The Underground Fem

The Kali-like feminine rising against fascism + a book group

“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.”

-Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson

A giant idol of the goddess Kali in Kathmandu, Nepal. (2015, photographer unknown.)

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Announcing: My first Substack book group begins April 12th on the extraordinary Dancing in the Flames. Details below.

Plus: our next Sunday gathering and some much-needed soul-tending is on March 2nd at 10am PST. I hope you’ll join us. Register here.

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Months before WWI erupted, Jung began an inner dialogue with his feminine soul. Of course, he didn’t know of the violence that was coming, but he’d had visions that deeply unsettled him. Something was happening and he knew he needed to return to his soul to reground. There was a specific female figure whom he encountered in his unconscious and called Salome. At first, she terrified him. He viewed her as directly connected to the Hindu goddess Kali, and he wanted her to go away: “I dread you, you beast." But over time, he changed his mind. He built a relationship with her, and they both transformed as a result. She was, he came to understand, his Eros, his lifeforce, and so much more.

Two decades later, as Nazi Germay was on the ascent, Jung spoke at length about the recent visions of Christiana Morgan, a former analysand. What Jung saw in Morgan’s visions was a parallel to what he’d experienced himself in his encounter with the unconscious. Jungian Analyst Claire Douglas, and author of a biography on Christiana Morgan, explained the connection that Jung saw between the horrifying violence in the outer world and Morgan’s visions.

Part of Jung's quest was to bring the dark aspect of the rejected feminine up into the light and examine its return. This gave a special urgency to his interpretation of Morgan's visions, as he found a collective link between the hypomanic intensity of what surged up in Morgan and “the outburst of volcanic forces . . . the uprush . . . of the collective unconscious in Germany[.]” …Hitler, instead of raising the feminine into light and consciousness, plunged Germany and the rest of Europe into the darkest nightmare corners of the archetypal Negative Feminine's lair. A sense of awe as well as fear descends upon the contemporary reader as Jung emphasizes the time moment of the Visions Seminar. He tries to find psychological meaning in his and the group's feelings about the return of the repressed—whether in the tie of the powerful and often negative feminine of Morgan's sometimes cataclysmic visions or in the rise of National Socialism as it was actually happening in Germany.¹

I’ve spent countless hours studying this period of history within Jung’s psychology and its relationship to the feminine, as well as Christiana Morgan’s visions and history, but I didn’t make the connection to my own experience until recently.

Alongside the descent into war and the descent of democracy over the last year and a half, I have noticed an uptick in images of the feminine in my dreams—and the dreams of students and clients. I noticed the same in the lead-up to the 2016 election. At the time, I spoke to my analyst about countless grief-stricken, raging female figures, dreams that I interpreted then as a kind of arrival: She is coming, I believed. She will win. She is emerging. We will not be kept down. White supremacist patriarchy is falling; it will fall. We will finally see a female president. We will finally experience enduring progress out of the lopsided insanity of patriarchy.

I couldn’t tolerate seeing the alternative.

I now understand that She is here as a counterbalance. It was the same during WWI and WWII. She is arising in the unconscious because she is so profoundly disregarded in the conscious realm. She is visible in our dreams as a psychological compensation and as medicine: to hold our feet fast to the earth and nourish our souls. You are not alone, I have felt Her saying. We have been here before. Creation is co-occurrent with destruction.

As we find ways to deepen our lived experience and our relationships with our bodies, our loved ones, our neighbors, with nature, and with the deep unconscious, She is here. Even if few of us can put it into words, the feminine is present in the midst of all of it, regardless of our individual sex or gender. She is an antidote to the reigning power outside. She is something we crave.

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In her essay, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, Audre Lorde tells us of the importance of connecting with this aspect inside ourselves, psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, and physically. Speaking about what she terms “the erotic,” Lorde speaks to a female—or feminine—source of power that is “firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.”

The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony.

In words so similar to Jung’s discovery of Salome and her connection to Kali, Lorde speaks of the erotic too as “lifeforce,” and one which terrifies the status quo. It does not stay in the box it is placed in, nor does it behave exactly as society would expect and desire. It is, again, like Kali and Salome, the fuel for individuation and change. It is opposite to the reigning systems in control all over the world, and so it is critical that we hold it close.

[As] we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.

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There is a particular book—nearly thirty years old—that I have returned to recently again, pulled more by psyche than conscious understanding. I first encountered this book myself, probably fifteen years ago. Six years ago, in an essay I wrote about Jung’s encounter with Salome, I quoted it at length.

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.

Most recently, I had one of the most numinous experiences of my life in relation to this book. It’s a story that I may share with paid subscribers soon—it’s too personal to place on the World Wide Web. But the result is the feeling that this material wants to be seen. It is time to come back to this book and its authors; it is time for us to discuss what Jung and Morgan were seeing in the unconscious and what I believe we’re seeing again.

I hope you’ll join me for my first book group on Substack to read: Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness by Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson.

Dancing in the Flames is a book that I believe will be a balm for the soul and an antidote to the sickness taking root in our world right now. Jung saw the need to counterbalance militarism and violence with an increased awareness of the repressed feminine within. Audre Lorde had the same clear insight. So did/do the brilliant authors Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson.

Announcing a “Slow Read” of Dancing in the Flames

Book: Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness by Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson.

Dates: April 12 through May 25 — six weeks.

Join: All paid subscribers to Self & Society will automatically receive:

1. Reading schedule (approximately 40 pages each week).

2. Weekly chapter summaries and space for written discussion & questions.

3. Two 90-minute sessions online to meet and discuss the chapters we’ve read.

4. An author conversation with Elinor Dickson (!✨✨✨!) at the conclusion

If you think you might like to join us for this and you’re already a paid subscriber, put these dates in your calendar and make sure you get a copy of the book! Request a copy from your favorite local bookstore, find it at the library, or order one from bookshop.org.

If you’re not yet a paid subscriber and would like to participate, you can upgrade to join us. I’ll share the reading schedule and meeting times soon.

*If you’d like to participate but have recently lost work due to the cruel funding/job cuts, or if you are otherwise financially unable to participate as a paid subscriber, send me a note, and I’ll get you set up.

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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. Claire Douglas, introduction to The Vision Seminars, pg. xxix