The Thing That Knowledge Can’t Eat: Engaging the Power of Archetypes and Deities for Radical Transformation/Exploring the Seven Souls

• Religion & Spirituality

With Langston Khan and Demetrius Lacroix

The Dagara, an indigenous culture in West Africa have a phrase, Yielbongura, roughly translated as “the thing which knowledge can’t eat,” the ecstatic and mysterious experience of the numinous that can’t be grasped completely by the mind. In indigenous cultures around the world, engagement with these forces is seen as integral to basic health. While in the west, the importance of myth, symbol and archetype in the psychological healing process have become part of popular consciousness, in large part due to the work of Freud and Jung, the lens of scientific materialism often reduces these complex forces to constructs of the mind, castrating their cosmic potentialities.

In a lecture to some of his students Jung stated, “You cannot get conscious of these unconscious facts without giving yourself to them. If you can overcome your fear of the unconscious and can let yourself go down, then these facts take on a life of their own. You can be gripped by these ideas so much that you really go mad, or nearly so. These images form part of the ancient mysteries; in fact, it is such fantasies that made the mysteries.”

To truly engage the power of the numinous to create change, it helps to understand the difference between psychological archetypes, cosmic Archetypes, and Gods, and how to work with them effectively. In this presentation, we will examine some of Jung’s own transformative experiences with Archetypes and Deities, how they parallel indigenous and shamanic understandings of these energies and discuss how we might more skillfully invite these powers into our lives to facilitate health. Through looking at the deeper cosmology of Vodou, most importantly the nature of the soul and how it is viewed, we can see a nurturing side of spiritual and mental development and growth.