As it usually goes, all things consist of a thesis and its accompanying antithesis and the truth lays only in the synthesis. The feminine is by no means exempt from this and what you see is entirely due to your own perception, it cannot be ripped out of the context it is viewed in.

So the feminine is something clean, pure, worth fighting for, worth adoring and kneeling before – that is why love songs never stop being written, this is why knights carried female form on the shields, this is why men take pride in letting the women and children be saved first. This female as a goddess, saint, vessel of reproductive capacities, so frail, wise, beautiful and distant, motivates male desire. It pushes them forward and gives meaning to the battles they lead. But this adored object is not a real person, it’s a symbol of something, it is what you see before “in love” turns into “love”. The women you’re in love with is still an archetypical figure fulfilling the empty space of you WANTING TO BE IN LOVE and wanting to find meaning and strength in the eternal feminine. The genders caught into this interplay make no difference, the same pattern occurs where one takes the position of the masculine and one of the feminine.

To move from naive worship into love, the divine feminine ideal needs to be the first stance in which the darker part of femininity is introduced later. This dark is represented through all cultures as the fear of the feminine, acknowledgement of the disillusion of the fragility that needs to be protected and its substitution by the deep strength the male can never fully understand or grasp, therefore perceiving it as dark and frightening. And so the representations of the witch, succubus and Medusa are formed to foster this fear. The masculine that never gets over the fear of this side of femininity will undoubtedly be turned into stone, paralyzed by looking the Medusa in the eyes, to afraid to even try and contest into the gene pool. Can the witch become a goddess? She already is both, there is nothing to become, and loving means seeing both and choosing and protecting both equally. This means to grow up as a man (or your chosen masculine role).