Wrestling with Thanatos
Wrestling with Thanatos
by Iona Miller, 2013
https://ionamiller2017.weebly.com/thanatos.html
Contemplation of death conjures up images of disintegration, dismemberment, flying apart. In consciousness journeys, the dreamer may be sucked through a swirling vortex into a profound blackness--black that is blacker than black--cold and utterly empty. This state of nothingness feels different to individuals, depending on their personal experience with various aspects of death.
Thanatos-consciousness may be an encounter with an apocalyptic whirlwind which rends one limb-from-limb, then fragments the sense of self even further down to cellular, genetic, and atomic consciousness. The imagery of apocalypse and natural disaster surfaces as the ego glimpses its immanent doom.
The dance of Death is a whirlwind of transformation. Ego-death is a requirement for opening to the broader realm of transpersonal reality. It heralds a change in the form of consciousness. The crux of this consciousness process is reaching the creative state of undifferentiated consciousness. It is in this state that old primal self images dissolve, and from it the new ones form. It is a death because at the deepest levels we define ourselves by this image and what it has created and frozen into our lives.
It ultimately means the dismemberment of our former personality and life patterns. We are it and it is our death when it dissolves into the infinite possibilities of chaotic consciousness. This unformed consciousness--which we often mistake for death-- is really the essence of our vitality and life force. It is the energy we can use to recreate ourselves in every instant of time. It reaches our awareness through dreams (Hypnos) and the flow of our imagination. Yielding to ego-death leads to this consciousness, whether it comes through therapy or a spontaneous near-death experience (N.D.E.) or a closely witnessing death.
This consciousness can result from a brush with one's own death or that of another. Dissolving is a death that opens into a field of unformed consciousness with infinite creative possibilities. But we must go through the fear and pain which surrounds this experience to reach this consciousness state. There may be sensations of falling, or floating-falling, or flying off in all directions at once.
Eventually all parts of the self are dismembered by the centrifugal forces experienced in the vortex. With a sweep of His scythe, the unseen specter of death cuts us down utterly. Sensations of spinning and being drawn deeper create intense dizziness and disorientation, even nausea. Dismemberment in the spiral often leads to a sense of being "no-thing."
The experience of another's natural death is awesome, as is that of birth. Being there, one finds that at that amazing moment there is a giant dilation in the flow of time; a window opens into that other vast realm which is slow to close. It may capture part of oneself for a time, creating a mini-death, or death-in-life. The changes which ensue may be voluntary or involuntary. It may trigger a regression as well as a profound opening to transpersonal awareness.
Particularly when a parent or child of ours dies, we are permanently changed in ways we may never have imagined. Some of them have to do with what we imagine or believe the nature of death and an afterlife to be.
In myth, Thanatos or Death, naturally supplied Hades with his subjects. Thanatos is the son of Night, who in turn was born from Chaos. The godform of Thanatos is pictured alternatively as dressed in a black robe holding the fatal sword, or as a winged spirit, resembling his twin brother Hypnos, or Sleep. Hypnos also lives in the underworld. He induces the little death of sleep with his magic wand or by fanning his dark wings. In eastern mysticism, death is personified in feminine form as the dreaded and dreadful goddess Kali. Her cult was portrayed in the blockbuster movie INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM.
Graveyards or cemeteries are the haunts of this bloodthirsty goddess. Her image is built of a myriad of skulls and bones. Tantric Buddhists contemplate her, and their own personal demise, by visualizations of rotting corpses, or meditating in graveyards where the remains are strewn about. They seek liberation of their human souls through immortality.
Shiva, the Destroyer, consort of Kali Ma is the masculine form of this force. Shiva is the prince of demons, who brings pestilence and death. Paradoxically, he is also the slayer of demons. He is the dissolver of outworn forms--destroyer of all things. Shiva's dance is a process of universal creation and destruction, a symbol of the reconciliation of opposites. This powerful unbridled erratic force also carries archetypal healing capacity within its pattern. This archetypal drive was the theme of Gore Vidal's KALKI.
In our modern society, questions of life and death create issues such as moral positions on suicide, abortion, euthanasia, and capital punishment. These questions bear directly ont who we are and shall be. Mankind is also wiping our entire species from the face of the earth daily. The Biblical injunction "Thou shalt not kill," has been misinterpreted as "Thou shalt not murder thy fellow human beings," while the pointless slaughter of animals for exploitation continues.
Spiritual teachers tell us that all life is sacred. As an archetype, Thanatos represents a fundamental soul-quality present in the psyche. From this perspective all life aims toward natural transformation and recycling through the process of death. The soul gains knowledge of itself, not only through love, intellect, and madness, but also by reflection on the great unknowable which lies past the gates of death.
The sorcerer's apprentice Carlos Casteneda was cautioned to keep death as his constant companion, always referring any powerful decisions to this touchstone of meaning. How differently we might act if we reflected on our actions in light of the constant possibility of immanent death. Psychologist Sigmund Freud spent as much of his career reflecting on death and the physical pathology of the body as he did obsessing on sexual motivation. He not only contemplated it in his patients' behaviors and fantasies, but in his own as well. He was phobic about cancer, which he later contracted in the mouth and jaws from years of smoking. As the father of depth psychology which focuses on the symbolic underworld, he introduced us to the world of Thanatos and Hades.
Freud pointed out that "pathologizing" is a metaphorical language of the psyche, allowing it to deliteralize the events of our daily life. Psychopathologies had been considered trivial, but Freud showed that they contained a previously invisible depth of meaning. The nature of that meaning revealed the profound relationship of death to life. Dreams, symptoms, and afflictions became the inroads into the dark realm of the subconscious. Freud resurrected the intimate symbolic connection between soul and death for Westerners.
Eastern religions had never lost this connection. He showed how the perspectives of Hades and Thanatos dissolve the organic, social, and emotional aspects of human life. Fantasies of putrefaction, decay, sickness, compulsion, and suicidal impulses disclose this psychological perspective which seeks deepening. Freud ended his own life enraptured or fascinated with this train of thought.
In Tarot, the Death card means being stuck in old patterns, needing to eliminate restrictive habits, beliefs, blocks and outworn ways. This painful uprooted may involve eliminating people or things from your past. The uprooting of habits is surgically cutting yourself free for entrance, assimilation and integration into a new state. It is liberation and renewal which makes new growth possible. Deep emotions can be like a "little death", as in intense sexual experience. Giving up one's sense of self means merging with another or Cosmos, cutting through superficialities, butting to the bone. Our energy is radically transformed from one shape or form to another.
