Safe Passage!

In her richly meaningful book Dreams and Death, (Shambala Publications, Inc.1986) the late Jungian scholar and psychoanalyst Marie Louise Von Franz, born in 1915 and one of my many mothers on Earth, continues to counsel me.
How deeply appreciative I am!

She reflects upon an ancient Egyptian Book of Aphorisms, wherein the deceased says:

“I am…Osiris. I came from you, wheat.
I entered into you, I became fat in you, I grew in you,
I fell into you…so that the gods live for me.
I live as wheat, I grow as wheat,
which the sacred ones harvest.
Geb covers me.*
I live, I die, I do not perish.”
* Geb means ‘earth’.

Marie Louise von Franz explains the meaning of this quotation with a dream by J.B. Priestly ( http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jpriestley.htm ) related in Man and Time:

“I was standing at the top of a very high tower, alone, looking down upon the myriads of birds flying in one direction; every kind of bird was there, all the birds in the world. It was a noble sight, this vast aerial river of birds. But now, in some mysterious fashion the gear was changed, and the time speeded up, so that I saw generations of birds, watched them break their shells, flutter into life, mate, weaken, falter and die. Wings grew only to crumble; bodies were sleek and then, in a flash, bled and shriveled; and death struck everywhere at every second. What was the use of all this blind struggle towards life, this eager trying of wings, this hurried mating, this flight and surge, all this gigantic meaningless biological effort?
As I stared down, seeming to see every creature’s ignoble little history almost at a glance, I felt sick at heart. It would be better if not one of them, if not one of us at all, had been born, if the struggle ceased forever. I stood on my tower, still alone, desperately unhappy.

But now the gear was changed again, and time went faster still, and it was rushing by at such a rate, that the birds could not show any movement, but were like an enormous plain sown with feathers. But, along this plain, flickering through the bodies themselves, there now passed a sort of white flame, trembling, dancing, then hurrying on; as soon as I saw it I knew that this white flame was life itself, the very quintessence of being; and then it came to me, in a rocket-burst of ecstacy, that nothing mattered, nothing could ever matter, because nothing else was real but this quivering and hurrying lambency of beings.
Birds, people or creatures not yet shaped and coloured, all were of no account except so as this flame of life travelled through them. It left nothing to mourn over behind it; what I had thought of as tragedy was mere emptiness or a shadow show; for now all real feeling was caught and purified and danced on ecstatically with the white flame of life. I had never felt before such happiness as I knew at the end of my dream of the tower and the birds.”

Priestly, explains Marie-Louise von Franz, understood the flame in his dream as the eternal cosmic Self.
Continuity, agreeing to provide safe passage for the Flame of Life – is our work.

This entry is dedicated to the family of Anastasia De Sousa who grieve the violent death of their daughter in Montreal, 2006.