On Lunar New Year and the Chinese Zodiac

The Lunar New Year is actually a lunisolar holiday in that it is celebrated according to a combination of solar and lunar events. The solar event is the Winter Solstice or the day of the year with the least amount of sun.  Typically the Winter Solstice falls on or adjacent to the 21st of December in the northern hemisphere. Then the Lunar New Year begins the day after the second full moon after the Winter Solstice.

Image of Chinese ZodiacIn the Chinese Zodiac, 2024 marks the Year of the Wood Dragon. While many of us are aware of the twelve basic Chinese Zodiac years, each year also has five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.  As noted on the Bendigo Joss House Temple website,

…wood makes fire burn, fire creates earth, earth bears metal, metal runs water and water makes wood grow.

While much can and should be written about the Wood Dragon, I am interested in my own alignment, that of the Metal Rat.   According to popular lore, rats are intelligent, adaptable, and quick-witted. Some people would add charming, artistic, sociable. While my metal element encompasses tenacity and hard working. Some people would say the negative sides of metal are grief and a lack of self worth (I easily can sink into both these pits).

Yet I wish I wasn’t a rat. I feel caught in between my own cultures’ rat mythology and that of the Chinese Zodiac. I personally have had some horrible experiences with rats and tend to think of them negatively even when I am thinking in a mythic way. After all, rats are like humans. We breed like crazy, take over every space we enter, are a species that can adapt to all sorts of situations and still thrive.

Perhaps that is one aspect of my abhorrence of rats: I am looking in a mirror and I don’t like what I see. I wish I were a Fire Dragon instead and therein lies the problem. There is a disconnect between the person I want to be and the person I am. This causes me plenty of internal turmoil, frustration, and self-disparagement.

Some days I think this drive to be more, other, better and strengthen my weaker personality traits is positive as it helps me achieves things in my life I would not otherwise accomplish. And it helps me stick with projects that seem like a lost cause. Like Rose Creek.

Other days I think being true to my essential nature might help me achieve this year’s goals of “ease and joy.” Yes I do see the irony of achieving a goal that can never be an absolute achievement.

Most days I feel more like a Metal Ox: loyal, reliable, and tenacious.  In other words: boring!

Photo of Chinese Zodiac carvings on ceiling of Kushida Shrine, Fukuoka

Chinese Zodiac carvings on ceiling of Kushida Shrine, Fukuoka
Jakub Hałun, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

All cultures create mythic psychologies in which we can deepen our understanding of human nature and create containers for a happy life.  Yet I wonder how much these containers create our destiny and how much they limit them.  Perhaps it is more about understanding the containers and using them to your advantage.

Balance in all things including cultural containers. I more more than the Zodiac signs under which I was born and yet, they are still part of me.

Forest and Folklore

Anywhere people have lived in forested areas, mythology and folklore about the woods co-exist with humanity. After all, before the internet and CNN, most of us perceived the nature of reality through the material world around us.  As Marie-Louise von Franz writes in her classic The Interpretation of Fairy Tales:

Photo of forest in the fog

Image by Juncala from Pixabay

Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes. Therefore, their value for the scientific investigation of the unconscious exceeds that of all other material. They represent archetypes in their simplest, barest, and most concise form. In this pure form, the archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche. In myths or legends, or any other more elaborate mythological material, we get at the basic patterns of the human psyche through an overlay of cultural material. But in fairy tales there is much less specific conscious cultural material and therefore they mirror the basic patterns of the psyche more clearly.

So what does von Franz write about the forest?

As von Franz would note, it depends on the tale. A longer answer might include one of the following depending on the tale.

  • Entering the forest is the start of a journey that may lead to change for the protagonist.
  • The forest can be considered a place of the unconscious and entering into it allows the protagonist to learn deep and meaningful lessons about themself and the world around them.
  • As a place of refuge, the forest can be the place to escape from the human-created horrors of this world.

Or as von Franz writes in The Feminine in Fairy Tales,

The forest is the place where things begin to turn and grow again; it is a healing regression

Now if we were looking at folk tales from the American Southwest or Saharan Africa, the forest would not be intertwined in so many folk tales.

Yet analyzing the tales from northern Europe, and specifically Estonia, where trees grow like weed, the geography and ecosystems create an imaginal perspective with the forest as the place away from the village.

Close up of photo blueberries on the bush

Image by Alexandr from Pixabay

Depending on the era, this place of separation between the human constructed world and nature can be a positive experience or a fearful one. The forest can exist only to serve human material needs by providing wood for fires and building, animals for hunting, or berries for picking. But the forest in more modern times can serve a psychological need as a place to reconnect with the natural world.

How does the forest serve you?  But even more importantly, how do you serve the forest?

 

Shadows of the Past

Shadows of the past lay over the present and spill towards the future the way my father’s Estonia obscured and at times illuminated my experience in Estonia.  My father’s Estonia was a secret, hidden away space and one I believe that he only let himself dwell on when he drank, which he did often. Instead of sharing the happy and even sad memories he had, he left me to imagine and excavate scraps of what Estonia was and is on my own.

Photo of a woman walking away and casting a shadow.How sad this makes me. How even now, thirty years after his death, the tears flow because he couldn’t or wouldn’t share it with me.  Not knowing who my father was before I knew him is heart breaking and I think Estonia, being Estonian, or the tragedies that Estonia faced during his lifetime created a shadow that kept him from me.

In Jungian terms, the shadow is the repressed contents of the psyche, either individually or culturally. What we do not want to or are unable to hold in our conscious mind, we repress. But repression is a living pile of energy just waiting to explode.

The shadow intrigues me. I delve into the depths to discover my heritage and ultimately to understand the roots of my own life challenges. After all, that which reveals itself fully is easily understood, but that which is tangled in multiple languages, multiple countries, and silence, functions as an emotional riptide.

I know that many people who suffered trauma during World War II did not speak about it. But not all of the “Greatest Generation” had the same general experience.

In the USA, those who fought in the war returned home to communities physically unscathed by the war.

Countries like France suffered horrific loss of life and physical damage. However, after the WWII, they were part of the Western world and therefore, their histories, war stories, post-war period and beyond were known to those not only in France but in other countries as well. From creative, scholarly, historic and social perspectives, the French could and did unearth and re-imagine their experiences in positive and negative ways. A process that continues to this day.

Yet in the eastern swath of Europe that existed behind the so-called Iron Curtain, countries that were forcefully incorporated into the Soviet Union like Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were cut off both from the Western world and often from their own traditions and cultures. The Soviet Union began a process of Russification. (FYI: Russia is not the only country to engage in this process. All the superpowers have done it under different names and many are still doing it.).

Returning to my own interest in my father and Estonia, a very different trajectory happened than what took place in France.  For example, educated people were deported to Siberia and/or executed. Sharing information was severely restricted. The social and historic research was done through a communist lens and alternative perspectives were not allowed. All arts and academic work had to support the Communist Party perspective.  Add to that the difficulties in communicating with family via letters that could be ready by the government at any time, information about my own family was hard to come by.

For me, this shadow hung over my family personally, but also over any understanding that I had about Estonia’s culture, history and my father’s childhood. In other words, not only did I not have access to family history, but the land of my father was hidden away by the Iron Curtain.

Photo of curved brick vaulted cellar with many arches.

Image by 132369 from Pixabay

My Estonian shadow is part of my unconscious life, yet I am also embedded in the shadow life of the USA. The USA has situated itself into a binary relationship with Russia and the former Soviet Union. This leads to painting with broad strokes all the evils of the other and failing to investigate the specificity of individual people’s culture and historical contexts both within the USA and also in other countries as well.

In the USA, we often view our neighbors through this binary. One neighbor, friend, or social group is all good and the other all evil. If we look at the transgressions committed by another country or another, we would have to admit to ourselves we make the same or similar transgressions.

This then is what I find so compelling about my foray into Estonian mythology and history. It serves as insight into the problems faced by not only Estonia, but also the problems the USA has created over hundreds of years. If only we faced up to what happened with the same brave face that Estonia faces up to its own dark history, perhaps we might be in a position to grow and evolve.

The shadow unexamined is one that continues to hold us in its clutches. I am ready to be free. Are you?

Old Wooden Houses

Photo of Kooli 18 Tartumaa Tartu

The house where my grandmother lived.

Estonia is full of old wooden houses. Many of them are a few hundred years old. You’ll find them in cities like Tallinn and in the countryside as well.  These old wooden houses provided shelter for both families and often times their farm animals as well. In a land where trees grow like weeds and pop out of the roofs of houses, abandoned cars, and old boats, houses were built from wood. Traditional buildings have a thatched roof, but these days many have been updated with a metal roof. I’ve been told that thatched roofs last a long time if you know how to care for them.

Photo of backyard of Kooli 18 Tartu

Backyard of Kooli 18 Tartu

Many Estonian folktales navigate the space between the village, with its wooden houses, and the liminal space of the forest, where trees and animals have agency and opinions. The mythic characters react to human behavior in positive or negative ways depending on human behavior.  This relationship is not always positive, but it reveals human nature and human attitudes towards the non-human world.

Even today, many old wooden houses exist in the cities and are still are heated with ceramic “ahjud” — a enclosed fireplace that heats up and then holds the heat for some time, although often not long enough to sleep through the night without adding firewood.

In the 1960s, my grandmother lived in this old wooden house in Tartu. I don’t know if this is the house in which my father lived as a child.  Perhaps, she moved there after WW II and the Soviet occupation forced people to live where the authorities decided.

I know very little about my grandmother. In Tartu I would walk over to the wooden house in which she once lived and try to imagine her life.  Was she 85 and waking up at two in the morning to add wood to the ahi?  Did she grow up in a wooden house in a small village where people lived at the crossroads of mythology and modernity? Did she walk to the turg (market) to buy mustakaid (blueberries) and seeni (mushrooms) in the fall?

What tales would she have told me as a child if she had not lived on one side of the Iron Curtain and I on the other? Walls, physical or maintained with guns, tear families apart or prevent them from ever meeting. Why do some people see these as solutions to problems?

The wooden houses function as part of Estonia’s past and future culture. Across the country, people restore the old wooden houses and give them new life.  In these old wooden houses, I feel the energies of the people and mythologies that inhabited this land for thousands of years.  I imagine my grandmother in old wooden houses.

 

Lembitu

In the thirteenth century, the German Livonian Brothers of the Sword entered the lands we now call Estonia as part of the medieval crusades.  Lembitu was part of the Estonian resistance to the German invasion. According to some sources, he was a leader of a small area in what is today Southern Estonia.

Until this time, most of Estonia consisted of small settlements that were not part of a nation-state. With a core common language that contained regional distinctions, the pagan Estonians lacked a centralized government.

Lembitu lead many men in battle against the Germans. In September 1217, Lembitu was killed at the Battle of Matthew’s Day.

Thus began approximately seven-hundred years of occupation of Estonia.  I will save that history for another blog post, but in the meantime, Lembitu took on mythic characteristics. In 1918, Estonia was ruled by Imperial Russia and declared it’s independence in true David and Goliath battle against not only Russia, but Germany as well.  In this heady new world where the Estonian War of Independence was raging, many young men were named after this Estonian hero.

Thus, when my father was born in 1918, my grandparents named him Lembit. I never knew my  grandparents, but I can imagine that naming their youngest son after Estonia’s national hero was an act of hope and bravery as in 1918, there was no guarantee that Estonia would be able to secure independence from Russia. The actual peace treaty wasn’t signed until early 1920.

Photo of Lembitu Monument in Estonia

By Vaido Otsar – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

But the story doesn’t end there.  Today in Estonia there are a plethora of streets named Lembitu, a Lembitu park in Tallinn, and even a hotel named Lembitu. There is a monument to Lembitu in Suure-Jaani, bus stops named Lembitu, and even the EML Lembit, a pre-World War II mine-laying submarine.

Finally, rumor has it that Lembitu’s skull is in a museum in Poland. With Estonian and Polish government support, the hunt is on for the missing skull of Lembitu.

This saga, which started almost 800 years ago, is continuing to unfold as a living breathing part of Estonian history and/or mythology, depending on how you see it.

 

The Forest as Cultural Heart of Estonians

In July, I presented preliminary research on Estonian folklore and depth psychology using the work of James Hillman and Mary Watkins at the Fates and Graces Mythologium.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology you can watch the presentation.  I would love feedback, comments, criticisms, etc..   Let’s start a conversation.  I recommend you set the speed to 1.25 or 1.5 instead of normal speed.

Meet Me at the Mythologium

I will be presenting at the Fates and Graces Mythologium on Friday, July 28 at 2:00 PM.   My presentation is called “The Forest as Cultural Heart of Estonians.”

Photo of Mushroom King sculpture

The Mushroom King from Estonian Folklore

In Estonian folklore, the forest forms an integral cultural theme that serves as an anchor for “Estonianness,” culture creation, and nation building as outlined by Atko Remmel and Tõnno Jonuks. However, due to historical and linguistic challenges, Estonian folklore has been underrepresented in mythology studies in the USA. Read more here.

There are three days of amazing presentations by mythologists from around the globe.  Registration to stream the event live closes on July 25th.   Want to learn more about his amazing conference taking place in Southern California and on-line?  Then check out the Fates & Graces Mythologium program and all the amazing mythologists who will be presenting.

Treating Christmas Metaphorically

Disclaimer: I mean no disrespect to those who believe in the god of the Christian faith, just exploring what makes sense to me.

As someone whose understanding of human culture goes back longer than two thousand and twenty one years, I find the central idea surrounding Christianity to be that of new beginnings symbolized by the metaphor of a baby.

Graphic of calendar based on seasons

Nothing is born in a vacuum especially not a new religious tradition. For example, the Christian Bible incorporates the written books of the Jewish tradition.

Historically in northern parts of the globe, the winter solstice was the end of darkness and the beginning of light, but as cultures do, they incorporate and alter earlier traditions — sometimes by violence and force for reasons of power and wealth.

Many of the traditions associated with Christmas in the USA actually come from pre-Christian northern European countries and the celebration of more light. When you live in the north, you can have six hours of sunlight a day leading up to the Solstice so the hope of more light is a really big deal.

This idea of new beginnings is a monumental idea for human culture that has resulted in positive and negative changes over the last two plus millennium.   Yet like most cultural changes, it continues to evolve and many people have incorporated the idea of new beginnings into other religious traditions, or into psychology, medicine, and most of the new age practices that continue to evolve the idea.

The USA incorporates the idea of new beginnings into its more secular culture through social justice progress.

While I appreciate the invention of the idea, I believe in the sun and the moon, the wind and the Photo of northern lightsstars, the oceans and the earth.   They are magnificent, awe-inspiring miracles and all I need. If you prefer to live your life according to rules that are out-dated, have at it, but just understand, I will be living my life according to ideas from thousands of years ago and from the current year. The positive evolution of human culture goes forward. Just like you can’t keep your baby a baby forever.

Fates and Graces Mythologium: A conference for mythologists and the myth-curious

Do people look at you strangely when you mention the trickster? Does your family ignore your goddess sightings? Do they roll their eyes at your favorite phrases: imaginal realm, liminal space, follow your bliss?

Then join the Fates and Graces Mythologium! The Mythologium is a two-and-a-half day conference and retreat for mythologists and friends of myth. Think Plato’s symposium meets mythological studies. A gymnasium for the mythic mind. Flyer for Mythologium Registration At the Mythologium, scholars of mythology present their work, and we spark inspiration through panels, poetry, and social gatherings.  Registration closes July 15th. Click here to register.

Keynote Speaker

Our 2021 keynote speaker will be Dennis Patrick Slattery, PhD. If you already know Dennis’s work, you’ll understand why we’re so thrilled to have him join the program. If you don’t know his work yet, your soul is in store for a treat.  His presentation will explore the power of a contagion as a large encompassing metaphor, to heal as it wounds. Such a pollution can be an occasion, even opportunity, for the gods to enter the arena to provoke us into a level of awareness that we could not have understood without an invasive infection that inflects our lives into a greater mytho-spiritual consciousness.