A prematurely Jungian archeologist at Glastonbury Abbey

Frederick Bligh Bond

A team led by Roberta Gilchrist, a professor of archeology at Reading University and a trustee of the Glastonbury Abbey, have completed a multi-year project to collect, reinterpret and publish records of 36 seasons of excavations from 1904 through 1979 (online and with a 500-page book). Glastonbury’s press release quotes Professor Gilchrist,

This project has rewritten the history of Glastonbury Abbey. Although several major excavations were undertaken during the 20th century, dig directors were led heavily [by] Glastonbury’s legends and the occult. Using 21st century technology we took a step back from the myth and legend to expose the true history of the Abbey.

Colorful legends of Apostles and Arthur have likely wrong-footed many scholars. As Professor Gilchrist put it, “Research revealed that some of the best known archaeological ‘facts’ about Glastonbury are themselves myths perpetuated by the Abbey’s excavators.” But one dig director stands out as having been led by the “occult.”

Frederick Bligh Bond (1864-1945) was an architect with extensive technical knowledge about old church buildings. He served at Glastonbury from 1908, when the Church of England bought the property, until 1921. His productive digs satisfied his superiors. Then in 1918, Bond published The Gate of Remembrance (here) and its sequel in 1919, Hill of Vision. Bond explained candidly how he had so efficiently and effectively rescued long-lost buildings from oblivion.

His career fell apart.

Hawks, aesthetic sense and synchronicity

The setting. Click to enlarge.

This morning I was walking up a steep hill which overlooks dairy pastureland. The view below charms the eye. Cows graze amid sparse trees and hedgerows scattered in a broad field with a narrow crooked pond. The composition is painterly. It is the perfect background to frame something aloft.

A peregrine falcon called from nearby trees. I heard the sound but it didn’t register. She called again (unlike songbirds; both sexes of falcon call), and this time I looked up. When I did, the bird launched from her perch to begin a shallow descent, turning a broad arc over the pastureland. For five long seconds, with exquisite precision, the falcon positioned herself to become the someone aloft who imparted balance, harmony and focus to the pastoral scene.

Her flight ended in the crown of a tree rooted in the pasture below. As she took her time folding up her wings, the thought occurred that the falcon wouldn’t have improved the composition or have been framed so well by it if she had flown directly to her new perch. This falcon who twice announced her departure literally went out of her way to be seen in flight just where she was seen. It seemed as if she knew what effect her flight and its calculated path would have on this passerby.

To have that intention would require aesthetic sense, a hunch that a different species could share her aesthetic sense, and a willingness to exert herself to create an ephemeral beauty that neither she nor any of her kind would see. Upon what I cannot prove, I will not insist. To seem and as if are the verbal shields against the dreaded charge of unwarranted anthropomorphization.

I resumed my walk, thinking about what I’d just seen. Closer to my destination, the road passes beside a neighbor’s lawn. As I walked by, another peregrine landed on the lawn at close social distance, just ahead of me and to the side. He remained there for several seconds, while we exchanged acknowledgments. I rarely see hawks close-up on the ground. They are vulnerable there. He seemed confident of his safe reception, as well he might be, but objectively he was taking an avoidable risk.

In his own good time, he flew to a tree at the far end of the property. His ascent allowed him to show his plumage – and his talons. He crisply launched from the tree into a flight across the lawn, almost directly at me at chest height. My turn to be confident that this was not an attack, but an air show. And so it was. He broke off to perch in another tree at the margin of the road, just overhead. He paused there for one last exchange of acknowledgments and then was on his way.

A synchronicity is Carl Jung’s term for the occurrence of two or more events close together in time that are related by complementary meaning but have no apparent causal connection. The second hawk answered some of my questions about the first, such as whether a falcon would go out of her way to make contact across species lines, and whether she would intentionally show off (in candid truth, I have long believed that hawks do sometimes enthusiastically show off).

What sense of visual aesthetics hawks might have, and the degree to which their sense might be held in common with other sight-oriented species like us is harder to say. I have my suspicions, though.

Practical magic on Main Street, Hallowe’en 1914

Click images to enlarge

One hundred years ago, while William Butler Yeats conjured in magician’s robes and Carl Jung began to transcribe visions into his Red Book, ordinary middle-class Americans, too, dabbled in magic, or as some prefer to say, explored depth psychology.

One night a year, standing alone before mirrors in dimly lit rooms, our grandparents and great-grandparents, some in jest and some on a dare, pretended to pierce the veil that keeps the waking world apart from the shadow realm. Many of them watched in awe as the veil dissolved before their eyes.

Did long-ago people think that dogs have souls?

An online article soon to appear in the pages of the Journal of Archeological Science reports that about 8,000 years ago, some Siberian women had tapeworms, probably because of close contact with dogs whom the women cared for. Publicity for the new paper has revived attention to a controversial hypothesis about that closeness. As explained in a 2011 article in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology from the same team,

We suggest that some animals with unique histories were known as distinct persons with ‘souls’ and because of this at death required mortuary rites similar to those of their human counterparts.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027841651100002X

A detailed and highly technical exploration of the physical evidence for this idea, based on human and canid (wolf and dog) burials in the Lake Baikal region of Siberia, near present-day Irkutsk, appeared last year in the well-regarded open-access journal PLOS ONE.

www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0063740

So, is it true that people have been thinking that dogs have souls for that long? How confident can anybody living now really be about that, even knowledgeable experts, writing in well-known peer-reviewed journals with respectable impact factors?

Yeats’ “Magic” is Jung’s science

Illustration by Moina Bergson Mathers

Early Carl Jung bookplate

Carl Jung (1875-1961) was a pioneer in psychology, trained in medicine, who firmly grounded his scientific work in empirical and clinical observation. Yet Jung’s ideas about synchronicity, the collective nature of much of the unconscious, his technique of “active imagination,” his investigations of spiritualist seances, the I Ching, astrology, alchemy … in a few words, his lifelong fascination with the occult and integration of occult-friendly concepts into his scientific work, mark him as an unusual scientist. In contrast, William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), the Irish writer and Nobel laureate in literature, immersed himself in the occult, unconstrained by scientific aspiration or self-identification.

This posting introduces a brief 7500-word essay, entitled “Magic,” that Yeats wrote in 1901, while Jung was still working at his first job as a psychiatrist. The full essay, reformatted and annotated, may be downloaded from the blog’s Unlinks page. Yeats anticipates several of the then as yet unknown Jung’s later ideas and methods.

 “Magic” offers a study in the synchronicity (“the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning,” as Jung would define his term) that surrounded the substantially independent emergence of parallel insights in two great thinkers of the last century.

Thinking that a dog remembers her dead

click to enlarge

This is Clea, an older dog, an alpha Akita. She’s asleep on her dining room rug. On the floor beside her head lies a small plush toy, brushing her cheek. It is a whimsical dragon which belonged to Alexei, her brother, litter-mate, lieutenant and inseparable companion in life, who died about a year and a half ago.

It may seem obvious what is going in the picture, but it is not. Clea cannot share her mind with me. I must be careful not to presume too much about what she is thinking, careful not to make connections between the living Clea and the dead Alexei that may not be in her mind, but only in mine.

That would be projection and unwarranted anthropomorphization. Those are bad. Then, again, so is denial. In any case, there is nobody whom Clea can tell what she feels. In this post, I argue that we should listen anyway.