Myth, rituals and symbols all play an essential part in Wiccan practice — particularly in its religious aspect, though the Craft aspect (operative witchcraft) also is concerned with the last two at least, since every spell is in effect the ritual manipulation of symbols.
Every religion, of course, is deeply involved in all three, though with various degrees of awareness. Some religions try to cram myth into the straitjacket of factual history — such as those fundamentalist Christians who insist that every word in the Bible is literally true, from the Garden of Eden onwards. This approach not only seriously devalues one of the richest anthologies of myth and symbolism that we possess; it also lands theologians in some absurd red-herring controversies. (Did Adam and Eve have navels? How did all the animals get into the Ark? — and so on.) Some debase ritual into a rigid pattern of orthodoxy which completely loses sight of its inner meaning, while others react against this by minimizing ritual to a point where meaning is also lost. Some have lost all sight of the psychological role of symbols, merely categorizing them into ‘ours’ (and therefore holy) and ‘theirs’ (and therefore devilish), and failing to grasp that a symbol may have different meanings in different contexts.
Every religion, of course, includes individuals who have a genuine understanding of myth, ritual and symbolism, and who are able to use them creatively within the framework of their own faith. But all too often, if they try to express this understanding to others, they are looked at askance as probable heretics by their co-religionists whose ‘faith’ is a rigid structure of conditioned reflexes.
Wicca, on the other hand, tries to achieve such an understanding deliberately and to develop it among its members. In other words, to understand and be honest about the psychological and psychic functions of myth, ritual and symbolism, and to make use of them in full awareness, according to the needs and the uniqueness of each individual. This is much easier for a non-hierarchical, non-authoritarian religion such as Wicca, which not only can afford to be flexible but actually values flexibility.
Let us try to define each of these three in turn.
‘Myth is the facts of the mind made manifest in a fiction of matter.’ (Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen,). Or more specifically: ‘Myths could be defined as extended symbols describing vividly the typical patterns and sequences of the forces of life, at work in the Cosmos, in Society, and in the individual … Because every myth has arisen straight out of the human psyche, each one is full of wisdom and understanding about the nature and structure of the psyche itself. Mythology is dramatised psychology.’ (Tom Chetwynd, A Dictionary of Symbols,)
Now the purpose of Wicca, as a religion, is to integrate conflicting aspects of the human psyche with each other, and the whole with the Cosmic Psyche; and as a Craft, to develop the power and self-knowledge of the individual psyche (and in a coven, the co-operating group of individual psyches) so that it can achieve results which are beyond the scope of an undeveloped, un-self-aware psyche — much as an athlete develops, and learns about, his muscular power and control to achieve feats impossible for the non-athlete.
Myths (and their folklore descendants, fairy-tales) owe their durability, and their powerful effects on men’s minds, to the fact that they dramatize psychic truths which the unconscious mind recognizes at once, even while the conscious mind may think that it is merely being entertained by a well-told story. Both levels of the mind are satisfied at the same time, and the knowledge of this fact filters through to the conscious mind in the form of a strangely enhanced sense of pleasure. Merely entertaining fiction, however good, soon dies. Where the work of a story-teller of genius does embody fundamental psychic truths, it survives either (in pre-literate days) by being absorbed into the body of myth and perhaps altering its form though not its content, or (in later times with such story-tellers as Shakespeare or Goethe) by becoming enshrined in a category of its own, midway between acknowledged myth and acknowledged fiction. Hamlet, The Tempest and Faust, for all their Renaissance or Age-of-Enlightenment sophistication, are fundamentally pure myths, which is what ensures their immortality.
We have spoken of the integration of conflicting aspects of the human psyche. This is the basis of all character development. It is certainly an essential and continuing process for every would-be witch — not only to achieve happiness and balance as a human being but to release and channel those potentially limitless psychic powers which a witch hopes to put to work.
Every witch would be well advised to study the works of Carl Gustav Jung, the great Swiss psychologist who built on the thinking of Freud and transcended it. Jung’s ideas strike an immediate chord with almost every witch who turns serious attention to them. (A useful brief summary of them, with a foreword by Jung himself, is Jolande Jacobi’s the Psychology of C.G. Jung.) His concepts of the Ego, the Shadow (everything in the psyche apart from the conscious Ego), the Anima (a man’s buried feminine side), the Animus (a woman’s buried masculine side), the Personal Unconscious, the Collective Unconscious, the Persona (the ‘cloak around the Ego'), the four functions of Thinking, Intuition, Feeling and Sensation (which in any one individual can be divided into dominant and inferior), the attitude types of Extraversion and Introversion, and the Self ('the centre and ultimate foundation of our psychic being') — all these seem to us indispensable to a creative understanding of ourselves and other people. And on a wider scale, his concept of the Collective Unconscious offers a key to the understanding of telepathy and clairvoyance, and that of Synchronicity (or ‘meaningful coincidence') does the same for divination and magic in general.
The central idea to grasp for our present discussion is that the greater part of the psyche is unconscious, out of reach of our conscious Ego, but strongly influencing the Ego’s behaviour without our realizing it. The Unconscious is primordial — which does not mean that it is inferior or that we should have outgrown it. On the contrary, it is in more direct touch with the fabric of the Cosmos than is the Ego, and it often knows better what are our real needs. It is also part of the Collective Unconscious — an individual outcrop of it, so to speak — so that it is essentially telepathic with other ‘individual outcrops', and has an awareness of overall situations beyond the immediate reach of the Ego, in a way that seems to the Ego almost supernaturally clairvoyant.
The Ego, on the other hand, possesses gifts which the Unconscious lacks: the ability to analyse and categorize incoming data, to think by logical steps and to communicate with other Egos by the precise and subtle medium of speech.
The two sets of gifts are complementary, and so Ego and Unconscious need each other, both for everyday living and for the ultimate liberation of the essential, integrated Self. But very few of us have reached the stage where the two work smoothly together.
When communication between the two departments is faulty (as it is to a greater or lesser degree in all of us but the highest adepts), conflicts emerge. Ego and Unconscious striving in opposite directions can give rise (in ascending order of seriousness) to tension, neurosis, psychosis and schizophrenic breakdown. When the Ego issues impossible orders to the Unconscious, conflicts can arise within the Unconscious itself — in the form of Complexes, autonomous centres which act almost like independent entities; and these, in turn, cause disturbances in the functioning of the Ego. Equally, unacceptable urges from the Unconscious may be pushed back by the Ego below the threshold of consciousness, where they fester and eventually erupt in one way or another.
What is needed, obviously, is greatly improved communication between the conscious Ego and the Unconscious. The Ego must develop techniques, first for being aware of the fact that the Unconscious has messages for it, and second for interpreting those messages, which the Unconscious can only express in symbols. The Unconscious is only too eager to communicate. It is an old joke that Freudian patients have Freudian dreams, Jungian patients have Jungian dreams, and Adlerian patients have Adlerian dreams. In fact it is no joke, but proof that, if the Unconscious is presented with a workable code of symbols which the Ego is learning to understand, it will willingly seize on that code to get its messages across.
This improved communication between Unconscious and Ego is a great part of what is meant by ‘opening up the levels’ or ‘expanding consciousness’. The whole content of the Unconscious can never (at least at our present stage of evolution) be made directly available to the Ego; but a great deal of it can, certainly enough to remove all major conflicts and to enrich significantly the Ego’s range of effectiveness — both by increasing the amount and variety of incoming data on which it can act, and by teaching it the lesson (which many Egos resist violently) that it is not the only, or even the most important, function of the total psyche. The more the Ego learns this lesson, and acts on it, the closer it comes to activating the central Self and handing over control to it.
Recording your dreams, and learning to interpret them, is one technique for becoming aware of what your Unconscious is trying to tell your Ego. Another is the study of myths, and their enactment.
Because myths, as we have seen, embody universal psychic truths and dramatize them in a way that appeals to the imagination they not only give the Ego a healthier understanding of those truths (even if only subconsciously) — they also open up channels for the Unconscious to transmit the subtler and more personal truths, and put the Ego in a suitable frame of mind to absorb them. This, too, may be subconscious; you may go away from enjoying hearing or enacting a myth, and then act more appropriately in the everyday world — thinking (or not even bothering to think) that it is by the Ego’s conscious decision, whereas in fact it is because both the myth’s universal message and the personal messages which have flowed along the channels which the myth has opened up, have influenced the criteria on which the Ego acts.
Many myths and fairy-stories dramatize this integration process itself — the confrontation by the hero of the apparent perils of the Unconscious, and the transforming of his relationship with them. For example, the ugly hag who turns into a beautiful princess when the hero persists in his ordained quest. Here, the Ego comes to terms with his Anima, which if unrecognized or rejected will be a source of conflict. The hero’s reward is that he marries (i.e., integration with) the princess and becomes heir to her father’s kingdom (i.e., to the Ego’s ultimate destiny, the reign of the undivided Self). And so on.1 In one sense, the witches’ Legend of the Descent of the Goddess can be seen as the story of a woman’s confrontation with her Animus; in this process, initial revulsion is transformed into understanding and integration, from which both emerge enriched.
This brings us naturally to a consideration of the function of ritual.
To quote Tom Chetwynd again: ‘Ritual is the dramatic enactment of myth, designed to make a sufficiently deep impression on the individual to reach his unconscious.’ (A Dictionary of Symbols,)
This may seem, at first glance, to be rather a narrow definition of ritual; but if we think about it, it remains true of all ritual. The ritual of the Mass is an enactment of the myth of Jesus’ symbolic action with the bread and the wine. Whether the Last Supper was an actual historical event or not, or even if there was no historical Jesus at all (as some people rather improbably maintain), does not effect the point. A powerful myth may be an historical fiction expressing a psychic truth — or a psychically significant act in real history may become the seed of a subsequent myth, or of a new version of an old one (just as the powerful myths of Hamlet and Faust had historically existing authors). Even simple ‘superstitious’ rituals can be myth-based; for example, does not turning over your money when you see the new Moon through glass (i.e., from inside your home) relate to myths in which the Moon symbolizes the Mother Goddess whose waxing encourages fertility (and thus domestic prosperity)?
Pursuing the myth-origins of a ritual can be interesting, even enlightening; but success or failure in tracking them down does not alter the validity of the definition. A ritual is an enacted psychic truth; a myth is a spoken or written psychic truth; so both are of the same nature — just as the same story can be told in a novel or a film, or in one based on the other.
In fact, a myth can originate in a ritual as well as vice versa. As Chetwynd points out: ‘Communal myths were the ritual words of the great cultic festivals of the ancient world, and the typical features of mythology gave symbolic form to man’s life, his longings, his needs.’ (A Dictionary of Symbols,)
Ritual, then, performs the same psychic function as myth, but with the added impact on the individual of personal participation. Hearing or reading a myth can have a powerful effect; taking part in it yourself, by enacting one of its roles, can be even more powerful.
Take the example of the Legend of the Descent of the Goddess again. The woman witch who enacts the role of the Goddess visiting the Underworld goes through all the process; her Ego is stripped of its Persona, her comforting but inadequate image of herself; naked she confronts the Lord of the Underworld (her own Animus) and accuses him of being destructive; as long as she persists in regarding him as an enemy, she has to suffer at his hands; but because she does not run away from the confrontation, enlightenment dawns, and she understands his true function. ‘They loved, and were one.’ Integration achieved, they learn from each other, and the Ego returns to the everyday world wiser and more effective, the supposed enemy, the Animus, having been transformed into an ally.
But the Legend has more than one meaning, and the man who enacts the Lord of the Underworld benefits, too. His Anima makes her presence felt, and at first he tries to dodge the issue by simply appealing to her to be nice to him (Oedipus-like, begging his Anima to identify with his mother?). She will not let him get away with this; she replies, ‘I love thee not’ — until he continues with the painful part of the confrontation. Wisely, he does not attack her; he ‘scourges her tenderly’ — in other words, he goes on probing to discover what their true relationship should be. His Anima meets him halfway, in spite of the pains of the attempt at integration: ‘I know the pangs of love.’ Now they begin the constructive interchange which enriches them both.
Each of these lessons concerns the individual psyche of the person who plays the role. But there is an interpersonal lesson, too; each is reminded vividly that the polarity of male and female aspects is the most powerful of all psychic ‘batteries’.
Now all these lessons, if they were merely set down in a psychological treatise, would appeal to the conscious Ego alone. If the Ego were convinced, it would then have the task of finding out how to apply them in co-operation with the Unconscious. But when they are enacted in dramatic form, they appeal directly to the Unconscious — and if the actor has grasped the significance of what he or she is doing, to the conscious Ego as well. The task of applying the lessons in practice is thus made very much simpler.
In dreams, the necessary communication between Unconscious and Ego is initiated by the Unconscious. In ritual, it is initiated by the Ego. So do dream and ritual complement each other.
Myth, ritual and dreams all speak in symbols. All three may use words, but symbols are their real vocabulary. The words of myth may describe factually impossible events or creatures; the words of ritual may seem paradoxical; and the words of dreams may be surrealist and apparently unrelated to the action. Yet in each case, the symbols involved speak the truth.
A symbol is the embodiment of a concept, distilled and condensed and stripped of its inessentials. It may be of many kinds. It may be a physical artefact (or its pictorial representation), such as a Calvary cross, an ankh, a pentagram or a national flag. It may be an imaginary creature, such as a mermaid or a centaur. Overlapping with the last, it may be a visual image giving graspable form to a non-physical entity, such as a human-bodied angel with wings or a Horned God. It may be a natural object in our environment whose behaviour evokes the concept it has come to symbolize, such as the Sun as a fertilizing and light-giving God and the Moon as a many-aspected Goddess who illumines the dark side of the psyche; or as the lotus, which symbolizes the integrated psyche by having its roots in the dark mud and its blossom in the bright air. It may be a piece of music, such as a national anthem or a revolutionary song. It may even be a living person, by the process known as ‘projection’ — either communally, as when a community projects its sense of national identity onto a sovereign or its sense of mission onto a charismatic leader, or individually, as when you project your own self-contempt onto an acquaintance and treat him accordingly with irrational dislike, or when a husband projects his Anima onto his wife (or a wife her Animus onto her husband) and so treats the partner unrealistically. It may be a colour, such as red for blood, danger or life, or black for death, the Unconscious, malicious magic or civil rights in America (colour is perhaps the supreme example of how symbols can be ambivalent, their meaning changing according to context). It may be a simple device like an exclamation mark or a dollar sign, which started off merely as a convenient bit of humanly devised shorthand, but which through long use became ‘numinous’ — i.e., charged with emotional significance, which is what distinguishes a symbol from a mere sign. It may be a number; in Christian thinking, 3 represents pure abstract spirit, while in all cultures 4 represents psychic wholeness, pure spirit enhanced and fulfilled by manifestation; and significantly, odd numbers appear repeatedly as masculine symbols, and even ones as feminine.
All these, and many more, are symbols — some obvious to the conscious Ego, and some more subtle and hard to interpret; and myth, ritual and dreams, by dramatizing their interaction, can present complex and vitally important messages.
The most powerful symbols of all are those which stand for the Archetypes — another Jungian word. At first Jung called them ‘primordial images’ or ‘dominants of the collective unconscious', but later he adopted the Greek word ảρχετυπίαι (arkhetupiai), equivalent of St Augustine’s Latin ideae principales or ‘principal ideas’. As St Augustine put it in his Liber de Diversis Quaestionibus: ‘For the principal ideas are certain forms, or stable and unchangeable reasons of things, themselves not formed, and so continuing eternal and always after the same manner, which are contained in the divine understanding. And although they themselves do not perish, yet after their pattern everything is said to be formed that is able to come into being and to perish, and everything that does come into being and perish. But it is affirmed that the soul is not able to behold them, save it be the rational soul.’ (Alan Glover’s translation.)
The Archetypes are elements of the Collective Unconscious — which is that part of the psyche which is universal to all periods and cultures, and common to all individuals. We inherit it from the human race as a whole, and not modified through the filter of our parents. The symbols by which we become aware of the Archetypes may be culturally or individually conditioned to a certain extent, but the Archetypes themselves are not; they ‘continue eternal and always after the same manner’. As Jung says, the term Archetype ‘is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of psychic functioning, corresponding to that inborn way according to which the chick emerges from the egg; the bird builds its nest; a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar; and eels find their way to the Bahamas. In other words, it is a “pattern of behaviour". This aspect of the archetype is the biological one — it is the concern of scientific psychology. But the picture changes at once when looked at from the inside, that is from within the realm of the subjective psyche. Here the archetype presents itself as numinous, that is, it appears as an experience of fundamental importance. Whenever it clothes itself with adequate symbols, which is not always the case, it takes hold of the individual in a startling way, creating a condition of “being deeply moved” the consequences of which may be immeasurable.2 It is for this reason that the archetype is so important for the psychology of religion.
All religions and all metaphysical concepts rest upon archetypal foundations and, to the extent that we are able to explore them, we succeed in gaining at least a superficial glance behind the scenes of world history, and can lift a little the veil of mystery which hides the meaning of metaphysical ideas.’ (Jung’s Introduction to Esther Harding’s Woman’s Mysteries, pp. ix-x.)
A good idea of Jung’s thinking on Archetypes may be gained from his book Four Archetypes — Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster. As will be seen from this title, many Archetypes can usefully be given name-labels. And to take just one of these Archetypes, the Mother: you can get a conception of how vast and complex are the ramifications of a single archetype by reading Harding’s Women’s Mysteries and Erich Neumann’s The Great Mother. Neither of these authors would claim to have exhausted the subject, for by its nature an Archetype can never be completely defined. It is too fundamental for that. It can only be related to consciousness by means of symbols, and even they, as Jung points out, may not always be adequate.
The Major Arcana of the Tarot owe their power, and their effectiveness in sensitive hands, to the fact that each of them is an archetypal symbol. Yet even here, the elusive nature of archetypal definition makes itself felt. To take the four examples in Jung’s Four Archetypes and try to equate them with Tarot trumps: the Mother corresponds most readily to the Empress, though aspects of her shade off into the High Priestess, the Star and others; Rebirth suggests Death, the Tower and Judgement for a start; and the Trickster is fairly obviously the Magician — but is he not the Devil as well? As an exercise, we leave you to try equating Jung’s fourth Archetype, Spirit, to a Tarot trump.
We tried an experiment ourselves. Stewart wrote the above paragraph and, without showing it to Janet, asked her for her own correspondences. She came up with: Mother, the Empress and the Star; Rebirth, the Star, Death, the Empress, the World, Judgement, the Wheel of Fortune and the Moon; Trickster, the Magician, the Moon and the Wheel of Fortune.
As you will see, our responses overlapped but differed, which does not mean that either of us was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It simply underlines the fact that, while the Archetypes themselves are unchanging, the symbols by which we approach them (or the order in which we arrange a complex of symbols) may differ according to our personal make-up, sex and experience.
Consideration of the Archetypes brings us to one of the most important problems of all: that of God-forms.
A God-form — the mental image in which a believer clothes, and through which he strives to relate to, a particular God or Goddess — is unquestionably an archetypal symbol; for equally unquestionably, Gods and Goddesses are themselves Archetypes, fundamental to the nature of the Cosmos. They are unknowable directly, like all Archetypes (‘Thou canst not see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live’ — Exodus xxxiii:20); but when they are approached through adequate and vividly experienced God-forms — in Jung’s phrase, the consequences may be immeasurable.
To the age-old question ‘Are the Gods real?’ (or as a monotheist would put it, ‘Is God real?'), the witch answers confidently ‘Yes.’ To the witch, the Divine Principle of the Cosmos is real, conscious and eternally creative, manifesting through Its creations, including ourselves. This belief is of course shared by the followers of all religions, which differ only in the God-forms (or single God-form) which they build up as a channel of communication with Its aspects. And even these various God-forms differ less than would appear at first sight. For example, the ancient Egyptian’s Isis, the witch’s Aradia and the Catholic’s Virgin Mary are all essentially man-conceived Goddess-forms relating to, and drawing their power from, the same Archetype. We say ‘man-conceived', but the building up of a God-form or Goddess-form is of course a two-way process; even a partially adequate man-conceived symbol improves communication with the unknowable Archetype, which in turn feeds back a better understanding of its nature and thus improves the adequacy of the God-form.
A non-religious psychologist would probably answer ‘No’ to the same question. He would maintain that the Archetypes, though vital to man’s psychic health, are merely elements in the human Collective Unconscious and not (in the religious sense) cosmic in nature.
We stick to our own, namely the religious, view of the Cosmos, which is to us the only one which makes ultimate sense. But from the point of view of the psychic value of myth, ritual and symbolism, the somewhat surprising answer to the question is, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Each man and woman can worry out for himself or herself whether archetypal God-forms were born in the human Collective Unconscious or took up residence there (and elsewhere) as pieds-à-terre from their cosmic home — their importance to the human psyche is beyond doubt in either case, and the techniques for coming to healthy and fruitful terms with them can be used by believers and non-believers alike.
Voltaire said: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.’ That remark can be taken as cynical; but it can also be rephrased: ‘Whether the archetypal God-forms are cosmically divine, or merely the living foundation-stones of the human psyche, we would be wise to seek intercourse with them as though they were divine.’ Myth and ritual bring about nourishing communication with the Archetypes, and because of the nature and evolution of the human psyche, the symbolism of myth and ritual — their only effective vocabulary — is basically religious. Dispensing with myth and ritual cuts us off from the Archetypes, which is a dangerous and crippling separation.
As a practical footnote — a small point on which Stewart in particular (as a professional wordmonger) feels strongly; and we find that Doreen Valiente does, too. Rituals are often couched in archaic language, full of ‘thou', ‘thee', ‘ye’ and so on. It is a matter of taste whether one uses such language or modernizes it (though for ourselves, we feel that modernization would sacrifice much of the poetry, as the New English Bible does). But if you are going to use it, try to get it right.
The rules about ‘thou', ‘thee’ etc., are simple. In the first place, they are always singular, never plural. To say ‘Ye Lords of the Watchtowers of the East, we do thank thee …’ is nonsense. (It should be ‘Ye Lords … we do thank you….')
‘Thou’ is nominative (the subject of a sentence) or vocative (the person addressed). ‘Thee’ is accusative (the object of the sentence) or follows a preposition ('to thee', ‘of thee’ etc.). If that confuses you — just remember that you use ‘thou’ in the same place where you would use ‘I’ or ‘we', and ‘thee’ where you would use ‘me’ or ‘us’. Similarly, ‘thy’ corresponds to ‘my', ‘our', and ‘thine’ to ‘mine', ‘ours’. (Though archaic usage also has the ‘mine', ‘thine’ form instead of ‘my', ‘thy’ before a vowel — for example, ‘mine adversary', ‘thine answer’.)
To make it easier, remember the first-degree challenge: ‘O thou who standest on the threshold … hast thou the courage to make the assay? For I say unto thee …’ and the acceptance: ‘I give thee a third …’
‘Ye’ and ‘you’ are used in the same ways as ‘thou’ and ‘thee’ and the sentence for remembering this is the biblical one: ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’
Which is not a bad motto for witches, at that.