More LOTR Caption Silliness

I haven't been participating in the weekly LOTR caption contests for a while, but I did want to share this week's winner, for anyone who wanted a bit of silliness in their day:

Click here for the inspired silliness.

(For those unfamiliar with lotrpiccaptions, the community has a weekly challenge to come up with the best -- usually funny -- caption for a still from the Lord of the Rings movies, or a behind-the-scenes shot. The winner of one week gets to choose the photo and the winner for the following week.)

The Fifth Archetype

Tallman's Archetypes for Spiritual Direction continues to resonate with me and inform my daily choices as I pause to reflect on whether I am acting from a healthy/heroic energy or a Shadow, particularly in the area of the Sovereign and the Abdicator shadow, as it relates to my hearthkeeping.

I continue to play with my perceptions of the archetypes, listing my heroes and heroines in a matrix and checking off which archetypes they model.

The problem was that for several of them, there was something missing. For example, Veronica Franco (as portrayed by Catherine McCormack in the movie Dangerous Beauty -- that's her in the icon on this post) -- is a highly educated courtesan, definitely a Lover. But she's more than that. She takes a stand against her society's treatment of women, and the Church's repression of human sexuality. But it didn't feel right to label her a Warrior. She displayed some of the traits which I associate with the Warrior, but it didn't fit her energy.

After a lot of contemplation, and after looking at the mandala I had been slowly putting together, where I had placed Inanna at the center, I realized that what was missing for me was the Rebel. As Veronica demonstrates, the Rebel has traits in common with the Warrior: a willingness to confront, to resist, to be willing to die for something greater than self. But for me part of the Rebel is simply about being able to see outside the frame, to resist the dominant paradigm, to say "there is another way." I suppose Tallman would call the Rebel a combination of the Seer and the Warrior: one who sees another way and then goes to the mat in the name of those convictions (again, Gandhi comes to mind), but for me, this particular energy/orientation calls for it's own category.

( Some of this goes over ground I've covered here before. It seems to be a lesson I need to keep coming back to so I can fully integrate it. )