The Goddess of Erocult in Ukrainian Nation-Building: Archetypes of the Mistress and the Subversion of Maternal Hegemony

In the fraught terrain of post-war Ukrainian nation-building, where the imperatives of cultural reconstruction intersect with the libidinal economies of desire and power, the invocation of a goddess of erocult emerges as a philosophical necessity, not merely for the perpetuation of demographic vitality but for the infusion of pure eros into the social fabric, embodying the vital, life-affirming, and libidinal forces that animate nature beyond the mechanistic reproduction associated with the archetypal maternal figure. This erocult goddess, conceptualized through a synthesis of Jungian archetypes, Freudian libido theory, and left poststructuralist critiques of biopolitics, stands in stark opposition to the “cattle-sow” of the climacteric wife, whose role is relegated to the endless birthing of “Aryan-golem-babies” — a grotesque parody of pronatalist ideologies undergirding nationalist discourses. Drawing on Foucault’s genealogical analysis of sexuality as a deployment of power that produces subjects rather than represses instincts (Foucault, 1978), the erocult goddess functions as a counter-hegemonic force, disrupting the Oedipal triangulation that binds men to dutiful wives and redirecting psychic energies toward polymorphic perversities that Marcuse envisioned as the basis for non-repressive civilization (Marcuse, 1955). In this schema, the mistress archetype proliferates into subtypes — dominatrix, quiet witch, hedonistic seductress, and eternal girl — each representing facets of eros that transcend the social plane of matrimonial obligation, yet paradoxically embodying maternal and wifely elements in a subversive register. These archetypes, as explored in contemporary Ukrainian cultural phenomena, from the dominatrix’s amazonian dominance to the witch’s arcane wisdom, the seductress’s carnal delights, and the girl’s radiant purity, serve to revitalize the nation’s psychic undercurrents, countering the enervating influence of aging “mommy-wives” — the wives of national heroes burdened by war’s hemorrhoids, the Volyn babki as bearers of tradition, grant-dependent custodians of national culture, and climacteric figures whose eros has ossified into reproductive duty. Psychoanalytically, this dichotomy evokes Lacan’s notion of the objet petit a, where the mistress incarnates the elusive surplus of jouissance, while the wife symbolizes the phallic lack inscribed in the Symbolic order (Lacan, 1973), a dynamic amplified in wartime Ukraine where compensatory masculinities seek not the терпеливая (patient) spouse but the face-sitting aunt, emblematic of a desire for domination that inverts patriarchal hierarchies.