Jesus, Quetzalcoatl, Dionysos - Archetypal yearning

This is a brief summary of a talk I gave in 2006 as part of a yoga and mythology workshop series. It being the holidays and all I though I might share the main points. I hope it is interesting to some readers:

In Southern and Central America there is a mythic figure common to several cultures. He is born of a virgin, ascends into the sky at the end of his time on Earth, promises to return and his symbol is the cross. His name is Quetzalcoatl, which literally translates to "feathered serpent," and when the Spanish conquistadors landed, the natives thought they might be his second coming, what with how they occasionally represented him with fair hair and beard! The Spaniards for their part noticed that the local religion had striking similarities to their own, but not being well versed in symbols and archetypes their interpretation was that the devil had implanted a perverted version of Christianity there to try and drive the conquering sons crazy and lead them from the Lord...



In Ancient Greece we find the story of Dionysos, born of the congress of horny god Zeus and a mortal woman - one version of the story has Zeus kill her and sew the fetus into his thigh until it is ready to be born. Horny and murderous! Dionysos is the god of wheat and wine and he is killed only to rise again from the dead. his followers perform a ritual of bread and wine to remember him.




Death and resurrection is not an uncommon theme in world mythology. It is most often associated with agrarian societies whose lives are tied to the cycles of the earth and who made sacrifices to the earth to ensure the resurrection of Spring after the death of Winter. The spilling of blood upon the land and in the temples went on even into the time of Jesus and there is a way that the evolving archetypal symbolism that he carries represents a once-and-for-all uber sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

Mythology scholar Joseph Campbell tells us that the earliest evidence we have of ritual and myth comes from the Alpine caves about 110 000 years ago in which a cult of the Great Bear existed. As human beings became more empathic and self-reflective we felt terrible anxiety and dread over the fact of our killing in order to live and began to enact rituals and construct myths as containers for this conflict.





Perhaps if we do a ritual honoring the Great Bear god he won't be angry that we kill his children, perhaps he will still send us more so that we can survive. One version of this hunting mythology says that the gods come to visit us in animal bodies but then can't escape to go home. When we kill the animal we set the god free and they are happy...

As agrarian societies developed the emphasis shifted from hunting myths and rituals to fertility myths and rituals and it is in these sacrificial cults that we find the roots of the archetypal constellations that will later give rise to Qutzalcoatl, Dionysos and then Jesus.

What Joseph Campbell calls "the mask of god" keeps evolving and taking on the clothing and the meaning structures of the societies it serves. In one of my favorite quotes from him he says "We wonder what is wrong with our society when we are trying to live by a myth that is 2000 years old from the Middle East ..." Campbell suggested in the early seventies that perhaps a contemporary world-centric mythology could have as it's central symbol the famous "Earthrise" photograph taken by the astronauts who landed on the moon.




Elsewhere he asks:

"What is mythology?

Other people's religion.

What then is religion?

Misunderstood mythology."

The earliest mythic symbols are the sun and the moon, the earth and the sky.

The moon dies every month and after three days is resurrected. The moon is often linked with the snake who sheds it's skin and is likewise reborn. The sun often associated with the lion or other hunters and the antelope or bull that has a crescent moon in it's horns. The sun (hunter) kills the moon and stars (antelope) every morning and they are reborn again at night...

In stories of gods fathering children with mortals we see the yearning for the marriage of the earth and the sky and perhaps the intuition of a next stage of our own evolution.

I find it interesting that in the yogic Chakra system the heart center is called "Anahata" which means "unstruck." I think of an unstruck drum - that beats of it's own accord. Interestingly, the image we know as the Star of David is also found at the heart center, representing upward flowing and downward flowing sky and earth energy. The horizontal and vertical lines of the cross also meet in the heart.

This leads me to an association on a "virgin birth" - an unstruck drum, a birth that is not preceded by the sex act, also the birth of the Buddha, whose myth says that he is born (after another mysterious spirit-impregnation) from his mother's right side at the level of the heart. Compassion strikes me as an emotion that has no ulterior motive and hence arises in this same mysterious way as these symbols...




Perhaps that is the yearning expressed in this collectively dreamed up poetry of the inner life - a yearning for compassionate awakening and altruistic self-actualization. A death and rebirth in the heart of hearts. The divine child of the Winter Solstice born from the womb of one's psyche.


May we keep learning to read the symbols and see them as signposts toward an inner life in healthy, integrated relationship to outer reality....

Pan's Labyrinth: The Archetypal Psyche Unveiled - Part One

In 2006 I wrote two pieces about the magnificent film, Pan's Labyrinth for my blog on the now defunct Gaia.com. These ended up being read over 25 thousand times and being linked to and quoted from in many locations on the internet.

What follows is my initial review of the movie - I have since written part two, which deals more explicitly with the mythic structure and psychological symbolism of the film.




The Plot

Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is a contemporary masterpiece of traditional mythic form. Political repression, family relationships and the mythic psyche all inhabit the canvas that Del Toro paints dark with the palette of the struggle to find meaning and resolution within traumatizing circumstances.

Rurally set in Franco's Spain of the 1940's, the principle story concerns itself with a sickly pregnant mother, Carmen, and her pre-pubescent daughter, our heroine Ofelia. These two have entered the world of the coming infant's father - the archetypically evil Captain Vidal of the fascist army.

Ofelia's real father is a casualty of the war, and her new stepfather is a cruel and inhuman sadist. Carmen is clearly grasping at straws to try and ensure survival for herself, her daughter and the child she is carrying through a very troubled pregnancy. Captain Vidal cares only for the son he imagines is growing in Carmen's womb as a mirror for his pinched and hateful sense of masculine power.

Ofelia takes solace as she has done for some time in her much-read treasure trove of fairy tale books, but as she crosses the threshold into the Captain's domain the line between fantasy and reality begins to blur. What ensues is a near classic unfolding of the stages of the mythic journey as laid out by Joseph Campbell. Don't let the inclusion of the mythic and fairy tale material fool you - this is no typically superficial representation of the inner world, in which magical forces enact a Disney-esque victory over evil for the pure-of-heart true believer. Del Toro restores his mythic motifs to their proper place as the symbolic representations of a psyche struggling to come to terms with traumatic social and familial conditions while forming a nascent sense of self. We are not in Kansas anymore.

This tragically constellated family unit is installed in an old mill that has been turned into a small military base to try and squash a Red rebellion from the hills. The Captain has a huge stone basement room to himself, where he spends his non-combatant time in reverie with his phonograph, booze, straight-razor, shaving mirror, and the repaired watch his father smashed at the moment of his death so that his son would know the time and "honorable" nature of his demise. The expendable Carmen is near death in a bedroom upstairs. The kindly and noble country doctor is under instructions to save the baby at all costs. The proud and unbroken housekeeper, Mercedes, and the Doctor are in secret collusion with the rebels.

The Mythology

Meanwhile the aptly named Ofelia is interacting with the mythic dimension of the psyche as she struggles to survive in impossible circumstances. She becomes immersed in the fantasy of herself as a reborn princess from a world where "there is no suffering or pain." In a meeting with the Faun - a most well-realized and captivating supernatural trickster, she agrees to take on three tasks that will take us into the heart of darkness on her quest to be reunited with her lost and kingly father.

The creatures of the mythic fairy tale realm are unsurpassed in their representation, and Del Toro is playing a supremely hip and psychologically savvy jazz with his storyline here, but it is in the resonances with real world torture, cruelty and loss of innocence that he strikes his most telling (and contemporary) chords.

Pan's Labyrinth dances nymph-like, or perhaps maenad-like (the Dionysian imagery works here too) between inner and outer reality, civilization and barbarity, the loss of innocence and the perverse quest for power, nature and the unnatural repression of our humanity. Ofelia is as appropriately lost and fallible in her fantasy world as she is in reality, and her guides carry an unpredictability that is sometimes as scary as the monsters she faces.




The Psychology

It is here that I would like to introduce the work of extraordinary Jungian therapist and theorist Donald Kalsched. His book The Inner World of Trauma; Archetypal Defenses of the Personal Spirit uses myth and fairy tale as a reflecting pool to witness both the healing genius and the potential for pathology in the traumatized psyche.

Kalsched uses (amongst several others) the myth of Eros and Psyche as well as the Rapunzel fairy tale to illustrate his "self-care system" hypothesis of how "when human resources are not available, archetypal resources appear", and how the Protector figure in classic tales as well as contemporary psyches has also the double face of being the Jailer. In other words, the very defense that initially saves you from unbearable pain becomes the limiting factor to resolving the healing process and participating fully in a real life-in-the-world.



This is no small insight for a world that has lost its appropriate relationship to both the psyche and its dream-language of mythic symbols. Too often, as in the case of both fundamentalist religion and New Age spirituality, this potent symbolic language is misinterpreted as literal information or as a factual map to a world in which we escape the trials of human maturity and depth. In this case we are still trapped in the dissociative fantasy defense against trauma, instead of making the complete journey into the rich imaginative connection between the inner and outer worlds that allows a fulfilling, though imperfect, engaged human life.

This theme is echoed through the several stories Kalsched utilizes, and once grasped can be seen again and again, particularly in powerful movies like The Piano, the under-appreciated The Cell, The Fountain, Jacob's Ladder, and Fearless. It is here too in Pan's Labyrinth.

Here again is Vincent d'Onofrio's contemporary Pan from The Cell. Here's Doug Jones' Pan from the film in question. Both of these mythic character depictions carry the Archetype of Protector/Jailer of the inner-world. Here too is Sam Neil from his similar but less mythically-themed role in The Piano.

Consider this kind of work in total alignment with a 21st Century Spirituality that concerns itself with the intellect, the psyche, and the life lived in authentic struggle with reality. The movie should make you shudder more than a little- it is about the confrontation with what Jung called the Shadow - and that aint' easy for anyone, but it is the road toward a more integrated, liberated, grounded and spiritually awake self. Consider it, too, a powerful antidote to such patty-cake "spiritual" fare as The Secret and What the Bleep.

In a forthcoming piece, I will enjoy unpacking Ofelia's mythic journey and comparing it to some other myths, fairy tales and movies to elucidate Kalsched's theme of the self-care system and how the psyche deals archetypally with trauma.


For now i leave you with my soulful recommendations for those interested in life-changing and mind-opening cinema:



Pan's Labyrinth
The Fountain
Babel
Fearless
The Piano
The Cell
Jacob's Ladder {here is William Blake's painting of the same name inspired by a Biblical myth.}

The Distance Between Spiritual Experience and Interpretation

The Distance Between Spiritual Experience and Interpretation
Posted on Feb 3rd, 2008 by Julian






This is a favorite subject of mine - the distance between experience and interpretation. It is undeniable that human beings in all times and cultures have been hardwired for spiritual experiences – some of course more than others. But is this proof of any of the multiple metaphysical belief systems that we tend, I would suggest, to superimpose onto the experience?

The central difficulty here is that the altered state of a spiritual experience is so convincing (and so important, beautiful and meaningful in its own right) and we are so suggestible during and afterward, that it is almost ubiquitous to be convinced that the experience is undeniable (or at the very least strong) proof of whatever belief system the ensuing interpretation is coming from - when actually the two may be barely related!

Humans love to go into altered states. There is not a culture in the history of the planet that has not come up with some way of fermenting, drinking, eating, fasting, dancing, sweating, drumming, smoking, snorting, chanting, breathing, meditating, stretching, sensory depriving or sensory overloading its way into altered states of consciousness.

In addition some people have more labile neurophysiology than others – be they epileptic, hypo-glycemic, bipolar, schizophrenic or merely garden-variety creative, empathic types with thin ego-boundaries.

Thankfully we have developed an ever-deepening understanding of some of the more extreme dysfunctions of the brain and have ways of diagnosing and treating these problems that are more effective than ever before. One cannot help but be curious about the similarities between say religious and schizophrenic statements about reality and wonder how much of the difference is one of degree, and to what extent the vocabulary of experience being used is coming from the same part of the brain.

How do we make sense of the fact that for both a) the person in thegrips of an ardent religious conversion as well as b) someone experiencing clinical insanity, the novel and metaphysical revelations being described are not only convincing but are held as extremely important, often not only for the individual in the grip of the experience, but for all of humanity?

I want to suggest that this is an extreme form of an activity of our physiology and its related interior - the psyche, that at its best can be positively transformational, healing and creative and at its worse can be fundamentalist, violent and crazy.


Three Layers of Spiritual Experience

I think it’s interesting to think about this phenomenon in terms of three layers:

1) The universal (with varying degrees of intensity) human proclivity toward not only experiencing altered states but also towards finding those altered states to some extent meaningful and significant.

2) The personal stage of development from which one
a) Interacts with or “co-creates “ the experience and
b) Interprets the experience – both based on one’s psychological profile.

3) The socio-cultural context within which the experience both
a) Occurs in the first place and
b) Is then interpreted

I think too that there is a powerful relationship between this proclivity toward altered states and the dream-like imaginative activity of creating mythology. The language of myth is one of metaphor and symbol - I think of it as a cultural dream. Myth is no less significant, numinous and meaningful than a potent personal dream or powerfully transporting piece of art.

Dream, art and myth all come form the same place; the deep unconscious psyche, and it is in altered states of consciousness that the pathway is opened between the conscious mind, with its steward the ego and the unconscious mind with, at its center, what Jung thought of as "the Self." I also like the word "soul" in this place.

So we find ourselves in a complex matrix of meanings, conditioning, emotional associations, instincts, primal forces and numinous energies whenever we deeply interact with dreams, high art, mythology and the altered states that give us access to the same layers of human consciousness.

Myths have always been a way to explain what we do not understand, a way to try and answer the unanswerable big questions about how the world began, what happens after we die, why things happen the way they do, what the purpose of existence is, where evil comes from etc..

This does not mean that cultures that dream up myths necessarily think of them metaphorically! The story-telling is taken as literally true when it is created, and most often what we see is that the myth is believed to have been "revealed" to the shaman or the holy man, or the wise elder or told to them by an animal, a spirit, an angel, god himself. But the point is - in a manner of speaking, the collective psyche dreams up the story. It comes from the deep unconscious and as such, just as with personal dreams, it speaks the language of symbol, metaphor, and archetype. I think of this as being the "soul language."

(As an aside I want to add that Joseph Campbell called myths "masks of god." He said that the high function of the "mask" was to help us see beyond it to what cannot ever be represented concretly.)


Three Functions of Myth

For the moment, let's say that there are three functions that myth serves:

1) Offering a poetic vocabulary with which to approach a state of awe, wonder and reverence for the world we live in, consciousness and life itself.
2) Reducing existential anxiety by explaining the unknowable and containing the fear of death.
3) Creating a shared psychic cosmology that is a container of belonging and belief for the culture.

These three functions are directly related to the above three layers, so let's put them together:

1) The universal tendency toward altered state/spiritual experiences needs a vocabulary with which to express and explore the largely non-verbal, non-rational states.
2) One of the ways we manage existential anxiety and psychological conflicts is often through spiritual or religious belief, petitioning, superstition, self-soothing etc.
3) The powerful sense of belonging, identity and taboo enacted by the socio-cultural context creates a convincing template within which the spiritual experience or altered state should be interpreted.

In other words there are reasons that Catholic nuns do not have visions of Avalokiteshvara on their deathbeds and that Tibetan monks don't have visions of the Blessed Virgin under similar circumstances. There are reasons there are "no atheists in foxholes," or that under conditions of extreme stress otherwise non-religious people may find themselves praying for a situation to turn out a certain way. There are reasons that the "soul language" that gets so sliced and diced into word-salad by schizophrenics tugs on our sleeves with its appearance of deep cryptic meaning. There are reasons that when people have powerful conversion experiences, open up emotionally, commune deeply with nature, take mind-bending drugs, experience intense trauma, or other altered state experiences they tend to come out the other side with a meaning that fits a fairly predictable socialized interpretation and that can often be seen as serving a particular personal psychological purpose - for better or worse.

(Of course this gets trickier in the multicultural/postmodern world in which (particularly in the West) there are now ever evolving sub-cultures that often draw threads of interpretation and belief from multiple sources - but though the collage may be more complex, the functions remain detectable and demonstrable. I must also add as an aside here that there is a level of radical spiritual experience in which one is actively going beyond acculturated metaphysical beliefs, experiencing revelations that subvert one's psychological defense structure and that make a strong enough impression on the right kind of psyche that the second two functions above are inactivated in the service of the first. This is most often the exception to the rule and for me marks the difference between transformational and translative spirituality...)


Cross-Cultural Examples

A 12-year-old boy in the Bible belt falls on the floor and begins speaking in tongues - he knows this is proof of the Holy Spirit and gives his life even more fully to Jesus. He vows to become a missionary in Africa.

An 18 year old girl on Ecstasy in London gazes in rapt absorption at the dance floor, her heart blowing open, mind stunned by the beauty of ordinary people and the power of music to unite people into a single moving organism of love and celebration, she is convinced that the Universe has led her precisely to this moment and that the Wicca initiation she received from her aunt the week before has connected her to her destiny.

The 22 year old couple hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains stand at the look-out point and breathe deeply as they do partner yoga stretches, the vast blue sky above them, the sun gleaming off the leaves of the trees and the warm rocks, they know without a shadow of a doubt that they are soul mates and the earth is a conscious being radiating love and wisdom at them.

The 29 year old woman goes to darshan with Amachi, the hugging saint. Her psychic reader has told her that she clearly has past-lives with the guru and that intersecting with her energetically in this life will help her to overcome the pain she feels at a failed relationship and recent abortion. In the arms of Amachi she feels accepted, filled with love, recharged energetically and blown away at the accuracy of the psychic's "information." What's more - gazing into the eyes of the guru she knew without a shadow of a doubt that God forgave her abortion, that it was the right thing to do and that she would have another chance to be a mother when the Universe was aligned.

The 35 year old Muslim man finally makes his pilgrimage to Mecca. A thousand men circle that most holy of stones - the Kaaba. This is the most important moment in his life and he is filled with awe, tears streaming down his face, he is caught up in the power of the presence of the prophet of the inevitability of his own destiny. He renews his commitment to bringing Islamic rule to the whole world for the glory of Allah and to donate as much of his income as he can to the cause of removing Israel from the face of the planet.

The 42-year-old homeless woman is transfixed, staring into the window of the restaurant. The customers are uncomfortable with her intent gaze and do not realize that she is looking at her own reflection. They are even less aware that she is seeing the Virgin Mary reflected back at her. She offers her unconditional healing love to all the world and knows that she must come again each morning to this spot until the police come and tell her to move, at which point she becomes again the bitter, persecuted crazy lady screaming foul curse words at the cops.

The 55-year-old therapist's young son is killed in a car wreck. As he walks past the cafe where his son loved to hang out and sometimes played his music at the open mic night he hears Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah" coming through the open door. He stops in his tracks and weeps. He weeps for all the things he never said and for all the things his son will never do, he asks forgiveness for he ways in which he knows he failed him. When the song reaches it climax he feels a soft breeze on his skin that covers him in gooseflesh and imagines his son's voice singing a low harmony on the chorus. He tells his wife and she is sure this was a communication from the spirit world, but he doesn't think it was anymore or less than a powerful moment of grief, gratitude, forgiveness and expansion.


Conclusion

I suggest that it isn't enough to merely affirm (though we should do this at the very least) these experiences in a non-ethnocentric way - I think that if we want to a) understand, facilitate, and integrate them better and b) keep creating more and more effective world-centric humanistic contexts within which to more adequately interpret the experiences, we need to tease apart the mystical, psychological and socio-cultural layers of the experience.

When we are able to do so, we can see ourselves more clearly, use the power of the experience more effectively and side step some of the classic traps that too often make spiritual experience the domain of superstition, fundamentalism, psychological denial and rationalization, cultish belief, ethnocentric nationalism and basic delusion about reality.

So far the laudable contemporary liberal desire to be affirming of all forms of spiritual experience does not do this teasing apart and so has a tendency to uncritically embrace the cultural baggage and defensive psychological distortions along with the universal sense of awe and deep opening.

Of course, on the other side, the laudable modern desire to be rational tends to throw out the baby of the potent and meaningful experience with the bathwater of the superstitious cultural baggage and the rather obvious defensive psychological distortions.

Both of these impulses are based in partial truths that end up missing the point. Finding out which part is true and which is mistaken is essential if the two are to be integrated.

The fact that all human beings are wired to some extent for experiences like these and that in certain cases such experiences can be positively transformational to our lives, in no way makes any of the culture bound and anxiety reducing interpretations any more true in the literal sense.

My sense of it is that we need to be able to differentiate a) what is truly universal in our physiology and it's experiential counterpart the deep psyche and even in the general archetypal form and themes that underlie the specific content of the mythic/metaphysical interpretation, from b) the interpretation itself.

Its a tricky task but one that is quite doable if we are rational and honest with ourselves.

Its about picking apart metaphor from reality, literal from figurative, defensive from expansive, conditioned from transcendent etc, in an attempt to understand both the meaningful trans-rational power of spiritual experiences and the ways in which their pre-rational interpretation can be deceptive.

To forego (or fudge) this task out of multi-cultural PC politeness, sentimental attachment to the supernatural, or soupy relativist confusion leaves us spiritually and intellectually impoverished and no closer to understanding this remarkable and central human concern.

it is possible to forge a 21st Century Spirituality that harnesses the exquisite transformational beauty and power of spiritual experiences without the non-essential cultural baggage, metaphysical belief and reality distorting interpretations.

If we:

a) Enact an inquiry-based practice that initiates us experientially into the universal physiological and psychological mind-body energetics, state shifts and stage-wise growth,
b) Maintain a space for shadow-work and other forms of psychological process/awareness and
c) Keep integrating and developing rational cognition and critical thinking,

we increase the possibilities of reaping the benefits of spiritual experience and side-stepping some of the long-standing drawbacks.