| I had a dream shortly after my mother’s death. I was in a bloody underworld not unlike the chamber of horrors described in The Visions of Zosimos of Panopolis, a third century AD alchemical text. I saw my mother as a huge spider with her face reflected in its eyes, and I was on a slab being sacrificed. The dream was a wake-up call that parts of myself needed to be sacrificed and transformed. My mother suffered from alcoholism, depression, and later dementia. In my own life I have had to come to terms with those parts of my mother that had become parts of my own personality. Much like a spider’s web, I was very much caught in the web of a negative mother complex. The Mad Mother Series came out of this dream. | 
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Ann McCoy
I had a dream shortly after my mother’s death. I was in a bloody underworld not unlike the chamber of horrors described in The Visions of Zosimos of Panopolis, a third century AD alchemical text. I saw my mother as a huge spider with her face reflected in its eyes, and I was on a slab being sacrificed. The dream was a wake-up call that parts of myself needed to be sacrificed and transformed. Much like a spider’s web, I was very much caught in the web of a negative mother complex. The Mad Mother Series came out of this dream.
My mother suffered from alcoholism, depression, and later dementia. In my own life I have had to come to terms with those parts of my mother that had become parts of my own personality. We take on the parent as an internal figure, the imago mater. I quit drinking at 24, but that was just the beginning. The rest of my mother’s personality was very rooted in my conscious and unconscious life. I suffered long periods of depression, paralysis, and isolation.
The breakthrough for me came when I had a dream that my mother and I were swimming in a river with the bodies of lepers. In it, I was in the water with my mother; we were in the same soup, the same complex. The work Washing the Leprous Mother in the Jordan came from this dream. In the Bible, bathing in the Jordan cures Neumann the leper. In alchemy “the leprous of the metals” refers to problems in the process. My mother had always kept a stone from the Jordan River in her ivory reliquary box, so the Jordan River had a personal association for me that related to my mother, and the idea of religious pilgrimage. For me, the dream led to a rebirth of sorts. It opened up a path to me out of the negative mother complex, and away from the depression. In the dream, the water started to sparkle with bits of light.
Lunar Birth shows a devastated landscape. In my dream a glimmer of light began to appear over a blackened landscape. A group of crows flew from the area, as a boat sailed in. One of the crows had my face as a child. The crow is a symbol par excellence of the Nigredo, the dark state in alchemy. For me this had to do with a dawn after a depression.
The child represents new possibilities in dreams and visions. In a symbolic way Christ as a child represents spiritual renewal in the individual as well as the collective. Erich Neumann has written a wonderful book on the meaning of the child in dreams. In the dream I saw a little girl child glowing like a lamp, illuminating the landscape. This was the “inner child” I had never been allowed to experience. The numinosity of the figure gives her another dimension; she has a link to the transpersonal. In another way the girl child represents the “divine feminine,” so repressed in our culture. I drew the child, modeled on a Christ child, wearing a dress. The child represents feminine divinity.
Sanctuary came from both a dream and an experience I had in India in a Jain temple. The Jains practice forgiveness as a daily ritual. The experience in the temple was what a religious writer would call a “peak experience”. The temple mirrored my inner sanctuary. In the dream I was holding my mother like the Christ in the Pieta across my lap. After many years of being angry, I was able to understand her life, empathize with her, and forgive her. She had had a tortured existence with the suicide of her brother and the death of another brother from the fall off a cliff. Her life had not been easy. I believe that giving up resentments and anger is an important step in everyone’s development. The alchemists say one must not have bitterness, using salt as a metaphor for it.
As I was finishing Sanctuary, a baby deer walked out of the woods into my garden. I saw it nose to nose with my dog. The deer followed us around for several hours. In Ireland, it is believed that fairies ride on the backs of deer. The deer goes from forest to city garden, and is an animal of the liminal realm. I put the deer into the drawing. It had come to tell me I was on the right track.
