Symbols and Myth-Making in Modernity: Deep Culture in Art and Action 1785272810, 9781785272813

Table of contents :
Cover Page
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. Introduction: Culture Is Deep
Myth and Modernity: Toward a Deeper View of Culture
Popular/Culture
Mything the World and the Self
“Action!”: Ritual and Art
Symbol
Statement
Method
Structure of the Book
2. Complex Transformations of the Self: The Hero as a Symbol
Revisiting Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Brains, brawn, and break-up: Odysseus’s transformative return
Psyche and the journey of the soul
Modern Masks: Vogler’s Journey
Star Wars: Rey and her (incomplete) journey
Transformation, Complexity, and Gender: Heroes Ancient and Modern
Discussion: Living the Hero
3. The Uncanny: Monsters, Blood, and Other 3: A.M. Horrors
Introduction to the Self
The Uncanny
Shake Us to Wake Us
Here there be monsters
Ghosts and demons: “Please allow me to introduce myself”
Threatening aliens and artificial intelligence
The Uncanny in Myth: Death, Dismemberment, and Rebirth
Blood and Wine: The Uncanny in Ritual
Blood and wine in Eastern Orthodox Christianity
Wine and blood in qawwali music
Discussion: Disquiet in the Cultural Operating System
4. The Feminine: Citadel of Metaphors
The Symbolic Feminine
Polarity
Birthing and containing
Containing and devouring
Modern expressions
Many Shades of Gray
Old witch
Young witch and Sophia
Medusa
Singularity versus Multiplicity
Artemis: goddess of modernity
Demeter and Persephone
The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean
Discussion: The Symbolic Feminine in Deep Culture
5. It’s culture all the way down
Introduction
Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue: The Symbolic Dimension
Fish
Chalice
Toward imaginal dialogue
The Veil: Politics, Poetics, and Play of Religious Symbols
Mona Lisa
Mary
Play: Facing the veil
Conclusion
Mythical truths
Deep culture
Culture All the Way …
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Symbols and Myth-making in Modernity

Symbols and Myth-making in Modernity

Deep Culture in Art and Action

Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir and Ali Qadir

Anthem Press An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2023 by ANTHEM PRESS 75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK and 244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

Copyright © Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir and Ali Qadir 2023

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested.

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-2-813 (Hbk) ISBN-10: 1-78527-2-810 (Hbk)

Cover Image: Image of “Pallas Athene” by Gustav Klimt (1898), Wien Museum.

This title is also available as an e-book.

TO OUR MOTHERS

For their unconditional love, support, and inspiration

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

1.Introduction: Culture Is Deep

Myth and Modernity: Toward a Deeper View of Culture

Popular/Culture

Mything the World and the Self

“Action!”: Ritual and Art

Symbol

Statement

Method

Structure of the Book

2.Complex Transformations of the Self: The Hero as a Symbol

Revisiting Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Brains, brawn, and break-up: Odysseus’s transformative return

Psyche and the journey of the soul

Modern Masks: Vogler’s Journey

Star Wars: Rey and her (incomplete) journey

Transformation, Complexity, and Gender: Heroes Ancient and Modern

Discussion: Living the Hero

3.The Uncanny: Monsters, Blood, and Other 3: A.M. Horrors

Introduction to the Self

The Uncanny

Shake Us to Wake Us

Here there be monsters

Ghosts and demons: “Please allow me to introduce myself”

Threatening aliens and artificial intelligence

The Uncanny in Myth: Death, Dismemberment, and Rebirth

Blood and Wine: The Uncanny in Ritual

Blood and wine in Eastern Orthodox Christianity

Wine and blood in qawwali music

Discussion: Disquiet in the Cultural Operating System

4.The Feminine: Citadel of Metaphors

The Symbolic Feminine

Polarity

Birthing and containing

Containing and devouring

Modern expressions

Many Shades of Gray

Old witch

Young witch and Sophia

Medusa

Singularity versus Multiplicity

Artemis: goddess of modernity

Demeter and Persephone

The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean

Discussion: The Symbolic Feminine in Deep Culture

5.It’s culture all the way down

Introduction

Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue: The Symbolic Dimension

Fish

Chalice

Toward imaginal dialogue

The Veil: Politics, Poetics, and Play of Religious Symbols

Mona Lisa

Mary

Play: Facing the veil

Conclusion

Mythical truths

Deep culture

Culture All the Way …

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of many years of work by us and we have accumulated many debts along the journey. It was inspired in part by our students, who passionately engaged with the Deep Culture frame in our course “Symbols that move us” at Tampere University, Finland in Spring 2018, showing us the many directions this theory can take in analyzing self and society. We are grateful to them and to our doctoral supervisor, renowned anthropologist, late Ulla Vuorela, who taught us to think of the discipline broadly and to not fear linking the world together. We also thank our colleagues and partners who enthusiastically supported our research pursuit, especially Dr Essi Ikonen, Dr Frederique Apffel-Marglin, and Dr Ruth Illman, with each of whom we collaborated on intercultural dialogue and research. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this book and to those who commented on our earlier publications and presentations, including at the 2016 International Symposium “Art Approaching Science and Religion” in Turku and EASR “Relocating Religion” Conference in Helsinki, as well as the “Suomi-100: Faiths and Beliefs in Finland” seminar in Helsinki in 2017. Dr Qadir received generous support from the Academy of Finland (2016–2019) that partly enabled his work on this book. Dr Tiaynen-Qadir’s work builds on two projects supported by the Academy of Finland and Kone Foundation at the University of Turku (PI Suvi Salmenniemi) between 2014 and 2017. We also received valuable comments on this work at the Center for the Study of Religion & Society at University of Victoria, BC in 2018. We humbly recognize that this book rests on the rich contributions and research of past and present scholars whom we abundantly refer to in the book, notably, Corbin, Jung, and post-Jungians such as Hillman and Ahmed. The latter’s work has been very important to us in introducing post-Jungian thought in a global and critical perspective. We also thank our interlocutors, those who spoke to us directly in the present and those whose stories came to us from ancient and recent pasts. Above all, we greatly value the support and care we received from our transnational family, spanning cultures, continents, and myths, particularly our parents and children.

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION: CULTURE IS DEEP

Blessed are the legend-makers with their rhyme of things not found within recorded time.

J. R. R. Tolkien

Since 2002, 48 of the 50 biggest box-office worldwide openings of any movies have been fantasy films. Hollywood blockbusters based on comic book characters (Marvel Avengers or DC Justice League), fantasy novels (like Harry Potter or Twilight), screenplay adaptations (like Star Wars or Pirates of the Caribbean), or fantasy cartoons (like Beauty and the Beast) have grossed more money by far on opening weekends than any other genre (WeekendRecords 2021). All in all, these movies have grossed over US$20 billion. Of course, the numbers are skewed by Western and Anglophone countries where people have higher disposable incomes and films are screened in cinemas, but the popularity extends worldwide, including out of the box office. In the same period, only one fantasy movie won the Academy Award for best picture, and only four have even been nominated out of 141 (Oscar Awards Databases). Why do people queue up for such movies that are hardly realistic and rarely critically acclaimed? Why do some fictional characters and their stories strangely arrest our mind and affect us so deeply? The sheer extent of this phenomenon begs for an explanation. In this book, we propose that such movies speak to—and build upon—a way of imagining the world that is common to humans and that compensates for certain gaps in modern life or amplifies dominant perceptions. We see such movies as examples of modern myths in popular culture that fulfill a similar role to the one played by myths enacted in earlier times. The ancients told legends and acted out

plays and rituals while we watch movies and read novels. J. R. R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings influenced generations of readers, filmmakers, and now a gaming culture, strived consciously for mythopoeia, myth-making (J. R. R. Tolkien, Humphrey, and C. Tolkien 2000; Tarnas 2019). “Successful films, like successful myths […] stir us to renewed action, emotion and thought” (Plate 2003, 7–8). Indeed, films and fiction are not the only examples. Myths are fundamentally symbolic, and from that symbolic perspective much of modern culture can be seen as myth-making. This includes, for instance, contemporary religious expressions and political drama or even the history that, in the words of anthropologist Victor Turner, “repeats the deep myths of culture” (Turner 1974, 122). In this introduction, we lead up to describing out theory of “deep culture” as a way to analyze and unpack the myths of modernity. We first describe what we mean by modernity and how we use the term “myth.” We then move on to the crucial concept of popular culture, in which myths emerge and are expressed. This leads to our discussion on the nature of myths and their truths for selves and society. But myths are not just passive tales, watched or read by barely interested audiences; they are active narratives that help participants make sense of the world around them. As such, they are embedded in ritualized action, an anthropological notion that we discuss in the following section. All of this comes together in the pivotal concept of “symbol,” which we unpack and use to describe our theory of deep culture. The chapter concludes with a brief description of the rest of the book.

Myth and Modernity: Toward a Deeper View of Culture

Scholars of comparative mythology, anthropology, literary, religious, and Jungian studies have illustrated the widespread prevalence of mythemes, archetypal motifs, and symbols across historical and contemporary cultures (Baring and Cashford 1991; Campbell [1949] 2004; Eliade 1963; Ford 1999; Frentz and Rushing 2002; Hillman 1998; Raglan [1936] 1990; Rank [1909] 1990). This prevalence entices readers and viewers to ask why that myth endures across time, or what that symbol is doing there and why it is shared across human history. The very presence of these myths and symbols, the commonality in the work they do on viewers, and their ability to tell what cannot be said in a logical manner or depict what cannot be said in any other way, suggests interconnectedness and intertwining of cultures and human experiences. But surely, the modern reader protests, “myth” is fiction, opposed to facts as in the common phrase “myth vs. reality.” That is, indeed, a popular way of thinking, but it is a limited and historically rather recent way of talking about myth. For much of human history, myth was as much a part of reality as agricultural techniques, carpentry, fashion, or mathematics. As much scholarship in myth studies has shown, myths are better expressed as realities speaking to different aspects of human existence than the physical and biological facts one often associates with “truth” (Ahmed 2002a; Bly and Woodman 1998; Boccassini 2018; Cobb 1992; Downing 1994; Eliade 1963; Hillman 1983; Hollis 2000; Jackson 2016; Jung 1968; Neumann [1955] 1974; Raglan 1990). Myths carry a multitude of emotions, possibilities, senses, and interpretations, and relate to the meaning and hence making of culture, society, and self (Campbell 2004; Eliade 1963; Jung 1968; Miller 2014; Turner 1974). Myths express the reality within us and surrounding us in the language of symbols, metaphors, images, and stories. For the famous myth theoretician Mircea Eliade, myth is “living” as “it supplies models for human behavior and, by that very fact, gives meaning and value to life” (1963, 2). Such literature points out that people make sense of the complexity of reality around them by means of mythical imageries and channel some very basic elements of the human condition into popular culture.

Now, the domain of meaning-making and understanding the human condition for living a better life are principal domains of psychology. It is not surprising, then, that psychologists have actively turned to the analysis of classical myths and their eruption in modern times. Most notable among these is the depth psychologist Carl Jung, once heir apparent to the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, and later his bitterest intellectual enemy (Safran et al. 2019). Jung, founder of analytical psychology, devoted his life to collecting myths from around the world as keys to reading the human soul (in ancient Greek, psyche) and used their lessons in his successful therapies and analyses (Dehing and Dehing 1992; Galipeau 2013; Olson 2019). Among his many contributions to thinking about myths and their shared lessons across human cultures is the concept of “collective unconscious,” by which he differentiated Freud’s idea about the unconscious into individual and shared components. Following in his footsteps, post-Jungians have productively combined Jungian psychology with studies of ancient myths (Campbell 2004; Kerenyi [1951] 2008) for individual analysis (Andrews 2016; Bolen 2014; Hillman 1983; Neumann 1974). Some scholarship has concentrated on fairy tales and legends (Bly and Woodman 1998; von Franz 1997), modern art (Cheetham 2015; Hollis 2000), modern cinema (Frentz and Rushing 2002; Merritt et al. 2018), and modern culture (Boccassini 2018). However, much of this research predates modern cultural expressions or has not fully explored contemporary myths in popular culture or, more importantly, has not collected the mythical elements in those expressions into a larger whole. Furthermore, there are few studies exploring political or social phenomena of the kind that are defining the modern world. In sum, while earlier literature is theoretically groundbreaking and empirically breathtaking, more study is needed on making it consistent and relevant. As such, previous scholarship has limits in its utility for students of modern popular culture per se beyond specific disciplines like literary criticism or screenwriting. If we want to probe cultural and political phenomena and the interlinkages between various types of cultural expressions, we need to move past these disciplinary limitations. Specifically, while much scholarship continues to speak to the importance of this broader notion of myths and to identify the mythical elements in this or that aspect of culture, more attention needs to be paid to what that expression is doing, or the role it plays in making of the self and society. Our purpose in this book is to unpack what such modern myths are speaking to and what they are compensating for or affirming. Myths have always been situated within a system of meaning—or a mytho-logia—and we highlight features of the mythology

within which modern myths function. In other words, we want to begin mapping the mythology of modernity, while tracing their origins in ancient art and rites. But, what is modernity? The French term moderne became prolific during the European Enlightenment to emphasize “recent” and “up-to-date” as opposed to the “ancient,” classic models of anything in the past. “Moderns” celebrated new knowledge, new thinking, new science, and a New World surpassing the ancient civilizations. For historians, this shift in consciousness signifies the “modern era” of industrial, scientific, and Atlantic revolutions, colonialism, and the perceived divide between science and religion (Harrison 2015; Strayer 2011). The universe was no longer a “sacred canopy” held up by divine forces, but rather a dark cloak thrown over the scientific machinery that could be described in precise language of concepts. French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault approaches modernity as a self-reflexive discourse that relies on breaking away from tradition, customs, and religion toward beliefs in individualism, freedom, equality, social, scientific and technological progress, rationality and reason, capitalism and market economy, urbanization, industrialization, nation state, and representative democracies (Foucault 1995; Lincoln 1999). Perceiving such assumptions as “natural” and “self-evident” brushes aside the fact that modernity itself is a discourse, a myth that has forgotten it is one (Asad 2003; Hillman 1983; Lincoln 1999). And this is how we approach modernity as a discourse (or a regime of truth in the Foucauldian terminology), within which certain social aspects and cultural expressions make sense. For instance, one such discourse defining modernity is that of “reality” being radically reducible to physical processes, by virtue of which all nonphysical processes become “fanciful” or “imaginary” and conflated with “mythical” (see Corbin 1964). Keeping that in view, we need to better understand the contours of the discourse known as modernity beyond an absolute and triumphant idea of modern. Departing from a purely political or historical mapping of the discourse of modernity, in this book, we enter this debate with a psychocultural framework. From this perspective, we map not the breadth and width of modernity as a discourse—how far it ranges and how long ago it can be traced—but rather its depth. Modern expressions in popular culture of all kinds, then, should be seen not as surface level but as carrying a dimension of depth, a depth that can be best described in the language of myth. To map that dimension of culture, the book develops a theory of “deep culture.” The link between culture’s surface and depth is the crucial concept of symbol, uniting cultures. We emphasize a strong

and always-present connection of symbols with everyday life, for instance, in popular culture. That is, deep culture refers to a depth dimension that is intimately connected with the obvious and evident cultural representations all around us. In this book, we extend this ground to theorize the cultural patterns that sustain, build on, or even misrecognize this symbolic dimension of life. This framework, described below in “Statement,” is primarily applicable for analyzing individual and cultural phenomena (understood broadly) in symbolic terms of how they play out in the modern world and self. While the most obvious cultural representations are those that the modern mind brushes aside as “mere fiction,” such as popular movies, similar representations are evident in religious, political, and other social life. The main focus of this book, therefore, is to apply the deep culture theory to make sense of ancient symbols and myths and see how they erupt in popular culture, art, religion, and politics today. This book brings together the insights from anthropology of ritual and art and material religion combined with postJungian scholarship but in a way that they apply to contemporary cultural reality. The book also fills a gap in existing scholarship by recognizing historical continuities and discontinuities, as well as the truly transnational nature of our modern life. On the one hand, a key theme in the book is to relate modern myths and symbols—such as those in popular cinema—to long-standing mythical themes, such as the hero’s journey, the eruption of the uncanny, and the symbolic feminine. On the other hand, the book maps out how those symbolic “mythemes” have been distorted in our period of modernity and what implications that has for cultural analysis and social progress (cf. Ahmed 1994, 2011, for two of the few such analyses). At the same time, the book illustrates that many of these symbolic mythemes are more widely shared across individual cultures than many recognize. What makes our time especially important is that never before in human history have so many participated so actively in a culture and society that spans so much of the globe. Of course, this does not mean that everywhere things are “the same” or the same films are viewed everywhere, but rather that cultural variations appear on the same grounds and ways of seeing the world (Alasuutari and Qadir 2019). The scope of this book is to map out common cultural grounds as expressed in myth. As such, this book makes an interdisciplinary statement on the symbolic dimension of our contemporary culture that spans more of the world than any single culture has spanned previously. Dismantling literalism and disturbing our

view of the world, at each step, the book will unpack how people relate to the world through symbols and myths, and how they play out in the modern world. From ancient mystery rites through masterpieces of Renaissance to modern cinema, contemporary religion, and political action, the book will unpack the symbols and myths that move us today and the work they do in transforming the self and society. At the same time, “deep culture” is helpful in pointing to ruptures—where modern myths “stumble”—thereby leading to new analyses of destructive ideologies (Lincoln 1999), emerging societal crises, and identifying new potential solutions. We have written this book as an exploration. We want, above all, to convey to you our excitement about thinking of culture and cultural expressions in this way that connects past to present, symbols to society, and art to action. The theory of deep culture provides the ingredients to do this in a systematic way that leads to insights into our times that may otherwise be obscured. As such, the book should serve as a platform to launch further contemplation, investigation, study, observation, and pedagogy. Our experience in sharing this material in university classrooms shows that it can lead to fascinating new instances of co-creation and new directions. The analytical instances we detail are new and important in themselves but also offer a way to think about similar cultural expressions. We invite you, as participants and students of the culture of our time, to explore the world in this way and to contribute to mapping the logos in which the myths of our time live. From studying about culture in its various forms to designing films and games, to writing fiction, we believe the theory of deep culture scaffolds cultural expressions and helps make sense of popular culture.

Popular/Culture

Popular culture is both a manifestation of modernity and its chief maker. What makes it so relatable and truly “popular” is globalization (Appadurai 1995; Guins and Cruzand 2005; Nehring et al. 2016; Wagnleitne and May 2000). Social anthropologists argue that the world has never been so dynamically interconnected in its entire history: people, ideas, and capital move in an unprecedented fashion and speed (Appadurai 1995; Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Hannerz 2010; Marcus 1995, 2009; Ong and Collier 2007; Vertovec 2014). Popular culture is “experienced, produced, practiced, marketed, lived and consumed ubiquitously due to the ever-increasing presence of media technology in all aspects of our everyday life” (Guins and Cruzand 2005, 12). Globalized popular culture shapes “the clothing we wear, the foods we eat, the products we consume, the ways we work, the music we listen to,” the religions we practice, and the identities we assume,” the movies we watch, and the ways we think (Strayer 2011, 1180). Global news, restaurants, international reality shows, films, spectator sports, fashion industry, and tourism, all enhance “today’s cosmopolitanism” experiences (Appadurai 1995, 96). Globally circulating social media, political imageries, and movie cultural representations alter the process of cultural reproduction and raise people’s awareness of the world as a single place (Robertson 1995). Indeed, this awareness is a unique feature of modernity. There are a number of factors that drive popular culture, which is reflected in diverse approaches and scholarship. Some point out that popular culture is driven by consumer capitalism, with its “mass-marketed beauty” and cheap emotional appeal (Collins 1989; Geczy 2008, 6; Nehring et al. 2016). Others see popular culture as a manifestation of “Americanization” and the Hollywood dominance that affects national cultures worldwide (Wagnleitne 2000), a line of argument that dates back to theoreticians Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno who saw “mass culture” as marking a crisis of separation between low and high cultures (Guins and Cruzand 2005; Strinati 2005). Foucauldian and gender theorizing claim that people’s aspirations and gender norms are discursively shaped and “governed” by popular culture (Foucault 1980; De Lauretis 1987;

Rose 1998; Alasuutari and Qadir 2019). As a counterargument, many scholars point out that popular culture can be a site of political struggle and postcolonial resistance, for instance, against apartheid in South Africa or the Black Power movement in the US (Fabian 1998; Guins and Cruzand 2005). To add to this, rock music, hip-hop culture, popular self-help, and feminist grassroot groups may also empower certain groups and challenge institutional control and norms (Hebdige 1988; Regev 2013; Salmenniemi et al. 2020). All these reflect different aspects and implications of popular culture. In this sense, popular culture is fluid, multilayered, dynamic, and situated (Barth 1993; Cerwonka and Malkki 2007). Following this anthropological tradition, we approach popular culture as a set of ideas, values, images, norms, and perspectives that shape and reflect people’s everyday lives in the West but also globally. As a “way of life,” popular culture is a particular manifestation of what ethnologists, folklorists, and anthropologists used to refer to as folk culture. The forms of its cultural expression and its range of outreach may have changed, but popular culture continues to communicate through symbols while shaping and reflecting our human condition (Bobby 1991; Boccassini 2018; Geertz 1973; Merritt et al. 2018; Turner 1974). The notion of popular culture allows studying popular arts and other cultural expressions, falling in between “high art” and exotified “tribal” cultures or “mass culture” (Fabian 1998). Some popular culture art gains widespread recognition similar to that of great works of art (Danesi 2007, 6). Fantasy movies like Star Wars or the Lord of the Rings, which create mythologies and worlds of their own, span several generations of admirers and fans, proving their status of popular culture classic. The extended franchise of television, books, costumes, and reenactments do not only commodify them, they also make these mythical journeys tangible and re-livable. Some find them literally connected to their lives and beliefs: as an example, in the 2001 Australian census, over 70,000 people marked “Jedi” as their religion (Plate 2003, 1). At the same time, some perceived masterpieces of high art find their niche in global popular culture. The Italian Renaissance painting Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the best-known example (Lichfield 2005) (Figure 1.1). In 1963, Andy Warhol, renowned for his prints of famous pop culture icons such Merilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley, silkscreened thirty images of Mona Lisa, the work known as “Thirty Are Better Than One.” The age of “mechanical

reproduction” of Mona Lisa has begun ever since, making it a subject for infinite reproductions, spoofs, pastiches, and advertisements. The Louvre gift shop alone sells more than 330,000 printed images of Mona Lisa each year (Lichfield 2005). Some may argue that the artistic uniqueness of the piece is, therefore, destroyed as this image is commodified and turned into a joke in the grids of popular culture (Strinati 2005, 214). Yet, some research suggests that this is how popular culture appropriates Mona Lisa, in fact not destroying the mysticism of La Joconde but rather enhancing it for a modern viewer (Sassoon 2016) (Figure 1.2). No doubt that there are commodification forces at work: both Star Wars and Mona Lisa can be seen as consumer culture products. There can always be found structural and historical explanations to their global popularity, whether it is the omnipotent power of Hollywood in worldwide distribution of cinema culture or the theft of Mona Lisa from Louvre in 1911 that brought international attention to this painting. However, there is also something else at work, which begs for explanation of why the Renaissance painting of a young lady becomes the most reproduceable feminine image of modernity, a “painting superstar, a celeb, an icon” (Lichfield 2005) and why the fantasy adventure of a young man turns into a “myth of our time” (Gordon 1995), “the most valuable mythology of our time” (BBCnews 2019), a “classic saga” (N. Barber 2019).

Figure 1.1: “Portrait of Mona Lisa Del Giocondo,” painting by Leonardo da Vinci (77 × 53 cm, oil on poplar panel), 1503–1506. Louvre Museum.

Figure 1.2: Celebration Cosplay—Mona Leia, Star Wars Celebration in Anaheim, April 2015 by Amy.

We suggest that such popular culture classics share a symbolic, mythical structure that relates to eternal, archetypal motifs that channel individual and societal needs rooted in deep culture. In other words, popular culture contains “deep psychological truths about ourselves and our current era” (Merritt et al. 2018, 28). Global modernity facilitates transnational circulation of such classics through which people make sense of themselves and the world. These classics become part of a global cultural form that has “a distinctive capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization, abstractability and movement across diverse social and cultural situations and spheres of life” (Ong and Collier 2007, 4). In this respect, the Hollywood film industries can be seen as a transcultural space that incorporates different cultural influences in its mythmaking: African spiritualities in the creation of the mythical land of Wakanda in Black Panther (2018), Russian classic ballet in The Nutcracker (2018), Polynesian myths in Moana (2016), or the Maroons’ culture in the Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) (Mackie 2005). “Omnivore” culture consumerism doesn’t quite capture what we are referring to here as the universal appeal of certain themes. As such, we make an interdisciplinary statement on the symbolic dimension of our contemporary culture that spans more of the world than any culture has spanned previously. Of course, there is no one “myth of our time,” there are many. So many forms of popular culture from cinema to fiction to even public architecture reflect a number of more or less cogent myths that speak to us. Such, indeed, was probably the case in ancient times and cultures too. However, what is more significant is that we do not have a mythology in our time. That is, there is no even loosely coherent system of meaning within which our popular myths can make sense. As moderns, we are all too content with letting popular myths pass us by as so many subjective fantasies, childish stories, or as imaginative products by those “creative types” that help us leisurely pass the time in between periods of active “work.” Here, by contrast, we unpack the symbolic and mythical structure of popular culture today, making evident the processes that are too often processed unconsciously.

Mything the World and the Self

In his critical theory article on “Mything the Study of Myth,” David L. Miller recollects an episode from the 1960s when renowned mythographer Joseph Campbell, existential psychologist Rollo May, and himself were returning from a radio interview and one of them noted: “We forgot a most important thing. We did that whole interview and never defined myth” (2014, 14). Mythographers, psychologists, social and cultural anthropologists, folklorists, literary scholars, historians, and sociologists have studied myth, but often refuse to see it as a clearly defined category (Bosley 1999a; Campbell 2004; Eliade 1963; Ford 1999; Hillman 1998; Jung 1968; Levi-Strauss 1980; Lincoln 1999; Propp 1986; Segal 2021; von Franz 2017). In fact, as some scholars warn, any attempt at defining a myth or even the study of myth runs a danger of being methodologically and hermeneutically naïve and oversimplified (Hillman 1998; Lincoln 1999; Masuzawa 2005; Miller 2014). Keeping that in mind, and notwithstanding all the important and subtle differences, academic approaches to myth fall in one of two modern usages: (1) myth as a powerful story that expresses the grains of truth or conveys moral lessons, or (2) myth as a false narrative. In general, we clearly follow the first approach rooted in the history of religions school at the University of Chicago with the central figure being Mircea Eliade, who claimed that “myth is an extremely complex cultural reality,” a “true story” that is “a most precious possession because it is sacred, exemplary, significant” (Eliade 1963, 1). However, it is important to acknowledge the second approach that sees myth as a “false,” constructed narrative. The superficial reading of ancient myths being a precursor to “proper” physics as the famous anthropologist Frazer contended in 1890 has been adequately debunked by many critics (although some important insights have been preserved, such as the significance of dying/resurrecting kingship). A more productive variation of this approach views myths as false discourses summoned to destructive ends, best exemplified by Bruce Lincoln, once a student of Mircea Eliade and then his opponent. As an example, Lincoln describes the construction of the Aryan myth by the Nazis to prosecute the Jews during the World War II (Lincoln 1999, 75). Lincoln’s scholarship, among

others, reminds us that false consciousness can be concocted to serve some ends and interests against others, often with a romantic appeal to the past with devastating implications. Indeed, as Joseph Campbell pointed out, “Clearly mythology is no toy for children” (Campbell 1960, 12). It would be just as naïve to fall into the second modern trap of reducing fairy tales and myth to childish stories as it would be to attribute a pre-physical epistemology to them (G. Anderson 2000; Hillman 1983). Yet, navigating between these two traps, we also don’t need to relegate myths to the rubbish heap of early, fanciful (and not very good) pre-literature. Myths held a high status in ancient societies. Interestingly, Lincoln writes that for the ancient Greeks, myth or mythos was considered a genre of high authority, “having the capacity to advance powerful truth claims” (Lincoln 1999, x). Logos, in contrast, was rather linked to speculative mode of speech, and associated with “falsehoods,” “seduction,” “deception,” “flattery,” and something “seductive” (Lincoln 1999, 5, 27). It is only amid the rise of legislative tradition in classical Greece that fewer and fewer were willing to take mythos seriously as it lost ground to logos. This tradition significantly shaped modern understanding of myth as fable, fiction, invention, or illusion. To the point that, as Talal Asad notes, secular modernity deems myth as something irrational, political fantasy, or dangerous ideology (Asad 2003). However, it is also true that not all myths have had such destructive consequences as the “Aryan” myth did in Europe. Indeed, myths have never really left human expression. Folk tales, fairy tales, legends and stories of miracles, vernacular religious practices and beliefs, and indigenous and tribal mythologies have continued to play an important role in cultures all over the world. The artists of the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation did not have to revive the Greek legacy of myths in late medieval and early modern Europe, nor did nineteenth-century British poets have to harken back to pre-Socratic Greeks in their metaphors of human existence. Michelangelo’s famed depiction of Christ in the fashion of Greek-god Apollo in the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel (Luchinat 2010, 18) or mythological themes in Peter Paul Rubens’s paintings, including the Head of Medusa, are also well-known examples of such development. We can only ignore these and other expressions to the detriment of our understanding of human culture and history. What is it in myth that continues to captivate human psyche? Depth psychologists explain this by the very nature of the psyche that expresses itself in the language of symbols, metaphors, images, and dreams. For Carl Jung,

the widespread prevalence of similar stories and symbols across cultures is because “myths are first and foremost are psychic phenomena that reveal the nature of the soul” (Jung [1954] (2014), CW 9, ¶7). Myth is the language that is natural to psychic processes with no “intellectual formation [coming]anywhere near the richness and expressiveness of mythical imagery” (Neumann 1974, 15). Myths speak to the “most fundamental patterns of human existence” (Hillman 1983, 3). Myths have always functioned as imagistic vessels for channeling human psychological, spiritual, and social nature. As such, “myth is not created; it is the phenomenological dramatization of our encounter with depth” (Hollis 2000). They are not truth in the factual sense but tell us things about the world and ourselves in the medium of images and stories. They also compensate for some missing or ignored elements in a culture’s self-consciousness. Individual dreams express hidden or unarticulated sides of the self (Olson 2019; Pickering 2012), whereas social and cultural dreams express suppressed or unaware aspects of the society. There is evidence that ancient peoples held such understandings of myth as complex and multilayered. For instance, the Pawnee people (originating in what is now Oklahoma in the US) distinguished between “true stories” and fictional stories (Eliade 1963, 8). The first related to the origins of the world and things featuring divine protagonists, supernatural, heavenly, or astral beings; the latter related to the adventures of human heroes, freeing people from monsters and performing other noble duties. The eternal, archetypal nature of gods and goddesses was and is in their ability to tap into human emotions and experiences (Bolen 2014; Downing 1994). Greek gods and goddesses also act and feel like humans but are immortal and mighty as human emotions and qualities that they personify: anger, warfare, wisdom, love, and jealousy (Ahmed 2002a). Humans can be trapped in the grip of Hera’s blind rage or experience an inexplicable feeling of awe looking at Zeus-like thunderbolts or subdue to Demeter’s sinking feeling when she found out her daughter Persephone was abducted. For the ancients, gods and goddesses also personified forces of nature (David 2020). In Ancient Egypt, the everyday survival and thousands of years of the enduring civilization depended on the benevolent waters and flooding of the Nile River, which the Egyptians personified as goddess Anuket, the source of their life and existence. Different aspects and moods of the Nile were represented by gods and goddesses: Khnum, god of the source of the river, Satis, goddess of the flood, Geb, god of vegetation around the river, and Sobek, helping to mitigate the dangers of Nile. We find similar personifications of nature and nature objects

in myths, indigenous cultures, and fairly tales across the world: rivers, trees, sun, moon, wind, sunset, sunrise, and night are personified, and enable the heroine’s or the hero’s journey. The personification of gods and goddesses was a nuanced hierarchy or cosmology. For instance, the ancient Greeks identified a first, ontological level of primordial deities, outlined in Hesiod’s Theogony as Gaia (Earth), Ouranos (Sky) along with Chaos (Void), Ourea (Mountains), and Pontus (Sea). Gaia and her son/husband Ouranos then gave birth to the second level of deities known as the Titans, including Oceanus (Ocean), Hyperion (father of the sun, moon, and dawn), Iapetus (father of Atlas and Prometheus), Mnemosyne (Memory, mother of the nine Muses), Cytherea (Heavenly Love), Phoebe (Shining, owner of the Oracle of Delphi and grandmother of Apollo and Artemis), Rhea (mother to Olympian gods), and Cronus (Time). Rhea and Cronus then gave birth to the third level of deities, the famous generation of Olympian gods: Zeus (king of the gods), his wife Hera, Poseidon, Hades, Hestia, and Demeter. As is obvious in this cosmology, the deities move from being barely sentient, primordial forces (Earth, Sky) to more identifiable yet crude impulses (Time, Ocean, Prophecy, Memory) to refined sentiments (kingship, family, hearth, agriculture). Eventually, they move down further with Zeus’ children to mathematics and music (Apollo), hunting (Artemis), war (Ares), love/passion (Aphrodite), communication (Hermes), and so on. While the story is a temporal chronology, the substance is a permanent cosmology. The succession of deities and their ontology is meant to be logical, not temporal. They all exist at the same time, with increasing refinement, coming closer and closer to the level of recognizable human experience. The same principle holds true here as it does generally with ancient cosmologies: as above, so below. That is, the same ontology speaks to the human psyche or soul: from the basic, primordial substances up to the crude, emotional impulses and further on to the refined human sentiments at the surface of human experience. If the cosmology is like an inverted pyramid moving down the heavenly levels to human experience, then the psychology is an upstanding pyramid moving up the subterranean levels to human experience. At all ontological stages, the impulses that drive human experience are personified in myths and stories. Such personification is often difficult to grasp for a modern anthropogenic mind that recognizes only human agency. Yet, for post-Jungian depth psychologist James Hillman, such personification is the “basic psychological activity” that “implies a human being who creates Gods in human likeness much as an author

creates character out of his own personality” (Hillman 1975, 12). “These Gods depict his own needs,” claims Hillman as “they are his projections” (Hillman 1975, 12). Such personification is the only way for the psyche to communicate its complex reality. As Walter F. Otto puts it: “there is no such thing as personification, only a depersonification […] so-called abstract concepts and words would never have been raised into the personal had they not been there from the very beginning personal, that is, divine forms” (1962, 261). Personification renders agency to every living being, including earth and natural objects and phenomena, that have their own autonomous reality, something that modernity with its colonial mindset has been perpetually denouncing as a sign of backwardness and inferiority (Apffel-Marglin and Stefano 2020). One powerful myth that has shaped history and culture of the Western civilization is, of course, the Christian myth. For Victor Turner, the Christian myth has been symbolically reenacted in some historical figures and events: Miguel Hidalgo, who initiated the Mexican War for Independence of the eighteenth century but was betrayed and executed, repeated the Christian myth in the most concrete and “bloody” fashion to become a powerful national symbol (1974, 102). Many literary works, that became classics and were adapted in modern cinema, including The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien and The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis, were inspired by the Christian myth (Phelpsted 2014, 82). The Christian myth shaped many Hollywood dying and resurrecting superheroes (Plate 2003). Famed “May the force be with you” from the Star Wars is a rephrasing of Christian “May the Lord be with you.” So was the intention of George Lucas in his elaboration of the concept of the force to capture the essence of all religions. In other words, Lewis, Tolkien, Lucas, and many others have been actively creating myths to make them relatable to modern readers and viewers, drawing on the archetypal, eternal themes. What these literary and cultural figures intuitively tapped into is that myth and religion have traditionally functioned as cultural and psychological vessels in societies (Allen 2000; Cosmopoulos 2015; Eliade 1963; B. Meyer and Verrips 2008; Morgan 2005). In historical terms, the sharp division between myth and religion is a relatively recent phenomenon dating back to the beginning of modernity, the Reformation, and the rise of Protestantism in the middle of the seventeenth century (Harrison 2015). In the ancient world, from the Assyrian Empire to Minoan Crete, and from the Mayancity builders to the Benin Empire of Kings, lived religion relied on dramatic enactments of myths. With the rise of modernity, religion was purified from its mythical essence, what was perceived

as weird stories and imageries, to become an abstract construct of propositions, meeting less and less of the psychological and spiritual needs of society and individuals (Asad 2003). Religion of the other was called myth, and our myth got to be called religion (Miller 2014, 18). The polarization between science and religion further pushed religion and myth into the private domain, asserting only one, correct way of presenting the world, the one that builds on scientific rationality (Asad 2003; Ecklund 2010; Harrison 2015; J. W. Meyer, Krücken, and Drori 2009). But the more the mythical is supressed, the more it erupts in popular culture and fantasy. Whether it is Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, Neo from Matrix, or Katniss Everdeen from Hunger Games, their stories connect to the archetypal, mytheme of the hero or the heroine embarking on a journey, fighting inner doubts, facing severe tests, being on the edge of death only to reemerge as a transformed self who has brought a change in the world around (Campbell 2004; Ford 1999). Individuals are inspired by their beloved popular culture characters in projecting themselves into the world or relate their personal life stories to the adventures of the protagonists. Such remythologizing of the world in filmmaking was in many ways inspired by a Hollywood screenwriter for Disney, Christopher Vogler, who closely studied Joseph Campbell’s book on the hero myth and popularized the twelve-stage hero’s journey into a book called The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Writers that became like a Bible in screenwriting courses (Vogler 2007). The emotive, psychological power of myths resides in the deeply seated principles of perception of the self and society, what we refer to as deep culture that points to the esoteric, hidden dimension of apparent, obvious elements of psyche and culture. Myths tell us psychological and cultural truths about ourselves and the world. The hero myth is one such principle and it is found everywhere as far as we can see (Chapter 2). But there are many others, reflecting different levels of ontological and cultural truths, which we do not recognize as such. These include individual, social, and religious myths, national and political ideologies that we deem dangerous or liberating. As we pointed out earlier, modernity itself is a myth that has forgotten it is one. So, rather than conceiving of deep culture as a concept or a type of culture, a noun, we approach it as a perceptional and analytical strategy that stands for a particular way of seeing things. It refers to a deeply seated human faculty: mything the world and the self.

“Action!”: Ritual and Art

In premodern societies, myths did not simply circulate as stories, but they were reenacted in rituals, which is well illustrated and discussed by anthropologists and scholars of religion (Cosmopoulos 2015; David 2000; Eliade 1963; LeviStrauss 1980; Rogers 2012; Segal 1990; Turner 1974). There is no myth without an action, without bodily and sensual immersion of the participants of a rite. The ancient Egyptians reenacted the bodily dismemberment of god Osiris and his resurrection as a mummified body in their religious dramatization of the Osiris myth (David 2000, 45). The ancient Greeks reenacted the mother–daughter separation and their reunion in the Demeter-Persephone myth, which was accomplished by a profound psychological and emotional experience (Burkert 1987; Cosmopoulos 2015; Gómez Iglesias 2016; Kellis 2017). “Oral” literature, including myths, fairy tales, prayers, and epic songs, remained an important part of many civilizations and societies, and were sung, recited, and transmitted orally (Goody 2010, 53). Even in literate cultures, written texts such as Homer and the Vedas or the Bible and the Quran are “learned by heart, internalized and reproduced through the spoken word” (Goody 2010, 45). The Christian myth reenacts the Last Supper, the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ and accompanied by the recitation of the Bible (Tiaynen-Qadir 2020). Such religious rituals and feasts have often evoked a sense of ecstasy and going beyond the bound self (Adams 2004; Cosmopoulos 2015; Gómez Iglesias 2016; Hayden 2014; Twiss 2008). Many such rituals dealt with the mysteries of birth, death, and rebirth, and their purpose was to organize a truly shattering experience that leads to collective and individual transformation. Rituals were to organize what anthropologist Victor Turner calls a liminal state, a state of in-betweenness, deriving from the Latin limen for a threshold. Such liminality “accompanies every change of state or social position, or certain points in age” (Turner 1974, 231): initiation and transition from boyhood to manhood, getting married or moving to a new country. In so-called transition rites, the novice has to go through the stages of separation, margin, and finally reaggregation. Separation means leaving the position of the known, an earlier social status leading to the liminal state of

“outsiderness,” beyond the social structure and cultural identifiers. The liminal stage of trials and uncertainty is followed by the stage of reaggregation, when the “ritual subject” reenters social structures with a transformed social status (this notion of liminality was reinterpreted in the context of migration studies and transnational anthropology in relation to unsettling experiences of migration (e.g., Eduardo and Murcia 2019). However, for Turner, the liminal state in the ritual is more than a transition of a new social position; it is a shattering, psychological, and spiritual experience, and a symbolic action. This psychological in-betweenness allows for the state as “being in a tunnel,” pointing to its hidden nature and mysterious darkness: “masked figures, representing gods, ancestors, or chthonic powers may appear to the novices or neophytes in grotesque, monstrous, or beautiful forms […] these strange and sacred habitants of liminality” (Turner 1974, 239). This darkness is often equated with a symbolic death. Just as the daughter has to die socially to become a wife through a bridal ritual, so is the soul has to part with comforting familiarity and experience symbolic death to achieve a qualitatively new state. The state of liminality triggers what Jungian and post-Jungians refer to as an individuation process that signifies a process of transformation, a series of metamorphoses and psychological maturing, recognition of the plurality of the psyche, and uniting its different, disintegrated parts into a complete, whole self (Bly and Woodman 1998; Galipeau 2013; Hillman 1983; Jung 1968; Romanyshyn 2021; von Franz 1980). While the ego is at the center of personality until 32–38 years old, “the heroic within the self” or ego must be “sacrificed” to enable the richness of the personality in the second half of life (Galipeau 2013). Dante’s journey metaphorically evokes this complex process of transformation, reconciling the irreconcilable parts of the self and leading to integration of Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso in the totality of the experience of the soul (Dehing and Dehing 1992). Thus, in everyday life, the process of individuation is triggered by a certain life-altering situation and stages: loss, divorce, illness, puberty age, and mid-life crisis. In myth and contemporary cinema, this is the time when a hero or a heroine crosses the first threshold, “encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage” and when the trials begin (Campbell 2004, 227; Vogler 2007). In modern popular culture, films offer some sort of reenactment of a myth. Films invent and project another reality, and at the same time require participation: “films do not merely appear on a screen; rather, they only exist in any real sense

as far as they are watched, becoming part of the fabric of our life” (Plate 2003, 5). Shooting of every scene in a movie literally begins with “Action!.” Many fantasy movies operate and create universes of their own with reenactments, toys, books, relics, objects, comics, and social media forums that again require action and participation on the part of their followers. Modern cinema shares some qualities with “imagistic, participatory, performative, and world-creating” qualities of religion (Plate 2003, 2). At the same time, on the margins of modernity, there are sites of lived religion as myth-making that aim to organize an encounter with the divine (Boylston 2017; Kupari 2016; B. Meyer 2008; Qadir and Tiaynen-Qadir 2018; Tiaynen-Qadir 2020). According to Turner, some individuals would find themselves more or less permanently outside comfortable social structures, sometimes choosing not to arrive at any final stable resolution of their ambiguity: in various cultures, these could be shamans, diviners, mediums, priests, ascetics, and hippies. Artists, writers, and philosophers may choose to remain at the state of liminality that facilitates seeing reality in poetic, mythic ways. This is why perhaps art has been traditionally a reservoir of various symbolic expressions. It is in the art that we find numerous mythical expressions, and it is the art that has always facilitated the reenactment of a myth: art of images, art of reciting, art of singing, art of dancing, and art of burning candles or fire (Florensky 2002; Turner 1974). In the words of anthropologist Michael Jackson, art is linked to “storytelling, play, dreaming and ritual […] working out vital relationships between inner desires and external determinants” (Jackson 2016, 3). Indeed, we see art everywhere, in popular culture and imagination, including cinema, music, books, oral poetry, religion, epic songs, visual and performing arts, street, art, indigenous art, and any objects created by imaginative artists and craftsmen of the past and present (Gell 1998, 3). Anthropological and material religion research illustrated that not only art-makers hold agency in the creation of art, but viewers, participants, and listeners are actively engaging with art, thereby, altering its life and perception (Gell 1998; B. Meyer and Verrips 2008; Morgan 2005). Creating art and participating in art is a ritual in itself, an action par excellence (Jackson 2016). For Jung and depth psychologists, writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, weaving, music, and dancing are therapeutic rituals as they trigger “active imagination” of an individual (Jung and Chodorow 1997, 33). Drama and theater can be seen as a ritual that attempts at bringing together the sacred

and the secular (Goody 2010, 51). Theater, drama, dreaming, singing, painting and contemplation of a painting, writing, reading, participating in a religious rite, making movies, and watching movies, all can be seen as the domain of art and rituals of modernity that evolve around ever-present mythical themes and symbols. These rituals bind art and action together, making myths and symbols of modernity.

Symbol

What is behind this moving power of myths and rituals? We argue it is because they organize a symbolic perception of reality: in other words, they point to the mysteries behind the literal object (Qadir and Tiaynen-Qadir 2016a). Whether these are ritualistic items of the African Ndembu universe that channel hate, fear, affection, and grief (Turner 1991, 43), the hiera in ancient Greek Eleusinian mysteries (Cosmopoulos 2015) or Moses’ tablets in the Orthodox Ethiopian Church (Boylston 2017), these are objects that point beyond their literal signifieds. Bones, tops, balls, tambourines, apples, mirrors, fans, woolly fleece, wine, and bread become symbols, “storage bins” of information, connecting to mythologies, cosmologies, values and cultural axioms, where a society’s “deep knowledge” is being transmitted (Turner 1974, 239). And it is the faculty of imagination that makes humans experience such things as symbols. The imagination has been a central feature in phenomenology from Kant on (Warnock 1976), and scholarly consensus ascribes it two faculties: that of creating or producing, and that of perceiving or reproducing. That is, what we see depends on how we see it, and the way we see is primarily symbolic. The “poetic basis of the mind” means that people perceive or grasp reality through images or, more properly, through symbols (Cobb 1992; Hillman 1975, xi; Hollis 2000; Tacey 2019). People perceive reality in the language of symbols and the imagination uses these symbols to construct meaning. Now for many literary theorists, symbols are defined by their multivalence (e.g., Damrosch Jr. 1981; Tacey 2019). What distinguishes a symbol from a sign is precisely that the latter only stands analogically for one other thing (one type of stick figure on a toilet door for a man, another for a woman, etc.), while a symbol can signify many things. A sign is there merely to “remind the viewer of a concept” (Spretnak 2004, 222) but a symbol points in many directions. This is not simply a complication but rather necessary to make multivalent references. Henry Corbin ([1969] 1997, 14) put it this way: “The symbol […] is the only means of saying something that cannot be apprehended in any other way; a symbol is never ‘explained’ once and for all, but must be deciphered over and over again.” Phenomenologists (like Gadamer, Ricoeur, or Tillich) note that a

symbol points beyond itself while containing meaning within itself (Gadamer 1987). One important implication of this is that a symbol is an inexhaustible source for interpretation. It does not signify a particular signified, but rather the signified is never reached: it is an element in an endless process of signification (Damrosch Jr. 1981, 67). Of course, this process of signification moves between conceptualization and image. A symbol must be interpreted in language although such interpretation is always incomplete and inadequate, leading to further interpretation and so on (Sperber 1975). So, a myth—as a loose narrative organized in symbols—is always accompanied by a mythology, a societal vessel in which the myths are allowed to make inner sense. Of course, this is just a specification of the broader anthropological notion of culture as patterns that provide the basis for making sense of the world. This is also what Jung was getting at with his concept of a “collective unconscious” that provides a common template for people to process reality symbolically (e.g., Jung 1968; see also Jung [1943] 2014, CW 7,¶492). For Jung, a “collective unconscious” is part of each person’s unconscious that is shared across all humanity. Turner contemplated this sharing through “root paradigms” (Turner 1974, 15). Existential anthropologist Michael Jackson talks of a “sense of a common humanity, abiding over many millennia, findings expressions in diverse forms of art and transcending radical cultural differences” (Jackson 2016, 15). Such research has meticulously probed symbols and the symbolic dimension of life and draws our attention to the human perception of reality through images, symbols, and myths shared across cultures and times. Another implication of the symbol’s contiguity with what it signifies is that a symbol could not be expressed in any other way. A sign may be replaced for reasons of expediency or by cultural consensus (this stick figure rather than that stick figure on the door), and this would cost nothing to the signification: people would just read the new sign in the same way. But a symbol participates in the reality it signifies. It cannot be replaced without irreparably damaging the signification, or the “mystery” it points to. For instance, the sun symbolizes light, revelation, energy, etc., and it is difficult to imagine that cultural consensus will now assign that role to Venus (Damrosch Jr. 1981). Whether a symbol is seen as being too deeply embedded in cultural consciousness to replace, or whether it is “hardwired” into the cultural unconscious, either way it cannot be readily exchanged: the mysteries it points to are only accessible through that

symbol. Jung put it nicely when he noted, “No genius has ever sat down with a pen or a brush in his hand and said: ‘Now I am going to invent a symbol’” (Jung 1968, 41). Quite the opposite. Paraphrasing science fiction and fantasy writer Gene Wolfe, symbols “invent,” make, and move us. In this book, we take this further to identify a depth dimension to symbolic perception, the work it does in people’s lives, and the societal formations that can elicit or hinder this depth work. Importantly, symbols are woven into mythical narratives, and thereby erupt into popular culture to compensate for some missing transformations or to reaffirm some important patterns. A third implication of symbolic connection to its signified is that no symbol should be taken purely literally. Singular, literal interpretation of any symbol is an insistence on one-sidedness of signification in the face of humanity’s inherent plurality. Hillman (1975, 174) puts it as a rule: “Remember: the enemy is the literal, and the literal is not the concrete flesh but negligence of the vision that concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors.” It is not that any symbol, like the sun or the chalice, is not a literal object. Of course it is that as well, but the literal reading is also an entry into symbolic perception, for instance, of the revelatory sun in Blake’s poetry (Damrosch Jr. 1981) or of the enfolding chalice in feminist theology (Eisler 1987). Uncanny, eerie images are symbols par excellence as they make us pause and reflect beyond the literal (Royle 2003). The key is not just that anything can be a symbol, but that everything is a symbol; or rather, everything, event, or person can be read symbolically in addition to its literal facticity. Not doing so is a literalist mistake. The hero myth is not only a story but the hero is a symbol for consciousness and rational, powerful ego. The mighty goddesses represent different aspects of the symbolic, archetypal feminine, representing multiplicity, “many-sidedness of human nature,” and “soul-making” (Hillman 1975, xiv; Bolen 2009; Downing 1994; Woodman and Dickson 1996). The emphasis on symbols distinguishes Jung and post-Jungians from Freud and those following him (Dehing and Dehing 1992). While the latter seek significance in the “language” of the unconscious, the former seek it in primordial images that cannot be reduced to concepts, “because the image is the primary psychological datum” (Hillman 1983, 9). The imaginal is, crucially, “personified,” leading to the notion of “archetype” as an essential building block for Jung, Hillman, and others. The complexity of archetypes and their fundamental challenge to our naturalized, Cartesian way of conceptualizing

things defy direct capture. Like “art,” “society,” “well-being,” etc., archetypes cannot be completely circumscribed or defined yet they are still used. Hillman (1975, xiii) discusses the term “archetypes” by elaborating the ways in which archetypes work rather than what they are:

Let us then imagine archetypes as the deepest patterns of psychic functioning, the roots of the soul governing the perspectives we have of ourselves and the world. They are axiomatic, self-evident images to which psychic life and our theories about it ever return. They are similar to other axiomatic first principles, the models or paradigms, that we find in other fields.

For Hillman, as for Jung, archetypes are autonomous to the extent that individuals do not fantasize or imagine them. We are, rather, living them, or experiencing the world through them like instincts, similar to Kantian categories of perception like space.¹ Indeed, “All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes” (Jung [1948] 2014, CW 8, ¶342). This is not so radical a proposition as it may first seem. Since the constructionist turn in social theory, it has become a truism to state that how people perceive reality depends on their vantage point. Most social constructionism tends to reduce that vantage point to more “real” sociological factors such as gender, class, or ethnicity. However, post-Jungians stress the importance of psychological factors that shape how people perceive reality. Just as gender, class, or ethnicity do not exist in the sense that we can touch them but nor are they simply fantasized, so archetypes do not “exist” like tables and chairs but nor are they manufactured by humans. Archetypes, in this view, are received more than produced, descending from what Corbin (1964) calls the “imaginal” (mundus imaginalis) rather than being abstracted up from human “imagination.” Both Jung and Corbin emphasize the importance of “active imagination” in apprehending archetypal symbols, but point to different aspects of it. For Jung and post-Jungians, “active imagination” is a healing, exploratory inner journey of individuation, recognition of how individual emotions and reactions are rooted in the unconscious, archetypal reality (Jung and Chodorow 1997). It is a psychological work with different structures and functions of the psyche: the

shadow, the syzygy (anima and animus), the persona, the ego, and the self. For Corbin, as a scholar of Persian and Arabic Sufism, “active imagination” is a mean to access the supersensible, intermediary, and intermediate worlds, the imaginal realm or the world of the image, beyond the physical universes (Corbin 1964, 5). Corbin writes that “active imagination” is “the mirror par excellence, the epiphanic place for the Images of the archetypal world” (Corbin 1964, 7). Crucial to both perspectives is that both allude to a deep culture place of archetypal images. Archetypal symbols that point to these images are ubiquitous: they are present all around us in nature and contemporary practice yet are typically perceived only in their literal representation.

Statement

With this framework of myths, popular culture, ritual action, and symbol, we put together the theory of deep culture. We describe how complex symbols such as those in ancient myths, religions, or modern popular culture should be seen as (1) multivalent, (2) irreplaceable, (3) collective to the extent that they carry significance across cultures and times, and (4) pointing to interiority or inner transformation, often as compensation or as affirmation. Moreover, the most popular and common symbols are (5) not fantasized by individuals from their subjectivity but are rather “grasped” or intuited (6). Symbols are manifest in popular culture yet simultaneously hidden so that their significance becomes apparent only with appropriate conceptual lenses, which carries signification beyond the literal object itself. Lastly (7), art and rituals have historically and culturally been societal vessels generating the space of liminality that discloses the depth of symbols. Taken together, these propositions constitute a framework for understanding cultural representations through “deep culture,” as we illustrate throughout this book.

Method

Our methodological approach is broadly anthropological, “humanity unsliced” as anthropologist Tim Ingold defines it (Ingold 2018, 118). As Turner puts it: humankind is “one in essence though manifold in expression, creative and not merely adaptive” its manifoldness (1974, 18). “The task of anthropology,” Ingold reminds us, “is to focus on the entwinement of aspects of life that might otherwise be apportioned between different disciplines for separate study” (2018, 118). Thus, we align with an anthropological tradition that encourages going beyond the disciplinary boundaries in pursuit of an extended anthropological inquiry into human condition across time and space, to “live more comfortably in those territories where the masters of human thought and art have long been dwelling” (Turner 1974, 18; Gupta and Ferguson 1997; Ingold 2018; Jackson 2016; Marcus 2009). As students of culture, we join the conversation with scholars of religion, myth, depth psychology, literature, and history. Our own disciplinary background in sociocultural anthropology, sociology and history and earlier research into archetypal symbols, lived religion, transnational anthropology, therapy cultures, and globalization enable this interdisciplinary conversation. Our approach is akin to a multisited ethnography in that we make a methodological shift by approaching symbols and myths as an object of research inquiry and follow them across strategic historical and cultural locations (Falzon 2009; Hannerz 2010; Marcus 1998, 2009). We operate with an extended notion of the field that is defined by our research design and purpose to illustrate how the deep culture concept may yield a different understanding of who we are as individuals and society (Gupta and Ferguson 1997). Our field of inquiry includes ancient texts, oral poetry and literary works, liturgical texts and Sufi poetry, art works and religious images, and modern films. Our cultural geography includes modern Western context, Ancient Mesopotamia and Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and Italian Renaissance, Sufi poetry and Finnish Karelian mythology, as well as lived religion of Islam and Eastern Christianity. There are obviously limitations to how many cultural locations and sites can be included in the analysis. Our purpose is not to represent the entire diversity of human

experiences and cultures, but to illustrate how the deep culture concept enables a new symbolic perspective to study different cultures and humankind in its manifoldness. While we identify popular culture broadly, we focus here on the Western cinematic expressions, one of the most powerful media that both ensure the continuation of older myths, even as it alters them. Films are both easily relatable and widely spread, as we noted in the opening. Of course, this is culturally and geographically restricted, but our point is that the deep culture theory’s elements are invariant and so applicable beyond such film expressions. In Chapter 5, we do explore religious and political dimensions of life as mythical and hence open to analysis by way of deep culture. However, this is more in the way of demonstrating the utility of the theory beyond film studies. Far more research is needed on this agenda to fulfill this potential.

Structure of the Book

The book proceeds as follows. Chapter 2 discusses the hero myth, unpacking the hero as a symbol that unfolds through a mythic narrative or mytho-logos and carries meaning for inner transformation. We revisit Campbell’s research on the hero myth ([1949] 2004), exploring its classical variations in the figures of Odysseus and Psyche. The chapter moves then to Vogler’s journey ([1992] 2007) and modern heroes and heroines: Neo, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, Skywalkers, Katneese Everdeen, Superman, and Spiderman. We illustrate that the hero symbol is central to our individual and societal development, but many modern heroes do not move through a full archetypal cycle, such as dying or giving up their superpowers, thus stalling the mythic narrative and hence stunting individual and social maturity. Chapter 3 on the uncanny shows how symbols not only point to an inner transformation but are intuitively grasped and enacted in popular culture and rituals. We outline Freud’s and Jung’s study on the uncanny and Nicholas Royle’s (2003) poststructuralist coverage of the concept. The chapter discusses how strange beasts, scary demons, and ghosts shatter our literal perception of reality and move us beyond the bound self. Exploring the individual and societal function of archaic monsters, the chapter moves on discussing the uncanny theme of body mutilation in the Osiris and Dionysus myths, as well as how the uncanny blood and wine symbolism has been lived out in ancient myths and vernacular Eastern Christianity and South Asian Islam. We illustrate how the modern uncanny is expressed in ghostly and alien technologies and argue that the modern uncanny at times lacks a transformative depth, descending into the stories of sheer terror for its own sake. Chapter 4 moves on discussing the feminine to illustrate that the symbol is inherently multivalent. We combine Neumann’s seminal study on the archetypal feminine (Neumann [1955] 1974) with post-Jungian feminist research to emphasize that the feminine as a personified symbol stands for the polyvalent ambiguity of the self. We explore the feminine in prehistory, ancient myths, religions, and contemporary examples from cinema. We unpack one of the most powerful feminine symbols of Medusa Gorgon and address the unity in

multiplicity of the symbolic feminine in the stories of Ancient Greek Demeter and Persephone, as well as Marian iconography. We illustrate how the depth and multiplicity of the female figures were disclosed through a mystery religion, and how they challenge our modern thinking of the self in singular and unitary terms. We focus on the best modern, mythic narratives that incorporate the complexity and ambiguity of the symbolic feminine and the self. Chapter 5 moves on to show that mythic narratives don’t have to be “fictional” and narratives of science, politics, and the like can all be analyzed with the lens of deep culture. It means that much more of the world around us is susceptible to analysis by way of the deep culture theory than might be originally assumed. While the chapter evokes some examples from real politik to discuss religious and political fundamentalisms, its prime focus is on exploring wide-ranging applications of the deep culture for interreligious dialogue on the basis of symbols. We analyze a particularly evocative piece of religious symbolism, the veil, focusing on the images of Mona Lisa and Mary. The final section in the chapter concludes the book, outlining further avenues for theoretical and empirical development of the theory of deep culture.

1In one of his last works, Jung (1968, 58) wrote: “What we properly call instincts are physiological urges, and are perceived by the senses. But at the same time they also manifest themselves in fantasies and often reveal their presence only by symbolic images. These manifestations are what I call archetypes.”

Chapter 2

COMPLEX TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE SELF: THE HERO AS A SYMBOL

In this chapter, we move to our exploration of how the deep culture theory can be used to analyze the hero as a symbol in contemporary popular culture. The hero myth was first ever recorded in human history as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. It is perhaps the most widespread, recognizable symbolic mytheme and has been extensively employed in contemporary Hollywood screenwriting. Indeed, the hero myth has become the basis for countless books and famous Hollywood adventure movies, including Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Matrix, Hunger Games, and Avengers. Yet, depictions of the hero’s journey in Hollywood and elsewhere tend to be rather uniform and truncated. Moreover, understandings or analyses of the hero’s journey are often disconnected from ordinary, “lived experience.” This is typically because while the hero’s journey may be narrated to include symbolic elements, the hero him- or herself is often not recognized as a symbol and therefore as neither complex nor relevant. In fact, the hero is not just an element in a story that encodes other symbols, which is how the hero’s journey tends to be viewed. Rather, the hero him- or herself is also a symbol, and was always enfolded in a mytho-logos, or logic, within which the hero’s journey carried meaning for inner transformation. Such a logos was well understood in the journey of the hero as a rite of passage in many cultures documented by anthropologists. And, we argue, this logos was also understood as the way to make sense of fictionalized hero myths in antiquity, such as Odysseus’ epic journey home. However, modern re-tellings of the hero story are typically not accompanied by a manual, as it were, that tells us how they fit symbolically into our lives. Using the theory of deep culture, in this chapter we recover some of the elements of the logic enfolding the hero as a symbol, concentrating on two aspects in particular: the hero symbol’s multivalent complexity, and its role in inner transformations. From this perspective, we connect the hero as a symbol to everyday life, which was the

function of ritualized practices in traditional cultures. One point to note here is that storytelling is an important venue where the hero as a symbol gets to work on audiences, while related images like paintings reinforce the story. However, the hero can also be recognized as a symbol in other venues, for instance in political narratives. After all, “actual” events in politics or history are, at the core, stories narrated by someone to someone else and, as such, contain narrative elements. From a deep culture perspective, we recognize that significant narratives are mythical, meaning not that they are false but that they incorporate a mythic structure which, almost by necessity, includes the hero as a symbolic element. The hero as an ever-present symbol in narratives of “actual” events is affixed to certain individuals by commentators or sometimes by those individuals themselves. Such symbolic accretion is not necessarily intentional; it reflects what Jung termed as expressions of archetypal imperatives. It is important to recognize the hero’s symbolic role in nonfictional mythic narratives such as politics. For the moment, our focus in this chapter is on the hero as a symbol in fictionalized myths. In the first section, we describe the mythological elements of the hero’s journey including some classical variants, based on recent research and Joseph Campbell’s seminal “Hero with a Thousand Faces” ([1949] 2004). The section spotlights the features of hero myths that have been downplayed in modern film interpretations: the complexity and cyclical nature of hero myths and the many trajectories that the hero journey may take. We analyze the hero myth as an archetypal story and the hero as a multivalent, irreplaceable symbol that points to transformation of the self. In the second section, we discuss the prototypical hero myth of Odysseus and the Psyche heroine myth, pointing out similar elements from other hero myths. Our focus is on the complexity of the hero as a symbol, on the hero’s irreplaceability, and the classical end of the hero’s journey in symbolic death/ servitude and rebirth. The third section discusses these elements as the basis for the modern hero journey popularized by screenwriter Christopher Vogler (2007). We identify variations of the hero journey in modern filmmaking—such as Neo in The Matrix, Luke in Star Wars, Frodo in Lord of the Rings, Katniss Everdeen from Hunger Games and Rey from the latest Star Wars trilogy. The concluding, fourth, section further discusses continuities and ruptures in the modern hero myth compared with the classic hero. In particular, we describe how the hero symbol made sense within mythology, disclosed through art and action or

ritualized practice, and to what degree modern myths fulfill this function. We argue that the hero is a complex symbol embedded in a mythical narrative and enacted in a ritual. Others have recognized the importance of the ritual and enactment but have not discussed it further in details. The deep culture theory allows us to unpack the hero as a multivalent, archetypal symbol, expressed in ancient myths, rites, and modern popular culture, which points to interiority of transformation.

Revisiting Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Human fascination with myths, legends, and stories dates back to pre-historic times, when such stories were transmitted by oral tradition as part of local mythologies, rites, and religions. With the invention of writing and rise of literate cultures, such stories were often recoded, modified, and complied by literate artists, known and unknown (Goody 2010, 227; Willcock 2014). The first written myth we know of was a hero myth, The Epic of Gilgamesh, from ancient Mesopotamia dating back to 2100 BCE (Kline 2016, 25). Gilgamesh is just one of countless heroes in myths, legends, and fairytales. It is a motif known since time immemorial: Odysseus undertaking a perilous journey home in Greek mythology, Sigurd slaying dragon Fafnir and witch Regin to save the people and marry the maiden Gudrun in Norse mythology, Rustam traveling on a quest to slay beasts and save his king in Persian mythology, among countless others. In other words, the hero archetype has no origin, and has been found everywhere we can see. As the first ever recorded, the hero myth has been studied more than any other. The modern, academic study of hero myths started with the Romantics of the eighteenth century, followed by ethnographers, folklorists, and anthropologists in the nineteenth century (Lincoln 1999; Miller 2014). They collected enormous materials and revived scholarly and public interest in myths. One of the founders of cultural anthropology, Edward Taylor, argued that many hero myths follow a similar pattern: the hero being “exposed at birth” and saved by other humans or animals to become a “national” savior (Segal 1990, vii). Throughout the twentieth century, anthropologists and folklorists attempted at offering their hero journey formulas (Campbell 1960; Dundes 1990; Orlov and Propp 2015; Raglan 1990). Paul Radin mapped the various hero myths among the Winnebago tribe of North America. Joseph Henderson found evidence of all the same cycles in patient’s dreams, sometimes even in one dream. At the same time, Freud and Jung developed psychological, ego-related, explanations of the hero myth (Ahmed 2002a; Segal 1990). This resulted in two distinctive, Freudian and Jungian, approaches to the hero myth in psychology. PostJungians, some pre-occupied with depth psychology, offered further

psychological and cultural interpretations of the hero myth, including in cinema and society (Cheetham 2015; Hillman 1975; Hollis 2000; Kline 2016; Merritt et al. 2018). It can be readily recognized now that many earlier studies on hero myths were motivated by, and supported, the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth-century Europe. In particular, hero myths were appealing to ultra-nationalists and became a powerful tool in creating racial, often brutal, ideologies: Hitler and the Holocaust are the best known examples (Lincoln 1999; Miller 2014, 16), although other incidents of purging may also be found in world history that were justified by heroic narratives. Most scholarly accounts of the hero have concentrated on fictional narratives, and typically draw on Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces. First published in 1949, Campbell’s book is considered to this day a classic study on the hero myth, based on impressive empirical material from Sumerian, Ancient Egyptian, Greek, Native American, Indian, Persian, Chinese, and South Asian traditions, as well as from world religions. It became his most influential book, inspired worldwide research on comparative mythology, and continues to shape contemporary analysis of popular culture and ancient myths (Kline 2016). Of course, Campbell’s work, like any scholarship, is a product of its time. As such, it has been criticized for the misrepresentation of certain cultures or the use of colonial terminologies or theories of language origins that have now been rejected (Ford 1999; Lincoln 1999; Masuzawa 2005). Nevertheless, rereading Campbell in the light of new developments in anthropological theory, postJungian and feminist analysis yields refreshing insights into deep culture theorizing on the hero myth. Our reading of Campbell parallels anthropological research into “transitional rites” or rites of passage, which also show the complexity of this myth. While French anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep initially launched the term “rites of passage,” it is due to the British cultural anthropologist Victor Turner (1974) that the term has been fully adopted into anthropology and then into literary, popular culture, and educational studies (Bobby 1991; DaMatta 2017). Contemporary scholarship explores the rites of passage in different cultures, religions, and historical epochs: Eleusinian mysteries (Cosmopoulos 2015; Kellis 2017), bridal rituals of Ancient Greece (Lissarrague 1994), pre-modern Ingria (Nenola 2002), or Russian North (Kuznetsov and Loginov 2001), coming of age initiations in African communities (Ford 1999; Goody 2010), Christian baptism and

confirmation, or circumcision in Judaism, Islam, and Coptic Christianity (Eller 2007). Baby showers, first word, first date, first kiss, first menstruation, graduation, prom, adventure programs, wedding, first job, retiring, or funerals are modern expressions of the rites of passage (Groot 2010; Merten 2005; Norget 2010). Such rites are seen as vital for growth and development, signifying a transition to a different age, status, phase of life, or mode of existence. Decades of anthropological scholarship reveals very similar inflection points in transitional rites as does Campbell about the core structure of the mythological journey of the hero, and so it is productive to approach Campbell from this perspective. For Campbell, the hero’s journey is represented by three stages of the “rites of passages”: separation, initiation, and return (Campbell 2004, 33). Separation or departure means that a hero must leave the world of the known and familiar in order to enter a mystical land of supernatural forces, full of trials and perils. In the stage of initiation, the hero goes through trials, slaying monsters, and experiences loss or death. They undergo a deep transformation due to the mysterious encounters and hardships of the journey to make a momentous, albeit difficult, return to complete the adventure and bring boons to restore the world: marrying a hard-won maiden, rescuing fellows, or bringing home a world-saving elixir (Campbell 2004, 228). This relatively straightforward outline often conveys an impression of the hero myth as linear progression. However, Campbell’s account of the hero myth, just like anthropological and historical accounts of traditional rites of passage (Cosmopoulos 2015; Goody 2010; Kuznetsov and Loginov 2001; Lissarrague 1994; Turner 1991), in fact has a complex and cyclical dynamic. At any point, the hero’s journey may stall depending on the choice the hero makes. The journey may never start if the hero refuses the call, at the very first step of the stage of separation. Campbell’s mythical historical heroes may respond either eagerly or reluctantly to “the Call to Adventure,” and sometimes only after “the Refusal of the Call,” they are driven into an adventure by forces beyond their control. For those who venture to embark on the journey, unexpected help comes in the next step in the form of “Supernatural Aid” from a protective figure with extraordinary powers: an old lady or old man, a fairy or a witch, a goddess or Virgin, and so on (Campbell 2004, 65). The hero has “crossed the first threshold” and in the third step “encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage” to the quest (Campbell 2004, 227). This last act of the separation stage is also referred to as “The Belly of the Whale,” when the hero is swallowed into

the unknown, passing into the realm of mysterious night. This is an allusion to Biblical Jonah who spends three days and nights in the belly of a big fish and then finally commits to God’s call to save the people of Nineveh. The next, initiation, stage offers further potential developments from the very first step, “the Road of Trials.” The adventure always takes the hero “beyond the veil of the known into the unknown” with mighty powers either threatening and testing the protagonist or providing magical aid. The hero may defeat or pacify such powers, go alive into the kingdom of the underworld, or be slain and descend into death. This is the lowest point of the hero’s fortunes and the highest point of suffering, when he or she “undergoes a supreme ordeal.” At this part of the initiation stage, different ordeals open up multiple options for resolutions: “Meeting with the Goddess” and sacred marriage, encountering “the Temptress” who lures the hero into destruction, “Atonement with the Father,” or enlightenment (“Apotheosis”), signifying “new life, new birth, new knowledge of existence” (Campbell 2004, 149), or indeed some “Ultimate Boon” for society. The Buddha bestows the priceless boon of the knowledge of the eightfold Path upon the people, Jonah rescues the people of Nineveh, and the prince rescues and/or awakens the princess. The final stage of the hero’s journey is that of the return. The task of the return is perhaps even more difficult than the departure. The hero is to return to the ordinary world and deliver the life-transforming trophy. The complexity of earlier stages continues here as well. Some refuse to return, satisfied with their achieved “bliss” and realization in the magical land (“Refusal of the Return”), while others are pursued and forced to flee (“The Magical Flight”) and some receive fabulous “Rescue from Without” at the moment of utmost danger. In any case, at the “crossing of the Return Threshold,” the magical powers acquired by the hero must be left behind, and the transformed hero reemerges stripped, to restore or save the world that was left behind. This step in the return stage often includes some ordinary (not supernatural), yet acclaimed, status for the hero in society, such as a law-giver who delivers magical wisdom back to human society, or as the head of a family whose new marriage produces a child, and so on. Many hero journeys then conclude with “the Death” of the hero, either literal or metaphorical as a blending return into “ordinary” society/self. We suggest that the cyclical nature of the hero myth is represented in two ways in Campbell’s flexible structure of the hero myth. First, the hero makes an actual circle in the journey, in which the initiation and the return stages mirror each

other. Second, the cyclical nature of the hero myth is also metaphorical. The result of the hero journey is that the hero becomes the “Master of the Two Worlds” and gains “Freedom to Live.” These gains come with realization that the two different worlds, “the two kingdoms” between which the hero story operates (the magical one of superpowers and the real one he started from), “are actually one.” Indeed, “here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol” (Campbell 2004, 201). As French surrealist Paul Eluard expresses it: “There is another world, and it is in this one.” Thus, the magical powers continue to operate in the final stage of the adventure: the hero is born back into the world stripped of his powers but thoroughly transformed. This transformation of the hero is an essential component in his complexityfilled cyclical journey. The hero must return from his ordeals significantly transformed, typically because he has carried back the creative, compassionate, and mysterious trophy from the magical realm to the ordered, logical, conscious self and united them. He has refreshed/saved society in this process, but that is only because he himself is also transformed. As Jung’s student, von Franz (2017) noted, the hero both brings salvation to society and also stands, metonymically, for society as a whole; that is, he symbolizes both ego and the self integrated with the ego. In cultural psychological explanations, Campbell is close to Jungians and postJungians, since the hero journey is represented as an “ego-shattering experience,” symbolizing transition from adolescence to adulthood, or the process of maturing. Post-Jungians have amassed a wealth of evidence from therapeutic sessions, global myths, and popular culture to support the idea that the hero myth symbolizes a transformation of the self. This complements anthropological accounts of rites of passage causing inner transformations of young adults. The hero is not symbolized by any other signs but is rather a symbol himself. Instead of holding on to ego, the hero that reaches the end of the journey, “loses it, and yet, through grace, it is returned” (Campbell 2004, 201). Although, for post-Jungians the ego cannot be returned but rather gets dissolved or integrated with other parts of the self in the process of psychological maturing, that is, individuation (Ahmed 2002b; Hillman 1975; Segal 1990). For Jung, individuation “does not shut one out from the world but gathers the world to oneself” (Jung [1948] 2014, CW 8, ¶432). From this psychological perspective, the entire story is to be seen as a drama within the self. The symbolic function requires a mythical narrative to carry and unveil this multilayered symbol.

In addition to cyclicity and transformation, complexity is the hallmark of Campbell’s account of the hero myth. Not only is the hero’s journey varied, and not only is he complex in terms of symbolizing both ego and self, but he also manifests complexity in all aspects. A striking instance of the hero myth is gender complexity, as developed in post-Jungian feminist research (Ahmed 2002b; Bolen 2014; Downing 1994; Spretnak 2004). Although Campbell uses the pronoun “he” when referring to the hero, this is a legacy of the English language tradition shared by writers of his time. In fact, Campbell evokes numerous examples of male and female protagonists embarking on a journey of mythical and historical heroes and heroines. There are also hero stories that involve two parallel but interconnected mythological journeys, that of the hero and the heroine. Furthermore, a main theme in the mystery of initiation for Campbell is the stage of “Apotheosis,” when the enlightened hero transgresses gender duality, admitting to the vision of God that is beyond gender, and discovering that the psychic and symbolic architecture of the self is both male and female. “He” becomes merely a manner of speech (Campbell 2004, 150). A core function of the hero is to “marry” the feminine aspect of the psyche (typically repressed) with the masculine aspect (typically dominant and wayward) and, as postJungians note, this is expressed in visionary art at a societal, archetypal level as much as it is expressed in myths and therapy at a personal level (Bly and Woodman 1998; von Franz 1980). Harmony is the key, in line with post-Jungian claims that the feminine and masculine aspects of the psyche are balanced in the complete self (Ahmed 2002b; Bly and Woodman 1998; Hillman 1983; von Franz 1997; Woodman and Dickson 1996). The androgynous presence in Bodhisattvas, Buddhist enlightened beings, and their symbolic depictions are examples of gender fluid symbolism in which neither side is suppressed. A sensitive reading of Campbell therefore reveals that the hero myth encodes great complexity, including gender fluidity. From a deep cultural perspective, this is akin to arguing that the hero is not just a symbol, but a thoroughly multivalent one, pointing to many potential pathways and trajectories. Moreover, the hero is an irreplaceable symbol, in the sense that his or her role cannot be given to the wise old figure, or senex, like Mentor in Odyssey or Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, or to any other symbolic function. In any significant narrative with a mythical structure, the hero’s role is only for the hero. Campbell’s discussion also connects with anthropological scholarship on rites of passage that shows the critical importance of such narratives for transformation of the

self and society. In the process, though, the hero him- or herself must also be transformed. Going through countless trials and shattering experiences with the help of supernatural powers, the hero must give these up on his return to the ordinary world. Yet, she or he must bring back the trophy from the magical realm, typically signifying compassion (Eros) and a marriage of mysterious creativity with logical order. As such, the hero myth points to the interiority of transformation. At the end, the hero must die to be reborn as transformed self. A hero’s ultimate journey is toward a matured self and the ultimate trial is overcoming the supernatural self. While the hero story is indeed an archetypal monomyth to the extent that it has been shared by most cultures, both oral and literate traditions, it has a thousand of expressions, each with multiple layers and trajectories.

Brains, brawn, and break-up: Odysseus’s transformative return

One of the most well-known hero myths illustrating these features is the mythical journey of Odysseus from Homer’s Odyssey in Ancient Greece. The Odyssey represents one of the first literary works based on oral poetry and written in the sixth century BCE and is a sequel to the epic Iliad Troy. Both used to be attributed to the blind poet Homer, although recent research tends to ascribe authorship of the Odyssey to another brilliant artist or bard due to stylistic differences (Willcock 2014). While the Iliad focuses on the Trojan War, historically relating to the fall of Troy, the Odyssey is about the return journey of the war hero Odysseus, the king of Ithaca (Homer 2002). Odysseus is already one of the prominent hero figures in the Iliad: “much enduring” and “cunning,” he displays “martial prowess,” “courage and resourcefulness,” as well as “wisdom and diplomacy” during the Trojan War (Brown 2014, 550). Gloriously, he embarks on his journey home, a 10-day sea voyage that ends up taking him 10 long years. The story of Odysseus displays, par excellence, the cyclical and complex structure of the hero myth, including the three stages of separation, initiation, and return. His journey starts with separation when he leaves his home and his beautiful wife Penelope for war and glory in Troy. Interestingly, his main trials are not during the war, but on his return. Brilliant and smart, he is loved and protected by the goddess of wisdom, Athena, who inspires, safeguards, protects, and helps him. She is his “Supernatural Aid” whose character is interestingly gender-fluid throughout the poem, as she even takes the forms of males Mentens and Mentor, old friends of Odysseus. Yet, Odysseus’s intelligence does not help much when he is punished for his arrogance (hubris), which turns out to be his main trial. The entire home journey, long, exhausting, full of perils, is because Odysseus, out of sheer curiosity, enters the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, a one-eyed giant. To escape, he blinds Polyphemus and, more importantly, reveals his name purely for the sake of minor glory and fame: “[…] if anyone […] inquire of you concerning your eye and the way it was shamefully blinded, tell him that it was

put out by Odysseus the sacker of cities, son of Laertes, the man who in Ithaka keeps his dwelling” (Od.9.500–505). Polyphemus calls out to his father Poseidon, the mighty god of the sea, to “[…] grant that Odysseus […] never return to his homeland” (Od.9.530–531). Poseidon’s wrath forces Odysseus into a long and perilous adventure (the initiation stage) in a mythical world of lotuseaters and human eaters, mighty gods and goddesses, deceptive female deities and luring Sirens, immortal cattle and sea monsters, as well as Hades’ land of the dead (Brown 2014). The hero’s strength and intelligence are important, but only divine help rescues him from death on multiple occasions. The journey humbles the “much-suffering” Odysseus, and he must enter his home as a stranger, disguised as a beggar (the return stage). Eventually, with difficulties and cunning planning, Odysseus wins his home back with the help of his wife, “prudent” Penelope and son Telemachus. Penelope and Telemachus had their own hero journeys to make in the epic: the son, searching for his father, and the faithful wife, fighting off lawless suitors who wish to marry her and seize the household in the absence of Odysseus. In the end, powerful Athena’s intervention proves to be decisive in Odysseus’s fight with the suitors. Odysseus returns as a transformed, matured man whose longing is for domestic life, a far cry from his fascination with glory that led him into trouble with Poseidon. He eventually dissolves into the roles of family man and king, and stops being a self-important hero of warfare. Indeed, all his pride in his own, much-vaunted cunning disappears in the realization that the gods, not he, are in charge of his destiny in so many small ways. The strength of Odysseys is in brains and in the brawn, but it is the break-up of his ego that truly makes him a hero. Odysseus’ journey turns into an ego-shattering experience that enables his transition from boyish wars and sex masculinity to matured masculinity and the husband–wife syzygy. The voyage of Odysseus is a journey home both in literal and metaphorical senses: “his ‘journey homeward,’ through the perils both out in the world and inside the soul, to peace, harmony, and self-reconciliation” (Walsh and Merill 2002, 2). Other famous hero journeys are closely related to Odysseus, such as the story of Lemminkäinen from the Finnish epic, Kalevala. Similar to Odysseus, Lemminkäinen is full of life and passion but also wanton, arrogant, boastful of his power and knowledge, and short-sighted (Pentikäinen 1999, 35). From leaving his wise mother and hard-won, loving wife to his trials in the magical northern land of Pohjola seeking riches and status, his tale is also one of self-

destructive arrogance. One notable aspect of Odysseus is his return, thoroughly transformed in a way that leads to prosperity in Ithaca. As above, the transformed and transformative return of the hero involves his literal or metaphorical death (to his older self), which is really the whole point of the journey. Another feature of the stories of Odysseus and Lemminkäinen, like those of so many other heroes, is the powerful roles of goddesses and women who protect and safeguard the hero, or lure and destroy him. Heroic action is always paralleled in myth by different facets of the feminine: sometimes as a maiden, representing the pure innocent part of the self to be rescued, sometimes as the controller of wild forces and protectress of treasure, and sometimes as wisdom. The hero is important to the extent that he incorporates the feminine into his tale at the end.

Psyche and the journey of the soul

The feminine was not only a symbolic component in a masculine hero myth, but also featured in many classical hero myths herself. One such myth was the famous love tale of Cupid and Psyche, recorded by Lucius Apuleius in his second century book, “Metamorphoses.” The tale was known centuries earlier in Asia Minor, parts of Europe, and in places in Africa, and has long shaped literature and art (Anderson 2000; Gollnick 1992). This hero myth features a female protagonist, Psyche, the heroine who has to endure trials and hardships to win her “lost lover” (Campbell 2004, 89). Anderson traces its elements in the story of Zeus and Semele and the Hittite myth of Telepinus (2000, 62–67). Cupid and Psyche have been extensively depicted in paintings and sculptures, while their story has been retold in many fashions and mediums of poetry, drama, and opera to this day. Ancients reenacted this myth in rites while moderns relive it in popular arts, fiction, and even science. Scholars of the classics, literature, and psychology have not been able to leave it alone (Hillman 1983, 56). The archetypal nature of the story of the young heroine Psyche continues to appeal and dwell in popular culture, deserving ongoing attention. Psyche is a maiden of such “incomparable beauty” that people call her a “new Venus,” neglecting the ceremonies and images of the true love goddess (quotations and page numbers are from William Adlington’s translation of Apuleius’ text rather than other variations (Apuleius [1639 ed.] 2008). Enraged, Venus (Aphrodite in Greek mythology) sends her mischievous son Cupid (Eros), the god of love and desire, to shoot his magic arrows and make Psyche fall in love with “the most miserable” and “the most crooked” living creature (6). Meanwhile, Psyche’s parents receive unsettling news from the Oracle that their daughter will marry a serpent-like creature of no “human seed” who flies and subdues “each thing with fire flight” (8). Psyche’s marriage ceremony turns into a funeral attire with parents and people of the city weeping about her bitter faith. Contrary to expectations, Psyche finds herself in a marvelous palace, served by

invisible servants (a well-known theme from Beauty and the Beast), and attended by her loving and caring husband at nights. He warns her not to try and see his true shape, and she promises accordingly. Psyche quickly falls in love with her loving but “unknown husband,” and carries their “divine child” in her belly. But Psyche’s two sisters, seeing her “great riches,” “conceived great envy in their hearts” (16), and trick her into breaking her promise. One night, Psyche lights a candle and sees that her husband is, in fact, “the sweetest of all beasts,” Cupid himself. The god had fallen in love with her when his mother had sent him on the earlier mission. Psyche looks at his bow and quiver, pricking herself on his magic arrows and falling even more in love with her divine husband, adding “love upon love” (27). However, in the process, she accidently drops burning oil on her husband. Cupid wakes up, realizes that her promise is broken and his identity revealed, and flies away. Venus receives wounded Cupid and seeks the death of Psyche to avenge her son. This is when Psyche’s trials (initiation) begin. For Campbell, Psyche’s quest for her “lost lover” is one of the best known and charming examples of the “difficult tasks” theme in myths (Campbell 2004, 88). Psyche pleads to the great goddesses Ceres (Greek Demeter) and Juno (Greek Hera) to shelter her against the anger of Venus, but they, although sympathetic to Psyche, refuse to go against the vengeful love goddess. Psyche decides to plead with Venus, but the furious goddess violently dashes the girl’s head upon the ground and asks her servants, Sadness and Sorrow, to torment Psyche. Then, Venus arranges a series of impossible tasks for Psyche as a condition to forgive her. First, she commands her to sort a great quantity of wheat, barley, millet, poppy seed, peas, lentils, and beans: an army of ants come to aid Psyche in this task. Next, Venus tells her to gather the golden fleece of dangerous wild sheep; the young girl is aided by a green reed to safely collect the golden locks left by the sheep in a passage. Now Venus requires her to bring a crystal vessel of water from a spring high on a towering rock, guarded by sleepless dragons. This time “Supernatural Aid” comes from a magical eagle who accomplishes this impossible task. Psyche’s final ordeal is to go to the Hell and bring a box of beauty from the Queen of the Underworld, Proserpina (Greek Persephone). A high tower instructs Psyche how to descend to the underworld, pay the ferryman Charon to take her across the river, and pacify the three-headed dog Cerberus to pass to Proserpina’s chamber where Psyche is to remain humbly seated at the feet of the

great Queen, not to eat anything but “coarse bread” (49). On her return, Psyche is tempted to open the box of supernatural beauty and finds there “infernal and deadly sleep” (Apuleius 2008, 50). By this time Cupid, healed and “more and more in love with Psyche,” escapes from his chamber and find his wife in a deep sleep (50–51). He wipes away the sleep from her face and puts it back in the box. Thus, “Rescue from Without” at this stage of the journey comes from Psyche’s spouse. The couple rushes then to Jupiter (Greek Zeus) for help. The mighty god blesses Cupid’s union with Psyche and tells his daughter Venus to accept the marriage. Jupiter commands Mercury to bring Psyche to the Palace of Heaven where she takes a pot of immortality to be forever reunited with her spouse, Cupid. Psyche’s return journey is the reunion with her husband, which climaxes in a heavenly wedding feast that becomes one of the most beloved “Feast of the Gods” themes in European Renaissance art. The child born of Psyche and Cupid is Pleasure (Latin Voluptas, Greek Hedone). This is what is born out of the “sacred marriage” that harmonizes the feminine and the masculine. Psyche’s journey is not only a hero myth but the tale of “sacred marriage,” another archetypal theme that has been shared across cultures and history in art and action. Post-Jungians explain the archetypal, enduring nature of this myth by its appeal to human psychology: Psyche’s journey is an adventure of the soul.¹ For James Hillman, in his pre-eminent Jungian analysis, this tale is a “fundamental myth of psychological creativity” and a “mystery text of personal transformation” (Hillman 1983, 55–56). Psyche can be translated as “soul” or “breath of life”: indeed, “psychology” is the logos of the soul. Psyche is an archetypal representation of the soul, which is usually depicted as a young maiden, Kore, in Greek mythology. Referring to Jung, James Hillman notes: “Soul is a functional complex of psyche, acting as a mediating personality between the whole psyche, which is mainly unconscious, and the usual ego” (Hillman 1983, 51). She is the innocent soul, beautiful girl, moody, inexperienced, naïve in relations with her sisters, and the goddesses. Psyche is also suicidal as she intends to end her life at several points in her perilous journey but is always magically rescued by the very forces she tries to use for her self-destruction (a river, a tower, etc.). She is partly punished for arrogance due to her association with Venus in the beginning of the tale but more so for her innocence and lack of experience. However, with all her weakness and moodiness, her ultimate strength is in her dedication and desire to be reunited with her lost love. For Hillman, while Venus

represents feminine energy and love in all its configurations, “in whose hands lies both the fluency of images and the lines of beauty,” her son Cupid or Eros represents another type of love, “soul-making,” masculine creative energy (Hillman 1983, 66). Eros connects the personal and individual psyche to something beyond and brings the beyond into personal experience (Hillman 1983, 70). This is why she desires him as much as he desires her. As Psyche proceeds in her journey, she is first overwhelmed and impregnated by the creative love energy that Eros embodies, then she tames the all-embracing but possessive and killing love of Venus (in relation to her son) by surrendering herself to the goddesses’ humiliating service. Toward the end of her journey, Psyche is no longer innocent and naïve but is a soul transformed by her trials and experiences. In her descent to the underworld, the soul attains maturity and beauty inaccessible to the love goddesses herself. The soul becomes truly immortal when reunited in her sacred marriage with Eros. Her transformation is completed as a syzygy, or sacred unification of the masculine and feminine in a single self.

Modern Masks: Vogler’s Journey

The tales of Odysseus and Psyche, among so many others, resonate today, hence their “classical” status. Not just that, but they are retold in modern guises in popular culture and arts. We can occasionally recognize them easily: the story of innocent Cinderella parallels that of Psyche, from the role of stepsisters to the evil stepmother giving mountainous tasks that are completed with external help, to the triumphant return in a marriage with the Prince. But often, we don’t recognize modern stories: the heroes wear modern masks of superheroes. The recognition of archetypal attraction in the hero story was channeled by a Hollywood screenwriter for Disney, Christopher Vogler. Vogler studied Campbell’s book closely and popularized it in a book called “The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structures for Writers” (2007). The book has become a Bible in screenwriting courses, and most science fiction and adventure stories employ his model. While the archetypal structure of modern cinematic myths may have captured the hero’s story anyway, history dictated that it does so via Vogler. Vogler’s insightful rendition of the hero’s journey into 12 stages is now virtually a plot template for Hollywood. The “Ordinary World” (stage 1) is presented in stark contrast with the special world that the hero will enter when they accept their quest. For instance, in Spider-Man, Peter Parker is introduced as a regular, particularly nerdy teen in Queens—quite the opposite of the swooshing crimestopper he becomes. The “Call to Adventure” (stage 2) starts with the initiating incident when the hero is introduced to the challenge or problem that their quest will seek to overcome. In Star Wars, the Call to Adventure for Luke Skywalker comes in the form of Princess Leia’s message, delivered by R2-D2: “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobe. You’re my only hope.” This is followed by the “Refusal of the Call” (stage 3). The hero hesitates to accept the Call to Adventure. This could be because they feel they don’t have the skills to take on the quest or they don’t want to leave the life they know. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is reluctant to go and in the book, he is literally dragged by Gandalf to leave his comfortable chair and join the adventure. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is reluctant to leave his own familiar life in the Shire in order to face the unknown dangers that await him on his journey. In Star Wars, Luke

Skywalker refuses Ben Kenobi’s offer and returns home to look after the farm and machinery. He is forced into the adventure when his foster parents are killed. The refusal of the call to quest is a refusal to grow up and take responsibility, a desire to stay in comfort of home. Stage 4, “Meeting with the Mentor,” takes place when the hero meets a wise, usually older person. In The Matrix, this is where Neo meets Morpheus, who asks him to choose between the red pill and the blue pill. Luke Skywalker and Ben Kenobi, Bilbo and Gandalf, Frodo and Gandalf, Simba and Rafiki, and Superman and Jor-El are other examples. The mentor guides the hero in gaining the supplies and knowledge needed to embark on the adventure. However, the mentor can only go so far with the hero. “Crossing the First Threshold” (stage 5) means that the hero commits wholeheartedly to the adventure and integrates into the special world. In The Lord of the Rings, Frodo surprises everyone on the council in Rivendell that he will take the ring to Mordor. In Spider-Man, Peter crosses the threshold when he catches the thief who killed his Uncle Ben and realizes that he must use his powers to stop crime. There is no turning back at this point. The separation phase ends here. In the “Test, Allies and Enemies” (stage 6), the hero explores the special world, faces trials, and makes friends and enemies along the way. In The Hunger Games, this is when Katniss Everdeen makes allies and enemies in the dangerous arena of the games. In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, this is where Harry adjusts to life in the wizarding world, makes friends with Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, and becomes enemies with Draco Malfoy. In “Approach to the Innermost Cave” (stage 7), the hero draws closer to the center of the story and the special world. Often, this “innermost cave” is where the “object” or “elixir” of the quest is hidden. The object of the quest may be an actual treasure or a symbolic achievement. In Star Wars, Luke and then Rey enter the Dark Side Cave, realizing that the Dark Side is also within them. Superman finds his crystal Fortress of Solitude, where a hologram of his dead father instructs him on his mission. Neo and Trinity gather an arsenal before heading off to rescue Morpheus in The Matrix. The “Ordeal” (stage 8) pushes the hero to the brink of death when they have to face the greatest challenge yet. Through this struggle, the hero experiences death and rebirth (figuratively/literally): Neo battles with the Agents in The Matrix, Simba battles with Scar, Katniss fires at the dome in Catching Fire, and Luke confronts Darth Vader in Star Wars episode V. This is the “boss fight” in video

games. In the Reward, “Seizing the Sword” (stage 9), the hero retrieves the object of the quest. Often at this point the hero has a love scene and reconciles with enemies. After the death of the dragon Smaug, Bilbo and the dwarves are free to help themselves to his treasure in The Hobbit. In the “Road Back” (stage 10), the hero returns to the ordinary world or continues onward to an ultimate destination, but the trials aren’t over yet. The hero is often pursued by a vengeful force that she/he must face. This is where Gollum confronts Frodo at the ledge of the volcano and tries to take the Ring back from him, or when villains unexpectedly resurrect to try to take back the trophy from the hero. In the “Resurrection” (stage 11), the hero emerges from the special world fundamentally changed by their experiences. In The Lion King, Simba learns the truth that it was Scar who orchestrated Mufasa’s death. Simba throws Scar off Pride Rock in order to reclaim his place as king. Superman dies in The Dawn of Justice and resurrects in The Justice League. Neo is killed by Agent Smith in The Matrix, only to resurrect and discover his full powers. Both Frodo Baggins and Bilbo Baggins save the world and change it forever, yet when they return from their heroic journeys, they could not fit in. Eventually, they have to leave with the last of the Elves. As Tolkien writes: “It is true that forever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honor of dwarves, wizards […] but he was no longer quite respectable […] he was in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighborhood to be ‘queer’” (Tolkien 2006, 348). In the final “Return with the Elixir” (stage 12), the hero brings the object of the quest, which he/she uses to better the ordinary world in some way—whether it’s through knowledge, a cure, or some form of protection. In The Matrix, armed with the knowledge of the truth, Neo delivers a message to the Matrix that he will save humanity and spreads into the world through telephone wires. Vogler’s journey remains a classic textbook for screenwriters and has revived the hero myth for modern viewers. However, it has been criticized for its linear representation of the hero journey and its overtly masculine character, which Vogler addresses in the third edition of his book (2007). Some filmmakers have addressed this gender bias by “promoting” female characters and expanding the role of the sacred feminine. In The Hunger Games trilogy, Katniss Everdeen is different from Neo but she also successfully completes the hero cycle. According to Merritt et al., who undertake a fascinating cultural post-Jungian analysis of the hero journey of Katniss Everdeen, she is an archetypal hero and her symbolic role is that of a “redeemer” for all of Panem and the wealthy

Capitol that indulges in the absurdity of its life while jubilantly sending teenagers from 13 districts to fight to the death (2018, 34). She embodies the qualities of Artemis, Greek goddess of hunting, and Amazonian female warrior to restore balance and compassion to a radically unequal and narcissistic society, but once her task is complete, she stops being a hero and returns to her home to become a partner to Peeta and a mother. The hero journey is complete as the ego is dissolved and integrated into a richer personhood, and the balance between the conscious and the unconscious is restored, collectively in Panem and individually in Katniss. In both The Matrix and Hunger Games, the hero journey is also the journey of the soul that balances female and male aspects of the self as a means to victory—Trinity saves and nourishes Neo till his final battle—or as Psyche-like syzygy climax such as with Katniss and Peeta. Another popular female Hollywood hero is Rey, from the last Star Wars trilogy (episodes VII– IX). Episode VII became the highest-grossing movies in North America in the history of cinema and the fourth highest-grossing film worldwide. The task of the hero is to save her country and move to a higher mode of existence which is only enabled by the dissolution of ego. It leads to further transformation and mysteries expressed in other myths. However, in many modern myths, the hero journey remains incomplete. Heroes continue to die and resurrect but their rebirth is not accomplished by any qualitative transformation, although Vogler emphasizes the importance of an indepth and not superficial transformation of the hero, linking it to the death and sacrifice of the ego (2007). Superman’s death in DC Comic’s Dawn of Justice was a truly heroic end but in Justice League he is simply reborn back into exactly the same form he had been in. Superheroes of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Iron man, Captain America, Black Widow, Spider-Man, and others either never die (even symbolically) or die and resurrect without any inner change. The sequels provide interesting, often psychologizing trauma-related backgrounds of heroes but they never complete their hero journeys, instead projecting their unstoppable greatness. There is no transformation, no death that leads to resurrection. In other words, ego never dies. Gender is incorporated, sometimes in female heroes and sometimes as syzygy, but gender fluidity is absent. Often, female heroes simply replace male heroes. While Vogler’s strength and inestimable contribution has been in developing an outline that all hero journeys follow in Hollywood, many modern heroes were not able to incorporate complexity, depth, and diverse trajectories.

Star Wars: Rey and her (incomplete) journey

As an example, Rye’s journey is in many ways built around Vogler’s hero journey of 12 stages and includes more complex elements from Campbell. From being a scavenger living “portion to portion” in dusty Jakku, Rey escapes the distant outworld as well as the clutches of the totalitarian First Order to discover her mysterious origins. She repeatedly refuses the call to embark on her journey, meeting many wise mentors who encourage and train her. In a new feature of the hero journey, Rey encounters Kylo Ren, the complex commander of the First Order, torn between good and evil, representing Rey’s own Dark Side, her shadow figure. With Ren, she crosses the first threshold and enters the “Belly of the Whale” (in Star Killer base), before beginning her “Roads of Trials.” She faces tests, builds allies, and fights her enemies, encountering the “goddess” who grants boons in the form of now-powerful Princess Leia. The shock when she recognizes that the Dark Side is within her as the granddaughter of the evil Emperor of old allows her to take the most heroic of actions: choose to be good and to return to save the world/Galaxy/Self. An intriguing part of the trilogy is that Rey’s journey is tightly interconnected with that of Kylo Ren: she communicates with him though the Force, always trying to save him. At the same time, Ren feels connected to Rey and wants to turn her to the Dark Side to rule the galaxy jointly. The magnetism between Rey and Kylo Ren is palpable and their mutual partaking in each other’s paths brings this trilogy closer to the mythical tales of couples: the tale of Psyche and Cupid, or fairytales like the Princess and the Frog. It mirrors the journey of the soul that seeks to be balanced, male and female, androgynous in its complete syzygy: two become one and only thus are able to defeat ultimate evil. Merritt et al. note: “Heroes are fascinating figures because they represent either the ego or the self—but in truth, they are both” (2018, 34). Rey’s adventures are as much the journey of the hero as the journey of the soul. Her hero task is to save the world by restoring the Republic but also to save her animus, the unconscious side of herself, represented by masculine figure Ren. She heals Ren by restoring him to health after their fight at Exegol. Ben Solo is reborn through the embrace of sacred feminine, his love and his mother, Leia. Indeed, recovered

and brought back to life, he uses his dyadic energy to reawake the sleeping princess Rey, whose life force is depleted in the ultimate fight. The awakening of the sleeping princess, the sleeping soul, is a recurrent theme in myths, folk tales and art forms (Hillman 1983, 55). Rey awakens and the couple shares a long-awaited kiss after which Ren/Ben Solo dies and disappears as Jedi. Rey’s hero journey is complete to the extent that the Dark Side is defeated, the Republic is restored, and she finds her true home as Skywalker Jedi by spirit. However, her moment of grief at the death of Ren/Ben rescuing her is embarrassingly brief, and she joyfully returns to the Rebels’ base to celebrate the victory of the Republic, untransformed and at ease with herself. Recall Psyche who tries to kill herself when parted from Cupid and then embarks on a perilous journey to win her lost lover, or priestess Hero who throws herself in the waters when sees that her love Leander is drowned, or Orpheus who is eternally tortured parted from Eurydice unable to return from the underworld. By contrast, the loss of the beloved after their hard struggle toward dyadic union does not seem to affect Rey very much, as she returns to boyish and independent youth, an embryonic masculine ego. In this respect, she is hardly different from young and boyish Hollywood superheroes that die and resurrect without undergoing any inner transformation, never turning into a humbled, matured, united self. This is why many fans could not help “feeling” that something went wrong with the trilogy ending.

Transformation, Complexity, and Gender: Heroes Ancient and Modern

These few examples show that the hero myth is an archetypal story that resonates with modern audiences as much as it did with the ancients, “paralleling and amplifying motifs experienced in both conscious life and unconscious fantasy” (Merritt et al. 2018, 30). The hero myth runs alongside a young adult’s maturing: child separating from immediate family unit, leaving the home, undergoing trials in a university, fighting monsters (the “man,” their own demons, “bad” peers), developing skills/strength, making allies, then submitting to forces beyond one’s control (ancients used to personify these as gods, but we think of them now as social forces or economic systems or interpersonal relations, something beyond one’s control), and then re-turning toward making a home but transformed with the death of ego and dissolution into the complete, united personality. Thus, the hero archetype mirrors development of the problem-solving ego to enter the unknown social as a competent, integrated individual. This transformative aspect tends to be overlooked when we think of modern myths or modern re-telling of ancient myths. In the classical myth, as above, the heroes return from the magical land to transform their place of origin with some boon, elixir, trophy, or even some wisdom that translates into law-giving. In this process of saving the world, the classical hero is radically transformed. They had to die and be reborn changed, like Lemminkäinen in Pohjola or Psyche in Proserpina’s Underworld, or be physically disfigured like the warrior hero Norse god Odin, who gave up his eye for wisdom. Sometimes the scars are internal but no less profound, such as the tenth-century Persian hero Rostam’s tragic recognition that he had killed his own son. The hero’s death often comes out of hubris, or pride above the gods. All of these signified the hero’s death to their former self and, sometimes, transformed rebirth in utter humility in the face of the gods who control their destiny. The hero must disappear in order to have been a hero. Now, the modern hero’s transformation of society has typically been retained in modern cinematic myths and forms a key component in Vogler’s journey. Superman saves the world (countless times), Luke Skywalker and then Rey save

the Galaxy, Katniss lights a spark of revolution to save the 12 districts, Neo saves what is left of humanity, Frodo saves Middle Earth and the Shire, etc. Most times, the modern hero’s efforts are recognized and celebrated, although sometimes they go unheralded by the majority who do not even know of the mortal danger the hero saved them from. However, the modern hero herself/himself is never as thoroughly transformed, and certainly not in the profound way the classical hero was. In some rare cases, the hero disappears like Frodo Baggins, or dies like Neo. However, these are rare stories that have been consciously written as modern reinventions of hero myths. In general, the hero’s death, transformation and, above all, humility—signifying the dissolution of the ego into a mature, wise personality—is conspicuous by its absence. Indeed, the death of the modern hero is often explicitly figurative not literal, just as the rebirth is not transformative. Superman is reborn in Justice League exactly the same as he had been. Another notable difference between heroes ancient and modern is gender. The classical hero is often masculine, but the masculine doesn’t need to be a man, as the term signifies ego features that need to be developed in all of us and then need to dissolve, like rational problem-solving skills, strength and determination to defeat “monsters,” make allies, recover purity of the soul, etc. The masculine signifies the hero/ego who saves the maiden/soul and thereby society/Self before dying/dissolving into Self. Of course, the stories such as those of Psyche, Demeter and Persephone, Artemis, etc., had their own complex, feminine hero journeys with equally profound lessons. But the key is that ancients understood that gender stands here for certain psychic features, not literally as only for man and woman. This metaphorical understanding is the key to the gender balance in classical hero myths. When the great hero Hercules completes his labors, he inadvertently kills Iphitus and, as punishment, is sent as a slave to Queen Omphale in Asia Minor (Figure 2.1). Roman and Hellenistic stories (such as by Lucian and Tertullian) describe Hercules being debased in the court of this Oriental queen with menial labors, often doing traditionally women’s work and wearing women’s clothing. These features highlight the death of the Herculean “masculine” ego and dissolution into service of the feminine, which ultimately leads to sacred marriage. The androgynous acts of dying and resurrecting godhero Dionysus, the trickster god Hermes, and the Hindu god Ardhanarishvara are further examples of metaphorical gender fluidity in the service of transformation. The hero myth speaks to the “masculine principle” in all of us, but only to the extent that it leads to the feminine and more androgynous understanding of the Self.

On the face of it, modern films seemingly feature more female heroes, although, as we discussed, ancient myths and medieval fairytales also featured many female heroines. More to the point, modern myths seem to largely ignore the porous and fluid, metaphorical understanding of gender in the hero myth, and display none of the complexity. Will Superman doff his cape to put on Lois Lane’s skirt and fetch her morning coffee in the next Justice League movie? Similar gender rigidity is seen in Star Wars, where Luke Skywalker does not yield to his sister Leia at the end of the original trilogy, nor do Rey and Ren form their much-awaited syzygy in which both consciousnesses would merge into one. The trend toward gender rigidity increases over time, with Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel both re-enacting only the youthful, huntress aspect of Artemis/Diana, without any of the complexity of, for instance, her killing of her hunting companion Orion or other heroic admirers. Katniss Everdeen comes closest to a balanced hero’s journey in Hunger Games, albeit without the transformative fluidity of ancient heroes.

Figure 2.1: “Hercules Capturing Cerberus from The Labors of Hercules,” by Hans Sebald Beham (1500–1550), Metropolitan Museum of Art, Credit line: Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1917.

Discussion: Living the Hero

Complexity is a hallmark not just of ancient myths but of the mythology surrounding these myths. As we discussed in Chapter 1, a mythology or, better put, a mythological sense informed classical audiences how to interpret the hero as a symbol in their own life journeys. They could re-live and re-enact the same hero myth time and again because it disclosed metaphorical truths that spoke to a particular aspect of personality: love, care, affection, fear, panic, cunning, strength, and so on. These archetypal impulses cannot be expressed in logically organized narrative, or they lose their force for the individual. Hence, they are mythologized. But they only make sense when they are taken together, and when there is a myth-ology to make sense of the myth. Ancients had not just myths but also mythologies, or imageries of myth. They had a sense of what myths are for, how they fit into social, interpersonal, and psychic life (Eliade 1963; Turner 1974). This does not mean at all that everyone in ancient societies had a highly developed symbolic science of mythology. Rather, this was just part and parcel of what life is and how it should be lived. What we call religion or religious rites today included, for those societies, myths in which the hero was a crucial symbol. The hero was never taken literally but rather symbolically. Only in modern times do we think that ancients literally believed them. Ancient societies, indigenous cultures and cultures with lived religion had selfconscious channels to help people develop this sense of the role of the hero in their lives. The hero myth was reenacted, retold, and relived through rituals and ritualized performances. The Gilgamesh hero myth was traditionally linked to rites and celebrated in religious festivals, songs, and dances (Kline 2016). The hero journeys of Odysseus and Lemminkäinen were performed by bards/singers in their respective contexts, historically distant yet proximate in their practices of myths that were linked to rituals, art, and action of everyday life (Bosley 1999a; Walsh and Merill 2002). In oral tradition and poetry, Lemminkäinen’s journey was also ascribed to other heroes such as Väinämöinen and Ilmarinen: One sings of Väinämöinen what another sings of Ilmarinen and a third of Lemminkäinen (Pentikäinen 1999). Each bard would add a new layer and a personal insight to the story but remain truthful to the myth. The same was true of the joyous annual

festivals and retold stories of the dying and resurrecting hero-god, Dionysus. The liturgical year in Christianity builds around ritualized reenactments of the hero journey of Christ: his birth, stories and parables surrounding his teachings, suffering, death, and rebirth. In Eastern Christianity, the liturgy is a symbolic and actual partaking in the mystery of the Last Supper, Christ’s self-sacrifice, death, and resurrection (McGuckin 2011; Taft 1995). Amongst Shia Muslims, the annual lamentation ceremony to commemorate the deaths of the Prophet’s heroic grandson in battle (matam) is marked by bloody self-flagellation and re-telling of the same symbolic narrative every year. In other words, for the hero to be alive and perform a transformative function, the hero myth had to be repeated and relived in ritual. Rituals made such stories personally significant and bodily relatable. Such repetition did not reproduce the same story over and over again but gradually disclosed its symbolic depth, enabling different experiences or insights. As famously pointed out by postructuralists, the same is never quite the same: it is always different. This is reminiscent of modern people having a habit of watching their favorite movies over and over again, which organizes an experience of participating in it and reliving it to a certain degree (Plate 2003). Comics, forums, toys, games, reenactments organized around major fantasy movies also add to experiencing these myths as a repeated action, as ritual. Yet the modern culture does not allow for the hero myth to be relived fully. This is partly due to the often-distorted nature of the modern hero. However, the main reason is in the very nature of modernity and its placement of ultimate value in innovation, the new, or modos. Repetition is rooted in tradition, which is deemed and doomed as old-fashioned in the modern outlook that craves novelty upon novelty. In the culture of modernity, heroes never die but myths do. The vessels or mythologies that used to channel myths collectively and individually have been shattered, as our imagery of myth now is “falsehood” and so the hero hardly has an accepting audience to do his symbolic work. We see modern myths as “mere” fiction and literalize heroes into cult idols with many yielding superman complexes of predestined and unstoppable greatness. Classical societies could process myths as symbolic “truths.” Ancients, Christian faithful or Hindu devotees could “internalize” the message through ritualized action. The hero myth remains today but its symbolism has become “scattered,” deprived of depth. Moderns are generally not prepared to process it as “truth” but more as psychologically comfortable passing of time. The myth does work

even when the conscious side rejects its psychological and spiritual truth, but the lack of awareness and sense limits its capacity to transform the self and society. Moreover, its many distorted versions within modernity start the transformation but never complete it. We talk about people being in the grip of Anger, Fear, Anxiety, Rage, Love, which are all archetypal emotions that the ancients use to personify as gods. What we see in modernity is the overwhelming presence of the hero myth. The hero never dies, and modern society is stuck in the grip of its unstoppable greatness, which the more “primitive” societies of past saw as simply a prelude to greater mysteries. There are no vessels in modernity for the hero myth to play out fully. We often think of symbols as things, but actually flesh is a “magnificent citadel of metaphors” (Hillman 1975, 174). Just so, hero is a symbol, expressed in narratives of myths and enacted in rituals. For Jung and Campbell, hero stands for masculine ego, even with all its variations. However, as we discussed hero can also stand for other features, like the soul. Psyche is the soul of her own narrative. As we shall discuss in Chapter 4, Artemis, Demeter, Persephone, Athena, Medusa, and other goddesses and female figures have their own heroic story. In this sense, the hero myth is not a monomyth as Campbell claims (2004, 1), but it can crop up in other myths. So, hero is not just a sign for the masculine ego, as has been pointed out. It is a symbol, indicating the ego, but not only. Modern heroes often vary from traditional heroes as a symbol due to this narrow interpretation of the hero as a sign for the masculine ego. While Vogler’s book was vital in crystallizing the stages of a heroic journey, it also made a linear and singular narrative, and the modern storyline and the script perspective have affected modern representations of the hero. Some simply replace masculine ego with a female ego, like Rey in Star Wars and/or derived hero from its essential elements, like death and transformative rebirth. What is missing is that the modern hero is not brought to life in a ritual enactment. People engage, imagine, and re-enact (especially children) with film representations of heroes but not in the same way. The main reason is, as we argue through this book, that there is no more or less conscious sense of a mythological framework within which to situate the hero as a symbol. It was how life was imagined, and this is unpacked in greater depth in the next chapter. The fact that the hero remains ever-present in modern film shows how critical and irreplaceable it is, but also that this myth is not allowed to run its full course and depth and, therefore, fails to lead to maturing transformation of Self and Society.

1For a detailed account on Freudian, Jungian, and post-Jungian interpretations of the Psyche and Cupid myth, see Gollnick (1992).

Chapter 3

THE UNCANNY: MONSTERS, BLOOD, AND OTHER 3:00 A.M. HORRORS

Introduction to the Self

People have always imagined and produced multitudes of weird, eerie, and unrealistic images that often puzzle us and shatter our sensibilities. The Mesopotamian eagle with a lion’s head, Assyrian winged bulls with men’s heads and magnificent beards, the Islamic Buraq with the body of a winged horse and tail of a peacock with the head of a woman, or the Egyptian Sphinx with the body of a lion, head of a woman, and wings of an eagle. These are just some of the many unsettling creatures from ancient cultures, not to mention countless myths that shake us: godly dismemberment in ancient Egypt, mutilation in Norse tales of Odin, or the famous Greek Oedipus marrying his mother and killing his father. Nor are these just ancient tales to scare children. Eerie images and strange stories continue to fascinate and strangely arrest our attention today. The Medusa Gorgon with venomous snakes as her hair, featured in Clash of the Titans and many other movies, in God of War and numerous more videogames, and in even one of today’s most popular tattoos, is a vivid example of the enduring significance of an uneasy symbol that originates in the mists of Greek mythology (discussed in Chapter 4). Contemporary horror movies, as well as cyborgs and aliens in science fiction play similar roles as the strange rites and images of ancient religions. They raise hackles, give goose bumps, and move us to the edges of our seats with images that are ghostly familiar yet strangely out of place. Why do these images and stories unsettle us? If they are just weird or out of place, why do they repeat throughout history and across cultures? In this chapter, we argue that (1) much of this imagery, particularly from ancient cultures, should be seen as uncanny, not as terrifying and (2) the uncanny is symbolic, so that it may be analyzed using the framework of deep culture. Indeed, just as with any symbol that recurs in ancient or modern popular cultures, the uncanny is irreplaceable and its purpose can only be indicated by that symbol and no other. We point out that one such function of the symbolic uncanny is to move us out of “normal” place and our “ordinary” selves to the extent that we are no longer familiar to ourselves. It is a displacing symbol.

Now, certain authors or artists may of course introduce uncanny elements with this precise aim in mind, but it is often difficult to gauge that. Nor is intentionality terribly important to our argument, since the uncanny as a symbol plays its part just as well whether it was intended to or whether it just crept into the artist’s imagination unbidden. So, while Odysseus completes his hero journey, we may well notice that his world is populated by one-eyed giants, bewitching maidens, and all manner of uncanny creatures, who are crucial in his ordeal. They are not heroes themselves. Rather, they are there to test the hero, to make him unfamiliar to himself and his ordinary path (back home in a straight line from Troy), and thereby raise awareness of his inner self. Uncanny images, symbols, creatures, and stories question our own feeling of the self and shatter the nature of ordinary reality. They evoke a flickering sense of the supernatural, strange, ghostly, weird, and mysterious, not quite terrifying or scary but … out of place. Uncanny themes are familiar yet unfamiliar, known yet alien. They may shock and disgust us, yet we are drawn to them. Such is the work of the uncanny, irreplaceable in its shattering effect that turns the gaze from the outer self inward. The uncanny has hardly been scrutinized in scholarship. Therefore, we begin with the section that outlines Freud’s and Jung’s study on the uncanny and Nicholas Royle’s (2003) poststructuralist coverage of the concept, while integrating their insights into our deep culture approach. Some relevant insights from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy are also included, pointing to the uncanny of the everyday. The second section discusses unsettling, uncanny monsters in myth and their counterparts in popular culture today. We include some examples from horror movies and science fiction themes like humanoid robots, as well as techniques like distorted CGI. From a deep culture perspective, the section describes the uncanny as an irreplaceable symbol that is intuitively grasped. The third section underlines other aspects of the uncanny in myth, focusing on the stories of dismemberment, death, and rebirth of Osiris, Dionysus, and Lemminkäinen, and their modern variations. The fourth section moves to an empirical analysis of the uncanny in religion, analyzing the symbolism of blood and wine in Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam. There, we build on by illustrating how the uncanny symbol is disclosed through ritual. Of course, while we touch upon examples from different cultures and historical periods in this chapter, we are fully aware of the limitations of our empirical coverage and the situatedness of the uncanny. The uncanny is always a matter of

perspective, and its function can be seen through the lens of cultural operating systems, as we discuss in the concluding section. Yet, the archetypal nature of symbols means that the cultural and individual significance of the uncanny bears a family resemblance everywhere, frequently pointing to the inadequacy of literalism (Hillman 1983; Qadir and Tiaynen-Qadir 2016b). Indeed, one purpose of the symbolic uncanny, we argue, is to force the participant to move beyond literal readings and into the realm of metaphorical interpretation. The monster is never just a monster, the ghost is never just a ghost, and the cyborg is never just a robot: the uncanniness of the symbol was and is never meant to be taken literally but to point inward to some unsettling and defamiliarized aspect of the self. In that sense, the uncanny is a symbolic gesture to step off the map.

The Uncanny

Literature on the uncanny is not voluminous, yet is star-studded. Those who have tacked the theme are among the leading lights of Western thought, particularly Continental thought. Such prolific thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Derrida have all commented on the word, albeit mostly in passing (Royle 2003, 15). For Marx, the uncanny was related to alienation and a “specter” haunting Europe while for Nietzche, nihilism was an uncanny guest at the doorstep of Europe. Wittgenstein conceived the uncanny as a philosophically significant form of disquiet in the ordinary world, a point we will return to later. Our deep culture perspective draws mainly on the uncanny as theorized by Freud, Jung, and the poststructuralist, Nicholas Royle. Freud, in his famous 1919 essay on The Uncanny, relates the term to an estrangement in the home, something new and unsettling in what is otherwise well known and settled (Freud 2003). He refers to the German “unheimlich” (unhomely) which is the opposite of “heimlich” (homely) but, at the same time, constituted with relation to the modalities of home (Freud 2003, 219). It is “unhomely at the heart of hearth and home” (Royle 2003, 1). Yet, there is further complexity in Freud’s discussion. For Freud, the uncanny is not just a disquieting displacement, but also something hidden inside, and the term should be used for “everything that was intended to remain secret (hidden away) and has come into open” (Freud 2003, 132). So, the uncanny is not just the familiar now unfamiliarized, like parts of two different but familiar animals joined together into an unfamiliar whole. Or, like an automaton mimicking some parts of human behavior but strangely alien in other parts. It is all of that but it is also, for Freud, the outcome of an unveiling or an unhiding of something that was meant to be secret. For the home is not just familiar but also private. The uncanny is a result of bringing into view what was recessed. The uncanny is thus, paradoxically for Freud, already familiar but hidden away and becomes uncanny by being brought out into open view in a manner that is unfamiliar. We shall see what that means in the following empirical discussions. Here, it is important to note that for Freud, the uncanny relates to the feeling that certain

persons, things, situations, experiences, images, and stories evoke in us. On the one hand, as sensation and feeling, the uncanny always relates to an individual experience and perception: “everyone’s relation with the uncanny is in some sense their own and no one else’s” (Royle 2003, 26). What may seem uncanny to one person or a group of people may be entirely unmoving for another. On the other hand, the feeling and perception is archetypal or collective to the extent that it is common and shared across humanity: everybody finds something or the other uncanny. Carl Jung did not devote much attention to the uncanny, nor did the concept attract too many of his followers. A post-Jungian perspective, though, would naturally approach the uncanny as a symbol. For Jung, a symbol’s meaning can never be affixed; yet, it is crucial to our lives since symbols say what cannot be expressed in any other way. As we have discussed earlier, in this view, a symbol is not simply a sign or replacement for saying something differently, like an allegory or simile: it is a fundamental challenge to the literal that resists singular interpretation. The uncanny, in this sense, is an uber-symbol, as it cannot be fully captured or literalized, yet it is still widely used. Deformed natures, half-human and half-animal creatures, Greek Cronus devouring his children, or god and human dismemberment and resurrection, all of these make us pause and reflect beyond the literal. Such stories and symbols cannot be taken literally and, therefore, they haunt the participant and spawn multiple interpretations. Nicholas Royle in his poststructuralist coverage of the concept of the uncanny distinguishes between different shades of the uncanny and situations in which such a feeling may arise. The uncanny can be something frightening, gruesome and terrible, like unnatural death, cannibalism or a foreign body with the self, but it can also be strangely beautiful, bordering on ecstasy, eerily reminding us of something, a déjà vu (Royle 2003, 2). It can be felt in response to dolls and different mechanical objects. It can also mean extreme nostalgia, “homesickness,” the death drive, or it may relate to humor, irony, and laughter. The uncanny unsettles time and space, order and sense, and helps us to move “less dogmatically about ourselves, the society and the future” (Royle 2003, 3). In a similar vein, Russian formalist Victor Shklovsky emphasizes the need to “defamiliarize” [ostrannenie] by making something familiar seem eerie, making all familiarity suspect ([1933] 1991). Familiar eagle and lion become the unfamiliar sphinx, giant man transforms into a cyclops, dog turns into threeheaded Cerberus, snakes into Medusa’s hair, and so on.

What unites these experiences and reactions is the feeling of uncertainty and the fleeting nature of reality that they evoke. The uncanny signifies the crisis of the ordinary and proper. It leads to, or should lead to, a crisis of one’s nature and perception of self, reality, and the world. In other words, such a feeling makes one look inward the self. Therefore, for Martin Heidegger, the uncanny is the primary, fundamental nature of our being in the world: a sense of “out of place” that moves us beyond an inauthentic surface to reach out to our own most “authentic being.” For Heidegger, these moments of the uncanny are the primordial nature of existence. In a remarkable discussion on this strange concept in Heidegger, Withy notes that for Heidegger, being authentically human means being uncanny, since uncanniness not only reveals some secret that must be brought to light, but also an “originary” angst of human existence thrown in the world (Withy 2015). Again, we see that for Heidegger the uncanny is similar to what Freud and Wittgenstein described: a disquieting moment of the unfamiliarized familiar that leads to a revelation of authenticity. Similar ideas about existential angst lie at the heart of the thought of Kierkegaard, Camus, Lacan, and others, who do not define them as “uncanny,” although they are clearly related. An important, if often ignored, addition to this list is the ordinary language philosopher, Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein used the term only twice in his later work, yet “the uncanny is the silent shadow of many of Wittgenstein’s internal conversations” (Bearn 1993, 48). On one occasion, Wittgenstein uses the term in the context of referring to people as automata (PI 420). His point is that the uncanny results from a process of undoing and abstraction from ordinary experience, then reassembling into an unfamiliar form that results in a certain feeling. The uncanny, for Wittgenstein, does not point to something unusual, but to something quite ordinary that has been made too familiar, as it were. It points to a sense of wonder at the everyday, once the everyday is recognized as being wonderful. In other words, Wittgenstein suggests that familiarity numbs our sense of wonder and distorts our true understanding. This might be termed a rather spiritual description, just as when he writes at the end of Tractatus that, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists” (Wittgenstein [1921] 2002, ¶6.44). Wittgenstein draws attention not to the unfamiliarity in the uncanny, but to the process of veiling by the world around us becoming overly familiar. All these, and other, thinkers have shed much light on the familiar at the core of the uncanny and the remarkable at the core of the ordinary. These coupled

insights are vital as we proceed, here, from the ontology of the symbolic uncanny to how it plays this role in popular culture. Our starting point is that the uncanny seeks to move the participant out of routinized literal readings to metaphorical interpretations. The former is all-important in so many domains of human existence. However, the uncanny is that inner sense conveying to us that there is more, indicating that there is a metaphorical aspect beyond literal existence. For instance, consider religious art, which is not often analyzed by these philosophers as uncanny. Yet, religious experience is all about the nonliteral and moving past what many religious traditions call the veil of the world. Indeed, we find that considerable religious imagery is uncanny, making a “phenomenological demand on the viewer that inherently challenges literalist or allegorical readings” (Qadir and Tiaynen-Qadir 2016b). For instance, when Christ is depicted with female breasts in the famous painting hanging in Hospices Lessines (Belgium), it is precisely to de-familiarize him, to unveil him as the nourisher, and thereby draw attention to ourselves as being nourished by more than literal food. When Mary is depicted with three hands growing out of her body, it is not some science fiction flight of fancy, but a tactic to emphasize supernatural powers associated with the Virgin and point to the mystery of the Holy Trinity that she embodies in Eastern Christianity, as we discuss in Chapter 4. Similarly, when St Christopher is depicted in an icon with a donkey’s head, it is to emphasize his sublimate nature that liberates his inner self and shows his symbolic role in carrying the Christ child across the river (Christ chose to ride a donkey when entering Jerusalem on the eve of the Passover; St Christopher chose to become that donkey to denounce his ego and carry the divine). Or, when the Prophet Muhammad is depicted with two left hands (“Charge of the Lion” painting in Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris), it is to point to the importance of the state of receiving revelation in Islam, which lies in the domain of senses and intuition (Qadir and Tiaynen-Qadir 2016b). It is folly to imagine that people believed that men could have heads of donkeys and that some humans had three hands or two left arms. Rather, they believed it to be a psychological and symbolic truth and presented familiar anatomy as unfamiliar in order to unveil the metaphorical truth they wanted to express. As Hillman reminds us, “distortion is at the same time an enhancement and a new clarification, reminding the soul of its mythical existence” (Hillman 1975, 100). Analyses of religious art are just one domain where a post-Jungian perspective on the symbolic uncanny can reveal the depth in popular culture. Indeed, it is

surprising that Jung and those following him did not devote all that much time to the uncanny, given the uncanny is a symbol par excellence. When approaching the uncanny from a relatively neglected, post-Jungian perspective, we argue the theory of deep culture can add to our understanding. From that perspective, the uncanny is (1) inherently multivalent, perhaps more than any other symbol given its strangeness, thus undeniably leading beyond literal readings; (2) irreplaceable in its weirdness and ability to shake us; (3) collective to the extent that uncanny symbols are archetypally shared across humanity, albeit not the same ones; (4) pointing to the interiority of transformation in disclosing what is hidden or suppressed within the self; (5) connected to emotions, sensations, and experiences, and, thus, often grasped or intuited rather than rationally appreciated; (6) vital in popular culture today; and 7) disclosed in art, religion, and rituals of the past and present. In the following sections, we highlight some of these.

Shake Us to Wake Us

Here there be monsters

In ancient culture, the uncanny was channeled through sacred art, myths, and mystery religions. Eerie images, strange stories, and secret rites of initiation were intended, and by all accounts served, to open the self to other dimensions, realities, and experiences (Cosmopoulos 2015; Kellis 2017). In modern culture, horror movies, aliens, and numerous monsters in science fictions and cinema took up this terrain. Modern popular culture has revived many monsters from the mythical past and invented new ones. Fluffy in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter takes up the role of Cerberus, Greek mythical three-headed hound that guards the gates to the Underworld. The beast only had an appetite for living flesh and so would only allow the deceased spirits to pass. The Greek hydra that could grow back its nine heads makes its return in Percy Jackson and the Olympians. We find legendary, octopus-like gigantic sea monsters of Greek and Scandinavian mythologies in Clash of the Titans, Pirates of the Caribbean, Chronicles of Narnia, and Lord of the Rings. In fact, many ancient monsters were inhabitants of the sea and ocean. For Jungians, the ocean often represents the unconscious and monsters personify stand for the destructive forces within the self (Neumann 1974). These monsters are hidden away in the vast sea of the unconscious to the extent that we are often unaware of their existence and, consequently, externalize them. For Freud, the monstrous is “that class of the frightening” that is “in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it through the process of repression” (Freud 2003, 240). In other words, monsters are within the self as energies and emotions that have been blocked or suppressed, possibly as a result of psychological trauma, but which are not recognized as such. For Hillmans, as a post-Jungian, such monsters are personifications of energies that are universal or archetypal and so have a sort of autonomous existence, while the individual psyche taps them, that is, lives out and expresses them (Hillman 1975, 12). In this sense, the uncanny is as important for what it hides/conceals as for what it shows/reveals, and it is this tension that produces a cognitive dissonance. Of course, monsters are all different and may stand for different emotions and

energies. Sea monsters are a special, archaic kind; they are at the very bottom of the unconscious and often indicate primordial energies. In the Finnish Kalevala, a mythical monster of the sea takes the shape of a giant walrus, the “thousand headed” Iku-Turso (Bosley 1999b; Kalevala). His primordial, archaic origins are seen in the stories that he impregnated the Maiden of the Air, who gave birth to the hero Väinämöinen in the creation myth of the Kalevala. In other words, this monster precedes the creation of the world. Iku-Turso rises from the sea and burns a stack of hay to plant an acorn that grows into a giant oak. The tree grows so large that it hides the sun and the moon. Väinämöinen has to cut the tree for the world to emerge and grow. In some Finnish mythology, this monster causes diseases or is even the god of war. The Northern witch Louhi summons IkuTurso to destroy the people of Kalevala and return to her the magic mill Sampo, very much like Davy Jones summons the Kraken to kill Jack Sparrow. However, Väinämöinen grabs Iku-Turso’s ear and makes him promise to go down to the bottom of the sea and never disturb the people again. In the Old Testament, a huge whale swallows the prophet Jonah, which eventually leads to his rebirth and embarking on the journey that had been destined for him (Campbell 2004). In the same manner, Jack Sparrow is swallowed by the Kraken and then brought back to life. Such archaic monsters cannot really be killed, but they inhabit the bottom of the ocean and are sent back there if they dare to return to the surface. This is also how “dancing” Krishna handles the poisonous river snake Kaliya and his mermaid wives, sending them all to Ramanaka Island never to harass people on the Yamuna River again. These archaic monsters are always sleeping a little ways away, ready to be awakened by triggering forces such as life situations, emotions, social cataclysms, or other circumstances. The Sufi poet Rumi tells a story about an arrogant man who captures a frozen, fire-breathing dragon in the mountains. In this case, the individual unconscious, or the unconscious terrain of society, is represented by a vast desert. The man thinks that the dragon is dead and boasts about his discovery, dragging the monster all the way across the desert to Baghdad. There, the monster, nourished by the warmth of the sun, comes to life and kills thousands. This dragon represents a different type of human quality, viz. greed, specifically the desire for wealth. This dragon is always within people, Rumi is suggesting: it is asleep until awakened by the warm sun of “high social status and riches” (Rumi 2010, 74).

Many fairy tales and myths allude to the fire-breathing dragon as that part of the self and society that guards material treasures, always hungry for more, always about to return. In English literature, Smaug in the Hobbit is the best-known depiction, showing how the dragon’s desire for gold corrupts even the heart of the noble warrior, Thorin Oakenshield. The human desire to accumulate wealth beyond any limit is thus obviously as ancient as history, as immortal as the dragon within whom we must kill over and over again. This dragon imprisons our souls, keeping the innocent princess or jewel locked in a tower and about to be devoured. She is the beautiful soul that must be rescued by “the hero with a thousand faces.” Hence, Saint George kills the dragon and rescues the king’s daughter, Russian bogatyr Dobrynya Nikitich slays the multi-headed serpent-dragon Zmei Gorynych and rescues Zabava. Saint Michael and Saint Patrick are also well known for killing dragons. Many of these monsters have many heads, which represent their resilience and power. Like Hercules in his 12 labors, Percy Jackson has difficulties with defeating the Lernaean hydra: in the place of every cut head, two more appear. Monsters may also represent pure evil within and outside us. Ancient, medieval, and indigenous cultures had their own “horror” stories and images that had a role in initiation rites. For instance, the Dzoonokwa of Kwakwaka’wakw mythology (in what is today British Columbia in Canada) is a wild woman who lives in the woods, steals children, places them in a basket on her back, and brings them home to eat. A similar cannibalistic character features in a famous Hansel and Gretel story, and many more variations are found across cultures. Pennywise in It by Stephen King (1986) is a similar character dressed in a clown outfit, an ancient evil in a modern costume. What is important is that with It and other adaptations, a child’s comic character becomes a child-eating terror. Pennywise is both familiar and unrecognizable, paralyzing and killing innocent, child-like parts of the self/society. From a deep culture perspective, in the same way the frightening terror of ancient monsters can be described as uncanny. All of these monsters are somewhat familiar, none is wildly made up. The monsters all include some element of the familiar: fish, octopus, snake, old crone, and so on. Yet, they are “defamiliarized” to emphasize a particular feature (arrogance, greed, killing of innocence, etc.) that is, in turn, unveiled in the process. When we see such monsters in ancient tales, it is thus like reading a signpost: “Caution! Here there be a lesson of some metaphorical evil lurking inside you.” The monster may

personify either individual or societal latent, self-destructive tendencies, waiting to come to life. They may swallow our older selves to give birth to transformation, or have to be warded away just by being watchful. Either way, the uncanny is irreplaceable in its ability to shake and wake us to what lies beneath.

Ghosts and demons: “Please allow me to introduce myself”

In Nikolai Gogol’s nineteenth-century, classic horror story The Vyi, we find an abandoned church in the wealthy Cossack region of rural Ukraine. The neglected church becomes easy prey for witches, demons, and monstrous Vyi, who kill the protagonist, Khoma. Gogol parallels that church with the human soul that, when abandoned, becomes a dwelling place for such monsters (Gogol 1887). His story is one of the first horror classics in world literature and modern culture. Surprisingly little has changed since. Contemporary horror movies continue to evolve around the same theme, which has been brilliantly captured by American poet and novelist Hilda Doolittle: “We are all haunted houses” (Royle 2003, 1). This is one of the archetypal stories of our time, as attested by scholarly literature in, for instance, the Dark Arts Journal and other forums exploring horror stories and movies. Indeed, in cinematic production today, horror movies have become an important space of channeling the uncanny in a modern context. The Conjuring (2013) and other horror movies of that type uncannily remind us that ghosts and monsters reside within the self, often with devastating and unexpected impact. In Conjuring, loving mother Carolyn, possessed by demonic powers, turns into a destructive monster in the blink of an eye, ready to devour her own children. Such energies and emotions are distinctly personified as demons, witches, and ghosts to emphasize that, although they may be within us, they also have their own autonomous existence to the extent that we find it difficult to control them (Hillman 1975, 100). In many ways, horror movies remain the only medium in popular culture that recognizes the independent, autonomous nature of these possessive “beings.” Often featuring themes of demonic possession and exorcism (Exorcist (1973), Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), and Rite (2011)), they de facto portray the invisible, spirit world as real and having direct implications in the world of humans. As pointed out by a recent research project at University of Chester (Gothic heresy: Religious knowledge and experience in horror culture 2021), many of these themes lead not just to terror but also to religiosity. Often, the human realm is presented as a place of an ongoing struggle between God and

Lucifer for human souls, for instance in the movie “Constantine” (2005), based on DC Comic’s Hellblazer. There, Earth Occult detective John Constantine is the main protagonist who has an ability to see and communicate with half-demons and half-angels. Skeptical police detective Angela Dodson doubts the realm of those beings: “I don’t believe in the devil,” to which Constantine replies: “The devil believes in you!” He thus affirms the “reality” of the invisible horror that exists whether one believes it or not, which in a way is the point of the uncanny. One cannot not help but think of the clever casting of this theme in the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the devil,” written in the Devil’s first-person pronoun:

Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste. I’ve been around for a long, long year, Stole many a man’s soul an’ faith.

In Constantine, Angela, recovering her suppressed psychic abilities, soon faces the reality that she had doubted first and helps John in unveiling and defeating the dark plot of Lucifer’s son, Mammon, to claim Earth as his own kingdom. Both Conjuring and Constantine tap into the Catholic worldview presented in modern mythological language and imageries. Many such movies evoke 3:00 a.m. as a time when demonic powers become especially strong. This has a Christian connotation, signifying the reversed time of the death of Jesus Christ on the cross at 3:00 p.m., just as the upside-down crucifix is often portrayed as a demonic sign. Such movies take the story of God’s and Satan’s contest over human souls to the literal extreme to shake and wake us to the presence of the invisible reality within, but also around, us.

Threatening aliens and artificial intelligence

For Nicholas Royle, the uncanny is a “key to understand modernity and postmodernity” with “the ghostliness of machines” prevalent in our era (Royle 2003, 23–24). This is yet another, modern expression of the uncanny in cinema. The role of the uncanny here is to draw attention to how society and self might go wrong relying too heavily on technology and, therefore, machine-like singularity of mind. It is, of course, part of a major trend in science fiction that starts questioning the effects of technological breakthrough and the spread of computers in the mid-1970s. Although Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) was the first to touch on this theme, and the first to be captured by cinema (1910), perhaps Terminator (1984) is now the hallmark movie describing the potential evils of machines. However, The Matrix (1999) is arguably the pre-eminent modern myth that explores the uncanniness of technology, with artificial intelligence taking over and imprisoning humanity. It parallels a modern world with a computergenerated reality in which humans live seemingly fulfilling, satisfactory existence, when in fact their bodies are being used by machines as battery cells to recharge their computers. In The Matrix, the plot is complex as “one uncanny thing leads to another uncanny,” avoiding any categorization (Royle 2003, 13). For example, human bodies in “reality” are plugged to the Matrix in a womblike sac containing water, strongly reminiscent of amniotic fluids that nourish the fetus in a woman’s body. This machine-like mother is what archetypal psychologist Erich Neumann would call a “devouring mother” who suffocates her children in deadly embrace (Neumann 1974, 148). For the ancients, the Terrible Mother aspect of the sacred feminine represented the untamed, destructive forces of nature. For the moderns, the Terrible Mother alludes to the perceived uncontrollable nature of the technological development that enables machines to have human agency. In the “Matrix,” plugged-in humans never leave the deadly womb. The “false mother” erases the difference between pleasure and reality and puts humans in an eternal sleep of complete dependency and isolation from other human beings (Frentz and Rushing 2002, 66). All of this may well feel quite uncanny in relation to modern dependence on

technology or embracing mothers. In other cases, an alien may evoke the growing presence and unpredictable effects of technology on self and society. The theme of extra-terrestrials in popular culture often signals the presence of the threatening Other: Xenomorph in Alien (1979) designed to reproduce by killing humans, It (2017) is really an alien monster feeding on human fear, or a relentless attack by time-warping aliens in Edge of Tomorrow (2014). The ancients told of half-human, halfanimal monsters devouring humans; moderns often assign this role to aliens. Alien (1979, 2017) is an especially uncanny symbol of our time expressed in the mythological language of modern space adventure. In fact, the drama unfolding in the spaceship Nostromo is a drama within the self: the machine-like animal within is set to eradicate all human-like aspects of the self. The work of the symbolic uncanny is to evoke something familiar appearing in a strange context and something strange in a familiar context to shock/shake us. The alien Xenomorph is familiar, as it reminds us of human biology, yet unfamiliar in its metallic and cold, glistening core (Figure 3.1). It enters, grows, and feeds off the human body while killing it. The Alien hints at an apocalyptical future with ghostly technology and artificial intelligence taking over, entering the self and giving birth to a distorted human, Xenomorph. In the eyes of artificial intelligent androids Ash (Alien, 1979) and David (Alien: Covenant, 2017), humanoid biology, animal-like adaptability, and machine-like invincibility make Xenomorph a “perfect organism” that may well eradicate flawed humanity. The movies remind viewers of the biomechanical alien within us transforming humanity into Xenomoroph. It also serves as a metaphor for a singular, one-sided logic of modernity, a “monotheism of consciousness” that is unable to accept difference and accommodate the Other (Ahmed 1994).

Figure 3.1: “Necronom IV,” painting by H. R. Giger (100 × 150 cm, acrylic on paper on wood), 1976. Provided by H. R. Giger Estate.

The theme of threatening technologies and aliens is also well articulated in a post-apocalyptic science fiction horror A Quiet Place (2018) by John Krasinski. There, a family of five is trying to survive in the presence of dominant, blind, extra-terrestrial, machine-like beings that kill everyone who speaks or makes a sound of any kind. However, here the uncanny theme of aliens takes a different cultural reading. Some see the movie as a cultural commentary on the “metaphorical silent” to refer to silenced groups that don’t dare to speak freely for “fear of being heard by the super-sensitive ears of the dark side” (Brody 2018). Krasinki himself repeatedly denied any political sub-text of the movie. However, as anthropologist of art Alfred Gell puts it (among others): “Once the work of art is completed, it has its own agency in circulation and reception in a particular social and cultural context” (1998, 3). Irrespective of what the filmmaker intended, people in different contexts perceived the movie as a political allegory that taps into their experience of being silenced. The alien here is an uncanny reminder of how dominant voices in the self and society threaten the weak. The alien theme in District 9 truly underscores this, making a clear political commentary on negative othering amid racism and xenophobia. Johannesburg, with its obvious histories of apartheid, segregation, and white supremacist policies, was probably a deliberate choice for the movie, where the South African government locks a population of insectoid aliens into an internment camp, District 9. Generally in the case of racism, xenophobia, and Cold War rhetoric, the negative within is projected onto others, whether individuals, groups or nations (Ahmed 1994; Kripal 2020), and the movie reflects one common way in which the uncanny is handled in modern society. Of course, more positive and embracing depictions of the uncanny alien also exist, as in Arrival (2016) by Denis Villeneuve or the recent animated series “Tales of Arcadia” (2016–2018, 2018–2019, 2020) by Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro Gomez. The point is that while the focus of the uncanny is on a process of unveiling the familiar that was hidden away as unfamiliar, there is also an associated process of reinscribing that familiar into consciousness. That

reinscribing may be, broadly speaking, constructive or destructive for the individual or society.

The Uncanny in Myth: Death, Dismemberment, and Rebirth

Uncanny symbols are best disclosed through uncanny stories. Ancient myths were interwoven in a coherent, symbolic narrative that made sense in the mythology of its time but that can also be relatable to us with the appropriate lenses. One such important, archetypal, uncanny theme is that of human dismemberment and resurrection featured in myths, legends, fairy tales, and religions across the world. What are these myths and why are they repeated and retold in stories right through to modern times? In ancient Egyptian mythology, one of the foundational myths tells a story of the god Seth murdering his brother Osiris and cutting his body into 42 pieces and scattering them across the country (representing the 42 provinces of Egypt) (David 2000). Similarly, Greek God Dionysus, son of Zeus, is torn into pieces by the Titans, who then boil and eat him (Kerenyi 2008). “Reckless” Lemminkäinen in the Finnish Kalevala is torn apart into eight pieces by the son of the underworld river, Tuonela (Bosley 1999b). These and so many other stories point to not just death, but a death from which recovery would be considered impossible. Yet, all these gods and heroes come back to life. Determined goddess Isis restores her husband Osiris. She and goddess Nephthys assume the forms of allseeing falcons and fly over Egypt in search of the parts of Osiris (Goelet 2015; Harding 1990). She finds and restores the body of her husband with the help of Thoth, the god of magic, science, and healing, and aided by Anubis, the god of mummification and funerary rituals. Similarly, Zeus destroys the Titans with thunderbolts and forms humans from the ashes. Dionysus, too, is restored to life by his grandmother, the goddess Rhea, from his heart, which the Titans had spared. In the Kalevala, Lemminkäinen’s mother recovers the remains of her son with the help of a rake and, through prayers, reassembles him into a complete man (Figure 3.2). What is interesting is that in the process, all three male figures undergo substantial transformations. Osiris begets a son, Horus, with Isis, who copulates with him as a falcon (or is impregnated by lighting in some versions). Osiris then

becomes the first mummified body and a powerful ruler of the land of the dead, Duat. His son Horus takes the place of the living god of Egypt, the embodiment of the land in the earthly manifestation of the pharaoh. Dionysus becomes a dying and resurrecting god of mystery religions in Ancient Greece and later as Bacchus in Ancient Rome. He is at the heart of rites of mysteries of death and rebirth, especially popular among women, and is accompanied by ecstatic dancing and singing (Cosmopoulos 2015; Kerenyi 2008). After his reassembly, Lemminkäinen is cured of his arrogance and proceeds to other adventures.

Figure 3.2: “Lemminkäinen’s Mother,” painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela (108.5 × 85.5 cm, without frame, tempera on canvas), 1897, Ateneum: Finnish National Gallery.

As a multivalent narrative, myth could also refer to a particular historical phase. For instance, in the case of Egypt, the murder and scattering of the body of Osiris across the land of Egypt could figuratively refer to intermediate periods when the pharaoh was more likely to have lost control over some of the provinces. This chaotic state of warring provinces was personified by the figure of Seth, god of violence and chaos. The restoration of order and unification of the lands of Egypt is personified by restoration of Osiris and return of the lifegiving god in the form of Horus, grounding his rule in Maat, representing order and stability. This discloses societal and contextual relatedness of a myth in each case. All three male figures are restored to life by the determined efforts of female figures: wife, mother, and grandmother; this speaks of the resurrecting role of the sacred feminine. In a deep culture perspective, the uncanny death and even more uncanny coming back to life symbolically point to a perpetual process of renewal and regeneration of psyche and society. In post-Jungian psychology, ego, represented by the male hero, has to die, after which the self is resurrected by the sacred feminine. In a cultural post-Jungian perspective, “today, at the edge of a global human excess that threatens the Osirian dimension of life like never before, we cannot but call on the Isis-wisdom buried within us in order to counter our Sethian propensities, our dismembering narcissistic drives” (Boccassini 2018, 48). The mysteries of death and resurrection become an important constitutional theme in Christianity and Hinduism, in the stories of Christ and Ganesha. Norse myths also tell of Odin’s quest for the secrets of the universe at a price: to gain insight into the future, Odin sacrificed an eye to drink from the magical well of Urd at the base of the Tree of Life, Yggdrasil. To gain the knowledge of the runes, a magical writing system that could give great power to the user, Odin had to stab himself with a spear and hang himself from a tree for nine days and nights, after which he resurrects. All this is to attain the knowledge of the runes

carved into the bark of the sacred tree Yggdrasil, which shapes the fates of humans and gods. Contemporary popular culture translates stories of dismemberment in the language of technology and cyber reality. In Star Wars (2005), Anakin is restored to life as half-machine and half-human by the Dark Side. In contrast to traditional myths, the transformation is reversed as Anakin turns into Darth Vader, his own shadow. In Alita: Battle Angel (2019), directed by Robert Rodriguez, a female cyborg Alita is severely damaged by serial killer Grevishka, literally losing most parts of her body. Dr Dydon Ido restores her into a complete self by transplanting her in a highly advanced Berseker cyborg body. However, while she becomes physically more invincible, we don’t see much transformation in her inner self. The theme of dismemberment and mutilation in popular culture today rarely carries the depth and unification of ancient myths. While beautifully displayed by advanced graphic technologies, these stories hardly un-settle time and space, or order and sense, and thus fail to achieve the primary purpose of the uncanny, that is, to enable and guide inner transformation.

Blood and Wine: The Uncanny in Ritual

The purpose of inner transformation becomes obvious in the many rituals evoking uncanny symbols around the world, as revealed by much ethnographic and ethnological research (Bobby 1991; Krueger 2014; Tiaynen-Qadir 2020; Turner 1991). For instance, blood has been an archetypal uncanny symbol frequently featured in ancient rites and today in many religious and spiritual practices, often metaphorically as wine. In the ancient world, blood-thirsty gods and goddesses demanded sacrificial blood to be nourished. Sekhmet, the invincible, lion-headed goddesses of Egyptian mythology was one of them. Evolving from the goddess Hathor, daughter of Ra, she was known for her protective forces against a dangerous and evil enemy in defense of the gods and humans. Yet, she was also feared by both gods and humans. One myth tells of Sekhmet hearing a plot against her father, Osiris, by the human followers of Seth. Enraged, she arranges a bloody massacre of humans, after which she withdraws to rest. The gods, fearing the extermination of humans, prepare 7,000 flasks of wine dyed red with ochre, a blood-like liquid, and spread that over the fields. Sekhmet wakes up and drinks the “blood” to satisfy her lust. However, the wine makes the terrible goddess fall asleep and so humankind escapes destruction. Ancient Egyptians followed the strategy of the gods, honoring Sekhmet during her mid-summer and mid-autumn feasts and rituals with wine drinking. The Mayan civilization is also well known for its blood-letting rituals, including among the royals. The Mayans themselves saw self-sacrifice and selfimmolation as an honor. While a bloody animal sacrifice was common not only to the Mayans, they are the culture especially known for human sacrifice rituals, for instance, decapitating or extracting the heart of noble enemy warriors or kings. Blood was vital to Mayan religious rituals as a sacred substance to nourish their solar deity K'inich Ajaw. Such blood sacrifice is not uncommon: Siberian shamans drink blood of sacrificed reindeer to this day to honor the animal as a giver of livelihood, as well as to enable community prosperity and individual spiritual transformation.

Blood and wine are often used as symbols interchangeably. In the oldest surviving written poem, the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, we see how Enkidu matures into a man only after having drunk wine. In the Odyssey, when Odysseus visits the dead, he offers them blood to revitalize them even for a while. And, of course, the dying and resurrecting Greek god Dionysus is known for wine symbolism linked to divine ecstasy. For archetypal psychologist, Erich Neumann, blood is a transformative substance of the archetypal sacred feminine. Fertility rites and blood sacrifice were often intertwined, as the Sekhmet story illustrates. In India, 800 goats had to be slaughtered during a Hindu festival honoring the goddess destroyer of evil forces, so that in her new aspect as the World Mother (Jagad-Amba) she may bestow life and nourish humanity with her breasts (Neumann 1974, 155). For the ancients, we might say, a woman’s body was a living symbol of the mysteries of sacrifice and rebirth: menstrual sacrificial blood leads to a childbirth and nourishment with motherly milk. The bloody sacrifice of a lamb, whether literal or symbolic, is common to the Abrahamic faiths. The sacrificial lamb is at the heart of the Jewish Passover that commemorates God “passing over” their houses when the plague killed all firstborn children in Egypt. Ritualistic slaughter of lambs is at the center of Eid Ul Azha in Islam that commemorates Abraham’s readiness to sacrifice his son, before an angel stops his hand and places a ram there instead. Orthodox Christian Liturgy and Roman Catholic Mass reenact the events of the Last Supper, death and resurrection of Christ in the Holy Communion that includes the consecration of wine and bread. These are just a few examples that illustrate that the blood and wine symbolism is prevalent across cultures and in different historical periods. They affirm Gil Anidjar’s detailed and complex point that blood is neither “just” a literal fluid flowing through the human body, nor “only” a metaphorical device in literature, myth, and scripture (Anidjar 2014). It is both and it is more, although tied up not only with the history of Christendom but with the history of humankind through uncanny rituals. What is the purpose of this uncanny symbolism that causes eerie discomfort yet persists everywhere and everywhen? In this section, we discuss the symbols of blood and wine in Islam and Orthodox Christian rituals, which has not been scrutinized much in comparative scholarship. Our main focus is on the Eucharist service and icons, and on a popular South-Asian qawwali, or ecstatic, devotional Sufi music in Islam.

We build on the point that sacred symbols, uncanny or otherwise, are not constrained to allegorical representations of static meanings, but rather are metaphorical truths disclosed in embodied ritual. We combine Turner’s theory of rituals with material religion studies and a post-Jungian archetypal approach to emphasize the bio-cultural nature of sacred symbols, as elsewhere (Qadir and Tiaynen-Qadir 2016a, 2018). In doing so, the section unpacks the seventh pillar of the deep culture perspective with regard to the uncanny: symbol is unfolded through ritual and art.

Blood and wine in Eastern Orthodox Christianity

The Divine Liturgy is central to Orthodox Christianity, which is a major branch of Christianity, with 200–300 million adherents worldwide (Roudometof 2014, 1). Talking of liturgy, some Orthodox theologians prefer the term mysterion (thing to be silent about), used by the apostles and Church Fathers in a deliberate reference to pre-Christian, Greek mysteries (McGuckin 2011). Orthodox Christianity developed into a distinct religious tradition over many centuries and as a result of differentiation between Greek East and Latin West or what we now know as Roman Catholicism (Roudometof 2014, 51). Eastern Christianity has typically emphasized the importance of the mystical, beauty, and revealed experiences in accompanying the understanding of the Word (Hann and Goltz 2010, 14). The outer, visible beauty aims to open the door to the beauty of the invisible, the spiritual realm of the divine that is inexplicable in human terms. In Eastern Christianity, the Divine Liturgy is a partaking in the mystery of the Last Supper that literally and symbolically evokes Christ’s self-sacrifice, death and resurrection, and glorifying the life-giving Trinitarian God (McGuckin 2011; Taft 1995). As a “synthesis of arts” (Florensky 2002), the liturgy has been a “unique source of aesthetic, intellectual, musical, poetic, and visual enjoyment” (Meyendorff 1995). The art of burning candles and flickering icon lamps, fine blue veil of incense in the air, art of icons, choir singing, priestly conduct and church poetry, all these elements go into making this a “musical drama on the aesthetic plane” (Florensky 2002, 109). The point of this drama is to organize a repeated entrance of the faithful into the mystery of Christ’s life, Passion, and sacrifice. One is expected to relive and reconnect to the Christian mysteries of death and rebirth. The experience of participating in the liturgy might seem uncanny for a novice and it can take some years of immersion to grasp its depths. Here, we are interested in one particular aspect that evokes the symbolism of wine and blood: Holy Communion, a quintessence of the Divine Liturgy that summons the faithful to “receive the body of Christ.” For Orthodox, as for Catholics, the Divine Eucharist is a sacrament, in which bread and wine are mystically transformed (transubstantiated) into the Body and Blood of Christ.

Literally speaking, receiving the Eucharist is consuming the flesh of Christ and drinking the blood of Christ, which sounds quite uncanny to modern ears. Orthodox Christianity in its Eucharistic rite has preserved the life-felt nature of blood/wine and body/bread symbolism, and the Liturgy prepares for the mystery of transformation and transubstantiation step by step. It starts during prothesis, the preparatory rites preceding the public part of liturgy when each piercing of the bread by the priest denotes a particular aspect of Jesus’ sacrifice (Denysenko 2017). At the same time, a cup of wine is mixed with cold water. The next part, Liturgy of the Catechumens or Liturgy of the Word, focuses on prayers, hymns, Gospel reading, and preaching. This is followed by the Liturgy of Eucharist. Just prior to communion, the deacon pours zeon (hot water) into the cup, making the content of the cup a warm mixture of concentrated water, wine, and bread, all to make the living and “pulsating” effect of the body and blood of Christ more tangible (Denysenko 2017, 8). The faithful take in the transubstantiated blood and body of Christ, accompanied by the choir singing “Receive the Body of Christ, Taste the Fountain of Immortality.” The Eucharist is a sensual, bodily experience, as are the symbols it evokes. A material perspective recognizes that religion is grounded in the body and its senses as the matrix of human experience (Houtman and Meyer 2012; Morgan 2005). Material religion scholars critique and overcome the dichotomous division between material and spiritual or transcendental that defined many modern definitions of religion (B. Meyer 2008). Meyer and Verrips (2008) argue that people make sense of their religious experience holistically, in embodied and embedded praxis of religious aesthetics. Since the material turn in religious studies, scholarship has shown tremendous variation in the ways in which people engage religiously through objects and sense (e.g., Boylston 2017; Opas and Haapalainen 2017). Matter is not “just” physical but is a site of meaning and has to do with the sensorial realm, that is, with sights, sounds, smells, and touch. The Eucharist makes the symbols of wine and blood pulsating, life-felt. As we argue in earlier research, the faithful experience their participation in the Eucharist as a body-felt, living experience that “moves beyond the self” and evokes the feeling of “goose bumps” or “trembling” in the body, “ecstasy,” and “blessed tearfulness” (Tiaynen-Qadir 2020). The multitude of interpretations and bodily reactions that this uncanny symbol/practice evokes points to its dynamic nature and depth that is repeatedly disclosed through an embodied experience. Flesh and blood become a “magnificent citadel of metaphors” (Hillman 1975,

174). The Eucharist is intended to be an uncanny experience that shakes, shatters, and purifies the body and the soul if participants truly reflect on the fact that they are drinking blood. “God-containing blood,” say a prayer, is like “fire that burns and purifies,” while the “godly body nourishes mind strangely” (Molitvoslov 2008, 115–116). Note that wine is referred to as blood literally, while fire is used allegorically as a simile. Blood and wine become living symbols, not mere allegorical representations. In Victor Turner’s terminology, the Eucharist is a liminal experience, “being in a tunnel” beyond fixed points of classification and signification (Turner 1974, 232). It opens up the bio-cultural nature of the symbols of wine and blood, unveiling their depth through ritual. Other aspects of Eastern Orthodox ritual also evoke literal drinking of blood, such as the miraculously revealed icon of the “Inexhaustible Chalice” or another icon showing John the Baptist’s head in a chalice. Some Orthodox icons even depict John as offering his own head in a platter or a Eucharistic cup, while many Renaissance artists are known for their shocking depictions of the Baptist’s head. The purpose of the uncanny here is again to wake us through shocking images leading to inner transformation (in this case through sacrifice of rationality, ego and ambition, as well as the virtue of shunning complacent society).

Wine and blood in qawwali music

The qawwali, Sufi devotional music popular in South Asia, is generally believed to have originated in fourteenth-century Delhi (Mirza 1986, 189). The founding figure, Amir Khusrau, was a devotee of the saint Nizamuddin Auliya, who believed profoundly in the power of music to enhance religious experience and communication. Auliya was a member of the Chishti Sufi order, which propounds ecstatic remembrance of God, including through song in a Sufi “path of Love” (for the authoritative, modern study of this order, see Ernst and Lawrence (2002)). Once developed, the qawwali soon became a cornerstone of practice by that order and beyond. Qawwalis are often sung on Thursday evenings at shrines of highly venerated saints—who are reputed to have achieved the elusive goal of ecstatically merging their identity with divinity— but also at gatherings dedicated to ritually reliving spiritual dissolution, known as mehfil-e-sama (gathering of song). Such gatherings have been a mainstay of South Asian Islam. Much has been written about the classical development of qawwali and its evolution into “popular” entertainment (e.g., Bhattacharjee and Alam 2012; Mirza 1986). Despite the inclusion of qawwali into modern recording and distribution systems, at its core the genre is a live performance, where the interaction between the singers and audience is crucial to its effect (see especially Qureshi 1986; Viitamäki 2015). The effect is one of the audiences being overcome by an ecstatic negation of the self and loss of conscious control in a moment captured by the Urdu term “haal.” The outstanding ethnographic study of qawwali by Regula Burckhardt Qureshi (1986) highlights these moments and the goal of ecstasy. Although the music is essential to the experience, it is rarely complicated, so that “the listeners, by contrast, may well be ignorant of the finer points of musical theory yet still benefit from the performance of the qawwals” (Viitamäki 2015, 312). The format typically involves one or two lead singers who also play the harmonium, as well as backup vocals by a group of half a dozen and a percussionist. Accessibility is a crucial feature of the qawwali, and so the poetry is typically in readily understandable vernacular. The verse is often taken from

revered Sufi saints of the locale, sometimes reaching back to the twelfth century, but is liberally handled by the performers, or qawwals, according to their perception of the mood (Kugle 2007). Popular qawwals will often weave in their own verse, or translate from other vernaculars such as from Punjabi into Urdu, to give poetry lyrical life. The term itself comes from the Arabic “Qawl,” or utterance, typically referring to a saying of the Prophet Muhammad or a saint (Qureshi 1986, 470). While the qawwali is not “strictly” a religious ritual in Islam like congregational prayers might be, yet it might well be viewed as lived ritual for the significance and deeply religious expression it continues to have in the region (Kugle 2007). We focus here on one recent, popular qawwali in Pakistan, often sung in accessible Urdu at shrines as well as at concerts to audiences of hundreds at a time. The singers, Sabri Brothers (d. 1994 and 2011), came from established musical schools, became hugely popular, and held concerts in Pakistan, India, and overseas. The group sang in common Urdu and freely adapted Sufi poetry, frequently mixing in their own verse. Their qawwali, “Saqia aur pila” (Cup bearer, give me more to drink), became wildly popular in India and Pakistan. The brothers evoke the symbolism of wine, well known in Sufi poetry as a metaphor for knowledge, wisdom, and experiential knowledge of the Divine. The thirteenth-century Sufi poet Rumi reminds us that “there are thousand of wines that can take over our minds [but not] all ecstasies are the same; Jesus was lost in his love for God, his donkey was drunk with barley.” Referring to mystical knowledge and experience, Rumi encourages to “choose the purest” wines, “not the ones adulterated with fear,” but the one that “moves you” (Barks 2006, 40). The Sabri Brothers developed their own verses, representative of numerous Sufi motifs in wine symbolism. “Saqia aur pila” is sung in the form of a dialogue between the drinker and the mystical cupbearer. The drinker (human soul) keeps asking the cupbearer to bring him more wine, the wine that “keep making me selflessly intoxicated.” (For Sufis, the soul searches out God, longing for the divine ecstasy that this encounter brings.) The Sabri Brothers follow this Sufi motif of renouncing the self in love for God: “give me a drink whose intoxication a lifetime will last.” They evoke the symbolism of wine in an uncanny, provocative, poetic way, first singing that the use of alcohol is prohibited among the Muslims, before turning it around:

“Drinking is forbidden, No! Drinking is not forbidden, Coming to your senses after drinking is forbidden”

Here is the core of Sufism: bodily, sensual experience of the Divine as beauty that can only be experienced, not rationally apprehended, and, therefore, expressed through poetry, sayings, dance, and music. The purpose is to be always drunk with God, to achieve Fana, annihilation in God and Baqq, eternal existence in the presence of God (Qadir 2018a). Who is the mystical Cupbearer? The Sabri Brothers sing:

“Pour two full cups, O’ cupbearer, of flower-hued wine. One in your name and one in the name of God”

They follow the symbolic tradition of refusing to name the mystical cupbearer, some combination of all the prophets and saints associated with the mystical tradition of Islam. The wine is uncanny throughout the poem, resembling the “officially” and literally suppressed drink that yet remains highly popular in practice, albeit hidden. The hidden familiar becomes unfamiliar when it is sung of by the qawwals, speaking to the same ecstasy Sufis believe is hidden in all souls yet seems unfamiliar when brought out. The purpose of the uncanny here is to move the ritual participant (not just a “listener”) out of the ordinary world to where clear demarcations between licit and illicit do not exist. The uncanny is evoked as something strangely beautiful, ecstatic, moving the self beyond the social norm (Royle 2003, 2). The Brothers evoke a divine tavern (Sufism) that is open to all souls: “O’ Cupbearer may you prosper, may your tavern last.” In the middle of the qawwali, the direction of the discourse changes, and we are introduced to the voice of the mystical Cupbearer who offers various types of wine to the drinker. These different types of wine represent various kinds of

mystical knowledge and religious traditions and revolve around the theme of blood and sacrifice. For instance, in one instance, the Sabri Brothers evoke a reference to tenth-century Sufi Mansoor Halaij, who having experienced the merge with the Divine, exclaimed “I am the Truth” and was executed.

Which wine will you drink, O possessed one? [asks the Cupbearer] That which Mansoor drank as he climbed onto his own hanging plank, this one will you drink?

The Sabri Brothers evoke the wine “which Jesus humbly drank as he raised the dead,” as well as the one that “Job drank in patience as his wealth wasted away,” among other. Metaphorically, emptying one’s chalice of wine symbolically points to a situation that demands sacrifice and actual or symbolic bleeding. The line between the sacrificer and the sacrificed becomes blurred. Yet, the drinker rejects all others to choose the wine that “was drunk in Karbala” by Hussain, the son of Ali and the grandson of the Prophet when he “gave his life” as “blood poured down the wounds of his body.” The Sabri Brothers evoke the sacrifice of Hussain, who was beheaded in the Battle of Karbala in 680 by Yazid, who unrightfully (according to Hussain and many others) took the place of the second Umayyad caliph. Hussain’s family, including his little son, and companions were also killed. Hussain’s martyrdom, commemorated as the Day of Ashura, became a major religious commemoration that is ritually reenacted by Shias with self-flagellation and bloodletting to connect to the sufferings of the martyr. Why does the drinker ask for this uncanny cup of wine? For the Sabri Brothers, Hussain “drank the wine of Light.” They contrast the political ambition of Yazid’s general with Hussain’s ambition to submit to God. General Shimr says that he holds government in his hands, Hussain replies: “My mercy in God’s hands.” The long dialogue goes on to make a sharp contrast between Shimr’s wine, equated with political power and ambition, and that of Hussain, who is drunk with his love for God. While Shimr refuses to abandon Karbala, Hussain says that he refuses to abandon “the path of righteousness.” Short of more

arguments, Shimr finally retorts: “Even a burial shroud will you not receive.” “A dress of heaven shall I receive,” Hussain replies. Like John the Baptist, Hussain “had his head cut off in the fervor of love” for God. As the head of the Baptist became a relic in Orthodox and Catholic Christianity, so did the head of Hussain, with many having claimed to house it. The return of the head of John is a subject of religious feasts in both Orthodoxy and Catholicism, so is the return of the head of Hussain with a pilgrimage to his shrine in Karbala seen by many Shias as having the merit of a thousand pilgrimages comparable to Mecca. The uncanny mythemes of beheading/bodily dismemberment, sacrifice, and heavenly rewards/resurrection are channeled through the bio-cultural symbols of blood and wine. Hussain’s beheading shatters the ossified notion of the self, leading to the realization that ego must die in order for the divine to reside within the human. In other words, the bleeding sacrifice of ego is a pathway to divinity and mystical knowledge. What is left unsaid in daily social discourse—wine, blood sacrifice, ecstatic submission, rejection of political power—is unveiled as both familiar and unrecognizable, possibly frightening: the very essence of the uncanny. These religious communications, in their vivid materiality, summon participants to the uncanny that is beyond rationalized, mechanical apprehension. They bring it out of the unsaid and into the world, to be seen, heard, and felt by all the senses in ritual participation, yet clothed in unrecognizable familiarity.

Discussion: Disquiet in the Cultural Operating System

In this chapter we have argued that the uncanny has many facets and expressions —from frightening to ghostly to repulsive—but they all serve to alert and awake us to the presence of destructive forces within self and society (Royle 2003, 23– 24). Moreover, while the expressions may vary from culture to culture, all cultures are anyway replete with uncanny symbols. As above, the uncanny is like a signpost in any narrative, pointing to some symbolic lessons coming up, something that will shatter self and ego to open into new perceptions and awareness. The few examples above demonstrate the theoretical point that the uncanny brings out into the open what is well known but now unfamiliar because of having been hidden. The suppression of hiding it away requires an unveiling to perform some inner transformation. Once unveiled and acknowledged, the uncanny moves the self beyond its perceived boundaries and accepted reality, which, in some cases, is a prerequisite to divine recognition and even ecstasy. The uncanny expresses the full gamut of deep culture theory. Despite its many variations, it is archetypally irreplaceable in the work it does on both individual and collective levels. The uncanny is always liminal, indicating a state of inbetweenness: unsettling and uncertain but, at the same time, dynamic and moving. The uncanny is intuited through senses and body, is replete with multivalency of meanings, interpretations, and sense, and triggers reflective movement inward. More than any other symbolic category, the uncanny illustrates the importance of ritual in its unfolding as a bio-cultural symbol. However, the uncanny is always a matter of perspective and, therefore, is embedded in cultural operating systems. The ghostliness of machines and unsettling presence of bio-robotic aliens make sense only in the context of modernity (although the medieval Jewish folklore of the golem was an interesting precursor). Animal-like elements of self among the ancients are replaced by the machine-like elements of the modern self. Machine-like singularity of consciousness also makes sense mostly for the moderns. Negative othering of aliens as a defamiliarized metaphor for migrants or other marginalized groups again is in response to racism and xenophobia in modernity.

As Jung noted, moderns tend to externalize the monsters within, and to project them onto others (Ahmed 2002a). People project their own monsters onto other people, nations onto other nations, etc. The more an individual suppresses and projects their own “monsters” on others, the more pathologies they themselves have to suffer in unexpected ways. In precisely the same way, the more internal monsters a group or society suppresses and projects onto others, the more monsters its own popular culture generates and is fascinated by. In Durand’s words:

Let us say very crudely that in a given society, when myth tends to expurgate its recourse to the deep imaginary and when the only roles honoured [sic.] are those most adequate to the rationalization and the conceptualization of the system, it is the neglected and marginalized roles that are the reservoirs or mythological resources […] Everything depends on the roles which are marginalized. (Durand 1993, 25)

It might be that we moderns tend to multiply, recreate, and produce new monsters more than any humans in the past. Moreover, these very same monsters are culturally consumed across more cultures than was ever the case before. Yet, there is arguably less reflection on what these monsters popping up from the cultural unconscious are telling us, than ever before. Moreover, there are fewer and fewer rituals for us to acknowledge and internalize these monsters to transform ourselves and our behaviors. The multiplication of uncanny monsters might be seen as a compensatory mechanism for “ascendant literalism and parallel loss of the symbolic,” now a “defining feature of modernity” (Ahmed 2011, 6). As post-Jungian, postcolonial, scholar Durre Ahmed notes:

While the desire for the encounter and difference remains, every type of physical, psychological and emotional risk is minimized […]. Having ‘been there, done that’, we return home - at best quantitatively more knowledgeable about another place but qualitatively remain at the same level of ignorance about self and Other. (Ahmed 2002a)

In other words, modern encounters tend to lack depth and are not allowed to unsettle us enough to enable a thorough transformation that goes beyond formal, superficial recognition of difference. Modernity has often suppressed the bodyfelt nature of symbols, first allegorizing them, then literalizing them and projecting into a past of “unscientific” ancestors, and generally assigning them one singular meaning. We illustrated that an embodied practice is what enables the depth of symbols and their bio-cultural rootedness to take hold. In a ritual, the uncanny triggers a transformation but also stops being uncanny as its depth unfolds. What is uncanny for the novice is no longer uncanny for the initiated, and bodily participation is crucial to this revealing. Rituals enable this transition. Our analysis of the Eucharist and qawwali illustrate that the uncanny is “bound up with a sense of repetition, coming back, eternal recurrence” (Royle 2003, 2). The uncanny here is about the feeling of extreme nostalgia, “homesickness,” “return to an inorganic state” (Royle 2003, 2), a sort of ecstatic home-coming to the numinous state of being. As Hunt (2012, 78) points out, Jung’s “archetypal experiences feel like a return to origins and source. Deeply integrative numinous experiences can feel both utterly new and as though they had always been somehow known.” The more the uncanny ritual is enacted, the more bodily and life-felt its symbolism becomes and the more depth it attains. In the process, the bio-cultural dimension of these symbols becomes clear. Bodily dismemberment, beheading, mutilation, and blood sacrifice stop being uncanny as their depth is disclosed through ritual and mythology. Being exposed to multiple cultures, as indeed we can be as moderns, one may well explore whether there are perhaps more commonalties between John the Baptist, Hussain, and Medusa than we assume. Indeed, perhaps we already know this, which is why the images of their heads strike us as … uncanny.

Chapter 4

THE FEMININE: CITADEL OF METAPHORS

“Remember: the enemy is the literal, and the literal is not the concrete flesh but negligence of the vision that concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors.” —James Hillman

The hero mytheme that stands for the outer journey and maturing self is simply not possible without facing the uncanny and without the aid of the feminine. The journey cannot take place without the hero or the heroine being shuttered by the uncanny and then helped and transformed by the meeting with goddesses. However, the role of the symbolic feminine is far more than aiding the hero and shattering the ego. The symbolic feminine best captures the multiplicity (Irigaray 1985, 36) of symbols, the “many-sidedness of human nature” and “soul-making” (Hillman 1975, xiv). The purpose of this chapter is to explore and appreciate the crucial symbolic mytheme of the feminine in a deep culture perspective, identifying it in myth, popular culture, and religion. Here, we discuss two features of the symbol: multiplicity and ambiguity in classical and modern myths. The chapter is divided into five sections. We begin with a quick overview of the way in which we are talking about the symbolic feminine. The next section discusses polyvalence of the archetypal feminine, focusing on pre-history, ancient myths, religions, and contemporary examples from cinema. Here, drawing on revisioning Neumann’s seminal study, we emphasize the symbolic feminine as the expression of polyvalence within psyche and the world. The third section moves on to the ambiguity of the symbolic feminine, focusing on the oft-neglected dark side of the symbolic feminine in myth and culture. Drawing again on Neumann and folklorists, the section describes the polar,

confounding-dark yet guiding-wise aspects of old and young witches, as well as one of the most powerful feminine symbols of Medusa Gorgon. The fourth section focuses on the unity in multiplicity of the symbolic feminine centered on the story of two Greek goddesses, Demeter and Persephone, archetypal mother and daughter. We show how the depth and multiplicity of these female figures were disclosed through a mystery religion, and how this myth continues to be a major metaphor for the journey of the psyche/soul today. The chapter concludes with a section briefly summarizing how we see the deep culture perspective disclosing representations of the symbolic feminine in myth and popular culture today, including its intersection with the sacred feminine in religious symbolism, as with Marian iconography.

The Symbolic Feminine

It is important to note first what we refer to with “feminine.” There is a large and growing body of scholarship disclosing the point that the archetypal, symbolic feminine has been to a large extent suppressed and devalued in modernity (Ahmed 2002a; Baring and Cashford 1991; Bray 2016). The dominant cultural and psychological view of the person is of a singular ego controlling irrational impulses. The literalism of early modernity (Taylor 2012) readily conflated the rational masculine with man and the irrational feminine with woman. Historically, this was not always the case: ambiguous Greek figures of Hermes, Dionysus, Artemis, and a Hercules who completes his feats then serves a Queen —not to mention Set and Horus in Egypt and Ardhanarishvara in Hinduism— bear witness to more complex formations of gender representations. However, modernity began a long tradition of pathologizing the feminine within both women and men, as often exemplified by Freud (Clement and Kristeva 1998). Men became associated with ego, rationality, and penetrating agency that acts upon passive, irrational women. Of course, modernity also kicked off a liberating process that allowed for women’s equality, whether politically with enfranchisement or economically with wage competitiveness. However, the literalism engendered by modernity has also obscured the symbolic dimension of psychological and religious experiences in which images symbolize multiple significances and complex gender. In this symbolic way of talking, “feminine” refers to one pole of being—for example, multivalent and symbolic, of interest to us here—while “masculine” refers to another, for instance singular and literal. Neither is inherently superior to the other from this perspective, but they do have different functions. The ancients personified these impulses and cast them into mythical narratives (Hillman 1975, 12), based on which further imageries were produced in art. Very often these personifications were of women, but they spoke also to men in the audiences. Indeed, “life is male and female” (Ahmed 2002a, 83), and for most postJungians, men have feminine aspects just as women have masculine aspects (Ahmed 2002a; Andrews 2016; Bolen 2014; von Franz 1980; Woodman and Dickson 1996). These are psychological-symbolic concepts in which

“masculinity” often represents a certain type of reason: penetrative, analytic, and external. By contrast, “feminine” represents a different sort of agentic attitude: receptive, poetic, and inner-oriented (Ahmed 2002b, 83). Contemporary postJungian scholars emphasize that femininity and masculinity thus depict certain qualities and their interplay within self (e.g., Bolen 2009; Rossi 2021). One of the important functions of the archetypal feminine for the psyche is its transformative potential (Bray 2016, 19; Neumann 1974, 74). If the usual egocentered consciousness tends to divide and make hierarchies, the “imaginal consciousness [of the complete self] is hermaphroditic, uniting masculine and feminine [symbolic] polarities” (Hillman 1998, 86). Post-Jungians take this point further to argue that both self and society find themselves in inner and outer balance when the masculine and the feminine sides are harmonized (Bly and Woodman 1998; Clement and Kristeva 1998; von Franz 1980, 1997; Merritt et al. 2018). It is in this way that we follow post-Jungians in talking about the feminine as archetypal and symbolic. In his masterful study, “The Great Mother,” Erich Neumann explores the structure, dynamics, and polyvalence of the archetypal feminine as a symbol that manifests both in society and individual. The feminine archetype appears as a motif in ancient Egyptian theology, Hellenistic mysteries of Mithras, Middle Ages Christian symbolism, as well as visions and dreams of modern people. For Neumann, the archetypal, symbolic feminine relates to “psychic reality [that] evades our desire for schematic disposition” (Neumann 1974, 83), and is, therefore, poetic in its nature. Thus, the symbolic feminine is an exhaustible reservoir of the individual and collective unconscious and structures the psychic processes in all individuals of different genders. The archetypal, symbolic feminine is crucial for the deep culture theory. It shows the multivalency of symbols in most expressive ways. However, in addition to the symbolic multivalence that it encompasses, the archetypal feminine has deeper implications for human psychology and society. Inspired by William Blake and John Keats, post-Jungian depth psychologist James Hillman approaches psychic processes as “soul-making,” a human adventure of wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul (Hillman 1975, ix). For Hillman, “the act of soul-making is imagining, since images are the psyche, its stuff, and its perspective” (Hillman 1983, 26). Soul is a “functional complex of the psyche acting as a mediating personality between the whole psyche, which is mainly unconscious, and the usual ego” (Hillman

1998, 51). Soul deepens events into experience, and it communicates and can be accessed through “fantasy-images,” which are “both the raw material and finished products of psyche.” Moreover, “whether in love or in religious concern,” the soul derives its special significance from “its special relation with death” (Hillman 1975, x). For Hillman, Psyche is an archetypal representation of soul, always depicted as a young maiden, Kore, in Greek mythology (Hillman 1998, 50). The soul is feminine because it works in the feminine, poetic, imaginal fashion. Manifoldness, multiplicity or polytheism is another feminine characteristic of the soul and its work within the self. In the words of Hillman, “if a psychology wants to represent faithfully the soul’s actual diversity, then it may not beg the question from the beginning by insisting, with monotheistic prejudgment, upon unity of personality” (Hillman 1975, xiv). Our psyche is “polytheistic” in its nature and encompasses the entire pantheon of gods and goddesses with their styles of action and being. They enter our existence as “moods of elation, depression, fleeting thoughts of prurience and passion, saying and doing thing we did not intend, from lying to over-eating to being haunted by conflicts of desire, betrayal and vengeance” (Ahmed 2002a, 74). In other words, the archetypal, symbolic feminine is at the core of psyche with its surprising directions, and polytheistic and multivalent nature. What is important is that while the soul is in the world, “it is also the soul of the world (anima mundi)” (Hillman 1983, 26, emphasis added). Gods and goddesses govern the self as they erupt and govern the outer world. The outer world is a mirror of the unconscious, which is symbolized as feminine: this does not mean that the unconscious has only feminine aspects; it has both masculine and feminine tendencies, forces, complexities, instincts, and archetypes, just as mythology has male and female gods, demons, spirits, animals, etc. (Neumann 1974, 148). The archetypes “cannot be reduced to human beings or placed inside their personal lives, their skins, or their souls […] for they are also Gods who cannot be encompassed by anyone’s individual soul […] we are in the psyche” (Hillman 1975, 134). Irrespective of whether the supreme being responsible for the creation of the universe is male or female (which varies from cosmology to cosmology, religion to religion), she is “the matrix of the universe,” “the world stage upon which the creation drama” plays out (Ford 1999, 128). The outer, manifested world is an expression of the archetypal, symbolic feminine; it is the

vessel of life and death, and the chalice of transformation. The drama within the self is accompanied by the outer drama in the social and cultural realm (Turner 1974). The richness of the symbolic feminine allows us to address the complexity, multiplicity, and multidirectional nature of myths and symbols. Psychic processes (and especially the realm of unconscious) are symbolic, so are always surprising and multidirectional, and the archetypal feminine is all the more so. In some sense, the uncanny points to the interiority of transformation, but it is the archetypal feminine that accomplishes this transformation. In a feminine, fleshy, sensual fashion, its symbolism discloses itself through enactment, rituals, and life itself. The very term “deep” owes to the dimension of soul, which is depth not breadth or height with its travel downward (Hillman 1975, xi).

Polarity

Neumann was fully aware of the limitations of the patriarchal gaze that labels the symbolic feminine as “contradictory” (Neumann 1955, 83). As contemporary feminist scholars of culture and psychoanalysis argue, multivalence and multiplicity cannot be neatly fit into the boxes of singular masculinity (Ahmed 2002b; Irigaray 1985; Spretnak 2004). Neumann genuinely celebrates the surprising, “paradoxical” developments of the symbolic feminine that “fills and overflows the schema,” even his own schema. According to Neumann, no analysis can grasp its richness and complexity, and his schematic portrayal of the archetypal feminine only points to such complexity without claiming to fully represent it. The relevance of his schema of the archetypal feminine continues to be an excellent guide to the multiplicity of the symbolic feminine. Thus, we turn to it in our deep culture analysis of the symbolic feminine. As depicted in Figure 4.1, Neumann’s complex schema has two coordinate axes —Good/Terrible Mother and Positive/Negative Transformative Character— overlapped by concentric circles showing degrees of transformation. We focus here only on two aspects of this schema.

Birthing and containing

Hundreds of Paleolithic and Neolithic female figurines, found across Eurasia belong to some of the earliest symbolic expressions in human history. Venus of Willendorf, unearthed in an Austrian village, and “seated goddess” of Çatal Huüyuük from central Turkey are perhaps the most famous representations of such “earth goddesses.” These nude female sculptures feature exaggerated portrayal of the breasts, abdomen, buttocks, underemphasized arms, and fullness of the posterior. The exaggerated belly area may point either to pregnancy or pronounced voluptuosity associated with fertility. In anthropological and historical perspectives, such figurines point to a cyclical perception of time, different from a modern chronological model moving in a straight line toward a predetermined goal. A female body with its biology of birth, menstruation, pregnancy, new birth, and death was seen as aligned with the changing phases of the moon and a cycle of agriculture. It shaped the cyclical understanding of the world, which saw endlessly repeated patterns of regeneration and disintegration. In post-Jungian perspective, such cyclical understanding of the world is akin to the understanding of the psyche with its inexhaustible potential for self-renewal.

Figure 4.1: Archetypal feminine. Schema III (Neumann 1974, 83).

For Neumann, such figurines embody protecting, containing, nourishing, and birthing qualities of the archetypal feminine. Its symbolic expressions are nest, cradle, bed, ship, hut, house, cave, temple, mountain, lattice, wall, veil (Neumann 1974, 46). Containing in this sense does not mean passively encompassing but transforming, shaping, and birthing (Ahmed 2002a; Avishai 2008; Bracke 2008; Mahmood 2006). In Hillman’s terminology, containing relates the feminine as the constitutional structure and modus operandi of the soul and the world. The arena in which inner and outer dramas unfold is feminine, and the pre-historic imagination expressed it through the symbol of a voluptuous female body. Birthing and containing qualities of the symbolic feminine continue to be represented in later religions and myths across the world. In Egyptian mythology, while god Ptah thinks the world into existence by the means of his word and breath, goddess Neith creates the first land from the primordial waters of the Nun. “Broad-breasted,” Greek goddess Gaia gives birth to the “starry Sky,” Uranus, the great Mountains, and “the foaming Sea” (Kerenyi 2008, 18). In the creation myth of the Wahungwe people of Zimbabwe, the virgin Massassi “does not stop bearing till the earth was covered with grasses, bushes, and trees” (Ford 1999, 128). The air-maiden, Ilmatar, births the world and then bears and gives birth to the hero Väinämöinen in Finnish Karelian mythology, Kalevala: “where she turned her hand around, there she arranged the headlands; where her foot touched the bottom, there she dug out the fish troughs” (Bosley 1999b, 8 (Lönnrot, Kalevala I: 250–322). The Christian story of creation may also be interpreted as incorporating the symbolic feminine as birthing in the Holy Ghost, which derives from the feminine Hebrew word “shekhinah” and is often depicted and referred to as a female pigeon (Seppälä 2013). The feminine establishes the stage on which future heroes play out their quests and dramas. The feminine births and contains the entire world within.

Containing and devouring

However, ancient goddesses would often encompass polar qualities, giving life and devouring at the same time. As Neumann’s schema shows, the Good Mother archetypal figure is on the same axis as the Terrible Mother. Life-giving goddesses could also be goddesses of death in their Terrible Mother aspect. Egyptian Sekhmet, Hindu Mother of the Universe, and Aztec Coatlicue were revered as “mothers,” “grandmothers,” and guiding figurers, but they were also “drinkers of blood” and “bringers of death” (Husain 2003, 132–133). As such they demanded sacrifice to satisfy their blood thirst and desire for death. Cats and feline animals were specifically bred in Ancient Egypt to be sacrificed and mummified in honor of lioness-goddess Sekhmet; the Hindu goddess commonly depicted as towering over people with an exposed tongue dripping blood, received sacrificial blood of male animals and occasionally humans (Husain 2003, 133). Coatlicue demanded human sacrifice through the extraction of hearts, as well as the sacrifice of children. All Greek goddesses had Terrible Mother sides to them, from Artemis killing the daughters of Niobe to Demeter ordaining famine for humankind. Goddesses of death could also be the goddesses of retribution: Roman Nemesis remorselessly executes the punishment for hubris, or arrogance; Ancient Egyptian Ammit, combining the features of a lioness, crocodile, and hippopotamus, stands ready to devour the souls that did not pass judgment in the afterlife (Neumann 1974, 155); the Polynesian Miru pushes evil souls in the “consuming flames of her oven” (Husain 2003, 132). The “warming protecting womb” becomes the “grave,” “deadly devouring maw, hell” (Neumann 1974, 148, 176). For Neumann, hell represents the abysmal side of the human psyche, the vortex that desires the death and destruction of the psyche; it sucks the unconscious and consumes unaware, immature, and arrogant souls (Neumann 1974, 153). Hell often stands for the psyche in agony and is associated with a feeling of being lost and disoriented. “All initiations in ancient Egypt,” notes Neumann, “were to safeguard the individual against the annihilating power of the grave” (Neumann 1974, 176).

Such polar ambivalence and seeming paradox is an important aspect of the symbolic feminine. Moreover, there is an intrinsic dynamic along this axis. For instance, nourishing and sheltering qualities may turn into deadly suffocating embrace in the blink of an eye and within a single individual. Or, on the contrary, in embracing emotional pain and distress, a woman may experience the transformation of the negative mother, often personified as a step-mother in fairy tales, into the positive one, “found in the depths of her own unconscious terror” (Bly and Woodman 1998, 126). Blood-thirsty goddesses may demand the sacrifice of the ego for individual self-growth and inner transformation, as heroic journeys illustrate. However, their destructive aspect translates into individuals’ emotional exhaustion and unhealthy obsessions that literally and symbolically make one’s soul bleed. On a societal level, blood-thirsty goddesses may also play out culturally as societal forces that manifest in prosecution and demonizing of ethnic, racial, and cultural groups and demand their social and even literal sacrifice (e.g., in negative “othering” of marginalized groups).

Modern expressions

Some modern cinematic production beautifully captures these aspects of the symbolic feminine as it erupts in modernity. As we discussed in Chapter 3, the Matrix (The Matrix by the Wachowskis, 1999, 2003) is a deadly womb of the Terrible Technological Mother that keeps humans plugged into her. As a replacement of female birthing with technological production, the Matrix represents a revenge of the sacred feminine for subduing her complex reality into singular, masculine, biotechnological rationality. The symbolic feminine as a world stage becomes ‘monstrously alien because she results from the reduction of the mother’s plenitude to the metrical world of “0’s” and “1’s”’ (Frentz and Rushing 2002, 72). Like bloodthirsty goddesses of early civilizations, she demands human flesh sacrifice as computers purée the dead bodies to feed newborn babies, who in turn power the computers. In this vein, some movies signal the crisis of the birthing feminine and the loss of woman as a fleshed symbol in modernity. Among them is Children of Men (2006), based on P. D. James’ novel (1992), that is set in the future and portrays a society where children are not conceived and born anymore, leading to disintegration and despair. The literal human infertility is a metaphor for modernity with its inability to give birth to the spiritual and create beauty within self and society. Under the guise of egalitarianism, the society is run by a tyrant. Even government-run “pornography centers” designed to increase libido fail to heal infertility. Refugees are violently prosecuted, foreign workers are exploited and sent back from the country at the age of 60, while local elders are disgraced and often forced to commit suicide. A young refugee woman, Kee, reveals that she is pregnant, and the protagonist Theo Faron, makes it his task to lead her safely to the Human Project ship, the Tomorrow, to save the Mother and Child, sacrificing his own life in the process. Another interesting example of the loss of the birthing feminine is the origin of Superman (Man of Steel, 2010), the only naturally conceived child born of his mother’s body: his highly advanced planet Krypton, where artificially cultivated babies filled predetermined roles, was doomed to extinction from over-exploitation of the mother planet. Some movies addressed how the symbolic feminine moves along the axis in

ambiguous, surprising developments from the Good Mother to the Terrible Mother and vice versa. For instance, in the Disney animated movie Moana (2016, directed by Ron Clements and John Musker), inspired by Polynesian myths, nourishing and life-giving earth goddess Te Fiti transforms into a devouring monster, Te Ka, when demigod Maui steals her heart. However, she transforms back to her “true nature” of the earth goddess when her heart is restored by a daughter of the tribal chief. In Darren Aronofsky’s mother! (2017), a nourishing and home-making goddess of the hearth, “Good Mother,” transforms into Terrible Mother that sets the house on fire and extinguishes humanity. The movie is a unique artistic interpretation of what happens to Mother Earth, when humanity arrives at the world stage and almost destroys her (Edalatpour 2017). The movie evokes biblical stories of creation, the fall, Abel’s murder by his brother Cain, the flood and Noah, the adoration of the magi and others. The movie opens with a serene life of a couple, Him and mother, living in their house in the countryside. Him, played by Javier Bardem, is a poet, absorbed in his creative writing work and nourished by the love and caring of his wife and muse, played by Jennifer Lawrence. Like Greek Hestia, mother is immersed in home making, renovating the house, cooking, and attending to the sacred fire. The house is a symbol for the Earth, and she is the nourishing Mother Earth, virgin in her innocence and proximity to nature. She is the poet’s muse and inspiration. The arrival of humanity, represented by Man (Adam), Woman (Eve), and soon other “fans,” breaks the tranquility of the couple’s life and leads to disaster. The crowd worships the poet but neglects and humiliates mother. Yet, the poet/creator, adored and worshiped by his “fans,” is too busy to notice that they are destroying her home, turning it into a battlefield and a place of mass executions. What turns the earth goddess into a monster is when the poet, while mother is asleep, takes their newborn child to show to the crowd of his “fans,” and they eagerly pass him around but end up killing the child in their adoration. Mother rushes to save her child and the next thing she sees is the mutilated corpse of her son on an altar and the people eating his flesh. The transition from Good Mother to Terrible Mother as revenge of the sacred feminine, fully unfolds in the scene to follow. Mother starts stabbing people with a shard of glass, runs to the basement oil tank and sets herself and the house on fire. The explosion kills the crowd, destroys the house, and badly damages mother. The poet remains untouched. She asks Him: “What are you?” Him replies: “I am. You are home.” At this point, we understand that Him is a creator himself, and she is the world

stage, Mother Earth, where human drama unfolds. Mother agrees to give the poet whatever is left of her love, and the poet opens her chest to take out her heart, which transforms into a crystal. He places the crystal on a pedestal in his study and the loving heart of mother transforms the burnt ruins of the house into a new beautiful home, beginning a new cycle of creation and destruction. A new mother wakes up in the bedroom to serve Him. As any myth, Aranofsky’s mother! is a symbolic narrative with many levels. As a modern myth, it tackles the pressing issues of modernity and the place of the sacred, symbolic feminine in it. On a societal level, it continues the theme of environmental and social degradation addressed in his earlier film “Noah” (Lee 2016, 305). Mother Earth is desacralized, objectified, and destroyed by humanity. In the cultural realm of modernity, the environmental crisis can be seen as a manifestation and punishment of the goddess of retribution and death, and the revenge of the sacred feminine for industrial humiliation, depersonification and blunt arrogance in denying its existence. Alongside this outer aspect, the movie zooms into the inner world of a creator, an artist. Although Him loves her dearly, he does not treat her as his equal consort; the poet can’t help but objectify and consume her to create and be loved and adored by humanity for his creation. Film critic Peter Travers notes that the poet “eviscerates” the artist’s ego, including that of the filmmaker, who holds his creation above everything else: “Motherhood and Mother Earth, be damned” (Travers 2017). The poet stands for the masculine ego, in all of us, that creates using the inspiration of the pregnant soul and consumes it in the process. This is why perhaps the filmmaker chose not to capitalize the letter “m” in mother in contrast to Him that is capitalized, standing for the ego thinking of himself as god. The continued importance of the symbolic feminine and its suppression in modernity is captured by the sharp, polar reactions to the movie, ranging from boos, naming it nonsense, and giving it an F grade by Cinemascore to standing ovations and “professing it to become a classic” (Scorsese 2017). Some found the movie an easy prey to associate with a patriarchal culture and indulgence in “violent imagery directed at women” by a male filmmaker (Edalatpour 2017). Others counter that the mission of mother! and other movies by Darren Aronofsky is not to “help you feel better about yourself and the world,” but “to prove and provoke” (Travers 2017). Legendary filmmaker Martin Scorsese notes that such movies “aren’t made to be decoded, consumed or instantly

comprehended,” “they’re just made, because the person behind the camera had to make them” (Scorsese 2017). Jung reminds us that “negative fascination” moves us as strongly as the positive one (Jung 1968, 286). This is how the eternal archetypal finds its expression and does not leave anyone unmoved whether you “love it or loathe it” (Travers 2017).

Many Shades of Gray

An important aspect of the multivalence of the archetypal, symbolic feminine is its dark side, which is multifarious and many-shaded. The darkness of the symbolic feminine has a complex structure, dynamics and variations ranging from destructive aspects to the blessed darkness of the hidden, mystical depth. It may lead to the disintegration of the psyche, personhood, and society, but it may also enable societal renewal and psyche’s regeneration and transformation. Denying such darkness blocks the vision of both destructive tendencies and great transformative potential of the symbolic feminine (Ahmed 2002a). The diversity of such darkness is well captured in the young and old witch, as well as Medusa Gorgon, whom Neumann places in the lower “negative” part of his symbolic feminine. They have different roles and implications for inner and outer worlds.

Old witch

The crone shares in the symbolism of the uncanny. She shocks us, speaks her “sharp truth;” she has lived long enough to be able to separate the grain from the chaff, the superficial bubbling from the depth (Woodman and Dickson 1996, 139). She is too old and wise to waste her time and energy on the vain. In the world of Russian fairy tales, her famous manifestation is Baba Yaga pictured as an old, ugly, and wise woman, the fearsome witch, traveling perched in a large mortar, flying through the air with the help of a broom, living deep in the forest in a hut that moves about on chicken legs. A hero or a heroine often addresses her as babushka (granny) to soften her rough, direct nature. Folklorist Vladimir Propp sees Baba Yaga as the “guardian” of the world of the dead (tridesjatoe tsarstvo) and points to her connection to the world of animals and other inhabitants of the forest (1986, 164). She is a trickster figure and asks questions to test the hero. She hates duplicity, arrogance, and dullness, and eats the hero or heroine if their answer is simplistic. If the stranger answers “Yes” or “No” to her question “Are you saved?,” she eats them. If she asks “Did you come here of your own free will or did someone send you,” and you answer “I came by compulsion” or “I came of my own free will,” she eats you. And “you deserve it” (Bly and Woodman 1998, 54). For those who dare to ask her and respond smartly, she is all-knowing and allseeing, and ready to share her deep magic and guide the traveler on their journey. Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz emphasizes that Baba Yaga’s role is to test, to cast doubts, and see if one is truly determined to take the path that one chose (2017, 379). In the fairy tale the Maiden King, the hero Ivan answers: “Largely of my own free will, and twice as much by compulsion.” In other versions, Ivan redirects the question and asks Baba Yaga first to feed and wash him and then ask questions. Either way, the answer satisfies Baba Yaga and she helps him with his quest. She often opens to the hero or the heroine a path to another world, the world of the dead, where his or her beloved is often trapped.

Sometimes, the power of her magical gifts is unknown even to her guest, like in the case with Vasilisa the Beautiful. Her evil stepmother and stepsisters send Vasilisa to the deep forest to Baba Yaga to fetch a fire/light for the house. Eventually, after trials and tests, Baba Yaga gives Vasilisa a skull with burning eyes from the hedge, saying “Here is your fire for your stepsisters” (von Franz 2017, 359). When Vasilisa comes home, the glowing eyes of the skull gaze into the very souls of her stepmother and stepsisters and turn them into ashes. It is important to emphasize that what is often omitted in research on Baba Yaga is that she too has many shades of darkness. Some fairy tales feature three sisters; the oldest Baba Yaga is often in possession of most powerful magical objects and knowledge, inaccessible to her younger Baba Yaga sisters. This is why younger Baba Yagas often direct travelers to their oldest, wisest but also most evil and merciless of her sisters. The oldest Baba Yaga may be the embodiment of pure evil, like her other counterparts: Syöätär (translated as eater) in Finnish Karelian fairy tales or Dzoonkwa, a human eater in Kwakwaka’wakw mythology of First Nations. In another version of Vasilisa the Beautiful, the heroine has no choice but to escape from Baba Yaga and takes the magical skull by accident as a light to make it through the dark forest. Indeed, the oldest Baba Yaga is often merciless, and not necessarily interested in sharing her magic with anyone. Oracle played by Gloria Foster (1999, 2003) and Mary Alice (2003) in The Matrix shares many qualities with Baba Yaga, and is an example of archetypal representation of the ambiguous crone in modern culture. She prophesies the One but, as a psychic program, develops beyond her original function. She guides Neo’s spiritual growth and teaches him how to see the extraordinary within the ordinary: her “lessons come cloaked in koan-like paradoxes, themselves embedded in chit-chat about baking cookies and breaking vases” (Frentz and Rushing 2002, 76). In her humility, down-to-earth disposition and homely, slightly chaotic charm and coziness of her apartment, the Oracle is the opposite to singularity and seriousness of self-importance. Similar to Baba Yaga, she does not like simplicity and does not give any straightforward answers, because there are none. She tells Neo that he is not the One, but at the same time, saying that nobody can really know it but Neo himself: “being the One is just like being in love. No one can tell you’re in love. You just know it, through and through, balls to bones.” With her paradoxes, she is there to make the hero mature and reassert the transformative power of one’s own belief. When subdued by Agent Smith, she erupts in the most crucial moment of the fight, Neo’s final

ordeal (The Matrix Revolution, 2003), to utter guiding words of wisdom.

Young witch and Sophia

Just as Good and Terrible Mothers are on the same axis, as are Old Crone and Guiding Oracle, so are Sophia and young witch. The positive pole is associated with vision, inspiration, and wisdom, while the negative pole stands for madness, impotence, and stupor. Young witch moves along the axis, offering both madness and divine inspiration. She carries on the same polyvalence and paradoxical nature as the old witch, but she has more sexual, erotic appeal due to her youth. She is Greek enchantress Circe, who offers her magical wine to turn Odysseus’ crew into swine, but also guides Odysseus in how to reach the Underworld in order to communicate with the dead. She is also Hecate, “Giver of Visions,” who shares her deep knowledge and guidance, but can also “strike with madness” (Harding 1990, 226). Her archetypal image is the “blessed harlot,” who seduces but also initiates Enkidu into manhood in The Epic of Gilgamesh, following the tradition of “sacred harlots” of Ancient Mesopotamia and India (Husain 2003, 100). In the creation myth of the Wahungwe people of Zimbabwe, the aspects of the young witch and the goddess of life and death are summoned in the figure of Morongo. As a consort to the first man, Mawuesti, she gives birth to cattle and humanity. As a temptress she tricks him into having an intercourse (despite the warning of god Maori) and gives birth to scorpions and snakes. As the goddess of death, she consorts with the Snake that bites Mawuesti, which leads to his death (Ford 1999, 131). Sirens, half-bird, half-human creatures are symbolic variations of young witch and goddesses of death. Odysseus had to put wax in his shipmates’ ears and have himself bound to the mast to be able to resist to their honey-like but deathbringing singing. For Kerenyi, sirens are the servants of Persephone, the Queen of the Underworld (2008, 59). He also points to the complexity, soft and tragic sides of these creatures: if the Sirens don’t kill, they are to face death by committing a suicide, but they are also “goddesses of love” as they carry mortals’ desires to Heaven (Kerenyi 2008, 60). Polarity of the young witch is also evident in a Slavic version of Greek Sirens, Sirin. She too wears a woman’s face and has the body of a bird, clawed, winged, and feathered (Figure 4.2). Sirin’s signing is soporific and harmful as it lures into

forgetfulness and madness. Like the Sirens, she is the embodiment of happiness of sweet dissolution and awareness within the Self. Yet, Sirin’s darkness can be healing. As a counterpart to the bird Alkonost, Sirin is the mourning bird of sunset and death that comforts and leads the souls of the deceased to the Paradise Garden. Alkonost, the bird of dawn and joy, comes in the morning to sing her divinely exquisite and sweet songs. Her singing also brings forgetfulness but not a bad one; such forgetfulness nourishes, heals, and inspires the hero or the heroine to do something extraordinary and brave to complete their errand.

Figure 4.2: “Sirin and Alkonost—Birds of Joy and Sorrow,” painting by V. M. Vasnetsov (133 × 250 cm, oil on canvas), 1896. Tretyakov Gallery.

In Christian tradition, Sophia stands for the wisdom, creative aspect of God and divine ecstasy. Her cup of wisdom is contrasted with the “wine of fornication” offered by the “great harlot” (Revelation 17:2). Sexual intercourse emerges here as a symbol of love-making with wealth, status, and power: “the merchants of the earth have become rich through the abundance of her luxury” (Revelation 18:3). As a goddess of death, she is “drunk with the blood of the saints” and “the martyrs” (Revelation 17:6). In a similar vein, the still-common interpretation of Mary Magdalene emphasizes her as a “fallen woman,” yet redeemable. The important point here is not whether Magdalene was or was not historically such a figure, but rather that people read this archetypal representation of young witch into her story. Modern cinematic productions offer interesting examples of the symbolic feminine moving along this axis. In X-Men, the most powerful mutant ever, Jean Grey, moves from the wisdom pole to the destructive, Dark Phoenix (2006, 2019). In X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), she ordains the destruction of Alcatraz, mirroring the destruction of humanity and the world, until killed by Logan out of love for her. Daenerys Targaryen in the Games of Thrones (2011–2019) transforms from loving and nourishing mother of dragons into Terrible Mother, unleashing fire and destruction upon King’s Landing. Similar to Jean Grey, she is killed by the man who loves her, John Snow, for the sake of her own and others’ salvation. In Pirates 4, the mermaids assume the role of dangerous Greek Sirens and Slavic Sirins, enchanting sailors with their heavenly singing, only to kill them. Yet, their polarity and movement along the axis is evident in the Syrena mermaid, who falls in love with the missionary Phillip. Her kiss rescues his life and gives him ability to breathe under water. Lady Galadriel also includes polarity and dynamics along the axis in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. As “the Lady of Light,” she is close to Sophia, yet she can easily transform into a beautiful, destructive witch.

Medusa

Medusa Gorgon is another complex symbol of the feminine with many shades of darkness. Her popularity is unprecedented in modernity: one of the most frequently used tattoos today, Medusa also features in the movies Clash of the Titans, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, video games (e.g., God of War), ballet and other cultural media. Why does this particular symbol erupt so forcefully and what does it try to tell us? The fascination with this image dates back to Ancient Greece, the home of this mythical creature. Among the three Gorgon sisters, Medusa was mortal and the most terrifying of them. Perseus, Zeus’s son from a mortal woman, embarks on a quest to kill the Medusa Gorgon to rescue his mother from an unwanted marriage. Perseus recovers the head and places it in a leather bag. This myth and the image of Medusa were later revived by many artists of early modern Europe. Peter Paul Rubens is credited with making one of the most recognizable, vivid, and horrific of her depictions (Figure 4.3). In post-Jungian perspective, Medusa Gorgon represents the dark, suppressed side of the psyche, mirroring the self, caught in the grip of uncontrolled anger and rage. Unable to rein in her powers, she is the blind anger that turns every living thing into stone. All other aspects of self, such as sense and reason, become paralyzed in the face of her deadly gaze. A social relationship aspect of Medusa is that we embody this mythical creature when we actually turn people into stone by constructing them as “other” and thereby dehumanize them. This type of Medusa “othering” stands for people’s impulses or intentions to dismiss and deny the importance of someone or something. It can express itself in ignoring, condemning or suppressing difference (Bright 2010). All are equally constraining for self and society. As Tony Harrison illustrated in his film-poem The Gaze of the Gorgon, Medusa’s petrifying gaze can serve as a powerful metaphor for the paralysis and silence of people in the face of the Holocaust and other atrocities sanctioned by political elites during WWI and WWII, especially in Nazi Germany (Rowland 2001). The Greek hero Perseus can’t face Medusa directly and cuts her head off looking

at her reflection in his shield while being guided by Athena, the goddess of wisdom. Just so, people can only deal with the rage within or on a societal level by not combating it directly but calmly observing it through distanced reflection guided by wisdom. An important feature of Medusa’s head is its ability to exert its powers even after being cut off. Perseus gives the head to Athena, and she carries it with her to fight her enemies. Anger can thus be an asset, but only when used by wisdom and separated from the body (see the image of Athena by Gustav Klimt on the cover of the book, which illustrates how she incorporates Medusa in her armor breastplate).

Figure 4.3: “Head of Medusa,” painting by Peter Paul Rubens (60.6 × 112 cm, oil on panel), 1617–1618. Moravian Gallery.

An interesting aspect of the darkness of Medusa is that she has always been an aspect of wise Athena and can be traced back to the powerful snake goddess of Minoan Crete (2000–14000 BCE) (see Figure 4.4). The goddess is a symbol of productive duality, mastering the venomous and deceptive nature of the snake and incorporating its wisdom and healing powers, balancing Medusa with Athena. In this sense, the darkness of Medusa is connected with the uber-symbol of the snake that carries ambiguity and polarity within. It relates to self and society, and embraces paradoxes of beauty and terror, venomous annihilation and rebirth, uncontrolled rage and balance.

Figure 4.4: The Snake Goddess, 1600 BCE, Heraklion Archaeological Museum.

We find a unique modern combination of Medusa and Athena in the Queen of Narnia, the main antagonist in The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. Beautiful, tall, physically strong Jadis of “giantish blood” is a great sorceress, an archetypal young witch in Narnia. Like Medusa Gorgon, she can turn living creatures into stone, but akin to Athena she controls her magic with a wand to intimidate and kill her enemies. Like Athena, Jadis is cunny, composed, calm, smart, having movements “quick as thought” with nothing that surprises her: one “could not guess from her facial expression what she thought” (Lewis 1994, 60). Her character was superbly enacted by Tilda Swinton in the film adaptation by Andrew Adamson (2005). Popular culture has now equipped Medusa with sexual appeal and eroticism. Many modern movies and videogames have made her more “snaky,” giving her the body of the serpent. The erotization of Medusa dates back to the Roman poet Ovid, whose version of the myth tells that Medusa was once a maid with beautiful hair. Her locks were turned into snakes by Athena, when she found out that Poseidon violated the maid in Athena’s temple. This version of the myth has been taken up by many scholars and feminist activists to interpret the Medusa myth through the lenses of patriarchal culture. For some scholars, the rape of Medusa by Poseidon is seen as the rape of the feminine by the masculine. Paradoxically, Athena takes the side of patriarchal culture by turning the beautiful maiden into a monster for the act of violation she was not to blame (Bowers 1990). In many ways, Athena represents a masculine rationality, and, therefore, is seen as being subjected to her father, Zeus, in contrast to independent Artemis (Bolen 2009, 2014). Or, Athena is driven by a women’s jealousy, envious of Medusa’s powers and taking them away through Perseus. Such readings suggest that modern culture blames women, the victims of male violence, and Medusa’ anger is then justified and celebrated as a feminist reaction to patriarchy (McKenzie 2019). In other words, Medusa can turn patriarchy into stone. Some artists have elaborated on this feminist reading of the myth and reimagined it altogether. For instance, a sculpture by Luciano

Garbati depicts Medusa holding the head of Perseus, a reinterpretation where she decapitated him instead (McKenzie 2019). While these feminist readings are insightful, they brush aside the post-Jungian and deep culture point that facing Medusa is an important aspect of individuation that enables recognition of Medusa and Athena both as internal aspects of self and society. Both the uncontrolled anger and dehumanizing the “other” are potentially present within self and collectively within society. The myth recounts that after her head has been cut off, Medusa undergoes a beautiful, powerful transformation when Pegasus, the child of her sacrifice, a symbol of poetry and inspiration, is born of her neck (Downing 1999) (somewhat similar to the creation story among the Aztecs, where snake goddess Coutlicue loses her head to bear the world into existence). Some post-Jungian scholars agree that Medusa is a victim, but seeing how her anger and pain turn others into stone, chooses to be sacrificed to be set free (Bright 2010; Downing 1999). The paralyzed self becomes liberated and open to growth. In this sense, being paralyzed by Medusa allows for the moment of stillness and introspection that eventually generates a new birth of the self (Bright 2010). The uncanniness and ambiguity of Medusa continues after her death into her blood, which can be used as pharmakon, for both healing and killing (Siebers 2002). It is important to emphasize that ancient versions of the myth recount that Medusa Gorgon was always horrific. Her hair were always swirling snakes, and her body was never violated by Poseidon. She is the ancient monster, as is the archaic, eternal emotion of rage she represents. The mythological imagination allows for different versions of the myth to co-exist and play different roles in individual and collective psyche.

Singularity versus Multiplicity

Artemis: goddess of modernity

Only one goddess beats the popularity of Medusa in modernity: Greek huntressgoddess Artemis, with her “indomitable spirit” to go beyond prescribed social roles (Bolen 2014, xii; Andrews 2016). Most female characters in Hollywood are modeled after Greek Artemis or Atlanta: runners, hunters, warriors, rebels, they are “quirky, independent, courageous” and act in the “metaphoric wilderness” (Bolen 2009). The Artemis archetype inspired the women’s movement, shaped powerful female political figures, and “dominated prime-time television” of the recent decades, including “Disney’s bow-wielding princess Merida in the movie Brave; the people’s favorite Katniss Everdeen in Suzanne Collins’s series The Hunger Games; and the fiery Dany in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones’ (Andrews 2016, xii; Bolen 2014). Also modeled after Artemis are Moana (2016), Mulan (Mulan 1998, 2020), Rey (Star Wars, 2015, 2017, 2019), and Wonder Woman who adopted Artemis’ Roman name of Diana (DC Comics 2017, 2020). Mighty goddesses, superheroines with supernatural abilities or determined women, they know how to handle their arms and armor to meet their goal. Artemis-like characters reflect the spirit of the time, the twentieth-century global feminism that put forward the ideal of an independent, self-reliant woman who respects her needs and body. Virgin by spirit, she is “one-in-herself psychologically” (Bolen 2014, xv). However, deep culture reminds us that archetypal symbols are classically well-rounded and (at least) double-sided. Exuberant celebration of the Artemis-archetype downplays complexity, polarity, and its destructive aspects. In Greek mythology, Artemis is a protector of childbirth and youth (and helps her mother Leto to deliver Apollo), but she shows little hesitation when killing six girls, daughters of the first human mother Niobe, to punish her for boasting that she had borne more children than Leto (Kerenyi 2008, 223). She turns her nymph Kallisto into a she-bear that later takes her place in the sky as the Great Bear (Kerenyi 2008, 146). Her independence and autonomy come with arrogance, which harms Artemis herself: once teased by Apollo on whether she could hit a target far away in the sea, she shoots the head of her beloved, the famous hunter Orion, and kills him (Kerenyi 2008, 204). One story has her turn the great hero Actaeon into a stag when he

accidentally stumbles upon her bathing naked: the master hunter is then torn to bits by his own hounds. In her Black Diana aspect, Artemis is a lady of the beasts, a virgin maiden birthing nature, plants, and animals. Thus, complex, ambiguous, full of depth Artemis that we encounter in Greek mythology and religion is very different from her singular counterparts in modernity. What singular representations also omit is that Artemis is one among many goddesses, nymphs, and other female creatures, which stand for different qualities of the feminine within self and society. For post-Jungian psychologist Shinoda Bolen, the seven Greek goddesses can be “active” in different ways in different women (Bolen 2009, 19). The archer goddess Artemis and Athena, the goddess of wisdom and patron of heroes, represent “goal directedness and logical thinking,” while Hestia, the goddess of hearth and home, “is the archetype that focuses attention inward to the spiritual center of a woman’s personality” (Bolen 2009, 16). Virginity of these goddesses represents the “independent, self-sufficient quality in women.” In contrast, Hera, Demeter, and Persephone are goddess of “affiliation” and “bonding” (Andrews 2016; Bolen 1990, 16–17). Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, is an alchemical combination of different types of goddesses. She represents consciousness that is both focused (Athena, Artemis, Hestia) and receptive (Hera, Demeter, Persephone). The Aphrodite archetype expresses itself in women’s desire to seek passion and intensity of relationships rather than stability, to “value creative process, and be open to change” (Bolen 2009, 17). The dominance of a certain goddess may dominate a certain life stage: Aphrodite represents the sexual desire and appetite of the youth, while Demeter’s maternal maturity may come with age. For Bolen, Demeter, Persephone, and Hera are “vulnerable goddesses” as they are aligned with traditional women’s roles (Bolen 2009, 17, 133). These are the goddesses who were raped, abducted, dominated, or subdued by male gods. Their vulnerability is due to their involvement in relationship: Hera, raging and jealous wife of mighty Zeus, is hurt by his endless affairs; Demeter is devastated by the loss of her daughter, who was abducted by Hades. Hera’s rage and Demeter/Persephone’s depression point to “psychological illnesses” (Bolen 2009, 132). As result, women who embody the archetypes of these goddesses are more vulnerable. However, for many post-Jungians, the myth of Demeter and Persephone is a foundational myth of the psyche (Downing 1994; Hillman 1983; Pearson 2015).

In deep culture perspective, any classification of women according to single archetypal goddesses misses out the crucial aspect. Such reduction operates with the notion of an archetype as a noun reducing it to a particular goddess, which is contrary to the nature of the “irrepresentable” nature of the archetype (Neumann 1974). Only the moderns essentialize Artemis as “the goddess of the hunt” or Demeter as “the goddess of the harvest.” For the ancients, goddesses and gods existed primarily in their actions; their depth and mysteries were disclosed through related myths, stories, and rituals (Burkert 1987; Rogers 2012). In this sense, the archetypal refers to the action, a verb, something that Hillman describes as the personifying propensity of the soul (Hillman 1975, 8). There is not one goddess in every woman, rather the goddesses (and gods) play out in our attitudes, emotions, reactions, and actions; they erupt in all of us and that moment of eruption is what we refer to as being possessed by that goddess. Such polytheism or manifoldness of the psyche is multiplicity and complexity, not singularity. We focus here on the Demeter and Persephone myth to illustrate how the multiplicity and complexity of these goddesses emerge in their actions and associated rituals.

Demeter and Persephone

For the Ancient Greeks, Demeter and Persephone were never vulnerable goddesses. Great Demeter bestows two great gifts upon humanity: the gift of grain (agriculture) and the gift of afterlife (Burkert 1987, 20), ensuring nourishment in everyday life and in the hereafter. Like the great goddesses of early civilizations, she has power over the world of the living and the world of the dead (Cosmopoulos 2015, 12). Demeter was at the heart of Great Mysteries known as the Eleusinian Mysteries, “the oldest and the most venerable mystery cult” of antiquity (Burkert 1987; Cosmopoulos 2015, i). The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, one of the key historical sources in this inquiry, starts with a dramatic abduction of Demeter’s daughter, Persephone, by Hades, Lord of the Underworld (Foley 1994). The whole universe, gods and mortals, heaven, earth, and sea are caught up in wonder at the extraordinary beauty of the narcissus, which is in fact a “trap” prepared by Gaia. Filled with a sense of wonder, Demeter’s daughter reaches out to the flower narcissus with both hands. The earth opens up and Hades seizes the innocent Persephone, puts her in his golden chariot, and whisks her away to the Underworld. “Sharp grief seized” Demeter’s heart, “she tore the veil on her ambrosial hair” and “sped like a bird over dry land and sea” in search of her daughter (To Demeter 40–45 (Foley 1994, 4)). The goddess experiences a number of transformations and takes on different aspects of the symbolic feminine. First, when she transforms from a beautiful, joyful, mother-goddess to a veiled, woman in grief. Demeter wanders for nine days and meets Hecate, archaic goddess of witchcraft and magic, often depicted with three faces, representing her three aspects: the maiden, the mother, and the crone. Hecate joins Demeter in her search and together they find out from Helios that Zeus himself gave Persephone to Hades to be his “fertile wife” (To Demeter 80 (Foley 1994, 6)). The high status of her prospective son-in-law, one of the three ancients, does not console her. In despair and protest, Demeter leaves Olympus, the dwelling of Greek gods and goddesses. At this moment, we witness a second transformation of Demeter into an old

woman “cut off from childbearing and the gifts of garland-loving Aphrodite [beauty]” (To Demeter 101–102 (Foley 1994, 6)). The daughters of Keleos, son of Eleusis, meet disguised Demeter at the Maiden’s Well and she becomes nurse to the royal child Demophon. The baby is serene and happy in the hands of the goddess. Secretly from his mother, Demeter buries him every night in the fire to burn his mortality and make him immortal like gods. When his mother, Metaneira sees it, she disrupts the ritual in fear for her son’s life. Demeter is enraged as Metaneira has condemned her son to mortality. Here, we observe the transformation of Demeter to her glory, beauty, and awe of the goddess. She unveils her true identity and the radiance of the goddess: “Thus speaking, the goddess changed her size and appearance, thrusting off old age. Beauty breathed about her and from her sweet robes a delicious fragrance spread” (To Demeter 275–277 (Foley 1994, 16)). In her Good Mother aspect, Demeter initiates Triptolemos, possibly an older son of Keleos, in the mystery of agriculture, who shares the greatest gift of the goddess with humankind (Kerenyi 2008, 243). The etymology of the names Keleos “the Woodpecker” and Triptolomes “The Threefold Warrior” points to Demeter as the main inspiration behind the transition from “forest-dwellers” and “warrior” mentality to an agrarian civilization (Kerenyi 2008, 242). At the same time, she instructs to build a temple and an altar devoted to her in Eleusis, where the mystery rites would take place. Yet, still overtaken by grief and in her Terrible Mother aspect, she ordains a brutal year when “the ground released no seed,” and humanity is at the threat of extinction. Demeter refuses messengers from Zeus, his special gifts and promise of a special place amongst the immortals in the Olympus, saying nothing will grow until she sees her daughter. Mighty Zeus has to bow down to the will of the sacred feminine in order to ensure the survival of humanity and sends Hermes to ask Hades to return Persephone to her mother. However, Persephone eats some pomegranate seeds in the Underworld and, therefore, is bound to return to the Underworld as the Queen and the wife of Hades for one-third of the year (according to some versions, half of the year). There is no evidence in the hymn that Demeter is unhappy with the final settlement of her daughter spending two-thirds of the year with her in the Olympus. Quite the opposite: she is pleased enough to release her reproductive powers. Demeter’s grief and anger give way to joy at her daughter’s return, and this is mirrored in the return of life to the natural world. The two goddesses ascend to Olympus and promise blessings in life and after death to those who enjoy their favors.

In the text of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the male gods are rather “flat” characters who behave quite predictably. Yet, the female characters, and especially Demeter, are rounded and develop as they move in and out of their transformations. The shifting facets, aspects, and age of the great goddess represent her multiplicity and polarity. Some research suggests that Demeter in fact is a triple goddess herself with Demeter, Persephone, and Hecate being her different aspects. Kore stands for Demeter’s innocent self, soul thrown into the deadly realm of Hades, and archaic Hecate within guides her search for the lost soul. Kerenyi reminds us that, according to some myths, Demeter herself went down to the Underworld (Kerenyi 2008, 244). Based on contemporary reconstruction by scholars of antiquity, for the ancients the Demeter myth had at least two dimensions: outer and inner. The Great Mysteries had a practical, everyday life dimension in guaranteeing the grain supply (Burkert 1987). The rite was held in autumn after harvesting to honor the goddesses who taught humanity the secrets of agriculture and continue to ensure the growth of the crops. In the hymn, Demeter is talked of as the “bringer of seasons and giver of rich gifts” (To Demeter 192 (Foley 1994, 12)). The myth mirrors the agricultural cycle: when Demeter is with her daughter at Olympus, nature blossoms and seeds grow; when Persephone is in the Underworld, the winter land is barren and does not bear any fruit. Descent of Persephone to the Underworld represents burying the seed in the soil (in late autumn and early winter) so that it gives new life in spring. This is why ears of grain were the symbols of Demeter and, as some research suggests, could be one of those sacred objects, the hiera, that were brought to Athens from Eleusis before the procession and then were revealed to the initiates during the climax of the Eleusinian Mysteries (Burkert 1987, 38). For women from a higher social stratum, confined to private space, participation in the Great Mysteries provided the unique opportunities to be part of the public ritual that lasted several days and included a grand procession. The inner aspect of the Mysteries was in the profound spiritual, psychological effect it had on its participants (Burkert 1987; Cosmopoulos 2015; Gómez Iglesias 2016). Historical reconstruction of the rite is difficult as the initiates could not disclose its secrets and their experiences on penalty of death. Some research suggests that the use of such psychoactive substance as frankincense “unwound the participants in the ritual,” while the use of entheogens in the herbs and the burning of lead tablets may have enhanced the experience of lived religion and led to an “altered state of consciousness” (Burkert 1987; Salvo

2020, 175). It is believed that the priestess of Demeter and Kore enacted the goddesses during the rite (Cosmopoulos 2015, 16), and the participants were to experience the pain that pierced Demeter’s heart when she lost her daughter, to endure the doubts, hopelessness, and hardships of her search and wanderings, to feel her determination in reclaiming her daughter and to ecstatically rejoice at the mother–daughter reunion. The horror of losing a child evoked by the passion play served to heighten the experience and drive home the psychic, inner lesson. A similar dynamic is at work today in the annual passion performance of Ashura among Shia Muslims, re-enacting the death of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson in battle and using it to transform the self. This inner aspect noted by scholars of antiquity is in line with some post-Jungian research that argues that myths and symbols of ancient religions represented inner drama (Cheetham 2015; Harding 1990, 170; Hillman 1975). Demeter, Kore/Persephone, Hecate, Demophon, Hades, Zeus, and other characters are different aspects of the manifold, polytheistic personhood. Kore stands for one’s soul, and the entire myth plays out the journey of the soul (Downing 1994; Hillman 1975). Persephone is “slim-ankled” (To Demeter 2 (Foley 1994, 1)) indicating her frailty and fragility, just like our souls. She recoils from marriage, from giving up her child-like innocence (picking flowers), just as our innermost souls do. But it is in her moment of narcissism that she is abducted and raped (Boccassini 2018). The myth tells of the necessity of every person’s soul to mature and transform. As Hillman puts it:

The rape of Persephone does not happen just once in a life. Because this anima experience, this radical change in soul is a mythical occurrence, it is always going on as a basic pattern of psychodynamics […] Hades’ rape of the innocent soul [of Spring] is a central necessity for psychic change. (Hillman 1975, 208)

The soul represented by Kore or Psyche does not want to go to the Underworld, but for the soul to grow and mature, it has to go through separation, symbolic death, and alienation. The abduction of Persephone refers to a marriage rite, which in Ancient Greece and many other cultures included separation of the

bride from her parental home and her transition into her in-law’s household (Lissarrague 1994, 158). In many cultures worldwide, bridal rituals were accompanied by heart-breaking songs performed by women-mourners, lamenting on the part of the bride/soul (Kuznetsov and Loginov 2001; Nenola 2002). The marriage rite in all traditional cultures is a liminal stage for the initiate (mostly bride but also groom to some extent), who is about to transit to a different role and status in the community (Turner 1974, 231) and enter the alchemy representing the unity of feminine and masculine aspects of the self (von Franz 1980). Persephone, too, goes through the agony of separation from her mother and enters the realm of her mighty spouse-to-be, where she is transformed to become the most powerful Queen of the Underworld. The maturity of the soul and its beauty (even Aphrodite sought to know and share in the secrets of the beauty of Persephone) can only be obtained by incorporating the darkness and depth of the Underworld. Of course, the myth has many other levels and implications for individuals and society today. Some women and men may find it relatable and relevant as the story of the mother–daughter separation, unavoidable and necessary for the maturing of the youth, but also painful and unsettling (Bolen 2009; Downing 1992). For Downing, this myth is also about the unconditional love in same-sex relationships between two women (1994). In the outer realm of politics and society, the rape of Persephone is akin to the rape of the Earth by industrial ambition of humanity that depersonifies and desacrilizes nature. These many levels of one myth also illustrate the multiplicity of the archetypal symbol of Demeter and Persephone. Of course, the very imagining of self and soul as manifold is the work of the symbolic feminine that resists any singularity and simplicity (Irigaray 1985; Qadir and Tiaynen-Qadir 2018).

The Matrix and Pirates of the Caribbean

The Demeter myth does not have a direct parallel in modern popular culture (this is an aspect of the symbolic feminine that modernity has suppressed), but there are characters which render similar mythical depth and multiplicity. Trinity in the movie, The Matrix, is one. Neo’s journey is impossible without Trinity. However, she is not a typical love interest who inspires the hero to do great deeds. For Frentz and Rushing (2002, 77), the Matrix revives a modern variation of the ancient threefold goddesses venerated as Virgin-Mother-Crone: “Virginal love object, who, by the way, kicks butt;” Mother, as “in the second mother of the Nebachudnezzar crew;” and Crone, as “in the Oracle who taunts Neo with his destiny.” Trinity’s name points to this threefold nature in which she is close to Demeter. Her multilayered nature and depth gradually unfold in the Matrix sequels. She remains virgin in her Artemis-like autonomy, determination, and actions, superb in projecting and mastering her body construct into the Matrix, fighting like an Atlanta warrior and escaping agents. As she perfects her performance in the Matrix, we begin to see her other aspect, a deep, sensual inner self that unfolds once Neo and she enter Zion, the last foothold of humanity. Indeed, in Matrix 3, we don’t see Trinity in her sleek leather outfit very much, and her indispensable role in the Neo–Trinity duad is further strengthened in Matrix Resurrections (2021). Once beyond the Matrix, her humanity plays out. Her kiss of human passion and love resurrects Neo in Matrix 1. In contrast to the Oracle, Sati, Persephone, and even Neo himself, who are programs (as we find out in Matrix 2), Trinity is not machine-made. Her task is to teach Neo how to be human, how to learn through his “bodily intuition, from an impassioned commitment of the heart, not a rational decision of the mind” (Frentz and Rushing 2002, 76). Trinity is crucial in Neo’s passing his ordeal in Matrix 2, when he meets the Architect of the Matrix and is given a choice on whether to go to the Source and recharge the Matrix and select a few survivors of Zion (as the earlier versions of his program did) or to destroy the Matrix and humanity. (The Architect of the Matrix, a bearded man strongly reminiscent of iconographic representations of the Father God figure in Christian art, is as much the Creator of the Matrix as its product, the son of Matrix-like thinking and

reasoning of artificial intelligence.) The Crone/Baba Yaga would approve Neo’s answer as his decision is beyond either-or machine logic: Trinity’s humanity transformed him from within. He chooses to rescue Trinity, engaged in a fight with an agent at the time, and in doing so, changes the pathway for the salvation of humanity. Soon it becomes obvious that the Matrix is about the hero and the heroine journey, the Neo–Trinity duo saving humanity (Matrix 3). “It was never just you,” says a new Architect to Neo in Matrix Resurrections (2021). Their becoming the One culminates in their first and only love-making scene in Zion, where both feel relaxed and at home. Restored, they venture to the Machine City to face the Source, while Zion prepares for the last attack with the killing machines, Sentinels that will destroy the city. Like Beatrice leading Dante, Trinity pilots Neo into the Machine City. As the ship Logos (also a title of Christ) enters the Machine City, missiles bombard it and the crash kills Trinity just as she delivers Neo to his destination. She is the sacred feminine that takes the hero to his final ordeal. A machine leader agrees to arrange for Neo to enter the Matrix in order to face Agent Smith in the form of thousands of his clones. The cyber-Jesus story ends with Neo allowing Smith/death to assimilate him: Neo sacrifices his life, but Smith is defeated and deleted from the Matrix through Neo’s body. In return Zion is saved from destruction, and a fragile peace is achieved between humans and the machines. Persephone, portrayed by Monica Bellucci, is another interesting female character that enables the hero’s journey. We meet modern Persephone, Queen of the Underworld married to “The Frenchman,” who controls souls moving from the machine world to the “real” world like Hades. Neo is Adonis for Persephone: in Greek mythology, Persephone falls in love with Adonis, who is also in love with Aphrodite. Adonis spends a third of the year with Persephone in the Underworld. In The Matrix, Persephone helps Neo for one passionate kiss of love such as he shares with Trinity/Aphrodite. Pirates of the Caribbean written by Ted Elliot and Terry Rossio and directed by Gore Verbinski (among others) is another example of the symbolic feminine amid the hyperbolized machismo of pirate culture. The series develops some complex female characters that capture the dynamic and paradoxical nature of the symbolic feminine. It is a hero story of Will Turner and a heroine journey of Elizabeth Swann, and the scared marriage, syzygy, between the two of them as a culmination of their journeys. Jack Sparrow played by Johnny Depp is a

wonderfully weird and uncanny character who challenges our ossified notions of what is like to be “proper” and “normal.” Surrounded by women and wine, he is like gender-fluid Greek Dionysus amid the sacred marriage story (syzygy) of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann. Calypso, beautifully enacted by Naomie Harris, is a powerful modern representation of the multiplicity of the symbolic feminine in Pirates (2–3). In the beginning, she seemingly carries on the function of a young witch, named Tia Dalma, but over the period of two movies, her powers of the goddess fully unfold. Although her origins are linked to Greek Calypso, the daughter of the Titan Atlas, the Pirates’ Calypso encompasses many more aspects of the Greek nymph who kept Odysseus captive in her island. In Pirates, Calypso is more like a great goddess of early civilizations in that she brings both life and death. Like Ancient Egyptian Isis, she reveals her power to resurrect when bringing Barbossa back to life. Like archaic witch Hecate or wise Athena, she guides others on their perilous journey to World’s End to rescue Jack Sparrow. Like the Queen of the Underworld, Persephone, she has power over the dead and entrusts Davy Jones with the task of carrying the souls of the dead to the world beyond. Like Aphrodite, she loves passionately yet is also changeable and capricious; like Hera, she rages passionately when betrayed. Like great Demeter, she disguises herself in human form until released to take her true, majestic, terrifying form. Also like Demeter, her wrath is terrible and neither supplications nor bribery can tame her to human will. Like Yoruba Yemaya of African mythology, she is the mother of the ocean, the sea goddess who represents the vast world of the unconscious and stands for the unbound forces of nature and psyche. The pirates, who despise colonial authority and control (a metaphor for a modern condition), humbly bow in front of her and pray to her as she is the very personification and source of the freedom they most cherish. Calypso is the force, stage, and inner core of the free world of the pirates.

Discussion: The Symbolic Feminine in Deep Culture

We have shown in this chapter that, as with all symbols, the feminine is “there” in any mythical narrative, summoned or not. When it erupts into a narrative, it has traditionally had certain, definable features that we categorized here as multiplicity and ambiguity. The ancients personified the feminine into goddesses or other female characters with these features, typically as a feminine collective with each individual representing one characteristic. While this may lead to interpretations that they essentialized women with certain features, it was actually the reverse: the feminine characters represented certain features that made sense in the mythical narratives and accompanying rituals. They point to the need for a certain kind of interior transformation that comes from recognition of multiplicity and of one’s own polar ambiguity. Leaning on deep culture, we described what we meant by multiplicity of the symbolic feminine with a number of classical examples, notably Demeter. We also discussed the many shades of ambiguity within traditional feminine symbols, notably Medusa. Moreover, we connected these myths with contemporary feminine symbols, for instance, the remarkable movies mother!, The Matrix, and Pirates of the Caribbean. Yet, in modern times we also see something go awry with the symbolic feminine, as with most symbolic representations in popular culture. When it is repressed and not acknowledged, this archetypal impulse tends to push its way into consciousness forcefully and destructively, seeking integration into the self as into society. Perhaps all archetypal impulses do, as we discussed in Chapter 2 with the hero, but evidently the symbolic feminine has both more force and more destructive capability to go along with more soul and more wisdom, than other archetypal impulses. Integration of the symbolic feminine is not only to do with recognizing the feminine but with recognizing all of the feminine. Indeed, the soul of the world, or anima mundi, is often grammatically feminine. As Apffel-Marglin (2020) points out, its demise has something to do with the mechanical, heroicmasculine modernity of the age of Enlightenment. Such may also be the explanation for the Medusa tattoo becoming one of the most popular today. One notable setting where the symbolic feminine is not only present but is

venerated as both multiple and ambiguous is the symbol of the sacred feminine. Many of the classical examples cited above are of goddesses, but also in world religions today we find the symbolic feminine either strikingly present or prominent in its absence. One fascinating and ceaseless source of feminine multiplicity in religion is Mary, mother of Jesus in Orthodox and Catholic Christianity as well as in Islam. While her presence in Sufi Islam is worth much further investigation (e.g., Murata 1992), her explicit and current presence in Eastern Orthodox Christianity is most obvious in Marian icons. Mary’s many faces are evident in her iconography: indeed, the sheer variety of Marian icons is bewildering, with over 700 different depictions in Russia alone (Yazykova 1995). Even a cursory glance at Orthodox icons, for instance, quickly reveals that Marian iconography far exceeds her scriptural role in quantity, form, variety, and veneration amongst laity and clergy, which points to her as an archetypal symbol erupting and breaking through institutional and theological boundaries (Qadir and Tiaynen-Qadir 2018). They speak to her undeniable multiplicity: she of three hands, quick to hear and quick to punish, multiplier of harvests, warrior in battle and slayer of dragons, healing addictions and reveling in snakes, containing as well as birthing, soothing pains and wearing fire, and so on. Her titles and icons, as well as accompanying hymns and rituals, bear witness to her benediction and to righteous wrath, to her intercession on behalf of supplicants as well as to responding to those supplications. Of course, here we enter the realm of the symbolic sacred feminine, which is not just an eruption of the feminine symbol in mythical narratives and popular culture, but a more essentialized description of the sacred. For now, we only note that if Mary is, in post-Jungian terms, a “myth” (Warner 1983), then deep culture is a mythology within which to make sense of her mystical role. We suggest that the deep culture framework can be used to explore similar “myths” of Mary in other traditions, as well as of other symbolic personages leading to mysticism in ancient and contemporary religious traditions. Mary as discussed here is far from a standard Western secular representation of a naive, sweet, and submissive girl. She is multiplicity, as the symbolic feminine par excellence. It is perhaps most true of her what French feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray said of the symbolic feminine in general:

Whence the mystery that woman represents in a culture claiming to count everything, to number everything by units, to inventory everything as

individualities. She is neither one nor two. Rigorously speaking, she cannot be identified either as one person, or as two. She resists all adequate definition. (Irigaray 1985, 26)

Chapter 5

IT’S CULTURE ALL THE WAY DOWN

The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other—different as life and death, as day and night […]. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol—the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. —Campbell (2004, 201)

From the imaginal these themes enter awareness Ghalib, the whisper of your pen is the sound of an angel —Mirza Ghalib (d. 1869, India, Urdu poet)

Introduction

Everybody is a symbol, everything is a symbol, every action is a symbol. At some level, symbols are universal because everything we describe is a narrative and, as such, ipso facto, follows the structure of a myth. Even if we only describe it to ourselves, and even if that description is not a conscious narrative but what we term perception it is, after all, structured as a narrative. Archetypal impulses inform that structure of perception, as they inform all mythical narratives. This means that the framework of deep culture can be usefully applied not just to all manner of explicitly “fictional” narratives, but indeed to all narratives even if they are a different sort of “fiction” that is not recognized as such. Among these are narratives of politics, religion, and everyday life. In this chapter, we discuss how the framework of deep culture can be used to identify archetypal impulses in descriptions of these cultural domains beyond fictionalized myths. First, though, as we pointed out in the introduction, we have taken a different view of “myth” than is common in ordinary parlance or even in much social research. People tend to see myth as a “false,” constructed discourse and so something that is opposed to the truth, as in “myth vs. reality.” Such views tend to stop at the literary or aesthetic value of myths. Indeed, from this perspective, when myths are employed in the “real” world, they are either seen as puerile— such as obviously nonfactual cosmic origins of humanity—or as downright destructive, for example, the “Aryan myth” of nationhood promoted by Nazis during the Second World War (Lincoln 1999). However, the rhetorical school of cultural analysis has gone a long way since the 1930s in correcting the impression that myths are constructs and truths are not, showing that rhetoric is at work in all manner of truth-telling, even if that is not acknowledged. In other words, the “Aryan myth” is no more a myth than, say, democracy, although of course one has demonstrably harmed human welfare while the other has enhanced it. At the level of rhetoric, though, both can be analyzed similarly. Another good example is of science, which in this sense is also as much a myth as anything else, albeit not typically recognized as such because of its functional

successes. For instance, Gross (2006) analyzes rhetorically how the nature of Francis’ and Crick’s announcements and publications about the discovery of DNA affected the direction of molecular biology, none of which changes how useful the subject is in saving lives. And that’s not all. Scholarship in general is a myth (Lincoln 1999, 207), and it has very particular rhetorical demands as well as archetypal impulses of rationality. Hillman (1998) has long been an advocate for viewing psychology as a myth that forgot it was one. Likewise, myth studies are as much a myth as the myths they study (Miller 2014). So, when we move beyond myths in this chapter, in one sense we are not moving beyond them at all: if all narratives have mythical structures, then myths are all around us. Fictions are no more or less mythical than any other forms of narrative. This also means that myths may be used for all kinds of ends, whether to deliberately fool others or to reveal some truths, or both. When analyzing narratives like those of science, rhetorical studies have concentrated on unpacking the linguistic tools and tricks that scientists use to construct an authoritative truth or that politicians use to convince others of their agenda. Narrative analysis has developed considerably from Aristotle and the Roman rhetoricians, yet the framework remains one of identifying technical means of suasion. The point has generally been to identify which tropes are successful in persuading audiences, and which techniques audiences of one kind or another respond favorably to. But here we are more concerned with the very structure of narrative as such. In this ontological dimension, there is a depth psychology element to all narratives, even those we tell ourselves or by way of which we perceive reality. We can analyze that narrative using the elements of deep culture theory. The analysis will reveal a sort of truth within the myth, irrespective of how factually correct it may be. It is in this sense, for example, that religion was considered mythical by the famous historian of religion, Mircia Eliade (1963). Regardless of whether a particular narrative might be considered theologically, factually or archaeologically true, and regardless of its function in maintaining a social order, a mythical narrative of any religion has a depth-psychology truth to it. Again, this does not say anything about the narrative’s other truth values—which need to be considered on their own epistemological grounds. What it does say something about is that a religious narrative also works within a psychological framework and its ability to help participants make sense of the world is due in part to its archetypal nature.

Consider, also, political narratives. Whether we read the newspaper or watch a media report, or whether we study some statistics or talk to our local MP, our political experiences are mediated. They are, therefore, narrated, even if only to ourselves. The structure of that narration is necessarily archetypal. For instance, any media reports about former US President Donald Trump, as well as his statements about himself, were all archetypal narratives. They mostly featured him as a hero or anti-hero. Not that he is one or the other. Rather, his actions were read and re-told by himself, and others, archetypally and then performed accordingly. These political texts—including Trump’s own performing of his brand—can be analyzed by way of deep culture, for instance by noting how his hero story has been distorted by not having a symbolic death (see Chapter 2). The making of a hero is in the telling of his-story. So, in addition to real-time narrations, also biographies, memoirs, and ghosted books go a long way to constructing a mythical narrative, often after a politician’s death or in their late life. This will doubtless be the case with Trump. Nor is there anything special about him in this respect: telling archetypal stories is just how the political world makes sense. In some way, this is connected to Ernst Kantorowicz’s (1957) argument about the “The King’s Two Bodies,” describing how the King wore the body politic (the populace) when he ascended the throne. Hence, the first part of “The king is dead, long live the king” refers to the physical body of the king, while the second part refers to the political body, or the representation of the nation’s people. What Kantorowicz didn’t elaborate on is that the king’s second, political body may be analyzed as a mythical text containing psychological truths. This way of looking at narratives as containing psychological truths and hence being susceptible to archetypal analysis has wide-ranging implications. For us, it means that much more of the world we see is open to analysis by way of the deep culture theory than might be originally assumed. Whether we examine narratives of, say, science or religion or politics, in principle the same theoretical elements should be applicable and should reveal new insights into these phenomena. Not, of course, that deep culture will explain all there is to be known about all societal phenomena. Yet, applying this theoretical outlook will yield otherwise hidden aspects of the world around us. The possibilities are, perhaps, endless. In this chapter, we explore two of these in the realms of interreligious dialogue and a particularly evocative piece of religious symbolism, the veil. There is no undeniable reason for selecting these arenas, as the theory should be

widely applicable. However, they mark important moments in our era and span the field from religion to art to politics and so show some of the flexibility of the theory. In the following section, we zoom in on pluralism, specifically interreligious dialogue. Drawing on our previous research and pedagogical work, we show that much of interreligious dialogue based on cognitive meaningmaking has often reached an impasse, while moving to symbolic dialogue can open up new avenues of cooperation and research. We discuss these with a focus on a couple of cross-cultural symbols that can act as the basis for shared meaning-making. Then, we move to a highly problematic piece of religious symbolism in the West, namely the veil. Using the deep culture theory’s elements of interiority and signification beyond the visible, we show how both the veil and the reaction to it can be better understood. Facing the veil reveals one of the most obvious signs of fundamentalism in our times, in terms of what Jung termed “monotheism of consciousness” (Jung, CW 13, ¶51). Again, these are quick scans of just a few topical issues, and the discussion here is intended to provoke further research rather than offer any final answers or statements. We end the chapter with a conclusion to the book.

Intercultural and Interreligious Dialogue: The Symbolic Dimension

While the deep culture theory enables seeing dominant as well as suppressed symbols of modernity, it can also have a direct application with the use of those symbols in building intercultural and interreligious dialogue. Since the 1980s, intercultural dialogue has been a major field for efforts to manage the new recognition of diversity in all countries of the world. The term was adopted by the United Nations and the Council of Europe, among others, as the basis for promoting tolerance (Besley and Peters 2012). Despite the presence of all kinds of cultural conflicts, including on ethnic lines, arguably the defining divide in our times is inter-religious. Even when political or economic factors might be at stake, still “religion sometimes constitutes the fault line along which opposing sides are divided” (Timmerman and Segaert 2005, 9). While engaging with the religious other is in part an individual activity, institutionalized platforms play a crucial role in defining that personal engagement (Keaten and Soukup 2009). There is also little doubt of the challenges in such endeavors. Journals, books, forums, and political activities attest to the difficulty in sustaining interfaith dialogue. Most experiences relate shared meaning as the central concern as well as central obstacle (Bohm 1996). Shared meaning is crucial to dialogue at both the institutional and personal level, but the search for commonality in meaning has proven elusive, especially in interfaith dialogue (Azumah 2002; Bohm 1996; Masuzawa 2005). However, few accounts break down what that meaning does or could consist in. The most common approach is epistemological. There is a reliance on conceptual dialogue, which assumes that meaning is a universal feature of any concept: it may be confused by users, but that confusion may be readily sorted out through discussion if only people were to sit across each other and do so. However, this has proven notoriously challenging. We argue here that this is because meaning is so tightly coupled to universal concepts. If instead, as argued by post-Jungians, meaning is viewed as primarily symbolic, we may open a space for dialogue based on shared symbols rather than on putatively shared concepts. This is where deep culture theory steps in, based on two of its central elements.

First, the theory suggests that symbols are archetypal and hence shared across cultures and times, even though they may be expressed in culturally specific manners. Second, the theory notes that symbols are intuited and grasped wholesale rather than being analyzed cognitively and piecemeal. Based on these two elements, we show that a dialogue can be constructed that sidesteps conceptual pitfalls and varying cognitions in favor of symbolic sharing.¹ In this section, we show how this may work with the living traditions of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and South Asian Islam as illustration here due to our own long-term, ethnographic fieldwork amongst Orthodox and Muslims in Finland, Pakistan, Russia, and South Africa between 2006 and 2019. Our data include some of this ongoing engagement and conversations with interlocutors, as well as popularly accessible images. Our focus is on developing the theoretical argument that dialogue through images supplements conceptual dialogue by tapping into universal, archetypal symbols to move beyond cognitive barriers. We illustrate this with two archetypal symbols: the fish and the chalice. The brief discussion of features of these symbols is not meant to “prove” the argument, but rather to highlight the variations in its utility for imaginal dialogue. More empirical work is needed to flesh out practical instances of the role these two symbols play in the life of faithful and in under-pinning dialogue. Our purpose in choosing the symbols is to exemplify our argument for a crosstradition dialogue that does not rely on individual imaginations reaching out to each other but rather on subtle tapping into pre-existent archetypes as ways of symbolically perceiving the world. As in the introduction, we see archetypes as autonomous to the extent individuals do not fantasize or “imagine” them; we are, rather, living them or, more precisely, experiencing the world through them. Archetypes are reflected in the world around us through what Jung termed the “collective unconscious.” With this term, Jung differentiated the homogenous unconscious innovatively identified by Freud, into a personal and a collective aspect. The latter is that part of each person’s unconscious that is shared across all of humanity (Jung, CW 7, ¶437ff). Over a lifetime of immersion into symbols, myths, and legends of cultures and religious traditions from around the world, Jung became ever-more convinced of the universality and autonomy of the collective unconscious. He collected a veritable library of evidence of symbols appearing in the visualizations and dreams of people who should never have known of those symbols through personal experience. The theory of deep culture does not accord any particular ontological status to

archetypes. Indeed, as discussed in the introduction, we feel it is more apposite to think of the existential adjective “archetypal” than the essentialized noun “archetype.” That is, the focus here is on human perception and action as archetypal and so tapping into the collective unconscious, rather than on which abstract space archetypes might reside in as opposed to Platonic ideals. Irrespective of ontological leanings, there is enough psycho-social evidence to posit the existence of a shared symbolic lexicon that human beings perceive the world through. Moreover, such symbols are best depicted and described metaphorically. In fact, “‘stick to the image’ (Jung, CW 16, ¶320)² has become a golden rule of archetypal psychology’s method, and this is because the image is the primary psychological datum” (Hillman 1983, 9). Post-Jungian psychology thus allows a move beyond singular, ego-dominated, and monocularly-moral visions of dialogue. Such work would free images from “serving a narrational context, having to tell a story with its linear, sequential, and causal implications that foster first-person reports of the egocentric actions and intentions of a personalistic subject” (Hillman 1983, 15). From the perspective of post-Jungian depth psychology, it is self-evident that archetypes exist in all traditions. Yet, these archetypes are not static, and their configurations or appearances vary across cultures. It thus becomes important to map empirically how bridges can be built in the cultural unconscious. In this backdrop, we are interested in reoccurring imaginal themes across history (in religious images, texts, and songs) and in contemporary ethnographic accounts of Orthodoxy and Islam. Our contention is that these archetypal themes resonate in humanity’s cultural unconscious, and it is this resonance that builds the platform for a dialogue of traditions. The cases of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam offer superficially very different takes on images. In the former, icons have been central to praxis (Weaver 2011), often seen as “windows on eternity” (Munteanu 2013). Yet, calling an icon a religious image or a religious painting would be inaccurate from the perspective of Orthopraxis—their veneration is not the veneration of the material pictures but is directed rather to the archetype of the painted icon (Hann and Goltz 2010, 12). In contrast, it has become almost a truism to point out aniconism or even iconoclasm amongst Muslims. Yet, there is a close relationship between Islamic art and Islamic spirituality (Nasr 1987), and images have been a core component of that. Arguably, even the aniconistic art of calligraphy can be seen as “visual representation of God,” representing divine presence in the world (Elias 2011, 127). Archetypal Islamic images remain

popular in Islamic culture, from truck art to pictures of saints to highly complex imagery in devotional poetry. Both Orthodox Christian iconography and Islamic imagery are replete with archetypally shared symbols, which can be used as a basis for mutual understanding and cooperation. We explore two such here, the fish and the chalice.

Fish

Jung devoted considerable attention to the symbolism of the fish, beginning with a historical analysis of the symbolism of Christ as fish (Jung, CW 9, part II, ¶145). He even pointed out Christ’s birth coinciding with the astrological age of the fish, being “born as the first fish of the Pisces era, and was doomed to die as the last ram (αρνíον, lamb) of the declining Aries era” (Jung, CW 9, part II, ¶147). Now, a peculiarity of the fish symbol is often its dual nature: in many cases, the common Christian symbol is of two fish, either crossing horizontally and vertically as in early historical representation, or as circling each other. From our modern psychological viewpoint, a fish is the living content of its fluid medium, the unconscious psyche (Ronnberg and Martin 2010, 202). For post-Jungians today, the two fish swimming in opposite directions may signify one vertically moving to the spirit, and the other horizontally to the matter, or the split between the conscious and the unconscious within the self (Ronnberg and Martin 2010, 202). For Jung, the symbol of two fish curling around each other is often representative of Christ. As Jung discusses at length (Jung, CW 9, part II, ¶162ff), the dual fish are a potent symbol, indicating at the same time the Divine/human nature of Christ, but also his presence/future-return and, interestingly, Mother/Son. In Pre-Christian religions, the Mother Goddess was often a virgin (Virgo), such as the virgin Kore bringing forth the Aeon, and of course the ancient Greek symbol for Pisces was of two fish circling each other. The fountain of Hera was thought to contain the one fish caught by the “hook of divinity” to “feed the whole world with its flesh” (Jung, CW, 9, part II, ¶178), and an early representation of the “lady of the beasts” shows her with a fish between her legs as if about to give birth to it (Neumann 1974, 134). An account of an engraving on an early Christian lamp even shows two fish devouring each other (Jeremias 1911). All of these themes bring out the point that the archetypal characteristics of the fish contain multiplicity. The symbol of the fish appears unexpectedly in religious practice of Orthodox believers, for instance in the altar of a member of an Orthodox Church in Finland who told us she felt it was “right” to place the fish figure above the icons

in a bedroom where she usually prays. In our discussions, she mentioned that she “felt” a connection between Jesus and the fish. In classical icons, the fish often appears as a side-image, as for instance swimming in the water in the famous Greek icon of the Zoodochos Pighi, or commonly in symbolism used by Orthodox churches around the world. Although the fish was used widely in early Christianity as a symbol, it is now predominantly employed in popular Protestant culture. Yet, its persistence in Orthodox symbolism indicates its archetypal importance. The double fish symbol is—less commonly known—also prevalent in Islamic tradition, for instance on a coin struck by the Mughal emperor Jahangir in India in the seventeenth century. If we turn to more obviously religious depictions, there is an entire sub-tradition of depicting the prophets Khidr and Elias (Elijah) with fish (Figure 5.1). The guiding figure in Surah (Chapter) 18 of the Quran (henceforth S.18 (Asad 2003)), often associated with the Prophet Khidr by exegetes, appears after the Prophet Moses and his servant lose track of a fish (S.18, 59–61 (Asad 2003)). Again, the Prophet Elias is generally depicted with fish, often as the double fish symbol. Khidr, the “Verdant One” or “Green One” is supposed to have drunk from the fountain of immortality and is a frequent guide to Muslim mystics. Despite the new dearth of imagery across the Sunni Muslim world, there are still many images that include the fish in vernacular practice, as for instance in posters used to illuminate a home or workplace with Baraka.

Figure 5.1: “The Prophet Khizr Khan Khwaja on a fish,” ca. 1760 Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Naturally, both the Quran and the Old Testament contain extensive references to the Prophet Jonah (Yunus) who was swallowed whole by a “whale” when he tried to avoid God’s direct command for mission and was then spat back whole when he submitted. In fact, the “whale” was actually traditionally depicted as a large fish in both traditions, often with scales, rather than as a mammal. Most classical and contemporary interpretations of the Quran translate the word “huut” in the story as “fish” (S.37, 142). In this context, the symbolism of the fish is that of the vessel-belly swallowing the sun-hero (Neumann 1955, 162). In modern art, the fish continues to feature as a prominent archetypal symbol. For the Swiss artist Paul Klee, the luminous Goldfish, gazing at us from his paintings, was a figure from another realm that guided his inner life. The otherworldly fish was a recurring theme in the paintings of the Russian-French modernist Marc Chagall. In his work Time is a River Without Banks and many other of his works, the fish is often equipped with wings, flying through the celestial realm. Incorporating human features, Chagall’s fish connects the human and the ethereal eternal. In the same way, some modern Indigenous artists, including Christi Belcourt, Qavavau Manumie, and Norval Morriseaus, draw on their living traditions rooted in the past to evoke the symbol of the fish as the carrier of life and the medium of transformation. Perhaps fish captures the intuitive desire of moderns to restore “lost participation in the archaic, unconscious world, one that fairy tale often portray as a lost golden ring that a fish returns as a gift in its mouth or inside its stomach?” (Ronnberg and Martin 2010, 202).

Chalice

The chalice is another emblematically Christian symbol. Its most striking appearance is as the Holy Grail, a “mysterious and haunting image, which crosses the borders of fiction and spirituality, and which, for eight centuries, has been a recurrent ideal in Western literature” (Barber 2004, 1). As Barber shows, the mystery of the Grail lies not least in its constant inspiration of lay-people as the highest mystery of Christianity, despite the fact that the Catholic and (many) Protestant Churches never officially recognized it (the Chalice of Benediction from I Corinthians 10:16 generally refers to the ritual of Eucharist/Communion). There is more scholarship on the Grail—from its existence to its many quests— than on almost any other symbol of Christianity except the cross. Yet, most accounts tend to overlook the Grail as an instance of the chalice, even fewer relate that symbol as a pre-existent imaginal archetype rather than a symbol imagined, and least of all do they comment on the widespread prevalence of this symbol across traditions and in a variety of practices (although see Jung and Franz (1998)). For post-Jungians, the chalice is an archetypal symbol par excellence, a cup of libation employed as “the container, that which receives, holds, and perhaps alchemically transforms” divine wisdom as in the blood of Christ for Christians (Hollis 2000, 80). It occurs in the paintings, dreams, and visions of patients in depth psychological analysis around the world and across time, and often stands for the soul. It appears in Jewish practice as the Kiddush Cup raised on Sabbath or the wine glass broken by the groom during wedding feasts. In ancient Greece, the chalice belonged to Dionysus, that ambiguous figure associated with women, wine, and Apollo. In Orthodox Christianity too, chalice symbolism is multiple and diverse. Receiving Holy Communion from a chalice, sacred cup of the wine in the Eucharist, is the quintessence of the Divine Liturgy. The bread and wine are not meant to symbolize, but rather are mystically transfigured to become the Body and the Blood of Christ (Merras 1992). The chalice is not only a symbol, but archetypically emerges in the mystery of the liturgy, in which the border between the human and imaginal realms is transgressed; the Divine Liturgy, too, is not

only a remembrance of the Last Supper but its active reliving (Lossky 1976). The archetypal aspect of the chalice distinctively appears in the history and veneration of the “miraculously revealed” icon of the Virgin “the Inexhaustible Chalice,” in which Mary “in the light of the divine glory” contemplates her son, “the Eternal God and Lord Jesus Christ, standing in the chalice” (Akathist n.d.) (Figure 5.2). Its iconography is inspired by the Byzantine “Mother of God of Nicea.” The icon “miraculously” revealed itself to an illiterate, retired, alcoholic soldier in the nineteenth-century Russia, and was accepted by the Church only after many reports of its healing cure. The icon’s veneration became part of people’s practices even before “the Inexhaustible Chalice” was incorporated in the icon-writing canon. Or rather, its incorporation could be seen as the result of the archetypal significance of the icon in people’s vernacular Orthodoxy. It is now venerated internationally, including in the Greek Orthodox Church and some diasporic Orthodox churches in the USA. The Akathist hymn devoted to “the Inexhaustible Chalice” is full of church poetry metaphorically pointing to the agentic vessel character of Mary as “the Inexhaustible Chalice,” who “quenches our spiritual thirst,” “a cup of heavenly gifts who always remains full,” “the Chalice of Life and Immortality,” and “heavenly cup of divine gifts” (Akathist-NC 2015, 14–17). Jesus also emerges as the sacred Chalice, “the mystery of the Divine Eucharist” (Akathist n.d.).

Figure 5.2: A Print of the Orthodox icon of Theotokos “Inexhaustible Cup” (a home altar piece of one of our interlocutors) (Source: photo by the authors).

To the one who suffers from “the destructive ailment of drunkenness” (AkathistNC 2015, 6), Mary offers another cup, the divine Eucharistic cup that “shows us the Lamb born of you, always eaten but never consumed” (Akathist-NC 2015, 15). This icon suggests the move between “two poles of one and the same axis” of the archetypal feminine, which “indicates the related phenomena that taken together constitute the transformative character” (Neumann 1955, 74). The negative pole of drunkenness is associated with alcohol overconsumption or drug abuse, triggering ecstasy that devours and eventually leads to personal disintegration (Neumann 1955, 73). The positive pole is the drunkenness of a poet (imaginative, abstracting) or mystic (imaginal, receiving), and is associated with temporal disintegration of the ego and ecstasy, leading to inspiration, vision, and wisdom, or Sophia. “The Inexhaustible Chalice” embodies this reversal movement, quenching spiritual thirst, and replacing the destructive cup of wine, “the wine of fornication” (Revelation 17:2) with the divine Eucharistic cup of wine. Alongside the Eucharistic chalice of wine, there is a vast chalice with water that is usually used during baptism or for example when water is blessed during the feast celebrating the baptism of Jesus. Infants as the fishes are literally bathed in such a chalice when they are baptized into membership of the Orthodox Church. The “The Life-giving Spring” (Zoodochos Pighi in Greek) is another Marian and more ancient icon that discloses the imaginal realism of the chalice in an Eastern Orthodox sanctuary of the Greek Orthodox Church in Turkey. The icon of “the Life-giving Spring” depicts Mary and Jesus, sitting in a marble fountain in the shape of the chalice, from which water flows. Two angels are hovering over their heads, and around the spring the emperor and ailing people are shown longing and drinking from the “Life-giving Spring.” A small pond with fish is painted on the side. Similarly, there is an actual marble basin beneath the icon, where two fish are swimming. According to tradition, the fish has been there for centuries, and the Turkish name of the place is Balikli, which means “a place with fish.” There are multiple stories of cures, miracles, and divine inspiration linked to this

place, and even more so in connection to holy wells, which for instance in Russia are traditionally devoted to the most holy Theotokos. The archetypal aspect of the chalice, Mary as the “Fountain of Life and Immortality,” is also revealed in contemporary vernacular Islam. Consider this example of a middle-aged Muslim Pakistani woman who unconsciously created almost exact arrangement of Mariological icons and the holy well of Balikli in her home altar (Figure 5.3). According to Laila, she “always felt Mary especially close to her heart.” This is not surprising given that the Virgin is the most honored women in Islam, “whom Muslims look upon as the perfectly feminine” (Murata 1992, 318). Medieval Sufi Farid-ud-din Attar (of the famous Conference of the Birds) notes: “When tomorrow on the Day of Resurrection the call goes up, ‘O men!’, the first person to step forward into the ranks of men will be the Virgin Mary” ((Attar 1967, 72); for a complete discussion on Mary’s femininity and masculinity, see Murata (1992)).

Figure 5.3: The home altar of Laila (Source: photo by the authors).

Laila is a devout Muslim, and her home “altar” includes numerous Orthodox icons of Mary, Hindu terracotta symbols and marigold motifs, as well as Islamic symbols of the Shia Hand-of-Five, blue pottery, and various animals. There is also a Greek Orthodox icon of Mary and her parents, St Anna and St Joachim. To the left from the icons, behind the chalice, there is a statue of Mary in a blue garment, made by an illiterate Muslim artisan in a small village of the Punjab. The potter himself had put a figure of baby Jesus next to Mary to complete the divine couple of the Mother and the Son. There is an Islamic calligraphy print above Mary’s figure, performed in traditional blue and white and in the shape of a perfect circle. Beneath the figures of Mary and Jesus, there is a small pond with water and multiple ceramic chalices, from which the water flows, along with a ceramic fish. In the upper left corner above the calligraphy, we may also observe a painting with multitude of green fish. Laila’s home “altar”—playing at least in part an aesthetic function in the living room in her home—illustrates people’s artistry and creativity in vernacular practices of religion (Primiano 1995), as well as synergetic combination of various spiritual traditions in lived religion (Keinänen 2010). Yet above all, irrespective of the degree of conscious and unconscious choices made to arrange the altar in this specific way, Laila’s home altar’s striking similarity with Zoodochos Pighi in Turkey discloses the archetypal connection of the chalice, Mary, and fish in their hardly-graspable complexity. Laila herself refers to a connection she “feels” between Mary and the chalice. In vernacular Islam and Orthodox Christianity, Mary symbolism overlaps with the archetypal symbolism of water and the archetypal feminine. As, the rising, cold, fresh waters of the spring, she is the “the Fountain of Immortality” (Akathist-NC 2015, 14), who quenches spiritual thirst and inspires poetic vision and the “eruptive moment of ‘being born’ and of creative movement” (Neumann 1955, 48). Church poetry sings of her as the “vessel of holy water who dissolves our sorrow” (Akathist-NC 2015, 15). As “the river who carries miracles” (Akathist-NC 2015), she is the archetypal river that enables mythic voyage to the other shore (Ronnberg and Martin 2010). She is the “life-giving fountain of

healing,” a whirlpool opening portals to other dimensions, a waterfall standing for the sacred, untamed power of the sublime, flooding waters that nourishes the soul. In Sufi poetry, she is the still waters of the lake, in which God is best contemplated (Austin 1988). As the “sea” (Akathist-NC 2015), she is the “Great Round,” the “mother of mothers” with its dark, mystic depths (Ronnberg and Martin 2010), who embraces her son-fish even in his masculine movement and activity (Neumann 1974, 48). For the fourteenth-century Byzantine Greek theologian Palama, Mary is “the Queen of all creatures, being in the world and before the world” (Palama 1993, 86), “the Beauty of all creation,” “the Beginning and the Source,” “the Hight and Perfection of all holy” (Palama 1993, 109). As ancient poets remind us: to understand water, the sea, “the great mother as matrix of being,” “one must study the fishes; to understand a fish, one must study water” (Ronnberg and Martin 2010, 202). In this aspect, Mary–Jesus symbolism can be seen through the lenses of a post-Jungian approach, where water often refers to the qualities of the world and the psyche, while the fish stands for an ego that thrives, dies, and is shaped by the surrounding waters. To this, we can add the entire body of Sufi shrine music (qawwali) from Central and South Asia in which the chalice appears ubiquitously as a carrier of divine wisdom (often wine). A curious example of this is found in the Shiite tradition of the grail, a liturgical text used in ritual ceremonies in medieval Iran (Corbin 1998, 173–204). The ceremony—evocative of tales of Knights of the Round Table on a quest for the Holy Grail—involves a “ritual of the cup.” Corbin’s description of the ritual performed by the Shia Abul-Khattab and since repeated in esoteric circles, includes a central role for the Grail. For instance, Salman the Persian (a companion of the Prophet) is mystically invoked with the words, “In his right hand he holds a Grail (or chalice) in which is found the servant of the Light.” Then again, a chalice is passed in the ritual amongst the participants before it is lifted up to be “refilled” from the imaginal realm.

Toward imaginal dialogue

The symbols of the fish and the chalice are archetypal in the sense that both spread across history, geography, and religious tradition, and emerge in vernacular, material practices of Orthodox and Muslim faithful. By drawing on post-Jungian archetypal psychology, we have described the prevalence of these symbols as being attributable to humankind’s collective unconscious. This means that these and other symbols, in some sense, pre-exist actors: actors do not imagine them, but rather they can be seen as tapping into these symbols. Actors use these imaginal symbols to make sense of the world around them, in the same way that scholars use language to understand the world around them. Just as the physical or social world around us would make no sense without the language we use to describe it, so the spiritual world around us makes no sense without these archetypal images as building blocks. We find that these archetypal symbols are expressed in places, times, and traditions where one often doesn’t look for them, such as the fish in Orthodox iconography, or the chalice in Islamic practices. Equally importantly, these expressions are involved as objects in the vernacular practice of faithful, whether in home “altars” of Muslim women in Pakistan or next to icons prayed with by Orthodox in Finland. If esoteric rituals such as Christian alchemical practices or Sufi grail rituals are mapped, the presence of these archetypal expressions appears even more central. So, while most psychological accounts would seek to uncover meaning in personal developmental history, and theological accounts might seek to “correct” the practices of faithful, we are interested here in how this outline can help in more or less stalled dialogue between religious traditions based on shared symbols. One difference between such an “imaginal dialogue” and dialogues based on conversation arises from the remarkable complexity of archetypal symbols. The fish is an excellent example that retains a “family resemblance” of meanings in different traditions, contexts, and times, without being reduced to a singular meaning in any one case. Using the archetypal fish symbol as a basis for dialogue is notably different from using abstract concepts of political “interest.” A dialogue on fish can build on its biological definition as a mostly ectothermic,

gill-bearing, aquatic craniate, paraphyletic organism (and the concomitant agreement on how biological vocabulary should be used). Or it can be based on needs of various populations served by a single body of fish (and the concomitant agreement on how fish should be used). However, such dialogues have been remarkably poor historically in yielding mutually satisfactory results. The archetypal perspective here suggests that dialogue can also be built without reducing the complexity of the symbols to other terms, but rather by exploring what the symbol means in vernacular practices. In other words, we look to an intriguing conception of “imaginal communities” rather than epistemic communities (e.g., Haas (1992) or political communities (based on shared ethical understandings of interests)). Another difference from typical accounts of dialogue is our emphasis on material practice as opposed to conceptual/epistemological or political/ethical exchanges. A feature of archetypal symbols, as seen especially with the chalice, is that they are materially brought into vernacular practices of the faithful. The ritualistic usage indicates that imaginal dialogue would not be based on passive contemplation but rather by the active use of archetypal expressions to recreate and relive meaningful events, over and over, every time anew. Yet the recreations are not “mere” performances; they mean just as much to everyone who participates in them every time, as for instance regular pilgrimages or ritual ceremonies have done. The very nature of archetypes and the collective unconscious implies sharing that we have sought to illustrate here through two symbols. So, interreligious dialogue based on archetypal symbols should be possible regardless of prior cognitive reflection. However, in order to develop this point further, we need a much more thorough understanding of how users of these symbols engage with them in their religious practices, for example, through ethnographic studies that describe what meanings people give to symbols in their lives, how they relate to them in their faith, and whether such meanings and roles in different traditions offer a basis for experiential dialogue.

The Veil: Politics, Poetics, and Play of Religious Symbols

In this section, we focus on one of the most ambiguous symbols of modernity: the veil. The veil is a headscarf that may fully cover the body (burka), the hair, or some part of the head. It could also be a piece of fabric hung to separate or conceal what is behind it. What is pertinent to these different types of the veil is that they all evoke the notion of covering, concealing, separating, and hiding as opposed to being exposed or open. An object of “great antiquity, uses, and misuses” across cultures and history, the veil has only now become globally polarized and politically framed as a “locus for the struggle between Islam and the West,” tradition and modernity (Heath 2008, 1). The veil has generated significant and often brilliant political, social, and psychoanalytical critique but the perspective of women who veil are rarely the “impetus for these theories” (Gökarıksel and Secor 2014, 178). The symbolic significance of the veil has been even more downplayed, although Fanon’s (2003) early work is a notable exception. Here, we turn to the veil as a deep culture symbol that gestures at something beyond, focusing on arguably the two most famous veiled women in art history and popular imagination: Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and Mary, mother of Jesus. In myth and religion, “veiling of women, men, and sacred places” has existed across countless cultures and religions since the dawn of civilization (El-Guindi 1999; Heath 2008, 1). The Egyptian pharaoh had to be veiled and protected from the profane eyes of the public and spiritual pollution. Zoroastrian priests had to keep their faces veiled to endure the light of the divine fire. In the Bible and the Quran, Moses is unable to handle the unbearable light of God and has to veil his face to stay alive. Prophet Muhammad is often depicted as veiled, while “Muslim lore has it that ‘the face of God is veiled by seventy thousand curtains of light and darkness, without which everything on which he gazes would be burned up’” (Ronnberg and Martin 2010, 530). In Islam, the Kaaba is veiled by multiple textiles. In Orthodox Christianity, some icons of Mary remain covered as it is believed that the divine light that they radiate may blind observers, while some rituals require priests to veil themselves. Myths tell us that unveiling often leads to disaster. Artemis turned the hunter

Aktaion into a stag and his own 50 hounds tore him to pieces when he saw her unveiled: “Woe upon the man who espied her [Artemis] bathing in the wild brooks and pools!” (Kerenyi 2008, 145). Tricked by Hera, mortal Semele sees Zeus in his true form and is instantly burnt to a crisp. Greek goddess “Hecate of the Delicate Veil” hides away her deep knowledge of magic (To Demeter 438 (Foley 1994, 24)). Psyche falls in love with her “unknown husband,” veiled by the darkness of the night, but once she sees his true shape, Eros flies away and she embarks on her perilous journey in his search. In these cases, and others, the veil conceals something that cannot be hastily unveiled. In the case of the gods, it is divine radiance that surpasses human apprehension and damages, blinds, burns, and kills the unprepared. Veiled female figurines by the eighteenthcentury Italian Rococo sculptor Antonio Corradini or the veiled Christ by contemporary Giuseppe Sanmartino point to the same aspect. In all these instances, the veil points to mystery: a mystery that cannot be unveiled by a modern rationalized mind that rushes to produce trivial and one-sided explanations. While contemporary commentary has focused on the politics of the veil, we address here its poetics.

Mona Lisa

One of the most famous veiled women in European art is Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, although one may not notice it at a first glance. She wears a fine, transparent fabric covering her hair and shoulders which makes some experts believe that Leonardo’s model was either pregnant or had recently given birth, since Italian noble women of the time veiled when pregnant or lactating (Judd 2011). The state of pregnancy is also tentatively confirmed by the recently uncovered layers of the portrait (Kemp and Pallanti 2017, 202). Veiling of Mona Lisa is also manifested in the special technique known as Leonardo’s sfumato, the smoky veiled effect of the shadows, detectable only through photographic methods and X-ray fluorescence spectroscope (Kemp and Pallanti 2017, 127, 205). This technique, which artists have not been able to reproduce since, is especially evident in the painting of Mona Lisa, where Da Vinci uses a “veiled application of layered glazes” with the “the veils of shadow” created by successive overlays of burnt umber. The transitions across the different tones, especially in the face and hands of the Lady Lisa, are so subtle that brushstrokes are indetectable! It is assumed that the famed subject of Leonardo’s portrait is Lisa Gherardini, a wife of Florentine merchant (Kemp and Pallanti 2017; Lichfield 2005). But why create this veiling effect requiring titanic effort and mastery to paint a merchant’s wife? Why never part with this painting and perfect it over many years? Some argue that this is in fact a self-portrait of Da Vinci, the theory initially proposed by artist Lillian Schwartz. Medieval and Renaissance Italian Studies and Jungian scholar Daniella Boccassini suggests that Mona Lisa is “the mirror-image of Leonardo himself,” his “double” in a spiritual way, “his guardian angel, his celestial twin, his divine anima,” and this is the reason for her “numinosity” (Boccassini 2018, 41). This enigmatic depiction captures the nature of the archetypal feminine, never fully disclosed both in the intention of the artist and in the veiling techniques behind it, paradoxical in the interpretations and meanings it evokes, ever veiled by mystery. But are the proposed theories regarding the identity of the sitter in fact irreconcilable? Can a deep culture perspective lead us to embrace multiple perspectives in order to attain a deeper understanding of the archetypal

feminine? Can the painting be the portrait of an “actual” woman, an eternal feminine soul gazing from the imaginal realm, and a self-portrait of Da Vinci at the same time? Mona Lisa captures a personal experience of Da Vinci, as the soul, anima of the artist. She may even be the personification of his feminine self. Over years of his work, she grew to personify his matured, illuminated soul described by nineteenth-century Walter Pater (Kemp and Pallanti 2017, 128). Another nineteenth-century literary giant, P. J. Théophile Gautier, points to the imaginal, eternal dimensions: “We have seen these faces before, but not on this earth, in some previous existence perhaps, which they recall vaguely to us” (Kemp and Pallanti 2017, 128). It is Leonardo himself gazing at us through her mischievous eyes, her miraculous and mocking smile with “such sweetness and grace and superiority, that you feel wholly timid like a schoolboy before a duchess” (Kemp and Pallanti 2017, 128). The illuminated soul is often personified in myth as a beautiful maiden. The alleged pregnancy of his model is also no accident: the soul of an artist is ever pregnant with a child, since every act of creation is birthing. In the same vein, Beatrice was an actual woman who famed, early Renaissance Italian poet Dante had known and loved in a distant way. He never, in fact, met her, reputedly catching but one glimpse of her on a bridge. But she eventually merges in his poetry with an archetypal image of the sacred feminine, standing for Dante’s “illuminated soul”: she becomes his “gateway to ecstatic joy,” “the love of God,” the very maker of Dante’s soul (Anderson 1980, 416). The Divine Comedy and Dante’s own paintings depicting Beatrice as a veiled woman point to her as Dante’s personification of the Divine Sophia, his inspiration and guide in the heavenly realm. Young, beautiful, sublime Nizam (Harmonia), a daughter of a Persian scholar, played a similar role for Ibn Arabi, the great Andalusian Muslim mystic and poet of the thirteenth century, during his sojourn in Mecca. In the words of Ibn Arabi, she “captivated one who looked upon her.” Beautiful and learned, she was “a sage among the sages of the Holy Places” (Austin 2008, 36). That young girl awakened a deep emotion that his “soul experienced” that made her a model for Ibn Arabi’s poems and the object of his “quest,” “hope,” “the Virgin most pure” (Austin 1988). Later he encountered a “transfigured and ethereal Nizam” while performing the ritual circumambulations of the Kaaba, a figure from the imaginal realm that became a “stern initiatrix into the rigors of the divine

mysteries” (Austin 1988). This imaginal Nizam is the personification of the great mysteries of the sacred feminine as the vehicle of Creation, Divine Love, and Mystical Knowledge. But the journey into this Realm was triggered by his encounter with “actual” Nizam. It may well be that working on the portrait of Lisa Gherardini turned into a numinous experience for Da Vinci, the meeting with an “actual” woman opening the archetypal image of the sacred feminine. The Jungian and mystical perspectives merge in Boccassini’s interpretation of Mona Lisa as the “feminine manifestation of his [Da Vinci’s] fully individuated self,” “the imaginal epiphany of the eternal Sophia and, concurrently, of Mother Nature” (Boccassini 2018, 41). The individuated self is the one that has attained its fullness, embracing paradoxes, differences, and polarities in a sacred marriage of the feminine and masculine parts of the self. In this sense, Mona Lisa is a spiritual self-portrait of Leonardo, standing for his illuminated soul, the soul par excellence that reflects the highest moment of divine ecstasy, beauty, and fullness. Neither Da Vinci nor Dante nor Ibn Arabi had any intimate relations with their objects of contemplation and devotion. Indeed, this was also the case for the Romantic Grail legends, for the troubadours in the courtly love tradition, and for the chivalric societal reform promoted by the group of poets, Fedeli d’ Amore, or Faithful of Love (Anderson 1980). Like the idealized and inaccessible beloved who haunted Renaissance artists and inspired Sufi poetry, the “actual” women remain out of reach, ever-Virgin, physically impenetrable, veiled in the eyes of the artists, and pointing to mysteries beyond.

Mary

We turn now to another famous, veiled woman in art history, both from Christianity and Islam: Mary, mother of Jesus. Many of her depictions feature a veil, even a symbolic one. In Renaissance paintings and frescos, Mary is unveiled only in the presence of her mother Anna, the Great Mother (whose symbolic significance remains largely veiled to this day). In most Orthodox icons, Mary is veiled, except for those where she is a patron of pregnant women and, therefore, designated to their gaze. In Islam, Persian and Turkish miniatures depict Mary as a veiled woman. In the Mughal Empire, royal mothers would be named after Mary, and paintings of Mary and Jesus were placed above the imperial throne as well as on the emperor’s jewelry and his official seal. In one of the most famed twelfth-century Byzantine depictions of Mary, known as the Vladimir Mother of God (Figure 5.4), the Virgin is depicted with the Christ Child gently nestling against her cheek and grabbing her veil. This Orthodox Christian iconographic style is usually referred to as “Tenderness” (Eleousa in Greek) due to its emotional intensity, in which the love between the Mother and the Child is fully, bodily expressed (Cawthorne 2005, 52). The icon itself is a veiled, multivalent symbol that is meant to point to mystery, never fully grasped, never fully articulated. At some level, the unusual intensity of the affectionate, corporeally expressed love between the Mother and the Child mirrors the intimate closeness in the relationships between God and the human soul (Yazykova 1995, 161).

Figure 5.4: The Virgin of Vladimir (104 × 69, tempera), 12th century Byzantine, Tretyakov Gallery, photo by Michel Bakni.

Mary’s veil or “maphori,” a dress that covers the head and the body, features the stars as a symbol of the Holy Trinity that she embodies. The star on the forehead symbolizes the Godhead, the star to the left side the Holy Spirit, and the star to the right side, covered by the Child, is the Christ himself, as the second person of the Holy Trinity, the incarnated God. What is important is that the Oneness of the Holy Trinity, the one essence of the three personhoods of God, is embodied in the figure of Mary. The icon painter does not point to the Christ Child as the mystery of the Holy Trinity, but to Mary. The fourteenth-century Byzantine Greek theologian Gregory Palamas only hints at this mystery, never fully disclosing it, following “apophatic” Orthodox theology of negation that claims the “incomprehensibility” and “inexpressibility” of divine truth (Lossky 1976, 34): “in the depth of Her soul, She carried the uncreated Trinity, the One Person of which, She, without a seed, conceived in Her womb, and birthed painlessly as a Virgin” (Palama 1993, 108). “Lighter than light, more bloomy than the paradise, more beautiful than the entire visible and invisible world!” (Palama 1993, 106), her ancient wisdom “exceeds reason and word” (Palama 1993, 92, 106). Yet, this is not some fideistic statement of religion, suggesting that the ineffability of spirituality is cut off from logic and reason. Rather, it is a statement of a mystery as invitation to experience. Mary’s veil does not shield her but invites us to experience her. The mysteries veiled Mary points to are thoroughly personal and are as wideranging as there are depictions of her. Just in Orthodox Christian praxis, for instance, we see a bewildering variety of Marian icons playing a significant roles in people’s lives as a “symbolic doorway to mystical religiosity” (Qadir and Tiaynen-Qadir 2018). In her icons, Mary is considered to have agency of a kind, for instance in healing alcoholism—through the icon, Quenching Thirst—or taming beasts when her icon Virgin of the Snakes calls snakes every year to a chapel in Greek Kellafonia yet renders them harmless to faithful worshippers. She assists women seeking to bear children in her capacity of containing and birthing the mystery of God on earth—such as Tsambika in Greek Rhodes—and

acts quickly and retributively against transgressors as through the icon Quick to Hear. In all these and a myriad other cases, as the embodiment of sacred feminine for millions around the world, Mary is not accidentally veiled to the viewer. Indeed, Mary is not veiled in the presence of God, since she physically carries God, the Divine Flame, in her body (while Moses trembled and veiled his face in the presence of the Burning Bush). Her veil is not to cover her head in the presence of God but to cover unprepared viewers from the great mysteries she represents. Her veil gestures beyond and points to such mysteries. Theologian Alehander Schmemann reminds us that Mary is beyond the institutional and dogmatic as She is the experience and knowledge of God: whatever we know what it means to be consumed in God, to be “nothing but light,” to be “nothing else” and yet “everything,” to be creation and yet to ascend to Heaven,” it is because “we know Mary” (Schmemann 1991, 79). Ibn Arabi also tells us that “God may best be contemplated in the image of woman” (Austin 1988). For Rumi, she is “a man in women’s clothes,” and yet as a “woman,” she is not a “creature,” but “Creator” (Austin 1988). For post-Jungians, she represents fullness when feminine and masculine aspects of the self are harmonized.

Play: Facing the veil

The two most famous veiled women in European history and art, Mona Lisa and Mary, are veiled to symbolize that the mysteries they gesture to are eternal, archetypal, and deep. Both women’s archetypal significance is obvious in their continued, vivid presence, veneration, and admiration. Neither woman is uncontroversial, as they and their veils are also subjects of mockery and humiliation. Both Mona Lisa and Mary are polarizing figures in modern perception: some are infuriated even by the mention of their names. For instance, when influential writer and ecofeminist Charlene Spretnak started her research into the Virgin in Catholicism, she was puzzled by the reaction of Catholic “progressives,” who enthusiastically assumed that she was writing against “that old Mother Mary stuff” (Spretnak 2004, 2). However, Spretnak’s intention was the opposite, that is, to state that the Church made a “serious error in suppressing so much of Mary’s cosmological dimension and the attendant spiritual practice.” Despite such perceptions, both veiled women endure in European, and now worldwide, culture. As much as some would like to see Mona Lisa as an overrated artwork and an objectification of a woman by a male artist, she continues to pop up as a cultural reference and an icon of European art in cinema (Mona Lisa Smile (2003), Equilibrium (2002), Luca (2021), and others). She remains the most visited painting in the world, attracting 10 million viewers every year. As to Mary, she continues to live on, not just in rich Orthodox and Islamic traditions but also in popular culture, as with P.L. Traver’s magical nanny Mary Poppins, who descends from the clouds and works miracles (movies 1964, 2018), or as the witch Maria who rescues humanity from destruction (Andrei Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice, 1984). Mona Lisa and Mary are eternal, archetypal symbols, finding their expressions in one way or another in all times. Whether people like it or not, the two most recognizable women in history are both veiled. And, whether these two veiled women evoke a sense of ecstasy and veneration or hatred and irritation, whether one loves them as expressions of truth and eternal motifs, or loathes them as uncanny symbols of modernity, they do move us. From the perspective of deep culture, it is important to understand the

dissonance and polarization around these figures and, indeed, the veil as an article of clothing. There is nothing inherently insidious or dangerous to the public sphere about women veiling themselves, nor is there anything inherently dangerous about women not veiling themselves. Why does it evoke such passion on either side? The question becomes not about the veil but about facing the veil, and there is something quite different about how moderns face the veil (Qadir 2018b). In some ways, unveiling is emblematic of modernity, itself driven by En-lightenment and in which the primary mode of knowing is analysis—the breaking asunder of a complex whole into smaller parts. Yet it is, after all, a penetration (Latifa 2017). So, it is significant that the veil is banned only in postcolonial European countries and in Francophone ex-colonies. As insightful literature on the veil has argued, the veil ban is a colonial issue (Fanon 2003). Colonialism was a crucial element in the modern formation of the veil as a significant symbol. Edward Said’s (1978) path-breaking exposure of the Orientalist psychology of colonialism showed that the colonizer’s fascination with the veil is layered with imperialist images of mysteries, depths, and folds of darkness. Veiled behind a new, patently absurd argument of national security is the old Orientalist impulse to penetrate the veil. The East has long been represented as “feminine,” “soft,” and “yielding”—making Europe “masculine,” “hard,” and “penetrating.” The colonial rape of the East was thus seen as the “natural” order of things. The veiled woman is the symbolic epitome of the “mystery” of the feminine that Orientalist penetrating impulses seek to expose. However, the issue goes beyond this postcolonial picture. Colonialism and patriarchy are thoroughly entwined, joined by their impulse to expose mystery, and neither is the sole cause of the other (Zayzafoon 2005). The extension of colonialism today is not just in neo-imperialist economic and political subjugation of the East. It is also in the cultural association of East with feminine and therefore the continued justification for systemic colonization of the feminine. Unveiling, in this sense, is a way of keeping up the penetration of the feminine by laying bare the feminine, just as colonialism was a symbolic rape of the feminized East by laying bare the feminized East to the Western, penetrating gaze (Latifa 2017). Through history, it appears that colonial moderns have faced the veil with one, overriding impulse: to unveil. The impulse is part of the general pattern of modern, enlightened behavior, viz. exposing mystery. Indeed, there is less and less that can be defended from harsh laying-bare, or that can be protected from the light of enquiry. Which is not to argue that there is anything inherently

inappropriate about uncovering by way of inquiry: rather, we are concerned here with the attitude that insists all must be uncovered. Politically, Jacques Derrida (1995) points out that the impulse to expose mysteries is at the very core of statehood, notably in Europe. The same impulse is obvious in other Westphaliastyle states outside Europe as well, which is not all that surprising since their model of statehood is contiguous (albeit, not copied). For example, the notable and unique constitutional amendment in Pakistan declaring the Ahmadiyya community “heretical” in 1974 took shape because religious judgments were, so to speak, unveiled, taken out of doxa/praxis, and brought into the full light of public discourse, whence the outcome was unavoidable (Qadir 2015). Of course, those forcing women to recede from public view behind the veil are clearly misogynistic. Their actions indicate a thorough-going literalism of the veil. Forcing the veil not only disempowers women by excluding and restricting them, but it also indicates an attitude of denial of mystery or interior transformation in general. It is no coincidence that such fundamentalists, for instance Islamists, almost universally decry art or symbolic interpretation of any religious text. They are an obvious example of fundamentalism, which is a simplicity afraid of complexity and a finality afraid of transformation. Putting both attitudes together, we are talking about polar opposites, both of which are thoroughly fundamentalist. Again, Jung put it succinctly when he noted that “our true religion is a monotheism of consciousness, a possession by it, coupled with a fanatic denial of the existence of fragmentary autonomous systems” (Jung, CW 13, ¶51). One dimension of this is the “fanaticism” Jung mentions, that is, the absoluteness inherent in insisting that all be laid bare or all be covered up. In this regard, both the misogynistic, religious patriarchy who insist on covering women up in public spaces despite their will, and the postcolonial, modern patriarchy insisting on uncovering women despite their will, are both absolutists. Both are, in the Jungian sense, fundamentalists. The other dimension of this is the monism that expresses itself as literalism. In this case too, both the misogynistic religious patriarchy and postcolonial modern patriarchy are united in seeing only the literal veil and reading into it whatever their own ideology deems fit. Both are, again, equally fundamentalist in being literalist. As Jung and post-Jungians point out, pathology is often an insistence on one-sided literalism in the face of a person’s inherent plurality. Here, literalism is:

an idol that forgets it is an image and believes itself a God, taking itself metaphysically, seriously, damned to fulfill its task of coagulating the many into singleness of meaning which we call facts, data, problems, realities […]. Remember: the enemy is the literal, and the literal is not the concrete flesh but negligence of the vision that concrete flesh is a magnificent citadel of metaphors. (Hillman 1975, 150, 174)

What is true of the individual is just as true of society at large. Moderns appear as enlightened in all cases, whether they are religious or “secular,” and their enlightened nature in each case appears to demand that their will be implemented across society. In both cases, the will is one of literalism, albeit demanding different prescriptions for women’s body. On one side, the veil is literalized to physically hide women away altogether from the public space, as in many Muslim majority countries, while on the other side no symbolic mystery is allowed as in European countries demanding abolition of the veil. The fact that both are fanatical means, a need to reconsider ideas about multiple fundamentalisms (i.e., this ideology vs. that) but rather focus on fundamentalism as a state of mind, whatever the ideology it is expressed in. So, contrary to the statement starting this chapter about everything being a symbol, fundamentalism may be defined from a deep culture theory perspective as a refusal to see anything as a symbol. Or, perhaps, as a refusal to allow any symbol to point multivalently to transformative mystery. Just so, when we consider the veil as a symbol, we begin to make sense of the popular cultural demand for mystery in an age where all is laid bare. People retain a never-ending fascination with the two most famous women in history, and they both remain veiled.

Conclusion

“The world, marm,” said I, anxious to display my acquired knowledge, “is not exactly round, but resembles in shape a flattened orange; and it turns on its axis once in twenty-four hours.” “Well, I don’t know anything about its axes,” replied she, “but I know it don’t turn round, for if it did we’d be all tumbled off; and as to its being round, any one can see it’s a square piece of ground, standing on a rock!” “Standing on a rock! but upon what does that stand?” “Why, on another, to be sure!” “But what supports the last?” “Lud! child, how stupid you are! There’s rocks all the way down!” New-York Mirror (“Unwritten Philosophy” September 15, 1838)

We have shown in this book that the nature of mythical narratives is archetypal and, hence, open to systematic analysis by way of the theory of deep culture developed here. Many of the narratives we have discussed are recognizably fictional, such as the Egyptian story of the Benu bird singing the cosmos into creation or headstrong hero Lemminkäinen battling a river in the Finnish Kalevala. Some are contemporary fictions, such as Superman and Katniss Everdeen. And some narratives, as we analyzed in this chapter, are not recognized as fictions but are narratives nonetheless and so readily unpacked as deep culture. In all these cases, we showed that the theory developed in this book reveals much about the stories being told, fictional or otherwise. The truths encoded in these “myths” are not necessarily archaeologically or physically accurate, but

nor were many of these meant to be read as such. As James Hillman notes, this supposition of ancient peoples as rather poor scientists trying to make physical sense of a mysterious universe is mostly a flawed, modern assumption. Instead, the ancients employed a mythical approach to the universe around them. The Roman thinker Sallustius offered us a key when he said, “These things (myths and gods) never happened but always are.” Part of this mythical approach was a poetic expression that insisted on personifying forces of nature, hence the proliferation of all manner of gods standing in for archetypal impulses or natural phenomena.

Mythical truths

The dramatic and personified nature of myths tells us that the ancients saw these impulses as having an agency of sorts. In other words, people were under their sway rather than controlling them. When they spoke of Ares running his chariot through a field, they didn’t mean that there was a physical man with impressive abs riding a large chariot and swinging his sword. Rather, they mean that the warring impulse had taken over men at a certain point, much as we say, “seeing red” or “being in the heat of the battle.” In the same way, uncanny beasts like the sphinx were not (necessarily) evidence of gene manipulation in ancient Egypt, but rather were dramatic personae in a mythical narrative that encoded some truths for the listeners. They only existed in that narrative and held a certain power over men’s fate in that narrative. The ancient Greeks, in particular, were well known for their dramatic plays in which the protagonist’s lack of control over his own destiny was a central element. Another aspect of mythical truths was that they did not distinguish in the same way as we do between the physical, the spiritual, and the social. The cosmos was a more holistic place than it is today; hence, it was perfectly legitimate to look for signs of political events in the behavior of animals or direction of the wind. In the same way, the truths encoded in myths used the physical world as a backdrop for spiritual and moral truths, which should be judged on those epistemological grounds rather than on physical ones. At the spiritual and psychological level, these mythical truths were about living one’s life. They provided guidelines on how to navigate key turning points in one’s life, such as a hero symbolizing a boy transitioning into manhood or eventually conquering his own ego and saving the innocent soul/treasure from his bluster, etc. At the societal level, these archetypal narratives informed participants about living collectively. For instance, Ares did not only sweep through a person’s ego, clouding his judgment with war-lust, but in fact could cast a spell over entire populations. A society could be caught up in a war-like state by fear and panic, just as the god of war was depicted in his chariot driven by his two sons, Phobos/fear and Demos/panic. Or the icy nature of a ruler could cast an entire land into never-ending winter, which had to be thawed out by acts of innocent

love. The point is that people knew how to interpret these tales and poems in a way that made sense to them personally and socially. In other words, there was a logos to their mythos, a logic by which the myths fit into their lives. The myths revealed personal and societal truths that were not biologically or archaeologically accurate but had spiritual and moral messages. This does not necessarily mean that ancients knew or were fully cognizant of this logos. It was simply a way of life that made sense, in which the individual and the collective fit together through certain practices and ways of being. In other words, it was a culture, whose depth ensured connectivity.

Deep culture

The deep culture theory encapsulates some of this logos by which myths can make archetypal sense today to us, who are by and large not living in that milieu in which myths fit together with life. The seven-fold framework here guides readers and analysts on what to look for when encountering a mythical narrative, hinging on the key element that mythical truths are encoded in symbols. We have argued that myths continue to have psychological and societal meaning for us, once we recognize that their symbols are (i) collective (archetypal) in that they are widely shared across time and cultures; (ii) irreplaceable in that one symbol cannot be readily replaced by another; (iii) multivalent, in that symbols do not necessarily or even often refer to only one signified like signs do; (iv) pointing to interiority of transformation, in that their purpose is not simply to substitute meaning but to lead to a meaningful change in the participant; (v) grasped or intuited much more than they are cognitively analyzed; (vi) are expressed in popular culture, since they cannot be picked up or abandoned at will but rather are impulses; and finally (vii) disclosed in ritual, that is they are lived out and not only “enjoyed” aesthetically. We used this framework (or, rather, specific elements of it in turn) to unpack the common mythical symbols of the hero, the uncanny, and the feminine in this book. Leaning on this theory, we could understand what the myth was trying to do, psychologically and socially, and where it might be getting misunderstood. With the hero, such analysis reveals some forgotten truths, due in large part to the fact that the hero is often treated as a dramatic person rather than a symbolic element within a mythical narrative. In terms of the latter, we showed that the hero is a symbol of inner transformation. But, for that transformation to work, the hero has to move through a full archetypal cycle, such as dying or leaving the magical land such that the ego dies and gives up its superhuman fights in order to reunite with society/the broader persona. Yet, most modern heroes, we showed, refused to die or to give up their superpowers, thus stalling the mythic narrative and hence stunting individual and social maturity. Part of this stunting is to leave the psyche (and society) split into parts. With the uncanny, we showed how symbols not only point to a transformation

but are lived out in popular culture and ritual. Strange beasts, scary demons, and ghost appendages were all depicted in ancient art and experienced in lived rituals. Above all, uncanny symbols made unfamiliar what was considered blasé and so was often ignored. These types of symbols pointed beyond themselves to make unfamiliar what was considered familiar and so recognize that we are living in a magical time. In the case of the feminine, we showed that the symbol is inherently multivalent. Not that women per se are more multi-faceted than men, but rather that the feminine as a personified symbol in mythic narratives indicates the polyvalent ambiguity of the self. It highlights to us how thinking of the self in singular and unitary terms is deeply detrimental. The best modern, mythic narratives incorporate this complexity and ambiguity and again encode this truth. An important point about symbols is that the cultural unconscious tends to manifest the symbols that have been either repressed or pushed to an extreme. This Jungian insight is a societal extension of Freud’s discovery when treating patients. Freud had found that when an impulse (typically Oedipian) is suppressed, the human unconscious manifests that impulse in strange and often disguised ways, for instance in dreams where characters from real life are “displaced,” and so on. Jung furthered this discovery in the societal realm where the active realm is the collective rather than the individual unconscious. Society tends to manifest those archetypal impulses that have been suppressed. The human being and a society are a whole with inherently many sides, argued Jung. So, when one particular aspect (as, for instance, personified by a Greek god) is denied its place in society’s conscious actions and rituals, then it tends to return through the unconscious. Often, this return is distorted and dark. The point of ancient rituals for Jung was that these impulses could be contained, channeled, and expressed in a conscious, lived manner. But modernity is marked by its disdain of conscious rituals (even through unacknowledged rituals abound). And so, the archetypal impulses push through in the form of symbols. In fact, the unrecognized popularity of a symbol in popular culture typically indicates it is affirming some suppressed impulse or compensating for some onesidedness. Indeed, the stranger the symbolic expression, the greater the need for a cultural diagnosis of what has been short-circuited, so to speak. The persistent image of Medusa is one example, as she pops up unbidden in the form of one of the world’s most popular tattoos, in video games, and even in patients’ dreams. Such a blinding feminine whose gaze can turn anyone to stone is an obvious

compensation for the loss in recognition of the multifaceted feminine. Another distorted recurrence we mentioned is the return of the terrifying All-Mother in the form of Nature’s revenge, Moana’s Te-Fiti or Calypso in Pirates.

Culture All the Way …

To the extent they are popular, modern narratives also encode elements or shards of these truths. The truths encoded by myths are archetypal, and human nature has not changed enough for these truths not to be relevant. The demand for narratives of all kinds shows this to be true, as does the fact that narratives in high demand retain easily recognizable archetypal elements. However, the myths are in many cases distorted, as the hero symbol shows most obviously. The same is true of the uncanny, which often descends into tales of sheer terror for its own sake. Or, the uncanny is separated off as a symbol from the rest of lived experience, as if it doesn’t matter to “real” life. The distortion with the feminine is also evident in many stories where a female hero simply replaces the male with no substantive, archetypal differences. Again, the feminine is linearly associated with a woman as a real dramatic character, rather than as a symbol for multivalence and ambiguity. We also showed that mythic narratives don’t have to be recognizably “fictional” in order to be mythical and hence archetypal expressions. Rather, narratives of science, politics, and the like can all be analyzed with the lens of deep culture. This reveals some fascinating new directions for social research, as for instance in constructing interreligious dialogue on the basis of symbols rather than cognitive meanings. Or, in recognizing the symbols in art that point beyond themselves to an inner transformation. In our analysis, we find that the element of “pointing beyond” is the most obvious “miss” when it comes to modern uptakes of mythical narratives. The fundamental difference between signs and symbols, as we noted in the introduction, is precisely that the former shows one mark standing in for another, while the latter has one mark standing for an indeterminate and complex collection of meanings. Mystery is endemic to symbols, since they don’t only point to one thing. Yet, it is that mystery that seems the most difficult to let be for moderns. The polar opposite of symbolic is literal and, indeed, we find much evidence in modernity of literal interpretations of narratives and events that may be better

understood as symbolic or metaphorical. As Hillman pointed out, literalism is a “coagulating of many into singleness of meaning.” Another post-Jungian scholar notes that, “Ascendant literalism and parallel loss of the symbolic is now a defining feature of modernity. While the desire for the encounter and difference remains, every type of physical, psychological and emotional risk is minimized” (Ahmed 2011). The Other is all too readily assimilated without its difference being recognized and processed, so the Self remains unchanged in the encounter. We find greatest evidence of this when we consider narratives that are not often considered mythical but are structured archetypally nonetheless, for instance when facing the veil. Perhaps it is no coincidence that it is the feminine as a symbol where modernity has stumbled most, undermining the very essence of the feminine that is “neither one nor two” and that “resists all adequate definition” (Irigaray 1985, 26). Behind this one-sidedness is the desire that drives us to “ignore depth and metaphor in favour of the shallow and literal” (Shaw 2009, 66). The Western feminist movement pointed to the limitations of a traditional mother role and revived the Artemis-like, economically, psychologically, and socially independent and self-assertive woman (Bolen 2014; Gross 1998). As we discussed, the archetypal, symbolic feminine has been to a large extent suppressed and devalued in modernity (Ahmed 2002b; Baring and Cashford 1991; Bray 2016; Clement and Kristeva 1998; Irigaray 1985). However, suppressed within the individual, the feminine finds the ways to express itself, even destructively. On the individual level, such disruption signifies “disintegration of personality” (Neumann 1955, 73), psychological problems, mental illnesses, and pathologies (Bolen 2009). Suppressed within the society, it erupts in popular culture and leads to shallow, superfluous, or destructive cultural and social expressions (Bly and Woodman 1998). One striking instance of the mother archetype being marginalized is how the birthing body is often desacralized in modern culture, or even deemed oppressive as with Mary, particularly by feminists. Impulses to venerate the holy Mother are to some extent now transferring to Mother Earth, who had earlier been subjected to the same desanctification that Mary continues to experience today. The cultural unconscious apparently senses the problems in profaning the holy Mother: we continue to see popular symbols of the feminine “Earth” wreaking vengeful havoc, as Te Ka in the cartoon Moana or Calypso in Pirates of the Caribbean until they are restored to their proper, natural place and not tamed by men. It now seems that the very survival of the feminist legacy

depends on reclaiming the Mother and resacralizing her archetypal place within the self and society. The suppression of archetypal impulses in the body politic, thus, produces the same effects that it does in an individual: a return of the archetype in destructive form. It was to contain these forms by expressing and recognizing the energy of archetypal impulses that “traditional” cultures had developed rituals. We have discussed how important rituals have been to express archetypal impulses. In fact, we would suggest that much of what we consider “culture” as a way of collective life might be seen through this lens of archetypes, which themselves can be construed as cultural. So, culture does not rest on other, somehow more “fundamental” forces like the economy or biology. It’s much deeper than that: deep culture constitutes us as individuals and rests only on … more culture. In a nutshell, its culture all the way down …

1In this regard, the theory connects with the highly correlated term, mundus imaginalis, translated as such from Persian Sufis by the remarkable Islamic Studies scholar Henry Corbin (1964; 1997). We have explored this connection separately (Qadir and Tiaynen-Qadir 2016a; Qadir 2018a). We note it here primarily to lean on Corbin’s classification of archetypes as autonomous to the extent individuals do not fantasize or “imagine” them; we are, rather, living them or, more precisely, experiencing the world through them. It is because of this work that James Hillman (1983, 3) has described Corbin as the “second immediate father” of archetypal psychology along with Jung. 2“To understand the dream’s meaning I must stick as close as possible to the dream images,” was Jung’s exact formulation, which post-Jungians crystallized into “stick to the image” as the Jungian maxim (Olson 2019).

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INDEX

action 2, 6, 19, 28, 30, 39, 48, 49, 99, 109, 114, 138 concept of 17–19, 99 agency 15, 62, 80, 136 of art 19, 63, 131 Ahmed, Durre S. ix, 3, 5, 14, 29, 33, 34, 63, 64, 76, 80–83, 89, 140 anima 23, 103, 127, 128 anima mundi 82, 107 animus 23, 44 Appadurai, Arjun 6, 7 archetype concept of 22–23, 45, 99, 114, 115, 119, 141 art concept of 5, 8, 19, 34, 56, 57, 69, 80, 115 Artemis 14, 42, 46, 47, 49, 80, 85, 96–99, 104, 126, 140 Asad, Talal 4, 12, 16 Athena 35, 36, 49, 94–96, 98, 106 Austin, Ralph 123, 128, 132

Baba Yaga 90–91, 104 Bible 17, 126 bird as a symbol 92 in myth 93, 100, 135 birthing 98, 107, 128, 131, 140 blood as a bio-cultural symbol 68–71, 73, 75, 77, 97, 119 as a cross-cultural symbol 68 as an uncanny symbol 26, 52, 67, 68, 71, 74, 85, 86 Boccassini, Daniela 3, 7, 66, 103, 127, 129 Bolen, Jean Shinoda 3, 14, 22, 81, 97–99, 103, 140 Buddhism 32, 34

Campbell, Joseph 11, 12, 16, 18, 25, 28, 31, 29–34, 37, 38, 40, 43, 49, 58, 109 capitalism 4, 7 Catholicism 69, 74, 107, 132 chalice and cupbearer 72, 73 as a symbol 71, 74, 82, 114, 115, 118–124 cupbearer 73

Christ 13, 17, 48, 56, 62, 66, 69, 70, 105, 115, 116, 119, 126, 129, 130 Corbin, Henry ix, 4, 20, 23, 124

Da Vinci, Leonardo 8, 126 Dante Alighieri 18, 105, 128–129 DaVinci, Leonardo 127–129 deep culture ix, 5, 10, 16, 17, 23, 139, 141 and hero myth 27, 29, 30 and the symbolic feminine 79–81, 83, 96, 98, 111–113 and the uncanny 111–113, 57, 59, 66, 69, 75 application of 6, 25, 108, 111, 126, 127, 133, 136, 139 theory of 2, 5, 6, 24, 25, 108, 109, 113, 114, 135

Demeter 85, 98–104, 106 demons 26, 45, 62, 82, 138 devil 61 dialogue imaginal 112–113 intercultural 112–115 interfaith 112, 113 interreligious 26, 112–113, 139

Dionysus 26, 52, 64, 66, 68, 80, 105, 119 Divine Liturgy 48, 68–71 Downing, Christine 22, 33, 97, 99, 102, 103 dreams 13, 19, 29, 81, 114, 119, 138, 139

Eastern Christianity 25, 26, 48, 52, 56, 74, 107, 113, 115, 116, 123, 124, 126, 129–132 ecstasy 17, 54, 68, 70, 72, 73, 75, 93, 121, 129, 132 eerie 22, 51, 55, 57, 68 ego 22, 23, 29, 33, 39, 42, 44–46, 49, 50, 56, 75, 79–81, 86, 89, 115, 121, 123, 137 death of the 43, 45, 46, 75, 138 sacrifice of the 18, 33, 36, 66, 71, 75 Eleusinian Mysteries 20, 30, 100, 102 Eliade, Mircea 2, 3, 11–13, 16, 17, 48, 111

fairy tales 3, 12, 13, 17, 44, 90, 118 The Maiden King 90 Vasilisa the Beautiful 90 fantasy 1, 8, 12, 16, 18, 45, 49, 82 feminine archetypal 22, 83, 89, 121, 123, 127

multiplicity of 22, 82, 89, 104, 138, 139 sacred 101, 105, 128, 131 symbolic 5, 22, 26, 83, 89, 93, 100, 104–108, 140 Foucault, Michel 4, 7 Freud, Sigmund 3, 25, 29, 53–55, 57, 114, 138

gender 7, 23, 33, 42, 46, 80 fluidity of 34, 35, 43, 46, 80, 105 ghosts 26, 53, 60, 138 globalization 6, 24 God in Abrahamic religions 60, 68, 69, 71–75, 93, 104, 115, 118, 123, 126, 130–132 goddess. (See feminine)

Hades 14, 35, 99–103, 105 Hera 14, 38, 98, 99, 106, 116, 126 hero 15, 59, 90, 93 as a myth 5, 13, 29, 111 as a symbol 22, 25, 30–34, 49, 50, 137–139 journey of the 16, 18, 27–33, 35, 36, 40–42, 48, 79, 90, 105 modern 28, 43, 46, 49, 50

mytheme 79 hero myth 16, 22, 27 concept of 25, 27–34, 45, 46, 48, 49 concept of the 45 heroine 14, 46, 98, 139 as a myth 28, 34, 37 as a symbol 27 journey of the 16, 18, 25, 37, 42–44, 79, 90, 91, 105 modern 45 Hillman, James ix, 2–4, 12, 13, 15, 18, 20, 22, 29, 33, 34, 39, 49, 53, 56, 58, 60, 70, 79, 84, 99, 102, 103, 110, 115, 134, 136, 140 Hinduism 66, 68, 80, 85 Hollywood 1, 7, 8, 11, 15, 16, 27, 40, 42–44, 97 Homer 17, 34 horror 51, 52, 57, 59–63

Ibn Arabi 128–129, 132 image 3, 13, 20, 23, 28, 51, 52, 71, 114 and symbols 21, 22, 80 archetypal 22, 23, 81, 115, 124, 129, 134, 139 imaginal 22, 23, 81, 109, 113, 115, 119, 121, 124, 125, 127, 128 (See also dialogue)

individuation 18, 23, 33, 97 Ingold, Tim 24 Isis 65, 66, 106 Islam 25, 26, 30, 51, 52, 56, 68, 71–75, 107, 113, 115, 116, 123, 124, 126, 129, 134

Jackson, Michael 19, 21, 24 Judaism 30, 68, 119 Jung, Carl G. ix, 2, 3, 11, 13, 18, 114–116, 25, 29, 33, 39, 49, 53, 54, 76, 77, 89, 112, 114–116, 134, 138, 139

Kerenyi, Carl 3, 64, 66, 85, 92, 98, 101, 126 Kore 39, 82, 101–103

legends 1, 3, 13, 29, 64, 114, 129 Lemminkäinen 36, 45, 48, 52, 64, 135 Lewis, C. S. 15 (See also movies) liminality 24 and ritual 18, 71, 103 and uncanny 75 concept of 17–19 Lincoln, Bruce 6, 12, 29, 30, 110

Lucas, George 15

Mary 26, 107, 108, 119, 121–123, 126, 129, 131, 132, 140, 141 as Mother of God 120, 121 icons of 56, 107, 119, 122, 126, 129, 131 Medusa 13, 26, 49, 51, 55, 77, 79, 89, 93–97, 107, 139 Meyer, Birgit 19, 70 Mona Lisa 8, 26, 126–129, 132 monotheism of consciousness 63, 112, 134 monsters 26, 31, 35, 45, 46, 52, 57–60, 62, 76 Morgan, David 16, 19, 70 mother 42, 44, 60, 88, 103, 129, 140, 141 (See also Mary) as a symbol 62, 68, 81, 83, 85–87, 91, 93, 100, 101, 104, 116, 123, 129, 140, 141 by Darren Aronofsky 87–89, 107 in myth 17, 36, 37, 40, 51, 65, 66, 80, 98, 102, 103, 106, 139 Mother Earth 88, 140 movies A Quiet Place 63 Alien 62 Alita Battle Angel 67

Arrival 64 Black Widow 43 Captain America 43 Children of Men 87 Clash of the Titans 57 Constantine 60 District 9, 64 Exorcist 60 Harry Potter 1, 41 Iron Man 43 Mary Poppins 132 Moana 11, 97, 139, 141 Percy Jackson and the Olympians 57, 93 Pirates of the Caribbean 57, 105–107, 141 Spider-Man 40–43 Superman 41–43, 45, 46, 87 Tales of Arcadia 64 Terminator 62 The Chronicles of Narnia 15, 57, 96 The Clash of the Titans 93 The Conjuring 60

The Hobbit 40, 41, 59 The Hunger Games 27, 28, 41, 42, 47, 97 The Lion King 42 The Lord of the Rings 8, 40, 41, 57, 93 The Matrix 16, 27, 28, 40–42, 62, 70, 86, 91, 104, 105 Wonder Woman 47, 97 Muhammad 56, 72, 102, 126 mystery 6, 21, 26, 33, 39, 48, 56, 66, 69, 70, 80, 100, 108, 118–120, 126, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 140 myth concept of 1, 14–17 dramatization of 13, 17, 19, 102 myth and mythologies Egyptian 66 mything 11, 17 myths and mythologies Aztec 97 Egyptian 14, 51, 65, 67, 80, 85, 135, 136 Finnish Karelian 25, 36, 58, 64, 66, 85, 136 Greek 12, 13, 14, 97–104, 26, 29, 37, 38, 39, 42, 51, 57, 64, 66, 80, 85, 94, 97– 104, 116 Indigenous 14, 48, 59

Kwakwaka’wakw 59, 91 Norse 29 Persian 29 Polynesian 11, 86, 87 Roman 37, 38, 66, 85 Slavonic 92 the Pawnee people 13 the Wahungwe people of Zimbabwe 85 Yoruba 106

Neumann, Erich 3, 13, 26, 57, 62, 68, 79, 81–86, 89, 99, 116, 118, 121, 123, 140

Odysseus 25, 27–29, 34–36, 40, 48, 68, 92, 106 Osiris 17, 26, 52, 64–67

Palamas, Gregory 123, 131 Persephone 14, 17, 26, 38, 46, 49, 92, 98–104, 105 in The Matrix 105 personification 14, 15, 58, 80, 106, 128 Plate, Brent 2, 8, 15, 18, 19, 48 politics 2, 5, 6, 17, 26, 28, 30, 97, 103, 109, 110, 125, 126, 133, 139

popular culture concept of 6–8 Poseidon 14, 35, 36, 96, 97 psyche concept of 3, 13, 15, 34, 83, 89, 94, 97, 99, 106, 116, 123 in distress 86 manifoldness of 18, 79, 82, 99 regeneration of 66 structure of 23, 84 Psyche in myth 25, 28, 40, 42, 44–46, 80–83, 103, 126 qawwali 71–75, 77, 123 Quran 17, 117, 118, 126

religion as myth-making 15, 19, 111 concept of 16, 19, 48, 70, 134 Renaissance 8, 13, 25, 38, 71, 128, 129 ritual. (See also Divine Liturgy, Eleusinian Mysteries, qawwali) concept of 17–19, 24, 28, 48, 52, 75, 77, 137, 139, 141 in Ancient Egypt 17, 85, 126

in Ancient Greece 17, 101, 102, 136 in Ancient Mesopotamia 48 in Zoroastrianism 126 Mayan 67 Royle, Nicholas 25, 53–54, 62, 73, 75, 77 Rumi, Jalaˉl ad-Dīn Mohammad 58, 59, 72, 132

soul-making 22, 39, 79, 81–83, 99, 103 Spretnak, Charlene 83, 132 Sufism 25, 68, 73, 107, 123, 124 symbol 15 and interiority of transformation 24, 25, 29, 33, 86, 106, 134, 137–139 bio-cultural 69, 71, 75 bio-culturl 77 concept of 27–29 interiority of transformation 83 ritualized 18 syzygy 23, 36, 39, 42, 44, 46, 105

The Hunger Games 16 Tolkien, J. R. R. 1, 15, 42, 59, (See also movies)

Turner, Victor 2, 7, 15, 17–21, 24, 30, 31, 48, 69, 71, 82, 103

uncanny concept of 53–57 unconscious collective 3, 21, 124, 125, 138, 139 cultural 138

veil as a symbol 84, 112, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 135 Vogler, Christopher 16, 18, 25, 28, 40, 42, 43, 45, 50 von Franz, Marie-Louise 3, 11, 18, 33, 34, 81, 90, 103

water. (See also chalice) as a symbol 57, 58, 85, 106, 123 Western 1, 15, 25, 53, 108 wine as a symbol 20, 26, 52, 67, 68, 71, 75, 91, 93, 105, 119, 121, (See also blood, chalice) witch old 91–93, 100

young 93, 96, 106, 132 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 53, 55

Zeus 14, 37, 38, 64, 94, 96, 99, 100–102, 126