In the Dream, I and a group of people decide to take Ecstasy/MDMA and the result is an intense DreamRoll indistinguishable from Waking Conscious experience of same. Except that eventually the labrynth leads into a much stranger series of events......in which, as the effects of the drug begin to wear off, I became suddenly cautious of what I am doing, and feeling and know that it has the capacity to open doors that I may not want to open, at least not in this particular Dream. So I am with the Group in a pickup truck that is Speeding up a steep and curved mountain road.......but I jump from the back, not wanting to be carried along with the momentum of the group mind, and wary now of the imbibimg of Substances. As I wander in the dark forests along the road, I start to question my decision, but it seems too late , they are gone from sight and from earshot and the pickup truck is incapable of slowing or straying from its narrow road.
Scenery shifts and I am in a very large building, which seems to be some kind of childrens home/hospital/school......not quite sure what....I am with several others, one of whom I know very well in DReamtime but do not actually have a fleshCentered relationship. It seems to be 'business as usual' at first, but then we become aware that the zoo down the street has lost power, the Grid has shut down or faltered, or something has interfered with the locking/cage mechanisms.....we seem to know this palpably but intuitively at first, without actually seeing anything. A very intense presence, or ConglomerationOfPresences seems to be rolling towards us, as a thick dark primal ball of Energy that we can feel and sense, and whose primal nature makes us wary. Everyone in the room we are in, seems oblivious, except for me and my Friend....who after sensing this energy coming toward us, immediately climb the walls into a vent hole or something, trying to get as high off the ground as possible. At this point there is chaos below us as the people are running and trying to hide, fearful and yet totally unable to orient themselves enough to think and act in survival mode. Its all out panic. My friend and I can feel the fear below us, and we KNOW that we have to do something, because the people in the building have no innate sense of how to deal with this, whereas, for us, it seems that we are coming face to face with something we have seen and dealt with before, perhaps for aeons...... We can hear a snarl, a very loud vibrating resonating Tigers growl, we hear it before we see it, but we know that we must move, we must get out of the building, because being stuck in those walls, is going to be Death and Disaster. Just as the tiger becomes visible, we have manifested a tunnel that leads from the vent hole we have been hiding in....and out we scurry. Our Intent is to get out of the building, find some resources that can help us save the others, and return, hopefully to find that every living soul within the building is not completely ravaged. Thru a series of very ninja-esque maneuvers, with run-ins with many predators and angry animals, we eventually get out to a main hallway, and we know that we must close and lock every door behind us AS WE NAVIGATE, so that we can contain the beasts until we can deal with them appropriately. WE somehow know that the other people/children etc in the building are at least somewhat taken care of and safe, and our main focus is in leaving the building quickly. At this point, the building starts to turn into a series of peoples homes, all within one large contained space. There is one family in particular, who we come across, and who we warn. This family is the brother in law of a good friend of mine, and he has several children....We need to escape thru this particular house/room, and are trying to explain what is going on. One of this mans small boys speaks to us, and seems to understand what is happening. The father points up and says something about all the toy animals on strings hanging from the ceiling of the room....the father says that the boy wanted him to tie them up there, as a game, but that in doing so, the animals became suspended over the space in a protective manner, almost as if they were caretaking this particular child/family/space.....because of the intuitive Honoring this child had done for them(the animals). This all starts to add up into a picture of what is actually going on in Dream, and we lock the doors to the space and leave the father and his kids inside, knowing they are safe within those parameters at least.
The moment we get out of the building feels like we have left a giant enclosure of Uncertainty and Snarling Repressed Energies ready to devour....but not in a malicious way, more because they have been locked within the cages of the zoo for so long the only way to remember Who They Are is to act out ferociously their Nature, following the pendulum swing all the way to the left, as they regain their knowledge of Primal Self. We make our way to another large brick building, and by this time, we are concerned that no one will believe us or take us seriously....and will not give us the supplies we need in order to rescue the other people. This building feels almost like a CIA headquarters or some other insidious 'toward the top of the pyramid' establishment......everyone seems to be operating in a very suspicious and wary manner, with something to hide. We start to get the feeling that if we do not get out of THERE, we are REALLY in trouble, as the awareness that THIS ZOO of beasts is FAR MORE DANGEROUS than the now feral creatures stalking the city. We scavenge a few supplies and hurriedly make our way back toward the building we left.
by this time, we know that the animals have taken over, that they are not just running rampant eating everything and everyone in a feeding frenzy. They are very consciously orchestrating a scenario in which they take control of the establishment that has imprisoned them for so long. We sneak around, knowing that this is going to have to be a very Intentional battle, and at this point we are unsure as to whether we should not actually JOIN the creatures instead of fight against them. AT the bottom of the building where I would consider a basement to be, or the entrance to one, is a chimpanzee dressed in a generals outfit, standing guard....very placidly, but very intently. WE go around the other side. Every entrance is being guarded by some particular form of animal.. Then, I get separated from my Friend, and I am in a forest outside the building, and I hear the Snarl, I feel the Energy of Immense Power..........at this moment I regain lucidity and realize I am in Dreamtime ( I had known this in the first part of dream, but after jumping from truck and wandering the forest I lost Consciousness) and yet, I know that this Energy is nothing to mess around with, Its There and its Coming, regardless of whether I KNOW IT TO BE, or whether I AM UNCONSCIOUSLY FIGHTING THE AWARENESS OF IT....I cannot just erase it from my Psych, nor can I just stop the dream and change it....I am Focused Inside It in such a way that something very important is taking place in the nethers, and I know that to try and Awaken myself out of the Discomforting nature of the events/Dreamtime would actually stall or halt the process taking place. Even with the Awareness that this Huge Tiger cannot physically harm me, i.e knowing I am in Dreamtime, I am still wary of it....I see a huge tree, some of the limbs are unsteady but the trunk is large and being an excellent climber I have faith I can get up it in a timely manner, to at least keep the Tiger at bay for a while longer. I scurry up the tree. The tiger starts to climb the tree after me, and I feel as if I am coming face to face with Infinity. As the Tigers immense jaws open and a deafening roar envelops me, I stop resisting. I enter its throat and suddenly my body is gone, and I am pure sensation, and a highpitched tonal sound reverberates thru the darkness, in which I am now embodied, as particles, touching everything.
🌹 “This time of year my thoughts always return to the rites of Kore. I might be coping with the world folding in on itself, and the similar changes I experience within my own inner world, or it may just be an inherent fascination with etiological myth, to say nothing of the powerful duality of delicate springtime maiden and Queen of the Underworld within one goddess.
Her more widely known name, Persephone, means “bringer of death,” in the sense that her deft but gentle hand is a comfort and a guide to those making their descent. In this way, and as the goddess of the Eleusinian mysteries, she herself is the door to worlds unknown, a portal to revelations. Among her other epithets in Homer and among cults (Euripides calls her arrētos, “she who none may name,” Homer calls her agauē and hagnē, “venerable” and “demanding respect”). Persephone is her name as mistress of the house of Hades. In these rites, she is often referred to as Kore, which means, simply, “maiden.” “
~Sara Long
🌹
Reese Miller as the Kore , (or Jester Maiden) before being Taken by hades to the Underworld to become his Jester Queen
The Kore archetype, traditionally representing youthful innocence and potential in mythology and psychology, symbolizes much more than just the early stages of life. It is a powerful symbol of transformation, growth, and the cyclical nature of existence. The Kore, as a maiden figure often associated with goddesses like Persephone in Greek mythology, also carries deeper meanings about the illusions tied to youth, time, and identity. By examining the symbolism of the Kore, we can explore the larger themes of human experience—innocence, growth, and the journey from one phase of life to another. ~ Jenna LillaThe Kore is often depicted as a young maiden, symbolizing the freshness and purity of youth. This stage of life is marked by innocence, untested potential, and an open future. In mythology, the Kore is often paired with the figure of the mother, as seen in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Kore, in this case, represents Persephone in her youthful form before her descent into the underworld, where she transforms into the queen of the dead. This dual role of the Kore—both innocent maiden and future queen—symbolizes the unfolding of life from youth to maturity. While the Kore is a symbol of growth and transformation, this very cycle also highlights the transitory nature of life. Youth, while often idealized as a time of beauty, vitality, and potential, is fleeting. The attachment to youth and the fear of aging reflect deeper psychological and spiritual challenges. Just as the Kore will eventually transform, we, too, are called to move beyond the illusions of youth and embrace the full journey of life. ~Jenna LillaThe Kore’s association with youth also raises questions about how we perceive time and change. The concept of youth, as something idealized or feared, is tied to the larger illusion of time itself. We often become attached to the idea of youth as a period of innocence and purity, but this attachment can lead to a sense of loss as we grow older. The fear of aging, or the desire to remain forever young, is an illusion created by the mind, which clings to temporary states of being. ~Jenna LillaIn reality, the essence of life is timeless and not bound by the cycles of youth and age. The Kore archetype reminds us that while we pass through different stages of life, these stages are just phases in a larger continuum. The true nature of our being—our consciousness or essence—remains unchanged, even as our bodies age and our experiences shift. The Kore, therefore, symbolizes the movement through these stages, but also serves as a reminder that beneath these changing forms, there is something timeless and unchanging.~Jenna LillaOne of the central themes of the Kore archetype is the journey from innocence to wisdom. In many myths, this journey involves a descent into the unknown, a confrontation with darker, more challenging forces. In the case of Persephone, her abduction by Hades and subsequent time spent in the underworld represent the loss of innocence and the gaining of wisdom. This is not just a story about personal growth but about the necessary transitions that all individuals must undergo to attain greater understanding. In this context, the Kore symbolizes the tension between innocence and experience, youth and maturity. While youth is often seen as a time of unblemished potential, true wisdom comes through the trials and challenges of life. However, both innocence and wisdom are part of the same journey. The duality between these states—between youth and age, innocence and wisdom—reflects the deeper truth that growth and transformation are part of the natural order of life. ~Jenna LillaThe Kore archetype also speaks to the cyclical nature of life, where birth, growth, decay, and renewal are intertwined. In many cultures, the Kore is connected to the cycles of the seasons, particularly in the myth of Persephone, whose descent and return from the underworld are linked to the changing of the seasons. Her time in the underworld represents winter and death, while her return to the surface symbolizes spring and rebirth. This cyclical pattern serves as a reminder that life is not linear but is made up of repeated cycles of growth and transformation. The Kore’s journey from maidenhood to queenhood, from innocence to wisdom, is not a one-time event but part of a continuous process of renewal. Just as nature moves through its seasons, so too do we pass through different phases of life, each phase offering its own lessons and opportunities for growth. ~Jenna LillaWhile the Kore represents the cycles of life, she also invites us to transcend the illusions of duality that often accompany these cycles. The distinction between youth and age, innocence and experience, can create a sense of separation, making us believe that these stages of life are opposites. However, the Kore archetype teaches that these are not separate states but are interconnected parts of a whole. ~Jenna LillaIn the myth of Persephone, her role as both Kore (the maiden) and queen of the underworld shows that youth and maturity are two sides of the same coin. The cycle of life encompasses both light and dark, innocence and wisdom. By embracing both aspects of ourselves—the youthful, innocent part and the mature, wise part—we can move beyond the illusions of duality and experience a more integrated, whole sense of self. ~Jenna LillaUltimately, the Kore archetype symbolizes the potential for growth, transformation, and renewal. She represents the beginning of a journey, but also the deeper truth that all stages of life are interconnected. The youthful innocence of the Kore is not something to cling to, but something to honor as part of the larger process of becoming. Her story is one of continuous transformation, reminding us that life is a series of cycles that lead us toward greater understanding and wisdom. ~Jenna LillaBy reflecting on the Kore, we are reminded that the passage of time, the movement from youth to age, is not something to fear but something to embrace. Each phase of life brings its own gifts, and by accepting the flow of time, we can experience life more fully. The Kore symbolizes the beauty of this unfolding journey, encouraging us to embrace both the innocence of youth and the wisdom that comes with experience. Jenna Lilla
I came thru the other side of that and learned that it’s not about Transcending but about Integrating. Spirit plays here for its own reasons, and is drawn to this Earth Flesh Playground because it wants to Feel Deeply and experience visceral Life. Being a very plutonic underworld person but aiming always for the spirit when I was in my 20s, it took a lot of delusional wake up experiences to Own all that I had believed myself to have transcended. All that stuff I thought I had evolved past, I had simply dissociated from, and the force of its wrath at being ignored and suppressed made its fury known in physical symptoms and deeply imbalanced emotional reality with a dash of incredibly Underworld-like navigations thrown in. The higher I thought I was flying in those years, the more pure i thought I was, came at a price and it was collected by the Dark Feminine in 2018. And since complete dissolution and and finally Truly making friends with the parts of the Self that I had trapped in deep subterranean caves and dungeons , with compassion, and awareness that it was a matter of freeing bit by bit, those fragments from all timelines trapped in my Prizm Cell.Ves. Instead of ‘Mind over Mattering’ my body and pushing it to extremes, instead of convincing myself I was pure and lofty and fully my idealized Spirit Self-the Puer( my online and business name even used to be Puella Eterna for 13 years)- i became engaged in the true Alchemical Work. I Realized how abusive I had been to Psyche and Body all those years ( and lifetimes) of denigrating the dark hungry fiery tempest of my soul, the Feminine, thinking I could Will Myself into the magical spheres of the heavenly abodes:.:::: I have always been easily carried away on the wings of spirit, can easily disembody into OBE states etc. What I came here to do, Now, was to actually Make This Body Fully Conscious , for it is the Marriage bed of Eros and Psyche, and the Alchemy of Life uses all vibrations to create.
When I made friends with the depth of my own Pain and Anger and Lust for Aliveness, Lust for Intensity of Being, and my own Arrogance etc ( Scorpio ascendent/Mercury conjunction, sun/Uranus Scorpio conjunction( all ruled by mars) and all in the 1st house( house of mars/Aries), with an Aries moon( mars ruled) and Mars aspecting strongly every planet in my chart = I was a complete Fool to imagine that I was a soft and ethereal spiritual angelic figure floating in the higher spheres…..:. I am a child of Mars, and Mars at its best is the Blood and Passion and Vitality to Exist and Move in this Realm, Mars is the defender and protecter of all that is sacred in creation, it is Raw, Brash, Authentic, Physically Vital, Mentally Agile, Temperamental….and Serves the Feminine……
When I truly came to Know Myself and stopped building castles in the sky, but used my archetypal Mercurial nature along with Mars to go to the Underworld and reclaim the very Selves I had locked up thru this Infinite Game over Time, I came Alive and learned what real Power is.
That’s my journey. I have compassion for that person I was and thought I was, but I have made my Vow, to Die in Battle, as a Sacred Warrior, and a Warrior must be in touch with his/her Fire and Anger and lust and Blood and sacrifice it on the alter of the Feminine Creation…..
( of interest is the relation of mars and Saturn… Mars/Blood is made in the Marrow of the bones/Saturn…… Mars is the Warrior who serves The Saturn Kingdom, which is the very energy that gives Form to the life principle:= in my chart, My mars is in Sagittarius/conjunct Neptune ( the spiritual warrior) in the second house( using the physical body/ it’s values and resources) And is Square( tension) (serving) Saturn in Libra which is also conjunct to almost a degree…… in the 11th house/ community and the larger stage of service to the people: It’s all written in Light Codes we wove ourselves into.
My heavy 12th house/ underworld where Pluto/hades sits exactly to the minute almost, with Venus, is my Lifelong lesson…..spiritualizing and completely transforming the Sexual and Aesthetic principles……using the raw lust and vitality of The black Goddess Black Carbon through Dionysus protean morphing Imaginal spheres under intense pressure to create the Diamond Body.:::: the twin Sisters of Carbon666 and Daimond ….. the Treasures hidden in this Earth and this Flesh and this Game of Matter Mater Mother Matrix Maat.
The Psyches realm is a dark realm that takes in everything….light and dark and everything in between. It likes the humus of earth, the compost, the shit of life, the messy smelly sweaty fleshy human realm of bodies bumping into bodies in sensate expression , playing with selves in Carnes Nation, the carnal nest of alchemy, where Soul is the Imaginal Playscape and Spirit must come Down To Earth to Play with Form.
I spent so much time out of body for the first 26 years of my life; I’m now happily Wed in the alchemical marriage bed knowing the Great Work goes on and on and on, and my relationship with Saturn has transformed my life into one of beauty: I used to balk at Saturn and his crusty old crystallization and constriction of my ever-so Icarus-like ideals……
But….
I am the Sacred Warrior who Serves the Divine…:.I serve the King and the Kingdom and Protect and Honor the Queen and her Queendom… because as the Mercurial Martian or the Martian Mercurius……..the Foolish Warrior or the Warrior Fool, my realm is not just the heavens but I travel between the Yooer and the Lower and The middle realms and so I just be able to hold the Tension of all Their Frequencies.
An honest person is one who knows his own capacity to Lie but chooses Truth…..a Strong person knows his own capacity for Violence but chooses Restraint….a Wise person is one who knows his own capacity for ignorance and knows he is a Fool…..a Peaceful person is one who knows his own Anger and so is not blindsided when least expecting it, and thus knows what it is to be Gentle.
May the black moist Fertile Soil keep your Roots nurtured as your branches reach for the Sky ⭐️🙌⭐️
Aho.
10-18-24
My friends post that my response is in reference to.
another way of saying what I expressed, is that as a Waving Being who Becomes Particular….in this journey of Embodiment through the entire Spectrum of Light and Frequency….. is that I am in the Prizm Cell of All my Lives in All Realities, in All Times and Spaces……expressing through this Body, Now, which is made up of All of Me~s, all the Cell.ves and Organ~I~zed Cohesions holographically …. In terms of Light… Infrared all The way thru UltraViolet….we also Embody as Sound and All variations of frequency.
Infrared penetrates all the way thru Earth and hence Body, ‘the smokeless fire’…..the realm of the Djinn….. that is where we have the Dark parts of ourCellves ….not Evil…..Darkness and of a different spectrum …..Ultraviolet more akin to our Angelic SidesOfSelf..,;;
When we seek the UV and demonize the Infrared, we get trapped in the Prizm of our own fragmentation…..we disown a huge amount of the deepest aspects of Being, whilst grasping for the Angelic Aspects: They have their Realms for a reason.:::::.
When I speak of going deep into the underworld, to mine the treasures of Pluto/Hades in the darkest layers of Self trapped and submerged and cast off in this infinite journey, I speak of going into the Infrared WaveForms of Self that are as much Me as the UV or higher vibration LightWaves that are of a very different nature, but equally Me.
Fire & Light
Is a poetic way of playing with it
In my lifetime of ‘out of Body’ experiences and traversing in the high frequency Light of detachment and lucidity, the permeations are very different than when I go deeply ‘in body experience’ which is raw and primal and Fiery and red heat of Feeling….
Our Bodies give us a Playground where we bring All Of these Refractions of Self into one Expression , as a Tether, if you will, to Come To Terms With Self Literally To Bring to Term Our Self Like a Mother carrying To term Her Baby
New creation.
The more we Integrate and ReClaim all the fractured frequencies that issue From our own Spark of Existence as a Being Who Is,
The more we Free those frequencies to Nourish all Of Bodies In all Of Times.
If the very Elementals/elements that make up my fleshly abode are brought into a cohesive net of Understanding and Loving Awareness, as they go on in their journey and become part of other bodies and abodes, they themselves are able to bring healing …
Like the Dwarves who live deep in earth and who are like elementals in a sense
And Elves who are like the perfected or angelic higher selves
And the HuMan, here in the Middle Earth,
Thigh we are all of them Depending on which Angle Of the Arc We Shine our I’s From
‘Voluptas lies curled in the womb of Psyche’….. Old painting of mine from 2009)
“The Poison is the cure”
Let me say it again: the result is not merely the objectification of subjective "me-ness," but the objectification of its material basis. This has been dissolved, calcined, tortured, putrefied, and distilled to a clarity that can be completely seen through, as if it were not there at all, not a speck of literalism remains, not even spiritual literalism. The libidinal compulsion, the organic towardness of hope and desire that would always go further for a faraway grail, turns around on itself and dissolves itself. The snake eats its own tail-another goal image of deconstructive subversion. The snake of healing, transformation, and rebirth, the goals most dearly desired, and the artifex's obedient service, all dry to dust, mineralized. The uroboric motion poisons (iosis) the very idea of cure. Or, poison is the cure.
What is actually accomplished by the alchemical work? According to my psychological fantasies, it is the objectification of the libido-our lives are not our lives. The alchemical goal is the realization in its complete sense of Freud's "object libido," The libido as a cosmic erotic dynamic that permeates the world because it loves the world of matter, even though it has been caught in the personal delusions of subjectivity, so that we believe we love the world, or can be improved or instructed to love the world. Whereas it is the object libido that loves the world through us, despite us. The anima in chains in the matter of "me, " and we place it there each time as we ask psychologically, what is the matter with me? Alchemy answers, saying: you, I, everyone, the world is matter, elemental material, and we indulge in the materials, as the artifex in the laboratory, all along believing that you are working on you, your life, your relations, your processes until the day dawns, aurora. You awaken within the idea of the goal, the goal not somewhere else out there calling for attainment, but you are within the idea. But because the mind is still trapped in me-ness, we shamelessly assert that the idea is in me when your mind is in the idea. You awaken to the recognition that you are already in that stone, mineralized, stoned out of your mind.
If my reading is on track and the telos or "that for the sake of which" is the de-subjectification of the object libido, then we are obliged to imagine resurrection from this vantage point, which hardly conforms with a Christian reading of either alchemy or resurrection. For now resurrection would indicate not the confirmation throughout eternity of the personal subject and its body saved from the world and the devil of its flesh but rather the resurrection of the body of the world with an idea to its eternity. Not the lifting, the Aufhebung, of material worldliness but the full realization of desire for a world that pulsates in the materials of the elemental psyche, those substances that compose the stone and give it its enduring life, a realization that the world itself speaks through the desire in the materials; that desire is the language of the world, that the libido of each individual human is indeed a cosmic force, an eros or object libido which yearns toward and enjoys this world. And we who labor in the garden as if it were a stony ground would find our individual resurrection in attachment to our materials, which are the world's body, this body becoming a jardin des délices, the objectification of pleasure.
Object libido finds its pleasure in the other, the object, the world as a body. This dry term "object libido" calls for a moistened language. Terms such as cosmogonic eros, desire, jouissance, or unus mundus cannot do justice to what is implied. Libido brings with it the aura of pleasure and the Aphroditic world of the senses. Did not Plotinus attribute to Plato the idea that the soul is always an Aphrodite, which suggests that we cannot adequately speak of the libidinal soul without shifting immediately to an Aphroditic language? Then we would imagine that this libidinal drive throughout the whole opus of soul-making and its increasing love has as its goal a resurrection in beauty and pleasure, and we would realize that even such terms as opus and operatio are work-words which distort the libido's nature. The Christianization of alchemy nonetheless retains the Aphroditic vision in the images it presents. She is the Golden One, the pearl is her jewel; the rose, her flower; the bath and the copulations in the bath of the Rosarium, her liquid territory. The translation of sensate images into spiritual value, as if a lifting improvement to the higher realm of Aphrodite Urania, succeeds only in losing the very sensate attraction of the goal as a pleasurable pull toward beauty. Hence Ficino, Valla, and other Renaissance Platonists insisted that Voluptas is nearer to the life of the spirit than the middle region or mediocrity of ataraxic rationality. Voluptas, according to Apuleius, lies curled in the womb of Psyche and comes to birth only after all psychological effort is passed.
This is the Nekyia, the night sea journey through the underworld made also by Odysseus, Aeneas, and Hercules, and by Eurydice, Inanna, Persephone, Psyche, by Orpheus, by Christ. Whether this underworld is frigid and ghastly or burning with the hots of hell, it is a realm characterized by temperatures suitable only for demons, ghosts, heroes and heroines, goddesses and shades who are no longer altogether of the upper world. Outsiders. Marginals. Alchemy is a profession of marginals; those at the edge. Those who live from their own fires, sweating it out, self-sustaining their own temperatures which may be at variance with the collective climate.”
(Disembodied Terror/ Magical Happenings and Self As Antidote- Consuming the Snake)
Dreamtime Feb 28, 2009
I am asleep and can hear B outside in conflict with a big mob of young people who are drinking and making noise and being destructive. I get up and look out the window, and eventually go downstairs. They have been fighting and hassling. I open the back door and say ‘Thats it’ really angry, and I throw and stone into their crowd in the street and it hits someone, but they see me close the door and then know who it is that has thrown it. I run upstairs, suddenly afraid of what they will do. B has gone somewhere and I am alone in the house with Oisin and I feel insecure and unsafe. I see someone climbing on the wall to get into the house. I look out the window and then someone throws something in ….they are targeting the house and me now. The next thing I know I am in the bed sleeping next to Oisin, and I feel a presence….unseen….and I am terrified. It is sucking me down the bed toward an invisible hole or something. I can feel the energy and palpable terror as I try to fight the pull. I am afraid for Oisin too. It seems to suck me to the door/wall and I know I am powerless in relation to this immense energy, whatever/whoever it is. At some point I am telling B about the dream of the kids and the terror, as if I have woken up. Then I am in a car with a man who I have met and feel in sync with …he is older and somewhat familiar. He seems to belong to some group that I have befriended. B and I are at odds and he has pretty much dissed everything I tell him matters to me. I feel so angry and I want to get away, so I go with the man. There is something about a girl, familiar either in Waking Life or in Dream, and we both somehow come to realize with are on the same ‘Mission’. The man and I are supposed to eat dinner with her and her parents but something happens and we are really late. When we turn up, with Oisin, Oisin is really wired and running around and I feel self-conscious and that I am offending her parents because they seem quite ‘proper’. He walks right off a table at one point while I half-catch him before he hits the floor in such a ways that it makes it look like no big deal. The girl and I are in in her room then, but we leave to meet the man at a pub or somewhere. We sit down at a table with some people There is a blonde girl who arouses my rage and I punch her and get into a spat. We are waiting for the owners of the place to leave with us. Then I am with the girl again, in her room, and there is an assortment of objects on a table. We are trying to do something shamanistic, and I turn into a Bat and she is something else. It has to do with the objects on the table. I fly out, in a bat-like manner, conscious of the quick flapping motion of my wings. It is hard to remain in flight however. We feel compelled to figure out or do something that has spiritual/ magical undertones and involves the girls parents too. There is a scene where I am hanging from a ledge in water or some other substance and asking for help up…saying “please help me!”. There is one scene where I am with Oisin and we are walking and I see a timber rattlesnake…a small fat one …and I run over to protect him. I end up grabbing it and have it in my hands. I feel I must consume it for some reason. As I am holding it I bite down on its belly and it lets out a loud squeal, then I crush its head in my fingers and take a bite out of it. It has a magical feel to it. There is another rattlesnake that seems to jump and bite Oisin in the face but we dont pay any attention … It is as if I consumed the snake in order to use it as an Antidote to any potential harm it could bring to Oisin. I end up describing the experiences to the girls parents. They are amazed.
The ultimate beauty of psyche is that which even Aphrodite does not have and which must come from Persephone, who is queen over the dead souls and whose name means “bringer of destruction." The Box of Beauty which Psyche must fetch as her last task refers to an underworld beauty that can never be seen with the senses. It is the beauty of the knowledge of death and of the effects of death upon all other beauty that does not contain this knowledge. Psyche must “die" herself in order to experience the reality of this beauty, a death different from her suicidal attempts. This would be the ultimate task of soul-making and its beauty: the incorporation of destruction into the flesh and skin, embalmed in life, the visible transfigured by the invisibility of Hades's kingdom, anointing the psyche by the killing experience of its personal mortality. The Platonic upward movement toward aestheticism is tempered by the beauty of Persephone. Destruction, death, and Hades are not left out. Moreover, Aphrodite does not have access to this kind of beauty. She can acquire it only through Psyche, for the soul mediates the beauty of the invisible inner world to the world of outer forms.
👁For the Eskimos, when one falls ill, one takes on a new name, a new diseased personality. To get over a disease, one must quite literally “get over” it by transcending it, that is, by dying. The only hope for cure lies in the death of the ill personality. Health requires death.
Perhaps this is what Socrates meant with his last obscure words about owing a sacrificial cock to Asklepiós. Once the cocky pride of life that crows hopefully at each day’s dawning is sacrificed, the instinct for tomorrow is yielded. Death then is the cure and the salvation and not just a last, worst stage of a disease. The cock crow at dawn also heralds resurrection of the light. But the victory over disease and the new day begins only when the ambition for it has been abandoned upon the altar. The disease which the experience of death cures is the rage to live. .
An analyst often finds himself purposely passing by the symptoms appearing in his practice. Rather than investigate these symptoms, he turns to the person’s life which has fostered the pathology. His premise is that the disease has its meaning in the life of the patient and he tries to understand this meaning. He cannot hold out the usual hope for cure or even relief of symptoms. His analytical experience says that the hope which the patient presents is part of the pathology itself. The patient’s hope arises as an essential part of the constellation of his suffering. It is frequently governed by impossible demands to be free of suffering itself. The same condition that constellated the symptoms is just the condition which these symptoms are interrupting and killing- or curing. Therefore, an analyst does not hope for a return to that condition out of which the symptoms and the hope for relief arose. Because hope has this core of illusion it favors repression. By hoping for the status quo ante, we repress the present state of weakness and suffering and all it can bring. Postures of strength are responsible for many major complaints today–ulcers, vascular and coronary conditions, high blood pressure, stress syndrome, alcoholism, highway and sport accidents, mental breakdown. The will to fall ill, like the suicide impulse, leads patient and physician face to face with morbidity, which stubbornly returns in spite of all hope to the contrary. One might ask if medical hope itself is not partly responsible for recurrent illness; since it never fully allows for weakness and suffering the death experience is not able to produce its meaning. Experiences are cheated of their thorough effect by speedy recovery. Until the soul has got what it wants, it must fall ill again. And another iatrogenic vicious circle of recurrent illness begins. 👁 (James Hillman ,Suicide and the Soul)
As an analysis proceeds, it moves inward from the case history toward the soul history, that is, it explores complexes more for their archetypal meanings and less for their traumatic history. Soul history is recaptured by separating it from obfuscations in case history. The immediate family, for instance, become the real people they are, undistorted by inner meanings which they had been forced to carry. The rediscovery of soul history shows itself in the reawakening of emotion, fantasy, and dream, in a sense of mythological destiny penetrated by the transpersonal, and by spontaneous acausal time. It reflects the “cure” from a chronic identification of the soul with outer events, places, and people. As this separation occurs, one is no longer a case but a person.
James HillmanSoul history emerges as one sheds case history, or, in other words, as one dies to the world as an arena of projection. Soul history is a living obituary, recording life from the point of view of death, giving the uniqueness of a person sub specie acternitatis. As one builds one’s death, so one writes one’s own obituary in one’s soul history.
“To sense penetratingly we must imagine, and to imagine accurately we must sense.”
James Hillman
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“Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each new event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a face bespeaking its interior image – in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing, God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street.”
James HillmanThere is a further consequent of the credit one pays to the im- ages of the soul. A new feeling of self-forgiveness and self-acceptance begins to spread and circulate. It is as if the heart and the left side were extending their dominion. Shadow aspects of the personality continue to play their burdensome roles but now within a larger tale, the myth of oneself, just what one is which begins to feel as if that is how one is meant to be. My myth becomes my truth; my life symbolic and allegorical. Self-forgiveness, self-acceptance, self-love; more, one finds oneself sinful but not guilty, grateful for the sins one has and not another’s, loving one’s lot even to the point of desire to have and to be always in this vivid inner connection with one’s own individual portion. Such strong experiences of religious emotion seem to be the gift again of the anima.
James HillmanThe third step is gratuitous. It refers to the free and creative appearance of imagination, as if the inner world now come to life begins to act spontaneously, by itself, undirected and even unattended by ego-consciousness. The inner world not only begins more and more to take care of itself, producing crises and resolving them within its own transformations, but it also takes care of you, your ego-worries and ego-claims. This is the feminine Shakti of India at a higher state; it is also the nine Muses responsible for culture and creativity. One feels lived by imagination.
James HillmanPanic, especially at night when the citadel darkens and the heroic ego sleeps, is a direct participation mystique in nature, a fundamental, even ontological experience of the world as alive and in dread. Objects become subjects; they move with life while one is oneself paralyzed with fear. When existence is experienced through instinctual levels of fear, aggression, hunger or sexuality, images take on compelling life of their own. The imaginal is never more vivid than when we are connected with it instinctually. The world alive is of course animism; that this living world is divine and imaged by different gods with attributes and characteristics is polytheistic pantheism. That fear, dread, horror are natural is wisdom. In Whitehead’s term nature alive means Pan, and panic flings open a door into this reality.
James Hillman“A world without soul offers no intimacy. Things are left out in the cold, each object by definition cast away before it is manufactured, lifeless litter and junk, taking its value wholly from my consumptive desire to have and to hold, wholly dependent on the subject to breathe it into life with personal desire. When particulars have no essential virtue, then my own virtue as a particular depends wholly and only on my subjectivity or on your desire for me, or fear of me: I must be desirable, attractive, a sex-object, or win importance and power. For without these investments in my particular person, coming either from your subjectivity or my own, I too am but a dead thing among dead things, potentially forever lonely.”“Isn’t devotio to anima the calling of psychology? So, another deep-seated reason for this book is to provide grounding for the vision of soul in psychology, so that psychology doesn’t abandon itself to the archetypal perspectives of the child and developmentalism or the mother and material causalism. The vision of soul given by anima is more than just one more perspective. The call of soul convinces; it is a seduction into psychological faith, a faith in images and the thought of the heart, into an animation of the world. Anima attaches and involves. She makes us fall into love. We cannot remain the detached observer looking through a lens. In fact, she probably doesn’t partake in optical metaphors at all. Instead, she is continually weaving, stewing, and enchanting consciousness into passionate attachments away from the vantage point of a perspective.
(James Hillman, Anima, ix-x)I like to imagine a person’s psyche to be like a boardinghouse full of characters. The ones who show up regularly and who habitually follow the house rules may not have met other long-term residents who stay behind closed doors, or who only appear at night. An adequate theory of character must make room for character actors, for the stuntmen and animal handlers, for all the figures who play bit parts and produce unexpected acts. They often make the show fateful, or tragic, or farcically absurd.
James HillmanDRAMATIC TENSIONS If psychotherapy is to understand the dreaming soul from within, it had best turn to “theatrical logic.” The nature of mind as it presents itself most immediately has a specific form: Dionysian form. Dionysus may be the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, but this force is not dumb. It has an internal organization. In psychology this language speaks not genetically, not biochemically in the information of DNA codes, but directly in Dionysus’s own art form, theatrical poetics. This means the dream is not a coded message at all, but a display, a Schau, in which the dreamer himself plays a part or is in the audience, and thus always involved. No wonder that Aristotle placed psychotherapy (catharsis) in the context of theater. Our lives are the enactment of our dreams; our case histories are from the very beginning, archetypally, dramas; we are masks (personae) through which the gods sound (personare). Like dreams, inner fantasy too has the compelling logic of theater.
James HillmanDionysian consciousness understands the conflicts in our stories through dramatic tensions and not through conceptual opposites; we are composed of agonies not polarities. Dionysian consciousness is the mode of making sense of our lives and worlds through awareness of mimesis, recognizing that our entire case history is an enactment, “either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical- comical-pastoral,” and that to be “psychological” means to see myself in the masks of this particular fiction that is my fate to enact. Finally, to view ourselves from within a drama refers to the religious origins, not only of drama, but of the mythical enactments that we perform and name with the mask of “behavior.”
Salt is the mineral substance or objective ground of personal experience making experience possible. No salt, no experiencing- merely a running on and running through of events without psychic body. Thus salt makes events sensed and felt, giving us each a sense of the personal–my tears, my sweat and blood, my taste and value.
The entire alchemical opus hangs on the ability to experience subjectively. Hence it is said in The Golden Tract: “He who works without salt will never raise dead bodies.” The matters are only macrocosmic and chemical, out there, dead unless one works with salt. These intensely personal experiences which give taste and flavor to events are nonetheless common to all-both mine and yet common as blood, as urine, as salt. In other words, salt acts like the ground of subjectivity (“That which is left at the bottom of our distilling vessel is our salt-that is to say our earth.”). It makes possible what psychology calls felt experience. So, we must turn to this same ground to mine our salt.
James Hillman, Salt
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Felt experience takes on a radically altered meaning in the light of alchemical salt. We may imagine our deep hurts not merely as wounds to be healed but as salt mines from which we gain a precious essence and without which the soul cannot live. The fact that we return to these deep hurts, in remorse and regret, in repentance and revenge, indicates a psychic need beyond a mere mechanical repetition compulsion. Instead, the soul has a drive to remember; it is like an animal that returns to its salt licks; the soul licks at its own wounds to derive sustenance therefrom. We make salt in our suffering and, by working through our sufferings, we gain salt, healing the soul of its salt-deficiency.Salt requires a pinch, feeling the pinch of the event that stings; lead seems to require time, waiting it through. What results from the salt cure is a new sense of what happened, a new appreciation of its virtue for soul. Salt may also be mined from whatever is stable. As the principle of stability whose alchemical sign was a square, salt can be mined from the rocks of concrete experience, those fixities which mark our lives with defined positions. These places are not merely solid facts-my degree, my property, my car accident, my war record, my divorce; these are also places where psychic body is salted away and stored. These rocks, when recognized and owned, belong to the history of my soul, where it has been salted down by the fixities of experience, giving a certain crystallization to my nature and keeping me from inflammations and volatilizations.Though we do not make it by fire, we do make salt by means of dissolutions. Salt is soluble. Weeping, bleeding, sweating, urinating bring salt out of its interior underground mines. It appears in our moistures, which are the flow of salt to the surface. “During the work the salt assumes the appearance of blood” (CW’ 14, 8337). Moments of dissolution are not mere collapses; they release a sense of personal human value from the encrustations of habit. “I too am a human being worth my salt”-hence my blood, sweat, and tears.Viewed from the perspective of salt, early traumas are moments of initiation into the sense of being a me with a subjective personal interior. We tend to fixate on what was done to us and who did it: resentment, revenge. But what psychologically matters is that it was done: the blow, the blood, the betrayal. Like the ashes which are rubbed into the wounds at initiation rites to purify and scarify, the soul is marked by its trauma. Salt still is touched to the body in Christian Baptism, and eaten still at Jewish Pessach in ritual remembrance of trauma. A trauma is a salt mine; it is a fixed place for reflection about the nature and value of my personal being, where memory originates and personal history begins. These traumatic events initiate in the soul a sense of its embodiment as a Vulnerable experiencing subject.The paradigmatic story of “looking back” is that of Lot’s wife. (Lot and Lot’s wife were even used as alchemical terms for salt- Jobnson’s Dictionary.) Because Lot’s wife could not refrain from looking back at the destruction of Sodom from which they had been saved, she was turned to a pillar of salt. Jewish commentators on the tale say that her mother-love made her look behind to see whether her married daughters were following; and Christian comments on Luke 17:32 also see the source of her move in remembrances of family and relatives, personal subjectivities of feeling. Evidently, family fixations are also salt mines. The disappointments, worries, smarts of mother-complex love–the evening with the photograph album, the keepsakes- are ways the psyche produces salt, returning to events in order to turn them into experiences.The danger here is always fixation, whether in recollection, childhood trauma, or in a literalized and personalized notion of experience itself: “I am what I have experienced.” Paracelsus defined salt as the principle of fixation (Il:366).
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