What’s In a Name?” with Stephen Gerringer”
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Robert; Stephen or Dennis can probably help you with this:
What sources do you think Jung’s and the apostles Paul’s subconscious unconscious draw from ???
Happy Day, Robert,
Jung’s psyche is expressing the Wise Old Man archetype that informs Merlin, Gandalf, Obi Wan Kenobi, Dumbledore, and so many similar figures found in myth, fairy tale, literature, and film. Recognizing this image as a refinement of his earlier encounter in his visions with a being that he referred to as Elijah (accompanied by a blind girl named Salome), Jung chose the name Philemon for this character – but doesn’t seem the New Testament epistle was foremost in his thoughts, if at all (nor is the real live Philemon Paul addressed his letter to, whom he knew in the flesh, an upwelling of Paul’s unconscious any more than a real life friend you send an email to is a production of your psyche; unlike the vision of the Apostle John detailed in the book of Revelations, Barnabas, Priscilla, Timothy, Luke, Peter, Philemon, and others he mentions in his letters seem to be real people).
Jung inscribed the following on the wall of the second tower he added to his stone edifice at Bollingen:
Philomenis sacrum––Fausti poenitentia” (Philemon’s Shrine––Faust’s Repentance)
According to Ovid, one day Zeus and Hermes, who liked to disguise themselves as ordinary mortals and wander the land, showed up in a town where the townspeople were wicked and they could find no hospitality; no one offered them a meal nor a place to stay, except one elderly couple who lived in poverty – Baucis and Philemon. Though they had next to nothing, the old folks invited the strangers in and gave generously of what little they did have.
While pouring wine into wooden cups for their guests, Baucis noticed the pitcher remained full, sparking the realization that their guests were Gods. The old folks immediately offered supplication and asked their guests to forgive the poor accommodations and simple fare. Philemon thought he should catch and slay the goose that guarded their home (there’s our gander connection!) so their divine guests could enjoy a worthy meal, but the goose fled to safety in Zeus’ lap. The All-Father then told Philemon and Baucis to forget the meal and instead accompany Hermes and Zeus to the top of the nearby mountain. Once they reached the summit they looked back and saw the town had been wiped out in a flood, save for their home, which had been transformed into a spacious, ornate temple.
Asked how the Gods could reward them, the couple asked that they be appointed the keepers of the temple, and that when when their time came, both would die in the same moment. And so, at the end of their lives, the couple did not die, but were transformed into two entwined trees (a linden and an oak).
Though this would seem a Greek myth, it is only told, in Latin, by Rome’s Ovid (a contemporary of Caesar Augustus). In Faust II (Act V), Goethe adapts and updates the characters for his own purposes: Baucis and Philemon own an estate that includes a cottage, a grove of linden trees, and a chapel, where the couple happily lives in peace. After building his seaside kingdom, Faust becomes obsessed by the fact that he himself does not control their estate—it is the last piece of land that eludes his grasp. He orders Mephistopheles and his minions to seize the property, although with due compensation and without violence. Instead, the devil murders Baucis and Philemon, along with a traveler staying with them, an episode that outrages Faust and leads him, at last, to renounce the use of magic:
There’s that wonderful chapter of Baucis and Philemon. The little old couple that have inherited this piece of property, but now it’s been condemed and the state’s going to take it over and they’re going to be moved out and put in a housing development. They die.”
(Joseph Campbell, summarizing the parts of Goethe’s Faust, in a question-and-answer session following a lecture on Thomas Mann)
Here’s Jung, on the same subject:
Faust, to be sure, had made the problem somewhat easier for me by confessing, ‘Two souls, alas, are housed within my breast’; but he had thrown no light on the cause of this dichotomy. His insight seemed, in a sense, directed straight at me. . . . Therefore I felt personally implicated, and when Faust, in his hubris and self-inflation, caused the murder of Philemon and Baucis, I felt guilty, quite as if I myself in the past had helped commit the murder of the two old people. This strange idea alarmed me, and I regarded it as my responsibility to atone for this crime, or to prevent its repetition.” (Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, p. 234)
And so it seems that is in part what motivated Jung to build his tower at Bollingen – penance to compensate for his Faustian tendencies. Jung’s tower is that sacred temple.
So seems Jung’s unconscious was not drawing directly on Paul’s Philemon in the New Testament – and yet you may be right that there is some resonance between Ovid’s account and the experiences of Paul of Tarsus: in Paul’s epistle to Philemon, who lived in the Asia Minor community of Collosae, he lauds the man’s obedience and directs him to prepare a lodging for Paul and Timothy(much as Ovid’s elderly couple did for the Greek Gods).
And even more intriguing –when Paul and Barnabas visited the city of Lystra (also in Asia Minor), Paul healed a man who had been crippled from birth, inspiring the crowds to proclaim “‘The gods have come down to us in human form!’ Barnabas they called Zeus, and Paul they called Hermes” (Acts 14: 11-12).
Curiouser and curiouser . . .
I don’t know if that really answers your question, Robert, but we’ll toss that in the stream of consciousness and see what eddies ripple out from there.
(Stephen; that rocked!)
“I don’t know if that really answers your question, Robert, but we’ll toss that in the stream of consciousness and see what eddies ripple out from there.”
Stephen,
I like that you say that Campbell regarded symbols as “an energy-evoking and -directing agent” generating a response; with some of the discussion on rituals lately, this phrase you used reminded me of how symbols are used in religious/spiritual rites–or how they can “work.” The symbol when used in ritual is charged with meaning, and it is that charge that as you mention reaches the heart. Sometimes that happens so fast it almost seems to bypass the mind and go straight to the heart or emotional “level.” Repetitive symbols/acts are recognized almost instantly, such as certain parts of a ritual that is done over and over each time. And writing or preparing to write can be such a ritual too. This post has gotten me thinking about some of the rituals I do before or during writing. I always have my coffee (and like a certain cup most when I write) by day or my tea if I am writing at night. I do not keep much on my desk because it is not very big. I like the idea of having my desk near a window–somehow I find a window inspirational for my writing. A writing instructor once told me that from one’s window or one’s backyard one can see the whole world. I think there is that saying or something similar in the Tao te Ching.
–Marianne
Stephen,
Thank you so much for your reply. It is full of interesting associations. Ovid was well known at the time and place of Paul’s evangelizing. It is interesting to speculate what literature and mythology inspired writings.
Your response lead me to find thisI did some YouTube searching through Dennis’s lectures and came across this “gem” and it is not to be missed!
Hello,
What is in a name ? Everyone here is a real unique person. What meaning can be playfully imposed on your name? Individuals are real all mythic narratives are fabrications of the active imagination … What is the history of you your life your name ?
Mary Ann Bencivengo
Stephen Gerringer
James Nichol
Dennis Slattery
All others
Robert R Reister
Hello Marianne and all,
Marianne wrote,
“This reminds me about how the symbols in language can sometimes fit the myth in our lives and vice-versa. So often we feel in symbols as much as we think in symbols.”
Such a warm topic, that I am still thinking about it, and deliberated a bit on what you wrote regarding ‘symbols in language can sometimes fit the myth in our lives…’
IKEA is known to name all its products, there is a Billy Bookcase, Poang armchair, Solleron outdoor sofa. Each product is named after Swedish towns and villages, humans, and other meaningful Swedish words. Take for example the Solleron sofa, named after a Swedish island.
And Marianne, your statement that language can sometimes fit the myth in our lives reminded me of IKEA’s founder. ” The naming system was created by Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s founder. Kamprad struggled with dyslexia, and he had trouble remembering the order of the numbers in item codes. So he swapped the numbers for names. This made it easier for him to remember each item, and as a result he made fewer mistakes when filling out forms.”
And then each category of product is assigned a specific type of name, all outdoor furniture is named after islands that have a lot of sun, like Mastholmen are their coffee tables, and also name of an island.
Äpplarö are wooden patio furniture
Solleron are outdoor sofas
Mastholmen are outdoor coffee tablesThen the categories are subdivided, “Bathroom items: Names of Swedish lakes and bodies of water
Linens: Flowers and plants Bedroom and Living Room Furniture: Norwegian places
Bookcases: Professions and Scandinavian boy’s names.” Many of us have assembled their most basic bookcase, the Billy book case. I know I have, and surely have not forgotten the name.So, following this trend, a furniture store in Canada, began naming its products too. Unfortunately, they gave their rubbish bins a few Arabic names : Wahid and Waseem. Fortunately, or unfortunately, “Wahid or vaheed is an Arabic masculine given name, meaning “One”, “Absolute One”. Al-Wahid is one of the 99 names of Allah.” This offended the Arab community, and now the matter is being scrutinized by the ethics committee.
Shaahayda and not Shaheda (Respelled after discussions with Marianne to reflect my myth)
Hello Marianne and all,
“This reminds me about how the symbols in language can sometimes fit the myth in our lives and vice-versa. So often we feel in symbols as much as we think in symbols.” (Marianne )
Such a warm topic, that I am still thinking about it, and deliberated a bit on what you wrote regarding ‘symbols in language can sometimes fit the myth in our lives…’
IKEA is known to name all its products, there is a Billy Bookcase, Poang armchair, Solleron outdoor sofa. Each product is named after Swedish towns and villages, humans, and other meaningful Swedish words. Take for example the Solleron sofa, named after a Swedish island.
And Marianne, your statement that language can sometimes fit the myth in our lives reminded me of IKEA’s founder. ” The naming system was created by Ingvar Kamprad, IKEA’s founder. Kamprad struggled with dyslexia, and he had trouble remembering the order of the numbers in item codes. So he swapped the numbers for names. This made it easier for him to remember each item, and as a result he made fewer mistakes when filling out forms.”
And then each category of product is assigned a specific type of name, all outdoor furniture is named after islands that have a lot of sun, like Mastholmen are their coffee tables, and also name of an island.
Äpplarö are wooden patio furniture
Solleron are outdoor sofas
Mastholmen are outdoor coffee tablesThen the categories are subdivided, “Bathroom items: Names of Swedish lakes and bodies of water
Linens: Flowers and plants Bedroom and Living Room Furniture: Norwegian places
Bookcases: Professions and Scandinavian boy’s names.” Many of us have assembled their most basic bookcase, the Billy book case. I know I have, and surely have not forgotten the name.So, following this trend, a furniture store in Canada, began naming its products too. Unfortunately, they gave their rubbish bins a few Arabic names : Wahid and Waseem. Fortunately, or unfortunately, “Wahid or vaheed is an Arabic masculine given name, meaning “One”, “Absolute One”. Al-Wahid is one of the 99 names of Allah.” This offended the Arab community, and now the matter is being scrutinized by the ethics committee.
Shaahayda and not Shaheda (Respelled after discussions with Marianne to reflect my myth)
Shaheda; this is the central question that drives the whole “individuation” process Jung proposes: “What is my (personal) myth?” Dennis quotes Jung when asking: “What am I about?” Both Joseph and Dennis start off by referencing Jung’s statement from “Memories, Dreams and Reflections”. In the book: “The Hero’s Journey”, on pages 81-82; Joseph mentions this:
“And Jung asked himself by what mythology he was living and he found he did not know. And so he said, “I made it the task of tasks of my life to find out by what mythology I was living.”He had been talking about Adolf Bastion’s distinctions between 2 separate definitions of myth; desi; which is the folk; and Marga; which is the universal or elementary idea. He then says: “So the desi, the folk, guide you into life, and marga, the elementary, guide you to your own inward life. Mythology serves two purposes that way.”
There is more describing this within the text; but for our purposes of naming things it might be helpful to refer back Dennis’s statement in the other thread about the difference between an Archetype and an Archetypal Image where the first informs the other:
” Steve. I think we might speak about an archetype and an archetypal image. The former is universal and constant, but the image it is birthed in is organic and dynamic. I believe Jung writes that archetypes are shaped and formed into an image depending on the cultural pressures that work on it as it comes into being. So, paradoxically, the archetype is unchanging and changeable, shaped by the particular cultural impressions that work on it.”
Joseph’s friend; writer: “John Steinbeck” named his pickup truck: “Roscinate”; which was the name of Don Quixote’s horse. That represents more than just an animal; that symbolized something to him just like the name: “Gander” did to Joseph’s little VW bug. (Although not previously knowing this I had also named my pickup “Roscinate” as well because it symbolized the musical Quest I was on). Don Quixote was this crazy old fool who was on a mission from God to restore chivalry to save the world; and Roscinate; this old nag; was his mount. Quixote’s spiritual quest was the symbol that informed the image of the vehicle one just named so to speak. So we name things that represent some kind of of symbolic representation in various situations. These things can evoke something; whether meaningful or not is up to the person that names it.
So back to the “personal myth” aspect where I will try to connect the two. The last few days weeks I’ve been going through various stages of personal reflections related to this pandemic and feeling rather frustrated. So yesterday I put together a few thoughts together with a copied article concerning different mental states and added a separate link to something that always picked me up when I view it that lifted my mood considerably; yet there was still melancholy afterwards because I learned of the passing of the character. Then later in the evening I came across a clip of rather recent rendition of the movie: “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote”; when after viewing it I went to sleep and woke up seeing the connections between humor, depression, and my Quest; (symbolized by Don Quixote). This may seem a rather disjointed configuration of ideas but it’s all related to the mental process of assimilation concerning my personal myth.
________________________________________________________________________________“Extistential Angst, Enni, Weltscmerz and Henri”
Below I’am going to leave to two items that may or may not counter-balance each other concerning today’s mental and emotional state and the ability to change one’s perception on how they see themselves within their inner life and how they navigate the current Covid Pandemic. One is an article from 2016 posted on mentalfloss.com and the other is a video clip from Will Braden’s – Henri the Extistential Cat series. One describes the various mental states that are often confused and the other uses humor to adjust one’s perspective.
_______________________________________________________How to Tell Whether You’ve Got Angst, Ennui, or Weltschmerz
BY ARIKA OKRENT AUGUST 3, 2016
English has many words for the feelings that can arise when a good, hard look at the state of the world seems to reveal only negatives. Hopelessness, despair, depression, discouragement, melancholy, sorrow, worry, disconsolation, distress, anxiety …there are so many that it would hardly seem necessary to borrow any more from other languages. But English never hesitates to borrow words that would lose certain subtleties in translation, and angst, ennui, and weltschmerz have made their way into English by offering a little something extra. Have you got a case of one of these imported maladies? Here’s a little guide to help you diagnose.Angst
Angst is the word for fear in German, Dutch, and Danish. It comes from the same Indo-European root (meaning tight, constricted, painful) that gave us anguish, anxiety, and anger. In the mid 19th century it became associated with a specific kind of existential dread through the work of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. He talked about a type of anxiety that arises in response to nothing in particular, or the sense of nothingness itself. It’s not exactly fear, and not the same as worry, but a simple fact of the human condition, a feeling that disrupts peace and contentment for no definable reason. The word was adopted into English after Freud used it as a term for generalized anxiety. Now it carries shades of philosophical brooding mixed with a dash of psychoanalytic, clinical turmoil. While anxiety and angst are often interchangeable, anxiety foregrounds a feeling of suffering (also present in angst), while angst foregrounds dissatisfaction, a complaint about the way the world is.
Are you dissatisfied and worried in an introspective, overthinking German way? You’ve got angst.Ennui
Ennui is the French word for boredom. The English word “annoy” comes from an early, 13th century borrowing of the word, but it was borrowed again during the height of 18th century European romanticism, when it stood for a particular, fashionable kind of boredom brought on by weariness with the world. Young people at that time, feeling that the promises of the French Revolution had gone unfulfilled, took on an attitude of lethargic disappointment, a preoccupation with the fundamental emptiness of existence. Nothing mattered, so nothing roused the passions. By the middle of the 19th century, ennui became associated with the alienation of industrialization and modern life. Artists and poets suffered from it, and soon a claim to ennui was a mark of spiritual depth and sensitivity. It implied feelings of superiority and self-regard, the idea being that only bourgeois people too deluded or stupid to see the basic futility of any action could be happy. Now, in English, though it is defined as “a feeling of weariness and dissatisfaction,” ennui also has connotations of self-indulgent posturing and European decadence. Are you tired, so tired of everything about the world and the way it is? Do you proclaim this, with a long, slow sigh, to everyone around you? You’ve got ennui.Weltschmerz
Weltschmerz, German for “world pain,” was also coined during the Romantic Era and is in many ways the German version of ennui. It describes a world weariness felt from a perceived mismatch between the ideal image of how the world should be with how it really is. In German philosophy it was distinguished from pessimism, the idea that there is more bad than good in the world, because while pessimism was the logical conclusion of cool, rational philosophical pondering, weltschmerz was an emotional response. Though weltschmerz and ennui are pretty close synonyms, ennui foregrounds the listlessness brought on by world weariness (it can also be a term for more simple boredom), and weltschmerz foregrounds the pain or sadness. There is perhaps a greater sense of yearning in weltschmerz (part of the pain is that the sufferer really wants the world to be otherwise). Also, as an English word, weltschmerz is not as common as ennui, so there are fewer connotations about the type of person that comes down with it. Its very German sound (that “schm”!) makes it seem more serious and grim than ennui.
Do you have sadness in your heart for the world that can never be and sensible shoes? You’ve got weltschmerz.
_____________________________________________I am leaving a link that contains two clips out of the dozens that exist along with a short article concerning Henri’s recent passing. Henri was loved the world over for his wisdom and his world-weary detachment. If you are not familiar with Henri’s celebrity you will soon fall under his spell that will make you laugh and give you a sense that life is still worth living no matter how depressing things may seem. His millions of fans have for years shared videos and will miss him terribly.
Shaheda; I’m adding a short promotional clip of the: “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote” because it gives an really good feel of the character surrounding this main figure which has come to represent the “Impossible Dream”. If you are familiar with the story his psychosis touches you poignantly in but in an inspiring way; and Jonathon Price’s depiction is magnificent along with Adam Driver’s Sancho Panza which takes this modern adaptation and puts a brand new spin on it. Joseph mentions in “The Power of Myth” that the “world is a wasteland” and Quixote was important because the modern technical world disorients people; and Quixote’s heroic psychosis of chasing windmills saves The Quest of this Adventure of the Hero for himself even though everyone around him thinks he’s crazy. In other words he represents something noble in the human spirit.
Robert – one more tantalizing clue re Jung’s vision of “Philemon,” and Goethe’s Faust:
C.G. Jung’s grandfather and namesake, Dr. Med. Carl Gustav I Jung (or sometimes Karl Gustav I Jung – his grandson, “our” Jung, was officially christened Karl Gustav II Jung and used that spelling until he graduated from the University of Basel) had a promising career in Berlin as a physician, but as a result of his liberal associations was arrested in 1819 and jailed for 13 months. Unemployable in Germany, who became a starving political refugee in Paris, where according to family lore the natural scientist Alexander von Humboldt sat at the same park bench one day and started a conversation. Upset at Jung’s plight, impressed with his scientific knowledge, he secured a position for him at the University of Basel’s medical school – which is how the Jung’s became Swiss.
Carl Gustav the elder is a fascinating figure who believed himself to be the illegitimate son of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – which would make C.G. Jung Goethe’s great-grandson. Deirdre Bair (author of my favorite of many Jung biographies) notes that C.G. Jung read Faust when he was 16, and that all the inner figures that later emerged came from Faust.
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