Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

By Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, Ph. D.

Newsletter

Vol. 23, No. 6, February 1998

Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness. By Marion Woodman and Elinor Dickson, Ph. D. (Boston and London: Shambala Publications, Inc., 1997, 256 pages

Although Marion Woodman has a co-author for her latest book in the person of Elinor Dickson, clinical psychologist, Jungian therapist and Director of Psychological Services at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, the voice of Dancing in the Flames is clearly hers. The themes of Woodman’s earlier writings are present, yet their development and the integration of ideas from a variety of disciplines have acquired a greater sophistication. It suggests to this reader at least that Dickson’s role may have been that of discussant, editor and contributor of some of the fascinating case studies which give rise or lend credence to the argument. And of the argument itself?

The Dark Goddess of western and eastern religious traditions is appearing in the dreams of contemporary men and women. Pressing from the depths of the collective unconscious, she represents a compensatory force to the power-driven patriarchal shadow that individually and collectively seeks to destroy both masculine and feminine energies. Both genders need a well-differentiated masculine and feminine. The integration into consciousness of the forces symbolized by the Dark Goddess offers to both genders a means.

An early childhood dream experienced by James who began analysis in his forties anticipated his life’s task. In the dream James was climbing a hill, when he found his way blocked by a boulder. A voice addressed him from the boulder and a finger appeared to be pointing at him. Gradually, a witch-like figure, with dark circles around its eyes and sunken cheeks, began to emerge. All it consisted of “was an enormous head and a menacing vagina.”

The authors comment:

This is the fierce Great Mother that most of us must face on life’s journey. To those who see her from a transcendent consciousness, she is fierce because she demands truth, sacrifice, and transformation. For the young boy (the unconscious masculine), she symbolizes death and prohibition ... The masculine must be conscious enough to approach this repressed energy with caution; otherwise, it will devour him.

In the course of his analysis, after attending a lecture by a male analyst, James had the following dream. He is in the office of a male analyst, above the fireplace is a picture of the Great Mother. On the invitation of the analyst to see what is behind the picture, he takes it down and pries off the back. The first layer reveals a young girl who is dismayed by her less than perfect results on a spelling test; nearby, holding a ruler and looking stern, is her father or teacher. The second reveals a dark, seductive woman, looking like Spiderwoman. Underneath it is a somewhat vacuous society type. The fourth is a naked, helpess-looking woman trying to cross a field of barbed wire as bullets strafe her. The fifth layer “is a woman with a large head and small arms but no torso. Her head is fragile and shaped like a tea cup, full of writhing snakes.”

This interpretation follows:

In the presence of a strong masculine figure—a father figure who can accept him—James is able to look at the full dimension of his mother-complex ... The most deeply repressed image seems to sum up all the other images: as fragile as a tea cup, yet as fierce as Medea (her hair is full of writhing snakes), whose ugliness can turn men into stone. In these images, James began to see the projections that he directed toward the women with whom he was having affairs.

Three months later, another dream of note occurs. James is on a journey, walking in the forest, when suddenly he is confronted by a “black-caped figure wearing a huge devilish-looking mask.” At first fearful, James then becomes angry, causing the figure to merge into a tree where his eyebrows have turned into horns. After James lunges at him, “the mask changes into the angry-looking face of a woman with huge breasts sitting in the tree.”

The commentary in part reads:

This dream shows very clearly the collusion between the demon, and the devouring mother. At a collective level, this collusion sums up unconscious patriarchy. The disembodied masculine, which sees its freedom as control over the cycles of nature, matter, mother, puts its energy into dominating her.

Patriarchy, the collective neurosis of our time, has raped the earth, upset the delicate balance of nature and created missiles of mass destruction. In keeping death at bay, it has brought us to the brink of extinction. The Goddess has been depotentiated by an unwillingness to accept life and death as complementary rhythms. The only feminine energies to be found in Christianity are those of Mother and Virgin. The Crone has been eliminated.

A study by Harvard researcher Carol Cohn on the language of the creators of defense strategy found that they actually refer to themselves as members of “the nuclear priesthood.” Compelling as technostrategic language may be, it is based “on a logic devoid of values, feelings and humanity. It makes it possible to think the unthinkable, to speak the unspeakable.”

Their claim to legitimacy rests on an objectivity born of technical expertise and a purging of anything that might threaten it. Yet if we are to look below the surface, we find “homoerotic excitement, heterosexual domination, the drive towards competency and mastery, the pleasure of membership in an elite and privileged group, of the ultimate importance and meaning of membership in the priesthood, and the thrilling power of becoming Death, the shatterer of worlds.”

The defense strategists of Cohn’s study represent the alienated ego which views people and things as objects to be controlled, dominated, exploited. A Goddess-centred awareness, in contrast, urges us to look within to body and mind. It leads us to an integration of body and mind, and more than that, to the creation of a subtle body. “The subtle body,” Woodman quotes from her book, The Pregnant Virgin, “denies neither psyche nor soma, but brings them together in a tertium non datur, a third which holds the physical and psychic tensions and acts as a catalyst releasing energy to both sides.”

A Goddess-centred awareness is consciousness in matter. It is the wisdom that comes from experience followed by reflection. It is not order imposed on chaos, but order emerging out of chaos. Neither one nor the other of the opposites of life and death, body and mind, masculine and feminine, but both held in balance until something new arises. The words we associate with the Goddess then are “paradox, presence, and process.”

Although the range of the discussion in Dancing in the Flames is far-reaching, it has its grounding for Marion Woodman in personal experience. Towards the end of her book, she gives an account of events which marked the beginning of her understanding of the role of the Dark Goddess in transforming consciousness.

Commenting on the experience which occurred during a particularly intense period of her analysis when she feared for her sanity, Woodman writes:

The efficient, clock-and-calendar, always-in-control woman was no more. I realized my empowerment was through concentration on an image, a gift from the unconscious. I realized that the fear and chaos in my rational mind could be stilled by the order in my unconscious. The archetypal image rising out of the depths of my body … could bring conscious and unconscious into harmony and with each other and with the natural order. Then, I could be whole. … Knowing that someone is moving you, whether you understand it or not, is an awesome experience. That nonrational knowing, which is being known, is what brings the heights and depths together. In that wholeness, healing lies.

—Alice Johnston