Permission to walk the earth. !

Permission to walk the earth.

Archetypal realities of the feminine and women in Colombia.

Carolina Gaviria Jiménez. Medellín, Colombia.

Abstract: This article explores the feminine, women and particularly, Colombian women
from an archetypal perspective. It does so going through my description and interpretation of
the symbolic images from the dance-theatre play “Permiso para Pisar el Mundo”, by the
Colombian choreographer Adelaida Mejía. The narrative of the play is intertwined with my
own reflections, elements of Colombian history and other authors’ contributions, such as
Vélez, Guggenbühl, Woodman, Jung, among others. It analyzes how the feminine has been
collectively dissociated since the dawn of patriarchy, and how this dissociation has become
visible throughout Colombian myths and history. It looks into the dependent roles that have
been available for women in patriarchy, followed by the artificial adoption women have made
of masculine identities in the present times. Thereafter, it explores the implications of the dis-
sociated feminine in nature, which point to the ecological emergency our world is facing;
nevertheless, it considers an underlying evolution process that could hopefully point to an
archetypal transition that constellates new possibilities for humankind. Finally, it evaluates
how the actual peace process in Colombia might be showing the emergence of a new femi-
nine attitude in the country that could give us clues for the new archetypal horizons that could
be taking shape for our species.

Keywords: jungian psychology, art, feminine, women, archetypal realities, archetypes, sym-
bolic images, nature, peace, Colombia.

INTRO. Her.

Archetypal dissociation.

The curtain opens.

“Yo Soy Ella

Soy Ella

Ella

Ella…”
 Permission to walk the earth. !2

“I am Her”, She says, echoed by three other women standing beside Her.

“I am Her”, the women repeat, with conviction (Mejía, 2016).

The feminine has been divided. It has been split into pieces, different aspects of Herself. She

is now four different women, four incomplete women.

There is a cold, dim light that illuminates these four newborn women in the dark. The light

passes through the limit behind which they stand, drawing straight dark lines across their

softly illuminated bodies, cutting the fragmented feminine again and again.

The women stand straight, as if they were rigidly placed there by someone else. They show

little signs of having an organic, animated nature: they just stand there, looking forward with

an empty gaze… lost eyes that look, yet see nothing. Like ghostly creatures, the three women

are closer to each other than they are to Her. They inhabit the same world, different than the

one She lives in; they are dim citizens of the shadows, She dwells in the sunlight where no

darkness can be reached. She moves in the daylight, they linger at night; She wears a rigid

blue dress, they are barely covered in white undergarments.

She has been divided. The feminine is no longer complete. There is an inside and an outside;

there is a day, and a night; there is a meticulously fitted mask, and a dark shadow… But this

is not just plain and delicate duality, there is something violent about it, “like the splitting of

an atom” (Kalsched, 1996, p.13), that releases enormous amounts of energy; energy that is

now lost for creativity, for movement, for transformation, for transmutation.

Trauma.

As Kalsched (1996) explains,

The psyche’s normal reaction to a traumatic experience is to withdraw from the scene
of the injury. If withdrawal is not possible, then a part of the self must be withdrawn,
and for this to happen the otherwise integrated ego must split into fragments or dis-
 Permission to walk the earth. !3

sociate. Dissociation is a normal part of the psyche’s defenses against trauma’s poten-
tially damaging impact (...). Dissociation is a trick the psyche plays on itself. It al-
lows life to go on by dividing up the unbearable experience and distributing it to dif-
ferent compartments of the mind and body, especially the “unconscious” aspects of
the mind and body. This means that the normally unified elements of consciousness
(i.e., cognitive awareness, affect, sensation, imagery) are not allowed to integrate.
Experience itself becomes discontinuous. Mental imagery may be split from affect,
or both affect and image may be dissociated from conscious knowledge. (p.13)

The feminine is now discontinuous. Her intuition, her feelings and her inner voice have been

torn apart and put to a seemingly eternal sleep in the land of the living dead.

And this is not new. This is a collective situation, it’s archetypal. When we speak of “Her” in

the text above, we are speaking about the feminine, including women and inner feminine as-

pects that populate our psyche; women, feelings, nature, intuition are silenced everyday and

inhibited from expression and from the necessary movement to live, expand, and develop.

But then a question arises,

How can this dissociation be archetypal? Why would this division be an almost inherent con-

dition of our modern human psyche?

Colombian PhD, author and professor Marta Vélez (1999) explores the murder of the Great

Mother, around whom mythologies and symbols used to lie. She shows how, thousands of

years ago in the dawn of patriarchy, the Great Goddess was drastically deleted and excluded

from the symbolic foundations where our culture grounds its experiences and feelings.

Thus,

Patriarchy emerged from the assassination of the Great Goddess, who constituted the
archetype of unity, the primal androgyne, and established a separation through a war
that was both real and symbolic. There, in the dawn of the history of patriarchy, the
symbols of unity, the myths of the Great Mother and the relation to the feminine lost
their fundamental elements, to be constituted as that against which contempt, pursuit
and war was exerted. (Vélez, 1999, p.210)

Following this, she continues:

 Permission to walk the earth. !4

After her defeat, the Great Mother was articulated as that which you must defend
yourself against, as the threat. And we know that every archetype opens the circle of
its radius until impregnating the life of the individuals; for this reason, behind the ar-
chetype of the Great Mother we find the coloration of our experience of the mother
and the feminine. (Vélez, 1999, p.211)

To put it shortly, in the daily rejection, exclusion and invisibility of women, feeling and intu-

ition, we are performing over and over, in both physical and psychic dimensions, the same

annihilation and murder of the Great Goddess. Since it began in the dawn of patriarchy, it left

room only for this “God as father” as the unique possibility of signification (Vélez, 1999).

One could argue that this separation from the Great Goddess is just one necessary stage of the

development of our consciousness. According to Erich Neumann it is indeed necessary and

vital that in the development of a human psyche, its emerging consciousness becomes capa-

ble of separating itself from the overwhelming unconscious, the Great Mother, that has con-

tained it so far; this way, the symbolism of the unconscious would be related with the femi-

nine and that of consciousness with the masculine (As cited in Vélez, 1999).

But, as the autor states,

Beyond this identification (of the unconscious with the feminine and the conscious-
ness with the masculine), our culture is characterized by a grave misunderstanding:
it’s about what we have defined as the confusion regarding the process of differentia-
tion, which is mistakenly conceived as dissociation, rejection, denial and deep sepa-
ration, not just between the unconscious and the consciousness, but in every de-
rivative separation that follows. Thus, after the separation from the unconscious -not
its recognition- the separation from the inner feminine is articulated, and from the
interior -anima- the separation of women, their marginalization. (Vélez, 1999, p.213)

Archetypal dissociation in pre-Hispanic peoples of Colombia.

Exploring Colombian history in particular, and the origin of its pursuit of women and the

feminine, we would be tempted to attribute this “assassination of the Great Goddess” to the

Spanish conquest of the indigenous peoples. The hands and weapons of these cold, patriar-
 Permission to walk the earth. !5

chal colonizers would have crushed an allegedly more matriarchal and harmonic civilization

built around the Great Goddess in the pre-Hispanic societies.

It is remarkable that, unlike other colonized South American countries where more native

cultures survived, the conquest in Colombia exterminated the enormous majority of the

Colombian pre-Hispanic peoples. As the researcher José Rodríguez (2006) explains, by the

end of the XVII century, almost 90% of the indigenous population was extinct. This is one of

the main reasons why, it is extremely difficult to track the symbolism, mythology and sub-

tleties of all these pre-Hispanic cultures that we are so inclined to idealize.

Nonetheless, at least in the surviving indigenous traditions we can still track their original

relationship with women and the feminine. Surprisingly as it may seem, it might not have

been as peaceful and romantic as we like to imagine. Maybe the assassination of the Great

Mother had already taken place in these remote jungles much before the Spanish version ar-

rived in South American lands.

One of the remaining indigenous traditions in Colombia is called Kogi. In their cosmogony,

the universe originated with the creation of nine worlds, which could represent nine different

layers of existence. Naturally, everything began with The Mother, and from Her, all of cre-

ation unfolded. When the first men were born (before there were any women), this is what

they say:

The Mother looked then like a man. She had beard and mustache, and she carried
backpacks and tools, like men. She ordered her children to do women’s work like
bringing water, cooking and doing laundry. That wasn’t right. That way her children
didn’t respect her. They mocked her. But one day, the Mother handed over her tools
and backpacks to her children and also her mustache and beard. She went to bring
water herself, to cook and do laundry. All was well. That way her children respected
her. (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1985, n.p)
“The primal androgyne”, as Marta Vélez would say, after the forced separation of her femi-

nine and masculine nature, is then reduced by the emerging patriarchy (Her children, in the
 Permission to walk the earth. !6

story) to an expression of the feminine that is nothing more than a subordinate of the mascu-

line. “That way her children respected her”(Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1985, n.p) it says. That way

She occupies merely the role patriarchy acknowledges for Her. That way the Great Goddess

had already been assassinated in at least this pre-Hispanic tradition of the Kogi, long before

the arrival of the Spanish, which did nothing more, in this respect, than bringing patriarchy in

a new language. The cult to the Great Goddess, the times when the symbolic universe was

built around her in this indigenous traditions was already far behind.

The feminine has been split. The Great Goddess has been divided into pieces, different as-

pects of Herself.

SCENE 1. Blue War.

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Photo: courtesy of the author.
 Permission to walk the earth. !7

Introjected “God as father”.

The woman with the formal blue dress sings a song of war. She stands out there, tough, facing

what is coming, with the rest of Her inner fragments; there are now twelve of them. Rouget’s

Marseillaise is intoned (as cited in Mejía, 2016), “The day of glory has arrived”, they sing,

but She can’t keep her voice from breaking; there is something that grabs Her from inside,

and while She keeps singing the Marseillaise“Citizens, take up arms, form your battalions” it

becomes ever more impossible for Her to hide. Her mask begins to crack.

But she manages to get back together again.

“Je ne suis pas triste”

She says, while forcing every part of Herself to repeat: “I am not sad”.

“Je ne suis pas triste”

A blue storm approaches Her from inside.

“Je ne suis pas triste”

Images of deadly women in white undergarments just around the corner.

“Je ne suis pas triste”

The storm is about to explode, overwhelming.

“JE NE SUIS PAS TRISTE!”

An inner voice emerges on its own, unexpected:

“Je suis tuée”

I have been killed.

Even though not in a literal sense, She suddenly realizes Her life had been taken away all this

time. There is indeed sadness everywhere. Her inner feminine voices had been violently shut

down against the background for so long, like so many women.

And so, this emerging inner voice claims:

The wall is full of women, women who backed further and further into the wall be-
cause they were too afraid to hear the sound of their own voices ringing in her ears,
(...). These women, spitting desires into handkerchiefs, turning heads away further
and further until they were flat against the wall like a wardrobe. Further still, until the
 Permission to walk the earth. !8

tendrils of the wallpaper began to curl and scroll over their shoulders, over the crown
of their heads, further still until the wallflowers step backwards over the skirting
boards and submerged themselves into the relieved pattern of the wallpaper. It’s
cooler there. Gone are the rivulets of sweat eroding fine lines across their backs, gone
are the desires. Really? No. Don’t be stupid. The desires, they stay. The desires and
the longing stay forever. (Gwinne, n.d., n.p. As cited in Mejía, 2016).

It is with these words that emerges this all-too-familiar voice after so many years of remain-

ing in the land of the dead, so many years of being submerged “into the relieved pattern of

the wallpaper”.

She gently lets herself be touched by this new voice and slowly recognizes Her own reality,

Her blue tone, Her blue dress, the blue scene She moves about, the blue lyrics of the Lara’s

song She has been singing: “blue, like the dark circles around a woman’s eyes” (As cited in

Mejía, 2016), around Her eyes... Blue like the ocean, like the sky.

As Chevalier (1986) describes in his Dictionary of Symbols, blue is the deepest, coldest and

most immaterial of the colors: It is generally made of transparence when nature presents it to

us, accumulated emptiness of the air, of the water, of crystal, or of diamond. Emptiness is ex-

act, pure and cold, he says: Blue is the coldest of the colors, and in its absolute value the

purest, besides the total emptiness of neutral white.

Blue, the color of emptiness in nature, in Her nature, in Her body. The color of the at-

mosphere in which She dwells, the color of Her sadness. The color of the bottom of the ocean

where Her inner voice had remained.

But as soon as She starts letting this blue sadness express itself, a new tone is displayed by

this inner voice of Hers: a tone of indignation, of rage even, rebelling against this imposed

reality with Farrokzhad’s words: “Pourquoi m’arrêterai-je? ¿Porqué debería callarme?” (As

cited in Mejía, 2016). The voice asks, “Why should I stop? Why should I be silenced?”.
 Permission to walk the earth. !9

She begins to echo these inner words that slowly become Her own, until this inner voice be-

comes Her own voice, so there is nothing to deny anymore. There is no longer the need to

pretend everything is alright. There is no longer the need of a stiff blue dress to convince

anyone. It is now gone. Gone is the character She used to play before this inner voice woke

up.

So many of us women have played these strong, convenient and charming characters with our

dresses and handkerchiefs- and different variations according to the culture. Characters we

can only play if we bury our inner feelings and images in the deep, blue ocean of the uncon-

scious.

One of the thousands of examples of this phenomenon takes the shape of a “patriotic hero-

ism” displayed by some women in the times of Colombian independence; it is described by

BN, El alternativo del redactor americano, (As cited by Lux, 2014): The 5 children of Ma-

trona Lacedemonia had gone to war; she waited patiently to receive some news and when a

soldier came and announced the death of her five children, she cried “this is not what I asked

you, damn, but, how is our mother country doing?” The soldier then notified her about the

victory, to which Matrona Lacedemonia expressed, full of joy, how blessed she felt, for hav-

ing given such good fruits to her beloved homeland!

This woman received with joy this terrible news for the sake of “her beloved homeland”;

even after having become independent from its colonizers, this land offered freedom only for

white heterosexual men. “La Nueva Granada” (Colombia’s name at the time) adopted the

French “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen”, a declaration of rights made

just for men, which is reiterated in various historic references, such as this one described by
 Permission to walk the earth. !10

BN. Argos de la Nueva Granada Martha (As cited by Lux, 2014): In it, they explicitly declare

that the title of Citizen should not be given indistinctly, given that a multitude of people, in-

cluding women, are not.

Her happy reaction can only show once again the restricted view she has of herself. The “pa-

triotic heroism” she is proudly displaying, tells us about an internalized “God as father” in

her psyche, that would force her to give everything to the patriarchal authorities without even

receiving human rights in exchange, and furthermore, to do so with gratitude.

Women couldn’t hope for any rights for themselves, they could only wait for them to be ef-

fective in their lives through the man on whom they were dependent. But, as Martha Lux

(2014) relates, there were also some women that in these same circumstances didn’t just sit to

wait for their husbands and children to return. The historical records don’t mention them very

much, but there were women who took the family matters in their own hands, did business,

and even participated directly at war to fight for their rights. They didn’t stay quiet or still. An

inner questioning about the role that was expected of them, began to emerge.

Why should I stop? ¿Why should I be silenced? (Farrokzhad, as cited in Mejía, 2016).

SCENE 2. Red Love.

 Permission to walk the earth. 1! 1

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Photo: courtesy of the author.

An archetypal dance of love and power.

With the disappearance of the blue mask, She arrives in another setting. There is hope, there

is love! There is a man that protects Her and He won’t let anything happen to Her. She holds

onto Him... they dance the tango, where He leads Her with His moves and She just lets Her-

self be carried away.

Meanwhile, the fragments of woman in white undergarments now have their own movements

and voices; each has a discourse of her own, but their stereotyped movements jump back and

forth from those of a prostitute to those of an innocent virgin, from one role to another, from

one extreme to another (Mejía, 2016).

Throughout Colombian history men promised women once and again a new dance, a new

freedom; but in reality women could only approach it while remaining dependent on the man.

Like in classical tango, as the dancer Adelaida Mejía (2016) describes, man is the woman’s
 Permission to walk the earth. !12

support and guide, without whom she would literally fall and lose the possibility of move-

ment, of dance… of life.

So since this is not about freedom or love, then what is it about?

Guggenbühl (1986) relates how through this patriarchal era, most of the feminine archetypes

that women have embodied are in relation to men: Hera the jealous wife, mater dolorosa the

crying mother of a dead son, Aphrodite the desired lover and so on. Archetypes like wise and

independent Athena or the Amazons, independent warriors, have barely seen light, Guggen-

bühl states. The Vestal Virgin, the nun, might be the only feminine archetype that wouldn’t be

related to men and that has been active during these times, he declares, but even if not around

a man, she is still giving her complete life to a male God that requires her to give everything

up. Not very different in my perspective.

On the other hand, Guggenbühl continues, masculine archetypes have all been independent,

whether it’s Ares the warrior, Odysseus the adventurer, Hermes the merchant, Hephaestus the

blacksmith, among many others, they all have a role and a meaning where no woman is in-

cluded or even mentioned- except as a dependent wife or daughter who needs to be saved.

It seems to have been even more extreme in the early XIXth century in 'La Nueva Granada'.

Lux (2014) relates how, when the church no longer had a strong role in the cultural imaginary

and morals of countries like France, in Colombia it still maintained its ideal of women, which

was an ambiguous notion based on the antagonism of Mary and Eve. Mary was good, the

mother of God and men; Eve, on the other hand, was evil and induced men to sin, she de-

scribes.

Like the fragments of woman in the play, jumping from the movements of a prostitute to

those of a virgin without being fully conscious of it, women have only had easy access to two

extremist ways of being with just a fine line separating them.

 Permission to walk the earth. !13

Why is that? How can a human being develop an authentic life experience in such a context?

This is certainly not about freedom or love. This is more about the contempt and pursuit ex-

erted against the Great Mother who is represented by women in this case. This has much

more to do with power, the real opposite of love, according to Jung (1979), The “power-com-

plex” is a “whole complex of ideas and strivings which seek to subordinate all other influ-

ences to the ego, no matter whether these influences have their source in people and objective

conditions or in the subject’s own impulses, thoughts, and feelings” (p.782).

In another opportunity, Jung (1979) clarified: “the person who manifests 'masculine protest',

who has to dominate to feel secure, is unable to love. Love and the will to power are antithet-

ical to each other” (p.1159).

Following this idea, Marion Woodman (1992) declares: “By patriarchy I mean a culture

whose driving force is power” (p.10). Patriarchal society seems to be built around this ‘mas-

culine protest’, being women and feminine values that which has to be dominated. In this

sense, the archetypal dependent realities of women are just a reflection of this power complex

that seems to have taken possession of our human psyche since the dawn of patriarchy. A

power complex that leaves no room for love, authenticity, freedom… both in women and

men. As Woodman (1992) states, “both genders carry the tragic shadow of patriarchal power”

(p.10).

SCENE 3. Grey Time.

 Permission to walk the earth. !14

!
Photo: courtesy of the author.

“Women trying to be men”

She and every other fragment of woman display now something different. They are all wear-

ing men’s business jackets over their undergarments. The music and their percussive move-

ments are now square, repetitive and predetermined, rushing more and more, pushing the

hands of time.

Frightening and cold, He speaks now a language She can’t understand; lost and confused,

She hides in this man’s disguise, but Her red lips reveal something other than masculine.

They go about rigidly walking in square circles in some kind of pursuit, until they face each

other, but only to interchange a dialogue of monologues, where neither of them are listening,

but both of them speak simultaneously, insistently, and each in their own language (Mejía,

2016).

In 1986, Guggenbühl wrote about an archetype of the professional woman, saying that it was

beginning to have unilateral domination among women. Today, 30 years later, I would say it

more or less succeeded. Guggenbühl (1986) recalls that after centuries of being dominated
 Permission to walk the earth. !15

especially by the archetype of Hera, women now undergo a collective compulsion to go to

work, commanded by an archetype that isn’t different from the rational and pragmatic atti-

tude of our times.

Running faster and faster, achieving more and more qualifications and goals, assuming more

and more responsibilities, women of these times, are not so much any more the representation

of Mary, Eve or Hera like women used to be, but may now be rather possessed by this unnat-

ural masculine disguise.

Once again, is this really freedom? It is true that women are now included in the Human

Rights, and in more and more countries women are allowed to vote and to exert roles that

used to be forbidden. But at what price? Women have fought to release themselves from be-

ing identified exclusively with restraining and dependent archetypes, but in essence, have we

changed? Are we truly more independent these days than Matrona Lacedemonia, who felt

blessed for handed over her children to die in the name “her beloved homeland”?

It seems that women are imprisoned today almost as much as in the times of Colombian in-

dependence and in the times when pre-Hispanic cultures used to flourish in this land. Women

are now largely possessed by an artificial adoption of a masculine identity. women now wear

men’s business jackets instead of stiff blue dresses, but we still seem to be moved by a collec-

tive complex more than from our individual, authentic identities. We remain slaves to the

roles that are expected of us, according to the spirit of the times.

SCENE 4. White Death.

 Permission to walk the earth. !16

!
Photo: courtesy of the author.

Archetypal horizons.

All the fragments of woman are lying on the ground. They rest still, as if they had been there

for eternity.

A powerful breath can be heard from the back of the theatre; this breath gives room to an al-

most imperceptible sound that begins to come out slowly, like a mourning, like a lament. The

sound stops, then continues beginning to take the shape of a word, of a song.

Suéltame
Que me estoy ahogando
(...)
Este frío me adormece
Me seduce
Lentamente
porque me obliga a olvidar…
(Feralucia, as cited in Mejía, 2016)

With these words, the fragments of woman, that have been lying forever on the ground begin

to come alive very slowly, heavy movements of bodies that seem to want to remain still. How-

ever, their intention to move is now stronger than the inertia and heaviness of their bodies,

but it is still with much effort that they begin to rise… each time they fall, only to rise again.
 Permission to walk the earth. !17

The song and the movements start to release more and more energy that was imprisoned for

so long in these living dead fragments of woman. And with this blossoming life inside of

them, they gently approach each other. Their movements become one movement, their breaths

become one breath and a new sound creates an atmosphere of farewell.

The fragments of woman are now one integrated woman.

Symbolic assassination of the Great Goddess: Literal assassination of ourselves?

How can dissociated fragments of a psyche come back to life again, after having been exiled

to the silent world of the living dead? How can it even believe it is possible to be complete

again, after having almost forgotten the movement of life?

If it is ever possible, it is with a monumental effort that it can move slowly back into life. Af-

ter having been limited and imprisoned for so long, it can be very scary to even consider to

move, to get out of the cage, of the grave, of whatever inner form the exile had taken.

In nature, winter shows us every year the need of death, or at least of hibernation, to be able

to rise back with new life during the spring. Animals hibernate, plants loose their leaves and

stop their metabolism.

It is not a mystery to say that death is an inherent part of life. Since the psyche is also nature,

then death is an inherent part of its transformation and development.

But death can take other forms as well. It can be a cold, dark and destructive reality, with no

hope of rebirth. As Marion Woodman explains (1992):

For too long we’ve taken the instinctual Mother Goddess for granted. In our own
bodies, our earth, we have assumed that she would nourish and protect us (...). Over
centuries, we have forgotten her, relieved her, raped her. Now we will either integrate
her laws into consciousness or we will die. There is an evolutionary process at work
on our planet and we can only hope that out of this present death, sanity will come.
(p.11)
 Permission to walk the earth. !18

Throughout all these centuries of patriarchy, we have “forgotten, relieved and raped” the

Great Mother and every one of Her images and representations. Nature, as an essential one of

them, is arriving at a point of no return. We have violated nature’s laws, provoking devastat-

ing proportions of death, that are way beyond natural cycles, and what it can endure to main-

tain its balance and health.

The ecological emergency we are facing right now is a real and urgent threat that could even

imply an eventual death of the human race, with no hope of rebirth in this world. This way,

the “assassination of the Great Mother” we have been performing in a symbolic sense, would

be leading to the literal “assassination” of our own selves: ‘innocently’, ‘unwittingly’ respon-

sible for our own demise.

Archetypal transition?

Marion Woodman (1992) also mentions an evolutionary process that is at work on our planet

and, I would say, in each one of us. We are part of a dynamic and evolving world and have

developed immeasurable possibilities from a cold and empty universe. The capacity of con-

stant creation and evolution is an inherent part of ourselves but we tend to neglect our great

potential for transformation. The only thing that would stop us from this evolution, with its

inevitable ups and downs, is our actual death as a species. But like Marion Woodman, I’ll just

hope that out of this present polarization, a new balance will come: As the Seeing Red Direc-

tor Loralee Scott-Conforti (2016) says, we might be moving away from a patriarchal duality

of the form “this or that”, towards an attitude that holds the tension of opposites that Jung has

so much talked about, where the feminine element is a key for it to emerge.

When Ursula Le Guin (2004) talks about inventing old women, Loralee Scott-Conforti

(2016) states that “it may be less about inventing and more about rediscovering and recon-
 Permission to walk the earth. !19

necting to our own roots as women” (p.11). She also mentions later that “If we are going to

invent old women, or, more accurately, reconnect to a lost archetypal identity of the powerful

feminine, we will have to expect resistance both in the inner as well as the outer world” (p.

20).

Guggenbühl talks about this difficulty in the archetypal transition, when he explains that

women (back in 1986, but still today), are being separated from a small group of archetypes

and approaching a great number of them, but the new ones are not yet clearly visible. Such a

passage, he says, brings with it an archetypal emptiness that makes the transition so very dif-

ficult; he recalls that we already know something about the difficulty of archetypal transitions

when we remember puberty for example, and how the child archetype steps back while the

adult one comes forward. But this can only illustrate to a certain point the current situation of

women and the feminine, Guggenbühl explains, since we are here talking about collective

transformations that mark turning points in the history of humanity, and not regular develop-

mental transitions. Nevertheless, he states, there can’t be doubt that a new freedom is now

constellating for women.

And for humanity in general, I would say.

A taste of a new feminine tone.

How do we imagine these emerging feminine archetypes that are not yet clearly visible, as

Guggenbühl explained?

Sallie Nichols (1980), narrates an active imagination exercise she did, where she had a fruit-

ful conversation with the number 2 Tarot card character, the High Priestess. She asked her
 Permission to walk the earth. !20

about her number two position in the Tarot, and how many women would think that she

should be number one. To this, the High Priestess said she wasn’t interested, she much

prefers to be in this chubby number that goes so well with her magic. Then, when the author

insists that number one will always be number one, the High Priestess laments for modern

people that keep evaluating everything. She accepts that it is indeed different being the 1st or

the 2nd, but that it is precisely that: different, not better, not worse. Every place has its flavor,

like spices, like flowers. If they were flowers, she says, the Magician would be a sunflower

and she, the High Priestess would be a rose. The question about being the first or the second

is of no importance at all.

I like to imagine a more conscious femininity with this relaxed and easy tone of the High

Priestess that Sallie Nichols relates. I like to think of it with a light disposition, but still as

strong as a High Priestess. A perspective that sees a non-linear reality where things, as she

says, are just different, not better or worse. A communication between consciousness and the

unconscious that gives room for new life to emerge, and an organic way of living it with its

cycles, its feelings, its images, and its women.

Hope of integration in Colombia.

One of the longest armed conflicts in world history has taken place over the last century in

Colombia. An inner war that has devastated the body of the country for so long that many of

us Colombians, born in the midst of it, had never even dared to imagine our reality without

conflict.

Despite these common expectations, there seems to be a new hope now, one of peace, rising

like the fragments of woman that had been lying dormant forever. The main two sides of the
 Permission to walk the earth. !21

conflict have arrived at an agreement that seeks to end, step by step, the long-lasting blood-

shed that has defined the country in the world’s eyes.

And, what is a peace process talking about, if it isn’t integration, or at least an attempt? War

can be seen as nothing but a projection of one’s own unacknowledged realities over the op-

ponent, being merely a war against ourselves. Isn’t it just an extreme expression of an inabili-

ty to recognize similarities and acknowledge differences, leading only to an exclusion in the

form “this or that”? And, wasn’t a “war against the Great Goddess”, precisely what marked

the dawn of patriarchy?

An attempt of integration is taking place now in Colombia, an attempt that hasn’t happened

without resistance: by a minimum margin, the majority of the Colombian people voted “No”

for the plebiscite that looked for the people’s approval of the peace agreement. Like Loralee

Scott-Conforti says above, we have to expect resistance if we pretend to connect to a lost (or

new?) archetypal reality. Processes in nature don’t usually happen in a linear fashion with no

turns or cycles, it is only natural that human processes do so as well.

Despite the resistance, the agreement for peace is happening, the fragmented country is seek-

ing to gather up its pieces, and searching for new possibilities of dialogue after decades of

only cold iron weapons. We still can’t see the shape it is gonna take (just like we can’t still

see clearly the new feminine archetypes that are being constellated, according to Guggen-

bühl), but if anything, we can see a new attitude arising, one that is open to inclusion and

communication. Like the one of the High Priestess that doesn’t need to compare, like Jung’s

‘analytic attitude’ that is open to receive, contain and elaborate the unconscious contents of

the psyche. It is a feminine attitude that can already give us clues to attenuate the extremist

position of our polarized culture, a polarization that is visible in all the dimensions of our ex-
 Permission to walk the earth. !22

istence: consciousness and unconscious, left and right political positions, masculine and fem-

inine aspects of our psyche, and so on.

If jungian psychology speaks of individuation, then it speaks of integration, of the re-union of

the pieces of our split psyche, or at least the communication between them. As Marta Vélez

(1999) states, for so long we have confused conscious differentiation with violent rejection

and denial, for so long we have known dissociation as our only possible reality. If it is indeed

integration what will take place at any level for humankind, then we will face the unknown at

its fullest. Any integrated reality that would lie ahead of us is still overwhelmingly new and

unfamiliar: Whether it is a country without inner conflict, a balance between humans and the

rest of nature, a world with authentic and acknowledged women, or an open communication

between consciousness and the unconscious (or all of the above, that are but sides of the same

essential dissociation).

It is therefore necessary to remain still and attentive, open to the images and contents that

have been waiting for the right conditions to emerge, strong to be able to contain them when

they arise, and patient to be capable of elaborating them into our consciousness.

Their movements gently become one movement, their breaths gently become one breath and a

new sound creates an atmosphere of farewell.

The fragments of woman are now one single woman.

 Permission to walk the earth. !23

!
Photo: courtesy of the author.

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