March tarot reading
with the Queen of Swords and Peter Kingsley's Catafalque: Carl Jung & the End of Humanity
It’s a bad habit of mine as a reader but I don’t mind bloviating and I don’t mind bluster. In fact, these writerly moves, however unconscious they may be, kind of delight me. I tried to figure out why1 this summer as I worked my way through Peter Kingsley’s Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity. The book arrested me! I underlined so much. I scribbled in the margins. I squabbled with Kingsley in my journals. I talked endlessly about him during client sessions. I tried to convince friends to read him; I tried to talk about him with family members I knew wouldn’t read him.
Kingsley bloviates. Kingsley blusters. Kingsley is a classics scholar turned self-proclaimed mystic. I’m pretty sure he thinks he is God? Or a god? Or has experienced union with God? Sometimes I wonder if he thinks that he, like Carl Jung before him, is one of the latest iterations of a long line of Western prophets that Kingsley identifies as having incarnated on this earth specifically to help Western civilization understand its place, its birth, and, yes, now, its death. These are some of Kingsley’s ideas, and writing them out like this makes him sound crazier than I think he actually is.
He published his first book, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic about the presocratic lives and teachings of philosopher-magicians, including the likes of Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles, with Oxford University Press in 1995. The book, as far as I can tell, received commendation and acclaim from his peers within and outside of the academy. But a shift occurred in the years after this first book’s publication as Kingsley found himself following a more devotional bent. Annoyed with what he described as the soulless nit-picking of scholars who didn’t understand either the rhetorical modes or the magical intentions of some of history’s first logicians and healers, Kingsley became caught up in the figures of Parmenides and Empedocles not only as intellectual subject matter but also as guides for how to live and how to be—not to mention how to experience God, magic, and spirituality in day-to-day life.
A break with traditional academia saw him take on—seriously, sincerely—the role of a mystic who wanted to help people understand the “reality behind reality.” The Gnostics became important to Kingsley. The real-life practices of magic and alchemy, too. His later books, including Reality, In the Dark Places of Wisdom, A Story Waiting to Pierce You, and Catafalque: Carl Jung and the End of Humanity were published through non-traditional presses with spiritual bents or by Kingsley himself. For those interested in his departure from studying magic and spirituality into fully practicing it, Kingsley uses his scholarly training in these books alongside a darkly rapturous2 rhetorical style as he traces what he sees as the throughline of the Western magical tradition from its most ancient practitioners to Carl Jung in the twentieth century.3
Kingsley’s books are strange to read. They’re filled with personal visions and poetically recounted dreams alongside some of the most pedantic endnotes and lugubrious scholarly biography I’ve read. In addition to the ancient Greeks, he’s got, I think, a moving read of Jung and Jung’s confidante, the French theologian Henri Corbin. Kingsley also knows and shows off his Goethe, Goethe’s Faust; he’s got unique close reads of Apollonian and Greek underworld myths. He likes to demonstrate his felicity with old languages and difficult literature only to veer into the ecstatic personal: Kingsley once drove through the night, he tells us in Catafalque, compelled as if by trance or possession, to sit at the base of Jung’s tower in Bollingen, Switzerland. Coming back to waking consciousness, cold and exhausted, Kingsley describes himself touching the Bollingen stones with his fingers, says he’s being called by the self-same “spirit of the depths” that spoke to and through Jung in the Red book. The moon was “close to” full that night, Kingsley writes:
And then—I don’t know how else to describe it—Jung came towards me, but not as a man although It was unmistakably him. He came like a wind moving in a spiral, stirring everything but at the same time perfectly still. It was as if he was silently speaking from everywhere, but also from inside myself … he went into telling me, through the silence, what I had to do; offered me guidance for the rest of my life …
So Kingsley writes of ghosts and prophecies. He also writes repetitively, from a place of gritted-teeth rage—the “howl,” he calls it, and, yes, of course, that’s also a nod to Ginsburg—ostensibly to highlight the prophetic mode of the poetry of Parmenides, Western civilization’s first logician and philosopher, who he sees as Jung’s direct and proper forbearer. The point, I think, of Kingsley’s mish-mash of style, genre, story, and tone is to try to shake the reader loose from preconceived notions about what it means to live a reasonable life.
All of our inherited ideas in the West about what is just, true, beautiful, and good come from a more magical place—a more insane place—than we could have ever imagined, he says, meaning this quite literally.4 Parmenides and Jung didn’t just imagine their respective descents into the underworld, Kingsley tells us: They actually went “down there.” Or to speak in psychological terms: They went mad, and, in going mad, they experienced revelations about how human law, civilization, and psychology work. Kingsley says there is something precious and important for us to learn and reclaim as part of our contemporary striving, hidden in the insights of presocratic poetry and the easily dismissed Red book. Reading him, I think he wants us, through his bluster and bloviation, to feel something crack in the base of our understanding of what rationality is, what civilization is, what the coherent self is. He wants us to acknowledge the ways in which, even when it comes to justice and reason, sometimes it truly is just “vibes” all the way down.5
Sometimes this works. Sometimes it doesn’t. In Catafalque, Kingsley is at his best when he’s tracing how Jung tried desperately to cover up the tracks of his own spirituality and irrational beliefs in the name of science. The archetypes were so much more to Jung than what Jungians can account for, Kingsley argues, with fastidious records and citations to support his claims. I buy this; I’ve found myself endlessly annoyed in recent years by the commodification and dumbing down of Jung’s archetypal world into psychological types for personal growth and power. But Kingsley fails in Catafalque when he allows himself page upon page of writing that amounts to: “I know Jung better than anyone, and anyone who says they know him better than I do is stupid and wrong!”
I was captivated by Kingsley even when he was failing, though. I read him in the hottest days of last July and August, when I was having to prepare a nursery for my daughter at the same time as wrapping my mind around the idea that I might die in the bed across from her crib, maybe in the same room, maybe one day, in the future, way too soon. “Death is the place language comes from,” Kingsley would say, and I’d be like, OK, what? But I kind-of got it! And I kind-of didn’t buy it! But, wow, what a sentence. What a sentiment to turn over in your mind when you’re so, so, so scared you’re gonna die and hurt everyone you ever loved, everyone who ever loved you back, too.
Kingsley is good at birth and death, together. It’s clear his own meditation practice and belief system have prepared him not only to face his own death but also to face the million tiny deaths we encounter everyday, as well as to face the deaths of governments and civilizations and ways of collective living we’ve always taken for granted. It’s clear that he loves the writers who he thinks have shown the way through the flat, materialist logics of the modern world, Carl Jung not the least among them. So I was fine with the sentimental kitsch of a man who had thought he might be great but then realized he never would be, not really, if he indulged in his sentiments. For better or worse, Kingsley indulged in his sentiments. He didn’t stick it out in academia or in publishing or in any sort of respectable position. He had his convictions, and the courage to live his life following and writing about them. I don’t mind that, not really, not at all.
I’ve got issues with him when it comes to gender, Gnosticism, his own inflated sense of self-importance. But … if you’re going to read a book about Carl Jung, I can’t imagine one that is more exciting, more copiously cross-referenced, more shocking and even, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. There’s inspiration to be had here, however unorthodox it may be. Many of us act (or talk or write) like we’re living in the apocalypse. We might as well read writers who are unabashed6 in exploring what they think that means and has meant, and then decide whether we’re actually going to pick up that line and carry it forward it ourselves.
March is a weird month. We’ve got eclipses and the end of an astrological era as Neptune and Saturn move closer toward the Aries point in the tropical zodiac. We’ve got the first irises pushing up over piles of stone in the cemetery in the woods. We found that cemetery on New Year’s Day, untended for generations but with a wrought iron fence around the root-strewn graves. There was a hawk in the oak, crows in the elms, a red-headed woodpecker knocking against its beech tree, turkeys pushing through low bushes. March is like that, life and death, some truth howling in with its bluster.
The bibliomantic tarotscopes for the individual signs are below. For the bibliomancy part, I’m using Kingsley’s Catafalque. If you want to read a real review of the book, I liked this one. The Queen of Swords is our tarot draw to help us place the quotes on the astrological wheel; she rules the last ten degrees of Virgo and the first twenty degrees of Libra. I drew from the Waite-Smith deck, but my favorite description of this always-incisive, sometimes-cruel Queen comes from Aleister Crowley (no one can touch him on the court cards, tbh):
The person symbolized by this card should be intensely perceptive, a keen observer, a subtle interpreter, an intense individualist, swift and accurate at recording ideas; in action confident, in spirit gracious and just. Her movements will be graceful, and her ability in dancing and balancing exceptional.
If ill-dignified, these qualities will all be turned to unworthy purposes. She will be cruel, sly, deceitful and unreliable; in this way, very dangerous, on account of the superficial beauty and attractiveness which distinguish her.
I’m happy to answer questions about this month’s tarot draw or astrology if you comment with your rising below. Otherwise, I would love to hear about your favorite books that embarrass you for how much you like them.
The way I do bibliomancy is to use the randomly selected quotations as a provocation to stir up some feeling, or some argument within myself. It’s not about whether I agree with these assertions, it’s more about what does it point me toward that I might need to understand, to develop understanding around? My own suggestions for the month follow the Catafalque quote. Read for your rising sign.
Pisces Rising: “For Jung’s despair as the impossibility of being understood when he speaks about the dead, see JP b26 (13 June 1958) … Already by 1918 Jung had become aware that it was the Gnostics who would provide the ultimate ‘foundations,’ the ‘Fundament,’ for his own psychology … But after all his efforts and his work with patients and his scientific discoveries had still left him unrooted, suspended in mid-air, he finally realized it was the alchemists who would provide him with the firm footing and stable foundation he needed because they were the solid bridge deck that could lead him straight back to the Gnostics” (593). Ancestor worship was big on social media back during the Saturn-in-Capricorn and Saturn-in-Aquarius eras, and ever one to go you’re own way spiritually, maybe you were understandably reluctant about opening that whole dead can of worms. This March offers a more genuine or authentic engagement with those you consider your “radiant dead.” Exploring your inheritances from the past, psychological or otherwise, will help you liberate yourself from current tired patterns of relationship.