| In depth-psychological terms, the negative feminine of the Empowered Witch is fairly well-integrated in the collective consciousness of the East. Unlike the West � whose Witch wears White -- the East knows that women are not always beneficent nor omniscient. Once upon a time, masculine religions stood as testaments to that ancient truth. Now, those religions are matriarchal, supported and attended by females, and �led� by weak males � like the �Sons of the Old Woman� at Mecca, who circle and circle in stasis around Her. In the West, the negative feminine -- the Empowered Witch -- is denied and occulted in extremely naive fashion. The character Heather personifies this unconsciousness, which is the coma of feminism itself. The denial of the negative feminine, termed by Erich Neumann the �Terrible Mother,� derives partly from the long process of �raising� or spiritualizing matter and the feminine -- a process central to Gnosticism, alchemy, and Catholicism, culminating for the latter officially in the Assumption of Mary. In the elevating process -- of which marriage, chivalry, and romanticism are examples -- negative and devouring aspects of femaleness must be retarded from consciousness, though the unconscious, both individual and collective, know very well of their existence and potency. All these processes are also simultaneously regressions to the psychological stage of gender dynamic which held sway for the longest portion of human development -- the feminine, and female, as deity. Romanticism is a hearkening-back by the masculine to the female as Great Goddess, magna mater -- to matriarchal and pre-matriarchal (uroboric) states, in which the feminine and earthly were indistinguishable from divinity, and consciousness was collective. This condition is �remembered� as paradisical and Edenic precisely because no conscious differentiation between individual and Earth had yet evolved. Most popular music prior to the mid-Sixties illustrates this point -- the attitude of the minstrel to the feminine, in antiquity or modern song, is not the reciprocity of equals, but of worship. Some men still get on their knees to propose marriage, a vestige of this worship, which has very real socio-organizational roots. The only sure laugh in any American romantic comedy inevitably involves physical violence by women against men. Females striking males in the testicles is as central to the psychological plot of romantic comedies as explosions in �guy� films. This act recapitulates assumed ownership by the female of the male body under matriarchy. Contrary to popular �progressive� scholarship, the matriarchies were neither non-violent nor egalitarian. As with the �mystery� of SIDS, female violence is almost always covert and deniable. (S)mothering, drowning, starvation, and murder-by-hire usually leave no evidence in the fossil record, but the evidence remains wholesale in world mythologies, and to lesser degree in the historical record. The physical and psychological abuse of males -- especially of undefended boys -- by females is perhaps the most singular characteristic of gynocentric culture, and is a sure sign of collective regression. Take a look at the gender-breakdown of child-abuse statistics in the West. It isn�t men who are torturing and killing little boys. Likewise, the Bard didn�t conjure old King Macbeth from thin air. The weak King clinging to power is an archetype very much alive in our collective unconscious, and indeed in our external reality. The fact that his spirit is already deceased, while his body lives on, only increases the damage he inflicts. And like murderous old Macbeth, like Slick Willie, behind him stands a Wifey Witch wearing the mask of kindness, of sympathy, and of morals of the highest order. Um hmm. If Shakespeare were to portray her today, she�d have an S.U.V., church deaconship, and membership in the American Association of University Women. "In normal times, when culture is stable ... [society is] distinguished by the fact that there is no father-son problem, or only the barest suggestion of one." [The Origins and History of Consciousness, Erich Neumann p. 173] Looked around the �hood, lately? How�s that father-son bond going? "The Terrible Male [Toxic King] . . . functions not only as a principle that disintegrates consciousness, but even more as one that fixes it in the wrong direction... [H]e is the destructive instrument of the matriarchate, as its henchman; he is its authority, as the maternal uncle [e.g., Set,Satan,Typhon]; he is the negative force of self-destruction and the will to regression, as the twin; and finally he is the authority of the patriarchate, as the Terrible Father... whenever the ego is overwhelmed by the sexual, aggressive, or power instincts of the male, or by any other form of instinct, we can see the dominance of the Great Mother... the phallic Terrible Father is only her satellite, not a masculine principle of equal weight." [Neumann, p. 186] In our cynical, rationalistic, reductionistic era we dismiss the personages of Toxic King and Empowered Witch with a wave of the hand, with a knowing smile, sure that such imaginings of those primitive folks in antiquity have forever been buried beneath equations, Cartesian logic, and McIntosh systems. �Magical thinking,� we call it, nudging our neighbor and drawing pompous little circles around our ears. But Toxic King and Empowered Witch live on, me droogies, powerful and very firmly in command � oppressing our people and our land, knocking off our true leaders, poisoning our collective awareness, inducing a national nightmare from which awakening is almost impossible. By law and by assumptive morality, by schooling and shaming, by media and drugs and cultural conditioning, they strike from where you know not, with what you see not. Indeed, they operate most viciously and effectively in rationalistic cultures, where solar, linear, masculine epistemologies ridicule the effects of their incursions upon our Waking and Dreaming Minds -- where weak, materialistic, sexually manipulable men can easily be controlled, and where the feminine is divinized, shielded from even mild reproach. Sound like any Land you live in? The Witch enslaves with perfect method: casting herself as victim, she forges armor invincible, names the caged �Oppressor,� and proceeds to rule her Plantation without threat of rebellion or overthrow. For what cruel and regressive Oppressor � dragging his invisible chains alongside, like Marley�s ghost � would dare raise the sword, or even an ahem of objection, against such a helpless, innocent old woman? Why, why, the thought is absolutely � er, unchivalrous. Thus, pathetic men cling to her in false gallantry, in hope of approval and of sexual favor, knowing well that the route to safety, wealth, and power lies in subjugation to her. Same as it ever was. |