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.”
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.” 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.
Hillman, James. “A Contribution to
Soul and Money,” p. 4. From Lockhart et al., Soul and Money. Dallas,
TX: Spring Publications, Inc., 1982.
Jung, C.G., Memories, Dreams, Reflections, p. 302. New York:
Vintage Books Edition, 1965.
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