Low Key May Day

We had a very laid-back May Day Weekend.  Saturday was rainy and damp; Sunday was drier as the day progressed.  Venus and Jupiter had a conjunction Saturday, but the mornings have been overcast the last week, which has made any early astronomy difficult.  

Sunday, May First, while it was still damp, I visited the Raptor Center and managed to photograph Parker the American Kestrel.  A little later, Dmitri the Eurasian Eagle-Owl, while apparently grooming some astroturf in his aviary, made high-pitched, chicken-like sounds—I've heard him make deep throated hoots and impatient sounding squawks, but never goofy-sounding, clucking squeaks.   The residents in general seemed to be more animated and vocal than I've observed in some time; I don't know this was related to seasonal changes or not, egg laying and nest building seemed to be last month.

By the time I got back home, the sun was showing more often than not and the back yard began to warm up and dry out.  The closest thing I had to a May Pole Dance was looking at pictures of friend's Morris Dances and the official Todrick Hall video, "I Like Boys."  

Mark's not a religious participant of any flavor, and he's really not into Beltane, so there was no jumping over fires, nor Great Rites at Dawn, or anything remotely like a bacchanal.  Well... okay, in the afternoon I laid out blankets and pillows and a small portable table and—after settling Aiofe on her corner of the blankets—read the opening chapters from "Book The Second" of C.G. Jung's "The Red Book."  I was struck by some similarities between it and part's of Dion Forutne's "The Winged Bull," and how Jung's imagery is filled with binary opposites.  She's obviously read a lot of his work.

Mark did house maintenance and re-painted the back door to our garage.  

Possibly as a result of reading Jung, I did have a quick dream image of a woman in a fuchsia dress, who did a handstand and as a result, her red dress fell over her head and shoulders, and her white petticoats and white stockinged legs were like the stamens and white petals of a passionflower (cue Tchaikovsky Waltz of the Flowers music from Disney's Fantasia...).

School Bus Vampire

As a result of reading Jung, I'm continuing to have very Jungian dreams.  In the latest most compelling dream image, a young teen boy was searching for a old toy.  We were in a kind of restaurant / BnB / forge, which was getting trashed in the search.  In the background were urn-shaped, stone Matryoshka dolls with very rounded bodies and small heads--they had been smashed open, but they were empty shells. 

The child used a power jigsaw to cut a realistic, yellow and black, toy school bus, about the size of a toaster-oven (or, I suppose the size of Barbie's 1970's camper), open.  Between the rows of bus seats, there was a Dracula-style vampire doll.  The child was slightly upset, because in cutting the bus open, a chunk of the vampire's cape had been cut off.  I'm not sure this is what the child was looking for.

This image was sandwiched between the usual, "odd driving someplace" and "airport anxiety dreams;" I've just remembered that a passenger gave birth in the airport anxiety dream (which is new)... so my dreaming self was particularly focused on images of birth and re-birth.   

The school bus is "a vehicle of instruction"?  The stone Matryoshka dolls are ossified personas?  

The Dracula doll (more Dracula than Count Von Count, and more Bela Lugosi than Gary Oldman) reminds me of a vampire story in an 1997's Gay Fairy Tales book:  but all I remember of the story was that the vampire "does unspeakable things to bodies," and something about thread through a small hole in a stain glass window.  And for a while, it seemed like Gay Vampires were a thing... so I'm guessing this is a metaphor for old notions about gay identity.  

Or maybe it's my undead self.  

More Jung

Continuing to read Jung.  He's just entered the desert of his soul and is having a vision with a red stone.  It reminds me of the ancient Egyptian concept of Re sailing the barque of the sun through the dual Netherworld of Duat / body of the goddess Nut (Night).   Jung even has drawn a dung beetle to go with this portion of the text.  Slogging through the ponderous, religious-sounding fluff, makes me sleepy -- but every so often an epigram will put in an appearance.  This round's is "Scorn cannot challenge you if you are not vain to the marrow of your bones."   

I'm not reading Jung regularly enough for it to effect my dreams much; or at lest I'm not recalling anything other than a notion that some dreams feel more fairytale.  The book's size discourages casual pre-bedtime reading.  I have tried some visualizations while dozing for ten minutes, which has produced some interesting imagery.  I can hear Dion Fortune saying, "...or to put it another way, I put myself into a trance and began to dream about her."   Unfortunately, the recall on my dozing dreams is incomplete.  If I were to get serious about examining my inner iconic/symbolic mindscape, I would nap with a pen and paper nearby.

Notes on "Liber Novus"

Continuing to read "Liber Novus," and I've gotten through the introduction by the translator and onto the actual text.   I'm on chapter iv -- the chapters are short, almost Biblical in length.   The original text is mostly straight caligraphy, with the start of chapters indicated with illustrated initials in square blocks.  

Jung uses an evangelical tone to describe a mid-life- crisis at age 40 and relates disintegrative fantasy/meditations wherein he has dialogs with The Spirit of the Times (The rational ego?  "Zeitgeist" ? ), The Spirt of the Depths (? the shadow self?), and his Soul (? the animus ?).   The language is very dualistic, and has a religious flavor, with references to divine madness and children of light who will illuminate the darkness.  

The most interesting passage from these Dark Night of the Soul chapters is from the end of Chapter i: "The image of the world is half of the world.  He who possesses the world but not its image possesses only half the world, since his soul is poor and has nothing."   This reminds me of the tarot card, "The Devil," and makes me wonder how much Jung was in contact with metaphysical societies.   I am also waiting for Jung to say something about cinema, since he spends so much time focused on symbolic meanings behind images.

Jung's Red Book

The other day I had the opportunity to purchase a copy of C G Jung's "The Red Book (Liber Novus)."  When it first came out, I had wanted a copy, but felt like it was out of my budget.  I would read summaries of it in news articles and wonder at some of the more striking illustrations of trees and dragons and sailing ships.  

I hadn't realized until I was hefting it out of Tsunami Books that it's a massive, oversized tome.   Holding it is like being six and opening a large, unabridged dictionary; or like retrieving some sorcerer's tome.  I was momentarily transported to my parents' study in in the seventies, which at the time had a eight foot by twelve foot bookshelf filled with books, books, books, books, books -- really big books of Egyptian antiquities, old US History books, dictionaries and encyclopedias and atlases, and old college course books (okay, and reel-to-reel tape recordings of Bach, Mozart, Vivaldi, and Fred Waring & His Pennsylvanians...).  Owning the book is comforting and pleasurable, and I'm pretty sure I need to make a little shrine for it.

I've only sat down with "The Red Book" for a few sessions so far.  It's such a large book that I've had to improvise an archivist's lectern for it out of small pillows in an attempt to protect the spine.  

The first part of the book is page after page of facsimiles of Jung's carefully ruled and executed calligraphy and the luminous paintings of his dreams and self-guided participatory meditations.   

When I first learned of "The Red Book," I thought Jung had been having sessions in his attic where he would write and paint the images in it -- but in reality he transcribed a first draft of notes and drawings before laying out the calligraphic text and illustrations.  

He wanted his book to be a work of art, a precious book.

The next part of the book is the translator's introduction and brief biography of Jung.  This is followed by an English translation of the German in the facsimile.

The best question that Jung asks is from an excerpt of his writings in the translator's introduction: "What is the myth you are living?"

What's struck me so far is that Jung seems to have developed a method of self-guided, participatory meditations similar to what some Tarot card readers suggest to their students:  look at or imagine a scene, then insert yourself into the scene and interact with what or who you find there.  I can't help but be reminded of how Dion Fortune says she would enter the astral plane by lucid dreaming herself there using symbols (established by the Golden Dawn) as signposts for her progress; or how other occultists suggest imagining traveling up the Tree of Life and conversing with the angelic beings at each station.

In Jung's case, he seems to have developed the Hero's Journey as a symbolic method for circling around different aspects of his Self.  

What's also struck me is how binary Jung's system is:  primitive/civilized; dark/light; lexical/symbolic; rational/insane; male/female; science/art.  I'm guessing this is a product of him being a European man before World War I. I think I can detect traces of Egypt-mania in the work, too.

 From what I can gather from the introduction, it sounds like he decided he wanted to be a lexical, logical, rational scientist instead of someone more grounded in the humanities.  I'm inferring his artistic talents seemed to come from a symbolic, illogical, irrational space that was confusing (or troubling) to him, so he experimented on himself with the tools of psychoanalysis in an attempt to integrate different parts of himself.  

But his focus on the rational and on words and logos does make me wonder what he thought of improvisational music and musicians.  I guess I'll have to find out as I read more.

Jung, homosexuality, parents, and gods

Over the weekend I indulged in a nice hot bath and read Jung's Aspects of the Masculine.  The thing that struck me the most was Jung's comments on the "problem" of male homosexuality.  The kindest thing he had to say was that among students, it wasn't a bad thing for them to experiment with.

Given that Dr Jung's comments were from essays written before he had formalized his theory of the collective unconscious, and given that I was reading essays from 1905-1930, I wondered what Jungians have to say about homosexuality in general and gay men today.  (Note to self: time to hit some peer-reviewed materials...)

The other thing that struck me were his comments on transference, fathers, and gods.  Jung presented a patient's dream.  She was on a hill overlooking a field of grain.  The mountain grew into a kind of god, who cradled her in his arms.  The wind blew, and the dreamer was rocked in the arms of the god while the fields of grain waved. 

Jung seemed more interested in how the dreamer had made a connection between wind and spirit -- but the passage made me wonder if the need to gender our deities, and the tendency to confound our parents and our gods is a part of a kind of cultural transference process.

And thinking about this particular dream more, it seems so Neo-Pagan to me; I wish I knew more about the (presumably) Judeo-Christian  woman who dreamed it.  What about her upbringing enabled her to have a vision of "Father Earth" ?