Prospero's Books

Cosmos, Nature, and Culture

This weekend I'm presenting a paper in Phoenix at "Cosmos, Nature, and Culture: A Transdisciplinary Conference," sponsored by the Metanexus Institute. I've just posted the paper, "A 'Mirror up to Nature': Cosmos, Nature, and Culture in Shakespeare," on this site. It's my first long essay that grew directly from writing I've done for this blog.

If you're a reader of this blog and would be interested in getting together with me in Phoenix this weekend, please let me know.

Meditations on the Tarot 5: The Pope

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

5. The Pope

• The number 5: The number 5 stands, according to Eliphas Levi, for "the domination of the mind over the (four) elements" (106). For the author of Meditations on the Tarot, the number also represents the five wounds of Christ, and the five senses "though which the objective world, withot regard to our will, imposes itself on us." The author continues, "But the senses are organs of perception, not of action. Imagine that the five organs of action--the limbs, including the head in its function as a limb--were to have analogous wounds, i.e. that the five currents of will of which they are an expression were to give access to an objective will which would be to personal desires what sense perceptions are to play of fantasy" (110).

• The Pope: The Pope is performing a blessing, a benediction: "the putting into action of divine power transcending the individual thought and will of the one who is blessed as well as the one who is pronouncing the blessing" (100).

• The two columns (and the two acolytes): "The Cabbala compares the role of prayer and benediction to the double movement, ascending and descending, similar to the circulation of the blood. The prayers of humanity rise toward God and, after having been divinely 'oxidised', are transformed into benedictions which descend below from above. . . . The two blue columns behind the Pope symbolise in the first place this twofold current." They also symbolize "the two columns of the Sephiroth Tree [of the Kabbalah], the pillar of Mercy and that of Severity, and similarly the two pillars of the Temple of Solomon, Jachin and Boaz" (100).Just as prayer and benediction are analogous to the circulation of the blood, they are also analogous to respiration, breathing out and breathing in. Respiration, says the author, can be "horizontal" (taking place between "outside" and "inside") or "vertical" (taking place between "above" and "below"). "The 'sting of death' . . . is the abrupt passage from horizontal to vertical respiration. Yet he who has learnt vertical respiration whilst living will be spared from this 'sting of death'" (100). "The law of horizontal respiration is: 'Love your neighbour as yourself'"; that of vertical respiration is "'Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind'" (101). 

• The Pope's triple cross: The three-level cross represents the "three levels of horizontal respiration . . . : love of Nature; love of one's neighbour; love of the beings of the spiritual hierarchies," and "the three stages of vertical respiration . . . : purification (by divine breath); illumination (by divine light); mystical union (in divine fire)" (101). Two other sets of three are also featured in this chapter. One set comprises the traditional monastic vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity (112-114). The other set comprises the journey "from the natural state ('limbo') and from the state of human suffering ('purgatory') to that of the blessedness of the divine state ('paradise')" (115-16).  [This journey parallels Dante's journey, as well as Joseph Campbell's monomyth, the journey of the hero. It is also the pattern of open systems, moving from a relatively organized status quo, through the threat of disorganization, to a new level of organization.]

Until something sets them off

From Harriet Hawkins's Strange Attractors: Literature, Culture, and Chaos Theory:

The long-term behaviour of nonlinear systems is humanly unpredictable because tiny differences in input can very soon result in enormous differences in output, and systems fraught with a variety of positive feedback will often undergo sudden and revolutionary changes in behaviour. Very like certain characters in mythic literature, nonlinear systems tend to behave in a regular, orderly way until something sets them off, a critical point is passed, and they suddenly become chaotic (x).

What Hawkins is describing in her second sentence is the separation stage of Joseph Campbell's "monomyth." Here are more of my monomyth-tagged posts.

A message in the formless flow of things

In tonight's Joyce seminar, I read my students a passage from No Souvenirs, a twelve-year journal by religious historian Mircea Eliade. The passage describes well the day-long journey of Leopold Bloom in the novel Ulysses, but it also describes the well-lived life:

1 January 1960
    Every exile is a Ulysses traveling toward Ithaca. Every real existence reproduces the Odyssey. The path toward Ithaca, toward the center. I had known all that for a long time. What I have just discovered is that the chance to become a new Ulysses is given to any exile whatsoever (precisely because he has been condemned by the gods, that is, by the "powers" which decide historical, earthly destinies). But to realize this, the exile must be capable of penetrating the hidden meaning of his wanderings, and of understanding them as a long series of initiation trials (willed by the gods) and as so many obstacles on the path which brings him back to the hearth (toward the center). That means: seeing signs, hidden meanings, symbols, in the sufferings, the depressions, the dry periods of everyday life. Seeing them and reading them even if they aren't there; if one sees them, one can build a structure and read a message in the formless flow of things and the monotonous flux of historical facts (84-85).

In this life we are all exiles. Knowing that, and reading the signs, can help us find our way home.

Transcendence beyond a known realm

During the last few days I've been reading both Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and the December 2006 issue of Seed magazine. In his Introduction to the Pelican edition of Dream, Russ McDonald writes:

During the performance of "Pyramus and Thisby" [the play-within-a-play performed by Bottom and his fellow craftsmen], we may imagine the stage and the theater and the world as a series of concentric circles. At the very center are Bottom and Flute, playing tragic lovers. They are watched by actors playing the courtly lovers, characters whose experience might have paralleled that of the doomed Pyramus and Thisby but who fail to notice the similarity. They, in turn, are watched by the theater audience, spectators who laugh smugly at the smugness of the onstage audience. This set of symmetries implies that we may be mistaken in thinking of ourselves as the final audience. Isn't it possible that we, too, are performing for unseen spectators, that our delight in the foolishness of what we see may itself be a brand of folly, and that the world we take to be real may be nothing more than a stage set for a divine audience? (xlvi-xlvii)

In Seed, Dan Glass writes of the extraordinary power of viewing Earth from space:

For those who have already experienced it, the beauty of the planet has been an epiphany, eliciting deep concern for Earth's health, a visceral understanding of human "oneness," and clarity about the interconnectedness of things. Unlike those of us here among the trees, they have seen the forest.

And here's where Glass reminded me of McDonald's vision of Shakespeare's plays within plays within (perhaps) plays:

Twenty years ago in his seminal book on the philosophy and psychology of human space exploration, The Overview Effect, Frank White suggested that every transcendence beyond a known realm provides an overview of that realm, and deep insight how it fits into the greater picture. A child leaves the womb, his hometown, his country, each time gaining greater understanding, altering his actions to some degree based on these new experiences and insights, and perhaps becoming a transforming element of society around him (24).

We can't truly know a system from inside it. Only with the distance provided by a Shakespeare or spaceship can we see the bigger picture.

An aside: Glass's last sentence provides one example of Joseph Campbell's "hero's journey" or monomyth.

 

Into the labyrinth of our own selves

Also in the Fall 2006 issue of Parabola is an interview with Karen Armstrong, perhaps the world's most popular scholar of religion and myth. She talks of the human need for mythos:

When a child dies, we want a scientific explanation but that's not all we need. We need some kind of different kind of thinking that helps us deal with the turbulence of our inner world at such a time. Myth is an early form of psychology. There are all these stories about gods going down into the underworld to slaughter demons. We all have to learn how to negotiate our unconscious worlds. We have to go into the labyrinth of our own selves and fight our own monsters.

We've always been aware that there are two ways of approaching truth, one through reason and science and the other through an intuitive knowing. The word mythos comes from the Greek word which means to close the mouth or close the eyes. Mystery and mysticism come from the same root. So they are associated with a sense of darkness, with going into a realm where you don't see very clearly, where things are more obscure and will remain obscure. It is also a realm of silence rather than wordy thought. We approach this kind of knowing in art. At the end of a great symphony or when you've listened to a great poem there's often nothing to say. You're being pushed beyond rational thoughts and distinctions into a silent intuitive space (21-22).

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.

The staircase of life

Joseph Campbell's "monomyth" traces the typical jouney of a mythic hero, leaving home to enter an unfamiliar world, there besting opponents or passing tests, and returning home with gifts. In two dimensions this journey can be represented as a circle—as Campbell does in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

But as I pointed out in my recent post, "Lynn, Lynn," the person who returns home is not the same person who left. (Incidentally, for returning expatriates, that fact can lead to significant "reentry shock" that can be more intense than original "culture shock." My wife, Bette, and I sometimes conduct repatriation training to help people deal with reentry.)

Since the monomythic hero is inevitably changed by his or her journey, we might represent that change by having our circle gradually rise into a third dimension, like one circle in a circular staircase. The hero returns to the place he or she left from, but "higher."

Our life is a series of heroic journeys, sometimes taking a day or less (the very word journey, after all, comes from the French for day). So our life can be represented as a helix, as a climb up a circular staircase.

Lynn, Lynn

Joseph Campbell's hero's journey, or monomyth, is a remarkably good way to describe the learning process. To learn, we must leave the comfort of the familiar, of what we think we know, and enter an unknown territory, a territory that can be frightening. There we are confronted with challenges, even dangers. If we overcome these challenges, we can return "home" with boons, in the form of new knowledge and skills, and apply them to our lives. The traveler who returns home is not the traveler who left it.

A friend and colleague from the Boston area has given me a piece of urban folklore that echoes this point. I report it here merely as a folklorist, with no wish to slander the good folks of Lynn, Massachusetts:

Lynn, Lynn, city of sin,
You never come out the way you went in.

(The illustration above, from Wikipedia, is a postcard from about 1910, showing Lynn's first school house.)

Not path nor friendly clue

Bette and I, along with our friend Bill, are in Stratford, Ontario, for our annual binge of playgoing at the Stratford Festival.

Our first play (of seven) was a minimalist production of John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, at the intimate Tom Patterson Theatre. I had acted in a production while I was in college, but for the past forty years, I hadn't seen or read the play again.

Webster was part of the next generation of English playwrights after Shakespeare, and like many other plays of that generation, Webster's works are dark. (In the film Shakespeare in Love, we see John Webster as a boy, playing with rats.) This production doesn't dodge the play's cruelty, and the chain of severed hand, murdered children, and final strangulations is vivid and chilling.

The play, in ways I had forgotten, is conspicuously aware of the great transitions going on at the time, from medieval to Renaissance, from geocentric to heliocentric models of the solar system, from alchemy to modern science.  Michaelangelo, Galileo, Paracelsus, and other figures of those transitions are alluded to, off-handedly, in the play. And in many ways, the collapse of the Duchess's private world reflects the collapse of larger systems.

The play includes one of the great prophetic speeches in all literature, a speech that may pass us by on the first reading or hearing, but that raises goosebumps when we know what's coming. As the Duchess of Malfi sets out on the metaphoric journey that leads to destruction, she tells her lady in waiting,

Wish me good speed;
For I am going into a wilderness
Where I shall find not path nor friendly clue
To be my guide.