SOBEK - WILD PSYCHE
https://the-wild-psyche.site123.me/
SOBEK: THE WILD PSYCHE
by Iona Miller, (c)2018
Prepared for Bibliotheca Alexandrina
SOBEK & THE DRAGON BLOODLINE
A New Myth of Bloodline Transformation for an Ancient God
https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/sobek---wild-psyche.html
We journey together to ancient Egypt, to the Egypt of the imagination. Within the imaginal landscape myths are created with their living archetypal figures of the soul. The ancient sages set up the method of reversion and restoration, so we could return home and recognize our ancestors, to revert to what is fundamentally inherent.
This essay is a deep dive into the Dark Waters of the human unconscious embodied in the dual nature of Sobek. The self-generated sacred crocodile deity of primal originating force expresses both celestial and chthonic forces of nature. The archetype is an ideational as well as celestial constellation. This dark journey into a dangerous place of unfathomable infinity is a necessary process. It provides an excursion into descent and renewal.
So, like the ancients we appeal to the soul and to myth for coherence, for order, for assurance the terrors of suffering and history are not blind, arbitrary or meaningless. The depths of soul become a void. While still felt deeply, we are stripped of our capacity to truly know and differentiate the other. Reactions are experienced only subjectively.
Mythologies perform their functions through symbols. The focal point provided by image and symbol holds the mind to truth. The ultimate is, of course, unknowable. Therefore, the images themselves are not "the truth." For us, a journey into the unconscious provides the vital meanings and relatedness to the cosmic order that myths once gave us. It is a return to the source. Meaning is inherent in conscious experience of archetypal processes and the soul's 'suffering of meaning'.
Consciousness remains a singular Mystery for mankind. The problem is in the raw materials. Consciousness seems to be a new kind of reality injected into the universe, instead of just a recombination of the old realities. Even if minds showed no hint of design, the same old problem exists: How can mere matter originate consciousness? All we can do is make a prolonged reflection on it, looking at its many facets from many different angles.
Mythic consciousness and its practice, ritual life, requires a telos to create the dynamics of consciousness in imaginal life. This urge propels the soul. Telos is our destiny or innate potential for becoming. Wholeness is the goal of Self-realization, including where we come from and who we really are. But we cannot know the end at the beginning because possibilities arise along the way, like the crocodile suddenly arises, surging from the deep waters.
For myself such an exploration is an experiential voyage back in time on the wings of my ancestors showing a direct family connection to the god and his patron dynasties and priests. It is one thing for history to tell us there was a Sobek cult in Memphis, and another to find that one ancestor priest there served Sobek, rather than Ptah, like his own priestly family. It puts a ‘face’ on those linking us back in remembrance.
My attempt is to contemporize both the mundane and transpersonal aspects of the Sobek cult and modern devotion. While informed by Depth Psychology it doesn’t use the tired Jungian tropes and theories, but approaches the archetype poetically. Post-Jungian archetypal psychology is radically polytheistic, even animistic.
So little is written on Sobek, this is an opportunity to expand our understanding of what that direct experience might be like, not only as its metaphors and manifestations, but as self-arising generative power that impacts our instincts, dreams, and healing. We need to know where the crocodile god hides within us.
While rooted in my own genealogy, the dragon bloodline applies to anyone who knows their similar royal lines, as well as those who intuitively feel a soulful connection to their roots, including Sobek. Simple mathematics shows we are all connected, just as we are to Genghis Khan or Charlemagne, for example. Mythically, this approach suggests that not only can ancient practice inform our own devotion, but our own experience may help us understand actual Egyptian devotional and initiatory practice as well as or better than interpretations from archaeology and anthropology.
We have to trust our imagination, dreams, and ancestral memories to guide us in the process. We have to trust Sobek as the soul-guide and protector the Egyptians knew. Our ancestors unconsciously affect our current lives. My work as a therapist working with Transgenerational Integration has given me the opportunity to watch many others besides myself find their roots in the mists of prehistory with various gods and goddesses. Most find it strikes at the core of their self-image and worldview, transforming their lives.
The result is often shock and awe that traditional genealogy reveals such divine wonders at its deepest roots. Such awesome numinosity is a trait of Sobek experience, itself a primary instinctual manifestation – a primordial Mystery. The convergence of the popularity of personal genealogy and personal mythology from the transpersonal schools of psychology has created a hybrid spirituality, fusing ancient knowledge and eclectic practice. It also gave rise to a controversial genre of alternative history rooted in royal lines. You may have done your DNA, but it will never divulge a single name, much less a face we can relate to.
Elsewhere, in other devotionals, I have unpacked the royal connections back to Aphrodite and Mars by using my own genealogical lines as a thread to explore the labyrinths of time. History takes on a different feel when we see it unfold in the lives of our own alleged great-grandparents. There are millions, who know or don’t know, their own lines of such bloodline descent from various cultural gods and goddesses. But something special happens to each of us who discover them. It forms a solid bond, couple by couple back to our ancestral root.
This linking back or remembering of our chain of ancestors and their veneration is a big part of what Egyptian religion was all about – keeping their names and their souls alive. We can see it as a metaphor of Sobek saving and recollecting the parts of Osiris and revivifying his generative spirit. There are so many aspects of this vital connection, based on blood descent, that we cannot follow them all out, even in a long essay.
My approach arises from my own experience as a therapist in modern Dragon bloodline societies and heritage groups. Interest in books from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, the da Vinci Code, The Dragon Legacy, and the many works of Sir Laurence Gardner, Ralph Ellis, and others on Grail cultures created a modern myth of ancient cultures. It has led to the formation of many international societies and gnostic religious groups. It also created a fad of dis- and misinformation, as well as some grandiose self-delusions.
While much of this literature focuses on alleged descent from Jesus, the origins of those royal lines as a civilizing force in early Egypt and Mesopotamia is even more interesting for those whose gods are older and even more chthonic, for those who are not afraid of the initiatory dark. What we don't know lives in our dark places, deep in the primordial unconscious waters.
We extend deep into matter, then into energy, and primordial ground, the primordial mind. The psyche plays a role as primordial as that of matter, energy, and space-time. It is the state of reality in which we become nobody and we remain as we are, which is deathless awareness. Yet, today our blossom clings to the vine. This is who we are.
Depth is our internal infinity. We are present now, with the stars in our face and expanding universe at our back. This is actually our primordial face. This primordial ground is the foundation not only of the universal forms and the purpose of the world, but also of distinct being and the source of all these psychic manifestations -- the infinite impulse of the unconscious.
Spontaneous Presence
The time before we become somebody is called “primordial time” in the Buddhist tantras. Nothingness or openness or emptiness or voidness or spaciousness is the ground of primordial awareness, a ground that is no ground at all. The nothingness or openness is light, luminous radiance, is the primordial ground of all that is. Consciousness-at-rest and conscious-energy are the two primary manifestations of the one ultimate, self-contained consciousness.
Taoists symbolize the Primordial chi field as Tai Yi, the Great Oneness. Tai Yi is not a deity or Supreme God, but rather signifies a chi field of Primordial Love that holds the ground for the unfolding of harmony and balance in manifest creation.
The depth dimension is human interiority, the unconscious dimension of the psyche. From the infinitely large to the infinitesimally small, the universe is the primordial depth dimension of ourselves, of human interiority. Depth includes not only the downward and the inward, but the depth of "the between."
This should not be surprising, because we each internalize our subjective life. Interiority activates this powerful internal archetypal dimension. Each aspect has its own unique features that give the human psyche an immeasurable degree of depth. The form of our actually lived life is seen from the perspective of psychological interiority, a more inclusive systemic viewpoint. We must value vitally important images that emerge from the unconscious, evoke such images, and engage them decisively.
Interiorization is the process of forming structures of the human psyche through the acquisition of life experience. The concept comes from the French "intériorization", which suggests a transition from the outside to the inside, and from the Latin "interior," which means the inner. Through interiorization the seer is transformed into an imaginal person--one who is living inside the creative imagination. And that's the void from which all arises. Because that seer is consciousness the faculty of attention is interiorized and turned back upon itself.
This interiorization of the person means many things. We locate our most essential being—soul, spirit, consciousness, self, mind—“inside”, and abstract time, space, and psyche. It is the interiorization and containment of the soul. Psyche as an internal orienting activity retains structural similarity with practical activities. Psyche's own language is image, not idea. Psyche needs images to nurture its own growth, for images provide a knowledge that we can interiorize.
Imagination and memory or remembrance are interiorizations. What gets interiorized are our strong affects which are mirrored back to us symbolically, metaphorically, and imagistically. Involuntary memory implies a deeper, interiorizing memory that lies forgotten and must be called to mind. Calling the material of the involuntary memory to mind alters its original form, however. Involuntary memory remains immaterial, fleeting, or at best distorted. Hegel likens the involuntary memory to the mine and the well.
Interiorizing a given phenomenon into its psychological objective meaning reaches its inner symbolic depth, its ‘soul,' the unconscious – below reflexiveness. Subjective vision helps us discover objective reality. Beyond all conceptual construction, we understand through stories of manifestation and interiorization.
The transcendent function emerges through and simply appropriates the self-arising image. We interiorize events, then go into them in search of psychological depths. We internalize body and externalize psyche. It's a false distinction, but psyche is imaginal. We can connect with it by listening, vision, dreams, attention, imagination, or 'soul making' -- trusting the transformative power of images. Eastern traditions, especially, have cultivated highly refined practices to interiorize consciousness and heighten this sense of looking.
Divination, as interiorization, can only be done in the present. The shift from shamanic exploits in the hunter/gatherer setting of open nature to subterranean rites indicates the interiorization of the human psyche. Legend and history are tightly connected; the former proceeds through interiorization and is dispersed through images. The accidental is reconstituted in the spontaneity and dynamism of this interiorized self, and visually represented by the faux accidents of synchronicity.
"Eternity is not something that has to come. Eternity is not even a long period of time. Eternity has nothing to do with time. Eternity is the size of here and now that it is excluded from the thought that moves within time terms. If we don't get it here where we are, we won't get it anywhere else." (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth)
Transformation in individuation is often experienced, and described, as a process of turning inwards. It emerged partly due to the renaissance and post-renaissance epistemological need to interiorize psychological life (Romanyshyn 1982, 1984) We need to take “inner” literally so. We can also look outside with an interiorizing vision, rooted in an increasingly interiorized soul life -- an interization of self, community, world, and cosmos.
Subjective personal psychic mechanisms drive us as individuals. Only an approach focused on the 'soul' of the work in its Opus Magnum significance (and not on personal intricacies) can reach its objective psychological interiority. Jung held that the real driving force behind conscience, in both its moral and ethical forms, is the "emotional component" and embodied feelings. A "numinous other" within the depths of one's own psyche has the potential to profoundly alter a person's fundamental attitude toward their own interiority.
"Dreams may contain ineluctable truths, philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides." (Jung, CW 8, Para 317). In order to survive, we need to return to original vision ... interiority.
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