Across myth and folklore we encounter powerful and unsettling feminine figures: goddesses of night, guardians of thresholds, devouring witches, grieving mothers, and queens of the underworld. They appear in forests, caves, crossroads, and night skies – places where the familiar begins to dissolve and something older, deeper, and more instinctual emerges.
Though separated by culture and time, these figures share striking symbolic qualities. From a Jungian perspective, they may be understood as expressions of an archetypal pattern within the psyche – the Dark Feminine.
These images constellate aspects of life that are difficult to assimilate: instinct, sexuality, grief, destruction, and transformation. Myth is only one place we encounter them. They also appear in dreams, projections, emotional intensities, and those moments when life draws us into territories we would rather avoid.
In this seminar, Nici Partridge explores the Dark Feminine through three interwoven lenses: the psyche’s encounter with the forces of nature, the emergence of symbolic imagery in myth and story, and the psychological consequences of repression.
Drawing on Jungian thought, mythology, and the symbolic life of the natural world, the presentation traces how these figures arise at moments of tension, transition, and change – and considers how neglected dimensions of the Dark Feminine may be re-emerging in contemporary life, both collectively and within the individual psyche.