"The discussion of the sexual problem is only a somewhat crude prelude to a far deeper question, and that is the question of the psychological relationship between the sexes. In comparison with this the other pales into insignificance, and with it we enter the real domain of woman. Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest.’” - C.G. Jung
This article is an exploration into the Jungian principle of Eros. It is my experience that we live in a time in which it is more socially acceptable for women to express their masculine energy and masculine attitudes than it is to express feminine energy. At the other end of the spectrum, pop culture is inundated with women who perform almost nude on stage to family audiences. These same women are promoted by the media as role models for children. The world is currently a sad state of affairs for the Divine Feminine.
As a result of this atmosphere, a need arose within me to rediscover my personal relationship to the feminine principle. By some act of grace I was led to study the writings of remarkable women like Mary Esther Harding, Marie-Louise von Franz, and Barbara Hannah, first generation Jungian analysts and direct students of Carl Jung, who seemed to know exactly the tug of war I was experiencing inside myself.
I did not feel I could find fulfillment as a housewife, yet neither could I support so called feminists who wanted to destroy the archetype of the housewife altogether, and men along with it, and who considered themselves to be interchangeable with men. The writings of these brilliant women held the keys to the alchemy I needed, to transforming the worst of both principles- distortions in Eros through misuse of power, as well as transforming the animus (masculine energy) of woman from 'possessing demon' into a bridge to the divine Self.
I will highlight some of Harding's deepest insights into the Eros principle along with the quotations which most rang true for me. The world needs a new archetype of woman. We cannot be what we were, as in the Middle Ages with undeveloped minds and aspirations, limited to home and hearth, nor yet can we continue to be what we are- either too polarized in our masculine energy or dancing nude on stage.
"Thus, as woman has evolved and become more aware of herself as a separate entity -an ego- a conflict has arisen within her psyche between the individual values which she has attained and the ancient, collective, feminine trends - and conflict is the beginning of consciousness."-M.E. Harding
Over the course of woman's necessary evolution of refining and evolving our masculine energy, we have unwittingly become possessed by it. The result of this possession is the birth of destructive social movements like third wave feminism, which proclaims masculinity to be toxic while at the same time encouraging increased masculinity in women. This form of feminism is not only anti-man, it is anti-woman and anti-human. When women are possessed by their masculine energy in this way, the Divine Feminine is silenced and the Divine masculine is assaulted. This is a foundational teaching in Jungian psychology that I have been studying over the past two years.
To heal themselves and the world, women need to rediscover and reassimilate the Eros principle, and bring the pendulum swing back towards balance.
Part 1: The Misuse of Eros
Eros is feminine power. And like all power it may be used for either good or evil, depending upon the maturity level and the state of consciousness of each individual woman.
“In nature the feminine principle, or Goddess, shows itself as blind force, fecund and cruel, creating, cherishing, and destroying. ‘It is the female of the species, more deadly than the male,’ fierce in its loves as in its hate.
This is the female principle in its daemonic [instinctual] form. The Chinese call it Yin, the shadowy power of the female symbolized by the tiger gliding stealthily through the grass, waiting to leap upon its prey with claws and fangs, yet looking all the while sleek, gentle, and catlike, making one almost forget its ferocity.
This feminine power was named Eros by the Greeks, it signifies relatedness rather than love, for in the idea of Eros, negative, or hate, is comprised as well as positive, or love.” -M.E. Harding p34
It is only through awareness and the use of will that this power may be guided in service to the highest Good. Just like in physics and the laws of thermodynamics, energy tends toward chaos and disorder over time when given no intervention. An ice cube, for example, will melt unless you intervene and place it in freezing temperature. So it is with the feminine instinct.
“Feminine instinctiveness is not necessarily destructive. If it is made to serve the ends of human love and cultural development, it is a force of great value. It is not evil in itself; but neither is it good in itself. It is energy, which can be used for either good or evil. Energy, if left to itself, produces only nonhuman effects. It always runs downhill, it never builds up. Human intervention is needed to convert energy into work through which something of value can be achieved. So when a woman gives herself over to the flow of this instinctive energy, neither love nor psychological relationship will be the outcome.” -M.E. Harding p123
Woman cannot give herself over completely to this instinct and yet, neither can she completely lose touch with it without her inner world becoming dry, like a desert. Throughout a woman’s life, there is a pendulum which swings between feminine instinctual living and the refinement of her masculine energy. The right balance must be achieved or there is suffering, for both the individual and the world. Woman’s capacity for attraction, her ability to overpower rational thought and action, has been both a blessing and a curse throughout history and has brought both creation and destruction, success and ruin. And as women evolve and mature, we go through different phases of relationship to this energy.
“Women are a magical force. They surround themselves with an emotional tension stronger than the rationality of men. Woman is a very, very strong being, magical. That is why, I am afraid of women.” Carl Jung (from an interview in 1941)
Just as any immature or natural creature uses its strengths toward its own advantage, Eros power is sometimes exploited by women. But with this comes extreme danger for women as a whole.
From the year 1400 to 1775, for example, the world experienced a Great Age of Witch hunts where roughly 50,000 women were tortured and executed in Europe alone.
“The ambivalent and potent character of the feminine principle is an ever-present psychological reality to men. To them women seemingly partake of its daemonic [instinctive] power, though many men are unaware of this fact. But the almost universal fear that men have of falling under the power or fascination of a woman and the attraction that this bondage has for them are evidence that the effect a woman produces on a man is not infrequently daemonic in character.” -M.E. Harding p 34
Man experiences Eros through his feminine soul (the Anima) via the unconscious. It creeps up on him from his inner blind spot. And because it is unconscious, it is most often underdeveloped and primitive. A dangerous state for such a deadly force! Imagine a raw, instinctual woman residing in the unconscious of every man! That is the Anima. It should therefore be no surprise that a measure of fear is woven into the projection of man’s Anima onto outer woman. And yet for all this fear, the human woman is actually the conscious mediating factor for this force. She may confront it head on with clarity, as opposed to men, who must deal with it approaching them from behind, so to speak.
"It is the primitive, feminine element in woman which catches the projection of the men’s Anima in actual life."-M.E. Harding
Even when not consciously used for personal gains in power, think of how many fairytales and myths outline the collective experience of the common woman marrying the prince or king. That is precisely the power of Eros, to turn a common woman into a Queen, to attract power, fame, and fortune solely through the merit of her existence, whereas men in general must work for their successes.
The women who get stuck in the phase of exploiting Eros power (either consciously or unconsciously) are what Carl Jung calls “Anima women.”
These women are everywhere in pop culture. But to give an 'every day' example of this type, I once watched a reel on social media from a wealthy, attractive California woman asking the question, “What are you wearing to the PTA meeting?” The video showed her strutting out the front door wearing a mid-drift designer top and skin-tight jeans with heels. The female form is a very effective outlet for Eros power. The point of her video was to show how hot she looked… on the way to a parent-teacher conference. To discuss the well-being of her children! With teachers and other parents. This is a destructive use of feminine power. This woman clearly valued her own negative ego desire for attention over the welfare of her children and the values of community. There are so many opportunities in life to express sexuality through dress, so many circumstances in which it really doesn’t matter, but when an event is centered on children and family, it only produces harm to the group and creates division.
“Woman’s natural capacity to attract men’s anima [soul] projection gives her an importance and power which are in a certain sense fictitious, for she has done nothing to merit them. They depend solely on the man’s illusion.It is like a fortune put into her hands for which she has not had to work.
To sacrifice this power requires real devotion to a purpose or value which is superior to her own ego [...]
A value which is to redeem us must have the power to release within us energies superior to those wielded by either sexuality or the ego.” -M.E. Harding
For example, dedication to the right spiritual path may serve to transcend the negative ego and transform a woman's Eros into a higher sphere of operation.
“To be related to the Eros principle means to be oriented to that which transcends personal aims and ambitions, it means gaining relation to a nonpersonal value, just as becoming related to the Logos means acquiring relation to a nonpersonal truth. Submission to either principle, in fact, implies that one is redeemed from a personal or ego orientation and from the desire for personal power and gives one’s allegiance to that which is beyond the personal. It is this that is the [spiritual] attitude.” -M.E. Harding
But rather than connect to Eros for a holy purpose, the Anima woman calculates her use of Eros in order to exploit man’s affection- by reflecting his inner feminine soul. She compresses her sexuality into the service of her ego.
By suppressing her individuality and reflecting the man’s expectations, she is able to hook the projection of his soul so that he believes himself in love. But of course, it is only the love of an illusion because she is only acting the part. There can be no real love based on illusion. Unless both parties are authentic, neither the love nor the relationship can be real. These are the circumstances which cause men to become so badly burned that they swear off women as a whole. They sense that a spiritual crime has been committed against them. But just as a side note on victimhood... “If we study the horoscopes of a murderer and his victim, we find that the victim has murdered himself.” -C.G. Jung Conversations p47.
In other words, on the level of fate, or the unconscious, both parties agree to the crime.
“As the cross made Christ suffer, so the load of our unconscious makes us suffer. And don't say that somebody else has nailed you onto the cross; you put yourself there, you are always doing your level best to get onto it; if you live properly you must surely come to it, and you have to learn to cope with the fact. This is exactly like the early Christian belief that redemption was in the cross, that everybody had to carry his cross and so on. That old-fashioned idea is full of meaning when given the right interpretation.” -Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, pg 1223
This particular blindness in man, his inability to detect falsehood in woman, is due to a lack of development of his own inner relation to Eros. Only when he develops this relation will he be able to discern the true from the false in women's intentions toward him. Women on the other hand, usually have no difficulty in spotting these types of false women in relationships.
"Concerning this Jung says that 'man will be forced to develop his feminine side, to open his eyes to the psyche and to Eros. It is a task he cannot avoid, unless he prefers to go trailing after woman in a hopelessly boyish fashion, worshipping from afar but always in danger of being stowed away in her pocket.' But the man who tries to become a "great lover" or to establish himself in the world of men through his feelings will be hopelessly lost. He becomes just a phenomenon, not a man at all.
In D. H. Lawrence's “Lady Chatterley's Lover” the hero is of this type; because of the blows life has dealt him, he has withdrawn from the world and hidden himself in a lowly position. He tries to make a new life based entirely on feeling values, but he is quite unable to establish any relation to the woman other than a sexual one, for he cannot uphold the masculine end of the relationship.“ -M.E. Harding
Woman, Sex, and Eros
One way in which women harm their relation to the Eros principle is through meaningless sex. Much of this has to do with the creational potential of becoming pregnant.
"In every act of sexual intercourse, the woman implicitly accepts her role as servant in the Temple of Life. For her all may not be finished when the night is over. For the night may be to her but the beginning of a long service not to be completed until a child can fend for itself. Every act of intercourse is not, to be sure, followed by pregnancy; but any one may be so followed, contraceptives notwithstanding, and every time a woman gives herself to the man she loves, she asserts again her willingness to pay, not with a gift, but with her body, her energy, even with her life, for the privilege of participating in that creative moment [...]
Sexuality for a woman is more closely linked with her feelings; it is more intimately a part of herself than it is for a man. So it follows that separating herself from her own sexuality and treating it as something apart from herself - an unimportant action indulged in for the stimulus and pleasure of the moment only - results in a hardness which is peculiarly destructive to the woman’s Eros values. For a man to take this attitude is also extremely regrettable, but it does not seem to destroy his specifically masculine values in the same way that it destroys the feminine values of the woman. After a disillusioning experience, a girl may well lose her sense of the sacredness of love. She feels that sexuality does not mean much either way, but since men want it, why refuse, if by acquiescing she gains and holds their attention. Through such an attitude she inevitably loses touch completely with the deeper side of her own nature. Sexuality can never be trivial to a woman who is in touch with the feminine principle, the Eros, within. Only by repressing and disregarding her emotions can she accept the embrace of a man who does not profoundly stir her, and if she does accept it, she no longer functions as a woman, but takes her sexuality in a masculine fashion." -M.E. Harding
When Eros power is used in service of the ego or personality, it produces harm. When a divine force is used in service of the “little me” there is suffering. Mary Esther Harding calls this the “Siren phase” of a woman’s evolution, where she is polarized toward power rather than love.
"Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other." -Carl Jung
Dolly Parton’s song “Jolene” is the perfect example of this:
[Chorus] Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene I'm beggin' of you, please don't take my man Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene Please don't take him just because you can
In the song there is an animal-like identification with instinct in Jolene, unbroken by human awareness, as if she would ruin a family just to flex her power. In this scenario it feels as though the evil is consciously done, but it is very often unconsciously done.
When these women finally do become aware of the destruction left in their wake, or perhaps see the destruction left by some other woman, many decide to adopt an attitude of complete conventionalism because it seems safer. Think of the dutiful but unexpressed housewife, or the successful but lonely businesswoman. But this is not the right answer either because it creates sterility in the inner world. And so the pendulum swings from distorted and misused Eros, to the desertion of Eros.
Part 2: Desertion of Eros
I sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order?
-T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
The problem of the anima-woman is often most encountered in youth, though there are many exceptions. As women mature with age, the pendulum may swing to the opposite pole, namely, a certain sterility of Eros resulting in a more masculine attitude and conventional way of living. Absolute conventionalism is an enemy of Eros- convention implies that certain ideas and modes of behavior are more important than authentic relating, so that by adopting conventionalism as law, one dethrones Eros. The conventional woman is very susceptible to being possessed by her unconscious masculine energy- the Animus.
Much of this is related to the suppression of emotion. Eros requires emotions be faced, that we find a way through emotion in real time, rather than avoiding and stuffing them down into the unconscious.
This requires discernment and balance, however, because once swept up in the flood it is easy to be carried away. To face emotions regardless of their nature without getting swamped is like the release of tension from a thunderstorm which afterwards brings moisture and bloom back to the inner world.
It is important to note that emotions are not the same as feelings and that they should not be dwelled upon. The emotional state is not the ideal state. The ideal state is on the other side of emotion.
*For deeper teachings on emotions and the negative ego, ask me about Empower Thyself or visit www.modernmysteryschoolint.com
“The characteristics which are generally considered womanly: The undiscriminating kindliness, the general or even universal charm, the yea-saying are by no means necessarily evidences of a developed relation to Eros. The Eros is a spiritual or psychological principle, or, in the older term, it is a divinity […] The coming of the flood of instinct resembles the flood through which the goddess Ishtar brought moisture to the land. But in the myth her children all became like the fishes of the sea, truly a cause for lamentation. No woman, however, who has experienced this fructification [of Eros] would wish to go back to a conventional attitude as a means of controlling the dark feminine force which acts through her. She knows from her experience of the power of the goddess that the conventional woman is no true woman, is, indeed, little more than an automaton. But no sooner is a modern woman released from [conventionalism], than she finds herself immersed in instinctive desires and ways of acting which threaten to drown all that is human in her. She cannot go back but must ask herself whether there is any way forward. Can she be saved from drowning in the flood, and yet not lose the values of the life-giving moisture?” -M.E. Harding p124
To find this middle pillar of Eros, in between animal instinct and sterility, Carl Jung speaks of the concept of reclaiming virginity. The psychological and spiritual definition of virginity is not concerned with whether or not a person has had sex, but rather, it is a regaining of purity and wholeness through the contact of God with the soul. And for this, one must find and follow a spiritual value which transcends the ego.
See The Path of the Ritual Master . This path is designed to transcend the negative ego in order to live and manifest from the divine Self.
“Philo of Alexandria, who lived 30 B.C. to 45 A.D. has a teaching on this subject which is very illuminating. He says, ‘For it is fitting God should converse with an undefiled, an untouched and pure nature, with her who in very truth is the Virgin, in fashion very different from ours. For men and the procreation of children makes virgins women. But when God begins to associate with the soul, He brings it to pass that she who was formerly woman becomes Virgin again.’ According to this concept, the hieros gamos, the marriage with God, creates the quality of virginity, it makes the woman one-in-herself. Through such an experience the woman comes into possession of her own masculine soul, which is then no longer projected entirely outside herself into a man who has for her the value of a god, with god-like authority. Thus she becomes complete, whole.” - M.E. Harding p187
Thus the alchemical transformation of the Animus is a gateway to giving Eros back her rightful authority (see The Alchemy of the Animus)
As I mentioned before, we live in interesting times regarding this evolution. When we look back to the state of women beginning around the 12th century, when our current social cycle began according to the Jungian perspective, we see that the masculine energy of woman was undeveloped. Women were less concerned with intellectual and spiritual pursuits and more concerned with the family and living close to the earth. She was maid, wife, or mother, always the counterpart of man. But to reach psychological maturity, her masculine qualities needed to surface in order to evolve. Today, the third wave feminist movement seems to say that the masculine woman is the true woman. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. We are simply at the apex of a particular phase in our development, one in which our masculine energy has become ultra-highlighted. As a result of this focused attention, we may now re-embrace our feminine values from a new place. Women may become reacquainted with Eros without losing the evolution of our masculine/logos qualities. The result is a new feminine archetype, one that is more whole, more one-in-herself, and one which ultimately has the capacity for a deeper relationship to man.
The following excerpt from M. Esther Harding expresses this more clearly:
“If we look back over the last hundred years, we can clearly discern that the aim of womanhood, as shown in the feminist movement, has been to reach the goal of a more conscious relationship between the sexes. The individual women concerned may not have realized this, but the historic sequence betrays the unrecognized aim. The way of woman is always to go by indirect routes to her goal [being so conditioned by biology]. You will rarely discover what a woman’s objective is by asking her a direct question, nor yet by observing what she attempts first and deducing her intentions from that, for she is herself often unconscious of her real aim. She will begin to look for a spool of thread and end by cleaning the whole house. She may have been quite unaware that it was her intention to houseclean, but on further investigation its obvious that preparations have been quietly going forward for some time for a spring cleaning, although she was unaware of it herself […]
Women do not really want complete independence of men in any sense which implies isolation. What woman really want is relationship, and for that a certain separation is necessary. There cannot be any real relationship between a dominant and a dependent member of a group, any more than there can be real relationship between masters and their slaves. Further, the independent or individual side of woman’s psyche was so completely neglected that it was incredibly undeveloped and childish. The most complete concentration and devotion were required for a period in order to compensate for the former neglect. In the early days of the feminist movement no woman who was not devoted heart and soul the achievement of independence and education could possibly have made any headway against the enormous weight of public opinion from without and the inertia of custom from within which combined to hold her down in the accustomed grooves of what was right and proper for a woman. When such a view is universally held in a community it comes to have the significance of a divinely instituted order. Women in breaking with custom had also to break with what they had been taught was God’s will for them. Instead of living for herself and her personal satisfactions, this remarkable woman surrendered family, ease, social position, wealth, even love and marriage to her urgent need to work in the world and make herself a useful and valuable member of society.
But woman, as always, was then and still is unconscious of her true aim. She thought she wanted independence and a career. This was a subsidiary though a very necessary phase in the movement toward her real goal, namely the creation of the possibility of psychic, or psychological, relation to man.
If woman herself has not understood her real goal, is it any wonder that her aim has been misunderstood? A few discriminating men have encouraged her, because they have understood, perhaps better than she did herself, what her goal really was. Outstanding among such farsighted men was Carl Jung. He has repeatedly reminded us that man and woman together make up humanity, that if woman remains in a state of primitive unconsciousness suitable to the days of medieval Europe, man alone cannot progress very far in the quest for greater consciousness. The woman’s problem is her problem, yes! But it is also a problem which concerns humanity. If she does not solve her problem, mankind is held back to her level of unconsciousness.” -M.E. Harding
"Man and woman together make up humanity." The world needs women to re-embrace the feminine principle of Eros. According to where on the pendulum a woman falls, she has a responsibility to cultivate and refine her relationship to the Eros principle and adjust where necessary.
For some, this means first becoming aware of the ways in which one is possessed by masculine energy in order to nurture the connection to instinct and Eros (see The Alchemy of the Animus). But for other women, perhaps the first step is in noticing the misuse of Eros power. Both routes are ultimately necessary for all women. We must allow instinct to express, while maintaining a foothold in reason. We must nurture and develop our intellect and ability to act in the world while at the same time not allowing ourselves to become possessed by the Animus, nor allow Eros to become dethroned.
“If a woman seeks for consciousness by this route, she will find a major difficulty to be overcome. The instinct of things which spontaneously occur to her to do [instinctively] may not correspond to her own idea of herself, or to the attitude toward life that she has consciously taken. A conflict will then invariably arise within her and, if she is not to repress this instinctual side once more, she will find it essential to change her attitude; she may even be compelled to admit that she has been mistaken in her estimate of herself – an admission no one likes to make." -M.E. Harding
The initial re-opening of the gates to Eros for women who have become rigid with conventionalism and the suppression of emotion can at first be overwhelming, as all these emotions will come rushing to the surface. I recommend a strong spiritual foundation such as I have found before going down this path. Performing my daily rituals and receiving metaphysical healing were essential to my well-being throughout my studies.
There is a force which moves through woman that is beyond her ego, and yet it is not exactly her Self either. It is nature and the force of life. We should not be afraid to allow this force expression in our lives for fear of regression. In the words of M. Esther Harding:
"When Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden because of their new consciousness of good and evil born from eating of the tree of knowledge, an angel with a fiery sword was placed before the gate to prevent their going back. That sword is still there, and a woman who has achieved a certain degree of consciousness cannot go back to the stage of naive anima woman [...] If she is to get in a position of balance through a wider consciousness of both sides of her nature, she must let her instinct - for instance, the instinct to play a part – show itself, while, at the same time she reminds herself continuously, “this is not all.” A remarkable expression of this double need occurred once in a woman’s dream. The dream said to her, “let us live strongly and devotedly whatever comes, and afterwords, let us analyze it.” By this means she can become aware of the deeper workings of instinct within herself, and yet not lose touch with her conscious attitude [...] By a kind of afterthought, she is enabled to discern, through viewing her actions objectively, what it was that life wanted of her. Psychological development takes place when she looks at herself in this objective way and so comes to understand the deeper aspects of her own nature and incorporates them consciously into the totality of her character and attitude. This is by no means an easy thing to do, for it makes the woman herself, her own ‘animal of experiment.’ However, if she allows these quite instinctual things to take their course she may find some thing functioning within her which is intrinsic to her, and yet is not her personal ego. The second century gnostics had a text in their books which bears on this way of experiencing oneself:
“Learn whence is sorrow and joy, and love and hate, and waking though one would not, and sleeping though one would not, and getting angry though one would not, and falling in love though one would not. And if thou shouldst closely investigate these things, thou wilt find Him in thyself, one and many, just as the atom; thus finding from thyself a way out of thyself."
Women require both an inner path of initiation to the Eros principle and an outer path of initiation. There are certain inner experiences which only women may undergo, and when regarded through the lens of Hermetics, Alchemy, Jungian psychology, and Kabbalah she may undertake the Heroine's Journey, as distinct from the Hero's Journey. The hero's journey is an outer world battle, of symbolically slaying the dragon and saving the town. It is a masculine journey. According to Marie-Louise von Franz, the Heroine's journey is an inner battle, of sorting the healthy from the rotten seeds within. The way a woman moves through her inner world experiences become analogous to slaying the dragon in the outer world, and this connects her to the Eros principle.
"And each woman who sacrifices her personal and egotistic grasp on the emoluments which the life principle can bring her and submits herself to the movement of life within, the power and significance of the Eros principle itself, or as one might say, the power of the moon goddess, shines forth more clearly. When she renounces her personal claims, the energy or libido formally bound up with the determination to get her own way, flows into the feminine truths for which she made her sacrifice. This as Meister Eckhart put it, is God is born anew within the soul, the Eros is raised in this particular woman’s heart to a place above her personal desires.
From this experience is born the power to love another. Before she has undergone such an initiation, her love is no more than desire. She cannot even see the difference between I love you and I want you to love me; cannot differentiate between I love you and I want the satisfaction you can bring me. But when she has passed through an inner experience analogous to the ancient sacred prostitution in the temple, the elements of desirousness and possessiveness have been given up, transmuted through the appreciation that her sexuality, her instinct, are expressions of a divine life force whose experience is of inestimable value, apart from their fulfillment on the human plane." -M.E. Harding
References
1. Harding, M. E. (1990). Woman’s Mysteries: Ancient and modern. Shambhala.
2. Harding, M. E. (1990). The Way of All Women. Shambhala.