Confessions
This website suggests the reemergence of the feminine divine as a symbol adequate to express both the material world and the sacred dimensions of creation. As a symbol, the hetairan form expresses the desire of the earth moving through life forms. This approach to relationship emerges from several sources: an ecofeminist experience studying relationship and spirituality (Rachel), the influence of the writings of Deleuze and Guattari on the material world (Mark), the visionary conceptions of desire in Dante's Divine Comedy (Rachel), Diarmuid O'Murchu's insights into desire and transformation (Rachel) and Cynthia Bourgeault's dynamic portrayal of ternary systems (Mark).
Although they have suffered from both neglect and stereotypical conceptions, Toni Wolff's relational forms precisely differentiate an interactive aspect of differing forms of relationship participating in an eco-system which is vulnerable and disturbed. We believe that a contemporary focus on relationship reflects the evolutionary experiences of growth and must account for the feminine within the creative impulse.
Within the expression of the feminine is the growing contemporary preoccupation with the plight of young girls, their vulnerability and their promise of cosmic regeneration. Carl Jung's fascination with alchemy as the paradox defying our one-sided rational perspective relates to Wolff's schema in that the mother and the hetaira (the old woman and the young girl) must unite in sharing centrality. In allowing the central archetypal form to evolve, evolvingdeepforms.com suggests that the archetype itself is dynamic and adaptive, moving from expressing a group orientation to one which is individual. The site also references the experiences of the school in South America in focussing on the relevance of Wolff's forms to the spiritual journey of contemporary women and to its ethical and social dimensions.
Traveling in Ireland recently, we photographed a gravestone. Death, the twin of birth, is caught up in the cycle of rebirthing. It appears to capture the paradox of material life, the promise of the wisdom of the collective unconscious and, perhaps, why our ancestors perceived divinity in feminine terms: the earth continually gives birth to a sheer cascade of forms. When Jungian Toni Wolff searched out distinct feminine forms within an archetypal Earth Mother, she reverenced this cycle in naming both the Mother and the Hetaira. Today the productive and futuristic archetypal form of the feminine may be the Youthful Hetaira freed from the Greek stereotypical hetairan form. Such a vision of the feminine can represent the desire for life which survives material decay.
In focussing on desire, our website explores contemporary possibilities in Wolff's century old schema. Toni Wolff died very shortly after an analytical session with Irene Champernowne, an English art therapist who was her patient. Together these two women had spent an analytic hour discussing Champernowne's recent dreams of circular objects whose uncanny appearance suggested flying saucers in space. Agreeing that the presence of the feminine figures in relation to the whirling saucers was central, Wolff and Champernowne were cut short in their exploration of the images. Later Carl Jung used Champernowne's drawings in his discussions of flying saucers as the archetype expressing the 20th century. The creative vacuum of pure space, a 20th century notion from physics, may be caught in the hetairan archetypal form meant to express openhearted youth, wildness, freedom, individuality--and the mysteries depicting the creation of the material world.
–Rachel & Mark