Arguments — 145 entries | Encyclopedia of Mystery

Thread · 1921

The Gendering of Anima and Animus

The Objection From Inside

Fifty years of argument from inside the tradition: is the content fixed by nature, or made by history?

SignificanceThe objection is that Jung read the conditions of his own society as facts of the psyche — that what he described as a woman's contrasexual nature was a description of women with no other authorised route to public thought. It was made by readers who stayed inside the tradition.

The FindingJung's gendering of anima and animus was contested from inside the tradition and with Jung's own tool: Goldenberg (Signs, 1976) proposed demoting the pair from archetype to archetypal image, making its Eros/Logos content historical and revisable.

Read this entry

Thread · Northern European Folk · 1692

The Trial of Anders Poulsen

The Drum on the Court Table

The fullest account of a Sámi drum exists because the court prosecuting its owner wrote it down.

SignificanceHe explained his drum to the court in detail — what each figure meant, what he asked it — and the clerk wrote it down as evidence. The fullest account of Sámi practice in its own words exists because a prosecution required the defendant to describe it.

The FindingOne of the very few explanations of a Sámi drum by its owner was made under a capital charge — and Willumsen argued in 2020 that, naming no deity and no sacrificial site, it is not a record of Sámi religion.

Read this entry

Thread · 8th century

Kuṇḍalinī

The Coil Before the Spine

The coiled goddess-power whose rising means liberation — exact in the texts, vague in every summary since.

SignificanceShe lies coiled three and a half times at the base, asleep, stopping the central channel with her own mouth — so the obstruction and the power are the same thing. Waking her opens what she was blocking, and the rising is a return rather than an ascent to somewhere new.

The FindingThe serpent asleep at the base of the spine is the later location; the earliest kuṇḍalinī, in eighth-century Śaiva tantra, is a coil in the heart, and the syndrome named for her was coined in 1976.

Read this entry