Animism, the belief that Nature is sentient and that material things contains spirits, is mostly considered a quaint footnote of Anthropology by Church and Science alike. Something our foolish ancestors and merely primitive people believe in. Little might any inter galactic tourist imagine the extent to which such beliefs pervade modern life and among the very people who consider themselves to have evolved beyond such apparent nonsense.
As a student I was invited not to return to lectures by a Great Professor whose scoffing at the Hunter-gather’s totemic world drew my attention to the Gucci suit he was wearing and the Mercedes key fob in clear view atop his mighty desk. I made the grievous error of asking if these were not also totems whose meaning, unlike our ancestors, we fail to recognize or have simply forgotten…
Despite pretensions to the contrary, modernity contains just the same degree of magical thinking as it ever did. Evolution builds on what went before. Previous adaptations are the basement of Being. You can’t discard them any more than you could tear out the foundations of a building or heroically leave your childhood behind.
One of the defining characteristics of our age, difficult as it is to see the wood for the trees, is a disdaining identification with the top most levels of the Psyche. We’ve made a cult of Veneer. Which means that the innate propensity for magical thinking, the conflation of spirit and matter, slips its leash and happens without you noticing, making a deity of Bling instead.
The hold that money has over our imaginations is perhaps the most generic and pervasive example of the way in which we create symbolic equations between spirit and matter. We do more than expect money to make us happy. We stake our worth and meaning on it, pursuing it as if it were a holy Grail containing the promise of redemption and do so with all the anxiety of one who has indeed just lodged their essence in something beyond influence.
The deBeers Diamond Company made a fortune out of our hidden but all to human animistic soul. Some bright spark in marketing came up with the idea that if diamonds could be symbolically equated with eternal love and made a fixture of a sacred marital vow then everyone would have to buy their stuff.
Prior to the 1930’s diamonds were a strictly luxury item whose inflated price could only be maintained by holding back reserves that might otherwise flood the market. Ad men N.W. Ayer and Son found a market for the stones de Beers couldn’t sell. Their aggressive campaign took advantage of the one thing designed to put a diamond into every household whilst maintaining its mystery and the myth of its rarity, they equated it with Eternity, wherein all anxiety of separation and death is laid to rest.
Stuff as Symbol is an important part of growing up. The transitional objects of bear and doll in early childhood are necessary to manage separation anxiety and signals the development of symbol formation, part of whose function is to manage change whilst preserving a sense of object constancy..
Thereafter the capacity of things to embody and represent other things helps us to cross life’s thresholds. When my son was making the transition into his teens he spent hours whittling precious lumps of wood with which he decorated the hearth. He spent hours carving and smoothing. These sacred bits of wood were deeply significant to him, like aboriginal soul stones, which gave him belonging, gravitas, space.
The equation between spirit and matter is not only common, it can assume some very specific and intricate meanings. My favorite example is the mythology surrounding pirate ear-rings, which, to those in the know, signified much more than ornament.
The tradition was that the gold ring in your ear would pay the price of your funeral. The fact that this so rarely occurred, pirates generally dying either at sea or upon the gallows, invites closer inspection.
What the gold hoop says is that I have mates who I can trust and will do right by me. Its a mark of Belonging, of collective identity, which also serves not just as payment in the event of death but as a defense against death itself, useful in the piratical business. The ring is a statement of confidence that you will not be lost at sea and that you’ll die sufficiently in one piece to be buried at all; that it will somehow be quiet and dignified with both the wood and the time for coffin making, that you will be neither sluiced from the quater-deck nor tossed over the side..
a sentiment somewhat betrayed by the brief eulogy traditionally afforded piratical demise..
‘One and the body, the body I say. Two, shall be cast, shall be cast away. Three.. and into the sea, the sea, into the sea goes he..’
Such projections into matter are not merely defensive. The psyche often discovers the incipient stirrings of nascent consciousness in the worldly garb of either fascination or disgust, which, with time, may be realized as having more to do with oneself than circumstance suggests.
This is the meaning behind alchemical gold. The old alchemists understood that the ancient Sanskrit maxim, ‘Tat twam Asi, (‘thou art that’) meant the outer physical events they were exploring were reflections of inner processes. The base elements they sought to transform were elements of their own psyche. They knew their work was symbolic and in pursuit of inner treasure.
‘Aurum nostrum non est aurum vulgi.’ (Our gold is not the ordinary kind.)
Often this confusion of inner and outer is most keenly felt in relationships. We confuse lovers with angels, spouses with parents, opponents with the devil, migrants with inner impoverishment. We attribute public figures with the power to redeem our lives. Irvin Yalom even gave that one a name.. ‘the fantasy of the ultimate rescuer’. Someone, somewhere has the power to save me from my situation.
Such projections are useful despite the mess they can get us into because they afford us a glimpse into the inner world otherwise hidden from view. Nature abhors a vacuum..
‘ It is as if the investigator’s own psychic background were mirrored in the darkness. What he sees in matter are qualities and potential meanings which are chiefly the data of his own unconscious.’ C. G. Jung.
Modern psychotherapy makes use of this phenomenon, taking the raw elements of experience and fantasy, the ‘massa confusa’ and giving them context so that transformation can take place. My analyst used to describe paranoia, of which I had plenty, as a feeling searching for its home.
So projection doesn’t deserve such poor press. It can be useful. Sometimes it’s the way ‘in’. Marie Louise von Franz went so far as to say that the projection of ‘healer’ onto another can often yield results even whilst the projection is in place. You know from your own experience how everything in life feels resolved when you are in love, that you suddenly have more vitality and drive. You ‘glow’ with life, even though the beloved is condensed into a flawed and all too human vessel which can only temporarily contain it..
We encounter ourselves in the world, in other people, in concrete situations and sometimes just in concrete. We do this as a prelude to the disruptive experience of ushering emergent aspects of Self across the threshold of our inner caucus where they can be more consciously at home. Far from being an aspect of a bygone era we would do well to re-discover the conflation of spirit and matter in our own experience so they may be sources of meaning rather than the drivers of a cruel fate.
