Eight of Swords

The Swords of Tarot. Often described as 'a difficult suite'; 'challenging'. It's a bit funny, really, when the Swords are what so much of modern western culture and civilisation is based upon.

The Swords are air. They are intellect, logic, reason; 'mentality'. Since the Enlightenment, so-called, these are the faculties that have been raised above all others as the way upwards and onwards. Science, the great religion of modern times, is sword stuff. Measuring is the sacred act; if something can't be measured on a funny device, it doesn't exist. Mentality is raised to the heavens, while the other faculties that Tarot and Jung alike present as aspects of our being - intuition, feeling, sensation - are relegated to the scrapheap of primitivism and animal nature.

You see, we are reflective, self-aware creatures. Our superiority, our distinctiveness, our personal and collective identities, all depend on our subservience to the Sword. To reason, our higher faculty. A serious rummage around the deeper, hidden layers of who we are reveals this all to be complete nonsense.

It is to his great credit that Jung, when portraying the four faculties which he considered went to make up the complete human being, did not arrange them in a hierarchy. 'Thinking' is not proposed as superior to the other functions of feeling, intuition, and sensation. He does not commit the heinous crime that much modern culture does, which sets out to cut off the human being from its 'totality', for us to identify with our mind, our reason, at the expense of all else. It is actually a thought control device, which effectively alienates folk from their own sacredness, their way towards  and connection with the divine. The 'scientific mind', the 'scientific world view', is a mind-f**k. Nothing but darkness will result.

There have been times during my own life when the cultural devotion to the sharp cutting blade of reason has done me in. Not all Buddhism is like this; but much of the way that it has migrated to the west has been characterised by a certain devotion to reason, to logic, to the brain sword. Unlike Christianity, which seems a bit based on blind faith and therefore a bit stupid, much modern Buddhism prides itself on its rational soundness, its conceptual efficacy. This was indeed one element which I initially found appealing, but which returned to haunt me in later years.

When I became a chairman of a Buddhist centre in west London, I would attend meetings of chairfolk from across the globe. These gatherings were populated by people with thinking faculty uppermost; people who would be at home with the cut-and-thrust of political debate, maybe, in interview on Newsnight. This is not, in general, the way that my mind works. I need to go away, allow something to digest for a week or a year, before coming up with a personal view. Time after time, the swordspeople would come up with an idea, a plan. I would sense there was something not quite right about it, but couldn't put my finger on it. As a result, I kept mum, only to find out much later that my doubts were indeed justified.

Buddhism in the modern west tends to appeal to thinking types, at home with concepts, at sea in feeling and instinct. So it was with great relief that I began to discover a few basics of Kabbala. Here, mentality is put in its place. It does indeed have its place, but alongside the other aspects of our being. Kabbala recognises, in particular, the vitality of feeling and of instinct. In this respect at least, I find it to be a kindred spirit. You cannot think your way to enlightenment, however much you may wish to. On this, Kabbala and Pale Green Vortex are in accord.

To return to Tarot. It is in the Eight and the Nine of Swords that the perils and tortures of identifying with mentality really come home to roost. Too much thinking, trying to work it all out. Trying to understand with logic and reason alone what cannot be comprehended in this way at all. The result: insanity......

"The tendency for analysing and considering everything, digging out a counter-argument for any argument there is....." "Empty thoughts and shallow sentences....." "The Prisons of the Mind....." "Only blessed stupidity can be self-secure enough to believe that thought is the only truth...." "Agony of Mind....." These are a few notes and comments on the Eight and Nine of Swords that I have rapidly compiled from a number of my sources. The 'much-maligned on Pale Green Vortex' Waite-Smith Tarot does a pretty good job of redeeming itself by communicating something of the mental trials evinced by the Swords. But there is even better......

The Eight of Swords from the Royo Dark Tarot I find a marvellous evocation of the pain and torture that we can inflict upon ourselves through overmuch misplaced sword activity, and where this can lead. A young woman in self-inflicted mental torture. Harsh judgement of our own thoughts and behaviour, no self-love, no self-humour. See where it can lead. Depend upon mentality to the exclusion of the other aspects of our being, and this is how we may end up. The self-wrought chains and manacles, the self-inflicted metal sunk deep into the head. This is a painting of deep compassion, I feel.

And I have said enough......  

Images: Nine of Swords from the Waite-Smith Tarot
             Eight of Swords from Royo Dark Tarot.

The Daughter of God

Imagine. Just imagine. What if....... what if......... instead of sending his only begotten son, God had instead had a daughter. Instead of Jesus, Son of God, we had Jezza, Daughter of God. Just imagine how different things might have been.

For sure, the past two thousand years would have seen fewer decimating large-scale international wars. Rather than inquisitions and conquistadores, hellbent on removing the opposition whatever the cost, the followers of Jezza might have found a little more kinship with the pagan, shamanic, and other indigenous peoples inhabiting planet Earth.

Nature would have had a little less of a hard time at the hands of an exploitative human mentality. Philosophers and theologians would have had less need to worry their silly little heads over artificial dichotomies such as body/mind, and spirit/matter. Life would be structured less in such a rigid, viciously hierarchical pattern of power. Instead of being menaces on the world stage, the likes of Trump and Merkel would be smalltown chiefs.

Scientific materialism, and the scientific revolution, so-called, would not have taken place - at least not in the form that they did. The internet and windfarms would not exist. Cancer therapies beyond surgery, chemo and radiotherapy would not be illegal to promote, as they currently are in Britain. We would be better friends with plants.

The thinking faculty would be less exalted, other aspects of personality happily given their rightful place at the table of human existence. We would be less afraid of the dark.

In truth, I sometimes give Jesus, Son of God, an unjustifiably hard time. The 'son of god' imperative was in place centuries before Jesus was purported to have walked the face of the Earth, with the relentless march of patriarchal ways of thinking. The offspring of God was to be male: it could be no other way.

We might fruitlessly surmise what Jezza, Daughter of God, might have looked like. For sure, unlike her solar sibling, she possesses an underworld, cthonic, aspect. I fancy her in this particular guise to resemble the Ace of Pentacles in the Royo Dark Tarot.

Pentacles: earth, matter, flesh. The word made flesh. Senses, physical, material beauty. And the Ace: the essence, the quintessence. The first tiny fall from the Oneness of creation, the Undivided God.

She comes naked, and is proud in her nakedness. Her body, ineffably beautiful yet fragile and mortal, is the vehicle through which the divine expresses itself, radiating in the splendour of God-given senses. The darkness is not her adversary, her martial enemy, as is the case with the Son of Light, Jesus. She embraces, takes it all in. On her way Jezza, daughter of God, is accompanied by the sacred serpents: not to be demonised, vanquished, overcome, as the great enemy, but to be honoured as the carriers of wisdom and power that they are. The serpentine secret key to direct communication with the divine, the intercession of a corrupt, power-greedy priesthood no more necessary. Jezza, Daughter of God, protector of the Kundalini.

She walks up the stony steps of the Underworld towards the Creator of all, dark through his unknownness. They stare in mutual love and awe.
 
Actually, Jezza is around, in the back streets of the city at night, or prowling the forest tracks at twilight. It's just that people ignore her lovely, threatening presence.

Image: Ace of Pentacles, Royo Dark Tarot

Simon Magus

Simon Magus is an interesting guy. He reminds me of Timothy Leary.

Simon is one of that obscure and disparate bunch who go by the name of early Gnostics. They are obscure because we don't know much about them at all, really, and most of the info comes in the form of vicious put-down by rival early Christian dudes. And they are disparate because there are loads of different Gnostic groups or 'sects'; though just how much of this has any real basis, and how much is later commentators trying to bring order to delicious chaos, is unclear.

Simon first caught my eye in the final couple of pages of Jung's 'adventures' in the Red Book. It's not exactly climactic-apocalyptic stuff: events in the book do not proceed in linear fashion. Rather, the path is serpentine in nature (in more ways than one, it transpires). It may even, I surmise, take on the form of the Uroboros, the snake that bites its own tail, circular, never to end.

Anyhow...... , here, right near the end, Christ, a rare player in the Book, makes a cameo appearance. He is spied lurking in the shades, and Jung's 'I' realises who he is. Christ has a bit of a chat with Philemon, another obscure Gnostic who has taken on a bit of a Wise Old Man role in the life of Jung. Christ is not overly impressed with this aged Gnostic, and at one point - it always reads to me as expressed in dismissive irritation - calls Philemon 'Simon Magus, or whatever your name may be.' Funny this, taking Philemon to be Simon Magus.

It is from Simon, apparently, that the word 'simony' derives. He was, after all, Simon Magus: Simon the Magician. And when he caught sight of Peter doing some magic tricks with the Holy Ghost, he couldn't resist asking the price for letting him in on the secret. This didn't go down too well.

More interestingly (personally at least) is the way that Simon goes around with as his constant companion one Helen or Helena. This young lady it seems was a slave and a prostitute, who Simon picked up in Tyre. She was in a previous life Helen of Troy, no less. So the story goes.

Gnostic metaphysics have far more room and respect for the feminine than does orthodox Christianity. This was one of the focal points which led to the early Christians demonising and intending to get rid of the Gnostics. You see, in the Gnostic systems, God is female. Or, rather, God's first thought, the Ennoia, is feminine. God is Goddess, at least in so far as the divinity impinges upon our life here on planet Earth. There are many variations, but the main drift goes like this. Sophia, the Goddess, falls from the Pleroma, the abode of the gods and goddesses, eventually touching base on this planet, the life on which is her creation. She is stuck here, however, unable to get back to the Pleroma. In Simon's version of events, Sophia incarnates in female forms, eventually turning up in the body of Helena the divine prostitute.

In alchemy, and for Jung, Helena is the soror mystica. She is the divine companion who accompanies the alchemist in his work. Without her presence, her assistance, he has no hope of success. Jung of course talks of 'anima', the sacred other, a term which a number of readers of this blog don't like. Be that as it may. It is significant, I suggest, that in the life of Simon Magus the soror turns up, not as a Virgin Mary type, or Princess Diana, not even as an inspired Pre-Raphaelite muse. She's a divine prostitute-slave. Sexy, no doubt, sensuous, possessing dark, dangerous beauty.

Equally, the female alchemist may find turning up on her doorstep unannounced one morning the frater, her mystic beloved counterpart. I am conflating alchemy and Gnosticism here; I am aware of this. They are not the same, but the similarities outweigh the differences on the theme getting an airing here. Simon Magus, Simon the Gnostic, is Simon the Great Magician, after all. Magic is essentially the art of transformation. And there is nothing that will get Simon going more than the transmutation of transmutations, that of base metal into gold.

The females in the stories from the orthodox solar, masculine religions always get a bad rap. Get this. Helen the prostitute does not fit in to the prostitute-and-whore demeaning fantasy of orthodox-based renunciate religiosity. She is sacred, she comes dripping sexy divinity. She is Sophia. Without her the great Simon Magus is lost, nothing.

The women are always the seductresses, luring the young male hero away from his noble quest. They're the bad guys (or gals). Take Odysseus of Greek mythology fame. There he is, doing all sort of important stuff. Then he gets seduced by the goddess-nymph Calypso. Seven years he wastes in her arms, before finally escaping her evil clutches and getting back on track. A similar fate befalls Aeneas in Virgil's 'Aeneid', captivated by the lovely Dido until he is reminded of his 'true purpose' and leaves her in the lurch.

What rubbish stories. Who are these pathetic guys, who allow themselves to get diverted for so long? I always thought that spiritual life involved taking personal responsibility for your actions. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book: get waylaid by the beauty of a girl, then blame her for your own lack of conviction. Or there is another take on the story. Maybe Odysseus's seven years with the lovely nymph were not a waste of time at all. Maybe he was learning a whole bundle of stuff from her. Maybe his time with her was a necessary part of his journey through life. Maybe she was the soror mystica all the while, but he was too much of a wimp to own up. Just maybe....

P.S. In an unpredictable turn, I can report that the Wikipedia entry on Simon Magus is not bad at all, a decent reference for anybody wanting a little closer acquaintance with our wacky hero.

Images: The Magician from the Hermetic Tarot
             Calypso's Isle by Herbert James Draper. Those Victorians liked to lay it on thick ....
     

A Few Flowers and Animals

The Daisies

The Michaelmas daisies in the back garden have just about had it for another year. The handsome white flowers are long-lasting, but even their beauty fails to stay forever. Since the inhabitants of this house are less than prompt with their gardening clean-ups, there remain large numbers of still-sturdy stalks, capped by dead or nearly dead heads of a sickly off-yellow colour. Some look putrid, as if they will smell bad, but they don't. Daisies past the sell-by date.

I recently had a dream. I was in a house set above an empty street. The town below appeared rather old, maybe a picturesque little place tucked away among the Tuscan hills. All was completely silent, apart from music that was playing in a room near the window overlooking the deserted street. It was on a vinyl record, played on an old gramophone player like His Masters Voice records once boasted as its emblem. The music was crackly, the stylus scratchy. It was vaudeville music that had been playing, the same, same music, for years. It was all old hat, the house was empty. All my life, since I was a little child, I had been listening to this same old piece of music; it had been going on since the beginning of time, it seemed. It had become increasingly tiresome and tiring, the tunes more desperately cliched, the quality of sound now painfully thin, crackly, tinny. I knew that people continued to listen to this record, but the room was empty of any other life; the music appeared to be playing to itself.

I suddenly yet calmly realised that I was under no compulsion to listen to this music any more. I quietly walked out of the house, into the bright morning sunshine, leaving the music to continue playing repetitively to itself in an empty room.

Walking out, walking away from the music that is still apparently doing its same tired and tiresome thing. Listening, entrancement, not obligatory......

The Dark Rose

The artwork of Luis Royo will not be to everybody's taste. I get that. Young females dripping dark sensuousness, clad in tattoos and body adornments more than clothing; wielding glistening swords, their most faithful lover, as they prowl the night under the stormy sky of the full moon. Yes indeed. But still.....

Beauty is subversive, according to Royo. "When we talk of beauty in our society, it always appears slightly fickle and superficial, when it's completely provocative."  "Pleasure and beauty as subversion, even in power and religion." Our 'weapon of splendour' he calls it.

It's funny. Declare that art is subversive, and everybody nods their head in sage approval. Replace the word 'art' with 'beauty' and it feels a whole load more uncomfortable. It's no longer safe.

I have watched a couple of interviews with Senor Royo, and he comes across as an unpretentious and modest man. He has studied Tarot seriously, and knows it well, he states (he is the creator of three Tarot decks, again not to everyone's taste). However, he cannot read and interpret properly for other people, he admits: he doesn't have the gift. I like this kind of straightforward honesty.

A major theme in some of Royo's work can be termed 'beauty and beast'. Such drawings or paintings generally involve magnificently-crafted nubile females in the company of some powerful Pan-like figure, or kind of monster or semi-monster. To some, this undoubtedly appears as just another excuse to depict sexy girls in various stages of undress in borderline taboo/transgressive (transgressive of what?!) perversion. To others, though, it may unfold as a meditation on the juxtaposition of contraries, extremes, and their relation to, communication with, one another. Are they truly distinct, parts of a greater whole, or what?

There's probably some truth in both of these stances. They are not mutually exclusive. Anyhow, Luis Royo sometimes likes to accompany his pictures with a little story, often based upon ancient or oriental mythologies. Here is one.....

Once upon a time, the mortals lived their lives in ignorance and forgetfulness of the gods. The divine beings were angry at such insult, and sent a messenger, a kind of emissary of death, to sow terror among the humans as a kind of punishment, or in an attempt to shock them out of their amnesia. Humans lived in constant fear of this figure of death and darkness who walked amongst them. One day, however, the dark emissary came upon a beautiful maiden who, instead of running away terrified as she was supposed to do, felt 'bewitched and attracted by the cold touch of death, and the bloody and sensuous kiss which turned them into sinister ladies of the night.'

Not much of a story, really. Some might consider it a bit sick. I find it interesting, thought-provoking.

A Bird of the Night

I had never visited Dundee before. There are many folk in the same position: although it is the fourth largest city in Scotland (which doesn't mean an awful lot....), Dundee still feels like a bit of a backwater. It is en route to nowhere in particular, with the exception of Aberdeen.

I was looking forward to seeing the statue of Desperate Dan, an iconic figure from the 'Dandy' comic which, along with the 'Beano', held a certain place in my childhood. The publishers, Thomson, remain in Dundee. I was very disappointed in the statue, as it turns out. Smaller than I had anticipated, grotesque and ugly, not fitting for the comic book hero at all.

In an effort to even things up, my wife and I paid a visit to the Dundee Wildlife Centre. It is located right next to where we were staying, which helped. Everything was going smoothly until we reached the Great Grey Owl enclosure. There are a number of impressive owls living at the Centre, the Great Greys being just one. But there, peering straight out at us were two enormous birds, their saucerlike eyes fixing us with an unalterable stare. "There's another one" exclaimed my wife, pointing to a motionless eminence perched on a branch high up. "There's another" she said, gesturing to a slightly smaller character sitting on top of their wooden house set aloft. "Oh no" I chipped in, "and another."

Five Great Grey Owls. All utterly silent, motionless. All bearing down on us with fixed, magnificent stares. We, in turn, stared back, trying unsuccessfully to match the focus of these birds. The only movement in the owl enclosure came when one of the inhabitants cocked its head at an angle, to get a better look at us, I suppose.

Streams of communication seemed to emanate between us. The nature and content of that communication, especially from the viewpoint of the owls, was way beyond me, and profoundly mysterious. But communication there undoubtedly was.

Unnerved and not a little disturbed, my wife and I eventually moved on, feeling, to tell the truth, relieved to be away from the owls. We examined the enclosure next door, and I made the error of casting an eye back at the owl residence. There they were, all five of them, still fixed intently on us. Their heads are like corkscrews, rotating silently on top of motionless bodies: all they needed to do was effortlessly twist their necks. We almost fled in terror, to observe brown bears ripping apart whole cauliflowers, nice and cheery in comparison to the Great Grey Owls.

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


  

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

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 .....)