"Archetype of soul", by Walter Odajnyk
Botticelli - The birth of Venus, detail (1485)
Extracts from :
Walter Odajnyk
Archetype and Character
Power, Eros, Spirit, and Matter Personality Types
Archetype of soul
Etymologically the term “soul” evolved from the Old English sawol, the Gothic saiwola and the Proto-Germanic saiwalo, meaning “coming from the sea,” or “belonging to the sea.” The etymology gives expression to the belief that the sea was a stopping place of the soul before its birth and after its death. Botticelli’s painting of Aphrodite’s birth from the foam of the sea is a representational depiction of this myth. The water from which souls emerge and to which they return is a metaphor for the source, or origin of life. Numerous creation myths refer to water as the original “matter.” Freud literalized the notion as the amniotic fluid; his literal idea can be extended by evolutionary theory which hypothesizes that life first emerged from the seas. Jung, however, felt that mythology expresses and elaborates upon internal psychic events; he, therefore, interpreted the references to water from which the soul emerged as analogous to the unconscious.
The Chinese version of the soul’s watery origins is the belief that at death the soul sinks to the earth and lives in the ground water near the Yellow Springs. These springs are the Land of the Dead, yet, paradoxically, the reservoir of life as well, and from there, having become rejuvenated, the soul comes back to life. In Homer, the afterworld is not underground but at the far end of the ocean, beyond where the sun sets. In both Nordic and Egyptian mythology, ships transport the soul to the land of the beyond. In Greek mythology, the Sirens, sea creatures with heads and breasts of women and bodies of birds, lure passing sailors into the sea where they devour them. The Greek Sirens are reminiscent of the Egyptian soul bird, Ba, which separates from the body at death and takes the form of a bird with a human head. The Greek Sirens were regarded as the souls of the dead who had turned into vampires, although they also had a positive side, charming the dead with their songs on the Isles of the Blessed. The Northern European versions of the Sirens are the mermaids, or the Lorelei, water nymphs whose singing lures men to their death.
The parallel Slavic figure is the rusalka, the ghost of a drowned girl who bewitches and drowns passing men. In part, these myths are probably based on actual events of love- sick youths committing suicide by drowning. But psychologically, the myths represent, on the one hand, a regressive tendency of the psyche, namely the temptation to return to one’s unconscious origins, and on the other hand, a desire on the part of the soul, as a personification of the unconscious, for a relationship with ego consciousness. The death and the drowning are not to be taken literally, although in a pre-psychological era or in an un-psychological person, the impulse may be acted out rather than responded to in a conscious way.
In various myths and folktales swans, geese and doves are other soul birds. The allusion to wings, and the fact that these soul birds are imagined at home both in water or in the air, alludes to the otherworldly nature of the soul, namely, that it is capable of living and moving in the watery realm and in the invisible element of air. In contrast to the soul birds, there are spirit birds, the falcon or the eagle, for example. These represent spirit, that is, the spiritual component of the psyche and its connection to transcendent reality. But soul birds are different from spirit birds: they are “feminine” in nature and associated with Eros and Physis; spirit birds are “masculine” and connected to Power and Logos.
As a personification of the feminine, or yin aspects of the unconscious, soul is characterized by fantasy, vague feelings, memories, moods, anxieties, fears, instinctual urges, prophetic hunches, dreams, inspiration, imagination, reflection, receptiveness to the irrational, capacity for personal love, feeling for beauty, for nature, and relationship with the unconscious. The I Ching regards receptivity as the chief attribute of yin. Receptivity presupposes openness and emptiness, and emptiness, Jung remarks, is the great secret of femininity. In this respect it is important to keep in mind that the concept of femininity is not circumscribed by gender.
I am reminded of Lao-tze’s description of Tao:
There is something formless yet complete
That existed before heaven and earth,
How still! How empty!
Dependent on nothing, unchanging,
All pervading, unfailing.
One may think of it as the mother of all things under heaven.
I do not know its name,
But I call it “Meaning.”
If I had to give it a name, I should call it “The Great.”
As for the value of emptiness, here are some examples from the Tao Te Ching:
We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of
the wheel depends.
We turn clay to make a vessel;
But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of
the vessel depends.
We pierce doors and windows to make a house;
And it is on these spaces were there is nothing that the utility of
the house depends.
Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize
the utility of what is not.
With the principle of opposites always in play, it is not surprising that next to emptiness, the other important attribute of the soul and of the feminine is that of giving form, substance and specificity to things. In alchemy, Luna, the moon, governs the process of coagulatio. Traditional folklore of many cultures calls the moon the place where souls gather after death before they journey to higher spiritual realms; and it is also the place where spirits and souls take on material substance before their return to earth.
The moon is the alchemical source of moisture: “Luna secretes the dew or sap of life,” which ties in with the idea of the soul’s origins in the waters.6 Both the waters and the moon, therefore, are places of cyclical transformation, where shapes are dissolved and from which they emanate. Jung continues, “the relation of the moon to the soul, much stressed in antiquity, also occurs in alchemy though with a different nuance. Usually it is said that from the moon comes the dew, but the moon is also the aqua mirifica that extracts the souls from the bodies or gives the bodies life and soul.”
In fantasy, myth and literature, the soul is usually personified as a woman. A phenomenological purview of her characteristics reveals that she likes diversity, the unique, the personal and the atypical. She is polyvalent, polygamous, polytheistic. In contrast, spirit prefers uniformity, similarity and abstraction; it is monotheistic, monogamous, and one. In addition, Soul is elemental, animistic, warlike, adventurous, romantic. She loves life, the adventure of it, and seeks experience and immersion in the hustle and bustle of daily existence.
Consequently, Jung defines Soul as “the archetype of life itself.” For Soul ties one to instinctive, material reality, to the earth, to country, church, community, family and personal relationships. She is responsible for our likes and dislikes, our loves and hatreds, our vocation and avocations. Soul is the source of artistic and intellectual pursuits, making one loyal to these endeavors. In the Slavic countries, hobbies, such as playing a musical instrument or painting, are said to be done “for the soul.” The Soul is also the font of religious devotion and of the mystic’s passionate desire for a relationship with God. And finally, Soul is the wise old woman of folklore and the Biblical Sophia, a personification of wisdom.
In her negative guise, Soul turns into a death demon, as depicted by the Sirens and the Lorelei. She can seduce human beings away from life, into the world of unreality, sterile fantasy, pedantic thought, insanity, depression and psychological or physical suicide. Here she reveals her ghostly side, the dark side of the moon, and becomes “the archetype
of death.”