Descent/Ascent—Death/Rebirth
Excerpt-James Hollis-Mythologems
When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest
wood, the thickest and most interminable and,
to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp
as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is
the strength, the marrow, of Nature.
—Henry David Thoreau, “Walking.”
Catabasis
The ancient stories are replete with descents, the catabasis to the underworld: Orpheus, Odysseus, Jesus, Aeneas, Dante, and many more. What is to be found down there? Certainly darkness, often monsters, sometimes treasures, and always something useful. We recall from the last chapter Jung’ s advice in the dream when the dreamer was in a deep hole: “Not out but through.” Indeed, Dante does not come out; he goes through and reaches into the other side which leads him to the Purgatorio and finally the Paradisio.
What is this darkness down there, this tenebrous metaphor? It can swallow the ego for sure, and that is why we fear it so. But the darkness is also the camera obscura from whence new images will arise. The future will be carried by those images, even though at present they remain remote to the ego. The ego can drown, as it does in psychosis. Jung said to James and Nora Joyce when they brought their schizophrenic daughter to him for referral, your daughter is drowning in that sea in which you learned to swim.’
Similarly, the darkness can reach up, if we stretch the metaphor, and seize the ego and occupy it, as sometimes occurs when the most somber of moods takes us hostage. The darkness down there is also the darkness of the womb, from which springs new life as well as the darkness of the tomb. Our fear of such nether places is projected onto spiders, serpents, mice, bats and other denizens of the dark. Yet all life begins in darkness, the warm, wet, frangible fertility of little things which become big things in time. In the suck and muck of slime the future will be formed and flung forth.
Just before her sixtieth birthday, a woman dreamt:
Five girlfriends came down the hill, skipping and singing. It was a joyous, playful, frolicking time in the sun. We proceeded together on a walking excursion and came to a small cliff that dropped straight down. There was a narrow ledge on the other side.
I said, “I’ll go first.”
We began walking on the ledge, which sloped downward. I moved ahead and at the bottom of the incline found a dark lake with five women standing in it. All was dark. The women were submerged in the black water up to their necks. They wore close fitting black hoods that covered their hair and only their white painted faces showed.
I looked down at my shoes on the dark ledge. They were “light,” numinous, and their warmth was beginning to melt the hard packed ground and turn it green.
I called to my friends coming behind me. “We need to get out. We will mess this up for them. We are melting it.”