Review of James Hollis's Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World

Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World
James Hollis
Toronto, Inner City Books, 2004
158 pages
ISBN 1-894574-10-9

By Stephen Morrissey

James Hollis's Mythologems: Incarnations of the Invisible World continues the author's exploration of the importance of mythology begun in his 1995 Inner City Book, Tracking the Gods. Myth, for Hollis, "is perhaps the most important psychological and cultural construct of our time." Mythologems is a term that might be familiar to some Jungians but not found in my copy of the Oxford English Dictionary or Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary. Hollis defines a mythologem as "a single, fundamental element, or motif, of any myth. The motifs of ascent or descent are mythologems. The hero's quest embodies two such mythologems: the hero and the quest, each of which has a discernible lineage and separable meaning, and yet synergistically enlarge each other." Mythologems are therefore specific motifs found in mythology.

We find in the invisible world the content of both our inner conflict and our psychopathology. Psychopathology is defined by Hollis as "the expression of the soul's suffering". Surely this description is part of the beauty and attractiveness of a Jungian approach to inner work: it turns away from a solely clinical and reductionist description of psychology and restores the numinous, the spiritual, and the epiphanous to the description of the complexity of the psyche.

This approach to psychology is not a flight from science (as it is found in what Hollis refers to as the therapeutic bible, the DSM-IV) or a rejection of the modern but rather it is a continuation of mankind's ancient journey to wholeness and completion. Hollis writes, "To map the psychological terrain of a person is to engage in mythographology, to depict the various scripts which each fragment of the whole embodies... The manifold forms of the child, of father, of mother, and also our relationships to them, play out in the schemes and fantasies of everyday life."

For Hollis, who acknowledges he is only one along with many other writers, it seems "there is a malaise in the soul of modern man" that can only be brought to consciousness by reflection on the inner life. The archetype of the child has been lived out by all of us: Hollis discusses "the child as original form", "the lost child", and "the child god". Parents have an obvious archetypal function in the psychology of their children. It should be noted that others, who are not biological parents, can assume the parental role in people's daily life, for instance anyone in authority, such as a teacher or landlord or police officer, can assume some aspect of the parental archetype.

We know that the father imago is a source of empowerment for the young and when absent can result in disempowerment. Hollis writes, "... whenever we are dealing with our own capacity or impotence, whenever we are serving the imago Dei or questioning its relevance to our actual life, we are dealing with the father archetype in all its many forms." Part of the empowering role of the father is that the child will seek to overthrow whatever symbol of authority is necessary for the child to achieve an authentic life of his or her own.

The mother archetype is, as Hollis writes, "both the source of life and of death." There are positive and negative expressions of the feminine; some mothers nurture their children while others actively discourage the child's individuation. Hollis discusses "the son's enmeshment with the mother"; he writes, "The power of the mother complex to affect the archetypal ground of the son cannot be overemphasized." Men who have been enmeshed with the mother's negative feminine can remain adolescent—what C.G. Jung called the puer aeternus—or express in their personal life destructive "Don Juan" behaviour. Meanwhile, there is also "the daughter's enmeshment with the mother" and Hollis describes the different scenarios women experience from inadequate or destructive mothering.

Another mythologem of importance for us is the "Hero's Task" which includes the work of individuation. The "Hero's Task" requires that we "align our conscious choices with our individuation agenda." There are two other mythologems that should be noted: Catabasis refers to stories of descent to the underworld while spiritual rebirth, ascent, or Anabasis, is "a going up in order to bring the gift to consciousness." It would not be an exaggeration or untruth to say that many of us have experienced both descent and ascent in our life's journey.

The concept of the Divine, as a mythologem, also interests Hollis. He writes, "Looked at archetypally, a god is an image which arises out of a depth experience, an encounter with mystery." According to Hollis, God is not a fixed entity but "always renewing itself". Further, Hollis elaborates,

Gods ignored, which is to say, primal energies repressed, split off, projected, today show up as neuroses. They are the animating wounds manifest in history, acted out in families, public forums or the sundry deformations of the private soul.

Still discussing the mythologem of the Divine, Hollis quotes Canadian archetypal psychologist Ginette Paris: "An ancient Greek whose destiny was going badly would ask which divinity he or she had offended. This questioning was part of what we would call therapy." With regard to the Divine, Hollis concludes, "The gods have hardly departed; they have simply gone underground and reappear as wounds, as inflations, as pathologies..." Finally, Hollis is critical of both science that is divorced from the human soul and fundamentalist religion with its dogmatic emphasis on what is perceived as God's "word". While science and religion are traditionally mutually exclusive, they have something in common when they reduce experience to a rigid set of rules and perceptions.

Contemporary American society appears to have forsaken the invisible world and has become, to use Hollis's word, "sterile". It is a society that can seem hostile to the multiplicity, variety, and complexity of the invisible world. Nevertheless, Hollis states that it is not too late to recover, by examining myth and its disparate mythologems that reveal the mystery and depth of the unconscious mind. Hollis writes, "The archives of our tribe are not so far gone that we do not remember a time when they were connected directly to the gods." Responsibility for our psychology rests inescapably with each one of us, but Hollis's book—written with intelligence and compassion—can help make the inner journey that much more accessible.

Published: The Newsletter of the C.G. Jung Society of Montreal, November 2004

Note: Read other reviews of books by James Hollis reviewed here, do a search on this blog.

Store windows in Manhattan, Easter 2009

The Great Reconfiguration

Taken while driving over the old Champlain Bridge

For some of us, there is a single moment when our lives changed radically, when life was reconfigured. Life was one thing and then, a moment later, it was something else. For some of us, this is how change occurs, not a slow progression but a sudden reconfiguration of everything that constituted our “life.” It may take years, even a lifetime, to understand this sudden, radical change; it may take years for the full consequences of this change--what I have termed the "Great Reconfiguration"-- to make itself known to us, but eventually it does become known.

I was a six year old child with two parents and a brother. We lived a middle-class life in a middle-class neighbourhood. Life was not perfect because of my father’s bad health, but it was, by 1950s standards, a “normal” life. Then, my father died on November 16, 1956, and my life as I knew it was over. All of the family dynamics changed. I was now a child whose father had died, a child in a one-parent home. I cannot impress on you too much the radical changes in my life that occurred because my father’s death. The whole family was affected by his death. It has affected my entire life and it has been the Great Reconfiguration of my life. It probably made me into the poet I am today, someone who is obsessive, filled with grief, regret, and failure, preoccupied with death, and always concerned with the spiritual side of life.

Silence fell on our house after my father died. His death was met with silence; he became a topic I always felt uncomfortable about and unable to discuss. I was ashamed that he had died. I was now different from all of my friends. I was never consoled in my child`s grief but met with silence; I was expected to deal with my grief by myself. This was not a home where we shared fond and loving memories of my father, it was a home in which the man who is my father was not mentioned. There were no trips to the cemetery to visit his grave, there was just silence, and it was decades before I visited where he is buried.

I will always remember lying in bed as a six year old child, praying to God that my father come home. I will always remember the little toy train engine, powered by batteries, my mother brought home for me from Boston when my father was in hospital there. Someone, perhaps a cousin, stepped on it almost as soon as I received it and broke the wheels; and then the engine, because it had a light on it, became a light I took to bed with me. It was, as I remember, when the toy train was given to me that my mother told me, only a day or a few days after my father had died, “It is better this way, it is better that he not suffer.” And that was the end of that.

No wonder, at university only thirteen years later, when I read William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” and Isak Dinesen’s wonderful short story “Sorrow Acre,” I found the single myth that was to preoccupy and define my life for many years. It was the biblical story of the Garden Myth, the fall from innocence into experience. It was a myth, a psychological truth, that described my own great reconfiguration. It was the event that saw the beginning of the end of my childhood puer existence and the birth of my senex concerns; it was the event in which I was conceived as a poet and the person I am today, many years older. It was the birth of my soul as a poet.

The Great Reconfiguration affects every aspect of one’s life and unless you have undergone such a radical re-organization of your life, it is difficult to understand how life changing a single experience can be. This new organization of life variables created for me a life I probably would not have had if my father had not died. Almost every aspect—I believe every aspect—of my existence was changed into something other than what it had been only seconds before his death. My life was made harder, I was given a challenge that most children do not receive at age six years. It was the challenge to understand the impermanence of life. To do this, I turned to writing poetry. Poetry was my calling in life, a calling that was presented to me by necessity, by the grief and experience of my father`s death. What my life would been like otherwise is impossible to say, that life that was denied is gone, never to have been. It is only with the perspective of age that I see these events as clearly as I now do; this life journey I am on became something different from what it could have been, it has made this journey difficult but certainly interesting.

From a window on 6th Avenue in Manhattan

A Visitor From the Future

Poster for poetry readings at Vehicule Art Gallery, and
showing interior of the gallery

One fall evening, back in the mid-1970s, at the old Véhicule Art Gallery on Ste. Catherine Street West, I was scheduled to give a reading of my poems. It was dark and rainy outside as I waited for an audience so I could begin. I remember the arrival of a bearded man as he came up the stairs from the street outside. He asked if “Stephen Morrissey” was giving a poetry reading and I remember speaking with him. He had just arrived in Montreal, he said, on a train from New York City and he had seen my name advertising the reading in the newspaper, and he had a few hours between the arrival of the train and his departure from Dorval Airport that same evening on a flight to Ireland. He wanted to know if I had any poems about being Irish and when I answered that I didn’t, he turned and left. I remember being annoyed by him, and thinking, as well, that whatever was implied by writing “Irish poems” didn’t interest me. I remember that his brief appearance at the reading, before it even began, caused a stir, as others also gathered around him when he entered.

The memory of this stranger has stayed with me all of these years; indeed, I see his visit in a different light now that I have spent the last ten or more years researching my Irish family history and writing what might be called “Irish Poems,” such as “The Colours of the Irish Flag” and “The Rock, A Short History of the Irish in Montreal.” I now think of this stranger as a visitor from my future, someone who came to remind me of what I would one day be writing. In retrospect I see that what I was writing back in the mid-1960s, and on through the years to what I am writing now, is a single continuum, although I was not conscious of this back then. I think of this visitor from the future not as someone who came to change what I was writing, but as someone reminding me of my themes in poetry: poems of family, memory, the ancestors, grief, and the knowledge that underlying everything we do is this journey we are on—this journey between being born and dying—that it is in every instance holy and divine.

Store windows (Park Avenue) (two)

Store windows (Park Avenue) (one)

Grave of Richard Morrissey, Montreal

After my great great grandparents, Laurence Morrissey and Johannah Meany, arrived in Montreal around 1842, they lived at various locations. It is possible other relatives arrived here around the same time, including Richard Morrissey. Not much is known about Richard, he seems to have worked as a gardener and lived on one of the streets that disappeared to make way for the Ville Marie Expressway. That he is related to us is anecdotal. We know that Richard married twice and he doesn't seem to have had children with either wife. His second wife, who died within ten days of his death, is buried in an adjacent grave to Richard's; Richard is buried with his first wife. Richard is listed as working as a gardener in Lovell's Montreal City Directory. Perhaps he was a brother of Laurence--it seems Laurence's sister Catherine also moved to Montreal and, like Richard, not much is known about her. Photos taken at Cote des Neiges Cemetery.

Richard Morrissey's grave stone from behind.

Richard Morrissey, on the left.

More information on Richard Morrissey can be found on the Morrissey Family History website.