Femme Fatale

The Seba library treats Femme Fatale in 8 passages, across 8 authors (including Jung, Carl Gustav, Vaughan-Lee, Llewellyn, Marcel Detienne).

In the library 8 passages

The French call such an anima figure a femme fatale. (A milder version of this dark anima is personified by the Queen of the Night in Mozart’s Magic Flute.) The Greek Sirens or the German Lorelei also personify this dangerous aspect of the anima, which in this form symbolizes destructive illusion.

Jung provides the canonical depth-psychological definition of the femme fatale as the death-dealing, destructive pole of the anima archetype, whose mythological cognates include the Sirens and Lorelei and whose essential function is the symbolisation of lethal illusion.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Man and His Symbols, 1964thesis

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The same archetypal story is told in the film The Blue Angel. Marlene Dietrich plays the anima figure… She totally degrades him, making him act the part of the clown. Finally the theater returns to his home town and she forces him to play the clown before his former pupils and fellow citizens.

Vaughan-Lee reads The Blue Angel and Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci as parallel cultural expressions of the femme fatale archetype, in which the destructive anima-projection systematically annihilates the ego of the man she has enchanted.

Vaughan-Lee, Llewellyn, Catching the Thread: Sufism, Dreamwork, and Jungian Psychology, 1992thesis

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These words of deceit are given by Hermes to Pandora, the femme fatale who is the shadow of the woman of ‘gentle pleasure.’

Detienne situates the femme fatale within archaic Greek semiotic mythology, identifying Pandora as the structurally negative counterpart to Aphrodite’s beneficent Peitho, defined by deceptive speech under the patronage of the nocturnal Hermes.

Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece, 1996thesis

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She is a psychic entity who lives between the two worlds, neither goddess nor femme ordinaire, but a living force which appears in different layers of reality.

Von Franz draws a clinical distinction between the anima as femme fatale and the anima as ordinary woman, arguing that the anima’s paradoxical ontological status—neither goddess nor femme ordinaire—is precisely what makes her dangerous when a man attempts to categorise her.

von Franz, Marie-Louise, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974supporting

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Whenever the anima appears as a beast of prey, as often happens in dreams and phantasies, it is her dangerousness that is being stressed.

Emma Jung documents the predatory aspect of the anima in dreams as an amplification of the femme fatale motif, showing how the dangerous feminine manifests in the symbolic register of the animal rather than the human.

Jung, Emma, Animus and Anima, 1957supporting

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Another familiar representation of this Terrible Mother aspect is Kali, the bloodthirsty wife of Shiva. Here she is pictured holding by the hair the human victim who will be her next morsel, her incredible red tongue slavering.

Nichols’s treatment of Kali as Terrible Mother touches obliquely on the femme fatale complex by examining the devouring, destructive feminine archetype in its mythological iconography.

Nichols, Sallie, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside

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The anima woman must find her suprapersonal value, not through an intellectually accepted ideal but through a deeper experience of her own nature which leads her into relation to the woman’s spirituality, the feminine principle itself.

Harding’s discussion of the anima woman’s need to transcend ego-driven relatedness is contextually adjacent to the femme fatale problem, implying that failure to integrate the suprapersonal feminine produces the destructive anima pattern.

Harding, Esther, the way of all women, 1970aside

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