Emerging Archetypal Themes: LadyHawke

LadyHawke:

The Union of Opposites, Gemini & The Lovers

If I had to pick an archetypal embodiment of Gemini, it would be the Bards, those ancient and modern storytellers and wisdom-keepers who inspire their people with imagination and hope.  Bards understand what people are going through - they create, paint, dance and communicate what they see through stories and songs to help people connect to the great Mystery of Life.  This is Gemini’s soul task – to experience, learn, remember and share cultural wisdom.  The Beatles are modern Bards, passing along to the rest of us music and stories which embodied the new vision of life we were exploring in the 60s.  They gave us a new template for life.

What happens when our collective wisdom no longer serves life?  What happens when there is a split between our beliefs and our actions?  That’s when Bards and their stories become important.  They take us to the archetypal realms, to the rich storehouse of ancient wisdom that can help us accept and embody our individual purpose and power.  

Something new arises.  A new perspective achieved.  Growth.  Consciousness.

The Sign of Gemini  

The sign of Gemini, the divine and mortal Twins, not only speaks to how we learn and perceive the world, but also symbolizes our dualistic world, the 0’s and 1’s of our binary code.  Our fifteen billion year old universe gave rise to the dualities of life and so we perceive things through the lens of day and night, sun and moon, good and evil, life and death, conscious and unconscious, right and left, male and female.  

            In Tarot, Gemini is represented by the major arcana card, The Lovers.  When we look at the possible meanings of the Lovers, they all hint at the union of opposites, the great alchemical transformation which gives rise to the Self, the Divine consciousness within us.  Gemini and The Lovers seek synthesis, combining the head and the heart, feeling and intellect.  And they represent male and female coming together as two equal, complementary and yet opposite energies.  And of course, this bond includes sexuality, which is the most intimate form of bond between these opposites.  What forms the real bond, though, is Love, the divine connector.  

            Unfortunately, patriarchy through its religious institutions has marginalized the truth of love at the same time as it has glorified it.  How can it be otherwise when the only god-image we are allowed is masculine?  Our old patriarchal paradigm of partnership is innately imbalanced, giving greater weight to masculine, rational, solar consciousness than to feminine, imaginative, lunar consciousness.  Love and relationship are the most sacred experiences of Life, and yet as we see in the myth of Psyche and Eros, we are most often left to stumble into love without any real knowledge of how to act and what it means.  Our world is sorely in need of a new paradigm of partnership, an equal and balanced union of masculine and feminine consciousness, of left and right brains, and of men and women.  

  

This imbalance between the sexes and modes of consciousness has given rise to a dominator mentality, regarding life and love.  Raine Eisler’s Sacred Pleasure: Sex, Myth and the Politics of the Body,  lays out how important it is to understand the way society uses pain or pleasure to motivate human behavior, which determines how it evolves.   Traditional Christian imagery, which is the basis of western civilization, sacralizes pain rather than pleasure, especially in choosing Christ Crucified rather than the Risen Christ as their central god-image.  Women’s bodies and sexuality have been demonized by Christianity and therefore rigidly controlled.    And so, we have a society where there is mistrust between men and women and control issues in our sexual relationships because of this longstanding religious mistrust. 

Ms. Eisler speaks about two different models of sexuality, the dominator model and the partnership model.  In the dominator model, men dominate women and other men through fear and force.  They equate sexuality and pleasure with pain and domination – i.e., violence and pornography – and block the natural bonding that the giving and receiving of sexual pleasure brings.   The partnership model is based on equality between all people, but especially between men and women, and the bonding through sexual pleasure is held sacred. 

When men and women work together, nothing can stop us.  But we’ve been separated for a long time now by religious belief, domination and violence, genetic inheritance and soul history.  The power generated in equal measure by masculine and feminine spirit can enliven the re-birth process we so desperately need for ourselves and our world.  Conscious women and men working together can re-birth the world.

So for Gemini’s movie theme of the union of opposites, we’ll let the story of LadyHawke enchant our minds and open our hearts to the possibility of breaking this ancient curse between the sexes and reclaiming the most powerful gift of life – LOVE.

LadyHawke

            Richard Donner’s 1985 film LadyHawke speaks to this theme of the degrading of love and the violence and separation it causes before we can achieve the ultimate re-union of Love.  Patriarchy has not been kind to Love, giving it hypocritical lip service, but degrading and prostituting it to serve the needs of the system rather than the flowering of the individual soul.  We cannot grow into our wholeness without learning the lessons of love.  It’s part of our DNA, and the most beautiful gift of Spirit in our sojourn here on Earth.  

The ways of love are many.  They include the ways we connect through the heart to children, parents, siblings, family, friends, lovers, communities, the world, art, ideas, Nature, visions, stories.  Love fills us with pleasure and pain in equal measure, but always teaches us lessons.   So never let a chance to love slip you by!  There’s always a gift and a sacrifice involved.  So let’s see how these themes play out in our tale of cursed lovers.

LadyHawke is a story of two lovers who are cursed by a powerful bishop because the woman, Isabeau, does not love him, but loves Navarre, the captain of the guard of Aquila.  The curse the bishop casts is heartbreaking:  by day, Isabeau is a hawk and at night she resumes her human shape; Navarre keeps his human form by day and at night he becomes a wolf.  They are cursed to be separated forever.  Then one day, a young thief becomes Navarre’s companion and their fate starts to change.  Gaston becomes their go-between, bringing them hope in their darkness.   And with the help of the priest who unknowingly betrayed their love, a way out of the curse is found.  During a solar eclipse, a day without night and a night without day, a time between times, they can both stand before the bishop and break the curse.   It is during solar eclipses that old patterns of behavior and thought can be broken, and psychic structures hidden in the unconscious can take on new life.  LadyHawke is a reminder that the cosmos supports love and can break the spell old ideas and beliefs hold over us that no longer serve life.  

LadyHawke is a magical story about the Mind’s ability to overcome the ancient ‘curse’ of our religious beliefs and the ultimate triumph of Love.  There are four main characters that drive the story: the Bishop who curses, the lovers who bear the curse, and the trickster who comes along and changes their story.  While dogma has cursed lovers with separation and denial, the fresh, original Mind/Heart brings them together again.

The Dogma of Disconnection

            The Church as embodied by the Bishop (a wonderfully evil John Wood) is hypocritical, refined, all-powerful, lustful and authoritarian, vindictive and cowardly.  He represents the dogma of both church and state, the dominator mentality that believes it has a divine right to whatever it wants.   This Bishop thinks he loves Isabeau, but when she refuses his love, he would rather see her dead or cursed than to see her be happy with someone else.  This is the selfishness of dominator love – the beloved becomes a possession.  To oppose the Bishop’s will is to court disaster, for he is willing to use all the power at his disposal to keep the lovers apart; he’s even willing to use the sinful (for his Church) tool of magic to achieve his revenge.  However, when he curses the lovers to take on the form of animals, Nature herself ultimately opens the door to the possibility of breaking the curse.  

In the same vein, this month’s Gemini solar eclipse opens the door to our own transformation.  The solar eclipse blocks our ego consciousness (sun), so new archetypal possibilities (moon) can take root within our psyches.   One task all of us share for this lifetime is to break the chains of violence and possessiveness that is patriarchy’s response to sexuality and love.  Heal your own inner Lover by breaking the old spell at the eclipse.

The Trickster Mind

Opposing the Bishop/Church is our little thief, Phillipe Gaston, aka the Mouse (a delightful Matthew Broderick).  Over against official dogma is set the inquisitive and questing mind that nothing can imprison.  This young man embodies the qualities of Hermes the Thief, the ancient messenger god who, under his guise of Mercury, rules over Gemini.  Gaston frequently talks with God, using Him as therapist and spiritual director, promising to change his ways as he escapes through a drainpipe from the inescapable prison of Aquila or when he sees something his rational mind can’t comprehend.  Uniting both common sense and spiritual insight is the goal of the Gemini mind.  Gaston’s communication with Spirit takes a turn when he meets the monk Imperius, the priest who foolishly told the Bishop of the lovers’ intentions.   The guilt of having been the cause of the curse drives Imperius to find a way to break it.  When the lovers refuse to believe the traitor priest, Gaston takes up his cause and uses Imperius’ knowledge to help them break the curse.  

 

 Gaston is the trickster mind which looks outside the box to previously disregarded or forbidden knowledge which can be used to unite these lost lovers, bringing messages of hope and eventual redemption. He brings a new awareness and consciousness to the lovers, who have been isolated from community and in exile from each other.  Through him, they start to communicate and once again see the possibility of re-uniting.   

Gaston’s Mouse totem gives him the ability to focus and pay attention to details.  This attention to detail is Hermes’ gift to thieves.  And these details help break the curse in the end, because it looks at the parameters of the curse and finds out that it can only be broken when there’s a day without night and a night without day – the magical time between times of a solar eclipse, when the conscious authority of ego and culture is overwhelmed by the needs of the psyche and wholeness.

The Lovers and the Curse  

 

Etienne Navarre (a dashing Rutger Hauer) is the captain of the guard in Aquila, the region the Bishop rules.  Isabeau (a haunting Michelle Pfeiffer) is a beautiful young woman whom the Bishop lusts after.   After Isabeau confesses her love for Navarre to Imperius (a marvelous Leo McKern) in confession, he in turn drunkenly reveals their secret to the Bishop.  Here is the dilemma our religious institutions create – on the one hand, the authority of the Church wants to possess all beauty and goodness for itself.  All love must be directed to these religious beliefs, making human love secondary to a supposed love of God.  On the other hand, the Church itself values marriage, but only on its terms.  The idea that all marriage must be sanctioned by religious dogma is hypocritical, especially in light of the revelations of priestly pedophilia.  The Bishop, who is supposed to be celibate, lusts after women and feels it’s his right to possess them as his handmaidens.  This kind of spiritual hypocrisy leads to the separation of lovers rather than to their love’s fulfillment.   The Church has fostered suspicion and misunderstanding between men and women and we see this today in the many marriages that end in nasty, resentful divorces, rather than with understanding and compassion.  

  

We often don’t realize how our unconscious beliefs shape our lives, especially our beliefs about partnership and marriage.  While we give lip service to equality, many men still believe it is their right to dominate their family and abuse their wives because it is sanctioned by their religion.  And women add pain and bitterness to the mix when they don’t know how to stand up for themselves and meet their partners as equals.  Our culture is so unbalanced because of religious beliefs that said women are irrelevant except as helpmates to their husbands.  And this led to the devaluation of feminine consciousness, the right-brained consciousness of connection, imagination and soul.  While we might not consciously think this, our unconscious motivations are often still unchanged.

We can see these cursed lovers as symbols of the left and right brains.  The left brain is a scientist and a mathematician.  It is the brain that looks for the familiar, that categorizes, that is linear, analytical, strategic.   It’s the practical, realistic, in control part of the brain.  It is a master of words and language.  The right brain is a free spirit, seeing connections with others and spirit.   It is creativity and passion, sensuality and movement.  It takes joy in vivid colors, art and poetry. It is the source of imagination and heart.   We need the higher Mind (the neocortex) to unite these separate sides of ourselves.  

With Navarre and Isabeau, the curse separates them into Hawk and Wolf.  These totem animals are wonderful expressions of the left and right brains as well as the innate gifts of men and women.  Let’s take a look at their symbolic meaning.

The beautiful Isabeau is human at night, the realm of the feminine Moon.  She becomes conscious under the moonlight.  Feminine consciousness has been repressed in patriarchy and so it is most often unconscious.  It comes to us through dreams and visions and feelings and imagination.  So Isabeau learns to live in the darkness of this kind of consciousness.  By day, she is a hawk.  Hawks are strong totems, keen-eyed and swift.  They are the messengers of spirit and vision.   Hawk’s power puts us in touch with kundalini energies that can open us to higher psychic awareness.  Hawk can help us balance this life energy so that we can achieve beauty and harmony and discover our life’s purpose.  Hawk brings messages from our soul, which is Spirit incarnate, so we can use our creative energies to manifest our destined purpose.  Hawk stimulates this kundalini energy, giving us greater physical, mental, emotional and spiritual energy to use in our lives.  It urges us to stretch our imaginations beyond cultural expectations. Hawk catalyzes us with hope and new ideas.  This powerful totem symbolizes the ability to connect our human consciousness with spiritual awareness.  And this is the innate power of feminine consciousness that women have been denied by patriarchy.  Women can bring this night vision into the light of day as the wisdom we need to heal the world.¹

Navarre is everything we would expect in a knight.  He is dashing, brave, powerful and protective.  And he’s got a magnificent horse!  He loves and yearns for his Beloved.  He follows the hawk and protects her.  But he also despairs more than Isabeau, because he is human in the daytime reality of the Sun.  He can only see what is in front of him, and that is the reality of never breaking the curse. That’s why he wants to go kill the Bishop and die himself. He has lost his vision and his hope.  He has lost Isabeau.

But at night, under the Moon, he becomes a wolf.  In his nighttime shape, he reverts to the animal that is most often misunderstood and reviled.  Wolves have gotten a bad rap from humans.  We send people out in helicopters to kill them in the snows and think it is a worthy occupation.   While our stories about them are full of terror and cold-blooded violence, they are really the exact opposite of how our stories depict them.  Rarely, unless they are wounded or starving, will a wolf attack a human being.  

Wolves are friendly, social and highly intelligent.  They can even be joyful!  They are loyal to their families and packs and live by defined rules and rituals. There are alpha males and females who rule the pack, and every wolf has a place and function in the hierarchy of the pack.  There is a balanced mix of alpha authority and democracy in the pack, which makes their way of life flexible.   They rarely fight, going out of their way to avoid one.  Through glances, growls and postures, they assert dominance and keep the peace.  They use a complex body language to communicate with each other as well as their famous howls and growls.  They have strong senses of smell and hearing. They are attuned to the particulars of their world.

Wolves are the wild spirits of the animal world, which is why our culture fears them.  If we were all free to be our wild selves, we could not be controlled by religions, governments or corporations.   That freedom, though, comes through discipline and a sense of order.  Wolves offer us an image of the right kind of rituals that shape a good life.²

One thing that wolves share with hawks is that they mate for life. As Navarre stays to Gaston, he didn’t even leave us that.  We could say that wolves love, because they deal with their pups with affection and playfulness.  They protect their families and share in taking care of them.  If only our society had these qualities, our divorced couples and their extended families would take better care of their own children.

Navarre’s wolf totem is a wonderful symbol for our left brain.  Their intelligence, their ability to form emotional attachments, their rituals and sense of discipline and order reflect the left brain at its best.  And they are wonderful examples for men, because we need men to be the loyal, loving, joyful and disciplined protectors of life.

Dreams of Separation

So many people today find themselves divorced from a person they thought they loved.  While baby-boomers have led the way with their longing for soul-mates, our children have looked for both independence and transformation from their partnerships.  So many of us have only found disappointment.  But how can we really find soul-mates and freedom and equality in partnership when we haven’t had those types of partnerships in the past, either our own past lives or our family history?  We have to work on healing the male-female relationship before our yearnings for a true soul-mate can be realized.  We too, have to break the curse.

When my own marriage was starting to break apart, I had a dream that was very telling.  I am in a beautiful green meadow filled with people I know.  I find out that I have to sacrifice myself for them.  I am to be be-headed.  I accept this as my fate and go around saying goodbye to everyone.  Some of them lovingly hug me; some tell me I don’t have to do it.  My mom begs me not to do it.  When I come to my husband, he is lying on a Roman-style couch and he ignores me.  I go and kneel down and a man with a black mask over his head comes and swings an ax.  Next thing I know I am standing and a round object comes flying into my hands and I wake up.

This dream marked an acceptance of the dissolution of my marriage.  That divorce ended up being what I needed to grow into myself, although it was a long, hard lesson.  But I had to accept that I couldn’t find myself within the marriage – my husband had already gone away.  He no longer cherished or wanted to protect me.   This is unfortunately the case in many marriages.  But perhaps Spirit needed women to learn to survive on our own so we could become the equals of our men, while men needed to continue the search for their Beloved until they could become the loving protectors they are meant to be.

I hope you take this chance to watch this movie and let the story sink in.  LadyHawke is an archetypal tale of the power of the Mind and of Love to break the curse our unbalanced religious beliefs have caste upon relationships between men and women and masculine and feminine consciousness.  We can use the power of this story to help us meet this month’s solar eclipse in Gemini with the strength and purpose to release old perceptions and categories about relationships and let the power of Love through the power of the Mind awaken us to new possibilities.  It is time to unite the opposites, both within and without.  We need men and women working together, using their own specific gifts in freedom and joy, to change our world.

And so the tale ends . . . to be continued.

Cathy Pagano

Footnotes:

1.       Ted Andrews, Animal Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great & Small.

(Woodbury, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 2008). Pp. 152-155.

2.       Ibid.  pp. 323-325.

Avatar: Taurus, Spiritual Matter, Mother Earth & Our Bodies

Emerging Archetypal Themes:  Avatar

Taurus: Spiritual Matter, Mother Earth & Our Bodies

The Lakota was a true Naturist - a Lover of Nature.  He loved the earth and all things of the earth, the attachment growing with age.  . . .  That is why the old Indian still sits upon the earth instead of propping himself up and away from its life-giving forces.  For him, to sit or lie upon the ground is to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; he can see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives about him. . .Luther Standing Bear

It’s time to find your copy of Avatar and watch it again. 

Our souls need archetypal stories to structure our psychic energy, and Avatar speaks to the part of us that knows we need to take care of Nature, both Earth’s nature and our own. 

With the Sun in Taurus, people naturally want to attune themselves to Nature.  Taurus builds the life that brings us beauty, peace and happiness, because it knows what’s of value.  Taurus values the body, the senses, eternal truths. Taurus tells us that the issues that speak to the heart of our global problems are environmental as well as moral.   Taurus asks us what we value.   Conscious Taurus values Life, unconscious Taurus values possessions.  It seems we’ve made a choice to value things over life.  

But we can change direction with our next steps.   Our Mother, the Earth, is sick and we need to take care of her. Her ecosystems are breaking down, her children are dying and her resources are being depleted. We have to work with the Earth to help restore balance, or it will become a replica of Mordor – the land dead, the people horrifically mutated, the one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them! 

“As Above, So Below.  As Within, So Without.”  

Just as our water is fouled, our air is poisoned and our soil is depleted, our bodies and our psyches are suffering from these same environmental damages.  If we want to change how we live in this world, we need to start believing that we really are connected with the Earth and each other.  So belief comes first.  That’s how Jake Sully learned on Pandora.  First he had to feel and believe in Pandora before he would fight for Pandora. 

We live in a society that prizes its economic success over people’s health and well-being, creativity and inner essence.  We need to change our priorities and focus on healing our bodies and our Earth.   There are other ways to live that are more healthy and creative than our present way of life.  We have the intellect, the imagination and heart to do it. But we need our wounded warrior king to heal first.  

Life on Pandora shows us another way to live. Like Taurus’ vision of life, it is a way that puts us in harmony with our Earth and each other.  We are seduced by beautiful, magical Pandora into imagining ourselves that free, that connected to Eywa, to the animals and plants, waters and air.  That connected to the Tree of Life.   Yes, Pandora is an image of Paradise, but Jake brings consciousness into the picture.  Paradise becomes a choice. 

Avatar’s theme is obvious: our mechanistic, violent, money-oriented way of life is destroying our own Pandora here on Earth.   The question is what will we do about it?  The story shows us how we can do it if we chose to side with the Earth.

Avatar shows us that our wounded bodies and the wounded Earth come from a common source.  We are faced with the truth of a despoiled environment; now we have to face the truth of how we’ve ignored the deeper needs of the body, settling for outer comfort rather than inner peace and health, beauty and connectedness.  

Understanding that we don’t need everything our society tells us we need, and simplifying our lifestyles, can help us discover new and better ways to live. Creating a society that helps everyone meet a level of comfortable needs will allow us time to use our energy for creativity and relationships.  As we form a deep connection with Nature, we will be able to see and know what the Earth needs to recover. This has to be our top priority.  We need to ensure that our Earth is healthy and strong so our children’s children will have a viable world to live in.  

We cannot count on our redemption coming from the heavens (on Pandora, the Sky People only bring destruction) because we need to become responsible stewards of our own world. That was God’s command in the Garden of Eden to Adam and Eve.  That is our true place in Earth’s ecosystem.   Just as the Na’vi are good stewards of Pandora, so we can become true stewards of the Earth.  

 To change how we interact with each other and the rest of Nature, it would help to “… sit or lie upon the ground … to be able to think more deeply and to feel more keenly; … see more clearly into the mysteries of life and come closer in kinship to other lives . . .   Jake changed as he learned how to navigate in Pandora’s landscape.  He changed as he became one with it. 

Avatar: Honoring the Earth and Reclaiming Our Bodies

  

Avatar’s appeal is not just visual, it’s visceral.  A story about the body and Nature, it speaks to our deep body wisdom.   Like the ancient myths, this beautiful story gives form to the archetypal energies that are stirring within our collective psyche, energies that sense a big change coming.  Because we see in images and hear it as story, Avatar speaks to our hearts and wakes up our innate love of Mother Earth.  This is what an archetypal story does – it makes us think about what we’re feeling and what we value, so we can do what is necessary to enhance life.   Archetypal stories teach us to see how we are part of the bigger picture, moving our perspective from the small self to the greater Self.  

What we call fairy tales are the remnants of ancient archetypal stories.   Avatar is a modern day fairy tale, build on ancient archetypal patterns.  Its message tells us that our society’s values are at war with Mother Earth and our physical nature.  We are out of balance with our instinctual life, our natural ecosystem.   Our Judeo-Christian, enlightened, rational, capitalist beliefs have led to the rape of our environment for economic gain, risking sickness and death in Nature and the human population rather than focusing on what is right and healing.  We are creating a wasteland, and the story shows us what we need to do to protect and defend our home planet from environmental death and from soul-death.  We have to hope that we find a way to make the land fruitful again.  And we have to know that sometimes it’s just not possible.  

It all begins with our beliefs.  We need to change our collective paradigm from the pursuit of human comfort to the responsibility of good stewardship, both of the Earth and of our own lives.  What is the best way to live on this beautiful and endangered planet?  We can no longer deny the damage.  We have to face it and deal with it to come back into balance.

The Wounded Earth: The Wounded Warrior-King

The beginning of an archetypal story tells us where the problem or the wound is. And then the story goes on to show us how to heal it.  So let’s see how Avatar speaks to our own condition.

 In the beginning of Avatar, we hear and see Jake, our wounded hero. We hear him say, “I dream I am flying. I am free.  But sooner or later you always have to wake up. Or cry when you can’t dream.”  His wound centers on freedom, and the disconnect between our collective reality and our deepest wishes, between our minds and our bodies. 

 When his brilliant scientist twin brother is killed in a robbery – all that life bled out for money - Jake is enticed to take his place on Pandora to make enough money to heal his spine so he can walk again. The money is emphasized, both the expense of creating the avatar body and the money Jake will make.  It’s all about the money.   

As Jake watches his brother’s body incinerate, he thinks: He was the brains and I was the brawn.  Right away we see that Jake doesn’t value his own knowledge, his common sense, even while he deeply ponders his life and his options.  His learning style comes through his body awareness, which he negatively compares to his brother’s intelligence.   We also do this by valuing left-brain rational thinking above right-brain emotional intelligence, mind over body, Heaven over Earth, masculine over feminine consciousness. Jake’s paralyzed, cut off from the thing he knows best.  He’s been wandering around lost until this new opportunity comes his way.  An opportunity to gain back what was lost.  To make a new beginning.  So he takes it. 

Jake is such a great symbol for our own wounded bodies, bodies cut off from the Earth’s energies and unconscious of our own instincts. Besides the obvious ways our health has been affected by our dying environment, we have lost our deep connection with Nature. Who spends more time out in Nature than inside a climate-controlled building?  We have lost touch with our instincts and it paralyzes us. Who follows receding ocean waters to be swallowed by the resulting tsunami?  A wounded body awareness doesn’t kill our curiosity.  It just kills us.

Jake’s useless legs symbolize the wound to our physicality and to our warrior nature; a wound that affects our standpoint.  By warrior nature I mean the warrior within each of us that is willing to grapple with issues and fight for what we believe in.   When we lose our belief in the system, we lose our spine, our standpoint and become paralyzed.  We begin to question what we believe in and what we’re willing to fight for.  That’s why the rallying cry of patriotism is so seductive.  We are called to defend our own.  But what happens when our own is no longer worth defending?  This is the dilemma Jake faces.  This is our dilemma.

What happens to warrior energy when it has nothing to believe in anymore?  It works for money, it gets cruel, and in the end, it operates out of fear.  Jake comments on this when he arrives at corporate headquarters on Pandora.  He looks around and sees fellow ex-marines who used to fight for freedom but now fight for money. The Colonial is a character whose outlook is based in fear, fear of something greater than his own prowess, which constellates his violent aggression.  He is afraid of Pandora and its wildness and of the Na’vi because they’re better warriors than he is.  And so he retreats to ‘pumping iron” and encasing himself in a metal monster to fight.  FEAR rules him.  He fears he is not a warrior, but a coward. 

The shadow Jake has to face is his fear that he’ll never walk again.  The need to heal his body is what keeps his hopes alive as Jake begins to inhabit his avatar.   Jake needs to become ‘embodied’ again – he wants his legs back, he wants to move forward.  When he gets those legs in his avatar body, he remembers his old skills and opens himself to learning new things. His natural joy, curiosity, playfulness and competitiveness come back online.   

For the most part, western culture is ‘dis-embodied'.  We all live in our heads, sitting for hours on end, perhaps taking the time to exercise for an hour, but never fully inhabiting our bodies for any length of time.  We adorn our bodies but rarely listen to them. We use our bodies but are not open to our bodies’ sensual gifts.  We’ve lost touch with our instincts. 

The freedom and joy of the body moving, leaping, daring is a major component of this story, just as Pandora’s beauty complements the body’s freedom.  Corporate (ironically, from the word corpus ‘belonging to the body’) people live in metal boxes, without beauty or free movement: even walking in open spaces, which is such a big part of the game of golf, is reduced to putting in the office.

On the other hand, the Na’vi live in their bodies. They use their bodies to live, and not just to carry around a brain!  They move through their day, depending on their body’s wisdom, strength and curiosity.   Many people longed for the ability to have the Na’vi hair endings that unite them to magical horses and flying dragons.  If we spent more time out in nature, we could develop similar organs of perception to connect us to nature.  We can once again feel at one with nature if we choose to really go and live as part of nature. Unfortunately, most of us do nothing because our warrior nature is wounded and our corporate state keeps us asleep.  

Once again, Jake shows us the way.  When his awareness is focused through the body again, Jake is naturally courageous, daring, strong, inquisitive and persistent, playful, foolish and fearless, willing to take risks and willing to learn.   All good warrior traits!   Traits that are completely different from the Colonial’s fear, control, and manipulation. 

 

The Divine Feminine

 Once we return to our bodies, we reconnect with the Divine Feminine spirit of Life.  Eywa is the spiritual energy of Pandora, its World Soul; it is an energy that pervades the landscape and unites all the beings of Pandora.  All of Pandora rises up to meet the challenge of defeating the Corporation because of this connection.  It is Eywa who announces that Jake is important to Pandora.   How do we know that it wasn’t this spiritual energy of Life who substituted Jake for his scientist twin, knowing, because all life is connected, that it was this type of knowing, rather than the scientific ‘brain’, that was needed to save Pandora?  

 Why would Spirit go outside Pandora for a new hero? Is it because white men, even the damaged ones, are superior to everyone else?  I don’t think so!   Spirit brought Jake to Pandora because new knowledge has to be integrated into the Na’vi collective psyche to get rid of the ‘Sky People’.  It is not about a white guy knowing more than the natives, but about the need to heal the wound of one side through the life-giving energy of the other.  The integration between these two different types of consciousness takes everyone to a higher level of awareness.  

 Spirit operates in our lives, whether we know it or not.  Spirit does not take away our free will, but rather opens us to the possibilities of growth available to us in life.  It is this deep connection to the Divine Feminine that heals Jake and opens him up to his ‘kingship’, just as a connection to the Divine Feminine can heal our ‘wounded’ body and Earth and restore us to a more balanced understanding of life.

 I love Neytiri!  She’s a perfect expression of how a woman lives the deep power of the Divine Feminine, grounded in her body, open to her intuition, in tune with her instincts. Her fierce rejection of Jake’s initial childishness is wonderful!  What woman hasn’t wanted to hiss at her man that way?  Her take on Jake is true: you have a strong heart and have no fear, but you are stupid! Ignorant as a child!  It says something about Jake that his response is: teach me to see. 

Neytiri’s fierceness is need now in our world, and like her strength and loyalty which open Jake up to his feelings, women need to stand in our fierce beauty and challenge men to open to the power of the Feminine.  Clarrissa Pinkola Estes wrote about this kind of feminine fierceness in her book, Women Who Run With the Wolves.  Neytiri’s female strength attracts Jake and helps birth the king archetype in him.  Would that our earthmen were attracted to this same strength in women!   

 It is the three women in the story, Neytiri, Grace and the clan priestess Moat, who help Jake grow up and take responsibility for the part he plays in the destruction of the Home Tree - the World Tree – the Tree of Life.  Neytiri teaches him love.  Grace teaches him responsibility.  Moat gives him his chance at new life.  When Moat decides to allow Jake to be trained as a Na’vi, he asks her why nobody else has done it.  Her response hits the nail on the head: we’ve tried to teach then, but they are already full. (That’s the hubris of left-brain thinking.) She allows Jake to train to see if man’s insanity can be cured.  Isn’t that what needs to happen?

It’s time we stopped blaming our mother Eve for eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge and getting us kicked out of Paradise.  Perhaps her only sin was sharing it with an unconscious man!  We have to grow up and acknowledge our part in the destruction of life – our home, our paradise - if we’re ever going to step up and do something about it.  The male left-brain (which women are caught up in too) is crazy when it thinks it has all the power.  It needs the balance of the feminine right-brain’s intuition, sensuality and feeling. 

It all goes back to the underlying belief of our patriarchal culture which says that there is a Father God who lives in the heavens and who has no Feminine counterpart.  This belief allows us to think the material world is 'dead matter' instead of the Feminine aspect of the Divine – the Divine ability to incarnate spirit in material life.  This belief in only the power of the Masculine Spirit has cut us off from Feminine Spirit, which comes through our bodies and souls and gives us a truthful 'standpoint' about life.  When we get 'embodied' again, we regain our connection to the Feminine Spirit of Life and to our connection with Spirit in an intimate way.  That’s how we grow into conscious human beings.  And that’s how we’ll save our Earth.

The Return of the King

 Jake gets a chance to be an Avatar, which means an incarnation of a god or spiritual essence.  We could all take this lesson to heart and remember that each of us contains a part of Spirit, and it is our spiritual destiny to integrate our body and spirit, which we do through a conscious connection to our soul.  This is what the upcoming square between Pluto in Capricorn and Uranus in Aries is calling us to.  Our hero, in connecting to his avatar body and to Pandora, learns the truth of the Celtic belief that the good king is wed to the Land to protect its health. (The Lion King, as well as the Grail stories, has this story plot: once the evil Scar kills the rightful king, the land dies.  We get the Wasteland.  It is only with the return of the true king that life become fruitful again.) 

 

Avatar is a story about the wounds we have inflicted on our Earth and on our bodies.  It is also the myth of the return of the King.  Neytiri doesn’t kill Jake because she pays attention to Eywa’s messages.  When the glowing seeds of the Sacred Tree float down and cover Jake’s avatar body, Neytiri understands Eywa’s message: he has a good heart, a strong heart.  That’s what we all need to face the challenges before us.  Our corporate world-view is willing to kill our Earth, our Tree of Life for profits, just as the corporation on Pandora topples the Home Tree in its search for the costly ‘unobtanium’.  

This is what our times are demanding of us.   We need men to take up their 'kingship' again and protect life, not create death in the service of the economy.  The inner king has returned in many women, but not yet in many men.  Arthur has been healed in Avalon, but the men have to bring him back to life here.  We need this new, strong warrior-King as much as we need the feeling, intuitive queen to ground our energies.  We need both men and women working as partners to use their energy and talents to reclaim our world before we destroy ourselves.  

Avatar sets us a task: defend what you love.  Honor the World Soul and listen to its voice.  It will tell you to ask for beauty, truth, honor and body awareness in your life.   Then create a new paradise by invoking Spirit whenever you do anything, so your life will be meaningful.  Learn to listen to your body, not just get in shape.   Unite with like-minded people through ritual and learn to understand the signs Spirit sends you.  When appropriate, stop worrying about what others think of you and in the right situations let your fierceness make the point. Take the leap, love someone who knows themselves, dare to risk death for the love of both your land and your people.  If you want to live on Pandora, find the Pandora here on Earth, and defend it.

 The visuals in Avatar are so breathtaking they open our imaginations and hearts to the message of the story.  The wounded Warrior-King, who has faced death and accepted it, now goes on to a new life. He becomes the avatar.  Avatar shows us how to ‘die and be re-born’; how to awaken to a new vision of life.  Jake is called to become a mythic person, taming the King Dragon to claim his power.  We are all being called to become mythic people again, so claim your souls and fly free!

 Copyright @ 2012 Cathy Lynn Pagano, All Rights Reserved

  

Emerging Archetypal Themes: Whale Rider, Aries and the Female Leader.

    

     While the sign of Aries conjures up images of warriors such as the Greek hero Jason with his golden fleece, and virgin huntresses such as the Greek Artemis and The Hunger Games heroine Katniss, it is also the sign of leadership.  Aries, which rules the head, gives the gift of strategy and leadership to its children.  

    Today our world is in need of good leaders, people who will take the part of the people over the powerful, leaders who know how to spark the enthusiasm and creativity of everyone to help create a new world of peaceful coexistence and good stewardship of the Earth.  The world especially needs female leaders who are not molded by the patriarchy.   We do not need female leaders who stand for the old patriarchal vision of hierarchical power, domination and greed, but rather women who know how to access their own feminine wisdom and who lead from the heart.  

    Niki Caro’s 2002 movie Whale Rider speaks about this need for new feminine leadership in a heart-rending story about the death and regeneration of a culture.  I believe it speaks to our own times and culture; it also speaks of the transformative power of Feminine Spirit to bring this new birth to life.   The old order is dying, but it seems that it is willing to kill off everything rather than die itself.  The way to help it die peacefully is to incarnate the feminine spirit of life.  

    The archetypal Feminine Spirit symbolizes “the origin of life; all phases of cosmic life, uniting all the elements, both the celestial and chthonic; the Queen of Heaven, Mother of God, opener of the way; the keeper of the keys of fertility and the gates of birth, death, and rebirth.  As the Moon Goddess she is perpetual renewal, the measure of time, the weaver of fate.  As Queen of Heaven, she is archetypal wholeness, the mother of all wisdom, self-mastery and redemption through illumination and transformation.”  (J.C. Cooper, Encyclopedia of Symbols, pp. 108-109.)   These are certainly qualities we need to nurture if we’re going to transform our society.  It is always the Goddess who presides over birth, death and rebirth.  When we have women leaders who remember their feminine gifts, I believe wisdom and life will blossom in the cultural deserts of our modern world.  Very much like what happens at the end of our story. 

    The mythological background of Whale Rider is important to the story, because our ‘creation stories’ help us understand our place in the universe.   On the east coast of New Zealand, the Whangara people believe their presence there dates back a thousand years or more to a single ancestor, Paikea, who escaped death when his canoe capsized by riding to shore on the back of a whale. From then on, Whangara chiefs, always the first-born, always male, have been considered Paikea's direct descendants. 

    Whales are mysterious and ancient creatures.  They are the largest mammals, and since they live in the oceans, they symbolize creation itself.  Being so ancient, they seem to hold the records of all our past history, back to the beginning of time itself.  When I was young, I had recurring dreams of being in a primeval ocean, watching these ancient beings swimming around.  It was my first conscious connection to the collective unconscious itself, which I’ve since explored through my dreamwork and storytelling.  These gentle giants are mentioned in the Old Testament as leviathans, and they make a special appearance in the story of Jonah and the Whale, where the reluctant prophet Jonah is swallowed by a whale when he refuses God’s call.  He lived in the belly of the whale for three days before he was reborn.  And so whales have come to represent going into the depths, containment and rebirth.  The great whales in our story symbolize this same rebirth.  While the ancient myth spoke of a rebirth of the Whangara, the story of Whale Ride speaks to the death of the old patriarchy and the rebirth of the culture through the powers of the feminine spirit and the new female leader.

Whale Rider begins with scenes of a hard birth and the death of the mother of twins, a boy and a girl, and the death of the baby boy.  Fairy tales often begin with a death, signifying that something is wrong with collective consciousness.   The missing piece needs to be regenerated, and in this story, it is the feminine dimension of life that can heal and transform the old order.  The patriarch of the family, who is tribal chief, has been waiting for the birth of this young boy, believing he will be the long-awaited new leader of the tribe. Porourangi, the twins’ father, will not bend to his father’s wish that he become tribal leader, and he leaves his baby girl, whom he defiantly names Paikea, to be raised by her grandparents.  While her grandfather, Koro, mourns the loss of the boy child, Paikea is immediately loved and cared for by her grandmother, Nanny Flowers.  As the years go by, even Koro learns to love his intelligent, curious and loving granddaughter.

Years later, twelve-year old Pai is caught between her love for her increasingly bitter grandfather and her love of and heart-felt link to her ancient traditions.  Koro is troubled because he needs to train a new leader for the tribe.  He is fiercely dedicated to the old ways, even as the tribe itself flounders in modern misery. Neither of Koro’s sons were willing or able to take on the mantle of leadership, and this makes Koro even more rigid in his belief that he has to find a boy to take his place. 

Meanwhile, Pai feels her connection to the whales and is so certain of her calling that she defies her grandfather and secretly sets out to learn the ancient lore of the tribal leaders, which her grandfather believes is reserved only for males. When she is banished from the lessons her grandfather sets up for the boys of the tribe, she secretly listens in and learns.  She gets her uncle to teach her how to use a traditional Maori weapon and even defeats the young boy who is beginning to stand out as a leader.  When Koro finds Pai fighting him, he sends her home in disgrace.  He feels as if she is the cause of all the trouble the tribe is having, never once looking at himself and the kind of leader he is.

Koro represents the Senex, the old patriarchal man who can become so rigid in his thinking that he never allows anything new to flourish.  This type of attitude causes people to rebel against the old ways instead of honoring them, because instead of living those ways with feeling and depth, the Senex uses rules and discipline to make people obey him.   We see this happening in our political system.  One side wants to go back to ‘the good old days’ and sees anything new as dangerous to the system.  And of course it is dangerous, mainly because the system doesn’t work anymore and has to be replaced. 

The sad part is that Koro really believes he is doing the right thing.  But he cannot see that his inflexibility concerning the old ways is exactly what is killing the tribe.  There is no life in the way he hopes to train the young men.  While their fathers are proud that their sons have been selected for this honor, they themselves do not honor the system.  They hang out like they’re teenagers, riding around like gang members or lazing away the day.   They are not men, so they cannot provide the example their boys need to grow into men.  And Koro’s rigidity does not serve them either.

There is no feeling life attached to the old system.  This is what happens when an archetype becomes a stereotype.  Archetypal energy is eternal, but its forms need renewing in each new age.  There is NO LIFE in the old ways for this tribe.  Except for Pai, who loves the stories and believes in them.  The men take no pride in their heritage and it shows.  And while the women support the old ways, they too are hampered by the deaden energy of the old system.   Life has become a wasteland.  This is what is happening in our society as well. 

As Koro gets more desperate to find a new leader, he takes his anger out on Pai, the loving and innocent young woman of heart who just wants to help!  He berates her and shames her and blames her for all his troubles, and still she loves him.  At one point when her dad comes to visit, Koro says something so hurtful about Pai that she decides to go live with her father in Germany.  But as they drive to the airport, Pai hears the call of the whales and knows she has to stay on.  And so she goes back.  

As things worsen, Koro becomes more rigid in his thinking.  None of the boys are working out as leaders, while time and again Pai proves her worth by doing what they cannot do.  But still she is rejected, because she is a worthless girl.  How many women can relate that that!   Even the most successful women have what I call the inner Taliban, voices within us which tell us how worthless we really are, berating, shaming and putting us down.  In one of the most poignant scenes in any movie I’ve seen, Pai, trying hold back her tears, recites something she wrote for her grandfather, about everyone being capable of being a leader in some way.  But her grandfather never shows up at the school, because he has discovered that a pod of whales have beached themselves.  When the tribe finds out, everyone tries to get the whales back into the water.  But to no avail.

Except, of course, for Pai.  She climbs up onto the biggest whale and prays for him to move.  And he does!  Soon Pai is holding on as the whale leads the other beached whales back to the deep ocean.  Pai is willing to sacrifice herself for the whales and her people, even though her beloved grandfather even blames her for the whales’ plight.  When Pai’s body is washed ashore and taken to the hospital, her grandfather finally acknowledges her as the leader of the tribe.

When Pai’s leadership is finally accepted, the tribe comes alive.  All the members feel the power of their ancient roots, and they come together to reclaim their heritage.  With young Pai as their new female leader, everyone is reborn.  

And that’s the power and purpose of Feminine Spirit!  With Uranus moving through Aries, all of us are sensing that we have to see ourselves differently if we want to make a difference to our world.  We all need a new identity, an archetypal identity, that names us as leaders, healers, wise women, storytellers, visionaries, warriors and stewards of the Earth. And  we will be seeing more and more feminine women taking on leadership roles in our society.  Women, often against great odds, are already working all around the world to help people live a more peaceful and sustainable life.  

Now it’s time for each woman to become the female leader our world needs, just as each man is being called to remember that to be a leader means to sacrifice his ego needs for the greater good.

Dreams of New Feminine Leadership

Women are working hard to discover who we are and what we can do to help each other and our world.  Each woman has her own special gift to bring to the table.  Yet all women must leave the patriarchy behind to they can explore these feminine gifts and learn to use them for the life of the world.

One creative and intelligent woman has been working hard to find out where her gifts and talents lie.  Like most modern women, she has been a ‘Father’s Daughter’ a woman who supports the patriarchal order.  Now she is leaving ‘the Father’s House’ and descending to her own roots.  She dreamed:

I am moving up to a large room at the top of a house. It is above the tree tops and has large windows opening in all directions. I can hear a bird singing outside. This is Father Will’s old room, (he died last year). I look around; it will take a lot of work to make it my own. The cabinets and tables are a light green, but in disrepair, paint crumbling etc. I am with another woman, a friend. I suddenly feel afraid and tell her my concern that I can be seen at night by everyone if I turn a light on. I fear gangsters may shoot at me. I also sense the presence of my perfectionist brother. I love this place but it seems too lonely, but I feel uncertain whether I want to go into the crowded town below.

I am walking down a dirt road with this woman friend. We see a country store to our right and go in. I see it sells a little of everything. There are two saleswomen. One, a dark skinned woman is selling black tee shirts. My woman friend asks for two. I then also ask for two, one for me and one for my mother.

I get on my bike and continue down the dirt road, it is unfamiliar, further left then the route I traveled before. I arrive in an indigenous town, and dead end inside a broken down cathedral. I turn left and go through an archway and I see there a dark skinned native woman with her two children in a small area outside the cathedral. It is hot and dusty with some small scrubs.

I continue to my left on a road that leads to a little town and there are many people in the town square.  A dark haired, dark skinned peasant woman is trying to speak. She keeps trying to position herself under an archway but others keep pushing her off center. Then she is up on a table and I am speaking to her telling her that she is beautiful and give her other compliments to give her confidence.

Then I am in a room or small house cutting the hair of childhood Puerto Rican friend, I am worried about how to trim it, suddenly I see a V patterned into her hair cut. I realize I must let that guide my trimming. Then my hair trimming changes into fashioning a leather jacket for her. Another peasant woman comes in who is going to hem it. I am trying to put the layers together and start to tell her what to do. But then I realize she knows what she is doing.

I leave the town through another archway and travel a distance further left and begin passing some adobe homes, with no one presently there. I become aware that the ocean is on my left and that a woman is ahead of me in the center of the village. She is coming to teach the townsfolk. I sense their presence welcoming her. She has no equipment or books but is really wanted by the villagers. She is going to simply talk from her own Experience.

I wonder if I can live here, if this is where I am to live. I feel relief.

    This is a woman who has been working at breaking free from old religious beliefs so she can teach about a new feminine spirituality.  In the beginning of the dream, she is high up, going to live in rooms with windows that look out over the landscape.  This is a bit removed from life, although she gets a perspective on life.  Like the old priest whose room it used to be, living here would keep her from experiencing life.  It keeps her locked into the intellectual perspective of the Father’s Daughter, which often only categorizes experience rather than lives it.

    When she descends to the city, she connects with her earthy, native feeling life. She comes to a dead end and passes by an abandoned church, which has obviously rejected the woman and children who live in the outdoor square.  She keeps going to the left, which symbolizes moving into the unconscious.  She’s ready to change her thinking (cutting hair) and put on a coat of animal skins – to live in her instincts.   The dream reminds her that she has all these parts within herself, waiting to be recognized and honored.  The woman who wants to teach down by the ocean is the new feminine spirit within her that wants to experience life and reflect on its meaning.  This is the path to female leadership that the dreamer is on.

    Another woman working on leaving the patriarchal Father’s House dreamed that she had to sacrifice herself for the good of her community.  This ended up being a sacrifice of her professional advancement, for she ended up stepping back from the expected outcome of her schooling and upbringing to learn about and integrate a new way of being for herself.  In the end, she became a conscious woman, a wise woman.

    I am in a large meadow with many people I know.  I go around to say goodbye to all of them, because I am about to be beheaded – for the good of these people.  My family is there, my friends, and my professional acquaintances.  Some people offer me advice.  An older analyst tells me I don’t have to do it if I don’t want to.  My mother tries the hardest to stop me from making this sacrifice.  My ex-husband lies there on a couch, coldly indifferent. But I am determined that this is necessary.  So I finally kneel down and put my head on a block of wood.  There is a figure with a black hood over his face, holding the axe.  Just as I begin to wonder if it’s such a good idea, I hear the swish of the axe coming down.  Next thing I know, I’m standing up and a round object comes flying into my hands.  And I wake up.

    The Head represent the life-force, vitality and intelligence.  The old tales of beheading, like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, speak to the necessity of letting the old life-force (the old year) die so the new life (year) can be born.  If we don’t lose our heads sometimes, we never get to experience new life – we get stuck in old patterns.  This woman had to let go of the patriarchal imperative that says to be really successful, one must become famous and make a lot of money.  She gave up that belief to learn a different way of being.  While this path was full of hard lessons, she ended up with something even more important.  She ended up with Wisdom.  

    Whale Rider is an exquisite movie about the struggle between the old order and a new order of being.  The old way disregards women as irrelevant.  We are seeing how this belief is still prevalent in American society as patriarchal white men gather to decide on women’s health issues without asking for female input.  It’s time to put these old beliefs to rest and allow women to take their place in leadership roles that allow them to use their innate female gifts and talents.

    The World will be better for it.  

From the Bard’s Grove,
Cathy Pagano  

If you have comments or dreams that speak to this emerging archetype, please add it to the comment section.  I’d love to hear from you!