Frame capture from the movie “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, … and Spring”

My upcoming series of posts is going to be based on three works of C.G. Jung:

1) Psychology and Alchemy, volume 12 of the Collected Works

2) Alchemical Studies, volume 13 of the Collected Works

3) Mysterium Coniunctionis, volume 14 of the Collected Works

The guiding thought for the series, which is not going to be a summary of Jung’s works but rather a collection of various thoughts and a tribute to Jung, comes from Psychology and Alchemy, where Jung states:

 “I for my part prefer the precious gift of doubt, for the reason that it does not violate the virginity of things beyond our ken.”

Alchemy, as well as the totality of the psyche (i.e. the conscious and the unconscious), is a sphere of deepest mystery, not explainable by abstract concepts or categories. Alchemy is not an abstraction from life, as its chief premise states that the unconscious is both the fertile ground and the water of life that nourishes all life. The word “alchemy” combines two root meanings etymologically: “land of black earth” (i.e. Egypt) and “that which is poured out” (juice, sap), which means that the word itself spells moisture and fecundity. It seems that by applying too much intellectual rigidity we risk drying alchemy out, stripping it of its pristine mysteriousness. As Jung writes in volume 12, pars 93-94:

“By acknowledging the reality of the psyche and making it a co-determining ethical factor in our lives, we offend against the spirit of convention which for centuries has regulated psychic life from outside by means of institutions as well as by reason. Not that unreasoning instinct rebels of itself against firmly established order; by the strict logic of its own inner laws it is itself of the firmest structure imaginable and, in addition, the creative foundation of all binding order. But just because this foundation is creative, all order which proceeds from it – even in its most ‘divine’ form – is a phase, a stepping stone. Despite appearances to the contrary, the establishment of order and the dissolution of what has been established are at bottom beyond human control. The secret is that only that which can destroy itself is truly alive. …

Painting by Jung from The Red Book: “Watering Hades” with the inscription: “This the holy caster of water. The Cabiri grow out of the flowers which spring from the body of the dragon. Above the temple.”

The water that the mother, the unconscious, pours into the basin belonging to the anima, is an excellent symbol for the living power of the psyche. The old alchemists never tired of devising new and expressive synonyms for this water. They called it aqua nostra, mercurius vivus, argentum vivum, vinum ardens, aqua vitae, succus lunariae, and so on, by which they meant a living being not devoid of substance, as opposed to the rigid immateriality of mind in the abstract. The expression succus lunariae (sap of the moon-plant) refers clearly enough to the nocturnal origin of the water, and aqua nostra, like mercurius vivus, to its earthliness.”

From Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum by Elias Ashmole. (London, 1652). (Photo by Oxford Science Archive/Print Collector/Getty Images), image via http://www.gettyimages.ch/detail/nachrichtenfoto/alchemical-symbolism-1652-a-toad-and-serpent-nachrichtenfoto/463916645?Language=de

The greatest question of alchemy, as it appears to me, is how to live according to the dictates of one’s inner life by tapping into its rich, fertile and dark unconscious roots; how to resist the imposed outside regulations and instead self-regulate from the depths within; finally, how to let go if the order that seemed to have worked for us for some time has stopped being nourishing, and instead has turned into scary, derelict ruins or a haunting dead forest. The need for fluid transformation seems to be the first law of alchemy. Such a transformation does not mean merciless hacking away at the coarse woody debris of our past life, but rather acknowledging that even that which needs to be left behind paradoxically nourishes us, just as the fallen tree logs actually recycle nutrients essential for all living organisms, provide shelter for countless creatures of the forest, and, when placed in streams, provide shelter for fish and a place for turtles to lay their eggs. On slopes, coarse wood debris “stabilizes soils by slowing downslope movement of organic matter and mineral soil“ (source: Wikipedia).  Dead trees, just as the dying and crumbling structures of our lives, are a valuable resource that needs to be maintained and protected as a sine qua non of our regeneration.

While reading Hermes Guide of Souls: The Mythologem of the Masculine Source of Life by Karl Kerènyi I came across the following passage describing the nature of Odysseus’s journeying and the special patronage of Hermes over Odysseus:

“We previously called the Odyssey a journey epic, and we must now imagine the often experienced reality of ‘journeying’ as something very special, in contradistinction to ‘roaming’ or ‘travelling.’ Odysseus is not a ‘traveller.’ He is a ‘journeyer,’ not simply because of his moving from place to place, but because of his existential situation. The traveller, despite his motion, adheres to a solid base, albeit one that is not narrowly circumscribed. With each step, he takes possession of another piece of earth. This taking possession is, of course, only psychological. In that with each extension of the horizon he also expands himself, his claim of possession on the earth expands continuously as well. But he remains always bound to a solid earth beneath his feet, and he even looks for human fellowship. At every hearth that he encounters he lays claim to a kind of native citizenship for himself. … His guardian is not Hermes, but Zeus, the god of the widest horizon and the firmest ground. In contrast, the situation of the journeyer is defined by movement, fluctuation. To someone more deeply rooted, even to the traveler, he appears to be always in flight. In reality, he makes himself vanish (‘volatizes himself’) to everyone, also to himself. Everything around him becomes to him ghostly and improbable, and even his own reality appears to him as ghostlike. He is completely absorbed by movement, but never by a human community that would tie him down.

…

The journeyer is at home while underway, at home on the road itself, the road being understood not as a connection between two definite points on the earth’s surface, but as a particular world. It is the ancient world of the path, also of the ‘wet paths’ … of the sea, which are above all, the genuine roads of the earth. For, unlike the Roman highways which cut unmercifully straight through the countryside, they run snakelike, shaped like irrationally waved lines, conforming to the contours of the land,  winding, yet leading everywhere. Being open to everywhere is part of their nature. Nevertheless, they form a world in its own right, a middle-domain, where a person in that volatized condition has access to everything. He who moves about familiarly in this world-of-the-road has Hermes for his God, for it is here that the most salient aspect of Hermes’s world is portrayed. Hermes is constantly underway: he is enodios (‘by the road’) and hodios (‘belonging to a journey’), and one encounters him on every path. … His role as leader and guide is often cited and celebrated, and, at least since the time of the Odyssey, he is also called angelos (‘messenger’), the messenger of the Gods.” (pp. 13-15)

Evelyn de Morgan, “Mercury”

“As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his
fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition.”

Brutus’ speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

Two excellent movies I have seen recently – Birdman directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and Whiplash directed by Damien Chazelle- seem to revolve around the theme of ambition, marked by single-mindedness of purpose, cut-throat competitiveness, extreme exertion and toil, the willingness to prove oneself and achieve greatness with a total lack of consideration for relationships, by way of contradiction accompanied by a need to be recognized and admired. Narcissism seems to be at the etymological root of the word “ambition,” which is connected with going around to solicit votes; ambition is “a striving for favor, courting, flattery; a desire for honor, thirst for popularity” (via http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ambition). In both movies, the shadow side, the price paid for the desire to soar above the ordinary is blood, sweat and tears of suffering and a poignant feeling of alienation. The question that occurred to me was this: can excellence and mastery be achieved only through merciless tyranny? In order for the wet soulful emotionality to be translated into the geometrical order of crystallized ambition, some amount of ruthless despotism seems to be indispensable. The root of the word “discipline” hides penitential chastisement, physical punishment, teaching, martyrdom and military drill.

In Birdman, I was particularly impressed by the ingenious deconstruction of the superhero archetype. By having played Birdman in his younger years, a superhero able to fly, move objects and destroy his enemies with the power of the mind, the actor underwent an inflation: he has acquired all of these superpowers, and yet he is still struggling with the usual human depression, listlessness, powerlessness and old age. Ostensibly, the actor seems to want to shake the mantle of the superhero and go back to being human again. However, his inner Birdman is not willing to go away and the two seem to be in symbiosis now. The young protagonist of Whiplash – an aspiring jazz drummer – has a similar task to fulfill: he needs to integrate the fierce taskmaster represented by his teacher into his own personality. The master is a projection of the student’s own soaring and unrelenting ambition. Without this crucial integration, no success will ever be possible for him. In the final exhilarating drumming scene, we are pulled back to the primal roots of music: the ecstatic, “phallic” drumming. I was left with this thought: dreams of success and ambition are not social constructs. They are natural and instinctual primal expressions of the soul. The hypocrisy of Brutus’ justification for assassinating Caesar is very apparent.

The New Age movement has given women more significance and more power of expression than art, science or politics of the last century. It is said to have been originated by Madame Blavatsky, who was a co-founder of the Theosophical Society. The chief idea behind the new age spirituality, as unveiled and put forward by Blavatsky, was a belief in panhuman fraternity without distinction of religion, color, caste or race. At the source of all cultures lies a primordial, unified tradition, which is obfuscated by sectarian conflicts and cultural differences. As divinity was believed to rest within every man’s and woman’s psyche, the theosophical emphasis lay on the individual religious experience rather than an adoption of outside, objective cultural forms of cult. As Gary Lachman wrote in a section dedicated to Blavatsky in his A Dark Muse: A History of the Occult:

“At the centre of the mass of doctrines about reincarnation, past lives, astral planes, higher consciousness and spiritual evolution was the formidable, electric and roguish figure of Madame Blavatsky. It is true that the world was waiting for something like theosophy to arrive. Bereft of God through the rise of science, and flooded with a triumphant materialist doctrine, thousands of individuals who sought spiritual guidance found themselves adrift in an indifferent universe. With its broad message of universal brotherhood, spiritual truth and cosmic mysteries, theosophy appealed to both the devout ascetic and the late-Romantic.”

I have not read The Secret Doctrine in its entirety, though I have approached the task and read longer passages, which I found very worthwhile. As the moon is dark right now, I was drawn to a particularly illuminating quote about light and darkness:

 “Darkness is Father-Mother: light their son, says an old Eastern proverb. Light is inconceivable except as coming from some source which is the cause of it; and as, in the instance of primordial light, that source is unknown, though as strongly demanded by reason and logic, therefore it is called ‘Darkness’ by us, from an intellectual point of view. As to borrowed or secondary light, whatever its source, it can be but of a temporary mayavic character. Darkness, then, is the eternal matrix in which the sources of light appear and disappear. Nothing is added to darkness to make of it light, or to light to make it darkness, on this our plane. They are interchangeable, and scientifically light is but a mode of darkness and vice versa. Yet both are phenomena of the same noumenon — which is absolute darkness to the scientific mind, and but a gray twilight to the perception of the average mystic, though to that of the spiritual eye of the Initiate it is absolute light. How far we discern the light that shines in darkness depends upon our powers of vision. What is light to us is darkness to certain insects, and the eye of the clairvoyant sees illumination where the normal eye perceives only blackness. When the whole universe was plunged in sleep — had returned to its one primordial element — there was neither centre of luminosity, nor eye to perceive light, and darkness necessarily filled the boundless all.”

What is dark to the scientific mind, is gray twilight to the average mystic but absolute light to the Initiate. The clarity of inner vision is unrelated to the presence or absence of what we profanely understand as light. In the following beautiful poem, the divine is seen and experienced most clearly by direct participation in different geographical zones: the I of the poem, in a sequence of incarnations, was a Celtic ornament, an oar from Ithaca, a bump of clay in a Navajo rug in Native America, a stone in Tibet, and a tongue of bark in the dark heart of Africa. When he just was his vision was clearer and more immediate than the one possessed by his present self – the anthropologist – equipped with all the contemporary trappings of scientific measurement and observation.

“Lives” [for Seamus Heaney], by Derek Mahon 

First time out
I was a torc of gold
And wept tears of the sun.

That was fun
But they buried me
In the earth two thousand years

Till a labourer
Turned me up with a pick
In eighteen fifty-four

And sold me
For tea and sugar
In Newmarket-on-Fergus.

Once I was an oar
But stuck in the shore
To mark the place of a grave

When the lost ship
Sailed away. I thought
Of Ithaca, but soon decayed.

The time that I liked
Best was when
I was a bump of clay

In a Navaho rug,
Put there to mitigate
The too god-like

Perfection of that
Merely human artifact.
I served my maker well

He lived long
To be struck down in
Tucson by an electric shock

The night the lights
Went out in Europe
Never to shine again.

So many lives,
So many things to remember!
I was a stone in Tibet,

A tongue of bark
At the heart of Africa
Growing darker and darker …

It all seems
A little unreal now,
Now that I am

An anthropologist
With my own
Credit card, dictaphone,

Army-surplus boots
And a whole boatload
Of photographic equipment.

I know too much
To be anything any more;
And if in the distant

Future someone
Thinks he has once been me
As I am today,

Let him revise
His insolent ontology
Or teach himself to pray.

by Alex Grey

The Zodiac, San Miniato al Monte, Florence

“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. They will practice Indian yoga and all its exercises, observe a strict regimen or diet, learn theosophy by heart, or mechanically repeat mystic texts from the literature of the whole world – all because they cannot get on with themselves and have not the slightest faith that anything useful could ever come out of their souls. … It is rewarding to watch patiently the silent happenings in the soul, and the most and the best happens when it is not regulated from outside and from above. I readily admit that I have such a great respect for what happens in the human soul that I would be afraid of disturbing and distorting the silent operation of nature by clumsy interference.”

Carl Gustav Jung, “Psychology and Alchemy,” par. 126

On the psychological level, all alchemical operations served to obliterate the separation between the conscious and the unconscious mind, which the alchemists saw as the real source of life:

 “In my experience the conscious mind can claim only a relatively central position and must accept the fact that the unconscious psyche transcends and as it were surrounds it on all sides.” (par. 175)

The “dark depths of the unconscious” are limitless and unfathomable. They are undefinable and must be approached with humility. Any claims of knowledge about what is hidden out there should be inspected with caution because we may always be wrong. We are caught in the maya web of our illusions, and yet so many of us sense that there is something “out there,” a mystical centre from which the visible universe emanated:

 “We can hardly escape the feeling that the unconscious process moves spiral-wise round a centre, gradually getting closer, while the characteristics of the centre grow more and more distinct. Or perhaps we could put it the other way round and say that the centre – itself virtually unknowable – acts like a magnet on the disparate materials and processes of the unconscious and gradually captures them as in a crystal lattice. For this reason the centre is often pictured as a spider in its web.” (par. 325)

Cathy Mcclelland, “The High Priestess,” via http://www.cathymcclelland.com/enlarge_htm_pages/Tarot/high_preistess.htm

The mandala, similarly to the stupa, the vessel and the egg, are all symbols that deeply resonate with the meaning of this all-encompassing sacred psychoid (i.e. both mental and physical) entity that Jung called the Self.

The centre of the mandala has been likened to the calyx of the sacred Indian lotus – the Padma, and has a feminine significance. If the lotus seed gets split in the middle, a miraculous discovery can be made: it turns out that the seed contains the leaves and the branches of the whole plant in miniature form. The One Seed holds all the possible forms within itself. Jung also compares it to the vas bene clausum (well-sealed vessel), and the uterus where the child is gestated. Nothing can escape the circumference of a sacred mandala nor can anything undesirable enter the walls of the sacred enclosure of the well-sealed vessel. From its primordial womblike Unity, the Centre, as the cosmic energy source, radiated things into existence.

Jung muses further: “Among the various characteristics of the centre the one that struck me from the beginning was the phenomenon of the quaternity.” (par. 327) All manifest reality that emanated from the centre is governed by the number four symbolizing the stable organization, the principle of wholeness, the triumph of order and structure over chaos.

Image from a twelfth century breviary in the monastery of Zwiefalten, Germany.

In her book Japanese Mandalas: Representations of Sacred Geography, Elizabeth ten Grotenhuis, gives an excellent analysis of the significance of the mandala in the Esoteric Buddhist tradition in Japan. In particular, she talks about the Mandala of the Two Worlds, which has two component parts: the Diamond Way mandala and the Womb World mandala:

“Broadly speaking, the Diamond Way Mandala represents reality in the Buddha realm, the world of the unconditioned, the real, the universal, and the absolute. The Womb World mandala represents reality as it is revealed in the world of the conditioned, the individual, the particular, and the relative. Each mandala is fully meaningful, however, only when paired with the other.” (p. 37) (bolding mine)

The Womb World mandala

The universal gives meaning to the particular as much as the particular gives back to the universal, and thus the circle closes. In the centre of the Womb World mandala seats an open eight-petaled lotus, eight being the number connected with the cyclical and temporal nature of manifested form. The process of individuation can be likened to a spiral journey round a mystical centre which is never quite reached but always sensed and seen with the eyes of the soul. While moving around the centre a sacred precinct is marked off; at the same time high concentration and fixation are achieved. Such a ritual focused action creates a sense of inner unity:

“The squaring of the circle breaks down the original chaotic unity into the four elements and then combines them again in a higher unity. Unity is represented by a circle and the four elements by a square. The production of one from four is the result of a process of distillation and sublimation which takes the so-called ‘circular’ form … so that the ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’ shall be extracted in its purest state. This product is generally called the ‘quintessence…’” (par 165)

This quintessence is the jewel birthed by the lotus.

All quotes, unless otherwise stated, come from Jung’s Psychology and Alchemy.

Bertel Thorvaldsen, “Nemesis”

 I. ”Nemesis, winged tilter of scales and lives,

Justice-spawned Goddess with steel-blue eyes!
Thou bridlest vain men who roil in vain
Against Thy harsh adamantine rein.
Great hater of hubris and megalomania,
Obliterator of black resentment,
By Thy trackless, churning, wracking wheel
Man’s glinting fortunes turn on earth.
Thou comest in oblivion’s cloak to bend
The grandeur-deluded rebel neck,
With forearm measuring out lifetimes
With brow frowning into the heart of man
And the yoke raised sovereign in Thy hand.
Hail in the highest, O justice-queen

Nemesis, winged tilter of scales and lives,
Immortal Judge! I sing Thy song,
Almighty Triumph on proud-spread wings,
Lieutenant of fairness, Requiter of wrongs.
Despise the lordly with all Thine art
And lay them low in the Nether-dark.”

“Hymn to Nemesis” by Mesomedes of Crete, translated by A.Z. Foreman (via http://poemsintranslation.blogspot.ch/2011/05/mesomedes-hymn-to-nemesis-from-greek.html)

II.“Thee, Nemesis I call, almighty queen, by whom the deeds of mortal life are seen:Eternal, much rever’d, of boundless sight, alone rejoicing in the just and right:Changing the counsels of the human breast for ever various, rolling without rest.

To every mortal is thy influence known, and men beneath thy righteous bondage groan;
For ev’ry thought within the mind conceal’d is to thy fight perspicuously reveal’d.
The soul unwilling reason to obey by lawless passion rul’d, thy eyes survey.
All to see, hear, and rule, O pow’r divine whose nature Equity contains, is thine.
Come, blessed, holy Goddess, hear my pray’r, and make thy mystic’s life, thy constant care:
Give aid benignant in the needful hour, and strength abundant to the reas’ning pow’r;
And far avert the dire, unfriendly race of counsels impious, arrogant, and base.”

An Orphic hymn to Nemesis

The very name Nemesis (Greek for “to give what is due”) arrests attention and commands respect. It connotes vengeance but originally Nemesis, also known as Adrasteia – the Inescapable One, was just “an abstract force of justice rather than that of retaliation,” as Demetra George puts it in Mysteries of the Dark Moon. At first, no value was attached to the fortune distributed by Nemesis: it was described as neither good nor bad, but just in due proportion according to what was deserved. With time, Nemesis came to be associated with the sense of resentment at an injustice done and a call for rightful vengeance.

The beauty of Nemesis, like of no other goddess, was compared to that of Aphrodite herself. She rode a chariot drawn by griffins, and had a wheel, a measuring rod, scales, a bridle, a scourge and a sword for her attributes. Her crown was adorned with stag horns; there was an apple bough in her hand. The wheel of life turned by griffins seems like her most striking attribute aligning her with the eastern concept of karma. Part eagle, part lion, the griffin “like certain kinds of dragon, is always to be found as the guardian of the roads to salvation, standing beside the Tree of Life or some such symbol. From the psychological point of view it symbolizes the relationship between psychic energy and cosmic force,” says Cirlot in his Dictionary of Symbols. Personally, I have always thought of royal griffins as symbols of concentrated benevolent consciousness and spiritual protection. The eagle being the king of birds and the lion the king of animals bestow on the noble griffin the gift of double royalty.

Griffin with the wheel of Nemesis

The apple is obviously associated with Venus:

 “For if an apple is halved cross-wise each half shows a five-pointed star in the centre, emblem of immortality, which represents the Goddess in her five stations from birth to death and back to birth again. It also represents the planet of Venus—Venus to whom the apple was sacred—adored as Hesper the evening star on one half of the apple, and as Lucifer Son of the Morning on the other.”

Robert Graves, The White Goddess

Winged and adorned in white, Nemesis acted swiftly when an injustice was committed. As Demetra George writes:

“She was held in awe and fear as a mysterious power who shaped the behavior of individuals in their time of prosperity, punishing crime and evil deeds, taking luck away from the unworthy, tracking every wrong to its doer, and keeping society in equipoise. Nemesis also personified the resentment aroused in people when others who committed crimes were not punished, or toward those who had inordinate or undeserved good fortune.”

Albrecht Dürer, “Nemesis”

She was especially adamant to punish the sin of hubris, which in modern understanding means excessive pride and self-confidence but for ancient Greeks meant insolence before the gods as well as all kinds of actions that shamed or humiliated the victim. In today’s terms we would speak of physical assault, rape, harassment, battery, but that was all collected under the umbrella term hubris for ancient Greeks. In the well-known myth of Echo and Narcissus, Nemesis punished Narcissus for the sin of excessive self-involvement. Shamelessness accompanied by arrogance, a sense of entitlement and exploitation of others, are listed among the traits of the narcissistic personality disorder. Nemesis strikes these with a single move of her sword.

Caravaggio, “Narcissus”

However, the scales held by Nemesis denote that not only can humans be excessively arrogant but they can also be excessively humble. Hubris has its shadow – a feeling of inadequacy and inferiority, the shadow of excessive humility is the deeply-seated illusion of grandeur. In an excellent book The Complex: Path of Transformation from Archetype to Ego, a Jungian analyst Erel Shalit, relates Nemesis to both the inferiority and the superiority complex:

 “We find an image of the core of the inferiority complex in Nemesis, goddess of measurement and retribution for good fortune, who reminds the ego of its minuteness and its boundaries. The person who suffers from an inferiority complex … feels defeated before setting out. In fact, the inferiority complex may withhold from the ego even the necessary minimum of adequate (primary) narcissistic energy, thus preventing the person from even departing on his or her journey.”

This goddess does not approve of wishy-washiness and hesitation. Her element is decisive action in the light of conscious discrimination.
In a lost epic entitled Cypria we find a fascinating myth with Nemesis as one of its chief protagonists, which shows her special significance in the Greek pantheon. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, Roberto Calasso devotes a lot of place to pondering this myth. The forever amorous Zeus seemed to have been at one time obsessed with Nemesis, going to great lengths to get her:

“Something tremendous must have been at stake in that erotic conquest. Never, for a woman, had Zeus traveled so far, crossing country after country, sea after sea, ‘beneath the earth, beneath the black, unfished waters,’ and on and on to ‘the ends of the earth, to the watery snake, Oceanus.’ Stubborn and desperate, Nemesis transformed herself into all kinds of animals, while Zeus never let up following her. And when all the feather flapping was finally done, when atlas and zoology were exhausted, what was left? A wild goose and a swan. The swan settled on the goose and forced her to yield. Zeus ‘passionately united himself with her, out of powerful necessity.’ … Nemesis was still sleeping when the swan raped her. Then from Nemesis’ womb a white egg appeared. Hermes took it, carried it to Sparta, and placed it in Leda’s womb. When the big egg hatched, from inside the shell emerged a tiny, perfect female figure: Helen.

Gustave Moreau, “Leda”

But what was the relationship between mother and daughter? We know a great deal about Helen, whereas only a few details have come down to us about the divine figure of Nemesis, and even these are often enigmatic. This goddess of the offense that boomerangs back on its perpetrator must have been very beautiful if people could mistake her for Aphrodite. Herself the great enemy of hubris, she gave birth to a daughter whose very body was an offense and in doing so provoked the most magnificent unfolding of hubris in all of Greek history: the Trojan War.”

Bertel Thorvaldsen, “Nemesis recites the deeds of men to Jupiter”

Called Queen of Motives and Arbitress of all Things, Nemesis’ cult originated in Smyrna, where she was worshiped as two identical goddesses both called Nemesis. Duplication seems to be a curious leitmotif in her myth: Narcissus looking at his reflection, Helen having two mothers and being born together with her twin brothers – Castor and Pollux and Clytemnestra, a twin sister. Castor was mortal, Pollux was an immortal son of Zeus. Nemesis embodies the duality of human versus natural/celestial law of the gods; she serves as a soul guide to the right action in the light of good conscience and good judgment. For me, she personifies faith in the balance of the universe. I take comfort in this archetype believing that inherent to our universe is a natural, archetypal defense against evil and injustice. I think this short poem by D.H. Lawrence captures the essence of Nemesis’ justice:

 “The profoundest of all sensualities
is the sense of truth
and the next deepest sensual experience
is the sense of justice.”

Alfred Rethel, “Nemesis.” “He painted Nemesis pursuing a murderer across a flat stretch of landscape. A slaughtered body lies on the ground, while in front is the assassin speeding away into the darkness, and above an angel of vengeance. The picture, so the story goes, was won in a lottery at Frankfurt by a personage of high rank, who had been guilty of an undiscovered crime, and the contemplation of his prize drove him mad.” (from Wikipedia)

After his wife’s death, a broken man lives in an isolated forest with his little daughter:

 “Nothing had been able to call him out of the fog that had enveloped him ever since his wife’s death; he saw everything through a veil, which greatly impeded his vision, but nothing worse.”

Having lost touch with the living tissue of life, he neglects his daughter, passing all his days wrapped in his mourning shroud. Quite unexpectedly, his lively younger brother comes to stay bringing high spirits, love of music and jarring blue socks. As it turns out, the brother is dying of consumption and has come to spend his last days in the idyllic setting of the birch grove with his older brother and his niece. In an extraordinary movie by Andrzej Wajda entitled The Birch Grove, based on a short story by Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, the symbolism of the birch tree is rendered in an outstanding way. Death, life and rebirth are the main themes of the movie; paradoxically, the brother closest to death is the hungriest for life, grabbing at it with all his might. The older brother, rigid and shrunk with mourning, throughout the movie undergoes a resurrection silently witnessed by the delicate yet resilient birch trees – “the snow-clad pillars, brittle, as if made of sugar or snow.” Towards the end of the story, the older brother experiences a mystical moment of connection with all life, while contemplating the birch grove. He sees the white tree trunks as pearls set in the dark velvet of the night. The white smooth entangled trunks remind him of feminine arms pointing upwards as if in a prayer of ecstasy. The humid and dense air circulating between the trees, transforms the grove into some sort of a sensual temple.

Gustav Klimt, “Farmhouse with Birch Trees”

Birch trees are my beloved ones. So many times they have made me stop and just marvel at their beauty. The birch tree is the first one to wake up in the spring. It is also associated with the first month of the Celtic calendar. The birch belongs to the so-called pioneering species, i.e “hardy species which are the first to colonize previously disrupted or damaged ecosystems” (Wikipedia). Birches spring up rapidly after a forest fire or another disturbance. Sharlyn Hidalgo, the author of The Healing Power of Trees: Spiritual Journeys through the Celtic Tree Calendar, connects the resilient birch tree with beginnings, endings, shedding, purification, renewal, overcoming difficulties and resolution of conflict, as her branches are pliant and subtle. The snake and the phoenix are totem animals associated with the birch tree.

In the runic alphabet, Berkano, meaning “birch goddess”, is a rune associated with femininity. In The Book of Rune Secrets by Tyriel we read:

“Berkano is the rune of life’s emergence from the fundamental cosmic law. In natural science, abiogenesis or biopoesis is the study of how biological life arises from inorganic matter.… The Berkano rune then, points to this biopoesis wherever it occurs in the universe, and its particular qualities of reproduction, regeneration and adaptation to the rhythms of varied environments. An example of one such event, to which the rune refers, is life’s spring-time renewal from the cold of winter.”

Berkano

This rune’s symbolism points to life force itself, because life can “care about itself and provide sanctuary for itself.” The fruition of this rune is achieved through silence, stillness and love. This can be a rune of deep secrets, which are justified, because the new life gestating in the womb requires our protection.

While learning Latin in high school, we were supposed to memorize parts of Julius Ceasar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War. The first sentence has been forever etched in my memory: “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, quarum unam incolunt Belgae, aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum lingua Celtae, nostra Galli appellantur” (“All Gaul is divided into three parts, one of which the Belgae inhabit, the Aquitani another, those who in their own language are called Celts, in ours Gauls, the third.”). Gaul of the 1st century AD is a setting for Norma, a celebrated opera by Vinzenzo Bellini. The most famous Norma of all times was undoubtedly Maria Callas, perfect for the role of a priestess with her natal Sun in Sagittarius in conjunction with Vesta.  It is worth pointing out that the very name Norma was invented by Felice Romani, the author of the libretto. Probably it derives from the Latin for “rule, standard.” It seems that the heroine was indeed both a giver of laws and a victim of them.

Maria Callas as Norma

The libretto, entirely fictitious, tells the story of a Druid High Priestess and leader of her people at the time when Gaul (a region of Western Europe which was inhabited by Celtic tribes; today covering France, Belgium, most of Switzerland, among others) was occupied by the Romans. Scene 1 of the opera takes place in the grove of the Druids. Oroveso, Norma’s father and the Chief Druid priest, tells the gathered Celts to pray for victory against Roman invaders. The sacred ceremony is being secretly observed by two Romans: Pollione and Flavio. What we learn later is that Norma who is secretly in love with Pollione, has broken her priestess’s vows for him and has borne him two sons, whom she raises by herself in a secluded house. Pollione appears to have abandoned her, which causes her a lot of anguish; she desperately tries to conceal her suffering from her people. Pollione confides in Flavio that he no longer loves Norma because he had fallen for a younger priestess – Adalgisa.

Dressing a priestess or bride,found in the palaestra of the Forum Baths at Herculaneum

The Druids expect Norma to break peace with the Romans. In response, Norma prays to the Chaste Goddess (Casta Diva is the Italian title of this celebrated aria) for peace telling the Druids that time is not ripe for war. It seems that by praying to the goddess for peace Norma is also pleading in her own cause: she is in great distress fearing that Pollione does not love her. The English translation of Casta Diva goes:

 “Virtuous Goddess, covering with silver
these sacred ancient plants,
turn towards us your fair face
cloudless and unveiled
Temper, oh Goddess,
you temper the ardent hearts
furthermore temper the audacious zeal,
spread on earth the same peace
that make you make reign in heaven.”

Taken from http://lyricstranslate.com/en/casta-diva-virtuous-goddess.html#ixzz3UT9hOF7Z”

Here the aria is sung by Maria Callas:

Later that night Pollione prevails upon the hesitant Adalgisa to elope to Rome with him the next day. The young woman decides to confide in her High Priestess, who is also her closest friend. She visits Norma in her house. Her confession is met with forgiveness and understanding. Norma, reminded of her own deep love for Pollione, promises to free Adalgisa from her vows so that she can be happy with her lover. In her case, the damage is already done, her sacred vows broken. On that, Pollione suddenly appears, to which Adalgisa confesses that this is her lover. In an extremely emotionally charged scene, the raging Norma attacks him, so does Adalgisa, while Pollione curses the day he met Norma and beseeches Adalgisa to accompany her. She firmly says no, remaining loyal to Norma.

Polish opera poster designed by Wieslaw Walkuski

The second act starts very dramatically. Norma is watching her sons asleep with a knife in her hand. She cannot bring herself to murder them. In anguish, she calls for Adalgisa and pleads her to marry Pollione and take Norma’s sons away from Gaul to spare them from the punishment of the Druids. Adalgisa is aghast and professes her eternal friendship to Norma, renouncing Pollione. She even vows to persuade Pollione to take Norma back. Pollione is not persuaded, to which Norma summons the Druids to war against the Romans, who in the meantime are plotting to abduct Adalgisa. However, the plot is thwarted and Pollione is captured by the Druids in the temple. They demand he be sacrificed by Norma, but she cannot bring herself to stab him, telling the crows she will question him instead.  After the questioning she orders a pyre to be built in order to sacrifice a priestess who has broken her chastity vows. Everyone thinks she means Adalgisa but Norma means herself. She is the one who has broken the holy vows and the pyre has been built for her. She begs her father to spare her sons. Pollione is deeply touched by her nobility and declares he still loves her. They both step into the flames to die.

The role of Norma is said to be one of the most difficult in the entire history of the opera. Maria Callas was admired for her emotionally stirring and passionate rendering of the heroine’s anguish. Uncontrollable passions, raw emotions, seem to be the subject matter of the opera. The friendship between the two priestesses, both united in their acute sense of an injustice committed, is extremely touching. The prayer to the Chaste Goddess is like a distant hope for redemption from anger, selfishness and war that will bring nothing but destruction. However, it seems that before that kind of tranquility can ever be attained, the flames of passion need to engulf us, consume us, just as they did with Norma and Pollione. No norms can stop that from happening.

I. “The dual fate of Heracles after death, dwelling simultaneously on high with the gods and below in Hades, reflects the Greek notion that we have two different kinds of soul. Thymos is warm, emotional and red-blooded; while psyche is colder, deeper and more impersonal. From thymos’ point of view, the Otherworld is the cold, grey, unsubstantial Hades full of `pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits/And mawkish in their wits’. From psyche’s perspective, it is our robust, red-blooded world which is unreal, while Hades who was called Plouton (Pluto), the Rich One, holds all the treasures of the imagination. The shades are not dim ghosts to psyche, but mythic images that erupt out of the Underworld like the laughing Sidhe, their silver eyes flashing. We can begin to understand what Heraclitus meant when he remarked that `Dionysus and Hades are one.’ The god of creative life has a secret affinity with death.

Thymos has been assimilated into the robust ego-consciousness of Western man who believes in no reality other than his own. From the deeper psychic viewpoint, however, ego-consciousness is – as the Neoplatonists noticed – a kind of unconsciousness. We are unaware of reality, claim the Romantics, except in moments of imaginative vision. The Otherworld lies all about us, an earthly paradise – if we would but cleanse `the doors of perception’, as Blake put it, and see the world as it really is, ‘infinite’.”‘

Patrick Harpur, “The Pilosophers’ Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination”

II.”The word ‘thūmos,’ which I translate here as ‘heart,’ expresses in Homeric diction the human capacity to feel and to think, taken together. … Thūmos is the vital force.

Psūkhe – ‘life, life’s breath, spirit, soul, mind,’ … In Homeric Greek this word refers to the essence of life when one is alive and to the disembodied conveyor of identity when one is dead.”

Gregory Nagy, “The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours”

Archaeological Museum of Chalkis: Votive relief of Dionysus and Pluto with adorant.

Brigid Marlin, “Meditation on Emptiness”

Alchemy speaks a secret language, which, provided there is a basic soul readiness, can be learnt through a slow and arduous process, yet abounding in moments of rapture and revelation. Its method of explanation was best summarized by a Latin phrase obscurum per obscurium, ignotium per ignotius (the obscure by the more obscure, the unknown by the more unknown):

“The real mystery does not behave mysteriously or secretively;… it adumbrates itself by a variety of images which all indicate its true nature. I am not speaking of a secret personally guarded by someone, with a content known to its possessor, but of a mystery, a matter or circumstance which is ‘secret,’ i.e. known only through vague hints but essentially unknown. The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist: he knew it only in hints. In seeking to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it.” (par. 345)

In the modern art of text interpretation called hermeneutics, in the foreground is the relationship between the reader and the text. My relationship with Jung’s alchemical writings is a devoted one; the vagueness, secretiveness and all the contradictions just fan my flames. If we agree that alchemy works with the soul, whose limits, as Heraclitus taught, one cannot find, so deep is its logos; then we will see that the multi-faceted and paradoxical nature of alchemical contents is warranted. Psyche is timeless, unchanging throughout the ages; this makes it possible to merge our modern horizon with that of the alchemists of the old times, provided we are attuned to our inner depths in the same way as they were.

According to Jung, two components were indispensable in order to embark on alchemical work: meditatio and imaginatio. They are defined in Ruland’s Lexicon Alchemiae as follows:

MEDITATIO — The name of an Internal Talk of one person with another who is invisible, as in the invocation of the Deity, or communion with one’s self, or with one’s good angel.

IMAGINATIO — is the Star in Man, the Celestial or Supercelestial Body.

Via http://www.rexresearch.com/rulandus/rulxm.htm

It seems that there was a hermeneutic process operating in alchemy, which was based on “an inner dialogue and hence a living relationship to the answering voice of the other in ourselves, i.e., of the unconscious” (par. 390). As the Emerald Tablet stated, “And all things proceed from the One through the meditation of the One,” which demands from us to attune ourselves to our inner psychic reality in order to bring what is hidden into light. The life-bringing exchange between the spotlight of consciousness and the vast fertile darkness of the unconscious is “a creative dialogue, by means of which things pass from an unconscious potential state to a manifest one.” (par. 390).

Brigid Marlin, “Mandala East to West”

Imagination was what fired up those great alchemical works with their phantasmagorical images. Those “fantasy-pictures,” said Jung, are not mere immaterial phantoms but they are subtle symbolic bodies. For Jung, imagination was “a concentrated extract of the life forces, both physical and psychic” (par. 394). The soul is the bridge that spans the material and the spiritual realm, constantly engaging in creative imagination in order to actualize the archetypal forms into manifestation:

“The place or the medium of realization is neither mind nor matter, but that intermediate realm of subtle reality which can be adequately only expressed by the symbol. The symbol is neither abstract nor concrete, neither rational nor irrational, neither real or unreal. It is always both.” (par. 400)

Imagination is the inner star guiding us along the process of our soul making. The process of imagining and birthing new forms takes place in an egg-shaped vessel, which the alchemists imagined as well sealed, “completely round, in imitation of the spherical cosmos, so that the influence of the stars may contribute to the success of the operation.” (par. 338). This soul vessel held all secrets of creation.

Brigid Marlin, “Wolves in St Marks”

Source of quotes:

C.G Jung, Psychology and Alchemy

Georges de la Tour, “Mary Magdalene with a Night Light”

I.“The chaos of the ancients; the Zoroastrian sacred fire, …; the Hermes-fire; …the lightning of Cybele; the burning torch of Apollo; the flame on the altar of Pan; the inextinguishable fire in the temple on the Acropolis, and in that of Vesta; the fire-flame of Pluto’s helm; the brilliant sparks on the hats of the Dioscuri, on the Gorgon head, the helm of Pallas, and the staff of Mercury; … the pentecostal fire-tongues; the burning bush of Moses; the pillar of fire of the Exodus, and the “burning lamp” of Abram; the eternal fire of the “bottomless pit”; the Delphic oracular vapors; the Sidereal light of the Rosicrucians; the AKASA of the Hindu adepts; the Astral light of Eliphas Levi; the nerve-aura and the fluid of the magnetists; … are but various names for many different manifestations, or effects of the same mysterious, all-pervading cause — the Greek Archeus, or [[Archaios]].“

Madame Blavatsky, “Isis Unveiled“

Morris Graves, “Chalice”“That which always was,

II.That which always was

and is, and will be everlasting fire,

the same for all, the cosmos,
made neither by god nor man,
replenishes in measure
as it burns away.“

Heraclitus, translated by Brooks Haxton

Morris Graves, “Lotus”

Morris Graves, “Lotus“

III. A Philosophical Hymn to Hestia

“I sing of Hestia,
the most ancient of Goddesses,
the Fire in the Middle,
the Centre of the Cosmos,
the Centre of the Sphere,
the Prime Composite,
the All, the Source, the Good,
she who maintains order,
she who is the Essence of All Things,
The Goddess of Being,
She Who Abides,
she who alone stays at home in the dwellings of the immortals,
tending the central fire in the heaven of Olympus,
the intellect of the Earth,
the Source and Cause of All Being,
she who presides over the universe with a guardian power,
the fountain of Virtue,
she who fixes the firm seat of the Earth,
who stabilizes the poles,
a ruling power among the supercelestial Gods,
imparting permanence to All,
illuminating all things with stable and inflexible power,
she who contains an inflexible and undefiled permanency in herself,
she who is conjoined to the first causes,
she who is responsible for everything stable and immutable,
she who imparts order to the cosmos,
she who fixes the circulations of the heavenly spheres,
bringing an unshaken permanency to the centre of the Cosmos,
she who is the summit of all beings,
the monad of the whole,
she who imparts from herself to the Gods
an uninclining permanency,
a seat in themselves,
an indissoluble essence,
she who abides in herself,
possessing an undefiled purity,
the Essence of All,
the Cause of Impulsion,
she who subsists in the self,
she who embodies all gravitational forces,
the Ether in the Heart,
the Flame of Life,
She Who Creates, Preserves, and Regenerates the Universe,
she who is honored both first and last in all things,
All hail Hestia, the most ancient of Goddesses!”

Written by the author of this blog: https://paganreveries.wordpress.com/2012/05/19/hestia-the-queen-of-fire-part-three/

Among Greek Gods and Goddesses, Hestia (the Roman Vesta) was worshiped as first born and last born. She was the first daughter of Cronus (Saturn) and Rhea, the first to be swallowed by her father, and the last to be brought back to life. Hence, she can be viewed as both the primal and the final archetypal principle, much like the fire she was the guardian of. She never married, preserving forever her mystic purity; she never took part in any ceaseless conflicts of other gods and goddesses, as if she had deliberately removed herself from the vicissitudes of the temporal world to stand as a guardian to eternity. The temples of other deities were usually quadrangular, but Hestia’s was circular and covered with a dome, the circle being the symbol of unity and eternity that she stood for. In his Greek Myths, Robert Graves acknowledged her primordial quality when he wrote that the very first image of the Great Goddess was in fact non-representational but just “a heap of glowing charcoal, kept alive by a covering of white ash, … (which) formed the natural centre of family or clan gatherings.”

Reconstruction drawing of the temple of Vesta in the Roman Forum

The Greeks believed that the centre of their world lay in Delphi, where the Oracle was located. This was the navel of the world, where Hestia was worshiped along with Apollo and Poseidon. Her sacred fire was viewed as the burning hearth in the centre of the ancient Cosmos. Both in Greek and Roman homes and temples the sacred fire was tended religiously. According to Plutarch:

“And in case by any accident it should happen that this fire became extinct, … then, afterwards, in kindling this fire again, it was esteemed an impiety to light it from common sparks or flame, or from anything but the pure and unpolluted rays of the sun, which they usually effect by concave mirrors…”

via http://www.hellenicgods.org/hestia

Flavia Publicia, statue to Vestal priestess

In this way, Hestia connects the fire of the centre of our solar system with the fire burning in the centre of the Earth. Dionysus of Halicarnassus wrote this of the Roman goddess Vesta:

“And they regard the fire as consecrated to Vesta because that goddess, being the earth and occupying the central place in the universe, kindles the celestial fires from herself.”

Via https://archive.org/stream/romanantiquities01dionuoft/romanantiquities01dionuoft_djvu.txt

Also Porphyry saw Hestia as a goddess of the earth, but he distinguished her from Rhea and Demeter in this way:

“The ruling principle of the power of earth is called Hestia, of whom a statue representing her as a virgin is usually set up on the hearth; but inasmuch as the power is productive, they symbolize her by the form of a woman with prominent breasts. The name Rhea they gave to the power of rocky and mountainous land, and Demeter to that of level and productive land. Demeter in other respects is the same as Rhea, but differs in the fact that she gives birth to Kore by Zeus, that is, she produces the shoot from the seeds of plants. And on this account her statue is crowned with ears of corn, and poppies are set round her as a symbol of productiveness.”

Porphyry,“On Images“ via http://classics.mit.edu/Porphyry/images.html

Hestia seems to symbolize the creative, enlivening spark in all nature, the undistinguishable spark of creativity in the very center of our soul, while Rhea and Demeter are connected with the manifest productivity of nature. Hestia presides over all ceremonies aiming at purification, centering on our soul with full devotion, reigniting the divine spark of creativity, preserving and creating the warmth of our personal sacred space, be it home, homeland, or the inner sanctuary of our soul. She calls us to center on our inner spark of divinity – the harmonious and unchanging part of our individual unique being. Tending to that fire brings us warmth, light, harmony and illumination.

Like every archetype, also this one has its darker aspect. It is connected with the ancient Rome and Vestal virgins, who may have enjoyed an elevated social status in comparison to average women, but who were cruelly punished for breaking the vows of chastity and also for letting the sacred fire be extinguished. The punishment consisted in the perpetrator being whipped and subsequently buried alive after a public ceremony (an echo of Vesta being the earth goddess). This is what may happen when archetypes are interpreted literally and not in symbolic terms. The virgin as an archetype is understood as a woman who is self-contained and one-in-herself, not chaste in sexual terms; the fire actually burning in the temple was just an external, profane representation of the archetypal sacred fire which can never be extinguished because it is tended by none other than Vesta, the guardian of the innermost things, as Cicero referred to her.

John Weguelin, “The Obsequies of an Egyptian Cat”

Susan Seddon Boulet, “Moon Cup”

“What special affinities appeared to him to exist between the moon and woman? Her antiquity in preceding and surviving successive tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant implacable resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”

James Joyce, “Ulysses”

Claude Monet, “Water Lillies”

In Woody Allen’s movie “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” Mia Farrow’s character, frustrated by her marital woes, falls in love with a character in a movie. The movie character also becomes attracted to her, and exits the screen to profess his love to her. The symbolism of the title is quite telling, a purple rose of Cairo standing for rare beauty and unreachable fantasy. The color purple is associated with the seventh chakra as the seat of archetypes, and the movie makes us ponder the ontological status of fantasy. The underlying thought seems to be that the real and the fantastical are not distinct: the spiritual realm is as real and has a direct impact on the main character’s life.

Violet is the highest vibrating color both in physics and in spirituality, which associates it with the crown chakra. In occultism, it is the color of the Seventh Ray of ceremonial order and magic. Chanelers of angel wisdom view it as the color of transformation, forgiveness and freedom. It is an extraordinary color rarely seen in nature. According to Manly P. Hall, tt was first obtained from “the blood of a sea shell-fish,” by the Phoenicians, who set an extremely high price on this rare and luxurious commodity. Purple combines the blue of spiritual heights and ocean depths with the energy and vitality of blood red. Only those with highest rank in society, namely clergymen and royalty, used to wear robes of that hue.

Mark Rothko

In Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, Barbara G. Walker claims that for the ancients purple did not mean violet but actually dark wine red. This made me wonder because in my native language the adjective “purpurowy” does not mean violet but actually dark wine red. Walker writes: “Royal purple meant the same as royal blood: matrilineal kinship in a sacred clan. … Purple still meant blood color in the time of Shakespeare, who spoke of the ‘purpled hands‘ of Caesar’s assassins, stained with ‘the most noble blood of all the world.‘” In Christian symbolism purple is often associated with the sacrificial blood of Christ, and consequently with penance and expiation, which is supposed to lead to purification and transformation. Also, since it combines the coolness of blue with the hotness of red, it fosters contemplation and may have a calming effect on those suffering from disruptive, negative emotions. In purple the sublime meets passion and energy of earthly desires, creating a new and surprising quality. As Anodea Judith explains in Eastern Body, Western Mind:

 “The separation of spirituality from the rest of life leaves us spiritually homeless. In reflection of the archetypal divorce between Earth Mother and Sky Father, we are taught to seek enlightenment by denying the basic nature of our biological existence. This chasm between Heaven and Earth creates a corresponding abyss between spirit and soul that many fall into as they engage in ascetic practices, sign their will over to gurus, and disengage from the world. Denying our basic nature in order to achieve unity is a contradiction steeped in dualistic thinking, which will never lead to unity or wholeness.

…

The crown chakra is the thousand-petaled lotus. Most people think of the petals as reaching up into the heavens; actually, the lotus petals turn downward like a sunflower, dripping nectar into the crown and down through the chakras. In this way, the two ends of the spectrum are profoundly connected. … The crown chakra is a two-way gate to the beyond. It opens outward, beyond ourselves to the infinite, and it opens inward and downward to the world of visions, creation, and eventual manifestation.”

Judith stresses that the goal of the seventh chakra is in equal measure transcendence and immanence, i.e. reaching out towards divinity, transcending the earthly plane, and finding divinity within, on the plane of earthly manifestation and embodiment. She calls transcendence “a cleansing bath in the waters of spirit a blissful relief from that which binds us to limitation.” The ultimate goal is to find the application for the treasures one acquired thanks to the expansion of consciousness. Immanence is about the soul’s individuality, transcendence about the spirit’s universality. The goal of individuation is to encompass both worlds and never lose a vital connection between them. Judith continues: “The soul is like a gatherer of spirit, forming the abstract into a composite being.” If the spirit does not receive anchoring and embodiment of the soul, the sacred process ends in a vacuum, not leaving the abstract realm. Also in occult traditions, the main work of the Seventh Ray is to infuse the spirit with matter. The ending of The Purple Rose of Cairo shows Cecilia immersed in the fantastical realm of cinema again, neglecting her immediate reality. She seems to have not met the challenges of the seventh chakra’s call for immanence, though she did leave an abusive relationship. True healing is achieved by aligning with the evolutionary soul purpose, materializing our highest potential in accordance with our soul’s archetypal blueprint. The movement is from below to above and simultaneously from above to below.

Georgia O’Keeffe

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, “The Librarian”

“Idle Reader: Without my swearing to it, you can believe that I would like this book, the child of my understanding, to be the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most discreet that anyone could imagine. … I wanted only to offer it to you plain and bare, unadorned by a prologue or the endless catalogue of sonnets, epigrams, and laudatory poems that are usually placed at the beginning of books.

…

For how could I not be confused at what that old legislator, the public, will say when it sees that after all the years I have spent asleep in the silence of obscurity, I emerge now, carrying all my years on my back, with a tale as dry as esparto grass, devoid of invention, deficient in style, poor in ideas, and lacking all erudition and doctrine, without notes in the margins or annotations at the end of the book, when I see the other books, even if they are profane fictions, are so full of citations from Aristotle, Plato, and the entire horde of philosophers that readers are moved to admiration and consider the authors to be well-read, erudite, and eloquent men? … My book will lack all of this, for I have nothing to note in the margin or to annotate at the end, and I certainly don’t know which authors I have followed so that I can mention them at the beginning, as everyone else does, in alphabetical order, beginning with Aristotle and ending with Xenophon, and with Zoilus and Zeuxis, though one was a slanderer and the other a painter. My book will also lack sonnets at the beginning, especially sonnets whose authors are dukes, marquises, counts, bishops, ladies, or celebrated poets …

I am by nature too lazy and slothful to go looking for authors to say what I know how to say without them.”

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (from the Author’s Introduction)

I am currently feasting on Don Quixote in a gorgeous translation by Edith Grossman. Having read a large number of books on the adventures of chivalrous knights, Don Quixote decides to become a knight errant himself, and sets out into the world in order to live what he has read about. “Don Quixote reads the world in order to prove his books,” says of him Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, “His whole being is nothing but language, text, printed pages, stories that have already been written down.” Having spent days on pondering on the names for himself and for his horse, proving thus that his reality is first and foremost the language, he embarks on his first adventure. The most important thing about Don Quixote is that he never leaves the books he has so avidly engrossed himself in. Everything he sees on his travels is transformed in his mind into what he has read about. For example, the inn he sees appears to him “a castle complete with four towers and spires of gleaming silver,” and when a swineherd blows his horn to gather the pigs, the knight sees him as a dwarf signaling his arrival.

Gustave Dore, Don Quixote goes mad from reading of books of chivalry

They pleasures of reading Don Quixote are endless, the layers of meaning plentiful, but the one I am focusing on today is the joy of reading, of burying oneself in an alternative universe conjured up between the pages of a great book. The comic genius of Cervantes pervades the pages, for example in the following tribute paid by Don Quixote to the lady of his heart, Dulcinea:

 “… her condition must be that of princess, at the very least, for she is my queen and lady, and her beauty is supernatural, for in it one finds the reality of all the impossible and chimerical aspects of beauty which poets attribute to their ladies: her tresses are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows the arches of heaven, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her skin white as snow, and the parts that modesty hides from human eyes are such, or so I believe and understand, that the most discerning consideration can only praise them but not compare them.”

Gustave Dore

Don Quixote lives in the symbolic order, his feet barely touching the ground. His world is heady, insubstantial, made of paper. Still, as will be shown in the subsequent posts, he makes a tremendous difference to his surroundings. Although he is a self-proclaimed knight, and not born one, his nobility is real and pure, because it springs straight from the source and has not been contaminated by the embodied reality. He is a pure reflection of the knight archetype – he is a symbol, not a man any more. According to Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols, the knight “is the master, the logos, the spirit which prevails over the mount (that is, over matter).” The medieval ceremony of knighthood emphasized the head of the knight as its most important symbolic component:

 “In the Middle Ages, a knight was created by a symbolic imitation of the ritual that used to make a man into a god: beheading him. Touching first one shoulder then the other with a sword implied that the sword had passed through the neck. Celtic tribes especially revered man-gods who were preserved in the form of severed heads, which were believed to give oracles. In Greece also, savior-gods like Orpheus spoke to their followers of the after-life through the mouths of their own mummified heads.”

Barbara G. Walker, “The Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets”

The beheading was an effective death of the ego preceding a rebirth to a higher, spiritual order. Just as Don Quixote owes his knighthood to no one but himself, so does Cervantes differentiate himself from erudite, snobbish writers of his era in the Introduction quoted at the beginning of this post. Don Quixote is a fiesta of pure, unbridled creativity, fantasy and imagination. It was dubbed the first modern novel because it created its own alternative literary reality. Fiction is not a mirror set to the world, but a whole new world in itself: an infinite world with endless possibilities. It is a domain of Mercurius: a trickster god building reality out of language. In a poem “The Joy of Writing,” written in a Quixotic tradition, Wislawa Szymborska captured the spirit of writing as a sort of lucid dreaming:

“Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?

…

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.”

Octavio Ocampo, “Friendship of Don Quixote”

The Library and the Laboratory (From Michael Maier, Tripus Aureus, Frankfurt, 1677)

In this vignette found in Michael’s Maier’s Tripus Aureus Jung saw “the double face of alchemy.“ On the right hand side, a man is busy at a furnace, engaged full on in the physical and transformative experience, while in the library three learned men are having a philosophical debate. Theorizing and applying the theory were of equal importance to alchemists: learning required an equal measure of doing, throwing oneself into an experience without hesitation or holding back. In the round flask on the tripod there is a winged dragon – a crucial symbol in the alchemical opus:

“The dragon in itself is a monstrum – a symbol combining the chthonic principle of the serpent and the aerial principle of the bird. It is … a variant of Mercurius. … When the alchemist speaks of Mercurius, on the face of it he means quicksilver, but inwardly he means the world-creating spirit concealed or imprisoned in matter. … Time and time again the alchemist reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare or else rota (the wheel). Mercurius stands at the beginning and end of the work: he is the prima materia, the caput corvi [crow’s head], the nigredo; as dragon he devours himself and as dragon he dies, to rise again as the lapis [stone]. He is the play of colours in the cauda pavonis [peacock’s tail] and the division into four elements. He is the hermaphrodite that was in the beginning, that splits into the classical brother-sister duality and is reunited in the coniunctio, to appear once again at the end in the radiant form of the lumen novum, the stone. He is metallic yet liquid, matter yet spirit, cold yet fiery, poison and yet healing draught – a symbol uniting all opposites.“ (Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, par. 404)

Mercurius – the embodied mind and the sublime mind; mind both practical and philosophical, the Creating Word that was at the beginning – is the key to alchemical process, and was frequently equated with prima materia – First Matter. In Martin Ruland’s Alchemical Lexicon, we can find a list of expressions that various alchemists used to refer to prima materia. Some of the more interesting ones are:

Water of Life, Dew, Bride, Spouse, Mother, Eve, Pure and Uncontaminated Virgin, A Spiritual Blood, The Soul and Heaven of the Elements, The Matter of All Forms, Heart of the Sun, Shade of the Sun, Heart and Shade of Gold, Chaos, Venus, Isis, Mother, The Sea, Bird of Hermes, The Woman, Water of Gold, Soul of Saturn, the Earth, Spirit.

Via http://www.rexresearch.com/rulandus/rulxm.htm

All of the above possess the undeniable ability of stirring imagination and inspiring a creative vision. All of them speak of begetting fertility of the world soul (anima mundi) that permeates the whole fabric of being bringing all its elements together. Alchemists visualized matter as spiritual, and spirit as material. The distinction into matter and spirit was actually only a matter of degree: from the crude and gross to the subtle (subtilis), though the essential ingredients were there all along, lying dormant, waiting to be discovered by an adept on the path to Self-actualization.

Cabala mineralis manuscript, the first book, via http://www.alchemywebsite.com/cab_min1.html

Earth is one of the thousand names given to materia prima by such alchemists as Basilius Valentinus, who believed that the earth-spirit, itself nourished by the stars, “gives nourishment to all the living things it shelters in its womb.” (Psychology and Alchemy, par. 444). The minerals and all life forms are hatched in the earth’s womb thanks to the grace of the spirit received from on high. Paracelsus used the term Yliaster to refer to prima materia he imagined to consist of body and soul, matter and stars. Yliaster was the star seed present in all matter, its spiritual core and its formless base (the bedrock of archetypes).

via http://www.alchemywebsite.com/paintings/paracelsus_portraits.html

Water was another very apt and popular metaphor for prima materia. Alchemists spoke of divine or miraculous water, humidum radicale (root moisture). This aqueous soulful substance was imprisoned in matter and could be extracted by means of cooking over fire, and also by the process of dismemberment – dissolution and separation of the elements with the view to transforming them. The alchemical water had the power to dissolve and to animate inert matter, to resurrect the dead, as well as to wash the blackness (nigredo) into whiteness (Jung, Alchemical Studies, par. 89). Water was believed to be the soul of all substances. Caesariud of Heisterbach, an alchemist quoted by Jung, believed the soul to be moist like dew, speaking of its spherical nature, “like the globe of the Moon,  or like a glass vessel that is ‘furnished before and behind with eyes” and ‘sees the whole universe.‘“ Thus, the soul contains the starry heaven within (Alchemical Studies, par. 114).

Twin-tailed mermaid

The feminine aspect of the prima materia – as the mother of the philosopher’s stone – was essential to all alchemists. Says Jung in Mysterium Coniunctionis:

“Materia prima in its feminine aspect: it is the moon, the mother of all things, the vessel, it consists of opposites, has a thousand names, …, as Mater Alchimia it is wisdom and teaches wisdom, it contains the elixir of life in potentia and is the mother of the Saviour and of the filius Macrocosmi, it is the earth and the serpent hidden in the earth, the blackness and the dew and the miraculous water which brings together all that is divided.“ (par. 15).

“She is that piece of chaos which is everywhere and yet hidden, she is that vessel of contradictions and many colours – a totality in the form of massa confusa, yet a substance endowed with every quality in which the splendour of the hidden deity can be revealed.“ (par. 422)

The deity hidden in prima materia was most frequently identified with Isis: the healing goddess, who not only healed Ra of poisoning but also put together the dismembered Osiris:

“… she personifies that arcane substance, be it dew or the aqua permanens, which unites the hostile elements into one. … The cognomen of Isis was the Black One. … since ancient times she was reputed to possess the elixir of life as well as being adept in sundry magical arts. She was also … rated as a pupil of Hermes, or even his daughter. … She signifies earth, according to Firmicus Maternus, and was equated with Sophia, … the vessel and the matter of good and evil. An inscription invokes her as ‘the One, who art All.‘ She is named the redemptrix. In Athenagoras she is ‘the nature of the Aeon, whence all things grew and by which all things are.‘ (Mysterium Coniunctionis, par. 14)

Since etymologically alchemy means “dark earth“ we may venture a statement: alchemy and Isis are closely intertwined. Isis is at the primal heart of alchemy, at the beginning of the opus. She is pure and untouched, waiting to be transmuted by the ensuing alchemical operations.

Illustration by Georges Rochegrosse

I.“Her hair, which was powdered with violet sand, and combined into the form of a tower, after the fashion of the Chanaanite maidens, added to her height. Tresses of pearls were fastened to her temples, and fell to the corners of her mouth, which was as rosy as a half-open pomegranate. On her breast was a collection of luminous stones, their variegation imitating the scales of the murena. Her arms were adorned with diamonds, and issued naked from her sleeveless tunic, which was starred with red flowers on a perfectly black ground. Between her ankles she wore a golden chainlet to regulate her steps, and her large dark purple mantle, cut of an unknown material, trailed behind her, making, as it were, at each step, a broad wave which followed her.

…

It was the moon that had made her so pale, and there was something from the gods that enveloped her like a subtle vapour. Her eyes seemed to gaze far beyond terrestrial space.”

II.“An influence had descended upon the maiden from the moon; when the planet passed diminishing away, Salammbo grew weak. She languished the whole day long, and revived at evening. During an eclipse she nearly died.”

Gaston Bussiere, “Salammbo”

III.“Salammbô crouched down upon the onyx step on the edge of the basin; she raised her ample sleeves, fastening them behind her shoulders, and began her ablutions in methodical fashion, according to the sacred rites.

Next Taanach brought her something liquid and coagulated in an alabaster phial; it was the blood of a black dog slaughtered by barren women on a winter’s night amid the rubbish of a sepulchre. She rubbed it upon her ears, her heels, and the thumb of her right hand, and even her nail remained somewhat red, as if she had crushed a fruit.

The moon rose; then the cithara and the flute began to play together.

Salammbô unfastened her earrings, her necklace, her bracelets, and her long white simar; she unknotted the band in her hair, shaking the latter for a few minutes softly over her shoulders to cool herself by thus scattering it. The music went on outside; it consisted of three notes ever the same, hurried and frenzied; the strings grated, the flute blew; Taanach kept time by striking her hands; Salammbô, with a swaying of her whole body, chanted prayers, and her garments fell one after another around her.

Illustration by Gabriel Ferrier

The heavy tapestry trembled, and the python’s head appeared above the cord that supported it. The serpent descended slowly like a drop of water flowing along a wall, crawled among the scattered stuffs, and then, gluing its tail to the ground, rose perfectly erect; and his eyes, more brilliant than carbuncles, darted upon Salammbô.

A horror of cold, or perhaps a feeling of shame, at first made her hesitate. But she recalled Schahabarim’s orders and advanced; the python turned downwards, and resting the centre of its body upon the nape of her neck, allowed its head and tail to hang like a broken necklace with both ends trailing to the ground. Salammbo rolled it around her sides, under her arms and between her knees; then taking it by the jaw she brought the little triangular mouth to the edge of her teeth, and half shutting her eyes, threw herself back beneath the rays of the moon. The white light seemed to envelop her in a silver mist, the prints of her humid steps shone upon the flag-stones, stars quivered in the depth of the water; it tightened upon her its black rings that were spotted with scales of gold. Salammbo panted beneath the excessive weight, her loins yielded, she felt herself dying, and with the tip of its tail the serpent gently beat her thigh; then the music becoming still it fell off again.”

Gustave Flaubert, “Salammbô”

Salammbô is the title character of a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert. Although the well-researched novel focuses on the mercenary rebellion in Carthage in 237 B.C., the story of Salammbô steals the spotlight. We first encounter her as a pure maiden, raised by her father away from society, in a castle surrounded with luxury and with servants constantly waiting on her. She is a striking ethereal being, always gazing at the moon and stars, accepting “pure symbols and even manners of speech as being true in themselves.” She devotes her entire time to worshipping the moon goddess Tanith. The zaimph – the sacred veil of the goddess – gives the city of Carthage its moral strength. The prophesy says that whoever shall touch it, will die. As the story progresses, Salammbô gathers more and more flesh without losing any of her sublime elevation. Touching the veil of the goddess can end only in one way for her, though.

Illustration by Lobel Riche

Jainism, an Indian religion prescribing a path of nonviolence towards all living beings, professes a doctrine of Ahimsa (non-injury, absence of desire to harm), one expression of which is sweeping the ground with very small brushes before stepping on it so that no life forms get trodden on. In the West, our approach to insects is quite the opposite: we despise them, associate with dirt and diseases, we are repulsed by them. In that, we are very far in our approach from ancient Egyptians, who revered the humble dung beetle as the symbol of the rising sun, renewal, transformation and resurrection.

In Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the monstrous vermin the main character transforms into is the ultimate symbol of utter repulsion and rejection. But there is a deeper meaning to Kafka’s story. Gregor Samsa’s metamorphosis into an insect is his psyche’s reaction against sadistic one-sidedness of patriarchy. Because our dominant Western religion has been removed from the earth and has lost connection to its chthonic roots, we can see nothing sacred in the humble insect. In the original German of Metamorphosis the insect is called “ungeheures Ungeziefer,” which means “an animal unfit to sacrifice,” dirty, unholy.

Drawing from popular culture, a psychological affinity between human and insect is quite significant in the symbolism of a TV series “Breaking Bad.” Hank Schrader, a macho DEA agent relentless in combating drug crime, compares the offenders he tracks to cockroaches who crawl from under the fridge and need to be stepped on and squashed out. In a related scene, Jesse Pinkman, a meth manufacturer with a heart of gold, spots a black beetle on the ground. He crouches to take a closer look at the little creature, cradling it tenderly on his finger, then releasing it gently. In another scene, a young boy catches a tarantula into a jar while biking through a desert. A few hours later he becomes and unwitting witness to a crime and gets shot in cold blood – squished like an insect. As time goes by and the main protagonist’s (Walter white, chemistry teacher turning into a drug lord) soul gets more and more calloused, he begins to view murder as a mere act of swatting a fly. In fact, he seems to walk the opposite path than that of Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, who murders a greedy pawnbroker for cash to prove to the world and to himself that some people can commit murder for higher purpose (to rid the world of vermin). He says: “I killed a loathsome, harmful louse, a filthy old moneylender woman who brought no good to anyone, to murder whom would pardon forty sins, who sucked the lifeblood of the poor, and you call that a crime?” Dostoevsky’s novel tells the story of Raskolnikov gradually reclaiming his humanity, while Walter White gradually loses it. Simultaneously, the New Mexico desert in all its glory, the sky above it, the whole natural world, life itself, the cosmos, preside over all events, eternally beautiful and constant in their cycles. Insects seem to be visitors from the non-human cosmos, which we, the moderns, have lost touch with.

In his essay “Going Bugs” included in the tome Animal Presences, James Hillman offers a comprehensive look into the significance of insects for our psychology:

 “We have yet to understand why the bugs raise such anxiety that eradication becomes the automatic response. This automatic step from fear to eradication leads to a further one into the world – pesticides. … This overkill may have its source in four frightening fantasies attributed to insects as their qualities.”

The qualities he attributes to insects are multiplicity, monstrosity, autonomy and mystery. The sheer number of insects, swarming in our imaginations, poses a threat to our uniqueness and individuality. This point to “fragmentation and the lowering of individualized consciousness to an undifferentiated, merely numerical or statistical level.” Symbolically, it threatens with the loss of centralized ego control. An ant colony, a locust cloud, a swarm of bees also demonstrate “wholeness, not as an abstract ideal but as a busy, buzzing body of life going every which way at once.” Because they are autonomous, impossible to control, we want them to be “crushed, burnt, and poisoned because they do not submit.” “The pesticidal ego” is terrified that it will be stripped of power and control, as it knows it is surrounded by flesh eating, relentless forces of nature. Bugs thrive on our “vegetative roots”  – we are sharing our bodies, our food and our property with them.

Locust

In depth psychology terms, insects demonstrate a terrifying vision of “being eaten up by one’s complexes.” We fear “disintegration into myriad parts, infestation with discarded filth (the return of the repressed), affected by monstrosities.” In science fiction movies, insects are responsible for alteration of personality – the ego’s ultimate threat. The ego’s view of the personality is narrow and limiting while insects symbolize “the hungry unlived life that also needs food at your table.” Further, insects show us that in fact we humans are parasitic as well:

 “If, as Jung said, the unconscious turns the face to you that you turn to it, then a parasitical invasion brings home to the host specifically how it depends in tiny hidden ways upon other psychic organisms, how it is influenced by complexes, how we use their blood to sustain our ambitions. The complexes, upon which we depend for our daily personality and from which we draw our energetic compulsion, show up in the dream as parasites, showing us up to be one among them, feeding off life’s banquet by taking care of number one, whether in workplace, family, friendship – or feeding off the dreams themselves, interpretation as a parasitical blood-sucking act, taking all, giving nothing back.”

Most naturally, insects feed our fear of death. They appear to come out from beyond, from the soil, from the underground, from hidden corners of “day-world structures.” They startke, appearing seemingly out of nowhere and suddenly, frequently announcing their arrival with otherworldly buzzing and ominous sounds. As Hillman says: “We re-enact the conquest of Christ over Pluto with our aerosol can of bug spray, swinging that censer in secular ritual, ridding each our own Garden of underworld demons.” No matter how many of them we exterminate, often harming ourselves with pesticides in the process, insects will remain primordial messengers of the unconscious life of the psyche and a symbol of all that we reject and are repulsed by in ourselves.

Source of quotes:

James Hillman, Animal Presences, “Going Bugs” (Kindle edition)

Camera obscura, image via Wikipedia

It is easy to romanticize the dawn of photography (literally “drawing with light”). I am not pretending I understand the technical intricacies of the entire process but I am drawn to the alchemical feel and terminology of the first photographic experiments. Apparently, it all started with “sun drawing” or heliography. Joseph Nicéphore Niépce created the first permanent photograph of the image in a camera obscura (“dark room”). Niepce partnered with Louis Daguerre, who invented the daguerreotype – a process which involved fixing images on a silver-plated copper sheet. The next phase in the history of photography was the calotype (“beautiful image”) invented by Henry Fox Talbot. This process utilized a silver salt solution, which made paper sensitive to light. As a result, multiple positive prints were able to be reproduced from negatives. But maybe it all started much earlier – with the Neolithic cave painters, who may have observed the camera obscura effects on cave walls. At least, this is a controversial theory put forward by one Matt Gatton (http://www.paleo-camera.com/ ). Whatever the truth may be, it can be safely asserted that the earliest uses of camera obscura always involved the interplay of darkness and light. In Ancient Greece, Aristotle observed how during a partial eclipse of the sun light that was passing through a small opening in a dark chamber produced an image on the opposite wall. Right until the 16^th century astronomers had only this technique to make solar observations without causing damage to their eyes. In his essay “Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography,” Roland Barthes wrote: “It seems that in Latin ‘photograph’ would be said ‘imago luci opera expressa'; which is to say: image revealed, ‘extracted,’ ‘mounted,’ ‘expressed’ (like the juice of a lemon) by the action of light.”

Subject worth of daguerreotype

As every art form, also photography has offered us a new way of glimpsing the eternal. However, already at its advent there appeared critics who saw its dangers. Notably, Charles Baudeleaire, a prominent objector to middle-class values, did not welcome photography. He did not mince words in the review of the Salon of 1859: “From that moment our squalid society rushed, Narcissus to a man, to gaze at its trivial image on a scrap of metal. A mad­ness, an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of all these new sun-worshippers. Strange abominations took form.” Exactly same words could be used to describe the aggressive predominance of narcissistic images flooding us from every direction nowadays. Susan Sontag, in a brilliant essay “On Photography,” argues that nowadays photography is used by most people as “a social rite, a defense against anxiety, and a tool of power.” Family albums achieve the same purpose as portraits of royalty in times of yore: they are there to immortalize, to build a monument, to assert one’s public stance. Yet, much as they want to preserve the moment, photographs deal with Death, says Sontag:

 “Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. … All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another’s person (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs – especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past – are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unattainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance. The lover’s photograph hidden in a married woman’s wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent’s bed, …, the snapshots of a cabdriver’s children clipped to the visor – all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.”

Christmas Morning, c.1933, Harlem New York. photo by James Van Der Zee

Barthes goes further by claiming that “however ‘lifelike’ we strive to make it… Photography is a kind of primitive theater, …, a figuration of the motionless and made-up face beneath which we see the dead.”

Noh masks, via https://whatwhileweslept.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/onward-to-oxford/

Sontag compares the camera to the gun, taking a picture to sublimated murder. How so? The camera trespasses, violates, intrudes, presumes, exploits and at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate(s).” It turns people into “objects that can be symbolically possessed.” The same can often be said of tourist photography, which lays claim to a foreign space and attests that good time was had indeed:

 “A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it – by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir. The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. … The method especially appeals to people handicapped by ruthless work ethic – Germans, Japanese, and Americans. Using the camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun.”

Barthes wonders whether a photographic image can ever capture the profound self. He concludes that “: ‘myself’ never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it), and ‘myself’ which is light,  divided, dispersed; like a bottle-imp, ‘myself’ doesn’t hold still, giggling in my jar…” Soulful photography, the one that captures the profound and ineffable, is extremely rare but possible.

A series of portraits of an artist Jean-Michel Basquiat by James Van Der Zee

A camera, as Sontag put it, can be “the arm of consciousness.” We are anaesthetized nowadays by a proliferation of images showing both beauty (or just prettiness) and atrocity. Can we still be pierced or arrested by a photograph, though? Can it touch us “like the delayed rays of a star?” asks Barthes, and writes further:

 “Ultimately – or at the limit – in order to see a photograph well, it is best to look away or close your eyes. ‘The necessary condition for an image is sight,’ Janouch told Kafka;· and Kafka smiled and replied: ‘We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes.’”

The laughing Kafka

It is the invisible that makes photography into art, what we may see when we close our eyes. The last word belongs to Barthes:

“Always the Photograph astonishes me, with an astonishment which endures and renews itself, inexhaustibly. Perhaps this astonishment, this persistence reaches down into the religious substance out of which I am molded; nothing for it: Photography has something to do with resurrection: might we not say of it what the Byzantines said of the image of Christ which impregnated St. Veronica’s napkin: that it was not made by the hand of man, acheiropoietos [made without hands]?”

“And near him stood the Lady of the Lake,
Who knows a subtler magic than his own–
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful.
She gave the King his huge cross-hilted sword,
Whereby to drive the heathen out:  a mist
Of incense curled about her, and her face
Wellnigh was hidden in the minster gloom;
But there was heard among the holy hymns
A voice as of the waters, for she dwells
Down in a deep; calm, whatsoever storms
May shake the world, and when the surface rolls,
Hath power to walk the waters like our Lord.”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, “Idylls of the King”

The Lady of the Lake taking the infant Lancelot, illustration by George Wooliscroft Rhead & Louis Rhead

While my train was approaching Lausanne, suddenly, though certainly not expectedly, which nevertheless did not spoil the effect – Lake Geneva (French Lac Léman) came to view in all its glory. Sparkling blue in the sun, nested by imposing mountains, surrounded by hills of vineyards, it took my breath away. Of all bodies of water, I have always felt particularly drawn to lakes for their depth replenishing power. So were many Romantic poets, notably Lord Byron and Percy B. Shelley with his wife Mary, who spent the summer of 1816 in Cologny near Geneva, drinking from Lac Léman’s  fountain of inspiration.

Lake Geneva

The summer of 1816 was very special for the whole world since a few months before there had been a huge volcanic eruption in Indonesia, as a result of which the whole Northern Hemisphere suffered from torrential rains and high winds also in summer months. 1816 was dubbed “the year without summer.” Restrained by ghastly weather, Byron and the Shelleys spent most of the time indoors, drinking wine, taking opium and working on their masterpieces:

“One night, when Byron read aloud a haunting poem, Shelley leapt up and ran shrieking from the room, having hallucinated that Mary had sprouted demonic eyes in place of nipples. It was in this surreal, claustrophobic atmosphere that she experienced the famous nightmare that became the lurid plot of Frankenstein…”

Tony Perrottett, “Lake Geneva as Shelley and Byron Knew It,” The New York Times of 27 May 2011, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/travel/lake-geneva-as-byron-and-shelley-knew-it.html?_r=0

J.M.W. Turner, “The Castle of Chillon” featured in Byron’s narrative poem “The Prisoner of Chillon” (“Lake Leman lies by Chillon’s walls: /A thousand feet in depth below / Its massy waters meet and flow / … and like a living grave / Below the surface of the lake / The dark vault lies wherein we lay: / We heard it ripple night and day”)

This particular quote attests to an important aspect of lake symbolism, namely their association with death and the underworld. In his Dictionary of Symbolism, Hans Biedermann writes about the concentric circles found on the walls of megalithic graves as suggesting “ripples in the surface of a lake when an object is dropped into the water, and thus seem to symbolize the descent of the soul into the waters of death.”

Circles at Knowth, Ireland

The Romans believed that the entrance to Hades led through Lake Avernus. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas is planning a visit to the Underworld to talk to the ghost of his father. He is guided there by the most famous Roman prophetess – The Sybil of Cumae.

J.M.W Turner, “Aeneas and the Sibyl, Lake Avernus”

Also for the English Bohemian group their stay by Lake Geneva was quite a portent of death:

“In retrospect, the ‘Frankenstein summer’ seems a fantastical interlude of happiness in lives marked by tragedy. In 1822, Percy Shelley drowned in Italy, at age 29; Dr Polidori had committed suicide the year before, at age 25. Claire’s daughter with Byron died at age 5, and only one of Mary Shelley’s four children with Percy survived. Byron died in Greece in 1824, at the ripe old age of 36.”

Tony Perrottett, “Lake Geneva as Shelley and Byron Knew It,” The New York Times of 27 May 2011, retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/travel/lake-geneva-as-byron-and-shelley-knew-it.html?_r=0

Cirlot’s Dictionary of Symbols further unravels the archetypal significance of lakes by giving a few very important bits of information. He writes: “In the Egyptian system of hieroglyphs, the schematic figure of a lake expresses the occult and the mysterious, probably by allusion to the underground lake which the sun has to pass over during its ‘night-crossing’ (but also simply by associating it with the symbolism of level, given that water always alludes to the ‘connection between the superficial and the profound’)”. There is an age-old analogy between the sun setting in the west and the death of a person. Hathor, a chief Egyptian goddess, was called The Lady of the West in her role as the one who nourished souls after death. At the heart of lake symbolism seems to be a consciousness of transition between here and there, this shore and the one barely visible, between life and death. Cirlot adds: “At the same time, the lake—or, rather, its surface alone—holds the significance of a mirror, presenting an image of self-contemplation, consciousness and revelation.”

One of the most beautiful poems inspired by lake contemplation was written by Adam Mickiewicz, a celebrated Polish Romantic poet. The following comes from his “Lausanne Lyrics”:

“Within their silent perfect glass

The mirror waters, vast and clear,

Reflect the silhouette of rocks,

Dark faces brooding on the shore.

Within their silent, perfect glass

The mirror waters show the sky;

Clouds skim across the mirror’s face,

And dim its surface as they die.

Within their silent, perfect glass

The mirror waters image storm;

They glow with lightning, but the blast

Of thunder do not mar their calm.

Those mirror waters, as before,

Still lie in silence, vast and clear.

They mirror me, I mirror them,

As true a glass as they I am:

And as I turn away I leave

The images that gave them form.

Dark rocks must menace from the shore,

And thunderheads grow large with rain;

Lightning must flash above the lake,

And I must mirror and pass on,

Onward and onward without end.”

Translated by Cecil Hemley

J.M.W. Turner, “Moonlight on Lake Lucerne”

Jacques de Gheyn II, “Witches in a Cellar”

1. “We are an evolving, dynamic tradition and proudly call ourselves Witches. Honoring both Goddess and God, we work with female and male images of divinity, always remembering that their essence is a mystery that goes beyond form. Our community rituals are participatory and ecstatic, celebrating the cycles of the seasons and our lives, and raising energy for personal, collective, and earth healing.”

Starhawk, “Spiral Dance”

2.“Like the word wild, the word witch has come to be understood as a pejorative, but long ago it was an appellation given to both old and young women healers, the word witch deriving from the word wit, meaning wise. This was before cultures carrying the one-God-only religious image began to overwhelm the older pantheistic cultures which understood the Deity through multiple religious images of the universe and all its phenomena. But regardless, the ogress, the witch, the wild nature, and whatever other criaturas and integral aspects the culture finds awful in the psyches of women are the very blessed things which women often need most to retrieve and bring to the surface.”

Clarissa Pinkola Estés, “Women Who Run with the Wolves”

The witch is the most important archetype for contemporary women, claims Wojciech Eichelberger, a well-known Polish therapist in an interview I have read recently. Author of the bestselling A Woman Without Blame and Shame, believes that a wise woman in close contact with natural cycles, one who does not need patriarchal go-betweens between herself and the sacred realm, is back for good and is becoming more and more mainstream. What still seems to stop Her is the legacy of the witch burning era, which continues to loom over the feminine psyche. There has been no atonement, no apologies for the mass extermination of witches (up to 9 million victims are postulated) that started in the sixteenth century. In the span of three hundred years as many as an estimated 9,000,000 women were incarcerated, degraded (the humiliation included shaving their bodies looking for marks left by the devil) and burnt at the stake or hanged. This mass trauma to this day continues to instill fear and anxiety in women, who wonder what might happen if they dare to go against the established social order.

Francisco Goya, “The Witches’ Sabbath”

One book deserves a dishonorary mention here – The Malleus Malleficarum (The Witch Hammer or The Hammer of the Witches), a fifteenth century treatise which served as a sort of manual for witch hunters of the time. The book enjoyed wide popularity, at one point almost as high as the Bible. Here I offer a handful of quotes pertaining to women that can be found in that learned tome:

“When a woman thinks alone, she thinks evil.”

“…they have slippery tongues, and are unable to conceal from the fellow-women those things which by evil arts they know; and, since they are weak, they find an easy and secret manner of vindicating themselves by witchcraft.”

“But because in these times this perfidy is more often found in women than in men, as we learn by actual experience, if anyone is curious as to the reason, we may add to what has already been said the following: that since they are feebler both in mind and body, it is not surprising that they should come more under the spell of witchcraft.”

“For as regards intellect, or the understanding of spiritual things, they seem to be of a different nature from men; a fact which is vouched for by the logic of the authorities, backed by various examples from the Scriptures. Terence says: Women are intellectually like children.”

“But the natural reason is that she is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations. And it should be noted that there was a defect in the formation of the first woman, since she was formed from a bent rib, that is, a rib of the breast, which is bent as it were in a contrary direction to a man. And since through this defect she is an imperfect animal, she always deceives.”

Via http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/downloads/MalleusAcrobat.pdf

William Blake, “The Triple Hecate”

Barbara G. Walker, author of Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets, in the entry dedicated to witches, emphasizes that all persecutors of witches greatly feared their victims. This fear can be read as the fear of the wild, the dark, the unbridled, the instinctive and the natural. All victims were forced to confess by torture. Looking in a witch’s eyes was considered dangerous, crossing oneself constantly was highly recommended. Charges of witchcraft were bandied indiscriminately, as Walkers retells:

“The so-called Witch of Newbury was murdered by a group of soldiers because she knew how to go ‘surfing’ on the river. Soldiers of the Earl of Essex saw her doing it, and were ‘as much astonished as they could be,’ seeing that ‘to and fro she fleeted on the board standing firm bolt upright … turning and winding it which way she pleased, making it pastime to her, as little thinking who perceived her tricks, or that she did imagine that they were the last she ever should show.’ Most of the soldiers were afraid to touch her, but a few brave souls ambushed the board-rider as she came to shore, slashed her head, beat her, and shot her, leaving her ‘detested carcass to the worms.’”

It is easy to understand why the self-blame tendency is still something women find very hard to shake off:

 “If crops failed, horses ran away, cattle sickened, wagons broke, women miscarried, or butter wouldn’t come in the churn, a witch was always found to blame…. Witches were convenient scapegoats for doctors who failed to cure their patients, for it was the ‘received’ belief that witch-caused illnesses were incurable.”

Women were given no right for defense, and denying of the accusations was considered “contrary to the libel” and taken for a confession.

In popular imagination, witches have not been rehabilitated yet. As Starhawk puts it, “Witches are ugly, old hags riding broomsticks, or evil Satanists performing obscene rites. Modern Witches are thought to be members of a kooky cult, primarily concerned with cursing enemies by jabbing wax images with pins, and lacking the depth, the dignity, and seriousness of purpose of a true religion.” For me, the witch connects to the goddess Hekate, whom Robert Graves called the Goddess of Witches. Hekate was a primordial goddess, older than the whole Greek pantheon. Once the most powerful Neolithic goddess, she subsequently got relegated to demonic fringes, which did nothing to lessen her power. As the guardian of the threshold, she ruled cosmic order and creation on the one hand, and chaos and destruction on the other. Our culture being at a crossroads, which is one of the main symbols of Hekate, we had better open up to the possibility that the witches are going to usher in a new era. Her name is related to “hecatomb” (sacrifice of a hundred). Hopefully, the sacrifice of the millions of witches will never again be brushed off or forgotten.

Jusepe de Ribera, “Procession to a Witches’ Sabbath” (“Hecate was the ancient Greek goddess of magic, whose retinue included the souls of those who died before their time, particularly children, or who were killed by force. Hence she is here shown picking up children and putting them into a brazier, while the heroic figures in her train also represent those who died before their time.” Via http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/hecate-procession-to-a-witches-sabbath)