---
slug: woodman-the-feminine-6b7efb1a
title: "Woodman on The Feminine"
author: "Marion Woodman"
work: "Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman"
section: ""
year: "1993"
tradition: jungian-core
themes:
  - the-feminine
fragment: |
  To feminine consciousness, the spiritual and the physical are two aspects of one totality. Spirit confirms body, articulates body's wisdom. Spirit is immediate and actual, not something arrived at, as in Plato, through dialectical ascent. "As above, so below" translates into "as in the head, so in the belly"; the two are simultaneously present, not dialogically opposed. The paradox of this simultaneous presencethe solar plexus in the head and the head in the solar plexusresists the logic of prose, demanding poetry's elliptical leaps which metaphor attempts to encompass. In my introduction to The Pregnant Virgin, I called this paradox "frog conjunctions,'' thinking of frogs among lilypads leaping from leaf to leaf. Metaphor is the language of the soul. Through a physical image, metaphor reveals a spiritual truth or condition. Take, for example, a line from a Zen koan: "Hide yourself in the middle of the flames." We see the picture and, if we understand metaphor at all, we don't smirk and say, "Who'd be dumb enough to hide in a fire?" Rather we understand we're being challenged to risk all in our passion for life, and our cells shout yes. Just as metaphor encompasses spirit and body, so, as I use the term, soul is the meeting place of spirit and body, the eternal part of us that lives in body while we are on Earth. Soul is traditionally feminine in both men and women.
lead_in: ""
reflection: |
  Woodman is pointing at something the pneumatic inheritance has spent centuries trying to dissolve: the body as a site of knowing, not merely of endurance. When she writes that spirit confirms body, articulates body's wisdom, she is refusing the Platonic transaction — the one where you ascend out of the physical in order to think clearly. Her "as in the head, so in the belly" is a direct counter to that ascent. The solar plexus doesn't need to be transcended; it is already a form of intelligence, simultaneous with and not subordinate to the head.
  
  Notice what she is doing with the Zen koan. "Hide yourself in the middle of the flames" doesn't work if you read it from outside the body — you get a puzzle, or an absurdity, and the smirk she mentions is exactly the response of someone who has evacuated the physical register. The koan lands only when the cells, as she says, shout yes — meaning the body was already in the conversation, already knowing what the image means before the head has finished parsing it. Metaphor is the language of the soul because metaphor is how body and spirit meet: the image carries both at once, without hierarchy, without sequential argument. Poetry gets there not because it is more decorative than prose but because it can hold two things as simultaneously true that logic insists on ordering.
reflection_v0_3: |
  The Zen koan does the argument's real work here — not as illustration but as proof of concept. Woodman doesn't explain what "Hide yourself in the middle of the flames" means; she watches what happens when the body receives it. The cells shout yes. That involuntary assent is precisely what she means by soul as meeting place: not a faculty that interprets experience from a distance, but the site where understanding and sensation arrive simultaneously. Hillman would recognize this move — soul as the deepening that happens in the middle of things, never above them — though Woodman anchors it more explicitly in the body than he tends to. What she's quietly claiming is that metaphor isn't decorative language pressed into service when argument runs out; it is the only language adequate to events that happen in two places at once.
parent_id: Woodman_1993_Conscious_Femininity_Interviews_With_Marion__par0002
source: oracle-v3-retrieve
generated: 2026-04-17
regenerated: 2026-04-18
prompt_version: v2.7
status: draft
---

Woodman writes:

> To feminine consciousness, the spiritual and the physical are two aspects of one totality. Spirit confirms body, articulates body's wisdom. Spirit is immediate and actual, not something arrived at, as in Plato, through dialectical ascent. "As above, so below" translates into "as in the head, so in the belly"; the two are simultaneously present, not dialogically opposed. The paradox of this simultaneous presencethe solar plexus in the head and the head in the solar plexusresists the logic of prose, demanding poetry's elliptical leaps which metaphor attempts to encompass. In my introduction to The Pregnant Virgin, I called this paradox "frog conjunctions,'' thinking of frogs among lilypads leaping from leaf to leaf. Metaphor is the language of the soul. Through a physical image, metaphor reveals a spiritual truth or condition. Take, for example, a line from a Zen koan: "Hide yourself in the middle of the flames." We see the picture and, if we understand metaphor at all, we don't smirk and say, "Who'd be dumb enough to hide in a fire?" Rather we understand we're being challenged to risk all in our passion for life, and our cells shout yes. Just as metaphor encompasses spirit and body, so, as I use the term, soul is the meeting place of spirit and body, the eternal part of us that lives in body while we are on Earth. Soul is traditionally feminine in both men and women.

— Marion Woodman

Woodman is pointing at something the pneumatic inheritance has spent centuries trying to dissolve: the body as a site of knowing, not merely of endurance. When she writes that spirit confirms body, articulates body's wisdom, she is refusing the Platonic transaction — the one where you ascend out of the physical in order to think clearly. Her "as in the head, so in the belly" is a direct counter to that ascent. The solar plexus doesn't need to be transcended; it is already a form of intelligence, simultaneous with and not subordinate to the head.

Notice what she is doing with the Zen koan. "Hide yourself in the middle of the flames" doesn't work if you read it from outside the body — you get a puzzle, or an absurdity, and the smirk she mentions is exactly the response of someone who has evacuated the physical register. The koan lands only when the cells, as she says, shout yes — meaning the body was already in the conversation, already knowing what the image means before the head has finished parsing it. Metaphor is the language of the soul because metaphor is how body and spirit meet: the image carries both at once, without hierarchy, without sequential argument. Poetry gets there not because it is more decorative than prose but because it can hold two things as simultaneously true that logic insists on ordering.

---

Marion Woodman · *Conscious Femininity: Interviews With Marion Woodman* · 1993