Cosmic Play

I saw Rilke’s letter advising that “perhaps all of our dragons are princesses” as a poetic way of relating to symptoms. In this research course I did Internet research for the first time, and I can honestly say that Google changed my life, because as I typed in dragons and depression, I eventually found an article by Stanislav Grof (2000b, online) about his recently released book Psychology of the Future, on a website called Lila! So for me play, research and the Internet have been combined from the beginning. The Internet is the domain of Hermes, god of communication (Neville, 1992)!

Jung’s decision to “play childish games” (Jung, 1961/1989, p. 174) was a turning point in his fate and it has likewise been for me in many more ways than I can express here. I was drawn to play initially and have continued to heed its synchronistic call. Like Jung, I have “consciously submitted myself to the impulses of the unconscious” (p. 173). Because play likes to slip through the interstices, while recalling my play-related experiences at Pacifica, I will mention some of the relevant play literature prior to the formal section containing the overview of the literature.

In our first course on Jung, the book The Creation of Consciousness (Edinger, 1984), and the Bollingen stone, which adorns its cover, entered my consciousness. In this course, Slater (2000, lecture) used the film The Day the Earth Stood Still (Wise, 1951, motion picture) to explicate the “Job archetype.” As I sat in class, it dawned on me that Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer’s (Rankin & Bass, 1964, televison production) story was archetypally similar. I was taken with the image of the stone and used it in my paper, modifying it slightly—my second act of bricolage, substituting Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer in the middle instead of the Telesphoros.

That quarter we also had a course on Introduction to Depth Psychology, where we were introduced to the concepts of rupture, liminality, and restoration, which I found fascinating. I was also very taken with the ideas of communitas and the threshold, as well as Anzaldua’s (1999, 2000) concept of nepantla, as I explored a single liminal scene in my favorite movie—Mary Poppins (Stevenson, 1964, motion picture). My favorite line in that movie comes from the song “A Spoonful of Sugar”: “In every job that must be done there is an element of fun, you find the fun, and snap the job’s a game.” This has come to be one of my mottos in life. So, the question is, where is the fun in a dissertation? For me, the Internet is the answer.

During my second quarter, I was reading Marion Woodman’s (1985) book, The Pregnant Virgin, and came across a paragraph from Victor Turner’s (1988) article “Body Brain and Culture,” written in 1983, which discusses play. Needless to say it made a big impression on me, and I later bought the book, The Anthropology of Performance, in which that article appeared and took it with me to India for my fieldwork project along with Stanislav Grof’s (2000a) Psychology of the Future. Not surprisingly, my first year community fieldwork centered around liminality, and my own experiences in India helped me realize the importance of play during liminal times. For my second year of community fieldwork, I did a project with second and third graders at Webster Elementary school in Malibu, California. I asked them to consider the question “how would you tell someone from outer space about what play is?” and to then create a drawing that would reflect this. Although I considered the project to be a total failure, as far as my expectations went, it was wonderfully illuminating and very humbling: I learned what should have been obvious from the start, that play does not like to be overly structured, and that assigning someone to play, takes all the fun and play out of the activity. The kids managed to play anyway, along the margins, and taught me a great deal.

Fast forwarding to our 2003 final project, I invented a game, inspired by a holotropic breathwork session, to show that Grof’s cartography and basic perinatal matrices (BPMs) were similar to concepts encountered in other courses that my classmates and I had taken along the way. [link to GTT] The game illustrated Grof’s and Tarnas’s findings regarding the parallels between the archetypal patterns present in the birth process and the archetypes of the four outer planets, and how these patterns iterated in our coursework. I called the game Monomythopoly ™ in honor of Joseph Campbell, who inspired my coming to Pacifica in the first place, and we will return to explore this “cosmic” game and its implications later in the first part of the dissertation.

Jung’s Bollingen stone has continued to capture my imagination. The Bollingen stone has found its way into papers that I wrote for different courses. For example, in a course on alchemy, I saw parallels between the stone and other symbols of “visionary windows” such as the Monolith from 2001:A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968, motion picture) and the famous woodcut “The Spiritual Pilgrim Discovering Another World” (Romanyshyn, 2002, p. 174). In a class entitled “Psyche and the Sacred,” I substituted Marilyn Monroe for the Telesphoros image at the center and I discussed various numinous experiences. Other stones appeared to me in reveries about my dissertation in our “pod” class. Thus, it is no surprise to find that the Bollingen Stone with Hermes as Telesphoros would seem to be eternally returning, coming up a fourth (and Jungian) time as the centerpiece of my dissertation, helping me to explore the archetypal aspects of play.

Saved by the Stone!

I had been struggling with a way to tie together the many disparate topics that I wanted to cover, and it dawned on me that the Telesphoros side of the Bollingen Stone was the key. The Bollingen stone was carved by Jung as a monument to what his tower meant to him. The stone itself was to be the cornerstone of the enclosing wall for his garden. A triangular-shaped stone of specific dimension was ordered, but a square block—a perfect cube was sent. Upon seeing the stone, Jung realized that he had to have it. On the first side of the stone, which faces away from the lake, Jung carved a Latin alchemical verse referring to the lapis. On third side, which faces the lake, Jung carved a Latin inscription letting the stone speak in quotations from alchemy, and on the fourth side, the back face which he left blank, Jung wanted to inscribe “Le cri de Merlin” (Jung, 1961/1989, p. 228). On the second side, Hermes, as Telesphoros, is at the center—the Trickster. Perhaps the Telesphoros is also the symbol of the transcendent function itself, since he stands between the symbols of the masculine—Jupiter and the Sun on one side, and the feminine—Venus and the Moon on the other; between the structure of senex Saturn above and the puer/destruction of Mars below. Hermes, as the symbol of Mercury, is in the liminal space between these things. Hermes, as Telesphoros, is the figure that will lead us to the land of dreams. The inscription reads:

Time is a child—playing like a child—playing a board game—the kingdom of the child. This is Telesphoros, who roams through the dark regions of this cosmos and glows like a star out of the depths. He points the way to the gates of the sun and to the land of dreams. (Jung, 1961/1989, p. 227)

This Telesphoros side is the one that has caught my imagination. The Bollingen stone has much wisdom and is alchemical. I felt at the time that much tricky transformation and awakening insights lay in store. Slater (2001) reminds us of the important implications of play, noting that the alchemists “referred to their opus as ‘ludus puerorem,’ the play of children . . . . Depth psychology moves us to take pause and to play in a culture seriously dislodged from the rhythms of imaginal life and the undulations of the soul” (p. 245). Play is where instinct and image meet, where biology meets cosmology.

Using Victor Turner’s (1988) discussion of play as a jumping off point and the Bollingen Stone as my compass, I sought out an adventure with play, and let it inform me through story and synchronicity, through myth and mystery, through evolution and embodiment. I ventured into Hermes’s realm, and was tricked and tripped up at every turn, but the process was illuminating. I boldly embraced the adventure and struck out into the forest, the edges of chaos allowing myself to cascade down bifurcation points and meet up with strange attractors. On this “e-ticket ride,” I have explored play’s liminal spaces through different cultural creations. Little did I know that Jung’s stone would in the end prove elusive to me, just as it had to Maud Oakes (1987), author of The Stone Speaks.

I am reminded of the book The Phantom Tollbooth (Juster, 1993) the story of a boy’s imaginal journey into the nature of things, and a recent quote from the Internet: “Madness takes its toll, please have exact change” (White, 2002, online). Play has the ability to help us change. It deterritorializes the ego. The days of the devouring fathers (Stein, 1973) are numbered. Cronos emasculated Uranus when Uranus would not let all of his children out of the Earth. Cronos was dethroned by Zeus and forced to disgorge his children who Cronos had eaten. Interestingly, Cronos was tricked by his wife Rhea into swallowing a stone instead of Zeus, and Rhea is my middle name! Zeus remains, but he can be tricked. Hermes and others show us this. Perhaps we will play our way out as the sun sets over the last days of the patriarchy. Nero fiddled while Rome burned; maybe he was onto something, only tragically much too late.

End of section, continue to Continuing Overview of the Literature