Image description: Crum Creek in Swarthmore, PA. There are cut-outs of characters by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. From left to right they are The Empress, The Emperor, Nine of Wands and Knight of Swords.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
This week, needing to diverge a bit from some of the stuff I’ve been reading on the history of psychotherapy and capitalism, I read a few folk tales from Italo Calvino’s collection.
I’m noticing, perhaps oddly for the first time, that there’s a preoccupation in the old Italian stories with captivity and liberation, specifically involving women as those needing to be freed.
I also continued reading Philip Cushman’s Constructing the Self, Constructing America, and read the first two chapters of Ignacio Martín-Baró’s Writings for a Liberation Psychology.
Through Cushman’s book, I’ve learned the term self-domination, which is related to the mind-body split that emerged in the 17th century. The logic goes that mind and body are distinct, and that the irrational body is to be controlled by the rational mind. This extends, of course, to the natural, other-than-human world including any human who’s deemed to be subhuman.
I’ve been paying closer attention to the way this hierarchy replicates in psychological spaces from therapy to tarot readings. I recall ecopsychologist Andy Fisher’s talk at Schumacher College—which I’ve shared bits from before in the Offerings.
Fisher identifies this split as “an ideological move; sucking the soul out of nature and placing it inside the individual, says Fisher, is the only way to justify and maintain the abuse and extraction that capitalism requires. Non-human nature becomes brute matter, and if there’s suffering it’s an individual problem.
I’ve been considering the ways in which we “suck the soul” from the body, as well. For instance, if you’ve ever done a westernized mindfulness meditation, you might recall being encouraged to take an objective, non-judgmental stance while observing the parade of thoughts, feelings and sensations that unfurl in the theater of the body.
The implication is that the contents of this parade are fleeting and insubstantial. Said another way, they are neutralized or devalued. Self-domination becomes possible to the extent that we can observe our internal experiences objectively—as if that were possible—without reacting to them.
I personally have written a ton from this perspective. For example, my take on The Emperor in Tarot for Change. And in light of all I’ve said here, I’m only now starting to look critically at the philosophical underpinnings of that approach to human experience.
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There’s a story in Calvino’s folk tale collection titled “Body-without-soul” that I remembered this week, not because of the weirdly apt name but because the main character shape shifts—from ant to lion to dog to eagle, and so on.
I went seeking the story because I’ve been wondering about what happens when collective reactions to mass events become predictable, and the unsustainability of reactive activism. And if you’re wondering what any of that has to do with shapeshifting, I’m going try to articulate the link here.
I wrote about this story in the early days of the pandemic and connected the teen’s shapeshifting with a teaching from the I Ching, which says that we “do [evil] a favor” by forming weapons directly against it because it learns to respond to those weapons and in doing so renders them obsolete. Today, I’m wondering who banks on the kind of activism that is reactive and knee-jerk, but unsustainable.
I probably wouldn’t have reached for my anthology of Italian folk tales at all this week if not for my wise friend, farmer and herbalist Annie Hasz, who reminded me of the way old stories can help us remember “we are not everything there is…not going to do the good thing by just being the most rational willpower-focused modern people.”
Even as I am knee-deep in learning about the history of this hyper-rational, willful way of being in the world, I need these reminders. So I went looking for this one particular story, whose name I’d forgotten.
And I was wowed when I realized that the tale is literally titled Body-without-soul. Wowed because I’ve been doing all this intellectualizing and reading about the body-without-soul ideology, and what it has to do with capitalism and patriarchy and other hierarchies.
Because I try not to go into a story with a fixed idea of what it’s “about,” I left the connection aside as best I could and dove in.
It starts with a teenage boy named Jack who wants to leave home to find fortune. His mom says he can’t go until he’s able to topple a pine tree with one kick, so he practices every day and eventually does it.
So he heads out, and comes across a king who has a horse that’s afraid of her shadow and therefore unrideable. Clever Jack rides the horse straight into the sun to keep the shadow out back. The King is amazed, and the people are jealous.
The king has a daughter who he hasn’t seen since infancy, when she was kidnapped by a sorcerer named Body-without-soul. Hoping to get Jack in trouble, the people go to the king and say Jack’s been bragging that he’s going to find her and free her.
When the king asks Jack about it and learns Jack actually knows nothing about the daughter, the king is so angry that people have been trivializing his loss that he orders Jack to either find her and free her, or die.
So Jack grooms and tacks up the horse—who can ride only straight at the sun—grabs a rusty sword, and rides off. It’s not long into the forest that he meets a lion, motioning for him to stop. A bit nervous, Jack heeds the invitation, gets off his horse and asks the lion what’s up.
But there’s more than a lion there. There’s also a dog, an eagle and an ant. They have a dead donkey, who they’re hoping to eat, but no tools to divide the body up with. And that’s where Jack and his rusty sword come in.
To the ant goes the donkey’s head, it will make a good home and provide plenty of food. To the dog go the hooves, a longterm supply of gnawing. For the eagle, the entrails, easy to pick at and carry high into the canopy. And the rest to the lion, as is proper.
In return, the lion gives Jack one of his claws, “which will turn you into the fiercest lion in the world when you wear it.” The dog gives one of his whiskers, “which will turn you into the fastest dog on earth” by simply placing it under the nose.
The eagle gives a feather, which, when called on, will transform Jack instantly to “the biggest and strongest eagle in the sky.” And finally, from the ant, Jack gets a tiny leg, which will make him so small as to be undetectable, “even with a magnifying glass” (1992).
Jack goes on his way. A bit skeptical, he pulls over to test out the gifts and sure enough, they are magic charms that instantly turn him to a lion, dog, eagle and ant and then back again. He smiles and goes along until he reaches the lakeshore, where Body-without-soul lives in a big castle, and where the king’s daughter is being held captive.
In eagle form, Jack flies to the window, then becomes an ant and crawls in. Sure enough, there lays the king’s daughter, sleeping. As ant, Jack crawls upon her cheek until she wakes. At this point, he gets off her cheek and changes back to a human, rushing to tell her that he’s come to free her.
Next, she agrees that when the sorcerer comes in, she’ll trick him into telling her what it will take to kill him. After all, a body without a soul is built for things that an ensouled body is not, like limitless youth and growth and functioning. To kill him will not be easy.
When the sorcerer comes in he tells her everything she needs to know, as Jack, in ant form, listens on. It will take a lion strong enough to kill the the forest’s elusive black lion. But once the black lion is dead, a dog so fast only the fastest dog in the world can catch him will spring from his stomach.
If the fastest dog in the world should come, catch and kill him, an eagle will fly from his belly. This eagle will be so big and strong that only a bigger, stronger eagle could catch and kill him. And in the unthinkable case that that happens, an egg will need to be pried from the dead bird’s claw and cracked over the sorcerer’s forehead. And only then will the sorcerer die.
Of course, with his charms Jack can do exactly each of these tasks, and he does. He goes from eagle, to lion, to dog, back to eagle, conquering each new animal with a quickness. Meanwhile, at the castle, the sorcerer falls ill. With egg in hand, Jack returns to the king’s daughter, who, under the guise of nursing her captor in sickness cracks the egg over his brow, and kills him.
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I first connected this story with Aleister Crowley and Lady Freida Harris’ Nine of Wands from the Thoth Tarot. Of the Nine of Wands, which is titled “strength,” Crowley writes that the strength itself lives in “its ability to change perpetually” and that “defense, to be effective, must be mobile” (1974).
I recognized in Crowley’s interpretation the I Ching teaching. If evil adapts to what weapons are formed against it, a warrior should start “from home,” rather than from a place of reactivity. Today it makes me curious about what’s missed if a raw experience like grief, uncertainty, rage, guilt or shame is bypassed in the rush to take swift and immediate action.
One benefit of being able to feel feelings is that it gives you access to the kind of change whose necessity is felt rather than simply intellectually known. No matter how many facts I might have, the change whose necessity burns deep in my body and can therefore afford to work slowly and steadily is a change that is both more likely and more sustainable.
If the default weapon against hard feelings is avoidance, then the emotions harden. They learn to preserve themselves rather than disperse and reorganize in such a way that new ways of moving with them can be possible.
It’s counterintuitive, but avoidance actually makes central what it seeks to escape—which is fear or distress or discomfort, rather than formulating ways of moving that are independent of that-which-is-to-be-avoided-at-all-costs. Maybe it’s not independence we should aim for, moreso a flexible relatedness.
On flexibility, the teenage Jack’s shapeshifting in the Body-without-soul story seems then to say we should get spacious with the things we relate to as problems and be agile in our dealings with them. Rather than latch onto them in rigid reactive ways we can make ourselves slippery so that the things we are up against don’t stick and then strengthen.
I recognize the ways in which a language of domination creeps in, even here. I don’t think that automatically makes it useless, or harmful. I do think it requires questioning.
I mentioned earlier that I’ve been reading Writings for a Liberation Psychology by psychologist and Jesuit priest Ignacio Martín-Baró. Chapter two is especially notable, and is titled “The role of the psychologist.”
In it, Martín-Baró writes that liberation is not a question of abandoning psychology altogether but rather “a question of whether psychological knowledge will be placed in the service of constructing a society where the welfare of the few is not built on the wretchedness of the many, where the fulfillment of some does not require that others be deprived, where the interests of the minority do not demand the dehumanization of all” (1996).
I think there will be more to say as the Body-without-soul story unfolds for me but I’m out of time for now so, we’ll see you next week.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.
You’re reading the weekly Offering for July 2, 2022. Weekly Offerings are generally for paid subscribers only but this one seemed like it wanted to be for everyone.
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Sources
Calvino, I. (1992). Italian folktales. Mariner.
Crowley, A. (1974). The book of Thoth. Samuel Weiser Inc.
Martín-Baró, I. (1996). Writings for a liberation psychology. Harvard University Press.