Stephen Gerringer
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
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.
Kristina,
Thank you for that rich and generous response to my questions! I so appreciate the work you are doing out in the “real world,” helping others make those connections with the rhythms and cycles of nature.
Your essay in particular rings true for me when you connect the death-and-rebirth sojourn in the Underworld with the enforced solitude so many hundreds of millions of us have experienced during Covid lockdowns:
One of the purposes of myth (whether the myth be of self-narrative or of the collective) is to help us to truly feel our lives. And for those who have experienced lockdowns due to the COVID-19 pandemic with consequent, extended lengths of time in solitude–or felt a sense of internal emptiness or vacuum of soul–the invitation has been extended to more deeply sense into ourselves, while also feeling into the entire beingness of the planet, and indeed, of the cosmos.”
Clearly, myth does have relevance today – as do your words on what this moment offers:
The underworld is the most fertile ground for our metamorphosis. Acting as an alchemical vessel, times of solitude and inner desolation invite us to explore what it is that must change in us and take another form. So much depends on our capacity to relinquish harmful and obsolete patterns and behaviors, for we know that every attempt to deal with challenges in outmoded ways will, ultimately, fail us.
Without engaging ritually with this realm, the psyche remains flat and one-dimensional.”
So true.
For those who might not know how to ritually to engage with this realm, or where to begin, could you expand on this – perhaps suggest some ideas, maybe some practices or tools that would help?
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.
Shaahayda (figured I would follow your lead and adopt the phonetic spelling of your name),
Though it’s not quite the same thing, I thought you might find this anecdote about Joseph Campbell relevant, in light of Dennis’ coat-sleeve metaphor:
James – Shaheda’s reference is to this paragraph from Dennis’s MythBast essay:
Which persuades us to glance with double vision at both myth and history, one inside the other, one connecting and transforming the other. We might, in Campbellian fashion, play with our own metaphor here at the end. Here is my image: the invisible lining of a jacket or coat is what I would call history’s inner myth; it gives shape and contour to the outer sleeve, which is history itself. Yes, the sleeve can be turned inside-out to reveal the hidden myth, and that is part of Campbell’s mode of excavation: he turns the sleeve inside-out in order to explore the mystery shaping history. Ok, not quite a veil, but certainly another form of fabric-ation. “
In another thread, James mentioned his delight that Joseph Campbell had named his car “The Gander” – which brings us back to the question that forms the title of the MythBlast essay this conversation references:
What’s in a name?
Just yesterday a Nasa spacecraft used a crane to lower the rover Perseverance to the surface of Mars. Eight years ago my wife and I were rapt in suspense as we monitored the perilous descent of the Mars rover Curiosity – so naturally yesterday I viewed this landing at my desk on my laptop screen, as did my wife from her office at work. No surprise we shared the jubilation of the scientists and engineers in Mission Control as Perseverance touched down and broadcast its first image. I texted to my wife how impressed and vested I was in the event – and she texted back
I know. I think it is giving them a name that makes them feel real”
That struck a chord.
Some years ago Daniel Bianchetta (a brilliant photographer with a passion for petroglyphs), long associated with the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, shared that the indigenous Esselen who lived for centuries in close proximity to the hot springs there had given a name to every tree on the property (not to mention large rocks)! I can’t imagine even counting all the trees there, much less naming them – but this makes so much sense. Trees did not come and go as quickly as people: the lifetime of most trees spanned multiple generations of humans – they were old souls, and old friends, part of each person’s life from first breath to last.
Knowing someone’s name creates a sense of, well, intimacy, changing the one named from an “It” to a “Thou,” to borrow Martin Buber’s terms, conferring a sense of interiority. This may strike our contemporaries as odd when it comes to what we are conditioned today to think of as objects – which, from the Cartesian perspective of empirical science, may seem little more than magical thinking.
And maybe it is; on one level, no doubt the relationship the Esselen had to the trees was simply a projection of the collective imagination – but that sense of personhood a name conveys meant trees are not simply objects to be uprooted and replaced during a landscaping project: one just doesn’t cut down and kill a tree person to improve one’s view.
Rather than treating nature as an object to be altered according to human whim and need, the accent was on living in harmony with nature.
What’s more, science has led the way in recent decades to understanding “the secret life of plants” (e.g. the work of biologist Rupert Sheldrake, or anthropologist Jeremy Narby’s Intelligence in Nature, which presents evidence that independent intelligence is not unique to humanity, with bacteria, plants, animals, and other forms of nonhuman life displaying an uncanny penchant for self-deterministic decisions, patterns, and actions).
But what about inanimate objects that don’t meet the biological definition of life? Isn’t that just silly magical thinking left over from childhood?
Again, maybe. After all, dolls and toys (or cars, for that matter) aren’t alive; any sense of an interior life is simply a projection we make. And yet, the need to name seems a universal human trait.
When I was a child I had my favorite toys, the ones I wanted to play with all the time – but, fairly regularly, I’d dig through the toy box and pull out toys to play with I really didn’t care for that much, because I didn’t want them to feel sad and abandoned (a childhood emotion Pixar taps into with their Toy Story film series). Can’t say I ever really got past that; even today, I have three favorite coffee mugs – one I drink from during the week, the other two on alternate weekends – but at least once very couple weeks I root around the back of the cupboard and pull out one of many cups I’m not fond of at all, just because I don’t want to hurt their feelings (which says more about me than the cup, as I project a sense of interiority onto these objects).
And I name everything, or so it seems. My Nissan Murano is named Sophie; my wife’s little Ford Escort is Katie; we call our Deik robo-vacuum Hazel (after the maid played by Shirley Booth in the black-and-white television sit-com we both watched as children); our printer is called Hermes, and even our Navigator pool sweep is named Henry (after Prince Henry the Navigator, son and brother to kings of Portugal, who was a driving force behind the Age of Exploration). The practical effect of such fancies is that these items are, from my perspective, imbued with soul; inanimate objects they may technically be, but a “Thou” rather than an “It” to me – and so I find myself going the extra mile to extend their lives. Over the years I have been advised to discard our pool sweep and upgrade, advice I would follow if I thought of it as nothing but a tool – but I just can’t arbitrarily do that to Henry, so we repair him and forge on.
This may be why I was so enamored of novelist Tom Robbins, whose characters include not just humans, but cigarette packages, spoons, and other “inanimate” objects with an animated interior life. No surprise that Jitterbug Perfume, my favorite Robbins novel, was written after he returned from a trip to Chichén-Itza in the Yucatan and elsewhere in Mexico with one Joseph Campbell.
So I am not surprised Joe named his little red VW bug “The Gander.”
Robert
I would agree the only connection between Yahweh and Yawi is the one that exists in your eclectic mind, though it’s fun to play with . . .
And I would also point out, as I believe Norland does in his essay, that even though this motif (sacrificing a mythological being at the dawn of time and burying the head, from which grows the culture’s primary food plant) may be an element in these sacrificial rituals, there are multiple layers and a heck of a lot more in play than just the one mythic image. It’s not so much an either/or as – can’t quite wrap it up that simply. I’d say that, though this observation by Campbell (and Fraser and company) does ring true, there’s more to it than just that: the ritual seems to encompass a multitude of myths.
During my decade or so “on the road” – thumbing my way around the continent – I usually spent a couple months every year in Taos, where Robert Mirabal was a legend (deservedly so).
sunbug – you may enjoy perusing this conversation, in our Campbell in Culture forum, where Nancy Allison (editor of The Ecstasy of Being, Joseph Campbell’s posthumous work on dance, who worked closely with Joe’s wife Jean), discussing Jean Erdman’s approach to dance. (No need to read it all at once, but Nancy’s comments are compelling, often sharing anecdotes involving Jean and Joe).
I’m also curious what handle you used in the old forums here back in the day (my cyber moniker was “bodhibliss”)
Indeed, Robert.
In fact, that’s a large part of what makes verifying Joseph Campbell quotes so difficult. Most faux quotes are very much in sync with observations Campbell makes, and sound enough like something he said that it’s difficult to rule them out with a cursory search. I find myself looking for a needle that may not exist in literally hundreds of haystacks (books, essays, interviews, and lectures galore). It’s one thing to find a needle in a haystack, but it can be a pain to prove a needle you can’t find never existed.
And the misquotes are almost always accidents rather than malicious misdeeds. Someone loves something Campbell said and quotes a line or two, then adds their own commentary, not making clear the difference between their words and Campbell’s words, and so a mishmash of “Joe and not-Joe” gets re-posted as Campbell’s own words and goes viral. Or someone writes something Campbell said that they loved, but they don’t have the quote in front of them so paraphrase, or misremember, creating something that sounds like it could be Campbell but is something he never said. They mostly mean well.
On the other hand, Michael Lambert recently managed to remove a publication being sold over Amazon that consisted of 100 Campbell “quotes.” Of course, the creators of that publication didn’t have permission to use those quotes – they were just riding Joe’s chi to make a quick buck. What’s more, after an exhaustive search, we found dozens of those “quotes” were seriously inaccurate or completely nonexistent (that’s what we have to do to remove the profiteers).
So thanks for sharing that clip – the message is what’s essential.
What great memories of your parents, sunbug, especially your mother’s love of science. Stories are so much a part of teaching, no matter the subject (even science, and math); thanks for sharing your stories.
What a wonderful expression of joy!
Joseph Campbell, from The Power of Myth:
“The Beatles brought forth an art form for which there was a readiness. Somehow, they were in perfect tune with their time. Had they turned up thirty years before, their music would have fizzled out. The public hero is sensitive to the needs of his time. The Beatles brought a new spiritual depth into popular music which started the fad, let’s call it, for meditation and Oriental music. Oriental music had been over here for years, as a curiosity, but now, after the Beatles, our young people seem to know what it’s about. We are hearing more and more of it, and it’s being used in terms of its original intention as a support for meditations. That’s what the Beatles started”
pjh1
Thanks for bringing up Bishop Pike – I haven’t thought about him in years! James Pike and his fellow Episcopalian priest, Alan Watts (who resigned from the clergy in 1950, his Anglican past eclipsed in the public memory by his role as an interpreter/advocate of Buddhism, Taoism, and Hinduism) were bold innovators, introducing elements of dancing, singing, and elements from other traditions into the services they led.
I live 90 miles east of San Francisco. Grace Cathedral (which I assume is the church you reference) holds a special place in my heart.
No worries about links, Marianne – it’s not you. We had powered back some of the restrictions to allow participants to more easily post links, and a lurker late at night posted porn links in several forums (which James caught right after they went up and zapped off a PM to me, which I happened to see when I had to briefly leave bed the middle of the night, so was able to quickly remove them and block the miscreant). As a result, we increased security, which means I have to manually approve all messages with links.
So go ahead and keep posting links – there may just be a slight delay before your message appears as I’m not online 24/7
