Is Jung's Archetypal Memory Real? If So, Can We Identify it in the Brain?

For anyone interested in Jungian studies, this is an interesting new entry into the neuroscience literature, where Jung and his ideas have essentially been ignored. Of the three best known off-shoots from the original Freudian group (Freud and psychoanalysis, Jung and Analytical Psychology, and Alfred Adler and Individual Psychology), only the psychoanalytic model has continued to evolve in any serious way. With the emergence of Self Psychology in the 1970s and 1980s, then the growth of both relational psychoanalysis and intersubjective systems theory (both of which includes elements of attachment theory and neuroscience [interpersonal neurobiology, or affective neuroscience]), the modern psychoanalytic school is thriving.

Not so true for Jung and the post-Jungians. There has been very little research into Jungian ideas and constructs - and those that have been developed, for example his typology model that has become widely known as the Myers-Briggs model, have been dismissed. Ideas of the unconscious (though now more accepted by some neuroscientists), or archetypes, or synchronicity have all been laughed at and dismissed as worthy of investigation.

Slowly, that is changing.

The study presented below (introduction only) attempts to ascertain if there is any validity to the idea of collective archetypes or a collective unconscious.

Full Citation:
Sotirova-Kohli, M; Opwis, K; Roesler, C; Smith, SM; Rosen, DH; Vaid, J; Djonov, V. (2013, Oct 9). "Symbol/Meaning Paired-Associate Recall: An “Archetypal Memory” Advantage?" Behavioral Sciences; 3(4): 541-561. doi:10.3390/bs3040541

Symbol/Meaning Paired-Associate Recall: An “Archetypal Memory” Advantage?

Milena Sotirova-Kohli [1],, Klaus Opwis [1], Christian Roesler [1], Steven M. Smith [2],
David H. Rosen [3], Jyotsna Vaid [2], and Valentin Djonov [4]

1. Department of Psychology, University of Basel, Missionstrasse60/62, Basel 4055, Switzerland;
E-Mails: klaus.opwis@unibas.ch (K.O.); christian.roesler@kh-freiburg.de (C.R.)
2. Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA;
E-Mails: stevesmith@tamu.edu (S.M.S.); jvaid@tamu.edu (J.V.)
3. School of Medicine, Oregon Health and Science University, Portland, OR 97239, USA;
E-Mail: drdavidhrosen@gmail.com
4. Institute of Anatomy, University of Bern, Balzerstrasse 2, Bern 3000, Switzerland 

Abstract

The theory of the archetypes and the hypothesis of the collective unconscious are two of the central characteristics of analytical psychology. These provoke, however, varying reactions among academic psychologists. Empirical studies which test these hypotheses are rare. Rosen, Smith, Huston and Gonzales proposed a cognitive psychological experimental paradigm to investigate the nature of archetypes and the collective unconscious as archetypal (evolutionary) memory. In this article we report the results of a cross-cultural replication of Rosen et al. conducted in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. In short, this experiment corroborated previous findings by Rosen et al., based on English speakers, and demonstrated a recall advantage for archetypal symbol meaning pairs vs. other symbol/meaning pairings. The fact that the same pattern of results was observed across two different cultures and languages makes it less likely that they are attributable to a specific cultural or linguistic context.

1. Introduction

The notions of archetypes and the collective unconscious, which are central to analytical psychology, have generally remained outside the domain of inquiry of mainstream academic psychology. Nevertheless, there are emerging efforts to integrate ideas from analytical psychology and those drawn from cognitive psychology, neuroscience and even physics, e.g., [1–9], etc. To date, these efforts have largely aimed at a theoretical or conceptual integration. Attempts to operationalize or empirically test ideas from analytical psychology are still fairly uncommon.

Two studies that did seek to provide an empirical test of the notion of archetypes are therefore noteworthy, see [2,10]. Rosen et al. [2] found that participants could not reliably identify the proposed associated meaning of symbols deemed to be archetypal when they relied only on resources available to consciousness. However, when participants were presented with pairs of symbols and meanings to learn in a paired-associate recall procedure, they showed significantly better recall of those pairs in which the archetypal symbols were matched with their associated archetypal meanings than those in which the associated meaning did not correspond to the archetypal meaning. In interpreting their results, the authors theorized that the presentation of the symbol and the associated meaning mobilized prior, implicit associations encoded in memory which under normal conditions are not available to conscious recall. The results of this initial study were subsequently replicated by Huston [11] and Bradshaw and Storm [12].

Although these results may be viewed as lending empirical support to the notion of the existence of collective unconscious (archetypal) memory, they may also reflect linguistic or cultural characteristics of the population tested (native speakers of English in the United States and Australia). To determine whether the obtained effect is not unique to this population it is important to conduct studies with native speakers of other languages, and in other cultural contexts. This was the aim of the present study. In this study we developed a German language adaptation of the materials used by Rosen et al. and tested participants residing in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. It was hypothesized that if certain symbols truly have underlying, perhaps universal, “archetypal” meanings, then they should be significantly better recalled if they are paired in a memory task with those meanings than if they are paired with other meanings unrelated to the archetypal ones.

Before proceeding with a description of our study a brief background discussion of archetypes as developed by Jung is in order.

1.1. Archetypes

Unlike Freud, Jung believed that the dynamic unconscious was not just the seat of sexual and aggressive instincts and repressed wishes. Through his work with the word association test, the study of myths and fairy tales, and of fantasy products of psychotic patients, Jung reached the conclusion that there was a layer of the unconscious which contains images, patterns of behavior and modes of perception accessible to the whole of the human race (and to the animal world, as well). He named these specific patterns of perception and behavior which crystallize in consciousness in the form of symbols archetypes (the word archetypos was used by Plato for his ideas and Jung knew this as was pointed out by Barnes [13]). Jung and suggested that archetypes were “empty and purely formal” ([14], p. 79, par. 155) “a possibility of representation given a priori” ([14], p. 79, par. 155). Further on, Jung stressed that “the representations themselves are not inherited” ([14], p. 79, par. 155). In this sense, Jung believed that the archetype-as-such is unknowable and “irrepresentable” ([15], p. 213, par. 417); rather, it affects consciousness mainly from its “ability to organize images and ideas” ([15], p. 231, par. 440). In Jung’s view, the archetype “can be named and has an invariable nucleus of meaning—but always only in principle” ([14], p. 80, par. 155). Anything we say about the archetype remains a visualization which is made possible by the current state of consciousness at a given moment. Archetypes for Jung are numinous (that is, highly emotionally charged) and are associated with strong affective responses. Furthermore, the archetype was thought by Jung to have a “psychoid nature” ([15], p. 215, par. 419), which he described as follows: ”the archetype describes a field which exhibits none of the peculiarities of the physiological and yet, in the last analysis, can no longer be regarded as psychic, although it manifests itself psychically” ([15], p. 215, par. 420). In other words, as conceptualized by Jung, archetypes-as-such while being universal are unknowable or unconscious, but can have a profound impact on consciousness and the life of the individual. They do not belong just to the psychic sphere and seem to be given a priori as a possibility or as a form without content.

It has been noted that Jung’s account of archetypes is multifaceted. For example, Roesler [9] pointed out that we can speak of at least four different definitions of the archetype in Jung’s writing. The first is a biological definition, according to which the archetype was considered as an inborn pattern of perception and behavior. The second definition is an empirical-statistical one based on Jung’s work with the word association test, according to which the archetype is the nucleus of the categories of complexes noted by him in different individuals. A third definition views archetypes as transcending any particular time, place or individual and whose real nature can never become conscious. Finally, there is a cultural-psychological understanding of the archetype which differentiates between the archetype-as-such and its concrete manifestations which are culturally determined [9]. Although depending on the theoretical orientation there can be significant overlap between these definitions, the research reported here investigates primarily the first, biological, definition of the archetype but it is also compatible with the third definition.

Contemporary researchers have tried to reformulate the theory of the archetype to make it more compatible with notions in modern science. Among one of the most well formulated approaches is a model which theorizes that what Jung might have meant with the archetype is similar to the contemporary cognitive semanticists’ notion of image schemas [3–5,16–18], that is, a structure of sensorimotor experience that captures a “dynamic, recurring pattern of organism-environment interactions” ([19], p. 136), that can be—“recruited for abstract conceptualization and reasoning” ([19], p. 141). Image schemas are thought to be “preverbal and mostly nonconscious” ([19], p. 144). Jean Knox [3] first proposed a connection between the notion of an image schema and the archetype-as-such. In this sense the archetype is looked at as an early achievement of development resulting from the qualities of the brain as a dynamic system and the interactions between the individual (biological and psychological) and the environment (social, cultural and physical). This understanding of the archetype uses a dynamic systems approach to the development of cognition and action. This approach to cognition and action relates to the process of formation of preverbal image schematic representations in the infant’s brain which are largely determined by the history of the brain as a system, i.e., are based on the experience the system has in the physical world and the ability of the brain as a dynamic system to self-organize [20]. Later on, this pre-verbal neuronal activation pattern serves as a foundation for the development of conceptual thought—categories and concepts. In themselves these neuronal activation patterns constitute attractor states for the dynamic system of the brain.

The idea of the image schema also finds support in contemporary research on embodiment where embodiment is defined as the meaning of symbols to an agent and the reasoning about meaning and sentence understanding which “depends on activity in systems also used for perception, action and emotion” ([21], p. 4). Neuroimaging studies support the idea that sensory and motor systems are involved in concept understanding and retrieval [22]. Thus, image schemas can be understood as neuronal activation patterns which encode embodied experience in the world. They function automatically, i.e. unconsciously, and underlie concepts, narrative and ritual [23], all qualities which can be attributed also to archetypes.

Varela, Thomson and Rosch [24] propose a slightly different approach to cognition and action, namely, an enacted cognition approach to the study of mental processes and representations. According to this approach, cognition is “enaction: a history of structural coupling that brings forth a world” ([24], p. 172); this view seems consistent with most of the above mentioned ideas. Varela et al. go a step further to suggest that “the cognitive system projects its own world, and the apparent reality of this world is merely a reflection of internal laws of the system” ([24], p. 172).

Among Jungian scholars, George Hogenson [25] looked into the connection between archetypes and mirror neurons and proposed understanding the archetype as an “elementary action pattern” ([25], p. 325), which sounds similar to some of the ideas of the enacted cognition approach of Varela, Thomson and Rosch. Other Jungian scholars stress in their re-interpretation of the nature of the archetype non-linear dynamics which underlie both the functioning of the brain as a system and some aspects of the archetype related to, for example, synchronicity, enantiodromia, or the therapeutic relationship looked at as a dynamic open system. Hogenson proposed that the archetype could be understood as an “iterative moment in the self-organization of the symbolic world” ([26], p. 279). Saunders and Skar have suggested that the archetype is an emergent structure which derives from the self-organizing properties of the brain (a notion very similar to the theory of the image schema) [27]. McDowell stressed that the archetype was a pre-existing principle of the organization of personality [28], while van Eewynk [29,30] looked at archetypes as strange attractors of the dynamic system of the psyche whose non-linear dynamics underlie individuation and the therapeutic relationship.

Perhaps one of the most controversial aspects of the notion of archetypes is that of innateness. How do we understand innateness and what was actually meant by Jung when he stated that archetypes are a priori given to us? Furthermore, how do we understand the innateness of archetypes in an age in which the meanings of symbols are not likely to be transmitted genetically?

While there are still proponents of the idea that archetypes are transmitted genetically (see for further information the review by Roesler [1]), many consider discussions of nature versus nurture to be obsolete and stress the interactionist nature of human development [1,4,9,17,25,31] or point out psychological factors in evolution in the argumentation against a purely genetically transmitted innateness [32]. The innate aspect of the archetype can also be looked at as predisposition to a genetic condition which needs certain environmental cues to find expression in the sense of epigenetics as described by Roesler [1,9] and Rosen [31,33]. In the light of new discoveries it might well be the case that this epigenetic process which provides the link between environment and genome and determines which genes are being active and which are deactivated might even be more important than the genes themselves and may provide the link between biological substrates—genome and cultural heritage—behavior, habits etc. [34]. The Jungian scholar Pietikanen [35] suggested a radical departure from the discussion about innateness and proposed that with the help of a Cassirerian approach archetypes could be understood as “culturally determined functionary forms organizing and structuring certain aspects of man’s cultural activity” ([35], p. 325).

Regarding inborn behavior and archetypes there appears to be empirical support for innateness in experimental psychology for a range of phenomena including the deep structure of language [36], early attachment patterns [37], the idea of “basic emotions”, language acquisition mechanisms, and a face recognition program [1,9]. Roesler [1] points out Seligman’s concept of “preparedness to learn” as a further example of innateness that can be applied to archetypal theory. Similarly, Erik Goodwyn [8,38] uses in defense of innateness findings from evolutionary psychology and neuroanatomy.

We can also say that controversies concerning innateness and the archetype reflect broader controversies in psychology at large. While approaches such as the dynamic systems approach, cognitive semantics, embodiment and enacted cognition as approaches in the study of cognitive processes enjoy widespread popularity, there are also many scholars who conduct experimental work in connection with innate mechanisms. The experimental work of developmental psychologists such as Spelke provides data which supports the hypothesis of multiple innate mechanisms with which infants are equipped at birth. Spelke suggests that “perception, thought, value and action depend on domain-specific cognitive systems” and “each system has its own innate foundations and evolutionary history” ([39], p. 204). For example, in a recent study Izard, Sann, Spelke and Steri [40] report findings that support the assertion that infants at birth are equipped with abstract, numerical representations. Yet other cognitive scientists do not readily accept the notion that there are innate foundations for cognitive capacities, particularly for certain capacities, such as language. It, thus, seems that cognitive science at large is still grappling with questions concerning innateness.

The debate around the nature of the archetype is further enriched by archetypal psychology which sees the place of the archetype in imagination and stresses the transcendental nature of the archetype [1,9]. Although this approach to the archetype might not resonate with many mainstream psychologists, there are tendencies in contemporary studies of consciousness which are compatible with the ideas of archetypal psychology. The Hameroff and Penrose quantum theory of consciousness [41], the idea that consciousness “emerges as natural processes” that involve quantum phenomena “unfold[ing]” [42], and the hypothesis that the brain does not produce consciousness but serves the purpose of receiving and transmitting information which exists from beyond it [43] can all be seen to resonate with some of the basic ideas of archetypal psychology concerning the archetype. Furthermore, the notion of synchronicity—meaningful coincidences—based on an acausal connection principle, which Jung developed in exchange with Wolfgang Pauli and Albert Einstein, and which can be seen as an expression of a constellated archetypal field at work [6,44], finds in recent days, support through discoveries in complexity theory and the dynamics of complex adaptive systems [7].

Given all these ideas how are we to understand the archetype? Are archetypes transmitted biologically or are they transmitted by culture as Roesler [1] asks? Can we understand the collective unconscious in terms of subliminal transmission and inter-individual neuronal format as Roesler [1] proposed or is it a form of archetypal memory as Rosen et al. [2] suggested? However we reformulate the theory of the archetype and the collective unconscious most Jungian scholars would agree that the basis of the archetype and the collective unconscious is both innate and environmental. The differences are more in terms of degree and the role of each of the two factors.

While the above developments in psychology provide much food for thought, finding a way to test notions about archetypes, however this notion is formulated, would be instructive. We thus turn to two previous empirical studies which attempted such a test and found empirical support in favor of the existence of something akin to archetypes, henceforth termed the archetype hypothesis.

1.2. Previous Research

Apart from the above mentioned theoretical discussions concerning the nature of the archetype a few scholars have sought to empirically test the hypothesis of archetypes and archetypal memory.

As mentioned above, Rosen et al. [2], as well as Huston, Rosen and Smith [45], Bradshaw and Storm [12] and Maloney [10] examined this in the domains of memory and preferences.

Maloney [10] asked a community sample of 151 participants to rate their preferences to images containing archetypal themes and factor analyzed the responses. The images included the archetypal themes of the mother and the hero in both anthropomorphic (e.g., woman gazing lovingly at a child  for the positive mother, Hercules for the positive hero) and non-anthropomorphic (e.g., the cave as a symbol of the Great Mother, the heraldic lion as a symbol of the hero) form. Both positive and negative aspects of these themes were examined. The study used an unconstrained Q-sort method. Participants were presented with sets of six images and asked to rate their responses to three questions in respect to the images using a limited set of possible answers. The analysis demonstrated a stable three-factor structure underlying responses to the question “If I were to keep this image with me forever, I would be”. Factor 1 contained images related to a quest theme—the positive hero, the non-anthropomorphic hero, the non-anthropomorphic mother, according to the author. Factor 2 was reported to contain images related to an attachment theme—positive mother. Factor 3 was interpreted as being related to a conflict theme. The author thus concluded that “archetypal structure underlies adult affective responses” ([10], p. 110). Furthermore, Maloney concluded that the images alone were not enough to evoke an archetypal structure, they had to be viewed in a certain way so that the structure was triggered which in the design of his study was achieved through the question that the subjects had to answer. Only the question which required most active participation on the part of the participants in assessing the images yielded significant results.

A different experimental paradigm was developed by Rosen, Smith, Huston and Gonzales [2]. Rosen and colleagues argued that a natural extension of Jung’s own early studies with the Word Association Test would be the study of associations on the basis of symbols. They developed an inventory of forty symbols and forty associated words which were intended to correspond to the symbol’s archetypal meanings—The Archetypal Symbol Inventory (ASI). Furthermore, they designed a cognitive psychological experimental paradigm to test the hypothesis that archetypal symbols were strongly associated to these proposed underlying meanings and that the association lies beyond conscious retrieval under ordinary conditions. Rosen et al. conducted a series of three experiments with undergraduate students in psychology at a large university in southwestern U.S. The first two experiments tested participants’ conscious knowledge of the symbols and their meanings. When they were shown each of the ASI symbols, and asked to guess the meaning of each symbol, American participants could not come up with the designated meaning of the symbols. Even more surprisingly, when they were given the 40 ASI symbols with a randomly ordered list of the meanings, participants were unable to match symbols to their correct meanings above the level of chance. These results show that participants were not consciously aware of the meanings of the symbols. The third experiment was a paired-associate learning task in which students (divided into two groups) were first shown all forty symbols. Each group was given half of the symbols matched with the proposed associated meanings and the other half with symbols and meanings mismatched (the particular pairings were counterbalanced across the two groups). After a one minute rest participants were shown only the symbols and were asked to remember and write down the word they initially saw paired with the symbol. It was found that students learned and recalled significantly better the words whose meanings corresponded to the proposed meanings of the archetypal symbols than those that were unrelated to the purported meaning of the symbols. From the list-learning research literature (e.g., [46,47]) it is known that pairs of strongly associated words are learned better than less associated pairs. This gave ground to the authors of the study to conclude that archetypal symbols are strongly associated to the proposed related meanings and that the association is unconscious.

Huston, Rosen and Smith [45] proposed a mechanism to explain the observed effects in the original Rosen et al. study and a second variation of the research [11]. They suggested that when a symbol  was presented paired with its associated “archetypal” meaning priming occurs which facilitates later recall. The correctly paired symbol with its proposed related meaning also triggers an emotional response which contributes to the “activation and constellation of an archetypal image” ([45], p. 147). The constellated archetypal image and the associated meaning presented to participants together led to priming of memory for the association and facilitated later recall. The mechanism proposed by the above authors is still in the realm of hypothesis and needs to be experimentally tested.

In a recent study Bradshaw and Storm [12] conducted three experiments based on the Rosen and Smith paradigm using 30 out of the original 40 symbols from the ASI in a sample of 237 students and members of the general public in the state of Victoria, Australia. The sample consisted of predominantly Australian/New Zealander citizens (81%) and was predominantly English native speaking (around 86%). The other countries/regions represented were respectively, Britain (3%), Europe (4%), Asia (7%), America (North and South 2%) and Other 3%. The authors replicated the results of Rosen and Smith in the free association task (Experiment 1) and detected in the forced association task (Experiment 2) seven out of 30 symbols which could be consciously known by the participants. For the rest of the symbols there was no statistical evidence in the forced association task for conscious knowledge. The authors modified the paired-associate learning task used in the third experiment of the paradigm. To additionally control for intermediate effects they presented four randomized versions of symbol-word sets, i.e. instead of two counterbalancing conditions they had four. Furthermore they modified the timing in the list learning task giving participants 8 seconds in  the learning phase as opposed to 5 seconds in the original paradigm and 20 seconds in the recall phase as opposed to 8 seconds in the original paradigm. As stimuli the authors used a set of pictures and drawings of the symbols predominantly downloaded from Internet instead of the original images from the ASI. There was no explanation given for the above modifications. The results replicated the findings of Rosen et al. [2] and Huston [11]. Matching words with the symbol that they are associated with, benefitted learning and subsequent recall of the words. The authors reported a statistically significant difference between the different versions of the main experiment. There was a statistically higher recall rate for both matched and mismatched recall in one of the versions. This was partially explained by the age difference between the participants in this version (M = 23 years) and one of the other versions (M = 30 years). No information is available about the mean age in the other groups, as well as the means and standard deviations for matched and mismatched recall in the different groups. Furthermore, the authors detected increased difficulty in learning and recall of mismatched pairs with increased age in their sample (mean age 27, SD = 11 years). No significant interaction between country and ethnicity and performance was found on any of the tasks in all three experiments. This is not surprising since as noted above the sample consisted of predominantly Australian/New Zealander citizens (81%). The number of participants from other countries of origin was very small. As such it could be argued that the sample size of the individual ethnic groups (distributed across the 6 different conditions) was too small to detect any meaningful difference. There is also no information available about how the different ethnic groups or counties of origin were represented across the different experimental conditions. Furthermore, the experiment was carried out in English. All participants, even those who were not native English speakers (14% or less since the authors did not control for language which the participants consider to be their native language) used English as the experimental language. In this sense, it cannot be ruled out that the effect which the authors report (no difference in performance between the different ethnic groups, as well as the significant effect of  matching on learning and recall) can be explained by characteristics specific to the English language.

Following its publication the Rosen et al. study led others to wonder how robust or generalizable the findings were. Jill Gordon [48] posed the question whether the images used by the team could be considered to be archetypal before additional, cross-cultural, research is conducted using the same paradigm. Similarly, Gordon stressed the importance of conducting cross-cultural studies to determine whether the images used really had the qualities of archetypal images, namely, whether these were “forms that provoke more or less similar or even identical associations from a majority of people” ([48], p. 229). Raya Jones argued in a similar fashion that the results observed by Rosen et al. could be explained either in terms of “cultural convention” or as “artifacts of the statistical procedure” ([49], p. 707).

Read the whole paper.

Tarology: The Art of Tarot - A Documentary

Cool . . . Tarot through the eyes of an artist.

Tarology Synopsis

Tarology follows Enrique through the streets of New York City as he shows us how to see the tarot - not superstitiously, but through the eyes of an artist - and how we are surrounded everyday by both the beauty and the symbolism of this ancient and often misunderstood tradition.

Film Credits

• Director: Chris Deleo
• Producer: Chris Deleo
• Writer: Enrique Enriquez
• Starring: Enrique Enriquez

Is the Human Mind Unique? - Entering the Soul Niche; An Evolved and Creative Mind; Humor

This is an excellent video presentation from UCTV (UC San Diego), featuring Nicholas Humphrey (Darwin College, Cambridge) on Entering the "Soul Niche", Steven Mithen (Univ of Reading) on An Evolved and Creative Mind, and Daniel Dennett (Tufts Univ) on Humor.

CARTA: Is the Human Mind Unique? - Entering the Soul Niche; An Evolved and Creative Mind; Humor

Published on Apr 11, 2013
UCTV

Cognitive abilities often regarded as unique to humans include humor, morality, symbolism, creativity, and preoccupation with the minds of others. In these compelling talks, emphasis is placed on the functional uniqueness of these attributes, as opposed to the anatomical uniqueness, and whether these attributes are indeed quantitatively or qualitatively unique to humans.

• Nicholas Humphrey (Darwin College, Cambridge) - Entering the "Soul Niche" 
• Steven Mithen (Univ of Reading) - An Evolved and Creative Mind
• Daniel Dennett (Tufts Univ) - Humor 

Series: "CARTA - Center for Academic Research and Training in Anthropogeny" [4/2013]

Jean Cocteau’s Avante-Garde Film - The Blood of a Poet (1930)

Way weird and ultra cool, although my tastes run to the surreal, symbolic, and non-rational.

Jean Cocteau’s Avante-Garde Film From 1930, The Blood of a Poet

November 8th, 2012

In a 1946 essay Jean Cocteau cautions against making a quick interpretation of his first film, The Blood of a Poet, with a quote from Montaigne:

Most of Aesop’s fables have many different levels and meanings. There are those who make myths of them by choosing some feature that fits in well with the fable. But for most of the fables this is only the first and most superficial aspect. There are others that are more vital, more essential and profound, that they have not been able to reach.

Cocteau conceived The Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d’un Poète) in late 1929, soon after the publication of his novel Les Enfants Terribles. He had just kicked his opium habit and was entering one of the most prolific periods of his career. The film is often called a surrealist work, but Cocteau rejected the association, saying that he had set out “to avoid the deliberate manifestations of the unconscious in favor of a kind of half-sleep through which I wandered as though in a labyrinth.” He goes on:

The Blood of a Poet draws nothing from either dreams or symbols. As far as the former are concerned, it initiates their mechanism, and by letting the mind relax, as in sleep, it lets memories entwine, move and express themselves freely. As for the latter, it rejects them, and substitutes acts, or allegories of these acts, that the spectator can make symbols of if he wishes.

Many of its first spectators saw anti-Christian symbolism in the film. Although production ended in September of 1930, Cocteau was not able to get his film shown publicly until January of 1932. The Blood of a Poet features the only film appearance by Lee Miller, a noted photographer and model of Man Ray. (She plays a statue.) The film is now considered a classic of experimental cinema and is the first in what came to be known as Cocteau’s “Orphic Trilogy,” which includes Orphée (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1959). The Blood of a Poet will be added to our collection of free movies online.

Related content:

• Man Ray and the Cinéma Pur: Four Surrealist Films From the 1920s
• Anémic Cinema: Marcel Duchamp’s Whirling Avant-Garde Film (1926)
• Ballet Méchanique: The Historic Cinematic Collaboration Between Fernand Legér and George Antheil

Mircea Eliade - Templum-Tempus: New Year's Day in Sacred Time

Today is New Year's Day and a lot of people around the world, from the most primal cultures to the postmodern technological cultures, see this day as a fresh start on a new year.

While we still enact many of the ritual behaviors of the new year, we have lost our sense of what this day means in the mythic history of our consciousness. For example, millions of people still engage in a wild night of drinking and celebrating on New Year's Eve, an activity that was once associated with a last symbolic night of debauchery before the fresh start of a New Year.

In many belief systems, the New Year is equivalent to the rebirth of the world. It is no coincidence that the early Christians chose a day close to the New Year to celebrate the birth of Jesus, the day in which the word of God was made flesh - a new beginning for a symbolic new world, a life of Heaven on Earth.

In his classic book, The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade examines the world of traditional myths and symbolic practice. In chapter two, Sacred Time and Myths, Elaide looks at the nature of sacred time, including mythology of the New Year.

The templum and tempus of this section are seen as an intersection between space and time: "templum designates the spatial, tempus the temporal aspect of the motion of the horizon in space and time." The templum is embodied by the temple, the sacred space, the image of the world. In many early cultures, the temple was round, symbolizing the circular nature of time.

With each New Year, the cycle of time is begun anew - each New Year's Day is the first day. And with this rebirth, we, too, are reborn anew, cleansed of the previous year.

In the annual peyote ceremony of the Huichol people in Mexico, the group who make the pilgrimage to the part of the desert where the peyote is found spend a night in a circle becoming purified of the previous year's "sins," everyone confesses transgressions, including affairs or crimes, free from retribution. It is believed that they musty be pure to enter the land of the peyote and bring back the sacred plant. The yearly pilgrimage marks their new year, a renewal for the community.

Eliade offers other tales here that repeat this motif. [This text is copied from a PDF, so apologies for any errors I did not catch and correct.]

TEMPLUM-TEMPUS
We shall begin our investigation by presenting certain facts that have the advantage of immediately revealing religious man's behavior in respect to time. First of all, an observation that is not without importance: in a number of North American Indian languages the term world (= Cosmos) is also used in the sense of year. The Yokuts say "the world has passed," meaning "a year has gone by." For the Yuki, the year is expressed by the words for earth or world. Like the Yokuts, they say "the world has passed" when a year has passed. This vocabulary reveals the intimate religious connection between the world and cosmic time. The cosmos is conceived as a living unity that is born, develops, and dies on the last day of the year, to be reborn on New Year's Day. We shall see that this rebirth is a birth, that the cosmos is reborn each year because, at every New Year, time begins ab initio.

The intimate connection between the cosmos and time is religious in nature: the cosmos is homologizable to cosmic time (= the Year) because they are both sacred realities, divine creations. Among some North American peoples this cosmic-temporal connection is revealed even in the structure of sacred buildings. Since the temple presents the image of the world, it can also comprise a symbolism. We find this, for example, among Algonquins and the Sioux. As we saw, their sacred lodge represents the universe; but at the same time it symbolizes the year. For the year is conceived as a journey through the four cardinal directions, signified by the four doors and four windows of the lodge. The Dakotas say: "The Year is a circle around the world" - that is, around their sacred lodge, which is an imago mundi.

A still clearer example is found in India. We saw that the erection of an altar is equivalent to a repetition of the cosmogony. The texts add that "the fire altar is the year" and explain its temporal system as follows: the 360 bricks of the enclosure correspond to the 360 nights of the year, and the 360 yajusmati bricks to the 360 days (Shatapatha Brahmama, X, 5, 4, 10; etc.). This is as much as to say that, with the building of each fire alter, not only is the world remade but the year is built too; in other words, time is regenerated by being created anew. But then, too, the year is assimilated to Prajiipati, the cosmic god; consequently, with each new altar Prajzpati is reanimated-that is, the sanctity of the world is strengthened. It is not a matter of profane time, of mere temporal duration, but of the sanctification of cosmic time. What is sought by the erection of the fire altar is to sanctify the world, hence to place it in a sacred time.

We find a similar temporal symbolism as part of cosmological symbolism of the Temple at Jerusalem. According to Flavius Josephus (Ant. Jud., 111, 7, 7), the twelve loaves of bread on the table signified the 12 months of the year and the candelabrum with seventy branches represented the decans (the zodiacal division of the seven planets into tens). The Temple was an imago mundi; being at the Center of the World, at Jerusalem, it sanctified not only the entire cosmos but also cosmic life-that is, time.

Hermann Usener has the distinction of having been the first to explain the etymological kinship between templum and tempus by interpreting the two terms through the concept of "intersection," (Schneidmg, Kreuzung). Later studies have refined the discovery; "templum designates the spatial, tempus the temporal aspect of the motion of the horizon in space and time."

The underlying meaning of all these facts seems to be the following: for religious man of the archaic cultures, the world is renewed annually; in other words, with each year it recovers its original sanctity, the sanctity that it possessed when it came from the Creator's hands. This symbolism is clearly indicated in the architectonic structure of sanctuaries. Since the temple is at once the place par excellence and the image of the world, it sanctifies the entire cosmos and also sanctifies cosmic life. This cosmic life was imagined in the form of a circular course; it was identified with the year. The year was a closed circle; it had a beginning and an end, but it also had the peculiarity that it could be reborn in the form of a new year. With each New Year, a time that was "new," "pure," "holy" -- because not yet worn -- came into existence.

But time was reborn, began again, because with each New Year the world was created anew. In the preceding chapter we noted the considerable importance of the cosmogonic myth as paradigmatic model for every kind of creation and construction. We will now add that the cosmogony equally implies the creation of time. Nor is this all. For just as the cosmogony is the archetype of all creation, cosmic time, which the cosmogony brings forth, is the paradigmatic model for all other times that is, for the times specifically belonging to the various categories of existing things. To explain this further: for religious man of the archaic cultures, every creation, every existence begins in time; before a thing exists, its particular time could not exist. Before the cosmos came into existence, there was no cosmic time. Before a particular vegetable species was created, the time that now causes it to grow, bear fruit, and die did not exist. It is for this reason that every creation is imagined as having taken place at the beginning of time, in principio. Time gushes forth with the first appearance of a new category of existents. This is why myth lays such an important role; as we shall show later, the way in which a reality came into existence is revealed by its myth.

ANNUAL REPETITION OF THE CREATION
It is the cosmogonic myth that tells how the cosmos came into existence. At Babylon during the course of the akitu ceremony, which was performed during the last days of the year that was ending and the first days of the New Year, the Poem of Creation, the Enuma elish, was solemnly recited. This ritual recitation reactualized the combat between Marduk and the marine monster Tiamat, a combat that took place ab origine and put an end to chaos by the final victroy of the god. Marduk created the cosmos from Tiamat's dismembered body and created man from the blood of the demon Kingu, Tiamat's chief ally. That this commemoration of the Creation was in fact a reactualization of the cosmogonic act is shown both by the rituals and in the formulas recited during the ceremony.

The combat between Tiamat and Marduk, that is, was mimed by a battle between two groups of actors, a ceremonial that we find again among the Hittites (again in the frame of the dramatic scenario of the New Year), among the Egyptians, and at Ras Shamra. The battle between two groups of actors repeated the passage from chaos to cosmos, actualized the cosmogony. The mythical event became present once again. "May he continue to conquer Tiamat and shorten his days!" the priest cried. The combat, the victory, and the Creation took place at that instant, hic et nunc.

Since the New Year is a reactualization of the cosmogony, it implies starting time over again at its beginning, that is, restoration of the primordial time, the "pure" time, that existed at the moment of Creation. This is why the New Year is the occasion for "purifications," for the expulsion of sins, of demons, or merely of a scapegoat. For it is not a matter merely of a certain temporal interval coming to its end and the beginning of another (as a modem man, for example, thinks) ; it is also a matter of abolishing the past year and past time. Indeed, this is the meaning of ritual purifications; there is more than a mere "purification"; the sins and faults of the individual and of the community as a whole are annulled, consumed as by fire.

The Nawroz -- the Persian New Year -- commemorates the day that witnessed the creation of the world and man. It was on the day of Nawroz that the "renewal of the Creation" was accomplished, as the Arabic historian a1-Biriini expressed it. The king proclaimed: "Here is a new day of a new month of a new year; what time has worn must be renewed." Time had worn the human being, society, the cosmos-and this destructive time was profane time, duration strictly speaking; it had to be abolished in order to reintegrate the mythical moment in which the world had come into existence, bathed in a it pure," "strong," and sacred time. The abolition of profane past time was accomplished by rituals that signified a sort of "end of the world." The extinction of fires, the return of the souls of the dead, social confusion of the type exemplified by the Saturnalia, erotic license, orgies, and so on, symbolized the retrogression of the cosmos into chaos. On the last day of the year the universe was dissolved in the primordial waters. The marine monster Tiamet -- symbol of darkness, of the formless, the nonmanifested -- revived and once again threatened. The world that had existed for a whole year really disappeared. Since Tiamat was again present, the cosmos was and Marduk was obliged to create it once again, after having once again conquered Tiamet.

The meaning of this periodical retrogression of the world into a chaotic modality was this: all the "sins" of the year, everything that time had soiled and worn, was annihilated in the physical sense of the word. By symbolically participating in the annihilation and re-creation of the world, man too was created anew; he was reborn, for he began a new life. With each New Year, man felt freer and purer, for he was delivered from the burden of his sins and failings. He had reintegrated the fabulous time of Creation, hence a sacred and strong time -- sacred because transfigured by the presence of the gods, strong because it was the time that belonged, and belonged only, to the most gigantic creation ever accomplished, that of the universe. Symbolically, man became contemporary with the cosmogony, he was present at the creation of the world. In the ancient Near East, he even participated actively in its creation (cf. the two opposed groups, representing the god and the marine monster).

It is easy to understand why the memory of that marvelous time haunted religious man, why he periodically sought to return to it. In illo tempore the gods had displayed their greatest powers. The cosmogony is the supreme divine manifestation, the paradigmatic act of strength, superabundance, and creativity. Religious man thirsts for the real. By every means at his disposal, he seeks to reside at the very source of primordial reality, when the world was in statu nascendi.

Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, p. 73-80.

Bartleby - A Patron Saint for Occupy Wall Street

I loved Bartleby, The Scrivener (you can read it free at the link) when I read it college. It, to me, was one of the great novellas ever, and my favorite piece by Herman Melville. In this excellent article from The New Republic, Nina Martyris argues that Bartleby is the patron saint of the #occupywallstreet movement.

A Patron Saint for Occupy Wall Street

Nina Martyris
October 15, 2011 

As the Occupy Wall Street protest blossoms across America, they are no doubt being watched over by the country’s patron saint of civil disobedience. Bartleby, the hero of Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, Herman Melville’s deeply ambiguous ode to passive resistance, published in 1853, didn’t bang on a bongo drum, sport dreadlocks, or march on Manhattan with an “Eat the Rich” placard. But he did occupy Wall Street. He did so quietly, with a stubborn calm, and without a single television camera in sight.


But while Bartelby is a refugee from the American Dream, the average OWS demonstrator desperately wants the Dream back. Today’s demonstrators could learn something from Bartelby’s story, even if, in the end, his model of resistance is insufficient.


Readers are introduced to Bartleby when a wealthy Wall Street lawyer hires a "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn" man as a human Xerox machine. Initially, the scrivener proves to be an outstanding copyist, so diligent that he is in danger of wearing out his wrists and retinas. Inexplicably, however, when the lawyer asks him to do anything apart from copying briefs (like, say, running an errand), Bartleby politely refuses with, “I would prefer not to.”


To an ever greater degree, the very essence of his work ethic is expressed in this negative refrain. Eventually, he prefers not to do any work at all. He offers no reason for his resistance, makes not one single demand, and spends all day in a reverie staring at the brick wall outside his window. He turns into a squatter, sleeping in the office and never leaving the premises. The other employees urge the boss to kick him out, but the lawyer, who fancies himself a humanist (if corporations are people, why not lawyers?), finds that he cannot bring himself to act. Instead, he develops a creeping respect for this stoic mule, and even begs him to come home with him, which of course, Bartleby prefers not to do.


Finally, spooked by the whole business, the lawyer ups and leaves for a new office The New York Police Department, sans pepper spray, marches Bartleby off to jail for vagrancy. In jail, he refuses all food, wastes away, and dies under a tree. The only clue to Bartleby's behavior comes at the tail end of the story when readers are told that thereclusive clerk had previously worked at the Postal Service’s Dead Letter Office, a job even more annihilating than copying title documents of rich men with only a brick wall for a view.


It is hard to pinpoint what Melville had in mind when he created America's first slacktivist, but implicit in his character’s passive aggression is a devastating critique of Wall Street.

Read the whole article.

James Curcio - Initiation, Part 1: The Masks of Identity

This is part one of three parts to this series on initiation - it looks like this could be an interesting book if these are the excerpts. I waited until all three parts were up to post this, so if you like this entry, the next two parts are linked to at the beginning of the article.

This is from Reality Sandwich, by the way, a great site for those interested in a wide range of ideas and explorations. You can check out James' blog, where all of these sections and a lot of other material are posted.

Initiation, Part 1: The Masks of Identity

James Curcio

The following is the first part of a three-part series. These are in-progress excerpts from the upcoming Immanence of Myth anthology. Read Part 2 here; Part 3 here.

"I tell you: one must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star." -- Frederich Nietzche.

Initiation is such a constant in the cultural body that it is evident in one form or another in nearly every human culture that has ever existed before the industrial age, at which point it became notably absent, at least on the surface. This absence has produced a very real psychological crisis on a cultural scale, although as we will see in many ways the initiatory impulse has merely transferred itself, oftentimes to behaviors and beliefs which only shallowly fulfill that impulse. (Or perhaps it is a symptom of a psychological crisis; it is probably the same, either way.)

There are many works available that systematically explore the vicissitudes of initiation within tribal and so-called primitive or archaic cultures. At the forefront of the works that deal with this subject within archaic culture is Mircea Eliade's Rites and Symbols of Initiation, which covers the various functions which initiation can serve, and provides elaborate examples of all of them, from the shamanic process of rebirth to that of the men's rites whereby a boy becomes a man. Similarly, his tome Shamanism goes into even greater depth of the specifically shamanic current of the cultural trend of initiation, Though a sketch of these ideas will serve us in regard to dealing with the main issue of this chapter, I will avoid elaborate restatement for the sake of brevity. In fact, much of the picture I'm going to create for you is generalized: the point here is to cut to the heart of what initiation is, what the proposed "initiatory crisis" is in modern life, and explore issues tied directly to that. It is not to compare the slightly different practices of Tungus or Yakut shamans.

This impulse is not merely the need to belong to a social group, although that is one of its exogenetic outcroppings. Lying submerged under such conscious needs is its prefiguring function: to forge our being, almost like a tool, for a specific purpose. It is a tool that in equal amounts -- depending on the nature of the initiation -- indoctrinates and confers meaning and knowledge appropriate with that transformation. Regardless of the specifics, initiation is always a tool of psychological transformation.

For instance, one of the most common forms that the initiatory ceremony takes is that of the adolescent transformation. Before the ritual, whatever it might be, one exists in the world of childhood concern, and afterwards, the initiate is both individuated, in a specific, culturally prescribed manner, and consigned to the service of a particular role, offered by the symbolism of the ceremony. "Indoctrination" has a certain feeling-tone to many of us, especially in light of the dystopian future so many seem to predict and fear, but devoid of intent it is essentially neutral. Feral children are rarely able to be brought back into the fold, if found too late. On pg. 86 of Masks of God: Creative Mythology, Joseph Campbell has some very interesting things to say on this subject,

"The intent of old mythologies to integrate the individual into his group, to imprint on his mind the ideals of that group, to fashion him according to one or another orthodox stereotype, and to convert him thus into an absolutely dependable cliché, has become assumed in the modern world by an increasingly officious array of ostensibly permissive, but actually coercive, demythologized secular institutions. A new anxiety in relation to this development is now becoming evident, however, for with this increase, on one hand, of our efficiencies in mass indoctrination and, on the other, of our uniquely modern Occidental interest in the fostering of authentic individuals, there is dawning upon many a new and painful realization of the depth to which the imprints, stereotypes, and archetypes of the social sphere determined our personal sentiments, deeds, thoughts, and even capacities for experience."

There are actually several general types of initiation: those that arrange ones role in society, those that confer knowledge, and the similar but slightly unique phenomenon of shamanic initiations. However, they all share many things in common, so I will speak at times of all three, hopefully without causing too much confusion.

One can be transformed by way of initiation into a soldier, into a priest, or into most anything else that a culture dreams up not just as a profession but as a way of life. To really be a soldier one must be a soldier. Such ceremonies are only truly effective when they make such a shock on the organism that the psychology is quite literally transfigured. In these cases, the symbolism usually involves death and rebirth: death to the old life, and the birth of the new. This must occur for transference of roles and models to occur. In some cultures, children are ripped away from their parents, tortured, or otherwise terrified in the name of the transformation. A boy enters a cave a boy, and leaves a man. This is simply a matter of attaining the social status that accompanies such a transformation; they are enacted instead for the very real, long lasting psychological shift that must result for it to be truly called an "initiation." This comes along with the archaic recognition of the sacrifice: the need to lose in order to gain. Death and rebirth is the formula of initiation. We'll look at that more closely in a moment.

Such transfiguration can hardly be a possibility for most modern individuals. For one, we are already individuated, even at the expense of our own in-born needs. Our submission to the needs of the society tend to be more through the guise of necessary concessions -- "I must work this job to pay the bills" -- rather than such a conscious, concerted dedication of ones self to a role in life or society. The initiatory ceremonies that persist are, by and large, pale imitations of those that came before. Modern baptism does not truly re-consecrate the individual, neither does the bar mitzvah or induction ceremony when joining an academy or a new career. Strangely, the closest thing that most Americans experience to the adolescent initiation are the bastardized rites of the fraternity. Yet, though they may approach the extremes requisite for psychological transformation, these pranks are so devoid of effective symbolism that at best they can only hope to enhance a feeling of belonging to the group, which as we already discussed is a mere outcropping of the initiatory complex.

Though many are able to find "initiations" in their own experience, which mark the transition from one phase of life to another, we are as a whole stumbling about in the dark. Those of us willing to actively consecrate ourselves to a spiritual or social task may not feel this absence, but those psychologies which require the imposition of an external force to bring about this change are likely to be forever lost, adrift from situation to situation, ever struggling to find a truly elusive meaning or purpose. These are the very types who are most at risk for indoctrination in cults, in the military, etc. because that psychological need can be so great that it strangles out the voice of reason. Because of all of this, an initiatory formula more appropriate as a model for the "modern psyche" as a whole is the heroic or shamanistic initiation. (Although it isn't universal, one general distinction between the otherwise similar shamanistic and heroic initiations come in whether that quest is rendered internally, or externally. The hero has the symbols rendered upon the external world, the shaman, the interior. Yet, dealing as we are with symbols in either case, it is difficult to say if this distinction is a truly worthwhile one, and if there is, in the final evaluation, a distinction between the shaman and hero in this regard.)

Joseph Campbell was well aware of this, and dedicated a majority of his life to clothing this message in various forms and disseminating it. For this, he has received a lot of flak in the academic community, yet I would suggest that often the academic insistence on restraint is in fact a symptom of a form of creative sterility, which could never effect an initiation of any kind. In my humble opinion, we need more teachers like Joseph Campbell, and fewer scholars.

Be that as it may, the model of heroic or shamanistic initiation is more relevant because it is either willed by the individual, taken on as a task or a test, or it is conferred by the very energies of life -- one is thrust into the initiatory crisis and must either muddle through it, or drown. In the case of the shamanistic mode, it is well recognized that a psychological illness, or "otherness," is requisite. However, the shaman gains the title precisely because he has been rendered whole by the trials and ultimate re-consecration of the self as a shaman. In this way the shamanistic worldview and experience, though superficially similar to what we consider mental illness, is in fact its diametrical opposite. It might be considered no different than molding of the self into a policeman, soldier, etc. as but of course, in a sense it is - and in our society, it is an entirely moot point as we have no such profession, and no such societal role as "shaman." And while it is inarguable that all the mentally ill of our society are most certainly not would-be shamans who never gained the training and insight that would have made them beneficial members of society in their queer way, it is equally unlikely to say that none of them would.

Let's distill, or simplify, this initiatory formula as it relates to our exploration here: first, crisis and the plunge into the "sub-conscious," then self exploration, and ultimately self knowledge or mastery. The nature of the crisis differs from individual to individual, however the first two steps of this process are easiest to express as the ancient Greek aphorism: "know thyself."

For most, this is easier said than done. It has been acknowledged by many social scientists that most Westerners are almost neurotically afraid of self analysis. The inner world, to many of us, is a complete mystery, terrifying and absolute darkness. There are some of us, to be sure, who can't help but go spelunking in there, fewer still who live there all the time.

There are no absolute guides in this path, and without any sort of shamanic or heroic tradition, there are few true mentors or teachers. Psychologists of past generations began to open these doors, only to have them slammed shut when the institution, indeed the industry, went pharmaceutical. The experiential practitioners went private. Many went underground, and consequently we are forced to sort the wheat from the chaff by trial and error or word of mouth alone. Artists, too, are natural explorers of the interior psychological spaces, but in our mass market culture, many of them are forced to either pander to the outside, surface world of fashion and appearance, or languish in dark caves themselves. When an artist expresses psychological truths, they commonly seem to fall on deaf ears with an audience so obsessed with plot, action, and everything else external.

To many other cultures, this "fear of the mirror" is more than a psychological affliction: it is a spiritual one. It is a condition that shamans, yogis and the like have long served to help cure. Yet to the indigenous practitioners of these arts, how strange we must seem -- coming to their lands in khakis, asking for a brief tour of ourselves, so that we can return to the Village and tell our friends about our Ayahuasca visions over sushi. We obsess, and ask whether the contents of such visions could be "real." Cracking open our heads must be a true challenge for them when dealing with us. As a civilization, we have come so far in terms of capability in the outside world, and as a result have left ourselves far behind.

Thankfully, we needn't merely resort to the tribal method of shamanism: it is fairly likely that those songs and symbols no longer truly reach us, and if they do, it can have a regressive result. The true value is in the formula, which -- I know from personal experience -- can be effective and transformative without requiring a trip to the Amazon.

Another element of the shamanic initiatory formula is that ecstacy becomes a transformative tool, and in many ways fear becomes that which must be overcome, rather than a tool unto itself. Truly, many of the trials faced in this sort of initiation are terrifying; but in the shamanic mode, success, (in the form of transformation), is acquired through overcoming fear, whereas in many adolescent rites the fear is in fact the transformative force.

As we move into personal mythology, we will see some examples of how initiations can and do occur within even a culture such as ours, devoid of a singular mythic fabric or initiatory system. The fact is that this absence is also a great boon: we get to choose, to a far greater degree, what course to take. However, none are offered to us, and for the majority of us, we aren't even made aware that the possibility for such psychological transformation even exists. Without a tradition, without a social mechanism for training let alone sustaining the individuals that would keep such a tradition alive, we are all on our own; and more often than not it is the charlatans, motivated by personal greed or ego, that are the most likely to attempt to peck around the edges of the initiatory traditions of other cultures, in an attempt to further their own ends. Worse yet, others experiment with the pieces of these traditions that they can glean from National Geographic, with potentially dangerous results.

An example from my own life pops to mind the moment I say this. I was at a Psytrance Festival somewhere just outside of Pennsylvania. As many of these events are, it was a mashup of neo-hippy, trans-humanist, and other neo-this and post-that movements in music, art and culture; most with good intentions, and many (though not all) without any clear sense of where to go with those intentions. I noticed someone standing next to me had tribal scarring, all up and down his legs. So without thinking much about it, I asked him what tradition he had been initiated into: regardless of the specific culture, these scars are almost always a symbol of having gone from one stage of life to another, within the context of a particular tribe. He seemed confused, and then talked for many minutes about how much it hurt, and about how proud he was to have gone through that level of excruciating agony. "How did you change?" I asked. Again, he seemed perplexed, as if the question had never entered his mind. "The point of an initiation is that you come into it from one phase of life, and leave it another -- it's an external way of symbolizing an internal transformation," I said. Or something along those lines. He explained that he had done it because he had seen other people doing it, and he wanted to go through something that intense.

I can't think of a more clear example of the initiatory crisis now facing the youth of today. Yearning for intensity of experience, born from a culture that allows them more freedom than most other cultures in the history of mankind, and yet absolutely no idea to do with it, and no idea why they feel so damn listless. I say this not from a position of superiority but more, if anything, of understanding and pity. My friends and I were a great deal more likely to research what we were doing than most, but aside from a sort of intellectual predilection, we were subject to the exact same conundrum as we grew up in the suburbian haze of the United States in the 1990s. I can only imagine that the situation is worse, rather than better, today.

Initiation is directly connected to the primary phases of transformation in life. Some are arranged for by the society: marriage, for instance. But most of them are ongoing processes that are set in motion by forces far greater than ourselves. Death. Sex. The recapitulation of life through the cycles of time. These are the things that it attempts to put us back into accord with.

The dismemberment of the God or hero, and spreading of his remains into the water is a re-occurring theme in myths with an initiatory quality. We see it with Orpheus, torn asunder by Dionysus' Bacchante long after the relative failure of his journey into the underworld; we of course see it with Osiris, slain by his brother and re-assembled like some kind of Vegetative Frankenstein by his wife, Isis; we see echoes of it in the myth of Jesus on the Christ and his rebirth, and on, and on, and on. Entire books have been dedicated to exploring the subtle elements of these connections; it is sufficient to say that they are a common, indeed an essential, quality to the initiatory myth. So we can move forward and say why? What does it mean?

The initiatory ritual is an attempt to enter sacred time and space, to recapitulate the death and rebirth of personified by these symbols, so that we can attain a psychological unity ourselves. This is admittedly a very Jungian reading of the initiatory formula -- to Jung the purpose of psychotherapy is individuation and unity -- but in my experience this is the right, which is to say the most useful, reading of these myths. In a successful initiation, the elements of the ritual reference events within ones own life; that of the dismemberment of the animal nature or ego, a hope for rebirth through redemption from those "binding" forces, the demons that we cling to, which keep us stuck in the "karmic rung" that we presently exist within.

This brings some of the ideas from the Bardo Thodal, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, to play. This book was ostensibly written as something to be read as an individual lies dying, to help them let go of their attachments to this world and ascend to the plane most properly aligned with their own psychological stage of development. I do not challenge this interpretation, but offer that it is an ongoing process. That is, it isn't limited just to a death and dying process, unless if you want to take the step and say that all of our life is a process of letting go of attachments, until that point when they are ripped from us if we haven't yet learned to live with them without clinging. The initiation attempts to prepare us for this -- it attempts us to recognize our true condition in life as transient beings, to let go, open up, and hopefully experience some of the true bliss and joy that is only allowed to the Gods simply because they are not tethered to the world of the senses which we, falsely, think of as the totality of the world. Far from forcing us to renounce these things, a successful initiation attempts to allow us to live with them without being controlled by them, and to be able to see beyond them. There is only so much that can be said about this because words simply aren't powerful enough to create the break necessary to truly come to this realization. Thus, the need for initiation.

Some paths attempt to steer us along a more ascetic path of renunciation, but I believe this is more because they simply feel that we are not strong enough to take the other path -- the path of initiation and moksha within the world, whether through the "blissful participation in the sorrows of the world" of a Bodhi-Satva path, the extremism of the Aghori's, or really any other path which allows an individual to attain liberation from the world while remaining within it. This smacks somewhat of the Zen koan, "How do you get the goose out of the bottle?" (An example of this can be found in The Book of Serenity, translated by Thomas Cleary, Lindisfarne 1990, case 91: "Nanquan's Peony." However, it is an oft repeated koan.) How can we be liberated from the elements of participation in the world that bind us to it, without simply renouncing it? A question worthy of consideration, and one that is more connected to initiation than most might at first assume -- but certainly not a question that can be answered in an essay!

Moving on, the exact meaning of the death and rebirth symbol is disputable, and thus the nature of this redemption differs somewhat from tradition to tradition. It is mutable. In the standard Christian interpretation that we are familiar with, it is a redemption in the hereafter, as these symbols are taken more or less as signs of historic facts. Heaven is a place that will happen at a specific time. In the mythology of Dionysus, the dismemberment occurs to Pentheus at the hands of the Bacchante. (And to Orpheus as well, at another point.) Pentheus, being the stand-in for the patriarchal, domineering, male ego, the dismemberment can be interpreted as the conflict between the systems of the mind and the needs and energies of the body. When the mind comes out of accord with the body, when it insists, like Yahweh, that "I AM IT," the other organs revolt. The sword turns upon itself.

Without going through a case-by-case analysis, an overview of Gnostic and Orphic cults demonstrate that the death and rebirth occurs in a series of ritualized stages which are meant to bring the neophyte into contact with his eternal nature. The same is seen in Masonic rituals and symbolism, and in fact most of the rituals that have become the core of Western Esotericism. Yet again, a side-by-side comparison of the variety of initiatory rights presented by the several thousand years of history which runs, either broken or unbroken, from ancient Egyptian mystery schools to the present would lead us very far off task, even though it is precisely what most scholars would insist that we do.

A single example of the rites of Eleusis is given in Arkon Daraul's History of Secret Societies which serves as a good model of what might occur at such an event,

"...the candidate had to undergo fasting and abstinence from certain foods. There were processions, with sacred statues carried from Athens to Eleusis. Those who were initiated waited for long periods of time outside the hall in the temple where the rites were being held. Eventually a torchbearer led them within the precincts. The ceremonies included a ritualistic meal; one or two dramas; the exhibition of sacred objects; the ‘giving of the word'; an address by the hierophant; and oddly enough, closure with the Sanskrit words ‘Cansha om pacsha.' The elements included the clashing of cymbals, tensions and a certain degree of debilitation, eating something, plus conditions which were awe-inspiring, strange. The candidate was in the hands of, and guided by, the priesthood. Other factors were: drinking a soporific drought; symbolic sentence of death; whirling in a circle... The effect of certain experiences was a carefully worked program of mind training which is familiar in modern times as that which is used in certain totalitarian states to ‘condition' or reshape the thinking of an individual... This process produces a state in which the mind is pliant enough to have certain ideas implanted: ideas which resist a great deal of counter-influence... the orgiastic side of the mysteries, too, has a place in the sphere of psychology. The catharsis which the secret cult of the Cathari experienced after ecstasy is paralleled by the modern therapist's procedure in bringing his patient to a state of excitement and collapse before implanting what he considers to be more suitable ideas into his mind."

Rather than belabor the comparison of various initiation practices, I want to help you cut to the quick in regard to the function and apparent cultural necessity of initiation. Just a few examples will do. In the myth of Orpheus, he is slain by the women of Dionysus. As the tale relates, his head, severed from his body, floats away to sea, still singing. Much could be made of this symbolically, as we think of Orpheus, patron of the artists, who attempted to resurrect the past (his beloved Euridyce) with his art, destroyed by women that serve a divinity who in many ways is a symbol of the present; the head, the rational function, floating off downstream, into the water, the unconscious, still singing... However, the point of initiation is experience, not analysis. One cannot know what the symbol refers to without having lived through it, at least in ritualized form, and only if the ritual was actually successful at creating the psychological shock or arrest necessary to generate the kind of intense experience we need to truly begin anew. The symbols are guides, but they won't take us there alone.

There's another element of death and dying worthy of considering in light of myths of initiation. Death is forgetting. A central motive in myth-making is the creation of meaning that counters both the meaninglessness of boundless existence, (literally existing without meaning, not as a reaction to meaning), and also the forgetfulness which is a symptom of the passage of time, of entropy -- death, which reduces the very edifices of meaning recollection to ash. Myth is an agent of an-entropy, all myth-making is in some sense heroic and Promethean, though perhaps also in the long run ultimately futile, as boundless existence and endless time is a realm where the eternal continuity of thought and meaning itself seems unthinkable. Initiation seeks to deal with this very dilemma, whether it is through a participation with what are seen as eternal principles, becoming a member of a sacred or immortal brotherhood (or, more rarely, sisterhood), or any of the other countless examples of secret society or mystical rite initiations that claim to provide experiential knowledge of immortal life. It is not surprising that, for instance, Hermes in his role as psychopomp is a very common image within the Greek-influenced Gnostic mysteries. (A psychopomp is a mediator or guide between the realms below and those above, which is to say, between consciousness and the unconscious, between life and death, and so on. Shamans, in their role as initiators, are psychopomps themselves.)

There are two general paths one may take to bring about this kind of experience. These opposites are fear / abstinence, and pleasure / excess, presented alongside symbolic representations of the transformation that is taking place. These methods of excess or trial are used to bring the mind, and the energies of the body as well, into direct contact with those energies referred to by the symbols. The symbols in themselves are powerless to create this change, and so we see so many devotees of traditions, as well as academics of these subjects who haven't at all opened themselves up to the references, at which point it seems almost a futile joke. Mythic symbols are only meaningful when they are connected with, not when they are collected and annotated, and the powers they represent are only powers at all if they are unleashed through that connection.

Of course, there are many levels of cultural difference between even the camps that might be seen as more less the same; for example, as Eliade comments on pg. 388 of Shamanism, "The Dionysiac mystical current appears to have a completely different structure; Bacchic enthusiasm does not resemble shamanic ecstacy." However, Eliade's comment relates more towards distinguishing variants of shamanistic practice, rather than identifying the initiatory complex as a whole. It remains fact that the dual current to initiation remains fear, pain, and or abstinence on one hand, and pleasure, ecstacy, and other forms of sensory overload on the other.

A powerful initiation allows us access to a new model of the world which may, based on our intentions and character, be experienced as heaven or hell. These are the kinds of experiences that most mythic artists I know work so very hard to bring about in a public that have been so trained to experience art with a sense of distance, that even the most extreme shock techniques often no longer work. It is somewhat ironic that, while the tools available to create these kind of mythic experiences nowadays certainly outpace the simple drug and light show of the Greek oracles, for instance, it is far more difficult to actually bring about some kind of psychological transformation in an audience fixated so firmly in the "myths of modernity" that we will be looking at in a moment. The challenge of creating such a personal experience in the audience remains the biggest challenge to artists such as myself, those that I regularly work with, and the many other thousands of mythic artists world-wide. It is my present opinion that sometimes what cannot be accomplished with a sledgehammer may be arrived at with a tuning hammer. But time will tell.

Rather than belabor the symbolic intricacies of rituals in times past, I would like to take a look at a movie that came out over a decade ago now that used the Bardo Thodal, and the interpretation of initiation that I've been talking about, to create an experience that was, in my opinion, a perfect example of what I am talking about here. To the general public it was a horror movie, that made them feel uncomfortable in a way they couldn't quite place. And to those a little more familiar with psychological symbols and the idea of non-linear narrative, it was something much more: a road-map of the final, eternal moments of all of our lives, and how an understanding of that can help us really appreciate just how vital, and just how fragile our e-ternal moment here on Earth truly is. The movie I'm referring to is Jacob's Ladder.

Tags: James Curcio, Initiation, Part 1, The Masks of Identity, Reality Sandwich, Immanence of Myth, mythology, symbolism, identity, personal growth, Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation, psychological crisis, Masks of God, Creative Mythology, Joseph Campbell, transfiguration, individuation, transformations, Bardo Thodal, Tibetan Book of the Dead, death, rebirth

Shrink Rap Radio - #219 - More Archetypal Dreamwork with Rodger Kamenetz

If you like doing dreamwork, this is an interesting podcast.

Shrink Rap Radio #219 - More Archetypal Dreamwork with Rodger Kamenetz

Rodger Kamenetz, Ph.D. is an award-winning poet and author of nine books, including the landmark international bestseller The Jew in the Lotus and the National Jewish Book Award-winning Stalking Elijah. His latest book, The History of Last Night’s Dream:Discovering The Hidden Path to The Soul, was featured on Oprah Winfrey’s Soul Series.

Dr. Kamenetz is the Erich and Lea Sternberg Honors Professor at Louisiana State University and is also the recipient of the LSU Distinguished Faculty Award. He has a dual appointment as a Professor in the Department of English and in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. He is the founding director of LSU’s highly successful MFA program in Creative Writing, and the founding director of the Jewish Studies Program.

He lives in New Orleans and works as a dream therapist. His website is http://kamenetz.com

A psychology podcast by David Van Nuys, Ph.D.

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Posted on September 17, 2009

Tags: Shrink Rap Radio, #219, More Archetypal Dreamwork, Rodger Kamenetz, David Van Nuys, Psychology, dreams, symbolism, self exploration, personal growth