STEPHEN KARCHER

MAKING SPIRITS BRIGHT: DIVINATION AND THE DEMONIC IMAGE

Signs of the Times

A definition of the way we tell time reveals a dichotomy. In Webster’s Dictionary, for example, “time” is first defined as: a “non-spatial continuum in which events occur, an interval on that continuum; and a system by which such intervals are measured or reckoned.” Alongside this abstract or “scientific” definition come more qualitative senses: troubled times, good times, high times; your own time; the right time, in the nick of time; bedtime, harvest time; the time of your life, the moment of truth; before its time, in no time, behind the times; to make time (with a desired person), to do time (in prison). These expressions of a particular quality of time give it a different sense from the abstract continuum of minutes, hours and days in which each unit is interchangeable with every other unit.

These two sorts of time are experienced as fundamentally incommensurable. This is the sign of a disjunction in our thought that haunts modern culture, a chronic division between subject and object, thought and feeling, reason and imagination. More precisely, this incommensurability reveals the disconnection of science from what we regard as magic, superstition and fantasy, a disconnection that has been termed the “disenchantment of the world.” As historians of science have noted, this disconnection is particularly obvious at the level of explanations of individuals or individual events. For one of the consequences of the scientific rationalization of time has been the separation of a cosmos of natural causality from a cosmos of psychological causality, of scientific law from psychic image. It is in this disjunction, how-ever, that individual experience may be said to exist: as an aura of qualitative value that shades the abstract unit.

The ancient world told time differently, for the time itself did the telling: Thor’s-day, Saturn’s-day; the Hour of the Snake, the Hour of the Wolf, the Year of the Rat or the Tiger, born in Aries the Ram, Capricorn the Goat, Sagittarius the Centaur; “take no action in the dark of the moon.” The units of time were themselves demonic images, and a calendar made of these images moved the individual through a series of Mysteries, special times in which everything partook of the quality of a God.

Divination was the art of “telling” this time, making it known by reverting each significant moment to its origin in a potent image or daimon. Divination and Mystery were the “essence and spirit of the ancient world.” Mirror, clock and map, they wove a fabric of meaning, narrating the individual into a unique relation with a meaningful cosmos.

According to Jung, this magical sense of time, the moment experienced as a demon or particular form of energy, coincides precisely with our psychological conditions. What we experience in dream, spontaneous fantasy, symptoms and the crises of individual fate constitutes a psychological parallel to the occulted spirit-world of the demons, whose transformative energy connects inner and outer, psyche and cosmos.

“This is the theoretical explanation of the I Ching,” Jung wrote, and a paradigm for all divinatory practices. When one “casts the sticks, they behave exactly as one’s psychology and the general conditions of the moment.” What we see as chance allows the demon of the time to mobilize one of the system’s signifiers or symbols. These symbols “tell” the inquirer into the story of the time, placing the individual in a “psycho-physical reality intelligible to the soul” (Dream Analysis, 416-17).

The ancients called this interconnection of everything with everything else sympatheia, and it characterizes superstitious or pre-scientific thought. It links what Jung called the dreamlike atmosphere of the Yi Ching, the occulted magical and mantic tradition that lurks outside modern culture and our psychic reality: the spontaneous appearance of our dreams, fantasies and crises. But its most superstitious quality is its focus on individual fantasy. Viewed from a scientific perspective, this crucial relation of the individual to the cosmos disappears. And with it disappears the most significant effect of contact with these demons of the psyche, the healing effect of being “in harmony with the time.”

(Part of Karcher's article in the Eranos yearbook 1992, vol. 61. ISBN 1-882670-03-5)