The projection-making factor [in the male] is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima. Whenever she appears, in dreams, visions, and fantasies, she takes on personified form, thus demonstrating that the factor she embodies possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a feminine being. She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous product of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute figure for the mother. On the contrary, there is every likelihood that the numinous qualities which make the mother- image so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype of the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child. –Jung

The woman’s body is the first world to the newborn. The child’s projections of anima will be of her from then on.

Just as the mother seems to be the first carrier of the projection-making factor for the son, so is the father for the daughter. A woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit….when anima and animus meet, the animus draws his sword of power, and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). -Jung

You know about your anima or animus by your response to the opposite sex.

There’s a fundamental image in the old Babylonian mythology of the God Marduk, the great sun god, the shaper and creator of the world. What does he create the world out of? His grandmother, Tiamat, who comes as a monster, and he carves her up.

She would have cut herself up anyhow, but she lets him become the agent of this deed, because one has to have that kind of confidence needed out there in order that the world can live. So, this is a generous woman,who lets the little boy think he is doing the job, when she could have done it herself.

That’s the way the animus is: it is a projection of something the female could do but instead allows the male to do for her. Though not half so vital a presence, he is a machine with a body that’s specialized, so he can do these things. The realization that the power is within you is one thing; but to realize that the action implied by that power is more adequately rendered by the male than by you as a female is to recognize relationship.

When a woman realizes that the power is within her, then the man emerges as an individual, rather than just being an example of what she thinks she needs. On the male side, when a man looks at a woman and sees only somebody to go to bed with, he is seeing her in relation to a fulfillment of some need of his own and not as a woman at all. It’s like looking at cows and thinking only of roast beef.

Falling in love is nature coming in. It starts with being carried off by the opposite sex.

You should find a way to realize your shadow in your life somehow.

Next comes the problem of gender. Every man has to be a manly man,

and all of the things that society doesn’t allow him to develop he attributes

to the feminine side. These parts of himself he represses in his unconscious. This is the counterplayer to the persona. They become what Jung calls the anima: the female ideal in the masculine unconscious.

Likewise, the woman carries the animus in her unconscious: the male aspect in herself. She’s a woman, and the society gives her certain things to do. All that is in her that she has associated with the masculine mode of life is repressed within the animus.

The interesting thing is that-biologically and psychologically-we have both sexes in us; yet in all human societies, one is allowed to accent only one. The other is internalized within us. Furthermore, our imagery and notions of the other are functions of our biography. This biography in- cludes two aspects. One is general to the human species: nearly everybody has a mother and a father. The other aspect is peculiar to yourself: that your mother should have been as she was and your father as he was. There is a specification of the male and female roles as experienced, and this has com- mitted, has determined, the quality of our experience of these great, great bases which everyone experiences. Everyone experiences Mother; everyone experiences Father.

In both cases, the buried ideal tends to be projected outward. We usually call this reaction falling in love: projecting your own ideal for the op- opposite sex onto some person who, by some kind of magnetism, causes your anima/animus to emerge. Now, you can go to a dance and there’s some perfectly decent, nice-looking girl who’s sitting all alone. Then there’s some other little bumblebee with everybody all around her. What’s she got? Well, it’s something about the way her eyes are set that just evokes anima projections from all the males in the neighborhood. There are ways to present yourself that way; yet we don’t always know what they are or how to achieve them. I’ve seen people who are perfectly good anima ob- jects so make themselves up that they repel the anima projection.

Two people meet and fall in love. Then they marry, and the real Sam or Suzy begins to show through the fantasy, and, boy, is it a shock. So a lot of little boys and girls just withdraw their anima or animus. They get a divorce and wait for another receptive person, pitch the woo again, and, uh-oh, another shock. And so on and so forth.

Now the one undeniable fact: this disillusion is inevitable. You had an ideal. You married that ideal, then along comes a fact that doesn’t corre- spond to that ideal. You suddenly notice things that don’t quite fit with your projection. So what are you going to do when that happens? There’s only one attitude that will solve the situation: compassion. This poor, poor fact that I married does not correspond to my ideal; it’s only a human being. Well, I’m a human being, too. So I’ll meet a human being for a change; I’ll live with it and be nice to it, showing compassion for the fallibilities that I myself have certainly brought to life as a human being.

Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love and I mean love, not lust-is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person, compared to the ideal of your animus or anima, peeks through, say. This is a challenge to my compassion. Then make a try, and something might begin to get going here. You might begin to be quit of your fix on your anima. It’s just as bad to be fixed on your anima and miss as to be fixed on your persona: you’ve got to get free of that. And the lesson of life is to release you from it. This is what Jung calls individuation, to see people and yourself in terms of what you indeed are, not in terms of all these archetypes that you are projecting around and that have been projected on you.

The function of the mythology, we recall, is also to spiritualize the place as well as the conditions in which you live. The function of the artist is to do that for you. But the artists that are responsible for the poetry of the Bible, which is glorious poetry, are not now here. Their work has been concretized. And we have this perduring and difficult notion, this corruption of metaphor, that the Holy Land, the Promised Land, lies somewhere else.

The Promised Land is any environment that has been metaphorically spiritualized. An elegant example of this universal experience is found in the mythology of the Navaho. Living in a desert, the Navaho have given every detail of that desert a mythological function and value so that wherever persons are in that environment, they are in meditation on the transcendent energy and glory that is the support of the world. The Promised Land is not a place to be conquered by armies and solidified by displacing other people. The Promised Land is a corner in the heart, or it is any environment that has been mythologically spiritualized.

Such phrases are metaphors to help you link yourself to this vast enterprise of being alive. Man can be thought of as an animal without a fixed character. Nietzsche calls Man “the sick animal,” “Das kranke Tiere.” He does not know what his job is. But men and women have such virtuosity that they can be ninety-eight different things. Each of us has a track to find and follow.

So whatever your life commitment is as of now, it involves certain dae- monic relationships-that is, the one you forge with the deity residing in you. One of the big problems in the Christian tradition arises from the in- terpretation of supernatural grace, which says, in effect, that salvation does not come from you, but from outside yourself through some kind of ritual experience. But the function of the sacrament of Baptism, for example, is not to pour anything into you but to pull something out of you. The sacra- ments are an evocation, not an indoctrination.

Carl Jung has suggested, as a means for fathoming one’s own creative depths, a technique that he calls “active imagination.” One way to activate the imagination is to propose to it a mythic image for contemplation and free development. Mythic images-from the Christian tradition, or from any other, for that matter, since they are all actually related-speak to very deep centers of the psyche. They came forth from the psyche originally and speak back to it. If you take in some traditional image proposed to you by your own religious tradition, your own society’s religious lore, proposing it to yourself for active meditation, without any strict game rules defining the sort of thoughts you must bear in mind in relation to it (such as those pro- posed by Ignatius Loyola concerning meditation on aspects of the Passion), letting your own psyche enjoy and develop it, you may find yourself run- ning into imageries, experiences, and amplifications that do not fit exactly into the patterns of the tradition in which you have been trained.

What are you going to do about that?Are you going to let yourself go, following your own activation imagination?Or are you going to cut the run short at some critical point?

The latter God is one who creates. One thinks of that God as a fact That The say, is the Creator. We conceptualize that God as an IT. On the OTher hand, in the impersonal dynamism of the cycles of time the gods are simply the agents of the cycle. The Hindu gods are not, therefore, creators in the way that Yahweh is a creator. This Yahweh creator is, one might say, a metaphysical fact. When he makes up his mind to do something, it is promptly accomplished. This one of the mythologies of God in the Bible was brought in by the nomads who, as herding people, had inherited the mythology of the hunting process in which God is considered out there. The planting people have a mythology of God in here as the dynamism
that informs all of life.

To give a sense of the real meaning of this agricultural mythology, one must examine the actual number of years it takes for the spring equinox to pass through all of the signs of the zodiac. Called “the procession of the equinoxes,” it takes 25,920 years to complete a cycle of the zodiac. Divide 25,920 by 60, and you get 432. This number, as we shall see, provides the link between the agricultural mythology and the actual cycles of time.

Some years ago a friend of mine gave me a book, Cooper’s Aerobics, that told how many laps a man would have to swim every day in order to stay healthy. A footnote read: “A man in perfect physical shape, at rest, has a heartbeat of about one beat per second.” At sixty seconds to a minute, and sixty minutes to an hour, in one day of twenty-four hours the heart beats 86,400 times. Divided by two, it is 43,200. The heartbeat matches the beat of the universe; they are the same. That coincidence of rhythm was the point of the old cosmic mythologies. The latter envisioned this microcosm, or little cosmos, and the macrocosm, or the big cosmos, as resonating to the same beat. When a person tells the doctor “I’ve got a fever,” the doctor takes his pulse to see if it registers in harmony with the 43,200 beats that is, to find out if the patient is in tune with nature.

These numbers, anchored in the Sumerian discovery that the order of the universe can be discovered mathematically, are found almost every- where. In the Hindu sacred epics, the number of years calculated to the present cycle of time, the Kali Yuga as it is known, is 432,000, the number of the “great cycle” (mahayuga) being 4,320,000. In the Icelandic Eddas, one reads of the 540 doors in Othin’s ( wotan’s) hall, through which, at the end of the current cycle of time, 800 divine warriors would pass to battle the antigods in that “Day of the Wolf” to mutual annihilation. Multiplying 540 by 800 equals 432,000.

An early Babylonian account, translated into Greek by a Babylonian priest named Berossos in 280 B.C., tells us that 432,000 years passed between the time of the rise of the city Kish and the coming of the mythological flood (the biblical story derives from this earlier source). In a famous paper on “Dates in Genesis,” the Jewish Assyriologist Julius Oppert, in 1877, showed that in the 1,656 years from the creation to the Flood, 86,400 weeks had passed. Divided by two, that again produces 43,200.

That is a hint, buried in Genesis, that two notions of God are to be found in its pages. The first was the willful, personal creator who grieved at the wickedness of his creatures and vowed to wipe them out. The other God, in complete contrast, is found hidden in that disguised number, 86,400, a veiled reference to the Gentile, Sumero-Babylonian, mathematical cosmology of cycles, ever recurring, of impersonal time. During this cycle, kingdoms and peoples arise and recede in seasons of the multiple of 43,200. We recall that the Jewish people were exiles in Babylon for half a century and could, indeed, have absorbed these notions that, exquisitely hidden, provide a subtext of recurring cycles of time in their scriptures.

The imagery of rebirth is of two main orders. The moon which dies and is resurrected is the chief symbol of this miracle of rebirth in time. The moon sheds its shadow as the serpent sheds its skin. The serpent also plays a role as the symbol of this same principle of the life that is reborn from its own death. In traditional mythologies, the sacrificial bull, too, is associated with this symbolism of death and rebirth. The horns of the moon are ren- dered in the horns of the bull. The sacrifice of the bull is symbolic of the sacrifice of that mortal part in us which leads to the release of the eternal.

The sun is our second symbol of rebirth, evoking that idea of not com- ing back at all, of not being reborn here but of passing beyond the spheres of rebirth altogether to a transcendent light. The typical image for this is the sun. The moon carries darkness within it but wherever the sun goes there is no darkness. There are only the shadows of those forces that do not open themselves to its light. The image of the sun-door speaks of yet an- other kind of rebirth, that of the return of the lost one that is, the one who is lost in the spheres of shadows and time, who returns to that eternal root which is his own great root.

As the bull is symbolic of the moon, so the lion, with his great radiant solar face, is the symbolic animal of the sun. As the rising sun quenches the moon and the stars, so the lion’s roar scatters the grazing animals, just as the lion’s pouncing on the bull symbolizes the sun’s extinguishing the moon. If we recall the serpent, we recognize the eagle, the solar bird, as its counterpoint. So we have these parallels: eagle against serpent, lion against bull, sun against moon.

Let us review some of the basic mythological heroes who work through for us the crisis of resolution by which the classical mythological cycle is completed.

We begin with Moses, the symbol of one who goes off alone, leaving his people only to return with a law for them. This is the identical hero journey that we find in all of the old ethnic traditions. Every one of the social orders is finally traced back to the realization and experience of some single individual who alone experiences the mystery, passes the test, as it were, and returns with a message for mankind, as in the case of Moses, his coming down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments.

The next great figure in this tradition is Christ. How was Christ understood by the original Christians, all of whom were Jews? The key word is found in Paul who wrote to the Galatians that Christ redeemed man from the curse of the Law. The “Establishment” may be understood as a system of laws through which one’s experiences of life are filtered. One must be redeemed from this through the doctrine of love. From Christ’s words, we have learned that we should love our neighbors. We are not-as in previous times-to hate our enemies, but to love them instead. Christ also said that man is not made for the Sabbath, but that the Sabbath is made for man. In other words, the Law is to serve man and not man the Law. This represents an enormous transformation of our spiritual understanding of our relation- ship to each other, God, and laws fashioned by other men in His Name.

Let me remind you of that moment in which Christ transcended all the laws. It is the story of His forty days in the desert. In this case, the Devil represented the Law that had to be transcended. The very first question the Devil put to Christ was, “Why don’t you turn these stones into bread?” Christ replies that man lives not by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. He rejects the economic theory of the spiritual life, thereby refuting Bernard Shaw’s notion that one must be economically well-off before one can practice spiritual exercises.

In the second temptation, the Devil takes Christ up onto the mountain top, showing and offering to Him the lands of the world if He will bow down to him. And Christ says, “Get thee behind me, Satan,” thereby transcending the seduction of political power as life’s aim.

The Devil then takes Him up to the pinnacle of the temple, suggesting that if Christ is so spiritual, He can cast himself down and God will bear Him up. Christ rejects this temptation to spiritual inflation by saying, “You shall not tempt the Lord thy God.” Christ returns then from the desert to preach to the people the new message of the spirit, the message of love.