This is the second part of the Cernunnos series. Stay tuned, we will be posting these leading up to Hekate's Sickle Festival , where Cernunnos will appear and share his wisdom of animals with us!

The previous article left us with a very big question - what is the Shadow? The Shadow-self of a person can contain many different ideas. For some, it is indeed the repository of all that we do not like about ourselves. For others, it is the more primal qualities of ourselves.

Those aspects of ourselves that we call the “Shadow” are those aspects of our personality that we as individuals deem “not good.” This is a personal judgement that we make on ourselves for a plethora of reasons. Some of these reasons are related to our social environment, our personal experience and other learned behaviors.

Here is an example I really like:

A particular person grows up in a home where to be compassionate and sensitive is considered a problem. As a child,he or she was repressed, punished, etc., for showing compassion. Therefore, as an adult this person put compassion in their shadow – that place where we put things that we do not wish to present to the world!

A different person grows up in a home where to be angry and show it is a problem. As with the previous child, signs of anger were repressed, punished, etc. As an adult, this person is very quiet and does not show anger – he or she has placed it in their shadow.

While we as outsiders may have opinions on which emotion should be in the shadow, both examples are perfectly valid. Remember, when discussing the shadow, there is no good or bad, there is only you!

Acceptance of all aspects of oneself is one of the things that an understanding of the Dark and Light half of the year can assist us with. It is not easy, for sure. We have whole lifetimes of what we “should” be. What we “could” be. This is the coulda, shoulda, woulda syndrome and it is totally not useful.

The point is – the shadow is part of a whole person and needs to be acknowledged and worked with. Carl Jung, renowned psychologist, said that unless we recognize the shadow within and reach the point of integration, it will continue to act without conscious control of the individual. Personally, I am too much of a control freak to let that happen. What about you?

Jung also writes on a collective Shadow that influences how one operates in society at large. This is an interesting concept and, for me, it is yet another challenge that the Warrior of Spirit works with to become the best that it can be.

In some circles, people say, “Why does God let bad things happen to good people?” Remembering that we said good and bad are individual judgments, the point here is that people choose to do things. It means that the Divine does not cause a person to do anything. That statement above is what victims use to justify their own behaviors. If a person lives in an area where violence is the mode of operation for the bulk of their community, it follows that experiencing an act of violence is far more likely. It behooves us as individuals to “rise above” the circumstances and to choose a different path. So, the answer to the question – of the Divine letting bad things happen to good people is that the Divine does not do it – people do.

So in summary, we choose to place those things that do not serve us in our personal shadow. On top of our shadows lie the shadow of the collective consciousness of the world we live in and the shadow of our species.

Stay tuned for the next part to this series!