Trickster is Psyche's child, not Spirituality's. Spirituality formed to escape from Psyche, from unfathomable, incomprehensible and therefore frightening depths, though it is a product of Psyche yet in hubris proclaims itself to be of greater value, nostrums of Narcissus/narkosis the "soma" drug most often imbibed. I witnessed and haplessly participated in Trickster's gripping of and dissolving a spiritual-ish group which, though it intended to "heal the split between spirituality and psychology", continually relegated psychology to "red-headed step child" status, not of equal value to "spirituality" which, of course, kept the very split it purportly desired to heal going. Thus, one August day while on vacation with some friends and colleagues of this overly identified-with-spirituality group and after difficult and troubling conversations between one of my colleagues and the de facto leader of this group who was unwittingly used by Trickster (and other participants, my inflated self greatly included) to dissolve the group, I went to the bathroom to ponder and shit. While letting go on my turd tuffet - which humbles one and all reminding that we are animals "after all is said and dunged", we holy animals who dung in our own dwellings - I suddenly heard just outside the open window the loudly resonant, cackling howls of at least three shrill coyotes.
Flushing fast and quickly spraying in vain "New Aeon Shit Coat Air Freshener", I called to my colleagues to "come quick! listen up! the coyotes are warning that there is real mischief at work and much shit ahead. No one shall be exempted." We immediately went to a sweat lodge on the property to sweat and fret for once Trickster has sprayed and marked one and others for his bitter "soul sending" medicine one can only pray and return yet again to conscious shadow work all the while knowing that scapegoating and shadow projecting will run unchecked in groups, and it did and still does, that shitty whiff-gift that keeps on giving. Willful ignoring of shadow and Trickster guarantees disaster and perhaps the greatest disaster is to to be ignored completely by the gods, to be left to one's own unconscious, inflated devices. Even though catching the gods attention, especially Trickster's, means trouble while in their gaze and grip, the eventual grace wrung is not of saintliness and rumored spiritual high-stature but of simple, humble humanity participating in imperfect yet creative encounter of self and other, newly awake to being only one member of vast uncountable choirs of beings in a tricksterish unfolding/enfolding cosmos creating and destroying entire galaxies like a child who crumbles a cookie in her hand merely because she can, a display of will to power and power over.
Growth and transformation is to be gained from struggle thus is Trickster's domain. Intuition, valuable as it is, does not really trump wisdom hard won from enduring vicissitudes in space and time. Intuition "drops in" to one and all heedless of quality of consciousness and development or moral character or social or spiritual stature. It impresses but does not necessarily transform. It often entertains delusions of Tom Thumb-like grandeur - "what a good boy am I!" thinking that the pie, the plum, the thumb and the eye/I are of his own god-like making. It is no accident that intuition has been subjected to dimly lit parlors or now New Age light-flooded lofts, reduced to fascinating entertainments with vague "metaphysics" manufactured more from slick wishes and wonders in the consumer wanderland of Trickster's "secret knowledge", paying participants sucker punched and punch drunk from table tipping and raps enraptured and intellectually, often psychologically/spiritually, fractured and disappointed from projected, promised and expected "enlightenment" with materialistic gain to prove one's spiritual arrival.
In wisdom's struggle transcendence (escape) is not gained for it is no needed. Transcendence, that fantasy of perfectionist religions and groups of "escaping to a fiddle beyond the pail" (Rainer Rilke) cannot surpass what is to be gained from incarnation, individuation, and the transformative struggle of psychological integration (also a dream but with practical incremental gains) which include all of the gods, sacred energies all, from warrior energies, erotic energies, to more subtly nuanced inflections establishing orders of history from which now and future generations may learn to build or take down "these lucastrine cities" of gods and humaity:
These lacustrine cities grew out of loathing
Into something forgetful, although angry with history.
They are the product of an idea: that man is horrible, for instance,
Though this is only one example...
The worst is not over, yet I know
You will be happy here. Because of the logic
Of your situation, which is something no climate can outsmart.
Tender and insouciant by turns, you see
You have built a mountain of something,
Thoughtfully pouring all your energy into this single monument,
Whose wind is desire starching a petal,
Whose disappointment broke into a rainbow of tears.
- John Ashberry, from Rivers and Mountains (1966)
As one banished now from more than one overtly spiritual guild, lucastrine cities all, I have had to bear stains that are truly my own. I have also had to painfully discover and differentiate those stains which are NOT mine and to return them to those who refuse to reclaim them or who cannot, from psychological wounding, weakness or outright hubris, bear the pain of seeing their own authentic sinfulness and guilt. Many these days in New Age "perfectionist trances" - those of organized religion have been numerously exposed and analyzed by history - refuse to acknowledge authentic evil in existence, their own and others. These days an inflated, naive, magical slight of hand dismisses evil and shadow to mere "gremlins" with whom one does a workshop dance, or pinches! thinking that Trickster can be appeased and transformed by such cartoon-like psycho-spiritual flickers which are ultimately egoic entertainments and impotent wishful thinking, what Trungpa Rimpoche astutely calls "spiritual materialism" where profoundly/confoundingly real sacred images, rituals and powers are turned into consumer items for purchase in what Harvey Cox calls the "new gluttony" - spirituality - with "enlightenment by Ticketron" and a dumbing down dance with one's cutesy gremlins. Oy.
Ironically, unwittingly prophetic, the notes from which I am composing this essay were taught in the group mentioned above three years before its demise, then already in the paws and maws of the Trickster. Repeating myself (so that I may ultimately "get it") hubris is an equal opportunity inflation and self or group hypnotic trances of piety and god almightiness are some of the ugliest and most difficult parts of the pathways of individuation and shadow integration. To find oneself there may be occasion for denial, for battle and scapegoating but if one can remain conscious enough and eat authentic humble pie with one's real crow one may also see that real enlightenment, not the transcendence-inflected, namaste-tourretting, consumer-Ticketron-best seller spiritualities-Lite so currently prevalent, greater wholeness may be derived. This wholeness is not perfection. Trickster laughs at perfection. Quoting a taunting Monty Python character, Trickster says, "I blow my nose at you. I wave my private parts at your aunties!" Trickster the maker, breaker, expander of boundaries is more about wholeness, greater expansions of consciousness which can contain and hold tremendous conflicting opposites without demanding that they all "get along" in hypnotic group think, sacred or secular. Trickster is not a god of perfection but infection and inflections of all the spectrum of consciousness from red to violet/indigo. To vote as "best" for one or several colors over the full spectrum of colors manifests variously as neuroses and, in extreme, psychoses of various kinds, so-called "spiritualities" being perhaps the most disguised forms of psychoses since spiritual group-think sacrifices critical intelligence for sheep-like belief in a leader and systems which perpetuate faux-transcendence bestowing power on a leader and inner circle who call themselves "good guys" as opposed to all those "bad guys" out there out to get them and their power, their "spiritual" and material baubles.
In this light the Trickster is irreverent and sacrilegious. Since my own life is the best example I know of hubris and denial, of "dumb-ass" pomposity and pretenses, alas, I share the following dream had at the advent of my first year of training in a New Age seminary which warned not only of my own god almightiness and inflation but in retrospect that of the very program I was training in. To be fair the program was no exception. All programs, beset by and identified with archetypes beneath their ideals and missions, are unconsciously inflated and this dream would be appropriate to them as well.
I am to be crowned Bishop to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I am standing outside the front doors awaiting entry into the cathedral overflowing with parishioners there to witness my ordination. I wear the gold robes and the bishops miter. At the signal I knock loudly with my Crosier/Shepherd's Staff upon the door. I can hear it echoing throughout the vast spaciousness of the cathedral. The door slowly open, clouds of incense smoke billowing out into the secular city. I enter and slowly begin my walk down the central aisle to the altar at the other end of the cathedral. As I pass the initial crowds in the foyer I begin to hear gaspes and snickers of laughter. Nevermind. I am full of the august occasion of my inauguration and stay focused. As I continue to walk the aisle past smiling people who then begin to gasp and laugh I become annoyed. This laughter is inappropriate to the seriousness of the ocassion. Halfway down the aisle the din of laughter is too loud to ignore. I stop and wonder what to do. It is then that I feel a cool breeze up my legs to my ass. I reach behind to feel my back side and discover that the robes have somehow caught at my waist above my buttocks which are naked. I look back and see to my horror that I have not a human ass but that florid garish brightly colored ass of a mandrill. The crowd roars with laughter. I cringe in humiliation and shame. So much for sacredness and pomposity. A sure cure for spiritual inflation and taking one's self way too seriously. The laughter compensates for the too too seriousness and high mightiness of belief and affiliation/institution.
Of Boundaries and Bounders, Hermes Makes & Breaks Them Without Apologies
Any discussion of boundaries calls for a presentation of the god of boundaries, Hermes/Mercury. According to C.G. Jung he is "the patron deity of depth psychology," which goes into the depths of the unconscious through the personal unconscious and into the transpersonal archetypal layers of the unconscious, to bring unconscious archetypes, energy, and content up over the boundary/threshold into consciousness.
Hermes is chiefly known as a guide or psychopomp, "psycho/psyche" meaning "soul" and "pomp" meaning "sending, sender." Thus He is a soul sender, in, through, and beyond official boundaries.
As Guide and Teacher, Hermes is a troublemaker, a boundary and rule breaker, a thief, a liar, and loudmouth truthteller. He's not "appropriate." He is a god of messes and makes plenty of them. He equally is an equal opportunity trickster manifesting chaos in both secular and "spiritual" settings where He is duty-bound to mug each without apology, with or without reason. The more Light-identified or Justice-identified the individual or group the more likely an encounter with Hermes is fated. He shouts out, "the king has no clothes..." or "ah, what a load of crap..." or like Cher in Moonstruck, as she slaps Nicholas Cage, "Snap out of it!". He's a trickster who shapeshifts to shock and startle, bringing a new way of perceiving reality, as it is, not as one visualizes it.
Hermes is not about safety. Safety for Hermes is being street smart, eyes wide open, canny, cunning and swift of foot and mind. He's a fast talker, a sideways walker-talker, speaking out of both sides of his mouth in order to gain something, to steal something hidden away in the unconscious in order to make conscious "by any means necessary" holy and unholy, writ, or wit, or twit, equally valuing the white between the lines, opening out or in to a "WHA'?" of mind.
Hermes, a god of occult, hidden knowledge, teaches by reversals, mistakes, sudden insight, and revelation. He is well-acquainted with the dark, the unconscious, the repressed, and forbidden, not only a protector of all wayfarers on official byways, but is the god and protector of thieves. He lies in wait, then springs upon and reshapes that which is set and stodgily staid into new revelations, new meanings, new formulations. He is the god of interpretations, of hermeneutics, which is the art of reading texts and finding the meaning "between the lines".
Hermes is a messenger deity, thus His winged helmet and feet. He carries messages between the upper world (the conscious), the lower world (the unconscious), and the inbetween world. In ancient times it was believed that if you entered the underworld without a guide, you would never come back. Hermes is that guide. He knows the ways of the demons there. He speaks "demon" and proclaims "shadow", and will shout it from the rooftops willy-nilly. He helps to negotiate and integrate the shadow, for He is a god of integrations, re- and dis- integrations in the depths of Dis (see William Blake's cosmological poem, "The Four Zoas" re: the Kingdom of Dis).
If one courts and sports with Hermes, be prepared for egg on the face and shit on the shoe, winged or not, and a large portion of humble pie which "is always hard to swallow with your pride" (lyrics from a Graham Nash song). Being a dissolver, He will dissolve groups, organizations, programs of all flavors that are too pompous and self-inflated. He wounds the healer and heals the wounder. He transforms all values in an ongoing evaluating and revaluing, unsettling those values which calcify into sacred cows. One of Hermes's first acts upon birth was to steal the sacred cows of His brother, Apollo!
I will use the following dream to reveal how Hermes shows up in contemporary dreams. As far as I know, the dreamer had no knowledge of the attributes of Hermes prior to dreaming this dream:
A client dreamed that he was late getting to the airport to fly to Europe, due to traffic congestion. He finally arrived, but found there was a problem with his passport and ticket. His plane was leaving shortly, and he felt "fucked with" when he realized that he had left his most important baggage back with the baggage claim man. He ran back to the man, who, upon seeing him, said, "I knew you'd be back for this", and gave him his bag. The dreamer explained the problems with his ticket and passport, and that the plane was about to leave. The baggage claim man smiled, and said, "No problem. Follow me." He led the client through a series of doors through which only airport officials go. In minutes they were at the gate. The doors were about to close. A few words from the baggage claim man to the flight attendant, and the dreamer was led to the airplane door. The client shouted his gratitude to the man, and asked his name so he could find him upon his return. The baggage claim man shouted back, "My name is HERMAN!"
In this dream we have the presence of a god, Herman, or rather, HERMES Himself, the keeper of the gates, breaker of rules and boundaries, who knows the right people. The baggage claim man (and the flight attendant) could allude to the dreamer's therapist, who functions as a guide and hermaneut in the ways of the client's conscious and unconscious life.
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