Image description: An Eastern Pennsylvania marsh in early spring with cut-outs of characters by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are The Tower, The Magician, Nine of Wands and Four of Pentacles.
Dear Friends,
It is solidly spring here in Eastern Pennsylvania complete with lots of rain, mud and the constant threat of temps in the twenties. I am pouring most of my energy into the Offerings these days, plus getting my garden going and back in the saddle (literally) still getting my bearings on horseback after a winter away.
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At any rate, thank you so much for being here.
Onward,
Jessica
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
I spent all of March making Offerings about the first card in the major arcana, The Magician. An encounter with an interesting wizard with a balsam vial from a Venetian folk tale plus a couple weeks reading and re-reading Valentin Tomberg’s letter on The Magician in Meditations on the Tarot, gave way to a dive into the famed western European magician-prophet Merlin and finally philosopher David Abram’s ideas on magicians from his book The Spell of the Sensuous.
One of the big themes that emerged was contradiction. Merlin himself was the child of a demon and a Christian princess, for example, known to be a friend of both evil and good (Jung & von Franz, 1998). The wizard in the Italian story was similarly mercurial, making few appearances but each going against the last. It turns out that magicians are often complicated, complex characters. One minute they’ll appear deviant, anti-social even, only to show up in a crisis later with some precise redemptive medicine.
I think this aspect of The Magician touches something in me that can have a hard time taking tough times in stride with the pleasant. And this might be why I’ve been so drawn to Merlin and them lately; they are walking contradictions who promise the right medicine, but not without some difficulty and are—at least I hope—helping me grasp something.
The unpredictability of magician characters feels like a reminder that there are times in life when things just click and there are times when they don’t. When things are going well it’s easy to feel like personal will is the sole reason—as if we are puppeteers pulling all the right strings with our therapy and our self-help books and our efforts—but when life switches up, things aren’t going your way anymore, what sense do you make of it?
When all the cool sweet rivers start to simmer, then boil, then run in reverse, and your late summer lover has learned all your spells and is using them against you, who’s responsible, now? Who did this? If you can imagine what kind of distress tolerance is required to accept a reality you did not choose and do not want, the receptivity you’d need to identify and get your projections in check, and the kind of flexibility involved in syncing up with undesirable changes knowing damn well they’ll be remixed again in the morning—then I think you can imagine what a magician does, and can do.
To me the magicians seems to say that magic isn’t an individual manipulating reality to get what they want, or being promised desired outcomes with the right amount of skill and practice. It seems more like magic is you and I opening up to what’s happening, and using all the tools we have available to get clear about reality as best we can so that we can figure out how to work with the 99.99% of stuff that we have no control over.
More and more I think that what we call the self is an intersection of more forces collaborating than can ever be accounted for, only for one “I” to turn around and take all the credit. I think it’s nice in a way, to imagine that from this perspective, while I may not get full credit for the high times, I alone won’t take the fall for the low ones, either.
Years ago, I was going through some hard things and reading The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer in this very weird apartment I lived in for a month near the MacArthur BART station in Oakland. The landlord lived upstairs and would stomp around until really late which made it impossible to sleep for any stretch of time most nights because I had to get up early.
I always return to this one part in the book where Singer writes that, “This world is unfolding and really has very little to do with you or your thoughts. It was here long before you came, and it will be here long after you leave” (2007). I left that apartment after a month and I'm pretty sure that landlord still lives there.
And I don’t think any of this means to say that personal agency isn’t real or important. We have wants and needs of our own and the ability to learn and adjust. We have an effect on the world and are affected by it. These things can seem contradictory. Maybe that’s where the magic happens.
—
One morning last week I was sitting in bed feeling afraid and protective about something that was happening in my life. I was looking out a second-story window thinking about how defensive I felt in my body and mind, and suddenly an image of Rapunzel popped up.
Rapunzel is an enormously well-known fairytale that is actually very odd. Despite being held captive by the enchantress Dame Gothel, Rapunzel experiences a miraculous degree of growth: she grows ninety-some-feet of hair, sings every afternoon, falls in love, gets pregnant with twins and ultimately lives happily ever after. I wanted to know what it might mean, that despite being under lock and key—the result of a reflexive defense by Dame Gothel after having been stolen from by Rapunzel’s parents—so much could still flourish.
I wanted to spend time asking how a story of both reactive fear and flourishing could change our relationship to defenses themselves, as we bear witness to how much can still bloom there. How this story might elicit a radical shift, from an attitude of condemnation about our self-protective tactics, to one of curiosity, respect and affirmation.
I wondered what, if anything, this story had to do with a technique I once read about in the Hakomi Method of psychotherapy called “taking over,” in which a therapist assumes the burden of a client’s defense mechanism itself, so that the client is free to experience what underlies it; often deep yearnings and unresolved pain. I’ll say a little bit more about that shortly.
It is—of course—not the happy ending despite hardship that’s noteworthy about this story. It’s the fact that even in spite of all the armor and isolation, Rapunzel is no less creative, accessible to love, or able to connect. Since I didn’t really know the story beyond the tower and the long hair and the climbing prince, I went and listened to Adam Field and Matt Hughes’ telling on their podcast Grimm Reading.
A Queen and King have been stealing an herb for their salads called rampion from enchantress Dame Gothel’s garden, which she’s painstakingly maintained. I learned in the podcast that Rampion was another name for a Rapunzel plant, whose tender leaves can be eaten like spinach.
When Dame Gothel catches the King stealing, she agrees to let it go under the condition that the couple give her their first born child. Unsure what else to do the King agrees, and that’s how his daughter—who Dame Gothel names after the stolen herb, Rapunzel—winds up in the tower in the first place.
An analyst might say that Dame Gothel and Rapunzel represent two aspects of the personal psyche—let’s go with that. Dame Gothel, while I personally empathize with her, is in the role of the bad witch, here. She’s the stifling part in people, that brings fear, mistrust, self-doubt, and doubt in others. She’s a voice that says nothing can reasonably be trusted, and who screeches in our ears at the first hint of danger, “run and hide.”
Rapunzel on the other hand, seems to be the fragile, sacred thing that Dame Gothel is protecting. It may not always be easy to know what exactly that is in ourselves, or quite how to articulate it, but when it’s threatened, we know. It’s something to do with vulnerability, and the promise of getting a deep need met that comes with just as much risk of profound loss.
As I was writing the first draft of these words, I heard a line from one of mythologist Martin Shaw’s books about (I think) the Slavic witch, Baba Yaga, which is that “she’ll kill you so you live better.” Even though Dame Gothel stifles Rapunzel’s life by locking her high up in a tower, the girl seems, against all odds, to wind up better for it. This is not intuitive.
In fact, most of what I’ve encountered about defense mechanisms—the ways we lock precious parts of ourselves away in a tower hoping never to be hurt again—views these impulses as maladaptive and dysfunctional. Problems to be identified and broken down. Even as we might muster some compassion for their origins, at the end of the day the walls we hide behind are little more than unwanted barriers. Blocking us from getting what we need.
But with all of Rapunzel’s flourishing, I wonder if this story offers a doorway into something else about defenses, something overlooked. Something also counter-intuitive.
How is it possible that even in captivity Rapunzel’s hair grows to be ninety feet long and thick enough to climb? How does she sing in the afternoons, find love, start a family? To be clear I’m not suggesting that singing, romantic love and parenthood are or should be everyone’s goals in life, but read symbolically these could reasonably stand for joy, creativity and connection.
None of which are the least bit stifled by Rapunzel’s isolation inside a seemingly impenetrable defense. How is this possible, and what does it trouble about the way we tend to view and approach defenses—ours and other people’s? Is hiding what’s precious away in a tower really so bad?
A while back I’d read a chapter in a book on the Hakomi Method, which is a body-based psychotherapy founded by Ron Kurtz, who apparently had an experimental attitude toward defense mechanisms.
While our defenses, or as they’re called in Hakomi, nourishment barriers, keep us from getting what we need, these defenses should be “appreciated, respected, understood and reevaluated,” writes Jaci Hull in her chapter of the book. Locking away a girl named after an herb that was stolen from you is, I think, a good example of an intelligent strategy to keep a distance from something that’s associated with painful memories.
Dame Gothel is violated, and it is traumatic for her. She’s worked hard on her garden, cultivated the best Rapunzel in all the land, and then a king thinks it’s okay to come into her space and steal it. Dame Gothel's reaction is to take the king’s daughter, name her after the stolen herb, and lock her away. Not that unreasonable an idea if the ultimate goal is to ensure no one ever steals her Rapunzel again.
But since so much blooms from the tower, we’re invited as witnesses to change our relationship to the defense itself. To wonder about it, validate it even, have respect. The visual of a captive girl’s hair pouring out the tower window stimulates a desire to re-evaluate the tower as automatically wrong or bad, just as a Hakomi therapist might do with a defense mechanism or nourishment barrier. If you’re paying attention to what’s actually happening in the story, the knee-jerk reaction to condemn the tower might give way to an affirmative curiosity, even an honoring.
Hakomi therapists have a technique to enact this shift called “taking over,” which is based on an assumption that there is “organic wisdom in the defense” and is meant to aid the client in “doing what she is already doing to protect herself” (2015). So rather than say, “Ugh, Dame Gothel, be reasonable here. Let this girl out and get over it,” a Hakomi therapist might say “Yes, let’s stick her up there where we won’t have to worry about losing her, again. In fact, I’ll do it for you. It’s a great idea, really.”
By embracing and taking over the defense, the therapist bolsters instead of fighting it, which, at least according to the handbook, can have a miraculous effect. No longer burdened with enacting and protecting the defense itself, the client is free to experience what’s underneath it; the painful feelings, renounced needs and yearnings.
I take this to mean that there is something of value that can live and flourish in the embracing of a defense, not forever, but for enough time that what underlies it, might have room to emerge. Sort of like Rapunzel’s hair, blooming out the windows, strong enough to form a ladder that could allow love to reach.
I wonder if the story, seen this way, could invite compassion, curiosity, or respect for defensive strategies when the first instinct is to condemn, get rid of, or beat ourselves up for them. And if some part of you is hiding out somewhere thinking that’s the best you can do to be safe, I wonder what might be possible even there. In hiding.
Is there some value in the pitch dark of a snapped shut clam shell, or a small room high up in a tower with no door. I wonder about this if for no other reason than that we are skittish animals who sometimes have the luxury of forgetting that about ourselves. We are immensely fragile beings with reactive hearts and this is our reality, and our condition. Which is to say maybe it’s worth taking our defenses seriously once in a while. Even worth considering what real things might bloom there.
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Sources
Jung, E. & von Franz, M. (1998). The grail legend. Princeton University Press.
Singer, M.A. (2007). The untethered soul: The journey beyond yourself. New Harbinger Publications.
Hull, J. (2015). Exploring the barriers: Hakomi perspectives on working with resistance and defense. In H. Weiss, G. Johansen & L. Monda (Eds.), Hakomi mindfulness-centered somatic psychotherapy: A comprehensive guide to theory and practice. W.W. Norton & Company.
Clark, M.S., & Reis, H.T. (2013). Responsiveness. In J.A. Simpson & L. Campbell (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of close relationships. Oxford University Press.
This whole piece could not have been more divinely timed. The good-and-bad of everything has been first in my mind for 48 hours after a really shocking experience Thursday, in which I sat in a room of mostly strangers and endured hit after hit after hit to my psyche resulting in a level of self-doubt not felt in years. Not to mention how often The Tower has shown up in my readings this year.