A Re-Visioning of Love

Dark Feminine Rising

Ana Mozol

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367179175
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429603112
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In A Re-Visioning of Love: Dark Feminine Rising, Ana Mozol parts the illusory veils of persona as she explores the reality of feminine experiences relating to love, trauma and sexuality in contemporary Western society. Mozol takes us on a personal journey through the three levels of experience, delving into the underworld and the trauma of rape, the middle world and the illusions of romantic love, and the upper world and the masculine spiritual ideals that fracture the feminine soul.

In this multidisciplinary examination of the feminine, Mozol seeks to understand violence against women intrapsychically, interpersonally and within the field of depth psychology. The book begins with Mozol's own experiences with violence and her exploration of the demon lover complex and the stages of breaking this complex after trauma. Combining personal testimony, theoretical reflections, historical analysis, and 20 years of clinical experience, Mozol uses a heuristic approach to explore personal stories, clinical material, dreams and depth analysis as they connect to the female individuation process. We follow Mozol's journey through the middle world and the illusions of romantic love, into the upper world and the complexity of Oscar Wilde's feminine character Salomé who represents the rising dark feminine energy that must be reckoned with for the possibility of love to exist. Accessible yet powerful, Mozol uses her personal story to place the oppression of women within the Jungian context of individuation.

A Re-Visioning of Love: Dark Feminine Rising will be key reading for academics and students of Jungian and post-Jungian studies, psychotherapy, trauma studies, gender studies, women's studies and criminology. It will also be an indispensable resource for Jungian psychotherapists and analytical psychologists in practice and in training. A Re-Visioning of Love, however, is more than a psychological exploration; it is a memoir of the personal and archetypal feminine and as such will appeal to anyone interested in the story of many women today.

1

A MEMOIR OF DESCENT

While I was walking through the deserted aisles of a Vons supermarket in Santa Barbara late one evening, protecting my eyes from the fluorescent lights, I encountered two heavy-set bikers in worn black leather riddled with flags and symbols indecipherable to those outside their circle. Averting my eyes so as not to encourage contact, I caught the briefest piece of their conversation. As they brushed past me, one complained to the other, “Where the hell does someone find the milk around this place?” The words, spoken in angry, frustrated bewilderment, stayed with me, penetrating like an oracle. The contrast between the sound bite and the harshness of their appearance sent me into a burst of uncontrollable laughter, which I held inside until they were safely out of distance and the full impact of their words had sunk in. God, I thought, as insight resonated throughout me, isn’t that the truth—where the hell does a person find the milk around this place? I had been in search of it for the greater portion of my life: the smooth, soothing hills of the eternal breasts flowing in abundance, open to all in need of replenishing, nourishing at the deepest layers of being.

Many years later, just prior to my conscious descent into the underworld of my dreams and symptoms, The Dark Mother came to me in a vision.

Shortly after I go to sleep, I am awakened by a vision. There is a female figure wearing dark, hooded robes at the foot of my bed. She moves closer. My heart races and I am paralyzed with fear. She starts to lean over me. She has a bundle of something in her hands. She is offering me to take it. I see it is golden sheaves of wheat. She carries them like a beloved child. I seem to understand what she is doing and for a moment think her to be my mother.

(Author’s dream journal, August, 1997)

At the time of this vision, I was not acquainted with the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Over the next many years, it would be this myth that held me. Through the myth I found the containment for the intolerable emotions and experiences that I had never been able to integrate or make sense of. I think myth can do this. The archetypal images are capable of holding suffering and emotions too large for any human to bear alone. The myths offer a contained space to reflect within. They can contain these raw emotional elements until enough safety has been established to reintegrate them into the individual. It was this initial vision that brought me to the myth. A fascination soon developed. I identified with Persephone.

For my master’s thesis, I wanted to write on the Demeter-Persephone myth and the mother-daughter relationship. There was a blue moon (a rare occurrence where the moon reaches its fullness twice in the same month) that happened to be in my sign, Libra—my sun and moon are both at home in the sign of Libra. When I heard of the unusual astrological event, it brought back an image from my dreams a few nights earlier. There had been two moons in the same sky. In the dream, I pondered the two silver spheres in absolute awe.

I decided this would be an auspicious time to begin writing. I wanted to begin typing out my initial thoughts at the moment the blue moon became full. The full moon was to enter Libra at 2:39 p.m. Early that afternoon, I sat at the computer, working on other material, waiting. As I waited, I began to feel very sleepy. At about 2:00, a wave of exhaustion swept over me, so strong that my eyes were slamming shut. I fought off the feeling, tried to deny it, but it became stronger. I was determined to make it to 2:39. Then I started to think this was ridiculous. Why not just write a few lines, call it a day, and go lie down? What are a few minutes, anyway, in the course of a lifetime? Still, my ego was very attached to the idea of starting at the perfect moment—but by 2:15, I realized that I was not going to make it. It was as if a force much larger than myself refused me entrance. I wondered whether I was meant to be dreaming at the moment the moon entered its fullest point, and I was fighting the wiser part of my psyche. Holding that thought, I went to lie down and drifted off immediately, my dreams taking me to the depths of my psyche—a place devoid of light.

I am in a dark dungeon. I am disoriented as though spinning out of control and then I stop dead. Nothing moves. Then sounds: primordial screams of terror from the mouths of ancient women. The screams are familiar somehow. They tear through my skin, breaking the boundary of self-protection, penetrating my skin. I fight to adjust my eyes to the dark. My vision comes to me slowly. There is movement all around me, like shadows. Cobwebs encase me and cloud my vision. My arms are immobilized. I struggle with all my will to move, to push the cobwebs from my face. Then everything becomes too clear too fast. There are women all around me being raped and murdered. I see the blood as it spurts from its sacred vessel. The screams grow unbearable, but the silence that follows is worse. The sweet, sticky smiles of nefarious men as they take their pleasure with no concern for the lives of their victims scorch themselves in my being. Things begin to swirl again. Boys become women; women become men. Nothing is sure but the carnage and the blood—so much blood.

(Author’s dream journal, March, 1999)

Waking, I had the strong sense that I was being asked to change the topic I was writing on. This dream, along with a previous one, led me to consider that I was being summoned to a darker journey. Incredibly, I did not see the great depth of the Demeter-Persephone myth as a dark journey. I was that split between the dark and light, the good and the bad. I had been planning to write on the mother-daughter reunion, a theme that exposed my devotion to maintaining my mother’s distorted version of reality. I wrote my thesis on sadomasochism from a depth, archetypal perspective, not thinking it was connected to the myth in any way. I was wrong.

Years later, when I had a better understanding of my own trauma, I was able to see that I had been working on this myth all along. I was in Hades. This was my myth, the archetypal pattern living through me, in me, with me, and it colored all my life decisions. I was catapulted out of my reverie in relation to the myth when I identified the missing piece, simply by asking why. Why was the Demeter-Persephone myth so important to me? Why was its ancient archetypal pattern embedded in the cells of my body? The deeper part of me knew why, but I hadn’t considered that I might be asked to disclose it in the process of writing. I did not feel strong enough.

I was raped. The night that I began to contemplate seriously whether I would include this disclosure in my doctoral dissertation, I had the following dream:

I went to bed around one in the morning and did some visualization exercises, breathing into my heart the image from a previous dream—a large, open meadow of the most magnificent green, endless in its expanse. I drifted off to sleep . . .

I am on a plane. It becomes clear that we are in danger and may crash. I take my seat as we move through an atmosphere racked with turbulence. Steve,¹ my friend, is beside me. I go to put on my seat belt and realize that I don’t have one! I kiss Steve. My attention is gripped by a glimpse of the full moon through the small plane window. What is strangely familiar is that the full moon is at rest beside a body of water right next to the earth in the corner of a garden under a beautiful tree. It is a magnificent sight. I am filled with joy and say to Steve, “Whether we die in the crash or land safely, whether in flesh or spirit, let’s meet under the full moon at the side of the garden.” Fear is replaced with a wave of intense curiosity and the grace of a final destination beyond life or death. It is a rough landing, but we are safe. I am awakened by the acute emotion evoked.

I have the intuition to try something new—to breath the fresh image of the full moon into my body. Vibrations take me over almost immediately and I am rendered powerless with awe. I think, “Well maybe I will try this experiment another night since I need to wake up early tomorrow.” I try to move, but my body is paralyzed. I decide to stay with it and breath the image deeper into my ovaries. The vibrations increase and I am transported into the familiar, but always frightening, psychoidal realm of psychic experience

The same night, closer to morning, I continued dreaming:

I go downstairs into an unfamiliar room. My aunt, my sister, and a few men are watching a movie. It is only after I sit down to join them that I realize that one of the men is George Olsen—the man who raped me when I was young. He is discussing something about penis length with the other men. I am horrified. I feel sick that he is here. I leave the room. Dawn (my sister) comes after me and informs me that George is being inappropriate. I want to go back in and keep an eye on him, but at the same time I don’t want to be anywhere near him! The silence of lucidity washes over me, and I can’t believe that he is HERE on this night when I began my exploration into Persephone and considered for the first time disclosing the rape in my research. I think of the absurd perfection that I must face him NOW. I am considerably calm. I want him out but I fear my family knowing. I worry about the repercussions of a confrontation with him. I walk up the stairs and wander the halls of the house in silent anguish. I find my grandfather in one of the rooms. He sees my torment and asks me why I don’t just march down there and kick him out. I tell him my fears. “What if he gets violent? What if he says horrible lies about me? What if…?” My grandfather cuts me off with his strong voice: “That doesn’t sound like the Ana I know. She would not let anything, especially a few insults, stop her.” Emboldened by my grandfather’s words, I go back downstairs. I push Olsen towards the door, demanding that he leave. I directly announce why: “You must leave because you raped me.” To my surprise, he calls the others and prepares to go without insult, denial, or violence. He takes the time to return my sister’s key so that all ties between us will be severed. As he leaves, he hands me a large green mug, saying, “This is for you in recognition of what has happened. Please accept it as partial reparation for what I have done.” In the mug there is a thick, black liquid and it is bubbling. He leaves. I am glad he is gone. I am left standing alone with the mug of seething darkness steaming between my hands.

(Author’s dream journal, July, 2003)

I knew upon waking that my psyche was inviting me to come forward with my story, my truth.

In my first dream, the full moon is at rest beside a body of water right next to the earth in the corner of a garden under a beautiful tree. The image of the moon and the tree, once entered, catapulted me deeper into the underworld of my own unconscious, offering guidance and protection over this work. Whether I lived or died, I was to enter back into the Mother of Mysteries and meet my love under the moon tree.

Persephone speaks

I remember sitting in a large auditorium during an introductory class in psychology at the local university. The female professor started by having us all write on a piece of paper what action we would commit if we thought we could get away with it. I don’t remember the purpose of the exercise. With all the papers placed in a not-so-neat pile at the front of the room, she began to read a few of them aloud. She got to one, opened it, and . . . all it said was RAPE in large, capital letters. A tangible wave of energy ran through the room, and no one spoke for some time. It was clear that the professor was visibly shaken, as was I. The incident remained lodged in my mind for a long time. Who had written it—which of the 30 or so men in the auditorium? Likely it was someone no one would expect. I knew it was real. I felt it was real. Timothy Beneke in his 1982 book Men on Rape stated that most of the men he interviewed blamed women for having been raped. He also found most of these same men admitted to being tempted to commit rape themselves.

Before I finish writing this sentence, a woman somewhere in Canada or the United States will be sexually assaulted; before I finish writing this paragraph, a woman somewhere in Canada or the United States will be raped. If this doesn’t disturb you, it should. Statistics show that one in four Canadian women will be sexually assaulted during her lifetime. Half of these assaults will be against women under the age of 16 (Brickman & Briere, 1984). The 1993 Statistics Canada Violence Against Women Survey found that “one half of all Canadian women have experienced at least one incident of sexual or physical violence. Almost 60% of these women were targets of more than one of these incidents” (Statistics Canada, 1993). In Janice Gary’s bold article “Sleeping Beauty Wakes Up: Breaking the Spell of Women’s Silence” (2014), published by Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture in an issue dedicated to “Women’s Voices,” Gary summarized the findings of a 2013 United Nations study on violence against women, one of the largest studies of its kind:

Out of 10,000 men surveyed, one half reported the use of physical and/or sexual violence against a woman and one quarter of those surveyed admitted to rape. The most common motivation that men cited for committing rape was sexual entitlement—a belief that men have a right to have sex with women regardless of consent.

(p. 135)

In her illuminating book Virgin or Vamp: How the Press Covers Sex Crimes, Helen Benedict (1992) outlined what are commonly referred to as “rape myths.” The word myth in this case refers to the collective fallacies and misguided assumptions that surround the crime of rape. Benedict outlined ten of the main “myths” and then presented evidence directly contradicting the commonly held assumptions. In regards to the first myth, rape is sex, Benedict wrote:

This most powerful myth about rape lies at the root of all the others. It ignores the fact that rape is a physical attack, and leads to the mistaken belief that rape does not hurt the victim any more than does sex. The idea that rape is a sexual rather than an aggressive act encourages people not to take it seriously as a crime—an attitude frequently revealed in comments by defense attorneys and newspaper columnists. (“If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it,” said Clayton Williams in 1990, when he was candidate for governor of Texas.) Rape crisis counselors and researchers define rape as an act of violence in which sex is used as a weapon, and point out that a woman would no more “like” rape than she would like being mugged or murdered. (As a teenage victim of rape once said to me, rape is to sex like a punch in the mouth is to a kiss.) I prefer to characterize rape simply as a form of torture. Like a torturer, the rapist is motivated by an urge to dominate, humiliate, or destroy his victim. Like a torturer, he does so by using the most intimate acts available to humans—sexual ones. Psychologists and researchers in the field have found that rape is one of the most traumatic events that can happen to a person.

(p. 14)

From this first false premise, rape is sex, the next myth is easily generated that the assailant is motivated by lust. Research has shown that far from fitting the picture of a sexually frustrated male with no other outlet, “most rapists have normal sex lives a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Credits
• Introduction
• 1. A memoir of descent
• 2. The demon lover: Becoming the bride of Hades
• 3. Embracing the mystery
• 4. The false bridegroom
• 5. Jung and the demon lover
• 6. Salomé
• Epilogue
• Conclusion
• References
• Index