From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V2 #47 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Sunday, February 27 2000 Volume 02 : Number 047 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: b/re faithdreams [GHighPine@aol.com] b/thunder ["Donald G. Keller" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2000 12:25:32 EST From: GHighPine@aol.com Subject: Re: b/re faithdreams Wow, excellent analysis. Hit lots of bullseyes, IMO. I'm thinking I'd like to repost this on another list -- would I have your permission to do so? (Cleindori. I'm thinking of Geniepipers, 'cause this seems like the kind of thing Karin would like.) Gayle ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2000 00:57:04 -0500 (EST) From: "Donald G. Keller" Subject: b/thunder A footnote to the dream-analysis from last night. I had randomly picked up Joseph Campbell's =Creative Mythology= (Vol. 4 of his tetralogy =The Masks of God=) and found myself quite by chance in the middle of Chapter 5 of Part 2, entitled "Phoenix Fire," which had as its dual subjects alchemy (aha!) and James Joyce. With lots of stuff drawn from Jung. (Makes sense if you read it...) Imagine my surprise when I came across this brief statement on page 283 about =Ulysses=: "...exactly in the middle of the book, that thunderclap resounds and a change begins." Campbell goes on to point out a similar case in T.S. Eliot's =The Waste Land= where "the same thunder and promise of renewed life sounds in the last section: Part V, 'What the Thunder Said.'" With quotes and references to the =Brihadaranyaka Upanishad=. (Jung believed that synchronicity was not random chance, by the way.) The thunderclap as portent of change and renewed life...sounds like Faith's dream-trilogy to me. (Here's a weirdness, while I'm on the subject: at the end of the first dream, we hear thunder and see lightning from the hospital room, not in the dream. But it's not rainy in the rest of the scenes in real time. Curious. The thunder and later the rain are more clearly in the dream in the other two sections.) Hm, I thought. Maybe I should flip through some other books--Jung, etc.--and see what I could find about thunder. And about rain, for that matter. Came across one little tidbit on page 221 of Jung's =Alchemical Studies=, that the Hopi Indians believed snakes to be "flashes of lightning auguring rain." Chalk up another signified for that snake. And I got to thinking about the fact that Thor in Norse mythology and Indra in Hindu mythology are both not only warrior-gods but storm-gods, with weapons related to thunderbolts (cf. Zeus), and that one of my postulates is that these warrior-gods are the mythological underliers of the Slayers. So I'll suggest a symbolic series of snake = thunderbolt = stake = knife that applies to the second dream. (And note the "synchronicity" that SMG named her dog Thor.) As for rain, there was the general sense that it =always= means renewal, crops growing, etc. etc.; but there was also the "see also: dew" in the various indices, which led me to alchemy again. Take my word for it without pages of exposition: there is a point in the mystical/symbolic process of alchemy where the united opposites (male/female, Sol/Luna, etc.) have conjoined into a single creature which dies; and subsequently it is revived by dew which falls from heaven. Back in the Campbell book again, here's a quote from Jung on p. 294 (I'm using the Campbell edit because he took two bits from ten pages apart): "The falling dew is the portent of the divine birth now at hand...The black or unconscious state that resulted from the union of opposites reaches the nadir and a change sets in. The falling dew signals resuscitation and a new light: the ever deeper descent into the unconscious suddenly becomes illumination from above." (p. 294) And much more succinctly, Jung says in a footnote on p. 492 of =Mysterium Coniunctionis= "dew wakens the dead." So the thunder signals the imminence of a change, and the rain signals the renewal of life. And Faith wakes up. That whole last dream has an alchemical feel to it: two Slayers, light and dark (i.e. opposites), in the grave together, and only one emerges to be revived by the rain. And then I got thinking of other patterns that are being reiterated here. Consider: In the 1st season, Buffy gets bitten by a vampire (the Master), which empowers him (to escape to the upper world); she dies, but is brought back to life; she impales the Master on a broken piece of wood (and later thwarts a plan to bring him back to life). In the 2nd season, Kendra, the Second Slayer, gets her throat slit by a vampire (though she is =not= brought back to life and there is no empowering); Buffy impales Angel with a sword and sends him to Hell (and later he comes back). In the 3rd season, Buffy gets bitten by a vampire (Angel), which empowers him (to survive his poisoning); she "dies" (is hospitalized) but "comes back to life"; she impales Faith with a knife and sends her to "hell"--or a coma (and later she wakes up). Naah, this show's not =mythic= or anything... ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V2 #47 ****************************