Chapter 10
THE EARTHLY PARADISE

I. All the Gods within You

“We of the Occident,” declared Heinrich Zimmer at the opening of a course on Indian philosophy delivered in 1942,

are about to arrive at a crossroads that was reached by the thinkers of India some seven hundred years before Christ. This is the real reason why we become both vexed and stimulated, uneasy yet interested, when confronted with the concepts and images of Oriental wisdom. This crossing is one to which the people of all civilizations come in the typical course of the development of their capacity and requirement for religious experience, and India’s teachings force us to realize what its problems are. But we cannot take over the Indian solutions. We must enter the new period our own way and solve its questions for ourselves, because though truth, the radiance of reality, is universally one and the same, it is mirrored variously according to the mediums in which it is reflected. Truth appears differently in different lands and ages according to the living materials out of which its symbols are hewn.

Concepts and words are symbols, just as visions, rituals, and images are; so too are the manners and customs of daily life. Through all of these a transcendent reality is mirrored. They are so many metaphors reflecting and implying something which, though thus variously expressed, is ineffable, though thus rendered multiform, remains inscrutable. Symbols hold the mind to truth but are not themselves the truth, hence it is delusory to borrow them. Each civilization, every age, must bring forth its own.

We shall therefore have to follow the difficult way of our own experiences, produce our own reactions, and assimilate our sufferings and realizations. Only then will the truth that we bring to manifestation be as much our own flesh and blood as is the child its mother’s; and the mother, in love with the Father, will then justly delight in her offspring as His duplication. The ineffable seed must be conceived, gestated, and brought forth from our own substance, fed by our blood, if it is to be the true child through which its mother is reborn: and the Father, the divine Transcendent Principle, will then also be reborn — delivered, that is to say, from the state of non-manifestation, non-action, apparent non-existence. We cannot borrow God. We must effect His new incarnation from within ourselves. Divinity must descend, somehow, into the matter of our own substance and participate in this peculiar life-process.”^{Note 1}

Traditionally, as our survey of the myths of the world has disclosed, the idea of an absolute ontological distinction between God and man — or between gods and men, divinity and nature — first became an important social and psychological force in the Near East, specifically Akkad, in the period of the first Semitic kings, c. 2500 b.c. Then and there it was that the older, neolithic and Bronze Age mythologies of the Goddess M other of the universe, in whom all things have their being, gods and men, plants, animals, and inanimate objects alike, and whose cosmic body itself is the enclosing sphere of space-time within which all experience, all knowledge, is enclosed, were suppressed and set aside in favor of those male-oriented, patriarchal mythologies of thunder-hurling warrior gods that by the time a thousand years had passed, c. 1500 b.c., had become the dominant divinities of the Near East. The Aryan warrior herdsmen, driving downward from the north into Anatolia, Greece, and the Aegean isles, as well as west to the Atlantic, were also patriarchal in custom, worshiping gods of thunder and war. In contrast to the Semites, however, they never ranked ancestral tribal gods above the gods of nature, or separated divinity from nature; whereas among the Semites in their desert homeland, where nature — Mother Nature — had little or nothing to give and life depended largely on the order and solidarity of the group, all faith was placed in whatever god was locally recognized as patron-father of the tribe. “All Semitic tribes,” declares one distinguished authority in this field, the late Professor S. H. Langdon of Oxford, “appear to have started with a single tribal deity whom they regard as the divine creator of his people.”^{Note 2} The laws by which men lived, therefore, were not the laws of nature, universally revealed, but of this little tribe or that, each special to itself and derived from its own mythological first father.

The outstanding themes of this Syro-Arabian desert mythology, then, we may summarize as follows: 1. mythic dissociation, God as transcendent in the theological sense defined above, and the earth and spheres, consequently, as mere dust, in no sense “divine”; 2. the notion of a special revelation from the tribal fathergod exclusively to his group, the result of which is 3. a communal religion inherently exclusive, either as in Judaism, of a racial group, or as in Christianity and Islam, credal, for and of those alone who, professing the faith, participate in its rites. Still further, 4. since women are of the order rather of nature than of the law, women do not function as clergy in these religions, and the idea of a goddess superior, or even equal, to the authorized god is inconceivable. Finally, 5. the myths fundamental to each tribal heritage are interpreted historically, not symbolically, and where parallels are recognized to those of other peoples (gentiles), the rationalization applied is: illis in figura, sed nobis in veritate, as in the Second Letter of Peter.

In the earlier, Bronze Age order, on the other hand—which is fundamental to both India and China, as well as to Sumer, Egypt, and Crete—the leading ideas, we have found, were of: 1. The ultimate mystery as transcendent of definition yet immanent in all things; 2. the aim of religion as an experience of one’s own identity yet non-identity with that “ground” which is no ground, beyond being and non-being (c ≠ = x); 3. the universe and all things within it as making multifariously manifest one order of natural law, which is everlasting, wondrous, blissful, and divine, so that the revelation to be recognized is not special to any single, supernaturally authorized folk or theology, but for all, manifest in the universe (macrocosm) and every individual heart (microcosm), as well as in the hieratic order of the state with its symbolic arts and rites (mesocosm): consequently 4. women play ritual roles, and since the universal goddess personifies the bounding power of mdya within the field of which all forms and thoughts whatsoever (even of gods) are contained, the female power may be revered even as superior, since antecedent, to the male. And finally, 5. since all personifications, forms, acts, and experiences make manifest the one transcendent-immanent mystery, nothing known, not even the being of any god, is substatial as known, but all equally are symbolic in the sense of Goethe’s oft-quoted lines from the final stanza of Faust:

Alles Vergängliche

Ist nur ein Gleichnis.

The Aryans entering Greece, Anatolia, Persia, and the Gangetic plain, c. 1500–1250 b.c., brought with them, as we have amply seen, the comparatively primitive mythologies of their patriarchal pantheons, which in creative consort with the earlier mythologies of the Universal Goddess generated in India the Vedantic, Puranic, Tantric, and Buddhist doctrines and in Greece those of Homer and Hesiod, Greek tragedy and philosophy, the Mysteries, and Greek science. Something similar appears to have occurred in China when the Shang people arrived — likewise c. 1500–1250 b.c. — to found the first dynastic house in that area, where formerly only a comparatively primitive high neolithic order of village civilization had been known. And in the Near East, where the dominant peoples were now largely Semitic (Phoenicians, Akkadians, Canaanites, Arabians, et cetera), comparable interactions of the male and female orders were in process. “Names of deities in Phoenicia like Melk-’Ashtart, at Hammon near Tyre, Eshmun-’Ashtart at Carthage, ’Ashtar-Kemosh, of the Moabites, clearly prove,” states Professor Langdon, “that the Mother-goddess of the West Semitic races held even a greater place in their religion than the local gods of their most important cults.… The entire mythology of Astarte goes back to the Sumerian Ininni-Ashdar-Ishtar, goddess of [the planet] Venus and mother, wife, and lover of the Sumerian dying god Tammuz.”^{Note 3}

Our reading of the Old Testament Books of Samuel and Kings has shown, however, that in the Hebrew sphere such interactions were resisted and from time to time severely put down. That they were occurring with support even from the royal house is clear; for of all the kings from c. 1025 to 586 b.c. in both Israel and Judah, not more than half a dozen “did right in the sight of the Lord.” The rest “built for themselves high places, pillars, and Asherim on every high hill and under every tree.… And the people continued to sacrifice and bum incense on the high places.” Yet the reactionary faction represented in the great doings of Elijah and his adjutant Elisha (ninth century b.c.: I Kings 17 through II Kings 10) and, five centuries later, the priestly tyrant Ezra prevailed, and in the end the Jews — in the midst of the mixed and mixing Hellenistic world of secular science and philosophies, syncretistic mysteries, and cosmopolitan culture — retained, or rather reinvented, an exclusive tribal, desert-based mythology, which, with its old Sumerian three-layer image of a god-created flat universe, was already scientifically out of date when put together by its priestly scribes.^{Note 4}

Now it can hardly be said of the Christian cult, which sprang into being in this environment and was carried thence to Europe, that it was “brought forth” from the substance, life experiences, reactions, sufferings, and realizations of any of the peoples on whom it was impressed. Its borrowed symbols and borrowed god were presented to these as facts; and by the clergy claiming authority from such facts every movement of the native life to render its own spiritual statement was suppressed. Every local deity was a demon, every natural thought, a sin. So that no wonder if the outstanding feature of the Church’s history in the West became the brutality and futility of its increasingly hysterical, finally unsuccessful, combats against heresy on every front! Already in Augustine’s time the Irish Pelagian heresy was abroad. And that heresy now has won. For who today, outside of a convent, really believes that every child born of woman throughout the world will literally be sent to an actual Hell unless water is poured on its head to the accompaniment of a prayer? Who accepts today the idea of inherited sin? And since there was no Garden of Eden, no Adam and Eve, no Fall, then what is all the talk about Redemption, unless by “Fall” and “Redemption” the same psychological states of ignorance and illumination are meant that the Hindus and Buddhists also are talking about? In which case, what happens to the doctrine of the unique historical importance of the Incarnation and Crucifixion? The whole myth, to make any sense, must be totally reread — with honest eyes.

“Just as in the period of the deflation of the revealed gods of the Vedic pantheon,” declared Zimmer, “so today revealed Christianity has been devaluated. The Christian, as Nietzsche says, is a man who behaves like everybody else. Our professions of faith have no longer any discernible bearing either on our public conduct or on our private state of hope. The sacraments do not work on many of us their spiritual transformation; we are bereft and at a loss where to turn. Meanwhile, our academic secular philosophies are concerned rather with information than with that redemptive transformation which our souls require. And this is the reason why a glance at the face of India may assist us to discover and recover something of ourselves.”^{Note 5}

The functions of mythological symbols, we have said, are four: mystic, cosmological, sociological, and psychological; and today, as we have seen, not only has science dissolved the claim of the Church and its Book to represent the second of these, the cosmological, but the social order once supposed to have been supported by scriptural authority also has dissolved. Even its social horizon has dissolved. The way in which India might contribute — and indeed already is contributing — to our rescue in this circumstance is through its teaching in the Upaniṣadic and Buddhist doctrines of the basically psychological origin, force, and function of the same symbols that in our system have been read as a) revealed from a jealous personal God “out there” and b) historically unique.

On the popular side, in their popular cults, the Indians are, of course, as positivistic in their readings of their myths as any farmer in Tennessee, rabbi in the Bronx, or pope in Rome. Kṛṣṇa actually danced in manifold rapture with the gopis, and the Buddha walked on water. However, as soon as one turns to the higher texts, such literalism disappears and all the imagery is interpreted symbolically, as of the psyche.

This that people say [we read in the Bṛhadāraṇya Upaniṣad]: Worship this god! Worship that god! One god after another! The entire world is his creation, and he himself all the gods.…

He has entered into all this world, even to the tips of one’s fingernails, like the razor in a razor case, like fire in firewood. Him they see not; for as seen, he is incomplete.

When breathing, he is called the vital breath; when speaking, voice; when seeing, the eye; when hearing, the ear; when thinking, mind. These are but the names of his acts. Anyone meditating on one or another of these aspects, knows not; for as in one or another of these, he is incomplete. One should worship with the idea that he is one’s Self (ātman); for therein all these become one. This — the Self — is the footprint of this All: and just as, verily, one finds cattle by a footprint, so one finds this All by its footprint, the Self.

Whoever knows “I am brahman!” becomes this All, and not even the gods can prevent his becoming thus, for he becomes their very Self. But whoever worships another divinity than his Self, supposing “He is one, I am another,” knows not. He is like a sacrificial beast for the gods. And as many animals would be useful to a man, so is even one such person useful to the gods. But if even one animal is taken away, it is not pleasant. What then, if many? It is not pleasing to the gods, therefore, that people should know this.^{Note 6}

Contrast Genesis 3:22–24!

The same idea appears to have been rendered in the Pyramid Texts of Egypt (c. 2350–2175 b.c.) and the later Book of the Dead (c. 1500), where the soul of him who has died is conceived of as reabsorbing the gods. “He is equipped,” we read in a Pyramid charm, “he who has incorporated their spirits. He dawns as the Great One, the lord of those with ready hands.” “It is he who eats their magic and swallows their spirits; their Great Ones are for his morning meal, their middle-sized ones are for his evening meal, their little ones are for his night meal, their old men and old women, for his fire.”^{Note 7} And from the Book of the Dead: “My hair is the hair of Nu, my face the face of the Disk. My eyes are the eyes of Hathor, my ears the ears of Ap-uat.… My feet are the feet of Ptah. There is no member of my body that is not the member of some god.” “I am Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow, and I have the power to be born a second time; I am the divine hidden Soul who creates the gods.… Hail, lord of the shrine that stands in the middle of the earth. He is I, and I am he, and Ptah has covered his sky with crystal.”^{Note 8}

James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is on one level a parody of this Book of the Dead: “We seem to us (the real Us!), to be reading our Amenti in the sixth sealed chapter of the going forth by black.”^{Note 9} “The eversower of the seeds of light to the cowld owld sowls that are in the somnatory of Defmut after the night of the carrying of the word of Nuahs and the night of making Mehs to cuddle up in a coddlepot, Pu Nuseht, lord of risings in the yonderworld of Ntamplin, tohp triumphant, speaketh.”^{Note 10}*

^*Amenti: Egyptian region of the dead; also, amenty, madness. Owl: bird of death and wisdom. Cow and Sow: animals of Hathor, respectively, and Epet (“She Who Bears the Sun”). Defmut: Deaf-mute; also, Jeff-Mutt, code names of the dreamer’s contending sons, Shaun and Shem. Nuahs: Shaun re-reversed. Mehs: Shem reversed. Pu Nuseht: The Sun Up, reversed. Ntamplin: Dublin; also tamp. Tohp: tope, a Buddhist reliquary shrine; a kind of fish; also to tope (drunk hard), and Tophet, Hell.

“If it were permissible to personify the unconscious,” wrote Dr. Jung in a paper on modern man in search of a soul,

we might call it a collective human being combining the characteristics of both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and, from having at his command a human experience of one or two million years, almost immortal. If such a being existed, he would be exalted above all temporal change; the present would mean neither more nor less to him than any year in the one-hundredth century before Christ; he would be a dreamer of age-old dreams and, owing to his immeasurable experience, would be an incomparable prognosticator. He would have lived countless times over the life of the individual, of the family, tribe and people, and he would possess the living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering, and decay.^{Note 11}

Just so was Joyce’s hero, H.C.E. (“Here Comes Everybody”). So too the embalmed Pharaoh in his pyramid. So each of us in the ground of his being. So Christ, the Word made Flesh.

In the course of any manifestation of this unspecified Master-Mistress Everybody in a field of space and time — in the way of a biological progress from infancy and dependency, through adulthood with its specific duties, on toward age and a preparation for departure — two main motives are to be recognized: first, in youth, engagement and commitment to the modes of the local culture (the ethnic motive), and second, emotional disengagement from the role one has learned to play and reconciliation with the inward self (the archetypal-individual motive).

In India these two ends were served in the course of the classical order of a lifetime by dividing the life in two: the first half to be lived in the village and the second in the forest, with each half, in turn, divided in two, the first part of each a preparation for the second, as follows: 1. as student, practicing obedience, learning the skills and duties of one’s caste (antevāsin); 2. as a responsible householder in marriage, fulfilling without question all of one’s caste duties (gṛhastha); 3. in middle life, departure to the forest, to undertake seriously meditation (vanaprastha); and 4. achievement of the goal of life (mokṣa: “release” from the will to live) and aimless wandering thereafter, as a rootless, lifeless mendicant (bhikṣu, sannyasin), until the body finally “drops off.”^{Note 12}

In the West, on the other hand, we have had an altogether different classical view, for which Dante’s formulation in the Convito of his own ideal of the four stages of life may be taken as an example. The course of a life Dante compares to an arch. “It is hard to say,” he concedes, “where the highest point of this arch is … ; but in the majority I take it to be somewhere between the thirtieth and the fortieth year. And I believe that in those of perfect nature it would be in the thirty-fifth year”: which is where he was himself at that moment “in the middle of the road of his life” when, at the opening of the Commedia, he discovered himself to be in a “dark wood” alone, confronted by three beasts. Moreover, his own thirty-fifth year fell precisely in the year of Our Lord 1300, which he took to be the apex year of the history of the world. And finally, Christ, who was “of perfect nature,” was crucified, he believed, at the end of his thirty-fourth year, at noon, the apex of the day.

Adolescence, the first stage, in Dante’s view, extends to the age of twenty-five. Its virtues are four: obedience, sweetness, sensitiveness to shame, and grace of body. “The adolescent,” he writes, “who enters into the wandering wood of this life would not know how to keep the right path if it were not shown him by his elders.” The aim of this period of life is increase, it is comparable to spring. The second portion is that of Manhood, ten years on either side of the apex, twenty-five to forty-five. Its proper virtues are temperance, courage, love, courtesy, and loyalty, its aim is achievement, and its season summer. Instead of retirement to the forest, however, the next stage is to be of usefulness, bestowal. “After our own proper perfection, which is acquired in manhood,” Dante writes, “that perfection should also come which enlightens not only ourselves, but others.” The virtues of Age, therefore, the autumn of life, from forty-five to seventy, are again four: prudence, justice, generosity, and affability. After which, finally, in the winter of Decrepitude, the noble soul does two things: “she returns to God, as to that port whence she departed when she came to enter upon the sea of this life,” and “she blesses the voyage she has made.… And even as the good sailor, when he draws near to the port, lowers his sails, and gently with mild impulse enters into it, so ought we to lower the sails of our worldly activities and turn to God with all our purpose and heart; so that we may come to that port with all sweetness and all peace.”^{Note 13}

A very different picture indeed from the Oriental, marked particularly by the contrast of the ideals for period three: retreat from the world, in the first case; service to the world in the second — which accounts in large measure for the contrast in the economic and political institutions, sciences and arts of the Orient and the West. “For, as Aristotle says,” declares Dante, “‘a man is a civic animal,’ wherefore he is required not only to be useful to himself but also to others.” Furthermore, throughout the history of the properly European tradition, from the period of the Greeks onward, the ideal of maturity has nowhere been obedience, which is the virtue rather of adolescence. The ideal is of responsible critical judgment and decision.

But this requires age. As again in Dante’s words: “the senior … should follow the laws only in so far as his own right judgment and the law are one and the same thing; and he should follow his own just mind, as it were, without any law; which the man in his prime cannot do.”^{Note 14}

The critical period of the transit, then, from adolescent obedience to the prudence and justice, generosity and affability of age, is the period of the mid-span of twenty years of manhood, at the middle of which, at the apogee, the adventure of the dark wood will occur: the crucifixion, death, descent to Hell, and passage through Purgatory to Paradise — and return, then, to the service of the world. Dante continually cites the paradigmatic history of Virgil’s hero Aeneas, who in mid-career, on leaving behind the Asian phase of his life, when about to undertake the task of the founding of European Rome, “hardened himself to enter alone with the Sybil into hell and search for the soul of his father Anchises, in the face of so many perils.”^{Note 15} Likewise Odysseus, though in a different order of life, on returning from his army duty to the governing of his own palace in his own kingdom, descended first to the Underworld, guided by Circe, and, beyond that, passed to the mythic Island of the Sun. Goethe, also, in Faust, divides the work into Parts I and II: the first devoted, as he himself tells, to “the development of a somewhat obscure individual condition, almost wholly subjective,” and the second bearing the hero from “the little world” of his individual life, to “the great,” of his labors in the field of history; while between the two occur his visits to the mythic realms of the Gothic and great classical Walpurgisnacht scenes. Wolfram’s Parzival, we have seen, rode forth to the ordeal of those desert years in his transit from adolescence to the realization of his high social role as King and Guardian of the Grail, and Stephen Dedalus, strolling, brooding, by the sea, was also at what he took to be the meridian of his life. Stephen associated the moment with the Crucifixion: “Come. I thirst.” With the fall of Lucifer: “Allbright he falls, proud lightning of the intellect.” With Hamlet and Ophelia: “My cockle hat and staff and his my sandal shoon.… He took the hilt of his ashplant, lunging with it still.” Moreover, the time of day was noon: “Pan’s hour, the faunal noon.” And the date was June 16, 1904, five days before the summer solstice.

“Yes,” thought Stephen, “evening will find itself in me, without me. All days make their end. By the way next when is it? Tuesday will be the longest day. Of all the glad new year, mother, the rum turn tiddledy turn.”^{Note 16}

But that same June 16 had been in the author’s own life the day of his first evening meeting — on that same shore — with Nora Barnacle, the woman who became his wife.

“The appointment was made,” Richard Ellmann tells in his biography of Joyce, “and for the evening of June 16, when they went walking at Ringsend, and thereafter began to meet regularly. To set Ulysses on this date, was Joyce’s most eloquent if indirect tribute to Nora, a recognition of the determining effect upon his life of his attachment to her. On June 16 he entered into relation with the world around him and left behind him the loneliness he had felt since his mother’s death. He would tell her later, ‘You made me a man.’ June 16 was the sacred day that divided Stephen Dedalus, the insurgent youth, from Leopold Bloom, the complaisant husband.”^{Note 17}

And in Thomas Mann’s unassuming Hans, whose family name suggests the mortal member of the classical twins Castor and Pollux (Figure 5, Stations 12 and 13), another life is shown in the attainment of its faunal hour. Mann explicitly compares the sanatorium to the alchemist’s vas Hermeticum. Already in the course of the two-day railroad journey to the whirling mountain summit, much of the outside world had been left behind; for, as the author tells: “Space, rolling and revolving between Hans and his native heath had possessed and wielded the powers that we generally ascribe to time, yet in a way even more striking. Space, like time, engenders forgetfulness; but it does so by setting us free from our surroundings and giving us back our primitive, unattached state.”^{Note 18} Like the flakes falling from the dragon of Figure 55, the sentiments of the social setting in which Hans had been reared dropped away, up there, and left him to his own ungoverned self. The Old Adam disintegrated, the Adam of the toils and duties of his temporal condition, and a New came into being — like Homunculus in the vas of Goethe’s Faust.

The pedagogue Settembrini, whom Mann compares to Goethe’s Mephistopheles — a dapper rhetorician working to win men’s souls to his own purposes — recognized in the young German signs of an increasing fascination for the spectacle of that dissolute Mountain of Venus and both warned and begged him to go home. However, such advice, while prudent, like that of Gumemanz to Parzival, or of the ferryman to Gawain, was contrary to this young man’s sense of life, and in the interest not of prudence but of wyrd — his own unfolding adventure — Hans let the beat of his excited heart hold and guide him to his own uncharted way.

The first stage of his adventure, would have to be of social disengagement, with a deep trust thereby both in his own nature, and in the nature of the world. Settembrini feared and rejected nature. “In the antithesis of body and spirit,” he said very sternly one day, “the body is the devilish, evil principle; for the body is Nature, and Nature — within the sphere, I insist, of her antagonism to the Spirit, to Reason — is evil, mystical and evil.”^{Note 19} And the second pedagogue, Naphta, the Jewish Jesuit-Communist due to appear in the story later, would equally, though differently, be antagonistic to the influence of the principle of nature in the individual. As he was to say one afternoon to all three, to Hans, Settembrini, and Joachim:

“Either Ptolemy and the schoolmen were right, and the world is finite in time and space, the deity is transcendent, the antithesis between God and man is sustained, and man’s being is dual; from which it follows that the problem of his soul consists in the conflict between the spiritual and the material, to which all social problems are entirely secondary — and this is the only sort of materialism I can recognize as consistent — or else, on the other hand, your Renaissance astronomers hit upon the truth, and the cosmos is infinite. Then there exists no suprasensible world, no dualism; the Beyond is absorbed into the Here, the antithesis between God and nature falls; man ceases to be the theater of a struggle between two hostile principles, and becomes harmonious and unitary, the conflict subsists merely between his individual and his collective interest; and the will of the State becomes, in good pagan wise, the law of morality.”^{Note 20}

It has been one of the really painful problems of the modern Western individual to gain release for his conscience from this Levantine assurance of a separation of spirit and nature (mythic dissociation), together with its correlative totalitarian dogma (social identification) of “society” — almost any quorum, it seems, will do: a “people,” a “Church,” even a trade union, or anything calling itself “the state” — as the only vehicle of value, through association with which an individual life can achieve worth: when actually the truth is the other way round, that whatever human worth a social group may claim, it will have gained only by grace of the great and little individuals of its membership.

It was consequently for Hans a moment of the greatest spiritual consequence when, together with his cousin Joachim, entering the laboratory to be X-rayed, he was allowed to see the skeleton of death in his own living hand held over a fluoroscope. He there gazed, as it were, into his own grave, but in the normal light of Settembrini’s world, when he again examined his hand, the grave had closed. And it was after that, that he spontaneously turned from his Italian friend’s sociological rhetoric to a study in solitude of the sciences of life, inspired not only, or even principally, by the wonder of his own interesting body, but by that, more fascinating still, of the irritating Russian woman who had slammed the door — and repeatedly did so — at the fish course.

The first phase of the Magic Mountain epic terminates in that grotesque little tragicomic scene, labeled by its author “Walpurgisnacht,” where Hans, on his knees, at the end of a silly carnival contest to see who, blindfold, could succeed in drawing a pig, declared to his Circe with the braided locks his love in the knowledge of the whole science of her body — which he understood to be one with the science of the earth and stars. “I love you,” he told her in French, eyes closed, head bowed to her lap. “I have always loved you; for you are the Thee of my life, my dream, my destiny, my wish, my desire eternal.…” She caressed the close-cropped hair at the back of his head and, beside himself at her touch, he went on: “Oh love … the body, love, and death, these three are together one. For the body is delight and disease: it is what delivers death. Yes, they are carnal both, love and death; therein their terror, their grand magic!…”^{Note 20a}

The first volume ends in this Walpurgisnacht of loss of control — which is, in its way, analogous to the scene of Bloom’s disintegration when he saw himself as a pig, and of Stephen’s collapse in the same Walpurgisnacht event, when, following a mad caper and street brawl, he was struck down by a cursing British Redcoat in the role of the Roman who pierced Christ’s side or — the pagan who struck Anfortas.

“Like a bridegroom Christ went forth from his chamber,” reads a passage from a sermon of Saint Augustine. “He went out with a presage of his nuptials into the field of the world: he ran like a giant exulting on his way and came to the marriage bed of the cross, and there in mounting it he consummated his marriage. And when he perceived the sighs of the creature, he lovingly gave himself up to the torment in place of his bride, and he joined himself to the woman forever.”^{Note 21}

Here, as in Stephen’s mind, the mysteries of marriage and the crucifixion — Tristan’s crystalline bed and the altar of the sacrifice — are the same. The state suggested is of the Solar King and Lunar Queen (Figure 58) united in the tomb. That is the ultimate consummation — where a deathlike stillness reigns — of the mystic coniunctio oppositorum. “When Adam sinned his soul died,” states Gregory the Great;^{Note 22} however, in the words of the alchemist Senior: “What had been given over to death, comes again, after great tribulation, to life.”^{Note 23} As in those words of Paul that are the secret of Finnegans Wake — “For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon us all” — so in the silence of the tomb, the retort, the cave (again Figure 58):

There falls the heavenly dew, to lave

The soiled black body in the grave.

And in the same order, in both Ulysses and The Magic Mountain, at the end of the journey into night a change occurs: the dew of divine mercy falls, caritas, compassion, karuṇā, and the ever deepening descent turns into illumination from above.

Stephen’s brief impulse of compassion for his mortified elder, Bloom (compare that of Parzival for Anfortas), and Bloom’s reciprocally, for a tortured youth struck down by a soldier in the street, break the reign in both lives of the law of death, and each gives to the other in the mutually sympathetic brief fellowship of the following two hours of the night (the only completely undefensive moment in the course of either’s long day) the keys to the resolution of his impasse and the passage of the difficult threshold.

In the brothel the ghost of Stephen’s dead mother had appeared to him:

The Mother

(With the subtle smile of death’s madness.) I was once the beautiful May Goulding. I am dead.

Stephen

(Horrorstruck.) Lemur, who are you? What bogeyman’s trick is this?

The Mother

(Comes nearer, breathing upon him softly her breath of wetted ashes.) All must go through it, Stephen. More women than men in the world. You too. Time will come.

Stephen

(Choking with fright, remorse and horror.) They said I killed you, mother.… Cancer did it, not I. Destiny.

The Mother

(A green rill of bile trickling from a side of her mouth.) You sang that song to me. Love’s bitter mystery.

Stephen

(Eagerly.) Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.

The Mother

Who saved you the night you jumped into the train at Dalkey with Paddy Lee? Who had pity for you when you were sad among the strangers? Prayer is all powerful. Prayer for the suffering souls in the Ursuline manual and forty days’ indulgence. Repent, Stephen.

Stephen

The ghoul! Hyena!

The Mother

I pray for you in my other world. Get Dilly to make you that boiled rice every night after your brain work. Years and years I loved you, O my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb.

Zoe

(Fanning herself with the grate fan.) I’m melting!

Florry

(Points to Stephen.) Look! He’s white.

Bloom

(Goes to the window to open it more.) Giddy.

The Mother

(With smouldering eyes.) Repent! O, the fire of hell!

Stephen

(Panting.) The corpsechewer! Raw head and bloody bones!

The Mother

(Her face drawing nearer and nearer, sending out an ashen breath.) Beware! (She raises her blackened, withered right arm slowly towards Stephen’s breast with outstretched fingers.) Beware! God’s hand! (A green crab with malignant red eyes sticks deep its grinning claws in Stephen’s heart.)^{* *}For the crab, compare Phoenix Fire.

Stephen

(Strangled with rage.) Shite! (His features grow drawn and grey and old.)

Bloom

(At the window.) What?

Stephen

Ah non par exemple! The intellectual imagination! With me all or not at all. Non serviam!

Florry

Give him cold water. Wait. (She rushes out.)

The Mother

(Wrings her hands slowly, moaning desperately.) O Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on him! Save him from hell, O divine Sacred Heart!

Stephen

No! No! No! Break my spirit all of you if you can! I’ll bring you all to heel!

The Mother

(In the agony of her deathrattle.) Have mercy on Stephen, Lord, for my sake! Inexpressible was my anguish when expiring with love, grief and agony on Mount Calvary.

Stephen

Nothung!

(He lifts his ashplant high with both hands and smashes the chandelier. Time’s livid final flame leaps and, in the following darkness, ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.)

The Gasjet

Pwfungg!

Bloom

Stop!

Lynch

(Rushes forward and seizes Stephen’s hand.) Here! Hold on! Don’t run amok!

Bella

Police!

(Stephen, abandoning his ashplant, his head and arms thrown back stark, beats the ground and flees from the room past the whores at the door.)^{Note 24}

It was then that he met with the Redcoat and, when knocked down, was rescued and taken in charge by Bloom, to be restored in Bloom’s kitchen with a cup of cocoa, enriched by the host with “the viscous cream ordinarily reserved for the breakfast of his wife Marion (Molly).”^{Note 25} Then on Bloom’s side it was to be the bit that he would tell his bedmate Molly of this nighttown adventure with Stephen that would turn her thoughts, eventually, from her galaxy of lovers to himself.^{Note 26} And in The Magic Mountain it was the gentle touch and sympathetic response of Frau Chauchat to her smitten carnival lover that enabled him to win from her in her grotto, at last, the resolution of his yearning.

In the sanatorium Berghof there were two cynically jovial, rather questionable doctors, one always dressed in shiny black, the other in a surgeon’s white belted smock, who controlled the population of that castle of the living dead. The black one, Dr. Krokowski, was a broad-shouldered, short psychiatrist, fleshy and pale as wax, about thirty-five years of age, with a black beard parted in two points. The other, Dr. Behrens, surgeon-director of the institute, three heads taller than his dark subordinate, had unhealthily purple cheeks, goggling bloodshot blue eyes, and wore, under his snub nose, a close-trimmed white mustache. It was he who had introduced Hans to his skeleton at the fluoroscope. And Krokowski, through a series of lectures delivered in the dining room on “The Power of Love as an Agent of Disease,” had then turned his thoughts even further inward, to the problem of his strangely thumping heart. For already on arrival, when he stepped forth from the railroad car, his heart had been set racing by the Alpine air; and his associated sense of a general excitement had lacked a proper object until his mind, of itself, after a few days on the mountain, began to return irresistibly and persistently to that female with the reddish-blond braided hair and Asian, Kirghiz eyes.

“All symptoms of disease,” Krokowski had declared, “are but disguised manifestations of love; and disease, but love transformed.”^{Note 27} Repressed, Krokowski explained, the power of love infects the entire system through an effect upon some unknown substance in the body, which, disintegrating, liberates toxins. “One could even believe,” Hans later remarked to his cousin in comment on this point, “that there might be something after all in those legends of love-drinks and the like, of which the old sagas tell.”^{Note 28} It was Behrens, however, who made clear to Hans — some time after his glimpse of his own body as his living grave — the line between death and life. Living, said Behrens, consists of dying; for living as well as putrefying is a process finally of oxidation, the combustion of cellular albumen: hence the temperature of which one sometimes has too much. “However, there is nevertheless a difference: Life is the keeping of form through change of substance.”^{Note 29}

And so it was that, toward the close of Hans Castorp’s curiously pedantic carnival exposure to Clavdia of his erotic intoxication in the wonder of her dying body, behold! like the sun of a new day, this saving term of Apollonian light came up — sainte merveille de la forme! — to be developed to the end of his speech:

“The body and the body’s love,” he declaimed, “are indecent affairs and troublesome. The body, in fear and shame of itself, blushes and pales on its surface. But it also is a grand and adorable glory, miraculous image of organic life, holy marvel of form and of beauty: and love for it, for the human body, is furthermore an altogether humanitarian interest, a force far more instructive than all the pedagogy in this world!”^{Note 30}

Thus, at the high noon of his years, hermetically sealed from history and its occasions, played upon by the vapors of science and philosophy, Life’s Delicate Child, as Mann calls him, incubating the fevers of his own body’s mystery and devotion, came in his own sweet way to an experience of spiritual centering and dedication. Mann terms such a process, “Hermetic Pedagogy.” And the second part of the novel then treats of its hero’s maturation around this central ordering point of a life-furthering, self-consistent wisdom; following which — as a “wheel rolling of itself” — Hans voluntarily departs, with a full knowledge of what he is doing, to a literal giving of himself on the field of battle (1914) to his people in loyalty and love. (Compare Dante’s age and act of “bestowal.”)

---

Now Carl Jung, during the years when Thomas Mann was at work on The Magic Mountain (c. 1912–1921), was arriving in his own way, independently, at interpretations of both the psyche and its mythic symbols that accorded remarkably with those of the novelist — as the latter acknowledged generously in his address on “Freud and the Future,” delivered in 1936. For the two were of exactly the same age (Mann, 1875–1955; Jung, 1875–1961) and so were crossing together, in those catastrophic years just before, during, and after the First World War, the meridian of their day. So too, in a way, was Europe itself: or so, at least, thought their contemporary, the historian Oswald Spengler (1880–1936), whose masterwork, The Decline of the West, appeared in 1923 — just between Ulysses, 1922, and The Magic Mountain, 1924. Moreover, in the year 1921 Leo Frobenius’s Paideuma had appeared: an anthropologically documented study in historic depth of the psyche and its symbolic forms, which had opened (both around and beneath the Magic Mountain of Europe) a new and mighty prospect of the spiritual dimension of man.

The typical motifs in dreams [wrote Jung] … permit a comparison with the motifs of mythology. Many of those mythological motifs, in collecting which Frobenius in particular has rendered such signal service, are also found in dreams, often with precisely the same significance.… The comparison of typical dream motifs with those of mythology suggests the idea — already put forward by Nietzsche — that dream-thinking should be regarded as a phylogenetically older mode of thought.… Just as the body bears the traces of its phylogenetic development, so also does the human mind. Hence there is nothing surprising about the possibility that the figurative language of dreams is a survival from an archaic mode of thought.^{Note 31}

In The Magic Mountain, the culmination of Hans Castorp’s noon-meditation on the mystery of death in life is rendered in the chapter called “Snow,” wherein the no longer innocent or young voyager, with both head and heart now full of experience, put on skis and, with a boldness greater than his skill, set forth alone. In the vast Alpine silence he presently realized he had gone astray and, frightened a little, drank a charge of port to give him strength, which, instead, put him to sleep leaning for support against a snowbound mountain hut. And there a beautiful dream came to him, of a landscape he had never seen: a lovely sunlit Hellenic world of people solemnly, gracefully moving among tall Ionic colonnades.

It was a dream that Mann had derived from the last paragraphs of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, where it illustrates that work’s central theme of a reciprocal relationship between Dionysus and Apollo: the powers, respectively, of the dark impersonal will (Figure 5, at Station 10) and beauty of form (Station 16). “Only so much,” wrote Nietzsche, “of the Dionysian ground of existence can enter into the consciousness of an individual as can be controlled by his Apollonian power of transfiguration. These two prime principles of art consequently unfold their powers reciprocally, according to a law of eternal balance.… And that this reciprocity is inevitable, everyone will intuitively know who has ever (even if only in dream) found himself carried back to an Old Hellenic scene.”^{Note 32} Like Nietzsche’s imagined dreamer, Hans too was carried back to a scene of idyllic nobility and beauty. And as the earlier dreamer had been taught by an Aeschylean guide to realize how great the terrible force must have been of the god of dithyrambic madness, where such radiant beauty was needed to hold it in control, so Hans, exclaiming in his heart at the beauty of his vision, was given to realize that behind him was a temple of darkness, death, and blood, where two gray hags, half naked and with hanging witches’ dugs, were in savage silence tearing a child apart over a caldron. And as he waked horrified from this revelation, spellbound still by its beauty, its meaning leapt to his mind, epitomized in a term that he had first heard in his conversations with Naphta and Settembrini, but now in a sense not known to either: Homo Dei. “Myth,” states Jung, “is the revelation of a divine life in man”;^{Note 33} and so was this dream, for Hans.

It is Man, Hans thought, Homo Dei, who is the lord of both life and death: he alone is noble, not they. More noble than life is the piety of his heart; more noble than death, the freedom of his thought. And love, not reason, is stronger than death. Love, not reason, gives gentle thoughts, and love and gentleness render form: form and civilization — in silent recognition of the feast of blood. “I shall keep faith with death in my heart,” he concluded, “remembering, however, that keeping faith with death and the past becomes malignant, ominously sensual and misanthropic, the instant we let it govern thoughts and deeds. For the sake of gentleness and love, man shall let death have no sway over his thoughts. And with this I wake.”^{Note 34}

“The dream,” states Jung, “is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the psyche, opening into that cosmic night which was the psyche long before there was any ego consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego consciousess may extend.… All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood.”^{Note 35}

In the ancient world, following Hesiod, Parmenides, Socrates, and Plato,^{Note 36} the deity symbolic of the creative energy of that whole was Eros:

Who breaks the limbs’ strength

who in all gods, in all human beings,

overpowers the intelligence in the breast,

and all their shrewd planning.^{Note 37}

“Eros,” Jung writes, in comment on this classical idea,

was considered a god whose divinity transcended our human limits, and who therefore could neither be comprehended nor represented in any way. I might, as many before me have attempted to do, venture an approach to this daimon, whose range of activity extends from the endless spaces of the heavens to the dark abysses of hell; but I falter before the task of finding the language which might adequately express the incalculable paradoxes of love. Eros is a kosmogonos, a creator and father-mother of all higher consciousness. I sometimes feel that Paul’s words — “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not love” — might well be the first condition of all cognition and the quintessence of divinity itself.… Love “bears all things” and “endures all things” (I Corinthians 13:7). These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic “love.”^{Note 38}

In the Orient the Bodhisattva represents this principle in its aspects both of time-transcending wisdom (bodhi) and of timeregarding compassion (karuṇā), while Śiva, as both the archetypal yogi and personification of the liṅgaṃ, is an earlier representation of the same. Dionysus, Orpheus, and the other figures of the mysteries are variant aspects in manifestation of this cosmogonic power, whose mythology in the Christian sphere became focused in the crucified Redeemer (Figure 11). (“Who sees me sees Him who sent me.” “I and my Father are one.”)^{Note 39} Through our humanity (we have been told), we are related to that of Christ, who through his godhood relates us to divinity (cRr). In the Bodhisattva, on the other hand, each is to recognize the mirror-to-nature of his own intelligible Buddhahood (c ≠ = x) (See The Crucified and The Balance.). “Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ,” Joyce wrote in the brothel scene. Feirefiz, Parzival, and their father Gahmuret are one: so Wolfram von Eschenbach. The Imitatio Christi proper to the non-dual knowledge of Homo Dei must be to recognize the personality of the god or goddess Eros-Amor, Kosmogonos, not where it can be neither sought nor found, “out there” somewhere, in transcendence, but — as Christ did — in oneself. And not oneself alone, but all things, all events: in every individual, just as he is — crude, fine, or superfine — God’s mask.

II. Symbolization

1.

The Indian Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, in its analysis and exposition of the four elements of the mystic syllable AUM, supplies a touchstone for the classification of symbols.

“AUM ,” the text begins: “This imperishable sound is the whole of this visible universe. Its explanation is as follows. What has become, what is becoming, what will become — verily, all of this is the sound AUM. And what is beyond these three states of the world of time — that, too, is the sound AUM .”^{Note 40}

The element A, we are next told, denotes Waking Consciousness and its world (what has become); the element U, Dream Consciousness and its world (what is becom ing); the element M, Deep Dreamless Sleep, the unconscious state (what will become); while the fourth element — the silence before, after, and around AUM — denotes that absolute, unqualified, unconditioned state-that-is-no-state of “consciousness in itself” to which Erwin Schrödinger refers in his passage above quoted.

Expounded in detail: first, The Element A:

Waking Consciousness, which is outward-turned, is called the Common-to-All-Men. Its objects are of gross matter and are separate from each other: a is not b. Perceived by the senses, named by the mind, and experienced as desirable or fearful, they compose the world of what Goethe called “the become and the set fast: the dead,” of which the understanding (Verstand) is concerned “only to make use.” This is the aspect of experience that Mephistopheles comprehends and controls: the world of empirical man, his desires, fears and duties, laws, statistics, economics, and “hard facts.” It is the world, as Stephen Dedalus judged, of the shells left behind by life: “Crush, crack, crik, crick. Wild sea money.”^{Note 41} Money and securities, banalities and fixed forms. It is the Waste Land, Dante’s Hell: the world of naturalistic art and intellectual abstraction. Its order of symbols can best be studied today in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s comanding Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; as, for example, in the following selection of his scrupulously dry formulae.

Proposition 2.1 “We picture facts to ourselves." 2.12 “A picture is a model of reality." 2.161 “There must be something identical in a picture and what it depicts, to enable the one to be a picture of the other at all.”

Proposition 3 “A logical picture of facts is a thought." 3.1 “In a proposition a thought finds an expression that can be perceived by the senses." 3.31 “I call any part of a proposition that characterizes its sense an expression (or a symbol).…" 3.32 “A sign is what can be perceived of a symbol.”

Proposition 4 “A thought is a proposition with sense." 4.001 “The totality of propositions is language." 4.11 “The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences)." 4.111 “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.…" 4.112 “Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts.… Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries. 4.1121 “Psychology is no more closely related to philosophy than any other natural science. Theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology.…" 4.116 “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly.…”^{Note 42}

Bertrand Russell, in this same tombstone spirit, has summarized in one sentence both his own idea and Wittgenstein’s of the aim of symbolization: “The essential business of language is fo assert or deny facts.”^{Note 43} A more usual business of language, however, has been to motivate action and, to this end, to excite fear, rage, or desire, to indoctrinate, to prevaricate, to intimidate, and to brainwash. Indeed, to assert or deny “fact” is about the last thing language has ever been used for. “Fiction,” rather, would have been the honest term for this master of clarity to have used — for, as Nietzsche already knew, “whatever can be thought, cannot but be a fiction.” “There are many kinds of eyes. Even the Sphinx has eyes. Therefore, there are many kinds of truths — and therefore, there is no truth.”^{Note 44} “Truth is that form of error without which a thinking subject cannot live.” And “Logic rests on presuppositions to which nothing in the actual world corresponds.”^{Note 45}

The psychological functions chiefly involved in the outwardturned, “objective” order of cognition, “common to all men,” are sensation and thinking. Feeling and intuition, on the other hand, lead inward, to private spheres. As Jung declares: “The pain-pleasure reaction of feeling marks the highest degree of subjectivation of the object”; whereas intuition is that mode of perception which includes the apprehension of subliminal factors: “the possible relationship to objects not appearing in the field of vision, and the possible changes, past and future, about which the object gives no clue. Intuition is an immediate awareness,” Jung continues, “of relationships that could not be established by the other three functions at the moment of orientation.”^{Note 46}

In the arts of both Joyce and Mann, such intuited subliminal relationships are indicated by the echoing motifs in which their works abound, suggesting analogies, homologies, significant synchronicities, and so forth; the recurrent “dog” motif in Ulysses, for example, or, in “Tonio Kröger,” the musically developed contrasting themes of “dark gypsies” and “blue-eyed blonds” (See Phoenix Fire here and here, and The Balance.).

So we are led to the Element U, the second element of AUM:

Dream Consciousness, called the Shining One, is inward-turned, where it coincides with the movement of the will, i.e., “what is becoming.” Its objects are not of gross but of subtle matter, which, like fire, like the sun, is self-luminous, not, like gross matter, illuminated from without. In the world of Waking Consciousness, the fire of the hearth and of the funeral pyre, as well as the blazing sun door, open to this visionary world, which is beyond all pairs of opposites. For here, since the dreamer and his dream are the same, the subject-object opposition falls: the visions are of his own motivating powers; their personifications are his gods — or, if improperly served, disdained, or disregarded, become his fiends. Furthermore, since the powers of nature in this dreamer, in that dreamer, and in the macrocosm of nature itself, are the same, only differently inflected, the powers personified in a dream are those that move the world. All the gods are within: within you — within the world. And it will be according to the inward tensions and resolutions, balances and imbalances, of the individual that his visions will be of either infernal or celestial kind: confused and personal, or enlightening and generic: negative, dark, and monstrous (like Dante’s three-headed Satan) or positive and radiant (like his Trinity). For the hells, purgatories, and heavens are within, as but modes of experience of the one terror-joy of Dream Consciousness at the burning point of what Goethe called “the becoming and the changing: the living,” through which it is the concern of Reason (Vernunft) “to strive toward the divine.” Here all pairs of opposites coincide, whether of subject and object, the dreamer and his dream, desire and loathing, terror-joy, or the micro- and the macrocosm.

Freud, in his epochal work The Interpretation of Dreams (published 1900), which is based on insights derived from years devoted to the fantasies of neurotics, concentrates all attention upon those distorting personal anxieties and fixations of his patients which were, in fact, the “sins” (to use a theological term ) that bound them to their hells, from which it was the aim of his compassionate science to release them. And for those self-condemned, tortured wretches, the whole world was an Inferno — as it is in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus for his Mephistophilis:

Faust. Where are you damned?

Meph. In hell.

Faust. How comes it then that thou art out of hell?

Meph. Why this is hell, nor am I out of it:

Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God,

And tasted the eternal joys of Heaven,

Am not tormented with ten thousand hells,

In being deprived of everlasting bliss?^{Note 47}

And again, a little later:

Faust. Tell me where is the place that men call hell?

Meph. Under the Heavens.

Faust. Ay, but whereabout?

Meph. Within the bowels of these elements

Where we are tortured and remain for ever;

Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscribed

In one self place; for where we are is hell,

And where hell is there must we ever be:

And, to conclude, when all the world dissolves,

And every creature shall be purified,

All places shall be hell that is not Heaven.

Faust. Come, I think hell's a fable

Meph. Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.^{Note 48}

“I believe that a large portion of the mythological conception of the world which reaches far into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected to the outer world,” Freud wrote in his early paper on The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1904). “The dim perception (the endo-psychic perception, as it were) of psychic factors and relations of the unconscious was taken as a model in the construction of a transcendental reality, which is destined to be changed again by science into psychology of the unconscious.… We venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality and the like — that is, to transform metaphysics into meta-psychology.”^{Note 49}

So too in Nietzsche’s Human, All-Too-Human (1878): “In the ages of the rude beginnings of culture, man believed that he was discovering a second real world in dream, and here is the origin of all metaphysics. Without dream, mankind would never have had occasion to invent such a division of the world. The parting of soul and body goes also with this way of interpreting dream; likewise, the idea of a soul’s apparitional body: whence, all belief in ghosts, and apparently, too, in gods.”^{Note 50} Compare Occam.

Freud, we have said, was concerned in his science primarily with pathology. He read the symbols of dream allegorically, as masked references to the psychological shocks sustained in infancy by the dreamer, chiefly in relation to parental figures; and in turning from dreams to mythologies, he diagnosed these, accordingly, as symptomatic of equivalent shocks in the formative past of the peoples to whom the myths in question appertained. “We base everything upon the assumption of a psyche of the mass,” he wrote in Totem and Tabu (1913), “in which psychic processes occur as in the life of the individual. Moreover, we let the sense of guilt for a deed survive for thousands of years, remaining effective in generations which could not have known anything of the deed.”^{Note 51}

Jung, on the other hand, gives stress in his interpretations of both dreams and myth not so much to history and biography as to biology and those initiations into the nature and sense of existence that all, in the course of a lifetime, must endure.

According to my view [he states], the unconscious falls into two parts which should be sharply distinguished from one another. One of them is the personal unconscious; it includes all those psychic contents which have been forgotten during the course of the individual’s life. Traces of them are still preserved in the unconscious, even if all conscious memory of them has been lost. In addition, it contains all subliminal impressions or perceptions which have too little energy to reach consciousness. To these we must add unconscious combinations of ideas that are too feeble and too indistinct to cross over the threshold. Finally, the personal unconscious contains all psychic contents that are incompatible with the conscious attitude. This comprises a whole group of contents, chiefly those which appear morally, aesthetically, or intellectually inadmissible and are repressed on account of their incompatibility. A man cannot always think and feel the good, the true, and the beautiful, and in trying to keep up an ideal attitude everything that does not fit in with it is automatically repressed. If, as is nearly always the case in a differentiated person, one function, for instance thinking, is especially developed and dominates consciousness, then feeling is thrust into the background and largely falls into the unconscious.

The other part of the unconscious is what I call the impersonal or collective unconscious. As the name indicates, its contents are not personal but collective; that is, they do not belong to one individual alone but to a whole group of individuals, and generally to a whole nation, or even to the whole of mankind. These contents are not acquired during the individual’s lifetime but are products of innate forms and instincts. Although the child possesses no inborn ideas, it nevertheless has a highly developed brain which functions in a quite definite way. This brain is inherited from its ancestors; it is a deposit of the psychic functioning of the whole human race. The child therefore brings with it an organ ready to function in the same way that it has functioned throughout human history. In the brain the instincts are preformed, and so are the primordial images which have always been the basis of man’s thinking — the whole treasure-house of mythological motifs.…^{Note 52}

In the course of the six and a half decades of his development of his theories of the unconscious (1896–1961 : exactly the years during which a formidable company of creative artists and authors — Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Mann, Picasso, and Klee, for example — were exploring the same “dark wood,” each in his own direction and where there was no way or path), Dr. Jung used the terms “archetype” and “primordial image” interchangeably, to designate those formative powers of the psyche that have been discussed at length in the first chapters of the opening volume of this study: Primitive Mythology, Chapter I, “The Enigma of the Inherited Image,” and II, “The Imprints of Experience.” Our pages chapters, and volumes since have been devoted to a systematic survey of the changes throughout space and time of these protean, timeless “forms,” which the poet Robinson Jeffers termed “the phantom rules of humanity / That without being are yet more real than, what they are born of, and without shape, shape that which makes them:

The nerves and the flesh go by shadowlike, the limbs and the lives shadowlike, these shadows remain, these shadows

To whom temples, to whom churches, to whom labors and wars, visions and dreams are dedicate.^{Note 53}

Adolf Bastian (1825–1905) coined the term “ethnic ideas” (Völkergedanke) for the local, historic transformations of the archetypes, and the term “elementary ideas” (Elementargedanke) for the archetypes themselves. Leo Frobenius then employed the term “Culture Monad” to represent an operative constellation of ethnic ideas in historic manifestation. The constellating force of such a “Monad” would be, according to his view, an intuiton of order inspired by some fascinating presence: for instance, among primitive hunters, the striking presences of the animal world, where the permanence of each unique species appears through ephemeral individuals; among primitive planters, the miracle of the plant world, where life springs from decay; and in the city-states of Sumer, the wonder of the night sky, where a mathematically calculable cosmological order was recognized in the passages of the planets, moon, and sun.

Such revelations of subliminal relationships behind and within fields of temporal-spatial observation were received with awe, according to Frobenius, and the associated phenomena themselves, regarded with fascination, then supplied both the imagery and the chief foci of a system of mythology and cult through which the affected social group attempted to bring itself into accord with the intuited principle of order. Frobenius thus gave stress in his studies of the genesis of mythology to the phenomena of the environment, whereas Freud, who in relation to myth also treats chiefly of historical factors, found that in no matter what environment, the nuclear theme of all myth, art, religion, and civilization, up to his own time, had been of the nuclear human family scene of desire, jealousy, and guilt in the inevitable triadic romance of Mother, Father, and Child.

It is reasonable to assume, however, that in the shaping of mythologies both environments must have counted. Where such differences appear as between, say, the primitive hunting and planting mythologies, or the Syrian of Astarte and biblical of Yahweh, the larger environmental factor will surely merit prime consideration, whereas in the case of a wealthy Viennese fantasizing on a couch, the family drama of his own half-forgotten infancy may well have built the labyrinth in which his hero soul has become lost.

In any case, whether as a reflex of a) the natural environment, b) historic tribal or national life, c) the family triangle, or d) the inevitable biological course of human maturation and aging, together with what James Joyce termed “the grave and constant in human sufferings,” — to which I would add, “in human joy” — it is clear that the actual images and emphases of any mythological or dream system must be derived from local experience, while the “archetypes,” the “elementary ideas,” the “roles” that the local images serve, must be of an order antecedent to experience; of a plot, so to say, a destiny or wyrd, inherent in the psychosomatic structure of the human species.

In the opening pages of the first volume of his great biblical tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, which in sense and inspiration is an unfoldment — large and beautiful — of the seed of Hans Castorp’s dream in The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann writes of the backward thrust of scholarship questing for the origins of those mythic forms that have been the support of all human life and culture whatsoever. And as he there declares: “The deeper we sound, the further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomable.”^{Note 54} He then calls upon the Gnostic myth that we have already considered — of creation as a function of the soul’s descent or “fall” before the beginning of time — to suggest that the actual garden of Paradise inheres in the soul itself and antecedes creation. “We have sounded the well of time to its depths, and not yet reached our goal,” he writes: “the history of man is older than the material world which is the work of his will, older than life, which rests upon his will.”^{Note 55}

So, also, Jung: “The deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. ‘Lower down,’ that is to say as they approach the autonomous functional systems, they become increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished in the body’s materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body’s carbon is simply carbon. Hence, ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world.’”^{Note 56}

One cannot help thinking here of the Upaniṣadic myth of the Self in the form of a man who became this whole creation,^{Note 57} and of Schopenhauer’s view of the world as will: the will that is all in all of us and in which each of us is the all.

But the “archetypes,” which are of this primal order of the psyche, are not to be thought of as of determined content.

Again and again [states Jung] I encounter the mistaken notion that an archetype is determined in regard to its content, in other words that it is a kind of unconscious idea (if such an expression is admissible). It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree. A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience. Its form, however,… might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which the ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praejormandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined in form only. The existence of the instincts can no more be proved than the existence of the archetypes, so long as they do not manifest themselves concretely.^{Note 58}

And so we are led from the sphere of the element U to that of M, Deep Dreamless Sleep, where potentiality, or “what will become,” resides:

“Here,” states the Upaniṣad, “a sleeper neither desires anything desirable nor beholds any dream. Undivided, he is an undifferentiated, homogeneous lump or mass of consciousness, consisting of bliss and feeding on bliss, his only mouth being spirit. He is here ‘The Knower’: the Lord of All, the Omniscient, the Indwelling Controller, the Source or Generative Womb of All: the Beginning and End of beings.”^{Note 59}

From the point of view of either Waking or Dream Consciousness, Deep Sleep would seem to be darkness, a mere blank; yet dreams pour forth from it, and out of it comes waking. Moreover, back into it, all disappears.

It is the dark into which Stephen Dedalus disappeared, following his kitchen conversation with Bloom in the basement of Bloom’s castle, Bloom’s temple, his home, where he lived with his goddess Molly, who was at that hour in bed upstairs. It is the dark into which Bloom disappeared, when he had mounted to that second floor and in the grotto of his goddess mounted the bed, his Cross.

How?

With circumspection, as invariably when entering an abode (his own or not his own): with solicitude, the snakespiral springs of the mattress being old, the brass quoits and pendent viper radii loose and tremulous under stress and strain: prudently, as entering a lair or ambush of lust or adder: lightly, the less to disturb: reverently, the bed of conception and of birth, of consummation of marriage and of breach of marriage, of sleep and of death.

 

What did his limbs, when gradually extended, encounter?

New clean bedlinen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed.

 

If he had smiled, why would he have smiled?

To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity.^{Note 60}

Molly, the goddess, roused a little, asked sleepily, and was answered, of her returning consort’s Odyssey that day. And, just as at the end of Dante’s heaven-ascent, The Divine Comedy, the poet, beholding the ultimate vision of God, saw above the heads of the Persons Three the marvel of a Living Light, of which the Trinity itself was a reflex, and of which he states that

within the profound and clear subsistence of that lofty Light there appeared three circles of three colors and of one dimension,^{Note 61}

so, on the ceiling above the adulterated marriage bed of Marian and Leopold Bloom, there was to be seen, as she listened to his saga,

the upcast reflection of a lamp and shade, an inconstant series of concentric circles of varying gradations of light and shadow.

 

In what directions did listener and narrator lie?

Listener: S.E. by E: Narrator N.W. by W: on the 53rd parallel of latitude, N. and 6th meridian of longitude, W.: at an angle of 45° to the terrestrial equator.

 

In what state of rest or motion?

At rest relatively to themselves and to each other. In motion being each and both carried westward, forward and rereward respectively, by the proper perpetual motion of the earth through everchanging tracks of neverchanging space.

 

In what posture?

Listener: reclined semilaterally, left, left hand under head, right leg extended in a straight line and resting on left leg, flexed, in the attitude of Gea-Tellus, fulfilled, recumbent, big with seed. Narrator: reclined laterally, left, with right and left legs flexed, the indexfinger and thumb of the right hand resting on the bridge of the nose, in the attitude depicted on a snapshot photograph by Percy Apjohn, the childman weary, the manchild in the womb.

 

Womb? Weary?

He rests. He has travelled.

 

With?

Sinbad the Sailor and Tinbad the Tailor and Jinbad the Jailer and Whinbad the Whaler and Ninbad the Nailer and Finbad the Failer and Binbad the Bailer and Pinbad the Pailer and Mindbad the Mailer and Hinbad the Hailer and Rinbad the Railer and Dinbad the Kailer and Vinbad the Quailer and Linbad the Yailer and Xinbad the Phthailer.

 

When?

Going to dark bed there was a square round Sinbad the Sailor roc’s auk’s egg in the night of the bed of all the auks of the rocs of Darkinbad the Brightdayler.

Where?

^{Note 62}

There is an important contrast to be noticed between the attitudes of Joyce and Mann toward the night world and the light: the abyss into which all pairs of opposites disappear, and the day where they subsist, “common to all men.” As already remarked, these two masters, in the stages of their progress, though largely unaware of each other, were on parallel courses, step by step. Both commencing at the turn of the century in the mode of the realistic sociological-psychological nineteenth-century novel of the world of Waking Consciousness, each told through his young characters of his own youthful separation from the economic, social, and political interests of his folk: “to find,” as Stephen Dedalus put it, “the mode of life or of art whereby his spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.”^{Note 63} Tonio Kröger’s formula of “erotic irony,” stated in his letter to Lisabeta, and Stephen’s theory of aesthetics — of proper and improper, static and kinetic art (See The Balance here, here and here.) — represent equally, though from different sides, the sense of aesthetic arrest, where all the faculties of sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition are dissociated from the service of the artist’s personal will, so that, like the Buddha on the Immovable Spot, he is released from fear and desire, because free (for the moment at least) of ego: “beside himself,” transfixed by the object. The eye, which normally, biologically, is an organ in the service of an aggressive, lustful organism — scouting the world for prey and estimating dangers — is in the aesthetic moment cleared of personal concerns, so that all is beheld as by the World Eye of Apollo with his lyre on the summit of Mount Helicon. The World Song, the music of the spheres, then is heard (“silent Thalia,” singing), and, as Goethe states in a famous poem: “Then life-joy streams from all things.”^*

Ulysses and The Magic Mountain are such world-eye visions of our present much-maligned humanity. The personages and events, ostensibly separate from each other — as in the field of vision of the sociological, psychological, realistic novel — are by the alchemy of art shown to be, as in a field of dream, at one: in Stephen’s terms, “consubstantial”: essentially the vision is of the Mahāyāna Buddhist “Net of Gems,” the universe as a context of “totalistic harmony mutually relating and penetrating,”^{Note 64} one in all and all in one; each gem, each jewel of a being, reflecting all, so that “even in a hair there are innumerable golden lions.” Or one thinks again of Wolfram’s comment on the battle of Parzival and Feirefiz: if one likes, one can speak of them as two, but they are one. Musically developed and manipulated motifs of explicit mythological association, echoing and re-echoing, serve in both novels — in the way of the anamorphoses suggested by Schopenhauer in his essay on the cosmic dream in which all the dream characters dream too — to reveal within all, within each, the image whole that on the waking plane is apparently in pieces: Hans Castorp’s Homo Dei; Stephen Dedalus’s “Florry Christ, Stephen Christ, Zoe Christ, Bloom Christ, Kitty Christ, Lynch Christ.”

The order of the world of Waking Consciousness disintegrates in these novels and that of Dream breaks through in the scenes, respectively, of Hans’s vision of the Greek landscape and of Stephen’s brothel orgy. However, Hans then is carried further and more deeply into the awesome sphere of night when, at a later stage of his adventure — in a chapter labeled by its author Fragwürdigstes, “Highly Questionable” — he allows himself to participate in a series of stances, where, at a climax, Joachim, who has died some months before, returns, reappears on the summons of Hans himself, garbed prophetically in the uniform which it was to be Hans’s destiny to wear, of the German Army of World War I.

The dilettante séances had been organized as an upshot of the lectures of Krokowski and the chance arrival in the sanatorium of a stoop-shouldered little Danish girl of nineteen who “had things about her of which no one could have dreamed.” She proved to be possessed of occult powers, and at first simply to pass the time, but presently more and more seriously, the old guard of the Mountain, of whom Hans now was one, discovered and exploited these, until, at the climax of a most amazing sequence of increasingly eerie apparitions in that darkened room, Joachim, who had long been dead, was summoned and indeed appeared: in that as yet unknown uniform, he was seen sitting in a vacant chair. Hans stared, appalled. It seemed for one moment as though his stomach would turn over. His throat contracted and a four-, a fivefold sob went through and through him. He leaned forward. “Forgive me!” he whispered to the apparition, his eyes broke into tears and he could see no more. He stood up, strode in two strides to the door and with one quick movement turned on the white light.^{Note 65}

Stephen Dedalus, on the other hand, overcome by a similar visitation — of his mother — had struck the light out and gone wild.

Thus the abyss that Hans refused, and together with Hans his author, Joyce and his characters entered: so that in the following majestic masterworks, Joseph and His Brothers and Finnegans Wake, where the implications of the dream in the snow and brothel orgy open to full flower and the plane of Waking is let go, to drop to that of Dream (which is to say, of myth), we are presented with opposed experiences and representations of the archetypes of our lives: that of the soul of light, so to say, and that of the soul of darkness; in the language of the Bible: Abel and Cain, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. Mann identified with Jacob and Joseph, Joyce with Esau and Cain; i.e., Mann with the one who wins in the light world, Joyce with the one who loses there, retreats to his hole, called “The Haunted Inkbottle, no number Brimstone Walk, Asia in Ireland,” and there, “dejected into day and night with jesuit bark and bitter bite,” “noondayterrorised to skin and bone by an ineluctable phantom,” “wrote over everysquare inch of the only foolscap available, his own body, till by its corrosive sublimation one continuous present tense integument slowly unfolded all marryvoising moodmoulded cyclewheeling history (thereby, he said, reflecting from his own individual person, life unlivable, transaccidentated through the slow fires of consciousness into a dividual chaos, perilous, potent, common to allflesh, human only, mortal).”^{Note 66}

Jacob and Joseph in the novel of Thomas Mann, as well as in the Book of Genesis, gain God’s grace and become a destiny (or, as they think of it, a “blessing” ) to the world: Hans went down from the Magic Mountain to engage in the course of history. But “history,” declared Stephen in Ulysses, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” And when the schoolmaster, Mr. Deasy, grandiloquently proclaimed, “All history moves towards one great goal, the manifestation of God,” “God,” was Stephen’s answer, “is a shout in the street.”^{Note 67}

In Sanskrit, the term deśi (pronounced “day-shee”), meaning “local, ethnic, of the region,” is used (as remarked in the first volume of this study)^{Note 68} to designate the necessarily various historic forms of mythology and ritual: the “ethnic ideas” of Bastian; while the term marga, “way” or “path,” is used for the transcendence of these, the passage of the gateless gate toward an experience of the formless forms of Dreamless Sleep. In Joseph and His Brothers the sense of enacting mythic roles is brought to the support, magnification, and sophistication of a way of life. “The artist eye has a mythical slant upon life,” Mann declared in his address on Freud and the Future, “which makes life look like a farce, like a theatrical performance, a prescribed feast, like a Punch-and-Judy epic, wherein mythical character-puppets reel off a plot abiding from past time and now again present in a jest. It only lacks that this mythical slant should pass over and become subjective in the performers themselves, become a festival and mythical consciousness of part and play, for an epic to be produced such as that of the Tales of Jacob.’ … Joseph, too, is another such celebrant of life: with charming mythological hocuspocus he enacts in his own person the Tammuz-Osiris myth, ‘bringing to pass’ anew the story of the mangled, buried and arisen god, playing his festival game with that which mysteriously and secretly shapes life out of its own depths — the unconscious. The Joseph of the novel is an artist, playing with his imitatio dei upon the unconscious string.”^{Note 69}

Figure 93. The Summoning of the Goddess; India, c. 1800 a.d.

In Finnegans Wake, on the other hand, the mythic forms point, rather, downward. In the final chapter of Ulysses, following Stephen’s disappearance into the outer night and Bloom’s into the inner, the lead has passed to Molly, Gaia-Tellus; in Hesiod’s lines:

Gaia of the broad breast,

the unshakable foundation

of all the immortals who keep the crests

of snowy Olympus.^{Note 70}

She is the mother of all beings: “the holy stock of the everlasting immortals came into being out of Gaia,” even “starry Ouranos,” Heaven, her son and spouse.^{Note 71} Figure 93 is from an Indian eighteenth-century manuscript illumination, showing the male divinities of the Hindu pantheon — who neither singly nor together had been able to overthrow a buffalo-demon who had laid waste and was ruling the world — sending back their energies to their source: the Mother Dark, Mother Night, from which, then, the personification appeared of Māya-Śakti-Devi, the Goddess Creatrix of All Forms, who, having taken back from her progeny of sons the powers originally hers, now, with many arms in token of the qualities of those powers, strode forth and in a battle of great fury and many miracles overcame and slew the monster, restoring to the world laid waste its life.

“Yes because …” begins Molly Bloom’s earth-mother recollection (after Bloom, her spouse, had gone to sleep) of the many males in her life, no one of them her match. Yet she is remembering, too, her Leo and why she had liked him (because she had seen he understood or felt what a woman is) and how she had thought, “well as well him as another”: “and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”^{Note 72}

Molly Bloom is the “Yes because” of the world. The minds of her lovers severally may not be able to understand and feel what life, what a woman, is, nor their deeds to fulfill the adventures of their promise (so that the world of Waking Consciousness in which they hold control is indeed a Waste Land: a world, as we are told in the Bible, of dust), yet, as told in Finnegans Wake: “This ourth of years is not save brickdust and being humus the same returns.”^{Note 73}

Anna Livia Plurabelle, the counterpart in Finnegans Wake of Molly Bloom in Ulysses, is the living source becoming, as Molly is the source become; she is of the world of Dream Consciousness, the world as vision, as Molly of the world of Waking, the world as fact. Nor is she a compound of all women; rather, an a priori archetype, primordial image of their being — and matched, furthermore, by an adequate consort in the a priori tragi-comical manliness of her consort, Here Comes Everybody. Moreover, as in dream, so here: all is here and now, in flux; not in progress, “moving towards one great goal,” but kaleidoscopically revolving. “The oaks of aid now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay.” “Teems of times and happy returns. The seim anew.” “All’s set for restart after the silence.” The atom “explodotonates”; no minutes, no seconds later, the two annihilated parties are shaking hands again. “Mere man’s mime: God has jest. The old order changeth and lasts like the first.” “Weeping shouldst not thou be when man falls but that divine scheming ever adoring be” … “in the multimirror megaron of returningties, whirled without end to end.”

And through all this revolution, the more one labors and broods upon its enigmatic “funforall,” its “Hereweareagain Gaieties,” the more impressively and ubiquitously do the presences of H.C.E. and A.L.P. come to view as the inhabiting — creating, supporting, and disintegrating — substance, consciousness, and bliss of all things.^{Note 74} Dante’s idea of Purgatory, as the condition of a soul being purged of its pride and so readied to respond to the radiance of God’s love (as Parzival, following his conversation with Trevrizent), is matched in the Orient by the idea of Reincarnation: through many lifetimes release from egoism is achieved and so from the sorrows of rebirth. Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, brings the two mythologies together as alternate symbols of that state or plane of experience in which the daylight illusions of separateness dissolve and a single Syllable — Voice — Presence — begins to be heard and perceived through all.

But there is a further depth to be known and realized, within, beyond, before and after that night into which Bloom dissolved — — and whence the goddess of many arms, beauties, talents, and names, Anna Livia Plurabelle (Figure 93), arises; that of, namely:

The Fourth Element of AUM: the silence:

As the last pages of Ulysses were of the monologue of Molly Bloom, so the last of Finnegans Wake are of Anna Livia Plurabelle — in her character of Old Age, passing out: the river Liffey at the end of its course, sweeping out to sea, to the All-Father, “moananoaning”: Manannan. “A way a lone a last a loved a long the ” The last sentence of Finnegans Wake breaks off abruptly, in a blank. Thus the ring is broken — if you like! However, turning back to the start of the book, we find there, at the head of the first page, the cut-off remainder of that last sentence, beginning all anew “riverrun … brings us … back to Howth Castle and Environs,” i.e., to H.C.E., and the round rolls on.

In Deep Dreamless Sleep, Absolute Consciousness, the Omniscient One, is buried, like a treasure, in darkness. “Just as those ignorant of the spot might pass, time and time again, over a buried treasure of gold and not find it, so do all creatures go daily to that Brahma-world in sleep and not find it.”^{Note 75} Creatures go there in death also, without finding. The goal of wisdom is to arrive there awake and alive: to carry Waking Consciousness through dream realizations, while awake, to an experience, awake, of identity with that (tat tvam asi). In Oriental Mythology there is a picture (Figure 21) of the mythic “Isle of Gems,” the womb of the universe, showing the world goddess seated on her spouse, who is there beneath her in two aspects: one upward-turned in connubium, the other turned downward and away. The reference of the first is to Consciousness in the state of Deep Sleep, which, as we have read, is “the Source (yonī: the Generative Womb) of All: the Beginning and End of beings.” Here the world is created, not in the way of an act at the beginning of time, but continuously, forever, as the ground of being; for there was never a beginning of time, there will never be an end, the creative moment is now, in Deep Dreamless Sleep, the sphere of bliss, of Śiva-Śakti, H.C.E. and A.L.P., Molly Bloom’s Yes. Whereas the figure turned away from the goddess, downward, is called Śava, the “corpse,” and represents Consciousness transcendent, the fourth portion of the Self, symbolized in the silence.

“What is known as the fourth portion,” we read in the Upaniṣad, “is neither inward- nor outward-turned consciousness, nor the two together; not an undifferentiated mass of dormant omniscience; neither knowing nor unknowing — because invisible, ineffable, intangible, devoid of characteristcs, inconceivable, undefinable, its sole essence being the assurance of its own Self: the coming to peaceful rest of all differentiated, relative existence: utterly quiet: peaceful-blissful: without a second: the Self, to be known.”^{Note 76}

2.

In our classification of symbolic forms, all four orders of experience represented in the syllable AUM will have to be recognized. On the first level, A, of Waking Consciousness, the references (ideally, as charged by Wittgenstein) will be directly and precisely, a) to facts, and b) to thoughts. Other symbols on this level (apparently not recognized by Wittgenstein) will be references, however, c) to feelings, and d) to intuitions of subliminal relationships (analogies, homologies, et cetera); still others e) will be to imperatives: stop, go, back up, sit down!

For a symbol to function as intended, certain conditions must be satisfied. First, the code must be understood by both the sender and the receiver. Codes are of two orders: 1. inherited (instinctual) and 2. learned; and of the latter category there are a) code elements triggering conditioned reflexes, and b) code elements consciously controlled. The code channels generally are of sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch. The sender and receiver may be the same or not the same; and anyone who has forgotten what his own jottings meant on his date pad will be likely to appreciate the possibility of misreading symbols, even when they are one’s own.

On the level of U, Dream Consciousness, this possibility of misreading one’s own communications is of high significance. For the sender of the message here would be one’s own unconscious, and the receiver, the conscious personality. Read in the Freudian way, as allegories symbolic of forgotten events, the symbols of dream would then be comparable to the messages on one’s date pad in forgotten or illegible script; while myths would be like that soiled and mangled letter scratched up in Finnegans Wake from an orangeflavored mudmound by a hen.

But, on the other hand, when the message is not of an occasion registered in the past, whether of oneself or of one’s race, it will be of another order altogether. It is then something like a bubble coming up from the bottom of a sea. What or who is the sender? The sender is oneself. What can the meaning be?

What is the meaning of a bubble from the bottom of the sea?

Well, in the first place, such a message is instinctual. Its source, ultimately, is of the consciousness below waves, the light folded in the dark of Deep Sleep. It is not of the order of Waking Consciousness, nor to be read as a conscious thought. Professor Thomas A. Sebeok, of the Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics at Indiana University, in an article in Science on “Animal Communication,” has enumerated a number of types of instinctual message, of which at least four might be of relevance here. The first is the Monologue, a “vacuum activity” in the absence of a recipient, delivered without regard to the ability of other individuals to receive the message: a display, a sort of spontaneous song of life. The second has been dubbed (following Malinowski) “Phatic Communication”: messages that serve merely to establish or prolong communication: a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange. “This,” we learn, “is the first verbal function acquired by human infants and commonly predominates in communicative acts both within and across species.” Next are “Emotive Messages” : messages that are action responses to visceral and sensory stimuli, and which chiefly serve to alert recipient individuals about the condition of the signaling individual. And finally, “Vocatives and Imperatives” : messages oriented toward the addressee, devoid of truth value, having a chiefly conative (or appeal) function: “Look at me!” “Let me out the door!”^{Note 77}

The message of our bubble, then, will be the announcement of a presence, possibly intentional, possibly addressed to the waking world, but certainly referring to no conscious context of concerns. Its only meaning, finally, is the announcement of its own presence — which can have no more “meaning” than the presence somewhere of a stone, a flower, a mountain, or a winding stream. The value of the message to our Waking Consciousness will be to alert us to an unknown aspect of ourselves, which, if we are to “know ourselves,” and so realize our destiny, our wyrd, will have to be recognized.

Dream Consciousness, then, to summarize and terminate, is the channel or medium of communication between the spheres of M, Deep Dreamless Sleep, and A, Waking Conciousness. In its upper, “personal” strata, the messages are of a code and context derived from the Waking Consciousness of an early, perhaps long-forgotten date, and may be read — though with difficulty — as referring to lightworld themes. In its lower strata, however, the messages and codes are of the instincts, the archetypes, the gods: vacuum, phatic, emotive, vocative, or imperative announcements of their existence — requiring to be recognized. And their language is of both-and, neither-nor: like the image of God set up for the brothers by Cusanus, regarding all ways at once.

Figure 94. Adapted from Pablo Picasso: Minotaur; 1933

Figure 95. Adapted from Pablo Picasso: Minotauromachy; 1935

Figure 94, from a sketch by Picasso, made four years before his “Guernica,” for the cover of the first issue of an elegant surrealist review entitled Minotaure, provides an interesting supplement to the icon of Cusanus’s thought. The moon, the moon-bull, and the dead and risen god, whether as the mild and loving Christ or as this savage mixed monster of the abyss, are of an order of symbolization the “meanings” of which cannot be reduced to light-world, even “dream-world” terms. The knife here is of the form of a leaf and Picasso has arranged beside his sketch three leaves of the same form. The death-life oxymoron is suggested. In Figure 95, from his etching called Minotauromachy (1935), the same monster appears from the watery abyss, shading his eyes from the light, in polar contrast to the figure of the sage at the left (Nietzsche’s “Socratic Man”), climbing aloft to escape the reality of the Dionysian terror, while the Graces Three with their dove (the bird of Venus-Aphrodite) calmly regard the apparition: the youngest of them, innocent Thalia, holding in one hand the flowers of life-abundance and in the other the light of consciousness, which are here the foci of the composition, equidistant from the eye of the sage and left eye of the bull. The sword of the overcome matador is pointed not at the bull but at the eviscerated horse, and the matador is revealed as a woman. Clearly the “Guernica” (1937) is a reorganization of the same mythological motifs, recognized as implicit in a monstrous act of war and rendered as a moment equally of rapture and of pain (terror-joy), with the figure in flames at the right marvelously falling and rising at once, both from and toward the window at the upper right, which, like the end of Finnegans Wake, opens to the void.

“O sweet fire!” sang the Spanish mystic Diego de Estella (1524–1578). “The flames of Thy holy love in Thy most sacred passion mount on high. Thy torments and afflictions are the wood wherewith this holy fire bum s.”^{Note 78} And from John of the Cross (1524–1591): “This flame of love is the spirit of its Spouse — the Holy Spirit. And this flame the soul feels within it as a fire which bums within it and sends out flame.… In this flame the acts of the will are united and rise upward, being carried away and absorbed in the flame of the Holy Spirit.”^{Note 79}

“The bull is a bull and the horse is a horse,” Picasso is reported to have said. “These are animals, massacred animals. That’s all, so far as I am concerned.”^{Note 80} Which is obviously untrue: horses are not of papier-mâché, nor do bulls have an eye in the middle of the forehead. Such deliberate prevarication is justified, however, by the fact that mythic symbols point beyond the reach of “meaning,” and even in the sphere of meaning have many “meanings.” To define and fix authoritatively any consciously conceivable set of final “meanings” would be to kill them — which is, of course, what happens in dogmatic and historicizing theology, as in both didactic and pornographic art. Symbols of the mythological order, like life, which they unfold from dark to light, are there, “thus come” from beyond “meaning,” on all levels at once.

Accordingly, as James Joyce’s title, Ulysses, refers us from the Waking level of the action of his novel to the mythic, so Picasso’s title “Guernica,” from the mythic order of his imagery to the Waking of historical event. Such double-talk, uniting history and geography (land náma) and the archetypes of the psyche, is of the essence of creative art-as-myth; the prime function of the Muses being to serve as the channel of communication (U) between the spheres of daylight knowledge (A) and the seat of life (M): in Figure 20, between the earthly order below of silent Thalia, and that aloft of Apollo and the Graces: the Lord of Light (consciousness) and the Goddess of Life (creative energy) in her triadic manifestation as future, present, and past: “Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be.”^{Note 81}

In art, in myth, in rites, we enter the sphere of dream awake. And as the imagery of dream will be on one level local, personal, and historic, but at bottom rooted in the instincts, so also myth and symbolic art. The message of an effective living myth is delivered to the sphere of bliss of the deep unconscious, where it touches, wakes, and summons energies; so that symbols operating on that level are energy-releasing and -channeling stimuli. That is their function — their “meaning” — on the level of Deep Sleep: while on the level of Waking Consciousness the same symbols are inspirational, informative, initiatory, rendering a sense of illumination with respect to the instincts touched, i.e., the order subliminal of nature — inward and outward nature — of which the instincts touched are the life.

The question arises as to whether in the human species any of the codes of communication on this preor unconscious level are inherited. Among the animals from whose midst our species arose, patterns of controlled behavior comparable to ritual forms appear spontaneously on occasions of social excitation: most notably in the highly stylized courtship exchanges of certain species of bird. And these extensions of action beyond the strictly necessary have been frequently compared to the rites of mankind, not only because of their formality, but also because of their function, which is, in a word, to engage the individual in a superindividual event, conducive to the well-being not of himself but of the race. On all such ceremonious occasions, the cries, attitudes, and movements elicit reciprocal responses from those to whom they are addressed; and these, in counterplay, conduce to the unfoldment of a kind of ritual ensemble, not invented either by the creatures performing it or by any choreographer, but grounded in the species and brought forth by all members everywhere in exactly the same way. The most elaborate of these festivals appear among the species with the best eyes; for the various displays are signals to be seen, depending for effect on correlations between the sending apparatus and a receiving organ — what is technically termed an “instinct crossing” structure. The sign stimuli work automatically as energy-releasing and -directing agents; so that the interlacing sequences, though apparently of the individuals, are actually unwilled, like the procesess of a dream. The performing bees, birds, fish, or quadrupeds are moved spontaneously from centers of memory antecedent to their own lives. Through each, the species speaks. And since in human traditional rites also spontaneous collective responses to formalized displays occur, the earliest creators of the myths and rites of primitive mankind may not have been individuals at all, but the genes of the species. And since in human traditional rites also a certain psychological readiness to respond to certain specific sign stimuli is to be remarked — particularly among primitives — the earliest individual creators of myths and rites must not have been merely freely inventive fantasists, but inward-gazing, inward-listening seers (shamans), responding to some inner voice or movement of the species.

However, already in the animal kingdom, on the higher levels, and particularly among apes, instances have been observed of individual wit and invention, as well as of individual cases (as it were) of fetish-worship. In Primitive Mythology I have quoted to this point from Dr. Wolfgang Köhler’s The Mentality of Apes, where he tells of an adult female chimpanzee named Tschengo who became so attached to a round stone that had been polished by the sea that, as Köhler states, “on no pretext could you get the stone away, and in the evening the animal took it with it to its room and its nest.” I have also quoted his description of the spinning game and dance invented by Tschengo and another ape named Chica,^{Note 82} where the occasion was mere disinterested play, of no use to the species, no “survival value” whatsoever, but only delight, which might be escalated to rapture: the field, that is to say, of creative art.

At the opening of Primitive Mythology I have discussed the old problem of nature and nurture in relation to the forms of myth and rite; and throughout the subsequent chapters of our survey, not only in the Primitive, but also in the Oriental and Occidental volumes, evidence enough has appeared to warrant the statement now that there are indeed universal mythological themes, which in the various provinces have appeared in local transformations appropriate to the differing local scenes; that, furthermore, the ultimate source and references of such enduring themes cannot have been the changing outward environments of geography, history, and belief, but only some enduring inward realities of the species; and finally that, since man, in contrast to the beasts, is endowed with a brain and nervous system not as stereotyped as theirs but greatly open to imprint and to learning, the signals to which the race responds do not remain unchanged throughout the centuries, but are transformed through experience. Basically, the responses remain associated with what James Joyce termed “the grave and constant” in human suffering and joy; but the stimuli through which such responses have been released have greatly altered in the course of human events. So also have the “meanings” attached to them. The large human brain, with its capacity for unforeseen experience and unprecedented thought, and the long human infancy, which is longer far than that of any other species, have endowed our race with a capacity for learning that greatly exceeds that of any other creature, and with a danger thereby of disorientation. One of the chief concerns of the ritual lore of primitive and developed human groups, therefore, has always been that of guiding the child to the adult state. The infantile response system of dependency must be transformed to responsibility, and specifically in terms of the requirements of the local social order. The son has to become father, and the daughter, mother, passing from the sphere of childhood, which is everywhere essentially the same, to that of the variously offered social roles, which radically differ according to the modes of human life. The instincts have to be governed and matured in the interests both of the group and of the individual, and traditionally it has been the prime function of mythology to serve this socialpsychological end. The individual is adapted to his group and the group to its environment, with a sense thereby of gratitude for the miracle of life. And that I would call the function of the Mythology of the Village Compound: the training of the instincts and inculcation of sentiments.

But there is the other function, beyond that: of the Mythology of the Forest, the Quest, the Individual: the silence. And there is in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain a charming scene in which the sense of the silence comes through. It is the picnic scene of the last chapter of the epic, where that manly old colonial Dutchman, a retired coffee-planter, Mynheer Pieter Peeperkorn (who had arrived late in the story, together with the much younger Frau Chauchat, when she had returned to the Mountain Palace after a sojourn in the flatland), led an expedition of his friends, one blissful day in May, to enjoy together a picturesque cascade in the valley of the Fluela. I shall leave it to my reader to discover for himself in the novel, if he has not already done so, Mann’s affectionate treatment of this sturdy, tragicomic personality, with his way of talking, flourishing his large broad hands with their pointed nails, leading on, it always seemed, to some revelatory climax, which, however, no one ever quite caught. His was a conversation of expectancy, of sentences not completed. And when he chose for his picnic site a spot directly by the waterfall, where the roar of nature’s wonder drowned completely all conversation, so that Settembrini and Naphta, that pair of verbal prodigies, were silenced absolutely to nonentity, it was a high moment when he himself stood up, delivering to his company an address of which not a single word could be heard.

On arriving at the romantic spot — Frau Chauchat and five gentlemen — their ears were saluted with the maximum of sound. The tumbling water, foaming white, sent sprays over the rocks, and the visitors moved close in toward the roaring, enveloped in its mist, exchanging glances, headshakes, and gestures of amaze. Their lips formed soundless phrases of admiration and marvel. Then Hans, Settembrini, and the fifth gentleman, a Russian, Anton Karlovitch Ferge by name, began climbing a series of narrow steps up the side of the chute to a bridge that spanned the water just where it arched to pour downward; and, while crossing, they paused midway, to lean on the rail and wave to the party below, then, continuing, climbed laboriously down on the other side of the stream to rejoin their friends. A journey without goal, a circle, for the pleasure merely of itself!

And when they had settled to their picnic, suddenly the old Dutchman, Peeperkom, began to speak. Extraordinary man!

It was impossible for him to hear his own voice, [declares our author] still more for the others to catch a syllable of what he let transpire without its in the least transpiring. But with the winecup in his right hand, he raised his forefinger, stretching his left arm palm outwards toward the water. They saw his kingly features move in speech, the mouth form words, which were as soundless as though spoken into empty, etherless space. No one dreamed he would continue; with embarrassed smiles they watched his futile activity, thinking every moment it would cease. But he went on, with tense, compelling gesture, to harangue the clamour that swallowed his words; directing upon this or that one of the company by turns the gaze of his pale little weary eyes, spanned wide beneath the lifted folds of his brow; and whoever felt himself addressed was constrained to nod back again, wide-eyed, open-mouthed, hand to ear, as though any sort of effort to hear could better the utterly hopeless situation. He even stood up! There, in his crumpled ulster, that reached nearly to his heels, the collar turned up; bare-headed, cup in hand, the high brow creased with folds like some heathen idol’s in a shrine, and crowned by the aureole of white hair like flickering flames; there he stood by the rocks and spoke, holding the circle of thumb and forefinger, with the lancelike others above it, before his face, and sealing his mute and incomprehensible toast with that compelling sign of precision. Such words as they were accustomed to hearing from him, they could read on his lips or divine from his gestures: “Settled” and “Absolutely!” — but that was all. They saw his head sink sideways, the broken bitterness of the lips, they saw the Man of Sorrows in his guise. But then quite suddenly flashed the dimple, the sybaritic roguishness, the garment snatched up dancewise, the ritual impropriety of the heathen priest. He lifted his beaker, waved it halfcircle before the assembled guests, and drank it out in three gulps, so that it stood bottom upwards. Then he handed it with outstretched arm to his Malay servant, who received it with an obeisance, and gave the sign to break up the feast.^{Note 83}

Once again, the words of Wittgenstein:

Proposition 6.44 “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.”

Proposition 6.522 “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

And finally, Proposition 6.4311 “If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”^{Note 84}

“C’est la personnalité qui conte,” the old master sculptor Antoine Bourdelle used to say to the students in his Paris studio; and in the guiding of their work: “L’art fait ressortir les grandes lignes de la nature.” The imagery of art, that is to say, as of myth and religious ritual, is presentational, beyond “meaning”; hence, of many possible “meanings” simultaneously (many dogmas), on both dream and waking levels, and with effects, as well, in the unconscious. “During the course of the spiritual adventure inward,” Heinrich Zimmer remarks in a comment on the syllable AUM, “the emphasis shifts from the outer world to the inner, and finally from the manifest to the unmanifest, and there is a prodigious increase in the powers gained; nevertheless, the inferior, as well as superior, states remain as constituents of the whole.… Each quarter is on an equal footing, somehow, with the others.”^{Note 85} So too in every mythic symbol: it touches and unites in the actuality of a person the whole range of his living present: the ultimate mystery of his being and of the spectacle of his world, the order of his instincts, of his dreams, and of his thought. And this today in a way of especial immediacy.

For even in the sphere of Waking Consciousness, the fixed and the set fast, there is nothing now that endures. The known myths cannot endure. The known God cannot endure. Whereas formerly, for generations, life so held to established norms that the lifetime of a deity could be reckoned in millenniums, today all norms are in flux, so that the individual is thrown, willy-nilly, back upon himself, into the inward sphere of his own becoming, his forest adventurous without way or path, to come through his own integrity in experience to his own intelligible Castle of the Grail — integrity and courage, in experience, in love, in loyalty, and in act. And to this end the guiding myths can no longer be of any ethnic norms. No sooner learned, these are outdated, out of place, washed away. There are today no horizons, no mythogenetic zones. Or rather, the mythogenetic zone is the individual heart. Individualism and spontaneous pluralism — the free association of men and women of like spirit, under protection of a secular, rational state with no pretensions to divinity — are in the modern world the only honest possibilities: each the creative center of authority for himself, in Cusanus’s circle without circumference whose center is everywhere, and where each is the focus of God’s gaze.

The norms of myth, understood in the way rather of the “elementary ideas” (mārga) than of the “ethnic” (deśi), recognized, as in the Domitilla Ceiling (Figure 3), through an intelligent “making use” not of one mythology only but of all of the dead and set-fast symbologies of the past, will enable the individual to anticipate and activate in himself the centers of his own creative imagination, out of which his own myth and life-building “Yes because” may then unfold. But in the end, as in the case of Parzival, the guide within will be his own noble heart alone, and the guide without, the image of beauty, the radiance of divinity, that wakes in his heart amor: the deepest, inmost seed of his nature, consubstantial with the process of the All, “thus come.” And in this life-creative adventure the criterion of achievement will be, as in every one of the tales here reviewed, the courage to let go the past, with its truths, its goals, its dogmas of “meaning,” and its gifts: to die to the world and to come to birth from within.