This is a snippet borrowed from a client’s healing, that others might benefit from:
Your ‘angel’ self is probably everything you aspire to be but fall short of. Your angel self is your idea about who you should be. It’s probably your idea about who you need to be in order to be approved of and accepted by others.
Your water sprite represents all the dark, smudgy, ugly, imperfect realities about yourself that you are rejecting or trying to hide. This is your ‘shadow’. (we all have a shadow).
Before healing, the angel and the sprite selves aren’t friends and they certainly are not integrated as one whole. You will tend to try to be the angel and repress the sprite. (it’s possible there is a play on words here: ‘sprite’ might be representing negative emotions like ‘spite’). The angel self will look down on and disapprove of the sprite. The sprite self will feel unloved by the angel. Like a naughty child feeling resentful and being bad to get attention, the sprite will tend to behave exactly how the angel expects her to. The sprite believes and resents the label the angel is placing on her. So we can also see that the ‘angel’, isn’t really all that angellic, at least not in terms of wisdom and unconditional love: she’s just a construct- an idea about who you should be and how you want to be seen. By contrast, the sprite is what you don’t want to be or be seen as.
The ‘marriage’, is about these two selves coming together with love and respect for one another. The angel without the sprite is squeaky clean and shiny, very well behaved…. but in danger of being ‘holier than thou’, judgemental and inauthentic. The sprite without the angel has a very nasty tongue. She says whatever she wants to say and she isn’t very nice. She can also tend towards jealousy.
When these two work together as a loving team, the angel teaches the sprite how to let go of negative emotions or to ‘rise above them’.
The sprite teaches the angel how to accept what she is feeling, even when it is negative or ugly, and to forgive herself.
The key to blending them together is love. Thus the marriage. They need to feel love for each other. You need to love and accept both selves. Work on resolving jealousy (your sprite will tend to see and be jealous of, and cynical about, the angel in others). And know that your angelic self becomes more real and authentic the more she learns to love and accept the presence of the sprite.
Think about what parts of you these two archetypes might be representing. What is good about the Sprite self? What is good about the Angel self? What are the short-comings of both selves? How can they help each other?