The Flowering Wand by Sophie Strand

Author:Sophie Strand
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spirituality/Mythology
Publisher: Inner Traditions/Bear & Company
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

The idea of the assemblage is just one narrative option—and substituting one monomyth for another is not the answer to the poverty of narrative imagination facing the mythic masculine. We need to offer the masculine many different modes of narrative expression.

A holobiont is an assemblage of beings that creates a larger whole. The word was first used in 1991 by Lynn Margulis in an attempt to explain her study of hosts and inherited symbionts.5 With each passing day new research confirms that macroorganisms like us human beings are intimately tuned and shaped by the populations of microbes and fungi (or, as microbiologist Siv Watkins calls them, “smalls”) that populate our bodies. Our very cells were created by the fusion of ancient free-living prokaryotes. The closer we look at our bodies, the flimsier the idea of an individual, bounded self becomes. We are walking communities, swarms in suits and ties, skin-silhouetted Towers of Babel.

Perhaps, then, it is time to expand our idea of archetypes. Jungian archetypes are defined as ancient, universal ideas, modes of thought, or symbols that flower from the collective unconscious. These archetypes inhabit our myths and folklore. And the belief is that, over the course of our lives, we tend to embody different archetypes. Unfortunately, as happens with most attempts at mythical taxonomy, the idea of the archetype has become a sort of prison. We are the mother, the maid, or the crone. The anima or the shadow. Always an individual, always firmly within a codified state. The masculine, in particular, has been impoverished by the rigidity of certain archetypal approaches. What is the masculine allowed? King, warrior, magician, lover. I am, of course, referring to the popular book by Jungian analysts Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, wherein the authors argue that to be an integrated man, you must “master” these archetypes.

Little surprise, then, that when confronted with such an impoverished selection, men are often easily shoved into the unspoken fifth and sixth options: the villain and the fool. But the masculine is not just four storybook characters. The masculine is numerous. And, most importantly, the masculine is not one star in the sky; it is a constellation of relationships, rather than a concrete singular. We are teeming cauldrons of aliveness. Holobionts. We need better ways of talking about archetypal expressions.

Let us offer the tarot as vital nourishment to the masculine. I don’t want to throw out the king, the warrior, the magician, and the lover. I just want to add more archetypes to create a biodiversity of masculinities. A holobiont that can thrive, flexibly dance with change, and evolve. Like most mythologies, the tarot comes to us from beyond the horizon of “proof.” Some claim it began in Egypt. Others say it is a distinctly Kabbalistic practice. We know that the earliest tarot deck, distinct from other “playing cards,” was designed by a mysterious man called Bonifacio Bembo in Milan in the mid-fifteenth century.

What I find particularly juicy about the tarot is that it is not one myth, it is many, and the modes of interpretation vary from reader to reader.

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