The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [215]
The Wise Old Man's feminine counterpart we have encountered as Athene, the goddess of wisdom in the Odyssey; as the priestess Sibyl who guides Aeneas down into the underworld; in those mysterious `young women' who play such an important role as guides in many other Quest stories; and as the awe-inspiring figure of the goddess Isis who redeems Lucius in The Golden Ass. In such supernatural manifestations, as when she appears to Frodo as Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings or to Dante as Beatrice in The Divine Comedy, the Anima-figure represents the `eternal feminine' in her most numinous guise. But like the Wise Old Man, when she appears on her own in such manifestations, she also stands very obviously for a balance of feminine and masculine qualities. Outwardly a woman, with her grace and beauty, she represents protective feeling and the visionary power to see whole. But she is also imbued with the inner strength and authority of the masculine, which is why she is so often of imposing physical appearance, like the towering Sibyl; or clad in semi-masculine garb, like the tall `flashing-eyed' Athene with her helmet and spear.
Indeed the way in which the Wise Old Man and the Anima are ultimately aspects of the same deep power in the human psyche can be seen in their tendency often to appear together in perfect alliance. In such instances they may appear in a Father-Daughter relationship, where the old man expresses the full weight of masculine authority and the young girl expresses the softer feminine in all its shining purity. We see a peculiarly moving expression of the power of this shaping archetype in the closing stages of King Lear where, as the king in the depths of his defeat finds a new inner sovereignty and clarity of vision, we see Lear and Cordelia in an evanescent constellation of this Wise Old Man and Anima relationship, united at last in their love and capacity to see the inner truth. An even stranger example is in the story of Theseus, where we see the extraordinary change coming over our image of Daedalus, the wicked old magician who had created the Minotaur and the Labyrinth. At last, at the moment when Daedalus gives Ariadne the magic thread which will lead Theseus out of the maze, we see him switching from the side of death to the side of life; and at that moment, in our inner mind's eye, we see Daedalus and Ariadne constellating in Theseus's hour of most desperate need into the Wise Old Man and the Anima, the twin symbolic figures presiding over the hero's salvation, leading him out of darkness into light.
The point about these two great archetypal figures is that they are the supreme personal expressions of that mysterious purposive power in stories which not only guides the hero himself towards the goal, but which is inherent in the very structure of the way stories form themselves in the human imagination, shaping the action towards some final image of perfect resolution. When we see Merlin appearing to Arthur, or Athene to Odysseus, when we see the old enchanter Prospero and his beautiful daughter Miranda waiting on the island for the shipwrecked travellers, or the twin figures of Porfiry and Sonia coming to exercise a strange growing influence over the tortured Raskolnikov, we are given a reassuring sign that, despite all indications to the contrary, there is some benign power behind the scenes, operating on a plane of consciousness beyond our comprehension, which is working to draw both hero and story towards some ultimate state of wholeness, when at last all will be made clear and when all the dark elements in the story have been dispelled.
But equally the point about these figures is that they cannot control what is going on in the story. They can understand what is happening, they can set things up, give guidance, point the way, proffer assistance. But in the end it is