Rites and Games For Creating Sacred Space
Avi Bauman (Jungian Psychoanalysis)
What does ritual have in common with authentic experience, about which Winnicott writes? Today rituals appear to us as something adult, quite serious, formal, collective, organized, and conducted according to rules. In this article, I discuss experiential rites that cause change – significant rituals and not ceremonies that merely mark something external. Nevertheless, we shall attempt to understand the marvelous connection between the order so vital to ritual and the experience of the kind that touches our soul, and how both of them together lead to change and self-development.
I will introduce this topic by reference to Winnicott's concept of the potential space. The potential space of which Winnicott writes is a transitional realm in which the child experiences himself and learns to play, to develop his world, to experiment in order to expand, and to cope with the physical and mental world in an internal and symbolic manner. This is a transitional realm in which trials and experiences occur through which the child, still dependent on his environment, maintains authentic contact with himself each time anew. In this place, the connection with the real self is preserved, and the encounter with this place constitutes a basis for experiencing initiation, instruction, and self-exploration in the transition that the youth will later experience, as does the adult (Winnicott 1953).
This experience will also enable the youth to learn to connect to transitional areas which are transcendental, beyond ordinary life, in his continued development. Even the adult individual who lives a gray, quotidian life and runs the Promethean race to attain more knowledge, more success, and primarily more Ego, seeks play areas that both relieve tensions and express higher needs, as moments of redemption where he will feel more at one with himself. The individual seeks a sacred realm, a sacred time or moment, delineated places of significance, in which he can go back and contact and experience lost, forgotten, and evolving parts of the self, in Jungian terms (Jung 1946).
From time immemorial, the human capacity to be part of an experiential ritual, to relate to ritual activity in symbolic fashion, to play a role in the ritual himself, and to connect ritual to the general myth of his life has enabled him to retain the equilibrium between contradictory elements in his personality, to undergo change, to develop, and to give his life a higher meaning.
People have always possessed the ability to cross a threshold, known as a liminal state in anthropological literature (Turner, 1969,) and to enter experiences of connection with higher worlds, onto which they project quite a bit of their self, like the baby and child who project parts of their self or of their mother onto the transition object.
The rituals to which we refer could be rites of passage, religious rituals, rites of connecting with the past and even modern rituals in which people depart from secularity and enter a domain with special significance. An example of this could be psychoanalysis or another form of significant treatment where an area of demarcation is created, providing access to an emotional, mental, or spiritual state, and in which the patient reconstructs events from his distant past and even undergoes rebirth and significant transformation in the presence of another individual.
The roots of the potential to play, to symbolize, to enter the sacred area, and even to undergo a significant process, are found at the outset of life, in early childhood, as well as at the cradle of human civilization. Subsequently, we shall see how this process transpires in new variations, like an old bottle that is continually filled with new wine (Campbell 1988),
The historian and theologian Mircea Eliade (1959) asserts that ever since human beings became conscious, they in fact became religious creatures. Hence, they had to create vital order in their life by allotting spaces and occasions for the sacred and the profane. In his opinion, in sacred places and times, people have always acted out of an inner center of their self, whence they drew direction. In the place and time defined as sacred, forces of creation, renewal, and change acted within people. At these times and places, people underwent special experiences, in contrast with the secular state, in which there was no central point from which they acted out of inner direction, but rather out of what we define as the Ego, which is the center of consciousness and responsible for functioning and adaptation to reality.
Sacred time and space helped people to break through the secular, to leave the ego to a certain extent, and, like the Creator, to create the world each time anew, always somewhat differently. On these occasions, as it were, the gate to heaven, symbolism, significance is opened. As with to Jacob’s Ladder, which connects between heaven and earth, a possibility was created for approaching another dimension. In Eliade's opinion, even in prehistoric time, people found various signs that symbolized the sacred for them, and when they indicated it as such, they created it as a defined place. They selected mountains, trees, stones, wells, various structures, and these places were where sensations, memories, and myths arose for them.
It was always possible to return to these primary places, to create a sort of consensual ritual order, and to relive experiences. An order was created within experience, a symbolic one that heightened its meaning. Sanctification was therefore linked to demarcation, in setting boundaries and creating signs – places of "put off thy shoes from off thy feet" – and experience took on meaning by means of the order. Over time, the signs, boundaries, and order became tied to general and private occasions, to periods of transition, or to life events in which transformations or crises transpire.
Turner (1969,) a social anthropologist who deals with ritual processes, expands on Eliade's theory within modern society. He maintains that “crossing the liminal threshold,” the objective of which is access to the realm of experience, identification with ancestors, the forces of creation and creativity, takes place today as well: the concept of a sacred place or special occasion can be extended to places of powerful and significant experiences.
We shall attempt to discuss places and times that are beyond the threshold as areas where there is a transformative container, where one sacrifices the ego and approaches the self or parts thereof, high and low, places where one feels a fuller sense of self, places where entry brings about change and expansion of the self. Sacrifice of ego in these places occurs with the arousal of emotions characteristic of rituals: anxiety, pain, mercy, and empathy.
From the Jungian viewpoint, the Self represents the evolving inner essence, and the archetype of spiritual wholeness that is expressed in the union of opposites in the mind, such as conscious and subconscious, male and female, or anima and animus (Jung 1944,) partially parallel to Winnicott's being and doing: the material and the spiritual, the good and the bad.
The Self, according to Jung, develops and becomes increasingly aware of collecting the lost parts, which were projected or suppressed, and of the integration that our personality undergoes in the process of individuation. The individuation process occurs experientially while creating a certain inner order, an order with meaning. The Self, which is the main archetype in the psyche according to Jung, propels the personality to development and fulfillment, and therefore it requires people to seek special moments of connection, meaningful symbolic moments, in order to unify the opposites. Therefore, people will seek areas and times of threshold-crossings. The threshold-crossing gives impetus for evoking experiences for every possible facet of the psyche. A facet of the psyche, for present purposes, might even be a darker part of the soul, perhaps an instinctive or mad facet. Thus, the threshold crossings of carnivals or – by contrast – of satanic cults and all sorts of other perverted rituals are created. The ritual occasionally fails, and the transition is not a transition or significant connection, but rather, merely an experience of repetitive compulsive release, without resolution. It should also be remembered that not every experience, even if it arose in a special place and time, is an experience of change.
In the Greek pantheon, which included all types of gods that are like spiritual archetypes expressing one facet or another of the soul, each god had a myth, shrine, altar, time of worship, and ritual. While participating in worship, the participant joined with one or another facet of his soul (Wosien 1974). I shall cite several illustrations here:
Apollo, the god of sun and wisdom, represented balance and sublime individuality. In contrast to him, Dionysius, the god of wine and nature, represented creativity, emotionality, orgiastic madness, and intermingling, like fermenting wine. Both of them – although they are opposing gods – could constitute a platform for transformative ritual in contrasting fashions. Thus, the myth recounts that Orpheus, the creative artist, was torn between the two, and his mission was to connect between them in art.
Additional examples are the goddesses Demeter, Cora, and Persephone, whose cult features the mysteries of seed and growth, departure, and the cycles of nature. Their cults were observed primarily by women in states of transition, like female puberty, marriage, birth, and leave-taking from mother or daughter.
Additionally, the gods of healing demanded rituals of healing in Temenos [the temple of Aescalepius, with the symbolic assistance of Chiron the injured centaur, a symbol of ‘the wounded healer.’
These rituals, which afforded a place for one facet or another of the spiritual life of the individual, were connected to the cycles of nature and human life. However, if we examine them from the psychological aspect, they were also a function of the preservation of the person's equilibrium and of the diverse and contrasting parts of the individual at the crossroads of transition. For example, women who participated in the ceremonies of Dionysius, took part – soon before becoming young brides or mothers – in mystery rituals of Demeter and Cora.
The ceremonial character was always connected to the myth in terms of content and symbol, and each action of dance and use of an object reconstructed parts of the myth and connected them, but they also led to something new. Therefore, it appears that even gods became objects for projections of the various components of the psyche.
To illustrate, I will focus on rites of transition and initiation of Australian tribes, referring to the ceremonies of Demeter and Persephone in Greece, and I will discuss rituals of therapy as a transformative threshold-crossing according to principles and stages in the rite of transition.
The transition from child to adult is an important and significant concept in modern society, and much reference to this concept exists in education and sociology. It is interesting to see how this concept appears in Australian coming-of-age rituals, conducted by the aborigines at least until the beginning of the previous century, and in which the focus of the ceremony was “trans-transformative."
The youths, aged ten to twelve, for whom this was the first time they went out into the world, were removed from the village, and, as the women danced around them, the men would toss them into the air several times. On the chest of each youth was drawn a personal image that was related to his group and the family to which his future wife was related. While hurling the boys aloft, the men said, "May the boy reach the belly of the sky, may he grow to the belly that is above, may he proceed directly to what is beyond." Each boy received a mythological figure from the fathers, a twin image for which he tried to perform the tasks of the ceremony. The character was from the period of the dream, the imagination, the chronicles of the tribe, and it was supposed to accompany him during the rituals. Throughout the entire period of the rituals, the boy had to be in the company of boys only, to cease hunting small creatures (such as lizards), and to participate only in kangaroo hunting. Hunting, which belonged to the world of animals and plants, was central in the ritual, since it was central to the pursuits of this society, which worshiped nature, over which it also attempted to attain mastery. In addition, this society was highly collective, and the individual did not stand at its center. Indeed the youth underwent a form of second birth, from the mother unto the sky, and his self expanded beyond individual physicality to spiritual-collective self of the father. The transition to the patriarch and the masculine denoted social and spiritual birth. The rituals therefore connected the boy to mythological figures and to an order beyond the temporal: thus, myths and rituals would be a part of his life from now on. Concerning this, Campbell says:
“Life, the here and now in a society such as this, are also an ongoing projection of mythological life from the dream era.” [צריכים לספק את המקור](Campbell 1987) The rites of the second birth, therefore, are connected to the fears and pain of leaving the mother, and the compensation for loss of mother earth is expressed by directing intellect, spirit, and desire inward toward his personality and outward toward his masculinity. The logic that underlies these rituals, like ceremonies in general and even psychoanalytical treatment, is the reorganization of libidinal and aggressive impressions that were inculcated in infancy and childhood. This reorganization is made possible by means of an encounter with a transferring intermediary in the ceremony, by arousing and resurrecting experiences that are interwoven with fear and pain (physical as well), which are characteristic of the early period, and by pity and empathy at a later stage in history, experiences that have become central in the current therapeutic process.
Emotions of pain and fear that emerge in such a process in no way resemble the depression and panic of the late twentieth century, which express precisely the opposite; namely, the absence of the sacred in rituals and places, a vacuum in the spiritual domain.
As the ceremony of the youth in transition continued, the main ceremony took place. It would begin suddenly one evening, suddenly, in the men's camp. The youth was seized by three strong men, who shouted at the top of their lungs, wrestled with him, and frightened him. They led him to the site of the ceremony, where they prepared him for circumcision. The entire community, men and women together, was present on the spot and blessed him. He was placed in the group of men, and the women, like the women who danced in the patriarchal period, danced and threw shields up as in the dream world. All this time the men sang. The boy stood and listened for the first time. Leather straps were bound tightly to his forehead and a sash of plaited hair was tied to his waist. Three men led him through the dancing women to tall bushes, where he remained for several days. Afterward, they drew a symbol on his body and the youth had to enter a period of silence, and he was forbidden to tell the women or the children what happened to him. The secrets that were revealed to him would become his own secrets. He had to answer tersely, keep silent most of the time, and not stand out. Thus, the boy sat in total isolation all night long, and he heard the singing and dancing from afar. On the next day, he was led to the camp by his aunts and his future mother-in-law. His mother watched the fire in the camp, and from that fire she removed two burning staffs, one of which was passed to the boy's mother-in-law and the other to the boy himself. The men sang stories about fire. The mother approached him, placed a leather strap on his neck, and blessed him that he might succeed in preserving the fire, which symbolized his vitality. In preparation for the ceremony, the boy was taken into the forest with the burning rod, sat there silently, partially fasting, for three days, so that his imagination and fears increased. On the fourth day, he returned to the camp, and on the same night the circumcision ceremony began, lasting about a week. An elder recounted and sang a legend about one of the original patriarchs to whom the rite of the circumcision was revealed. At midnight, the boy’s eyes were blindfolded, and he was taken to a central spot, where the games and rituals were conducted. Opposite the boy lay a costumed, painted man, with the face of a wild dog. Another costumed man with a kangaroo face stood with his legs spread, holding two eucalyptus branches, moving his head from side to side in protective motions, emitting kangaroo cries. The dog-man rose, barked, and started running on all fours between the legs of the kangaroo man. The kangaroo caught him after two attempts, dashed his head onto the ground, pretending to kill him, and he lay on the ground for a short while as if dead. Then four disguised men came: the eagle-man, the mouse-man, the kangaroo-man, and the dog-man. The boy had to support their weight for two minutes. The kangaroo games were replicated with the boy’s cooperation over the course of two more days, symbolizing the overcoming of the animal in myth and in life. On the seventh day, the boy was anointed with grease, as three men took charge of him, painting a white pipe on his back. The blast of a horn was suddenly heard in the air, the boy lay on his back, the men held rods above him and swung them while lightly striking him. Strains of chanting accompanied the ceremony, everyone entered a state of excitement, the fire was made particularly bright, and the men who performed the circumcision, their beards in their mouths, their legs open, and their arms stretched forward, took their place alongside the boy. They stood in silence, everyone saw the knife, and the father-in-law, who participated as well, held a shield above the boy’s face. Loud horn blasts were heard, symbolizing the voices of the spirits. The boy lay like a sacrifice among the rods, and two men moved him, placing him atop the shield. The circumcision was carried out in haste, everyone disappeared, and the boy who was in a semi-conscious state, was blessed: “You did well, you did not cry…” The blood of the circumcision flowed into the shield, and the horn was positioned on the spot of the wound. Everyone introduced himself to him, and he received a gift of several horns. The youth stood in a cloud of smoke as when he was baptized in smoke after to his birth.
All the boys had to undergo this ritual, and it was believed that youths who did not receive the same induction constituted a danger to society, primarily in that they were liable to become demons that would fly up to heaven and bear away the souls of the elders. The ceremony brought them down and kept them down. The circumcision symbolized the boy’s death and devouring. Nevertheless, the adults received the youth with empathy and great identification, even wounding themselves and feeding him their blood. The blood of the adult men flowed onto him and created a symbolic connection to the blood of the father. The blood that flowed and was collected served for painting in rituals but also for glue. The blood symbolized spiritual food: it was not mother's milk, not food for infants; rather it was masculine food, the alchemical force, both terrifying and fascinating, of the second birth (Campbell 1987.)
The boy thus underwent a second birth by traversing a difficult threshold, from a state of dependency on his mother toward taking part in the nature of the fathers, not merely by physical alteration due circumcision, but rather, through spiritual experience, arousal of fantasies and fears, concomitantly with the organizing of childhood imprints. As Freud wrote, adults arouse, receive, and redirect oedipal urges, and along with that, the desire to live and to love.
Interestingly, the concept of a second birth as a symbol for this age appears in many cultures. For example, in Greek mythology it is recounted that Dionysius was born twice: the goddess Demeter concealed her daughter Persephone in a cave while she was in Sicily, watching over her with the aid of a pair of serpents. In her cave, the girl knitted a dress and embroidered a marvelous image of the universe on it. The god Zeus appeared in the cave in the form of a snake, impregnated her, and she bore Dionysius in his first birth. He grew secretly in the cave, where his playthings were a ball, a rattle, blocks, a golden apple, a ball of yarn, and a horn. When he grew into a youth, Dionysius received a mirror as well, and began to look into it with pleasure. As he gazed into the mirror, two Titans, which his stepmother Hera had sent in revenge, appeared behind him. They were painted with white chalk and attacked the boy, tore him to pieces, and saved his heart, cooking all the other parts of his body in a large cauldron. Athena rescued his heart and brought it to her father Zeus who swallowed it and then gave birth to Dionysius anew. Hence he became a symbol of the transformative god and of rebirth.
What are Rituals and Symbolic Ritualism in Our Own Times?
The Bar Mitzvah ceremony is a religious ritual that symbolizes transition from childhood to maturity. Military service can be mentioned as partially a rite of passage. Likewise, religious marriage ceremonies can be seen as rites of passage, (as can a civil marriage, insofar as there is a ceremony,) as well as various funerary rights.
Even today people clearly seek to connect rituals to repetitive cycles, to myths, and to symbolic meaning. What transpires in religious and secular ceremonies under the wedding canopy or at graveside is intended to be something from beyond, imbued with a certain symbolic significance. In all rituals, we should search for the place and time suitable for that, the proper emotions, the leader of the ritual, which transmits the connection to a story, a myth, and to meaning.
Ritual and Transition in a Therapeutic Setting
Even in the pscyhoanalytical therapeutic setting, there is a search for rituals: the way Freud performed therapy, on which sofa, whether his patients lay down or sat. We search for what will create the ultimate threshold crossing, which will create the greater contrast to everyday life and the most fitting setting for another connection, outside of treatment.
In his article about rituals, sacred space, and healing, Robert Moor (1991) presents the therapeutic parallel of our time for the ancient rite of threshold crossing. The caregiver is the leader of the ceremony, who brings the patient over the threshold. In Moor's opinion, the place of the treatment with its boundaries, times, and the leadership of the therapist are not mere ethical and methodological characteristics, but rather, significant means for creating a suitable place for development of the self. The place, with its boundaries and its empathic enclosure also makes the experience and the order possible. The therapeutic location actually exploits the human potential and need to enter a sacred space, in which unconscious topics are aroused. This is parallel to a shrine of Temenos a symbol of a temple of healing. The boundaries of the location are important and are created not only because of the method and the power of the therapist, but rather, with the power of the environment to arouse deeper processes. This is an awakening, not a directive. Both the therapist and the patient will develop a language, symbols, and shared codes, the intimate ritual of the therapeutic enclosure. Each therapist creates a number of important and principle conditions for creating this sacred space, which promote healing and transition. Several reasons can be given for the significance of this space:
First, it is important for most therapists that there should be a certain threshold crossing that distinguishes from mundane existence and provides a different way of being and a special meaning for everything that occurs in this sphere. Second, reference to this space is to a place that brings wholeness and a certain maturity. Third, it is important for the place of treatment to be able to arouse, but it must also contain emotions, fears, and pain or suffering. Fourth, the message of this place is one of separation from the mother figure and from parents in general or of the possibility to resolve problems that were created due to these bonds. However, in our era, when individuality and the self stand at the center of life, it is particularly important to deal with personal mythology and the personal story, as a part of the same separation and uniqueness. Formation of that uniqueness will enable significant connection to society later on. The fifth point is the symbolic character of the place of therapy, which is similar to the womb which we enter and then exit as transformed people. Thus the therapeutic womb can enable rebirth, as well.
We have seen that in ancient times or in primitive tribes, emphasis was placed on social context, social responsibility, religious or cultural awakening of mythologies of ancient forebears. In therapy in our time, in the twenty-first century, the emphasis is on individual responsibility and awareness in the framework of collective life. Individuality depends on arousal of experience of the self, to which the therapeutic process connects. In rituals of the past, there were diverse elements that emphasized the connection to the whole, like the symbolism of being swallowed in the jaws of a monster or entering an actual place within the earth that symbolized the womb of Mother Earth. Today, when the individual and the I-self-you connection are the focus, the system of relationships and its characteristics constitute an event similar to those of ancient times. The ancient initiate, like the modern patient, touched the forces of creation and attained a higher state of being, although it was always identified with the powers of the ancestors and to tradition.
It is important to note that Turner (1969), following van Gennep (1960), discerned three principal phases that appear in rituals, and these should be mentioned in the context of therapeutic ritual: separation, transition, and incorporation (assimilation.) Separation creates the boundary, transformation takes place beyond the threshold, and in this period a regressive, cloudy, transpersonal experience takes place, in which there is a loss of primal things that are stronger than the leader of the ritual. In the final stage of the ritual, incorporation, the individual reconnects with his original environment and prepares himself for new demands. In therapy as well, incorporation and internalization occur for the most part precisely after connection to reality.
In every therapeutic process, there is a certain destruction of the old order, but the connection with it is preserved, and the leave-taking, which is similar to death, requires a unique ritual of its own. In this ritual, the gathering of what has taken place and the ordering of the most important things occur through the ability to internalize, after the leave-taking.
Hence, the ritual model whose roots are in our ability to play, to imagine, to cross thresholds, and to enter another world, was always possible and important both for balance and joining opposites and also for self-development and maturity. This model has been illustrated with the aid of rites of passage to adulthood in tribes in Australia, where the youth underwent a series of rituals and symbolic games and experienced his birth into the male world as mediated by transitional figures. We have seen that this model is also likely to take on new expressions in our world. Even today, the sacred space, which, for the individual, was an area of connection between substance and spirit, past and present, childhood and adulthood, the id and society, can constitute a place of connection between being and doing, order and experience – which together make possible the formation of the self and proper internalization of spiritual processes. Expression of this in our day is found in the areas of separation between everyday life and special occasions and places, when meaningful experiences occur there.
A unique catalyst that illustrates the creation of such a state is the mental or spiritual process that occurs in deep psychological therapy. In Jungian terms, this is the area of the alchemical vessel in which the therapist and the patient meet, and the unconscious and the conscious encounter one another, and there the self evolves to unify the opposites. |
