LIMINAL ENTITIES
"LIMINAL (Latin limin, "threshold"): A liminal space is a blurry boundary zone between two established and clear spatial areas, and a liminal moment is a blurry boundary period between two segments of time. Most cultures have special rituals, customs, or markers to indicate the transitional nature of such liminal spaces or liminal times. Examples include boundary stones, rites of passage, high school graduations, births, deaths, burials, marriages, carrying the bride over the threshold, etc. These special markers may involve elaborate ceremonies (wedding vows), special wardrobe (mortarboard caps and medieval scholar's gown), or unusual taboos (the custom of not seeing the bride before the wedding). Liminal zones feature strongly in folklore, mythology, and Arthurian legend." https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/lit_terms_L.html
Liminal Entities
by Iona Miller
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer,
together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.” ―Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
Historically, there has been no shortage of metaphysical descriptions of the afterlife and the beings who allegedly inhabit it, but this is not that. We are concerned here only with certain imaginal approaches to the ancestors, relevant to psychogenealogy, the art of darkness, and unconscious exclusion. There is an impulse to both express and repress intuition.
With imagination we can go beyond ordinary reality. Shaman spirit walkers work in liminal time and space. These edge walkers walk between the worlds, connecting those of the spirit world with those of this one, talking with the spirits, helping keep life in balance and harmony. Similarly, we can communicate with our own ancestral spirits.
These are excursions into the depths of the body, encounters with others, self, and eternity. As in this world, we can expect positive, negative, and mundane experiences in the imaginal field. As well as happiness or intimacy there is also negative empathic identification, suffering, loss, anger, despair, tragedy, etc. Ordinary experiences include focused concentration, meaningful memories, dreams, continuing inner dialogues, social/relational interactions, reflexive and reflective thought.
Intuition demands representation for communication. There are many techniques that evoke a first-hand experience of the self through imagination, yet none are quite as personal and resonant as our ancestors. Where do we draw the line between knowledge and belief? There are differences between attributions of being right and knowing,
We feel the reality of the image as a specific value -- a transposition of psychological consciousness. Feelings are inherent in the image. The psychic realm is the spirit realm. Our descent to the depths is a pilgrimage to the inner universe, beyond rational consciousness. The background becomes present. The relationship involving the whole being simply is, and spoken to directly. God is the worldwide relation to all relations. Our fuller life includes the ancestors.
Our part is to participate, to acknowledge the living relationship, nurture it with attention, and interpret it with intuition as a mental or spiritual relationship. We abandon the world of sensation and melt into the in-between where that relationship is foremost. Any splitting is merely for purposes of interpretation or description. But it is only in that "in between" place that we can access who we are at the heart of it all.
The 'other' is an abstraction through which we can experience the world, sometimes in a less or unlimited way in the world of relation -- a self-aware coherence with the other and unlimited store of wisdom. Life unfolding understanding emerges in the now, which is always present and timeless.
Transitory Situations
Stories need liminality; the middle of every story is liminal -- disruptive, chaotic, disorienting, and transformative. Transformation always requires death of the old person to become something new. Our lives are full of inconvenient setbacks from some purpose we don’t comprehend. In waiting, we become.
Presence implies coming alive to this present moment, wherever we are, without changing our conditions. We learn to see and embrace these moments, knowing that a birth of some sort is about to happen, but as with birth there may be discomfort and waiting. This is the time between birth and death, life passages, the time between wounding and healing. Liminality means learning to live with tension and pain and even the boredom of waiting -- contentment in tension.
Liminal Theory
Liminality is a motif, a transition, and a potentially numinous or transpersonal phenomenon. Ultimately, it means any place or point of entering or beginning. In psychology the term limen means the point at which a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to begin to produce an effect. Liminal spaces are where the boundaries become thin, as described in "second sight" -- edgy places, in the sense of forefront, excitable, and provocative.
Liminal gaps allow libido to fall into the unfathomable psychic depths. Jung says, "The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life." Those psychic depths are so vast compared to ordinary space that emotion feels like it drains away into that immensity, that abyss.
Between what was and what will be lies kairos or the depth dimension of time and the frontier or wilderness of space. Kairos is the moment when spontaneous change is possible, the opportune moment -- the timely qualities of a given instant. In rhetoric kairos is "a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved." We don't really know how to proceed.
The challenge is to create a liminal space that operates as a bridge between the present and the future – beyond the status quo, and yet able to engage with it. Such linking experiences, a living and peopled drama, compare to our ancestors and their linking places in the family tree. How are necessary truths known? An emotional storm can ignite with liminal entities that must be allowed participatory relations to speak in a sense that somehow goes with truth and learning by experience.
A liminal presence is an unknown and unknowable something that exists outside all categories of our world (or any other) but between them. The branches of our family tree are liminal pathways, some visible, most invisible and undeterminable. Liminal time is the moment when something changes from one state to another. “Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity.”
Liminal Wisdom
Some sense of death hovers in the body. That cleft leads down directly to the unplumbed depths of the unconscious. If the quality of life is compromised, the issue is not survival alone, but the of quality of life we have have in surviving. We are dealing with an unsolvable fracture, which cannot be mended. We can try to soften the rupture.
Ancestors can rebuke or approve our behavior, whether this coincides with our conscious imagination, our understanding, or not. We may be surprised. Begging forgiveness can go either way. Is the world something fearful or not? Such speculations are part of classical studies: Imagine that Antigone and Creon meet in the Underworld. Write a dialogue in which they argue over which one of them is the hero of Sophocles’ tragedy.
Ordinarily, we are 'outsiders' to our inner life, but there are ways we can make inroads along our ancestral lines. If our own inner life is unknown, the inner lives of our ancestors is real terra incognita, a vast, unexplored territory we scarcely recognize and usually avoid.
Liminal Dreaming
Liminal entities are 'life stories' -- voices, faces, and names. Our psychophysiology is a liminal bridge. Language or dialog is another bridge. Mythic ancestors play cosmological roles. They hold the place of or define mythic concepts. Mythic ancestors often emerge in male/female pairs who are also mythical teachers.
Liminal entities help us ponder on our relationship with nature’s body and to our own bodies. Our inner and outer worlds remain largely disconnected -- dissociated. But, even then, we are unconsciously co-mingled with our ancestors. Out of misery comes fantasy. Even pain is information; the body tells us 'pay attention,' something is wrong here. Pain is a great teacher that makes us wiser.
Even if we master the external world, it is grounding to map our Tree as the landscape of our inner lives - our hopes and fears, values and beliefs, needs and motivations, complexities and contradictions. The impact they have on our everyday choices and behaviors roots us in deeper reality and self-awareness.
Doing genealogy or not, we can all experience spontaneous liminal experiences, even nightmarish ones (liminal terror) in dreams. Encounters with liminal phenomena almost always produce a sense of strangeness, uncomfortableness, or uncanniness. Something that falls on the interstices of our conceptual and cultural "world" tends to reminds us of the fact that virtual mountains of phenomena have been, and are being, excluded from consciousness. Whereas reality itself is much bigger and stranger and more unbounded than ordinarily perceived.
Liminal Body
Liminality is a heuristic model in which our borderlands that both divide and connect become more permeable. Imagination transcends the physical limits of ancestral connectivity. In the midst of our own life-passages, such as (adolescence, mating, parenting, midlife, or old age), we become more liminal ourselves and perhaps more inclined to look for 'signs.' Ancient wisdom and patterns have a way of making themselves known.
Liminal phenomena are normally relegated to the periphery of our attention. It's as if attention quickens the ancestors. Because we are wired for pattern-recognition, sometimes we perceive patterns that aren't really there in regular noise, but then we find a 'real' meaning in that perception of what was formerly unknown or subconscious. The family tree is a multi-vocal symbol. The World Tree is our collective liminal body.
Liminal Bridge
Death is the ultimate liminal bridge that makes transformation from one realm to another possible. Ancestral bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds. Transformation comes in the unstable, unpredictable, precarious place without clear borders. Liminality is unstable, so it can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
“Between-ness” defines these spaces. Liminal places can range from borders and frontiers to no man’s lands and disputed territories, to crossroads, marshes, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas. In mythology, religion, and esoterics liminality can include such realms as the Abyss, Purgatory, or Da’at. When theologians deny they actually exist, they become doubly liminal.
Meaningful information can cross the threshold between the unconscious and conscious mind in a variety of traditional and idiosyncratic ways. Some might call it prayer, or ESP, "second sight," gnosis, guidance, or visionary experience. It doesn't matter what we call it. That only reflects our beliefs about the phenomena.
Liminal Ambiguity
Liminal personae slip through any network of classifications. The interpretation of 'conversations' is a subjective process, the content of which is meaningful primarily to the inquirer. It is simply a natural model of liminal states or entities in cultural domains -- the symbolic encoding of transitional phenomena.
Spaces can appear, disappear, reappear, and travel around between cracks of structures, resisting any concrete definitions or developmental progress. We play with elements of the familiar and unfamiliar. We might find ourselves traveling through another's body in a liminal narrative. The liminal field is personal, fictive, and mythic, just like the family tree.
Transliminal
Liminality might appear at first glance as suggesting a loss of power and vitality, due to its location on the "edge", it is in fact a powerful source of creativity, generating symbolic forms of culture from rituals and mythologies and up until works of art and analytic tools in terms of root metaphors or models of reality.
Liminality is the site of reflection, a 'threshold' space between conscious and unconscious, open to all kind of possibilities, ready to be populated by imagined realities. When we work in the liminal we separate from ordinary consciousness, suspend disbelief and enter the space of imagination, drama, and metaphor. No matter how strong the experience, sooner or later, we return to our ordinary selves.
In a liminal state we are freed from the demands of daily life. The 'go betweens' become the site of the action, which remains a temporary passage, bridging the empty space and providing new perspectives, reinforcement, creative and artistic inspiration. It is a spontaneous communion in transitional, sacred space where internal decisions and special behavior is required.
We may be temporarily uplifted, swept away, or 'taken over,' in a psychological rather than metaphysical, religious, or supernatural way in the 'I-you dialog'. There is a bit of all the ancestors in us with which we can imagine a direct, unmediated experience. We don't merge identities or submerge in them but preserve their uniqueness as well as our own values, and perhaps share a moment of transport, changing attitudes, or intersubjective illumination.
Separation, Transition, Incorporation
After a time, we deliberately reassimilate or reassociate with our ordinary awareness. We divest our personality, become open to new information with a 'beginner's mind' and cross a threshold to a new identity and powers. There are many ways to accomplish the transformation. Our actions or objects take on a new value.
Liminal entities are regenerated by our interest. They are neither 'here nor there'; they are in between 'realms'. Liminal dialog or conversations can be seen as an informal ritual act during which we are also essentially interactive liminal entities. We deal with the character’s consistent personality which allows them to deal with the world. In other words, mythic characters impose their will on the mythic world, while non-mythic characters are imposed upon by their non-mythic world.
Liminality collapses categories. We can take a liminal stance and engage in imaginal conversations with our ancestors, who we can consider a class or category of liminal entities in the imaginal field of consciousness, or soul. Some of these experiences may feel numinous or mythic. Such 'threshold people' are naturally ambiguous inner beings represent the co-presence of opposites, both human and spirit, dead but somehow 'alive' for us. Ancestors have differentiated identities.
Liminality is not outside of the social structure or on its edges, it is in the cracks within the social structure itself. It signifies an imaginal freedom of movement among states, areas, and time. Ultimately, liminality (like liminal figures) is hard to pin down. It is evanescent, like a wisp of smoke in the wind. Only in literature and the arts is it a permanent trait of certain figures. In the real world, even though it can theoretically be a permanent state, it is generally a temporary state and thus can be very hard to grasp at times.
As liminal entities, ancestors are images at their core with effects that can range from change agent, to mentor to trickster. Such liminal personas represent and highlight the semi-autonomous boundaries of the imaginal world. The powers that shape the neophytes in liminality for the incumbency of new status are felt, in rites all over the world, to be more than human powers, though they are invoked and channeled by the representatives of the community.
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Turner.htm
Psychology is a 'study of the soul,' so a psychological approach to our family tree means working that tree with a focus toward its effect on our soul, and honoring the 'transgenerational laws' that have been neglected in modern culture. The object of the psychological approach is the inside subject engaged with psyche. Insight completes the work of integration.
Thus, it is possible in the psychological approach to speak of 'subtle bodies' without yoga, 'rebirth' without 'reincarnation', and 'resurrection' without a religious worldview. They are real phenomena but psychic events, not limited to paranormal or superstitious interpretations. What was buried in the past becomes available to us as a transformative resource.
To be engaged with the psyche, inevitably means to be engaged with the ancestors:
"There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, pg 38.)
"Perhaps certain traits belonging to the ancestors get buried away in the mind as complexes with a life of their own which has never been assimilated into the life of the individual, and then, for some unknown reason, these complexes become activated, step out of their obscurity in the folds of the unconscious, and begin to dominate the whole mind." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.)
"Therefore there are gates and walls, showing the aspiration is not to be dead and buried in the mandala, but to function through the mandala." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 265.)
Subject and psyche reflexively fold back upon one another fusing subject and object on the unus mundus or psychoid level. The family tree graphically represents this vast process, and merely hints at its complexity. At the psychoid (psychophysical) level the unconscious domain is the deep wisdom of nature -- our connective consciousness of nature and our nature -- our aboriginal knowing field -- an immediate, direct, non-discursive, perception of reality.
In a way the collective unconscious is merely a mirage because unconscious, but it can be also just as real as the tangible world. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40)
"As soon as one begins to watch one’s mind, one begins to observe the autonomous phenomena in which one exists as a spectator, or even as a victim." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40.)
Genealogy is a reflexive discipline. Your family tree opens a vast inner realm of ancient, living symbols -- your ancestors. More than learning about them, we want to become familiar with them. We yearn toward eternity, longing for connection. It begs the question, "are we comfortable in the presence of the disembodied?"
The Absence & the Presence
Genealogy is full of mythic power for us individually and collectively, and how we understand what the human condition is all about with its paradoxes and tragedies. We swing from bough to bough and the players and locale shift to the subtle dimension. The deeper we penetrate it, the more we become known to ourselves.
Genealogy is the domain of subtle bodies, neither this nor that. Now a presence it then eludes our grasp, shows itself and hides itself, reveals and conceals itself. Disembodied spirits are a conceptual category, rather than an ontological 'reality' or delusion from beliefs or religion.
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, the essence of being. But ontology is only the study of anything under the aspect of its being, of what is involved in its existing.
In the psychological context, ontology itself is a mythologizing activity. It is not an ultimate but can have consequences: (1) Ontological security is achieved by routinizing relationships with significant others, and actors therefore become attached to those relationships. (2) Worldview implodes in Ontological Catastrophe. (3) Ontological anarchy insists no "state" can "exist" in chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of chaos. In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all roiling energies, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement—is chaos.
Undecideability
What kinds of things actually exist? Meta-questions include: What is existence? and What is the nature of existence? We ask, "What is the nature of the universe?" or "Is there a god?" or "What happens to us when we die?" or "What principles govern the properties of matter?" The entangled nature of quantum entities provides a plausible theory for how our ancestors might 'appear' in our own very material psychophysiology.
Bateson names the connection between opposites with a paradoxical image borrowed from C. G. Jung, who paraphrased ancient Gnosticism -- ''pleroma/creatura.'' This image implies the idea that the fundamental connection is not between two substances, mind and matter. Rather, mind is the pattern and fabric, texture and weave (pleroma) in all matter (creatura). This is the psychophysical essence of psyche, or soul.
We can try to ground our heuristics on firm metaphysical and epistemological foundations. The ontological argument claims to establish the real (as opposed to abstract) existence of some entity with some a priori 'proof.' In its general meaning, ontology is the study or concern about what kinds of things exist - what entities there are in the universe. Such questions are moot speaking of a dead or discarnate, and therefore, 'non-existent' being.
The basic question of ontology is “What exists?” The basic question of metaontology is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Here ontological realists say yes, and ontological anti-realists say no. (Chalmers) But we don't need to answer or have faith in any ontology to pursue psychogenealogy. We don't need to believe in 'ghosts' for an epistemology of the sacred.
Metaphor is the logic of psyche. We have countless metaphors of appearance and disappearance. It doesn't matter that our ancestral spirits are discarnate, because they 'matter' in terms of psyche, which is indistinguishable from matter -- our matter. One effect of this is psychophysical symptoms rooted in transgenerational issues.
Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. The psychological or therapeutic approach does not require ontological speculation or meta-questions. We perceive them as epistemological metaphors, or 'how we know what we know' and what it's 'like,' which awakens their psychophysical aspects.
We can explore metaphors. They act as a bridge, imaginative propositions, even epistemic intuition. They use a story or illustration to see alternative ways of looking at something. Every culture and religion uses these types of stories, analogies, and parables to improve understanding, make a point more memorable, and help us make positive changes.
The internal/external metaphor is foundational. Metaphors assist transformation. A metaphorical scheme effects a reorganization. Interrelating conceptual, perceptual, and biological metaphors enables a cycle of transformation. They are inherently irrational but unconsciously 'make sense.'
Much of our thinking is a matrix or complex web of metaphors. Emotive metaphors are feelings transformed into a metaphorical equivalent. It is sustained throughout the work and functions as a controlling image. Metaphors deepen the information. The questions used to develop a metaphor develop space not time.
A metaphor awakens conceptions with more force and grace than 'common' language. An epistemological metaphor is personal and unique, translating a feeling or thought into a form that can travel through time to its original.
Zhuangzi metaphorically puts forth three meta-questions or fundamental
questions in epistemology: 1) as an epistemic subject, do I know I myself? 2) Among epistemic subjects, do I know others? 3) What can I know about the world?
Virtual Agents
Epistemology is a knowledge creation metaphor. References to virtual agency are metaphorical, beyond body, death, and social identity. Epistemological metaphors are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams, symptoms, and our family tree.
Content-free therapy can be done through metaphor, rather than through directly reliving trauma thereby avoiding re-traumatizing. Metaphors act as a means for the psyche to represent experiences of personal significance in symbolic ways. Metaphoric expressions are tied to some unconscious or implicit aspect of our experience.
Metaphor does something in relation to our understanding. Beyond rhetoric, metaphor is rooted in some quality of the world as it is. Metaphor functions like a dream or symptom in the sense that it simultaneously expresses material from different psychic levels -- topographical, structural, and dynamic.
Metaphor use and exploration gives us a way of linking our experiences across diverse times and situations. In genealogy, history uses veils as epistemological metaphors, reflecting the conception of reality dominant in each respective epoch.
Social Presence in Sacred Space
In our transgenerational work we can extend that self-inquiry, asking ourselves 'where do I feel that in my body', and 'how do I know it's happening when it happens' to develop dynamic images and metaphors of 'what it is like' for process work. It's a functional approach that is used because it works as a tool for exploring personal meaning, fundamental to insight-oriented psychotherapy.
Disembodied Soul
Personifying is a way of making subjective experience, passionate identification, and indwelling images more tangible through conversation and relationship in symbolic form. Hillman (1975) called it “an epistemology of the heart, a thought-mode of feeling.” It imagines what’s inside, outside, and makes this content alive, personal, and even divine. Jung claimed that the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside; the claim is that psyche is matter and matter is psyche.
Theoretical Grounding
The scientific search for knowledge is the search for Truth and Beauty, appealing to both spirit and soul. To know facts is to survive; not to know, or to assess one's environment wrongly, is to lose the fight for survival. With the examination of the sources, nature, and accuracy of our knowledge, we begin to develop epistemic awareness, a more informed understanding of what we know and don't know.
We are faced with two serious epistemological problems: (1) How can we determine which facts are true? and, (2) How can we determine which facts are important? Our minds compare and interface the internal and external realities we navigate through.
Denial is a complex “unconscious defense mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality.“ Even skepticism and solipsistic arguments – including epistemological relativism – about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction.
Rebirth is synonymous with restoring the true history of our origins and integrating our transgenerational inheritance, somewhere between the loss of what we thought we knew and true self-knowledge.
The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Jung's basic ideas about the unity of knowledge and existence are in principle synonymous with the Platonic tradition, alchemy, Qabala and Gnosticism. Plato treated the end product of the evolution of mathematical concepts, (a fixed system of idealized objects), as an independent beginning point of the evolution of the "world of things." This concrete form of philosophy was determined by the nature of Greek mathematics.
These philosophies seek to reconcile the actual condition with a hypothetical distant ideal, which expansively incorporates both personal and universal dimensions. It is an inward-oriented epistemology. By intuitive perception we can consciously reiterate the laws of Nature and mind which are equivalent to the archetypes themselves.
Going back to the question of fantasizing, if once the resistance to free contact with the unconscious can be overcome, and one can develop the power of sticking to the fantasy, then the play of the images can be watched. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38.
Liminal Archetypes
In Sumerian mythology, Tiamat is a liminal goddess.
Tiamat is often imagined as a huge serpent. Of the typical animal motifs – the snake, the tiger, or the bird – the snake or serpent is the most complex and ambiguous of all. Like the fish or archetypal sea creature, snakes inhabit a non-human underworld – dark, murky, and fraught with unknown, liminal forces.
Jung provides an example of the anima expressing itself in a dream in the form of a snake. He does not say whether this dream belongs to a man or woman: A female snake comports herself tenderly and insinuatingly, speaking with a human voice (Jung, 1951, p.201). The snake confers upon humanity, in this case via a woman, supernatural knowledge – knowledge forbidden by the god of Genesis, but not necessarily by the gods in contemporaneous cultures at the time this myth was written.
In Egyptian mythology, Osiris is the liminal god of death and rebirth, and cyclic dismemberment. According to Jung, archetypes are the God-likeness in man that are “meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower.” It is through the archetypes that life renewal occurs. It is quite evident that the bereaved enter a transitional, or liminal, period following a sudden separation by death, and this liminal state is revealed in their dreams. In Eastern religions, it is believed that dreams cross the realm of sleep for the living and the place of death for the deceased; therefore, encounters with deceased spirits in dreams are not uncommon. Such encounters, referred to as visitations, may occur for several months or even years following a loss by death, and can be a source of resolution and transition for the bereaved.
Significant dream themes may come upon the bereaved during the early phases of bereavement, all of which connect them symbolically and psychically with the world of the dead. Such themes include the death tunnel and bridal chamber commonly seen in near-death experiences, dismembered Osiris, the Egyptian deity of afterlife, the Dark Night of the Soul, a representation of the deep sorrow of bereavement, images of the Self as encounters with the divine, and the death wedding or sacred marriage in which the soul of the deceased, as well as the bereaved, unite with the universal dimension.
In Greek mythology, Hermes is the god of liminality and guide of souls -- decision-making and psychological wandering -- and 'wandering spirits'. He guides both the souls of the dead to the underworld and sleepers to the realm of dreams. His ability to cross boundaries makes Hermes a mediator between the human and the divine realm, or between the personal psyche and the unconscious.
Hermes is the inner experience between conscious and unconscious, punctuated by meaningful synchronicities, sudden compelling through and feelings, or vivid image, and twilight or trace states that unexpectedly envelope us. Liminal Hermes suspends us between one familiar ego place and another. At its deepest this feeling is a sense of strangeness or subtle depersonalization, heralding a new leg of journey.
Messages from beyond the border of everyday reality illuminate our experience and bring eternity into time. The ancient Greeks viewed Hermes as psychopomp. They knew that without his guidance their disembodied shades would wander the earth eternally and–perhaps more frightening still–would leave them while still alive at the mercy of the lost shades of others.
The task of guiding the soul into the underworld cannot be minimized or omitted from psychology,” notes Lopez-Pedraza, because “death is death–the always fearful opposite of life –in spite of the fact that our culture has systematically repressed what death is to the psyche.” The value of having Hermes as one's companion in the descent to the underworld rather than Hades is that the psychopomp's role is to guide us in whatever ways are required to learn the lessons which a knowledge of death brings to the living of life.
More importantly, since we no longer are able to experience death as a communal experience, notes Lopez-Pedraza, if we look at solitary modern man's “desolation in the face of death from a psychology of depth, it has been to man's gain, because it provides him with the freedom to make death his own imaginative and intimate concern, to become better acquainted with his own images and emotions concerning death, thus enriching his psychic life” (93).
An aspect of Hermes' role as psychopomp is his unique ability to make the transition between the realms of the living and the dead, between the world of consciousness and the depths of the personal and collective unconscious. Because of his great skill at passing “in between” dimensions—whether these dimensions are physical, chronological, or psychological in nature–Hermes is also the god of all things liminal, all things transitional. “Ever a transitional figure,” Doty states with simplicity, “Hermes divinizes transition” (137).
“He is there, at all transitions,marking them as sacred, as eventful, as epiphany,” adds Downing, and “his presence reminds us that the crossing of every threshold is a sacred event” (56, 65). As a result, she concludes, “our awareness of Hermes' presence opens us to the sacredness of such moments, of those in-between times that are strangely frightening and we so often try to hurry past” (56).
Just as Hermes leads Priam to the place where he will retrieve the corpse of his beloved son, the place “where death will be faced and grief will meet its maker,” as Stein described the scene, so too have I been confronted with knowledge of the dead places within myself and the need to mourn the passing of those aspects of myself. Equally importantly, as Stein also notes of this episode from the Iliad, “this encounter with death also brings consciousness of a dead past that needs to be buried” (36). I am now arriving at that place where I am able to allow the injuries of a constricted childhood to be laid to rest, to let these wounds finally heal and scarify, and finally begin to look to a future more whole and alive than I had ever imagined.
possible.http://www.soulmyths.com/hermes.pdf
Public Liminality
Ritual and drama are public liminality. In Greek drama, Antigone is the daughter/sister of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Her name means "worthy of one's parents" or "in place of one's parents". She descended across the Bridge of Acheron into the archaic depths of the Underworld, prying open the chasm between the stark light of interrogation and the plunging darkness of the abyss.
Liminal Entities
by Iona Miller
“I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become.”
― C.G. Jung
“We are one, after all, you and I, together we suffer,
together exist, and forever will recreate each other.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
“A genuine odyssey is not about piling up experiences. It is a deeply felt, risky, unpredictable tour of the soul.” ―Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life
Historically, there has been no shortage of metaphysical descriptions of the afterlife and the beings who allegedly inhabit it, but this is not that. We are concerned here only with certain imaginal approaches to the ancestors, relevant to psychogenealogy, the art of darkness, and unconscious exclusion. There is an impulse to both express and repress intuition.
With imagination we can go beyond ordinary reality. Shaman spirit walkers work in liminal time and space. These edge walkers walk between the worlds, connecting those of the spirit world with those of this one, talking with the spirits, helping keep life in balance and harmony. Similarly, we can communicate with our own ancestral spirits.
These are excursions into the depths of the body, encounters with others, self, and eternity. As in this world, we can expect positive, negative, and mundane experiences in the imaginal field. As well as happiness or intimacy there is also negative empathic identification, suffering, loss, anger, despair, tragedy, etc. Ordinary experiences include focused concentration, meaningful memories, dreams, continuing inner dialogues, social/relational interactions, reflexive and reflective thought.
Intuition demands representation for communication. There are many techniques that evoke a first-hand experience of the self through imagination, yet none are quite as personal and resonant as our ancestors. Where do we draw the line between knowledge and belief? There are differences between attributions of being right and knowing,
We feel the reality of the image as a specific value -- a transposition of psychological consciousness. Feelings are inherent in the image. The psychic realm is the spirit realm. Our descent to the depths is a pilgrimage to the inner universe, beyond rational consciousness. The background becomes present. The relationship involving the whole being simply is, and spoken to directly. God is the worldwide relation to all relations. Our fuller life includes the ancestors.
Our part is to participate, to acknowledge the living relationship, nurture it with attention, and interpret it with intuition as a mental or spiritual relationship. We abandon the world of sensation and melt into the in-between where that relationship is foremost. Any splitting is merely for purposes of interpretation or description. But it is only in that "in between" place that we can access who we are at the heart of it all.
The 'other' is an abstraction through which we can experience the world, sometimes in a less or unlimited way in the world of relation -- a self-aware coherence with the other and unlimited store of wisdom. Life unfolding understanding emerges in the now, which is always present and timeless.
Transitory Situations
Stories need liminality; the middle of every story is liminal -- disruptive, chaotic, disorienting, and transformative. Transformation always requires death of the old person to become something new. Our lives are full of inconvenient setbacks from some purpose we don’t comprehend. In waiting, we become.
Presence implies coming alive to this present moment, wherever we are, without changing our conditions. We learn to see and embrace these moments, knowing that a birth of some sort is about to happen, but as with birth there may be discomfort and waiting. This is the time between birth and death, life passages, the time between wounding and healing. Liminality means learning to live with tension and pain and even the boredom of waiting -- contentment in tension.
Liminal Theory
Liminality is a motif, a transition, and a potentially numinous or transpersonal phenomenon. Ultimately, it means any place or point of entering or beginning. In psychology the term limen means the point at which a stimulus is of sufficient intensity to begin to produce an effect. Liminal spaces are where the boundaries become thin, as described in "second sight" -- edgy places, in the sense of forefront, excitable, and provocative.
Liminal gaps allow libido to fall into the unfathomable psychic depths. Jung says, "The psychic depths are nature, and nature is creative life." Those psychic depths are so vast compared to ordinary space that emotion feels like it drains away into that immensity, that abyss.
Between what was and what will be lies kairos or the depth dimension of time and the frontier or wilderness of space. Kairos is the moment when spontaneous change is possible, the opportune moment -- the timely qualities of a given instant. In rhetoric kairos is "a passing instant when an opening appears which must be driven through with force if success is to be achieved." We don't really know how to proceed.
The challenge is to create a liminal space that operates as a bridge between the present and the future – beyond the status quo, and yet able to engage with it. Such linking experiences, a living and peopled drama, compare to our ancestors and their linking places in the family tree. How are necessary truths known? An emotional storm can ignite with liminal entities that must be allowed participatory relations to speak in a sense that somehow goes with truth and learning by experience.
A liminal presence is an unknown and unknowable something that exists outside all categories of our world (or any other) but between them. The branches of our family tree are liminal pathways, some visible, most invisible and undeterminable. Liminal time is the moment when something changes from one state to another. “Liminal moments are times of tension, extreme reactions, and great opportunity.”
Liminal Wisdom
Some sense of death hovers in the body. That cleft leads down directly to the unplumbed depths of the unconscious. If the quality of life is compromised, the issue is not survival alone, but the of quality of life we have have in surviving. We are dealing with an unsolvable fracture, which cannot be mended. We can try to soften the rupture.
Ancestors can rebuke or approve our behavior, whether this coincides with our conscious imagination, our understanding, or not. We may be surprised. Begging forgiveness can go either way. Is the world something fearful or not? Such speculations are part of classical studies: Imagine that Antigone and Creon meet in the Underworld. Write a dialogue in which they argue over which one of them is the hero of Sophocles’ tragedy.
Ordinarily, we are 'outsiders' to our inner life, but there are ways we can make inroads along our ancestral lines. If our own inner life is unknown, the inner lives of our ancestors is real terra incognita, a vast, unexplored territory we scarcely recognize and usually avoid.
Liminal Dreaming
Liminal entities are 'life stories' -- voices, faces, and names. Our psychophysiology is a liminal bridge. Language or dialog is another bridge. Mythic ancestors play cosmological roles. They hold the place of or define mythic concepts. Mythic ancestors often emerge in male/female pairs who are also mythical teachers.
Liminal entities help us ponder on our relationship with nature’s body and to our own bodies. Our inner and outer worlds remain largely disconnected -- dissociated. But, even then, we are unconsciously co-mingled with our ancestors. Out of misery comes fantasy. Even pain is information; the body tells us 'pay attention,' something is wrong here. Pain is a great teacher that makes us wiser.
Even if we master the external world, it is grounding to map our Tree as the landscape of our inner lives - our hopes and fears, values and beliefs, needs and motivations, complexities and contradictions. The impact they have on our everyday choices and behaviors roots us in deeper reality and self-awareness.
Doing genealogy or not, we can all experience spontaneous liminal experiences, even nightmarish ones (liminal terror) in dreams. Encounters with liminal phenomena almost always produce a sense of strangeness, uncomfortableness, or uncanniness. Something that falls on the interstices of our conceptual and cultural "world" tends to reminds us of the fact that virtual mountains of phenomena have been, and are being, excluded from consciousness. Whereas reality itself is much bigger and stranger and more unbounded than ordinarily perceived.
Liminal Body
Liminality is a heuristic model in which our borderlands that both divide and connect become more permeable. Imagination transcends the physical limits of ancestral connectivity. In the midst of our own life-passages, such as (adolescence, mating, parenting, midlife, or old age), we become more liminal ourselves and perhaps more inclined to look for 'signs.' Ancient wisdom and patterns have a way of making themselves known.
Liminal phenomena are normally relegated to the periphery of our attention. It's as if attention quickens the ancestors. Because we are wired for pattern-recognition, sometimes we perceive patterns that aren't really there in regular noise, but then we find a 'real' meaning in that perception of what was formerly unknown or subconscious. The family tree is a multi-vocal symbol. The World Tree is our collective liminal body.
Liminal Bridge
Death is the ultimate liminal bridge that makes transformation from one realm to another possible. Ancestral bridges span liminal (threshold) spaces between worlds. Transformation comes in the unstable, unpredictable, precarious place without clear borders. Liminality is unstable, so it can pave the way for access to esoteric knowledge or understanding of both sides. Liminality is sacred, alluring, and dangerous.
“Between-ness” defines these spaces. Liminal places can range from borders and frontiers to no man’s lands and disputed territories, to crossroads, marshes, springs, caves, shores, rivers, volcanic calderas. In mythology, religion, and esoterics liminality can include such realms as the Abyss, Purgatory, or Da’at. When theologians deny they actually exist, they become doubly liminal.
Meaningful information can cross the threshold between the unconscious and conscious mind in a variety of traditional and idiosyncratic ways. Some might call it prayer, or ESP, "second sight," gnosis, guidance, or visionary experience. It doesn't matter what we call it. That only reflects our beliefs about the phenomena.
Liminal Ambiguity
Liminal personae slip through any network of classifications. The interpretation of 'conversations' is a subjective process, the content of which is meaningful primarily to the inquirer. It is simply a natural model of liminal states or entities in cultural domains -- the symbolic encoding of transitional phenomena.
Spaces can appear, disappear, reappear, and travel around between cracks of structures, resisting any concrete definitions or developmental progress. We play with elements of the familiar and unfamiliar. We might find ourselves traveling through another's body in a liminal narrative. The liminal field is personal, fictive, and mythic, just like the family tree.
Transliminal
Liminality might appear at first glance as suggesting a loss of power and vitality, due to its location on the "edge", it is in fact a powerful source of creativity, generating symbolic forms of culture from rituals and mythologies and up until works of art and analytic tools in terms of root metaphors or models of reality.
Liminality is the site of reflection, a 'threshold' space between conscious and unconscious, open to all kind of possibilities, ready to be populated by imagined realities. When we work in the liminal we separate from ordinary consciousness, suspend disbelief and enter the space of imagination, drama, and metaphor. No matter how strong the experience, sooner or later, we return to our ordinary selves.
In a liminal state we are freed from the demands of daily life. The 'go betweens' become the site of the action, which remains a temporary passage, bridging the empty space and providing new perspectives, reinforcement, creative and artistic inspiration. It is a spontaneous communion in transitional, sacred space where internal decisions and special behavior is required.
We may be temporarily uplifted, swept away, or 'taken over,' in a psychological rather than metaphysical, religious, or supernatural way in the 'I-you dialog'. There is a bit of all the ancestors in us with which we can imagine a direct, unmediated experience. We don't merge identities or submerge in them but preserve their uniqueness as well as our own values, and perhaps share a moment of transport, changing attitudes, or intersubjective illumination.
Separation, Transition, Incorporation
After a time, we deliberately reassimilate or reassociate with our ordinary awareness. We divest our personality, become open to new information with a 'beginner's mind' and cross a threshold to a new identity and powers. There are many ways to accomplish the transformation. Our actions or objects take on a new value.
Liminal entities are regenerated by our interest. They are neither 'here nor there'; they are in between 'realms'. Liminal dialog or conversations can be seen as an informal ritual act during which we are also essentially interactive liminal entities. We deal with the character’s consistent personality which allows them to deal with the world. In other words, mythic characters impose their will on the mythic world, while non-mythic characters are imposed upon by their non-mythic world.
Liminality collapses categories. We can take a liminal stance and engage in imaginal conversations with our ancestors, who we can consider a class or category of liminal entities in the imaginal field of consciousness, or soul. Some of these experiences may feel numinous or mythic. Such 'threshold people' are naturally ambiguous inner beings represent the co-presence of opposites, both human and spirit, dead but somehow 'alive' for us. Ancestors have differentiated identities.
Liminality is not outside of the social structure or on its edges, it is in the cracks within the social structure itself. It signifies an imaginal freedom of movement among states, areas, and time. Ultimately, liminality (like liminal figures) is hard to pin down. It is evanescent, like a wisp of smoke in the wind. Only in literature and the arts is it a permanent trait of certain figures. In the real world, even though it can theoretically be a permanent state, it is generally a temporary state and thus can be very hard to grasp at times.
As liminal entities, ancestors are images at their core with effects that can range from change agent, to mentor to trickster. Such liminal personas represent and highlight the semi-autonomous boundaries of the imaginal world. The powers that shape the neophytes in liminality for the incumbency of new status are felt, in rites all over the world, to be more than human powers, though they are invoked and channeled by the representatives of the community.
The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae ("threshold people") are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial. As such, their ambiguous and indeterminate attributes are expressed by a rich variety of symbols in the many societies that ritualize social and cultural transitions. Thus, liminality is frequently likened to death, to being in the womb, to invisibility, to darkness, to bisexuality, to the wilderness, and to an eclipse of the sun or moon. http://faculty.dwc.edu/wellman/Turner.htm
Psychology is a 'study of the soul,' so a psychological approach to our family tree means working that tree with a focus toward its effect on our soul, and honoring the 'transgenerational laws' that have been neglected in modern culture. The object of the psychological approach is the inside subject engaged with psyche. Insight completes the work of integration.
Thus, it is possible in the psychological approach to speak of 'subtle bodies' without yoga, 'rebirth' without 'reincarnation', and 'resurrection' without a religious worldview. They are real phenomena but psychic events, not limited to paranormal or superstitious interpretations. What was buried in the past becomes available to us as a transformative resource.
To be engaged with the psyche, inevitably means to be engaged with the ancestors:
"There is one ego in the conscious and another made up of unconscious ancestral elements, by the force of which a man who has been fairly himself over a period of years suddenly falls under the sway of an ancestor." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, pg 38.)
"Perhaps certain traits belonging to the ancestors get buried away in the mind as complexes with a life of their own which has never been assimilated into the life of the individual, and then, for some unknown reason, these complexes become activated, step out of their obscurity in the folds of the unconscious, and begin to dominate the whole mind." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 39.)
"Therefore there are gates and walls, showing the aspiration is not to be dead and buried in the mandala, but to function through the mandala." (Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 265.)
Subject and psyche reflexively fold back upon one another fusing subject and object on the unus mundus or psychoid level. The family tree graphically represents this vast process, and merely hints at its complexity. At the psychoid (psychophysical) level the unconscious domain is the deep wisdom of nature -- our connective consciousness of nature and our nature -- our aboriginal knowing field -- an immediate, direct, non-discursive, perception of reality.
In a way the collective unconscious is merely a mirage because unconscious, but it can be also just as real as the tangible world. (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40)
"As soon as one begins to watch one’s mind, one begins to observe the autonomous phenomena in which one exists as a spectator, or even as a victim." (Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 40.)
Genealogy is a reflexive discipline. Your family tree opens a vast inner realm of ancient, living symbols -- your ancestors. More than learning about them, we want to become familiar with them. We yearn toward eternity, longing for connection. It begs the question, "are we comfortable in the presence of the disembodied?"
The Absence & the Presence
Genealogy is full of mythic power for us individually and collectively, and how we understand what the human condition is all about with its paradoxes and tragedies. We swing from bough to bough and the players and locale shift to the subtle dimension. The deeper we penetrate it, the more we become known to ourselves.
Genealogy is the domain of subtle bodies, neither this nor that. Now a presence it then eludes our grasp, shows itself and hides itself, reveals and conceals itself. Disembodied spirits are a conceptual category, rather than an ontological 'reality' or delusion from beliefs or religion.
Ontology is a branch of metaphysics that deals with the nature of being, the essence of being. But ontology is only the study of anything under the aspect of its being, of what is involved in its existing.
In the psychological context, ontology itself is a mythologizing activity. It is not an ultimate but can have consequences: (1) Ontological security is achieved by routinizing relationships with significant others, and actors therefore become attached to those relationships. (2) Worldview implodes in Ontological Catastrophe. (3) Ontological anarchy insists no "state" can "exist" in chaos, that all ontological claims are spurious except the claim of chaos. In effect, chaos is life. All mess, all roiling energies, all protoplasmic urgency, all movement—is chaos.
Undecideability
What kinds of things actually exist? Meta-questions include: What is existence? and What is the nature of existence? We ask, "What is the nature of the universe?" or "Is there a god?" or "What happens to us when we die?" or "What principles govern the properties of matter?" The entangled nature of quantum entities provides a plausible theory for how our ancestors might 'appear' in our own very material psychophysiology.
Bateson names the connection between opposites with a paradoxical image borrowed from C. G. Jung, who paraphrased ancient Gnosticism -- ''pleroma/creatura.'' This image implies the idea that the fundamental connection is not between two substances, mind and matter. Rather, mind is the pattern and fabric, texture and weave (pleroma) in all matter (creatura). This is the psychophysical essence of psyche, or soul.
We can try to ground our heuristics on firm metaphysical and epistemological foundations. The ontological argument claims to establish the real (as opposed to abstract) existence of some entity with some a priori 'proof.' In its general meaning, ontology is the study or concern about what kinds of things exist - what entities there are in the universe. Such questions are moot speaking of a dead or discarnate, and therefore, 'non-existent' being.
The basic question of ontology is “What exists?” The basic question of metaontology is: are there objective answers to the basic question of ontology? Here ontological realists say yes, and ontological anti-realists say no. (Chalmers) But we don't need to answer or have faith in any ontology to pursue psychogenealogy. We don't need to believe in 'ghosts' for an epistemology of the sacred.
Metaphor is the logic of psyche. We have countless metaphors of appearance and disappearance. It doesn't matter that our ancestral spirits are discarnate, because they 'matter' in terms of psyche, which is indistinguishable from matter -- our matter. One effect of this is psychophysical symptoms rooted in transgenerational issues.
Spirits are not ontological or metaphysical facts, but imaginal realities. The psychological or therapeutic approach does not require ontological speculation or meta-questions. We perceive them as epistemological metaphors, or 'how we know what we know' and what it's 'like,' which awakens their psychophysical aspects.
We can explore metaphors. They act as a bridge, imaginative propositions, even epistemic intuition. They use a story or illustration to see alternative ways of looking at something. Every culture and religion uses these types of stories, analogies, and parables to improve understanding, make a point more memorable, and help us make positive changes.
The internal/external metaphor is foundational. Metaphors assist transformation. A metaphorical scheme effects a reorganization. Interrelating conceptual, perceptual, and biological metaphors enables a cycle of transformation. They are inherently irrational but unconsciously 'make sense.'
Much of our thinking is a matrix or complex web of metaphors. Emotive metaphors are feelings transformed into a metaphorical equivalent. It is sustained throughout the work and functions as a controlling image. Metaphors deepen the information. The questions used to develop a metaphor develop space not time.
A metaphor awakens conceptions with more force and grace than 'common' language. An epistemological metaphor is personal and unique, translating a feeling or thought into a form that can travel through time to its original.
Zhuangzi metaphorically puts forth three meta-questions or fundamental
questions in epistemology: 1) as an epistemic subject, do I know I myself? 2) Among epistemic subjects, do I know others? 3) What can I know about the world?
Virtual Agents
Epistemology is a knowledge creation metaphor. References to virtual agency are metaphorical, beyond body, death, and social identity. Epistemological metaphors are a gateway to the subconscious, as are dreams, symptoms, and our family tree.
Content-free therapy can be done through metaphor, rather than through directly reliving trauma thereby avoiding re-traumatizing. Metaphors act as a means for the psyche to represent experiences of personal significance in symbolic ways. Metaphoric expressions are tied to some unconscious or implicit aspect of our experience.
Metaphor does something in relation to our understanding. Beyond rhetoric, metaphor is rooted in some quality of the world as it is. Metaphor functions like a dream or symptom in the sense that it simultaneously expresses material from different psychic levels -- topographical, structural, and dynamic.
Metaphor use and exploration gives us a way of linking our experiences across diverse times and situations. In genealogy, history uses veils as epistemological metaphors, reflecting the conception of reality dominant in each respective epoch.
Social Presence in Sacred Space
In our transgenerational work we can extend that self-inquiry, asking ourselves 'where do I feel that in my body', and 'how do I know it's happening when it happens' to develop dynamic images and metaphors of 'what it is like' for process work. It's a functional approach that is used because it works as a tool for exploring personal meaning, fundamental to insight-oriented psychotherapy.
Disembodied Soul
Personifying is a way of making subjective experience, passionate identification, and indwelling images more tangible through conversation and relationship in symbolic form. Hillman (1975) called it “an epistemology of the heart, a thought-mode of feeling.” It imagines what’s inside, outside, and makes this content alive, personal, and even divine. Jung claimed that the inside is the outside, the outside is the inside; the claim is that psyche is matter and matter is psyche.
Theoretical Grounding
The scientific search for knowledge is the search for Truth and Beauty, appealing to both spirit and soul. To know facts is to survive; not to know, or to assess one's environment wrongly, is to lose the fight for survival. With the examination of the sources, nature, and accuracy of our knowledge, we begin to develop epistemic awareness, a more informed understanding of what we know and don't know.
We are faced with two serious epistemological problems: (1) How can we determine which facts are true? and, (2) How can we determine which facts are important? Our minds compare and interface the internal and external realities we navigate through.
Denial is a complex “unconscious defense mechanism for coping with guilt, anxiety and other disturbing emotions aroused by reality.“ Even skepticism and solipsistic arguments – including epistemological relativism – about the existence of objective truth, are generally a social construction.
Rebirth is synonymous with restoring the true history of our origins and integrating our transgenerational inheritance, somewhere between the loss of what we thought we knew and true self-knowledge.
The soul generates images unceasingly. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Jung's basic ideas about the unity of knowledge and existence are in principle synonymous with the Platonic tradition, alchemy, Qabala and Gnosticism. Plato treated the end product of the evolution of mathematical concepts, (a fixed system of idealized objects), as an independent beginning point of the evolution of the "world of things." This concrete form of philosophy was determined by the nature of Greek mathematics.
These philosophies seek to reconcile the actual condition with a hypothetical distant ideal, which expansively incorporates both personal and universal dimensions. It is an inward-oriented epistemology. By intuitive perception we can consciously reiterate the laws of Nature and mind which are equivalent to the archetypes themselves.
Going back to the question of fantasizing, if once the resistance to free contact with the unconscious can be overcome, and one can develop the power of sticking to the fantasy, then the play of the images can be watched. ~Carl Jung, 1925 Seminar, Page 38.
Liminal Archetypes
In Sumerian mythology, Tiamat is a liminal goddess.
Tiamat is often imagined as a huge serpent. Of the typical animal motifs – the snake, the tiger, or the bird – the snake or serpent is the most complex and ambiguous of all. Like the fish or archetypal sea creature, snakes inhabit a non-human underworld – dark, murky, and fraught with unknown, liminal forces.
Jung provides an example of the anima expressing itself in a dream in the form of a snake. He does not say whether this dream belongs to a man or woman: A female snake comports herself tenderly and insinuatingly, speaking with a human voice (Jung, 1951, p.201). The snake confers upon humanity, in this case via a woman, supernatural knowledge – knowledge forbidden by the god of Genesis, but not necessarily by the gods in contemporaneous cultures at the time this myth was written.
In Egyptian mythology, Osiris is the liminal god of death and rebirth, and cyclic dismemberment. According to Jung, archetypes are the God-likeness in man that are “meant to attract, to convince, to fascinate, and to overpower.” It is through the archetypes that life renewal occurs. It is quite evident that the bereaved enter a transitional, or liminal, period following a sudden separation by death, and this liminal state is revealed in their dreams. In Eastern religions, it is believed that dreams cross the realm of sleep for the living and the place of death for the deceased; therefore, encounters with deceased spirits in dreams are not uncommon. Such encounters, referred to as visitations, may occur for several months or even years following a loss by death, and can be a source of resolution and transition for the bereaved.
Significant dream themes may come upon the bereaved during the early phases of bereavement, all of which connect them symbolically and psychically with the world of the dead. Such themes include the death tunnel and bridal chamber commonly seen in near-death experiences, dismembered Osiris, the Egyptian deity of afterlife, the Dark Night of the Soul, a representation of the deep sorrow of bereavement, images of the Self as encounters with the divine, and the death wedding or sacred marriage in which the soul of the deceased, as well as the bereaved, unite with the universal dimension.
In Greek mythology, Hermes is the god of liminality and guide of souls -- decision-making and psychological wandering -- and 'wandering spirits'. He guides both the souls of the dead to the underworld and sleepers to the realm of dreams. His ability to cross boundaries makes Hermes a mediator between the human and the divine realm, or between the personal psyche and the unconscious.
Hermes is the inner experience between conscious and unconscious, punctuated by meaningful synchronicities, sudden compelling through and feelings, or vivid image, and twilight or trace states that unexpectedly envelope us. Liminal Hermes suspends us between one familiar ego place and another. At its deepest this feeling is a sense of strangeness or subtle depersonalization, heralding a new leg of journey.
Messages from beyond the border of everyday reality illuminate our experience and bring eternity into time. The ancient Greeks viewed Hermes as psychopomp. They knew that without his guidance their disembodied shades would wander the earth eternally and–perhaps more frightening still–would leave them while still alive at the mercy of the lost shades of others.
The task of guiding the soul into the underworld cannot be minimized or omitted from psychology,” notes Lopez-Pedraza, because “death is death–the always fearful opposite of life –in spite of the fact that our culture has systematically repressed what death is to the psyche.” The value of having Hermes as one's companion in the descent to the underworld rather than Hades is that the psychopomp's role is to guide us in whatever ways are required to learn the lessons which a knowledge of death brings to the living of life.
More importantly, since we no longer are able to experience death as a communal experience, notes Lopez-Pedraza, if we look at solitary modern man's “desolation in the face of death from a psychology of depth, it has been to man's gain, because it provides him with the freedom to make death his own imaginative and intimate concern, to become better acquainted with his own images and emotions concerning death, thus enriching his psychic life” (93).
An aspect of Hermes' role as psychopomp is his unique ability to make the transition between the realms of the living and the dead, between the world of consciousness and the depths of the personal and collective unconscious. Because of his great skill at passing “in between” dimensions—whether these dimensions are physical, chronological, or psychological in nature–Hermes is also the god of all things liminal, all things transitional. “Ever a transitional figure,” Doty states with simplicity, “Hermes divinizes transition” (137).
“He is there, at all transitions,marking them as sacred, as eventful, as epiphany,” adds Downing, and “his presence reminds us that the crossing of every threshold is a sacred event” (56, 65). As a result, she concludes, “our awareness of Hermes' presence opens us to the sacredness of such moments, of those in-between times that are strangely frightening and we so often try to hurry past” (56).
Just as Hermes leads Priam to the place where he will retrieve the corpse of his beloved son, the place “where death will be faced and grief will meet its maker,” as Stein described the scene, so too have I been confronted with knowledge of the dead places within myself and the need to mourn the passing of those aspects of myself. Equally importantly, as Stein also notes of this episode from the Iliad, “this encounter with death also brings consciousness of a dead past that needs to be buried” (36). I am now arriving at that place where I am able to allow the injuries of a constricted childhood to be laid to rest, to let these wounds finally heal and scarify, and finally begin to look to a future more whole and alive than I had ever imagined.
possible.http://www.soulmyths.com/hermes.pdf
Public Liminality
Ritual and drama are public liminality. In Greek drama, Antigone is the daughter/sister of Oedipus and his mother, Jocasta. Her name means "worthy of one's parents" or "in place of one's parents". She descended across the Bridge of Acheron into the archaic depths of the Underworld, prying open the chasm between the stark light of interrogation and the plunging darkness of the abyss.