The Ravaged Bridegroom Quotes

“Paradoxically, the feminine soul in our culture subsists on dimes, while millions are spent to dramatize her victimized condition.
Imagine what would happen if images of the victimized feminine were banned in our culture. We would lose many of our classical dramas Tamberlaine, Othello, St Joan. Opera houses would not resonate with the anguish of La Iraviata, Lucia di Lammermoor, Madam Butterfly, Anne Boleyn. Theaters would not play Tennessee Williams, Eugene O'Neill, Samuel Beckett. Bookshelves would be depleted without Anna Karenina, The Idiot, the poetry of Robert Browning, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton. The list is endless. The cruelty of the victimization is veiled by the beauty of the art form in which the images are enshrined. Without those diaphanous veils, we have something quite different -Dallas, Dynasty, Miami Vice and ubiquitous examples of advertising where the feminine is raped by male and female alike. At the bottom of this barrel is pornography.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“So long as the meaning of a dream is not brought to consciousness, the metaphors we are dreaming are enacted either in the bodies or in our relationships. If, in the other hand, we work hard on associations to the dream images, and allow the feelings, imagination and mind to move in and through and around the symbol, inevitably, we are silenced by the rightness of the metaphor. There is a moment of YES! or OH NO! when the truth resonates through body, soul and mind, sometimes a painful truth, but nevertheless a truth that leads towards freedom.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“In the self-destructive and murderous literalism of our time, caution and careful consideration are necessary to protect the psychic reality.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“That first love warrants careful consideration. In recognizing what was projected then, we can often see the same projection recurring in every serious relationship. Part of the projection is neurotic; part is a genuine yearning for the Beloved. The projection itself may become a betrayer— in a man, the maiden in the tower; in a woman, the rescuing knight. If not recognized as projections, these inner images become the ultimate betrayers of oneself. We cannot look to another human being to complete our soul process. The inner marriage is a divine marriage, the outer marriage a human one.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“Without embodied soul, spirit cannot manifest through human feeling.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“Without embodied soul, spirit cannot manifest through human spirit.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“The fear of being receptive also manifests in emotional blocks that restrict dialogue in daily encounters. The feminine side in both men and women is so frail that anything radical coming in from outside has to be censored in order to protect the container against the possibility of shattering. On the other hand, the masculine side often lacks the strength to penetrate; terror of losing oneself in another overwhelms the initial thrust that could lead to deeper intercourse. This biological imagery clarifies the ways in which we all move between our masculinity and our femininity in daily conversation. But how many of us are flexible enough to fully receive another without critical judgment? How many of us are able to trust that we will be received unconditionally? How many of us are able to stand to our own phallic truth when we see our relationships endangered?”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“So long as consciousness is enslaved by the darkness of unconsciousness, we blindly live out these handicaps in our lives, projecting them onto our men or choosing defeated men as an image of our own defeat. The flames of our fear, grief and rage burn without light. Without realizing what we are doing, we can allow consciousness to fall into the service of darkness. If, on the other hand, we are conscious of the darkness, that very consciousness is the light that illumines the darkness. This is the journey into mature consciousness, with arms and legs, heart and genitals, strong enough to bear the lights.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“In any revolution the greatest danger is that the oppressed become carbon copies of their oppressors. They fail to see that fighting back with the same tactics, same values, same psychic weapons, can change nothing. Sudden decisions to draw the line and shout "enough" won't work. Men and women who have worked diligently to liberate their femininity from internal Nazi prison camps dare not rest on what they have accomplished. Too soon they may unwittingly find themselves once again collaborating with the very energies that imprisoned them in the first place. Since these regressive complexes resist giving up control, they become more subtle and more dangerous. Hope withers into despair, unless creative masculinity protects the feminine values.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“So long as we are blind to our inner tyrant, we blame an outer tyrant, some person or some system, for victimizing us. That maintains the split because victim and tyrant are dependent on each other, and together they must be healed. Either/or thinking is symptomatic of this split. It is patriarchal thinking and maintains the destructive status quo. It allows people to smile benignly and say, "I don't know what you’re going on about,” when they themselves have had a medically inexplicable heart attack or their own cedars are dying of acid rain. Broken hearted or terrified, they smile, unaware.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“We are all unconsciously bound to the wheel of fortune. It goes round and round and we go blindly around on it until one day something happens that wakes us up, face to face with ourselves. What for years we could not or would not see is made visible. The unconscious is made answerable to consciousness. The Self demands a reckoning: the ego must recognize what it has long feared and rejected. Whether we grow or wither in that encounter depends on whether we cling to our ego's rigid standpoint or whether we choose to trust the Self and leap into the unknown.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Masculinity in Women

“The inner dictators enslave more cruelly than the outer.”
― Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: Maculinity in Women