Animus I

..... animus appears as Hermes, messenger of the gods; in dreams he is a helpful guide--C.G.Jung

I was 13 or 14 year old at that time.  I had just started reading the trio of  Koestler, Orwell  and Dostoevsky . To understand what follows, at that time I had morally given up communism but emotionally was still attached to the great Soviet myth. The following dream was the first in a series that ended about 20 years later.—

(I often have dreams where ‘I’ am not Saroja, but stripped of most of my identities, yet usually am a girl or a woman but not always – in this dream series ‘I’ is not Saroja, but still a female. These dreams have a strong mythical tinge) 

I am living in a house with my father.  A man in a red car pays a visit. Father is not at home. This man has ostentatiously come to visit my father, but I know he has come to meet me. He has strong Russian features. This Russian then presents me with a red frock.  I am very happy with the present, go and change into it, but the frock is too short, doesn’t fit and I am pulling it here and there trying to make it fit. This Russian doesn’t notice anything odd and I feel embarrassed and happy at the same time.

When I woke up, this character from my dream had walked into my real life. I had a ghostly presence standing behind me on the right. Right from the beginning, I knew that this Russian whom I called my guardian angel was a creation of my mind. To him I reported every experience of mine, we read every book together, and I was never lonely even for a moment over the next year or year and a half till this experience lasted. I recognized him in the voices that Joan of Arc heard. More disturbingly, I recognized him in O’Brien from 1984. He was a pillar of support, though he never spoke a word. He was ‘dumb’.

Without him I would have never found the strength to fight gender prejudices both at home and at school. Like most people, I accepted gender stereotyping. But I did not feel one iota a ‘woman’. Now, being of scientific bent of mind, I had read about XXY chromosome females. I thought I was one of those, i.e., it was easier for me to accept gender roles and place myself outside it than challenge it. It was with menarche that I had to revaluate everything. At school, boys were not a challenge intellectually, so physically I had to prove myself their equal by outperforming them. I discovered that I had a talent for long jump. Every day I used to practise before and after school hours. World record for long jump was 29 ft something for men. That was my target. My average jump was about 16ft and best was 18ft. I don’t know how all this would have ended had we girls once in an inspired burst of play not beaten the boys in a basket ball match. That was the last match that I ever played. After that I did not long jump either. Guess part of me was tired with all this competitiveness and pure physical existence.  Later in life, I have had running race against men on three occasions and won each time. Last time it  was against my nephews some five years back. Poor guys, their mothers and sisters were cheering for me. At home I reacted to pressures to be more feminine by choppling off my long hair and by dressing up dowdily. For years I was the great unspeakable in my family.

The departure of my guardian angel came with the following dream – I was plucking some flowers from a tree and suddenly a feeling of horror overwhelms me. I realize that my guardian angel was Death personified. He makes an appearance with an axe. In his presence I lose the fear of dying but have strong reservations against being killed by human hands. Then I realize that he is not human. I had accepted death and was calmly walking with him. Then we were walking past scenes from my past. My old school, my friends. I was looking at them dispassionately. disassociated from them. Then my bookshelf and out tumbled a small notebook that I used to have. I lazily flicked it open, and it opened on a page where I had written my excitement at understanding the meaning of a closed universe. Now we were at an open field where I was to die, but suddenly death lost all hold on me and I wanted to live and study. My guardian angel just faded away. When I woke up, the ghostly presence was gone. My life and its priorities became very clear to me. 

Then I came across this poem of Emily Dickinson, which summed it up so well (parts of it atleast)

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labour, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then 'tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.

Later when I started reading Jung, I came across the concept of Animus and how he also is the angel of death. 

From Wiki on Julian Jaynes

Jaynes wrote that ancient humans before roughly 1200 BC were not reflectively meta-conscious and operated by means of automatic, nonconscious habit-schemas. Instead of having meta-consciousness, these humans were constituted by what Jaynes calls the "bicameral mind". For bicameral humans, when habit did not suffice to handle novel stimuli and stress rose at the moment of decision, neural activity in the "dominant" (left) hemisphere was modulated by auditory verbal hallucinations originating in the so-called "silent" (right) hemisphere (particularly the right temporal cortex), which were heard as the voice of a chieftain or god and immediately obeyed.

Jaynes wrote, "[For bicameral humans], volition came as a voice that was in the nature of a neurological command, in which the command and the action were not separated, in which to hear was to obey. Jaynes argued that the change from bicamerality to consciousness (linguistic meta-cognition) occurred over a period of centuries beginning around 1200 BC. The selection pressure for Jaynesian consciousness as a means for cognitive control is due, in part, to chaotic social disorganizations and the development of new methods of behavioral control such as writing.