Rings of X-ray light centered on V404 Cygni, a binary system containing an erupting black hole (dot at center), via https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-s-hubble-finds-evidence-of-galaxy-star-birth-regulated-by-black-hole-fountain

I.“He had begun by speaking of mines and metals, of gold and diamonds and all precious elements buried deep in the earth, but now, without my knowing how, he had ranged out into the depths of space, and was telling me of quasars and pulsars, of red giants and brown dwarfs and black holes, of heat death and the Hubble constant, of quarks and quirks and multiple infinities. And of dark matter. The universe, according to him, contains a missing mass we cannot see or feel or measure. There is much, much more of it than there is of anything else, and the visible universe, the one that we know, is sparse and puny in comparison. I thought of it, this vast invisible sea of weightless and transparent stuff, present everywhere, undetected, through which we move, unsuspecting swimmers, and which moves through us, a silent, secret essence.”

John Banville, “Ancient Light”

II.“Ever incomplete, terrestrial, and then again celestial,

you circle around in pursuit of sprightly phantoms,

you force light into the nether world…”

Orphic Hymn to Night

III. “You have no form, even though with the help of Maya, you take on myriads of forms. You have no beginning, though you are the beginning of all. It is you who creates, upholds and dissolves the worlds.”

Mahanirvana Tantra (quoted from “Shiva: The Wild God of Power and Ecstasy” by Wolf-Dieter, Ph.D. Storl)

Having listened to a recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time dedicated to black holes, I was particularly struck by one observation made during the show. The remark was a definition of singularity, which lies at the centre of a black hole – “a place where gravity becomes infinite and where physics transcends what we now understand.” Anything that enters a black hole, having crossed the so-called event horizon, enters the sphere of mystery: it is no longer observable, while all communication with it is lost. A hypothetical body sucked into the black hole by way of its irresistible gravitational pull would be cruelly ripped apart.  It is dense mass and gravity that overwhelms all other forces, including light, and also obliterating the power of time. Anything that falls into the black hole will release infinite amount of energy, emitting blinding brightness of quasars or exploding stars. Although no energy comes from the black hole itself, objects interacting with it are energized to a tremendous extent.

A fascinating issue divides physicists: what happens with the information that gets sucked into a black hole? Some believe it is just lost, though this goes against the scientific axiom of quantum mechanics that it should be conserved. Stephen Hawking upholds that the information must survive:

“’I propose that the information is stored not in the interior of the black hole as one might expect, but on its boundary, the event horizon,’ Hawking said at a conference back in August 2015. ‘The message of this lecture is that black holes ain’t as black as they are painted. They are not the eternal prisons they were once thought. Things can get out of a black hole both on the outside and possibly come out in another universe.’

The idea is that when charged particles get sucked into a black hole, their information leaves behind a kind of two-dimensional holographic imprint on the event horizon. This means that while all the physical components of an object would be so totally obliterated by a black hole encounter, its blueprint lives on.”

Via http://www.sciencealert.com/stephen-hawking-just-published-new-solution-to-the-black-hole-information-paradox

Robert Fludd, “Utriusque Cosmi”

Leaving an exciting possibility of black holes being portals to other universes aside, another question seems even more pressing: Was the Big Bang and the creation of the universe a result of a black hole seeding the manifest reality? This has been strongly suggested by Stephen Hawking. However, nothing is certain or proven as of yet:

“It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. Cosmologists have speculated that the Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions. The standard Big Bang model tells us that the Universe exploded out of an infinitely dense point, or singularity. But nobody knows what would have triggered this outburst: the known laws of physics cannot tell us what happened at that moment.

‘For all physicists know, dragons could have come flying out of the singularity,’ says Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada.”

via http://www.nature.com/news/did-a-hyper-black-hole-spawn-the-universe-1.13743

Black holes are said to be extremely efficient in converting matter into energy through the process of accretion. The spinning matter forms a brightly shining belt around the event horizon of the black hole. This luminous halo is called a quasar. It is postulated that a supermassive black hole lies at the very centre of our galaxy. Before the twentieth century and the theory of relativity, such an idea was inconceivable. The concept of the existence of black holes has been proven beyond doubt now, but when the idea was first postulated by John Mitchell as early as in 1783, nobody was mentally equipped to grasp it. The long-forgotten concept had to be rediscovered in the last century.

Robert Fludd, “Utriusque Cosmi”

In 1848, Edgar Allan Poe published a non-fiction work called Eureka: A Prose Poem. Some of its part were subsequently interpreted as postulating the existence of black holes, albeit in a purely intuitive, non-scientific fashion. In an essay dedicated to Eureka, David Grantz wrote:

“Poe states that God created matter from His spirit. The matter originally assumed its simplest form, without distinct kind, character, nature, size, or form. This primary particle comprised Oneness, which Poe believed to be the ‘natural’ condition of the universe. … However, for reasons unknown, the primary particle was willed by God into the ‘abnormal condition of Many.’ Because of gravity and according to their proximity, the irradiated atoms coalesced, later becoming suns, galaxies, planets, moons, and other cosmic debris. Finally, differentiation of particles by size, kind, form, character, and nature became possible, awaiting only the dualistic mind required to perceive the differentiations. Today’s astro-physicists speak more specifically in their discussion of particles than did Poe, who merely speaks of atoms; but the process of the irradiating universe is the same.

Very important is Poe’s idea that the normal condition of the universe can be achieved only in the unity of the primary particle. As a result, all matter longs to return to that which gave it birth. The force which compels all matter to return to simpler forms is gravity. Because of gravity, all atoms lump together in the most comfortable posture possible until the particle proper is completely reassembled.

…

Even before the primary particle becomes completely reassembled, aggregations of ‘various unique masses’ (Harrison 210) are possible, each mass assuming the characteristics of the original One. Today scientists call these particles black holes. They constitute energy and matter in their undifferentiated form, possessing gravity so great that not even light can escape from them.

…

Poe believed that the multitude of stars, having spiraled from their source, were bound to return to the Unity from which they were spun.”

Via http://www.poedecoder.com/essays/eureka/

I read on black holes with fascination, and if you are anything like me, you will agree that they are incredibly poetic. Echoing the Heart Sutra, to understand black holes is to understand that “emptiness does not differ from form, form does not differ from emptiness, whatever is emptiness, that is form” (translated by E. Conze). I can imagine the mysterious singularity, simultaneously acting and non-acting, as the Heart of Perfect Wisdom. The sphinxlike qualities of black holes fascinate and elude full understanding. They seem to be associated with stillness, yet the objects pulled by them are locked in an ecstatic dance, swirling around the invisible dark centre.

Gustave Dore, “Heavenly Host,” Dante’s “Divine Comedy” – Paradise

Werther and Lotte

“She had a wildness in her eyes and into it I plunged.”

Goethe, “Sorrows of Young Werther”

In January 1778 Christel von Lassberg drowned herself in the river Ilm, the reason most probably being unrequited love. A copy of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther was found in her pocket. Goethe was distraught. He had written the book to purge himself of a period of suffering that a failed romance had cost him. He did achieve his catharsis but a lot of his reading public went “Werther-mad” after the book was published:

“In scores of literary, plastic, and musical forms Werther’s life was extended in Europe and America and even into China (where a porcelain factory reproduced him on tea-sets for the European market). Men dressed like him, in blue coat, buff-yellow waistcoat and knee-breeches, women wore a perfume called ‘Eau de Werther’.”

(from the Introduction by David Constantine, Oxford World’s Classics, Kindle edition)

The beautiful poem “To the Moon” that Goethe wrote shortly after Christel’s demise and possibly to commemorate her, seems to capture one of the main paradoxes of love, which was so eloquently expressed by Werther in one of his letters: “Does it have to be the case that what made a person’s felicity will become the source of his wretchedness?” In the poem Goethe receives solace and a promise of spring rebirth from the river:

River, flow the vale along,
Without rest or ease,
Murmur, whisper to my song
Gentle melodies!

Swelling in the winter night
With thy roaring flood,
Bubbling in the spring’s delight,
Over leaf and bud!

I have recently reread The Sorrows of Young Werther to find that it has not aged; quite the contrary, it is every inch as compelling as it was when I first read it. In the Introduction to the Oxford World Classic’s edition that I read, David Constantine points out an interesting tidbit: the book was written two years before The Declaration of Independence famously proclaimed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Werther’s plight stemmed from, among other things, the social mores of the times. Lotte was out of bounds for him. Nowadays, we hold a belief that there should be no barriers to love, and certainly not those erected by social strata; that who and how we love should remain at our own discretion. But the torment in our souls caused by love is just as tumultuous as it was for Werther.

Goethe’s novel abounds in beautiful passages. In a manner of true Romantics, nature plays a pertinent part in Werther’s expressions of his undying love. I particularly enjoyed the letter in which he delineates how from a state of powerful tranquility, serene contemplation and self-contentment (all that prior to meeting Lotte), his psyche was catapulted into torment and despair:

“The full and warm feeling of my heart for living Nature, my wellspring of abundant joy that turned the world to paradise on every side, has now become my unbearable tormentor, a spirit of torture pursuing me wherever I go.”

Caspar David Friedrich, “The Tree of Crows”

Vincent van Gogh, “Wheatfield of Crows”

“And so I reel in fear, the energies of heaven and earth weaving around me. And all I see is an eternally devouring, eternally regurgitating monster,” he concludes. The entire book is so delightfully quotable it is hard to resist one more piece: “I wander the moors in the howling of the storm-wind that marshals ancestral ghosts in a wreathing mist in the unsteady light of the moon.” This tunnel vision drives him to self-destruction; suicide is a natural consequence, a tragic yet logical conclusion.

Lotte, who was married to a stable and predictable Albert, at one point asked Werther whether it was the impossibility of possessing her that made his desire so exciting. A portend question. The Sorrows are written in the form of letters to a friend, whose replies we can never read. This artistic decision of Goethe was acknowledged as masterstroke by the critics, for it highlights Werther’s self-absorption and his self-serving alienation. Is Lotte a woman of flesh and blood or, as Jungians would call it, a rampant anima complex possessing the hero’s psyche? Did he fall in love with a shadow that he mistook for substance, to paraphrase Ovid’s Metamorphoses?

This brings me to Shakespeare and a much more comforting masterpiece of his, namely The Winter’s Tale. This may not be his most famous play, nevertheless it is truly delightful. Neither a tragedy nor a comedy, though it ends happily, it was dubbed “a problem play.”  Yes, the consequences of love can be catastrophic, Shakespeare seems to be saying, but there is a great potential for healing in love; also, from great passion arises great art. In the story, king Leontes becomes irrationally jealous (is jealousy ever rational?) of his pregnant wife Hermione and imprisons her in a tower. Even though the Oracle of Delphi pronounces her innocent, he stubbornly persists in his paranoia. The key words of the play are uttered by Leontes to his wife: “Your actions are my dreams,” and “Affection! Thy intention stabs the centre.” In a moment of self-reflection, he laments “the infection” of his brain. He had dreamt the whole situation. But it is too late. The queen dies, while the infant daughter is abandoned in a wasteland of a foreign land of Bohemia by the king’s servant. Leontes mourns her for years.

Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys, “Perdita”

His lost daughter is raised by a pair of shepherds who name her Perdita (the lost one). Shakespeare lovingly portrays her as a delight of spring that brings and end to the woes of winter’s tale. The servant who abandoned her to die himself dies devoured by a bear. Much can be said about the symbolism of that scene. Bear, being connected with Artemis, goddess of childbirth, exacts revenge in the name of Nature. In addition, the bear’s winter hibernation alludes to the hope of spring and rebirth. But bears also stand for senseless cruelty as epitomized by the tyrant Leontes, who wielded his power in the very wrong cause.

In a very moving ending of the play, the queen Hermione is brought back as a lifelike statue that had stood motionless for years. She is revived in a wonderful spectacle and reunited with her happy and repentant husband. On the one hand, the beautiful statue may well be a symbol artistic expression born out of torment and suffering. On the other, it is an image of frozen emotions, a typical reaction in a face of a major trauma. This passive, frozen immobility, arrested movement, is transformed into a wave of love that washes over the audience watching the final scene of Winter’s Tale. Maybe this is not really Hermione, but only an image revived by Leontes in his imagination. Nevertheless, healing is achieved, and that is all that matters.

The place closest to my heart in the whole of Switzerland is the Monastery of Einsiedeln. “Einsiedeln” is a German word for “hermitage.” Surrounded by a dark, mysterious forest, situated near a scenic lake, adjacent to glorious mountain peaks, the place is second to none of the famous holy sites of the world in its beauty. It is in this area that Paracelsus was born, and perhaps more importantly – it is a place of worship of the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln, a delicate statue carved lovingly in lindenwood in the first centuries AD. She was a gift from Abbess Hildegarde of Zurich to Saint Meinrad, a monk who established the hermitage of Einsiedeln.

Meinrad was born into a privileged family but he felt he needed to walk his own path instead of rising in the ranks in an established monastery of Reichenau. He wanted to leave the familiar and the predictable behind, because above all he craved a life of solitude and contemplation. He chose the life of an eremite at Etzel, a mountain pass close to Einsiedeln. However, because his wisdom was widely known, he was visited by countless pilgrims, which disturbed his inner peace. Like Dante in Divine Comedy, he felt the pull of the Dark Forest, which seemed to hold a promise of the long awaited silence, solitude, contemplation and the intensity of deep inner work. He moved into the Finsterwald (Dark Forest), taking the Black Madonna statue with him and making Her the centre of his hermitage. “Finster” is a curious and mysterious adjective in German; it means darker than dark, pitch black, impenetrable, but at the same time it does not carry any sinister connotations. It just denotes a complete lack of light, similarly to the word “Sonnenfinsternis,” that is the solar eclipse.

Meinrad died the death of a martyr at the hands of two robbers, who clubbed him to death. According to the legend, the robbers were punished thanks to two ravens, who alarmed the locals about what had occurred. The legend of the two ravens is very compelling and symbolic of Meinrad’s individuation path. In his book on the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln, Fred Gustafson wrote this of the ravens, who symbolized the nigredo in alchemy – the first stage of the alchemical work:

“… as Meinrad made his way into the Finsterwald he noticed a nest in a fir tree, above which two hawks were hovering threateningly. The hermit chased the hawks away, climbed the tree, saved two ravens, and fed and cared for them. Finding a suitable clearing, he built a cell and a little chapel beside it. Meinrad dedicated the chapel to the Mother of God; today this is the site of the Monastery of Einsiedeln. The ravens stayed with him at his new hermitage.

…

In the Egyptian myth of Horus’ sparrow-hawk, as well as in the myths and symbolism of the Graeco-Roman age, the hawk is very definitely associated with the sun, that is, with the patriarchal values of logic and linear thinking. The raven, on the other hand, traditionally represents only the darker aspects, the shadow of consciousness. That the hawk would thus descend upon the young ravens symbolically represents the hostility of consciousness towards contents of the unconscious, especially embryonic contents – such as new awareness of attitudes or opinions – that need to be nourished and cared for. Meinrad’s rescue of the ravens is a spiritual victory for the emerging unconscious. The Finsterwald and the two ravens are closely related, one being the prima materia of the unconscious, the other, one’s personal relationship to the contents that begin to arise from it.

…

Ravens are indeed worthy and appropriate companions for St. Meinrad in that they fulfill their traditional role as messengers of gods, i.e., carriers of the vital messages of the unconscious to consciousness.”

Fred Gustafson, “The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln: An Ancient Image for Our Present Time, Kindle edition

St Meinrad’s chapel, via Wikipedia 

As in the case of the Dark Forest, also the darkness of the Madonna is not viewed as sinister or evil. Rather, it is peaceful, good, enveloping, and also creative, fecund, powerful and potent. It embodies the creative forces of the unconscious. The central part of the monastery is her chapel – octagonal, carved in black marble, lit by candles. In the centre, she resides surrounded by the blindingly golden halo of clouds and lightning. Her robes are extremely elaborate and ornate, and come in many shades and colours. Gustafson continues:

“She is elevated to a celestial-spiritual and dynamic position, the clouds emphasizing the former and the lightning the latter. Both have long figured as fertile, life-giving forces. In this respect, Augustine compared the apostles to a cloud because of the fertilizing nature of prophesies which, like clouds, come from a higher order. It is also said that lightning has an illuminating, vivifying, fertilizing, transforming, and healing function. Lightning, especially, is representative of energy and power; it symbolizes psychic energy in its most dynamic form. From another perspective, however, the gold lightning and clouds are just not a glorification of the Black Madonna; they are in fact eclipsed by her.”

The last sentence seems to say something very crucial about the Black Madonna. She is the creative force, the veiled mystery of darkness standing for the creative matrix. Her extremely potent and alluring quality, says Gustafson, “represents that side of the psyche that leads and entices an individual into life in its fullest measure.” She fascinates because she cannot be fathomed; she just suggests that what is apparent is just a thin layer covering the vast ocean of truth. She reminds us, according to the same author, that “for renewal to come in our time, it must be borne in the arms of the black, unknown maternal night of the unconscious, where humanity will once again open its psyche to that rich natural soil that is the mother of all human thought, invention, doctrinal formulation and truth.”

It is quite paradoxical that with Her mighty, formidable presence which makes one humble and full of reverence, She can simultaneously be related to in a very personal and direct way, as if She carried an individual healing message for each pilgrim’s soul. She is both of the earth (warm, accessible, maternal) and of heaven (distant, striking, regal). She is always surrounded by numerous pilgrims, both men and women. It is worth remembering that after Meinrad’s deaths Benedictine monks had full control over who had access to the Black Madonna statue and who was allowed to worship her. In that time, the so called Forest Sisters continued to live in loose communities of nuns without following any strict rules. They gathered herbs in the forest, practiced mystical arts and healed the pilgrims that flocked to Einsiedeln to visit the monastery. In the 16^th century, the Benedictine monks came to the conclusion that the free community of Forest Sisters was not to be tolerated on the land of the monastery. The women were evicted from the town and had to live according to strict Benedictine rules in the town of Au. In 1703 they lost their free status. In addition, they were ordered to wear black robes. They were also banned from visiting the monastery and the town of Einsiedeln.

It is astounding how that tyrannical decision goes against the all-encompassing, all-loving wisdom of the Black Madonna, who obliterates all barriers and accepts every soul based on its inner depth rather than any accidental social status. The exclusion of Forest Sisters from the cult of Black Madonna is also symbolic of the Catholic Church patriarchal slant. However, this bias stands in direct contradiction to the true spirit of the religion and its dark, impenetrable roots.

“As in the hand a sulfur match flares white
and sends out flicking tongues on every side
before it bursts into flame –: in that ring
of crowded onlookers, hot, eager, and precise
her round dance begins to dart and spread.

And all at once it is entirely flame.

With a glance she sets her hair ablaze
and whirls suddenly with daring art
her slender dress into this fiery rapture,
from which, like snakes awakened,
two naked arms uncoil, aroused and rattling.

And then: as if she felt the fire grow tight,
she gathers it all up and casts it off
disdainfully, and watches with imperious
command: it lies there raging on the ground
and still flares up and won’t surrender –.
But unwavering, assured, and with a sweet
welcoming smile she lifts her face
and stamps it out with rock-hard little feet.”

Reiner Maria Rilke, “Spanish Dancer,” translated by Edward Snow, quoted from “New Poems,” Kindle edition

Hans Rudolf Strupler, Composition in Red

Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of Psychic Opposites in Alchemy (volume 14 of Collected Works) was completed by Jung when he was 81 and is a synthesis of his lifelong work on marrying alchemy and psychology. A central symbol of alchemy was Mercurius, which was a subject of part 5 of this series. In basic terms, Mercurius can be understood as the unconscious matrix itself, the cosmic Nous (Mind), or the spirit which appears in reality in differentiated form. The active, masculine aspect of Mercurius is Sol, the feminine and passive one – Luna (par. 109 of Mysterium Coniunctionis – all subsequent quotes comes from this book). Mercurius in Jung’s words is “a dark, latent, non-manifest side, the unconscious, whose presence can be known only by the light of consciousness” (par. 109).  To manifest itself, Mercurius needs other transformative substances, sol and sulphur being vital in this equation.

Max Ernst, “Red Sun”

The sun is as ambivalent and multi-faceted as any other alchemical symbol. It was perceived as “an active substance hidden in the gold” and extracted as red tincture (par. 109). It was believed to contain an active, hot, dry and red sulphur, which is how the alchemists explained its redness. Sulphur has always been a universal attribute of the devil and infernal fires. As a chemical substance it is sharply penetrating and has an extremely pungent smell. It ignites rapidly and produces a very bright and a very hot flame. When burned, it melts to a blood-red liquid and emits a blue flame. However, chemists know that in fact it is not sulphur that can make gold red, but copper, which for alchemists was associated with Venus. This makes things interesting, since the planet Venus in its appearance as the morning star (Venus Phosphorus – “Light-Bringer) was called “Lucifer” in Latin, a name also given to the most beautiful of fallen angels. In alchemy, all symbols are light and dark in equal measure. Darkness is not the absence of light, but an entity of equal importance and endowed with a tangible substance.

Stanislaw Wyspianski, “Eos, Phosphoros, Hesperos, Helios”

The sun’s favorable effects were its generational and transformative properties, fostering growth of fruit, wine and the mineral gold in the bowels of the earth. In humans, it was said to “enkindle the inner warmth,” will and appetites; as a “vital spirit” it was believed to have “its seat in the brain and its governance in the heart” (par. 110). Alchemists called the sun “the father and begetter of all.” Sulphur was the hot and deamonic principle of life, the vital energy, the “central fire,” in short – the soul (par. 112). What Dylan Thomas called “the force that through the green force drives the flower” in his magnificent classic poem was referred to as “the animating principle” by the alchemists. They believed in the universality and ubiquity of this “universal power of growth, healing, magic and prestige” (par.113). It was present in the sun above and in the plants and humans below. This supreme power was the alchemical gold, which was not the common gold (aurum vulgi), but a miraculous, incorruptible substance, “the true and indubitable treasure” (par. 113), which could only be perceived by those who can see with their mind’s eye.

Paul Klee, “Ad Marginem”

But since every alchemical substance had its shadow, so the sun was equipped with one also. Jung quotes Maier: “For what, in the end is this sun without a shadow? The same as a bell without a clapper” (par. 116). A saying of Hermes, pivotal for all alchemists, deserves to be quoted in its entirety: “Son, extract from the ray its shadow, and the corruption that arises from the mists which gather about it, befoul it and veil its light; for it is consumed by necessity and by its redness.” This admonition can be explicated in the following terms. In the first stage of the alchemical opus, the sun is obscured by the shadow. This is the Black Sun, the earthly sun, which is “an instrument in the physiological and psychological drama of return to the prima materia, the death that must be undergone if man is to get back to the original condition of the simple elements and attain the incorrupt nature of the pre-worldly paradise” (par. 117). The black sun brings about the death of the old. This putrefaction cannot be achieved without sulphur, whose role is to “corrupt man back to his first essence.” In the next stage, the reborn sun will be joined with Mercurius, but before that can happen, the sun is not only obscured by the shadow but it will also be “consumed by necessity and by its redness.” This brings sulphur back onto the stage.

Max Ernst, “Sea and Sun”

Alchemists distinguished between a red and a white sulphur. The former was the active substance of the moon, the latter was believed to be more virtuous and it was said to be the active substance of the sun. Sulphur was chthonic, corporal and earthly; it was associated with the fire breathing dragon. It was Paracelsus who referred to sulphur as the soul, which together with salt (the body) beget Mercurius. The red masculine sulphur is the fiery ferment of the soul’s hidden depths. Gerhard Dorn (quoted here after Jung) called it “the male and universal seed, …, the first part and most potent cause of all generation” (par. 136). It is a generative power that burns and consumes from within. Too much of it corrupts and weakens, bringing about evil and blackness, violence and rampant instincts, but without it there would be no impetus to life and no progress. In a concluding paragraph, Jung calls compulsion symbolized by sulphur “the great mystery of human life,” “the thwarting of our conscious will and of our reason by an inflammable element within us, appearing now as a consuming fire and now as life-giving warmth” (par. 150).

Marc Chagall, “Field of Mars”

Related posts:

Jung on Alchemy (1): The Moist and Earthly Foundation

Jung on Alchemy (2): The Mandala

Jung on Alchemy (3): Meditation and Imagination

Jung on Alchemy (4): Prima Materia – The One, Who Art All

Jung on Alchemy (5): Hermes, the Arcane Interpreter of All

Henry Farrer, Lighthouse, http://metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/382738

The world’s first lighthouse, the Pharos, was erected in the ancient city of Alexandria. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, it turned the insignificant port of Pharos into one of the greatest cities of the ancient world. It was most probably built out of dazzlingly white limestone and around up to 600 feet (180 metres) tall. Not only was it a beacon for sea travelers but it also served as a sort of welcome centre or a shining portal for all newcomers into the magnificent city.

Mosaic in St. Mark’s basilica representing the saint arriving in Alexandria, showing the Pharos Lighthouse

It is quite easy to see why lighthouses stir our romantic core. They are a stark image – tall, austere towers which are nevertheless comforting as they are there to guide mariners to a safe harbor through treacherous waters. The symbolism of any tower is dual at its core: on the one hand it is phallic, mighty, erect, denoting power and spirit reaching from the earth to the heavens. On the other hand, it is feminine, reminiscent of an enclosed area, a walled sanctuary, and a safe haven. The Tower of Ivory was one of the names given to the Virgin Mary in her protective role of offering refuge and comfort.

The lighthouse may be seen as symbolic of individual consciousness, which kindles “a light in the darkness of mere being,” as Jung famously put it in his memoirs. He also wrote these words of warning in Psychology and Alchemy:

“The meeting between the … individual consciousness and the vast expanse of the collective unconscious is dangerous, because the unconscious has a decidedly disintegrating effect on consciousness.”

photo via http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/2014/masterworks-mellon-n09245/lot.2.html

Lighthouses used to be built near the most dangerous waters, only after a plethora of horrific sea disasters had taken place in the area. As such, they brilliantly symbolize the perils of individuation – a constant danger of being swallowed by the unconscious forces beyond our control. In a fascinating article, Nathaniel Rich of The New York Review of Books, compares these “brilliant beacons” to “cenotaphs, marking deathtraps that for centuries devoured mariners along the continent’s coasts.” Granted, thousands of lives were saved thanks to lighthouses, but at the same time their keepers were in constant mortal danger, living in utter and often desperate isolation.  As Jung wrote:

“By becoming conscious, the individual is threatened more and more with isolation, which is nevertheless the sine qua non of conscious differentiation.”

The Eddystone Lighthouse, via http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-eddystone-lighthouse-t04820

Lighthouse keepers often paid a high price for performing an invaluable service to the collective. Specific examples of their plight mentioned by Rich are quite eye-opening. A lot of lighthouses burnt because the whale oil used to fuel the lighthouse fire at the beginnings of the twentieth century was highly combustible. Furthermore,

“the keeper’s life was not at all quiet. During periods of low visibility, keepers had to sound fog signals, which depending on the era might involve blasting canons, shooting guns, ringing bells, or blowing horns.

…

Keepers not only had to maintain the light and fog signals but also clean the lens, trim the lantern wicks, and scrub the walls, floors, windows, balconies, and railings, inside and outside. The many brass fixtures and appliances had to be polished diligently, a job that of itself was enough to drive keepers to madness… Inspectors appeared without warning wearing white gloves…”

The job of the lighthouse keeper evidently required diligence, vigilance and a fair amount of drudgery. Like priestesses of Vesta tending the sacred fire, he or she had to maintain focus on purity. Harold Bayley in The Lost Language of Symbolism, claims that the words fire and sphere are derived from the same root. Both are the most ancient symbols of divinity understood as the primeval cause of the universe as well as the inner spark of the individual soul. Heraclitus wrote this on fire: “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.” Keeping the fire ablaze while living on the edge of society, bearing loneliness as a price paid for individuation, is the main task of the (symbolically understood) lighthouse keeper.

Phare d’Alexandrie (Barclay), via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phare_d%27Alexandrie_(Barclay).jpg

I.“Thus the fire began to work upon the air and brought forth Sulphur. Then the air began to work upon the water and brought forth Mercurius. The water began to work upon the earth and brought forth Salt. But the earth, having nothing to work upon, brought forth nothing, so the product remained within it. Therefore only three principles were produced, and the earth became the nurse and matrix of the others. From these three principles were produced male and female, the male obviously from Sulphur and Mercurius, and the female from Mercurius and Salt. Together they bring forth the “incorruptible One,” the quinta essentia…”

Anonymous alchemical treatise “De sulphure” (quoted by Jung in “Mysterium Coniunctionis”)

II.“Yet the real carrier of life is the individual. He alone feels happiness, he alone has virtue and responsibility and any ethics whatever. The masses and the state have nothing of the kind. Only man as an individual human being lives; the state is just a system, a mere machine for sorting and tabulating the masses.”

C.G. Jung, “Mysterium Coniunctionis”

III.

“This salt
in the salt cellar
I once saw in the salt mines.
I know
you won’t
believe me
but
it sings
salt sings, the skin
of the salt mines
sings
with a mouth smothered
by the earth.
I shivered in those
solitudes
when I heard
the voice
of
the salt
in the desert.
Near Antofagasta
the nitrous
pampa
resounds:
a
broken
v oice,
a mournful
song.

In its caves
the salt moans, mountain
of buried light,
translucent cathedral,
crystal of the sea, oblivion
of the waves.
And then on every table
in the world,
salt,
we see your piquant
powder
sprinkling
vital light
upon
our food.
Preserver
of the ancient
holds of ships,
discoverer
on
the high seas,
earliest
sailor
of the unknown, shifting
byways of the foam.
Dust of the sea, in you
the tongue receives a kiss
from ocean night:
taste imparts to every seasoned
dish your ocean essence;
the smallest,
miniature
wave from the saltcellar
reveals to us
more than domestic whiteness;
in it, we taste infinitude.”

Pablo Neruda, “Ode to Salt”

Wieliczka salt mine, crystal chandelier (via Wikipedia)

In the early sixteenth-century England the Church strictly controlled the access to God’s word by forbidding translating the Bible into English. The scholar William Tyndale defied the ban, working ceaselessly on his translations of the Holy Book right until his cruel death by execution. In his Adventure of English, Melvyn Bragg sings the praises of the “soaringly poetic” and yet “always earthed” English of Tyndale’s Gospels. Those rhythmically beautiful English words, with their “instant memorability and authority” shook the foundations of the church establishment. The famous verses from the Gospel of St Matthew still sound beautiful in Old English:

“Blessed are the povre in sprete: for theirs is the kyngdome off heven.

Blessed are they that morne: for they shal be comforted.

Blessed are the meke: for they shall inherit the erth.

Blessed are they which honger and thurst for rightewesnes: for they shal be filled

Blessed are the mercifull: for they shall obteyne mercy.

Blessed are the pure in herte: for they shall se God.

Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shal be called the chyldren of God.

Blessed are they which suffre persecucion for rightwenes sake: for theirs ys the kyngdome off heven.

Blessed are ye when men shall reuyle you and persecute you and shall falsly say all manner of yvell saynges against you ffor my sake.

Reioyce and be glad for greate is youre rewarde in heven.

For so persecuted they the prophets which were before youre dayes.

Ye are the salt of the erthe.”

Alchemists viewed salt as a paradoxical, arcane substance, which in itself had corruption and protection against it. Like the alchemical salt, the language of Tyndale corroded the establishment, while simultaneously crystallizing the newly risen power of the individual, who was now able to get acquainted with the Holy Book without the church’s mediation.

Paracelsus equated Sal (salt) with the soul, “the stable basis of life, its earth, ground, body.” Jung offered many enlightening quotes from the alchemist Vigenerus, who saw salt as “that virginal and pure earth which is contained in the centre of all composite elementals, or in the depths of the same.” Hillman calls salt “the ground of subjectivity” and “felt experience.” While the alchemical sulphur is masculine and solar, salt is feminine and lunar. It deals with life, the individual soul embodied in the concrete and the material. Thanks to salt, says Hillman,

“we descend into the experiential component of this body – its blood, sweat, tears, and urine – to find our salt. … salt is the mineral, impersonal, objective ground of personal experience making experience possible.

…

Salt is soluble. Weeping, bleeding, sweating, urinating bring salt out of its interior underground mines. It appears in our moistures, which are the flow of salt to the surface. “During the work the salt assumes the appearance of blood” …  Moments of dissolution are not mere collapses; they release a sense of personal human value from the encrustations of habit. “I, too, am a human being worth my salt” – hence my blood, sweat, and tears.

Pain implicates us at once in body, and psychic pain in psychic body. We are always subjected to pain, so that events that hurt, like childhood traumas, abuse, and rape, force our subjectivity upon us. These events seem in memory to be more real than any others because they carry the force of subjective reality.

These traumatic events initiate in the soul a sense of its embodiment as a vulnerable experiencing subject.”

Wieliczka salt mine, old corridor, via Wikipedia

Too much salt, however, may bring about fixation on past wounds – the immobile bitterness of Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt.

Kent Monkman, “Lot’s Wife”

The right amount of salt denotes wit (cum grano salis), emotional, erotic participation and excitement, which arouses passion and desire. Hence the Ancient Romans called a man in love “salax” (modern English still uses the word “salacious” with a similar meaning). All meanings of the alchemical salt seem to revolve around the feminine, the earthy, the body (including the emotional body), the feeling nature, the moistness of being. The ancients valued salt so much that they associated it with fecundity, and by extension with money and wealth (the word “salary” is derived from “salt”). Jones explains (quoting Schneider):

“The sea was unquestionably the fructifying, creative element. … the offspring of sea creatures are to be counted by thousands and hundreds of thousands. This was all the more easily ascribed to the salt of the sea, since other observations believed to have been made were connected with it.”

For the Egyptians, salt guaranteed rebirth. Mummies were washed and preserved with the use of a brine solution called natron, which was perceived as birth-fluid, or as Barbara Walker puts it, “the Mother’s regenerative blood.” Natron was also used by the Egyptians as a beautifying, cleansing product, as a way to get rid of toxins and cleanse the household of vermin, as well as for spiritual purification. In ancient Rome, it was the Vestal virgins who were responsible for handling salt in sacrificial religious rituals. As Hillman wrote,

“The inherent capability of salt to crystallize its own essence is what I would call the inherent virginity of salt. By virginity here I mean the self-same, self-enclosed devotion to purity.”

Alchemists were not interested in the common salt, but in what they called Sal Sapientiae (salt of wisdom). On the one hand, salt and sulphur were viewed as opposing substances, as it was believed that “Sal inflicts on Sulphur an incurable wound.” (Jung) However, salt, the feminine and lunar principle, needed the solar and masculine ardour of sulphur to avoid the risk of rigidity and puritanism. When does the soul need salt? asks Hillman:

“There is another time and place for salt: when the soul needs earthing. When dreams and events do not feel real enough, when the uses of the world taste stale, flat and unprofitable, when we feel uncomfortable in community and have lost our personal ‘me-ness’ – weak, alienated, drifting – then the soul needs salt.

We mistake our medicine at times and reach for sulfur: action, false extraversion, trying harder. However, the move toward the macrocosm may first have to go back toward the microcosm, so that the world can be experienced and not merely joined with and acted upon as an abstract field. World must become earth; and this move from world as idea to tangible presence requires salt.

This effect of salt proceeds from its own fervor, a fervor of fixity that can be distinguished from the fervor of sulfuric enthusiasm and its manic boil of action, as well as from the fervor of mercury and its effervescent volatility.

…

When we sit still and sweat it out, we are stabilizing and adding salt to the solution so that it becomes a genuine one. Problems seem not to go away until they have first been thoroughly received.”

Wieliczka salt mine lake

Sources:

James Hillman, “Salt,” chapter in Alchemical Psychology

Ernest Jones, “The symbolic significance of salt in folklore and superstition”

C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis

Barbara G. Walker, Women’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets

Paul Klee, “Tree Nursery”

According to the Book of Genesis (New American Standard Bible), “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters.” All other translations known to me prefer the word “hovering” instead of “moving.” I like the boldness and dynamism of this particular translation because it conceives of the act of creation as a clash of opposing forces; an expression of the energetic, potent and fructifying spirit acting upon the inert, receptive earth and waters. I thought about this while visiting an exhibition at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland dedicated to the artist’s fascination and attempts at depicting movement in his paintings. The section of the exhibition entitled “Centrifugal forces of nature” has this as its motto:

“I place myself at a remote, originary place of creation, where I assume formulas for men, animals, plants, earth, fire, water, air and, at the same time, all the circling forces.”

Paul Klee, Diary IV

Paul Klee, “Landscape in the Beginning”

Paul Klee, “Rose Wind”

Klee believed the motion to be at the root of all growth. He described his works as Genesis. He was particularly fascinated by gravity and all kids of movements working to defy its inexorable force, namely the free centrifugal forces directed dynamically away from the centre (hence the frequent use of arrows and rolling wheels in his paintings); walking, jumping, running and dancing as other ways of overcoming gravity; finally, he juxtaposed the free movement of the spirit (mental motion) with the bodily movements hindered and limited by gravity. He called water an “in-between realm,” where “gravity, defined by the attraction of the earth, acts in the opposite direction, namely upwards.”

Paul Klee, “Eros”

Perhaps the word “hovering” used in all major Bible translations can be defended if we thought of it as implying “balancing movement.” Klee’s work was very much concerned with balance found through motion. He was interested in an equilibrium of colour, line and form as an expression of a spiritual balance of being. He saw the inner paradoxical nature of balance as a simultaneous action and (static) condition. If all of nature is a precarious interplay between the static and the dynamic forces, then a balance is a temporary, fragile and rare moment, as beautifully shown here by artists from Cirque Rigolo:

I. “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

Peter Brook

II. “All the world’s a stage.”

William Shakespeare

Adrian Lester as Hamlet in Peter Brook’s production

Perhaps theatre is the most primal of all arts. As far as we can tell, it developed alongside and through agricultural and religious ritual. The mask, its main symbol, is age old, with the first objects of this kind dating back to the Neolithic period (ca 7000 BC). In Ancient Greece, theatre was dedicated to and inextricable from the cult of Dionysus. Drama and dream are two words that come from a common root, which means that the theatre offers a way of looking behind the curtain straight into the eternal dimension. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche saw the beginning of the theatre in the ecstatic performance of hymns sung and danced in honor of Dionysus:

“In the Dionysian dithyramb man is aroused to the highest intensity of all his symbolic capabilities. Something never felt before forces itself into expression — the destruction of the veil of Maja, the sense of oneness as the presiding genius of form, of nature itself. Now the essence of nature must express itself symbolically; a new world of symbols is necessary, the entire symbolism of the body, not just the symbolism of mouth, face, and words, but the full gestures of the dance — all the limbs moving to the rhythm. And then the other symbolic powers grow, those of music, rhythm, dynamics, and harmony — all with sudden spontaneity.”

In his classic work Dionysus: Myth and Cult, Walter Otto speaks of the “shattering” appearance of the god as the one who simultaneously brings “pandemonium and silence.” The central Dionysian symbol appears to be the mask. Otto saw the mask as “the strongest symbol of presence.” In his view, it depicts a god or spirit who appears, who is encountered, but who is also a being from beyond:

“It is the symbol and the manifestation of that which is simultaneously there and not there; that which is excruciatingly near, that which is completely absent – both in one reality. … The final secrets of existence and non-existence transfix mankind with monstrous eyes.”

A stone mask from the neolithic period, via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mask#/media/File:Musee_de_la_bible_et_Terre_Sainte_001.JPG

In this passage Otto captures the essence of the theatre: it is palpable and material, arresting and tangible, but at the same time the spectator feels that there is a division, a line that cannot be crossed because the reality presented on the stage is not of this world – it invokes the metaphysical dimension.

My first theatrical epiphany occurred while watching Peter Brook’s Mahabharata on TV when I was about twelve years old. It was a deeply transformative experience, arresting from the very first moment when I saw the orange flames that preceded the opening credits. In his captivating book about the theatre entitled The Empty Space, Brook speaks of the Holy Theatre as the one which makes the invisible visible:

“We are all aware that most of life escapes our senses: a most powerful explanation of the various arts is that they talk of patterns which we can only begin to recognize when they manifest themselves as rhythms or shapes. We observe that the behaviour of people, of crowds, of history, obeys such recurrent patterns. We hear that trumpets destroyed the walls of Jericho, we recognize that a magical thing called music can come from men in white ties and tails, blowing, waving, thumping and scraping away. Despite the absurd means that produce it, through the concrete in music we recognize the abstract, we understand that ordinary men and their clumsy instruments are transformed by an art of possession. We may make a personality cult of the conductor, but we are aware that he is not really making the music, it is making him—if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.”

Peter Brook

The theatre has the power of awakening our imagination, through which our inner eye opens to the images that populate the invisible. On the stage, objects, gestures and words transform into universal symbols. If what we have experienced was the Holy Theatre, we feel that a profound and invisible eternal truth has made itself present in our midst. The transient moment that can never be repeated in the same way (the theatre is all about portend though fleeting moments) has been endowed with a symbolic dimension. I remember being particularly struck by a performance of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting of Godot, which I saw years ago on a school trip. One prop particularly caught my attention with an irresistible force: a suitcase full of sand carried by Lucky, a slave to the character Pozzo. I resonate deeply with the following passage from Brook, in which he gives homage to Beckett’s unique talent of symbolization:

“Beckett’s plays are symbols in an exact sense of the word. A false symbol is soft and vague: a true symbol is hard and clear. When we say ‘symbolic’ we often mean something drearily obscure: a true symbol is specific, it is the only form a certain truth can take. The two men waiting by a stunted tree, the man recording himself on tapes, the two men marooned in a tower, the woman buried to her waist in sand, the parents in the dustbins, the three heads in the urns: these are pure inventions, fresh images sharply defined—and they stand on the stage as objects. They are theatre machines. People smile at them, but they hold their ground: they are critic proof. We get nowhere if we expect to be told what they mean, yet each one has a relation with us we can’t deny. If we accept this, the symbol opens in us a great and wondering O.”

Waiting for Godot, via http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/04/26/theater/20090426_GODOT_SLIDESHOW_3.html

Symbols are eternally reborn in modern costumes. The great artists of the theatre have never had any doubts about the fluidity of all material representations of the underlying symbolic order. We have seen marvellous performances of female Hamlets, as we have seen Hamlets of all races. The Tragedy of Hamlet envisaged by Peter Brook achieved the seemingly impossible by bringing Hamlet back to life for the modern audience. As one critic wrote,

“It is a landmark production of the most hackneyed great play in history precisely because it compels us to see it with utterly fresh eyes. The fine Polish critic Jan Kott–an influence on Brook’s early work–wrote memorably about Hamlet that he’s become like Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. ‘We know she is smiling even before we have seen the picture,’ Kott wrote. ‘Mona Lisa’s smile has been separated from the picture, as it were.’ … Peter Brook’s aim is to see behind the smile.”

via http://observer.com/2001/05/whos-there-peter-brooks-hamlet-leads-the-way/

The sublime way Adrian Lester delivers the famous monologue sounds unbelievably contemporary.

Giulio Camillo was a sixteenth-century Italian philosopher, most notable for his idea of the “Theatre of Memory.” The following passage comes from chapter 6 of The Art of Memory by Yates Francis (the embedded quotes are by Camillo himself):

“The Theatre rises in seven grades or steps, which are divided by seven gangways representing the seven planets. The student of it is to be as it were a spectator before whom are placed the seven measures of the world ‘in spettaculo’, or in a theatre. And since in ancient theatres the most distinguished persons sat in the lowest seats, so in this Theatre the greatest and most important things will be in the lowest place. That there would be no room for an audience to sit between these enormous and lavishly decorated gangway gates does not matter. For in Camillo’s Theatre the normal function of the theatre is reversed. There is no audience sitting in the seats watching a play on the stage. The solitary ‘spectator’ of the Theatre stands where the stage would be and looks towards the auditorium, gazing at the images on the seven times seven gates on the seven rising grades.

Looking at our plan, we can see that the whole system of the Theatre rests basically upon seven pillars, the seven pillars of Solomon’s House of Wisdom. Solomon in the ninth chapter of Proverbs says that wisdom has built herself a house and has founded it on seven pillars. By these columns, signifying most stable eternity, we are to understand the seven Sephiroth of the supercelestial world, which are the seven measures of the fabric of the celestial and inferior worlds, in which are contained the Ideas of all things both in the celestial and in the inferior worlds. Camillo is speaking of the three worlds of the Cabalists, as Pico della Mirandola had expounded them; the supercelestial world of the Sephiroth or divine emanations; the middle celestial world of the stars; the subcelestial or elemental world. The same ‘measures’ run through all three worlds though their manifestations are different in each. As Sephiroth in the supercelestial world they are here equated with the Platonic ideas. Camillo is basing his memory system on first causes, on the Sephiroth, on the Ideas; these are to be the ‘eternal places’ of his memory.

…his memory building is to represent the order of eternal truth; in it the universe will be remembered through organic association of all its parts with their underlying eternal order.

…

Each of the six upper grades has a general symbolic meaning represented by the same image on each of its seven gates. We have shown this on the plan by giving the name of the general image for a grade at the top of all its gates, together with the characters of the planets, indicating to which planetary series each gate belongs.

…

…the second grade of the Theatre is really the first day of creation, imaged as the banquet given by Ocean to the gods, the emerging elements of creation, here in their simple unmixed form.

The third grade will have depicted on each of its gates a Cave, which we call the Homeric Cave to differentiate it from that which Plato describes in his Republic. In the cave of the Nymphs described in the ‘Odyssey,’ nymphs were weaving and bees were going in and out, which activities signify, says Camillo, the mixtures of the elements to form the elementata ‘and we wish that each of the seven caves may conserve the mixtures and elementata belonging to it in accordance with the nature of its planet.’ The Cave grade thus represents a further stage in creation, when the elements are mixed to form created things or elementata. …

 With the fourth grade we reach the creation of man, or rather the interior man, his mind and soul. … this grade (has) as the leading image to be depicted on all its gates the Gorgon Sisters, the three sisters described by Hesiod who had only one eye between them…

 On the fifth grade, the soul of man joins his body. This is signified under the image of Pasiphe and the Bull which is the leading image on the gates of this grade. ‘For she (Pasiphe) being enamoured of the Bull signifies the soul which, according to the Platonists, falls into a state of desiring the body.’ The soul in its downward journey from on high, passing through all the spheres, changes its pure igneous vehicle into an aerial vehicle through which it is enabled to become joined to the gross corporeal form. This junction is symbolised by the union of Pasiphe with the Bull.

…

‘The sixth grade of the Theatre has on each of the gates of the planets, the Sandals, and other ornaments, which Mercury puts on when he goes to execute the will of the gods, as the poets feign.

…

‘The seventh grade is assigned to all the arts, both noble and vile, and above each gate is Prometheus with a lighted torch.’ The image of Prometheus who stole the sacred fire and taught men knowledge of the gods and of all the arts and sciences thus becomes the topmost image, at the head of the gates on the highest grade of the Theatre. The Prometheus grade includes not only all the arts and sciences, but also religion, and law.

Thus Camillo’s Theatre represents the universe expanding from First Causes through the stages of creation. First is the appearance of the simple elements from the waters on the Banquet grade; then the mixture of the elements in the Cave; then the creation of man’s mens in the image of God on the grade of the Gorgon Sisters; then the union of man’s soul and body on the grade of Pasiphe and the Bull; then the whole world of man’s activities; his natural activities on the grade of the Sandals of Mercury; his arts and sciences, religion and laws on the Prometheus grade.

…

The Theatre is thus a vision of the world and of the nature of things seen from a height, from the stars themselves and even from the supercelestial founts of wisdom beyond them.

…

Though the Ficinian influence is everywhere present in Camillo’s Theatre, it is in the great central series of the Sun that it is most apparent. Most of Ficino’s ideas on the sun are set out in his De sole, though they also appear in his other works. … On the Banquet grade of the Sun series, Camillo places the image of a pyramid, representing the Trinity. … Camillo’s arrangement is completely Ficinian in spirit, in its suggestion of a hierarchy descending from the Sun as God to other forms of light and heat in lower spheres, transmitting the spiritus in his rays.

…

The Theatre presents a remarkable transformation of the art of memory. The rules of the art are clearly discernible in it. Here is a building divided into memory places on which are memory images. … The religious intensity associated with mediaeval memory has turned in a new and bold direction. The mind and memory of man is now ‘divine’, having powers of grasping the highest reality through a magically activated imagination. The Hermetic art of memory has become the instrument in the formation of a Magus, the imaginative means through which the divine microcosm can reflect the divine macrocosm, can grasp its meaning from above, from that divine grade to which his ‘mens’ belongs. The art of memory has become an occult art, a Hermetic secret.”

From Astrological Mandalas by A.T. Mann: the sign Gemini imagined as Memory Theatre (more at http://www.atmann.net/12mantxt.htm)

I.“There is something special about their relationship, something not simply reducible to teacher and devotee, and all attempts to hedge and prevaricate about its nature merely render its energy more palpable. The unspoken bond between them reverberates through even the highly muted accounts in the canonical gospels, while the Nag Hammadi gospels make no bones about naming this energy for what it is. …

With her come the cadences of gentleness and forgiveness, the sounding of that core vibration of love.”

Cynthia Bourgeault, “The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity”

II.“Finally at the heart of the Christian mystery there are only two people; this is the mystery of Jesus and Mary Magdalene.”

Michael Haag, “The Quest for Mary Magdalene”

III. “I saw the Lord in a vision and I said to Him, Lord I saw you today in a vision. He answered and said to me, Blessed are you that you did not waver at the sight of Me. For where the heart is there is the treasure.”

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene

Gustave Moreau, “Pieta”

In December 1945 a magnificent archaeological discovery was made, as it often happens entirely by accident: an Arab peasant dug out a jar containing papyrus books bound in leather. They were the Gnostic Gospels, buried in the desert by early church authorities, ready to see the light of day only in the twentieth century. Although they were written around the time or possibly a little earlier than the four canonical gospels, they were deemed so dangerous that somebody decided to make them disappear for centuries. They unveiled a hidden face of Christianity, namely its connections with Eastern mystical traditions, and a crucial role of women in early church; furthermore, they criticized the concept of virgin birth and bodily resurrection as stemming from a tendency to misconstrue what is symbolic and inner as literal and outer. But arguably the most sensational content of those apocryphal texts was related to the role of Mary Magdalene. The shocking lines of the Gospel of Philip (described as a Tantric gospel) read:

“. . . the companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples, and used to kiss her [often] on her [mouth]. The rest of [the disciples were offended] . . . They said to him, ‘Why do you love her more than all of us?’ The Savior answered and said to them, ‘Why do I not love you as (I love) her?’”

Some Biblical scholars have argued, however, that this is nothing new, as the extraordinarily special role of Mary Magdalene can be gleaned from the canonical gospels if read devoid of years of orthodox prejudice.  Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest and a mystic, lays a convincing claim that the four canonical gospels, if read inquisitively, make a strong case for Mary Magdalene’s special role. She was the first witness of the resurrection and the first one to announce it in public. Before Jesus died she anointed him with priceless perfume that she brought in an alabaster jar. By performing this ritual she recognized him as the Messiah (the Anointed One):

“Mary then took a pound of very costly perfume of pure nard, and anointed the feet of Jesus and wiped His feet with her hair; and the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.”

John 12:3

Eric Gill, “Mary Magdalene”

Moreover, all four gospels portray her in the role of “apostle to the apostles,” not only the first witness to the resurrection, but the first to announce it publicly. Bourgeault makes a firm claim that she was first among the apostles, as the one who fully got the message and was able to reach a spiritual realization unavailable to the other followers. She is consistently portrayed as the one who “knows”, as the one who has reached the true gnosis:

“It is not just a knowing from the head; it’s a knowing with the entire being. The Hebrew term which it translates is da’ath, which is also the word used for “lovemaking” (as in “David entered Bathsheba’s tent and ‘knew’ her”). Gnosis speaks of a complete, integral knowing uniting body, mind, and heart—and by its very largeness connecting the seen and the unseen.”

The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, via Wikipedia

True Gnosis comes from the heart; it is as much of the body as of the mind. According to Bourgeault, the central message of Jesus, which was profoundly understood and embodied by Mary Magdalene, is a blending of “incarnational and Platonic elements,”  “a profoundly incarnational, warm-hearted, and hopeful path, where the realms support and interpenetrate each other and divine fullness is accessed simply by keeping the heart in natural alignment with its invisible prototype.” Bourgeault goes on to suggest that early Christianity was not in the least bit ascetic. Most of the Apostles were married, including St Peter, the first Pope, and it just stands to reason that so was Jesus. He was certainly at ease with women, contrary to the customs and taboos of his time. In a famous passage in the Gospel of John, he speaks with a woman from Samaria drawing water from a well. He converses with to her on equal terms though he is a male Jew, which for his contemporaries offered enough reasons to ignore her. But his message was about openness and inclusiveness. Further, all that Jesus taught seems to contradict the idea of celibacy, which, as Bourgeault points out, is connected with “conserving, collecting, concentrating,” its shadow side being avarice, storing up, withholding, not sharing of one’s essence. Bourgeault concludes:

“By contrast, the path that Jesus himself seems to teach and model in his life, and particularly in his death, is not a storing up but a complete pouring out. His pranic energy is quickly depleted; on the cross, as all four gospel accounts affirm, he does not hold out even until sunset, but quickly “gives up the ghost.” Shattered and totally spent, he simply disappears into his death. The core icon of the Christian faith, the watershed moment from which it all emerges, is not enstatic but ecstatic—love completely poured out, expended, squandered.”

Rembrandt van Rijn, “Christ and the Woman of Samaria”

In his fascinating book The Quest For Mary Magdalene, the historian Michael Haag carefully analyzes all New Testament passages where she appears. He offers an illuminating analysis of her name, which means “the migdal, the tower, the beacon, the saving light in the darkness.” Jesus was fond of giving special names to his followers, and thus he called Simon Peter the rock upon which he will build his church (Greek petros – rock), and Mary Magdalene he named the tower that shines in darkness.

William Blake, “The Last Supper”

She was an independent, perhaps aristocratic woman of means, who chose to support Jesus and his movement. According to the so-called Secret Gospel of Mark, Mary Magdalene may have been a sister of Lazarus, at least this is the conclusion drawn by Haag in his book. Haag writes that together with her brother she may have been helping finance Jesus’s ministry and opened their home in Bethany to him and his followers. It is important to point out that nowhere in any of the gospels is she referred to as sinful or a prostitute. She was made into one by Pope Gregory I in a sermon he delivered in the 6^th century. This is clarified very carefully by Haag:

“MARY MAGDALENE FIRST APPEARS in the chronology of Jesus’ life in Galilee where she is travelling with Jesus as he proclaims the kingdom of God. ‘And the twelve were with him’, writes Luke in his gospel, ‘and certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities’. Among these women three are mentioned by name, and the first is Mary Magdalene, ‘out of whom went seven devils.’

…

There is a popular misconception, which was first promoted by the Church in the early medieval period, that Mary Magdalene’s condition had something to do with sin. But this is plainly not true. Wherever Jesus is driving out devils the gospels are clear that he is healing people of their illnesses, mental and physical.”

Was there conspiracy intended to write Mary Magdalene out of early history of Christianity? Admittedly, the new hierarchy was becoming increasingly male, and soon women were banned from being ordained as priests. It seems that old prejudices against women were not ready to go away, despite what Jesus had taught and practiced. St Paul, the apostle who never met the historical Jesus, completely ignores Mary Magdalene in all of his fourteen books included in the New Testament. He does not mention Jesus’s mother, either. According to Haag, Paul chose to ignore the historical Jesus and focused entirely on spreading the new faith with its main message of Resurrection.

But Mary Magdalene’s name lived on in legends. In the Middle Ages she was called the light-bearer,and she was especially venerated in France, where she was believed to have travelled after Jesus’s death. Vézelay in Burgundy has a Romanesque cathedral dedicated to her, Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence a cave where she supposedly spent years repenting her sins and performing miracles. The French chapter was made famous thanks to Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, which was based on the famous book The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. It claimed that Mary Magdalene’s children with Jesus intermarried with the noble French families, leading to the birth of the Merovingian dynasty.

Le Nain Brothers, “Mary Magdalene in Meditation”

She continued to fascinate the greatest minds of the Renaissance. Next to the famous Last Supper, which may feature her as a companion of Jesus, a portrait of Mary Magdalene has been identified as done by Leonardo da Vinci as well:

“This bare-breasted Mary Magdalene has recently been identified as a painting by Leonardo Da Vinci, done in about 1515. The exposed breasts associate her with the goddess Venus and also suggest that she is preparing to consummate her marriage. She is entirely frank about her sensuality; her smile is a promise, and soon her fingers will let her robe fall away entirely. There is not an ounce of sin or repentance in this Mary Magdalene.”

Leonardo da Vinci (?), “Mary Magdalene”

For the Gnostics, Mary Magdalene, “Our Lady in Red,” played a very central role. They believed that she reached salvation through gnosis, which is, in the words of Tau Malachi, “the product of a direct spiritual or mystical experience of the Truth that illuminates and liberates the soul.” While Christ embodied the Logos, she was the Sophia. There exists a Gnostic legend in which Mary Magdalene is promised as a bride to a wealthy Babylonian merchant. On her way to Babylon she gets raped and sold to slavery and prostitution. She is trapped in Babylon. As Bourgeault summarizes:

“After a time she managed to regain her outer freedom, but inwardly she was still held hostage by hatred, rage, and darkness. At length a dream came to her telling her that she must return to the land of her birth and seek out the Anointed One, who would deliver her. She left immediately for the Holy Land, crossed the Jordan River, and found her way to the place where he was teaching.”

Hrana Janto, “Goddess Sophia”

According to Malachi, the Gnostics believe that one of the demons that possessed her soul at those dark times was Lilith, the first wife of Adam, who refused to be submissive to him. Malachi writes:

“When the Lord banished the seven demons from Magdalene, he did not banish Lilith. Rather, receiving the Holy Bride, he redeemed Lilith and Eve, and in Lady Mary, womanhood was restored to its rightful place, for in her was the Divine fullness of the Supernal Woman. … She is the consort of God and mistress of the dragon. In her holy breath is the power of creation and destruction.”

Her feast in the Catholic church is on 22 July, which is when the Sun enters the sign of its rulership – Leo. A woman of vision, inspired directly by Jesus, she bypassed all hierarchy and still continues to shatter all dogmas. She seems to combined wisdom with the gentleness and compassion of love and the fierceness of wild passion. As Sophia (Anima Mundi – the World Soul) she stands as an intermediary between the upper world and the lower world, fueling the flames of the inner vision of the heart.

Sebastiano del Piombo, Mary Magdalene and other women at the foot of the cross (detail). She came there to anoint his dead body, which only closest relatives were allowed to do.

Sources:

BBC Radio 4 In Our Time – Mary Magdalene  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0717j1r

Cynthia Bourgeault, The Meaning of Mary Magdalene: Discovering the Woman at the Heart of Christianity, Kindle edition

Michael Haag, The Quest for Mary Magdalene, Kindle edition

Tau Malachi, St Mary Magdalene: The Gnostic Tradition of the Holy Bride, Kindle edition

Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels

I.”The men where you live,” said the little prince, “raise five thousand roses in the same garden–and they do not find in it what they are looking for.” “They do not find it,” I replied. “And yet what they are looking for could be found in one single rose, or in a little water.”

II.”It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Salvadore Dali, “Enigma of the Rose”

The rich minimalism of the Little Prince’s wisdom brings to mind the apparent simplicity of the Japanese karesansui (dry-mountain-water) gardens, known as Zen gardens in the West. The origins of those gardens are long lost in historical obscurity, but most probably they go back to Shinto – the Japanese native religion, which founded the sacred in elements of nature such as rocks, trees, mountains or rivers. The wavelike patterns of the raked gravel are believed to evoke currents of running water, while lone-standing rocks could be viewed as mountains rising out of the ocean, but one would be fooled to trust such limiting interpretations. The dry garden, always viewed from inside a room and composed like a painting, is first and foremost a place of contemplation; it is meant to startle the mind of the observer into a spiritual state by purifying it from pre-conceived ideologies.

Kyoto, Ryoan-ji

Kyoto, Ryoan-ji

The central symbol of the Zen garden is the stone. For Jung, it signified “something permanent that can never be lost or dissolved, something eternal that some have compared to the mystical experience of God within one’s own soul;” for Cirlot it is “the first solid form of the creative rhythm —the sculpture of essential movement, and the petrified music of creation.” Stones are pure and perfect in their simplicity, yet powerful, mysterious and inscrutable like the gods.

Abraham Bosse, “Geometric Garden”

In Shinto the purified places where spirits or gods gathered were called “niwa” – a word which means “garden.” Spiritual purification, a return to soulful simplicity, seems to be a unifying idea behind all Eastern gardens. At last that was the impression I got from an exhibition dedicated to the history of gardens, which I have seen recently (http://www.rietberg.ch/en-gb/exhibitions/vorschau-gaerten-der-welt.aspx). An inscription next to an installation dedicated to a well-known Korean ghttp://www.rietberg.ch/en-gb/exhibitions/vorschau-gaerten-der-arden reads:

“Yang Sanbo became disillusioned with politics at the imperial court and retreated to his father’s country estate, where he made himself a garden. Called a Hermit’s Garden, it is surrounded by a bamboo forest. Through the middle of it, a mountain stream crashes down over a rock. Its Korean name Saswaewon means ‘the garden in which the spirit is refreshingly cleansed just as bamboo leaves are cleansed by the rain of a thunderstorm.’”

The following video shows the garden’s beauty:

Ruth Ammann, a Jungian analyst, in her book dedicated to a psychological meaning of gardens, traces the roots of the word to the Indo-Germanic word “ghordo” – fence, enclosure, stockade, hence denoting a fenced-in or enclosed area. She marvels at a coincidence:

“Incidentally, ‘paradise’ has the same meaning, originating from the Old Iranian words ‘pairi’ (enclose, surround) and ‘daeza’ (wall). Thus, paradise is first of all a place or site surrounded by a wall. However, it encloses a particularly sacred place, namely the Garden of Eden, the garden of bliss.”

“The Garden of Earthly Delights (by Hieronymus Bosch) mimics the physical form of a sacred image and presents religious content, but its extraordinary central panel looks like nothing else in this world. When closed, the triptych presents a grisaille view of creation as it happens, formless void taking form beneath the crystal sphere of the firmament, moved by God, encased in his own tiny bubble in a space beyond the universe, as he holds open the book that contains the text of universal history. The plants and geological shapes brewing beneath the glassy dome of heaven are fat and swollen, bursting as Thomas Aquinas might have it, with their potential to come into being. When this double panel of amorphous forms is opened, a universe crowded with figures is revealed in a burst of color. The left-handed panel of the open triptych shows Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, a Christlike God joining them in marriage. … Behind the First Couple, crazily fertile plants sprout gigantic shoots in improbable pastel colors, carrying out God’s injunction to be fruitful and multiply. The spotted cat carrying a mouse in its teeth in the left foreground, like the lion attacking a stag in the distance, is usually interpreted, like the serpent that coils discreetly around a tree in the middle ground of the panel, as an indication that evil is already present in Creation. But the book of Genesis never specifies that the animals God created in the Garden behaved otherwise than the animals we know; instead, we read that ‘God saw that it was good.’ The cat is being a good cat, doing what a cat is made to do, and so is the lion.” Quoted from “The Mystery of Hieronymus Bosch,” Ingrid D. Rowland, The New York review of Books, August 18, 2016 issue

At its root, a garden and a paradise are one and the same thing. Ammann points out that the garden is enclosed and bounded on the horizontal plane, but it is open on a vertical plane, that is, “unbounded toward the sky and the depths of the earth.” It connects heaven and earth, the mundane changeability with the eternal permanence. The existence of the fence makes a garden akin to a hermetically sealed alchemical vessel. It is a receptacle, where the raw “materia prima” of the chaotic nature is transformed and cultivated through the gardener’s dedication, hard work and respect for nature and its creative divinity. “Half a proper gardener’s work is done upon his knees,” wrote Kipling in his poem “The Glory of the Garden.”

Both in the East and the West, our ancestors performed sacred land-taking rituals, which, as Ammann writes, placed “the garden or the enclosed plot of ground under the protection and mercy of a godhead that represented much greater power than that available to any individual.” The gardener is responsible for attending to and nurturing his or her garden, but its ultimate prospering may in fact lie beyond the gardener’s power. That brings to mind the concept of “borrowed scenery” used by East Asian Garden designers. It involved incorporating background landscape, such as mountains or a lake, into the composition of a garden. Perhaps it is worth remembering that the whole garden is “on loan” from the mighty nature, which may claim it back at any moment. How wild should the garden be is a matter of individual taste. I cannot decide whether I prefer the wilder English garden or the geometric grace of the French one.

Albrecht Dürer, he risen Christ shows himself to Mary Magdalene as a gardener

There is a beautiful line in The Song of Songs: “My sister, dear bride, you are a sequestered garden, a sealed fountain, an enclosed spring.” This line gave birth to the medieval concept of the Hortus Conclusus, a garden strictly shielded from the outside world, which was associated with the Virgin Mary. But perhaps the bride from the Song of Songs could also be interpreted as Mary Magdalene, the first witness of the resurrection, who mistook the risen Christ for a gardener. Or perhaps he chose to show himself as a gardener to her. In broader terms, the soul (anima) seems to have a lot of affinities with the symbolism of the garden. Saint Teresa of Avila compared a soul to a garden. Gardens are certainly places where the soul finds nourishment at the intersection of nature and culture. Whenever I stroll through a beautiful garden, I always have a feeling that it is a place conjured by my imagination, that it will disappear if I close my eyes. In Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, Marco Polo talks to Kublai Khan in Kublai’s garden. At one point he muses:

“Perhaps this garden exists only in the shadow of our lowered eyelids. … Perhaps the terraces of this garden overlook only the lake of our mind.”

Detail from an illustration for the French translation of La Teseida (1460) by Boccaccio, via http://lemiroirauxpreles.com/GardenHistory.htm

Sources:

Ruth Ammann, The Enchantment of Gardens: A Psychological Approach

Juan Eduardo Cirlot, The Dictionary of Symbols

Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols

Francis Picabia, “Crashing Waves”

I. ”Water nourishes and soothes us. But this same stuff also carved the Grand Canyon out of solid rock over the course of millennia, and every day thunders down with unimaginable fury at Niagara and Victoria Falls.”

II. ”One of the roots for the word ‘water’ comes from the Sanskrit ‘apah,’ meaning ‘animate,’ something that gives life.”

James Whistler, “Nocturne, the Solent”

III. “There is nothing softer and weaker than water. And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.”     Lao Tzu

Leonardo da Vinci’s water powered gyroscopic compass

IV.”For Leonardo [da Vinci] water was the ‘vehicle of nature’ (‘vetturale di natura’), the driving force behind all natural things. He was obsessed with it.

…

Water, he reasoned, was the fluid that transported nutrients around the Earth, feeding plants and fields, just as blood … nourished the organs of the human body.”

V. “Water is sometimes sharp and sometimes strong, sometimes acid and sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet and sometimes thick or thin, sometimes it is seen bringing hurt or pestilence, sometime health-giving, sometimes poisonous. It suffers change into as many natures as are the different places through which it passes. And as the mirror changes with the colour of its subject, so it alters with the nature of the place, becoming noisome, laxative, astringent, sulfurous, salty, incarnadined, mournful, raging, angry, red, yellow, green, black, blue, greasy, fat or slim. Sometimes it starts a conflagration, sometimes it extinguishes one; is warm and is cold, carries away or sets down, hollows out or builds up, tears or establishes, fills or empties, raises itself or burrows down, speeds or is still; is the cause at times of life or death, or increase or privation, nourishes at times and at others does the contrary; at times has a tang, at times is without savour, sometimes submerging the valleys with great floods. In time and with water, everything changes.” Leonardo da Vinci

VI.”If I were called in

To construct a religion

I should make use of water.

Going to church

Would entail a fording

To dry, different clothes;

My liturgy would employ

Images of sousing,

A furious devout drench,

And I should raise in the east

A glass of water

Where any-angled light

Would congregate endlessly.”

Philip Larkin, “Water”

Tinguely Fountain in Basel, Switzerland

All quotes have been taken from The Water Book by Alok Jha.

Lakshmi, the most widely worshiped Indian goddess, emerged on a lotus out of the primeval ocean of milk. In the pantheon of goddesses she is a soothing and gentle presence. In her book Awakening Shakti, Sally Kempton includes compelling words of Thomas Merton, which perfectly invoke Lakshmi’s divine essence as balancing the fiery essence of warrior goddesses such as Kali or Dhurga: “There is in all things an inexhaustible sweetness and purity, a silence that is a fountain of action and joy. It rises up in wordless gentleness and flows out to me from the unseen roots of all created being.” The ocean of milk not only gave the world Lakshmi but also soma – the life-giving moon nectar. Ayurvedic medicine speaks of soma as a vital essence which can be found in the bone marrow. It is supposed to govern sexuality and rejuvenation, cool down the fiery Kundalini power and, as Kempton puts it, it is “the water of life and the subtle nectar that moistens the heart.” In iconography, Lakshmi is usually portrayed flanked by two elephants showering her with water while she pours golden coins out of her hands in a gesture of abundance.

In many ways, Lakshmi is the primordial mother goddess. Before she was even named, she already existed in the minds of her worshipers as a lotus goddess on the one hand and as “sri,” explained by Rhodes as “splendor, glory, majesty, brilliance, and the divine power of auspiciousness,” on the other. Ancient Indian art rejoiced in depictions of lotuses resembling feminine figures curling gracefully upwards. Feminine figures holding lotuses symbolized life-force and fertility. Besides the well-known symbolic meaning of the lotus as rising from mud through the water and into the air, always gloriously untouched by any kind of impurity, it carries an additional significance pointedly explained by Rhodes:

“…lotus,” also literally denotes a foothold: ‘pad’ refers to foot and ‘ma’ refers to a measured expansion across a spatial dimension. The lotus seat serves as the foundation upon which the gods rest in their embodied forms when they become manifest upon the earth…”

Osho Zen Tarot – Flowering (Queen of Pentacles)

As said before, in the earliest Vedic texts an abstract quality called “sri” was not associated with any particular goddess, though it already denoted a radiant divine feminine force, which bestowed abundance and dispelled misfortune. In the later Vedic period those qualities started to be called Sri Lakshmi. The name Lakshmi is related to a Sanskrit word meaning “sign, imprint, symbol, an embodied expression.” The goddess Lakshmi began to embody the abstract qualities of sri; she became the living symbol that manifested itself as a divine revelation of a deeper mystery.  Rhodes calls her “the quintessential devi” Devi, the Sanskrit word for “goddess,”  is derived from “div,” which means to shine, to play, to sparkle, to rejoice, and also to gamble, as Rhodes further explains:

“The term, then, also conveys the excitement of uncertainty, the expectancy of luck, and the vibrant sensation that anything can happen – all of these as opposed to the frozen stagnancy of absolute certainty. Laksmi is the epitome of luminous energy in action… When that luminosity expresses itself as bounteous beauty, delight, harmony, abundant wealth, and spiritual liberation-in short, prosperity of every kind – then it is recognized and called upon as Laksmi, goddess of abundance.”

By her devotees she is called “bhukti-mukti pradayini” – “bestower of material enjoyment and spiritual liberation.” She infuses the world with four qualities: kama, artha, dharma and moksa. The former three deal with worldly enjoyment, the latter denotes freedom from worldly attachment. They are the four goals of life. Kama is pleasure, sensuality, sexuality and passion. It gives the spark to procreate being the beauty of all life, and all the flavours of material reality. Artha is wealth and its fluid circulation in society. Unsurprisingly, the goddess’s most ardent devotees are merchants, who enthusiastically erect shrines to the goddess. Diwali, the most important festival devoted to Lakshmi, also marks the beginning of a new financial year. It is during Diwali that gambling is encouraged as well.

The coins that are being poured forth from the goddess’s open hands or from a golden urn symbolize all forms of abundant energy, not only money. Lakshmi is also the goddess of self-worth, believed to make the inner beauty of a person shine through. Her sacred animal is the owl symbolizing the ability to see in darkness and to be able to move towards the light of wisdom. Rhodes adds that the golden coins can also be looked upon as “bija mantras” or “seed syllables that are produced from the body of the goddess as vibratory patterns of sacred sound.” They are the fruit of her womb holding “the potentialities of all of creation.” Through those sound-forms, i.e. the fifty-two letters of the Sanskrit alphabet, the goddess is “unfurling herself into the universe as the matrka Sakti (matrix of cosmic energy). Together with her consort Visnu, Lakshmi preserves and upholds harmony in all the realms. This is her role as an upholder of dharma (the Sanskrit root word “dhr” meaning foundation and support). Rhodes writes:

“In general, we may consider dharma to be the energy governing harmonious relationships – with oneself, with one’s spouse, children, and family, with one’s community, with one’s natural environment, and with the gods.  On a cosmic level, dharma is the harmony of interconnectedness that upholds society and supports the creation…”

Many different translations of the word dharma have been offered, including  “virtue,” “virtuous conduct,” “harmonious relationship,” “”etiquette,” “communal obligation,” “social consciousness,” “balanced way of life,” “living in right relationship,” “doing the right thing.”

From Lakshmi’s perspective, doing the right thing often involves mundane tasks such as cleaning and maintaining self-discipline. Her festival begins with a thorough housecleaning because it is believed that she will not grace a dirty house. The final component is moksa – release from attachment, spiritual liberation. Mahalakshmi is the Great Illusion and a means to liberation from it. Kempton observes:

“The release from cyclical existence in samsara, then, comes from the same goddess who sanctions the world and embellishes it, even mesmerizing one to enjoy attachment to it for lifetime after lifetime.”

The goddess of luck has a sister called Alaksmi, who brings bad luck whenever an imbalance occurs. Lakshmi does not approve of “an overly zealous attention to any one of the four aims of life to the exclusion of the others.” The truth of beingness calls for a dynamic equipoise between the four elements. This task involves “weaving together” (the word Tantra means “weaving”) the seemingly irreconcilable opposites. Vedic Hymn to Sri conveys this paradox beautifully:

“Draw unto me, O sacred fire, the goddess Lakshmi,

The resplendent, the golden,

Doe-like, moon – lustrous,

Garlanded in silver, and in gold.

…

I invoke the goddess Sri,

Who manifests as golden light.

She blazes with the effulgence of fire

Yet glistens like soothing, cool waters.

Seated on a lotus,

The lotus-hued one

Smiles benevolently.

Contended, she bestows contentment.”

Sources:

Sally Kempton, Awakening Shakti, Kindle edition

Constantina Rhodes, Invoking Lakshmi the Goddess of Wealth in Song and Ceremony, Kindle edition

I “The anthropologist Paul Radin points out that … ‘it must be explicitly recognized that in temperament and in capacity for logical and symbolical thought, there is no difference between civilized and primitive man,’ and as to ‘progress,’ that none in ethnology will ever be achieved ‘until scholars rid themselves, once and for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses an evolutionary history; until they realize that certain ideas and certain concepts are as ultimate for man’ as his physical constitution. ‘The distinction of peoples in a state of nature from civilized peoples can no longer be maintained.’”

“The Bugbear of Literacy”

II “We have no other language whatsoever except the symbolic in which to speak of ultimate reality: the only alternative is silence.”

“The Christian and Oriental, or True, Philosophy of Art”

III “’Revelation’ itself implies a veiling rather than a disclosure: a symbol is a ‘mystery.’ ‘Half reveal and half conceal’ fitly describes the parabolic style of the scriptures and of all conceptual images of being in itself, which cannot disclose itself to our physical senses.”

“The Christian and Oriental, or True, Philosophy of Art”

IV “The references of the symbolic forms are as precise as those of mathematics. The adequacy of the symbols being intrinsic, and not a matter of convention, the symbols correctly employed transmit from generation to generation a knowledge of cosmic analogies: as above, so below.”

“Is Art a Superstition, or a Way of Life?”

V “The symbol must be naturally adequate, and cannot be chosen at random; one locates or infers … the unseen in the seen, the unheard in the heard; but these forms are only means by which to approach the formless and must be discarded before we can become it.”

“The Hindu Tradition

Theology and Autology”

All quotes found in The Essential Ananda K. Coomaraswamy.

Kay Sage, “Margin of Silence”

“The cairns of piled stones that mark the high passes are spiked with poles where prayer flags fly. Who hung them in these lonely defiles we cannot tell. As the wind funnels through the passes, their inscriptions stream in faded tatters. With every flutter, it is believed, the wind disperses their prayer into the world, to ease the suffering of all sentient beings. And they will propitiate whatever capricious mountain gods control the pass. I touch them gingerly: the Tibetan script that I do not understand. I have seen them before in China and in regions of Tibetan exile, and every time they stir a poignant wonder. They glare in five primary colours, embodying earth, air, fire, water and sky. Like the prayer wheels that circle holy sites or turn in the hands of pilgrims, they redeem the world by the mystique of words. Some, near monasteries, are even turned by flowing water. Many are stamped with the wind horse, who flies their mantras on his jewelled back; others with the saint Padmasambhava, who restored Buddhism to Tibet. Iswor circles them reverently, clockwise. I follow him, glad, for some reason, of his faith. Sometimes the flags are so thinned that their prayers are as diaphanous as cobwebs. But this, Iswor says, does not matter. The air is already printed with their words.”

Colin Thubron, “To a Mountain in Tibet”

I. THE WALL

 “In Rome on the Campo dei Fiori

baskets of olives and lemons,

cobbles spattered with wine

and the wreckage of flowers.

Vendors cover the trestles

with rose-pink fish;

armfuls of dark grapes

heaped on peach-down.

 

On this same square

they burned Giordano Bruno.

Henchmen kindled the pyre

close-pressed by the mob.

Before the flames had died

the taverns were full again,

baskets of olives and lemons

again on the vendors’ shoulders.

 

I thought of the Campo dei Fiori

in Warsaw by the sky-carousel

one clear spring evening

to the strains of a carnival tune.

The bright melody drowned

the salvos from the ghetto wall,

and couples were flying

high in the cloudless sky.

 

At times wind from the burning

would drift dark kites along

and riders on the carousel

caught petals in midair.

That same hot wind

blew open the skirts of the girls

and the crowds were laughing

on that beautiful Warsaw Sunday.”

Czeslaw Milosz, “Campo dei Fiori”

In this touching poem, the brutality of the Nazis liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto is happening behind the wall, sheltering the potential onlookers from the atrocities. In Polin, the Warsaw Museum of the History of the Polish Jews (see below for the meaning of “Polin”), these words written by Chaim A. Kaplan struck a poignant chord with me:

“We are imprisoned within double walls: a wall of brick for our bodies, and a wall of silence for our spirit.”

The Jewish story is no longer surrounded by the wall of silence. The central thought of The Story of the Jews, beautifully imagined in the opening credits to that magnificent documentary by Simon Schama, is that the people who were left with nothing started living in the house of words. Their story and their holy book, the Torah, was sustaining them. The thought is strengthened in his book The Story of the Jews: Finding the Words. Those who have found their words, have found themselves.

II. THE PALM TREE

The 15-metre tall artificial Palm Tree at a busy roundabout in the centre of the city may seem an unlikely symbol of Jewishness. It stands at the intersection of the two most representative streets – Aleje Jerozolimskie (Jerusalem Avenue) and Nowy Swiat (New World Street). The palm tree, reminiscent of the palms of Jerusalem, marks the absence of the Jews in the city, which was previously their settlement. Wikipedia explains why the Jews chose Poland as their home:

“Some Jewish historians say the Hebrew word for ‘Poland’ is pronounced as Polania or Polin in Hebrew. As transliterated into Hebrew, these names for Poland were interpreted as “good omens” because Polania can be broken down into three Hebrew words: po (“here”), lan (“dwells”), ya (“God”), and Polin into two words of: po (“here”) lin (“[you should] dwell”). The “message” was that Poland was meant to be a good place for the Jews.”

The palm is an ancient symbol of life, victory and fertility, and the Christian symbol of resurrection. It has both masculine and feminine connotations, making it a symbol of totality. In the Dictionary of Literary Symbols, Michael Ferber wrote, “The word “palm” (Latin “palma”) is the same as that for the palm of the hand: to the ancients the tree resembled the hand, the branches or fronds looking like fingers.” In the web of symbolic meaning, another association was solar, the branches of the palm resembling the rays of the sun. Apollo was born under the palm tree. On the feminine side, both in the Odyssey and in the Song of Songs, the beauty of women is compared to the beauty of palm trees. Ferber adds, “The Hebrew word for palm, tamar, was and remains a common girl’s name.” “Phoinikos”, the Greek word for the palm, brings to mind its association with rebirth.

There is something very triumphant, exultant and joyful in this ancient symbol positioned in the middle of a busy roundabout in the part of Europe where palms do not belong. As the symbolic palm unites the opposites, so does this one bringing two worlds together.

“And just as the cosmos is not a dissolving mass of particles, but rests in the unity of God’s embrace, man must not dissolve into a whirl of warring possibilities and tendencies imposed on him by the unconscious, but must become the unity that embraces them all.”

C. G. Jung, “Psychology of Transference”

“To be great, be whole;
Exclude nothing, exaggerate nothing that is not you.
Be whole in everything. Put all you are
Into the smallest thing you do.
So, in each lake, the moon shines with splendor
Because it blooms up above.”

Fernando Pessoa

There is a desire in every soul to open up and merge, rather than stand alone. The Sufis called this the longing of every soul for the beloved, while the Orphics placed Eros at the top of the Pantheon. Jung, after Silberer, referred to the coniunctio as the central idea of alchemy. In Rosarium Philosophorum, a sixteenth-century alchemical treatise, we read:

“There is the conjunction of two bodies made, and it is necessary in our magistery, and if but one of our two bodies only should be in our Stone, it would never give tincture by any means.”

As Jung explains in The Psychology of Transference, “the coniunctio oppositorum in the guise of Sol and Luna, .., occupies such an important place in alchemy that sometimes the entire process takes the form of the hierosgamos [holy marriage] and its mystic consequences.” In the same book he guides the reader through a sequence of selected woodcuts from Rosarium Philosophorum. Adam McClean of The Alchemy Website, inspired by Jung, presents his own reflections on the full sequence of twenty images (http://www.levity.com/alchemy/roscom.html).  This and the subsequent posts will summarize Jung and McClean’s offerings concerning the images of the Rosarium. My goal is to elucidate the nature of the coniunctio as presented in the Rosarium images while simultaneously referring to the Jung’s final work Mysterium Coniunctionis.

IMAGE 1 (view all the images here: http://www.alchemywebsite.com/virtual_museum/rosarium_philosophorum_room.html)

This image showcases the Mercurial Fountain, which symbolizes the activation of the unconscious. The fountain as a symbol is “an image of the soul as the source of inner life and spiritual energy”, as was aptly summarized by Cirlot in his Dictionary of Symbols. About Illustration 1 McClean writes:

“In illustration 1, we have a picture of man’s inner soul world. In the lower part of the soul we see a triple fountain which pours forth the threefold soul-substance – the Virgin’s Milk ( the feminine receptive lunar forces in the soul), the Spring of Vinegar (the masculine sharp, penetrating solar forces in the soul) and the Aqua Vitae, the water of life (the inner source of soul energies). These three streams pour forth from the head of the fountain, at the central point of the soul, and stream down merging together in the basin at the lowest part of the soul. This vessel contains the primal substance of the soul forces, the Inner Mercury, the Mercury of the Philosophers, that is one and yet is composed of these three streams.

Thus we have here a picture of the unintegrated soul realm of man. The three streams pour down from the heart centre into the lower soul world, but are cut off from a balanced direct connection with the upper soul, the realm of the soul that can touch upon the spiritual. The only connection with this upper soul initially is through the unintegrated polarity of the lunar and solar streams within the soul.”

For alchemists, Mercury was the fluid substance symbolizing the oscillating nature of the unconscious. In Mysterium Coniunctionis Jung called Mercurius the ligament of the soul because it united the body with the spirit. To amplify McClean’s description, in image 1, there are four stars which symbolize the four elements while the fifth star stands for  the quintessence, the unity achieved at the end of the opus. Further, if we see the Mercurial Fountain as located in the centre of the universe, then the four stars may be an allusion to the Four Rivers of Paradise. The three mercurial streams point to the inherent ambivalence of Mercurius – he is both nourishing and poisonous, as indeed is the unconscious. The vinegar is the dissolving substance, which penetrates and breaks down the forms which need to be destroyed before the new structures can be built. The forces erupting from the depths of the unconscious may have a destructive aspect. The water of life cleans and purifies, healing and reviving after the shock and suffering caused by the acidic spring erupting from the unconscious. Finally, the milk nourishes and allows the soul to grow. There is also nourishment coming from the stars, which are being licked by the two mercurial dragons.

The first image already heralds the future coniunctio, while presenting all the elements of transformation. “With its quiet song and strange power” (to quote Denise Levertov) the Mercurial Fountain is rushing, moving and flowing within our innermost being.

To be continued with further images…

Einsiedeln Abbey, exhibition poster https://www.nationalmuseum.ch/e/microsites/2017/Zuerich/Einsiedeln.php

A striking poster advertises an exhibition dedicated to the history of 1000 years of pilgrimage to Einsiedeln Abbey, the seat of the Black Madonna. We see her red robe and the crown but the statue is not there. A veil is all there is. The energetic, blood red colour of the cape arrests and fills with awe. It dresses up the unconscious, adorns the shadow, crowning darkness and emptiness. “I am all that has been and is and shall be; and no mortal has ever lifted my veil,” – the words inscribed on the statue of Isis of Sais come to mind. All the symbolic representations of the divine are just what comes from our attempts at peering through the veil; this is why we communicate the mystery or perhaps how the mystery communicates with us. In our daily world biased towards clarity, obviousness, growth, achievement and tangible benefits, the Black Madonna is an omen of wholeness that we have lost on the way. She heals by making whole, soothes and warms the cold hearts, projecting boundless forgiveness and compassion. She is not always meek, but can be quite defiant and disruptive in relation to the stale status quo. Like the unconscious, she is the great balancing force. The weak, the sick, the disenfranchised, the disempowered, women, strangers, outsiders and foreigners, have all sought refuge under her mantle. It was believed in the earlier centuries that only the Black Madonna can show the right way to murderers and other criminals. Until the eighteenth centuries convicted criminals of Switzerland were able to atone for their guilt and go free if they made a pilgrimage to the holy statue.

The capes of the Black Madonna of Einsiedeln

There are many covert ways in which the church still try to downplay her vibrant and growing cult. Her blackness, for example, is usually explained by the prolonged exposure of the statue to candle smoke. This is quite hard to believe, since the numerous Black Madonna statues have sprung up in numerous places in the world immediately in their black glory. According to legends, the statues were often found by children, shepherds or animals close to caves or streams, often buried in the earth. The mystery surrounding their sudden emergence is symbolically very fitting. She shows herself to the humble and the weak, her source of origin being veiled in mystery. She does not seek a central or prominent role, and yet she is the centre of the mandala, the creative matrix from which all life came and to which it will return. Although her face is featured on the poster advertising the exhibition, she is just but one of the themes of it. Still, it was easily noticeable how crowds gravitated towards and concentrated in the sections dedicated to her. Disappointingly, the role of Forest Sisters, one of whom offered the statue of the Black Madonna to St Meinrad, the founder of the monastery, was not acknowledged. Nothing is said of the appalling treatment of the Sisters by the male establishment of the Monastery. Namely, they were driven out of the Dark Forest, where they lived in a peaceful community gathering herbs and healing the sick, banned from visiting the Black Madonna statue, ordered to wear black and had to lead a convent life in the nearby town (see my previous post on the subject https://symbolreader.net/2016/02/28/the-black-madonna-of-einsiedeln/).  As a consolation, the sisters received a copy of the original Black Madonna statue. What is more, the lay public were also restricted by the Benedictine monks from adoring the statue right until the beginning of the twentieth century. Older female inhabitants of Einsiedeln still remember the times when they had to sneak in to the church to pray in front of the Black Madonna.

The Black Madonna of Einsiedeln

I am Black and Lovely: the Mystery of the Black Madonna by Margrit Rosa Schmid is a booklet rich in detail that accompanies the exhibition. It contains a wealth of stories about the Black Madonnas of the whole world. I was not aware of the sheer number of statues and shrines of her in Switzerland alone. At the beginning of the twentieth century in the Italian canton of Tessin, where her cult is very strong, a local pastor felt uncomfortable with what he perceived as a pagan cult of the statue of La Madonna Nera. He replaced it with a white Madonna, which sparked outrage with the locals. Eventually, the church had no choice but to give in, the Black Madonna was restored, while the white one ended up in pastor’s attic. This particular Black Madonna is a copy of the magnificent Black Madonna of Loreto in Italy. Schmid beautifully describes the symbolism of the appearance of the original Italian statue. Especially striking are the five black moon sickles adorning her gown complete with a reversed red triangle – a symbol of feminine fertility (the chalice and the womb). During the French Revolutionary Wars, Napoleon moved the Black Madonna statue from Loreto to Paris, where she was displayed in Louvre as an Egyptian goddess. He must have understood subconsciously that the Black Madonna indeed comes from a long lineage of ancient dark mother goddesses, especially but not only Isis. The Loreto Chapel of Madonna showcases statues of nine Sibyls, further strengthening the connection with the ancient cult of the goddess as well as pointing at the gift of prophecy, seeing in the dark, common to all dark female deities. Mary, not only in her role as the Black Madonna, has always fulfilled a symbolic role of a pontifex – a bridge builder between humans and divinity.

La Madonna Nera of Sonogno, Switzerlad

The Black Madonna of Loreto

A particularly moving legend is connected with the Polish Black Madonna of Czestochowa, who bears two long scars on her face. In the 15th century, the monastery was raided by the Hussites, who stole the icon. However, their horses refused to move the wagon in which they were travelling. In frustration, one of the robbers inflicted two strikes on Madonna’s face with his sword. When he tried to draw his sword upon the image for the third time, he fell to the ground and died a painful death. It is perhaps her fragility and a memento of suffering visible on her face that makes her divine form so human.

The Black Madonna of Czestochowa, Poland

“I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are—

(1) That the borders of our minds are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy.

(2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are a part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself.

(3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.”

W.B. Yeats, “Ideas of Good and Evil”

I am looking forward to seeing a new documentary by Thomas Riedelsheimer about the work of Andy Goldsworthy, a Scottish land artist. As he works, “getting under the skin of the earth,” engaging deeply with the elements, he taps into the memory of nature, evoking it by means of symbols. The Hebrew/Greek word ‘archetype’ understood as the original pattern is also linguistically related to “mark of a seal,” while the adjective “archetypos” can be translated as “stamped first.” In a way, Goldsworthy “stamps” the earth with his archetypal creations, and by so doing he makes us see the symbolism that nature hides in plain sight. In one of his works, he even imprints the earth with his own body.

In 2001 Thomas Riedelsheimer made the first documentary about Goldsworthy entitled “Rivers and Tides.” You can see it here:

https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/andy-goldsworthys-rivers-tides/

Goldsworthy is not a man of many words. He would much rather dialogue with us through his art. But what he says is quite powerful. Far from being just decorative, his art invites us to look deeper at nature, which he does not see as just pastoral or pretty. As he is making his ephemeral stone creations on the beach, which within minutes will be flooded by the tide, he states, “My art is trying to understand the stone.” He goes on to say that he offers his work to the sea as a gift. The sea will transform it beyond what he can imagine. He has a deep awareness of roots, what is hidden, the life processes working in darkness. He enjoys taking his work to the very edge of collapse. What accompanies him is a constant amazement that he is actually alive. The black holes he adds to the landscape are particularly striking; they are reminiscent of absence, void, death, but also of the space where life germinates.

I. “Whenever, in the course of the daily hunt, the red hunter comes upon a scene that is strikingly beautiful or sublime–a black thundercloud with the rainbow’s glowing arch above the mountain; a white waterfall in the heart of a green gorge; a vast prairie tinged with the blood-red of sunset–he pauses for an instant in the attitude of worship.”

Charles Eastman, “The Soul of the Indian”

II. “In the world where I was raised, life has only a brief moment of flowering — the time of physical strength for men, the season of youthful beauty and childbearing for women. All else is a time of becoming or a time of decline. Rather than looking at our lives like the seasons, where each has a richness that belongs to no other, we look at them like a flower that moves from bud to bloom to gradual decay and death. Only the time of bloom is seen as the fullness of life. Native people like Joe do not see life this way. They see it as a passage through spiritual seasons where we gain knowledge and richness as we pass from one season to the next. Only a person in winter has seen them all, so only a person in winter is granted the respect that comes with full spiritual knowledge. Far from being vestigial or in eclipse, the elders, who have lived through all of life’s seasons, are the honored ones, the crown jewels of the Native family.”

Kent Nerburn, “Voices in the Stones: Life Lessons from the Native Way”

III. “There were ideals and practices in the life of my ancestors that have not been improved upon by the present-day civilization.”

Luther Standing Bear

Luther Standing Bear

Mount Rushmore is a landmark with complicated history. The portraits of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln were carved onto the Black Hills rock, which is sacred to Native Americans, who were granted this territory in a treaty of 1868. The treaty read, “As long as the rivers run and the grasses grow and trees bear leaves, Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, will forever and ever be the sacred land of the Indians.” Like many promises bestowed on Native Americans, this one was also broken. After gold was found there, the Hills were immediately seized by the whites. The land is still under dispute.

Black Hills National Forest, via Wikipedia

Some thirty kilometres from Mount Rushmore another leader’s portrait is being carved onto rock – the statue of Crazy Horse, a Lakota warrior. The memorial was commissioned by Henry Standing Bear, to be sculpted by Korczak Ziolkowski, an American sculptor of Polish descent. Ziolkowski worked on the monument for thirty-six years, until his death. Throughout that time, he refused to take any salary. He carved his own epitaph, which can be viewed on the site:

“KORCZAK Storyteller in Stone
May His Remains Be Left Unknown.”

Crazy Horse Memorial

Rather paradoxically, throughout his short life Crazy Horse consistently refused to be photographed. He did not want anyone to know his face and yet his carved head is 27 metres high. Perhaps there is no other way of raising public awareness about the First Nations but to erect a giant memorial as a counterpoint to the existing White American one. But the Native soul is in actuality humble and alien to ostentation. This was beautifully expressed in a landmark book by Charles Eastman, who was a physician and an activist of Santee Dakota, English and French ancestry. In The Soul of the Indian: An Interpretation, he wrote:

“There were no temples or shrines among us save those of nature. Being a natural man, the Indian was intensely poetical. He would deem it sacrilege to build a house for Him who may be met face to face in the mysterious, shadowy aisles of the primeval forest, or on the sunlit bosom of virgin prairies, upon dizzy spires and pinnacles of naked rock, and yonder in the jeweled vault of the night sky!”

Charles Eastman

Quite different, much less conspicuous but not less powerful stone carvings are mentioned in another worthy book devoted to the spirituality of Native Americans, namely Voices in the Stones: Life Lessons from the Native Way by Kent Nerburn. He recalls a time when two of his Native American friends accompanied him to see ancient carvings on stones known as petroglyphs, located east of the South Dakota border. The two Indians, father and son, did not try to rationalize the Great Mystery; they did not strive to understand the meaning of the ancient carvings, but instead performed an ancient ritual that involved burning sage over the rocks.

Nerburn explains that In Native American tradition, everything has a voice, the whole nature calls out to us with the voice of the Great Mystery. The stones and the soil call to us with the voices of our ancestors who died or who were buried there. In some places, such as The Wounded Knee or in Auschwitz, the stones and the earth speak louder, so the more sensitive of us have to cover their ears.

Petroglyphs, photo by John Novotny via https://www.behance.net/gallery/9053885/Native-American-Petroglyphs-at-Writing-on-Stone

In a striking passage from Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he remembers an encounter with an older of the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, who said to him:

“How cruel the whites are: their lips are thin, their noses sharp, their faces furrowed and distorted by holes. Their eyes have a staring expression. They are always seeking something. What are they seeking? The whites always want something, they are always uneasy and restless. We do not know what they want, we do not understand them, we think that they are mad.” I asked him why he thought the whites were all mad. “They say they think with their heads,” he replied.

“Why, of course. What do you think with?” I asked him in surprise.

“We think here,” he said, indicating his heart.”

When such two radically different visions and ways of living clash, disaster ensues. If stones were taken to represent atrocities committed on Native Americans, the Wounded Knee massacre would be the last stone thrown on top of a high mountain. A particularly distressing to me was the story of the Osage murders, of which I had been unaware. This nation was repeatedly stripped of their land until, finally, they managed to acquire some barren, unfriendly rocks in Oklahoma, which no one else wanted. The situation changed drastically when oil was discovered in the area and the Indians got extremely wealthy. As a result, they immediately became target of “theft, graft and mercenary marriage.” They were kidnapped, shot and poisoned often by those that posed as their friends or who were their spouses in the eyes of the law. In four years dubbed as the Reign of Terror sixty Osage Indians were murdered. Most of the murders were never prosecuted.

The words of Martin Luther King who said that he American nation was born in genocide express a shameful truth that cannot be hidden any longer. Historian Howard Zinn agrees:

“And so, Indian Removal, as it has been politely called, cleared the land for white occupancy between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, cleared it for cotton in the South and grain in the North, for expansion, immigration, canals, railroads, new cities, and the building of a huge continental empire clear across to the Pacific Ocean. The cost in human life cannot be accurately measured, in suffering not even roughly measured. Most of the history books given to children pass quickly over it.”

And yet, the Native Way is neither buried nor forgotten. Quietly, the wheel of history is turning again. As Nerburn puts it in the epilogue to his book, “We could destroy the First Peoples physically, but we could not erase their presence from our hearts. And so we hid them, buried them deep in our cultural psyche, just as we had buried so many of them in the earth they once had called their own. They became the shadow of our cultural guilt.“

At the Wounded Knee site

American Indians are so much more than the shadows. Their teaching us about the Great Spirit that unifies all opposites, bringing about the necessary reconciliation, appeals to ever increasing number of people. The indigenous values of respect for nature and inclusion are making a relentless resurgence. We are slowly realizing that domination has to be replaced by understanding, as Nerburn writes, “…your task in life is not to dominate, but to understand; to learn the rules of the universe and come into right relationship with them.”

Links:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2000/09/09/us/an-apology-and-a-milestone-at-indian-bureau.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/28/books/review/killers-of-the-flower-moon-david-grann.html?mtrref=undefined&gwh=DB7126F99355F35C0BB21DC87CADB903&gwt=pay

https://www.economist.com/node/11848993

https://crazyhorsememorial.org/crazy-horse-the-man.html