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Who and what is Ananke? First, she is extremely potent among the powers of the cosmos. Plato cites only two great cosmic forces: Reason (nous or mind) and Necessity (ananke).17 Reason accounts for what we can understand, for what follows reason’s laws and patterns. Necessity operates as a “variable”— sometimes translated as “erratic,” “errant,” or

We came from the ocean, and we only survive by carrying salt water with us all our lives—in our blood, in our cells. The sea is our true home. This is why we find the shore so calming: we stand where the waves break, like exiles returning home. —Dr. Ha Nguyen, How Oceans Think

This was Jung’s finding, too: the human psyche consists of light and dark, masculine and feminine, and countless other syzygies that coexist in a fluctuating state of psychic tension. Like the Taoists, Jung warned against resolving this tension by identifying with only one pole (for example, trying only to be productive in life). He felt that

The mirror appears throughout the human drama as a means of self-knowledge or self-delusion. We have used the reflective surface both to reveal and to hide reality, and mirrors have found their way into religion, folklore, literature, art, magic, and science.

Jung wrote that it was a difficult task to differentiate the personal and collective psyche. One of the factors one came up against was the persona—one’s “mask” or “role.” This represented the segment of the collective psyche that one mistakenly regarded as individual. When one analyzed this, the personality dissolved into the collective psyche,