Of Antlers And Destiny or The Faux-losopher Changed Into A Stag Cries Out Forest Edged — A Not So Secret Fantasy

After decades of intense Jungian analysis I am pleased to reveal the results. I had no idea how painful it is to grow antlers from the groin up. But the deed is done. Tongue in cheek. Das ding an sich. Und such. Kant an Hegel duking it out, magickal stag to magister stag (vice versa vera vicer) deeper in Disenchanted Forest rife with shagfoats, tantarrabobs, swaithes, tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-the-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yeth-hounds and such. And sich sic post hoc propter ergo hoc. Und spit.

And/But I have to sleep without pillows, and also on the floor, a pallet, because the sofa cannot accommodate the new growth. I've now taken to cognitive behavioral therapy in hopes to adjust to living as a stag-man amongst humans.

I'm taking notes for a book project on coping skills while accepting that Calvinism AND Southern Baptism and all those dire depressings and subjugation (FAT CHANCE) of nature/Nature are no longer, if ever were, up for impossible arrivals of merge with a verge toward what - more carrot and raisin salad while singing,

"O come come come to the church in the wildwood, o come to the church in vale..."

The Stag surveys in those very wild woods, in the vales, and lets go in dung chorus, in scrapes of ground and on trees for tis the season of Easter aka estrus so sharpen up those antlers for alpha takes 'em all....that scent upon the wind, no, not the tuna casserole wafting from the meeting hall window of the church, is Eros over Thanastos and that lousy vegan spanakopitakia crappola. I question that church lady who put that mess together re: being a Baptist at all! But if Christian then she's very definitely a barnacled, calcified Calvinista!

IT TAKES A GOOD RUT TO GET OUT OF A THEOLOGICAL ONE!

You can quote me on that while stamping a forepaw while threateningly bobbing head and antlers up and down, side to side.

Of Antlers and Destiny [what follows beyond 2 or 3 paragraphs after this one is a paste of an essay by a Jungian analyst on the "Shag-Man/Shag-God]....a destined association for me, and many among the pinkies raised in effulgent etiquette-tical elbows off the table, napkin in lap. Lap you say? 

Why, yes, "as in dewlap," grunts the Stag while, bad news, all those books on my walls must, just have to go. Stag insists but I insist back:

I demand veneration for my wild civility, arduously acquired here in a most uncivil city. I came from mountains more a hermit than wild game of any kind but perforce had to shed my adapted halo for a bit of dread in my aura, no more Wednesday night church dinners with Tupperware fare and prayer where "love may fail but politeness shall prevail".

Now is ongoing alchemical heat and hell to (FAT CHANCE) refine, it is hoped, into adequate enough

"harmonizing of the civil and wild aspects of self and human society. Civility is often expressed in a code of conduct that has evolved across many generations, developing into customs and taboos, influencing all spheres of human interaction including religion, art and politics. Fundamental to the idea of a code of conduct is the concept of self control, that the individual is able to bend his or her will to abide by the socially proscribed forms of behaviour.

Self Control

This is in contrast to wild, unbounded forms of behaviour where the individual does not abide by a code of conduct. Instead it is an essential, visceral and ultimately liberated state that has its own power, attractions and downfalls. Its the state of instinctive urges and reactions, such as experienced in love-making, hunting or fighting. It is the non-rational state of the animal, where behaviour is instinctively attuned to experience.

The stag-man figure, if we treat it purely as a symbol in the Jungian sense, could be interpreted as harmonizing these two potentially conflicting attitudes. If the conflicting aspects of civility and wildness were brought into harmony in this symbol, we could conclude that Celtic culture of the time where the stag-man-god still carries mythic weight and power, had evolved to embrace both aspects of human life as one experience. The great popularity of the horned god symbol could suggest that balancing these two aspects of the self was a theme in Celtic art and religion, a synthesis expressing the ideal state of the human animal.

Balancing heart and mind.

But this hypothesis depends upon reducing two ultimately complex aspects of life into simple conflicting opposites, and although this is an attractive interpretation, it is dependent upon abstracted simplifications that are inevitably modern in tone. What we understand to be concepts of civility and wildness will inevitably differ to what was the actual lived experience of historical Celts."

For more of this [not my] essay, by a Jungian Celt!! PERFECT! click here...

https://celticsource.online/cernunnos-a-jungian-symbol/

[John Keats wrote]: "Call the world if you please, 'The vale of Soul-making.' Then you will find the use of the world..."  From this perspective the human adventure is a wandering through the vale of the world for the sake of making soul.—James Hillman

"We are composed of agonies, not polarities." - James Hillman

He who binds himself a joy Does the winged life destroy.
But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity's sun rise. - William Blake 

Hardly stag, late stage mage o the words

he would be.  Forested in firs, losing hair

and teeth, takes to heath and vale to be-

wail civilization too much. 

With a crutch (a book), a walking stick,

edges' fence lines stretched decades ago,

 nothing to show for the boundaries 

camouflaged by weed, scrub, tree fall.  

But, a place to long sit to meditate on

a stump, wildness lost to civility and 

now the hue and cry, "I tried" but 

"what's to become of the monk, the monk, the monk"

(a children's song)

when Nature reclaims raised pinky and 

whitened teeth "please, thank you blindly." 

Therefore into the wild I blindly plunge, stumbling

about, making racket so as to alert the deer and the 

bears, but Raven follows me from above, loud 

gutturals giving ALL Nearby WILD my bearings —

A joke of sorts.

I snort with ironic laughter rather than 

that natural retort of stag in rut or other

wild cry.

I'll plead, as i did, in the dark wood, 

from Theodore Roethke, his lines

from "Of Evening Air":

1

A dark theme keeps me here,
Though summer blazes in the vireo’s eye.
Who would be half possessed
By his own nakedness?
Waking’s my care—

I’ll make a broken music, or I’ll die.

My partial farcical inspiration for the above is taken, seriously, from one of the most magnificent poems of the 20th or any century for that matter.  Hungarian poet Ferenc Juhász's stunning, stanza after stanza of a human boy changed into a stag hearing the voice of his aging mother calling to him, "Where have you gone, my son?"  And the stag-boy knows he would kill her in his savage nature side as stag but the boy mourns and weeps.  I used to assign this poem to my students in a counseling training program when teaching about infant development and the psychological phases needed to be undergone good enoughly (that development being of an ego separating from the mother in terms of infant unconsciousness (no ego yet) and an ongoing growth and maturity away from and out of identity with the mother into a separate self.  The poem impacts the reader emotionally around this "oneness and separateness" destiny of each child.  Not so tender and mild but wild wild wild.  But with destined purpose.

Here's the poem (free to join archive dot org with access to millions of books to "borrow"):

https://archive.org/details/boychangedintost0000juha/page/54/mode/1up