Lukewarm divorcée winter: That time I got caught in a mansoon and lived to tell the tale
On spinsters, Aphrodite and the virgin archetypes.
When my marriage ended (which I write about here, here and here) I made a tongue-in-cheek vow to live out the rest of my days as a spinster divorcée. I (kind of) really meant it, emphatically announcing to all in my inner circle my aspirational goal of raising the children then promptly and permanently retiring to my esoteric studies in a solitary, A-frame cabin in the woods at the edge of civilization. And if I could find a way to do it while my girls were still small, all the better. The following scene featuring the intoxicating enigma that is Tilda Swinton in the delightfully disorienting film Orlando sums up my post-divorce sentiment. It’s a perfect mood board for my leaving the rather prescriptive role of wifedom for the foggy, labyrinthine dream of living in solitude and devoting my life to Mystery.
“Nature, nature, I am your bride. Take me.”
Exiting the marriage, I wanted the exclusive gravitational pull of Eros in my life to center around my creative process, namely writing, with only my two Aquarius-moon babies in tow. It was decided: I would give myself over to the primordial soup and rear the children in a labyrinth, Bowie’s not Pan’s, obviously. (What Scorpionic Pisces doesn’t want to keep company with deranged Muppets?) I was already there psychologically; I just needed to find a way to enact it in my outward reality.
I regret to inform you this is not what happened. Which is probably for the best because as it turns out, this course of action is wholly inadvisable and exactly what Jungian priest, Robert Johnson, says not to do in his book She: Understanding Feminine Psychology:
“To identify with the mystery is to lapse into unconsciousness, which is the end of any further development. Many women who safely make the journey this far fall into the trap of identifying with Persephone’s mysterious charm. No further development is possible to them, and they remain a kind of spiritual fossil with no human dimension.”
Now I’m not necessarily one for going around following priests’ orders, but Dr. Johnson speaks an uncommon wisdom here. Have you ever met one of those spiritual people who don’t live behind their eyes? Let’s put a pin in that thought and pick it back up in a future post about my maternal grandmother - not the gritty one I wrote about last week, but the other one - a southern baptist preacher’s daughter whose mysterious life shaped mine in more ways than I can measure.
Back to my pseudo-spinster saga… I have to insert ‘pseudo’ here because despite my resolute prohibition of entanglements with men, week after week in analysis I was having to look my analyst in the eye and report my close-ish encounters of the masculine kind. In my experience Jungian Analysis - all therapy in fact - is most effective when used as a kind of confessional. This isn’t a place to edit in order to make yourself more palatable or likable. If you’re seeking the approval of your therapist, you’re probably not getting your money’s worth.
I can still see the look on my analyst’s face when I’d report the previous week’s unintended extracurriculars. She’d get the same kind of look my grandmother did when I told her a story I probably shouldn’t’ve been telling (as she would say): first, a scrutinizing squint, stock-still; then a smirk that I wasn’t sure she wanted me to see so I’d pretend not to notice; finally, the twinkle in her eye would break signaling grandma’s (always) unspoken blessing. Don’t read me wrong, we were still in the middle of a pandemic and, global panny or not, I don’t really like to leave the house. But seemingly out of nowhere and overnight, my stolen moments outside of work and mothering were interwoven with texts, emails and hours-long conversations with men from all over the world. It seemed the Mother Nature I left my marriage for was the one The Weather Girls were singing about in It’s Raining Men.
“I feel stormy weather moving in About to begin Hear the thunder Don’t you lose your head Rip off the roof and stay in bed! God bless Mother Nature She’s a single woman, too She took off to heaven and she did what she had to do”
But couldn’t she just not? Couldn’t the storm just skip over my house? Remember my monastic vows? I wanted my “hallelujah” to be a “hell no.” To build my Interior Castle in the style of St. Teresa of Avila. Except instead of a full-on love affair with God, mine was going to be the Goddess. I was swearing off men altogether, enfleshed or not. It wouldn’t be the first time.
My post-divorce pandemic experience was supposed to be ceremoniously celibate on every level imaginable. I didn’t sign up for a single dating app. The closest I came to having a man in the house was a bust of Socrates and a penis-shaped, scented candle. Inside, the minister of my mind was holding up a megaphone entreating, “Do you, Joanna, solemnly swear to heretofore sequester yourself to No Man’s Land, so help you, God?” Believe me when I tell you that my reply was, “I do! I do! So help me, Goddess!”
“Can I get a witness?!”
Instead, I was witnessing myself being pulled into the gravitational field of what felt like that great benefic philanderer, Jupiter himself (who also happens to be the archetype of the Wise Man). Think: psychospiritual dialogue, but with sexual tension; Sage, but make it steamy. That’s what I get for putting phalluses on my altar.
Suffice it to say that it was a time when the Virgin Priestess archetype within me was having to contend with the intoxicating allure of my more Venusian archetypal indweller who prefers a decidedly more embodied rapture over the saintly, transcendental kind.
To illustrate what I mean when I speak of being host to antithetical archetypes, here are two definitions, named after Greek goddesses Hestia and Aphrodite from Jungian Analyst, Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen, in her book, Goddesses in Everywoman:
On Hestia: “The virgin goddesses represents the independent, self-sufficient quality in women… Emotional attachments did not divert them from what they considered important… As archetypes, they express the need in women for autonomy… Hestia is the archetype that focuses attention inward, to the spiritual center of a woman’s personality.”
“When a virgin goddess - Artemis, Athena or Hestia - is a dominant archetype, the woman is (as Jungian analyst Esther Harding wrote in her book Women’s Mysteries) ‘one-in-herself.’ An important part of her psyche ‘belongs to no man.’ Consequently, as Harding described it: ‘A woman who is virgin, one-in-herself, does what she does - not because of any desire to please, not to be liked, or to be approved, even by herself; not because of any desire to gain power over another, to catch his interest or love, but because what she does is true.”
On Aphrodite: “Aphrodite seeks to consummate relationships and generate new life. This archetype may be expressed through physical intercourse or through a creative process. What she seeks differs from what the virgin goddesses seek, but she is like them in being able to focus on what is personally meaningful to her; others cannot divert her away from her goal. And in that what she values is solely subjective and cannot be measured in terms of achievement or recognition, Aphrodite is (paradoxically) most similar to anonymous, introverted Hestia - who on the surface is the goddess most unlike Aphrodite.”
“Whoever or whatever Aphrodite imbues with beauty is irresistible. A magnetic attraction results, ‘chemistry’ happens between the two, and they desire union above all else.… While this drive may be purely sexual, the impulse is often deeper, representing an urge that is both psychological and spiritual.… The desire to know and be known is what Aphrodite generates. If this desire leads to physical intimacy, impregnation and new life may follow. If the union is also or either of mind, heart, or spirit, new growth occurs in psychological, emotional, or spiritual spheres.”
Before you get the wrong idea, a great number of these invigorating interactions were wholly platonic, even as they left me spiritually turned on in the spinster-esque “I’ll be in my hag’s hut alone” kind of way. When I look back on this Zeus-y thunderclap that brought a flash flood of masculine persuasion into my solitary hovel, I think fondly of it as an extraordinary moment I got to spend immersed in the uncommon medicine of brotherly love.
“When Aphrodite influences a relationship, her effect is not limited to the romantic or sexual. Platonic love, soul connection, deep friendship, rapport, and empathic understanding all are expressions of love. Whenever growth is generated, a vision supported, potential developed, a spark of creativity encouraged - as can happen in mentoring, counseling, parenting, directing, teaching, editing, and doing psychotherapy and analysis - then Aphrodite is there, affecting both people involved.”
During that mystifying mansoon, I met uncommon men offering untold gifts I didn’t know I needed during a time when I might otherwise have been unable to receive them. All of them were my teachers and there are a few I am fortunate enough to still call friends.
Do you know what they all have in common? Every single one was a writer, poet and philosopher of sorts (that Jupiterian archetype again). Coincidence? Nah, I don’t believe in them.
I’ll explain later.
“I’m every woman It’s all in me.”
Whitney Houston