[See: Carnival Culture Index]

An Invocation To The Muse

Without a song, the day would never end
Without a song, the road would never have been
When things go wrong, a man ain’t got a friend
Without a song

That field of corn, would never see a plow
That field of corn, would be deserted now
A man is born, but he’s no good no how
Without a song

I’ve got my trouble and woe, but sure as I know
The jordan will roll
I’ll get along, as long as a song
Is strung in my soul

I’ll never know, what makes the rain to fall
I’ll never know, what makes the grass so tall
I only know, there ain’t no love at all
Without a song

The Circle of Life

Rhythm consists of alternating accents and rests, set to repeatable - and danceable - patterns. In this dance, accent and rest are partners, propelling the motion of the music forward through time and space.

Likewise, every human soul is composed of and comes out of such a partnership. For our species to transmit its genetic song through time, a partnership is required between male and female, Shiva and Shakti in Hinduism, yang and yin. In Jungian psychology, the hidden core of a man’s soul is his feminine anima image, and for women, it is the masculine animus. We unconsciously project these inner images of the ideal or perfect counterpart onto other people. It is, in fact, this drive to seek completion in the opposite sex which propels the rhythms of life forward through sex, love and reproduction.

… we could say that the anima is the feminine side of a man, or more graphically, inside every man is a woman whom he must come to terms with. And it is one of the great works of a man’s life to try to relate to this woman. […]

Clearly there is no woman inside in the sense of an actual person. Rather, a man’s feelings to the degree that they are unconscious and immersed in the unconscious take on a certain life of their own and act as if they have a kind of autonomous nature, a partial personality, if you will. They form an energetic center, or archetype, that Jung calls the anima.

Give Me Something To Sing About

Through the course of his travels, the wandering Fool encounters women who touch this place deep inside his soul, who activate something hidden, some latent potential within himself. Through interactions with these incarnations of the Queen of Song, the man’s anima, he gains access to parts of himself he could never achieve on his own. He learns, in effect, to sing. She acts as what Jung referred to as psychopomp, leading him down into the depths of his unconscious, mediating for him the contents of his own hidden heart. Robert Graves spoke of this relationship through the classical lens of the Poet inspired by his Muse.

No Muse-poet grows conscious of the Muse except by experience of a woman in whom the Goddess is to some degree resident; just as no Apollonian poet can perform his proper function unless he lives under a monarchy or a quasi-monarchy. A Muse-poet falls in love, absolutely, and his true love is for him the embodiment of the Muse…

But the real, perpetually obsessed Muse-poet distinguishes between the Goddess as manifest in the supreme power, glory, wisdom and love of woman, and the individual woman whom the Goddess may make her instrument…

The Goddess abides; and perhaps he will again have knowledge of her through his experience of another woman…

Her Hidden Chamber

Like the High Priestess in the Tarot deck, the Muse, the Queen of Song initiates the Fool into the Mysteries, transforming him into the Bard, the Troubadour, the Minnesinger - he who is indwelt by God, who sings His praises inspired: literally breathed into. The ancient Israelites recognized this phenomenon in the figure of the Shekinah, the feminine presence of God, which later morphed into the Holy Spirit in Christian traditions, Sophia in Gnostic myth, and notably the Virgin Mary: impregnated by the Word of God.

The idea was the God could not be complete, whole, until he was united with her [the Shekinah]. The Kabbalists believed that it was God’s lost of his Shekina which brought about evil. From the Hebrew Shekina means “dwelling place,” giving the concept that God had no “home” without her. Like her Tantric counterpart Shakti, the Sh’kina was the source of all “soul” in the universe. The Gnostic Christians of the fourth century spoke of Sh’kina as a “spirit of glory” in who Beings of Light lived, as children in their mother’s body or home. […]

Jewish mystics claimed the “outer garment” of the Shekina is the Torah, “Holy Law.” Man becomes a Bridegroom of the Torah by study, symbolized in erotic imagery. He has to court her as he would a beautiful maiden. “She begins from behind a curtain to speak words in keeping with his understanding, until very slowly insight comes to him.” The Shekina as the “Indwelling One” might be compared to the Latin I-dea, or Goddess Within. “She opens the door of her hidden chamber ever so little, and for a moment reveals her face to her lover, but hides it again forthwith…He alone sees it and is drawn to her with his heart and soul and his whole being.”

As the feminine presence of divinity within the world, the Queen of Song is not to be trifled with. The relation between the Poet and his Muse is one of utter devotion, and can be compared to the total commitment of a Knight to his Lady in the chivalric courts of Medieval Europe {See also: Romantic & Courtly Love in the Middle Ages; Bhakti Yoga}. The Queen of Song - in whatever form she takes for the individual man - becomes the vessel of God’s Love, Grace and Inspiration poured out upon the poor Fool-Poet-Knight. As the container for a man’s anima projection, she takes on an unearthly quality which is - in actual fact - completely impossible for an ordinary mortal woman to ever live up to. For the man projects onto her an ideal, and the great danger is that his projection eclipses the reality of who and what she - as a real woman - actually is.

The unindividuated man identifies with those personal qualities that are symbolically masculine; he develops these potentialities and to some extent integrates their unconcious influences into his conscious personality. However, he does not recognize qualities that are symbolically feminine as part of his own personality but rather projects them onto women. He will project his anima—those particular characteristics and potentialities that are significant components of his personal unconscious and therefore carry a special emotional charge—onto a few women for whom he will then feel a strong and compelling emotion (usually positive but occasionally negative). Infatuation (an instant, powerful attraction for a woman about whom he knows little) is one of the signs of anima projection, as is a compulsive possessiveness. […]

Since the unindividuated man has not consciously developed any of his symbolically feminine qualities (e.g. emotion, need for relatedness), his personality is apt to be taken over or “possessed” by these qualities at times, so that his emotional behavior and relationships may be acted out in childish and immature ways that are apparent to others but not to him.

The Virgin-Whore

This conflict between the projected ideal and the real woman onto whom the image of the Queen of Song is projected creates what is commonly called the Madonna/Whore complex. The projected ideal is perfect and pure, “Virgin”, while the real woman who reflects back to the man these elements of his own self - including his dark side - becomes the unclean, imperfect “Whore”.

Men imagine, for example, that the woman they fall in love with is actually the way they imagine her to be. They fail to realize that the woman within is constantly projecting herself outside and mingling with the woman without in such a pervasive and subtle way that it is extremely difficult to separate the two. Men have to make a great effort to relate to two women at once, or in the case of a married man, to be married to two women at once, and it doesn’t matter whether a man is married or not, or even if he is committed to lifelong celibacy, he still needs to relate to his own anima.

In short, there is a dimension of a man’s psyche that acts like a woman, a woman that is not seen clearly, one who appears for a moment and then disappears. She is, in turn, beautiful and alluring, obsessing us with desire, and then perhaps scornful and rejecting, driving us to contemplate dark deeds.

Mary Star Of The Sea

Within this relationship lies a great danger: first for the real woman who cannot live up to unearthly ideals projected upon her, and second for the Fool who suddenly gains access to repressed unconscious contents of his own psyche, and is unprepared to deal with them. The danger for him is one of drowning, of being washed away or sunk in the great depths of archetypal divine experiences unleashed upon him like a tidal wave by the Queen of Song. Hence we find the origin of such figures as mermaids, water nymphs, and deadly sirens throughout world mythology:

In Kreyol, we sing the following song to LaSiren, the mermaid of Haitian mythology:

LaSiren, La Balenn, chapeau tombe a la mer, La siren, La Balen, chapeau tombe a la mer!

It translates as: “La Siren, La Balen, my hat falls into the sea, La Siren, La Balen, my hat falls into the sea!” Falling hats into the sea is code for going under possession. Your head “falls” into the sea of consciousness, where all the knowledge and power of the world preside. Here is where we meet LaSirenn, wife of Agwe Tawayo, the supreme lwa of the ocean. LaSiren is feminine, enchanting, sensual. She moves with unerring grace through the water domains of her husband. She carries her trumpet, which she uses to call the faithful to service, seducing us with her siren song…

LaSiren is beautiful, but she also very powerful! It is said that if you fall under her spell, she will steal you away to her underwater kingdom. Here, she will keep you for a time (some stories say 7 days, other say 7 years). When you return, you are given the ability to perform feats of magic and divination. It’s said those who have spent time in her watery domain return lighter in color, because they have gone beneath the waters.

Her realm, of course, is that of Death. The Queen of Song is that same spirit as Persephone: she who can exist in both realms, Above and Below. She is the Death Mother in whom dreams are dissolved, and from whom the darkest depths of Light and Life ultimately spring after the cold depths of winter, Demeter. She gives all and she demands all: absolute sacrifice of the highest order. But do not confuse her with any one living woman. For to do so is to court certain disaster. She is a goddess, the Goddess, and while her spirit lives in all beings, she exists not in this imperfect world. The ultimate sacrifice the Fool must make, in the very end, is to give up seeking her. Or at least externally. She may only be wedded and bedded in the Bridal Chamber of the human heart. From that inner union only springs the fountain of all creative energies, all beauty, all love, all Grace and majesty, which pours out into our earthly existence and fills our lives with Joy and Thanksgiving. In exchange for the Fool’s sacrifice (at her feet a footloose man), the Queen of Song grants access to a transcendent Love which surmounts all earthly delights. When the anima projection is withdrawn, the Fool can see others for who they really are, and love them for that.

Christ issuing forth from his sojourn in the Tomb-world happens first upon the weeping Magdalene, the penitent whore who loved Him more than all the others. She mistakes him initially for a gardener, a cultivator of life, then realizing who he is cries out, “Rabboni!” To which he responds, “Noli me tangere” in the Latin translation, which some take to mean, “Do not touch me.” But what he means, more properly, is “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to my father.” He bids her go ahead of him and tell the others what she has seen. He asks her, his unlikely Queen, to sing His Song, and he himself keeps ramblin’ on.

[Dedicated to M. Meder]

happy birthday to me!