In Man and His Symbols, C.G.Jung wrote: “My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.”
The unveiling of the mystery of the fundamental power of the collective unconscious is one of Jung’s greatest gifts to the knowledge of what makes us tick. Within us all are basic symbolic constructs, as inherent and functional as our other internal organic systems—all of which allow us to wend our way through this world.
Were it not for the evolutionary adaptivity of life, we might well still be amoebae in mud puddles. Yet, even a one-cell amoeba must deal with its environment. It projects pseudopodia to move towards food that it engulfs, digests, and excretes. Somehow, it knows what food is, and goes in quest of it.
Darwin’s studies of Galapagos finches tells us that each species on Earth adapts to occupy a niche within its surroundings. We human beings have pretty-much taken over the whole wide world, mostly because of the adaptability of our hands and heads. The complex manipulations of our fingers and the creative imaginings of our minds— from stone arrowheads to the atomic bomb, from hieroglyphics to i-pads— have projected us through the millennia to the top of the food chain.
But man lives not on bread alone. Our quest for nourishment entails other aspects of both the natural and man-made worlds. We seek sex on Saturday night, and religion on Sunday morning. Procreation, and its attendant pleasures, drive us to the carnal dance; but what is it that propels the majority of mankind to churches, temples, and mosques?
The word “religion” is said to derive from “to reconnect”— re- (again) and ligare (to bind or tie). But reconnect to what? The easy answer is God. But then I have to ask: what is God?
Gods have been plentiful throughout the traditions of all cultures. Many nations have had but one god, and some, many gods. Christians have a triune one— God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Muslims swear there is no God but Allah. The ancient Greeks and Romans believed in a pantheon of deities, each embodying various aspects of humanity. Hindus have a supreme trinity, too: Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, functioning as creator, protector, and destroyer— and they also have thirty other deities, each with its own aspects and powers; plus, ten avatars, ten incarnations of gods. The Indians of America sing of one Great Spirit.
The validity of one system of belief over another is moot. What I want to get at here is what motivates mankind to create such constructs, and give them the importance to rule the lives of civilizations.
One thing is common among them all: symbolism. Religions use symbols like a chef uses ingredients to feed the hungry customers— each dishing it out according to acquired tastes. Early Christianity rehashed the pagan and Jewish beliefs of the ancient Mediterranean world. The Koran reheats parts of The Bible. Out of a Hindu mash, Buddha distilled a new spirit.
Joseph Campbell revealed the masks of god and told us of the hero with thousand faces. James Frazer compared varieties of spiritual fruit hanging from the golden bough. Edward Whitmont writes that life is a symbolic quest.
What I gather from all this is that within people is the urge to reunite with the force that causes the world to be— unsolvable mysteries, unseen and unknowable. We know it to be, because we are a piece of it all; however, how can we, existentially a part, possibly know the whole? In our individuality, we feel ourselves to be orphaned from that force, so people through time immemorial have sought reunion with Mother Earth and Father Sky, and sought communion with their attendant spirits.
We have mostly done so by projecting aspects of our own psyches into self-seeking realms of heavens and hells. We view the world as in a mirror, a reflection of ourselves and our experiences, both individually and collectively. In order to bring the gods down to earth, we personify them— we anthropomorphize what we presume to be their powers. We create rites, myths, and heroes that glorify our relationship with them. We employ shamans, priests, and preachers to be our intermediaries with them. From statues of stone to bibles of paper, we deify idols that depict ourselves to ourselves.
Apart from mystics who succeed, more or less, in connecting with the essence of the godhead, humanity spawns symbols to bring the divine near. The demiurge behind this begets the archetypes that Jung says populate the collective unconscious of every human— symbolic conceptions, born and bred through millennia of human interaction with the world.
Like the beaks of Galapagos finches, our minds have adapted methods and abilities to deal with the challenges of our environment, which for us greatly includes the contents of our psyches. Archetypes as plentiful as the cast of characters upon Olympus seek roles upon the stages of our lives. They all need to be actualized. We must allow them to play their parts, for us to live a full life.
In the introduction to Women’s Mysteries, Jung states: “The term (archetype) is not meant to denote an inherited idea, but rather an inherited mode of psychic functioning, corresponding to the inborn way in which the chick emerges from the egg, the bird builds its nest, a certain kind of wasp stings the motor ganglion of the caterpillar, and eels find their way to the Bermudas. In other words, it is a “pattern of behavior.” This aspect of the archetype is the biological one….. But the picture changes at once when looked at from the inside that is from within the realm of the subjective psyche. Here the archetype presents itself as numinous that is, it appears as an experience of fundamental importance. Whenever it clothes itself in the appropriate symbols, which is not always the case, it puts the individual into a state of possessedness, the consequences of which may be incalculable.”
The adjective “numinous” means: mysteriously associated with deity; having a mysterious power that suggests the presence of a spirit or god; filled with inextricable associations with God; holy. Whatever archetypal forms a society exalts upon its altars— animal, vegetable, or mineral; humanoid or geometric— they have a mysterious power that evokes awareness of the divine. From the golden calf to the black stone within the Kaaba; from petroglyph spirals to Christian crosses; from the Green Man to Zarathustra— they all address our desire to be again in the presence of the essence of our being.
We are thrust from the womb and into this world as individuals, separate from all others. We strive to be who we must become, unique and independent. Yet we inevitably return to the source. This is the myth of the hero’s journey. There are many variations on this archetypal theme. One of which I attempt to relate in Appalachian Carnival.
Our myths, rites, and icons differ in specifics from people to people, but their function in life is the same— reconnect our solitary souls with our ineffable source. Folks do so in myriad ways, each likely as valid as the next. I prefer a pantheistic approach. If we assume that God is everything, why not call it All That Is? When we turn archetypes into idols, do we not have false gods in our temples?
Cautioning the reader that my novel’s theme is concerned with the detrimental effects of society upon the individual— and humbly asking myself, “What the heck could I ever really know— I attach below, from Appalachian Carnival, a segment from the mimeographed booklet written by my bearded-lady character, Isis, and given to my heroine, Annabelle:
If you think that you know, then you do not. Whoever knows knowledge to be unknowable—who knows that truth is simply too much for our minds to grasp, and is thus always misunderstood—knows the truth that sets one free.
Symbols are how we know what we believe we know. And what we believe we know creates our world. The first symbols were real objects, real events, their meanings evident in the animal lives of ancient men. Then, symbolic objects, replacements for what they represented, were fashioned into statues, fetishes, totems, used in ceremonies mimicking the older realities.
The first handmade symbols were small fat figurines of women, of the Great Mother Goddess—and over time, many other goddesses came to be worshiped. When some people saw the power these objects had over others, they exalted these idols for their own selfish gain. Whoever controlled these objects, controlled their power, controlled what people believe, controlled their world.
Idols other than the Great Goddess also became powerful, but nothing is so revered by people as is their mother—so she reigned supreme in the temples of old. All was from her womb. She not only represented our human mothers, she was Gaia, the earth goddess, from whence we receive all that the world gives. Her priests gained dominance, and her temples the most treasure—while the priests of other temples, other goddesses, vied for power.
Then, not long before history began, the civilizations of the ancient world were overrun by men from the north. Their spears and chariots, and their male gods and priests, vanquished the goddesses from their temples, and overthrew the beliefs of the people. And on the blood-washed pedestals, these men exalted their own gods of war, and lust, and power.
But the people would also have their goddesses. So, in realms like those on Olympus, tales of marriage and rape brought forth pantheons of newborn deities—their myths ruling people’s lives for eons.
When the Christians converted this world, they smashed the old stone idols and stole the old stories. And they bred new creeds with words on paper—now exalting the idolatry of a book. Declaring it to be the Word of God, their priests, like those of old, knew the power of symbols—whether written, chanted, painted, or etched in stone at a cathedral.
Though the Christians did not include the goddess in their trinity, the people worshipped Mary, nonetheless. Nevertheless, all gods and goddesses are false gods—made by men and women to glorify aspects of their own selves. And to ascribe powers to these gods conceals the world’s truth from us—our own truth.
All That Is cannot be known. Yet one may know that It cannot be known, and thus not be misled by those who believe that they speak the truth.
I vividly remember a May Day in 1982, on St.Thomas in the Virgin Islands, where onstage at a small festival a bare-chested young man, wearing tights and a horned wreath, fingered recorders in each hand, blowing them in wild harmony— one flute in each nostril! He seemed to me an echo of Pan, the Greek god, half goat and half human; and, as I gazed at his performance, I felt that the role he was playing was as old as the world.
One of the eight spokes within the pagan wheel of the year (each holiday either on or halfway between the solstices and equinoxes), May Day is a festival of fertility— a time to dance around maypoles, leap over bonfires, swap a basket of posies for a kiss. One of the calendar’s cross-quarter days (along with the first days of November, February, and August), the holiday harkens back long before history, when each eighth of the year brought forth its own needs for survival and celebration amid the turnings of the seasons.
The fields having been sown with new seed, the workers get May Day off, to eat, drink, and make merry. The May Queen is adorned with flowers— as once was Flora, the Roman fertility goddess. The ancient Celts, calling the day Beltane, built bonfires to beget the warmth and light of summer, and they coupled in the flickering shadows upon the dewy grass, enacting the union of the Horned One and the Goddess— like the Stag King in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon.
On the eve of May Day in Germanic countries, Walpurgis Night is when witches and sorcerers are said to cavort atop the Brocken in the Hartz Mountains, where the dark forces of winter have their last fling before the dawn of summer. I quote Goethe’s Faust: “Now to the Brocken the witches ride; the stubble is gold and the corn is green; There is the carnival crew to be seen, And Squire Urianus will come to preside. So over the valleys our company floats, with witches a-farting on stinking old goats.”
The Czechs, on Walpurgis, burn straw effigies of witches. Estonians masquerade as witches and warlocks. Around bonfires ablaze with what is dead and decaying, Swedes sing to banish evil spirits from their midst. On May Day morning, burghers enact mock battles led by their May-King, to drive away winter’s deathly tyranny and fly the ribboned pennants of a reborn reign of fecundity. Whereas on Halloween (a half-year before and afterward), folks around the Northern Hemisphere observe nature’s transition from life to death, Walpurgis hallows its transition from death to life.
Amid our collective unconscious— a stew pot of pagan and Christian traditions— there lies a conundrum betwixt carnality and evil. Our heathen sexuality has been damned by the sacred cows of popes. The lusty rites of spring are those of a horned god, a.k.a., The Devil. The hot blood of Beltane surges through our hearts; however, our puritanic history represses this erogenous birthright, inherited from Mother Nature herself.
As I was clicking around Google for May-Day lore, I came across this in Wikipedia: “Sherry Salman considers the image of the Horned God in Jungian terms, as an archetypal protector and mediator of the outside world to the objective psyche. In her theory the male psyche’s ‘Horned God’ frequently compensates for inadequate fathering. When first encountered, the figure is a dangerous, ‘hairy chthonic wildman’ possessed of kindness and intelligence. If repressed, later in life The Horned God appears as the lord of the Otherworld, or Hades. If split off entirely, he leads to violence, substance abuse and sexual perversion. When integrated he gives the male an ego ‘in possession of its own destructiveness’ and for the female psyche gives an effective animus relating to both the physical body and the psyche.”
“In considering the Horned God as a symbol recurring in women's literature, Richard Sugg suggests the Horned God represents the ‘natural Eros’, a masculine lover subjugating the social-conformist nature of the female shadow, thus encompassing a combination of the shadow and animus. One such example is Heathcliff from Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Sugg goes on to note that female characters who are paired with this character usually end up socially ostracised, or worse— in an inverted ending to the male hero-story”
Although this analysis is news to me (I’ve never before heard of Salman nor Sugg), it appears to reflect aspects of my novel, Appalachian Carnival. Walt, akin to most any horny wildman, is Annabelle’s protector and mediator. She, as did Persephone, gets spirited off to an otherworld— a roadshow’s midway, rife with violence, drugs, and sex. Annabelle struggles to seek her animus and unveil her shadow— nevertheless, she cannot conform, and ends up left out.
When a carny refers to someone as a “First of May,” it means the person is new in the business. A carnival’s season often begins on May Day, bedazzling and amusing the local celebrants of summer’s arrival, with dizzying thrills, dangerous chances, freakish curiosities, and con men bedeviling young and old.
On May 1st, 1970, Annabelle meets Walt. He and his ersatz gypsy troupe carry off this child of coal-town West Virginia. Townsfolk swirl amid the leaping colored lights of monstrous mechanical whirligigs. Hootchy-kootchy banners and ballyhoo blare into their upturned eyes and ears as lascivious May-Queens bump and grind on the carnival midway— luring men behind the curtain of their own primal lust for life.
Maybe I’m too eager to find symbolic parallels among my own written imaginings. Yet perhaps, notwithstanding, one oughtn’t underrate the archetypal gestations of one’s own collective unconscious.
Today is Friday the 13th, and on Sunday morning, April 15th, Susan and I head north to Michigan for the summer. We are busily cleaning and packing up our apartment here in Gulfport, Florida, an artsy waterfront village at the south end of St.Petersburg, where we’ve whiled away the wonderful weather this winter.
It’s tax time— the day our numbers must add up. Though two and two are definitely four, twenty-two is a number I’ve often wondered about. There are twenty-two cards in the Tarot’s Major Trumps, eleven of which I employ as chapter themes in Appalachian Carnival. Yet my curiosity about eleven and twenty-two also turns in other circles— those of the sun and the earth— our cycles of time.
I’m no historian; nevertheless, I’m fairly familiar with the story of the 20th Century. The pendulum of history swings us back and forth, right and left, and it seems to me that its arc, from one side to the other and back, is nigh on to twenty-two years.
In 2011, people of the Arab Spring arose spontaneously to end the reigns of several right-wing dictatorships. The last time such a thing happened was in 1989, twenty-two years before, when citizens of Eastern Europe brought down the Communist tyranny. Before that it was in 1967, when protests in America precipitated the Vietnam War’s downfall; and in '68, students barricaded the streets of Paris. Go back twenty-two years from there, and the Allies defeated the Axis in 1945. In 1923— a quieter year— Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” failed, and he was imprisoned; also that year, Marxism’s ideals birthed the U.S.S.R. experiment. Twenty-two years earlier, around 1901, Queen Victoria and William McKinley died, and the progressive Republican, Teddy Roosevelt, rode rough against the robber barons.
Flip the coin the other way, and I observe the rise of the forces of war, repression, and conquest: pre-WWI tensions in 1913; Hitler’s election in 1933; the Cold War of the mid-1950s; the rise of the Ayatollah in late-1970s, along with Brezhnev’s invasion of Afghanistan; and at the turn of the 21st Century, the spread of Al Qaeda and Islamic militarism, resulting in our 9/11 cause for war.
Not only do the trends seem to swing politically from left to right, but also there appears to be corresponding oscillations in the worlds of art and invention, in the ups and downs of economics, and in the cycles of fashion.
A surge of creativity during the first decade of the 20th Century brought us the works of Picasso, Scott Joplin, Henry Ford, Marconi, Einstein, and the Wright Brothers. The 1920s roared with jazz, movies, literature, industry, and the Harlem Renaissance. Geared up for war in ‘44, WWII spawned rockets, jets, radar, the atom bomb, TV, bebop, and abstract expressionism. We reached for the moon with high-tech gizmos in ‘66, and during its Summer of Love we explored inner space, setting off a big bang of musical genesis with the genius of Hendrix, Clapton, and The Beatles. The late ‘80s saw another burst of creativity, this time with computers. And nowadays, we are witnessing a kaleidoscope of graphic art on our televisions, smart phones, and computer-generated cinema.
The other halves of these 22 year cycles, 1911, ‘33, ‘55, ‘77, and ‘99, had much to do with economic and artistic stagnations. Boom years occured around 1900, in the early 1920’s, the late ‘40s, the ‘60s, the late 80’s; and were it not for the sub-prime mess, and the deficits of two long and unnecessary wars, perhaps would have been booming lately as well.
And fashion?— Teddy Roosevelt saw the bustle disappear and skirts rise above the ankle. The ‘20s brought higher skirts and shorter hair. During the depression years, and 22 years later in the mid-50s, hems dropped to the shins. The ‘60s gave us the mini-skirt. The 70’s, disco duds. Dressing for success in the early 80’s became as conservative as Nancy Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The ‘90s brought retro-hippie grunge and hip-hop sloppiness. And today, were I to sit at a sidewalk table in downtown St.Petersburg and watch the parade of young people march by, my eyes would be seeing a lot of skin,
Now, I’m not claiming that this historical pendulum swings like clockwork, swaying the whole world from progressivism to conservatism, from boom to bust, from creativity to mimicry, all on time and in totality. I’m trying to show the trend that appears to occur approximately every eleven years— a zenith of positive forces followed eleven years later by a nadir of negative forces. I find it very curious.
And what’s even more curious… I quote from nasa.gov: “The Sun's magnetic poles will remain as they are now, with the north magnetic pole pointing through the Sun's southern hemisphere, until the year 2012 when they will reverse again. This transition happens, as far as we know, at the peak of every 11-year sunspot cycle— like clockwork.”
Hmm…. The polarity of the Sun flips every eleven years? Its positive pole switches with its negative pole every eleven years?
Are we not simply manifestations of the Sun’s essential energy?
S.M.F.
In 1582, New Year’s Day moved from April 1 to January 1, decreed by Pope Gregory XIII on his new calendar. Some say that April Fools’ Day began when the folks still celebrating the new year on the old day were called fools and had jests played upon them— but days of pranks and foolishness on the week after the vernal equinox go back to the ancient world.
The Romans took from the Greeks such a rite, renamed it the Hilaria, and celebrated it on March 25. Modern Iranians, 13 days after the equinox (our April 1), celebrate the ancient Persian feast of Sizdah Bedar (translated as “getting rid of the thirteenth”). They go on picnics in the countryside where they sing, dance, and play games— and play tricks on each other. Young girls knot blades of grass together for good fortune. Green vegetables from picnic baskets are left behind, offerings upon the meadows. During India’s vernal festival, Holi, people cast colored and scented powders upon one another, and frolic without caste around bonfires.
No one really knows where April Fools’ Day comes from. Like most of the doings of humans, it’s been around a long time, much longer than written history. In 1983, Professor Boskin of Boston University told an Associated Press reporter that the tradition started when Emperor Constantine let one of his court jesters be king for a day on April 1st. This story, printed nationally, was an April Fools’ trick, a tongue-in-cheek hoax, a poisson d’avril swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the media.
Festivals after the equinox are all about the newborn vegetation of spring. After months of folks’ eking through winter, abundance was again on its way. Exorcizing the past winter’s troubles with springtime mirth— what better way to celebrate than with laughter?
Like all archetypes, The Fool has many masks in his bag of tricks. The Jester, at medieval European courts, wore motley garb and a hat with bells while he joked and juggled. A licensed fool— differing from a natural fool: that is, one born moronic or mad; providing entertainment, as well; and once widely considered to be divinely inspired— was royally permitted to say things no one else would dare to say. Like the comedian of today, nothing was out of bounds for his wit— the ridiculous ridiculed; the unspeakable spoken; sometimes advising the king with unwelcome barbs that swayed decisions. A jester’s buffoonery in the halls of government not only created laughter, his mischief was an antidote to the self-righteous dominion of the status quo. By deriding the way things were, he turned the soil for new ideas to take root.
The Trickster is another mask of The Fool. The Norse shape-shifter, Loki, breaks the rules of Viking gods and men alike. West African stories of Anansi, a spider, tell of deceptions of theft and lust, which often backfire on the anthropomorphic and metamorphic arachnid. Lakota Sioux know a spider-trickster, too: Iktomi is both good and bad; switching his personas to alter the fates of tribes. Coyote, of North-American mythology, and his European cousin, Reynard the Fox, are wily thieves. They, along with Loki, Prometheus, and Māui, stole fire from the gods and gave it to men.
Carnies are tricksters, too. They roll into town, spinning their devious spiel, signifyin’ the rubes, and playing the fools. A carnival midway on a vacant lot becomes an evocation of mirth and danger, whereupon kith and kin wander afar from their daily circles. The fire-eater’s ballyhoo, the freak’s sideshow, the shyster’s game, the mechanical roundabout turning plain folk into dizzily laughing fools— an Appalachian carnival is a 20th-century caravan of revelry and deceit.
A god’s-honest story I often tell is of the day I ran a carnival game for the very last time. In 1975, under October gold-and-red Massachusetts maples at the Belchertown Fair (which was bizarrely also the very first fair I ever played games at when I was a boy). I quit and huffed out to the road to hitchhike back to Northampton— and there in the gutter lay a dead fox! I stared drop-jawed, stone-dumbfounded, knowing it was an omen. Then, a VW bug with hippies in it pulled over to give me a ride— even though I did not have my thumb up. I got in, commenting on the dead fox. They asked: what dead fox? As we rode away, I overruled my urge to turn and see if it was really there. After that, I never worked a midway game again.
Psychedelic drugs were The Trickster’s potions in the sixties. The Merry Pranksters knew their role: befuddle, bamboozle, and mystify— blow minds by buffoonery. Many stale egos tripping bewildered within Alice’s wonderland discovered new outlooks and insights amid psychoactive states of mind. The hocus-pocus of a Zen kōan is but a verbal trick to transmute a monk’s meditation into greater self-awareness. Discombobulate a person’s, or a culture’s, self-absorbed thought forms— frozen within and without— then renewals are free to flow.
Trapped within her coal-town society, Appalachian Carnival’s heroine, Annabelle, escapes with a troupe of tricksters. She corresponds to the Tarot’s Fool. Le Mat, the card’s Italian name in the Marseilles deck, translates as “the madman.” I quote Wikipedia: “The Fool is the spirit in search of experience. He represents the mystical cleverness bereft of reason within us, the childlike ability to tune into the inner workings of the world. The sun shining behind him represents the divine nature of the Fool’s wisdom and exuberance, holy madness or ‘crazy wisdom’.”
Each year upon the sun’s return, a hilarious spirit of spring again arises from a withered winter world.
S.M.F.
Resolved upon blogging at the beginning and middle of each month, I find the ides of March upon me. My subject this time is why I put the first-person narration of Appalachian Carnival into the voice of a nineteen-year-old West Virginian girl. After all, I’m a sixty-something-year-old male Yankee.
The tale I wanted to tell is one of self discovery, a personal experience. Were I to write it in my own voice, I thought that this point of view, being one step removed from the main character, would not work as well as might were I to have the protagonist telling the story.
Huck Finn came to mind— told by Twain through a boy. Huck’s unique voice resounds powerfully in his characterization. To drift on a raft downriver appears more alive. The time and place of Huck’s language annunciates the era of the Mississippi in the mid-1800’s— resurrecting it from the long forgotten.
Now, I’m no Mark Twain. In fact, when I set myself to writing my novel six years ago, I was nothing but a novice novelist, dangling participles and all, prone to playful alliteration. Writing a novel is difficult. One has to learn how. It soon seemed to me that the easiest voice to write in was the first-person— narration with a fixed point of view and a particular personality. The task was to make the voice believable: my most disciplined concern.
When I passed around to several friends, male and female, a suede-bound print-out of the second draft of Appalachian Carnival, the first thing I asked each was, “Do you believe Annabelle’s voice?” Their revues came back with sufficient suspension of belief, but they complained about too much Appalachian argot and carny cant. One reader wrote that it seemed like I’d peppered the pages with words from a hillbilly dictionary— which is just what I did. (Kudos to Mountain Range by Robert Hendrickson) Though I had heard West Virginian dialects amid swirling midways and within their steep towns, I’m a born-and-bred Frenchy Yankee, heir to mid-Massachusetts terms and idioms. Carny lingo, I know well enough. I spoke it in my profligate youth. Nevertheless, I heeded my readers’ critiques about too much arcane lingo, and in subsequent drafts edited it to seek a balance.
So, my having given Annabelle a voice, now who might she be? She is foremost the reader’s eyes into a carnival world within an Appalachian time. Her fears and desires are the pulse of this story. Her flight away from socialization, and into individuation, drives the plot. Bold enough to take her chances, but cautious enough to take care, we wonder what she’ll do next. She is on a path to herself, the pilgrimage we must all make.
C.G. Jung tells us that a person is both feminine and masculine. Most men exert their animus and repress their anima— that is: upon their world’s stage, they act out their masculine aspects (animus); and their feminine qualities (anima) are cut out of the script of their lives. Jung prescribes becoming conscious of one’s own lesser half, and proposes growing in awareness of it, so that one might become more whole. We are men and we are women, but more importantly, we are all human beings, cast from the same stuff, yet too often playing one-sided roles. A woman flaunts her femininity (anima) for her advantage, but often cedes her masculine powers (animus) to her man. Every person must actualize their whole being to become who they are. My heroine's challenge, amid the contests of a carnival midway, is to strengthen her animus.
Annabelle, is no doubt a projection of my own anima— a figment from the feminine side of my soul, taking my personal tale of once upon a time among carnies in West Virginia, and casting it upon a dramatic screen. In so many words, a joker’s subtitle to my novel might well be, An Anima Enema. I figure it’ll be up to each reader to reckon whether my book is bull doo-doo.
S.M.F.
The sixth card of the Tarot’s Major Arcana, The Lovers, perhaps would have been timelier to blog about on St. Valentine’s Day a few weeks ago, rather than on this extra day in the calendar that comes but once every four years. Yet, not unlike love itself, this 366th day realigns us with how the world turns. As the song goes: love makes the world go around. And the vortex of centrifugal and centripetal forces— attraction and repulsion and the pull of gravity— are powers well known to lovers.
The image of The Lovers shows a young man between a young woman and an old one. Above them hovers Cupid, a.k.a. Eros, his arrow aimed at the two youths. The old woman, on the one hand, seems to be pushing the youths together; but the other upon his shoulder appears to caution him. The young man’s eyes question hers. His feet step in opposite directions. The young woman— her left hand reaching for his heart, and her right holding the cloak over her womb— stares off beyond my own left shoulder, far into the mystery of what might be.
In Chapter Six of Appalachian Carnival, Annabelle and Walt lustily start their day off with a bang; but, Annabelle puzzles over whether she has fallen in love. Knowing little love within her childhood home, her affections suffer from a lack of education, as well as from a lack of experience. Because of what she has read in novels and seen in movies, and when she finds herself not transfigured with the bliss of what these tales tout as love, Annabelle doubts she is in love. Her twentieth-century conception of love is so confused, she tightens her grip on her hesitant heart. Later that day, when secretly attracted to another man sitting beside her and Walt at a lunch counter, she worries that her licentious yen is a dawning wantonness awakened by the eagerness yawning amid her thighs. When Walt’s jealousy rages afterward, she finds refuge in a library, and seeking a clue to her dilemma, she reads The Art of Love, by Erich Fromm.
Fromm instructs us on what various types of love can be. Denis de Rougemont, in Love in the Western World, tells us that the romantic myth, inscribed into the European heart since the days of Provençal troubadours, is but the fancy born of a mystical conceit of poets. The Greek and Roman myths, save that of Psyche’s, relate the genealogies of lust— the Olympians ravishing one another like cavemen with clubs. Kama, the Hindu deva, and his consort, Rati, are lords of: “desire or longing, especially as in sensual or sexual love.” (Wikipedia)
A paternal trade in virginal brides once brought forth most tribes and nations. The eons-old sex-glue between a man and a woman, plus the cement of family, engendering marriages with deep roots and plentiful fruit, was once what love was. One did not fall in love; one grew with it. Although the twitter-patter of hearts young and old, that urge to merge, no doubt sparked countless Greek and Hindu trysts— they didn’t make a myth out of it. They did not deify it.
The medieval romance of Tristan and Iseult, tells of a treasonous tragedy, which was nevertheless revolutionary in rousing to ecstatic heights a new form of worship, as close as living skin— the exaltation of one’s beloved. But like Dante’s Beatrice, or the courtly troubadour’s maiden, this mystic ideal, one’s soul mate, is unattainable— an imagined projection of one’s own psyche.
Psyche, a mortal maiden, falls into Eros’ land of enchantment, but the god lies with her only in the darkness of night. After her jealous sisters goad her into a monstrous plan, she brings a lamp and a knife to bed, to behold the husband she has never seen, and slay him. But as Psyche gazes upon Eros, only then does love take hold of her. Eros flees. She has broken her marriage vow. Heartsick, she searches far and wide for her husband. And only after completing Aphrodite’s tasks, does she drink ambrosia with Eros and the immortal Olympians.
Today, we call what’s between our ears— psyche. I too grew up in the Western World, watching love stories at the movies, reading them in books, and hearing about them from gossip. Like the finches on Galapagos, we modern human beings have evolved amid our surroundings and background— whatever gods our psyches have illuminated. And the flickering sequential images projected onto the inside our skulls, the stuff of last Sunday’s Oscars, breed in us ideas born from the myths that exalt our lives. The soap operas of the Olympians and those of daytime TV are one and the same. Only the gods have changed. Today we worship the stars of Hollywood, and believe we must act out the constellations they portray.
Impressionable youths, until they learn better, believe that the paradise of being in love is the most marvelous thing under the heavens. And when the path of their real-time love affair wends awry from their dream-time version, these lovers, both young and old, become downcast by their own devils.
Perhaps if we had not fallen under the spell of troubadours and their latter-day ilk, love might bring less disappointment and more fulfillment. Nevertheless, imagine what would be, were we not to have that lusty spark which we call “falling in love.” The Great Mother gives us such pleasures to multiply creation. Yes, love at first sight does occur. But better yet, it can turn us toward the long view, high upon the mountain where love ascends.
S.M.F.
Another thing I’ve been asked about is— what’s the deal with the acid trip in Chapter Seven? LSD has been demonized, outlawed, debunked, cursed, damned, vilified, and anathematized. Why would I not only write about it, but also, how could I color my heroine’s psychotropic experience with beneficial tones?
The uses of entheogenic substances are as old as the world—their abuse, their evil twin. An entheogen, a word coined in 1979, is “a psychoactive substance used in a religious, shamanic, or spiritual context… mostly derived from plant sources and… used in a variety of traditional religious contexts.” Derived from the archaic Greek, the word has been defined as: “that which causes God to be within an individual”; or “creating the divine within”; or “God inside us”; or “a substance that causes one to become inspired or to experience feelings of inspiration, often in a religious or ‘spiritual’ manner.” (all quotes from Wikipedia).
With Native Americans, we’ve seen such use with peyote cactus and magic mushrooms. The Olympians had their ambrosia; the Rig Veda, its soma; the Rastafarians have their cannibis; the Christians, the body and blood of Jesus himself. In the Eleusinian Mysteries, the kykeon was imbibed by the initiates just before the culminating rites in the Temple of Demeter. (The myth of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, tells how she was abducted into the underworld by Hades, and I suspect that Annabelle’s story, in some aspects, reflects Persephone’s tale.)
Be that as it may, Appalachian Carnival is a narrative of a time in America when psychedelics were widely available and daringly used for various purposes—mostly thrill-seeking, but also for experiments in psychiatry, and explorations of spirituality. In vogue during the mid-nineteen-sixties and into the early-seventies, was the idea that psychedelics were the way to “turn on” to peace and love. Peace and love are the aim of most religions, what the gods aim to instill in us. The safest and most reputable way to seek such bliss are the time-honored disciplines of meditation, scripture, gurus, rites, initiations— the whole panoply of spiritual quests.
It is not advised that one storms either heaven or hell, unprepared for the divine, nor the diabolic. We cling to our fragile egos, the lifeline to our realities, so that the persona we’ve become will survive. Mysticism has much to do with the vanquishment of oneself— to get to know a Self greater than one’s own individual being. When our egos are overpowered by substances like LSD, our arrogance is brought to its knees; we taste the dust of our ephemeral conceptions. This may be a sacrament to the virtue of humility, but among those whose lives are built upon pride, or among those weak in heart, or muddled in mind, LSD could be very dangerous to their sanity. That is why it was outlawed. Whatever its entheogenic benefits, its damage to fragile psyches cannot be denied, nor tolerated.
But like the mores of carnies and hillbillies, my fiction seeks to document the behavior of people, once upon a time, both good and bad. The reality of Appalachian Carnival is that such things happened. And the fact remains that during this time of war and assasination in America, many people discovered peace and love in a wafer of acid.
The aim of my plot, the metamorphosis of Annabelle’s character within one week in May, 1970, required a literary device, a deus ex machina, to do just that in only a day or so. Thus, the alchemical entheogen, lysergic acid diethylamide— along with some mystic fundamentals from Isis, the bearded lady— spark in Annabelle some basic epiphanies, which, in the reflective calm following her internal firestorm, begin to transfigure her spirit.
I do not condone the recreational use of LSD, nor similar drugs. Tripping for kicks may well lead to a regrettable kick in the head. I also do not agree with the outright ban of LSD. It has been put to good uses by good people— psychiatrists, gurus, counsels to the dying— experienced guides through the internal world. Also, in the age-old shamanic tradition, some adventurers have benefited their own souls, and those of their tribe, because of their courageous journeys through the doors of perception. Yet, alas, many have also lost their minds in the hells that they possess within.
The Chariot of the Tarot portrays a rider high and mighty beneath a four-square canopy. Its number, seven, is the number of transformation and creation. The chariot’s crossbar divides the upper world from the lower, and the ego’s will from subconscious forces. An unbridled pair of horses pulls the wheels in contrary directions, while the driver, without reins, steers their eyes to the right with his own. Balanced on his shoulders are two faces: his mask and his true self.
A question often asked me about my novel is: what’s with the Tarot cards? Well, it began with a connection I made with my two main characters and the images of the first two cards of the Major Arcana—The Fool and The Juggler—depicted above in reproductions of the Marseilles deck from fifteenth-century Provence.
Carl Jung, and many others, have attributed archetypal and mythic qualities to icons like the Tarot. From stone-age cave paintings on up to post-modern-abstract-expressionism, artistic images are not just representations of the visible world; they’re also reflections of the unseen, of the unconscious, echoes of dreams and myths.
The Fool portrays a traveler afoot, staff and bindle in hand. Lunging at The Fool’s half-naked backside is a cat or dog, or a cat-dog. The Fool has a beard, yet his gay array, his gentle gaze, the bells at his waist, the sweep of his headdress, the swag of his ample buttock, all hint at a feminine aspect. His left hand is larger than his right, and it’s his right buttock that the animal attacks. And why does the bindle’s staff seem to sever his head from his body? Throughout the ages, the right hand has been said to be masculine, the left, feminine. In the last century, Jung wrote that both men and women have a masculine side and a feminine one—which he named the animus (male) and the anima (female).
My heroine, Annabelle Cory, is at a time in her young life when she must leave her mother’s apartment in their coal-town home. I set Annabelle forth, in the prelude, sneaking into the back of a carnival, where a Gypsy’s dog champs onto her bellbottoms—clearly evoking The Fool. Although Annabelle is an immature woman with much to learn, there are also masculine traits and strengths that Annabelle must fetch from within herself on the journey toward individuation.
In chapter one, the image of The Juggler, which looks a lot like a flimflammer at a fair, represents my anti-hero, Walt Ryder. (The old French word bateleur means mountebank.) And when boy meets girl, we have the start of a story. Nevertheless, to carry this conceit forward, I required a plot.
Then I came upon a notion in a book by Sallie Nichols, Jung and Tarot, that the progression of the symbolism of the Major Arcana, cards zero through twenty-one of the Tarot deck, stacks up with Jung’s idea of individuation—a person’s eventual progression toward whom he or she essentially is.
Thus, in my carnival tale, why not have a tattooed bearded lady represent the next card, The High Priestess? Why not explore various aspects of the symbolism of the next card, The Empress, in the next chapter, on the next day? What do the rest of the cards mean to me, and to the tradition of their interpretation? And how do I incorporate it all into my story?
So this is how I came to build each day of Annabelle’s ten days with Walt and the carnival around the images of the Tarot. Appalachian Carnival ends with The Wheel of Fortune, card X, which leaves me with two more novels to write in my trilogy, carrying this conceit forward, from card XI through XXI, in Walter Ryder’s Medicine Show and The Astral Circus.
Any way you cut the cards, I have my work cut out for me.
S.M.F.
On another sunny Florida day...
As the two sides of the coinage of these un-United States flips before my face, Mitt Romney spins his "pre-buttal" spiel prior to Obama's state of the dis-union address tonight, while Newt, campaigning here today in St.Pete, grins with his growing power—a likely time to pay heed to The Emperor archetype of the Tarot.
There seems to be three sorts of leaders: one imposes his will by physical force or the power of his charisma; a second senses what a crowd feels, and ballyhoos it loudly; a third type dons appointed or inherited trappings—judge, ambassador, king—and with authority thus bestowed, we-the-people become personified. Human groups create their own leaders, projecting into them the echos of their collective fears and desires.
In chapter four of Appalachian Carnival, Eli McCain, the carnival's owner, appears in only one quick scene. Nevertheless, it is solely his sovereignty, vested in good-old American money and cunning, which has begotten his realm—the electric mechanical whirligigs gyrating week to week from one town to the next, the townsfolk milling around McCain's Magic Midway encircled by tentfuls of outlandish bamboozlement.
Wielding sly capitalist chutzpah, Old Eli has brought forth and commands a state of affairs known as a carnival—a way of life rooted in country fairs, a life form cultivated by gypsies and their ilk. Each carny, in turn, is in charge of his or her own game, ride, sideshow, or popcorn stand. Whether an independent concessionaire, agent, or salaried ride jockey, each is granted frontage on the midway upon privilege paid to the show boss—transacting the age-old deal of: "This is my territory, and I'll protect you, for a cut of the action."
Also in chapter four, on my fictional day entitled The Emperor, May 4, 1970, the real Kent State massacre occurs. Whether or not President Nixon has anything to do with it does not matter, because he would be blamed regardless. Imperial arrogance, a trait of most politicians, is what they all adopt in order to win elections. A candidate for office must exaggerate his own consequence in order to beat the other montebanks on the slate. In doing so, he risks being seen with no clothes, and thus he claims the responsibility of causing many things, whether actually capable, and culpable, or not.
So during this week of Republican primary, Mitt and Newt, Rick and Ron, shall travel Florida, boasting of what they'll do to save conservative souls from the liberal boogyman. Romney exalts his destined coronation. Gingrich tunes up the choir of angry white folks. Santorum, a devout Christian, touts another war with the Infidels. And Ron Paul attempts to reason with the irrational mores of business as usual.
I reckon all I can do about it is go to happy hour, and before the sun sets over the Gulf of Mexico, raise my beer to the absolute power of its blazing light.
S.M.F.
Kind Reader....
So now that this website has been set up, search-engine optimized, and brought forth into the world-wide web of ballyhoo, then what's my spiel? I suppose I might write about the excellent weather here in Florida, or what I did or will do, yesterday, today, or tomorrow—but that would bore me as well as you. What does interest me, and hopefully you, is what exists between the lines, behind the pages, within the structure, of Appalachian Carnival.
One writes a novel because one must. Some also do so for money, some for fame, or career. I don't have a lot of money, but I have enough for a while. And during my career as a self-made shoemaker, when people would tell me that I was famous, I knew my narrow fame to be good for business; nevertheless, it was never a goal for my wider soul.
What has broadened my consciousness has been my curiousity for whatever awakens awareness. You name it, and I've perused it—from bibles to heresies, philosophies to psychologies, psychics to physics. Some guys are interested in sports, but my interest is in why they are interested in sports.
Why? is one of the first questions we ask when we begin to speak. We are often told: "Because," and most leave it at that. Many accept the answers for lif'e's questions from whatever society they were born into. One main function of society is to provide its people with beliefs—myths that ease the confusions of lost souls, and stamp their passports to contemporaneous purgatories.
Appalachian Carnival juxtaposes two societies, carny and townie, each with their own credos. Folks in each believe that their world is better than the other. But Annabelle, our heroine, is one of us who is betwixt the worlds. She doesn't fit into her hometown's way of life, and she is unlikely to adopt carny mores, nor any others. As an outsider, she must seek her answers inside herself.
Societies tyrannize, more or less, each person's individuality. Individuation and socialization are two sides of the ever-flipping coin of our lives. Heads, I win; tails, you lose—either way it's a toss-up for getting one's way. Perhaps only when the coin spins balanced on its edge does one's soul both escape and belong to one's world.
Metaphors stretching beyond their limits make me wonder even moreso.
Wishing all the best on this Friday the 13th..... SMF
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