Money for Winter

 

 

Youth is the time of getting, middle age of improving, and old age of spending.

--Anne Bradstreet

 

You can’t approach old age without thinking about money. At 62 years old, I fall squarely within that grey area between middle and old age that we encounter in our late fifties and sixties. In these years, it is quite natural that we should have a new attitude toward money, given that we are nearing or have reached the end of our working lives. Like most Americans, financial security at the threshold of old age means having the resources to see me through my remaining years, paying for my care when I can no longer manage on my own and, barring some unforeseen crisis, leaving my children a modest inheritance. Nevertheless, despite my relative financial security, I find it difficult if not impossible to lean into that notion, take pride in the fact that I earned every penny on my own, or even acknowledge all that I commendably sacrificed along the way. Rather, I feel burdened with a familiar sense of uneasiness and unworthiness, feelings that have colored my relationship with money from an early age. In this frame of mind, I decided to coax forward an image that has long haunted my daydreams. I knew that this archetypal figure, who I had dubbed the Winter Hag, had something to say about my relationship with money, but for decades I had done my best to suppress her. I wondered if now, in my autumn years, I might bring her forth and ask her whether she intends to hound me into old age or whether we might instead forge a more amicable relationship.

Having recently retired it is not surprising that my relation to money has shifted from the chronic worry that afflicted me for decades, as I struggled to maintain a certain standard of living, fund my children’s educations, and save and invest for retirement. My present fear is that, for all my sound financial stewardship and reasonable projections, and despite evidence to the contrary, I may not have enough money to see me through the winter of my life, my old age, until my death. In tandem with this fear is an enormous sense of shame that I did not do enough, or did not do things well enough, to merit a comfortable retirement. These two hobgoblins—fear and shame—are the Winter Hag’s most determinedly loyal handmaidens. Indeed, at this very moment I can see these two Furies out of the corner of my eye, scrambling to get my attention and leading me to fret about potentially dark days ahead and all the ways I am woefully unprepared to meet them. No longer willing to deflect or cower from fear and shame’s vehement imprecations, I determined instead to consult directly with the Winter Hag, the high priestess of the realm in my psyche where money matters reside.

Much has been written about financial insecurity as a universal human fear in modern societies. Indeed, research into the psychology of money reveals that anxiety about money is in no way a direct function of the amount of money a person possesses. Multi-millionaires experience the same feelings of fear and anxiety around losing their money as those who have little. As for shame, it is important to acknowledge that money is not just what it appears to be, that is to say, an abstract medium for the exchange of goods and services. In human civilization, it has also acted as a symbol of self-worth, status, and power. Much of the shame we feel around money arises from the enormous emphasis society places on it, the ever-increasing autonomous power given over to it, and the unashamed worship of it in our culture. We feel shame over having it, not having it, wanting it, talking about it, not talking about it, how we got it, or how we lost it, to name just a few. Because it carries such complex and often oppositional energies, money is an archetypal psychic reality that is especially complicated. This complex psychic reality, according to James Hillman, a Jungian analyst who paid particular attention to the archetypal components of money as part of our personal and collective unconscious, presents problems that are “inevitable, necessary, irreducible, always present, and potentially if not actually overwhelming. Money is devilishly divine.”[1] Hillman was especially interested in the relation of money and soul, and posited that in order to understand money on a soul level, one needs to connect with some very deep, old, and imperceptible attitudes about money that our entire culture has internalized and hidden in the collective unconscious. There is no doubt in my mind that the Winter Hag personifies a negative aspect of those ancient attitudes.

As an archetype, the Winter Hag lives deep in my unconscious and, I venture to guess, in the unconscious of many women who live in cultures where the family and social fabric no longer operate to provide a safety net for their elders. I first conceived the image of the Winter Hag when I was in my early twenties, immediately after I graduated from college and relocated to the city where a new job had taken me. For the first time in my life I was completely on my own with no financial resources other than the meager paycheck from my job as a legal secretary. During my first year in this new life of unprecedented financial insecurity, in the pit of a dreary winter, a fully-etched figure came unbidden to me in one of my habitual daydreams. There she was, an impoverished, old witch, wearing filthy black rags, shuffling down a frozen city street, and poking through garbage bins for food to bring back to her dark, unheated hovel to share with a roommate, an old tomcat that previously roamed the fetid alley outside her door. Even then, I understood that this specter emerged from my deepest fears that I would fail at the adulthood challenge before me that demanded I make something of myself and achieve financial independence. And if I failed, I would end up this destitute old woman. Terrified, I shoved her down into the dark recesses of my unconscious, hoping that would be last of her, although of course it wasn’t.

C.G. Jung regarded witches, hags, and their ilk as female versions of the scapegoat onto which women transfer the darker side of their impulses and imaginings. In Irish and Scottish folklore, the cailleach is a hag goddess concerned with creation, harvest, and the weather. She is a seasonal goddess seen as ruling the winter months and controlling the cold and the winds. Perhaps drawing from the same well in the collective unconscious, the Greeks represented the season of winter as a lean, bare-headed woman standing beside leafless trees. These images evoke feelings of austerity, harshness, and deprivation. The hag archetype abides in her hiddenness, ready to emerge and overtake us when we feel overburdened or when our personal safety feels threatened. For example, in the case of my Winter Hag and her minions, they have shown themselves capable of breaking through to consciousness in times of financial strain, shrieking that my aspirations towards security are delusive and, quite frankly, terrifying me. According to Jung, however, the archetypes do not just carry out a negative function. Rather, Jung believed that each archetype in our psyche is “rich in secret life and seeks to add itself to our own individual life in order to make it whole.”[2] I wondered what gifts the Winter Hag might come bearing if, for once, I welcomed her into my warm home.

In considering what higher purpose my Winter Hag might serve, I turned to the etymology of the word “money” to determine whether there might be an alternative to the hag’s doom-saying and fearmongering. That is to say, might the Winter Hag be the shadow representation of her opposite, an entity that emanates a more benign attitude toward money? I am speaking here of the Roman goddess Juno Moneta. The Latin word moneta, for mint or money, derives from the name of this goddess in whose temple in Rome money was coined. Moneta presided over the minting process and also served as protectress of those coins. An ancient, religious symbol of exchange, money was reflective of the inner feminine attributes of relatedness and protection, both of which Moneta embodied. But just as Moneta and her temple were eventually abandoned and forgotten, the feminine attributes underlying money were also forgotten or suppressed. Consequently, the feminine feeling values that formerly attached to money came to be overpowered by the masculine perception of it as a means to acquire possessions, security or, even more disturbingly, power. Out of this shift came the punitive state of affairs that we now know and experience to our individual and collective detriment as savage capitalism. It was this devaluing of the feminine principle inherent in money that resulted in the banishment of Moneta—with her positive aspects of protection and stewardship—and supplanted her with the hag, that frightening creature from the dark underworld of the psyche. What a profound loss the banishment of Moneta was, with her emphasis on fair exchange, reverence for coins as a means of that exchange, and protection of the coins minted in her temple! In her absence, we are left with the hag and her dire auguries of destitution and hardship.  

My efforts to call forth the Winter Hag have been fruitful. In facing her directly for the first time in decades, it occurred to me—and quite spontaneously at that—that she had a name, Maude. Having no context for this name, I looked up its origins and discovered that it is an Old German feminine given name meaning “powerful battler.” This was interesting new information, but I never once doubted her formidableness as an inner opponent. As a result of my gentle beckoning, however, Maude has come forward and shown herself in a less fearsome guise than I imagined. While her protests against my sense of financial security haven’t necessarily abated, they seem to lack some of their former urgency. Oh, she is still there, deploying her minions to whisper in my ear of the remote threat of financial ruin, but she and they are less relentless about it. Perhaps this is because Maude has agreed to make space in our relationship in order to bring Moneta out of her longstanding hiddenness and thus give Maude a break from her decades of singularly pessimistic watchfulness. For her part, Maude has admitted to me that, without Moneta to join with her in guiding and advising me in my financial dealings for so many years, she had no choice but to take up the work of them both. As she explained it, she only knew how to frighten me into earning, saving, and investing; that was the only tool in her bag. With Moneta now retrieved from her exile and sharing space in my consciousness with Maude, there can finally be a heiros gamos, a union of these two archetypes, leaving them free to share in the work of serving as my spiritual financial advisors, if you will. As I look ahead toward my winter years, I derive enormous comfort from the image of Maude and Moneta, arm-in-arm and accompanying me. For what it’s worth, in my mind’s eye Maude—still impoverished and prophesizing financial ruin—is wearing a new red coat.

 

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[1] Hillman, James. “A Contribution to Soul and Money,” p. 4. From Lockhart et al., Soul and Money. Dallas, TX: Spring Publications, Inc., 1982.

 

[2] Jung, C.G., Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 302. New York: Vintage Books Edition, 1965.

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