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Walking through the Aztec hall of the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City, the visitor notices that so many of the sculptures depict the gods of war and evoke the terrifying vision of human sacrifice. Indeed, these deities are the mythic images that represent the values of a society devoted to conquest. But one form stands out (sits, actually) in a completely alternative posture.

The 1.2 metre-high statue depicts a male figure seated cross-legged on a temple platform (or perhaps a drum)

Wendell Berry: "To Know the Dark"

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

            I have spoken these lines, penned by poet, philosopher, farmer and social activist, Wendell Berry, in Solstice celebrations at the church where I ministered for thirteen years.  Every year, the doors would open into the candle lit sanctuary. 

PART FOUR: COATLICUE and GUADALUPE

Sixty years after the conquest Fray Diego Durán complained:

These wretched Indians…On one hand they believe in God, and on the other they worship idols. They practice their ancient superstitions and rites and mix one with the other… They sing these things when there is no one around who understands, but, as soon as a person appears who might understand, they change their tune and sing the song made up for Saint Francis with a hallelujah at the end, all to cover u

C.G. Jung wrote "You cannot have both, Church and freedom, and if you want both undiminished, no Solomon will be found to pronounce judgement." (C.G. Jung to Pastor H. Wegmann, November 20, 1945) Patients often struggle with the issue of feeling bound to church. They crave a freedom of spirituality. Dogmas bind them to one way of seeing and experiencing the spiritual world.

A patient recently told me of how they came to grips with this during the holiday season: "Christmas for me isn't about reli

My last blog post described the 1993 "What Makes a City" conference in Saint Paul that featured Gail Thomas of the Dallas Institute and my spouse, Elizabeth VanderSchaaf, as co-keynote speakers.  Together they provoked reflection in the Twin Cities community about how to discern the myth (deeply true story) of a city, and how to perceive landscape patterns that manifest that myth. 

One objective of this conference was to prepare the way for launching an institute similar to the Dallas Institute i

Standing today in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, Coatlicue astonishes us first by her sheer size. The colossal statue is some three meters high and 1.5 meter broad. It weighs somewhere between two and ten tons (significantly, even the academics can’t agree). Then, emotions arise in the viewer: one observer might be amazed at the sculptural craftsmanship, while another might be repulsed at the violent images that configure her body, because we stare at the goddess in her most terrible form.

S

Mary Pipher, author, psychotherapist, and activist, spoke at the recent Future First Conference in Minneapolis, addressing the most dangerous defense the human race could adopt at this point, that of "willful ignorance". According to Mary, willful ignorance occurs when we are caught between facing something too dreadful to acknowledge yet too dreadful to ignore.

"Yet we cannot solve a problem we cannot face," she asserted, and she continued to lace the hard facts of climate change and the politic

PART TWO: History of a Statue

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within – Historian Will Durant

The complex notion of sacrifice invites us into the terrible reality of Mexico that the conquistador Hernán Cortés and his men encountered.

On one level, the Sun God Huitzilopochtli symbolized the creative, regenerative power of the world of the spirit. Sacrifices to him were necessary to provide the nourishment that might ensure the daily rebirth of the

Part One: Mythology and Ritual of the Goddess and Her Son

Coatlicue (kwat-LEEK-ay) was the Great Mother Goddess of the Aztecs (or Mexica, as they called themselves). She gave birth to the moon, the stars and the sun.

Coatlicue maintained the shrine on the top of the legendary sacred mountain Coatepec (Snake Mountain). One day, as she was sweeping, a ball of feathers descended from the heavens, and when she tucked it into her belt it miraculously impregnated her. The resulting child was the powerfu

1993 would be my final year of collaboration with the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.  But what an eventful and fruitful year it would turn out to be!

The 1992 Saint Paul Neighborhood Forum, described in my previous post, whetted the appetite in my community for approaching the city archetypally.  So later that year I began exploring opportunities to expand both the audience and the scope of the discussion.  I was able to find allies at a local Catholic women's college (St. Catherine'

Returning from our trip to Mexico, we see that Americans are gawking at – or turning their faces away from – TV images of the protests over the outrageous news from Ferguson. Michael Brown was another (and there have been many since) in a long list of unarmed Black men murdered by the police. Hundreds of grieving families because of our refusal to confront the racist foundations of our society and our continual denial of death.

Mexicans have also been in the streets for months now, protesting the

In early 1992 I had the opportunity to bring the insights I learned from the Dallas Institute into the life of Saint Paul, the city where I was working as a planner.  Several images and ideas were inspiring me at that time: the need for cities to advance culture but avoid the traps of imperialistic "civilization," the importance of having places of soul but also a strong civic spirit to bring a broader identify into focus, attentiveness to seven generations back and seven generations forward, re

For the last two weeks my blog has described how my emerging terrapsychological perspective in 1991 was enriched by mentoring from Robert Sardello of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.  He provided me with important insights about how cities should be centers of culture, nor civilization, but also how it is necessary for cities to have both strong souls (typically rooted in neighborhoods) and strong spirits (typically centered in downtowns).

I had another important mentor in 1991, wh

Seasons of Our Lives: 

            Archetypal pattern analysts, depth psychologists, Jungians, Freudians, students of human development and consciousness have a lens through which they try to make sense of the world and our place in it.  Humanists, behaviorists, reductionists, all sorts of “ists” postulate, theorize and ponder the human condition as well.  The fact is, regardless of the theoretical stance, we are all in the same soup.  Our task is to find the meaning of our lives, to answer the d

One of the many phrases that will stay with me from this week at Women's Future First 2014 Congress is that of Joanna Macy: sustaining the gaze. Even though what we see in the world is frightening and enraging, it is so important we witness (not deny) what mankind has perpetrated upon our planet and to feel, to let ourselves have open hearts to Earth and her many inhabitants.

This conference is focusing on drafting of a Bill of Rights for Water. Joanna addressed three practices that have conseque

My post of last week described Robert Sardello's advice to Saint Paul City government leaders in 1991: pursue culture, not civilization.  That is, allow cultural creativity to flourish without interference from other spheres of human activity that seek to dominate the cultural realm.  In particular, don't regard culture as a means to the end of economic profit.  Instead, cherish cultural activity as a pillar of what Lewis Hyde calls the Gift Economy which expects no return on investment, but par

In a letter dated June 12, 1933 C.G. Jung wrote, "You have a mind just as well as any other human being and you can use it if you only know how to apply it. Any of my pupils could give you much insight and understanding that you could treat yourself if you don't succumb to the prejudice that you receive healing through others. In the last resort every individual alone has to win his battle, nobody else can do it for him."

No one else can win our battles. We alone have to face the monsters and bea

I was intrigued to read Patricia Damery's October 27 blog post describing a recent San Francisco seminar on Jung and Steiner, and their contributions to an evolution of consciousness.  Synchronistically, that relates closely to the topic of my blog for today, picking up on my post of last Saturday.

When I met Robert Sardello of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture in 1991, we had both recently become students of Steiner and valued his thought as a complement to that of Jung.  And for bo

When Lao-tzu says: “All are clear, I alone am clouded,” he is expressing what I now feel in advanced old age.

Lao-tzu is the example of a man with superior insight who has seen and experienced worth and worthlessness, and who at the end of his life desires to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable meaning.

The archetype of the old man who has seen enough is eternally true. At every level of intelligence this type appears, and its lineaments are always the same, whether it be an old