THE ARK: THE TRANSIT FROM CHAOS TO ORDER
We live in a time of disaster. In the past few years images
of sudden, violent destruction have filled our television screens and
newspapers. Nature and the hand of man have both been active to bring about destruction
and ruin. There have also been the more constant images of war and famine, and
the ravages of disease. In the background there is the ominous threat of
ecological disaster, depletion of the ozone layer, universal pollution of the
waters and the skies, the melting of the Arctic ice, global warming, the loss
of species of flora and fauna, the destruction of the natural world. Some say
the end times are near, the time of the Apocalypse, and even work to bring it
about. The question of survival is posed to us, and it seems to be a question
of the survival of the planet itself and of humanity as a whole.
How then do we live in the face of disaster? What power
prepares us for the onward rush of destructive forces, what power preserves us
as they strike, what regenerates us as we emerge from their deadly grip? These
questions have troubled humans from the earliest times. The fragility of life,
together with the possibility of its total obliteration has been evident to
people of many cultures throughout history. The theme of a great flood which
destroys all but a small remnant of humanity is almost universal. On the
individual level, the survival of a helpless infant who is consigned to the
waters in a little container, and who thereby survives an imminent threat to
its life, is a universal theme of myth and story.
The earliest such story dates from about 2300 B.C. It tells
of Sargon, one of the founding kings of the Mesopotamian region. In an early
text, he himself tells his history:
My
mother was a priestess. I do not know my father. The priestess, my mother,
conceived me and gave birth to me in hiding. She placed me in a basket made of
reeds and closed the lid with pitch. She put the basket in the river which was
not high. The river carried me away and brought me to Akki who was a man
responsible for libations. Akki looked upon me with kindness and drew me from
the river. He adopted me as his child and brought me up. He made me his
gardener. It was while I was his gardener that the goddess Ishtar loved me.
Then I became king.
This brief summary, one that characterises the trajectory of
the hero’s life, and that is found repeated many times in subsequent centuries,
includes several standard motifs. The unusual circumstances of the birth, a
birth that is forbidden, and the threat to the newborn infant: these are
seemingly the necessary preconditions out of which the hero must evolve. The
lesson is that a comfortable, safe existence cannot promote that creative leap
in the psyche that the hero represents. From his very first moment of life, the
hero is a survivor. He is an expression of the life force that, in hidden and
secret ways, withstands the lethal restrictions of the collective, and
ultimately transcends them.
The basket made of reeds is suggestive of a very early stage
of the development of human consciousness. Inhabiting the shores of the great
rivers, humans learnt the many properties of the reeds that grew along the
river banks, properties that have themselves become inherent in human consciousness
itself. The strange, unearthly whispering of the reed-beds, even on a still
day, has always suggested voices that utter secret things. What better way to
express the ever-present ambience of the unconscious, uttering its secrets in
an unfamiliar tongue. The many uses that
have been found for the reed- from arrows to pens, from measuring-rods to music
pipes- all have meant an increase and amplification of consciousness. It has
been used for many forms of construction, particularly the wattles used for walls,
fences and roofs, out of which the first houses were built. Reeds can be woven
into containers, such as boxes and baskets, and they can provide a covering for
human habitation in the form of thatch. The reed basket, then, represents the
response of human consciousness to need. It is the product of human invention,
inspired by an intuition that hears the whisper from the unconscious. This
response of the psyche expresses itself in the form of human technology.
There is a complex of ancient words that relate to the Greek
word techne, the root of the word
technology. In Greek we have two related words: techne, meaning a craft or manual skill, and the word tekton, a builder or carpenter. In Latin
we get the words tegere, to cover,
and texere, to weave. Technology is
the art that the reeds have taught us. Weaving is a fundamental technology for
the conservation and promotion of human culture. It is the art of building,
constructing, covering. It corresponds to one of the basic energies of the
psyche, the centripetal force that draws things together in order to promote
and conserve life. It is a function of the psyche that responds to the
inevitable entropic energies of life itself, holding out a hope that something
will endure, as things threaten to fall apart. This primal energy corresponds
to Eros, the Eros of the Orphics, who believed that he was the first to arise
from Chaos and create the world.
The container of woven reeds on its own cannot endure. It is
a product of the ephemeral world, the vegetable world that grows up and
perishes in its yearly cycle. Some other substance fundamental to the survival
of life is one which can resist the destructive, disintegrating effect of the
world of matter, which the element of water typifies. In a world mostly made of
water, in a body similarly composed, we are constantly aware of the forces of
decomposition. In the earliest historical times, humans discovered an element
that miraculously defied the power of water. Pitch or tar has been used from
time immemorial to make vessels watertight. It also created a seal, to preserve
things, to close up containers, to keep things secret and intact. Pitch can
come from either mineral or vegetable sources. It binds and closes and seals,
as though human ingenuity had found in nature itself a way to heal what is open
and vulnerable, and to make the ephemeral endure.
With reeds and pitch Sargon’s mother creates a sealed vessel,
setting it afloat on the waters, consigning the infant to the rhythms, laws and
directions of nature itself. In a world where the threatening, destructive,
forces arise from the human realm itself, it is only by relying absolutely on
Nature that we can find a way to survive. In fact, this mother creates a second
womb for her infant son, from which he will be regenerated, with a new
identity, a new destiny.
The element of trust involved in this reliance on the
energies of the natural psyche, on the unconscious, is no small accomplishment.
Human consciousness has an irreplaceable part to play here. It is a great
achievement for the human ego to resign itself to the power of the Self, the
immortal Other, here represented by the River waters. It also has to invent, to
create technology, in order to initiate some change. Once the conscious ego has
built its little craft, the unconscious responds, conserving and preserving the
new life, until such time as it is viable. This auspicious time is represented
in our story by the appearance of Akki, the man ‘responsible for libations.’
This suggests a man open to the gods and the spiritual realm, in contrast to
the waters of the material world. Even more significant, says Sargon, ‘he
looked upon me with kindness.’ This response represents the capacity of the
human being for empathy, an aspect of the feeling function. It is this function
par excellence that acts as a conserver and preserver of life. It is the social
function of consciousness. It stands for the altruism of humanity, an aspect
that belies the theory of the selfish gene.
The little sealed vessel, then, together with its discovery
on the river waters, represents a combination of the powers of the mind and the
heart, or as we might put it, the powers of the thinking and feeling functions.
The manufacturing of the vessel reminds us of the immense importance of the artefact in the development of the human
mind. Whether it be the stone hand-axe, the steel sword, the wheel, or the
computer, man the inventor, or homo faber,
has transcended the purely natural state, and been able to construct something
that outlasts his mortal span of life. The human being has, through
imagination, intelligence, and the influence of the heart, been able to achieve
a certain kind of constancy within the changing stream of time. The artefact
endures, even when the hand that fashioned it, and the mind that devised it,
are no more. The artefact has the ability to preserve and in this way,
transform life. The structures that withstand Time and its relentless flow are
human creative achievements, the products of human culture.
It is the constant, miraculous reality of human life, that
from the most unpromising and inimical conditions, the human spirit reaches
beyond itself, given the minimum of positive care and concern. It is because of
this unexpected turn of Fate that Sargon eventually attains the kingship,
despite not knowing his father, and despite the abandonment by his mother. We
can only imagine the conditions inside the little dark, sealed vessel as it is
borne along on the waters of the river. Its voyage is a night-sea-journey which
transforms the child within. The little craft is carried at the will of the
flowing waters. Yet, like the seed that is carried far from its tree, all the
elements of its future achievements are contained there, preserved until the
conditions are propitious and nurturing for its growth.
The story of Moses occurs much later than that of Sargon. It
comes with more specific detail of the threat to the newborn. The Pharaoh’s
edict was that all new-born boys of the Jews be thrown into the river, to
prevent their population multiplying. But when the mother of Moses had given
birth, she managed to conceal him for three months.
When she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket for him;
coating it with bitumen and pitch, she put the child inside and laid it among
the reeds at the River’s edge.
When Pharaoh’s daughter comes to the river to bathe, she
discovers the infant and. feeling sorry for him, she adopts him as her son.
Moses’ sister suggests a wet-nurse for him and brings his own mother for the
task. Unlike Sargon, Moses has the care
and attention of his mother during his childhood. The name Moses was given to
him by the Pharaoh’s daughter, because, she said, ‘I drew him out of the
water’. This is the Hebrew interpretation; however, the name Moses is found in
Egyptian, and its meaning there seems to be something like “water-child”, which
is appropriate, as he is one reborn from the waters.
The Egyptian setting immediately conjures up several related
images from that mythology. The infant Horus is often portrayed sitting on a
lotus-cradle, with his thumb in his mouth. Threatened with death by his evil
uncle Seth, he was protected while still an infant by his mother Isis in the
papyrus swamps of the Nile Delta. The image of ‘Horus who is upon his papyrus plants’ stood for a reversal of
fortune, inasmuch as Horus, from being hidden behind the papyrus, in time
becomes king of Egypt. The heavenly
boat in which Ra is depicted sailing across the heavens after leaving the
underworld is a boat made of papyrus. The reeds in which the infant Moses is
placed suggest the Field of Reeds of the Egyptian underworld, the place of
perpetual spring where Osiris rules, just below the Western Horizon. It is
therefore, the place of rebirth. It was the custom in Egypt to place little
boats with images of Horus in the river, a ritual similar to that in Phoenicia,
where the figure was that of the young Adonis, reborn every springtime. In this
way the annual reappearance of the dying and resurrecting vegetation-god was
celebrated.
The symbolism of Moses cast on the waters of the Nile, with
its association with Horus, is an indication of the heroic, if not god-like,
destiny which lay ahead of the infant. As one twice-born, he embodies an heroic
ideal, divorced as he was from the ordinary fate of humanity by being cast into
the waters. As with Horus, Moses was to become the leader of his people,
leading them from darkness into light. It seems to be a rule of the psyche that
only by an immersion in the lethal waters, and a subjection to the forces of
chaos and dissolution, can the person attain an heroic destiny.
We can hardly discuss the Egyptian parallels without
mentioning the greatest of all their myths which mentions a chest cast on the
waters, namely, the story of Osiris. His brother Seth, whom we’ve already met,
conspired against him, tricking him to get into a specially made chest, locking
him in and then throwing it into the Nile .
From there it floated to the coast of Syria Byblos Egypt Nile act as the regenerative forces that
restore the dead to life. It is a typical vegetation myth, similar those of
Adonis and Tammuz.
We find again the motif of the chest cast into the waters in
the Greek myth of Perseus. In a further development away from the story of
Moses, this myth tells how the infant Perseus is thrown into a chest together
with his mother Danae, by her father Acrisius. The oracle at Delphi
had prophesied to him that he would be killed by any son she might have. Having
in vain tried to prevent that eventuality, he had them both thrown into the
sea. The further Fate of Perseus follows from this event: they are rescued by a
poor fisherman called Dictys, whose brother Polydectes ruled the island where
they drifted ashore. It is this ruler, through his wish to have Perseus
eliminated so that he can marry Danae, who sends Perseus on his heroic task to
slay the Gorgon Medusa, whose very gaze would kill a man by turning him into
stone.
In this story, the maternal aspect is underlined, by having
Danae herself shut in with the infant. It may be that the heroic endeavour
Perseus has eventually to perform- the confrontation with the terrifying
Medusa- can only be undertaken by one who is both abandoned and attended by the
care of the good mother. As the father of Perseus is father Zeus himself, this
power, too, preserves the infant on the waters. He is the spiritual or sky
father, opposed to the dark realm of the earthly waters, whose power Medusa
also represents. She is the force of chaos, the personification of a deadly
Fate, which the hero has to overcome.
The special nature of this child who will have an unusual
destiny is already prefigured at birth, as we have seen quite clearly in the
cases above. All are born into circumstances that already circumscribe their
futures. This natal destiny is clearly shown in the Grimm Fairy Tale called The Devil With The Three Golden Hairs.
It opens quite dramatically:
There was once a poor woman who gave birth to a little son; and as he
came into the world with a caul on, it was predicted that in his fourteenth
year he would have the King’s daughter for his wife.
The King, naturally, when he heard the story, was not well
pleased. Having purchased the infant, he took him away in a box, which he threw
into a ‘deep piece of water’.
The box, however, did not sink, but floated like a boat, and not a drop
of water made its way into it. And it floated to within two miles of the King’s
chief city, where there was a mill…
The miller and his wife gladly took him in as they had no
children, and they said: ‘God has given him to us’. As he is a ‘child of good
fortune,’ this is the first of his lucky escapes from death. Like Perseus,
eventually he has to undertake an almost impossible, a death-dealing, task. He
has to get three golden hairs from the head of the devil, the Lord of the Underworld
himself.
This young man had been already singled out at birth for his
unusual and sinister enterprise. Being born with a caul was considered to be
very lucky, in itself a kind of personal ark in which the infant made its way
through the waters of birth and the birth canal. Sailors paid big money for a
preserved caul, as it was guaranteed to save a person from drowning. Such an
infant might live through traumas which might overcome others, and as an adult
might penetrate the darkest dangers and survive. Our young man not only escapes
the threat of robbers, but benefits from their actions. He goes down into hell
itself and manages to avoid being devoured by the devil. This is because he
wins the devil’s grandmother to his side. The Great Mother herself, Mother
Nature, cannot deny him, as it is she who has endowed him with the caul in the
first place.
How then can we view these stories from a psychological point
of view? What insight can they give us into how we survive in the face of
catastrophe and disaster? We can approach them in several ways. First, they
present us with a myth of how the human ego first arose from the dark waters of
the unconscious. This is the phylogenetic or collective aspect. From the
perspective of the emerged ego, there is only amnesia for the state which
preceded it. Whatever that may have been, it was part of the natural world, of
wind and waters, a place now dreaded as chaos. The original chaos is the place
of disaster itself; or rather, every disaster re-presents itself in the form of
the original chaos, as we shall see even more clearly in the stories of the
universal flood. To help us endure disaster, the psyche, in the guise of the
story of the infant abandoned on the waters, offers us a poignant and powerful
image of survival: the weakest and most vulnerable, innocence itself, rescued
from chaos.
The stories of Sargon and Moses illustrate quite well the
conditions in which the human ego first emerged from the waters of the
unconscious, and which is repeated in the history of each individual’s life.
The human ego is a ‘technological’ product of the psyche, its greatest miracle.
It is something woven, from the basic material of the vegetative psyche, but it
has also a permanent quality, that outlasts the erosions of Time. What is it
that gives this fixed quality, that endures in the changing stream?
I am reminded her of how Jung describes the ego in the
Tavistock Lectures. Here is what he says:
The ego is a complex datum which is constituted first of all by a general
awareness of your body, of your existence, and secondly by your memory data:
you have a certain idea of having been, a long series of memories, Those two
are the main constituents of what we call the ego.
The bodily awareness is like the woven basket; the memory is
like the pitch that makes it endure. The construction of the little ark by the
mother can be seen as the fabrication of the ego, initiated by Mother Nature
herself, in order to withstand the vicissitudes of the material world. The
lesson of our myths and stories would seem to be that Nature itself contrived
the human ego as a method of survival, in the face of whatever disaster might
befall.
The second way we might interpret these stories is to see
them as paradigms of how the psyche responds to traumatic events in early
childhood. Fate already surrounds us at our birth. It is a web woven out of the
conscious and unconscious inheritance of the people and the family into which
we were born. This net of collective fate is so strong it may bind us for all
of our lifetime. When trauma happens in childhood, of whatever kind, we are cast
out of that collective and into our individual fate. The little box or ark
becomes the carrier of that individual pattern for our lives, and with luck, we
may change our fate into a destiny, as our heroes above do. It is the one
destined to be the culture-hero, or founding-ancestor, who most especially
belongs to the category of the twice-born.
The ark offers us a fitting image for the survival of trauma
experienced in early childhood, before the ego has developed. The miracle
experienced daily in therapy is how varied are the methods the psyche develops
in order to survive trauma, and to preserve the integrity of the soul. On a
personal, psychological level, the ark can stand for all those structures that
intervene in a situation of distress, catastrophe and trauma, and help the
individual survive. From Freud on, we have had descriptions of these structural
adaptations. Whether we call them defences, or the False Self, or complexes, or
the emergency ego, the psyche hides itself, within its arks, its own artefacts,
where it rides out the forces of chaos.
These protective coverings may manifest as amnesia or as
neurotic defences; they may manifest as addictions or neuroses; they may indeed
take on any form the psyche needs in its distress. All our talents, skills,
aptitudes, even our habits and pastimes can be woven into a protective layer.
As Donald Kalsched suggests, in his book The
Inner World of Trauma, it is the wisdom of the Self that protects and
preserves the infant psyche. It is an aspect of Nature herself that installs
these saving structures. Contained within, as in an ark, the psyche is enabled
to grow until the time it can leave its protection, and dispense with its
life-preserving aspect. The ark represents the providential aspect of the Self,
that archetypal blueprint which comes with us into the world, and which upholds
the survival of the psyche in the face of the most daunting circumstances.
It is clear in all our examples that the Maternal Feminine is
involved in the survival of the infant. It is mostly She who entrusts the child
to the waters, which are her own realm; it is She who enables its survival
there. He (for in our examples it is surely he) has to be harshly initiated
into the death-dealing waters of nature itself, in order to be born into the
high destiny that awaits him. This phase of the process of initiation which the
infant is undergoing is under the auspices of the Great Mother. She both casts
him out and preserves him.
The waters of the river or the sea, into which the infant is
cast, to whose erratic rhythms they are subject, and from which they are
eventually rescued, are symbolic of the waters of chaos and death. Every
childhood trauma is such an encounter with chaos, as the child is thrown out of
the known into the unknown. The effect of trauma or disaster is disunity and
dismemberment. The child is disconnected from a sense of continuity on many
levels, of time, place and society. On the surface of the waters, they are cut
off from heaven and earth, above and below, past and future. They are cut off
from their origins, from their roots, from the natural bonds in their society.
They do not belong in the ordinary sense; or rather they belong, not to the
human realm, but to that of Nature itself. It is She who will dictate their
Fate henceforth. This sense of isolation, which survivors of childhood trauma
describe so well, precipitates the individual into a liminal space, cut off
from social bonds.
The element of secrecy is central to the symbolism of the
ark. This is not only to be seen in the fact that the infant is usually born in
secret and hidden ways, a birth that is forbidden by the collective. The lowly,
hidden origins of the child are also emphasised. The ark in itself embodies
this element of the hidden or secret. The alchemists understood this aspect
well. The ark is the symbol of individuation, the vessel through which the
individual is preserved and resurrected. It has to be sealed up, as though to
keep secret the process that preserves and transforms the life within. In the
end, the ark is our little temporary dwelling that protects us as we make our
way towards our ultimate destined Home, at the end of our long voyage.
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