Archetypes

Shadow

The evil of our time is the loss of consciousness of evil. {Krishnamurti}.

Something we were witholding made us weak,
Until we found it was ourselves. {Robert Frost}

That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our lives as fate. {CGJ}

If only it were all so simple? If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? {Alexander Solshenitsyn}

Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions. {CGJ}

Yet there is a mystery here and it is not one that I understand: Without this sting of otherness, of-even-the vicious, without the terrible energies of the underside of health, sanity, sense, then nothing works or can work. I tell you that goodness - what we in our ordinary daylight selves call goodness: the ordinary, the decent - these are nothing without the hidden powers that pour forth continually from their shadow sides. {Doris Lessing}

We spend our life until we're twenty deciding what parts of ourselves to put in the bag, and we spend the rest of our lives trying to get them out again. {Bly}

Shame, guilt, pride, fear, hate, envy, need, and greed are inevitable byproducts of ego-building. They call forth the polarity of inferiority feeling and power drive. They are the shadow aspects of the first emancipation of the ego. {Edward C. Whitmont}

Darkness, call me brother!
that I may not fear
which I seek. {Anonymous}

This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine. {Shakespeare}

Man's shadow, I thought, is his vanity. {FWN}

Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other. {CGJ}

Our shadow personality is often obvious to others, but unknown to us. Much greater is our ignorance of the masculine or feminine components within us... For this reason Jung termed the integration of the shadow the "apprentice-piece" of becoming whole, and the integration of the anima or animus the "master-piece." {John A. Sanford}

[Hate] has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them and in fact.

the delegation of a piece of one's own identity to them... The hater longs for the object of his hatred. {Vaclav Havel}

One can only face in others
What one can face in oneself. {James Baldwin}

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives
are princesses who are only waiting to
see us once, beautiful and brace.
Perhaps everything terrible is in
Its deepest being something
that needs our love. {Rainer Maria Rilke}

Our tendency is to exalt the bright side of industry over the dark side of nature or to exalt the bright side of nature over the dark side of industry. In reality we need to compare bright with bright and dark with dark. {Thomas Berry}

The love of money is the root of all evil. {1 Timothy 6:10}

[A male shadow figure] the Wild Man encourages a trust in what is below: the lower half of our body, our genitals, our legs and ankles, our inadequacies, the soles of our feet, the animal ancestors, the Earth itself, the treasures in the Earth, the dead long buried there, the stubborn richness to which we descend. "Water prefers low places," says the Tao Te Ching, which is a true Wild Man book. {Bly}

The human devil resides in the pit of the belly... Carnal pleasure is the main temptation the devil uses to lure the ego into the abyss of hell. Against this catastrophe the terrified ego strives to maintain control of the body at all costs. Consciousness, associated with the ego, becomes opposed to the unconscious or the body as the repository of the dark forces. {Alexander Lowen}

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark.
Go without sight, and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings. {Wendell Berry}

If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you. {Jesus}

I dreamt last night,
oh marvelous error,
that there were honeybees in my heart,
making honey out of my old failures. {Anthony Machado}

So the person who has eaten his shadow spreads calmness, and shows more grief than anger. If the ancients were right that darkness contains intelligence and nourishment and even information, then the person who has eaten some of his or her shadow is more energetic as well as more intelligent. {Bly}

If a way to the better there be, it lies in taking a full look at the worst. {Thomas Hardy}

One thing that comes out in myths is that at the bottom of the abyss comes the voice of salvation. The black moment is the moment when the real message of transformation is going to come. At the darkest moment comes the light. {Joseph Campbell}

Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
For the straightforward pathway had been lost...
So bitter it is, death is little more. {Dante}

The great epochs of our lives are at the points when we gain courage to rebaptize our badness as the best in us. {FWN}

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. {Henry Wadsworth Longfellow}

An enemy is like a treasure found in my house, won without labor of mine; I must cherish him, for he is a helper in the way to Enlightenment. {Santi-Deva}

Our friends show us what we can do,
our enemies teach us what we must do. {Goethe}

We live in a time when there dawns upon us a realization that the people living on the other side of the mountain are not made up exclusively of redheaded devils responsible for all the evil on this side of the mountain. {CGJ}

The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites-day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battleground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end. {CGJ}

There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth. {William James}

The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues. {William Shakespeare}

A spiritual life can't save you from shadow suffering. {Suzanne Wagner}

Behind the repressed darkness and the personal shadow - that which has been and is rotting and that which is not yet and is germinating - is the archetypal darkness, the principle of not-being, which has been named and described as the Devil, as Evil, as Original Sin, as Death, as Nothingness. {James Hillman}

It belongs to the depth of the religious spirit to have felt forsaken, even by God. {Alfred North Whitehead}

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintained their neutrality. (Dante)

All bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:
1. That man has two real existing principles: a body & a soul.
2. That energy, called evil, is alone from the body: & that reason, called good, is alone from the soul.
3. That God will torment man in enernity for following his energies.

But the following contraries to these are true:
1. Man has no body distinct from his soul: for that called body is a portion of soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life, and is from the body; and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy.
3. Energy is eternal delight. {Blake}

Being is a mystery, being is concealment, but there is meaning beyond the mystery. the meaning beyond the mystery seeks to come to expression. The destiny of human beings is to articulate what is concealed. The diving seeks to be disclosed in the human. (Abraham Joshua Heschel, Who Is Man, 1965)

To talk of the body as more than the shadow is to relinquish the pessimism of the twentieth century and take heart, once more affirming the living being of man. {John P. Conger}

Home Trickster

{Notes:
Individual: Hero ScapegoatOutcast DevilFigure WomanFigure(EathMother) Temptress(Siren) PlatonicIdeal UnfaithfulWife Shaman
Situational:
Quest Initiation Fall DeathAndRebirth
Symbols:
Light-Darkness Water-Desert Heaven-Hell }