This weekend’s monthly newsletter isn’t actually a newsletter. (It’s also a day and a half later than usual, but don’t tell.) I’ve been having my usual winter internet and work break over the past couple of weeks, and so it seems has almost everyone else, and I’m delighted as a consequence to announce that I don’t have any personal or work-related news to share. So I thought instead that I’d share some comments on an issue has kept appearing on my radar recently.

But before I get on with that (and this isn’t really a digression, honestly; it all weaves together most wondrously), I wanted briefly to introduce you to this guy: Janus, the Roman god after whom January is named. He’s the most liminal of all gods – and also, along with Jupiter, the most powerful in the Roman pantheon. He’s primarily associated with beginnings and endings, but also with the passage of time itself. And with gates, doorways and other kinds of passages: transitions from one place/ state/ time to another, above all. He has a two-faced head which looks both backward into the last year and forward into the new. (If I were Janus, I’d be thinking about investing in a couple of blindfolds. Some things you just don’t want to see. It’s only January 4 and already it feels as if 2026 has been a long year ...)

This might all sound very lovely and magical and – well, liminal – but Janus, I’m afraid, also happens to be yet another of those rapist gods who were all the rage in the Classical period. Check out the story of the nymph Carna, who after being raped by Janus (really, what was it with these guys?) was magically transformed into Cardea, the goddess of hinges. Yes, hinges. Say what you like about them, but the Romans clearly understood the divine significance of being able to hang a good door.

Segueing neatly into the heart of my subject here today, two-headed Janus is, of course, rather by definition also associated with duality, and the reason why I remembered his existence in the first place is that a paid subscriber emailed asking me to write something here about the dual nature of the archetypal masculine and feminine.

While I was thinking about how to approach this, I opened Instagram to go looking for a message I’d forgotten about, and some bonkers meme flashed up at the top of my feed which roundly declared that the ‘divine feminine’ doesn’t exist in Celtic myth. Well, as a decades-long scholar and teacher of Celtic Mythology with actual postgraduate-level qualifications in it, I can say quite categorically that this statement is false. There is very clearly a ‘divine feminine’ in Celtic myth, just as there is a concept of the divine feminine in pretty much every other mythic tradition on the planet.

Now, before we go stomping around denying the divine feminine, which also seems to be all the rage right now (see what happens when I take two weeks off?) we have to actually understand what the divine feminine means, and that of course happens to be all tangled up with the question of what we mean by the archetypal feminine – and by extension the archetypal masculine – and all of these concepts are often misunderstood. They’re concepts that emerge from a combination of mythology and depth psychology, and those two subject areas happen to be the subject areas in which I’m qualified to explain and opine, so what follows constitutes both an explanation and a set of informed opinions.

First: when we begin talking about such subjects, we have to begin by understanding how ‘the feminine’ – and ‘the masculine’ – are represented in the specific mythic and spiritual traditions we’re talking about. The qualities that make up these complexes certainly overlap from culture to culture, but they’re not always identical. For example: in Celtic traditions, the notion of the divine feminine and the divine masculine have nothing to do with qualities of passivity/ receptivity in the case of the feminine, contrasted with activity in the case of the masculine, as they might do in some eastern cultures. As always in our native traditions, it’s more interesting and more complex than that. The Celtic divine feminine is associated not only with the land, but with the moral and spiritual authority of the Otherworld that’s entangled with it. She’s really quite cosmic. As shorthand, let’s say she represents the natural order. The masculine represents the social order: truth, justice, honour, balance, protection. This idea is beautifully conveyed in the long tradition of the ritual sacred marriage between the king and the Sovereignty goddess, which I wrote about in If Women Rose Rooted:

So you see, this isn’t about opposition between the masculine and feminine, it’s about balance. I’ll come back to that and related notions in a moment. But in the meantime: individual goddesses might display their individual (and often idiosyncratic) traits and characteristics, but the nature of the divine feminine in Celtic myth is always founded on this concept of Sovereignty. We see this especially clearly in Irish mythology, in which almost all goddesses are in some sense tutelary (i.e. tribal; of a place). (And indeed, markers of Sovereignty are important determinants of whether a character is likely to be a goddess or a human woman in some of the stories where it’s not otherwise entirely clear.)

Now, this isn’t just my opinion: the most excellent Irish folklorist Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, Professor (Emeritus) of Folklore and Ethnology at University College Cork, refers to ‘a universe whose outer and ultimate layer is the domain of a divine female who permeates the whole with her presence and her power’.[1] The now-deceased eminent Irish scholar Prionsias Mac Cana wrote extensively about Sovereignty and the divine feminine in the wider Celtic traditions. I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you.

So that’s the specific Celtic thing sorted – yes, there is a clearly delineated divine feminine in Celtic myth – but what about the more general notion of the archetypal feminine and masculine in myth and spirituality?

Let’s begin by reminding ourselves that myths are archetypal stories, sort of by definition, and the key players in them are also archetypal. This means that we can’t map the essential archetypal qualities of the feminine and the masculine which these characters represent directly onto the lived experience of actual human men and women. They don’t map. That’s because archetypes are essential qualities: they’re essences. They’re in a sense extremes. They represent a ‘pure’ idea or image which doesn’t actually exist in the physical world. Actual human men and women can’t ever reflect pure archetypes. Rather, we’re reflections of a combination of different archetypal energies that might be at work in our lives at different times. We can never be the archetypal Witch, but we might just let a bit of Witch energy into our lives from time to time – maybe mixed up with a bit of the energy of the Maiden archetype and also a bit of the Warrior.

Now, every culture/ mythic tradition has archetypal dualities/ polarities that reflect certain ways of being in the world, and more often than not, those polarities have become embedded in myth as clusters of qualities onto which we place the labels ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’. But not all traditions conceive of such polarities in terms of masculine and feminine qualities. Because it’s quite a well-known polarity, let’s take the Taoist notion of yin and yang. The word yin’s original connotation was the northerly shaded side of a hill, and yang referred to the bright southerly aspect. They then came to be associated with concepts of the masculine and feminine in that particular culture, which happened to conceive of the masculine as intrinsically active and the feminine as intrinsically passive or receptive. But here’s the interesting and pertinent thing about yin and yang: these terms refer to two clusters of quite different qualities, but each cluster has a drop of the other inside it – and so the two clusters are not separate and were never meant to be. Each contains the seed of the other. They’re two aspects of the same hill. Truth is, they’re arguably not even proper opposites, because they’re complementary and interdependent, not in conflict with each other. They’re inseparable parts of a single, unified whole, and a healthy balance between them is essential for existence.

As a neuroscientist back in the day, this idea was inevitably going to remind me of Iain McGilchrist’s perspective on the two hemispheres of the brain, as outlined in his book The Master and His Emissary. The left hemisphere, in McGilchrist’s conceptualisation, is detail-oriented, consistent, unchanging; the right hemisphere sees the bigger picture and is infinitely more fluid. But one hemisphere without the other would be an accident waiting to happen. And in that sense, just like yin and yang, they’re not really opposites, they’re just different ways of attending to the world. They’re two quite different takes on ‘reality’, but they both need to work together to provide a balanced and full understanding of the world. And it’s exactly the same with what we call the archetypal feminine and masculine: each reflects a different way of attending to the world, of being in the world. But none of us can be purely one or the other, because we can’t fully embody an archetype which doesn’t by definition actually exist in physical reality.

In other words, if you’re worried that the concept of the archetypal feminine and the archetypal masculine (or the divine feminine and divine masculine; they come down to the same thing) are overly essentialist when it comes to mapping them onto gender identities, and so believe that they’re outdated and should be wholly abolished, you’re completely missing the point. They can’t be mapped, because they’re archetypal! Category error, see. Archetypes are symbolic concepts, essential images. Cultural notions of gender aren’t archetypal (and nor are they divine) and neither are people.

One of the best-known representations of the archetypal feminine and masculine can be seen in Carl Jung’s concept of the anima and animus. The anima is the feminine archetype in a man’s psyche (which, Jung declared, was all about emotion and relationship – but that was just his idea of the feminine, and today we might have a different one), and the animus is the masculine archetype in a woman’s psyche (representing, in Jung’s opinion, reason and spirit). Once again, these contrasting archetypes make no sense alone but form a pair (which Jung called the syzygy), and we all have both an anima and an animus in our psyche. Jung believed that integrating the anima for a man, and the animus for a woman, was necessary to achieve wholeness during the long process of individuation. That’s the point of the whole Jungian project: it’s about uniting opposites, and so becoming whole.

And so, in that sense, Jung’s concepts of the anima and animus reflect exactly the same scenario that I’ve outlined in the case of yin and yang, as well as Iain McGilchrist’s thoughts around the roles of the left and right hemispheres of the brain. These ideas only appear to be binary on the surface, and at the archetypal level. When it comes to thinking about how those archetypal energies play out within the human condition, the binaries vanish into thin air.

To finish then, I think that if we allow them to, understanding these archetypes can help us develop a more rounded concept of our humanity, of our wholeness. They can help us to recognise these varying energies within ourselves, and the many ways in which they can dance together, combine together in so many unique forms – allowing us to move beyond limiting gender stereotypes of all kinds.

And after all that, you’ll probably be relieved to hear that normal monthly newsletter service will resume in early Feb.

[1] Gearóid Ó Crualaoich, The Book of the Cailleach, p. 27.