As we move through the season of darkness, I feel it’s a good time to bring up the problem of “rising”. Whether you’ve been brought up in traditional religion of any stripe, or atheistic and purely materialist in your thinking, you are affected by this issue.
In short—our collective culture places a value on “rising up”, whether it be spiritually, scientifically, or socially. In a spiritual sense, we talk about “lower” or “bestial” instincts. In the scientific sense, it is the championing of rationality and human progress over “delusion and superstition”. In the social sense, the “lower” are those in poverty or in the decidedly non-elite and often powerless part of the system. This also occurs in feminism; women’s rights movements often boil down to issues of equality, of what amounts to “raising yourself up” to the privileges and rights of a man. You never seriously hear about this the other way around, though that might be changing.
This reveals the Platonic basis of our thinking, as well as the Biblical influence. It comes down to a war with the forces of nature, and an attitude of either transcendence or separation from it. Humans are exceptional in this system due to their reason, and a striving for “purity” and the realm of the “spirit” (or the pure objectivity of scientific and mathematical language without all that emotional or spiritual “nonsense”). This is epitomized in a Christian worldview that is about salvation from death, a rising to Heaven and away from Hell.
I’ve been reading several different works over the last month; among these are the second edition of The Cult of the Black Cube by Dr. Arthur Moros (Theion Publishing, 2021), and a re-read of The Dream and the Underworld (Harper & Row, 1979) by James Hillman. These two works are written from rather different viewpoints, but appear to be in agreement on this subject.
In Dream, Hillman discusses our inability in the so-called “Western” world to deal with the underworld, or to identify aspects of our psyche with it. He addresses an episode of Christian narrative called “The Harrowing of Hell”, in which Christ descends into Hell “that we ourselves might not have to descend thither.” (85). He observes the quotation from the prophet Hosea: “Oh Death, where is thy sting? O Hades, where is thy victory?” (13:14) Western religion accepts the idea of the victory over death, the core of its soteriology, the notion that we have been “saved”.
But saved from what? Hillman goes on: “Let us compare: Orpheus and Dionysos went down to redeem close personal loves … Hercules had tasks to fulfill. Aeneas and Ulysses made their descents to learn: there they gained counsel from the ‘father’, Anchises and Tiresias … But Christ’s mission to the underworld was to annul it through his resurrected victory over death.” (85) The consequence of this “victory” is “a radical translation from psychikon to pneumatikon” (86)—from soul to spirit. “We pay for spirit with our souls.” (87)
One consequence of this shift is “the Satanizing of Thanatos. The black figure with wings, indistinct, and even at times gentle in pagan descriptions, became ‘the last enemy’ (1. Cor. 15:26) and the personification of the principle of evil. The underworld became thoroughly moralized; death became equated with sin.” (87)
Hillman places this break from the underworld in the lap of Christian theology, but that aspiration to “spirit” predates Christianity. In The Cult of the Black Cube, David Beth’s essay “Clavis Saturni: A Cosmic Heresy” puts this break at the Titanomachy, when the Olympian gods gained supremacy: “The ancient, complementary daemonic forces or living images that were beyond good and evil had to give way to new Gods, such as the Graeco-Roman Olympians, reflecting the projected rational identity and self-awareness.”
Earlier in the same essay, he demonstrates the problem: “At the dawn of history, a parasitical force emerged within humanity’s metaphysical organism: Ludwig Klages calls it the spirit. Alien to the polarity of body and soul, it splits body from soul and soul from body and leads to a gradual alienation from the daemonic reality of the world. By manipulating and deconstructing the soul-based ability of visioning the spirit triggered the development of the self-consciousness of the rational ‘I’. Humanity stepped into history or historical time when day-consciousness supplanted the night-consciousness of the daemonic human.” (15)
We have lost this night-consciousness, and are afraid of the underworld; we are thus cut off from what makes us truly alive. Life and Death are on the same spectrum; it would be disastrous (and impossible) to eliminate the latter. Whether you see this loss as being cut off from our collective unconsciousness or from the natural, chthonic world of daemons (or both), the result is the same. As Joseph Campbell put it in The Power of Myth, “Every natural impulse becomes a sin.”
And thus we see the problem of “rising”: always looking to the future, always striving for the next thing, continually anxious about security and status, needing to have a perfection that doesn’t exist. We don’t know how to slow down, we are uneasy with the idea of standing still, or just doing something “unimportant”. We do not trust ourselves, because we have been taught that our natural selves are untrustworthy. The end result can be a life that is never actually lived.
I remember having a dream when I was about 15 years old; I was in a house at some kind of social gathering, and one of the priests who taught at my high school (I went to Catholic school) and the local bishop were also there. There was some “thing” moving among the crowd, which was decayed and rotten, and as it touched people in the room, they also decayed and rotted. Alarmed, I mentioned this to the priest and the bishop; both shrugged their shoulders and said they “couldn’t see anything wrong with it.” As this thing moved in my direction, I climbed out a window and into the night.
In retrospect, this was a dream that shaped how I moved forward in life. I did not want a living death; I wanted to live, and this meant going into the “night”. That hasn’t always been an acceptable choice to others; the uber-rational disdain the attention to intuition and deeply felt experience; the traditionally religious disapprove of “jumping the fence” and going into wild territory. But there are more devouring monsters within the confines of the fence than outside of it.