Crow

The crows, which in Germanic mythology belong to Wotan, and in the Mediterranean to Apollo, represent the capacity for divination. Apollo is the owner of the Delphic oracle and the revealer of truth, and the same applies to Wotan. Black birds, ravens and crows, are believed capable of knowing the future and of telling the hidden truth. In part this evolved since ravens and crows often assemble in places where a battle takes place, or on a house where someone is dying. When many crows or ravens frequently assemble in a place, people say that someone will die and that the crows know it. From that hook came the projection that they knew the truth and the future. Wotan had two ravens, Hugin and Munin, his sources of secret information. Birds in general represent intuitive hunches: creatures which fly in the air, in the medium of the spiritual world, and have therefore to do with involuntary thoughts which are revealed to be true. These two birds are the spirits of truthfulness. The birds represent that invisible truth of the unconscious which fulfills itself. —Marie Louise Von Franz, The Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

If we observe unconscious processes, we see that wrong deeds do not have to be avenged by other human beings, for they are punished from within. The murderer ultimately kills himself. This is a terrible truth again and again confirmed. Frequently one is shocked by the injustice of human life, when the evil man prospers and the good man does not, but, psychologically, this is not true and it sometimes makes one shudder to realize what people risk. They may succeed in the outer world, but they incur terrible psychological punishment.—Marie Louise Von Franz, The Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

Jung once told of a woman who had committed murder. She put poison in the soup of another woman who was in love with her lover, and she was not found out. She came to confession absolutely destroyed. She felt cut off, for people had begun to avoid her without knowing why. She lost all her maids and servants and nobody wanted to live near her. She lived quite alone. She rode every day, but then the horse would bolt and would not carry her, and then one morning she called her dog and the dog put its tail between its legs and slunk away. She was slowly and cruelly ruined from within. This secret truth, the law of inner truth, is here expressed by the crows who are the spirit of truth and also have to do with healing power. In the tale of Apollo and Coronis, from whose union resulted the birth of Asklepios, the crow too gave valuable information. It is the crows who call the our attention to the cure for our eyes.— —Marie Louise Von Franz, The Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales

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Published by Professor P

My name is Paityn Masters, my friends call me P. I am queer, Pisces, & an ENFP. I am trained as a psychotherapist, and my roots were as a youth pastor. As a psychotherapist, my specialty is in trauma and complex PTSD. I met my best friend and my cosmic partner, Jenni McCullum in graduate school. Together, we began discovering the spiritual world and the psychic gifts that had laid dormant in our psyche. We both went through a wild initiatory process that joyfully and sometimes even painfully expanded our capacity to both SEE and to HEAR, beyond the limits of the five senses. We are both intuitives, and Jenni is also a medium. As traditional psychotherapy frowns on the mystical modality, we had to start our own practice, and sacrifice licensing in order to answer the Call. Fortunately, we found our theoretical home in a branch of psychology known as Depth Psychology, that has its roots in the discoveries made by C. G. Jung, and seeks to study the soul rather than behavior, and sees the whole person on a spiritual level first—then works down to personality, family influence, upbringing, biology, heredity, physicality, status, image, and complexes. We see symptoms as more than something to eliminate, we see them as messages from the Soul. Psyche means Soul, but not many people know this, because our culture can’t seem to get beyond its dependence on the “safety” of the logical/rational mind. “Whenever you are in the realm of Soul, things will always go over your head. The statements of the conscious mind may easily be snares and delusions, lies, or arbitrary opinions, but this is certainly not true of the statements of the soul: to begin with they always go over our heads because they point to realities that transcend consciousness.” (C.G. Jung, Answer to Job). Healing means “making whole,” and many either think they are already whole, or fear they’re broken beyond repair. Healing involves the courage to look at the wounds that caused the brokenness to begin with. Symptoms are a huge help in identifying not only the injury but also the gifts one possesses. Marion Woodman said, “the wound is where the God enters.” So, we look at pain and trauma from the standpoint of Soul Making. I speak of God in my writing quite frequently, and like Soul, God is something that transcends our ability to conceptualize what that means. When I say God… I mean the God that I have discovered within… the same one that is within you. Folded up within each of us is the entirety of the cosmos. How we relate to our inner world determines how we will relate to everything. Our primary wounds and our deepest wounds are in the realm of relationship—beginning with the way we relate to our own inner selves. We are wounded in relationship and so we must be healed in relationship. That’s one of the things that we hope to do in our work here in this earth school. We hope to hold up a mirror so you can see your true nature, the image of your soul; reflection brings about insight, knowledge, and Wisdom.

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