Advent and Psychic Birth - An Introduction

From Advent and Psychic Birth by Mariann Burke

Meister Eckhart in a Christmas sermon paraphrasing St. Augustine says of Christ's birth, "This birth is always happening. And yet, if it does not occur in me, how could it help me? Everything depends on that."(1) The thesis of this book is that our own psychological "birth" is related to the "birth" of God within us, and that this birth is "always hap­pening." The paradox is that we long for this birth and yet we fear it. For centuries our unconscious fears and longing have been mirrored and "contained" in the religious dogma and symbolism of the church, a channel to the riverbed of the unconscious. But in a church and a culture that general­ly devalues the feminine realm--earth, the body, sexuality, instinct--these energies flow back into the psyche. Today the longing for consciousness and the integration of these energies have led many to leave the church which, they feel, no longer speaks to their needs. Others find spiritual ful­fillment in a strong adherence to traditional doctrinal and Biblical interpretation. Still others, in increasing numbers, find that a more personal inner journey leads not only to greater self-awareness, but also to a richer appreciation of their religious heritage.

My approach throughout Advent and Psychic Birth is to try to make connections between the archetypal images and personal experience, in both ancient and modern modalities, through associations, amplifications and clinical material. In one sense this approach has evolved out of my training in ana­lytical psychology. Yet it has become deeply personal and flows out of my own felt sense of the Advent imagery and my own journey toward psychic birth. Far from diminish­ing my faith in Christ, it has broadened and deepened my understanding of the meaning of incarnation. Jung writes: "The efficacy of dogma by no means rests on Christ's unique historical reality but on its own symbolic nature, by virtue of which it expresses a more or less ubiquitous psy­chological assumption quite independent of the existence of any dogma."(2) On first reading these words we may feel that Jung is undermining dogma and Christ's mission on earth, yet our own experience as it relates to the underlying pattern of dogma, can only serve to enrich its meaning. "In religious matters ... we cannot understand a thing until we have experienced it inwardly ... for it is in this experience that the connection between the psyche and the outward image or creed is revealed .... "(3)

For each of us the image that speaks to us differs. For some it is an image from the Bible or from another religious tradition, while for others it is a dream image, or an image that seems to surface directly from the body. Each of these can be received as "messages " from God.

If we look at the biblical poetry of Advent in a more personal way, we find that while it belongs to the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, it transcends both. Beginning in darkness and destruction and ending in light and rebirth, Advent imagery represents a mythic or archetypal pattern. The Advent call to awaken from sleep is a call to follow the way of consciousness, to search for the inestimable gift, the treasure of the "hidden" self as well as the Imago Dei which carries the power to revitalize us both as individuals and communities. Symbolically, the four Sundays of Advent remind us of the quarternity and of wholeness, as does the familiar Advent wreath with its four candles, one lighted each week suggesting the gradual dissipation of inner and outer darkness. During the first three weeks of the Advent liturgy, the tone is decidedly one of action and movement, beginning with the Baptist's call to prepare a way. With the desert "transition" the tone changes, and during the fourth week the Virgin appears, strong, questioning, willing to trust in the unknown. As in any religious initiation we are led to participate in a new dimension of life. Here, if we can con­tact our own "virgin energies," we listen as the angel speaks and we, in silence, like Mary, wait as the earth "buds forth a savior."

The Christmas Myth: Taking Back the Child-God

Article by Mariann Burke, author of Advent and Psychic Birth and
Re-Imagining Mary: A Journey Through Art to the Feminine Self

In Christianity the Advent-Christmas Mystery celebrates the historical birth of Jesus through the mythological imagery of Virgin Birth, Cave, Star, and the Child-God. Feelings of renewal related to the winter solstice and the ancient Saturnalia festivals find echoes in our own family reunions, gift-giving, and general merry making on New Year’s Eve. The circular “return” to primordial Origins for renewal has given way to linear history with its goal of unlimited progress. Yet the soul’s language is circular, as Frances Hatfield writes in her poem “The Soul’s Geometry” from The Book of Now: Poetry for the Rising Tide:

 We are not traveling a straight line as thoughts do.
 A circle is a line that went looking for itself.(1)                    

This “looking” is a soul hunger, a return or remembering beyond history still slumbering in the unconscious of those who crowd churches on Christmas day, many who do not believe in Virgin Birth, angels, etc. and have lost the imaginative power to see reality in the mythic world which these images reflect. We want to feel, to surrender ego momentarily in the imaginal world of music, poetry, and ritual of remembrance made present. Back in 1936 C.G. Jung suggested what he felt each of us needs and longs to remember, “In the last analysis most of our difficulties come from losing contact with our instinct, with the age-old unforgotten wisdom stored up in us.”(2)

It is this remembering as the profound meaning of the Incarnation and the essence of some religions that makes Advent and Psychic Birth as relevant today as it was when it was published in 1993. While the literalists take the Christmas myth as history, and the doubtful seeing the cracks in the whole Christian myth still enjoy the artful Nativity story and its magical mystery, many atheists, taking science and materialism as guide while dismissing angels and stars, still hunger for the communal sense fostered by living myth. In Jung’s view Christmas rituals and the Christ Child image speak to our longing for rebirth, that is for greater awareness of our innate divinity, and they are a “religious necessity only so long as the majority of people are incapable of giving psychological reality to the saying: ‘Except ye become as little children…”’(3) Exploring the Child-God mythic image and its powerful psychic energies latent within us, we participate in the emerging myth or spirituality of the 21st century and beyond.

In this article, I want to offer a few meanings of myth, the Child-God and the imaginal world in which they are experienced. Why focus on these topics? Years ago in church settings during discussions of Advent and Psychic Birth, a number of people questioned my use of the phrase “Christian myth.” Comments ranged from, “I was taught that myth is pagan and false” to “Myth is less than history for history consists of ‘real events’ and is therefore true.” Over the years thanks to the influence of Joseph Campbell and others we have a better idea of how mythology affects our lives. Yet Jungian analyst James Hollis has recently published two books on myth saying that he senses a need “out there.”(4) I hope that you will explore these topics more fully than is possible here, using resources listed here as well as others readily available. It is a sad commentary on the spiritual hunger of our times that expressions of soul or imaginal experience have been overshadowed by the reams of ego-based information that can overwhelm us. The word, “mythological" is a stumbling block for many who either dismiss it as old fashioned or fear it as “pagan.”

Annunciation and Mythos

by Mariann Burke

In the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent by God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the House of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary. He went in and said to her, “Rejoice, so highly favored! The Lord is with you.” She was deeply disturbed by these words and asked herself what this greeting could mean, but the angel said to her, “Mary, do not be afraid; you have won God’s favor. Listen! You are to conceive and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High.” (Luke:1:26-38)

I had read this passage many times but it was soon to take on richer meaning.

Since we know nothing of Jesus’ conception and birth, legend and myth “fill in.” The word ‘myth’ comes from the ancient Greek word ‘mythos’ meaning ‘word.’ Both ‘logos’ and ‘mythos’ mean ‘word.’ While ‘logos’ refers to rational thinking, ‘mythos’ describes poetic or intuitive thinking. “Biblical accounts of Jesus’ birth and resurrection are ‘mythos.’ Biblical historical facts of his life are ‘logos.’ Both are true.”(1) Myths or mythos express truth closer to life’s meaning than facts. Myths resonate in the soul. For example, stories about the quest for the Grail resonate with all “searchers.” We long to experience the Holy, the numinous. The Annunciation, the birth in the stable, the shepherds’ adoration, and the journey to Egypt, all of these give valuable insights into our personal spiritual journey. And the artists who have painted these scenes have provided us with “windows” into depths unknown perhaps even to them.

Some of these “windows” would eventually open for me into other images of Mary, as Virgin Mother, Black Madonna, and Wisdom Sophia. But, at that moment down in my basement study, I was captivated only by the Annunciation. I longed to see other artists’ versions of the scene. In Milan, Arezzo or Florence, I sat in churches just looking at sculptures and frescoes. In museums, I marveled at the number of artists who had painted the scene with such depth, delicacy and power. Now these images of Mary, masterpieces from another age, stirred something vital within me. Writing these pages helped awaken me to their personal and symbolic meaning.

Over many years of paying attention to images from my unconscious in dreams and in artistic works, I was beginning to “see” a connection between the image and myself. I had known that through the history of Christianity there have been two ways of interpreting images or symbols: the historical and the poetic or imaginative. I had been exposed to the historical or literal. Now I began to realize that the two are not mutually exclusive. Early Christians honored both approaches but the historical and literal gradually took precedence. In this view the Annunciation is something that happened in the past. In the poetic or mythic approach, we are not so much viewing an image as experiencing it. My personal experience and my study of Jung would open me to see the Annunciation not as history, but as something happening now.(2) Taken in this way, the image reflects something within me. Like a dream, the image is happening within.

Certainly this is not new, for mystics of every religious tradition are “seers.” And the early Christian Gnostics valued the inner knowledge of God, but they were regarded as heretics. The thirteenth century Dominican Meister Eckhart suffered a similar fate for expressing his beliefs that God and the soul are somehow united. One of Eckhart’s favorite sayings found in his sermons is that the Divine Birth is always happening. If it does not happen within our soul, of what value is it? This insight we find echoed in the writings of Angelus Silesius, a seventeenth century mystic, speaking of the Annunciation:

If by God’s Holy Ghost thou art beguiled,
There will be born in thee the Eternal Child.
If it’s like Mary, virginal and pure
Then God will impregnate your soul for sure.
God make me pregnant, and his Spirit shadow me,
That God may rise up in my soul and shatter me.
What good does Gabriel’s ‘Ave, Mary’ do
Unless he give me that same greeting too?(3)

1. Seminar notes by Dr. Richard Naegle, Guild for Psychological Studies, San Francisco, 1995. In St. John’s Gospel “Logos” refers to the eternal existence of the Word. See also Karen Armstrong, A Short History of Myth, p. 31.
2. Joseph Campbell, The Mythic Image, p. 58.
3. C.G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, CW, Vol. 14, p. 319.

You're just read an excerpt from Mariann Burke's:

Re-Imagining Mary: A Journey Through 

Art to the Feminine Self

Mothers Day, The Motherline, and The Great Mother Re-Imagined

With Mothers Day fast approaching, perhaps the following Fisher King Press titles will be of interest:

The Motherline: Every Woman's Journey to find her Female Roots
by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky.

The Motherline takes the perspective of the mother who is always also a daughter. It is a book for women who have mothers, are mothers, or are considering becoming mothers, and for the men who love them. Telling the stories of women whose maturation has been experienced in the cycle of mothering, it urges a view of the psyche of women that does not sever mother from daughter, feminism from "the feminine," body from soul.

It argues that the path to wholeness requires us to reclaim aspects of the feminine self that we have lost or forgotten in our struggle to free ourselves from constricting roles. It describes a woman's journey to find her roots in the personal, cultural, and archetypal Motherline.

Our mothers are the first world we know, the source of our lives and our stories. Embodying the mysteries of origin, they tie us to the great web of kin and generation. Yet the voice of their experience is seldom heard. We have no cultural mirror in which to envision the fullness of female development; we are deprived of images of female wisdom and maturity. Finding our female roots, reclaiming our feminine souls, requires us to pay attention to our real mothers' lives and experience. Listening to our mothers' stories is the beginning of understanding our own.

Reviews
“(In) this perceptive and penetrating study . . . (Naomi Ruth Lowinsky) imaginatively applies Jungian, feminist and literary approaches to popular attitudes about . . . mothers and daughters and movingly, to personal experience.”

—Publisher’s Weekly

“A combination of years of scholarship and recordings of personal journeys, this book belongs in every woman’s psychology/spirituality collection.”

—Library Journal

“In this accessible volume, Jungian psychologist Lowinsky explores the pain that women feel when their mother-love is undervalued or erased.”

—ALA Booklist

About the Author
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky is the author of The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way and The Motherline: Every Woman's Journey to Find Her Female Roots and numerous prose essays, many of which have been published in Psychological Perspectives and The Jung Journal. She has had poetry published in many literary magazines and anthologies, among them After Shocks: The Poetry of Recovery, Weber Studies, Rattle, Atlanta Review, Tiferet and Asheville Poetry Review. Her two poetry collections, red clay is talking (2000) and crimes of the dreamer (2005) were published by Scarlet Tanager Books. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize three times and the recent recipient of the Obama Millennium Poetry awarded for "Madelyn Dunham, Passing On.” Naomi is a Jungian analyst in private practice, poetry and fiction editor of Psychological Perspectives, and a grandmother many times over.

Re-Imagining Mary: A Journey Through Art to the Feminine Self 
by Mariann Burke

Artists plumb the depths of soul which Jung calls the collective unconscious, the inheritance of our ancestors' psychic responses to life’s drama. In this sense the artist is priest, mediating between us and God. The artist introduces us to ourselves by inviting us into the world of image. We may enter this world to contemplate briefly or at length. Some paintings invite us back over and over again and we return, never tiring of them. It is especially these that lead us to the Great Mystery, beyond image. Re-imagining Mary: A Journey through Art to the Feminine Self is about meeting the Cosmic Mary in image and imagination, the many facets of the Mary image that mirror both outer reality and inner feminine soul. Jungian analyst Mariann Burke explores symbolic meanings of paintings and sculptures by several famous artist from the renaissance period on up to our modern age including: Fra Angelico, Albrecht Durer, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Nicolas Poussin, Parmigianino, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, and Frederick Franck.

Aspects of Mary explored include: Mary not only as Mother of God, a title from the Judeo-Christian tradition, but as Mother God, a title reaching back to an ancient longing for a Female Divinity. In western Christianity this Mary bears the titles and the qualities worshipped for thousands of years in the Female images of God and Goddess. These titles include Mary as Sorrowful One and as Primordial Mother. Recovering Mary both as light and dark Madonna plays a crucial role in humanity s search for a divinity who reflects soul. Also discussed is Mary as the sheltering Great Mother that Piero della Francesca suggest in the Madonna del Parto and Mater Misericodia. Frederick Franck s The Original Face and the Medieval Vierge Ouvrante also suggest this motif of Mary as Protector of the mystery of our common Origin. Franck s inspiration for his sculpture of Mary was the Buddhist koan 'What is your original face before you were born?'

Reviews
"In this beautiful book, recounting her personal journey of discovery, Mariann Burke offers us her awakening to the experience of the Feminine. We follow her as she encounters and responds to images of Mary which hold meaning for her: Mary as Virgin Mother, Mary as Mirror, Mary as the Compassionate Sanctuary for suffering humanity, Mary as Temple, Mary as Black Madonna and Divine Wisdom. Through her contemplation of these images, she leads us deeper into an understanding of the Feminine and into unexplored dimensions of the soul. This is a book to savor and return to often."

--Anne Baring, co-author of The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image.

"Mariann Burke has undertaken the remarkable and urgent task of grounding one of the major icons of Christian history, Mary. She plants Mary side by side with her ancient sister colleagues: Isis, Kali, Demeter, Tara and others, revealing Mary's ancient roots. This reading is critical for the 21st century since, through Mary, one expression of the Feminine archetype, matter can again be seen as divinized and the idea of incarnation pushed solidly into the matter of all things. Re-Imagining Mary is really re-imagining ourselves as women and men giving birth to God in newer and more relevant ways today. It is reimagining not only our own personal soul s journey but also the deep sacredness of the soul of the world itself."

--Fred Gustafson, author of The Black Madonna.

About the Author
Mariann Burke is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Newton, MA. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, Andover-Newton Theological School, and the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. She has done graduate work in Scripture at Union Theological Seminary and La Salle University. Her interests include the body-psyche connection, feminine spirituality, and the psychic roots of Christian symbolism. She is a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart (RSCJ).

Phone orders welcomed, Credit Cards accepted: +1-831-238-7799.

Imagining Mary in Her many splendid forms . . .

Just Published

Re-Imagining Mary: A Journey through Art to the Feminine Self
by Mariann Burke

Artists plumb the depths of soul which Jung calls the collective unconscious, the inheritance of our ancestors’ psychic responses to life’s drama. In this sense the artist is priest, mediating between us and God. The artist introduces us to ourselves by inviting us into the world of image. We may enter this world to contemplate briefly or at length. Some paintings invite us back over and over again and we return, never tiring of them. It is especially these that lead us to the Great Mystery, beyond image. Re-Imagining Mary: A Journey through Art to the Feminine Self is about meeting the Cosmic Mary in image and imagination, the many facets of the Mary image that mirror both outer reality and inner feminine soul. Jungian analyst Mariann Burke offers personal reflections and suggests symbolic meanings in works by several artists including: Fra Angelico, Albrecht Dürer, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Nicolas Poussin, Parmigianino, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Salvador Dali, Andy Warhol, and Frederick Franck.

In western Christianity this Mary bears the titles and the qualities worshipped for thousands of years in the Female images of God and Goddess. These titles include Mary as Sorrowful One and as Primordial Mother. Recovering Mary both as light and dark Madonna plays a crucial role in humanity’s search for a divinity who reflects soul. Also discussed is Mary as the sheltering Great Mother that Piero della Francesca suggest in the Madonna del Parto and Mater Misericodia. Frederick Franck's The Original Face and the Medieval Vierge Ouvrante also suggest this motif of Mary as Protector of the mystery of our common Origin. Franck’s inspiration for his sculpture of Mary was the Buddhist koan—"What is your original face before you were born?"

From the Author: “My first meeting with Mary began with an experience of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation (Cortona). I cannot account for my unusual response to the image except to say that, at the time, over twenty years ago, I was studying Jungian psychology in Zürich, Switzerland and was then probably more disposed to respond to the imaginal world. One day as I sat in my basement apartment reflecting on a picture of his Annunciation, energy seemed to surge through me and lift me above myself. Tears brought me to deep center. It was as if I was restored to my truest self. This was an awakening for me—not an ecstasy. Far from leaving my body-self, I seemed to recover it.”

What is spirituality? What does it mean to grow spiritually and psychologically closer to the Feminine Self? How can we begin to see the "outer" image as a manifestation, a projection of the psyche? Can we be challenged by being “betwixt and between” a male dominated Church without a recognized female divinity where God is generally imagined external to the soul and a more feminine depth psychological approach to the Marian mystery and to the Feminine Self? Will we answer the call of the mystic within us? If so, how will we be changed?

Mariann Burke is a Jungian analyst in private practice in Newton, MA. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Pittsburgh, Andover-Newton Theological School, and the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich, Switzerland. She has done graduate work in Scripture at Union Theological Seminary and La Salle University. Her interests include the body-psyche connection, feminine spirituality, and the psychic roots of Christian symbolism. She is a member of the Religious of the Sacred Heart (RSCJ).

Re-Imagining Mary:A Journey through Art to the Feminine Self

Fisher King books are available from your local bookstore, a host of online booksellers, 
or directly from Fisher King Press. 

Attention Booksellers and Libraries:
 FKP titles are available directly from Fisher King Press with industry standard discounts.

Re-Imagining Mary by Mariann Burke 
—ISBN 9780981034416