Golden Darkness: Samhain

Samhain Shadow Stack in honor of liminal passages at the crossroads/thresholds of psychic transformation and the re-emergence of Self. Today we suffer and play in the thinning of the veil.

From The Chiron Clinical Series on Liminality and Transitional Phenomena ed. by Schwartz-Salant and Stein.

Chapter: The Watcher at The Gates of Dawn: The Transformation of Self in Liminality and by the Transcendent Function (by James Hall):

“(Discussing the Green Corn Dance of the Pueblo Indians) Facilitating the dance of the dancers, the clowns themselves seemed outside the dance, remnants of an older, more basic order. The clowns were on the margin of the dance, moving in the interstices of the dancers, with none of the signs of social rank worn. The clowns were liminal—yet their liminality served to maintain the community of the dancers, their communitas. The clowns were “outsiders” who were more “in” than the dancers themselves .There is an essential grace to these imaginal figures. They are outside order, but essential to it, much like primordial chaos. Liminality began as a term of discourse in 1909 as the middle way of three stages of initiation ceremonies defined by van Gennep in Rites of Passage. The classical three stages are separation, liminality/transition, and incorporation/aggregation. They describe the manner in which a person is separated psychically and placed in an intermediate state of liminality “#betwixt and between,” and finally returned, after initiation, for reincorporation or re-memberment. The state of the ritual “passenger” or liminal is ambiguous, neither here nor there, not described by the usual social classification. Turning to Jung’s map of the self, laid out in Aion, we see that with the self image that is established within the Anthropos Quaternio, movement toward either central node would suggest the experience of liminality for the whole relational structure of that quaternion (map in live streams). Liminality thus can be a property of any movement from any relatively fixed identity.For example, we can experience liminality of the lowermost type if the self-image movement is toward an identity in the Shadow Quaternio.But any movement of self-identity that involves the quality of liminality can produce a sense of communitas, a feeling of basic oneness with humanity outside the usual social (persona) identity.If the psyche is looked upon as fixed, identities not integrated into the persona will seem marginal, the shadow will take on qualities of the inferior lowermost including some of its numinous appeal, but liminality requires that the ego-centrum itself dis-identify from the dominant self-image, undergo the experiences associated with the liminal state, and then re-identify with a self-image that is usually more comprehensive and inclusive than the original image.Psychologically, liminality is the sense of crossing and re-crossing borders such as of the psyche. Stein states, ‘In liminality the ‘I’s’ standpoint is not fixed, and it occupies no clearly defined psychological location.It floats; it is not sharply delineated as ‘this’ and ‘not that’; boundaries between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’ blur… The ego is a has been and a not-yet… The ‘I’ is not anchored to any particular inner images, ideas, or feelings… Inner ground shifts… liminality is the realm of #HermesTrismegistus.’”