, is the source of spirituality and fertility. It is the attachment of the child to the parent of the opposite sex, accompanied by envious and aggressive feelings toward the parent of the same sex.

The Sin Adam and Eve

The Lover

A powerful female mythological archetypical lover complex runs deep in Eastern and Western Civilizations. In the cradle of civilization, it started with Astarte and Ishtar. Some scholars hold Astarte was a prototype of the Virgin Mary. Their theory is based on the ancient Syrian and Egyptian rituals of celebrating Astarte’s rebirth of the solar god on December 25th. Other counterparts are Isis of Egypt, Kali of India, and Aphrodite and Demeter of Greece and Venus of Rom. In China you have the archetype of the Green Snake and White Snake and the holistic archetype of Tao, which to me is the perfect example of the Self, integrating female and male love..

Thus, the Lover intrudes powerfully into humanity’s collective consciousness and enthusiastic, connects with followers, inspiring them to accomplish the difficult deeds. The intoxication of love opens an alternate reality with its own truths which separates those in the grip of the Lover from mundane concerns. Thus, as is the case with the male Lover, the female Lover gains enormous powers of transcendence, but she, and he, are subjected to “the other” and therefore lack the freedom of the other archetypes. This is the power and limitation of the hierosgamos—the cosmic marriage of opposites. Without Jesus, our life would be meaningless, incomprehensible; Jesus explains our life. Joan of Arc, whose last recorded words before she was burnt at the stake were: “I pray you, go to the nearest church, and bring me the cross, and hold it up level with my eyes until I am dead. I would have the cross on which God hung be ever before my eyes while life lasts in me. Jesus, Jesus!” It appears again that the Lover archetype is essential. Of course, there is also the dark story of Salome, the infamous daughter of Kind Herod, has fascinated many painters for centuries. Paintings of her equally infamous dance with John the Baptist’s head evoke a sensual, evocative atmosphere.Salome’s story first appears as a fragment in the New Testament Gospel of Mark, where she dances in exchange for the head of John the Baptist on a silver charger, at her mother’s behest. In the Gospel version, the burden of wickedness thus falls upon Salome’s mother, Herodias, and Salome’s virtue remains ambiguous.

salome-with-the-head-of-st-john-the-baptist

salome-with-the-head-of-st-john-the-baptist

Salome dances as a femme fatale for her stepfather, Herod Antipas, defying Herodias. The beheading of the Baptist is Salome’s own idea, for which she will pay with her own ghastly death. Nevertheless, John, the Evangelist, comes to prepare the way of Messiah with a new gospel of love, succeeds in coaxing the Judean princess to a personal epiphany, for the soul of Salome is not the same fetid sink as her mother’s. “Speak again,” Salome exhorts him, “Thy voice is as music to mine ear…. Speak again…and tell me what I must do.” But just when a prophet’s wisdom might have done some good, John is out of ideas, saying: “I will not look at thee. Thou art accursed, Salome….”

Conclusion

What can we learn from the examination of the archetypes of the mature feminine ? First, female like male, in order to fulfill their wholeness properly, would do well to embody the best qualities represented by all of their archetypes. When men and women do this, they model these archetypes inspire both of them on the path of virtue and spirituality. The archetypes are viable because they furnish us with a short-cut, an intuitive way to grasp the essence of a group of attributes that connects directly with the unconscious mind. Instead of patient intellectual analysis of each individual attribute of leadership, the ethos of each archetype is immediately accessible through a complex of cultural pattern which are instantly recognized even trans-cultural. These archetypes are emotional and spiritual pictures that have an immediate effect on individuals and groups. This effect is readily apparent when one compares the phrase “The Good King” with “a King who is good, strong, wise, just and so on”. The first phrase is incomparably richer in context and seems “alive” compared to a list of adjectives to describe a particular King. It evokes an instant visual image that has an immediate appeal. This is why the old Greek epics, the Bibles stories and Wagner’s opera are so powerful.

Archetypes – actually “archetypes per se”- are, are cultural patterns and by their very nature, are universal and here to stay. Like the physical heritage, stored in our genes, cultural patterns are saved in our collective consciousness. They can be invoked or forgotten, or even suppressed. But even in materialistic, matriarchal or patriarchal cultures, that are hostile to spirituality, to the male. or the feminine, archetypes cannot forever be suppressed. Once more, external like internal suppression of archetypes is a case of too much, or of too little, of a needed cultural model for humanity to survive and for the individual to live a meaningful life. However, archetypes can be invoked as symbols any time — hence their power to manipulate, to motivate, to influence. There is much to contemplate in these archetypes which can be mapped with political, mythic and culture examples. The self-evident interpretation and its usefulness is overwhelmingly convincing.

Women should be aware of her animus and thus with the aspects of the four male archetypes and for men to mature, they must meet and integrate their anima and learn from the four female archetypes. How does it look in your family or relationship? Suppression of an archetype only results in denial of attributes and spiritual resources that we, as humans, need. If one comes to terms with the Shadow and the Soul, one will encounter the enchanted castle with its King and Queen. This is a pattern of wholeness and individuation. The opposites of the outer and the inner life are now joined in marriage. Great power arises from this integration. Be aware of pretended or real archetypes in the public realm. For example, look at your (male or female) politicians: Does one of them have the virtues of those positive archetypes?

Looking beyond herself, women should care how and if divine couple symbols (syzygy images) are invoked. Pharaoh and his Queen, Christ and the Church, God and Israel are syzygy images. Do we still have Divine Couples (Syzygy) and Divine Triads in the spiritual realm? The believer who aspires to be the “bride of Christ” is modeling his or her experience in response to the syzygy archetype. Next our hope is from the Child Archetype, a pattern with a promise of new beginnings. The birth of the Christ Child who unites Heaven and Earth, God became Man and God, is one of those powerful archetype creating a triad. Triads, like for example the Egyptian triad of Isis, Osiris and Horus are predecessors symbols of the Trinity. When the Mother Archetype joined the Holy Trinity Jung’s Quaternity was formed.

What I am trying to say in a nutshell, is this: Good Kings (and Queens) need to encompass two Quaternities. Not only take care of your own set archetypes, which enhances your temporal virtues, we need also to understand our opposite sex archetypes – of our Animus or our Anima. According to C.G. Jung this will lead you to our Shadow, and if we integrate the Shadow, that opens us to our Self – the divine in us – or at least a communication path to it. God or goddesses are both holistic and androgen. The yin yang symbol from ancient China represents the belief that everything in the universe consists of two forces that are opposing but in need for each other. The Great Mother Cybele was Mother (in a narrow sense) and Warrior symbol.

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Bibliography Links

  • Emma Jung. Animus and Anima – Two Papers
  • STRUKTURFORMEN DER WEIBLICHEN PSYCHE wolff Structural forms of the Feminine psyche (http://ufdc.ufl.edu/AA00001582/00001)
  • C.G. Jung Four Archetypes (Routledge Classics)
  • C. G. Jung Archetypen (dtv, Bd. 11)
  • King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette (Aug 16, 1991)
  • Tao Te Ching The idea of the Ying-Yang duality
  • Jacobi, Jolande, Die Psychologie von C. G. Jung – Eine Einführung in das Gesamtwerk, mit einem Geleitwort von C. G. Jung [Gebundene Ausgabe]
  • Jacobi, Jolande, Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the Psychology of C.G. Jung (Bollingen Series) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]
  • Theologische Aspekte der Tiefenpsychologie von C. G. Jung (Patmos-Paperback) (German Edition) by Herbert Unterste (1977)
  • Mandala: Bilder aus dem Unbewussten (German Edition) [Hardcover] 2.Auflage Olten 1977
  • Jung, C. G., Jaffé, A. (1962): Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken von C. G. Jung. Aufgezeichnet und herausgegeben von Aniela Jaffé. Olten: Walter
  • Jung, C. G., Kerényi, K. (1951): Einführung in das Wesen der Mythologie. Zürich: Rhein
  • C. G. Jung Grundausgabe CW 18

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