weird, part II
Monday 19 February 2007 | I like a cookie
Who is this flower above me,
and what is the work of this God?
I would know myself in all my parts.
—traditional Feri prayer
•
Struggling through the neither-fish-nor-fowl prose of Drawing Down the Moon (because surely after all these years I should finish the damn thing), pitching and yawing through Margot Adler’s fat chapters neither solidly academic nor openly pagan, I’m startled to encounter something actually interesting. It figures that the passage would star my favorite unpopular psychoanalyst:
Much of the theoretical basis for a modern defense of polytheism comes from Jungian psychologists, who have long argued that the gods and goddesses of myth, legend and fairy tale represent archetypes, real potencies and potentialities deep within the psyche which, when allowed to flower, permit us to be more fully human. […] Most Jungians argue that the task is to unite these potentialities into a symphonic whole. One unorthodox Jungian, James Hillman, has argued for a “polytheistic psychology” that gives reign to various parts of the self, not always leading to integration and wholeness.
It abruptly occurs to me that I might even have this essay, “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic” in my collected Hillman—A Blue Fire (ed. Thomas Moore), a book I’ve long dragged around without much reading. Sure enough, it’s excerpted and it’s far more contrarian and pungent than Adler’s limp précis would indicate—annotations insquare brackets mine.
Which fantasy governs our view of soul-making and the process of individuation—the many or the one? [Already, from the second word he’s being difficult—which fantasy?!] The very sound of the question shows already to what extent we are ruled by a bias toward the one. [Yes!] Unity, integration and individuation seem an advance over multiplicity and diversity. As the self seems a further integration than anima/animus, so seems monotheism superior to polytheism. [Busted! In four terse sentences, the Christian-cum-Hegelian assumption lurking within a supposedly atheist “social science.”]
Jung used a polycentric description for the objective psyche. The light of nature was multiple. Following the traditional descriptions of the anima mundi, Jung wrote of the lumen naturae as a multiplicity of partial consciousness, like stars or sparks or luminous fishes’ eyes. [Love him.] By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, polytheistic psychology would find place for each spark. It would aim less at gathering them into a unity and more at integrating each fragment according to its own principle, giving each god its due over that portion of consciousness, that symptom, complex, fantasy, which calls for an archetypal background….The pagan gods and goddesses would be restored to their psychological domain.
We would consider Artemis, Persephone, Athena, Aphrodite, for instance, as more adequate psychological backgrounds to the complexity of human nature than the unified image of Maria, and the diversity expressed by Apollo, Hermes, Dionysus and Hercules, for instance, to correspond better with psychological actualities than any single idea of self, of single figure of Eros, or of Jesus and Yahweh. Not that Maria, Eros, Jesus or Yahweh are false—far, far from it; only that they, like Zeus too, tend to present themselves in descriptions which dominate through unification, thus losing the values shaped by the other gods and goddesses. [Of course! It’s in each one’s nature, as it is in the ego’s, to proclaim himself as the One True Representation of the sacred. But need we believe that?]
One could understand the psychic fragmentation supposedly typical of our times as the return of the repressed, bringing a return of psychological polytheism. […] The complexes that will not be integrated force recognition of their autonomous power. Their archetypal cores will not serve the single goal of monotheistic wholeness. Babel may be a religious decline from one point of view and it may be a psychological improvement, since through the many tongues a fuller discordant psychic reality is being reflected. So the current delight in superstitions, astrology, witchery, and oracles has a psychological significance even if they be considered inferior religion. Through these images and practices anima/animus aspects of the psyche begin to find traditional reflection and containment….
The current delight in witchery….holding my place, I close the book to stare at the cover. Its title must come from another essay of Hillman’s, “Alchemical Blue,” where he defines blue as the liminal state between albedo and nigredo. I think simultaneously: of Thorn Coyle’s quite reasonable insistence on capitalizing “Gods” and “Goddesses” in Evolutionary Witchcraft (”I do not want to reinforce the prejudice that my Gods are somehow lesser for having multiple expressions”); and of the Feri practice of visualizing blue fire in the shape of a pentacle. Hillman again:
The blue transit between black and white is like that sadness which emerges from despair as it proceeds toward reflection. Reflection here comes from or takes on into a blue distance, less a concentrated act that we do than something insinuating itself upon us….an emptying out, the creation of a negative capability, or a profound listening—already an intimation of silver….
But don’t think that Hillman would for an instant consider this movement as a linear, upward gesture—as some progressive motion toward the transcendent:
The transit from black to white via blue implies that blue always brings black with it. (Among African peoples, for instance, black includes blue: whereas in the Jewish-Christian tradition blue belongs rather to white.) [I think first of indigo batik, Robert Johnson, Miles Davis;
then of blonde Mary’s or Jesus’ robes, God-in-the-sky with little puffy clouds.] What before was the stickiness of the black, like pitch or tar, unable to be rid of, turns into the traditionally blue virtues of constancy and fidelity. The same dark events feel different. [As the blues as an African-American musical form offers catharsis, discharges pain, precisely because profoundly rooted in suffering.]
It then occurs to me—if Thorn is seeking her “polythealogians,” her deep, inner-directed thinkers of paganism—should she not look any further than the “unorthodox” Jungians? Who else besides late Jungians take the Gods and Goddesses so literally? Who else argues so seriously for accepting the weighty, Saturnine, limiting gravitas of depressive pain as equally crucial to the enterprise of living fully—argues as urgently for darkness? Who else is as enamoured of ritual, symbol and the mythopoetic as aids to soul-making? For that matter, who else talks with a straight face about soul-making at all?
So, Thorn, I put them to you: Marion Woodman and James Hillman, voluble Lady and Lord of all that is contrary, ambivalent, disruptive and polytheistic. (Though I won’t sponsor their more popular counterparts, Jean Shinoda Bolen and Robert Bly.) Honestly, I’ve never met either of them and it may well be that their personal situations or energy patterns aren’t something I’d want to emulate. (And I’m not even sure they’re still living.) But their thinking offers some usefully focused counterpoint to the gushing prehistorical-Goddess-pushers, while still celebrating the reality of plural deity. And for those who would know ourselves in all our parts, their genuine commitment to polytheism is no small gift.
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