THE WORSHIP OF WOMAN AND THE WORSHIP OF THE SOUL

 

The Christian principle which unites the opposites is the worship of God, in Buddhism it is the worship of the self (self-development), while in Spitteler and Goethe it is the worship of the soul symbolized by the worship of woman. Implicit in this categoriza­tion is the modern individualistic principle on the one hand, and on the other a primitive poly-daemonism which assigns to every race, every tribe, every family, every individual its specific religious principle.
The medieval background of Faust has a quite special signifi­cance because there actually was a medieval element that pre­sided over the birth of modern individualism. It began, it seems me, with the worship of woman, which strengthened the man's soul very considerably as a psychological factor, since the worship of woman meant worship of the soul. This is nowhere more beautifully and perfectly expressed than in Dante's Divine Comedy.        
Dante is the spiritual knight of his lady; for her sake he embarks on the adventure of the lower and upper worlds. In this heroic endeavour her image is exalted into the heavenly mystical figure of the Mother of God - a figure that has detached from the object and become the personification of a purely psychological factor, or rather, of those unconscious contents whose personification I have termed the anima. Canto XXXIII of the Paradiso expresses this culminating point of Dante's psychic development in the prayer of St. Bernard:

O Virgin Mother, daughter of thy Son,
Humbler and more exalted than all others,
Predestined object of the eternal will!
Thou gavest such nobility to man
That He who made mankind did not disdain
To make Himself a creature of His making.

Verses 22-27, 29-33, 37-39 also allude to this development:

This man, who from the nethermost abyss
Of all the universe, as far as here,
Has seen the spiritual existences,
Now asks thy grace, so thou wilt grant him strength
That he may with his eyes uplift himself
Still higher toward the ultimate salvation.
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I ... proffer to thee
All my prayers - and pray they may suffice –
That thou wilt scatter from him every cloud
Of his mortality, with thine own prayers,
So that the bliss supreme may be revealed.

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May thy protection quell his human passions!
Lo, Beatrice and many a blessed soul
Entreat thee, with clasped hands, to grant my wish!

The fact that Dante speaks here through the mouth of St. Bernard is an indication of the transformation and exaltation of his own being. The same transformation also happens to Faust, who ascends from Gretchen to Helen and from Helen to the Mother of God; his nature is altered by repeated figurative deaths (Boy Charioteer, homunculus, Euphorion), until finally he attain the highest goal as Doctor Marianus. In that form Faust utters his prayer to the Virgin Mother:

Pavilioned in the heaven's blue,
Queen on high of all the world,
For the holy sight I sue,
Of the mystery unfurled.
Sanction what in man may move
Feelings tender and austere,
And with glow of sacred love
Lifts him to thy presence near.
Souls unconquerable rise
If, sublime, thou will it;
Sinks that storm in peaceful wise
If thy pity still it.
Virgin, pure in heavenly sheen,
Mother, throned supernal,
Highest birth, our chosen Queen,
Godhead's peer eternal.
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O contrite hearts, seek with your eyes
The visage of salvation;
Blissful in that gaze, arise,
Through glad regeneration.
Now may every pulse of good
Seek to serve before thy face,
Virgin, Queen of Motherhood,
Keep us, Goddess, in thy grace.

We might also mention in this connection attributes of the Virgin in the Litany of Loreto:

Mater amabilis                                      Lovable Mother
Mater admirabilis                                  Wonderful Mother
Mater boni consilii                                Mother of good counsel
Speculum justitiae                                 Mirror of justice
Sedes sapientiae                                   Seat of wisdom
Causa nostrae laetitiae              Cause of our gladness
Vas spirituale                                        Vessel of the spirit
Vas honorabile                                                 Vessel of honour
Vas insigne devotionis               Noble vessel of devotion
Rosa mystica                                        Mystical rose
Turris Davidica                                                 Tower of David
Turris eburnea                                      Tower of ivory
Domus aurea                                        House of gold
Foederis arca                                       Ark of the covenant
Janua coeli                                            Gate of heaven
Stella matutina                                      Morning star

These attributes reveal the functional significance of the Vir­gin Mother image: they show how the soul-image (anima) affects the conscious attitude. She appears as a vessel of devotion, a source of wisdom and renewal.
We find this characteristic transition from the worship of woman to the worship of the soul in an early Christian document, the Sheperd of Hermas, who flourished about A.D. 140. This book, written in Greek, consists of a number of visions andrevelations describing the consolidation of the new faith. The book, long regarded as canonical, was nevertheless rejected by the Muratori Canon. It begins as follows:

The man who reared me sold me to a certain Rhoda in Rome. After many years, I made her acquaintance again and began to love her as a sister. One day I saw her bathing in the Tiber, and gave her my hand and helped her out of the water. When I saw her beauty I thought in my heart: "How happy I would be if I had a wife of such beauty and distinction." This was my only thought, and no other, no, not one.

This experience was the starting-point for the visionary epi­sode that followed. Hermas had apparently served Rhoda as a slave; then, as often happened, he obtained his freedom, and met her again later, when, probably as much from gratitude as from delight, a feeling of love stirred in his heart, though so far as he was aware it had merely the character of brotherly love. Hermas was a Christian, and moreover, as the text subsequently reveals, he was at that time already the father of a family, circumstances which would readily explain the repression of the erotic elem­ent. Yet the peculiar situation, doubtless provocative of many problems, was all the more likely to bring the erotic wish to consciousness. It is, in fact, expressed quite clearly in the thought that he would have liked Rhoda for a wife, though, as Hermas is at pains to emphasize, it is confined to this simple statement since anything more explicit and more direct instantly fell under a moral ban and was repressed. It is abundantly clear from what follows that this repressed libido wrought a powerful transformation in his unconscious, for it imbued the soul-image with life and brought about a spontaneous manifestation:

After a certain time, as I journeyed unto Cumae, praising God's creation in its immensity, beauty, and power, I grew heavy with sleep. And a spirit caught me up, and led me away through a pathless region where a man may not go. For it was a place full of crevices and torn by water-courses. I made my passage over the river and came upon even ground, where I threw myself upon my knees, and prayed to God, confessing my sins. While I thus prayed, the heavens opened and I beheld that lady for whom I yearned, who greeted me from heaven and said: "Hail to thee, Hermas!" While my eyes dwelt upon her, I spake, say­ing: "Mistress, what doest thou there?" And she answered: "I was taken up, in order to charge thee with thy sins before the Lord." I said unto her: "Dost thou now accuse me?" "No," said she, "yet hearken now unto the words I shall speak unto thee. For God, who dwelleth in heaven, and hath created the existing out of the non-existing, and hath magnified it and brought it to increase for the sake of His Holy Church, is wroth with thee, because thou has sinned against me." I answered and spake unto her: "How have I sinned against thee? When and where spake I ever an evil word unto thee? Have I not looked upon thee as a goddess? Have I not ever treated thee like a sister? Wherefore, O lady, dost thou falsely charge me with such evil and unclean things?" She smiled and said unto me: "The desire of sin arose in thy heart. Or is it not indeed a sin in thine eyes for a just man to cherish a sinful desire in his heart? Verily is it a sin'', said he, ''and a great one. For the just man striveth after what is just."

Solitary wanderings are, as we know, conductive to day-dreaming and reverie. Presumably Hermas, on his way to Cumae, was thinking of his mistress; while thus engaged, the  repressed erotic fantasy gradually pulled his libido down into the unconscious. Sleep overcame him, as a result of this lowering of density of consciousness, and he fell into a somnambulant or estatic state, which itself was nothing but a particularly intense fantasy that completely captivated his conscious mind. It is significant that what then came to him was not an erotic fantasy; instead he is transported as it were to another land, represented in fantasy as the crossing of a river and a journey through a pathless country. The unconscious appears to him as upper world in which events take place and men move about exactly as in the real world. His mistress appears before him not in an erotic fantasy but in "divine" form, seeming to him like a goddess in heaven. The repressed erotic impression has activated the latent primordial image of the goddess, i.e., the archetypal soul-image. The erotic impression has evidently become united in the collective unconscious with archaic residues which have preserved from time immemorial the imprint of vivid impressions of the nature of woman - woman as mother and woman as desirable maid. Such impressions have immense power, as they release forces, both in the child and in the adult man, which folly merit the attribute "divine" i.e., something irresistible and absolutely compelling. The recognition of these forces as daemonic powers can hardly be due to moral repression, but rather to a self-regulation of the psychic organism which seeks by this change of front to guard against loss of equilibrium. For if, in face of the overwhelming might of passion, which puts one human being wholly at the mercy of another, the psyche succeeds in building up a counterposition so that, at the height of passion, the boundlessly desired object is unveiled as an idol and man is forced to his knees before the divine image, then the psyche has delivered him from the curse of the object's spell. He is restored to himself again and, flung back on himself, finds himself once more between gods and men, following his own path and subject to his own laws. The awful fear that haunts the primitive, his terror of everything impressive, which he at once senses as magic, as though it were charged with magical power, protects him in a purposive way against that most dreaded of all possibilities, loss of soul, with its inevitable sequel of sickness and death.

Loss of soul amounts to a tearing loose of part of one's nature; it is the disappearance and emancipation of a complex, which thereupon becomes a tyrannical usurper of consciousness, oppressing the whole man. It throws him off course and drives him to actions whose blind one-sidedness inevitably leads to self-destruction. Primitives are notoriously subject to such phenomena as running amok, going berserk, possession, and the like. The recognition of the daemonic-character of passion is an effective safeguard, for it at once deprives the object of its strongest spell, relegating its source to the world of demons, i.e., to the unconscious, whence the force of passion actually springs. Exorcistic rites, whose aim is to bring back the soul and release it from enchantment, are similarly effective in causing the libido to flow back into the unconscious.

This mechanism obviously worked in the case of Hermas. The transformation of Rhoda into a divine mistress deprived the actual object of her provocative and destructive power and brought Hermas under the law of his own soul and its collective determinants. Thanks to his abilities and connections, Hermas no doubt had a considerable share in the spiritual movements of his age. At that very time his brother Pius occupied the episcopal see at Rome. Hermas, therefore, was probably qualified to col­laborate in the great task of his time to a greater degree than he, a former slave, may have consciously realized. No able mind could for long have withstood the contemporary task of spreading Christianity, unless of course the barriers and peculiarities of race assigned him a different function in the great process of spiritual transformation. Just as the external conditions of life force a man to perform a social function, so the collective determinants of the psyche impel him to socialize ideas and convictions. By transforming a possible social faux pas into the service of his soul after having been wounded by the dart of passion, Hermas was led to accomplish a social task of a spiritual nature, which for that time was surely of no small importance.

In order to fit him for this task, it was clearly necessary that his soul should destroy the last possibility of an erotic attachment to the object, as this would have meant dishonesty towards himself. By consciously denying any erotic wish, Hermas merely demon­strated that it would be more agreeable for him if the erotic wish did not exist, but it by no means proved that he actually had no erotic intentions and fantasies. Therefore his sovereign lady, the soul, mercilessly revealed to him the existence of his sin, thus releasing him from his secret bondage to the object. As a "vessel of devotion" she took over the passion that was on the point of being fruitlessly lavished upon her. The last vestige of this pas­sion had to be eradicated if the contemporary task was to be accomplished, and this consisted in delivering man from sensual bondage, from the state of primitive participation mystique. For the man of that age this bondage had become intolerable. The spirit­ual function had to be differentiated in order to restore the psychic equilibrium. All philosophical attempts to do this by achieving "equanimity," most of which concentrated on the Stoic doctrine, came to grief because of their rationalism. Reason can give a man equilibrium only if his reason is already an equilibrating organ. But for how many individuals and at what periods of history has it been that? As a rule, a man needs the opposite of his actual condition to force him to find his place in the middle. For the sake of mere reason he can nover forgo the sensuous appeal of the immediate situation. Against the power and delight of the temporal he must set the joy of the eternal, and against the passion of the sensual the ectasy of the spiritual. The undeniable reality of the one must be matched by the compelling power of the other.

Carl Gustav Jung,
Aspects of the Feminine