The genius of the story of Tristan and Iseult is that it tells us exactly what is. It shows us in amazing detail what has happened to us as a culture and as individuals. Like a faithful mirror, it reflects back to us our attitudes and our behavior and it shows the psychological forces at work in us.
But the myth leaves us, in a sense, in a quandary. It tells us what is, but it doesn’t tell us what to do about it.
Just as myth enables us to see ourselves as we are, so myth and dream will often give us the prescription for the problem. We will now look at two other mythical statements that seem to offer us a solution to our dilemma.
The first is a myth of the Oglala Sioux nation, recounted by the great medicine man Black Elk—the story of the White Bison Spirit Woman. This is the story of how a divine woman brought the first sacred medicine pipe to the Oglala people.
A very long time ago, they say, two scouts were out looking for bison; when they came to the top of a high hill and looked north, they saw something coming a long way off, and when it came closer they cried out, “It is a woman!” and it was. Then one of the scouts, being foolish, had bad thoughts and spoke them; but the other said: “That is a sacred woman; throw all bad thoughts away.”
When she came still closer, they saw that she wore a fine white buckskin dress, that her hair was very long and that she was young and very beautiful. And she knew their thoughts and said in a voice that was like singing: “You do not know me, but if you want to do as you think, you may come.” And the foolish one went; but just as he stood before her, there was a white cloud that came and covered them. And the beautiful young woman came out of the cloud, and when it blew away the foolish man was a skeleton covered with worms.
Then the woman spoke to the one who was not foolish: “You shall go home and tell your people that I am coming and that a big tepee shall be built for me in the center of the nation.” And the man, who was very much afraid, went quickly and told the people, who did at once as they were told; and there around the big tepee they waited for the sacred woman. And after a while she came, very beautiful and singing, and as she went into the tepee this is what she sang:
With visible breath I am walking.
A voice I am sending as I walk.
In a sacred manner I am walking.
With visible tracks I am walking.
In a sacred manner I walk.
And as she sang, there came from her mouth a white cloud that was good to smell. Then she gave something to the chief, and it was a pipe with a bison calf carved on one side to mean the earth that bears and feeds us, and with twelve eagle feathers hanging from the stem to mean the sky and the twelve moons, and these were tied with a grass that never breaks. “Behold!” she said. “With this you shall multiply and be a good nation. Nothing but good shall come from it. Only the hands of the good shall take care of it and the bad shall not even see it.” Then she sang again and went out of the tepee; and as the people watched her going, suddenly it was a white bison galloping away and snorting, and soon it was gone.
This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true. (Black Elk, in Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks)
Here, in mythical language, we have the essence of what we have been trying to say. Here, in the contrast between a wise scout and a foolish scout, we see the two approaches that man may take to anima, and the results that flow from each way. We cannot avoid her, for she comes to us as we stand on the hunting grounds, going about our ordinary life, little expecting a visitor from the “other world.” But how we treat her makes the difference between blessedness and destruction.
Anima is a sacred woman. Our willingness, or unwillingness, to treat her as a sacred being is what makes the difference. This inner feminine that we project is “Spirit Woman,” like unto White Bison Woman, a being of the other world. If we are like the wise scout, we say: “That is a sacred woman; throw away all bad thoughts!” And when we treat her as a sacred being, then she brings the medicine pipe, she brings the sky and the twelve moons, she brings us our means of knowing the other world.
If we are like the foolish scout, if we try to make her into a physical being by projecting her onto an external person, then we lose her sacredness. We lose the chance to receive her gift. The terrible thing about anima is that she lets us approach her as we will—foolishly, or wisely. She says: “You do not know me, but if you want to do as you think, you may come.” But the price is terrible! The price for failing to treat her as a sacred being, as a spirit creature of the inner world, is not only the loss of the other world but the destruction of human life while we live it. This is the meaning of this worm-eaten skeleton of the foolish scout lying in the dirt at her feet.
When we approach anima as a divine presence in the inner world, what blessings she bestows! The gift she brings is the sacred world, the restoration of the sacred in our lives.
So much of our lives is spent in a longing and a search—for what, we do not know. So many of our ostensible “goals,” so many of the things we think we want, turn out to be the masks behind which our real desires hide; they are symbols for the actual values and qualities for which we hunger. They are not reducible to physical or material things, not even to a physical person; they are psychological qualities: love, truth, honesty, loyalty, purpose—something we can feel is noble, precious, and worthy of our devotion. We try to reduce all this to something physical—a house, a car, a better job, or a human being—but it doesn’t work. Without realizing it, we are searching for the Sacred. And the sacred is not reducible to anything else.
Sacredness is, in a sense, a feeling—but a feeling that goes to the very heart of life. It is the feeling of recognition directed toward what is great and high enough to give our small lives meaning, to put our personal journeys in a greater perspective. It is the feeling of reverence. What we call the sacred is ultimately a universe of meaning against which we measure our personal efforts, our personal lives, to see whether they, too, have meaning.
For the male psyche, the discovery of the sacred, the communion with the sacred, is always through the inner feminine. It is White Bison Woman who brings the sacredness in life, the vision of the sky and the twelve moons.
With visible breath I am walking.
A voice I am sending as I walk.
In a sacred manner I am walking.
With visible tracks I am walking.
In a sacred manner I walk.
Like a river of being in which all the streams of inner life run together, all the values that we feel instinctively as “sacred” converge in the image of anima and are made conscious in us through her. She is, as Jung said: “the matrix of all the divine and semi-divine figures, from the pagan goddess to the virgin, from the messenger of the Holy Grail to the saint.”
We seem never to go searching directly or consciously for the sacred side of life. Like the two scouts, we wander in our old hunting grounds, seeking only the habitual and the known. Suddenly we are confronted with an unknown part of ourselves. She comes walking a long way off, arrayed in white buckskin; and when she speaks, it is a voice like singing. At first we are confused: She bears the image of woman, and we want to believe that we can relate to her as to a woman. It is hard to believe that she is not physical woman, but a metaphysical force so powerful that we dare not try to touch her physically.
This is the fact that the sacred presents to us: This is how the sacred becomes one “person” and speaks to us with a single voice. This is anima.
Otherwise we would feel the sacred only vaguely as the “other side of life,” the “other side of myself,” that we have never touched, never known. It manifests as dreams of adventures we long for, triumphs we can almost taste, luminous men and women we meet walking in the corridors and fabled kingdoms of our minds. Without reasoning, without thinking, our feelings pull us toward the other side of ourselves, where every image vibrates with the promise of an extraordinary meaning, experience, or sense of wholeness.
All this converges and focuses in one inner being; White Bison Woman comes to the two scours as a stranger from a larger world outside the ego’s vision, the ego’s opinions or notions of “reality.” Her reality is so much larger, so filled with potential for enlarging our lives and for giving them meaning, that the unconscious says to us: “This is sacred; this is what you must treat as sacred.”
White Bison Woman sings: “With visible breath I am walking. A voice I am sending as I walk.”
Breath is the age-old symbol of life and spirit. For ancient people breath was the very substance of God, breathed into our nostrils by our creator, a spark of the divine energy lent to mortal flesh for a handsbreadth of time on this earth: the breath of life. As White Bison Woman walks with “visible” breath, she makes what we call the “spiritual” side of life visible, manifest. She makes the invisible, visible.
When we treat White Bison Woman as our soul, she has the power to make the “sacred” into an immediate, direct, conscious, experience. “With visible tracks I am walking,” she says. She is not physical; she is Psyche, Pneuma, Light-as-wind, yet her tracks may be seen. She has substance; she is the power that gives the sacred world the substance of symbol. She takes it off the level of the theoretical, the abstract, the sentimental, the figure-of-speech. She renders the sacred accessible in the here-and-now: touched, felt, and experienced as though it were physical. The spirit world is made immediate and palpable through symbolic experience.
Thus, she has the power to give us psychological faith:
…The faith arising from the psyche which shows as faith in the reality of the soul. Since psyche is primarily image and image always psyche, this faith manifests itself in the belief in images…. Psychological faith begins in the love of images, and it flows mainly through the shapes of persons in reveries, fantasies, reflections and imaginations. Their increasing vivification gives one an increasing conviction of having, and then of being, an interior reality of deep significance transcending one’s personal life.
Psychological faith is reflected in an ego that gives credit to images and turns to them in its darkness. (Hillman, Revisioning Psychology)
We may come to see that psychological faith and spiritual faith intersect at the deepest level, for the early Christians knew that “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen”—and we find that it is in the numinous symbols, flowing through the soul to the conscious mind, that we apperceive the substance of what we hope, the substance of what we dream, the substance of what lives within us beyond the limits of this physical sphere.
It is anima—White Bison Woman—who brings to the conscious mind the evidence of realities not seen in the physical world. We seek the spirit realm in romantic love, we seek it in sex, we seek it in physical possessions and drugs and physical people; but it is not there. It is only revealed through the soul.
The medicine pipe is the power to contact the “other world.” This power consists in the conscious use of symbolism, for it is by symbolic experience that we breathe in the gods of the archetypal worlds like smoke from the sacred pipe.
By the twelve eagle feathers, representing the sky and the twelve moons, we receive the power to know the totality of life, a vision which merges spirit and matter, sacredness and ordinariness. Twelve is the number that symbolically combines the three and the four. We have spoken of three and four earlier: Three symbolizes the ordered, limited, finite life of the physical world and practical, daily existence. Four symbolizes the infinite realm of the soul where one is lifted into a vision of the limitless archetypal realm and the wholeness of the cosmos. Twelve combines these two sides of human nature in a synthesis. Twelve combines heaven and earth, the “other world” with the ordinary world, the spiritual life with the physical life. This is the symbolism of the twelve disciples who surround Christ in a perfect circle in the Christian mandala, the twelve moons of the solar year, and the twelve signs of the zodiac that mark off the revolving ages of the galactic universe.
On the other side of the medicine pipe is carved a bison calf, telling us that the earth, and our earthly human life, is also drawn into this synthesis with the sacred when we approach the Lady wisely.
Perhaps the deepest lesson we learn from the wise scout is this: The quality of sacredness consists not only in what is there in the inner world, but also in the attitude we take toward it. It is made up not only of what is, but also of what one does with it. It is up to us to recognize it, to treat it as the sacred, in order to experience its power. The great power of White Bison Woman is manifested to the people only because the wise scout sees that she is sacred and gives her the respect that is her due.
For anima to bestow her gifts she depends on someone, an individual human ego, who will open his eyes and acknowledge her sacredness. If the wise scout had followed the path of the foolish man, there would be two skeletons lying in the dust, not one. The “other world” would still not be revealed to the nation; no great tepee would stand in the midst of the people; there would be no medicine pipe with which to call the Thunder Nation and seek its help.
Psychologically, the quality of sacredness consists in a double flow of energy: It is partly the revelation of the inner world to my ego, and it is partly my ego’s reverence toward the inner world of archetypes. Only when my ego has a capacity for reverence, only when respect and awe flow from me, can anything be “sacred” for me.
Here is a strange and wonderful fact, which shows why people have always believed that the evolution of the cosmos is a partnership between God and humankind: The sacred is always there, closer to us than any physical person could be, but it takes on the power to fill our lives with meaning and quality only when we open our eyes and bow down in awe. This is one of the great mysteries: It is our consciousness, our act of recognition, that has the power to make things into what they are, and to make the sacred, sacred.
Most of us are more like the foolish scout: Our irreverent culture teaches us from childhood that nothing is holy, that nothing deserves our reverence, that everything in life can be reduced to either physical possession or a sex act. The wise scout knows he is confronted with something that is outside his experience, something he can’t deal with by the ego’s usual “bag of tricks.” He senses her sacredness and he waits on her with reverence. He warns the foolish scout: “That is a sacred woman; throw all bad thoughts away.”
What does the wise man mean when he says: “Throw all bad thoughts away?” What makes them “bad”? It is not because they are sexual thoughts. The American Indians, unlike us, did not have a tradition of puritanism; they did not denigrate the physical and the sexual. The problem is more subtle: The foolish scout is trying to find in the sexual side of life what can’t be located there. He is trying to turn Spirit Woman into a physical being, trying to experience her through physical contact. In psychological terms, he is trying to make her physical by projecting her onto an external woman. The results are devastating: Instead of the benevolent Bison Goddess, he meets Kali, Goddess of Death, and she leaves his fleshless bones in the dust.
If there is such a thing as psychological blasphemy, it is to take what is sacred and try to convert it to something else; it is to try to make the sacred into grist for the ego’s mill. Psychological sin does not consist in sex nor in being physical nor in “immorality” but rather in calling a thing other than what it really is, treating it as something other than what it is, pretending to do one thing while doing another. This is the sin against consciousness, the refusal to take life consciously. The foolish scout’s thoughts are “bad” because he is confronted with what is spiritual, sacred, and transpersonal, and he wants to treat it as though it were physical, sexual, and personal. He wants to reduce White Bison Woman to an appendage of his ego world.
She instructs us: “You shall go home and tell your people that I am coming, and that a big tepee shall be built for me in the center of the nation.”
To build her tepee in the midst of the nation means to make a place for anima, and a place for the sacred, in the very center of my life. It means to devote time and energy to experiencing my psyche, to exploring my own unconscious, to discovering who I am and what I am when I am not just this ego. The first thing required for a Western man is to acknowledge that the sacred world exists. He has to be willing to consider that behind his fantasy of the “perfect” woman, the “perfect” way of life, the “perfect” relationship, he is looking for something that is outside this world of phenomena: He is looking for the sacred. He has to spend time and energy learning to experience these energies, which manifest in symbol and fantasy, as inner realities, as inner parts of himself. This is what it means to take White Bison Woman as she is, as Spirit Woman, and to prepare for her a place at the center of the nation.
She comes walking with visible breath, with visible tracks, walking in a sacred manner. She will come to us if we prepare a sacred dwelling for her, if we will open our eyes and see her as she is. But her true dwelling is composed of the stuff of our own attitudes toward her, of our sense of reverence. The place we prepare is a place within; if she will dwell with us at all, it must be there.