Eros and this Cave, our Bodies and this Darkness

Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature (2000) and The Eros of Everyday Life (1995)

The shape of this cave, our bodies, this darkness. This darkness which sits so close to us we cannot see, so close that we move away in fear. We turn into ourselves. But here we find the same darkness, we find we are shaped around emptiness, that we are a void we do not know. (2000, 161)

Human consciousness can be rejoined not only with the human body but with the body of earth. Indeed, what seems incipient in the reunion is the recovery of meaning within existence that will infuse every kind of meeting between self and the universe, even in the most daily acts with an Eros; a palpable love, that is also sacred. (1995, 9)

Interior Topography

James Hillman's IN
Spring Journal 63: 1998

James Hillman reminds us of what we already know: “‘In’ is no doubt the soul word.” The word connotates an “interior topography,” a literal defined “place into which we go—the unconscious, the body; or a definite time in the past” (11).

This literalization makes us forget what the master said: not the psyche is in me, but I am in the psyche. We forget and literalize the soul inside the skin, the mind inside the skull, the dream, the emotion, the memory inside the “me” to the neglect of the collective psyche, the anima mundi in which we live our lives all day long. (11)

Any dictionary will explain that the preposition “in” means within the limits of space, time, condition, situation, circumstance (12). Once deliteralized and liberated from “Cartesian conundrums that catch it up in personal subjectivity versus the objective world, or mind versus matter, we can at last realize that anything anywhere offers its interiority and can deepen inward continually” (12). Hillman insists that the archetypal realm of interior topography belongs to the goddess Hestia, the “Goddess of the ‘inner’” (15-21). He defines her image and embodiment as a “glowing warmth-emitting hearth” and that the word “hearth” in Latin means focus translated as “the centering attention that warms to life all that comes within its radius” (15). Hestia is “not an object seen but an enlivening, enlightening focus, the soul essence that inhabits anything” (15), a “sacred space giving focus to psychic contents” (17). Like a cave, Hestia provides, what Ginette Paris describes in Pagan Meditations as, a “sacred asylum where one could take refuge” (qtd, 17).

Humming the Bloodsong on the Heartstring

Jeanne Achterberg's Woman as Healer

Shamans are capable of pearl diving in the collective unconscious and discerning the information writ in their own entrails and bones, the knack of humming the bloodsong on the heartstring...The shaman, like Plato's philosopher, has found the Sun Door and gone outside the cave, has burrowed into the depths of the cave and found that door, too. His (her) job is to bring back images for healing of the soul. (198)