The Archetypal Evolution of Femininity

There are two archetypal patterns, polar opposites, which comprise the existential experience of human beings collectively. These are the light pattern and the shadow pattern, alternatively recognisable as a progressive attitude which tends towards the elevation of consciousness vs. a regressive attitude characterised by the sporadic and compulsive manifestation of the unconscious.

Naturally, these general notions of light patterns and shadow patterns are embodied differently by masculine psychology than by feminine psychology, and this article is a preliminary attempt to sketch out the contours of just such an imaginative space. Significantly, the outlined schema is quite black-and-white however in practice these two paths are intertwined with one another at every level of analysis. The higher peaks of the light archetype require the integration of the relevant aspects of the shadow if one wishes to reach them, and similarly the higher levels of the shadow require the collaboration of one’s light archetype.

To be clear:

The shadow pattern is a corruption of the light pattern and involves repurposing the hard-won skills and virtues garnered through the continual and progressive elevation of one’s light archetype. Consequently, if one is dominated by the shadow prior to achieving spiritual evolution, their shadow is thereby limited by the powers then possessed by the light. In other words, the shadow — when permitted to dominate the individual — keeps the individual down, and therefore one can never reach the bottom-most depths of depravity which are ultimately possible unless they are willing and able to struggle against their nature to begin with, to grow and to learn and to elevate the pattern that they inhabit towards the heavens above. For it is through this very same elevation of one’s pattern that the shadow receives its many blessings: unappreciated aspects of the light.

It is important to grasp this point, as it helps to explain why each level of the shadow archetype corresponds to the corruption of the light idea at the peak of its power. It is because the shadow is capable of assimilating the nascent potency of the light archetype that this usurping of position is possible, because the transformative elevation — the level up — results in the removal of previously concrete limitations. This, in turn, makes accessible vistas of power and control which one has never had cause to learn to resist, and it is precisely at this moment that those elements of one’s own nature which one has failed to recognise, honour and integrate make themselves manifest. Slowly but surely, the corruption takes root and before you know it, you’ve fallen from grace.

In order to clarify how this can be possible, it will be necessary to move from the abstract into the concrete. What follows is an imaginative projection regarding the archetypes as they manifest themselves to my mind, and they may be different for you. If they are, I would love to know what changes you would make to my schema and why. If, on the other hand, you resonate with what I’ve laid out, I’d love to know that too! This is a piece of conjecture, to be sure, but it is one which my intuitive abilities affirm absolutely. I wonder what you think of it?

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Tier One — Light: Healer/Empath/Spirit Guide

The first level of the light archetype for a female is the idea of the healer, the empath or the spirit guide. This threefold division shares a common core, a spark that animates each and every thread: this spark is a subtle spiritual and emotional awareness which positions the woman ideally for a role in which they help to heal other people, whether those wounds be physical, emotional or psycho-spiritual. Images which spring to mind include Ariel from The Little Mermaid and Moana.

Consequently, all three images tend to bleed together somewhat, however what follows is an attempt to separate the characteristics of each. The Healer tends to be an individual who is highly sensitive to the pain of others, and wishes to care for that individual in an active capacity. In order to facilitate this goal, they are often highly intelligent and conscientious workers who are deeply invested in providing the best care possible to their patients.

The Empath is an individual who is able to read other people like open books, because she can feel their emotions and respond directly to things they may not even be aware of. This makes her an incredibly magnetic individual who appeals quite deeply to men who do not understand themselves. She may feel a desire to help and heal the people whose feelings she is able to connect with, or she may be more reserved about her energies, but when she decides to care for someone she has a natural gift at understanding their most intimate needs and desires.

The Spirit Guide is an individual who has an unusual sense of the currents in the ocean of life and who has a yearning to help souls, lost or otherwise, on their way towards their ultimate destiny. She is a spiritual explorer, a former of new connections; she recovers what was lost, just as the seeker does, but more as a function of an intuitive awareness of the laws and principles of the natural world than as a function of conscious will. She is guided by the moon, and she is uniquely receptive and strives to be understanding of the people who surround her, eager to connect with them. She may not have the same kind of natural gifts as The Healer or The Empath, but she is a better all-rounder because she offers people the breath of fresh air that their souls require.

The Spirit Guide, The Healer and The Empath are women who are connected with their natural origins, who understand how to follow their intuition, and who instinctively play their role in the way of things, receiving from nature the hidden instruction they need to guide them on their path.

She is a woman who has a healing touch, and an aura of vitality.

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Tier One — Shadow: Witch

The Witch is the woman who has turned her innate vitality and subliminal spiritual awareness towards nefarious ends, which often revolve chiefly around the vindication of her interests in clashes with the people in her social circles. She has turned her basic capacity for receptivity on its head, inhabiting the masculine and therefore projective aspect of her nature instead. This woman has gone cold to the currents of life, but is nonetheless able to harness her own life force to influence and manipulate others, and she frequently does so; she is also apt to punish her detractors as creatively as she is able.

The more she turns her inner vitality towards harming other people, the more her nature is twisted by her choices and the more her healing powers fade. She turns on the caring act and plays the part of the ideal girl, but it’s only a mask and her true personality is callous and cold. Her isolation infuriates her, and she blames and punishes others for the lack of fertility in her life.

She employs her inner vitality to prioritise youth and appearance, position and power, rather than attempting to advance herself and those around her on the path towards health, wholeness and interconnectivity — both with nature and with themselves. Instead, she separates and damages, inflicts sickness and obfuscates the path with her spells and enchantments, hexes and charms. A witch is often possessed by her animus and, not realising she is in the grips of something that is not herself, she uses her affinity with nature to strike down her enemies and in turn is so struck down herself, as the universe balances itself out. Naturally, however, she is unwilling to interpret things this way, and it only serves to intensify the victim complex which motivates much of her attitude towards others.

A Witch is a woman who employs her natural powers impulsively and spitefully, to punish and control those around her.

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Tier Two — Light: Priestess

The spiritual spark which was present in the first level of the feminine light archetype now blossoms into devotion for and servitude of God. Significantly, this need not be God the Father, but can and often is the goddess Mother Nature. This devotion includes purity of mind, body and soul and the corresponding awakening heralds a period of spiritual intensification (and therefore the intensification of psychic powers). This however relies on the individual woman being able to nurture her wild side while maintaining her devotion to the light, and not allowing her shadow to infect her thinking. An excellent example of this can be found in the oracle who resided at Delphi in the time of the ancient Greeks.

This is where the Empath and the Healer coalesce into the more central archetype, which is the spiritual guide. As a priestess, a receptive receptacle for the wisdom of God, one is uniquely positioned to show others the way, and help them along their path. One is also blessed with unique and extraordinary gifts which are crucial to the proper development of those around them. Central among these gifts is the healing touch, and an intuitive faculty which transcends common-sense. This kind of individual could conceivably awaken such subtler powers of the mind in someone else as well, especially someone with whom there was a love connection of some kind. More broadly though, any personal connection could establish a spiritual link.

The Priestess is the female who is on the path to health and wholeness, the foundation for a harmonious family. In order to achieve this, she must integrate her animus and recover her projective facility, so that she is no longer merely receptive but can also inaugurate new order, a skill which is quite necessary for more advanced styles of healing. All this is something in which the Priestess is instructed by the very forces of Nature themselves. The winds and the rains guide her along her way and, as long as she doesn’t stray from her path, she will get where she needs to go, because she is guided, and because it is written that the guided cannot go astray. The Priestess, in occupying the state of receptivity at a higher state of consciousness than most are capable of, can, at times, even perceive the world through more than just the six senses, and with an exquisite level of detail.

The Priestess is the woman guided by God, and she serves as a spiritual pivot point for all who know her. She is Healer, Empath and Spiritual Guide at once.

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Tier Two — Shadow: Siren

The Siren is a has-been devotee to the spirit of Nature who strayed from the path because an obstruction blocked her way. She got lost in the oceans of the unconscious mind and has become mired in her ways, finding that she cannot change because she refuses to revisit the site of the crash. To revisit the site of the crash would be to look in the mirror and see herself for exactly what she is, and perhaps she cannot bear that. She has increased her mastery with respect to the masculine talent for projection in order to compensate for the lack of her natural receptivity, and she consequently uses it to project a reality in which both she and her prospective partners might like to live. She sings him a song and he is enchanted by the music such that he begins to live with her in the projection, and he sees her exactly as she wants him to. In other words, she bewitches him in order that she might steal his soul.

Unfortunately, a Siren is a man-eater and she cannot stay satisfied with the man for long, because even when she lets him live, he lives with his head in the clouds, perpetually fooled by the simplest of illusions. He never sees her, because she keeps him bewitched the entire time, so that he has no eyes. Of course, she cannot cease her song because if she were to do that he would see her as she is, and flee immediately. And so she finds herself in a paradox, a self-fulfilling prophecy, where she begins to hate the men she attracts precisely because they fall so easily for her ploy, and yet if they did not fall for it, she would not attract them. She rages against the tragedy of her situation and punishes the men she catches in her medusa-like gaze by sucking them dry and throwing them aside so that they drown.

She has alienated herself from her basic femininity, and she feels the loss keenly, but she is unable to bear it and so she projects it onto the men that she ensnares. That is, the reason that she feels empty, she supposes, is because they are not enough in some way or another, and she forces them to squirm so that they can maintain the fantasy they’re living in, and slowly drains their life force. In this way, she can maintain her youth and some modicum of power, but she gets further and further out to sea the longer she lives as a siren. She is lost among the oceans of the unconscious, always among the waves, never having ground to stand on. This is a metaphor for her total situation, which is a self-feeding loop where the way in which she copes is what creates the loop.

A Siren is a woman who has mastered the masculine aspect of projection, however at the cost of receptivity altogether, and it has robbed her of her inner vitality. Her soul is twisted, and she no longer recognises herself in the mirror.

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Tier Three — Light: Spirit Mother

The Spirit Mother is the feminine version of The Avatar, which is to say that she is the woman who is guided unerringly by the spirit of Mother Nature herself. She is inspired and blessed, and spreads both blessing and inspiration to all those she comes into contact with. She is nurturing and protective, but she can also be terrifyingly powerful when her charges are threatened. She is the spirit of the mother grizzly, although this is just one of her many faces. In general she is the archetype of the mother. She has powerful healing magic and can cause tremendous growth in a plant or animal over a short period of time. She helps to guide the spirit of the nation, and receives the messages or signals from the universe more readily than an avatar would, embodying the ultimate vessel of God’s intention and love. Rather than moving mountains, she quells storms.

She is also the creative spirit of the muse — novelty and spontaneity, the wild side of existence, playful and powerful, life giving and sustaining. Renewing and rejuvenating, she is like the constantly flowing waters of the fountain of eternal youth. She is the endless round of the seasons and the music of the celestial orbs. She embodies the powers of Mother Nature, the ancient wisdom of the earth. She is the fertile soil that receives the seed of the tree of life; she is both the root of life and the fruit of the tree. She wears every face of Nature, but she especially embodies the qualities of the archetypal and ideal mother image. This is an understanding, loving, caring, giving, seeing being. She is a paragon of bounty and creation, overflowing with mercy.

The spirit of the spirit guide — that aspect of the feminine spirit which is equipped to receive guidance from God — which was in its nascent stage in the previous tiers has become a fully-blown manifestation of the phoenix. This is the creature that is always regenerating, always rejuvenating, always guiding, always teaching, and most importantly, always telling stories. For the spirit mother is, first and foremost, a mother, and to her the process of maturation is no joke. So it is that the raising of younglings, even younglings in the bodies of adults, is of utmost importance in her world. She is descended from the mother ocean, from which emerged time itself. The moon is her mirror, and she heals all wounds — time is merely her instrument, and it alone is insufficient; one must attend to themselves, care for themselves: love themselves. She is the goddess of affirmations, the goddess of self-care and the goddess of self-love.

The Spirit Mother is the ever-changing face of Nature, the guide of all and a force to be reckoned with. She is creative and loving, though she can be wild and wrathful if her offspring are threatened.

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Tier Three — Shadow: Shade

In this, the final evolution of the female shadow, the archetype of the mother receives its most disgusting twist. Here, we come upon a shapeshifting siren that preys upon children. She is the ultimate devouring mother, posing as a genuinely caring and nurturing individual but actually feeding on the life-force of those children whom she supposedly ‘takes care of’. An incredibly vivid imagistic depiction of this kind of phenomenon can be found in the cinematic version of Stephen King’s famous IT, specifically IT: Chapter Two. There is complex symbolism involved in this movie; it features a shapeshifting predator that evolves through the fears of the children upon which it feeds, and it is ultimately animated by three orbs of ‘light’ which totally hypnotise anyone who looks into them.

Of course, Pennywise the clown is male, but that’s the thing about shapeshifters — they can disguise themselves. But, you might point out, the clown is animated by three orbs of light — surely that doesn’t fit with the theory? I imagine, however, that you’re familiar with the trope of three sister witches — how might such sister witches at the height of their power disguise themselves? What would be the most effective disguise for them to utilize, behind their manifest mask (pennywise). Well, for three shades, celestial orbs of light (in other words, the opposite of what one might expect of a creature of darkness) seems like a pretty safe choice.

Such a creature, a Shade, can achieve immortality by constantly siphoning the life force of children in her care, feeding off them until they are husks, if they are even alive at all. This kind of woman is not satisfied with man-eating, but must have the children as well. After all, they are much more plentiful sources of vitality, having so much life left to live. Shades are capable of powerful magic, and of weaving a web of lies and spells that thoroughly entraps her prey so that there is no way for them to escape her grasp. She can also assume any shape she wishes, which makes her the most deadly of foes. One who trifles with such a being is much more likely to end up dead before they even know they have found her than to slay her unsuspecting. She is a master of deception and manipulation, always hiding in the shadows and never showing her face until it’s too late.

The Shade is the ultimate in energy vampires, except that her vampirism is not limited to any one kind of energy, and she’s more than willing to drain someone to death. During the night she is practically invisible and there are rumours that she can fly like a bat, although no living soul has ever been able to confirm this — probably because so few survive encounters with this creature. They are exceptionally rare and extraordinarily dangerous, not to mention sadistic beyond belief. There is nothing this creature will not do to ensure that the last few moments of your life are as juicy for her as possible, which means utter torment and despair for you. The Shade is the original snake and psychopath.

The Shade is a force of deadly destruction and has no regard for motives and needs except her own. She enjoys aping empathy, however, just to crush the hope of her victims. She feeds off their emotional distress, draining their life force through her hypnotic eye contact.

The Shade is the amalgamation of all the forces of nature gone wrong, an instance of the world-soul twisted by a black heart. She is an eternal parasite, a powerful siren who can take any form at will, and her powers defy comprehension.

She is Death incarnate.