The Trickster twists perception Through the NewsFeed Twined minds in GroupThink FeedLots
Marionettes dance and Pirouette As Myelin Ministers twist the knots Into viral See Ee Oh My Gods of Deception
….sacrificial Lambs for Dear Ole Set….
Blessed Inception of regrets embedded Within brains as the frozenPlay rewinds Again and again
To point fingers at the Sins And the Stains And what remains to be Said
Of ThatStory Of ThisStory Of HerStory Or HisTory
Millions of taunting fingers pointed in blame Millions of tongues engulfed in flames Millions of clicks and tik tok toes Tipping quietly Through the Show …..minions clapping at their masters blows…..
A cyclic repeat of the cameras lens Optical Collusion as Harvest Season Begins (Fallen Idols’ idyllic hymns In Idle Hands as the puppet descends From the public pulpit
To mock the culprits In a Feast of Loosh)
Hashtag #cheaters sweeten the meat As the blood rips loose
(Rotten Pomegranate Seeds Drip from the Nous)
This old man, he played One He played Knick knack on my Phone With a Knick knack paddy whack Give the crowd some stones.:.: ( this old man came scrolling home)
Wakey wakey the Devil said Just two fried eggs On a toasted head
The Neutral Zone is the Creation Zone I am a chosen Enemy Of The State Of Mind That tries to tug at my I And keep me Blind To NeutralEyez is to surf the Callosum I call it stepping into the Center of the Spindle of the Core Processor The zero point The jester is the fool who has come full circle Creating worlds Taut InTension With Time & Space Words are worLds We fertileyez EL.ectromantically Sealed In Mag.Dalenes Vas Ben Clausum
Neither HemisPhere Will win the War Of Fear Within my Mirror
I Play in the Zone Of Zero A fancyFool Looking InWard To And From center
The clothes you're wearing, the room, the house, the city that you're in. Everything in it started out in the human imagination. Your lives, your personalities, your whole world. All invented. All made up. All the wars, the romances. The masterpieces and the machines. And there's nothing here but a funny little twist of amino acids, playing a marvelous game of pretend.
🗝🕸🃏Alan Moore, Promethea, Vol. 5🃏🕸🗝
👁️🌟Vagabond Rambler🌟👁️
I am the pupil in the center of the eye I am the pupae in the center of the sky I am the purpose of the moon and the mind I am the purplepink lustre of the rotting rind.
I am moved not by your manipulation I am smoothed not by your capitulation I am removed from your observation I am soothed by your undulation.
But what does this mean, what does this mean Where does this lead me, the silver queen the rampant wanderer of time and rhyme the vagabond rambler through moistened minds?
And where does this take me, what forgotten land what does this make me, and by whose hand where will I lay my weary head my friend when the path that I tread winds to the end?
I live surrounded by mirrors I like the way the light reflects And objects change Relationship When eyes Play From different angles Angels swim through the glass Rays of tangled Mass Passing Through As maps to clearer Vision As time and space Collapse Inside the Prism.
ALchemical psychology remarkably condenses the two traits of the lion heart–the conformity of its thought and its objectification- into the alchemical substance, sulfur, the principle of “combustibility,” the magna famma. “Where is the sulfur to be found? asks Kramer, a fourteenth-century English Benedictine. “In all substances, all things in the world–metals, herbs, trees, animals, stones, are its ore.
Everything that suddenly lights up, draws our joy, fares with beauty–each bush a god burning: this is the alchemical sulfur, the flammable face of the world, its phlogiston, its aureole of desire, enthymesis everywhere. That fat of goodness we reach toward as consumers is the active image in each thing, the active imagination of the anima mundi that fires the heart and provokes it out.
(James Hillman, Thought of the Heart )
Continued in photo captions
At the same time that sulfur conflagrates, it also coagulates; it is that which sticks, the mucilage, “the gum,” the joiner, the stickiness of attachment. Sulfur literalizes the heart’s desire at the very instant that the thymos enthuses. Conflagration and coagulation occur together. Desire and its object become indistinguishable. What I burn with attaches me to it; I am anointed by the fat of my own desire, captive to my own enthusiasm, and thus in exile from my heart at the very moment I seem most to own it. We lose our soul in the moment of discovering it: “Sweet Helen,” says Marlowe’s Faustus, “make me immortal with a kiss./Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!” Hence Heraclitus had to oppose thymos and psyche: “Whatever thymos wishes, it buys at the expense of soul.”Psychology now calls this love in the heart of the lion compul- sive projection. The alchemical basis of this kind of projection is actually the sulfur in the heart that does not recognize it is imagining. The objective himma is literalized into the objects of its desire. Imagination is thrown outward, ahead of itself; and the task is less to take back these kinds of projections -who takes them back and where are they put–but more to leap after the projectile reclaiming it as imagination, thereby recognizing that himma demands that images always be experienced as sensuous independent bodies. There are styles of projection: it is not a unitary mechanism. Cordial projection requires an equally leonine mode of consciousness: pride, magnanimity, courage. To desire and to see through desire–this is the courage that the heart requires.As Jung says: “Sulphur represents the active substance of the sun… the motive factor in consciousness, on the one hand Will and on the other Compulsion” (CW 14, S15t). Compulsion becomes will through courage; it is in the heart that the operations upon sulfur are performed. We shall come back to these operations in the second part. For now it is enough to recognize compulsive projection to be a necessary activity of the sulfur, as the way in which this heart thinks, where thought and desire are one.Our lion rages and our sulfur burns. Our saint is eaten by lions. We cannot let loose our aesthetic outrage in its simple form. Alchemical psychology recognized this need for work on the lion. Alchemical psychology considered the black and red sulfurs, and the green lion, in desperate need of subliming. One well-known method cuts off the green lion’s paws, depriving it of its reach into the world. Yet it stays alive as a succus vitae in the heart, for “green is the color of the heart and of the vitality of the heart,” as we know from Corbin. The color of the himma must be green like the natural driving sulfur that is also the green/red copper goddess Venus. This ardent green has to be enlightened, the sulfur chastened: a whitening of the heart.To make white the heart is an opus contra naturam. We expect the heart to be red as its natural blood, green as its hopeful desire. This heart operation originates in the dilemma presented by sulfur: the imagination captive in its sulfur that both burns and coagulates at the same instant, imagination held fused into its desire and its desire fused with its object. The himma blinded, unable to distinguish between feeling and image, image and object, object and subject, true imagining and illusion.Alchemy often speaks of subliming to a sulfur white as snow. This is not only an operation of calming and cooling, the “Doves of Diana.” In fact sublimation requires going with the fire, like curing like, raising the temperature to a white heat so as to destroy all coagulations in the intensity of the desire, so that what one desires No longer matters, even as it matters most, mattering now sublimed translucent, all flame.
Anthropologists describe a condition among "primitive" peoples called "loss of soul." In this condition a man is out of himself, unable to find either the outer connection between humans or the inner connection to himself. He is unable to take part in his society, its rituals, and traditions. They are dead to him, he to them. His connection to family, totem, nature, is gone. Until he regains his soul he Is not a true human. He is “not there." It is as if he had never been initiated, been given a name, come into real being. His soul may not only be lost; it may also be possessed, bewitched, ill, transposed into an object, animal, place, or another person. Without this soul, he has lost the sense of belonging and the sense of being in communion with the powers and the gods. They no longer reach him; he cannot pray, nor sacrifice, nor dance. His personal myth and his connection to the larger myth of his people, as raison d'être, is lost. Yet he is not sick with disease, nor is he out of his mind. He has simply lost his soul. He may even die. We become lonely. Other relevant parallels with ourselves today need not be spelled out.
One day in Burghölzli, the famous institute in Zurich where the words schizophrenia and complex were born, I watched a woman being interviewed. She sat in a wheelchair because she was elderlyand feeble. She said that she was dead for she had lost her heart. The psychiatrist asked her to place her hand over her breast to feel her heart beating: it must still be there if she could feel its beat. "That," she said, "is not my real heart." She and the psychiatrist looked at each other. There was nothing more to say. Like the primitive who has lost his soul, she had lost the loving courageous connection to life--and that is the real heart, not the ticker which can as well pulsate isolated in a glass bottle. This is a different view of reality from the usual one. It is so radically different that it forms part of the syndrome of insanity. But one can have as much understanding for the woman in her psychotic depersonalization as for the view of reality of the man attempting to convince her that her heart was indeed still there. Despite the elaborate and moneyed systems of medical research and the advertisements of the health and recreation industries to prove that the real is the physical and that loss of heart and loss of soul are only in the mind, I believe the "primitive" and the woman in the hospital: we can and do lose our souls. I believe with Jung that each of us is “modern man in search of a soul."
Because symptoms lead to soul, the cure of symptoms may also cure away soul, get rid of just what is beginning to show, at first tortured and crying for help, comfort, and love, but which is the soul in the neurosis trying to make itself heard, trying to impress the stupid and stubborn mind--that impotent mule which insists on going its unchanging obstinate way. The right reaction to a symptom may as well be a welcoming rather than laments and demands for remedies, for the symptom is the first herald of an awakening psyche which will not tolerate any more abuse. Through the symptom the psyche demands attention. Attention means attending to, tending, a certain tender care of, as well as waiting, pausing, listen ing. It takes a span of time and a tension of patience. Precisely what each symptom needs is time and tender care and attention. Just this same attitude is what the soul needs in order to be felt and heard.
So it is often little wonder that it takes a breakdown, an actual illness, for someone to report the most extraordinary experiences of, for instance, a new sense of time, of patience and waiting, and in the language of religious experience, of coming to the center, coming to oneself, letting go and coming home. The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of the soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one's secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it still must be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its luster: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an exoteric splendor. To get rid of the symptom means to get rid of the chance to gain what may one day be of greatest value, even if at first an unbearable irritant, lowly, and disguised.
In the darkness of this [analytical] initiation, the two people instinctively move nearer to each other. A bond forms, as if an eros between the dying, something that is other than the transference of past emotions, other than love between pupil and guide, between patient and doctor, a quite rare and inexplicable feeling brought by the mystery of the image.
I do not know what this kind of loving is, but it is not reducible to other more familiar forms. Perhaps it is an experience of the eros in Thanatos. Perhaps it is an experience of telestic eros, of which Plato speaks in the Phaedrus, the eros of the mysteries and initiations of the soul; or, it may have something to do with the creative eros that always occurs when one is close to soul, the myth of (Eros) and Psyche moving through our emotions. Whatever the nature, there is a loving in dream work. We sense that dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us- and this feeling of being loved by the images permeates the analytical relationship. Let us call it imaginal love, a love based wholly on relationship with images and through images, a love showing in the imaginative response of the partners to the imagination in the dreams. Is this Platonic love? It is like the love of an old man, the usual personal content of love voided by coming death, yet still intense, playful, and tenderly, carefully close.
“⭐️This book changed the way I look at dreams, or maybe the book taught me what my heart always wanted me to understand. Hillman looks at the dream as happening in the “Underworld” – a place of death – and wants us to enter into that world to understand the dream instead of trying to drag the dream up into the day-world by interpreting it.
Some quotes from the book:
“Freud’s method projects the persons in a dream back over the bridge into the dream-day, even if for the sake of their latent meaning. We associate my dream-brother and dream-father to my day-brother and day-father and, by this association, return the dream to the day. Jung’s method of interpretation on the subjective level takes the dream persons into the subject of the dreamer. They become expressions of my psychic traits. They are introjected into my personality. In neither method do we ever truly leave the personal aspect of the dream persons, and thus they remain in the upperworld. Dare I say it loud and clear? The persons I engage with in dreams are neither representations of their living selves nor parts of myself. They are shadow images that fill archetypal roles; they are personae, masks, in the hollow of which is numen.”
“Public performance on a stage, perhaps because it puts us into the underworld of theatre, also constellates the curious interplay between life-soul and image-soul. The almost depersonalization experience of stage fright makes one feel deserted by one’s soul. All that one memorized and trained for has suddenly vanished. It is as if another soul must play the role, and this moment of going on stage is like a rite de passage, a transition into death.”
“For a dream image to work in life it must, like a mystery, be experienced as fully real. Interpretation arises when we have lost touch with the images, when their reality is derivative, so that this reality must be recovered through conceptual translation. Then we try to replace its intelligence with ours instead of speaking to its intelligence with ours.”
Hillman notes that when we see a killer in a dream, we tend to fear him. But Hillman looks at this figure as a helper who is trying to initiate us into the Underworld land-of-the-dead; the dream world: “There is a divine death figure in the killer, either Hades, or Thanatos, or Kronos-Saturn, or Dis Pater, or Hermes, a death demon who would separate consciousness from it life attachments.
Hillman, in one section of the book describes the circus as a metaphor of the Underworld: “Where else but the circus will we ever see the underworld in daylight: the tent of enclosed space, the rings, everyone as close to death as his or her art will allow, the freaks of nature that are beyond nature, and above all, the precise performances of repetitive nonsense, as if Ixion, Tantalus, and Sisyphus had once worked for Ringling Brothers.”
“The comic spirit masquerades in all things we do and say; we are each a joke and do not need to put on a white face. The matter is not one of becoming a clown but of learning what he teaches: making an art of our senseless repetitions, our collapsing and our pathologizings, putting on the face of death that allows the dream world in and watching it turn ordinary objects into amazing images, our public persons into butts of laughter.”
“Unfortunately psychology emphasizes attention and recall; the dayworld wishes to have, must absolutely have, a ‘good memory’; a bad memory is more devastating to success than is a bad conscience. Forgetting therefore becomes a pathological sign. But depth psychology based on an archetypal perspective might understand forgetting as serving a deeper purpose, seeing in these holes and slips in the dayworld the means by which events are transformed out of personal life, voiding it, emptying it. Somehow we must come to better terms with Lethe, since she rules many years, especially the last years, and we would be foolish to dismiss her work only as pathological. The romantics took Lethe most seriously.”⭐️
James Kulm, in reference to the book ‘The Dream and the Underworld’ by James Hillman
{self portrait series Kennedy Peak 8-6-24 part 4 ::::The SilverScreen of the Underworld Dream }
~all photo captions contain quotes/excerpts from the book by Hillman
UNDERGROUND AND UNDERWORLD When using the word underworld, it is imperative to keep in mind a distinction made by some classicists. This distinction is of great psychological importance, because it frees the psychic realm from nature. Chthon and ge (“underworld” and “underground”) do not necessarily refer to the same region or evoke identical feelings. “Chthon with its derivatives refers in origin to the cold, dead depths and has nothing to do with fertility. “This kind of deep ground is not the same as the dark earth; and the Great Lady (potnia chthon), who sends black-winged dreams and who can also be called Erinys, cannot simply be merged into the single figure of the Great Earth Mother.Psychology’s great-mother complex has swallowed even her own differentiations. Small wonder that this complex is also called “uroboric consciousness,” for even she herself vanishes into an interpretive monotony that makes me believe that the monotheistic psychology I so often belabor is less a mimesis of ancient Hebrewism (within and alongside of which there was much space for imaginal variety) than it is a mimesis of the Great Mother. Monism as Momism. Be this as it may, when we read analytical psychology today to discover about the ‘chthonic,’ we find it has taken on her meaning of primitive earthiness. Morever, as primitive and earthy, it must mean matriarchal and feminine. Thus our instinctual body, whether in flesh or image, in men or women, in the past or now, belongs to her, and we must become murderous heroes to get it back. The great-mother complex hangs the trinket of female gender on agriculture and fertility, as well as on the earth, body, instinct, and on depth. This move ignores that chthonic is an epithet belonging in the sense of “Is ignorant about,” a chthon that cannot be identified with instinctual body or earthy soil.Let us be clear: the chthonic is not only female, not only instinctual, not only physical, and it does not have to do with fertility rites. As Wilamowitz-Moellendorf said, Ïf modern scholars, who talk so much about chthonian cults, think in this connection of agriculture and all that goes along with Demeter in that sphere, they have not accustomed their ear to the overtones of Greek words.” The two words ge and chthon imply two worlds, the first of the earth and in it, the second below the earth and beyond it.There are even three distinctions here which have been imagined as levels of earth: an earthed imagination in keeping with Ge herself, whose name we still find in ge-ography, ge-ology, and ge-ometry. The first of these distinctions is between Demeter’s horizontal green plain with its activities of growth and Ge, the earth below Demeter. This second level Ge, may be imagined as the physical and psychic ground of an individual or community, its ‘place on earth,’ with its natural rights, rituals, and laws (Ge-Themis). Here, Ge serves as a fundament on which human life depends even more deeply than on food and fertility, like a governing maternal principle that makes material fertility possible and is its spiritual ground, and then beneath these the third, chthon, the depths, the dead’s world.Of course, a polytheistic mind does not firmly divide these “levels,” and so Demeter-Ge-chthon frequently merge in epithet and cult. (What scholars imagine about the Greeks does not correspond, nor must it, with what the Greeks imagine about the Gods.) Also against my distinctions is the fact that one can as well view the entire complex of the underworld that one can as well view the entire complex of the underworld from the perspective of Ge, as does Patricia Berry. She then is able to see much of the chthonic spirit that I meet in Hades to be equally present in Ge, and that Gaia (Ge) is both material, maternal earth, and chthonic void with its own spirit.The question here partly turns on how one regards earth. The strata of meanings which I have just laid out in terms of Demeter-Ge-chthon imagines a nonphysical earth or terre pur, below or beyond and maybe prior to the ground that we touch. Some etymologists and classicists try to relate the three “levels” culturally, believing one level of meaning to be prior in the sense of historically earlier than another; as if in a genealogy fantasy themselves, they try to derive one level from another, tracing the historical development of these three concepts. For example, Kirk refers to the very early pre-Socratic Pherecydes of Syros (frg. 1), who placed Chthon at the beginning with Zeus and Chronos, “but Chthonie acquired the name Ge…”Rather than enter the arguments of historical fantasy, I would keep to the psychological distinctions reflected in the three words and three personifications. Ge herself shows two aspects. On the one hand, she has to do with retributive justice, with the Fates, and she has also mantic, oracular powers. (Ge chthonia was worshipped on Mykonos, together with Zeus Chthonios and Dionysos Leneus, as she was linked with the chthonic Pluto and Hermes and the Erinyes at Athens [Areopagus].) This is the “great lady” who sends the black-winged dreams and is appropriately the mother of Themis (“Justice”). This spiritual side of her can be distinguished, on the other hand, from the physical Ge to whom grains and fruits were given (Ge-Demeter). Demeter too has a mystery aspect; her daughter Persephone belongs to Hades and has an underworld function. The spiritual significance may not be reduced to the physical (death cult to fertility rites, sense of justice to agricultural rituals) without ignoring the blatant fact that there are different figures with different epithets. In other words, even the earth and nature have their psychic function as well as their terrestrial ones, and one may serve the earth and be on the ground in more ways than one, i.e., through psychic activities, and not only through natural ones.“Is it the transition to light that gives the dream its shadowy quality? We all know how much of an art it is, not to dream, but to recall it.”The distinction between chthonicand earthy, between invisible fundaments and tangible ground, between darkness of soul and blackness of soil, between three Egyptian hieroglyphs, one for earth, another for Aker or entrance to the underground at the edge of existence, and yet another for the realm of the dead of Anubis, the blue-black jackal-dog.Once again, the distinctions are presented in terms of distance. The most radical classicist of the late nineteenth century, Erwin Rohde friend of Nietzsche, said in his great work Psyche that the underworld of Hades and Persephone is so remote from our world that those removed there “can have no influence upon the life and doings of men on earth.”He further emphasized the distinction between the underground of Ge and the chthonic underworld by saying that Ge ïn actual worship was seldom found among the groups of male and female deities of a chthonic nature such as were worshipped together at many places.”The spiritual quality of the underworld stands forth most clearly in descriptions of Tartaros, which, from Hesiod onward, was imagined to be at the very bottom of Hades, its farthest chasm. Tartaros was compared with the sky – as distant from the earth as the heaven above, and it was personified as the son of ether and of earth, that is, a realm of dust, a composite of the most material and immaterial. As the fantasy of Tartaros developed, it became more and more a pneumatic region of air and wind. Unlike the Christian hell of fire, in the imagination of late antiquity Tartaros was a region of dense cold air without light. Hence, Hades often was spoken of as having wings, just as in the Gilgamesh Epic, Enkidu dreams of his death as a transformation into a bird, his arms covered with feathers. The dead are clad like birds, their element evidently air.The volatilization of the underworld contrasts it sharply with the ground under our feet. In the Alexandrian age, the netherworld lost its localization in the earth altogether – that is, it became free of natural literalism – and was geographically transposed to the underside of the world. There was now a lower hemisphere. The word subterranean (hypogeios, or “below ge”) referred to the whole celestial hemisphere curved below our earth and which, like Hades, must necessarily be invisible from our perspective. It cannot be seen from our usual standpoint. Already then the dayworld and the nightworld, the two sides of the romantic soul, were conceived in a geographical theology of the upperworld and netherworld.In “this theology the world is divided into two halves by the line of the horizon; upper hemisphere is the domain of the living and the higher gods, the lower that of the dead and the infernal gods. “The Egyptians had carried into extreme detail this reversed world below our feet. The dead walked upside down, feet up, heads down. “People there walk with their feet against the ceiling. This has the unpleasant consequence that digestion goes in the reverse direction, so that excrements arrive in the mouth.” The Underworld is converse to the dayworld, and so its behavior will be obverse, perverse. What is merely shit from the daytime perspective – or what Freud called day-residues – becomes soul food when turned upside down. The way we go about there, the way we ruminate, even logic is stood on its head, for there our heads are in another place. (In Chapter 6 we shall look at some contemporary examples of this “upsidedownness,” including excrements in dreams.)Might there be an archetypal figure within Freud’s “day residues” that are the material of the dream? Could these leftover scraps refer to the household garbage that was sacrifice to Hekate (Cults2:515)? Hekate has long been implicated in dream interpretations. Both the magical view that considers dreams to be foretellings and the nineteenth-century mechanistic view that attributes them to waste products of physiological sensations (garbage) show Hekate’s influence when she becomes equated with Nyx (night), as in Spenser and at times in Shakespeare, then dreams become her province and our interpretative ideas reflect her perspectives.We may continue this tradition, although in a different manner. Yes, the dream is made of scraps that belong to the Goddess who makes sacred the waste of life, so that it all counts, it all matters. Offering the dream to “the mysteries of Hekate and the night” (King Lear, act 1, scene 1) means giving back the regurgitations that “come up” in dreams without attempts to save them morally or to find their dayworld use. The junk of the soul is primordially saved by Hekate’s blessing, and even our trashing ourselves can be led back to her. The messy life is a way of entering her domain and becoming a “child of Hekate.”Our part is only to recognize that there is a myth in the mess so as to dispose of the day residues at the proper place, that is, to place them at Hekate’s altar. Ritually, the garbage was placed at night at a crossroads so that each dream may lead off in at least three directions besides the one we have come from. Hekate, who has traditionally been represented with three heads, keeps us looking and listening in many ways at once.Because the underworld differs so radically from the underground, that which has its home there, dreams, must refer to psychic or pneumatic world of ghosts, spirits, ancestors, souls, daimones. These are invisible by nature, and not merely invisible because they have been forgotten or repressed. This world is fluid, or dusty, fiery, muddy, or aetherial, so there is nothing firm to hold to – unless we develop intuitive instruments for seizing impalpables that slip through our fingers or burn at the touch.By locating the dream among these impalpable fundamentals in Hades, we will begin to find that dreams reflect an underworld of essences rather than an underground of root and seed. They present images of being rather than of becoming. We will learn that a dream is less a comment on life and an indication as to where it is growing, than it is a statement from the chthonic depths, the cold, dense, unchanging state – what we so often today call psychopathic because, as Freud saw, the dream does not show morality, human feelings, or the sense of time. We can no longer turn to the dream in hopes of progress, transformation, and rebirth.I think too that the underworld teaches us to abandon our hopes for achieving unification of personality by means of the dream. The underworld spirits are plural. So much is this the case that the di manes (underworld spirits), who were the Roman equivalent of the Greek theoi chthonioi, have no native singular form. Even individual dead persons were spoken of plurally, as di manes. “The ancient Egyptian was thought to live after death in a multiplicity of forms, each of these forms was the full man himself”(Ba, p. 113). The underworld is an innumerable community of figures. The endless variety of figures reflects the endlessness of the soul, and dreams restore to consciousness this sense of multiplicity. The polytheistic perspective is grounded in the chthonic depths of the soul. A psychotherapeutic emphasis will be upon the disintegrative effects of the dream, which also confronts us with our moral dis-integrity, our psychopathic lack of a central hold on ourselves. Dreams show us to be plural and that each of the forms that figure there are “the full man himself,” full potentials of behavior. Only by falling apart (RP, pp. 53-112) into the multiple figures do we extend consciousness to embrace and contain its psychopathic potentials.We get into difficulties when we try to read the deep chthonic level from the viewpoints of Demeter or of Ge. To perceive the chthonic with Demeter’s eyes is to take the dream as signal for literal action and to translate it with naturalistic ethics into a moralized world. To take a dream as containing an immoral implication or a moral indication for setting matters right and redressing a balance is to read it from the Ge-Themis-Dike perspective. Perhaps we need the intervention of another lady of the underworld, Hekate, who was especially adept with ghosts, who both brought and banned fear, and who had nothing to do with the round of human life (marriage, birth, agriculture), herself without brother or sister or any descendants. “Her worship was without morality.” Hekate’s underworld perspective reaches to the chthonic depth of the dream, which, on the one hand, is a simple statement of essence – how spectral things look when stripped of their human context – and, on the other, elicits our psychopathy. The region of the soul in which dreams have their home is deeper than flesh-and-blood urges, which we have been, mistakenly, calling chthonic, as if it were the same as natural, as if the underworld referred to ira and cupiditas, the blood-soul, the thymos. This all is earthy; the natural, physical, somatic soul of emotions. Our modern word unconscious has become a catch-all, collecting into one clouded reservoir all fantasies of the deep, the lower, the baser, the heavier (depressed), and the darker. We have buried in the same monolithic tomb called The Unconscious the red and earthy body of the primeval Adam, the collective common man and woman, and the shades, phantoms, and ancestors. We cannot distinguish a compulsion from a call, an instinct for an image, a desirous demand from a movement of imagination. Looking into the night from the while light of the dayworld (where the term unconscious was fashioned), we cannot tell the red from the black. So, we read dreams for all sorts of messages at once – somatic, personal, psychic, mantic, ancestral, practical, confusing instinctual and emotional life with the realm of death. The pronounced distinction between emotion and soul, between emotional man and psychological man, comes out in another of Heraclitus’ fragments (85): “. . . whatever it [thymos] wishes it buys at the price of soul.” Thymos, the earlier Greek experience of emotional consciousness or moist soul, did not belong in the underworld. So, to consider the dream as an emotional wish costs soul; to mistake the chthonic as the natural loses psyche. We cannot claim to be psychological when we read dream image in terms of drives or desires. Whatever counsel an analyst gives about emotional life, supposing it drawn from dreams, refers to his experience, which he reflects from the dreams. It is not in the dreams. He is “sup-posing” about them, that is, he is “putting onto” them what he knows about life. What one knows about life may not be relevant for what is below life. What one knows and has done in life may be as irrelevant to the underworld as clothes that adjust us to life and the flesh and bones that the clothes cover. For in the underworld all is stripped away, and life is upside down. We are further than the expectations based on life experience, and the wisdom derived from it. Again, we can follow Heraclitus (frg. 27): “When men die there awaits what they neither expect nor even imagine.” The word translated here as “expect” is related in Greek to “hope” (elpis), so that the specific hope that is abandoned (Dante, Inferno 3) on entering the underworld perspective is the fantasy of daylife expectations and flesh-and-blood illusions. Souls in Hades are “incurable” said Plato. There is no alteration to be hoped for. Such hope would be hope for the wrong thing. We need more the hope of St. Paul, which is a hope of invisibles and for invisibles, than the hope of Pandora, who, as the wife of Prometheus, contains a hidden hope, which he makes evident in his mission to help mankind. To go deep into a dream requires abandoning hope, the hope that rises in the morning and would turn the dream to its purposes. At the Hades level of the dream there is neither hope nor despair. They cancel each other out; and we can move beyond the language of expectations, measuring progressions and regressions, ego strengthening and weakening, coping and failing.Let me once more try to draw this distinction between the underground of vital, emotional life and the underworld Heraclitus said (frg. 15): It it were not in honour of Dionysus that they conducted the procession and sang the hymn to the male organ, their activity would be completely shameless. Hades and Dionysus are the same, no matter how much they go mad and rave celebrating bacchic rites in honour of the latter. The passage has given scholars – those who accept this phrasing at all – so much trouble partly because it juxtaposes, even identifies, the very different realms we are keeping distinct: psychic essences and emotional nature.This fragment refers to the mystery of a sacred procession and it must be read with a similar reverence, even as a revelation of something profound in acts that seem shamelessly pornographic, raving, and mad. It is therefore not enough to pass it off with a moral generality, as some interpreters do, that Heraclitus means that even the wildest life forces also lead to death, or let it go by, as other interprets do, as another of his metaphysical generalities about the sameness of life and death (frgs. 62, 88). We are still left with the vivid imagery of this mystery in the sexual language that is so fundamental to psychology. So, Heraclitus, as one psychologist to another, across the centuries I read you to be saying that for this troublesome distinction between emotion and soul, between the perspective of vitality (Dionysos) and the perspective of psyche (Hades), sexual fantasy holds a secret. In what seems most evident, public, and concrete, there is also something covered in shame, hidden and invisible.The Hades within Dionysus says that there is an invisible meaning in sexual acts, a significance for soul in the phallic parade, that all our life force, including the polymorphous and pornographic desires of the psyche, refer to the underworld of images. Things in life, no matter how full of life, are not only natural. Dionysos is also a “downer.” We may believe we are living life only on the level of life, but we cannot escape the psychic significance of what we are doing. Soul is made in the rout of the world. What has meaning for life has meaning for soul at the same moment, so consider you living in the light of the Hades within it.The other side of the mysterious identity, the Dionysos within Hades, says that there is zoe, a vitality in all underworld phenomena. The realm of the dead is not as dead as we expect it. Hades too can rape and also seize the psyche through sexual fantasies. Although without thymos, body, or voice, there is a hidden libido in the shadows. The images in Hades are also Dionysian – not fertile in the natural sense, but in the psychic sense, imaginatively fertile. There is an imagination below the earth that abounds in animal forms, that revels and makes music. There is a dance in death. Hades and Dionysos are the same. As Hades darkens Dionysos toward his own richness. Farnell describes their fusion as a “mildness joined with melancholy.”
All modern therapies which claim that action is more curative than words (Moreno) and which seek techniques other than talk (rather than in addition to it) are repressing the most human of all faculties-the telling of the tales of our souls. These therapies may be curative of the child in us who has not learned to speak or the animal who cannot, or a spirit-daimon that is beyond words because it is beyond soul. But only continued attempts at accurate soul-speech can cure our speech of its chatter and restore it to its first function, the communication of soul.
Soul of bulk and substance can be evoked by words and expressed in words; for myth and poetry, so altogether verbal and "fleshless," nonetheless resonate with the deepest intimacies of organic existence. A mark of imaginal man is the speech of his soul, and the range of this speech, its self-generative spontaneity, its precise subtlety and ambiguous suggestion, its capacity, as Hegel said, "to receive and reproduce every modification of our ideational faculty, “ can be supplanted neither by the technology of communication media, by contemplative spiritual silence, nor by physical gestures and signs. The more we hold back from the risk of speaking because of the semantic anxiety that keeps the soul in secret incommunicado, private and personal, the greater grows the credibility gap between what we are and what we say, splitting psyche and logos. The more we become tied by linguistic self-consciousness, the more we abdicate the ruling principle of psychological existence. That we then turn to the rats of Skinner and the dogs of Pavlov, the geese and wolves of Lorenz--tune into dolphins or consider man a naked ape-in order to find prototypes for human behavior, indicates to what extent we are losing our speech and with it our sense of a distinctly human nature. It is not animal prototypes we need for discovering our original patterns, but personified archetypes, each of whom speaks, has a name, 'I' and has its existence in the language world of myth. Without speech we lose soul, and human being assumes the fantasy being of animals. But man is half-angel because he can speak. The more we distrust speech in therapy or the capacity of speech to be therapeutic, the closer we are to an absorption into the fantasy of the archetypal subhuman, and the sooner the archetypal barbarian strides into the communication ruins of a culture that refused eloquence as a mirror of its soul.
🌟But the moment we realize body also as a subtle body–a fantasy system of complexes, symptoms, tastes, influences and relations, zones of delight, pathologized images, trapped insights–then body and soul lose their borders, neither more literal or metaphorical than the other. Remember: the enemy is the literal, and the literal is not the concrete flesh but negligence of the vision that concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors.
Putting soul inside man also neglects that man, too, is a personified literalism- no more an actual real container than soul. In Chapter 1 the realization grew that a human life is actually a personification of the soul, a projection of it, contained by it. Although we readily accept the notion that human energy, and nature, life, and Gods are not specifically human privileges and that they exist “‘outside” human be- ings, we curiously balk over distinguishing soul from human being. Is this because we do not allow anima her independence? Is this the fundamental intolerance of human psychology: its inability to admit the distinct reality, the full reality, of soul, so that all our human struggle with imagination and its mad incursions, with the symptoms of com- plexes, with ideologies, theologies, and their systems, are in root and essence the unpredictable writhing movements of Psyche freeing herself from human imprisonment?
Our distinction between psyche and human has several important consequences. If we conceive each human being to be defined individually and differently by the soul, and we admit that the soul exists independently of human beings, then our essentially differing human individuality is really not human at all, but more the gift of an inhuman daimon who demands human service. It is not my individuation, but the daimon’s; not my fate that matters to the Gods, but how I care for the psychic persons entrusted to my stewardship during my life. It is not life that matters, but soul and how life is used to care for soul. This bears upon dreams. Dreams, we said earlier, are the best model of the actual psyche, for they show it personified, pathologized, and manifold. In them the ego is only one figure among many psychic persons. Nothing is literal; all is metaphor. Dreams are the best model also because they show the soul apart from life, reflecting it but just as often unconcerned with the life of the human being who dreams them. Their main concern seems not to be with living but with imagining.”
BlissNinja 