Orientating Ourselves in the World; Outside and Within.
Archetypes are more than personalities.
Here in Bali as with most ancient traditions the mountains are the homes of the gods.
Rather than North, South, East, and West Bali has Kaja and Kelod, Kangin (East) and Kauh (West).
Kaja and Kelod don’t correspond to North/South, rather they are mountainwards and oceanwards.
Hence Kaja is south for Northern Bali and North for southern.
It may sound strange but I found that it clicked rather fast. Rather than a distant concept of magnetic or geographic poles, one has physically demonstrated orientations.
The mountains, the ocean, the Sun rising and falling.
These orientations transcend the seen world or sekala and derive much of their meaning from the niskala or the unseen.
One is given internal orientation via the rising and falling of the Sun, the mountains and the gods, the oceans and its life.
Archetypes as more than personas.
In his book, Aeon Jung talks about several archetypes of stability that arise in his client’s dreams and fantasies. Amongst these are kings, mandalas, and mountains.
He also mentions the rivers of paradise, the holy city of Zion, and several other geographical mythologems.
The ancient world was full of these.
Some of the Homeric hymns read more like a travel guide than paeons to the gods, unless one starts to realize that each location listed adds to the numen of the diety by invoking the power of the place.
This is similar to the way the ancients deified regions of the world, the earth, the sky, even Tartarus and the depths of Abzu were seen as alive.
Jung would say this means that the unconscious is projecting life upon the symbols of the geographic location. He would call this libido, the energy and attention of the psyche is now projected and mixed with the geographic location.
In Rome, they called it numen, the nodding of the head, the recognition of a god that you are there.
If an archetype is a projection of the unconscious and the unconscious has a range beyond the typical modes of consciousness it will need to have symbols beyond the anthropomorphic in order to fully express itself.
At some level, even the mightiest of anthropomorphized gods will seem less stable than a mountain. Even the most fertile of deities will pale in comparison to a river and even the most chaotic will seem gentle in the face of the ocean’s rage.
When the psyche needs a symbol that goes beyond human comprehension it looks to nature to supply the depths and peaks of the psyche’s experience.
As above so below.
There are many references to the microcosm/macrocosm, above/below relationship these days. In the modern world these reference cosmic or microscopic proportions.
Scans of the stars are compared to those of neurons for a good meme.
We see larger systems of organization and relate it to our own thought processes, archetypes, or to the mycelium of fungi growing in a culture tray.
In the ancient world, however, the scope was often far smaller and far more familiar. In later traditions, it involved the seven luminaries and the stars beyond but earlier it was a matter of the local mountains, the rivers, the trees.
In certain forms of Hindu mysticism, one can meditate on the sacred geographies of the Vedas and Upanishads. In Jewish mysticism, one sees visions of the four sacred rivers.
In his work with the Yanomami tribe of Venezuela, Zeljko Jokic underwent an initiation based on internalizing the sacred mountains and inviting the spirits of the mountains and those that lived there to now inhabit his body.
These spirits are believed to maintain themselves in the mountains and in the body and when the shaman dies he is made immortal through his spirit joining the others back in the mountains.
The external world is internalized even as the unconscious projects upon the external world its deeper narratives and symbolism.
This is more than our experience of reading of an oddly named mountain in a distant land. Ancients could see the mountains of their myths, feel themselves in relation to them, internalize them into their own inner experience.
Ancients and anyone still following their ancestral religion in their homeland.
Tangent thought on the brain and how it navigates space.
I was talking to a neurologist friend of mine and mentioned the topic of this article. He pointed me in the direction of May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser, winners of the 2014 Nobel prize in medicine.
Their research showed that the hippocampus, an unconscious part of the brain, has nerve cells that keep track of one’s location. Further, there are other cells that create a sort of grid model, generating a coordinate system that allows for precise positioning and pathfinding.
In essence, our brain has a GPS system.
Now imagine that GPS system not only taking into account the mountain you visited but logging that mountain as the stairway to heaven while the cave you visited is the entrance to the underworld.
Associations in culture.
It is hard to imagine the level of impact associating the local mountain with the axis mundi has on a native.
This is more than “oh they believe this strange thing, I believe it now too.” It is the way the native’s brains have developed, their sense, their body and its associations.
Balinese talk about their anxiety when they go somewhere new and don’t know which way is Kaja. Their inner maps are based on their local geography and as with most ancient cultures this infuses every part of their society.
Homes are built according to the four directions. The Kaja-Kangin portion of the home is considered most sacred, here is where the family temple is built, its altars arranged by the directions.
The trash heap goes in the Kelod-Kauh portion of the house.
Guests of honor are seated by Kaja and Kangin.
The gods themselves are assigned to the nine directions.
- Kaja: Wisnu (Vishnu)
- Kaja- Kauh: Sangkara
- Kaja-Kangin: Sambhu
- Kauh (West): Mahadewa (Mahadeva)
- Center: Siwa (Shiva)
- Kangin (East): Iswara (Ishvara)
- Kelod-Kauh: Rudra
- Kelod-Kangin: Mehasora
- Kelod: Brahma
Each is given their own color and a host of symbols that allow them to be invoked and projected onto the world around.
These symbols infuse everything from marriage rites to cremations. The entirety of the society is infused in a symbol system that is orientated around the local geography.
So that GPS system in the mind is woven through every part of the society in layer after layer of meaning.
Symbols and archetypes as power.
The numen and interconnection of symbols is more than a list of meanings. Its effect is one of hypnosis upon the minds and bodies of the people who live within that society.
Think of our visceral reactions to certain brands. The ones we love, the ones that turn our stomachs. I see a sign for In-N-Out and my mouth waters. I see one for McDonald and my body says “no thank you.”
As a former smoker who used to smoke American spirits, the branding still makes me want to smoke more than anything else.
Symbols have visceral effects on our bodies and powerful effects within our minds. When this is paired by years of exposure and association as well as our mind’s unconscious projection, the effect is incredibly powerful.
These layers can then be invoked to create powerful shifts in the psyche as Istvan Praet’s work with the Chachi of Ecuador shows.
He translated one of their shaman's chants which illustrated the way that geography, identity, and symbolism all come together to affect the practice of ritualistic healing.
Let us lighten
Mountaintop of the Orient
Let us lighten body
Mountaintop rising
Oh my ferocious Hill Dweller
Guerrilla-Fighter Mountaintop rising
Let us dance
Oh my four Policemen
Let us dance
Oh my Devil’s Mountaintop
Oh my Mountaintop come come
Otavalo Mountaintop come
Mountaintop come, come
By manipulating the symbol system of the tribe the shaman is able to invoke significant changes in his client.
Perhaps its all psychological and he creates a powerful placebo or hypnotic effect, maybe the psychological experience of numen is an experience of something greater than a projection.
After praying at a waterfall today and feeling the mountain here I can believe it.
But as Jung often points out the details of the experience may be beyond us as we experience the world through the very mind we use to sort the fact from fiction.
Who really cares though if it’s magic or placebo if it works?
What does this mean to us?
Honestly, I think it means a lot.
- Many of us are missing a lot of depth from our symbol systems.
- This lack of depth can greatly affect our experience of those symbol systems.
- It may not be as easy as we think to tap into another culture’s system if we weren't raised in their geographical environment.
- If we want to invoke a powerful symbol system of meaning we need to graph it onto the world we live in.
I’ve been contemplating these points for a long time now and I think they still need a lot of mindful musing from a lot of different minds.
I know it was the consideration of the third point that led me to limit a class I taught on shamanism a few years ago to anthropological accounts.
I came to the personal conclusion that there is no way to fully tap into a specific tribal tradition without being raised in their culture and geographic location.
Instead, I went about giving anthropological examples and then asking what practices we could derive from those traditions that are relative to our own environments.
Rather than learning “shamanism” we learned about ourselves through the lens of other people’s perspectives, perspectives that we acknowledged may be beyond our reach.
Here in Bali, I am greatly enjoying the people, the temples, and the island but I wonder how much of the spiritual experience will allude me due to three decades of my brain and body learning a different system, seeing different mountains, creating different layers of association, meaning, neurological connections.
I am certainly experiencing a lot with or without those local conditionings and it makes me want to find a way that we can create these associations, these ways of living wherever we are.
The West is meaning starved, or as Jung put it a hundred years ago, “soul-starved.” He outlined the need for our myths, our stories, the acknowledgment of our archetypes, the old saints, the old gods and daemons.
But what about our landscapes? What about the stages that all these forces play on?
How do we relate to the world around us?
I believe if we find a way to breathe life back into our local world, to make the mountains thrones of heaven, the rivers the waters of life, the oceans a force to be reckoned with we will not only imbue our lives with more meaning, more depth, but we could cultivate a relationship that ends our abuse of the world, and perhaps some of the abuse of ourselves.
What about you?
What do you think of all this? Of pairing our psyche to the local realms around us?
Have you had this experience? What did you find there?
Love and share.
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