How curious is consciousness, and, what it is in time, learning. This line of thought reminds me of Heidegger's 'Was Ist Denken'? Teaching is speaking and thinking about thinking, according to Heidegger.
I just learnt that Schoenberg did indeed obsess about 'nameless' objects. Based on the story of Anna O, Erwartung refers to material based on Freud's case histories. Schoenberg was friends with Mahler, and we know that Mahler visited Freud himself, though only for one session. The woman in Schoenberg's 'monodrama', nevertheless, is nameless.
A similar theme emerges in Schoenberg's Die Gluckliche Hand. Obsessed by a beast, 'obssedere' being the Latin notion of sitting upon in the manner of a succubus, the nameless protaganist attempts to forge a nameless work of great beauty from nothing, all the while in fear of failure and destruction. A woman mysteriously appears in the story.
There is still the spiritual in Schoenberg, unlike some logical positivism. (Of course, Wittgenstein was quite the Mystic, and himself had a brilliant knowledge of music. His brother Paul was a fabulous one-armed pianist for whom Vaughan Williams, Ravel and Hindemith wrote concerti). Schoenberg in fact sustained a long friendship with the abstract expressionist, Wassily Kandinsky and greatly admired his Concerning the Spiritual in Art. I agree that Kandinsky's treatise is frankly sublime..
Amazing what you can learn, moment-to-moment..
Monday, 21 November 2011
ERWARTUNG: REFLECTIONS ON POST-RECITATIVE
For the first time, I heard Schoenberg's Erwartung. Schoenberg, in this melodrama, as he called it, really reduces music to the primeval and, in a sense, surpasses the recitative. Probably, 'breaks the bonds' is a better expression. Can anyone truly surpass Bach??
An earlier expression, in a more idiomatic style, is Gurrelieder. I would argue that this cantata is more in the tradition of Western opera, but, once again, the music is 'proleptic', a word I borrow from the phenomenoligcal philosopher, Edmund Husserl. In a post-Wagnerian/Mahlerian mould, Schoenberg is trying to fashion something new, 'the light of other planets' as he states in his Quartet. He is aching to cast a new sound which is beyond-sound, beyond life itself even..
Finally, I listened to his Serenade. The serenade is pastoral in nature, and draws on Schoenberg's education under Viennese classicism. I always remember that Schoenberg loved Brahms and chamber music. The serenade is thus more Viennese. His later works really approach the 'namesless', the soundless. Interesting that Mach's phenomenalism and Wittgenstein's logical positivism took off at this time, an antidote to Freud, Schnitzler, Mahler et al.
Sunday, 20 November 2011
TRAGEDY RECITED: NIETZSCHE'S BEYOND-REASON/BACH'S RECITATIVE AND THE CONTOURS OF CONSCIOUSNESS
Now I am going to compare the glory of passivity with the glory of activity which illuminates Aeschylus’s Prometheus. What Aeschylus the thinker had to say to us here, but what Aeschylus as a poet could only hint to us through a metaphorical picture—that’s something young Goethe knew how to reveal to us in the bold words of his Prometheus:
“Here I sit—I make men
in my own image,
a race like me,
to suffer, to weep,
to enjoy life and rejoice,
and to ignore you,
as I do.”
in my own image,
a race like me,
to suffer, to weep,
to enjoy life and rejoice,
and to ignore you,
as I do.”
As I pored through the Birth of Tragedy, I sank into the interstices of Nietzsche's reasoning, and his beyond-Reason: I find a similar dynamic in Bach..
There seems to be a substream to thought and feeling, an undifferentiated thought-feeling that defies our logic.. An urlicht light, as we see and 'hear' in Mahler. (The sustained A in the opening to Mahler Symphony 1 is a haunting archetype. And also, the sharpened conscious tone of the flute in the conclusion to Mvt 1 of Symphony 9).
In Bach, his cantas and especially the Matthew Passion, we endure the overflowing epic, which yet does not overreach. The Eternal Onward presence. I call it Absolute Presence.
Nonetheless, to reduce the ineffable to the meaningful - the bearable - Bach interpellates the ongoing-conscious with momentary meaning: the recitative.
*Incidentally, Nietzsche discerns like traits - if not sustained by the same intensity, arguably - in opera. The Paradigm for opera would likely be Tosca, in my view.
And now to travel beyond William James's 'fringe' of consciouness.
Dear Reader, you've lasted this far! I will lay out the passage from BT, and maybe all will become clear - for us all(?):
19
We can designate the innermost meaning of this Socratic culture no more precisely than when we call it the culture of opera, for in this area this Socratic culture, with characteristic naivete, has expressed its wishes and perceptions, something astonishing to us, if we bring the genesis of opera and the facts of the development of opera together with the eternal truths of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. First, I bring to mind the emergence of the stilo rappresentativo [the representational style] and of recitative. Is it credible that this entirely externalized opera music, something incapable of worship, could be accepted and preserved with wildly enthusiastic favour, as if it were the rebirth of all true music, during an age in which Palestrina’s inexpressibly awe-inspiring and sacred music had just arisen?* On the other hand, who would make the diversion-loving voluptuousness of those Florentine circles or the vanity of its dramatic singers responsible for such an impetuously spreading love of opera? The fact that in the same age—indeed, in the same peoples—alongside the vaulted structure of Palestrina’s harmonies, which the entire Christian Middle Ages had developed, there awoke that passion for a half-musical way of speaking —that I can explain only by some tendency beyond art at work in the very nature of recitative.
To the listener who wishes to hear clearly the word under the singing, there corresponds the singer who speaks more than he sings and who intensifies the expressions of pathos in this half-singing. Through this intensification of pathos he makes the words easier to understand and overpowers that part of the music which remains. The real danger now threatening him is that at an inopportune moment he may give the music the major emphasis, so that the pathos in the speech and the clarity of the words necessarily disappear at once. On the other hand, he always feels the urge for musical release and a virtuoso presentation of his voice. Here the “poet” comes to his assistance, the man who knows how to provide him sufficient opportunities for lyrical interjections, repetitions of words and sentences, and so on, places where the singer can now rest in the purely musical element, without considering the words. This alternation of urgently emotional speech which is only half sung and interjections which are all singing, which lies at the heart of the stilo rappresentativo, this rapidly changing effort at one moment to affect the understanding and imagination of the listener and, at another, to work on his musical sensibility, is something so completely unnatural and similarly so inwardly contradictory to the Dionysian and Apollonian artistic drives that we must infer an origin of recitative which lies outside all artistic instincts. According to this account, we can define recitative as the mixing of epic and lyric performing, and, to be precise, not at all in an inwardly consistent blending, which could not have been attained with such entirely disparate things, but in the most external conglutination, in the style of a mosaic, something the like of which has no model whatsoever in the realm of nature and experience. But this was not the opinion of those inventors of recitative. By contrast, they themselves, along with their age, believed that through that stilo rappresentativo the secret of ancient music had been resolved, that only through it could one explain the tremendous effect of an Orpheus, Amphion, indeed, even of Greek tragedy.* The new style was valued as the reawakening of the most effective music, the music of the ancient Greeks; in fact, under the universal and totally popular conception of the Homeric world as the primitive world, people could abandon themselves to the dream that they had now climbed down once more into the paradisal beginnings of humankind, in which music must necessarily have had that superb purity, power, and innocence which the poets knew how to talk about so movingly in their pastoral plays. Here we see into the innermost development of this truly genuine modern style of art, the opera: a powerful need forcibly creates an art, but it is a need of an unaesthetic sort, the yearning for the idyllic, the belief in a primordial existence of the artistic and good man. Recitative served as the rediscovered language of that primordial man, and opera as the rediscovered land of that idyllic or heroically good being, who at the same time follows a natural artistic drive in all his actions, who sings at least something in everything he has to say, so that, given the slightest emotional arousal, he immediately sings out in full voice. For us now it is unimportant that contemporary humanists used this newly created picture of the paradisal artist to fight against the old church idea of human beings as inherently corrupt and lost, so that opera is to be understood as the opposing dogma of good people, something with which they simultaneously discovered a way of consoling themselves against that pessimism to which the serious-minded people of that time, given the horrifying uncertainties of all social conditions, were attracted most strongly. It’s enough for us to recognize how the real magic and thus the origin of this new artistic form lies in the satisfaction of an entirely unaesthetic need, in the optimistic glorification of man as such, in its view of primitive man as a naturally good and artistic man. This operatic principle has gradually transformed itself into a threatening and terrible demand, which we, faced with the socialist movement of the present day, can no longer fail to hear. The “good primitive man” wants his rights: what paradisal prospects!
[According to Daniel Barenboim, for example in his Reith Lectures, we hear the sound of primal music from birth, and the more sensitive we are, the more attuned to the ineffable/the sublime, the stronger our perception and the larger our perceptual sphere.
For Barenboim, we hear sound akin to this Original Form in Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde. I will add a post about Tristan soon].
Friday, 18 November 2011
FIDELIO
- Furtwangler on Fidelio. I think nothing more need be said:
- '[T]he conjugal love of Leonore appears, to the modern individual armed with realism and psychology, irremediably abstract and theoretical.... Now that political events in Germany have restored to the concepts of human dignity and liberty their original significance, this is the opera which, thanks to the music of Beethoven, gives us comfort and courage.... Certainly, Fidelio is not an opera in the sense we are used to, nor is Beethoven a musician for the theater, or a dramaturgist. He is quite a bit more, a whole musician, and beyond that, a saint and a visionary. That which disturbs us is not a material effect, nor the fact of the 'imprisonment'; any film could create the same effect. No, it is the music, it is Beethoven himself. It is this 'nostalgia of liberty' he feels, or better, makes us feel; this is what moves us to tears. His Fidelio has more of the Mass than of the Opera to it; the sentiments it expresses come from the sphere of the sacred, and preach a 'religion of humanity' which we never found so beautiful or necessary as we do today, after all we have lived through. Herein lies the singular power of this unique opera.... Independent of any historical consideration ... the flaming message of Fidelio touches deeply.
BEETHOVEN FOUR, ZHENG HE AND THE GODDESS MATSU
(Admiral Zheng He)
If you will indulge me, I compare (at least in one frame of mind) Beethoven's Symphony 4 to a Daoist journey..
In mvt 1, we suffer through the Void Brightening, the impenetrable Dao.
In mvt 2, the Admiral stands at the prow of his ship (sometimes, I see Marcus Aurelius on his horse) through a heavy string section of terrfying, angry weather..
And then the horns enter as the sails are unfurled to the hasting wind
In mvt 3, a sailor's romp on board, the navvies are excitable, the intermezzo section with its soaring 'hiccupy' strings reflects the sun on the mast. And then it is out again to unknown seas..
In mvt 4, we close on the decisive battle, a glorious engagement that rivals Ma He's Seven Expeditions.
The joy of this symphony is how, like Lin Mo-niang/Tian Fei, the music is waiting to bring us safely to shore..
[I will be writing a 'Three Sea Tales' to expand on this subject.
ELEMENTARY NEEDS
If one was to find method in my madness, I would like to say I was pre-intellectual, and post-intellectual..
EPIPHANY!
Just now I saw what music really means.. I was looking at the picture of the woman waiting for the Cloud-Messenger, the Megadhuta. And in my head, I heard Mahler's sorrowful scherzo from No 5. Then I saw my picture of Beethoven, from the infinite desperation of the adagio from the Cello Sonata in D Major to the Eighth Symphony and Fidelio.
Simply, music is love and life! (Which reminded me of a more equivocal revelation in Joyce's Dubliners).
Simply, music is love and life! (Which reminded me of a more equivocal revelation in Joyce's Dubliners).
Thursday, 17 November 2011
A GLOBAL PROJECT: IMAGINING PAX GLOBALIS
In light of Obama's recent visit to Australia, I think a more critical paradigm is in order. We have to look to the future..
I am particularly intrigued by China's 'new strategic concept' and the imperative, I think, toward expanded and 'expansive' regionalisation.
As an ideal, I would advocate Malraux's 'musee imaginaire' which would trace a harmonious cultural construct - even better - 'community' within the Asia-Pacific. Australia is in the 'East Asian Hemisphere', as Gareth Evans is fond of saying.
Ultimately, I see the need for a 'grand bargain', a meta-narrative of progress toward a normative harmony conceived in mutual amity and respect. China and Australia, I am convinced, should be friends. It is in our mutual interest to be so..
I see the imperative for a Summit of the Nations, not just the hegemons. In this respect, I would allude to the Indian 'Advaitist' philosophy of Oneness, which need not, however, lead the Asia-Pacific region (fruit of so many hopes) to a sterile political monism. (That would be impolitic).
Peace, order, harmony -
And, above all, creativity. A creative future for us all..
[I will be writing a more specific paper on developments, as I see them, within the Asia Pacific soon].
Tuesday, 15 November 2011
A NEW ORDER? CHARIOTS OF FIRE
Will the Hedge Funds and intermediaries descend like Elijah in his Chariot upon Europe, to sweep away the debris? Cf Stravinksy's Symphony of Psalms..
(I note Elijah also ascended into Heaven. Irony is always possible).
Sunday, 13 November 2011
THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY: SONGS OF VICTORY AND DEFEAT
When I came to men for the first time, then did I commit the hermit's folly, the great folly: I appeared in the market-place.
And when I spoke to all, I spoke to none. In the evening, however, rope-dancers were my companions, and corpses; and I myself almost a corpse.
With the new morning, however, there came to me a new truth: Then did I learn to say "Of what account to me are market-place and crowd and crowd-noise and long crowd-ears!"
You higher men, learn this from me: In the market-place no one believes in higher men. But if you will speak there, very well! The crowd, however, sputters "We are all equal."
"You higher men," -- so sputters the crowd -- "there are no higher men, we are all equal; man is man, before God -- we are all equal!"
Before God! -- Now, however, this God has died. Before the crowd, however, we will not be equal. You higher men, go away from the market-place!
Ye higher men, the worst thing in you is that ye have none of you learned to dance as ye ought to dance—to dance beyond yourselves! What doth it matter that ye have failed!
How many things are still possible! So learn to laugh beyond yourselves! Lift up your hearts, ye good dancers, high! higher! And do not forget the good laughter!
This crown of the laughter, this rose-garland crown: to you, my brethren, do I cast this crown! Laughing have I consecrated; ye higher men, learn, I pray you—to laugh!
(Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘On the Higher Man’, Thus Spake Zarathustra)
Nietzsche’s account of the origins of Greek tragedy, the Birth of Tragedy was published 2 January 1872 in the midst of the Franco-Prussian War. In his ‘Attempt at a Self-Criticism’ within BT, Nietzsche reminisced that he felt the very pang of battle as he battled his own contradictions and penned his thoughts ‘in the field’ of chaos and uncertainty.
Surrendering, as Nietzsche does with Schiller before him, to the musical mood, I feel in my bones a parallel with the substratum of events in modern Greece
Hence in BT, we distinguish two modes, or moods and moments of change: the Apollinian and Dionysiac. The optimism of ‘theoretical man’, Nietzsche attributes to the cool, sun-centred worship of Apollo; the Deity inspires happy order and rational reflection. Epitomised by the Doric style in architecture, the Apollinian mode is Schiller’s ‘frozen music’, which freezes the Parthenon and the European Central Bank atop its pillars. The Dionysiac spirit, contrarily, is characterised by Dionysus/Bacchus' savage will for mischief and laughter. He leads the maenads in revelry with his thyrsos, or pine cone, the symbol of natural regeneration and destruction.
Dionysus, in particular, instantiates the chaotic destruction which Joseph Schumpeter considered to be endemic with capitalism.
Dionysus, in particular, instantiates the chaotic destruction which Joseph Schumpeter considered to be endemic with capitalism.
According to Nietzsche in his Introduction to BT:
We will have achieved much for scientific study of aesthetics when we come, not merely to a logical understanding, but also to the certain and immediate apprehension of the fact that the further development of art is bound up with the duality of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, just as reproduction similarly depends upon the duality of the sexes, their continuing strife and only periodically occurring reconciliation. We take these names from the Greeks, who gave a clear voice to the profound secret teachings of their contemplative art, not in ideas, but in the powerfully clear forms of their divine world. With those two gods of art, Apollo and Dionysus, we establish our recognition that in the Greek world there exists a huge contrast, in origin and purposes, between the visual arts, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian.* These two very different drives go hand in hand, for the most part in open conflict with each other and simultaneously provoking each other all the time to new and more powerful offspring, in order to perpetuate in them the contest of that opposition, which the common word “Art” only seems to bridge, until at last, through a marvellous metaphysical act of the Greek “will,” they appear paired up with each other and, as this pair, finally produce Attic tragedy, as much a Dionysian as an Apollonian work of art.
In order to bring those two drives closer to us, let us think of them first as the separate artistic worlds of dream and of intoxication, physiological phenomena between which we can observe an opposition corresponding to the one between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. According to the idea of Lucretius, the marvellous divine shapes first stepped out before the mind of man in a dream.* It was in a dream that the great artist saw the delightful anatomy of superhuman existence, and the Greek poet, questioned about the secrets of poetic creativity, would have also recalled his dreams and given an explanation similar to the one Hans Sachs provides in Die Meistersinger.*
‘My friend, that is precisely the poet’s work—
To figure out his dreams, mark them down.
Believe me, the truest illusion of mankind
Is revealed to him in dreams:
All poetic art and poeticizing
Is nothing but interpreting true dreams’.
In keeping with the essential musical dreaming behind nature, Nietzsche discerns a profound joy and melody beneath the works of Beethoven and Wagner. The market, our own markets in illusions, one might say, craft the harmony supporting our artistic striving, our work in artibus. The European structure, today, with its treaties and mosaic of conventions and sources of funding are the stabilising ballast of deeper aspirations. If I were to reproach the ECB and commission in Dionysian language, I would say, as Nietzsche does of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’, that the technocrats have mistaken the essence of pastoralism for the ever-transposed ‘scenes’ of pastoral life, ‘the countryside’, ‘the peasants’. Inflation targeting, is not alone, or even essentially, stability.
Nietzsche, moreover, was no utilitarian. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Schiller - various as these Titans are - agree that the true artist seeks, and mediates the underlying Will of his time. He is urged, not prompted, by enveloping chaos as by the spirit of change.
With our “modern” tendencies, regrettably, Nietzsche laments that we have lost the shock, the terror of chaos, of the ‘witches’ brew’ of socio-political disorder which paves the way for new life. As in Greece Italy
From the Attempt at Self-Criticism:
One can guess from all this just where the great question mark about the worth of existence was placed. Is pessimism necessarily the sign of collapse, destruction, of disaster, of the exhausted and enfeebled instincts—as it was with the Indians, as it is now, to all appearances, among us, the “modern” peoples and Europeans? Is there a pessimism of strength? An intellectual inclination for what in existence is hard, dreadful, evil, problematic, emerging from what is healthy, from overflowing well being, from living existence to the full? Is there perhaps a way of suffering from the very fullness of life? A tempting courage of the keenest sight which demands what is terrible as the enemy, the worthy enemy, against which it can test its power, from which it wants to learn what “to fear” means? What does the tragic myth mean precisely for the Greeks of the best, strongest, and bravest age? What about that tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian?* And what about what was born out of the Dionysian—the tragedy? And by contrast, what are we to make of what killed tragedy—Socratic morality, dialectic, the satisfaction and serenity of the theoretical man?* How about that? Could not this very Socratism [Sokratismus] be a sign of collapse, exhaustion, sickness, the anarchic dissolution of the instincts? And could the “Greek serenity” of later Greek periods be only a red sunset? Could the Epicurean will hostile to pessimism be merely the prudence of a suffering man?* And even science itself, our science —indeed, what does all science in general mean considered as a symptom of life? What is the point of all that science and, even more serious, where did it come from? What about that? Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an excuse in the face of pessimism? A delicate self-defence against—the Truth? And speaking morally, something like cowardice and falsehood? Speaking unmorally, a clever trick?* O Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps your secret? O you secretive ironist, was that perhaps your—irony?—
For, underneath the horrifying, the terrible, the novel, lies a sense of Primal Oneness. And that, perhaps, would be Nietzsche’s final consolation and gift of wisdom to the Greek republic. Revel in your own pessimism, your solitary doubts to find and reach a higher order beyond the Doric simplicity of the current European experiment. Then, in our jubilation, we will have rent asunder the veil of Maya, the Indic curtain of illusion that separates us from further, and more profound illusions. Though Nietzsche abhorred mediocre demagogic thought, it is thus instructive – maybe ironic - that his archetypal tragedy, Oresteia ends with Apollo instituting democracy among the Athenian citizenry.
Between the plastic art of the Apolline and the musical/tragic art of the Dionysiac, Nietzsche emphatically favoured the latter. Indeed, Nietzsche and the ‘barbaric’ Titans of yet-to-be conceived spiritual and material, even marketable forms would claim in chorus with Faust: ‘Should not my longing overleap the distance And draw the fairest form into existence?’ [From Goethe's Faust, II, 7438-9.]
In closing Nietzsche would rather eulogise a long-view, beyond mere politics. Long for a cosmopolitan Europe , truly unified..
Saturday, 12 November 2011
CREDO: AN ANGEL INVESTOR’S VISION
Capital inflow = Creative outflow
(With a crescendo of investment, comes a deafening roar of development).
Material and spiritual vigilance: we should listen to the gap between sounds.
OTHER-WORLDLY THOUGHTS: ESSAY CONCERNING AN EARLY MODERN CASE OF DEMONIC POSSESSION
SYNOPSIS
The possession of Mary Glover is emblematic of early modern hysteria, as it meets with Christian demonology. 'A Briefe Report’ features the totemic Lion of Juda, the tribes of David, Abraham, Issac and Jacob, David's heroic defeat of Goliath, the battle between Satan and Christ, the discomfiture of adders, serpents and the dragon, the mysteries of the canticles, taboo fasting and the physical manifestation and management of demonic behaviour. This essay will compare Mary Glover's case with the early modern scepticism of Dr Meric Causabon, D. D and the totemic/taboo and archetypal structures of obsessional thought of Jung and Freud. As a result, this essay aspires to supply an "architectonic" of the early modern mind, in regard to the witch-hunting phenomenon of early modern Europe , 1450-1750...
I must confess to an element of surprise when I discovered the conceptual links between psychoanalysis and demonic possession. Without exaggeration, psychoanalysis - as exemplified by Freud and Jung - may provide one of the most extraordinary paths into the hysterical unconscious (possessed by the Devil and haunted by visions). In this article, I intend to show the 'phenomenal' parallels between Freud's clinical analysis and Jung's depth psychology with respect to a case of early modern possession; and redoubtable 'affinities' between the analytic scepticism of Professor Freud and 'mythopoeic' imagination of C G Jung, in comparison with the treatise of a fifteenth-century Doctor of Divinity, Meric Causaubon. In this (otherwise) short paper, I shall compare selections from Freud's 'Totem and Taboo’l and 'Some General Characteristics' of obsessive neurotics from his 'Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (‘The Rat Man’)2, with 'A True and Briefe Report,3 of the possession of Mary Glover. Further into my inquiry, I will compare these extractions with chapters from 'Man and his Symbols’4 by C.G. Jung and with the early modern text, 'A Discourse Concerning the Nature of Enthusiasme' by Dr Meric Casaubon5. Finally, I will attempt to provide a psychoanalytic explanation for the service of exorcism, translated from the original 'Rituale Romanum’6 of Pope Paul V in 1614. Here, Jung's collection of dream 'motifs' should prove invaluable.
As John Kerr claims, neither Jung nor Freud was new to the phenomenon and 'treatment' of demonic possession7. Freud, for instance, based his most lurid case-history on Dr Schreber, a provincial German magistrate who believed against his 'better', rational judgment, that he was transformed into a woman and thereby controlled by the tencacles (or 'confabulated rays') of God8. In his prolific dream-theory Jung contended that nightmares (particularly those- involving supernatural animals, horses or 'incubi' and 'succubi') revived dormant sexual or emotional conflicts9. In addition, Jung summarised the 'hallucinations' and graphic dreams of his most disturbed patients in several compendia. In one paper, Jung relates how an analysand dismissed the visions of Moses and animal fantasies of Ezekiel as schizoid 'voices', only to suffer from such visions himself 10. Jung also examined the psychical symbolism of the 'hellish demons' which persecuted St Anthony11 (just as Christ was tempted) and the case of a psychiatrist, whose ten-year old daughter had a sketchbook of bizarre 'delusions' 12.
In his two intriguing manuscripts, 'Totem and Taboo' (1913) and 'Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (the Rat Man)' (1909), Professor Freud fashioned his criticism of the animist system's 'Omnipotence of Thought', and described the theoretical 'characteristics' of the obsessive-compulsive - or 'demonic' mind. In 'Totem and Taboo', Freud depicted, in exquisite detail, the instinct and ritual of animist magic13. In primitive societies - for instance, among the native tribes of Polynesia, Aboriginal Australia and Malaya - Freud held that human beings, as a rule, mistook an 'ideal' connection (mental association) for a 'real' connection (physical cause and effect) whenever they pondered the phenomena of Nature. In Freud's opinion, this primitive culture gave rise to the uncanny solemnity of magic ritual, and, among early societies at least, explained magic's astonishing efficacy.
Freud's examples of this thesis of 'contagious' magic were manifold. Thus, men assumed that they shared the qualities of their 'totem animal' (ie. strength and agility) and they would not eat it for fear of 'eating' themselves; the dead were buried across river to prevent their revenant, 'murderous ghosts' from tormenting the living; warriors stabbed waxen effigies in order to 'inflict' wounds on their enemies; the sprinkling of water through a sieve was presumed to 'make it' rain and performing sexual intercourse in a rice field encouraged the rice to 'seed,14. Most importantly, Freud argued, persons, plants and animals could be possessed by demons and spirits, and themselves were possessed of a freely-acting spirit. On this pretext, Freud concluded that,‘Animism is, in its narrow sense, the doctrine of souls, and,in its wider sense, the doctrine of spiritual beings in general’15.
Freud’s ‘General Characteristics of Obsessional Neurosis' enunciates the first principles, the primum mobilia, of neurotic thought. According to Freud, the patient uses obsessive ritual as ‘protective formulae’ against their delirium16. What we might term their ‘supersitions’ are, under Freud's observance, the ‘misapprehension’ or psychical ‘withdrawal of affect’ of cause and effect (and its necessary relation) by the patient's Unconscious Mind. In sum, Freud asserts - by psychoanalysis - that a possessed person’s thoughts are explicable: that is to say, comprehensible as constellations of their wishes and unconscious impulses, finally their pre-conscious mental associations. Moreover, obsessive patients are plagued by psychical 'doubt' and by the seeming 'omnipotence' of their evil wishes: wishes directed variously against spouse, family, even strangers. Freud argues that possessed and 'hysterical' patients are torn between contrary 'convictions'. This entails a 'split' between the patient's rational, conscious mind and their wish-fulfilling unconscious. Freud believes that possessed persons experience their repression of unconscious urges in their psychosomatic or peculiar, fantastic symptoms. As such, Freud claims that fear of 'demons' would give vent to 'unconscious fantasies', which must be discharged through psychoanalysis or the auto-suggestion ('auto-erotism') of ritual. Freud further maintains that patients delay their treatment by way of 'substitutive' acts. By such temporisation, they cling to their fantasies and 'distortions' of the obsessive impulse. As a consequence of this 'inhibition' and 'reaction-formation', thinking replaces action in the patient's psyche. The patient is unwell, yet the patient becomes comfortable with this ideation17.
'A True and Briefe' report of Mary Glover's possession suits the psychoanalytic paradigm of obsessive ritual, and Freud's theory of compulsive-neurotic thought. In an eye-witness testimony, we are told that Mary Glover's exorcism began with an elaborate rite of 'expiation'. In an act of 'purification', ten to twelve people gathered at her home in Themstreet to supplicate themselves before God, that He might grant 'comforte in his good time' to his 'handmaiden', Mary18. Moreover, the psychoanalytic 'undertone' of Mary Glover's exorcism is strong. In point of fact, the author of the pamphlet reiterated that the 'measure' of these rituals sacred and Mary Glover's deliverance was 'secondary' to the congregation's intention of securing God's glory19. Given the exorcism was performed for God's glory, the author asseverated that the procedure of exorcism had to follow 'in what manner measure it pleased him (Sic)’20.
Freud encapsulates this disposition ideally, in the following passage from 'Totem and Taboo'. The polarity between 'faith' doubt can serve as a template for Mary Glover's exorcism.
'As time goes on, the psychological accent shifts from the motives for the magical act on to the measures by which it is carried out - that is, on to the act itself. (It would perhaps be more correct to say that it is only these measures that reveal to the subject the excessive valuation which he attaches to his psychical acts). It thus comes to appear as though it is the magical act itself which, owing to its similarity with the desired result, alone determines the occurrence of that result. There is no opportunity at the stage of animistic thinking, for showing any objective evidence of the true state of affairs. But a possibility of doing so does arrive at a later time, when, though all of these procedures are still being carried out, the psychical phenomenon of doubt has begun to emerge as an expression of a tendency repression. At that point, men will be ready to admit that conjuring up spirits has no result unless it is accompanied faith, and that the magical power of prayer fails if there is no piety at work behind it. Cf. The King in Hamlet (III . 3):
'My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go’21.
Animated, thus, by the 'affective' symbols of totem and taboo - which signified to her the 'extrordinarie' presence of God - Glover struggled violently with the possessive force of Satan22. In his remarkable apologia for the priests who ministered, the author assures his readers that Mary Glover's spiritual battle had, in curious symmetry, all the markings of a 'physical' ordeal. We remark, therefore, that the young woman was paralysed completely on her left side; that she became blind, dumb and deaf; that had a distorted and gruesome visage; that she expectorated at priests and helpers; that she cried 'almost' or 'once more' whenever she felt the power of the Devil either increase or subside; that she had, previous to her exorcism, experienced fits at almost identical hours; that she could not consistently digest food; that she scowled and that she spoke in a bellowing, malevolent voice23.
In the light of its colourful 'symbolism', it repays to adopt Jung's method of dream-interpretation with regard to demonic possession24. A leader of the famous Zurich Europe , Jung ascertained a disassociation between our 'rational' world of conscious thought and the unconscious world of instinct. The 'psychic undertones' of demonic possession, Jung claimed, voiced our most personal needs. Through the 'subliminal' or visual logic of our' psyche, the Unconscious gave 'pictorial expression' to Man's primeval conflicts: the collective unconscious, or 'archetypes', of life and death, good and evi125:
In order to isolate the probable symptoms of 'hysteria' from actual demonic possession, Casaubon distinguishes between 'naturall' and 'supernaturall' enthusiasm26. As opposed to the capricious theatrics of 'natural' enthusiasm (in which hermits went into comas by slowing their breathing and women spoke in contrived dialects or unintelligible tongues), Casaubon's treatise maintained that supernatural enthusiasm was a 'concurrent' union of the Divine and Human will. Noting the disposition for impression and reception' of creative ideas among extraordinary and prophetic minds - in other words, the Poet or Prophet's "afflatus" - and the amazing 'natural unsensible emanations' between Man and his environment, Casaubon extolled the gifts of God revealed through human agency and the power of nature herself. In Casaubon's mind nature was the handmaiden of God and his spiritual, intellectual kingdom. On the basis of this natural 'wonder', Casaubon was ready to accept the existence of a deeper, unconscious Self; and of a sub-stratum, though he did not state such, to human experience. In allowing for Divine visitation through the 'miracles' of nature and human cognition, Casaubon links both the scientific empiricism of Freud and Jung's belief in 'mystical participation'.
Although published in 1656, the treatise of Meric Casaubon, D. D maintains a vital link with the twentieth century, by dint of Jung's 'philosophic' impressions regarding demonic inspiration. Reflecting articulately Jung's quasi-rationalist and spiritualist modes of thought, Casaubon quotes a plethora of medical tracts and authors, as well as learned classicists, (including Aristotle's 'Physic', Plato's 'Menon' and Hippocrates etc) in his analysis of possession. While Doctor Casaubon impugns Giraldus of Wales for his comments in the 'Itinerarium' concerning the power of magicians and 'merlins', Causabon also refers to Origen, Eusebius and the Patricians in admitting the possibility of possession among Christian peoples27. In this thorough treatise, despite his sometimes caustic commentary, Casaubon betrays a fascination with 'demonic' obsession: reporting the reported 'ecstasies' of the Trojan soothsayers, the magnificent dreams of Alexander the Great, the spiritual trances of Hermotimus Clazomenius, the 'divinity' of the ancient poet, Lucan and the 'enthusiastick divinations' and Christian revelations collated by Raphael Thorius of London during the Plague, 1603. The majority of alleged possessions, Casaubon attributes to the 'sympathy' and 'antipathy' of man's imagination and almost all female demonianism, to 'Woman's resolute obstinacy in point of suffering'. In this respect, Casaubon reflects the studied incredulity of Jung and science with respect to actual possession of the body by demons. In other respects, nonetheless, Casaubon is every bit as abstract as Jung, and every whit as curious. Indeed Casaubon quotes:
'I believe there is no part of the world, where any creatures be, that can be called God's creature's, from which God's providence, not generally only, but even particular, upon some extraordinary occasions, is excluded: But neverthelesse, as better understood, so much more to be seen, where God is worshipped as he (sic) ought to be. Farre be it therefore from me to doubt, much more to deny, but that some things in that kind among Christians may happen extraordinarily: though I am very confident, that as among Heathens, so among Christians, the matter is often mistaken, through grosse ignorance or superstition’28.
Casaubon was very curious, and also highly uncertain of the 'ecstas melancholica' or 'hysterica passione' of young women and possessed girls. Earlier in his treatise, Causabon had audaciously interpreted the episode concerning the man named legion in the New Testament as describing merely a syncope, or advanced faint. Asserting that there was undoubtedly imposture in certain of their gestures, Causaubon was nevertheless at a loss to describe the reasons behind the young women's more bizarre behaviour. Apart from the milder instance of fainting, this comprised speaking j foreign languages, sonambulism, exceptional volume in speech or physical strength and the putative divinity, or demonianism, of their condition. As a conservative worthy of the Church of England, Casaubon was, perforce, obliged to defend the bishopric and halls of learning from the 'pestilence' of heresy. In Casaubon's estimation, this included the 'Anabapticall' conspiracy, 'plague-rumour', oriental divination and remnants of Chaldean astrology (which he distinguished from astronomy), and any undermining of reason by false 'faith'. While Casaubon thus ascribed supernaturalism mostly to human perversity, he was ambivalent about the finer aetiology of hysteria, and possession29.
Jung's understanding of the exorcist 'myth' could provide a frE critical response to the medieval Christian 'Rituale Romanum’30 Once again, Jung holds that the power of exorcism emerges from 'hero myth' and its hero 'makers'. According to Jung and the Zurich
The rite of exorcism is contained in the celebrated Rituale Romanum of 1614 33. The author must make several cautionary points here. The Roman Rite, as it is translated, would not 'strictly' apply to Mary Glover's vexation, since she was a Protestant. Though her denomination is not identified in the eyewitness account, it is evident that Mary Glover belonged to the Church of England, given that the congregation wer, the Bishop's ecclesiastical permission or ordinance their exorcism of Satan. To complicate matters, hO1 Glover was clearly ministered to by recusant pries' controverted the divine authority of the established Church. These were the conventicleers targeted by Dr Causaubon. In the second place, the Rite is not a ‘sacrament' of the Catholic Church: one infers from the report into Mary Glover's possession, priests exercise ample discretion in the 'measures' of exorcism. The priest, however, must be of good character, have been delegated by his Ordinary to perform the rite, have first confessed his sins and said the 'Holy Sacrifice' of Mass.
The appalling appearance of Satan in the Rite and of Christ, the Holy Virgin, the Saints and the Devil in its text is echoed in Jung's writing. Along with the noxious, mephitic asp, adder, dragon and basilisk of the Rite's imagery, Jung signalled the 'nefarious' trends of our 'shadow' selves. Jung was convinced that the 'Ego' and the 'Shadow' _were antagonistic, and yet intimately joined, in the mar 'Thought' and 'Feeling'. Comparable to the Devil and Christ – the Son of Man - mankind exists in a state of change; of reciprocity. According to Jung, this conflagration of the 'Psyche’ (Soul) was engendered in a 'Battle
In Mary Glover's case, the 'animus' predictably sur Devil, who is an analogue for death, despair or des Jungian analysis, death often appears in women's dreams as a skeleton, a perfidious lover, a male witch or magic necromancer or an evil, preternatural king like Hades (who made Persephone 'Queen of the Damned'). Moreover, the negative animus, identically to Satan in the Rite, plays the role of 'robber and murderer'.
Ironically, however, the animus, whenever his warnings or prophesies are heeded, disburdens the Woman of her deepest 'convictions', in the process perfecting her 'self': this process is mirrored in the Rituale Romanum and Mary Glover's exorcism. In Jungian depth psychology, the Self is the 'nucleus', or deepest recess, of the Psyche. As in Mary Glover's exation, the Self motif is 'recurrently' referred to by Christian iconography, and is represented by Jungians as being 'built of stone'. In the Rite, for example, the Lord is designated as the 'Fortified Tower
In conclusion, leading Jungian, M L von Franz denotes, in general, the infernal 'figure' of the Devil or witch, confronted by the patient in possession and early modern thought34. Franz states that the shadow figure, in Jungian discourse, is the 'malefic' personification of a person's unconscious. In Jungian dream-motif, the patient has a positive ('benevolent') and a negative ('malefic') soul-image. The benevolent deity tends to appear, it must be stressed, whenever the patient's personality is 'differentiated' on the path to wisdom. Franz states that the Devil or witch is Humankind's 'deadly demon', or black symbol. The inverted 'shadow personality' of the Devil and the witch embody a threat to the emergence of Self, expressed in our masculinity/feminity, which threat is characterised by impotency, depression, and spiteful 'anima moods'. Axiomatic to our collective unconscious - our 'active imagination' - the shadow figure has posed historically as the 'poison damsel' , the Lorelei of Teutonic lore, the Queen of Night in Assyrian worship, Hecate or Hecuba, the Greek Sirens and Maenads, the genii or jin of Arabian legend, the evil father or stepmother and the 'Femme Fatale'. Franz admonishes that 'a bearable solution to such a drama can be found only if the anima is recognized as an inner power'. And, I hope, my adventure into psychoanalysis and early modern possession has accomplished this laborious task.
BIBILIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme as it is an Effect of Nature; But is Mistaken by Many for Either Divine Inspiration, or Diabolicall Possession; Reel 27, n 201, London, Printed by Roger Daniel, 1656.
A True and Briefe Report, of the Grievous Vexation by Satan, of Mary Glover Performed by Those Whose Names are Set Down on the Next Page; Reel 89, n 945, [by John Swan, Student in Divinity, London ?, SN, 1603.
Rituale Romanum, Editio Typica, 25 January 1952 .
SECONDARY SOURCES
Freud, Sigmund, Case Histories II: "Ra t Man", Schreber, "Wolf Man", Female Homosexuality, Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Great Britain, 1979.
Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, New York
Jung, Carl G (Ed), Man and His Symbols, Arkana , Spain
MISCELLANEOUS
Frazer, James George, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Macmillan Papermac, London
Gay, Peter, Freud: A Life for our Time, J M Dent & Sons Ltd, London
Kerr, John, A Most Dangerous Method: the Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein, Alfred A Knopf Inc, New York
Robbins, Rossell Hope, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft & Demonology, Crown Publishers, New York
Strickland, Bonnie (Ed), The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, Second Edition, Gale Group, USA
Treasury of World Masterpieces, Edgar Allen Poe: Complete and Unabridged, Octopus Books, Great Britain
1 Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, New York
2 Freud, Sigmund, Case Histories II: "Rat Man", Schreber, "Wolf Man", Female Homosexuality, Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading , Great Britain
3 A True and Briefe Report, of the Grievous Vexation by Satan, of Mary Glover ofThemstreet in London
Deliverauncefrom the Same, by the Power of the Lord Jesus, Blessinge his Own Ordinance of Prayer and Fastinge
4 Jung, Carl G (Ed), Man and His Symbols, Arkana , Spain
5 A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme as it is an Effect of Nature; But is Mistaken by Many for Either Divine Inspiration, or Diabolicall Possession; Reel 27, n 201, London, Printed by Roger Daniel, 1656.
6 Rituale Romanum, Editio Typica, 25 January 1952 .
7 Kerr, John, A Most Dangerous Method: the Story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina
Snip7rpin. nl_rprl n Knnn_ Tn0 Np_ Vnr_ laa_ ___ __- -- 1n en
1<> - :?; _:-
8 Op cit, n 2, pp 131-220.
9 Jung, Carl G (Ed), Man and His Symbols, Arkana , Spain
10 Extracted, Ibid, p 45.
II Ibid, pp 48-49.
12 Ibid, pp 69-75.
13 Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, New York
14 Ibid, pp 69-80, pp 100-10 1.
16 Freud, Sigmund, Case Histories II: "Rat Man", Schreber, "Wolf Man", Homosexuality, Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Great Britain, 1979,
pp 104-105 et passim.
17 Ibid, pp 101-128.
Female
18 A True and Briefe Report, of the Grievous Vexation by Satan, of Mary Glover Performed by Those Whose Names are Set Down on the Next Page; Reel 89, n 945, [by John Swan, Student in Divinity, London 7, SN, 1603, pp 4-6, also p
19 A True and Briefe Report, of the Grievous Vexation by Satan, of Mary Glover Performed by Those Whose Set Down on the Next Page; Reel 89, n 945, [by John Swan, Student in Divinity, London ?, SN, 1603, pp 11
20 Ibid, P 5.
21 21 Freud, Sigmund, Totem and Taboo: Some Poin ts of Agreemen t between tl Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, New Y, 1950, pp 105-6.
22 Op Cit, n 19, P 13, pp 14-63 passim.
23 Ibid.
24 Jung, Carl G (Ed), Man and His Symbols, Arkana , Spain
25 Ibid, pp 67-82.
26 A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme as it is an Effect of Nature; But is Mistaken by Many for Either Divine Inspiration, or Diabolicall Possession; Reel 27, n 201, London, Printed bv Roaer Daniel. lG_G. nn lll-l? p_ n___im
27 Ibid, pp 136-45. 281hirl n 1il
29 Ibid, pp 131-163 passim.
30 lung, Carl G (Ed), Man and His Symbols, Arkana , Spain
31 Ibid, pp 104-58.
32 Rituale Romanum, Editio Typica, 25 January 1952 .
33 Ibid
34 Ibid, pp 158-230.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)