ACHELOUS AND THE BUTTERFLY:
TOWARD AN ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY OF HUMOR
To be yourself, just yourself, is a great thing. And how does one do it, how does one bring it about? Ah, that’s the most difficult trick of all. It’s difficult just because it involves no effort … nothing is unimportant. Nothing. Instead of laughter and applause you receive smiles. Contented little smiles—that’s all. But it’s everything—more than one could ask for.
—Henry Miller, The Smile at the Foot of the Ladder
This crown of laughter, the rose-wreath crown: to you, my brothers, I throw this crown. Laughter I have pronounced holy: you higher men, learn—to laugh.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Lurking somewhere between the lines of Miller and Nietzsche is a modern truism that goes something like this: a sense of humor is vital to the authentic lite of a self, a society, even to the vitality of the cosmos and the gods. So indubitable is this sentiment in contemporary consciousness that questions are seldom raised about the matter of a functioning sense of humor. The truism lacks depth because we fail to imagine—to give image to—humor’s figuration and meaning. Thus we ask: What collective fantasy informs man’s happy hope about a sense of humor?
On the few occasions that this issue has been probed, the analysis has been prosecuted by those whose literalistic, positivistic, and behavioristic modes of thinking and speaking have functioned in fact to reduce the matter of humor’s sense to a not-so-smiling and not-so-laughing conclusion, with the result that the sense-of-humor fantasy evaporates before our human understanding. What we are then left with is a residual and somewhat impotent senex seriousness that turns the truism into its moralistic opposite: namely, the conclusion that laughter is bad!
For example: Aristotle, in his intellectualistic way, cites two sorts of laughing and laughable men—the braggadocio and the boor. The one makes fun of everything, thereby laughing too much; the other takes everything seriously, thereby being himself laughable. Both types are to be avoided.1 Saint Ambrose and Saint John Chrysostom are two of the theologians that the rationalistic and doctrinal Aquinas lists as taking quite seriously the Biblical injunction: “Woe to you who laugh.”2 In Freud’s writings the philosophical and theological advice against laughter is qualified psychologically, and we are encouraged to think all jokes and witticisms phallically aggressive, hostile, and comparable to those other antisocial behaviors—the belch and the passing of air.3 More recently there are those “sensitized” at Esalen Institute who, on discovering the function of their joke-telling and laughing vis-à-vis other persons, have given up the practice of joking altogether in the name of humanness.
This list of testimonies could be lengthened extensively, but the point that begins to take hold reminds one of the South American Indians who have a sacred taboo against laughter. About these tribesmen Lévi-Strauss tells us that eighteen of their twenty myths dealing with laughter connect it to death and destruction. The elders view laughter as effeminate and to be avoided.4 One thinks also of the advice Lord Chesterfield gave his son. It is in the worst of taste, Chesterfield said, for a gentleman to laugh. Smile, perhaps; but laugh, never!5
What is wrong here is the assumption that wit and laughter, jokes and smiles, are the only expression of a sense of humor, that humor is in their expressions. This assumption neglects the possibility that the smile of Miller’s clown and the laughter of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra may be metaphors of certain archetypal forms, imaginal patterns,rather than only overt behaviors. Our hunch here is that there is more to humor than its smile. To take humor at its face value also betrays a literal bias and moral-mindedness that can hardly be expected to give adequate account of the richness of humor’s dimensions. Were we forever to leave humor in these hands, we would be neglecting to give humor a sense rooted in archetypal amplification. It would have no source and the sense of humor would have no sense. The present essay comprises some notes that hopefully may compensate this lacuna.
But there is a bit more in the present agenda. Nietzsche’s epigrammatic aside, that laughter is “holy,” linked to Miller’s hope, that the smile is “everything", suggests a possibility that archetypal explorations in humor may disclose some coordinates of the matrix of religion and psychology. The pronouncements of Miller and Nietzsche subtly imply that humor may provide a clue to the “hidden harmony", as Heraclitus called it, of myth and psyche.
Earth and Water
An etymology will allow us a point of departure into the problematic of humor’s sense. Though etymologies may be a sort of academic play with words, as Heidegger has observed, “it is not we who play with words, but the nature of language plays with us.”6 Hiding within words are eternal forms of human meaning, patterns and paradigms of psychic signification. The gods and the goddesses are there named. In searching a word’s history (the story of its mythos), one enters, as if for the first time in full consciousness, the evolution of meaning. Etymologies are like therapy: they differentiate what is deeply and collectively unconscious. Potentially, therefore, an etymology can relieve the repressions of over-rationalized fantasies and provide new and compensatory resources in the dream-like depths of sense.
Unfortunately in the case of “humor” we are stuck with a seemingly uninteresting history. “Humor” does not belong to a large family of terms with many rich associations. “Humor” has as its immediate relatives only “humid,” “humidity,” “humidor” and “humoresque.” Its lineage is from the Old French, and originally Latin, húmor or úmor, which is derived from húmére or úmére, meaning to be “moist.” Its ancient cousins are the Greek hugros, the Old Norse vökr, the Sanskrit uksati, the Old Iranian fual, and the Indo-European root ug- or udh-— all of which signify “moisture, sprinkling, and urine”7
Why, we may well wonder, when man wished to mean “humor” did he imagine “moisture”? What is it about wetness that suggests, not tears, but joy? Why did it once seem appropriate to picture in terms of fluid what we now think of abstractly as a sense of the comic. And where does one go for answers to these questions?
Ben Jonson provides a clue. Though the theory of the four humors was by no means novel with Jonson’s writing, he handles this medieval medical hypothesis in a new way. Jonson links the old “humours” physiognomy to a theory of dramatic genres coined apparently by Roman schoolmen. The result is a new view of comedy.
In Jonson’s “induction” to his play Every Man Out of His Humour(1599), Asper explains that “humour” is an ens, an essence of man that flows from the idiosyncratic balance of his four fundamental fluids: namely, the blood, the phlegm, the choler, and the melancholer (melancholy). They are called “humours,” Asper explains, because they have “moisture and fluxure,” or, as he says later, “by reason that they flow continuously.” But these “humours” may be viewed “by metaphor” to apply to “the general disposition”:
As when some one peculiar qualityDoth so possess a man, that it doth drawAll his affects, his spirits, and his powers,In their confluxions, all to run one way,This may be truly said to be a humour.8
The implication clearly is that one of the “humours” may take precedence in a particular person, acting as a sort of controlling metaphor or “objective correlative” for all the rest. Thus we may characterize a person as being sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic. It is not that the other fluids are missing; it is simply that they have been repressed, or better, pressed into the service of the one, all of them, therefore, running “one way.”
A further step backwards, from the sixteenth- to the twelfth-century, will reveal the further peculiarity of colors being assigned to each of the humours: red for blood; yellow for choler or bile (compare our word “cholera”); dark blue or black for melancholer; and green for phlegm. The medieval theorist located the source of the fluids in the hypochondia (literally, “under the musculature of the lower breastplate,” i.e., in the center cavity of the body), and he called the name of the proper harmony of the fluids temperamentum or complexio. The opposite of having a tempered or temperate complex or complexion was, of course, a distemper or what we would now call disease.9
It is tempting to leap to the conclusion that the interplay of the humors corresponds to four modes of being human: irony and wit to the sanguine; dry humor to the phlegmatic; belly laughter to the choleric; and black or sick humor to the melancholic—the ideal humor of the humors being a precarious balance among the four. But this sort of conclusion would be superficial and simplistic. The matter of humor is deeper. Juggling words and concepts—matching modes of the comic with character types—will not do. In so doing a problem of words and ideas may have been solved on the surface; but the mystery of humor still evades our meditation, like the fluxure of moisture that continually flows in and out, waiting to be tapped as a resource of life.
The mystery of moisture as a source of life: it turns out that this is precisely the secret behind the secrets, like the humor of the humors, in several alchemical traditions. The spirit of life in everything was identified by certain alchemists to be a humidum radicale, a deep moisture, which was sometimes referred to as aqua vitae, the water of life. But by far the best water, the one whose energies held the power of transformation, was the aqua vitae that was also aqua sicca, or dry water; distilled seven times seven, it attained the quality of pure spirit. It was aqua manus non madefaciens, the water that did not make one’s hands wet. This is the humor we are after: the deep humor of the spirit, whose mystery is unwittingly attested to in the alchemist’s lore.10 Indeed, it would be unadventuresome to stay with the tempting conclusion of the last paragraph when “the holy mystery of water” still flows before us. “Felix sacramentum aquae nostrae,” as the theologian Tertullian proclaimed it.11
Kerényi once wrote that “water is the most mythological of the elements.”12 Why? And in what sense? Of course there was the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales, in whose cosmological speculation water came to be identified as the first principle of everything. He also apparently said that “all things are full of gods.”13 Perhaps in light of his saying about water, the gods to whom he refers are water gods, hudór theion, which is the name of the alchemist’s patron, Mercurius, “divine water” or hydrargyrym or argentum vivum, “quick silver.”14
Aristotle links Thales not of course to alchemy, but to mythological stories, perhaps the sort Kerényi had in mind, about Okeanos-and Tethys, the waters above and the waters below, which, on con-verging, become the parents of creation, like the similar watery creation mythologems in Egypt and Polynesia,15 In the Koran, Moses is made to declare that he will not rest until he has discovered “the junction of the two oceans” (maima’ al-bahrain), as if the coming together of the waters above and the waters below has not only the function of original creation, but also that of re-creation, rejuvenation, and redemption in the ultimate day.16
What is most surprising in this mythologem is the frequency among diverse cultures of a theme reminiscent of what was later to become attached to the human body. When the waters above and the waters below come together at creation, the blissful Eden of the originative moment is characterized by the flowing of four rivers. The constitution of the body is a microcosmic recapitulation of the macrocosm. So in Genesis 2: 10–14 we read about the four rivers of paradise flowing from the water of life that nourishes the tree at the center of the garden. But the testimonies are not limited to the Ancient Near East: in Hindu mythology the four rivers flow from Mount Meru; in Iranian tales they are located in the realm of the Blest and flow from the fountain of Arduisir; in Tibet, on the Hill of Hamavata, the four rivers flow from the root of the Zampu tree of life; in China the location is the Kwan-lum hills; in Slavic mythology the four rivers come from a magic stone, Alatuir, in the island paradise of Bonvan; in Scandanavian tales the four rivers come from the spring, Hvergelmir, in Asaheim, the home of the gods. There are similar accounts to be found among the Sioux, Aztec, Mayan, and Polynesian peoples.
But note well what has become of the four rivers of paradise during the “fall” of the West! In Homeric epic we read of the four springs outside the cave of Circe. But by the time of Plato the rivers have had to go underground, as if another symbology attached to a very different sort of human meaning had taken ascendency. In the Phaedo, Socrates tells a different story; it is his last tale. Contemplating the adventure and liveliness of his coming death, Socrates comforts his disciples by telling them that surely Aeschylus was wrong in describing the journey of the soul after death as following a single path. The topography allows for richer possibilities. The earth is a sphere suspended in ether. Inside the earth are hollows, and out of the hollows flow the underground rivers that will guide the soul on its way. Socrates names the rivers according to Orphic cosmogony: Acheron (“Mourning”), Kokytus (“Lamenting”), Lethe (“Forgetting”), and Pyrephlegethon (“Flame”),18 The rivers of paradise surely have shifted their shape!
The Greek description may be compared with the Jewish apocalyptic motif of the waters of life flowing from the cavity in the rock that lies under the throne of the Lord (see Ezekiel 47: 1–12; Psalms 46: 4; and compare Revelation 22: 2). If the rivers of paradise went underground by the time of Plato, the tone remained, if not blissful, surely purgatorially neutral. However, by the time of the Divine Comedy the rivers flow out of the cavities of hell, and the whole scene is darkly negative in the extreme. Why? What has happened to transform the waters of life into the waters of death?
There is a clue in Western Christian iconography; paintings of paradise produce a curious datum. One might have thought that the four rivers of paradise would be a natural subject for representation. Indeed, until the thirteenth century one does find, but only here and there, a manuscript page with the rivers pictured boldly.19 But William Blake’s sketch of the water of life (1805) is symbolic of the curiosity: he names the picture “Tree of Life.” And so it is in the tradition. Characteristically, when paradise is imagined by Christian artists, it is the tree that appears, not the waters. The classic instance is the bay window at Chartres, and, as in this case, the tree in the garden combines with the tree of Jesse and the cross of Jesus.
Of course, the waters do go with the tree. The latter needs the former for nourishment. But in the Western tree tradition this is precisely what was forgotten. In theological and philosophical systems of thinking we do not have examples of the tree as lapis, or feminine numen, or serpent wisdom, but rather we have a simple one-sided “wooden-ness” that forgets its roots in the moist earth and whose rigidity is devoid of vital juices. The waters have gone underground, and we have lost touch with our sensing of the humors, because our traditional axis mundi turns out to be all bark.
Our tree tradition has in the process grown quite proud of its ladder-like reaching toward heaven, forgetting thereby its source, which thereupon returned to the earth and became a shade in the dark depths of mourning. Masculinely aggressive and dogmatic theologies supported this movement so that the more contemplative mystical tradition, being fluid in its theological mode, haunted the orthodox lineage as a shadow and often became viewed as marginal at best and sometimes outright heresy. It is not surprising that such a tree and its concomitant theologizing has lost its liveliness in our own time. We may as well chop it up for firewood and pray for the wings of a Phoenix or the dance of a Shiva!
Barfield provides a tentative conclusion concerning the lost humors, the bodily fluids, when he says: “It seems for the moment as though some invisible sorcerer had been conjuring them all from inside ourselves—sucking them away from the planets, away from the outside world here we have the mythological theme of the four rivers], away from our own flesh and blood [the humors of the body], down into the shadowy realm of thoughts and feelings. There they still repose.”20 When the mythological symbol-system dropped away in favor of a more sophisticated view of the cosmos, the rivers went underground into the human body. And when the ancient and medieval physiognomy was replaced by a more scientific view of anatomy, something else happened. It is this “something else” that does not allow us to stop here. Barfield’s phrase, “the shadowy realm of thoughts and feelings,” indicates where we have yet to explore. The rivers have gone underground into the unconscious.
Freud has already been mentioned on the contra side of wit and laughter. Therefore it is not surprising to find his hermeneutic identifying dreams of water as manifest contents signifying latent regressive tendencies toward an intra-uterine return. Though Freud may have moved us in the right direction in attempting to locate humor in the unconscious, he himself still belonged to the phallic-tree tradition, and therefore his aggressive view of humor, so like that of Hobbes, may be in need of some modification in the light of the mythological evidence we have adduced.21
Ferenczi helps in the modification. Taking into account the full mythological scope of water symbolism, Ferenczi re-envisioned Freud’s hermeneutic. His focus was upon the mature sex act rather than upon infantile perversity. Coitus, he argued, is a recollection of the struggle of the primal creature among its ancestors who suffered the great catastrophe of the drying up of the sea. Post coitus omne animal triste: following copulation man suffers the drying up. The climax, therefore, is to enter the waters, swim freely there, finding that, in spite of the anticipation of castration or regressive fixation, one can emerge anew, only to re-enter and reach the goal once again.22 The meaning is deep in the psyche and it is intimately connected with the fluids of one’s body, as well as with the mythology of one’s phylogenesis.
By returning the argument near to transformations like those of alchemy, Ferenczi moves us towards Jung’s psychology. Jung often mentioned the “four rivers” when speaking of Gnostic and alchemical images of the self.23 In the context of the physiognomy of the humors and the mythology of the four rivers, it would not seem overly bold to say that the humors are the four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. This nomenclature has the advantage of differentiating more precisely than did either Freud or Ferenczi the psychology of humor; but most importantly it places Jung’s psychology of the four functions in a mythological, which is to say, an archetypal, framework.
Jung himself told us not to think of the functions as empirical descriptions. Rather, the function theory is a way of seeing and of speaking about empirical realities. It is a mythos. And above all, Jung warned us, we should not use the functions as a way of “putting people into this box or that.” He said: “It is no use at all putting people into drawers with different labels.”24 What is the “use,” then, of the psychology of the functions? It is the same “use” that the physiognomy of humors (read the quotation from Ben Jonson again) and the mythology of the rivers have.
Jung’s typology is a mythology, a fantasy. An archetypal psychology of the humor of the humors can help us to re-mythologize the very psychology that gives us clue to humor itself. When viewed in the context of a sensing of humor, our therapy may take on a moisture,25 not being so analytic and “dry,” but rather truly archetypal, possessed by a sense of humors, rather than being monolithic and overly-masculine in an unwitting and witless capitulation to a tree-tradition theology and an occidental rationalistic philosophy. Therapy then could be a making contact with earthy resources, where the water of life is still bubbling away at the crux of four rivers. The health of the humor is sensed in the harmony of the humors. It all happens at the emptied cavity in the center of the self, which is also, for purposes ot psychic meaning, the center of the universe. It is out of the deep emptiness that vitality flows.26 Albertus Magnus said: “In quiet and repose of the humors, the soul attains understanding and prudence.”27
“In tranquil water how close the surface and the depths are,”28 Bachelard wrote. And Goethe, in one of his conversations with Eckermann, urged “aqueous affirmation,” the drawing of the vapors into oneself, as opposed to “aqueous negation,” the allowing of moisture to dry up in the air, earth, and fire of life. So it is that Jung wrote:
The water of life is easily had: everybody possesses it, though without knowing its value. ‘Spernitur a stultis’—it is despised by the stupid, because they assume that every good thing is always outside and somewhere else, and that the source in their own soul is a ‘nothing but’ … The treasure has sunk down again into the unconscious.29
And there it still reposes, said Barfield, meaning by the “it” the humor for which all men hope.
Fire and Air
It is indeed tempting to think that by identifying the psychology of a physiognomy of a mythology we have thereby completed an amplification of a sense of humor’s collective fantasy. But to think this way is an academic seduction. There is still another side, a shadow of a shade, as it were, the fantasy of the fantasy itself. We are not finished—by no means. When earth and water go to sleep they dream of fire and air. The marvelous reveries on the elements by Bachelard make this point (see L’Air et les songes; La Terre et les rêveries du repos; L’Eau et les rêves; La Psychanalyse du feu). It is a mistake to go to sleep in the middle of one’s own dream, the dream of the felix sacramentum aquae nostrae, the happy sense of humor’s mystery. Yes, we would be remiss if we failed to point to the mistakes we have already made.
(1) A methodological problem has been plaguing our sentences. M.-L. von Franz has pointed to the faux pas of the intellectual who analyzes archetypal materials. By overlooking the emotional and feeling factors and by making archetypal images into patterns of thought, anything can become anything. Start with four rivers and the whole world can end up in a watery conflux! And all one has accomplished is betraying one’s own psychology.30 More directly to the case of our argument, Hillman has written that “attempts to equate the functions with these older principles do not quite work—feeling with water or with phlegm—since each age has its appropriate ciphers for expressing this archetypal metaphor and translations of it violate the context of the symbol.31
(2) There is a mythico-religious problem, also. Half the story has been omitted—in fact, the half that would have provided the feeling and intuitive contents (von Franz), and that would have replaced the archetypal metaphor in its symbolic context (Hillman). Barfield, when speaking of “humor” divulges the other side of the story: “The medieval scientist believes with Hippocrates that the arteries (Greek aer, air) were ducts through which there flowed, not fluids but three different kinds of ether (Greek aither, the upper air) or spirits (Latin spiritus, breath, life), viz. the animal (Latin anima, soul), the vital, and the natural.”32 Apparently the breaths of life, the anima, are vaporized humors, whose transformation is important for a deeper humor.
(3) Jung, with the help of alchemical symbols, reminded us of the psychological dilemma that confronts us. The waters that are manifested as the four rivers of paradise whose axis is the tree with serpent atop and lapis at the base (“the paradise quaternio”) tend not to stay put as an image of meaning. Rather, the waters become transformed through a dynamic alchemy into the image of the four elements centered by a lapis top and a rotundum base ("the lapis quaternio").33 Just as an adequate picturing of the alchemical process does not allow the four waters to stagnate, so a proper archetypal psychology of humor is mistaken if it fails to follow the humors through their various transformations. A monomorphic archetype will never be able to account for the dynamic aspect of humor.
(4) There is, too, a serious theological problem in the humors business. Saint John of the Cross warned the novitiate on the mystical path never to confuse the authentic aridity that characterizes the true purgation of the soul with its masquerading look-alike, humor.34 Heraclitus bears witness to the same phenomenon of spirituality when he notices that it is “death to become water,” since “the dry soul (psyché) is wisest and best.35 Saint Paul, too, noticed that entering the waters at baptism is a kind of dying.
All these problems—mythico-religious, theological, psychological, and methodological—could be transcended were not our argument and its image of humors-as-waters so ponderous. Were the matter lighter, had it more levity, in short, more humor, we would feel it to be dynamic, lively human, and natural. The waters cannot flow—indeed, they get trapped in the earth and grow stagnant, if there is no air flowing through them to keep them bubbly. Or to put it differently: just as fish cannot live in waters that are devoid of airs, neither are the humors humor without some vaporization and recycling. We need air in the waters.
One way to get on with the story, so as to get the air into the water, is to tell how the air (spiritus, psyché) got left out of the water, producing the humorless onesidedness we have suffered in our theologies, philosophies, and perhaps in our psychologies too. The story will reveal that it was not a vaporization that caused our lack of spiritedness and vitality, but simply that the air drowned in the waters. It all has to do with imaginal attempts to express the self; and the story, like our very Western being, has its roots in Greece. It is the story of psyché, and it begins with Anaximenes.
In imagining the self in its spirited aspects, Anaximenes used both psyché and pneuma, and he meant by both the image of air-soul (aér). Yet the usage of pneuma did not catch on at first, and psyché was the dominant metaphor. The analogy between psyche and pneuma is in fact striking: psyché is to psychó as pneuma is to pneó.36 This is simply to recognize the commonplace that both psyché and pneuma body forth the active, verbal image of breathing or blowing, as the wind.
In Homeric literature, psyché was eidolon, a “phantom,” as an image reflected in water. Also, the Iliad uses the image “smoke” to picture psyché, and the Odyssey uses “shadow,” this latter corresponding to Pindar’s picturing of psyché as a “second self” or alter-ego. Pindar also equated psyché and kardian. So it was believed that if a person could not see his eidolon in a mirror, it was a sign of impending death. This belief is similar to the custom among Florida Seminoles, who, when a woman was dying in childbirth, held the newly-born infant over the mother’s face to receive the parting spirit, a sort of artificial resuscitation.37
At the beginning of the evolution of spirit’s consciousness, Heraclitus gave us these enigmatic words:
You could not discover the limits of psyché, even if you traveled every road to do so; such is the depth (bathos) of its meaning (logos).
(Psyché) is the vaporization out of which everything else is derived; moreover it is the least corporeal of things and is in ceaseless flux, for the moving world can only be known by what is in motion.
Psyché is vaporized from what is moist,
A dry psyché is wisest and best.38
Sometime later, in a time when mythological and poetic imagination had already become transformed into philosophical and rhetorical modes, the Greeks found psyché too fluid a term. Its usage died out and pneuma (a term Aristotle used to mean “flatulence”!) replaced psyché as the image of the spirited self. At this time psyché’s usage is relegated to its secondary meanings, and the word and its cognates (e.g., psychros) come to mean “cold.” Life goes out of psyché as one moves from myth to philosophy, from Dorian and Ionian settlement to City-State, from peace to war, from oral to written tradition, from the enervating warmth of a deep breath to the damp chill of death that is an aesthetized Being without meaning.
Apuleius’s fairy tale, “Amor and Psyche,” discloses another reason for the death of psyché. Since Psyche is feminine, Eros can only have life through Psyche, and Psyche only in Eros. Psyche without Eros and Eros without Psyche is death. But the conjugation of the two results not only in life, but also in new life: “soon a daughter was born to them—in the language of mortals she is called Pleasure.”39 This tale, and presumably its potential Pleasure, goes underground when the moisture of Christendom’s baptismal waters kills psyché by a usage of pneuma. Western Christian culture adopted pneuma as a neuter, never feminine, grace. But the “eternal feminine” cannot forever be forgotten.40
It is a long way—the transformations of the image of psyché—such is the depth of its logos: from the air/wind/breath of the Ionians, through the phantom/shadow/shade of the epics and the cult of the dead, the winged-daimon of the Orphics and Attic tragedy, to Socrates, about whose use of psyché Jaeger observes, “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own psyché?”41
Pneuma could never do the imagination’s realistic job, as psyché did. For pneuma leads too quickly to the non-imaginative and rationalistic nous. Spirit, in this fashion, like the German Geist and the French esprit, “had come to mean rational, intellectual, ideological” and it therefore “belongs to the world of the decaying kind of man.”43 “The soul,” writes Heidegger with a clue from the poet Trakl, “is the gift of the spirit—the spirit animates. But the soul in turn guards the spirit, so essentially that without the soul the spirit can presumably never be spirit.43
Unfortunately, the Church Fathers, and thereafter the “wooden” Christian culture of the West, adopted pneuma as its image of the spirited self. Already in the New Testament psyché is used only fifty-seven times to pneuma’s two hundred and seventy-four occurrences. Over half the uses of psyché are in the Gospels and the Acts, and only four are in the Pauline Epistles. So much is this the pattern that Paul comes to call psychikoi bad and pneumatikoi good.44It is the same with the Fathers (with perhaps the exception of Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, who hardly carried the day on the question of theological psychology). Pneuma is regarded as the opposite of psyche, in spite of the fact that in early Greek usage they meant both “soul” and “spirit.”45 The Christian culture learned much from the Greeks, but little of it had to do with the educated imagination. By the time the Christians got the myths, they were pure ideas, which the Christians made into categories of thinking and called theology. It was as if the Church, and then the civilization, systematically forgot what was an axiom to the early Greeks, that pneuma is the psyché of man.46
It would seem that the story of psyché leads to no humor at all—no way to get air into water, or some moisture into the airs. But right at the end there is a strangeness that changes the whole tale, if only we could feel its meaning. Plato had called psyché a “winged animal,”47 and he had said that psychés proper erotic, philosophic, prophetic, and poetic function is “to fly.”48 Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Plutarch, with neither etymological justification nor philosophical, biological, nor psychological precedent, use psyché to mean “moth” or “butterfly.”49 This is reminiscent of Eliphaz, when speaking to Job, making “moth” a surrogate term for God, though without having religious justification or precedent in Wisdom literature.50 And it is like Jesus, in a cultural context in which moth is synonymous with destruction,likening the heart that treasures the Kingdom to a situation in which the moth does not corrupt.51
Jung had mentioned that “the Greek word psyché also means butterfly,”52 but he never said why, nor did he ever press the point. The Miller fantasies, particularly the “Song of the Moth” (CW 5) might have been a clue to help account for these odd uses of psyché, as might have been Freud’s saying, had he taken his own image as something more than a mere figure of speech: “I believe I am in a cocoon, and heaven knows what sort of creature will emerge from it.”53
Certainly the moth knows the secret of the transformation from moist humus to the airs whose true fascination is the element that itself transforms the moisture of earth into air: fire! But to say this is quite a different thing from seeing the “feeling and intuitive contents” of the fantasy in their full “symbolic context.” For this human task only poets and mythographers suffice.
Serrano related the story of Piktor’s Metamorphosis, a tale that the aged Herman Hesse had illustrated with watercolors and had given, as a token of friendship, to Serrano. The narrative recounts the process by which Piktor, whose name suggests both imagemaker and victor, receives a new name and discovers “the truth of eternal metamorphosis, because he had been changed from a half to a whole.” The central metaphor of this process of the psyche’s alchemy is figured in a dream fantasy which is the answer to Piktor’s question, “Where can one find happiness?” A bird with feathers like a peacock, reflecting all the colors of the spectrum, responds: “Happiness is everywhere—in the mountains and the valleys and in every flower.” With this the bird stretched and shook its feathers. As it settled back it had become a flower, the feathers now leaves and petals and the claws, roots. The flower then rustled its leaves and began to float upwards into the air, and Piktor noticed it was no flower at all, but a butterfly. It was a butterfly that now glided to earth, like a snowflake, and on the earth was transformed into “a crystal radiating a deep red light.” But the earth seemed to absorb the light, for it was gradually disappearing into the ground. Piktor grasped at the jewel, held it tightly in his hand, “because it seemed a talisman for every adventure in the world.” At that moment a serpent slid from a nearby tree and whispered to Piktor, “This jewel can transform you into anything you wish.”54
John Keats (“Surely I dreamt today, or did I see / The winged Psyche with awakened eyes?"),55 and Denise Levertov (“only those [butterflies] / that lie dead revealing / their rockgreen color and the bold / cut of the wings”),56 among poets, are only two who join Hesse in his imagery of the butterfly-self. Among novelists, there is James Agee’s remarkable ending to A Death in the Family (“Maybe ‘miraculous’ was the way the colors were streaks and spots in patterns on the wings. …”),57 not to mention the butterfly-passage in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (“Genus Papilo and genus Morpho … regarded by the natives as evil spirits”).58 Portmann’s 1954 Eranos lecture, “Metamorphosis in Animals,” spells out in detail the mystical biology of butterflies, providing the background for understanding Mann’s butterfly discussion in the Leverkühn family: “I must leave it to the reader’s judgment whether that sort of thing is matter for laughter or tears.”59
Little by little we come closer to the waters of transformation and to humor, but in so doing we should remember that the imagery of the poets and novelists is by no means new, nor even is it as recent as Aristotle, Theophrastus, and Plutarch. The reference by Mann to “the natives” is the clue to the final step in our trek.
Among the Aztecs, Xochipilli-Centeotl is a young god of life, morning, procreation, and vegetation, who, like Amor in Apuleius’s tale, stands between night and day, and who, like Psyche among the Greeks, is mysteriously pictured as a butterfly.60
In northwest America, the butterfly is shown on the lips of the goddess as a breath-soul.61
In Samoa, the butterfly was a family god.62
In Germany, folklore makes the butterfly a source of babies.63
Among the Pimans, the Malagasians, and the Antimerinians, the butterfly is the name of the soul who creates, and back to whom we descend at death, often in butterfly form.64
Among the Finno-Ugric myths, there are to be found butterflies that are urts or souls, and witches who act, in butterfly-form, as shaman healers.65
Among the North Pacific coastal Indians, the soul of the dead arises out of parted waters as a butterfly.66
The Japanese have a kami- or spirit tale about “Mr. Butterfly and his Flowers” that parallels Hans Christian Andersen’s tale “The Butterfly.”67
The African Swahili say that Kukuwazuka, the “fowl of the ghosts,” is identical to Mantis, which is a butterfly, this being the totem object with taboo function and mana power.68
In Hawaii, abandoned souls feed on butterflies.69
In England, fairies sometimes take the form of butterflies.70
The Melanesians recount the story of a woman who, on hearing about a neighbor at the point of death, heard also a rustling sound and discovered a butterfly in her hut, caught it, took it next—a fascinating form of not-so-artificial resuscitation.71
Why this uniform testimony? Certainly it is already clear in our deepest experience that butterfly-like fluttering is the crux of life and liveliness. It is a fluttering we feel deep down when we are extremely nervous, and so our language speaks of “butterflies in the tummy!” And our speech is right, of course. It would be true to our deepest selves, too, to name the fluttering feeling of a heart attack or a nervous breakdown by the name “moth.” But happily the fluttering feeling is not always symptomatic of failing energies. The beating of butterfly’s wings is metaphorically the proper name for the source of that gentle influx of spirit’s energy that we occasionally feel when gently lifted sunward for a brief and quietly ecstatic moment of renewed vitality. Let us call it a sense of humor. But there is more.
Moths and butterflies are called lepidoptera, a name indicating that they have scales like fish but also wings like birds, as if lepidoptera transcend the earthly realm and are equally at home in the fertile dewy moisture and in drying airy skies. This imaginative clue from science tips us off to a double implication of the lepidopteran spirit of humor.
First, there is the important matter of the butterfly’s many-colored wings, which (like the tail of the Peacock in the alchemical tradition, like the Coat of Many Colors for Joseph, and like the Rainbow for the Greek goddess Iris and for Noah) suggests spiritual maturity, a maturity of psyché that allows for the richness of many views, many voluntary associations, many colorations. Let us always remember that without those colors a butterfly cannot in fact fly; yet those colors are refractions of mere dust.
Second, there is the equally important matter of the moth and its flame. Goethe tells of this dimension of great Spirit in a poem titled Selige Sehnsucht:
The stuff of life is what I praise,that longs to die in flames.In the assuagement of those nights of love which begot you,in which you have begotten,strange presentiments come upon youwhen the quiet candle gleams.You remain no longerheld in the overshadowing darkness, and new desire sweeps you upwardto more exalted mating.No distance makes you hesitate, you come flying and enchantedand at last, a moth eager for the light,you are burnt.
Then the poet concludes in his last stanza:
Until you have grasped this:Die and be transformed! —you will be nothingBut a sorry guest on the somber earth.72
Such is the dynamic of humor, the fire of Zarathustra that vaporizes moist tears into the quiet smiles of a master clown. When the poetess Sappho wrote, “my heart is a-flutter,”73 certainly the fluttering was the fluttering of butterflies’ wings. When we are released from our ego-spun cocoons, the result is a gentle breath of air, as if the beating of the deep wings of psyché creates the wind that will support her very flight. There simply is no pneuma, no spirited self, without psyché, because, in the imagination’s touch, there is neither breath nor wind, hence no humor, without the beating of wings that lift us sunward, out of the moisture, through the air, toward the fire, as butterflies are free.
“It is funny,” wrote Christou (meaning that it is not funny at all, “how men are always seeking to bypass the soul [psyché] in their attempt to get a shortcut to spirit [pneuma].”74 And now we may also say: it is funny (meaning what Christou meant by the word) how men are always seeking to bypass humor in their psychologies.
It is because of the cocoon. Bypassing and shortcutting are a syndrome of being all wrapped up, without humor. We may think there is a butterfly inside the wrapping, but it is only a worm. It is a butterfly when it emerges, which is why Goethe said, “Die and be transformed.” To say that the butterfly is not inside the cocoon is to say also, as Christou does, that psyché is not in man. That is where we went wrong in our Western imagination, imagining psyché to be “inside,” thereby subordinating psyché to ego, forgetting eros altogether. “The psyche is not in man, it is we who are inside the psyche.”75 Think of the butterfly and the moth—or rather, feel the fluttering—and the air and fire of the moisture will no longer be a problem, but an earthy mystery. There are many images of psyché, but the neglected image of psyché as butterfly is a clue to the humor archetype. It gives levity to moisture.
Naming the Gods
It may seem that there has been a considerable excursus from our original concern: namely, that of the collective fantasy regarding a sense of humor. But this is not at all the case.
Psyche as butterfly is the form of being at home in the interplay of the airs or ethers. This is so because she is the insect of shadows flitting light, and because some of her kind are keyed to the light of fire.
So, too, Achelous (for now we may say his name) as the river of rivers, eldest of the children of Tethys and Okeanos, is the form of being at home in the interplay of moistures (humors). This is so because he is the god and father of Castalia, who resists Apollo’s ego and becomes the source of the Muses’ creativity as a spring. Achelous himself resisted Heracles’s heroic laboring and, though Achelous failed against Heracles, he is thereby in his failure eternally linked to the earth rather than to the vaulted sky. Achelous can have Castalia as an offspring because he is flowing always, archetypally in Psyche. He is the River within the Spring, who is within the Muses. Achelous is a deep resource. He is the underground of humors.
It is not easy to see the point about Achelous until one has encountered the butterfly. Achelous lives dynamically only in relation to the butterfly; they are together the Heraclitean fluxure that is composed of waters and airs. An archetypal psychology of humor should always focus on both the watery-chthonic and the airy-fire, so as to avoid in its psychologizing the either/or of a rigid senex and a fleeing puer (butterflies are too much at home in the shadows to fly too high).
In our civilization it is doubtless the case that Apollo will catch up with Castalia and ravage her, just as Heracles will impose his utilitarian will and power upon Achelous.76 Similarly, the ego in such a civilization will think itself wind or flame (pneuma), not noticing that the source of the air and the lover of the flame (psyché) is a deep resource considerably more shadowy than the wind that makes all things cold and more shadowy, too, than the flame whose end is apocalypse.
It would seem that a sensing of the humors in such a time might indeed be worthwhile, for ourselves and for our psychology. Achelous and the butterfly know how, for together they are the source of the interplay of a double archetype. They are the collective fantasy of an archetypal form. The poet Robert Duncan feels this as his moist tears turn toward “an orange butterfly with an eye / of turquoise staring / even as I stare, lost in setting four / factors of something I am making / into motion.” And so he writes:
the soul . recognizes wingsas flight long known the coloritself a universe so nearonly my hands counting and eyesnaming these thingsholds at bay what is from me.77
In recognizing the “wings as flight long known,” the poet points toward the source of humors, a veritable Daphne, transformed and become Psyche, feeling herself Laurel, whose moisture desires Apollo’s thinking to become erotic wind in her branches and water on her roots. The wind she wishes is, as Rilke said, not a rash breath, the song of the ever-too-young, but it is the breath round Nothing’s tear, the emptied cavity at the center, whose presence is the very being of the interplay of waters and airs, and whose source, as it now appears to me, is Achelous’s flow and the beating of butterflies’ wings.
NOTES
1. Aristotle, The Ethics (Baltimore: Penguin, 1955), iv. 7 (pp. 131 ff.).
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), Pt. II–11, Quest. 168, Arts. 2–4.
3. See Freud’s Jokes and the Relation to the Unconscious (1905) and his article “Humor” (1928). Also: Martin Grotjahn, Beyond Laughter (New York: McGraw-Hill, Blakiston, 1957).
4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 122–33.
5. The letter is dated London, March 27, o.s. [Old Style Julian Calendar], 1747. See Letters of Lord Chesterfield (New York: Oxford University Press, World Classics, 1929).
6. Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), p. 118.
7. Eric Partridge, Origins (New York: Macmillan, 1959), p. 299.
8. Cited in: Paul Lauter, ed., Theories of Comedy (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1964), p. 117.
9. Owen Barfield, History in English Words (London: Faber and Faber, 1926), pp. 136–38.
10. C. G. Jung, Alchemical Studies, CW 13 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), par. 255; Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 528.
11. De baptismo I; cited in: Hugo Rahner, Greek Myths and Christian Mystery (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), p. 69.
12. Cited in Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie (New York: Orion Press, 1969), p. 177.
13. Philip Wheelwright, ed., The Presocratics (New York: Odyssey Press, 1966), p. 45.
14. See Jung. CW 13, par. 255.
15. Aristotle, Metaphysics 938b7; cf. Wheelwright, op. cit., p. 47.
16. See: The Koran (Baltimore: Penguin, 1961), p. 94; and cf. Theodore Gaster, Myth, Legend, and Custom in the Old Testament (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), pp. 26f.
17. Ibid. See also Jung, Aion, CW 9.2, pars. 288, 311, 336.
18. Plato, Phaedo 107d–115a; cf. Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill (Boston: Gambit, 1969), pp. 179–230. See also Walter Wili, “The Orphic Mysteries and the Greek Spirit,” in Joseph Campbell, ed., The Mysteries: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955), pp. 64–92.
19. See the illustrations in Jung, Aion, CW 9.2, pp. 130, 219. The classical instance of a description and explanation of quarternarian religious symbology is Radulphus Glaber, Historarum libri quinque, Lib. 1, Cap. 1, in Migne, Patrologia Latina, CXLII, col. 613, edited by Maurice Prou (Paris, 1886), pp. 2f. This text is explicated by Joan Evans, Cluniac Art of the Romanesque Period (Cambridge: University Press, 1950), pp. 110–13 (“The Quaternities”); see also figs. 191a & 191b. At the top of several monastery columns the four rivers are sculpted into the corners of the pillar capitals.
20. Barfield, op. cit., p. 138.
21. For an analogous modification of Hobbes’s view of humor, see the gloss by Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New York: Vintage Books, 1957), pp. 318–20. And for an ingenious updating of traditional theories of laughter, in keeping with new researches in “double-bind” psychological theory, see William Fry, Sweet Madness (Palo Alto: Pacific Books, 1963).
22. Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (New York: Psychoanalytic Quarterly Publ., 1938), p. 48.
23. See Aion, CW 9.2, pars. 288, 311, 336, 353, 358, 373, 382.
24. C. G. Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice (New York: Random House, 1968), p. 19. It should also be noted that Jung found there to be clinical evidence for a strict correspondence in dream imagery between specific colors—red, blue, green, and yellow (like those of the humors!)—and the four functions of the psyche.
25. See James Hillman, The Myth of Analysis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 284f.
26. See: John 4: 10–11.
27. Cited in Gerald Vann, The Water and the Fire (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1961), p. 9.
28. Gaston Bachelard, op. cit., p. 197.
29. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 160.
30. Marie Louise von Franz, An Introduction to the Interpretation of Fairytales (New York: Spring Publications, 1970), pp. 8–10.
31. Marie Louise von Franz and James Hillman, Jung’s Typology (New York: Spring Publications, 1971), p. 76.
32. Barfield, op. cit., p. 137.
33. See Jung, Aion, CW 9.2, pars. 372–77.
34. John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul (Garden City: Doubleday, Image Books, 1959), p. 64.
35. Philip Wheelwright, Heraclitus (New York: Atheneum, 1964), p. 58.
36. Hjalmar Frisk, Griechisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch, vol. 3 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1970), p. 1142.
37. Cf. Erwin Rhode, Psyche: The Cult of Souls (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1966), pp. 30–31, 46–47, 365, 442.
38. Wheelright, Heraclitus.
39. Cf. Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Development of the Feminine New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), p. 53.
40. Cf. H. J. Rose, A Handbook of Greek Mythology (New York: Dutton, 1959), pp. 286–87.
41. Werner Jaeger, Paideia: Ideals of Greek Culture, vol. 2 (New York: Oxford Press, 1943), pp. 40f.
42. Martin Heidegger, On the Way to Language (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), p. 179.
43. Ibid., p. 180.
44. 1 Corinthians 2: 13–15; cf. 1 Corinthians 15: 44–46.
45. Cf. G. W. H. Lampe, ed., Patristic Greek Lexicon, fasc. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 1097–98; 1546. Also Rahner, Ernst, Smyth, eds., Sacramentum Mundi: An Encyclopedia of Theology, vol. 6 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), pp. 138–39, 143–45.
46. Cf. Gerhard Friedrich, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, vol. 6 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1968), p. 357.
47. Phaedrus 251a.
48. Ibid.
49. Aristotle, Historia Animalium 551a14; Theophrastus, Historia Plantarum 2.4.4; Plutarch, De causis plantarum 5.7.3.
50. Job 4 19.
51. Matthew 6 19–20.
52. Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 663.
53. Cited in David Bakan, Sigmund Freud and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Schocken, 1965), p. 225.
54. Miguel Serrano, C. G. Jung and Herman Hesse: A Record of Two Friendships (New York: Schocken, 1966), pp. 16–17.
55. John Keats, “To Psyche,” in Richard Aldington, ed., The Viking Book of Poetry of the English Speaking World (New York: Viking, 1959), vol. 2, p. 773.
56. Denise Levertov, With Eyes at the Back of our Heads (New York: New Directions 1959), p. 14.
57. James Agee, A Death in the Family (New York: McDowell Obolensky, 1956), p. 335.
58. Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (New York: Vintage Books, 1948), p. 14.
59. Ibid., p. 20; see Adolf Portmann, “Metamorphosis in Animals,” Joseph Campbell, ed., Man and Transformation: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks (New York: Pantheon, 1964), pp. 300–306.
60. Cf. Erich Neumann, The Great Mother (New York: Pantheon, 1963), p. 196.
61. Cf. James Hastings, ed., Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, vol. 9 (New Lork: Scribners, 1917–21), p. 729.
62. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 506.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Cf. J. A. MacCullough, ed., The Mythology of All Races, vol. 4 (Boston: Marshall Jones, 1927), pp. 8–9, 13, 240f.
68. Cf. ibid., vol. 10, p. 263.
67. Cf. ibid., vol. 8, pp. 345f.
68. Cf. ibid., vol. 7, p. 288.
69. Cf. Stith Thompson, ed., Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, vol. 2 (Bloomington: University Indiana Press, 1956), p. 506.
70. Cf. ibid., vol. 3, p. 42.
71. Cf. James Frazer, The New Golden Bough, ed. by T. H. Gaster (New York: New American Library, Mentor, 1964), p. 199; Frazer here is taking his information from R. H. Codington, The Melanesians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), pp. 207ff.
72. J. W. von Goethe, “Selige Sehnsucht,” in Leonard Forster, ed., The Penguin Book of German Verse (Baltimore: Penguin, 1957), p. 227.
73. Sappho, 2.6.
74. Evangelos Christou, The Logos of the Soul (Zurich: Spring Publications, 1963), p. 102.
75. Ibid.
76. See also the downfall of Achelous before the Olympian power of Zeus, all understood as an archetype of human struggle; Iliad 9: 195.
77. Robert Duncan, “Yes, I Care Deeply,” in Tony Stoneburner, ed., Parable, Myth, and Language (Cambridge, Mass.: Church Society for College Work, 1968), back cover.
Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1973): 1–23
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