JUNG'S CURE FOR PATRIARCHY - A WORLD OUT OF BALANCE

Before Jung’s work was about the Shadow and the Self, it was about Salome: the young, sensual Jewish woman, the dancer, who requested the head of John the Baptist from the transfixed King Herod. Jung met this disheveled, discarded woman in the depths of his own psyche and withdrew in horror. “Let me be,” he tells her when they first meet, “I dread you, you beast.” But, Jung had embarked on this journey in order to pay attention to what arose. So over many nights of his descent into the unconscious (and his many years of exploring these early visions), Jung came to acknowledge Salome’s divine power. He experienced Her divinity within his own body, not as he had once understood the divine feminine in Mother Mary, but as Kali, the dark goddess of Hindu mythology. He wrote: this “many armed bloody Goddess—it is Salome desperately wringing her hands,” and…