Chapter 5, "The Stone or the Statue," (9/29-10/5)
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Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law!
I apologize in advance for getting this post up late, however I hope everyone had a lovely Autumnal Equinox last week!
This chapter proved longer than I anticipated but we are now finished with Part One. Since we will begin Part Two next week, I wanted to do this post a little differently than the previous ones! If you don't mind, please indulge me in an experiment.
First and foremost, I would love for everyone to share their thoughts on the book thus far. I have been pretty vocal about my attitude towards Part One in previous posts, and so I thought I would ask others to check in with themselves! Feel free to spend the first part of your post sharing anything significant thus far in your experience of reading this book. Although my attitude towards the book has not been the brightest at moments, I still feel as if I am getting a lot out of reading this book. I am curious to see what your relationship with the text has been like thus far.
For the second half of the discussion this week, I would like to try something new. Rather than pose questions, I am going to present a series of passages from the text. Choose any number of passages presented and write a response detailing your relationship to it. I am purposefully being vague here. I would love to hear your reactions and interpretations of these passages: feelings, updated knowledge about themes described in the passage, Qabalistic significance, Jungian & Qabalistic comparisons & contrasts, etc., are all encouraged. If so called, explore the passage with different lenses from Literary Analysis. Ideally, one would provide any gnosis they may have received from these passages, however if none of these passages call out to you, feel free to supply your own! The goal is less to critique the text (as you may have guessed) and instead to discover what your Holy Guardian Angel is speaking to you through the text.
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"...You must insist on your interpretation, leave the thing in its own realm, and not seek outer solutions. In this way you can reach the inner realm and live in that: but then comes the "red horse difficulty," which is that naturally the outer realm has not been changed and there remains the problem of the practice meaning. This occurs with the foreign analysand who comes here and discusses the family situation and works it out on a psychological level: but then he has to go back and wonders if the whole thing will not collapse when he gets home. Because of the analysand's change, however, the situation is different..." (100)
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"Mary the saint and Mary the prostitute are both images of the anima. As the prostitute she is attraction to the other sex, the emotional attraction, the drive, and at the upper end she is all the things Dante says about Beatrice. There is Venus ourania (the heavenly Venus) and Venus pandemos (the profane Venus), the divine and the vulgar. The symbol of one is the dove, and of the other, the sparrow. The anima contains this duality and is within herself neither an idea not something physical but, in her own essence, something between the opposites. A man gets town between the two aspects, between the common well-known attraction to the other sex and all its emotional mechanisms, and the inner experience of the highest order." (102)
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"The petrification of Faithful John can be seen whenever the dominating principle of consciousness does not recognize the ever-changing aspect of the unconscious, for this failure of vision has a petrifying effect on the unconscious: the failure creates a nonelastic and rigid point of view." (108)
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"When a new symbol of the divinity is built up during the process, the divinity is either sacrificed to strengthen a community or kept secret within the individual." (130)
There are plenty more passages to look at in this chapter (in fact, I felt like this chapter was finally starting to say something, but that it has a lot of what could be volatile subject matter in the latter half). I chose these to give everyone a place to begin with in their response to the text. I didn't want to pull out too many more passages because I fear that this post is already a wall of text
I look forward to seeing what you all post!
Love is the Law, Love under Will.
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H Hannah pinned this topic
-
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law!
I apologize in advance for getting this post up late, however I hope everyone had a lovely Autumnal Equinox last week!
This chapter proved longer than I anticipated but we are now finished with Part One. Since we will begin Part Two next week, I wanted to do this post a little differently than the previous ones! If you don't mind, please indulge me in an experiment.
First and foremost, I would love for everyone to share their thoughts on the book thus far. I have been pretty vocal about my attitude towards Part One in previous posts, and so I thought I would ask others to check in with themselves! Feel free to spend the first part of your post sharing anything significant thus far in your experience of reading this book. Although my attitude towards the book has not been the brightest at moments, I still feel as if I am getting a lot out of reading this book. I am curious to see what your relationship with the text has been like thus far.
For the second half of the discussion this week, I would like to try something new. Rather than pose questions, I am going to present a series of passages from the text. Choose any number of passages presented and write a response detailing your relationship to it. I am purposefully being vague here. I would love to hear your reactions and interpretations of these passages: feelings, updated knowledge about themes described in the passage, Qabalistic significance, Jungian & Qabalistic comparisons & contrasts, etc., are all encouraged. If so called, explore the passage with different lenses from Literary Analysis. Ideally, one would provide any gnosis they may have received from these passages, however if none of these passages call out to you, feel free to supply your own! The goal is less to critique the text (as you may have guessed) and instead to discover what your Holy Guardian Angel is speaking to you through the text.
-
"...You must insist on your interpretation, leave the thing in its own realm, and not seek outer solutions. In this way you can reach the inner realm and live in that: but then comes the "red horse difficulty," which is that naturally the outer realm has not been changed and there remains the problem of the practice meaning. This occurs with the foreign analysand who comes here and discusses the family situation and works it out on a psychological level: but then he has to go back and wonders if the whole thing will not collapse when he gets home. Because of the analysand's change, however, the situation is different..." (100)
-
"Mary the saint and Mary the prostitute are both images of the anima. As the prostitute she is attraction to the other sex, the emotional attraction, the drive, and at the upper end she is all the things Dante says about Beatrice. There is Venus ourania (the heavenly Venus) and Venus pandemos (the profane Venus), the divine and the vulgar. The symbol of one is the dove, and of the other, the sparrow. The anima contains this duality and is within herself neither an idea not something physical but, in her own essence, something between the opposites. A man gets town between the two aspects, between the common well-known attraction to the other sex and all its emotional mechanisms, and the inner experience of the highest order." (102)
-
"The petrification of Faithful John can be seen whenever the dominating principle of consciousness does not recognize the ever-changing aspect of the unconscious, for this failure of vision has a petrifying effect on the unconscious: the failure creates a nonelastic and rigid point of view." (108)
-
"When a new symbol of the divinity is built up during the process, the divinity is either sacrificed to strengthen a community or kept secret within the individual." (130)
There are plenty more passages to look at in this chapter (in fact, I felt like this chapter was finally starting to say something, but that it has a lot of what could be volatile subject matter in the latter half). I chose these to give everyone a place to begin with in their response to the text. I didn't want to pull out too many more passages because I fear that this post is already a wall of text
I look forward to seeing what you all post!
Love is the Law, Love under Will.
@jjones I feel very similar about the text, I at times have to lumber through reading and don't always like what she has to say, but the discussions around its contents have been really powerful for me. Lately I have been seeing the shape of my shadow more and more, and feel empowered taking responsibility for its machinations.
I think no matter the book, the real learning is coming from exchanging dialogue with ya'll! Especially given all of our unique backgrounds which we bring to the text!
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System unpinned this topic
-
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law!
I apologize in advance for getting this post up late, however I hope everyone had a lovely Autumnal Equinox last week!
This chapter proved longer than I anticipated but we are now finished with Part One. Since we will begin Part Two next week, I wanted to do this post a little differently than the previous ones! If you don't mind, please indulge me in an experiment.
First and foremost, I would love for everyone to share their thoughts on the book thus far. I have been pretty vocal about my attitude towards Part One in previous posts, and so I thought I would ask others to check in with themselves! Feel free to spend the first part of your post sharing anything significant thus far in your experience of reading this book. Although my attitude towards the book has not been the brightest at moments, I still feel as if I am getting a lot out of reading this book. I am curious to see what your relationship with the text has been like thus far.
For the second half of the discussion this week, I would like to try something new. Rather than pose questions, I am going to present a series of passages from the text. Choose any number of passages presented and write a response detailing your relationship to it. I am purposefully being vague here. I would love to hear your reactions and interpretations of these passages: feelings, updated knowledge about themes described in the passage, Qabalistic significance, Jungian & Qabalistic comparisons & contrasts, etc., are all encouraged. If so called, explore the passage with different lenses from Literary Analysis. Ideally, one would provide any gnosis they may have received from these passages, however if none of these passages call out to you, feel free to supply your own! The goal is less to critique the text (as you may have guessed) and instead to discover what your Holy Guardian Angel is speaking to you through the text.
-
"...You must insist on your interpretation, leave the thing in its own realm, and not seek outer solutions. In this way you can reach the inner realm and live in that: but then comes the "red horse difficulty," which is that naturally the outer realm has not been changed and there remains the problem of the practice meaning. This occurs with the foreign analysand who comes here and discusses the family situation and works it out on a psychological level: but then he has to go back and wonders if the whole thing will not collapse when he gets home. Because of the analysand's change, however, the situation is different..." (100)
-
"Mary the saint and Mary the prostitute are both images of the anima. As the prostitute she is attraction to the other sex, the emotional attraction, the drive, and at the upper end she is all the things Dante says about Beatrice. There is Venus ourania (the heavenly Venus) and Venus pandemos (the profane Venus), the divine and the vulgar. The symbol of one is the dove, and of the other, the sparrow. The anima contains this duality and is within herself neither an idea not something physical but, in her own essence, something between the opposites. A man gets town between the two aspects, between the common well-known attraction to the other sex and all its emotional mechanisms, and the inner experience of the highest order." (102)
-
"The petrification of Faithful John can be seen whenever the dominating principle of consciousness does not recognize the ever-changing aspect of the unconscious, for this failure of vision has a petrifying effect on the unconscious: the failure creates a nonelastic and rigid point of view." (108)
-
"When a new symbol of the divinity is built up during the process, the divinity is either sacrificed to strengthen a community or kept secret within the individual." (130)
There are plenty more passages to look at in this chapter (in fact, I felt like this chapter was finally starting to say something, but that it has a lot of what could be volatile subject matter in the latter half). I chose these to give everyone a place to begin with in their response to the text. I didn't want to pull out too many more passages because I fear that this post is already a wall of text
I look forward to seeing what you all post!
Love is the Law, Love under Will.
@jjones Okay, phew! I finally read the chapter and am ready to respond!
I actually really enjoyed the fairy tale for this chapter, and felt it was ripe with lots of symbolism beyond my comprehension. But it was intriguing and had exciting rhythm. I'd like to expand on quote 2, because I am just on the female kick.
While reading, I could see how male-centered these stories are and started to wonder about what shadow vs. holy figures could be depicted from a female gaze on masculinity. Von Franz easily talks about the different forms of Venus, the "heavenly Venus" who is virginal, pure, and innocent and the "profane Venus" who is sexual, unclean, and a temptress. This is a very common image depicted in all kinds of stories today, movies, books, and so on. To be sexual as a woman is seen as profanity against the feminine spirit and a deviant temptation to male attraction.
I can't speak for all women, but I think there is a kind of masculine shadow from the female gaze on violence and aggression. It is at once magnetizing and repulsive. Like the female shadow, it speaks to the power of reproduction and survival to human desire. Aggression is dominating and protecting, it is power and oppression. Perhaps the "heavenly Mars" would be an image of a strong and courageous warrior, I am picturing Odysseus for some reason. While the "profane Mars" might be a cruel despot who enjoys owning and breaking women, men, and children alike.
To be fair, the profane Mars is far more "profane" in my eyes. I would say a "profane Venus" might be even more extreme. Women have survived in the past hundreds of years by their sexual, aesthetic, and homemaking appeal. Thelema is working to change this, but we can't escape the history involved which influences modern culture and behavior. There are some women, as there are men, who use their power solely to hurt other's wills, in varying degrees of violence. Though, I think women do this less by their sexuality as by their learned ability to control others to do their violence for them, being that women are often taught to pay close attention to the needs of others. I would say this is more emotional violence rather than the physical and oftentimes sexual violence by men.
So I would say a profane Venus would involve violent manipulation, using whatever means necessary, emotional, sexual, and so on to inflict pain upon others. It would perhaps more be an image of Venus as narcissus, which I think paints a deeper picture than just equating prostitutes as profane... which.. um.. prostitutes actually served in temples during ancient and maybe modern times? I don't know much about that history. But obviously we all know sex workers can as easily access the divine as our virginal Beatrice.
Working with gender is complicated, it involves careful distinction between the planes and ability to hold a mutable boundary which exists between culture, biology, and environment. But as a woman, or someone who was raised and identifies as a woman, I am attuned to the differences in which women experience life... at least my small circle of perspectives of women in my life. And I think as a part of the natural dominance of men within occultism, most of the perspective encoded within texts are male-centered, both in texts written by males and females hoping to gain an audience within male-centered spaces.
So, I think an exciting part of doing this work right now is opening up more dialogue about what a female perspective is on occultism, alchemy, and so on. The fundamental forces at play remain the same, but the symbols and words we use to describe them are mutable to a certain degree. It is the difficult work to attempt to preserve the consistency of meaning with revised symbols incorporating more female-centered narratives.
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@jjones Okay, phew! I finally read the chapter and am ready to respond!
I actually really enjoyed the fairy tale for this chapter, and felt it was ripe with lots of symbolism beyond my comprehension. But it was intriguing and had exciting rhythm. I'd like to expand on quote 2, because I am just on the female kick.
While reading, I could see how male-centered these stories are and started to wonder about what shadow vs. holy figures could be depicted from a female gaze on masculinity. Von Franz easily talks about the different forms of Venus, the "heavenly Venus" who is virginal, pure, and innocent and the "profane Venus" who is sexual, unclean, and a temptress. This is a very common image depicted in all kinds of stories today, movies, books, and so on. To be sexual as a woman is seen as profanity against the feminine spirit and a deviant temptation to male attraction.
I can't speak for all women, but I think there is a kind of masculine shadow from the female gaze on violence and aggression. It is at once magnetizing and repulsive. Like the female shadow, it speaks to the power of reproduction and survival to human desire. Aggression is dominating and protecting, it is power and oppression. Perhaps the "heavenly Mars" would be an image of a strong and courageous warrior, I am picturing Odysseus for some reason. While the "profane Mars" might be a cruel despot who enjoys owning and breaking women, men, and children alike.
To be fair, the profane Mars is far more "profane" in my eyes. I would say a "profane Venus" might be even more extreme. Women have survived in the past hundreds of years by their sexual, aesthetic, and homemaking appeal. Thelema is working to change this, but we can't escape the history involved which influences modern culture and behavior. There are some women, as there are men, who use their power solely to hurt other's wills, in varying degrees of violence. Though, I think women do this less by their sexuality as by their learned ability to control others to do their violence for them, being that women are often taught to pay close attention to the needs of others. I would say this is more emotional violence rather than the physical and oftentimes sexual violence by men.
So I would say a profane Venus would involve violent manipulation, using whatever means necessary, emotional, sexual, and so on to inflict pain upon others. It would perhaps more be an image of Venus as narcissus, which I think paints a deeper picture than just equating prostitutes as profane... which.. um.. prostitutes actually served in temples during ancient and maybe modern times? I don't know much about that history. But obviously we all know sex workers can as easily access the divine as our virginal Beatrice.
Working with gender is complicated, it involves careful distinction between the planes and ability to hold a mutable boundary which exists between culture, biology, and environment. But as a woman, or someone who was raised and identifies as a woman, I am attuned to the differences in which women experience life... at least my small circle of perspectives of women in my life. And I think as a part of the natural dominance of men within occultism, most of the perspective encoded within texts are male-centered, both in texts written by males and females hoping to gain an audience within male-centered spaces.
So, I think an exciting part of doing this work right now is opening up more dialogue about what a female perspective is on occultism, alchemy, and so on. The fundamental forces at play remain the same, but the symbols and words we use to describe them are mutable to a certain degree. It is the difficult work to attempt to preserve the consistency of meaning with revised symbols incorporating more female-centered narratives.
@Hannah There's so much in your response that I want to hear more about.
I agree that Occultism and Alchemy are a much more male-centric spirituality. It's ironic to me because anything within the Wiccan and Witchcraft traditions, which often get overly simplified to "intuitive traditions" seem to be seen as feminine spiritual systems according to Occulture.
I would be so fascinated to read about the nuances in these Shadows and how these dynamics interact with the gender norms that we are raised with. It's interesting because there are aspects of the Shadow that I could imagine are gender neutral, but depending on how one might've been raised (especially given gender norms), it could be associated with a stereotype of a particular gender. If these were catalogued (and hopefully not abused like the manuals used in the Medieval Witch hunts), how much more our discussion of gender could evolve on a grander scale...
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@Hannah There's so much in your response that I want to hear more about.
I agree that Occultism and Alchemy are a much more male-centric spirituality. It's ironic to me because anything within the Wiccan and Witchcraft traditions, which often get overly simplified to "intuitive traditions" seem to be seen as feminine spiritual systems according to Occulture.
I would be so fascinated to read about the nuances in these Shadows and how these dynamics interact with the gender norms that we are raised with. It's interesting because there are aspects of the Shadow that I could imagine are gender neutral, but depending on how one might've been raised (especially given gender norms), it could be associated with a stereotype of a particular gender. If these were catalogued (and hopefully not abused like the manuals used in the Medieval Witch hunts), how much more our discussion of gender could evolve on a grander scale...
@jjones I took a witchcraft and heresy class in college and it was so interesting! We learned about how the Inquisition and witch trials centered much on the power of deciding who holds authority in "knowing." Plenty of the main players of western occultism operated within the dominant class, white, educated men oftentimes associated in some way with the church (at least externally). Witches were women, who barred from education, developed ways of knowing through their realms of expertise, within homes, kitchens, among natural environments and communities.
There has always been a thread of folk magick and a thread of ceremonial magick, oftentimes intertwining, but put this way, divided mainly by class. It is interesting how the divide still lasts today, I feel like there are often antipathies between ceremonial magicians and witchcraft practitioners and wonder if perhaps ceremonial magick might benefit from earnestly learning from nature-based workers, and vice versa. I reckon there are far more similarities than not. Btw, the book we read in the class was The Witch in the Western Imagination by Lyndal Roper, it has some absolutely horrific details of men with mommy issues playing god on poor women. The inquisition was vast in scope and quite violent but the witchcraft trials were even worse in terms of sheer depravity, and they happened more recently!
I think one could go pretty deep exploring the shadow content of the "witch," "magician," and "sorcerer!"