Who is she that looketh forth as the morning,
fair as the moon, clear as the sun and
terrible as an army with banners?
- The Song of Songs (1)

THE DIVINE LOVER

The divine lover appears within us and leads us towards union. Within a woman, as we have seen, this lover takes the form of her own inner masculine self, her animus. He gives her the power and strength she needs to walk through the burning fire that is the path of love. Within the psyche of a man the same lover appears as a woman, veiled and mysterious. Alluring and fascinating, she beckons him into the beautiful and terrible depths of his own being.

The anima arises like Venus from the waters of the unconscious. She has many forms; she is both virgin and temptress. For many men she is their most powerful archetypal figure, and every romantic poem or song is written in homage to her. From the first time you see her you know that “you have always been her lover.” Like Ariadne she holds the thread that can guide a man through the labyrinthine maze of his unconscious, back to the hidden core of his being. She carries the image of a man’s soul, of his own inner mystery. It is through union with her that the Christ Child, the Self, is born. In much Sufi poetry the anima echoes the Beloved; in the images of a woman’s beauty a divine beauty is mirrored:

I became love-crazed when my Beloved
like the new moon, revealed an eyebrow,
displayed herself, then closed the door.(2)

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

The feminine is both creative and destructive, nurtures life and yet also devours it. The anima has her dark side. She is the siren who lures men into the waters of the psyche and leaves them there to drown. Belonging to the impersonal depths, she is cold and uncaring; she seeks only power and uses all her magical attraction to imprison consciousness. Keats personifies her as “La Belle Dame sans Merci.” He describes how a brave knight-at-arms is captivated by her beauty, her long hair and wild eyes, how she sings him “a faery’s song” and feeds him “honey wild, and manna dew, And sure in language strange she said—‘I love thee true.’” But once she has seduced him, she leaves him; and in a dream he sees all those whom she has enchanted and left desolate:

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—“La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!”
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.(3)

The same archetypal story is told in the film The Blue Angel. Marlene Dietrich plays the anima figure, an actress in a small touring theater which visits a provincial town where the well-respected school teacher watches a performance and becomes entranced by her. He leaves his job and joins the theater company in order to be with her. She totally degrades him, making him act the part of the clown. Finally the theater returns to his home town and she forces him to play the clown before his former pupils and fellow citizens. Unable to endure such humiliation, he goes to his former classroom and hangs himself. As in Keats’s poem, the anima has woven her spell, seducing and then destroying her victim.

The femme fatale is an inner figure as much as an alluring outer woman, and many men have been caught by her cold passion. They are often unable to relate to women but are fed only by fantasies which leave them starving. One friend who had great difficulty forming a relationship with a woman had a dream in which he was shown the effigy of a witch, under which was written “she can put out any fire.” She is the enemy of consciousness and warmth of feeling. Like the spider mother, she is an aspect of the devouring feminine which is merciless and cruel. She alienates those whom she has bitten, leaving them isolated, and, in the words of Keats’s poem, “alone and palely loitering.”

THE VIRGIN AND THE DRAGON

The power of the anima derives from the archetypal world, for she stands between the personal and the collective unconscious, her image merging back into the Great Mother herself. In her darkest form she is Medusa, whose glance has the power to petrify. Fascinated and yet frightened, man has projected the dark anima onto both the femme fatale and the witch. Just before writing this passage I saw a car sticker which read “My ex-wife’s car is a broomstick.” This “joke” points to the depths of fear a man can have about the dark woman who haunts his dreams, and many innocent women have been tortured and burned as witches because of this fear. Unable to face the darkness within, he has persecuted his projection.

Man’s fear of the dark feminine derives from his fear of the Great Mother, the dragon mother, who represents the deepest powers of the unconscious. Hers is a realm in which there is no light of consciousness. In this primal place there is no morality, no division into light or darkness. It is the instinctual jungle world—“red in tooth and claw”—and the domain of the tiger who symbolizes the undifferentiated energy of the goddess.

This fear of the feminine is very real and should not be dismissed. Towards the end of his life Jung said, “Woman is a very, very strong being, magical. That’s why I am afraid of women.”(4) If we are to make a creative relationship with the inner feminine we must acknowledge this fear. In myths a virgin, symbol of the anima, is often held captive by a dragon. In previous ages the heroic quest involved slaying the dragon. Man needed to free himself from his instinctual drives and the fearsome power of the Great Mother. Only then could he find the anima, his individual feminine self. While the anima is an archetypal figure, with her roots in the collective unconscious, she also symbolizes a personal relationship to the feminine. A man’s anima figure is very personal and intimate, unlike his relationship with the mother in which his individuality is easily lost in the collective nature of the mother archetype.

A man’s relationship with the feminine is first held in the grip of the dragon, the Great Mother archetype. A man who remains so imprisoned always looks for a mother figure—for him all women are identified with the mother. In this state there can be no individual creative relationship with the unconscious. In order to realize his own individual relationship to the inner and outer feminine, he must free the virgin, his own pure feminine self.

But in our era, too many dragons have been slain, and we now need the power of the Great Mother to heal ourselves and our world. The anima still needs to be set free, but the dragon needs to be accepted, not killed. We need to look at our fear of the feminine and in the mirror of consciousness see her darkest face. Only then will we cease to project this fear; only then will we integrate rather than reject the powerful energies of the feminine.

The anima often first appears in her idealized form. She is a pure and beautiful virgin. In our Western culture we have separated the light and the dark aspects of the feminine. The heroic ideal honored “Mary, Queen of Heaven” and rejected and repressed her darker, earthier twin. This twin first appeared in the Judeo-Christian tradition as Lilith, the first wife of Adam, who refused to be subservient to him. In killing the dragon we may have freed a virgin but we have rejected the instinctual power of the feminine. The feminine is as much the dragon as the virgin and we can no longer afford to separate the two. We need the primal power of the instinctual world. If we look at the face of the dragon with love and the reflective quality of consciousness, its energy can be integrated. This is a work as much for women as for men, for women need to accept their own primal power as much as men need to integrate this feminine potential. Here lies the heroic quest of our age, for the child of the future needs to ride on the back of the dragon.

In descending into the unconscious, we meet this natural energy of the feminine, which the romantic, idealized image of the anima is unable to contain. We see this idealized image represented in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in the prince’s initial love for Ophelia. She is “the celestial and my soul’s idol, the most beautiful Ophelia”; no earthly images intrude upon his vision. But like the moon, the feminine has a dark side which cannot be ignored forever: “The baying of Hecate is always there, whether it sound from near or from far.”5 Hamlet’s destiny forces him to confront the dark side of the feminine in his mother’s instinctual sexuality, her adulterous affair with his uncle Claudius. In disgust he accuses her of bestial sexuality:

Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty! (6)

Yet what this image evokes is not merely animal squalor, but associations with the Great Mother. In ancient times honey was sacred to the Earth Goddess, and the “nasty sty” relates to the pig which symbolizes the creative female, “the fruitful and receptive womb.” Both honey and the pig were associated with the female genitals: there is a Hindu marriage custom of daubing the woman’s genitals with honey, and “the most primitive and ancient of the pig associations is with the female genitals, which even in Greek and Latin were called ‘pig.’”(7)

Sexuality and fertility belong to the domain of the Great Mother. Here Shakespeare images both her sensuality and her amoral, instinctual nature. Hamlet’s Ophelia, his “soul’s idol,” cannot embrace this deeper and darker anima, and so she dissolves back into the unconscious, first into madness and then drowned in the “glassy stream.” Later Hamlet is able to integrate both poles of the feminine, and so realize its transcendent nature. When Ophelia has been buried, Gertrude describes this state of inner peace that follows the “madness” of Hamlet’s descent into the unconscious:

Anon, as patient as the female dove
When that her golden couplets are disclos’d,
His silence will sit drooping.(8)

Here the “female dove” corresponds to the feminine spirit of God, the highest form of the feminine.9 This is the transformation of the feminine archetype, whose dual aspects are recognized as the “golden couplets.” In the inner alchemical process the conflict of opposites has become pure gold.

A SEDUCTIVE AND CUNNING LADY

The negative aspect of the anima takes on many forms and she does not always appear projected onto an external figure. The anima is the mediator between the conscious mind and the unconscious and thus through her a man has access to the creative energies of the unconscious. She is his muse but in her negative form she does not allow a man to taste the fruits of his creativity. She would keep his potential trapped in the unconscious or, as in the case of some great artists like van Gogh or Wagner, she so overwhelms him with the creative power of the unconscious that his own individual consciousness is lost in insanity.

Jung experienced this aspect of the feminine as an invisible presence full of deep cunning. When he was working with the fantasies of the unconscious, an inner voice told him it was “art,” and he realized that if he believed her

she might then easily have seduced me into believing that I was a misunderstood artist, and that my so-called artistic nature gave me the right to neglect reality.(10)

The dark side of the anima always tries to lure us away from reality into the fascinating but murky waters of the unconscious. Our defense against her is the power of consciousness, which keeps us grounded in the ordinary, everyday world while at the same time facilitating a bridge into the inner world. Jung stresses the dangers of the anima and the importance of consciously working with the contents of the unconscious:

The insinuations of the anima, the mouthpiece of the unconscious, can utterly destroy a man. In the final analysis the decisive factor is consciousness, which can understand the manifestations of the unconscious and take up a position towards them.(11)

One friend, whose work, like Jung’s, involved both factual research and working creatively with the unconscious, experienced this dark lady as a fascinating sequence of ideas that suddenly came to him and appeared to distract him from the main direction of his writing. For a while he deliberated as to whether to follow these ideas or to stick to his previous direction. He was aware of their fascination and of the inherent danger of being lured away from the central theme of his work; yet, at the same time, he consciously chose to follow up these new ideas. The importance of making this decision consciously can not be overestimated, for it meant that he had not been seduced by the unconscious. It had a profound psychological effect as was shown in a dream he had soon after. This dream has the quality of a myth or fairy tale:

I am involved with others in a war against an evil man and his woman. Our base and stronghold is a strange building like the upper half of a huge, lichen-covered crab shell. It’s perfectly round and symmetrical and has about ten or twelve entrances arranged regularly all around it. It seems impenetrable. I am the leader in the war, but I’m also totally dissociated from the leader—whom I can watch and observe as a distinct person.

The evil man’s woman hatches a ploy. She takes on a human form—the form of a physically beautiful, sensuous, lightly clothed woman—and she enters the stronghold in human disguise. I, the leader, see through her disguise. I know exactly who she is but I consciously decide to play along with her disguise—hiding what I know just as she is hiding who she is—and I deliberately seduce and make love to her.

The next morning the other people in the stronghold come up to us as we lie in my bed. We are not in a separate bedroom but next to one of the arches in the single vast room that makes up the stronghold. She gets out of the bed and as she does so, young and attractive as she was, in front of everybody’s eyes she starts changing rapidly—second by second—into an old, senile, dying woman. I, the leader and hero, remain lying on the bed, dying of a disease which I caught through making love to her. This is what she meant to do, and her seduction ploy has succeeded. But, as I am dying on the bed, the celestial voice of a woman speaks out clearly and loudly as if from a loudspeaker which reverberates throughout the building: “If you write a book which you owe (no matter why) to someone else, you cannot yourself write books.”

I have heard that voice before and I know who she is. Only once in my life has she spoken to me, when I was lying on my bed fifteen years ago, and what she said then changed my life.

This dream begins with a war, symbolic of an inner conflict, between the dreamer’s ego and his shadow, “an evil man,” and the dark side of his anima. As frequently happens, the shadow and the negative anima are in league: she is the evil man’s woman. Furthermore, the dreamer’s stronghold seems impenetrable. It cannot be defeated by a direct attack from the shadow. Direct confrontation can often be defeated by reason, but the anima’s power of “insinuation” and “suggestion” can, as Jung warns, be far more dangerous. Her “ploys” can undermine a man’s consciousness, devalue what he is doing, misdirect his attention—often without his even being aware of what is happening. (In contrast the negative animus will often attack directly with well-reasoned arguments: “Nobody will want to read the book you are writing,” or “Can’t you see you are a total failure? You are unable to relate properly to a man.”) (12)

However, at the beginning of this dream, the dreamer’s ego, which is the “leader in the war,” is also “totally dissociated from the leader—whom I can watch and observe as a distinct person.” The importance of such an attitude of detachment, or “observing,” is that it “counterbalances the devouring powers of the unconscious.” It is this attitude which enables the dreamer to experience the dark side of the anima without becoming lost in her seductive embrace.

The anima is the mistress of disguise, and in this dream, as in many fairy tales, the evil witch-like woman takes on the guise of a beautiful, sensuous woman to beguile the hero. However, the conscious detachment of the dreamer enables him to see through her disguise, though he allows himself to play along with it. In the real-life dynamic he was aware of the dangerous fascination of the ideas that had come from the unconscious, but decided to work with them. Playing a perilous role, he “deliberately seduced and made love to” the evil man’s woman.

To make love is symbolic of integration; through accepting the deceitful nature of the dark aspect of the anima, the dreamer was able to consciously experience and thus integrate her negative energy. When these lovers awake the next morning, the other people in the stronghold come up to them, which also suggests an integration (as aspects of the psyche come together). Furthermore the lovers are not in a separate bedroom, but “next to one of the arches in the single vast room that makes up the stronghold.” The dreamer’s psyche is thus imaged as a single inner space without the experience of separation. The arch also carries an auspicious symbolism, for to pass under an arch in initiation ceremonies symbolizes “being reborn, leaving behind the old nature.” (13)

The integration of the dark aspect of the anima is a profound initiation, but first the dreamer must experience the stage of putrefaction, decay and death, as the old attitudes of consciousness break down. The beautiful, seductive woman becomes an old and senile woman. This is an image found in many fairy tales, as the negative anima loses her powers to bewitch and is shown in her true form as an old witch. But this woman is not only senile, but dying, and so is the dreamer, dying of a “disease ... caught through making love to her.” This is what the woman had intended; she had meant to destroy him, to lure him into the unconscious where his consciousness would be lost forever. But, because of his conscious acceptance, this death will not leave him lost in the unconscious; rather it will lead to a transformation of consciousness. In particular, his old attitude towards the feminine and his relationship with her creative potential will die so that a new relationship can be born. The negative anima has been transformed into Sophia, the divine aspect of the feminine, the figure of wisdom. Hers is the voice he now hears speaking out. Purified of her distorting, negative aspect, the highest form of the feminine can now be heard clearly through his whole psyche.

The dreamer has heard Sophia’s voice once, fifteen years before, and it changed his life. He has never forgotten it, and now, through integrating the dark side of the anima, he will be able to have a direct relationship with Sophia. She will guide him in his work, but first she tells him what must be a basic principle for his work: “If you write a book which you owe (no matter why) to someone else, you cannot yourself write books.” This may appear to be just a simple precept, “to thine owne self be true,” but it has a profound psychological significance. In working with the creative potential of the anima we are channeling energy from within. If we are not true to our deepest self, then this energy can become distorted. If this energy from the unconscious is distorted, it can corrupt and become very destructive.

Our only motive in working with the energy of the unconscious should be to serve our deepest creative purpose; this purpose is always in harmony with our true inner self. If the individual is not free to follow his own inner guidance, if this creative energy is used to serve any other purpose (if the book is owed, for whatever reason, to someone else), this energy will become contaminated and will contaminate. This applies to any allegiance to an external cause or ideal, because however justified a cause may be, it imprisons the individual within a certain conscious framework. The most dangerous case is when this energy is used for the power purposes of the ego, for the sake of personal gain or prestige. This primordial energy is numinous, dynamic, but essentially amoral. It has no quality of discrimination, and will feed the power-hungry shadow, which in time will become strong enough to dominate the ego.

Before the full potential of the unconscious can be used creatively, the shadow must be confronted and the dark side of the anima unmasked. We need a pure vessel to contain these powerful forces. It is for this reason that the deeper we go into the unconscious and the more we channel its energy, the higher is the ethical standard which is required. It is not that we need to be a morally “better person,” but that our consciousness needs to be pure enough not to be corrupted or distorted by the primal energies from within.

BEHIND THE DANCE OF ILLUSION

The anima is a temptress, deceiving a man not only with the bewitching nature of the unconscious, but also with the myriad attractions of the outer world. She is the mistress of illusion; hers is the dance of maya. Jung describes maya as an aspect of the anima:

She is the great illusionist, the seductress who draws him [man] into life with her Maya—and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair counterbalance one another. (14)

As Salome she is the temptress, keeping man entranced in the beauty of this world, hiding her real purpose behind a seductive veil. The ascetics who turn their eyes from women and punish their flesh try to escape her power. But only too often this temptress is merely repressed, and she exerts her fascination through the shadow. She becomes a demon who haunts the dreams of the pious.

But once a man has confronted her dark, seductive nature and is no longer in her grip, then the feminine reveals her higher nature as Sophia. Sophia carries the deep wisdom of the soul, and allows us to see through the veils of the illusion and glimpse the real beauty that lies behind. She enables us to see the secret face of creation. Sufi poetry speaks of the beauty of the human form because it is a reflection of the formless. The form of woman holds the highest essence because she is the most beautiful creation of the Great Artist. According to Ibn ‘Arabî, “Woman is the highest form of earthly beauty, but earthly beauty is nothing unless it is a manifestation and reflection of the Divine Qualities.”(15) Thus, in Sufi poetry, each of her features has symbolic significance representing qualities of the Eternal Beloved. The eye symbolizes the quality of the mystery of God’s vision; the mole or beauty spot signifies the Divine Essence itself; the twist or curve of her curl is a metaphor for Divine mysteries:(16)

By the fragrant breeze from your tresses’ ringlet
I am forever drunk;
While the devastating guile of your bewitching eyes
devastates me at every breath. (17)

The eternal beauty seen projected in the wonder of romantic love is a glimpse of our own eternal nature. Sophia draws aside the veils of the dancer, and allows us to wonder at the divine beauty of the feminine side of God. He for whom we long comes to us in so many guises, and with the wisdom of the feminine we are able to recognize Him in His creation, hear the music that is beneath life’s surface, and see the true beauty in everyday life. I was once on an airline flight with my teacher, and looking down the aisle saw a heavily made-up stewardess walk towards me. I have always been prejudiced against women wearing a lot of make-up, particularly when it is an attempt to disguise their natural age. But just as this thought came into my mind, my teacher turned to me, and with the simple wisdom of Sophia awoke me, saying, “Human beings are so beautiful, aren’t they? Aren’t all human beings so beautiful?”

THE SECRET PLACES OF THE SOUL

Within the psyche the feminine carries the mystery hidden in the dance of creation. As much as she is a temptress, she is also a guide who, like Dante’s Beatrice, can lead a man to the secret places of the soul. Once we have accepted her dark face, she can no longer devour us or lead us astray. She shows us the beauty of our inner self, which is none other than her own face unveiled. This is her role in the following dream:

I am in a castle and am being taken by an extremely beautiful woman to a part of the castle which is not open to the public. It is a secret place which nobody else is allowed to see. I go in. It is a most wonderfully beautiful room with chandeliers. It contains a huge pool, rectangular like a ballroom. In the middle of the pool there are beautiful water lilies in a mandala-shaped flower arrangement.

The pool is full of the most beautiful fish I have ever seen. They are absolutely extraordinary. They have just been fed and I am able to feed them a little bit. They are a beautiful coral color and are big and fat like those very old goldfish one finds in Japan. There is also a frog there.

Then I notice that the pool is also full of giraffes. There is one huge giraffe and lots of baby giraffes. They are able to breathe underwater and are perfectly all right there. That is where they lived.

I accompany the woman and she takes me round the castle.

In the castle of the Self this dreamer’s beautiful anima takes him to a secret place which is not open to the public and which “nobody else is allowed to see.” Living in the world of the ego and the bustle of our daily lives, we rarely enter the secret places of our own innermost being. Sometimes a dream will open a window through which we can glimpse the wonder that we really are. In the public world our beauty is usually veiled, not only to others but to our self. Only when we withdraw—into the silence of meditation or into the deep peace of sleep—is this veil lifted and we see the mystery and smell the fragrance of our bride, who has long been waiting for our embrace:

A garden inclosed is my sister my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.
Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates with pleasant fruits; camphire with spikenard....
Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden and eat his pleasant fruits. (18)

The feminine takes us into her garden, a place rich with the fruits and the flowers of the soul. The longing to find this “secret garden” is deeper than sexual attraction; the garden is filled with the wisdom that belongs to the heart. This is the real meeting place of lovers; in the fleeting moments of sexual bliss we taste its fruit. Sexual ecstasy is a momentary experience of the bliss that lies within the heart, given to us for the sake of procreation. According to Irina Tweedie it is “really the soul and not the body that is the experiencer.”(19) If a couple make love with both their souls and their bodies, and in the moment of bliss give everything as an offering to the One True Lover, they can then enter this fragrant garden that is the ecstatic home of the mystic. Mystical states can be very erotic (though the energy is not felt in the sex organs but in the throat chakra); in these moments of bliss, the mystic is always the receptive one, the lover impregnated by the spirit of the Beloved. Whether man or woman, we become feminine in this experience; and in its ecstasy we are both enslaved and freed, ravished and purified:

Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish mee.(20)

The mysteries of the soul are feminine. In the beautiful room hidden in the castle of the dreamer all the images are feminine. There is a huge pool in the midst of which there are beautiful water lilies. The lily is a flower sacred to the Virgin Goddess, but it also exhibits the quality of the lotus, for it rises from the mud to flower only when it reaches the surface of the water. Thus the lily images the process of inner transformation, which begins in the muddy depths of the unconscious and only flowers when it finally emerges into consciousness. This is why the ego is unaware of the really important inner changes, and the individual so often feels that nothing is happening. The alchemical processes that change our whole being grow silently in the depths, transforming the structure of our psyche from within. Transformations that are not rooted in this way are rarely lasting; they are merely like waves on the surface. Real inner work requires patience and perseverance; only those who are truly committed will continue to walk along the hard and stony path without experiencing obvious results.

But the flowers have opened and the water lilies form a mandala. The beauty of the Self opens before the eyes of the dreamer, and that beauty is always awe-inspiring, for it brings into consciousness our own divine nature. It reminds us of our real home.

What a wonderful lotus it is, that blooms at the heart of the spinning wheel of the universe! Only a few pure souls know of its true delight.

Music is all around it, and there the heart partakes of the joy of the Infinite Sea. (21)

The pool is also full of fish, symbolizing the contents of the unconscious which the alchemical process brings together and transforms. But these fish are “the most beautiful fish I had ever seen,” for here again the dreamer sees the true beauty of his inner self, hidden in the unconscious. They are “a beautiful coral color.” Coral is the tree of the Mother Goddess, and because the inner transformation takes place in the depths, it is under the dominion of the Great Goddess. The Great Mother may resist the evolution of individual consciousness, but the heart is the king and the Self is the master and the “source of every power.” Even the Great Goddess follows the will of the Self. Therefore if the seeker—through meditation and aspiration—focuses on this essence that lives within the heart, the energies of the Goddess will help and not hinder the evolution of the soul. Coral is also suggestive of pink which is the color of love. This hints at an inner secret of the path of love: that it infuses the whole psyche of the seeker with the energy of love. The psyche and all of its contents become permeated from within with the transforming energy of love.

In addition to the fish, there is a frog in the pool. The frog is a lunar symbol of renewal and transformation, emphasizing the feminine potential for inner change. But then the dreamer notices that the pool is also “full of giraffes.” With its long eyelashes and gentle ways the giraffe is the most graceful and feminine of creatures. These giraffes are happy underwater, for that’s where they live. In the unconscious are the beauty and grace of the feminine. These qualities have a deep wisdom, a wisdom of silence rather than speech. The graceful walk of a woman is movement in harmony with nature; for the Sufi the curve of her eyebrow symbolizes the subtlety of Divine beauty. We have become so conditioned to value only knowledge communicated through words that we have forgotten what is contained in the senses: how touch can evoke hidden qualities of feeling, how a caress can convey understanding. The giraffes image the instinctual world of the feminine which has qualities we have long overlooked, but now need in order to bring warmth into the coldness of our rational existence.

THE MESSENGER OF MEANING

The anima can open a man to the music of his soul and thus allow its song to manifest in his life. She is the personification of his creativity, and meeting with her brings its fire flowing from the source of his being. Connecting us with our inner powers, she brings meaning into our everyday world, which each of us manifests in our own unique way. With her hands every act can be an offering of the soul, each gesture creative. Baking bread or writing a song, painting a picture or planting a flower, each can speak of the inner mystery and allow its beauty and meaning to be heard.

Meaning does not come from the external world, but from within, from the archetypal world. The primal, archetypal beings who inhabit it are imprinted with meaning. The archetypes do not have an identifiable meaning; they do not mean something specific in the sense that bon in French means “good” in English. They rather have qualities of meaning; they make things meaningful. Huston Smith, the contemporary American philosopher, designates this type of meaning as “existential”; it is “the kind we have in mind when we say that something is meaningful.”(22) However, because our language has developed to describe the external world of the senses, it has very few words to describe this type of meaning. We can say that something is “very meaningful” or “quite meaningful,” but the different ways in which things feel meaningful cannot be expressed. This is true of our language for feeling as well. In Sanskrit there are ninety-six words to describe love: love for a child is different from love for a brother; a different word expresses a husband’s love for his wife from the one that expresses a wife’s love for her husband; and the love for a guru is also a different word. In our language there is only one word; the poverty of our feelings is reflected in the poverty of our language. We have not named the different qualities of feeling because we have not valued them. Our rejection of the feminine has caused the qualities of meaning she brings with her to be left out of our lives.

The anima is the messenger of meaning. Embracing the physical and symbolic worlds, she lets us taste the substance of our soul in our day-to-day life. But work with the anima should never be self-indulgent; it should be directed towards a greater understanding of the inner world. This need for a greater understanding was encapsulated in a dream in which the dreamer was about to make love with his anima figure when the teacher appeared at the other end of the room, and, pointing to a symbol on the wall, said to the dreamer, “What does this mean?” The dreamer had to understand the symbolic meaning of his relationship with his anima. This has to be a conscious union, for only then is the meaning of the symbolic inner world infused into the outer world, a place which today has too often become a wasteland.

The highest form of the anima is Sophia, who, personifying the wisdom of the soul, brings the deepest meaning of the Self into our everyday life. In Shakespeare’s King Lear she is Cordelia, Lear’s daughter who refuses to flatter his ego and is banished because of her refusal and her silence. The king then has to confront the dark, power-hungry aspect of the anima in his other daughters, Goneril and Regan. They strip him of his worldly status and leave him destitute on the heath in the storm of his own unconscious. Only then can he find his own inner wisdom, which is so different from that valued by the world. This is the wisdom of the fool, a wisdom well-known to the Sufi. It is the natural wisdom of the Self. When Lear is finally reunited with Cordelia, he no longer cares about the world of the ego, “Who loses and who wins,” but looks behind its veil of appearances: he sees his task now as to

...take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies. (23)

Sufis are known as “God’s spies” for they see into the hearts of people where the real mystery and meaning are hidden. Ibn ‘Arabi described Sophia as “an image raising its head from the secrecy of the heart.” She connects us with our own divine nature and so allows us to see the inner purpose hidden within everything. Within all of creation is a hidden message reminding us of our real home, for everything—every leaf and stone—sings the song of its creator. Through her ears we can hear this sublime song, through her eyes we can see His face reflected in every sky and every street. Her greatest wisdom is the way that she beckons us into the beyond. In her highest emanation she is the Divine Sophia, the feminine aspect of the Higher Self. Our union with her is a merging into our own mystery:

Dearly beloved!
I have called you so often and you have
not heard me.
I have shown myself to you so often and
you have not seen me.
I have made myself fragrance so often, and
you have not smelled me,
Savorous food, and you have not tasted me.
Why can you not reach me through the
object you touch
Or breathe me through sweet perfumes?
Why do you not see me? Why do you not
hear me?
Why? Why? Why?

For you my delights surpass all other
delights,
And the pleasure I procure you surpasses
all other pleasures.
For you I am preferable to all other
good things,
I am Beauty, I am Grace.

Love me, love me alone.
Love yourself in me, in me alone.
Attach yourself to me,
No one is more inward than I.
Others love you for their own sakes,
I love you for yourself.
And you, you flee from me.

Dearly beloved!
You cannot treat me fairly,
For if you approach me,
It is because I have approached you.

I am nearer to you than yourself,
Than your soul, than your breath.
Who among creatures
Would treat you as I do?
I am jealous of you over you,
I want you to belong to no other,
Not even to yourself.
Be mine, be for me as you are in me,
Though you are not even aware of it.

Dearly beloved!
Let us go toward Union.
And if we find the road
That leads to separation,
We will destroy separation.
Let us go hand in hand.
Let us enter the presence of Truth.
Let it be our judge
And imprint its seal upon our union
For ever. (24)

© 2003 The Golden Sufi Center

FOOTNOTES

Chapter 6: The Inner Feminine and Her Dual Nature
1. Song of Songs, 6:10.
2. Hâfiz, in Nurbakhsh, Sufi Symbolism, vol. 1, p. 6.
3. Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci,” x-xi.
4. Recorded by Suzanne Percheron, in C. G. Jung, Emma Jung, and Toni Wolff: A Collection of Remembrances, p. 53.
5. Jung, Collected Works, vol. 14, para. 216.
6. Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.iv. 91-94.
7. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, p. 85.
8. Hamlet, V.i. 281-283.
9. In The Acts of Thomas there is a Eucharistic prayer which uses similar imagery to worship the Holy Ghost in its feminine form:

Come holy dove,
Which hast brought forth the twin nestlings;
Come secret mother...

quoted by Jung, Collected Works, vol. 5, para. 561.
10. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 212.
11. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 212.
12. Marie-Louise von Franz, The Way of the Dream, p. 268.
13. J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols, p.14.
14. Jung, Collected Works, vol. 9ii, para. 24.
15. Quoted by Laleh Bakhtiar in Sufi Expressions of the Mystic Quest, p. 21.
16. See Nurbakhsh, Sufi Symbolism, vol. 1.
17. Hâfiz, in Sufi Symbolism, vol. 1, p. 23.
18. Song of Songs, 4:12-16.
19. Tweedie, quoted by Roger Housden in The Fire in the Heart, p. 164.
20. John Donne, “Batter my Heart, three person’d God.”
21. Kabir, Songs of Kabir, trans. R. Tagore, XVII.
22. Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind, pp. 111-112.
23. King Lear, ed. K. Muir, V.iii. 16-17.
24. Ibn ‘Arabî, quoted by Corbin in Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi, pp. 174-175.