I am back from my travels, keen to sit and write after joyful times, reunions and explorations. Meantime, here is the second excerpt of my conversation with Bonnie Bright, originally published in Earth, Climate, Dreams: Dialogues with Depth Psychologists in the Age of the Anthropocene . Here Bonnie and I delve into myths, dreams and human-animal relationships. Keen to hear your response on this, what resonates and what doesn’t? Although this conversation took place sometime ago, it refers to realms that are timeless.
For those who want more, here is the link to the full conversation.
Bonnie: Sally, you had a couple of chapters in Depth Psychology, Disorder and Climate Change edited by Jonathan Marshall. One of your chapters is called “Descent in the Time of Climate Change”, and in it you talk about looking at things mythologically. I think most of us would agree that we need a new myth because the story that we are living today as a collective culture is really not serving us very well. I wonder if you can say more about the idea of descent?
Sally: I was inspired in part by something Ginette Paris wrote, “The space between the old myth and the new myth is a deadly zone.” I feel that this is where we are collectively.
What I see is we are in the midst of shedding myths as we make our way through this deadly zone, and this is the beginning of the emergence of new cultural myths. Certainly, there is a sense of death with us as we face, not only climate change, but all sorts of destructions which are resulting from our current ways of living on this planet. These might seem very concrete, but they are also mythically-based, for example the belief that human activity cannot or does not affect global ecosystems. The shedding of old myths fertilises the ground for new myths which take into account the causes and effects of the losses and destructions, as we come to see and understand them.
Contemporary myths of capitalism, or globalisation, are not able, within their ideologies, to acknowledge our embeddedness in nature. They insist on seeing the natural world as being a bottomless bucket of free resources. We know these current myths aren’t holding water, holding life. They’re at their end point and we’re in this deadly place. And when we’re in the deadly place, mythologically, we go into the underworld.
The underworld myth that most inspires me, and has for many, many years, is the myth of Inanna and Ereshkigal, which is one of the oldest recorded myths from Sumerian times. Briefly what happens in it, is that the Queen of Heaven, Inanna, goes down to the Underworld to visit her twin sister Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Underworld who is in a rage of grief because her husband has died and no one is acknowledging her, or her grief. Erishkegal is furious with Inanna, who has been so loved and honoured in Heaven, while she has been so feared and neglected in the Underworld. Erishkigal orders that Inanna surrenders all the symbols of her rank and power on her descent into the Underworld through seven gates. So Inanna arrives before Erishkigal, naked and bowed low. And then Ereshkigal, enraged and grief-stricken, turns Inanna into a corpse and hangs her upside down on a meat hook.
I think for those of us who have lived such privileged lives in the West, not conscious of the costs of our lifestyles to others on the planet and to the planet itself, we are having to recognise now that we have had a somewhat Queen of Heaven-like existence, with all our privileges and abundance of material wealth and comforts. But now climate change awareness is sending us into a descent, we’re being compelled to go down into the Underworld to meet grief and death, to challenge and relinquish our privileges. Everyone told Inanna, “Don’t go down. Don’t go down. It won’t end well.” But she knew she had to. Just as we know that we have to go through a time of descent which will compel us to shed a lot of our old assumptions and beliefs and values, which are not only unsustainable, they’re destructive. They’re destructive of life on this planet, they’re destructive of others, and they’re destructive of our own psyches.
And then hanging on the meat hook – who knows what form that’s going to take? It’s not a quick process, all this letting go of who we have been and how we have lived. Some of this sacrifice we can anticipate and volunteer for. Some goes way beyond what we might want to volunteer for. But in the end what gets Inanna reborn and out of the Underworld are little creatures created by Enki, the god of water, wisdom and creation. These wise and humble creatures descend to the Underworld. They mirror Erishkigal’s grief, so when she says, “Oh, great is my woe,” they respond, “Oh, great is your woe, Erishkigal. Oh, how you suffer.” And it is their compassionate recognition which moves Erishkigal sufficiently to agree to release Inanna’s corpse to them. They then revive Inanna and send her back into the world on the condition that she or those close to her will spend time each year in Erishkigal’s underworld realm.
What I think this myth reminds us of is that life, and the transformations that feed life, require us to be humbled and relinquish who we have been in order to mature, and that losing our naivety about life and the world, means enduring loss and grief. Only through a deep descent and letting go, which is akin to death, can we come up transformed in some way, empowered by having faced into what is most often avoided or denied, not knowing what’s going to happen next.
Bonnie: A couple of things struck me about what you said. First of all, the little creatures, aren’t named. We don’t quite know what they are. I envision them as gnats, maybe, or little flies that come around. But in many ways, they represent the idea of witnessing, and of course, empathy. Because when you wholly witness something, rather than being just a spectator, then you begin to be able to mirror back those feelings. And the more that those feelings are mirrored back, the more that someone can move into them, which creates a field of its own that is not one person and not the other, but something different entirely. I guess it’s that capacity for something new to arise and to develop between people.
And then the other thing that occurs to me is those little creatures were ‘the other’, and of course, the other is anything that we don’t identify, recognise, acknowledge, and own for ourselves. But of course, it is part of us. Often we can only see it on the outside, and it becomes what’s called ‘the shadow”, right? And so, it occurs to me that animals hold that place of the other in this scenario because they are not human. And in the age of the Anthropocene, where humans are the front and centre and have created so much havoc and had such an impact on our planet, the animals are very much the ones that are suffering. Maybe as we bring this to a close, we could talk for a few minutes about the other that is in the form of the animal. How do animals come into all of this?
Sally: I had a huge series of dreams that pulled me into working with climate change. They were quite apocalyptic and quite despairing to begin with. But in each of those dreams, an animal leapt into my arms or approached and touched me. And I feel like that animal-being helped me to not get lost in a despairing frame of mind. One thought that I actually had in one of the dreams was, “Oh, when are humans going to go extinct, so the seas can be restored and the fish can thrive?” But in my dreams the animals reached out to me and helped me to understand that we’re all in it together, and that animals don’t want to punish us humans despite the guilt we carry. They just want us to be with them, to be touched by them, to relate to them and to work with them. We all know animals will work in partnership with humans beautifully. But are we humans really acknowledging our capacity, abilities, and need to work in relationship with animals and be with them? Can we listen to them, look into their eyes, and feel their being and their connectedness to us, and us to them?
I feel the animals are with us, but are we with the animals? We are, but we’re not knowing that. We’re holding that out of our consciousness. There are some very moving stories that come through in terms of that connecting to animal consciousness through dreams, and through experiences. For example, we’re seeing wild animals start to come into cities, probably because they’re very hungry and their habitats are being destroyed. But this is a breaking down of a separation. There are all these boundaries that our old myths have supported, human and nature, human and animal, city and wild, all those binaries and dualities are really being challenged. And if we can find that compassionate and relational response, we can find a way forward. One example is what’s called biomimicry where we develop ways of living and technologies which learn from and follow the ways of nature.
Bonnie: Yes, relatedness. And so we’ve come full circle back to the beginning question of how do we engage with the other, in groups, with relatedness, in order to create a container that can hold all of this and bring us into some kind of a new space where we can actually take advantage of the transformation that is available to us.
Sally: One fundamental thing: keep your resilience up around climate change. Go on the Internet and find some inspiring stories, around breakthroughs in doing things, or of thinking, which are based in a conscious connection to ecological functioning. There’s some fantastic stuff happening, and we really need to hold that along with the knowledge of the urgency, because I believe we’re well into the process of forming new myths, which are based on ecological consciousness and understandings of inter-connectedness. We can’t see it because we’re in the middle of it. There’s a lot of examples and stories out there which really illustrate a very different way of being and holding consciousness of human in world and world in human.
Click here for a free pdf of Depth Psychology, Disorder and Climate Change edited by Jonathan Marshall, which Bonnie references above.
Thank you Brigid 🙏 the work and gifts of these times
Inspiring and deeply encouraging. To recognise the good whilst also facing the darkness. Sending blessings to all. Brigid