Man )O( Woman

The deconstructive threads dealt with the socio-psychology of male/female and why and how gender evolves, etc.
Campbell in "Hero with a thousand faces" speaks here and there mythologically on their symbiosis, which I thought adds to those threads from a different perspective. Excerpts.

Campbell wrote:

The same harrowing, mysterious voice was to be heard in the call of the Greek god Apollo to the fleeing maiden Daphne, daughter of the river Peneus, as he pursued her over the plain. "O nymph, O Peneus' daughter, stay!" the deity called to her—like the frog to the princess of the fairy tale; "I who pursue thee am no enemy. Thou knowest not whom thou fleest, and for that reason dost thou flee. Run with less speed, I pray, and hold thy flight. I, too, will follow with less speed. Nay, stop and ask who thy lover is."
"He would have said more," the story goes, "but the maiden pursued her frightened way and left him with words unfinished, even in her desertion seeming fair. The winds bared her limbs, the opposing breezes set her garments aflutter as she ran, and a light air flung her locks streaming behind her. Her beauty was en­hanced by flight. But the chase drew to an end, for the youthful god would not longer waste his time in coaxing words, and, urged on by love, he pursued at utmost speed. Just as when a Gallic hound has seen a hare in an open plain, and seeks his prey on fly­ing feet, but the hare, safety; he, just about to fasten on her, now, even now thinks he has her, and grazes her very heels with his out­ stretched muzzle; but she knows not whether or not she be already caught, and barely escapes from those sharp fangs and leaves be­ hind the jaws just closing on her: so ran the god and maid, he sped by hope and she by fear. But he ran the more swiftly, borne on the wings of love, gave her no time to rest, hung over her fleeing shoulders and breathed on the hair that streamed over her neck. Now was her strength all gone, and, pale with fear and utterly overcome by the toil of her swift flight, seeing the waters of her fa­ther's river near, she cried: 'O father, help! If your waters hold di­vinity, change and destroy this beauty by which I pleased o'er well.' Scarce had she thus prayed when a down-dragging numb­ness seized her limbs, and her soft sides were begirt with thin bark. Her hair was changed to leaves, her arms to branches. Her feet, but now so swift, grew fast in sluggish roots, and her head was now but a tree's top. Her gleaming beauty alone remained."

This is indeed a dull and unrewarding finish. Apollo, the sun, the lord of time and ripeness, no longer pressed his frightening suit, but instead, simply named the laurel his favorite tree and ironically recommended its leaves to the fashioners of victory wreaths. The girl had retreated to the image of her parent and there found protection—like the unsuccessful husband whose dream of mother love preserved him from the state of cleaving to a wife.
The literature of psychoanalysis abounds in examples of such desperate fixations. What they represent is an impotence to put off the infantile ego, with its sphere of emotional relationships and ideals. One is bound in by the walls of childhood; the father and mother stand as threshold guardians, and the timorous soul, fearful of some punishment, fails to make the passage through the door and come to birth in the world without.
Dr. Jung has reported a dream that resembles very closely the image of the myth of Daphne. The dreamer is the same young man who found himself (supra, p. 55) in the land of the sheep— the land, that is to say, of unindependence. A voice within him says, "I must first get away from the father"; then a few nights later: "a snake draws a circle about the dreamer, and he stands
like a tree, grown fast to the earth."
This is an image of the magic circle drawn about the personality by the dragon power of the fixating parent.

Brynhild, in the same way, was protected in her virginity, arrested in her daughter state for years, by the circle of the fire of all-father Wotan. She slept in timelessness until the coming of Siegfried.
Little Briar-rose (Sleeping Beauty) was put to sleep by a jeal­ous hag (an unconscious evil-mother image). And not only the child, her entire world went off to sleep; but at last, "after long, long years," there came a prince to wake her. "The king and queen (the conscious good-parent images), who had just come home and were entering the hall, began to fall asleep, and with them the whole estate. All the horses slept in the stalls, the dogs in the yard, the pigeons on the roof, the flies on the walls, yes, the fire that flickered on the hearth grew still and slumbered, and the roast ceased to simmer. And the cook, who was about to pull the hair of the scullery boy because he had forgotten some­ thing, let him go and fell off to sleep. And the wind went down, and not a leaf stirred in the trees. Then around the castle a hedge of thorns began to grow, which became taller every year, and finally shut off the whole estate. It grew up taller than the castle, so that nothing more was seen, not even the weathercock on the roof."
A Persian city once was "enstoned to stone"—king and queen, soldiers, inhabitants, and all—because its people refused the call of Allah. Lot's wife became a pillar of salt for looking back, when she had been summoned forth from her city by Jehovah. And there is the tale of the Wandering Jew, cursed to remain on earth until the Day of Judgment, because when Christ had passed him carrying the cross, this man among the people stand­ing along the way called, "Go faster! A little speed!" The unrec­ognized, insulted Savior turned and said to him, "I go, but you shall be waiting here for me when I return."
Some of the victims remain spellbound forever (at least, so far as we are told), but others are destined to be saved. Brynhild was preserved for her proper hero and little Briar-rose was res­ cued by a prince. Also, the young man transformed into a tree dreamed subsequently of the unknown woman who pointed the way, as a mysterious guide to paths unknown. Not all who hesitate are lost. The psyche has many secrets in reserve. And these are not disclosed unless required. So it is that sometimes the predicament following an obstinate refusal of the call proves to be the occasion of a providential revelation of some unsus­pected principle of release.

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Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigura­tions: she can never be greater than himself, though she can al­ways promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.

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The goddess guardian of the inexhaustible well—whether as Fergus, or as Actaeon, or as the Prince of the Lonesome Isle discovered her—requires that the hero should be endowed with what the troubadours and minnesingers termed the "gentle heart." Not by the animal desire of an Actaeon, not by the fastidious revulsion of such as Fergus, can she be comprehended and rightly served, but only by gentle­ness: aware ("gentle sympathy") it was named in the romantic courtly poetry of tenth- to twelfth-century Japan.

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Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very na­ture of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and re-interpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, all the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some un­pleasant someone else.
But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our atten­tion, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolera­ble to the pure, the pure, pure soul.

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix}d
His canon 'gainst self slaughter!
O God! God!

So exclaims the great spokesman of this moment, Hamlet:

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!

The innocent delight of Oedipus in his first possession of the queen turns to an agony of spirit when he learns who the woman is. Like Hamlet, he is beset by the moral image of the father. Like Hamlet, he turns from the fair features of the world to search the darkness for a higher kingdom than this of the incest and adul­ tery ridden, luxurious and incorrigible mother. The seeker of the life beyond life must press beyond her, surpass the temptations of her call, and soar to the immaculate ether beyond.
For a God called him—called him many times, From many sides at once:

"Ho, Oedipus,
Thou Oedipus, why are we tarrying?
It is full long that thou art stayed for; come!"

Where this Oedipus-Hamlet revulsion remains to beset the soul, there the world, the body, and woman above all, become the symbols no longer of victory but of defeat. A monastic-puritanical, world-negating ethical system then radically and im­mediately transfigures all the images of myth. No longer can the hero rest in innocence with the goddess of the flesh; for she is become the queen of sin.

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"The Lady of the House of Sleep is a familiar figure in fairy tale and myth. We have already spoken of her, under the forms of Brynhild and little Briar-rose. She is the paragon of all paragons of beauty, the reply to all desire, the bliss-bestowing goal of every hero's earthly and unearthly quest. She is mother, sister, mistress, bride. Whatever in the world has lured, what­ ever has seemed to promise joy, has been premonitory of her existence—in the deep of sleep, if not in the cities and forests of the world. For she is the incarnation of the promise of perfection; the soul's assurance that, at the conclusion of its exile in a world of organized inadequacies, the bliss that once was known will be known again: the comforting, the nourishing, the "good" mother—young and beautiful—who was known to us, and even tasted, in the remotest past. Time sealed her away, yet she is dwelling still, like one who sleeps in timelessness, at the bottom of the timeless sea.
The remembered image is not only benign, however; for the "bad" mother too—

(1) the absent, unattainable mother, against whom aggressive fantasies are directed, and from whom a counter-aggression is feared;

(2) the hampering, forbidding, punishing mother;

(3) the mother who would hold to herself the growing child trying to push away; and finally,

(4) the desired but forbid­ den mother (Oedipus complex) whose presence is a lure to dan­gerous desire (castration complex)—persists in the hidden land of the adult's infant recollection and is sometimes even the greater force. She is at the root of such unattainable great god­dess figures as that of the chaste and terrible Diana—whose ab­solute ruin of the young sportsman Actaeon illustrates what a blast of fear is contained in such symbols of the mind's and body's blocked desire."

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Come, O Dithyrambos, Enter this my male womb.
This cry of Zeus, the Thunder-hurler, to the child, his son, Dionysos, sounds the leitmotif of the Greek mysteries of the ini­tiatory second birth.

"And bull-voices roar thereto from some­ where out of the unseen, fearful semblances, and from a drum an image as it were of thunder underground is borne on the air heavy with dread."

The word "Dithyrambos" itself, as an epi­thet of the killed and resurrected Dionysos, was understood by the Greeks to signify "him of the double door," him who had survived the awesome miracle of the second birth. And we know that the choral songs (dithyrambs) and dark, blood-reeking rites in celebration of the god—associated with the renewal of vegeta­tion, the renewal of the moon, the renewal of the sun, the renewal of the soul, and solemnized at the season of the resurrection of the year god—represent the ritual beginnings of the Attic tragedy. Throughout the ancient world such myths and rites abounded: ...we are united to those immortal images of initiatory might, through the sacra­mental operation of which, man, since the beginning of his day on earth, has dispelled the terrors of his phenomenality and won through to the all-transfiguring vision of immortal being.
The ogre breaks us, but the hero, the fit candidate, un­dergoes the initiation "like a man"; and behold, it was the fa­ther: we in Him and He in us. The dear, protecting mother of our body could not defend us from the Great Father Serpent; the mortal, tangible body that she gave us was delivered into his frightening power. But death was not the end. New life, new birth, new knowledge of existence (so that we live not in this physique only, but in all bodies, all physiques of the world, as the Bodhisattva) was given us. That father was himself the womb, the mother, of a second birth.
This is the meaning of the image of the bisexual god. He is the mystery of the theme of initiation. We are taken from the mother, chewed into fragments and assimilated to the world-annihilating body of the ogre for whom all the precious forms and beings are only the courses of a feast; but then, miraculously reborn, we are more than we were.

"I have no doubt that every noble woman will oppose what Dante and Goethe believed about woman--the former when he sang, "ella guardava suso, ed io in lei," and the latter when he interpreted it, "the eternally feminine draws us aloft"; for this is just what she believes of the eternally masculine." - Nietzsche

People are caught up in being careful, in the right "approach", to 'win' it, to come away as a winner or atleast not as a total loser, but this is what will get one even more entangled.
To think in terms of success and how one measures, to Know Thyself  *so as to*  understand a game and the other better and thus Order oneself is to be enmeshed still further and further in the game. One enslaves oneself.
The feminine may be attracted to order, but when this attempt at ordering, itself becomes an anxiety, its just self-defeating. A vigilance become an ends-in-itself is a dis/ease.
The masculine then smells 'un-fit'.

Nietzsche remarks,

“Living in a constant chase after gain compels people to expend their spirit to the point of exhaustion in continual pretense and overreaching and anticipating other. Virtue has come to consist of doing something in less time that someone else. Hours in which honesty is permitted have become rare, and when they arrive one is tired and does not only want to "let oneself go" but actually wishes to stretch out as long and wide and ungainly as one happens to be... Soon we may well reach the point where people can no longer give into the desire for a vita contemplativa (that is, taking a walk with ideas and friends) without self-contempt and a bad conscience.”


Maintaining the hearth-fire defined a woman.
She who lights the fire lights up a world, a face, a fate.

When this woman goes to sleep, like sleeping beauty Campbell points out, the world goes to sleep. Everything falls asleep.
The Lady of the House of Sleep is Death.

Evola says, in the Doctrine of Awakening,
"The danger that a woman represents, particularly today, is not so much her female aspect as the fact that she encourages the need for support, for reliance upon someone else who may be a weak soul unable to find in himself a meaning for his life.
The same Indo-Aryan tradition records a saying attributed to a yogin,an ascetic: "What need have I of an external woman? I have an internal woman within me" - meaning that he had within himself the element of self-completion, of fulfillment, an element that the common man confusedly seeks, instead, in woman."

Masculinity is not just about Dominating an inner chaos, imposing order on the feminine nature within, but self-possession is also about En-Trusting your inner feminine to come to life, to keep the dominated feminine from falling asleep.

Odysseus and Penelope symbolize this En-Trusting.
She Is vigilance, always weaving never falling asleep, keeping the suitors away...
She Is his Trust. And his reserve.

Odysseus trying to remember himself, the most wary, the most cautious, the most cunning and meticulous thus only dis-trusts, but never mis-trusts any of the other females he meets along the way - Not Circe, no sirens, no calypso.

The one in whom the woman and nature is awake, illumines his world.
How should a self-possessed man falter? That is part of the story.


Heidegger says in The Ister,
"Shyness does not become more and more insecure, and yet it does keep to itself. In their keeping to themselves, however, shy ones escape the danger of becoming all wrapped up in themselves in the manner of those who are fearful. But the keeping-to-oneself of shyness also knows nothing of reservedness. As an originally firm and collected keeping to oneself, in the face of what makes it shy, this shyness has at the same time the most intimate affection for it. What arouses shyness makes one hesitate. Yet this hesitant shyness knows nothing of the fainthearted or downhearted. Its hesitation is the expectant decisiveness to be patient. Here hesitation is the courage to go slowly, a courage decided long ago. The hesitation of shyness is forbearance.
...essential shyness is the mood of a homecoming which which commemorates and remembers the origin.
Shyness is the knowledge that the origin cannot be directly experienced.
Shyness does not obstruct. But it sets what is slow and patient on its way.
Shyness attunes the course toward poetic paths.
Shyness determines that one go to the origin. It is more decisive than all violence."

Masculine "order" is not about being smart or clever or putting on a front of bravado - all of which Odysseus does, but as he shows, it is about possessing a fluid spontaneity, that is made possible by having a reserve, a shyness that is not an *air of Indifference and secrecy and intrigue to which we think females are attracted to, but engaging with a self-trust. A courage that is openly resolute, unyielding.

Masculinity, or 'Coolness' that smells of power is possessing this Reserve, which is not the same as being Indifferent or non-caring or insensitive to another, but indifferent to the outcome in the sense, beyond gain or loss, folly and pride, deceit or deception, one still possesses oneself. The Real Reserve.
Spontaneity is clinging or yielding to nothing, because one is reserved at one's root. It is to be in a state of being un-prompted.
Spontaneity is possessing the courage to go Slowly.
A man with his inner feminine awake, was thus said to possess Metis, or spontaneous intelligence as Odysseus was characterized.

Nietzsche:

“Nothing is needed more than truth, and in relation to it everything else has only second-rate value.

This unconditional will to truth—what is it? Is it the will not to allow oneself to be deceived? Or is it the will not to deceive? For the will to truth could be interpreted in the second way, too—if only the special case "I do not want to deceive myself" is subsumed under the generalization "I do not want to deceive." But why not deceive?

But why not allow oneself to be deceived?

Note that the reasons for the former principle belong to an altogether different realm from those for the second. One does not want to allow oneself to be deceived because one assumes that it is harmful, dangerous, calamitous to be deceived. In this sense, science would be a long-range prudence, a caution, a utility; but one could object in all fairness: How is that? Is wanting not to allow oneself to be deceived really less harmful, less dangerous, less calamitous? What do you know in advance of the character of existence to be able to decide whether the greater advantage is on the side of the unconditionally mistrustful or of the unconditionally trusting?” [JW]

perpetualburn wrote:

"I have no doubt that every noble woman will oppose what Dante and Goethe believed about woman--the former when he sang, "ella guardava suso, ed io in lei," and the latter when he interpreted it, "the eternally feminine draws us aloft"; for this is just what she believes of the eternally masculine." - Nietzsche

Nice one Perpetual; so true...

Distrust and Mistrust....

The modern dictionary would suggest that there are very little differences between those two words.  

What Lyssa made me think about -

Distrust is found in an individual who has power, over himself and the situation he's in. Someone who distrusts doesn't become infatuated. Mistrust on the other hand comes from a position of weakness. Similar to an aggressive stance versus a defensive one.

Mistrust from a man ruins a woman's game, which she plays.
And if it ruins the woman's game then it also ruins the man's game, as both share it.

I'd like to think that a woman requires integrity from a man or she'll grow mistrustful.
Part of her role in being selective. To trust is to surrender and woman doesn't feel attraction for those who surrender.  So a man should be distrustful of a woman, always - or mistrust will follow quickly.

Woman, to surrender, must gain trust in the man.

Odysseus is prepared for the Sirens because of his knowledge. He's prepared for Circe because a crewman who escapes, warns him. Why does Odysseus trust his knowledge, that which somebody else told him? Why does he trust his crewman but not Circe? Why does he try to get back to Penelope? I never thought about it that way but it makes sense to think of it as an inner journey. What he can trust in, are his own experiences. That takes time and continues to grow.

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"A Man’s own Confidence in himself makes up a great Part of that Trust which he hath in others." [Rochefoucauld, Moral Maxims and Reflections, 556]

"If Interest Level too high, okay for squaw, but great warrior become boy." - Apache proverb.

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"The sun-hero has a dual relationship to the Great Mother, as exemplified by Heracles; his name means Glory of Hera, yet the goddess drives him to madness. He sets out on the mission to break free from the bonds of the Great Mother, to face her magnitude, ready to draw his sword in combat with her however awesome she seems to be, and to enhance his ego-consciousness. The sun-hero, while not always able to fulfill the entire mission of his journey, works towards replacing id and the unconscious with ego. He must abandon the comfort and the security of the kingdom of childhood, about which Jung writes:

For him who looks backwards the whole world, even the starry sky, becomes the mother who bends over him and enfolds him on all sides ... As such a condition must be terminated, and as it is at the same time an object of regressive longing, it must be sacrificed in order that discriminated entities - i.e., conscious contents - may come into being.

It is the sun-hero’s undertaking to break away, to free himself from the archetypal world. Simultaneously, as part of his mission, he must gather the strength required to bring the very same archetypal energy into the ego and human consciousness. Thus, the hero has one foot in divinity, one in the world of mortals. It is the hero’s task to dismember the archetypal energies and transpose them as increasingly human complexes into the personal world and the realm of the ego. This is what Prometheus does when he brings fire to man. His name means forethinker; the Promethean fire is the capacity to plan the use of that natural transformative energy, fire, for the benefit of mankind, to create consciousness and acculturation, heating and cooking, creating new materials and fresh ideas.48 But also when the complex has become autonomous, split-off from consciousness and detracting energy from the ego, the hero is called for. The man who compulsively clung to a job far below his capabilities because of his fear of losing it was constantly threatened by dismissal until he gathered his strength to fight the complex that nearly destroyed him.

The sun-hero may be the obstinate two-year-old who repeatedly says no and no to being dressed, “I dress.” Or the five-year-old who pulls the hero’s phallic sword with which he fights the beasts within—as they are projected upon the little kindergarten-brutes of the real world without. The sun-hero is unmistakably masculine, a He, whether a boy or a girl.

The solar hero brings something new, something formerly unknown into the consciousness of the individual or that of society. By means of the adventures of the sun-hero, man has, for instance, accomplished scientific achievements and expanded geographical boundaries. The solar aspect of the hero pertains to patriarchal consciousness. With his sword, the hero cuts and divides, which is structurally essential for the establishment and expansion of consciousness." [Erel Shalit, Enemy, Cripple and Beggar]

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"But there is a lunar aspect or phase of the hero’s journey as well, which may likewise unfold when the hero abandons the conventions of the royal throne and the safe rule of ego, when he stands up against and turns away from collective consciousness. This is the case, for instance, with Buddha, whose way is enlightened by reflection rather than by the splendor of the sword. It pertains to conceiving, rather than “deliberate doing,” and, says Neumann, “time must ripen, and with it, like the seeds sown in the earth, knowledge matures.”

This is the moon-hero. He, or in fact She, because it pertains rather to the feminine, whether in man or woman, ventures into the dangerous paths, the forests and the rivers, the hills and the valleys, the labyrinths and the netherworlds, the pandemonium, the chaos and the torment outside the boundaries of collective consciousness, beyond norms and conventions. She is maybe not the skillful goal-directed archer Apollo, but rather his twin sister Artemis, the hunter goddess roaming in the wilderness and the forest, armed with silver bow and arrows. This may be the sense of drifting around the outskirts of town, sneaking into backyards, to hike around in foreign places in the geography of the world or in the psychography of the soul, learning “how to observe nature, the way it grows and changes.”50 It is dangerous; as happens to Artemis, by mistake, you may kill your loved one, or if you come too close you may be transformed into a stag, because it is an oscillating journey between death and rebirth, waxing and waning, appearance and disappearance, love and disaster, reflection and deflection, healing and wounding. The ground easily quakes, and on winding roads and behind thorny bushes the forces of love and madness, pain and desire, despair and anticipation struggle with savage ferocity. The lunar hero pertains to relationship and unification, but breakup and falling apart, as well.

The hero’s lunar quality refers to the mirror and reflection, rather than the sword and division. As we shall see later, Perseus is equipped with both.

In its lunar aspect, the hero does not attack the unconscious. It entails a conscious turning towards the unconscious, quietly and humbly awaiting what in the course of time arises and unfolds in the hero’s reflective mirror. As Campbell says:

The mirror, reflecting the goddess and drawing her forth from the august repose of her divine non-manifestation, is symbolic of the world, the field of the reflected image. Therein divinity is pleased to regard its own glory, and this pleasure is itself inducement to the act of manifestation or “creation.”

Neumann is mainly concerned with matriarchal or moon-consciousness as something preceding patriarchal consciousness, pertaining to “enchantment and magic, ... inspiration and prophecy” rather than “its recurrence in the psychology of individuation, which is a reappearance at a higher level, as is always the case where, in the course of normal development, we again encounter something already experienced.” I believe the lunar and the solar elements constitute complementary aspects of the hero and his/her journey, even if the one may precede or dominate the other.

In fact, as regards the lunar aspect of the hero’s journey, he naturally ventures into darkness only as the sun sets, rather than at dawn. Yet, the hero needs to be equipped with some of the day’s light to withstand the night’s depressive darkness, and with summer’s warmth for the cold loneliness of winter not to overwhelm him.

He travels at night-time, west to east, in the reflective light of the moon rather than in the unambiguous light of day. “The alchemical work starts with the descent into darkness (nigredo), i.e., the unconscious” says Jung. Only thereafter “one arrives at the east and the newborn sun,” says Edinger." [ib.]

“How we hate to admit that we would like nothing better than to be the slave! Slave and master at the same time! For even in love the slave is always the master in disguise. The man who must conquer the woman, subjugate her, bend her to his will, form her according to his desires—is he not the slave of his slave? How easy it is, in this relationship, for the woman to upset the balance of power! The mere threat of self-dependence, on the woman’s part, and the gallant despot is seized with vertigo. But if they are able to throw themselves at one another recklessly, concealing nothing, surrendering all, if they admit to one another their interdependence, do they not enjoy a great and unsuspected freedom? The man who admits to himself that he is a coward has made a step towards conquering his fear; but the man who frankly admits it to every one, who asks that you recognize it in him and make allowance for it in dealing with him, is on the way to becoming a hero. Such a man is often surprised, when the crucial test comes, to find that he knows no fear. Having lost the fear of regarding himself as a coward he is one no longer: only the demonstration is needed to prove the metamorphosis. It is the same in love. The man who admits not only to himself but to his fellowmen, and even to the woman he adores, that he can be twisted around a woman’s finger, that he is helpless where the other sex is concerned, usually discovers that he is the more powerful of the two. Nothing breaks a woman down more quickly than complete surrender. A woman is prepared to resist, to be laid siege to: she has been trained. Sexus.

reasonvemotion wrote:

“Nothing breaks a woman down more quickly than complete surrender. A woman is prepared to resist, to be laid siege to: she has been trained.     Sexus.

And what has trained her, cultivated, her, nurtured this feminine role, is not man, not the male....for he also has been trained by....Mother Nature, and father Time.
Only a women who despises her nature would think a surrender to a man would be a "break down".
What is seduction but a negotiation?
As someone said.
What is surrender than this acceptance of an other's essence, his genetic material, delivered in the usual heterosexual manner of intrusion, into the very confines of your becoming?

And what does woman surrender to?
Necessity.
Possibility.
Making amends for her own mortality...and she need not know it, only act, as nature intended, on impulse, crafting romantic words to hide the impulse.

Female endurance: The relentlessness of women in never being totally submissive or dominant, tireless in maintaining illusions… eternity seems locked away in appearances…male endurance in searching for keys and giving illusions new meaning with a gentle turn.

It’s impolite to stare, but he’s always ready to pay the price for being rude.

He’s so incorrigible she wants to strangle the life out of him, and now she loves him most dearly. The tight coil of life.

So many great men, so many reflections, so many mirrors to smash… until I see only her face.

"He loves me...he loves me not.” Even her insecurity is another level of seduction.

Only a woman could lose herself in the abyss without losing herself. Always on the verge of boredom, on the verge of death…she’s configured to sense all restrictions on excitement, thus she could never lose herself in boredom, the condition of disenchantment… For her, there’s nothing more exciting than the abyss, nothing like the thrill of falling for the right guy…nothing is more tempting, no experience more unlimited.

PB wrote:

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For her, there’s nothing more exciting than the abyss, nothing like the thrill of falling for the right guy…nothing is more tempting, no experience more unlimited.

Pretty words, except in this world, most of the time, you have to pay as you go, for almost everything.

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"But there is a lunar aspect or phase of the hero’s journey as well, which may likewise unfold when the hero abandons the conventions of the royal throne and the safe rule of ego, when he stands up against and turns away from collective consciousness. This is the case, for instance, with Buddha, whose way is enlightened by reflection rather than by the splendor of the sword. It pertains to conceiving, rather than “deliberate doing,” and, says Neumann, “time must ripen, and with it, like the seeds sown in the earth, knowledge matures.”

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"Mensis, month, and the word measure belongs to the root ma and to the Sanskrit root mas; the other is the Sanskrit root manas, Greek/Latin mens, mind, etc., which represents the "spirit"-root par excellence.
Moon-spirit, which is expressed in all these linguistic ramifications and reveals its essence and original meaning to us in this way. Here an emotional movement intimately bound up with the activity of the unconscious emanates from the moon archetype as moon-spirit. In an active eruption it is fiery spirit, courage, anger, possession, and madness; it is the activity of revelation that leads to prophecy, to thinking things out, devising and conceiv- ing, and to lying, but also to poetizing. But this fiery productivity is accompanied by another, "more measured," stance, which is associated with meditating, dreaming, awaiting, wishing, hesitating, tarrying...

A richly ramifying growth of essentially spiritual meanings arises from the Sanskrit root manas: Greek spirit, heart, soul, mettle, ardor; to think of something, meditate, wish; to have in mind, intend; to think, but also to be lost in thought and to rave or rage, to which possession, raving, madness, frenzy, and prophecy, also belong.

Other branches from the same spirit-root are; anger, to announce, inform, reveal, memory and learning,and flows into measure, in-maneo, to remain, tarry, and the Sanskrit man, to hesitate, linger, await, remain firm or steadfast, to learn, memini, to recall, and mentiri, to lie. All these spirit-roots arise from the one original Sanskrit root mati-h, thought, intention. Now, without any justification, we find the moon-root, mensis, month, mas(belonging to ma,to measure) juxtaposed to this root. From it arises not only matram, measure, but also verness, wisdom, ,meditate, to have in mind, to dream.

We have already spoken of the sudden emergence into consciousness (German Einfall) of an idea as an original spiritual activity of the unconscious. The penetration into consciousness of spiritual contents, endowed with the character of intuitive cogency, and their capacity to domi- nate it, is probably the original form in which the spirit appeared to humankind. While an expanding conscious- ness and a strengthened ego introjects these emerging contents and understands them as an internal manifestation ofthe psyche, they originally appear to the ego "from outside" as sacred revelation and as numinous messages from the powers or the gods. Even if it calls them intuitions or inspirations, the ego that experiences these contents coming from without assumes a receptive stance vis-a.-vis the spontaneous phenomenon of spirit, a stance characteristic of matriarchal consciousness. Today it remains as true as ever that humankind receives the revelations of the moon-spirit more easily during the night with its enlivenment of the unconscious and the attendant introversion than in the light of day. It is obvious that matriarchal consciousness is not restricted to woman; it exists equally in man to the extent that his conscious is an anima-consciousness. This holds true especially for the creative person; yet people in gen- eral are dependent on the activity of the unconscious for inspiration and intuition, as well as for the functioning of the instincts and for providing consciousness with "libido." But all this is governed by the moon; for this reason it is necessary to remain in harmony with the moon and to attend to it, i.e., to maintain its cult.

The significance of the moon as chronometer stands in the foreground of the moon cult. The moon guides primitive humankind's orientation in time; for all of humanity, calculating the moons, months, and lunar year derives from the moon. Moon-time, however, is not the abstract, quantitative time of the scientific, patriarchal consciousness. Rather, it is qualitative time: it undergoes changes and in changing assumes various qualities. Moon- time is rhythmical and periodic, waxing and waning, favorable or unfavorable. As the time governing the cosmos, it rules the Earth, living things, and the Feminine.

Ernst Cassirer speaks of biological-cosmic time and of the feeling for phase inherent in the mythical time concept, without, however, recognizing the former's de- pendence upon the experience of the moon and its inti- mate relationship to the Feminine. What is involved is not only that humankind experiences sacred times and its own existence as a sequence of phases (moreover, based on seven); it is important to see that this experience of the moon is a fundamental category of matriarchal con- sciousness and hence of the archetypal feminine spirit.

The periodicity of the moon with its nocturnal back- ground is the symbol of a spirit that waxes and trans- forms in connection with the obscure processes of the unconscious. Moon-consciousness, as one could also call matriarchal consciousness, is never separated from the unconscious, for it is a phase, a spiritual phase, of the unconscious itself. The ego of matriarchal consciousness possesses no free and independent activity of its own; rather, it awaits passively, attuned to the spirit-impulse that the unconscious brings to it.

"Favorable" and "unfavorable" is a chronology in which the spirit-activity dependent upon the periodicity of the unconscious turns toward the ego, becomes visible, and reveals itself, or turns away, becomes obscure, and vanishes. It is the task of the ego at the matriarchal level of consciousness to await and to be on the lookout for favorable and unfavorable times, to place itself in agree- ment with the changing moon and to establish a harmony, a unanimity with the oscillations emanating from it.

In other words, matriarchal consciousness is dependent upon the mood, the agreement-in-mood with the unconscious. One can place a negative valuation on this moon-dependency as lack of constancy and as capriciousness, but regarded positively, it provides consciousness with a background that works as a sounding-board and as such represents a special and most positive peculiarity of matriarchal consciousness. There is something strongly musical about this character of mood and of congruency of moods in its dependency on rhythm, on the times and tides of waxing and waning, of crescendo and decrescendo. Precisely in their emphasis on rhythm, music and dance therefore playa significant role for the attitude and the establishment of matriarchal consciousness and for the unanimity between the ego, the Feminine, and the moon-spirit that sets the tone for matriarchal consciousness. Even if musical quality is not a general characteristic of the "patriarchal uroboros," it is still a feature very often encountered in it. Music's intoxicating, orgiastic nature belongs to the deepest fascinations and exaltations of the female essence. Here an emotional feeling, driving one to the point of dissolution, and the irrational spirit-experience of harmony combine to work together according to an invisible inner law. The experience of being seductively transported and carried away extends from fascination with the sound of the Pied Piper's voice and flute to the ecstatic music of Dionysus, from the disintegrative force in the music of the orgiastic ritual to the effect of music on the modern woman. If we construe the moon as the spiritual side of the unconscious-the way it often appears in the unconscious of modern persons-it seems initially incomprehensible why we would associate this with periodicity and the phenomenon of time. But this connection, too, is most informative.

A multitude of facts support the view that, indepen- dently of the conscious system and in its own right, the unconscious psychic system (which we call the collective unconscious) is active and animated at certain times and at others quiescent and at rest, i.e., that it possesses an inner periodicity. This phenomenon commences with the alternation of day and night, which is linked with an alternation within the psychobiological system and with an alternation between consciousness and the unconscious. Therefore the psychic system and the relationship between the psychic subsystems of consciousness and the unconscious are subject to a psychobiological periodicity. A periodicity of this sort has been partially demonstrated in the doctrine of male and female periods.

But the dependency of psychic life on the life of the more encompassing season of the year also belongs in this context. Psychologically, not only do autumn and spring influence the outbreak of psychoses, whose greatest numbers fall in these seasons, sexual life also stands in conspicuous relationship with spring, whose character as "the season of love" is confirmed by the increase in concep- tions, sexual crimes, and suicides in the spring.

But since sexuality is a central locus for symptoms of psychic life in general, we may infer from this the extent to which our psyche depends upon cosmically deter- mined periods, probably right down to the details of our lives. In this regard it makes no difference at all whether we conceptualize this effect as controlled by hormones or in some other manner.

The times in which one lives and the phase of the supraordinate course of fate in which one's personal life-span is embedded is not only individually fateful; time itself is fate and its course is what determines humanity.
Humanity has always experienced it thus, and the deities of fate are deities of time, i.e., at first preeminently moon deities.

Initially the anonymous group member has neither personal time nor fate. He shares the fate and the time of the group. Personal fate separates out from the fate of the collective only with progressive individualization that takes place in the wake of the Great Individual who was the first to have a personal fate and time. Only now is the generally decisive world epoch and cosmic season re-shaped into individuation-time, in which the individual's present belongs irrevocably to him as does his ego, his wholeness, and his destiny. Only in individuation-time does the moon become an "inner moon" and the increasingly visible totality of the Self become an encompassing and simultaneously guiding center that is perceived, center to which, in a certain sense, even the moon is subordinated. But, viewed from the perspective of a ma- triarchal consciousness, it is still a long way indeed to this final stage.
Matriarchal consciousness, or moon-consciousness, stands at the beginning of the development of human consciousness..." [Erich Neumann, Fear of the Feminine]

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"The attacking and raping quality that grips the personality and transports it to ecstasy, madness, poetry, and wisdom through seizure by the sudden idea, by inspiration and intoxication emanating from the unconscious, is one side of the spirit activity. On the other side we find dependency and reliance upon matriarchal consciousness. This is the reliance of every intuition and inspiration upon the emanations from the unconscious that emerge whenever, wherever, and however they will, in a mysterious manner scarcely to be influenced. In this sense all shamanism, extending all the way to prophecy, is pre-dominantly a passive suffering: its activity is more that of conceiving than of deliberate doing. The ego's actual achievement lies in one's readiness to accept the emerging contents of the unconscious and to bring oneself into accord with them.

While patriarchal consciousness is by nature quick- moving and overtakes the long processes of transforma- tion and development in nature with the arbitrary action of experimental calculation, matriarchal consciousness stands under the sway of the moon's growth time. Its luminescence and its light-knowledge is bound to the course of time and to periodicity, as is the moon. For this form of consciousness time must ripen, and with it, like the seeds sown in the earth, knowledge matures.

In rite and cult, "having to wait" and "waiting for" are identical with procession and circumambulation. As in many other fairy tales, the wife in the marvelous tale "The Nixie of the Pond"3l must wait until the moon is full again. Until then she must silently circle about the pond, or she must spin her spindle full. Only when the time is "fulfilled" does knowledge emerge as illumination or enlightenment.

Likewise in the primordial female mysteries of cooking, baking, fermenting, and distilling, the processes of maturation, readiness, and transformation are always bound by a period of time that must be waited out. The ego of matriarchal consciousness is accustomed to remaining still until the time is propitious, the process has run its course, the fruit of the moon-tree has become as ripe as the full moon, i.e., until knowledge is born from out of the unconscious. For always the moon is not only lord of growth but also the growth itself as moon-tree and tree of life: "Self-generated fruit."

That the processes of matriarchal consciousness are through and through uniquely and specifically different from those of patriarchal consciousness commences with the act of "understanding." Here understanding is not, as for patriarchal consciousness, an act of the intellect as a rapidly comprehending organ that perceives, works through, and organizes;" rather, it means "conceiving." Whenever something is to be understood, it must "enter into" matriarchal consciousness, and in all respects this is to be understood in the symbolically sexual sense of a fertilization, i.e., of a conception.

But this female symbolism of matriarchal conscious- ness goes still further, for what has "entered into" must now "rise up," Aufgehen. With linguistic genius, Aufgehen -the act of "arising," "rising up," or "sprouting"- captures the twofold aspect of matriarchal consciousness for which the light of knowledge "rises up" just as the sprouting seed does.

But once something has "entered into" (eingegangen) and has "risen up" or "sprouted" (auf- gegangen), this "something" lays claim to the entire psyche that now is permeated by the matured knowledge that the psyche seeks-indeed, is compelled-to realize with its totality. This means that with the act of understanding- conceiving, matriarchal consciousness experiences a personality change. The whole person isgripped and moved by the content, in contrast to the experience of patriarchal consciousness in which an intellectually "understood" content is often only filed away in one of the pigeonholes of the systematized mind. Just as it is difficult for a patri- archal consciousness to actualize something rather than only to "magnificently understand it," a matriarchal consciousness finds it hard to understand something if it cannot make it real. But here, "making something real" means "carrying it to fruition" and relating to the content in the manner of the relationship in which mother and embryo reciprocally alter each other during pregnancy.

Matriarchal qualitative time is unique and singular as gravid, pregnant time in contrast to the quantitative time of patriarchal consciousness. For the patriarchal ego-consciousness, every segment of time is the same, but in moon-time matriarchal consciousness experiences the individual time of the world, even if not of the ego. The unique and unforgettable quality of time comes into view precisely for the eye schooled in perceiving living growth, an eye that experiences and realizes the fullness of the

Figuratively, aufgehen occurs in the expression "Mir gehen die Augen auf," meaning "I see the light," "It dawns on me," "I understand." In business or political parlance,atifgehen translates as "to merge." In moment, its readiness for birth. In the fairy tale a treasure emerges from the deep once every hundred years, on a certain day, at a certain hour, and belongs to him who finds it at the right moment of growth. Only a matriarchal consciousness, attuned to the processes of the un-conscious, recognizes this individual temporal element, while a patriarchal consciousness, for which this moment is one of countless identical moments in time, is fated to let it slip away. In this sense, moon-consciousness is more concrete and closer to the reality of life, the patriarchal more abstract and more distanced from actuality.

Hence, symbolically, matriarchal consciousness is usu- ally not situated in the head, but rather in the heart. Here "understanding" also means an act of feeling that comprehends, and often enough this act-as, for example, in the creative process-is accompanied by an intense par- ticipation of affect so that something can burst into light and illuminate consciousness. In contrast, the process of thinking and abstraction typical of patriarchal consciousness is "cold," since the "cold-blooded" objectivity demanded of it necessitates establishing distance that pre-supposes a cool head.

Assigning moon-consciousness to the heart is gener- ally true for that part of humanity in whom the head has not yet become the center of patriarchal consciousness, separated, as it is, from the unconscious. Just as in Egypt the heart was regarded as the source of thought and of the creative spirit, in India the heart-cosmically assigned to the moon-is believed to be the locus of a psychic and spiritual organ called manas (related to the word root men), and is the place where the highest, self-revealing god manifests. The same holds true for China. "Do (in ancient times written simply with the character for 'heart,' i.e., spiritual or intellectual capacity, and with the character signifying what lies directly in the line of vision) originally meant the radiating, magical power; then the mystical power of the heart; moreover, power, usefulness in general; and finally virtue." This heart-center of matriarchal consciousness that is referenced to the qualitative time of the moon remains the valid orien- tation for all processes of growth and transformation. It is also typical for the creative, spiritual process in which contents are constellated in slow developments in the unconscious more or less independently and stream towards a non-systematized, open consciousness ready to be expanded.

The creative process takes place not under the burning rays of the sun but in the cool, reflected light of the moon when the darkness of the unconscious is great: night, not day, is the time for begetting. Darkness and stillness, secrecy, remaining mute and veiled, are a part of it. For this reason the moon as lord of life and of growth is opposed to the death character of the devouring sun. The nocturnal moistness of the moon-night is the time of sleep, but also that of healing and recovery. Therefore the moon-god Sin is physician, and, as a cuneiform inscrip- tion states, the healing herb "is cut after sundown and before sunrise when one has veiled one's head and made a magic circle of flour around the healing herb."

In addition to the symbolism of the magic circle and the flour we find "veiling" as a mystery symbol that be- longs to the moon as well as to night and to its secretive character. The precinct of healing and of the healer, of the healing plant and of the growth that heals, find their place in this context.40 It is the regenerative power of the unconscious that does its work during sleep, in the dark- ness of the night or in the light of the moon, as a mystery and in mystery, from out of itself, from nature, without the influence of consciousness and without the help of the head-ego. This is why the healing pill and the healing plant are assigned to the moon, and their secret is pro- tected and preserved by women, or better, by the Femi- nine, which belongs to the moon.

Growing vegetation is to be understood here in the broadly symbolic sense embraced by every symbol as the synthesis of both inner and outer realities. The power of sleep that regenerates the body and its wounds and the restoration that runs its course in darkness belong to the night domain of the healing moon, as do the happenings in the soul that let a person "grow beyond" an insoluble crisis through the dark processes perceived only by the heart." [Neumann, Fear of the Feminine]

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"A woman has had the fundamental receptive-accepting attitude of matriarchal consciousness; by nature that is something she takes for granted. It is not only during the menstrual period that woman must place her agreement with the moon ahead of the willing and planning of a masculine ego-consciousness if she is to live wisely. Pregnancy and childbirth bring about a total psychobiological alteration that demands and presuppose both a stance and a change of attitude that have existed in her for years. The unknown nature of the child, its uniqueness, its gender (of decisive significance in many matriarchal and patriarchal cultures), the state of its health, its destiny-in all these things woman is dependent upon the mercy and power of the deity and condemned, as an ego, to non-activity and to being unable to intervene. Similarly in a later phase, woman is handed over to the superior power of a love relationship in a different way than a man is.

This is why the male's unquestioning patriarchal belief in ego and consciousness is foreign to woman; indeed, it even seems to her a bit ludicrous and childish. This is the origin of woman's deep skepticism and, in a certain sense, lack of interest in patriarchal consciousness and in the masculine world of the spirit associated with it, especially when woman, as is often the case, confuses spirit with the world of consciousness. The male is a captive of the ego and of consciousness and has intentionally freed himself from his relatedness to nature and to fate, in whose depths matriarchal consciousness has its roots. But the patriarchal accent on ego, will, and freedom contradicts woman's experience of the predominance of the powers of the unconscious and of fate, and of life's dependence upon the non-ego and on the Thou." [Neumann, Fear of the Feminine]

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"In contrast to the activity of the head-ego, the preferred attitude of an observing consciousness at the matriarchal level also corresponds to this muted activity of the ego. Here it is a question more of an attentive perceiving than of an intentional thinking or judging activity of consciousness. The observing matriarchal consciousness is to be confused neither with the sensation function of masculine ego-consciousness nor with the distance of masculine consciousness that leads to science and objectivity; the observing matriarchal consciousness is guided by concomitant feelings based on half-conscious processes and accompanying intuitions with the help of which the ego orients itself in the presence of strong emotional tendencies.

Matriarchal consciousness reflects the unconscious processes, summarizes them, and directs them inward; that is, it assumes a stance of "waiting for," without deliberate ego-intentions. For matriarchal consciousness it is a question of a kind of total perception in which the entire psyche participates and in which the ego has more the task of directing the libido toward the observed life processes or events and intensifying them than that of abstracting from them and hence arriving at an extension of consciousness. Typical for this observing consciousness is the act of contemplation where energies are guided toward a content, process, or midpoint while the ego establishes a participation with the emotionally colored content and lets it impregnate and permeate it. This differs from the extremely patriarchal consciousness that dis- tances and abstracts itself from the content.

The observing nature of the moon-spirit that is con- nected more to the Cerniit, the totality of the soul's innermost sensibilities and feelings, is referred to in German by the root-word Sinn, which has a range of related meanings in English: feeling, inclination, disposition, tendency, temper; mind, wit, understanding; sense, faculty, organ of perception. A number of compound words derive from Sinn: sinnieren, to be lost in thoughts, brood, ponder; im Sinn haben, to have in mind; to meditate, muse; sid besinnen, to recollect, remember, call to mind, think of; but also Besinnung, recollection, consideration, consciousness; Sinnesart, character, disposition; and Gesinnung, disposition, sentiment, way of thinking; as well as sinnlich, material, physical; sensuous; sensual, volup- tuous; sentient. And last but not least we must mention the Eigensinn-the obstinacy, stubbornness, headstrongness, and willfulness-that men generally ascribe to women. The brooding and circumambulating mental activity of matriarchal consciousness does not have the goal-directedness of the act of thought, of inference, and of judgment. What corresponds to the mental activity of matriarchal consciousness is circumambulation about a center or consideration (which Jung once interpreted as "making full as in pregnancy," trachtig machen), not the bull's-eye directness of masculine consciousness and the knife edge of its analytic power. Matriarchal consciousness is more interested in the sensory-sensual-sensuous aspect (Sinnhaftzgkeit) of phenomena, situations, or per- sons than in facts and figures, and, in accord with organic growth, is oriented more by teleology than by the causal- mechanical or the causal-logical point of view.

Because for moon-consciousness knowing is a preg- nancy and its product a birth-i.e., a process in which the totality of the personality participates; the epistemological act lies beyond statement, justification, and proof. As an inner possession realized by the personality and inti- mately bound up with it, moon-consciousness has a kind of intuitive cogency that easily tends to evade discussion because the inner experiential process inherent in this way of knowing cannot be adequately verbalized and is scarcely communicable to another person who has not gone through the same experiential process.

To a dull masculine consciousness the manner in which matriarchal consciousness "knows" appears un- controllable, arbitrary, and-especially-mystical. And in the positive sense this does in fact capture its essence. What mysticism and the authentic mysteries have come to know are indeed of this sort-i.e., not communicable truths but experienced transformations that therefore of necessity have validity only for those persons who have the corresponding experiences. Here Goethe's warning applies:

Tell it no one, only sages, For the crowd derides such learning.

This means that the knowledge of matriarchal consciousness does not exist independent of the personality that has it; this knowledge is neither abstract nor stripped of emotion, for matriarchal consciousness preserves the connection to those realms of the unconscious out of which its knowledge arises. Therefore it can often stand in opposition to the knowledge of patriarchal conscious- ness that consists ideally of isolated and abstracted contents of consciousness from which all emotion has been extracted and which is generally valid independent of the personality.

The fundamental direction in the development of occidental humanity tends toward extending the domain of patriarchal consciousness and feeding it with whatever it can possibly incorporate. In spite of this, matriarchal consciousness is definitely neither an antiquated mode of functioning nor a range of contents that, simply out of lethargy, have not been developed to the level of patriarchal consciousness. For the most part the insights and knowledge of the moon-side of the psyche cannot be grasped by the natural scientific consciousness, at least not by our contemporary psyche. These are insights into life of a general sort that have been the object of the mysteries and of religion since time immemorial, and that belong to the domain of wisdom, not to that of Science.

The moon-spirit always brings culture, too, but its significance does not lie in having led historically to mathematics and astronomy via observation of the heavens and astrology. It brings culture as the heavenly prototype, as the "Self-generated Fruit," as victor over death, and as the one who brings rebirth. As the lord of the spirits and of the dead, the moon-spirit from the waters of the deep over which it holds sway is the one who com- mands the nature- and spirit-forces of the unconscious to rise up when their time has come, and thus it gives the world of humankind not only growth and bread, but also prophecy, poetry, wisdom, and immortality.

Matriarchal consciousness experiences the mysteri- ously unknown process of the coming-into-being of an insight or of knowledge as an activity in which the Self as a whole is at work. This is a process running its course in the dark. The Self is dominant as the moon, but above and beyond it the Self rules as the Great Mother, as the unity of all things nocturnal and of the nocturnal realm. The very relationship of matriarchal consciousness to growth presupposes that matriarchal consciousness never surrenders its connection to the matrix of all growth, the Nocturnal Mother herself, as the masculine ego does on principle and with heroic decisiveness. Hence in the sym- bol of the moon the efficacy of the masculine moon often overlaps that of the Great Mother. The participation of the matriarchal ego with the moon goes yet further, as is true also of the Great Mother herself, who is the partner of the moon-lover and almost achieves identity with him. The hermaphroditic nature of the Great Mother is re- vealed in two ways: first, she receives the moon-spirit, her lord and beloved, not only as a woman from outside herself (as she believes, both rightly and wrongly); and, second, in the fact that she carries the moon-spirit within herself as her own masculine side, a deity who is simul- taneously son-lover, father, and child.

The ego of matriarchal consciousness experiences the fructifying power of the moon as the fructifying side of the unconscious, i.e., as part of the uroboric Great Mother. This is why, in its non-separation from the whole that confronts it in the image of the Great Mother, the ego of matriarchal consciousness experiences itself in her likeness. Like her, it surrounds what it has received and like her also knows him who procreates as one born of herself, as her son and fruit of her own growth. Thus the moon manifests in male form as the center of the spirit-world of matriarchal consciousness, but also in female form as the highest expression of the female spirit-Self, as Sophia, divine wisdom. This wisdom, however, refers to life in its indissoluble and paradoxical unity of living and dying; nature and spirit; time and destiny; growing, dying, and overcoming death. For this female figure of the wisdom of life, order is not based on unrelated, abstract laws where dead heavenly bodies or atoms orbit in empty space; rather, it is a wisdom that is and remains bound to the earth, to organic growth on earth, and to experiencing the ancestors in us. It is the wisdom of the unconscious and of the instincts, of life and of relatedness.

Consequently the wisdom of the earth, of peasants, and, to be sure, of woman corresponds to matriarchal consciousness. The teachings of China, especially those of the I Ching and of Lao-tse, are an expression of this matriarchal consciousness that loves darkness and hidden things, and that has time. Renunciation of speedy success, of prompt reactions, and of visible effects belong in its domain. Facing the night more than the day, matriarchal consciousness tends to be more dreamy and contempla- tive than alert and active. By no means does it love the brilliance, clarity, and sharp focus of the light of day to the extent desired by patriarchal consciousness, which, in its aversion to the moon-side of life, is all too glad to disguise the dependency of its existence upon the dark- ness of the unconscious. Its wisdom is the wisdom of paradox that does not extricate and juxtapose opposites with the clear separation of patriarchal consciousness, but rather binds them together with a "both-and." In this sense-which must not be misunderstood - matriarchal consciousness is relativistic, for it is refer- enced less to the absolute unequivocality of truth than to a wisdom that remains embedded in the cosmo-psychic system of continually changing forces. Often this relativ- ization even appears as the hostility of matriarchal con- sciousness vis-a-vis the "absolute," if we are permitted to label as hostility what in fact is a difference in nature and a tendency to relatedness.

Matriarchal consciousness depends upon its moon- spirit partner and upon coinciding with the moon's phases, and this contains an element of eros, of depen- dency upon the Thou who, as moon-lover, is partner. This fundamentally distinguishes matriarchal conscious- ness-as a consciousness of relatedness and relationship -from patriarchal consciousness. Where the patri- archally liberated and unattached consciousness is able to do and think whenever, however, and whatever it will and is self-satisfied-or better, ego-satisfied-in its re- moved, abstracted manner, and is ruler within the circle of its conscious contents, matriarchal consciousness is not independent since it is related and referenced to the moon and to the unconscious upon which it knows itself to be dependent and which govern it.

This is why Moon-Sophia does not have the abstractly non-individual and generally absolute character of spirit that the patriarchal male declares to be the ultimate, which he reveres as the day-heavens-sun-spirit and super- poses above the moon-world. The moon-spirit of matri- archal consciousness is "only" moon-spirit, only soul and eternal Feminine. But instead of having the quality of the "distant" deity, matriarchal consciousness preserves the milder and non-blinding light of a human spirit. Female wisdom is non-speculative, for it is close to life and to nature, bound to fact and to living reality. Its illusionless eye for reality may shock an idealistic male mentality, but on the other hand it is bonded to this reality through nurturing and helping, consoling and loving, and it leads this reality beyond death to ever new transformation and birth.

The moon-wisdom of biding one's time, of accepting and ripening, absorbs everything into its totality and transforms what has been taken in and itself as well. It is always concerned with wholeness, with giving form and actualizing-that is, with creating-and let it never be forgotten that by its very nature creating is bound to matriarchal consciousness, not because consciousness is creative but rather because the unconscious is, and because every creative accomplishment presupposes all the attitudes of pregnancy and relatedness that we have rec- ognized as characteristic of matriarchal consciousness.

But while the cultural achievement of the creative person-at least in its highest expression-is always a synthesis of the matriarchally receptive-gestative and the patriarchally form-giving consciousnesses, woman's pre- dominant attachment to matriarchal consciousness and to its wisdom holds fundamental dangers in addition to all its blessings. That remaining silent add making real are more important than formulating and making con- scious is a significant and wise part of the moon-spirit and of growth. But in the case of woman, the tendency toward making real, which is one of the creative elements inherent in matriarchal consciousness, easily gets caught up in what is merely natural creativity.

In the phase of self-conservation, the stage in which woman may naturally remain in the custody of the Great Mother without damage, the matriarchal ego is com- pletely unaware of being dominated by the unconscious. But even if woman's ego attains to a level of self- awareness that distinguishes it from matriarchal con- sciousness, it continues to cling to the basic conditions of the existence it has hitherto led-i.e., of being undivided. Even when woman must move from self-conservation to self-surrender (as we have discussed elsewhere), she de- mands to be totally seized by emotion. Woman is not satisfied, as is man, with fulfilling a part-structure of the psyche, for example with the accomplishment of the ego's differentiation of consciousness. Woman wants to be gripped and moved as a whole. At the spiritual-emotional level that means realization, actualization.

But here one of the "tricks" of woman's nature often comes into play, and instead of realizing and actualizing she concretizes and, via the natural process of projection, she displaces the creative process of pregnancy onto an external object.

This means that woman takes the phase of matriarchal consciousness and its symbolism literally and falls in love, gets pregnant, gives birth, nurses, cares for, etc., and is feminine outwardly but not inwardly. Woman's fewer visible creative intellectual accomplishments, the absence of a creative opus (as compared to that of man), may possibly arise from this tendency. To be the origin of life through pregnancy and birth and to shape the proximate reality that belongs to this life appears to woman ade- quately creative. And is she wrong? Matriarchal con- sciousness is "written in woman's flesh," and with her body she lives in external reality everything that, for a man, must take place as a spiritual and emotional process if it is to be realized. In this respect man is a step ahead of woman in his development toward patriarchal conscious- ness, for by his very nature he can experience the phase of matriarchal consciousness only as a spiritual-emotional stage, not in a physically concrete way.

If, for reasons we have elaborated elsewhere, human- kind must attain to patriarchal consciousness and to a separation from the unconscious, matriarchal conscious- ness like the matriarchy-and with it the moon- signifies something negative to be overcome. For every stage and development that presses toward patriarchal consciousness-i.e., toward the sun-the moon-spirit becomes the spirit of regression, the spirit of the Terrible Mother and the Witch. Whether experienced as feminine or masculine, this negative moon is now the symbol of the devouring unconscious. Especially as the black moon it becomes the bloodsucker, child murderer, and cannibal47 and symbolizes the danger of being inundated by the unconscious as moodiness, somnambulism, and insanity. The English term, to moon-to be listless, to fritter away one's time-shows that "being distracted" can also mean being attracted by the moon and the dangerous pull of the unconscious.

Here as everywhere it is a question of the significance of a psychic phase within a developmental stage. Moon-consciousness or matriarchal consciousness is creative and productive as beginning and as end. The light of the moon is the first light that illuminates the dark world of the unconscious, out of which light is born and to which it is bound; and everything growing, creative, and feminine remains faithful to this connection with and indebtedness to the moon-spirit." [Neumann, Fear of the Feminine]

Women secretly laugh at men who think they have made convincing arguments for her disenchantment.  

How can you resolve temptation once and for all when desire springs eternal.  Somewhere a man and a woman are helpless to desire. Yet, we’re always quick to come to the aid of desire and not the helpless.  If Desire is a bridge, then some men are eager to cross no matter the cost while others are stuck playing the troll.

Man: Everything about her is gross deceit.  
Woman:  Everything about his approach indicates defeat.

Does he leave her wanting more, or rather does he leave her with too much to sort through.  Women love to organize and pick apart. He keeps his distance with dense content to unravel.

Some men like to put and keep her in place, while other men enjoy finding and seeing her in new places.

Her faults are always his to fall through.

The woman that feeds on compliments is only satiated when she’s starved.

His clumsy moments can be his most endearing as long as he doesn’t make a habit of it.

He thinks he’s being cute.  But he’s never cute enough to avoid her claws.  He fashions himself into a toy and is surprised when he gets scratched up.

He tries in vain to avoid stirring the beast with a harmless attitude, mistaking gentleness with harmlessness. He only knows the art of relaxing and never fought hard to be gentle.  Now he’ll never be hard enough to feel her soft embrace.

Sober ecstasy: She loves when he’s drunk and spontaneous, but she loves him even more if he doesn’t have to take a sip to get her there.

She’s drawing him closer to completion. He removes the shades to reveal a forgotten light.

She loves the criminal, but she loves the criminal that retains his freedom most.  Love is a crime that men don’t have the heart to penalize. Yet still, most men are afraid to steal and so her heart remains behind eagerly fragile glass.

She is ready. He becomes ready. Together they discover what they are ready for.

She’s doesn’t represent safety as much as a place to heal for the next battle. That he would take away her claws and make her into a grazing companion is the biggest insult.  How is she supposed to give birth to a painful destiny in such a “safe” place?  And who would need healing there?

She has to be sure he isn’t hiding anything before she can commit.  He remains committed that she’s always in hiding.

He wants her as arm candy. And just now does she turn sour.

She’s expensive yet priceless.  With women one can afford being neither too cruel nor too kind and now she’s all the richer, even if in the end she makes him pay the highest price, as cruel as it may be.

Man and woman rarely match each other with more desire, trying to outdo one another. Rather, man adjusts the acceleration of his desire in relation to the limits revealed in her signs. Consequently, he’s always breaking the speed limit.

Woman is all body but never as proud in her body as man. In fact, his pride makes her feel insecure in her body. Only when she is his pride does she feel secure.

Looking for her, he dug deep into the earth so that his roots could be nourished by fire and his heart could pump magma.

He loved so strong he became unrecognizable to everyone but those who were likewise burnt beyond recognition.

She secretly wants to be found so she can lose herself again in love.  And it’s only when she’s lost that he finds all her secrets.

Love never loses. It just takes a rest and tags in hate.

Love is sometimes a game of tag between those never born at the same time stretched out over centuries.

Light, love, beauty and violence are old friends that now look strange and lost without each other.

He’s less concerned with turning darkness into light than giving light the poetic character of darkness.  That he could be dark enough for the day.

What are all her aspirations compared to his desire for her?  That he could inspire such desire in her.

Women indulge in behavior they’re ashamed of but find forgivable.  The same behavior is always unforgivable in a man.

Men that find women dirty creatures are never clean enough for the truth and will consequently never create any worthwhile truths of their own.

If he becomes too concerned with catching her at the "right time" he might miss her forever.

When we think of death, we're not scared of dying but of having no more chances to eternalize our love.

She’s just a drop in the ocean, but that one drop makes quite a loud splash in his soul.

The story between man and woman is the story of the chicken and the egg; who broke whose heart first.  Men put all there energy into mending a broken heart, even if some hearts get broken along the way as collateral damage.  Women put all their energy in keeping wounds open yet remain the best nurses for all love sick soldiers.

He wants to undress as fast as possible. He wants the lights on and the clothes on the floor. He will tear all the pretty garments she so carefully put on, if he must. He must sweep through her like the winds of a summer storm, and he won't stop until all there is between them is flesh, and flesh. It is only after seeing her bare that he feels himself cured of his disease.

It’s unfortunate that he is attracted to those women who would rob him of all his potential and laugh at his shriveled state as if she were completely innocent and unaware of her theft, a bystander to the power of her own effects.  It’s even more unfortunate that he still needs her to grow.  But the best plants can grow even in acid rain and the most inclement weather.

Is his light majestic enough to reach her distant shores?  His pride swells and brings a tide of dreams to be collected in her soft sands.

His love grows in the darkest place and blooms without craving attention.

Love runs dry when one is no longer capable of being a desert.

Does she feel closer to him when he’s unmoved by her violent moods or when he joins her in eruption? Doesn’t she really love how well he contests her mood? Anger isn’t always a loss of control and silence isn’t always a lack of emotion. He shows his unlimited love in is his passion for fire and ice.

The fruits of love’s hard work always appear when we least expect it in a soft, kind light of some new and encouraging horizon, providing nourishment and solace in our lowest moments, if only so we may have the energy to go lower again, back into the unforgiving conditions of love’s sweatshop.

Love presents itself most boldly in those silent pauses between lovers.

The language of love is said to require no words but is routinely misinterpreted in nearly every language

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"The difference among men does not manifest itself only in the difference of their lists of desirable things—in their regarding different good things as worth striving for, and being disagreed as to the greater or less value, the order of rank, of the commonly recognized desirable things:—it manifests itself much more in what they regard as actually HAVING and POSSESSING a desirable thing.

As regards a woman, for instance, the control over her body and her sexual gratification serves as an amply sufficient sign of ownership and possession to the more modest man;

another with a more suspicious and ambitious thirst for possession, sees the "questionableness," the mere apparentness of such ownership, and wishes to have finer tests in order to know especially whether the woman not only gives herself to him, but also gives up for his sake what she has or would like to have—only THEN does he look upon her as "possessed."

A third, however, has not even here got to the limit of his distrust and his desire for possession: he asks himself whether the woman, when she gives up everything for him, does not perhaps do so for a phantom of him; he wishes first to be thoroughly, indeed, profoundly well known; in order to be loved at all he ventures to let himself be found out. Only then does he feel the beloved one fully in his possession, when she no longer deceives herself about him, when she loves him just as much for the sake of his devilry and concealed insatiability, as for his goodness, patience, and spirituality.

One man would like to possess a nation, and he finds all the higher arts of Cagliostro and Catalina suitable for his purpose.

Another, with a more refined thirst for possession, says to himself: "One may not deceive where one desires to possess"—he is irritated and impatient at the idea that a mask of him should rule in the hearts of the people: "I must, therefore, MAKE myself known, and first of all learn to know myself!"

Among helpful and charitable people, one almost always finds the awkward craftiness which first gets up suitably him who has to be helped, as though, for instance, he should "merit" help, seek just THEIR help, and would show himself deeply grateful, attached, and subservient to them for all help. With these conceits, they take control of the needy as a property, just as in general they are charitable and helpful out of a desire for property. One finds them jealous when they are crossed or forestalled in their charity. Parents involuntarily make something like themselves out of their children—they call that "education"; no mother doubts at the bottom of her heart that the child she has borne is thereby her property, no father hesitates about his right to HIS OWN ideas and notions of worth. Indeed, in former times fathers deemed it right to use their discretion concerning the life or death of the newly born (as among the ancient Germans). And like the father, so also do the teacher, the class, the priest, and the prince still see in every new individual an unobjectionable opportunity for a new possession. The consequence is... [N., BGE, 194]"