Awakening

A magical event is the emergence of a hibernating beast from its den in the earth.

Ancient, far-northern people celebrated this mystery mid-way between winter Solstice and spring Equinox when they summoned the sacred bear* or the oracular snake* for a prophecy about the changing season. In less harsh climates the fox, badger, groundhog, or wolf were similarly questioned. Weather divination was serious business in the prehistoric world. Travel, food, and shelter depended on it. There were no do-overs.

When a mythical rite loses significance, it becomes folklore retold to children. And in America it is, if at all possible, commercialized. Thus we unserious citizens today end up with Punxsutawney Phil’s* Groundhog Day.

Poor Phil is trotted out to look for his shadow every February 2nd. Will he predict early spring or six more weeks of winter? It’s a goofy, spoofy ceremony staged for tourists, a minor holiday observed by schoolkids and their teachers.

What once was a sacred event now serves as filler for the local news. Comfortable, well-housed folks do not associate winter with chilblains and hunger. The season that terrorized our ancestors merely inconveniences us. We pretend to imagine, but we cannot know the personal triumph represented by surviving those dark months until the sun returns.

When my daughter was a schoolgirl our midwinter ritual became family movie night. Every February 2nd we rewatched the 1993 rom-com Groundhog Day*.

Bill Murray plays to perfection a human Phil, a vain and arrogant TV weatherman sent to Punxsutawney on woodchuck Phil’s special day. The annual assignment, which human Phil loathes, is to make a bit of feel-good video fluff for the TV audience. Early on Phil announces a prediction of his own. No more trivial stories. He is moving on to bigger and better things — a more prestigious job at a more cosmopolitan station. Human Phil plans to ride the upward trajectory of a successful modern life. Time will advance as a straight line into the future.

So what happens if that trajectory arcs and curls into a closed circle? Inexplicably, on what should be the morning of February 3rd, he awakens to a world that is recycling the previous 24 hours. Phil is trapped in a time loop. His life stalls. Day after claustrophobic day he is seat-belted inside a karmic Ferris-wheel, stuck with only his own most miserable aspect for company. Carl Jung called it the Shadow* — that part of us we cannot bear to look at, that part we deny and push away. But Phil has nowhere else to look and no place to which he might push it.

The hibernating animal awakened at mid-winter feels equally distraught about facing its shadow.

Awakening the mild beast: (top) Thirteen-lined ground squirrels dormant in nest. (middle) Removed from nest but still dormant. (bottom) Waking; head moved convulsively.

The holy days from which Groundhog Day evolved are Imbolc* and Candlemas*. Both traditions employ “contraries.” Bright, clear weather is, surprisingly, a bad omen. A sunny day at mid-winter is too sudden a transition for the awakened beast. According to tradition, sunshine is hard on sleepy eyes. It casts a black shadow that startles an animal. The menacing shadow frightens a creature already feeling vulnerable. Our somnolent prophet scuttles back into the earth, and we are left with the forecast of a long, dreary winter.

(top) Becoming more steady. Nearly awake; (middle) head and tail still quivering. (bottom) Wide awake and active. Popular Science Monthly, February 1914.

What an excellent metaphor for the often contrary process of psychological exploration and growth, a drama that plays inside the mind.

The awakening beast who emerges from a dark den into the above ground world is like a fragment of unconscious information irrupting into the light of awareness. If rationality shines too harsh a spotlight on the new, untested material, then the awesome Shadow looms and fear overwhelms us. We are horrified by this new truth. The revealed matter rushes back into the psyche’s covert spaces.

Unconscious content* is the label given a vast, swirling ocean of jumbled stuff that exists outside the glow of consciousness. Here are cloistered secrets we keep from ourselves, keys to unlocking our self-delusions. One of Jung’s seminal theories was that humans grow in self-knowledge by gathering and structuring bits and pieces from that chaotic swarm. The process allows us to reconcile what we think now with surprising revelations. The conscious mind enlarges with every mystery it plumbs, every clue and sign it draws from the psyche’s depths.

Self-discovery is the ongoing work of a lifetime. Unexpected news is best introduced carefully, indirectly, even stealthily under cloud-cover. The task is about coaxing out, into the day, facets of the Self that we’ve not been willing to know, then integrating them into who we want to be.

Murray’s Groundhog Day character, human Phil, demonstrates the struggle. He goes round and round inside the set reality of 24 hours. Only his actions, his choices alter the script so as the day repeats itself, he takes a trial-and-error approach to apply different strategies. Phil becomes that most modern of thinkers, the empirical scientist, revolving inside his own experiment. Each new act he introduces, each new bit of dialog is a variable that can be tested and its outcome observed as he endlessly, desperately revises his hypotheses on how to escape Groundhog Day.

Phil the scientist acts out his story within that most ancient of templates — reincarnation — but updated for our impatient age. Instead of cycling through 100,000 lifetimes, he takes about 40 days. Instead of earning enlightenment, he wins the girl. Reforming himself into a man worthy of her allows February 3 to dawn at last.

A magical event is the emergence of new behavior when it allows a person to be a better human being.

header image: “Brown Bear*” by Walter Heubach