Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

Archetypes are, by definition, universal, and students of folklore know perfectly well that all the major themes and motifs in these stories are cross-cultural.

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Properly expressed, it can be a great healer — because all rage hides a wound; all rage emerges from pain. My

The Otherworld, which we might also call the “imaginal world,”* and which has sometimes been conflated with the anima mundi, the world soul,28 is always in some sense the place beyond the veil. Not to know it (those older and infinitely wiser traditions tell us) is to be cut off from the source,

“Of all those who ever consulted me who were in the second half of life,” he wrote, “no one was ever cured who did not achieve a spiritual outlook on life.”31

The Medial Woman, unlike the other three archetypes, doesn’t define herself in relation to others. Instead, she finds her primary identity and fulfillment in cultivating relationship with Jung’s “collective unconscious” — which is similar in many ways to the place that in many older European traditions might be called the Otherworld — and acting as

“The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal women are castrates,” pronounced American gynecologist Robert Wilson in a 1963 essay;

Maria the Jewess, who lived in Alexandria sometime between the first and third centuries CE; she is similarly credited with the invention of several kinds of chemical apparatuses and is considered to be the first true alchemist of the Western world.

Alchemists called this work mortification: literally, “facing the dead parts.” In the laboratory, mortification produces ashes, so that the characteristics of the original material are no longer recognizable.