ABSTRACT
This chapter centers around the author’s experience of playing Salomé in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s play of that title. The chapter weaves together the separate threads of the dreams, synchronicities, and research that occurred as she developed the character of Salomé.
Wilde’s play, and Jung’s active imagination with Salomé and Elijah in The Red Book are analyzed to show that the initial meeting of the spiritualized masculine and the eroticized feminine ends in tragedy, a death coniunctio. The foundations of this death marriage flourish within the traditionally narrow gender roles of the patriarchal world frame. Anima projections present in the “male gaze” attempt to limit the expression of the feminine through keeping it vacillating between being sexualized or abandoned, lost or fallen, just as collective animus projections keep the masculine struggling to maintain sovereignty and spiritual authority.
Salomé and Elijah represent the most extreme union of the opposites: masculine/feminine, Pagan/Christian, old/young and logos/eros. They are the Mystery Play at the heart of Jung’s Mysterium Coniunctionis. Bringing together the ecstatic, erotic kind of living from the body represented by Salomé with the wisdom and spiritual insight represented by the prophet is a tremendous task. It is a task Jung did not complete in his opus. The chapter argues that it is the great task of our unique time in history. As long as the essence of anima and animus exist in projected form, individuals will remain Orphans of “O”—in Wilfred Bion’s terms—orphans of the real. In mythological language, Salomé represents an inner move away from blind commitment to a masculine principle embodied by the hero archetype (Theseus) to one embodied by the god of ecstasy and theatre: Dionysus. James Hillman has long proposed the importance of Dionysus and the theatre for bringing the spark of life back to the heart of psychology.
The chapter ends with a discussion of what both women and men face when they attempt to embrace the dark feminine rising into consciousness, represented by the symbol of Salomé.
