Journey through the Archetypes: The Sage

Cultivate the unique power & beauty of the Sage for intellect, skill, accomplishment & strategy.

By Pascal-Adolphe-Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (French; 1852 – 1929)

Today, we continue our journey through the goddess archetypes, inspired by Bolen’s famous book. Many of my readers come with inquiries to expand the goddess archetypes and give more insight. The purpose of these posts is exactly that. As always, I remind that multiple archetypes can be present in a woman. Also, some archetypes that are not dominant may appear during a phase in life — for example, even a woman who is not naturally dominated by the Mother archetype (not in her top three), may experience the archetype when she gives birth or she desires to have children or if she begins to pursue a caregiving career. Previously we have explored the Mother, the Mystic and the Maiden.

When we talk about the Sage archetype, we are talking about one of the virgin archetypes. In archetypal psychoanalysis, the virgin does not refer to sexual acts but rather to the orientation of the psyche. The virginal psyche is oriented towards its own internal world and motivations and not necessarily to relationships.

However, the Sage archetype has one significant relationship and that is the relationship with her father (or a father figure and by extension the archetypal father). She is the archetypal father’s daughter and her father’s favourite child — she is curious about his world and is proudly reflecting and defending his values. She defines herself by how well she performs in the archetypal Fatherworld — academia, politics, law, economy, and other traditionally male domains. She is what we may nowadays consider a ‘girl boss’. Her close bond to her father is the reason why she is a virgin. Yet, this virginity of hers can be an obstacle to her greater creative development since she remains in in the state of a ‘rigid stone’.

The Sage is fully armoured in her father’s shield. Because of that, no other man can reach her or penetrate her. She is unresponsive to love or anything that may touch her heart as that is primarily where the shield is. Even if she does marry and have children, her husband is likely to take role of her son, mentor or friend. She will deny him any deeper, more personal relation.

Since of her creativity and libido are undifferentiated from the father, she tends to lack any connection with the archetypal mother and the Motherworld. When she speaks of things traditionally associated with the mothers or the feminine—soil, land, blood, birthing, intuition, body, feelings, emotions, non-academic methods of knowledge—, she may treat them with the similar contempt and mockery that the man who (ignorantly) sees himself ‘above it all’ does. On a subconscious level, she knows that her own Feminine development was ‘hijacked’ by her father. This is also why she may sometimes subconsciously seek ‘revenge’ on men while outwardly or consciously ‘worshiping’ everything traditionally male. She is a femme fatale who swears to destroy men while still existing in their domain. For example she may seek to ‘dominate’ all men at her work place, not realising that in doing so, she is still placing men as her centre even while she seeks to move beyond her attachment to the patriarchal values. Prostitution—using her femininity and female body as a tool—is also the Sage’s shadow activity.

The Sage is ‘expelled’ from her father’s Heaven the moment she decides to act on her own values. These are the values that come from her own heart and not from the blind obedience to the father’s values. This is also when her femme fatale arch may begin to manifest.

I have heard it often from women who resonate with the Sage that their trigger into their mother was in realising that no matter how accomplished or successful or intelligent they were, the men that they considered their ‘comrades’ still saw them as a ‘fine piece of ass’. She has invested her entire life avoiding her ‘femaleness’, seeking not to be defined by it, seeking to prove herself that she can measure up to men only to notice that she is still perceived as a woman and female. She then realises that in trying to measure up to men, she was the one who saw her own femaleness as something inferior to begin with. She has so identified with the tyrannical patriarch that she cannot see that he is within her. This is when the Sage women would begin to explore their mothers, grandmothers and feminine lineage and finally become comfortable with their female bodies and sexuality.

When the Sage women integrate the mother, they usually become those women who stand up for the dignity and rights of women in law, education, politics or healthcare. Her brand of ‘feminism’ is different than the one of the Amazon (who may be more radical and activist leaning) or the Queen (who focuses on empowering women in their own personal power as women) but she is usually the one behind legislations, education, funding or anything similar.