The Blackberry Walk

I'm two episodes in to Cardcaptor Sakura, and I can tell it will be a blast. It's an anime which has sat on my plan to watch for some time, which I knew I'd enjoy but never got around to watching. After watching Utena recently, the idea of magical girls and their symbolism has been on my mind which I also hope to explicate here. Without further ado, let's explore the symbolism from the beginning of Sakura. A good starting point would be to understand the purpose of the magical girl narrative. The story of the mahou shoujo is the feminine hero myth - essentially a coming of age story for girls. The narrative starts off when Sakura stumbles into her father's library in the basement, afraid of the snoring noises which were coming from there. A book down in the library begins to shine and, upon opening it and accidentally invoking the wind card, scatters the many cards contained inside the book across the city. To examine this idea, Jung's notion of individuation is handy. Individuation is the maturing instinct. It is the genetic operating system which presupposes development in a person. You can think of it like a series of containers labeled adolescence, adulthood, middle-aged, etc, with certain properties, waiting to be filled once you've attained a certain level of maturity given certain environmental factors. The best example, which is what Cardcaptor Sakura is showing, is when the genetic switch of puberty is flicked. You don't 'learn' new knowledge to initiate the physical and mental changes of puberty - all the changes are lying latent in the genome waiting to be activated. Returning to Sakura, by finding the book in her father's library, she has flicked that genetic switch, taking her first steps into adolescence. Her father represents the spirit and her ancestors - the dimly lit library belonging to her father is, therefore, the spiritual knowledge of her ancestors - the latent knowledge in the genome waiting to be awakened, which until now had sat there snoring. However Sakura isn't a finished product from purely awakening to adolescence. Her 'adolescence' container is empty and waiting to be filled. The cards, the experiences of youth, are now scattered across the land waiting to be collected. She's left only with the card of the wind, the pneuma, her own spirit, to guide her. Another interesting point is the development of the image of masculinity across development. There are two older, seemingly more 'complete' men who she knows - her brother and her brother's friend (haven't learnt their names yet; brother's friend will be friend from now on). They form a kind of polarity in the eyes of the young Sakura between the kind and good friend and her evil mean older brother. This same polarity is in Sailor Moon, between the kind and good arcade employee Motoki-onii-san and evil mean Mamoru-san. However, like in Sailor Moon, I'm sure Sakura will become more disinterested over time with the friend as she realises, by virtue of maturing, that the 'nice guy' persona, that of the protective father, is not preferable to the 'bad boy' who's willing to put himself on the line for her. Puberty is a time when, for both men and women, the divine image of the opposite gender changes drastically from parent/caregiver to lover/family maker. For men, the equivalent would be going from a caregiving 'mother' figure to someone to give care to. By saying that Sakura in growing up will follow a similar plot to Mamoru from Sailor Moon, I am definitely not suggesting that there will be incest - simply that she'll alternate from one pole, that of a 'fatherly' nature as represented by the friends, to the other, that of the 'lover' as represented by the brother's character. That change in polarity in the masculine image is shown in her magical girl rod. I don't wanna say it. I really don't. But her magical girl rod really is phallic. Sorry. It starts off as a small key - an implement for unlocking locks - and grows to a far greater size upon incantation. The head of the staff is even shaped like the head of a male chicken: a cock. But this shouldn't be understood to be primarily sexual in nature, however. Rather you should see it purely symbolically. To become a magical girl, you must embody the divine feminine, the feminine image which exists at the end of time in its whole and completed state. For this sense of completion, of the Jungian Self and independence, a women must, in a sense, possess her own phallus. To illustrate this, let's look to a story of the past. Pre-WW1 USA. The idea of women smoking was anathema. In several parts of the US, women were banned from smoking in public. However tobacco companies after the war wanted to increase their market by extending their product to women. In order to create a public shift in moral opinion, they enlisted the help of a Freudian analyst who said that to advertise cigarettes to women, you have to sell it as a symbol of independence. A woman who smokes holds her own phallus between her lips, the analyst explained. And, lo and behold, smoking for women took off in the US. In a sense, the development in maturity in the feminine hero's journey is to be able to control the container for man, the animus, in one's own heart. To be able to nurture the growth of that container into a healthy image of man and to have a stable relationship with that image is what much of the maturing process is about. Sakura's magical rod also doubles as a hammer. In using her cards, she hammers down upon them with her staff, as if she were hammering an anvil. Maturity is much like this. If one's soul is a blade, a hammer is necessary to shape oneself into a perfect person in the flames of strife and hardship. And as the show progresses, I'm sure Sakura will learn to incorporate these different aspects of herself as she matures and develops into an adult on her journey. I'm going to go back to watching Cardcaptor Sakura, now. Until next time!