o n e
a n i m a m u n d i
debra goldman, 2021
"Was somebody asking to see the soul?
See your own shape and countenance, persons,
substances, beasts, the trees, the running rivers,
the rocks and sands."
- Walt Whitman
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Yes, we must remember.
But we must also forget,
else bygones
would never become
bygones,
there would be
no fools to rush in,
and wounds would
resist the healing
touch of time.
Without forgetfulness,
there would be goings
but no returnings,
for we would remember
too well why we had
left in the first place.
If the comforts of
home are held
always in the forefront
of memory,
we never get
out the front door.
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Look here -
these cherubim are
asleep at the garden gate.
They, too, its seems,
have drunk
from the river Lethe.
Nearly obscured behind
a tangle of vines, the
unremembered
portal beckons.
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Perhaps we have
been so long in exile,
so reconciled to
this splendid isolation
as subjects within
a billiard ball sea
of objects
that we will
simply pass
on by, persist in our
wandering pursuit
of dominion to fill the
aching hollow once
filled by
communion.
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Or, perhaps, the spring
robin will reveal
the place where, all these
long years, a key
has been tucked
within the folds
of sleep.
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If we did cross
the threshold,
would we know the
place for the first time?
Would ours be
a prodigal return,
met, perhaps, not with
forgiving arms
of the Father but
the dark, wet embrace
of the Mother?
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I wonder and I hope:
Are we are
nearing that point of
the story where
the snake eats
its own tail,
where we forget
what we have forgotten
and step back, with a sense
of déjà vu, into a world
ensouled, into the
Anima Mundi?
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remembering/forgetting: "And the end of our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, unremembered gate." (T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding)
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fools:
Air. Aleph.
Know naught!
All ways are lawful to innocence.
Pure folly is the key to initiation.
Silence breaks into rapture.
Be neither man nor woman, but both in one.
Be silent, Babe in the egg of blue, that though
mayest grow to bear the Lance and Graal!
Wander alone, and sing! In the King's palace
His daughter awaits thee.
(Alister Crowley, writing on the Fool card of the Tarot)
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"If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise." (William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell)
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so long in exile: "When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee her strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth." (Gen. 4:12)
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climb down the ladder: "My soul leads me into the desert, into the desert of my own self I did not think that my soul is a desert, a barren, hot desert, dusty and without drink. The journey leads through hot sand, slowly wading without a visible goal to hope for? How eerie is this wasteland. It seems to me that the way leads so far away from mankind. I take my way step by step, and do not know how long my journey will last." (C.G. Jung, Liber Novus)
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as above, so below: Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius, et quod inferius est sicut quod est superius. "That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above." From the Tabula Smaragdina, alchemical text attributed to the mythic figure Hermes Tresmegistus and highly influential during the zenith of Islamic alchemy as well as European alchemy of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
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the spring robin: "Mary looked at it, not really knowing why the hole was there, and as she looked she saw something almost buried in the newly-turned soil. It was something like a ring of rusty iron or brass and when the robin flew up into a tree nearby she put out her hand and picked the ring up. It was more than a ring, however; it was an old key which looked as if it had been buried a long time." (F.H. Burnett, The Secret Garden)
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prodigal return: "And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. And when he had spent all, there arose a mighty famine in that land; and he began to be in want... (Luke 15: 13-14)
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the snake eats its own tale: "The Ouroboros is a dramatic symbol for the integration and assimilation of the opposite, i.e. of the shadow. This ‘feed-back’ process is at the same time a symbol of immortality, since it is said of the Ouroboros that he slays himself and brings himself to life, fertilizes himself and gives birth to himself. He symbolizes the One, who proceeds from the clash of opposites, and he therefore constitutes the secret of the prima materia which […] unquestionably stems from man’s unconscious." (C.G. Jung, CW 14, para. 513)
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"Time and again the alchemists reiterate that the opus proceeds from the one and leads back to the one, that it is a sort of circle like a dragon biting its own tail. For this reason the opus was often called circulare (circular) or else rota (the wheel)." (C.G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy)
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Anima Mundi: "The idea of the "soul of the world", coming into the west from Plato’s Timaeus, but found in myths of many other times and places, offers itself as a symbol of this: "This world is indeed a living being endowed with soul and intelligence...a single living visible entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related" (Plato1961,30b, d)." (Jules Cashford, 2018)
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"During the medieval period, the anima mundi was often forced to travel incognita through Christian Europe. She carried rather too much heretical luggage with her to be wholly respectable: too many echoes of the old pagan deities, too many hints of animism. In the official view of the Church, nature was desacralized territory, created by God but apart from and wholly other than God. The anima mundi threatened to impart some aura of divinity to that profane and fallen realm. Some have seen in mainstream Christianity's entrenched hostility to nature worship one of the deep roots of our environmental crisis. Others assimilated her to the study of astrology, a subject not altogether banned by the Church of the Middle Ages. The anima mundi was frequently entrusted with mediating the influence of the stars in human affairs." (Theodore Roszak, 1993, Ecopsychology and the anima mundi)
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