Through a Jungian Lens

This is a male Rufous-Sided Towhee found in the semi-desert hills of south-western Saskatchewan.  One of my grandsons pointed out this bird to me while we were hiking in the hills.  There were seven of us, a grandfather, a son-in-law and five grandsons – a gathering of the masculine.  At one point, the youngest had a small fall with a very slight skinning of one knee – a wounding of sorts.  Of course, that resulted in a badge of honour, a chance to be manly.  As Monick points out:

Masculinity is an accomplishment, not a birthright – so strong is the pull of nature-mother. (Monick, Phallos:  Sacred Image of the Masculine, 1987, p. 48)

The bridging of generations for males is built through small rituals and large rituals as well as containment of the developing masculine in the absence of the mother.  A sense of self as a masculine being is simply that, a sense of self.  It isn’t about other, it isn’t about power over other.  It is about self awareness as a male.

Yesterday was spent in a nearby city, a city that is only about150 kilometres away, close by Canadian prairie standards where we measure distances in the time it takes to travel rather than the distance.  It was a day for strengthening the bond between father-in-law and son-in-law.  On the agenda was the enjoyment of jazz music in the park, dining out, rummaging through a used book store for treasures, spending time in two electronics stores to see what is available, enjoying designer coffee in an upbeat university area coffee shop, and wandering and talking.

Roses remind me of my wife.  She loves roses and has numerous rose plants in our gardens.  This yellow rose plant is one of the first to bloom this year.  Roses have had a place in our relationship since day one when I gave her three red roses on our wedding day.  We still have those three roses almost forty years later.  Roses symbolize love and relationship, our relationship.

Love and relationship – eros.  Here are a few words from Eugene Monick on the topic:

For Jung, logos is to masculinity as eros is to femininity.  Where logos thinks and transforms thinking into work, and understands this as accomplishment, eros feels and transforms feeling into relatedness, and understands that as accomplishment. (Monick, Phallos: Sacred Image of the Masculine, 1987, p. 102)

This fits.  And the union of logos and eros, coniunctionis, the holy marriage, our marriage.

This photo was taken in March, 2009 in Yucatan, Mexico at the Mayan site called Dzibilchaltun.  It is a photo of a sundial.  I went in search through my photo archives for this image as I wanted a symbol of Phallos that I had taken rather than to borrow one from the Internet.  It is obvious to anyone who thinks in symbolic terms, that the spire at the centre, pointing to the sun is a representation of Phallos.

In Jungian terms, in alchemical terms, the sun is the father.  The womb is the earth which is mother.  When phallos is erect, there is energy (libido) which is essential for the act of creation.  Creation is a co-creative act, a holy marriage of masculine and feminine.

It’s a touchy subject, that of the masculine, especially in this age of politically correct thinking and speaking.  The human race has shifted from matriarchal to patriarchal dominance and is currently shifting again.  Patriarchal forms still dominate, but in so many ways, those forms are being emasculated.  Men are losing their bearings in a world that is increasingly seeing them as throw-backs to ancient-times thinking.  Rites of passage have almost fully disappeared for boys becoming men.  Monick captures the essence of the problem:

The problem is that patriarchal attitudes and values are no longer obviously true.  Unless masculinity is differentiated from patriarchy, both will go down the tubes. (Eugene Monick, Phallos:  Sacred Image of the Masculine, 1987, p. 9)

So, what do you think?

As you can probably tell, I have started reading another book.  This time, it is by Eugene Monick, author of Phallos:  Sacred Image of the Masculine.  In the photo above which I took in January, 2008 near the city of Dungarpur, a boy is getting ready to fill his little container with water.  A closer look will reveal that the water pump and the base are in the form of a Shiva Linga, the basic representation of Phallos in the Hindu religion.  The pump represents linga, an erect penis, from which flows the seed of creation.  The base represents the yoni, the womb into which the seed is poured to complete the act of creation.

I took a number of such photos, most of them within Hindu temples such as these two photos which were also taken in the Dungarpur countryside.

These two photos point to a numinous quality of phallos, an authentic religious dimension of phallos as a god image.

The top photo implies this god image finds concrete expression in the outer world. Jung defined the psychoid unconscious as existing in both archetypal and physical dimensions, where an aspect of the archetype manifests in the outer world.  Eugene Monick has a series of three books published at Inner City Books, which looks at the issues facing men, issues which centre around their masculinity in a world that is becoming less and less friendly to the masculine psyche.

I will come back to this theme later as I read what Monick has to say on a topic which found little space in the Collected Works of Carl Jung.