Portrait of the Soul

AziMuth

“She is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya – and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another.  Because she is his greatest danger, she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it.”  ~ Carl Jung

For Jung, the soul was personified in the images that manifested in dreams and fantasies.  For men, this figure tended to be a woman, or often the unknown woman.  For women, the soul image an unknown man. He used the Latin terms anima for soul image of men; animus for women.  Another way to phase it: the anima is inner feminine side of a man and vice versa.  As one delves further into relationship with inner realities, a hermaphroditic aspect emerges.   

My experience has been that the soul image, the seducer/guide, has been commissioned to render the messages and situations of dreams.  When her figure seems absent, or turned away, I tend to consider the soul as the artist that has arranged the experiences of the dream, the offstage director leading me further into the mystery.