An abstract from the Marion Woodman keynote speech at the 3rd Annual Women & Power Conference .

Marion Woodman
Marion Woodman is a widely read and acclaimed author, a leader in women’s spirituality and feminine consciousness, and a Jungian analyst. Internationally acclaimed for her work as a “bridge builder between the male and female worlds,” the former high school English and drama teacher has, in the 25 years since she enrolled in Zurich’s C.G. Jung Institute, earned a name as a groundbreaking analyst with a rare understanding of the role of the feminine in bringing about personal and cultural transformation.

In Woodman’s presence, the often enigmatic world of Jungian archetypal psychology becomes accessible to anyone, and especially to women who are on a quest for wholeness. Woodman believes that centuries of “patriarchal thinking” have stripped the soul from the inner and outer lives of individuals and in the world. To recover the soul, we must engage with the complex shadow world of the unconscious and go beyond absolute, either/or thinking to embrace the “dance of opposites.”

The publication of the Red Book (RB) has rekindled much interest in Jung and his world. People are fascinated with its imagery and often inexplicably moved by it. What is it about this book?  Many people feel its soulfulness, literally, when they first hold it in their hands. The Red Book is in the truest sense of the word awesome. But what to do other than admire it? Who has access to Jung’s at times elusive knowledge? Is it only the world of Jungian analysts who inherit Jung’s world? That would be terrible.  Jung would abhor that thought.

Are those who have experienced an in-depth Jungian analysis his rightful heirs? Maybe. There is a lot to be said about working closely, intimately with someone who has walked the walk before. There are plenty of wonderful Jungian analysts out there. But unfortunately psychoanalysis has been assimilated by the medical model and has lost, by and large, its connection to soul. It is a shame. Psychology is the science of the soul, but it has deteriorated into a mere management of symptoms for the most part. Mainstream psychology has forgotten that symptoms are messages from the soul.

Jungian work is soul work.  There may be other ways than the traditional route. Jung did not want us to emulate him. Psychoanalysis was originally conceived as a new “Weltanschauung, a new world view, a new way of experiencing reality. Jung was particularly interested in rescuing the soul out of the clutches of what he experienced as a stifling dogmatic Christianity.

In the book “Who owns Jung?” ( by Ann Casement), the analyst Joe Cambray answers the question with “the one who emerges from Jung”. What does emerge for you out of an encounter with Jung? Where does Jung take you? What does Jung mean to you? When we look for meaning we get in touch with the soul.

Jung held on to his soul. He held on to his longings and his felt sense of wonder beyond the visible world. He held on to his visions outside the world of reason. He maintained an unwavering trust in her. “My path is light” his soul says and Jung answers in his vision, “Do you call light what we men call the worst darkness?” “I have become a monstrous animal form for which I have exchanged my humanity”, Jung reports from the same vision. His trust is tested to the brink. He becomes angry at his soul.

I wonder if anyone has ever experienced that when trying to be truthful to oneself, following one’s path, one ends up in a spot where one did not want to be at all? When self-reflection only conjures up accusatory self attacking images? How can one have trust, faith, in an elusive guidance from the invisible world that has lead one so astray? The rational mind will say that one has lost it, one may feel insanity knocking on one’s door. Jung did. “My thoughts were murder and the fear of death spread like poison everywhere in the body” Jung writes. He knows a murder needs to be committed.The king must die, long live the king.

Jung relives here the archetype of the year king. A cyclical life-death-rebirth deity that represents a pattern of creation and renewal in nature. The king that needed to die was Jung’s idea of reality . “So the reality is meaning and absurdity”, he realizes, and he captures the circling movement of the archetype of the year king as it enters his consciousness with the following words: “Noon is a moment, midnight is a moment, morning comes from night, evening turns into night, but evening comes from the day and morning turns into day. So meaning is a moment, and a transition from absurdity to absurdity, and absurdity only a transition from meaning to meaning.”

The task  is to tolerate the “absurdity”, when life shows us a face we don’t understand. To ask for meaning even then. Especially then. The challenge is to move with the spiraling twirl of our psyche. To let the king of our identifications die. To welcome the newness even if it still feels utterly insane. To trust nature. One’s own nature. That there is a central axis that holds the universe together and that there is also a central axis that holds us together. That we become an embodiment of the tree of life.In a few hours the darkness will collapse in itself and light will move in.  Winter solstice.  Just a moment in the dance. But a moment of victory. New Life! Rekindle joy!

I have had the fortune to see and hold in my hands a new publication: The Red Book of C.G. Jung. It is a large format, coffee-table type book of one of the 20th century’s most important psychologist/philosophers. Here are some pictures from amazon.com:

I have been drooling over this book since I first heard it was being published back in October. The Red Book resembles an illuminated text, like many early bibles and prayer books, or the Book of Kells. It is also a dream book. Here’s the caption from the amazon.com product description:

“[...]The most influential unpublished work in the history of psychology. When Carl Jung embarked on an extended self-exploration he called his “confrontation with the unconscious,” the heart of it was The Red Book, a large, illuminated volume he created between 1914 and 1930. Here he developed his principle theories—of the archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the process of individuation—that transformed psychotherapy from a practice concerned with treatment of the sick into a means for higher development of the personality.”

A friend of mine brought it to one of our classes one evening and let us all look through it. All that did was further my desire for this book. The price is a bit steep at $195.00 USD, but it’s on sale for half off on amazon right now. I cannot wait to get this and will post a full review when I do.

I just returned from a New York pilgrimage to get an audience with the actual object: The Red Book of C.G. Jung. Every Wednesday, the Rubin Museum turns a page , so I got to see two actual spreads. Plates 104-105 and 106-107.  Stunning! The majority of the exhibition includes high-resolution facsimiles, pencil sketches, and a few other original paintings in the style of the Book’s plates.  I was quite taken with two small chalk pastel landscapes.  Jung was a very talented artist of high dexterity. He possessed an extraordinary ability to capture light.

It may take the rest of my life to get through the Red Book. Then, maybe, I will understand something of it, and therefore of myself. Jung’s ability to connect to and describe the inner workings of the soul are unparalleled. Reading his biography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I somehow felt less alone in the world by learning of his visions and how he used the mandala as a tool for decoding his inner experience.

Mysterious Creative Powers— a small painting from the exhibition, in the style of the Red Book illuminations

The exhibition is quite small, but The Red Book is displayed center stage, behind bullet-proof glass. The lighting is low, glowing. It definitely has a talismanic quality. I just stood in front of it wondering what hubris it takes to commission a book like this in the first place?

“Yes, I’d like to order a really, really big, 500-page, 100% cotton paper, hand-bound, leather book. And while you’re at it, let’s make that RED leather. Oh, and can you embellish it with lots of gold foil stamping, and why not add a little rose border on the edges too. “

Now imagine— you have the giant leather tome with its gold embossing and thick vanilla pages— already a masterpiece— in front of you, and you have to start drawing and painting on the pristine pages. Page One— Deep breath. Begin…

What many people do not realize is that the book is carefully planned. It is not a “stream of consciousness” effort. The texts were written in several smaller Black Books, then transcribed, carefully edited, and finally, typed up with carbon copies over a period of many years.  Jung worked on the Red Book at night after his daily tasks and family responsibilities were complete.

A sketch of Jung's early mandala "Systema Munditotius" from Black Book 5

After years of  preparation and pencil sketches, the gouache and calligraphy pens were employed. It took him 16 years to complete the final illuminated manuscript. On the scale of the Book of Kells, Jung’s Red Book work is absolutely precise—an illuminated manuscript for the new millenium.  You can purchase a reproduction of the Red Book through Amazon and Barnes and Noble, but alas, it is temporarily out of stock.

Here is a Review from today’s New York Times, with some good images of the exhibition and examples from the Book.

Once a week Arnie and I convene at Bubby Rose’s Bakery & Café to enjoy the intimacy of friendship. We pay attention to whatever is weighing on the other’s heart-mind by deep listening and compassionate problem-solving. Our time together is marked by kindness and honesty. Once pressing business has been attended to, our conversations roam freely from topic to topic: politics, writing, loving, ageing, relationships, Zen, movies, women, money, art, and the subtle delights for which a café is the ideal venue.

For much of my life I’ve preferred the company of women; hanging with men has made me feel ill at ease. Now in “the afternoon of life” (C.G. Jung), such categorical boundaries are becoming increasingly blurred. As we leave the bakery, we catch a Saying on the chalkboard: It is futile to resist.

                                                                                   Amen.

image: en.easyart.com

Psychosis is the great other in Western civilization. Insanity, craziness, off-the-wallness is what frightens us the most. And for good reason, for one it is terrifying. And if that were not enough, we also run the risk of being immediately (over)medicated, hospitalized and stigmatized with that awful descriptive of having a “mental illness”. To be fair, there are of course psyches that are so fragile that they are hopelessly and helplessly flooded by what Jung refers to in the Red Book (RB) as the spirit of the depth. Much of this individual suffering can be alleviated by proper medication and designated caring environments. The psychiatric wards of most hospitals these days are not “caring environments”, but the problem is a systemic one and generally not the fault of the well intentioned but overworked and misinformed personnel of these wards. But the needs of this relatively small group of the population are not what I am addressing here. I am talking about you and me. The chances are that if you are reading this, you qualify for this much larger segment of the population, the reasonably well functioning average neurotic. What we generally deny is that we also have psychotic pockets in some of the more hidden corners of our psyche. Often a source of great fear and shame, these raw, uncontrollable spots in our inner landscape may also connect us to a divine, transpersonal reality.

A good working definition of psychosis is that the boundaries between inner and outer world have become blurry or non-existent. Remember the last time you completely lost it? Had a melt-down? Were so caught up in a personal complex that outer reality became skewed? This is where the other side begins. No problem as long as you can bounce back.  The ability to recuperate from a moment, or days, or weeks, or even years of insanity is the real marker for psychic health and not having no knowledge of madness and therefore seeing (projecting) it only onto others. “It is unquestionable: if you enter into the world of the soul, you are like a madman, and a doctor would consider you to be sick”, Jung writes in the RB.

“I am seized by fear, but I know I must go in” he says, “the spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing”. The descent into the depths can be maddening and dangerous, but what is remarkable is that Jung also sees a form of madness looming when a person never leaves the surface. In other words, when a person is entirely identified with waking life and ego consciousness. In Jung’s words, “the spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly, balance is godly”. There is great wisdom in these three words, “balance is godly”. There is a time to be lost and there is a time to find oneself again. We fall apart and we are put together again. We breathe in and we breathe out.  To accept the good and the bad.  Life and death. Each cycle leaving us slightly changed. The secret of transformation lies in moving to this rhythm, consciously. “Depth and surface should mix so that new life can develop”, Jung writes.

Consciousness is related to awareness, but also to meaning. Without finding meaning in events, especially in our mad episodes, whether they take the form of a suicidal depression, a panic attack or an outburst worth a wrathful god, no light, no consciousness can be wrested out of it. “The meaning of events is the way of salvation that you create”, Jung writes.

The editor of the RB, Sonu Shamdasani, remarks in a footnote that what Jung is developing here in the Liber Primus is the connection between individual and collective psychology. What that means is that if we, as Jung did, look inward, give credence to our dreams, visions, fantasies and moods, when we dive into them versus running away, we will unavoidably come in contact with the forces of the collective unconscious and that can  be terrifying and overwhelming. “My knowledge has a thousand voices, an army roaring like a lion, the air trembles when they speak, and I am their defenseless sacrifice”, Jung writes.

What is being sacrificed here? Jung suggests that it is our own head that needs to fall. Growth and new life are subjectively experienced as something most dreadful and even evil, like our own execution. “You thought you knew the abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it”, Jung writes. Our head is also sacrificed, when we let go of our judgment, when we accept experiences for what they are: expressions of the soul’s life regardless of how psychotic they might be. I know this is easier said than done, but Jung for one has walked the talk before us. The Red Book is proof, it can be done.

We cannot learn without pain.
Aristotle (384-322 BC), Greek philosopher.

There is no coming to consciousness without pain.
C. G. Jung (1875-1961), Swiss psychiatrist.

A Contribution To The

ERBzine Library Project

A Review Of

SHE

by

H. Rider Haggard

Review by R.E. Prindle

Part IV and end:

Herself Portrayed

     The idea of a twenty-two hundred year old woman patiently waiting for the reincarnation of a man she had murdered in that far off time is in itself an extraordinary concept.  As an imaginative flight of fancy very likely Rider Haggard can be seen as its originator.  Burroughs would borrow the notion twenty-seven years later in his The Eternal Lover when he reverses the sexes and has a cave man asleep for millennia wake to find his reincarnted woman.  Since then variations on the theme have become quite common.

     She, or Ayesha, was a powerful image of a woman.  C.G. Jung saw her as the personification of his Anima theory.  Haggard drew on many personal and historical details to create her.  Ayesha was titled She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.  As a child Haggard had a doll to which he gave that name.  The doll must have represented his mother.  If he invested characteristics of his mother into Ayesha then she must have been both warm and loving and cold and imperious.  Over all one gets the impression that she was not particularly loving.  Thus, Ayesha, while appearing to be in love with Leo/Kallicrates is nevertheless imperious, demanding and self-centered. In her only real display of afftection she kisses Leo on the forehead, as Haggard says, like a mother.   As Haggard says of Meriamun in The World’s Desire, her love was not so much for her lover but an expression of her own vanity.

     Haggard represents her as a living corpse in white funereal garments, completely shrouded.  She has a strange accoutrement in the serpent belt with two heads facing each other.  This is  close to the caduceus.  Perhaps Haggard had no ideaq of what the symbol meant in 1886 but by 1890 he had come up with an explanation.  In The World’s Desire Queen Meriamun of Egypt keeps something she calls the Ancient Evil  in a box.   The Evil is a small blob.  When she warms it in her bosom it grows.   World’s Desire pp. 144-45:

          Thrice she breathed upon it, thrice she whispered, “Awake! Awake! Awake!”

     And the first breath she breathed the Thing stirred and sparkled.  The second time that she breathed it undid its shining folds and reared its head to her.  The third time that she breathed it slid from her bosom to the floor, then coiled itself about her feet and grew as grows a magician’s magic tree.

     Greater it grew and greater yet, and as it grew it shone like a torch in a tomb, and wound itself about the body of Meriamun, wrapping her in its fiery folds till it reached her middle.  Then it reared its head on high, and from its eyes there flowed a light like the light of a flame, and lo! its face was the face of a fair woman- it was the face of Meriamun!

     Now face looked on face, and eyes glared on eyes.  Still as a white statue of the Gods stood Meriamun the Queen, and all about her form and in and out of her dark hair twined the flaming snake.

     At length the Evil spoke- spoke with a human voice, with the voice of Meriamun, but in the dead speech of a dead people!

     “Tell me my name,” it said.

     “Sin is the name,”  answered Meriamun the Queen.

     “Tell me whence I came.”  it said again.

     “From the evil within me.”  answered Meriamun.

     “Tell me where I go.”

     “Where I go there thou goest, for I have war and thee in my breast and thou art twined about my heart.”

     This quote gives an idea of what the snake belt worn by Ayesha signifies.

          Of signficance while Meriamun is dealing in magic Ayesha denies all connection with the art saying she utilizes nature.  She doesn’t use the word science but nature; nature would include psychology.  She herefore draws on natural processes discovered but not scientific processes exposed.  Thus when she kills her rival Ustane she does it by untilizing electro-magnetism, somehow using her own electro-magnetism  to negate Ustane’s thus extinguishing her life force.  We have then an example of tele-kinesis- action at a distance.  As I’ve noted in other essays tele-kinesis was amongt an array ofr mental powers thought to reside in the unconscious being investigated by the Society For Psychic Research.  Thus Haggard, probably through Lang is up on the latest psychic developments.

     The ability to kill by telekinesis places a moral burden on Ayesha.  If one agrees that the use of such a power may be necessary the question arises of when it may be misused.  It would seem that the killing of a sexual rival was an inappropriate use, so the warring good and evil heads of her snake belt refers to the moral dilemma Ayesha faces.

      Her belt seems somewhat different than that of Queen Meriamun of The World’s Desire.  The latter having accepted the aid of the Ancient Evil was committed to evil being unable to remove the belt.  There seems to be an element of volition remaining to Ayesha.  She is not ‘possessed.’  Of course Ayesha began her life some thousand years after Meriamun so perhaps psychology was somewhat further evolved at that time or evolvedwith her over her two thousand year life span.

      Indeed, a topic of discussion Haggard introduces shouldn’t be dimissed lightly.  That topic is the age old discussion of whether good can come from evil and evil from good.  This is indeed a dilemma as bad results can arise from good intentions and vice versa.  There is a serious side here.

     Ayesha is pure irresistable beauty.  Once she shows her face no man can resist her.  She glories in this power.  In The World’s Desire of four years hence Haggard will separate good and evil making  Meriamun represent evil while Helen, the world’s desire, is all good.

     Holly is an interesting character who may be a back hand slap at the concept of evolution.  Holly also makes this the story of a beauty and a beast.  Holly is described as having a low forehead with a hairline growing out of his eyebrows, further his beard and his hairline meet.  He is said to have a hugely broad chest and shoulders with extra long arms, perhaps down to his knees although this is not stated.  What we have in Holly then is the Wolf Man combined with King Kong.   Monstrous indeed.

     In contrast Leo Vincey is a Greek god, a sort of Apollo.  As Ayesha is irresistable to men Leo seems likewise to be irresistable to women.  Indeed, he was married to Ustane within minutes of arriving in Kor.  He appears to have sincerely liked Ustane even though on sighting Ayesha’s face he too loved her.  Ustane was a rival for a portion of Leo’s affections  so Ayesha cut off her electrical supply.

     Of several truly dramatic scenes in this spectacularly well constructed story a very dramatic one is when Leo confronts his twenty-two hundred year old incarnation 0f Kallicrates.  Haggard doesn’t dwell on Leo’s understanding of this strange phenomenon although from the potsherd and his father’s letter he must have been convinced of the truth.  Strangely he doesn’t ask Ayesha for an account of this earlier life, nor how it was that she came to Egypt from Yemen to interfere in his romance with Amenartas.

     Haggard and Lang were aware of the early history of Yemen from whence Ayesha as a pure Semite came.  She was pre-Christian, although not pre-Jewish,  of some ancient Arabic religious beliefs.  How she got to Egypt is never disclosed or how she came into conflict with the Egyptian princess Amenartas for Kallicrate’s affections.

     Ayesha merely confronts Leo as the neo-Kallicrates without any preparation.  A year or so to get to know her and become accustomed to her face might have been nice.  Although, Leo weas married within minutes of arrival in Kor and was apparently satisfied with his wife.  He was a pretty adaptable guy.

     At any rate Ayesha rushes him into immortality and while tomorrow may be a long, long time, eternity is even longer.  One might want to consider a moment about a relationship of that duration.  Nor does she adequately prepare Leo’s mind for the ordeal of fire that she wants him to go through to become immortal.  Twenty-two hundred years of waiting had done little to improve her patience.

     Haggard has put everything he has into this story.  He was granted clear vision only once in his life and he took advantage of it.  In later years he was frequently asked why he didn’t write another story as good as She.  His reply was that such a story may only come once in a man’s lifetime.  The concentration and focus probably will never return again.  While Allan Quatermain, his third successive attempt to create a lost civilization was on the weak side I would argue that Treasure of the Lake come close to She.

     So, the four of them set out for the place of the fire of life.  Masterful effects.  High in the mountains there is a gigantic balancing rock, a huge mushroom type cap balanced on a spire.  It would seems that Zane Grey was also greatly affected by She as Riders Of The Purple Sage  hews very close to She.   A narrow ledge of rock extends out opposite with a gap of fifteen feet.  To cross this gap with high winds howling through, a plank carried by the ever patient Job has to be lowered across the gap.  No mean task I’m sure, with only one chance of getting it right.  Once in place, thousands of feet above the gorge each has to walk from side to side; plus they have only a few minutes for all four to get over during a single beam of light from the setting sun.

     Fortunately all four make it crossing the balancing rock to descend into a cave leading to the bowels of the mountain.   There an eternal flame that ensures the life of the planet rumbles by every so often.  Twenty-two hundred years before Ayesha had bathed in this fire which following esoteric doctrines had burned away her gross, earthly, moral impurities making her essentially, pure spirit.

     A famous incident of the process is recounted of the goddess Demeter in her travels after the abduction of her daughter Persephone by Hades.  Coming to Eleusis Demeter in her form of old crone was taken in by King Celeus and his wife Metaneira.  As a reward for her kind treatment Demeter set about to make their infant son Demophon immortal.  Thus each night she held him over the hearth fire to burn away his mortal impurities.  Surprised one night by a startled mother, Metaneira, the process was disrupted so that Demophon retained mortal impurities and failed to attain to godhood.

     In this sense then the fire that maintained the life of the Earth traveled a route through this mountain at the center of the Earth.  It appeared something like Old Faithful at Yellowstone periodically.  When it swept by, of one stood in the flame it burned away one’s mortal impurities leaving one, it is to be assumed, wholly Spiritual.  All the materiality was gone. 

     Spirituality and materiality are still being discussed today.  Some talk of Spirit as though it exists while the materialists aver that all so-called spirituality is a seeming effect of materiality.  I am of the latter school of thought.  Oneself is all there is, there is nothing more.  The effect of spirituality is nothing more than a mirage created by intellect and consciousness which is entirely material.  It is all reduced to psychology which is a description of material existence.

     In Haggard’s story it is clear that Ayesha having lost her materiality to the flames is purely spiritual.  This is going to cause her problems as she steps into the flames the second time.

     The flame passes by while Leo dithers.  Impatient for Leo to assume immortality Ayesha strips, as the flames will flame the material garments about her but not her body.  As the flame comes around again Ayesha eagerly stands in its way.  However having been once purified it is good for eternity.  The second time is disastrous.  Perhaps spiritually dessicated by the double dose Ayesha begins to wither devasted even in her death throes by her loss of beauty.  Love in vain.

     Job is so horrified he dies of fright leaving Leo and Holly alone.

     The story for all intents is over but Haggard takes a dozen pages or so to get his heroes out of the caves and back to civilization.

     Ayesha’s existence wasn’t extinguished.  Her dying words were that She would return.  Room left for the sequel which not surprisingly was called The Return Of She appeared in 1906.

     Haggard hit the groove sharp as a knife in this incredibly well devised and executed story.  One will find evidences of it strewn all through Burroughs’ corpus.  Not least in his own character of La of Opar.  La itself translates from the French as She, of course,  so Burroughs even appropriates the name.

     La is as ardent for Tarzan as She was for Leo/Kallicrates.  Tarzan himself remains cold and indifferent to La throughout all four Opar stories finally abandoning her in Tarzan The Invincible.

     She by Haggard is well worth three or four reads to set the story in mind and savor the wonderful and unearthly details

End of Review

Thanksgiving is a huge holiday in this country. Their favorite one many of my US friends say. It was not a holiday where I grew up and as the meaning of holidays is very much tied to one’s culture and familial traditions, Thanksgiving as I saw it practiced in mainstream America meant very little to me. I love the idea of harvest festivals and of expressing gratitude, but I could not make  sense of a national turkey day and an obese nation stuffing themselves silly followed by a shopping spree on Black Friday.

I wonder if those who consciously experience and express gratitude on Thanksgiving are a miniscule group. Maybe not, but probably not as large a group as they could be. How do we understand gratitude psychologically and how does one get there? Melanie Klein introduced gratitude, together with its opposite, envy, into psychological language. There are always two sides to everything. Just as light and shadow do, gratitude and envy go together. Jung had a profound understanding of the duality of nature. He knew that the opposite is always present, but usually hidden in the invisible world he called the unconscious.

Most people who experience gratitude describe a feeling of fullness and richness that is unrelated to any material possessions. They experience a well of goodness that does not run dry. There is  enough good to go around for all. They feel as if they were plugged into a source that stills a thirst beyond the physical. Gratitude is an expression in response to an experience of being deeply cared for and held by something larger than oneself. This gratitude goes far beyond a thought of gratefulness that one’s lot is a little lighter to carry than one’s neighbor’s. Gratitude is fearless, it fosters compassion for all living beings and the ability to see life even in the so called inanimate matter.

I do not believe one can fully experience gratitude without being aware of its opposite envy. In Jungian thought gratitude and envy are archetypal forces. They exist outside of our individual lives, but we partake of them. In the case of envy, there is no escaping it.  We all are envious to some degree. The problem is that envy lives in the shadows of the unconscious. Whatever is unconscious will be projected out. Our unconscious searches for a suitable object  and we just hang our projection on this object like an old hat. Consciousness will trick us then into believing what what we see is “reality”.  (Reality becomes more slippery the more we think about it.)

We all know some of these people, may even have been one of them at times, who spew nothing but negativity. Everything needs to be criticized, ridiculed, made small or put down. Envy destroys hopes and dreams.  Envy is full of fear. There is never enough of the good. It is anti-life. It poisons the soul.

Envy is even harder to catch when it is directed against oneself. Then it manifests in that, often very rational and “adult” inner voice, that ridicules our desires and will stop us from believing that our dreams are worth pursuing. That you are too young, too old, too fat, lack education, lack money, not healthy enough or it is just plain impossible or unrealistic… I better stop, I made my point, the list could go on forever. Envy constricts and restricts and hardens, it turns the heart into an arid patch.

What to do about envy? Unfortunately there is no miracle cure or pill. But, as with everything else, awareness and acceptance are the first steps. Nothing changes without them.  Envy is archetypal. We did not create it. We are only responsible for how we express it. We need to trace our negativity. Who or what is on the receiving end of our sneer? How can we put an image to that inner  voice, that judge or saboteur that prevents us from living our life with courage and grit. As we take a stance and stand up to the poison of envy, its opposite, gratitude and trust in goodness, can be released. We don’t own goodness either, but we can take our fill from that cup that never runs empty, regardless of where and who we are in our lives. Gratitude – at last.

Happy Thanksgiving.

A Fascinating and Unique Autobiography

Jung explores many fields that are both familiar and strange, such as astrology, alchemy, philosophy, psychology and religion. For someone with limited knowledge and experience, Jung is quite understandable, as he conveys his ideas and feelings very well despite the broad scope and  complexities of the subjects. He has a truly synthesizing mind.

It’s a unique autobiography, because, instead of a record of events in Jung’s life, it’s an account mainly of his inner experiences, his dreams, fantasies and reflections. Life is viewed as a process of transformation, namely, transformation of the psyche to achieve “wholeness” or “total consciousness”. Jung also reflects on his relationships and encounters with people who have influenced him, most notably Freud. It’s surprising, however, that he seldom mentions his wife, though he speaks volumes about his parents.

Jung identifies himself strongly with Goethe’s Faust, who gave his soul in exchange for knowledge. He asserts that there are opposites in everything and is particularly obsessed with the dark secrets. The book documents his fascination with corpses and graves, his experiments and experiences with  the unconscious, spirits and multiple personalities. If not for his social support, he would perhaps have gone over the edge like Nietzsche.

Answer Comes From Within

“Inner experiences also set their seal on the outward events that came my way and assumed importance for me in youth or later on. I early arrived at the insight that when no answer comes from within to the problems and complexities of life, they ultimately mean very little. Outward circumstances are no substitute for inner experience. … I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals.”

A Diabolical Mixture of the Sublime and the Ridiculous

“From the beginning I had conceived my voluntary confrontation with the unconscious as a scientific experiment which I myself was conducting and in whose outcome I was vitally interested. Today I might equally well say that it was an experiment which was being conducted on me. One of the greatest difficulties for me lay in dealing with my negative feelings. I was voluntarily submitting myself to emotions of which I could not really approve, and I was writing down fantasies which often struck me as nonsense, and toward which I had strong resistances. For as long as we do not understand their meaning, such fantasies are a diabolical mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. It cost me a great deal to undergo them, but I had been challenged by fate. Only by extreme effort was I finally able to escape from the labyrinth.”

“I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well what that meant. After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me. A cogent motive for my making the attempt was the conviction that I could not expect of my patients something I did not dare to do myself. … This idea that I was committing myself to a dangerous enterprise not for myself alone, but also for the sake of my patients helped me over several critical phases.”

The Process of Individuation

“As I worked with my fantasies, I became aware that the unconscious
undergoes or produces change. Only after I had familiarized myself with alchemy did I realize that the unconscious is a process, and that the psyche is transformed or developed by the relationship of the ego to the contents of the unconscious. In individual cases that transformation can be read from dreams and fantasies. In collective life it has left its deposit principally in the various religious systems and their changing symbols. Through the study of these collective transformation processes and through understanding of alchemical symbolism I arrived at the central concept of my psychology: the process of individuation.”

A Contribution To The

ERBzine ERB Library Project

She

by

H. Rider Haggard

Review by R.E. Prindle

From London To The The Caves Of Kor

     She is dedicated to Andrew Lang:

I Inscribe This History To

ANDREW LANG

In Token Of Personal Regard

And Of

My Sincere Admiration For His Learning

And His Works

     One may well ask then who is this Andrew Lang and what is his learning?  In point of fact Haggard not only dedicated She to Lang but wrote three books in collaboration with him.  Andrew Lang, 1884-1912, was a Scottish scholar specializing in folklore, mythology and religion so you can see where Haggard came by much of his esoteric knowledge.  In addition Lang was one of the founding members of the Society For Psychic Research and a past-President.  Lang wrote dozens of books over his lifetime.  He even wrote a parody of She in 1887 called He.  Today he is remembered only for his collections of fairy tales.  Twelve volumes in all each titled after a color such as The Crimson, or Blue or Pink or Gray Fairy Book.  The volumes are undergoing a fair revival now with a collector’s edition published by Easton Press and several nicely bound volumes by the Folio Society.

     The nineteenth century was the one in which advanced knowledge of the past was rapidly extending European knowledge greatly.  The Rosetta Stone deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics had been achieved as recently as the 1830s.  Nineveh and the Assyrian ruins had been unearthed.  Schlieman had discovered the locations of  Troy and Mycenae.

     The exoteric side was covered by the academics while the esoteric side was covered by independent scholars like Madame Blavatsky and probably Andrew Lang.  There was a clean split between the academic Patriarchal view of  ancient history and the emerging Matriarchal view that had just been developed by the Swiss mythologist, J.J. Bachofen.    Bachofen organized ancient history into Hetaeric, Matriarchal and Patriarchal periods.  He himself was a member of the successor  Scientific period.

     The academics totally rejected the notion of  a Matriarchal period.  This, of course, led to a complete inability to understand Homer, both Iliad and Odyssey. The Iliad especially is a description of the war by the Patriarchy to destroy Matriarchy. 

     Lang seems to have understood the Matriarchal phase of ancient history.  He must have passed this knowledge on to Haggard.  Ayesha, as She, rules a Matriarchal society.  While the ideas represented in She must have seemed bizarre or merely an amusing reversal of the Patriarchal world at the time, today it all reads comprehensibly.  It rings true if not exact.

     C.G. Jung, the psychologist, who developed such notions as the male Anima and the Shadow was very immpressed by what he saw as the male Anima in She.  Madame Blavatsky lauded the book for its esoteric content.  But then, Haggard was firing on all eight cylinders when he wrote it, it is difficult to conceive of a more perfect fantasy/adventure novel.  Indeed Haggard subtitles the novel: The History Of An Adventure.

     Haggard was an excellent Egyptian scholar.  He not only visualized Egypt convincingly in his Egyptian novels but his Egyptian ideas pervade the African novels.  Many of them involve Egyptian influences and even peoples filtering down into East and Central Africa.  The Ivory Child is a case in point as is She.

     The set up to the trip out is brilliant incorporating details that become cliches in B movies.

     Leo Vincey’s father before he died gave a metal box to Leo’s guadian, Horace Holly, that wasn’t to be opened until Leo was twenty-five.  This box is now opened.  It contained a letter to Leo, a potsherd (a piece of a broken jar) covered with ‘uncial’ Greek lettering, a miniature and a scarab containing Egyptian hieroglyphics that read ‘Royal Son of the Sun.’

     Thus Haggard captured most if not all of the elements that went into the intellectual aura fostered by B moves primarily in the first years of the talkies through the thirties.  That entailed things like the Curse of the Pharaohs, movies like The Mummy  melding into Wolf Man, Dracula, Frankenstein and African juju spells.  Things against which Europeans had no defense because the ancient magic was stronger than modern science, or so we were led to believe.  I can’t speak for others  but it took me a while to shake this oppressive spirit.  This was pretty strong stuff for my ten to twelve year old brain.  Not to mention being bombarded by The Creature From The Black Lagoon, The Thing and The Day The Earth Stood Still.  We wuz tried in the fire and come through good.

     The gist of it is that Leo’s ancestor Kallicrates lived in the time of the last Pharaoh Nectanebo as one of the royal family.  Spookier still Nectanebo was said to have fled Egypt before the conquering hordes, going to Macedon where he secretly impregnated Olympia, Philip’s wife, who then gave birth to Alexander which made him the rightful heir to the Pharaohship instroducing Greeks as rulers into his city of Alexandria.

     At any rate Kallicrates girl friend, Ayesha, killed him in a jealous rage.  The family nursing vengeance for all these two thousand years it is Vincey’s mission if he chooses to accept it, to follow the ancient map to the Caves of Kor and kill Ayesha or, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed who has been nursing regrets over killing Kallicrates two thousand years previously.  Listen to me, I’m tellin’ ya it’s all here.

     So Vincey, Holly and their man Job set out to find this place in Africa even more remote, if possible, than King Solomon’s Mines.  And a heck of a lot more hostile too.

     The trip out is some of Haggard’s finest writing.  They are to be looking for a rock formation on the coast in the shape of a gorilla’s head.  Sailing the coast they miraculously spot this head just as a terrific squall sends their felucca, dhow or other exotic ship from foreign  climes to the b ottom.

     But, even though the ship sinks they beat the reaper because they brought a boat containing unsinkable water tight compartments.   As the storm subsides the three survivors along with an Arab float into the mouth of the appropriate stream as though it were all foreordained.  What follows is some excellent writing with details I don’t need to recount.

     Suffice it to say they are dragging their boat along an ancient canal when they are accosted by men from Kor.  Ordinarily these guys would have speared them and moved on, no strangers needed in Kor.  Using her magic She had learned of Leo’s coming a week previously thus ordering their lives spared while they were to be brought to her.  Uh huh.

     The detailing is terrific, this book is tight and well organized.  It moves right along.  The land is under the thumb of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.  This is a tight Matriarchy as we now recognize not  just some strange place where a woman is in charge.

     While the three are entering the Caves of Kor, Leo Vincey, being the cynosure of all female eyes, a knockout named Ustane steps up and kisses him.  Not averse to a public display of affection Leo lays one on her back.  New to the area and not aware of the customs of the place Leo had just accepted Ustane as his woman.  In town for a few minutes and already married.  That’s the way things happen in this particular Matriarchy.  Ustane is now in conflict with Ayesha, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.

     The stage is now set for the main drama when Ayesha recognizes Leo as her long lost Kallicrates come back from all those reincarnations at last.

     The exoteric Catholic Church is thus thrust aside in favor of all the heretical doctrines of the esoteric which have been bubbling under the Hot 100 for two thousand years.  These unfamiliar esoteric doctrines would become the mainstay and staple of science fiction/fantasy for the next one hundred years.

     Just as an example of how Burroughs probably learned esoterica, I became familiar with estoeric themes myself from reading 1950s science fiction and fantasy- Amazing Stories, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury  and all that sort of stuff without realizing what I was taking in,  thus Burroughs surrounded by the Society for Psychical Research,  Camille Flammarion, George Du Maurier and Stevenson et al. naturally learned the esoteric language.  No mystery, he was speaking in tongues before he knew it.

      Leo is awaiting the summons from Ayesha which will be covered in Part III.

Saturn devouring his son, P. P. Rubens

This entry is difficult to write. I have dragged my feet. I am struggling with how to make the subject more palatable. How does one write about Jung’s night sea journey in search of the soul in an appealing way? It just wasn’t a pretty and sweet story. But maybe that is the wrong approach. Maybe some things just need to be said as they are. Jung’s School of Analytical Psychology grew out of an intense personal and maddening process that brought Jung to the brink of his sanity. No pain, no gain? Is it that simple? I think that some things come to us as grace, serendipity, as gifts from the gods, if you will. But, unfortunately for the most part, the creative process is a painful, arduous and confusing path,whether creativity is expressed in writing a novel or in carving out a life for oneself that is truthful to one’s soul calling. The deeper one digs, the greater the treasure, if one can withstand the pressure of the deep.

In Liber Primus of the Red Book Jung writes “My soul leads me into the desert, into the desert of my own self. I did not think that my soul is a desert, a barren hot desert, dusty and without drink”. Who does!? That is not what we imagine when we think of soul.  Jung’s search for an authentic experience of his soul lead him into solitude,  away from “men and events” and he continues to say that he even had to detach himself from his thoughts so he could open up to his soul’s life. This strikes me as significant because thinking was Jung’s primary function. This was how he perceived the world and made sense of it. I think what Jung describes here is the necessity to let go of  attachments, distractions and identifications.

Imagine of how you make sense of the world. It could be through rational thinking or it could be through emotional feeling values, or more through scientific data and facts,or it could be through a sense of intuitive knowing. And then imagine that you deliberately let go of this mode of perception, which has become so much part of your identity. Jung seems to suggest that it is from this state of emptiness (or discomfort or confusion more likely) that one makes contact with the otherness of the soul/psyche.

“The soul has its own peculiar world”, Jung writes. Jung expresses his confusion and disappointment, I assume, that having given up most of ego’s distractions, the soul is experienced as an arid, barren land. No comfort, no inspiration, nothing to hold on to. What Jung describes is not the soft, nurturing quality so often associated with soul.

The image of Saturn devouring his son expresses what Jung initially found on his soul searching journey. Astrology  understands Saturn as a stern task master who teaches about limitations, restrictions and duty. Duty to what or whom one may wonder? I suggest that the often maligned Saturn teaches us to be in the service of the soul. The image of devouring his son reflects the idea of being robbed of what is the dearest to one’s heart. The barren land of despair, hopelessness, confusion,when no future seems possible. “But my soul spoke to me and said”"Wait”", and Jung continues,”Nobody can spare themselves the waiting and most will be unable to bear this torment”.

To patiently wait and tolerate one’s feelings is not a popular notion in mainstream psychology. Yet it is a hallmark of Jungian  work.  It is devastating and disorientating to be robbed of the idea of a predictable future and to be robbed of a solid sense of self that can make sense of the world. But these feelings may be unavoidable when venturing into the unknown.  The conscious experience of soul life was the unknown, new territory for Jung. For those of us who wish to live a soulful life we may wonder, what is our desert? Where is our barrenness? Where is that place within us that is so restricted that no life or light can ripple through. Jung suggests that our journey towards wholeness must go through this inner desert.  When we are stripped to the bare bones , then we may meet the soul in the form of the other yet also part of who we are and a dialogue may begin. In  a Jungian sense, only then are we truly alive.

Wassily Kandinsky. Im Blau, 1925

Creativeness, like the freedom of the will, contains a secret. The psychologist can describe both these manifestations as processes, but he can find no solution of the philosophical problems they offer. Creative man is a riddle that we may try to answer in various ways, but always in vain, a truth that has not prevented modern phychology from turning now and again to the question of the artist and his art. Freud thought that he had found a key in is procedure of deriving the work of art from the personal experiences of the artist. It is true that certain possibilities lay in this direction, for it was conceivable that a work of art, no less than a neurosis, might be traced back to those knots in psychic life that we call the complexes. It was Freud’s great discovery that neuroses have a casual origin in the psychic realm-that they take their rise from emotional states and from real or imagined childhood experiences. Certain of his followers, like Rank and Stekel, have taken up related lines of enquiry and have achieved important results. It is undeniable that the poet’s psychic disposition permeates his work root and branch. Nor is there anything new in the statement that personal factors largely influence is and in what curious ways it comes to expression.

Freud takes the neurosis as a substitute for a direct means of gratification. He therefore regards it as something inappropriate-a mistake, a dodge, an excuse, a voluntary blindness. To him it is essentially a shortcoming that should never have been. Sice a neurosis, to all appearences, is nothing but a disturbance that is all the more irritating because it is without sense or meaning, few people will venture to say a good word for it. And a work of art is brought into questionable proximity with the neurosis when it is taken as something which can be analysed in terms of the poet’s repressions. In a sense it finds itself in good company, for religion and philosophy are regarded in the same ligth by Freudian psychology. No objection can be raised if it is admitted that this approach amounts to nothing more than the elucidation of those personal determinants without which a work of art is unthinkable. But should the claim be made that such an analysis accounts for the work of art itself, then a categorical denial is called for. The personal idiosyncrasies that creep into a work of art are not essential; in fact, the more we have to cope with these peculiarities, the less is it a question of art. What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind. The personal aspects is a limitation-and even a sin-in the realm of art. When a form of “art” is primarily personal it deserves to be treated as if it were a neurosis. There may be some validity in the idea held by the Freudian scholl that artists without exception are narcissistic-by which is meant that they are undeveloped persons with infantile and auto-erotic traits. The statement is only valid, however, for the artist as a person, and has nothing to do with the man as an artist. In is capacity of artist he is neither auto-erotic, nor hetero-erotic, nor erotic in any sense. He is objective and impersonal-even inhuman-for as an artist he is his work, and not a human being.

Max Ernst. L'ange du Foyer, 1937

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process. Since as a human being he may be sound and morbid, we must look at his psychic make-up to find the determinants of his personality. But we can only understand him is is capacity of artist by looking at his creative achievement. We should make a sad mistake if we tried to explain the mode of life of an English gentleman, a Prussian officer, or a cardinal in terms of personal factors. The gentleman, the officer and the cleric function as such in a impersonal rôle, and their psychic make-up is qualified by a peculiar objectivity. We must grant that the artist does not function in a official capacity-the very opposite is nearer the truth. He nevertheless resembles the types I have named in one respect, for the specifically artistic disposition involves an overweight of collective psychic life as against the personal. Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes though him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense-he is “collective man”-one who carries and shapes the unconcious, psychic life of mankind. To preform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

All this beig so, it is not strange that the artist is an especially interesting case for the psychologist who uses an analytical method. The artist’s life cannot be otherwise than full of conflicts, for two forces are at war within him-one the one hand the common human longing for happiness, satisfaction and security in life, and on the other a ruthless passion for cration which may go so far as to override every personal desire. The lives of artists are as a rule so highly unsatisfactory-not to say tragic-because of their inferiority on the human and personal side, and not because of a sinister dispensation. There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire. It is as though each of us were endowed at birth with a certain capital of energy. The strongest force in our make-up will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. In this way the creative force can drain the human impulses to such a degree that the personal ego must developed all sorts of bad qualities-ruthlessness, selfishness and vanity (so-called “auto-erotism”)-and even every kind of vice, in order to maintain the spark of life and to keep itself from being wholly bereft. The auto-erotism of artist resembles that of illegitimate or negleted children who from their tenderest years must protect themeselfs from the destructive influence of people who have no love to give them-who dveloped bad qualities for tht very purpose and later maintain an invincible egocentrism by remaining all their lives infantile and helpless or by actively offending against the moral code or the law. How can we doubt that it is art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflits of is personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable resultus of the fact that he is an artist-that is to say, a man who from his very birth has been called to a grater task than the ordinary mortal. A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

Georgia O'Keeffe. Special N.º 21, 1916

It makes no difference wheter the poet knows that is work is begotten, grows and matures with him, or wheter he supposes that by taking thought he produces it out of the void. His opinion of the matter does not change the fact that his own work outgrows him as a child its mother. The creative process has feminine quality, and the crative work arises from unconscious depths-we might say, from the realm of the mothers. Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and moulded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the counscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events. The work in process becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe. And what is Faust but a symbol? By this I do not mean an allegory that points to something all to familiar, but an expression that stands for something not clearly known and yet profoundly alive. Here it is something that lives in the soul of every German, and that Goethe has helped to bring to birth. Could we conceive of anyone but a German writing Faust or Also Sprach Zarathustra? Both play upon something that reverberates in the German soul-a “primordial image”, as Jacob Burckhardt once called it- the figure of a physician or teacher of mankind. The archetypal image of the wise man, the saviour or redeemer, lies buried and dormant in man’s unsonscious since the dawn of culture; it is awakened whenever the times are out of joint and a human society is committed to a serious error. When people go astray they feel the need of a guide or teatcher or even of the physician. These primordial images are numerous, but do not appear in the dreams of individuals or in works of art until they are called into being by the waywardeness of the general outlooks. When conscious life is characterized by one-sidedness and by a false attitude, then they are activated-one might say, “instinctively”-and come to light in the dreams of individuals and the visions of artists and seers, thus restoring the psychic equilibrium of the epoch.

In this way the work of the poet comes to meet the spiritual need of the society in which he lives, and for this reason his work means more to him than his personal fate, whether he is aware of this or not. Being essentially the instrument for his work, he is subordinate to it, and we have no reason for expecting him to interpret it for us. He as done the best that in him lies in giving it form, and he must leave the interpretation to others and to the future. A great work of art is like a dream; for all its apparent obviousness it does not explain itself and is never unequivocal. A dream never says: “You ought,” or: “This is the truth.” It presents an image in much the same way as nature allows a plant to grow, and we must draw our own conclusions. If a person has a nightmare, it means either that he is too much given to fear, or else that he is too exempt from it; and if he dreams of the old wise man it may mean that he is too pedagogical, as also that he stands in need of a teacher. In a subtle way both meanings come to the same thing, as we perceive when we are able to let the work of art act upon us as it acted upon the artist. To grasp its meaning, we must allow it to shape us as it once shaped him. Then we understand the nature of his experience. We see that he has drawn upon the healing and redeeming forces of the collective psyche that underlies consciousness whit its isolation and its painful errors; that he has penetrated to that matrix of live in which all men are embedded, which imparts a common rhythm to all human existence, and allows the individual to communicate his feeling and his striving to mankind as a whole.

Odd Nerdrum. Night Guard, 1983

The secret of artistic creation and of the effectiveness of art is to be found in a return to the state of participation mystique-to that level of experience at which it is man who lives, and not the individual, and at which the weal or woe of the single human being does not count, but only human existence. This is why every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves  us each and all. And this is also why the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to his art-but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task. He may go the way of a Philistine, a good citizen, a neurotic, a fool or a criminal. His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet.

C. G. Jung in Modern Man in Search of a Soul – Psychology and Literature

Lately I have thought a lot about darkness. It seems timely as November feels like the darkest time of the year. It might be. But while darkness begins to wrap around us at an early hour, I see the familiar emphasis on light wherever I look. We all want to be in the light  at all times and if we are not, move towards it as fast as possible. Darkness is the unwanted stepsister.

We experience darkness psychologically as depression, as the “hour of lead”, as the poet Emily Dickinson once wrote. A fitting image reflective of the heaviness, the stuckness and the dull, all consuming despair of depression.  Why would anyone of sound mind find any value in the darker moods ?! Mainstream psychology seems to agree and focuses primarily on the eradication of  symptoms via the help of pills, pills and more pills. Make no mistake, there is a place for medication in the treatment of depression, but I abhor the unquestioning carelessness with which our culture medicates its citizens, particularly its most vulnerable members, the poor and poorly educated.

But even the well-off are seduced by our culture’s one-sided infatuation with the lighter, more pleasant moods. It is so much easier to escape into substances or addictive behaviors.  No joke, it is. Nonetheless, I argue that practioners of the healing arts need to rediscover the value of depression and the darker shades of being, because they are as much part of nature, our nature, as the darkness of November is in the cycle of a year.

I recently read that “you can’t discover light by analyzing the darkness”. This was written by an internationally best selling author and spiritual teacher. A very successful person and presumedly helpful to millions, but in this instance he simply did not get it right. But I can see why the message of tolerating difficult feelings and searching for meaning in the muck of one’s psyche is a much harder sell.

But is there a spark in the darkness? On a cosmic level,  science has shown, literally, with the help of an x-ray observatory that a glow with the intensity of ten billion suns pours out of a black hole into the surrounding universe. For a long time scientists believed that no light beam could ever escape a black hole. They were wrong.

Is there meaning to be found in depression? More often than not there is. It might be helpful to differentiate the nature of the darker mood. Is the depression related to a loss that needs to be mourned? It could be the loss of a person or an abstract idea, such as the loss of youth or health, hopes, or the loss of the illusion that life is meant to be an uninterrupted state of happiness. Freud got it right when he said that our whole life is a process of mourning. Think about it, when you allow yourself to feel deeply into your being, are we not always mourning something or someone, even if we are simultaneously quite content and “happy” with our lives?

But there can be black holes in our psyche that can not be explained by insufficient mourning. When Saturn clutches the soul  causing wounding and despair too much to bear. How tempting it is to abandon the soul to her suffering and find refuge in medication that quiets her screams. Jung descended into his own darkness/madness and brought forth the insights and techniques that today constitute the School of Analytical Psychology. We Jungians value the darkness. We know that only by bearing witness to suffering and by extracting meaning from it can a new morning dawn. Spring will follow winter, but in the middle of November there is no memory of that.

For those who are interested in a unique Jungian perspective on darkness and its psychological implications I have a wonderful book to recommend. “The Black Sun, the Alchemy and Art of Darkness” by Jungian analyst Stanton Marlan. It was in this book that I found the information on the discovery of light in the black holes. The book, like its subject matter, is illuminating the dark.

And with Emily Dickinson, wherever she is now, I would like to share that the old alchemists knew that the lead of Saturn holds a hidden promise. When made into a fine powder, it ignites all by itself. There is indeed a spark in the darkness of our depression.

WORD

animus [an-uh-muhs] n. 1. strong dislike or enmity; hostile attitude; animosity 2. purpose; intention; animating spirit 3. (in the psychology of C. G. Jung) the masculine principle, esp. as present in women

BIRTHDAY

Martin Luther (1483), Winston Churchill (1871), Russell Johnson (1924), Richard Burton (1925), Ennio Morricone (1928), Roy Scheider (1932), Russell Means (1939), Saxby Chambliss (1943), Tim Rice (1944), Sinbad (1956), Linda Cohn (1959), Mackenzie Phillips (1959), Neil Gaiman (1960), Michael Jai White (1967), Tracy Morgan (1968), Warren G. (1970), Brittany Murphy (1977), Eve (1978), Miranda Lambert (1983)

STANDPOINT

While I’m not writing this blog or reading a book or doing something of a social nature or whatever the hell else I feel like, I am a bartender. I like being a bartender. I like serving drinks, talking to people and making them laugh. It’s important to like what you do. For those of you out there who don’t like your chosen occupation, get out while you still can. That’s my advice to you. So there.

In any case, there’s one aspect of bartending that grates on my fucking nerves – listening to people drone on and on about something that matters so little to everyone everywhere and no one yet realizes it.

Lately, I’ve been listening to a lot of pointless nonsense about one subject in particular. You see, I bartend in a little town called Skippack. Down the road a ways is a slightly-larger, but no more important, town named Collegeville, cleverly because of the fact Ursinus College is located within it.

But nowadays, no one’s talking about Ursinus. To be fair, it’s likely they weren’t anyway. Nevertheless, there’s only one thing everyone wants to talk about no matter what: the grand opening of the Wegmans, a supermarket that, apparently, has the ability to capture the collective consciousness of everyone within a 45-minute drive.

It’s all anyone can talk about. So automatically I hate it. In general, I have a problem with anything that no one has a problem with. That’s mainly my problem with almost everything.

Here’s the thing. I don’t want to talk about a place you can go to buy food. (a) I’m not particularly dazzled by recollections of an, until now, never before seen selection of cheese. Also, (b) I’m not entirely impressed by the fact there’s a pub inside a supermarket. In addition, (c) I’m not remotely interested in the largest selection of seafood in the area. (These three things, by the way, are almost always offered as the main reasons one would ever go to Wegmans, although not the only ones.)

Granted, I am a single, 35-year old male (temporarily) living in an area greatly overpopulated with parents and children. For parents, it is a unique opportunity to provide for your family and afford yourself a few drinks while doing it, instead of having to wait to get home, unload the groceries, make dinner and put the kids to bed before opening a bottle of wine, or four, and get your buzz on. I am not ignorant of this fact. As I’ve been more exposed to parents as an adult, I’ve figured out that good parenting is directly proportionate to the amount of weekly alcohol consumption. It wasn’t that way when I was growing up but that’s the way it is now. At least, for the most part. Not saying all you parents out there are getting bombed every night. But a lot of you are. I can’t blame you. If I were a parent, I would probably be within your ranks.

In any case, hearing people swap stories about their first (and second and third) trip to Wegmans is about as depressing a level of converation that can be reached.

I refuse to participate.

So I’m not going. Even it means never talking to anyone again. Or, at least, until I move downtown in January. Then, I’ll have to talk to all the single folks about how fresh everything at Whole Foods seem to be. But, somehow, it doesn’t seem like it’ll suck half as much.

QUOTATION

The weirder you’re going to behave, the more normal you should look.  It works in reverse, too.  When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person. → P.J. O’Rourke

TUNE

Sometimes, all it takes is a killer line in a song to make listen to it about 93 times – over and over. Such is the case with Mike Doughty’s tune, “I Just Want the Girl in the Blue Dress To Keep On Dancing.” It’s a good and quick song that features the line, “I’ll assess the essence of the mess…” Not sure why I like that so much. But I do. And that’s that.

GALLIMAUFRY

→ If you haven’t seen the video footage of University of New Mexico’s women’s soccer player, Elizabeth Lambert, you should. This chick is so completely crazy, I’m surprised I’ve never dated her.

→ Just want to officially thank the Philadelphia Phillies for coming oh-so-very-close to winning back-to-back World Series. I know the whole organization has been waiting for me to weigh in. Once again, I will state Philadelphia is a “baseball town.” I will keep saying that until everyone believes it. Because it’s the truth.

→ In a world gone mad, sometimes I read some news that alleviates all the numbness and actually allows me to feel again. The fact Steven Tyler has officially left Aerosmith was not that kind of news. I’m sure there’s a large group of people out there who care when a middle-aged singer leaves a band that hasn’t contributed anything musically solid in decades. I’m just not a member of that group.  

As reported in the New York Times Magazine, the Jungian analyst Stephen Martin, a nonobservant Jew, once responded to his daughter’s question about his religion with “Oh, honey, I ‘m a Jungian”.  No, Jungian psychology is not a religion and the Jungian world is not a sect, at least not if it’s definition involves a specific dogma under a doctrinal leader. Jung’s comment of “thank God I am not a Jungian” is often quoted in this context. And yet, let me be the devil’s advocate for a moment, Jungian psychology always views the dynamics of human behavior from a perspective that is larger than the ego. In Jungian thought, all phenomena are understood in relation to the archetype of the Self, which some translate as the equivalent to God, although that  is not quite correct. This distinction was very important to Jung. Whatever the outer reality may be, all we have is a psychic image, including a psychic image of God. Whether the image is Christ, Yahweh, Allah, shamanic spirits, Buddha, the Great Goddess, or the “image” of an atheist belief, depends on one’s culture and personal inclination. From a Jungian perspective all these images are rooted in the archetype of the Self, which can be imagined as a vital psychic core that bridges humanity with a larger, transpersonal reality.

Psychology is the science of the soul. It does not set out to prove or disprove that metaphysical entities exist. In Jung’s self-experiment, he recognized that his entire life was the expression of his soul. “I am as I am in this visible world a symbol of my soul” he writes in the Red Book,(RB)p.234. In this search for his inner truth he discovered that even, or especially, the people we love the most are ultimately symbols of that search for soul. I do not think that Jung wanted to diminish the reality or intensity of human love, but rather add another dimension to it. One, I’d like to think, true lovers always sensed. The search for soul does not lift you into ethereal heights. It leads right into fleshed out life. To know your soul,  you have to live your life to the fullest. Consider the following quote from Jung: “ To know the human soul one has to hang up exact science and put away the scholar’s gown, say farewell to his study and wander with human heart through the world, through the horror of prisons, mad houses and hospitals, through drab suburban pubs, in brothels and gambling dens, through the salons of elegant society, the stock exchanges, the socialist meetings, the churches, the revivals and ecstacies of the sects, to experience love, hate and passion in every form in one’s body” (CW 7, para 409).

Go out and live your life, Jung seems to say.  Do not deny your darker impulses. They are part of your soul’s life. I do not believe Jung meant that we literally all have to end up in prisons and “madhouses”, although it may happen, but that we need to find the compassion, the “Mitgefuehl”, which means “feeling with the other”, of what it is like to be there. To connect to another in compassion is an expression of soul, which weaves a net between us all. Soul partakes of all experiences humanly possible.

In other instances, internalized collective judgments and values may prevent us form pursuing our heart’s desire. What part of myself do I not dare to live? Do I need all the prisoners in society so I can feel morally superior? “Consider that your heart is both good and evil, Jung wrote in the RB, p.234. It takes courage to acknowledge evil in the first place, it takes even more to see it within oneself.

In the Red Book (RB) Jung documents his process of confronting a series of gruesome visions and fantasies filled with blood, destruction and cruelty. As I am writing this, images of the tragic news today of the massacre at Fort Hood flash through my mind. Jung’s recorded visions date from 1913 to 1914 and he considered them to be precognitive, foreshadowing the flood of destruction that would soon sweep through Europe. I am thinking of our culture’s current fascination  with horror, violence and destruction, which, so we are told, will culminate in the cataclysmic events of “2012″. End days? The final hurray before the ultimate apocalypse? Maybe. Jung was deeply effected by the darkness that enveloped Europe during the First and Second World War. The horrors were unimaginable and it was indeed the end, the death for millions. Yet life continued. But the danger still looms. The archetype of the apocalypse (the violent pattern of disintegration of the world as we know it) continues to be the dominant force. Hindu mythology tells us that the dark age of Kali Yuga began 3000 BC and will last for another while (another 400 000 or more years). Are we depressed yet? Ready to stick the head in the sand or bury the nose in a bottle? I would not blame you.

But that is not what Jung did. One way of looking at the RB is, I suggest,  as a “How To” book of some sort.  How to gaze into the darkness and survive it. How to gaze into the darkness and bring forth meaning. How to gaze into the darkness and, Deo Concedente, find a shimmer of light in it. Not a job for the faint hearted, but then the Jung I know never was. One thing I am certain is that the RB will do away with for good with the notion that Jung is a fluffy, new agey psychologist whose path of individuation is filled with love and light and flowery archetypal imagery.

If we stay with the idea of looking at the RB as a  “how to” (deal with these times) book a little longer, then Jung suggests the absolute necessity of “refinding the soul”( p.231). Not the idea of soul as it has been co-opted by religious institutions, but the very private soul (or psyche if you prefer). Our core that is capable of the most terrible suffering and the most ecstatic bliss. It is the expression of our shared humanity, which  connects us to the larger world soul, the anima mundi. The soul in us feels, connects, longs for, desires. It finds and creates beauty. Cynicism, political games and unbalanced ambition are lethal to soul.

Jung writes:” He could find his soul in desire itself, but not in the objects (italics mine) of desire. If he possessed his desire, and his desire did not possess him, he would lay a hand on his soul, since his desire is the image and the expression of the soul. If we possess the image of a thing, we possess half the thing. The image of the world is half the world” (p.232). Jung develops here what is to become a hallmark of his work: an appreciation for the power of the imagination, the true alchemical imagination that creates and transforms worlds.

Looking back out into our blood stained, violent and cynical world as we spin (out of control?) towards 2012, it is our courage and willingness to follow the soul’s imagination that could change the trajectory of our current path of destruction, for nothing is ever written in stone.

The Rubin Museum of Art in NYC is currently offering a fascinating event series, the Red Book Dialogues. Today’s program was a dialogue between Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and my colleague, Jungian analyst Doug Tompkins. It was an inspiring evening in a serene, beautiful setting. Both Jack and Doug were logged on to Twitter and so was the audience who could send questions and comments via their mobile devices, which were then projected onto a big screen. Twitter and Jung? Do they have anything in common? Doug rightly commented that most Jungians were somewhat technologically challenged. But Twitter is not about technology. It is all about communication. Fast communication, with a lot of people and entities. Doug introduced the very fitting archetypal image behind Twitter. It is the winged god Hermes, the messenger from the underworld, who rules all aspects of communication and commerce. He is flighty and fast, I can almost glimpse him in the 140 character tweets that swoosh past me on the screen. He is often depicted as a youth with winged sandals and it was not lost on the audience that he lives right there in Twitter’s logo of the little bird. The moderator remarked that the German word for Twitter is “zwitschern” but that he could not find that word anywhere in the Red Book. That may be so, but let’s not forget that the Red Book was left unfinished because Jung became fascinated with alchemy, which he translated into the dynamics of psyche. Alchemists communicated in an oblique writing style that became known as, guess what, the “language of the birds”.

But Hermes is also a trickster and thief who can cross our path just when we think we have it all figured out and under control. I bet he was to blame when my iphone just all of a sudden refused to function and would not connect until after the event! Go figure! It is said of Hermes that he lives in the in-between places and that he bridges  boundaries. Hermes also trespasses. He will not be confined in neatly ordered places. Maybe Hermes’ inspiration could help to bridge the seemingly different worlds of Twitter and Jung’s Red Book.

People send their “What are you doing” tweets into cyberspace in the hope to find or connect with others. In the process an interconnected web is being woven that brings the immediate experience of its participants to the forefront.  As just one example I am thinking of the transparency the tweeting community brought to the recent elections in Iran. An anonymous mass of people were suddenly individual voices, which were heard. Now to Jung’s self-experiment as documented in the Red Book. I wonder if the cyberspace of the tweeting community is not the equivalent to Jung’s collective unconscious out of which he wrestled images and meaning and thereby created a structure and road map that allowed him to negotiate a world much larger than himself.

By far the most interesting question came from an audience member who inquired about Twitter’s shadow. The question kept lingering in the room. Nobody had a clear answer. I don’t have an answer. Twitter is such a new tool,  it might be too soon to tell. The shadow by definition does not want to be seen. But from a Jungian perspective, we also understand that everything has a shadow. As a start, I suggest that we might want to look at what we project onto Twitter. If I see it as a means to connect with great speed to others and allow others to make contact with me, “follow” me, with little discrimination of who they are, then I am at risk of being flooded, overwhelmed and losing my bearings. Could one shadow aspect of Twitter be the disintegration of boundaries and the loss of a container for private, sacred space? When Jung traveled into the depths of the unconscious he was  aware of the dangers. He sensed the treasures the invisible world held, but he knew that if one got lost in it the price was disintegration and psychosis. In lieu of clear answers I may have to live with the questions a little longer. Hermes is a trickster god, but he is also the only guide we have when we enter new territory.

There is indeed a buzz about Jung’s Red Book (RB). At least within the comparatively tiny group of people who either know of Jung’s significance in the field of depth psychology or those who, in one way or the other, appreciate the value of soul and psyche. So far the book’s images elicit the greatest interest. No doubt, they are magnificent and incredibly meaningful in the context of Jung’s journey through his psychic depths. But be warned, I say, don’t be simply seduced by their esoteric beauty. Don’t become reduced to a mere audience that applauds a master.

I wonder what the purpose of the publication of the RB at this time might be? One valid answer is a purely academic one and Shamdasani, who edited and introduced the RB,  notes the importance of putting Jung’s process in a historical context. But that still begs the question of how Jung, or at least the Jung that I have internalized, would have liked to see the RB put to good use? We already know that he rigorously refused to be cast in the role of a teacher or guru. He clearly did not want his way, which we can trace step by step in the RB, to be seen as the way. Nothing is further away from Jungian thought than a dogmatic one size fits all program of how to understand psyche.

The RB follows Jung’s trail of how the School of Analytical Psychology came into being through the process of Jung’s “most difficult experiment”. Maybe this is what ails main stream psychology and other forms of the healing arts today, a stifling willingness to follow a well trodden path, even if the path was forked out by someone like Jung, without delving deeply into the chaos and mystery of one’s own psychology. Maybe this is one reason why the RB is needed. Jung records the development of  tools and techniques, which later became known as active imagination. Armed with these tools we can walk our own path. Jungian work is all about experience followed by integration. Our own experience. The value we give to the imagination, the sense we make from our dreams, the relationships and dialogues we build with our dream figures. Jung demonstrates over and over again that only through the imagination do we gain access to the mysteries of our inner lives. What has been experienced needs to be integrated. The alchemists knew this phase of the process as the reddening. When experience needed to be infused with the red of one’s own life blood, which means bringing what you have gained in your imaginative exercises into your life. That is integration. Then you live your truth. So don’t be an admiring audience, Jung would not have any of  it, be a participant in the great work of the alchemical tradition that Jung envisioned. The world needs it and that may be why the RB has been made available to us at this time.

Jung’s Red Book (RB) is a book of extraordinary beauty. Nothing got lost in the reproduction. While I focus here primarily on the images of ideas in the text, it is a treat to spend time with Jung’s paintings, the details of the calligraphic script of the Liber Primus in its medieval manuscript form. Wherever you can, take the chance to take a look at the book! I hope I will eventually find a way of bringing some of the images in here, without infringing on any copyrights. I can read the original in German, which I do in bits and pieces, but it is hard work to decipher Jung’s calligraphic longhand. For the most part I resort to the English translation, which, as far as I can tell, is a brilliant one.

But let me begin at the beginning. The way of what is to come is the heading of the first section of the Liber Primus. Jung speaks “in the spirit of the time”. Each time, each era has a specific “spirit”, a Zeitgeist, that forms our rational mind, morals and values. We are good citizens if we act in accordance to this spirit of the time. The spirit of the time forms our ego-personality  and does not question the supremacy of God in the spiritual realm.

But then Jung also speaks of the spirit of the depths that has begun to stir in him. A spirit that “from time immemorial and for all the future possesses a greater power than the spirit if this time” p.229.  It was this spirit, irrational, foolish, intoxicating, even ugly (at least from the other spirit’s point of view) that was the motivating, even dictating force behind the RB.  Here Jung seems to talk about the spirit of the greater archetypal psyche. A potentially dangerous force if one is possessed by it. Madness, insanity and psychosis loom if this spirit takes over. But this very same spirit of the depths is also the source of all visions, inspiration and greatness and divine bliss that humanity can hope for. It is, in Jungian lingo, the spirit if the Self (with a capital S), which represents and brings forth the God-like nature in mankind, with all its dark and bright aspects.

Jung is a true shaman here. Never identified. Never possessed. Fully aware of the danger of a one way ticket into psychosis, he stays put and moves along where the spirit of the depths ushers him. He made sense of the nonsensical because a NEW VISION was needed. No pain, no gain. No risk, no gain.

Apropos, a new vision. There is a quote from “Flight out of time: A Dada diary” in the RB, which I will repeat here:

“The world and society in 1913 looked like this: life is completely confined and shackled. A kind of economic fatalism prevails; each individual, whether he resists it or not, is assigned a specific role and with it his interests and his character. The church is regarded as a “redemption factory” of little importance, literature is a safety valve……The most burning question day and night is: is there anywhere a force that is strong enough to put an end to this state of affairs? And if not, how can one escape it?”

Now that is a pretty neat quote. I have no problem putting 2009 instead of 1913. Are we not as much in need of a vision  for cultural and spiritual renewal as the dadaists observed in 1913? Another question, is it not interesting that the RB is  published at a time when we are desperately in need (think 2012!) of a new vision that leads to renewal. In fact our very survival may depend on that. Some might even call that a synchronicity.

The alchemists, and I consider Jung to be one of them, were guided by the belief that in order to fully comprehend a text one needs to follow the Latin dictum of “lege, lege, lege, et relege”. The English translation means,”read, read, read and then read again”. A work of the magnitude of the Red Book most likely needs to be read four times. I have just begun my first reading, it will take time.

Time is such an interesting concept. From psyche’s point of view there is no such thing as time. Psyche lives in the experience of the eternal moment that includes past and future. The conscious personality, the ego, has difficulties wrapping its head around such an idea. And for good reason, linear ego time is all too real in lived life. Whether we like it or not, we grow older, “time” moves on and one day we will “run out of time”. I often struggle to “make time” for what really feels important. Jung worked diligently and with unwavering focus from 1917 to 1930 on what was to become the Red Book (RB). That is a long time. He painstakingly devoted seventeen years of his life to a self experiment that became known as his confrontation with the unconscious and ultimately resulted in the RB. He gained all material for his later works, now published as the Collected Works of C.G. Jung, from this confrontation. It was a humbling reminder of the energy, devotion and, yes, time it takes to establish a fruitful relationship to the unconscious. I was reminded of how often I had a dream that felt meaningful. I may have written it down, engaged the images for some time and then moved on. Jung was always very clear on the fact that there is a proportional relationship between the effort, (which I define as the investment of energy, intent and time) one puts towards the unconscious and the fruits this labor can bring forth.

I don’t think I ever felt as clearly as I do now what it is that defines a Jungian.  It is not that one has the credentials of being a Jungian analyst, it is not years of Jungian analysis, nor is it the reading of Jung’s writings up and down and four times back and forth. None of that may hurt, but the defining quality will always be the courage and strength to confront the unconscious, this invisible world as it manifests within each one of us. The persistence to bring forth meaning and to follow the path that will form out of it. A truthful Jungian will find the courage to walk his own path, with the highest degree of consciousness possible. Much easier said than done, I know. But this attitude is a Jungian’s north star, a point of  orientation and navigation. I quote Jung from the RB, p. 231 ” Believe me, it is no teaching and instruction I give you. On what basis should I presume to teach you? I give you news of the way of this man, but not of your own way. My path is not your path, therefore I cannot teach you. The way is within us, but not in Gods, nor in teachings, nor in laws. Within us is the way, the truth, and the life”.

The Red Book by C.G. Jung

Edited and Introduced by Sonu Shamdasani

Philemon Series, 2009

A Contribution To The

ERBzine Library Project

Edgar Rice Burroughs Meets Rider Haggard

by

R.E. Prindle

     Among the very many important influences on Edgar Rice Burroughs, contending for the top spot was the English novelist of Africa, Henry Rider Haggard, frequently named as just Rider Haggard.

     Haggard was born on June 22, 1856 in Norfolkshire.  He died on May 14, 1925.   When Burroughs was born in 1875 his future idol was beginning his stay in South Africa of seven years duration.  It was there that Haggard learned the history of the Zulu chiefs from Chaka to Cetywayo that figures so prominently in his African novels.

     In Africa at twenty, he was back in England at 27.  Even though Science was surging through England and Europe curiously Haggard was untouched by it all his life.  There is not even an acknowledgement that he had ever heard of Evolution in his novels.  Nor was he religious in the Christian sense.  Instead he became well versed in the esoteric tradition leaning even toward a pagan pre-Christian sensibility.  Perhaps very close to African animism.

     One supposes that on his return to England he might have immersed himself in Madame Blavatsky’s Isis Unveiled published in 1877.  He certainly seems to be a theosophical adept in his first two African novels, King Solomon’s Mines and She but he must have been pursuing his esoteric studies in Africa to have known so much.  If so, he is certainly knowledgeable of Zulu and African lore having a deep sympathy for it.  Indeed, he frequently comes across as half African intellectually. 

     Once he began writing he apparently never put down his pen.  I am unclear as to how many novels he wrote.  For convenience sake I have used the fantasticfiction.com bibliography which lists 50, but as I have sixty so there are obviously some missing.  In addition Haggard wrote a dozen non-fiction titles.

     While writing dozens of African novels Haggard also wrote a dozen or so esoteric novels placed throughout the eastern Mediterranean, Mexico and Nicaragua.  These are all terrifically impressive displays of esoteric understanding, breathtaking as a whole.  Usually disparaged by those without an esoteric background and education these volumes are almost essential reading for anyone so inclined.  For those who would deny ERB’s esoteric training and background I refer them to Haggard’s novels.

     The key to understanding Haggard’s thinking and works are a batch of novels exploring the relationship of the Anima and Animus.  Haggard’s quest in which he failed was to find union with his Anima.

     His fictional seeker and alter ego was Allan Quatermain.  Thus the first of his esoteric novels is King Solomon’s Mines, in which he introduces Quatermain establishes his Ego or Animus.  With his next novel, She, he introduces his Anima figure Ayesha otherwise known as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.  Early Sheena, Queen Of The Jungle.

     She was much acclaimed as the epitome of the Theosophical doctrine by Madame Blavatsky while C.G. Jung asserted that She was a perfect representation of the Anima figure.  Haggard followed She (1886) with Ayesha, The Return Of She (1905) and the final volume of the trilogy, Wisdom’s Daughter: The Life And Love Story Of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed (1923).  Terrific stuff, well worth a couple reads each.  She, of course, became the model for Burroughs’ La of Opar.

     Haggard died in 1925 so it can be seen that he was obsessed by his quest for union with his Anima.  Two additional volumes deal with his problem.  The trilogy does not include Allan Quatermain so Haggard had to write his alter-ego into Ayesha’s story.  This was begun in She And Allen of 1920.  You can see that he closer he got to his death the problem became more urgent.  The end of the story was told in his postumously published Treasure Of The Lake (1926).

     Treasure is the most hauntingly beautiful title Haggard wrote.  Just astonishing.  In the novel Quatermain is ‘called’ to travel to a hidden land.  He has no idea why but fate is visibly arranging things so that he must obey.  Terrific stuff.  The Treasure Of The Lake is none other than Allan’s Anima although no longer called Ayesha.  She lives on an island in the middle of a lake in an extinct volcano, She being the Treasure.  Heartbreakingly she is not for Allan.  He is only to get a glimpse of the grail while a character is rescued by Allan who bears a striking resemblance to Leo Vincey, the hero of She who is winner of  the Treasure.  The Treasure is reserved for him.  Thus Allan and Haggard journey back from the mountain’s top having seen the promised land but not allowed to enter.  By the time the first readers, which included Edgar Rice Burroughs, turned the pages H. Rider Haggard had crossed the bar, his bark being far out on the sea.

     Burroughs was impressed.   His 1931 novel, Tarzan Triumphant, is a direct imitation in certain episodes.  Largely on that basis I have to speculate that Burroughs read the entire Haggard corpus at least once.

     The Anima novels of Haggard then are:

1. King Solomon’s Mines

2.  She

3.  Ayesha, The Return Of She

4.Wisdom’s Daughter: The Life And Love Story Of She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed

5.  She And Allan

6.  The Treasure Of The Lake

     The writing of the titles span Haggard’s writing career.

     His first esoteric novels which I heartily recommend are Cleopatra, The World’s Desire (top notch), The Pearl Maiden, Montezuma’s Daughter, Heart Of The World, Morning Star and Queen Sheba’s Ring.

     What most people think of and when anyone thinks of Haggard is his character Allan Quatermain.  The makes and remakes of Quatermain and She movies are numerous.  You could entertain yourself for many an hour.

     Fourteen novels were published during Haggard’s lifetime, the best known being King Soloman’s Mines and Allan Quatermain.  Many people have no idea he wrote anything else.  She, of the first African trilogy, doesn’t include Quatermain.

     Both of the first Quatermains were highly influential on Burroughs.  Tarzan was fashioned to some extent on the character Sir Henry Curtis, the original white giant.  While most people look for the origins of Tarzan in the Romulus and Remus myth of Rome that is only a small part of it that reflects Burroughs’ understanding of ancient mythology.  The models for Tarzan are more diverse including not only Curtis but The Great Sandow who Burroughs saw and possibly met at the great Columbian Exposition of 1893.  The list of titles in the Quatermain series:  (N.B.  It is Quatermain not Quartermain.)

1. King Solomon’s Mines

2.  Allan Quatermain

3.  Allan’s Wife

4,  Maiwa’s Revenge

5. Marie

6.  Child Of The Storm

7.  The Holy Flower

8.  Finished

9.  The Ivory Child

10.  The Ancient Allan

11.  She And Allan

12.  Heu-Heu or The Monster

13.  Treasure Of The Lake

14.  Allan And The Ice Gods

      As I look over the list I find that they were all pretty good.  The trilogy of Marie, Child Of The Storm and Finished, concerning Chaka’s wars is excellent.  The Holy Flower and The Ivory Child are also outstanding.  The Ivory Child introduces the notion of the Elephant’s Graveyard that captivated Hollywood while taking a central place in MGM’s Tarzan series of movies.

     Other noteworthy African titles are Nada, The Lily,  The People Of The Mist and Benita.

     In addition to the Esoteric and African novels Haggard wrote various contemporary and historical novels.  All of them are high quality but mainly for the Haggard enthusiast.  Burroughs may have been influenced to write the diverse range of his stories by Haggard’s example.

     In the current print on demand (POD) publishing situation nearly the entire catalog is available.  The Wildside Press publishes attractive editons of forty-some titles.  Kessinger Publishing publishes most of what Wildside doesn’t and most of what they do but in relatively unattractive editions.  You can search other POD publishers and probably come up with what you want.

     Haggard is wonderful stuff.  You can choose at random and come up with something that truly entertains you.

Themes And Variations

The Tarzan Novels Of Edgar Rice Burroughs

#5  Tarzan And The Jewels Of  Opar

Part V

by

R.E. Prindle

Texts:

Du Maurier, George: Peter Ibbetson

Dudgeon, Piers: Captivated:  J.M. Barrie, The Du Mauriers & The Dark Side Of  Neverland, 2008, Chatto And Windus

Hesse, Herman:  The Bead Game

Neumann, Erich:  The Origins and History Of Consciousness, 1951, Princeton/Bollingen

Vrettos, Athena: “Little Bags Of Remembrance: Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson And Victorian Theories Of Ancestral Memories”   Erudit Magazine Fall 2009.

     While it is today commonly believed that Sigmund Freud invented or discovered the Unconscious this is not true.  As so happens a great cataclysm, The Great War of 1914-18, bent civilization in a different direction dissociating it from its recent past.

     Studies in the earlier spirit of the unconscious continued to be carried on by C.G. Jung and his school but Freud successfully suppressed their influence until quite recently actually.  Through the fifties of the last century Freud’s mistaken and harmful, one might say criminal, notion of the unconscious held the field.  Thus there is quite a difference in the tone of Edgar Rice Burroughs writing before and after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

     There are those who argue that Burroughs was some kind of idiot savant who somehow knew how to write exciting stories.  In fact he was a well and widely read man of varied interests who kept up on intellectual and scientific matters.   He was what might be called an autodidact with none of the academic gloss.  He was very interested in psychological matters from hypnotism to dream theory.

     The scientific investigation of the unconscious may probably be dated to the appearance of Anton Mesmer and his interest in hypnotism  also variously known as Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism.  The full fledged investigation of the unconscious began with hypnotism.  Slowly at first but by the last quarter of the nineteenth century in full flower with varied colors.  Science per se was a recent development also flowering along with the discovery of the unconscious.

     While Charles Darwin had brought the concept of evolution to scientific recognition in 1859 the key discipline of genetics to make sense of evolution was a missing component.  It is true that Gregor Mendel discovered the concept of genetics shortly after Darwin’s Origin Of Species was issued but Mendel’s studies made no impression at the time. His theories were rediscovered in 1900 but they were probably not widely diffused until after the Great War.  Burroughs knew of the earlier Lamarck, Darwin and Mendel by 1933 when he wrote  Tarzan And The Lion Man.  His character of ‘God’ is the  result of genetic mutation.

     Lacking the more complete knowledge of certain processes that we have today these late nineteenth century speculators seem ludicrous and wide of the mark but one has to remember that comprehension was transitting the religious mind of the previous centuries to a scientific one, a science that wasn’t accepted by everyone then and still isn’t today.  The Society For Psychical Research sounds humorous today but without the advantage of genetics, especially DNA such speculations made more sense except to the most hard nosed scientists and skeptics.  The future poet laureate John Masefield was there.  Looking back from the perspective of 1947 he is quoted by Piers Dudgeon, p. 102:

     Men were seeking to discover what limitations there were to personal intellect; how far it could travel from its home personal brain; how deeply it could influence other minds at a distance from it or near it; what limits, if any, there might be to an intense mental sympathy.  This enquiry occupied many doctors and scientists in various ways.  It stirred George Du Maurier…to speculations which deeply delighted his generation.

     Whether believer or skeptic Burroughs himself must have been delighted by these speculations as they stirred his own imagination deeply until after the pall of the Revolution and Freud’s triumph.

     Burroughs was subjected to dreams and nightmares all his life.  Often waking from bad dreams.  He said that his stories were derived from his dreams but there are many Bibliophiles who scoff at this notion.  The notion of  ‘directed dreaming’ has disappeared from popular consideration but then it was a serious topic.  Freud’s own dream book was issued at about this time.  I have already reviewed George Du Maurier’s Peter Ibbetson on my blog, I, Dynamo and on ERBzine with Du Maurier’s notions of ‘Dreaming True’.  It seems highly probable that Burroughs read Ibbetson and Du Maurier’s other two novels so that from sometime in the nineties he would have been familiar with dream notions from that source.

    Auto-suggestion is concerned here and just as support that Burroughs was familiar with the concept let me quote from a recent collection of ERB’s letters with Metcalf as posted on ERBzine.  This letter is dated December 12, 1912.

     If they liked Tarzan, they will expect to like this story and this very self-suggestion will come to add to their interest in it.

     Athena Vrettos whose article is noted above provides some interesting information from Robert Louis Stevenson who developed a system of ‘directed dreaming’  i.e. auto-suggestion.  We know that Burroughs was highly influenced by Stevenson’s  Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde while he probably read other novels of Stevenson.  How could he have missed Treasure Island?  Whether he read any of Stevenson’s essays is open to guess but in an 1888 essay A Chapter On Dreams Stevenson explained his method.  To Quote Vrettos:

     Rather than experiencing dreams at random, fragmented images and events, Stevenson claims he has learned how to shape them into coherent, interconnected narratives, “to dream in sequences and thus to lead a double life- one of the day, one of the night- one that he had every reason to believe was the true one, another that he had no means of proving false.”  Stevenson describes how he gains increasing control of his dream life by focusing his memory through autosuggestion, he sets his unconscious imagination to work assisting him in his profession of writer by creating “better tales than he could fashion for himself.”   Becoming an enthusiastic audience to his own “nocturnal dreams”, Stevenson describes how he subsequently develops those dreams and memories into the basis for many of his published stories, most notably his 1886 Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde.

     Now, directed dreaming and Dreaming True sound quite similar.  One wonder if there was a connection between Stevenson and Du Maurier.  It turns out that there was as well as with nearly the entire group of English investigators.  Let us turn to Piers Dudgeon again, p. 102:

          Shortly after they met, the novelist Walter Besant invited [Du Maurier] to join a club he was setting up, to be named ‘The Rabelais’ after the author of Gargantua and Pantagruel.  Its name raised expectations of bawdiness, obscenity and reckless living, (which were not in fact delivered) as was noted at the time.  Henry Ashbee, a successful city businessman with a passion for pornography, and reputed to be Robert Louis Stevenson’s model for the two sides of his creation, Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde, denounced its members as ‘very slow and un-Rabelaisian’, and there is a story that Thomas Hardy, a member for a time, objected to the attendance of Henry James on account of his lack of virility.

     Virility was not the issue however.  The members of the Rabelais were interested in other worlds.  Charles Leland was an expert on fairy lore and voodoo.  Robert Louis Stevenson was the author of The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde (1886) which epitomized the club’s psychological/occult speculations.  Arthur Conan Doyle, who became a member of the British Society For Psychical Research, was a dedicated spiritualist from 1916.  Henry James was probably more at home than Hardy, for both his private secretary Theodora Besanquet, and brother William, the philosopher, were members of the Psychical Society.

     In many ways  the Rabelais was a celebration that [Du Maurier's] time had come.  Parapsychological phenomena and the occult were becoming valid subjects for rigorous study.  There was a strong feeling that the whole psychic scene would at any moment be authenticated by scientific explanation.

       Du Maurier was obviously well informed of various psychical ideas when he wrote Ibbetson.  In addition he had been practicing hypnosis since his art student days in the Paris of the late 1850s.

     So this was the literary environment that Burroughs was growing up in.  As Bill Hillman and myself have attempted to point out, ERB’s mental and physical horizons were considerably broadened by the Columbian Expo of 1893.  Everything from the strong man, The Great Sandow, to Francis Galton’s psychological investigations were on display.  The cutting edge of nineteenth century thought and technology was there for the interested.  Burroughs was there for every day of the Fair.  He had time to imbibe all and in detail.  The Expo shaped his future life.  That he was intensely interested in the intellectual and literary environment is evidenced by the fact that when he owned his stationery story in Idaho in 1898 he advertised that he could obtain any magazine or book from both England and America.  You may be sure that he took full advantage of the opportunity for himself.  As this stuff was all the rage there can be no chance that he wasn’t familiar with it all if he didn’t actually immerse himself in it.  Remember his response to Kipling’s The White Man’s Burden was instantaneous.  Thus you have this strange outpost of civilization in Pocatello, Idaho where any book or magazine could be obtained.  Of course, few but Burroughs took advantage of this fabulous opportunity.  It should also be noted that he sold the pulp magazines so that his interest in pulp literature went further back than 1910.

      In addition ERB was enamored of the authors to the point of hero worship much as musical groups of the 1960s were idolized so he would have thirsted for any gossip he could find.  It isn’t impossible that he knew of this Rabelais Club.  At any rate his ties to psychology and the occult become more prominent the more one studies.

     It seems to me that longing as he did to be part of this literary scene, that if one reads his output to 1920 with these influences in mind, the psychological and occult content of, say, the Mars series, becomes more obvious.  He is later than these nineteenth century lights so influences not operating on them appear in his own work making it more modern. 

     At least through 1917 the unconscious was thought of as a source of creativity rather than the source of evil impulses.  If one could access one’s unconscious incalculable treasures could be brought up.  Thus gold or treasure is always depicted in Burroughs’ novels as buried.  The gold represents his stories, or source of wealth, brought up form his unconscious.  The main vaults at Opar are thus figured as a sort of brain rising above ground level.  One scales the precipice to enter the brain cavity high up in the forehead or frontal lobe.  One then removes the ‘odd shaped ingots’ to cash them in.  Below the vaults are two levels leading back to Opar that apparently represent the unconscious.  Oddly enough these passageways are configured along the line of Abbot’s scientific romance, Flatland.

     In Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar the gold is taken to the Estate and buried replicating the vaults.  Once outside Opar and in circulation, so to speak, the ingots are accessible to anyone hence the duel of Zek and Mourak for them.  The first gold we hear of in the Tarzan series is brought ashore and buried by the mutineers.  This also sounds vaguely like Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  The watching Tarzan then  digs the gold up and reburies it elsewhere.  In The Bandit Of Hell’s Bend the gold is stolen and buried beneath the floorboards of the Chicago Saloon.  Thus gold in the entire corpus is always from or in a buried location.  These are never natural veins of gold but the refined ingots.

     Not only thought of as a source of treasure during this period  the unconscious was thought to have incredible powers such as telekinesis, telepathy and telecommunication.  One scoffs at these more or less supernatural powers brought down from ‘God’ and installed in the human mind.  As they have been discredited scientifically Western man has discarded them.

     On the other hand Western Man deludes himself into accepting the oriental Freud’s no less absurd assertion that the unconscious exists independently of the human body somewhat like the Egyptian notion of the ka and is inherently evil while controlling the conscious mind of the individual.  This notion is purely a religious concept of Judaism identifying the unconscious as no less than the wrathful, destructive tribal deity of the old testament Yahweh.  Further this strange Judaic concept of Freud was allowed to supersede all other visions of the unconscious while preventing further investigation until the writing of C.G. Jung were given some credence beginning in the sixties of the last century.

     In point of fact there is no such unconscious.  The supernatural powers given to the unconscious by both Europeans and Freud are preposterous on the face of it.  For a broader survey of this subject see my Freud And His Vision Of The Unconscious on my blogsite, I, Dynamo.

     This so-called unconscious is merely the result of being born with more or less a blank mind that needs to be programmed.  The programming being called experience and education.  The maturation and learning process are such that there is plenty of room for error.  All learning is equivalent to hypnosis, the information being suggestion which is accepted and furthers the development of the individual.  Learning the multiplication tables for instance is merely fixing them in your mind or, in other words, memorizing them.  All learning is merely suggestion thus it is necessary that it be constructive or education and not indoctrination or conditioning although both are in effect.  Inevitably some input will not be beneficial or it may be misunderstood.  Thus through negative suggestion, that is bad or terrifying suggestions, fixations will result.  A fixation is impressed as an obsession that controls one’s behavior against one’s conscious will, in the Freudian sense.  The fixation seems to be placed deep in the mind, hence depth psychology.  Thus when ERB was terrified and humiliated by John the Bully certain suggestions occurred to him about himself that became fixations or obsessions.  These obsessions directed the content of his work.

    To eliminate the fixations is imperative.  This is what so-called depth psychology is all about.  The subconscious, then, is now ’seprarated’ from the conscious, in other words the personality or ego is disintegrated.  The goal is to integrate the personality and restore control.  Once, and if that is done the fixations disappear and the mind become unified, integrated or whole; the negative conception of the unconscious is gone and one is left with a functioning conscious and subconscious.  The subconscious in sleep or dreams then reviews all the day’s events to inform the conscious of what it missed and organize it so that it can be acted on.  No longer distorted by fixations, or obsessions, the individual can act in his own interests according to his abilities.  The sense of living a dream life and a real life disappears.

     That’s why experience and education are so important.  What goes into the mind is all that can come out.

     But, the investigation of the unconscious was blocked by Freudian theory and diverted from its true course to benefit the individual in order to benefit Freud’s special interests.

     So, after the War ERB forgot or abandoned the wonderful notions of the unconscious and was forced to deal with and defend himself against Freudian concepts.  The charactger of his writing begins to change in the twenties to meet the new challenges of aggressive Judaeo-Communism until by the thirties his work is entirely directed to this defense as I have shown in my reviews of his novels from 1928 to 1934.

     Tarzan And The Jewels Of Opar then reflects this wonderful vision of the subconscious as portrayed by George Du Maurier and Robert Louis Stevenson

     Then the grimmer reality sets in.

End Of Review.