APHRODITE
APHRODITE: MYSTIQUE & MYSTERIUM
The Breath of the Soul Is the Heart of the Matter
By Iona Miller, ©2016
“The world of gods and spirits is truly
'nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me.”
~Carl Jung, On 'The Tibetan Book of the Dead, CW 11; Page 857.
Summary: It is not easy to make an honest attempt to find words for the ineffable. Like unashamed Aphrodite, this essay hopes to titillate, to provoke, to promise even more than it may deliver. The naked mysteries and hidden charms of existence are concealed and revealed.
We will flirt with ideas, but won't cover all of her aspects, exploits, or relationships. We may even mix metaphors, or skip promiscuously from subject to subject like a restless dreamer. We all have a keen grasp of the obvious when it comes to love goddess myths and basic psychology. Culture is part of our nature.
Hopefully, each reader -- anyone who has had or lost a love, or is a devotee of the goddess – will find their own revelations arising within from the unconscious. A psychological approach to Aphrodite as image-making capacity attends and tends passionately to both psyche and logos.
Image and words are the interplay of sensation, intuition, thinking, and feeling. Born into Chronos, our 2 million year old soul longs for Kairos, spirit's time -- the opportune or crucial moment for significant change. Every moment is an opportunity if we tend and attend to it.
Aphrodite, the divine Beloved, is the unseen third being that informs every relationship, every devotion. We suggest an archetypal sense of her in the world at large, beyond our libidinous cravings. Tending the heart is minding the soul. Imaginal figures invite us to share the wisdom of our own inner landscapes, dreams, intuitive callings, visions, feelings, and events.
Ritual action expresses that relationship with wisdom greater than our conscious mind leading to a larger view of self and world. But technique is not soul. Aphrodite’s mystique is her sacred presence in the ordinary, inherent beauty apprehended as soul.
But the creative and poetic power of language is also a natural feature of reality. Imagination and language transform the soul through Mystery. All the functions of the psyche converge in fantasy, in imagination. We are all equally prone to the seductions of our own inner images, thoughts, emotions, and sensations.
We experience our own imaginal essence through the power of love and other structures of human experience, the archai. The power of Aphrodite is an expression of the divine whose trans-sensory organ of perception is imagination. Raw nature, fertile chaos, lies at the heart of the psyche -- the wild energies of creation. Love is a path for consciously realized life. Imaginal love plays a central role in human life that softens the heart.
Whether activated or dormant, the vital principle still living in our substance and essence, re-enchants the world. There is more to life than just matter. The unconscious modifies the conscious. The invisible force of animation is an immense force of nature -- metaphysical, biological, and phenomenological resonance.
We call such awesome emotional intensity a numinous experience. We are aroused by the power, presence, or realization of a divinity -- an uncanny, mighty spirit, a tremendous mystery. True imagination embodies the divine wisdom of the soul through percepts, affect, and concepts. Aphrodite is our image making capacity.
Only when the soul enters the material cosmos is there need to honor its generative power, to make a relationship with the divine through that particular worldview. Aphrodite is a living system, the cycle of life and love, complexes of experiences in which we participate, where duality is expressed as the sublimated quest of alliance.
The light in nature is the divine in the world. Myth, the interplay of cosmic principles, and memory are the basis of our relationships. The root of existence is matter and spirit, including that of Aphrodite --the deep nature of reality and experience, veiling and revealing its divinity.
The image freely gives itself, inviting sustained attention. We can watch our soul when we embrace the image. When the emerging god-image remains unconscious and unintegrated, it expresses as archetypal opposites instead of unpolarized consciousness.
All archetypes bring more than one archetypal pattern with them -- positive and negative, concealed and revealed, healthy and destructive. Fantasy precedes the symbol which flowers spontaneously in the soul and is more potent and descriptive than fantasy. Such fields of potential have forceful intentionality and complete autonomy. We are all aware of the slings and arrows love exerts beyond the sentimental moments through all the seasons of the heart.
Rather than us coming to the gods, it is more they who come to us. We are called by her when the soul is called by love of the phenomenal image. This is also an integrative, deep imagery-based approach to therapy. Our deepest impulses of the soul take on a divine shape, mythical configurations. We see by means of dynamic patterns, forms and textures.
The invisible -- the unseen aspect of our existence -- is revealed through visible images and shapes. We just need sensitivity to the image to contact the hidden depths of the soul. We don't need to interpret or understand the uncanny and irrational for them to work on us, independent of our thinking. Psychic development leads toward self-understanding. The mystery is not knowledge but experience.
To worship her is a world affirming theurgy that invokes the world soul. By working on and through us, the goddess manifests as the living spirit of creation and divine consciousness in matter. Only by living soul's embodied experience, embodied agonies, and experiential knowing can we determine if the suffering is worth the trajectory.
Our breath is our mantra. The primary relationship of our soul is with the soul of the world, the divine spark in every cell of creation. By bridging the opposites, soul weaves cosmos into existence. The mystery of turning lead into gold is a revelation of the hidden light within the darkness of matter.
Primordial Images
Aphrodite is the basis of formative aspects of the unconscious, the spiritual seed of creation, the relativity of psychological processes, peak experiences, and libidinal transference. She is the radiant emptiness beyond our self-image and worldview, beyond our sense and sensory projections. Soul illuminates the body.
In the cleavage between creation and redemption is the breath of the anima mundi, the macrocosmic world-pervading element of space itself. Remembering to breathe grounds us from the spinning mind, in which we can lose ourselves. She unites the whole mindbody with universe. The numinous appears as the sacredness of creative acts.
As all archetypes, she is aggressive, possessive, and very jealous. All compulsions are pressures of the archetype, but we don't like to dis-identify from it, even when it is harming our humaness. Such force overwhelms the ego, possesses the ego from unconscious wish to manifest behavior. We are subjected to fragmentation and reshaping. In her liminal space we abandon our previous identities.
But we need to honor it, without identifying with it or being inflated by its numinosity. The strongest religious experience happens in crisis. Without containment the numinous annihilates the ego and structural field with unconscious associative attachments.
Aphrodite's siren call is seductive, enormously tempting and powerful, filling us with energy, vision, and a sense of meaning. Feeling wonderful, it is hard to simply feel ordinary again. If you don't honor it, because of primitive grandiosity you think you are it -- a god[dess]. This thing is unconscious within us, and we try to find somebody to embody and hold that significant energy for us.
Thinking you are it, you act it out, it is destructive for yourself and others. She is a natural phenomena, therefore amoral, so we are charged with the issue of ethics in relation to her, because a potent or creative person is either a dangerous person or a potentially great server. Jung suggests that when you "do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate."
Aphrodite's name is one of many we give to the voice and vision of the unconscious which can reunite us through transformation with the unconscious source of our creativity and our divine source, however we conceive it -- the variety of forms through which we realize the self.
Relating to an image is like relating to an entity. If we create a space, unconscious content manifest as personifications open to dialogue and exploration. They come when they want to come but are explicitly anchored in our lives in some way.
Vision is perceived by intense concentration on the background of consciousness. We try to grasp its significance to us, apart from the tyranny of the literal. We seek the affirming glow of a love story. We concoct our narrative, but is it fiction, romance, or wisdom literature? It include the irrationals: synchronicity, beauty, truth, grief, and love.
Until then, we practice the Art of longing. We have a longing for belonging. We are cut off from our ancestral voices and relationships in the technological society. Thus, we don't know who we are and where we come from, much less where we are going. The cliche is 'the heart wants what it wants.' Some things are best seen through the eyes of those we love.
Typically, in a midlife crisis we go looking for a special or magical person, a fantasy of the transformation process. In our Dark Night, we experience fear, anxiety and in some cases panic, as we lose sight of our purpose, our goals and a bright future. We may feel abandoned, helpless and depressed; our self-compassion suffers. We naturally seek the known or unknown person that embodies rebirth for us, yearning for their love.
Aphrodite is about relationships, being related, not just to a family or partner, but to the depths, to the calling that wounds and names us, to the Soul of the World. Soul is in and of the world in both the open and attentive broken heart which allows the gods to penetrate through our wounds. Truth grows organically from deep roots in the body, through investigating the secret language of nature and our own nature.
We break up, we break down, and sometimes break out. Soul is heard through the symptom if we listen carefully, acknowledge, and recognize it, in our blind instinct, fascinations, projections, and participation mystique with the herd. To be conscious in the present is to be solitary.
Social containers keep us undifferentiated, unable to break up into individual personalities. Jung cautions that participation mystique with the herd is submersion in a common unconsciousness. "Every step forward means tearing oneself loose from the maternal womb of unconsciousness in which the mass of men dwells."
Existentially, Aphrodite has always been with us unconsciously, in our ongoing fantasies, native connectivity and kindness. We sometimes notice her myth playing through our life giving it 'reality.' But rapture and ecstasy are passive states that happen to us, that come over us.
Rainer Maria Rilke suggested, “Let everything happen to you — beauty and terror. Just keep going, no feeling is final.” Intensity moves us from need to want to desire to consuming passion. We can get lost in our relationships, in our psychic gaps, with groups and individuals. Identified with the group in participation mystique, a relic of the primordial unconscious state of mystical connection, we cannot distinguish ourselves from it. We feel whole because we 'belong,' but we aren't.
The powers of life and death always speak mythologically, connecting the ideal and the ordinary. Love fertilizes the psyche. They help us to not ‘lose heart’ in a rapidly-changing overwhelming world. As the Delphic Oracle said, “Called or uncalled, the god is present.” Our task is to grasp this psychic process, and embrace it with our thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition as our paths of orientation. Thinking and sensation are complimented by the intuition and feeling of our spiritual nature.
We are born naked and go down to the grave stripped of personality with a bare soul or psyche. Aphrodite was goddess of love to both the living and departed souls. In her more archaic form as Hathor, she also had a heavenly and underworld form, and made a descent to the underworld like Inanna. The primeval goddess helped women give birth. She welcomed the dead to the next life and helped the dead to be reborn. Hathor renews the cosmos, even the unseen depths of the unconscious.
From the field of mythological expressions, Aphrodite mobilizes and mediates universal motifs or repetitive images and nature's creative response. Our image of the world is our worldview, or mental model of reality - a philosophy or conception of the world. Such presuppositions condition our outlook and ground how we perceive life in the cosmos.
Deeper understanding of existence is the heart our knowledge. Worldview exerts a crucial influence on our thinking and behavior. This set of beliefs about Reality grounds our way of perceiving, thinking, knowing, and doing. It is the basis of our cosmology, metaphysics, teleology, epistemology, theology, and anthropology -- even our love life.
Through a union of our physical and psychological aspects, psyche mirrors both with anthropomorphic qualities. We project a body on the goddess, a haunting otherness, that corresponds with our own constitution. We perceive it with the senses and a self-conscious psyche, reflecting the god we imagine.
Our grasp of the psyche, vital psychic phenomena, and the unknown darkness that surrounds us is limited. But we know god-images exist, in general and in particular. In much the same way, we may never know who our human partners really are, but we have a relationship, including all sorts of unknown factors and projections. We have experiences with imagination, substance, and body.
Myth reveals our divine life. The gods still reign within. Living figures confront us autonomously. Libido is the creative power of our own soul, bringing forth the useful and the harmful. Love's opposite is the power shadow -- power vs. love, or pleasure in hurting.
A psychological fact, Aphrodite grips us when we ‘fall into temptation,’ or love falls on us from above, determining our destiny, (amor fati). The shadow of Aphrodite appears as conquest-oriented seduction, love and sex addiction, an inability to say no to passion, or being totally destroyed when a lover leaves.
Love is ambiguous: it can be terrible, even self-destructive or self-realizing.
Rather than speak of being in love, the ancients claimed they were hit or possessed by a god. The archaic love relationship is a Marriage with God. Sex becomes love of the divine, (amor Dei). The transpersonal is symbolized by the King and Queen, god and goddess.
The unconscious merges with the physiological body, including joy, stress, pain, and symptoms. Even love penetrates us as an ailment – we are “lovesick” with or without it. We sometimes fear it is beyond our human capacity to endure. We yearn for the very source of yearning. If we yearn for, or even if we imagine we have ‘lost’ Aphrodite, certain conditions can bring her back in full force.
Our subtle body is personal anima, which echoes the transpersonal Anima Mundi, or Aphrodite, the breath soul that causes and bridges the gap between mind and physical body. She is everything that breathes or is breathed. She is our philosophical potential. The body of the world and its psyche reflect the goddess we imagine. Jung quotes an alchemical text that says, “The mind should learn compassionate love for the body.” (Jung-Ostrowski, p. 25)
What we call spirit is the living body seen from within, and body is its outer manifestation. Spirit and body are really functional psychic modalities. Body as psyche is an expression of interiority. We give body to our thoughts by speaking or expressive arts, so we can share them by making them perceptual in the ordinary world.
Only the living body contains the intelligent secret of life, but the anatomical body doesn’t really inform us about the nature of matter. The body has its own psychological condition and consciousness.
We thrive by maintaining a conscious relationship to the body, where the rights of the body and spirit are equivalent. Archetypes and bodily functions follow universal instinctive patterns. They can be reduced in shame to “mere” instincts, or overvalued as gods in a grandiose or addictive way, rather than at human scale
– a human representation.
The opposites are united in the soul through primordial experience of the outer world and inherent divinity. Though we don’t know how, we experience them as numinous events. Aphrodite is a biological, instinctual, and elemental “model,” mediating between human consciousness and the primordial numinous experience. But sometimes we are fooled by our own interpretations, instead of simply being aware of immediate experience. We have to follow a rather uncertain path.
We encounter her spellbinding personal aspects and transformative collective aspects that move us from one state of consciousness to another, and another. Myths and their cosmic dramas shape and reshape us and the beliefs that influence our behavior. The ordinary body is transformed into the eternally enduring body, at least symbolically or metaphorically.
The earthly Aphrodite of ‘ordinary’ love is suspended between our ascents to her cosmic nature and chthonic (material) descents. Our animal soul leads us down into the depths of our body, our instinct symbolized as Aphrodite’s familiars, which include the serpent, a symbol of kundalini.
Her highest truths spring from the roots of the body, or our psychic experience of the body as shown in dreams. But we tear this experience of body and spirit apart with the mind, separating them with concepts. We only know a small part of our psyche like we have limited awareness of our internal physiology.
We have centers of consciousness in our head, heart, and abdomen which we experience as our psychic image of the body. Body, soul, and mind are one, but we parse them into categories.
Their reunification is rebirth, the hermaphrodite, the stone, the golden flower. So, the ‘reborn body’ is spirit at the same time – the glorified body that unites spiritual and material principles. An eternal or subtle body at least symbolically ensures the continuity of our detached consciousness, but represents our future potential – our unknown and as-yet-unrealized potential.
Mind is related to body (matter) as body is to earth. We must return to our body for true individuation. The psychophysical self embodies our past as memory. The body is our subconscious memory and mirror of our experience. The indestructible body is the integrated personality, the refined psyche filled with inherent light.
Notions of gods are the first of all myths, vital psychic phenomena symbolizing the powers of the unconscious. We may not know what a god or archetype ‘is,’ but we can ‘know’ them and interact with that image spiritually, and experience it psychologically, and metaphorically. It may be essentially unknowable, but is intense and compelling. For some, primordial experience of the source means the sanctuary and refuge of the deity, only present in direct experience.
Our experience of love and loss changes our beliefs about it and the pain we can experience from attachments, as well as lessons we learn from it. Some open us to reconciliation and renewal. Our particular life solutions lie only along our particular life path or trajectory. Without general solutions, problems are answered only through our individuality.
The instinctive drive overtakes and consumes our personality. Sexual passion has been deified, divinized, or even feared as evil and demonic because of its overwhelming nature. In the real world sex often isn't associated with love, even when respectful or consensual. Many experiences can awaken us to a shock-receiving capacity.
We passion bearers find out who we are through our difficulties, life passages, and turning points. We break open to our impediments and destinies. The unconscious comes to life in all of its awful glory. An inner impulse motivates us, especially at critical times. Visions spring from the unconscious as spontaneous phenomena; so does a new sense of wonder.
Love is our main motive power and shapes our lives -- in dream, or vision, or passionate encounter. Nature and beauty have a divine origin beyond common love. The unmediated vision is instantaneous experience. As for psychic life, we join mystery to mystery to create a portrait of a Mystery. We borrow and distort images from our actual experience that surge up from the mists of the past.
The mysteries of life are hidden between the opposites, including fullness and emptiness. Consciousness is born of suffering when we are shaken by naked truths that will not be comforted. In failure we find that there are driving forces. We're here for deeper life experience that funds our compassion, rapport, and empathy with weight and importance.
Affect, another word for god, forms and shapes us with unconscious determinants. The divine impresses our inner experience. High-level networks of control make decisions long before they enter awareness. Our body and behavioral patterns carry our stories, our symbolic life of depth and meaning. Images reveal complex relationships, tensions, and interconnections. Something huge has shifted.
