The
following essay was originally published (in a slightly different form) in the June, 1996 issue of M.E.N. Magazine.
The image of Father stands like
a mountain, shrouded in thunder, on the landscape of the human heart. It is a
marker that demands our attention. If we are to pierce the clouds and
understand our position, or place in the great scheme of things, then we must
refer to those landmarks that reveal our location. The Father as one such
landmark is obscured by the storms of anger and shame, that make it impossible
to see him all at once.
A sense of location, or locus
[appointed place] is the primary
step into trustworthiness and so into community. When we have "location"
we are centered, or grounded. Now we know, and others can know "where we
stand." It is the purpose of tradition, religion, myth, art, and now
psychology, to create a map of those sacred and trustworthy landmarks by which
to take our bearings.
With a proper sense of location
our thoughts and actions are oriented to the divine forces that surround us. If
we work from a false map, or a half-map, we live with a feeling of
disorientation; we feel "dis-located." In order to heal the Father in
our selves, and restore his values to the culture, we must recover that portion
of His divinity which has broken away and is no longer visible in the culture. We
can never have an accurate sense of self-location until we see an accurate and
trusted image of the divine masculine standing on the horizon of our world. We,
as individuals, families, and communities will never enjoy the resources and
gifts of a mature masculinity, until we find the "Other Father" and
learn his ways.
Men are made by the tempering
of repeated exposure to extremes [fire to water and back again]. This is the
initiatory cycle of Nature: birth, initiation, consummation, death, and
resurrection. It can be understood as the Dance of the Father-God away from,
and back again to, the Goddess: the Dance of Life and Death. The Father we seek
is the Initiator and Guardian of these rites. He is the "other side"
of the masculine that we have lost. He is the Earth-Father: the Wild, Ecstatic,
Wounded, Dancing, Singing, Phallic, Father of Nature.
Long ago we began to
misunderstand his Dance as a kind of dead-end; a tyranny of hopeless
repetition. We learned to reject the Earth and turned for salvation to an
Omnipotent Heavenly-Masculine: free of the feminine, and free of the earth. This
broken, half-image of masculinity has deprived us of the Nurturing Masculine
and cut us off from his Beloved [Goddess] "The Soul of the World." For
when we choose the Monocracy of the Heavenly-Father we must deny all divinity
to the feminine and to her consort the Earth-Father.
If it is true that there is a
Natural counterpart, a twin brother, to the Heavenly Father, and that we have
destroyed our connection with him, then it is also true that we have lost those
parts of the human father most related to his Divine and life-giving Nature.
The move away from Nature is
the move toward control, intellect and Reason. In the struggle to escape death
our culture has chosen to sanctify the One-God of "the Rational-Mind"
the Religion of Scientific Materialism. But the concrete landmarks of "Scientific
Reductionism," which reduce matter [mater, mother] to so much dead stuff,
do not ring true to the body and the soul; as seen in the following:
There is no life, truth,
substance, nor intelligence in matter. All is infinite mind, and its infinite
manifestation, for God is all in all. Spirit is immortal truth; matter is
mortal error. Spirit is real, and eternal; matter is unreal and temporal. . .
--Christian Science
Prayer
We long
to redeem the Poetic [mythopoeic intelligence] of the Ritual-Mind, that is, the
Dancing Mind of the Earth Father.
The Ritual-Mind has its style
of thought and perception: it can hold, in tension, the contradictions and
paradoxes of Life and Death: as Mystery. And Mystery is reality to the Ritual-Mind--because the ritual and
myth include the body, which includes desire and death. The rigidly Rational-Father,
however, has no respect for the ways and intentions of ritual and myth, and so
today, body and soul must find a sideways expression: through the Shadow. Thus
the heart is split: The Rational Father sits, high in his tower of glass and
steel, deciding things for those below. He is remote, indifferent,
dispassionate, and inhuman.
The Earth Father has fallen: the
poet and the priest are now eccentrics; work in the arts is not "real work";
romance is illusion; the work of our hands, working the earth, is both mundane
and uncouth. At best we are made to feel a certain embarrassment or even shame
with regard to the expressions of the Ritual-Mind. At worst the repressed
energy of the Earth Father seeps out as obsession, perversion, addiction, and
violence.
The Father of the Heavenly
Throne has driven his Dancing Brother down and out into the infernal realms of
the underworld. There he is bound-up with all the devils and monsters of our
most terror filled dreams. The Omnipotent Masculine has claimed all divinity,
all dominion to Himself:
[Man] is divine not in his
single person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing
Year he is always jealous of his weird, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year and
vice-versa; he cannot be both at once except by an intellectual effort that
destroys his humanity. . .
--Robert Graves The White Goddess
"Intellectual
effort," the great road of infinite progress in Western culture, cannot
afford to look both ways at once. The dark lunar god of the waning year is
conquered and exiled, and we would have eternal daylight, endless civilization--our
"twinhood" and so our "divinity" is lost.
Holding the energies of the two
fathers at once looks like madness to the rational world--it cannot be done by
intellect. Only myth and ritual has the capacity to handle such existential ambivalence.
Our expectations, ambitions, and prejudices are formed by, and founded on the Cartesian
premise: "I think therefore I am." This slogan has been raised up in
every camp, from religion, to politics--even among poets--as Robert Bly has
written: "The father poets, like Pope, try to find a substitute for the
Ecstatic Mother inside male consciousness; their poems have excitement but no
ecstasy. However, they live a long time."
So, maybe we live longer, but
as Rilke asks: 'When however are we really alive[?]"
We are ill, the culture is ill,
our families and communities are ill as a result of the constant and repeated
murder of our "Instinctive Nature." The medicine we desperately need
is in the hands of the Dancing Father, the Wild Father, who would call the
Goddess to a full return; only he can throw down the monocracy and dethrone the
Rational-Mind long enough to initiate us into the living Mystery.
There are Three Rivers in the
heart, Three Rivers of consciousness and being that make the cosmos: the Red,
the Black, and the White. The White Culture, with our White King in The White
House, has chosen to sanctify only the White stream of consciousness. While the
Red and the Black spill in the gutters, into the sewers, the culture bleeds to
death becoming a pure white corpse.
Novalis tells us that "the
Seat of the Soul is where the inner world and the outer world meet and permeate
each other. . ." and Rilke
says "a man is split, and where two roads intersect inside us no one
has built the Singer's Temple. . ." Where spirit and flesh, intellect and instinct, interpenetrate,
commingle, and commune, at the crossroads of the soul, in the human heart we
must build a Temple to the Wild Singer: the one who howls at the moon, the fertile
one, the expressive one; there, between the worlds, a Temple of the Dancing
Father and his Beloved.
Kokopelli is the phallic,
humpback, flute-playing deity of the Americas. His flute and his phallus are
one, combining heaven and earth in the fruitfulness of art and love. Can we
begin to imagine the qualities of Fertility, Artistry, and Woundedness, as
combined in the image of Kokopelli, to be Divine? That is our task and the
Rational-World will do everything in its power to hinder us.
Robert Bly has suggested "a
practical way to heal [this] wound; it involves imaginative labor, and that
labor cannot be done by the collective. Each person has to do it alone." And
so, in recovering the lost Father we will oppose the great "Intellectual
Effort" with an "Imaginative Labor." It is certainly already
begun; men and women throughout the West are endeavoring to recover the sacred
in our daily lives, in our work, and our environment. If we are to succeed in
pushing the inner-world over the boundaries of the outer-world, to form a
little pocket of sacred space, we must first redeem the divinity of the Red and
Black sides of the humanity. We must find it in our hearts to admit the "Other
Father" back to his rightful place. To be "really alive" we must
have both Fathers, Above and Below,
together in our hearts, weaving the Dance of Life and Death; waxing and waning;
the Seasons, the wilderness, the rhythm, and the heart-beat of the Earth.