#mystic archetype

[d4rkpluto]

𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔤𝔬𝔡𝔡𝔢𝔰𝔰 𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔢𝔱𝔶𝔭𝔢

[I AM FOLLOWING AYESHA K.FAINES RESEARCH OF FEMININE ARCHETYPES]

↳ the sexual feminine archetype of the mystic archetype.

♇ when your percentage of the lover percentage is lower than 70%. and when your personal score matches with your percentage goddess the most. [your lover archetype is dominant and the mystic archetype is the second dominant too].

♇ the goddess is one of the sexual feminine archetypes that belong to the feminine archetype the mystic, whereas the other sexual feminine archetype is the enigma.

♇ people who belong to the goddess archetype are perceived to be sultry women, women who have an ethereal and laid-back essence which could be considered hypnotic and mesmerising to those around them. they have a type of emotional manner that keeps the people around them at arms-length.

♇ when developed, those who belong to the goddess archetype have an emotional intelligence that could be considered wise, and due to this, they might appear other-worldly to other people. even if they're people who are emotionally smart, due to them being distant to other people, they come off as aloof, but it is usually because they're focusing on themselves.

♇ as majority of them are naturally introverted, they are people who like solitude and isolation, sometimes like a hermit. and most of the times, they like to tend to hobbies that help them search inward, such as meditation.

♇ though, even though if they're introverted, they still like attention, they like being surrounded by their friends and loved ones.

♇ their appearance can come off as striking and to pair it off, they have a personality which could be perceived as distinct. as i have mentioned, goddess women like inner peace, so they tend to be interested in spirituality, connecting to something that is greater to them helps them feel comfortable, safe and protected.

♇ their most private area, where they feel the most comfortable is their home. it helps them keep a grounded energy. people find their energy to be alluring and pleasant, and even more enchanting and people find them to be at their most magnetic is when they're disappeared from the public, specifically when they're a celebrity. a good example, is alexa demie.

♇ she is known to hide in the shadows a lot, and sometimes, well actually majority of the times, it has people wondering what she actually wants for her career. an example can be seen in this video.

♇ overall, goddess women are stars, even said by Ayesha her self, they're a star light years away, and only a few people can see their qualities.

♇ when close to their loved ones, they appeal and encourage their dreams and future wants. when they're closed to the people they care about, they're like a warmer version of a siren, which could be considered a "mermaid". a calm mystic essence, an aura that can make people want to be around them more.

♇ the description of a goddess woman can include them having a sultry voice and lush hair. they're women who take care of their appearance as how they look likely matters to them a lot.

♇ on one hand, they can become people too fixated on other things that cut them off from their comfortability. and since they are people who attract all kinds of people, one of them being curious individuals, they sometimes get overwhelmed and get into hiding. underdeveloped goddess women sometimes are not able to express their creative and "erotic" energy.

♇ majority of the time, goddess women are peaceful and humanitarians. they're likely feminists and stand for a cause. and when speaking to them or hearing them speak, you'd realise they're usually kindly spoken people, very articulate.

♇ other people might see them as a young soul, or someone who brings refreshing energy. artistic energies, when fully developed they can easily bring their ideas to life.

♇ they like things that touch their soul, attracted to things that help them understand their roots and are not afraid to face their inner-depths. sometimes underdeveloped goddess women might fear to face their inner-depths to please other people in their life, to be a walking matt for them.

♇ as i did more research about goddess women, i understood that they can be deeply in touch with spirituality, and like to be very private. other people around them could sometimes feel like they cannot or dont live up to their potential. and sometimes this could lead people into thinking that they're stupid.

♇ they have a dreamy way of speaking, and even sometimes drag out their words. when they dont see themselves as the high value they are, they could get into relationships with people that dont really fit with their political views, specifically feminism.

♇ when it comes to their clothing, they like to wear garments that define their personality. could like aesthetics that are dark or portrays their femininity in a "broken" way. specifically lana del rey. most of them are into the vintage aesthetic, and have a style that other people want to replicate. [gabriette and alexa demie specifically].

♇ they're very expressive about their likes and dislikes, and most of the people i've watched are into getting tattoos, or are interested in having things that make their physique stand out.

♇ most of them have a strong connection with their mother and make-up, and sometimes they might allow make-up to help value themselves.

♇ goddess women understand that women can be many things, and can express themselves in ways the patriarchy dont want them to be elevated in. as they're seen as glamorous, they like to look good as they're usually under the spotlight. many goddess women have a popular partner, or even if their partner is unknown, they could be a respected person with an authoritative position. sometimes their partners could be their complete opposite.

♇ whenever goddess women are under the spotlight, the usually get meme'd a lot, or just whenever they do anything people speak about it. they could sometime feel suffocated by fame.

♇ as goddess usually represents fertility, it's not a surprise that most goddess women are into having a family of their own. but even if they want a family of their own, it doesnt mean they dont want to work, as i did research, i realised most goddess women were/are into modelling.

♇ they like to pursue a route that gives them happiness, so people in their social circle could think of them to be stubborn. they're usually questioned for their ideas and how they embrace their heritage and roots, and since they're usually questioned a lot, goddess women step into a role of being self-aware.

♇ some goddess women could be into cosmetic surgery, and can be a bit [but almost too much] into heteronrimity.

♇ their intelligence and beauty could be envied, they're open about their sexuality and most people look up to them for guidance. when doing research about them, i realised that a lot of them have been victim of sexual shaming, [even though many people have been in general, this has also happen to some of my friends who do belong to this archetype].

♇ when it comes to their appearance, a lot of them have doe/bug eyes, have luscious hair, they also have an earthly and natural type of beauty, which can make them be deemed as elegant and graceful.

♇ they like to be prepared for anything, especially career wise. and women who belong to the goddess archetype like to experience almost everything with their partner. sometimes might be seen as someone who is smothering. on the other hand, even though they like to be around their partners a lot, they also like to be private.

♇ and in a friendship group, they might be seen as the mother of the group, or you could say leader of the group. can be into making food, and also specifically the art of it. unlike the mother archetype, they dont only/mainly do it for their partner, they do it for themselves, their friends and the people they care about.

other goddesses ↴

♇ goddesses i put above are eva peron, cindy crawford, dita von teese, jisoo, grace kelly and melania trump.

♇ understanding the goddesses archetype, is that it shows that they are women who are usually do focus on themselves, and can be so to themselves to the point that other people might feel like they do not know them at all.

♇ and to make the goddesses archetype easier to comprehend i gathered characters from different tv shows or films that come under the archetype.

♇ from yellow jackets - lottie matthews, lottie. is a big example of an underdeveloped goddess archetype, though it isnt necessarily her fault due to the trauma she has gone through while stuck in the wilds. she is a very spiritual person, and even isolates herself with other people to find herself. but due to her spiritual nature, people easily found way to see her as a leader and was advised for her guidance, during the time the team were stuck in the woods, lottie was seen as somewhat as a mother [not to be confused as the mother archetype as they are striking differences between the two]. she helps other people express their emotions and speaks about spirituality that could make other people uncomfortable.

♇ from the maden men franchise - betty draper, her character strengthens my idea that a lot of goddess archetypes are models, as she was a model for a print ad. she is a character who gets with a romantic partner that has authority, her romantic partner, don who is a completely different person to her, made betty express versions of herself that she disliked and wanted to change for the better.

♇ we have the addams family - morticia addams, for the fictional goddess women, morticia addams is a patron saint of what a goddess archetype is. her husband, gomez kisses the floor she walks on, morticia is a seductress and has a striking appearance that fascinates other people and makes other want to replicate her style, in real life [like vanessa hudgens] and in the show, wednesday. she is soft spoken, almost dreamy like and could be considered as laid-back and ethereal.

♇ from the postman always rings twice - cora smith, a mysterious woman who is married to someone who has authority, [an older man]. is perceived as a character that can also be deemed as an underdeveloped goddess archetype, who uses the love a man has for her to aid her to kill her husband.

♇ the fall of house usher - verna, another mysterious woman who does keep people at arms length, people come to her to have once in a life time deal, she uses her erotic energy to lure people in and capture them. she is wise, and has a calm essence that makes people comfortable around her. verna is prepared for everything and knows how to handle obstacles like how the two siblings, specifically the man went against her deal and hunted everyone in the usher family down.

♇ we have from the infernal devices and shadow hunter chronicles - tessa gray/herondale, like the other goddess archetype, tessa gray has a romantic partner who has high authority from the novel she is from. will herondale is the leader of the clave and is well respected. aside from that, tessa is usually under the spotlight because of what she is, and is seen to be someone who is serene, wise and has a warm energy that has many people want to be around her, but as she gets older, she does keep people at an arms length. in the early books, fertility was a big theme for her, as she was unsure if she could have children because of her being a half-demon. like a goddess archetype, tessa herondale has a grounded energy and has a striking beautiful appearance that other say is unconventional.

♇ from lore olympus/greek lore - selene, being a goddess herself, selene is someone who is respected and under the spotlight as she is a prominent and important figure for those who worship her, and like most women from the goddess archetype, she is someone who wants to have many moments with her loved ones, like endymion. a deity of fertility, she is someone who likes to keep in the shadows unlike her brother, helios who is considered to be flashy. selene has a personality that could be deemed as peaceful and timid like most women under this personality type.

♇ from the witcher franchise - yennefer of vengerberg, fertility was a big element to her character, as having a child was something she was not able to do, but with geralt, ciri was able to be her child surprise. and like the other goddess archetypes, yennefer is seen with a partner of authority/power, and it being geralt. her beauty is perceived as other-worldly, and becoming [beautiful], and powerful was so important to her that she constructed herself to become a better version of herself in a painful manner. there was a moment of the show, [i'll play the games later], that there had to be much internal search because she had lost her powers for a brief moment.

♇ next from legacies, there is josie saltzman - looking within herself was a big theme for her character, because she was known to be a character who was in her twin sister's shadow, lizzie for a long time; to the point that other characters had almost forced her to become a better version of herself, and even stand up for josie to her sister. josie was almost like a glass child. her main relationship, or most known one, is with someone who is the opposite of her, penelope, someone who had high authority within the boarding school she was in. even though josie is timid and shy, she is very emotionally intelligent, which is why people like to be around her a lot. she is understanding and empathetic.

♇ lastly, there is a character from winx club, aisha - in the show aisha is one of the main characters who gave advice to other people, sometimes she can be perceived as the mother of the group, [once again, to not be thought as the mother archetype]. when aisha was younger, aisha was isolated, which kind of made her into someone who is explosive and has a strong temper. and when. the series began, aisha was seen as anti-social, but when she is gotten to know more, the people around her are more aware of her open-minded traits.

♇ as i have done my research, i gathered that a lot of enigmas are are likely going to have capricorn, taurus and scorpio in their big six; in order of how much they appeared.

♇ they are also going to have leo, aries and taurus appear in their dominant signs; in order of how much they appeared.

♇ the planets sun, saturn and moon appeared in their dominant planets the most; in order of how much they appeared.

♇ the element that appeared the most was fire, second was earth.

♇ lastly, when it comes to the modality, what appeared the most was fixed.

♇ feminine archetype masterlist

to find out what feminine archetype and sexual feminine archetype you are

buy a natal chart reading from me

masterlist

♇ pluto

#goddess archetype #the goddess archetype #the mystic archetype #mystic archetype #feminine archetype #the feminine archetype #alexa demie #lana del rey #gabriette #claire nakti #eva peron #cindy crawford #dita von teese #jisoo #grace kelly #melania trump #lottie matthews #betty draper #morticia addams #cora smith #verna tfothou #tessa gray #selene #yennefer of vengerberg #josie saltzman #aisha winx

[fierysword]

The Hestia archetype thrives in religious communities, especially those that cultivate silence. Contemplative Catholic orders and Eastern religions whose spiritual practice is based on meditation provide good settings for Hestia women... They place a secondary focus on community maintenance (or housekeeping), which is done with the attitude that this task, too, is a form of worship.

Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen

#goddesses in everywoman #mystic archetype #feminine archetypes #t

[villainihavedonethymotheronao3]

Not sure how to explain my enduring weakness for Liliana’s shitty mom antics. It’s just. In a modern AU she’d be 53 year old separated-but-not-divorced semi-employed conspiracy theorist living a cabin off the grid chopping her own fire wood and corresponding exclusively by messenger pigeon. She’s got a an anti-religion religion that involves communing with the moon. She might be on the No-Fly List and she’s definitely banned from multiple local churches. She has a bittersweet relationship with her adult daughter who moved out and got on good medication where she couldn’t. There’s a twenty year old arrear against her for child support but she and her ex still have pictures of each other in their wallets. I know this woman. If she showed up to a family reunion and introduced herself as one of my aunts I would not question it.

#liliana temult #critical role #I come from a storied lineage of scientist farmers with hermit tendencies #whose repressed mental illness steadily alienates them and poisons their efforts to lead a normal life #if you think that’s a weirdly specific archetype please know it describes like three of my great grandparents #it’s just ranchers and engineers and rancher engineers and itinerant chemists all of them with drinking problems #a lot of new age mysticism too! amazing what being moderately clever and insanely depressed in the seventies inevitably lead to #she’s a mess but she’s a familiar mess

[theidealistphilosophy]

Chaos is what we've lost touch with. This is why it is given a bad name. It is feared by the dominant archetype of our world, which is Ego, which clenches because its existence is defined in terms of control.

Terence McKenna, Source Unlisted.

#philosophy tumblr #philoblr #ethology #mystic #philosopher #author #thinker #terrence mckenna #analytical psychology #archetypes #existentialism #jungian psychology #order and chaos #ego #the unconscious #dark academia #life quotes

[nyxshadowhawk]

The Red Book, Liber Primus Part Three

Previous section: https://nyxshadowhawk.tumblr.com/post/740006966416588801/the-red-book-liber-primus-part-two

Picking right up where I left off...

The Splitting of the Spirit

So, now it’s time for Jung’s own Shadow work.

To journey into Hell is to become Hell itself.

Damn. You know, I’d never considered that before, but seeing it written out like this really helps it to sink in. Journey into Hell, and you take on its essence — you become monstrous.

[The desert] seems inhabited by magical beings who murderously attach themselves to me and daimonically change my form. I have evidently taken on a completely monstrous form in which I can no longer recognize myself. It seems to me that I have become a monstrous animal form for which I have exchanged my humanity.

I’m reminded of the concept of Beasthood in Bloodborne, in which drinking the blood of gods turns one into a beast that constantly craves more blood. It’s outright stated at multiple points in the game that the beast is part of man’s inherent nature, a “horrific and unwelcome instinct deep within the hearts of men.” I know exactly what it feels like to transform into this beast-possessed self in meditation, to temporarily suspend one’s humanity and become a savage thing. So, I understand what Jung is going through here.

What follows is a dialogue between Jung and his soul, in which he is indignant at the darkness and animality and stupidity of it all. It seems very backwards to Jung that he should be getting this instead of knowledge, truth, and light. The soul answers obtusely, frustrating him further. It insists that its way is still that of knowledge and light (because Shadow work is necessary for enlightenment), but Jung doesn’t understand this yet. Jung cries out that he has worshipped the soul like a god, but now it wears the face of a devil, of “eternal mediocrity” (showing that Jung associations devilishness/shadow with banality and mundaneness). Everything feels insane and pointless, and he doesn’t like it. It’s counterintuitive that this should be the path towards knowledge and enlightenment. He engages in civil war with himself.

It’s so wild to witness someone else’s Shadow work, and straight from the horse’s mouth. I’m watching him go through almost the exact same thing that I went through, but the things that trigger Jung are not the same things that trigger me. I have much less of an issue with the idea of banality or meaninglessness, and Jung doesn’t seem to have any of my issues around power or sex. Everyone’s Shadow looks different, but the process is always the same.

It’s also interesting to me that Jung’s soul basically becomes his Shadow in this scene — it “wears the mask of a devil, a frightful one” — but he still calls it the soul and not the Shadow. So, does that mean that the Shadow is an aspect of the soul? My own Shadow appears to me as a man, so does that mean that he’s actually my soul, but wearing a Shadowy face? He only wears that face some of the time, not all the time. He’s both my beast and my prince. That’s partly because my Shadow aspects all have to do with power, but it also hearkens back to the duality of sacrificer and sacrificed.

I felt myself transformed into a rapacious beast. My heart glowered in rage against the high and beloved, against my prince and hero, just as the nameless one of the people, driven by greed for murder, lunged at his dear prince. Because I carried the murder in me, I foresaw it. Because I carried the war in me, I foresaw it. I felt betrayed and lied to by my king. Why did I feel this way? He was not as I had wished him to be. He was other than I expected. He should be the king in my sense, not in his sense. He should be what I called ideal. My soul appeared to me hollow, tasteless and meaningless. But in reality what I thought of her was valid for my ideal.

People project onto their leaders. It can be hard for you to accept that your leaders are still people, that they are still flawed, and that they have Shadows of their own. Instead, you want the leader to fulfill your agendas and make the world in your image; to be king according to your idea of what a king is and what a king should do, instead of the king’s own. When the king inevitably demonstrates that he is, in fact, a unique person who has his own personality and agenda, the people feel betrayed and turn on him. Think of all the complaints about politicians not being who you thought they were when they get into office! During campaigns, they pander to the projections, and then their real self inevitably shows because they’re people and not ideas.

Because of all these projections, leaders tend to reflect the unconscious of the people they rule to some extent, especially if the leader is elected by those people. However, sometimes the leader ends up being the pure, concentrated Shadow of the society they rule. Whenever the Shadow goes unaddressed, it takes over, often in spectacular fashion. There’s an obvious example of one such leader in Jung’s time and place. There’s also an example of one such leader in my time and place. If a writer of dystopian fiction created a character that mixed together every bad stereotype of Americans into one person, then named that character after McDonalds and a word that means both “to overcome” and “fart,” I would tell them that they were being way too ham-fisted and writing a strawman instead of a person. Who the hell writes this shit?!

The Murder of the Hero

In a dream, Jung (helped by a colonial “savage” stereotype of a dark-skinned indigenous person) slays the hero Siegfried, who rides on a chariot of bone. Siegfried is blond and blue-eyed, representing all that is good and noble in Jung’s mind. (The footnotes say that Jung didn’t actually feel attached to Siegfried, but this was the image his mind latched on to.) Jung is so disturbed by this dream that he feels like he must take his own life if he does not figure out what it means. He feels better after the spirit of the depths says, “The highest truth is one and the same with the absurd.” I completely agree with that — often the most profound truths delivered by the divine are weird and nonsensical when understood using human logic. This is one of those things.

There is an illustration of this dream:

Jung sort of goes back and forth on what this dream means throughout The Red Book, but his eventual interpretation seems to be that the heroic ideal needs to die in order for one to confront the reality of the Shadow. Here’s his interpretation from Memories, Dreams, Reflections:

…suddenly the meaning of the dream dawned on me. "Why, that is the problem that is being played out in the world." Siegfried, I thought, represents what the Germans want to achieve, heroically to impose their will, have their own way. "Where there is a will there is a way!" I had wanted to do the same. But now that was no longer possible. The dream showed that the attitude embodied by Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me. Therefore it had to be killed. After the deed I felt an overpowering compassion, as though I myself had been shot: a sign of my secret identity with Siegfried, as well as of the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice his ideal and his conscious attitudes. This identity and my heroic idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the ego's will, and to these one must bow.

This isn’t what my interpretation of the hero’s death would be. My immediate thought was that heroes or kings always have to die as part of the alchemical process, because that represents ego death, and resurrection always follows. But it is significant that Jung himself is not the one who dies, he’s the one who shoots, accompanied by his Shadow. The idea of indigenous people as “savages” is full-on colonial racism, but it’s also a textbook example of Shadow-projection: Europeans assume that indigenous people are animalistic, barbaric, and violent, and then proceed to commit centuries’ worth of heinous atrocities against them. The Europeans attack the very thing they fear in themselves, and thus become it. So in a way, it’s… uh… progressive?… that Jung recognizes the “savage” symbol as an aspect of himself, identifying with it instead of projecting onto it.

Meanwhile, Siegfried represents everything that Jung perceives is good about himself:

Oh that Siegfried, blond and blue-eyed, the German hero, had to fall by my hand, the most loyal and courageous! He had everything in himself that I treasured as the greater and more beautiful; he was my power, my boldness, my pride. […] If I wanted to go on living, it could only be through trickery and cunning.

You can’t identify with the Shadow until you abandon the notion that you are purely good, beautiful, and noble. Now that Jung has destroyed the noble aspects of himself, he has to live ignobly, through trickery and cunning, i.e. as his Shadow.

The reason why it’s Siegfried in particular is because he represents idealized German-ness. Siegfried or Sigurd is a mythological hero from Germanic and Norse mythology, who slays the dragon Fafnir (and he is actually murdered in mythology, though not like this). Therefore, he’s someone to be admired and emulated. Plus, he’s blond. But, as Jung says in the next chapter, imitating the hero is not a good thing. In fact, it’s explicitly a bad thing, because imitating someone else prevents you from being yourself: “The hero must fall for the sake of our redemption, since he is the model and demands imitation. But the measure of imitation is fulfilled.” Beyond that, I think we can see something prophetic in the murder of Siegfried, the German ideal. If Jung interprets Siegfried as the Germans’ desire to “impose their will,” that is definitely not a heroic thing, and should be shot dead before it gets too far. Alternatively, one could say that the positive and flattering reputation of Germany is killed — I might have to brush up on my history, but if I remember correctly, Germany was on top of its game at the beginning of the twentieth century. Then Siegfried, the blond and blue-eyed German hero, is murdered. The ideal is dead. The world will see Germany’s Shadow. Boy will it ever.

Most of that interpretation is presented in the next chapter, though. In this chapter, Jung’s interpretation of Siegfried is as a projection of the divine:

…I had to kill my lord and God, not in single combat, since who among mortals could kill a God in a duel? You can reach your God only as an assassin, if you want to overcome him. But this is the bitterest for mortal men: our Gods want to be overcome, since they require renewal. If men kill their princes, they do so because they cannot kill their Gods, and because they do not know that they should kill their Gods in themselves.

I like this interpretation better, because it fits in with my general idea that spiritual death is required for rebirth and renewal. The idea that “our Gods want to be overcome” reminds me of Aly Seleem’s Bloodborne theory that the Great Ones want the player to kill them so they can ascend to a higher plane of existence. I’m still not sure if I completely agree with that theory, but this idea of killing God in oneself does make “Hunt the Great Ones. Hunt the Great Ones.” make more sense. Also interesting that God must be assassinated (boy, if only Bloodborne were that easy…) because there’s no other way to win against it — that reminds me of the Titans setting upon baby Zagreus while he’s distracted with toys.

The next section addresses alchemical inversion:

If the God grows old, he becomes shadow, nonsense, and he goes down. The greatest truth becomes the greatest lie, the brightest day becomes darkest night. As day requires night and night requires day, so meaning requires absurdity and absurdity requires meaning. Day does not exist through itself, night does not exist through itself. The reality that exists through itself is day and night. So the reality is meaning and absurdity. Noon is a moment, midnight is a moment, morning comes from night, evening turns into night, but everything comes from the day and morning turns into day.

Night and day are not separate things that exist by themselves. The reality is that both day and night exist and regularly turn into each other, so, they are one thing and not two things. The same is true of all other pairs of opposites. Each pair of opposites represents one thing, not two things.

Interestingly, Jung then makes a connection with Norse pagans:

Judge not! Think of the blond savage of the German forests, who had to betray the hammer-brandishing thunder to the pale Near-Eastern God who was nailed to the wood like a chicken marten. […] But their life force bade them to go on living, and they betrayed their beautiful and wild Gods, their holy trees and their awe of the German forests.

You know, I’ve always wondered, why did pagans abandon their gods for the sake of Christianity? I can understand the appeal of Christianity itself, especially early Christianity, but the mandate that only one god be worshipped seems intolerable to me now. I couldn’t imagine abandoning my gods for its sake. So why did they? It wasn’t all under duress. Sometimes the old gods were kept on as saints, and sometimes churches were built on the same holy sites, but it is not the same. As Jung said before, it lacks its madness. I appreciate that Jung can see that the old gods are beautiful and wild. They are. They still are.

After death on the cross, Christ went into the underworld and became Hell, so he took on the form of the Antichrist, the dragon.

Now this is interesting. This goes back to what Jung was saying before, “To journey into Hell is to become Hell itself.” If Christ journeyed into Hell, then he had to have become his hellish counterpart, the Antichrist. The idea of Christ and the Antichrist being one and the same being is utterly blasphemous by Christian standards, but it also seems really obvious. Of course Jesus would have a Shadow, and of course the thing literally called “Antichrist” would be it. I wonder why I’ve never considered that before.

Gods are unavoidable. The more you flee from the God, the more surely you fall into his hand.

Lol, this is certainly true in my experience.

I can understand Jung’s feelings of confusion and terror after having this murder dream. I actually had a dream like this, once. It’s the only dream I’ve ever had that possessed me with so much terror that it made me literally sit up in bed like in the movies, and like Jung, I had to process it before falling to sleep again (though thankfully it didn’t make me feel suicidal). In the dream, I was apprenticed to a wizard. There was another wizard whom my mother idolized as a spiritual teacher. My wizard told me to kill that other wizard, and while I usually trust my mother’s judgement, I obeyed my wizard and killed him (I don’t remember actually doing it, the dream cut to it having been done). My mother mourned his death. My wizard told me that we were not done, because the wizard’s hat and book still had evil magical power, and that I needed to destroy them. I felt a mounting sense of terror as I tried to acquire the hat and book, and it didn’t subside when I succeeded. My wizard told me to burn the hat and book, and to make the dead wizard’s familiars watch. That last bit was so sadistic that I bolted up in bed. Even after I woke, the terror still didn’t subside. Then I realized the truth: I had killed the wrong guy. My wizard was evil, the magic of the hat and book wasn’t dangerous, and my mother was right all along. Suddenly I felt completely at peace, and promptly went back to sleep. This remains the only truly Jungian dream I’ve ever had, and I still have no idea how to interpret it.

The Conception of the God

The ideas of this chapter are elaborated upon in Jung’s book Aion, in which he argues that the Age of Aquarius will bring the end of Christianity’s two-thousand-year-long spiritual supremacy in the Western world. That period of two millennia happens to coincide with the astrological age of Pisces, the sign of the fish, which is one of the earliest symbols of Christianity. In the coming astrological age, Jung argues, Christianity will begin (and arguably, has already begun) to lose its hold over the cultural consciousness, and the Shadows that it has repressed for so long will start to be addressed.

This chapter of The Red Book is about the conception of the new God of the coming astrological age. Jung says that this new God will be characterized by its synthesis of all dualities:

The divine child approached me out of the terrible ambiguity, the hateful-beautiful, the evil-good, the laughable-serious, the sick-healthy, the inhuman-human and the ungodly-godly. I understood that the God whom we seek in the absolute was not to be found in absolute beauty, goodness, seriousness, elevation, humanity or even in godliness. Once the God was there. I understood that the new god would be in the relative. If the God is absolute beauty and goodness, how should he encompass the fullness of life, which is beautiful and hateful, good and evil, laughable and serious, human and inhuman? How can man live in the womb of the God if the Godhead himself attends only to one-half of him?

This checks. It checks with everything I know about alchemy, in which the opposite principles of sulfur and mercury unite in the Chemical Wedding to produce a secret third thing, the Philosopher’s Stone, which is a perfect mix of both polarities. Jesus, as he is, is only one half of the equation. The new God is going to encompass both the light and the Shadow, the totality of existence and of the human soul. Haven’t I said this? I’m almost certain that I have said something to this effect in my answers before: Life is nuanced, so God is nuanced. The reason why I like my gods’ dark and terrifying sides is because they encompass the whole of life, with all of its aspects, and that this is more spiritually useful than focusing only on the good or light aspects of things. Dionysus in particular is a god that expresses and reconciles multiple dualities, like good/evil, above/below, male/female, life/death, divine/human. The Absolute must be all things, or it’s not the Absolute. To fixate only on the things that are light, good, and comfortable is insufficient.

Therefore after his death Christ had to journey to Hell, otherwise the ascent to Heaven would have become impossible for him. Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his underworldly brother. No one knows what happened during the three days Christ was in Hell. I have experienced it. The men of yore said that he had preached there to the deceased. What they say is true, but do you know how this happened? It was folly and monkey business, an atrocious Hell’s masquerade of the holiest mysteries.

I have to say, it’s pretty ballsy of Jung to say straight-up that he had the same harrowing experience as Jesus Christ and came out of it unscathed, but that’s also exactly what happened. He underwent the first part of the Great Work and descended into the Underworld, confronting and becoming his own Shadow, and finally rising to the surface again. This is a great and old Mystery, and one of the ones that I feel I’m familiar with. I’ve experienced it too.

Jung provides the reader with instructions for katabasis, which I’m once again going to transcribe in full:

If we do not have the depths, how do we have the heights? Yet you fear the depths, and do not want to confess that you are afraid of them. It is good, though, that you fear yourselves: say it out loud that you are afraid of yourselves. It is wisdom to fear oneself. Only the heroes say that they are fearless. But you know what happens to heroes. With fear and trembling, looking around yourselves with mistrust, go thus into the depths, but do not do this alone: two or more is greater security since the depths are full of murder. Also secure yourselves the way of retreat. Go cautiously as if you were cowards, so that you preempt the soul murderers. The depths would like to devour you whole and choke you in mud. He who journeys to Hell also becomes Hell; therefore do not forget from whence you come. The depths are stronger than us; so do not be heroes, be clever and drop the heroics, since nothing is more dangerous than to play the hero. The depths want to keep you; they have not returned very many up to now, and therefore men fled from the depths and attacked them. What if the depths, due to the assault, now change themselves into death? But the depths indeed have changed themselves into death; therefore when they awoke they inflicted a thousandfold death. We cannot slay death, as we have already taken all life from it. If we still want to overcome death, then we must enliven it. Therefore on your journey be sure to take golden cups full of the sweet drink of life, red wine, and give it to dead matter, so that it can win life back. The dead matter will change into black serpents. Do not be frightened, the serpents will immediately put out the sun of your days, and a night with wonderful will-o-the-wisps will come over you. Take pains to waken the dead. Dig deep mines and throw in sacrificial gifts, so that they reach the dead. Reflect in good heart upon evil, this is the way to the ascent. But before the ascent, everything is night and Hell. What do you think of the essence of Hell? Hell is when the depths come to you with all that you no longer are or are not yet capable of. Hell is when you can no longer attain what you could attain. Hell is when you must think and feel and do everything that you know you do not want. Hell is when you know that your having to is also a wanting to, and that you yourself are responsible for it. Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful. But the deepest Hell is when you realize that Hell is also no Hell, but a cheerful Heaven, not a Heaven in itself, but in this respect a Heaven, and in that respect a Hell.

The Hero’s Journey is probably one of the most instantly-recognizable things to come out of Jungian psychology, but Jung kind of eviscerates the idea of the hero in The Red Book. If you try to be a hero — that is, if you try to match a particular ideal… well, you’ve seen what happens, haven’t you? The only way forward is to admit that you are not ideal, that you are dark and scary. You have no choice but to descend into your own Underworld and confront your own monsters. Bring a guide with you, and ensure you know the way out again, because the depths are hungry and they want to keep you — it’s not natural for souls to return from the Land of the Dead, so the Underworld will do everything it can to prevent you from leaving. The best thing is to be cautious and humble. Death itself cannot die (because it’s already dead, by definition), so the only way to overcome Death is to confront it with its opposite, which is life. When you get to the Underworld, the first thing you must do is reawaken dead matter with red wine (liquid life-force). The dead matter will turn into serpents that will blot out the sun. Sacrifice to the chthonic powers. Meditate upon evil.

That last bit in particular is counterintuitive, but it is the only way back up. That means allowing yourself to think, feel, do, and be everything that you normally want to disassociate from yourself. If you don’t want to be seen as evil, then you’ll be evil. If you don’t want to be seen as weak, then you’ll be weak. If you don’t want to be seen as foolish, then you’ll be foolish. And so on. You have to admit that you are responsible for every dark desire and evil impulse that you have had, that at least part of you actually does want to do evil things. Even if you feel compelled, even if you feel inclined to say “I did what I had to do” or some other half-assed justification, part of you does want to be evil. And that’s not some external force like demons or the Devil working on you, that is all you.

“Hell is when you know that everything serious that you have planned with yourself is also laughable, that everything fine is also brutal, that everything good is also bad, that everything high is also low, and that everything pleasant is also shameful.” This line once again addresses the general theme of inversion. In the Underworld, everything becomes its opposite, including everything about you — but all opposites are also the same thing. As above, so below. This line reminds me a lot of a similar, thematically-significant line from Macbeth: “Fair is foul and foul is fair.” The last inversion is that of Hell and Heaven itself, which brings to mind another very famous Early Modern English line, this time from Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / can make a heav’n of Hell, a hell of Heav’n.”

The one arose from the melting together of the two. He was born as a child from my own human soul, which had conceived him with resistance like a virgin. Thus it corresponds to the image that the ancients have given to us.

Once again, a very alchemical image. Reminds me of this line from The Twelve Keys of Basil Valentine (I started doing an analysis of that ages ago, and I promise that I will get back to it): “But our Stone, as it has been bequeathed to me by the Ancients, is derived from two things, and one thing, in which is concealed a third thing.” The secred third thing is the Philosopher’s Stone, the Divine Child that unites all opposites and therefore becomes its own separate thing — neither red, nor blue, but purple.

Jung says how he worshipped his soul, believing her to be God, but he was actually worshipping the unborn God within the womb of the soul.

This section addresses the interpretation of the hero’s death as the death of an ideal:

The hero as we understand him has become an enemy of God, since the hero is perfection. The Gods envy the perfection of man, because perfection has no need of the Gods. But since no one is perfect, we need the Gods. The Gods love perfection because it is the total way of life. But the Gods are not with him who wishes to be perfect, because he is an imitation of perfection.

Again, really interesting that perfection is defined as a sort of opposite to divinity, instead of as divinity itself. Often, gods are defined as perfect beings, but here Jung places a sharp distinction between perfection and divinity. Here, perfection is defined as lacking any darkness, flaws, “incapacity,” or other Shadow traits. Gods are therefore not perfect, because gods are an even mix of conscious and Shadow traits. Perfection involves ignoring half of God. (This is probably why the Neoplatonic idea of gods as perfect beatific beings never really resonated for me.) Perfection is not only unattainable, it’s actually dangerous to try to achieve perfection. (A certain Dwarf in the Flask comes to mind.) The only thing one can really do is imitate it, and imitation amounts to nothing, because it makes you into a hollow facsimile of whatever you’re imitating, instead of self-actualized.

The new God laughs at imitation and discipleship. He needs no imitations and no pupils. He forces men through himself.

This God is no guru. He doesn’t instruct or preach. His worship is more experiential than theoretical. Worshipping him means being forced through oneself, forced to confront the internal world and the unconscious. You aren’t supposed to follow him, you’re supposed to follow yourself, and that’s a whole lot harder. About damn time.

The God must be within, not projected outside the self:

If we set a God outside of ourselves, he tears us loose from the self, since the God is more powerful than we are. Our self falls into privation. But if the God moves into the self, he snatches us from what it is outside us. We arrive at singleness in ourselves. So the God becomes communal in reference to what is outside us, but single in relation to us. No one has my God, but my God has everyone, including myself. The Gods of all individual men always have all other men, including myself. So it is always only the one God despite his multiplicity. You arrive at him yourself and only through your self seizing you. The hero must fall for the sake of our redemption, since he is the model and demands imitation. But the measure of imitation is fulfilled. We should become reconciled to solitude in ourselves and to the God outside of us. If we enter into this solitude then the life of the God begins. If we are in ourselves, then the space around us is free, but filled by the God.

I’m not sure I fully understand this, but here’s my take: If your fixation is on the external world, God will tear you away from yourself and you’ll fail at self-actualization. If God is within you, then you’ll be pulled inward, and you’ll have to do all the difficult work that Jung has been doing. As said before, God fills the empty space, so God is essentially a powerful vacuum that sucks you towards itself. The external God is communal, but the internal God is personal: Each individual person has their own conception of God within themselves, so God appears different to all of the different people. Your idea of God is completely unique to you. But from God’s perspective, all of these different unique Gods are still versions of itself. Therefore God is both one and many. (I would argue that God can be subdivided into many individual divinities within a person, but the point is that all people’s interpretations are different while also all amounting to the same thing.)

Your desire is the father of the God, your self is the mother of the God, but the son is the new God, your master. If you embrace your self, then it will appear to you as if the world has become cold and empty. The coming God moves into this emptiness. If you are in your solitude, and all the space around you has become cold and unending, then you have moved far from men, and at the same time you have come near to them as never before. Selfish desire only apparently led you to men, but in reality it led you away from them and in the end to yourself, which to you and to others was the most remote. But now you are in solitude, your God leads you to the God of others, and through hat to the true neighbor, to the neighbor of yourself in others. If you are in yourself, you become aware of your incapacity. You will see how little capable you are of imitating the heroes and of being a hero yourself. So you will also no longer force others to become heroes.

Spiritual work of this type is inherently isolating, which is why so many who attempt it are monks or suchlike that already isolate themselves for spiritual purposes. Speaking from experience, it is very difficult to engage with the external world when so much of me is floating around up in the astral realm. (The Internet is such a blessing in that sense, because it is a midway between the physical and non-physical worlds — it is wholly in the airy intellectual realm, but almost everyone on it is a real person who exists somewhere, so I’m still engaged with actual human beings.) The external world could also seem “cold” in comparison because the external goals you may have been chasing may seem like they no longer matter, like you’re living in the Matrix. Being drawn into yourself involves becoming acutely self-aware, but the advantage of self-awareness is that it will prevent you from projecting (either heroes or Shadows) onto other people, which will help you to see them as they really are. And that promotes empathy, which brings you closer to other people, and so on.

I’m really interested in what Jung would have thought of the Hero’s Journey concept…

Mysterium Encounter

So, Jung has successfully completed his journey to the Underworld. Now what? The next three sections concern a series of visions in which Jung meets an old man, Elijah, and a young woman, Salome, in a dark house with pillars and a bright garden. There’s also a black snake. Jung recounts his dialogues with these spirits in the form of a mystery play.

Elijah says that Salome is his daughter, and the source of his wisdom, and that is why she is blind. Jung is utterly disturbed by this. He cannot reconcile that Salome, the woman who requested that John the Baptist’s head be delivered to her on a platter, could be the daughter of a holy prophet. She asks him if he loves her, and Jung says, “I dread you, you beast.” In response, she asks him, “And what wouldn’t you give for a single look into the infinite unfolding of what is to come? Are these not worth a sin for you?” This is interesting to me, because it seems to suggest that sin is preferable, or even necessary, as part of the experience of acquiring divine knowledge. Honestly, that makes sense — mysticism and occultism tend to be transgressive in many ways, especially when they push against established religious doctrine. Jung’s reaction to Salome sort of reminds me of my reaction to the nightmare woman, except that Salome is not at all threatening to Jung. At least, not from my perspective. He seems to think she’s a wicked temptress. The Spirit of the Depths insists that Salome is divine, and Salome insists that Jung must love her.

Elijah and Salome’s partnership force Jung to question just about everything he knows about spirituality. The idea of the “bloodthirsty horror” being the daughter of the prophet, that they are in fact one being, is too much for Jung to bear. And yet, that falls right in line with the recurring theme of the union of opposites. Here are two extreme opposites, that Jung is being told are the same being. How’s he going to accept that? Hearing all this, he assumes he’s still in the Underworld. But he’s not.

After the dialogue is an interjection that insists to the reader that this is Jung’s own mystery, and that it does not apply to anyone else: “This play that I witnessed is my play, not your play. It is my secret, not yours. You cannot imitate me. My secret remains virginal and my mysteries are inviolable, they belong to me and cannot belong to you. You have your own.” Again, I feel validated and almost relieved to see this here, because it means that Jung isn’t trying to apply his personal experience on a universal scale. He recognizes that it applies only to himself. Go get your own mysteries!

He who enters into his own must grope through what lies at hand, he must sense his way from stone to stone. He must embrace the worthless and the worthy with the same love. A mountain is nothing, and a grain of sand holds kingdoms, or also nothing. Judgement must fall from you, even taste, but above all pride, even when it is based on merit. Utterly poor, miserable, unknowingly humiliated, go on through the gate. Turn your anger against yourself, since only you stop yourself from looking and from living. The mystery play is soft like air and thin smoke, and you are raw matter that is disturbingly heavy. But let your hope, which is your highest good and highest ability, lead the way and serve you as a guide in the world of darkness, since it is of like substance with the forms of that world.

This stream-of-consciousness mystical advice reads like instructions to initiates who dare to go through a similar experience to find their own mystery plays. I experience a lot of mystery dialogues in my free time, while I’m meditating by pacing back and forth, in this astral space where everything is volatile (in the alchemical sense) and I all but lose track of my heavy matter. Once again, one must accept what comes without judgement, especially if it involves seemingly-irreconcilable opposites. The line about hope reminds me of The Sandman, in which Hope is the form that Dream uses to win The Oldest Game. It wins because even Hope has power in Hell, and can’t be snuffed out.

There’s an illustration of Elijah and Salome, in front of their pillared house. Elijah wears blue and Salome wears red. The black snake is at their feet. The figure representing Jung is once again a dark-skinned man in white, with shoulder-length black hair. Decorating the border is blue light on the left side, and red tendrils on the right side that coil around the beams of light. I think it’s safe to assume that the light represents Elijah and the tentacles represent Salome.

The scene of the mystery play is a deep place like the crater of a volcano. My deep interior is a volcano, that pushes out the fiery-molten mass of the unformed and the undifferentiated. Thus my interior gives birth to the children of chaos, of the primordial mother. He who enters the crater also becomes chaotic matter, he melts. The formed in him dissolves and binds itself anew with the children of chaos, the powers of darkness, the ruling and the seducing, the compelling and the alluring, the divine and the devilish. These powers stretch beyond my certainties and limits on all sides, and connect me with all forms and with all distant beings and things, through which inner tidings of their being and their character develop in me. Because I have fallen into the source of chaos, into the primordial beginning, I myself become smelted anew in the connection with the primordial beginning, which at the same time is what has been and what is becoming. At first I come to the primordial beginning in myself. But because I am a part of the matter and formation of the world, I also come into the primordial beginning of the world in the first place. I have certainly participated in life as someone formed and determined, but only through my formed and determined consciousness and through this in a formed and determined piece of the whole world, but not in the unformed and undetermined aspects of the world that likewise are given to me. Yet it is given only to my depths, not to my surface, which is formed and determined consciousness.

This is a powerful image. Because mystical visions are predicated on madness to some extent, they are a raw outpouring of pure chthonic material, primordial Khaos at its finest. Engaging with it requires alchemical dissolution or ego death. Everything that is “formed” (i.e. fixed) in you dissolves or “melts” into the prima materia, and is reformed, having been infused with underworldly divine power. This is more or less participation in the primordial process of creation itself. Consciousness interacts only with the “formed and determined,” i.e. fixed, aspects of existence. So, you need your depths to engage with the unformed and undetermined, i.e. volatile, aspects of existence.

Most of the rest of this chapter is an analysis of what Elijah and Salome represent, even though Elijah explicitly stated that they do not represent anything. Jung interprets them as representing the dual faculties of “precognition and pleasure,” or thinking and feeling. Yup, this is where the thinking/feeling axis on the MBTI test comes from! It comes from Jung trying to make sense of this particular vision. Jung says that “Both are equally old and in nature intimately one,” and interprets the serpent as representing a mediator between the two. Some people are more inclined towards thinking, and others towards feeling, but you need some degree of both to avoid falling out of balance. Jung assumes that because he’s a thinking person, he fears Salome. My bet is, that’s not why. I think he fears Salome because he struggles to see divinity in a stereotypically “evil” figure. He’s struggling against his conditioning that pleasure is evil.

I’m not going to go through Jung’s analysis of the specific symbols in his vision, because to be honest, very little of it resonates for me. Jung does not interpret these visions the way I would, and I think that much of his interpretation misses the obvious because he’s trying so hard to force a disturbing truth into a comfortable framework. But, it’s not my vision or my mystery, so I’m not going to tell him he’s wrong.

Instruction

Jung goes back to Elijah’s house the next night. He says to Elijah,

I have toyed with myself enough. I played hypocritical games with myself and they all would have disgusted me, were it not clever to perform what others expect of me. It seems to me as if I were more real here [in the dream world]. And yet I do not like being here.

I completely relate to the sensation of feeling more real in my dream world than I do in the physical world. I definitely feel like that. But I don’t feel as unsettled in my dream world as Jung does at Elijah and Salome’s house. Jung recognizes that most of his life in the external world involves “hypocritical games,” doing things that don’t really resonate and aren’t really meaningful for the sake of propriety and fitting within the societal expectations that have been set for him. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t seem comfortable in either world.

I forgot to mention that there is a scrying crystal inside the house. Previously, Jung saw the Garden of Eden and Odysseus with the sirens in the crystal. This time, he sees Mary with baby Jesus, St. Peter, the Pope, then Buddha, then Kali.

Elijah provides Jung with some good advice about thoughts that I could use. Jung says that thoughts are dangerous because men confuse them with themselves, and Elijah says:

Will you therefore confuse yourself with a tree or animal because you look at them and because you exist with them in the same world? Must you be your thoughts, because you are in the world of your thoughts? But your thoughts are just as much outside your self as trees and animals are outside your body.

Because I live in my thoughts, my thoughts cause me a lot of trouble. Thoughts that cause me shame are particularly awful, because I feel like just having the thought reflects badly on me, when really only an action would reflect badly on me. The idea of thought as something separate from myself, something that exists around me as nature physically exists around me, is genuinely good therapeutic advice. (Therapeutic advice from the work of a psychotherapist? You don’t say!) I shouldn’t take my thoughts seriously, or interpret them as expressions of my identity.

Salome calls herself Jung’s sister. He asks who their mother is, and she says that it is Mary. It’s getting worse! Jung is absolutely sent reeling by this revelation:

Is it a hellish dream? Mary, our mother? What madness lurks in your words? The mother of our Savior, our mother? When I crossed your threshold today, I foresaw calamity. Alas! It has come. Are you out of your senses, Salome?

I sort of relate, in that it can be extremely difficult to think that you actually are that special. It seems the height of hubris to claim to be the child of a powerful goddess (yes, I’m calling Mary a goddess, because she functions like one), even when your spirits explicitly tell you that this is the case.

Jung tries to rationally make sense of it by continuing to insist that Elijah and Salome and Mary are symbols that he hasn’t interpreted yet. This is Elijah’s response:

You may call us symbols for the same reason that you can also call your fellow men symbols. But we are just as real as your fellow men. You invalidate nothing and solve nothing calling us symbols. […] We are certainly what you would call real. Here we are, and you have to accept us. The choice is yours.

Daaamn. Of course, Jung insists on interpreting Elijah and Salome as symbols of the “thinking” and “feeling” principles anyway. The idea of the actual entities Elijah and Salome being the same being freaks him out too much. This is one of the big reasons why I think that his interpretations throughout these three chapters are wrong. He can only process all of this by interpreting it as symbolic language as opposed to taking it at face value, because he can’t make sense of it any other way.

If you do not acknowledge your yearning, then you do not follow yourself, but you go on foreign ways that others have indicated to you. So you do not live your life but an alien one. But who should live your life if you do not live it? It is not only stupid to exchange your own life for an alien one, but also a hypocritical game, because you can never really live the life of others, you can only pretend to do it, deceiving the other and yourself, since you can only live your own life. […] To live oneself means: To be one’s own task. Never say that it is a pleasure to live oneself. It will be no joy but a long suffering, since you must become your own creator. If you want to create yourself, then you do not begin with the best and the highest, but with the worst and the deepest. The flowing together of the stream of life is not joy but pain, since it is power against power, guilt and shatters the sanctified.

Good advice in general. Pay attention to what you really want out of life, not what society says you should want. If you only do what everyone around you says you should and acquire what they say you should want, then you’re living someone else’s life instead of your own. No one else is going to live your life for you, and you can’t live anyone else’s life either. So embrace your own desires, and live your own life. That’s not an easy thing, because you have to do the work to reinvent yourself in your own image instead of following someone else’s self-help guidebook (literal or figurative). And you have to begin by doing Shadow work, which is extremely difficult. Everything that you hold sacred will likely ring hollow throughout that process, because you won’t see it in the same way until you can find divinity for yourself.

As the God developed in me, I thought he was a part of my self. I thought that my “I” included him and therefore I took him for my thought. But I also considered that my thoughts were parts of my “I.” Thus I entered into my thoughts, and into the thinking about the God, in that I took him for a part of my self. […] Therefore you love reasonable and orderly thoughts, since you could not endure it if your self was in disordered, that is, unsuitable thoughts. Through your selfish wish, you pushed out of your thoughts everything that you do not consider ordered, that is, unfitting. You create order according to what you know, you do not know the thoughts of chaos, and yet they exist.

Jung confused the developing God for an aspect of himself, just as he worshipped the soul believing it was God. Because he hates thoughts that he considers disorganized or unreasonable, he roots out all the thoughts that don’t fit his projection of what God should be. Where does all the “disordered” thought end up? The Shadow.

My thoughts are not my self, but exactly like the things of the world, alive and dead. Just as I am not damaged through living in a partly chaotic world, so too I am not damaged if I live in my partly chaotic thought world. Thoughts are natural events that you do not possess, and whose meaning you only imperfectly recognize. Thoughts grow in me like a forest, populated by many different animals. But man is domineering in his thinking, and therefore he kills the pleasure of the forest and that of the wild animals. Man is violent in his desire, and he himself becomes a forest and a forest animal. Just as I have freedom in the world, I also have freedom in my thoughts.

This is good advice for me personally. My thoughts can be scary and chaotic, but they do not damage me. I love the image of thoughts being like a forest. I should just enjoy my time amongst the wild things, and the absolute freedom that my thoughts give me, without any shame.

Resolution

Jung dreams that he is standing on a ridge in a wasteland, with day on one side and night on the other. A black snake is on the night side, and a white snake is on the day side. They fight each other, with Elijah watching from above. The black snake’s head turned white, and they both curled around themselves.

Jugn and Elijah climb to a stone circle that is the Temple of the Sun. Elijah turns into Mime (a dwarf from Wagner’s The Ring). Mime brings Jung to springs in a cave, that confer wisdom on those who drink from them. Jung doesn’t trust Mime, and leaves the cave without drinking, feeling discombobulated, and follows a snake to Elijah’s house. He sees a series of visions in the crystal, ending with Christ on the cross with the black serpent coiled about the base. The serpent coils around Jung’s own feet, and up his body — he turns into Aion/Arimanius, the Mithraic lion-headed god. Salome says, “You are Christ.”

This is an amazingly profound experience. Jung experiences the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection directly, and experiences it in the form of a pagan deity, the primordial creator god Aion or Phanes. In a way, it is the ultimate Mystery. It goes back to what Jung said before about how Christians should not deny that Jesus is a part of them, that you yourself are Christ. That is why Mary is named as Jung’s mother, because he is not separate from Christ.

If you are aggravated against your brother, think that you are aggravated against the brother in you, that is, against what in you is similar to your brother. As a man, you are part of mankind, and therefore you have a share in the whole of mankind, as if you were the whole of mankind. If you overpower and kill your fellow man who is contrary to you, then you also kill that person in yourself and have murdered a part of your life. The spirit of this dead man follows you and does not let your life become joyful. You need your wholeness to live onward.

This is just a lesson on projection again, but I like the phrasing. We’re all one being, all incarnations of the Divine, so any harm we do against each other is harm against the corresponding parts of ourselves. You can’t experience any authentic joy, or really live at all, with that sort of burden. That’s what makes Shadow work worth it.

If you go to thinking, take your heart with you. If you go to love, take your head with you.

I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole thinking/feeling dichotomy, but I like this phrase.

I saw a new God, a child, who subdued daimons in his hand. The God holds the separate principles in his power, he unites them. The God develops through the union of the principles in me. He is their union.

Not much to say about this that I haven’t already said, except that I’m once again reminded of Dionysus, who unites all opposites and commands all daimons. I feel like I can get myself there. Maybe I already am. It feels good to unite opposites in oneself; it’s hard to do, but once you’ve done it, it feels comfortable and fulfilling.

Jung interprets WWI as people learning self-sacrifice, Christ’s mystery, which will teach them to look inward. “The spirit of the depths has seized mankind and forces self-sacrifice upon it.”

That's the end of Liber Primus! I'll start posting the sections of my commentary on Liber Secundus soon. There's more very cool art to come!

#the red book #the red book jung #carl jung #jungian psychology #symbols #archetypes #shadow work #mysticism #occult #occultism #jungian archetypes #long post #analysis #commentary #liber novus #illuminated manuscript #mystical experiences #mystical art #tw murder

[youngestdaughtersyndrome]

I kind of hate personality tests like this but also? Very interesting....

#'like this' meaning its a quiz on seduction archetypes and a lot of the questions are about your relationship to men which like ugh #mystic huntress and sage is such a based collection of descriptors though #hollyws

[christinas-place]

Made this mood board today channeling my inner mystic 🫶🏻✨

#mystic #feminine archetypes #divine feminine #feminine energy #aesthetic #moodboard #healing #love #tarot

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Anima Mundi

Infinity could break a mind. Attempts to truly wrap the mind around the infinite were doomed because the mind was forever cursed with limitations.

Infinity could break a soul. Eternal it may have been, yet reaching for both things within its grasp and the unattainable would stretch it thin, to the point of tearing itself apart.

Inviolable laws of the cosmos.

The only path to infinity was in making peace with its power. Making peace with one’s self. One or the other: accepting the things within one’s grasp, or forever reaching for the unattainable. Surrendering to the limitations of one’s mind, or reaching out to infinity and seeing what lies beyond once the mind had broken like a dam, allowing the forever ocean to swallow all.

The Shadow knew this. A thousand tiny white dots glimmered in its intangible shape, thousands of eyes eagerly watching, eagerly awaiting while Michael worked his magick. It hovered and peered over his shoulder like an oversized parasite of roiling pitch-black. Like a demon. Liquid ink. Spiritual tar.

Dancing darkness, cast by the flames of tiny fires in the chapel, set among small piles of stone and old wood the necromancer had set ablaze with his lighter to illuminate the ruin’s bowels. In that starry night, Michael needed light to complete this magnum opus. The Shadow waited with great patience.

Michael dipped two fingertips into FBI Agent Parker’s open wound, like the painter wielding his palette. The decrepit old wall behind the altar served as his canvas. His fingertips kissed the coarse sandstone bricks, painting upon them the shape of a large triangle.

The beginning of a door to another world. To another time. The beginning of an end.

Parker moaned softly, though her consciousness had slipped into the arms of oblivion.

The Shadow smiled as it waited and watched.

The Shadow’s ghostly tar dripped from other places now, too. It oozed from all the cracks in reality it had wrought. It had invaded this world by crossing through a different door. Hailing from different times. Arrived from a different year, and a different era before that.

A dark traveler in the dark void of time and space. A projection, burnt into the fabric of reality. And yet, it had no true shape.

Eyes and dark tendrils extended like limbs of invisible mold, connecting all the people and places it had visited and infested.

Its tar-like imitation of SUBSTANCE still dripped from the dead machinery of THE HIGHWAY which it had corrupted, deep inside the Heart, in the basement of the Way King’s ranch house. Clockwork systems and steam engines no longer dripped with water, but with weightless matter, with the viscosity of tar.

Even the door where Klemens had opened a pathway between our world and the House of Change now oozed dark matter from its bottom crack.

It gathered in the cracks of a supermax prison cell in Kentucky, where Freddy Fletcher had been incarcerated. He stared at that shadowy stuff, pooling in the darkest corner of his small, confined space, pushing his sanity beyond its final frontier.

Droplets coalesced on the concrete of a basement wall in a mall in Kentucky, where the Shadow’s original form had originally crossed into this age. The sleeping wall, locked away in storage for nobody to see, sweated with tiny beads of dark matter.

In the train graveyard, far away, the same intangible matter pooled in a pit between two blobs of fleshy eyes and tentacle-like appendages. Once been human, THE SUBSTANCE had transformed. Evolved. A remnant of a lost world.

I am what awaits at the end of all roads.

The Shadow spoke in its Whispers to Michael.

Your king’s highway is dead, and I await you all at the end of its final road.

I am inevitable.

The sorcerer did not respond to the Shadow’s Whispers in his mind. He continued to work. Focused on the ritual he was conducting, he painted that triangle to completion, inch by inch, line by line, each edge of its shape drawn to the width of two fingertips pressed together.

Parker’s body lay motionless on the altar of this ruined chapel. Michael dipped his fingers into the wound on her belly again, salvaging more blood from the dying woman.

She was still alive. Barely. For once she died, the blood would no longer be useful to him. Beyond committing his focus and spirit onto the current ritual, keeping Parker alive continued to chew away on Michael’s focus. It sapped him of his meticulously harvested reserves of magick energy, sacrifices upon sacrifices of human lives he had taken in the past.

The Oracle of New York. A dark luminary in the world of occultists.

Spirit speaker.

Necromancer.

Behind even the Shadow, imperceptibly, a cloud of screaming souls swirled behind Michael. The many lives he had taken—most often against their will, sometimes through deception, and on rare occasion, even by honest seduction—all drawn to power his magick. They hated the living they could see through the veil, trapped just behind it. They screamed for his demise, and they screamed for freedom. Freedom from the prison he kept them in. The lives he had traded for arcane power.

Usurper of the throne. The Way King now slept, and his highway, the greatest glyph of all times—the totality of all roads in the world—slept with Klemens now. All owed to Michael’s winding path of dark machinations and betrayal.

Michael desired to open that triangle-shaped door. Just like the Shadow.

They dreamed of the possibilities. A new world shaped by their dreams. A new dawn.

Together, they yearned to usher in a new future.

Thus, Michael painted in the flickering light shed by small fires in the ruined chapel. A reflection of the primitive world they all came from. With Parker’s blood, Michael painted strange symbols along the lines of the triangle. In his other hand, he held the jade tome, the Thaum of Thritain, studying its alien hieroglyphs, and replicating them around the triangle in a fingerpainting in blood.

Getting closer and closer to completing this ritual.

And the Shadow watched with glee.

Outside the chapel, clouds cleared the sky for the moon and distant stars to shine through. They bathed the deserts of Las Vegas in an eerie, cold light. The winds howled, cold and unforgiving, and they fed the flames of Michael’s fire inside the chapel.

And a group of people stood outside the ranch house, down the path along the dead fields, leading to that ruined chapel.

In reality, this path extended merely over a few hundred yards of crushed gravel and sand, flanked by decaying fence and desert.

But the Shadow had altered reality. That pathway now stretched into infinity. The closer one got to the chapel, the farther that path became. And its Shades, its deranged spawn, lurked between the fence posts, and the stray stones, and the cacti. They hungered for human spirit.

Outside the ranch, four people waited. Helpless. Unable to cross that distance.

Special Agent Derek Wells stood out in the open and his tattered bureau jacket fluttered in the cold wind.

Aria Chambers in her dirtied designer dress, and her bodyguard, the bulky mountain of meat in a suit named Barry, stood behind Wells.

Behind them, in turn, FBI director Anthony Collins sat on the sagging steps of the ranch house porch, hands bound behind his back with cuffs.

All four of them gazed across that stretch of unnatural infinity, that warp in the way, stopping them from reaching the ruined chapel on Klemens Weidmann’s dead ranch.

Or, at the very least, the infinity stalled them long enough for Michael to complete his work.

Their palpable impotence filled the Shadow with a sense of sadistic glee.

A sense of victory.

The porch to Weidmann’s home, where hundreds of bullets had pockmarked and torn up the wood and windows, squealed. The fly trap door, barely hanging from its hinges, opened. Three figures pushed out from the bowels of the darkened building. Their boots and shoes clomped down on the porch steps as they stepped out into the open.

Two more people, and a copy of a human.

In their leather jackets, the fallen Way King’s knights, Jericho Kane and Karma, joined this strange gathering.

The Way King’s final homunculus, a clockwork automaton—a perfect copy of Agent Parker’s appearance—followed right behind them.

They, too, came to stare in awe at the impossible distance between house and chapel. At the dancing Shades, mocking with their awful and monstrous presence.

Wells shot a glance over his shoulder to the new arrivals. He grimaced, recognizing the vicious woman named Karma, who had almost sliced his throat open with shards of glass.

He still wore the bandages from that confrontation.

“Oh, fuck off,” she muttered while he glared at her. “Don’t look at me like that. Your partner shot me.”

His hand twitched around the pistol in it. But he held his tongue.

She exuded no threat to him. The symmetrical features of her face shed no spite for him any longer, and she stared like the everybody else into the distance.

“Cool your fuckin’ jets,” Jericho said. His eyes were reddened with recent tears, and that struck a first nerve in the FBI agent. Jericho struck a second nerve when he continued speaking, cementing that he was addressing the evil beauty by his side, and not Wells. “This ain’t the fucking time or place. We all wanna get to that motherfucking snake over there.”

“That thing is no demon,” Aria said, repeating what she had told Wells and Barry earlier, upon their first failed attempt to cross the infinite distance to the chapel.

Jericho peeled his gaze off the distant building and locked onto Aria. His eyes sparkled in the starlight and he swallowed emptily. He tried to find the right words, to convey his concern, or to convince her to get out of dodge before their world ended.

Instead, he only blurted out something stupid.

“Why the hell are you here? You shouldn’t even fuckin’ be here.”

“Shut up,” she snapped. “I go wherever the hell I want. And I have unfinished business with Michael.”

“We all do,” spoke the homunculus. The red-headed facsimile of a woman spoke evenly, calmly, in a monotone that rivaled Parker’s regular demeanor. Staring into the distance like all others, she added, “She is there with him, and dying. The longer we wait—”

“Nah, fuck that,” Jericho said.

“Well, what’s the fucking problem?” Karma asked. “We’re all here to ice that piece of shit, so why are we standing around like jackoffs and talking?”

Barry pointed a meaty finger towards the chapel. Aria spoke in his stead.

“Bad mojo. That entity warped the space around the chapel. And do you not see those things out there?”

As if to underline her words with a threat of ill-will, the Shades danced madly between fence posts, stones, and cacti. Hungry, and wiggling their shadowy claws in anticipation of human contact. Grasping at the gravelly path, like they wanted to slice through hapless legs.

“So fuckin’ what?” Karma asked. She smirked, showing teeth. Having escaped the House of Change unchanged, her sadism returned to the fore. “Are you all stupid? Do you not realize what I am capable of?”

“I don’t even know the hell who you are,” Aria fired back.

Wells swiveled, gravel crunching underneath his scuffed shoes, and his eyes went wide. He stormed up to Karma with wide steps.

He knew.

“Yes. Do it,” he ordered. “Take us there.”

“Yo, cowboy,” Karma said, the smirk fading from her lips. “Hold your fuckin’ horses. Are we all on the same page here? What do all you dipshits think we’re gonna do when we get there?”

A beat of silence. Then everybody answered at the same time.

“Save Parker,” Wells growled.

“Stop Michael,” spoke the homunculus.

“Find and destroy that fucking book, which I bet that asshole has already,” Jericho drawled out.

“Squeeze Michael on where to find the book,” Aria said.

“No clue,” Barry replied.

“Wait, you think he found the book? When? How?” Collins asked. His questions lingered the longest out of all their conflicting responses.

“Shut up,” multiple people told Collins in groans with varying levels of annoyance.

Karma’s smirk widened into a wicked smile. “You dipshits should be way more worried about that thing with Michael. You all know what I’m talking about. We need to get rid of that thing.”

“I don’t think we can,” Aria admitted, deflating more with each word she uttered. “I don’t even understand what it is.”

“It’s bad fuckin’ news,” Jericho growled. “It could just come and go in the House of Change, so it’s clearly out of this world, above our fucking paygrades.”

“Until we figure out how to deal with it, let’s focus on what we do know, and know how to do right,” Wells ordered again.

He puffed his chest out. The anxiety and stress gnawed on his nerves, but he recalled the bureau’s motto. Like a silent mantra, it repeated in his head. Echoed in his mind in Parker’s voice, from the time she had said it out loud in earnest to him, he let it loop.

Fidelity, bravery, integrity.

He let it repeat in his mind while the wind howled over the desert, and all their eyes came to rest on him with expectation.

Even the Shadow’s millions of starry eyes. Even as it smiled.

“We get over there, we save Parker, we stop Michael, and if he has that book, we take the book away from him. In that order. Then we can bicker about the consequences until we’re blue in the face, but until then, we’re in this one together. Ride. Or die.”

Jericho sighed. Jutted his chin out. “Yeah, okay, fuck it. Yeah, let’s do it. I’m game, let’s go, come on.”

Aria sighed and added nothing. She glared at Jericho, for she sensed where they were headed. He only stared ahead into the impossible distance of the chapel, avoiding all eye contact with anybody else. Aria wasn’t ready to let him burn his life away.

The homunculus stared in the same direction and she suddenly spoke, bursting out into a flood of words.

“Agent Parker and I both dreamed of a long valley, where rain fell eternal, and all the stones on mossy grounds were of perfectly geometrical, spherical shape. In the fog, at the end of that valley, a forest of crystal trees awaited, and in its clearing, a tar pit bubbled, from which Shadow rose. It assumed our shape, a dark mirror of the self. Shadow, we all are. It is neither here nor there entirely. SUBSTANCE in an incomplete, corrupted form, twisted by human ambitions. A corruption of all things that exist. It cannot be destroyed without destroying reality itself.”

She fell silent.

All stood stunned, mouths agape at the homunculus fashioned in Parker’s image.

The Way King’s final act of peace, as he had declared himself.

The homunculus expected no response.

“The fuck is that supposed to mean?” Jericho grumbled.

“Anima mundi,” replied the homunculus.

Aria squinted at the red-headed homunculus. As a true Witch of the West Coast, Aria was the only person present who knew enough to glean any sense of her cryptic message.

“Who gives a shit?” Karma asked. “Let’s go, people. Time’s wasting. Start holding hands like we’re some kinda hippie protest chain. Come on, chop chop.”

She extended a hand for Jericho to take. He seized it, grabbed Aria’s hand. She, in turn, took Barry by his hand, who snatched Wells’ hand in a meaty fist, the one not occupied by the FBI agent’s pistol. Wells holstered his service weapon in the confines of his jacket, and then took the homunculus by her hand, unsettled by how much she looked like Parker.

Karma led the way, back up to the fly trap door into the ranch house, right past Collins, still sitting on the steps dumbfounded. The train of people passed him by, steps thumping up the decrepit old wood, and he gawked at each of them.

“Uh, what—what about me? Hey! Are you leaving me here?”

“Shut the fuck up,” Jericho snapped at him in passing.

Karma stepped through the door, and they chain of people bypassed reality, one by one. Stepping through the darkness of the fly trap door, they did not enter the ranch house, they instead emerged inside the chapel.

Her strange and unnatural power had crossed the impossible distance with her improbable ability. The liminality of all thresholds in reality served her as gateways between disconnected places. It could boggle the mind, though the people present either already knew of her terrible power, or possessed the faculties to process its effect in action.

Or, as in Barry’s case—they tried not too hard to think about it. Like anybody exposed to the unnatural, trying to rationalize it with conventional logic, and filing it away in the dustiest and oldest forgotten drawers of the mind, before it could chip away at and erode too much sanity.

The six figures crowded inside the far end of the chapel.

They gazed across the broken pews, to the altar upon which the dying Agent Parker lay. Michael had crossed her arms over her chest, like laying an ancient Egyptian pharaoh to peaceful rest.

Dim light flickered from the three tiny fires Michael had lit. He paused amidst painting the final glyph outside the triangle’s lines, rearing his head to gaze upon the interlopers. Surprise flashed in his bright blue eyes.

And the Shadow, creeping in the darkest corners of that cavernous ruin, it blinked its thousands of tiny stars. It oozed with malice.

Hatred for those six who had simply bypassed its attempts at keeping them away. It had worked so hard to corrupt THE HIGHWAY, distorting the distances of reality to create a pocket of infinity around the chapel, and one of the people present was capable of ignoring that awesome might altogether.

Well, well, well, look at this. Just in time to play the party poopers?

They now all heard its Whispers in their minds, provoking shudders to run down every spine. Then the mental Whispers turned to menacing Growls.

DO YOU NEED TO FEAST ON HUMAN ENTRAILS LIKE VULTURES? TO BE TAUGHT OF THE FRAILTY OF YOUR FLESHY MEATBAGS?

The light from the three flames dimmed and flickered. But it had not been the Shadow to do so.

Nothing but the howling wind, sweeping through the ruined chapel, whistling through the holes in sandstone brick walls.

Michael’s wide-eyed surprise gave way to a half-lidded, relaxed gaze. He picked up the switchblade from the altar, where it lay hidden behind Parker’s dying body.

The threat was clear. The sharp little blade glinted in the dim light, hovering above the unconscious red-headed woman. Its tip, however, was pointed at them.

He smiled at the six witnesses to his ritual.

“An auspicious gathering,” he said.

They would empower the energy he invested in it. They would serve perfectly to seal the sacrifice. Witnesses were almost better than the faithful.

“Karma,” Michael muttered, staring coldly at her. Confidently. He clicked his tongue between uttering her name and his next words. “And here I thought the House of Change would leave you forever… changed. Maybe fix your attitude, or your lousy manners. A shame you show up to sabotage me at the eleventh hour. I really, truly, should have known better.”

Karma smiled at him, but there was no joy behind it. Then the trauma of her entrapment in the otherworld all bubbled to the surface. Her face twisted into a mask of rage and malice.

She screamed at him, “I’m gonna gut you like a fucking fish!”

“God, I’ve had enough of this shit,” Wells muttered.

His pistol was slung up in a flash, and the former ranger shot Michael in the dead center of his forehead. The necromancer crumpled onto the floor behind the altar.

“God fucking damnit!” Karma spat, yelling. “He was mine!”

“Holy shit. Are we already done here?” Jericho said, taken aback by the sudden turn of events. “I mean, fuck, I’m not one to complain.”

His chin crinkled and he took a single dauntless step towards the opposite end of the chapel, towards Parker’s body on the altar.

The entire ruin rumbled, quaked. Its walls shook, and dust rained from the crumbling ceiling. Howling winds swept through the abandoned abode, and the three fires flickered till they nearly died down. Only embers remained and the Shadow grew. Intangible claws crept across every solid surface, closer and closer to the six intruders. The shifting Shades crowded outside the holes in the chapel’s walls, peering inside with tiny white dots for eyes, like a hungry sky of glimmering starlight.

The Growls in their minds rumbled, matching the force of the earthquake.

WE ARE FAR FROM DONE, YOU AND I. NOW YOU ALL ARE GOING TO HELP ME FINISH THIS.

The six people huddled together, back to back now, surrounded by swelling darkness. Terror gripped their hearts, a fear of the unknown paralyzed them with inaction. The agents of dark matter closed in on them.

Get back up, Mikey. GET UP.

Michael’s hand smacked onto the top of the altar, leaving a handprint in blood. His splayed digits trembled as he slowly pulled himself back up.

Heal her. And I’ll take over from here.

“Gimme your gun,” Jericho told Wells. He grabbed at it.

The FBI agent slapped Jericho’s grabby hand away.

Jericho growled, “Just keep shooting him, for fuck’s sake! He can’t keep doing that shit forever!”

Barry and Aria reacted, drawing their own pistols.

“Stop!” Wells’ command sliced through the howling wind. “I don’t trust you to not hit Parker.”

Michael chuckled darkly. Blood wept from the third eye that Wells’ bullet had punched into his forehead. The necromancer poked a finger into it, and smiled upon seeing his own blood and bone, clinging to his quaking fingertip.

HEAL HER. I WILL DEAL WITH THESE INSECTS.

You can sacrifice your own blood, and heal from it again.

“That violates the laws of cosmic transaction,” Michael breathed in protest, wobbling as he stood on buckling legs.

He braced himself against the altar, leaning over Parker. The dark priest. His power was divided in every direction.

The walls of reality are already crumbling while this event ripples forward and backwards through time. Reality is as malleable and decrepit as this old chapel. Don’t you feel it? Don’t you feel its flesh rotting away as the Way King now forever sleeps? His reign has ENDED.

You can remake everything. You can make up the rules as you see fit.

HEAL HER.

“This is bullshit,” Karma exclaimed. “These are just fucking shadows! What the fuck can they do, anyway?”

She pulled a large hunting knife out of her jacket. Then she snarled, casting a sneering grin at Michael.

“Now… to make good on my promise.”

Michael couldn’t help but shudder. She meant every word and she didn’t care about any consequences.

Everybody else hesitated as Karma charged at the altar, boots clomping down the aisle between all the broken pews, until others broke from their paralysis.

Karma had spoken true. The Shadow and its Shades only postured with menace. The touch of their dark tendrils instilled a dark chill in their hearts, yes, but it carried no substance. As the homunculus had said.

SUBSTANCE in an incomplete form.

The entire group advanced, three firearms drawn upon Michael, waiting for the right moment to shoot him dead.

DOOM.

An explosion of invisible energy repelled them. Karma tumbled backwards over the ground, struck strongest by that powerful blast. The others merely stumbled and stopped in their stride.

The cloud of screaming souls behind Michael had manifested momentarily, surging outwards from him in hateful waves. Each pulse that followed the blast deepened a feeling of sickness in their bowels. They all reeled with a sense of vertigo, feeling unable to reach the sorcerer.

He stood behind the altar, arms wide open, his head cocked back to the crumbling roof, like a dark messiah channeling divine wrath through his entire body. The vision of the cloud of screaming souls dissipated, but one thing was clear to everybody present.

Unlike the Shadow and Shades, Michael’s power was all too real.

The pulses from his cloud of death waned and the sinuous vision dissolved.

In its wake, the Shadow and Shades were all gone.

On the altar before Michael, Parker stirred. A pained moan escaped her parched throat. Uncrossing her arms, she pawed at her belly, where blood still soaked the fabric, yet skin no longer yielded to pressure in form of an open wound.

Healed again. By grace of Michael’s dark sorceries.

She sat up and let her legs dangle off the side of the altar, her back turned to Michael. Her head bobbed up and down, eyelids more closed than open, speaking to volumes of delirium, reminiscent of someone who had just woken up from a long coma in a hospital.

Karma groaned on the floor where she reeled, crawling towards the altar with painful slowness, her face twisted and cringing with agony from the blast, and a bloodthirst that raged in her, urging her to murder Michael.

All others stood still again, paralyzed with a new fit of indecision, and a deep-rooted fear of the unknown unfolding before them.

“Why?” croaked Agent Parker through her haze.

The embers and tiniest of flames in Michael’s fire cast a long Shadow behind her, looming above them.

The Growls had died down into Whispers, now isolated to Parker’s mind again.

As tender as they ever had been… just as when they had first met.

Because we can open the door, you and I. As I always said, and I will say again: you listen.

You let me in.

Tar-like droplets of dark matter began beading upon the lines of the triangle on the wall behind them, oozing from the cracks between the bricks upon which Michael had painted the symbol in Parker’s blood.

“What if I don’t want what you want,” Parker breathed. The pain subsided as Michael’s magick continued to work, and she recovered from all the blood she had lost. “You are threatening these people’s lives. You are… I don’t even understand what you are or what you really want.”

The necromancer tilted his head. The reflection of embers in his icy blue eyes flashed with curiosity as he blinked, listening intently to Parker’s side of her telephone call with the Whispers.

I want to be whole again. To fill the hole with THE SUBSTANCE your sister from another world deprived me of when we crossed over together.

“What does that… mean?” she answered in question anew. “Explain, and I will consider—”

“Parker! Please,” Wells shouted. His gun lowered by his side. “Do not negotiate with these God-damned Whispers!”

Wrinkles creased his forehead above his furrowed brow, and he stared at her with wet eyes, concerned for his partner’s well-being.

Yes. You listen. You understand. We open this next door, and we reshape reality. We cross the sea of stars. Dive into the dark depths of the ocean of time, where everything folds into the present.

The Whispers spoke to her with infinite tenderness.

But you’ve done me so much harm, she answered the Whispers in her own head. No longer speaking aloud. Becoming one with the Shadow, wrapping her entire being around that parasitic entity in a gentle embrace. You have threatened, and hurt, and endangered myself and others. Time and time again. Why would I help you?

As the fire in her being grew, so did the flames of Michael’s externals fires. A cold wind from the desert let the embers and dry wood flare up again with new flickers. Parker’s Shadow grew behind her, and even Michael’s fear began to grow while he craned his neck to behold the swelling presence, towering over them.

“Naw, fuck this,” Jericho muttered. Then he shouted at them. “I know you got that fucking book, and I’m gonna destroy that stupid fucking book, you stupid fucking assholes!”

He didn’t make a step towards the altar. He didn’t need to. His intent was enough. He was moments away from burning down his entire life to finish the job, to ride into the sunset, with all his connections, and affections scattered in the wind. His friend, Klemens, had wanted that book so badly, but Jericho believed it needed to stop existing. And as a final “fuck you” to all the “mystic psychos” around him, Jericho was hellbent on annihilating the tome in one final blast of his own. He only needed to see it to destroy it.

The Thaum of Thritain, the jade tome from another time or space, it rested on the altar, right behind Parker, between her and Michael. It radiated with unnatural gravity. An opposite pole to the screaming cloud of souls that followed Michael through the ether; the jade tome sucked everything in like a black hole. Everybody sensed its presence, even if they weren’t aware of it.

That unreal presence only intensified, as if it was responding to Jericho’s threat.

“Don’t,” Aria whispered. Firmly. Glaring at Jericho, her voice cracked. “Do not throw your life away.”

Jericho clenched his jaw and spat out a string of incoherent expletives before he settled on a plan B. “Fine, fine. I don’t even need to tap my own mojo. Klem gave me a little something and I’m going to make some good fucking use of it now.”

Look at how they struggle to grasp the gravity of what is about to unfold, the Whispers told Parker. They resist without understanding what they are resisting. We can bridge the future and past. Connect all humanity with a higher enlightenment, and move this world one step closer to a greater evolution. Take my hand, and open the door with me, and we will be whole again. You always wanted to see what lies beyond, right? Beyond the confines of the only reality you knew?

“Right,” Parker breathed. “I do.”

It was true. Not only despair had invited the Whispers and Shadow in.

Earnest curiosity drove her. Had always driven her.

Michael burned with the same intensity. He studied the profile of her face, his eyes glittering with adoration of someone he considered his equal, despite the disparity of their occult power. In a mystic sense, they had become husband and bride.

“Yes,” Michael whispered. Oblivious to their conversation. He sensed it beyond words, he caught the glint in her, that subtle change, shifting from resignation to determination.

Yes, whispered the Whispers. Yes.

“Yes,” Parker repeated. She locked eyes with the homunculus down the aisle. Her doppelganger stood still, and rigid, and she stared back at her, mirroring the same calm resolution. “Promise they will not be harmed, and I promise to open this door with you.”

I PROMISE.

The chapel shuddered again with a quake, causing all people standing to stumble, and more dust rained upon them. The desert wind whistled through all holes again, howling.

“No!” Wells shouted.

He whipped his gun up, held in both hands with the same discipline and drill that had allowed him to shoot Michael in the head. But he knew not what to target.

Wells stared down the iron sights at Parker. But he didn’t have it in him to pull the trigger.

Not after all they had been through on THE HIGHWAY.

THE SUBSTANCE, usurper of THE HIGHWAY, thrummed from beyond the triangle door. Dark matter oozed and dribbled from the triangle of lines drawn in drying blood. The walls wept with the intangible tar. The symbols pulsed with the same pull, the same gravity as the jade tome.

“Yes. It’s time, isn’t it?” Michael asked.

He walked around the altar, interposing himself between Parker and their unwitting crowd of witnesses. Michael walked as if he had never been shot, neither in his side nor his head. And he only stopped once he stood in Wells’ line of fire.

The artificial third eye on his forehead no longer wept blood, having healed entirely.

It is time.

“Parker,” Wells spoke up again, no longer shouting. Tremors shook his voice, but he spoke with sharp clarity. “Where do you see yourself when we close the lid on this case?”

His face flickered like the flames, fighting back the despair and finding it in him to muster a feeble smile.

The homunculus and Parker answered in unison, identical words, sharing the same cadence and pronunciation. A strange chorus.

“Kicking back with some damn fine coffee, cherry pie, and so many chocolate donuts that I might just grow sick of them.”

Parker’s lips curled into the same kind of feeble smile. Wells’ smile widened.

“No, absolutely fuck this, and fuck all of you,” Jericho growled. And like Karma before him, he charged at the altar to stop this ritual.

Michael’s cloud of screaming souls exploded outward again, blasting them back, this time yielding even greater force. Jericho learned the same hard lesson as Karma, the same hard way. Everybody else stumbled backwards several steps, thrashed by the hate-waves.

Jericho wound up on the ground, curled up into a fetal position, mere steps behind Karma, gripping his head as if it was about to explode. The teeming mass of screaming, angry souls were threatening to do exactly that. The paradox of their hatred towards Michael extended to his victims.

“Goodbye,” Parker said.

She swiveled on the altar and hopped off the opposite side. In the same fluid motion, she seized the Thaum of Thritain, scooped Michael’s jackknife up off the floor, and then approached the triangle painted onto on the wall.

As soon as she pressed her hand flat against the center of the surface, feeling the thrum of infinity hidden between all worlds, Wells clicked his tongue and shook his head.

He steadied his aim. He unloaded every bullet in his pistol into Michael. Barry and Aria soon joined in, discharging all three pistols in a blaze. The hail of bullets staggered the dark messiah. Every shot caused a spasm, made him dance, like a puppet being jerked around by countless strings, and spraying the world around him in his blood.

Perhaps he would have recovered even from that, with all his dark magick—

But Karma latched onto his ankle. Just as the others ran out of bullets, she clutched, yanked, and sent Michael hurtling sideways through the world, slamming his temple against the edge of the altar, only to bounce off that and crash into the ground where she crawled onto his back to straddle him.

Her hunting knife gleamed in the dark, raised high above her head.

The jackknife in Parker’s hand gleamed the same way.

Parker cut her own arm. Deep and wide. Letting blood flow onto the jade tome, and then drip from there to the ground. Spattering out in rhythmic, gushing bursts.

Sacrifice. Others readily sacrificed other human beings to power their magick, but Parker knew no other choice. Her honor demanded it.

Self-sacrifice.

A simple act, but an honest one. A powerful one. Its rule rippled backward and forward through the ocean of time, a cosmic law, eternal.

Yes. You are kind. And with you, I know, we will evolve together to be so much more.

So much more.

We are so much closer to being whole again. You complete me. Now… finish this.

Others shouted behind her, but their words all blurred into an unintelligible haze, a slurred soup of syllables which she was readily capable of shutting out.

Parker smiled as the warm fluid escaped her to the rhythm of her own heartbeat, painting the floor beneath her in a bright crimson.

The necromancer would ill have a chance to heal her like this, as Karma sat on his back, and plunged her knife into him, over and over again. Michael would only be able to heal himself.

Karma cackled and smiled as she stabbed Michael for the twentieth time. She could have been faster, even, but she relished it every time she sunk the blade into Michael’s back.

The others, meanwhile rushed to Parker’s side. She reached out to the triangle, ready to seal the ritual with the final act necessary: she and Shadow had become one, possessed the will to complete it, and the sacrifice was rendered.

Inches away from touching bloodied palm against stained sandstone, hands grabbed at her. Pulled her away.

Through the darkness, where her field of vision narrowed while the consciousness escaped her again, she saw their faces, huddled over her. Concerned, fearful, and confused.

And among them, the peaceful mirror of her own, that unsettling doppelganger; the homunculus stared back Agent Parker. A strange mirror. Blue eyes like crushed diamonds, fleeting and memorizing every inch of each other’s countenance. The short crop of red hair to frame the freckled pale face of one another.

Agent of Peace.

Damn it all. The Shadow and Parker thought in unison.

The Whispers caressed her mind. Maybe… you were just too kind.

Jericho’s face was the only one absent from those who rushed to Parker to save her life. Wells’ jacket flew off, and he tore up his shirt to improvise new bandages.

Jericho seized the Thaum of Thritain. He had wrestled it from Parker’s weakening grasp in the shuffle. His knuckles turned white as he gripped the tome in his hands, and the jade covers began to crack.

But the Shadow could no longer do anything to prevent any of this.

One vessel, Parker, was already too weak to finish the ritual; and the people present had dragged her away from the triangle.

The other vessel, Michael, was being dragged down the chapel’s aisle by Karma. She cackled again as she dragged her nemesis away from the group, all the way through the dark doors leading outside. Instead, she teleported through that portal, dragging her most hated foe with her, back into the Heart inside the ranch house; the center of the Way King’s machine, where she would continue to drag him to the next and final door.

To the door to the House of Change from which they had escaped, thanks to Klemens’ self-sacrifice.

Past where Klemens still sat on his brass throne alone, eyes closed, deeply asleep, and oblivious to the chaos of the world around him.

Karma continued dragging the bleeding, broken body of Michael. She stabbed him every now and then for good measure, preventing him from regaining enough strength to break free from her clutches. She spat out strings of expletives to spite both him and the screaming cloud of death he commanded, the angry spirits who hated the women who kept adding to their legion, until she booted Michael’s body through the door into its infinite corridor, her final act of disrespect towards the necromancer.

“Maybe you’ll come back out as something other than a flaming piece of shit,” she spat. She cackled by the end.

Michael raised a helpless hand, covered in his own blood, but Karma kicked the door shut between them, banishing him into the House of Change.

And Jericho, well, he indeed no longer needed to burn his life away with magick to destroy the Thaum.

We were too kind, Parker thought.

The Whispers answered her. No. To be whole again, we need kindness, too. You were the right choice all along. A shame we failed, so close to the end.

That kindness was mirrored in the mess of hasty hands, all scrambling to offer Parker first aid, to stop her intense bleeding, and prop her up.

Wells held her head against his chest and told her to stay awake, and stay with him, but everything sounded like she was underwater; a million miles away. They even looked like they were peering down on her through the shimmering veil of the ocean’s surface. Wells, Aria, and Barry all stared into her face, their expressions ranging from panic over dread to concern.

The face of the homunculus vanished from that group, appearing next to Jericho with the calm of a ghost. The flames of Michael’s flickered, and all shadows returned to normal.

Natural.

“Are you sure you want to destroy it? You nor anybody else will be able to use it again to open these doors,” the homunculus told Jericho.

He paused. Some part of him still hesitated from doing the deed.

Maybe Aria could still use the book and travel through time to prevent what was slowly killing her. Or maybe time travel would only invite greater disaster. They would find another way.

Jericho clicked his tongue.

“Nah, fuck all of this. This one’s for Klem,” he growled.

His nape bulged where the Way King’s clockwork spider had drilled into his flesh and latched onto his spine, and the inhuman strength it infused him with exploded outward with all his fury, an unnatural physical might once more unleashed.

The alien tome crumbled in his crushing grasp. The covers cracked apart into chunks. His fingers curled and ripped the ancient parchment to shreds, like a strongman tearing apart a phonebook, and then ripping it up into tiny pieces. He scattered the relic’s remains into the nearest of Michael’s fires, feeding the flames.

They flared up ever so gently, lapping at and then devouring the old parchment, all soon to be ashes joining the dust of the desert.

This is not the end. There is another way, said the Whispers.

But the Shadow was no more. Spread too thin, latched onto the dying Heart of the Highway, and the otherworld of the House of Change, its grasp on this world finally faded. The loci of power it had piggybacked on all waned, and fell apart, devoured by the sands of time. Gone was one vessel, crawling, bloodied, and helpless; lost in the House of Change. Asleep, another, a mind forever obliterated, liberated from his memories.

Only one vessel remained, though her grip on life slowly faded like the rest.

The oceans swallowed the Shadow. The Whispers remained.

Agent Parker’s consciousness faded to black.

#spoospasu #spookyspaghettisundae #horror #short story #writing #literature #spooky #fiction #mystery #THE HIGHWAY #surreal #hyperrealism #anima mundi #occult #mysticism #alchemy #magnum opus #Jung #archetypes #Shadow #rubedo #magick #sorcery #FBI #agent #Parker #Michael Sharpe #Derek Wells #Aria Chambers #Barry

[d4rkpluto]

𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔢𝔫𝔦𝔤𝔪𝔞 𝔞𝔯𝔠𝔥𝔢𝔱𝔶𝔭𝔢

[I AM FOLLOWING AYESHA K.FAINES RESEARCH OF FEMININE ARCHETYPES]

↳ the sexual feminine archetype of the mystic archetype.

♇ when your percentage of the lover percentage is 70% and over. and when your personal score matches with your percentage engima the most.

♇ the enigma is one of the sexual feminine archetypes that belong to the feminine archetype the mystic, whereas the other sexual feminine archetype is the goddess.

♇ people who belong to the enigma archetype are perceived as earthy and have this mesmerising and magnetic energy that can be depicted as positive.

♇ some of them could be seen as very aloof and can have a resting bitch face. they're spiritual people and positive enigmas have a hard time being narcissistic and cold.

♇ they're people who dont necessarily need fame or attention, [they just focus on what they create and people are attracted to], these women are more focused on their inner peace.

♇ they are people who feel like they need to connect to a higher source of power, its comforting for them to know that there is something bigger than them that they can be lenient on.

♇ since they're people who like peace so much, they could have this tendency of fleeing from situations when they recognise that trouble would be led to them in the end. they're women who are likely to have a sense of high value of themselves and to reach that, they like to ground their energy.

♇ when it comes to romance, they like to make their lover feel seen and heard. enigmas are HUGE lovers, and most of them express their love for them within their music. like when i was writing the enigma post, fka twig's song, pendulum kept on playing in my head.

♇ the lyric "dying to be yours" repeated in my head, sometimes, enigmas are the type of women to drop everything to be and please their significant other. the link to the song :)

♇ they can sometimes overlook their lover's very bad flaws, and can be the type of people to be into open-relationships.

♇ when it comes to non-romantic situations, or in general, they're people who keep a big part of themselves only to themselves, they don't like the idea of people knowing about them 100%.

♇ as it comes to people interacting with them, people might give them the burden of having to fix them.

♇ they can get into episodes where they have a lot of blockages when it comes to expressing their sensuality or creativity. enigmas are the type of people to live in their head than executing their ideas.

when it is not blocked you'll find them to be people with very artistic and original.

♇ though, enigmas come in many forms, even though they are people who can love very deeply, they're also very closed off women. watching interviews of them, most of them have reminded me of manic pixie girls.

♇ they're women who are very strong with their opinions, and since they're strong about their thoughts they can be very poetic. they're woman who can easily express their feelings so people can understand where they are coming from.

♇ when around the right people, they can come off as very chatty but they're the type to speak about everything but themselves.

♇ i have noted that many of them do know how to sing, i've implied that they're creative and enigmas are likely going to be those who take the musician route.

♇ are aware of how society and how poorly it treats people, so they try and help others, [and the earth]. they're people who always like to be prepared and can be considered as very cute. they have this earthy energy to them but still like to indulge in luxury, chiefly for their jewellery.

♇ they like to nurture things so they are the type to get plants or even pets. [and as a stretch could be open to having kids].

♇ when enigmas are really in love with someone or just take a liking too much for a person, they can become very agreeable people, they sometimes become a walking mat or you could say people-pleaser.

♇ after watching tons of interviews many of them do have a raspiness to their voice, could sometimes be because of weed. or just smoking in general.

♇ as it comes to their aesthetic, i have observed many of them like neutral colours and are into self-care. the type to have many skin products.

♇ scent/senses is very important for them and they tend to be very hygienic people.

♇ out of all the feminine archetypes, enigma archetypes are the ones who have the most diverse personalities, makes sense to the title of their archetype, not knowing who or what they specifically are.

♇ are women who are direct with what they want, especially when it does come to romance, confident enigmas know what they want and they get it. they could have many romances but not marry, plus, if they're famous they're likely tired with the attention they get.

♇ are sexually fluid people and love to express their sensuality within their art. many of them love memories and will always be grateful with what they have been taught in the past.

♇ moreover, when i was watching interviews of them, many of them had voices i did not expect them to have. if not careful can get pressured easily and hastily anxious. the type to want to make others feel included. they like to heal, very spiritual people, and as i have said that they remind me of manic pixies, the more i did my research on them, the more i realised they're very fairy-like.

♇ they're people who are interested in research and like to embrace their powerful feminine side. the type to indulge in witch-craft; some enigmas can be very insecure about their face, can be interested in cosmetic surgery, [even though all of them are gorgeous]. + also noticed many of them have very curvy bodies.

♇ can appear as two-faced or fake because they want to set a certain reputation of themselves. don't like drama or would walk away from the mess they made. they do like to be left alone and due to this people might consider them as boring, but they just have a wall in front of their real personality.

♇ as they are people who like to ground themselves, they are people who are long to temper, or try not to be easily tempered.

fashion wise, they are people who know their colours really well. are likely going to wear gold jewellery.

♇ and can sometimes come off as very bimbo-like because of their lack of care for things. they are people who are very open about their past, and majority of the time, young enigmas were forced into the spotlight. [asia monet ray + kourtney kardashian].

♇ they are great entertainers and can be favoured in what they do. what makes them more likeable is their sunny appearance. some of them display themselves as delicate. on the other hand, people might find them to be weird.

♇ sometimes enigmas can come off as childlike and a lot of them have chubby-cheeks.

other enigmas ↴

♇ enigmas i put above are fka twigs, krotchy, frida kahlo, greta garbo, kourtney kardashian and nicole kidman.

♇ understanding the enigma archetype, is that it shows that they are women who are usually deeply underestimated when it comes to their intelligence, spiritual women who are on a hermit path of understanding themselves and others.

♇ and to make the enigma archetype easier to comprehend i gathered characters from different tv shows or films that come under the archetype.

⟶ harry potter franchise - luna lovegood, embodies the shy and kept to themselves side of the enigmas, [as i said they are a very fluid and diverse archetype], as enigmas, luna is perceived to be someone who is strange but doesnt allow it to make her feel insecure. she helps other people and is kind, embraces her quirkiness.

⟶ from american horror story [coven] - misty day, the stereotypical spiritual enigma who cares for nature and the earth. has a special connection with animals and with life itself, very caring and eccentric, and as a healthy enigma, she doesnt allow people's views of her to bring her down.

⟶ avatar the way of water - kiri, when i was thinking of fictional characters who are the enigma, kiri was the first character that appeared in my head. she is connected with the earth, creative and connects herself to a higher source of power, [even though she is already connected to eywa from what i believe]. is connected to life and death.

⟶ from friends - phoebe buffay, embodies the childlike nature of the enigma, the nature where people perceive them to be "ditzy". when she is around the people she likes, she can come off as very chatty.

⟶ naruto franchise - hinata hyuga/uzumaki, embodies the shy nature of the enigma. the enigma that loves with their all, can have creative blockages and people underestimate who she is and her power. hinata is aware of how the world poorly treats people as she did belong to clan that didnt really care for their people. [ex. neji]. sometimes expresses the mysterious side an enigma can be.

⟶ from the original franchise - freya mikaelson, is the witch of her family and is very connected to nature, chiefly because of the time she was born. she is someone who likes to ground herself and is one of the siblings who thinks things out the most, will do anything for the sake of love and family. strong opinions and holds a strong bond of life and death, like misty day.

⟶ the last of us - dina woodward, likes to be connected to a higher source, shows when she gives ellie the evil eye bracelet, embodies the expressive side of the enigma and is likely open to "open-relationships" chiefly due to her bond with jesse and ellie. she is direct with what she wants, does like her peace.

⟶ from the haunting of hill house - nell crain, some people overlook her connection to a higher source of power; to see how you are going to die since you were young is pretty psychic. had spiritual phases and like many enigma characters is very connected with death, had tried to ground herself but wasnt able, especially becuase of her therapist. does keep a big part of herself but she normally did that because she didnt want to burden her siblings.

⟶ winx club - flora, represents the kind, nature-loving and mysterious side of the enigma, especially with the vibrant colours she wears, it might not really appear that there's this secrecy and mystery to flora's character but ever since i've watched the show when i was young, i've always noted an essence of puzzle and unsolved problem when it comes to her. like she's there but not at the same time.

⟶ from euphoria - cassie howard, you might wonder how cassie belongs to the enigma archetype and the girl embodies everything that an underdeveloped enigma is. is willing to drop everything for her lover, look past the red-flags and become what their lovers wants them to be. cassie is a big lover girl, and likes to make her lovers feel seen and heard, especially for what she did to nate, telling him she can be whatever he wants her to be.

♇ as i have done my research, i gathered that a lot of enigmas are are likely going to have capricorn, leo and pisces in their big three; in order of how much they appeared.

♇ they are also going to have leo, capricorn and taurus appear in their dominant signs; in order of how much they appeared.

♇ the planets jupiter, sun and pluto appeared in their dominant planets the most; in order of how much they appeared.

♇ the element that appeared the most was earth, second was fire and third was water.

♇ lastly, when it comes to the modality, what appeared the most was fixed and the second modality was mutable.

♇ feminine archetype masterlist

to find out what feminine archetype and sexual feminine archetype you are

buy a natal chart reading from me

masterlist

♇ pluto

#sabrina claudio #kali uchis #rosé #jhene aiko #fka twigs #the enigma #mystic archetype #the enigma archetype #enigma archetype #luna lovegood #misty day #harry potter #american horror story #kiri #phoebe buffay #hinata hyuga #dina tlou #dina woodward #freya mikaelson #nell crain #flora winx #cassie howard #euphoria #capricorn #leo #pisces #taurus #jupiter #sun #pluto

[fierysword]

Hestia can be found in the quiet solitude and sense of order that comes from doing “contemplative housekeeping.” In this mode, the woman can be totally absorbed in each task, unhurried in doing it, with time to enjoy the resulting harmony... For example, a day taken to clean out a closet may involve discarding and keeping clothes, remembering and anticipating events, sorting both belongings and self. In the end, the housekeeper has an orderly closet...and a day spent well. Or a woman may experience Hestia in the pleasure and satisfaction of going through old photographs, sorting, labeling, and putting them in an album.

After deciding on a task, the woman must provide ample time for it. For example, folding laundry is a repetitious chore for many women who hurry through the task feeling hassled. Adopting Hestia’s mode, a woman might welcome the opportunity to fold clothes, as a time to quiet her mind... A woman needs to focus on one task at a time, one area or one room at a time, whatever feels easily manageable in the time available. She must become as absorbed in doing the task as if she were performing the Japanese tea ceremony, with a sense of serenity in each movement. Only then will a pervasive inner quiet replace the ordinary chatter of the mind.

Goddesses in Everywoman by Jean Shinoda Bolen

#cleaning #feminine archetypes #mystic archetype

[blackwoodbanshee]

#Personal #Quiz #Archetype #Feminine archetype #Results #Enigma #Gamine #Mystic #Maiden

[sidewalkchemistry]

"The comprehension of this Wild Woman nature is not a religion but a practice. It is a psychology in its truest sense: psukhi/psych, soul; ology or logos, a knowing of the soul. Without her, women are without ears to hear her soultalk or to register the chiming of their own inner rhythms. Without her, women’s inner eyes are closed by some shadowy hand, and large parts of their days are spent in a semi-paralyzing ennui or else wishful thinking.

Without her, women lose the sureness of their soulfooting. Without her, they forget why they’re here, they hold on when they would best hold out. Without her they take too much or too little or nothing at all. Without her they are silent when they are in fact on fire. She is their regulator, she is their soulful heart, the same as the human heart that regulates the physical body.

When we lose touch with the instinctive psyche, we live in a semi-destroyed state and images and powers that are natural to the feminine are not allowed full development. When a woman is cut away from her basic source, she is sanitized, and her instincts and natural life cycles are lost, subsumed by the culture, or by the intellect or the ego—one’s own or those belonging to others.

Wild Woman is the health of all women. Without her, women’s psychology makes no sense."

- Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Women Who Run With the Wolves)

#q #clarissa pinkola estes #women who run with the wolves #ecofeminism #wild woman archetype #archetypes #divine feminine #higher self #self knowledge #inner work #psychoanalysis #mysticism

[nyxshadowhawk]

The Red Book, Liber Primus: Part One

This is going to be a long series of posts in which I interpret Carl Jung's Red Book! Jung has been a cornerstone of my mystical practice for basically as long as I've been practicing, and a major inspiration for my creative work, so imagine my surprise when I learned that Jung had his own grimoire of mystical experiences! This is maybe the most important book I've ever read.

Introduction

I owe a lot to Carl Jung. I read one page about him in a book about symbols that I received when I was about twelve, and something just clicked. In particular, the idea of the Shadow Complex really stuck with me, and has absolutely defined the last decade of my life in terms of my personal spirituality, my approach to interpreting media, and my creative writing. It’s kind of hard to overstate the impact that Jung has had on me, but despite that, I haven’t actually read that much Jung. You all know how much I care about primary sources, so I was uncomfortable with the fact that I was using Jung’s ideas as the basis of my own work without being intimately familiar with his.

I’ve made some missteps. I originally really loved the idea of interpreting gods as archetypes, and claiming that all of humanity worshipped the same gods under different names. I saw that as a beautiful uniting feature of humankind. But the concept did not hold up under scrutiny, for a long list of reasons; the short version is that I was ignoring nuances that distinguished gods from each other, dismissing some of their defining qualities as cultural quirks, as if entire human cultures were “hats” that gods put on and not the thing that makes them what they are. I didn’t start having real relationships with gods until after I started viewing them as individuals, rather than archetypes. And then there’s Joseph Campbell, and his whole “Hero’s Journey” idea, which seemed extremely profound until I actually read The Hero with a Thousand Faces and realized how flawed the Hero’s Journey framework really is. (Spencer McDaniel has a great article about that over on her site, so I recommend you check that out.) So, that was all another strike against Jungian ideas. The third strike is that people like Jordan Peterson use his ideas a lot. That in particular has made me afraid that I’ve been misinterpreting Jung this whole time.

There’s also the fact that Jung’s ideas are difficult to understand and apply, and frequently misunderstood. Clinical psychology has mostly disregarded Jung’s ideas of the collective unconscious and archetypes as more mystical than empirical, despite Jung’s efforts to prove his ideas empirically. Fans of Jung will sometimes downplay his mystical leanings to try to lend more scientific credibility to his ideas. But to me, Jung’s mysticism is a feature, not a bug. Turns out, Jung was a mystic. Jung had mystical visions and prophetic dreams since he was a young child, and his entire brand of psychoanalysis was developed specifically to explain said mystical experiences (which honestly explains a lot). Not only was Jung a mystic, he was basically the William Blake of his day! He chronicled his mystical experiences in what is basically a personal grimoire, written in the style of an illuminated medieval manuscript, with stunning illustrations.

It’s called The Red Book, or Liber Novus, and it was published in 2009 (translated by Sonu Shamdasani). I got the really expensive version that’s about two feet tall and contains a facsimile of the actual illuminated manuscript. To call it an eye-opener would be an understatement. Reading it is infinitely more valuable to my spirituality and my writing than reading any of Jung’s psychological essays. The Red Book is the real source of most of Jung’s ideas and theories, and the purely mystical nature of them explains why the concepts themselves resonate much more for me than the psychoanalytic application of them does. Reading it is immensely validating, because it proves that I was right all along! Not only were my interpretations of Jung’s ideas spot-on, but my UPG aligns with his — though some of that alignment is undoubtedly a result of his influence on me, I’ve also come to many of the same conclusions entirely on my own.

I hope that the field of modern psychology will eventually do mysticism its due diligence using modern methodology, but until then, Jung’s attempt to ground all of this weirdness in psychology is the best we’ve got. I’m no psychoanalyst, so I’ll interpret Jung as a fellow mystic, because that is what I am most familiar with. I can compare his own experiences against my own, and hopefully get something valuable from my interpretation of them.

Disclaimer: These are mostly my notes and impressions; I’m not responding line-by-line (because that would take forever), I’m responding to what stood out to me. This is my interpretation of The Red Book based on my own mystical experiences and mystical knowledge, not based on Jung’s other writings. I’m using Jung’s name as shorthand for “the person writing this” or “the dreamer” — I don’t mean to suggest that what Jung expresses here is indicative of his personal spiritual beliefs. I know he had a complicated relationship with mysticism, science, and religion, so I won’t even touch that here. I’m going to be looking at this from a strictly mystical angle, and everything that follows is subjective.

The Way of What Is to Come

Jung began by introducing two spirits. One is “the spirit of this time,” a literal translation of zeitgeist (Jung’s manuscript is in German), which represents the conscious mind and conventional thought. It’s a reference to Goethe’s Faust: “What you the Spirit of the Ages call / Is nothing but the spirit of you all, / Wherein the Ages are reflected.” It’s called “the spirit of this time” because the times that we live in influence what and how we think, and form the foundation of our conscious faculties. I might define the Zeitgeist as the set of assumptions we make that defines our base-level interpretation of the world around us. So, when I complain about “latent Christianity,” I’m calling attention to the Zeitgeist. To put it in my own mystical terms, the Zeitgeist is the part of you that thinks like a human, instead of thinking like a god.

The opposite of the Zeitgeist is what Jung calls “the spirit of the depths,” which represents the unconscious mind. The Spirit of the Depths is both a personification of and Jung’s guide to the unconscious. It is something like a collective Shadow combined with a chthonic god, that encompasses all of the hidden and buried parts of humanity (or at least of Jung) that can be accessed through dreams and mystical visions. It operates independently from the Zeitgeist, and therefore can introduce Jung to secret information and concepts that fall outside of the Zeitgeist’s purview. A lot of what it tells Jung is harsh, but he understands that it’s necessary to listen to the Spirit of the Depths and internalize what it tells him.

Only a page in, and we’ve already got a mention of the Shadow concept. Since everything has a Shadow, God also has a Shadow. Jung defines God as “supreme meaning,” so God’s Shadow is lack of meaning — nonsense, void. The Spirit of the Depths tells Jung to notice the small things in life, which is pretty banal spiritual wisdom for most of us nowadays, but it’s very hard for Jung to accept. He writes, “It completely burnt up my innards since it was inglorious and unheroic. It was even ridiculous and revolting.” Everything has their own thing that they’re working through — I have to work through issues related to power and sexuality, and what Jung has to work through is issues relating to meaning vs. meaninglessness, greatness vs. mediocrity, sensibility/respectability vs. foolishness. The Zeitgeist of early-twentieth-century Germany insists that only great deeds, great men, and great ideas are the ones that matter. Jung was taught to think that things must be “glorious” and “heroic,” larger than life, for them to matter. The Zeitgeist encourages Jung to dismiss the little things as part of God’s shadow. The Spirit of the Depths informs him that the small things are still part of God and not God’s Shadow because they are not nonsense. The mundane is still divine, because it is not nonsense.

The Spirit of the Depths tells Jung, “all the last mysteries of becoming and passing away lie in you.” It’s a big deal to be one of the people of this time who can experience the Mystery the way the ancients did, or near enough. Actually, wait — Jung isn’t quite a person of this time. There’s a solid century between Jung and me, which is enough time for the Zeitgeist to have changed considerably, but not that much time. He’s essentially my immediate ancestor, the most recent entry in my mystical tradition. It is absolutely wild to be reading the Mystery filtered through a specific, named person who lived only a century ago, as opposed to ancient mystics of Antiquity who didn’t write everything down so I have to blindly guess at what they might have experienced or how they might have interpreted it. But there’s enough time in there that I keep wondering, am I in the time that is to come? Is Jung receiving this information so that I can be primed to receive it?

Jung says, “It is true, it is true, what I speak is the greatness and intoxication and ugliness of madness.” Yeeeeah! We’ll get back to divine madness, but I love that it’s being brought up this early. However, it’s a lot harder for Jung than it is for me to admit that these words or visions might come from a place of madness, because Jung is a person who really likes for things to make sense. On that note:

I must also speak the ridiculous. You coming men! You will recognize the supreme meaning [God] by the fact that he is laughter and worship, a bloody laughter and a bloody worship. A sacrificial blood binds the poles. Those who know this laugh and worship in the same breath.

Hmm, this doesn’t sound like any god I know at all… I love that phrase “a bloody laughter and a bloody worship.” That’s Dionysian worship in a nutshell, right there.

My speech is imperfect. Not because I want to shine with words, but out of the impossibility of finding those words. I speak in images. With nothing else can I express the words from the depths.

That checks. Mystical experiences often come as floods of insights and images, but few words, I think because words are literally processed differently by the brain (don’t quote me on that). Putting it into words literally requires a translation, and it can be very difficult to find the right words to do it justice or record every aspect of it. I’m also reading an English translation of Jung’s German, so that’s another degree of separation, but two degrees of separation is relatively little.

Jung has a vision of a sea of blood blanketing Europe, which is obviously a premonition of WWI. He also dreams that he returns to his homeland (Switzerland) from a “remote English land,” to find it covered in frost in summer; he makes wine from iced grapes, which he shares. The first part of this is a premonition — he was in Scotland when WWI broke out, and hurried home. As for the second part, “…I found my barren tree whose leaves the frost had transformed into a remedy. And I plucked the ripe fruit and gave it to you and I do not know what I poured out for you, what bitter-sweet intoxicating drink, which left on your tongues an aftertaste of blood.” Not sure exactly how to interpret this, but it’s a striking image, especially to a Dionysian like me.

Reassuringly, Jung insists that he is relaying his own experiences, not mine or anyone else’s:

It is no teaching and no instruction that I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path, therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws, Within us is the way, the truth, and the life. Woe betide those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves. The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you? Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul? You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that? There is only one way and that is your way. You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you. May each go his own way.

Thank the gods for this! It’s too common for mystics to assume that their own personal revelations apply to everyone else, because mystical experiences really do make you feel like you have all the answers to life, the universe, and everything. Hearing straight from Jung himself that he is only speaking for himself, and that what he says here need not apply to me or anyone else, ironically makes his words more validating. Also, my biggest criticism of Jungian psychoanalysis is that it seems to apply the same symbols universally (the gender essentialism in the anima/animus concept comes to mind), so I assumed that Jung was extrapolating from his own mystical experiences. It seems as though he actually had the wisdom to admit that these symbols apply only to himself.

Refinding the Soul

Jung feels distanced from his soul, because surprise surprise, 20th century patriarchy is spiritually bankrupt. At the time he had the bloody-flood vision, Jung was forty years old and had accomplished everything that patriarchy says you should want in life — he had honor, power, wealth, knowledge, and happiness. He succeeded. He won the game of life. All he was left with was abject horror and the question of what to do with himself, a midlife crisis. (From a quotation in the footnotes, Jung defines the midlife crisis at the moment at which the Shadow first asserts itself: “A point exists at about the thirty-fifth year when things begin to change, it is the first moment of the shadow side of life, of going down to death.” Buddy, I’ve gotten way past that and I’m not even twenty-five!)

Jung thus came to the realization that he had dedicated his life to the wrong things:

I had to accept that what I had previously called my soul was not at all my soul, but a dead system. Hence I had to speak to my soul as to something far off, and unknown, which did not exist through me, but through whom I existed.

“A dead system” is a great way of putting it. It reminds me of the Fight-Club-esque dissatisfaction of having ticked all the boxes within the system and done everything you’re supposed to, and receiving absolutely no real fulfillment from it. (I bet Fight Club also owes a lot to this.) It also reminds me of my new favorite Terry Pratchett quote, from Small Gods, “People start off believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.” A structure by itself is completely hollow — what’s scaffolding for if it doesn’t support anything? I also like that second line. You exist through your soul, by means of your soul, and not the other way around… That suggests that it’s more real than you are.

Jung explains to the reader that if you seek external things – money, success, validation from other people — then you will not find your soul, and will enter midlife crisis. The soul is only found internally. So go inward, and do the work. Pretty self-explanatory at this point, but must have been earth-shattering back then because he spends a lot of time justifying it. It’s the Spirit of the Depths who tells Jung to look internally and reconnect with his soul:

Therefore the spirit of the depths forced me to speak to my soul, to call upon her as a living and self-existing being. I had to become aware that I had lost my soul.

I think it’s interesting that Jung uses feminine pronouns for his soul. That makes sense, since I use masculine pronouns for mine. I’m not sure how this relates to the anima/animus concept, whether it’s the same thing or a slightly different thing. It’s probably the same idea, because “anima” is the Latin word for “soul.” I checked, and Jung uses “seele” and not “anima,” possibly because he hadn’t developed the concept yet.

I interpret Astor as my Shadow and associate him with my repressed personality traits, but Jung would say that he was my animus, because I’m a woman and Astor is the man that exists in my mind. Jung conceived of the Shadow and anima/animus as separate figures — the repressed aspects of the personality and repressed femininity/masculinity, respectively — that need to be integrated separately. For me, they’re the same figure. The anima/animus is one of the concepts that I think hasn’t aged well, not because the concept is inherently bad (internal repressed qualities that one associates with the opposite sex) but because the way it’s presented and describes falls along strictly gender-essentialist lines. This is especially because the anima/animus is less personal and less “universal” than the Shadow, which inevitably means projecting Western gender norms (such as “women are more emotional and men are more logical,” which Jung expressed as Eros and Logos) onto everyone in the world and calling it an inherent psychological feature of humankind.

I think it’s is one of those concepts that was progressive for its time but regressive now with our more nuanced interpretation of gender. For example, the anima appears in men’s minds as a sex symbol, but the animus apparently does not appear as a similar sex symbol in women’s minds: In Man and His Symbols, Marie Louise von Franz says “…the animus does not so often appear in the form of an erotic fantasy or mood [as the anima does for men]; it is more apt to take the form of a hidden “sacred” conviction.” Yeah, that’s bullshit. I’m willing to bet anything that this interpretation is the result of women being sexual objects from men’s perspectives (as the “anima”) but denied any access to or expression of sexuality within their own minds. Women aren’t culturally allowed to desire men, so the animus is the unsexed voice of her father giving her very judgemental advice and rigid solutions, instead of a seductive incubus. That doesn’t check. Astor is basically a sexual fantasy with a mind of his own, and if Lestat, Rhysand, Edward Cullen, and Azhrarn exist, I’m clearly not the only woman who has a relationship with this specific archetypal lover.

Actually, I also have the “nightmare woman,” a separate entity from Astor that is a textbook example of what Jung would call a “negative anima”… if I were a man. Maybe having an opposite-sex Shadow and same-sex anima/animus is another sign of my gender identity being a bit screwy. Or maybe the reason why Jung’s soul is female is because his gender identity isn’t that straightforward, either. Either way, I think the anima/animus concept needs to be redefined to make it less cishet. It’s not universally applicable to say that your Shadow must be the same sex as you or that you have repressed femininity/masculinity. That was probably true back in the early twentieth century when anyone would repress any inclination towards cross-gender expression for fear of social disembowelment, but now? “Hey, turns out men/women have feminine/masculine traits, too” is not an archetype.

I digress. Back to The Red Book.

I came upon an interesting revelation while reading this section — if Jung’s soul is feminine and he has to “refind” her, then that’s why the hero of every fairy tale gets his princess at the end of the story. The princess is his soul, which he is given a right to by having completed the self-actualization process through the events of the story. The “half a kingdom” part of the Standard Hero Reward could represent control over part of the unconscious mind. I got a prince and half a kingdom from this process (maybe it’ll be a whole kingdom if I ever finish a version of the map that I’m happy with). It’ll quickly become apparent that this whole book chronicles Jung’s own Hero’s Journey. That means… in a manner of speaking… the the Hero’s Journey isn’t based on Jung’s ideas – Jung’s ideas are based on the Hero’s Journey. Because the Hero’s Journey is the ancient mystical process of self-actualization.

[Edit: I was getting ahead of myself here. Pretty much all of this will be addressed later when we get to Liber Secundus.

If we possess the image of a thing, we possess half the thing. The image of the world is half the world. He who possesses the world but not its image possesses only half the world, since his soul his poor and has nothing. The wealth of the soul exists in images. […] My friends, it is wise to nourish the soul, otherwise you will breed dragons and devils in your heart.

I interpret this as meaning that in order to “possess” the world in full, to have our princess and half-a-kingdom, you have to have both the internal and external aspects of it. To put it in alchemical terms, unite the fixed and volatile. (Unification of opposites is going to be a big theme throughout this book.) If you don’t “nourish the soul,” then it festers like a wound and you start projecting unaddressed Shadow aspects on the external world. (We’ll get back to that, too.) Without your Shadow or your unconscious mind, you’re half gone.

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[tiktoksinspo]

The Feminine Archetype you'd be based on your Star Sign:

Aquarius: The Siren

Virgo: The Empress

Gemini: The Mystic

Capricorn: The Enigma

#feminine archetypes #omg #nice #zodiac signs #star signs #perfect #aesthetics #I love this #inspo #fantasy #book lovers #aquarius #siren #virgo #empress #gemini #mystic #capricorn #enigma #tiktok #@jasminebeacroft

[carljungdepthpsychology]

And how can we know the whole of which we are only a part?

Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group So the Self is part of the collective unconscious, but it is not the collective unconscious; it is that unit which apparently comes from the union of the ego and the shadow. We designate that totality as the Self, where everything conscious is united with everything unconscious, with the exception of those things that reach beyond our limitation in time…

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