The anima and animus should function as a bridge, or a door, leading to the images of the collective unconscious, as the persona should be a sort of bridge into the world.
C. G. JUNG
Dionysus is the divine adrogyne, the god who perfectly assimilates male and female. As we learn to recognize the Dionysian archetype in ourselves, we will become more aware and accepting of our own male and female aspects.
The meaning of this psychological androgyny was forcefully brought home to me one day when a friend and I climbed a high mountain in India to see the temple of Gomata (who, in a later incarnation, founded the Jain religion). This great, seventy-foot-high statue, carved of one block of stone, stands at the top of the mountain at the end of an eight-hundred-step ascent. And at his foot—just at the height of the toenail, which is human height—there’s a most lovely life-sized statue of a great, buxom-breasted goddess.
I exclaimed to my friend, “What a beautiful goddess!” And he replied with a smile, “I have to inform you that it is a god, not a goddess.” Surprised, I said, “Please explain.” “Well,” he said, “before the fall of man, a baby was nursed by both his father and his mother. This is how a hero was produced.”
That’s a psychological truth, as true now as it ever was in any time in history. If you want to nurture the heroic side of yourself, you must nurse it with both your masculine and feminine natures. This will produce the Dionysian quality for you.
Anima and Animus
Where do we go to find the repressed Dionysus in ourselves? He lives a hole-and-corner existence, searching out those places where we have only partial or no control. Certainly the realm of anima and animus is one of those. In Jungian terms androgyny is the integration of masculine and feminine “soul images.” Anima, the feminine, means “soul” animus, the masculine, means “spirit.” A man’s anima appears in his dreams as a woman; a woman dreams of her animus as a man. Jungian psychology would say that when we dream of the opposite sex, even if that dream image represents a real person, we are actually dreaming of our soul image.
We naturally tend to emphasize the qualities of whatever gender we happen to be. To become psychologically and spiritually unified, however, each of us must make a synthesis of our masculine and feminine qualities. In Jungian terms Dionysus represents perfect psychological harmony. Dionysus is neither a man who dreams of a woman, nor a woman who dreams of a man. He is both: self-nurturing and complete.
We hear a lot about androgyny these days. “The new androgyny” is hailed in the pages of fashion magazines: Girls wear sweatshirts and blue jeans; boys wear pink shirts and earrings. Because we have become more aware of the way our language can stereotype sex roles, mailmen have become mail carriers, firemen have become fire fighters, stewardesses have become flight attendants. Many women are now working at what were formerly considered to be “men’s jobs,” and more men are staying at home to mind the babies.
Some of us like these moves away from the old roles and stereotypes, and some of us are uncomfortable with them. I think this is because we are dealing with outer change—clothes, names, roles—without having made an inner change to befriend both our male and female aspects.
Without question, men and women are different from one another. Quite naturally, the two genders express opposite aspects of the human spectrum. Physically, men and women are different. Emotionally and psychologically, there is a wide range. But, to compound the separation, men and women in our society have been raised so differently that we do in fact see different worlds. Most women are raised—subtly or overtly—to please, to serve, to cede their wills; men are raised to initiate, to create, to be boldly decisive, “to go where no man has gone before.” We suffer with our stereotypes: Men are “strong,” women are “weak” men are “rational,” women are “irrational” men “bring home the bacon,” women cook it. We place these burdens on ourselves and wonder why we can’t carry them. We know, consciously or unconsciously, that these labels and expectations are nonsense; but overcoming them is very, very difficult.
Our Judeo-Christian tradition has done a heroic job of preventing the divine androgyny within us from reuniting itself. In Orthodox Judaism, for example, men and women cannot worship together; they must sit in different sections of the temple. Men speak of women, and women of men, as though they were of different species. Women shake their heads and say, “Men. They’re all alike.” Men respond, “Women. You can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em.” Because we have lost touch with our anima or animus we have lost touch with each other and with the Dionysian principle, which would give us so much of joy and ecstasy if we but knew it.
Male/Female Relationships
In our personal lives we work out anima–animus struggles with our partners. Dionysus is said to be the only god who never quarreled with his wife. Psychologically, he was completely at peace with his male and female aspects.
When we cannot communicate with our inner man or woman, we cannot communicate with the physical men and women with whom we must interact. If you have the objectivity to observe your personal life, you will see that family fights are more in the nature of ritual than they are of any understanding. If you are a participant, of course, the emotion of the moment will blind you to the fact. But if you can stand off just a little way, you will see immediately that arguments and family fights—which are almost exclusively anima–animus tugs of war—accomplish nothing. They never settle anything. Perhaps, at their very best, they discharge some energy; but one has only to fight the battle again as soon as more energy has built up. Poor-quality Dionysus thrives here. To listen to a family quarrel you’d think there was no hope and that the family was doomed. But it usually patches up to fight another day.
Spiritual Mates
Dionysus married Ariadne, the Queen of Athens, who had not had a good marriage to Theseus—in fact, he abandoned her on an island from which Dionysus later saved her. Ariadne then married Dionysus as her second, spiritual husband.
Many married women of the time took Dionysus as a second husband. In the Catholic church nuns take Jesus as their spiritual husband. In our own day, in cultures other than our own, shamans often take a human wife as their second wife because they are married to the interior spirit goddess, the anima, as their first wife.
I once heard this very touching tale from a Native American shaman: His intermediary went to a young woman and said, “The shaman wants you for his wife, because he’s already married to his spiritual wife. And if you marry him, you’re going to have to understand that you’ll be his second wife and take a subservient position in that sense.”
Many people have a spiritual wife or husband whether they like it or not—and even whether they know it or not. And sometimes their flesh-and-blood wife or husband feels as if she or he takes second place to someone unknown. Quite often they do not understand this at all.
Perhaps the best-known spiritual wife in literature is Dante’s Beatrice, his guide through heaven and hell. He was much more married to Beatrice than he was to his real wife, about whom we know so little. Once the wife of a patient came into my office unannounced and took her husband’s hour. She said, “I’m serving notice on you that I’m not going to be Beatrice to my husband.” She did not want her husband to see her as an ideal woman, she wanted to be appreciated for herself. This situation can be terribly difficult, and underscores our need to know our own inner woman or man.
Denial of Pleasure
Anima and animus are powerful psychological forces that can wreak havoc in our lives if lived unconsciously. As an archetype Dionysus, like the soul, is eternal. The body dies, the soul lives on—or, as in many Eastern religions, returns to live another life on earth in its pursuit of wholeness. If we deny Dionysus, we deny our soul; and if we deny our soul, we will become dangerously off balance.
For us, our repression of Dionysus has meant our repression of ecstasy. Our overidentification with mind has made us disrespectful of sensation and intuition. Oriental religions, often thought of as bastions of spirituality, respect the body as a legitimate means of enlightenment. Hatha yoga, Chinese Taoism, Tantric yoga, and others have made a sacrament of the sensuous world as a path to the divine union. In the West, however, much of the Judeo-Christian tradition has done its best to keep earth and heaven from uniting.
When we do honor our physical self it is generally with guilt and anxiety. We feel that we must cover the ecstasy of physical pleasure with alcohol or embarrassment or guilt. As a Frenchman once said of the English, they take their pleasures so gloomily!
The Jewish consciousness in its traditional attitudes never adopted the repression of Dionysus to the extent that our Anglo-Saxon world has done. A Jewish proverb observes that whatever legitimate pleasure we deny ourselves on earth will also be denied us in heaven. When we deny ourselves the Dionysian experience, we also deny ourselves true knowledge of ourselves, our mates, the life process, joy. We deny ourselves heaven on earth.