It’s on. You are cordially invited to the Royal Wedding! Which seems just perfect for discussing the archetype of the Hermaphrodite. In the first half of my Jungian themed essay I shall explore my personal reflections and in the second, I will continue that journey in the shape of a long prose poem. The joint presentation of each feels right, bringing the Solar King and Lunar Queen together in a way I have never worked before. I hope you enjoy!
Twelve weeks ago, around the start of the year, I made a conscious decision to start something completely new in my life, I call it the Animus Diet. Yes, I appreciate that January and dieting tend to go hand-in-hand, however, this was an entirely different kind of diet because there would be no calorie counting or weighing scales involved. Not even a tape measure, as I attempted to slim down my overweight animus, ‘Brutus’ and build up my skinny anima, whom I refer to fondly as ‘Olive Oyl.’ It was only when I discovered the wonderful cartoons at the beginning and at the end of this article that I recognised the characters as archetypes for my inner masculine and feminine aspects. In the first part of this article Journey of Love: The Animus Diet I wrote about my initial thoughts, reflections and changes that I felt I needed to make and I explored a number of suggestions about how to put these in place. This article picks up where week four left off as I continue to explore my inner masculine/feminine imbalance. And so the animus diet continues.
Halloween is the perfect spell for exploring evil visitations and how we unconsciously invite more fear-provoking ghouls into our everyday lives without really knowing or understanding why. In this seasonal blog post I shall be bringing to light the fate of the magician, otherwise known as the witch, healer, or shaman, for the alchemist has many names. To begin with I’ll briefly explore the terms ‘alchemy’ and ‘fate’ before delving into one of Jung’s richest passages that I’ve ever had the good fortune to stumble across.
Why I was first drawn to Clarissa I’ll never know …
I remember entering the shop and pushing back the curtain to find her sitting there, at her table in the back room, smiling. As I approached my thirtieth birthday, I was nervous yet desperate for insight into a life-changing decision I was making. Time backed up the moment she pulled out her Tarot cards, it was like magic being spread around the table. The consultation with Clarissa lasted two hours and I remember feeling amazed by her deeply intuitive, accurate reading of those mystical cards. It was revelatory! I saw her two more times over the next six years. Each time I felt held, in some way contained, by this archetypal witchy looking woman with her large gold earrings. Then, as often is the case, after the crisis had passed I forgot all about her.