Assigning
Meaning
“As
far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light
of meaning in the darkness of mere being.”
Carl
Gustav Jung
In
Genesis 2: 19-20, God has placed Adam in the Garden of Eden and gone on with the
business of creating living beings out of the earth: “Now the Lord God had
formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the
air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever
the man called each living creature, that was its name. So the man gave names
to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field.”
From the very beginning,
then, humanity’s job was to shed light, to name things, to assign meaning to never-before-seen
creations. And God went along with whatever the man said. All this was done to
find a proper “helper” for Adam. None of the animals seemed exactly right, so
God created woman—not from the dirt, as he had Adam and all the animals, but
from Adam’s rib, which God took out of his chest while Adam was sleeping. When God
brought the woman to Adam, Adam named her Eve, pronouncing her “bone of my
bones, flesh of my flesh.”
This language is often
included in the modern marriage ritual—“the man will leave his father and mother
and be united with his wife and they will become one flesh.” It has been
construed, I think, to establish the preeminence of Adam—Eve came from him and
therefore, she belongs to him. She is literally his flesh and his bones. They once
were one being, and now through marriage, they are again.
But there’s another way
of looking at it. In Jungian psychology, this coming together of the masculine
and feminine is called the Hieros Gamos, the sacred marriage, in which divinity
and humanity are united in the physical world. This union is what brings fertility to the earth—its people, its animals, and crops. The ritual of the
sacred marriage was, once upon a time, enacted by the King of the land (God’s emissary)
mating with the Priestess of the temple (emissary of the Goddess) once a year
at Beltane in May.
Thinking about that (which
we moderns would call a primitive pagan ritual) there is an underlying deep
truth. It is, in fact, the union of heaven and earth that produces fertility. The
sunlight shines on and warms the earth; the earth provides the seeds, the
water, and the soil. When these two elements come together in Springtime,
fertility results.
There are always many
ways of looking at things, and we humans are still assigning names and meanings
to whatever we touch. Unfortunately, we have lost most of the rituals that once
connected us deeply to the earth. Along with that, we misplaced our
appreciation for the sacredness of those connections. We may want to rethink
that since the earth is the only home we have. She deserves our respect, but
also our delight.
I hope this Sabbath finds
you out reveling in the beauty of early autumn.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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