All human persons -- not just men but also women -- come equipped with the Wise Old Man archetype in their psyches.
Young Dante aspired to be a poet. This was to be his professional persona for presenting himself to the world. He engaged the positive Wise Old Man archetype in his psyche by aspiring to the one of the great poets. The poet Virgil was among the great poets admired by young Dante.
When men today undertake to develop a professional persona as part of their identity, they can engage the positive Wise Old Man archetype in their psyches by admiring and striving to emulate excellent male exemplars. (I will discuss women and the Wise Old Man archetype in the psyches below.)
Similarly, all human persons -- not just women but also men -- come equipped with the Great Mother archetype in their psyches.
Now, literary critics regard the character Beatrice to be a compound construct based not only on young Beatrice but also on other women in the poet's life, including presumably his wife. I agree with this judgment. As a result, I think that the poet was accessing the positive Great Mother archetype in his psyche when he constructed the composite character named Beatrice -- not just the anima archetype that young Dante had projected on to young Beatrice.
No doubt many men and many women today will have difficulty accessing the positive Great Mother archetype in their psyches -- probably more difficulty than Dante the poet had.
In the Christ myth, Mary, the mother of Jesus, has been constructed as a positive Great Mother archetype. Dante the poet had this mythic imagery of Mary to draw on.
Concerning imagery of the positive Great Mother archetype, see Harding's book WOMAN'S MYSTERIES: ANCIENT AND MODERN (1935) and Charlene Spretnak's book MISSING MARY: THE QUEEN OF HEAVEN AND HER RE-EMERGENCE IN THE MODERN CHURCH (2004).
In any event, Harding notes that young Dante's passionate love for the young Beatrice held "nothing but suffering and frustration" for him (page 455). As I have indicated, Dante's inner suffering was undoubtedly compounded by being exiled from his hometown and wife and children.
Then Harding goes on to make one of the most extraordinary claims about the DIVINE COMEDY that I have ever seen anybody make:
"[Y]et it [his experience of suffering and frustration of his early love for Beatrice] proved the stimulus to the inner experience described in the DIVINE COMEDY, and to the quest that culminated in the vision of the celestial rose, which corresponds to the supreme mandala of Buddhist initiations and to the vision of Selfhood that we have been discussing" (pages 455-456).
Of course somebody could claim that the correspondence between the celestial rose in Dante's DIVINE COMEDY and the supreme mandala of Buddhist initiations is not accurate. Such a person would say, "No, the vision of the celestial rose in Dante's DIVINE COMEDY does not correspond to the supreme mandala of Buddhist initiations."
But what if the celestial rose does correspond, as Harding says?
If Harding is correct about this correspondence, then men and women in Western culture today can look to Dante the poet as a pioneer showing them the inner way to Selfhood. That's the good news.
The bad news is that the inner way to Selfhood involves suffering through the inner Inferno, which is both hot and cold, and then suffering through the inner Purgatory and then suffering through the inner Paradise.
If men today in the second half of their lives want to try to follow Dante's example of an inner journey, they might find it helpful to remember their first experience of projecting the anima archetype on to a woman so that she was "it" for them. Men could commemorate the "it" woman experience by using the name of the woman involved as the name of their feminine guide in the inner world to help them access the positive Great Mother archetype in their psyches.
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