Emerging
Archetypal Themes: Leo, the New Queen & Dirty Dancing
Hrana
Janto offers beautiful photo-quality art prints of the image of Sekhmet
shown here, as well as her other goddess images, at her website, http://www.hranajanto.com.
The emerging archetypal theme I’ve worked with this month is
the journey of Individuation, the Leo initiation of becoming conscious of your
original Self. Due to the critical
issues facing our world, individuation is the most important task any of us can
undertake this lifetime. Many spiritual
people believe that we are at a moment of conscious evolution, and we are
living in the moment of choice. The only
way to make a real choice is by living our essential truth, through being
connected to what Carl Jung called the Self.
That’s what our movie heroine does.
The spotlight is on the new Queen for this Leo month because
it is the Feminine Spirit that leads us to transformation and individuation. At
the turn of the Ages, the Goddess returns to rebirth the world. She is here, now! And the truth is, women have led the way in
the search for an authentic Self, partly because we’ve never been this free to
understand ourselves before and partly because we make second-class men!
In a world understood and shaped by male perceptions, women
have had to run away from those masculine perceptions to find that Self. But all of us have a feeling nature, a
feminine side that wants to leave the old rules behind and find our own
standpoint. Our emotions as well as our
beliefs shape our choices. If they are
left unconscious, we are easily led; when understood and acted upon, we are
free.
Leo is the sign of the King and Queen and ruled by the Sun, an
ancient symbol of the Center. The Lion’s
gift to all of us is this search for individuation, for the ability to express
who we are fully, with joy, pride and dignity. The path of individuation leads inward to
those feminine aspects of life which help us achieve transformation and inner
freedom. The truth is that outer freedom
is an illusion unless you first achieve inner freedom.
Both Leo and the Sun are apt symbols for our powers of
self-awareness and generative creativity.
If we are in any way like the gods, it is because we are also creative. The
Sun’s light is an ancient image of spiritual enlightenment, taking this
exuberant energy even deeper. So you
see, Leo isn’t only about fun, applause and power. Leo’s fixed nature can take the fire of
creativity/destruction and ground and center it, stabilizing and sustaining the
fire for the benefit of life.
When women claimed our freedom in the 60s, we claimed it with
our bodies as well as our minds and hearts.
Many of us threw off the shackles of patriarchal expectations and went
exploring, and others met those expectations by entering the work world or
staying home with their children. But
all of us were Father’s Daughters, women committed to the masculine ideals of
patriarchy/capitalism. Education in
hand, we thought we were quite capable of handling life. Well, life more often handled us, but though
we were often disillusioned and sometimes hurt, we learned from our experiences
and built on that new knowledge. Many of
us left the Father’s House of patriarchal expectations and became conscious
women.
For the most part, women have been denied Leo’s gift for
millennia, subjugated to the rules of a society that devalued women and offered
few opportunities for freedom of expression.
I love the cosmic synchronicity that it is the Pluto in Leo women – the
Baby Boomers – who first experienced this freedom on a large scale.
Women want to find out who we are as opposed to just living as
who we’re told to be. The Archetypal
Feminine energy is abroad once more, the Goddess has returned and her daughters
are transforming the world with their freedom.
As we incarnate this renewed archetypal energy, we each
exemplify an aspect of the New Queen. Being
a Queen is being a female leader; being a Queen is embodying the emotional
rhythms of life. I wrote about such a
new queen in the Aries blog about the movie Whale Rider. The movie speaks of the shift of leadership
from masculine to feminine if we want renewal of life.
An ancient function of the queen and king was to serve as
mediators between heaven and earth, man and woman, god and goddess. They represented the gods to their people,
and their people to the gods. They were
spiritually conscious people and they were leaders of their people. Isn’t it time again for wise leaders?
In a democracy, we are all called to become queens and
kings. We’re supposed to contribute our
creativity to the world. That’s what
makes us whole, personally and collectively.
It’s not enough to create for our own sakes; we want to share our
creativity with the world. We want to
make a difference when Leo is strong in us.
But first women have to leave the Father’s House and move
beyond the patriarchal rules in their souls.
I’m not talking about rebellion, although that’s often a first step. Or being sexually free, which isn’t the same
as sexually whole. Women need to take the best and brightest of what we’ve
learned from our ‘fathers’ and leave all the rules behind and find our own
rules, based on our values, understanding and love. The first step is to return
to our bodies, not just with sexual freedom but with understanding and love. We need to discover our own courage, strength,
truth, beauty, love, imagination, intelligence, power and mystery. Happily, we’ve been left stories and fairy
tales to show us how to do this.
Fairy tales seem to be the bare bones of the primal archetypes
of life. Stories passed down through the
ages to help us get through the transitions in life. One big transition that’s been brewing for
centuries is this women’s journey from the Father’s House to freedom. There is an old story that tells the tale of a
princess who fled the father’s house and gained her freedom and deep wisdom
through day-long toil and a strong dose of patience. Freedom from oppression is never free!
The tale gives us clues to achieving our quest for a conscious
feminine standpoint to base our purpose on.
The basic pattern is set. How we
fill it in is up to us. The Grimm fairy
tale is called Allerleirauh and the
movie that fleshed out this archetypal pattern is Dirty Dancing.
Allerleirauh: The Wisdom of Nature
Real individuality calls for freedom of choice – we must have
the freedom to listen within and choose our own course to become whole. In the past century, women, for the most
part, have found outer freedom, and still more recently, some have found inner
freedom. But first, because patriarchy
gives higher value to the outer world than to the inner realms of feeling and
intuition, women used our freedom to go into the outer world, expecting to find
equality with men. But what we found was
that we had to act like men because our social structures are male-based and
cared nothing about feminine gifts unless they served patriarchy’s purposes.
When women realize that patriarchy still wants to own our
creativity and energy, many of us decide to leave the father’s house and go out
on our own. It takes the bravery and
determination, intelligence and passion of a father’s daughter. A father’s daughter who is ready to grow up
and become her own woman. When women
start to listen to our own wisdom, the world prospers. Through the years since the 60s, women have
worked long and hard to change the culture, and we’re beginning to see the
effects of adding responsibility and compassion, imagination and intuition to
our public life.
The story of betrayal, flight, toil and transformation goes
like this.
Once there was a king and queen who were deeply in love. But the queen got sick and began to die. Before she did, she forced the king to make a
promise that he would only marry someone like her, with the same golden
hair. The only one who fit the bill was
their daughter. And so the king decided
to marry her. Think of it – all her
fertility and life will belong to him.
Being a smart father’s daughter, the princess demands that her
father make her three dresses: one that shines like the Sun, one like the Moon,
and one like the Stars. Then she demands
that he make her a mantle of furs with a bit of fur from every animal in his
kingdom. She believes he will never
accomplish the tasks and she will be free.
Unfortunately, the king has a lot of people working for him,
and he gets the clothes made. And makes
his demands – they will marry! So the
princess does what any conscious woman would do – she leaves. Or rather, she runs away to the forest,
dressed in her mantle of furs, taking a few treasures and her dresses with her
in a nutshell.
The forest is, as you know, a place of mystery. All those shadows and hidden places. All the life and silence. Finally exhausted from running away, the
princess falls asleep in a tree. Safe at
last. Only she isn’t. For now a new king comes, a hunter who also
lives in the forest. And he finds her,
thinks her a beast and brings her home to work in his kitchen.
He’s certainly different from her father. In fact, it seems she dreamed him up in that
tree, don’t you think? Anyway, she works
hard for a long time in the king’s kitchen.
Then the hunter king decides to hold three balls.
Dancing is a must in fairy tales of transformation. We need to catch the rhythm, need to
incarnate the energy, need to focus it on our goals. Dancing is the most
ancient form of this kind of archetypal energy transfer. Like the pounding contractions of birth,
rhythm takes over our bodies and we are at one with our nature again. The Feminine is Nature’s rhythms; the
Masculine is choice of rhythm. That’s the choice of an individual destiny.
So the princess, who is now called Allerleirauh – of many kinds of furs – appears at the balls each
time in one of her cosmic dresses, appearing to the king clothed in the light
of the sun, the moon and the stars. She
knows who she is, she knows what needs to be done and she knows why it needs to
happen. But she never would have
understood if she hadn’t been living in her mantle of furs – in her body
wisdom. That’s the first thing we need
to validate and understand if we want to be free. We need to listen – to our bodies, to our
hearts, to our minds and most especially to our spiritual imagination – to be
free.
After each appearance, she leaves some nourishment for the
king, something for him to ponder and feel and desire. Until he desires her just as much as she
desires him. She has shaped a new King
while she’s been working in the kitchen of transformation and nourishment. A new masculine energy within herself that
will begin to resonate with the man in her life and transform him.
After the third ball,
the king, who’s been enchanted by Allerleirauh since the beginning, recognizes
her and desires her Wisdom and Beauty, and gives her his love and allegiance.
This New Queen becomes the
man of her dreams – and probably finds her mate too. That’s the story we
find behind the 1983 movie, Dirty
Dancing.
Dirty
Dancing: the Birth of the Conscious Woman
I just spent an evening with a multi-generational group of my
women friends, re-watching Dirty Dancing
for the umpteenth time. I don’t know a single woman who doesn’t love that movie. Why? There have certainly been other movies
about first love, a changing society and rebellion, just as there are lots of
movies with hot dancing in them. Why do
women of all ages gather round to experience this story again and again? And love it every time?
I believe it’s because Dirty
Dancing is built around the archetypal story of Allerleirauh.
When a story
is based in an archetypal process, we can’t help but be affected. The energies call to us. We are all father’s daughters, and our next
step in consciousness is to leave the father behind and find our own emotional
standpoint. This girl/woman Baby is a
perfect persona for our innocent, idealistic father’s daughter who wants to
become the heroine of her own life.
The movie begins with Baby saying she couldn’t imagine ever
finding a man as good as her dad. She is
the archetypal father’s daughter, idealistic, accommodating and ready to make
her mark in the world. It’s interesting that Baby doesn’t have one strong exchange
with her mom during the whole movie. For
Baby, mom is dead. It’s dad who nurtures
her – the real sign of a father’s daughter.
Baby is just that – a baby - she goes along with whatever her father
suggests, even when she feels uncomfortable.
She doesn’t really fit into the resort’s activities like her mother and
sister do. She has other interests.
Like the dancer, Johnny.
His sensuality grabs Baby’s attention.
He’s Baby’s hunter king of the forest.
She’s smart enough to know she’s interested and courageous enough to
seek him out. She pays attention and is
the one who discovers that Penny is in trouble.
And then she does something about it.
She gets involved because of her idealistic beliefs and because of her
interest in Johnny. She leaves the father’s
house when she helps Penny without telling her father. She starts to wear her mantle of furs when
she offers to take Penny’s place in the dance.
She learns to dance. Everything her father taught her gets
enhanced once she brings her energy into her body in the dance. She comes into herself and becomes a
woman.
After Baby tells Mr. Kellerman she was with Johnny the night
the wallet was stolen, Baby’s father won’t talk with her. So she goes to confront him in the best scene
of the movie. And the truth of the
matter shines out. He is the father who
rejects the reality of his child. The father who would rather marry his own
daughter than let her live her own life.
Baby: I’m sorry I lied to you, but you lied
too. You told me everyone was alike and
deserved a fair break, but you meant everyone who was like you. You told me you wanted me to change the world
and make it better, but you meant by becoming a lawyer or economist and
marrying someone from Harvard. I’m not
proud of myself… There are a lot of things about me that are not what you
thought, but if you love me, you have to love all the things about me. And I love you, and I’m sorry I let you down,
Daddy. But you let me down too.
Baby arrives at Kellerman’s a baby in truth and leaves as a woman
named Frances, standing in her own truth.
And the interesting thing we find out at the end of the story is that
Baby’s mother claims that Baby gets her dancing ability from her! While mom doesn’t seem to have an identity of
her own, being another father’s daughter herself, she claims the Feminine power
of dance and rhythm as her great gift to her daughter.
The power of a good story comes from its connection to
archetypal themes. Dirty Dancing’s power lies in showing us the process of leaving the
Father’s House and becoming a conscious woman.
That’s the gift that Leo offers all of us – the task of becoming
conscious human beings.
