Prospero's Books

The transcendent philosophy has always been there

 From Joscelyn Godwin's The Golden Thread:

"It is almost incredible that towards the end of the twentieth century, biblical fundamentalism made such a comeback in America. No less astounding is its alliance with the small body of Jewish fundamentalists in Israel to further their respective apocalyptic dreams. And then there is Islamic fundamentalism. These frightening movements reduce their parent religions to the lowest and most literal level. . . .

"On the other side of the chasm is scientific materialism, which is no less dogmatic in denying the existence of any psychical or spiritual reality. This too has its hysterical defenders, as passionate about their belief as any Bible thumper, and seething with derision for any who question it as the proper path for mankind . . . .

"The twentieth century has come and gone, but neither side has made the slightest progress. Each is mired in a rigorous and dogmatic frame of mind, and as any student of Jungian psychology knows, this causes it to repress the doubts that would naturally and harmlessly occur to a less rigid person, and to project them as a Shadow onto others. . . . The tragedy, here as in many other dualistic impasses, is that no one in the public arena can proclaim the third way that transcends them. Such a solution should be possible especially in the United States, whose founding philosophy derived from Freemasonry, and, beyond that, from its Hermetic and Pythagorean parentage. . . .

"The transcendent philosophy that rises above so many useless arguments has always been there, and never so available as it is today" (148-49).

Meditations on the Tarot 6: The Lover

(This post is sixth in a series on the book Meditations on the Tarot. See the first for explanation.)

6. The Lover

• The number 6: For the author of Meditations on the Tarot, this sixth arcanum is the card of chastity. He writes, "One is chaste only when one loves with the totality of one's being. Chastity is not wholeness of being in indifference, but rather in the love which is 'strong as death and whose flashes are flashes of fire, the flame of the Eternal'. It is living unity. It is three--spirit, soul and body--which are one, and the other three--spirit, soul and body--which are one; and three and three make six . . . ." (124). Six is also the number of the three temptations of Eve, of Jesus, of us all--power, richness, and debauchery--plus the three corresponding vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity (137). "This," says the author, "is the practical meaning of the hexagram or seal of Solomon" (137). 

• The figures: The woman on our left is the temptress, seizing the shoulder of the young lover. However, the arrow of "the winged infant archer" is aimed at the woman on our right, the true love, making "appeal to his heart with a chaste gesture of her left hand" (123). Chastity, the devotion to the true love, in an acceptance of the other as a whole. "Carl Gustav Jung re-established the principle of chastity in the domain of psychology--the other psychological schools . . . being contrary to chastity, since they break down the unity of the spiritual, psychic and physical elements of the human being. He discovered the divine breath at the core of the human being" (128).

Wonder makes us fall to our knees

Sunday I spent a couple of hours with my daughter, Casey, at Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum. The current exhibition, "All Faiths Beautiful," features an incredible array of spiritual art by mostly self-taught artists, interspersed with quotations. Here are the two quotations I copied:

One of the main functions of formalized religion is to protect people from a direct experience of God. --Carl Jung

Concepts create idols, only wonder comprehends anything. People kill one another over idols. Wonder makes us fall to our knees. --St. Gregory of Nyssa

The labyrinth of Stephen Dedalus

A reflection--surely not original--from my umteenth reading of Joyce's Ulysses:

Stephen, in his role as the Greek artificer Daedalus, has built, in his psyche, a labyrinth (his sense of subjugation to church, state, family, history) that entraps him. In his role as Ithacus, he has tried to fly from that labyrinth, but has failed.

By the end of the book, Stephen has found (and we have found) in Bloom a man who can fly beyond the labyrinth of his psyche--the labyrinth shown to us so graphically in the Circe episode. Bloom has shown Stephen that he (Stephen) can become truly Daedalus (no longer just the son of Daedalus) and fly beyond.

As a mature man, Bloom's challenge is to return home--to his center. As a young man, Stephen's challenge is to leave home. Paradoxically, Bloom, by returning, empowers Stephen to leave.

Meditations on the Tarot 1: The Magician

Meditations on the Tarot is widely regarded as one of the past century's spiritual classics. The author, who published the work anonymously, presents a Hermetic Christian theology in the form of meditations on the twenty-two major arcana of the Tarot, using the Marseilles deck. (For more on the book, including identification of its author, see its Wikipedia entry.)

I'm restarting my reading of the book; this time I hope to finish it. As a self-discipline, I'm planning to summarize, briefly, its chapters, and add some commentary of my own, especially from a systems perspective.

Text in quotation marks is quoted directly from Meditations; other unbracketed text is summary or paraphrase of the book. Text in brackets is my own commentary.

1. The Magician

• The number 1: This number reminds us of "the unity of all worlds" (in the words of the Emerald Tablet, "as above, so below") and the goal of individuation, Jung's term for the "synthesis of the self." [This goal is, paradoxically, where we start from; see the last section of Eliot's Four Quartets.]
• The Magician himself: The Magician's manner demonstrates "concentration without effort," the ability to "transform work into play," and to make "every yoke . . . easy and every burden . . . light" (8).
• The Magician's hat: The hat, in the form of the infinity symbol, reminds us of the eternal rhythm of the breath as the center of consciousness.
• The Magician as the first arcanum: The Magician, standing at the beginning of our journey, both invites us and warns us. [The Magician is Hermes, a trickster figure, and meets us as we enter the unpredictable and unknown. When we go to seek deep knowledge, just as when we go to see a stage magician, we must bring a willingness to be surprised.]

If any story is structured into our unconsciousness . . .

Another passage (with minor corrections) from my 1974 Earthrise article, a precursor to this blog:

Consider the activity of any natural system, from atom to Earth: The system is in a status quo, a steady state in which internal and external forces are balanced. When, from time to time, new external forces disrupt the system, it quickly "corrects" and settles back into the status quo. Sometimes, however, greater external forces—forces ultimately directed toward disorganization and death—threaten the very existence of the system. The system is unable to "correct" itself, and so, at first, succumbs to those forces. But, in doing so, it uses them as a means toward reorganization. If this reorganization is successful, the system emerges into a new steady state, one more organized and resistant.

And we've just heard Campbell's monomyth. It's the only story there is.

If the monomyth is a Jungian archetype, a pattern inherited as part of one's collective unconsciousness, it's a small wonder. Humanity is the result (although, it is to be hoped, not the final result) of the precise process the monomyth recounts, over and over since the universe began. If any story is structured into our unconsciousness, it must surely be this one.

Now, in 2006, this passage seems to me somewhat simplistic. But I have to acknowledge it as one of the first statements of an idea that I've often returned to for the thirty-two years since I wrote it.

Jung's cosmic perspective

Anthony Stevens continues the passage quoted in my preceding post:

This cosmic perspective gave him [Jung] his reverence for the unconscious and the unknown, for the numinosity of symbols, for the magical power of the imagination and the reconciling genius of the transcendent function, for the meaning we attribute to everything about us, for the primacy of the individual psyche as the link between our own lives and the inscrutable intentions of the great universe itself. His emphasis on the priceless value of the individual, his insistence on the supremacy of gnosis (knowledge through experience, not through book-learning or belief), his openness to the irrational, the spontaneous, the synchronistic, his celebration of the richly creative purposes of life, his realization of individuation as the goal to which all other goals are subservient, his recognition of dreams and myths as speaking the timeless language of the soul—all were expressions of the cosmogonic inspiration that filled his life (157-58).

The universe within

Anthony Stevens continues the passage from Jung I began in my preceding post:

Being passionately on the side of individuation, the Self seeks growth and development in our lives. Affirmation of the Self liberates its creative energies and brings certain knowledge that the best life is the life lived sub specie aeternitatis: "The decisive question for a man is this: is he related to something infinite or not?" This, the ultimate question for mankind, has given rise to all the myths and religions ever created, each one being a brave attempt on the part of some human group to relate to the infinite, the eternal. The quest for the cosmic connection, the experience of the Sacred and Holy, is a fundamental requirement of the Self. To deny it brings spiritual decay; to embrace it illuminates the soul with meaning. [Jung writes,] "I can only gaze with wonder and awe at the depths and heights of our psychic nature. Its non-spatial universe conceals an untold abundance of images which have accumulated over millions of years of development." It is comparable in magnificence to the starry heavens at night, "for the only equivalent of the universe within is the universe without" (157)

Jung, Bloom, and Molly's Yes

Near the end of his Jung: A Very Short Introduction (see What I've Been Reading), Anthony Stevens writes:

"Man," said Jung at the end of a famous BBC television interview, "cannot stand a meaningless life." Where does meaning come from? Jung's answer is through an unequivocal affirmation of the Self (157).

In James Joyce's Ulysses, Leopold Bloom affirms his Self at the end of the Cyclops episode:

—Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.

—He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead.

—Whose God? says the citizen.

—Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.

But the greatest "unequivocal affirmation of the Self" in the book—perhaps in all of literature—is Molly Bloom's, in the novel's final words:

first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Time, thou must untangle this

In his little book on Jung (see What I've Been Reading), Anthony Stevens quotes Jung on the function of time in the therapy process:

The psychoanalyst thinks he must see his patient for an hour a day for months on end; I manage in difficult cases with three or four sittings a week. As a rule I content myself with two, and once the patient has got going, he is reduced to one. . . . In addition, I break off the threatment every ten weeks or so. . . . In such a procedure time can take effect as a healing factor (132-33).

Jung's optimism about the healing power of time reminds me of the contrast between the ways Shakespeare's tragic and comic heroes view time. For Hamlet, "the time is out of joint" (Hamlet 1, 5, 206), and for Macbeth, time's arrow points only toward meaninglessness:

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death (Macbeth 5, 5, 20-24).

In the comedy Twelfth Night, Viola—one of Shakespeare's delightful cross-dressing trickster heroines—takes a very different view of time:

What will become of this? As I am man,
My state is desperate for my master's love.
As I am woman (now alas the day!),
What thriftless sighs shall poor Olivia breathe?
O Time, thou must untangle this, not I;
It is too hard a knot for me t' untie (2, 2, 34-38).