Comfort for a necessary crime

Psalm 139 has taken on new meaning as I have reconsidered the concept of duality in the context of my readings on psychological development. This great hymn to God's omnipresence and omniscience contains such powerful images as in verse 8 (That God May Be Glorified):

If I climb the heavens, you are there.
If I lie in the grave, you are there.

In what grave can a living human being experience the presence of God? Psychologist Edward F. Edinger (1972) called the development of consciousness "a necessary crime" (p. 25), because at each stage, it involves a transgression that generates conflict, leading to a new level of consciousness:

What is a crime at one stage of psychological development is lawful at another and one cannot reach a new stage of psychological development without daring to challenge the code of the old stage. Hence, every new step is experienced as a crime and is accompanied by guilt, because the old standards, the old way of being, have not yet been transcended. So the first step carries the feeling of being a criminal. (p. 21-22)

To put it another way, as we become more conscious, we suffer as we sacrifice a bit of our old selves. If we do not die incrementally in this manner, we remain dependent and unable to undertake effective action in the world. Where Psalm 139 provides so much comfort is in its vision of a God whose thoughts reach out equally to those walking in the light and those hiding in darkness, even the night of their own "necessary crime." Consider verses 10-11 (The Saint Helena Psalter):

If I say, "Surely the darkness will cover me,
and the light around me turn to night,"
darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day;
darkness and light to you are both alike.

As a longtime optimist, I am anxious about encountering the more negative aspects of my personality. Certainly, I may find untapped strengths there, but doubtless I would also encounter stumbling blocks that could hold me back. But I am assured by Psalm 139 that God will be with me throughout the process.

References:
Edinger, E. F. (1972). Ego and archetype: Individuation and the religious function of the psyche. New York: Penguin Books.

Schauble, M. (Ed.). (1998). That God may be glorified. Erie, PA: Benet Press.

The Saint Helena Psalter. (2004). New York: Church Publishing.

The Egyptian eye for nature

In his application of Jungian analysis to Egyptian civilization, Michael Rice lauds the ancient Egyptians for their skill in drawing, accompanied by their keen eye for and love of nature. It's easy to see these combined in several small limestone panels from the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC. Some panels have human images, but others show a falcon, a crocodile, and other animals, such as this bird:

Fragment: A young bird in low relief. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
Soft limestone H: 11.0 W: 10.7 D: 1.7 cm Egypt
Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1908.59

The description from the gallery's web page explains:

Fragments such as this one carved in low relief have been identified as "sculptor's trials" or "sculptor's models," and were used in Egypt from the Third Dynasty to Ptolemaic times. The reliefs were used to aid sculptors in instructing apprentices about the canonical Egyptian grid. The models are often "framed" by L-shaped borders, which could have been used as depth measures. The human subjects of the sculptor's models were most often idealized versions of royal heads with headcloths or uraeus crowns. The animals used in hieroglyphic writing (the alphabet and royal titularies) were most commonly modelled.

Some of the models apparently also have edges incised at regular intervals, suggesting that they could have been overlaid with a grid, and the image then used to make larger or smaller copies by working with a different size grid.

Reference:
Rice, M. (1997). Egypt’s legacy: The archetypes of Western civilization 3000-30 BC. New York: Routledge.

Image and description copyright © Smithsonian Institution.

Spring 2007 Bookpile

I thought this would be fun -- pile up all the texts, research materials, and other extra readings from the three classes I just finished:


The other happy event of this week is that my 7th book on Microsoft Outlook went to press, due for release the first week in June.

End of Quarter 1

Today marks the end of my first quarter in the M.A. Humanities program at Pacifica Graduate Institute. The final papers that I turned in for my three classes are a good indicator of the breadth of this program:

Incoherence in the Cloud: Flexibility and Vitality in Social Cataloguing

The Egyptians were not confounded by their religion's proliferation of gods, overlapping iconographies, and relative lack of detailed myth stories. Likewise, the lack of an externally imposed categorization scheme need not obscure the layers of significance on a social cataloguing Web site such as del.ico.us. If there is a lesson to be learned from the balance between disorder and order achieved by the Egyptians in their religion, it is that the process of maintaining order is never-ending and requires the attention of the highest personages. Social cataloguing Web sites must invest in the work of software engineers, information analysts, and psychologists. These skilled professionals tend the temple fires behind the scenes at social cataloguing sites, constantly revising the applications that build tag clusters and other mechanisms for bringing coherence to the tag cloud.

Spiritual Rebirth Revealed: The Virgin in the Burning Bush

By combining natural vegetation with transforming flame and the sign of the divine taking on human form, the Virgin of the Burning Bush icon, a type that originated at the St. Catherine Monastery at Mt. Sinai, personifies the essential spiritual journey, in which the material world and the unseen, spiritual world may be discovered to be intertwined and interdependent. The hope and promise for each pilgrim on this journey is the possibility of being reborn as a unique and individual Self, allied with the divine wisdom and energy that powers the universe.

Identity, Fidelity, and Initiation in "The Wild Swans"

The task and trials of the heroine in Hans Christian Andersen's story The Wild Swans can be read as an extended rite of passage that concludes with her embracing a new role as wife and queen. Her success comes through the attainment of the ego strength of fidelity, described by Eric Erickson as part of his model of identity versus role confusion as the key crisis of adolescence.

Lunch with a bird of prey

In a chat last night, Mercurius put a bug in my ear about using active imagination. I decided to give it a try in the context of what I've adopted as my primary (although somewhat haphazard) spiritual practice -- hospitality. I invited Horus for a visit.

At first I was anxious about which aspect of the god would appear, but I quickly realized that he had already given me an indication a couple of weeks ago, when a dove flew into our window and was stunned, to immediately fall prey to our neighborhood hawk. This image was still fixed in my mind, and so I knew which Horus I would meet.

Feeling a little more confident that I could handle the situation, I opened the front door and in flew Horus as his full falcon-self. Everything seemed to slow down as he nodded appreciatively at the airplane models shelved over the stairwell and swooped to a perch on the top shelf of the cats' climbing structure. I touched my hand to my breastbone and bowed, as I often do when entering a sacred space. Then I looked into his eyes, which were warm and intelligent. The ceiling fan was turning, rippling his beautiful feathers ripple with a slight breeze.

He gave a couple of annoyed cries. I hadn't planned what to feed him. We'd just returned from a trip and there was no fresh meat in the refrigerator. In any case, I didn't think he would find cold flesh very appetizing. He turned to look out the window at the bird feeder, and I knew what to do. I opened the window. He hopped down from the cat shelf to the window ledge and glided swiftly and silently toward the feeder, snaring a dove in his talons. Then he carried the dove to the table on the deck, which was suddenly covered not in pollen, but in rushes reminiscent of Horus' birth and upbringing, hidden on the Nile shore. He devoured his lunch as I pulled up a chair to watch at a respectful distance, but feeling surprisingly at ease. The cats sat tall (and safe) on the screen porch overlooking the deck, Agador as usual a little restless as his natural hunter-self thought about what he'd like to do with a dove. Dymka was more serene.

A noise startled Horus and he flew away with the rest of the dove's body, leaving behind just a pile of gray feathers. I swept them and the bloodied rushes into a brown paper bag for the spring brush pickup, happy that they would be recycled back into someone's garden in a year or two.

Some useful observations from this experience:

• You can issue invitations, but you can't control who will actually come.

• Even with invited guests, you can set boundaries. I wasn't going to let Horus bring his prey into the house. He had to consume it outside.

• Guests may leave suddenly and without ceremony. Still, be grateful for the time you had in their company.

  
  

Strange night at Roxy's café

Horus, Coyote, and Thor went to their favorite café one evening this week. Prometheus had planned to join them, but he went to bed early -- it's hard to get a good night's sleep when your liver is healing from being torn by an eagle all day long. They were all hoping to get a mega dose of magnificent mocha from Roxy, the star barista, but the café atmosphere was rather odd.

It's not that big a café, just a couple of rooms, and hardly busy at 10 at night, but Coyote was told he couldn't get in because he was already in. The same thing happened to Thor: He couldn't enter the café because he was already inside. How very odd! To be in, but not in. And too bad, because they'd both dressed up for the occasion. Coyote was in a fine black suit, and Thor sported a new helmet and armor obtained at the Nebula.

Horus was able to enter the café, but when he didn't see either of the other two there yet, he went off to the bathroom to change into a different aspect -- it's hard to sip coffee when you have a beak for a mouth. He chose his Harpokrates (Horus-the-child) look, an athletic youth with a fashionably long side lock and a touch of eyeliner to suggest the udjat eye.

"Blue is a nice change from my usual black eyeliner," thought Horus. (Photo by BrittneyBush)

Horus ordered a cup of mocha java from Roxy and then noticed the sign over the espresso machine: "Due to circumstances beyond our control, we have no fresh coffee. All the coffee is made from old beans, batch number 7. We had to destroy our most recent coffee shipments because they produced a hallucinatory brew that makes you feel like you're in, but not in."

Bewildered, the three friends exchanged text messages and confirmed that they were all indeed at the right café. (Fortunately, this didn't happen the night of the Blackberry blackout.) Horus found a private room that had a back door and opened it to let Thor in. Thor found another room and let Coyote in, but there was no way all three could be in the same room.

I asked Horus later why the three of them, with all their divine powers, couldn't have just opened a door between the private rooms. He said that even gods have limits, that they still have to play by the rules of the universe. The main difference between humans and gods, he explained, is that humans see only part of the rules, while gods know them all. What keeps the gods so aware of these universal truths is the way humans keep retelling creation stories, constantly adapting them to fit new surroundings and new cultures. It's like Marie-Louise von Franz wrote in Patterns of Creativity Mirrored in Creation Myths, "The unconscious re-tells part of the creation myth to restore conscious life and the conscious awareness of reality again." We humans aren't aware of what we're doing when we keep the gods alive in this way.

Visions of Horus

When a god has more than a dozen different identities and takes on a part-animal form, I think Eric Hornung (1996/1970) again summarizes the challenges well:

Evidently a single image is not adequate for the metalanguage, which depends on continually changing combinations of many signs. The outward form of these signs is not decisive. The Egyptians are not concerned to give them as pleasing a form as possible, but to show what they wish to express.... We may feel that the mixture of the animal and the human is grotesque, but we should recall the saying of Christian Morgenstern: 'The material manifestation of God is necessarily grotesque.' (p. 257)

I consider myself among the graphically challenged, but I'm content with the way this image conveys the majesty of Horus as sky god as well as the immediate, concrete presence of Horus in the world, incarnate in the Egyptian king, both centered on the locale of the Temple of Edfu, where the annual drama of Osiris, Isis, Horus, and kingship was reenacted each year. It was tedious to do masking and transparency in OpenOffice Draw, which was the tool required for this assignment. The original images were all public uploads from Flickr, from photographers MykReeve and Lenka P and illustrator flondo. (I'd like to see flondo draw Hathor for Horus to hook up with!)

Reference:

Hornung, E. (1996). Conceptions of god in ancient Egypt. (J. Baines, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. (Original work published 1970)