Like a Virgin?

Like a Virgin?

Is there any archetype more misunderstood than the Virgin?

We are now at the beginning of Virgo season, which is associated with the Virgin, so it’s as good a time as any to ponder this question.

For starters, the word virgin in Greek (parthenos) and in Hebrew (almah) simply meant “unmarried” and was also used in reference to unmarried mothers. Virgin wasn’t associated with being chaste and innocent.

Now let’s consider the deeper meaning of Virgin in this quote from the late Jungian analyst Marion Woodman:

The virgin is the being-ness in us, the I-am…One-in-herself. That is what the word really means. I’m talking about the initiated virgin, not the 14 year-old-maiden who is not initiated yet, but the virgin who has worked on her feeling, knows what her values are, has the courage to live those values. Use the word as you would the word “virgin forest” where the forest is untrammeled, there’s nothing foreign in it, it is clear to be itself, but it is full of all kinds of seeds so that there is immense potential.

The Crown of Age by Marion Woodman

Here is Esther Harding’s description of the virgin goddess:

She is essentially one-in-herself…Her divine power does not depend on relation to a husband-god, and thus her actions are not dependent on the need to conciliate such a one or to accord with his qualities and attitudes. For she bears her divinity in her own right.

Woman’s Mysteries by Esther Harding

For a visceral sense of what this is like, even a very brief encounter with a young child will present you with “One-in-herself” in action.

My mother has often told me that when I was around age four I would go around saying, “I’m the boss!” She always found that amusing and her coworkers would often ask her “how’s the boss today?”

There certainly wasn’t much I could be boss of at that age, other than my stuffed animals, but that child was in touch with her inner authority in a way that my adult self marvels at and has often struggled to replicate.

One can also sometimes see “One-in-herself” in the elderly. There are many Jungian analysts, for example, who are in their 80s who are “full of all kinds of seeds” and continue to write, see clients, and travel. James Hollis is just one of many that come to mind. He maintains a full client load and writes books in the evenings, even though he has had significant health challenges in recent years.

For the rest of us in between childhood and old age it can be hard to bear our divinity in our own right. But perhaps in those fleeting moments when we truly know ourselves, we can reconnect with that inner authority and, like the Virgin, stand fully in our own power, untrammeled and whole.

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The influenza of the Sun

The influenza of the Sun

Have you ever tried to imitate the influence of the Sun?

That is what scientists in the Middle Ages tried to do through alchemy. They thought they could turn base metals into gold:

They wanted to imitate the influence of the Sun, which was traditionally thought responsible, under God, for making all the gold that already existed in the Earth. This, we might say, was the original understanding of ‘solar power.’

–The Narnia Code: C.S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens by Michael Ward

It’s currently Leo season. Leo is the temple of the Sun and symbolized by the lion. As James Hillman describes it:

The heart of the lion is like the sun: round and full and whole. The classical symbolisms of this heart are gold, king, redness, sol, sulfur, heat. It glows in the center of our being and radiates outward, magnaminous, paternal, encouraging.

The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World by James Hillman

That brings us to the current Full Moon in Aquarius. Full Moons are polarities, with the Moon in Aquarius opposite the Sun in Leo.

When we consider Leo, with its focus on a heart-centered personal journey, we also need to take into consideration Aquarius, its opposite sign, which is the temple of Saturn and emphasizes the intellect and the collective.

Carl Jung was born under a Leo Sun and an Aquarius rising sign. One of the major themes in his work is that we should not capitulate to collective norms and should instead strive towards our own individuation.

By contrast, a major emphasis of James Hillman’s work was that if we focus too much on the inner soul and neglect the outer soul, we contribute to the decline of the world. Hillman had Jupiter and Mars – the Sage and the Warrior – in Aquarius in his natal chart.

Another example of this Leo-Aquarius polarity comes from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis, which is a book drenched in Sun symbolism. In a subtle reference to alchemy, Eustace gets greedy when he discovers a pool that turns everything it touches into gold. Suddenly he wants to turn all the things into gold and rake in the money.

Of course that doesn’t work out so well for Eustace. His greed turns him into a dragon and he desperately tries to remove the dragon skin, but is unsuccessful.

Aslan the lion – a solar figure – appears and removes it for him. Eustace says, “The first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.”

After this, Eustace evolves from a self-absorbed individual to someone who embodies more Aquarian traits, with a greater focus on the collective and a more cooperative approach to life.

There will never be perfect balance between the Aquarius-Leo axis in our lives, but we can regularly remind ourselves that, as James Hollis says, “group action can be no more efficacious than the sum of individual consciousness brought to it.” A deeper understanding of the Sun’s placement in your astrology chart, and of your Aquarius-Leo axis, are two practical ways astrology can begin to assist with this.

C.S. Lewis prefered the metaphorical use of the word influence in astrological passages, which was influenza. Therefore the change in Eustace was brought about by the influenza of the Sun through Aslan.

Rather than trying to imitate the Sun’s influence like the alchemists, we should instead allow its “influenza” to transform us from within, letting its light guide our personal growth while also illuminating our contributions to the collective.

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What makes you roar?

What makes you roar?

When you were a child did anyone ask you “How do you want to be when you grow up?”

My guess is probably not!

Calling is more how you do something than about what you do. That is a key insight I learned years ago from my favorite James Hillman book, The Soul’s Code.

We tend to find ourselves going through the first half of life focused more on what we want to be when we grow up.

Leo season presents the opportunity to revisit and reflect more deeply on the Hero archetype:

In reflecting on the archetypal gestalt of the hero, Jung notes how each of us has an innate cluster of energy whose task it is to overthrow the dark powers that threaten, whether outer or inner. The outer threats are the powers and principalities of this earth that confront us and generate fear.

Each of us knows this well, for more of our reflexive, patterning behaviors arise out of fear management, or rather our being managed by fear, than any other motive. And yet, each of us also knows a summons to show up in life as ourselves, no matter how deeply buried that impulse is.

–Living Between Worlds: Finding Personal Resilience in Changing Times by James Hollis

For a clue as to that “innate cluster of energy” within you, consider the Hero function of your personality type.

One indicator of the “summons to show up in life as ourselves” is the location of the Sun in your natal chart. The Sun shows us the manner in which we respond to that call; or, the how, not just the what.

Because the Sun is the host of Leo, the location of Leo in your chart also gives clues about that summons, even if there are no planets in Leo in your chart.

During the New Moon in Leo tomorrow, the Sun will be in the Retreat section of Leo (per the I Ching). Retreat is about a leader remaining at a distance from their people – an advisor rather than a friend. It takes the 10,000 foot view and practices caring detachment.

The lion is the symbol of Leo. The roar of a lion can be heard from great distances and establishes the lion’s presence without physical confrontation. A roar is used strategically; a lion never says more than is necessary. The roar of a lion captures the essence of Leo’s confident, expressive energy and Retreat’s strategic wisdom.

When you speak from your core and show up fully as yourself, it is like roaring. Roaring helps you reconnect with the essence of how you want to be in life, beyond just what you want to do. The deeper the summons to show up as your true self is buried, the louder you might need to roar!

What makes you roar?

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A Wild and Wise Inner Mother

A Wild and Wise Inner Mother

A branch fell off the top of a large maple tree in our backyard a few days ago, narrowly missing the power line and family members in the yard at the time. The day was sunny with no wind.

It was yet another jolt from Mars-Uranus in Taurus.

There were many other such zaps in the air last week, especially the aptly named CrowdStrike, which is the largest IT outage in history.

To top off the fun, we get some Full Moon energy this weekend!

It’s the second Full Moon in Capricorn in a row. The Sun was just barely into Cancer during the first Full Moon – now it is at the tail end of Cancer.

Cancer and Capricorn are opposite each other on the zodiac. It’s a polarity of the archetypes of The Great Mother and Wise Old Man (Senex).

I have been contemplating the below quote during Cancer season, and it seems fitting to share it now under this Full Moon:

Rather than disengaging from the mother, we are seeking a wild and wise mother. We are not, cannot be, separate from her. Our relationship to this soulful mother is meant to turn and turn, and to change and change, and it is a paradox. This mother is a school we are born into, a school we are students in, a school we are teachers at, all at the same time, and for the rest of our lives. Whether we have children or not, whether we nourish the garden, the sciences, or the thunderworld of poetics, we always brush against the wild mother on our way to anywhere else. And this is as it should be.

Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

Capricorn would have us disengage from the mother.

Such disengagement is necessary when it focuses on withdrawing projections from the personal mother, or an idealized image of mothering, and developing one’s own inner mother.

With the Sun entering Leo the day after the full Moon, the focus shifts to the father archetype, as Leo is the home sign of the Sun. It provides an opportunity to reflect more on becoming father to your own life:

One becomes a father to one’s own life by becoming intimately acquainted with it and by daring to traverse its waters. I’m talking here about a deep father figure that settles into the soul to provide a sense of authority, the feeling that you are the author of your own life, that you are the head of the household in your own affairs.

Care of the Soul by Thomas Moore

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The art of letting yourself go

The art of letting yourself go

No, not that kind of “letting yourself go,” which is a phrase used to disparage someone who pays less attention to their appearance than they used to.

We’re in the Keeping Still section of Cancer season, so I’ve been reflecting on the Chinese wu wei sort of letting go. Jung described wu wei as “the art of letting things happen, action through non-action, letting go of oneself.”

The Keeping Still hexagram of the I Ching is a doubling of the mountain trigram. It correlates with introverted feeling (Fi) per Chinese Jungian analyst Chenghou Cai: “For Fi, deep feelings are seldom articulated, but are powerful when they are expressed. At this level of introverted feeling, one is like the person who has mastered the art of Keeping Still as taught by the I Ching.”

One is at rest, not merely in a small, circumscribed way in regard to matters of detail, but one has also a general resignation in regard to life as a whole, and this confers peace and good fortune in relation to every individual matter.

The I Ching translated by Richard Wilhelm

The opposite of introverted feeling is extraverted thinking. The United States is an ESTJ culture and one-sided in extraverted thinking. Jung said extraverted thinking is the only kind of thinking recognized by Western culture.

Extraverted thinking (Te), which compares to Thunder in the I Ching, acts with directness and authority and has little use for wu wei and Keeping Still.

Since the Aries eclipse this spring, followed by the Jupiter-Uranus conjunction in Taurus, and then all the Gemini energy, it sometimes felt like it has been a never-ending parade of extraverted thinking, extraverted sensation, and extraverted intuition.

Now that it’s Cancer season with its introverted feeling energy, hopefully some of how we let ourselves go can be in the “Calgon, Take Me Away!” kind of way.

If the waters of Cancer ever get too choppy, here’s Marion Woodman’s reminder about stillness, with its introverted feeling undertones:

To find the stillness at the center of the whirlpool, the eye of the hurricane, and not hold onto it with the rigidity born of fear, is what in analysis we struggle to reach. That center I call Sophia, the feminine Wisdom of God. It is not the masculine standpoint, the highly-principled “Here I stand.” … It is an invisible center encountered only in a creative process, at first not consciously recognized, but gradually revealed as the process unfolds.

Addiction to Perfection by Marion Woodman

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8 Things I Learned From Ashok Bedi, M.D.

8 Things I Learned From Ashok Bedi, M.D.

It’s a good thing I’ve been doing wrist strengthening exercises lately (for pickleball) because I took notes almost constantly as Jungian analyst and psychiatrist Ashok Bedi spoke to our Jungian Studies group at the Jung Institute of Chicago.

The topic was individuation , which he defined as: “The process of becoming oneself, whole, indivisible and differentiated from the collective but worthy of merger with the collective in one’s uniqueness.”

Here are eight things I learned during those four hours:

  1. Individuation is immoral unless you pay it back. Might as well start out with the one that pulls no punches! Focusing on individuation cuts you off from conformity and collectivity. After a while you should emerge and serve the community that chooses you to serve it. This is a summary of Jung’s thoughts in The Symbolic Life.
  2. The 4 types of people and how to handle them (based on the Yoga Sutras):
    • Unhappy people – Show them compassion, but not too much. You rob them of necessary suffering if you are too compassionate. Suffering is needed for individuation.
    • Happy people – Be mildly joyful towards them, but not too much, because you don’t know how they got their success.
    • Wicked people – Avoid them. If they are a family member and you can’t avoid them, put them on a maintenance list, such as only seeing them on holidays.
    • Virtuous/soulful people – Stay with them and follow them to the end of life.
  3. Live your authentic nature in balance. He used the analogy of Lion and Lamb. If you are a lion, be a lion most of the time. But there are times for a lion to be a lamb and vice versa. Sometimes a lamb must speak and act from greater strength and there are times for lions to focus on healing, forgiving, and not holding grudges.
  4. All our transactions are one of the following (I’ll let you guess which one is the most preferable):
    • Both lose.
    • I win, you lose.
    • You win, I lose.
    • Both win.
  5. Is Jungian psychology spirituality or psychology? Per Bedi it is on the edges of science. The “edge of science is always spirit.” As one of our instructors put it, Jungian psychology is “psychological understanding of how spirit works in human beings.”
  6. Absence of proof is not absence of truth.
  7. You are everything. The universe is one. As above, so below. You are god, human, animal, vegetable, and mineral. In small group sessions we had fun discussing which animal, vegetable, and mineral we are. If you must know, for mineral, I’m an amethyst, because that was once a nickname given to me by a friend who thought I was multi-faceted. For animal, I’m a white-throated sparrow, my favorite bird. A flock of them spends a few weeks in our backyard every spring before migrating north. I love their unique and charming whistles and the stipes on their heads. If you look closely at them, and listen carefully, you will see they aren’t “just a sparrow.” For vegetable, I’m a potato: I like the underworld connotations. They are boring to look at, yet multi-purpose (French fries are my favorite of their forms), nourishing, easy to cook, and abundant in tough times.

Which animal, vegetable, and mineral are you?

Did someone say French fries?

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Contemplation gives you true power

Contemplation gives you true power

I love that Hexagram 20: Contemplation of the I Ching correlates with the beginning of Gemini season.

As I wrote about last year, Mercury’s sign of Gemini has a lot more depth than one might think. It is perfectly suited to help us with the three levels of contemplation that Richard Rudd describes in his commentary on this hexagram in The 64 Ways.

The first level is simply viewing. We have to learn to train our lens on the present and on our current life situation. This helps us to make the connection that “our outer life is built upon the foundation of our inner life.”

The second level “is about viewing oneself in relation to the world. The self awareness really deepens now.” Seeing the effects of our actions has a preventative effect in us. Bad habits start to fall away. As we start to become more integrated in the world it brings a sense of calm. Note that it is becoming more integrated in- and not detached from – the world that brings this calm. “Allow this calm to settle deeply into your soul.” Cultivate it and make space for it to grow.

The third level is when the contemplation ceases of its own accord. “Everything you do or feel becomes an aspect of your contemplation. You use everything that happens in your life. This is the subtle art of contemplation.”

Using everything that happens in your life reminds me of what Jungian analyst Robert A. Johnson said:

Becoming whole is a game in which you get rid of nothing; you cannot do without these diverse energies any more than you can do without one of the physical organs that make up your body. You need to draw upon everything that is available to you.

Living Your Unlived Life by Robert A. Johnson

Isn’t that a wonderful alternative to the all-too prevalent notion that you have broken parts that need fixing?

Jupiter entered Gemini yesterday and will spend a year there. I look forward to having that in the background as we move through all the zodiacal seasons. It will be in Hexagram 20 for several months.

Jupiter, combined with the Mercurial nature of Gemini, brings a positive outlook, eloquent communication skills, ability to see the big picture, and ability to synthesize a lot of ideas. It will also help remind us that, as Rudd says, “Contemplation gives you true power.”

From a personality type perspective, hexagram 64 contains Earth (extraverted sensation) and Wind (extraverted feeling). You can see this combination in our closing quote:

When you learn the art of contemplation you have more influence on the direction of humanity than the President of the United States. You may not see this on the surface, but it’s true. A person living in presence affects the very air around them. They send off radiations of harmony that touches all quadrants of the universe. They are like the gentle wind blowing across the earth.

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Complete and full devotion

Complete and full devotion

The Sun just entered Gemini, which marks something of a milestone for me.

This begins my second year of blogging around the zodiac using the I Ching in a devotional way as a sort of lectionary, with a dash of depth psychology quotes.

A little bit eclectic, which is how my Gemini self likes it.

It was a year ago that I decided to do weekly blog posts like this. I’m excited to continue.

Today the Sun is still in hexagram 8: Holding Together, which I wrote about last time during the final week of Taurus season.

Now it is in line 6 of this hexagram (each hexagram has six lines), which adds additional nuance.

The sixth line is the top of the hexagram. In Hexagram 8 it reminds us:

The head is in the beginning. If the beginning is not right, there is no hope of a right ending. If we have missed the right moment for union and go on hesitating to give complete and full devotion, we shall regret the error when it is too late.

The I Ching by Richard Wilhelm

Gemini is a mutable air sign ruled by Mercury. The upside to its mutability is adaptability. The downside is the hesitation to give complete and full devotion.

The Mercury of Gemini is curious and loves to explore areas others do not. It can get bored quickly and move on. But us Gemini types need to remember that complete and full devotion, a Jupiterian quality, is sometimes warranted.

Even if you don’t have Gemini planets in your natal chart, the area of life Gemini represents for you is now lit up by the Sun and other planets will be zipping through in the coming weeks.

Here are a few things to ponder during Gemini season in light of Hexagram 8, line 6:

Reflect on a recent experience where you hesitated to fully commit or devote yourself. How did this hesitation impact the outcome?

Explore a time when your curiosity led you to explore new territories or ideas. How did this curiosity manifest, and what did you learn from the experience?

Consider the areas of your life currently illuminated by the Sun’s transit through Gemini. How can you harness the adaptability of this mutable air sign to navigate any changes or challenges you may encounter?

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New seed in the empty places

New seed in the empty places

Some problems can’t be solved; you simply have to wait until you outgrow them.

That Jungian theme came to mind as I read Hexagram 23: Splitting Apart of the I Ching, our hexagram host for this next week of Taurus.

The image is of a mountain on top of the earth. Just as a mountain experiences continuous erosion, the old ways of living must be stripped away.

It’s not good, at such times, to imagine the future and make plans. You need to bring your energy back to the centre and honour the process: this is a time to be transformed, not to act.

Moreover, until the old is so utterly stripped from you that you have no choice but to think in new ways, you will only be able to re-create the old patterns.

I Ching: Walking Your Path, Creating Your Future by Hilary Barrett

In the book The Faithful Gardener by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, which is perfect reading for Taurus season, she describes a time during her childhood when the local government stripped their land bare to build a highway near their property.

It was heartbreaking to lose all the trees and plants. Estés’ uncle instructed the family to leave the land bare and unseeded, as this is the best way to attract seeds of new life. The seeds would know how to find the bare, scorched earth.

Sure enough, the seeds arrived, and a small forest of hardwood trees grew over a long period of time. To Estés and her uncle they felt like they were in Eden.

I learned from my dear people as much about the grave, about facing the demons, and about rebirth as I have learned in all my psychoanalytic training and all my twenty-five years of clinical practice. I know that those who are in some ways and for some time shorn of belief in life itself—that they ultimately are the ones who will come to know best that Eden lies underneath the empty field, that the new seed goes first to the empty and open places—even when the open place is a grieving heart, a tortured mind, or a devasted spirit.

The Faithful Gardener by Clarissa Pinkola Estés

An important insight to ponder in the wake of the recent New Moon in Taurus.

Everything that is built up – power, or achievement, or the edifice of self and identity – must continually erode away. It leaves behind an enriched inner world, and a quiet sense of being at home here.

I Ching: Walking Your Path, Creating Your Future by Hilary Barrett

What is eroding away in your life?

How is your inner life being enriched as a result?

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8 Things I Learned from John Beebe in 8 Hours

8 Things I Learned from John Beebe in 8 Hours

I had the honor of attending eight hours of virtual instruction from John Beebe about psychological types.

This was part of the training for the Jungian Studies Program at the Jung Institute of Chicago.

I have written many posts about Beebe’s work over the years to help me understand it better, so it was a thrill to hear directly from Beebe himself and be able to ask him some questions.

Here are eight things I learned:

  1. Jung’s typology is practical and pragmatic. Sensation names what is, Feeling determines it worth, Intuition shows where it is going, and Thinking figures out what it means.
  2. Most of us have an aspirational type. Even Jung himself! Jung wanted to believe he was an introverted thinking type (INTP). But per Beebe he was an INTJ, which is why Jung was able to explain his material so that Americans in particular could understand it.
  3. Jung’s psychology is a psychology of the person in the psyche, not just defenses and syndromes. Beebe’s term for this is “personology.” It shows us how the person self-organizes. This is also known as “complexity theory,” which explains how the complexes we have tend to group together and self-organize. Beebe’s 8 function model is based on this. As he said, “We are never more than a complexity out of which consciousness is slowly emerging.”
  4. Jung’s psychology is a self-psychology, not an ego psychology. Beebe considers Jung a precursor to self-psychology. Self-psychology bolsters the self, with an emphasis on mirroring and empathy.
  5. The USA is an extraverted thinking (ESTJ) country. In fact, its four functions are Extraverted Thinking (Te), Extraverted Sensation (Se), extraverted intuition (Ne), and Introverted Feeling (Fi). This is a very imbalanced type, with three extraverted functions and inferior feeling. A normal function stack alternates between two introverted and two extraverted functions.
  6. Dreams are more like analogies than metaphors. When Beebe writes down a dream, he prefaces it with the words “It is exactly as if…” An analogy is in exact proportion to something. A metaphor is an exaggeration for the sake of emphasis (example: “My love is like a red red rose”). Dreams also tend to reflect our type and sometimes even a better or more enhanced version of it.
  7. Our type should not be viewed as “This is who I am!” Beebe said the hexagrams of the I Ching show that there are types of situations, rather than fixed types of people. Therefore our type is more fluid and situational. This was in response to my question to him about how the eight trigrams compare to the eight functions. In discussing this point with my analyst, who also has expertise in the I Ching, he said that the hexagrams we receive when asking a question would take our type into account. By the way, Beebe said he is working on a book about the hexagrams! I can’t wait.
  8. Typology has a value for sorting out self-experience. Beebe showed us several movie clips from Broadcast News (an ESTJ movie) and The Grifter (an ISFJ movie). Developing an eye for spotting the type of a movie, and the types of the characters in a movie, is a good practice for helping us sort out our own self-experiences using type.

If you are interested in learning more about typology, and Beebe’s work in particular, I’ll list some books below:

If you are new to typology, I recommend Personality Types: Jung’s Model of Typology by Daryl Sharp. In just over 100 pages he summarizes typology in a concise way that is easy to understand.

Building Blocks of Personality Type by Leona Haas and Mark Hunziker is an excellent introduction to Beebe’s 8 function model.

Lectures on Jung’s Typology by Marie-Louise von Franz and James Hillman is essential. It is one of the first type books I read. With its focus on the inferior function, it will help you identify your type if you currently are unsure about your type. Hillman’s essay on the feeling function is brilliant.

Once you have these basics down and understand the four main functions of the function stack, then it will be easier to understand Energies and Patterns in Psychological Type by John Beebe. Pair this book with Projection and Personality Development via the Eight-Function Model by Carol Shumate to complete your understanding of the model. Shumate’s book is superb and breaks everything down in a way that is easy to understand. Any lingering questions you have after reading Beebe’s book will be answered by Shumate’s.

Feel free to contact me if you want more book recommendations or have any questions.

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