Conversations with Christine
Conversations with Christine, Chapter 1: Archetypes, Symbols, and Talismans
During a trip to Spain, I was fascinated by the Spanish admiration and dedication to the Virgin Mary. The Spanish people bring their devotion to a whole different level, not unlike what I have witnessed in India with the Hindu devotion to the female Goddesses Lakshmi and Derga.
In Spain, banners of the Virgin Mary hung from balconies, ceramic tiles with religious imagery adorn the sides of their homes, rosaries line the shop walls, streets are named after the Virgin, in the month prior to Easter, crews of dozens of the faithful practice carrying the floats, or Pasos, that transport the Blessed Mother statues for the Holy Week Parades.
I too was mesmerized by her, even though I haven’t been a practicing Catholics for over forty years.
If you think this story is about religion, you will be mistaken.
It is about the intelligence that is within all living things.
All my love-
Becky
Conversations with Christine, Chapter 1: Archetypes, Symbols, and Talismans
I entered my house to find papers sprawled across the kitchen and dining room floor. Christine, my oldest sister by eleven years, was crouched over the table with her reading glasses halfway down her nose. A lock of her once blond hair, now turning gray, fell in front of her eyes. As I watched, her hand slowly reached up and tucked it behind her ear. She was so engrossed in her studies she hadn’t heard me enter.
As I placed my groceries on the counter, the rustling of the paper bags broke her concentration. She looked up.
Christine had traveled from Southeast Alaska to the Pacific Northwest in pursuit of a master’s degree in theology. My husband and I were restoring a 1920’s bungalow in the Admiral District of West Seattle at that time, so having her for an extended visit was a nice distraction from our house repairs.
“They are all connected,” she said without greeting me.
I loved that quality about my sister; she was intense and focused. She didn’t waste time on excess words.
“I can see the connections between all the religions, cosmologies, and mythologies. The concept of unus mundus, or one world, is coming into focus for me.”
She bent back over her papers and started to take notes in a black and white composition journal. Several of these journals lay across the kitchen table and floor with paragraphs of handwritten notes highlighted by fluorescent-colored markers.
“My undergraduate degree in mythology is really coming in handy.”
Christine stood up and took a long stretch and continued to do yoga like moves as she continued. “I am starting to see the connections of the enlightened masters of these world religions and each of their culture’s mythologies. The hardest truth for me to see clearly is that of my own lineage’s religion, Christianity. It must be because we were so conditioned for generations to believe a certain way that we didn’t question anything.”
As I began to unpack the groceries, I reflected on our conversation of the night before. Monologues often flowed out of my sister as she was going about her day. Last night as she was making popcorn, she entered one of these spontaneous states of altered consciousness.
“Carl Jung was one of the founders of analytical psychology as we know it today. He introduced humanity to words such as “psyche,” which is ancient Greek for soul, breath, or mind. I love that he used the word “psyche” instead of “soul” to bridge the gap between the natural and social sciences. He was from the upper elite class of his time so he must have walked a fine line between his rich spiritual life and his professional life. In my experience using the word “soul” or “God,” can make eyeballs roll, or worse yet, risk labeling the conversation as “religious.””
Christine paused as for several moments as she stared intensely at the butter she was melting on the stove top.
“I was uneasy telling lifelong friends back home about pursuing a master’s in theology. I had to start using words like “psyche” and “consciousness” for my studies to be seen as socially acceptable at a dinner party!”
“What made you want to study mythology and then religion in the first place?” I asked her.
As I watched she slowly drizzled the melted butter across the fluffy white kernels brimming in the large metal bowl. She finished with just the right amount of salt and yeast.
“In the 1900’s, Jung introduced the concept of how archetypes help us understand our own behaviors in the same way that mythologies help us see things within a culture that might be too difficult to address, such a rape and incest. These archetypes and myths are universal concepts within all of us, whether we are aware of them or not. They are primordial, part of our collective consciousness, something that has been with us since the beginning of time.”
She paused a moment while I filled up bowls of popcorn for each of us, then we headed into the living room to sit on the couch. Even the simple act of changing rooms was an art form for my sister. She had to have everything situated just right before she could begin again. A pillow to support her back, a blanket to cover her lap, a glass of filtered water positioned on a coaster.
“Jung introduced to the West a concept that the Eastern religions understood, the idea of a feminine and masculine soul within each person. He described the Virgin Mary, or the Hindu Goddess Lakshmi, as archetypical symbols of the devoted mother within each of us, pure in heart and mind.”
I would return home from work to many of these conversations over the summer months. Many evenings we would sit outside in our backyard under the pear tree. Brett typically worked in the garden, acting like he wasn’t listening, but neither of us wanted to miss a word of her nightly lessons. It was almost like she was telling us ancient stories that we had heard before but had forgotten.
I remember on one of the evenings I brought up a topic that had puzzled me for years. I had carried a tray to the backyard where my sister was sitting. I walked careful to prevent from spilling the mugs of hot tea. Even for a Pacific Northwest summer, there was a chill in the air that rose from Puget Sound, just blocks from our house.
Once we were settled, I asked, “as a Catholic teenager, I never understood the concept of the Virgin Mary. I mean, how in the heck is that even possible. How could a woman with a child be a virgin?”
Christine shrugged and said, “I think that symbolically, she represents the purity of mind, body and soul when we remember that we are not separate from God. I think the Garden of Eden stories we grew-up with really did us harm, leading us to believe in a punishing God that was separate and outside of us. It is only in the West that we believe we have fallen and were separated.”
“How does one wake-up to the understanding that the Divine Mother is within ourselves?” I asked as I blew gently on my cup of tea.
“I think the ancient philosophers of Greece knew the answer when they inscribed Know Thyself upon the Temple of Apollo at Delphi.”
I paused to make the connection.
We started at the divine feminine, leapt to the Virgin Mary, and now the Greeks? Looking a bit bewildered, I turned toward my sister. She smiled and said, “I told you all of this was connected.”
“But how?” I exclaimed.
“Through an intelligence we cannot see, but is always there, moving through each of us, connecting us all together, in the unus mundus, the one world.”
“Are you talking about the Holy Spirit? Like in the Trinity?”
“Yes. For Christians, that is what we call it. Many world religions have their own forms of a trinity.”
“But how does that relate to the Greeks and knowing thyself? What does that have to do with divine feminine and Carl Jung’s archetypes?”
“All good questions” my sister replied. “I think the best place to start is in understanding the know thyself part. A core question that humans have been asking themselves for maybe 100,000 years is “who am I?” Let’s take our own childhood as an example. As children, we often interpreted a look or a glance to mean that we weren’t doing something right, that we weren’t enough. As we slowly forgot we were born pure and whole, we fractured into different aspects of who we thought the world wanted us to be. We start to wear “social masks” to be “socially acceptable,” such as not talking about God at a dinner party! This persona we develop is called the false self, or the egoic personality.”
Christine reached up into the pear tree overhead. A ladybug climbed onto her finger. She watched it until it took flight and then continued.
“The virgin state of the soul can be found in the parts of us untouched by what others think or believe. The state of awareness that we were originally born into. To know thyself is to stay pure in our own heart, mind and body. To love and understand all aspects of ourselves. This is the Whole, or Holy, Mother that resides within, always willing to start anew, regardless of what is going on in the outside world. It is our work to keep our minds pure, not be caught up in egoic patterns that keep us fixated on unpure thoughts and passions. These fixations of the mind and passions of the heart easily form into patterns and habits. It is important that we confront all our patterns and not repress the darker or unpure parts of ourselves. Carl Jung defines this practice as “shadow work.”
“I think the place where we all need to start – is to know thyself first. I think once we understand fully our own beliefs, habits and reactivity, the other dots that you are trying to connect will all come together.”
Christine stood up and bent over to kiss me on the top of my head, a simple gesture that she had done as long as I could remember.
“You are such a gift to me Becky. You challenge me to find the words to express that which I am researching through your questions and curiosity. These aren’t easy concepts we are trying to grasp, but they are essential.”
She walked toward the house. I heard the screen door shut behind her. Through a window I saw the lights in her bedroom turn on.
I sat there for a moment longer staring up at the night sky, lost in my own thoughts of the unseen forces Christine had spoken about.
After some time had passed, I felt Brett’s hand on my shoulder. I knew it was his way of inviting me to rest.
I stood, smiled at him, and followed him inside.
Conversations with Christine Series
Becky has been exploring creativity, spirituality, and the patterns that shape us through her ongoing series, Conversations with Christine. The series imagines two sisters in deep conversation about life’s larger questions, who we are, what shapes us, and why we are here.
Chapter 1: Archetypes, Symbols and Talismans ·
Chapter 2: Defining the Ego ·
Chapter 3: Woundings ·
Chapter 4: Vices and Virtues ·
Chapter 5: The Spiritual Practice of Journaling ·
Chapter 6: Redefining God ·
Chapter 7: Trinities
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