The feminine brings life out of darkness. Life is conceived deep within the goddess Gaia. But is isn’t just her power to give birth. She has the power to draw in the masculine who plants the seeds that will gestate and then flourish when finally emerging from the darkness into the light.
A man is drawn in like a moth drawn to a solitary light in the darkness. The goddess swallows the essence of a man, not the man himself. But, it isn’t all mythology. In this mortal world, an ordinary man and an ordinary woman become god and goddess for a moment to perform the same miracle. What draws the ordinary mand and woman together is an unconscious fascination with the other. At least, that is the hope. There are too many assaults on mortal women by men and women who are too damaged to see the goddess within every woman.
There is a fine line between active imagination and acting out unconscious desires. Assaults on others are all about the acting out. The ego gets confused and contaminated with the shadowy world of the unconscious. With active imagination, there is safety for both self and other as the unconscious gets expressed as art, whether that art be in photographs such as Lanie’s above, paintings such as those from the Renaissance, sculptures such as those by Rodin, dance and theatre, or in poems and stories.
Active imagination can bring out the best about who we are as individuals and as a society. I use the word “can” as it isn’t always the case. The darkness of who we are deep within ourselves, or as a culture is also expressed via active imagination. However, since the expression of our personal and collective shadow is contained within various art forms, they are contained safely.
We need to see the truth of who we are deep within, both the shadow self and the light self – self as a god or goddess – self as a demon.