Wisdom’s Call: Understanding The Archetypal Patterns
The
Arab word al-kimia means the art of transformation. Alchemy, besides being a forerunner of the
science of chemistry, was also a spiritual undertaking in which the alchemists
were trying to produce the Philosopher's Stone.
This mystical substance was believed to be an essential ingredient for
turning common metals into gold, as well as being the foundation for an elixir
of life which would cure any disease as well as prolong life. As a spiritual
discipline, alchemy was the art of transforming human consciousness. The Philosopher's Stone symbolized the key to
the evolution of human consciousness from an imperfect, diseased, corruptible
and ephemeral state towards a perfect, healthy, incorruptible and everlasting
state. For the alchemist, the Stone
symbolized his evolution from ignorance to enlightenment, as well as the hidden
spiritual truth that leads to that goal.
Jung
felt that alchemy was an historical forerunner of his own psychology of the
unconscious, whose goal is also the transformation of consciousness. The alchemical images are very similar to
those images which appear in modern dreams that depict the production of a new
center of personality in an individual.11 Jung calls this new center the Self, which
results from the process of Individuation.
The alchemists, like Jung, explored the realm of the psyche, trying to
understand its processes through symbolic imagery. One of their most important tasks was to
liberate (or discover in themselves) the Spirit in nature. Paracelsus, a famous medieval doctor and
alchemist, states that the lumen naturae,
which is the 'light in nature' comes from the astrum, the star in each individual. This star is innate in us, for it comes from
God; in fact, it is the part of God within each of us. And it is through this light that we can come
to knowledge, for it drives us on to seek out the mysteries and wisdom of the
Divine.12 This divine image
within each person corresponds to the archetype of the Self.
The
Self is the energetic center of psychic life, the archetype of wholeness which
contains all other archetypes within it.
Disconnected as we are from our essential nature, we find our wholeness
through these other archetypes. The
archetypes configure our experiences of life – friendship, parents, siblings,
schooling, love, marriage, work, creativity, initiation, death, sacrifice,
transformation. They hold the patterns
of relationship and while they are eternal principles, they manifest
differently in each age. They are in the
process of changing, for at least cosmically, we are coming to the changing of
the Great Ages.
The
archetypes operate within us unconsciously, energizing and informing our lives
for good or ill. But we can become
conscious of how they operate in our lives and actually work with them to
co-create a new life. They speak to us
in the symbolic language of our imagination, our visions, our dreams and more
generally in our myths and stories.
That’s why it’s so important to understand what stories you tell
yourself. The old story is a small one –
the story of how we fit into the patriarchy. Our work, our hopes, our talents –
all in the service of patriarchy. But
when we go in search of our soul, we need these Big Stories to reflect on. Once we see our lives in terms of these
mythic stories and deep symbols, patriarchy loses our allegiance When we work consciously with these
energies, we step outside the ego delusions of what we believe we want and get
in touch with the reality of the Self.
When we align our ego with the Self, we open ourselves to our true
desires, discover our wholeness, and understand our life purpose. It is easy to see the correspondence between
the different archetypes and the many stars in the heavens, for each archetype
holds out a bit of light and knowledge, each exerts an influence by its
luminosity and numinosity.13
When
we discussed lunar consciousness in an earlier chapter, I mentioned that at the
new moon, the lunar light shines out into the universe, and that this is a time
in which the movement of psychic energy flows deep within. At this time in the monthly cycle, lunar
consciousness looks at the stars within, just as the moonlight shines out
toward the starry universe. We make
contact with the archetypal images through lunar consciousness; when we look
within we can bring back these images into our daily lives.
The
alchemists had a similar view of the Moon's function. They believed the Moon, which they called
Luna, is the sum and essence of the nature of the six major metals – silver,
mercury, copper, iron, tin and lead - which correspond to the five planets
known in the ancient world - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - plus
the Moon itself. Luna is called the
"universal receptacle of all things" and "the first gateway of
heaven. She gathers the powers of all the stars in herself as in a womb, so as
to bestow them on sublunary creatures.”14
The
stars' energies are focused through this Moon funnel, just as the archetypes
can only be known through the archetypal images of lunar consciousness, which
come to us in dreams and are the stuff of stories. In astrology, the Moon represents our
personality, the unconscious needs that give us security and comfort. The planets are the archetypal energies
common to all of us, and it is through the movement of the Moon through the sky
and through our charts which touch off these complexes. If we understand how we
are affected by these complexes, we can make them conscious. Our rational
consciousness cannot go right to this source of Wisdom - it must be mediated
through the imagination. Even scientists
like Descartes, Einstein, Niels Bohr and Elias Howe, the inventor of the sewing
machine, were among the many creative people who got their initial idea from a
dream image.15 We behold
this truth in the sky, for we cannot see the stars in the light of day. They are only visible when the light in the
sky is the Moon, not the Sun.
Our
ancestors saw in the movements of the planets and the stars an image of the
power of the Spirit. The sky meant
something to them, for it symbolized the principles that they felt ordered
their lives and also the force behind those principles. They knew there was power in the sky and,
just as the tides where pulled by the changing Moon, they found that the
seasons came and went with the changes of the Sun and stars.16 (I don't need to remind you that the sun is
our own individual star.) In predicting
this orderly process, early humanity came to feel that their fate was also
guided by a divine order. The
mysterious night sky, with its billions of sparkling lights and the great soft
light of the Moon, symbolizes the collective unconscious of humanity, a guide
to Spirit and to the greater purposes of life.
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