Masculine Shame

From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine

Mary Y. Ayers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136721427
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

How does the image of the succubus relate to psychoanalytic thought?

Masculine Shame: From Succubus to the Eternal Feminine explores the idea that the image of the succubus, a demonic female creature said to emasculate men and murder mothers and infants, has been created out of the masculine projection of shame and looks at how the transformation of this image can be traced through Western history, mythology, and Judeo-Christian literature.

Divided into three parts areas of discussion include:

• the birth of civilization and the evolution of the succubus
• the image of the succubus in the writings of Freud and Jung
• the succubus as child killing mother to the restoration of the eternal feminine.

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Through a process of detailed cultural and social analysis, the author places the image of the succubus at the very heart of psychoanalytic thought, highlighting its presence in both Freud's Medusa and Jung's visions of Salome. As such, this book will be of great interest to all those in the fields of analytical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.

Part I

The birth of civilization
and the evolution of the
succubus

At the dawn of time, there was an age of gold when man was at one with nature, when the eternal harmonies and laws of nature were more clearly expressed in man himself than they have ever been expressed since. Even today, we regard those moments in which our being is at one with the whole of nature as instants of perfect bliss.

(von Schubert, 1808)

He once let her breathe deep

into an ear of his apple orchard,

and she could feel his sky's chest sigh.

Lilith knows where God's eyes can be found;

she has kissed them.

Divine Mornings

And when she wakes

to find the earth's sheets wet with dew,

she knows he still dreams of her.

(Gold, 1998: 127)

He whose vision cannot cover

History's three thousand years,

Must in outer darkness hover,

Live within the day's frontiers.

(Goethe, Westostlicher Diwan)

Chapter 1

The succubus, the evil eye
and shame

Shame is the hidden affect that inspires oppression. Woman, once the site of fertility and birth, is oppressed and recast in the image of the succubus. Although strikingly little has been written about her given her 7,000-year history, the succubus is a universal image that appears throughout world history in mainstream and marginal cultures, acquiring a multiplicity of faces and coming to be known under many names. She is the dark feminine inspiration for the femme fatale, castrator, dominatrix, vixen bogey, witch, enchantress, blood sucker, seductress, villainess, scarlet woman, beguiling abomination, preening temptress, predator, demon bride, impure female, Hell's rose, or black widow. More recent names might be bimbo, eye candy, career bitch or feminist. She appears throughout the world in many animal forms, such as a serpent, dog, screeching owl, or donkey, and she inhabits the soul as any creeping creature. Some might know her best by her proper biblical names of Lilith, the first wife of Adam and even worse than Eve because she is demonic from the moment of her creation; the seductive Salome, the temptress who danced for Herod in return for the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter; the beautiful but cunning Delilah, the Philistine woman of the Old Testament who betrayed Samson by having his hair shorn as he slept, thus depriving him of his strength; or Princess Jezebel, who painted her face and waited to be pushed out a window for taking the blood of an innocent man. Some of her mythic names are Circe, the witch in Homer's Odyssey who turned men into swine; Clytemnestra, the screaming bitch who called for an axe so that she could murder the war hero Agamemnon; the infanticidal Medea, who murdered her husband out of rage and revenge; Pandora, the Kallon Kakon or beautiful evil, the lovely curse that men had to pay for getting fire; Rusalka, the Slavic female ghost who seduced men with her eyes that shined with green fire; or Yuki-Ona (Snow Woman), the beautiful woman of Japanese folklore whose skin was transparent, and only her face and pubic hair stood out against the snow. Her eyes would strike terror into mortals, whom she would transform into frost-coated corpses, or lead them astray to die of exposure (shame). And then there are her historical names, the duplicitous seductress Mata Hari or the well known Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt who captivates our imagination and lives on throughout the ages in myth and legend, novel and poem, paintings and operas, Shakespearean play and Hollywood film.

No matter what the age or culture, the succubus drains the life-force from weak-willed men, encapsulating everything that is morbid, nihilistic, and abortive. The epitome of depraved sexuality, she wastes potential fertility by causing men to ejaculate in their sleep – or else she steals their emissions to inseminate herself in order to produce more demons in revenge for the loss of her own children. In her seductive form, she is a very beautiful but most feared evil woman who through her gaze threatens man's power by taking over his mind and penis. Despite her beguiling beauty, the power of the succubus appears to reside in her fascinating Evil Eyes. The word fascination is a particularly important one when it comes to the succubus, for it has been defined as that power “derived from a pact with the devil, who, when the so-called fascinator looks at another with evil intent, or praises by means known to himself, infects with evil the person at whom he looks” (Elworthy, 1958). A man's mind is attacked when struck by the gaze of the succubus, and, thus weakened, he is led by hell's delusion to take her to his bed. Full of sadistic, voracious malice, her brilliant and cruel orgasm embodies the castration of a man. Figure 1.1 is an engraving by Gustave Dore for The Succubus in Balzac's Les Contes Drolatiques. It vividly depicts the eyes that can disempower a man and bring him to his knees. Its caption reads “I saw her with a bizarre plumage on her head, having a supernatural color and eyes more flaming than I can tell of, from which came a flame from Hell” (Huxley, 1990: 28).

The succubus as Terrible Mother is the all-inclusive symbol of the devouring aspect of the unconscious. All dangerous affects and impulses, all evils that come from the unconscious of man and overwhelm the ego, are her progeny. Folklore has it that she counts among her offspring the Devil of Christian literature, which makes the seven deadly sins – the root of all evil – her granddaughters (Russell, 1984: 77). The granddaughters’ names are pride, envy, wrath, lust, greed, gluttony and sloth.

During the Great Witch Hunt of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, writers renamed Lilith “queen of the succubi” (Williams & Williams, 1978: 4), and so her story, which forms the core of Part I of this book, will be shared in some detail in order to illuminate the archetype with which we are dealing. In order to resurrect the central ideas of the myth of Lilith, I will be wandering around like Isis piecing together dismembered pieces of Osiris. Yet I hope that this process, in combination with the historical review tracing Lilith's manifestations in the next chapter, will show exactly how the succubus is a castrating dimension of the Terrible Mother, who, with her Evil Eyes, generates annihilating shame.

Queen of the succubi

For the first two millennia of recorded history, nature and society reflected a more holistic view of the world. Somewhere in the first millennia B.C., however, this communal world view of humanity broke down, and the alienations of civilization began to reshape history. It is during this time (700 B.C.) that Lilith, Adam'srebellious first wife who demands equality, first appears in the Old Testament Book of Isaiah (34:14) as the “night hag.” Isaiah reads:

Figure 1.1 Engraving by Gustave Dore for The Succubus in Balzac's Les Contes Drolatiques. Scanned from a copy of The Eye: The Seer and the Seen, by Francis Huxley. Used with permission of Thames and Hudson.

And wild beasts shall meet with hyenas,

The satyr shall cry to his fellow;

yea, there shall the night hag alight,

and find for herself a resting place.

This verse is part of a biblical chapter about the Lord's rage at all nations, and the image of Lilith as a night hag is situated between the following two verses. In Isaiah 34:8–12, we read about the Lord's vengeance, when he intends to turn the entire land into pitch night and day so that it

shall not be quenched;

its smoke shall go up for ever.

From generation to generation it shall lie waste . . .

the owl and the raven shall dwell in it.

He shall stretch the line of confusion over it,

and the plummet of chaos over its nobles.

They shall name it No Kingdom There,

and all its princes shall be nothing.

In Isaiah 34:15, reference to Lilith is repeated in the image of an owl:

There shall the owl nest and lay

and hatch and gather her young in

her shadow;

yea, there shall kites be gathered,

each one with her mate.

Later, when God comes to save the people, “the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap like a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing for joy” (Isaiah 35:5–6).

For the nomadic Hebrews of the desert, Lilith “was the voice howling over the mounds of dead and vanished civilizations; she was the female force living in the desolation of male vanities” (Thompson, 1978: 46). Eyes, smoke, ashes, chaos, confusion, blindness, lameness and a place called No Kingdom There where princes are nothing – images that evoke the incinerating power of absolute shame (Ayers, 2003). Shame always lurks in the places of darkness, ash and waste. God, consumed by rage, dominates the land by threatening to obliterate it and make men powerless, and it is at this point that Lilith makes her first appearance. Could this vengeance the Lord is acting upon be due to his shame over the limits of his own power and goodness, an evil aspect of God's own nature? In his book entitled God: A Biography, Jack Miles (1996) makes an interesting observation about God: he states that when God created woman he suffered considerable anxiety. God is narcissistically fretting over the perceived flaw in his supposedly perfect creation of Adam – the fact that he is alone, either as male or as androgyny. God is compelled to attempt its correction through the creation of a woman. God says “It is not good for a man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him.” Thus, says Miles, “it is understood desire, admitted need, that shames” (p. 37). In needing woman (as both sexual object and mother) the perfection of God's sovereignty is compromised. And why are not Adam and Eve, in their shameful desire for each other, an image of God who created them in his own image? “Is it this – their presentation to him of himself as not exercising mastery but as experiencing need – that enrages him? And is he, his rage spent, ashamed of his own desire and moved to cover his shame by covering theirs?” (p. 37).

What, then, does God's dissociated shame have to do with the creation of the succubus, that desirable female created by God? God is dependent and cannot be without woman, and so he projects this need into man which inspires woman's creation (in the same way he later projects his humanity into man through Jesus, who had to be given birth through woman). In other words, the patriarchal God, that same perfect, omnipotent God that eradicated the Great Mother, can't create the world without a woman because of his need-driven desire. He does not create perfection in a single stroke, but, like any human being, struggles towards perfection time and time again. In order to rid God of his shame, another creation story emerges (one that we later learn precedes Eve) introducing the image of Lilith. Desirousness, that unruly emotion which is the hallmark of the man's attraction to the succubus, is now evil, and it is this sin that incites the generation of absolute shame in the masculine psyche.

Lilith's story is told in a sixth century A.D. Judaic book entitled The Alphabet of Ben Sira, which has been kept alive to this day.

When the Almighty – may his name be praised – created the first, solitary man, He said: It is not good for man to be alone. And He fashioned for man a woman from the earth, like him (Adam), and called her Lilith. Soon, they began to quarrel with each other. She said to him: I will not lie underneath, and he said: I will not lie underneath but above, for you are meant to lie underneath and I to lie above. She said to him: We are both equal, because we are both (created) from the earth. But they didn't listen to each other. When Lilith saw this, she pronounced God's avowed name and flew into the air. Adam stood in prayer before his Creator and said: Lord of the World! The woman you have given me has gone away from me. Immediately, the Almighty – may His name be praised – sent three angels after her, to bring her back. The Almighty – may His name be praised – said to him (Adam): If she decides to return, it is good, but if not, then she must take it upon herself to ensure that a hundred of her children die each day. They went to her and found her in the middle of the sea, in the raging water in which one day the Egyptians would drown. And they told her the word of God. But she refused to return. They said to her: We must drown you in the sea. She said to them: Leave me! I was created for no other purpose than to harm children, eight days (after birth) for boys and twenty for girls . . .

(1858: 23)

According to this passage, Lilith is Adam's first wife, a shameless, sterile avenging witch who leaves her husband after a bitter quarrel and denies her own motherhood in pursuit of supremacy. At his elation at having a mate, Adam tries to do what he has seen the animals doing, and so puts her on the ground and tries to mount her. Adam attempts to compel her obedience by force, but Lilith, full of her own wildness and instinctual power, is no object to be placed under control. In her rage she utters the magic name of God, rises up into the air, and flees. In her departure a great theme of division between male and female is being announced, and it is one that will echo throughout history all the way to the present. Lilith is not a loyal companion; as demon-wife, her power is derived from the shame that a man feels when he has been unable to command his wife's exclusive loyalty.

The source of Lilith's omnipotence is speaking God's name, for to know the secret name of something is to know how to gain power over it. The unity of God is expressed in the tetragram YHWH. In one version of the Zohar, Lilith tears his divine name apart.

She it is who separates the two H's from each other and prevents the entry of the W between them. When Lilith stands between the one H and the other, then the Almighty, may His name be praised, cannot join them together.

(quoted in Hurwitz, 1999: 148)

Lilith has the will to speak God's name, and this gives her the power to not accept His patriarchal authority and flee from Adam. As a result of her stand God divides his unity and dissociates from his female side. In order for God to maintain his omnipotence, mind and heart, thinking and emotion, reason and imagination are no longer united in a harmonious fashion. Captured in this idea is the essence of God's dysfunctional relationship not only to woman, but to the whole of Israel. In the following biblical passages, the Master of all the powers in the universe reveals his feelings of impotence as He rages at Israel – metaphorically his wanton wife (Frymer-Kensky, 1992: 144): “I will then uncover her shame in the very sight of her lovers” (Hosea 2:10); and “I myself will lift up your skirts over your face and your shame shall be seen; I have seen your abominations, your adulteries and neighings, your lewd harlotries . . . How long will it be before you are made clean?” (Jeremiah 13:26–27).

Lilith was a complete failure, and so now God needs to create another woman, a completely subordinate being who complies with Adam's wishes without hesitation. Adam's second wife is the more well-known and docile Eve –...