I read a short book awhile ago that I’ve been wrestling with ever since. It came as a recommendation from Sufi mystic Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee’s wife, Anat, and so I read it closely and carefully. (You can listen to my podcast conversation with Llewellyn here, it still ranks as one of my favorites.) The book is titled The Way of Woman: Awakening the Perennial Woman by Helen Luke, a Jungian who died in the ‘90s at the age of 91.
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Parts of the book delighted me, and parts upset me, or stirred me, in very subtle ways, and I’ve been trying to figure out why ever since: I think it’s because, at times, the book reads as essentialist about gender, and I’m reading it at a time when we’re trying to move past our obsession with making gender the primary thing, or assigning “feminine” values to women, and “masculine” values to men. But I realize that’s also not really it.
In thinking deeply about Gilligan (see last week’s newsletter here) and trying to knit her work together with Luke, I began to see that maybe my irritation in reading about the qualities of the feminine is precisely the point. In her preface to The Way of Woman, Marion Woodman (one of the greatest Jungians of all time) describes sitting with the namesake essay for years. She writes to Luke: “Thank you for steadfastly living the feminine values in a society that, consciously and unconsciously, despises them.” I realize now how much that contempt for the feminine values is also alive in me. (More to come from me on this.)
As you read this newsletter, sit with any irritation about what it suggests, and remember that she’s a Jungian, so she abides by the idea of the animus/anima—the animus is the unconscious masculinity inside of women and the anima is the unconscious femininity inside of men. Jung’s theory being that when these are not made conscious they can devour us from within. (Sidenote: I think the anima is so repressed in the toxically masculine men amongst us that they are blaming women for feminizing culture, whereas they’re really being persecuted by their own internal anima, which insists on being made conscious.)
One of Luke’s points is that women own the darkness: We own the tomb and the womb. And in a culture that solely prioritizes the external, the outward-facing, the sun, we’ve forgotten how to nurture our own variety of creativity…in darkness. (Here, I would like to say that the “feminine” owns the darkness.) Luke writes:
The extremes of this worship of the bright light of the sun have produced in our time an estrangement even in women themselves from the patient nurturing and enduring qualities of the earth, from the reflected beauty of the silver light of the moon in the darkness, from the unknown in the deep sea of the unconscious and from the springs of the water of life. The way back down to those springs and to the roots of the tree is likewise the way on and up to the spirit of air and fire in the vaults of heaven.
The receptive does not lead but follows, since it is like a vessel in which the light is hidden until it can appear at the right time. Thus it has no need for a willed purpose or for the prestige of recognized achievement.
If we can rediscover in ourselves the hidden beauty of this receptive devotion, if we can learn how to be still without inaction, how to “further life” without willed purpose, how to serve without demanding prestige, and how to nourish without domination: then we shall be women again out of whose earth the light may shine.
I both loved and bristled at the above passages, specifically the idea that the receptive does not lead but follows. As it’s written, ouch. (Again, I wish it said the feminine and not “women.”) But then she really caught my attention in the following paragraphs since several months ago, I began to publicly lament my lack of a PhD.
To those of clear and differentiated feeling, it may come in the manner expressed by my friend. In a great many others the guilt produces a positively compulsive desire to go to school—to acquire academic degrees—to own pieces of paper with printed evidence of achievement which will, they believe, prove at last that they are people of worth.
But the acquisition of mental and rational skills appears to innumerable modern women as the only way to escape the sense of inferiority that besets them.
…
She starts from secondhand masculine thinking and is frustrated—even panic-stricken—when the feminine soil on which she is working refuses to come to life. And this situation extends into her whole life. She has then to learn to start from the receptive, the hidden, the goalless aspect of yin, and gradually the true light of the spirit will shine in the darkness, and the intellect too will be illuminated and come to its fruition.
HELEN!
One of the points Luke makes, which makes me mad (and I have to wonder why) is that she thinks the genius points of men and women are essentially different. That women’s genius lies not so much in original ideas, but in relating those ideas back to the whole, of feeling them and integrating them. In her estimation, the feminine genius is that of relating. (This correlates with some of the developmental models that Gilligan puts together, which we’ll get to in a future newsletter.) She puts a real point on it when she writes that “the cause of the neurosis” in both the man and the woman lay in their subjection to the collective contempt for the feminine way of receptive devotion.” She has me there, as I hate the sound of receptive devotion. Hate. I have to wonder why?
Here she is again:
I hasten to add that this is not to say that the extraordinary influx of the spirit which we call genius comes more often to men than to women. Surely there have always been as many women as men in this rare category, but usually we do not see the feminine genius because it does not often come to expression in an art or science but is at its greatest in the sphere of relationship. Even those who are most indebted to it are sometimes quite unaware of the unseen genius in mother or wife or friend which has created the atmosphere wherein their own spirits have been nourished and set free. So the creative resonance of the feminine being remains unrecognized.
Is she right? Help me here.
Where Luke really piqued my interest in this particular essay is in her discussion of the qualities of privacy, because our lack of privacy is the plague of our age. The necessity of being public, seen, and appraised is a kind of death—even as many of us long for it. It’s particularly deadly when you’re trying to create something and it requires the cave, the womb, the darkness. (My editor and I were recently talking about the rarity of writers these days who can really disappear and don’t need to support their efforts by continually marketing themselves to the public.)
Here’s Luke, again writing well before the advent of social media—even of the internet:
I use the word “publicity” here in its widest meaning, not in the context of literary publication. One of the major psychological diseases today is the urge to make everything public; to keep anything hidden or secret is felt to be almost a crime. Emotions are evoked and expressed in large groups; mystical or spiritual experiences are shared with as many as possible; workshops are founded in which people work publicly on the most private things; and statistics are collected with fervor so that all manifestations of the human spirit may be document and publicized as indisputable truth. None of this is evil in itself. The urge to share creative thoughts is an essential good, and the value of group activity and of statistics is beyond question. But the extremes, sponsored by those with genuine concern for humanity as well as by the media of our society, are largely destroying the sense of mystery itself and with it the essential value of the individual secret, without which a man and, still more dangerously, a woman, loses contact with the soul.
She goes on to write about Bronté and Austen, who shunned all publicity. “Elizabeth Jenkins says in her biography of Jane Austin, ‘…whatever the motive which led her to refuse to enter society as an authoress, she was actually obeying a profound instinct of self-preservation…nothing would have induced her to accept a position, even in her family, in which she had to support a well-defined attitude or to be anything but the most ordinary of human beings; such a position would have been abhorrent to the conscious mind, and it would have threatened that capacity of vision that was the inspiration of her art.’”
Holding these to the standards of the universal feminine—that these qualities also belong to men, though often repressed and suppressed—I think this is a critical point for all of us. Is it possible to shift culture back to a time where those channeling creativity could do it in the dark? Is it possible to reverse this “climate in which the feminine qualities wither and die because nothing is judged valuable unless it is known to and approved by large numbers of people.” Is it enough for us to remember to take what we’re making back to our caves, to keep it close and sacred and quiet, without feeling like we need constant affirmation that it’s good enough?
(Unrelated but related: Therapist Lori Gottlieb reminds us that privacy and intimacy are not synonyms—in an intimate relationship, everyone deserves some privacy.)
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I wonder if some of what makes you bristle is not so much that the qualities are reduced to feminine or WOMAN, but that there is a wholesale devaluing of the witness in relationship to the creator. It's not so much that male/ yang/ sunshine energy MAKES but that the value of the female/ yin/ moon energy RECEIVES. However we categorize them, they exist in the whole together. You can't have one without the other-- so obvious, but our culture prioritizes makers so much that the act of witnessing, of quiet, of silence and receiving is coded as totally passive, invisible, invaluable, even. But of course, the meaning only lands when there's someone on the other side to witness, synthesize and receive. Would I, as a woman, feel less ambivalent about my ambition to be a creator if I felt more culturally valued for the essential act of bearing witness? Probably.
So much here. Thank you for diving into some sticky tricky territory. I try and use "yin" and "receptive" as much as possible when speaking of "the feminine" while also trying to honor the long history of how it's suppression has played out on actual female, femme, and queer bodies. I don't think I'm very successful at it LOL. But I'm getting ready to write about the rejection of the "dark feminine" in relationship to Black women... Also, do you know Rosemarie Anderson's new-ish translation of the Tao Te Ching? She insists that generations of translators simply ignored that the original language in fact refers to the Tao/Way as the dark womb and dark feminine. Thanks again for this post. I'll definitely be coming back to it.