Artist's Statement 2016
For the Love of Creation
Iona Miller, 2016
For the Love of Creation
Iona Miller, 2016
SOUL MOVEMENT
In her common form, Aphrodite is anima -- soul or psyche; in her heavenly form, Aphrodite Urania is the Anima Mundi. The feminine principle or mode of Being is historically considered the "soul of the world," the fertility of human, animal and plant life. Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno said the World Soul “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.” She is the magical world of creative mystery.
Our geocentric understanding of ourselves has expanded to the realization that we are an intrinsic part of Cosmos. The Universe is also literally within us. No longer limited merely to our planet, Anima Mundi is the personification of the whole natural world – the Universe, personified as Heavenly Aphrodite. Every atom is bound together by the power of attraction. Every photon is her radiance.
This light, the dynamic reality of the energy field, is within us as within everything. Embodied nature is the link between the archetypal and formative worlds, the hyperdimensional matrix of eternal patterns with sacred proportions and unique phenomena.
She is also infinite potential, the possibility of bringing creative ideas to birth, to manifestation. In the deepest sense, she is the universal wave function, the unmanifest ground of our being, spacetime and the radiant light of virtual photon fluctuation, which underlies all matter and manifestation.
"I have not the faintest idea what "psyche" is in itself, yet, when I come to think and speak of it, I must speak of my abstractions, concepts, views, figures, knowing that they are our specific illusions. That is what I call "nonconcretization." And know that I am by no means the first and only man who speaks of anima, etc.
Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the Unknowable.
Don't you see that it is life too to paint the world with divine colours? You never will know more than you can know, and if you proudly refuse to go by the available "knowledge" (or whatever you like to call it) you are bound to produce a better "theory" or "truth," and if you should not succeed in doing so, you are left on the bank high and dry and life runs away from you.
You deny the living and creative God in man and you will be like the Wandering Jew. All things are as if they were Real things are effects of something unknown.
The same is true of anima, ego, etc. and moreover, there are no real things that are not relatively real. We have no idea of absolute reality, because "reality" is always something "observed." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 56-57
In her common form, Aphrodite is anima -- soul or psyche; in her heavenly form, Aphrodite Urania is the Anima Mundi. The feminine principle or mode of Being is historically considered the "soul of the world," the fertility of human, animal and plant life. Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno said the World Soul “illumines the universe and directs nature in producing her species in the right way.” She is the magical world of creative mystery.
Our geocentric understanding of ourselves has expanded to the realization that we are an intrinsic part of Cosmos. The Universe is also literally within us. No longer limited merely to our planet, Anima Mundi is the personification of the whole natural world – the Universe, personified as Heavenly Aphrodite. Every atom is bound together by the power of attraction. Every photon is her radiance.
This light, the dynamic reality of the energy field, is within us as within everything. Embodied nature is the link between the archetypal and formative worlds, the hyperdimensional matrix of eternal patterns with sacred proportions and unique phenomena.
She is also infinite potential, the possibility of bringing creative ideas to birth, to manifestation. In the deepest sense, she is the universal wave function, the unmanifest ground of our being, spacetime and the radiant light of virtual photon fluctuation, which underlies all matter and manifestation.
"I have not the faintest idea what "psyche" is in itself, yet, when I come to think and speak of it, I must speak of my abstractions, concepts, views, figures, knowing that they are our specific illusions. That is what I call "nonconcretization." And know that I am by no means the first and only man who speaks of anima, etc.
Science is the art of creating suitable illusions which the fool believes or argues against, but the wise man enjoys their beauty or their ingenuity, without being blind to the fact that they are human veils and curtains concealing the abysmal darkness of the Unknowable.
Don't you see that it is life too to paint the world with divine colours? You never will know more than you can know, and if you proudly refuse to go by the available "knowledge" (or whatever you like to call it) you are bound to produce a better "theory" or "truth," and if you should not succeed in doing so, you are left on the bank high and dry and life runs away from you.
You deny the living and creative God in man and you will be like the Wandering Jew. All things are as if they were Real things are effects of something unknown.
The same is true of anima, ego, etc. and moreover, there are no real things that are not relatively real. We have no idea of absolute reality, because "reality" is always something "observed." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 56-57
I love the refinement: the love of the sun
He gave me in fate splendor and beauty.
--Sappho
APHRODITE:
Rising Above the Darkness
Biological, Conscious & Unconscious Coupling
By Iona Miller, 2016
“Surely it must have been on one of these shores so filled with grace and frolicsomeness that the miraculous transformation of beast into man took place. It must have been on such a Greek strand that Astarte of the multitudinous sowlike breasts cast anchor from Asia Minor and the Greeks, receiving the barbaric and coarsely carved wooden statue, cleansed it of its bestiality, left it with only the human breasts, and gave it a human body full of nobility. From Asia Minor, the Greeks took the primitive instinct, orgiastic intoxication, the bestial shout--Astarte. They transubstantiated the instinct into love, the bite into kisses, the orgy into religious worship, the shout into the lover's endearment. Astarte they transformed into Aphrodite.” --Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Grcco
“You have captivated me; let me stand tremblingly before you.
Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber,
You have captivated me; let me stand tremblingly before you.
Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.
Bridegroom, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey,
In the bedchamber, honey-filled,
Let me enjoy your goodly beauty,
Lion, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey.”
--Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, “The Love Song of Shu-Sin”
Beauty evokes affection and at times even pity. Anything that is beautiful is cherished for the very reason that it is subject to decay. In a world without beauty, there would not be ugliness but apathy. If objects are not prized for their unnecessary existence there would be a distorted concept of time. One that rests on utility rather than attachment. By making time more meaningful, beauty fills it with a sense of longingness. --Saqib Fazal
Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being." --Rilke
I can say nothing,
my tongue is broken. A delicate fire
runs under my skin, my eyes
see nothing, my ears roar,
cold sweat
rushes down me, trembling seizes me,
I am greener than grass.
To myself I seem
needing but little to die. --Sappho
"But if we can reconcile ourselves with the mysterious truth that spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit --the two being really one -- then we can understand why it is that the attempt to transcend the present level of consciousness must give its due to the body." ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Page 220
"Psychic and somatic symptoms express the soul's painful wounds and obstructions. The rational mind is incapable of deciding what is best for the soul. The mind can discover what is needed only by listening to and reflecting upon the subtle movement of the soul as it expresses itself in bodily sensations, feelings, emotions, images, ideas, and dreams." --Robert M. Stein, "Body and Psyche"
This is equally true of the concept of matter or body. We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter. Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.
Soul and body are not two things. They are one.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355
Aphrodite's Romantic Aesthetic
A sense of meeting in the imagination arises, revealing the dual structure of individuality, otherwise unknowable. This mighty source of psychic energy fuels imagination to create a field of inner freedom and curatorial narrative.
As with each archetypal meeting, we are subjected to it, consumed by it, or integrate it to the limited extent we can. We are each a primal body-self vulnerable to the shocks and enticements of the world and our needs. Being mostly body, the self remains just as vulnerable to the world -- spontaneous and visceral.
Wild hunger impairs reason and choice. In obsession life may not be perfect, but it remains vital and lively. We overestimate our autonomy. In our 'bright awareness' we oversimplify ourselves as coherent, solid, and articulate in our self-reports.
What sounds grand may be hubristic, immature, uprooted, or willful. We can be enthralled or bound by our own self-image, manipulating or forcing gratification. Beauty devastates or elevates, ravages or ravishes, engulfs in psychological addiction or enlightens.
The personifications of Aphrodite are a many-headed sexual infinity sign expressing the essence of her divine nature. They aesthetically objectify our life's changes. Love has permanent poetic value and marks our passages. Recognizing and mirroring one another takes place in the dim regions of the body's self-consciousness. We unconsciously mimic and orchestrate muscular, glandular, and vascular changes in one another.
Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display temporal representatives of nature's constants in the imagistic world. High and low narrative situations are rooted in archetypal, imagistic, and symbolic field coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Things fit in a natural story line. Self-arising images have stable configurations and issues with specific properties. It helps us better appreciate our discreteness and wholeness.
Can we be kind, generous, and loving without being foolish? Our human heart, mind, spirit, and soul emerge through the same process that created all of life, encouraging us to supersede our limitations.
Unknown to ourselves, love can consume us in vortices of unconscious repetitions of earlier trauma, competition, or jealousy and other patterns in psyche, or holes in the heart from loss and decay. This may always be part of our lives, consistencies in behavior and involuntary moments. Body flows with the motion of the world. Creative excitement dissolves boundaries.
Like unashamed, unabashed Aphrodite, this essay seeks to titillate, to provoke, to promise even more than it may deliver of the mysteries and hidden charms of existence. Soul includes our nonphysical aspects: consciousness, wisdom mind, clairvoyance, thought, feeling, and will, seemingly distinct from the physical body. It is our feelings: our emotional and moral nature, our hidden most private thoughts and feelings. Aphrodite is a soul-guide and her myth is therapeutic.
We imagine the heart as the basis of emotional life. This source and center is where the deepest and sincerest feelings are located and we are most vulnerable to pain, momentary unbalance, and divine frenzy.
We won't cover all of her aspects, exploits, or relationships, nor means of apprehending soul. The eternal mother and source of all creation is the root and ground of every soul and fountain of heaven and earth.
We may even skip promiscuously from subject to subject like a dreamer. She is with us on the threshold of life's greatest decisions. In The Red Book, Philemon tells Jung, "Joy comes from fulfillment, but not from longing." (Pg. 341). Certain primordial human desires are not mainly concerned with possibility, but with desirability, and energy beyond striving.
Each reader -- anyone who has had or lost a love -- finds their own revelations arising within from the unconscious. It isn't what you look at, but what you see with the Art of Seeing -- a perceptual framework. Jung notes, "The unconscious mind sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind." And Goethe, "everyone sees what he carries in his heart."
Conceptual analysis of romantic love can be rather dry, cliche, or predictable tropes. This character is regarded as a deity of love and sexual lust as well. A deity from a ruling pantheon or a mortal can be considered a goddess of love. Male love gods are included in this trope. It is called "Love Goddess" rather than "Love Deity" because the females are much more common.
We all have a keen grasp of the obvious when it comes to love goddess myths and basic psychology. Culture is part of our nature. Hopefully, we will introduce dormant associations from the depths to restore the bond with cosmos that enfolds humanity with a universal sense of meaning. Aphrodite is born of the primal serpent of the oceans that spans time and space.
We apply abstract associations between patterns to create meaningful connections.
Amplification of ordered pattern-recognition functions include:
1) Enhanced pattern recognition, or a new awareness of "hidden" patterns in nature, matter, and body that are not normally sensed;
2) Synchronicities, or the perception of meaningful connections between similar patterns that occur in close temporal proximity; unconscious, uninhibited cross-talk; attributions of constructed connections;
3) Morphology, elaborate "hidden" or "buried" similarities between previously unrelated patterns; mimetic imitation, sameness, similarity of process or structure, morphic resonance theory, self-organizing systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems; so-called laws of nature may be more like habits;
4) Singular Consciousness, a state of mind where all patterns seem to merge into one harmonious "Universal Pattern" from which all other smaller patterns flow.
Interiorizing means to internalize or cause feelings and values, for example, to become an interior or internal part of one's mental or spiritual being; to make them a part of one's own inner being, mental structure, or inner life.
Interpersonal Synchronization
Universe and consciousness are inseparably linked. The cosmos is mirrored in our physicality and the psyche, soul, or unconscious. The subconscious creates, always there, always functioning as the foundation of our being. Memories are the ancestors of our creativity. The creative impulse is rooted deep in the psyche beyond our conscious reach.
A cosmic principle, Love is the ultimate symbol of a continuous process of participatory transformation, which can be glorious, painful, irreversible, and essential. Energies associated with the deity change our outlook, perceptions and feelings through communion with intimate otherness of the world.
It ranges from heartfulness, to heartache, and heartbreak. It begins in dissolution -- loss of the centrality of the ego and sacrifice that frees us to be more alive and vital. It is an initiation and deep renewal. Archetypes, as patterns of perception, are rooted in or emerge from our biology. Their forms are culturally transmitted.
We seek the Beloved as the Beloved seeks us, in the unconscious roots of creativity, in generative properties, relative knowing in detail, affective ways of knowing, and the truth of essential knowing -- meaning of richness and depth. The ontological presence of substantive existence is the self-existing quality of being and love of the presence of true nature. Earth molds us physically, rhythmically within herself.
The Universal Medicine
Love is a psychedelic state, effecting rebirth -- a new form, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow. Instinctual attraction dissolves the ego and liquifies consciousness in a new incarnation of spirit. Something in us dies if we don't periodically resonate with wild rejuvenating nature and meaningful ecstatic involvement.
Rebirth typically opens us to the transpersonal domain with its virtually infinite creativity, but not without the implied dissolution, death itself from which that rebirth is coming. Being in the physical-symbolic means internally and externally hearing the breath of the spirit in dialogue with the soul, with the anima mundi.
This powerful archetypal theme is initiatory in character. The process of rebirth is the mythic enactment of "the one story," whose pattern is found in every narrative. Beneath the differences, the meaning -- having to do with the loss and recovery of identity -- does not change. The descent, including 'falling in love' and subsequent ascent, means going deep into the consciousness journey and emerging transformed.
Falling in love is stimulating like amphetamines and adrenaline. Lovers feed off of the excitement. Bonding oxytocin is like opioids. Dopamine is love, lust, adultery, motivation, attention, sensation-seeking, and addiction. Dopamine is released by pleasurable sensations but also by stress, pain or loss. So love modulates as well as creates experiences.
The loss of love is also universally paradigmatic. Love transcends loss. The process continues in dreamlife. Union with the object of love is not an end in itself, but an archetypal instrument, a numinosum [any phenomenon experienced as a manifestation of tremendous power felt to be objective], that ushers in a new condition with a new sense and meaning.
But there are real consequences. The love deity has a wrathful side which we experience in divine suffering. Non-human powers can leave us split and even break us. What occurs in this area of life affects others, as well, by shifting our thoughts and releasing helpful and unhelpful stored emotions, synchronizing heart and mind, and grounding soul.
“It’s easy to be a naive idealist. It’s easy to be a cynical realist.
It’s quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.” —Marie-Louise von Franz.
In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it, have come to represent the lost Feminine element. We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the mind/body split fostered by non-relativistic Cartesian thinking.
Body is made complete, not by perfecting it, but by spiritualizing it. It becomes the vehicle of the "incarnating Self." Spirit is attracted to matter and matter to spirit. Matter gets purpose and meaning from spirit. An "immortal body" now means grounding of the spirit. The uniting of soul, body, and spirit was called the Unus Mundus, or One World in alchemy.
The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters." Let the images come into your body. Embrace the image. To heal the mind/body split we need a view of reality that eliminates the dichotomy of "in here" in this separate body vs. "out there" in the alien, external world.
There is a way that joins spirit and body through the spontaneous imagery of soul. It seeks neither to solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. It suggests direct engagement with images for soul-making or deepening through personal experience. We can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try.
Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We seek the lost soul primarily because of the intense degree of wounding in our modern consciousness. This wounding has "opened" us to transformation. We can embody soul by seeing-through appearances to an acute awareness of the archetypal, subjective perception of our experience.
We can find soul in the body. It speaks metaphorically in body language (how closed or open one is to life and experience), body talk ("he's a pain in the neck;" "I can't stomach that"), symptoms, and displacements. Conversion reactions change psychological dis-ease into concrete ailments.
Jung said the gods have become diseases and there is a god within every disease. Noticing that psychic element and giving it voice is psychological soul-making. We can also look at our behavior, emotions, thoughts, and styles of consciousness psychologically.
Perhaps life's great challenge is to develop an integration of spirit and body, including our shadow side, the dark part of ourselves. We must first descend into the unconscious in order to ascend to transpersonal states. Things that are not supposed to exist, like synchronicities, spark the imagination.
The essential thing about these [Synchronistic] phenomena is that an objective event coincides meaningfully with a psychic process; that is to say, a physical event and an endopsychic one have a common meaning. ~Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.
A new integrated consciousness emerges from this "divine tension," "divine fire" -- a dynamic equilibrium with an open heart and a spirit of exploration. Psychoactivation mobilizes the psyche, inspires imagination, and synchronistically dissolves the boundary between mind and matter.
Jung speaks of the direct psychic experience of the body, head, heart and gut: "If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart and one in the abdomen." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.
So when we say body, we really mean our psychic experience of the body. This has only a distant Relationship to the anatomical and physiological structure of the body and nothing whatever to do with matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.
The body is the past, our earth, the world of heretofore, but out of it rises a new light which is not identical with the body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 374
The spirit can easily be anything, but the earth can only be something definite. So remaining true to the earth would mean maintaining your conscious relationship to the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 66
We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side; we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 235.
Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316
Probably in absolute reality there is no such thing as body and mind, but body and mind or soul are the same, the same life, subject to the same laws, and what the body does is happening in the mind. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 20
Love originates in immediate experiences. Emotions and will interact with spirit and body. We receive love differently. The couple is a reciprocal body and neurological feedback system. 'Knowledge' is visceral awareness and awareness of the nervous system. Sexual and relational synchronization increases with cooperative interaction in a unified field. Healthy love and attachment are described in research on attachment disorders.
"Attachment Disorder is defined as the condition in which individuals have difficulty forming lasting relationships. They often show nearly a complete lack of ability to be genuinely affectionate with others. They typically fail to develop a conscience and do not learn to trust."
Jung notes, "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside of you as fate." We must simply accept a destiny which does not come from our conscious will. Even when love pulls us back and forth, we always hope love wins. As primordial light arises with her form, so does radiant insight in all directions.
A symbol without love, sympathy, and participation is not a symbol. It must 'touch' us. It is only there when we are at the same time in its 'lived' aspect. We want to do one thing, but are bound to do something else. Things hurt us that we know shouldn't. Though we know better, we take certain things for granted. Love engenders a hyper-associative state, synchronicities, and universal patterns.
A cascade of associations and semantic networks of subconscious thoughts rising to the surface permits quicker access to remote concepts stored in the mind. It facilitates ordered pattern emergence: rhythms, interpretive patterns, hormonal pulses, metabolic patterns, circadian rhythm, memory, recall and pattern recognition of organic function from the genetic level on up the scale. When we are heartful, we are hardier.
When balanced, serotinin produces immense spiritual feelings. It is the well-being hormone and neurotransmitter than makes us feel spiritual bliss, and governs our capacity for transcendence, to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively and reach a higher state of consciousness, joy, and happiness. Dopamine controls the spotlight of attention and rewards.
Aphrodite is a liminal goddess. The beginning and end of each love is a crossroads. Boundaries are thin at cross roads, where the unlikely occurs and the unworldly cross over. The crossroads is the nexus of approach/avoidance. "Every relationship has its optimal distance, which of course has to be found by trial and error." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 53-54
Magic has more power in liminal spaces, thresholds and gateways to other worlds. Liminality occurs at boundary times, where two opposing ideals meet, such as sunrise or sunset, "magic hour," where day turns into night, or when "opposites attract."
We only know creative force through direct experience. We feel empty without the dynamic of opposites that love engenders and perpetuates. It brings grace to ourselves and everything that surrounds us -- a paradigm of implicit social interaction.
"The elimination of the psychic factor (the feminine) from consciousness necessarily leads to exteriorization and collectivization, for the psyche/soul is the inner life and the basis of individuality. In medieval mysticism the soul is the organ for the experience of God and the ‘birth of God’; man thus reaches the center in himself and at the same time in the ‘primal ground’. The modern ‘mystical’ urge does not strive for ‘soul’ but for ‘gnosis’, for ‘superior knowledge’, and thus imitations of ‘eastern wisdom’ of all kinds are consequently in sway." --Toni Wolff
We can therefore assume, psychologically speaking, that the object which is to be transformed in alchemy is connected with the human body: it is a mystery of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 177.
There is another possibility, that of the subtle body, a fine material veil of the soul, which cannot exist so to speak without a body. This is the "corpus glorificationis" (glorified body), the transfigured body, which is our future portion. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 115.
The earth, in the alchemistic sense, means the body and in a double sense: chemical bodies (substances), minerals etc., and the human body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 101.
And this being has body, soul and spirit, and is, therefore, the principle of life itself, as well as the principle of individuation. Its nature is spiritual, it cannot be seen, and it contains an invisible image. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.
~The Essence of Love is Understanding~
"The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other. We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering.
Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the subject of our observation. When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, "to suffer with.
So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person.
Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice DEEP LOOKING directed toward the other person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha."
--Thich Nhat Hanh
FIFTY SHADES OF APHRODITE
The Enigma of Love
by Iona Miller, 2016
What hurts the soul?
To live without tasting
The water of its own essence.
--Rumi, “What Hurts The Soul”
"Love is the dynamism that most infallibly brings the unconscious to light."
--C.G. Jung
"Secret analogies tie together the remotest parts of Nature, as the atmosphere of a summer morning is filled with innumerable gossamer threads running in every direction, revealed by the beams of the rising sun." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emptiness and luminosity are not two separate things, but rather the nature of emptiness is luminosity, and the nature of luminosity is emptiness. This indivisible emptiness-luminosity, the naked mind, free of everything, dwells in the uncreated state. ~Guru Rinpoche
He gave me in fate splendor and beauty.
--Sappho
APHRODITE:
Rising Above the Darkness
Biological, Conscious & Unconscious Coupling
By Iona Miller, 2016
“Surely it must have been on one of these shores so filled with grace and frolicsomeness that the miraculous transformation of beast into man took place. It must have been on such a Greek strand that Astarte of the multitudinous sowlike breasts cast anchor from Asia Minor and the Greeks, receiving the barbaric and coarsely carved wooden statue, cleansed it of its bestiality, left it with only the human breasts, and gave it a human body full of nobility. From Asia Minor, the Greeks took the primitive instinct, orgiastic intoxication, the bestial shout--Astarte. They transubstantiated the instinct into love, the bite into kisses, the orgy into religious worship, the shout into the lover's endearment. Astarte they transformed into Aphrodite.” --Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Grcco
“You have captivated me; let me stand tremblingly before you.
Bridegroom, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber,
You have captivated me; let me stand tremblingly before you.
Lion, I would be taken by you to the bedchamber.
Bridegroom, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey,
In the bedchamber, honey-filled,
Let me enjoy your goodly beauty,
Lion, let me caress you,
My precious caress is more savory than honey.”
--Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, “The Love Song of Shu-Sin”
Beauty evokes affection and at times even pity. Anything that is beautiful is cherished for the very reason that it is subject to decay. In a world without beauty, there would not be ugliness but apathy. If objects are not prized for their unnecessary existence there would be a distorted concept of time. One that rests on utility rather than attachment. By making time more meaningful, beauty fills it with a sense of longingness. --Saqib Fazal
Someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only of life and reality: the female human being." --Rilke
I can say nothing,
my tongue is broken. A delicate fire
runs under my skin, my eyes
see nothing, my ears roar,
cold sweat
rushes down me, trembling seizes me,
I am greener than grass.
To myself I seem
needing but little to die. --Sappho
"But if we can reconcile ourselves with the mysterious truth that spirit is the living body seen from within, and the body the outer manifestation of the living spirit --the two being really one -- then we can understand why it is that the attempt to transcend the present level of consciousness must give its due to the body." ~Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Page 220
"Psychic and somatic symptoms express the soul's painful wounds and obstructions. The rational mind is incapable of deciding what is best for the soul. The mind can discover what is needed only by listening to and reflecting upon the subtle movement of the soul as it expresses itself in bodily sensations, feelings, emotions, images, ideas, and dreams." --Robert M. Stein, "Body and Psyche"
This is equally true of the concept of matter or body. We must say here that the body has nothing to do with matter. Matter is an abstraction, nowadays it has become a philosophical and scientific concept, whereas body is the direct psychic experience of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.
Soul and body are not two things. They are one.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355
Aphrodite's Romantic Aesthetic
A sense of meeting in the imagination arises, revealing the dual structure of individuality, otherwise unknowable. This mighty source of psychic energy fuels imagination to create a field of inner freedom and curatorial narrative.
As with each archetypal meeting, we are subjected to it, consumed by it, or integrate it to the limited extent we can. We are each a primal body-self vulnerable to the shocks and enticements of the world and our needs. Being mostly body, the self remains just as vulnerable to the world -- spontaneous and visceral.
Wild hunger impairs reason and choice. In obsession life may not be perfect, but it remains vital and lively. We overestimate our autonomy. In our 'bright awareness' we oversimplify ourselves as coherent, solid, and articulate in our self-reports.
What sounds grand may be hubristic, immature, uprooted, or willful. We can be enthralled or bound by our own self-image, manipulating or forcing gratification. Beauty devastates or elevates, ravages or ravishes, engulfs in psychological addiction or enlightens.
The personifications of Aphrodite are a many-headed sexual infinity sign expressing the essence of her divine nature. They aesthetically objectify our life's changes. Love has permanent poetic value and marks our passages. Recognizing and mirroring one another takes place in the dim regions of the body's self-consciousness. We unconsciously mimic and orchestrate muscular, glandular, and vascular changes in one another.
Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display temporal representatives of nature's constants in the imagistic world. High and low narrative situations are rooted in archetypal, imagistic, and symbolic field coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure. Things fit in a natural story line. Self-arising images have stable configurations and issues with specific properties. It helps us better appreciate our discreteness and wholeness.
Can we be kind, generous, and loving without being foolish? Our human heart, mind, spirit, and soul emerge through the same process that created all of life, encouraging us to supersede our limitations.
Unknown to ourselves, love can consume us in vortices of unconscious repetitions of earlier trauma, competition, or jealousy and other patterns in psyche, or holes in the heart from loss and decay. This may always be part of our lives, consistencies in behavior and involuntary moments. Body flows with the motion of the world. Creative excitement dissolves boundaries.
Like unashamed, unabashed Aphrodite, this essay seeks to titillate, to provoke, to promise even more than it may deliver of the mysteries and hidden charms of existence. Soul includes our nonphysical aspects: consciousness, wisdom mind, clairvoyance, thought, feeling, and will, seemingly distinct from the physical body. It is our feelings: our emotional and moral nature, our hidden most private thoughts and feelings. Aphrodite is a soul-guide and her myth is therapeutic.
We imagine the heart as the basis of emotional life. This source and center is where the deepest and sincerest feelings are located and we are most vulnerable to pain, momentary unbalance, and divine frenzy.
We won't cover all of her aspects, exploits, or relationships, nor means of apprehending soul. The eternal mother and source of all creation is the root and ground of every soul and fountain of heaven and earth.
We may even skip promiscuously from subject to subject like a dreamer. She is with us on the threshold of life's greatest decisions. In The Red Book, Philemon tells Jung, "Joy comes from fulfillment, but not from longing." (Pg. 341). Certain primordial human desires are not mainly concerned with possibility, but with desirability, and energy beyond striving.
Each reader -- anyone who has had or lost a love -- finds their own revelations arising within from the unconscious. It isn't what you look at, but what you see with the Art of Seeing -- a perceptual framework. Jung notes, "The unconscious mind sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind." And Goethe, "everyone sees what he carries in his heart."
Conceptual analysis of romantic love can be rather dry, cliche, or predictable tropes. This character is regarded as a deity of love and sexual lust as well. A deity from a ruling pantheon or a mortal can be considered a goddess of love. Male love gods are included in this trope. It is called "Love Goddess" rather than "Love Deity" because the females are much more common.
We all have a keen grasp of the obvious when it comes to love goddess myths and basic psychology. Culture is part of our nature. Hopefully, we will introduce dormant associations from the depths to restore the bond with cosmos that enfolds humanity with a universal sense of meaning. Aphrodite is born of the primal serpent of the oceans that spans time and space.
We apply abstract associations between patterns to create meaningful connections.
Amplification of ordered pattern-recognition functions include:
1) Enhanced pattern recognition, or a new awareness of "hidden" patterns in nature, matter, and body that are not normally sensed;
2) Synchronicities, or the perception of meaningful connections between similar patterns that occur in close temporal proximity; unconscious, uninhibited cross-talk; attributions of constructed connections;
3) Morphology, elaborate "hidden" or "buried" similarities between previously unrelated patterns; mimetic imitation, sameness, similarity of process or structure, morphic resonance theory, self-organizing systems inherit a memory from previous similar systems; so-called laws of nature may be more like habits;
4) Singular Consciousness, a state of mind where all patterns seem to merge into one harmonious "Universal Pattern" from which all other smaller patterns flow.
Interiorizing means to internalize or cause feelings and values, for example, to become an interior or internal part of one's mental or spiritual being; to make them a part of one's own inner being, mental structure, or inner life.
Interpersonal Synchronization
Universe and consciousness are inseparably linked. The cosmos is mirrored in our physicality and the psyche, soul, or unconscious. The subconscious creates, always there, always functioning as the foundation of our being. Memories are the ancestors of our creativity. The creative impulse is rooted deep in the psyche beyond our conscious reach.
A cosmic principle, Love is the ultimate symbol of a continuous process of participatory transformation, which can be glorious, painful, irreversible, and essential. Energies associated with the deity change our outlook, perceptions and feelings through communion with intimate otherness of the world.
It ranges from heartfulness, to heartache, and heartbreak. It begins in dissolution -- loss of the centrality of the ego and sacrifice that frees us to be more alive and vital. It is an initiation and deep renewal. Archetypes, as patterns of perception, are rooted in or emerge from our biology. Their forms are culturally transmitted.
We seek the Beloved as the Beloved seeks us, in the unconscious roots of creativity, in generative properties, relative knowing in detail, affective ways of knowing, and the truth of essential knowing -- meaning of richness and depth. The ontological presence of substantive existence is the self-existing quality of being and love of the presence of true nature. Earth molds us physically, rhythmically within herself.
The Universal Medicine
Love is a psychedelic state, effecting rebirth -- a new form, rejuvenation, immersion in the creative energy flow. Instinctual attraction dissolves the ego and liquifies consciousness in a new incarnation of spirit. Something in us dies if we don't periodically resonate with wild rejuvenating nature and meaningful ecstatic involvement.
Rebirth typically opens us to the transpersonal domain with its virtually infinite creativity, but not without the implied dissolution, death itself from which that rebirth is coming. Being in the physical-symbolic means internally and externally hearing the breath of the spirit in dialogue with the soul, with the anima mundi.
This powerful archetypal theme is initiatory in character. The process of rebirth is the mythic enactment of "the one story," whose pattern is found in every narrative. Beneath the differences, the meaning -- having to do with the loss and recovery of identity -- does not change. The descent, including 'falling in love' and subsequent ascent, means going deep into the consciousness journey and emerging transformed.
Falling in love is stimulating like amphetamines and adrenaline. Lovers feed off of the excitement. Bonding oxytocin is like opioids. Dopamine is love, lust, adultery, motivation, attention, sensation-seeking, and addiction. Dopamine is released by pleasurable sensations but also by stress, pain or loss. So love modulates as well as creates experiences.
The loss of love is also universally paradigmatic. Love transcends loss. The process continues in dreamlife. Union with the object of love is not an end in itself, but an archetypal instrument, a numinosum [any phenomenon experienced as a manifestation of tremendous power felt to be objective], that ushers in a new condition with a new sense and meaning.
But there are real consequences. The love deity has a wrathful side which we experience in divine suffering. Non-human powers can leave us split and even break us. What occurs in this area of life affects others, as well, by shifting our thoughts and releasing helpful and unhelpful stored emotions, synchronizing heart and mind, and grounding soul.
“It’s easy to be a naive idealist. It’s easy to be a cynical realist.
It’s quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.” —Marie-Louise von Franz.
In our culture, the body and our fantasies about it, have come to represent the lost Feminine element. We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the mind/body split fostered by non-relativistic Cartesian thinking.
Body is made complete, not by perfecting it, but by spiritualizing it. It becomes the vehicle of the "incarnating Self." Spirit is attracted to matter and matter to spirit. Matter gets purpose and meaning from spirit. An "immortal body" now means grounding of the spirit. The uniting of soul, body, and spirit was called the Unus Mundus, or One World in alchemy.
The soul lives on images and metaphor. These images form the basis for our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters." Let the images come into your body. Embrace the image. To heal the mind/body split we need a view of reality that eliminates the dichotomy of "in here" in this separate body vs. "out there" in the alien, external world.
There is a way that joins spirit and body through the spontaneous imagery of soul. It seeks neither to solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. It suggests direct engagement with images for soul-making or deepening through personal experience. We can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try.
Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves.
We seek the lost soul primarily because of the intense degree of wounding in our modern consciousness. This wounding has "opened" us to transformation. We can embody soul by seeing-through appearances to an acute awareness of the archetypal, subjective perception of our experience.
We can find soul in the body. It speaks metaphorically in body language (how closed or open one is to life and experience), body talk ("he's a pain in the neck;" "I can't stomach that"), symptoms, and displacements. Conversion reactions change psychological dis-ease into concrete ailments.
Jung said the gods have become diseases and there is a god within every disease. Noticing that psychic element and giving it voice is psychological soul-making. We can also look at our behavior, emotions, thoughts, and styles of consciousness psychologically.
Perhaps life's great challenge is to develop an integration of spirit and body, including our shadow side, the dark part of ourselves. We must first descend into the unconscious in order to ascend to transpersonal states. Things that are not supposed to exist, like synchronicities, spark the imagination.
The essential thing about these [Synchronistic] phenomena is that an objective event coincides meaningfully with a psychic process; that is to say, a physical event and an endopsychic one have a common meaning. ~Jung, Letters Vol. II, Page 27.
A new integrated consciousness emerges from this "divine tension," "divine fire" -- a dynamic equilibrium with an open heart and a spirit of exploration. Psychoactivation mobilizes the psyche, inspires imagination, and synchronistically dissolves the boundary between mind and matter.
Jung speaks of the direct psychic experience of the body, head, heart and gut: "If you contemplate the body from the point of view of the psyche, you will be able to locate a mental sphere of consciousness in the head, another centre of consciousness in the heart and one in the abdomen." ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.
So when we say body, we really mean our psychic experience of the body. This has only a distant Relationship to the anatomical and physiological structure of the body and nothing whatever to do with matter. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.
The body is the past, our earth, the world of heretofore, but out of it rises a new light which is not identical with the body. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 374
The spirit can easily be anything, but the earth can only be something definite. So remaining true to the earth would mean maintaining your conscious relationship to the body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 66
We cannot say the side of the spirit is twice as good as the other side; we must bring the pairs of opposites together in an altogether different way, where the rights of the body are just as much recognized as the rights of the spirit. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 235.
Whatever you experience outside of the body, in a dream for instance, is not experienced unless you take it into the body, because the body means the here and now. ~Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 1316
Probably in absolute reality there is no such thing as body and mind, but body and mind or soul are the same, the same life, subject to the same laws, and what the body does is happening in the mind. ~Carl Jung, Dream Analysis, Page 20
Love originates in immediate experiences. Emotions and will interact with spirit and body. We receive love differently. The couple is a reciprocal body and neurological feedback system. 'Knowledge' is visceral awareness and awareness of the nervous system. Sexual and relational synchronization increases with cooperative interaction in a unified field. Healthy love and attachment are described in research on attachment disorders.
"Attachment Disorder is defined as the condition in which individuals have difficulty forming lasting relationships. They often show nearly a complete lack of ability to be genuinely affectionate with others. They typically fail to develop a conscience and do not learn to trust."
Jung notes, "When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside of you as fate." We must simply accept a destiny which does not come from our conscious will. Even when love pulls us back and forth, we always hope love wins. As primordial light arises with her form, so does radiant insight in all directions.
A symbol without love, sympathy, and participation is not a symbol. It must 'touch' us. It is only there when we are at the same time in its 'lived' aspect. We want to do one thing, but are bound to do something else. Things hurt us that we know shouldn't. Though we know better, we take certain things for granted. Love engenders a hyper-associative state, synchronicities, and universal patterns.
A cascade of associations and semantic networks of subconscious thoughts rising to the surface permits quicker access to remote concepts stored in the mind. It facilitates ordered pattern emergence: rhythms, interpretive patterns, hormonal pulses, metabolic patterns, circadian rhythm, memory, recall and pattern recognition of organic function from the genetic level on up the scale. When we are heartful, we are hardier.
When balanced, serotinin produces immense spiritual feelings. It is the well-being hormone and neurotransmitter than makes us feel spiritual bliss, and governs our capacity for transcendence, to apprehend phenomena that cannot be explained objectively and reach a higher state of consciousness, joy, and happiness. Dopamine controls the spotlight of attention and rewards.
Aphrodite is a liminal goddess. The beginning and end of each love is a crossroads. Boundaries are thin at cross roads, where the unlikely occurs and the unworldly cross over. The crossroads is the nexus of approach/avoidance. "Every relationship has its optimal distance, which of course has to be found by trial and error." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Pages 53-54
Magic has more power in liminal spaces, thresholds and gateways to other worlds. Liminality occurs at boundary times, where two opposing ideals meet, such as sunrise or sunset, "magic hour," where day turns into night, or when "opposites attract."
We only know creative force through direct experience. We feel empty without the dynamic of opposites that love engenders and perpetuates. It brings grace to ourselves and everything that surrounds us -- a paradigm of implicit social interaction.
"The elimination of the psychic factor (the feminine) from consciousness necessarily leads to exteriorization and collectivization, for the psyche/soul is the inner life and the basis of individuality. In medieval mysticism the soul is the organ for the experience of God and the ‘birth of God’; man thus reaches the center in himself and at the same time in the ‘primal ground’. The modern ‘mystical’ urge does not strive for ‘soul’ but for ‘gnosis’, for ‘superior knowledge’, and thus imitations of ‘eastern wisdom’ of all kinds are consequently in sway." --Toni Wolff
We can therefore assume, psychologically speaking, that the object which is to be transformed in alchemy is connected with the human body: it is a mystery of the body. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Page 177.
There is another possibility, that of the subtle body, a fine material veil of the soul, which cannot exist so to speak without a body. This is the "corpus glorificationis" (glorified body), the transfigured body, which is our future portion. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Lecture XIV, Page 115.
The earth, in the alchemistic sense, means the body and in a double sense: chemical bodies (substances), minerals etc., and the human body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 101.
And this being has body, soul and spirit, and is, therefore, the principle of life itself, as well as the principle of individuation. Its nature is spiritual, it cannot be seen, and it contains an invisible image. ~Carl Jung, ETH, Alchemy, Page 221.
~The Essence of Love is Understanding~
"The essence of love and compassion is understanding, the ability to recognize the physical, material, and psychological suffering of others, to put ourselves "inside the skin" of the other. We "go inside" their body, feelings, and mental formations, and witness for ourselves their suffering.
Shallow observation as an outsider is not enough to see their suffering. We must become one with the subject of our observation. When we are in contact with another's suffering, a feeling of compassion is born in us. Compassion means, literally, "to suffer with.
So if we love someone, we should train in being able to listen. By listening with calm and understanding, we can ease the suffering of another person.
Training is needed in order to love properly; and to be able to give happiness and joy, you must practice DEEP LOOKING directed toward the other person you love. Because if you do not understand this person, you cannot love properly. Understanding is the essence of love. If you cannot understand, you cannot love. That is the message of the Buddha."
--Thich Nhat Hanh
FIFTY SHADES OF APHRODITE
The Enigma of Love
by Iona Miller, 2016
What hurts the soul?
To live without tasting
The water of its own essence.
--Rumi, “What Hurts The Soul”
"Love is the dynamism that most infallibly brings the unconscious to light."
--C.G. Jung
"Secret analogies tie together the remotest parts of Nature, as the atmosphere of a summer morning is filled with innumerable gossamer threads running in every direction, revealed by the beams of the rising sun." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emptiness and luminosity are not two separate things, but rather the nature of emptiness is luminosity, and the nature of luminosity is emptiness. This indivisible emptiness-luminosity, the naked mind, free of everything, dwells in the uncreated state. ~Guru Rinpoche
In giving and receiving are the forces of life multiplied.
Even fifty shades of Golden Aphrodite are not enough to describe her sparkling facets, perceptual shifts, and revelatory access to meaning others ignore. Body reveals her essence which is Love. She is an enigma of unbound life and love, universal patterns and symbols, unconscious desires and instincts for physical passion.
Physical: In love we may feel like an infinite being, charged with a virtually infinite potential. Power can be obtained from nature. Contact is made with the divine through the body -- through sexual bliss, opening a window on the divine and the nectar of immortality. She is the primal truth of erotic connection -- felt connection to the reality of our being and toward the world.
Psychic: She is concerned with tending images - her own, those of dreams, and waking life. Anima mundi is the field of infinite meanings, created from metaphors of different places, points of view, and narratives. New understandings arrive with new images at the surprising edge of things, new expressive forms that arise of their own accord.
Body & Soul
Real love is not so much just feelings, but Presence -- the luminosity of the natural mind that dawns before us. Her truth is embodied, despite social constructions, identity theories, and hidebound roles. She is the foundation of the perceptual world.
The soul is the principle of relatedness. Soul needs meaning, belonging, community. Visible and invisible 'vision' joins us with her carnal embrace. Vision 'sees through' literal appearances to the organic and symbolic understanding of life. There is hope in meaning -- how we imagine our world.
We must have a psychic image of the body, in order to become conscious of it, we must translate the physical fact of the body into a psychic experience.
~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 221
Her autonomous archetypal field is full of nonlinear and synchronous phenomena.
Synchronicities are attributions and notions about relational phenomena, patterns of connection, spectrum phenomena of coincidence and dissociation. She is the enchanting connector, the persistent pursuer, the charismatic persuader.
Aphrodite is soul. Spontaneous imagery soulfully joins spirit and body. It doesn’t solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. Direct engagement, meditatio, with images for soul-making deepens us through personal experience.
We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the mechanistic mind/body split, which is also non-relativistic. We talk a good game about 'wholeness' but don't really connect as much as nostalgically yearn for it.
James Hillman (1975) observes that soul, “refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second the significance of soul, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relationship with death. And third…the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”
Light of the Soul
The soul generates images unceasingly, purposefully ordering our lives. Artists are able to capture and express some of that ceaseless flow. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Physical reality becomes psychic and psyche becomes real. It "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and Outer worlds are real. They are One World. Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. They are integrated with feeling, mind, and imagination through wonder and awe. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality.
When spirit as energy and matter as form are in balance, the body becomes the living "Temple of the Spirit." A sense of immortality deepens the sacred dimension of life. Soul’s immortality is sensed in direct experience of non-spatial, non-temporal, nonlocal, four-dimensional reality. Real alchemical work is for the sake of the whole of which we are a microcosm.
Golden & Black-Hearted
Both her spotlight brightness and darkness are beyond us and may or may not serve us. Her initial shiny demeanor can tarnish when she doesn't live up to the ideal. Relations can be a dank swamp rather than a generative ocean. We can drown in the other. Some relationships can be shrouded in unconscious darkness and pathology: guile, manipulation, bad temper, frenzy, anonymity, jealousy, vanity, infidelity, even lies and deliberate misrepresentation.
Socrates' heavenly Aphrodite contrasts with the neuroses, power games, and treachery. Hence, she was know as 'the killer of men,' and 'the unholy.' Breakthrough, emergence from the unconscious sea of instincts, is never far from the breakdown of loss, death, betrayal, unrequited love, disappointment, devastation, and abandonment. Knowing our own darkness well is the best defense.
Dyads are co-constituted by the couple. Relationships, especially conscious partners, are a primal way of changing self and world. Emotions and feelings develop through interaction. For a true union, each must have a union of body and spirit within themselves. Deep sexuality is heart-based sacred sexuality.
Aphrodite's luminous quality is radiant Presence, unsuppressed Being here and now, neither in the past or future, living out the deep possibilities of who we are. The body holds the feeling, the archaic identity. Lucid meaning lies in the inherent psychological value of form itself. The divine is present in the earthy, the material.
Alchemically, earth means the body. Our physicality includes various traits, skills and abilities, such as gut reactions, body posture, tone of voice, awareness of senses (e.g., smell, taste, touch), psychosomatic connections.
Through illumined senses we can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Things become transparent, shine and speak. Signs echo within us. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves, perhaps even into delusional lunacy.
The body is influenced by emotions and thinking patterns. We can detect automatic movements of the body, the bio-energy of the body, and a connection with our physical surroundings.
Divinity is revealed in the form that shapes itself, making the world perceptible through display, exhibition, and presentation of self. We no longer see it as exclusively out there, but as processes of psychic reality within ourselves -- a comprehensive but less defined consciousness. We are shaped for reaching deeper, where soul gives birth to spirit.
Like life, love has its rewards -- the euphoria of peak experiences, exaltation, or rebirth. Dangers real and imagined include heartbreaking disappointment, disillusionment, wounding, fragmentation, dissociation, and loss. People do what they can. When we see it we know it.
Aphrodite is emotionally complex, social, outgoing, kind, yet paradoxical. She embodies mythic imagination. Coming and going, she persistently raises the imaginal question, "What if...?" These are the animated possibilities of each moment.
What if...such multiple fantasies could be realizable? The actual skills and abilities related to the emotional world that back up such realization include: empathy, emotional validation, openness, vulnerability, recognizing emotions of others, detecting automatic patterns in emotional life. It means mirroring others, emotional acceptance, emotional intelligence, selecting among emotions, sustaining positive emotions, and adapting emotional responses to various social contexts.
Aphrodite is the capacity for awareness of deep connections with our social relations. These traits, skills and abilities relate to parental relationships, close relationships, social interactions, perceiving communications styles of others. Theyinclude detecting social deception, cognitive empathy, social intuition, and flexibility in social behaviors. We get to know ourselves by developing relationships, empathetic thinking, and cognitive openness when discussing matters with others. Conversational skills help us detect hidden agendas of others.
Jung suggests we are steeped in a world created by psyche, the all-pervasive meaning and flower-like nature of natural spiritual development. "The materialistic premise is that the physical process causally determines the psychic process. The spiritualistic premise is the reverse of this." (Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 366).
Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
The natural light of the soul is illumination, embodied in the pineal light of the “spirit molecule,” DMT. Likewise, alchemists seek the divine spark, the light hidden in matter. To work creatively in the world, the Light of Nature needs to be released through inner alchemy. Our own light or divine spark is part of the light of the World Soul, so we can understand the mysteries of creation and the secrets of nature. The tools of inner transformation help Anima Mundi reveal her divine light.
Whether called Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Aphrodite, Demeter/Persephone, Mary, Great Mother, White Goddess or any cultural variant, Anima Mundi is the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form. She is personified internally as a soul guide or Initiatrix and externally embodied as the Soror Mystica. Glimpsing inspiring inner workings of our soul helps us realign our lives, our hopes and our dreams.
We are partly empirical and partly transcendental -- a glorious body with natural instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc. Our bodies are filled with energy that streams through us with the warmth that flows in our veins.
Just like banal reality can be a redeemer, so can ordinary healthy relationships. The exaggerated highs and lows of high-octane but toxic relationships deepen in trauma-bonds, emotional oscillation, and wounding, as in the narcissist/empath match. In a letter, Charlie Chaplin told his daughter Geraldine," Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul.”
The unconscious is the living psyche and remains archaic. We tend to convert physical events into psychic processes in unconscious fantasies and metaphors such as 'desire springs up from the depths'. Lovers find the beauty in one another and an enlightened sex life with transparency and presence. We have immediate knowledge only of psychic existence, psychic images of instincts. We are 'touched' in the deepest emotional sense, connecting through the heart.
"Switch off your noisy consciousness and listen quietly inwards and look at the images that appear before your inner eye, or hearken to the words which the muscles of your speech apparatus are trying to form." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 82
"All the difficulties you overcome in such a fantasy are symbolic expressions of psychological difficulties in yourself, and inasmuch as you overcome them in your imagination you also overcome them in your psyche." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 109.
"I am indeed convinced that creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 60
Feminine wisdom is a soulful understanding of life. Jung calls imagination a psychic process. He claims (Psychological Reflections, 98:889 ), "it is completely irrelevant whether the enlightenment is 'real' or imaginary." So, whether you think you are enlightened or not is a psychic fact, even when illusory or lying.
According to Jung, "Events signify nothing, they signify only in us. We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it." (The Red Book, Page 239). Does an event open your heart in compassion or close it in judgment? Is there pleasure, joy, courage?
In love, we can interpret things correctly or incorrectly. Projections, fantasy, and delusion are psychic actualities, psychic truth. But in the meanwhile, we attribute our internal ideals to a normally fallible individual.
No one can exhaust psychic Being's mysteries of love. Jung says, "Your destiny is the result of the collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious." (Letters Vol. I, Page 283.) He implies that there are those who love others, those who love the souls of others, and those who love their own souls.
Soul images can be the ground of artistic inspiration, philosophical speculation, quasi-religious idiosyncratic beliefs, or squandered in licentiousness. Jung links anima to our philosophical potential. Anima is synonymous with Aphrodite.
Aphrodite is an autonomous relater. Independent but open, she carries our story as body language, shared feelings, and sensations. Relationships can be incandescent and joyfully fated or tragic and torturous. She ignites a tremendous amount of libidinous energy in us.
The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension between opposites. To unite the opposites we first have to find the questions we are trying to reconcile. No experience is lived in vain. She makes it a richer experience -- a transformation that is not an identity from social institutions or civilizations but from a deeper realm.
"Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even the 'unreal' ideas and thoughts which refer to nothing 'external'. We may call them 'imagination' or 'delusion,' but that does detract in any way from their effectiveness..." (Jung, CW, 81:Para 747)
Aphrodite Urania is the "heavenly," wisdom, or spiritual facet of the goddess. Aphrodite Genatrix is the goddess of marriage; and Aphrodite Pandemos the goddess of lust. The mediatrix has numerous other epithets and qualities.
Her glories, follies, and pathology have paradoxical internal and external effects on our cosmos (worldview), environment and being in conscious and unconscious personal, social, and spiritual dimensions. Everything 'out there' is us; the whole body is psyche -- what it does, how it moves, how we feel.
Love is elemental. If we truly loved mother earth, we would be deeply listening. We feel it in the water; we sense it in the earth; we smell it in the air; we refine it in the fire. "Air" thinkers prioritizes communication; "Earth" types are practical and grounded; "Water" tends toward emotion and intuition; while "Fire" is creative and enthusiastic. Jung describes the elements of the body:
"The Earth element is “She who causes fall'; the water element is 'She who
kills'; the fire element' She who summons ';the air element 'The Lady of Dances' and the ether element is 'She who has the net of Lotuses'." (ETH Lecture, 20 Jan. 1059)
Thus, the alchemical process also begins with such a division into the four elements, by which the body is put back into its primordial state and so can undergo transformation. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, Page 367.
Men are attracted to women who reflect their anima, and women are attracted to men that exemplify her animus. In “The Process of Individuation,” Marie-Louise von Franz describes how a man’s anima attraction moves from the erotically attractive woman, to the romantic beauty, then the mature woman, and finally to the woman of wisdom. Animus images likewise morph from the physically attractive man, to the romantic man, the man of action, and the man of wisdom.
But such "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" stereotypes fail in more complex gender issues. We all have male and female elements, male and female hormones, etc. LGBT individuals are helping us understand the distortions and distinctions between gender and sexuality in less polarized terms with new ways of discovering the hidden side of the psyche.
Unmet childhood needs are transferred to the romantic arena, often recreating that earlier situation, roles, and traumas echoing the past. The romantic search for our missing half can take on religious proportions. The search for Aphrodite is part of all out lives. Spiritual yearning can be misplaced onto concrete objects or charismatic people. We can even use beloved pets compulsively and addictively.
Cultures are relative, not some kind of metaphysical superspace.
We live in an ecology of internal and external influences, including the presence or absence of love. "The beginning of all things is love, but the being of things is life," Carl Jung says. (The Red Book; Page 327.)
The first stage of love is psychic. Aphrodite mirrors all experiences, including our potential immortality, back to our own consciousness. But a glimpse of the deeper self of another does not insure longterm compatibility in lifestyle, values, or personality. We may let them carry our unlived life potential and avoid that self-development. The world is a waiting lover. The romantic search for the beloved is spiritual longing for divine communion.
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates says: “Every lover is fain that his beloved should be of a nature like to his own god...his every act is aimed at bringing the beloved to be like unto himself and unto the god of their worship."
Aphrodite represents the soul of beauty -- luminous, incorruptible, and radiant -- the holy grail of life. Love itself is a kind of "knowing," soulful engagement with the world. Consciousness proceeds from symbiotic, to magical, to mythical, to rational, to transpersonal growth. Adult relationship only emerges at the rational, not archaic stages.
"Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit"
C.G.Jung,C.W.13,par.229
Psyche fosters the deliteralization of life. Animism informed all life as the worldview that animals, plants, and inanimate objects—possess a soul or spiritual essence. As Plotinus said, "The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment on the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other; as has been said: "Everything breathes together."
Are we part of the inherent fabric of the universe or just an accidental by-product? One answer may lie in the nature of our consciousness. Some conscious contents disappear into the unconscious while others arise from it, an outgrowth of the depths.
Animism is mirrored in modern scientific theory as panpsychism, the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness. Emergent panpsychism denies that macroexperience is grounded
in microexperience.
Panprotopsychism is the view that fundamental entities are proto-conscious: they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems. If it is the ground of macroexperience, all phenomenal truths are grounded in protophenomenal truths concerning these entities -- for example, fundamentals of mass and charge.
This ground for both physical and phenomenal properties may be mixed -- some phenomenal and some protophenomenal or unrelated to the phenomenal. Panprotopsychism does not need subjects at the bottom level. (Chalmers)
The idea that some fundamental physical entities have protophenomenal properties is a modern retrievals of archaic thought. It's all ensouled psychic being with phenomenal properties, as personified by the beauty of Aphrodite.
Myth can collide or synchronize with personal history. Beyond mythic escapades, her archetype describes how psyche experiences physical facts, including distorted body image, emotional flooding (sudden reaction syndrome), addiction to sexual trauma and relationships. When we are dominated by our anima or animus, we uncritically believe everything the autonomous inner figures suggest.
Mystical knowledge effects a transformation. Mind penetrates the center of being, void of images and conceptual thinking, and we begin to see differently, informed by perceptual solitude discovered in descent. We "polish the mirror of the heart" with daily practice. Existential 'nakedness' is emptying the mind of all concepts and imagery.
Aphrodite's yoga is bhakti, the highest function of the soul -- union through love, devotion, and adoration of the divine as a path of self-realization. Bhakti -- the force of attraction -- is the most direct method to experience the unity of mind, body and spirit. But we must use discernment when we choose to devote ourselves. Devotion to the divine, in whatever form or non-form you care to imagine, is the unveiling of soul.
It is a matter of psychic transformation of subjective lived experience, transmuting compulsive (addictive) desire into more refined energy. "You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart," W.H. Auden wrote. We can become toxically enmeshed, romancing our own or another's shadow.
The common lover's fantasy of devotion remains questionable, riddled with projections and personal issues. If we need healing, the lover is the healer; if we need rescuing they are savior, or priest, or guru, etc., or so it seems until it flips to the reverse.
The teacher-student archetype presents an aspiration and a burden of desire for spiritual power, disillusionment, and spiritual shadow. The beloved can also appear as an autonomous soul-sibling. Instead of projection, the beloved ideal can become an inner guide. "At any rate we can never treat the anima with moral reprimands; instead of this we have, or there is, wisdom, which in our days seems to have passed into oblivion." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 193
Psychological understanding fills us with the breath of life. In his ETH lectures, Jung calls alchemy "a curious sort of initiation, a sort of practical yoga." Aphrodite's alchemy -- a projection of cosmic and spiritual drama -- is refinement. Transformed emotions increase our capacity to contain and express life with conscious femininity. The great work rescues soul and redeems cosmos. Withdrawing spiritual projections, we regain our own radiance.
The coniunctio in alchemy is a union of the masculine and feminine, of the spiritual and material principles, from which a perfect body arises, the glorified body after the Last Judgement, the resurrection body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 159.
This means an eternal body, or the subtle body, which is designated in alchemy as the philosopher's stone, the lapis aethereus or invisibilis. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 159.
"But there is something which can be proved from everyday experience, not body becoming spirit, but body becoming conscious, man becomes conscious of his body." (Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940)
Nature shapes existence. A cosmology of love is revealed in the radiance of light from the macrocosm to the microcosm -- a soul of light. An ancient Pyramid Text (Morrow) says, "Pure energy, the nature of light, underlies all. We emerge from and dissolve back into this radiant ground. Not only can you know this—you are this." Aphrodite is this ocean of light -- the holographic ocean of energy.
Hillman says, "Aphrodite is what makes something light up so you want it.” Light is seductive and tempts us toward disembodied transcendence -- a death wish toward matter, toward our disowned substance and darkness. There's no real awareness without death. Even death is a sensuous experience to be embraced.
Life behaves as if it were going on, and so I think it is better for an old person to live on, to look forward to the next day, as if he had to spend centuries, and then he lives properly. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 438
One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. (Jung, Liber Novus, pg. 267)
Embodied psyche is experiential integration and natural instinctive psyche -- wild vitality, rapture, primordial revelation, and body wisdom. “The universes which are amenable to the intellect can never satisfy the instincts of the heart.”
(Anon, The Cloud of Unknowing).
We experience primordial wholeness through primordial images in the ancient dynamics in all kinds of love; we enter an enchanted realm. As Jung reminds, "The soul demands your folly; not your wisdom." (The Red Book, Page 264.)
In identification, the beloved "captivates" us and becomes a component in our own self-image. Falling in love is an altered state. Unformed psyche takes on form. We begin thinking in primordial images of our transgenerational ground – in symbols older than historical mankind.
Our deepest ground is the primordial experience of archaic gods and goddesses -- their lived meaning. Myth is one form of knowledge of the primordial psyche. Archaic remnants rise into consciousness and embodiment.
It is for this reason that the alchemists believed in the truth of “matter,”
because “matter” was actually their own psychic life.
~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 228
Love of Form for Its Own Sake
Psyche mirrors matter. What is Above mirrors that which is down Below. Anima is the primordial carrier of psyche, or the archetype of psyche itself, according to Hillman.
Her meaning is form itself, here and now. Essence shines through appearance -- the divinity of form in shape itself. It may well be that primordial psyche plays a role as primal as matter, energy, and space-time.
We must have a psychic image of the body, in order to become conscious of it, we must translate the physical fact of the body into a psychic experience.
~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 221.
Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life…. With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of snares, and traps, in order that man should fall, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and stay caught….
--Jung, CW 9, i, 56
She projects herself into consciousness through expression; expression is her art, whether in the extraordinary artfulness of symptom formation and clinical ‘picture’ or the artifices of anima bewitchments. And the wisdom that Sophia imparts is seeing sophically into these expressions, seeing the art in the symptoms. --James Hillman
The anima makes possible a ‘purely human relationship independent of the maternal element of procreation.’ (CW 10, 76)…. The movement from mother to anima represents this shift in perspective from naturalistic to psychological understanding. In alchemy the relationship corresponding with the psychological perspective was exemplified in the adept’s relationship with the anima-soror. --James Hillman
The anima makes possible a ‘purely human relationship independent of the maternal element of procreation.’ (CW 10, 76)…. The movement from mother to anima represents this shift in perspective from naturalistic to psychological understanding. In alchemy the relationship corresponding with the psychological perspective was exemplified in the adept’s relationship with the anima-soror. --James Hillman
Reconnection with Soma
Soul and body are not two things. They are one.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355
First: these qualities are differentiated and separate in us; therefore they do not cancel each other out, but are effective. Thus we are the victims of the pairs of opposites. The Pleroma is rent within us. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 348.
Not the power of the flesh, but of love, should be broken for the sake of life, since life stands above love. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 326.
After all, if you should still get stuck, there is always the enantiodromia from the unconscious, whichopens new avenues when conscious will and vision are failing. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Pages 158-159.
The transcendent function is not something one does oneself; it comes rather from experiencing the conflict of opposites. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 269
Integration unites the opposites of spirit and body, light and dark. In Holding the Tension of the Opposites, Marion Woodman tells us, "By uniting both sides of the unconscious, we attune to those around us and to the energy within the earth itself."
Soul unites the visible and invisible. This coniunctio implies the birth of
new possibilities. As Aphrodite is born from the sea, consciousness is born from oceanic feeling that promises to lead to conscious, ecstatic union with the divine, and feeling limitless in love or religious sentiment. It relates to the oceanic waves of pleasure and paradoxical suspension in ecstasy or synesthesia. It is mirrored in intuitive poetic sensibilities.
Ancient philosophers proclaimed the world soul, a pure ethereal spirit, is diffused throughout all nature. The notion of soul as imaginative possibility, in relation to the archai or root metaphors, is what Hillman has termed the “poetic basis of mind.” Whitening into psychic reality is embodiment of spirit and inspiriting of body, eliminating oppositional tension.
Michael Malone models Pychetypes (1978): "Thinking and feeling types are always continuous; sensation types and intuitives are always discontinuous. "Various types perceive space as either volcanic (concrete), ethereal (abstract), territorial (structured), or without boundaries (oceanic)." This includes intuitive and feeling oceanic types and oceanic spiritual experiences.
Oceanic feeling can be a regression to undifferentiated feeling and loosening of ego boundaries, dissolution of sensory boundaries, the amniotic state of unconscious fusion. The original chaos of infantile wholeness which is regressive, amorphous, and sentimental, is differentiated in a higher state of differentiated consciousness, governed by the Self, not Mother archetype.
In aesthetics, oceanic changes in existential feeling can lead to a wider process of artistic self-transformation and to a restructuring of fundamental relations with oneself, others, and the world. Mystics speak of the 'drop' merging in the ocean of bliss -- the ocean of universal mind. It also relates to the imagery of alchemical 'solutio.'
Conversely, we can find ourselves adrift in the ocean of emotion, emotional flooding. Drowning in such emotions, being overwhelmed, can be triggered by a partner, stress, or memories. When the Self is activated romantically, we feel special and exalted. The Self is projected onto the idealized Other, as soul mate, hero, savior, goddess, etc.
“Soul-making is allowing the eternal essence to enter and experience the outer world through all the orifices of the body … so that the soul grows during its time on Earth. It grows like an embryo in the womb. Soul-making is constantly confronting the paradox that an eternal being is dwelling in a temporal body. That’s why it suffers, and learns by heart.” (Woodman, Leaving My Father's House)
Aphrodite impacts us personally, intimately, in her heavenly, common, and chthonic forms. Her "common love" seeks fulfillment in the human sphere. She is the hidden meaning in our suffering.
This is the way of élan vital, biological truth, and embodied awareness or body awareness -- the psychophysical basis of love, psychic integration of symbolism, and spiritual union. The coniunctio, or hieros gamos is the central component of the mystery of the Tao or unus mundus -- the lost secret of enlightenment.
Spirit and body meet in the movement of soul. Sexual energy is symbolized by fire, water, and light. The great light casts a dark shadow -- the driving strength of our own soul to make life, dissolving the boundary between our psyche and the psyche of the earth.
Sex & Death
The way that leads to Aphrodite is also the way of the life-death dichotomy, the Art of Death, including the intimations of the petit mort, or "little death." Taoism suggests that to die is not to perish but to be eternally present.
Mirroring the Sumerian sky goddess Inanna, Aphrodite Persephaessa has chthonic associations with the underworld of psyche, which is an immortal realm. "Black Aphrodite" was also called "the dark one." She brings life to death in rebirth for nature and humanity -- for the foresaken body.
Religion is the art of death. We protect ourselves with rituals and taboos from our ancestral worlds that protect us from Mystery and the unknown. We descend into the redeeming darkness, making that walk, not because we want to, but because we must.
Initiatory descent signifies the removal of illusion, denial, and repression, through experiential death and rebirth, so soul and spirit can resonate together. This is intense bottom-up processing which is then brought back to daily life in the return.
The Romantics used the metaphor and images of descent. Their whole-hearted quest is inward and downward, into the hidden regions of the underworld. It is natural to descend in the inner world into more profound depths of consciousness. Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell describes a "descent" into the "subterranean void" of the unconscious, where salvation lies -- a reconciliation with the heart of cosmos.
“All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.” (Perera, Descent to the Goddess, 1981)
In many ancient myths, descent is an integral part of the Great Feminine Round of Life and Death. "You cannot be redeemed without having undergone the transformation in the initiation process." (Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502.)
We are mortal and vulnerable. We live in a world of catastrophe and chaos, personal loss and social threat. We are thrown down by chaotic defensive furies, such as desire, rage, and greed. We are helped up by the dynamics of rebirth. Miraculously, we find our way to life again.
Hathor was an Egyptian sky deity of fertility and erotic love. She was called "Lady of the West," as a euphemism for the afterlife. The same chthonic archetype appears as witches and sirens, the seductress, or hierodule, who possess or exploit. They derive their energy from the untransformed primordial psyche.
"I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, like a smooth wave on the sea-beach."
(Jung, The Red Book, Page 268.)
Sex & Life
Aphrodite is air become rising breath -- the very "breath of life."
And words are made of nothing but breath -- living psyche.
The Word is the creative act, including the language of our instincts.
Only that living breath connects us to the fact of all existence.
However, Taoism says,The truth is not always beautiful
Nor are beautiful words, always the truth
~Tao teh Ching~ Ch 81
You see, life wants to be real; if you love life you want to live really, not as a mere promise hovering above things. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508
Mistress of the Labyrinth, Aphrodite-Ariadne, (goddess of paths, wine, snakes, passion, and fertility) symbolizes vast convoluted mazes of entangled memories and transgenerational relationships. The monster at the center of the maze is a symbol of animal desire, carnal needs, and fleshly pursuits. The hero conquers and transcends it.
Traumas, fixations, phobias and anxieties are potential trans-generational memories. We are each a living story influenced by the unhealed burdens of past generations and historical trauma: unresolved conflicts, beliefs, individual roles. Family of origin unconsciously continues to influence our current relationships and level of functioning. Emotional shocks can create psychophysical disorders or recreate the emotional conditions of original trauma.
The goddess behind our primordial images and symbols remains otherwise inaccessible as the imagistic potential of Nature. Our destiny and our myth are found in the images of our psyche -- what is lost and what is redeemed. We weigh our lives in the balance of love and loss. Our loves write the story of our own impermanence.
We embody time with temporal and spatial metaphors. The fleetingness of time and unbridgeable distance profoundly affect our loves. Every inevitable loss evokes all loss. Emotional arousal, attention, fluency, reverie, and motivations can reduce psychological distance.
We live out our own vision of life with its necessary errors and misperceptions. Transformations are losses, too, which require mourning or grief to complete transitions of the heart. Even lost love continues to radiate light and inform our lives in which we continue to want what we cannot have.
Post-modernists, like Debord, caution that the proliferation of images and desires alienates us, not only from ourselves, but from each other. The path of discovery is full of sharp and dull pains. Our most personal experiences are the most universal -- the pursuit of the Beloved.
This serpentine path represents a soul journey to our own center and back again to the world with that sacred connection. On our individual path we overcome our own obstacles and expose our own illusions. As Joseph Campbell suggests,
The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss."
Aphrodite informs the heart of the journey. Participatory wisdom suggests bringing the sacred back into the material realm. The aspirant balances the four psychic elements of instinctual awareness -- earth, air, fire, and water.
Others may help us avoid false paths, but sometimes we veer off on necessary detours from our planned roadmap. Our participation in the whole gives it meaning. Psyche initiates. Because the serpent sheds its skin as it grows, it represents cyclic life and is associated with the Tree of Life.
"The growing one is the Tree of Life. It greens by heaping up growing living matter." ~Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 351
"The serpent represents magical power, which also appears where animal drives are aroused imperceptibly in us." (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 366).
"The serpent shows the way to hidden things and expresses the introverting libido, which leads man to go beyond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness, as expressed by the deep crater." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102)
Nothing makes this effect clearer than the serpent. It signifies everything dangerous and everything bad, everything nocturnal and uncanny, which adheres to Logos as well as to Eros, so long as they can work as the dark and unrecognized principles of the unconscious spirit. ~Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.
This suggests that Eros does not tend toward the right, the side of consciousness, conscious will and conscious choice, but toward the side of the heart, which is less subject to our conscious will. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 366.
Aphrodite's symbol is the ankh-cross, symbol of the millions of years of life to come. The inexhaustible essence of the life force is a key of life that represents physical and immortal life and death, male and female balance, art knowledge wisdom, reproduction and sexual union. Her cosmology is that all life is connected with an interwoven animating energy, naked fullness, and loving receptivity.
Tradition says the possessor of the geometric key to the hidden mysteries is able to open the gates of the Kingdom of the Dead and penetrate the hidden meaning of eternal life. The ankh is identified with the Tree of Life, its trunk and foliage -- the nervous, glandular, and endocrine systems.
The ankh-like symbol from ancient Mycenae and Cyprus became the symbol for both copper and the goddess Aphrodite, and for the feminine -- carnal and creative fertility, and the sacredness of procreation. Coptic Christians used it instead of the Latin cross.
Interiorization
Conceptual analysis of common, romantic or ideal love can be rather dry or predictable. We all have a keen grasp of the obvious when it comes to love goddess myths and basic psychology. Two people fall in love and build their romantic world. Hopefully, we will introduce dormant associations from the unconscious to restore the bond with cosmos that enfolds humanity with a universal sense of meaning.
Interiorizing means to internalize or cause feelings and values, for example, to become an interior or internal part of one's mental or spiritual being. We make them a part of our own inner being, mental structure, or inner life -- an impression full of grace.
It is a change in the center of gravity of our consciousness. We give unreserved attention to the unfolding core or essence of the process -- the soul of the concept. An inner dynamic or metaphor cannot be reduced to a biological substrate. The core metaphor unfolds hermeneutically on its own terms.
Ancient rituals were internalized to discover the inward universe. The tantric interiorization of Buddhist ritual did not reject ritual. Nor did it psychologize. It did not reduce ritual, to 'the spiritual state of the faithful,' but a commitment to the independent manifestations of phenomenology. Like ritual, we can interiorize sacred space, even sacrifice.
Consciousness speaking about itself is devoted attention to the phenomenon as it unfolds itself revealing its inner truth or essence -- a mental or noetic perception. Phenomena retains its own independence, its own essential truth, its own "truth" and “subjectivity.”
The mode of apprehension becomes an object which is itself transformed through its own act of knowing the independent phenomenon of dreams, emotions, ideas, and feelings. It is a receptive rather than intentional approach to emotions, images, ideas, etc., which are understood as expressing underlying structures or “thought.”
When we are smitten, it is like the French expression le coup de foudre, literally, a "bolt of lightning" or "thunderbolt." Figuratively, it is "love at first sight." It can be a huge a shock to the system that washes away boundaries, exaggerating panic about deflation. Devotion abd love itself can be extreme -- a transformative madness or healing balm that eases our emotional pain.
Identification with the numinous also leads to dangerous ego inflation, overidentification, or 'possession' -- seizure of the psyche by a seductive archetype and overexpansion. Inflation is the misuse of transcendental energy. In extreme states the nonpersonal unconscious can form a vortex that pulls us under a stormy sea.
We value our moments of emotional love as highly as any human experience. We find the meaning of life in love -- as caretaker and care receiver -- compassionate response and love for self, others, life itself, and beauty. The soul can rest in love.
Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness.
~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 179
When a loving healing presence or self-care is missing we suffer from wounds of omission or lack of love (numbing, emotional unavailability, approach/avoidance, grief, depression, stroke deficiency, denial, instability, abandonment) in the immediate environment and larger world.
An ensouled world mirrors our own love, death, sorrow, happiness and much more. We see-through the surface of a world that needs mirroring. We don't need to burden images with too many meaningful ideas as much as let them live and breath through us.
Soul reveal itself spontaneously and irrationally. It amplifies our understanding of observed phenomena. A flow of ideas arises from the image. We develop a dark-adapted eye for the unexpected or less apparent. A narrative emerges from finding hidden value in the depths.
Each reader -- anyone who has had or lost a love -- finds their own revelations arising within. It isn't what you look at, but what you see with the Art of Seeing --
a perceptual framework. Jung notes, "The unconscious mind sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind." And Goethe, "everyone sees what he carries in his heart."
And, Jung, again, "What the heart hears are the great, all-embracing things of life, the experiences which we do not arrange ourselves but which happen to us." (CW 18, Para 1719). "The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only under the gentle breath of a mood, an intuition, which does not drown the song but listens." (Jung, CW 18, Para 1719) "The utterances of the heart— unlike those of the discriminating intellect—always relate to the whole." (Jung, CW 18, Para 1719)
James Hillman suggests a process of "seeing through" phenomena to the archetypal basis of being, mythologizing, and deliteralizing -- transparence rather than transcendence. The beauty of images, their architecture, and the frames of our consciousness are foundational to soul and its image making. We see through the concrete givens, our language, and our metaphors to psyche. Psyche finds itself and is enlightened by seeing through the hidden yet revealed illusion of separation.
An act of imagination, active imagination means engaging perception with desire. Hillman (1976) said, “love, too, can be a method of psychologizing, of seeing into and seeing-through, of going ever deeper” (Revisioning Psychology, p. 136). In that magical world symbols are alive. The Tibetan Book of the Dead defines both our experience in this world and in the supernatural realm as desire and temptation. Even things that seem like they aren't connected, suddenly are.
The Heart of Soul Work
We can imagine Aphrodite much more broadly as the relativity of all psychological phenomena and symbolic imagination. Psyche and soma are joined by the bridge of imagination. In the phenomenological view, symbols emerge from human engagement with the social and material environment just as psychic life emerges from embodied action in the world.
Soulwork is the art of living soulfully and fully embodied, consciously aware of the depth dimension and its interaction with our body, emotions, mind, and spirituality. Through myth we participate in our own transcendence. Aphrodite's way is a soul-centered, open-hearted way of being. The dreamy nature of love is symbolically retained in her fluidity, meter, and rhyme.
The imaginal world of the spirit is not separate from the material world. It is active participation within a world enlivened with meaning as well as respect for dreams. Our psychosocial and physical aspects are part of one symbolic world. In a colloquial sense, it just boils down to who you want to be 'in bed' with, physically, symbolically, and collectively.
Anatomical knowledge does not tell us how we fill our own bodies but psychic experience does give us information on this point. We fill our bodies as if through inner streams. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.
Our perception of reality differs from reality itself. Cognitive neuroscience suggests that body awareness is a complex and multifaceted structure. It can be dissociated in several subcomponents, possibly underpinned by different brain circuits.
One example is ideomotor responses during hypnosis when the body can answer questions the rational mind cannot. The body produces unconscious signals or physical manifestations of mental events. Suggestion or expectation has an influence on involuntary and unconscious motor behavior. This involuntary movement of the body is a subconsciously produced response to a thought, feeling, or idea.
A sense of meeting in the imagination arises, revealing the dual structure of individuality, otherwise unknowable. This mighty source of psychic energy fuels imagination to create a field of inner freedom and curatorial narrative. Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure.
Like Aphrodite, this essay seeks to titillate, to provoke, to promise even more than it may deliver of the mysteries and hidden charms of existence. No vacuous nymphomaniacs here. It won't cover all of her aspects, exploits, or relationships, nor means of apprehending it.
We may even skip promiscuously from subject to subject like a dreamer. She is with us on threshold of life's greatest decisions. In The Red Book, Philemon tells Jung, "Joy comes from fulfillment, but not from longing." (Pg. 341). Certain primordial human desires are not mainly concerned with possibility, but with desirability.
Sensing the Body
It is absolutely necessary to grasp every psychic process with all the four functions, otherwise we only grasp a quarter of it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10th Feb 1939
Imagination is a deep and inexhaustible archetypal field. When we cultivate deep imagination we cultivate soul in the world -- anima mundi. We continue to move and expand our depth in the vast energy field of personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal love, softening and opening our hearts.
The ego "takes the plunge," it lets go and dissolves its old matrix, its old boundaries. When its boundaries melt, ego-consciousness dissolves into deep consciousness. The "wave merges with the ocean," and experiences its own deep transpersonal nature. It moves swiftly through the fear and pain, awakening to an infinitely wider reality of universal energy waves. In the ocean of creativity, "your own consciousness, shining, void and inseparable from the great body of radiance, has no birth, nor death." (Leary, 1964).
Jung associated universal mind, as the transpersonal source of being, with the Collective Unconscious, which contains all information in subtle form. All things in the universe have a connection with the universal mind. Nothing can exist without that unmanifest connection to everything else. Separation is an illusion for we are all one. In her relation with the world, Aphrodite is both the Universal Cause, Universal Soul. and Universal Mind -- matter, energy, spirit.
Soulful love is a spiritual path. Most of us have suffered the pathos, confusion and pain, trust and betrayal, jealousy, need for power, loss of identity, erotic fantasy, and even co-dependence. They are born from both our dysfunction and deep longing for authenticity. "Creative life always stands outside convention." (Jung, CW 17, Para 305).
As the goddess does in her own affairs, we may take flight from subject to subject, all in her honorable name. Imagine Cleopatra amplifying her own majesty taking on the aspect of Isis.
Komarius teaches Cleopatra that the dead who stay in Hades [that is in chaos) are transformed into Spring flowers by the miraculous dew. This is the idea of the living elements in chaos or Shunyata waking and uniting through being contained in the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.
The mystical rose, like the lotus in India, grows for the salvation of man.
~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3, Mar1939, Page 101.
The red rose is a symbol of the heart; her symbol of bees is like the humming sound of the primordial OM -- a singing sound and a humming sound -- the magnetic voice of the silence. "The western rose is wholly parallel to the eastern lotus." (Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 21). As for the 'rose' attribution, she is the bud which contains the becoming being that undergoes transformation through entrainment with the fundamental rhythms of arousal and relaxation.
Love ignites at least twelve convoluted brain regions in love, releasing hormones and neurotransmitters. The reward circuit activates the limbic system, hippocampus (memory), frontal lobes, vision, and more. They create sensations of attraction, arousal, pleasure, and obsession. As in social life, it's all about how they interact -- eros (feeling life) and pathos -- the original of archetypal wound in the heart of the gods.
Mythic Retrieval
Myths encapsulate and personify universal instinctual experience. Retrieving the myth is a contemporary form of spirituality, helping us revision the erotic encounter and amorous exchange. It differs from religion in the sense Jung explains: "There is religious sentimentality instead of the numinosum of divine experience. This is the well-known characteristic of a religion that has lost its living mystery." (CW 11, Para 52)
Just enough religious scruples inform us of the proper performance of rites to venerate the gods and touch our existential core. We need only enough religio, to reconnect, bind us back or bind us to the god/goddess. She arouses us -- physically, psychically, spiritually -- which elevates simple biological acts to the sublime. 'Divine Lady' is a priestly office.
Sexual alchemy perpetuates the universal Mystery -- to fuse with the highest, or God. The joining of deified spouses makes them a divine macrocosmic domain. Rather than fulfillment through the other, it means fulfillment of self and other through reciprocal enhancement if desire and mutual concern.
Aphrodite's myth remains contemporary and aspirational -- a psychosexual satori. The eternal nature of the divine reminds us that transcendence cannot be put on a timeline of temporal concreteness. Nor does a romantic desire to reify one's sex life or secular relations make one a tantric.
There is a difference between balancing heaven and earth, and a primary desire to transcend the material human condition. Jung notes, "What is the power of the individual against the voice of the whole people in him?" (Liber Novus, Page 365.)
Erotically Fixated
Hypersexuality arises from trauma-bonding over sex or sexuality. Fawning is a trauma response, as is excessive passion, self-surrender, and fusion with the beloved. Complex PTSD is often related to prolonged childhood trauma and responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn. Self-abandonment and escape are not the healthiest motivators.
Most religions don't make sex part of their path beyond cultural sacraments of marriage and taboos. The heart-mind-body connection may be ritually honored as within the Jewish tradition of Friday night sex. Shekinah is now imagined as the Shabbat Bride. The Hebrew word Shekinah literally means “dwelling” or “resting”, or “Divine Presence.”
The kabbalists revisioned Shabbat as a marriage festival. Earthly union between man and woman symbolically mirrors the heavenly marriage -- mystical marriage -- unification through the mystery of oneness. She is the radiance of God. Originally, Shekinah as Ashera, was the God-Wife if El or YHVH, rejected after the Babylonian captivity. No union is compete without a separation.
http://www.rabbimaller.com/hassidic-wisdom/spiritual-sexuality
http://www.abigailsarah.co.za/myart/Festivals/sabbathqueen.html
Other creeds or spiritual paths that transcend religions, like Sant Mat, claim that those bound to anyone never reach 'salvation.' Jung said, "But if you know what the dead demand, temptation will become the wellspring of your best work, indeed of the work of salvation. (Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188).
The united personality will never quite lose the painful sense of innate discord. Complete redemption from the sufferings of this world is and must remain an illusion. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 400
But love and devotion by which we are affected needs a face; for some it is that of the living teacher, guru, or master. That smile and soothing presence fulfills the devotee, enraptured by the physical presence, amplifying love, hope, and comfort for the personal and collective. The brilliance, beauty, and radiance of Light are utterly transcendent qualities of the divine related to ecstatic awakening of the third eye. Real love without separation is union with the radiant form.
The theologian, the only person besides the psychotherapist to declare himself responsible for the cura animarum, is afraid of having to think psychologically about the objects of his belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 628-630
Aphrodite is that numinosum (novelty), or evocative experience, even holy dread -- a quality of her visible and invisible presence that creates a peculiar alteration of consciousness. It is the induction and maintenance of a complex trance state, describable only in gems of poetry and song. Creativity is the primal spiritual impulse, a madness that floods intellect, intuition, and vision. It promises to transform the ordinary into the valuable.
Speaking of intuitive people, he [Jung] said it was important for them to get down to some task and make it real, ‘Otherwise they are like someone looking at that mountain over there through a telescope, and the next thing is they feel they have been there. But they haven’t, they must do the work.’ ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Page 74
Reminiscence
At the heart of existence, Aphrodite is all about the embrace of our sensual side, relationships -- to ourselves, to others, and to the sacred. These are the waters of relationship in which, under the jeweled sky, we can swim shallow or dive deep.
Her sensuality is an irresistible blend of image, imagination, and happy or painful memory of the senses -- the lapse of memory or precise memory of a smell, a touch, a look, a feeling. Under the spell of temptation we tend to 'forget who we are.' Even 'misery loves company,' we say. In committed relationships, we conspire to build a single mutual body with mutual memories and mutual field of perception.
But sometimes that 'body' falls apart, whether by destiny, archetypes, or typology. Perhaps we idolize or idealize the lover. Idolizing the object of affection, the lover is actuated by ideals. Even in the context of sacred sex this is projection taken way too literally, burdening the partner with unrealistic qualities of the divine out of the ritual space.
To be perfect or have a perfect relationship is unrealistic and imposes a role, whether it comes from romantic notions, fantasies, or religious zeal. It encourages 'fixing' the beloved to conform to one's vision. This obsession is disguised possession and control to ensure continuance of the romantic - a vain attempt to solve personal issues.
Avoidant behavior is really self-preoccupation. Ultimately, it devalues the personal sovereignty of both. Fusion is regressive dissociation, not merger. It ends the self-transformation of both lovers in an impasse. Fulfillment through private relationship can be a substitute for self-actualization in the outer world. Passionate love comes from integral selfhood when we truly value the other person. In our autonomy we mutually enhance one another. Self-knowledge includes knowledge of the soul.
There are other pitfalls. Maybe we are a door-slammer, desire to run, or want to live by 'the rules.' We may need to 'be right', or control, or avoid commitment. Some may have difficulty expressing feelings, or slowing down and 'making room,' getting priorities straight, or taking care of oneself instead of serving others. We may be unreliable, or need to be needed, be impulsive, check out, or unable to accept the worldview of others.
We re-member myths to remember and integrate the powerful majesty of concepts like psyche. In Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis remarks, "It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.” Whether we speak of the gods, significant others, or ourselves, his words apply: "How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?" [personification]
Beauty is transporting. Aphrodite is the mysterious, awe-inspiring something that comes over us when we are overcome. Lust incites intoxication, chaos, and destruction beyond that of love. To be, we must be perceived, mirrored back to ourselves by the immediate intimacy of others. All relationships are subsequent to our primordial, symbiotic union with our mother. At birth we die as aquatic beings to become autonomous air-breathers.
*
Thomistic philosophy includes four inner senses:
Common Sense
Imagination
Cogitative Sense
Memorative Sense
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Whole Body & Soul
In A Sense of Cosmos, Jacob Needleman reminds us, "Whenever we have looked to a part for the sake of understanding the whole, we have eventually found that the part is a living component of the whole. In a universe without a visible center, biology presents a reality in which the existence of a center is everywhere implied."
Aphrodite [Ishtar, Inanna] is the well-known goddess of love, beauty and seductive power. She is the pure erotic impulse, creative fire, pure libido, pure imagination, fertility, fruitfulness. The Hollywood love-goddess is a modern icon of her eternal power. She inherently possesses the qualities of grace, charm, and desire. The Kama Sutra includes the forehead, eyelids, cheeks, throat, breasts, lips, mouth, thighs, arms and navel as areas ideal for protective kissing in sacred sex.
She is a goddess of passion as well as pleasure, sensuality, affection and sensitivity. She can manifest as artistic and aesthetic inspiration, the desire to give birth to something remarkable by concept or conception. We have to mobilize our imagination to deal with conflicts of all nature from a point of view beyond the literalism of "I." Jung noted that for the artist there is a striking distance between ordinary ego-consciousness and the creative personality.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, creative mind plays with the object it loves. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Page 123, Para 197.
So doing, our efforts will follow nature’s own striving to bring life to the fullest possible fruition in each individual, for only in the individual can life fulfil its meaning—not in the bird that sits in a gilded cage. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 229.
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157
There are disarming pleasures and dangers in her enchanting attentions.
Aphrodite can be conflated with the uncontrollable urges of the shadow. As Lewis says, “the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.” (Lewis, Till We Have Faces)
Assimilation of the shadow gives a man body, so to speak; the animal sphere of instinct, as well as the primitive or archaic psyche, emerge into the zone of consciousness and can no longer be repressed by fictions and illusions.
~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 452
There is a long list of obvious attributions backed by great literature as well as personal and collective experience. Aphrodite inspires a compelling, subjective state. Euripides called love the "breathes (or blasts) of Aphrodite." She seeks intimacy, touching the most private aspects of our lives. Aphrodite is linked with many lovers in different myths.
In one version of her life, Aphrodite was married to Ares. So we see that when we are well acquainted with the Ares principle of physicality, we have an encounter with the sensuous energy she represents. You own evoked embodied experience with your nervous system and your soul.
In another myth, Aphrodite is said to be the wife of the lame smith Hephaistos. In this story of adultery, Ares is her paramour of choice. Aphrodite derives her warmth from a golden, sunlit type of sexuality. She has the greatest degree of solar qualities in her personality; whereas the other goddesses have greater lunar consciousness. This solar affinity does not, however, mean that she possesses a superior style of consciousness where self-awareness is concerned. In fact, she can tend to drift into situations with an aplomb only possible through reckless disregard for the future.
Aphrodite can be the source of envy arising from a pulsating desire for life and love. Paraphrasing Jung in a letter, "In a state of participation mystique one always projects emotion, but that emotional condition is brought about...by desire and by desire you are bound to things, and when they become chaotic you are drawn into the chaos." (Visions Seminar, Pages 1045-1046)
The origin of Aphrodite is a peculiar image for the Goddess of Love, since she stems from the violent castration of Uranus by Cronos. Stan Grof has described the uterine experience as an archaic matrix. Aphrodite reminds us our life on Earth in physical form is the sacred space of our soul and our psychic life.
The four Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPM) , the stages of the birth process
and the archetypal character of the four outer planets include:
Neptune/Poseidon (BPM I: The Amniotic Universe),
Saturn/Cronos (BPM II: Cosmic Engulfment and No Exit),
Pluto (BPM III:The Death-Rebirth Struggle), and
Uranus (BPM IV: The Death-Rebirth Experience).
Her birth from the severed genitals of Uranus symbolizes genetically the relationship of this goddess to the birth matrix, to her father, and by extension with all men. She is the embodiment of both his cynicism and his phallic sexual imperative. She is the drive personified in an alluring image.
Paradox
Sexual desire and amorous pleasure function as aphrodisiacs which lead to fulfillment through union of male and female. Psychological quandry makes us unable to decide between two options, not knowing which path to take. Transformative solutions arise from the tension of opposites.
We are that pair of Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one. --Jung, ‘
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’, CW.I §235.
The Ghostly Lover is a man or woman who does not exist, or only exists in your imagination, or one who blocks a move on to another by making us emotionally unavailable. Hillman said this archetype means avoidance of an ordinary human relationship for an enchanting, seductive relationship with a dangerous ephemeral lover.
Imaginal fantasies of the ghostly lover archetype can distort the transformative process. Psychological development means entering a dialogue between ego and anima/animus. Romantic longing, engulfment, or emotional fusion is stimulated by separation, death, abandonement, or emotional unavilability.
The animus may be pathologically dominated by identification with the ghostly lover archetype, a constant invisible companion relegated to 'soul mate' status but never realizable. We become possessed by a celebrated, fictional or deceased character to whom we misattribute numinous effects.
A ghostly figure elevated in imagination to the sovereign point of the spirit usurps it. Thoughtforms can take on certain autonomous behaviors. This form of 'spirit possession' is the shadow side of spiritual longing conferring illusory 'specialness' on both parties in the self-narrative. But it is a confabulation and conflation of trickster, bright or dark shadow, and animus or anima, with which one is unconsciously bound and cut off from maturing.
Archetypal images of yearning for unavailable lovers include the bewitched prince, the romantic poet, the ghostly lover, or the marauding pirate -- celebrity or pop star. Another form is extreme father fixation, obsessing on the parent's pursuits and standards.
These are not sacred partners, but 'demonic' forms mixed with shadow and self. The demonic lover may be a psychopath, narcissist, vampire, or corpse. Projections on the idealized dead or unavailable fantasy figures are literalizations of one's own fantasies -- a "head trip" that sucks away the energy for real life.
The best protection against abandonment to demons is a conscious relationship to a close, living human being. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 25.
So if you speak of individuation at all, it necessarily means the individuation of beings who are in the flesh, in the living body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202
The union of anima and animus is a major step in individuation, a preliminary form of mystical union -- union of the spirit and body, spirit and matter (Mater). We learn to live at the stillpoint in a world of paradoxes: inner/outer, masculine/feminine, light/dark, visceral/cerebral, fight/flight, likes/dislikes, gain/loss, happiness/despair.
Opposites of being are a defining characteristic in mystical thought -- the synthesis of all the desires and thoughts. Kabbalists say opposites arise from and are united in the primordial Ether and that union of opposites is the purpose of the world, a vehicle for reaching primal unity by undoing the bifurcating tendencies of mind in the unity of all things.
Polarities are complimentary. They signify the essence of wholeness, union of the conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche -- the Self, the whole Self, and nothing but the Self, completeness at least in that divine instant -- creation and negation, concealment and revelation. Rather than wildly oscillating back and forth we learn to hold the dynamic tension of opposites. Emotional management needs healthy boundaries for deeper connections.
Aphrodite is an embodiment of the non-rational and psychological union of opposites wherein the lovers are annihilated. Her form is ecstatic, reconciling. Opposite principles are brought together by desire. A similar union of opposites, the alchemist and soror mystica, is the goal of alchemy -- deep union with the divine and feminine principle that opens our senses and reconnects us with the body. This is the spirituality of earth, life, and the present moment.
Pairs of opposites have a natural tendency to meet on the middle line, but the middle line is never a compromise thought out by the intellect and forced upon the fighting parties.
It is rather a result of the conflict one has to suffer.
Such conflicts are never solved by a clever trick or by an intelligent invention but by enduring them.
As a matter of fact, you have to heat up such conflicts until they rage in full swing so that the opposites slowly melt together.
It is a sort of alchemistic procedure rather than a rational choice and decision.
The suffering is an indispensable part of it.
Every real solution is only reached by intense suffering.
The suffering shows the degree in which we are intolerable to ourselves.
--C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 233-235
Venus is a binding force, which may appear as a voluntary involvement or with the strength and dynamism of possession. The paradox of Aphrodite is that she is a loving and passionate wife, yet always leaves open the possibility of exploring numerous relationships with gods and mortals. She is always friendly and intimate, except to those who would usurp her position. In her, both love and power drives are embodied in a single goddess. Conflicts of opposites arise between duty and what we really want.
It's All Chemistry
The physical chemistry of love modulates our attitudes and desire through three stages: Lust, Attraction, and Bonding. Each deploys different hormones and neurotransmitters to accomplish its alchemy. They act like addictive drugs shaping our behavior -- in the beginning like stimulating cocaine, and in bonding like heroin. Love changes how we think, feel, and act with Aphrodite's rose-tinted glasses.
Stage 1 is governed in both sexes by testosterone and estrogen. Pheromones are unconscious scent attractors and sex signals which draw us toward biologically suitable partners and change the hormone levels of others.
The love-struck attraction of Stage 2 is modulated by adrenaline (stress response), dopamine (rush of desire and reward; decreased sleep and eating; hyper-focus; idealization) and serotonin (fixation; obsession-compulsion), dopamine.
Stage 3 involves oxytocin (released in orgasm), the cuddle and bonding hormone, and vasopressin (devotion; pair-bonding).
It changes the fabric of our being. Ernest Rossi suggests this “novelty-numinosum-neurogenesis-effect” implies that gene expression is related to natural healing. He links it to arousal and the very nature of consciousness itself. Ecstasy, as the breakthrough moment of creative consciousness has been described as the activating emotive force of a daemon that drives our human experience, whether we want it or not. Peak experiences provide insight, inspiration, and transformation.
Air, Light & Fragrance
She is the extroverted world of sense and sensuality and the immanent world of imagination. Stimulating the imagination is erotic. We carefully take hold of our experiences with enough passion and loyalty to hang onto and continue them through the multidimensional layers of meaning Aphrodite imposes on reality.
Reality emerges with symbolism and imagination as its companions, manifesting as symbols, dreams, and language. Jung says, "If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything." (Red Book, p. 310).
One creates inner freedom only through the symbol. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book , Page. 311
Some meanings are too deep to grasp except in symbols. The dream’s obscurity is really only a projection of our own lack of understanding.
Poetry reveals the essence of Nature. Giovanni Boccaccio suggests that the poem is the voice of the anima mundi, the voice of the wind, the sea, the tears. It is not the voice of this or that thing, but the voice of the soul. An integral approach to reality unites the opposites of animal and psychic beauty to re-enchant the world.
In The Poet (1844) Ralph Waldo Emerson perhaps alludes to Aphrodite when he says: "Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing."
http://www.emersoncentral.com/poet.htm
Art expresses feelings and understanding. It is the fulfillment of sensation in an audible or visual form. It is an expression of an archetypal process in relationship with life. Art is philosophy expressed in symbols and imagery. or the sensation function, art serves the same purpose that science does for thinking. Other analogies for art include philosophy and psychology for the intuitive function, and the emotions of human society for feelings.
THE OCEAN OF EXISTENCE
The Unconscious Mother
As Jung says, "To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth." (Red Book, Page 266) Soul is at the heart of being. Beyond personifications and the confusion of dreams, W.B. Yeats said, "Our daily thought was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea: Henry More's Anima Mundi, Wordsworth's "immortal sea which brought us hither . . ."
The groundstate of our being is a Fierce Luminosity emanating from the vast roiling ocean of the creative vacuum – the endless sea of creation. What IS is, and the primal matrix is the eternal shimmering, full vacuum of space -- IS-ness.
Light is an excitation of empty space -- "she who shines from the foam (ocean)."
The metaphor of navigation, the night sea journey, appears in Boccaccio's On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles. It is a cipher of hermeneutic experiences related to poetry. Such movement anchors us to ourselves. Sailing on the sea of genealogies of the pagan gods is a metaphor for the existential journey of a modern person reflecting on antiquity in a sort of poetic anthropology with the promise of finding personal interpretations of meaning in unevidenced beliefs.
The most intimate place of the image is our heart. The heart of the image is the most vulnerable and requires our care. It is the you that goes on of itself, breathing without thinking of it, blood circulating and nerves tingling, not the symbolism the persona or distanced self. It is the place of all suffering and pain but also the container of constant transformation.
Fascination, Fixation, Arousal
When we look out at Nature happening, it is us -- no longer left outside, but embodied self-reflexivity -- embodying the symbolic mirror of Aphrodite. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and effect affecting one another in a circular relationship where neither are cause or effect. As Joseph Campbell put it, "The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature."
Internal dialogue is on-going conversation with what you are experiencing as you are experiencing it. Tuning into one's own state of being is meta-communication -- self-realization. Hyper-awareness of the body includes both self-knowledge and self-monitoring. Aleister Crowley admonishes, "look closely into the heart of the seeker and lead him by the path which is best suited to his nature unto the ultimate end of all things, the supreme realization, the Life which abideth in Light, yea, the Life which abideth in Light.” (Liber Porta Lucis Sub Figurâ X)
Of images Yeats said, "I came to believe in a great memory passing on from generation to generation. But that was not enough, for these images showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet were an extension of one's knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of the gold, as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of cabalistic symbolism..." (Per Amiga Silentia Lunae, p. 55)
After extensive research on color, Rudolph Steiner developed the lazure style of painting, a subtle wash of hues that allows light to pass through it, reflecting back an amazing depth of color. His theory describes the “language” of color related to light and darkness. He calls such “activity” between light and darkness "the language of the soul," suggesting colors speak a language more universal and archetypal than any spoken word. https://beduwen.com/2015/03/13/spiritual-painting-art-therapy/
Art for Art's Sake
Whether in awe of Nature or in aesthetic arrest, we gasp in wonder that takes our breath away. Jung promises, "By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life." (CW 15, Para 130) And, "Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual’s conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs." (Jung, CW 15, Para 131)
"As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense—he is “collective man,” a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind." ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157
Like any archetype, Jung warns, "Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him his instrument." ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157
"The artist seizes on this image, and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers."
~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130
"The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present." ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130
"By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life."
~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130
Deleuze (2003) implies, "Art aims not at reproducing the sensed model, but at reproducing sensation." Seeing and being seen are the essence of Aphrodite's divinity and essential to her sensuous autonomy. Yet, how often we take our touch, taste, smell, vision, and proprioception for granted. Our legitimate and socially illegitimate sensations are primordial.
In primordial consciousness there is no supernatural world, only the natural world with its visible and its invisible domains. As the part connects with invisible wholeness, moment, transcendence, and visceral awareness merge in the invisible inherent meaning of direct experience. Clarity and understanding deepen the moment of Mystery beyond the sensory when unconscious thoughts synchronize in a conscious thought.
Visible and invisible unite in comprehension. Our task is to engage that domain, to look from outside to inside, to embrace the unseen, not simply describe it, but engage it. Like a shaman we establish a dialogue and interaction around ‘what do they want?’ and ‘what do they bring?’ Concept and conception share a connotation.
Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring.
~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 129
Maurice Merleau-Ponty notes, "the meaning is invisible, but the unseen is not in contradiction with the visible: of the rest, the visible has an internal structure invisible and the visible in-equivalent is the secret of the visible."
These are non-hierarchical worlds interpenetrating and permeating one another with intimate communications, engaging the invisible world with the significant implications of phenomena. Myths are relics of the time when fervid human imagination could catch hidden meanings and signs of life in mysteriously divine divine presences in every aspect of the world represented by words and rhythms.
Arts of Love
The sixty-four arts of making love all had to be mastered, and would define a cultured courtesan . These arts are described in the various versions of Kamasutra, and in The Perfumed Garden Sir Richard Burton gives a rare glimpse into this culture. The courtesans also mastered many other artistic disciplines including tailoring, fine carpentry, rules of architecture, chemistry, mineralogy, laws of society, how to pay respect and make compliments, singing, playing a musical instrument, dancing, writing, reading the thoughts of others, the art of attracting and captivating the mind of others, magic, manufacturing scents and garlands, drawing, sculpturing and painting. They were often more artists and teachers than we tend to believe. It is within this context we can understand the courtesans of ancient India.
http://levekunst.com/courtesans-of-ancient-india/
Anima & Animal
Images can ignite angelic and carnal pleasure in us as much or more than any mortal human. A 'Venus in Fur' evokes the paradox of refined animality, perhaps dangerous, sly, even deranged. Ideally, we see Aphrodite's beauty in every thing, person and event in the world. It's there, whether we refine our perceptions to see it or not, or if we cannot blind ourselves to her continuous revelation -- nature's unfurling dance of the seven veils.
Through the mystique of the non-rational, we cultivate life through acts of love. She renews awareness of the importance of a certain kind of sexual ritual and liminal transformative space where the unconscious manifests and opposites reconcile. With cooperation and mutuality between the sexes, each act becomes one of gender reunion, rather than power and domination from either side.
Instead of obsessing on dichotomy and oppositionalism or phallic-narcissism, ritual practice deliteralizes both sword and chalice. This frees their symbolic, balancing, and transpersonal power. A metaphoric intensification of our life energies and libido is a rhythmic phenomenon that wells up from the depths as the emergent, incarnate goddess. Jung reminds us that, "To live what is right and to let what is false die, that is the art of life." (Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 75).
Art narratively relates the invisible, shaping ideas and modulating feelings. The arts from Homer forward are represent the spiritual quest of rebirth rituals. ‘Rebirth’ in pagan ritual amounts to retracing the stages of descent of the soul in the existential hell of matter and chaos. As such, art and ritual reveal the process of abstraction, or spectrum of human apprehension.
Few arts are more emotionally evocative than music and its key characteristics. Musicologist Rita Steblin calls G major “every calm and satisfied passion, every tender gratitude for true friendship and faithful love.” C major has the air of “innocence, simplicity.” Meanwhile, G minor sounds like “discontent,” and C minor is the “sighing of the love sick soul.” Aesthetic deprivation kills the soul. Art and spirituality deepen our meaningful contact with reality.
Such loyalty is the strength of the bond to Aphrodite -- respect for what is sacred in our relationships with the gods, a feminine gnosis, and eroticism. James Hillman said Marsilio Ficino equated anima mundi and Aphrodite, calling her the mirror of divine realities, the life of mortals and the nexus of both. And that body is a sacred alchemical vessel. To be present with the whole body rearranges us from the center of being. But bodies also mean illness, accidents, ageing, and death.
When we go into our room of mirrors, the gaze of the other who lives there gets more penetrating and at the same time more welcoming. Each time we touch the perception we have of ourselves, we are reminded we are our memories, which make us the person we are. Borges describes how we belong to that "imaginary museum of changing forms" that is eternal. The gestalt remains constant, though the forms change like a kaleidoscope.
Anima Mundi embodies the pandemonium of all forms in external and internal perceptions. She bridges our perceptions of the world by stimulating the imaginative faculty. Yet, being attached to materialistic images is not the same as being attached to Mater, matter and earth.
The Sea of Dreams
Within certain limits, image, imagination and metaphor can heal. Imagination can be employed therapeutically for catharsis as images reveal what is hidden in the unconscious and manifests in symptoms. Memory is the sum total of what we remember from the atomic to organismic level. Our whole body is our long memory, subconsciously incorporating all our experience in structure, dynamics and symptoms. Enriching symbolic language can guide us along an inner path with a wordless dialogue.
Liquid symbols flood the collective psyche ("mother liquid" of the unconscious 'womb' - the experience of humanity) with the overwhelming force of nature itself. In waves of contemplation, they morph constantly in dreams and daydreams calling us within to the source of what wants to be transformed. Their effect is decidedly osmotic, passing through the semipermeable conscious/unconscious membrane like some unacknowledged solvent, recalling the alchemical maxim "Solve et Coagula."
Rising to conscious images are irradiated by the dawning light, in constant recreation of the miraculous birth of Aphrodite from the eternal sea. As Jung notes, "Consciousness, no matter how extensive it may be, must always remain the smaller circle within the greater circle of the unconscious, an island surrounded by the sea; and, like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of living creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming." (CW 16, Para 366.)
You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
ART & MAGIC
There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic.
Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.
I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.
In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity.
Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.
-Alan Moore
The Beauty of Soul
The self-presenting reality, Aphrodite is soul and the beauty of soul. Soul is beauty and beauty is soul. She is self-presentation -- the sensate qualities of things just as they are, the bare facts in all their lustre, clarity and perceptual aesthetics -- a panoply of shapes, colors, atmospheres, and textures animating and ensouling the world. As mirror, self-reflection is its self-display, its radiance, interiority, subjectivity, psychic depth, even psychopathology.
Beauty is fundamental to life and the sensibility of the cosmos. Natural beauty often exceeds the limits of art. Aesthetics is a necessary aspect of our perception of the world, the effulgence and brilliance of her consciousness, all the way down into the microcosm of the luminous absolute space of reality beyond the mere absence of energy/matter. Our perceptions of ourselves and cosmos come through the interplay of figure (ourselves) and ground (cosmos).
Navajo principles of life feature balance and harmony, manifested through honoring the four directions: East (Spiritual), where our thoughts originate; South (Physical), where we set our plans; West (Emotional), where our thoughts and plans are set into motion; and North (Mental/Environmental), where we consider our thoughts and actions to determine if we have remained on the correct path. Working with this energy, one easily learns to walk "the middle way". Echoed in the Hermetic Qabalah, this "Middle Way" is a path of devotion. Art is prayer.
The Navajo "Beauty Way" ceremony embodies beauty, harmony, goodness, normality, success, well-being, blessedness, and happiness -- as a living ideal. During the ceremony, someone wishes to re-establish balance and beauty in their life. Sense of beauty, or balance and harmony may be lost for many reasons. But for the Navajos, the singular cure is to find the way back to Beauty. If you wander off the Beauty Way, then your link to the natural world must be re-established in order to regain it. To Walk in Beauty means being in harmony with all things, people, and events. You connect with inner peace and serenity when polarities are neutralized. One with everything, you walk in Beauty.
Navajo Beauty Way Prayer
In beauty may I walk.
All day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.
With dew about my feet may I walk.
With beauty may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
Lumin-Ids
Environments can be notoriously invisible, below our perceptual threshold, and they have their own “ground rules”. The primordial ground is invisible, immeasurable, unmanifest, in fact metaphysical, by definition. How can we attune to the nature of the ground, ground our meditation? Can we perceive reality as an unbroken wholeness more than conceptually? Where is our “common ground”? What is that something we are searching for in an another human being?
Hillman notes, "…psyche is the life of our aesthetic responses, that sense of taste in relation with things, that thrill or pain, disgust or expansion of breast: these primordial aesthetic reactions of the heart are soul itself speaking" (The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, p. 39). In he oldest writing by a a male or female, "The Exaltation of Inanna," Princess Enheduanna celebrates the Sumerian love goddess -- "the supreme one in Heaven and Earth."
William Blake says, "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age." Thus, she is the soul in natural and healthy sex, the "bare facts" of body as "erotic landscape." The nonordinary states of love and desire expand that landscape.
The Stella Matutina (Morning Star)
Just as evening gives birth to morning, so from the darkness arises a new light, the stella matutina, which is at once the evening and the morning star— Lucifer, the light-bringer. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 299
Sexual arousal is an altered state of consciousness. If sex is juicy, radiantky visceral, and wildly uncontrollable, it is also full of paradox. For example, projection and enchantment can block relatedness or call it forth. The most adventurous yet least meaningful love affairs often end in disaster, estrangement, isolation, and alienation -- the bête noire of fatal attraction.
Aphrodite is primordial allure and divine impact is her modus operandi. She is a soul-guide, never far from darkness as the Morning and Evening Star. Love is a poison and a cure. Epicurus suggests living nature is our principal Guide through pleasure and pain, sweetness and bitterness, through overt, liberated sexuality.
Her grace, ineffable mysteries, and wisdom tradition is past on in art, music, imagery, and oral teachings. If reality can only be experienced directly through the senses, the arts make that sensuality tangible. Divine imagery feeds the soul, like sweet honey. More than an alluring physical form, she is a form of thought, a
tradition of inner enlightenment. This revelatory experience of knowledge is true self in dynamic encounter with the ground of being.
Deep Knowing
Hillman evokes a perception of the heart, recalling beauty as manifesting anima mundi: "World must be flowing through soul if soul is to shine forth in the world." He says we must stand in the temple of Aphrodite, "recognizing that each thing smiles, has allure, calls forth aesthesis. "Calling forth," provoking, kaleo, was Ficino's depiction of Aphrodite's main characteristic, kallos, beauty. (Griffin, 1989)
In every meaningful way, the body is the subconscious mind, with the heart as its 'brain.' We honor the captivating Aphrodite when we imagine the world as our lover, with naked awareness, rapt attention, and self-revelation. Such a living inquiry with a sense of immediacy that brings contact is a mind-body-spirit approach to personal transformation. We honor her when we honor the World Soul.
Imagination uses belief, thought, and visualization to impact the physical or biological root. We are hers when we devotedly pursue the inner images, thoughts, feelings, impulses, urges. William Blake tells us, "Imagination, the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable, mortal bodies are no more. The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself."
Jean Shinoda Bolen calls the golden Aphrodite an 'alchemical goddess.' But in what sense is alchemy an 'Aphroditic' art? Practical and spiritual alchemy has always been concerned with the perfection of metals and mortals -- mining the soul from the inside out. Her special operation in alchemy is the albedo, a union of Hermes and Aphrodite, where the morning star plays a special role in the Great Work -- the elevation of he lower passions to purified energies. His unitive view includes hermeneutics, the art of reading symbolic things, including symptoms.
The transmutation of gold-making is a symbol for the creation of the philosopher's stone and completion of the Great Work, and the apotheosis of god-making. So, it is not surprising to find her married to Hephaistos, the god of the forge.
Divine beauty comes into this world -- a fulfillment of the spirit of the times. The supreme meaning is not in events nor the soul, but in the mediatrix of life that functions as a bridge to connect them. If you are not conscious of more than yourself how can you heal, and what are you conscious of?
While the man who despairs marches towards nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them. ~Carl Jung; MDR; Page 306. Our localized instinct, firmly rooted in our earth (matter), is securely fixed in its body.
"Divinity of the individual" is the core-idea of apotheosis -- liberation or freedom from a metaphorical prison. Love and strife, like 'solve et coagula' combine and separate. Alchemy is as goal-oriented as sex, related to souls, metals, stars and planets, and sympathy between objects, living and dead. Aphrodite and alchemy share the parameters including correspondence, living nature, imagination as mediation of what cannot be said in words, and transmutation.
The whole affair is best approached with contact and closeness, without expectations, with a ‘beginner’s mind,’ or simply by responding authentically to what comes up. And it all 'comes up' from the unconscious. The gods may reside in Olympian heights, but they also come up from Hades and the sea.
We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. (Jung, CW 11, Para 757). Heraclitus told us the way up and the way down are the same, and that change determines the birth of the world.
In Sumeria, she was called "she who shows the way to the stars." Jung suggested an analogy between the starry sky and the unconscious has existed from very early times, at least as a symbol. Of this naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky, Hillman says, "...the sky is so clear that the stars seem to form a network, Aphrodite is this too. She lives in the cosmos, not only in the morning and evening star, but also in the zodiac signs. ...Soul is an Aphrodite." Her spiritual title is Aphrodite-Urania -- the openness of space is also vastness of mind.
Great Brightness
She may be the great brightness of the dawning light -- inner gold. Only the awakened are truly immortal. But she is also the material opaqueness of darkness, instincts, feelings, and raw emotions. Emotions are repetitive thoughts packed with intensity. She symbolizes the spiritual and physical duality of humanity, and all the frightening prospects of love gone wrong -- devastation, disconsolation, and despondency, even revenge of the raging heart. She can be as repulsive as beautiful. Spiritual love counters the unbridled power of attraction.
Jung says the body lays claim to recognition equal to the psyche. When both exert a fascination, the antithesis between mind and matter disappears. He says spirit is the living body seen from within, so to transcend our present level of consciousness, we must give the body its due. The bafflement, shattered illusions, disheveled hair and walk of shame are hers. Desire can be unholy or divine.
Sex is one of the ways we do give. As anima Aphrodite is both animal or of the created world and subtle body. Both carnal (Aphrodite Pandemos) and sacred sex are an immersion in the unconscious. Aphrodite's genitals are special because they are magic and cast a spell of enchantment that allows us into her temple experience, screwing the ego out of us and embedding enlightenment of her special sort of 'yoga' in.
"The body is the original animal condition; in the body we're all animals and therefore we should have an animal psychology to be able to live in it. ...But, since we have a body, it is indispensable that we also live like an animal, and every time we come up with a new expansion of consciousness, we need to add another link in the chain that binds us to the animal..." --C.G.Jung Seminars, Nietzsche's Zarathustra
Looking at the last 3.8 billion years, scientists say our last common ancestor is a planet-wide “mega-organism,” as old, huge and deep as the sea itself. Last universal common ancestor (LUCA) grew where hydrothermal vents of hot water rich in hydrogen, carbon dioxide and minerals emerged from the sea floor. Two kinds of simple cells (bacteria and archaea) emerged.. Previous studies identified around 100 genes almost certainly present in LUCA and common to almost all cells living today.
The possibility of a vast living mother ocean as our Last Universal Common Ancestor blurs the lines between ancestor and deity reverence. All life was interdependent in Grandmother LUCA, when life was whole. This is the foam from which Aphrodite arises.
We instinctively invoke her to arise from the foamy depths ("aphro" means foam) -- the Cosmic Waters of our unconscious and reveal herself to us so we can bask in her golden glow, the color of copper and honey. Conversely, She can provoke us to enter the roiling ocean of our subconscious to swim with her in that primordial element.
We may surf the waves of phenomenological symbolism that crash to the shores of ordinary existence. In such an act we sanctify ourselves and make ourselves a vehicle for her energy. Or, we may be swept away by a riptide of primal forces and powerful unconscious currents of what we don't know, unconscious behavioral systems.
However we perceive it, we are drawn to the Light. Aphrodite's realizations, enlightenment, and meaning "dawn upon us," much like the brilliant flash of light recently (2016) said to accompany the incredible moment of conception when life begins. It seems, sparks fly between male and female elements from the very beginning. Stunning news, like stunning Beauty can stop us dead in our tracks because it brings esoteric Mystery to our mundane attention.
Is this unconscious notion the flip-side of the fluorescent flash of light seen at death, reported in near-death experiences? We have to separate the phenomenal experience from our premature interpretations, no matter how psychologically appealing they may be. Unconsciously, we may be equating a flash of light at the beginning and end of life; yet, scientifically we could be wrong about both, much less the appealing symmetry of such tacit thoughts.
Conceptions & Misconceptions
But that florescence has been overstated and mythologized since its discovery, demonstrating how the distorting effects of such a 'fiat lux' react in our psyche. This conception of life in light is an alluring concept. It is not human egg activation but human psyche activation that spurs such misconceptions.
Researchers reported their results as a “stunning explosion of zinc fireworks” when a human egg is “activated” by sperm enzyme, but their detailed explanations were ignored in favor of a fantasy image of soul brought forth in light that recapitulates our creation myths. Biophotons are light emitted by biological cells, but this is not that. The truth is a far less romantic idea. No matter how attractive the notion, there are actually no sparks of light that actually fly out of zygotes at conception. http://www.ncregister.com/blog/trasancos/pro-lifers-there-is-no-flash-of-light-at-conception/#ixzz4Egoy0xWH
Yet it remains a good metaphor for the way psyche and Aphrodite 'work' on our consciousness, though there are no biophotonic fireworks at conception except those created in the lab. We would like to idealize that physical process and inorganic signature of zinc emission into a personal 'Big Bang,' with our own conception at the center of our personal universe.
Wish Fulfillment or Wishful Thinking?
People were excited to “see” what they "know" to be true about the awesome moment of conception. But the zinc detecting experiment and conception are not the same biochemical event. The public simply 'married' two ideas in their minds creating a folie or delusional idea that became implanted in the collective imagination. The 'mything link' in this tale is the revelation about Psyche.
The viral meme spreads and persists because no one bothers to check the facts because we cannot trust popular science sources that parrot such nonsense disconnected from the research itself. If we are going to use science to elevate our archaic beliefs or even to create poetic metaphors, we had better get the science right, or we merely conjure up false conclusions and errors of category. This process is repeated over and over, especially in the hot media environment of the information age.
Coming Attractions
This how the Aphrodite's mythologizing process works. The metaphor is taken as literal, and spread like wildfire as justification for a variety of spiritual notions. The misconception about the flash of conception continues to spread. None of that means that biophotons in the human body cannot also be metaphorically related to the traditional domain of Aphrodite and specific qualities of light.
However, this meme of a 'flash' at conception is nothing more than an illusion spread by media, a bait-and-switch lie, even though biophotons may be equated with vital force at some level. While biophotonic light never mentioned related to this experiment, we have unconscious ideas about it that float around in collective consciousness.
Stored in the DNA in the nuclei of each cell, biophotons are ultraweak photon emissions of biological systems. They are weak electromagnetic waves in the optical range of the spectrum and are indeed light. Living cells of plants, animals and human beings emit biophotons. An expression of the function state of the living organism, they cannot be seen by the naked eye but can be measured by special equipment. (Bischoff, 1995)
Now, a similar sort of confusion happens when we meet a potential lover and elevate them to a semi-divine state with our romantic projections of idealiation and specialness, surrounding them with the glow of our distortions and possessiveness. We get excited when we imagine we see the “fireworks” we were hoping to see.
Answering Aphrodite's siren call, we unleash the unfolding of her love, fertility, and sexual mysteries in our own lives through the riches of myth, natural magic and the biological alchemy of love. As a cosmic factor, she is the very essence of existence. But as a complex and paradoxical goddess, she also wounds the heart and soul with a Bellica pax, vulnus dulce, suave malum, a warring peace, a sweet wound, a mild evil.
The unconscios nucleus of meaning of the eternal archetype remains “unborn” but her specific meaning and form, imagery and affects permeate us. If Aphrodite is eternal, eros is an event of specific temporality. Perhaps in a faithless world, the transitory and temporal hold the only redemptive power possible.
The spectacular ‘birth of Venus’ in the ordinary world predates the Upper Paleolithic fertility goddesses found in the ancient caves and art of southern France. She shared her dawn with that of modern humanity 30-40,000 years ago. A continuous creation is consummated in her embodied exaltation in each of us. We can seek Aphrodite's spiritual insight through ritual ways of enhancing and resacralizing it.
We consciously worship her when we adore our beloved, making the conjugal bed an altar. In fact, it alters everything. The wisdom of the Tree of Knowledge is that sexuality isn’t just in the gonads, but permeates every cell and atom of our bodies. Aphrodite is an attitude or style of consciousness and behavior through which we fulfill legitimate psychophysical needs. She not only engenders but enlarges life with the mystical splendor of love. In some poetic sense, our very atoms and molecules, as well as the galaxies, are held together by the attractive force of love.
Provocateur
We can experience our own imaginal essence through the power of love. When it overwhelms us, desire feels like a supernatural force. Sexual passion has been deified, divinized, or even feared as evil and demonic because of its overwhelming nature – the instinct overtakes the personality. The awe-inspiring force of desire and sex has played a role in religion, magic, mysticism, occultism, symbolism, and the whole spectrum of human psychobiological interaction with the transpersonal – the timeless world of the seemingly eternal.
Soul is a gift from Aphrodite, who shines within the psyche as morning and evening star. She teaches the cultivation and significance of beauty and pleasure as links between earthly and spiritual mysteries, as well as cautioning us about the troubles Beauty can trail in its wake. The glory of love may be its transience. As Goethe reminds, Love is eternal but its object keep changing.
Nature of the Gods
Carl Jung argued that "gods" exist, but only metaphorically (not literally) and only in the natural dimension of the psyche. He said all we can ever know is the phenomenological god-image. Image is metaphor with a powerful internal cohesion and coherence with intense energy and affect. He called them archetypes, symbols of transformation of the psyche, facets of am indivisible deeper underlying unity.
Archetypes help us redefine human identity as a connective multiplicity in a continuous process of integration (holy union) embedded in a cosmic matrix of consciousness, polarity, and life. We are entangled with them, so they affect our lives physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
In her complications and tragic conflicts, Aphrodite can even undermine the meaning of blood and family. She also takes her revenge on those who stubbornly refuse to obey her desire, hence her archetypal description in the Victorian novel as "She-who-must-be-obeyed." (Haggard, 1886)
Jung said, "Nothing happens in which you are not entangled in a secret manner; for everything has ordered itself around you and plays your innermost. Nothing in you is hidden to things, no matter how remote, how precious, how secret it is. It inheres in things."
All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
Aphrodite's Inner Chamber
In the mysteries of embodiment, death and renewal, union with the creative source is a "death marriage", a return to the womb, and union with God. All these forms and imagery arise from a cosmic holographic field that contains all of existence in potential. Like a fractal, each part contains the whole only in lower resolution. This holographic plenum is the ultimate source of existence, our cradle of being, and the matrix of the phenomenal world.
Archetypes are the elements of the soul, showing up as numinous images with sacred powers, including numinous enchantment, fascination, and wonderment. Jung recommended we engage them consciously with active imagination to develop insight and growth. They are exemplary forms or prototypes -- an informational code -- the original schema or dynamic patterns that model all things of the same kind. For Plato, they were the primordial forms of the universal mind. We recognize the world within us through their patterns. Being universal, archetypal forms can be found everywhere. They are the essence that sustains life.
Dynamically, archetypal forms are underlying instinctual patterns of behavior which reflect how the unconscious “imagines” reality into being by giving it form. Psyche, our "larger self", reveals itself in symbolic form through manifestations of the archetypes. They organize our instinctive and transpersonal experience giving it collective meaning. Their dreams are our realities. Each has its agenda and characteristic mode of appearance.
This plenum is the energetic ocean from which Aphrodite, "the foam-born goddess," arises. In physics this ground of existence is called the Dirac Sea, the fluctuation of the seething subquantal vacuum potential, the empty space in our bodies between the particles that binds matter and primordial consciousness. In psychology it is the Collective Unconscious.
Physics and psyche are complementary aspects of the same reality at the cosmic and personal level, uniting mind and matter in psychophysical being. We can develop a metaphoric or symbolic sensibility, attending to unconscious myths in our daily lives and dreams. Aphrodite is the supreme metaphor of all relationship dynamics.
Siren & Symbol
Since the psychological condition of any unconscious content is one of potential reality, characterized by the polar opposites of “being” and “non-being,” it follows that the union of opposites must play a decisive role in the alchemical process. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 557
Without the experience of the opposites there is no experience of wholeness and hence no inner approach to the sacred figures. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 24.
Depth psychology is an alternative to the literalness and concretizing of religious thinking, the idiosyncrasy of self-delusions, or the dryness of cynical rationalism. Symbols are psychic realities that dramatize the union of opposites and integration of dissociated projections or identifications. In the symbolic life, we re-experience the death-and-rebirth process, over and over again, just as we experience the ‘petit mort’ (“little death”) of orgasm and renewal in our sexual lives.
"All deities," William Blake says, "reside in the human breast." The literal is dead, but the metaphorical is alive and well. The "gods" are metaphors --personifications or deifications in the psyche. We recognize archetypal dynamics through their real-time effects and imagery. Aphrodite, wellspring of our creative and erotic potential, remains close to our hearts, as Blake suggests.
Blended Paths
“As above; so below.” The yin-yang of universal opposites is mirrored in the microcosm at the human scale, symbolized as male and female, sun and moon, king and queen, immanent/transcendent, conscious and unconscious. Creation stories often begin with an exemplary cosmic couple (Shiva-Shakti, Isis-Osiris, Adam and Eve, El-Eloah).
Aphrodite is a numinous hypnotic reality that can spontaneously influence us consciously and unconsciously at the physical, emotional, mental and mythic level. It is a fusion -- mouth to mouth, heart to heart, body in body and soul in soul. It is primordial wisdom that mankind can participate in the sacred during physical sexual union.
The way of the couple, mutual affection, unites not only physical and material lives in partnership, but sensation, emotional intimacy, and aesthetic tastes. Sharing intellectual interests, enrichment, and spiritual discoveries unite the lovers who grow together with one another on all planes of aspiration.
An individual's personal myth or mytheme can be conceived as a magnetic vortex drawing life to itself. In another phase of life, the focus and narrative could change to other patterns. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, sometimes competitive, other times catastrophic, sweeping the old structure away in an avalanche of uncontrollable consequences that result in new self-organization.
How have your attitudes toward sexuality changed over different periods in your life? Consider your first time, love at first sight, addictive, illicit and forbidden love, rejection and lost love, vanities, romantic idealism and follies, sexual fantasies, inner partners, devotional and exploitive relationships. Escapism, inspiration, and all forms of artistic creativity can all be associated with the generative power of Aphrodite.
Passion Personified
Call her what you will – Venus, Aphrodite, Cybele, Inanna, Ishtar, Asherah, Shekinah, Astarte, Hathor, Bhavani, Shakti, Freya, Erzuli, Ochun (Black Aphrodite) or any other European, Asian, African, or indigenous First World goddesses of the mysteries of love. Her nature and stories are so paradoxical, it is a challenge to believe them all at once.
Aphrodite easily captures our devotion with her allure and delightful boons. Love transports our souls into the mythic dimension where it renews or destroys depending on our fate. The mythic enters daily life as our experience. We can interact with it in ritual and experiential process therapies.
The sensational realm of the Love Goddess is the immediate experience that veils our subconscious relationship to our own unconscious sexuality and power motives. Some use wiles and tricks to attract another's attention, gifts, and strokes.
They deliberately exploit the anima/animus projections of another onto themselves, using it for personal advantage. This is the motivation of the flirt. In an egotistical identification with Aphrodite, a person becomes a lady-killer or man-eater, the stud, sex kitten, gigolo, whore, “sexual vampire,” or other role-bound image that feeds off others.
There is beauty in the rhythms of nature and our erotic nature. It begins with sensory giveness - paying attention our sensory phenomena and sensual feelings. Essentially anyone can enjoy the practice of imagining the indwelling divinity of their sexual partner, in or out of an intimate or committed relationship. We fill up our senses creating voluptuousness through poetry, imagination, eroticism, sexuality, trance, vision, and exaltation.
By honoring the sensual self, the metaphysical nature of surrender to the erotic impulse is experientially revealed as a glimpse of nondual reality The non-dual Heart is radiating as all creation, and blessing all creation, and singing this embrace through eternity: God and Goddess, Emptiness and Form, Wisdom and Compassion, Agape and Eros, Ascent and Descent -- perfectly and blissfully united.
On the positive side Aphrodite is romantic or mutual love; on the negative side narcissism, addictive love or co-dependence. A sophisticated manipulator can use sex to get what they want. Addictive lovers use others as objects of their gratification. They desire to possess people only to fulfill their neurotic needs and rarely remain friends once they split up when the enchantment is lifted. Love is the opposite of this misuse of attachment. It is based on the desire to grow and expand and for the beloved to do the same.
These are not only patterns of behavior, but concepts rooted in our belief systems and their mythic backgrounds. You might think romantic love is emotional, not an intellectual idea. Nevertheless, romantic love is a notion which builds certain expectations and follows certain patterns. Some relationships reinforce neurotic patterns in one another through forming a consensus of two, "just us against the world." Mutual brainwashing, or folie a deux, is a shared delusion which reinforces fantasy, while inner fortitude remains unchallenged.
The mind is the primary sex organ, stimulating imagination as well as the genitals. Aphrodite is an erotic and enchanting sexual fantasy. She embodies the dual capacity to delight and lead astray. No respecter of roles, an urgent search for affairs may seek unity, but creates disruption. In her myths, more than once Aphrodite herself has been “caught in the act” of her infidelities.
Queen of Sheba, Delilah, Cleopatra, and Helen of Troy as well as today’s celebrity icons embody many of Aphrodite's charismatic qualities. Helen made the egotistical error of feeling superior to the divine Queen who made her pay for her vanity. Aphrodite's energy should be recognized as a dynamism and domain that is not to be challenged competitively. She brings life's mystery with her, so mortals can never possess her fully.
Sexual Appetite
All libido is sexual energy to some extent, according to Jung. Libido is psychic energy in general and relates to the natural urges of life at any given moment. Jung associated libido with self-regulating intentionality. It “knows” where it ought to go for the overall health of the psyche. Libido is an energy arising from the Eros or "life" drive as the urge to create. It includes physiological or psychic energy associated with sexual urges as well as fantasy images which arise from the depths of the unconscious in definite forms. Such urges and affect emerge unchecked by moral authority, being a natural appetite and need, like hunger, thirst, and sleep. (Jung, CW7; CW5)
Sensual and constantly creative, Aphrodite still rises up fully blown in her majesty out of the great sea of our Unconscious to have her way with us -- the very image and icon of natural love and attraction. She is associated with nakedness, special costumes, the artful use of cosmetics -- all "the arts of love" including courtship and lovemaking. She is both the carnal and soulful aspects of romantic love.
Aphrodite conveys a sense of immortality through the oceanic bliss of love and the sensation of timelessness when we are swept away in the thundering surf of desire and orgasm. "The union of man and woman is like the mating of Heaven and Earth. It is because of their correct mating that Heaven and Earth lust forever. Humans have lost this secret and have therefore become mortal. By knowing it the Path to Immortality is opened" said Shang-Ku-San-Tai.
At the metabolic and molecular level, she functions through the glands on an instinctual level, producing pulsating physical desire. Biochemistry is fundamental, primordial. It drives our attitudes and actions towards the object of attraction. The irresistible energy breaks through our ossified routines with powerful desires, impulses, and fantasies in spite of our rational objections.
Friendly Persuasion
Sex is the single strongest intensive, euphoric, even hallucinatory natural emotion alterant available. The sex act itself creates a twilight state, including the dramatic paradoxical shift from sympathetic arousal to the afterglow of parasympathetic tranquility. Natural cycles of hyperarousal and hypoarousal balance the hemispheres of the brain, mediate fight-flight responses, and pain-pleasure cycles.
From the attractant of pheromones to the excitation of adrenaline and the release of dopamine, it is a chemical imperative – the Aphrodite cocktail. Aphrodisiacs have been sought for producing erection in the male, stimulation of the genitals or nervous system, relaxing inhibitions, augmenting physical energy, strengthening the sex glands, or preventing premature ejaculation. Along with traditional love potions, shamans and healers have long used nerve stimulants and placebos to instill love, stir up lust, and increase sexual appetite or ability in the user.
Some traditional botanical aphrodisiacs include yohimbe, kava kava root, saw palmetto, ginseng, fo-ti-tieng, black American willow bark, cactus flowers, damiana, and guarana seeds. There are no anaphrodisiacs, dampeners, or desexualizers worse than ignorance, fear, or anxiety regarding the quality and effectiveness of one's sexual performance.
The greatest sexual tonic is physical and psychological health so that we can spontaneously respond with depth. Sex is not mere lust, even if lust is sex. It transcends the animal functions and enters the realm of the cultural and spiritual, promoting feelings of mutual love, consideration, and solicitude.
Rapport is the ability to communicate and bond instantly and instinctively with others. In rapport like attracts like in a shared state of awareness. Through our mirror neurons we are paired in the biological depth of empathy, at the level of passive association of living bodies, of self and other in embodied action. We immerse fully in the process through intentionality, conscious mood-matching, emulation, and participation mystique. Emotions anchor us to the here and now with meaning and feeling values.
When we’re out of synch, relationship wanes. If our partner sees things differently, we must relearn our communications strategies to relate in a way that fits their map of the world. That is what rapport is all about. ‘Sensual empathy’, the empathic grasping of another as animated by his or her own fields of sensation, has been called 'sensing in.' It is a natural ability in all great lovers.
Both Are Changed
This is the Way of Devotion, with all of its illusions, projections, hopes, and dreams. It is the same feeling that strikes lovers and spiritual devotees (Bhakti yoga). In intimate relations, both parties are utterly changed by such encounters. The nature of Beauty is an immediate revelation of things as they are: unity, line, rhythm, tension, elegance. Aesthetic arrest stops us in our tracks in communion of the soul with the inner and outer mysteries.
The felt-sense of form and beauty is instinctual. In the union of body, soul, and spirit, the lead of the psychosexual self is transmuted or transubstantiated into the gold of a life lived from the higher Self. In modern terms, we might call it self-actualization or an intentional life.
A famous Jung quote says, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
Irresistible attraction can drive us far beyond the real needs of our personality. We become fixated. Compulsions can disrupt, derail, and detour rational life. The archetype blindly executes its own agenda, regardless of the human toll. Aphrodite crosses personal, social, and spiritual boundaries in the service of biology and transcendence.
Her vision becomes our vision -- a way of “seeing through” the veneer of everyday reality to deeper driving forces in a conscious way. We notice nature at work, stirring up our life like the waves of some vast ocean and casting us wet and naked on the beach of a Terra Incognita, an unknown world in which we have lost our bearings. Love can break over us like a tsunami, with wave upon wave of uncontrollable emotions.
Soul Symptoms
Soul enters via symptoms, and Aphrodite is soul. Jung said the gods have become diseases, and with Aphrodite rising we find ourselves ‘love-sick’ with obsession, longing and yearning. She is linked with death through longing for the departed lover. She can also inspire hate, rivalry, vanity, and jealousy. Her impulsive pathology shows in the depression and desperation of borderline personality disorder. These perils of Aphrodite, the results of unfulfilled desires, reveal the ambiguity of her gifts.
The instinctual pressure can make us deceitful and manipulative. The predatory love sorceress compels or manipulates others into loving her for her own selfish ends. In a direct, balanced love encounter, both power and love are balanced. Balance is disturbed by arousing love through power, rather than the spontaneous awakening of love which has power over both of the pair.
Another obvious example of finding this divine force as a disease is the aptly named venereal maladies, sexually transmitted afflictions, each with its own sources and consequences. There are all manner of psychobiological sexual disorders that perturb our natural sexual behaviors in a variety of ways, consciously and unconsciously. They all metaphorically draw us into the realm of Aphrodite and cause us to focus our attention on them. This is true for both the problems and blessings, as all archetypes have this paradoxical good/bad quality.
Male or female Don Juans are typically high flyers. They are impulsive, energetic, enthusiastic, and suggestible. They seem to lead an exciting, free life, spontaneously realizing their whims. Changing from partner to partner, these people play a terrible price by eternal role-playing to the companion of the moment. They can't form real relationships of any duration because they are in love with conquest of their own shape-shifting projections and fantasies. Sex addiction, with its shame and guilt, is one result of thrill-seeking behavior. “Fatal attraction” is an extreme manifestation of compulsive response, linking life and death.
Enactment: Caught in the act
Myth is actually a dynamic expression of the motivational power of the archetype at its core. The main value of ritual is for the poetic soul. If ritual is merely symbolic enactment of a myth, every sexual act is essentially an unconscious ritual. Partaking in its performance is an end in itself as it has been from the golden dawn of humanity.
The purpose of ritual lies in its expression as an art form. The spiritual import lies in the quality with which the ritual is conducted. Symbolic enactment of mythic patterns is for the sheer joy of the relationship with the archetypal dimension. Conscious awareness of such archetypal dynamics adds a depth dimension to experience. We have a biological, relational, and philosophical approach to dating and mating, all of which must be satisfied for fulfillment.
The lover seduces the beloved by instinctively making them feel special. Such attention is magic. Paradoxically in this specialness we live out one of the most common patterns from the repertoire of mankind. She embodies a goddess with that charismatic kind of grace and graciousness. Her charms remain relevant throughout the ages and constantly inspire the search for the Beloved.
When Aphrodite decrees, we are compelled to follow. Love trances are induced or triggered by archetypes or complexes, memories of places, social roles, etc. Reactions are spontaneous trance states when they happen to us. Being ‘smitten’ is one such trance – often beginning with love at first sight. Fated )Besert) or ‘star-crossed lovers’ (Heloise and Abelard, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Iseult) are examples. What fate decrees cannot help but come to pass, despite our protests or cooperation.
Sexual trance-formation can be applied to awakening or re-awakening the sensual self, overcoming dysfunctions, fears and anxieties, increasing desire and relaxation, building rapport and mutual resonance with your partner. Hypnotic suggestions can facilitate communication (sexual attraction, mirroring, congruency, mood matching), creating sexual suggestions, post-hypnotic suggestions, and response on demand. Often beginning with direct gaze and the mirroring of rapport, mutual trance induction is spontaneous and instinctual rather than predatory or contrived.
The goddess within provocatively reflects our amorous aspirations back to us in a multitude of forms. Something touches a deep chord and soul takes flight, like her symbol, the Dove. Engrossed in excited stimulation, we yearn for the birth of something new, to renew mind, body, and spirit, invigorated by energetic exchange.
The Aphroditic woman can be a physical, intellectual, or spiritual companion simultaneously. With little or no regard for the future, her perception of time is discontinuous. As lovers under her influence we feel "suspended in time." Therefore, each moment must be experienced anew, irrespective of past commitments or consequences. Intensity of immediate experience and gratification is valued over duration.
The erotic companion can also be a muse, helping to shape and guide one’s dream to fruition through the nourishment of belief. The beloved fosters dreams and encourages achievement of potential. She is alchemical, because in this sense she transmutes lead into gold. She is the epitome of the idealized “Golden Girl.”
But her myths show, that as much as we’d like to identify with her powers, she can be a jealous and vindictive force for those who might out-shine her. This trait is illustrated in the story of Eros and Psyche with its trials and tribulations. As archetype, Aphrodite retaliates when she sees her glory co-opted by a mortal personality. There is a price to pay, a ‘sacrifice.’ It reminds us that in courtship the ‘love-test’ can be a dance of approach/avoidance. We tend to lose our objectivity in love, like an artist with their works.
Involvement makes us all paradoxically vulnerable to risk/reward. Inanna's creative descent to the netherworld and return to the heavens reminds us that we need to make ourselves vulnerable to be reborn -- to make our own experiential journey and mythic retrieval and ignite the spark of transformation within ourselves.
Initiatory rebirth demands we let go of the grasping human aspects of the mundane human world, our roles and values. She abandoned both heaven and earth for this creative descent experience. Through her journey, Inanna acquires knowledge of death and the underworld to be complete in her wisdom.
The heart wants what it wants and actively and spontaneously initiates interaction. We do it and may objectively watch ourselves in that flow of passion at the same time, in awe and wonder at its power over our rational being. It makes us think and do things we never would otherwise. It is not without reason, we call it ‘falling’ in love. Whatever gods have been in charge of our attitudes and lives are toppled when Aphrodite is in ascendance.
Aphrodite makes advances and supports the advancement of dreams and visions. Aphrodite comes alive in our creative processes as well as our seductive liasons. Like a geisha she offers emotional and aesthetic succor. This isn’t just attention, but loving attention. All relational modes that are intimate in nature and affect both people spontaneously evoke Aphrodite.
We become focused and receptive, even imaginative and visionary. At the threshold of life changing experiences, in that liminal glow we can’t resist dreaming the rosy story forward. Our beloved carries a special relationship to potential realization of this dream whether it fits in with our ‘real’ life, or not. Conversely, when we split, we lose not only that special person, whether they are still valued or devalued, but our dream. The reconstitution of a new dream can be as compelling as finding a new partner.
We are drawn effortlessly by the magnetic presence of fascinating beauty. Our minds may be active but in a focused or absorbed way. Interactive energy facilitates change and growth in both parties. We can explore the exotic mystery and phenomenon of love and relationships on earth by combining sexual energy and imagination. The esoteric practice and ancient healing technique is for understanding yourself and another. The effects are healing, completing, harmonizing, and liberating. But you are generating this narrative and imagery within yourself for connecting and transcending.
When the irresistible desire for union takes precedence, Aphrodite is there. The drive – the living Presence -- may be sexual, but the impulses and non-rational urges can be psychological and even spiritual. Intercourse is her epiphany, and the more planes of mind, heart, and spirit that are penetrated, the fuller the ravishment of union. Such feelings can exalt even mundane sex. Like the Holy Spirit, her symbol is the dove.
Separation Trauma
We all suffer from the devastating crisis and wound separating culture from nature and oneself. We need to work on sustainable relationships to self, others, and the natural world as much as sustainable ecologies. A wounded heart makes it impossible to let love all the way in. We will repeat negative cycles until we learn to heal the heart, clear the pain and find our new way, individually and collectively -- healing the wounds of betrayal, convincing our hearts and mind that it is safe to trust again, to surrender, to let go.
Our core wound is a wound of the heart. All wounds of the psyche mean we are disconnected from love, cut off from the heart, cut off from other people, cut off from our true nature, thus emulating the primordial castration of Uranus, cut off from life by repressed and tormented love -- cut off from Redemptive Love. Core pain and a false self give us a negative approach that takes us down into an unbearable dark hole of pain: "I am suffering and separate from love because..."
Hiding and denying the wound of abandonment keeps it unconscious as a negative and fragmenting self-concept. We feel imperfect, worthless, inadequate, non-existent, alone, incomplete, loveless, powerless, and that we can't do enough to compensate for such short-comings. We need to believe in the body, feel and face the fear, experience the vulnerability, and invite in unconditional love, building conscious relationships. Consciousness of what is happening is a redemptive principle.
Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition.
Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind.
This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation.
The unconscious as we know can never be “done with” once and for all.
It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys.
The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided.
It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensation works with entire success.
The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts.
His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature.
Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work.
Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are. ~Carl Jung; Aion, Page 20
Resacralization of Sensuality
We all worship Aphrodite informally and devote ourselves to her arts in an effort to attract and thrive with the love we all naturally need. She is the goddess of mutual desire and emotional experience with others (friendship, understanding, soul connection, rapport, empathy), and consummation of relationships. Beyond our intentions and desires, synchronicity, fate, or destiny also play their role in our encounters – stolen, fulfilled, or denied.
We can reclaim the divinity of our bodies that may have been lost in a profane world that criticizes, abuses, represses, or thwarts our sexual expression. We can heal any shame-based attitudes, romantic assumptions, obsolete programming, and dissociations, or the wounds and trauma inflicted on us by the toxic behaviors of others. We can banish sexual ‘ghosts’ and learn to bring our whole selves into the sexual experience. Wounding opens us to compassion. Part of Aphrodite’s tremendous appeal is her vulnerability which mimics our own tortured hearts.
The Empress
The initiatory tale of Inanna is world’s oldest love poem of courtship. The poem was not just a love poem, however, but a part of the sacred rite, performed each year, known as the "sacred marriage". As The Empress, the venusian archetype in the Tarot, the king would symbolically marry the goddess Inanna, mate with her, and ensure fertility and prosperity in the land for the coming year.
Her classical symbols and qualities echo down through the aeons, exemplified in the symbolism of the venusian Tarot Trump, ‘The Empress.’ These trumps are associated with pathways on the qabalistic Tree of Life. In that system, Venus corresponds with the imaginal sphere Netzach (deathless Splendor) and is paired with the mental sphere of Hermes, Hod.
Netzach represents the dawning light of consciousness, and symbolizes the victory of light over the darkness of ignorance and understanding of the inner meaning of physical processes (the sexual instinct, in particular). Together they give birth to the sun child of Tiphareth.
Netzach means clarity or brightness, such as sincerity and truth, or perfection and glory, characteristic of our desire nature. Whatever we strongly and consistently desire is always victorious--it dominates our attention. Clarity helps us become more effective at thinking things clear through. Satiety with material desires makes them no longer attractive to us.
Detachment goads us into a search for something less transitory and more meaningful. Desire (or bhakti) can be cultivated and focused into full creativity (Tiphareth). This yoga of devotion links us back to the source. Netzach is a compassionate way of being in the world.
The imaginal qualities of the trump give rise to artistry and creativity in inner and outer life. Aphrodite can even take over the behavior patterns of other Olympian gods, most of whom aren't immune to her charms. The Empress card is attributed to Hera, as well as Venus – committed and uncommitted love.
As Hera, her goal is legally-sanctioned marital and societal life and she may sacrifice part of her needs in order to achieve it. Aphrodite has a place in Hera's realm of marriage as the highest moment for husband and wife--the pleasure of love. Aphrodite is also the passion in committed love, and also represents mature love.
She herself can become possessed by the passion she arouses in others. This assertive goddess can even take over the behavior patterns of other Olympian gods, most of whom aren't immune to her charms. But in her desire and longing she can be persuasive, deceitful, or conniving. She is always the potential lover of anyone she befriends.
Hot & Wet
But, self-possessed Aphrodite is the unfettered Queen of Hearts and orgasmic ecstasy-- the undisputed goddess of love – a primary facet of the Divine Feminine. As a blood mystery, she offers ordeals, sacrifice, and transformation. From robbing rituals to disrobing we are preceded by eons of human sexual practice of presentation, and gifting or offering.
We should also not lose sight of the fact that a big part of our sexuality takes place in our dreams, from which we can draw inspiration and self-knowledge otherwise hidden. We don’t have to act out all facets of our sexuality. Our dreams and imagination inform us as much as real life.
Psychic or psychological space is a different sort of freedom where anima and animus interact much more freely. New models of gender reunion have placed an emphasis on conscious relations with and awareness of these inner dynamics. We may be projecting, but at least we can reflectively catch ourselves in the act.
The Greeks realized that no single partner could contain the power of anima or animus indefinitely. That is why they distinguished the divine archetypal power of love as a goddess of great force and beauty. No partner can live up to the lofty conception of the projected anima or animus. This higher aspect of the soul should be given due consideration and attention for itself.
Each godform or archetype has its own style of sexuality and relating that comes into play in the compulsions of the mating drive. We may experience many varieties of attraction throughout our lifetime, depending on our situation, opportunities, and inclinations. Some archetypes distance lovers while others draw them closer toward intimate interaction.
The sensuous Aphrodite, a primordial form of the Great Mother, is magnetic, drawing others in, rather than distancing in relationship. She can be electric, stimulating our nerve endings with delightful sensations. The creative compulsion, sexual and otherwise, has its own natural inhibitions which should be heeded.
We both conceal and reveal ourselves in love, both actively and passively. In love our experiences are dramatized and magnified. Our physical exchange doesn’t have to follow any social or ritual script or prescription to produce depth and transcendence.
With a depth dimension, mutual attraction is a poetic and aesthetic act, a celebratory rite, and a marriage of matter and spirit in an experience of wholeness. Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect of alchemy. This flowstate is lyrical, epic and dramatic. Aesthetic signification is one thing, but the deep emotional impact of aesthetic arrest -- being suspended for a thrilling radiant moment in the eternal -- stops us in our tracks in a moment of self-realization.
We don’t need to support that phenomenon with any theory, jargon or interpretation. Sex is an inherently healing practice that promotes well-being. It’s about rapport, reverie, and rebirth. But like any archetypes its effects can be both positive and negative, arousing shadow behaviors and unconscious machinations.
Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception. Aesthetics is an artistic philosophy. It makes us permeable to the image, mobilizes us internally and enables imaginative activity through a form of observance. Imagery evokes a perceptual response -- an aesthetic response, a participatory way of knowing, remembering, and reconnecting with soul and identity.
Syzygy
Syzygy is a poetic term Jung used for the union of opposites -- coupling driven by the love maps, rhythms, and desires of our inner male and female counterparts. Jung called those opposites anima and animus, our internal contrasexual partners, template of our romantic ideals, wholeness and completion and the divine couple. The pattern repeats endlessly. Pulsating life is the substrate of our existence. Anima/soul and Animus/spirit merge in psychological and spiritual androgyny.
We need to be related to another individual, according to Jung, to experience the full depth of our own psyche. From an internal perspective, spiritual marriage is an inner experience which is not projected onto another living individual. In the royal marriage of the soul with the Self, the projections of anima and animus have been returned to their proper level in the personal unconscious. Our partner no longer carries an essentially religious function for us. The King and Queen are united, or conjoined, synthesizing the opposites.
One is never separated from the other, its antithesis. The syzygy has three components: a man's femininity and woman's masculinity; the experience man has of woman and vice versa; and the masculine and feminine archetypal image. Archetypal symbolic pairings are 'yoked together' by this term.
The perfect partnership includes physical and psychic compatibility of anima and animus, which fire the quest for love and myths of the soulmate. The syzygy yokes the dynamic and magnetic animus and anima. It is coupling driven by the love maps, rhythms, and desires of our inner male and female counterparts. Like the conjoined yin/yang opposites, they inspire us with a repertoire of identifications and desirable qualities for ourselves and others.
Biology is not gender, so the same nuances of yin and yang energy apply to all varieties of relationships. It isn’t so crucial to notice or define when we express male or female energies or behaviors as to know that such opposites have their own rhythms within us and in our love lives.
Jung said that the splitting into opposites makes consciousness possible, but the ‘gender binary’ cannot hold everyone. We share our minds as well as our bodies. Psychic ‘gender’ or identification is beyond physical gender, and such dynamics play out in relationships in couples of all descriptions. Both real and symbolic effects are consequential in the “neosexual revolution” that dismantles and reassembles old patterns of sexuality and diversifies intimate relationships.
Sexual Sacraments
There is a sacred intimacy between the polarities of the Divine expression within and without the Bridal Chamber. The model of human sexuality refers in one dimension to this transcendental keynote. The superficial and materialistic reduction of this ineffable mystery as human intercourse, is at best a misplaced projection and worst profaning of the sacrament. --Petros Regulum
Sacred sex is about freely expressing your emotional core. Like any myth or worldview, it has cosmological, metaphysical, sociological, and psychological aspects. If your approach to life is infused with spirit and meaning, it will be likewise in sex, with or without esoteric props, scripts, and pretenses. Passion and a merger of minds as well as bodies are more important than protocols.
When you can fully imagine your lover as God/Goddess, their transcendent embodiment of the essence of male/femaleness, you’re there. “Knowing” in the “biblical” sense is direct, undeniable experience -- a gnosis. It is ravishment, beyond rapture; complete transport to the sacred world which is beyond time, beyond decay. It conveys a sense of the eternal, the fated. It fascinates us because transformation is our biological imperative.
Can you fuse as alchemical opposites? Can you hold the multisensory vision of the lover as a divine archetypal force? Will you simply fully surrender to the sensuality, to the moment, letting the mind go blissfully blank? Do you want to transcend your psychosexual boundaries? Can you surrender completely by trusting your partner and trusting the process?
When you are generating this transcendent dramatization and imagery within yourself, Aphrodite is there. This is not just about sacred sex, but a sacred rather than profane body. So sex is an energetic merging of subtle bodies. It’s an augmented reality using spiritual technology that heightens sensual experience. It opens the couple to Cosmos, to the psychic reservoir of humanity.
Partnered Spiritual Sex
Jung linked the rites of the “royal marriage,” hieros gamos, or mysterium coniunctionis to the broader concept of the union of opposites. Erotic and religious impulses converge in the hieros gamos, an ecstatic transformation of ordinary life. Ritual practice is dated to at least 7000 BCE in the Sumerian cult of Dumuzi-Inanna, Tammuz-Ishtar, and Astarte with thematic continuity.
The desire to consciously amplify the numinous or divine aspect of encounter led to the development of sacred sex practices (inexorably linked with death) found throughout the world. The symbolic meaning of sex changes over time. Our models of sexuality are in flux.
We may experiment with sexual rituals once reserved for royals that symbolically mated to insure the fertility of the land. Our motivations today may be different but generally we seek greater well-being and range of experience. It is about feeling connected to and awed by the spiritual essence of the universe. It is merging and emerging. We can experience a rebirth or rejuvenation using a sacred sex approach during which the couple becomes an altar of worship.
Coupling can also have spiritual qualities which have echoed down through history in Courtly Love, Gnostic, Taoist, and Kabbalistic practices within or without marriage. The Celts had the practice of a ritual Morganatic marriage that only lasts for the ceremonial night, but was recognized for both its personal and collective transformative effects. The participants, in effect, become the god and goddess in one another’s eyes and that of the community.
Some methods require both parties to share the psychophysical process while others can be done quietly on the inner planes. All depend on establishing rapport and resonance with oneself, the known or unknown partner, and the cosmos. Each method has its own symbolism, practices, and goals. We can awaken and free the potential genius for love that lies within us all. We can develop compassion and empathy for self, others and cosmos.
Coupling can also have spiritual qualities when the goddess is animated as Soror Mystica, living embodiment of the Feminine, becoming a full partner in alchemical transmutation. She is considered essential to the Great Work. The sacred marriage, or coniunctio, creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials.
The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical or divine child. This process creates a cellular, alchemical, energetic rebirth into a higher order of being, symbolically called a spiritual androgyne – a symbol of psychological and spiritual wholeness. In her myth, Aphrodite gave birth to Hermaphroditus, the child of Hermes, another boundary crosser. The mother is the unconscious, the son is the conscious. Aphrodite can exhibit a bisexual aspect as a god-goddess. She embodies the golden purity of male-female wholeness emerging from the union of opposite but complementary halves.
Ordinarily, spirit, soul and body are separated from each other, even while in dynamic interaction. But when the Great Work is complete, the divine spirit is brought ‘down’ to shine through the soul and body and unifies itself with them, so they all form one and the same ‘body’
Alchemical symbolism sometimes refers to this union as the marriage of the Sun (spirit) and the Moon (soul), solar and lunar ways of knowing. Jung tells us that the queen symbolizes the body, the king stands for the spirit, and the soul unites the two in the royal marriage. Therefore, our psyche is a half bodily and half spiritual substance. When king and queen (animus/anima) unite, they form a magical hermaphroditic being which is a union of opposite energies. Their union is a hieros gamos, or sacred marriage which results in the manifestation of all things.
When the goddess is animated as Soror Mystica, she become a full partner in alchemical transmutation. Nothing else can catalyze new potential for life and even a sense of immortality quite like Aphrodite. Orgasm is practical and eternal, earthy and divine. If you have a spiritual approach to your sex life, then it will be so physically and psychically, here and now.
Love and desire change our attitudes and attitudes change our biochemistry, which reciprocally remolds us accept the overtures of others. There is magic in the persuasive power of transformation. We speak of “having chemistry” with those to whom we are attracted energetically. If we have been estranged or dissociated from our bodies through trauma, Aphrodite helps us reclaim the intimate relationship with our own physicality.
Chemistry & Coupling
We live, life moves, at the confluence of these polarities of spirit and matter, body and soul have the capacity to hold contradiction and paradox so we can become whole. Such is the Chemical Marriage, Courtly Love and tantric secrets that conceive a magical child.
We speak of “having chemistry” with those to whom we are attracted energetically. If we have been estranged or dissociated from our bodies through trauma, Aphrodite helps us reclaim the intimate relationship with our own physicality. It may be gentle or it may be irrepressible.
The sex hormones are estrogen, testosterone, and the ‘cuddle hormone’ oxytocin. Biological chemistry plays an important unconscious role in love, romance, and bonding, releasing the “feel good” chemistry of dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline. Chemistry can also crash our mood when we feel unloved, experience loss, or life events impact us as mood swings.
The endorphin haze is a liminal or spacey, even luminous consciousness that others notice as a ‘glow.’ It produces a cascade of endocrine secretions that support and sustain the state of transport. We like to bask in that glow, feeling attractive and interesting.
Eros can inflate or wound us, making the heart sink in despair through chemical modulations we experience as reactions to internal or external events and conscious or unconscious cues. The throes of new love as well as the bonds of mature love are modulated by our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system as it continues striving to merge the opposites and maintain dynamic tension.
We all know the saying that “Love is blind,” and indeed it blinds us chemically and neurologically to the shortcomings of our potential partners. We see what we want to see and show the other the best of ourselves and our behavior. But even with that intention, our complexes intrude on the process throwing a monkey wrench at nature’s prime directive to be fruitful and multiply.
Under such diminished capacity we may be sure we have met the person of our dreams, unless the unconscious intervenes and disrupts the process. We may ignore all rational warning signs of rough roads ahead. Such states persist until the honeymoon is over and power struggle begins, which in the natural cycle leads to a calmer but deeper, more mature love.
Conventional & Transgressive Love
The power of Magic is rooted in Eros. When the connection between the erotic and the occult is unconscious, repressed or hidden, the mystery of uniting the esoteric and the erotic becomes the ultimate arcane secret. It penetrates into the depths where all life is one, all boundaries broken down, body and mind fused in one. A deep and abiding awareness of the intimate interrelationship unites the opposites through the realization of imaginal workings.
We embody the myth. As in Tantra, occult ritual involves the transgression of social mores, locating and enacting cultural taboos in order to transcend constrictive boundaries. The erotic and the sexual then become a tool to experience the breaking of mundane bonds and something 'other.'
Sex can also be enhanced by a variety of aesthetic and therapeutic means, including the 64 sexual arts, described in ancient Indian literature. As ever, sex can be a double-edged sword, hurting, healing, or initiating, and that choice remains ours. It remains a challenge throughout our life-span. Unbridled or utterly wild sex is probably better represented by phallic gods, such as Pan or Priapus, whereas, we tend to associate Venus with romantic love, even though she is so much more.
Everyone has their own love style. We are fundamentally psychophysical beings, and the mind is the biggest sexual organ. Sacred sex is just part of a more integral worldview and a joyous expression of nature in the language of gesture, action, and communication. It is the feeling of eros, the relational function, and the harmony of drama. Eros is the passionate joy not only for another or a sexual lover, but even for things and animals.
We don’t need to control or transform our sexual urges if we trust in the meaningful goals of love. Nevertheless, the physical and emotional risks remain. Excitations and inhibitions remind us that the goal of Eros is always Psyche or, as the ancient myth of the Lovers shows. Passion is revealed in the urgency of the process, inward reflection of fantasies, the blinding and glorious inflations of falling in love and the descent of dejection.
There is possible and impossible love, with its own torture and suffering, regression and enthrallment. Triangles, jealousies, erotic entanglements.
Soul, Lived & Loved
The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.
~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Pages 60-61.
Even fifty shades of Golden Aphrodite are not enough to describe her sparkling facets, perceptual shifts, and revelatory access to meaning others ignore. Body reveals her essence which is Love. She is an enigma of unbound life and love, universal patterns and symbols, unconscious desires and instincts for physical passion.
Physical: In love we may feel like an infinite being, charged with a virtually infinite potential. Power can be obtained from nature. Contact is made with the divine through the body -- through sexual bliss, opening a window on the divine and the nectar of immortality. She is the primal truth of erotic connection -- felt connection to the reality of our being and toward the world.
Psychic: She is concerned with tending images - her own, those of dreams, and waking life. Anima mundi is the field of infinite meanings, created from metaphors of different places, points of view, and narratives. New understandings arrive with new images at the surprising edge of things, new expressive forms that arise of their own accord.
Body & Soul
Real love is not so much just feelings, but Presence -- the luminosity of the natural mind that dawns before us. Her truth is embodied, despite social constructions, identity theories, and hidebound roles. She is the foundation of the perceptual world.
The soul is the principle of relatedness. Soul needs meaning, belonging, community. Visible and invisible 'vision' joins us with her carnal embrace. Vision 'sees through' literal appearances to the organic and symbolic understanding of life. There is hope in meaning -- how we imagine our world.
We must have a psychic image of the body, in order to become conscious of it, we must translate the physical fact of the body into a psychic experience.
~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 221
Her autonomous archetypal field is full of nonlinear and synchronous phenomena.
Synchronicities are attributions and notions about relational phenomena, patterns of connection, spectrum phenomena of coincidence and dissociation. She is the enchanting connector, the persistent pursuer, the charismatic persuader.
Aphrodite is soul. Spontaneous imagery soulfully joins spirit and body. It doesn’t solve our troubles (pathologies) nor "save" our souls. Direct engagement, meditatio, with images for soul-making deepens us through personal experience.
We have lost touch with our primal femininity, the animating principle (nature, body, instinct). We have become estranged from the body through the mechanistic mind/body split, which is also non-relativistic. We talk a good game about 'wholeness' but don't really connect as much as nostalgically yearn for it.
James Hillman (1975) observes that soul, “refers to the deepening of events into experiences; second the significance of soul, whether in love or religious concern, derives from its special relationship with death. And third…the imaginative possibility in our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image, fantasy—that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical.”
Light of the Soul
The soul generates images unceasingly, purposefully ordering our lives. Artists are able to capture and express some of that ceaseless flow. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Physical reality becomes psychic and psyche becomes real. It "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and Outer worlds are real. They are One World. Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. They are integrated with feeling, mind, and imagination through wonder and awe. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality.
When spirit as energy and matter as form are in balance, the body becomes the living "Temple of the Spirit." A sense of immortality deepens the sacred dimension of life. Soul’s immortality is sensed in direct experience of non-spatial, non-temporal, nonlocal, four-dimensional reality. Real alchemical work is for the sake of the whole of which we are a microcosm.
Golden & Black-Hearted
Both her spotlight brightness and darkness are beyond us and may or may not serve us. Her initial shiny demeanor can tarnish when she doesn't live up to the ideal. Relations can be a dank swamp rather than a generative ocean. We can drown in the other. Some relationships can be shrouded in unconscious darkness and pathology: guile, manipulation, bad temper, frenzy, anonymity, jealousy, vanity, infidelity, even lies and deliberate misrepresentation.
Socrates' heavenly Aphrodite contrasts with the neuroses, power games, and treachery. Hence, she was know as 'the killer of men,' and 'the unholy.' Breakthrough, emergence from the unconscious sea of instincts, is never far from the breakdown of loss, death, betrayal, unrequited love, disappointment, devastation, and abandonment. Knowing our own darkness well is the best defense.
Dyads are co-constituted by the couple. Relationships, especially conscious partners, are a primal way of changing self and world. Emotions and feelings develop through interaction. For a true union, each must have a union of body and spirit within themselves. Deep sexuality is heart-based sacred sexuality.
Aphrodite's luminous quality is radiant Presence, unsuppressed Being here and now, neither in the past or future, living out the deep possibilities of who we are. The body holds the feeling, the archaic identity. Lucid meaning lies in the inherent psychological value of form itself. The divine is present in the earthy, the material.
Alchemically, earth means the body. Our physicality includes various traits, skills and abilities, such as gut reactions, body posture, tone of voice, awareness of senses (e.g., smell, taste, touch), psychosomatic connections.
Through illumined senses we can see through the nature of apparent reality for ourselves, if we but try. Things become transparent, shine and speak. Signs echo within us. Then we develop our own philosophy, apart from consensus. When it comes to questions of speculation on the unknown, we can either accept what others have said, or look for ourselves, perhaps even into delusional lunacy.
The body is influenced by emotions and thinking patterns. We can detect automatic movements of the body, the bio-energy of the body, and a connection with our physical surroundings.
Divinity is revealed in the form that shapes itself, making the world perceptible through display, exhibition, and presentation of self. We no longer see it as exclusively out there, but as processes of psychic reality within ourselves -- a comprehensive but less defined consciousness. We are shaped for reaching deeper, where soul gives birth to spirit.
Like life, love has its rewards -- the euphoria of peak experiences, exaltation, or rebirth. Dangers real and imagined include heartbreaking disappointment, disillusionment, wounding, fragmentation, dissociation, and loss. People do what they can. When we see it we know it.
Aphrodite is emotionally complex, social, outgoing, kind, yet paradoxical. She embodies mythic imagination. Coming and going, she persistently raises the imaginal question, "What if...?" These are the animated possibilities of each moment.
What if...such multiple fantasies could be realizable? The actual skills and abilities related to the emotional world that back up such realization include: empathy, emotional validation, openness, vulnerability, recognizing emotions of others, detecting automatic patterns in emotional life. It means mirroring others, emotional acceptance, emotional intelligence, selecting among emotions, sustaining positive emotions, and adapting emotional responses to various social contexts.
Aphrodite is the capacity for awareness of deep connections with our social relations. These traits, skills and abilities relate to parental relationships, close relationships, social interactions, perceiving communications styles of others. Theyinclude detecting social deception, cognitive empathy, social intuition, and flexibility in social behaviors. We get to know ourselves by developing relationships, empathetic thinking, and cognitive openness when discussing matters with others. Conversational skills help us detect hidden agendas of others.
Jung suggests we are steeped in a world created by psyche, the all-pervasive meaning and flower-like nature of natural spiritual development. "The materialistic premise is that the physical process causally determines the psychic process. The spiritualistic premise is the reverse of this." (Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 366).
Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness. ~Carl Jung, CW 9ii, Pages 26-27
The natural light of the soul is illumination, embodied in the pineal light of the “spirit molecule,” DMT. Likewise, alchemists seek the divine spark, the light hidden in matter. To work creatively in the world, the Light of Nature needs to be released through inner alchemy. Our own light or divine spark is part of the light of the World Soul, so we can understand the mysteries of creation and the secrets of nature. The tools of inner transformation help Anima Mundi reveal her divine light.
Whether called Isis, Shakti, Maya, Shekinah, Sophia, Aphrodite, Demeter/Persephone, Mary, Great Mother, White Goddess or any cultural variant, Anima Mundi is the universal animating principle, the upwelling spring of the creative Imagination, the dynamic flow of imagery, pattern, and form. She is personified internally as a soul guide or Initiatrix and externally embodied as the Soror Mystica. Glimpsing inspiring inner workings of our soul helps us realign our lives, our hopes and our dreams.
We are partly empirical and partly transcendental -- a glorious body with natural instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, creative impulses, etc. Our bodies are filled with energy that streams through us with the warmth that flows in our veins.
Just like banal reality can be a redeemer, so can ordinary healthy relationships. The exaggerated highs and lows of high-octane but toxic relationships deepen in trauma-bonds, emotional oscillation, and wounding, as in the narcissist/empath match. In a letter, Charlie Chaplin told his daughter Geraldine," Your naked body should only belong to those who fall in love with your naked soul.”
The unconscious is the living psyche and remains archaic. We tend to convert physical events into psychic processes in unconscious fantasies and metaphors such as 'desire springs up from the depths'. Lovers find the beauty in one another and an enlightened sex life with transparency and presence. We have immediate knowledge only of psychic existence, psychic images of instincts. We are 'touched' in the deepest emotional sense, connecting through the heart.
"Switch off your noisy consciousness and listen quietly inwards and look at the images that appear before your inner eye, or hearken to the words which the muscles of your speech apparatus are trying to form." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. 1, Page 82
"All the difficulties you overcome in such a fantasy are symbolic expressions of psychological difficulties in yourself, and inasmuch as you overcome them in your imagination you also overcome them in your psyche." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 109.
"I am indeed convinced that creative imagination is the only primordial phenomenon accessible to us, the real Ground of the psyche, the only immediate reality." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 60
Feminine wisdom is a soulful understanding of life. Jung calls imagination a psychic process. He claims (Psychological Reflections, 98:889 ), "it is completely irrelevant whether the enlightenment is 'real' or imaginary." So, whether you think you are enlightened or not is a psychic fact, even when illusory or lying.
According to Jung, "Events signify nothing, they signify only in us. We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it." (The Red Book, Page 239). Does an event open your heart in compassion or close it in judgment? Is there pleasure, joy, courage?
In love, we can interpret things correctly or incorrectly. Projections, fantasy, and delusion are psychic actualities, psychic truth. But in the meanwhile, we attribute our internal ideals to a normally fallible individual.
No one can exhaust psychic Being's mysteries of love. Jung says, "Your destiny is the result of the collaboration between the conscious and the unconscious." (Letters Vol. I, Page 283.) He implies that there are those who love others, those who love the souls of others, and those who love their own souls.
Soul images can be the ground of artistic inspiration, philosophical speculation, quasi-religious idiosyncratic beliefs, or squandered in licentiousness. Jung links anima to our philosophical potential. Anima is synonymous with Aphrodite.
Aphrodite is an autonomous relater. Independent but open, she carries our story as body language, shared feelings, and sensations. Relationships can be incandescent and joyfully fated or tragic and torturous. She ignites a tremendous amount of libidinous energy in us.
The greater the tension, the greater is the potential. Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension between opposites. To unite the opposites we first have to find the questions we are trying to reconcile. No experience is lived in vain. She makes it a richer experience -- a transformation that is not an identity from social institutions or civilizations but from a deeper realm.
"Far from being a material world, this is a psychic world, which allows us to make only indirect and hypothetical inferences about the real nature of matter. The psychic, alone has immediate reality, and this includes all forms of the psychic, even the 'unreal' ideas and thoughts which refer to nothing 'external'. We may call them 'imagination' or 'delusion,' but that does detract in any way from their effectiveness..." (Jung, CW, 81:Para 747)
Aphrodite Urania is the "heavenly," wisdom, or spiritual facet of the goddess. Aphrodite Genatrix is the goddess of marriage; and Aphrodite Pandemos the goddess of lust. The mediatrix has numerous other epithets and qualities.
Her glories, follies, and pathology have paradoxical internal and external effects on our cosmos (worldview), environment and being in conscious and unconscious personal, social, and spiritual dimensions. Everything 'out there' is us; the whole body is psyche -- what it does, how it moves, how we feel.
Love is elemental. If we truly loved mother earth, we would be deeply listening. We feel it in the water; we sense it in the earth; we smell it in the air; we refine it in the fire. "Air" thinkers prioritizes communication; "Earth" types are practical and grounded; "Water" tends toward emotion and intuition; while "Fire" is creative and enthusiastic. Jung describes the elements of the body:
"The Earth element is “She who causes fall'; the water element is 'She who
kills'; the fire element' She who summons ';the air element 'The Lady of Dances' and the ether element is 'She who has the net of Lotuses'." (ETH Lecture, 20 Jan. 1059)
Thus, the alchemical process also begins with such a division into the four elements, by which the body is put back into its primordial state and so can undergo transformation. ~Carl Jung, Children’s Dreams, Page 367.
Men are attracted to women who reflect their anima, and women are attracted to men that exemplify her animus. In “The Process of Individuation,” Marie-Louise von Franz describes how a man’s anima attraction moves from the erotically attractive woman, to the romantic beauty, then the mature woman, and finally to the woman of wisdom. Animus images likewise morph from the physically attractive man, to the romantic man, the man of action, and the man of wisdom.
But such "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" stereotypes fail in more complex gender issues. We all have male and female elements, male and female hormones, etc. LGBT individuals are helping us understand the distortions and distinctions between gender and sexuality in less polarized terms with new ways of discovering the hidden side of the psyche.
Unmet childhood needs are transferred to the romantic arena, often recreating that earlier situation, roles, and traumas echoing the past. The romantic search for our missing half can take on religious proportions. The search for Aphrodite is part of all out lives. Spiritual yearning can be misplaced onto concrete objects or charismatic people. We can even use beloved pets compulsively and addictively.
Cultures are relative, not some kind of metaphysical superspace.
We live in an ecology of internal and external influences, including the presence or absence of love. "The beginning of all things is love, but the being of things is life," Carl Jung says. (The Red Book; Page 327.)
The first stage of love is psychic. Aphrodite mirrors all experiences, including our potential immortality, back to our own consciousness. But a glimpse of the deeper self of another does not insure longterm compatibility in lifestyle, values, or personality. We may let them carry our unlived life potential and avoid that self-development. The world is a waiting lover. The romantic search for the beloved is spiritual longing for divine communion.
In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates says: “Every lover is fain that his beloved should be of a nature like to his own god...his every act is aimed at bringing the beloved to be like unto himself and unto the god of their worship."
Aphrodite represents the soul of beauty -- luminous, incorruptible, and radiant -- the holy grail of life. Love itself is a kind of "knowing," soulful engagement with the world. Consciousness proceeds from symbiotic, to magical, to mythical, to rational, to transpersonal growth. Adult relationship only emerges at the rational, not archaic stages.
"Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit"
C.G.Jung,C.W.13,par.229
Psyche fosters the deliteralization of life. Animism informed all life as the worldview that animals, plants, and inanimate objects—possess a soul or spiritual essence. As Plotinus said, "The stars are like letters which inscribe themselves at every moment on the sky. Everything in the world is full of signs. All events are coordinated. All things depend on each other; as has been said: "Everything breathes together."
Are we part of the inherent fabric of the universe or just an accidental by-product? One answer may lie in the nature of our consciousness. Some conscious contents disappear into the unconscious while others arise from it, an outgrowth of the depths.
Animism is mirrored in modern scientific theory as panpsychism, the doctrine or belief that everything material, however small, has an element of individual consciousness. Emergent panpsychism denies that macroexperience is grounded
in microexperience.
Panprotopsychism is the view that fundamental entities are proto-conscious: they have certain special properties that are precursors to consciousness and that can collectively constitute consciousness in larger systems. If it is the ground of macroexperience, all phenomenal truths are grounded in protophenomenal truths concerning these entities -- for example, fundamentals of mass and charge.
This ground for both physical and phenomenal properties may be mixed -- some phenomenal and some protophenomenal or unrelated to the phenomenal. Panprotopsychism does not need subjects at the bottom level. (Chalmers)
The idea that some fundamental physical entities have protophenomenal properties is a modern retrievals of archaic thought. It's all ensouled psychic being with phenomenal properties, as personified by the beauty of Aphrodite.
Myth can collide or synchronize with personal history. Beyond mythic escapades, her archetype describes how psyche experiences physical facts, including distorted body image, emotional flooding (sudden reaction syndrome), addiction to sexual trauma and relationships. When we are dominated by our anima or animus, we uncritically believe everything the autonomous inner figures suggest.
Mystical knowledge effects a transformation. Mind penetrates the center of being, void of images and conceptual thinking, and we begin to see differently, informed by perceptual solitude discovered in descent. We "polish the mirror of the heart" with daily practice. Existential 'nakedness' is emptying the mind of all concepts and imagery.
Aphrodite's yoga is bhakti, the highest function of the soul -- union through love, devotion, and adoration of the divine as a path of self-realization. Bhakti -- the force of attraction -- is the most direct method to experience the unity of mind, body and spirit. But we must use discernment when we choose to devote ourselves. Devotion to the divine, in whatever form or non-form you care to imagine, is the unveiling of soul.
It is a matter of psychic transformation of subjective lived experience, transmuting compulsive (addictive) desire into more refined energy. "You shall love your crooked neighbor with your crooked heart," W.H. Auden wrote. We can become toxically enmeshed, romancing our own or another's shadow.
The common lover's fantasy of devotion remains questionable, riddled with projections and personal issues. If we need healing, the lover is the healer; if we need rescuing they are savior, or priest, or guru, etc., or so it seems until it flips to the reverse.
The teacher-student archetype presents an aspiration and a burden of desire for spiritual power, disillusionment, and spiritual shadow. The beloved can also appear as an autonomous soul-sibling. Instead of projection, the beloved ideal can become an inner guide. "At any rate we can never treat the anima with moral reprimands; instead of this we have, or there is, wisdom, which in our days seems to have passed into oblivion." ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 193
Psychological understanding fills us with the breath of life. In his ETH lectures, Jung calls alchemy "a curious sort of initiation, a sort of practical yoga." Aphrodite's alchemy -- a projection of cosmic and spiritual drama -- is refinement. Transformed emotions increase our capacity to contain and express life with conscious femininity. The great work rescues soul and redeems cosmos. Withdrawing spiritual projections, we regain our own radiance.
The coniunctio in alchemy is a union of the masculine and feminine, of the spiritual and material principles, from which a perfect body arises, the glorified body after the Last Judgement, the resurrection body. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Page 159.
This means an eternal body, or the subtle body, which is designated in alchemy as the philosopher's stone, the lapis aethereus or invisibilis. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lectures, Pages 159.
"But there is something which can be proved from everyday experience, not body becoming spirit, but body becoming conscious, man becomes conscious of his body." (Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940)
Nature shapes existence. A cosmology of love is revealed in the radiance of light from the macrocosm to the microcosm -- a soul of light. An ancient Pyramid Text (Morrow) says, "Pure energy, the nature of light, underlies all. We emerge from and dissolve back into this radiant ground. Not only can you know this—you are this." Aphrodite is this ocean of light -- the holographic ocean of energy.
Hillman says, "Aphrodite is what makes something light up so you want it.” Light is seductive and tempts us toward disembodied transcendence -- a death wish toward matter, toward our disowned substance and darkness. There's no real awareness without death. Even death is a sensuous experience to be embraced.
Life behaves as if it were going on, and so I think it is better for an old person to live on, to look forward to the next day, as if he had to spend centuries, and then he lives properly. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 438
One needs death to be able to harvest the fruit. Without death, life would be meaningless, since the long-lasting rises again and denies its own meaning. To be, and to enjoy your being, you need death, and limitation enables you to fulfill your being. (Jung, Liber Novus, pg. 267)
Embodied psyche is experiential integration and natural instinctive psyche -- wild vitality, rapture, primordial revelation, and body wisdom. “The universes which are amenable to the intellect can never satisfy the instincts of the heart.”
(Anon, The Cloud of Unknowing).
We experience primordial wholeness through primordial images in the ancient dynamics in all kinds of love; we enter an enchanted realm. As Jung reminds, "The soul demands your folly; not your wisdom." (The Red Book, Page 264.)
In identification, the beloved "captivates" us and becomes a component in our own self-image. Falling in love is an altered state. Unformed psyche takes on form. We begin thinking in primordial images of our transgenerational ground – in symbols older than historical mankind.
Our deepest ground is the primordial experience of archaic gods and goddesses -- their lived meaning. Myth is one form of knowledge of the primordial psyche. Archaic remnants rise into consciousness and embodiment.
It is for this reason that the alchemists believed in the truth of “matter,”
because “matter” was actually their own psychic life.
~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Page 228
Love of Form for Its Own Sake
Psyche mirrors matter. What is Above mirrors that which is down Below. Anima is the primordial carrier of psyche, or the archetype of psyche itself, according to Hillman.
Her meaning is form itself, here and now. Essence shines through appearance -- the divinity of form in shape itself. It may well be that primordial psyche plays a role as primal as matter, energy, and space-time.
We must have a psychic image of the body, in order to become conscious of it, we must translate the physical fact of the body into a psychic experience.
~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture IX, Page 221.
Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in man, that which lives of itself and causes life…. With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived. She is full of snares, and traps, in order that man should fall, should reach the earth, entangle himself there, and stay caught….
--Jung, CW 9, i, 56
She projects herself into consciousness through expression; expression is her art, whether in the extraordinary artfulness of symptom formation and clinical ‘picture’ or the artifices of anima bewitchments. And the wisdom that Sophia imparts is seeing sophically into these expressions, seeing the art in the symptoms. --James Hillman
The anima makes possible a ‘purely human relationship independent of the maternal element of procreation.’ (CW 10, 76)…. The movement from mother to anima represents this shift in perspective from naturalistic to psychological understanding. In alchemy the relationship corresponding with the psychological perspective was exemplified in the adept’s relationship with the anima-soror. --James Hillman
The anima makes possible a ‘purely human relationship independent of the maternal element of procreation.’ (CW 10, 76)…. The movement from mother to anima represents this shift in perspective from naturalistic to psychological understanding. In alchemy the relationship corresponding with the psychological perspective was exemplified in the adept’s relationship with the anima-soror. --James Hillman
Reconnection with Soma
Soul and body are not two things. They are one.
~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 355
First: these qualities are differentiated and separate in us; therefore they do not cancel each other out, but are effective. Thus we are the victims of the pairs of opposites. The Pleroma is rent within us. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 348.
Not the power of the flesh, but of love, should be broken for the sake of life, since life stands above love. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book, Page 326.
After all, if you should still get stuck, there is always the enantiodromia from the unconscious, whichopens new avenues when conscious will and vision are failing. ~Carl Jung, C.G. Jung Speaking, Pages 158-159.
The transcendent function is not something one does oneself; it comes rather from experiencing the conflict of opposites. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 269
Integration unites the opposites of spirit and body, light and dark. In Holding the Tension of the Opposites, Marion Woodman tells us, "By uniting both sides of the unconscious, we attune to those around us and to the energy within the earth itself."
Soul unites the visible and invisible. This coniunctio implies the birth of
new possibilities. As Aphrodite is born from the sea, consciousness is born from oceanic feeling that promises to lead to conscious, ecstatic union with the divine, and feeling limitless in love or religious sentiment. It relates to the oceanic waves of pleasure and paradoxical suspension in ecstasy or synesthesia. It is mirrored in intuitive poetic sensibilities.
Ancient philosophers proclaimed the world soul, a pure ethereal spirit, is diffused throughout all nature. The notion of soul as imaginative possibility, in relation to the archai or root metaphors, is what Hillman has termed the “poetic basis of mind.” Whitening into psychic reality is embodiment of spirit and inspiriting of body, eliminating oppositional tension.
Michael Malone models Pychetypes (1978): "Thinking and feeling types are always continuous; sensation types and intuitives are always discontinuous. "Various types perceive space as either volcanic (concrete), ethereal (abstract), territorial (structured), or without boundaries (oceanic)." This includes intuitive and feeling oceanic types and oceanic spiritual experiences.
Oceanic feeling can be a regression to undifferentiated feeling and loosening of ego boundaries, dissolution of sensory boundaries, the amniotic state of unconscious fusion. The original chaos of infantile wholeness which is regressive, amorphous, and sentimental, is differentiated in a higher state of differentiated consciousness, governed by the Self, not Mother archetype.
In aesthetics, oceanic changes in existential feeling can lead to a wider process of artistic self-transformation and to a restructuring of fundamental relations with oneself, others, and the world. Mystics speak of the 'drop' merging in the ocean of bliss -- the ocean of universal mind. It also relates to the imagery of alchemical 'solutio.'
Conversely, we can find ourselves adrift in the ocean of emotion, emotional flooding. Drowning in such emotions, being overwhelmed, can be triggered by a partner, stress, or memories. When the Self is activated romantically, we feel special and exalted. The Self is projected onto the idealized Other, as soul mate, hero, savior, goddess, etc.
“Soul-making is allowing the eternal essence to enter and experience the outer world through all the orifices of the body … so that the soul grows during its time on Earth. It grows like an embryo in the womb. Soul-making is constantly confronting the paradox that an eternal being is dwelling in a temporal body. That’s why it suffers, and learns by heart.” (Woodman, Leaving My Father's House)
Aphrodite impacts us personally, intimately, in her heavenly, common, and chthonic forms. Her "common love" seeks fulfillment in the human sphere. She is the hidden meaning in our suffering.
This is the way of élan vital, biological truth, and embodied awareness or body awareness -- the psychophysical basis of love, psychic integration of symbolism, and spiritual union. The coniunctio, or hieros gamos is the central component of the mystery of the Tao or unus mundus -- the lost secret of enlightenment.
Spirit and body meet in the movement of soul. Sexual energy is symbolized by fire, water, and light. The great light casts a dark shadow -- the driving strength of our own soul to make life, dissolving the boundary between our psyche and the psyche of the earth.
Sex & Death
The way that leads to Aphrodite is also the way of the life-death dichotomy, the Art of Death, including the intimations of the petit mort, or "little death." Taoism suggests that to die is not to perish but to be eternally present.
Mirroring the Sumerian sky goddess Inanna, Aphrodite Persephaessa has chthonic associations with the underworld of psyche, which is an immortal realm. "Black Aphrodite" was also called "the dark one." She brings life to death in rebirth for nature and humanity -- for the foresaken body.
Religion is the art of death. We protect ourselves with rituals and taboos from our ancestral worlds that protect us from Mystery and the unknown. We descend into the redeeming darkness, making that walk, not because we want to, but because we must.
Initiatory descent signifies the removal of illusion, denial, and repression, through experiential death and rebirth, so soul and spirit can resonate together. This is intense bottom-up processing which is then brought back to daily life in the return.
The Romantics used the metaphor and images of descent. Their whole-hearted quest is inward and downward, into the hidden regions of the underworld. It is natural to descend in the inner world into more profound depths of consciousness. Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell describes a "descent" into the "subterranean void" of the unconscious, where salvation lies -- a reconciliation with the heart of cosmos.
“All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.” (Perera, Descent to the Goddess, 1981)
In many ancient myths, descent is an integral part of the Great Feminine Round of Life and Death. "You cannot be redeemed without having undergone the transformation in the initiation process." (Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 502.)
We are mortal and vulnerable. We live in a world of catastrophe and chaos, personal loss and social threat. We are thrown down by chaotic defensive furies, such as desire, rage, and greed. We are helped up by the dynamics of rebirth. Miraculously, we find our way to life again.
Hathor was an Egyptian sky deity of fertility and erotic love. She was called "Lady of the West," as a euphemism for the afterlife. The same chthonic archetype appears as witches and sirens, the seductress, or hierodule, who possess or exploit. They derive their energy from the untransformed primordial psyche.
"I saw how we live toward death, how the swaying golden wheat sinks together under the scythe of the reaper, like a smooth wave on the sea-beach."
(Jung, The Red Book, Page 268.)
Sex & Life
Aphrodite is air become rising breath -- the very "breath of life."
And words are made of nothing but breath -- living psyche.
The Word is the creative act, including the language of our instincts.
Only that living breath connects us to the fact of all existence.
However, Taoism says,The truth is not always beautiful
Nor are beautiful words, always the truth
~Tao teh Ching~ Ch 81
You see, life wants to be real; if you love life you want to live really, not as a mere promise hovering above things. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 508
Mistress of the Labyrinth, Aphrodite-Ariadne, (goddess of paths, wine, snakes, passion, and fertility) symbolizes vast convoluted mazes of entangled memories and transgenerational relationships. The monster at the center of the maze is a symbol of animal desire, carnal needs, and fleshly pursuits. The hero conquers and transcends it.
Traumas, fixations, phobias and anxieties are potential trans-generational memories. We are each a living story influenced by the unhealed burdens of past generations and historical trauma: unresolved conflicts, beliefs, individual roles. Family of origin unconsciously continues to influence our current relationships and level of functioning. Emotional shocks can create psychophysical disorders or recreate the emotional conditions of original trauma.
The goddess behind our primordial images and symbols remains otherwise inaccessible as the imagistic potential of Nature. Our destiny and our myth are found in the images of our psyche -- what is lost and what is redeemed. We weigh our lives in the balance of love and loss. Our loves write the story of our own impermanence.
We embody time with temporal and spatial metaphors. The fleetingness of time and unbridgeable distance profoundly affect our loves. Every inevitable loss evokes all loss. Emotional arousal, attention, fluency, reverie, and motivations can reduce psychological distance.
We live out our own vision of life with its necessary errors and misperceptions. Transformations are losses, too, which require mourning or grief to complete transitions of the heart. Even lost love continues to radiate light and inform our lives in which we continue to want what we cannot have.
Post-modernists, like Debord, caution that the proliferation of images and desires alienates us, not only from ourselves, but from each other. The path of discovery is full of sharp and dull pains. Our most personal experiences are the most universal -- the pursuit of the Beloved.
This serpentine path represents a soul journey to our own center and back again to the world with that sacred connection. On our individual path we overcome our own obstacles and expose our own illusions. As Joseph Campbell suggests,
The idea is to find your own pathway to bliss."
Aphrodite informs the heart of the journey. Participatory wisdom suggests bringing the sacred back into the material realm. The aspirant balances the four psychic elements of instinctual awareness -- earth, air, fire, and water.
Others may help us avoid false paths, but sometimes we veer off on necessary detours from our planned roadmap. Our participation in the whole gives it meaning. Psyche initiates. Because the serpent sheds its skin as it grows, it represents cyclic life and is associated with the Tree of Life.
"The growing one is the Tree of Life. It greens by heaping up growing living matter." ~Philemon, Liber Novus, Page 351
"The serpent represents magical power, which also appears where animal drives are aroused imperceptibly in us." (Jung, Liber Novus, Page 366).
"The serpent shows the way to hidden things and expresses the introverting libido, which leads man to go beyond the point of safety, and beyond the limits of consciousness, as expressed by the deep crater." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 102)
Nothing makes this effect clearer than the serpent. It signifies everything dangerous and everything bad, everything nocturnal and uncanny, which adheres to Logos as well as to Eros, so long as they can work as the dark and unrecognized principles of the unconscious spirit. ~Jung, Liber Novus, Page 365.
This suggests that Eros does not tend toward the right, the side of consciousness, conscious will and conscious choice, but toward the side of the heart, which is less subject to our conscious will. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 366.
Aphrodite's symbol is the ankh-cross, symbol of the millions of years of life to come. The inexhaustible essence of the life force is a key of life that represents physical and immortal life and death, male and female balance, art knowledge wisdom, reproduction and sexual union. Her cosmology is that all life is connected with an interwoven animating energy, naked fullness, and loving receptivity.
Tradition says the possessor of the geometric key to the hidden mysteries is able to open the gates of the Kingdom of the Dead and penetrate the hidden meaning of eternal life. The ankh is identified with the Tree of Life, its trunk and foliage -- the nervous, glandular, and endocrine systems.
The ankh-like symbol from ancient Mycenae and Cyprus became the symbol for both copper and the goddess Aphrodite, and for the feminine -- carnal and creative fertility, and the sacredness of procreation. Coptic Christians used it instead of the Latin cross.
Interiorization
Conceptual analysis of common, romantic or ideal love can be rather dry or predictable. We all have a keen grasp of the obvious when it comes to love goddess myths and basic psychology. Two people fall in love and build their romantic world. Hopefully, we will introduce dormant associations from the unconscious to restore the bond with cosmos that enfolds humanity with a universal sense of meaning.
Interiorizing means to internalize or cause feelings and values, for example, to become an interior or internal part of one's mental or spiritual being. We make them a part of our own inner being, mental structure, or inner life -- an impression full of grace.
It is a change in the center of gravity of our consciousness. We give unreserved attention to the unfolding core or essence of the process -- the soul of the concept. An inner dynamic or metaphor cannot be reduced to a biological substrate. The core metaphor unfolds hermeneutically on its own terms.
Ancient rituals were internalized to discover the inward universe. The tantric interiorization of Buddhist ritual did not reject ritual. Nor did it psychologize. It did not reduce ritual, to 'the spiritual state of the faithful,' but a commitment to the independent manifestations of phenomenology. Like ritual, we can interiorize sacred space, even sacrifice.
Consciousness speaking about itself is devoted attention to the phenomenon as it unfolds itself revealing its inner truth or essence -- a mental or noetic perception. Phenomena retains its own independence, its own essential truth, its own "truth" and “subjectivity.”
The mode of apprehension becomes an object which is itself transformed through its own act of knowing the independent phenomenon of dreams, emotions, ideas, and feelings. It is a receptive rather than intentional approach to emotions, images, ideas, etc., which are understood as expressing underlying structures or “thought.”
When we are smitten, it is like the French expression le coup de foudre, literally, a "bolt of lightning" or "thunderbolt." Figuratively, it is "love at first sight." It can be a huge a shock to the system that washes away boundaries, exaggerating panic about deflation. Devotion abd love itself can be extreme -- a transformative madness or healing balm that eases our emotional pain.
Identification with the numinous also leads to dangerous ego inflation, overidentification, or 'possession' -- seizure of the psyche by a seductive archetype and overexpansion. Inflation is the misuse of transcendental energy. In extreme states the nonpersonal unconscious can form a vortex that pulls us under a stormy sea.
We value our moments of emotional love as highly as any human experience. We find the meaning of life in love -- as caretaker and care receiver -- compassionate response and love for self, others, life itself, and beauty. The soul can rest in love.
Suffering is not an illness; it is the normal counterpole to happiness.
~Carl Jung, CW 18, Para 179
When a loving healing presence or self-care is missing we suffer from wounds of omission or lack of love (numbing, emotional unavailability, approach/avoidance, grief, depression, stroke deficiency, denial, instability, abandonment) in the immediate environment and larger world.
An ensouled world mirrors our own love, death, sorrow, happiness and much more. We see-through the surface of a world that needs mirroring. We don't need to burden images with too many meaningful ideas as much as let them live and breath through us.
Soul reveal itself spontaneously and irrationally. It amplifies our understanding of observed phenomena. A flow of ideas arises from the image. We develop a dark-adapted eye for the unexpected or less apparent. A narrative emerges from finding hidden value in the depths.
Each reader -- anyone who has had or lost a love -- finds their own revelations arising within. It isn't what you look at, but what you see with the Art of Seeing --
a perceptual framework. Jung notes, "The unconscious mind sees correctly even when conscious reason is blind." And Goethe, "everyone sees what he carries in his heart."
And, Jung, again, "What the heart hears are the great, all-embracing things of life, the experiences which we do not arrange ourselves but which happen to us." (CW 18, Para 1719). "The heartstrings sing like an Aeolian harp only under the gentle breath of a mood, an intuition, which does not drown the song but listens." (Jung, CW 18, Para 1719) "The utterances of the heart— unlike those of the discriminating intellect—always relate to the whole." (Jung, CW 18, Para 1719)
James Hillman suggests a process of "seeing through" phenomena to the archetypal basis of being, mythologizing, and deliteralizing -- transparence rather than transcendence. The beauty of images, their architecture, and the frames of our consciousness are foundational to soul and its image making. We see through the concrete givens, our language, and our metaphors to psyche. Psyche finds itself and is enlightened by seeing through the hidden yet revealed illusion of separation.
An act of imagination, active imagination means engaging perception with desire. Hillman (1976) said, “love, too, can be a method of psychologizing, of seeing into and seeing-through, of going ever deeper” (Revisioning Psychology, p. 136). In that magical world symbols are alive. The Tibetan Book of the Dead defines both our experience in this world and in the supernatural realm as desire and temptation. Even things that seem like they aren't connected, suddenly are.
The Heart of Soul Work
We can imagine Aphrodite much more broadly as the relativity of all psychological phenomena and symbolic imagination. Psyche and soma are joined by the bridge of imagination. In the phenomenological view, symbols emerge from human engagement with the social and material environment just as psychic life emerges from embodied action in the world.
Soulwork is the art of living soulfully and fully embodied, consciously aware of the depth dimension and its interaction with our body, emotions, mind, and spirituality. Through myth we participate in our own transcendence. Aphrodite's way is a soul-centered, open-hearted way of being. The dreamy nature of love is symbolically retained in her fluidity, meter, and rhyme.
The imaginal world of the spirit is not separate from the material world. It is active participation within a world enlivened with meaning as well as respect for dreams. Our psychosocial and physical aspects are part of one symbolic world. In a colloquial sense, it just boils down to who you want to be 'in bed' with, physically, symbolically, and collectively.
Anatomical knowledge does not tell us how we fill our own bodies but psychic experience does give us information on this point. We fill our bodies as if through inner streams. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 26 Jan 1940.
Our perception of reality differs from reality itself. Cognitive neuroscience suggests that body awareness is a complex and multifaceted structure. It can be dissociated in several subcomponents, possibly underpinned by different brain circuits.
One example is ideomotor responses during hypnosis when the body can answer questions the rational mind cannot. The body produces unconscious signals or physical manifestations of mental events. Suggestion or expectation has an influence on involuntary and unconscious motor behavior. This involuntary movement of the body is a subconsciously produced response to a thought, feeling, or idea.
A sense of meeting in the imagination arises, revealing the dual structure of individuality, otherwise unknowable. This mighty source of psychic energy fuels imagination to create a field of inner freedom and curatorial narrative. Narratives, both personal and collective, arise from the desire to have life display coherence, integrity, fullness, disclosure, and closure.
Like Aphrodite, this essay seeks to titillate, to provoke, to promise even more than it may deliver of the mysteries and hidden charms of existence. No vacuous nymphomaniacs here. It won't cover all of her aspects, exploits, or relationships, nor means of apprehending it.
We may even skip promiscuously from subject to subject like a dreamer. She is with us on threshold of life's greatest decisions. In The Red Book, Philemon tells Jung, "Joy comes from fulfillment, but not from longing." (Pg. 341). Certain primordial human desires are not mainly concerned with possibility, but with desirability.
Sensing the Body
It is absolutely necessary to grasp every psychic process with all the four functions, otherwise we only grasp a quarter of it. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10th Feb 1939
Imagination is a deep and inexhaustible archetypal field. When we cultivate deep imagination we cultivate soul in the world -- anima mundi. We continue to move and expand our depth in the vast energy field of personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal love, softening and opening our hearts.
The ego "takes the plunge," it lets go and dissolves its old matrix, its old boundaries. When its boundaries melt, ego-consciousness dissolves into deep consciousness. The "wave merges with the ocean," and experiences its own deep transpersonal nature. It moves swiftly through the fear and pain, awakening to an infinitely wider reality of universal energy waves. In the ocean of creativity, "your own consciousness, shining, void and inseparable from the great body of radiance, has no birth, nor death." (Leary, 1964).
Jung associated universal mind, as the transpersonal source of being, with the Collective Unconscious, which contains all information in subtle form. All things in the universe have a connection with the universal mind. Nothing can exist without that unmanifest connection to everything else. Separation is an illusion for we are all one. In her relation with the world, Aphrodite is both the Universal Cause, Universal Soul. and Universal Mind -- matter, energy, spirit.
Soulful love is a spiritual path. Most of us have suffered the pathos, confusion and pain, trust and betrayal, jealousy, need for power, loss of identity, erotic fantasy, and even co-dependence. They are born from both our dysfunction and deep longing for authenticity. "Creative life always stands outside convention." (Jung, CW 17, Para 305).
As the goddess does in her own affairs, we may take flight from subject to subject, all in her honorable name. Imagine Cleopatra amplifying her own majesty taking on the aspect of Isis.
Komarius teaches Cleopatra that the dead who stay in Hades [that is in chaos) are transformed into Spring flowers by the miraculous dew. This is the idea of the living elements in chaos or Shunyata waking and uniting through being contained in the lotus. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3Mar1939, Page 101.
The mystical rose, like the lotus in India, grows for the salvation of man.
~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 3, Mar1939, Page 101.
The red rose is a symbol of the heart; her symbol of bees is like the humming sound of the primordial OM -- a singing sound and a humming sound -- the magnetic voice of the silence. "The western rose is wholly parallel to the eastern lotus." (Jung, Modern Psychology, Page 21). As for the 'rose' attribution, she is the bud which contains the becoming being that undergoes transformation through entrainment with the fundamental rhythms of arousal and relaxation.
Love ignites at least twelve convoluted brain regions in love, releasing hormones and neurotransmitters. The reward circuit activates the limbic system, hippocampus (memory), frontal lobes, vision, and more. They create sensations of attraction, arousal, pleasure, and obsession. As in social life, it's all about how they interact -- eros (feeling life) and pathos -- the original of archetypal wound in the heart of the gods.
Mythic Retrieval
Myths encapsulate and personify universal instinctual experience. Retrieving the myth is a contemporary form of spirituality, helping us revision the erotic encounter and amorous exchange. It differs from religion in the sense Jung explains: "There is religious sentimentality instead of the numinosum of divine experience. This is the well-known characteristic of a religion that has lost its living mystery." (CW 11, Para 52)
Just enough religious scruples inform us of the proper performance of rites to venerate the gods and touch our existential core. We need only enough religio, to reconnect, bind us back or bind us to the god/goddess. She arouses us -- physically, psychically, spiritually -- which elevates simple biological acts to the sublime. 'Divine Lady' is a priestly office.
Sexual alchemy perpetuates the universal Mystery -- to fuse with the highest, or God. The joining of deified spouses makes them a divine macrocosmic domain. Rather than fulfillment through the other, it means fulfillment of self and other through reciprocal enhancement if desire and mutual concern.
Aphrodite's myth remains contemporary and aspirational -- a psychosexual satori. The eternal nature of the divine reminds us that transcendence cannot be put on a timeline of temporal concreteness. Nor does a romantic desire to reify one's sex life or secular relations make one a tantric.
There is a difference between balancing heaven and earth, and a primary desire to transcend the material human condition. Jung notes, "What is the power of the individual against the voice of the whole people in him?" (Liber Novus, Page 365.)
Erotically Fixated
Hypersexuality arises from trauma-bonding over sex or sexuality. Fawning is a trauma response, as is excessive passion, self-surrender, and fusion with the beloved. Complex PTSD is often related to prolonged childhood trauma and responses: Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn. Self-abandonment and escape are not the healthiest motivators.
Most religions don't make sex part of their path beyond cultural sacraments of marriage and taboos. The heart-mind-body connection may be ritually honored as within the Jewish tradition of Friday night sex. Shekinah is now imagined as the Shabbat Bride. The Hebrew word Shekinah literally means “dwelling” or “resting”, or “Divine Presence.”
The kabbalists revisioned Shabbat as a marriage festival. Earthly union between man and woman symbolically mirrors the heavenly marriage -- mystical marriage -- unification through the mystery of oneness. She is the radiance of God. Originally, Shekinah as Ashera, was the God-Wife if El or YHVH, rejected after the Babylonian captivity. No union is compete without a separation.
http://www.rabbimaller.com/hassidic-wisdom/spiritual-sexuality
http://www.abigailsarah.co.za/myart/Festivals/sabbathqueen.html
Other creeds or spiritual paths that transcend religions, like Sant Mat, claim that those bound to anyone never reach 'salvation.' Jung said, "But if you know what the dead demand, temptation will become the wellspring of your best work, indeed of the work of salvation. (Liber Novus, Page 278, Footnote 188).
The united personality will never quite lose the painful sense of innate discord. Complete redemption from the sufferings of this world is and must remain an illusion. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 400
But love and devotion by which we are affected needs a face; for some it is that of the living teacher, guru, or master. That smile and soothing presence fulfills the devotee, enraptured by the physical presence, amplifying love, hope, and comfort for the personal and collective. The brilliance, beauty, and radiance of Light are utterly transcendent qualities of the divine related to ecstatic awakening of the third eye. Real love without separation is union with the radiant form.
The theologian, the only person besides the psychotherapist to declare himself responsible for the cura animarum, is afraid of having to think psychologically about the objects of his belief. ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. II, Pages 628-630
Aphrodite is that numinosum (novelty), or evocative experience, even holy dread -- a quality of her visible and invisible presence that creates a peculiar alteration of consciousness. It is the induction and maintenance of a complex trance state, describable only in gems of poetry and song. Creativity is the primal spiritual impulse, a madness that floods intellect, intuition, and vision. It promises to transform the ordinary into the valuable.
Speaking of intuitive people, he [Jung] said it was important for them to get down to some task and make it real, ‘Otherwise they are like someone looking at that mountain over there through a telescope, and the next thing is they feel they have been there. But they haven’t, they must do the work.’ ~E.A. Bennet, Conversations with Jung, Page 74
Reminiscence
At the heart of existence, Aphrodite is all about the embrace of our sensual side, relationships -- to ourselves, to others, and to the sacred. These are the waters of relationship in which, under the jeweled sky, we can swim shallow or dive deep.
Her sensuality is an irresistible blend of image, imagination, and happy or painful memory of the senses -- the lapse of memory or precise memory of a smell, a touch, a look, a feeling. Under the spell of temptation we tend to 'forget who we are.' Even 'misery loves company,' we say. In committed relationships, we conspire to build a single mutual body with mutual memories and mutual field of perception.
But sometimes that 'body' falls apart, whether by destiny, archetypes, or typology. Perhaps we idolize or idealize the lover. Idolizing the object of affection, the lover is actuated by ideals. Even in the context of sacred sex this is projection taken way too literally, burdening the partner with unrealistic qualities of the divine out of the ritual space.
To be perfect or have a perfect relationship is unrealistic and imposes a role, whether it comes from romantic notions, fantasies, or religious zeal. It encourages 'fixing' the beloved to conform to one's vision. This obsession is disguised possession and control to ensure continuance of the romantic - a vain attempt to solve personal issues.
Avoidant behavior is really self-preoccupation. Ultimately, it devalues the personal sovereignty of both. Fusion is regressive dissociation, not merger. It ends the self-transformation of both lovers in an impasse. Fulfillment through private relationship can be a substitute for self-actualization in the outer world. Passionate love comes from integral selfhood when we truly value the other person. In our autonomy we mutually enhance one another. Self-knowledge includes knowledge of the soul.
There are other pitfalls. Maybe we are a door-slammer, desire to run, or want to live by 'the rules.' We may need to 'be right', or control, or avoid commitment. Some may have difficulty expressing feelings, or slowing down and 'making room,' getting priorities straight, or taking care of oneself instead of serving others. We may be unreliable, or need to be needed, be impulsive, check out, or unable to accept the worldview of others.
We re-member myths to remember and integrate the powerful majesty of concepts like psyche. In Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis remarks, "It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.” Whether we speak of the gods, significant others, or ourselves, his words apply: "How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?" [personification]
Beauty is transporting. Aphrodite is the mysterious, awe-inspiring something that comes over us when we are overcome. Lust incites intoxication, chaos, and destruction beyond that of love. To be, we must be perceived, mirrored back to ourselves by the immediate intimacy of others. All relationships are subsequent to our primordial, symbiotic union with our mother. At birth we die as aquatic beings to become autonomous air-breathers.
*
Thomistic philosophy includes four inner senses:
Common Sense
- To know all the sensations of the external senses which are known separately by the external senses.
- To compare and distinguish these qualities, e.g., color and taste.
- To be aware of the operations of the external senses.
- To distinguish the real objects from the images of the fantasy, e.g., to know whether we are dreaming, and to realize that our dreams are not reality.
Imagination
- To preserve the impressed species that it receives from the common sense--not only the impressed species related to sight, but any impressed species (e.g., that of a melody).
- To combine images or phantasms to form unreal images (artistic ability).
- To know quantity. (Thus the imagination plays an important role in mathematics.)
Cogitative Sense
- To retain the perceptions of the estimative sense, namely, to remember what is harmful and beneficial for the animal.
- To recognize the experiences of the past as concretely past.
- In man, to help the recollection of memories by way of a sort of syllogism, or by way of a spontaneous recollection, like association. This is called reminiscence in man:
Memorative Sense
- To retain the perceptions of the estimative sense, namely, to remember what is harmful and beneficial for the animal.
- To recognize the experiences of the past as concretely past.
- In man, to help the recollection of memories by way of a sort of syllogism, or by way of a spontaneous recollection, like association. This is called reminiscence in man:
*
Whole Body & Soul
In A Sense of Cosmos, Jacob Needleman reminds us, "Whenever we have looked to a part for the sake of understanding the whole, we have eventually found that the part is a living component of the whole. In a universe without a visible center, biology presents a reality in which the existence of a center is everywhere implied."
Aphrodite [Ishtar, Inanna] is the well-known goddess of love, beauty and seductive power. She is the pure erotic impulse, creative fire, pure libido, pure imagination, fertility, fruitfulness. The Hollywood love-goddess is a modern icon of her eternal power. She inherently possesses the qualities of grace, charm, and desire. The Kama Sutra includes the forehead, eyelids, cheeks, throat, breasts, lips, mouth, thighs, arms and navel as areas ideal for protective kissing in sacred sex.
She is a goddess of passion as well as pleasure, sensuality, affection and sensitivity. She can manifest as artistic and aesthetic inspiration, the desire to give birth to something remarkable by concept or conception. We have to mobilize our imagination to deal with conflicts of all nature from a point of view beyond the literalism of "I." Jung noted that for the artist there is a striking distance between ordinary ego-consciousness and the creative personality.
The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect, creative mind plays with the object it loves. ~Carl Jung, Psychological Types, Page 123, Para 197.
So doing, our efforts will follow nature’s own striving to bring life to the fullest possible fruition in each individual, for only in the individual can life fulfil its meaning—not in the bird that sits in a gilded cage. ~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 229.
The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157
There are disarming pleasures and dangers in her enchanting attentions.
Aphrodite can be conflated with the uncontrollable urges of the shadow. As Lewis says, “the Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is.” (Lewis, Till We Have Faces)
Assimilation of the shadow gives a man body, so to speak; the animal sphere of instinct, as well as the primitive or archaic psyche, emerge into the zone of consciousness and can no longer be repressed by fictions and illusions.
~Carl Jung, CW 16, Para 452
There is a long list of obvious attributions backed by great literature as well as personal and collective experience. Aphrodite inspires a compelling, subjective state. Euripides called love the "breathes (or blasts) of Aphrodite." She seeks intimacy, touching the most private aspects of our lives. Aphrodite is linked with many lovers in different myths.
In one version of her life, Aphrodite was married to Ares. So we see that when we are well acquainted with the Ares principle of physicality, we have an encounter with the sensuous energy she represents. You own evoked embodied experience with your nervous system and your soul.
In another myth, Aphrodite is said to be the wife of the lame smith Hephaistos. In this story of adultery, Ares is her paramour of choice. Aphrodite derives her warmth from a golden, sunlit type of sexuality. She has the greatest degree of solar qualities in her personality; whereas the other goddesses have greater lunar consciousness. This solar affinity does not, however, mean that she possesses a superior style of consciousness where self-awareness is concerned. In fact, she can tend to drift into situations with an aplomb only possible through reckless disregard for the future.
Aphrodite can be the source of envy arising from a pulsating desire for life and love. Paraphrasing Jung in a letter, "In a state of participation mystique one always projects emotion, but that emotional condition is brought about...by desire and by desire you are bound to things, and when they become chaotic you are drawn into the chaos." (Visions Seminar, Pages 1045-1046)
The origin of Aphrodite is a peculiar image for the Goddess of Love, since she stems from the violent castration of Uranus by Cronos. Stan Grof has described the uterine experience as an archaic matrix. Aphrodite reminds us our life on Earth in physical form is the sacred space of our soul and our psychic life.
The four Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPM) , the stages of the birth process
and the archetypal character of the four outer planets include:
Neptune/Poseidon (BPM I: The Amniotic Universe),
Saturn/Cronos (BPM II: Cosmic Engulfment and No Exit),
Pluto (BPM III:The Death-Rebirth Struggle), and
Uranus (BPM IV: The Death-Rebirth Experience).
Her birth from the severed genitals of Uranus symbolizes genetically the relationship of this goddess to the birth matrix, to her father, and by extension with all men. She is the embodiment of both his cynicism and his phallic sexual imperative. She is the drive personified in an alluring image.
Paradox
Sexual desire and amorous pleasure function as aphrodisiacs which lead to fulfillment through union of male and female. Psychological quandry makes us unable to decide between two options, not knowing which path to take. Transformative solutions arise from the tension of opposites.
We are that pair of Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one. --Jung, ‘
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious’, CW.I §235.
The Ghostly Lover is a man or woman who does not exist, or only exists in your imagination, or one who blocks a move on to another by making us emotionally unavailable. Hillman said this archetype means avoidance of an ordinary human relationship for an enchanting, seductive relationship with a dangerous ephemeral lover.
Imaginal fantasies of the ghostly lover archetype can distort the transformative process. Psychological development means entering a dialogue between ego and anima/animus. Romantic longing, engulfment, or emotional fusion is stimulated by separation, death, abandonement, or emotional unavilability.
The animus may be pathologically dominated by identification with the ghostly lover archetype, a constant invisible companion relegated to 'soul mate' status but never realizable. We become possessed by a celebrated, fictional or deceased character to whom we misattribute numinous effects.
A ghostly figure elevated in imagination to the sovereign point of the spirit usurps it. Thoughtforms can take on certain autonomous behaviors. This form of 'spirit possession' is the shadow side of spiritual longing conferring illusory 'specialness' on both parties in the self-narrative. But it is a confabulation and conflation of trickster, bright or dark shadow, and animus or anima, with which one is unconsciously bound and cut off from maturing.
Archetypal images of yearning for unavailable lovers include the bewitched prince, the romantic poet, the ghostly lover, or the marauding pirate -- celebrity or pop star. Another form is extreme father fixation, obsessing on the parent's pursuits and standards.
These are not sacred partners, but 'demonic' forms mixed with shadow and self. The demonic lover may be a psychopath, narcissist, vampire, or corpse. Projections on the idealized dead or unavailable fantasy figures are literalizations of one's own fantasies -- a "head trip" that sucks away the energy for real life.
The best protection against abandonment to demons is a conscious relationship to a close, living human being. ~Carl Jung, Conversations with C.G. Jung, Page 25.
So if you speak of individuation at all, it necessarily means the individuation of beings who are in the flesh, in the living body. ~Carl Jung, Zarathustra Seminar, Page 202
The union of anima and animus is a major step in individuation, a preliminary form of mystical union -- union of the spirit and body, spirit and matter (Mater). We learn to live at the stillpoint in a world of paradoxes: inner/outer, masculine/feminine, light/dark, visceral/cerebral, fight/flight, likes/dislikes, gain/loss, happiness/despair.
Opposites of being are a defining characteristic in mystical thought -- the synthesis of all the desires and thoughts. Kabbalists say opposites arise from and are united in the primordial Ether and that union of opposites is the purpose of the world, a vehicle for reaching primal unity by undoing the bifurcating tendencies of mind in the unity of all things.
Polarities are complimentary. They signify the essence of wholeness, union of the conscious and unconscious elements of the psyche -- the Self, the whole Self, and nothing but the Self, completeness at least in that divine instant -- creation and negation, concealment and revelation. Rather than wildly oscillating back and forth we learn to hold the dynamic tension of opposites. Emotional management needs healthy boundaries for deeper connections.
Aphrodite is an embodiment of the non-rational and psychological union of opposites wherein the lovers are annihilated. Her form is ecstatic, reconciling. Opposite principles are brought together by desire. A similar union of opposites, the alchemist and soror mystica, is the goal of alchemy -- deep union with the divine and feminine principle that opens our senses and reconnects us with the body. This is the spirituality of earth, life, and the present moment.
Pairs of opposites have a natural tendency to meet on the middle line, but the middle line is never a compromise thought out by the intellect and forced upon the fighting parties.
It is rather a result of the conflict one has to suffer.
Such conflicts are never solved by a clever trick or by an intelligent invention but by enduring them.
As a matter of fact, you have to heat up such conflicts until they rage in full swing so that the opposites slowly melt together.
It is a sort of alchemistic procedure rather than a rational choice and decision.
The suffering is an indispensable part of it.
Every real solution is only reached by intense suffering.
The suffering shows the degree in which we are intolerable to ourselves.
--C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 233-235
Venus is a binding force, which may appear as a voluntary involvement or with the strength and dynamism of possession. The paradox of Aphrodite is that she is a loving and passionate wife, yet always leaves open the possibility of exploring numerous relationships with gods and mortals. She is always friendly and intimate, except to those who would usurp her position. In her, both love and power drives are embodied in a single goddess. Conflicts of opposites arise between duty and what we really want.
It's All Chemistry
The physical chemistry of love modulates our attitudes and desire through three stages: Lust, Attraction, and Bonding. Each deploys different hormones and neurotransmitters to accomplish its alchemy. They act like addictive drugs shaping our behavior -- in the beginning like stimulating cocaine, and in bonding like heroin. Love changes how we think, feel, and act with Aphrodite's rose-tinted glasses.
Stage 1 is governed in both sexes by testosterone and estrogen. Pheromones are unconscious scent attractors and sex signals which draw us toward biologically suitable partners and change the hormone levels of others.
The love-struck attraction of Stage 2 is modulated by adrenaline (stress response), dopamine (rush of desire and reward; decreased sleep and eating; hyper-focus; idealization) and serotonin (fixation; obsession-compulsion), dopamine.
Stage 3 involves oxytocin (released in orgasm), the cuddle and bonding hormone, and vasopressin (devotion; pair-bonding).
It changes the fabric of our being. Ernest Rossi suggests this “novelty-numinosum-neurogenesis-effect” implies that gene expression is related to natural healing. He links it to arousal and the very nature of consciousness itself. Ecstasy, as the breakthrough moment of creative consciousness has been described as the activating emotive force of a daemon that drives our human experience, whether we want it or not. Peak experiences provide insight, inspiration, and transformation.
Air, Light & Fragrance
She is the extroverted world of sense and sensuality and the immanent world of imagination. Stimulating the imagination is erotic. We carefully take hold of our experiences with enough passion and loyalty to hang onto and continue them through the multidimensional layers of meaning Aphrodite imposes on reality.
Reality emerges with symbolism and imagination as its companions, manifesting as symbols, dreams, and language. Jung says, "If the word is a sign, it means nothing. But if the word is a symbol, it means everything." (Red Book, p. 310).
One creates inner freedom only through the symbol. ~Carl Jung, The Red Book , Page. 311
Some meanings are too deep to grasp except in symbols. The dream’s obscurity is really only a projection of our own lack of understanding.
Poetry reveals the essence of Nature. Giovanni Boccaccio suggests that the poem is the voice of the anima mundi, the voice of the wind, the sea, the tears. It is not the voice of this or that thing, but the voice of the soul. An integral approach to reality unites the opposites of animal and psychic beauty to re-enchant the world.
In The Poet (1844) Ralph Waldo Emerson perhaps alludes to Aphrodite when he says: "Doubt not, O poet, but persist. Say, 'It is in me, and shall out.' Stand there, baulked and dumb, stuttering and stammering, hissed and hooted, stand and strive, until, at last, rage draw out of thee that dream-power which every night shows thee is thine own; a power transcending all limit and privacy, and by virtue of which a man is the conductor of the whole river of electricity. Nothing walks, or creeps, or grows, or exists, which must not in turn arise and walk before him as exponent of his meaning. Comes he to that power, his genius is no longer exhaustible. All the creatures, by pairs and by tribes, pour into his mind as into a Noah's ark, to come forth again to people a new world. This is like the stock of air for our respiration, or for the combustion of our fireplace, not a measure of gallons, but the entire atmosphere if wanted. And therefore the rich poets, as Homer, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Raphael, have obviously no limits to their works, except the limits of their lifetime, and resemble a mirror carried through the street, ready to render an image of every created thing."
http://www.emersoncentral.com/poet.htm
Art expresses feelings and understanding. It is the fulfillment of sensation in an audible or visual form. It is an expression of an archetypal process in relationship with life. Art is philosophy expressed in symbols and imagery. or the sensation function, art serves the same purpose that science does for thinking. Other analogies for art include philosophy and psychology for the intuitive function, and the emotions of human society for feelings.
THE OCEAN OF EXISTENCE
The Unconscious Mother
As Jung says, "To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth." (Red Book, Page 266) Soul is at the heart of being. Beyond personifications and the confusion of dreams, W.B. Yeats said, "Our daily thought was certainly but the line of foam at the shallow edge of a vast luminous sea: Henry More's Anima Mundi, Wordsworth's "immortal sea which brought us hither . . ."
The groundstate of our being is a Fierce Luminosity emanating from the vast roiling ocean of the creative vacuum – the endless sea of creation. What IS is, and the primal matrix is the eternal shimmering, full vacuum of space -- IS-ness.
Light is an excitation of empty space -- "she who shines from the foam (ocean)."
The metaphor of navigation, the night sea journey, appears in Boccaccio's On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles. It is a cipher of hermeneutic experiences related to poetry. Such movement anchors us to ourselves. Sailing on the sea of genealogies of the pagan gods is a metaphor for the existential journey of a modern person reflecting on antiquity in a sort of poetic anthropology with the promise of finding personal interpretations of meaning in unevidenced beliefs.
The most intimate place of the image is our heart. The heart of the image is the most vulnerable and requires our care. It is the you that goes on of itself, breathing without thinking of it, blood circulating and nerves tingling, not the symbolism the persona or distanced self. It is the place of all suffering and pain but also the container of constant transformation.
Fascination, Fixation, Arousal
When we look out at Nature happening, it is us -- no longer left outside, but embodied self-reflexivity -- embodying the symbolic mirror of Aphrodite. A reflexive relationship is bidirectional with both the cause and effect affecting one another in a circular relationship where neither are cause or effect. As Joseph Campbell put it, "The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature."
Internal dialogue is on-going conversation with what you are experiencing as you are experiencing it. Tuning into one's own state of being is meta-communication -- self-realization. Hyper-awareness of the body includes both self-knowledge and self-monitoring. Aleister Crowley admonishes, "look closely into the heart of the seeker and lead him by the path which is best suited to his nature unto the ultimate end of all things, the supreme realization, the Life which abideth in Light, yea, the Life which abideth in Light.” (Liber Porta Lucis Sub Figurâ X)
Of images Yeats said, "I came to believe in a great memory passing on from generation to generation. But that was not enough, for these images showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet were an extension of one's knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of the gold, as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of cabalistic symbolism..." (Per Amiga Silentia Lunae, p. 55)
After extensive research on color, Rudolph Steiner developed the lazure style of painting, a subtle wash of hues that allows light to pass through it, reflecting back an amazing depth of color. His theory describes the “language” of color related to light and darkness. He calls such “activity” between light and darkness "the language of the soul," suggesting colors speak a language more universal and archetypal than any spoken word. https://beduwen.com/2015/03/13/spiritual-painting-art-therapy/
Art for Art's Sake
Whether in awe of Nature or in aesthetic arrest, we gasp in wonder that takes our breath away. Jung promises, "By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life." (CW 15, Para 130) And, "Thus, just as the one-sidedness of the individual’s conscious attitude is corrected by reactions from the unconscious, so art represents a process of self-regulation in the life of nations and epochs." (Jung, CW 15, Para 131)
"As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense—he is “collective man,” a vehicle and moulder of the unconscious psychic life of mankind." ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157
Like any archetype, Jung warns, "Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him his instrument." ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 157
"The artist seizes on this image, and in raising it from deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers."
~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130
"The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present." ~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130
"By giving it shape, the artist translates it into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life."
~Carl Jung, CW 15, Para 130
Deleuze (2003) implies, "Art aims not at reproducing the sensed model, but at reproducing sensation." Seeing and being seen are the essence of Aphrodite's divinity and essential to her sensuous autonomy. Yet, how often we take our touch, taste, smell, vision, and proprioception for granted. Our legitimate and socially illegitimate sensations are primordial.
In primordial consciousness there is no supernatural world, only the natural world with its visible and its invisible domains. As the part connects with invisible wholeness, moment, transcendence, and visceral awareness merge in the invisible inherent meaning of direct experience. Clarity and understanding deepen the moment of Mystery beyond the sensory when unconscious thoughts synchronize in a conscious thought.
Visible and invisible unite in comprehension. Our task is to engage that domain, to look from outside to inside, to embrace the unseen, not simply describe it, but engage it. Like a shaman we establish a dialogue and interaction around ‘what do they want?’ and ‘what do they bring?’ Concept and conception share a connotation.
Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is seeking to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring.
~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 129
Maurice Merleau-Ponty notes, "the meaning is invisible, but the unseen is not in contradiction with the visible: of the rest, the visible has an internal structure invisible and the visible in-equivalent is the secret of the visible."
These are non-hierarchical worlds interpenetrating and permeating one another with intimate communications, engaging the invisible world with the significant implications of phenomena. Myths are relics of the time when fervid human imagination could catch hidden meanings and signs of life in mysteriously divine divine presences in every aspect of the world represented by words and rhythms.
Arts of Love
The sixty-four arts of making love all had to be mastered, and would define a cultured courtesan . These arts are described in the various versions of Kamasutra, and in The Perfumed Garden Sir Richard Burton gives a rare glimpse into this culture. The courtesans also mastered many other artistic disciplines including tailoring, fine carpentry, rules of architecture, chemistry, mineralogy, laws of society, how to pay respect and make compliments, singing, playing a musical instrument, dancing, writing, reading the thoughts of others, the art of attracting and captivating the mind of others, magic, manufacturing scents and garlands, drawing, sculpturing and painting. They were often more artists and teachers than we tend to believe. It is within this context we can understand the courtesans of ancient India.
http://levekunst.com/courtesans-of-ancient-india/
Anima & Animal
Images can ignite angelic and carnal pleasure in us as much or more than any mortal human. A 'Venus in Fur' evokes the paradox of refined animality, perhaps dangerous, sly, even deranged. Ideally, we see Aphrodite's beauty in every thing, person and event in the world. It's there, whether we refine our perceptions to see it or not, or if we cannot blind ourselves to her continuous revelation -- nature's unfurling dance of the seven veils.
Through the mystique of the non-rational, we cultivate life through acts of love. She renews awareness of the importance of a certain kind of sexual ritual and liminal transformative space where the unconscious manifests and opposites reconcile. With cooperation and mutuality between the sexes, each act becomes one of gender reunion, rather than power and domination from either side.
Instead of obsessing on dichotomy and oppositionalism or phallic-narcissism, ritual practice deliteralizes both sword and chalice. This frees their symbolic, balancing, and transpersonal power. A metaphoric intensification of our life energies and libido is a rhythmic phenomenon that wells up from the depths as the emergent, incarnate goddess. Jung reminds us that, "To live what is right and to let what is false die, that is the art of life." (Liber Novus, Page 274, Footnote 75).
Art narratively relates the invisible, shaping ideas and modulating feelings. The arts from Homer forward are represent the spiritual quest of rebirth rituals. ‘Rebirth’ in pagan ritual amounts to retracing the stages of descent of the soul in the existential hell of matter and chaos. As such, art and ritual reveal the process of abstraction, or spectrum of human apprehension.
Few arts are more emotionally evocative than music and its key characteristics. Musicologist Rita Steblin calls G major “every calm and satisfied passion, every tender gratitude for true friendship and faithful love.” C major has the air of “innocence, simplicity.” Meanwhile, G minor sounds like “discontent,” and C minor is the “sighing of the love sick soul.” Aesthetic deprivation kills the soul. Art and spirituality deepen our meaningful contact with reality.
Such loyalty is the strength of the bond to Aphrodite -- respect for what is sacred in our relationships with the gods, a feminine gnosis, and eroticism. James Hillman said Marsilio Ficino equated anima mundi and Aphrodite, calling her the mirror of divine realities, the life of mortals and the nexus of both. And that body is a sacred alchemical vessel. To be present with the whole body rearranges us from the center of being. But bodies also mean illness, accidents, ageing, and death.
When we go into our room of mirrors, the gaze of the other who lives there gets more penetrating and at the same time more welcoming. Each time we touch the perception we have of ourselves, we are reminded we are our memories, which make us the person we are. Borges describes how we belong to that "imaginary museum of changing forms" that is eternal. The gestalt remains constant, though the forms change like a kaleidoscope.
Anima Mundi embodies the pandemonium of all forms in external and internal perceptions. She bridges our perceptions of the world by stimulating the imaginative faculty. Yet, being attached to materialistic images is not the same as being attached to Mater, matter and earth.
The Sea of Dreams
Within certain limits, image, imagination and metaphor can heal. Imagination can be employed therapeutically for catharsis as images reveal what is hidden in the unconscious and manifests in symptoms. Memory is the sum total of what we remember from the atomic to organismic level. Our whole body is our long memory, subconsciously incorporating all our experience in structure, dynamics and symptoms. Enriching symbolic language can guide us along an inner path with a wordless dialogue.
Liquid symbols flood the collective psyche ("mother liquid" of the unconscious 'womb' - the experience of humanity) with the overwhelming force of nature itself. In waves of contemplation, they morph constantly in dreams and daydreams calling us within to the source of what wants to be transformed. Their effect is decidedly osmotic, passing through the semipermeable conscious/unconscious membrane like some unacknowledged solvent, recalling the alchemical maxim "Solve et Coagula."
Rising to conscious images are irradiated by the dawning light, in constant recreation of the miraculous birth of Aphrodite from the eternal sea. As Jung notes, "Consciousness, no matter how extensive it may be, must always remain the smaller circle within the greater circle of the unconscious, an island surrounded by the sea; and, like the sea itself, the unconscious yields an endless and self-replenishing abundance of living creatures, a wealth beyond our fathoming." (CW 16, Para 366.)
You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
In this deification mystery you make yourself into the vessel, and are a vessel of creation in which the opposites reconcile. ~Carl Jung, Liber Novus, Page 253. Footnote 211.
ART & MAGIC
There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic.
Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimmoir for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness. And I believe that this is why an artist or writer is the closest thing in the contemporary world that you are likely to see to a Shaman.
I believe that all culture must have arisen from cult. Originally, all of the faucets of our culture, whether they be in the arts or sciences were the province of the Shaman. The fact that in present times, this magical power has degenerated to the level of cheap entertainment and manipulation, is, I think a tragedy. At the moment the people who are using Shamanism and magic to shape our culture are advertisers. Rather than try to wake people up, their Shamanism is used as an opiate to tranquilize people, to make people more manipulable. Their magic box of television, and by their magic words, their jingles can cause everyone in the country to be thinking the same words and have the same banal thoughts all at exactly the same moment.
In all of magic there is an incredibly large linguistic component. The Bardic tradition of magic would place a bard as being much higher and more fearsome than a magician. A magician might curse you. That might make your hands lay funny or you might have a child born with a club foot. If a Bard were to place not a curse upon you, but a satire, then that could destroy you. If it was a clever satire, it might not just destroy you in the eyes of your associates; it would destroy you in the eyes of your family. It would destroy you in your own eyes. And if it was a finely worded and clever satire that might survive and be remembered for decades, even centuries. Then years after you were dead people still might be reading it and laughing at you and your wretchedness and your absurdity.
Writers and people who had command of words were respected and feared as people who manipulated magic. In latter times I think that artists and writers have allowed themselves to be sold down the river. They have accepted the prevailing belief that art and writing are merely forms of entertainment. They’re not seen as transformative forces that can change a human being; that can change a society. They are seen as simple entertainment; things with which we can fill 20 minutes, half an hour, while we’re waiting to die. It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience knew what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of artists to give the audience what they need.
-Alan Moore
The Beauty of Soul
The self-presenting reality, Aphrodite is soul and the beauty of soul. Soul is beauty and beauty is soul. She is self-presentation -- the sensate qualities of things just as they are, the bare facts in all their lustre, clarity and perceptual aesthetics -- a panoply of shapes, colors, atmospheres, and textures animating and ensouling the world. As mirror, self-reflection is its self-display, its radiance, interiority, subjectivity, psychic depth, even psychopathology.
Beauty is fundamental to life and the sensibility of the cosmos. Natural beauty often exceeds the limits of art. Aesthetics is a necessary aspect of our perception of the world, the effulgence and brilliance of her consciousness, all the way down into the microcosm of the luminous absolute space of reality beyond the mere absence of energy/matter. Our perceptions of ourselves and cosmos come through the interplay of figure (ourselves) and ground (cosmos).
Navajo principles of life feature balance and harmony, manifested through honoring the four directions: East (Spiritual), where our thoughts originate; South (Physical), where we set our plans; West (Emotional), where our thoughts and plans are set into motion; and North (Mental/Environmental), where we consider our thoughts and actions to determine if we have remained on the correct path. Working with this energy, one easily learns to walk "the middle way". Echoed in the Hermetic Qabalah, this "Middle Way" is a path of devotion. Art is prayer.
The Navajo "Beauty Way" ceremony embodies beauty, harmony, goodness, normality, success, well-being, blessedness, and happiness -- as a living ideal. During the ceremony, someone wishes to re-establish balance and beauty in their life. Sense of beauty, or balance and harmony may be lost for many reasons. But for the Navajos, the singular cure is to find the way back to Beauty. If you wander off the Beauty Way, then your link to the natural world must be re-established in order to regain it. To Walk in Beauty means being in harmony with all things, people, and events. You connect with inner peace and serenity when polarities are neutralized. One with everything, you walk in Beauty.
Navajo Beauty Way Prayer
In beauty may I walk.
All day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk.
With dew about my feet may I walk.
With beauty may I walk.
With beauty before me, may I walk.
With beauty behind me, may I walk.
With beauty above me, may I walk.
With beauty below me, may I walk.
With beauty all around me, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
It is finished in beauty.
It is finished in beauty.
Lumin-Ids
Environments can be notoriously invisible, below our perceptual threshold, and they have their own “ground rules”. The primordial ground is invisible, immeasurable, unmanifest, in fact metaphysical, by definition. How can we attune to the nature of the ground, ground our meditation? Can we perceive reality as an unbroken wholeness more than conceptually? Where is our “common ground”? What is that something we are searching for in an another human being?
Hillman notes, "…psyche is the life of our aesthetic responses, that sense of taste in relation with things, that thrill or pain, disgust or expansion of breast: these primordial aesthetic reactions of the heart are soul itself speaking" (The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World, p. 39). In he oldest writing by a a male or female, "The Exaltation of Inanna," Princess Enheduanna celebrates the Sumerian love goddess -- "the supreme one in Heaven and Earth."
William Blake says, "Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age." Thus, she is the soul in natural and healthy sex, the "bare facts" of body as "erotic landscape." The nonordinary states of love and desire expand that landscape.
The Stella Matutina (Morning Star)
Just as evening gives birth to morning, so from the darkness arises a new light, the stella matutina, which is at once the evening and the morning star— Lucifer, the light-bringer. ~Carl Jung, CW 13, Para 299
Sexual arousal is an altered state of consciousness. If sex is juicy, radiantky visceral, and wildly uncontrollable, it is also full of paradox. For example, projection and enchantment can block relatedness or call it forth. The most adventurous yet least meaningful love affairs often end in disaster, estrangement, isolation, and alienation -- the bête noire of fatal attraction.
Aphrodite is primordial allure and divine impact is her modus operandi. She is a soul-guide, never far from darkness as the Morning and Evening Star. Love is a poison and a cure. Epicurus suggests living nature is our principal Guide through pleasure and pain, sweetness and bitterness, through overt, liberated sexuality.
Her grace, ineffable mysteries, and wisdom tradition is past on in art, music, imagery, and oral teachings. If reality can only be experienced directly through the senses, the arts make that sensuality tangible. Divine imagery feeds the soul, like sweet honey. More than an alluring physical form, she is a form of thought, a
tradition of inner enlightenment. This revelatory experience of knowledge is true self in dynamic encounter with the ground of being.
Deep Knowing
Hillman evokes a perception of the heart, recalling beauty as manifesting anima mundi: "World must be flowing through soul if soul is to shine forth in the world." He says we must stand in the temple of Aphrodite, "recognizing that each thing smiles, has allure, calls forth aesthesis. "Calling forth," provoking, kaleo, was Ficino's depiction of Aphrodite's main characteristic, kallos, beauty. (Griffin, 1989)
In every meaningful way, the body is the subconscious mind, with the heart as its 'brain.' We honor the captivating Aphrodite when we imagine the world as our lover, with naked awareness, rapt attention, and self-revelation. Such a living inquiry with a sense of immediacy that brings contact is a mind-body-spirit approach to personal transformation. We honor her when we honor the World Soul.
Imagination uses belief, thought, and visualization to impact the physical or biological root. We are hers when we devotedly pursue the inner images, thoughts, feelings, impulses, urges. William Blake tells us, "Imagination, the real and eternal world, of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow, and in which we shall live in our eternal or imaginative bodies when these vegetable, mortal bodies are no more. The Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself."
Jean Shinoda Bolen calls the golden Aphrodite an 'alchemical goddess.' But in what sense is alchemy an 'Aphroditic' art? Practical and spiritual alchemy has always been concerned with the perfection of metals and mortals -- mining the soul from the inside out. Her special operation in alchemy is the albedo, a union of Hermes and Aphrodite, where the morning star plays a special role in the Great Work -- the elevation of he lower passions to purified energies. His unitive view includes hermeneutics, the art of reading symbolic things, including symptoms.
The transmutation of gold-making is a symbol for the creation of the philosopher's stone and completion of the Great Work, and the apotheosis of god-making. So, it is not surprising to find her married to Hephaistos, the god of the forge.
Divine beauty comes into this world -- a fulfillment of the spirit of the times. The supreme meaning is not in events nor the soul, but in the mediatrix of life that functions as a bridge to connect them. If you are not conscious of more than yourself how can you heal, and what are you conscious of?
While the man who despairs marches towards nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them. ~Carl Jung; MDR; Page 306. Our localized instinct, firmly rooted in our earth (matter), is securely fixed in its body.
"Divinity of the individual" is the core-idea of apotheosis -- liberation or freedom from a metaphorical prison. Love and strife, like 'solve et coagula' combine and separate. Alchemy is as goal-oriented as sex, related to souls, metals, stars and planets, and sympathy between objects, living and dead. Aphrodite and alchemy share the parameters including correspondence, living nature, imagination as mediation of what cannot be said in words, and transmutation.
The whole affair is best approached with contact and closeness, without expectations, with a ‘beginner’s mind,’ or simply by responding authentically to what comes up. And it all 'comes up' from the unconscious. The gods may reside in Olympian heights, but they also come up from Hades and the sea.
We cannot tell whether God and the unconscious are two different entities. Both are border-line concepts for transcendental contents. (Jung, CW 11, Para 757). Heraclitus told us the way up and the way down are the same, and that change determines the birth of the world.
In Sumeria, she was called "she who shows the way to the stars." Jung suggested an analogy between the starry sky and the unconscious has existed from very early times, at least as a symbol. Of this naked brilliance of the voluptuous night-sky, Hillman says, "...the sky is so clear that the stars seem to form a network, Aphrodite is this too. She lives in the cosmos, not only in the morning and evening star, but also in the zodiac signs. ...Soul is an Aphrodite." Her spiritual title is Aphrodite-Urania -- the openness of space is also vastness of mind.
Great Brightness
She may be the great brightness of the dawning light -- inner gold. Only the awakened are truly immortal. But she is also the material opaqueness of darkness, instincts, feelings, and raw emotions. Emotions are repetitive thoughts packed with intensity. She symbolizes the spiritual and physical duality of humanity, and all the frightening prospects of love gone wrong -- devastation, disconsolation, and despondency, even revenge of the raging heart. She can be as repulsive as beautiful. Spiritual love counters the unbridled power of attraction.
Jung says the body lays claim to recognition equal to the psyche. When both exert a fascination, the antithesis between mind and matter disappears. He says spirit is the living body seen from within, so to transcend our present level of consciousness, we must give the body its due. The bafflement, shattered illusions, disheveled hair and walk of shame are hers. Desire can be unholy or divine.
Sex is one of the ways we do give. As anima Aphrodite is both animal or of the created world and subtle body. Both carnal (Aphrodite Pandemos) and sacred sex are an immersion in the unconscious. Aphrodite's genitals are special because they are magic and cast a spell of enchantment that allows us into her temple experience, screwing the ego out of us and embedding enlightenment of her special sort of 'yoga' in.
"The body is the original animal condition; in the body we're all animals and therefore we should have an animal psychology to be able to live in it. ...But, since we have a body, it is indispensable that we also live like an animal, and every time we come up with a new expansion of consciousness, we need to add another link in the chain that binds us to the animal..." --C.G.Jung Seminars, Nietzsche's Zarathustra
Looking at the last 3.8 billion years, scientists say our last common ancestor is a planet-wide “mega-organism,” as old, huge and deep as the sea itself. Last universal common ancestor (LUCA) grew where hydrothermal vents of hot water rich in hydrogen, carbon dioxide and minerals emerged from the sea floor. Two kinds of simple cells (bacteria and archaea) emerged.. Previous studies identified around 100 genes almost certainly present in LUCA and common to almost all cells living today.
The possibility of a vast living mother ocean as our Last Universal Common Ancestor blurs the lines between ancestor and deity reverence. All life was interdependent in Grandmother LUCA, when life was whole. This is the foam from which Aphrodite arises.
We instinctively invoke her to arise from the foamy depths ("aphro" means foam) -- the Cosmic Waters of our unconscious and reveal herself to us so we can bask in her golden glow, the color of copper and honey. Conversely, She can provoke us to enter the roiling ocean of our subconscious to swim with her in that primordial element.
We may surf the waves of phenomenological symbolism that crash to the shores of ordinary existence. In such an act we sanctify ourselves and make ourselves a vehicle for her energy. Or, we may be swept away by a riptide of primal forces and powerful unconscious currents of what we don't know, unconscious behavioral systems.
However we perceive it, we are drawn to the Light. Aphrodite's realizations, enlightenment, and meaning "dawn upon us," much like the brilliant flash of light recently (2016) said to accompany the incredible moment of conception when life begins. It seems, sparks fly between male and female elements from the very beginning. Stunning news, like stunning Beauty can stop us dead in our tracks because it brings esoteric Mystery to our mundane attention.
Is this unconscious notion the flip-side of the fluorescent flash of light seen at death, reported in near-death experiences? We have to separate the phenomenal experience from our premature interpretations, no matter how psychologically appealing they may be. Unconsciously, we may be equating a flash of light at the beginning and end of life; yet, scientifically we could be wrong about both, much less the appealing symmetry of such tacit thoughts.
Conceptions & Misconceptions
But that florescence has been overstated and mythologized since its discovery, demonstrating how the distorting effects of such a 'fiat lux' react in our psyche. This conception of life in light is an alluring concept. It is not human egg activation but human psyche activation that spurs such misconceptions.
Researchers reported their results as a “stunning explosion of zinc fireworks” when a human egg is “activated” by sperm enzyme, but their detailed explanations were ignored in favor of a fantasy image of soul brought forth in light that recapitulates our creation myths. Biophotons are light emitted by biological cells, but this is not that. The truth is a far less romantic idea. No matter how attractive the notion, there are actually no sparks of light that actually fly out of zygotes at conception. http://www.ncregister.com/blog/trasancos/pro-lifers-there-is-no-flash-of-light-at-conception/#ixzz4Egoy0xWH
Yet it remains a good metaphor for the way psyche and Aphrodite 'work' on our consciousness, though there are no biophotonic fireworks at conception except those created in the lab. We would like to idealize that physical process and inorganic signature of zinc emission into a personal 'Big Bang,' with our own conception at the center of our personal universe.
Wish Fulfillment or Wishful Thinking?
People were excited to “see” what they "know" to be true about the awesome moment of conception. But the zinc detecting experiment and conception are not the same biochemical event. The public simply 'married' two ideas in their minds creating a folie or delusional idea that became implanted in the collective imagination. The 'mything link' in this tale is the revelation about Psyche.
The viral meme spreads and persists because no one bothers to check the facts because we cannot trust popular science sources that parrot such nonsense disconnected from the research itself. If we are going to use science to elevate our archaic beliefs or even to create poetic metaphors, we had better get the science right, or we merely conjure up false conclusions and errors of category. This process is repeated over and over, especially in the hot media environment of the information age.
Coming Attractions
This how the Aphrodite's mythologizing process works. The metaphor is taken as literal, and spread like wildfire as justification for a variety of spiritual notions. The misconception about the flash of conception continues to spread. None of that means that biophotons in the human body cannot also be metaphorically related to the traditional domain of Aphrodite and specific qualities of light.
However, this meme of a 'flash' at conception is nothing more than an illusion spread by media, a bait-and-switch lie, even though biophotons may be equated with vital force at some level. While biophotonic light never mentioned related to this experiment, we have unconscious ideas about it that float around in collective consciousness.
Stored in the DNA in the nuclei of each cell, biophotons are ultraweak photon emissions of biological systems. They are weak electromagnetic waves in the optical range of the spectrum and are indeed light. Living cells of plants, animals and human beings emit biophotons. An expression of the function state of the living organism, they cannot be seen by the naked eye but can be measured by special equipment. (Bischoff, 1995)
Now, a similar sort of confusion happens when we meet a potential lover and elevate them to a semi-divine state with our romantic projections of idealiation and specialness, surrounding them with the glow of our distortions and possessiveness. We get excited when we imagine we see the “fireworks” we were hoping to see.
Answering Aphrodite's siren call, we unleash the unfolding of her love, fertility, and sexual mysteries in our own lives through the riches of myth, natural magic and the biological alchemy of love. As a cosmic factor, she is the very essence of existence. But as a complex and paradoxical goddess, she also wounds the heart and soul with a Bellica pax, vulnus dulce, suave malum, a warring peace, a sweet wound, a mild evil.
The unconscios nucleus of meaning of the eternal archetype remains “unborn” but her specific meaning and form, imagery and affects permeate us. If Aphrodite is eternal, eros is an event of specific temporality. Perhaps in a faithless world, the transitory and temporal hold the only redemptive power possible.
The spectacular ‘birth of Venus’ in the ordinary world predates the Upper Paleolithic fertility goddesses found in the ancient caves and art of southern France. She shared her dawn with that of modern humanity 30-40,000 years ago. A continuous creation is consummated in her embodied exaltation in each of us. We can seek Aphrodite's spiritual insight through ritual ways of enhancing and resacralizing it.
We consciously worship her when we adore our beloved, making the conjugal bed an altar. In fact, it alters everything. The wisdom of the Tree of Knowledge is that sexuality isn’t just in the gonads, but permeates every cell and atom of our bodies. Aphrodite is an attitude or style of consciousness and behavior through which we fulfill legitimate psychophysical needs. She not only engenders but enlarges life with the mystical splendor of love. In some poetic sense, our very atoms and molecules, as well as the galaxies, are held together by the attractive force of love.
Provocateur
We can experience our own imaginal essence through the power of love. When it overwhelms us, desire feels like a supernatural force. Sexual passion has been deified, divinized, or even feared as evil and demonic because of its overwhelming nature – the instinct overtakes the personality. The awe-inspiring force of desire and sex has played a role in religion, magic, mysticism, occultism, symbolism, and the whole spectrum of human psychobiological interaction with the transpersonal – the timeless world of the seemingly eternal.
Soul is a gift from Aphrodite, who shines within the psyche as morning and evening star. She teaches the cultivation and significance of beauty and pleasure as links between earthly and spiritual mysteries, as well as cautioning us about the troubles Beauty can trail in its wake. The glory of love may be its transience. As Goethe reminds, Love is eternal but its object keep changing.
Nature of the Gods
Carl Jung argued that "gods" exist, but only metaphorically (not literally) and only in the natural dimension of the psyche. He said all we can ever know is the phenomenological god-image. Image is metaphor with a powerful internal cohesion and coherence with intense energy and affect. He called them archetypes, symbols of transformation of the psyche, facets of am indivisible deeper underlying unity.
Archetypes help us redefine human identity as a connective multiplicity in a continuous process of integration (holy union) embedded in a cosmic matrix of consciousness, polarity, and life. We are entangled with them, so they affect our lives physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
In her complications and tragic conflicts, Aphrodite can even undermine the meaning of blood and family. She also takes her revenge on those who stubbornly refuse to obey her desire, hence her archetypal description in the Victorian novel as "She-who-must-be-obeyed." (Haggard, 1886)
Jung said, "Nothing happens in which you are not entangled in a secret manner; for everything has ordered itself around you and plays your innermost. Nothing in you is hidden to things, no matter how remote, how precious, how secret it is. It inheres in things."
All life is bound to individual carriers who realize it, and it is simply inconceivable without them. But every carrier is charged with an individual destiny and destination, and the realization of these alone makes sense of life. ~Carl Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, Page 222.
Aphrodite's Inner Chamber
In the mysteries of embodiment, death and renewal, union with the creative source is a "death marriage", a return to the womb, and union with God. All these forms and imagery arise from a cosmic holographic field that contains all of existence in potential. Like a fractal, each part contains the whole only in lower resolution. This holographic plenum is the ultimate source of existence, our cradle of being, and the matrix of the phenomenal world.
Archetypes are the elements of the soul, showing up as numinous images with sacred powers, including numinous enchantment, fascination, and wonderment. Jung recommended we engage them consciously with active imagination to develop insight and growth. They are exemplary forms or prototypes -- an informational code -- the original schema or dynamic patterns that model all things of the same kind. For Plato, they were the primordial forms of the universal mind. We recognize the world within us through their patterns. Being universal, archetypal forms can be found everywhere. They are the essence that sustains life.
Dynamically, archetypal forms are underlying instinctual patterns of behavior which reflect how the unconscious “imagines” reality into being by giving it form. Psyche, our "larger self", reveals itself in symbolic form through manifestations of the archetypes. They organize our instinctive and transpersonal experience giving it collective meaning. Their dreams are our realities. Each has its agenda and characteristic mode of appearance.
This plenum is the energetic ocean from which Aphrodite, "the foam-born goddess," arises. In physics this ground of existence is called the Dirac Sea, the fluctuation of the seething subquantal vacuum potential, the empty space in our bodies between the particles that binds matter and primordial consciousness. In psychology it is the Collective Unconscious.
Physics and psyche are complementary aspects of the same reality at the cosmic and personal level, uniting mind and matter in psychophysical being. We can develop a metaphoric or symbolic sensibility, attending to unconscious myths in our daily lives and dreams. Aphrodite is the supreme metaphor of all relationship dynamics.
Siren & Symbol
Since the psychological condition of any unconscious content is one of potential reality, characterized by the polar opposites of “being” and “non-being,” it follows that the union of opposites must play a decisive role in the alchemical process. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 557
Without the experience of the opposites there is no experience of wholeness and hence no inner approach to the sacred figures. ~Carl Jung, CW 12, Para 24.
Depth psychology is an alternative to the literalness and concretizing of religious thinking, the idiosyncrasy of self-delusions, or the dryness of cynical rationalism. Symbols are psychic realities that dramatize the union of opposites and integration of dissociated projections or identifications. In the symbolic life, we re-experience the death-and-rebirth process, over and over again, just as we experience the ‘petit mort’ (“little death”) of orgasm and renewal in our sexual lives.
"All deities," William Blake says, "reside in the human breast." The literal is dead, but the metaphorical is alive and well. The "gods" are metaphors --personifications or deifications in the psyche. We recognize archetypal dynamics through their real-time effects and imagery. Aphrodite, wellspring of our creative and erotic potential, remains close to our hearts, as Blake suggests.
Blended Paths
“As above; so below.” The yin-yang of universal opposites is mirrored in the microcosm at the human scale, symbolized as male and female, sun and moon, king and queen, immanent/transcendent, conscious and unconscious. Creation stories often begin with an exemplary cosmic couple (Shiva-Shakti, Isis-Osiris, Adam and Eve, El-Eloah).
Aphrodite is a numinous hypnotic reality that can spontaneously influence us consciously and unconsciously at the physical, emotional, mental and mythic level. It is a fusion -- mouth to mouth, heart to heart, body in body and soul in soul. It is primordial wisdom that mankind can participate in the sacred during physical sexual union.
The way of the couple, mutual affection, unites not only physical and material lives in partnership, but sensation, emotional intimacy, and aesthetic tastes. Sharing intellectual interests, enrichment, and spiritual discoveries unite the lovers who grow together with one another on all planes of aspiration.
An individual's personal myth or mytheme can be conceived as a magnetic vortex drawing life to itself. In another phase of life, the focus and narrative could change to other patterns. Sometimes these transitions are fairly smooth, sometimes competitive, other times catastrophic, sweeping the old structure away in an avalanche of uncontrollable consequences that result in new self-organization.
How have your attitudes toward sexuality changed over different periods in your life? Consider your first time, love at first sight, addictive, illicit and forbidden love, rejection and lost love, vanities, romantic idealism and follies, sexual fantasies, inner partners, devotional and exploitive relationships. Escapism, inspiration, and all forms of artistic creativity can all be associated with the generative power of Aphrodite.
Passion Personified
Call her what you will – Venus, Aphrodite, Cybele, Inanna, Ishtar, Asherah, Shekinah, Astarte, Hathor, Bhavani, Shakti, Freya, Erzuli, Ochun (Black Aphrodite) or any other European, Asian, African, or indigenous First World goddesses of the mysteries of love. Her nature and stories are so paradoxical, it is a challenge to believe them all at once.
Aphrodite easily captures our devotion with her allure and delightful boons. Love transports our souls into the mythic dimension where it renews or destroys depending on our fate. The mythic enters daily life as our experience. We can interact with it in ritual and experiential process therapies.
The sensational realm of the Love Goddess is the immediate experience that veils our subconscious relationship to our own unconscious sexuality and power motives. Some use wiles and tricks to attract another's attention, gifts, and strokes.
They deliberately exploit the anima/animus projections of another onto themselves, using it for personal advantage. This is the motivation of the flirt. In an egotistical identification with Aphrodite, a person becomes a lady-killer or man-eater, the stud, sex kitten, gigolo, whore, “sexual vampire,” or other role-bound image that feeds off others.
There is beauty in the rhythms of nature and our erotic nature. It begins with sensory giveness - paying attention our sensory phenomena and sensual feelings. Essentially anyone can enjoy the practice of imagining the indwelling divinity of their sexual partner, in or out of an intimate or committed relationship. We fill up our senses creating voluptuousness through poetry, imagination, eroticism, sexuality, trance, vision, and exaltation.
By honoring the sensual self, the metaphysical nature of surrender to the erotic impulse is experientially revealed as a glimpse of nondual reality The non-dual Heart is radiating as all creation, and blessing all creation, and singing this embrace through eternity: God and Goddess, Emptiness and Form, Wisdom and Compassion, Agape and Eros, Ascent and Descent -- perfectly and blissfully united.
On the positive side Aphrodite is romantic or mutual love; on the negative side narcissism, addictive love or co-dependence. A sophisticated manipulator can use sex to get what they want. Addictive lovers use others as objects of their gratification. They desire to possess people only to fulfill their neurotic needs and rarely remain friends once they split up when the enchantment is lifted. Love is the opposite of this misuse of attachment. It is based on the desire to grow and expand and for the beloved to do the same.
These are not only patterns of behavior, but concepts rooted in our belief systems and their mythic backgrounds. You might think romantic love is emotional, not an intellectual idea. Nevertheless, romantic love is a notion which builds certain expectations and follows certain patterns. Some relationships reinforce neurotic patterns in one another through forming a consensus of two, "just us against the world." Mutual brainwashing, or folie a deux, is a shared delusion which reinforces fantasy, while inner fortitude remains unchallenged.
The mind is the primary sex organ, stimulating imagination as well as the genitals. Aphrodite is an erotic and enchanting sexual fantasy. She embodies the dual capacity to delight and lead astray. No respecter of roles, an urgent search for affairs may seek unity, but creates disruption. In her myths, more than once Aphrodite herself has been “caught in the act” of her infidelities.
Queen of Sheba, Delilah, Cleopatra, and Helen of Troy as well as today’s celebrity icons embody many of Aphrodite's charismatic qualities. Helen made the egotistical error of feeling superior to the divine Queen who made her pay for her vanity. Aphrodite's energy should be recognized as a dynamism and domain that is not to be challenged competitively. She brings life's mystery with her, so mortals can never possess her fully.
Sexual Appetite
All libido is sexual energy to some extent, according to Jung. Libido is psychic energy in general and relates to the natural urges of life at any given moment. Jung associated libido with self-regulating intentionality. It “knows” where it ought to go for the overall health of the psyche. Libido is an energy arising from the Eros or "life" drive as the urge to create. It includes physiological or psychic energy associated with sexual urges as well as fantasy images which arise from the depths of the unconscious in definite forms. Such urges and affect emerge unchecked by moral authority, being a natural appetite and need, like hunger, thirst, and sleep. (Jung, CW7; CW5)
Sensual and constantly creative, Aphrodite still rises up fully blown in her majesty out of the great sea of our Unconscious to have her way with us -- the very image and icon of natural love and attraction. She is associated with nakedness, special costumes, the artful use of cosmetics -- all "the arts of love" including courtship and lovemaking. She is both the carnal and soulful aspects of romantic love.
Aphrodite conveys a sense of immortality through the oceanic bliss of love and the sensation of timelessness when we are swept away in the thundering surf of desire and orgasm. "The union of man and woman is like the mating of Heaven and Earth. It is because of their correct mating that Heaven and Earth lust forever. Humans have lost this secret and have therefore become mortal. By knowing it the Path to Immortality is opened" said Shang-Ku-San-Tai.
At the metabolic and molecular level, she functions through the glands on an instinctual level, producing pulsating physical desire. Biochemistry is fundamental, primordial. It drives our attitudes and actions towards the object of attraction. The irresistible energy breaks through our ossified routines with powerful desires, impulses, and fantasies in spite of our rational objections.
Friendly Persuasion
Sex is the single strongest intensive, euphoric, even hallucinatory natural emotion alterant available. The sex act itself creates a twilight state, including the dramatic paradoxical shift from sympathetic arousal to the afterglow of parasympathetic tranquility. Natural cycles of hyperarousal and hypoarousal balance the hemispheres of the brain, mediate fight-flight responses, and pain-pleasure cycles.
From the attractant of pheromones to the excitation of adrenaline and the release of dopamine, it is a chemical imperative – the Aphrodite cocktail. Aphrodisiacs have been sought for producing erection in the male, stimulation of the genitals or nervous system, relaxing inhibitions, augmenting physical energy, strengthening the sex glands, or preventing premature ejaculation. Along with traditional love potions, shamans and healers have long used nerve stimulants and placebos to instill love, stir up lust, and increase sexual appetite or ability in the user.
Some traditional botanical aphrodisiacs include yohimbe, kava kava root, saw palmetto, ginseng, fo-ti-tieng, black American willow bark, cactus flowers, damiana, and guarana seeds. There are no anaphrodisiacs, dampeners, or desexualizers worse than ignorance, fear, or anxiety regarding the quality and effectiveness of one's sexual performance.
The greatest sexual tonic is physical and psychological health so that we can spontaneously respond with depth. Sex is not mere lust, even if lust is sex. It transcends the animal functions and enters the realm of the cultural and spiritual, promoting feelings of mutual love, consideration, and solicitude.
Rapport is the ability to communicate and bond instantly and instinctively with others. In rapport like attracts like in a shared state of awareness. Through our mirror neurons we are paired in the biological depth of empathy, at the level of passive association of living bodies, of self and other in embodied action. We immerse fully in the process through intentionality, conscious mood-matching, emulation, and participation mystique. Emotions anchor us to the here and now with meaning and feeling values.
When we’re out of synch, relationship wanes. If our partner sees things differently, we must relearn our communications strategies to relate in a way that fits their map of the world. That is what rapport is all about. ‘Sensual empathy’, the empathic grasping of another as animated by his or her own fields of sensation, has been called 'sensing in.' It is a natural ability in all great lovers.
Both Are Changed
This is the Way of Devotion, with all of its illusions, projections, hopes, and dreams. It is the same feeling that strikes lovers and spiritual devotees (Bhakti yoga). In intimate relations, both parties are utterly changed by such encounters. The nature of Beauty is an immediate revelation of things as they are: unity, line, rhythm, tension, elegance. Aesthetic arrest stops us in our tracks in communion of the soul with the inner and outer mysteries.
The felt-sense of form and beauty is instinctual. In the union of body, soul, and spirit, the lead of the psychosexual self is transmuted or transubstantiated into the gold of a life lived from the higher Self. In modern terms, we might call it self-actualization or an intentional life.
A famous Jung quote says, “The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.”
Irresistible attraction can drive us far beyond the real needs of our personality. We become fixated. Compulsions can disrupt, derail, and detour rational life. The archetype blindly executes its own agenda, regardless of the human toll. Aphrodite crosses personal, social, and spiritual boundaries in the service of biology and transcendence.
Her vision becomes our vision -- a way of “seeing through” the veneer of everyday reality to deeper driving forces in a conscious way. We notice nature at work, stirring up our life like the waves of some vast ocean and casting us wet and naked on the beach of a Terra Incognita, an unknown world in which we have lost our bearings. Love can break over us like a tsunami, with wave upon wave of uncontrollable emotions.
Soul Symptoms
Soul enters via symptoms, and Aphrodite is soul. Jung said the gods have become diseases, and with Aphrodite rising we find ourselves ‘love-sick’ with obsession, longing and yearning. She is linked with death through longing for the departed lover. She can also inspire hate, rivalry, vanity, and jealousy. Her impulsive pathology shows in the depression and desperation of borderline personality disorder. These perils of Aphrodite, the results of unfulfilled desires, reveal the ambiguity of her gifts.
The instinctual pressure can make us deceitful and manipulative. The predatory love sorceress compels or manipulates others into loving her for her own selfish ends. In a direct, balanced love encounter, both power and love are balanced. Balance is disturbed by arousing love through power, rather than the spontaneous awakening of love which has power over both of the pair.
Another obvious example of finding this divine force as a disease is the aptly named venereal maladies, sexually transmitted afflictions, each with its own sources and consequences. There are all manner of psychobiological sexual disorders that perturb our natural sexual behaviors in a variety of ways, consciously and unconsciously. They all metaphorically draw us into the realm of Aphrodite and cause us to focus our attention on them. This is true for both the problems and blessings, as all archetypes have this paradoxical good/bad quality.
Male or female Don Juans are typically high flyers. They are impulsive, energetic, enthusiastic, and suggestible. They seem to lead an exciting, free life, spontaneously realizing their whims. Changing from partner to partner, these people play a terrible price by eternal role-playing to the companion of the moment. They can't form real relationships of any duration because they are in love with conquest of their own shape-shifting projections and fantasies. Sex addiction, with its shame and guilt, is one result of thrill-seeking behavior. “Fatal attraction” is an extreme manifestation of compulsive response, linking life and death.
Enactment: Caught in the act
Myth is actually a dynamic expression of the motivational power of the archetype at its core. The main value of ritual is for the poetic soul. If ritual is merely symbolic enactment of a myth, every sexual act is essentially an unconscious ritual. Partaking in its performance is an end in itself as it has been from the golden dawn of humanity.
The purpose of ritual lies in its expression as an art form. The spiritual import lies in the quality with which the ritual is conducted. Symbolic enactment of mythic patterns is for the sheer joy of the relationship with the archetypal dimension. Conscious awareness of such archetypal dynamics adds a depth dimension to experience. We have a biological, relational, and philosophical approach to dating and mating, all of which must be satisfied for fulfillment.
The lover seduces the beloved by instinctively making them feel special. Such attention is magic. Paradoxically in this specialness we live out one of the most common patterns from the repertoire of mankind. She embodies a goddess with that charismatic kind of grace and graciousness. Her charms remain relevant throughout the ages and constantly inspire the search for the Beloved.
When Aphrodite decrees, we are compelled to follow. Love trances are induced or triggered by archetypes or complexes, memories of places, social roles, etc. Reactions are spontaneous trance states when they happen to us. Being ‘smitten’ is one such trance – often beginning with love at first sight. Fated )Besert) or ‘star-crossed lovers’ (Heloise and Abelard, Romeo and Juliet, Tristan and Iseult) are examples. What fate decrees cannot help but come to pass, despite our protests or cooperation.
Sexual trance-formation can be applied to awakening or re-awakening the sensual self, overcoming dysfunctions, fears and anxieties, increasing desire and relaxation, building rapport and mutual resonance with your partner. Hypnotic suggestions can facilitate communication (sexual attraction, mirroring, congruency, mood matching), creating sexual suggestions, post-hypnotic suggestions, and response on demand. Often beginning with direct gaze and the mirroring of rapport, mutual trance induction is spontaneous and instinctual rather than predatory or contrived.
The goddess within provocatively reflects our amorous aspirations back to us in a multitude of forms. Something touches a deep chord and soul takes flight, like her symbol, the Dove. Engrossed in excited stimulation, we yearn for the birth of something new, to renew mind, body, and spirit, invigorated by energetic exchange.
The Aphroditic woman can be a physical, intellectual, or spiritual companion simultaneously. With little or no regard for the future, her perception of time is discontinuous. As lovers under her influence we feel "suspended in time." Therefore, each moment must be experienced anew, irrespective of past commitments or consequences. Intensity of immediate experience and gratification is valued over duration.
The erotic companion can also be a muse, helping to shape and guide one’s dream to fruition through the nourishment of belief. The beloved fosters dreams and encourages achievement of potential. She is alchemical, because in this sense she transmutes lead into gold. She is the epitome of the idealized “Golden Girl.”
But her myths show, that as much as we’d like to identify with her powers, she can be a jealous and vindictive force for those who might out-shine her. This trait is illustrated in the story of Eros and Psyche with its trials and tribulations. As archetype, Aphrodite retaliates when she sees her glory co-opted by a mortal personality. There is a price to pay, a ‘sacrifice.’ It reminds us that in courtship the ‘love-test’ can be a dance of approach/avoidance. We tend to lose our objectivity in love, like an artist with their works.
Involvement makes us all paradoxically vulnerable to risk/reward. Inanna's creative descent to the netherworld and return to the heavens reminds us that we need to make ourselves vulnerable to be reborn -- to make our own experiential journey and mythic retrieval and ignite the spark of transformation within ourselves.
Initiatory rebirth demands we let go of the grasping human aspects of the mundane human world, our roles and values. She abandoned both heaven and earth for this creative descent experience. Through her journey, Inanna acquires knowledge of death and the underworld to be complete in her wisdom.
The heart wants what it wants and actively and spontaneously initiates interaction. We do it and may objectively watch ourselves in that flow of passion at the same time, in awe and wonder at its power over our rational being. It makes us think and do things we never would otherwise. It is not without reason, we call it ‘falling’ in love. Whatever gods have been in charge of our attitudes and lives are toppled when Aphrodite is in ascendance.
Aphrodite makes advances and supports the advancement of dreams and visions. Aphrodite comes alive in our creative processes as well as our seductive liasons. Like a geisha she offers emotional and aesthetic succor. This isn’t just attention, but loving attention. All relational modes that are intimate in nature and affect both people spontaneously evoke Aphrodite.
We become focused and receptive, even imaginative and visionary. At the threshold of life changing experiences, in that liminal glow we can’t resist dreaming the rosy story forward. Our beloved carries a special relationship to potential realization of this dream whether it fits in with our ‘real’ life, or not. Conversely, when we split, we lose not only that special person, whether they are still valued or devalued, but our dream. The reconstitution of a new dream can be as compelling as finding a new partner.
We are drawn effortlessly by the magnetic presence of fascinating beauty. Our minds may be active but in a focused or absorbed way. Interactive energy facilitates change and growth in both parties. We can explore the exotic mystery and phenomenon of love and relationships on earth by combining sexual energy and imagination. The esoteric practice and ancient healing technique is for understanding yourself and another. The effects are healing, completing, harmonizing, and liberating. But you are generating this narrative and imagery within yourself for connecting and transcending.
When the irresistible desire for union takes precedence, Aphrodite is there. The drive – the living Presence -- may be sexual, but the impulses and non-rational urges can be psychological and even spiritual. Intercourse is her epiphany, and the more planes of mind, heart, and spirit that are penetrated, the fuller the ravishment of union. Such feelings can exalt even mundane sex. Like the Holy Spirit, her symbol is the dove.
Separation Trauma
We all suffer from the devastating crisis and wound separating culture from nature and oneself. We need to work on sustainable relationships to self, others, and the natural world as much as sustainable ecologies. A wounded heart makes it impossible to let love all the way in. We will repeat negative cycles until we learn to heal the heart, clear the pain and find our new way, individually and collectively -- healing the wounds of betrayal, convincing our hearts and mind that it is safe to trust again, to surrender, to let go.
Our core wound is a wound of the heart. All wounds of the psyche mean we are disconnected from love, cut off from the heart, cut off from other people, cut off from our true nature, thus emulating the primordial castration of Uranus, cut off from life by repressed and tormented love -- cut off from Redemptive Love. Core pain and a false self give us a negative approach that takes us down into an unbearable dark hole of pain: "I am suffering and separate from love because..."
Hiding and denying the wound of abandonment keeps it unconscious as a negative and fragmenting self-concept. We feel imperfect, worthless, inadequate, non-existent, alone, incomplete, loveless, powerless, and that we can't do enough to compensate for such short-comings. We need to believe in the body, feel and face the fear, experience the vulnerability, and invite in unconditional love, building conscious relationships. Consciousness of what is happening is a redemptive principle.
Though the effects of anima and animus can be made conscious, they themselves are factors transcending consciousness and beyond the reach of perception and volition.
Hence they remain autonomous despite the integration of their contents, and for this reason they should be borne constantly in mind.
This is extremely important from the therapeutic standpoint, because constant observation pays the unconscious a tribute that more or less guarantees its co-operation.
The unconscious as we know can never be “done with” once and for all.
It is, in fact, one of the most important tasks of psychic hygiene to pay continual attention to the symptomatology of unconscious contents and processes, for the good reason that the conscious mind is always in danger of becoming one-sided, of keeping to well-worn paths and getting stuck in blind alleys.
The complementary and compensating function of the unconscious ensures that these dangers, which are especially great in neurosis, can in some measure be avoided.
It is only under ideal conditions, when life is still simple and unconscious enough to follow the serpentine path of instinct without hesitation or misgiving, that the compensation works with entire success.
The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is, the less he is able to follow his instincts.
His complicated living conditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that they drown the quiet voice of nature.
Opinions, beliefs, theories, and collective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberrations of the conscious mind. Deliberate attention should then be given to the unconscious so that the compensation can set to work.
Hence it is especially important to picture the archetypes of the unconscious not as a rushing phantasmagoria of fugitive images but as constant, autonomous factors, which indeed they are. ~Carl Jung; Aion, Page 20
Resacralization of Sensuality
We all worship Aphrodite informally and devote ourselves to her arts in an effort to attract and thrive with the love we all naturally need. She is the goddess of mutual desire and emotional experience with others (friendship, understanding, soul connection, rapport, empathy), and consummation of relationships. Beyond our intentions and desires, synchronicity, fate, or destiny also play their role in our encounters – stolen, fulfilled, or denied.
We can reclaim the divinity of our bodies that may have been lost in a profane world that criticizes, abuses, represses, or thwarts our sexual expression. We can heal any shame-based attitudes, romantic assumptions, obsolete programming, and dissociations, or the wounds and trauma inflicted on us by the toxic behaviors of others. We can banish sexual ‘ghosts’ and learn to bring our whole selves into the sexual experience. Wounding opens us to compassion. Part of Aphrodite’s tremendous appeal is her vulnerability which mimics our own tortured hearts.
The Empress
The initiatory tale of Inanna is world’s oldest love poem of courtship. The poem was not just a love poem, however, but a part of the sacred rite, performed each year, known as the "sacred marriage". As The Empress, the venusian archetype in the Tarot, the king would symbolically marry the goddess Inanna, mate with her, and ensure fertility and prosperity in the land for the coming year.
Her classical symbols and qualities echo down through the aeons, exemplified in the symbolism of the venusian Tarot Trump, ‘The Empress.’ These trumps are associated with pathways on the qabalistic Tree of Life. In that system, Venus corresponds with the imaginal sphere Netzach (deathless Splendor) and is paired with the mental sphere of Hermes, Hod.
Netzach represents the dawning light of consciousness, and symbolizes the victory of light over the darkness of ignorance and understanding of the inner meaning of physical processes (the sexual instinct, in particular). Together they give birth to the sun child of Tiphareth.
Netzach means clarity or brightness, such as sincerity and truth, or perfection and glory, characteristic of our desire nature. Whatever we strongly and consistently desire is always victorious--it dominates our attention. Clarity helps us become more effective at thinking things clear through. Satiety with material desires makes them no longer attractive to us.
Detachment goads us into a search for something less transitory and more meaningful. Desire (or bhakti) can be cultivated and focused into full creativity (Tiphareth). This yoga of devotion links us back to the source. Netzach is a compassionate way of being in the world.
The imaginal qualities of the trump give rise to artistry and creativity in inner and outer life. Aphrodite can even take over the behavior patterns of other Olympian gods, most of whom aren't immune to her charms. The Empress card is attributed to Hera, as well as Venus – committed and uncommitted love.
As Hera, her goal is legally-sanctioned marital and societal life and she may sacrifice part of her needs in order to achieve it. Aphrodite has a place in Hera's realm of marriage as the highest moment for husband and wife--the pleasure of love. Aphrodite is also the passion in committed love, and also represents mature love.
She herself can become possessed by the passion she arouses in others. This assertive goddess can even take over the behavior patterns of other Olympian gods, most of whom aren't immune to her charms. But in her desire and longing she can be persuasive, deceitful, or conniving. She is always the potential lover of anyone she befriends.
Hot & Wet
But, self-possessed Aphrodite is the unfettered Queen of Hearts and orgasmic ecstasy-- the undisputed goddess of love – a primary facet of the Divine Feminine. As a blood mystery, she offers ordeals, sacrifice, and transformation. From robbing rituals to disrobing we are preceded by eons of human sexual practice of presentation, and gifting or offering.
We should also not lose sight of the fact that a big part of our sexuality takes place in our dreams, from which we can draw inspiration and self-knowledge otherwise hidden. We don’t have to act out all facets of our sexuality. Our dreams and imagination inform us as much as real life.
Psychic or psychological space is a different sort of freedom where anima and animus interact much more freely. New models of gender reunion have placed an emphasis on conscious relations with and awareness of these inner dynamics. We may be projecting, but at least we can reflectively catch ourselves in the act.
The Greeks realized that no single partner could contain the power of anima or animus indefinitely. That is why they distinguished the divine archetypal power of love as a goddess of great force and beauty. No partner can live up to the lofty conception of the projected anima or animus. This higher aspect of the soul should be given due consideration and attention for itself.
Each godform or archetype has its own style of sexuality and relating that comes into play in the compulsions of the mating drive. We may experience many varieties of attraction throughout our lifetime, depending on our situation, opportunities, and inclinations. Some archetypes distance lovers while others draw them closer toward intimate interaction.
The sensuous Aphrodite, a primordial form of the Great Mother, is magnetic, drawing others in, rather than distancing in relationship. She can be electric, stimulating our nerve endings with delightful sensations. The creative compulsion, sexual and otherwise, has its own natural inhibitions which should be heeded.
We both conceal and reveal ourselves in love, both actively and passively. In love our experiences are dramatized and magnified. Our physical exchange doesn’t have to follow any social or ritual script or prescription to produce depth and transcendence.
With a depth dimension, mutual attraction is a poetic and aesthetic act, a celebratory rite, and a marriage of matter and spirit in an experience of wholeness. Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect of alchemy. This flowstate is lyrical, epic and dramatic. Aesthetic signification is one thing, but the deep emotional impact of aesthetic arrest -- being suspended for a thrilling radiant moment in the eternal -- stops us in our tracks in a moment of self-realization.
We don’t need to support that phenomenon with any theory, jargon or interpretation. Sex is an inherently healing practice that promotes well-being. It’s about rapport, reverie, and rebirth. But like any archetypes its effects can be both positive and negative, arousing shadow behaviors and unconscious machinations.
Aesthetic response is an essential emotional aspect that lends flow and harmony to the process of balance, rhythm and synthesis of immediate perception. Aesthetics is an artistic philosophy. It makes us permeable to the image, mobilizes us internally and enables imaginative activity through a form of observance. Imagery evokes a perceptual response -- an aesthetic response, a participatory way of knowing, remembering, and reconnecting with soul and identity.
Syzygy
Syzygy is a poetic term Jung used for the union of opposites -- coupling driven by the love maps, rhythms, and desires of our inner male and female counterparts. Jung called those opposites anima and animus, our internal contrasexual partners, template of our romantic ideals, wholeness and completion and the divine couple. The pattern repeats endlessly. Pulsating life is the substrate of our existence. Anima/soul and Animus/spirit merge in psychological and spiritual androgyny.
We need to be related to another individual, according to Jung, to experience the full depth of our own psyche. From an internal perspective, spiritual marriage is an inner experience which is not projected onto another living individual. In the royal marriage of the soul with the Self, the projections of anima and animus have been returned to their proper level in the personal unconscious. Our partner no longer carries an essentially religious function for us. The King and Queen are united, or conjoined, synthesizing the opposites.
One is never separated from the other, its antithesis. The syzygy has three components: a man's femininity and woman's masculinity; the experience man has of woman and vice versa; and the masculine and feminine archetypal image. Archetypal symbolic pairings are 'yoked together' by this term.
The perfect partnership includes physical and psychic compatibility of anima and animus, which fire the quest for love and myths of the soulmate. The syzygy yokes the dynamic and magnetic animus and anima. It is coupling driven by the love maps, rhythms, and desires of our inner male and female counterparts. Like the conjoined yin/yang opposites, they inspire us with a repertoire of identifications and desirable qualities for ourselves and others.
Biology is not gender, so the same nuances of yin and yang energy apply to all varieties of relationships. It isn’t so crucial to notice or define when we express male or female energies or behaviors as to know that such opposites have their own rhythms within us and in our love lives.
Jung said that the splitting into opposites makes consciousness possible, but the ‘gender binary’ cannot hold everyone. We share our minds as well as our bodies. Psychic ‘gender’ or identification is beyond physical gender, and such dynamics play out in relationships in couples of all descriptions. Both real and symbolic effects are consequential in the “neosexual revolution” that dismantles and reassembles old patterns of sexuality and diversifies intimate relationships.
Sexual Sacraments
There is a sacred intimacy between the polarities of the Divine expression within and without the Bridal Chamber. The model of human sexuality refers in one dimension to this transcendental keynote. The superficial and materialistic reduction of this ineffable mystery as human intercourse, is at best a misplaced projection and worst profaning of the sacrament. --Petros Regulum
Sacred sex is about freely expressing your emotional core. Like any myth or worldview, it has cosmological, metaphysical, sociological, and psychological aspects. If your approach to life is infused with spirit and meaning, it will be likewise in sex, with or without esoteric props, scripts, and pretenses. Passion and a merger of minds as well as bodies are more important than protocols.
When you can fully imagine your lover as God/Goddess, their transcendent embodiment of the essence of male/femaleness, you’re there. “Knowing” in the “biblical” sense is direct, undeniable experience -- a gnosis. It is ravishment, beyond rapture; complete transport to the sacred world which is beyond time, beyond decay. It conveys a sense of the eternal, the fated. It fascinates us because transformation is our biological imperative.
Can you fuse as alchemical opposites? Can you hold the multisensory vision of the lover as a divine archetypal force? Will you simply fully surrender to the sensuality, to the moment, letting the mind go blissfully blank? Do you want to transcend your psychosexual boundaries? Can you surrender completely by trusting your partner and trusting the process?
When you are generating this transcendent dramatization and imagery within yourself, Aphrodite is there. This is not just about sacred sex, but a sacred rather than profane body. So sex is an energetic merging of subtle bodies. It’s an augmented reality using spiritual technology that heightens sensual experience. It opens the couple to Cosmos, to the psychic reservoir of humanity.
Partnered Spiritual Sex
Jung linked the rites of the “royal marriage,” hieros gamos, or mysterium coniunctionis to the broader concept of the union of opposites. Erotic and religious impulses converge in the hieros gamos, an ecstatic transformation of ordinary life. Ritual practice is dated to at least 7000 BCE in the Sumerian cult of Dumuzi-Inanna, Tammuz-Ishtar, and Astarte with thematic continuity.
The desire to consciously amplify the numinous or divine aspect of encounter led to the development of sacred sex practices (inexorably linked with death) found throughout the world. The symbolic meaning of sex changes over time. Our models of sexuality are in flux.
We may experiment with sexual rituals once reserved for royals that symbolically mated to insure the fertility of the land. Our motivations today may be different but generally we seek greater well-being and range of experience. It is about feeling connected to and awed by the spiritual essence of the universe. It is merging and emerging. We can experience a rebirth or rejuvenation using a sacred sex approach during which the couple becomes an altar of worship.
Coupling can also have spiritual qualities which have echoed down through history in Courtly Love, Gnostic, Taoist, and Kabbalistic practices within or without marriage. The Celts had the practice of a ritual Morganatic marriage that only lasts for the ceremonial night, but was recognized for both its personal and collective transformative effects. The participants, in effect, become the god and goddess in one another’s eyes and that of the community.
Some methods require both parties to share the psychophysical process while others can be done quietly on the inner planes. All depend on establishing rapport and resonance with oneself, the known or unknown partner, and the cosmos. Each method has its own symbolism, practices, and goals. We can awaken and free the potential genius for love that lies within us all. We can develop compassion and empathy for self, others and cosmos.
Coupling can also have spiritual qualities when the goddess is animated as Soror Mystica, living embodiment of the Feminine, becoming a full partner in alchemical transmutation. She is considered essential to the Great Work. The sacred marriage, or coniunctio, creates a bond by which opposites are united in an image which transcends both original potentials.
The whole art of alchemy is contained within the image of a magical or divine child. This process creates a cellular, alchemical, energetic rebirth into a higher order of being, symbolically called a spiritual androgyne – a symbol of psychological and spiritual wholeness. In her myth, Aphrodite gave birth to Hermaphroditus, the child of Hermes, another boundary crosser. The mother is the unconscious, the son is the conscious. Aphrodite can exhibit a bisexual aspect as a god-goddess. She embodies the golden purity of male-female wholeness emerging from the union of opposite but complementary halves.
Ordinarily, spirit, soul and body are separated from each other, even while in dynamic interaction. But when the Great Work is complete, the divine spirit is brought ‘down’ to shine through the soul and body and unifies itself with them, so they all form one and the same ‘body’
Alchemical symbolism sometimes refers to this union as the marriage of the Sun (spirit) and the Moon (soul), solar and lunar ways of knowing. Jung tells us that the queen symbolizes the body, the king stands for the spirit, and the soul unites the two in the royal marriage. Therefore, our psyche is a half bodily and half spiritual substance. When king and queen (animus/anima) unite, they form a magical hermaphroditic being which is a union of opposite energies. Their union is a hieros gamos, or sacred marriage which results in the manifestation of all things.
When the goddess is animated as Soror Mystica, she become a full partner in alchemical transmutation. Nothing else can catalyze new potential for life and even a sense of immortality quite like Aphrodite. Orgasm is practical and eternal, earthy and divine. If you have a spiritual approach to your sex life, then it will be so physically and psychically, here and now.
Love and desire change our attitudes and attitudes change our biochemistry, which reciprocally remolds us accept the overtures of others. There is magic in the persuasive power of transformation. We speak of “having chemistry” with those to whom we are attracted energetically. If we have been estranged or dissociated from our bodies through trauma, Aphrodite helps us reclaim the intimate relationship with our own physicality.
Chemistry & Coupling
We live, life moves, at the confluence of these polarities of spirit and matter, body and soul have the capacity to hold contradiction and paradox so we can become whole. Such is the Chemical Marriage, Courtly Love and tantric secrets that conceive a magical child.
We speak of “having chemistry” with those to whom we are attracted energetically. If we have been estranged or dissociated from our bodies through trauma, Aphrodite helps us reclaim the intimate relationship with our own physicality. It may be gentle or it may be irrepressible.
The sex hormones are estrogen, testosterone, and the ‘cuddle hormone’ oxytocin. Biological chemistry plays an important unconscious role in love, romance, and bonding, releasing the “feel good” chemistry of dopamine, serotonin, and adrenaline. Chemistry can also crash our mood when we feel unloved, experience loss, or life events impact us as mood swings.
The endorphin haze is a liminal or spacey, even luminous consciousness that others notice as a ‘glow.’ It produces a cascade of endocrine secretions that support and sustain the state of transport. We like to bask in that glow, feeling attractive and interesting.
Eros can inflate or wound us, making the heart sink in despair through chemical modulations we experience as reactions to internal or external events and conscious or unconscious cues. The throes of new love as well as the bonds of mature love are modulated by our sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system as it continues striving to merge the opposites and maintain dynamic tension.
We all know the saying that “Love is blind,” and indeed it blinds us chemically and neurologically to the shortcomings of our potential partners. We see what we want to see and show the other the best of ourselves and our behavior. But even with that intention, our complexes intrude on the process throwing a monkey wrench at nature’s prime directive to be fruitful and multiply.
Under such diminished capacity we may be sure we have met the person of our dreams, unless the unconscious intervenes and disrupts the process. We may ignore all rational warning signs of rough roads ahead. Such states persist until the honeymoon is over and power struggle begins, which in the natural cycle leads to a calmer but deeper, more mature love.
Conventional & Transgressive Love
The power of Magic is rooted in Eros. When the connection between the erotic and the occult is unconscious, repressed or hidden, the mystery of uniting the esoteric and the erotic becomes the ultimate arcane secret. It penetrates into the depths where all life is one, all boundaries broken down, body and mind fused in one. A deep and abiding awareness of the intimate interrelationship unites the opposites through the realization of imaginal workings.
We embody the myth. As in Tantra, occult ritual involves the transgression of social mores, locating and enacting cultural taboos in order to transcend constrictive boundaries. The erotic and the sexual then become a tool to experience the breaking of mundane bonds and something 'other.'
Sex can also be enhanced by a variety of aesthetic and therapeutic means, including the 64 sexual arts, described in ancient Indian literature. As ever, sex can be a double-edged sword, hurting, healing, or initiating, and that choice remains ours. It remains a challenge throughout our life-span. Unbridled or utterly wild sex is probably better represented by phallic gods, such as Pan or Priapus, whereas, we tend to associate Venus with romantic love, even though she is so much more.
Everyone has their own love style. We are fundamentally psychophysical beings, and the mind is the biggest sexual organ. Sacred sex is just part of a more integral worldview and a joyous expression of nature in the language of gesture, action, and communication. It is the feeling of eros, the relational function, and the harmony of drama. Eros is the passionate joy not only for another or a sexual lover, but even for things and animals.
We don’t need to control or transform our sexual urges if we trust in the meaningful goals of love. Nevertheless, the physical and emotional risks remain. Excitations and inhibitions remind us that the goal of Eros is always Psyche or, as the ancient myth of the Lovers shows. Passion is revealed in the urgency of the process, inward reflection of fantasies, the blinding and glorious inflations of falling in love and the descent of dejection.
There is possible and impossible love, with its own torture and suffering, regression and enthrallment. Triangles, jealousies, erotic entanglements.
Soul, Lived & Loved
The great decisions of human life have as a rule far more to do with the instincts and other mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning reasonableness.
The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is no recipe for living that suits all cases. Each of us carries his own life-form—an indeterminable form which cannot be superseded by any other.
~Carl Jung; Modern Man in Search of a Soul; Pages 60-61.
REFERENCES
Bolen, Jean Shinoda, (1984) Goddesses in Every Woman, Harper & Row; San Francisco.
Carotenuto, Aldo, (1989) Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts), Inner City Books; First Paperback Edition (11-1-89).
Deleuze, Gilles [2003] (2004) Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, New York: Continuum.
Downing, Christine, (1981, 2007), The Goddess, Author's Choice Press.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Writings, Vol. II. New York: William H. Wise, 1929, p. 949.
Friedrich, Paul, (1978), The Meaning of Aphrodite, Univ of Chicago Press; First Edition edition (January 1, 1978)
Gregerson, Edgar, Sexual Practices, Franklin Watts; 1St Edition edition (September 1983).
Griffin, David, (1989), The Archetypal Process: Self and Divine and Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman, p. 154, 1989, Northwestern U. Press, Evanston; Illinois, "Psychocosmetics & the Underworld Connection," Catherine Keller.
Grof, Stanisla, Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985), 96-97.
Hillman, James, (1976) Revisioning Psychology. Harper and Row: NY.
Jung, C.G., “The Technique of Differentiation,” CW 7, par. 345.
Hall, Nor, The Moon and the Virgin, The Women's Press Ltd (October 1, 1980)
Harding, M. Esther, The Way of All Women, Shambhala (May 1, 2001)
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Kramer, Samuel Noah, History Begins at Sumer, The Love Song of Shu-Sin, pp 246-247
Arlene Diane Landau, Tragic Beauty: The Dark Side of Venus Aphrodite and the Loss and Regeneration of Soul, Spring Books
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Ronald Schenk, The Soul of Beauty: A Psychological Investigation of Appearance
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The Soul of Beauty: A Psychological Investigation of Appearance By Ronald Schenk
We also find four colours in the Bardo Thodol as the lights of the four wisdoms, they form four "light-paths" to Buddhahood or redemption. These are clearly the four functions expressed as four paths of orientation. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10th Feb 1939
http://www.crossdreamers.com/2012/05/transgender-psychology-4-animus-and.html
Are fantasies of devotion the same as true devotion? Do we keep digging below our assumed truths to find higher ones? Do we substitute or mistake fantasies or religiosity for actual service? What works better, a passive self-serving piousness or actually serving others compassionately? It is not a literal or geographical pilgrimage that is called for but a deepening of the inner journey. We have to be careful not to devote ourselves to a fantasy, even of devotion for that is beguilement and false glamor. What excites or even satisfies us may be no more than hubris and a mask of persona. A self-deceptive loss of soul is a projection only reclaimed by unveiling the soul.
It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 11 - Jan 1935, Pages 171.
activhttps://neosalexandria.org/bibliotheca-alexandrina/calls-for-submissions/untitled-aphrodite-devotional/
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/naturespath/2016/07/scientists-discover-lifes-common-ancestor-an-ancient-living-ocean/Scientists Discover Life’s Common Ancestor, An Ancient Living OceanJuly 8, 2016 by Alison Leigh Lilly 5 Comments
Ocean Spray – Dirk Dallas (cc) 2015.
Almost every religious tradition has a creation mythology or genesis story about the triumph of order, light and civilization over the powers of confusion, darkness and wilderness. Though details differ from culture to culture and era to era, many of the themes are remarkably similar:
But what if science uncovered evidence that these ancient creation stories might just have gotten some of the facts right after all? That’s looking more and more likely, according to geneticists seeking clues to the origin of life on this planet in the shared genetic traits of plants, animals, bacteria and the microorganisms known as archaea. Piecing together the puzzle of evolution over the past several billion years, scientists now believe that our last common ancestor may have been a planet-wide “mega-organism” so huge that it was the size of the sea itself.
Scientists Meet Mother Ocean
Ocean Sunset. photo by John Hilliard (cc) 2016.
From the beginning, evolutionary biologists have postulated that all of the organisms currently living on the planet must have originated from a single shared ancestor — a theory that recent statistical analysis now confirms is more probable than there being multiple ancestors by a factor of 10^2860. Scientists call this great-great-grandparent organism from which all current life descends LUCA, or the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and estimate that it lived between 2.9 and 3.8 billion years ago.
Since very little evidence remains to show what kind of beings lived in the ancient seas of our young planet, genetic researchers have had to piece together the lingering traces of similarities in molecular structure shared among the three domains of life: single-celled archaea, bacteria and multicellular eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi and the rest). The details get pretty technical (if you want to know more, check out this article in Science Daily), but the long and short of it is that scientists now have a pretty clear picture of what LUCA might have looked like.
What does that picture show? Something pretty startling. Billions of years ago, life existed as a primordial living soup that used the oceans as its medium, spanning the entire planet in what scientists are calling a “mega-organism.” (Think: the leviathan from the Illuminatus! trilogy or, better still, the living ocean of the planet Solaris in the novel of the same name.)
The latest research suggests LUCA was the result of early life’s fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition – effectively creating a global mega-organism.
LUCA’s cells lacked the specialized molecular structures of cells today which allow them to efficiently and precisely control the production of the proteins they need for survival. However, those ancient cells did have primitive organelles and the basic enzymes necessary to break down and process nutrients, as well as the ability to build proteins in a clumsy, hit-or-miss kind of way. They also had “leaky” membranes that made the exchange of genetic material much easier, encouraging cooperation and coexistence rather than competition among cells.
That’s why LUCA had to be cooperative, with any cells that produced useful proteins able to pass them on throughout the world without competition. This was a weird variation on what we know as natural selection — helpful proteins could go from a single cell to global distribution, while harmful or useless proteins were quickly weeded out and discarded. The result was the equivalent of a planet-spanning organism.
This latest research puts a new twist on evolutionary biologists’ assumptions about “survival of the fittest” among primitive life on the planet. Rather than a single-celled organism that slowly evolved into a multicellular structure in order to gain the competitive edge over other early forms of life, it now seems likely that LUCA began as a vast, multicellular organism that thrived through cooperation and interdependence, breaking up into different entities as its parts became increasingly self-sufficient. Today’s bacteria are not more complex or sophisticated than LUCA’s cells; they are actually simpler and more streamlined.
Ancient Myth Meets Modern Science
So what did the old creation myths get right? Almost every culture in the world has a cosmogonic story that shares one or more of these themes: the primordial waters of chaos, the separation of substances into their complimentary (and competing) opposites, and the dismemberment of a god or other being from which the world itself is made. Each of these three themes can serve as a pretty accurate metaphor for what scientists now believe to be the factual history of how life evolved on earth.
Chaotic Waters
Venus Virated. by Village9991 (cc) 2009.
The dark waters and murky depths of the ocean have long held sway over the human imagination as the realm of confusion, disintegration and mystery as well as the source of creation and life. The ancient Babylonian creation myth describes a primordial goddess of chaos named Tiamat, who held the other gods — as well as the yet-unnamed sky and earth — within her body where “their waters were mingled together.” In the Judeo-Christian genesis story, the creator god Yahweh moves across the face of the roiling waters before speaking the single word that will part them to create heaven and earth. Similarly in ancient Egyptian mythology, life is said to have arisen out of the lifeless, watery abyss (deified as Nu), and in both Greek and Norse mythology the wellspring of creation exists within a dark void of nothingness from which the first waters of life spring.
In Japanese mythology, the story is told of how the two spouse-sibling deities Izanagi and Izanami plunged a jeweled spear into the thick soup of the ocean and stirred until the briny substance congealed into islands, forming the archipelago of Japan. Nearby in China, it is said the primordial giant P’an-ku formed inside a cosmic egg in which all the stuff of the universe was mixed up together, and that as he grew, he cracked the egg open and divided its shell and inner mixture into the opposites of yin and yang, earth and sky, male and female, and so on. In their own way, each of these myths evoke the sense of life appearing from the dark, chaotic depths of undifferentiated form where all substances mix and mingle together. One could hardly find a better description for what life must have been like in the earth’s oceans some 3 billion years ago.
Separation and Competition
Venus. by Alice Popkorn. (cc) 2008.
In several of these myths, we can also see the recurring theme of the separation of these chaotic, intermingling waters into distinct elements that both compliment and compete with each other. Gods like Yahweh, P’an-ku and Atum are said to have divided this basic formless stuff of the world into opposites like heaven and earth, land and sky, male and female, light and dark, day and night, sun and moon. In Greek mythology, out of the void of Chaos comes Gaia (earth), along with Tartarus (abyss) and Eros (love) — or in other words, both separation and space, and the potential for attraction and relationship between distinct beings.
Sometimes this separation is an act of masturbation, while other stories describe it as a birth. In some cases — such as in the Chinese story of P’an-ku, the Hiraṇyagarbha (“Golden Egg”) of Brahma in Hindu cosmology, and in some versions of the Egyptian creation story — the birth takes the form of hatching from the cosmic egg. In Polynesian mythology, the earth-goddess Papa creates the oceans when her belly swells so full of water that they suddenly burst forth, giving birth to the sea god Tangaroa, who proceeds to separate his mother earth from her lover, the sky (Rangi). Besides being a separation of the offspring from the mother, such a divine birth often results in the separation of primordial gods into male and female pairs. Egyptian mythology holds that Geb (earth) was joined in eternal sexual union with Nut (sky) until their offspring Shu (air, or emptiness) came between them and forced them apart. In Greek mythology, the machinations and betrayals of the father by a son who sides with his mother is a theme that recurs through several generations of deities.
These stories of separation, division and distinction strongly echo what scientists think might have been the reality of LUCA’s fate, as this planet-sized, oceanic mega-organism broke apart into individuated, self-sufficient entities capable of surviving on their own. With this new independence came an end to the playground of free genetic exchange, and in its place arose competition and the more familiar process of natural selection as we know it today. Ancient myths of divine sibling rivalry and conflict seem especially poignant in light of such scientific theories.
Dismembered Gods
Finally, another common element in many creation stories is the dismemberment and scattering of a divine being’s body to create the very stuff of the universe. In Norse mythology, the frost giant Ymir and the giant cow Auðumbla are both born of the commingling of opposite elements in the life-giving moisture called eitr, which formed when the congealed rime of the icy realm of Niflheim fell through the void into the fiery realm of Muspelheim where it melted and joined with sparks of flame. The sons of Auðumbla’s offspring eventually rise up to kill Ymir and dismember his body to create the world. His blood becomes the sea, his bones make the mountains and his skull becomes the sky. In a similar story in Babylonian myth, the primordial sea-goddess and mother of creation Tiamat plots to kill her own descendants, but they discover her plans and eventually her great-great-grandson, Marduk, defeats her in battle, cutting her body in half. He uses one half to create the earth and the other to make the sky, while her tears became the source of the Tigris and Euphratus rivers. From the blood of her consort, Kingu, Marduk created the first human beings. Both of these creation myths are arguably further examples of the male and female separating from a single undifferentiated substance, with their divine offspring or descendants eventually rising up to set against the parents.
kali goddess by clod (cc) 2013.
Another example of the dismembered god can be found in Hindu cosmology, which tells the story of Purusha, a primeval giant chosen by the gods as a sacrifice from whom they make the world. His feet become the earth and his head the sky, his breath is the wind, his eyes are the sun and his mind becomes the moon. The four castes of Indian society were also said to have been made from Purusha’s body. And last but not least — in ancient Chinese mythology, after being born in the nourishing soup of the cosmic egg and separating the elements into their opposites, our old friend P’an-ku finishes his act of creation by bursting apart his own body to create the ten thousand things: his eyes become the sun and moon, his head the sacred mountains, his blood makes the rivers, his hair becomes the grass, his breath the wind and his voice the thunder.
In these tales — and in particular stories about how new living creatures and the very existence of human beings themselves are formed from the corpse of a god or giant — we can see clear parallels with the literal “dis-membering” of LUCA from a single mega-organism into disparate creatures of specialized and competing interests. From the ancient unity of this great mother ocean was born, quite literally, the ten thousand (and more!) things.
Ancestor Worship Just Got Nerdy
Mara, Goddess of the Sea by Prairie Kittin (cc) 2012.
Many modern Pagans and polytheists honor the ancestors of their bloodlines and homelands alongside the gods and goddesses of pre-Christian peoples. With the genetic theory of LUCA evolving (no pun intended!) in new and exciting directions, we can see how scientifically viable facts can sometimes support the poetry and insight of the old stories. The possibility of a living mother ocean as our Last Universal Common Ancestor not only blurs the lines between ancestor and deity reverence, but also challenges us to keep a more open mind about the ways in which science and religion can shape and inform each other.
So next time you’re relaxing to the soothing sounds of the ocean’s tides, or marveling at the amazing diversity and interdependence of life on this planet, take a moment to say a prayer for our vast and clumsy Grandmother LUCA, as old and deep as the sea.
Bolen, Jean Shinoda, (1984) Goddesses in Every Woman, Harper & Row; San Francisco.
Carotenuto, Aldo, (1989) Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts), Inner City Books; First Paperback Edition (11-1-89).
Deleuze, Gilles [2003] (2004) Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith, New York: Continuum.
Downing, Christine, (1981, 2007), The Goddess, Author's Choice Press.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Writings, Vol. II. New York: William H. Wise, 1929, p. 949.
Friedrich, Paul, (1978), The Meaning of Aphrodite, Univ of Chicago Press; First Edition edition (January 1, 1978)
Gregerson, Edgar, Sexual Practices, Franklin Watts; 1St Edition edition (September 1983).
Griffin, David, (1989), The Archetypal Process: Self and Divine and Whitehead, Jung, and Hillman, p. 154, 1989, Northwestern U. Press, Evanston; Illinois, "Psychocosmetics & the Underworld Connection," Catherine Keller.
Grof, Stanisla, Beyond the Brain: Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985), 96-97.
Hillman, James, (1976) Revisioning Psychology. Harper and Row: NY.
Jung, C.G., “The Technique of Differentiation,” CW 7, par. 345.
Hall, Nor, The Moon and the Virgin, The Women's Press Ltd (October 1, 1980)
Harding, M. Esther, The Way of All Women, Shambhala (May 1, 2001)
Johnson, Robert, The Invisible Partners, Paulist Press (January 1, 1979).
Kerenyi, Karl, Goddesses of the Sun and Moon, Spring Publications (June 4, 1999).
Kramer, Samuel Noah, History Begins at Sumer, The Love Song of Shu-Sin, pp 246-247
Arlene Diane Landau, Tragic Beauty: The Dark Side of Venus Aphrodite and the Loss and Regeneration of Soul, Spring Books
C S Lewis, “Till We Hace Faces”
Liebowitz, Michael, The Chemistry of Love, Berkley (June 1, 1984).
Miller, Iona, Holographic Godforms: Holographic Archetypes, Scientific God Journal, Jan. 2013, Vol. 4; Issue 1.
Neumann, Erich, Amour and Psyche, Princeton University Press (April 1, 1971).
Peele, Stanton, Love and Addiction, Broadrow Publications (April 28, 2015).
Rossi, Ernest, The Psychobiology of Gene Expression: Neuroscience and Neurogenesis in
Rossi, Ernest, Creativity and the Nature of the Numinosum: The Psychological Genomics of Jung's Transcendent Function in Art, Science, Spirit and Psychotherapy, http://www.ernestrossi.com/ernestrossi/keypapers/JS%20Creativity%20Nature%20of%20Numinosumd.pdf
Ronald Schenk, The Soul of Beauty: A Psychological Investigation of Appearance
https://books.google.com/books?id=FTe0koDzooMC&pg=PA38&lpg=PA38&dq=james+hillman,+aphrodite&source=bl&ots=D2HxiDk2Cf&sig=AIyLnInfMwy__to2vOzgjVRIYrk&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQtomsqcLOAhWFRCYKHZKvBHE4ChDoAQgyMAQ#v=onepage&q=james%20hillman%2C%20aphrodite&f=false
von Franz, Marie-Louise, The Golden Ass of Apuleus, Shambhala; Revised ed. edition (May 1, 2001).
von Franz, Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man (C. G. Jung Foundation Books), Shambhala; Revised ed. edition (May 1, 2001)
Re-enchanting Aphrodite: The feminine and erotic wisdom in myth by Dragin, Alexandra, Ph.D., Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2016, 248 pages; 10107668
http://gradworks.umi.com/10/10/10107668.html
Vision and Society: Towards a Sociology and Anthropology from ArtBy John Clammer
White, Richard John, Love's Philosophy,
Woodman, Marion, Leaving My Father’s House: A Journey to Conscious Femininity (co-authored with Kate Danson, Mary Hamilton, Rita Greer Allen), Shambhala, Boston 1992, 354.
Zweig, Connie, The Holy Longing: Spiritual Yearning and Its Shadow Side
https://books.google.com/books?id=sWNApIafB2gC&pg=PA55&lpg=PA55&dq=archetype,+ghostly+lover&source=bl&ots=hxJf0M-l1T&sig=QxGNi1_mC2nL_nZ28IMPzZOn5nY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjdkNrXlcTOAhVEeSYKHaC4DVM4ChDoAQgsMAM#v=onepage&q=archetype%2C%20ghostly%20lover&f=false
The Soul of Beauty: A Psychological Investigation of Appearance By Ronald Schenk
We also find four colours in the Bardo Thodol as the lights of the four wisdoms, they form four "light-paths" to Buddhahood or redemption. These are clearly the four functions expressed as four paths of orientation. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 10th Feb 1939
http://www.crossdreamers.com/2012/05/transgender-psychology-4-animus-and.html
Are fantasies of devotion the same as true devotion? Do we keep digging below our assumed truths to find higher ones? Do we substitute or mistake fantasies or religiosity for actual service? What works better, a passive self-serving piousness or actually serving others compassionately? It is not a literal or geographical pilgrimage that is called for but a deepening of the inner journey. We have to be careful not to devote ourselves to a fantasy, even of devotion for that is beguilement and false glamor. What excites or even satisfies us may be no more than hubris and a mask of persona. A self-deceptive loss of soul is a projection only reclaimed by unveiling the soul.
It is common for very infantile people to have a mystical, religious feeling, they enjoy this atmosphere in which they can admire their beautiful feelings, but they are simply indulging their auto-eroticism. ~Carl Jung, ETH Lecture 11 - Jan 1935, Pages 171.
activhttps://neosalexandria.org/bibliotheca-alexandrina/calls-for-submissions/untitled-aphrodite-devotional/
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/naturespath/2016/07/scientists-discover-lifes-common-ancestor-an-ancient-living-ocean/Scientists Discover Life’s Common Ancestor, An Ancient Living OceanJuly 8, 2016 by Alison Leigh Lilly 5 Comments
Ocean Spray – Dirk Dallas (cc) 2015.
Almost every religious tradition has a creation mythology or genesis story about the triumph of order, light and civilization over the powers of confusion, darkness and wilderness. Though details differ from culture to culture and era to era, many of the themes are remarkably similar:
- the churning waters of chaos in which all substances are intermingled and indistinguishable;
- the first divine act (a breath, a coupling, a hatching, a birth) that begins the process of separation;
- the death or dismemberment of a deity to create the very stuff of the universe.
But what if science uncovered evidence that these ancient creation stories might just have gotten some of the facts right after all? That’s looking more and more likely, according to geneticists seeking clues to the origin of life on this planet in the shared genetic traits of plants, animals, bacteria and the microorganisms known as archaea. Piecing together the puzzle of evolution over the past several billion years, scientists now believe that our last common ancestor may have been a planet-wide “mega-organism” so huge that it was the size of the sea itself.
Scientists Meet Mother Ocean
Ocean Sunset. photo by John Hilliard (cc) 2016.
From the beginning, evolutionary biologists have postulated that all of the organisms currently living on the planet must have originated from a single shared ancestor — a theory that recent statistical analysis now confirms is more probable than there being multiple ancestors by a factor of 10^2860. Scientists call this great-great-grandparent organism from which all current life descends LUCA, or the Last Universal Common Ancestor, and estimate that it lived between 2.9 and 3.8 billion years ago.
Since very little evidence remains to show what kind of beings lived in the ancient seas of our young planet, genetic researchers have had to piece together the lingering traces of similarities in molecular structure shared among the three domains of life: single-celled archaea, bacteria and multicellular eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi and the rest). The details get pretty technical (if you want to know more, check out this article in Science Daily), but the long and short of it is that scientists now have a pretty clear picture of what LUCA might have looked like.
What does that picture show? Something pretty startling. Billions of years ago, life existed as a primordial living soup that used the oceans as its medium, spanning the entire planet in what scientists are calling a “mega-organism.” (Think: the leviathan from the Illuminatus! trilogy or, better still, the living ocean of the planet Solaris in the novel of the same name.)
The latest research suggests LUCA was the result of early life’s fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition – effectively creating a global mega-organism.
LUCA’s cells lacked the specialized molecular structures of cells today which allow them to efficiently and precisely control the production of the proteins they need for survival. However, those ancient cells did have primitive organelles and the basic enzymes necessary to break down and process nutrients, as well as the ability to build proteins in a clumsy, hit-or-miss kind of way. They also had “leaky” membranes that made the exchange of genetic material much easier, encouraging cooperation and coexistence rather than competition among cells.
That’s why LUCA had to be cooperative, with any cells that produced useful proteins able to pass them on throughout the world without competition. This was a weird variation on what we know as natural selection — helpful proteins could go from a single cell to global distribution, while harmful or useless proteins were quickly weeded out and discarded. The result was the equivalent of a planet-spanning organism.
This latest research puts a new twist on evolutionary biologists’ assumptions about “survival of the fittest” among primitive life on the planet. Rather than a single-celled organism that slowly evolved into a multicellular structure in order to gain the competitive edge over other early forms of life, it now seems likely that LUCA began as a vast, multicellular organism that thrived through cooperation and interdependence, breaking up into different entities as its parts became increasingly self-sufficient. Today’s bacteria are not more complex or sophisticated than LUCA’s cells; they are actually simpler and more streamlined.
Ancient Myth Meets Modern Science
So what did the old creation myths get right? Almost every culture in the world has a cosmogonic story that shares one or more of these themes: the primordial waters of chaos, the separation of substances into their complimentary (and competing) opposites, and the dismemberment of a god or other being from which the world itself is made. Each of these three themes can serve as a pretty accurate metaphor for what scientists now believe to be the factual history of how life evolved on earth.
Chaotic Waters
Venus Virated. by Village9991 (cc) 2009.
The dark waters and murky depths of the ocean have long held sway over the human imagination as the realm of confusion, disintegration and mystery as well as the source of creation and life. The ancient Babylonian creation myth describes a primordial goddess of chaos named Tiamat, who held the other gods — as well as the yet-unnamed sky and earth — within her body where “their waters were mingled together.” In the Judeo-Christian genesis story, the creator god Yahweh moves across the face of the roiling waters before speaking the single word that will part them to create heaven and earth. Similarly in ancient Egyptian mythology, life is said to have arisen out of the lifeless, watery abyss (deified as Nu), and in both Greek and Norse mythology the wellspring of creation exists within a dark void of nothingness from which the first waters of life spring.
In Japanese mythology, the story is told of how the two spouse-sibling deities Izanagi and Izanami plunged a jeweled spear into the thick soup of the ocean and stirred until the briny substance congealed into islands, forming the archipelago of Japan. Nearby in China, it is said the primordial giant P’an-ku formed inside a cosmic egg in which all the stuff of the universe was mixed up together, and that as he grew, he cracked the egg open and divided its shell and inner mixture into the opposites of yin and yang, earth and sky, male and female, and so on. In their own way, each of these myths evoke the sense of life appearing from the dark, chaotic depths of undifferentiated form where all substances mix and mingle together. One could hardly find a better description for what life must have been like in the earth’s oceans some 3 billion years ago.
Separation and Competition
Venus. by Alice Popkorn. (cc) 2008.
In several of these myths, we can also see the recurring theme of the separation of these chaotic, intermingling waters into distinct elements that both compliment and compete with each other. Gods like Yahweh, P’an-ku and Atum are said to have divided this basic formless stuff of the world into opposites like heaven and earth, land and sky, male and female, light and dark, day and night, sun and moon. In Greek mythology, out of the void of Chaos comes Gaia (earth), along with Tartarus (abyss) and Eros (love) — or in other words, both separation and space, and the potential for attraction and relationship between distinct beings.
Sometimes this separation is an act of masturbation, while other stories describe it as a birth. In some cases — such as in the Chinese story of P’an-ku, the Hiraṇyagarbha (“Golden Egg”) of Brahma in Hindu cosmology, and in some versions of the Egyptian creation story — the birth takes the form of hatching from the cosmic egg. In Polynesian mythology, the earth-goddess Papa creates the oceans when her belly swells so full of water that they suddenly burst forth, giving birth to the sea god Tangaroa, who proceeds to separate his mother earth from her lover, the sky (Rangi). Besides being a separation of the offspring from the mother, such a divine birth often results in the separation of primordial gods into male and female pairs. Egyptian mythology holds that Geb (earth) was joined in eternal sexual union with Nut (sky) until their offspring Shu (air, or emptiness) came between them and forced them apart. In Greek mythology, the machinations and betrayals of the father by a son who sides with his mother is a theme that recurs through several generations of deities.
These stories of separation, division and distinction strongly echo what scientists think might have been the reality of LUCA’s fate, as this planet-sized, oceanic mega-organism broke apart into individuated, self-sufficient entities capable of surviving on their own. With this new independence came an end to the playground of free genetic exchange, and in its place arose competition and the more familiar process of natural selection as we know it today. Ancient myths of divine sibling rivalry and conflict seem especially poignant in light of such scientific theories.
Dismembered Gods
Finally, another common element in many creation stories is the dismemberment and scattering of a divine being’s body to create the very stuff of the universe. In Norse mythology, the frost giant Ymir and the giant cow Auðumbla are both born of the commingling of opposite elements in the life-giving moisture called eitr, which formed when the congealed rime of the icy realm of Niflheim fell through the void into the fiery realm of Muspelheim where it melted and joined with sparks of flame. The sons of Auðumbla’s offspring eventually rise up to kill Ymir and dismember his body to create the world. His blood becomes the sea, his bones make the mountains and his skull becomes the sky. In a similar story in Babylonian myth, the primordial sea-goddess and mother of creation Tiamat plots to kill her own descendants, but they discover her plans and eventually her great-great-grandson, Marduk, defeats her in battle, cutting her body in half. He uses one half to create the earth and the other to make the sky, while her tears became the source of the Tigris and Euphratus rivers. From the blood of her consort, Kingu, Marduk created the first human beings. Both of these creation myths are arguably further examples of the male and female separating from a single undifferentiated substance, with their divine offspring or descendants eventually rising up to set against the parents.
kali goddess by clod (cc) 2013.
Another example of the dismembered god can be found in Hindu cosmology, which tells the story of Purusha, a primeval giant chosen by the gods as a sacrifice from whom they make the world. His feet become the earth and his head the sky, his breath is the wind, his eyes are the sun and his mind becomes the moon. The four castes of Indian society were also said to have been made from Purusha’s body. And last but not least — in ancient Chinese mythology, after being born in the nourishing soup of the cosmic egg and separating the elements into their opposites, our old friend P’an-ku finishes his act of creation by bursting apart his own body to create the ten thousand things: his eyes become the sun and moon, his head the sacred mountains, his blood makes the rivers, his hair becomes the grass, his breath the wind and his voice the thunder.
In these tales — and in particular stories about how new living creatures and the very existence of human beings themselves are formed from the corpse of a god or giant — we can see clear parallels with the literal “dis-membering” of LUCA from a single mega-organism into disparate creatures of specialized and competing interests. From the ancient unity of this great mother ocean was born, quite literally, the ten thousand (and more!) things.
Ancestor Worship Just Got Nerdy
Mara, Goddess of the Sea by Prairie Kittin (cc) 2012.
Many modern Pagans and polytheists honor the ancestors of their bloodlines and homelands alongside the gods and goddesses of pre-Christian peoples. With the genetic theory of LUCA evolving (no pun intended!) in new and exciting directions, we can see how scientifically viable facts can sometimes support the poetry and insight of the old stories. The possibility of a living mother ocean as our Last Universal Common Ancestor not only blurs the lines between ancestor and deity reverence, but also challenges us to keep a more open mind about the ways in which science and religion can shape and inform each other.
So next time you’re relaxing to the soothing sounds of the ocean’s tides, or marveling at the amazing diversity and interdependence of life on this planet, take a moment to say a prayer for our vast and clumsy Grandmother LUCA, as old and deep as the sea.
