She-King: The Mythopoetic Reunion of Masculine and Feminine

Lecture to The Jung Society of Melbourne (20/5/22)

Thank you for having me. It’s an honour to be back again.

As I mentioned last time I spoke, the mythopoetic movement was created by a group made up of psychologists, poets, musicians, storytellers and authors from the early 1980s. The word ‘mythopoetic’ does not necessarily mean myth and poetry. From my perspective, it means to re-mythologise — both individually and collectively — in the sense that we need to ‘re-story’ ourselves in order to re-store the world.

The mythopoetic was brought to life largely by poet and activist Robert Bly, and was heavily influenced by Jungians such as Robert A. Johnson, James Hillman and Marion Woodman.

I also mentioned that Bly began his work with an exploration of the feminine, which is where we will largely orientate ourselves this evening. Bly was heavily influenced by the work of women such as Woodman, as well as — importantly — Marie Louise Von-Franz.

I focused on the most well-known mythopoetic text, Bly’s ‘Iron John’, where he suggests that masculine energy has been diluted through institutions, industrialisation, and the resulting separation of fathers from their family life.

In 1991, the year Iron John was published, Bly ran a series of workshops with Woodman based on an ancient Russian folktale, The Maiden King, exploring the possibility of a re-imagined relationship between the masculine and feminine.

Their common desire at the time was that people would rediscover their vision of a truly powerful feminine, an energy they felt contemporary society had not been able to either receive or sustain.They would go on to co-author a book in 1999 called ‘The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine’. Their work around this ancient tale is the basis of my offering this evening.

The Maiden Tsar, as it was originally titled, is one of the many stories collected by Alecksandr Afanas’ev in the 1850s, earning him the reputation as the Russian counterpart to the Brothers Grimm. It was later translated into English by Norbert Guterman.

Bly and Woodman felt that their voices needed to be heard together if the roads of gender were to be brought back in touch with one another. Their intention was, as they put it, “to throw the audience into the ocean of the story, and we would then all have to swim for our lives.”

They worked together with the audience to build, according to Bly, “a road over the sea”, in the sense of the great poet Antonio Machado, much of whose work Bly translated and brought to English speakers.

Here’s the poem where he found that sentiment:

All things die and all things live together;
but our task is to die,
To die making roads,
roads over the sea.

To understand and embody the realignment of the masculine and the feminine that this story demanded, Bly and Woodman said it would, “require leaps of imagination beyond the limits of rationality and common sense”.

At its essence, The Maiden King is a tale about the return of powerful feminine energy into the world. It is woven of an absent father, a possessive stepmother, a false tutor and a boy overwhelmed by a beautiful maiden. When the young man’s response has her retreating in rage, he must go on a quest of self-discovery.

It is far from a hero’s tale, but rather one of failure and repair. Our hero does not rescue, but is himself rescued, and by the feminine. It is about first listening, then doing.

Perhaps we could say that it represents a map of the grief that many men and women feel today in relation to each other, providing a guide for reunion where they can finally discard their false anima/animus projections of each other.

Bly called The Maiden King, “perhaps the most magnificent story of all time.”

A telling of the story by Robert Bly can be found here.

We see big topics in this story such as the immature masculine tendency toward impotence when faced with the full power of the feminine, we see traits in the feminine such as rage and withdrawal, and the necessity of being at ease with oppositional thinking, which even this lecture title, ‘The She-King’, invokes.

There are a great many threads upon which we could pull, but I would like to spend my remaining time briefly examining three major themes in the story before, hopefully, leaving space for some group discussion.

The Pin and the Betrayal

The primary element that frames this story is that Ivan is betrayed by his tutor and stymied by his stepmother. When confronted by the intensity of the divine feminine — perhaps his own anima — he then falls asleep, thanks to a pin in the neck orchestrated by the stepmother who has the tutor under her thumb.

Let’s explore the ripple effect of this, and the idea that our soul is always trying to rise into our consciousness to meet us.

Are we often asleep to this and therefore easily lose touch with our deepest desires? Perhaps we too have been betrayed by our own ‘tutors’ or held in the thrall of possessive ‘stepmothers’ so that our imagination, creativity and inner aliveness suffocates?

When the ecstatic woman does arrive, do we run the risk of being completely overwhelmed by the enormity of the encounter?

It seems to me that many people circumnavigate the experience altogether by succumbing to addiction, or the need for approval, or a lack of self-esteem. We fall asleep on our own.

Woodman’s own decades of work in addiction is a powerful illustration of this. Alcohol, drugs, gambling, pornography, even sleeping pills — and of course, social media — all play a role.

This idea of culture sticking in the pin, as it were, and cutting off the connection between head and heart, reminds me of a Rumi poem.

There are two kinds of intelligence: one acquired,
as a child in school memorises facts and concepts
from books and from what the teacher says,
collecting information from the traditional sciences
as well as from the new sciences.

With such intelligence you rise in the world.
You get ranked ahead or behind others
in regard to your competence in retaining information.

You stroll with this intelligence
in and out of fields of knowledge, getting always more
marks on your preserving tablets.

There is another kind of tablet, one already completed and preserved inside you.
A spring overflowing its springbox. A freshness in the centre of the chest.
This other intelligence does not turn yellow or stagnate. It’s fluid,
and it doesn’t move from outside to inside
through conduits of plumbing-learning.

This second knowing is a fountainhead
from within you, moving out.

There is a wonderful story Marion Woodman tells about her own schooling.

To paraphrase, she was instructed by her kindergarten teacher to paint a landscape, which she did, but imagined the sky green and the grass blue. Young Marion was thoroughly chastised and told to do it again properly. “I put my head down on the table and went to sleep. I didn’t wake up again until grade school,” she recalls.

This is a prime example of a tutor placing a pin in the neck.

There is also the idea that the pin provides an illusion of safety (a safety pin, no less) so we can understand that maybe it is perceived by the perpetrator as an act of care — to keep us safe.

And aren’t we all about that in the collective consciousness right now? #staysafe and the ‘abundance of caution’.

I subscribe to a very different view; as an old Irish poet once said, ‘a false sense of security is the only one there is’.

But let’s take a closer look at Ivan and what his predicament tells us about young men in the world.

We could say that the exuberant masculine energy building in his body has no place to go and without the connection to the Ecstatic Women, it comes out in either anaesthesia or anger.

Many young men are so afraid of this energy, they put it to sleep. Others remain in constant competition with other men. Both keep the divine feminine from entering. Or they are asked to go straight to work after schooling, so there is simply no time to meet her.

What is the result of all this? I would suggest it is a loss of imagination, creativity, and the heart’s desire. I meet many men who simply don’t know what they want. They cannot articulate their desires. There is an urgent need to find their words, but the throat has become constricted by the pin.

I’m reminded of the ancient Hindu story of Shiva swallowing the poison of the world only to have it stick in his throat. Shiva turns blue — and don’t so many men get the blues this way?

If not depression, the pin makes us ‘too nice’, we simply aim to please — it removes our innate wildness, our ability to ask the bold and beautiful questions of the world.

It takes away our identity, and thus our inherent life-spark which is needed for us to serve life in the very specific way we are intended to do so.

Here’s something more from Rumi:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.

Of course, this is not just a situation for men either, as illustrated by the story I mentioned of a young Marion Woodman. I am also thinking of The Briar Rose when our sleeping-beauty-to-be pricks her finger on the spindle.

For all of us, in order to fulfil our journey, we must disavow the destructive inner demands for power over us. The head of the tutor must be removed. The yearning always persists to return to soul, even if at first it overwhelms.

Soul Initiation and the Dark Feminine

Here we have a young man blind to the call of the divine feminine — perhaps his soul, as we have suggested — and needing to rediscover it via an encounter with the fierce old women of the dark feminine — the Baba Yagas — who open up a pathway of initiation and ultimately, reconnection, with the help of another feminine aspect, the wise crone.

Once awake, encountering and making peace with the feminine energy is our primary task, according to Jungians James Hillman and others — their belief predicated on the idea that it was our first ‘imprint’ or ‘memory’ in life.

But we learn here that the powerful, divine feminine does not always wait for the masculine to wake up. It has its own life. Once dishonoured, she can rage at not being seen and might retreat way back to distant and inaccessible parts. When we do meet her again, we find that things are very different indeed.

What does it mean when we hear that her love for us has been hidden away and she will ‘tear us apart’ if she ever sees us again? This can be a shock that sends men all the way down into deep grief.

We talked last time about our culture’s lack of rites of passage. Bly argues that initiation must include this kind of ‘going down’ — a descent into the ashes of one’s own life.

The story tells us we need to be discharged from life for a time — whether it results from a divorce, job loss, illness, death of a loved one — and accept that we must meet something quite horrendous that will guide us through to the other side.

And so, back to the story. The first step on Ivan’s journey — which may, in fact, be ten or twenty years wandering aimlessly through life — is a visit with Baba Yaga. She is death serving life, and a definitive cure for anyone who shuns the divine feminine. In her special kind of way, she encourages him to go beyond his adversarial, black and white thinking and dig into the deeper, messier mysteries of life.

“Did you come here of your own free will or did someone send you?” What a question! Think for a moment about the conundrum of oppositional thinking presented here.

What brought you here, right now in this moment, out of infinite possibility, to listen to me speak? If you answer absolutely either way, Baba Yaga will devour you. We must learn to dance in the middle where the answers don’t even add up.

An encounter with Baba Yaga requires a substantial move, precipitated by the necessary cutting off of the tutor’s head — the habitual, overthinking part of ourselves — which then opens us up to an investigation of our true desires.

The journey toward wholeness always involves a stern test. I like to say that the mythological invites a ‘test followed by a lesson’, when we are more used to lessons, followed by a test. To survive a test with Baba Yaga is to come to terms with the paradoxical nature of life.

Oppositional thinking is of no help in the Underworld. However, if we can sit within the tension of opposites long enough, a third way — which almost always involves imagination — will arise.

But nothing at all happens without Baba Yaga. I believe that she and her like (Kali, Rangda, Hecate, Hel) in their fullest capacities, have been kept out our narrative for centuries.

For me, the requirement to understand the dark feminine is at the core of mythopoetic re-storying and our collective restoration.

But it’s not an easy task. Baba Yaga hides from our consciousness. The endless cycle of the seasons are ground up and recycled by her pestle and mortar, and her broom covers her tracks so we rarely even see her.

The truth of it is that she is hidden in plain sight, collectively informed by the very time in which we live — ‘Kali Yuga’ — the final stage of the Vedic Cycle. Chaos and uncertainty — bushfires, floods, biospheric catastrophe, misinformation, cancel culture, disease. We are all being called to examine our own ‘Baba Yaga’ energy and take responsibility for it.

Perhaps the embedded persecution of women we see in society is a fundamental fear of this dark feminine?

Bly says that, “men’s fear of women seems to be a fundamental emotion on this planet. It is possible that when a culture refuses to visualise the dangerous mother, men then become vaguely afraid of all women, and finally of the entire feminine side of their own personalities.”

The Inner Marriage

Back to the story, where Ivan eventually cries out for what he wants, for what his heart desires, via the blowing of the horns.

Of course, it all comes back to the breath. His exhale and the release of stuck energy calls down the great Russian firebird of imagination that carries him to the wise crone, and eventually — via a series of trials including the curious oak, coffer, hare, duck and egg, not to mention the re-emergence of the symbolic pin as a kind of shamanic listening device — back to his betrothed.

According to Bly, this final stage of our development is a marriage with our interior King or Queen. The reunion of the masculine and feminine within. Whole humanhood.

This inner marriage is the place of intersection where matter and divine intensity finally embrace. We are awake and the radiance of our individual spirit shines through. We now proceed in our own lives with awe and wonder, taking great joy in attempting to solve the mystery of our own birth.

As Camus said, “our work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover those two or three great and simple images in whose presence our heart first opened.”

Personally, I am reminded that plenty happens in that slow and arduous trek home. We must learn to suffer well. This seems to be a pre-nuptial condition of the inner marriage.

Working on it is a lifetime process, it is a constant coming together of spirit and soul, of masculine and feminine. This gives us the power to love unconditionally, within and without, and is the key to renewal and transformation.

It continually shifts our outer relationships, as we now see each other’s individual nature and the soul in the other trying so hard to be seen and heard — and we are ready for the intensity that brings.

Conclusion

I believe this is a story for our time, as we try to reverse the centuries of regression of our psychic understanding of the feminine.

It appears to me that we do understand her in an ecological sense, at least to some degree, but not so much in a mythological one.

Maybe ancient stories like these can help us to re-story and re-store.

Thank you for having me this evening. I hope that The Maiden King will soak in your bones a little while and create an opportunity for a marriage with soul — or at least a renewal of vows.

May you articulate your deepest desires — without a constriction of the throat — and from a place of true sovereignty.

This lecture is kindly reproduced with permission of the Jung Society of Melbourne.