Category Archives: Mythology

A Walk on the Dark Side

I’ve been wrestling with my unconscious – or maybe it’s the other way around.

Ishtar vase

Ishtar vase

Several weeks ago, the names ISHTAR and ISAIAH appeared to me in the middle of the night. By morning, I had no memory of a dream nor any visual clues – just the names. And neither of the them meant anything to me. All I could conjure up for Ishtar was the movie of the same name starring Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty. As for Isaiah, I remembered him as a prophet, but that was it. But I felt strongly that these names held an important message for me.

I’ve since learned that Ishtar was the Babylonian goddess of love, sex, fertility, and war – the perfect embodiment of the opposing forces of life and death. Often described as bad-tempered, vengeful and cruel, her love was a curse to mortals and gods alike. In one myth, she descends to the underworld. After demanding admittance and threatening the gatekeeper with unimaginable horrors, she’s imprisoned. It’s not clear why Ishtar chose to take this journey, but a week later  when I discovered Carl Jung’s recently-published opus, The Red Book, things began to fall into place. For Jung, too, took a trip to the underworld.

Jung’s journey to the depths began in 1913 with an uninvited, two-hour vision in broad daylight of a massive flood that covered land from the North Sea to the Alps. Two weeks later, he had a similar vision and then another and another that finally ended with a horrifying vision of a sea of blood. Unaware that the Great War was coming, Jung feared that he had lost his mind. What he came to realize was that he had lost his soul.

The Red Book: Liber Novus by C. G. Jung

The Red Book: Liber Novus by C. G. Jung

Instead of turning away from these terrifying experiences, Jung embraced them. For the next 16 years, he induced what he called “active imaginations” by visualizing himself digging a hole and descending to the underworld to explore his unconscious mind. In his expeditions, he traveled the land of the dead where he met up with God, experienced the death of Christ, and engaged in dialogue with the prophet Elijah and his daughter, Salome, with the devil, monsters, and demons. He also met up with his soul in the form of a female figure who advised him not to fear madness, but to accept it and use it as a source of creativity.

These excursions, detailed in runic Latin and German calligraphy and illustrated with Jung’s own paintings, resulted in a 205-page red leather bound folio. And much to my amazement, I found that the very first page begins with quotes from ISAIAH.

I’ve been possessed by all of this for weeks. It seems obvious that my subconscious is trying to get me to look at my shadow self. But having grown up in the Midwest, I was taught to run away from the bogeyman, to repress my anger and my fears, to ‘put on a happy face’ and soldier on.

Dr. Stephen Diamond, a clinical and forensic psychologist and the author of Anger, Madness, and the Daimonic: the Psychological Genesis of Violence, Evil, and Creativity, believes that we all cast shadows and that repression of anger and rage can result in violence. Only by unconditionally accepting ourselves as we are with our human imperfections can we let go of self-defeating attitudes and destructive behavior patterns. Further, he suggests that if we acknowledge and respect our daimonic impulses, we can make constructive use of their energy.

Before his encounter with ‘the spirit of the depths’, Jung had denied aspects of his personality. By age 40, he had accomplished everything he’d set out to do; he had a fulfilling family life and a successful career. But life had lost its meaning. With his singular focus on the cerebral, he had neglected his emotions. And of his soul, he said, “I had judged her and turned her into a scientific object.”

Jung’s walk on the dark side not only showed him the importance of nurturing the soul, but also convinced him that the shadow self was an integral part of life and needed to be affirmed. Ultimately, it led him to ‘the supreme meaning’ – “the path, the way and the bridge to what is to come.” For Jung, that turned out to be a new chapter in analytical psychology born from his experiences moving between the light and the dark. And in the end, he regained his soul.

It’s taken me decades to recognize and to accept my demons, but clearly, something’s up. My ‘spirit of the depths’ seems to be telling me that I’ve left a few stones unturned. Or maybe it’s saying that the time has come to transform my fears and unleash my creative impulses. I’m going with that.

 

Chipmunks and Cow Pies

The chipmunks are driving me crazy. They won’t let me sleep and when I sit down to write, there’s so much chatter I can’t think straight. Each and every one of the furry little beasts is jumping up and down in a fit of frenzy trying to get my attention. These aren’t real chipmunks, mind you, and they’re not spirit guides either. They are, instead, physical manifestations of my overactive mind. Let me explain.

For several weeks, I’ve been going to The Aesclepion Healing Center in San Rafael for a ‘healing hands’ class. Before getting to the chipmunks, though, let me point out that Aesclepius, the Greek god of medicine and healing, was the son of Apollo. And it was Apollo that the Oracles at Delphi channeled in their trances. Yet another Greek connection!

In the first healing hands class, we were introduced to the basic principals of meditation. I’ve been avoiding meditation all my life. It’s not that I hadn’t tried, but every time I  sat down and attempted to relax and empty my mind, my body rebelled and I’d be up and moving within five minutes. So I was interested to see if I was ready to quiet my mind and find a way to access a higher state of consciousness.

We learned to set grounding cords to anchor us to the earth, to make our thoughts vanish by putting them in a rose and blowing it up, and to bring in the energy of the sun by imagining golden light coming in through our crown chakras. So far so good. If given a task of imagining something, I could keep my thoughts at bay. Maybe I could do this after all.

Before each class, the students at the Center gather to give and to receive healings and energy checks. After three classes, I had my energy checked by a perky blonde who looks like Julia Duffy in the ’80’s series ‘Newhart’. First she saw the color green around me. Every time I have a reading, I’m surrounded by green and I have yet to find out what this means. Then she said that she saw cow pies on top of my head (I don’t know what this means either), and a bunch of chipmunks scurrying around inside my head. According to ‘Julia’, the chipmunks are uninvited spirit guides, and they’re not happy because I’m not paying as much attention to them as I did in the past.

And she saw my father who’s been dead for over 20 years. He, too, was trying to get my attention, waving his arms saying, “I can help. Let me help.” At the time I understood this to mean that he wanted to help me with my healing hands class. Later I realized that his intention was to inform me that I could call upon him to help heal from the trauma of our past lives together.

So, I have a lot of work to do. I need to get the chipmunks under control, and I have to find a way to forgive my father. I would guess that those past lifetimes with him are the very reason I’ve been avoiding meditation in the first place.