Susan Rowland's Blog, page 3

Pandemic is Alchemy

This is Alchemy

Alchemy is the art and science of transformation. It is multicultural in heritage (Africa, China, India, Islam, European). It comes from an age of a different paradigm, one that is already returning to us in complexity theory and the quantum realm. But even if we are wedded to the material paradigm of modernity, the medics tell us that psyche and attitude are part of wellness. If we have a positive attitude, it is likely that our bodies (ensouled bodies) will recover faster and stronger. So a big part of this virus is psychological. Alchemy was about psychological transformation of dark matter: lead, leaden spirit, depression, fear, grief – to gold: good feelings, happiness, divine spirit, even the water of life or panacea, cure for all diseases. In one way, the entire human community is enduring an alchemical progression through dark matter or prima materia with suffering from which we will emerge with lighter spirits. On the other hand, we as individuals can help this process for ourselves and others. Transformations on one level promote transformations on others. Creativity in all forms is in this sense, alchemical transformation. The prime matter of words, paint, memes, musical notes, etc can be combined and distilled (solve et coagula) to lighten the spirit and enter the panacea. Just watch those Italians playing music and singing on balconies! They are healing the world as well as themselves!

Pandemic: Our Choices, Our Creativity

Self-isolating is not Self Isolation!

We have choices. We do not have a choice about whetherwe are going to have this pandemic. We do have a choice about how we have this pandemic. Self-isolating is not self isolation, nor has it ever been. Not only do we need people “out there” to put the toilet paper back on the shelves, but the world needs help and we can give it.

A huge part of the threat facing us is psychological. Fear, loneliness, panic are all natural results of the insidious spread on the coronavirus. It is our nature that is challenged, our psychic nature as well as the suffering body. The shadow is out there and in here – for everyone. While there is a material aspect of this shadow in the actual virus itself, it is far more pervasive and unstoppable in psychological form. This is in-spirited shadow and the in-spiration is dark and potent for alchemical transformation.

Of course the coronavirus will transform us and is already doing to. The choices that face us are: do we consciously participate in this planetary alchemy or do we unconsciously participate in it? We are all in this together whether we want to be or not.

So it is time for creativity to get large, get out there and get going! It is time for depth psychologists of the intrinsically creative psyche, and for artists of all kinds to get stuck into the corona-spirit-shadow all around us. We are in a time of unseen acts of transforming kindness of mythical proportions. For example, neighbors on Apps contact and support neighbors. Who is are neighbor in this time? Our neighbor is everyone who can be reached online and on social media. Writers, get you writing, painters get painting and share online. Depth psychologists too have ways of materializing the transforming images of the deep and collective psyche.

This is the time is of rapid, planetary alchemy or put another way of psyche-social and material evolution. We are part of it; we have choices!

Susan Rowland, Core Faculty, Pacifica Graduate Institute

The Detective as Home-maker!

Hestia, goddess of hearth and home, might appear an unlikely divinity for the mystery’s quest for truth. In the Greek pantheon, Hestia is paired with the enquiring, mercurial Hermes, in the sense that Hestia inhabits the hearth, stays at home, while Hermes is darting about delivering messages.1 It is he who uses language trickily in ways familiar to criminals and detectives. On the other hand, as James Hillman says, at the end of each day of legal cases the judge would leave a written account of the proceedings on the altar of Hestia.2 If Hermes is the unreliable patron of trickiness in words, and father of hermeneutics, Hestia conversely guards contracts. Hestia’s relationship to the word is one of fidelity to meaning that makes writing a core ingredient of a centered sense of home, in the city, amongst family and for the self.3

Hence, Hestia is found in the sacred commitment between sleuth and those for whom the investigation is undertaken. Such a bond occurs whether the witnessing of truth takes the literal form of a written contract or not. So, “centering” and stabilizing being via the quest for the right story is a clue to Hestia’s role in detecting to re-make home. In some of the mysteries discussed below the amateur sleuth is forced to solve a situation that is blighting her own hearth. Hestia is here the object of the detective’s quest, while providing a crucial dimension to knowing. By finding out what really happened, hearth fires are both (re)discovered and re-ignited.

However, Hestia also resides in detective fiction by women in negative forms. Some detectives are spurred on by the mystery of Hestia’s absence in a family or in a workplace that is cold and uncentered. Detecting the ways in which Hestia is absent draws upon a mode of knowing based on familial warmth and trust, in order to solve by dis-solving the uncanny disappearance of these qualities. Yet also, Hestia can be too much present in ways that foster dangerous desires for the purity of home and homeland.4 Without the ameliorating factor of Hermes’s opposite energies of ambiguity, communicativeness and movement, Hestia is the hearth become a purifying inferno, “She” may demand the sacrifice of anything that would pollute the home of its historic or ancestral identity.

Therefore, Hestia reveals herself as a true inhabitant of a polytheistic cosmos; these gods do not come alone. If adhered to singly they spell possession and disaster. With the implied presence of Hermes, Hestia offers a unique gift to the sleuth: a focused centering consciousness that is often crucial to success in the quest for truth. Indeed, James Hillman argues that Hestia is the quality of “in-ness,” the structuring of psychic interiority that has been so central to the modern age.5

It is she who cultivates a sense of an inner self. Fortunately, she is also more than the impoverished inner being of the modern person who sees him- or herself as separate from the world. Hestia is “soul essence” that gives a quality of being at home in a body, household, city, or even the planet.6 She gives hearth-life to all the ways we might find “home.” Hestia’s sense of being “in” therefore includes the hometown, the wilderness; also the sense of Earth as a planet with a core of fire as our home’s hearth. In fact, Hestia converts the abysmal homelessness of space and time to the embodied, psychic sculpting of “place;” the place where the hearth makes a home.

Consequently, although Hestia mistakenly erected as a monotheism, a goddess ruling alone, may persecute those who do not belong, she is also the protector of the stranger at the hearth. She constellates in many detectives who take on cases of those outside their usual definition of home. Finally, the cozy genre, with its ubiquitous turning to the Grail Quest as a myth for meaning, has summoned Hestia to sustain the development of food-oriented mysteries.

As we will see, these catering businesses work as a mediation of Hestian powers, from the home place in the domestic household to constituting it in the home town. In doing so, Hestia is threatened by that most unhomely of crimes, murder; and so the cook becomes sleuth, in order to live fully up to her Hestian skills. Because cooking becomes a way to detect the truth inextricable from comfort and hearth-making, the food itself becomes a materialization of the Grail. Therefore, the sleuth in her quest manifests the Grail as fertility cup, sacred for bringing the goddess and her fertility as food to heal the wasteland.