IN CONFERENCE HOW 2

In Habentibus Symbolum Facilior Est Transitus

by Dr. Nesrin Eruysal

During the London Blitz, H.D. found herself in a city which corresponded to the chaotic
world described by Hans Jonas in his book about Gnostic religion, a "world of darkness,
utterly full of evil ... full of devouring fire ... a world of darkness without light ... a world of
death without eternal life and a world in which the good things perish and plans come to
naught." (57) In her books, H.D. borrowed images from a variety of heretical discourses with
roots in ancient Gnostic teachings. She melted these images in the alchemical vessel in which
base metals are transformed into gold. She aimed at transforming herself mentally and her
labor Sophiae – "an alchemical encounter with the unconscious" as Jung put it in Alchemical
Studies" (171) – was an attempt to resuscitate the alchemical axiom: "Transform yourselves
from dead stones into living philosophical stones!" In order to make the transition possible,
the poet required images in which inner meanings could be deciphered via transformation.

In his lecture on Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Jung talked about how he discovered a passage in
the 16th century Hermetic text in which the philosopher makes an interesting statement: "For
those who have the symbol, the passing from one side to the other, the transmutation is easier.
(In habentibus symbolum facilior est transitus)" (1248). Jung went on to speculate on this
statement and reached the conclusion that "This is the condition by which any man in any
time can make a transition: with the symbol he can transmute himself ... It's the system or the
symbolic formula to apply when the soul is in danger" (1249). In wartime London H.D. felt
that the soul was in jeopardy and she sought to revivify it by delving deep into her personal
unconscious laden with images and ultimately returning with a Jungian "union of opposites,"
or, in other words the final reunion of anima and animus as a pair of opposite archetypes. As a
syncretist, she borrowed her images from ancient religions in which she discovered a central
theme: the exile of the goddess from the realm of God and her final reunion with Him. Albert
Gelpi, in his introduction to H.D.'s "Notes on Thought and Vision," wrote that H.D. and Jung
could have reached a better understanding. I also think H.D. and Jung had a similar
perspective.

Echoing H.D.'s announcement in "Notes on Thought and Vision" that "today there are many
wand bearers but few inspired," Jung, in Symbols of Transformation, claimed that only the
poet could understand the origin of words which have a healing power. As he put it: "It's as if
the poet could still sense, beneath the words of contemporary speech and in the images that
crowd in upon his imagination, the ghostly presence of bygone spiritual worlds, and possessed

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the capacity to make them come alive again" (30). In "Notes on Thought and Vision," H.D.
emphasized this mission of the poet and stated that "the minds of men differ but the
overminds are alike" (12). In other words, the personal unconscious differs but the collective
unconscious is shared by all of us and the poet has the power to excavate these buried images.
H.D. found these images in three heretical discourses: Gnosticism, Kabbalah and Alchemy.

In Gnosticism, she found Sophia, the feminine counterpart of God who is sent into exile, since
he cannot bear his own feminine side. Only Christ can liberate Sophia after fusing the
masculine and feminine aspects of his self. In the Kabbalah, the most striking idea is the
dualism in the godhead which comprises both masculine and feminine aspects. The Shekhinah
is a feminine dimension of God which he disowns. Therefore, the Gnostic symbol of Wisdom,
Sophia, and the Shekhinah have certain features in common. Both of them are anima figures,
companions of a God animus who sends them into diaspora. The human psyche is God's
bride. Adam's violation of the unity between God and His bride makes the Shekhinah fall.
When God and the Shekhinah unite, all dualities will disappear. One of the symbols which the
alchemists used at different stages of the alchemical operations is Luna (The Moon is also the
Shekhinah) whose spiritual marriage to Sol is intended to help cease the masculine and
feminine duality. They are also, alternatively, personified as King and Queen, Rex and
Regina, Sulphur and Mercury. Their union is a symbol for the transformation of man into a
higher being or a living stone. These are the figures that H.D used in order to constitute the
central theme of her poetry: the separation and the final reunion of masculine and feminine
forces in one's nature.

In the opening lines of "The Walls Do Not Fall," the first part of Trilogy, one can feel the
dissolution of profane time. Mircea Eliade describes this process as a projection into
"mythical time in illo tempore when the foundation of the world occurred. Thus the reality
and the enduringness of a construction are assured not only by the transformation of profane
space into a transcendent space (the center), but also by the transformation of concrete time
into mythical time" (20). This transformation dominates the whole poem. The image of the
temple stands for the discontinuance of concrete time. In the opening lines, the shrine lies
open to the sky and is transformed into what Eliade calls an "axis mundi." The ruin and the
tomb are images that appear in the Rosarium Pictures, twenty woodcut illustrations depicting
the alchemical process. The rain, or alchemical aqua permanens (water of life), falls upon the
shrine and the poet finds herself on the verge of a religious transformation or an individuation
process (in Jungian terms). Like the Gnostic alien, the poet or the soul ascends, transcending
the barriers erected by the archons, the rulers of the world. The road is full of dangers, but the
poet is strong as she can decipher the meaning of archetypes and the hidden patterns of her
own unconscious, as well as the collective unconscious of her age. The sliced wall represents
the gate opening unto the unconscious where there are otherwise no walls, no doors. Seeking

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to discover the "inner hall or cellar to Mary" H.D. passes on to another sliced wall "where
poor utensils show / like rare objects in a museum"(510). In the Old Testament, the Fourth
Book of Moses Commonly Called Numbers (4:7), I came across a similar description of the
Presence and the utensils. The Presence advises Aaron and Moses to take away the ashes and
lay a purple cover on the altar and asks them to put on it all the utensils. The words of the
Lord and H.D.'s description of the utensils also resurrect the Gnostic "Hymn of the Pearl,"
Moses, Aaron and the Prince in quest for the pearl accompany H.D. "in a dream parallel."
H.D.'s dream "merges the distant future with most distant antiquity" (526).

Like the Wisdom Sophia of the Shekhinah, the poet wants to go back home which is a
beautiful place where the grasshopper says "Amen." In the Kabbalistic philosophy the
grasshopper is a symbol of God worship. Besides the grasshopper, the fish appears as a
symbol for the Lapis-Christos parallel. In alchemistic literature, the two fishes in the sea are
Soul and Spirit. Soul is the inward individual spirit; Spirit is the universal soul in all men.
Their endeavor to come together will end in a wedding ceremony or the mysterium
coniunctionis of alchemy. H.D. defines this marriage as a clash of opposites and uses Osiris
and Isis as archetypal figures whose marriage stands for the clash between the masculine and
feminine forces in nature. The answer to H.D.'s question at the end of "The Walls Do Not
Fall" is nothing less than the union of opposites: "O sire,/ is this union / at last?" (542).

"Tribute to the Angels" opens with the declaration of Hermes Trismegistus as the patron of
alchemists. The angels Azrael, Raphael, Gabriel, and Uriel are gathered in the domain of
poetry and in the imagination of the poet. The line "the levelled wall is purple as with purple
spread upon an altar" (551) takes us back to the beginning of "The Walls Do Not Fall," when
the emergence of the Presence brings to mind a scene in the Old Testament where Aaron and
Moses lay a purple cover on the altar. The color signifies an important stage in the process of
reaching the magnum opus, the Great Work of the alchemists. Although the Lord has declared
that they shall not look upon the holy things, the poet does enter the divine realm and she
wonders "how is it that we dare / approach the high-altar?"(558). She melts the words and
reaches Mary, the mother of the philosopher's stone. H.D. asks: "what is this mother-father /
to tear at our entrails ? / what is this unsatisfied duality / which you cannot satisfy?" (522).

At the end of the alchemical operation, the jewel is attained; the poet passes through fire and
enters a shrine where she finds the eternal image of the female awaiting her. She asks herself:
"was it the may-tree or apple" (558). Gershom Scholem interprets the apple tree as a Zoharic
symbol which stands for the Shekhinah. After the King and Queen are united, a tree appears
and the united eternal body is resurrected. This is the final stage of the reintegration process
called Tikkun in Kabbalistic symbolism. It is this resurrection which H.D witnesses: "This is
the flowering of the rod / This is the flowering of the wood"(561). The Lady or the apple-tree

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appears while the poet is waiting for Gabriel or The Moon regent. The Lady/ Shekhinah /
Wisdom Sophia / Regina comes because she is the Moon in the process of Chymical
Marriage, yet she looks different. She is as white as snow denoting the final stage of the
alchemical process. She is God's widow, called Malcuth. The book she is carrying is white
like the white pages of the authentic Torah. Scholem writes of this Torah: "In the time of the
Messiah the letters of this ‘white Torah’ will be revealed" (174).

"The Flowering of the Rod" represents the last stage of reintegration of the dual forces in
one's nature. The poet and Hermes leave cities behind and "mount higher to love-resurrection"
(578). The poet leaves the earth and sets out on a return journey like the geese of the arctic
circle. Her destination is the region of love, that is, Eros. The poet declares that she is not
responsible for the barrenness of the earth. She cries: "pitiless, pitiless, let us leave / The place
of a skull / to those who have fashioned it" (579). H.D. is drawing on a very familiar story in
these lines, that is the crucifixion, yet she changes the story radically and relates the story so
that Mary Magdalene and Christ are trying to escape from the cemetery. In Mysterium
Coniunctionis, Jung interprets this escape as follows: "The word ‘escape’ presupposes a state
of imprisonment which is brought to an end by the union of opposites" (65).

In the poem, there is a flashback to the encounter between Mary Magdalene and Kaspar who
has something that he cannot sell. He says this thing is for a double ceremony, both funeral
and coronation. I interpret his words from an alchemical perspective and see that the double
ceremony is exactly the mysterium coniunctionis which emerges in the form of two images:
the tomb and the coronation which appear in the final picture of the Rosarium Pictures. There,
Mary identifies herself with the Anatolian goddess Kybele and the mother of Attis and anoints
Christ's head. In his book Bloodline of the Holy Grail: The Hidden Lineage of Jesus Revealed,
Lawrence Gardner claims that the anointing ceremony is a wedding ritual. The bride is Mary
Magdalene and the bridegroom is Christ. Kaspar reveals this suppressed fact and frees his
own feminine side (Jungian anima) after he rediscovers the Eternal Feminine. In the final
lines of the poem Kaspar is accompanied by Balthasar and Melchior. His gift is symbolic and
the Eternal Feminine speaks: "he did not know whether she knew / the fragrance came from
the bundle of myrrh / she held in her arms" (612).

In The Gospel of the Gnostics by Duncan Greenlees, I've come across a scene in a Gnostic
hymn called "Wisdom’s Wedding Song," which bears a striking resemblance to the
emergence of the Eternal Feminine. A shrine is described where a bride is about to meet her
bridegroom" "Her bridechamber is brightly lit / breathing an odour of balsam and spice / And
giving out sweet scent of myrrh and foliage / while myrtle branches are spread within" (262).
The self-chosen exile of the Shekhinah / Sophia comes to end at this point.

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After creating several different manifestations of the Eternal Feminine in Trilogy, H.D. wrote
Helen in Egypt, where she revived the legendary figure of Helen. The composite figure
Helen / Hell / Hel or Hilda, the Germanic Goddess of the Underworld knows underworld
images and lets H.D. discover the image of the mother in the course of her own individuation
process. H.D. recreates this image in the form of the legendary figure of Helen. Jung describes
this process of moulding as follows: "The unconscious yearning of the artist reaches back to
the primordial image in the unconscious which is best-fitted to compensate the inadequacy
and onesidedness of the present. The artist seizes on the image, and in raising from deepest
unconscious he brings it into relation with conscious values, thereby transforming it until it
can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers" (83). Helen
(Selene/ Moon) is an image of the fallen soul like Sophia and the Shekhinah and has a lunar
origin. Helen's words echo Sophia Prunikos' lamentations when she admits: "I'm a woman of
pleasure" (12). Helen and Achilles ( Sophia and God / the Shekhinah and God / Regina and
Rex) undergo a process of reconciliation of opposites in the self. Achilles is wounded and
needs Helen to complete his being which suffers from anima-possession and Helen needs his
cooperation in order to cut off the bonds repressing Eros. Troy is the place of the skull like
Golgotha. Helen and Achilles try to escape. Their escape brings to mind Mary and Christ's
escape from the place of skulls. After their marriage and the birth of their child, Helen
witnesses the flowering of the pomegranate and she remembers that she has to return to the
underworld, yet the apple trees (the Shekhinah) also bloom. Leuke is as white as the moon
and Helen feels that "the wheel is still." The birth of the child / lapis philosophorum (the
philosopher's stone) finishes the cycle of transformation reintegrating the opposing forces in
Helen's / Hilda's self. Thus H.D. unites the opposites in her self and reaches Matrepater, a
union of Mother and Father as they exist together in Moravian hymns.

Works Cited

Doolittle, Hilda. Collected Poems (1912-1944). New York: New Directions,

––-. Helen in Egypt. New York: New Directions, 1974.

––-. Notes on Thought and Vision and the Wise Sappho. San Francisco: City
Lights Books, 1982.

Eliade, Mircea. The Mystery of the Eternal Return: Cosmos and History.
London: Arkana, 1983.

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Greenlees, Duncan. The Gospel of the Gnostics The World Gospel Series.
Adyar Madras: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1958.

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

Jung, Carl Gustav. Symbols of Transformation. New York: Pantheon Books,

––-. The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. New York: Pantheon

––-. Mysterium Coniunctionis: An Inquiry into the Separation and Synthesis of

––- . Alchemical Studies. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967

––-. Notes for Seminar Given in 1934-39 on Friedrich Nietzsche’s

Scholem, Gershom. Kabbala. New York: Dorset Press, 1974.