Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D., is a Jungian analyst as well as
Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California,
San Francisco, and a board member of Ms. Foundation for
Women. A Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and
Diplomate of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology,
Dr. Bolen also teaches and leads seminars throughout North
America. Her four most recent books include Goddesses in
Everywoman (1985), Gods in Everyman (1990), Ring of Power:
The Abandoned Child, the Authoritarian Father, & the
Disempowered Feminine (1992), and Crossing to Avalon: A
Woman's Midlife Pilgrimage (1994).
ALEXANDER BLAIR EWART: The women's movement in the West in a
way found its roots in the birth of America. If we go back to the late 1700s
or early 1800s, America led the Western world in the establishment of
women's educational centers and that kind of thing. By the 1960s it took a
sociopolitical form, and by the beginning of the 1980s you have the Goddess
really appearing in mass consciousness. There is a sort of chicken. and egg
question here, if this doesn't sound too absurd. But do you feel that those
early glimmerings in women's suffrage, and the breakthrough in feminine
consciousness in the West, is something that was already moving out of the
depths, out of the archetypes, and that it just took us a while to catch up to it?
JEAN SHINODA BOLEN : I think they are related. I would say that,
first of all, the United States and Canada have by and large been settled
by immigrants who were adventuresome, who set off on one of those great
journeys beyond the known world to settle over here. So that the very
archetypal nature of the people who came to the Northern Hemisphere
included the impulse to define their own space, to break with tradition,
and the need for a certain real autonomy in defining themselves and their
experience. Most of the people who came over were Protestants, at least in
the case of the United States, And so there is a shucking off of
patriarchal, established, institutional authority sort of built in to the folks
who came over and settled here. I think that spirit had a lot to do with the
suffragette movement and the women's movement of the sixties. When
pioneers start to settle a new country, the men and women who come over
struggle to establish themselves on a much more equal level than is the
case in their original home with traditions that go back thousands of
years. So there's a sense of equality and an "I define myself" archetype.
Finally there is the meeting with the return of the Goddess that is one of
these morphogenic field phenomena.
ABE : Something that is beginning to really penetrate into mass
consciousness as well is the phenomenon of the Madonna, the Virgin,
the Goddess at places like Medugorje. What impression does that
phenomenon make on you?
JEAN B : It seems to me that it's a part of a global return of the Goddess
in different forms. The return of Mary, not only there but in Mexico and in
Ireland, around Knox, shows increasingly in the experience of the
apparition of the Virgin. It is an outer visionary experience that is in my
way of thinking the same as the internal mystical experience of the
feminine aspect of divinity.
ABE : So we're talking about living in a period now where the barrier, if
you like, between the inner world, the subjective world, and the objective
world is collapsing. One of the things I've been wondering about,
particularly in the light of Julian Jaynes' book The Origin of Consciousness
in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, is what does that mean for us now,
with the Virgin at Medugorje and these other places? I mean, that's an
objective phenomenon. Five hundred people at a time see the sun dancing,
or whatever it is. It's almost like a total reality shift, as if miracles are
reappearing in the world.
JEAN B : Well, miracles are reappearing and they are being objectively
contemplated as well. Julian Jaynes would say that there isn't a pause
between the feeling and action and the experience of divinity right,there. So
that "I do this because Athena standing behind me directs me to do it.".
ABE : But it's something a little different from that, isn't it?
JEAN B : I think it is. I think it has to do with a probable time when
divinity was hallucinated or experienced inwardly in a very real way by
people who had not developed a linear, left brain, and who didn't have a
sense of separation, didn't have a sense of "I think therefore I am," but
rather "I'm part of everything, including this apparition or this
hallucination which is just as real as this tree or this animal or me." Because
we are all a mix of spirit and matter, And that then shifted into a much more
rational mind separation from environment and from mystical experiences.
But now we have in place a developed thinking apparatus, an observing
apparatus, and at the same time increased access to the archetypal, the
mystical or the eternal realm, with the right brain as receptor of that realm.
So we seem to be able to cross back and forth between the two worlds
without obliterating them.
ABE : That's one of the primary issues, isn't it, that here we are functioning
in this postindustrial, technological world, at least in the West, and yet at
the same time a mystical reality is breaking through into a world that was
originally constructed in such a way that its goal was to keep that out? So in
a way it looks as if there is something in humanity, or something in our
primal reality, that is reasserting itself in the face of that. Or is it that people
feel the loss of something in this technological world, and at some level or
other open themselves to mystical reality?
J EA N B : I can see we've got a chicken or egg situation here.
ABE : I don't know, is there an answer to that yet? Maybe there isn't.
JEAN B : There probably isn't an answer to it, and yet there does seem to
be an accurate spiritual tradition that's been present all along as the left
brain has been developed. By the time Christianity emerged, it had that
sense of "seek and ye shall find," "ask and it...
ABE : ... shall be rendered unto ye."
JEAN B : Yes. That sense that you as an individual entity, which is a left
brain experience "I think therefore I am" begin to intuit that there is a
higher order, a divinity, that might be accessible if you are open to the
experience. And you can't make it happen. It isn't something that you can do
through your will alone, but something you can only do by invitation and
receptivity. There is some shift when you go into a contemplative or
meditative experience that invites in that other mystical reality, and whether
within the Christian tradition through prayer, to invoke the deity or the
sacramental experience through which grace would come, or whether
through a more Eastern tradition of meditation, there is a voluntary
suspension of pure left brain functioning to open up to the right brain as the
receptor organ of this other reality.
In psychology, especially so in Jungian psychology, that increased
openness includes an appreciation for the dream realm, and that means you
start to consciously remember your dreams, or try to remember them, write
them down, think about them, amplify them, work at perceiving the
symbolic language. And when you're doing that, you're clearly doing that
with your intelligence. You are putting your intelligence to work on receiving
that which is possible to receive through that right brain perceptive organ
that presents us with images and affects, that nonverbal language. As soon
as we start paying attention to the dream world, then it's easy to start
viewing the outer world as if it were also a dream, and through that way of
looking at outer reality as if it were a dream, noticing that synchronicities
are always happening, and that there are symbols to interpret. When you
do, as when you interpret a dream, you find the meaning of the experience
that you're living at the moment. You find some coherent way of making
your way by listening and trying to find the inner equivalent of landmarks
on the journey.
ABE : One of the criticisms that is leveled at the Jungian approach by its
critics is that here you have something that is purely subjective. So, if
someone tells me that my dreams are significant, then by suggestion they'll
become significant, or if somebody tells me that archetypes are significant,
then by suggestion they'll become significant. And yet, coming back to the
experience of the Goddess at Medugorje, it seems as if the archetype acts
quite independently of human wish fulfillment. We're talking about five
hundred people at a time experiencing something together.
JEAN B : Of course, they are standing there wishing and open for the
experience, too. So there is no difference in relation to your other example.
ABE : Then are the archetypes independent of humankind?
JEAN B : Yes, that's what Jung was maintaining all along, that the
archetypal level of the psyche, the collective unconscious, is objective, it's not
personal, and it has its own life. It's there in place. We get in touch with it.
ABE : The whole thing sounds very much, then, as if it's pointing at a
Neoplatonic or Platonic view of the universe, where you have your nine
hierarchies of archetypal beings, you know, gods, goddesses, all the way
back to the Godhead.
JEAN B : Except that that's a systematic viewpoint that is not necessarily
right. I name archetypes by goddesses' and gods' names, and that's in some
way an equivalent. The archetypal world is like the world of nature. When
we come into the world we look around us. We can put everything into
phylums. We can define the different categories of animal, mineral, etc. We
can say that there is an order because we have a need to make order in our
psyches. But whether there really is such a thing, or whether it is just helpful
for us to impose some sort of hierarchy, is another question altogether. And
the systems that are essentially hierarchical, that come out of a hierarchical
mentality, are reflections of a left brain tendency.
ABE : I can see how they can be perceived in a left brain way. But I think
the original idea of those hierarchies was that the hierarchical aspect of it
was simply that awareness or human consciousness, as it came into an
authentic relationship with the different characters or archetypes in these
hierarchies, would grow or expand. You're talking about, not so much a
vertical hierarchy, but more that these things are almost like symbols or
directions to show you that you've come this far, you're aware of this much,
but that there's more.
JEAN B : Well, that's certainly true. It's like entering a forest, or entering
the ocean. You start wherever you start and you go in, and there's all the rest
of it to discover. Is that how you're using it?
ABE : Yes. And that each one of the archetypes has distinct characteristics.
They're recognizable in the sense that if as a man, you’re in Zeus
consciousness, that's a whole modus vivendi that is a very different kind of
experience from, say, Hermes or somebody else. Or, if it was Aphrodite or
Persephone or Demeter, that it's actually a different experience of yourself
and of the world in relationship to that archetype, to that state of
consciousness. How many years ago was it that you published Goddesses in
Everywoman?
JEAN B: It was 1984.
ABE : That book has had an absolutely phenomenal affect. People are still
picking it up for the first time. People are reading it for the tenth time, and
the language that is in that book has become part of culture in a certain
respect. The whole goddess movement has grown and is developing, and
from where you're standing as one of the primary enunciators of that
consciousness, where do you see it at the moment, and where do you think
it's going to be in the future?
JEAN B : Well, it's interesting to track myself as an example, because I
start out as a woman influenced by the women's movement and someone
who knows about Jungian archetypes. That leads me to write something that
is intended primarily as a psychological book, a book that defines
psychological patterns in us, and how the outer world encourages or
discourages the expression of those particular archetypes. At that point it is
still quite psychological. But what then happens with me and especially with
women who read the book is that the spiritual dimension starts to move into
the psychological dimension, which I think is only fitting because psyche
does come from the word "soul," and it really is about the soul level of the
person. But the book ends up being a text for women's spirituality, and I find
myself participating in some of the first women's spirituality conferences
that are being held.
What I did for many women was provide words for an experience that
they were already having. I'm a highly intuitive word making person, and a
lot of women are not. I meet them and discover their realms and it affects
me, I understand now how much more embodied and nonverbal and
energetic are the archetypes than how I described them in Goddesses in
Everywoman. So the realm gets bigger, and yet the labels of the goddesses
are large enough to continue to fit. Then there is the synchronicity of these
times in which goddess literature and goddess archeology starts to emerge,
and it meets a spirituality oriented psyche in thousands of women who are
receptive to what'is literally being dug up, and understanding something
about the nature of divinity having a definite feminine quality that we never
were told about. So there is a movement into that whole realm of goddess
spirituality, which, unlike sky god divinity, isn't monotheistic and isn't all
full of theological premise. And it starts to see divinity by all kinds of
names, which was always traditionally so when there really was goddess
worship. Each goddess in a particular place had her own name, which was
different from the goddess's name somewhere else. And yet everyone really
was worshipping or experiencing the same archetypal entity.
ABE : So a bridge, in fact, has occurred, because I recall you were here in
Toronto a number years ago, and I had the very interesting pleasure of being
at your seminar as one of three men in a hall with about six hundred women,
That was an experience in itself. And I recall at that time wondering, Well,
where is the bridge from this into the spiritual? It seems as if the spiritual, in
fact, has made its move from the other side; the bridge has come from there
into the psychological.
JEAN B : Yes. But it's almost like a landmass starting to come up out of an
ocean; it may come up at one point and look like just a little piece, but in
fact the whole landmass is moving up. It really is all connected under the
water, and we just don't see it initially. And then you see another piece of an
island, still part of that big landmass, and that is, say, a new archeological
find. And then there's another island that comes up that is some kind of
wiccan tradition that has been rediscovered, or a combination of rediscovery
and emergence. Then there is the whole feminist, Christian theology that is
emerging, and there is Carol Gilligan writing about how women have a
different ethical way of looking at things. At first it looks like they're all just
disparate islands of thought, but then, as it emerges more and more, it
becomes obvious that this is the top of a much grander landmass that is
what might be called "the Goddess" coming back up into the culture. So it
isn't so much a bridge, but rather a recognition.
ABE : The whole process continues and it looks as if we haven't seen all
of it yet.
JEAN B : I would certainly agree. It really does seem as if more is
happening, and much of it has to do with the whole connection between
feminism and ecology, seeing the Earth as a sentient being, and acting as if
it had a consciousness. And then there is the affection that is growing in
people towards the Earth. To me, this represents a major shift in collective
consciousness. We so often talk about the collective unconscious, but there
really is a collective consciousness that also makes major shifts.
ABE : If you were to rewrite Goddesses in Everywoman this year, would it
include more of the spiritual aspects?
JEAN B : Well, it would be different in a couple of ways. I think there
would be another archetype that I would have emphasized. I would have
added the wise woman, the crone, Hecate. I didn't before because I was too
young to really know it intimately enough. The other reason is that it wasn't
emerging into the culture quite as much then.
ABE : Say more about Hecate. What's Hecate all about?
JEAN B : Well Hecate was a pre Olympian goddess. She isn't emphasized
very much in Greek mythology, and yet every single one of the major
pathways of development in the Greek goddesses has a maiden form and a
mature form. As it turns out Hecate is the last shared form. So if you're
looking at the schema of the moon divinities, you go from Artemis, who is the
virgin goddess, to Celine to Hecate. And you go from Persephone to Demeter
to Hecate. And you go from a virgin form of Hera to Hera to Hecate. So
Hecate ends up being the wise woman crone version of what is known in all
other cultures as "The Triple Goddess." The wisewoman crone in Western
civilization especially got obliterated with the witch hunts. As the women's
movement women, who have tapped into this archetypal layer, are growing
menopausal and postmenopausal, they're tapping into this archetype, and
they are getting a sense of an initial fear of it, because to claim it is to also
claim the history that went with it, which was that you got burnt at the stake
for having this kind of wisdom of nature, of bodies, of seasons. It's an earth
wisdom that comes from having lived long enough, having suffered enough,
having gotten through enough lives to have a perspective on it.
ABE: So does Hecate have a much more embodied spiritual consciousness
out of her life experience?
JEAN B : Yes, there's much more a sense of the sacred dimension in
everyday life, and a being present at the time of birth. She's the midwife,
she's a presence when life begins and when life ends. There is something
awesome and sacred and archetypal about these major transitions in life that
people know who are present with a receptivity to the experience. They're in
the presence of something that could be called sacred or divine, which
should be presided over with some kind of priest or priestess attitude.
ABE : And this awareness is cutting across many different cultural, ethnic,
and theological boundaries, it seems.
JEAN B : It really does seem to be doing that. What I see it doing is
bringing up what was repressed and dismembered. It's a remembered part of
the human collective psyche that comes up again to be side by side with that
more left brain, linear, objective observer part. So there's a possibility as this
whole archetypal realm becomes much more real to people in any form,
whether it be Jungian psychology or goddess spirituality or Eastern
meditation, that whatever the form it takes, it then carries the other half of
our human nature. I happen to think that Jungian psychology is one of the
most accessible ways to go for people who are intellectually curious and
psychologically minded. There are different strokes for different folks, but if
you are kind of introvertedly oriented and you've been educated in literature
and other things, and you have a questing mind, then to delve into this realm
I'm speaking of from a Jungian perspective is a nonthreatening way in.
ABE : Year after year, I've been watching this phenomenon right here in
Toronto through being at the desk of Dimensions magazine, and watching
how much Jungian awareness is finding its way into many aspects of culture.
One would have to imagine that there must be something that is either
intrinsically valuable and/or intrinsically needed by people at this time in
Carl Jung's work. Twenty five years ago, when I was a younger theosophist
living in England, the joke that used to be made around occult and spiritual
circles was that Carl Jung was the mystic's psychologist. But out in the
mainstream Jung was very peripheralized at that point.
JEAN B: What I saw in San Francisco was that in the sixties Jung became
much more accessible to young people, and this was the psychedelic period,
the antiauthoritarian, anti Viet Nam period. A whole generation of people
had come into contact with this, mostly through the drug culture and
through the altered state of consciousness that rock music alone provided.
And during that same period, because of the Beatles, there was this whole
interest in the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the whole Eastern meditative
movement with people like Richard Alpert moving east and becoming Ram
Dass, etc. So from the sixties onward there was an anti industrial revolution
happening, and Jung fit into that. Jung still doesn't fit into mainstream
psychiatry. Jungian ideas and thoughts are much more pervasive in the
culture generally than they are in the scientific establishment. He is still a
sort of mystical, nonscientific person from their point of view.
ABE : So there's Goddesses in Everywoman, there's Gods in Everyman. You
also wrote a book called The Ring of Power. Could you talk a little about
what you're exploring in that book?
JEAN B : The book is about rejected children, their authoritarian fathers
and dysfunctional families. It came out of getting totally engrossed in
Wagner's Ring of the Nibelangs, and seeing that the characters in that story
are more complex, more human forms of the great divinities that I was
writing about. So Brunhilda is an Athena that has really grown in depth and
conflict as a result of being moved by compassion. Wotan is a Zeus who has
literally come down off the mountain to wander amongst the folks, and who,
in his effort to rule the world, turns out to be a terrible father, and suffers
from the difficulties he has balancing his relationship to his children with
being number one in the universe. So, first of all, it was like getting
immersed in figures that I knew very well from writing about gods and
goddesses. And then, within The Ring Cycle there is this whole deeper
mythology that begins with the notion that there was once a world ash tree
which linked Heaven and Earth and there was harmony and there was a
spring at the bottom.
ABE : Iggdrasil, with the serpent gnawing away at it.
JEAN B : It's not named that in Wagner's Ring. He calls it the world ash
tree. And a figure that is like his version of Wotan comes and tears a branch
off the tree in order to make the spear with which he will rule by law. It's
right on the shaft of the spear, the contracts and treaties that will bring
order to the world. When he takes that branch off the tree, the tree withers
and dies, and the spring dries up. It's a whole commentary on the cost of the
attempt to rule the world with law. Anyway, that's just one glimmer of it.
And because I was just captivated by the music and the message, I began to
want to write a small book on this. Well the trouble was that I can't write a
little small book. [laughter] It emerged as a much more profound book than
I had intended.
ABE : Do you have anything to say about "following your bliss' and
psychological health?
JEAN B : Well, I think the healthiest people do follow their bliss. It sounds
too light sided, just "follow your bliss," but if you follow your bliss there is a
sense of deep meaning in what you do, and it also means that you have this
sense that you are living the life that you are meant to, that you're doing
what you came for. It may take you through real depth and difficulties, it
might estrange you from other people. So it's not all sweetness and light to
"follow your bliss." If you're doing what you love, even if it's hard to do,
there's a joy that comes from engaging it, and I think that psychological
health does not have to do with being well adjusted in the world so much as
it has to do with living from authentic depths.
ABE : One of the other things that Was been widely discussed in new age
and parallel circles is the emergence of a spiritual Brotherhood. I'm hearing
that from so many different men now, the desire to bring together
heterosexual men who are aware of what women have been going through
for the last twenty years, have gone through their own stuff with that, and
are now at a place where they feel that they can positively and in a very
yang sort of way interact with that. I'm very happy to see that emerging and
I think that's going to be a very large part of what the nineties are going to
be about. I hope the dance is actually going to begin now, in that sense.
JEAN B : Oh, I think it will. And it's time for the fathers and mothers to
exit and leave it to the sons and daughters. It's really a different archetype
for culture when it's brothers and sisters, or sons and daughters, rather than
mothers and fathers. That seems to be what's happening.
