The Trouble with Archetypes

Magician. Warrior. King. Lover. 

Enneagram 6. Myers Briggs INFJ. Virgo with the Moon in Drag Queen.

Sometimes we'd really, really love to find the Captain Midnight Decoding Ring. 

When we're casting around trying to make sense of our lives, trying to find a center that will hold, it's comforting to think that in some universal archetype, finally, lies the deep truth of who I am. The deep truth of who I've always been, of a destiny that's mine to fulfill. The truth of who other people are as well. Cut through the vagaries of my history, the random stuff that's happened to me, and underneath I'll strike the archetypal bedrock that makes sense of it all. 

Except it doesn't.

We want there to be something solid down at the bottom. We're drawn to the possiibility of some universal truth. But we won't find the truth of our lives in some eternal verity that's waiting to be uncovered. The truth of our lives is in the random history of how we came to be who we are. Peel away a layer of the onion, and you'll find the onion inside. Except that there's another layer to peel away after that. And another layer after that. 

It's not always easy to look with clear eyes at our own histories, with their joys, their traumas, their wounds, their experiences of grace, and their sheer accidents. Sometimes it's hard work to see ourselves as the entirely particular beings that we are. So we start projecting our experience onto some transcendent realm, instead of facing the specific, precious randomness of who we've become and are still becoming. We start making outrageously overgeneralized statements about the universal nature of men's experience, or gay experience. We imagine we're including everyone, when what we're doing is marginalizing those whose experience doesn't conform to our own formulation.

Men don't, as men, have some core essential nature that makes us protectors or warriors, kings or magicians or lovers. Gay men aren't, by some innate gift of being gay, nurturers or tricksters or shamans. We may have some or all of these qualities, but none of them sets us apart as men, or as queer men. None of them is a secret handshake that admits us to the Boys' Club or the Queer Boys' Club. None of them makes us esssentially different from women or straight people or gender-fluid folks or anybody else. And all the other components of our identity--our religion, our class, our race, our cultural background, and on and on, just as importantly make us different from one another.

What we have is the particularity of our experience. We need to dive deeper into it, not impose on it the template of some imagined realm of essential identity. Use whatever images, whatever boxes, whatever labels, you need to make sense of your story. But they're only tools to use for as long as they're useful.

Random Objects

The Sacred isn’t just something we discover out there, or within. It’s also something we invent with our bodies. And something that invents us.

That’s my summary, in twenty-four words, of Brent Plate’s A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). It’s that rarest of all phenomena, a book by an academic who can write clearly and accessibly for an intelligent non-specialist, without sacrificing subtlety or suggestiveness. It’s the kind of book that will unsettle anyone who thinks his own spiritual path offers an exclusive or unique access to the Divine. And it’s an antidote to mystified shamanic woo-woo.

Plate starts by making a fundamental point about our experience in human bodies--we’re not complete. We feel partial, because we are partial. We’re not each a whole, but a half. We long for completion, and we try to find it by a whole slew of means: drugs, companionship, sex, the perfect relationship, our i-Phone, the touch of a dog.

We also look for it by reaching out further, when these stopgap measures fail to satisfy, toward the Mystery. We create religion. But we get sidetracked into believing that religion is about disembodied teaching, or that the spirit is separate from our flesh, even antithetical to our flesh. Religion, Plate insists, is about tying body together with the longings we experience for relation to what is beyond us. (The word "religion" itself derives from a Latin verb that means "to tie back together.") And we do that through the means of the senses.

Plate’s five objects are stones, incense, drums, crosses, and bread. In each case, it’s the physical practice of what we do with these objects that comes first, not an abstract understanding of the meaning of our action. We act, then we think about the meaning of our action. First comes practice, then comes belief. 

We set stones on top of one another to mark a place out as noteworthy, or even sacred. Later, we create an explanation for what made us do it. 

We make a memorial quilt panel for someone we’ve loved. Only later do  we experience what our grief might mean in the larger world, when we see our handiwork incorporated into a project that honors tens of thousands of those lost to HIV-AIDS. 

We lay a bouquet of flowers in a public space to honor someone who’s died. But the meaning of what we’ve done depends on the offerings that others have already made there, and on the offerings that will follow. 

We witness our love for someone by buying a cheap lock and shackling it to the grate on the Pont des Arts in Paris. All this is not only about discovering or expressing what’s within us. It’s just as much about inventing it, making it real through the senses and through the body. 

All this turns our understanding of the relationship between ritual and the soul inside out. We want the rituals we participate in to be immediately and easily meaningful. Many of us want their purpose and significance spelled out for us ahead of time, and we’re uncomfortable with doing something before we understand why we’re doing it. 

It’s not a bad idea to resist this impulse for clarity. “Listen to your art,” says Marina Abramovic. “It knows more than you do.” The same can be said, sometimes, of ritual. Long ago, Pascal said, “Kneel down, move your lips, and you will believe.” Walk into the river and submerge yourself. Afterwards, you may understand that you longed to be cleansed. 

Ring a bell at the door of a temple, and afterwards you may get it that you needed to announce your entrance into the Presence of what’s honored there. Bow to someone who smudges you with sage, and later you may understand that the smoke has prepared you to take what happens afterwards more seriously. Hold your wrist out and let someone tie a red thread around it, and days later it may go on bearing witness that the ritual it was part of is still working its way through your consciousness. Your urge to sit quietly at the back of a church with your eyes closed for five minutes every afternoon doesn’t require your belief in a creed.

First we do. Then we understand.

But the reverse of this trust in the integrity of the ritual before you completely understand it is also true. Plate’s approach also invites us to build ritual from the roots of our experience up, when we need to, instead of waiting helplessly for some expert to hand it down to us ready-made. Your favorite park bench may work better for you than the back pew of a cathedral. 

A ritual doesn’t depend for its authenticity on an esoteric meaning fully possessed only by some master of the tradition. Being recited in a language no one in the room knows except for the officiant doesn’t make a chant more effective. Exotic materials aren’t necessarily preferable to what’s around us from day to day. Something as ordinary as water or wine or bread or a candle becomes extraordinary because of how it’s used, and the care with which it’s treated, and because of how its use encourages us to sink further down into its deep multiple meanings for our life. 

“...one point of a history of religion is that all these sacred rituals were, over time and space, made up. All traditions adapt and change, fitting new environments,” as Plate puts it (p. 133).

We build a spiritual practice for ourselves out of the materials we have on hand. There’s nothing to wait for, no expertise you need that you don’t already have, no clear understanding that has to come first. Pick up the tools. They’ll teach you what you need to know.

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence

 

Midsummer Reverence