Recovering the Feminine in Consciousness. A Story for All Genders.

Jung's encounter with Salome, the woman within, is a collective antidote

“The acceptance of femininity leads to completion.”

-Carl Jung, The Red Book

Announcing a Men’s Discussion Group during our Dancing in the Flames slow read | May 4th at 10 am PDT | Learn more + register here.

Speaking of, we start with the first chapter of Dancing in the Flames on April 12th! I’ll send one post each week—one chapter a week— and we’ll meet for two 90-minute gatherings. All paid subscribers are welcome to participate. Make sure to order the book from bookshop.org or your local bookstore to join us! Learn more + register here.

Salome, Alfred Janes; Cyfarthfa Castle Museum & Art Gallery

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The following is an essay I wrote in 2019 and mentioned in a post last month, edited and abridged here in advance of our slow read. If the art is alarming, imagine how Jung felt when he encountered Salome in his unconscious!

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One of Carl Jung’s great teachers was a young woman called Salome. She was the teenage stepdaughter (and niece) of King Herod, a dancer who’s been blamed for centuries for beheading John the Baptist.¹ Salome wasn’t named directly in the Bible, though poets, playwrights, and artists have since turned her into a seductive, blood-thirsty villain. (Never mind that it was the King himself who ordered the killing.)

Of course, separated by two thousand years, Jung didn’t meet Salome in waking life. Instead, he discovered this woman, disheveled and disfigured by history, in the depths of his own psyche and withdrew in horror.

“Let me be,” he asserted when they first met. “I dread you, you beast.”²

Aubrey Beardsley's art for Oscar Wilde’s Salome

But in 1913, in his “confrontation with the unconscious,” Jung had committed to learning whatever he could from his inner life, no matter how unsettling. So after many nights of his descent, he began speaking with Salome, and he soon accepted her. He began to experience her presence not as he had once understood the feminine, as pure and placid, but more as Kali, the dark goddess of Hindu mythology. This “many armed bloody Goddess—it is Salome desperately wringing her hands.”³ It was through being witnessed that Salome herself began to transform. And as Jung began to love her, he discovered that she was, also, him. She was that which provided him vibrance and joy, the capacity to feel, to create art, to deeply connect, and to trust: “[she] takes hold of me, she is my own soul.”

But Salome had not descended from on high, surrounded by golden light; long neglected and ignored, mocked and feared, she herself carried a shadow.

Salome and the Apparition of the Baptist’s Head, watercolor by Gustave Moreau, 1876

In Christian, colonial, patriarchal consciousness, the once-whole image of the feminine was split into “good” and “bad.” There is the Mother (good) and then Lilith, the dark temptation, the whore, associated with the Devil and evil. Only one aspect of the feminine and, therefore, women is allowed: light, not dark; chaste, not sexual; socially appropriate, never out-of-line; “civilized,” not “savage.”

Jung came to understand the dangers of this split of the feminine through his encounters with the seemingly dangerous figure of Salome. It was primarily through this relationship that Jung learned about what patriarchy had done to women—and men. Everyone had been taught to climb vertically into hierarchies of power instead of relating horizontally. They’d been taught about the importance of thinking while dismissing the value of feeling. They’d been taught control and conformity instead of the natural vibrancy of spontaneity and individuality.

All people had been separated from nature, from each other, and from the basic principle of Eros: Love.

Nearly a century after Jung’s initial encounter with Salome, Jungian analyst Marion Woodman and Jungian psychologist Elinor Dickson reflected on the danger of this split of the feminine in their book Dancing in the Flames: the Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness. Informed by Jung’s experience, they offer direction:

The chaos that we fear is the very thing that can free us. To refuse to enter into Kali’s dance of creation and destruction is to get stuck in a one-sided view of reality that can bring anarchy—destruction without creation. Armed with a new understanding of the very nature of reality itself, we may now be able to embrace the Goddess energy that is necessary if we are to move forward in our evolution.⁴

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In The Red Book—the record of Jung’s journey into the unconscious—there is a section titled “Castle in the Forest” in which Jung approaches a castle door in the dark of night to request a place to sleep. Once inside and settling in for the night, Jung begins to feel haunted by the presence of the owner’s maiden daughter. At this stage in his inner journey, the feminine was no longer scary to him, but now she struck Jung as something even worse: banal. Rather than feel fear, this vision felt almost too mundane and novelistic to be worthy of his attention. Yet the lonely young woman continued to demand more from him than his jeering dismissal: “You wretch, how can you doubt that I am real?”

Here was a rather ordinary young woman, isolated to the brink of insanity, begging Jung to take her seriously. She was a captive in the home of her father, “an old man petrified in his books, protecting a costly treasure” (her) “and enviously hiding it from all the world.”⁵

Finally, determined to acknowledge what arose from within, Jung drags his ego as if out of a drunken state to see this young woman not as a character in a dull soap opera drama but as someone truly worthy of his empathy. When he does greet her, she replies with relief: “Finally, finally a word from a human mouth.”⁶ She then disappears. True acknowledgment was all she’d needed. A red rose appears, declaring her as Salome in another form.

It was from these encounters that Jung’s true creative work was born.

Jung recognized that he had spent the first half of his life climbing the ladder of patriarchal achievement. He was no longer enthralled by his previous desire for the accolades of academia and the prestige of decorated colleagues. He retired from celebrated positions and resigned from boards. These accomplishments and goals held no interest for his soul. He discovered that she was crazed from neglect and demanding a wholly different form of attention. After Jung’s life had lost meaning and his depression had sunk him into a state of near-psychosis, he was forced to witness this neglect head-on.

Alongside the outbreak of WWI and the unraveling of Europe, he was forced to acknowledge too that the sudden assault of war on the world was in a tightly woven relationship to his own outbreak of suffering; it was the result, in fact, of the same root, the same split, the same absence of something precious to life that had been hidden away and forgotten.

The state of the world and the state of Jung’s psyche were one and the same. Jung had to descend into his own chaos to seek the restoration of both. He had to engage with the neglect and the split of his own inner feminine. He discovered that She is the shadow of modern civilization. And that She is, therefore, also the road to wholeness found within the Self.

Rather than stay where he was, at the top of society as a wealthy, respected Western male, grasping for wisps of heady meaning, he made the descent towards his unconscious and his feminine soul. He understood that climbing upwards could no longer be the goal. In the end, he found the elixir, the antidote to an entirely out-of-balance dominant culture.

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Following his encounter with the banal maiden, Jung beseeches men like himself in a remarkable passage:

It is bitter for the most masculine man to accept his femininity, since it appears ridiculous to him, powerless and tawdry.... You are abandoned without mercy to woman so long as you cannot fend off mockery with all your masculinity. It is good for you once to put on women’s clothes: people will laugh at you, but through becoming a woman you attain freedom from women and their tyranny. The acceptance of femininity leads to completion.⁷

“The acceptance of femininity leads to completion” because of the patriarchal soup in which we all swim. To engage directly with this energy, we are released from the tyranny of our projections and our obsessions with those outside our own skin.

Of course, women in the world have always been separate beings, people living their own lives, sorting through their own paths, but forced to hold the projections of others within a system that deems “the feminine” as less than. This is true for queer and trans people too. And for cis-men who do not express themselves in the ways that are demanded by the dominant culture of performative, power-obsessed masculinity. These forced projections are compounded by racial identities other than Whiteness: whatever is further from the White-holy-Christian-Mother ideal will make acceptance within dominant culture that much more complex.

As offspring of patriarchy and the greed-driven, racially divisive, and institutional violence that patriarchy engenders, each of us finds ourselves at some point longing for the experience of a life and a planet in balance. We search, separately, isolated, for the experience of embodiment, connection, and intimacy with ourselves, with an Other, with nature, and with the imaginal world. We long to experience vibrancy with our physical senses and internally in dreams, visions, revelations, and insight. It is only through a restored relationship to the feminine soul, long ago dumped and discarded, that we can accomplish these tectonic shifts in culture and lived experience. This is the revolutionary notion of Jung’s psychology. It is an antidote to the life-threatening patriarchal world that takes everything for granted and views life not as circular, mutually dependent, and mutually enriching, but as fundamentally dangerous, requiring self-protection, dominance, and control.

Nothing thrives under hierarchy and power. Everything thrives under connection: empathy, love, the erotic, embodiment, the sensory, and the sensual. Jung showed us a way to get back there, where we actually belong.

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Coming up in April:

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Our next Sunday gathering is coming up on April 6th at 10 am PDT, during which we throw all the s*^% we’re holding into the alchemical fire for transformation. Learn more + Register here.

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I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. All links can be found here.

1. Also, Salome’s uncle and stepfather.

2. Jung, C. G. (2012). The Red Book: A Reader’s Edition. (S. Shamdasani, Ed.). New York: W.W. Norton, p.175

3. Ibid, p.184

4. Ibid, p. 45

5. Jung, 2012, p. 221

6. Ibid., p. 223

7. Jung, 2012, p.228