Mortificatio
Letting Die What Must Die
THE FRAME
Freewrite prompts from Edward Edinger’s book, Anatomy of the Psyche
For decades, both on my own and in workshops, I’ve turned to freewriting as a way to access my psyche. I’ll choose a jumping-off point, a single sentence, and let my mind follow its own thread, free-associating for as long as it needs. Sometimes I set a timer. Sometimes I don’t. It depends on the day and what wants to come through.
For this exercise, I read Edinger’s chapter on mortificatio and pulled every sentence that snagged my attention. I gathered them all, then used each as a springboard into the unconscious. It was a deep dive.
The process involved letting go of the rational brain and letting my mind wander. I enter into a fugue state of pleasant dissociation and am generally surprised by what shows up. It is a meditation in writing. I hope you enjoy.
THE DRAGON’S GEM
“The dragon is a personification of the instinctual psyche.”
My erotic nature is a dragon. She wakes and scorches the village. I don’t trust her. She makes terrible choices with men. I’m not ready for her to die, but I know I must take her head when she sleeps.
“Unless you slay me, your understanding will not be perfect; and in my sister, the Moon, your wisdom increases.”
Slay me—some days, single mothering in late-stage capitalism feels impossible. I have fantasized about illness doing the job for me, or a tree at high speed. But would my death bring perfect understanding of myself? Would my daughter look up at the moon and see my love reflected there instead of my madness?
“I am the toad then, full of unbridled concupiscence.”
No one will argue that. Biblical lust propels me to my detriment, a lineage of repressed religious sex. I was branded a heathen at my birth, the mark of the devil upon my forehead where the forceps pulled me out.
“When the prison can both kill and save.”
When the prison looks like a man I’d willingly sacrifice my sanity for. Men have the capacity to heal, but choose mostly to harm. “Men have used her meanly. She will eat them.” - Sylvia Plath
“That which has become flesh or earth is subject to death and corruption.”
As long as the fantasy remains, just that, a fantasy, it cannot die. For 3 years, I fantasized about Bryan. It was when the fantasy was on the verge of coagulatio and embodiment that it perished. Before that, it remained in sublimatio, a dissociated version of me and him intertwined in the night sky, locked in an ungodly embrace.
“Therefore the head is removed from dragons while asleep, and thus the gem is secured.”
The gem is self-worth, dignity, and confidence. They say, “She has low self-worth.” Maybe. I’ve begged at men’s feet. Sever the head, keep the gem. Must I die alone? Perhaps not, but I must stop dying for those who won’t live for me.
“It is also good that we sometimes suffer contradictions and be thought of as evil, wretched, sinful.”
I am leaning into this. I’m exhausted from taking the high road, trying to be liked, accepted by “him,” by “community.” When the man-child texted, “Thinking of you,” after months of silence, my reflex was to soothe his ego. I owed him nothing. I said nothing. It felt revolutionary.
Messy. Dirty. Unladylike. Fuck being a lady. I am a daemon, for real. Cross me, you cross the land.
THE GRAVEYARD
“On an archetypal level it is desirable to be aware of evil.”
Who decides what is evil? “Religious folk,” I suppose. I have acted evil in my life, horrendous versions of me I’ve buried, praying my daughter never sees. In my twenties, drunk, I once threatened a twelve-year-old on crutches who asked me to turn my music down so she could study. I told her I’d cut her. She loved me on my tween TV show. Tell me—what archetype is that?
“The childhood state of purity and innocence must be sacrificed.
She flew up from Mexico to see me, my mother. I told her how accusing me at nine years old of seducing my stepfather carved me open and left me bleeding out. When I told her at thirteen I’d had sex (rape), she was unfazed. I asked why she never cared for my innocence. She said, “Because you never were.”
(In hindsight I believe she was talking about the innocence that was stolen from her when she was a child)
“The despicable worm can turn into the supreme value.”
She handed me a box of my childhood drawings. My Mom was cleaning out her house. A gymnastics certificate for finally achieving “novice.” My first “book” I ever wrote, The Healing of Eilonway where a princess no one notices flees to an understanding and motherly Pegasus in the forest who has lost her child. The princess finds the child and reunites them, never returning to the castle. A child’s drawing of a snake or worm-shaped thing with a child’s script, “the dillybump comes in the night.” Can someone please tell me what the dillybump is? I fear it is not a worm, nor a snake, but something far more sinister. What was I trying to say? Perhaps: the worthless becomes the precious; last becomes first. I must find the gem in the dragon’s head.
Maybe I am the worm? “I am a worm and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.” Despicable. Depraved. The Vedic astrologer told me she saw deprivation in my ancestry. My fundamentalist Mormon roots are rearing their dragon head. Where is the gem? Buried deep inside. I have to dismember the beast to find the solace I seek. It is in there somewhere. I keep scratching at the surface, but I need more effective tools of extraction. She also told me to “Just get with God, Honey” when I asked about me and relationships with men. I believe she was right.
“All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished.”
By whom? I have not seen it. Men break my heart and flourish. They thank me for teaching them how to be men. Meanwhile, I learn to bury my dead.
“A lurking bear he has been to me, a lion in ambush.”
My stepfather. His creepy crawly friends. My older brother. His deranged friends. I was a lamb surrounded by hungry wolves. At thirteen, I felt safer drinking, doing drugs, and hooking up with older boys at high-school parties than being at home.
“He deranged my ways, set me astray, left me desolate.”
My first “boyfriend” was twenty-three; I was sixteen. My childhood robbed. The only thing he gave me was acid, chlamydia, and a lot of grief. Decades later, when his daughter turned sixteen, I asked him how he would feel if she dated a man like him. He said she never would, because she was not precocious like you, as if being hypersexualized was something to be proud of.
“He bent his bow and set me up as the target for his arrow.”
I met him at the height of the pandemic, on Hinge. We bubbled early. The world was ending. Eight months later, he asked me to marry him on a beach in Kauai. I said yes so I wouldn’t destroy him. He destroyed me instead.
“He has broken my teeth with gravel; pressed my face into the dust; my soul deprived of peace.”
Instead of working every day, he was selling cocaine, cheating, lying, and abusing me. I spent one year living with him and three desperately trying to go no-contact. Trauma bonds are no joke. A dark night of the soul, if there ever was one. Gravel as a palate. Dust in my eyes. I could not distinguish between true and false. I did not know peace for many years.
“I have forgotten what happiness is; I tell myself my future is lost.”
Bereft and lost, I found dance again. It had been twenty years since I last stepped foot in a dance studio. The first time, when I was eleven years old, it gave me a home I desperately needed. In my thirties, it helped me turn my life around. And now, it saved me from him so I could find myself again.
THE HANGING
“One allows oneself to be less in order to be more - less nearly perfect, but more nearly whole.”
My last day in the mountains, even after I’d “let go” of the fragile dalliance that propelled me there, the fantasy still haunted me. I spent the day in mortificatio—reading, note-taking, contemplating Edward Edinger’s Anatomy of the Psyche, finding sentences that spoke to me. At dusk, I was eerily compelled to visit the abandoned haunted schoolhouse built in the early 1800s one last time. I did not logically know what I was doing there, but my body knew: it propelled me in a counterclockwise circle around the structure. At the great tree out front, I stopped and knew I needed to place my palm on the trunk.
Two ravens flew overhead, cried out, circled once, then continued south. I’d only seen buzzards till then.
Later, I learned counterclockwise circumambulation is a banishing ritual in both Nordic and Appalachian folkways, a way to bury and release. Hand to trunk: Odin, the Nordic All Father, at Yggdrasil, the tree of life, speared and hanging nine nights until the runes revealed themselves. Odin’s ravens made it plain: Huginn (thought) and Muninn (memory) witnessed the rite.
I had performed a ritual without knowing it.
The next morning, I woke up, and the pull toward Bryan was simply gone, and I mean, absolutely gone. Three years of fantasy, finished. I thought wanting him would never leave, that I would be forever haunted. Now, when I imagine him, I feel nothing. This is freedom. I am less but more. Nearly perfect, but never so.
THE TREASURE
“Dead bodies equal buried treasure.”
I buried a fantasy. Six feet underground. I grieved its passing. Where do fantasies go when they die? More importantly, what takes its place?
“The Moon even dies and is reborn each month.”
Rotatio—the forest floor where decay and growth coexist in an eternal cycle, a rotation. I have held on too tightly my entire life. I felt my grip loosen on the steering wheel this morning as I drove my daughter to school, and thought, Peace. That is what takes its place. Peace.
“The King and Queen, following intercourse, have merged into one body with two heads and are lying dead in a tomb.”
Looking back, all the detours, roads less taken, worlds I inhabited, lives I lived that seemed disparate but never were. None of it was for naught. It all makes sense now, in sublimatio, with a soaring view from high above. After separatio, taking myself out of my daily life and thrust into a mystical place outside of space and time, burned by the desire of calcinatio and dissolved by the grief of solutio, my body reformed through coagulatio in relation to the land, and now I emerge internally unified in conunctio—one body with two heads.
“The parents are the food of the son.”
I crave eldership. Maiden and mother, I have lived; the crone is arriving. I’ve stopped wearing makeup and bras. I choose comfort and quality. I care less about the male gaze. Something also died in those woods when Bryan didn’t show. I can’t fully name it yet, but it will be the food I give my child: freedom from grasping and centering men.
“To be at home in the darkness of suffering and there find germs of light and recovery.”
I teach nervous system work or how to sit with discomfort. Shame, grief, and boredom drive ritualized comfort-seeking. The warrior path is staying. Ayahuasca taught me: the only way through is through; the only way to love myself was to fall in love with the parts of me I find despicable.
“When you see your matter going black, rejoice; that is the beginning of the work.”
Nigredo comforts me now. Because I know what follows, if I stay the course and do not abandon the experiment, I will eventually find myself in rubedo. Oh, exquisite rubedo! It is the union of opposites! It is wisdom and peace! However, one must never forget, rubedo is transient too, brutalful (brutal/beautiful). Day follows night. But night also follows day. Trust the cycle.
“Decapitation = losing one’s head (mind) or logic.”
I think, therefore, I am. Descartes’ famous words gave rise to the erroneous concept that the thinking brain can fix everything. Even though it wasn’t exactly what he meant. However, I prefer to say I feel and embody, therefore I make meaning. Periodically, cut off the head, let the absurd, magical, whimsical in. Too much rigidity strangles rubedo.
“What remains below in the retort is our salt, that is, our earth, and it is of a black color, a dragon that eats its own tail.”
Ouroboros. What goes around comes around. We are always in a cycle, a never-ending process. Salt of the earth. A salty dog. Some say salt is the body; others disagree. Salt adds flavor. Salt stings. Salt heals. Swish some in your mouth. Jump in the ocean that raised me, salt-crusted skin as sacrament.
“I despise the dark empty state while I am in it, yet it holds the gold of inspiration and illumination necessary for creation.”
I always want to rush through the dark, empty state while I am in it. Today, as I settle back at home after a month away in the woods with six strangers, the darkness visits. Let it. There is magic in the depths, if you know where to look. The gem sits in the dragon’s head; hold it close. Inspiration follows if I give it room.
“Consulting one’s own decapitated head for wisdom… you hollow skull, what has your grin to say?”
I had to cut off my head to leave fundamentalist AA. I was filled with dogma and rigidity. Identity is a prison when it stops you from becoming who you truly are. Even Bill W. sought Jungian help late in life for his terminal depression; freedom requires a decapitation of certainty, identity, and ego.
“I must be mindful of my impotence—my death is my genesis.”
Leaving AA, I studied spiritual materialism and reached for tools teaching me to slow down, pay attention, and notice my body. I learned many things. But the biggest thing was that I don’t know what’s right for anyone else, sometimes even me. So, I learned to listen and to teach others to do the same, listening to the language of your body, even when it is whispering to you.
“The psyche cannot come into existence as separate until the death of the literal.”
Psyche and body don’t speak in the literal. They speak in image, dream, synchronicity, and sensation. I practice a balance: enough literal to navigate, enough imaginal to live.
“The collective unconscious is equivalent to the land of the dead.”
Maybe the dead are pure potential. Maybe we’re zombies. Either way, graveyards surround me. Bury me alive.
“True philosophers make dying their profession.”
Bone-tending. Die alive, apprentice with impermanence. Mortificatio is constant, the half-life of everything. New loses value the instant it’s driven off the lot; why cling? Unless you’re really fond of the new car smell.
“You must kill everything in you that belongs only to earthly life.”
Stillness wants to kill me. Every time I lie down, I tremble. Decapitate the mind; make it stop. I crave the small death of a deep sleep.
“The experience of the Self is always a defeat for the ego.”
This is why so many avoid it. The ego has a tenacious grip on our throats. Slowly suffocating us all. I’m tired of fighting to live. And yet I live.
“One rarely chooses mortificatio.”
Unless you’re like me and morbidly fascinated, Alchemy exalts decay and shows me what it is, the beginning of becoming.
Theodore Rothke “In a Dark Time”
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood
A lord of nature weeping to a tree
That was me in the woods. Bryan’s rejection was larger than him: the death of the ultimate sensual fantasy and the father-wound projection on the father who never showed up. It was a reclamation. It was a resurrection. It was a redirection.
“I know the purity of pure despair.”
It has enabled some of my best work. The death rattle that turns into a kitten’s purr.
“My shadow punned against a sweating wall.”
Like a feral animal backed into a corner. Unpredictable. Volatile. Vicious.
“The edge is what I have.”
I ride it well. A teacher recently told me that I lived on the edge of extreme experiences. I nodded. Agreed. It doesn’t make it any more enjoyable, however.
“Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.”
Complex-PTSD is the gift that keeps on giving, if you know how to receive it. Learning to sit with shame and not listen to or act on it is something everybody could stand to learn. The same could be said for desire. And grief.
“Darkness brings a new kind of vision if you know how to let it.”
Last night, my daughter and I watched The Descent—women spelunking in an Appalachian cave, hunted by eyeless creatures evolved from humans into darkness with sonar hearing. The only one who survives is the one who has known true tragedy and grief. She has been tempered and forged in trauma; she has evolved to see in the dark.
“One came to me in haste, overpowered me, pierced me, dismembered me in accordance with harmony.”
The woods dismembered me. Friendships feel stale. No one here knows what I now know. The trees were my people. Who came for me? Odin? Not the lover, knowledge. Perhaps it’s better not to know. And yet, knowing is what I live for.
I was flayed alive. Each dead fantasy skins me. Raw, nerve-bright, alien in my body. Bones mingled with flesh: the fantasies more real than the men, or the fantasies I created since I was a child, staging Dickensian epics with stuffed animals. My birth was unwanted; my mother took mescaline pregnant with me while watching Slaughterhouse-Five. Fantasy was the food that sustained me.
Burned on a pyre to become art. I’ve known I’m a witch for a long time. I loved Merlin, not Arthur. Give me sorcery; I’m tired of boys playing knights.
“I am both the sacrificer and the sacrificed.”
I am not innocent. I have blood on my hands: kind men I used and good men I wounded. Others earned it; I don’t regret those.
God is dead. About time. Let’s resurrect the Goddess.
Lucifer is a light-bringer. Burn it all down.
CLOSING
Let die what must die; I’m keeping the gems.
