More from Mars....

 In the last post in this space, Mars, and the American (and other’s?) love of war, was the focus. Referred to as a template for an introduction to archetypal psychology, this discussion, while not an attempt eliminate war from our consciousness, either individually or collectively, it was an attempt to .a deferential, open and honest acknowledgement of the ‘voice’ of the gods and goddesses, it can be and was intended as a wake-up call.

Hillman, himself, notes his intention to ‘regain the mythical perspective. My thoughts have not bee aimed at finding another literal answer to either war or nuclearism. We each know the literal answer: freeze, diffuse, dismantle disarm. Disarm the positivism but re-arm the god; return arms and their control to the mythical realities that are their ultimate governances. Above all: wake up. To wake up, we need Mars, the God of Awakenings. Allow him to instigate our consciousness so that we may ‘escape the fate of violent death’ and live the martial peace of activism…..How can we lay out the proper field of action for Mars? In what ways can martial love of killing and dying and martial fellowship serve a civilian society? How can we break apart the fusion of the martial and the nuclear? What modes of thought are there for moving the martial away from direct violence toward indirect ritual? Can we bring the questions themselves into the postmodern consciousness of imaginal psychology, deconstruction, and catastrophe theory? Can we discern the positivism and literalism—epitomized by and the fantasy of the ridiculous counting of warheads—that inform current policies before those policies literally and positively deconstruct our life, our history, and our world? Let us invoke Mars. At least once before in our century (20^th) he pointed the way. During the years he reigned -1914-1918- he destroyed the nineteenth century mind and brought forth modern consciousness. Could a turn to him now do something similar? Yet Mars wants more than reflection. The ram does not pull back to consider, and iron takes no polish in which it can see itself. Mars demands penetration toward essence, pushing forward ever further into the tangle of danger, and danger now lies in the unthought thicket of our numbed minds. Swords must be beaten into plowshares, hammered, twisted, wrought. Strangely enough, I think this deconstruction is already going on, so banally that we miss it. Is the translation of war from physical battle-field to television screen and space fiction, this translation of literal war into media, mediated war, and the fantasy language of war games, staging areas, theaters of war and theater commanders, worst-case scenarios, rehearsals and the Commander-in-Chief, an actor (Reagan)-is all this possibly pointing to a new mode of ritualizing war by imagining it?....A translation of the bomb into imagination keeps it safe from both military Martialism and civilian Christianism. The first would welcome it for an arm, the second for an Apocalypse. Imagination seems anyway to be the only safe place to keep the bomb: there is no literal positive place on earth where it can be held, as we cannot locate our MX missiles anywhere except as images on a drawing board or dump the wastes from manufacturing them anywhere safe. However-to hold the bomb as image in the mind requires an extra-ordinary extension, and extraordinary daring, in our imagining powers, a revolution of the imagination itself, enthroning it as the main, the greatest reality, because the bomb, which imagination shall contain, is the more powerful image of our age. Brighter than a thousand suns, it is our omnipotent god-term (as Wolfgang Giegerich* has expounded), our mystery that requires constant imaginative propitiation. The translation of bomb into the imagination is a transubstantiation of god to imago dei, deliteralizing the ultimate god-term from positivism to negative theology, a god that is all images. And no more than any other god-term can it be controlled by reason of taken fully literally without hideous consequences. The task of nuclear psychology is a ritual-like devotion to the bomb as image, never letting it slip from its pilar of cloud in the heaven of imagination to rain ruin on the cities of the plain. The Damocles sword of nuclear catastrophe that hangs upon our minds is already producing utterly new patterns of thought about catastrophe itself, a new theology, a new science, a new psychology not only burdening the mind with doom but forcing it into postmodern consciousness, displacing deconstructing, and trashing every fixed surety. Trashing is the symptom, and it indicates a psychic necessity of this age. To trash the end of this century (20^th) of its coagulated notions calls for the disciplined ruthlessness and courage of Mars. Deconstructing the blocked mind, opening the way in faith with our rage and fear, stimulating the anaesthetized senses: this is psychic activism of the most intense sort…..Rather than blast the material earth with a bomb, we would deconstruct our entombment in materialism with its justification and salvation by economics. We would bomb the bottom line back to the stone age to find again values that are sensate and alive. Rather than bring time to a close with a bomb, we would deconstruct the positivistic imagination of time that has separated it from eternity. In other words: explode the notions; let them go up in a spirited fire. Explode worldliness, not this world; explode final judgements; explode salvation and redemption and the comings and goings of Messiahs—is not the continual presence of here and now enough for you? Put hope back into the jar of evils and let go your addiction to hopeful fixes. Explode endings and fresh starts and the wish to be born again out of continuity. Release continuity from history: remember the animals and the archaic peoples who have continuity without history….Then timelessness could go right on being revealed without Revelation, the veils of literalism pierced by intelligence, parting and falling to the mind that imagines and so welcomes the veiling. No sudden rendering, no apocalyptic ending; timelessness as the ongoing, the extraordinarily loving, lovable, and terrifying continuity of life. (Hillman, Mythic Figures, pps. 136-7-8-9)

While this eschatological essay/lecture is not written and delivered as an effort specifically appropriate for theology, and even serves as an indictment of the fusion of materialism/literalism/apocaplyticism that includes both redemption and a fixed conception/perception of the universe and our relationship to God, it does open up many issues for the person/nation/planet to consider without relinquishing or abandoning or denying our most life-affirming, complex and essential imagination. The anima mundi, in which we all breathe, exhale, drink and eat, read and think, reflect and pray, worship and grieve, celebrate and love….is a shared “soul” and the care of that “soul” depends on our capacity, willingness and orientation to the discipline of caring for our own soul, and the souls of all other  earthlings.

We are not likely to begin to consider, espouse, embrace and dedicate ourselves to the notion of our shared and essential life-sustaining resources, unless and until we begin to adopt a different way of seeing ourselves, our place in time and our fragility and vulnerability. And while Hillman’s rhetoric itself, has both a ring of and a trumpet blast of the warrior-prophet, his profound insight and empathy and intellectual ethic reverberates throughout this passage.

Nevertheless, in any attempt to reflect critically on our own lives, without the deferral from trauma, the betrayer within, the imagined ‘hero’, the imagined ‘lover’ and partner, and the heroic ‘ego’ that has been the centrepiece of the psychological menu for many decades, our families, our schools, churches, universities and corporations as well as our institutions of the state might like to take a page from the “Mars” playbook, as Hillman has articulated it to counter  the over-weening image of monotheism, literalism, as it has been grafted onto the anima mundi, as well as the definition and conception of the ‘healthy, well-adjusted, mature, admirable, and eminently emulatable human individual. This tectonic shift in how we look at ourselves, each other, and the driving energy of our culture will not be, and cannot be envisaged as a ‘quick-fix’ in order to magically transform the “ship” of our consciousness into a new and different definition of the hero. Indeed, the reverse is not only more likely; it is to be preferred.

There is a very ironic, and even paradoxical aspect to the thinking  of Hillman, who was raised in a Jewish home. In Jewish (Kabbalistic) thought, tsim-tsum, considered as the first step in the process by which God began the process of creation by withdrawing his own essence from the area. From the website, chabad.org, we read: Tsimtsum literally means ‘reduction.’ For a Kabbalist, a tsimtsum is a reduction of the divine energy that creates worlds-something like the transformers that reduce the voltage of the electric leaving the turbine generators, until it’s weak enough for a standard bulb to handle. So too, the divine energy needs to be stepped down so that the created  worlds can handle it.

And while positioning Mars as the wake-up call to re-visioning our dominant intellectual, cultural, religious and ethical/moral beliefs, structures, dogma and especially the images to which we seek to conform, seemingly a rejection of tsimtsum, for Hillman, it is precisely the embrace, in the imagination of all the relevant images in any situation, that can and will bring about the most real and enhanced questions, provocations, and awakenings.

There are so many ‘new’ (yet very old, if we knew and embraced their origin) images that have fallen into disrepute, that nevertheless remain ready for rediscovery, from the perspective of archetypal psychology, for all people, in all faith communities, in all ethnicities and in all periods of history, through an awakened, energized and courageous active imagination.

Hello Mars, welcome to our world!

*Wolfgang Giegerich defines psychology proper as fundamentally separate from the everyday person and the ‘human, all-too-human’ aspects of the soul. (National Library of Medicine, ed.ncbi.nlm.gov. From philpapers.org, in a piece entitled, Soul-Violence: Collected English Papers, Wolfgang Giegerich, by Routledge, (2020) we read: ‘All steps forward in the improvement of the human psyche have been paid for by blood’. Further to this statement from C.G. Jung, Wolfgang Giergerich’s third volume of Collected English Papers shows that the soul is not merely the innocent recipient or victim of violence; it also produces itself through violent deeds and expresses itself through violent acts.