Citation: Crowley, Vivianne. 2008. “The Mystery of Waters.” Chap. 10 in Deep Blue: Critical Reflections on Water, edited by Sylvie Shaw and Andrew Francis, 177194. London: Equinox. The Mystery of Waters Vivianne Crowley The sea always signifies a collecting-place where all psychic life originates, i.e., the collective unconscious. Water in motion means something like the stream of life or the energy-potential. (Jung [1935] 1966c: para. 15) The ancient mystery traditions, spiritually oriented psychologies such as those of Carl Jung and those contemporary spiritual traditions that seek to revive the ancient mysteries have in common a desire to understand the deeper, ‘truer’ nature of the individual. Common to all three is the idea that our surface ‘everyday’ personality is only a small part of us. Hidden in the depths, often envisaged as the watery depths, is a part of the personality that is not the product of our biology or of societal conditioning but is a seed of individuality that endures beyond bodily death and indeed pre-exists the body. This core can be termed ‘transpersonal’, a part of us that touches on eternity. To pursue the water analogy, in the language of myth this deep core may be symbolized as a fish within the depths of the ocean, a symbol found commonly in ancient myth (Jung [1945/54] 1967c: para. 408). In Irish tradition, the fish is the salmon, which swims from its spawning ground in freshwater rivers thousands of miles to its ancestral ocean feeding grounds until, possessed by what to the ancients was a mysterious knowledge, it returns once more to the place of its spawning to begin the cycle again. This chapter explores, through the language of Jungian psychology and the Wiccan mystery tradition, the human journey to find the true self: a journey of exploration and return. 177 Jung and the unconscious The water-simile expresses rather aptly the nature and import and of the unconscious. (Jung [1956/59] 1984: para. 1586) Psychology is the science of the ‘psyche’, which can be translated as science of mind. For Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), one of the foremost theorists in the field of psychology of religion, mind meant not only the conscious mind, but also the unconscious. Human beings were for Jung creatures of limitless depths, possessors of an unconscious psyche of which we are dimly aware and that we both seek and flee. Jung’s ‘unconscious’ is not Sigmund Freud’s ‘subconscious’, a repository for repressed instincts that the civilized self cannot own, but a ‘living fountain’, ‘the very source of the creative impulse’ (Jung [1947/54] 1969b: para. 339). The personal unconscious comprises: everything of which I know, but of which I am not at the moment thinking; everything of which I was once conscious but have now forgotten; everything perceived by my senses, but not noted by my conscious mind; everything which involuntarily and without paying attention to it, I feel, think, remember, want and do; all the future things that are taking shape in me and will sometime come to consciousness … (Ibid.: para. 185) The waters of the personal unconscious flow to a wider and more mysterious sea: that of the collective unconscious. Jung was already speculating about the phenomenon of a collective psyche in his earliest writings, the product of his years as a psychiatrist at the Bürgholzi Clinic. Just as the migratory and nest-building instincts of birds were never learnt or acquired individually, man brings with him at birth the ground-plan of his nature, and not only of his individual nature but of his collective nature. These inherited systems correspond to the human situations that have existed since primeval times: youth and old age, birth and death, sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, mating, and so on. Only the individual consciousness experiences these things for the first time, but not the bodily system and the unconscious. (Jung [1909/49] 1961: para. 728) Ultimately, however, Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious drew not on biology but on his psychological interpretations of the religious and folk traditions of peoples West and East [188]. Confirmation for Jung of the universality of the concept of the collective unconscious came in 1928 when scholar Richard Wilhelm sent Jung the manuscript of his translation into German of a Chinese Taoist alchemical text of the Qing dynasty The Secret of the Golden Flower, the aim of which was to find the Chin-jo or ‘golden juice’, the elixir of life. In The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung found images startlingly like those that appeared in his patients’ dreams and fantasies. This 178 was a major turning point that confirmed for Jung that ‘the human psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in culture and consciousness. I have called this substratum the collective unconscious’ (Jung [1929] 1967b: para. 11). Jung’s ‘discovery’ of the collective unconscious led to another concept important for his understanding of psychological and spiritual development: ‘the content of the collective unconscious is made up essentially of archetypes’ ([1936] 1970c: para. 88), ‘definite forms in the psyche which seem to be present always and everywhere’ (ibid.: para. 89). These were ‘categories of the imagination’ ([1935/53] [189]: para. 845), common to all humankind and, ‘the reason for the identity of symbols and myth-motifs in all parts of the earth’ ([1918] 1970a: para. 14). It is from these powerful building blocks of the imagination that religious ideas are born ([1947/54] 1969b: para. 342). Religions ‘have developed, plant-like, as natural manifestations of the human psyche’ and this is why, ‘religious symbols have a distinctively “revelatory” character; they are usually spontaneous products of unconscious activity’ (ibid.: paras 408–9). Jung’s practice began in psychiatric wards but moved from his mid-life onwards into his private consulting rooms. During 1911–12, he saw the publication of two volumes that became Volume 5 of his Collected Works, Symbols of Transformation ([1911–12] 1967a). The contents helped precipitate a breaking point in his relationship with Freud and with the psychiatric and academic establishment. Without rejecting his original psychiatric training in psychopathology, Jung ventured into new waters: those of culture, myth, religion, human aspiration and potential. While he continued to treat patients suffering from what could be labelled ‘mental illness’, many of those who consulted him were seeking not Jung the Doctor of Medicine, but Jung the Doctor of Souls. Their afflictions were spiritual rather than psychological: ‘I should like to call attention to the following facts. … Among all my patients in the second half of life – that is over thirtyfive – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life’ (Jung [1932] 1968c: 334 [190], para. 509). The Secret of the Golden Flower stimulated Jung’s researches into alchemy. He concluded that the alchemical traditions of East and West were designed not to achieve their ostensible goals of turning base matter into gold, or of brewing the elixir of life, but to achieve a psycho-spiritual transformation of the base matter of human nature into something greater than the sum of its parts. Jung’s alchemical researches, coupled with his re-reading and psychological reinterpretation of ancient texts and folk and fairy tales, provided the insight that within religious traditions around the globe was a ‘mystery’. The mystery was not that of a transcendental deity, but one that rose from the waters of the unconscious, the mysterious process of individuation. A transformation of the personality, individuation implied a radical shift in consciousness from a psyche dominated by the ego to a personality anchored in the archetype of ‘the self ’. The human personality is incomplete so long as we take simply the ego, the conscious, into account. It becomes complete only when supplemented by the 179 unconscious … Through its integration the centre of the personality is displaced from the limited ego into the more comprehensive self, into that centre which embraces both realms … and unites them with each other. This self is the midpoint about which true personality turns. (Jung [1943] 1977a: para. 819) In other words, ‘normal’ functioning – for the individual to have a strong healthy ego able to act in the world and fulfil his or her social obligations free of neurotic compulsions – is no longer the goal of Jung’s psychology. His vision takes him beyond ‘normalcy’ to that of self-realization, the goal of individuation. Water and the unconscious Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious. The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, ‘subconscious,’ usually with the pejorative connotation of an inferior consciousness. Water is the ‘valley spirit,’ the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water – a yang embraced in the yin. Psychologically, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious. (Jung [1934/54] 1968a: para. 40) In Jung’s own journey of individuation, water played an important role. After his break with Sigmund Freud precipitated a psychological crisis, Jung describes himself as feeling like a small sailing boat cut adrift on storm-tossed waters. Images, symbols and strange mythological figures flooded his dreams and as he could not escape them, like a mariner deciding to sail into the face of a storm, Jung plunged into the waves of the unconscious in what he later termed, borrowing from the Odyssey, his Nekyia, the ‘night-sea’ journey of Odysseus’s descent into the underworld, an ‘immersion in the unconscious’ ([1946] 1966d: para. 455). The process of individuation is largely a process of ‘letting go’. By allowing the boundaries of the ego to become permeable to the ‘waters’ of the unconscious – our dreams and fantasies, our hopes and fears – we take up the anchor that keeps us chained to the here and now and cast ourselves adrift on the current of the collective psyche. At the mercy of archetypal forces, in a dynamic interplay between ego and archetype, the new centre of consciousness is born. This experience arouses deep emotions. Emotions are connected in Western cultural consciousness with the symbolism of water, with tears of happiness and sorrow. The imagery of water gives an intimation of the dangers of spiritual growth for the psyche, which are those overwhelming, drowning and dissolving. ‘Although everything is experienced in image form, i.e., symbolically, it is by no means a question of fictitious dangers but of very real risks upon which the fate of a whole life may depend’ ([1934/54] 1968a: para. 82). Contact with archetypal forces by a psyche unready for such upheavals can create a veritable Tsunami. Much of the psychiatric illness Jung treated in his early career was evidence of the consequences of the individual being overwhelmed by material 180 from the unconscious: a tidal wave of unconscious energy with its flotsam and jetsam drowns the conscious mind. Contact with archetypes though myth, symbolism, ritual and imagery is for Jung the foundation of religion: ‘archetypes have, when they appear, a distinctly numinous character which can only be described as “spiritual”, if “magical” is too strong a word. Consequently this phenomenon is of the utmost significance for the psychology of religion’ ([1947/54] 1969b: para. 405). The unconscious is the source of the religious revelation that in time becomes the codified doctrine, but the doctrine is for Jung a rationalization of overwhelming experiences that well up from the depth of the unconscious. Indeed, for Jung, religious belief without such experiences is arid, sterile and meaningless: ‘If attention is directed to the unconscious, the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water. For consciousness is just as arid as the unconscious if the two halves of our psychic life are separated’ ([1970 ed.] [191]: 193). Contact with the unconscious and its archetypes is both necessary for spiritual growth and also dangerous: ‘we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors … It can even give rise to primitive panic, because, instead of being believed in, the anxiously guarded supremacy of consciousness – which is in truth one of the secrets of human success – is questioned in the most dangerous way’ ([1934/54] 1968a: para. 49). To achieve spiritual and psychological growth without destroying the psyche, we must find a means to contact archetypes of the collective unconscious from an ‘island’ in the psyche, a place of safety: ‘Where there is no water nothing lives; where there is too much of it everything drowns. It is the task of consciousness to select the right place where you are not too near and not too far from water; but the water is indispensable’ ([1956/9] 1984: para. 1586). In religion, the place of safety is provided through communal ritual. If the world of the unconscious is that of water and sea, ritual becomes an island rising out the sea or, to use another less static metaphor, a night boat in which we traverse the choppy waters of the unconscious. The mystery of the waters We must surely go the way of the waters, which always tend downward, if we would raise up the treasure … (Jung [1934/54] 1968a: para. 37) Wicca is a mystery religion (Gardner 1949, 1954, 1959).1 Mystery comes from the Greek word ‘musterion’, which has the connotation of something about which we must be silent and keep our mouths shut. A mystery is revealed by symbol or whispered as a secret in the dark places. It is akin to the teaching of the Upanishads, which are given to those who ‘sit near’ the teacher. We have to listen and strain hard, 181 partly because the words are spoken in secret, partly because the words mean more than their literal meaning. The meaning is allusion not precision; it is a hint not a revelation, a pointing and not the moon. To go to the place of watery realization, we must turn to the ancient seat of the emotions, and learn to see with what archetypal psychologist James Hillman in Re-Visioning Psychology, describes as l’immagine del cuor, the perception of the heart (1975: 14). Jung’s psychology was about revelation, a revealing of the hidden parts of the psyche so they could enter into consciousness and give meaning to human existence. The mystery traditions also attempt to answer the age-old question of life’s meaning and to reveal a secret at the heart of human existence. Jung was not an advocate for secrecy. On the contrary, he considered personal secrets to be dangerous: they involve deceiving others about our true nature. Even more dangerous is repression: hiding something from and thus deceiving ourselves. In small homeopathic doses, however, a communal secret is psychologically adaptive: even an essential pre-condition of individual differentiation, so much so that even on the primitive level man feels an irresistible need actually to invent secrets: their possession safeguards him from dissolving in the featureless flow of unconscious community life and thus from the deadly peril to his soul. It is a well know [192] fact that the widespread and very ancient rites of initiation with their mystery cults subserved this instinct for differentiation. (Jung [1929] 1966b: para. 125) Secrets have power; the power to transform the psyches of the individuals to whom they have been imparted. Jung explains: There is no better means of intensifying the treasured feeling of individuality than the possession of a secret which the individual is pledged to guard. The very beginnings of societal structures reveal the craving for secret organisations. When no valid secrets really exist, mysteries are invented or contrived to which privileged initiates are admitted. Such as the case with the Rosicrucians and many other societies. (Jung [1961] 1995: 374–5) Archetypes are in themselves mysteries. Their importance lies in their power to stir the conscious mind. They speak to us principally because, paradoxically, we cannot understand them. An archetype is the grit that creates the pearl. ‘There is a mystical aura in its numinosity, and it has a corresponding effect upon the emotions. It mobilizes philosophical and religious convictions in the very people who deemed themselves miles above any such fit of weakness’ ([1947/54] 1969b: para. 405). In Wicca, secrets are revealed, mysteries enacted and contact with the archetypes facilitated within the confines of ritual, a patterned act of collective worship. Wiccan ritual, while varying in form between different groups, is conducted according to a common archetypal pattern. A circle is delineated; the four quarters are honoured and invited to bring to the ritual elemental powers. The circle becomes ‘sacred space’ 182 in which psychological and spiritual transformation can take place. This consecrated space is the island in the sea, the magic circle. ‘The drawing of a spellbinding circle is an ancient magical device used by everyone who has a special or secret purpose in mind. He thereby protects himself from the “perils of the soul”’ ([1936] 1970c: para. 63). The Wiccan circle with its four ‘guardians’, representations of the four elements at east, south, west and north, forms a mandala, a circle symbol, usually divided into four or divisions of four that represent totality and signifies in psychological terms, ‘the wholeness of self … or, to put it in mythic terms, the divinity incarnate in man’ (Jung [1961] 1995: 367). Circles and mandalas were for Jung ‘organizing’ archetypes that create order out of chaos, archetypes with particular potency. The archetype thereby constellated represents a pattern of order which, like a psychological ‘view-finder’ marked with a cross or circle divided into four, is superimposed on the psychic chaos so that each content falls into place and the weltering confusion is held together by the protective circle … At the same time they are yantras, instruments with whose help the order is brought into being. (Jung [1958] 1970b [193]: 803) ] In ritual, contained with the sacred circle, we enter not a realm of chaos, but the collective psyche contained. The circle becomes the pool of water on which the psyche floats, interacting and permeable to those with whom it has chosen to immerse itself. Th rough this ‘letting go’, a temporary sacrificing of our psychological boundaries, we open ourselves to spiritual and psychological growth. In the mystery traditions, these processes are termed ‘initiation’. For Jung, they are the revelatory process of ‘individuation’. The communal rites of mystery traditions are a shared cultural interpretation of an inner process. Undergone by those ‘properly prepared’ (Crowley 1989: 66) and psychologically open to them, they become a means to precipitate a reorientation that leads to individuation. Wicca is at once a physical enactment of a ritual form and an inner experience. The sacred space is created by the use of symbols, words and symbolic actions. By an act of imagination, through a shared language and symbol system, a group of people bound by initiatory ties meet at a time sanctified by the tradition – the full moon or an important turning point in the seasonal tide – to worship together an archetypal deity that connects the individual worshipper to an archetype greater than the personal ego and at the same time connects the participants to one another. Initiates are taught that what empowers the experiences is not the outer forms and actions but the inner ‘work’. Each aspect of the ritual is accompanied by inner processes of visualization. The faculty of the initiate’s imagination is therefore the bridge that allows him or her to enter the place ‘between the worlds’. These worlds are ‘the realms of men’, in other words the ordinary everyday world, and the ‘realms of the mighty ones’ (ibid.: 84), the world of the mighty powers of the archetypes, in other words the collective unconscious. 183 Between the worlds I don’t presume to know what the psyche is; I only know that there is a psychic realm in which and from which such manifestations start. It is the place where the aqua gratiae springs forth … (Jung [1956/59] 1984: para. 1587) Religion and myth are the creations of the human mind, a psychological and cultural means to bridge the abyss, the void, between our subjective sense of ourselves and material reality, between the objective world and our interpretation of it. Is the ‘realm of the mighty ones’ real or imaginary? For Jung, this question was unimportant. It is our powers of imagination that define us as human and have the power to make us whole. The illusionary world that lies between the worlds of men and gods is a realm that is in the process of becoming ‘real’. Magic is a concerted wish, a desire that what is not shall become what is. It can be seen as symptomatic of infantile wish-fulfilment (Faber 1993) or the product of the urge to create a place where we can express that which truly defines us as human. We can rarely perceive unmediated reality. From infancy, our perception of the world is coloured, shaped, formed by our hopes and fears and the cultural interpretations of those around us. The mismatch between our senses, memory and longings is constant. Our earliest experience is that reality is fluid. In seeking a place to drop anchor in this fluid sea, we learn to create transitional objects that are temporarily stable and link us to the here and now. The island in the sea, the safe harbour, God, all these become the talismans that keep us safe from harm. Freud, who described himself as an atheist (Freud 1927), is well known for his reduction of religion to sexuality. His view of religion as ‘illusion’ has been developed, however, by post-Freudians, and particularly object-relations theorists, in a much more constructive way. Paul Pruyser (1983), for example, uses Donald Winnicott’s (1971) theories of transitional object and transitional space in his exploration of the possibilities for spiritual growth of the ‘illusionistic world’ as a bridge between inner subjective consciousness and the hard objective world. In The Play of the Imagination, Pruyser lists the salient features of the inner autistic world of subjective feeling, the outer realistic world subject to empirical analysis and the ‘illusionistic’ world that bridges them, an imaginal realm shaped by shared language and culture that is the source of artistic and religious ideas and expression (Figure 1) (Pruyser 1983: 65). Pruyser’s illusionistic world has a role for the poetic, imaginative, myth-making, story-telling aspect of the human psyche. They are not, as for Freud, neurotic displacement activities or sublimation of wilder instincts that civilization must suppress. Their importance lies in the fact that they are not, ‘“untutored” fantasy which, entirely under the sway of the pleasure principle, is autistic, private, unspeakable, and infantile’, but, ‘the creative fantasy which is stimulated by curiosity, spurred by aesthetic, moral, or numinous, feelings, makes active use of human talents, and respects the nature of reality’ [194]. This ‘third realm’, the illusionistic creative world, is real in the same way that the outer world perceived by the senses is ‘real’. It is real in its effects. As Jung explains: ‘Symbols are not allegories and not signs: they are images of contents which for the most part transcend consciousness. We have still to discover that such 184 Autistic world Illusionistic world Realistic world untutored fantasy omnipotent thinking utter whimsicality free associations ineffable images hallucinatory entities or events private needs symptoms dreaming sterility internal object (imago) tutored fantasy adventurous thinking orderly imagination inspired connections verbalizable images imaginative entities or events sense perception reality testing hard undeniable facts logical connections look-and-see referents actual entities or events cultural needs symbols playing creativeness transcendent objects prefigured by the child’s transitional object factual needs signs, indices working resourcefulness external object Figure 1 Pruyser’s three worlds contents are real, that they are agents with which it is not only possible but absolutely necessary for us to come to terms’ ([1911–12] 1967a: para. 114). The Protestantism of Jung’s youth failed to inspire him because, in a determined pursuit of rationality, it had stripped away the mysticism for which, as a teenager going through the rites of confirmation, he longed ([1961] 1995: 71–3). Communal worship, lacking shared inner engagement around a meaningful symbol system, became empty and meaningless. Jung accorded rationality its place and considered himself primarily an empirical scientist, but he made the realm of imagination his special study. His life’s work was to help human beings to understand its role in our health and wellbeing: ‘We should never identify ourselves with reason, for man is not and never will be a creature of reason alone, a fact to be noted by all pedantic culturemongers. The irrational cannot be and must not be extirpated. The gods cannot and must not die’ (Jung [1917/26/43] 1966a: para. 111). Wicca’s place of safety, the circle, the ‘place between the worlds’, is an environment in which the gods can live. It corresponds to what Pruyser called the ‘third world’: the transitional sphere, containing transitional objects – the world of symbols, of novel constructions that transcend the infantile fantasy and the entities of nature. It is the world of play, of the creative imagination in which feelings are not antagonistic to thinking, in which skills and talents are used to the utmost, and where pleasure is found without categorical abrogation of the reality principle. ([1977] 1991: 52 [195]) Operating in the ‘third world’ Wiccan ritual operates in this transitional and symbolic ‘third world’ where thinking is not antagonistic to feeling because ritual requires us to hold these critical faculties 185 in balance while we enter the ‘third world’ through what in Jungian psychology are the ‘irrational’ functions, those of sensation and intuition. Jung’s personality theory identified four functions though which we process reality (Jung [1925] [196]: para. 900). We perceive either the bare sensory data, the role of the sensation function, or the meaning and connections between the data, the function of intuition. Having selected data from our environment we then analyse it using one of the two rational functions, by either judging whether it is logically true, the function of thinking, or by judging its value and worth, the function of feeling. Jung does not offer here the word ‘irrational’ in a pejorative sense. In fact, the sensation and intuition functions would be best termed ‘pre-rational’. These are both perceptive functions. Sensation perceives directly without the intervention of the imagination. Intuition is an imaginative rendering of sensation. As a product of the ‘third world’, Wicca is an act of creative imagination whereby a physical mandala comprising ritual actions and objects is interpreted by the intuitive function as a symbol of both macrocosm and microcosm. It is at once both a representative symbol of the holistic universe around us and a symbol of the holistic psyche, both universe and psyche whole and hence healed. We can think of ritual as a translation program. It translates the language of the unconscious into a language that can be understood by consciousness. By creating a sensate world of salt and water, incense, candles, altars, besom and ritual knife, these physical objects become symbolic representations, what Winnicott (1971) calls ‘cultural objects’, that fill the gap between fantasy and reality. Ritual helps fulfil the ineffable longing, the desire of human beings for what is at once immanence and transcendence; the desire to allow our psyches to break the bounds of the body and to flow into (again the watery imagery predominates) the wider universe, into nature and into others. The creations of the ‘third world’ are acts of defiance against the reality of bodily death, the abyss, the drowning. Our intuition soars and shows us the possibility of life everlasting, but the realm of the senses feeds back to us the message of our mortality. Unbearable as this reality is, we must endure it and explain how such a cosmic tragedy can be. We create the artistic, imaginal, spiritual realm as a way of bridging the abyss between what we want and how we find the world to be. The power of imagination is both therefore the defining quality of our human condition and that which makes it bearable. Imagination has created the problem, but imagination can also solve it. The beginning is the ending and the ending the beginning. Intuition takes sensation beyond itself. With sensation alone we could only mimic nature and create what we have seen and heard. With the power of imagination, we can transform our sensory data into something other than themselves. To understand the imaginal world, we must turn to psychology, for it is this science of the psyche that enables us to understand how imagination creates the world in which we live and move and have our being. Jung foresaw a death of the imagination, a suicide whereby we would lose our power to imagine and would live by second-hand images that had lost their emotive power. The secret power of image and symbol lays [197] its power to move us, to take us beyond the here and now, the realm of the 186 senses, to the realm of culture and spirituality, the intuitive world of magic. For Jung, it is the response of the psyche to the power of the image that is the core of religious experience. Jung’s ‘re-visioning’ of religious experience gave religion validity beyond its metaphysical claims. If religion could not save us beyond the grave, perhaps it could ‘save’ us in the here and now. It provided a means to transform how we related to the world by transforming the way in which we related to the disparate aspects of ourselves. For the sceptical, this could be seen as a desperate clinging to the comfort of religion when faced with overwhelming evidence of its futility. Many deeply religious people from different faith traditions were willing, however, to embrace Jung’s insights to renew and enrich their religious experience and understanding. Individuation, invocation and apotheosis … the archetype as an image of instinct is a spiritual goal toward which the whole nature of man strives; it is the sea to which all rivers wend their way … (Jung [1947/54] 1969b: para. 415) In Wiccan ritual, once the sacred space has been delineated by the four elements of earth, air, fire and water, a fifth element, spirit, is invoked in the form of goddess and god, the divine within, the self. The aim of psychological development is to make the archetype of the self the core of one’s being. The self is where the image of the divine is born and from which religious symbolism, feelings, thoughts and longings arise and filter through into consciousness: ‘The symbols of the self coincide with those of the Deity. The self is not ego, it symbolizes the totality of man and he is obviously not whole without God. That seems to be what is meant by incarnation and incidentally by individuation’ ([1958/59] 1977b: para. 1624). In a daring leap of the imagination, within Wiccan ritual an apotheosis occurs, one of the core experiences of the mysteries. The initiate: ‘takes part in a sacred rite which reveals to him the perpetual continuation of life through transformation and renewal. … the permanence and continuity of life, which outlasts all changes of form and, phoenixlike, continually rises anew from its own ashes’ ([1940/50] 1968b: para. 208). In Wicca, invocation is the sacrament, the sacred core process by which the worshipper and the worshipped create a temporary identification between a human being and an archetype. The participants invoke the divine as archetypal forms of deity – the Great Mother and the Horned God – that in their archaic appeal have the power to move us. The deities are invited to enter the sacred space and to commune with the ritual’s participants. In particular, two individuals are chosen by the group to ‘become’ the goddess and god. The power of the divine enters into them and they speak to participants in the form of pre-created or spontaneous ritual poetry. They may give oracles, perform healing or simply bless the participants with their presence. 187 Religion has through recent millennia moved the location of the divine away from human beings, away even from nature, into the ‘beyond realm’, a transcendent realm beyond time and space. Unusually in contemporary religions, although not in preChristian traditions, in Wicca the worshipper is at the same time the worshipped. The Gods are both transcendent and immanent, outside time and space, but also present within material creation and within human beings. For humans, they can be considered ‘aspirational self’, that which the devotee wishes to emulate. Invocation breaches the membrane between conscious and unconscious, reality and aspiration, present state and future state, to create a temporary identification between divine and human, self and ego. The person who is invoked as the incarnate deity withdraws the conscious mind as censor, a suspension of belief or disbelief. The aim is to become a passive vessel, the recipient of the divine outpouring; to become the grail of the wine of life. Jung says of this experience: To carry a god around in yourself means a great deal; it is a guarantee of happiness, of power, and even of omnipotence, in so far as these are attributes of divinity … in the pagan mystery cults, … the neophyte, aft er initiation, is himself lift ed up to divine status: at the conclusion of the consecration rites in the syncretistic Isis mysteries he was crowned with a crown of palm leaves, set up on a pedestal, and worshipped as Helios. ([1911–12] 1967a: para. 130) Invocation sets aside the ego, the everyday sense of ‘I’, to become ‘other’, something/someone greater and better; greater in the sense that the ritual intention is to identify with the forces of nature themselves. ‘I am … the mystery of the waters,’ says the Goddess. ‘I am the door to the Land of Youth’ (quoted in Crowley 1989: 161): what comes after the door is, surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad. It is the world of water, where all life floats in suspension; where the realm of the sympathetic system, the soul of everything living, begins; where I am indivisibly this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me. (Jung [1934/54] 1968a: para. 45) This experience is an intimation of the goal of individuation, a radical reorientation of the personality around a centre greater than the personal ego. We invoke within the sacred space of the circle, a consciousness change is effected, the change dissolves and we return to ordinary consciousness with just a small part of us permanently changed by that experience. The repeated experience of that change causes erosion. Water, dripping, smoothes the unyielding stone of our egocentricity so that pure water may flow to find its destination, self fuses with the transcendent other. 188 Out of this state there emerges a more or less continuous dialogue between the conscious ego and the unconscious, and also between outer and inner experience. A twofold split is healed to the extent individuation is achieved, first the split between conscious and unconscious which began at the birth of consciousness, and second the split between subject and object. The dichotomy between outer and inner reality is replaced by a sense of unitary reality. (Edinger 1972 [198]: 96–7) We experience the dissolving into oneness of unification mysticism. The divine seizes us, takes hold of us. In an experience that is within the body as well as in consciousness, at once sensual and sexual as well as imaginal, we realize the divine within by a fusion with the divine without. To borrow the language of the Upanishads, Atman becomes Brahman and Brahman Atman: I am Thou, Thou art I. The outcome is a permanent reorientation, a shift in the psyche through the creation of a new vantage point beyond the functions of sensation, intuition, thinking or feeling. We create a fifth ‘transcendent function’, a vantage point for the deeper self whose perspective is ‘transpersonal’, beyond the fixed prison of the ego. It has been named the ‘transcendent function’ because it represents a function based on real and ‘imaginary,’ or rational and irrational, data, thus bridging the yawning gulf between conscious and unconscious. It is a natural process, a manifestation of the energy that springs from the tension of opposites, and it consists in a series of fantasy-occurrences which appear spontaneously in dreams and visions. (Jung [1917/26/43] 1966a: para. 121) No longer ‘caught’ in our subjectivity, we see the true purpose of our individual existence, which is alchemical: to redeem base matter and separate gold from the lead. As Edinger explains in Ego and Archetype: ‘Psychological development in all its phases is a redemptive process. The goal is to redeem by conscious realization, the hidden self, hidden in unconscious identification with the ego’ (1972 [199]: 103). We make room for a deeper, wider, self-based awareness that is at the same time ‘not self ’, that takes account of a more objective perspective on reality than the subjective perspective of the ego. For Jung, this is the ‘Great Work’ of which the hermeticists – the Renaissance magicians and alchemists and their heirs – spoke of in hushed tones as ‘a true labour, a work which involves both action and suffering’ ([1917/26/43] 1966a: para. 121). Invocation is a union between ‘I and other’, a healing of the inner division that results from the separation of the ego iceberg from the waters of the unconscious to provide us with a stable reference point in consciousness. In a letter of [200] Walter Bernet on 13 June 1955, Jung explains that this ends in, ‘the confrontation of the ego with the “emptiness” of the centre. Here the limit of possible experience is reached: the ego dissolves as the reference-point of cognition.’ (McGuire 1979: 259). This dissolution takes us back to the element of water. 189 To the sea and back again Ancient cultures revered the salmon for its extraordinary journeys and its mysterious knowledge that enabled it to navigate its way home. The salmon is unusual in that it can live in both fresh stream and salt sea, swimming from the clear freshwaters of consciousness down the stream of imagination, dream, symbol and myth to enter the ocean of the collective unconscious and then return stronger than before to bring new creation into the world. The salmon represents separation from the collective psyche that is essential for adult maturity, a process by which we develop a strong sense of ‘me’ and go forth on our personal journey of discovery. Once we have made the journey to the great sea, we can then return, stronger and wiser than before, to the spawning ground, the place where we fulfil our obligations to society. Collective identities, such as membership of an initiatory tradition, can play an important role in spiritual growth: ‘for a long time to come it will represent the only possible form of existence for the individual, who nowadays seems more than ever threatened by anonymity’ (Jung [1961] 1995: 376). Wicca helps the initiate to the point where he or she realizes his or her separate and unique personhood and, at the same time, the deep bonds between the individual and the initiatory group. The ‘spiritual family’ of the coven replaces the fragmented family and restores to the individual a role and place, albeit in a virtual society that operates in another realm from the bonds that ostensibly distinguish us: those of blood, class, locality, ethnicity, gender and nationality. The coven is a group bound by sharing secret interpretations of reality offered by the initiatory tradition, its symbols and passwords, its robes and its rites, and its world-vision. It creates an alternative family, bound not by ties of blood but by the world of water, the world of the collective unconscious and shared imagination. In the world of the circle, we create a shared symbolic meaning, an agreed language of movement, gesture, symbol and thought that extraverts the inner realm into a virtual reality. It awakens the dreaming individual from his or her isolation and alienated individualism to participate in a shared vision. For Jung, however, the mystery traditions are not the final end but, ‘a home port for the shipwrecked’ (Jung [1961] 1995: 375) where we can take on water and fresh supplies. Eventually we have to stand on our own feet; the ecstatic experience of apotheosis does not last forever. The value of the mysteries lies in their ability to transform human beings for the better. The proof of their worth lies in what the individual does with the experience. As Joseph Campbell describes in The Hero with a Thousand Faces ([1949] 1972), after achieving the goal of the quest, the hero must return to serve his or her community. The first part of the initiatory journey, the heroic quest, is a journey to the collective unconscious and back again to fulfil our social obligations to our species. Having done so, there comes a turning point; we must return to the collective. Key to happiness in life is the recognition that the goal of life’s morning is not that of life’s afternoon (Jung [1930/31] 1969a). The mysteries become no longer an education for life, but an education for death and that which lies beyond. The inner transformation experienced by the initiate through invocation becomes the chart that shows the way to return to the 190 great sea of the collective. At the third quarter of the circle of life, we come to the west, the waters of the womb, and of the great sea of the unconscious, of the holy well, of the living stream, the deep waters of the place of dream, the end of the journey. In the oration given at Jung’s funeral, the imagery of water prevailed: ‘But now he himself must go through the last great waters, not only as an explorer and discoverer, but also as one who is explored and discovered. May he in crossing the great water cast himself bravely and gladly into the purifying storms of judgment’ (Lammers 1994: 240–41). On the waters of the womb, we are pushed out into the world to ride the stream of being. We return to the salty waters with death, that last and greatest adventure that takes us on the night boat of the Ankhou to the Islands of the Blessed.2 Notes 1. 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