From The Shadow Side to the Syzygy

by | Dec 14, 2020 | Articles | 0 comments

Anima rising,

Queen of queens

Wash my guilt of Eden

Wash and balance me

– Joni Mitchell, Don’t Interrupt the Sorrow

 

I’ve always enjoyed learning new words—or, as is more likely at my age, relearning words I’ve forgotten—so I was pleased to put syzygy in the headline of today’s post.

It’s been a while since I read Jung, but it turns out that the syzygy is a combination of the anima, or feminine image in the male psyche, and animus, or male image in the female psyche. As I found on verywellmind.com, “The combined anima and animus is known as the syzygy or the divine couple. The syzygy represents completion, unification, and wholeness.” 

Why am I thinking about Jung today, of all people? Well, I wanted to write about the shadow side, one of Jung’s four archetypes (the other two are the persona and the self), and that led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, reading about anima and animus.

 

Where We’ve Been 

I don’t know that I’ve actually committed this to print so baldly, but I feel like we’ve been living in the shadow side here on planet earth for quite some time.

As a guy who was born not even a year from President Kennedy’s very public assassination, I’m not sure I’ve lived during anything but the shadow side.

I well remember back in the late eighties, late at night, listening to New Age gurus, and wannabe gurus, talking about how we were going to be entering an age of Aquarius or whatever, where we would all be living in peace, love, harmony, and lots of free drugs.

Okay, I’m being a little sarcastic, but in all seriousness, it does feel like things have gotten increasingly darker—not only because of this awful pandemic but also because of the fomenting of violence, the naked, unabashed racism, the scorched-earth approach of seeing all opponents as “enemies.” There’s been a sense for some time now that things are lurching toward chaos on a global scale.

 

Where We’re Going?

All that’s to say, I’ve been deeply pessimistic about human beings and our future prospects for years. (“Weren’t we all supposed to be flying around with jet packs now like George Jetson? We can’t even fix the roads!”) But I guess hope really does spring eternal, because I’ve been allowing myself a bit of hope as we move into 2021. 

I’ve got this image in my mind now of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and I feel something about it. In its way, it’s almost primal. Maybe it combines that anima/animus for me on some subconscious level—a guy who’s known real suffering, and therefore has real empathy, at least moderately in touch with his so-called “feminine” side, and a tough former prosecutor, at least somewhat connected to the traditionally “masculine” role of law enforcement. 

The combined anima and animus is known as the syzygy or the divine couple. The syzygy represents completion, unification, and wholeness.” Caucasian and mixed-racial, male and female. A glass ceiling historically shattered for the first time. The promise of a greener future. Might we move toward something better for the 2020s? Certainly, we have been living in the shadow side for far too long.

history

Nostalgia, Conspiracies, and A Vanishing World

Recently, I’ve been visiting the minutiae of history a little more than usual. Some of my readers may be aware that I’m a a big music fan, and have collected music in various formats over most of my life. While it’s often digital these days, I've also been known to...
shoemaker

“Shoemaker, Stick to Thy Last!”

I always try to help my fellow indie authors by passing on my experiences. Among the most important, in my mind, is don’t be a jack of all trades, master of none. Find your niche, and stick with it. This might not be the greatest advice if you’re already a...
forget

Writers, Don’t Forget to Write It Down!

It's happened to the best of us, right? You have a great idea, and you really should write it down. After all, you don't want to forget it. But it's well past midnight, and you're in bed. In fact, you're getting sleepy...very sleepy...your eyes are starting to --...
phooey

Hong Kong Phooey and The Casual Racism of the 70s

As kids, my brother and I used to love The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, which ran from the late 50s to the early 70s. The cartoon featured Boris & Natasha, a.k.a., Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, as in “bad enough” and “femme fatale.” The former was a pun on the...
family

Forget the Big “Family & Friends” Plan

About three months ago, I wrote a post entitled What I’ve Learned In Six Years of Growing An Indie Author Business. My idea was to share six lessons from my publishing experience, one for each year in the biz. As time went on, my thinking evolved. I realized these six...
indie author

What I’ve Learned In Six Years of Growing An Indie Author Business

As someone who’s spent the better part of the past 20 years making his living as a writer, I definitely have some opinions on what works and what doesn’t in this business. However, there is a subset of that 20 years, and that’s the novelist part of the equation. Some...
break

A Bit of a Blog Break

I've been busy scheduling my social media for the next few months, and came to a realization: I've got a ton of existing content, and no one has seen anywhere near all of it. As a result, I decided it's time for a little break. This realization did coincide with...
holidays

Books: Great Holiday Gifts, or The Greatest Holiday Gifts?

I saw a cartoon the other day that features a character who's starting to sing, "It's beginning to look a lot like..." A second character quickly and quietly puts the first character down, saying, "Shh. Sleep now." Dark stuff, right? But hey, these are dark times—in...
COVID-19

We’re Doing This To Ourselves—And It’s Hard to Comprehend

​As the COVID-19 crisis grinds on and on, I’ve become increasingly motivated to write about it…for a number of reasons. First, we’re all thinking about it, so I might as well address it here. Second, I’ve sort of avoided writing about it in some previous blog posts,...
political

Navigating the Murky Waters of Political Correctness

“If you don't have a sense of humor, it just isn't funny.”  —Wavy Gravy   When it comes to political correctness, I’m not convinced we should go back to the “good old days.” I mean, do we really want to go back to calling someone born to an unwed mother a...
self-promotion

What’s The Problem With Shameless Self-Promotion?

While I still find it somewhat hard to believe, I've been on Twitter for almost eight years. I know this not only because Twitter shows Joined March 2015 on my profile but also because, even if they eliminate that feature, I use a tracker called Who Unfollowed Me? If...
MLK

MLK Day 2023

Here’s wishing everyone a safe, sane Martin Luther King Jr. Day. For many of us, today is always something of a day of mourning: not only mourning the loss of a great civil rights leader, but also mourning the turn our great nation seemed to take in recent years....

Twitter Tips for Authors in 2023

If you follow my blog, you probably connected with me via Twitter, whether you’re a fellow author or not. In 2020, I wrote a post about Twitter for fellow writers that got a good response. Three years later, the landscape has changed, but some Twitter best practices...
rails

Going Off The Rails (But Not On A Crazy Train)

Last April, I wrote a blog post called Back on Track With a Work-In-Progress. Part of that post was to talk about the difference between a “plotter” and a “pantser” (and to describe myself as a hybrid of the two, a “plantser”). Another, less obvious motive, was to...
French

Those Tricky French Authors and Their Obsessions

Today’s blog post was originally going to be Write Whatever the @#$% You Want, Pt. III. However, after seeing parts I and II lined up, I decided to call an audible and make it something less repetitive. Somehow the SEO gods have gotten into my head. As I’ve mentioned...
scared

Write Whatever the @#$% You Want, Pt. II

In last week’s post, I mentioned a pretty well-known author who has publicly reported his publisher “wouldn’t touch” a new release, in part because a character in his novel referred to herself as “fat.” I heard this story on a podcast, and I remember thinking, “Wait...
censorship

Write Whatever the @#$% You Want

I’ve been stewing on this for a while. It’s been brewing for quite a while. I could probably write a song about it (how about a rap?), but I don’t think I will. This is more of a blog post topic, and it might even deserve a series. And that’s the title and topic of...
gratitude

Should Every Month Be Gratitude Month?

When I was a kid, I loved Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz. I read it daily and collected nearly every paperback volume of the cartoon, so I could see what I’d missed since the comic strip’s inception in 1950.  Certain things stuck: quotes like “happiness is a warm puppy”...
robot

More Thoughts On Robot Writers and The Tech Dystopia

A couple of months ago, I wrote a blog post here called When Will the Robot Overlords Replace Us? Apparently, I’m fairly obsessed with this stuff, because every time I come here and empty my brain, it seems to come up again. Today is no different. Part of the reason,...