Symbols of Transformation

Anyone who’s an artist (indeed perhaps creative of any kind) will relate to the problem of when to recognise that a work is finished. Most of us know what it’s like to overwork a work in progress and then wish we had stopped at an earlier stage. It takes experience and good instincts to recognise when the optimal point has been reached.

I studied Economics at college as a teenager and one of the fundamental principles we learned was the Law of Diminishing Returns, always illustrated as an arced curve that climbed to a certain point before falling away again. This appears to be forgotten in our present world where more is seen not only as always achievable, but inevitably better. If your performance is measured at a certain point in time as one thing, it can inevitably be improved, apparently endlessly. Uncontrolled growth to no good end, disconnected from the welfare of the overall whole is how cancer operates. It is also what we see around us with endless construction. A friend of mine once saw a billboard on a construction site with the words: ‘Love the planet? Go construct!’ A cynical statement of the ethic underlying our capitalist world today.

 

Strangely, in the world of Analytical Psychology with its focus on the life journey known as Individuation – the ongoing production of the individual self to the highest achievable outcome – this is also seen as something ongoing until death. There appears no room made for the end of the journey within the life course, of the reaching of the fullest expression of the individual self whilst still alive. This is something I do contend.

For something to carry on growing it needs to eat. An analogy oft employed by me is the caterpillar, which progresses through the course of its caterpillar stage of existence from egg to chrysalis eating, splitting its old skin to grow to a new caterpillar stage, until it finally spins its cocoon to transform into a butterfly. It never carries on eating getting bigger and bigger and bigger to no end.

As one progresses upon the life course journey, the life experiences themselves serve as the food for the growth of the maturing psyche, be it personal relationships, work undertaken, actual journeys undertaken, different formal or informal courses of learning and so on. Looking back upon my own life I can see now clearly the different stages of it and how these naturally reached a conclusion in the fullness of time as something within me recognised that that particular growth cycle was completed and couldn’t progress usefully further without simply perpetuating the growth of the organism in its same form. I know in this world where achievement is rated by career for example, I am generally seen as an underachiever or as someone who has never been able to stay whatever particular course sufficiently long to advance to the higher levels with their attendant status markers. Conversely, I also know what it feels like to meet people years after one has first known them in a particular context, and find that they simply look and indeed behave like physically older versions of the same person you first knew way back when they were much younger. They really haven’t grown at all. I first experienced this in my later twenties when I met a college friend I had know when we were eighteen. I can recall the sense of shock realising that he hadn’t changed in any way at all, but had simply settled down more into the person I had known them, complete with even more conservative, bigoted opinions than he had had then. Whatever growth potential he had had as a young adult had somehow atrophied.

With the conclusion of the Pilgrimage, variously recounted in different posts in this blog, there is indeed a sense of the Individuation journey being largely completed. For some time now I have been averse to taking into myself new experiences that then have to be integrated into the overall whole. Although new averse,  many aspects of myself I had let go of when I started the Pilgrimage, most lately my work with Indigenous Andean cosmology, now seem spontaneously to be returning to me in totally unsought ways,so that the present situation is indeed an integrative one, exploring all these different aspects to find out how they might usefully contribute to the life of the whole.  How the end product will look I do not know, but I cannot keep on growing forever. Already what I have within has given me a sense of having grown immensely and sometimes I can feel like Alice in Wonderland when she has the experience of becoming so large as to have outgrown the capacity of the room she is in to contain her.

Now, just a couple of days ago, I found an email in my university inbox from someone I had apparently met at a professional conference in Alburquerque in 2019, a few months before commencing the Pilgrimage, inviting me to take part in a closed session at the next conference meetings. I have never in all my academic life ever been invited to give a paper in a closed session before, so this was an absolute first, and I’m told by those inviting me that my work is still very remembered and relevant and they’d like me to give a paper. What I did, having acknowledged that I am no longer an active archaeologist and that my life and work has moved on a long way, was to realise that I could offer a paper on the Indigenous Andean mythos of volcanoes (given the session is about human – volcano interactions)  which seemed like a viable and interesting option and would allow me to pursue my interest in the whole subject of mythos. It seems something ‘given’, not in any way sought, so why not?

Volcanoes are that consummate symbol of transformation, in physical reality as well as symbol. As destructive as they certainly are, they bring great mineral wealth from the depths of the earth to the surface and volcanic soils are always amongst the most fertile. In symbolic Andean mythic terms they were seen as repositories of wealth, harbouring  workshops in their depths where goods are turned into riches. What better a symbol of transformation for the work of a lifetime and the act of Pilgrimage to realise it, to break down the inner repositories of the psyche and bring all the wealth of that journey of a lifetime into the realised individuated individual at the end?

 

 

 

 

Featured Image: https://medium.com/thethursdaythought/the-phoenix-must-first-burn-to-emerge-phoenix-businesses-phoenix-life-963493b33d83

Image of Cotopaxi volcano from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotopaxi#/media/File:Cotopaxi_volcano_2008-06-27T1322.jpg. Photography by Gerard Prins