This article explores the theme of the crowning of the feminine that was left undeveloped in my Green Knight article.

In a post-credits scene at the very end of The Green Knight, we see a young girl putting on Arthur’s crown.

This short and mysterious scene has left many people, myself included, with a lot of questions. Why was it included? What does it mean if anything?

In this piece, I will attempt to work with the symbol of the crowning of the feminine as if it was coming from a dream. After all, great movies are not very different from collective dreams.

While this might appear obvious, I need to make clear that I am assuming that this scene, like the rest of the movie, is not ideological in essence but rather made of raw material originating from the unconscious. This point will be picked up again in the second half of the article.

Another assumption is that the subjective or personalistic interpretation is not appropriate here. In other words, the narrative structure of the movie does not appear to have been contaminated by personal biases from the director, David Lowery. As Jung writes,

The essence of a work of art is not to be found in the personal idiosyncrasies that creep into it—indeed, the more there are of them, the less it is a work of art—but in its rising above the personal and speaking from the mind and heart of the artist to the mind and heart of mankind. The personal aspect of art is a limitation and even a vice. Art that is only personal, or predominantly so, truly deserves to be treated as a neurosis. When the Freudian school advances the opinion that all artists are undeveloped personalities with marked infantile autoerotic traits, this judgment may be true of the artist as a man, but it is not applicable to the man as an artist. In this capacity he is neither autoerotic, nor heteroerotic, nor erotic in any sense. He is in the highest degree objective, impersonal, and even inhuman—or suprahuman—for as an artist he is nothing but his work, and not a human being.

Carl Jung, Psychology and Literature, CW15, par 156

The reductive, personal dimension of treating a work of art as the sum of all the artist’s biases can be a valuable way to deepen the understanding of the artist as a person. But in this case, my working assumption is that this methodological approach will not be adequate.

What we are left with then is to explore the scene through an archetypal approach, using other motives from myths and religions in order to clarify the symbols that one wishes to interpret. This is called amplification in analytical psychology.

Coming back to the scene, we have only two symbols to work with: the crown and the young girl.

Thankfully, the visual design of the crown is significant. Its design is similar to a solar halo, the ubiquitous symbol of holiness in religious symbolism. Resting on top of the head, the sun-like aspect of the halo-crown indicates a higher faculty of the mind because “it shines like the sun”.

Drawing from the understanding of the symbolism of the sun such as discussed by Jung in Mysterium Coninunctionis (CW 14, par 110 ff.), this special form of consciousness is both an aspect of the ego but is also tied to the sun as a God-image, which stands for the self. In other words, solar consciousness is the divine, world-creating quality of consciousness where the ego is able to express the authority of the self.

The crown also indicates kingship and, contrary to the spiritual halo, it has an earthly dimension. Therefore wearing a solar crown points towards the incarnate, embodied nature of being a carrier of solar consciousness. This form of kingship is thus not strictly a spiritual achievement but resonates with the mystery of the Incarnation of God in man.

With this understanding of the crown as solar consciousness, the crowning of the young girl means that the feminine becomes a bearer of solar consciousness. To clarify this idea, we will turn first to alchemy. In the Aurora Consurgens, we read:

“The heavenly judge who now appears is an alchemical parallel to the filius philosophorum. He is, as it were, the glorified, ultimate manifestation of the prima materia and is thus in a mysterious manner identical with Wisdom. Similarly, in Ripley’s “Cantilena,” Luna changes into the “splendour of the sun.”

This transformation of the feminine substance into the masculine recalls the view of Theodoret of Cyrus that Ecclesia-Luna, who represents a “composition of souls fully initiated into the mysteries,” in her final glorification becomes the sun, the image of Christ, whose light calls forth the wonder of men. Throughout this whole passage, therefore, Aurora does not really depart from the Christian doctrine of redemption.” (Marie-Louise von Franz, Aurora Consurgens, pp. 237-238)

In this alchemical parable, Wisdom appears as a heavenly judge after undergoing a solar transformation. Because the light of the sun (i.e., of consciousness) is symbolically masculine, that transformation is also in essence a masculine transformation. It is worth emphasizing that this solar transformation of Wisdom is a glorification, an exaltation of the feminine.

Image from the Rosarium Philosopher (source)

In Christian tradition, the glorification of Wisdom can be found in the Coronation of the Virgin, which was made into a dogma of the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XII in 1950 as The Assumption of Mary. Considered to be the most important event since the Reformation, Jung commented:

You are quite right; with the dogma of the Assumptio the unconscious “wells into the Church,” since Woman is its (the unconscious) representative on earth. (Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, p. 231)

If the A[ssumptio] means anything, it means a spiritual fact which can be formulated as the integration of the female principle into the Christian conception of the Godhead. (Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, p. 567)

With these two aspects, we can now understand that the crowning of the feminine is not a matter of turning women into men, or of making women a legal or religious authority above men. It means the rising of the unconscious as an autonomous agent inside each and every individual, striving for integration in consciousness. This phenomenon however will be amplified in women, for the psyche of women has been observed to be closer to the unconscious.

As I understand it, the unconscious has now the ascendancy over the old dominant of consciousness, best described as the trinitarian Christian worldview. By bringing forth what has been ignored, suppressed, and denied until now, the decaying dominant of consciousness has the opportunity of being renewed into a quaternity.

The Coronation of the Virgin by Tintoretto (source)

While I am confident about the amplification discussed until here, there are two points that might be unclear to the reader.

First, The Green Knight represents a young girl and not a woman. This can be explained by the fact that the young girl stands for “the virgin soul” that Mary exemplifies.

Second, the young girl crowns herself and is not aided by anyone. This is more difficult to explain. As it can readily be observed through dreams, the unconscious can be activated spontaneously, without any causal event related to the experience of ego-consciousness. Symbolically speaking, this is equivalent to saying that the feminine (the unconscious) initiates herself autonomously and does not require the participation of the masculine (consciousness). In a way, this is the earthly representation of the spiritual idea of the virgin birth.

All in all, we can conclude that The Green Knight scene heralds the incoming development of the crowning of the feminine as a material and incarnate reality, whose heavenly version is the Assumption of Mary.

While I could have finished the article here, it would be irresponsible to do so without trying to outline some of the dramatic consequences that the crowning of the unconscious implies.

The first immediate consequence can be explored through another alchemical representation, The Pandora picture.

Edward Edinger gives a long description of this picture in The Mysterium Lectures (pp. 132-137). While I recommend people to read this part in its entirety, I will quote the essential elements given the context of this article.

Edinger argues that The Pandora represents in a single image the “total Christian Weltanschauung” (ibid.). This means that it represents Christianity compensated by alchemy: The Pandora makes visible the union of both traditions.

Surrounded by the four evangelists (John as an eagle, Mark as a lion, Luke as an ox, Matthew as an angel), we see in the upper half the crowning of Mary by the trinitarian God (the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit). So far so good.

Looking at the lower half, we see the ongoing alchemical work. A haloed figure is extracting a monstrous figure out of a lump of matter. Quoted by Edinger, Jung comments:

“Underneath the coronation scene [is] a kind of shield between the emblems of Matthew and Luke, on which is depicted the extraction of Mercurius from the prima materia. The extracted spirit appears in monstrous form: the head is surrounded by a halo, and reminds us of the traditional head of Christ, but the arms are snakes and the lower half of the body resembles a stylized fish tail. This is without doubt the anima mundi who has been freed from the shackles of matter, the filius macrocosmi [son of the great world] or Mercurius-Anthropos, who, because of his double nature, is not only spiritual and physical but unites in himself the morally highest and lowest. The illustration in Pandora points to the great secret which the alchemists dimly felt was implicit in the Assumption. The proverbial darkness of sublunary matter has always been associated with the “prince of this world,” the devil.” (Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par 238)

By virtue of being identified with the Anthropos, this monstrous creature is the emergence of the self, not as a symbol but as a living experience.

“Symbolic images of the Self, such as this quaternity-creating one of the Coronation of the Virgin Mary and her entrance into heaven, are beautiful, grand and numinous. But the living experience of the Self is very different indeed. The living experience of the Self is a monstrosity. It’s a coming together of opposites that appalls the ego and exposes it to anguish, demoralization and violation of all reasonable considerations. That’s what a monstrosity is—a violation of everything we’ve come to expect as natural and reasonable and normal. This is how the Coronation of the Virgin in heaven looks from the standpoint of the limited, earthbound ego—it looks like the emergence of a monstrosity out of a lump.” (Edward Edinger, The Mysterium Lectures)

By crowning Mary, the God-image is being transformed to include the unconscious. This can be understood as the addition of the feminine, of matter, and of evil into the Godhead.

“[T]he center of the Christian mandala is like a cuckoo’s egg that’s been laid in somebody else’s nest. It’s been laid in the nest of the Christian mandala and something unexpected is going to hatch out of it! I think it signifies that the central myth and God-image of the Western psyche, by virtue of this alchemical process that’s been inserted into it, is giving birth to a new entity.” (ibid.)

To birth this “new entity”, the ego has to go through the gruelling alchemical transformation of being turned inside-out. Edinger describes the result of this process in the following manner:

“Now out of this lump a bizarre creature is being pulled by a crowned and haloed figure. What should we understand this figure to represent? My suggestion is that we might call it the Christified ego. What I mean by that is an ego functioning under the aegis of the Self, the crown and halo being symbols of the Self, of wholeness. And if that line of thought is right, then the ego is doing on earth what Christ is doing in heaven. Christ in heaven—in the archetypal realm—is crowning the Virgin Mary; there, the principle of materiality and egohood is being glorified. But on earth, the task of realizing that glorification is taking place through the redemption and transformation of concrete personal existence by the individuating ego; in other words, by an ego that’s consciously living out the process of continuing incarnation.” (ibid.)

The emergence of the anima mundi, breaking all the containing structures that were imposed onto it. Illustration by Mary Church. (source)

Alchemy was largely an unconscious endeavor, which allows us to see the reality of the psyche projected in the open. The fact that the material looks the way it does is not surprising to anyone who is familiar with dreams. Unconscious material is more often than not the result of meaningful things being merged together along the lines of a logic that is inscrutable to human rationality—Freudian slips are a good example of this merging. This is why the resulting symbols are often freakish or malformed from the point of view of the ego.

As a comparison, we can find in the Tarot a similar birthing but this time the phenomenon appears in a humanized manner. Just like in the Pandora, the picture is surrounded by the four apostles and we see an androgynous figure being birthed through the vaginal mandorla. As it unites so many opposites, the androgyne is undoubtedly a symbol of wholeness, of the filius philosophorum, thus of the self. Psychologically speaking, this is another representation of the self becoming closer to ordinary human experience.

The World, Arcana XXI of the Tarot de Marseille by Camoin-Jodorowsky.

Another important consideration is that the crowning of the feminine leads to an accelerated destruction of the old world, what Jung calls in his work the aging “dominant of consciousness”, the “enfeebled old king” seeking renewal.

What is this old dominant? By studying Ripley’s Cantilena, an alchemical story where a king has become barren and is obliged to return to his mother’s womb for rejuvenation by rebirth, Jung comments:

“The king sinking in the sea is the arcane substance, which Maier calls the “antimony of the philosophers.” The arcane substance corresponds to the Christian dominant, which was originally alive and present in consciousness but then sank into the unconscious and must now be restored in renewed form.”  (Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par 466)

“The Cantilena shows us what that dominant was which is subjected to transformation not only in Ripley but in many other alchemists: it was the Christian view of the world in the Middle Ages. This problem is of such dimensions that one cannot expect a medieval man to have been even remotely conscious of it. It was bound to work itself out in projection, unconsciously. For this reason, too, it can hardly be grasped even today — which is why the psychological interpretation of the One, the filius regius, meets with the greatest difficulties.” (ibid., par 507)

In the ninth chapter of her C. G. Jung, His Myth in Our Time, Marie-Louise von Franz goes into great detail about the conflict between the old king and the emerging son, the filius regius.

“The “old king,” the Christian outlook or the Christian God-image, is dead and buried; that is, he has fallen into the depths of the collective unconscious, into matter, and into everything that would be attributed to his adversary. [For these reasons, too, the king constantly needs the renewal that begins with a descent into his own darkness, an immersion in his own depths, and with a reminder that he is related by blood to his adversary.]” (Marie-Louise von Franz, C. G. Jung, His Myth in Our Time, p. 183)

If the God-image is being renewed into a quaternity, the trinitarian worldview will be unbearably restrictive to the new emerging dominant of consciousness. While the decaying dominant should voluntarily renounce to rule, it is still maintaining a fierce opposition to his successor.

“This process of a darkening of consciousness has been repeated countless times in human history and must therefore correspond to a profound archetypal structure in our unconscious psyche. This basic pattern is symbolized most simply in the world-wide mythological and fairytale motif of the aging, sick and dying king, who is superseded by a new successor, both child-like and creative. Sometimes this hero-successor is the third, youngest prince who has been derided as a fool, or again he may be a young man of the people, the “son of a poor widow,” a foundling or a despised blockhead. Usually the old king abdicates voluntarily after the hero has performed his heroic feats and passed successfully through the necessary ordeals, but in other cases the king resists and must be forced to renounce his rule.” (ibid., p. 179)

The King undergoing death and rebirth.

Representing the Christian dominant, what is going to happen to the Church? In a long footnote, Jung quotes the theologian Hugo Rahner:

“The fundamental idea of the theologians is always this: the earthly fate of the Church as the body of Christ is modelled on the earthly fate of Christ himself. That is to say the Church, in the course of her history, moves towards a death, as well in her individual members  . . .  as in her destiny as a whole, until the last day when, after fulfilling her earthly task, she becomes ‘unnecessary’ and ‘dies,’ as is indicated in Psalm 71 : 7: until the moon shall fail.’ These ideas were expressed in the symbolism of Luna as the Church. Just as the kenosis of Christ was fulfilled in death, even death on the cross (Phil. 2 : 8), and out of this death the ‘glory’ of the divine nature (2 : 9f.) was bestowed on Christ’s ‘form as a servant’ (2 : 7), whence this whole process can be compared with the setting (death) of the sun and its rising anew (glory), even so it is with the parallel kenosis of Ecclesia-Luna. The closer Luna approaches to the sun, the more is she darkened until, at the conjunction of the new moon, all her light is ‘emptied’ into Christ, the sun  . . .  The doctrine implied in all these passages is that the Church in her future glory ceases her work of salvation, which is destined only for the earth, and that she is totally eclipsed by the splendour of Christ the sun, because (and this again is a strange paradox) in the resurrection of the flesh she herself has become the ‘full moon,’ and indeed the ‘sun.’” (Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, note 194)

According to this theological view, for the solar transformation of the Church as Ecclesia-Luna to take place, she must first go through an earthly death, similar to the life of Christ to which She is completely identified.

As a reminder, the Church was founded at Pentecost. Ten days after Christ ascended to Heaven, the Paraclete descended and emptied itself (kenosis) into what became the Church. Now filled with the Holy Spirit, the Church as the body of Christ must go through the same fateful pattern that Christ went through: the Church continuously moves towards an earthly death, a crucifixion, a resurrection, and a final ascension. This will once again bring Pentecost, meaning the descent and emptying of the Paraclete, but on another level. Where will the Paraclete descend this time?

The Holy Spirit that was contained by the Church until the “last day” is released into the population when the glorification of Wisdom is happening.

“The man who is not particularly bold . . . will . . . thank God that the Holy Spirit does not concern himself with us overmuch. One feels much safer under the shadow of the Church, which serves as a fortress to protect us against God and his Spirit. It is very comforting to be assured by the Catholic Church that it “possesses” the Spirit, who assists regularly at its rites. Then one knows that he is well chained up.

Protestantism is no less reassuring in that it represents the Spirit to us as something to be sought for, to be easily “drunk,” even to be possessed. We get the impression that he is something passive, which cannot budge without us. He has lost his dangerous qualities, his fire, his autonomy, his power. He is represented as an innocuous, passive, and purely beneficent element, so that to be afraid of him would seem just stupid. This characterization of the Holy Spirit leaves out of account the terrors of YHWH.” (Carl Jung, Letter to Père Lachat, CW 18, par. 1533-1535)

The unchaining of the Paraclete from the Church, now released into each and every individual, is a terrible danger:

[T]he prudence of the serpent counsels us not to approach the Holy Spirit too closely.” (ibid.)

From 19:55 onwards, Edinger talks about the transformation of the God-image and the fate of the individual. This video is the finest articulation of the ideas that this article has tried to put together. The first twenty minutes are an exemplary summary of analytical psychology.

Coming back to The Green Knight, one of the criticisms that have been levied at it was that the movie was cheaply subversive and ideological in the way it treated gender. One can see for instance Sorry to Disappoint You but This Is What The Green Knight Movie Is All About | Jonathan Pageau.

By the end of this article and the previous one, I hope to have demonstrated to the reader that this is not the case. While it is true that women being turned into men is a common ideological misuse in the media, there is a much more potent reality below it. It is my conviction that the crowning scene of The Green Knight swims in the same current that the Assumption of the Virgin.

“The Assumption of the Virgin, for instance, is vouched for neither in Scripture nor in the tradition of the first five centuries of the Christian Church. For a long time it was officially denied even, but, with the connivance of the whole medieval and modern Church, it gradually developed as a “pious opinion” and gained so much power and influence that it finally succeeded in thrusting aside the necessity for scriptural proof and for a tradition going back to primitive times, and in attaining definition in spite of the fact that the content of the dogma is not even definable. The papal declaration made a reality of what had long been condoned. This irrevocable step beyond the confines of historical Christianity is the strongest proof of the autonomy of archetypal images.” (Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW 14, par. 668)

This leads me to ponder on the question of the blindness of the old King. Traditional Christianity is convinced that its understanding does not need to be updated. In the face of the Assumption, we are at a fracturing point where we can stay within Scripture and Tradition or have to acknowledge that archetypal realities are contributing to shaping human existence. The far-reaching consequences of accepting or denying the unconscious are unfortunately going to be a dividing line in the transition from Pisces to Aquarius.

« De défaite en défaite jusqu’à la victoire finale »

As we have seen, the crowning of the feminine leads to death and rebirth in the masculine psyche (either by crucifixion or by the King entering the bridal chamber in alchemy). Given the asymmetry of the male and female psyche (such as the anima/animus or the Oedipus complex), what is likely to happen to the female psyche?

I suggest that a potential answer can be found in Mamoru Oshii’s 1985 masterpiece, Angel’s Egg.

Spoilers ahead. I recommend watching the movie before continuing this article, or skipping to the next paragraph.

Angel’s Egg tells the story of a little girl whose task is to care deeply for eggs. Her task however is coming to an end. The apparition of the gigantic orb covered in statues signals to a mysterious swordsman that he has to intercede in her life.

Within the context of this article, the little girl is the female ego who has been helping to hatch the new lifeform, the alchemical monster, the emerging new dominant of consciousness. The swordsman is her animus (sword = logos) who acts on behalf of the floating orb, a symbol of the self and the collective unconscious.

      You have to break an egg
      if you want to know what’s inside.

The movie is not naïve about the cost related to this change. Following the intervention of the swordsman, she has to process an accelerated growth that she cannot handle.

A more recent and optimistic presentation of this issue can be found in the independent short by Shingo Tamagawa, Puparia.

Against a pleromatic background, we have a glimpse of the incoming transformations that have been hinted at in this article. As the video description reveals, “Something is about to change drastically. We can only be witnesses to it.”

The first transformation is the feminine psyche, which has to change from a passive to an active position. The second transformation is the masculine psyche, which has to face an “Other”. And finally, we witness the mysterious but reassuring presence of the androgynous sun-moon child.

To conclude this heavy article, I suggest listening to the following track. As the lyrics suggest, the perspective of a new dominant of consciousness (Vision, Creation, New sun) is not to be perceived only from the unbearable tension between the old and the new. We are also called to join the tribal ekstasis of this celebration.

A useful aspect of analytical psychology is that dreams are able to support investigations into collective symbolism. They are so to speak pieces of empirical evidence to be used in the process of forming a worldview. I would like to present two dreams, left without much analysis, that corroborate what has been presented in this article.

1/ The changing moon (September 2020)
I’m on the road, outside of a car. I look at the starry sky and see the moon and the earth. I hear the voice of a huge being asking the moon if she wants to keep doing this and she replies “No”. Suddenly, the moon explodes and transforms into a second earth. Absolutely shocked at what I’ve witnessed, I go back in the car and drive until I meet someone. In a parking lot that is full of water, I see a couple and I try to talk to them about what I’ve seen. Unconcerned by what I am saying, they try to steal my car so I push them away and drive in the other direction. Further along, I meet someone on the road. He asks me, “What happened to the moon?” and I reply, “It transformed into the earth. I saw it with my own eyes.”

This dream of mine recalls the part quoted above “until the last day when, after fulfilling her earthly task, [Ecclesia-Luna] becomes ‘unnecessary’ and ‘dies,’ as is indicated in Psalm 71 : 7: until the moon shall fail.’”

2/ Newborn Crab (Early 2021)
I was lying down with a blanket over my abdomen, as though I was about to give birth. However, what came out was a crab. I remember finding it strange and a bit weird, especially since there were people around who were happy about the birth and not at all phased that it was not a human. We treated it with care and wrapped it up like a newborn, I wanted to protect it, but I did feel a slight sense of shame.

This dream was brought to me by a woman who had no familiarity with the material discussed above. The birth of the inhuman crab is similar to the extraction of the monster from alchemy. While the ego experiences discomfort, the unconscious expresses a fondness towards it. The dreamer mentioned that there was a collective presence that felt feminine around the birth.

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