Grismere

Anima · Earth Mother · Goddess

The name Grismere holds her meaning within it. From the Spanish gris — grey, gloomy — and the French mer— the sea — with mère folded silently inside it: mother. She is the Grey Sea. She is the Grey Mother. The two are not separate in her. They never were. This is the nature of the anima — the interior feminine, the soul-image, the figure through which the psyche first turns toward its own depth. Grismere is that figure. She does not point toward the anima. She is the anima.

Grismere is one of a series of archetypal images linked to the process of individuation — the movement Jung understood as universal, leading toward an original state of wholeness. She is an archetype of the collective unconscious: a mermaid, a Goddess, an Earth Mother, an inhabitant of the twilight sphere — bewitching, and luring not toward danger but toward depth.

Whoever looks into the water sees his own image, but behind it living creatures soon loom up… Sometimes a nixie gets into the fisherman’s net, a female, half-human fish. — C. G. Jung

Jung associates the mermaid — siren, nixie, elfin — with the anima: the Eternal Feminine and the Soul-image. Grismere personifies this feminine energy, but her tail is more than unconscious symbol. The feminine image is joined to a decidedly masculine energy, holding both in a single form. She is an indirect portrait of wholeness — of gender, of division, of the self that lives both above and below the surface.

She appears as the Handless Maiden: armless, fragile, incomplete in the world of air. Her tail is her connection to the buried self — to the whole of nature hidden in the sea of the unconscious. To meet her is to recognize the divided self, and to begin the movement toward integration.

Eternal truth needs a language that alters with the spirit of the times. The primordial images undergo ceaseless transformation and yet remain ever the same. — C. G. Jung