Archetypal Processes I: The Concept – CREDO XCVII

   
The Emerald Tablet of Trismegistus gives us the saying “As above, so below”; Jung, in my opinion, gives us the horizontal of “As within, so without,” making a linear cross , and the quaternity is symbolic of the manifest world. It can be measured.

Processes are active verbs. They start out as abstractions, which even primitive man recognized, and since they were in nature, they were considered divine and given different names of gods and goddesses in different cultures, because the necessity of speaking about them required reifying images with names.

A quick example of what this means is expansion, ruled by the planet Jupiter, which Roman god goes by many different names: Jove, as in jovial, and the French jeudi or the Norse god Thor, as in Thursday. Every culture has a name of this gift-bestowing process. We recognize the positive Santa Claus, or Falstaff. In the natal astrological chart, it shows generally where a person’s enthusiasm lies. That word breaks down to the Greek en-theos, to describe being possessed by a god within. Too much expansion runs into excess, physical obesity, gluttony, etc. I have Jupiter conjunct Mercury (communication) and so suffer from an excess of books and papers, now made worse by only being able to use my left hand!

This process will be delineated later, but I hope you get the idea. To use a homely analogy: a cake baker sometimes uses a frosting bag with adjustable tips. The frosting itself is the same sugar but it now can be expressed in large, small, rippled, star-shaped spurts. Well, energy or prana is one force but it can be expressed in many different ways. The center of our Solar System is the radiating source of light, life, heat, and love. The planets reflect that light in different ways. Saturn’s lead, Jupiter’s tin, and Venus’s copper are symbolic ways that the radiant sun’s energy is reflected on our earth and every living creature and every atom hidden in matter. Mind-boggling! However absurd this sounds scientifically, the fact remains that these elementary processes do exist and function in outer nature and inwardly in each of our psyches. I have studied and lived reflecting on this for sixty-six years, only to become more and more convinced that this cosmic science we call astrology is in fact a symbolic language of archetypal processes. It is far, far more than just dealing with individual charts. It is in fact not only a spiritual guide to individuation, but a faint glimpse into the proof positive or “vast certainty” that some greater force is at work and that there is even a menu for the evolution of consciousness, a topic addressed in my The Heavens Declare.

Somebody rightly said, There is another world and it is hidden in this one! Jung coined the concept of synchronicity as the meaningful coincidences that occur and flabbergast us by being so improbable. I call them Sophia’s Winks! And if you are reading this CREDO, chances are that you know full well what I am describing.

I remember an incident in Heathrow Airport in London. I had to go to the Ladies. As I opened my cubicle door, a friend and member of a spiritual group in the USA walked past that narrow aperture! We had no idea either one of us was in England. She was on her way to Berlin and I was returning from Scotland to New York, as we discovered over a quick last cuppa in the busy airport. We had not seen each other for several years!

Another instance was when I traveled with three young students of mine on Long Island , New York, to the Scottish Hebrides. We were in a rowboat off the west coast of Skye. There were three other men in the boat. As we headed to a remote peninsula, one of the men looked at one of my boys and said, “You must be Peter Murnane!” He was. The man had been a college friend at Yale with Peter’s father, and this boy was the image of his father. Coincidences happen; meaningful coincidences are synchronicities.

I mention these examples only to suggest that our lives seem to be lived at more than one level, and these Winks are indicators that we need to pay attention. Life consists of two halves: an event and its meaning. To live a symbolic life, as Jung highly recommends, is to look for the meaning! He wrote:

Now, we have no symbolic life but we are all badly in need of [one]. Only the symbolic life can express the daily need of the soul, mind you! And because people have no such thing, they can never step out of this mill—this awful, grinding, banal life in which they are “nothing but.”… They are simply sick of the whole thing and that is the reason people are neurotic … and therefore they want sensation. They even want a war.… They say, “Thank heaven, now something is happening that is bigger than ourselves!”… Life is too rational, there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life.
Have you got a corner in your house where you can perform the rites, as they do in India … even a private spot where they can lead a symbolic life, renew their vows or meditate.

Thus, it is my intention to write a series of CREDOS examining some of these basic processes and linking them to the planets they represent. Hopefully, we will begin to see how our Solar System may indeed be a hologram uniting infinite diversity as expressions of the One, as in uni-versal. To me a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an invisible spiritual meaning. Uniting the two is the function of living that symbolic life. The true meaning of sym-bolos in Greek is putting things together, and its antonym is dia-bolos! This literally means separating, the function attributed to the devil which separates the radius of Sophia’s Wisdom connecting the ego at the circumference and that mysterious centerpoint Jung called the Self, which like the individual wick in a candle holds the same flame of Spirit.

We have to remember that a diagram is read with the right brain but what I am writing, you read with the left.

So keep in mind that processes are active verbs. As Heraclitus says, “Everything flows. The river remains though the waters flow.” Thus the diagram is describing an active process!

lovingly, ao

Sophia’s Devices VI: Sacred Geometry – CREDO XCVI

   
Heaven’s way is round, earth’s way is square.
– Lu Wu-pei (Chinese poet)

As the ancient Greeks proclaimed, “God geometrizes.” By that they meant that nature unfolds according to discernable patterns of consistent nature, true now even in the subatomic world. In addition, a symbolic value is implied. Unfortunately, I am unable to do justice to this, being limited to my computer, but I have written a book on the topic called The Web in the Sea: Jung, Sophia, and the Geometry of the Soul. It is a sequel to The Dove in the Stone: On Finding the Sacred in the Commonplace, so you know it is more conversations with Walter on Iona, but with illustrations of circles and squares, et al.

However, I can give you an idea: Draw a circle and look at it. Can you see the whole circle? If you think you can, think again. What is the formula for a circle? It is π r squared and pi never ever comes out. So a circle is a mystery and stands for Spirit Unmanifest, which, no doubt, is the reason that Jung called the psyche a mandala and Joachim of Floris wrote, God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere! This even hints at the suggestion that our solar system may be a hologram, hinting that everything is contained in everything! Phew!

Emerson wrote a whole essay on “Circles,” pointing out that every circle can be encircled by another, and we have the saying: “He drew a circle and shut me out; I drew another and brought him in.”

In the history of mathematics, the introduction of zero was a huge step!

The three-dimensional of a circle is a sphere, and the dodecahedron fits into it with 12 sections! This hints at the nature of the Sun and the 12 Signs of the Zodiac. However, since this is symbolically static and radiant, the Moon adds its orbiting of our Earth, making 13! And this past December (2009), we saw that “blue moon” with two full moons in one month. Incidentally, the number 13 gave rise to all kinds of negative feminine projections in the superstitious Middle Ages, which surprisingly continue to this day. Friday (Freya’s or Venus’s day) the 13th was the double feminine whammy!! And even today, some hotels just don’t have a 13th floor!

So the circle is an abstract concept. The visible constellations are actually an ellipse, as is the twisted form of the lemniscate or symbol for eternity. However, many things in nature are circular: the eye is circular and raindrops form circles, and the scorned dandelion’s pouf is a miraculous life-giving wonder! A streetlight shining through falling snow is a sermon in silence.

It takes a compass to draw a circle. One point is stationary at the center, the other sweeps the circle. The visual result yields the glyphs of the Sun and the metal gold, and sheds light on Jung’s symbol for the mandala of the psyche, the point being the wick of the individual Self, which holds the same flame of the Spirit in every individual.

Perhaps you are familiar with William Blake’s powerful work depicting God holding that compass.

The square is symbolic of the manifest world. Why? Because it can be measured. The carpenter’s square and the compass are the symbols of the esoteric Ancient Order of Masons indicating that they knew of the symbolic import of these two factors for centuries.

The three-dimensional forms of the circle and the square are the sphere and the cube.

The Golden Rectangle employs both a compass and a ruler. There is no way I can convey the miraculous results of this figure! The Parthenon on the Acropolis in Athens is built in every detail according to its formula! It engenders not only the four proportions hidden in a pentagram, but also the spiral that one finds in a nebula, the water swirling in your toilet bowl, or the cowlick on a newborn’s head! The unfurling of a rose, the setting of seeds in a sunflower, and on and on. These geometric insights were familiar to the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Sumerians but were lost during the destruction of European civilization by the barbarian Goths, resulting in the Dark Ages, but were kept alive by the Islamic world and restored to Europe when the Moors invaded Spain around A.D. 711, which led directly over the following centuries to the Renaissance and, among many others, to a mathematician called Fibonacci. He discovered the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, in which each subsequent number is the sum of the two before, starting with 0 and 1: 0, 1, 1 (0+1), 2 (1+1), 3 (1+2), 5 (2+3), 8 (3+5), 13 (5+8)….. The ratio of each successive pair of numbers in the series soon converges on the Golden Number (phi), 1.618, the ratio expressed in the Golden Rectangle.
Here is my tribute to Fibonacci:

Fibonacci at my kitchen door
Fronds of one stock furl
mathematically considerate
of each other's surging
into space
their rectitude
the straightest lines in nature
their modesty in touching curl
of heads bowed
in proportion's acknowledgement
of place
I am undone, dear Fibonacci,
by this green and silent sermon
of humble harmony's
return
an old testament of ordered law —
a new testament of beauteous portent
a family of fern.

lovingly,
ao

Sophia’s Devices V: Astrology, the Cosmic Science – CREDO XCV

   
I have related in my book Jungian Symbolism in Astrology and elsewhere how I came to be converted from viewing astrology as “superstitious twaddle for nincompoops” to spending the next sixty-five years of my life studying it, teaching it to Jungian analysts, lecturing worldwide, and writing about it in my books! So I will concentrate on it as a majestic topic uniting the visible cosmos with its invisible meaning. Astrology transcends people’s individual charts. It is at least 5000 yrs old and has evolved through the collective unconscious and sheds wisdom through each of those Ages right up to the Age of Pisces and the coming “New Age” of Aquarius. If you are sick of hearing about the New Age, relax, we have 2000 years of it to come!

So my definition is Astrology is a symbolic language of archetypal processes. The astrological horoscope or natal chart is a description of the way an individual is likely to process experience. In other words, no two people are exactly alike. Even born at the same moment, one will go to the drugstore while the other takes a nap. As Heraclitus put it, “With our eyes open we share the same world, but when we close our eyes, each of us enters a separate world,” Jung warns of predicting because many complexes can be dissolved through consciousness; otherwise we have to live them out as fate! Three factors are requisite: latitude, longitude, and exact time of birth plus the gender of the person.

Up until the Age of Reason, in the seventeenth century, astrology was what united science and religion. For centuries Christian cathedrals and early Jewish temples had zodiacs on their floors, and the 12 tribes of Israel and the 12 disciples each were allotted to a sign of the zodiac, but when the split occurred with Descartes and others, religion lost its proof and science lost its sense of the sacred. Now, in the last hundred years, thanks to theoretical physics, Jung and many others, we are beginning to see the reunion of the two taking place on a new level.

We do not reject Shakespeare because of comic books, though both share the same words and even some of the archetypal characters. Unlike many other mantic or psychic devices, such as tea leaves, crystal balls, etc., astrology is soundly based on the visible planets orbiting a visible Sun whose positions are measured mathematically through time. But I confess I get a symbolic kick out of looking in an almanac and seeing the Sun’s glyph depicted as a circle with a dot in the middle and finding the same glyph for gold in metallurgy! The same symbolic implication is the wick in a candle and the individual Self that Jung describes as the center of our own unconscious psyche’s mandala. And each Self holds the Same (!) Flame of Spirit’s Life, Light, and Love that I call our Divine Guest to avoid the differing names given it in different cultures.

I find all these matters to make sense, to be symbolically obvious. God geometrizes indeed.

Most of humanity these days is too preoccupied with enormous social and environmental problems to remember and appreciate that our solar system is still running on time. The Sun appears to rise daily, the Moon orbits the Earth every month, and the seasons come and go every year. The Point of the Vernal Equinox precesses (not processes) through the 12 visible sidereal constellations at the rate of 1 degree every 72 years. This message of cosmic order should be a source of comfort. (The word kosmos comes from the Greek and actually means ‘beauty,’ as in cosmetics.)

As I am writing this in December, the whole idiotic argument about whether schools, for constitutional reasons, should abstain from religious or even secular displays and music celebrating the season! What most people don’t realize is that the entire basis for celebration is astronomical – the Winter Solstice – when the Sun appears to suffer the longest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and yet begins to return the Light anew. Hence all the Light symbolism! December 21 marks the entry of the Sun into the sign of Capricorn, ruled by Saturn. Pagans for millennia have naturally welcomed this event, and the Romans literally called it Saturnalia and whooped it up, big time. When Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, it was easiest to arbitrarily supplant this with Christmas, which symbolically equates the birth of Jesus Christ as the coming of the “Light of the World.” The actual date, even year, of his birth still is a mystery. One thing only is certain – the astronomical event of the Winter Solstice, and the rejoicing of all of us that the days will be getting longer and spring will come again.

When my children went to school, they sang all the carols, Christian, Jewish, and secular, and celebrated Santa Claus, who as the disguised archetypal Jupiter, the beneficent opposite to Saturn, ho-ho’s his way, bestowing gifts and good cheer. If you don’t believe me, look at the actual planetary glyphs or symbols. They are the same, only reversed! They balance each other’s processes of contraction/expansion.

Saturn, who is depicted as an old man with a long white beard, rules the material world and matter. Symbolically, it takes nine months for a new life (Aries) to manifest in a body. Capricorn starts the tenth sign. Saturn is also the Grim Reaper or death, proving our body is temporary, and, wouldn’t you know, Saturn’s Greek name is Kronos, which rules chronological Time! Saturn’s process is contraction.
Jupiter, rules Sagittarius, and the processes of expansion, fecundity, religion, optimism, and joy. These archetypes manifest themselves in literature in characters such as Scrooge and Falstaff, and, by now you should know which is which!

The Chinese advised the artist: When you think of expansion, use contraction and your work will have good form. When you think of contraction, use expansion and your work will have the spirit of effortless ease.

To close, a friend of mine decried the loss of these archetypes in our daily lives, and I had to laugh – each day of the week is named for a planet with a god’s name:

Sun-day, Fr. dimanche, Lord’s Day;
Mon-day, Moon’s day, It. lune-di;
Tues-day, Norse for Mars or Fr. mar-di;
Wednes-day, Norse, Wotan’s Day or Mercury, mercredi, Fr. (the German Mittwoch or midweek, is Mercury’s function as both/and);
Thurs-day, Norse for Thor or Jupiter, as in It. giovedi, Jove’s day;
Fri-day, Norse goddess Freya, or Venus, as in Fr. vendredi;
and finally Satur-day!

Writing this on Mercury’s Day. I could mention that the ancients also had planetary hours, starting with the Sun’s rise. Years ago I made myself, for fun, a bracelet with colored beads: gold, silver, red, white, blue, green, black, so I could watch the rotation. I know, I was eccentric, but that is Uranian, the higher octave of Mercury, and I have Uranus rising in Pisces in my First House and Aquarius on my Ascendant. Uranus, now rules Aquarius, and Aquarius rules astrology. Figures! Now I have hunger rising and will stop for lunch!

Lovingly,
ao

Toys, Games – Chaos, Order, and Motion: Sophia’s Devices IV – CREDO XCIV

   
“The unexamined life is not worth living” could have been one of Jung’s mantras, and I learned early from him to ask the simple question “why?” or “how come” and then look for a symbolic answer. And this is fun! What demonstrates chaos and order at the same time? How about a kaleidoscope? The Greek word translates into “a seeing device of beautiful image.” It is a toy and I hope you can find one. It is a colorful cardboard tube containing two vertical mirrors set at an angle. At the bottom is a cluster of small transparent tiny shapes of multi-colored glass or plastic held in a translucent bottom that can be shaken around. At the top is a peephole. When you look through the hole the bits and pieces form gorgeous mandalas of geometric shapes which change as you rotate the tube. Were you only to see the one end of random bits, you have chaos but reversed is breathtaking beautiful order in motion. The one I have is cheap, but I have seen more expensive ones made with real glass. I keep one in my office to prove a point now and then.

Another example that comes to mind is knitting, especially with different colored wools to make a patterned sweater. As you knit the right side it forms beautiful order but the inside or wrong side is a total mess of seeming chaos. When I could knit, and I loved to! before my stroke, I used to think that most of the time my self-estimation was of the chaotic mess, and I would hope that when I died, some pattern could emerge. I also remember my grandmother had a Chinese silk embroidered little hoop that was supposed to serve as a sconce for a wall light. The embroidery was the same on both sides! It was so fragile it eventually fell apart but not before delivering the message of an avatar’s example, a Buddha or a Christ, who wore a “seamless garment.

Children’s games are another source. Take Ring-around–the-Rosy (Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!). Nobody’s perfect. But from another point of view, when children hold hands in a circle, the energy is distributed and may reach a niveau of collective energy which helps the teacher. When grown-ups form a circle, I have already pointed out that each individual sees the same circle from a unique perspective, and I quoted Heraclitus saying With our eyes open we share the same world, but when we close our eyes each of us enters a separate world. Later I learned from the Stanford physics professor William Tiller, who discovered through biofeedback, that when two people hold hands the energy is squared! Then on Iona with a group of seventy two participants, I shared this, and realized we had solved the insoluble riddle that one cannot square a circle!! I probably am repeating this anecdote but in this context it shares an insight on Ring-around-the-Rosy, and further on the dichotomy presented by the coming 2000+ years of the Age of Aquarius!

Aquarius rules the “Common Man” and the global collective – we see this development happening all around us – the opposite constellation is Leo, which rules royalty and the imperial Self of the individual. In North Korea, when you see squadrons of men marching as one, that is Aquarian, and individual opinion seems difficult to come by. This was the ideal of Communism, but with time, the opposite, an elite (Leo), inevitably emerged. Technology is Aquarian: We get Social Security in an envelope but there is no love (Leo) in it. So a flashing light that says “Thank you! “is a poor substitute for gratitude. Now we have the Internet with Facebook, Twitter, etc., presenting the so-called civilized world with a “virtual life” rather than a natural, real one. It will take some time before the balance is restored. Obama is a Leo with Aquarius rising and undoubtedly used Aquarian know-how not only in trying to get elected but in trying to set our sights on a peaceful global community. Lincoln was also an Aquarian, I might add.

I hope I can be forgiven for repetition, but Sophia’s wisdom is at work in every candle. Each individual has the wick Jung calls the Self, but the flame on every wick is the same Flame!! So the Christmas season abounds in light symbolism. Why? What we forget is that for millennia we have welcomed the return of the Sun at the winter solstice on December 21 and that Christmas was consciously designated to replace the pagan festival of Saturnalia after Rome became officially Christian. Saturn rules Capricorn, the most material sign of the Zodiac, so the rebirth of the Sun coming at this darkest time, had symbolic meaning also for pagans throughout history. The Gospel of John speaks of Christ as that true Light which lighteth every one that cometh into the world.

Hanukah is a festival of light as are Hindu traditions involving floating lighted candles down rivers at Diwali.

In Gerald Schroeder’s masterful scientific book The Hidden Face of God, he describes the light in the subatomic world. He doesn’t have to preach. There is Light hidden in darkness, where Jung points out, One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but in making the darkness conscious.

Sophia’s Wisdom extends even further. I remember my ninth graders expressing boredom on an absolutely still day and using that to defend the use of “Speed,” a drug popular at the time. I stopped them in their tracks with the following information, which emphasizes her paradox of stillness and motion:

1. When you, like Newton, drop an apple or a stone, gravity seems to draw a straight line of descent; however, is it really?
2. Our earth is rotating at 1000 mph.
3. The earth is orbiting the sun at 60,000 mph.
4. The Sun and Solar System are moving at 481,000 mph in the Milky Way.
5. The Milky Way is said to be moving at 1,350,000 mph!!!, or so I have read.

I’d like to close with a funny dream I once had:
It is night and I am in a hotel. The manager is conducting me down a hall to show me the rooms. The odd thing about him is that his head is a small blazing sun. He proceeds to open the door to a closed room, sticks his head in which lights it up, and says “I can’t see anything dark in here!” He repeats this each time.

I woke up laughing and then realized a Solar God cannot know darkness, so the domain of Sophia’s feminine Wisdom of the Moon provides the dark in which the Sun’s light can be reflected and constantly changed during each mo(o)nth. If everything were light, we would not be conscious of it. The paradox is that sunrise is actually earthset! And vice-versa. The sun is always shining and steady, at least, in its centering of our solar system. Earth as a planet is the one constantly moving in orbit.

Today, the astronauts are able to move outside the spaceship as if nothing were happening, and yet they, too, are subject to orbiting the earth at 20,000 mph! Now if someone could explain to me who or what the Prime Mover was or how motion ever began!

As Galileo put it, E pur si muove and Heraclitus was spot-on when he remarked “Everything flows.” But, guess what, now I am going to stop!

lovingly,
ao

Sophia’s Devices -III: Myths, Legends, Fairy Tales, Parables, and Fables – CREDO XCIII

   
Many of us may have grown up dismissing all of the above as fanciful nonsense from the past – just not true! Jung however points out that myths are “true of the psyche.” Marie-Louise von Franz, whom I met in Davos, wrote extensively on the psychological import of fairy tales. Jesus and all other avatars taught with parables, and good old Aesop did it with fables. It seems that hiding psychological wisdom in these devices endures because everybody enjoys a good story, so they last, but “having ears we do not hear” until we learn to think symbolically. That is the key!

A Hindu example is “Two birds sit in a tree. One of them eats the fruit and the other one watches.” Think about that from the psychological point of view or from the philosophical point of view, etc. It contains, for me, the whole essence of Herman Hesse’s novel Narcissus and Goldmund! Two schoolmate boys make a deal: one goes out into the world and the other enters a monastery. They agree to meet again when they are old and compare notes. . . What does the saying suggest to you? Are you an extravert or an introvert? As for myself, I have decided I’m an ‘ambivert’(!), extraverted with people, deeply introverted when alone.

The hidden wisdom in all of the devices above is revealed when we think symbolically because this demonstrates the different levels of understanding. The story of the lion that is suffering from a thorn in his paw and is rescued by a kind child was always one of my favorites. One version has him meeting the same lion in the Roman Coliseum. The man expects to be martyred but the lion recognizes him and comes over to lick him fondly. I think George Bernard Shaw wrote a play about that.

On a more controversial level is the whole story of the Exodus in the Old Testament. Some historians today maintain that this story of the Hebrews fleeing Egypt is an allegory, on the grounds that there is absolutely not a shred of historical proof of it given by Egyptian records, which are extensive for the period. Stay tuned. My own take is that this story is set during the Age of Aries the Ram, when the concept of the ego (Aries – I am!) and its opposite Libra (law) emerged. It was the great Age for Judaism. Remember Abraham substituted a ram for Isaac’s sacrifice, and altars with rams’ horns were built, and even today the shofar that is blown is made of a ram’s horn! Moses, stand-in for the ego, led the people to the Promised Land but could not enter it, a psychological truth. Up until the last eight centuries of the Age of Aries, 800 BC, only rulers or eponymous figures were given names, and the concept of universal laws rather than local ones flowered then in the Code of Hammurabi, the Roman Twelve Tablets of Law, the Ten Commandments, and the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path. Also, at the end of that Age, the huge number of named individuals indicated the final triumph of an anthropocentric era, and actual men and women entered history for good in countless fields of endeavor. Jason and the Golden Fleece (ram!) seems another reference to Aries the Ram, and Greek coins of the time have Athena with ram’s horns on them. (For lots more, read my book The Heavens Declare: On the Evolution of Consciousness through the Astrological Ages.) We owe the actual discovery of the Precession of the Equinoxes, that Platonic Year of 26,000+ years, to the astronomer Hipparchus of Alexandria, an incredible feat!

Aesop’s fable of the ant and the grasshopper, and many of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the Grimm brothers’ fairy tales, contain much symbolic wisdom, and perhaps I might include my own efforts in my “children’s” The Beejum Book, which has also been studied by several groups of grownups for several weeks, and the chapter “Figg Newton’s Tale” has been taught at two universities, one in a class of cognitive psychology!

I find it sad that the Fundamentalists in many religions take every word literally in their sacred scriptures. This concretizing is a form of idolatry. It keeps the story at the level of kindergarten and by the time the child is in college, he or she is apt to chuck the whole idea as nonsense. And yet if you read my CREDO LX, “The Global Return of the Prodigal Son,” you can see that parable even has political applications.

I cannot stress Jung’s emphasis on thinking symbolically enough! He wrote extensively on the subject and maintained that leading the symbolic life was the key to individuation because it united any external events and objects with their inner meaning. In the end, after all, when we die, all we can take with us is the intangible import of it all. As I will be 87 tomorrow, I can honestly say this with some conviction!

I feel that the purpose of my own life has been to prove that the Sacred is also to be found in the commonplace and that is the easiest place for us to start finding it. Love can be found and expressed in kindness, as well as passion. If you think about it, kindness has no secret agenda. It’s such a simple thing, and I learned this from a fairy tale and as an old lady from a six-year-old little boy, who got off the school bus with a bunch of wild flowers for his mother meeting him. When he saw me, he rushed to the edge of the road and picked some buttercups so I, too, would be happy. I am still blessed, not by the actual buttercups, but by the memory of his kindness. My life has been punctuated with such examples, as well as hideous examples of the opposite.

As a former teacher of children, I cannot resist giving the reader an assignment! What story, parable, or fable was meaningful to you as a child and has guided you unconsciously ever since? If you can remember it, you have been touched by Sophia whose disguise is often the Fairy Godmother, that archetypal aspect of feminine wisdom that mediates between the visible and invisible worlds, always with our spiritual benefit in mind.

This is the first of Sophia’s levels and leads us to understanding that the “Vast Certainty” of Spirit operates on ascending stages of discovery and is constantly challenged by the destructive aspects of dia-bolos, hateful ignorance, the antonym of symbolos. The thing to remember is that there has to be first a yes! for a no to deny it!

The most serious level of Sophia’s devices has to be legends. The difference between a myth and a legend is that myths tend to involve supranormal beings and deities, whereas legends involve human beings. It seems every unique culture has one and they are of heavy duty import. The Hindu Mahabharata, The Teutonic Walkyrie Cycle, the Norse Sagas, the Irish Leobhar Gabala Eirann, and the Christian Legend of the Holy Grail, to name only a few. Each, in its way, is filled with esoteric levels of interpretation and reveals a different facet of humanity.

lovingly,
ao

Sophia’s Devices II: Alchemical Processes! – CREDO XCII

   
Don’t be alarmed. Just realize that you’ve been using them all along, which I will explain later on. Alchemy is the name given many, many centuries ago to the discovery of those archetypal processes that are basic to our existence and operate on every level. The popular image is that of a medieval man attempting to turn lead into gold. By now, dear readers, you will remember how often I write of them and the importance of viewing them symbolically. Astrologically, Saturn rules lead and – you guessed it! – the Sun rules gold, which never tarnishes.

Jung studied the matter assiduously and wrote copiously on the subject because he saw the psychological symbolism of the individual’s vicissitudes of experience (Saturn) as the struggle for spiritual growth or individuation. He found that his patients often dreamt alchemical images, which in turn, mirrored the problems and solutions necessary for growth. Solutio is one of the alchemical terms. Shakespeare and Goethe, both literary giants, were familiar with the “science” and the late great Jungian analyst Edward F. Edinger wrote a whole treatise on Faust and also on Paracelsus. Jung was pooh-poohed for his interest, but has hopefully been validated more recently.

My purpose today, in connection to Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom, is to point out that if you have ever been cooking in a kitchen, you have been practicing alchemy. All that is necessary is to attach the Latin terminology to a few of the processes. The gold in this case must surely be the secret ingredient: Love! Also the nourishing of life.

One of my very earliest memories of my mother was in the kitchen when I was three. It must have been the cook’s night off. (I never saw my mother in a kitchen again until twenty-four years later because when I was four we left the only home I ever knew for our traveling days, and hotels, nannies, and boarding schools, etc. for me.) Mother had cooked some soup and was eating it, and I sat across the table which, in my memory was as wide as a billiard table! I wanted a taste, so she filled a spoon, blew on it, and reached across with a smile and fed me with love. Needless to say, she never was domestic. My father ended up cooking, making a ghastly mess, and Mother cleaned up. No dishwasher! But that once is still a most meaningful event.

The alchemical term coagulatio describes what happens when you turn raw eggs into scrambled or make Jello; the liquid mixture becomes more solid, or the batter becomes a cake.

Sublimatio occurs as the hot water for tea lets off steam.

Putrefactio takes place in the rottings of the garbage pail.

Distillatio is what you are performing if you make homemade beer or if you made coffee years ago in those glass globe coffeemakers that sent the boiling water up a tube to the top one and you put the coffee in and turned the heat off. Meditation, for me, is the equivalent! You send the consciousness to a higher level, and the Powers-that-Be put a message in and you go about your day until brrrrbrrrbloop, the Thought comes down. The only problem was that I might be getting into the tub or driving in traffic at the magic moment! But I find that if I have a question, it rarely gets answered on the spot. Alas, this system has cost me many insights. Like dreams that vanish on awakening.

Separatio – just peel and core an apple, or debone a fish.

Solutio – dissolve sugar in your coffee or honey in your tea.

The point I am trying to make, is that these basic archetypal processes are hidden in everything occurring on our planet – they are the varying ways energy expresses itself and go by an infinite number of names. The key to perceiving them, as Jung points out, is to be able to think symbolically. Can you remember those IQ tests that list church, house, womb, knife and ask, which one does not belong? You pick knife. Why? Because all the other three contain. The astrological shortcut is the sign of Cancer, ruled by the Moon as Mother, the archetypal container. This understanding can extend all the way to Mother Earth and Mother Nature. In prehistoric archeology, and the Age of Cancer, figures of the Mother Goddess had animals, birds, and stick figures carved into them. Psychologically, the Good Mother/Bad Mother complex has connections to the placement and aspects of the Moon in a man’s or a woman’s chart. There is a difference.

In alchemy the container is the vessel; in the Taoist symbol of the yin/yang, it is the circumference that holds the opposites of light/dark, each holding a tiny circle of dark/light. The entire manifest world belongs to Hagia Sophia, and the struggle of opposites is played out in history and the daily news. Humanity today is out of balance with nature because of our ignorance. Primitive man saw the opposites of womb/tomb and covered the dead with red powder to illustrate the blood of rebirth. Capricorn, ruled by Saturn, is the opposite sign to the Moon-ruled Cancer and rules, among other things, what the Dutch call stoffeljik overschot, stuff left over or mortal remains! In other words, we come into the world naked and live a manifest life but leave everything behind. I believe I have already quoted the Tibetan lama who said we make a huge mistake in making verbal opposites of Life/Death. It should be Birth/Death and both are part of that Greater Life.

It should be noted that the Moon transits everybody’s chart once a mo(o)nth and Saturn transits it every 28/29 years. I think it was Lincoln who said, “The years know much that the days don’t know.” So there is a “menu” to life. The first 28-year stage consists in dealing with what psychological gifts/lacks (karma?) we have; the second, in acquiring new experience and dealing with what we missed in the first stage; the third, combining the results of the first two, and offering that consciousness to the world. As an apple tree blossoms, grows a long summer of little green apples, and drops the fruit and seed for future generations. So by 60, ideally, you should be sharing. Personally, I think I’m making cider by now! Only a few more days and I’ll be 87! The cackling lessons are almost done! I graduate on November 13. Needless to say, this is the ideal plan for psychological evolution, but it is very obvious that the exceptions far outnumber the rule! No two people are alike. All we have in common is time, a mystery itself.

The phone just rang. One of my granddaughters’ water just broke and the world awaits a new incarnation as I write. Awesome! And one of these days, someone is likely to tell you I have departed. Just remember I refuse “to die.” I am going to celebrate my Aberduffy Day. (Later – Arabella just arrived in Maine!)

lovingly,
ao

Knowledge, Understanding, and Wisdom – CREDO XCI

   
Let me start with Wisdom, because for some reason people often think I am “wise.” This may be because in less than a month I will be 87, which is old and ready for cackling lessons(!) or because I am still semiliterate, but I wish to straighten out the matter for good. I am wise in one respect only: I know for sure how much I don’t know!! So, there, just remember that.

In Beejumstan, the land of my The Beejum Book, there is a character called Virgo Prunefiddle, a lady elk. She carries a large leather bag full of “facts”! Period. Ten thousand Lithuanians wear bed socks. A horse has no toes, etc. The problem is that for a fact to be meaningful, it has to relate to something further, or So What?

There is a gap between knowledge and understanding. Many think reading some texts equips you to be a teacher or a therapist, but book learning needs life experience to yield understanding. “Emotional Intelligence” as Daniel Goleman puts it. If you think about it, there is a huge imbalance between knowledge and understanding, and it is getting worse every day as technology makes leaps and bounds, and meaning, in the deeper sense, is lost. A dangerous example is our overuse of plastic which doesn’t deteriorate or the worst – the use of drones in warfare to kill human lives!

A sacrament could be described as an outer and visible sign with an inner and spiritual meaning. Science alone covers three levels of knowledge and by its own definition stops, but the fourth remains unspoken. This is meaning which leads both to potential understanding and greater wisdom.
Science 1) Observes and studies. 2) Experiments and proves. 3) Draws conclusions and makes assumptions.

Spirit 1) Intuits symbolic meaning. 2) Our Divine Guest, (Jung’s Self) teaches us from within, i.e., Sophia’s process of Wisdom. (The word science comes from the Latin scire, to know.)

Nothing is hidden but we are blind, and “having eyes we do not see!” which is what I learned from that dream in which Jung shouted at me: “Consider the obvious! I did!” When I checked the root of obvious, I found it comes from Latin ob via, on the road, which is where Petrus Bonus, the alchemist, says the Philosopher’s Stone is said to lie, “and wagon wheels roll over it!” I have written this before, but not in connection with science. Let me bring this down to a kindergarten level. Suppose:

1. We wind up a long length of string into a ball.
2. Hanging on to the string, we let the ball drop.
3. The drop is far quicker than the winding up.
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Meaning? An analogy that applies to making mistakes?

Years ago, I was chapel lady for a group of Sunday school kids, K–3rd Grade. The reading included the mysterious saying of Jesus: “To him that hath shall be given but to him that hath not, even that which he hath shall be taken away from him.” There was dead silence. Then a little boy held up his hand. “If he had stuff in a bowl and turned it upside down, what he had would fall out.” Brilliant! Perhaps the bowl is symbolic of our need to be receptive? The bowl in every kitchen can now instruct you further! Yang/yin?

This is my source of delight lately. I look at things and ask, What do you do? Then the archetypal process takes over and you have released the noun to become a verb.
Agrippa, the alchemist, wrote Virtutes divinae in res diffusae. Divine powers are hidden in things. I used to write that quotation on the top of every blackboard at every lecture. But recently in my old age, I see the entire manifest world concealing this wisdom everywhere I look! I am beginning to see! Shakespeare expresses it best in As You Like It:

Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
I would not change it.

This all started for me in giving names to things (see Credo 82). This may seem silly to some of you, and yet the word silly comes from the German selig, which means holy, blessed. As it is, many give names to their homes, cars, boats, so why not more intimate things? The whole point is that it helps us to learn wisdom from wrapping paper, window panes, pencils, the spiral of water going down an emptying bathtub – that one yields the mathematics of the Spiral Nebula, the nautilus shell, the Golden Rectangle, and the shape of the Parthenon! Phew! God does indeed geometrize!

This is a Geometry of Being, and these archetypal processes can be found anywhere you look if you know the secret. It helps to know astrological processes because they make the linking go quicker. Remember my definition: Astrology is a symbolic language of archetypal processes! The zipper demonstrates this perfectly. Sym-bolos means putting two and two together: going up the zipper unites the manifest with its meaning, and the wee tab is Jung’s Transcendent Function! Going down, it becomes dia-bolos! which separates the two through doubt and cynicism, ridicule, and we are left with a dead world of matter only. Think this through. But even the word matter comes from mater, mother (Goddess!) Sophia is giggling and so am I!

I hope you see how etymology, the meaning of words, is another of Sophia’s clues. My friend Jungian analyst Russ Lockhart and I both came up with the phrase “Words are eggs,” because they hatch out hidden meanings. Another “obvious”!

lovingly,
ao