You’re standing in the wreckage of the crisis, and there are pieces of yourself scattered everywhere – old beliefs that no longer fit, new insights that haven’t yet settled, patterns you thought you’d broken but that keep showing up, parts of yourself you didn’t know existed until everything fell to bits. Now, your task is to figure out what’s real, what’s salvageable, and what needs to be left behind.

Welcome to the moonlight of the Albedo. This is where you discover who you truly are.

If you read the first part of this series, welcome back. If you’re new to this, here’s what you need to know in a flash. First, true alchemy isn’t about turning lead to gold so much as transforming consciousness – moving from confusion to clarity, connection and integration.

The first stage – the Nigredo – is the blackening or death of the old self.

The second stage – the Albedo – is the whitening, and it’s all about purification, discernment, and learning to see clearly.

The third stage is the Rubedo, where you actually live as the transformed person. But we’re not there yet. For now, we’re in the moonlight of the Albedo, searching for what’s real.

The Albedo’s core challenge

But there’s a problem, which is that it’s hard to trust yourself in the aftermath of a life-altering breakdown, loss, or failure. The person who created the life that just fell apart? That was you. The person who believed all those things that turned out to be false? Also you. So, how do you know you’re not just building another house of cards?

When discussing the Nigredo in Part I, I used the film Groundhog Day as an example of the desperate dissolution of the first stage (spoiler alert). Bill Murray’s character Phil Connors, forced to live the same day over and over again, hits rock bottom after every attempt to manipulate, cheat or otherwise weasel his way out of the time loop fails, including multiple attempts to end his own life. Eventually, he surrenders and accepts that he’s stuck, which is when he enters a new phase – he starts learning.

Phil takes piano lessons – every day, the same lesson, building skill incrementally. He learns ice sculpting, poetry, and to speak French.He memorises everything about everyone in town – what they need, when they need it, how to serve them.

He becomes, on the surface, the perfect person: talented, helpful, knowledgeable and kind. But anyone watching can see that this perfection is problematic – he’s too perfect. If he were on Ru Paul’s Drag Race, he’d be getting told off for lack of realness. And he knows it, too. He’s still not being himself. Rather, he’s accumulating all this skill, knowledge and good-deed karma because he’s trying to win the affections of Rita. He’s trying to figure out the formula.

Phil is in the limbo stage of the Albedo – he’s sorting through his experiences, trying things out, and he is learning. But he hasn’t transformed yet.

It’s only when Phil stops trying to win Rita and starts living for the genuine love of the life he has now that the loop finally breaks. Once he has separated performance from authenticity, that’s when the Albedo completes.

What is the Albedo?

In practical alchemy, after the Nigredo the alchemists would take the black residue and repeatedly wash and distill it to separate it into its component parts. During the blackening, what was false was burned away, but that initial stage of the process was not absolute. It was a crude filter. In the Albedo, discernment happened at a much finer level. Now, they were looking for the essence of the matter – the pure substance underneath all the contamination. Or, the truth beneath the dross.

In his studies of the alchemical texts, Carl Jung understood the Albedo as a stage of psychological purification – the process of gaining clarity about yourself after the confusion and challenge of crisis. This is when you start to see patterns, glimpse aspects of your shadow self, and distinguish between what’s genuinely yours and what you have simply absorbed from the outside world.

However, Jung made an important distinction. The Albedo is a stage of emerging consciousness, but it’s not the bright light of certainty that we tend to think we need. It’s not “solar consciousness”, but “lunar consciousness”.

It’s moonlight – a gentle, subtle light that lets you catch your first glimpse of the new landscape you’ve woken up to.

The soft glow of the Albedo moon will show you simple shapes and sizes, but not much more than that. And this is a good thing, because if the sun were to suddenly switch on from complete darkness, we’d be blinded by the light. Flooded and overwhelmed. The lunar light of the Albedo gives us just enough illumination, not enough for perfect answers, but enough to begin to discern and separate – enough to see what’s actually there rather than what we wish were there, or what you were told should be there.

Clarity vs. certainty

It’s easy to mistake the grasping of the ego for true insight. Psychologist James Hillman, in his lectures on alchemical psychology, emphasised that we often confuse clarity with certainty. We think being clear means being sure and having all the answers, knowing exactly what to do. But that’s solar thinking – the ego wanting to be in control again.

Lunar consciousness is different. It’s the ability to see without needing to force conclusions. It’s discernment as opposed to stubborn rigidity or dogmatism.

This makes sense because in the Albedo, you’re not trying to master the material, but separate it: to see what’s precious and what’s rubbish; what’s yours and what’s borrowed. This is patient, delicate work that requires us to sit with ambiguity while slowly, slowly gaining clarity.

Psyche sorts the seeds

The myth of Psyche and Eros (which I have explored in detail in a previous series; here’s Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV, if you’re interested) perfectly captures this process. Psyche, married to Eros but forbidden to see his face, makes the mistake of lighting a lamp to look at him while he sleeps. Betrayed, Eros flees, and Psyche must complete a series of impossible tasks set by his mother, Aphrodite, to win him back.

For the first of these tasks, Aphrodite pours an enormous pile of mixed seeds onto the floor – wheat, barley, millet, poppy seeds, lentils, beans, you name it – all jumbled together. She says to Psyche, “Sort them by nightfall.” This is an impossible goal; there are millions of seeds. No human could do it.

So, when Psyche sits down to the task, she begins to cry. One of those big, sploshy tears falls on a passing ant, who fetches the rest of its troupe to come and help her. With the aid of these ants – small, patient creatures who know how to discern one tiny thing from another – Psyche passes the test. By morning, everything is separated, clarified, and organised.

That’s the Albedo. That’s the work of this stage. But how do we know which seeds are which?

Trust the kindly animals

In her book, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Marie-Louise von Franz writes about this particular motif, which shows up in a few different stories – you see it in Cinderella and in Vasilisa the Beautiful, for example.

Von Franz studied folklore from cultures across the globe and admitted that she once hoped to unlock a kind of secret, universal code for being human or living a good, happy life. But this was not to be the case. Every time she thought she’d found a universal rule, she would come across a tale to break it. That is, except for one particular rule, which held true across every story: the protagonist of a fairytale must always follow the advice of the kindly animals. Accept this advice, and they will succeed; ignore it, or hurt the kindly animals, and the protagonist is doomed.

Von Franz’s interpretation of the meaning of this motif is simple. The kindly animals represent one’s intuition. Now, intuition isn’t infallible, but if you learn to listen to your own inner knowing in situations where the answers aren’t obvious, you will eventually find your way forward. Ignore your intuition in favour of following rules or values set by other people or the world in general, and you may well get lost.

This is what the Albedo is all about. The laborious process of trying, testing, feeling, watching and listening for what has the ring of truth is not only how this stage happens; it is the very point of it. Psyche’s mound of seeds is so large precisely so she has to connect with the kindly animals. We must learn to understand the difference between our authentic knowing and everything else.

Moonlight consciousness

Jung described the Albedo as lunar consciousness because it is the first glimmer of insight emerging from the chaotic, unconscious darkness of the Nigredo. The glow of the moon is different from that of the sun. The moon doesn’t generate its own light. Instead, it reflects the sun, softly and indirectly. In the Albedo, you’re not creating certainty for yourself, but reflecting on truth from a deeper source – your intuition, inner wisdom, bodily knowing, soul, or whatever you want to call it.

The point is to reconnect with the part that knows without needing to explain or justify. This part speaks in a much quieter voice than that of solar certainty. It whispers, suggests and nudges. It shows rather than tells. After the Nigredo shattered all of your certainties, the Albedo provides the time and space for you to learn to trust your own voice again.

The alchemists could sit in the Albedo stage for weeks or months, however long it took for the purification to complete. If the matter didn’t turn white, the stage wasn’t yet over.

Coming back different

In the previous post, I described my own Nigredo experience from my time competing as a fighter – a physical and emotional breakdown when my assumed warrior identity and false strength dissolved into the dark, foetid sludge of the blackening. I had no idea who I was any more.

My Albedo began when I started the difficult healing journey of therapy and recovery from burnout, and when I eventually walked back into the world of fighting as a different person, testing my newly acquired self-insights and values. Instead of exhausting myself with brutal sessions and starving to make my old fighting weight, I went up a weight class, and I trained easily by comparison, listening to my body instead of overriding it. When the old-school boxing coaches (I had, by this point, switched to boxing from kickboxing) told me to do it the hard way, the punishing way, the “proper” way, I had to learn to stand my ground and say “no”.

This was what the sorting work looked like for me at that stage. Building the skill of discernment meant asking, “What’s mine? What’s theirs? What serves me? What destroys me? What feels right?”

As a result, I separated good training from destructive training, self-respect from self-punishment, my authentic drive from fear-driven performance… and I won. I won the boxing championships I’d always dreamed of winning. But that’s when the moonlight finally broke through. On the way home from that final – sitting in the club’s minibus, trophy on my lap, everyone celebrating – something became undeniably clear.

I didn’t want or need to fight anymore.

I wasn’t a fighter. Actually, I had never been a fighter. Not truly. I’d been using fighting to prove myself, and to become someone I thought would be safe from pain. What I actually wanted, though – and what had been quietly emerging through all the patient sorting and testing of the Albedo – was to work in a more connected, creative space. I wanted to be a therapist, a writer, a dreamer. A lover, not a fighter.

The yellowing

The Albedo stage of alchemy finishes with a sub-stage called the Citrinitas, or the yellowing. It comes when the sorting is nearly complete, and you’ve clarified enough to start seeing and feeling what’s truly yours. The yellowing is the transitional stage where the cool silver moonlight begins to warm. It’s the first hint of dawn – a gentle infusion of insight that signals you’re ready to move from understanding into embodiment, which happens during the Rubedo.

For me, those insights about what I truly wanted to do with my life felt like the warmth of the Citrinitas. By the time of the title fight, clarity had been building for a couple of years. I was already trained as a therapist by this point, but I hadn’t fully committed until after that night. Travelling home with proof of everything I thought I’d wanted, it finally became clear enough to see. The fighting had served its purpose: it taught me discipline, resilience, and how to face my fear. But it wasn’t me. Fighting was never the destination. It was the vessel instead.

I wasn’t struck by this insight. It didn’t come as a surprise so much as a quiet little nod to myself – “Oh, yeah” I thought, “that’s what’s actually true.”

At last, the matter had turned white.

The false-clarity trap

Now, in summary, all of that sounds relatively straightforward, doesn’t it? It wasn’t. The biggest threat during the Albedo is false clarity. While in this stage, all we want is to grab hold of something that feels steady and certain. And we will, along the way, almost certainly grab onto the wrong things without realising it. And we’ll hold tight, too.

Just as Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day spent what seemed like an age learning and perfecting his “good guy” skills before he worked out who he actually was, I spent the longest time fooling myself into believing that the skills I was learning from therapy and about my health were meant to make me into some kind of exceptional, enlightened fighter. I had to train for and win that title fight before I finally realised this really wasn’t the point at all.

False certainty can show up as spiritual perfectionism – “I’ve learned so much, now I need to be perfectly healed/awakened/enlightened”. It can show up as the adoption of new dogma – simply replacing the old limiting beliefs with new limiting beliefs that sound cleverer. And it can show up as intellectualisation – conscious understanding without embodiment, which was a big one for me. “I can explain my patterns perfectly,” I thought. “I mean, I keep repeating them, but I understand them so… I’m fine, right? I’ve made it, right? Right?“ Wrong, but I was getting somewhere.

As we find our way through the Albedo, we may collect any number of tools that we don’t actually use – we take course after course, read book after book, and we think and fathom and dissect without truly changing. We might force premature conclusions, too, and fabricate entire worldviews to back them up, but the moonlight has yet to really shine.

These things may sound like failure, but really, they’re part of the process. We need to engage with the fake stuff in order to hear the voice of truth when it finally speaks.

The second descent

In the previous post of this series, we met a stranger who descended into the Alchemist’s dark laboratory to begin the work for themselves.

Now, finally, they have returned to the spiralling steps. Standing at the top, one hand on the cold stone wall, they feel the call of the laboratory below. It’s less urgent this time – more of a quiet sense that something has shifted. So, once again, they descend.

When they reach the bottom of the stairs, the laboratory has transformed. The furnace still burns, but low now – embers, not flames, and the heat is gentler. Moonlight pours in through a window that wasn’t there before, turning everything silver.

The stranger casts about the space. Some tables are now visible in the soft, white light. They’re covered in vessels – glass retorts, ceramic bowls, crystal containers. Each one is filled with liquid, some clear, some cloudy, some separated into layers.

The Alchemist stands at one of the tables, carefully pouring a milky solution from one vessel through a fine filter into another. They look up, unsurprised. “The burning is done,” they say simply. “Now, we separate.”

The cleansing

The Alchemist gestures to a large bowl filled with water. Floating in it are the fragments of the stranger’s life that survived the fire. The stranger leans forward to take a closer look, but they can’t work out exactly what they’re seeing just yet. A pattern of swirling lines, some white, some cloudy, coruscates on the surface of the liquid.

“This is what remains,” the Alchemist says, handing over a mesh strainer. “But it’s not pure yet. You need to sort it.”

The stranger dips the mesh into the water. When they lift it, something is caught inside – a value, perhaps, or a belief or rule. Eyeing the strange shape, the Alchemist quietly asks, “Does that belong to you? Or was this given to you by someone else?”

The stranger reaches into the sieve and holds the fragment up to the light. They couldn’t tell you how they know, but they know. This doesn’t belong to them.

The Alchemist nods, “Then put it back in the solution, and let it dissolve away.”

The next element the stranger extracts feels different. It’s a memory with meaning to it – something that feels true. This one is theirs.

Again, the Alchemist nods just once, “Put that one aside.” The stranger places the truth into a second vessel. It’s clean and dry.

Over and over again, they do this. The Alchemist asks if each component is real, or if it is a story, a fabrication, an exaggeration or a mask. The truth is separated from the lies and placed in the new container. The rest dissolves away.

After a little while, the stranger starts to find comfort in the repetition of it all – like sorting seeds or learning a language, the same, careful action is repeated, and the matter, refined and clarified.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, the vessel of true things fills.

One truth

After what might be hours or days – the stranger has no idea how much time has passed – the Alchemist asks, “What’s one thing you know to be true? If just one thing survived the fire, what would that thing be?”

The stranger looks into the vessel of kept components, reaches inside, and pulls out something that feels solid. “This is mine,” they say to the Alchemist. “This one thing is true.”

The Alchemist’s reply is simple. “Good,” they say. “Keep that, and go back to your life for a while. Use it as a filter or a lens for the decisions you make. Come back to it repeatedly to check whether you’re still on track.”

The Alchemist gestures to the stairway, their fingers silver in the light of the moon. “Everything you build needs to rest on what’s actually true, not what you want to be true. So keep sorting, keep cleansing and separating, and keep listening. When you have clarified enough, you’ll know. And that’s when you may return.”

The ascent

So, just as before, the stranger climbs back up the stone stairs, holding their one true thing. Step by step, they return to the surface.

And as they climb, I wonder:

What’s one thing you thought you needed, but that isn’t actually yours?

What’s one thing you genuinely do need, but that you’ve been ignoring?

And finally, if only one truth were to survive your fire, what would that truth be?

Remember, you don’t need all the answers just yet. The Alchemist is still washing, still sorting, still clarifying in that moonlit laboratory. They’ll be there for as long as is needed. And, in the meantime, the moonlight will show you what you need to see.

REFERENCES:

• Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944)

• Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56)

• James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology lectures (Uniform Edition, Vol. 5)

• Dennis William Hauck, Complete Idiot’s Guide To Alchemy: The Magic and Mystery of the Ancient Craft Revealed For Today (2008)

• Marie-Louise von Franz, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales (1974)

• Greek myth, The Tasks of Psyche (from Apuleius, The Golden Ass)

• Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis (1993)

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So you start to slip into darkness and confusion. Into what feels like death. But what if it’s not quite the ending you think it is?

This bleak, unmooring experience is part of an ancient pattern of transformation that the alchemists called the Nigredo, or the blackening. It was achieved using fire – the fire that burns away everything false so something true can finally emerge. Something golden.

So, what could that gold look like when it’s yours? And how do you move through the fire without being consumed by it?

Alchemy? Seriously?

Alchemy fascinates me more than anything. An ancient, largely sniffed-at practice whose wisdom aligns perfectly with what we now understand as the psychology of change? Yes, please.

These days, when we think of alchemy, we’re most likely to imagine medieval charlatans promising untold riches, claiming they could turn lead into gold. These guys certainly did exist. Brilliantly, they were known as “puffers” because they just sat around all day blowing into their fires. But they only knew part of the story. Struggling to decipher Egyptian alchemy texts, which were largely metaphorical, medieval Europeans clung onto the one bit they could (and really wanted to) grasp. Mmm… gold.

For true alchemists, though, practical alchemy was just one element of a much bigger process that took place across three increasingly abstract planes – the material, the personal or psychological, and the spiritual. Gold was actually a pretty meagre prize compared to the self-actualisation and direct connection with god on offer at the other two levels.

Unfortunately, in medieval Europe, to practice anything that smacked even vaguely of spirituality beyond the church was punishable by death. So the real alchemists had to keep the true nature of their pursuit hidden. To this end, they used an entire language of secret symbols to communicate in code, so only the safe, material aspects of their practice would be visible to outsiders.

Thinkers, researchers and artists like the poet William Blake, the psychiatrist Carl Jung, and the artist and writer Leonora Carrington have since devoted years to the unpacking of those esoteric Egyptian texts. Thanks to their work, we have a far better idea of what the alchemists were onto, and it rings uncannily true.

Before we dive in, I must warn you that alchemy always, always starts in the dark, because transformation cannot happen without dissolution. We can’t grow if we’re clinging to whoever we were before. In other words, the old self has to turn to ash first. We have to find our way through the Nigredo.

That said, we do need some light to go with all that shade, so the film I’m going to use to illustrate the dark desperation of the Nigredo is…

Groundhog Day as alchemy

Groundhog Day is another of my all-time faves – and yes, I do realise that my movie choices are dating me.

Phil Connors, a narcissistic weatherman played by Bill Murray, is trapped in a time loop, reliving the same day over and over in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. At first, he tries to manipulate the situation – he learns people’s secrets, he tries to seduce Rita and he exploits the loop for personal gain.

When that doesn’t work and he realises he can’t control or escape this situation, he falls apart completely. Phil tries to kill himself in a plethora of different ways – he drives off a cliff, electrocutes himself, throws himself from a building. But every morning, he wakes up again to the exact same song on the radio.

Finally, he stops trying to escape and surrenders to the situation, which is to say he lets his old life go – he lets his old, arrogant, manipulative, cynical self die. With nowhere to run and no tricks left up his sleeve, he is forced to sit in the wreckage of who he used to be. This is complete dissolution, or “rock bottom”, and it is where the transformation begins. Phil is now safely on his way to a little pot of gold.

The three stages of alchemy

The Nigredo is the first of the three main stages the alchemical work must pass through to achieve what’s known as the philosopher’s stone. At the practical level, the philosopher’s stone is represented by gold, the purest of metals; psychologically, the stone is akin to the birth of the true, authentic self; and spiritually, we’re basically talking about enlightenment.

In brief, the three stages go like this (please don’t worry about retaining everything here because I’ll return to the parts you need to know):

First, the Nigredo, or blackening, in which the base matter is heated to burn away the unnecessary and bring impurities to light. Nigredo symbolism includes the Black Dragon, ravens or crows, bones and decaying bodies, and the Black Sun (or sol niger).

Next, the Albedo, or whitening, in which the matter is separated, distilled, and purified; its essence extracted and released. Albedo symbols include the white swan or dove, the moon, clear water, and the White Queen.

There is a transitional stage next, known as the Citrinitas or the yellowing, which involves the infusion of warmth and spiritual insight, symbolised by honey, ripening wheat, and the sun rising on the new day.

The Rubedo, or the reddening – the final stage of the work – involves the integration of opposites and the experience of the true self, culminating in the Philosopher’s Stone, the perfected work across all three planes: material gold, psychological wholeness, and spiritual enlightenment.

The symbols for this stage include the phoenix, the full sun, the Red King, and the hermaphrodite (or rebis) – which represents the integrated whole, where masculine and feminine are united.

Enter the Nigredo

To get a sense of the first stage, the blackening, picture the alchemist in a darkened laboratory, lit only by the fire of their specialised furnace, the athanor. On the bench sits a sealed glass vessel, the vas hermeticum. It’s filled with crude matter – lead, sulphur, salt – and also moisture from water or mercury. The vessel goes into the flames, causing its contents to rot – to putrefy, blacken and dissolve into a thick, foetid sludge.

Days pass, maybe weeks, and the putrefaction continues, until finally what remains is a black mass at the bottom of the flask, known as the caput mortuum, or “death’s head.” Everything reduced to primordial darkness.

On the surface, this looks like destruction, but the Alchemist knows that you can only purify what has first broken down. It’s only from this black chaos – also known as the Prima Materia, or “first matter” – that something new can emerge.

This is the black dragon of the Nigredo: the necessary death. And it doesn’t only happen in flasks.

Jungian alchemy

Unlike the puffers, Carl Jung could see that the ancient alchemists’ true goal was bigger than the acquisition of gold. The Nigredo, in Jungian terms, is the dissolution of the ego, or the death of who you thought you were.

Jung writes that the Nigredo represents a confrontation with the shadow – the parts of self that have been repressed, denied, or hidden. It’s when your carefully constructed identity breaks apart, your defences fail, and the persona you’ve been presenting to the world finally cracks open, forcing you to behold what’s actually underneath.

This feels like death because, in a very real way, it is. It’s not physical death, obviously, but it is the end of your old story, your old certainties, and your old way of being in the world. All of this is painful. During the Nigredo, we must allow ourselves time to grieve for who we were.

Down is the way through

The psychologist James Hillman explores Jung’s work on alchemy in his lectures on alchemical psychology. Hillman emphasises that our culture has a pathological obsession with ascent – that is, rising above, transcending, reaching enlightenment, going up and up toward the light.

But alchemy begins with descent – going down into darkness and into the underworld of the psyche, where everything rots. Hillman proposes that we’ve lost the understanding that depression, dissolution, and darkness aren’t just problems to be solved, but necessary stages of transformation. The soul makes itself through descent, he says, not transcendence.

The Descent of Inanna

Consider the ancient Sumerian myth, The Descent of Inanna.

Inanna is a goddess. She’s powerful and beautiful, queen of heaven and earth. But although she has everything, she decides to descend into the Underworld to meet her sister Ereshkigal, the dark goddess who rules the realm of death.

As Inanna approaches the first gate to the Underworld, the gatekeeper, acting on Ereshkigal’s orders, stops her. “You may pass,” he says, “but you must remove your crown.” So she does. She removes her crown of divinity and begins her descent.

At the second gate, she hears, “You may pass, but you must remove your jewels.” So she removes her jewels.

At the third gate: “Remove your royal robes.” She removes them.

Gate by gate, Inanna is stripped – her necklace, her breastplate, her rings. Everything that stands for who she is, defines her identity, or gives her power, is taken away.

By the seventh gate, she enters the Underworld completely naked, and when she finally faces her sister, the dark goddess kills her and hangs her corpse on a hook to rot. Inanna – the powerful, beautiful, divine queen – is reduced to a piece of spoiling meat in the darkness.

That’s the Nigredo.

The story doesn’t end there, of course. Inanna is eventually resurrected and returns to the upper world, but not as who she was before. Inanna is fundamentally transformed by the descent, the stripping, and by death into a holistic deity, embodying the full spectrum and the full cycle of life and death – her light and shadow now integrated. In other words, she comes back whole.

What gets stripped away

So what does this look like in real life?

In the real world, the Nigredo looks like crisis – like breakdown, burnout, a huge failure, or a life-changing loss. The darkness descends as certain things are torn away. An old identity – like “the strong one” or “the selfless one” – is smashed to pieces. Certainty is stripped, the things we thought we knew about ourselves, our wants and our needs. Our illusions of control decay; our relationships rot; perhaps our health erodes or our faith vanishes. Whatever mask we’ve been wearing falls to the ground and shatters.

When the blackening begins, the natural thing is to search for what we can salvage. But you can’t negotiate with the gatekeeper. You can’t say, “I’ll give you the crown, but I need to keep the robes.” Everything that isn’t essential has to go, and that means everything that’s been propping you up artificially. Everything that’s not really you has to burn.

The fall of a fighter

I don’t tend to talk about my personal experience that much here, largely because there’s only so much to share. But the reason I’m making this content now and not still working in the world of combat sports is because of the Nigredo experience I went through around 16 years ago.

I was training for the national championships in full-contact kickboxing. From the outside, I was the picture of strength: disciplined, dedicated, fierce. But inside, I was at war with myself, desperately trying to become the perfect Amazonian warrior because I thought that would make me into someone who couldn’t be hurt, couldn’t be heartbroken, couldn’t fail, and couldn’t be derailed by fear. That was my ingenious plan for a painless existence.

I was performing an identity that obviously wasn’t realistic, but also wasn’t mine. Instead, it had been built on values I’d borrowed, and it was fueled by the terror of being seen as weak. The more I pushed to achieve this impossible ideal, the more I fractured. Until I couldn’t any more.

This is what I wrote about my breakdown when I finally had language for it years later. It’s from a book I published in 2018, which I haven’t looked at in a while. I grabbed it for the purpose of this post, and reading it now, I’m stunned by how closely the description fits alchemy’s Nigredo symbolism – the darkness, heaviness, slow rot and the fire that’s beginning to burn from within. All of the archetypes are there. Check this out.

A fog has descended behind my eyes. It functions like a protective wall of white noise, but I’m no longer sure if it’s there to stop the bad getting in or out.

I don’t know how long I’ve been lying here. Hours? Days? It doesn’t matter. Time is all muddled up, and I can’t see the point in trying to separate things out any more. If I look for it, the future stretches away from me like a long, dark tunnel of nothing; just more and more of the same.

I’m motionless, but my pulse is racing; a quick, erratic heaviness in my chest.

There’s a weighty sickness deep in my stomach and a dull ache surging through my bones. Every movement sends an excruciating, creeping feeling like a slow electric shock through the fibres of my body.

Underneath all that, I can hear the murmurs of a dark and sinister presence.

A knowing that rises up from the depths – like the promise of death, but less welcome than that. It tirelessly follows my every thought in the way that a slow-moving beast in a horror movie might do. My shadow monster has breached the boundaries of my body and has taken up residence under my skin.

I used to be fast enough to outrun it. I used to be strong enough to fight it. But now that my speed and power have left me, the wall of white noise is my only salvation. Without thought, I drift back into the meaningless drone of the TV I’m not watching.

Just like Inanna, I was being stripped by my burnout. Everything I’d meticulously built for myself – the warrior identity, the performance of strength, the belief that I could force my way through fear – was turning to a terrifying sludge that I experienced as a deadly monster within. No amount of positive thinking or regimented training was going to get me out of this one. All I could do was lie there while everything that wasn’t real rotted and burned away.

In retrospect, I can see that I wasn’t breaking down at that moment so much as breaking open. That false self had to die. There was no other option.

Spiritual bypassing

Now, I don’t know where you are in your life right now, obviously. I don’t know if you’ve had an experience like that, or if you’re in that kind of place at this very moment. I do know that no one who lives to be an adult gets through life without at least one Dark Night of the Soul, which is why this kind of exploration is so important to talk about.

That said, it’s difficult to talk about in a motivational kind of way for one simple reason: there is no sugarcoating this experience. Even though it is a necessary part of fundamental, positive transformation, to focus on that while you are blackening would be a huge error.

Our culture urges us to “stay positive”, “look on the bright side,” and to find the silver lining or the growth opportunity. It’s implied that we can learn to transcend our pain through meditation, affirmations, and gratitude practices. Things can be helpful, healthy and important at the right moment, but when you’re in the Nigredo, trying to skip past the darkness and jump straight to the light is known as spiritual bypassing – the Nigredo’s bright and fluffy shadow side, if you like.

Spiritual bypassing is when we use spiritual ideas and practices to avoid dealing with painful feelings or unresolved trauma. It’s the use of “high” consciousness to escape “low” feelings.

The alchemists knew better. They knew you can’t turn lead into gold without first breaking the lead down completely. Without braving the descent.

The Accidental Descent

Picture, in your mind, a stranger. Lost, they’ve been walking for hours, not really going anywhere… just moving because sitting still seems impossible when the ground feels like it’s caving in.

Turning down an alley they’ve never noticed before, they come across a stone staircase spiralling down into darkness. Should I just keep walking? they wonder, but something pulls them in: the faint smell of smoke and earth, a warmth rising from below. Before they can think better of it, they’re descending.

At the bottom of the steps, they discover a stone chamber. A massive furnace roars at the centre, flames visible through the grate. There are shelves on every wall, each crammed with strange-looking vessels. Some contain liquids, some ash, and some are filled with bizarre, unidentifiable things. The air here is thick with heat and the smell of scorching.

By the furnace stands the Alchemist – ageless and androgynous, tending the fire with an iron poker. They don’t look surprised to see the wandering stranger.

The Alchemist picks up a heavy, blackened clay crucible from the shelf and hands it over. “Put in what’s dying,” they say, with a voice that sounds like grinding stone. The stranger reaches for the vessel, but before they can take it, the alchemist quickly pulls it just out of reach. “Don’t just put in what you think should die. You need to put in everything that you can sense is already beginning to decay, like it or not.”

With that said, the Alchemist allows the stranger to take the crucible, and as their fingers touch its warm, weathered surface, the laboratory comes alive with shapes and visions, each one formed from the curves of flame and the coils of black smoke.

The stranger watches as their life plays out before them – the relationship that’s ending, the belief that never fit, the work or hobby, friendship or goal that’s falling apart at the seams… Every pretense, every performance, every lie. Appearing before them in visceral clarity, the stranger sees everything they’ve ever used to keep what’s true unspoken.

They feel, now, the heaviness in the room as if it belongs to them – as if it is lead in their stomach. Still, they do as they’re told, reaching for the visions and then placing the false fragments of their world into the vessel, naming each one as they do.

“The person I was trying to be,” they mutter. “The person I thought I had to be… “ The Alchemist watches dispassionately, but not coldly, as every falsehood is collected up.

“This thing that I’ve been clinging to for safety. This lie I’ve been telling my friends. This lie I’ve been telling myself.”

The Fire

When the work is done, the Alchemist takes the vessel, now heavy and full, and places it in the heart of the athanor, where it heats and heats. Its skin blackens even more, its contents decay and decompose – eventually breaking down so entirely that they’re left unrecognisable.

“Fire cleanses,” the Alchemist says. “Everything false must burn before you can see what’s true.” Then, they turn slowly from the athanor, locking eyes with the stranger. “Your job is simply to sit with this loss. Don’t rush it. Just let it burn.”

The vessel glows now – red hot on the outside, blacker than black on the inside.

The Return

Satisfied with this progress, the Alchemist nods once. “This will one day be gold, but it’s not that time just yet. So, we wait.”

Finally, the Alchemist retrieves a piece of darkened metal from a shelf near the ceiling, hands it to the stranger, and gestures to the stairs. “This is you now – base matter. Keep it. You’ll want to see what it becomes. Now, go. I’ll tend the fire. Whenever you return will be the time for the second stage.”

As the stranger climbs the spiralling stone steps, one by one, I wonder what happens when you ask yourself what the Alchemist would have you pluck from the smoke and place in the flames?

What, in your life, have you been trying to hold together in vain?

Which things would you gladly place in the crucible?

Which things would be hardest to let go?

You don’t need to know the answers to these questions right now. The Alchemist is always tending that fire, and the process is older than any of us. But these questions are worth keeping close, because at some stage, for all of us, there will be a time when we have to let ourselves burn.

REFERENCES:

• Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (1944)

• Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955-56)

• James Hillman, The Dream and the Underworld (1979)

• James Hillman, Alchemical Psychology (Uniform Edition, Vol. 5)

• Dennis William Hauck, Complete Idiot’s Guide To Alchemy: The Magic and Mystery of the Ancient Craft Revealed For Today (2008)

• Diane Wolkstein and Samuel Noah Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer (1983)

• Robert Masters, Spiritual Bypassing: When Spirituality Disconnects Us from What Really Matters (2010)

• Hazel Gale, The Mind Monster Solution (2018)

• Groundhog Day, directed by Harold Ramis (1993)

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***

We live in a world that seems to offer an impossible choice: be powerful or be loved; be fierce or be nurturing; be raw and real and vital, or be acceptable. Most of us choose to hide our hunger and strength in favour of palatability or ease. But what if we can have it all?

Even if you’ve never seen the movie Aliens, you’re probably aware of it. It may be my favourite film of all time – Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, terrifying insect-like aliens with an extra mouth inside their mouth and acid for blood. You know the one.

So, picture Ellen Ripley in her power loader, facing down the twenty-foot alien queen surrounded by those horrifying, gooey, convulsing eggs. The queen hisses, protecting her brood. Ripley growls back, protecting a child who isn’t even hers.

It’s the ultimate battle between two mother figures, both willing to die – and to kill – for their young. But all is not quite as it seems when it comes to this vignette.

Today we’re going to explore one of the most primal, powerful, and potentially dangerous archetypes in the human psyche: the Mother. Specifically, we’re going to look at the difference between the Nurturing Mother and the Devouring Mother, and how both of these forces live within us and work through all of us, regardless of our gender or whether we’re parents in real life.

The Mother archetype in myth and mind

Carl Jung wrote extensively about the Mother as a fundamental archetype in the collective unconscious – one of the deepest, most universal patterns in human experience. The Mother represents nourishment, protection, growth, and security. But every archetype has its shadow side and for the Mother, this means possession, devouring, darkness, destruction, and death.

In a very real sense, Mother is the first world we know. The womb is our first home, and it’s both a sanctuary and a jail – we’re held in place, can’t get out. This duality continues throughout our childhood – our parents (not only the mother in real life these days, thank goodness) feed, clothe and nurture us, but also confine us, control us.

No one has a completely uncomplicated relationship with their parents as they grow up. The parent/child connection is conflicted by design. We’re biologically and psychologically compelled to push against our parents, to test boundaries, and to individuate. It’s how we become separate people.

Mother Nature – the mother as life, death, and everything in between

As a fundamental player in the cycle of life, a Mother births us – she gives us life – but she’s also our first encounter with impermanence. The breast that feeds us will be withdrawn, the arms that hold us will let go, the protection she offers will eventually end – when we grow up, when she dies, when each of us returns to Mother Nature. That is, the earth from which all life comes and to which all life returns.

So, creation and destruction, life and death, attachment and loss… the Mother contains all of it. She’s not just the archetype of nurture; she’s the archetype of the full cycle. And our relationship with our earliest caregiver is our first training ground for understanding that nothing – not even love, not even life itself – lasts forever.

Erich Neumann, in his seminal work The Great Mother, describes how mythology worldwide depicts the Mother in dual form: the Good Mother who nourishes, and the Terrible Mother who devours.

In Hinduism, you see this in stories of the goddess Kali – creator and destroyer, wearing a necklace of skulls while dancing on corpses, tongue dripping blood.

In Christian literature, there’s the Virgin Mary – pure and obedient, the mother of salvation – but also the Whore of Babylon from the Book of Revelation: the mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth, drunk on blood, riding a scarlet beast, representing corrupted feminine power and spiritual consumption.

In Greek myth, there’s Demeter, who nourishes the earth, but also Medea, who murders her own children to punish their father. And in fairy tales, you get the loving mother who dies early, replaced by the wicked stepmother who poisons, imprisons, and consumes.

The archetype is always double-sided. Always. Aliens gives us both sides in perfect, visceral clarity. Let’s break it down to see how we can use it.

The Xenomorph Queen: Pure devouring mother

We’ll start with the obvious monster: the Xenomorph Queen.

She is, in many ways, the Devouring Mother in her purest form. She doesn’t nurture individual young – she produces them mechanically, endlessly churning them out.

Her offspring exist only to spread, consume, and reproduce. They’re not individuals, really, but extensions of her hunger, her need to propagate, and her will to succeed at all costs. They are, quite literally, consumed by their purpose the moment they’re born.

But it would be hard to claim that the Alien Queen does this out of malice. She’s not evil. More… amoral. The Queen is operating outside of the sphere of morality, doing what she’s biologically driven to do – protect her species, ensure survival, create more life. From her perspective, she’s being a good mother.

Ripley: The Nurturing Mother who must become fierce

Now let’s talk about Ellen Ripley. In the first Alien film, Ripley is pragmatic, tough, and survival-focused. We get a hint of what she’ll become in the relationship she has with Jonesy, the ship’s cat, but she’s nobody’s mother. In Aliens (the second movie), everything changes when she finds Newt, a traumatised child, and the sole survivor of a colony on a planet overrun by Xenomorphs.

Ripley doesn’t have to protect Newt. She could leave her behind and prioritise her own survival, but she doesn’t. She decides to become Newt’s fierce, protective mother.

Choice here is key. Ripley chooses to mother, and she mothers in a way that’s fundamentally different from the Queen – she’s not possessive or controlling, and she doesn’t want to make Newt her dependent. Instead, she teaches Newt to survive, to fight, to think for herself.

Ultimately, Ripley’s goodness shines a light on the Queen’s devouring monstrousness. The film shows us what we need to avoid and how to do that. But then again… does it?

The Devouring Mother in psychology

Let’s explore what this shadow archetype looks like in real life.

First of all, I need to be very clear that nothing I’m saying here is intended to demonise protective mothers or other kinds of caregivers. The Devouring Mother isn’t a person; it’s a pattern – an archetypal force that all of us can embody, regardless of our gender, position in the world, or whether or not we have children.

Specifically, this is the archetypal energy that inspires someone to love so much that they consume. Who hasn’t held their dog, child or partner in their arms and thought, “I love you so much I want to eat you up!” Like it or not, love can be a very consuming force. To love is to want to unify or join, and sometimes that can feel like the need to devour.

This shadow archetype entangles the identities and the needs of the parent figure (not always a parent) with those of the child figure (not always a child), making the “child” into an extension of the “parent”. Due to this merging, when we’re in the thrall of the Devouring Mother archetype, we fail to let our merged dependents fly the nest or become their own people, because this would mean losing some of ourselves. We need our “children” to need us, so we are terrified to let them grow into their own people.

Jungian analyst Marion Woodman wrote about this pattern in Addiction to Perfection (among other works). She describes how the Devouring Mother archetype often shows up in families where love is conditional and the child must essentially perform, achieve, or sacrifice themselves to earn approval from their parents.

In this most obvious domestic setting, the archetype says, “I sacrificed everything for you, so you owe me”, “I know what’s best for you better than you do”, and, “You’ll never survive without me”. But underneath those intimidating statements is this much more vulnerable message: “Don’t leave me. Don’t change. Stay small. Stay mine.”

The Devouring Mother in real life

As dramatic as the name of this archetype may sound, when the Devouring Mother shows up, it won’t always be in a monstrous kind of way. Think the father who can’t stop “helping” his adult children; the mother who unwittingly sabotages her kid’s independence because she likes to feel needed; the partner who says “I’m just worried about you” while tracking your every move; the friend who feels threatened when you succeed because it means you might not depend on them any more.

Here’s the thing: when this archetype takes hold, we do not see ourselves as controlling or harmful. We see ourselves as devoted, protective and loving. Just like the Xenomorph Queen, we think we’re being good mothers.

How the Devouring Mother Gets Created

So where does it come from, this energy? As with all shadow archetypes, the Devouring Mother arises from fear, repression, a sense of scarcity, and unmet needs.

People who truly embody this archetype are themselves starving – starving for love, purpose, significance, or control in a world that feels chaotic and threatening. They devour because they’re trying to fill a very real void, and have conflated being needed with being loved, important, and worthwhile. So, they create the dependence they crave – keeping their “child” convinced that they can’t survive alone. The cruel irony is that the more they devour, the more the dependent wants to escape. But the person playing the role of Devouring Mother can’t see this, because acknowledging it would mean facing the void – the one they’ve been ineffective in filling, precisely because they cannot bear to see it for what it is.

This is the psychological horror that the Xenomorph Queen makes visceral and visible. What the Devouring Mother does emotionally – implanting fear, creating dependence, consuming autonomy – the Queen does literally.

She implants her offspring inside unwilling hosts, her parasitic issue a gruesome mirror for her own vampiric nature. She creates creatures that exist only to serve her, and she builds a hive where nothing survives without her. The horror we feel watching Aliens is the horror of recognising this pattern made real and undeniable.

The Impossible Mother

But there’s another horror here, too – one that has nothing to do with xenomorphs and everything to do with the world that created this story. Ripley isn’t real or achievable. She’s an impossible ideal.

Ripley is the perfect mother – protective but not possessive, fierce but not angry, nurturing but not needy. She doesn’t lose control; she doesn’t have desires of her own; and she doesn’t give birth, either (too messy, too animal, too raw).

I’m just going to go ahead and say it – Ripley is the intergalactic Virgin Mother, sanitised and separate from the carnal reality of both womanhood and childbirth, all the protection and strength, none of the uncomfortable biology or emotional messiness.

Women already know this battle all too well, of course, because society presents us with the same impossible choice: we can either be the Virgin Mother (see Ripley – rational, controlled, sexless, safe) or be the Devouring Whore (like the Queen – angry, powerful, carnal, revolting. Too much). It’s getting better, but there’s still not much in the way of middle ground.

The mechanics of the monstrous mother

So, there is something deeply revealing going on with the Mother depictions supplied in Aliens. In “The Monstrous-Feminine”, film scholar Barbara Creed discusses a pattern to be found in movies such as Aliens and The Brood, where the biological mother is represented as fearsome, unnatural, abhorrent, full of rage, and often producing these mini-me offspring that are her minions rather than autonomous beings. Ripley, as an adoptive mother and therefore separate from the unwholesome business of childbirth, embodies the safe, sanitised, “good mother.”

“The mother’s offspring in The Brood represent symbolically the horrifying results of permitting the mother too much power. An extreme, impossible situation – parthenogenetic birth – is used to demonstrate the horrors of unbridled maternal power. Parthenogenesis is impossible, but if it could happen, the film seems to be arguing, woman could give birth only to deformed manifestations of herself.”

“The second reason why woman’s maternal function is constructed as abject is equally horrifying. Her ability to give birth links her directly to the animal world and to the great cycle of birth, decay and death. Awareness of his links to nature reminds man of his mortality and of the fragility of the symbolic order. The idea that woman in her mothering role is transformed into a human/animal figure is represented very strongly in The Brood, and in other horror films, such as Aliens where the generative mother is literally a creature and the ‘human’ mother is a surrogate who does not actually give birth.”

Creed suggests that we’re witnessing motherhood and, by extension, womanhood through the distorting lens of patriarchy in films like these.

We’re seeing the monstrous results of permitting the mother too much power, or of women being allowed to give physical form to their rage and desire.

Additionally, we see a systematic othering of the Mother as dangerously close to the animal world. We prefer to see ourselves as separate from other beasts, better than them. As thinking beings in a death-averse culture, this is partly self-protective. Awareness of our link to nature, as Creed points out, reminds us of our mortality as well as the “fragility of the symbolic order.”

In other words, mothers like the Xenomorph Queen are too raw, too powerful, and too angry for patriarchal values. They don’t fit comfortably in the modern world, so they need to be alienated, literally. They need to be forced into the darkness of their shadow. After all, everyone knows that the most hideous monsters “mostly come at night. Mostly”.

It wasn’t always this way, of course; the monstrous mammy has evolved over the years. Take Grendel’s mother, for instance. In the original Old English poem, she’s a warrior woman seeking justified vengeance for her murdered son.

But by 2007, in Zemeckis’ film Beowulf, she’s been transformed into a hypersexualised golden demon played by Angelina Jolie, who seduces men and births monstrous offspring. The grieving mother becomes the seductive monster who corrupts through sex and spawns evil.

Medusa serves as an even earlier example of this mutation. Originally, “a symbol of primal motherhood, gorgoneions showing the strained grimace of the woman in labour,” explains Natalie Lawrence in Enchanted Creatures, Medusa’s infamous expression became “the bestial glee of a grinning predator, an image of a cannibal Mother Nature”.

So, the biological mother has, over the past few millennia, grown more and more untouchable, and James Cameron’s character Ripley is that monstrous mother’s mirror opposite. She has to access a similar energy to save Newt, of course. She has to be ruthless and willing to kill. But she does so in a sanitised, comfortably dude-coded way.

The final battle in Aliens, then, isn’t Good vs Evil so much as two different expressions of the Mother archetype in direct conflict – the light and the shadow. One is portrayed as socially acceptable and creating autonomy, while the other is shown as vile, monstrous and creating dependency.

The Father’s Daughter

In The Heroine’s Journey, Maureen Murdock describes a pattern many women experience in life: we start by identifying with the masculine, becoming a “father’s daughter.” We reject the feminine because we’ve learned that masculinity equals power and respect. So, we become Ripley – we learn to sanitise our anger, hide our needs, apologise for our bodies, and perform the kind of nurturing that doesn’t threaten anyone. In many cases, we become the “cool girl” version of Woman: the laid-back one who doesn’t ask too much or take up too much space.

I did this for most of my life. I prided myself on being a “tomboy”. I literally learned to fight, and I was outgoing and tough. During that time, I looked down my nose at people I saw as “girly girls” as if I was somehow better by being closer to the masculine ideal.

This is what people now call being a “pick-me” – performing the “cool girl” who’s not like other women to gain approval. But while, in one way, it’s good that we can name internalised misogyny when we see it, calling women “pick-mes” has just become another means to judge and police femininity. We’ve traded one binary for another: instead of tomboy vs. girly girl, it’s now aware woman vs. pick-me. Ultimately, it’s the same trap; we’re still pitting women against each other.

And the truth is that, during my tomboy years, I could never shake the little voice inside that tried to speak the sadness, jealousy and shame I felt for not being like the girlier girls. I felt shame for not being feminine, and both sadness and anger for rejecting half of myself in order to be acceptable.

I don’t feel that way anymore. Not because I “rose above” the feminine as I used to think I should – which now sounds ludicrous to me – but because I finally understand: I wasn’t rejecting femininity because it was beneath me or because it was fundamentally weak or revolting. I was rejecting my femininity because I’d been taught to fear it and see it as monstrous.

Everyone’s battle

Of course, this double bind doesn’t only affect women and feminine-identifying people. Everyone has both masculine and feminine energy within them, and the world we live in teaches us to loathe that side of ourselves, regardless of our presenting gender.

So women and men alike learn to hate their softness, their emotionality, and their nurturing capacity, and can wind up projecting that repressed hatred onto the women in their lives. This is how misogyny comes about, and where incel culture comes from. It’s why women don’t feel safe to walk the streets after dark. Even the trad wife movement, which appears to celebrate “traditional femininity”, champions the confinement of women to safe, unthreatening motherhood and limits their control to the domestic.

In a world that demonises femininity, boys learn early that emotions are weakness, that needing support is emasculating, and that tenderness corrupts and undermines masculinity. So they’re forced to build their own version of Ripley’s sanitised strength – all protective power, no vulnerability allowed. Men learn to police their own softness as viciously as society polices women’s power. This is the same devouring pattern, just inverted. Where women are told their strength is monstrous, men are told their vulnerability is. Everyone loses.

Integration, Not Destruction

The most incensing thing about all this is that it’s based on a load of nonsense. There is no dichotomy for mothers or women – there is plenty of space between Virgin and Whore (and, by the way, no shame in being at either end of that scale in a literal sense).

So, what if the deepest allure of the film Aliens isn’t getting to see the “good, clean mother” rising victorious over the monstrous one at all? What if we find this storyline so engaging partly because we know this impossible-to-win battle first-hand? We have lived it, and sacrificed parts of ourselves to it.

I’d like to propose that the real challenge set by this film is not to be the good mother, but to integrate both ends of the polarity for ourselves – to merge the off-limits, raw feminine power of the Devouring Mother with the rational, dispassionate love of Ripley’s mother character. I believe the ultimate mother energy – that is, the creative force within us all – exists between these two poles. It’s not either/or, but both/and.

Don’t forget that the Queen is dormant throughout most of this movie – unconscious in some kind of trance state, just laying vile egg after vile egg. We don’t even know she’s there until Ripley wakes her up – until Ripley causes her to literally tear herself away from her reproductive organs, which are physically attached to the nest. The Queen is imprisoned by her role as Devouring Mother until Ripley rouses her; until she brings her into the light of consciousness. The shadow cannot integrate until consciousness chooses to face it.

The integrated mother

To integrate the Ripley part of self with the Xenomorph Queen is:
To be able to access rage without being consumed by it.
To nurture without needing to possess.
To protect fiercely without controlling.
To be powerful without devouring.
To create without consuming.

This excites me because, when it comes down to it, I don’t want to shrink or vanquish my inner Xenomorph Queen, thank you very much. I want to understand her. I want to integrate her fierce power, her relentless creativity, her refusal to be contained. I just want to feel in control of all that ferocity and realness, so I channel it into creations of purpose and meaning, and into relationships that feel vital and alive.

In other words, I want to be the Mother we’re not allowed to be:

• Powerful and loving.

• Fierce and conscious.

• Raw and intentional.

To be these things, we need to humanise the alien.

Your Inner Xenomorph Queen

So let’s meet the Queen and invite her back home.

Imagine, if you will, that you’re walking through a dark corridor. The walls, once made of metal and plastic, now seem to breathe – organic, pulsing, covered in unfamiliar flesh.

Strange, ridged patterns stretch up further than you can see. Every now and then, movement catches your eye, but when you turn, there’s nothing but darkness.

Up ahead, in a vast chamber lit by an eerie bio-luminescence, you see her: your inner Xenomorph Queen. She is massive, powerful, and ancient. Maybe she looks like the creature from the film, or maybe she takes a different form – something uniquely yours. She might be made of rage, or hunger, or raw creative energy that’s been locked away for years. She might look human, or like a different kind of animal.

Keeping your eyes locked on the Queen, you step into the chamber and find that it feels alive. It’s warm, humid, almost womb-like.

She sees you now. Turning her head to face you as if waking up.

I wonder what your first instinct is – whether you feel fear to look at the part of you that’s been called monstrous, or whether you feel sadness, hate, curiosity, excitement. Love? Maybe all of the above.

The longer you look at your Inner Queen, the easier you find it to see what lurks beneath her terrifying exterior.

She is the part of you that would burn the world down to keep what you love safe.

She is fearless creativity, able to birth ideas, projects, connections, and life itself…

She is your hunger for life, for meaning and for more – the part of you that wants to consume experience, take up space, and live fully.

She is primal power – a force that doesn’t ask permission, doesn’t apologise, doesn’t compromise itself to make others comfortable.

All of this has been called monstrous. But what if it’s not?

As you stand here with your Inner Queen, what would it mean to reclaim her?

Ripley’s iconic line from the end of this film – “Get away from her, you bitch!” – is a battle cry we all know. But maybe we should be saying this not to the Queen but about her. Maybe, instead, we should be saying it to the traditions and outdated values that made her monstrous in the first place. What if the Alien Queen – tethered biologically to her duties as mother, locked away out of sight so as not to offend or frighten the world – is the one we ought to be saving?

The Queen is not our enemy, but our power. Integrate her, wield her consciously, and then just see what you can create.

–

REFERENCES:

• Aliens, James Cameron, 1986

• Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959)

• Erich Neumann, The Great Mother: An Analysis of the Archetype (1955)

• Barbara Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993)

• Marion Woodman, Addiction to Perfection: The Still Unravished Bride (1982)

• Laura Mulvey and Mary Ann Doane’s work on feminist film theory and the virgin/whore dichotomy

• Maureen Madock, The Heronine’s Journey

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Some time ago, I was ghosted by someone I thought was a good friend. It wasn’t dramatic – no fight, no confrontation. Just… distance, and that gradual fade that feels worse than a clean break because it leaves you wondering: What did I do wrong? In trying to answer that question, I spiralled: was it something I said, or something I did? Was I too much, too intense, too weird?

I took it to my therapist, expecting her to help me figure out how to fix the broken relationship. Instead, she shared a story, and it changed everything for me.

Today I want to tell you about the three colours of friendship, why most of us are drowning in the wrong kind of shade, and why and how we should stop performing for people who will never actually see us.

The Ugly Duckling

You almost certainly know the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Ugly Duckling.” A little duckling is born in a farmyard, and from the moment he hatches, he’s different: too big, too grey, too long-legged and awkward. The other ducklings – all perfectly fluffy, cute and yellow – mock their odd-looking sibling: they ridicule him for being different, and peck at him as if trying to keep him at a safe distance.

Even his own mother is embarrassed by him. So he tries to fit in, making himself smaller, staying quiet, and struggling to perfect the other ducklings’ style of waddle and quack. But nothing works – they still reject him, so he runs away in search of somewhere to belong. On his travels, he finds wild ducks who tolerate but don’t embrace him.

He finds geese – they’re shot by hunters. He finds an old woman with a cat and a hen, but they mock him for not being able to purr or lay eggs. When winter comes, the ugly duckling is alone and exhausted. One night, he hides in the reeds by a lake, and by morning – the water having turned to ice overnight – the frightened little creature finds himself frozen in place, nearly dead from the effort of trying to belong where he doesn’t.

The Three Colours of Friendship

When I took the story of my ghosting friend to therapy, I too was frozen in the water. I couldn’t go back to my old, broken friendship, obviously, but I didn’t know how to move forward either. My therapist listened to my situation, nodded, took a breath and then said, “When it comes to people, there are just three colours in this world: green, orange, and yellow.”

Greens are the people who see you – the real you – and like what they see. It might be that they understand you, they may admire your principles, feel inspired by what you do, or share your passions. But not necessarily, and even if they do, there’s more to Green than a completed checklist of similarities. When it comes down to it, these people are simply your people, and there’s nothing more to it than that. They will stand by you through thick and thin, they will cheer you on and celebrate your successes because, for whatever reason, they are your true friends, and you know this instinctively.

When we’re with people who are Green for us, we feel safe to be vulnerable, honest, authentic and real because we just know that they love us for who we are.

Oranges, on the other hand, are the opposite – not your people, not your vibe. They may disagree with your opinions, principles, politics, work, or whatever. Or, they might just rub you up the wrong way – again, there’s no formula here. Some people just aren’t your people, and that’s fine. It’s good, actually, because it proves you’re being true to yourself. No one in this world is innately, automatically likeable to everyone, so Oranges are inevitable when you choose to be Green for yourself. They’re the natural result of being authentic in the world. And that’s a good thing.

And then there is Yellow. Yellow relationships are performative and inauthentic – the ones where you can’t quite be yourself.

Yellow might be a close friend, a colleague, a family member, or someone you barely know. What makes them Yellow isn’t how well you know them, but how you feel around them: like you need to learn to waddle in a certain way to fit in. Like you’re carefully editing yourself, monitoring what you say, walking on eggshells, or simply trying to appear funnier, tougher, more successful, more agreeable, or just... different. Even if there’s no specific trait you need to perform, you can tell a Yellow relationship from the persistent feeling of unease it brings – a sense that any misstep could lead to judgment, and that you need to stay carefully calibrated as a result.

Often, Yellows are the people you think you should be friends with for some or other reason. Perhaps they’re a friend from school or someone another friend really likes. Perhaps they’re in your family or your team at work, and you think you simply have to find a way to keep it going. So you bend for them, just a little. You fold yourself, contort yourself; you speak in half-truths and polished, censored stories… You do whatever you need to do to keep them on, even though they leave the faintest hint of a bad taste in your mouth every time you walk away.

Yellow is any relationship where you leave feeling slightly diminished and a bit less like yourself. When my therapist shared these ideas, she leaned forward at this stage, looked me right in the eye, and said, “Yellows are the people who invite you to their dinner party simply because they have one seat left to fill.” Then, she sat back, lifted her chin, and said, “The only colour to get rid of is Yellow.”

Why we stay

Remember, the ugly duckling stayed in that farmyard for quite some time before the ridicule and pecking finally got too much. He kept trying, kept performing, and kept making himself smaller, quieter and, ultimately, less like himself.

Why? Because leaving is tough. Admitting that people in our lives are not our people – perhaps never have been – is fundamentally difficult. It’s hard to admit to ourselves that all the effort we’ve been putting in will ultimately have been for nought, and because no relationship is all bad, there will undoubtedly be some things about it that we don’t want to let go of: people, places, events, or other kinds of “perks” that we will miss out on from the moment we walk away.

So we stay, and we keep the performance going just a little longer – exhausting ourselves trying to quack when we were meant to glide.

The damage of performance

When it comes down to it, Yellow relationships are built on the lie that if we just perform well enough, if we just hide our differences effectively enough, we can belong anywhere. But we can’t, of course, and nor do we want to. Not really. Because this kind of performance is profoundly damaging.

When we repeatedly self-censor, we teach ourselves over and over that who we really are is simply not safe to show the world. Simply not good enough. This is true even when we’re conscious of the reason for the performance. Who hasn’t had to suffer through a dinner party or work event being polite to people they don’t really like, only to find themselves having to shake off the experience afterwards? Social performance like this feels fundamentally dirty and wrong. Each time we do it, we like ourselves a little less.

The only colour to get rid of is Yellow… not Orange.

What if the ducks were never wrong?

When we hear the story of the ugly duckling, we instinctively want to boo at the chicks when they reject our ill-fitting hero. But the ducklings aren’t villains in this story. They just aren’t swans. The same goes for the people who are Orange for us. Just because we don’t like them and they don’t like us doesn’t necessarily make them bad people. They’re just not our vibe, and that’s fine.

In fact, it’s better than fine; it’s a good thing. Oranges validate us because they prove we’re not performing. They also give us a chance to test our principles, to healthily question ourselves, and to understand our purpose, direction, values, with more clarity.

I’m not saying we ought to hang out with our Orange people – why on earth would we want to do that? What I’m saying is that we needn’t fear them, because the problem has never been the fact that Orange exists. The problem is that we don’t let Orange be Orange, but turn them into Yellow instead. The problem is when we think, “This doesn’t feel right, but if I just change this one thing about myself, maybe it will.” That’s how we end up frozen in a pond somewhere, wondering where we went wrong.

So, no, Orange isn’t the enemy. The only colour to get rid of is Yellow.

How to get rid of Yellow

Now, I’ve told this story before, and I know that “the only colour to get rid of is Yellow” can sound like I’m suggesting we should cull all of our awkward friends – or unceremoniously cut out all of the people we’re afraid to be ourselves around. But that’s not exactly the case.

A person’s friendship colour isn’t about who they are; it’s about who we’re being around them. Yellow is our fault – it means we’re not being ourselves with this other person.

In reality, they could be the biggest Green in the whole world. Or they could be Orange. We haven’t found out yet because we aren’t showing them who we really are – we’re not giving them a chance to reject or embrace us, because we’re scared.

Getting rid of Yellow, then, is not about cutting people out. It’s about being real. It’s about finding the courage to show up as ourselves. To be Green for ourselves.

To be Green for yourself means dropping the pretences.If you’re part of or in touch with the neurodivergent community, you’ll know this as “unmasking”. It means choosing not to hide your weirdness or your difference. It means deciding to express your passions, opinions, and vulnerabilities – not all the time or totally without filter because that might not be safe, but whenever it feels right to share these things.

Sometimes, being Green for yourself means choosing honesty that might make someone else think less of you or feel uncomfortable. Ultimately, it means risking Orange – both being Orange for others and realising they’re Orange for you. It means risking rejection in order to learn where you stand.

If you do this, and a former Yellow turns out to be Orange, then that’s fine. Sure, it can be disappointing, but it’s better to know. And now that you do, they’ll drift away. There’s no need to keep people in our lives that make us feel uncomfortable to be ourselves, it’s as simple as that.

But sometimes we’ll discover that a former Yellow has been Green all along, just waiting for us to finally show up. Perhaps they’ve been afraid to open up around us, because they’ve been feeling uneasy too. Human beings can sense inauthenticity, and we don’t like it one little bit. It makes us feel unsafe and uncertain. So, when we finally decide to be Green for ourselves, the people around us breathe a sigh of relief, too.

The only colour to get rid of is Yellow. And we do that by being Green for ourselves.

Your actual flock

The morning the ugly duckling finds himself frozen in the lake, a kind-hearted farmer breaks him out of the ice, takes him home, and revives him by the fire. The ugly duckling recovers, but of course realises this human household is not where he belongs either. It’s full of children, for one thing, and they’re noisy and scary, so he leaves the farmhouse and goes back into the wild world outside.

But it’s warmer now, at least. The ice has thawed, spring has sprung, and one day, feeling the summer sun on his back, the ugly duckling makes his way to a beautiful garden pond, where he sees a flock of magnificent, snow-white swans. Despite his fear of rejection and mockery, he’s drawn to their beauty and decides to approach them, believing it is better to be killed by such beautiful birds than to live in misery.

He bows his head in anticipation of death, but instead of mockery or pain, he sees his own reflection in the water. To his astonishment, he discovers that he is no longer an ugly, grey duckling, but a beautiful, fully grown swan himself. The other swans welcome him warmly, gently pecking him with their beaks. Children on the bank throw bread into the water and point at the new swan, saying he’s the most beautiful of them all.

The swan feels a profound sense of happiness that he could never have dreamed of when he thought he was a duckling. Finally, he belongs, having found his true home and his family.

Swan green – the greenest green of all

Perhaps the easiest way to know that you’re in a swan-green relationship is the sense that belonging feels effortless – you have nothing to prove.

The swans didn’t need the ugly duckling to achieve or demonstrate anything, they didn’t need him to perform swan-ness convincingly – they just looked at him and knew: “This is one of us.”

Green people recognise you, and are drawn to you – as you are them – without the need for any bending or folding to fit. Because that’s what friendship truly is: acceptance and enjoyment of someone who makes your world better just by being themselves.

Time to leave the duck pond

I’m still not in contact with the friend who ghosted me, but I don’t feel loss or regret any more. Rather, I feel relief, because I finally stopped trying (and clearly failing) to be the person I thought she needed me to be.

After that day, I found my swans – not all at once, and not in a big dramatic way. But slowly, surely, the people who actually saw me, who liked what they saw, and who I liked right back, started to appear in my life. Many of them had been there all along. I just hadn’t appreciated how excellent they were yet because I was too busy performing for the ducks.

So this is my invitation to you: risk being Orange to some people, and let your Yellow relationships become what they actually are. Because somewhere out there, there’s a whole flock of swans who are waiting for you, and they’ll never find you if you’re still trying to quack.

REFERENCES:

• Hans Christian Andersen, “The Ugly Duckling” (1843)

• Rafael Bejarano’s Three Colours framework (passed on by my old therapist, Rachel Moore)

• Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone (2017)

• Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy (1961)

• Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life (2016)

Have you heard about our new game Echoes?

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You know that voice in your head that tells you to work harder, or improve yourself by fixing that one little problematic thing? This voice might sound like motivation when you hear it, or like self-care – encouragement towards a perfectly reasonable goal. We all need to grow, of course, and the impetus has to come from somewhere. But how much do you know about that voice, really? Is it on your side, empowering healthy change? Or is it motivating you towards something much darker?

Today we’re diving into the world of K-Pop Demon Hunters – the smash-hit animated movie that hundreds of millions of people, young and old, have devoured, dissected, and sung along to in their living rooms over the last year.

This is the story of a demon hunter battling dark forces in a bid to save the world from destruction, and reckoning with her own demon nature in the process. For me, the most fascinating and useful thing about the psychodrama presented by K-Pop Demon Hunters is what this film reveals about how we use other people’s adoration to fuel self-elimination, and how shame doesn’t always look like darkness, but rather productivity and the pursuit of success. K-Pop Demon Hunters is about the walls we build to protect ourselves, but that often turn out to be the very things that will destroy us.

Fair warning: this article contains significant spoilers. If you haven’t watched K-Pop Demon Hunters and want to go in fresh, bookmark this and come back.

Still here? Then let’s talk about what this film says about you.

K-Pop Demon Hunters in a nutshell

Meet the K-pop girl group, Huntrix: Rumi, Mira, and Zoey. On the surface, they’re pop stars loved all over the world, but their true mission is bigger than releasing yet another No.1 hit – they are also secret demon hunters under oath to protect humanity from the evil that seeps in through tears in the Honmoon.

The Honmoon is a magical barrier woven from collective human soul energy that keeps the demon realm separate from the human world.

The word Honmoon is a combination of two Sino-Korean words: hon (혼), meaning “soul” or “spirit”; and mun (문), meaning “door” or “gate”. This soul gate, then, divides what’s acceptable from what must be kept out.

Huntrix’s goal is to turn the Honmoon gold, symbolising perfection and purity. By perfecting the barrier through a combination of the power of song and the collective soul energy/love from their fans, the demon hunters will seal the human world permanently, making the separation between good and evil absolute. Music, worship, and collective energy: that’s the defence system.

But here’s where it gets complicated: Rumi, whose name means “flowing beauty” or, as fans have noticed, “to come true” if used in combination with the common Korean surname Lee, is half-demon. Her father was a demon, and she has dark marks on the skin of her arms that she desperately hides. Rumi has been told that when the Honmoon is sealed, her marks will disappear, making her extra invested in the endeavour.

The fight against shame

K-pop Demon Hunters makes no attempt to veil the psychological meaning behind their story of good versus evil – which, by the way, I think is a fantastic sign of where we’re headed in terms of what we teach growing minds about fear, shame and human struggle. Because that side of things is evident, I’d like to focus on some of the less explicit messages conveyed by this movie.

The film opens with Rumi’s bandmates making a beeline for the couch and some hard-earned rest after all the success they’ve been having.

Rumi, however, has other ideas – she secretly releases their next single and propels them into yet another sprint of work.

Fast forward twenty minutes or so, and Rumi’s demon patterns have spread to her neck, where they affect her voice. That is, the very thing she needs to perform, and to maintain the barrier and complete her mission. She’s losing the capacity to do the work that’s supposed to save her.

Taking the advice of her bandmates Zoey and Mira, she goes to a doctor, sits down, opens her mouth like a child, and goes, “Ahhhhhh.” The doctor wags a finger. No. “In order to heal a part, we must understand the whole,” he says.

Staring at her in a slightly menacing way, he diagnoses the real problem. “You have lots of walls up,” he notes. “Focusing on one part leads you to ignore other parts, leaving you separated.”

So, the Honmoon isn’t just external. Rumi has an internal wall, too, designed to keep her demon heritage separate from her human identity. And this defence system, it would seem, is the real problem.

At this point, Mira and Zoey chime in to agree – “she’s emotionally closed off,” they nod, “a workaholic! She doesn’t know how to relax!” But the doctor doesn’t stop with Rumi’s analysis.

Rounding on Zoey, he diagnoses an “eagerness to please,” constantly accommodating others.

And in Mira, he finds a fierce protector whose vicious anger won’t let anyone close.

This is where we start to see the psychological interplay between characters. Just as every story that touches on the archetypal, K-pop Demon Hunters tells the inner tale of a single psyche as well as one of external conflict. Read internally, this doctor isn’t diagnosing three separate people, so much as three trauma responses: freeze, fawn, and fight. Rumi is freeze – the shut-down workaholic. Zoey is fawn – the accommodator and people-pleaser. Mira is fight – the warrior part that does battle in order to protect. In Huntrix, these three responses work in concert (pun intended) to maintain the barrier.

The lure of the quick fix

So, it would seem like this doctor really knows his stuff. But, much to Rumi’s disgust, he’s revealed as yet another simpering fan when they leave the surgery and see their poster on the wall, his effigy superimposed on top to look like they’re the best of friends. To make matters worse, the tonic he gives Rumi for her voice is fake. They don’t know it yet, but they’re leaving with a presumably expensive box of grape juice.

What takes place next all happens pretty quickly. They leave the doctor and encounter the Saja Boys: a demon boy band sent to defeat them, but also totally swoon-worthy and annoyingly talented.

Rumi literally falls in front of Jinu, their leader – whose name means “genuine friend” – and, for a moment, there’s attraction and the hint of recognition. But then he brushes lint from his shoulder, tells her to watch herself, and walks away without helping her up. Disgusted by this rejection, Huntrix follows the boys to an impromptu gig they stage in the street, realise they’re demons, and have a big fight in the men’s bathhouse with a horde of water demons the Saja Boys had up their perfectly tailored sleeves.

Huntrix walks away from this encounter, but not unscathed. Rumi’s patterns have been glimpsed by Jinu, who therefore now knows her secret, and there was at least one civilian casualty – an old man in the bathhouse is singing the Saja Boys’ catchy new song as a water demon rises up behind him and sucks away his soul.

The bathhouse is deeply symbolic. It’s where transformation takes place through ritual and nakedness, but this man, isolated and singing alone, shows that even a place meant for cleansing can become the site of consumption.

The fragmented system

Here’s what we can take from an internalised reading of K-pop Demon Hunters. Rumi, Mira, and Zoey represent three parts of one fragmented psyche that have learned to perform as a coordinated unit. Each member is a different wall and a different defence mechanism. Together, they’re convinced that if they just strengthen the barrier enough – turn it gold, make it perfect, eliminate all the demons – they’ll finally be safe.

But this isn’t working. What a surprise.

The demon patterns that spread across Rumi’s body represent the shadow refusing compartmentalisation. The more she tries to perfect the barrier, the more her demon nature asserts itself, until it tries to claim the most important thing: her voice.

The doctor gave her the answer right away – tear down the walls, understand the whole, stop separating – but she wasn’t ready for this truth yet, and instead left with the quick-fix grape juice, devaluing the doctor on the way out by seeing him as just another fan. We all do this when we catch a glimpse of something that’s both true and difficult to accept – if we aren’t ready to transform, we warp the advice or the advisor in our minds with rationalisations and bent truths until we can write it all off as nonsense.

Ultimately, even the doctor – with his picture superimposed on their poster – is captured in the same performance system. He can diagnose the problem, but he won’t be heard, because he’s also a fan. In a way, he’s complicit.

The fans – projection and paradox

Now, in our internalised reading, the fans aren’t external to the psyche, either. They’re Rumi’s projected self-love and her terror of rejection made visible, representing how she perceives the adoration she’s destroying herself to earn.

When the Saja Boys perform, the fans worship them with the exact same fervour they do Huntrix, and as the film goes on, the adoration splits down the middle – 50% for Huntrix, 50% for the demon band. What this shows us is that the acceptance Rumi is fragmenting herself to earn flows to her authentic demon nature just as easily as her perfected persona, because self-love doesn’t require perfection or elimination. Quite the opposite, actually; self-love needs imperfection in order to be real.

Rumi can’t see this, of course, because she’s externalising her self-connection, throwing it out onto the audience and convincing herself that ratings and adoring fans will finally make her whole. She’s weaponising her own capacity for self-acceptance and using it as fuel to destroy herself through shame.

Shame’s whispered promise

Shame is the dark heart of this movie, and it conveys a message that I find powerful.

When we think of shame, we tend to imagine isolation and darkness – perhaps someone curled up in a cold, lonely room, drowning in self-hatred. But while shame certainly can manifest that way, that’s not what it looks like for most of us. More often, the shameful person looks like Rumi – busy, driven, productive, and constantly “improving”.

Shame can look and feel like a mission or path; a pseudo-goal of barrier-strengthening that we call self-improvement. And while we’re on that path, shame is the voice that whispers, “Just fix this one problematic part. Just build that wall a bit higher. Just work a little harder, win the competition, get the promotion or the partner or the family or the damn car, and you’ll finally be acceptable.”

Shame promises us gold. And in doing so, it keeps us moving through the world like zombies, mindlessly following the lie that salvation is just one achievement away.

This is what the film’s villain Gwi-Ma understands. K-pop’s Big Bad isn’t a demon – it doesn’t have a body or form beyond a plume of pink smoke. But it has a voice, and it uses that voice to control and imprison its demons in the murky underworld of shame. “Feel is all demons do,” Jinu tells Rumi when she claims that his kind are pure, unfeeling evilness. “Feel our shame, our misery. That’s how Gwi-Ma controls us.”

Later, when it looks as though all is lost, Gwi-Ma’s cruel voice can be heard by everyone in the city. “You’re a failure,” it whispers to Huntrix’s manager; Mira hears that she never deserved a family; Zoey’s told she’ll never belong. Each person gets their specific fear and self-doubt amplified, and then turned into a promise: “And I can take that pain away,” says Gwi-Ma… all for the little price of their soul.

Seeing this, Rumi goes to the woman who raised her – her birth mother died when she was young – and presents a sword: “Do what you should have done a long time ago, before I destroy what I swore to protect.” The jig is up. Rumi can finally see that what she was trying to do was never going to work. She’s initially ready to admit defeat, but something clicks when her mother figure can’t kill her, and instead suggests she just keep going with the lies to mask her demon nature.

With the fans all moving like zombies towards the demon band’s sinister midnight concert, Rumi finally gets in touch with the self-love she’s been separated from the whole time. “Why couldn’t you love me?” she screams. “Why couldn’t you love all of me?”

What actually heals

So, how does she manage this just as everything looks so hopeless? Since the moment Huntrix meets the Saja Boys outside the doctor’s office, Rumi’s voice has been healing. It wasn’t the sham tonic that did this, obviously, though she was happy to let her bandmates believe this to be the case. In reality, her voice returned when she started to connect with her shadow – with Jinu.

The process of reunion began with conversations fraught with conflict, and progressed through secret trysts and the gift of a loveable demon cat. The closer she and Jinu got, the more whole she felt, until the two of them – light and shadow – sing a duet about how they can be free if they face things together.

When Jinu reveals that he was once human – a poor boy who traded his soul to Gwi-Ma to save his starving family – Rumi sees his humanity and learns that anger and fighting can never win this battle, just as self-censoring and masking won’t make her marks go away. She learns that you can’t hate your way from shame to freedom, and you can’t eliminate your way to wholeness. The Honmoon – the barrier – was the problem, not the solution.

Crucially, the superstar Rumi’s journey of growth takes place in private, not on stage. Integration happens at the margins, away from the performance. It happens when Rumi gives up striving to perfect her public persona and succeed in her public mission – when she stops trying to turn the Honmoon gold and starts connecting with the parts of herself she’s been taught to wall off.

“If this was the Honmoon I was supposed to protect, I’ll be glad to see it destroyed,” Rumi says, finally, to her mother figure.

Boss fight

And with that, Rumi descends into the demon realm to face the embodiment of shame that is Gwi-Ma. She looks worn and battered, but not broken. “Everyone finally sees who you are, and the Honmoon is gone,” the demonic voice says. “It is,” she agrees, with a glint in her eye, “So we can make a new one.”

Time for a change. Rumi sings now about how she used to think she had to fix her patterns, and how she fragmented in the process, but now she sees beauty in the broken glass. Mira and Zoey join her – the three fragmented parts reunifying. “I’ll be right here by your side,” they all chorus.

And with this last song – a song of integration rather than performed strength and hate – Gwi-Ma is defeated. Jinu, freed by being genuinely seen, offers his soul to empower Rumi’s final blow. “You gave me my soul back, and now I give it to you.”

The demon world vanishes, along with Jinu and the rest of his band (though I’m sure we’ll learn more about what happened to them in the second movie). The sun comes up as the people of the world are re-imbued with their stolen souls, and the Honmoon turns not gold, but a full spectrum of rainbow colours.

Perfection and permanence were never the solution. Gold was too narrow, too restricting and too impossible to achieve. But acceptance, diversity, fluidity and everything else about the sheer complexity that is being human are finally allowed in the world. The Honmoon is transformed rather than strengthened – it’s turned into a vessel that can hold multiple truths at once.

What about the ending tho?

Now, if this had been an old-school Disney movie, that would have been the end. In K-pop, though, things aren’t sewn up in quite such a tidy fashion.

Huntrix goes to the bathhouse – the space for spiritual cleansing and vulnerability – where they relax for a brief moment. When they leave, promising themselves they’ll head to the couch and chill, they see a pair of young fans and get right back to work instead. “The couch can wait,” they giggle before heading off to take some selfies with the girls. The camera pans right to show the cuddly demon cat watching from a nearby rooftop, its huge grin plastered all over its Cheshire Cat-like face.

So here’s the question: have these parts actually integrated, or did they just survive one crisis before reverting to the same pattern? They defeated Gwi-Ma’s voice and transformed the barrier, but they’re still trapped by the same performance imperative, no? The fans are still there, their projection is still externalised, and the moment adoration calls, they choose it over the rest they’ve been wishing for throughout the movie.

Defeating one voice of shame doesn’t end the work

Maybe this is the most honest thing the film could show us – defeating one voice of shame doesn’t end the work, it just reveals the next layer.

Huntrix is reunited, but the world is still built from the same machinery – striving, hero-worship, consumption. The shadow has been integrated enough to be kept as a beloved pet, but not enough to be public. It still has to watch from the sidelines.

The question for us (and maybe for the sequel, who knows?) is how integration can survive when everyone around us still demands the same performance they got from our fragmented selves.

Will we ever truly rest, or will the couch always have to wait?

The answer isn’t in the film; it’s in your next choice. Right now, are you going to push through to “just one more thing,” or are you going to close this post, take a breath, and give yourself permission to simply be? The rainbow Honmoon isn’t something you achieve once. It’s something you choose, again and again, every time the performance imperative calls, and you find the strength to turn down its shiny offer.

So, let me leave you with some questions to chew over instead:

Does slowing down feel like failure to you? If taking a break feels wrong, dangerous or like “giving up”, then you’re probably listening to the voice of Gwi-Ma.

In what ways do you perform perfection? Where are you hiding parts of yourself to be acceptable? What gets locked behind your personal Honmoon because you’ve decided it’s too messy, too ugly, too much? Your gold barrier might look like productivity, politeness, or never showing weakness. It’ll be different for each of us, but its effect is the same: it fragments rather than protects.

Finally, perhaps the most important question of all: What’s the worst that could happen if you just… stopped? What fear arises when you imagine dropping the mask? That fear is where your work begins.

–

References:

• K-pop Demon Hunters, directed by Maggie Kang & Chris Appelhans, from Sony Pictures Animation and Netflix (2025)

• Carl Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious (1959)

• Carl Jung, Psychology and the Unconscious (1912/1943)

• Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score (2014)

• Carol S. Pearson, Awakening the Heroes Within (1991)

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Have you heard about our new game Echoes?

Our new game Echoes is available for pre-orders on Kickstarter. It’s a futuristic tale of time travel, magic, myth and tarot, and it’s perhaps our favourite and most awaited project.

There’s a special card deck and other exclusive rewards available only on Kickstarter. Ready to meet the Selves, gather ancient wisdom, and save the future?

Pre-order Echoes

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It moves like a nightmare stitched from four different dreams: a lion with a goat’s head rising from its back, a dragon’s wings, and a serpent tail that hisses and bites. The Chimera is not one beast but many – a living contradiction that transgresses boundaries of species, type, and reality. And that world-rattling horror is exactly why it can be so profoundly helpful to us.

So, let’s invite this beast to the table and see what it has to say.

This article is for anyone who’s ever felt pulled asunder by disparate parts of themselves. In other words, all of us.

The Chimera – Monster of Contradiction

The Chimera comes from Greek mythology. It was the offspring of the fearsome Typhon and Echidna and a sibling of Cerberus – the three-headed guard dog of the Underworld – and Hydra – the also multi-headed serpentine monster slain by Heracles at Lerna, another entrance to the Underworld.

What I’m saying is that you probably don’t want to ask the Chimera for a look at its family portrait.

It’s worth noting here that the term “chimera” has come to describe any mythical or fictional creature with parts taken from various animals. So, these days, centaurs, mermaids, fauns, etc. are all considered chimeras with a lower-case C. In this post, we’re discussing the original Chimera, proud owner of a capital C.

The mechanics of monsterhood

In his book Monsters, David D. Gilmore describes the amalgamative nature of the Chimera – not one creature but a mish-mash of many – as a defining characteristic of monsterhood. In order to be monstrous, something must transcend boundaries: the Vampire, for example, is human plus animal (the bat, mainly, but sometimes the wolf); were-creatures obviously follow the same pattern; Zombies and Ghosts are both alive and dead; Witches and skinwalkers are both human and familiar, but also magical and superhuman.

As such, monsters are challenging in a number of ways:

• Morally challenging – what is good, what is bad, where is the line between the two?

• Cognitively challenging – what is real, what is make-believe, how do I know the difference?

• Existentially challenging – monsters defy the rules, refusing to fit into the categories that provide us with a sense of normalcy, order, and therefore our comforting illusion of control.

In Gilmore’s words, monsters highlight “the arbitrariness and fragility of culture”.

What’s interesting is that we seem to have a fundamental need to be challenged in this way. No matter how uncomfortable this existential rugpull might feel, we crave monsters; dream of them; invent them as children; write them into our stories; and create them when they’re denied us (as discussed in the first episode of this series).

The Chimera, then, is the archetypal monster – the embodiment of chaos, contradiction, terror and confusion, born of a family of demonic beasts associated with death, darkness and the Underworld.

Monster as divine

Noting that the prevalence of monsters in art, literature and folklore grew exponentially with the genesis of monotheism, Gilmore discusses the “paradoxical closeness” of the monstrous and the divine.

Where God arrived to play the role of good, sacred, all-powerful father figure – the light – monsters possessed that same numinous mix of unnatural power, terror, and otherness but in darkness. In other words, monsters became the necessary shadow for the divine: awe-inspiring, chaotic forces that give shape to the concept of goodness by opposition.

To view this same theme from a psychological perspective, the monstrous is required for us to make sense of ourselves, what it means to be human, to be good, to be loveable, to be happy.

You, the Chimera

Of course, we are all chimeric in a sense. We cheerfully entertain the illusion of a constant, singular self – the self we refer to when we say “I” or “me”. But there is no singular “I” for any of us. We each shift and morph between versions of self from context to context and over the course of our lives.

We don’t like to acknowledge this, though. Just as with the Ship of Theseus, if we are rebuilt piece by piece over the years – beliefs, habits, preferences – what is there left at the end? Where am I in all of this? It’s super uncomfortable. So, we cling to the feeling of being the same vessel, charting a continuous course through time, even when presented with solid evidence that we are not the same people as we were in the past. In psychology, this is known as the end-of-history illusion.

“At every age, people underestimate how much their personalities will change in the next decade. And it isn’t just ephemeral things like values and personality. You can ask people about their likes and dislikes, their basic preferences. For example, name your best friend, your favorite kind of vacation, what’s your favorite hobby, what’s your favorite kind of music... To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect... 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do... Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”

– D. Gilbert, ‘The psychology of your future self’ TED talk, 2014

Harvard psychologist, Dr. Daniel Gilbert, found that when people are given time to reflect, they can see massive differences between their current and former selves. However, when asked to project forward 10 years, people of all ages predict only small changes between their current and future selves.

Many parts

Our chimeric nature runs deeper than the big life changes of ten years’ time.

Inside, moment by moment, different parts of us take the wheel: parts with their own beliefs, skills, wounds and desires; parts of different ages, each trying to protect us in its own way.

You’ve probably heard yourself say things like:

“Part of me just wants to scream.”
“I hate how needy I feel.”
“I should be over this by now.”
“I don’t know what came over me.”

These moments show how it feels when contradiction rises to the surface. We don’t like it. We’d rather cling to the illusion of being one simple, consistent thing.

And so we spend decades at war with ourselves, trying to cut away the very parts that could make us whole.

The great irony is that this resistance – this effort to exile or amputate the pieces of us that don’t fit – is what makes them monstrous. The key is not to slay them, but to invite them in. To integrate them, just as the Chimera embodies its many selves.

So, is the Chimera really a devilish, fearsome anti-god, or is it a metaphor for the totality of self? An integrated whole? Is this monster, in other words, godly?

Order’s shadow

The reality is not that monsters are opposed to goodness such as order; internally, they’re at odds with the consistency illusion we like so much; and externally, with the directives of society and the simplistic rules we’re supposed to follow when it comes to who we are: be good, be strong, be certain, be reliable.

But real human beings are not that simple.

We can be kind and angry; hopeful and grieving; tender and ferocious; confident and ashamed; wild and wise.

We are everything all at once, but rather than embrace this, we flinch away from such paradoxes because they threaten our sense of control.

The chaotic soup of self

Control, control, control. This is the nub of it. The Chimera personifies our fear of losing control.

If I allow my anger, will it devour my kindness?
If I embrace my wildness, will I lose my reason?
If I admit my grief, will it drown my hope?

The unconscious self doesn’t think in binaries, and it isn’t afraid of contradiction. It’s only the conscious, rational mind that fears chaos – because when chaos abounds, we can’t even pretend that we’re on top of things.

So we squeeze our eyes shut, smooth out the edges, and try to flatten our nature into something neat, choosing the parts we like and cutting off the rest.

But integration doesn’t mean choosing one head and severing the others. It means letting every part have a seat at the table.

Internal Family Systems (IFS) & The Many Selves

In Internal Family Systems therapy (or IFS), we learn that each of the many parts that make us up has its own story along with its own ideas on how to keep us safe.

The angry part wants to fight.
The avoidant part, to flee.
The perfectionist, to achieve.
The wounded child, to weep.

None of these aspects of self is monstrous, but when ignored, repressed, or in the language of IFS, exiled… well, that’s when they roar, spit fire, spread their wings and loom larger than life.

I’d argue that this is what the Chimera exists to show us. Its message is an anguished, eternal cry for reintegration of resisted selves, and therefore acceptance of inner contradiction.

The chimera within

So, if it feels safe and comfortable to do so, I’d like to finish here by inviting you to consider one of your own contradictions.

For example, perhaps part of you wants to throw caution to the wind and move somewhere amazing, while another craves the comfort of familiarity.

Perhaps you see yourself as wild and carefree some days but reliable and mature on others.

Perhaps you both desire and dread something like competition or change, or perhaps you want to both quit and continue with a particular habit.

Take a breath, relax your muscles and open your mind. I’m going to present you with four incomplete sentences and I’d like you to see how your mind chooses to fill in the gaps. You don’t have to complete all four if one comes easiest, but of course you can if you like. Here you go:

1. Part of me wants to … but another part needs …
   

2. On the one hand, I see myself as … but on the other, I like to think of myself as …
   

3. Part of me wants to run from … but another part of me needs …
   

4. I find it hard to choose between … and …

If you can think of a contradiction of any of these kinds (or any other kind), imagine for a moment that on either side of the divide is a different part of the self. Then, if it feels okay, see if you can imagine an animal (or monstrous form) for each.

For example, perhaps the part that craves freedom looks like a bird or a flying fish, while the part that wants safety may take the form of a tortoise or hedgehog. The part of yourself you see as strong and dependable may look like an elephant, while the carefree dreamer might look like a unicorn or butterfly. You don’t need perfect representations. Anything that comes to mind will do.

When you have your two animals, take a moment to wonder how — if such things were allowed — you might combine them into one chimera.

It might be simple, as with a centaur or mermaid – half one thing, half the other.

It might be more complex, like the Chimera – requiring multiple heads and improbable anatomy.

Or, it might combine to become something totally different — a newt merged with a firefly becomes… a tiny fire-breathing dragon.

Obviously, there’s no right or wrong here – this is your Chimera, your imagination, you can do with it whatever you like.

When you have an idea, take a look at the fantastical beast you’ve created. Or, if you’re not a visual person, feel into it, sense it, imagine it in whatever way works for you.

It probably seems absurd, perhaps childish, funny. It might feel quite grotesque. All of these things are fine. More than fine, actually; they’re the point. The object of this little exercise is simply to allow this seemingly impossible thing to be.

When you have it, whatever it is, I’d like you to imagine that you can release your Chimera into the world. Whether you’d set it free to roam the tundra, to wander through the forest, to swim in the ocean, or to live in a city, or up a mountain, behind a waterfall doesn’t really matter, just that you give it a home – some kind of space to call its own.

The chimera in modern life

Lastly, as you imagine your Chimera in the wild — or as you just breathe and relax, if you haven’t followed the process — I’d like to leave you with the Chimera’s key piece of wisdom, which is that although the modern world exerts pressure on us to define ourselves neatly, the truth is messier and richer.

You might be a healer and a warrior; a skeptic and a mystic; a leader and a wanderer. And that’s okay. Your complexity is your power, not your flaw.

The process of individuation, according to Jung, is a lifelong journey of becoming more and more uniquely yourself, integrating every part, every shadow, every dream, every contradiction you come across as you grow. It’s not neat and it won’t ever be finished. Instead, it’s a living, breathing, ever-changing thing, just like the Chimera itself.

The journey’s end

So, with this, we have completed our epic journey through these ten meaningful monsters, each with its own vital message.

• The Sea Monster posed the initial question: are you ready to face your own mystery?

• Medusa taught us that our pain can become our strength when allowed to be seen.

• The Vampire invited us to guard our life blood, and feed our souls fully.

• The Witch cast a spell to help us trust our wild intuition even when the world finds it threatening.

• The Dragon demonstrated that fear is the gate to transformation.

• The Ghost whispered that grief and memory must be honoured, not exiled.

• The Beast showed us that loving the shadow leads to liberation and wholeness.

• The Werewolf howled that transformation and instinct are natural, not shameful.

• The Zombie warned us against the death of spirit and called us back from numbness to life.

And now, the Chimera – the final monster, the ultimate monster – shares the ultimate truth: you are all of it. You are wound and wisdom, beast and beauty, shadow and light. And you are vaster, wilder, more magnificent than you were ever taught to believe, which means that you do not exist to be simple, but to be real – fully, messily, gloriously, and paradoxically alive.

And that is a magical thing.

References & Citations

• David D. Gilmore, ‘Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors’

• D. Gilbert, ‘The psychology of your future self’ TED talk

• Benjamin Hardy, ‘Who Will You Be in 10 Years? Not Who You Expect…’, published in Psychology Today

• Richard Schwartz, ‘No Bad Parts’

• Carl Jung, ‘Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’

• Carl Jung, ‘Psychology and Alchemy’

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***

Slowly but ceaselessly, they drag themselves forward. Arms, outstretched. Skin, rotten. Milky and unseeing, their eyes search for the living, hungry. There is no thought, no decision, no pain, only the unrelenting drive to consume.

This post is for anyone who ever wonders why they feel dull inside, as if something is missing. As if something has perished.

Zombie as archetype

“The monsters that rose from the dead, they are nothing compared to the ones we carry in our hearts”

— Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)

Zombies are as undying in our culture as they are in stories. From Night of the Living Dead (1963) to World War Z, Shaun of the Dead (brilliant), Zombieland (also brilliant), The Walking Dead and The Last of Us, we just can’t get rid of these creatures.

Perhaps the reason for the Zombie’s resilience in modern stories is the deeper warning this monster conveys – a message that makes immediate, visceral sense: that it is not death that we should fear most, but living without life, advancing without thought or autonomy, consuming without connection.

The origin of the zombie

The Zombie legend has ancient roots. In medieval folklore, a ‘revenant’ was a spirit or soulless animated corpse revived from death to haunt the living.

A little more recently, the Haitian religion of Vodou – often misrepresented in pop culture – gives us the word zombi. In Vodou, a zombi is a person revived after burial, compelled to work, and stripped of autonomy. Scholars now suggest that some zombi cases may have been induced by toxins like scopolamine, from deadly nightshade, and pufferfish poison.

Frankenstein’s monster

By the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution, the monster of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – not a Zombie technically, but with strong Zombie vibes – added a new twist: stitched from dead flesh, this story asked what happens when humans manufacture life, something human-shaped but not human.

Philosophers have been discussing this for some time. The “philosophical Zombie” is a popular thought experiment in discussions of human consciousness. It goes like this: imagine a world full of people who look, talk, and behave exactly like you and me, but with no inner life at all. They smile, they nod, they say “I love you” but there’s no one in there.

A note: the philosophical Zombie was once confined to the classroom. Right now, though, in the age of artificial intelligence, it doesn’t feel so abstract.

Zombie stories tap right into the same basic theme: a fear that the people around us are unreachable; that they’re shells; that no matter how close you get physically, you’ll never really be able to connect, because they’re void of self or soul — and worse, that the same could happen to us.

That’s the true horror of the Zombie’s bite. With Vampires and Werewolves, a bite is a curse and a gift. You gain powers, awareness, even beauty. But when a Zombie bites you, it doesn’t give anything back. The thing characters always beg for in those films — don’t let me turn, kill me first — isn’t about the fear of dying, it’s about the bigger fear of continuing to exist without the spark of consciousness. It’s about becoming whatever it is that we will be when our sense of self, soul or mind is removed.

Ultimately, we have always been obsessed with these questions. What makes a person? What happens when that light goes out? And what responsibility do we have if one day, whether by science or accident, we create a whole new kind of being — one that walks and talks like us, but may or may not be awake?

Hungry for braaaaaaains

Let’s fast-forward again. It was only in much more modern times that flesh-eating (or brain-eating) Zombies became a thing – an augmentation of the zombi/revenant concept with that of the flesh-eating ghoul from Arabian mythology.

In 1963, George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was the first Zombie story to show the undead monsters feasting on human remains, thus launching into the collective consciousness the pervasive image of society devouring itself.

It’s surely no coincidence that Zombies as mindless consumers entered the world just as the “Golden Age” of capitalism was gaining speed in the west, and in the U.S. in particular. Once again, the stories we tell hold up a mirror for the world to look into.

The zombie as disconnection

“It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive - to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.”

– Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, Family Limited Partnership

So, whether ancient revenants or Vodou zombis, whether brain-eating or mechanically resurrected, across cultures and eras, the core theme of the Zombie’s archetypal story remains the same: this monster is a body without soul, a life without essence.

Psychologically, the Zombie is the perfect metaphor for what happens when we dissociate – when we become disconnected from ourselves, from each other, from life itself. It personifies soul-death before physical death: the death of spirit.

At this point, I need to state very clearly that I’m not calling people with dissociative disorders Zombies. I’m also not suggesting a little self-reflection can “cure” a disorder of this type.

This post is also not meant to shame or discourage our non-pathological moments of numbness either. Because numbness is needed sometimes. Dissociation is a natural and adaptive function of the brain. It helps us to cope when our emotions would otherwise overwhelm us.

What this archetypal monster warns of is extended, chronic disconnection – disconnection as a way of life – not the occasional, healthy ins and outs of consciousness and presence.

In essence, the Zombie carries a timeless warning about straying too far from our authentic selves, something many of us do on a near-daily basis: whenever we disconnect from our instincts, our dreams, our passion, our values; whenever we start doomscrolling, overworking, binge-watching, or chasing compulsive achievement; whenever we allow ourselves to be productive but not present.

The Zombie shuffles ever closer each time we let a day pass without difference, feeling, meaning, or authentic decision (modern Zombies crave brains, after all – they want their consciousness back). We can see this monster in patterns of people-pleasing, consumption as a coping mechanism, living for the weekend or working our way into burnout, and striving for goals that don’t matter to us but we think that’s what we ought to be doing.

The way back

The good news is that the Zombie isn’t just a warning – it’s also a call to action. Beneath its hollow groaning, there’s a quieter, clearer message: that a life without meaning, connection and feeling is a kind of slow death. That consumption can never replace creation. And that mere survival is not enough.

Perhaps more than any other monster in this series, the Zombie is asking us for something. What if it isn’t stumbling towards us to consume, but reaching out, desperate to get back in – into the body, into feeling, into a present, living experience of life?

If the Zombie is the archetype of soul-death, then its antidote isn’t escape or battle. It’s to live. To return to embodiment, to desire, to meaning – to whatever it is that makes you feel alive.

So, let’s turn this monster into a tool for self-reflection. I invite you to ask yourself gently, and with curiosity:

Where in my life have I gone numb?

The question posed by the philosophical Zombie is, by nature, unanswerable. We can study the brain, and we may some day know more about what consciousness really is and where it comes from, but we will never experience for ourselves what goes on in the minds of others. What we do know, though, is that when we allow our own spark to dim, or our authentic self to fade away, we diminish the possibility of connection. If we drift too far from ourselves, then we might as well be living in a world of Zombies.

In addition, the Zombie motif taps into our fear of becoming indistinguishable from everyone else. Just another groaning horde member following the crowd.

So, whenever the Zombie moans its lifeless warning, there is a vital opportunity available to each of us: to find our way back, slowly, bit by bit, feeling by feeling. To reanimate our true selves and our lives.

The answer:

1. Reanimate — move your body.

You could start by simply moving your body as if trying to wake it up from sleep. A stretch, a short walk without headphones, or dancing alone in your kitchen — these things are simple acts of rebellion against inertia.

2. Experience — pause to taste, feel, enjoy, savour

Seek out small pleasures and actually taste them, feel them — a sip of tea, the smell of the air, the comfort of your favourite jumper. Presence begins with noticing. It’s as simple as that.

3. Create (instead of consume) — make something, anything, that’s yours

Choose to create, sometimes, instead of consume. It doesn’t have to be art in the grand sense – cook a meal, write a sentence, grow something. Make a tiny mark on the world that wasn’t there before.

4. Connect — with others and with yourself

Importantly, take your chances to connect, even if only briefly – look up and meet someone’s eyes across a shop counter or in the street, or send a message that lets a friend know you’re thinking of them. And do the same for yourself, whether through self-talk, journaling, breathing or just placing a hand over your heart. Zombies are lonely because they’re cut off. So is the part of you and me that feels numb.

5. Feel — without judgement

Lastly, let yourself feel one thing without judging it. Sometimes what melts numbness is not joy, but allowing the grief or frustration that’s frozen underneath to be heard.

You don’t have to do all of these things, of course. Choose one, or invent your own. The point is not to fix the numbness, but to turn towards life again, a fraction at a time.

This, I think, is the invisible gift the Zombie clasps in those reaching fingers: an invitation to return to ourselves, and to the wild, messy aliveness that makes being human worth the trouble.

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As the full moon rises, the body changes: the heart beats faster, teeth lengthen, claws extend, and one self shatters as something wilder takes its place.

The Werewolf as an archetype, is an inevitable part of the human psyche. It’s not a comfortable proposition, is it? But what if we were to let go of the temptation to see this monster as a curse to fear, and frame it instead as a natural cycle to embrace? If integrated, what could the wolf have to offer you?

This piece is for anyone who fears what might happen if they allow their untamed instincts to overflow, along with those of you who secretly, desperately want to know what that would feel like.

The history of the Werewolf

The Werewolf is a creature caught between worlds: human and animal; conscious and unconscious; civilised and primal.

Although we’re most familiar with the wolf, tales of other were-creatures are told around the globe. According to David D. Gilmore, author of Monsters, “in Africa, people believe in were-lions, and in the South Seas there are man-eating were-sharks, not to mention (...) the bellowing ape-men of the Far East!”

There are also, of course, tales of shapeshifters from indigenous mythology from the Americas, such as Skinwalkers from the Navajo tribe. I should be clear that these traditions belong to the Navajo people and are distinct from European werewolf stories – but they do show how widespread and ancient the fear of shapeshifting wildness is.

Werewolf as archetype

No matter which version of the story we refer to, at its heart, the were-myth is about the transformation from tame and domesticated to violent and terrifying.

Most of us know what it feels like for something feral or primal to rise up from within, whether it’s anger we tried to hold back, repressed trauma, or even excitement, lust or a gleeful burst of laughter. We live in a world that, by and large, expects and celebrates self-control, containment, dispassion and stoicism – we revere thought over feeling, order over chaos. But we are not robots, and our emotions inevitably break through the hardened outer shells that we’ve been conditioned to assume.

The Werewolf is that breakthrough. We fear it and feel ashamed of it, and therefore try to keep it locked away, but as we all know, what we resist persists. The moon will become full again. It’s only a matter of time.

The question, then, is not how to hide, control or weaken the wolf within, but how to accept and integrate it. What happens when we choose to see this archetype as a call to honour our instinctive, wilder selves?

Or, more specifically, the primal masculine energy within.

Werewolf as Animus

When we think of werewolves, we usually imagine men first – David in American Werewolf in London, Scott in Teen Wolf, Oz in Buffy, Jacob in Twilight. Overwhelmingly, werewolves are male because the untamed, aggressive, animalistic energy they embody is traditionally coded as masculine.

However, masculine is not the same, of course, as male, which leads us straight into one of Carl Jung’s most provocative ideas: Animus v. Anima. In Jungian theory, the Animus is the inner masculine aspect of the psyche, supposedly found in the unconscious of women. It’s the counterpart to the Anima – the inner feminine – supposedly found in the unconscious of men.

People will undoubtedly fight me on this but, in my opinion, this part of Jung’s thesis just doesn’t stand the test of time. Jung’s framework reflected the binary views of his world. Back then, basically everyone (including doctors and scientists, which is no longer true today) believed that sex was binary – you were either male or female. Jung believed that women could only consciously associate with the feminine and therefore the masculine would live in the shadow of the unconscious. And vice versa. Thus, the Animus lived in women, the Anima lived in men.

A more modern and, I’d say, more helpful reading sees these energies as available to everyone. Some of us repress the feminine, others the masculine. Crucially, it’s that repression, not the energy, that does the damage.

When the Animus is buried, it turns volatile. Instead of confidence, it becomes criticism; instead of assertion, aggression; instead of clarity, icy detachment. If you’ve ever found yourself snapping, lashing out, or collapsing into harsh self-judgement, you may have felt the shadow Animus at work.

Animus as Ally

When integrated, this energy becomes a powerful inner guide: visionary, dynamic, a doer. The healthy Animus is the backbone that lets us stand in integrity. It’s the voice that says, “This is who I am,” without flinching – even when the world demands we be someone else.

So, no matter our gender, when we deny this confident, go‑getting force, we diminish ourselves. We cage a vital part of who we are.

It’s easy to see why. Few of us feel safe being unapologetically ourselves in the face of cultural expectation, so we push the Animus away. But that only makes it roar louder.

And roar it does: in road rage, drunken arguments, emotional outbursts with partners or colleagues, in slammed doors, snide online comments, or sudden, sharp words. These micro‑transformations are all moments when the untamed breaks through the shell.

So, enter the Werewolf: the angry, lustful, emotional, wild masculine self that erupts through the rational persona, not with the express intention to cause harm, but because it has been silenced too long and needs to be seen.

Where masculine meets feminine?

There’s something very intriguing about the Werewolf when viewed through the lens of archetypal gender. The wolf breaks through when the moon is full, and the moon, across centuries and cultures, stands as a symbol of the feminine: cyclical, reflective, intuitive.

So why is it that feminine light calls the masculine beast out?

One way of reading this symbolic motif is that the moon draws out what the sun — the conscious ego — cannot bear to look at. Moonlight is sunlight reflected, after all; it’s sunlight transformed, and consciousness in reverse. So, like an archetypal midwife, that soft silver glow births all the things we’ve suppressed, insisting that they come forward, no matter how feral or frightening they have become in the dark. In other words, the full moon doesn’t make the human into a wolf. It just makes visible the wolf that was always there.

Why? Because the moon needs the wolf as much as the wolf needs the moon. They are two halves of one whole; you can’t have feminine without masculine, nor masculine without feminine. They each need the other in order to make sense, in order to be healthy and integrated.

We know from the stories, of course, that this meeting is not harmonious. The Werewolf does not come out to talk; it erupts. The energy we’ve spent a lifetime repressing has no skills in dialogue; it knows only how to burst through in violence. The moon becomes the trigger because it is the opposite pole, and when these polarities meet after too much separation, they collide rather than integrate.

This is as much a representation of the outer masculine and feminine as it is the inner – we see a similarly explosive dynamic in today’s polarised, us-versus-them debates about gender roles. Is there a social call to action underpinning the steady flow of Werewolf stories we create, then? In this time of incel culture, trad wives, Andrew Tate and all the rest of it, is the Werewolf motif a mirror we need to look in?

Cycles of transformation

It is worth noting that the wolf’s uprising is not a random event. The moon is faithful. She rises and completes her cycle, again and again, no matter how hard we try to deny her influence. Which means that this confrontation — the pull of the feminine on the shadowed masculine — is inevitable and also natural.

We are not meant to be static: we cycle through periods of strength and vulnerability; certainty and doubt; emotional excitement and calm. This is how we develop. Just like the cycle of breath and the oscillation between neurological arousal and the necessary rest that comes after it, we mature and adapt to life in spurts. Periods of outgoing, assertive exploration are followed by periods of recuperation and integration. We see this in any course of therapy or self-development: breakthroughs are followed by slower moments of processing. And we see it in any creative process, too: explosions of ideas and productivity are followed by lulls in which we do and make very little. This is the natural way of things.

Trying to maintain complete dispassionate control at all times, then, is not a sign of strength so much as a sign of stagnation and disconnection. The primal self within will not stand for it. At some point, the wolf will be forced to howl.

Meeting the wolf within

As with all the monsters we’re exploring in this series, the Werewolf itself is not the problem. It’s our repression of it that causes harm. So, what if, instead of running from this energy, we learned to run with it?

To run with the wolf is to give the wild, masculine energy within us a conscious outlet instead of locking it away. It means practising healthy assertion, strength, and action rather than waiting until those forces erupt as rage or dangerous, obsessive pursuit of success.

In real life, it could be as simple as moving your body in ways that feel powerful, or speaking your mind in a room where you’d usually stay silent. It’s about taking up space without apology, setting clear boundaries, or daring to go after the thing you want, even if it feels like a risk.

So let’s try something. Just for a moment, settle yourself, wherever you are. Let your shoulders drop. Let your breath deepen. And if it feels right, gently close your eyes.

Now imagine that it’s night. Not city-night, with streetlights and the hum of traffic, but deep-wilderness night.

You’re walking alone through a forest, the air sharp with the scent of pine. Above the canopy, the moon is rising – full and bright, casting a silver glow across the leaves of the trees, and the skin of your hands.

There’s a tightness in your chest, you notice. It’s not fear exactly – not quite. It’s more like anticipation: a vibration beneath your skin and the undeniable sense that something – or someone – is near.

Then you hear it: a low growl, primal and present. And, as you turn, you see them. A figure stands across the clearing ahead. Their eyes glow gently in the moonlight, and they feel… familiar.

You realise, now, that you’re not looking at a stranger, but at a part of yourself. This may be a part that you know well. Or it might be a part you buried – one that felt too much, wanted too fiercely, or spoke too loudly.

This figure begins to move towards you, now, slowly and deliberately. And, as it does, it changes form – two legs becoming four, snout lengthening, teeth growing.

Now, just a few steps into the clearing, the wolf stops and stands still, waiting patiently as if it knows you’ll come to meet it when you’re ready.

So, take a breath now, as you imagine this untamed self in the clearing. I’d like you to ask yourself a series of simple (though not necessarily easy) questions:

What part of me have I labelled dangerous just because it’s not what the world considers proper?

Which emotion, instinct, urge or perspective have I tried to cage?

What part of me have I labelled dangerous just because it’s not what the world considers proper?

And what would happen if I stopped running from this wilder self, and ran with it instead?

To run with the wolf is not to submit to difficult instincts but to allow them, to give them somewhere to go, to make it possible for the energy to flow or to pass through, if that’s what’s needed.

So, regardless of whether you had answers to the questions I just asked or if those answers remain a mystery for now, I invite you to simply run with your wolf. You might do so on your own two feet, or you might also transform for the journey – it matters not which form you take if you choose to run, just that you do. Feel the wind rushing across your skin, the blanket of leaves and sticks beneath your feet, the wolf beside you, not fighting, not controlling, not monstrous in the least. It just is.

So, you run.

And perhaps, as you speed through the forest, with the moon as your witness, you might find yourself remembering that untamed is not the opposite of good or wise. Rather, it’s the way back to who you were before the world taught you to behave.

References & Citations

• Robert Lamb, ‘The Skinwalker Is No Mere Werewolf’, (science.howstuffworks.com/science-vs-myth/strange-creatures/skinwalker.htm)

• Josephine Campbell, ‘Skinwalker (Mythology)’ (https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/skinwalker-mythology)

• David D. Gilmore, ‘Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors’

• Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious

• Carl Jung, Psychological Aspects of the Persona

• Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

  ---

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  Our new game Echoes is available for pre-orders on Kickstarter. It’s a futuristic tale of time travel, magic, myth and tarot, and it’s perhaps our favourite and most awaited project.
  
  There’s a special card deck and other exclusive rewards available only on Kickstarter. Ready to meet the Selves, gather ancient wisdom, and save the future?
  

  Pre-order Echoes

  

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Some things don’t die. Not because they shouldn’t, but because they were never allowed to — never mourned, never laid to rest — and so they linger, they whisper, they wait. They haunt.

But here’s the thing: if we’re brave enough to listen, our ghosts can teach us how to live again.

That memory you try to bury but which never really leaves is your Ghost, and it’s trying to talk to you. This is how to hear its message and finally lay it to rest.

Ghost stories

In stories, Ghosts appear to offer advice or show the way.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus travels to the edge of the Underworld to speak with those who have crossed that threshold. His journey involves a ritual to summon the “shades of the dead”, and it’s through their advice that he gains the knowledge necessary to navigate the challenges of his journey back to Ithaca.

In Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is guided by the Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Yet to Come. They show him his life from new perspectives, transforming his character.

In Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, the house itself is a psychological entity: its walls creak with all the pain, fear and longing that the living characters refuse to speak but need to face.

And in Disney’s Encanto, the magical house literally begins to crack under the weight of generations of unprocessed trauma. Healing only happens when the unspoken pain finally finds a voice.

Narrative Ghosts are rarely about horror. They are about memory. They come back so that what was silenced can be heard. The same is true of our inner spectres.

The Ghost as archetype

Symbolically, Ghosts have a number of potential psychological meanings, all very potent. Our Ghosts are our unfinished business, unacknowledged grief, memories we couldn’t bear to bury, parts we couldn’t allow to live on.

Carl Jung proposed that the unconscious mind was populated by autonomous “splinter psyches” – clusters of feelings, memories, and thoughts around specific emotional themes that often operate outside our conscious awareness. Effectively acting as self-contained entities, Jung believed that these “complexes” can influence behaviour and patterns of thought, just as a Ghost may haunt a house or person.

“(splinter psyches) lead a separate existence in the dark realm of the unconscious, being at all times ready to hinder or reinforce the conscious functioning”

Carl Jung, ‘Psychological Types’

So, as with all the psychological monsters we’re discussing in this series, our Ghosts are not monstrous, not truly; they’re merely unresolved – aspects of self doomed to operate from old, outdated strategies. Without the means to update these strategies due to being isolated from the greater self, they are forced to live on another plane, cycling through the experiences that made them.

Ghosts in myth and mind – what haunts us and why

So, in both myth and mind, Ghosts arise when we deny grief; repress pain, anger, trauma; or when we leave parts of ourselves behind – the hurt child, the abandoned dream, the love that was lost but never mourned.

Then, when they return, they do so with a distinct purpose: they come to warn us; to demand justice; to weep for what was lost. To remember.

Ghosts live on because the pain that was too much to feel in the first place still needs to be processed. Or, in other words, what the conscious mind forgets, the unconscious remembers. If we don’t consciously honour our past, it will haunt us. Although this might feel like punishment, retribution is never the motivation of the unconscious mind, which is geared to survival, safety and happiness – not judgement or damnation.

So, the Ghost is not the wound itself, and it’s not trying to drag us back in. Rather, it’s the aspect of self that suffered that wound, and even though we might consciously believe we’ve buried the memory, this part has never been able to leave the gravestone. It’s still standing there, holding a bouquet of flowers, waiting for us to say, “Yes. That happened. That mattered. That hurt.”

Ghosts as guardians

A Ghost is the part of self that refuses to give up on something precious – a kind of guardian who stayed behind to hold the memory safe until we were ready. And if all of that sounds a bit too much like a bunch of therapeutic “shoulds” and “oughts”, then perhaps it would help to remember that, just like every other monster we’ve explored in this series, each Ghost is the guardian of some kind of psychic treasure.

The gift may simply be clarity – offered by the Ghost who points to an old decision you made out of fear and whispers, “It’s time to choose differently now.”

It may be freedom – when you finally cry the tears you never allowed yourself as a child, and can move on at last.

Sometimes, the treasure is tenderness – a deeper compassion for yourself and others, born of having turned towards pain rather than away from it.

It can be meaning, too – a renewed sense of why you do what you do, what you value, need or truly long for.

When a Ghost is witnessed, something shifts, and that movement – no matter how subtle – is how a haunting begins to loosen its hold.

Questions for the haunted

So, I invite you now – very gently, and only if it feels safe to do so – to ask:

What have I lost that I never mourned?

What version of me still haunts the halls of my inner world, waiting to be remembered?

Your Ghost may be the tender young self who lived in the childhood home you never said goodbye to; the part that misses the friend who drifted away without a farewell; the dreamer that dreamt the dream you quietly decided was impractical.

Your Ghost may mourn the body you once had before illness or age changed it; the person you loved but never kissed; the faith or sense of meaning you outgrew but never replaced; the safety you lost when trust was broken.

Perhaps your Ghost is the version of you who was wild, creative and free before responsibility took hold; the one who loved freely, before heartbreak made you cautious; or the voice you silenced to keep the peace.

Maybe you have Ghosts of all these kinds and more.

If any of these examples ring true, or if a different kind of Ghost comes to mind for you, then the final question to ask is this:

What would it take to lay my Ghosts to rest, not by forgetting, but by allowing?

If it feels safe, imagine that you’re walking slowly through a house you once knew well. As you move through its rooms, you notice a door you’ve never seen before, never opened before. So, quietly and with just a little caution, you turn the handle.

Behind the door, a small figure waits – your Ghost. But they don’t speak; they just hold out their hand. You look down and you pause, because these decisions are not to be made lightly.

Will you take the Ghost’s hand and let them show you what they’ve been holding all this time? You don’t have to, if it’s not the right time or if it doesn’t feel safe. I’ve led you through this little visualisation just to remind you that you can if you want to.

A ritual of remembrance

In the real, practical world, there are countless ways to honour past pain, and no one method will be right for every person. You may choose to start by naming your Ghost, by drawing it, or imagining its message and putting it into words.

Perhaps you’d like to light a candle, write a letter, or sing a song that this part of yourself would know and love. Or, maybe you need only whisper, “I do remember.”

Sometimes, the tiniest of outward gestures can create inner release. The moment we remember with compassion, our Ghosts can start to settle – not dead and buried, but reintegrated and allowed: parts of the living self at last. In spite of their focus on remembering, Ghosts are not designed to drag us backwards. Rather, they appear so that, at last, we can carry them forward with us. And therein lies the true magic of this archetype – the Ghost shows us that the very memories that haunt us are also the ones that can set us free.

Our new game Echoes

Our new game Echoes is available for pre-orders on Kickstarter. It’s a futuristic tale of time travel, magic, myth and tarot, and it’s perhaps our favourite and most awaited project.

There’s a special card deck and other exclusive rewards available only on Kickstarter. Ready to meet the Selves, gather ancient wisdom, and save the future?

Pre-order Echoes

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By engaging with these archetypes and the wisdom they convey, we’re able to awaken and integrate hidden aspects of the psyche in order to let go of destructive patterns, breathe life into our strengths, passions and values, and ultimately become our whole selves.

Now, as storytellers and game designers, my team and I are creating an experience that takes archetypal self-reflection to the ultimate level – an immersive, whimsical journey through a magical world populated by archetypal guides.

Let me introduce you to Echoes, which, thanks to our amazing community, absolutely smashed its Kickstarter target. Over 1,300 of you pledged to make this game a reality and it’s now available for pre-order (expected launch in July 2026), together with a number of special rewards.

Pre-order Echoes

Echoes – a tale of time travel, magical connections and saving the future

In Echoes, you find yourself among the Selves – the humans left to nurse our planet back to life in the aftermath of the mysterious Collapse and the cataclysmic Split of humanity.

Now, the recovering world whispers its secrets, but are you able to hear them?

Your mission is to track down the Echoes of Earth’s ageless wisdom so you can save the future and also reveal the forgotten parts of your own psyche.

Your guide on this journey – the mysterious Quinn – will lead you through the magical environment of the Sanctus, where you’ll engage with an individualised series of Jungian archetypes based on Tarot’s Major Arcana.

Which of the Heralds you’ll meet, and how they’ll help you solve the puzzle? Only time will tell.

If you want to play this game and receive exclusive rewards…

Now you can pre-order Echoes on Kickstarter and receive various rewards.

Here are our most popular pledges:

• Seeker (£29) - Lifetime access to the game

• Artisan (£69) - Lifetime access to the game + an exclusive card deck with the 22 archetypes/Heralds (based on the Major Arcana of the tarot) and a symbolic guide, and more.

• Elder (£39) - Lifetime access to the game + a digital copy of the soundtrack
  

  Pre-order Echoes

A sneak peek into Echoes

If you have Betwixt installed, you can play an intro chapter of Echoes here. (If you don’t have Betwixt on your phone, you’ll be directed to download it first, but please know that playing the Echoes sample will be separate to Betwixt and entirely free).

Finally, I leave you with some of the amazing original artwork we’re creating for this game. I haven’t been more excited about anything in a long time. I hope you will be, too.

For the past year, along with scheming new Betwixt stories with Hazel, I’ve been writing fantasy and science fiction. I’d never thought of myself as a writer, or been one of those cool Star Trek people, so it came as a big surprise when one of my things sold to a professional magazine.

I’m so happy to share with you “Hope Is the Thing With Circuits and Steel”, published in Flash Fiction Online today.

It’s a quick 5-min read that tells the story of a bunch of grandmothers who join an android rebellion, end up cooking for the little robots and teach them how to feel.

My assigned editor said the story made her tear up. I hope you like it, too, and if you do, please let me know in a comment on the story’s website. I can’t wait to hear your thoughts!

https://www.flashfictiononline.com/article/hope-is-the-thing-with-circuits-and-steel/

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***

Here’s a thought: What if the most effective form of self-love isn’t at all what you’d expect? What if it has less to do with rituals, affirmations and forgiveness than it does with valour? What if the ultimate act of self-love simply involves the courage to stand in front of the parts of yourself that terrify you, and say, “I see you”?

The (shadow) beast as archetype

Some of the oldest stories we know – Eros and Psyche, Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame – begin with a dreadful creature: mysterious and terrifying and Other.

But then something happens – someone (often the heroine) dares to love the Beast, which breaks the curse, and the monster is transformed. It’s made whole, made… good.

Of course, we don’t only see this in old stories. The same pattern plays out in novel after novel, movie after movie: The BFG, Moby Dick, King Kong, Edward Scissorhands, Shrek.

Stories where the ‘monster’ is lovingly revealed to be more human than the humans who feared it get told over and over. It’s perhaps the simplest archetypal arc of all – radical acceptance creates the possibility of change. Or: Love heals.

Why do we love these beastly transformations?

Why does this storyline move us so much? Maybe it’s because, on some level, we know it’s not just about the Beast out there – it’s about the Beast in here.

When we watch a monster become loveable, something in us breathes a sigh of relief. We’re rehearsing, in story form, a transformation we long for inside ourselves: to take the parts of us that feel unworthy or unacceptable and see them embraced instead of exiled.

Neuroscience even shows that when we witness a story of any kind, our brains light up as if we are going on that journey – as if we are the protagonists, meaning that with a love-heals story, we get to practice integration by proxy. A similar thing happens when we engage with underdog stories – Million Dollar Baby, Rocky, The Shawshank Redemption. We root for the character the world sees as least worthy, because deep down we hope that our own rejected parts might turn out to be winners, too. These stories will enthrall us for as long as there’s shadow work to be done. In other words, until the end of time.

The shadow and the monster

The Jungian shadow self – as in, the collection of repressed traits, instincts, emotions, and memories within each of us – continues to accumulate stuff over the course of our lives. Anything can go in there, from shame and humiliation to stand-out strengths and feelings like love and joy. The only rule, when it comes to something’s relegation to the shadow, is that it doesn’t fit with the image of self we think we have to maintain in order to feel safe, or loved, or simply to survive.

The Shadow is the anger we were told was too dangerous, the need we were taught was selfish, the creativity, wildness, sexuality, ambition, or tenderness we feared might get us hurt.

People usually think of shadow work as a painful process of uncovering personal flaws – inner ugliness that we’ve locked away for good reason. And sometimes that will be the case, but more often than not, our shadow selves seem ugly only because we have forced them into the dark, where anything can look scary.

However, as the Dragon taught us, that fear is a signpost. It marks a threshold we must cross if we want to lay our hands on the treasure beyond. The threat of the Shadow Beast is what stands between a fractured self and an integrated whole.

Projection and demonisation

This monster makes tracks in the outer world as well as the inner, because whatever we won’t face in ourselves, we end up facing in the external world.

When we refuse to acknowledge our Shadow, we project it — we perceive “the Beast” in the outside world because we can’t bear to witness it within. If you care to look, it’s easy to see that the traits we hate most in other people — the ones we mock online, cancel, or rage against — are almost always the ones we refuse to see in ourselves. Social media is one huge projection machine, with every comment section a hall of mirrors.

But projection isn’t limited to obviously beasty traits. When we reject our own femininity, for example, we fall into misogyny. If we disown our creativity or strength or ambition, we’ll throw that out there too, and find ourselves consumed by intense jealousy, forced to live in an ostentatious world full of brilliant, powerful achievers that we feel we could never even hope to rival.

Ultimately, what we demonise in ourselves we’ll be fated to suffer in others, and whether we feel repulsion, rage, envy, fear or simple shame when we look at these other people flaunting what we’ve worked so hard to bury, that discomfort – that ugly, ugly feeling we get – is the growl of the Beast, asking to be recognised.

Meeting the beast

In Beauty and the Beast, the Beast transforms because Beauty chooses to see him and love him as he is.

Similarly, in the myth of Psyche and Eros, Psyche’s fear of the terrible monster she initially believes is holding her captive melts into love when she dares to shine a light on his true face.

Reading these motifs through a psychological lens, the message is simple (if not easy to follow): we cannot integrate what we refuse to see, so we must brave a look.

Loving the beast within

Seeing, accepting and loving the parts of ourselves that are hard to love doesn’t, however, mean indulging destructive urges. Acceptance is not the same as submission – it doesn’t mean obeying the Beast; it means giving it a chair by the fire so you can finally hear what it has been trying to say.

At first at least, loving our inner monsters is a matter of creating space for them:

• To take the opportunity to feel and listen to our emotions, rather than numbing them away or rushing onto the next thing;
  

• To give ourselves grace and permission to process difficult experiences such as grief, loss, heartbreak and anger, over time;
  

• To welcome the wilder urges and instincts, the old wounds, the questionable ideas and unmet needs back into the fold by allowing them just a little attention.

So, it’s not about giving in to these difficult experiences, nor is it about following every whim. It’s about allowing them to exist, because our monsters are far more harmful when pushed away or ignored – they have more agency, more power and more control from the shadows than they ever can when we accept that they’re a part of us.

Most importantly, only once invited back can these exiled aspects of ourselves begin to work with us rather than against us, using their strengths and abilities to move towards a better self rather than continually regressing to a problematic past or pattern.

Loving the beast within

That all sounds great in theory, but the trickiest part is this: How are we supposed to open the door to these inner beasts if we’ve been denying them until now? If we don’t even know that they exist?

Well, one way is to pay attention to what we rail against, what we criticise or hate in others. Our projections will lead us to our Shadow Beasts, for sure.

What are the traits you find most insufferable in others – the most irritating, obnoxious, or rude?

Here’s the kicker: no trait is off the table for any of us. Even the most intelligent of people say something stupid from time to time. The kind can still be mean, the modest still pride themselves on something they do, and there’s not a person alive who has never acted selfishly or greedily. All these things are innate parts of being human. So, whenever we find ourselves seething or grimacing to witness someone else’s behaviour, it’s a good idea to pause and take a look in the mirror. We may well have our own Beast to behold.

But projection isn’t the only signpost. The truth is that none of us will ever fully know our shadow selves. For every monster we let back in, there are tens, hundreds, maybe more waiting in the dark. And that’s okay. Shadow work is not a computer game to complete and then replace with the next shiny title. Instead, it’s a way of life, and the universal key to accessing and integrating our various monsters is – bear with me here – pain.

As Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes in this beautiful passage, “The doors to the world of the wild Self” – aka the Shadow and all its potential – “are few but precious. If you have a deep scar, that is a door, if you have an old, old story, that is a door. If you love the sky and the water so much you almost cannot bear it, that is a door. If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane life, that is a door.”

In short, your emotions will show you the way. I have found myself close to tears a number of times while writing these latest articles. Not all of the monsters get to me, but a couple of them do every time I read through their scripts. Why? Because those ones touch something within me that still feels raw, that still needs a bit of work. Those will be the monsters I take to therapy, journal about, think about, talk about with friends, because my emotions have told me there’s something in them that I’m yet to process fully – something I’m yet to see.

When it comes to living a bigger, fuller life, pain is our most important teacher. But, before you run for the hills, this doesn’t mean signing up for a life of discomfort. It’s closer to the opposite, because just as with beasts and monsters, pain itself rings louder and feels more devastating when we try not to feel it more than it does when we let it in.

I’m not going to tell you to “welcome” all pain here because that kind of flippant BS isn’t going to help anybody, but I do believe we can benefit from the decision to be less afraid of it, less avoidant where we can. Sometimes, all it takes is five seconds to stop and say to yourself “Right now, I’m feeling shame” or “I’m noticing a feeling of fear”.

You can, of course, breathe into your emotions, sit with them for longer, write about them, talk about them, paint them, sing them… if you want. But it’s important to remember that you don’t have to do any of these things right away. Numbing and distraction are not good long-term strategies, but sometimes they’re needed at first, when the feeling is too big, or your life too busy. So please don’t beat yourself up for habits of avoidance either. You have all the time in the world to welcome your beasts back home.

Lessons from the Beast

So, for now, I’d like to leave you with a few gifts the Shadow Beast has to offer if or when you choose to engage with it.

Imagine that you’re holding a small lantern as you walk through a dark landscape. To your left, a river flows – deep and slow. To your right, moorlands or fields, scattered with trees. A crescent moon hangs low in the sky. The air is cool but not cold, and threaded with the comforting scent of the wild.

Up ahead, standing on the river’s verge, you can see the faint outline of a creature. Your creature. And it doesn’t matter if it’s big or small, furry or winged; whether it’s clearly silhouetted or so vague you have no idea what shape it might take. Just notice it there, head bowed slightly as if trying to see its own reflection.

As you walk and breathe, with each exhalation into the cool night air, the light from your lantern grows warmer, brighter, until you see not just this creature’s shape, but also its eyes – strangely soft and human, watching the water flow by, patient as if waiting.

Until it looks up, noticing you.

All you need to do for now is this: hold the light steady, hold its gaze, and breathe as you allow your mind to remember the lessons the shadow beast teaches:

• That you are not only the polished parts of yourself, and that’s a good thing.
  

• That the messy, wild, and painful bits of your life are potentially powerful parts of your story, of your wholeness.
  

• And finally, that love – fierce, conscious love – transforms what fear cannot.

So, finally, if it feels comfortable and if it feels natural, and without needing to assign any particular meaning to this creature if you don’t want to, you might imagine the light from that warm lantern glowing so bright that it flows into the being before you – as if it can flow into the creature’s lungs like air, around its body like blood, transforming it in some way.

What do you imagine? For some, the Beast may become a bird and fly off into an increasingly bright sky. For others, a small animal, soft and gentle. For others yet, a person – perhaps a child – who walks towards them.

You may imagine the Beast transforming into something as simple as light or colour, a sound, a feeling. Or it may be enough for you here today to just imagine that creature bathed in the light of the lantern. Because to love the Beast is to see it, as it is – it’s to love yourself back into existence, not despite your wounds, but through them.

Beasts of Belonging

“True belonging is the spiritual practice of believing in and belonging to yourself so deeply that you can share your most authentic self with the world and find sacredness in both being a part of something and standing alone in the wilderness. True belonging doesn’t require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are.”

― Brené Brown, Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

So why not finish here by giving a part of your mind permission to go out into the wilderness and find it – belonging? To find the part you fear, the part you loathe, the part you feel ashamed of – and just see what happens when the wild comes home.

References & Citations

• Carl Jung, ‘Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’

• Speer, Raynolds, Swallow, Zacks, ‘Reading Stories Activates Neural Representations of Visual and Motor Experiences’

• Clarissa Pinkola Estés, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’

• Credited to Gabrielle-Suzanne Bardot de Villeneuve and later animated by Disney, ‘Beauty and the Beast’

• The myth of Psyche and Eros

• Brené Brown, ‘Braving the Wilderness’

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There’s a dragon at the gate. Its scales glisten in the dark. Its breath is fire. Its roar shakes the ground beneath you. As Tolkien wrote of the dragon Smaug:

“His rage passes description - the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.”

The Dragon does not speak, it only watches – daring you to approach.

The question here is not Will you fight this monster? but Will you walk through its fire in order to become who you were meant to be?

This piece is for anyone who’s ever stood at the edge of something life-changing and felt terrified – of who they might become, and of who they might have to stop being.

The Dragon Archetype

In almost every myth, dragons are guardians: they hoard treasure, they block passage to sacred lands, they sleep atop gold, guarding it from heroes who dare to approach.

Viewed symbolically, the dragon represents fear itself, particularly the fear of transformation – of becoming something greater than we are right now. Something different. They are the threat inherent in any transition.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell is quoted ad nauseam on this idea: “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” It’s a Dragon that waits at the entrance.

“Dragons are subterranean, winged, smoke- and fire-breathing creatures, hybrid go-betweens in a magical bond between heaven and the underworld, where they guard secret treasures and reign over fires and concealed palaces.”

- A description found on Dragon Path on Mount Pilatus (known as Dragon Mountain) in Switzerland

In myth, dragons mark turning points. In Norse mythology, Fafnir mutates into a cold-hearted dragon to guard his cursed gold. In Greek mythology, Ladon coils around the golden apples of the Hesperides – the fruits of immortality. In Christian mythology, St. George slays the dragon to save the city of Silene from its poisonous wrath, after which a spring flows from the site of the beast’s death, yielding water that cures all disease.

In The Lord of the Rings, the Balrog drags Gandalf the Grey down into the fires beneath the bridge of Khazad-dûm so that he can be reborn as Gandalf the White.

In each case, the dragon appears at the border between the known and the unknown, conscious and unconscious, mortal and transcendent. And it foretells great change.

Fear, alchemy and the psychology of change

Jung compared the Dragon to Mercurius – who “stands at the beginning and end of the work” of alchemy:

“He is the prima materia, the caput corvi, the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again as the lapis. … He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught—a symbol uniting all opposites.”

- C.G.Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW vol. 12, par. 404

And, indeed, the Dragon is at home in all four elements – in the sky, the water, on the earth and with the fire it breathes. In alchemical symbolism, fire represents transformation – the burning away of impurities to reveal true gold.

Facing your Dragon, then, is not about external battle, but internal alchemy: burning away illusions about who you are; releasing attachments to comfort, approval, or outdated identities; allowing a false self to die, so that the true self can be born.

Big stuff. The biggest, really. The Dragon is everywhere and everything, and our fear of it is present in every change. You cannot step into your next self without meeting it.

Why we fear the dragon

It’s easy to romanticise transformation until we’re in the midst of it. Real change always comes with a cost, and if a positive change has not made itself, then that means the price is higher than feels comfortable: the end of a relationship; the loss of an identity we once clung to; a confrontation with grief, anger, or truth long suppressed.

At the gates of change, then, the Dragon demands payment, not in gold, but in letting go of who we thought we needed to be to survive. Death, that’s the price. Like Mercurius, we must devour ourselves in order to rise again. It’s the ultimate test.

Meeting the Real-world Dragon

So what do we do when we meet the Dragon in real life?

In real life, the Dragon is fear. This means we can’t slay it like old St. George. Believe me, I’ve tried – you can’t fight fear and win. But you can listen to it.

When the Dragon breathes its fiery message, it’s testing us, challenging us to weigh up what actually, truly matters. And it’s showing us where and how change can be made.

As living beings, we are wired for safety, and since novelty and difference by definition involve the unknown, we will automatically feel afraid of the prospect of change, no matter how beneficial that change may prove to be.

So, when the Dragon appears, it draws our attention to the possibility of change as if laying down the gauntlet: “Does this matter enough?”, “Is this where you transform?”,and most importantly, “Are you brave enough to want what you want, even if it changes everything?”

Becoming

Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the Dragon’s message is that it is an unquestionable yet unsoftened and unadorned permission from within. The Dragon won’t mollycoddle, it won’t trick you into change, and it’s not here to guide you through it either; it’s here to say “This is the threshold, if you’re brave enough to cross.”

But as dispassionate as that may sound, the Dragon is of course on our side, yes? Of all the monsters we’re discussing in this series, in story, the Dragon is the one that’s most likely to become an ally. When it does, its strength and wisdom become assets rather than threats. See: How to Train Your Dragon, Merlin, Shrek, Game of Thrones, Fourth Wing.

This begs an important question: we tend to think of fear as a barrier, but what changes when we choose to see it as a form of love instead? What if the Dragon stands between you and your treasure with the express intention of ensuring you are strong enough to hold whatever waits on the other side?

For some, the Dragon is a diagnosis, a divorce, a move, a big and scary goal… it’ll look different to everyone, but its fire is always the same: it burns away the skin of who you thought you were so that you can step into your next self.

The treasure/passage/renewal

Here’s a little thought experiment for you to try on for size. I’d like you to imagine that you’re standing at the entrance to a deep, dark cave. Within, you can glimpse the faint glitter of gold or diamonds – treasure that you can’t discern just yet, but you know is there all the same.

As you squint into the shadows, something moves in the corner of your vision – an uncoiling, slow and serpentine. The Dragon’s huge head lifts into the light, black scales glimmering incandescent, flame flickering from its nostrils, and fixes you with an ancient, all-seeing gaze.

Now, you needn’t know – perhaps cannot know – which threshold it is that you have reached. You needn’t know what the treasure is on the other side, either. These things can only be known in retrospect. Right now, you have one choice to make: do you enter, or do you retreat?

If you choose to move forward – if you choose this, because you never have to – I’d like you to imagine taking step after step into the cave, the Dragon watching as you go. Perhaps your throat is dry. Maybe your stomach tightens. The closer you get, the louder your pulse, but still, the only way forward is through the heat. As you pass through the Dragon’s flames, you get the sense that a layer of self is being burned away. You don’t feel physical pain, just a bone-deep knowing that something is being shed. Something you were once too afraid to let go of, but that had to go in order for you to move on. To change. To transform into something new.

Then, darkness.

Your eyes strain to adjust. The cave feels cool, the damp air soothing against your skin. You can’t see the treasure just yet, can’t touch it either, but you will.

First, though, I’d like you to turn back towards the opening to see the Dragon coiling into itself once again, its job done. And then I’d like you to just wonder what it was that had to be burned away.

Do you have a sense of it? An idea of what you had to let go of – a belief, a tie or attachment, a fear, a plan, a promise, a perceived limitation, a pattern or thought or behaviour? A version of self? What was it that the Dragon stripped away?

If you know the answer, then you also know that the only real question the Dragon poses is this: Will you let it burn to ash? Or, perhaps, even more simply: When?

References & Citations

• Carl Jung, ‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’

• Carl Jung, ‘Psychology and Alchemy’

• Joseph Campbell, ‘The Power of Myth’

• Marie-Louise von Franz, ‘The Problem of the Puer Aeternus’

• JRR Tolkien, ‘The Lord of the Rings’ and ‘The Hobbit, Or, There And Back Again’

• A description found on Dragon Path on Mount Pilatus (known as Dragon Mountain) in Switzerland

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She lives at the edge of the forest, or deep inside it. She knows spellcasting and how to use what grows from the earth. She’s at one with the seasons and the stars. She does what she wants and cares not for the opinions of others. People fear her, but only because they can’t control her.

Do we not all want to be just a little more… Witch? And, if so, why do we resist?

The witch in myth and mind

In myth, fairytale and folklore, witches are powerful women — sometimes men, but usually women — who are feared for their independence. They heal, curse, protect, perform magic, and they refuse to be tamed.

Some of you might wonder how the Witch made it onto a list of monsters – and as you can probably tell from my tone, I agree that the Witch archetype is not demonic or evil in the slightest. She’s on this list because she has been portrayed as monstrous for thousands of years – as the wart-nosed cackling menace who cannot be trusted. In short, historically at least, we’re supposed to see the witch as a monster.

We’re supposed to stay away, but that doesn’t mean that we should.

In terms of archetypal psychology, the Witch represents sovereign intuition — the wild wisdom that hegemonic systems have tried to domesticate for centuries, and have been fairly successful in doing so, too. But not entirely successful, because the Witch is one of the most enduring, fascinating, polarising archetypal figures we know. And she ain’t going anywhere.

Today, we’re exploring how we can all awaken the energy of the Witch within (regardless of whether we’re interested in anything like herbalism or paganism) and what we can gain from doing so.

Witchy pronouns?

First, a note: In many of my articles, I have de-gendered the archetypes’ external shells – their avatars – to make them more accessible to men, women and nonbinary people alike: the Maiden becomes the Tenderfoot, the Hero becomes the Warrior, the Crone becomes the Seer, etc. This doesn’t mean I’m denying the feminine and masculine traits wrapped up in the different archetypes, just that I don’t see the point of confining universal human energies to physical bodies that only, at most, 50% of people can readily identify with.

Having said that, I’m not going to de-gender the Witch because she is so important to the history of women and feminism. But that doesn’t mean this archetype isn’t available to those who identify as either nonbinary or male. Because she is available, and important. In fact, men, I especially invite you to embrace your inner Witch. She has a lot to offer us all.

The Witch is the wilder part of all of us that lives at the vital threshold between the mundane, familiar conscious world, and the magical, mysterious forest of the unconscious.

She is a way into a place where inner knowing bubbles up to eclipse societal expectation and the need for approval. And that, my friends, is genuine magic.

Witch Trials and Shadow Projections

Let’s address the elephant in the room.

The witch trials were a historical campaign of persecution – mostly between the 15th and 18th centuries – during which thousands of people (primarily women) were accused of witchcraft and brutally punished and/or executed. Scholars estimate between 30,000 and 60,000 people (again, mostly women) were lost during this time.

But the witch hunts weren’t really about magic. They were about control: a way for patriarchal and religious powers to suppress those who defied social norms – especially independent, outspoken, or unconventional women.

Historians such as Carolyn Merchant and Silvia Federici write about how the witch hunts were a systematic tool of social control. By demonising women’s knowledge of the body, of herbs, of cycles, and of community during the Scientific Revolution, patriarchal and economic powers dismantled the older, earth-connected ways of life and replaced them with hierarchy and obedience – a social structure within which the Witch and all that she stands for not only had no place, but became taboo.

Viewed through this lens, we can see that the trials functioned as collective shadow projections, scapegoating individuals who demonstrated things like instinct, autonomy, sexuality, and spiritual knowledge – the potent, truth-bearing aspects of humanity that couldn’t be subjugated and thus posed a threat to the governing system.

What it all boils down to is this: the Witch was never the danger; she was the mirror that society could not stand to look in.

Centuries have passed since the trials, but those old warnings live on in quieter forms today. We can hear them every time someone tells us to tone it down, to be ‘nice,’ to play small. Thankfully, though, not everyone listens to these injunctions.

Modern-day witch culture, argues India Rakusen on the BBC Sounds podcast Witch, can be seen as a powerful movement for renouncing the trials and the subjugation of the feminine in the past and present. There’s “a certain perverse pleasure,” she says, “as well as a sense of rightness and beauty, in insisting on flowering just when the world expects you to become quiet and diminish”.

This is the call of the Witch – she shows us the cost and necessity of reclaiming our authentic instincts, depths and wisdom.

Beware the lure of the Disempowered Hermit

Note: I’m including “disempowered” to differentiate between the Hermit/Sage archetype – a wise recluse – and what we’re discussing here.

So, how do we go about reclaiming this bigness of self? The first step is to face the Witch’s antagonistic opposite – that which tries to keep us small.

The Witch archetype’s passive shadow side is the Disempowered Hermit – the disconnected recluse who retreats to the cabin in the woods to be alone, rather than to gleefully concoct her magic spells. The Hermit does not own or acknowledge her power. She doesn’t choose life or magic or knowledge, because she prefers to stay small and quiet and unseen, as the world wants her to be.

To deny the inner Witch is to retreat into one’s inner hermitage, and it’s all too easily done. The Hermit is the result of allowing ourselves to be reduced and confined by the warnings we internalise over the course of our lives:

Don’t speak too loudly or want too much.

Don’t be too strange, too angry, too clever, too powerful.

Don’t let them see the fire in your belly, or the hunger in your eyes.

And for the love of god, don’t cackle at your own jokes.

It might sound relatively innocuous – even peaceful – to give up the fight and go off to live a quiet life in a log cabin with a few cats and a good book, but of course that’s not how it works out when the Hermit hasn’t been chosen but forced. The Witch within refuses this fate – so she whispers in our ears while we try to sleep, attempting to nudge us back into our wildness from her place in the dark. As with all shadow parts – that is, the resisted parts of the self – if we try to ignore her rebellious, nonconformist calls, she can actually start to feel quite monstrous.

Beware the madness of the Shadow Witch

The resisted Witch archetype – the Shadow Witch – makes us think and act in ways that feel irrational, unattractive, ridiculous, unacceptable. To awaken the Wild Sovereign autonomously – to own our instincts and opinions and power in a way that doesn’t feel horribly othering – means renouncing the imposed rules and expectations that try to minimise these things, and shining a new, brighter, better light on the Witch so we can use her magic for positive change.

Put differently, we need to replace the hypnotising sorcery of our social conditioning with some realer, wiser, better spells.

Undoing the darker magic

At some point in your life – probably early on when you were still soft and pliable – someone looked at your bigness and flinched. At that moment, a spell was cast. Maybe it was a parent, a teacher, a group of kids at school. Maybe it wasn’t spoken outright, just implied with a glance, a turned back, a door that was quietly closed.

These spells go something like this:

“No one likes a show-off.”
“You’re being dramatic.”
“Calm down.”
“Be quiet.”
“Why can’t you just be normal?”

Though usually well-meant, these aren’t spells of protection; they’re spells of containment, designed not to keep you safe so much as to keep you small. Regardless of whether we’re into this Witch metaphor, we need to rewrite these old spells.

The dark spell you still obey

So now, I invite you to pause. I’m going to ask you some questions about the times and places you might have received diminishing messages while you were younger. If this doesn’t feel safe, take a step back.

If it does, though, close your eyes if you can, and ask yourself this:

What’s one dark spell that has been cast upon me?

What’s one thing I was told – directly or indirectly – that made me shrink?

You may remember moments rather than messages you can put into words – times when you were told off at home or at school, happenings or events that made you feel humiliated, less-than, or like you had to hide yourself away.

When it’s safe to do so, most of us can usually come up with these memories fairly easily, and we know when we’ve found them because they still sting. Even if the old criticism or warning sounds childish, silly and outdated to our adult ears, something about it remains uncomfortable all the same. That’s how you know it’s real. That’s how you know the spell stuck.

If you have an idea of a spell of containment that was cast on you, just notice it. It might come to you as an image, a sound, a feeling, taste or smell… It may be clear or it may be vague, and it may be something you can put into words, but it doesn’t have to be.

Whatever you’re noticing right now – however you’re noticing it – label it, if you like, as something that was never your truth, never reality, just someone else’s fear.

And then take a breath so we can invite the Witch forward.

The counter-spell

Witches in folklore were often healers, midwives, wise women. The village came to them in secret – for tinctures, for prayers, for truth, or to be challenged, tested, initiated.

To reclaim the Witch within is to reclaim our right to step back and question what we are told – to recover the right to know for ourselves and to be ourselves — even when no one claps for it. Especially then.

The magic the Witch wields is made of consciousness, awareness and truth. When the light of this magic is cast upon old messages, they come undone, because awareness is the starting point of every new spell, and the breaking point of every old curse.

The Witch is able to take the dark spells forced upon all of us and turn them on their heads.

Meet the Witch. Hear her cackle.

Imagine, if you will, a young warrior journeying to the cabin in the woods seeking help with a spell of confinement. Chin high but heart pounding, they approach the Witch’s door and knock. The door swings open of its own volition, and the black cat watches from its place in the corner – amber eyes, shrewd and unflinching – as the warrior ventures into the gloom to find the old, wizened woman pottering around the stove, weighing herbs and stirring some strange boiling concoction. She speaks without needing to turn and see her guest. “What have you brought me, then? Spit it out, child.”

Imagine the warrior laying their curses out on the battered old table – spelling out the words that once felt so powerful. First, “No one likes a show-off,” then “Don’t be so dramatic,” and finally, “Why can’t you just be normal?”

Let’s pause here, and give this a moment. How does the Witch respond to these messages? Does she soften, comfort the warrior, placate them? Does she hesitate, weighing the ideas against the rational reality of the world? No. Of course not. The Witch looks down her crooked nose at the fragile little words on the table and she laughs. It’s not that she doesn’t care that the warrior suffers; it’s that, from her dwelling in the forest — in the raw, bare truth of the natural world — these ideas mean nothing to her. Nothing.

“No one likes a show-off?” she says, voice crackling like firewood. “Then let them look away. The sun doesn’t dim itself for fragile eyes and neither should you.” She flicks a pinch of tarragon into the cauldron, and the first cursed phrase burns to ash as she moves on to the next.

“Don’t be dramatic?” She scoffs, shoulders shaking. “My dear, drama is divine. The sky weeps, the sea rages, the earth quakes — and you think you’re meant to smile sweetly through it all? Nonsense. Feel fully, or don’t bother feeling at all.” With a dismissive flick of the wrist, the little words erupt into an explosion of purple flame, and then they’re gone.

The old crone looks towards the final spell. “Why can’t you just be normal?” The Witch freezes at this. Then, slowly, she turns to face the warrior. Her voice is low now, almost reverent. “Normal…” she repeats, tasting the word like something sour on her tongue. “I have watched ‘normal’ break more souls than war or famine. ‘Normal’ is the grey mask they hand you the moment you begin to shine. It’s the binding spell. The shrinking spell. The spell of domesticity.”

She leans in, so close the warrior can smell the smoke in her breath. “You were never meant to be normal, child. You were meant to be free. You were meant to be fierce. You were meant to be magic. And magic,” she hisses, “has never once followed the rules.”

Choosing the wise freedom

Now, I’m not here to tell you how the Witch would respond to your old curses. Only you can know that, really. Whether you let her cast your new spell right now, or whether you let her wisdom bubble up slowly over the coming days, doesn’t really matter, just that you do question the rules you were taught to follow. Question the things you were taught to fear. Because the Witch knows that you are not too loud or too wild or too opinionated or too rash. You’re not too anything. And you know it as well, do you not? The very same things that made them flinch are the things that will make you free.

The Wild Sovereign Witch does not ask you to be wicked, she asks you to be whole. And wholeness will always be too big for a world that prefers us tame.

So, please take every opportunity you have to incinerate and rewrite all the old curses that try to keep you small. The only question for now is this: which spell will you choose to break first? Tell me, so we can cackle at the fragile old words together.

–-----------

References:

• Carolyn Merchant, ‘The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution’

• Silvia Federici, ‘Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation’

• India Rakusen, ‘Witch’ podcast, BBC Sounds

• Carl Jung, ‘Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’

• Clarissa Pinkola Estés, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’

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Sometimes, the monster doesn’t roar, but whispers, charms, and seduces, and before we know it, a little of our life has been drained away.

This article is for anyone who ever feels depleted of energy, vibrancy, or zest for life – anyone who’d like to rediscover their authentic spirit – because we’re inviting a very old, very hungry archetype into the light: the Vampire.

The legend of the vampire

Vampires are everywhere – from the demons of ancient Mesopotamia to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the modern-day glittering immortals of Twilight and the slightly earlier, but obviously far superior, bloodsucking fiends slain by Buffy.

While this monster has shapeshifted across time and culture, it has clung on with slender fingers to the same core themes of shadowy allure and death by slow depletion, which is perhaps why this ancient monster has us so enthralled. The Vampire shows us what happens when we lose touch with our own vitality. Because what we exile doesn’t die – it waits, and drains us, silently, from the dark.

The vampire as monster

As with all archetypes and all good monsters, vampires are dual-natured: they are seductive and repellent, charming and deadly, and they bridge the gap between mortal and immortal, human and animal. Internally, they bridge the gap between conscious and unconscious.

As undead, the Vampire cannot sustain itself because it needs something it can’t create for itself: blood. In terms of archetypal symbolism, blood is the emotional, active, connected energy within us. It is vitality, creative power and love, lust and libido, too. All of this comes together to make a monster inherently connected to the purest of energies: life force.

In psychological terms, then, this monster serves as a potent metaphor for both inner and outer dynamics that drain our joie de vivre, or lure us into parasitic cycles of perpetual dissatisfaction.

The good news is that this means that we can use the Vampire as a seductive symbolic vehicle for identifying and ultimately disentangling ourselves from the unconscious patterns and habits that keep us feeling drained, powerless, dependent or simply unable to step into the light of day.

The Vampire as split-off

Marie-Louise von Franz talks about the psychic vampire as a split-off part of the personality. The example she gives is the split-off anima, which is the archetype of the inner feminine soul or spirit. “When the anima is negative,” she says, “it is the impulse to dream about life and make wishful fantasies about life instead of living life”.

To have become vampiric, she goes on to say, this isolated complex (or rejected part of the personality) must have been split off so dramatically, so radically, that it can only sap energy away in secret – attacking under the cover of darkness, leaching the life blood out of us, and leaving us listless, unmotivated, tired, depressed and with an enduring sense that nothing means anything anymore.

To someone who comes to analysis with these complaints, she says – and I always enjoy von Franz’s shockingly blunt honesty in these kinds of accounts – “we could answer them: you are probably being sucked by a vampire. You are bloodless. You have no life impulse, no pleasure in life anymore, no interests or anything.” Ouch!

Vampire movies are so popular, says von Franz, because they are our modern version of folklore or fairytales, and the stories that capture us – old and new – are the ones that “tell about the inner world”. We need an orientation, she says; a way of “mapping out the dreamworld and the unconscious”, and the vampire motif is an age-old means for doing this.

Vampires in modern culture

Today’s vampire stories often glamorise the monster.

Think Interview with the Vampire — beautiful, immortal beings who ache for the connection they can never truly have. We watch the challenging love affairs between human and vamp – Buffy and Angel, Buffy and Spike, Sookie and Bill, Bella and Edward – and our hearts break over and over.

Another reason for the Vampire’s longevity as a narrative symbol is that we all know that hunger. We feel it every time we let a fundamental part of ourselves slip into the shadows, leaving us with an eternally unfulfilled longing for intimacy or connection, wholeness, creativity, whatever. The Vampire tries again and again to add in something it needs to find within itself in order to fully experience it – life blood, vitality, being.

External vampiric relationships are built on this same dynamic. They seduce by offering fulfilment, but what they actually deliver is codependency, conflict, and hurt. And when in a draining relationship of any kind, part of us knows this, right? Yet, we keep going back for more, addicted to the rush of blood, the thrill of almost tasting what we aren’t supposed to touch.

Although this isn’t always the case – because some abusive relationships truly are one-sided – there is often a parallel between inner and outer Vampires. The inner Vampire, as a split-off part of the personality that drains us and disconnects us from our authentic spirit, gets reflected in the draining external relationships that we form when unable to fully access our own life blood.

The vampire as shadow

“The shadow, when it is realized, is the source of renewal; the new and productive impulse cannot come from established values of the ego. When there is an impasse, and sterile time in our lives—despite an adequate ego development—we must look to the dark, hitherto unacceptable side which has been at our conscious disposal.”

― Connie Zweig, Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature

Ultimately, the inner Vampire shows up when something essential inside us is perpetually starving – as an immortal, the Vampire does not grow, change or die; it is frozen in time, and locked into its pattern of hunger and unfulfilment. Its motivation is valid, therefore, and its intentions are good, but its means are disconnected, unhealthy, unhelpful and unconscious. The Vampire, of course, can’t see itself in the mirror – it knows not what it does.

This monster needn’t be limited to von Franz’s vampiric anima, though. Really, any exiled aspect of the psyche can be viewed through the lens of this archetype, because once split off, it will be forced to feed in the dark. Whatever its origin, it will sap something away.

The inner Vampire may be active when we people-please to the point of self-erasure because the fragile validation it yields feels like nourishment when self-worth is at a deficit.

When we feed on drama, crisis, or chaos because the intensity mimics aliveness when true passion or purpose are missing.

When we scroll endlessly or numb with consumption because something inside us is desperate to feel, but we don’t trust what might surface if we allow it to actually do that.

However it feeds, whatever it takes from us, in order to heal, the vampiric part must be brought into the light, where its parasitic tendencies burn away and the fundamental energy it’s made of can be invited – only ever invited – back in.

Consciousness as cure

So, the antidote to this monstrous threat isn’t a wooden stake after all. It’s awareness.

When we become aware of the ways in which we drain or are drained, we can start to understand what it is that we lack, and then how to actually satiate those needs.

We can ask:

Where am I giving out of depletion instead of abundance?

Who or what is draining my energy rather than fuelling it?

Where do I need to choose vitality over survival?

What do I search for in the outside world that I really need to find within?

And, most importantly, What am I truly hungry for?

Allow a part of your mind to consider this idea now: if there were an aspect of you that feels bloodless, which part would that be, and what is it hungry for exactly?

What’s missing for you? Is it connection, creativity, self-compassion? Is your inner Vampire starved of rest, play, belonging, truth, touch, purpose, freedom, wonder?

We need to let ourselves feel into the lack – to taste it, to define it – because when we can name our hunger, we can start to meet it consciously, and then we can stop living as prey to our own shadow.

It is not the quick fix this monster initially seems to promise, but awareness can, over time, transform the inner Vampire from a hidden predator into a conscious part of the psyche that we can nurture more fully and without harm – one that it’s safe to allow over the threshold.

The Vampire’s simplest message, when we dare to face it, is this: survival is not the same as living. To choose the latter is invariably challenging; it requires courage, acts of bravery, and honesty. But only when we take that challenge, can we step into the light of sovereignty, spirit and being.

Ultimately, the inner Vampire is only ever a part of the psyche that has forgotten how to feed itself in healthy ways. It may have been forced to forget, it may have been taught by people who weren’t able to face their own monsters, but whatever the reason for the forgetting, it can remember. So teach it, and you’ll be free, because what leeches in the dark is healed in the light of awareness.

References & Citations

• Marie-Louise von Franz, The Anima and The Vampire

• Connie Zweig, ‘Meeting the Shadow: The Hidden Power of the Dark Side of Human Nature’

• Carl Jung, ‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’

• Carl Jung, ‘Psychological Aspects of the Persona’

• Marie-Louise von Franz, ‘Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales’

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Now, onto Menaces of the Mind Part III. You can watch the post on YouTube or read it below.

***

They say her gaze turned others to stone, but what if, just once, Medusa had been truly seen?

This third part of Menaces of the Mind series is a how-to for reclaiming your inner Medusa and a deep dive into why we all really, really ought to do just that.

Medusa

Medusa is one of the most recognisable monsters in all mythology, with snakes for hair, a petrifying gaze, and a mien so powerful that even after death, it could destroy.

But before she was a monster, Medusa was a maiden – the only mortal among the three Gorgon sisters. She served as a priestess in Athena’s temple, sworn to celibacy until she lay with Poseidon, the god of the sea, consensually or not, depending on the version of the story you read. Either way, though, the outcome is the same: Medusa is the one to be punished.

For her transgression, Athena transforms her into a creature so terrifying that no one could look at her without turning to stone. Medusa's metamorphosis takes her from beautiful to monstrous, from visible to unbearable. From desirable to unseeable.

Medusa as shadow

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also If I am to be whole.”

― C.G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Medusa is, in many ways, the quintessential shadow figure. She represents the aspects of self our culture cannot easily tolerate – truths too raw to be neatly expressed, namely: feminine power, feminine sexuality, feminine rage.

In patriarchal cultures, women’s anger is taboo. It’s considered unattractive, dangerous, “too much.” As a result, women and girls are conditioned to internalise our anger from a very young age – to turn it inwards, and direct it towards ourselves rather than others. When we do this, that rage calcifies into shame, anxiety, depression, or physical illness. Something, in other words, that will stop us in our tracks.

But this archetype of course isn't only for women to worry about. Medusa’s gaze turns men to stone, too, because that's what internalising pain, anger and needs does to all of us: it freezes, paralyses, leaves us petrified — emotionally, psychologically, even spiritually.

In other words, anyone denied the right to express pain, anger, power or any other kind of innate, emotional force may well find their inner Medusa turning to face them.

Medusa & the Cultural Shift

Let's rewind back to the beginning, because the context of this story's origin is illuminating. Medusa's tale emerged during a time of great change to the collective experience of humankind. Largely matrilineal societies – settlements where nature, the earth, and goddesses of fertility held great sway – were being replaced by the patriarchal cultures of nomadic communities, followed by hierarchies, and then civilisation as we know it.

During that shift, the feminine — that is, a psychological principle that has to do with receptivity, intuition, emotion, relationships and the implicit — was forced underground; superseded by the masculine values of goal-orientation, rational thinking and the explicit.

So, earth goddesses were downgraded and the moon gave way to the sun. As this happened, intuition and mystery were replaced by linearity, order, and control.

And of course this pattern isn’t just ancient history – it lives on even today. Every time a woman swallows her anger to avoid being called “difficult,” every time someone hides their intuition in favour of logic because it seems safer, every time a person of any gender learns to mistrust their emotions in order to survive in a goal‑driven, productivity‑obsessed world, that old silencing plays out again.

Medusa stands at the edge of that particular fault line and her story depicts the objectification and demonisation of femininity and women – this important figure is punished not only for being sexual or powerful, but for being seen in those ways. She was literally dehumanised for being beautiful, desirable, and for what was done to her, whether she chose it or not. But – and this is so important – Medusa doesn't end when slain; her power – primal and indestructible – cannot be snuffed out by a pesky little beheading.

Between Worlds

What she becomes, then, is a liminal figure who, like all monsters, serves as a bridge between worlds. She’s human and animal. Mortal and divine. Her hair is a nest of snakes, which are symbols of both death and transformation. She is tangled, contradictory, and sacred in her complexity.

Importantly, she is cast out by Athena: the virginal goddess of wisdom, strategy, and war. Literally born from Zeus’ head, Athena represents logic and order in feminine form. She is the face of femininity shaped to fit a patriarchal ideal – severed from wildness, instinct and vulnerability.

So, where Medusa is chaos, Athena is order – a classic story of demonised yin vs. exalted yang, and all going on within the bodies of women.

Medusa shows us what happens when feminine energy is repressed, and my favourite detail from the entire tale is this. Whether consensual or not, Medusa lies with Posiedon, god of the sea – turbulent, wild, unpredictable, dangerous and unstoppable – and this is too much for Athena (i.e. civilisation) to bear. Medusa, as a result of this coupling, is stepping back into the frightful feminine forces of chaos, depth and the unknown. She is punished, then, not just for the act, or for her beauty, but for consorting with the unconscious, where taboo feminine power resides.

Medusa in the modern mind

This gives me chills, and I'm not the only one. After centuries of being seen as a grotesque, fearful figure, Medusa, more recently, has been reclaimed as a symbol of feminine agency.

Luciano Garbati's Medusa statue in New York, for example, stands as a powerful symbol of the #MeToo movement, particularly among survivors of sexual assault. It reimagines the Medusa myth by portraying her as a figure holding the head of Perseus, inverting the traditional narrative where Perseus is the hero who slays the monster.

So, she's transformed once again: from a symbol of virginal beauty to a grotesque she-monster to an archetype of power. She is an eternal reminder that no matter how disempowered we might feel, our strength does not disappear; it just goes underground until we dare to bring it back.

The Integration of Medusa

Let’s talk briefly about the "hero" of Medusa's story: Perseus.

Perseus is sent to slay Medusa, but of course he can't face her directly, not without being turned to stone. So he holds up Athena’s gift: a polished shield, which serves as a mirror. Then, through reflection rather than confrontation, he beheads her.

The psychological meaning of this motif is as clear as any. Sometimes, looking straight at repressed pain or other unconscious content will overwhelm us. But if we can reflect on it – through writing, dreams, art or connected conversation – we can integrate what was once too dangerous to face.

Even Jung warned against staring directly into the unconscious – better, he proposed, to observe its movements in the water, in dream, in symbol and story, just as we're doing in all of these articles. Perseus succeeds where others fail by renouncing brute force and, instead, respecting the power of what he faces.

Importantly, that power does not die when Medusa's body is slain. Her severed head continues to destroy tyrants and monsters even after death. Finally, in a beautiful metaphor for psychological integration, Athena – the same goddess who cursed her – emblazons Medusa’s image onto her breastplate (or shield, depending on the story's version) where it's used for protection.

The monster, in other words, becomes the medicine.

Shadow Work & Sovereignty

So, this is what integration promises. When we reclaim what we once exiled – be it our anger, our needs, sexuality, voice, power, or whatever – it stops appearing as an ugly, monstrous threat. Instead, it strengthens us.

If we don't accept this challenge, then, just like Medusa's power, those parts will be forced to rumble away menacingly from the shadow. They will show up as symptoms and illnesses, and they will get projected out onto the world around us too.

“The psychological rule says that when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate.”

Carl Jung, CW9, Part I: Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

Put differently, if we don’t face our inner Medusas, we’ll keep meeting them out there in real life — as conflict, as threat, as pain, as the paralysing anger of others.

So what does Medusa mean for you and me?

So, how can we break this pattern? How do we brave a look at Medusa's terrifying face as Perseus did?

Of course the answer to this question will be different for different people, and it will depend on what we've tried to shut out over the years. Whatever our unsightly monsters are made of, it's important not to rush in, guns a-blazing, but to do as that clever young hero did and seek these entities through careful reflection.

Reclaiming your Medusa may mean revisiting moments when you were silenced. Moments of injustice. Moments when your own thoughts, feelings, perception of the world — your truth — was denied. It may mean daring to speak up, to lift your chin or stand taller in the face of what's expected of you.

Regardless of whether you feel shame over your body, your appearance, your emotions, sexuality, natural instincts, opinions or story, Medusa's gift is the all-important reminder that there is power within all of these things. If used consciously and with acceptance, then you can bring the lost parts of yourself back from the brink, and they can fight alongside you, as opposed to against you.

Perseus went on to save Andromeda, the daughter of Cepheus and Cassiopeia, from a sea monster, of all things. He brought something pure and beautiful back from the chaotic unknown, and you can too.

Next time, we're going to meet the Vampire within – charming, seductive, addictive. Until then, let a part of your mind stay with the mesmerising monster Medusa so that she can teach you her most poetic lesson: sometimes, the things you were told to hide may be the very things that will save you.

References & Citations

• This Jungian Life Podcast, ‘The Many Faces of Medusa’

• Carl Jung, ‘The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’

• Carl Jung, ‘Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self’

• Clarissa Pinkola Estés, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’

• Marie-Louise von Franz, ‘Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales’

• Ovid, ‘Metamorphoses’

• Natalie Haynes, ‘Stone Blind’

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***

First, the water shifts. Then, silence. A shudder moves through the hull.

From the deep – where sunlight cannot reach – something vast begins to rise. A shadowy tangle of limbs and teeth and huge, all-seeing eyes.

The Kraken, the Levianthan, Scylla and Charybdis, Umibōzu… The sea monster goes by many names, but it always inspires dread, horror, awe. It is always very, very big. As an archetypal beast, its meaning is equally mammoth.

The Sea Monster Archetype

Accounts of sea monsters are found in virtually all cultures with a connection to the sea — their presence in the waters of human imagination, in other words, seems pretty much inevitable. In myth, this common archetypal symbol tends to represent primal, chaotic forces in the world's creation or the embodiment of the unknown, unpredictable, mysterious and dangerous.

Examples of sea monsters include:

The Leviathan, a large sea serpent or whale-like creature from Jewish mythology, often associated with chaos and destruction.

In Greek mythology, Scylla and Charybdis were fearsome sea monsters guarding the strait of Messina. Scylla, with six heads and twelve feet, resided on a cliff, while Charybdis, often depicted as a monstrous whirlpool, lurked opposite her.

Umibōzu from Japanese folklore, is often described as a giant, shadowy, human-like being that rises from the sea to capsize ships, particularly those of sailors who disrespect it.

And of course the Kraken, a massive, squid-like creature from Norse mythology, also known for attacking ships.

The forms sea monsters take vary – some tentacled, some humanoid, some serpentine – but they all share one important thing: they rise from below. From the unseen, the unknown, the uncontrollable.

The Depths of the Psyche

In Jungian psychology, the archetype of the ocean, sea or any deep dark water represents the unconscious mind and the shadow.

Sea monsters, then, represent the fears, urges, memories and truths we’ve thrown overboard, but which still stir below the surface. Because, no matter how much we'd like to delete or slay our most painful, uncomfortable or unpalatable thoughts and feelings, it isn’t possible to exterminate an aspect of the self. Instead, within the mysterious and terrible soup of those unconscious waters, resisted parts of the self mutate into monsters.

Sea monsters are the ultimate symbol of what we fear will consume us. They are the panic attacks that come without warning, the grief we thought buried that surfaces in other ways, the shame that casts a menacing shadow everywhere we go, the unmet need that devours and devours, forever attempting to find fulfilment that it cannot reach.

Myth & Meaning

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus must sail between Scylla (the many-headed devourer) and Charybdis (the whirlpool that swallows everything). To survive the journey, he has to reckon with both monsters – not to defeat them, but to navigate between them.

He chooses to sail closer to Scylla, who devours six of his men, rather than risk losing the entire ship to Charybdis's whirlpool. So, as opposed to the more obvious (and in my opinion less helpful and less interesting) proposition of a direct victory over the monsters, Odysseus' encounter speaks of the impossible choices and inevitable sacrifices inherent in any epic journey.

As such, the story serves as the perfect metaphor for what it means to move through the inner chaos we must willingly walk (or sail) into when going through a challenging experience, or when processing pain or trauma in therapy, for example. On journeys like these, things will be lost: old beliefs about the self and the world, coping mechanisms, habits, dreams, versions of self. And while it may feel like obliteration looms, with courage, caution and conscious decision-making, we don't need to be consumed when we make these passages.

The mother monster

Often, sea monsters are depicted as female. This is not a universal truth – the Kraken is androgynous (not assigned any gender) and although Umibōzu is said to take the form of beautiful women to lure sailors to their death, the monster is usually described as male.

However, both Scylla and Charybdis are portrayed as female. Particularly in earlier Jewish texts such as the Book of Enoch, the Leviathan is described as a female sea monster. Lesser monsters of the sea also tend towards femininity: mermaids, sirens, and the Nereids (or sea nymphs) were all originally female.

The prominence in myth of dangerous female sea monsters (and any other female monsters, really) may reflect social anxieties about feminine power and sexuality. Within a patriarchal world, such as ours, femininity is de facto forced into the collective shadow and feminine forces – emotion, intuition, chaos and creation – are cast in a monstrous light. What's more, for a patriarchal structure to sustain itself and remain unchanged, that rejected femininity must stay beneath the surface, lest it rise up and take the system down, pillar by pillar. Historically, then, sea monsters may have served as warnings about the potential dangers of female influence or transgression. Stacks up.

"It was in the Middle Ages that the Sirens were re-imagined in their familiar form of half-fish mermaids, who still retained their infamously alluring voice; this trait was already established in Homer’s Odyssey, where the eponymous hero is asked to be tied to the ship’s mast in order to resist the Sirens’ deadly song. This particular attribute is deeply gendered, since the Sirens’ danger lies in their having a voice, contrary to patriarchal gender conventions: their ability to sing literally causes death, thus encapsulating the male fear of allowing women to speak in public."

– Lamia, Sirens, and Female Monsters: Feminist Reframings of Classical Myth in 19th-Century Literature, Posted on 31st March 2022 by Nina Triaridou, Antigone journal ⠀

Take the Sirens' deadly song, for example. As Nina Triaridou argues, "the Sirens’ danger lies in their having a voice, contrary to patriarchal gender conventions: their ability to sing literally causes death, thus encapsulating the male [i.e. patriarchal] fear of allowing women to speak in public." Around the time of those myths' first tellings, women were not meant to tell their stories, and so instead, stories were told about the importance of silencing them.

“When the Sea came to our village, she was an old woman. She arrived when the water crested and draped over the earth, its salty fingers pushing out offerings of sea glass and bladder wrack. Her dress trailed behind her, hair tangled with kelp and tentacles. No one doubted that she was the Sea. Everyone was disappointed."

– The Day of the Sea by Jennifer Hudak

However, the femininity of sea monsters is also connected to the fact that the ocean is usually coded as feminine (e.g. "the sea is a cruel mistress") and all that traditionally, water is a feminine archetypal force along with the moon, soil, and caves, as opposed to the masculine symbols of the sun, fire, sky, and mountains. Equally, darkness, emotion, intuition, the unconscious, and chaos are feminine, as opposed to their masculine counterparts of light, logic, reason, the conscious mind, and order.

Again, because we live in a world that venerates the masculine side of all those polarities, the deep feminine does sound like a scary proposition.

And it is, but it's also the home of transformation, connection and relatedness (as opposed to the masculine focus on stability, individuation, and separation).

Ultimately, we need both forces. If we allow the feminine to stay in the shadow – if we continue turning away from our emotions, intuition, and our quieter needs for self-reflection, mystery, even chaos – then we are inviting the Leviathan, Scylla and Charybdis into our worlds, along with other watery beasts like the Kraken (or the Kra-Karen if you've read the Dungeon Crawler Carl books, which was a reference I enjoyed greatly, and one that paints a brilliantly modern picture over everything I've just been talking about).

Patriarchal values encourage us to be the constant hero – to strive for outer strength and success and the shiny achievements that result from slaying weakness, vanquishing enemies, and just… doing – but we can't stay in that mode indefinitely. As with pretty much everything, balance is key. Just as the tide advances and withdraws in an endless cycle, a life of wholeness and growth will also oscillate between feminine and masculine energies: periods of individuation and self-assertion are followed by periods of integration, reflection and connection, and on and on.

Shadow Work and the Rising Deep

So, we all need to take a deep breath and face our sea monsters at some point. If we insist on sailing smooth, shallow waters – living only at the surface – these monsters will catch us off-guard. But if we dare to look down, to meet the beasts below with curiosity instead of fear… that's when things can change.

Over the course of this series, we're going to meet monsters of all kinds: Medusa, the vampire, the witch, the dragon, the shadow beast, ghosts, werewolves, zombies and the Chimera. Each has its own lore, its own wisdom and its own challenge to take on.

Welcome to the deep

Here at the very beginning of the journey, it's the sea monster's challenge that we must face: are we willing to wade into the water? Are we willing to brave a look into the depths?

If it's safe to do so, close your eyes, then take a deep breath and imagine that you’re standing at the edge of the world – a cliff overlooking the midnight ocean. Salt air fills your lungs. You can hear the crash of waves breaking far below. The moon hangs huge in the air, its silver light turning the water to mercury.

Somewhere in the distance, something moves beneath the surface, and you don’t need to see it to know that it’s vast. But you step forward anyway, and begin to descend – down, down the crumbling path that leads to the rocks, slick with saltwater.

Then, as you kneel at the boundary between land and sea, the waves still – the water becoming a black mirror. And as you look into that mirror, you find a face staring back. It's yours, at first, but then it shifts – becoming strange, suddenly: older, wilder, eyes gleaming with wisdom, with grief, with power, truth, and with everything you've ever rejected, too, everything you've tried to forget or disallow.

Looking deep into those eyes, though, I wonder if you feel not repulsion or even fear, but… something else. Something with more promise, more purpose. I wonder if you can feel that this monster is not separate from you, never was, and never needed to be, either. Not really.

So you breathe and you do the only thing you can: you let it rise, let it speak, and you listen to the song it sings.

Now, I can't tell you what you may hear within that melody if you listen for long enough; whether you’ll remember who you were before these parts of you were silenced, before the storm, before the forgetting; whether you'll hear a plea or a warning or a cry of strength; or whether, for you, something different will surface. But, no matter what it offers, I can tell you that your mission is not to banish the monster. None of us is on that path. Instead, our quest is to welcome it home.

So, as you pause there by the water’s edge for just a moment longer, face to face with this dark being, I'd like to ask if you can sense this simple thing: that the work has already begun.

I'll leave you with that, and I hope to see you for the next episode in this series, where we're going to meet the queen of rage herself: Medusa.

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***

With a mocking smile, he placed one hand upon my shoulder and, holding me tight, bared my throat with the other, saying as he did so: “First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions". (...) I was bewildered, and, strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it is a part of the horrible curse that such is, when his touch is on his victim.

– Bram Stoker's Dracula (1931)

Has there ever been a time when we humans were not fascinated by monsters? Every culture's stories are saturated with darkness and menace: vampires, werewolves, changelings, ghosts, incubi, succubi… So, what if our obsession with the monstrous were about more than just the drama of the macabre? What if the creatures we most fear are not enemies at all, or even threats, but heralds or helpers? And, if so, how can we use their messages to better our lives?

Today, I’d like to explore the strange, beautiful, and terrifying world of monsters — not just as characters in stories, but as archetypal symbols of our inner worlds, and the shadow self. Why? Because what these eerie messengers have to say can empower us more than you might ever have imagined.

Humans need monsters

We humans, it seems, have a fundamental need for monsters. We are drawn to them, and fascinated by them, and if you take them away from us, we'll find a way to create them back into our worlds.

During the West’s Age of Enlightenment — that is, the 17th and 18th centuries – the church took a stand against what it saw as an unsavoury fixation on the grotesque, and all but erased the monsters that had up until this point saturated literature and storytelling. But the people of the time didn't abandon their fascination with monsters as the church had intended. Instead, they projected their need onto unsuspecting human targets – labeling people as witches, vampires or werewolves. This led, of course, to the witch trials and the death of between thirty and sixty thousand people – mainly women – in Europe and America.

Thankfully, the literary monster made a comeback in the late 18th century with the infamous gothic beasts of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula.

The birth of the monster

Our monster lust has an interesting genesis.

In his book, Monsters, David D. Gilmore traces the first appearance of monsters back to the dawn of human civilization. Though there are records of monster-like cave paintings that predate this point in our history, by and large, monsters came onto the scene at the same time as social order. As Gilmore explains, art historian Heinz Mode "argues that visual portraits of menacing creatures occur precisely at the same time as does literacy" and that "consciousness of such ideas, as far as archeology can tell, occurs as a product of the earliest known civilisations, in the period of around 3000 BC".

So, it seems almost as if monsters serve as some kind of cosmic balancing device or, perhaps, as idealised society's evil twin or shadow self. Monsters function as a reminder of what we should fear and avoid; a metaphorical means of teaching us about evil and sin.

Compounding this idea, the words "monster" and "demonstrate" (or demon-strate) have the same etymological root in the Latin word "monstrum", which means "divine omen" or "portent". The word "monstrum", in turn, is derived from the verb "monere", meaning "to warn" or "to advise".

So, the idea of learning from monsters about what it means to be human is no modern flight of fancy or indulgent act of over-intellectualisation. It is, perhaps, what monsters were always meant for.

Monsters as archetypes

“Archetypes are the living systems of reactions and aptitudes that determine the individual’s life in invisible ways.”

- Carl Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, 1959

To view this idea through a psychological lens, we can see that monsters are archetypal and, as such, they speak to us on a deep, instinctual level about both the inner and outer world.

Those who aren’t that familiar with the term archetype may think of human characters when they first hear the word – the magician, the mother, the artist, the child… But archetypes aren't limited to the humanoid or even the animate.

In fact, some of the most pervasive and evocative archetypal motifs that show up in our dreams, myths, stories, etc. are non-human: the ocean, the mirror, the forest. Storms, fire, light, darkness… These universal symbols speak to us and through us on a primal level – we relate to them as more than their literal meaning, and we automatically understand them as both external and internal things. Fire is not just a flickering flame; it's passion, love, drive. Darkness is not just the absence of light; it's fear, threat, uncertainty. The unknown.

If you’re interested in the meanings of different archetypes, here’s a glimpse:

​​The House

Shelter, memory, self. But also: containment, repression, ghost.

The house holds our inner architecture. Attics brim with what we’ve forgotten; basements, what we fear to confront.

It is the psyche’s blueprint — and the monsters inside are often parts of us.

The Ocean

Endless, ancient, unknowable. It represents the unconscious mind, the maternal abyss, the place we emerged from and fear returning to. To face the ocean is to face what we cannot control — feelings too big to name, truths too vast to hold.

The Mirror

Reflection, distortion, doubling.

What does it show when no one’s looking? What does it reveal when you stare too long?

The mirror is the archetype of self-awareness — and its shadow: self-loathing, illusion, ego collapse.

The Void / Darkness

Absence, potential, terror. It is where form ceases and mystery begins. Not inherently evil, but terrifying because it’s blank. It asks: Who are you without your story?

The Forest

Liminal, wild, ancient. It is where logic dissolves and instinct takes over. The known becomes unknowable, paths twist, symbols breathe. The forest is the unconscious — the sacred chaos where ego gets lost to find itself.

The Storm

Sudden change, emotional upheaval, catharsis. The storm doesn’t ask permission. It arrives. Destroys. Clears. It’s the archetype of transformation through crisis.

Fire

Destruction and illumination. It burns away falsehood, but also razes comfort. A sacred force of purification and rage. To invite fire is to risk being remade.

I'm sure you've heard of the Shadow Self – a term coined by Carl Jung to describe the resisted, rejected and forgotten aspects of who we are. The Shadow itself is also an archetype. In fact, it's one of the purest, oldest and most archetypal archetypes, and it is also the home of and the fabric from which monsters are made.

Dracula, Medusa, the Minotaur, the Golem, the Sphynx, the Sirens. These figures can be understood as personifications of what we're afraid to confront or own in terms of our own psyche, and of taboos and disallowed behaviours in terms of the external rules and morals of society.

Looking inwards, we might read monsters as representations of exiled parts of the personality — aspects of self that have been rejected or denied, and that can now only wait to be seen, named and welcomed home. Just like Beauty's Beast or the frog-prince who needs a single kiss, when our monsters are brought out of the shadow and into the light, they can transform into something altogether different.

Monsters as divine messengers

“In mythos and fairy tales, deities and other great spirits test the hearts of humans by showing up in various forms that disguise their divinity. They show up in robes, rags, silver sashes, or with muddy feet. They show up with skin dark as old wood, or in scales made of rose petal, as a frail child, as a lime-yellow old woman, as a man who cannot speak, or as an animal who can. The great powers are testing to see if humans have yet learned to recognize the greatness of soul in all its varying forms.”

― Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves

Psychologist and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estés talks about monstrous characters as if they are guides, doors or road signs to our natural instincts — parts of ourselves, perhaps, that have only gone wild because they were ignored or starved in the first place.

Think of the Minotaur, trapped in his labyrinth — a terrifying threat, and a symbol of rage, destruction and primitive animalistic instinct. Read psychologically, that labyrinth is the psyche and, trapped within it, the Minotaur is our repressed emotion or unresolved conflict. This monster is not, as it might first seem, the enemy; it's the entity that was left behind, and a potent warning about the damage done by denial.

Estés writes: “The wild nature carries the bundles for healing; she carries everything a woman needs to be and know. She carries the medicine for all things.” The “wild nature” Estés talks about here is the instinctive, emotional self – a part of the inner world that can seem and feel beastly, but only because we've forgotten its language.

Estés is writing for women, so her statements are gendered, but instincts and emotion are of course not only for women. No matter our gender, this world trains us from day dot to disconnect from our (quote/unquote) "wild nature" – girls are taught to numb and quiet their feelings in order to be good and nice and amenable; boys are taught that men don't cry or show weakness; and we're all taught that logic and rationality are King, which is another gendered archetype, used here very much intentionally. The strong, stoic, dispassionate and accountable king — the one who slays monsters to protect the realm — is the persona we are taught to strive for… but at what cost?

In Jungian analysis, monsters are seen as shadow figures — the parts of ourselves we repress because they’re too painful, too intense, or considered socially unacceptable. The Shadow, then, as the inner realm of monsters and madness is certainly a frightening prospect, but as most of us are well aware, the darker parts of the mind are not all bad. Jung himself is often quoted to have said that the Shadow is “ninety percent pure gold.” Monsters, I'd like to argue, are the guardians of that gold.

Monsters in modern therapy

“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
- Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, 1944

Modern psychotherapy is, in many ways, a monster story. Shadow work is essentially the process of descending into your own internal labyrinth, facing the beasts within, and emerging transformed.

We need to do this because, when we repress emotions like anger, shame, desire, or grief, as we all do, they don’t disappear, but go through a dark process of metamorphosis and reappear as monsters.

Unprocessed pain becomes a ghost, lingering in the background, rattling chains only you can hear.

Suppressed rage becomes a werewolf, calm by day but clawing its way out when the moon is high.

Disowned desire becomes a vampire, feeding in the dark on whatever it can get.

Repressed grief becomes a wailing banshee; shame, a golem, built from fear; ignored intuition, a siren, leading you in circles, calling you to places you refuse to go.

These monsters don’t show up to torment us; they appear because they’re trying to get our attention – because they need to get our attention.

Estés refers to this as “the return of the wild self”. And she implores us to "go out in the woods, go out. If you don't go out in the woods nothing will ever happen and your life will never begin."

The darkness calls

As Joseph Campbell said, “The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.”

Whether we're descending to the depths of the ocean to face the Kraken, entering the labyrinth to meet the Minotaur, or wandering into the woods to reckon with the wild self, into the darkness we must go if we wish to live, to grow, to be. Because without darkness, there cannot be light, and vice versa.

So, before I bring this piece to a close, let me ask you a couple of questions. First, this:

When you hear the word "monster", which monster comes to mind?

Which monster has most haunted you in your life?

I'm not just interested in the ones that made you jump. I want to know about the monsters that have lingered. The ones you dreamed about. The ones that made something in you go quiet when you saw them.

You might think of a creature from a bedtime story, a beast in a movie you were too young to watch, a character from a book or TV program that simply stayed with you for longer than you thought it should. You may even think of a monster from a nightmare that no one but you would know about.

The really juicy question, if you have a monster in mind, is this:
What if that monster stayed because it had something to say?

What if it wasn't chasing you at all, but calling you?

If you’re willing, write down the name of your monster – not to banish it, but to begin listening.

Do this for yourself in private, or in the comments so I can read it. But either way, remember that the monsters that haunt us are the ones that carry meaning. To speak their names, is to open a door – just a little – to invite the conversation you need to have in order to decipher that meaning.

I hope to help with that conversation. The remaining articles in this eleven-part series will each tackle different monsters and types of monster from their vast history. Will your monster make the list? Let's see.

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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Over the cliff, the woman was thrown. Over time, the sea and the rocks and the fish together stripped her of flesh and sinew, leaving only bones. As she lay underwater, Skeleton Woman turned over and over in the currents – cast away, but not forgotten. Not entirely.

One day, a fisherman unknowingly hooked her ribcage while out at sea. Assuming he'd caught a very big fish, he struggled to reel her in, thinking of all the meals he'd provide for his people, only to be horrified when her skeletal form emerged from the water.

But he didn't realise what had happened, exactly. He thought her a ghost or monster born of the sea, and so when he snatched up his gear and fled across the tundra, unwittingly dragging her behind, he was terrified, believing her to be in pursuit. No matter how fast he ran, she followed, bumping along behind his kayak, collecting icicles and frozen fish as she went.

Eventually, he reached his home, where he collapsed in fear and exhaustion. But when he lit his whale oil lamp and saw her twisted bones strewn on the ground, he found himself moved by compassion. So, gently, he began to untangle the Skeleton Woman from his fishing line, murmuring soft words like a lullaby. "Oh, na, na, na."

First he untangled the toes, then the ankles.

"Oh, na, na, na," he sang, on and on.

The fisherman worked into the night until, after dressing her in furs to keep her warm, Skeleton Woman's bones were all in the order a human's should be.

Now, as he oiled the precious wood of his fishing rod and rewound the gut, he gazed over at Skeleton Woman from time to time, the light of the fire flickering across her form. Eventually, the man fell asleep. As he dreamed, for reasons we don't know, a single tear fell from his eye. Seeing this, Skeleton Woman became suddenly aware of the extreme thirst that was upon her. She dragged her bones across the ground, put her mouth to his cheek and drank.

That tear became a river, so she drank and she drank and she drank. She then reached into his chest to take out the drum of his heart, which she beat to a reviving, soul-arousing rhythm. Bom, Bomm! … Bom, Bomm!

Singing now, Skeleton Woman sang the flesh back onto her body: she sang for hair, and keen eyes, and nice strong hands; she sang for breasts, and legs, and everything a woman needs to be whole.

When she was done, she sang the sleeping man's clothes off and crept into bed with him, where she replaced his heart and entangled her body with his – tangled in a good way now – skin to skin.

The story goes that she and the fisherman went away together and were forever well-fed by the creatures she'd known underwater. At least, the people say that this is true, and that is all they know.

Bone-deep truth

"This story reminds us that true beauty is revealed only when we stop wishing for ugliness to disappear and accept the other for what he or she -or place-is."

– Trebbe Johnson, Lessons from Skeleton Woman: Radical Joy Revealed

This is the tale of Skeleton Woman, a story based on an Inuit poem, told by Clarissa Pinkola Estes in Women Who Run with the Wolves, and paraphrased here for brevity.

I'm telling you this story because it is beautiful and because it is a most potent symbolic map for the ever-present Life/Death/Life cycle that spins and spins through nature, through love and relationships, the process of personal growth, and through each of us as well.

The challenges of living in a death-averse world

In our culture, we are taught to cling to the “life” side of the cycle: to growth, beauty, vitality, certainty, progress. We fight to keep the “light” on, even as the flame gutters.

But here’s the thing: the moment we resist the death side of life — loss, endings, stillness, grief — we also resist the fullness of love, of wholeness, of meaning itself, as well as the opportunity to transform, or to be reborn, as something new, more vital and more connected.

Death in other cultures

This isn't the case in all cultures. In Bhutan, there's a belief that thinking about death five times a day will make you happy. In Thailand, Buddhist Monks have been known to meditate to photos of rotting corpses as a reminder of their own mortality. In the practice of traditional native healing or shamanism, Estés writes, Lady Death is said to turn the baby in the womb to the head-down position so it can be born.

Life is death, and death is life. Because to love is to risk loss. To create is to accept eventual destruction. To truly live is to die a little over and over again, each time reforming anew. Wiser. Greater. More whole.

The meaning of Skeleton Woman

The story of Skeleton Woman reminds us that we can’t just chase the catch; we must also meet the bones. We need to tend to the tangled, terrifying parts of ourselves, and offer them a seat by the fire. The new life both Skeleton Woman and the fisherman wound up enjoying (pun intended) was only made possible because he got over his fear, stopped running, and let himself see her as she was.

This isn’t just about shadow work or grief processing, though it can look like those things. It’s about learning to sit with the old as well as the new; the crone as well as the maiden. It's to welcome not only birth and expansion, but also decay and descent, as equally important and equally nurturing parts of the experience of life.

Welcoming Death and Endings

So, what if we were to see death not as something that ends things, but reveals them? The Life/Death/Life cycle issues clarity – it feeds a particular type of wisdom that can only be earned through surrender.

And yet… Most of us spend our lives trying to stay forever in the “spring” of being. As if we can outsmart entropy. As if darkness is a flaw to fix rather than a chapter to honour.

So, the lesson to be taken from Skeleton Woman's story is simple, if not easy or painless. It's this:

If you want more life, you must befriend death.

If you want growth and new beginnings, you must embrace decay, loss and inevitable endings.

It hurts, doesn't it? Even just to think about it. And that's the point. If life is death and death is life, then pleasure is pain and pain is pleasure. Love is loss and loss is love. These things are one and the same: they cannot be split, and the harder we try to divide them, the less we get of the side we believe we want.

So, whatever this means for you, I'm asking you to give yourself a gentle permission now to let things go.

Let relationships shed their old skins.

Let identities dissolve so new ones can emerge.

Let love mean loss.

Let epiphany mean doubt.

Let beginnings form from endings.

Because what we grieve, we have loved.

And what we allow ourselves to relinquish makes space for the new life that comes next.

So, the next time life brings you to your knees, or strips you bare, or hauls up something skeletal from the depths, don’t run. Light a lamp. Sit beside the bones. You might just find they’re yours — and that they have been waiting all along, ready now to be sung back to life.

—

References:

• Skeleton Woman, Inuit folklore

• Clarissa Pinkola Estés, ‘Women Who Run With the Wolves’

• Trebbe Johnson, ‘Lessons from Skeleton Woman: Radical Joy Revealed’

• K. M. Weiland, ‘Writing Archetypal Character Arcs’

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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The reason this meditation is so versatile is that it works with archetypal imagery and metaphors that stretch and bend to fit the individual challenges of your life. In other words, it asks your mind to do what it does best, which is to make connections between your experiences and encounters, and to find meaning in sometimes the most surprising of places.

You can listen to the full visualisation on YouTube.

We’re Hazel (ex boxer, therapist and author) and Ellie (ex psychology science writer). We left our jobs to build an interactive narrative app for self-awareness and emotion regulation (Betwixt), which you can try on Android here and on iOS here.

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