In our psyche, especially in the unconscious, time is not only marked by numerically measurable intervals, like those of a chronometer, nor by cause and effect relationships, but also by many qualitative moments that reverberate with each other with own rhythms.
di Alessandro Mazzi
article originally published on The Indiscreet
cover: Max Ernst, “Birth of a Galaxy”, 1969
«High my spirit yearned, but love / He brought it back; the more powerful the pain bends; /so I walk the arch / of life and I go back where I came from»
Friedrich Holderlin, Course of life (first draft).
«I left boy, aged return, / with unchanged accent, but gray. / The children laugh / coming around me: / where does this stranger come from?»
He Zhizhang, Return to the native country.
«And when I traveled within the soul I saw only Luna / until revealed was all of the manifestation / eternal the mystery! / The nine circles of the sky were immersed in that moon, / and the boat of my being was all in that hidden sea»
Gialal ad-Din Rumi, Mystical Poems.
In the introduction chronospheres, I described how human existence does not experience spacetime only as something shapeless, but brings it back to dynamic geometry-symbologies that we project inside and outside of us through spherical and spiral-shaped images. We live in chronospheres, that is, in physical realities and psychic experiences that repeatedly intersect with each other, overlapping like circles in the water, cutting our lives into images that resonate together in space and time. The purpose of the chronospheres is to offer a flexible existential horizon for the human condition after the postmodern.
Philosophers such as T. Morton and E. Thacker, writes C. Kulesko, relate to reality through monstrous geophilosophies and disturbing objects, from which we are unable to distance ourselves. Between ecological disasters and awareness of the irrational nature of reality, man seems to have lost every possibility of being in the world. If for Thacker the world is unthinkable, it does not mean that it is closed to us, but that until now we have based ourselves on ways of being and inadequate perspectives. Transforming symbols means transforming the relationship with the world, because Lacan says in his Seminar II (1954-55), "we have no other means of learning this real - on all levels, and not only on that of knowledge - if not thanks to the intermediary of the symbolic". The soul of the world does not allow the end, but the transition.
The philosopher M. Ghilardi defines the way we think and experience time through chronograph, which means arranging the facts in chronological and historical order: from an early age we are taught to talk about past, present and future, about chronological time, about instants and events with measurable durations, as if they all unfolded in one direction. Ghilardi recalls that we shape our temporal experiences with the language we use. Language, be it artistic, mathematical or otherwise, is the chronosphere in which we live. Chinese and Japanese, for example, do not conjugate verbs, they do not properly have past, present or future. Conscience, however, to resume E. Cassirer in his Philosophy of symbolic forms (1923), although he struggles to represent time in language, he has the natural ability to translate these experiences into symbolic forms. A moment unfolds in a crystal ball that we caress in the hand, perfectly accomplished, although it resonates with eternity. Sing W. Blake:
«See the world in a grain of sand,
and a paradise in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour»
Talking about spacetime in our interior life requires abandoning a language that distinguishes three different times arranged in a linear and progressive sequence (first the past, then the present and finally the future). In our psyche, especially in the unconscious, time is not only marked by numerically measurable intervals, like those of a chronometer, nor by cause and effect relationships, but also by many qualitative moments that reverberate with each other with own rhythms. In this essay we will see how the soul is born, and how the origin from the mother joins the round beating of the celestial rhythms. These experiences form the basic symbology of the movements of our interiority, stretched between different temporalities lived mythically and ritually in the peak experiences of our life.
Before Time: matriarchal chronospheres
«A spark out of the fire, a drop out of the sea: / what are you, man, without your return?»
silesius, The cherubic pilgrim.
The anthropologist M. Augé identifies from the beginning the temporal paradox of birth and death. In What happened to the future? (2009) says, "The first paradox of time is inherent in the awareness that everyone has of living in a time that preceded his birth and that will continue after his death." Our life is a round punctuated by the two great extremes of what was before the coming into the world and what will be after death, the poles where human existence returns with a circle to itself. In this interlude, as the poets Hölderlin and He Zhizhang write, the arc of life stands out, which returns to itself transformed once our time in earthly existence is completed.
Parallel to Augé, in the trilogy balls (1998, 1999, 2004) P. Sloterdijk finds the first circular space that we all inhabit in the mother's womb. Together with his colleague T. Macho, Sloterdijk reformulates Freudian psychoanalysis by shifting the biographical axis from childhood impressions to prenatal gestation. The mother's body is the environment where the first somatic proto-perceptions are imprinted in our unconscious psyche, what A. Damasio calls the original self, of a marshy, humid, chthonic space-time, beyond all measure.. Descending into the unmentionable of mysticism, "there is no other path," says Sloterdijk, "other than that consisting in starting with one's own black monochrome. When dealing with the latter, one immediately understands that life is deeper than autobiography ».
Prenatal psychoanalysis took root from the work of O. Rank, The trauma of birth (1924), where the psychoanalyst finds the origin of various neuroses and traumas in the separation between fetus and mother. Being born is the event of fall over time sung by E. Cioran, the breaking of eternity and the beginning of transience. Prenatal temporality is examined by AS Nutricati in Prenatal psychology and time (2009). The fetus is not a helpless being, but has a psychic life very rich in sound, tactile and visual perceptions, which will form the foundation on which our temporal consciousness will then develop. In the unconscious we find traces of a uterine timelessness in which we were suspended before seeing the light, to which we cyclically return along our process of individuation. Nutricati says «the antenatal precedent weighs on the after within a“ nuanced ”dimension: since the previous and the following, the past and the present do not have clear and defined outlines, but one seems to flow into the other».
This original eternity shapes the relationship we have with the world elsewhere. For the psychoanalyst L. Janus in How the soul is born (1991) the unconscious prenatal experience marks, without reductionism, all the mythology and rituality of human groups. The spiritual journey of the shamans uses a prenatal symbolism when they tell of descending «into a completely unknown cave. Many concentric circles opened around me, composed of light and shadows, which seemed to drag me away with them ». Their drum brings back the maternal heartbeat heard in the womb. The same goes for the fairy tale, the sagas and the myth.
Taking up the Sumerian myth of Etana, Janus comments the symbolism of the eagle and the snake as symbols of the placenta and the umbilical cord perceived by the fetus in the womb. "At that time [illo tempore] the eagle and the snake lived together and peace and harmony reigned between them. Historical time begins with their fight, which from the psychological point of view represents the contrast between positive and negative forces that is created when the unity between the placenta and the umbilical cord is broken ». Even the celestial bliss of Heaven and the eternal damnation of Hell can be traced back to feelings of well-being or malaise experienced in gestation. Paradise is that "enclosed place", perfectly complete in itself, where we are suspended eternally, as we once were in the amniotic fluid.
We never leave this chronosphere, but we return from time to time. It doesn't take much to make it re-emerge, as when we try to isolate ourselves in our room under the covers or in the isolation tubs. Russian psychoanalyst S. Groff, known for experimenting with LSD psychotherapy, noted in his writings entitled When the impossible happens (2006) temporal regressions of his patients reaching the prenatal stage. Thus the case of Richard, a young man who suffered from chronic depression, came to the point of reliving his fetal phase in therapy: he felt a strong feeling of symbiotic well-being, the sound of blood flowing inside him, the voices and music of the village festival to which his mother, still pregnant with him, went, shortly before giving birth.
The Hero's Path: Circles of Individuation
«In my beginning there is my end. [...] / In my end there is my beginning»
Thomas S. Eliot, East Cooker (Four Quartets).
After birth, the black uterine chronosphere breaks, from the timeless of mysticism we slip into the realm of historical succession, made up of time cycles, lunar phases and eternal spiral returns. Man enters the chronosphere of planet Earth, which, as I have said elsewhere, he finds again in the astronomical motion of the celestial vault. The maternal origin and the aeonic cycle of the stars overlap in two chronospheres that vibrate in unison in the human psyche. From the upper Paleolithic (approx. 40.000 BC) we find the Aurignacian Venuses, in which M. Gimbutas finds the first images of the Mother Goddess, which will become more numerous in the Neolithic (approx. 12.000 BC). In the Paleolithic the maternal body is originally symbolic and geometric: the whole world and the phases of life are enclosed in the chronospheric roundness of the feminine. The mother is a vessel, a cosmic egg, a universal container.
Neumann in The Great Mother (1956) speaks in this sense of the Great Circle, reconnecting the feminine archetype to the eternally renewing circularity of the ouroboros. We find this union exemplified in the oldest known temple complex, Göbekli Teple in Turkey, built around 10.000 BC The pillars of the central chamber bear animal symbols that match to the constellations of the time: for M. Sweatman and A. Coombs the temple marks the event of the crash of some comets that started the recent Dryas glaciation. The ovoid structure of the temple recalls the uterine origin of the one who generates every form, whose body are the animal images of the constellations. Eternity is not one, but twofold: the time indicated by the animal pillars is not chronological, but is made up of many particular intensities that express the qualities of the events witnessed. Primitive spacetime is characterized by many chronospheric temporalities that define, when they occur, the existential possibilities and intensities of men.
From the Paleolithic to the Neolithic the Mother Goddess begins to take theriomorphic forms. In his work The civilization of the Goddess (1991), Gimbutas isolates in particular four forms of goddess: the mother goddess in childbirth associated with the taurine form is the moment of birth, the bird goddess with long neck and large breasts as the goddess of life, the serpent goddess who carries out continuity of the arc of life, finally the vulture Goddess, the terrible aspect that indicates death. These representations are the protophases of the life cycle, because the Great Mother is also the Lady of Time.
Thus was born fate, initially linked to the stars and woven from the feminine principle to the birth of every man. The seasons, day and night, life and death are chronospheres that we travel from the uterus to the tomb, from the underworld to the sunlight, a thread that unwinds between the stars within us. Neumann continues on the motif of the goddesses, "these spinners are originally the great ladies of fate, the triune form of the Great Mother", while the mythologist K. Kerényi notes "that the expression" weaving "can be valid for the generation of life or of the human body ”operated by the Mother. The Moiras of Greece, the Norns of the Scandinavians, but also Neith, Netet and Isis of the Egyptians, and the weaving goddesses of the Maya are all temporal phases that weave our path (beginning-center-end, past-present-future) around the spindle of eternity. Plato will speak in the myth of Er of the Republic of a large circle that moves around the spindle from the eight vessels of the goddess Ananke (Necessity), while on another nearby circle sit the three moon goddesses Lachesis, Clotho, Atropos. "From there, without turning around, the soul passed to the foot of the throne of Necessity", or even of the womb, as it is sometimes translated.
Fromm writes in Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism (1970) that "birth is not a single act, but a process". The soul needs to be born and reborn completely, in a continuous temporal flow, although in this process it preserves an atemporal core. Among the celestial bodies of the Mother, it is the moon with its phases that offers the chronosphere suitable for archaic man to always return to himself, founding the chronological and ritual basis of the calendars of all human cultures well before the calendar was established. solar. Here mathematics, mysticism and soul are one. The oldest calendar in the world, the Blanchard Bone discovered by A. Marshack dates back to the European culture of the upper Paleolithic (32.000 BC). These are 69 Aurignacian bone engravings of the various phases of the moon arranged on a fluvial and protospiraliform pattern, spanning two and a half lunar months.
Being in the world for large animal groups, including man, it means synchronizing chronologically and symbolically with the lunar movements that guide the movements and natural phenomena. In this sense the moon teaches hunting. M. Eliade, in his Treatise on the history of religions (1948), explores the mysticism of the moon as the life of the primitive soul that extends into the rhythm of existence. All the cosmic planes of reality are governed in ancient times by the Moon: the fertility of plants, of the generating waters, of the woman; the periodic regeneration of forms, which regulates the natural cycles of initiation death and rebirth; above all time and destiny, «the Moon sets out again, lines up, measures; or it nourishes, fecundates, blesses; or it receives the souls of the dead, it begins and purifies, being alive, and consequently in eternal rhythmic becoming ». Consequently, time and destiny are, as Eastern philosophies also recall, processes of the rhythm of existence, plots of the cosmic network in which we move. «The Moon reveals to man his own human condition; that, in a certain sense, man looks at himself and finds himself in the life of the Moon ", to the point of becoming the land of the dead, or even" regenerating receptacle of souls ".
Every dualism, including that between body and soul, is symbolically found for Eliade in the phases of the moon, "The lower world, world of darkness, is represented by the waning Moon (horns = crescent moon, sign of the double volute = two sickles in the opposite direction , superimposed and welded together = lunar change, old decrepit and bony) ». The upper world, or even the world of life, is instead rendered by the new Moon, and the birth of the new man or divine child is the reborn Moon.
At this juncture G. Sermonti speaks in his own Lunar Mysteries (2014) of the lunar presence in the narrative structure of fairy tales, in fairy tales, and in religious, philosophical and mythical symbolism. So for example Little Red Riding Hood tells the sinusoid of the moon phases: the little girl with the hood points to the crescent moon, the grandmother is an image of the new moon or waning moon, while the wolf refers to the black part of the moon, which devours the moonlight in its shadow, to then be reborn. «The Latin comes from the lunar god Men monthly, the month, and from monthly, measured (measure) e menstruation. Spinning destiny, the moon counts the years of life, she is a prophetess, a guesser, a sorceress. Like algebra, the moon spells out symbols, letters ».
In archaic animism, on the other hand, writes L. Zoja in Psyche (2015), «the mind hardly perceived external“ objects ”: everything was“ subject ”», that is, the soul of the individual is the soul of the world. When Jung relates his experience with the Pueblos Indians, the Mountain Lake chief explains to him that “we are the sons of the father Sun, and with our religion we help our father to cross the sky every day. If we stopped practicing our religion, the sun would never rise again in ten years. And then it would be night forever ». In The dynamics of the unconscious (1927) Jung writes “our psyche is built in harmony with the structure of the universe; what happens in the macrocosm also happens in the infinitesimal recesses of the soul ". If the Moon offers the soul phases of death and rebirth, the Sun follows the same cycle, always remaining equal to itself. Both have hosted images of masculine and feminine heroes and divinities that tell the journey of the single soul from the supernal world to the underworld through different levels of consciousness, and of the universal soul through cycles of drying up and regeneration.
In the visions of F. Kahlo, the solar hero is born as a counterpart of the stars. Joseph Campbell isolates this cycle in particular in the heroic monomito in his cult bestseller, The hero of a thousand faces (1949). Consisting of seventeen stages, the journey of the soul marks a returning temporal cycle. The heroic monomito, with the due differences, determines the initiatory path that leads from ignorance to the attainment of a mature knowledge, the end point of the old path and the beginning of the new. Called by the vocation, Campbell says, the soul will cross the threshold of the historical world, “the fantasy reassures and promises that the peace of Paradise, first known in the maternal womb, is not lost; it supports the present and is found in the future as well as in the past (it is the omega and the alpha) ».
The hero who makes the journey follows the temporality of external events, "As long as the hero's action coincides with what his society is ready for, he seems to ride the great rhythm of the historical process." Only upon reaching a guardian of the threshold, that is, one who "represents the limits of the present sphere of the hero, or horizon of life", does one enter the unconscious world of the abyss, in which the treasure of immortality is found. This treasure is reached for Campbell through the inner experience of apotheosis, "Those who know that the imperishable rests in them, but that what they and all things are is the imperishable, and everywhere listen to the unheard music of eternal harmony".
The end of the journey will allow us to return to the everyday world, and the new awareness will be transmitted to other men, to carry out "the work of representing eternity in time, and of perceiving time in eternity". The myth and the rite are the main chronospheres that mark the events that we live in the soul, made up of courses and appeals, stories that are renewed in several events and continually adapt to new narratives. Sallust, the Latin philosopher, said that "the myth never happened, but it always is". This is because myth and ritual are inherent in the human psyche. There can be no man without myth, and there can be no flowering without a rite of passage, but these are ever-renewing realities.
Once you have completed a tour, the story does not end. The soul will continue to unfold uninterruptedly through new phases and places that come closer and closer to the center where timeless stillness resides. This was taken up by the spiral movement that marks one of the oldest symbols of humanity. In his studio on Symbolism of the Spiral: the Milky Way, the shell, the rebirth (2017) Marco Maculotti takes up the Neolithic origin of the spiral, present all over the world in the vast majority of primitive cultures. The spiral, actually linked to the selene motion of the Moon and the spiraling circles of the Milky Way, writes Maculotti "was considered the symbolic representation of the" Primeval Source "of the universe, worshiped in the form of the Mother Goddess, from whose" Cosmic Uterus "all souls come and then return ". This implies that in the motion of the soul there is a double movement, which from birth-life-death also includes a temporal inversion, so to speak, which leads back to life from death. It is no coincidence that in the process of individuation J. Hillman comments that "each character in identifying himself brings his plot with him, writing his story forward and backward".
The inner path of man therefore takes place on an overall spiral development that always returns to itself, but at a different intensity. The pilgrim soul perfects its spacetime by referring to the rhythm with which it circulates around the eternal center of its path. In The mystical spiral. The journey of the soul (1971), J. Purce distinguishes the Archimedean spiral, which grows with a constant movement around the center, and the logarithmic spiral, which progressively moves away from the center. Both dynamics are marked by the rhythm and speed of the vortices that bring circular and linear together.
For Purce the spiral has no natural beginning or end, nor a uniform center or periphery: these elements actually flow into each other. "The cycles of becoming, the rounds of existence, spiralize and reveal their origin, creating a point of advantage: from its own opposite pole, the source can look and become self-conscious". The unwinding along the spiral thus has its beginning in its end and vice versa, it brings together in a single moment what happens only once and what has happened forever. Instead of dividing the eternal plane and the chronological plane, interiority and exteriority, the spiral assumes through itself an essential cosmological image.
We will see later how this leads us to explore within ourselves a universal sensitivity for the representation of spacetime also in other animistic, religious and spiritual currents, such as the oriental ones. The soul is not only linked to our interiority, but determines our historical and secular order. Her motions are the motions that mark time and reveal the space we call the world. In the next part of the chronospheres of the soul, we will explore the interior through the chronospheres of the East, together with Western religions, in search of forms to guide us in the crisis of the contemporary.
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