images copyright d sinclair 2007, from 'Negredo Journal'
"..we find the Senex in our solitary taking account, sorting through, figuring out; alone behind the wheel on the way to work; head under the shower, under the dryer; alone at the kitchen table looking down into black coffee, in bed staring into night - the Senex mind tying together the unraveled fringes of the day, making order...here is our melancholy trying to make knowledge, trying to see through, but the truth is that the melancholy is the knowledge; the poison is the antidote. This would be the Senex's most destructive insight; our Senex order rests on Senex madness. Our order is itself a madness.." (Hillman)
I'm going to come right out and say it, because I know of at least one person who'll ask me about this; yes, I have been a mad, lonely ol' bag of late, and this all makes perfect sense to me.
I believed that the Mercury archetype makes madness - the Trickster that sends us all a bit batty with ideas and stories and magic. I blamed my slippery-quick mind for soaking up ideas and confusing me - no besieging me - with constant dialogue and argument. I thought I had a brilliant but unruly child in me, who wants wants wants. So many questions, twice as many answers. Too much!
But lately came the revelation that its the Saturn/Senex part of the Senex/Puer syzygy that's the real pain-maker. Its the Big Daddy Ego that gives form to the spirited, tricky, mercurial wisps of thought. All the stories in the world cannot be real without the Saturnine 'fixing' of them.
What I mean is that its now apparent that its the threshold dweller; the terminating, opening-and-closing, border-guarding, ancient in me - Death itself, my own inner Reaper, that takes those thought-threads and makes them, holding them in. All thoughts are of no consequence until the Ego turns them to bones and stones and walls.
And so this is good news - because the message is finally getting through that this part of me is necessary and as loveable as any other. In a monotheistic conceptual universe I may be tempted to solar heroics and 'shining the light of consciousness' upon my Ego's bone-making, but instead I am going to love and honour all of it like I would my own mother.
I'm going to come right out and say it, because I know of at least one person who'll ask me about this; yes, I have been a mad, lonely ol' bag of late, and this all makes perfect sense to me.
I believed that the Mercury archetype makes madness - the Trickster that sends us all a bit batty with ideas and stories and magic. I blamed my slippery-quick mind for soaking up ideas and confusing me - no besieging me - with constant dialogue and argument. I thought I had a brilliant but unruly child in me, who wants wants wants. So many questions, twice as many answers. Too much!
But lately came the revelation that its the Saturn/Senex part of the Senex/Puer syzygy that's the real pain-maker. Its the Big Daddy Ego that gives form to the spirited, tricky, mercurial wisps of thought. All the stories in the world cannot be real without the Saturnine 'fixing' of them.
What I mean is that its now apparent that its the threshold dweller; the terminating, opening-and-closing, border-guarding, ancient in me - Death itself, my own inner Reaper, that takes those thought-threads and makes them, holding them in. All thoughts are of no consequence until the Ego turns them to bones and stones and walls.
And so this is good news - because the message is finally getting through that this part of me is necessary and as loveable as any other. In a monotheistic conceptual universe I may be tempted to solar heroics and 'shining the light of consciousness' upon my Ego's bone-making, but instead I am going to love and honour all of it like I would my own mother.
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