Once More Into The Fray

[Triton]

The below are excerpts from James Hillman responding to an essay by W.
Giegerich who seemed to suggest we need concrete rituals (like
sacrificial animal killing and bloodletting) in order to do soul-
making:

Rituals, Imagination, Receptivity

Remember: what the Greeks said their Gods asked for above all else,
and perhaps only, was not blood; it was not to be forgotten, that is,
to be kept in mind, recollected as psychological facts. For me, that’s
the value of history. It keeps events in mind, lest we forget. So, the
task of re-finding again and again ways of remembering the divine and
human, and not repeating what once worked assuming it goes on working.
Above all, the task of re-finding means abandoning complaint,
abandoning nostalgia, not bemoaning the lost connection in a durftige
Zeit (dry time). For the complaint only limns the desolation of today
against a vividly meaningful “history”, driving the sacred ever
farther from the secular and leaving contemporary life without divine
presences, a condition which Giegerich describes in the last desperate
sentence of his paper as “the emptiness, meaninglessness, unrealness.”

Must we have actual bulls to feel their imaginal presence? Certainly
not in my dreams or visions or works of art or theatre. Let us turn to
the Gods not with knives in hands, in search of rituals to contain our
passionate desperation; rather let us imagine their claims, beseeching
the powers to tell us what they want now, how we may serve them now.

My point here is that the experience of death does not require the
ritual sacrifice of actual animals because the imagination, the
metaphor, the abstraction, of this act is no less an actual fact-
unless we attribute primary ontological status to actual knives and
blood… His ontological fallicy gives priority to the knife and the
blood; my “fantasy” gives priority to the imagination of this act. And
I would further add that only when the imagination fully transposes
the act of killing into sacrifice does killing become ritual and yield
the experience of soul that Giegerich, and I, are both seeking. Again,
the reality of the imagination is primary—how it enacts the act,
transforms the act, animates the act. Otherwise, its just another
butchering or road-kill, indifferent.

Giegerich accuses the mythologizings of archetypal psychology: “you
are still stuck with… imagination and intuition, which… can only yeild
abstractions and never connect us with reality” [p. 16].

The question of “doing something” is an old one. Geigerich refers to
an anecdote in Plotinus who rebuked the theurgists in his day because
they wanted to draw down the Gods and influence fate through magic
rituals. Plotinus said, as Giegerich observes, “It’s not for me to go
to them; it is for them to come to me.” I take plotinus to be saying:
it’s not a matter of human will; it is a matter of grace whether they
take part in our life. My position sounds close to the Catholic fiat
mihi, let it be done to me, a position of receptivity. Giegerich,
however, finds receptivity too passive; he interprets Plotinus as
follows: “This anecdote beautifully reveals the platonistic fallacy,
the reduction of soul-making to its passive half, that of receiving,
of vision, imagination. Its active half, that of our making, of
sacrificial act and fact, has been dropped.” [p. 14] This astounds me
because intellection, imagination, vision, are intense and exhausting
actions. Geigerich’s own works, to wit. Besides, poesis means
“making.” “Soul-making” means psychopoetics, as David Miller pointed
out years ago. The soul is “made” poetically, aesthetically,
imaginatively, intellectually, and, without that vision which
perceives myths in acts, sacrifice is merely a bloody mess.

Whether [the Gods] can be killed, that is, actually disappear from all
memory is doubtful. For the Gods, too, are said to be bound by moira,
fate. They, too, may not overstep their limits, one of which is not to
die. Let us say they are forced to immortality as we are forced by the
same moira to mortality. Existence is their fate! Neither ritual nor
logic (Giegerich appeals to both), nor faith (the Christian method of
keeping God alive) are necessary to maintain their existence.

What then is necessary? Sensuous imagination. Gods exist as images;
that’s their reality. Psychic reality. Fantasy powers. Powers of
fantasy. They can be celebrated, honored, reinforced by rituals but
they do not exist by virtue of rituals any more than their existence
is tied to the mythical narratives about them. As psychic realities
they are present anywhere to the heart of sensuous imagining and the
mind’s eye that sees imagistically, imaginatively.

Giegerich’s answer must call for something concrete… My answer says
that the concrete killing is already going on, but that the killing is
without ceremony, without sacrifice, without Gods. The repression of
the mythical imagination and the Gods into which it opens has rendered
the killing null and void. We have the killing, but it is severed from
the Gods, so that it serves only secular purposes- high protein diet,
speedy transportation, economic profit, weekend sport, medical
research, etc. The animals have been corraled into giving up their
lives for the only one God left that is truly universal, omnipresent,
omnipotent, observed faithfully in thought and action, joining all
human kind in daily acts of devotion: The Economy. That’s the God we
nourish with actual animal blood. Even I would call this a “hard
fact.”

So one way to go would be to re-connect the Gods to the facts-
blessings at harbors as the net hauls come in; little marker stones at
the roadside commemorating a roadkill; images of the animal in its
pride pasted over cold-bins in the supermarket; animal stories on the
menus of duck and pork and loin of lamb; service by school children in
the dog-pound and the neutering surgery; instructional visits to the
pet-food cannery. Absurd, banal, trivial? Would these concrete
gestures satisfy Giegerich’s requirments for concrete ritual? Or is
something still missing? Just remembering animal slaughter, concrete
as possible, will not restore the holiness Giegerich is calling for;
and anyway it’s not the concrete that re-instates the holy. What is
already real is not more real by adding concrete.

Moreover, we cannot force the Gods and Goddesses to be present at the
slaughter, or invent rituals with a positivistic kind of piety.
Giegerich is against positivism, and says so. I am too, but what else
are his real actions but the bricks with which positivism builds its
kind of temples? Programs that would make positive connections between
facts and myths by inventing rituals show the foolishness of
attempting to move imaginal necessities into hard facts. Such
maneuvers employ the faulty instrument of the Western ego to restore
relations with the Gods, the very instrument that so proudly divested
itself of Gods to begin with.

They [the Gods] give us vision. Vision makes the world real; aisthesis
makes it bearable; rhetoric makes it speakable; poesis, illusional;
and rhapsody, illogical. Not Hegel; Whitman. The Gods are our
propensity.

[From – Once More Into The Fray].