But this is also true for women.
In patristic and medieval times, certain Christian writers had no problem with discussing the possibility that the mythic figure known as Christ could deify them.
After all, if we are made in the image and likeness of God, as the Bible says we are, then it would seem to follow that we are made for deification -- this is our common human destiny -- to be like God in some sense.
But in the natural course of our lives, men and women need to work out a healthy relationship with the anima archetype in their psyches before they are ready for the psycho-spiritual experience of Dionysian mysticism and deification.
But I want to say that these psychological developments are not quick and easy for men and women to work through from the onset of their proverbial mid-life crises onward in the second half of their lives. In Jung's case, he cultivated the unio mentalis for approximately three decades before he himself had profound mystical experiences in 1944 when he was hospitalized.
However, many Jesuits cultivate the unio mentalis by practicing Jesuit spirituality, but without ever having the kind of profound mystical experiences that St. Ignatius Loyola had.
To take a mundane example, we could liken the inner work that men and women need to undertake to work out a healthy and viable relationship with the anima archetype in their psyches, to undergoing something like the character Dante's extended visit to the Inferno and Purgatory -- with the character Virgil as his guide. Virgil represents the Wise Old Man archetype in the human psyche. Those two fellows took in all the sights in the Inferno and Purgatory. Beatrice, the anima figure, appears only when Dante-the-character is ready to enter Paradise in his grand tour, at which point Virgil disappears as Dante's guide.
Regardless of how long it takes, all men and women face the challenge in the second half of their lives to work out a healthy relationship with the anima archetype in their psyches -- and so all women in the second half of their lives, as Jean Houston suggests in her book THE HERO AND THE GODDESS: THE ODYSSEY AS MYSTERY AND INITIATION (Ballantine Books, 1992).
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