The Fall of an Image
uprooting racial injustice
by Faranak Mirjalili
Artwork above: Laura Krusemark for the Anima Mundi School
“They thought they killed a man, but they awakened a giant.”
— Sonia Guajajara
These are the powerful words of an indigenous woman who spoke about the death of George Floyd and the spark that has lit the fire of justice in peoples hearts around the world.
What we have been witnessing across the globe is the awakening of a giant, as the Sonia Guajajara shares in her plea. With this awakening comes the loss of the numinosity of an image that has had the world in its grip for a long time: the elevated status of the white male. We have to understand that this, in its deepest roots has to do with the evolution (or regression) of consciousness within humanities deep psyche.
The archetype of the white male reflects the monotheistic image of an enlightened bearded god in the heavens, up in the clouds of a perfected mind, looking down on the dirt of soil and body — looking down on the darkness of life on Earth. The white male has been a reflection of this ‘priestly’ image that has held a numinosity for thousands of years. It is this image that colonised the indigenous people, it is this image that killed the witches, wise women and men, the pagans and the druids. It killed its own mothers and daughters for a guaranteed seat in the white, impeccable heavens. It is this image that took the horror of rape and pillage across the world, colonizing land, people, and culture across the globe. It is this image that called the native and indigenous man ‘primitive’ and ‘of the devil’, which gave Europeans from the 15th century onward the license to kill and take innocent lives, land and severe ancient spiritual roots across the globe. This virus is a very old one and has contaminated the whole world, paralyzing the very roots of our human existence.
Inner and outer
I was listening to a podcast-discussion about the Black Lives Matter protests. The discussion was covering some significant matters with the voice of an African-American Jungian Analyst present (something that is unfortunately very rare in the somewhat elitist bubble of the Jungian community). One of the Analysts brought up her concern about the possible risks of the coronavirus spreading due to the protests, and wondering if the lockdown had been part of why the protests have been so huge around the world. I had listened to the discussion with a neutral feeling, up until that point—I sensed a sadness about how the ignorance of our everyday consciousness misinterprets the deep movements of the inner worlds and the signs of the spirit of the depths speaking to us. Imprisoned by rationale and the idea that we are the ones that are conscious and intelligent, we mistrust the deep sea of the feminine—the dark waters of yin and chaos that Jung called ‘the unconscious’ and forget that we might actually be the ones that are unconscious of its vast intelligence.
Perhaps one needs to have a lived experience in one’s blood and bones of the kind of oppression minorities have suffered to understand that the invisible and dangerous virus is not per se the physical one, but a much deeper one of authoritarian superiority and supremacy, colonizing the breath of life itself.
The realm of the primal forces of creation, that used to be revered as deity in the Lunar era, has become something that even in the science of it, like Jungian psychology, is often misunderstood and mistrusted. Perhaps, from the perspective of the unconscious, it is not important that we ‘stay safe’ in the comforts of our homes when there is so much injustice and cruelty in the world that is destroying the very fabric of creation. How comfortable have we become in ‘father’s house’ to question such a great moment in history? Yes, many lives are being lost due to the pandemic and yet, the urgency of the voices that are now welling up in this momentum, speak the voices of ancestors and lineages that have suffered for hundreds of years. Racial injustice is the tip of the iceberg that roots down to how the Western mind has learned to suffocate life on Earth. Colonial cruelty and genocide cost many lives, vast parts of land, forests, waters and left species plundered, children killed, women raped and cultures lost. What value do these lives, does life, hold? How do we value not only the lives of the living, but also those of the dead?
Mundus Imaginalis
Even amongst Jungians, who claim to be experts and specialists in understanding the ‘collective unconscious’, the trap of forgetting that the collective unconscious is a deity to relate to, instead of mere contents to examine, is a great one. It is for this reason that I have learned to lean more towards the mystical tradition and heritage to which I belong —Persian mysticism and Sufism—in trying to understand and comprehend my relationship to the spirit of the depths. When we are not rooted in a tradition or in a living pulsating ancestry, it is easy for concepts like the collective unconscious to become dangerously ungrounded.
On the Sufi path, we are taught to be a witness, a spy for the Beloved as Sufis call it. In being a witness, we are not detached because we learn to witness with the eye of the heart, not just the awareness of the mind. There is feeling, even deep suffering in becoming a witness for the Beloved. This has been part of the work of Sufis across different lineages and times.
To be watchful to the signs of God has been one of our main practices. In his books ‘Signs of God’, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee writes about these changing signs of God, and how the symbols are showing us that a change is happening on the deep level in the inner worlds, a sign that our very spiritual images are changing. By witnessing these changing symbols, we can contribute to the transformation of the Anima Mundi, the World Soul. And that is exactly what is happening at this time.
Old Father’s ashes
We have to understand that the image of the enlightened Father in Heaven has lived on as a ghost in our modern desacralized era, and it is the ghost of this same white male god that is being worshipped in science, economy, politics as well as technology today. When the Church Fathers severed the connection between spirit and matter by declaring matter, the Earth and the body of woman, sinful and possessed by evil, they laid the foundations of the way our science and technology would develop. Matter became devoid of life and man could do whatever it wanted to the natural world. At the same time, the image of evil and the rejected shadow of their own primordial nature was projected onto the darker skinned people of the world.
James Hillman speaks in his lectures on Alchemical Psychology about the origin of the word ‘black’ used by the white people for the first time when they discovered black skinned people during early colonization. The color black was perceived as ‘dirty, stained, soiled, evil’ due to the Church’s original sin doctrine which had been dominating the West. This Christian shadow was projected onto the black people of our world. The so-called ‘primitive’ man became the scapegoat of the white elite, and a deep racial injustice was born.
The Persian prophet Mani once said in his writings that the notion of ‘evil’ is not static, but dynamic. Evil in itself changes throughout time and thus what is evil, is our inability to change and move with the consciousness of the cosmos. When we get fixed on one image, idea or era and refuse to listen, preventing the dynamic being of the universe to take us into a next image and era, we are conspiring in the manifestation of evil. Therefore, what once was ‘good’ can now be ‘evil’. And what once was considered ‘sinful’ can now be experienced as ‘holy’.
There is a tremendous idea in the statement above, the idea that there is evil, and that we all have this dynamism inherently within us. Not because of a dreadful devil sitting on our shoulder, but because of our inability to change, our inability to transform and move with the currents of life. This puts an enormous responsibility on the human being — the burden of becoming conscious. This has always been the real essence of any mystical tradition.
When Nietzsche said ‘God is dead’ he, perhaps unconsciously, meant that an image had died; the old god image was no longer in tune with the dynamic movement of creation. That image had died and as a result, the Divine felt no longer present amongst man. By (consciously or) unconsciously refusing the death and transformation of this old god within, its energy moved into our modern, globalised era. We became co-conspirators, fuelling this image with our life force at the cost of the lives of many, humans, animals, and nature; at the cost of the Soul of the World.
It is this image that is now finally dying. The old father has fallen from his pedestal; the old king lay beheaded.
The killing of George Floyd was a tipping point from where the already collapsed structure in the inner worlds shows its decay in the outer. We are witnessing the very fall of patriarchy symbolised by the colonial man.
Artwork made through a synthesis of dream-images of our women’s collective in February 2020, while working with Isis & Osiris.
Artwork is part of our research center’s work with the objective psyche; the archetypal patterns of the collective unconscious.
The death of the old king symbolised by the man in colonial attire. The tree of life behind him is barren and bleeding soul blood. The pangolin tail hints at the pandemic and being ‘boxed in’. But another creature is in leading this process: the black raven who in Alchemy oversees the stage of Nigredo—a phase of suffering and chaos necessary for transformation. The raven is wearing a red cape that symbolises the planet Pluto and points with its beak to his object of transformation: the white male ruler.
Just like Osiris, he is an old king who has to die and dissolve into the currents of the river, making way for a new consciousness. Behind him, we see the Nile that leads onto the light of a new era.
