Craig Chalquist, PhD, PhD
Noember 14, 2024
This article describes Depth Philosophy, the latest evolution of my ongoing work with psyche, story, place, mythology, dream, and imagination. Depth Philosophy is not a dry system for explaining the world, but a body of concepts, ideas, and practices for imaginative living. For more detail on this, see my second PhD dissertation Restorying Our Lore.
Do you feel like you fit in? Me neither. I never have. Yet I feel at home on Earth and in the cosmos. This can be confusing, especially with so much change going around.
I’ve known since childhood that I dwell in a world different from that of most people. My world is one of presences rather than objects. In my world, things speak.
To a different world belongs a different worldview: the philosophical compass by which we orient ourselves in life. Each of us has one. Whether our worldview is conscious or not, it tells us who we are, why we are, where we live (and with whom), and where we are headed. Our worldview is a guiding story by which we navigate life. We are all philosophers, whether we know it or not.
Doesn’t it seem like many of our best-known worldviews need therapy?
My worldview, Worldread, heals splits that can render life meaningless. It respects science, for example, without falling for its dreary habit of reducing everything to lifeless matter (an ideology called scientism). It embraces faith without the overemphasis on absolute belief dispensed by robed authorities (usually male). It honors our deep ties to place, nature, and Earth—which live within us as well as outside us—while asking: What would a civilization of Earth-honoring homes, neighborhoods, and cities be like?
I came to Worldread not just by being different, but through decades of teaching, reflection, study, conversation, exploration, collaboration, and creative activity. I came to it through depth philosophy, unpacked in my second doctoral dissertation.
To merit its worth, a serviceable philosophy should be able to help us live through chaotic times while encouraging reenchantment, humaneness, and responsibility. It should offer both humility and self-respect. It should enrich our spiritual life, help us master fear, and encourage us to feel at home on our homeworld.
Instead of fussing about how we know a table is a table, our philosophy should help us grow up as one species among many on our troubled but beautiful planet. And it should help us make the world a better place to live.
What Is Depth Philosophy?
Let’s start with a definition. Depth philosophy (“DPhi”) is a way of earthly reenchantment, a way of deep knowing, feeling, and being through embodied storytelling, play, reflection, and imagination.
So, philosophy felt and enacted, not just thought up. Its goal? The primary goal of Depth Philosophy is to encourage guiding stories that help us make sense of and celebrate ourselves, each other, and our place in the world. It is a philosophy of noetic hope: the firm expectation, based on history, experience, and faith, that things don’t have to be this way, and that what was done yesterday need not determine the story of tomorrow.
I tend to use “Depth Philosophy” and “Worldread” interchangeably, but to be more precise, Worldread is a worldview storied forth by DPhi.
Why do we think a meaningful life path must be set in stone? That the struggle for good change can’t also be enjoyable? Imagine a philosophy for life and action that would be performative, not prescriptive; creative, not creedal; visionary, not missionary. Grounded, imaginative, and informed by dreams (not doctrines), stories, and the power of play.
DPhi is an applied depth philosophy for restorying the seeker into an animate world. Results include wonder, inspiration, and reentry into the great conversation with earthly things and creatures. Worldreading means partnering with the imaginal to interpret the symbols living all around us.
DPhi’s theory of how we acquire knowledge is participatory, imaginal, visionary, interpretive (hermeneutic), and animistic. Its ethic is one of Fivefold Caring, including care for ourselves, each other, and the world and its diverse creatures. The moods that propel its devotions include awe, love, respect, play, and homecoming. Its activism is enchantivism and transrevolution: change through outgrowing outworn stories.
Its practices, which are reflective, imaginal, and embodied, include ecotherapy and Earthdreaming. Its cosmology links soul of self (anima ego) with soul of Earth (anima terrae) and soul of cosmos (anima mundi) as outlined in the fictional philosophy of Ten Lamps (see my novel Soulmapper).
Its emblem is a silver tree with six roots and seven branches bearing gold fruit. Its central vision is Terrania, a just, delightful, ecological civilization of earthly plenty and wellbeing. Not utopia, but a good society wisely managed.
What Is Depth?
What do we mean by “depth”?
Psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined the term depth psychology in 1914 to describe a brand of psychology that seeks the underlying meanings of symptoms. Studying behavior isn’t enough to reveal its unconscious motives. Let’s say we have three depressed people. One is depressed because she chops herself down with inner criticism every time a beneficial opportunity arises. Another is depressed because of hopelessness brought about by long-endured trauma. The third is depressed because he thinks selling houses is his calling when it’s actually leadership. The behavior of depression taken by itself can’t tell us much. We have to go deeper, to its sources.
The same with dreams. Their symbolic content is not irrational and cannot be explained solely by their neurology (e.g., the brain doing a self-clean every night). The fact that the hippocampus and other brain areas are involved in dreaming is interesting, but it doesn’t help us understand why a dreamer too distracted to pay bills, return calls, or be present in relationships dreams of flying over his neighborhood. The psychological function of such dreams might be a warning: Get your feet back on the ground!
Freud gives another example of depth from his collection of the slips named after him. A facilitator opens a meeting by accidentally declaring the meeting closed. Oops! How much do you think he wants to be there? Politicians and religious leaders make these slips all the time, a fact worthy of attention.
“Depth” also refers to how figures we take to be those of fantasy, fiction, and dream often express opinions and attitudes different from those of our conscious mind. Jung’s work with active imagination provided many examples of this, including imaginal beings who told him to quit smoking so much, eat less meat, and treat his women associates better. The psyche personifies promptings from deep within by turning them into figures we can engage with. More about this later.
The mythic aspect of depth is hard to appreciate without some education in mythology. Mythic images, plots, deities, and symbolic monsters recur regularly in public and private life. When the Titanic went down, for example, it echoed the demise of the overly proud Titans, giant gods exiled by Zeus to the darkest depths. The story repeated when the submersible Titan imploded and sank near the Titanic.
In cases like these, “depth” refers to the mythic structures behind current events and strange replays. A tech worker laid off because of AI should have no trouble understanding the dangerous shadow of the Golem. The archetypal motif of the spirit leaving the body behind recurs in attempts to upload consciousness into virtuality. Taylor Swift brings back the figure of Freya, enchantment-wielding goddess of erotic diplomacy, just as Marilyn Monroe gave a human face to Venus.
“Depth,” then, refers to the meanings, symbols, themes, fantasies, mythic characters and motifs, and even feelings and body states underneath or behind what’s on the surface of how we are. Depth psychology works with psychological depth, the mental dynamics under the hood.
Depth philosophy says: Depth is everywhere! Within us and all around us. Depth is a mountain appearing in a dream to tell the dreamer, “You need to become a tribal healer.” Depth psychology looks for the mountain in the dreamer. But what about the mountain? What about the fact that this mountain is considered nonverbally vocal by the tribe living next to it? What about its long history of appearing in local dreams?
Are we saying that mountains think? Not necessarily. Certainly not like human beings. At the very least, though, they show up as presences beyond those of hunks of granite and tree-bearing soil. They are not mere objects, as in the destructive worldview of Western materialism, which treats entire regions like raw material. Mountains engage us. We are always in conversation with them, with rivers and roadways, with everything. Depth philosophy seeks to make this conversation conscious.
Jung the Reluctant Philosopher
Speaking of depth.
Jung insisted he was no philosopher, just as he insisted he was no artist. On both counts, his works—including his marvelous paintings—say otherwise.
Jung was adamant about both for the same reason: his need to convince himself and his audience that what he did was scientific. In part this was a matter of professional credibility. Psychologists like Gustav Fechner, an early experimenter with sensory thresholds, wrote about his profoundly spiritual nature encounters under a pseudonym to protect his reputation as a scientist. The same bias against subjective experience was still in force by the time Jung came along and is still in force today, even in the social sciences.
In part, though, being a scientist was part of Jung’s identity. As recorded in his Black Book journals, the imaginal mentor Soul tells him to “let the science go,” but he won’t. When she told him what he created was art rather than science, he disagreed. Today, we would say he worked more on the side of the humanities. (As Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow pointed out, we need a more spacious way of holding scientific inquiry than the physical science model allows.)
As Sean Kelly points out in his dissertation Individuation and the Absolute: Hegel, Jung, and the Path toward Complex Holism, Jung did some metaphysics now and then without calling it such. All the early depth psychologists did; Freud called his “metapsychology,” but it was really philosophy. Jung’s speculations about how the inner and outer worlds merge at the level of something not entirely physical or psychological is a metaphysical idea.
So is Jung’s concept of synchronicity: how two meaningful events occur uncannily together without causing one another. You think about a friend you haven’t spoken to or about in years, and in an hour you receive a surprise email from them. A New Age-style explanation would smuggle in causality by claiming that you “manifested” them, but Jung would say that something archetypal stirred in the depths, revealing itself as two thematically similar events occurring together. This parallelism shows up in many cultures; the ancient Egyptians called it heka, and the Stoics sympatheia.
These and other aspects of depth psychology smack of the philosophical. Depth philosophy says: Let’s play with that imaginatively and go even wider.
Imagiknowing
A vital tool for depth philosophizing arrives on our doorstep from a long path stretching back to ancient Egypt. The tool is imagination used as a source of deep knowledge. The tradition in which this tool developed is Hermeticism.
Some confusion surrounds this tradition, in part because scholars often call it “Hermetism” before the European Renaissance. We need not bother with that. An additional confusion is that fake documents like the Kybalion and a list of disreputable organizations have used “Hermetic” to refer to supposedly secret doctrines understood by a minority of elites.
Hermeticism is not a belief system, secret society, or arcane religion; rather, it is a lived and embodied philosophy of consciousness. “Hermeticism,” writes Meervat Nasser, “is a philosophical system based on the study of the Hermetica [the literature] as a way of helping the soul (psyche) to develop a reasonable mind (nous), reasonable speech (logos), and self-knowledge (gnosis), so we may begin to understand the world and our place in it.” She adds: “Hermetic hope…is the belief in the unlimited potential of the human being; the trust in its ability to always find a way towards a better future.”
Blossoming in first-century Alexandra from the same root as Gnosticism, Hermeticism grew a depth-tending array of practices that worked its way into alchemy, Islamic Gnosticism, Renaissance natural magic, European Romantic philosophy and poetry, American Transcendentalism, depth psychology, and terrapsychology. In these and other forms, Hermeticism served as a lived philosophy of imaginative insight. You might recognize some names associated with it: Leonardo da Vinci, Albrecht Durer, Roger Bacon, William Blake, John Donne, Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe, Hesse, Umberto Eco, Jung, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Keats, and Coleridge, among other explorers of the depths.
In Hermeticism, imagination allows us to contemplate the world as an integrated totality. “Imagination is nothing but begetting” (Corpus Hermeticum).
This is because imagination is not a pale copy of reality. As many philosophers have pointed out, and as some research suggests, imagination is a power foundational for consciousness and our very sense of reality. Freud referred to the realm of fantasy as a “primary process” because our imaginings, conscious or not, underlie all our “secondary” rational thoughts, ideas, and plans.
Tied to remembrance, imagination draws forth the neural and situational resources it needs to create, sort, and integrate visions of possible futures. It also enables empathy, creativity, originality, planning, stress management, coping with threats, and motivation, pulling us forward in anticipation and enabling learning and task completion. Even goalless daydreaming helps us prepare for whatever awaits. All these imaginative activities modify the brain and exercise and develop its systems and complex interconnections.
The capacity to imagine ahead and adapt is particularly urgent now, with climate chaos accelerating everywhere and authoritarianism on the march. The polycrisis could be thought of as a global failure of imagination.
Imagining comes in at least two flavors: fanciful-fantastic, as when we daydream or play games, and what we might call imagiknowing, similar to what the ancients call gnosis, a kind of profound intuitive understanding beyond ordinary measurement. When we imagine deeply, the imaginal can speak to and through us. No firm line divides them. Rather, they are both aspects of imagining on a spectrum of depth, degree, and will; and all imagining gives us some access to the imaginal.
Depth philosophy begins with the question, What if? From there it moves into exploring our guiding stories.
Loreologizing
Lore is knowledge, story, or practice handed down, especially from a particular tradition. That is the usual understanding of lore. The storied teachings of esoteric systems. Baseball lore, like the tale of Casey at the bat. Secret Freemason rituals. Figure skating lore I learned as a boy: lace the boots tight near the foot but looser higher up to leave give for jumps and spins.
Lore includes folklore: myths (sacred tales), rituals, folktales, fairytales, fables, legends. Lore can also mean the backstory of fictional cosmologies and philosophies like those of the Discworld series or the Chronicles of Amber. Star Trek lore includes an anecdote about Gene Roddenberry flipping over a model of the proposed starship Enterprise to put the nacelles on top, giving us the vessel we recognize today.
Lore does not have to be correct to be lore. When I trained in the martial arts, I was told to avoid using the supposedly lethal palm-heel strike to the nose because “it will drive the nose bone up into the brain.” There is no such bone. Tarot lore says the cards came from Egypt, but they were invented in Italy in the 1400s to entertain the mad tyrant Filippo Visconti. He might never have recognized the alchemical or astrological images painted in his deck.
Some of the tales we tell with our fund of lore are frivolous and transient: gossip, lies, rumors, bad jokes, fun facts, life hacks, off-the-cuff explanations with varying amounts of truth. Some are impersonal: political platforms, changes of plan or schedule, policy announcements. The lore such stories contain is implicit and rather thin. The stories we use for guidance are another matter. Backed by tradition, superstition, admonition, or intuition, they serve as important tools for making sense of ourselves, our roles, our relationships, our worldviews. Let us call them keystone stories.
A well-placed keystone provides support, strength, and ornamentation. But if a cement truck pulls up and bathes an arched doorway in concrete, the structure stiffens to a rigidity vulnerable to erosion or cracking. Likewise, when our keystone stories and their lore are taken literally, as idols of belief and Truth, they undergo a hardening of the argosies. What should transport a wealth of experience and practice into our lives sinks the consciousness in which it lies becalmed. We grow closed-minded, fearful, dogmatic. Argosies toughen into armories. Stories stiffen into beliefs. The beliefs compete.
Instead of having our keystone stories, they have us, and we a little less of our humanity.
In some cases, our keystone stories were too small to begin with. Raised in a violent home, I grew up with the story that couples getting upset always hurt each other. It was quite a revelation at age ten to see a friend’s parents engage in intense discussion and work things out. A different story altogether.
For my entire career, I have studied and taught how to expand and deepen old keystone stories, whether personal or collective, into new ones. I call this “loreology.”
Loreology is the craft (“loreologizing”), study, outlook, and philosophy of how we use compelling fictions—with varying degrees of consciousness—as our lore for weaving our web of keystone stories, with all their limits, enchantments, and possibilities. Loreologizing melts literalisms back into lore, remaking rigid beliefs into elegant serifs for reenchanting, widening, and polishing our guiding tales.
“Fiction” in a loreology sense means an emotionally resonant story dreamed forth by imagination. Customary usage distinguishes between fictional and real, but if a dragon warns me in a dream about a real-life pitfall I then avoid, by what right do I call the dragon “unreal”? Of what use is the distinction in cultures that do not separate the fanciful from the historical in their tales of what occurred in the past?
Religious believers, fundamentalists especially, object to regarding their folklore as fictional, or even as folklore. The usual division between fiction and, say, myth is that myths were or are believed, whereas fiction never is. But this is just to say that myth is made of guiding stories taken literally. The division also ignores the creative imagination’s role in shaping the stories. The word “fiction” once referred to kneading and forming from clay and goes all the way back to a word for “to form, build.”
Instead of erecting a hard-but-illusory difference between fictional and real, perhaps a more useful discernment would sift spacious, soulful, and insightful working fictions from dishonesties. The fictional tale of Noah and the ark harbors important lessons while entertaining; taking it as factual while ignoring its many parallels with an earlier Babylonian flood myth is dishonest. (In a Gnostic tale, the heroine Norea burns down the first ark with her breath because Noah refuses to let women board. He builds a more inclusive vessel. What might that version teach us?)
Most, perhaps all, of our guiding stories carry along remnants of the lore of old. For example, observe the return of folkloric elements in these contemporary items:
· artificial intelligence: magical familiar motif
· lotteries, gambling, stocks, and sweepstakes: Wheel of Fortune motif
· invisible hand of the market: hidden god of fate motif
· skyscrapers competing for height: land of the battling giants motif
· Make America Great Again: Golden age motif
· fossil fuels: underworld turned into upperworld motif (Chalquist 2012)
· mind uploading (whole brain emulation): ascension to heaven motif
· smart devices: magical object motif
· Gaia theory: Earth Mother motif
Our stories influence us more than we might admit to ourselves. War and peace, illness and health, insanity and clarity, misery and happiness hang on twists in the plots we live by. Lingering trauma is a tale unfinished and yearning for completion. While practicing family therapy I studied how emotional legacies of injustice and fairness, gratitude and guilt, gain and loss ran like underground rivers down through the generations. Similar restless currents pervade neighborhoods, districts, troubled companies, divided nations, global movements, and all of humanity.
When tended consciously, however, our fictions help us avert disaster, suggest new possibilities, dissolve stubborn blockages, help us understand those whom we Other and move into a more inclusive story. “If you only empathize within the smallest version your self-identified group,” observes futurist and science fiction author P. J. Manney, “you’re not utilizing what humans are capable of concerning empathy. We can empathize beyond our tribe. We can empathize with humanity, possibly all living things, or at least show compassion.”
From a loreology standpoint, folklore (including myth ideologized into religious belief) is fictional not in the sense of being untrue or arbitrarily made up, but as lore too vital and creative to literalize. It deserves better, runs deeper, and offers more. All over the world, our keystone stories depend upon this lore. Loreology asks: How might our lore undergo transmutation to regain its inspiring and enchanting luster?
When we engage deeply with this fictive source of our lore, we move from acting as static personalities trying to reign over our lives (and perhaps other people’s) to flexible characters dwelling in a particular story. Then the story can shift.
The Silver Tree
In Religions, Values, and Peak Experiences, Maslow distinguishes between Religion as an institution and “small-r religion”: a natural experience of the sacred compatible with science and sociality. Likewise, small-g gnosticism refers to direct encounters with the Divine not necessarily encompassed by the Gnosticism of the first-century Eastern Mediterranean.
Broadly understood as a tradition of embodied gnosis, the small-h hermetic way runs like a steady, informal flow of learners, adepts and communities spread across the ages, spontaneously resurfacing here and there, ducking underground for a while, persisting, transmuting, waiting, and resurfacing again, always without need of a uniform creed or religion. It is not an august Aurea Catena, then, no Golden Chain of secret masters in a straight and literal lineage, but an Argentum Arbor, a Silver Tree of inspiration waiting in cultural moonlight for opportunities to reenchant.
We glimpse its emergence long ago in Africa, Australia, Asia, and the Indigenous Americas, mediated by shamans and the kinds of artists who left petroglyphs of animals, handprints, and the elements. Its branches shine in the Upanishads (sixth to seventh century BCE) composed by countercultural rishis (seers); in the mysteries of the lyric philosopher-god Orpheus (sixth century BCE); in Pythagoras and the pre-Socratic philosophers who wrote about matter as intelligible (around 600 BCE); and in Hermeticism and Gnosticism (first century CE).
For the most part, the Tree is not found along wide paths, although we may spot it in Taoism, schools of Vedanta and Buddhism that take matter as ensouled, the nature spirits of Shinto, and the indwelling holy Presence studied in Kabbalah. Neoplatonism (third century CE) described a Soul of the World. In Northern Europe, druids practiced their version of nature gnosis until the Romans decimated them and the missionaries of the Cross suppressed those who would not convert. Curanderas and plant medicine experts practice in South and Central America to this day. The silver impulse returned in European movements like Romanticism (seventeenth century) and its German offspring Naturphilosophie. By 1914, it was calling a branch of itself depth psychology; and by 2000, terrapsychology, the study of how the presences of the natural and built worlds show up in the human psyche.
Now and then the Tree seems to flourish specific locales. Leaders throughout the ancient world prized the utterances of the Oracle at Delphi (1400 BCE to sixth century CE). Ile-Ife in what is now Osun State in Nigeria was known not only for its superb stone, bronze, and terracotta sculptures, but, since at least 500 BCE, for its oracles, spiritual celebrations, and dream enactments of the lively doings of the Orishas, naturalistic deities who resided there before fanning out during the African Diaspora. Around that time the Jixia Academy rose in Shandong, China, to foster Confucian, mystical Taoist, naturalist (yin–yang, five elements) and cosmological scholarship. The Academy also published the Tao Te Ching. In 762, the Abbasids founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. Perhaps the earliest of such locales were the Egyptian Houses of Life: scriptoria and lore repositories attached to the temple complexes.
Each Silver Tree branch bears fruits of gnosis that nourish mind, soul, and spirit despite the cultural soil deficiencies of time and place. Gnosticism brought elaborate tales involving powerful feminine presences to a time when the Church of Rome excluded women from power. Alchemy compensated for religious otherworldliness by seeking spirit in matter. Islamic gnosticism countered rigid religious doctrine with wisdom of the loving heart, and the Book of Nature tradition enlarged Christian spirituality by reading the world as sacred scripture. Romanticism and Transcendentalism opposed the dark satanic mills of industrialized destruction with beckonings to attend the wisdom found outdoors all around us.
Jungian psychology showed how the gods live inside us as archetypes and collective fantasies: the return of the mythopoeic to consciousness. Ecopoetics addressed a key split of modernity, that of self from Earth, by reconnecting creative expression to the natural world and its flesh. Ecopsychology, terrapsychology, and ecospirituality highlight conscious relationship with the more-than-human world as foundational for wellbeing and embodied spiritual life.
The Silver Tree has filled out its luxuriance by developing different sides of itself, including the philosophical, intellectual, rhetorical, ethical, ritualistic, mythological, political, egalitarian, scientific, emotional, aesthetic, symbolic, psychological, ecotherapeutic, and ecological. In every hermetic expression and evolution, imagination has served as the touchstone of visionary gnosis, healing splits of time and of place between vital realms of experience.
The question of where the Silver Tree will branch next is therefore a question, at least in part, of where it needs to, and of what deficiencies of our time it seeks to heal.
Mythologically understood, climate chaos—the most obvious side of the polycrisis now unfolding across the world—is a symptom of giantism: giant corporations, governments, armies, religions colonizing the planet. The Titans and Asuras have taken over almost every aspect of contemporary life. We live in an archontic time in oppressively networked societies. Our stories—including our worldviews—led us here. Explains literary scholar Marek Oziewicz,
The stories we have been telling ourselves, about human exceptionalism (we’re the image of God), human entitlement (we’re masters of this planet), and human identity (we’re separate from and above “nature”) channeled our creativity into projects that transformed the planet—in our eyes—into a purely human domain… To call trees timber, coasts beachfronts, and animals livestock are discursive operations that give narrative shape to our assumptions, structure relations, and legitimize action.
We must also face the fact of steeply declining membership in organized religion in some parts of the industrialized world, the United States in particular, where “nones” are now the largest religious group. More and more seekers are looking for an Earth-honoring spiritual path of inclusivity and collaboration even as a subgroup of the frightened cling to the idols of rigid dogma, paternal authority, and flagolatry.
Although more recent hermetic branches like spiritual ecology, ecopoetics, and related efforts respond to large global facts like climate change, they often lack four crucial ingredients: inspiration, effective storytelling, a sense of play, and eros, which includes a feeling of how things connect to each other and to us. In other words, love. “Without attachments, no life. From cell division to child rearing, we can understand all processes in the biosphere as processes of relationship—and we can learn from them,” writes philosopher-biologist Andreas Weber. Perhaps the planet suffers less from environmental stress or economic crisis than from a lack of love.
The tales we tell about our influence on the ecological world conform mainly to the tragic mode of drama, a heroically glorious striving and downfall within an uncaring universe. A redreamed hermeticism might instead use the comic mode characterized by love of life, inspiration, improvisation, humor, and community. Fantasy stories in particular, which rose again after Coleridge and other Romantics through the novels of William Morris, Lord Dunsany, and E. R. Eddison, push back against grim realism by envisioning humanity as part of the natural world even while dreaming things forward creatively. “Literature, particularly the fantasy novel,” Dwayne Elgin writes, “offers humanity a way to reintegrate itself into the natural world and, in so doing, invites a new relationship between itself, its fellow creatures, and the science and literature that create and mirror that world.”
Worldreading
The imagination-rooted wisdom walk of worldreading opens a reenchanting way of being in the world and an ecospirituality without bishops, bulls, or big books. Like Hermeticism, worldreading can partner with traditional religion, but it also offers alternatives: Worldread as a philosophy, my Assembling Terrania Cycle of fiction, the Lamplight Trilogy within it, the Cycle’s Ten Lamps philosophy, and its fictional religion, called Lamplight, an Earth-honoring ecospiritual path without authority hierarchies, ironclad commandments, or authoritative books. All rely on imagiknowing as an Earth-honoring gnosis. Worldreading is hermeticism refictionalized and refantasized into depth philosophy.
For the worldreader, the house of reverent gathering is the world. The sacred lives inside, outside, and all around. Symbols swimming in imagination open doors onto a holy world that interpenetrates the one our senses record.
Worldread shares these qualities of the Silver Tree:
· a sophianic path of embodied and imaginative wisdom;
· matter, nature, world, and cosmos perceived as enspirited and animate;
· a profoundly and consistently felt unity of divine, world, and innermost self;
· animism rooted ultimately in an archetypal World Soul;
· transition from dysdaimonia (misalignment with one’s “Angel”) to eudaimonia;
· emphasis on knowledge through symbol, metaphor, image, story, and myth;
· “in the air” and synchronistically arising;
· encouragement of students to become teachers; egalitarian and nonhierarchical;
· a heart-based path, with “heart” (following Ibn Arabi) as a chamber of divine images;
· engagement with the imaginal as a semiautonomous many-powered realm of being;
· a spiritual adventure pictured as long exile leading to joyous homecoming;
· actions and responses of the “subtle body” felt through the physical body;
· liberation from everyday ignorance and illusion (the Gnostics’s “deep sleep”);
· antiauthoritarian, nonorthodox; friendly to religion but not held by it;
· compensatory to more solar, exoteric, priestly forms of knowledge and practice;
· challenging of polarized gender roles; accepting of diverse forms of love;
· of interest mainly to gnostically inclined seekers wanting knowledge more than belief;
· of an underground tradition, never mainstream but often reborn in periods of cultural collapse.
Worldreading supports scientific discovery but rejects materialistic scientism and its destructive consequences. It accepts religion, but only insofar as it transcends dogmatic intolerance in favor of religious and other kinds of diversity. The natural world prizes and designs for variety: so should we.
Daily practice of terragnostic reverence means engaging in continual conscious conversation with the following:
· oneself, including moods, responses, thoughts, feelings, health, sensorium, being fully present
· the unconscious, as amplified by dream work, free associations, somatic states, fantasies, and active imagination
· each other, speaking and listening from the heart, watching our projections, and using imagination to empathize and respond
· folkloric images, plots and motifs that recur in dreams, complexes, current events
· plants, animals, all the nonhuman beings who share our world
· the world, including lands and waters, elements and skies, winds and weathers and cycles, and even matter, including the everyday “inanimate” objects with which we surround ourselves
Through all these dimensions of attention pulses the cyclical nature of time: birth and aging and death, developmental stages and rites of passage, seasons, climate, movements of the stars and planets.
Informed by terrapsychology and Hermeticism, I maintain a healthy respect for the genius loci, the active presence of places within places. Where I am now, where you are now, constitutes a living center amid other nested and interlocking living centers. Terrapsychologically, this means that place is an altar, hosting presences alive within other places and presences. For example, take San Francisco, the altar of dramatic, consciousness-changing, genderqueer Dionysus, a Greek name and image for the place presence the indigenous people there recognized long ago. San Francisco can be imagined as the mood-altering, mystical, dramatic aspect of the larger presence or being of California, just as San Diego is her witchy aspect, Los Angeles her visionary aspect, Monterey her depths, Ventura her maternal abundance, the Mojave her trickster facet, and the Central Valley her alchemical interior.
California is in turn the cliff- and crevice-armored young Athena of North America. As terrapsychology demonstrates, a name can offer an inside story about what is named. Minerva, who is on the Great Seal of California, is a Roman counterpart to both Athena and to Queen Calafia, the fictional figure for whom California is named. “Calafia” is thought to mean “female caliph.” California’s name, angular geography, edgy geology, and founding imagery blend into an image like that of strong Minerva, goddess of wisdom, education, and public affairs. Alchemists revered her archetypal sister Sophia. California is their altar.
California in turn is part of the Americas, whose name means “great power” and “master craftsman.” Alchemical California is a site or psyche or subpersonality of transmutation within the continent whose name refers to the grand opus, the work to harness and employ great power. “Europe” derives from Europa, kidnapped by a powerful king. “Africa” might come from an Egyptian word for “motherland.” All the continents are part of procreative Earth, Terra, Gaia, circled by her reflective offspring Luna, born from a collision between our planet and one called Theia, named for the Titan sky daughter of Uranus, in astrology a planet of shocks, surprises, and liberation (R. Tarnas 2016).
Might the terrapsychological fantasy of nested place presences reach even farther out, including the stellar nursery near which our solar system was born, our massive Milky Way galaxy (in some myths, made of the milk of the gods; in others, a roadway of light), whose maternal spiral arms scoop interstellar gas to feed her networks of stars and whose shape makes a symbol of individuation? What of the vast dark matter bodies in which the galaxies shine, embedded like cells in a universe born of an opening egg of energy like that of myths from Egypt and Asia?
How important it is for the citizen of an animate cosmos to nourish strong links with terra firma! To love and protect our temple of temples. To remain in conversation with rain and sun, breeze and blossom, and with the cycles of time binding all together into one synchronized movement bridging heaven and Earth.
As a possible new bud on the Silver Tree of hermeticism, Worldread also invites reimagining archetypes and gods as ecological presences active on every side.
Immanent and Evolving Gods
In Jung’s Black Books and Red Book, what were once called gods are reimagined as archetypes. Deep in active imagination, Jung realized that the Sumerian hero deity Gilgamesh is an imaginal structure. Jung used his mind to shrink him to the size of an egg, carry him around for a while, and then, through a series of meditative incantations, release the reborn god as a powerful stream of psychic energy.
Historically, this is not as peculiar as it might sound. Throughout the ages, deities have sprung up, basked for a time in the light of devotion, and, having worn out their relevancy as time went on, lapsed into literature or ideology. Then we hear stories of their demise: “The great god Pan is dead!” But their demise is always temporary. Finding the gods and spirits a new form brings them back to life and relevancy. Jung gave the gods new archetypal bodies.
In antiquity, deities were conversed with as sentient natural forces or as presences behind natural forces. Planting societies reimagined them as celestial kings and queens. The Gnostics reimagined them as exalted powers we could contact inside ourselves, powers that somehow benefit from Sophia’s fall and the creation of the world. Jung reimagined gods as psychological archetypes. Have we come full circle to a higher (or deeper) turn of the spiral of our relationship with the divine? With millennia of reimaginings to draw on, in a time of dire worldwide peril, can we now reconnect with the sacred presences outside and inside simultaneously?
Jung saw spirals primarily as psychological symbols. But the human psyche evolved in the natural world, where spirals spin all around us. The same is so for other archetypes: all true ones live somewhere outside, below, around, above, on Earth, and out among the stars. They constitute the structures of the psyche, but also the very bones of the cosmos: universal motifs made manifest. If we combine this insight with what terrapsychology teaches us about the presence of place, we have grounds to wonder: What if each goddess, god, sprite, spirit, daemon, and familiar reflects some sentient aspect of the natural world?
Perhaps all deities manifest as nature deities, whatever their ultimate transcendent dimension. Zeus and his fellow sky god brothers are not behind the heights: they are Height, they are Sky stooping down to witness us as we go about our affairs. They are also the higher view within us. There is no wind god, for the wind is a godlike presence, blowing where it listeth, herding clouds, inhumanly intelligent, symbolizing Spirit in many languages. A cyclone’s “eye” gazes down upon what it crosses over.
As part of the Planetary Psychology class I once taught in San Francisco, students and I would make an excursion of the Mission neighborhoods near the school and look for gestures of place responding to our questions. It soon became apparent that we were in conversation with the places where we walked. On one occasion, we stood under a butterfly sculpture on the wall of a café. As I explained that for the ancient Greeks, the butterfly symbolized the psyche, a rare event unfolded: a butterfly floated through the noisy air and landed on one of my students. I had never seen a butterfly there before. Another time we saw so many such events that I remarked, “All we need is the woman in the red dress,” whereupon a suitably garbed woman rounded the corner. My students gasped.
The raven who flew a perfect circle over the heads of my students and myself during a nature exercise out on Dartmoor; the big Northridge earthquake that knocked me back into bed, the safest place to be at such a time: When such responses occur over and over and over, they feel less fortuitous or even synchronistic than gestural, a nod or wave from the genius loci.
Larger, existential archetypes are also found everywhere: untamed but responsive Wildness, amusing or disconcerting Trickster, Underworld characters leading into the depths, Life giving birth and Death making endings, Eros pulsing in every connection, subatomic, molecular, planetary. Each of these archetypes is adorned in masks, motifs, and roles found in the world’s legends, folk tales, fairy tales, and myths.
This close connection between nature and story—especially myth—is certainly nothing new. Indigenous tales have featured it since there were tales to be told. For rural Greeks, the vines, the growth, areDemeter, and the sea is Poseidon. Athene and Apollo are wisdom and truth. From a god-filled world we gaze out at the rest of the glittering darkness of the cosmos, even as we engender our secure attachment to place, people, world, and soul.
What might be our relationship with reimagined deities? And what does that have to do with what could be Worldread’s strongest potential: dreaming together toward Terrania? How might fiction serve as lore to light the way forward?
Lamplighting
Although I’ve read speculative fiction for most of my life, I did not write any until ten years or so ago. “History Lesson: The Rematch of Blood and Dust” is my sequel to Roger Zelazny’s “The Game of Blood and Dust,” first published in the SF magazine Galaxy. Rather than publish, I posted the tale online. Unlike the original, the tale had a hopeful outcome.
Completing other unfinished science fiction series, I liked how my stories turned out, so I wrote and posted “Godsylum,” a tale prompted by an odd blend of professional disenchantment and a powerful dream of gods fleeing from capture by government-sponsored fascists. “Godsylum,” my first inkling that I wanted to publish a cycle of tales about humanity’s long struggle to mature as a species, appeared in the Assembling Terrania Cycle, the first book of which was Tales of Terrania Rising, available for free. I also posted my sketches of some of the key characters. One of them is Lucas Murdock, the protagonist (not hero!) of my novel Soulmapper. The second novel in the is Heartlander, and the third is Lamplighter. All deal with humanity trying to wake up to its own speciehood.
The Cycle’s cosmos is called the Tetraverse because of its four layers: the Source, similar to the Hermetic Big Mind or God; the archetypal Infrarealm of potentiality; the Coaguum of material existence, where human beings live; and, between Infrarealm and Coaguum, the Dreamvale, the realm of the imaginal. A peculiarity of the Dreamvale is its differentiation into Vales, subrealms corresponding to worlds of fiction: Middle-earth, Dorsai, Earthsea, London as the Holmes brothers knew it, Dune, and so on. Any fictional world imaginable exists somewhere in the Dreamvale. Humans tend to think they create these fictions, but Dreamvalers see it the other way around.
When the Source emanated the Infrarealm, it also brought what humans think of as gods into being. These Powers are archetypes in the sense of showing up in many forms and names. Radantia, for example, the mother of all the Powers and of the cosmos itself, has been called Ein Sof, Athena, Protennoia, Sige, Barbelo, Sky Woman, and just plain God. The trickster power Kluni has many names, as he is fond of reminding anyone who will listen. The thirty archetypal Powers are engaged in a universal experiment in growing consciousness on many worlds. They comment among themselves on pivotal historical developments, with some Powers taking one side of a “Nexus Crisis” and other Powers helping the other side. Caught in between, humans must find ways to mediate these divine conflicts or go under.
A key theme of the Cycle is the Long Adventure, the human version of the cosmic experiment: to grow up as a species while differentiating from the Powers. We tend to get stuck to them. The joker who can’t quit joking is stuck to Kluni or one of his mythic expressions. Getting stuck to Iustia turns one into a humorless judge. Stuckness to Bellum looks like General Patton, who loved battle but had an eye for Venusian beauty shining from the Power Aluere.
Exemplary humans who contribute significantly to the urgent project of maturation—Mitochondrial Eve, Enheduanna of Akkad, three founders of Gnosticism, Indian poet Khana, Shakespeare, Margaret Cavendish, Li Qingzhao, Samuel Clemens, Jung, Lucille Clifton, others—belong to a Transdaimonic League of creative hermetics who remain influential and in touch in the Dreamvale even after they die. There is also a Dreamvale Exchange whereby humans can converse with imaginal figures to align the realms more closely, strengthening both.
Down the difficult road of the Long Adventure awaits Terrania, a world civilization of justice, peace, ecological wisdom, creative adaptation, and appreciation of difference. It is not utopia, which for mortals will never come to be, but a sustained attempt at a sane society. Why should that not be possible for us? The last tale, “Vigilance,” which deals with a resurgence of fascism in Terrania, underlines how, in the words of the character Alethia Jabari, “There can be no impregnable utopias. Only what nowtopias we make together: soulful attempts at a good society, with always the need to watch ourselves.”
My fictional efforts seek to draw attention to Joseph Campbell’s idea that mythmaking today is in the hands of creative tale tellers. We add the loreological idea that the lore which fuels our keystone stories is fictional. Why not make conscious use of fiction to dream up new possibilities for living with ourselves and each other on the only world we have?
I hope creative people add to the Cycle. To be impactful, such a loreway—a story cycle for imagining us forward—needs diverse contributors. I included some world mythology in the stories, for example, but I would love to see people writing, making music, and doing art with folkloric figures from their own traditions. Elias Lönnrot gave Finland the Kalevala, a blend of Finnish folktales and myths retold as an epic. Imagine a Kalevala for humanity, with storytellers from every culture on Earth contributing to it!
The usual idea is that when we weave fictions, stories, myths, and other lore that combines into viable worldviews, the results are entirely ours. The presence of the imaginal and the autonomy of characters in dream and myth suggest otherwise, just as Sophia—philosophy’s central goddess—appeared as the character Soul to instruct Jung. Depth Philosophy asks: Who are these presences, how are they present both inside and outside us, and how might we respond to them as creative and responsible adults?
Fields of Inquiry Related to Depth Philosophy
What follows is for those interested in the more academic aspects of Depth Philosophy. I’ve worked in and taught in all of these areas:
Jungian psychology. As seen above. Also, DPhi brings some important differences, including a more extraverted focus and how it applies archetypal theory to major historical changes (Eradigmatics). Depth Philosophy also draws here and there from psychoanalysis, including Pierre Janet’s pre-Freudian work.
Ecopsychology and Ecotherapy.
Terrapsychology. The qualitative, story-based study of how place presences get deeply into us. I named it, but three of us started it. Since then it has grown into its own field.
Storytelling. Especially the kind that reenchants. Not to be confused with positive thinking.
Research on storytelling, imagination, and play. See Chapter 2 of my dissertation.
Mythology. I call my version of this Applied Mythology because it looks for mythic motifs and images and characters in current events, including interior ones. Applied Mythology also includes my work with personal myth.
Enchantivism. I coined this word in 2017 to describe the performative uses of story to describe beneficial changes to work toward. It is a kind of activism of imagination, as when an artist’s works strengthens human relationships with nature or a television show introduces a diverse and representative cast.
Consciousness studies. Quite a grab bag there.
Systems Theory, especially Family Systems.
Various psychologies, including humanistic, existential, and neoanalytical.
Work from various philosophers, including those who recognize imagination as a primal power. See Chapter 3 of my dissertation.
Work from various writers and poets. See Chapter 9 of my dissertation.
Various other fields, including bits and pieces of cosmology, anthropology, ecology, ecospirituality, and speculative fiction.
Hermeticism and Gnosticism. Depth Philosophy is inspired by and perhaps an evolution of these. History will decide.
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