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I’m a big Elinor Dickson fan. She is one of the wise elders of our time. She spent more than 35 years as a Jungian therapist, and nearly 20 years as a community builder and chief psychologist at a trauma hospital. And she of course co-wrote Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness with her good friend, the very famous Jungian Marion Woodman. That book has been so formative in my own life and work, and particularly to how I figured out what I was up to in my book On Our Best Behavior.

It was such an honor to talk to Elinor today about the new universal mythos that our culture so badly needs. I loved hearing Elinor’s historical perspective on how so much of our modern world is actually shaped by the Great Plague. We talked about the idea of living in a pre-Christian world. And we talked about matriarchies and patriarchies—and how neither are right for us.

We also talked about inspiring female archetypes, where Elinor sees hope, and the crazy ways that, within chaos, a deeper intrinsic order reveals itself.

After our conversation, I share a few more of my favorite passages from Elinor’s work. Which you may have already guessed I would, if you typically stick around until the very end. Thank you, friends.

Dancing in the Flames: The Dark Goddess in the Transformation of Consciousness

Elinor’s Website

ELINOR:

I’ve read your book and I was impressed with your diagram much better than mine.

ELISE:

No, it’s your diagram. It’s from you. No, when I saw Satya that she was doing something with you, I was like, oh my God, I need to talk to Eleanor Dickson too. As you probably can tell, Dancing in the Flames was a massive inspiration and so helpful as I was trying to understand my book and what I was trying to do. I sort of started at the end, if that makes sense, then needed to understand how I got there.

ELINOR:

I do that a lot.

ELISE:

How do I prove this to myself and other people?

ELINOR:

Yeah,

ELISE:

Yeah.

ELINOR:

No, you have kind of the vision and then you have to track it down and see how can I make this applicable and

ELISE:

How

ELINOR:

Can I speak to other people through it?

ELISE:

And in my case, I needed to prove this out to myself, and then it stayed in the book, but I had to fight. I have that in the beginning. I have a brief chapter about the history of patriarchy, which I fought really hard to keep, and I’m so glad it’s in there, but I needed to do all of that work myself because I didn’t know. I could just understand its contras and the culture and so many people. I think I had accepted it as a foregone conclusion and the way that things had always been and cultural inevitability, et cetera, and so people like you and you continue to, because my next book is an even deeper dive into the same territory, but different. Yeah. One of my favorite things about Carl Jung is that so many of his co-conspirators and colleagues are women. It’s so unusual, right?

ELINOR:

Yes. Yeah. And it makes sense.

ELISE:

No, it does.

ELINOR:

Yeah, because I think women get it. We have that natural affinity for relationship and for intuition and all those things that are so necessary, those abilities and so forth that we’ve always had that have been so

ELISE:

Suppressed, and I want to talk about that with you today. I’m not going to quiz you on Dancing in the Flames. I know you wrote it a minute ago, two minutes ago, but it’s so powerful and so resonant, and it feels like a piece of cultural prophecy that might seem obvious to you, but I think for many people it’s not. And then I think it still has these tendrils of prophecy that we’re continuing to contend with today in terms of what’s been repressed and what wants to come up. And I read the introduction for what you’re working on now, which seems like, do you feel like it’s a continuation?

ELINOR:

Yes, much deeper and I’ve gotten bolder and bolder as I’ve been writing it. And so I’ve really just in the last while put the last part into two new chapters that I’m really going for. And I was going to ask you remember to ask the least, do you think we’re ready for a new myths, a new universal myths? Because that’s really what I’m pushing right? In this book, particularly as I got to the end of it, I thought, no, I got to rewrite this whole thing in the last month or two, the ending and really be bold.

ELISE:

Yeah. I don’t even know if that’s the right question. Right. Are we ready? I think it’s coming, right? The disorder that we’re experiencing is emerging. I know you start with slouching toward Bethlehem, but can you tell us what you see, where you feel like we currently are?

ELINOR:

Well, yes, it would seem on the surface. We think of things in the states today particularly. We’re always a minor version in Canada, but that it’s the anti myth. It’s the anti, everything is just breaking up and so forth. But I think it’s writing this book kind of as for life after death, that those of us who can move through and it is almost like a Petri dish where you can see all the reasons and why and why we’re dissolving and why we have to dissolve, and then what is coming out of that? What has emerged. I set myself up in this book to look at the last a hundred years, both the 20th century was very devastating, starting with the plague of the Spanish flu to the depressions and the global and the wars and two world wars, and it really, it started then this kind of really a realization for many people of our time, disintegrations really. And I thought, okay, I’m going to look for, because there’s always compensatory movement is part of our nature. And so where is the water flowing? Where is the new life coming and where are the new shoots coming? So this book, the current book was based around this and really looking for in the last a hundred years of where the new life is coming from and what form it’s taking and what shape and where is it surfacing.

ELISE:

Are you finding signs of hope little green shoots?

ELINOR:

I am. I am. Well, if you go out into the bigger perspective, two big things. One is that we found all the work that’s gone on in excavating and finally by 2018, understanding the whole matriarchal culture, the egalitarian culture, and it didn’t have memorials to war and had incredible art. And that has finally found its place in our thoughts. It’s archeology and the whole thing of DNA analysis. And we’ve got that. And that’s a big breakthrough to bring. We have to bring the past into the present to really understand our physician.

ELISE:

Well, and it’s interesting, I heard you auto-correct from matriarchal to affiliative, which I do as well because one of the things that you hear is we need a matriarchy, and I don’t think we need another dominance based, oppressive scheme with women at the top. Right. It’s a completely different model. Can you say what that is a little bit?

ELINOR:

Well, I think the origin, as I’ve talked about, is an origin. Our origins, they were egalitarian. There was no distinction. The only distinction they found was that women wore more beads

ELISE:

And had maybe slightly different hunting tools. From what I’ve come to understand, that men were more inclined to throw spears and women would use knives and smaller things

ELINOR:

To dig in the ground. And the other big breakthrough to me as I’ve phrased it, is that it symbolized for me and two young men of genius, Einstein and Carl Young, and they had between 19 three and 1913, over those 10 years, they had many, many dinners together and discussions. And if you take those and flow out from them and the work, it set a whole new basis for our understanding of inner and outer worlds. To me, it was greater than the, I talk about the Copernicus revolution. I think one of the great revolutions that people haven’t totally grasped is, and I use that just as a symbol of it, you know what I mean? Of those inner and outer space and these two men talking over dinner, young men talking over dinner, and that has, and if you follow there, both inner and outer, it’s setting up a whole new diagram that is now coming together. The veil is thinning as I see it.

ELISE:

Yeah. I want to read to you from the beginning of dancing in the flames, because that goes to this idea of patriarchy versus matriarchy and the way that the paradigm that we’ve been served, which I think many of us feel inherently intuitively is not accurate. Why? One of the reasons that it fails. So you and Marian Woodman write, while we are clarifying words, we need also to note that patriarchy and masculinity are not synonymous. Female patriarchs can be just as domineering as males. Oh, yeah. Like their male counterparts. They live in a patriarchal ethos that operates through control over others, over themselves, over nature. We need to recognize also that many men have a more finely honed femininity than many women. We are all the children of patriarchy, and therefore we all have to take responsibility for a killer power shadow that would massacre the feminine and the masculine and whatever form they manifest. This book is not a defense of the feminine at the expense of the masculine, the one without the other leads to suicide or tyranny. And so that’s so powerful just as a setup of this moment in time too,

ELINOR:

Of

ELISE:

Again, a killer power shadow. That is what we are experiencing, this extreme repression of the feminine. Can you take us back to that? When you were thinking about this egalitarian world and we think about the reverence of the mother, the black Madonna, the way that black and wise were synonymous, and then what emerged with monotheism and the sun God, and control over chaos, and how that’s screwed us up, I guess would be the simplest way of saying it, but that’s the killer power shadow. Can you explain that?

ELINOR:

Well, yeah. I think in the masculine that there’s a great tale of Gilgamesh, as I’m sure you’ve heard of. And you see, Gilgamesh had a dream. The king had a dream that he would meet this stranger, this man from nature, and that they would become fast friends, and together they would do great things. But Anka do was seduced. You have the development of the ego because you Gil tell, oh, you know more about this and you more this. See, he got seduced into the ego-centric viewpoint of the king rather than maintaining his natural instincts as the natural man. And they got separated. And I always say, what would’ve happened if they hadn’t separated? Because in Kadu was with nature and the animals and with the feminine, the natural man. And so man got split in that way, and the masculine got split. Or the men, I don’t want to use the word masculine, because I think for me it has a specific meaning. It’s not gender,

It’s beyond gender. And that’s a big difficulty in talking about it. It’s to get people to realize we’re not talking about gender. We’re talking about certain characteristics that we have in us that are organized in a sexual way, have roots, but they’re not gender that we have to be concerned about. So it goes right back there, the masculine gut split. That’s why it’s such a great story. And actually we haven’t progressed far from the last 5,000 years patriarch the cycles. They’re really the same. And I go through the shadow side of the hero in the first part of the new book and in each phase up to robotic man.

ELISE:

Yeah. Well, I want to talk about that and how did you describe it? The killer shadow? I mean, you write, this is in dancing in the flames. Ironically, the very fear that led patriarchy to repress matriarchy has kept patriarchy neurotically bound in a struggle for power to what it did and does repressed what is repressed out of fear, reemerges in the form of its repression. It is not therefore the absence of the feminine that should be lamented. Both feminine and masculine are always already present in some form. It is the distorted forms of their presence that exaggerate the tragic imbalance between them. That imbalance undermines an entire civilization contributing to its collapse. So that’s kind of it. Right. So can you talk a bit about when you think about what the masculine tries to repress and suppress and then gets into this toxic, I will repress. I mean, we see it, obviously, it’s manifold in our culture with the loss of reproductive rights and wanting to strip women from this incredibly regressive push against women is how it’s manifesting, which makes sense. But against the feminine in general, how is this resolved? Is it all need to be burnt down for something new to emerge?

ELINOR:

Well, I don’t know if it all has to be, I certainly think in many ways women have to lead the way, which doesn’t seem fair on the surface, you know what I mean? But we have to recapture the fullness of our own humanity in a feminine form that I would say women, I have to become the grail and men serve the grail, but in serving it, they partake of everything that the grail has to offer. You know what I mean? It’s a reciprocal thing. And so to focus on that, how do we become and the grail and how do we deal with each other? Often it’s the women, how women deal with each other. That is so horrifying to me at times. We have to let go of our own patriarchy and we’re afraid to because it represents control for us

ELISE:

And safety

ELINOR:

So that if you not identify with it, and yet the very identification with it puts us one down always. We can never really compete with patriarchy in its form as power over.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I mean you write about this as it’s the biggest curiosity, which is putting it lightly, but it is the ultimate dilemma that we face, and which so many women are like, I’m just going to be like men. I’m going to operate like a man. I’m going to accrue capital and power like a man, and I will be better with that power. But doing that is inherently, I don’t want to say contaminating, that’s not the right word, but often corrupting. And if you’re taking your place in the patriarchal power paradigm, that feeling of control and power is intoxicating.

ELINOR:

And

ELISE:

Yet how do you transform it if you don’t enter it? And you write about the need there of having a very conscious mother virgin crone to sail these waters. And so I think what you’re suggesting, and this is a big focus of my work, is that the grail becoming of the grail of women requires our own deep shadow work we have to become. What do you think needs to happen in that ascent to cdom, the self-actualization and the shadow work and the growth, the maturity, the owning that’s required? What do you think that looks like for women?

ELINOR:

Well, even today in the public, there are some women that do have aspects of that real deep respect for self and compassion for others that have kind of put it together. You don’t want to label because you don’t know everybody’s background. But we do have examples I think in our culture that women who have achieved power that are not power driven, although they have to often compromise to power, to stay in power, and that’s a big problem. They go against their natural instincts. It’s not safe.

ELISE:

Who do you look to? Are there examples that you can point us to of who you feel like, again, I’m sure they still have manifold shadow and their own work to do and et cetera, but who do you think is compelling?

ELINOR:

Well, I think there’s people like Amal Clooney, although she’s not spoken out on that, but even as Bill Gates, ex-wife, Melinda, and I think, well, it gets so muddied up, but I think the instinct for goodness is there, even for Hillary Clinton, for even Kamala Harris, there’s an instinct in women to see the whole and to have compassion for the whole. I know they get chewed up. I think those instincts are real. They’ve got to play this game. But I think, see, it’s a lack of a vision. We need a new vision. Young. We don’t have a mythology, and we’ve always had a mythology. Every tribe and this, we’ve had mythology, but the world has become so complicated and fragmented today that we really need a kind of mythology, a vision that gives us, that supports us in going forward as well as the work we do or have to do a vision different from the one we have now, a very different one.

I’ve been coming at it lately from that, what is the vision that we need? What is the new mythos and a world mythos, not just individuals, they’re not tribes or this or that or countries or Christianity or this or that. What is the world? What could be a new mythos that we can all what is emerging? That’s what I’ve been focused on recently is what’s emerging. That also was a story that could support us as we are trying to make those changes in our own life. If we don’t have a culture that can support us or hold up a universal vision or mythos, then it’s very difficult to operate, to become a whole person in a culture that is unholy better words to put it. But that’s one of the big problems. Yeah,

ELISE:

The fracturing of the cosmic egg. We’ve lost our collective stories and the story that holds us all together. And of course, the vacuum gets filled by fundamentalists and cult leaders and offering control and power in the face of fear.

ELINOR:

I mean, the mockery that to me in the states in a large part, I mean, I think we know of so many of the people. I’m not saying Christianity is such, right? Christianity has great hope if we understood it, but it’s almost a mockery.

ELISE:

Yes, no, it is. I want to talk about that because the way that you write about our world is potentially pre-Christian, I think is so accurate. Before we go there though, I just want to put a bow on for people who aren’t familiar, the three female archetypes, it’s the maiden mother and the crone. Crone is such an awful etymology carrying, but you write so beautifully about the crone, and I think a big part of my book is about this, the absence of the feminine elder from our culture. These are the women that were our healers. They were the ones that were executed witches. There’s a profound fear of older women in our culture, profound. We don’t want to become them. The reverberations are intense, and you offer such a compelling, I mean, I want to be a crone, but it’s this idea about the blunt truth and letting chips fall where they will. You’re right. Not that she’s without feeling, certainly not without sensitivity, but she is obs seen enough to be able to separate the irrelevant from the essence, and she has neither the time nor the energy to waste on superficiality. And you go on and it’s beautiful, and you talk about how in the crone we begin to see everything from two sides, the side that is totally in life and the side that is already dwelling in disembodied soul. The crone helps us hold the paradox

ELINOR:

Because

ELISE:

She is learned to love without any personal agenda. She makes an excellent guide. She knows how tough and how gentle we have to be to enter into this life and to leave it. She holds an unspeakable wisdom in the very cells of her body. The beauty and the horror of the whole of life are held together in love. The crone energy is strong enough to guide men into the feminine. She can hold the container in which they can experience their own shadow rage without destroying themselves or others. I mean, I know it’s been maybe 40 years or whatever since you

ELINOR:

30 years, 30.

ELISE:

Well,

ELINOR:

I just told somebody the other day, I said, well, I really see myself now as part Kry and part baba yaga.

ELISE:

I mean, can’t we all, I want to be Baba.

ELINOR:

Well, did you come here of your own free will or did you come by compulsion? And that’s her question. And if you answer free will, your head goes on a stake. If you answer by compulsion, your head goes on a stake. You have to learn to live in a both and world. I came here 65% by compulsion, and I came here 95% of my own free will.

ELISE:

That’s such a profound metaphor for life because of course we have free will, and yet life is going to just roll these boulders at us that are not under our control. So that’s the dance

ELINOR:

Ultimately.

ELISE:

Even though I think what you see in our culture, if you can step back far enough, but you see a culture that is so, if we’re talking about the feminine as irrational, the womb and the tomb, that which cannot be controlled or compelled, and then you think of patriarchy as this, I will control you. And you think about what’s happening politically in the lashing of fear to control, contain power over dynamics of what appears to be fascism happening in a place where that seemed impossible, but it is this, I will control and contain that which cannot be controlled and contained. And then I feel like the sort of cultural, mythic feminine is like, watch me knock you out. The environmental, the ecological disaster, everything that’s happening where it’s like, what the stage?

ELINOR:

Think you’re in charge.

ELISE:

Yes, you think you’re in charge. I’ve got

ELINOR:

Boost for you.

ELISE:

Yeah. Hold my beer. And so it’s wild to, and it’s another paradigm. I have this conversation with my friends all the time where in one sense, my life has never been better and more seemingly more stable and richer, et cetera. And then I’m looking at what’s happening over. It’s a great paradox to balance between what’s happening on the global and personal scale. And it feels like a culmination of this dance that we’ve been having. Well, your book Dancing in the Flames, it feels like the disorder that leads to the reorder and it’s going to happen whether we want it to. There’s no stopping it as much as people are like, let’s go back to trad wives and 1950s,

ELINOR:

I lived through that. You don’t want to do that again. No,

ELISE:

I know. I don’t. It’s very confusing when people are pioneering. I’m like, try one winter in Montana with heat and tell me about it. So what is the vision? What do you think is coming to play?

ELINOR:

Yeah. Well, I think a portal is being open. At least I still have hope for that, that all of this is just opening a portal. But I think I have met so many. It’s interesting from my part, I hope I don’t sound like the condescending elder, but I’m so grateful because there are this, I’ve met all you and Satya, there’s many others that I met through putting out that website a couple of years ago. And I’m so grateful that there are women carrying this on and seeing it through and struggling with it and making sense of it. And it’s a cause to have great gratitude for me. I don’t have a personal, I’m beyond the ego of the stuff I’ve lived too long, but I’m just so grateful for the women I do see around me in old ages. Great solace, I put it that way. Yeah.

ELISE:

We’re all deeply indebted to you. And what’s amazing about Dancing in the Flames is it’s accessible in a way that some of Marian Woodman’s other works are much harder. Amazing. But so much of this is

ELINOR:

More simplistic. Put it politely.

ELISE:

No, but it gets very difficult when you start wrestling with some of these ideas and then bringing them down in a way that people are like, oh, I understand exactly what you’re saying. And it maps to my experience.

ELINOR:

Yeah, yeah. Marian said, I remember one time we were at her place and when she first put things out and people wouldn’t understand, they would resonate bodily, but they wouldn’t understand. And I think it something like the pregnant bru, Jim, you’re talking about, and now the daughters were in university and the daughters were saying, oh, this is our book. They got it. The next generation got it. Yeah. Much easier than the first generation who felt it, but had a hard time getting it.

ELISE:

It is a somatic experience, I think, for many. And then I think what happens, which is completely understandable, is that, or sort of what we’re moving out of in third wave feminism maybe. I don’t know that we’re moving out of it. We still seem to be somewhat stuck, but it’s this awareness, and yet the instinct again is to reach for control and certainty and to place blame. And so you get two things happening, one where it’s like it’s the men and two, I’ll just enter this patriarchal paradigm, and once all the women are in charge, everything will be different. But without that becoming the crone, without that soul work, it’s again the same thing just at the hands of women, which in my work, I’m sure this is true of your work, but when I go out and talk to groups of women in my chapter and envy was essentially about how that unconscious envy is one of the mechanisms of, I think a lot of our women on women hate.

ELINOR:

All

ELISE:

That people want to talk to me about is what they’ve suffered at the hands of other women and how extra painful it feels at a moment in our culture when we’re slapping hashtag women supporting women on everything as though that’s the antidote. This is the patriarchal counter move. And meanwhile, it’s no guys, we’re missing the plot. It’s about all of us resolving our anxiety about the feminine. We

ELINOR:

Have to all do our individual work. I mean, it’s the same now, even AI and all that. It’s all based on our data. So it’s reflecting back to us exactly who we are for better or for worse, and the worldwide web.

ELISE:

Okay. This is a bit from dancing in the Flames about the emerging order. I dunno if you remember this paragraph, but I do. You write, this is about, I think, a really apt description of this moment in time, even though it was written three decades ago. It is within this chaos that a deeper intrinsic order reveals itself. This is not the imposed order that we have become so accustomed to in a patriarchal conceptualized world, an order that is not connected to the creative matrix. Rather, it is an order that emerges instead of being imposed when we are connected to this emerging order, we are psychically living from the incarnate feminine energy that has within it the possibility of transformation. We are in touch with the rhythms of matter, and its deepest wisdom.

ELINOR:

Yeah. That’s it. We all have to get back. See, our whole world is we’re not in the earth. We’re of the earth and the wisdom. That’s why I call it the wisdom option now, because in seeing the world through the eyes of the soul, because until we get to that point, we have to be rooted in the deep rules of nature. That’s what the feminine is in every way. And so everything grows out of that. And when we’re unrooted from that natural mysticism, I call it to be rooted in the laws of nature, then everything we’re doing is artificial. One of the things I found when I was coming up with that original diagram was that during that sabbatical, it was a short, I read Barbara Mann’s book on the plague, and it was so viscerally written. I mean, it’s really, and I just suddenly realized, people say, oh yeah, the modern world came out of this and this and this and this. And I thought, no, the modern world came out of the great plague where half the world’s population died and we didn’t know why. And then you start to trace, I did this big chart and I started tracing back in the day everything that was pre plague and post plague. And I put spiritually this government, everything, all the human endeavor, pre and post medicine, pre and post. And I think the modern world is founded profoundly on the fear of death.

ELISE:

Yes. Say it louder for the people in the back. Yes.

ELINOR:

I mean, not saying good or bad, but before the plague you had your herbalist and your people. And that was all around para ssus. And I’ve gone into a lot of his work, which he got the psyche and the whole thing after the plague, then you got Lia, and they were working corpses. So we got man as machine.

They discovered the blood vessels and the heart and the circulation and the nerves, and as they explored the corpse, it became man as a machine. And then we got into Newton, and the world is a great claw. So we got into the machine age, and so we could fly higher than birds and go deeper in the ocean than fish. And we could do all these things by making, and now we’re going to make ourselves into machines because we’ve discovered ai or we’ve discovered and even other, the whole biochemical, but we’ve got to get out of the machine age. I always say that, and I think people don’t really get it. We’re still in the machine age,

ELISE:

And we’re seeing the wild, this machine age, not only with AI and moving to Mars, but in this don’t dive movement and the way that these men are trying to engineer their lives for the singularity so that they can survive to the point where death is not inevitable. I mean, it’s such a wild distortion, but this exact thing that you’re describing playing out, and you trace it too. The plague as a demarcation is so stunning in part because I think even with COVID, that broke something in the psyche as well.

ELINOR:

We at least know what’s caused it, but I think it’s still in our bones, in our cells that we remember this really violent death coming at us and not knowing the source of it. And then all our reactions to the plague, all the actions we’re taking today, and it changed everything. At least that’s what I discovered in my little diagrams that I was in into those days of everything pre and post plague was just switched.

ELISE:

Yeah. This brings us to this idea of living in a pre-Christian world because essentially Dion, ISIS and Jesus Christ are potentially the same sort of metaphysical figure, right? Yeah. All of these variations of God, you write, the real reason Dionysus has been banished from our culture is that he is the God of death and resurrection patriarchy with its unrealistic faith in the goals of this life is built upon the denial of transformation and death. It cannot tolerate a God who dies, an Osiris, a Dion, isis, or a Christ. For men and women, allowing the horn God to live within us means accepting death as transformation. It means living an incarnated life, a life in which spontaneous spirit is allowed to transform matter. It means allowing spontaneity to burst through outworn patterns of thought and behavior, recognizing that these patterns are dead and allowing them to die, to make room for the new. And this is so important, and in this context of you explaining that we are pre-Christian and even the way that I didn’t grow up in a religious household, but what I heard is Jesus, he died for our sins and we got to

Get rid of sin and blah, blah, which is a reversal almost of what he was actually representing, which is death, resurrection, death, resurrection.

ELINOR:

And the scripture says it, and we don’t get it. Christ is the incarnation of wisdom.

ELISE:

Yes. Yes. And that’s our job to realize through the crucifixion and resurrection of daily life, right. Dying to our illusions, dying to our old selves, and that we can’t accept that, right. We’re like, we’ll just engineer this up into the right trajectory. We will not change. We will not allow ourselves to move or be pushed or to grow. It’s the metaphor of being compelled in free will. Right. It’s free will only,

ELINOR:

Yeah. Yeah. And it was just such a joke. No, it’s for better or worse. Well, as you know the story of Satya, I’m meeting her grandmother.

ELISE:

Yes. This is an amazing story. Yeah.

ELINOR:

And how a 17-year-old, whatever, I was 18 and somewhere in there, I mean out of sure ignorance because somebody said, well, you should go and see Dr. Anita because I had no health shirts and everything. I had an infection. First of all, you don’t go to a leading oncology surgeon for an infection. I didn’t know any better. Amazing. I went and seen her and all that happened. She changed my life. Totally.

ELISE:

Can I tell people that story? They won’t necessarily know it, but essentially, yeah. So Satya Doyle Bak, who has been on the podcast many times, who is a dear friend who I grew up with

ELINOR:

In

ELISE:

Missoula, Montana. And then our lives have intertwined in really interesting ways now. And her father was a physician. My father was a physician. We went to the same hippie dippy school, and I knew about her grandmother in San Diego because I think her grandmother was friends with Mother Teresa and

Which is dazzling. And so anyway, Satya becomes a Jungian and she decides to do this book club on Dancing with the Flames and goes to your website. And I had read, obviously Dancing With the Flames for on our best behavior, love the book and Love your work. And when she went to your website that you just put up, you explained in your bio that when you were a teenager and not in a great place, that you had approached Satya’s grandmother in San Diego, and she had, I guess, helped you with your infection, but also you became a Jungian analyst because she put you through school. Is that accurate?

ELINOR:

Well, she was examining, I was on the table there and she was sitting writing a big pad writing fears, and it can’t be that bad. And what she did was wrote a letter to the president of USD. And so I went up there and I’m an introvert. 17, 18. I was so shy, but the whole thing was I became a live-in student and it was a private university, and it took me, you’re so innocent is a nice word. Clueless is the other word when you’re that age to realize that she paid for my tuition all the way through.

ELISE:

It’s such an amazing story. And then you became a young Ian.

ELINOR:

Yeah, came back to Canada finally and finished my education. I mean, this woman changed my life entirely. I had a grade nine education. Elise and I took a commercial course, like secretarial course and bypassed the SAC test. I was a big avid reader. And I think, what did she ask me? Why did she do that? I mean,

ELISE:

This warps time, it’s the most stunning synchronicity.

ELINOR:

And then I make Satya,

ELISE:

Yeah, who had no idea. Her grandmother had never told her any of these stories, and here we are.

ELINOR:

We don’t set things out. You have intentions. I think we must’ve talked about really what my interests were and what I felt compelled to and why I’d left home at that early age and trying to find out what these questions I had. I don’t know what it was exactly, but I think if you have intentions and you’re leaning into things happen.

ELISE:

Yeah. I think that stories like this are so powerful too. For those of us who, I like systems, I like patterns. I believe in synchronicity. I have faith in a lot of some sort of organizing principle or structure and stories like that are so good at reminding us that we are contained and held in some evolving pattern. And that is larger, wiser, immortal in its own way that I think can actually be quite calming and reground us in that there is something universal. There’s something at play here. When you think about that in the context of your work and life and just following the unfolding, how do you think about it? Do you feel like been what’s propelled you forward? Not a compulsion, not a free will, but is that what it’s been for you?

ELINOR:

Well, it was having the intention. I think the free will gets expressed through intention. You know what I mean? I was going and taking junior college or something they have in the states, which we don’t have. And well, I was trying to keep body and soul together in terms of job kind of thing and going to school and reading. And I had been down in Mexico doing some humanitarian work with the young Christian workers that I’d met down there. And because I didn’t have a religious upbringing, my mother was a professional concert violinist, and my dad was a Freemason, so I didn’t have any kind of conventional Christian or upbringing. My mother, her music was her way. I remember her saying one time that her impression of organized religion was ritualized hypocrisy, which is a little rough, but

ELISE:

It’s pretty accurate.

ELINOR:

So all of this, but I was doing it with work down there, and then that’s when I came back with the infection. But you’re leaning into things that attract you.

And I often with clients would use at times, they had a big decision to make a life kind of decision to take down maybe the last 10 years down one side of the page and then across here, put the events, the people you met, a movie, anything. The places where I used to say where your heart burned within you. And as they did that, I did this for myself. And all of a sudden you knew what you had to do, where you had to go. And it was that you met a person. I met Thomas Barry and I met this person and I read this book, and as I thought of that, so I’ve often used that with other people, if appropriate to where am I at today? It’s not because, I mean, we do this, we have to, I went through classes and took classes and all that stuff, but where we end up has as much to do with following, even though we don’t know, it may be until we put it down where our heart burned within us. And so part of it was compulsion and part of it was freewill, and part of it was this and that. Yeah.

ELISE:

Are you hopeful for us?

ELINOR:

I am, but I’m not sure the worst is over.

ELISE:

I agree with that, unfortunately. I agree with that.

ELINOR:

I’d like to say otherwise I am really trying to lay it out with this last will probably be the last thing more or less that I write. Anything big that I write only be this last book. But I have your book right here, by the way.

ELISE:

Thank you.

ELINOR:

Yeah, I do. And it will be a death and resurrection story, and I’ve come to my own personal thing in it. Is that who better to tell the story or who knows more about Death and resurrection than The Crown?

ELISE:

Than the crown.

ELINOR:

So I don’t have a choice in that sense. You know what I mean? To think about this or to write about it or to try to push it to the limit and put down what I really think. But there’s a part of me that wants to ride in on my ass when there’s celebrating patriarchy and just lay it all out.

ELISE:

This is a moment where Marion Woodman and Eleanor write about this vision for a pre-Christian era that we might be in. They write. However, it could equally be argued that we are living in a pre-Christian era and that the revolutionary message of Christ, though preserved over the years among a few, has never been widely put into practice under the power as strength, mindset of the patriarchal paradigm, the basic principles of Christianity, compassion, forgiveness, repentance, love for one’s, enemies, tolerance, meekness, our elite, beyond what patriarchy stands for, may we live into the future, which I think to do will require a lot of our own internal and personal work. It is that interior spirituality, interdependence, affiliative, partnership style, living power with nature rather than power from nature or power against nature and really power as love. There’s a chart in dancing in the flames that I reproduced in on our best behavior that when my first reached out to Eleanor, she was tickled to see it reprinted however many years later.

But where they put together this idea of what the matriarchal stands for, what the patriarchal stands for, what androgynous future looks like, which I think is so powerful, this idea of androgyny. So here’s their definition of matriarchal, instinctual self, tribal polytheistic. Here’s the definition of patriarchal, ego, self hierarchical, monotheistic. And here is the androgynous soul, spirit, self, ecological inner marriage, interiorized, spirituality, matriarchal power from nature, patriarchal power against nature, androgynous power with nature. The cultural expression, matriarchal power as gift patriarchal, power as strength, androgynous power as love, the psychological state, matriarchal dependence, patriarchal independence, androgynous interdependence. So that’s what we’re moving toward. Friends power with nature. Power is love. Interdependence with an interiorized spirituality, which I read as applied spirituality is living the vertical into the horizontal and a marriage between the instinctual self and the ego self. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you. s.