Words and Music
After retiring from a long career as a paramedic, I lived in the old German city of Nürnberg. Most of the town was destroyed in a fire storm during World War II, and when Nürnberg was subsequently rebuilt, Katharinenkirche was maintained as a burnt-out shell. Rather than a neglected war memorial, however, the townspeople still to this day use this Church of St. Catherine as an open-air theater for concerts of all musical genres.
The walls of Katherinenkirche still stand, though bare. When fire burnt away its roof and hollowed it out, the church’s sanctity was released to the heavens. Its remaining skeleton evokes a memory from the opposite end of my career, an hour in which, as part of my training to become a paramedic, I was called to witness the autopsy of a woman in her late twenties. Although she’d died of a cancerous liver, her body showed no external signs; her face was lovely and her figure the ideal of a woman. I think of her now as Catherine, in recognizing her likeness to the ruins of the medieval church.
St. Catherine of Alexandria, ‘the pure one,’ is the patron saint of scholars, philosophers, and apologists. St. Catherine was a beautiful, privileged and well-educated woman who tried to convince the Roman Emperor Maxentius to end persecution of Christians. Maxentius called pagan philosophers to debate her, but she converted them all. For that, and surely also because she refused the emperor’s seduction, she was martyred.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, St. Catherine was a devout intellect who “declared to her parents that she would only enter into marriage with someone who surpassed her in reputation, wealth, beauty and wisdom.. Her intercession was implored by theologians, apologists, pulpit orators, and philosophers. Before studying, writing, or preaching, they besought her to illumine their minds, guide their pens, and impart eloquence to their words.”
Part of her legend (not embraced by the church) is that, upon her own conversion, Catherine was transported to heaven in a vision and betrothed to Christ by the Virgin Mary. This story comes from a time in which people believed that the body is a burden to the soul, and that truly holy people rejected all worldly things, and especially fleshly love.
Within the medieval walls of Katharinenkirche, where there are no windows to the world but the roof is open to the sky, one can imagine St. Catherine’s male counterpart as Sir Galahad, the purest knight of the Table Round, who pursued the Holy Grail in preference to everything earthly. The day after Sir Galahad was made to accept a kingship, Joseph of Aramathie appeared to him and offered him to drink from the holy cup. When he did, Sir Galahad ascended into Heaven in the company of angels, freed forever from his mortal burden.
Only the shell of Katharinenkirche still remains. And of the woman I know as Catherine, I have only the memory of her autopsy. I felt it a blasphemy to dissect her in the cold basement of the hospital, and yet this was an academic necessity in my acquiring the knowledge with which I could bring healing to my community.
St. Catherine and Sir Galahad left their mortal burdens as virgins; I can’t know whether my Catherine did, but I remember her as a promise unfulfilled. How dearly I would like to have known her as she went about her apartment singing love songs, or joining in with folk tunes on the radio while driving about our city. But the love she might have inspired in me was multiplied in every patient I touched throughout a long career, through the knowledge she imparted to me.
St. Catherine converted the pagan philosophers, not by refusing their arguments, but by engaging with them. She revealed something beyond the laws of logic, of nature, and of moral living – the love of a personal God. Remembering the concerts I heard in Katharinenkirche, it’s fitting that the shell of her church still reverberates with music even when the words of gospel are no longer preached therein; I’m reminded of Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher who’s study of mathematics was preliminary to and fulfilled in the Music of the Spheres.
The medieval mind understood Pythagoras’s musica universalis (music of the heavenly bodies) as one of three branches of their concept of musica; the other two are musica humana (music of the human body) and musica instrumentalis (music of instruments and voices.) Hindus (who were aware of Pythagoras) expressed this theme as Shabd (the Word made flesh) – a near identity with divine meaning and sound, tones which can be heard with ‘the inner ear.’ The idea is that of John 1:1 – “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”
Indulge me an exert from my novella, The Beautiful Fountain:
“The universe was approaching clarity - expanding with Aristotle’s vocabulary and contracting with Plato’s nameless Beauty. But, though these two sages were restored by the Orient, Pythagoras was returned in tatters. The monks were extracting the Music of the Spheres and discarding the harmony. Their thesis was a dictionary - a circular argument, words sustained only by each other, and without a theme.”
A friend – my fellow blogger, Moriah Joy – danced around these ideas in speculating what heaven might be like, especially in her intuition that Heaven has much to do with the intellect, as she remembered God’s charges to Adam before the Fall. In the first creation story, God gave man rulership of all the fish, the birds, and the beasts of the earth, and in the second, more detailed creation story God paraded all these creatures before Adam to see what he would name them.
Naming the things of the earth is beginning to take rulership of them. Naming things is forming concepts of them, but rulership is more – it becomes co-creative by organizing them intellectually in a specific way. As there is more than one language, there is more than one way to understand the world. And, for that matter, each speaker within even a common language will have a unique understanding of his own tongue, formed of both natural and accidental associations of terms within his dictionary. The history and legends of St. Catherine are in the public encyclopedia, while Nürnberg’s Katharinenkirche, the autopsy, Sir Galahad, and my association with Pythagorus’s music are additional elements in my personal lexicon of Catherine.
Having names for things gives one the focus, the power to master them intellectually, with something comparable to using variable names in algebraic equations or logical expressions. The word, “dog,” for example, is an abstraction for rather a wide variety of beasts – knowing the features common to dogs gives one knowledge of how to interact with all, but the generic word obscures the unique characteristics of each. We achieve a certain clarity in the use of language, a recognition of the structure of our world, but we want always to remember that our dictionary is an approximation, a thesis comprised partly of what is given to us and partly an extension of our own minds.
But the structure is a skeleton – it lacks something which gives it life. What I wanted during Catherine’s autopsy was her life restored. Her body had fallen out of harmony, and life had left it. It’s necessary to exploit language, to say that what was missing in her flesh was her music, because there is no really suitable English word – and if one were invented it would soon be martyred by academics, if the emperors of the flesh didn’t first turn it to their use.
In communion service we eat bread and drink wine; bread is a universal symbol for knowledge, but, again, there is no satisfying word for what the wine represents. One thinks first of “life,” but this doesn’t capture the immediacy, the human passion that is wanting in the intuition. For this we want music. The bread is broken – separated into parts – and then the wine follows; the words are written, then revealed in music.”Music begins where words leave off. Music expresses the inexpressible. If there is a Kingdom of Heaven, it lies in music” ( Edward Abbey.) Though the words are written first, the music is the alpha and the omega; if one changes the music it expresses a different passion – it’s a different song – but if the words are changed it’s only another stanza.
Much of Richard Wagner’s “Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg” was set within the city’s Katharinenkirche (before it was burned.) Wagner’s opera is the tale of a naturally gifted musician who struggles against the rigid rules of the music guilds, so that, by winning a competition, he would win the hand of the woman he loves. But the musician, Walther, has a competitor named Beckmesser. Walther has composed a song for the event, and the local master, Hans Sachs, arranges that Beckmesser obtain a copy and believe it to be Sachs’ work. But Sachs anticipates correctly that Beckmesser will utterly fail to understand the spirit of the song, and when Walther follows and sings it in a way to reveal its inner beauty, Walther wins the prize and thus also his paramour.
The words were the same, but where Beckmesser was a master of the craft, Walther bested him by expressing the passion within the words. As one who understood the rules, Beckmesser was an academic, an intellectual musician, while Walther was a poet in love.
Within the text of Le Morte d’Arthur, Sir Thomas Mallory often mentioned that he was translating the history from the French, but when he spoke of the Holy Grail he almost always retained the French word, Sangreal. Consciously or not, Mallory was communicating the meanings both of san greal (cup of Christ) and also sang real (royal blood.) Sangreal incorporates a mix of ideas (which our unconscious mind tends to do); depending upon the legend, it may be a platter, or the cup which Christ used in the Last Supper, and which Joseph of Aremathie later used to catch Christ’s blood in the tomb. Sangreal captures the sense of the full dinnerware of communion – most importantly, the vessel containing the wine, but also to a lessor extent the tray containing the bread.
When the Sangreal appears, it is carried by a maiden, and in some stories that maiden is thought to be Mary, mother of Jesus. But one may also recall the revived story that Mary Magdalene carried the daughter of Jesus; what is downplayed in The Da Vinci Code is that the legends assert not only Christ’s bloodline through French aristocracy but also through them to Scottish nobles, and so to Uthur Pendragon (King Arthur’s father.) Literalists would not be happy with this connection to the legendary King Arthur. But the power of myth is not in its historical accuracy, rather, in the spiritual intuition that is honed through the retelling from generation to generation, including ours.
The myth expresses the heart’s yearning for the divine feminine (”God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them” – Genesis 1:27.) Too often, and especially in Arthurian times, the church becomes a political power in the world. What is done in public is masculine – it is the outer world, law, authority. But if the church is the bride of Christ, what it does is private, and intimately personal. The quest for the grail is our unconscious yearning for a personal union with God, unmediated by any clergy. It is our feminine instinct to find and submit to God, to take him into ourselves, to fill our senses with the Spirit as wine heats our blood, to make of our own hearts the cup of Christ.
St. Catherine was prepared for this with a good education and a fine intellect. But, like Pythagoras’s study of mathematics opening him to the music of the spheres, this was only preparatory to betrothal to Christ, to Sir Galahad drinking the wine. This is a metaphor for the union of the masculine and the feminine. We can fill our senses anonymously with the lights dimmed and our eyes closed, but taking the bread before drinking the wine symbolizes our learning the law and then discovering the love; it’s coming to know our partner so that we can kiss with our eyes open and looking into those of our beloved, learning the words before our hearts burst into song.
The Arthurian legends have it that on many occasions the Sangreal was present but could not be seen; nonetheless its presence healed both physical wounds and injuries to the soul (it cured Sir Lancelot of a two-year madness.) Many Arthurian tales depict a lady healing a knight of wounds or poisoning, and nurturing him back to health. The maiden bearing the Sangreal is the ultimate fulfillment of this feminine virtue.
God prepared Adam for rulership of the earth by awakening language within him. After the Fall, Adam was separated from God, and had to learn both natural and God’s laws to survive. Through Adam, mankind becomes masculine, but through Christ the feminine is restored.
Wagner’s Beckmesser is like Maxentius’s pagan philosophers – intellectuals, masters of both natural science and moral law. In communion, we partake not only of the body (the bread, the truth) but also the blood (the wine, the passion) in expressing our union with Christ. Walther is like St. Catherine, having not only an intellectual understanding of God, but also that inarticulable something of a heart in love.
On the opposite side of Nürnberg’s central river from Katharinenkirche stands a world-class music school, where students who are naturally gifted must go through the academics, the autopsies of music before they can become masters of their craft. In like manner, our intellectual grasp of God’s order in this world is a step in preparing us for our place in the divine symphony, our part in the Music of the Spheres. Bread and wine – words and music. Heaven is not plucking a harp somewhere in the clouds, following notes on sheet music, but rather the co-creative expression of our own hearts in love. In this way we are keepers of the garden. This garden.
Perhaps we shouldn’t bemoan the Fall overmuch. Now we are in the academy, mastering language, mastering our world, but seeking the music – the passion, intent, the meaning. The autopsy is a necessary step in learning what the music is about. And in recalling that Walther’s paramour was named Eva, I am reminded that Adam’s wife was not named until they were expelled from the garden. Neither did I have a name for my Catherine until the close of my career. By study, by intellect, we come to more clearly see whom we love. Beauty is, after all, an intellectual perception. Love is our heart’s response to it.
Dragons & Virgins
Dragons and virgins belong together in the Western mind. The images as we have them developed together through the Dark Ages. Dragons are quite solitary creatures, usually referred to as ‘she,’ and they have an appetite for virgins.
It’s different in the East. Asian dragons are rather high up in the hierarchy of nature spirits, rather like embodiments of the Greek’s primitive elements of fire, water, earth, and wind. Should nature get out of balance, Asian dragons make catastrophic adjustments to restore harmony, but they are normally more benign than in the West, and serve a natural purpose. The ideas of balance and harmony is captured in the traditional Buddhist symbol – an abstract rendering of two dragons circling each other facing outward, each holding the other’s tale in it’s mouth. The image encapsulates Taoist philosophy of the interplay of Yin and Yang.
Post Roman Europe went quite the opposite way, however. Rather than seeking balance, we incorporated polar extremes in our world view. Dragons and virgins are among these.
When Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire, there were about four fundamentally different interpretations of the faith. The religion and its moral code finally became standardized through the ministry and writings of St. Augustine. He had immersed himself in various understandings of Christianity before finally fixing himself on the idea that we humans are utterly corrupt and unworthy of redemption, and totally dependent on the mercy of God, who inexplicably loves us. In particular, Augustine condemned our desire nature as emblematic of our original sin, defying God’s will. And so he preached the ascetic life.
Northern Europeans had dragon myths from pagan times. As these people became Christian, dragons absorbed the quality of being among the last fading remnants of the previous age of earth, a time of magical creatures and sorcerers. Once Europe was Christian, however, the dragon became increasingly reptilian, connected at least unconsciously with the serpent in the Garden of Eden. In association with the serpent, the dragon became the subconscious archetype for Eve’s desire nature. The dragon handed down to us is the female libido.
Not all early interpretations of Christianity recognized Jesus as divinity, as One of the Three Persons of God. Augustinian Christianity did, and so Jesus could be perfect, even though men are fundamentally corrupt, because He was God made flesh. That gives support for the hope that at least men are potentially redeemable, but women are different enough that they need a model for holiness, too. Meeting this, Christianity found increasing importance in the virgin birth of Jesus, admitting that in Mary’s likeness a woman could be pure enough that God as the incorporeal Holy Spirit (not the personified Father) would come to her.
Many ancient religions included tales of immaculate conception, varying from visitations by the One (as in Buddha’s conception) to impregnation by any of a family of gods. Alexander the Great is said to have been conceived by a god coming to his mother; being half mortal, half god handily accounted for Alexander’s incredible military and cultural accomplishments, though the legend may have also been a political device to remove the implication of patricide in any complicity he may have had in the assassination of his mother’s husband, the king.
However, the virginity of Mary took on great significance to the Christian world. No element of sex or desire was involved in Jesus’s conception. Had lust played any part, that stain would have been passed on to Jesus in the same way that original sin is passed on to us, and as perfect man, Jesus could not be stained. In this context, one might cast a Freudian eye on what Augustine writes about his mother, and his subsequent adult relationships with women, then consider how the original sin of disobedience to God became fixed to Adam, while at least subconsciously (where it actually has more power) Eve’s sinfulness became identified with her desire nature. Surely the first shame – recognizing that they were naked – became dominantly linked to Eve in Augustine’s thought as he struggled with asceticism.
In the Dark Ages, only first-born sons of the nobility inherited the titles and estates of their fathers. The church hierarchy became the place for other, disenfranchised sons to find a place with many of the trappings of aristocracy. The church became a worldly institution, and reflected a male-dominated feudal culture. The political and social repression of women was extended into religious doctrine, too. The stain of our desire nature was even blacker in the hearts of the lesser humans, women, and could only be redeemable within the bonds of marriage. The ideal for a woman is to be like the Virgin Mary, her passion only for God, and by remaining innocent to be desirable to God.
Feminine passion can be restrained, but not destroyed. Our unconscious sense of it is contained in the dragon. Fittingly, our dragon rests in solitude underground, and can only be approached through a narrow cave opening. Heros can’t resist approaching her, however, because she guards a treasure. That treasure is sometimes said to be precious jewels of the earth, sometimes her own eggs. Our dragon is scaled because of her association with the serpent. We can’t admit she is warm-blooded, and so we recognize her fire as coming from a furnace where a heart should be, and the flames released under pressure as a weapon, rather than any civil use of fire. Yet her fiery breath is not the greatest challenge to the hero-thief; never mind any aversion we may have to reptiles, he finds her hypnotically beautiful, her voice intoxicating.
The virgin and dragon are polar opposites of the mortal aspect of women. The virgin is seen as holy because she hasn’t had worldly experience. That, however, is only Augustinian interpretation of the virgin birth. The simpler is that immaculate conception is evidence that something comes into this world through a woman that is not of this world, but rather of Deity. According to His purposes for us, God sends the heavenly, the divine in the person of a man who walks among us, whether we understand this to be His Son, Jesus, or as in another culture the warrior Alexander. Virgin birth speaks to the heavenly origin of the child thus conceived, not to whether Deity condemns the desires we mortals have for each other.
It’s revealing that the first great dragon story of the Dark Ages, St. George and the Dragon, is almost concurrent with Augustine’s ministry. As Augustine’s preaching of ascetic living spread, a dragon crawled from a well, quite close to Augustine’s homeland in North Africa. The local king tried to placate the beast with livestock, but eventually found himself having to offer his own daughter in sacrifice to save his kingdom. Giving his virgin daughter to the beast would be her death. This image expresses the paternal, Augustinian concept that freeing a woman’s libido leads to her damnation. And the image draws from a father’s emotion that the idealized romance with his daughter is changed forever when she marries.
One needn’t study the legend of St. George and the dragon overmuch to recognize the erotic metaphors. There’s a message in that George declined to marry the princess and moved on to fight other dragons because he had already quieted the flames of her beast outside wedlock – never mind that he introduced himself to the dragon as “a man of pure heart.” The legend encapsulated Dark Ages attitudes toward the feminine libido, and became the standard for dragon lore.
European dragons are evil because they are the feminine libido repressed. This is not to underplay the significance of a woman’s virginity – only that suppression and condemnation of any passion whatsoever in a woman creates an untamed and corrupt monster when it finally does find release. And in the polarized view of the feminine that developed in the Dark Ages, the dragon is usually provoked by men who attempt to steal her treasure.
Sexuality is external to a man, internal to a woman. Our coming together reenacts the divine mystery of the meeting of soul with spirit. To say that Augustinian condemnation of a woman’s passions should be corrected by unbridling the dragon is to invite unknown evils of the opposite extreme, to remold women in the likeness of men. There is a balance to be found. Ideally, when George took the maiden’s belt to tie her dragon’s neck, he should have handed the leash to the princess herself, not to her father. Then the dragon’s beauty could be made manifest to us above ground, expressing her spirit in its natural harmony in this world..
Gender
The first nickname that firefighters gave me was ‘Guru’ – not because I showed any symptom of wisdom, but because they learned that I studied yoga and even rented a room at my instructor’s home. But an hour after the first firefighter learned that I danced classical ballet I became known across the county as ‘Tutu.’ As long as they imagined that the name irritated me they wouldn’t search for another because we all adhered to the warrior principle, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
I’m too nice a fellow for such games. Ok, mostly. There was the time I was assigned to a station where the fire lieutenant had genuine doubts about my sexual orientation. In so perfect a setup I felt compelled to follow him into the restroom to stare at him whenever I saw him go. I suppose I could have explained my life-long quest for beauty to him, and if I’d simply introduced my yoga mistress to him he would have seen how close I was. But what’s the karmic penalty for giving a man prostate problems compared to providing the rest of the crew a long-running laugh?
One of my grandfathers, Clay, was an Atlanta police officer, and the other, Jimmy, was a Southern Baptist preacher. One influenced what people did by his power, and the other changed what they were by his beauty. I am simply the stuff of these two men and their families. How their natures combined in me to form a soul is an accident of the time and place in which I live, but the spirit descended from them was determined before I was born. No one at my parents’ wedding could have foreseen that the union would produce a paramedic. But seeing me in uniform with the authority of the county in my badge, charged to the ministry of rescue and healing, one could look back and say, “Of course – that’s Clay and Jimmy.”
We are all a combination of the masculine and the feminine. Not a stagnant blend, but a fluctuating balance of the qualities. If I happen to be an extreme example, happily so, because it makes it easier for me to notice the differences.
Even the routes by which I came to the vocation of paramedic and avocation of danseur express the difference. At a very young age I lost a marriage at the same time that I was laid off from my job in printing. My wife’s parting gift was to tell me that the county fire department was expanding and hiring. I would have never considered such work, but my expectations of this life had been destroyed and I was helpless to create a new reality. By accidents, then, the world called me to be a firefighter at just the time the county was developing its Emergency Medical Service. I stumbled blindly into EMS training, but once assigned to an ambulance crew I realized I’d found my calling.
One evening during that training I attended a performance of the Pennsylvania Ballet at the Fox Theater in Atlanta. Seated there, about halfway through a piece, I heard a strikingly clear voice say, “You should be doing this.” I’d never heard this voice before, nor have I since, but it was instantly familiar. I’ve always heard that the ‘still, small voice’ calls one to a ministry, but this call was secular, to the arts. I don’t know why, but the purpose is not mine – it is Deity’s. Even now that my careers both in dance and in EMS are completed, it’s still evidently not for me to know what purpose was served. Well, so be it. At twenty one, I was too old to begin dance classes, but there was no doubting this voice.
So, both pursuits called me. One via a series of external accidents which could theoretically be explained away in a chain of cause-and-effect. The other was an internal, mystical event – Deity taking an instant to reach into this world to give me a direction. It was of course the same Deity working in opposite ways, one to expose me to the chaos of emergencies in the physical world, and the other into a realm where every step is choreographed to music. Can I help it if God loves me best?
So what are these ‘masculine and feminine’ attributes? European languages assign gender to all nouns, according to their speakers’ sense of the object named. In German, the moon is masculine and the sun feminine, while in Italian, for example, the moon is feminine and the sun masculine. If there is an essential truth, a whole people have it wrong.
I’ve no doubt that there is an absolute truth, and if we each were perfect we would be compelled to comply with the attributes of our gender absolutely, both externally by force of law and internally by our very nature. But wait – I’ve already acknowledged that I have a feminine side.
Masculine and feminine are attributes of consciousness. They aren’t two things, but rather two faces of one. We may as well look at the tricky concept right up front. It’s impossible for a physical object to be two different things at the same time, and it’s absurd to assert a logical principle which has mutually exclusive developments. Consciousness, however, is precisely this. It is a natural development of an organism’s sensitivity to its environment, and it is the a priori intention which brings that organism into being – it is both the chicken and the egg. Material and logical objects are things of which consciousness is aware — consciousness itself is a different sort of thing.
The masculine mind is individuality, and the feminine unity. One wants to see the world as an extension of himself, and the other to see herself as inseparable from all. One wishes to own, the other to belong. The masculine mind is the soul, and the feminine mind is the spirit. But soul and spirit aren’t two different things – they are two faces of one.
Power is masculine, beauty is feminine. Power is the capacity to bring about change, and beauty is the eternal unchanging. Power is unfolding drama, beauty is the intention behind the drama. Power is the movement from one frame to the next in a film, beauty is a single photograph that contains all its meaning. Power is actual, beauty potential, one is right now, the other is always. One is law, the other love. And each is the fulfillment of the other.
Because psyche is simultaneously two different things its analysis is ripe with paradox. For example, the spirit is eternal and the soul temporal – one thing, psyche, which has mutually exclusive attributes.
The method by which one analyzes psyche will itself be either masculine or feminine, and the choice will bias one’s conclusions. Feminine thinking sees relationships, while masculine eyes see each thing as distinct – one sees the forest and the other the trees. As soon as one begins breaking psyche into constituents the analysis is masculine, and yet the thing being considered, consciousness, is an inseparable whole to the extent that it’s feminine. One sees the bark of a tree or the skin of an animal and recognizes that as the extent of its being, while the other sees it within the balance of an ecosystem.
Let’s have a closer look at mortality. Western religion teaches that we each live only once, then go to another state of being permanently. Eastern religion, however, has it that our state of being is cyclical – that we continually reincarnate in a form consequential to our previous lives. There is the potential for escape from the cycle by reaching enlightenment, but this is described as surrendering one’s individuality and merging with Deity. That’s the pure feminine state. And there’s a psychic trick one must accomplish – achieving the desire to become one with Deity requires the surrender of personal desire. In the West, existence in Heaven (or Hell) is masculine because we retain our individuality – God is a separate personality, often conceived as the Lord of the Eternal Realm.
But the West has the paradox that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within,” meaning that Deity is somehow at the core of our being, a nucleus, or a seed. This hints at our duality as both spirit and soul – one with Deity and yet distinct, both feminine and masculine. We earn admission to Heaven by believing in the Christ within ourselves. Churches differ in stressing whether that belief is only to recognize Christ, or also to “accept Him as our Lord and Savior,” that is, whether the knowledge itself is sufficient, or whether trying to live according to that knowledge is required evidence of genuine faith. In any event, if we meet the condition we will each upon death be transferred into a perfected body (or all of us at once, at the end of this world) and live eternally in Heaven.
Eastern religions do not always suggest that we all aggressively seek enlightenment now, but that we will each eventually reach it through a series of lifetimes. We form a soul from the mulch of the earth, live out our lives, and return to the soil, either directly by psychic decay or indirectly by ascending into the heavens as a vapor and descending again as rain. Yes, there is a vagueness inverse to that within Western thought in how the spirit retains sufficient individuality that someone’s next life is determined by the last. The two systems are not so different as they may appear.
Westerners believe that the individual soul is the essence of our being and that spirit is entirely distinct from us, an ‘other.’ Easterners think that the spirit is the absolute truth, and that our own soul is ultimately an illusion. My position asserts the paradox – that we are both spirit and soul, masculine and feminine, consciousness both eternal and temporal, one with all and each distinct.
This discussion probably implies that I find the feminine perfect and the masculine corrupt. It should only reveal how I yearn for beauty. Again, the separation of the psyche into its attributes is partially artificial. Both soul and spirit have desires – the soul for sensations and experience and the spirit for understanding. Sins of the soul are quite familiar – indulgence and self-interest. Sins of the spirit involve failure to understand or respect the individual (perhaps even including oneself) – lack of empathy or the use of others to satisfy intellectual wants. The archeologist who violates the tomb of a pharaoh on the grounds that the pursuit of knowledge overrules the obvious will of the deceased commits a sin of the spirit. And there can be strange intermixing of the masculine and feminine – Dr. Mengele’s adherence to the Nazi principle of the ‘master race’ was masculine, and the inhuman experiments on prisoners which that allowed expressed coldly detached feminine curiosity.
Dreams often represent our own psyche to us as a house. The soul is in the basement, and the spirit is in the attic (dream attics are often open to the heavens, either via windows and skylights, or simply by being incomplete in construction.) The attic stores ideal things – hopes, aspirations, potential – while the basement holds more mundane things which have been used and stored. New-Age names for these rooms are the superconscious and the subconscious. One can see a certain generality to one room and universality to the other; the basement is sunk into the earth, and the attic open to the heavens. The difference between them is primarily that one is self-aware and the other is not. In gender terms, the masculine is instinctive and the feminine intuitive; both are connected to sources of knowledge beyond their physical senses, but one as animal consciousness and the other as spiritual consciousness. Again, we are each our own balance of both. And our lives are conducted on the floors in between.
It’s quite cliché that authors write about themselves, and I’m no different. In my novel, The Beautiful Fountain, one character is Dove Warrior because my own guide has revealed herself to me as the Dove. Yes, I’ve seen her, even before I heard the voice. It was at Atlanta’s old Municipal Auditorium during a Simon and Garfunkel concert. I knew that she was a spirit creature, and sensed my identity with her. No, it wasn’t a pigeon, and yes I was cold sober – this was before concert halls filled with illicit smokes. Live performance arts again – as with the ballet, the music had opened me to the mystical. You probably have experiences which you could compare. Anyway, my former wife made a portrait of me as a dove, which she called “the voyeur” – the watcher. This was without my telling her about the dove, but there was no need because she has the eyes of an artist. Pity that we didn’t work and play well together.
My book offers two versions of the myth of the dove descending to earth and becoming the turtle. There is the hope that the turtle will eventually become the eagle and return to the heavens, but my story didn’t lend itself to developing that point. My focus was on the dove forming a shell around herself to become an individual. This world is masculine. But dove and turtle yearn for each other’s gifts – the dove wants to experience and the turtle (when he eventually begins to awaken) to understand. She wants to immerse herself in this world, and he to see it from above.
These cross-purposes can be found in the mythology of the Navajo. Women form villages, but men tend to wander off into the forest alone. Only desire for each other motivates them to make the adjustments necessary to come together and form a nation. The feminine knows what should be built and why, the masculine knows what can be built and how. The Navajo creation story of First Man and First Woman differs from the Biblical account of Adam and Eve in that the conflict of wills is not between man and God, but between man and woman; and rather than being cast out from Eden, men and women separate from each other. The myth doesn’t shy away from the erotic nature of their desire for each other.
The current Western world-view is scientific – everything can theoretically be explained within a chain of cause and effect. This is masculine thinking, as opposed to the medieval, feminine view that all things in this world express a divine intention. The masculine mind induces laws from observed phenomena, though it can never reach an ultimate cause. The feminine mind deduces phenomena from an intelligent purpose, though she can never account for why it takes one form and not another. Plato is feminine, Aristotle masculine.
Our current, material perspective is grounded on the philosophy of the German, Immanuel Kant. He theorized that we could not know anything (any object, or even ourselves) as it truly is, but can only have indirect knowledge – a concept formed in our minds by our limited and fallible set of intellectual processes applied to the data provided by our equally limited and fallible set of physical senses. That defines the psyche as a biological computer, equipped with a specific instruction set that is applied to the datum of its input/output devices. Kant did not doubt that there is a real world beyond our senses, or even that God exists – only that our capacity to know either is quite restricted. We are minds condemned to solitary confinement within our skulls, trying to interpret noises in the hall.
Kant’s is an extreme masculine view, fixed by his resolute assumption that we are each finite in every way. We can’t really know God because Deity is an infinite being, and a finite mind cannot contain an infinite concept. Kant’s logic is inescapable, but if his premises are true then the Kingdom of God cannot be within. Kant saw us as objects – essentially animals with sophisticated minds. The religious view conflicts with this, arguing that we are subjects, having some sort of identity with Deity. Scientific proof of either the material or religious view is impossible because only objective evidence can be valid. And logical proof is inappropriate because it’s a paradox to assert that we are both soul and spirit.
We can, however, refer to the philosopher who paved the way for Kant – the French mathematician, René Descartes. In his Principles of Philosophy Descartes was seeking the sort of knowledge about which he could be absolutely certain. He recognized the fallibility of the senses, as well as the possibility that he could misunderstand things in one way or another. His meditation led him to the conclusion that he could be mistaken in every concept he held; however, he could not doubt that thinking itself was going on. And so, eureka, Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am.) Descartes then embraced his concept of the world as being reasonably accurate, if not perfect, on the grounds that God has our best interests at heart and so would not deceive us.
Kant developed Descartes’s insight into rather a sophisticated account of the interplay of mind and senses. He made the one assumption that we are finite. Descartes made two: like Kant, he never questioned the reality of God, Who has the positive characteristics generally held by Western religion; and he never examined what the “I’ is that is doing the thinking. In his philosophy, “I” is the soul, the individual, finite mind, and God is the ‘other,’ an infinite and distinct personality.
These two philosophers shifted the balance of Western thought toward the scientific, masculine world-view. Needful, and there have been magnificent developments, but neither addressed the concept that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within.” The feminine is ignored, our connection with Deity is forgotten. There can be no purpose in life, and meaning can only be the fulfillment of biological and psychological needs.
According to Kant, even though God exists, our idea of Him is an empty concept – a vague placeholder in our minds. Since Kant’s time, other philosophers have undertaken the search for what we mean by the word, “I” – what is the self – and many reached the same conclusion, that this, too, is an undefined, empty reference. Neither God nor self can really be known, and in the extreme view are not real things.
The balance point is the paradox that the infinitely small is identical with the infinitely large – that “I” refers to the same thing as God but with different characteristics, where one is Deity individualized and the other is Deity unified, the soul and the spirit, the masculine and the feminine. The two things that Descartes didn’t examine are two faces of one; and Kant’s assumption of our finitude is an error reflecting and contributing to our shifting balance from a religious to a material world-view.
Descartes’s own Cartesian Coordinate System happens to be a lovely model for the balance. As a mathematician, he saw space as sort of a continuous substance which can be defined in reference to an arbitrarily selected origin. Though he didn’t apply this to his philosophy, so too, as spirits we are a continuous substance upon which souls are drawn, each with its unique perspective of all. Don’t push the model too far – as is the Creative Word itself, this is a metaphor.
The medieval religious view was feudal – even if spirituality is feminine, God is masculine, a Lord distinct from us Whom we can only contact indirectly through a church hierarchy. Protestant reformation modified this view, capturing more of the sense that Christ is within each of us. But it could be clearer still that this is not other than us – it is our own feminine selves, our own spirit.
One of my paramedics took me serious when I told him that most people outside work call me Bob, but my girlfriend had to call me Lieutenant. Snicker. Anyway, the point is that people evoke a slightly different personality in me depending upon whether they call me Bob, Robert, Mr. Flanders, rookie, or Lieutenant (Guru and Tutu, too). The name they use reveals how they see me and our relationship, and I generally respond to that, though there times I choose to assert something different.
Within us (you, too – ‘us’ is not used here in the regal sense) are personalities with different world-views and different perspectives of ourselves. Pop psychology has it that in extreme cases some of these personalities are unaware of or in conflict with each other, but for the most part we sense the general unity. The psyche is fluid in this way. As above, so below. The cases of which I’ve heard (and one whom I knew personally) reveal that when the schism between these personalities becomes clinical, the individual personalities develop so slowly that they never mature (and are implicitly incomplete.) The masculine mind – the soul, the turtle – develops over time through experience in this world. When personalities within a mind are isolated and compete for dominance, no one of them has the time to develop.
But our dreams represent these personalities to us symbolically, as they do our beliefs and our emotions – for the healthy as well as the injured soul. Sometimes we identify with a particular character in a dream, seeing things from his perspective and feeling what he feels. And we sometimes shift that sense of identity from one to another character. Sometimes we don’t identify with any of the actors – we’re simply an audience – and sometimes our role as author comes to the fore as we rewrite and replay a dream sequence when something just didn’t seem right with the previous version.
As souls we are simply players in the divine dream. We need the feminine to connect us with the Author, else this life is but a tale told by a madman. I know my power – I’ve been a paid professional hero – but I hunger for beauty. Seeing her once has given me a glimpse of eternity, certain knowledge. And I have not only seen her – when I carried my ballerina overhead in promenade the audience saw the dove perched on my hand in as clear a light as she can express in this world, and I could feel when they recognized her. So be my little metaphor and I will be yours, and together we can enter the realm of suspended disbelief.
Robert C. Flanders
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