Green World Lover / Powerful Female Element

[ikhet_sekhmet]

I made a note of this passage years ago. I'm not quite sure what it all means, but it's enticing.

"But what happens when the woman hero quests into her unconsciousness? To start with, the 'shadow' realm for women is infected with self-repudiation and self-loathing for any manifestation of feminine sexuality - a social inheritance, as we shall see, from very recent nineteenth-century gender norms. Some women poets describe encounters with an apatriarchal 'green world lover' who represents a healthy heterosexual Eros, an archetypal figure who combines antisocial shadow with the 'animus' (internal 'masculine' element) and who sometimes takes the form of Pan, Dionysus, or the horned god of the Celts... Anima, or internal femininity reinforced by maternal memory, plays a similarly central role in women's as in men's psychological quests; should the woman hero prevail she must come to terms with a powerful feminine element at the core of her psyche. Although, like male questers, women often fight this terrifyingly powerful female archetype, the encounter is different from men's in its meeting of same with same, of daughter with mother, resulting in a woman/woman destruction or empowerment."
- Annis Pratt, Dancing With Goddesses: archetypes, poetry, and empowerment, p 7.