2023, in Chinese astrology, is going to be the Year of the Rabbit. Though we won’t technically be entering that year until January 22, my 2023 has been unusually full of rabbits already. For one thing, there was the tarot card I drew for the year which, in the Anima Mundi deck, happened to feature a rabbit – a lucky sign, I thought. For another, I spent the last few days of the old year sewing this stuffed rabbit for my new baby niece, which (as rabbit is a psychopomp) I’m counting as the craft project for my final book of the year, Trickster Makes the World, by Lewis Hyde.
(Rabbit pictured here on the way back from our holiday. I’ve got lots of materials left, and am starting to wonder exactly how full of rabbits 2023 is going to end up being.)
This was a really great, wide-ranging book that I had been working on for a while. I’m almost not sure where to start, but for one thing it had way more Greek philosophy than I had been expecting. In particular, I got a lot out of the author’s discussion of aporia (and the inevitable transcendence of aporia) as an important spiritual process.
In a way, aporia is like the alchemical process of conjunction, which is most dramatic when it involves two people, groups, states or ideas that seem to be locked in opposition until a moment when a third possibility suddenly becomes available. This miraculous resolution is what Jung (a big fan of alchemy) called the transcendent function; which analyst Frith Luton describes like this:
Jung believed that the potential resolution of a conflict is activated by holding the tension between the opposites. When every motive has an equally strong counter-motive—that is, when the conflict between the ego and the unconscious is at its peak—there is a damming up of vital energy. But life cannot tolerate a standstill. If the ego can hold the tension, something quite unexpected emerges, an irrational “third” that effectively resolves the situation.
She goes on to mention that the transcendent function typically manifests as a symbol, which makes sense if the logical/narrative perspectives on the situation seem to be entirely at odds, and also releases the energy that was previously tied up in the conflict. We usually hear a lot more about synchronicity, active imagination and the shadow, but personally I think the awareness of this process is one of Jung’s greatest innovations! While it’s light on theory, I also learned a lot how to apply it in practice from the book Rock the Boat, by Resmaa Menakem, another read that I recommend very highly.
After all that, the first book that I actually finished in 2023 was A Short Course In Dreams, by Robert Bosnak. I’m pretty happy with the dreamwork process that I’m currently using, but I picked up a few interesting things here that I might want to integrate. Three things in particular stood out to me:
First, there was some stuff about memory palaces, an idea from antiquity where you imagine yourself walking through some building as a mnemonic device, visually storing things that you want to remember in a particular order or relationship. This practice gets quite a bit of emphasis in occult history, and it’s been on my mind recently because I noticed that I’d always sort of overlooked it. I wondered: What was the real function of this exercise? Was it only important as a technical tool in the days before computers, or even easy access to books? It also occurred to me that it could be useful as a sort of concentration/visualization practice.
In Course on Dreams, the author caught my attention by opening with a memory palace exercise, then later explained the importance of getting inside a dream when you describe it, imagining yourself as a kind of tour guide. He points out that being spatially inside a dream helps the dreamer to be inside the dream experientially, more emotionally and intuitively connected to the meaning of whatever is unfolding. I’ll be adding this note to my own work with dreams, and I’m also making a mental note about memory palaces: Maybe this way of storing information helps to keep it in context, encouraging holistic processing rather than stripping it of embodiment, perspective and symbolic imagery.
Second, the book ends with a dream about an aquatic rabbit (hello, rabbit) in a bowl of water, followed by a call back to a dream about two dogs fighting that had been described at the beginning, wrapping things up neatly with an image of the two dogs combining into one and a description of Jung’s transcendent function (apparently as useful in dreams as anywhere else). He describes it like this:
The difficult process of the successful rubedo [the alchemical stage of conjunction] is that of bringing together and keeping together the experiences of what we perceive as inner and outer worlds. It is a matter of action that gives the tendencies of the image world their due and at the same time perceives the images in the so-called outer world and reacts to them. One then lives in a world of inspiration in which the sharp distinction between inner and outer, contemplation and action, has been diminished. Active imagination and imaginative action fuse.
Personally, I’m left with a less resolved image: A couple of times while reading, a vision of a boxy kind of labyrinth flashed through my mind. The second time, it was clearly a labyrinth made of sugar cubes. Well, I guess I’ve finished another book, so I need another creative project. As usual, I’m curious where this could be going.
As it happens, my spirit animal is the trickster... what does that mean?