The Lost Story of New Year’s Day: The Old Man and The Child
January 1st, 2008
By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTÉS, Assistant Editor, TMV Columnist
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We’re led to believe that New Year’s images are about the Old Year going out as a bent over old man…
and the New Year toddling in as a grinning infant.
That’s what the buycandy buywine buybeer folks would have us believe.
But those are degraded images. Long ago, there were far brighter symbols for this ending of one revolution and beginning a new revolution of earth around sun…
Long ago, the child of ‘the new year,’ was named Dionysus; and as an infant he was carried about by the old men Silenus and Hermes.
Back in that day, the child Dionysus, was born at this time of year …when the dark is lifting and the light of day is growing longer… and that child represented bright new life, fresh imagination, sunny impetuosity, joyous spirit without end.
Though in late forms, he was devolved into the God of drunkenness, in earliest understanding he stood for the kind of psychic intoxication that comes from knowing what could be called the et Deus, the God in all things.
And the old man who carried the child in his arms, represented the senex, the old wise man; the one who had lived long, who knew the preciousness of new life, the locations of the trip and fall places, the detours and long-cuts, the underground pathways through… and he was the child’s protector.
Long ago, the child and the old man were not separate ideas, but one. The older one did not die in order to be replaced by the younger. Instead, they represented a hieros gamos of sorts, a sacred union… two critical aspects of inner nature, that when melded, created a third: a conscious and awakened psyche.
And, only if one were severed from the other, disorder would follow. Each would falter, eventually go awry, then sicken and die… for lack of their life’s work with their balancing opposite.
In our time, in reality, many older persons remain in high spirit by creating deep friendships with the very young, and/or with ideas and attitudes that carry fresh vitality.
In our time too, many of the young feel they are living in the shelter of a mountain, because they are near the heart of an elder who is reasonably aged in love, loyalty, praise and prescience.
And, in each person’s psyche, regardless of spare number of years lived, there is a senex function too. Even in the very young, there is a source of wisdom, uncanny and reliable, if it is sought out.
In the psyche too, despite a person’s gathering decades, there is also an eternally young spirit, one that never, ever, grows old. Thus, even in the frail old, there is a source of leaping in spirit, of laughing, of creating anew daily.
New Year’s was once that time when people turned to consciously ‘remember’ themselves once again. They strove to rejoin this duality of the senex and the puer in themselves… after a long year of being worn down and away from center… having been in some ways ‘parted out’ from true self… But now, they would seek to join one valuable aspect of the core self, to another venerable aspect of human dignity…
rejoining the steady to the spontaneous;
the arid to the empathic;
the thoughtful to the impetuous;
the longing for life, to the life spark itself…
Where I grew up, in just a very few weeks from now, you’d tramp way out into the fields in preparation for disking new ground. You’d clean and then open the sluice gates on the creek, letting the new water join the old water
… and you’d see how this made the old water leap
…and you’d see how it let the new water learn to follow good currents never before known …
So may it be for you.
So may it be for me.
So may it be for all of us.
Blessed New Year dear readers.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 3:26 am and is filed under Family, Nature, Children, Psychology, Language, Ideologies. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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