"At the River" in Late October: Estes, Jung, and Pilgrimage

 

"Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul, and memories,  and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River. Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.  The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of those rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. "

Norman MacLean, "A River Runs Through It"

A quote that stays with me,  from the beautiful book by Norman MacLean that became an equally beautiful movie in the 90's.  I often think of it, increasingly with age, and perhaps especially, as Samhain and the Veils thin away.  What an exquisite and elegant metaphor for the depthless and unfathomable River we have our brief dwellings in.

Perhaps he speaks of what storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes *  called "Rio Abajo Rio, the "river beneath the river of the world". 

That stays with me as well, and arises especially when I feel the dryness of my life overtaking me.  She  speaks of the River of Story, its universal waters flowing beneath the surfaces of all things.   In her book Women Who Run With the Wolves *** she writes,

"Each woman has potential access to Rio Abajo Rio, this river beneath the river. She arrives there through deep meditation, dance, writing, painting, prayer making, singing, drumming, active imagination, or any activity which requires an intense altered consciousness. A woman arrives in this world-between worlds through yearning and by seeking something she can see just out of the corner of her eye. She arrives there by deeply creative acts, through intentional solitude, and by practice of any of the arts. And even with these well-crafted practices, much of what occurs in this ineffable world remains forever mysterious to us, for it breaks physical laws and rational laws as we know them."*

Whether tapping, if only briefly, the wellsprings of El Rio in grief, creativity, meditation, or through the sudden psychic upwelling that can happen when the so-called ego cracks and splinters, I think it is ultimately a blessing, an opportunity given,  when the waters are revealed, for they re-member the greater life.  I didn't say that was always easy, or comfortable. 

 And sometimes the river of story has a voice that sounds like a roar, sometimes it sounds like a whisper.  

Estes, who is a Jungian psychologist, believes that to simply experience this "great river of being" is not enough: one must also instinctively participate in some way, find some way to open a pathway, a well spring, for others to follow.  She writes:

"...[W]hat Jung called 'the moral obligation' to live out and to express what one has learned in the descent or ascent to the wild Self. This moral obligation he speaks of means to live what we perceive, be it found in the psychic Elysian fields, the isles of the dead, the bone deserts of the psyche, the face of the mountain, the rock of the sea, the lush underworld - anyplace where La Que Sabe breathes upon us, changing us. Our work is to show we have been breathed upon - to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowings, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts."

Beautiful.  Here's something I myself wrote about that quote, some  12 years ago:

"I respectfully submit that this is so for any creative person, this work of the SEER, residing within each of us. The River beneath the River of the World."

True.  Reading that, at this time when I am questioning everything and especially myself,  it pleases me that I wrote that.  It shows me a bit of who I was then.  And also, things change, we change, the rivers of the world move us along. Sometimes it's time to retire, to just be.  I think this is a hard time for Seers, as virtual reality seems to be replacing them.   It's a hard time to know what is real any more.  Recently a young, educated woman told me that gender, and indeed everything, is just "narrative".  That left me speechless.  And I realized that this isn't my world any more. I don't know where my world went, but it is apparently gone.  I need to explore that more in the next post.  

There is a scene from the 2021 award winning movie NOMADLAND where the heroine, Fern, having become a nomad,  meets a fellow traveler living in an old motorhome.  The elderly woman tells the newly nomadic heroine about a place she visited where she saw the swallows return, thousands of them.  She confides that she has stage 4 cancer, and she's not willing to spend her final years in clinics and chemo labs.  Shortly after that she drives off, lightening her load with a "give away" of items from her motorhome.  Later in the movie Fern receives a text from her:  a video of swallows flying over a river.  

 

That little story, those swallows flying over a fast running river, that stuck with me, it (appropriately for the season, again) haunts me.  A river runs through it.  And the swallows are the hearts desire.   

I wish, like the aged often used to do in India, I wish sometimes I could divest myself of all the very real responsibilities and meaningless work-for-money I still wake each morning to do.  Like the woman in the old motorhome, I wish I could just lighten the load, give it away, and go.  On Pilgrimage.  Maybe, like her quest to see the swallows again,  the road itself might tell me where my Pilgrimage will lead me.  

"Rio Abajo Rio", the River Beneath the River of the World calls to me these days, and I need to jump into its waters. As we approach Samhain, the sweet Dark calls as well.   Pilgrimage, the intention to travel within the liminality of Pilgrimage,  is actually what I think the aged are called to do.  I would give myself the advice I would give a friend, who made the shocking comment to me recently that "This isn't my world any more".  That comment haunts me most of all.  It won't leave me.

The advice I would give her, and myself, as we both realize this isn't our world anymore, is to go.  On Pilgrimage.         Go to the Ganges.  Climb slowly the Sacred Mountain of Kilamajaro, or Babaquiviri.  Go to where the Swallows return.  Walk the Camino to Compostella, where souls are composted, or travel on, to Finisterre, to Lands End, where the Ocean waits.  Or some where else as yet unknown, maybe, the Pilgrimage is more within than without.  .  Just let it be the Pilgrimage.

"The Hidden Sea" (2010)

* (p.30, below)

** (p.96, below)

*** Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Hardcover, 560 pages, Random House Publishing Group, 1992

Marga: Footprints in the Mythic Sand

 

PREFACE:  

Since I seem to be unable to write much of anything new these days (although my mind is full of images) I have decided to return to posts from the past that I like a lot, posts that are "touchstones" along the path, to re-explore posts that lead me back to the "roots" I'm currently looking for when I go into the studio.  Which, I see, is really the same work I've been pursuing for a very long time.  Perhaps I just get a bit closer to the source.  I hope. 

So  here is this entirely appropriate  article (which I'll be improving along the way) from 2010 called "Marga".  At the time I was thinking a lot about the synchronicities that continually seemed to occur in the course of my creative wanderings and searches.  I had a brief internet  coorespondance with an Englishman named Rober d'Amour after one of these posts on this Blog.  He has since entirely  disappeared, along with his Blogs,  and this was probably never his name anyway.   But I shall always be grateful to him for introducing me to the concept of Marga.  So..............from the 2011 Blog post below, "footprints in the Mythic sand."  

May, 2011

The "Blog sphere" has been a continuing source of information and inspiration - recently I received a fascinating correspondence from Robur D'Amour  who introduced me to the concept of  Marga.  This  is a term I've not run across before, but it resonates  for me, another viewpoint  of what  I've fancifully called "conversations with the universe".  Robur  kindly gave me permission to quote some of his insights:

"'Marga' is a term that means following a path of signs or symbols that lead a person to their spiritual self. Marga is a bit like finding one's way through a labyrinth by reading signs that are given to you along the way by the unconscious."

Carl Jung believed that what mattered most in life was to find his spiritual identity. He felt that a person could best achieve this by  leading what he termed a 'symbolic life'. Jung wrote:

“when people feel they are living the symbolic life the see themselves as  actors in the divine drama.......That gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A career, producing of children, are all maya (illusion) compared to that one thing, that your life is meaningful.”

I do not agree with Jung that a career, the producing of children, and all of the travails and joys and conflicts , the "banalities" of being human,  are so easily dismissed as unimportant.  Perhaps it was easier to see it so if one was a wealthy and respected man with a wife and servants to attend to those annoying tasks.......but I do agree with him that a symbolic life, a symbolic or, as Carolyn Myss*** termed it,  an "archetypal path",  can be profoundly meaningful.

Mythologist Joseph Campbell, who was a great admirer of Jung,  referred to this "archetypal path"  as  'marga'.  It is a way of living, a way of proceeding  without following any particular creed other than paying attention to what is presented to you by the Divine within your own system of symbols, however that may appear to you.  In The Hero's Journey (p45) Campbell writes:

"Adolf Bastian, a German anthropologist, has meant a great deal to me with just this main idea. The common themes that come out of the collective unconscious he calls elementary ideas.... In India the elementary ideas are called 'marga', (meaning)  the path. Marga is from a root word 'mrg', which refers to the footprints left by an animal, and thus  you follow that animal. The animal you are trying to follow is your own spiritual self. And the path is indicated  by mythological images.

Follow the tracks of the animal and you will be led to the animal's home. Who is the animal? The animal is the human spirit. So, following these elementary ideas, you are led to your own deepest spiritual source." *

 In practical terms, this means paying attention to what we see in the world around ourselves, to the synchronicities that occur, and to symbolic and meaningful "signs" that are presented to us -  in dreams,  and within the things we come across in our daily lives. The symbols - the "footprints"  we see are presented to  us by Fate, the Goddess, God, the unconscious,  the Muse...........or whatever name you like to give to the source that we cannot see, yet what determines 'what happens next'.  I just call it the Mystery.  

Campbell described it as following Marga as a way to find one's own myth:

“…the way to find your own myth is to find those traditional symbols that speak to you, to use them, you might say, as bases for meditation. …Let the symbols play upon the imagination, act upon the imagination, and bring your own imagination into play in relation to these [symbols] and then you will be experiencing the marga or the power of these symbols to open things up for you” (Campbell, 2011)****

Following the links in a trail of symbols that are presented to us by the unconscious, amounts to finding one's way through a labyrinth.  Labyrinths and mazes were, by the way,  common features in Elizabethan gardens, and the U.K. has many elaborate mazes still preserved, mazes that are wonderful metaphors for that "path of symbols" Jung wrote about.  As Robur wrote in his coorespondence with me back in 2010, 

"The marga (path of symbols) that I seem to have been unwittingly following is a very curious one.  I originally seemed to connect the word marga with Megara.  Megara was popularised as the heroine in the Disney version of Hercules. It's 'only' a film for children, but it does, to some extent, bring the archetypes to life. Megara is a very vivid anima archetype."

I personally was somewhat amazed, speaking of my own "Marga", to read his further comment that:

"Megara was originally a Greek word for a fissure in the ground used

for sacred rites connected with beliefs about the underworld (the unconscious)

and Persephone-Hecate." 

 

 In 1993 I began a novel, the only novel I've ever written, called The Song of Medusa.  I  wrote it with artist Duncan Eagleson, and it was inspired by the writings of  Riane Eisler**.  It was based on the idea of an ancient shamanic priestess of an old-European, Earth Goddess culture. The priestess was called a "Singer", and she entered altered states of consciousness and prophesy by going into fissures or caves in the earth.  This was called being "given to the Serpent".  The Serpent arose, for me, from the importance of the Serpent or Dragon as a symbol for the telluric  energies of the Earth, as a universal symbol of the renewal of life, and also for the early Earth Goddess.  The novel was about the conflict that happened as this long lived priestess experienced her world shattered by the invasions of warlike, Indo-European tribes. As the little novel evolved, somehow, and surprising indeed to me, my own version of the myth of Persephone (I called her "Persepha") also evolved within the story, so much so that it became the novel's secondary theme. 

I have recently (in 2018) had fun looking back at this little novel, and I illustrated it.  I still like it, although I see it as rather naive now, a project that could have been more evolved but was not.  

But interestingly, there are several things I did not know in the winter of 1993 when I began writing about my "Singers", loosely based on readings I had done about native American shamanic practices.  One was that the Oracle of Delphi (called the Pythoness) supposedly became intoxicated or achieved an altered state of consciousness by breathing in fumes from cracks or fissures in the earth (possibly volcanic?).   In this state she prophesized or answered questions asked of her by petitioners,  being perceived as possessed by the God. 

Delphi was dedicated to the God Apollo in classical Greece, but earlier, probably extending in to pre-historical cultures even before the arrival of the Greeks, it was  dedicated to Gaia, the First Mother or original Earth Mother.  One can see in this "transfer of ownership" of a sacred Earth Mysteries site from a Goddess to a God the evolution of patriarchal co-option as well.  

As a further footnote to this wonderful "linkage" that can occur:  not long after re-posting this Blog post about Marga in May of 2016 to illustrate a synchronicity I had experienced, I happened to read an article in Feminism and Religion (I posted the link below on my Blog  May 10th of 2016):

Dance of Persephone: The Trata of Megara by Laura Shannon 

So here I am, in 2021, re-posting and pondering again,  looking for those footprints. 

All I can say is,  "Bingo!"

Learning about "MARGA" and "MEGARA" was thus a revelation for me, a reminder that creativity can be truly magical. It seems, once again, that in the course of opening to the creative process, we do indeed open to the collective mind, and access information from that very mysterious place.

*From "The Marga Path", from The Hero's Journey Blog

**  Eisler, Riane, The Chalice and the Blade  (1987)

***Myss, Carolyn  on Archetypes

“All truths wait in all things,

they neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,

they do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon to be born

the insignificant is as big to me as any

(what is more or less than a touch?)

I believe a leaf of grass is no less

than the journey work of the stars.”

.......Walt Whitman