Christ's Cat


"I read one of your recent blogs and you mentioned that you had a dream where you were observing yourself as a Native American.  Was this a recent dream? 
I had a dream about you this week.  You were giving me a massage and when I looked at you at one point during the body work session, you were a Native American.  You were wearing a loin cloth, your hair was dark and in long pony tails or braids, and you had a headband around your forehead with a feather in the band." (Karen)

The dream was some years ago.  There seems to be a Native American who shares my psyche with the professor and an entourage including a shop foreman, an old woman in an old fashioned wheelchair -- like a high-backed cane chair -- well, there's an entire Board of Directors that shows up at times. My next installment of "The Hypnotist" was going to be my relating my first encounter with this Native American energy in full persona. But your letter seemed so synchronous I thought I'd reply to it here prior to writing that one.

The Indian stuck with me because he was so vibrant and beautiful, and when I feel myself lose contact with him life begins to feel stale and sad.  I was feeling that way in the last couple of days, which is why it felt synchronous that he showed up in your dreaming.

You might wonder how I lose contact with him, and I do ask myself that question.   Why would you let a part of yourself you love drop off into the unconscious? It's because it's hard to hold the duality in consciousness without wanting to resolve it, which happens to be what I am reading about at the moment.

Being male, my thinking and sensation  functions tend to naturally dominate over feeling and intuition.   The expected configuration is two dominant and two non dominant, or inferior, functions. The most common masculine configuration is thinking and sensation as dominant.  

The word for left, in Latin, is from the same root as "sinister."  The feeling function isn't "right." Reason rejects it as unreasonable, which of course it is. It knows things by their quality of vibration, and knows them instantly and without thinking about it.  The masculine reason is always "right."  As our current leader puts it, "I know how to tell good from evil."  That's the same thing as saying "I know my right hand from my left,"  or, "Turn it upside down and see what it is."

This is an unconscious inflation of the masculine ego. It tends to reject what is not like itself as inferior, which is quite correct. But the inferiority is in one's own undeveloped and probably unconscious functions, projected outward onto those in whom those functions are dominant. When you get this, then it is totally logical that the "rightist" opposes what is feminine, which in society, as in a family, is communal care of children, old people, education, health care, etc.

Maybe a good historical example of the demonizing of the feminine can be found in observing the persona of the witch. One of her characteristics in fairy tales is poor eyesight and a keen sense of smell.  The sense of smell would indicate the intuitive function.  Seeing clearly would indicate a practical, realistic approach, or extroverted sensation function, typically masculine.  It doesn't take a genius to begin to see the witch as a projection of a man's inferior functions, projected onto women who are not under masculine control.

The same projection goes onto the cat, especially the black cat.

Here is a quote from Marie Louise von Franz from the page I was reading before I starting answering your letter:

"In Christian times in Aix-enj-Provence on the festival of Corpus Christi, a cat was ceremonially burned as an analogy for Christ. It was thought that at the time Christ was born, a cat gave birth in the same stall. Thus the female cat became parallel to Christ himself, something like his animal shadow." (pg. 125)

One of my favorite stories, and one my daughter loved when she was little, was, "The Boy Who Drew Cats." It cleverly demonstrates the power the boy achieves upon integrating the inferior functions.

It was interesting that you were listening to the tape of Brugh talking about the four functions at the time you received my email regarding them as the four points of the Mandala, and the center as the Self, or godhead, which is outside time.  He said it's not possible to be fully  conscious, or developed,  in all four functions, only in three.  I have no way of knowing how he comes to that conclusion, what his terms are, etc.  I'm sure in the context he thinks of it, it is accurate.  I might think of it in a different context.

The major theme of this book, "Archetypal Dimensions of the Psyche," is that we are headed for certain destruction if we do not reach a critical mass of individuals who can evolve past the one-sidedness of current social and religious thought.  To do this requires connecting back to the deity as one who reconciles opposites. One of my favorite depictions of the problem is in the South Park Movie, "Bigger, Longer and Uncut," where the devil sings about how he longs to be allowed to come back to the surface and be integrated into the upper world (collective consciousness).




When unconscious content is at the threshold of consciousness it appears as two, such as  "Jupiter-Mercury." The trickster embodied in "Khidr-Elijah," for example, is necessary to counterbalance the humorless and often murderous nature of Yahweh and Allah.   It's not hard to see what you get when Allah in the Arab lands and Yahweh in the Jewish lands lose their shadow!  Mass murder follows.   It probably doesn't matter, as the bees are dying now, and Einstein predicted a life of four years for humans on earth following that event.

Not long ago I wrote about an ancient deity named Ares Dionysus, "an age old god from the beginning of time."  Ares is the Greek God of War while Dionysus is a God ruling the theater, wine and, in general, drugs, sex and rock and roll.

The two together combine opposites, and thus can exist in the center of the mandala instead of causing mayhem by being separated, as they are in Shakespeare's Richard III, where Richard's dark musing reminds one of Bush reflecting on the despised Clinton:

Now is the winter of our discontent
    Made glorious summer by this son of York;
    And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
    In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
    Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
    Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
    Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
    Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
    Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;
    And now, instead of mounting barded steeds
    To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
    He capers nimbly in a lady's chamber
    To the lascivious pleasing of a lute. 

Jupiter is dark and filled with laws and Mercury is a trickster.  But they are resolved in the figure of "Jupiter-Mercury." This in contemporary psychology is the Senex-Puer, which is discussed in another of von Franz's books, "The Problem of the Puer Aeternus."

Okay, the professor is rambling and there's always more background to cover.  I have purchased a loincloth and black wig for my new business model, "Chief Dan's Magic Hands," which replaces, "Old Bald-Headed Body-Worker." I could not, unfortunately, purchase a buff young body without getting into a moral conundrum.

Posted: Fri - March 30, 2007 at 02:51 PM