Dreams and the Archetype of the Feminine
In the dream Venus rules the night sky, shedding
Light on an antique table displaying a solitary
Mushroom that some voice tells me
Will provide guidance as I move
To the seaside, with chats about boating,
Surfboarding, layers of waterproof garments,
Stretches of sea and longitudinal life
All hiding something, perhaps burnt offerings,
Incense, countervailing attempts at order
As the dream chases a form, a cohesive
Structure, a grammar, a beginning, middle
And end from pieces of indecipherable bits
Lost in some dark medieval forest
Lacking moonlight for centuries.
Then the dream opens and the sea
Seems to part, a curtain lifted by light
From Venus and I am salt and sailor again
Sextant in hand to bring order to the night sky.
Streams of dizzying light flow from the stars
And I fall back and down under this heavenly weight
Seeing what surely must be a mirage
Of the Christian cross, encased in a circle
Streaming into an ornate square that Jung
Called a quaternity with Mary
Now an equal presence in the godhead
Completing a masculine deity
With the feminine, the unconscious, the alchemical
All giving birth in my dream space
With Venus showing the way
Reminding me of my task and my fate
Order from disorder, grammar
Resurrected and the mushroom sign
Full of peace and new-found divinity.
****
Before this dream fully fades into the night
Another, darker one invades the space.
I see an image of the Madonna, Virgin
Or Great Mother on the side of a cliff
A Mount Rushmore that honors the feminine
And a man in overalls who sees this blessed presence
Moves towards these images with a shovel
As if bent on changing the course of history
With threatening gestures and fire in his eyes,
Perhaps sharpening the weapon on his teeth.
With the Goddess within inches of his weapon
He stumbles and falls, as if off the edge
Of a cliff leaving a “God damn” in his wake
While other men who seem to read
The landscape, safely transit the space
In full view of this blessed mountain
Then another shift, another time
Perhaps another country but surely a showroom
Where a woman tells a male customer
That she had fond memories of him
As an ornament, naked on the hood of a car.
Yet the night is not done with me
As Jung shows up as spirit or apparition,
My eager and earnest projection
Or a footnote from his book on “Alchemy”
And I, as if in a confessional, say to him
“I am being overwhelmed by my dreams
And they are damaging my soul.”
Before he disappears into a crowd
The man who might be Jung
Might have said “Be aware of the shadow”
That had at first a comic book connotation
Then I remembered the psychological shadow
Plays a key role in completing the circle
Joining the opposites, the male and female
The “ying” and ‘yang,” melting into each other,
Jung’s “individuation,” the creation of Self
My journey, my task and my fate,
****
****
(Note: This poem has many sources that include: two decades of course work at the C.G. Jung Foundation in NYC; more specifically, a recent reading of Jung’s “Psychology and Alchemy” and numerous dreams recorded in my dream journal during August and September, 2021.)
