Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life

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

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,

then, gives us the opportunity to rediscover the parts of ourselves that we’ve buried, to find the path we have lost.

the Wise Old Woman is an archetype. It’s an idea that, in its essence, is recognized by all cultures. But we never engage with the archetype itself; instead, we encounter culturally specific images that derive from it.

the Mother, the Hetaira, the Amazon, and the Medial Woman.24 Wolff argued that although every woman has the potential to embody all of these four archetypes at various stages of her life, one or more of them tends to be of primary importance to each of us.

In his writings, he repeatedly lamented the loss of the spiritual — what he called numinosity — in the modern world.

There are, of course, fundamental differences between anger and aggression; the one doesn’t lead inexorably to the other.

the idea of looking for a deeper, more meaningful way of living.

the process of integrating disparate and neglected parts of the psyche into a functioning whole. In psychological alchemy, mortification is accompanied by difficult emotions — shame, embarrassment, guilt, or worthlessness, for example — as we finally face up to these old issues which we’ve hidden away.