Calling the Storm God: Private Myths, Collective Dreams

I run into storm gods quite often: Zeus and Perkunas, Shango and the Thunderers.. In a dream report I disinterred from my 2020 journals, I am reconstructing a ritual to call on the power of a storm god feared and revered in the ancient Near East. As so often, the dream set me the task Jung called "amplification": tracking correspondences in mythology and literature. 

August 9, 2020

dream

Calling the Storm God 

I am holding an extraordinary stone. It is dark reddish and may be a meteorite. There is the hint of a figure or scene, maybe its natural contours. Its shape reminds me, oddly, of the foreleg of a bull. I want to set it up in its ancient stand. I examine some bits of metal that were used to anchor it. I ask two lovely young priestesses who are assisting me to bring me some wire, figuring that I can bind the object in place. Before they return I have worked out how to get it securely into its bronze base. Power will be generated when the right words are spoken and the right powers evoked.

I have found an ancient text - Mesopotamian or Hittite - of a hymn to the storm god. I have written a free version of the scholarly translations and feel it has real power to move things for the benefit of communities as well as individuals. I share this with the priestesses and they are excited. I am going to read my work aloud for the first time to them.

I consider how to explain my hymn to a broader audience. One of the priestesses has a collection of my previous writings including an essay titled "Words from Ur". Perhaps somethng in this vein.

Now I have the stone standing securely on its plinth, I decide where I will deliver the prayer. There are three doors in the wall before me. I open the middle door. There is a tremendous surge of energy, seeking form, in the sky. 

 

Feelings: keenly interested, excited

Amplification: I knew that a storm god (Hurrian Teshub, Hittite Tarhan) was very important for the Hittites. I was soon reading up on Iškur (Sumerian) or Adad (Akkadian), a Mesopotamian storm god. Adad’s name is said to be derived from the Canaanite Hadad. The root meaning of both names is "Thunderer". He was also called Rammanu, Thunderer, in Akkadian. A text dating from the reign of Ur-Ninurta characterizes Adad/Iškur as both threatening in his stormy rage and generally life-giving and benevolent [1]. 
     I would imagine that meteorites and thunderstones were widely regarded as symbols of the storm gods. Early Hittite inscriptions speak of them as “stars falling from the sky” and the Hittites supposedly worshipped sacred stones set up at many places. A Hittite king sent a meteorite dagger to Tutankhamun. 
    The Opening of the Mouth ceremony was performed in Egypt to reanimate the spirit of the dead. A distinctive tool was used – an adze with a bent handle resembling the foreleg of a bull. It has been suggested that the actual foreleg of a freshly sacrificed bull may have been used to pump blood to revive a deceased pharaoh. The Egyptians called Ursa Major Msḫtjw, the Foreleg of the Bull .[2]
    It seems that statue magic throughout the ancient Near East involved similar arts, to import the spirit of a deity or ancestor into a statue or stone and then bring it alive.
    I looked for hymns to the Near Eastern storm gods and copied phrases that might be part of an invocation:

Thunderer 

Owner of the House of Abundance
and the House Where Prayers are Answered

Bull Rider|
who leashes and unleashes the Lion Dragon

Guardian of the Tablets

Lord of Divination

Bringer of rain from heaven and floods from underground [3]

By the Old Babylonian period Iškur/Adad was one of the great gods of the Babylonian pantheon with sanctuaries in many cities  He is "the bringer of plenty" in Enki and the World Order . In Enmerkar and the Lord of Aratta he causes a storm that makes wheat grow on a barren mountainside  Elsewhere his violence is featured. In the Old Babylonian version of the creation epic Atrahasis, "Adad was roaring in the clouds" as the Flood began. The deluge "bellowed like a bull" and the wind screamed like an eagle. 

Five years on: I note that the priestesses in my dream were modern Americans, perhaps an alert that storm gods will be heard again. 

Notes

1. Alberto Green writes that "On a tablet among the adab compositions from the time of Ur-Ninurta of Isin, Iskur is metaphorically described as a howling tempest with flashing bolts of lightning, a butting storm, and a great lion who makes all his enemies tremble, yet he is simultaneously revered as a benevolent lord and warden of heaven and earth who gives life to the land...In this important series of liturgical incantations dated to Ur III, Iskur is the son of Enlil. In addition to being called a lion, he is also represented as an enormous bull-cloud, booming his name across the sky. Here the Storm-god rains destructive hail rather than life-giving showers. He is lauded as the august bull and the great lion, mounting the seven storms like donkeys; he is also the roaring storm, thunder, and lightning. The mythic picture is that of the Storm-god Iskur galloping in his frightful war-chariot, drawn by his steeds, the lion, and the bull." - Alberto R. W. Green, The Storm God in the Ancient Near East (Winona Lake, Indiana: Eisenbrauns, 2003.) p.54.

2. Gábor W. Nemes, “The mythological importance of the constellation Msḫtjw in mortuary representations until the end of the New Kingdom” Égypte Nilotique et Méditerranéenn vol. 13 (2020) pp. 1-61.

3. Benjamin R. Foster, Before the Muses: an Anthology of Akkadian Literature. 3rd edition. (Bethesda, MD: CDL Press. 2005) p.784

4. ibid., p249.

Illustration: RM+AI

Jung's Amplification of Miss Frank Miller

I recently re-read Jung’s Symbols of Transformation, a massive revision of a work he composed  thirty-seven years earlier, as he came to the parting of the ways with Freud. He noted that at 36, when he wrote Wandlungen und symbole der libido (published in 1912), he was still fighting to get out of the narrow box of Freud’s theories, and just embarking on the deeper journey towards death in the second half of life. His introduction to the 1950 edition contains some fine general statements about our relations with myth, suggesting that if we are unconscious that we are living a myth, we may be driven by it to unfortunate or disastrous outcomes. 

     He insists that psychology needs to learn from history just as history can learn from psychology.
     The seed of this book is a 20-page journal of the “autosuggestive” fantasies of Miss Frank Miller, an American woman, a writer and journalist and stage performer.  Jung did not know her personally, and got several things wrong about her. Her name was not a pseudonym; she was named for her father in Alabama. Jung diagnosed her fantasies as “the prodromal stages of schizophrenia” and predicted she would eventually suffer a full schizophrenic breakdown; she did not. However, in 1909 she was admitted to a hospital in Massachusetts diagnosed with a “psychopathic personality” and a tendency to “hypomania”. [1].Her fantasies were published in French translation by Théodore Flournoy, a professor of psychology at the University of Geneva and a student of the paranormal, in 1906. Jung read the French translation, not the original.

    It’s desirable to read this text (published as an appendix) before weighing into Jung’s immense commentaries. Miss Miller was clearly a woman of considerable education and intelligence; she notes where her knowledge had to catch up with her experience. She dreams a hymn of creation in which God first manifests Sound, then Light, the Loves. She notes she had not heard at the time of Anaxagoras, who imagined creation starting from chaos in the form of a whirlwind, which presumably involved sound.
    Jung's method in exploiting this material is an example of both circumambulation and amplification. He walks round and around the images, then allows himself to find their likenesses on the big screen, in the mythology and iconography of all the world’s cultures that are known to him.
    Jung’s approach – as he admitted many years later – may also be a textbook example of projection: what he finds in Miss Miller’s psyche are the contents of his own.

"I took Miss Miller's fantasies as ... an autonomous form of thinking, but I did not realize [at that time] that she stood for that form of thinking in myself. She took over my fantasy and became the stage director of it, if one interprets the book subjectively. ...to put it even more strongly, passive thinking seemed to me such a weak and perverted thing that I could only handle it through a diseased woman." [Shamdasani, 2012, 27‐ 28]  “And so I assimilated the Miller side of myself, which did me much good. I found a lump of clay, turned it to gold and put it in my pocket. I got Miller into myself and strengthened my fantasy power by the mythological material” [2].

His justification for turning to myth to illuminate the individual psyche is that psyche is more or less the same everywhere. “Because the basic structure of the psyche is everywhere more or less the same, it is possible to compare what look like individual dream motifs with mythologems of whatever origin.” [3]

References

1.Somu Shamdasani, "A woman called Frank". Spring: Journal of Archetype and Culture (1990) vol. 50, 25-56. 

2. Somu Shamdasani, Introduction to Jungian Psychology: Notes of the Seminar on Analytical Psychology given in 1925 by Carl Jung. (Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2012) 32

3. C.G.Jung, Symbols of Transformation, Collected Works volume 5,para 474