Welcome into the vortex........

anarcho-shamanism, mountain spirits; sacred wilderness, sacred sites, sacred everything; psychonautics, entheogens, pushing the envelope of consciousness; dominator culture and undermining its activities; Jung, Hillman, archetypes; Buddhism, multidimensional realities, and the ever-present satori at the centre of the brain; a few cosmic laughs; and much much more....


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Thursday 24 August 2017

Finishing the Red Book

Part One

I finished Jung's Red Book (see post of June 7th). I was going to try a vaguely literary, dramatic style: how I put the book carefully onto the coffee table; how I looked ponderously out the window at the shafts of late afternoon sunlight shining on the rooftops; how I felt a strange mix of awe, relief, and bewilderment. I wisely decided against it. Instead, I report simply: I reached the last page.

It wasn't easy. Rarely have I read so much and understood so little. It is not a book to 'understand' in the normal sense of the term. A tome consisting entirely of Jung's visions as he descends into the realm of images, followed by his own valiant yet frequently futile attempts to come to terms with them. Five hundred pages of this. Relentless, unrelenting; tortured at times, tortuous more often, tricky, impossible, uniquely inspirational.

Jung frequently has a hard time. The images give him a hard time, he gives them a hard time, Jung gives himself a hard time. Amongst all this is a man undergoing deep transformations of his being. Not just conceptually, but viscerally. And here's the nub - or one of them. It is easy to consider Jung to be conceptual - overly conceptual. People object to his terms like 'the unconscious', 'the shadow', 'the anima'. So get this. None of these classical Jungian terms pop up at all in the Red Book. It is all image, vision, wrestling with the figures, what they do and what they say. For some folk, it should demand a radical reassessment of what they consider 'Jungian' to be. The concepts are not something that Jung just came up with in a philosophical kind of way over a cup of coffee in Bollingen. No, they came afterwards - most of them at any rate. They are one man's attempt to provide maps, guidelines, frameworks, for others who wish, or need, to follow the path of the imagination. But that is all they are. The images come first; no image, no Jungian psychotherapy. You can do without the shadow and the psychological types, but you can't do without the direct experience of the image. This is the 'message', should we look for one, underlying the Red Book.

Somewhere there is a story in which a man approaches the, by now rather elderly, figure of Jung, and blurts out: 'I don't believe in your theory of the anima.' Jung looks back, gives a wink, and says: 'Don't worry. I won't tell anyone.'

Reading the Red Book I found something of a shocking experience. Partly, I think, because it is so different to most of the methods of communication that I have come to associate with Jung. It is the prima material of the work of the last 45 years of his life. It is the source. Also, I have rarely been confronted with another person's intimate experience in such utter nakedness as I was in the Red Book. Sometimes it seems more like a confessional of a man afraid of going completely off the map.

Part Two

In terms of the precise 'content' of Jung's encounters with the figures, I feel surprisingly little resonance. The characters who Jung spends his evenings with are largely Biblical figures, obscure Gnostics (is there any other type of Gnostic?). The occasional dwarf and anchorite, plus a serpent and his soul. Jung engages in complex and emotionally-charged conversations with them about philosophical and theological matters, and follows this up with further monologues on similar subjects. I, on the other hand, during my period of intensive shamanic journeying, and working with imaginal figures more recently, have rarely got beyond "What's your name?", "What are you doing here?", "Friend or foe?", and "Are you going to attack me?"

There are a number of complications for Jung which I am happy to be free of myself. Firstly, there is abiding anxiety to somehow make what comes out of his imaginal dialogues acceptable to the medico-psychiatric-scientific community. One part of Jung remains a scientist, or at least of a scientific mindset, and some of the more conceptual body of work that ensued is a result of this perspective.

For my part, I have never felt any need to 'validate' any of my inner work within a context of modern science. In fact, should it begin to appear scientifically acceptable, I would wonder if I was doing something wrong. The priesthood of rational scientific materialism and its accompanying armoury of academia is over as far as I'm concerned. 'Research shows...', 'Recent studies suggest....', the opening fanfares of the modern wise ones, have no hold over me. Aside from inducing vague feelings of nausea every time I hear them.

Needless to say, Jung needn't have bothered: his effort to reconcile his pioneering work with the small-minded constraints of much modern science and rational materialism was a miserable failure.

Another of Jung's complicating concerns is with Christianity. He sees clearly the problems that have been created by the lop-sided nature of the religion, and he is painfully aware of the deficiencies of the figure of Christ. Yet he maintains the faith. He struggles to do so throughout the many pages of the Red Book, and keeps up the fight until his death forty-five years later. His persistence with Christianity stems, it seems to me, from a standpoint that he takes. We must stick with, work with, if you like, our history - our western heritage. Disappearing into Hinduism, Buddhism, or some exotic form of shamanism, is escapism to Jung. It is avoiding the issue of the past of the west, which remains ours, like it or not.

I can't really buy this line. Cultural and spiritual past, yes: it's in the bag I carry on my shoulder come what may. I have no choice. It's in the ways that I react, see things, how I behave, often unconsciously. Something it is perilous to ignore. But the way that I relate to all that is a bit different to how Jung does. I am no slave to that collective inheritance. And to equate it with Christianity, as Jung does, is a bit off-target in the early 21st century. Christianity remains one strand, but one strand only. I wonder what Jung would make of the ways his ideas have been incorporated into a multitude of non-Christian and post-Christian groups, ideas, spiritual practices, and the rest today.

And, as if all that was not enough....... Jung appears to feel that his visions, his adventures, as he terms them early on, have to be validated through outer action: taking it all somehow or other into society, as if there is a duty to social usefulness. I draw another question mark here. The inner necessity of images - archetypes, to get conceptual, though we don't need to - is sufficient unto itself. Of course, it's nice to be able to shed light for other folk, but I feel that as no prerequisite. Neil Kramer once opined that half of the most meaningful moments in our life can be shared with others, while the other half is incapable of communication. It's mine. Or I share it with Soul and with the Gods.

What the Red Book tells us, if it tells us anything, is not to follow Jung in his ideas, his concepts, his idiosyncrasies. It is to find the images which sit behind our life - those images which are simultaneously deeply personal and not personal at all - to explore them, chat with them, live with them. Honour the part they play in our life. Like it or not, they are there....

Image: Sonu Shamdasani, editor of the Red Book


  

Saturday 12 August 2017

Justice


Part One

We are probably familiar with the Great God Pan. The horned and horny goat-god of the ancient Greeks. He whose domain was all that came to be known as 'pagan'. In particular, was Pan associated with nature and with sexuality. Not the lovey-dovey sexuality of Aphrodite; nor the mortgage-and-domestic-bliss version of sexuality embodied in Hera. His sex was basic, spontaneous, free of any trappings of orthodox morality. He had a particular liking for young nymphs.

As God of the natural world, Pan could be found in woodland glades, grottos, typically alone, sometimes enchanting with the sound of his pan-pipes.

Even in ancient Greece, Pan was a bit of an outsider, roaming the hills and forests on the very edge of civilisation. Two thousand years ago, Plutarch made the great declaration: "The Great God Pan is dead!" And thus was ushered in the era of modern civilisation.....

'A question from Pan might ask us: "Why are you civilized people who profess compassionate Christianity so hard on the environment? Why do you blast, bulldoze, and flatten so many acres of scrub woodlands and hillsides? Why are there fewer and fewer lonely places where people may hide in nature and nature hide from people? Are you trying to eradicate my haunts? Put a final solution to the problem of Pan?"

'Pan might go on to say: "Sometimes I believe you practice a reverse psychology ....... You rape nature and call me the rapist. You serve your own private desires and call me the masturbator. You leave tracts of ruin, yet claim I am the God who favors deserted wilderness. Is not your day world becoming a suffocating nightmare? Your children having more and more trouble breathing? Are you not security obsessed, seat-belted against surprise, medicated against panic attacks? And what have you done to save the nymphs, the tiny differentiated sounds of nature, nature's little night music? Parks, resorts, golf courses, and well-marked trails - no nymphs there, no risk of swooning at the earth's beauty. No risk of panic either."'         (James Hillman, 'Pan and the Nightmare')

Wise words from a Wise Elder, sadly no longer with us. Things have both changed and remained the same since Hillman's essay was first published in 1972. Alert to the burgeoning sentiment of sympathy towards Pan in the closing years of the twentieth century, those who would like to control (both nature and humanity) were quick to implement a clever strategy. A bundle of measures was rolled out which superficially appeared to be on the side of Pan, while in reality permitting the continued destruction of his venerated haunts. Popular environmentalism was born. A pseudo-scientific rationale for maintaining the status quo, it became the ideology of choice for the politically correct, the trendy, the concerned, the right-on. Thus, 'working for Pan' became windfarms flapping in the breeze, slicing up birds, destroying the tranquillity and wilderness of Pan's favourite places for miles around. It became fields plastered in solar panels rather than sheep and potatoes. It became biofuels instead of food for nutrition.

Pan continues to be persecuted, most by people who think they are doing the opposite. His haunts being blasted to pieces as the bulldozers come in to set up yet another wind turbine, or maybe for another housing estate. Anybody who wishes to witness the wholesale rape of Pan's sacred places, encouraged by people officially designated to the care and protection of that country, should come to Scotland and have a look. Pan, for sure, is both in mourning and in fury. The nymphs are quietly raging, too. Which leads neatly on to........

Part Two

Justice. The meaning of the word has been debated by philosophers, theologians, intellectuals, and the likes for over two thousand years. They still appear to be clueless. Which suggests that the tools they have at their disposal, those of logic and rational thought, are not up to the task. Some of the Kabbalists seem to have a better way, more intuitive, I suppose. They may speak simply yet directly of a sense of 'wrongness' and 'rightness' in ways of going about things. This resonates with me better, but it does require the individual to have acquired a certain degree of inner integrity in the first place.

The typical depiction of 'Justice' in Tarot involves a person with a sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other. The Waite-Smith Tarot, to which I generally give a hard time, is one such example (see above). 'It indicates the moral principle that deals unto everyman according to his works' apparently intoned Arthur Waite of the Justice card. Frankly, I find this all a bit predictable, uninspiring, obvious but doubtful, and not hugely illuminating.

In the Thoth Tarot, Aleisteir Crowley dispenses with Justice, replacing it with 'Adjustment'. I feel a faint spark of interest light up on this one. It is as if things get out of kilter, either personally or collectively, with respect to the way that phenomena naturally work. So 'justice' is concerned with a movement back to the divinely-ordained way of things, metaphorically at least. 'Balance against each thought its exact opposite. For the Marriage of these is the Annihilation of Illusion.' (Book of Thoth). Crowley is mining a deeper layer of reality altogether; but one which is still not quite where we're heading just now.

In a return to the sadly departed Wise Elders of post-Jungian practice, here are a few sections from Marie-Louise Van Franz. It's from 'The Feminine in Fairy Tales', chapter three.

'When we think of revenge or punishment - revenge is an older form of punishment - we think of the law, of its transgression, and of punishment according to established laws, for that is our custom.'

'To make laws and to decide what is to happen to those who break them is in our countries a man's way of dealing with the problem. Our laws are based on Roman law and patriarchal mentality........... The problem of justice and punishment in the male world is linked up with the idea of 'just' laws, and justice means that everybody gets the same punishment for the same sin. It is based on statistical thinking, and there are no exceptions, unless there is a regulation to cover them.'

'.......... it is a one-sided way of looking at the problem. According to mythological standards, there is also feminine justice, and a feminine principle of revenge. ......... It would be more individual and personal ........the law represents the logos principle....... Certain rules have to be made and those who do not keep to them must be punished. It is a protest against chaos and typical of a rational attitude toward life. But there is another process of revenge and punishment which I would like to define as the revengefulness of nature......... It could be called revenge by the natural process of things.'

Von Franz goes on to relate how most primitive mythologies have an aspect of the feminine goddess of nature connected with revenge and fate: Nemesis is one. And another concerned with justice: Themis. She also points out how, on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, justice turns up on the left-hand, feminine, side of the tree. The feminine, she continues, works not so much through 'rule', but 'reacts against what it does not like with nastiness.' As an example, Von Franz cites the vixen who bites its cub at a certain moment in its growing up: inflicting pain, suffering, as the necessary stimulus to get the young one to leave home, go off as an independent little fox.

Nature works more in the feminine mode, according to Von Franz. Nature can be harsh, severe, cruelly revengeful. OK. But what's that got to do with our nice little civilised human world?

Part Three

'Nastiness'. That's good, as James Hillman was wont to say when somebody uttered words that he approved of in some rap or another. Nature does not quite work with revenge, methinks. It's not punishment either. Nor are we talking about karma exactly. I once wrote against Lovelock's notion of 'Revenge of Gaia', opining that Mother Earth will put up with a fair amount of shit without keeping that list of checks and balances: as Big Mum, she loves us, and unconditionally, possibly. But nastiness. Yes. believe me, do a dirty on her and Mother Earth can be nasty.

Two prime candidates for nature's nastiness in the world of humans: cancer and dementia. People have always suffered from these, but not in the way they do today. Such is my admittedly subjective impression, at any rate. They constitute a veritable plague on the species. Anyone and everyone is in the firing line for cancer. Gone are the days when you could point a finger and say "Ah, George. Well he did smoke a packet of fags a day." No. I am familiar with enough people who have led, and continue to live, pretty healthy, high-risk-free, lives both physically and mentally, but who have unfortunately succumbed to cancer. And at no great age. Cancer, I submit, is no longer personal.

There are those who will point out that life expectancy is longer nowadays, so it is natural that more people will end up with cancer or dementia. A bit of research a few years ago led me to the 'conclusion' (I am open to be shown otherwise) that this is not the case - or at least only part of the truth. The rise in incidence of cancer in the UK far outstrips what one would expect from changes in life expectancy alone over the past 50 - 100 years. I have lost my sources of info, I am quite bad like that, and I ain't gonna run around the internet a second time. But this would appear to be the case.

Nobody in mainstream life understands what cancer is at all. I might characterise it as a serious disruption to the healthy functioning of an organism. Things just start to go haywire; as if the physical system requires reconfiguring. As such, it would appear to be a fairly accurate reflection of how humanity at large goes about things on the face of the earth today. Gone haywire, creating mayhem, something seriously amiss. Dementia, similarly, is one large part of mental process and processing gone completely crazy, or missing. The image of an out-of-control helicopter looping round and round as it heads to disaster comes to mind. It is the species gone mad in the head; the archontic factor, if you like that. Erroneous, out of control, lop-sided mentalising, reflected in stupid acts by stupid people; stupid opinions on everything under the sun; mental process out of touch with other aspects of the personality. Research, opinion, statistics, reason as the one and only pathway to truth; academia as the residence of the new gods. Mentalising gone mad, in complete pathological disconnect.

Out of touch with Nature. She does not like it. Not one little bit. The way that most of us immersed in modern western culture live is far from the natural cycles that have formed the basis of human life until more-or-less yesterday. So much of what our psycho-physical organism experiences as its environment is foreign to it: screens, microwaves, mobiles, the continual bombardment with information. Even fifty years ago, this was unthinkable.

Nemesis, it appears, is not overly harsh. She doesn't go out looking for trouble, and would prefer things to go smoothly. She understands a degree of human error. What really gets her angry, though, is hubris. Taking up above your natural station. Thinking you really are the greatest, and know best, so two fingers up to Nature, Nemesis, the other gods and goddesses. Then you are in for trouble. Big trouble. We could do worse than all put up little shrines to Nemesis in our bedrooms, and offer a prayer before turning out the light. It might bring down the cancer rate. Nothing else seems to.

Images: Justice, Waite-Smith Tarot
             Nemesis



Saturday 5 August 2017

Medusas, Rapes, and Virgins

Part One

Ah, Medusa. They think they know you well. Your visage horrific, horrifying, horrendous. Snakes entwined around your head, the serpentine tousled hair. You, whose very look turns brave men to stone. Such is the story they tell about you, at least.

Yet, Medusa, as you know only too well, it wasn't always like that. One face of the Triple Moon Goddess, gloriously you went, beyond the distant shores of northern Africa. One aspect of the resplendent moon, one of the three great lunar sisters. Athena, maiden goddess of the waxing moon; Metis, mother goddess of the moon in fullness. And you, Medusa, the beautiful, the wise, splendid Lady of the Dark Moon, presiding over divination, death, renewal, and all manner of magic. Thus were the three sisters of the starry night, roaming across the skies of northern Africa.

Then came the Hellenes, the Greeks, across the seas. With them, the patriarchs, the new gods, the solar gods, their solar religion, their solar-centric view of life. No more welcomed with your wisdom of the dark places, Medusa, you had to go. Or, rather, you had to change. Friend of the courageous, provider of fearlessness, now to be transformed into a figure of horror and fear, in keeping with the new myths of the new races.

You were, so the story goes, raped by Poseidon, the god of the sea, your independence violated, your power broken. Dear sister Athena, in misguided outrage, took your breathless beauty, turning it against you, into petrifying horror. Beauty turned to terror, lunar silvery liquid debased into cold, hard stone. A sight to transform men of the sun into stone indeed. Medusa - gravest threat to the dominance of the new solar religions on Earth. Betrayed by one of her sisters, no less - into a monster. And then, Medusa, in a final act of humiliation, you were slain by the hero Perseus, great solar warrior hero of the new patriarchal peoples, your head to be worn as a trophy. Debasement of the Dark Moon Goddess was complete; nothing remained to be said.

Part Two

There is a dual aspect to myth, mythology, fairy tale. One face is sociological/historical, myth seen as an expression of a particular culture at a specific point in time. Thus do we witness the transformation and humiliation of Medusa the Dark Moon Goddess, as her ways are seen as a threat to a new world order, and must be supplanted. The sociological is the 'modern' way of going about things. Academics can't get enough of it, and it has its place. But there is another way to see myth, as communicating realities which are more universal, with one foot at least outside the vagaries of space and time. This is the more completely archetypal perspective.

For myself, I specialise in getting caught up in 'either/or' fantasies, when 'both/and' may work far better. So it is with myth. Bypass the temptation to indulge in the 'but what is the real way to read mythology?' question, and embrace both approaches simultaneously. Then the richness of the stories stands a chance of being experienced properly.

Part Three

Rape. Not a very pleasant topic; not something which most of us care to dwell on overmuch at all. It is an unavoidable reality, however: that rape is not uncommon in the myths and legends of ancient Greece, among others. It almost seems the normal way of going about things among the gods. Take Zeus, Big Chief Daddy of the Greek pantheon. I am not the cataloguing type, but I know enough bits and pieces to recognise him as a serial rapist. No goddess, nymph, or mere mortal female was safe from his clutches. Europa and Semele are two of the well-known unfortunates who undergo unwilling abduction by Zeus, who often takes on a sneaky guise in order to get his way. We have already seen how Medusa was, according to some accounts, raped by Poseidon. And Pan, the horned goat-god, was inclined to impose himself on any nymph or mortal who happened to be passing by.

From a historical/sociological perspective, the stories seem to tell the tale of a take-over bid by predominantly patriarchal, solar cultures. Rape is one unambiguous and unsophisticated means to show who's in charge now, and to vividly communicate the disdain with which the old ways of the moon worshippers were to be regarded from now on.

This is one view of the ancient myths. But there is another.

Probably the best-known rape in mythology is that of Persephone, daughter of Demeter. Sweet young Persephone was out one day collecting flowers with her buddies. Hades, Lord of the Underworld, who had previously taken a fancy to her, saw his opportunity and, coming out of nowhere, grabbed poor little Persephone and dragged her kicking and screaming down into the Underworld (it is from this incident that the term 'deflowering' is apparently derived).

Raped into the Underworld. That's how it can seem. Unbidden, unwelcome, out of control. A force greater, stronger, than everyday consciousness, ego-consciousness if you like, turns up and just takes you away, drags you down. 'You' have no choice, no part to play. It's an event activated by a big, scary, unknown, 'Other'.

That was unquestionably my own experience some 25 years ago, when I underwent my own tumble into the nether realms. It is a scenario re-enacted in less dramatic fashion to this day. It's an integral part of any spiritual life worth its salt, really. Stuff happens that's not 'you'; it comes upon you, smothers, takes over. Not nice. Rape.

Not all descent to the Underworld takes this form. Aeneas makes his descent consciously, as a necessary act in his own voyage through life, to meet the ancestors. I found my first reading of his visit to the depths a moving one, beautifully related by Vergil. Odysseus similarly goes down as a deliberate act. And, from a far deeper layer of mythology, the beautiful Inanna, goddess of heaven and earth in ancient Sumer, pays her own visit to the Underworld. She is warned against it, and the denizens from below attempt to dissuade her. Inanna insists, however, and gets more than she bargained for.

This is rape deliteralised; seen for what it is in mythology, granted its archetypal meaning. There is a lucid chapter on rape in 'Pan and the Nightmare' by James Hillman, the master of deliteralising, of restoring a mythological perspective.

Part Four

At the other end of the spectrum to rape, and thus intimately connected, are the virgins. Thanks to two thousand years of Christianism with its distinctive tendency to take things literally, we have ended up with a very unmythological angle on the topic, embodied in the image of the Holy Virgin Mary. This is 'virginity' seen as a completely literal and physical phenomenon. Has she actually done it with anyone or not? This is the question, the only question. Thus has physical virginity become fetishised, to the detriment of many young - and not so young - females and males.

Taken less literally, more archetypally, we could say, the virgin is the embodiment of freedom, of joyous autonomy, of energy untrammelled, unfettered. "I am nobody's but my own." In the mythologies of Greece and Rome, she roams the hills and forests under the name of Diana the huntress, or Artemis before her. Hecate, Dark Moon Goddess, overseer of magic, mystery, lady of the yew tree, is another embodiment of the 'virgin spirit'.

In her original form, Medusa too shared in this free, untamed femininity, along with her Amazon priestesses. Whether or not they do it, or have done it, is irrelevant. I recall a quote from way back from Neil Kramer, who averred that he hoped God had more important things to do than worry about where we've been putting our private bits (I paraphrase, though not wildly). Diana and Hecate roam free, unattached, untamed and untameable. Yet they remain fully sensuous, sensual, sexual. They have sacrificed not one iota of their physical being-ness. They radiate beauty, physicality, as a necessary aspect to their archetypal magnificence. Our Holy Virgin Mary, by contrast, is an incomplete version of a universal image, I have to report sadly. Not that some of the depictions of her in Byzantine and Renaissance art are not beautiful. But she is a fallen figure. Some parts have gone missing, and the results have been devastating.

Images:  Top: Medusa by Caravaggio
              Centre: Medusa when she was beautiful, apparently
              Bottom: Hades kidnapping Persephone (most elegantly .....)