SOUL AND OTHERWORLD
The most intense emotion felt by the Kikuyu of East Africa is reserved for the rich, red soil of their homeland, which nourishes them and to which they are bound by sacred ties—each family’s land has been tilled by the ancestors since time immemorial. For their neighbors, the Masai, it is the grassland that is sacred and numinous, because they are not cultivators but herders, and all their love and reverence is bound up with their cattle. For them, it is sacrilege to dig up the immense pastures of swaying grass over which they love to roam.
In death, therefore, the Kikuyu ideal is to be buried in the ancestral soil and to live a happy life in the fields of the Hereafter. The Masai on the other hand are horrified at the thought of burial. They wish only to be laid out under the stars, with a pair of sandals and a cattle stick in their hands, to be disposed of by jackals and vultures while their souls join the ancestral herders who live like stars in the heavens and drive their celestial cattle across the sky.1
The Otherworld for traditional cultures such as the Kikuyu and the Masai is like this world. I use the word “Otherworld” rather than afterlife in order to highlight the ambiguity of their post-mortem state. It is like the ambiguity that attends body and soul, or shadow, as I outlined it in my first chapter. The afterlife is a separate condition, as the soul is separable from the body. But, just as the soul also retains an identity with the body, the afterlife is also, as it were, in this world because traditional cultures believe that they already inhabit the best of all possible worlds. The idea of the Otherworld is intended to convey this ambiguity. It is like this world, only better—there is none of the pain, dearth, and drought that sometimes disfigure earthly existence. Conversely, we might imagine life for tribal peoples as already taking place in the Otherworld, so charged is their existence with richness of meaning. Even hardship, pain, and physical decay have meaning, because they signal relationship with daimons and gods, albeit an inharmonious relationship that has to be amended. The old age that so dismays us is for them the accumulation of mana, wisdom, and respect; its proximity to death brings farsightedness.
The Bantus of Southern Africa will say—much to the confusion of anthropologists—that the dead go to a great village in the earth where life is good; or to a country in the east; or to a country in the north; or they have remained in the house of the living; or they might be wandering the bush as wild animals.2 The apparent vagueness is really metaphysical subtlety: as we have seen, the location of the dead in a variety of places is a metaphor for the nonspatial nature of the Otherworld. We might say: there are many other worlds—but they are all in this one. In Greek myth the “Upper-world” of the sky god Zeus and the Underworld of Hades may seem poles apart. But Zeus and Hades are brothers. Their worlds are the same, but seen from different perspectives. Zeus sees the world from above, through the light; Hades sees it from below, through darkness. Zeus gives the world its lofty spirit; Hades, like soul, supplies life’s shading and depth.
Spirit imagines its afterlife as a world outside of time and elsewhere in space, over the hills and far away; soul imagines its Otherworld as if inside time, enfolded in every moment, and always present. This is why it is available to poetic vision, like William Blake’s when he saw “eternity in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower.”3 For W. B. Yeats we enter at death an “earth-resembling life” that is “the creation of the image-making power of the mind, plucked naked from the body”4—for the Otherworld is all shape-changing imagination. It configures itself according to the outlook we bring to bear on it. It is the landscape of the heart, the self’s true home. It may be a cottage, a castle, or a cosmos, but we are not in it, as we feel ourselves to be isolated entities inhabiting this world. Rather, it is the outward manifestation of our inner selves, as if we are our own landscape and habitation. Heavenly city or pastoral Arcadia, our Otherworld may be an ideal version of a place on Earth, not because we remember that place with love, but because the place on Earth was already a memory, a shadow, of the divine prototype. It may even be an abstract space of pure geometry rather than an Elysian Field, but, whatever it is, we will not so much live in it as wear it like a heavenly robe. Like the daimon’s identity, it will be exotic, amazing—yet strangely, deeply familiar.
“Paradise is a state of being,” wrote the poet Kathleen Raine, “in which outer and inner reality are at one, the world in harmony with imagination. All poetry tells of that vision.… And ultimately the many are sustained by those images of a lost perfection held before them by the rememberers”—a reference, this, to the poet’s power of anamnesis. “Such … is the whole and sole purpose of the arts and the justification of those who refuse to accept as our norm those unrealities the world calls real.”5
So powerful among the old European cultures was the feeling that this world is the best that—in their myths, at least—we find a reluctance to leave it. There are long and terrible lamentations in Irish mythology for the dead heroes who will no longer hear the blackbird’s song or the babbling brook, no longer ride laughing to hounds or rejoice in their strength in battle. As the shade of the Greek hero, Achilles, remarks after he is summoned back from the dead by Odysseus: “We who are parted from this world have the strongest desire to return to it again.”6
The sensuous life of the pagan heroes is wrought up to such a pitch, it seems, that deprivation of the body can only be a diminishing of life. We can all empathize with the robust heroic perspective. Death would not be death without some bitterness and regret. It is not physical death, however painful, that is bitter—it is only, after all, like slipping off the leaden diving suit we needed to breathe on Earth. Rather it is the death of the ego’s fierce attachment to life that is bitter, like the tearing off of Nessus’s shirt.
The Greek and Norse heroes feared slipping insipidly out of life. Our dream of dying peacefully in our beds was anathema to them. They were desperate to die gloriously in the heightened state of mortal combat so that they would not fade away to the condition of a shade in Hades or Hel, but be received among the heroic dead, rejoicing in the Elysian Fields or feasting in the mead halls of Valhalla.
Platonic philosophy replaced the idea of the exceptional man—the hero was precisely what the rest of us could not be—with the idea of the wise man, the philosopher, who has already left Plato’s cave while in this life. But such a state of illumination was for the few. Both hero and philosopher belonged to the elite. One of Christianity’s attractions lay in making both the hero’s sensuous Paradise and the philosopher’s enlightenment available to everyone. Its afterlife was determined by ethics. It was not the glorious hero or the enlightened philosopher who necessarily entered heaven, but the good person—or, at least, the penitent person, who took responsibility for his or her own initiation, as it were, by abnegating egoism, overcoming fear, and attaining humility and selflessness. Even in our increasingly secular times the democratic nature of the afterlife seems to have persisted, if the NDEers are to be believed; and we are all permitted to enter bliss, provided only that we realize that we must reap what we have sown.
In traditional cultures those who have gathered enough mana in life, enough personal power, like the Greek heroes, doubtless pass directly into Paradise. But for ordinary people it is usual to enter a transitional place, like a liminal, or “threshold,” zone that is analogous to the ones reported by spiritualists and NDEers, especially the medieval NDEers, whose motifs of narrow bridges and perilous fires are often found in tribal accounts of the immediate afterlife.
When the Winnebago people of Wisconsin and Nebraska die, they find themselves on a spirit road leading to the land of the dead. The first person they meet is “Grandmother,” to whom they must give a pipe and tobacco. She feeds them with rice and then breaks open their heads, taking out the brains. After this, they forget about their people and no longer worry about their relations on Earth. Instead, their dead relations appear and help them across the precarious bridge that spans a great fire raging across the Earth from one end to the other, until they are brought safely to their new village, where they live in a great lodge along with all the ancestors.
People of the Thompson River tribes in British Columbia travel, after death, along a twilit road beneath the ground. It winds down to a shallow stream they cross by means of a log. On the other side, the trail climbs to a height heaped with the clothes that, back on Earth, the living have brought. The dead put these clothes on (metaphorically, of course). Then, three guardians send back to Earth those souls whose time has not yet come. The remainder are directed to a great moundlike lodge in which they can hear talking, laughing, singing, and beating drums. When they enter the lodge, they find themselves in a wide, sweet-smelling, grassy country where it is always light and warm, and where dancers come forward to carry the newcomer on their shoulders in delight.
For the Guarayú of eastern Bolivia, the dead follow a narrow path choked with weeds, and cross two dangerous rivers: the first via the back of a ferocious alligator, the second by jumping on to a tree trunk that races between each bank. If they fall off, they are torn to pieces by palometa fish. They have to travel through a darkness lit only by the burning straw that relatives have placed in their grave. They have to shoot, but not kill, hummingbirds and pluck their feathers as a gift for the great mythical ancestor, Tamoi. They must undergo ordeals, such as negotiating a way through clashing rocks, and being tickled by a monkey without laughing, until they reach the Paradise of Tamoi—where they are washed with magical water to restore their youth, and where they live happily, just as they lived on Earth.7
These descriptions of what happens to the soul immediately after death have both similarities to, and differences from, Western accounts. There is the same period of transition between the moment of death and the entry into Paradise. But for traditional cultures this transition is explicitly initiatory—it is only the final initiation in that series of deaths and rebirths that define life. A crucial part of the transition, we notice, lies with the participation of the living, whose grave gifts of clothes, food, weapons, tobacco, and so forth are bits of equipment necessary to guarantee a safe passage. This suggests that we should not neglect funerary rites but support the dead, if not with literal grave goods, then at least with prayers, wakes, vigils, sung Masses, and the like, because the dead remain near to us for a while and seem to be helped in their passage if we remain mindful of them.
Whereas we do not know where we will find ourselves when we die, and even Christians do not agree on the topography of the afterlife, there are no surprises for tribal people. They find themselves in the Otherworld familiar to them from the tribe’s myths, a landscape kept vital and alive by the shamans who regularly travel there and back. There is no wrench from bodily life into spiritual life: because their bodily life is already “subtle,” just as the material world is transparent to the nonmaterial, they slip more easily than we do into the Otherworld. Nor is there any need for blinding light or supernatural revelation: they have already encountered the fullness of life and the sacred myths of the tribe in previous initiations. Hence their immediate afterlife is more likely to be twilit, symbolizing an in-between world, before they enter their bright Paradise.
The traditional Otherworld is highly concrete, but not literal, as our afterlife accounts tend to sound, as if we carried over our literalism with us. Yet the Otherworld of soul is not a different world from the afterlife of spirit. It is the same world but experienced in a metaphorical rather than a literal way. Thus there is no emphasis on spiritual ascent and development in the traditional Otherworld, nor any moral progression or growth—the soul simply goes to its proper home, as if the Otherworld were parallel to this world. If there is movement, it is not linear or ascending but circular, as we have come to expect of the soul. This circularity finds metaphorical expression in belief in reincarnation, which is common in traditional cultures. The worlds of the living and the dead are so close, almost transparent to each other, that the dead are liable to slip back into the world of the living, to circle easily between them or, as we have seen, even exist in both at the same time but in different forms.
There is no “life review” in tribal Otherworlds, because “judgment” is continuous in this life. Because everything in this world is held to be ensouled, every wrong action is immediately reflected in the environment as some kind of misfortune, such as bad hunting or foul weather. If the miscreants are not obvious—as people who have offended the ancestors or broken a taboo, for example—they are soon rooted out by questioning or by a shaman’s supernatural detection. The wrongdoers then pass the same verdict on themselves as the tribe does. There is shame, in other words, but not guilt—which presupposes the sort of inner life that we have, where what is in our hearts can remain hidden until we die, and all is revealed.
The only kind of hell in the Otherworld is exclusion from the life of the ancestors, because this is also exclusion from the life of the tribe—the tribe is always thought of as being composed of the living and the dead together; and, if anything, the dead are preeminent. We can see, too, why tribespeople are reluctant to convert to, say, Christianity: they fear that they will be cut off from the tribe when they die and live in the Otherworld alone.8
The proximity of the dead to the living makes funerary rites a delicate matter. The living revere the dead but also fear them, because the dead can inflict harm, whether through jealousy or a desire for revenge, or even unwittingly, through attachment. The mutual participation of living and dead can become contagion.9 Thus funeral rites can take weeks, months, and even years, as the living ease themselves away from the dead without offending them. In some societies, such as the Dowayos of Cameroon, the interred body will be dug up again when the flesh has had time to decompose, and the bones—identified with the immortal part of the person—will be stored in a special skull-house. There they will be revered at first, but more and more neglected until at last mud is flung at them to show that the dead are now remote enough from the living to present no threat.
Here we see how precarious “soul” cultures can be. Their equilibrium is so finely balanced that, without an element of “spirit,” they can suffocate under the weight of their own belief in the spirits of Nature, restless ghosts, malevolent ancestors, and undetected witchcraft. In constant dread of the daimonic, which they perceive as more harmful than helpful, they can live more in fear than in freedom. Greek polytheism may well have reached such a point of saturation when the new dualistic philosophy sprang up, and Plato’s single Form of the Good provided a pure and brilliantly lit distillation of the dark, seething proliferation of gods and daimons. Analogously, the monotheism of Christianity may have been embraced partly because it offered relief from the stifling polytheism of Roman religion, with its “almost infinite number of divine beings”10 inhabiting virtually every grove, spring, rock, and tree. Part of the attraction of the modern scientific method, too, was that it seemed to lift Reason’s head above the “clouds of demonic rumour”11 that bedeviled sixteenth-century Europe with its medieval belief in magic, witchcraft, and all manner of daimonic infestation. All these developments used the leverage of the “spirit” perspective to achieve some traction on a “soul” culture that had become bogged down in the excessive opulence of its own images.
“If there is one unvarying feature of the realm of the dead,” wrote Lucien Lévy-Bruhl of tribal societies, “it is that it is the reverse of the living.”12 For example, the Cayapa of Ecuador believe that the sun and moon in the “lower world” of the dead travel from west to east. For the Bataks of Sumatra the dead go headfirst downstairs and their markets are held by night instead of day, which is when the dead sleep. For the Pacific Islanders of Aua the canoes of the dead float bottom-up above their underwater villages; for the Dyaks of Borneo the dead speak the same language as the living, but every word has an opposite meaning.13 In parts of Indonesia, however, the meanings of words among the dead are the same but are spoken backward. When the Sora of northern India cut down trees to make a clearing, it annoys the dead who are cultivating the same trees.14
The idea of reversal, therefore, expresses the discontinuity of this world and the Otherworld but also maintains continuity—they remain connected, even interwoven. The relationship is reciprocal. Sometimes the Otherworld is seen as complementing this world; sometimes it is the inside-out version of this world; at other times it is the mirror image of this world. However, it is not opposed to this world. It is the spirit perspective, and the monotheistic religions, that tend to take the archetypal image of reversal and turn it into opposition. The afterlife becomes a polarized and inverted version of this world, as when Christianity asserts that “the last shall be first.” To polarize is also to literalize, so that the afterlife is depicted as equally literal as earthly life, but in an opposite way—what was matter is now spirit, what was darkness is now light, what was suffering is now joy, and so on. It is as if the Cinderellas and Goose Girls of fairy tales were allegorical figures who invert the social order by becoming princesses, just as the country bumpkin Parzival becomes the perfect knight who wins the Holy Grail; or, for that matter, as the little carpenter becomes the Son of God. From soul’s point of view, however, these characters are not “upside down,” not inverted, but reversed, “inside out”—the Goose Girl was already the princess in the first place, and had only to be revealed as such.
To put it in psychological terms, Jung often writes as though consciousness is opposed to the unconscious. He describes how dreams are compensatory, presenting us with inverted versions of our waking lives in order to redress imbalances in the psyche. He also divides life into two halves: the first should be devoted to the development of consciousness and to forging relations with the outer world; the second should be more attentive to the unconscious—as we move toward death we should become more detached from the world, attending to soul’s deeper, less personal concerns and confronting the world-soul and its daimons. We have to follow soul’s promptings to orient ourselves away from this world and toward the Other. But if we are strangers to soul, such promptings threaten us. We are afraid of embracing a wider existence and cling to what we were, trying to renew the first half of life by running off with younger women and embarking on militant antiaging campaigns.
Conversely, we are not taught to heed the whisper of the daimon in the first half of our lives. Even those of us who do manage to discern what our soul wants and needs, do not believe strongly enough in its paramount importance, because, as Jung often said, our peculiarly modern malaise is to be estranged from soul. So we are tempted, for instance, to put soul “on hold” until we have made enough money, bought enough time, acquired enough security, to start doing “what we should really be doing.” But our essential selves cannot be put on hold. We are changed by what we do meanwhile. And the neglected soul, like any lover, pines away so that when we wish to embrace her again, she is nowhere to be found.
We do not have to take Jung’s two halves of life as gospel. They are two aspects of our single lives, one conscious and the other unconscious. Their movements can be complementary rather than antagonistic, like interlocking spirals. It is our double vision by which the one sees through the other, and their mutual abrasion that shapes the iron bones of the self. Outer events are entwined with their inner meaning so that, when we die, we are turned inside out: what was inner and hidden is now outer and manifest. Earthly life is like that of a dull chrysalis that cannot imagine it will one day take rainbow flight.
Of course Jung was only describing what he observed: a culture in which the ego is so strong that it casts the soul into darkness and places itself in polar opposition to the unconscious. Attempts by the unconscious to compensate for this merely seem to the ego like demons coming out of the dark in the form of threatening images, hellish nightmares, irrational fears. The unconscious reflects back at us the face we show to it. Analogously, the Otherworld reflects whatever stance we approach it with.
So, if we were to approach Hades, say, with the humble and self-effacing attitude of one who has been initiated, we find that he is Plouton, “the Rich One”; and his realm, one of unimaginable treasure. Whoever has died to themselves finds superabundant life. But to those who approach Hades in the blaze of their own worldliness, certainty, and egoism, his realm will seem a shadowy, gray, godforsaken place. Worse still, under the forceful Heraclean glare of the rational ego, the Otherworld will appear to lose substance altogether and become—as militant rationalists insist—nonexistent. This is not an option for monotheistic religions, of course, and so they offer us either heaven or hell, depending on how we have lived our lives—depending, that is, on what attitude we bring to bear on the afterlife, what state of soul we carry into death.
Because we Westerners do not have the same agreement about the geography of the Otherworld as traditional cultures, we are more at the mercy of our own imaginative capacities when it comes to entering the afterlife. This is exciting and liberating in one way, but perilous in another. How far do we trust ourselves to dream up a state of bliss?
I am pretty confident that I can imagine heaven. I will find myself being chauffeur-driven from my Mediterranean villa, well-stocked with the finest food and wine, swimming pools, and compliant women, to the party at the palace, where all the rich and famous and powerful are gathered to congratulate each other on having made it to Paradise. Feted and lionized by this exalted company, I, the guest of honor—I am heaped up with all the praise and admiration I was denied in life. Naturally I am modest and gracious, but pleased. We are all pleased—pleased with each other and ourselves. So pleased and self-congratulatory, in fact, that we do not hear above the chatter and chink of glasses filled with vintage champagne the singing of angels above our heads. Too busy catching the eye of other men’s beautiful wives, we do not look up. We do not notice that those who wait on us are helpful daimons; we do not hear them ask us in whispers whether we would care to step outside for a moment, through the doors of the great hall flung wide, where there are interesting views … We are happy where we are, comparing successes and triumphs with a noise that, to the angels, sounds like the squeaking of bats, the sound the dead are said to make in Hades.
The heaven I have imagined is, of course, the heaven of the egotists—which to everyone else is hell.
We know that hell exists because we see people every day trapped in little hells of their own making and, whether through fear, self-centeredness, defiance, or simply habit, unable to escape—unable, that is, whether through a lack or distortion of imagination, to walk out. For the gates of hell are always open. It is we who do not take the single step into heaven, despite the prompting of our daimons and the imploring of our ancestors, because to walk through would be to admit of another life outside ourselves, which, having admitted it, we would have to lead. We would have to change, and this we cannot do: however miserable my little self, it is mine, all mine, and I won’t let go of it.
And so we go on partying, listening to the echo of ourselves, day after day, under a dazzling sun and a sky of uniform blue, until one day perhaps we find ourselves longing for a cloud to appear. And it does appear; and in its shadow we see for the first time the face of our pool attendant. It is the face of an old, familiar friend—we can’t quite remember the name—who asks us if we might like to swap a swim in the heated pool today for a dip in the ocean, just beyond our high electric fence, where we had never noticed it before.…
This fanciful scenario is to remind me that I must be suspicious of finding myself in any heaven I can imagine. I do not mean that heaven cannot be like this world—indeed it will, initially at least, be like this world, but unutterably transformed just as those who have experienced in this life the great visions of Nature or of the Beloved have reported. Hell may well be getting the heaven we have imagined—I should say: fantasized. Because nothing is outside soul’s imagining, even our egoism is a way of imagining. The trouble is, it does not give itself up to Imagination, but manipulates and coerces it for its own self-serving fantasies. It insists on its own version of heaven, and this is why there may be no hell—only a myriad false heavens. As Vergil remarks in The Aeneid, “each one of us we suffer the afterworld we deserve.”15 Among the “many mansions,” therefore, that Christ attributed to his Father’s Kingdom, we must suppose that there is, for example, a Valley of Shadows, peopled by souls who refuse to admit that they are dead; a Narrow Street of the timid who cannot give up the habits and routines of their life on Earth; a Gridlocked Highway of the trapped, who cannot give up the jealousy, resentment, and hatred that binds them to their former lives; and a Hall of Slumbering Atheists, who have insisted on oblivion. Even the Angelic Cloud of the Pious can seem like a false heaven to a man of “Genius,” as William Blake calls himself. In “A Memorable Fancy,” he lampoons the unimpeachably orthodox Christians by depicting their perspective on his paradise of the Imagination: “As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius, which to the Angels look like torment and insanity …”16 To the purely spiritual, that is, soul’s imaginative bliss can look like hell.
Consequently, we cannot logically be denied the right to burn always. Because there is no coercion in the Otherworld—Love is the only power, but it will not use force—we can defy soul, personal daimon, God, indefinitely. Theologically, this is the sin of pride. It can be seen in those tyrants and Man-Gods, such as Hitler and Stalin, whose self-exaltation and conviction of their own divine rightness leads them to believe that everyone else is beneath them and, indeed, barely human. They secretly desire that all others should be soulless numbers or corpses. Therefore, after death, they stalk alone through a wasteland of an Otherworld, a death camp of an afterlife, whose scent is burning flesh, whose music is the screams of the dying—their perfect heaven. But even these satisfactions are not enough, because the void left by the denial of soul is bottomless and can never be filled, no matter how many other souls it devours. And so they are gnawed by the vultures of a craving that can never be gratified and burned by a thirst that can never be slaked.
We can, and do, forget, ignore, renounce, sell, or betray soul—but we cannot get rid of it. We will have to face it in the end. I take the optimistic view that most of us will tend to face it sooner rather than later. I am hopeful, for instance, that even hardened materialists who deny any Otherworld will quickly see their mistake. If the impact of death itself is not enough of an initiatory shock to wake them to the reality of the Otherworld, there will always be some fragment of imaginative life to appear before them and pry open a crack in their ideological preconceptions—something like the selfless engagement they had with their work or something overlooked like the love they had for a pet. After all, the realities of soul they denied during life will have built up a head of steam in the unconscious and can scarcely be prevented from bursting out at death, like the dazzling presence of Christ that blinded the arch-persecutor of Christians on the road to Damascus.
We all wear the shirt of Nessus, because it is really the skin of the soul, which cannot be removed without tearing ourselves to pieces. It is the gift of Love, which warms and nourishes, illumines and delights us—unless we resist it. Then, of course, it burns like hell. But in truth the burning is only Love’s attempt to fit us for bliss.
It may be that hell is nothing other than our refusal to give up our literalism. If we insist on maintaining in the Otherworld the constraints of earthly time, for example, the timeless state of the Otherworld symbolized by the word “eternity” becomes perpetuity. Everything goes on “forever.” Hell may be nothing other than this continuation of time, because nothing can go on forever without becoming appalling. The only things that could keep us trapped in this perpetuity are events in our lifetime that we cannot give up or assimilate. We experience them over and over again, as if they were actually happening. This notion is metaphorically embodied in the persistent folktales of ghosts who perform the same actions or haunt the same places. Often they are said to have committed suicide or murder; or to have been heinously betrayed. We sense some sort of truth in this, as if some crimes keep the perpetrators and victims alike “earthbound.” W. B. Yeats believed that, during its “dreaming-back” in the afterlife, the soul’s most momentous experiences “awake again and again, all our passionate events rush up about us and not as seeming imagination, for imagination is now the world.”17 We are easily able to assimilate good experiences, of course, but there may be traumatic experiences or crimes that we cannot come to terms with—as we cannot in life. Then we are compelled to live them over and over again until we are free of them—something psychotherapists are familiar with in their patients.
If it seems too harsh to condemn the whole soul, as it were, to this pattern, it may be that only part of us is trapped in this way, just as we are not wholly confined in, or wholly defined by, neurotic compulsions and obsessions while we are alive. It may be only some fragment of the dead person’s soul—or, better, only one image of soul—that continues to act out, like a looped videotape, the original trauma.
Repetition looks like hell. In Greek myth, Sisyphus forever pushes a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down before he gets it to the top; Ixion revolves forever on his burning wheel; Tantalus craves the food and drink that is forever just out of his reach. Because these figures are part of myth, they cannot be left out of psychic life. And in fact we can all empathize with the states of frustration, pain, and craving they symbolize. However, they may not only be illustrating kinds of hell, as our Judeo-Christian outlook tends to interpret their fates. They may be illustrating the psychic necessity for repetition. They might be the base images of the soul’s natural affinity with circularity, such as the endless telling of the same stories we never tire of, or the cycle of the same seasons we welcome as emblems of death and rebirth. They might reflect the soul’s love of performing the same sacred rituals daily or yearly, in order to “make the sun rise,” for example. The voluntary repetition of rituals is an image of that self-renewing eternity of which the involuntary repetition of compulsions is the shadow. They may even look the same: one man’s meaningless and hellish routine can be another’s meaningful and delightful ritual. Everything depends on the degree to which it is invested with imagination and imbued with sacred meaning, as the whole of life is for traditional societies.
If this is so, repetition might itself be transformative, as if its desperate circuits can automatically—alchemically perhaps—generate of themselves the imaginative loosening of the noose and the hope of salvation.
The soul is fathomless and defies definition. It never appears as itself but always as something else, some image of itself. The very word “soul” is just such an image. It is all imagination, including its own self-imagining. It is paradoxical, encompassing all contradictions. I have concentrated on those contradictions that, I guess, cause the most confusion, namely the way soul manifests both individually and collectively, personally and impersonally. Its preferred mode of manifestation is the personified image, notably gods and daimons. It likes to appear to us in another person, as Beatrice appeared to Dante; or as another person, like the unknown Beloveds we meet in dreams. Soul is like Jung’s anima: both our personal soul, conferring our sense of uniqueness; and also the impersonal face the world-soul shows to us. But soul is also the personal daimon who guides and protects us, and mediates between us and the gods—as well as that which is guided and mediated.
All ideas or statements about the soul are from soul in the first place. The variety of bodily parts where we have historically located it—head, heart, blood, “kidney fat,” brain, and so on—is a metaphor for its omnipresence. We cannot capture it head-on, but only obliquely, whenever we are opened out onto unsuspected depths, giving meaning; whenever we sense a secret, something within, giving insight; whenever we suddenly make a connection, like a metaphor, bringing new vision. By the same token we cultivate soul by seeking depth, interiority, and connectedness—in short, by exercising imagination. This includes the practice of changing perspective, or “seeing through” to another reality; the practice of looking poetically at the world, or “seeing double”—seeing the metaphorical in the literal, the story behind the “facts”; the practice of reflection or “seeing back” in order to connect the present to the past, and, more especially, present experience to its archetypal background; the practice of amplifying and developing images, whether they are in dreams, works of art, or even in the supermarket aisle, by becoming aware of what associations and feelings the images evoke—by “dreaming the myth onward,” as Jung used to say.
However, because soul will always remain in itself unknown and unfathomable, what Paracelsus—arguably the first great natural scientist—called the “Great Mysterie,”18 there can, disappointingly, be no final answers to the questions with which I began: “What is my purpose in life? What am I here for? Where do I go when I die?” The provisional answer might be: our purpose is to fulfill the daimon’s secret plan and build our selves from its blueprint. From spirit’s point of view this is a goal, like a height we have to scale; from soul’s point of view it is a way, like a mazy wandering in the course of which we are transformed. After death, the linear trajectory of spirit is reconciled with the spiral path of soul, like the impossible squaring of the circle. “The way up and the way down,” said Heraclitus, anticipating the Zen masters, “are one and the same.”19 The answers to the questions of life will be self-evident, because to enter into the fullness of our selves is self-evidently fulfilling. As part of the Soul of the World we are part of a cosmic dance of which it is meaningless to ask the purpose and meaning—because it is all purpose and meaning.
Yet, in our earthly state we still feel incomplete—a feeling induced by spirit’s standpoint, from which soul appears as all potential, as something that must be unfolded, made actual, in the self. From soul’s point of view, she is complete from the start, as if she were herself the personal daimon that directs our unfolding but does not itself develop. Spirit maintains that we change—grow, develop, and progress; soul refutes this, holding that we simply manifest different facets of our wholeness, as if we were cutting and polishing our diamond selves. It is as if all the changes spirit initiates and undergoes are only the adoption of different outlooks, each of which, like the gods, is already latent in the soul. Every mother looks at her child from both points of view: even as she watches him or her grow and change, she also recognizes the same personality that, often to her amazement, was complete and fully formed at a very early age, even at birth.
Our task is to heed the daimon, glean from each situation the greatest possible insight, and try to acquire a larger, more meaningful context in which to view our lives. This, in turn, means asking ourselves what deity is operative in our lives and trying to connect it to other deities in order to achieve the most and the deepest perspectives. Often our presiding deity will become apparent by what we instinctively shun. If we are too rigid to let ourselves go in a bit of Dionysian madness, we can be sure we are in thrall to the prissy side of Apollo or to prim, overchaste Artemis. If we are too earnest, banging on about social justice or political theories, we are one-sidedly gripped by Athena, who can make us dogmatic and humorless without the leavening wit of Hermes or the sense of ridiculousness provided by Pan—whose grotesque appearance at birth made the gods burst out laughing. Perhaps the most invisible wallflower among us is really under the aegis of Hestia, goddess of the hearth, of whom little mention is made and less known—telling characteristics in themselves. She seems to embody that sense of focus (in Latin, a “hearth”), inwardness, and enclosure that enables deep psychic transformation to take place, as if hermetically sealed, without dissipating itself. Simply by acquainting ourselves with myth and attending to our dreams and fantasies, we soon become aware that one story resonates with us more than another, and stays with us, providing a clue as to where our worldview is coming from and whither the deity is conducting us. We cannot know what tribulations this will involve, but we can treat them as essential elements of the long initiatory process of life.
We are all alchemists who are looking for the primordial ingredient necessary to begin the Great Work. It can be found “in the sweepings of the street” yet it is the “treasure hard to attain.” Once we have found it we cannot begin the work of transmutation until we have unearthed “our mercury”—the “secret fire” that is the chief agent of the Work. Even if we obtain these, there is no guarantee we will reach our goal, or indeed even know what that goal is, since it is called the “Stone that is no Stone.” In short, the Work is its own beginning, process, and end result. The secret ingredient is soul, with which we begin; its imagination is the secret fire by which we transmute ourselves; and the self is the transmuted soul in which we are consummated.
The more we realize our selves, the less they seem to be our selves, as if the world-soul merely wishes to reflect itself through our eyes. The less self-important we are, the more important we are as selves, with a unique perspective on the cosmos. The self is what spirit spends a lifetime searching for, heroically setting out by land and sea to circumnavigate the globe, to suffer hardship and slay dragons, until he comes to the remote, overgrown castle. He hacks a way through, climbs to the top of the tallest tower, and—there, the love of his life, Beauty, lies sleeping. He kisses her. She wakes …
Her waking symbolizes the soul’s dormant state until spirit wakes her, and makes her real. What is less obvious in our heroic age is that the kiss also wakes spirit. He looks around him, rubbing his eyes, and sees that the castle is in fact his castle, the place he started from. Beauty always slept there, but he did not notice her, so eager was he to set out and find her elsewhere.
As soul comes to herself in spirit, so spirit returns to himself in soul—and they are joined in the holy matrimony of the self.
When we die we return to the Soul of the World from whence we came. In fact we never left it. We are still in that great Imagination but we do not see it. We cannot imagine Imagination itself. Those who have glimpsed it tell us over and over again that we are like sleepers or blind people until death wakes us and restores our sight. Most of us have sensed this, however fleetingly, in the course of our lives—perhaps in a sunrise or in an epiphanic dream; in a work of art or the joy of love; in quiet moments at midnight when eternity descends on our hushed souls like moonlight. Then, for a second, we understand that we are like the prisoners in Plato’s dim and musty cave, unable to conceive of sunlight and a scented breeze; understand that our chains are Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles”20 we can shake off instantly and step out into the glory of the earthly Paradise.
It has always been difficult to find the right metaphor or symbol for the mutual inherence of soul and spirit. I can think of only two successful ones: marriage and music.
As an example of marriage, T. S. Eliot drew on the long poetic history of the rose as a symbol of soul, and of fire as a symbol of spirit. At the end of the Four Quartets, he unites these incommensurables in a cry of gratitude and praise—and a mystical image of flames being knotted into the shape of a rose.
At the end of his four-volume Mythologiques, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss concludes that if there is one pair of symbols that embodies our twofold condition, it is heaven and earth. For nearly all mythologies speak of a time when the skyworld lay with this world; and it was their separation that caused all our unhappiness and their reunion that we yearn for. The hieros gamos, or sacred marriage, of heaven and earth is a symbol of all our longed-for reunions up and down the scale of being. Emotion and intellect, matter and spirit, body and soul, One and Many, male and female, human and divine, freedom and necessity—all the contradictions of our fractured existence are most marvelously woven together in the wedding of soul and spirit, which preserves our twofoldness right into the heart of the One. The metaphor of marriage tells us that the truism is also true: that while we are always and only ourselves, we are also only truly our selves when we find ourselves in another, like Dante and Beatrice reflected in each other’s eyes as they stand before the blazing altar of Love.
Like the Hermetic definition of God, soul is “an intelligible sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”21 It is the beating heart of the cosmos, and also the circulation of its lifeblood. It contracts into the One, the abstract God, and expands into the Many, the personified gods, just as our psyches move centripetally toward a center and centrifugally toward a circumference as if breathing in and out. Breathe in—and everything is within you; breathe out—and you are in everything. For our souls are contained in the Soul of the World, yet, through the impossible convulsion of Love, we also contain that immensity. Congruent with the cosmos, we also are One and Many as we contract and expand in harmony with the heart of soul.
Music provides a useful way of picturing how it might be possible to retain our identity while submerging ourselves in a greater whole, because, whether musician or listener, the more we forget ourselves and the more transparent to the music we become, the more we are our unique selves. We can imagine that our souls participate in Paradise as an individual voice participates in a choir, or as a musician in an orchestra. However, the image of the heavenly choir sounds a bit, well, spiritual for my taste. Its community smacks too much of the monastery and not enough of the marriage feast. I would mistrust an afterlife that was too pure to include fools and rogues, just as I cannot picture a literature without Falstaff and Bottom, Sam Weller and the Artful Dodger, Sancho Panza and Bertie Wooster.
Thus I cannot help hoping that the music of the Otherworld will be more like tribal music, such as the old music of Ireland that can still be chanced upon in unexpected pubs and rural kitchens, where fiddles, wooden flutes, goatskin drums, tin whistles, and uilleann pipes continue to celebrate centuries-old reels, jigs, hornpipes, polkas, and slides. In the Platonic Form of the Pub, of course, I trust I will find myself in an otherworldly session where the music is inseparable from dance, like all traditional music; where the same ancient tunes, like myths, are re-created afresh with every playing; where each musician has a chance to call the tune and no one is left out—the audience is as important as the players; where pauses in between the tunes—for jokes and laughter, talk and drink—are as crucial as the music; where beneath the apparent informality there are, like courtesy, exacting, unspoken, and voluntary rules that allow each person the most freedom, as in a ritual, to play their part to the full, whether it is singing or fiddling, dancing or making merry, or even not listening at all. Where all are woven together in the music, it is suddenly possible to see what is meant by agape, communal love, as, in the midst of a heart-stopping reel, one by one—Dionysus arm-in-arm with Hades—the gods begin to slip in by the back door.
Marriage and music are only symbols. Once we cross the border from the transitional realm into the Otherworld proper, we run out of images and language, as the ecstatic stutterings of the mystics attest. We only know that to enter the Soul of the World is to consummate that lifelong desire that, no matter how we dress it up, is the longing for the Paradise we lost at birth; the longing for the Beloved who waits with open arms to whirl us, both dancer and dance, into that kingdom where, as wise Heraclitus (with whose definition of a soul we can never know, so deep is its measure, we began) says: “there awaits us what we neither expect nor even imagine.”22