Two Popes & Dreaming the Feminine Ground

I’ll have to start with a disclaimer. No, I don’t dream about Lady Gaga in some version of her fifty gaudy outfits. No, I haven’t dreamt of her air-lifted in her flying dress in Brooklyn, New York, just so she could say she did.

And until I recently spent a week in Italy, looking for Venus and Aphrodite in all her assorted garments, in town squares, statues and shuddering cleavage, I hadn’t dreamt about Pope Francis either. However, I did dream years ago about the late Pope John Paul II after I heard on television crowds outside the Vatican chanting, “Santos Subito, Santos Subito” or “Sainthood in our time.” They will likely get their wish.

I wrote a poem about this dream, “Chanting the Feminine Down” which appeared in my Set Pieces of the Feminine. I have long been interested in how the Catholic Church deals with the feminine and never thought that the somewhat arbitrary doctrine about Mary’s Assumption into heaven did much to blunt the Church’s war on the feminine principle and the notion of Aphrodite. I explored the Catholic imagination in my PhD dissertation and have wrestled with the subject for thirty years. The poet Rilke says something about growing by being defeated daily by increasingly powerful angels. The Church has a lot of them. And I have a lot of bruises.

We know from depth psychology, courtesy of Freud, Carl Jung, James Hillman and others, that what we repress or don’t deal with fully can appear in a dream or vision and bite us in the ass. I’m not going to lay out a dream theory here other than to say, courtesy of James Hillman, that dreams often have a mythological base, a dramatic structure and are not necessary about my petty personal life, no matter how interesting I think it is. Dreams are autonomous.

Why John Paul came to me in a dream, I haven’t a clue. I admired him for his body-focused centrality and his embrace of the feminine, even though some of his theology bothered me. But this is not about me. In the dream, the Pope falls to the “slow drag of gravity,” his broad lumberjack “shoulders round into a feminine curl, inward as if they are reaching for the heart.” A blue stole “winds around the body that is falling into itself like a circle of peace.”

As the dream proceeds, the dreamer is prevented from participating in the Mass by a thick rope. A priest dressed him in a black robe and paints his face white. He is turned away from the altar as if in a shunning. Finally he screams, fighting his way out of this ritual, responding to the prayer, “The Lord Be with You,” with the refrain, “And with You Mother,” invoking the Pope. The poem concludes: “Grant us your peace, at your table, in your grace, as you slip into the earth, becoming for us our ‘panem nostrum,’ our daily bread, we take slow.”

The Catholic Church pretty much outlawed non-sanctioned imagery at the Council of Trent seven hundred years ago, tossing out demons, myths, and the occult, including dreams. It’s a pity really and quite meaningless because the Italian Renaissance, at the very least, tattooed wonderfully lush imagery on the Catholic soul that no amount of religious edicts will unencumber.

Doctrine aside, the dream about Pope John Paul seemed like a very compassionate, counter-ritual, delivering this man to the feminine earth, while in the presence of religious censors who discourage anything non-traditional. The dreamer has been excommunicated from this Church.

The dream about Pope Francis is a little more sanguine. The Pope and another man are with two nuns who appear to be guides or interlocutors. All stand outside a building, waiting to enter. There is humor in the air and the dream feels at first a little like the “who’s on first” routine. It somehow becomes clear that the two men are about to enter a monastery to learn who will be the next Pope. The men point to each other and ask the nuns, but they seem largely disinterested. Once inside, the two men are supposed to receive a sign about who will be the anointed one.

As soon as he entered, the non-Pope feels a change come over him, a sign. He feels pumped up, inflated, full of himself. He imagines he’s been hit with a thunderbolt that moved him sideways. The man feels that he is the anointed one. Power radiates from him. Then he travels underground with Francis and watches him in silence as he administers in hushed tones to the poor and people who look like gargoyles. The Pretender then announces through his tears and anguish to everyone that his companion is the true Pope, but no one will listen.

An authority figure with an official book searches for the Pope’s name but cannot find the Holy Father. The companion weeps some more and begs the official to look deeper. Finally, on the last page of the book, the official finds the name of Pope Francis in small letters. He drops to his knees, kisses the Pope’s ring, and, still underground, experiences the fullness of the holy man.

I’m sure my time in Italy contributed to this dream, given the attention the media pays to Pope Francis. But I also think there is something archetypal or abiding about this and the earlier dream, perhaps addressing ageless issues of power, psychological inflation, institutional rigidity, and, of course, the flight from the feminine.

In its attention to spiritual ascension, the Church has also neglected the necessary journey underground, and engaging the undesirables and mythological remnants who flourish there; those who have been banished from the kingdom.

Psychologist James Hillman refers this activity as “soul making.”

No wonder Pope Francis makes the Vatican nervous.

(A related article, “Searching for Venus/Aphrodite” can be found at www.magtech.org)

Charles McCullagh