Friday, July 16, 2021

Invoked or uninvoked, gods are present

 


"I was just walking Zeus,” the lady dogwalker greets me on the sidewalk. “He’s in a very good mood today.”
     This is excellent news, even (or especially) if the Zeus in question is a large black lab mix. “God” is “dog” spelled backwards. Anyone who knows anything about gods knows that they don’t stay in one form.
     The mug on my desk has the motto, Vocatus atque non vocatus deus aderit. “Invoked or uninvoked, the god is present.” This is the inscription Jung carved over the entrance to his home on Lake Zurich. He found it in a text among the papers of Erasmus it is said to be a Latin version of an oracular message to the Spartans. My mug holds pens and pencils I reach for every day.
     Coincidence is God’s way of remaining anonymous, goes that old saying. This is certainly the view of ancient and indigenous peoples, though they would prefer the plural version. The Stoics maintained that divination is possible because there are gods and they wish to communicate with humans. “If there is divination, there are gods; if there are gods, there is divination,” Cicero summarized the argument in his treatise De divinatione. [1]
     Living in the vicinity of Zurich, city of bankers and cuckoo clocks, and mentored by Freud, a self-declared atheist and skeptic, Jung invented a language of “archetypes” for public use, in place of the old talk of gods and spirits. But the old gods continued to dominate his imagination, and they even exerted a hold on Freud, who surrounded himself with an army of statuettes of deities from all over the ancient world and refused to travel without at least a platoon of these “old and grubby gods”. [2]
     When Jung speaks of archetypes as dynamic forces emerging from the collective unconscious and working effects in the mind and in the world, he is talking about powers that most human cultures have recognized as gods or spirits. In his essay "The Spirit of Psychology", Jung describes an encounter with the archetypes as an experience of the “holy”. He observes that it can be both healing and destructive and that no one who has gone through this experience remains unchanged. The archetypes are not subject to time and space.
     Canadian dream teacher Nance Thacker recalls, “When I was a kid I used to think the gods, goddesses and our ancestors were playing with us, setting up the scenarios and making bets as to what we'd do. Sometimes they'd slip us a little hint about something that was to come or give us a little nudge to remind us that they were there in the form of synchronicities, déjà vu and the like (though I didn't have words for the experience at the time).”
     Perhaps we need to return to the wisdom of the child, and the ancients. While the world around us is alive and spirited, it is also the playground or boxing ring for spirits whose home is in other realities. Some have been worshipped as gods, invoked as angels or feared as demons, and still are by many. A passage in the Puranas informs us that there are forty thousand orders of beings, humanoid to human perception, that are within contact range of humans. They may be friendly, hostile or inimical to humans and human agendas.
     For the ancients, the manifestation of a god did not necessarily remove the need to do some fact-checking or at least get a second opinion. There is a most illuminating story about this in the Odyssey. The hero Odysseus has survived sea monsters and sirens and the wrath of a sea god and is at last on his home island. But he has been away for ten years since the war he went to fight, and almost everyone believes he is dead. His palace is full of brutish and lustful men, suitors vying for the hand of his wife Penelope and with it, his kingdom. Their appetites are laying waste to his livestock, his wine cellar and his female servants.
     At the prompting of his constant guide, who is no less than the goddess Athena, Odysseus has disguised himself in the rags of a beggar, with a funny traveler's hat. He is mocked and scorned by the suitors and even some of his own retainers. Nobody recognizes him. They will find it hard to recognize him even when he shows himself in a different form. His homeland seems stranger to him than the magic realms from which he has returned. He must be asking himself, Which is the dream? He may be wondering whether he is dead.
    He spends a sleepless night, tossing and turning.  The "man of many ways" is seeking a way to expel the suitors who have taken over his home. But they are many and he is one, and even if he finds the way to kill them all, their kinsmen will come to take revenge. The goddess Athena now appears to him in mortal form, "swooping down from the sky in a woman's build and hovering at his head". She wants to know why he is still awake, fretting and exhausting himself. Why does he distrust her when she assures him that he will gain victory that day? Athena promises that "even if fifty bands of mortal fighters closed around us, hot to kill us off in battle" — because she is with him.
     Athena "showered sleep across his eyes", but when Odysseus wakes, on the morning of Apollo's feast day, even the promise of a goddess is not enough. He wants further signs. He speaks to the All-Father, Zeus. "Show me a sign." In fact, Odysseus asks for two signs, "a good omen voiced by someone awake, indoors" and "another sign, outside, from Zeus himself."
     He is answered at once by a great roll of thunder, out of a clear blue sky.
     Then he hears a "lucky word" from a woman grinding grain inside the halls. Hearing thunder from a cloudless sky, the woman recognizes a sign from Zeus. She speaks aloud to the king of the gods:

Sure it's a sign you're showing someone now.
So, poor as I am, grant my prayer as well;
let this day be the last, the last these suitors
bolt their groaning feasts in King Odysseus' house! [3]
 

    The twin oracles — from the sky and from overheard speech — harden Odysseus' resolve, and the scene is set for the astonishing slaughter of the suitors under the rain of arrows from the bow that none but the hero (and his son) can bend. In the Fagles version, Book 20 of the Odyssey is given the title "Portents Gather", and it is a good one. Here we see oracles speak in ways the Greeks observed closely and valued highly: through brontomancy, divination by thunder, and by listening for kledons, overheard speech or sound. 
    In the Odyssey, as in ancient Greek society, dreams and visions are the most important mode of divination. Yet our understanding of dreams may be deceptive, as Penelope explains in Book 19, when she speaks of the since-famous gates of ivory and horn. So even when blessed by a direct encounter with a goddess, the hero turns to the world around him for confirmation.
    Consciously or unconsciously, we walk on a kind of mythic edge. Just behind that gauzy veil of ordinary understanding, there are other powers, beings who live in the fifth dimension or dimensions beyond. To them, our lives may be as open as the lives of others would be to us if we could fly over the rooftops — and nobody had a roof on their house and we can look in and see it from every possible angle.
   A kairomancer [5] is always going to be willing to look for the hidden hand in the play of coincidence, and to turn to more than one kind of oracle to check on the exact nature of the game.




Text adapted from Sidewalk Oracles: Playing with Signs, Symbols and Synchronicity in Everyday Life by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Picture: Athena counsels Odysseus. From red-figure pelike c.450 B.C. in Staatliche Museen, Berlin.


References

1. Cicero, Cicero on Divination: De Divinatione, Book 1 trans. David Wardle (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2006) 108.

2. Janine Burke, The Gods of Freud; Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection. (Milford Point NSW: Knopf Australia, 2006)

3. C.G. Jung, "The Spirit of Psychology". English translation of Der Geist der Psychologie in Joseph Campbell (ed) Spirit and Nature: Eranos Yearbook 1954 (Princeton NJ: Princeton Universty Press, 1954). 

4. Odyssey Book 20, lines 128-131 trans. Robert Fagles (New York: Penguin Books, 1997)

5. A kairomancer [my coinage] is someone skilled in divination by special Kairos moments of opportunity and synchronicity.

 

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