The Golden Bough, a Fairytale Ballet for Children — and Adults

“The Golden Bough, a Fairytale Ballet for Children” is about a confrontation with the numinous.  The word ‘numinous’ means ‘to nod’ or ‘to beckon’.  It refers to the ineluctable call of the ‘wholly other’ within the soul, which may, on occasion also be experienced outwardly in synchronicities.  When you awaken to find yourself sobbing, not out of fear, but from a superfluity of profound grace from a dream, you realize that you have been intimately approached and beckoned to by the numinous power of divinity within your own soul!   It’s like you have been in a pit somewhere, and a hand has reached down to grab you and pull you out.  If you are paying attention and being totally honest, it is crystal clear to you that your own, pitiful ego was not the author of the dream.  In 1987, I had such a dream.  That dream propelled me into the inner work I needed to do and ultimately led to the creation of “The Golden Bough, a Fairytale Ballet for Children” (1996).

After the experience of that 1987 dream, I struggled to find the same quality or even support for my experience in the forms and language of the institutional church I had loved for so long.  The failure of institutional religious forms to any longer mediate a genuine experience of the numinous power that is simultaneously at the center of the universe and resident within the soul is a serious problem for many.  Going to church is now (with a few notable exceptions) just like going into the environment and chaos of a supermarket, for churches, strapped for cash, seem to have lost their way in a misguided and illusory attempt to somehow compete with the megaliths for people’s attention and dollars.  We no longer have a collective alternative except the degraded forms of American idol worship in mass media.  Without an alternative to the collective hysteria surrounding the megalithic sports and entertainment industries, the soul withers and society suffers from spiritual dislocation, disease, addictive behaviors, rage, brutality, and descends into chaos and mass psychosis (wars).  Without the vehicle for or a container of authentic being-ness, activity has no root and merely becomes a banal, enslaved knee-jerk reaction to the wizards, gimmickry, and advertising ploys of the megaliths.

  

“The Golden Bough, a Fairytale Ballet for Children” [1996 (paper) and 2000 (hardcover) English versions; 2015 Spanish, French, and Russian translations] is a parable about retrieving the genuine energies of authentic being-ness which leads to creative doing and manifestation in the world.  The “Companion Guide to ‘The Golden Bough, a Fairytale Ballet for Children’:  the Ballet as Parable” resides at the intersection of psychology, philosophy, religion, mythology, and art.  Where these various streams converge, the current of a genuine, inner-experience-based, non-theocratic, non-dogmatic religious human spirituality flows and is picking up breadth and strength.

  

In the future, which is now, the job of the Church almost certainly is to educate people on the use of metaphor and imagery in reaching a deeper, more soulful understanding of the traditional images and iterations of the institution.  By educating people in the use of metaphor and imagery, the Church might, it seems to me, redeem the products of fantasy which are all around us, illuminate dreams that occur every night, and reconcile all of these products of the imagination with the more traditionally-stated themes of the Church (i.e., penitence, crucifixion, resurrection, transfiguration, reconciliation).  If the Church were to loosen its grip on its insistence on analytical, linear, left-brain doctrine and dogmatic statements, it would find true ‘religion’ (from the Latin religare, “to link back”) — one that links the past, the immediacy of the present, and the future.