Master of Arts
RICE UNIVERSITY
Nepantlería of Self: The Supernatural and the Soul in an Anzaldúan World of Motion
By
Stefan Ray Sanchez
A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE
Master of Arts
APPROVED, THESIS COMMITTEE
Claire Fanger Associate Professor, Director of M.A. Studies
William B Parsons (Mar 29, 2020)
William Parsons
Professor
Jeffrey J. Kripal Jeffrey J. Kripal (Mar 31, 2020) Jeffrey Kripal
J Newton Rayzor Professor
HOUSTON, TEXAS May 2020 Abstract
The writings of Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa are greatly influential in Chicanx and
Southwest Studies, with her work being recognized for its value in feminist and queer theory; art, culture, and literary criticism; and the portrayal of a uniquely and unapologetically Mexican-
American historical narrative that seeks to highlight hybridity and porousness in response to narratives of cultural purity. The latter portion of her short life and career saw her developing these ideas further, drawing from a comprehensive understanding of Western philosophy and occultism, as well as her understanding of both traditional and modern forms of Mexican shamanism to form a distinct philosophy of self. This Anzaldúan self is not immutable, but instead composed of a community of smaller spirits, which at once resemble Jungian archetypes or Freudian complexes, as well as animistic spirits which interact with and in many cases come from the wider environment outside of the individual or even outside of humanity altogether.
This thesis seeks to explore the working and implications of both the Anzaldúan self, and the ecosystem in which this self exists, hence my employ of the term, “nepantlería,” used by
Anzaldúa to refer to the art of navigating colliding worlds, after the Nahuatl “nepantla,” or space in between worlds. This thesis is, in Anzaldúan fashion, a work of nepantlería, as it attempts to take seriously, and make sense of this complex, dynamic, animistic ecosystem of selves which
Anzaldúa herself observed. Acknowledgements
I would like to first extend my thanks to the members of my graduate committee; Bill
Parsons, who within an hour of meeting me told me that I had a future in this field, and that I should pursue it, and who since then has offered continual support in forms ranging from thorough essay commentaries, to kind words during accidental coffee shop encounters; Claire
Fanger, the first professor I ever spoke to at Rice, who as both Director of M.A. studies and course instructor poured unthinkable amounts of time into familiarizing herself with the works of
Anzaldúa, and the basic concepts of Mexican shamanism generally in order to provide round- the-clock support for my writing process at every conceivable level; and finally Jeffrey J. Kripal, who took me under his wing and encouraged me to pursue academically the strangest and most intellectually difficult aspects of my cultural background and chosen materials without prejudice.
I am additionally indebted to April DeConick, who in my first semester at Rice listened to my every question and concern, sat through long conversations about my interests and source materials, and asked the precise questions I needed to be asked in order to figure out exactly what I wanted to do in my time in the M.A. program.
I must also acknowledge the early and continual support of my good friend Thomas
Millary, who read nearly every section of this thesis in its original conception, and spent more time than anyone discussing the base concepts that ultimately formed the thesis with me, on both academic and personal terms. His presence both as a colleague and as a friend has been invaluable in both my academic and personal growth in the last two years, and I look forward to similar progress on both fronts in the future of what is sure to be a long-lasting friendship. ii
I give special thanks to my friends and colleagues Benjamin Mayo and Kyle Smith, as well as author Lupa, who provided their extended theoretical commentary and moral support throughout my writing process, and who have all fundamentally reshaped my understanding of these materials.
Finally, I thank my ancestors from both Europe and the Americas, whose circumstances both good and bad ultimately allowed the authorship of this thesis, and to the memory of Gloria
Evangelina Anzaldúa herself, whose writing changed my life, and whose posthumous final publication has become something akin to my personal bible.
To all of you, and to my readers,
Contigo en la Lucha
Stefan Ray Sanchez Table of Contents
Introduction: Abre los Ojos ...... 1 Chapter 1. The Power of Language: Mythic Rebellion ...... 10 Chapter 2. Dismembering the Eternal: Meditations on Kierkegaard and the Anzaldúan Self ...... 22 2.1. Enter Anti-Climacus ...... 22 2.2. The Relation of the Self to Itself: the universal trauma ...... 24 2.3. A New Vision of Dismemberment ...... 34 2.4. Moving Forward in the World of Motion: the Coyolxauhqui Imperative to Heal, and the Nonhuman ...... 39 Chapter 3. The Beastly, the Godly, and the In-Between ...... 43 3.1. The Shadow Beast ...... 47 3.2. Goddesses ...... 53 3.3. Ambiguity, the Nonhuman, and the human as Nonhuman ...... 59 Conclusion: Bolt Cutters for the Cage ...... 66
Table of Figures
Figure 1: "Santa Gloria de La Frontera" by Alma R. Gomez ...... 21 1
Introduction: Abre los Ojos
I’ll tell you how I became a healer. I was sick, my leg had turned white.1 --Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, excerpt from La Curandera “Abre los ojos, North America; open your eyes, look at your shadow, and listen to your soul.”2 This is the call that author and activist Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa put out to her readership in her 2015 posthumous publication Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting
Identity, Spirituality, Reality in response to the political and social complacency and ignorance that she observed of North American culture in the wake of 9/11. Anzaldúa passed from diabetic complications in 2004, and the book was written in the final decade of her life; she would have been writing this section, which ended up being her first chapter, shortly after the attack on the world trade center, while the cultural wounds and psychic traumas of the event were still fresh upon the American mind. Though, while this wake-up call is addressed to 9/11-era North
America, this demand may sum up the general flavor of Anzaldúa’s politico-spiritual voice. She is known for her interaction with the concept of the “borderlands,” the zone along the border of the U.S. and Mexico, where she is from. Of this cultural backdrop, Anzaldúa has this to say:
A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.”3
1 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 176. 2 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 11. 3 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute,1987), 3. 2
She describes a world in turmoil, one which is constructed by hostile outside forces to stigmatize and destroy the agency of those who live within it. The hostile force, the enemy that constructs this world and the institutions which keep it in place are the principle “us” of the U.S., and indeed of North America, the people who are thought of when envisioning North America: As a starting point, Anzaldúa’s political and cultural enemies are “the whites,” or more specifically the institutional identity of white Americans as the only legitimate inhabitants of the New
World.4 However, for Anzaldúa, it would be a mistake to believe that everything simply gets fixed if we simply get rid of the white-dominant culture of the US. She takes issue with the state of not just Mexican culture, but seemingly all present-state culture as machines which keep those in power in power, and keep those out of power out of power. In her words “culture is made by those in power—men. Males make the rules and laws; women transmit them.5” She describes her own cultural experience, of men being told by both mothers and mothers-in-law to beat their wives for overstepping the culturally mandated boundaries of gender roles. Women are used here in the same way that non-whites are used in the creation of conceptual borderlands. The world of women is created by men in order to diminish their agency, for them to serve the will of the status quo, which is not constructed by them.
The project of Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa is best understood as an attempt by an individual to understand herself in the context of the world she lived in, against the backdrop of the institutional traumas of the world she lived in, and the personal traumas she experienced at a more local level. The project of self-authorship that became her corpus begins with a need to understand the world and overcome its oppressive aspects. Like so many activist authors she
4 Ibid, 4. 5 Ibid, 16. 3 aimed to heal the wounds of both her readers and the broken world that they (and she) lived in.
She sought to do this by showcasing and examining the oppressive realities of the world that she herself experienced, that had constructed her own experience and identity, namely the worlds of
Chicana and queer existence, and introducing philosophies for rewriting these realities.
Indeed Anzaldúa’s worldview was dominated by combat with and attempts to transcend mentally, emotionally, and spiritually the limitations of the world she lived in, that is to say her historical and physical context. Anzaldúa has described her conception and treatment of spirituality as forming in large part from her relationship to her body. Perhaps more accurately, to what she experienced as a hostile physical world, of which her body was emblematic.6 Anzaldúa suffered from a rare hormonal condition (rare enough that including her, she only knew of three recorded cases) which caused her to menstruate at three months, and experience her first growth spurt extremely early in her childhood.
She developed a very defensive attitude to being thought of as flawed in ways that she could not control.7 Her mother expected her to act through a very restricted expression of femininity. She was expected, as the first born of her family to help around the house and take care of her younger siblings. Like many women growing up as Chicanas and Mexicanas, she was always expected to be a practical. Her fascination with stories, reading, writing and the furtherment of her intellectual pursuits were seen as decidedly impractical.8
Moving beyond her home life, she observed a cultural and political world that seemed hell-bent on alienating everything that she was. Women in Chicano and Mexican culture were
6 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 288.
4
(and still often are) treated largely the same way she was as a child, and she observed even the cultural space that her family occupied was not wholly compatible with either American or
Mexican overculture, due to being Chicano in the first place. Everything about her seemed to be something that the world around her did not agree with. She was hormonally imbalanced, seemingly aging faster than her peers, an intellectual Chicana who defied the cultural norms, and add to this her emerging complex sexuality, she felt constantly as if she did not fit in. What she saw as a failure to adapt to the physical world was worsened later in life with her diabetes, her description of which reveals a violent and painful struggle for balance in her late life.9 Every time she felt she would begin to fit in and become “normal,” something else would come up to dislodge her from her perception of having fit the mold, and it shaped her into who she became.
,..when I began to fit in, something would slap me down again. I’d have another near death or I’d have horrendous pain with my menstrual periods, pain so horrendous that I’d fall on the floor and go into convulsions. These experiences kept me from being a “normal” person. The way I identify myself subjectively as well as the way I act out in there in the world was shaped by my response to physical and emotional pain.10
Anzaldúa’s experience with this hostile physical world led her to seek ways, understandably, to escape it, which led her to seeking escape in spirituality, thinking it the “ultimate resort for people who are extremely oppressed.”11 This is the origin story of the woman whose writing is my subject of examination. She was a chamana, a shaman, whose art art built on conflict, whose spirituality and written work is dedicated to the healing of the psychic wounds of both herself and the world at large. She stood at a crossroads between a neoshamanism built upon inherently
9 Ibid, 290. 10 Ibid, 289. 11 Ibid, 288. 5
Chicana-Mexicana identity, and a feminist consciousness which could help but highlight the problems with the dominant masculine culture that dominated (and arguably still does) both
Mexican and US culture. Similarly, her writing conveys a conflict between her instinct as an academic, and as a deeply and unconventionally spiritual person. Considering herself an apostate academic, never teaching with one institution for too long, she avoided the need to conform to the standards of those institutions. Drawing from previous European philosophers, authors of
Mexican shamanism, authors of Western esotericism, and her own spiritual, cultural, and political experience, she spent her short-lived academic career before her untimely death building a limited but powerful corpus which would inspire and provoke future authors to explore further the themes and conflicts enshrined in her work.
What I am interested in is the complex philosophy of self that emerges from this corpus.
The Anzaldúan self is complex, dynamic, ever changing and ever in motion. For Anzaldúa we are not simply one self, a singular identity, but a community of smaller selves which make up the complex communities we know as our identities. The “selves” that make up these communities bear strong resemblance to the multiple souls in many shamanic traditions that make up a human individual, as well as the various archetypes and complexes found in psychoanalytic literature.
By Anzaldúa’s philosophy, they are simultaneously both of these things.
The multiself is not simply a schema of human psychology, but a principle for understanding the expression of systems which, whether they originate from inside or outside of the individual, manifest themselves in the human consciousness and life. One should also note that these systems may originate outside of the human individual, and thus may, and indeed usually do, manifest outside of the human self. The world itself is inhabited by these selves. The
Anzaldúan self is one of dynamism, one of constant motion and flux. It exists in a world wherein 6 everything that exists is imbued with living force which trades back and forth with one another, wherein all things trade souls back and forth in some sense. This is true at the level of social interaction between human individuals, but also between cultures, between humans and nonhumans, and indeed in interactions between nonhumans that humans may never witness.
Because of this dynamism of and between systems, it seems appropriate to term this investigation “nepantleria of self”, or the practice of navigating the inherent dynamism of what it is to be a self in motion, so described. Nepantleria is taken from the Nahuatl nepantla, the space between worlds. Nepantleria is the art of navigating in-between spaces, changing conditions, and colliding lifeworlds. Nepantleria is the exercise of perceiving and dealing with a world in constant motion. Thus, nepantleria of self is the art of navigating the changing conditions of a self constantly in motion, in a world that its itself constantly in motion.
The bulk of this investigation will focus on the individual self, building the idea of the human identity first with an analysis of Anzaldúa’s use of language and the role it plays in identity formation in her system, in Chapter 1, Mythic Rebellion: The Power of language. In this chapter I will detail the way “language” is understood in Anzaldúa’s system and related ones, encompassing verbal and nonverbal symbols, cultural systems of coding, and in particular, myth. The role of myth, of storytelling, sets the stage for this investigation of language and the role it plays in expressing and suppressing identity. Language here acts as a gateway to the broader themes of dismemberment, trauma, and self-construction that will permeate the rest of the thesis.
In Chapter 2, Dismembering the Eternal: Meditations on Kierkegaard and the
Anzaldúan Self, I will tease out the construction of self through an Anzaldúan reading of Soren
Kierkegaard’s Sickness Until Death, a text whose influence in Anzaldúa’s dissertation materials 7 is clearly manifest. I will examine the similarities and differences between the two texts, and in doing so I will build the metaphysics of the Anzaldúan multisoul, as well as its cycle of dismemberment and regrowth through the processes of susto (soul loss), and conocimiento
(knowing, spiritual discovery). The multisoul’s dynamism will be established here, and the constant cycle of dismemberment and regrowth will be established as a baseline for existence not just of the human individual, but all things which exist, establishing the world of motion, and with it the Coyolxauhqui imperative, or the moral imperative to encourage regrowth and heal susto. This chapter will introduce the Anzaldúan definition of the supernatural, as well as
Aztecan animism, defining life in the world of motion.
In Chapter 3, The Beastly, The Godly, and the In-Between, I will open the self up to the larger world of the nonhuman by expanding upon the two nodes of the Anzaldúan supernatural, the undivine and the divine, between which the human is centered. I argue that the human individual is pulled toward both of these, using the examples of undivine and divine selves present in Anzaldúa’s work, the Shadow Beast and the Goddesses respectively. This chapter is an exploration of the porousness of Self that is different from the one presented in
Chapter 2, as this chapter deals with the transformation of the human into something altogether different. After exploring the undivine Shadow Beast and the divine Goddesses, I will tease out an implicit third node of Anzaldúa’s supernatural, the Shapeshifter, which for Anzaldúa is the actualized state of humanity, which has at the same time moved beyond the conventional boundaries of humanity. Through the shapeshifter, I will break down the dichotomy between the undivine and the divine, showing that the two participate in each other, and that, for Anzaldúa, becoming either involves becoming both. 8
In my conclusion, Bolt Cutters for the Cage, I will close with a further exploration of the nonhuman in the world of motion. I will introduce the figures of the fairy knight in the
Norman romance, Gui de Wairewic, and the Aztec goddess Cihuacoatl as allegories for the interplay between human and nonhuman selves. Through the fairy knight’s narrative role as an embodiment of nonhuman controlled nature, I will explore the implications of the world of motion as an animistic world where agency and life is a baseline for all things, be they conventionally considered animate or not, and in doing so I will propose definitions for Nature and life that will hopefully enable the reader to share in an expanded sense of the natural world.
Cihuacoatl will bookend the beginning and end of the conclusion, serving as the Anzaldúan metaphor for Apotheosis via both self-awareness and trauma. Cihuacoatl’s role in Anzaldúa’s mythos as a human who becomes a Goddess by becoming that which is outside of the implied
“natural” of the Anzaldúan supernatural will serve to illustrate the role of the nonhuman in human self-development.
My introduction opens with a command, abre los ojos, in English, Open your eyes! This simple command from Anzaldúa’s dissertation is essential to nepantleria. To understand the nature of the colliding systems one must attempt to understand the nature of collision. In truth, I am taken with Anzaldúa’s conception of self. The animistic world that the multiself inhabits is not unfamiliar to me, as I was raised by a practitioner of chamanismo myself. I say this because it is difficult for me to separate my analysis of Anzaldúa’s text from my own thoughts, and the reader deserves fair warning of this. I feel this is relevant because these texts taught me something about the wider relevance of the beliefs I grew up surrounded by. Anzaldúa presents a philosophy of self that takes seriously the struggles of shifting, pluralistic identities, as well as 9 the living, dynamic nature of the world. In a sense, I am asking the reader to open their eyes as
Anzaldúa opened mine.
10
Chapter 1. The Power of Language: Mythic Rebellion
Coyolxauhqui, Coyolxauhqui, tu eres mujer, En la luna esta tu imagen,tu eres fuerte Sangramos, damos vida, damos leche y amor. Tu espiritu esta conmigo, Soy fuerte mujer.
Coyolxauhqui, Coyolxauhqui, woman you are, In the moon is your image, strong you are. We bleed, we give life, we give milk and love. Your spirit is with me, a strong woman I am. --Mexican folk rhyme
An important figure to Anzaldúa’s philosophy, spirituality, and activism is Coyolxauhqui, the Aztec moon goddess. Folklore has it that the moon and the sun are represented by
Coyolxauhqui and her half-brother Huitzilopochtli respectively.
The story begins with Coatlicue’s miraculous impregnation. One day while sweeping at the top of Coatepec (Serpent Mountain), Coatlicue placed a stray ball of [feathers] in her bosom. Later that day she realized she was pregnant. Upon learning of Coatlicue’s pregnancy, her children, Coyolxauhqui (Painted with Bells), and the Centzon Huitznahua (Four Hundred Southerners), were furious at their mother’s sexual transgression and decided to kill her. Still in the womb, Huitzilopochtli learned of the plot and spoke to his mother, reassuring her that all would be well. When the battle began, Coyolxauhqui beheaded her mother, Coatlicue. However at the moment of Coatlicue’s death, Huitzilopochtli emerged from the womb fully armed [with Xiuhcoatl, the fiery serpent], decapitated his half-sister Coyolxauhqui, and routed his half brothers. He then threw Coyolxauhqui’s body down the mountain, resulting in her dismemberment.12 The myth has many versions with similar elements. I will give my own approximation of the basic story here: Coyolxauhqui was an overzealous warrior goddess who was angered by her mother Coatlicue (also known by the title of Tonantzin, “Great Mother”) for being impregnated
12Debra J. Blake, Chicana Sexuality and Gender: Cultural refiguring in literature, oral history, and art. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 30. 11 by a divine ball of feathers. Coyolxauhqui led her four-hundred brothers, the Huitznahua, or southern star gods in an assault on Coatlicue. Coyolxauhqui struck a fatal blow against
Coatlicue, severing her head, and at the moment of her “death,” from the womb, Huitzilopochtli, the Southern Hummingbird, warrior-god of the sun, sprung forth to defend his mother, slaying
Coyolxauhqui and her brothers, cutting them into thousands of pieces. In the versions of the story that I am most familiar with, and which is supported by Alicia Gaspar de Alba, and
Anzaldúa herself, Coyolxauhqui’s body was scattered over the earth and her skull flung into the sky, where it became the moon that we know today.13 According to David Carrasco and the short retelling by Debra J. Blake quoted above, Coyolxauhqui’s body is dismembered by falling down the mountain of Coatepec after being flung down, with Carrasco’s version specifying that
Huitzilopochtli steals the radiance from the corpses of his siblings to add to his own upon winning the battle.14 Most versions of the story involve the goddess Coatlicue wishing to leave the home of the gods upon the mountain of Coatepec to settle on a small landmass in lake
Texcoco, which would become Tenochitlan, the capital and cult center of the Tenocha (Aztec) empire, and eventually the center of modern day Mexico City.
For Anzaldúa, Coyolxauhqui is the first sacrificed victim of the Aztecan patriarchy.15 Her body scattered throughout the land in more than a thousand pieces and head flung into the sky, her suffering enshrined as a show of the power and authority of the sun god. Coyolxauhqui is a traitor goddess who seeks to undermine the authority of the Aztec empire and identity, and whose dismembered visage is a reminder to all who would dare betray the authority of the empire, whose authority is derived from the sun god, and therefore from the sun, the center of the
13 Alicia Gaspar de Alba, [Un]framing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui and other rebels with a cause. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 199. 14 David Carrasco, Religions of Mesoamerica. (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2014), 95. 15 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 257. 12 cosmos. Then, for someone who makes heavy use of the Aztecan mythic structure as the basis for her philosophy and spirituality, it seems a bit strange that Anzaldúa would choose to venerate
Coyolxauhqui.
In order to understand Anzaldúa, one must understand her use of symbol, her view of language. This is true not only in regard to her orientation, but her view on the construction of the orientation(s) of society. Huitzilopochtli is not a central figure for Anzaldúa at all, instead taking a backseat as merely the one who severed the head of Coyolxauhqui, whose symbolism is by contrast the basis for much of Anzaldúa’s inspiration in the political, philosophical, and spiritual spheres. This allegiance to the figure typically considered the villain of the story is an overt example of the practical application of Anzaldúa’s philosophy of language. For Anzaldúa, language/writing (the distinction for her would seem to be irrelevant in the context of this particular philosophical point) is both a powerful tool of expression and a powerful weapon of oppression. Not language in a simple, literal sense, as the typical reader might be inclined to think, as the words on this page are writing, which conform to a model which correspond to language.
If you define writing as any kind of scribble, any kind of trying to mark on the world, then you have the oral, dance, choreography, performance art, architecture…Some of us want to take those marks already inscribed in the world and redo them, either by erasing them or by pulling them apart—which involves deconstructive criticism. Pulling them apart is looking at how they’re composed and the relationship between the frame and the rest of the world.16 Anzaldúa sought to use her understanding of “language” and “writing” to dismantle the oppression enacted by the established language system that she experienced in her surroundings.
She goes on to explain the difficulty of making these “marks” upon the world in the situation she
16 Ibid, 252. 13 finds herself, which is to say, the difficulty of making any mark as a “postcolonial, feminist, queer, or whoever.”
In this country the frame of reference is white, Euro-American. This is its territory, so any mark we make has to be made in relationship to the fact that they occupy this space...It’s kind of like a fish in the Pacific Ocean, with the analogy that the Pacific Ocean is the dominant field and the fish is this postcolonial, feminist, queer, or whoever is trying to make changes. Before you can make any changes…you have to have a certain awareness of the territory…my goal is a liberatory goal: to create possibilities for people, to look at things in a different way so people can act their daily lives in a different way. It’s a freeing up, an emancipating.17 This conception of language, of writing, of “making marks,” continues into her use of myth, a sort of revisionist mythmaking.18 The myths which Anzaldúa revises are those which do wrong by the people that they are told to and which they represent. Anzaldúa wishes to change the language of the people (specifically the Chicana and, more broadly, Latin American languages) so that it reflects those who must exist within and use it. Anzaldúa sees the power of myth
(which, again, should be logically seen as an extension of language) not as a tool for institutions to make their people happy, but rather as having been used by the institution she lives in to enslave and enact violence upon her people (broadly conceived through the scope of her many identities). Furthermore, she sees that this power can be used to fight back against the institutions.
Myths and fictions create reality, and these myths and fictions are used against women and against certain races to control, regulate, and manipulate us. I’m rewriting the myths, using the myths, back against the oppressors. An example of how a myth has created reality is the stereotype that Mexicans are dumb. For decades people have said that Mexicans are dumb and after a while it becomes part of the cultural perspective itself.19
17 Ibid, 252-253. 18 Ibid, 219. 19 Ibid, 219 14
Anzaldúa then moves on to explaining her use of the characters which are central to her existential symbolism and spirituality.
...I want to take these figures and rewrite their stories. The figures we’re given have been written from the male patriarchal perspective. Right away these figures are divided. For example the Virgin of Guadalupe’s body and sexuality were taken away from her. In the case of La Llorona the culture projects all its negative fears about women onto her, making la Llorona the bad mother who kills her children. Coyolxauhqui, the daughter of Coatlicue...was such a threat to Huitzilopochtli...that he decapitated her, cut her up in pieces... To me that’s a symbol not only of violence and hatred against women but also of how we’re split body and mind, spirit and soul, we’re separated.20 The centrality of Coyolxauhqui in Anzaldúa’s later shamanism is where we see the a stark defiance of the order of Aztecan mythology by Anzaldúa and those like her in using
Coyolxauhqui as a healing and empowering deity, as shown in the folk rhyme at the beginning of this section. The first chapter Anzaldúa’s posthumous publication, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo
Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, is a description of what is termed the
Coyolxauhqui imperative, or the urge and need to fix susto, the urge or need to heal. This sets the stage for the entire text, as it describes the state that necessarily befalls the reader. The dismembered goddess presides over the state of chaos and existential unhinging that, for
Anzaldúa, characterizes her time of writing.21 She is, in this way, La Diosa de las Asustadas, the
Goddess of the Frightened, the Goddess of those with Psyches Scattered.
Anzaldúa sees that not only has the world not become any kinder toward the Chicana,
Latin-American, or female existences, but now the nation is thrown into chaos by the 9/11 attacks, subject to the whims of an ignorant government who only seeks war, and the threat, perceived or legitimate, of the enemies of the nation which provide flimsy ideological
20 Ibid, 219-220. 21 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 16. 15 justification for the actions of that government. As the conflict rages on, she writes of the US’s deep state of desconocimiento, ignorance of perspective, or lack of insight or knowledge in the
Anzaldúan framework, specifically an urge for violence made clear by both the government’s acceptance and use of racialized language, demonizing the innocents perceived as belonging to the enemy, and willingness to treat starvation of and violence against innocent people of our
“enemy” nations as a result of collateral damage to our military actions as normal, as the people’s willingness to allow such attitudes to be normalized in their self-victimization.22
Institutionalized desconocimiento separates the collective from itself, and keeps the people ignorant, the individual incapable of knowing itself, and therefore, for Anzaldúa, we are all dismembered as is Coyolxauhqui through the psychic wounds inflicted by this institutional violence and, certainly, the condition extends to those whom we hurt as part of this. We are all wounded, specifically North America, but arguably the whole modern world, and all exist in this
Coyolxauhqui state.23
Anzaldúa calls out to what may be loosely defined as her people, “Abre los ojos, North
America; open your eyes, look at your shadow, and listen to your soul.24” We all must fight against ignorance, and against the institution which would keep us literally apart from ourselves and our own reality, which would shatter our perspectives and keep us ignorant of the darkest parts of ourselves. If this is the world in which Anzaldúa lives, which she has made clear has always been the case, as even in times of relative peace there has been no rest for the Chicana, the Queer, the Female existence, then the patron deity of this rebel Chamana cannot be the
Southern Hummingbird who is the embodiment of institutional violence. An activista who
22 Ibid, 11-15. 23 Ibid, 17. 24 Ibid, 11. 16 believes in the power of her people, but also in the power of the myths which construct culture, then she cannot simply accept the worship of Huitzilopochtli, who more than the god of the sun, is the god of men who rule their countries with an iron fist, the god of an empire which kept smaller enemy kingdoms alive to farm them for human sacrifices, the god of oppression, whose symbol is that which exists at the center of nature. Who will this Chamana worship? She will worship the one framed as the enemy of the solar god of institutional violence: the warrior goddess whose cheeks are painted with bells, she will draw power from the first victim of the
Aztecan patriarchy. Coyolxauhqui is the savior of the oppressed that will heal the wounds of the shattered people.
Anzaldúa’s spiritual system is a shamanism built upon rebellion against institutional trauma. I would hope that it is clear to the reader that this is not the sort of system which appears out of nowhere. The Rebellious, Neoshamanic Apostate Academic is not an archetype of culture that we pick easily out of the archives of cultural memory (though I might suggest casually and rather non-academically that it may become one in the present and future). Neither are
Anzaldúa’s treatment of Mexican religious forms entirely unique.
Novel though her particular configuration may seem and even be to a certain extent, it is important to recognize that she represents one of a cluster of recent developments within a vague sphere of Mexican-American writing in both fiction and nonfiction. Here I would like to provide
Dr. Anzaldúa’s writing with some additional context from an author that she drew from (Don
Miguel Ruiz) and an author that she impacted (Alicia Gaspar de Alba), specifically on the point of language as formulated above.
Though his work is heavily critiqued in many circles, it is hard to deny the contemporary fame and impact of Mexican neoshamanic author Miguel Ángel Ruiz Macías, or Don Miguel 17
Ruiz as he is better known. In Light in the Dark Anzaldúa specifically references his idea of the collective dream or dream of the planet, which contains all of society’s laws, ideas, symbols, etc.25 Ruiz uses the language of agreement, wherein humans in their own realities and in the dream of the planet literally form agreements for how reality is. Many of these agreements become imposed by the dream of the planet, and here humans become domesticated, or more accurately, they have domesticated each other.26 Ruiz even frames literal words in quasi religious terms in the same text, stating that we ”can either put a spell on someone with our word or we can release someone from a spell. We cast spells all the time with our opinions.27” Ruiz even makes the bold statement here that domestication results from the spells of others put on us by their opinions, which would necessarily result from their own domestication. Later in the same chapter, he speaks of how we may harm each other with these spells, terming this “black magic.”28 As is the case in Anzaldúa’s framework, social interaction, “spells” of opinion and word, cause spiritual harm. Later in his career, after spending some time in a coma after a heart transplant, Ruiz co-authored The Toltec Art of Life and Death with Barbara Emrys, publishing in
2015, the same year as Light in the Dark. In The Toltec Art of Life and Death, the concept of the potentially imprisoning nature of language and symbol become personified in an arguably quasi- gnostic narrative, wherein the dream of the planet is a goddess with power over language, symbol and images, who believes that she has control over the world, and is its creator, when in fact she is merely the creator of the images in the minds of the people, which is the world to most
25 Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, ed. Janet Mils. (San Rafael, CA: Amber-Allen Publishing, 1997), 2. 26 Ibid, 6. 27 Ibid, 29. 28 Ibid, 34. 18 people. This character is put in conflict with Shaman characters who draw their power from the cosmos rather than symbol and language.29
A similar theme of breaking free of our highly conceptual formulation of language comes to us in the form of Alicia Gaspar de Alba’s [Un]Framing the ”Bad Woman”: Sor Juana,
Malinche, Coyolxauhqui and Other Rebels with a Cause published in 2014. Gaspar de Alba’s project should be thought of as directly inspired by Anzaldúa. The book even begins with a thirteen-page letter to Anzaldúa as its preface, explaining in great detail the inspiration that
Gaspar de Alba has drawn from la Chamana. In this text we are treated to an analysis of the
Coyolxauhqui story that is, in all honestly, much more considered than anything we see in
Anzaldúa’s works. Gaspar de Alba examines the nature of the Sun-Moon explanation of the story, and sees it as a copout. She encourages the reader to see these myths for exactly what they are: justification for mistreatment and murder of women and the other.30 What is most interesting for the purpose of this paper, however, is that Gaspar de Alba takes part in Anzaldúa’s concept of revisionist mythmaking by rewriting the entire Coyolxauhqui story from its long-form appearance in the Florentine Codex. Her version of the story frames Coyolxauhqui as attempting to save her mother from a parasitic prophesied god who would strip the gods of their homeland, and who had taken control of Coatlicue. The deaths of the Huitznahua and Coyolxauhqui are framed as noble and beautiful, with Coatlicue using her divine power to resurrect their corpses as the celestial bodies after Huitzilopochtli’s failed attempt at murdering her. The Aztec empire,
29 Don Miguel Ruiz and Barbara Emrys, The Toltec Art of Life and Death. (San Francisco: Harper Elixer), 2015. 30 Alicia Gaspar de Alba, [Un]framing the “Bad Woman”: Sor Juana, Malinche, Coyolxauhqui and other rebels with a cause. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 131-132. 19 with the Southern Hummingbird as its ruler, is cursed by the Great Mother to be the greatest empire, but to fall at the hands of foreign invasion.31
The character of the Meztizaje of which she spoke, the cultural borderland, musings about which put her on the map, changed her and was changed by her. Her death in 2004 from diabetic complications in no way halted the rebellion that she embroiled herself in. She and those that stretch forward and backward in time from her time of death that we might call her literary comrades would seem to share a common goal of dismantling the symbols which cloud the truth of reality and take power from the people, to heal the wounds of the disaffected North America, whether they be susto, black magic, or harmful myths.
Anzaldúa’s impact is significant. If one researches the concept of the borderland in geography or history, it will be impossible not to come across her definition. In her short academic career and life, she sparked many conversations on the questions of identity, definitions of race, indigeneity, and what sort of attention we should pay to these concepts. She can be found in philosophy, history, literary criticism, feminist theory, and indigenous studies classrooms in her home state of Texas. My first encounter with her prose was in an introductory ethics classroom, and I have known several university professors who have chosen to include her either as mandatory reading for students, or as a conceptual framework for lectures. Her willingness to poke at the boundaries of self-other constructions, and of the cultural status quo has earned her a place in the hearts of many feminists and people of color. The impact of her scholarship has been such that in 2005, after her death, the Society for the Study of Gloria
Anzaldúa was established, holding yearly conferences dedicated to Anzaldúa’s vision, the most
31 Ibid, 193-201. 20 recent of which, at time of writing, was held in May of 2018. The call she put out to the world was simple, abre los ojos, open your eyes. Drawing from and adding to the rich tradition of
Mexican folklore, activism, and art, she used her creative talents to do just that, to open the eyes of her readership, and impact for the better the many worlds she inhabited. In the preface to
[Un]Framing the “Bad Woman” Alicia Gaspar de Alba addresses Anzaldúa by writing a letter to the deceased activista.32 She describes offering a poem at Anzaldúa’s grave several years prior, an act of devotion that any reader will recognize as significant.33 One simply does not leave anything at the grave of someone whom one considers insignificant. Gaspar de Alba showcases the great impact that Anzaldúa had on many writers, on many people. She sums up the lessons she learned from Anzaldúa, as they impacted her life, with the knowledge of ”how to tap into the healing, transformative power of the written word.34” I do think, however, that there is a more striking, provocative, and powerful show of Anzaldúa’s impact upon the worlds she touched, in the form of folk art. A 2009 oil portrait of Anzaldúa by artist Alma R. Goméz portrays her in the style of a Mexican folk saint.35 The image of Santa Gloria de la Frontera is inscribed with,
“Patroness of all nepantleras and nepantleros.36 Invoked by writers and those negotiating shifting identities.”
32 Ibid, ix-xxi. 33 Ibid, xx. 34 Ibid, xxi 35See Figure 1 36 Workers of Nepantla, the liminal space between colliding worlds. Those who practice Nepantlería 21
FIGURE 1: "SANTA GLORIA DE LA FRONTERA" BY ALMA R. GOMEZ37
37 Image used in compliance with fair use. A web copy of the painting can be found here: https://almargomez.com/artwork/1042457_Santa_Gloria_de_la_Frontera.html 22
Chapter 2. Dismembering the Eternal: Meditations on Kierkegaard and the Anzaldúan Self
2.1. Enter Anti-Climacus
You’ve shut the door again to escape the darkness only it’s pitch black in that closet. --Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, excerpt from that dark shining thing
Pain, suffering, ignorance of truth38, wounding, dismemberment, soul loss; these are the interrelated, and at times interchangeable terms which Anzaldúa uses to describe the apparent hostility toward the human personage imbedded in the world in her unfinished dissertation, published posthumously in 2015 under the title Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting
Identity, Spirituality, Reality. In the text she presents what may be thought of as the most complete version of her thought. Synthesizing her comprehensive education in the western philosophical and literary canons with her equally in-depth understanding of western esoteric literature and Mexican folk magic and mysticism, Anzaldúa presents a world that is at once deeply spiritually and deeply ethically charged, a world where living “selves” are constantly torn apart and put back together in growth cycles which must continue as a matter of ethical imperative, a world of constant pain, suffering, ignorance, wounding, dismemberment, soul loss; which enables pleasure, growth, knowledge, generation, and construction.
In Anzaldúa’s thought, these concepts center around the Mexican folk-magical concept of susto, which itself is usually translated to “soul loss,” but is more accurately translated as
38 Desconocimiento, lit. negation of knowing 23
“fright,” or “fear,” described by English-speakers who are more deeply familiar with the concept as the soul frightened out of the body. The reader will note that the condition of susto, to be asustado, to be so frightened, is inextricable from trauma. Susto in the traditional folk-magical or even folk-medical sense is thought of as a single traumatic event which results in a portion of the individual’s vital essence to be dislodged from its functional place within that individual’s system, either because that piece has literally become “frightened out,” or has been stolen away by some malevolent force. In Light in the Dark, susto is not just an affliction that can befall an individual, it is an affliction that has already befallen the individual, and necessarily befalls all individuals. Susto here is not an unnatural imbalance, it is an inevitability, one will be, and indeed already is asustado, frightened out of their own body, in a sense, regardless of their knowledge of it.
Anzaldúa’s fixation on ambient, perpetual trauma afflicting individual existence is not particularly difficult to understand. She was dealt a difficult hand as a queer woman born into
Mexican American culture, which even in the current day is often not open to flexibility of gender roles.. Additionally, the rare hormonal disorder from which she suffered caused her to menstruate beginning at only three months of age, and her body to develop rapidly and painfully.
Her autobiographical writings often descend into descriptions of the horrific psychological and physical suffering which for her was a simple background reality.
In her early life she found her escape from this painful world in books, searching for both release from her own suffering and explanation for it. In one obscure essay she describes herself through La Prieta, her author surrogate in her autobiographical works, as “[burying] her head in
Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Sickness unto Death [finding] a despair equal to her 24 own.”39 In a way, this paper is about this sentence, or at least half of it. The despair of
Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacus40 is taken away from the simple idea of despair that most assume to be its nature, the true nature of despair built out into a vast existential psychology which details both the knowing and unknowing aspects of human trauma. The logic of Anzaldúa’s all- pervasive susto is amazingly similar. The following may be read as an Anzaldúan meditation on
The Sickness unto Death, an archeology of Anzaldúa’s read of The Sickness unto Death, or a treatise on the implications of the Anzaldúan susto in order to explore the nature of self. It is important to do so in order to understand how it is that the individual exists in the world put forth by Anzaldúa, and in order to understand that world itself. The influence of Kierkegaard, specifically of the Sickness unto Death is undeniable in Light in the Dark, and yet Anzaldúa does far more than turn the affliction of frightening out of the body into a Kierkegaardian exercise.
Rather, I would argue, that the influence of The Sickness unto Death acts as a springboard for
Anzaldúa to develop the folk-magical conception of susto into her larger anthropology of spirit.
2.2. The Relation of the Self to Itself: the universal trauma
But I know you are the Beast its prey is you you the midwife you that dark shining thing I know it’s come down to this: vida o muerte, life or death.41 --Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, excerpt from that dark shining thing
39 Gloria Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader (Durnham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 235. 40 Anti Climacus is the pseudonym used by Kierkegaard in the text. Anti Climacus displays distinctive views and personality traits from other pseudonyms of Kierkegaard’s, which is why it is important to note which of his pseudonyms is used. 41 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 173. 25
The “human being” is defined, in The Sickness Unto Death as “spirit,” which is “self,” which is “a relation which relates itself to itself,” specifically not the relation in itself, but “the relation’s relating itself to itself.”42 This may be read as a cheeky reference to the vagueness inherent in the talk of “spirit” so often put forward by Kierkegaard’s enlightenment predecessors, but there is also a fair bit that may be said about the circularity of this simple definition, both in the way that it is expounded upon in the text, and the ways in which its meaning may be interpreted. I would encourage the reader to begin in a simple but functional way by thinking of the self-spirit as metacognition, not in concept, not as a static concept of the ability to reflect upon one’s own cognition, loosely conceived, but the action, process, motion of metacognition.
My reasons for taking this interpretation will become abundantly clear in the following pages, though I imagine that readers of both Anzaldúa and Kierkegaard will already have inklings as to the importance of this reading.
When beginning to elucidate the nature of despair (a task to follow shortly in this paper), despair is described most characteristically as a misrelation of the self to itself, which may be interpreted logically as an interruption of the aforementioned, present-progressive metacognition.
The reader is given further detail into the nature of this self-motion when Kierkegaard describes despair as “the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself…”43 or, in an earlier draft of the text, “of a synthesis that relates itself to itself, between the temporal and the eternal in the human being compounded of the temporal and the eternal…”44 with temporality referencing corporeal mortality and eternality referencing divine immortality. We are a creature that is at once bound by time and yet undying, possessed of both mortal body and immortal soul.
42 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13. 43 Ibid, 15. 44 Ibid, 143. 26
On the logistical level, this construction of what I will call the self-motion reads as a
Schellingian construction of the emergence of the self as act rather than object, where the self must paradoxically be an object for itself and thus must never be objective, in a sense.45
The self must be constant, from the point that an individual begins to perceive an identity, that is, to develop a relationship which relates to itself, to the point which that identity or self ceases. However, if the self as-such must be constant, it is troubling that various components of the self, personality traits, sensibilities and the like, change over time. This would seem to contradict the idea that the self is constant. The self, in order to be identified as self, that which observes the continuity that it is identified with, must have a degree of “fixity” in spite of such changes. There must, then, be some distinction between that self which changes, the series of temporal experiences, and the constant self, there must be both an ephemeral and an essential
“self”.46
In this way, the self makes itself into an “object” even as it is eternally a subject. The ephemeral self is capable of registering phenomena, it itself being made up of instances of experiential data, and yet the fact that it can be observed within the larger, overarching self makes it distinct from the essential, for which it is an object. To put this more simply, the essential self is the self which is always a subject. One can say that they “used to be” a certain way or that they “grew as a person.” This indicates that there is indeed a subject within the overarching self which observes “itself” as a series of experiences, observes the continuity of that with which it is identified
45Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism, trans. Peter Heath (Richmond, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 31-33. 46 Fiona Steinkamp, “Parapsychological Phenomena and the Sense of Self,” in Parapsychology, Philosophy and the Mind, ed. Fiona Steinkamp (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc., 2002), 67. 27
However, this self-relation is faced with a problem, this transcending self, as Fiona
Steinkamp refers to it, which she identifies with the essential self, must be able to identify the ephemeral self as identical to the transcending (essential) self, it must be able to identify the self that it observes as itself. Yet, in order to be identical to the self that is its object, this transcending self must be in flux, not itself constant, they simply have different properties.
Steinkamp suggests that the essential self, then, is not a constant in that it is a fixed and concrete component of a being, but rather the process of transcending the ephemeral self.47 It is this that I mean by self-motion, the nature of self is self as motion. This is what it means, I would venture for the self to be the synthesis of temporal and eternal, metaphysically. Spirit itself is self-sustaining motion.
It is difficult to say exactly what Anzaldúa means by her use of the term “spirit,” as she does not give a particular definition, and appears to move between multiple uses of the term, but what can be easily said is that the definition given by Kierkegaard, as expanded above, is both related to what Anzaldúa means by “spirit” and is what is ultimately striven for in Light in the
Dark. Common to Anzaldúa’s concept of self and the principle of self-motion as described above is the idea of self as simultaneously multiple and singular.
The “immutability” of self-motion is not so much taken as evidence of an immortality of a singular soul as it is in Kierkegaard,48 but rather of an ever-changing collective. However, the multiplicity of what we have termed the ephemeral self is not limited to individual points in time or individual experiences, but individual, “smaller” selves, with the self being made up of
47 Ibid, 68. 48 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 20. 28 different individual spirits.49 Further, this sort of ecosystem, which is identified with a particular member of itself called the “I” purely for referential convenience, would seem to be particularly porous. Self-motion is sustained by the relationships of this ecosystem as its individual members,
“imaginal figures,” shortened merely to “images,” enter and leave the psyche as they wish.
“Images” do not belong to the person whose “self” they exist in, and they act, again, as they, wish, not as the ecosystem identified with the “I” wishes. Anzaldúa offers a tamer, less fantastical version of the self-self relation in an alternative version of her fourth chapter, wherein, choosing to take the rout of identifying the self-ecosystem with the “I” for convenience, she articulates the same relationship expressed by Steinkamp and Schelling, describing an “I” of experiential data and an “I” which observes that string of data. The “sense of self,” is the result of the self-self relation as described above (in any of the previous formulations). “Wounding…”
Anzaldúa states, “disrupts that sense of self and disturbs that union, causing alienation from physical experience…” or, to rephrase, the transcendent is alienated from the ephemeral.50 This disruption of the sense of self is, I would argue, analogous to Kierkegaard’s conception of despair as the misrelation of the self to itself.
The form of despair for Kierkegaard is, in its way, a thing which is willed. “To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself—this is the formula for all despair.”51 Despair is a misrelation wherein the eternal or transcendent does not relate to the mortal or ephemeral, or vice versa. The self-self relation’s malfunction is the function of despair, and yet this tension in
49 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 36-38, here the term spirit appears to simply be used to mean “noncorporeal entities,” but I do find the notion of these spirits being defined by the same sort of self-motion as previously established to be a compelling conjecture that would certainly fit the conclusions of this meditation. 50 Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 184. 51 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 20. 29 the relation of the self to itself is always present. This is evinced by the difficulty in establishing the principle of self-motion in the earlier pages: what is transcendent is not what is ephemeral, and yet it must be, and as such hybrid entities the self-motion is doomed to this misrelation, to this eternal cycle of despair, of alienation or misrelation of the self from the self by virtue of what self is. Wounding, susto, dismemberment etc., is for Anzaldúa, this alienation of self from self.
And yet, why susto? What is so significant about this folk-magical concept that
Anzaldúa does not simply use Kierkegaardian terms in her dissertation? Susto is usually translated into “soul loss,” a condition described by Mircea Eliade in his iconic work
Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, wherein the condition’s cure is described as always being under the purview of shamans.52 According to Eliade, some or all of the soul is thought to have wandered away, meaning it must be drawn back. In actuality, the term translates to “fright,” or “fear,” and the condition of “having” susto, to be asustado, is to be “afraid.” The condition is still understood as one wherein the vital energies have become misplaced, but understanding susto as fright lends an extra dimension to this spiritual affliction, which to Anzaldúa is key: trauma.53
Four hypotheses on the occurrence of susto as a social phenomenon are proposed by
Rubel, O’Nell, and Collado-Ardón in their study of susto in Latin America which may act as explanatory aids in understanding this idea of susto as endemic to the social systems of
Anzaldúa. I have paraphrased these below
52 Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 300. 53Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 87. 30
1. Susto will result from situations that are stressful to the individual
2. The social stresses which susto reflects will be intracultural and intrasocietal (they will
not result from cross-cultural or cross-strata stresses)
3. Susto will result from an incident where one does not meet the expectations of a social
role for which one has been socialized
4. Susto will not always result from this sort of interaction54
Furthermore, Rubel et al describe susto as follows:
“The victim is (1) restless during sleep and (2) otherwise listless, debilitated, depressed,
and indifferent to food and to dress and personal hygiene.55”
I do not think that these hypotheses and definition fully capture the meaning of Anzaldúa’s susto, which, interchangeably with soul loss, she describes as wounding, psychic fragmentation, damage, scattered energy etc., but I do believe they give us something to work with for understanding the world which Anzaldúa is reacting to. Rubel’s data comes from particular isolated indigenous communities, whereas Anzaldúa is referring to a wider world in which all people are subject to susto, because all people are subject to trauma. One will note that the symptoms of susto described by Rubel’s hypotheses are indicative of depressive disorders. Other descriptions include these symptoms along with those which may be indicative of anxiety disorders and trauma responses. Where some may view such notes as an undue psychologization of the affliction which dismisses the realities of its sufferers, Anzaldúa comes to similar conclusions in her own ideas not just about susto, but about psychology generally. While she has much more spiritualized view of mind generally, she embraces the psychological aspects of susto
54 Rubel, Arthur J., Carl W. O'Nell, and Rolando Collado Ardón, Susto: A Folk Illness (Berkely and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1984), 11. 55 Ibid, 6. 31 and its metaphysical implications, even making a point of synonymizing the ideas of soul and mind.56
Anzaldúa describes this as an equation of “spiritual needs and belief in spirits” with
“psychological needs” resulting in a “blending of chamanerías57 and psychotherapy.”58 Thus, we are presented with an idea of susto, wounding, or dismemberment that is a spiritual one in a very direct sense, wounding is a wounding of the self-self relation, a disruption of the self-motion, and thus what is psychological is at the same time spiritual, moving away from contemporary pop- cultural uses of these ideas and moving more toward both newer psychospiritual ideas of mind present in contemporary secular spiritualities, and older, less secular conceptions of mind such as can be found in Kierkegaard and Schelling, and indeed it would appear to be the case that
Kierkegaard’s despair contributes greatly to the construction of Anzaldúa’s susto.
Despair for Kierkegaard, per the logic outlined in the previous pages, is an essential feature of the human condition, it is what defines and, to his mind, separates us from animals.59
Since eternality and mortality are in tension with each other, and we are a synthesis of the two, we cannot help but be predisposed to despair, and indeed eternality will make known its tension with mortality. Eternality is within the realm of God, and our eternality draws toward God.60 For
God, all things are possible, and this possibility is something toward which we are also drawn, as eternal beings, and yet, as we are simultaneously beings of mortality, we are met by necessity,
56 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 184. 57 Shamanic practices 58 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 37. 59 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980),15. 60 Ibid,40. 32 which is to say we are met with inevitability, things which must happen.61 What is eternal in us pulls us toward what is infinite in potential, and what is mortal in us pulls us toward the specific and determinate. To be human is to be possessed of both these aspects, and for either to lack the other is to paradoxically lose self, to lose the relating process of the relationship of the self to itself, and yet the two consistently pull away from each other in an attempt to become more themselves.
The relationship of the necessity and possibility can be read more concretely in Anzaldúa.
One of the most illustrative examples of the nature of susto is in the example of racial injustice;
For racialized people, managing losses, the trauma of racism, and other colonial abuses affect our self-conceptions, our very identity, fragmenting our psyches and pitching us into states of [liminality]. During or after any trauma (including individual and group racist acts), you lose parts of your soul as an immediate strategy to minimize the pain and to cope…you go into a state of susto… (you’re dismembered).62 Here the psychological trauma of racialization is not expressed as the only source of susto, but rather it is the case that racialized people, and others that have been liminalized by culture have had control of their histories and construction wrested from them in particular ways that make the mechanics and effects of susto particularly apparent. She formulates identity, self, or “I,” as a
“composition of a composite,” identity existing as an “embodiment of theories from various discourses…” or a “composite of different sets of information, an embodiment of theories, markers, and bars on our human flesh. 63”
The self, this strange self-motion, a self-sustaining relation that has made itself its own object is pulled in different directions, desires in different directions. This is illustrated well by
61 Ibid, 37. 62 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 87. 63 Ibid, 185. 33
Kierkegaard’s formulation of the dialectic of despair as masculine and feminine. The masculine and feminine despairs are described respectively as “to will to be oneself” or “defiance,64” and
“not to will to be oneself” or “despair in weakness65” respectively. In despair to will to be oneself one loses recognition of any power over oneself, it is simultaneously a will to the eternal and a loss of the eternal because of this intense will to the eternal, so termed defiance because it is a will to identify oneself as the eternal rather than to be in the eternal.66 In despair not to will to be oneself one experiences a will to immediacy, a will to mortality in that it is a despair of ones material circumstances, not a will to power but instead a will to simply passively not be due to ones own concern with the material.67
Anzaldúa reformulates this to dismemberment, wounding, or susto, wherein portions of the self, portions of one’s construction, images of the self, are deemed undesirable, they deem themselves unfit for the ecosystem, and become suppressed, or “frightened out.” The one in despair is asustado. “When what you expect to happen doesn’t happen,” Anzaldúa says, “you experience a lack of control in your life, a loss of control. This breach in reality upsets your sense of equilibrium. 68” This is crucial, a lack of met expectations based on one’s narrative. This seems simple, even petty, but there’s a sense in which that is the point. We are composed of a complex narrative of potentiality and actuality, and the dual nature of our existence necessarily doesn’t allow for fixity of that narrative. Despair, or wounding, is unavoidable and eternal. The asusustada may not escape susto’s peril any more than the one in despair may escape the
64 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 67. 65 Ibid, 49. 66 Ibid, 68. 67 Ibid, 54. 68 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 87. 34 sickness of despair, even in death, because every “soul” within the multiplicity of souls, every member of the ecosystem, is subject to a cycle of loss, is part of the motion. A human being is not simply an open and closed book, much as the self is in motion, the world too is in motion.
Or, perhaps it is more accurate to say that just as the self is itself a self-sustaining motion, the self itself is a portion of world-sustaining motion.
2.3. A New Vision of Dismemberment
It’s not enough opening once. Again you must plunge your fingers into your navel, with your two hands rip open, drop out dead rats and cockroaches spring rain, young ears of corn. Turn the maze inside out. Shake it.69 --Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, excerpt from Letting Go
It should be clear to the reader at this point that the Anzaldúan susto cannot simply be read as the original indigenous concept from which it derives, or straightforwardly read as a retooled Kierkegaardian despair; rather it would seem to be the case that The Sickness Unto
Death’s system plays a significant part in generating what may be read as a new, uniquely
Mexican-American existentialism, or perhaps more relevantly, a new anthropology of spirit which assumes an environmentality to psychological states that is not often acknowledged in
Existentialism. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s system via Anti-Climacus would seem to play very well with the basic metaphysics of a living, inspirited world in motion defined by Aztec-based
69 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 164. 35 philosophy from which Anzaldúa derived much of her thought.70 Aztec animism as characterized by James Maffie as “the thesis that all things are empowered and vivified,” that all things which exist are alive and in constant motion—
…then Aztec metaphysics clearly embraces animism. Aztec animism appears to be underwritten by the following ideas. First, to exist (to be) is to be alive (or animated) in the sense of being energized, vitalized, or empowered. Second, to exist and to be alive is to move, act, change, transform, affect and be affected. Things change, move, and affect both themselves and other things by dint of their animating energy. Since all things possess power to make things happen, all things may be said to possess agency. The ongoing agency of all things contributes to the ongoing transformation of the cosmos.71 By this definition, logical primacy is given to motion above all else, and this logical primacy to motion is, I argue, the key to understanding both the attractiveness of the metaphysics of despair as presented in The Sickness Unto Death for Anzaldúa, and to understanding core differences between the two thinkers in terms of their dealing with this “sickness,” for lack of better terms.
One way of examining these similarities and differences is in the “cures” of the two authors, that is, how it is that one deals with the sickness. Kierkegaard’s and Anzaldúa’s cures would both seem to tend toward proper treatment of the eternality of the self, which, remember, is the observant self, the self-motion, given that the eternal is the self. Kierkegaard emphasizes the importance of proper treatment of tendency toward eternality in allowing spirit, which is self, which is our self-motion, to both exist (relate to itself, exist dialectically as self-motion), and in doing so the self must be willing to be itself, and in doing so, it exists in its eternality, in
70 A full-scale explanation of the linkages between Anzaldúa and philosophies based in Aztec revivalism and Aztec- derived folk practices is beyond the scope of this paper. For a more thorough explanation see David Carrasco and Roberto Lint Sagarena, “The Religious Vision of Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands/La Frontera as Shamanic Space,” in Mexican American Religions: Spirituality, Activism and Culture. Ed. Gastón Espinosa (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2008), 234-241. 71 James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy, Understanding a World in Motion (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 114-115. 36 eternality itself, and therefore “rests transparently in the power that established it.”72 This willingness to be close to the eternal, to God, does emphasize the importance of will to motion, but only as a means to an end, that end being resting in God, namely the Christian God. Further, this Christian eternal is required for the self to be self, in self-motion.
Anzaldúa’s “cure” emphasizes something a bit different, the will to motion is not a means to an end, the will to motion is the end, in that motion is the end, as motion gains logical primacy in Anzaldúa’s system, taking the place of the Christian God. Rather than resting within God, the
Eternal, the ecosystem of self-motion, wherein pieces, images, spirits, enter and exit the complex of body and soul, must exist literally in motion, and in constant creation and destruction. Rather than the cessation of the sickness, the sickness, susto, wounding, dismemberment is required to achieve greater and greater heights.
Anzaldúa describes seven stages of wounding and regeneration in a perpetual cycle, one which is constantly taking place, wherein the real problem is not that the injury takes place, but anything that would cause the cycle to stagnate. She calls this cycle the conocimiento cycle, or the cycle of knowing.73
Roughly, this cycle involves an initial wounding, un susto, which fundamentally alters perception (1). The reader will remember that susto is a trauma which frightens, jars a portion of the personality, and thus remakes the world of the self, it disrupts the self-motion and establishes a need for stabilization. In striving for stabilization, one begins to see new patterns, to work with the new and fundamentally altered perception, exercising la facultad, the capacity to see beneath
72 Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna Hong (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1980), 131. 73 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute,1987), 121. 37 the normal workings of reality due to having been so altered, “to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface (2).”74
In this new state of perceptibility, one is overwhelmed, seemingly unable to proceed, one may consider this another wound that may in itself begin a new epicycle of conocimiento (3).
Eventually one overcomes the state of overwhelming (4), and begins to construct new maps, new ways of understanding and constructing meaning based on the new perceptual lifeworld that has been granted by the wounding, in other words, new images or spirits, new modes of self- motion/self-relation begin to form (5). One then has to test the new map, to actively self- construct, or begin telling a new story as it were (6). In describing the process within herself,
Anzaldúa often defaults to the practice of writing in her rituals of self-construction.75 The process of conocimiento is not one of simply being: it is not passive. Motion is active. More so than Kierkegaard, the active nature of the self-self relation is active in a very personal sense. One must do self in order to self-relate, in a very literal sense. In keeping with this spirit then, the process must be begun over again, new conflicts must be negotiated on the ground, the new story must be tested, and thusly new sustos will occur (7). Where the self-motion must seek its ultimate refuge in God for Kierkegaard, for Anzaldúa the self-motion must acquiesce to motion itself.
An aspect of aquiescence to motion which cannot be ignored in the Anzaldúan scheme is the inherent motion of the world around the individual. It is not simply the individual that is in motion, but the individual as ecosystem is itself part of an ecosystem, both necessarily implied
74 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco, CA: Spinsters/Aunte Lute Book Company, 1987), 38. 75 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 5. 38 by existence in an animistic world as described by Maffie, and described quite directly by
Anzaldúa. It is not simply individuals who undergo susto, but groups of people, society itself is so ensouled. Societies themselves are subject to interruptions in self-motion, stagnations in their ecosystem, to desconocimiento, the condition of deep ignorance which is the opposite of conocimiento,76 which in Anzaldúa’s expanded scheme of dismemberment is closely related to susto, as it is the lack of allowance of regeneration.
The collective nature of susto, conocimiento, and desconocimiento is illustrated by
Anzaldúa in the first chapter of Light in the Dark, entitled Let us be the healing of the wound by way of her observations of the deep cultural turmoil that befell North America in the wake of the
9/11 attacks. “Abre los ojos, North America; open your eyes, look at your shadow, and listen to your soul.77” She describes a nation controlled by fear in the wake of collective trauma, launching into a cultural war on “terror,” a nation turning itself against itself, creating new nepantlas, ambiguous spaces, where old rules no longer apply and hostility is embraced out of survivalism, shoving whole multiple social groups into the new riffs opened up by these actions, accentuating existing marginalities and creating new ones. In this way the ephemeral, multiplicitous narratives of the “I” are mirrored in society, both in that there are multiple perspectives in the ecosystem which is the “soul” of a society, but also in that these perspectives may be, and are, suppressed, forced to wander and exist in the liminal, are “frightened out.”
76 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 20. 77 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 11. 39
2.4. Moving Forward in the World of Motion: the Coyolxauhqui Imperative to Heal, and the Nonhuman
Why do I cast no shadow? Are there lights from all sides shining on me? Ahead, ahead. curled up inside the serpent’s coils, the damp breath of death on my face I knew that instant: something must change or I’d die.78 --Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, excerpt from Sueños con serpientes
The porous ecosystem of self-motion exists in multiple, inumerable layers, all the way up and all the way down, blurring the lines of individual and collective, generating a need to facilitate regeneration in the world if there is to be regeneration of the self. This is referred to by
Anzaldúa as the Coyolxauhqui Imperative. Both a feminist allegory for institutional violence at the hands of patriarchal governmental powers (Coyolxauhqui’s brother Huitzilopochtli was the patron god of the Aztec empire, and center of the empire’s violent sacrificial cult which subjugated the tribes and kingdoms around them), and a source of power and creativity for
Anzaldúa, Coyolxauhqui stands as La Diosa de las Asustadas, the Goddess of the dismembered, providing literal light in the dark, and acting as an example of transformation and power in the face of wounding.
The Coyolxauhqui imperative should, however, not be read as only applying to humans.
In terms of Anzaldúa’s system, the boundaries between individual and collective are blurred, distorted, and at times erased altogether, and so too are the boundaries between the human and
78 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 34- 35. 40 the nonhuman, showcased in Anzaldúa’s definition of the supernatural, which itself serves as a formulation of what it is to be human:
Humans fear the supernatural, both the undivine (the animal impulses such as sexuality, the unconscious, the unknown, the alien) and the divine (the superhuman, the god in us). Culture and religion seek to protect us from these two forces. The female, by virtue of creating entities of flesh and blood in her stomach (she bleeds every month but does not die), by virtue of being in tune with nature’s cycles, is feared. Because according to Christianity and most other major religions, woman is carnal, animal, and closer to the undivine, she must be protected, protected from herself. Woman is the stranger, the other, she is man’s recognized nightmarish pieces, his Shadow-Beast. The sight of her sends him into a frenzy of anger and fear.79 The human here is placed at a point of ambiguity between two poles, the undivine and the divine, one which is animalistic and “less than,” and one which is divine and “more than,” and yet,
Anzaldúa uses the example of Woman to show that although the category of the supernatural is constructed so as to place “human” (read: man) in the middle of two dangerous and uncontrollable poles, the construction of human is in no way about species. Further, the species that is referred to as “human” is implied to contain both divinity and animality. This is not merely a philosophical move for Anzaldúa, but a literal reality which “culture and religion” seek to hide. These animal and divine aspects make themselves known in her own life experiences at times of wounding, closely mirroring Kierkegaard’s modality of masculine and feminine despair.
The shadow beast is exactly to the individual what the cultural, feminine shadow beast is to the male-dominated cultural whole, “recognized nightmarish pieces,” the parts which have been othered and deemed unacceptable, and she has one too. She describes herself as possessed by the shadow beast. Much as masculine despair defies the nature of the eternal by asserting its own will to eternality, the shadow beast “refuses to take orders from outside authorities…hates constraints of any kind, even those self-imposed. At the least hint of limitation on [Anzaldúa’s]
79 Ibid, 17. 41 time or space by others, it kicks out with both feet.”80 She is at once animal and human, the animal, the beast is image, that being which “[has] body] and exists in three-dimensional space” despite “only” being part of the ecosystem of self.81 These beings are themselves part of the world of motion, and thus are part of both the individual and the collective, playing at “the connective membrane between the interiority and exteriority of subjectivity.82
The cosmos itself is described by Anzaldúa in terms of a great organism, a tree.83
Following a “mythologized” organization of the cosmos, the tree is used to describe three layers of reality: the sky world, the middle world or “standard” reality, and the underworld, however
Anzaldúa encourages us not to think of this organization as literal. Rather than the underworld representing a place literally below the ground, the roots of the tree extend into el cenote, a sort of vivified collective unconscious, into one’s own mind and eventually into the minds of everyone else, and then its branches reach far out into the cosmos.84 They are “the same place,”
Anzaldúa would like her reader to understand, and their denizens are all in constant exchange with one another.85
Anzaldúa’s most dramatic portrayal of her own susto, reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s feminine despair, wherein she quite literally wills not to be herself, is what invites her iconic encounter with the divine, with the earth goddess Coatlicue, the resurrected serpent goddess of the Aztec empire, mother to Coyolxauhqui and Huitzilopochtli. In her longing for the eternal to
80 Ibid, 16. 81 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 36. 82 Ibid, 36. 83 Ibid, 25. 84 Ibid, 25-26. 85 Ibid, 26. 42 reject the mortal, the divine herself came to the aid of Anzaldúa to place her own dismembered spirit back in its place.86
The world portrayed here is big, the world of motion is one that depends upon self- motion for its own existence, and yet, for Anzaldúa, it would appear to not simply be an impersonal swirling mass of momentum. In fact, self-motion’s relative cheapness, nay, metaphysical triviality becomes the reason for caring not just about other humans but about the world, and in turn the world may find its way toward caring about us, for what we see in
Anzaldúa’s philosophy, or rather, what may be teased from it, is a world where self-motion, the relation of the self to the self, the duality of ephemeral and transcendent entails great multiplicity of ecosystems. The conceptual structures of the Sickness unto Death permeate Anzaldúa’s thought in highly generative ways, helping to expand her sense of what I have termed the world of motion and will to motion into a larger ethics and metaphysics, an eco-ethics that decenters the human and yet demands its flourishing.
At this juncture it seems necessary to examine the interaction between the human and the nonhuman in further detail. The nonhuman is best explored via its interaction and blending with the human in Anzaldúa’s work, and so this will largely be the focus of this exploration, based upon Anzaldúa’s descriptions of what I characterize as both undivine and divine supernatural entities, per the definition given previously. I will also introduce a third node of the supernatural that is not named in the text, but emerges over time through Anzaldúa’s corpus, that of the ambiguous nagual, or naguala, the shapeshifter, or the ambiguation of the divine and the undivine within the individual human.
86 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute,1987), 49. 43
Chapter 3. The Beastly, the Godly, and the In-Between
It’s not enough deciding to open.
You must plunge your dingers into your navel, with your two hands split open spill out the lizards and horned toads the orchids and the sunflowers, turn the maze inside out. Shake it87
--Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, excerpt from Letting Go Anzaldúa’s notion of the supernatural centers around the notion of parts of the self that have been suppressed. It is less that what is “supernatural” is above or outside of nature, but rather that it is outside of what is institutionally safe.
Institutionalized religion fears trafficking with the spirit world and stigmatizes it as
witchcraft. It has strict taboos against this kind of inner knowledge. It fears what Jung
calls the Shadow, the unsavory aspects of ourselves. But even more it fears the supra-
human, the god in ourselves…The Catholic and Protestant religions encourage fear and
distrust of life and of the body; they encourage a split between the body and the spirit and
totally ignore the soul; they encourage us to kill off parts of ourselves.88
A reaction to what humans do not understand and cannot control has historically been to label it as other, and place thick conceptual walls around it so that it cannot break into the white rational
87 Ibid, 164 88 Ibid, 37 44 notion of what is real (read: safe). We create our monsters, our abominations in the face of reality, by constructing our reality as a cage to contain them. This is the picture of white rationality that Anzaldúa brings to the attention of the reader.
That said, it is not true that every human culture creates these walls of fear around the same things. Much of Anzaldúa’s writing, rightly so, highlights parts of the “supernatural” which were relatively normalized either at one point in history, or especially in her own upbringing.
Like many people of culturally Mexican heritage, Anzaldúa grew up with heavy exposure to
Mexican Catholicism as a matter of backdrop rather than as foregrounded, day-to-day practice, citing her immediate family as not particularly religious. “…My mother isn’t the kind of woman who says, ‘If God wills it. If God wishes.’ Nothing like that. She believes there is a God, but we weren’t religious. (I mean, I never heard about the Pope until I was eighteen.)”89 Simultaneously, she describes her grandmother as having been “more pagan than Catholic,” describing the woman as burning incense and propitiating saints whose images appear on prayer candles.90
“Pagan” in Anzaldúa’s work refers broadly to pre-Christian belief systems, and in the case of
Anzaldúa’s own life experience, it specifically refers to more Native American “Indian” belief structures and those practices which would appear to be derived from such. Anzaldúa has at various times referenced this upbringing amongst a mix of Catholic and “Indian” pagan beliefs.
This sort of religious hybridity will seem familiar to many readers approaching this essay from a
Latin American background, and is extremely common in the US/Mexico borderland where
Anzaldúa was raised.
89 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000, 94. 90 Ibid, 95. 45
We must understand here that Anzaldúa had what any reader might think of as religious beliefs, and certainly throughout her unfortunately short body of works, a coherent theology seems to solidify, but the term “religion” must be used with caution, lest it cause confusion between the reader’s understanding and Anzaldúa’s own usage of the term. In no uncertain terms, Anzaldúa thinks “religions are bad.”91 At the same time, Anzaldúa would seem to embrace what might commonly be referred to as “spiritual but not religious,” viewing organized religiosity as antithetical to the expression of her identity, writing and speaking with an acid tongue on the subject.
Additionally, what we speak of for Anzaldúa is more of a complete worldview that cannot be contained by usual categories when studying “religions.” The experiences, politics, the supernatural, language, and philosophy are all intertwined and inseparable. For this reason I insist the reader think in terms of orientation when considering Anzaldúa’s worldview, which is perhaps a more useful term given the subject matter of this paper. By orientation I mean “how one comes to terms with the ultimate significance of one’s place in the world,” and
“…experience, expression, motivations, intentions, behaviors, styles and rhythms.92
Anzaldúa describes her experiences growing up, “listening to the voices of the wind as a child and understanding its messages” as experiences that she tried very hard, as culturally mandated (read: religiously mandated), to repress.93 According to Anzaldúa, those of us who do experience the world’s enchantment, vitality, and spiritedness beyond their own human existences, “are not supposed to remember such otherworldly events.”94 We ignore, we repress,
91 Ibid, 95. 92 Charles H. Long, Significations. (Aurora: CO: University Press of Colorado, 1999), 7. 93 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute,1987), 36. 94 Ibid, 36. 46 we cage such experiences, forcing them into the world of otherness. The existence of the otherworld, which was too powerfully present in her experience, was, to Anzaldúa’s mind,, originally relegated to the realm of pagan superstition by what she refers to as “white rationality,” echoed both by American secular culture and organized religion.95 These experiences, stigmatized by the organized religions “as witchcraft,” specifically those experience associated with the otherworld or spirit world, but broadly anything associated with the realm of the “supernatural” as previously quoted, are relegated to what I will call the other-world. By the other-world, I mean the “world” or conceptual realm inhabited by those things which are not
“allowed” by white rationality, by the institutionally constructed norms. To put this another way,
I conceive of the other-world as a broad category of things which are othered.
Note that I have intentionally stated that the other-world is the category of things which are othered and not things which are other. I insist, as does Anzaldúa, that the other is created, not essentially other. Otherness, may be viewed as a signification of the Anzaldúan supernatural, the undivine and the divine, those things considered less-than, dirty, animal, sub-human, and those things which are beyond understood human capability, and therefore dangerous. The reader will have, by now, picked up on the fact that the description of the supernatural, of the other-world which I am running with, is one that describes Anzaldúa herself by virtue of being a woman and experiencer of the spirit world. Anzaldúa’s own definition of the supernatural defines her as fundamentally a part of it. I dare say that she thrived in life as a queen of the cage society built around her, embracing her existence in what I call the other-world. She took on the role of the undivine and superhuman for herself, embracing otherness, and allowing monstrosity
95 Ibid, 36-37. 47 to be her therapy; what is antithetical becomes her thesis, what is monstrous, what is other, is her self.
In the following pages, keeping in mind that the distinctions between these concepts in
Anzaldúa’s orientation are not always clear and that there is heavy overlap between all of these categories of experience in her writing, I will examine three concepts within Anzaldúa’s writing to further deepen this understanding of the other-world. First I will examine the Shadow-Beast, the principle undivine figure. The second are Anzaldúa’s goddesses, extremely vaguely conceived, the divine figures of Anzaldúa’s definition of the supernatural. Finally, I will examine an intermediary class of being, the shapeshifter or nagual and its accompanying spirits, spanning the animalistic undivine and the godly, superhuman divine.
3.1. The Shadow Beast
The alternative to feeding our demons is to engage in a conflict we can never win: our unfed demons only become more and more powerful and monstrous as we either openly battle them or remain ignorant of their undercover operations96 --Lama Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons
This term “Shadow-Beast” pops up a lot in Anzaldúa’s writing. It is only ever defined in snippets, but it is used in a very particular context. As previously quoted, man’s Shadow-Beast, woman, is a projection of his “recognized nightmarish pieces,” the sight of which sends him into
“a frenzy of anger and fear.97” This concept would appear to be based on the Jungian archetype of the shadow, which Anzaldúa references in Borderlands/La Frontera, describing it as “the unsavory aspects of ourselves.98” The shadow is “a living part of the personality and therefore
96 Tsultrim Allione, Feeding Your Demons. (New York: Hactchette Book Group, 2008), 7. 97 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 17. 98 Ibid, 37. 48 wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness,” and as such, its status as a caged entity, (placed in the linguistic cage of the unsavory, the fundamental “not I”), makes it dangerous.99 Anzaldúa very much refers to an imaginally living shadow, driving the personality in one direction or another. The shadow beast is one of many imaginal spirits that make up the identity, the personality, the individual, of which the conscious ‘I’ is only a part.100 All portions of the self, all members of this multiself, inhabit a state of simultaneous literal and metaphorical existence, with the distinction between the two mattering very little.101
Anzaldúa does occasionally refer to the shadow, the simple and collective unsavory aspects of the self, to which she would seem to ascribe a far less active though no less real role,102 but more often, when referring to herself, or referring to more active, emotional, tumultuous, living shadows, she refers to the Shadow-Beast. Remember that in describing
Woman as Man’s Shadow-Beast, she describes her as man’s recognized nightmarish pieces. The shadow is unsavory, while the Shadow-Beast is nightmarish. Anzaldúa equates this to defensive, protective, and animalistic behaviors, what she calls the undivine in her concept of the supernatural. It stirs in the face of any threat to self-image, to the self-world model. “A threat to your self-identifications and interpretations of reality enrages your Shadow-Beast, who views the
99 Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. eds. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerard Adler. Trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), 20. 100 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 184. 101 Ibid, 177. If one examines her citations and bibliography, one will find that Anzaldúa links her conception of the imaginal to Henry Corbin, though she does not explicitly discuss Corbin’s thought. An extended discussion of Corbin’s conception of the imaginal world is not the intended scope of this thesis, however one may find an articulartion of the concept in his lecture mundus imaginalis, referenced in passing by Anzaldúa when the term imaginal is first introduced in the text. See Corbin 1972, 8. 102 Ibid, 11. “Abre los ojos, North America: open your eyes, look at your shadow, and listen to your soul.” This was a call to action in the wake of cultural complacency and complicities to institutional violence that Anzaldúa observed in North American culture in the wake of 9/11. 49 new knowledge as an attack on your bodily integrity.103” The Shadow-Beast is survival, unconscious and animalistic; it does not mesh with our idea of human, with “rationality.” It is not concerned with objects in the world; it exists to protect the subject.
Readers of Jung will remember, however, that there is a transformative aspect to the shadow. Anzaldúa evokes Jung in her construction of the shadow as a thing which eventually becomes the shadow beast. It is at once a harrowing presence representing all that we do not believe ourselves to be and yet simultaneously are, the things which we stuff down, for one reason or another, and a potential locus of transformation through confrontation, evoking at once the Jungian shadow and the Freudian id. For Jung, confrontation with the shadow is a necessary, painful step toward knowing oneself, “a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.”104 The Shadow-Beast serves a function. It is only beastly because it is a subject made into an object, it is those aspects which keep us alive and take care of basic needs, the animalistic. It is only shadow for the reason that Jung’s shadow is shadow, it is the repressed and abused parts of the self, impulsive, instinctual, and unresolved. We are trained to fear what happens when the Shadow-Beast breaks out. An angry, malnourished, wild antithesis to the ‘I,’ but it is only in this lack of resolution that the shadow finds monstrosity.
Anzaldúa finds that the solution to the presence of this wild, imaginal beast is to ally with it, a solution much like Jung’s. To find power in the monstrous, and ally with what has been
103 Ibid, 147. 104 Carl Gustav Jung, The Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, eds. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerard Adler, trans. R.F.C. Hull (New York: Pantheon Books, 1959), 21. Emphasis mine. 50 caged. Simple suppression is no solution.105 Indeed the Shadow-Beasts must be confronted in order to move past ignorances of the self.106
For Anzaldúa, there would appear to be power in what is caged. This beast is dangerous, and not always cooperative, it is painted as a wild monster for a reason, but the key is the knowing that the signification of monstrosity, the projections upon the beast, is a lie.107 In the face of the fear of an outbreak, the fear of the violent monster that rattles the cage of its signification, “we try to make ourselves conscious of the Shadow-Beast, stare at the sexual lust and lust for power and destruction that we see on its face, discern amongst its features the undershadow that the reigning order…projects on our Beast…we try to waken the Shadow-Beast inside us.108” This is a painful process, and Anzaldúa herself describes it as one that many don’t wish to undertake; but the monstrous is the ally, and the realized self inherently monstrous.
The Shadow-Beast is the monster within the human for the same reason that Anzaldúa inhabits the other-world, for the same reason that she herself is monstrous. She herself is subject to the cage of society, she is other to society in the same way that the beast is other to the accepted and curated portrayal of Self. This is not to say that Anzaldúa does not struggle with the
Beast. She describes in her attempts to reconcile with the monster being dragged underground by cold, clammy hands while stared at by lidless, serpent eyes. However, despite this difficulty, despite the harrowing confrontation with the Beast, she embraces the power that it holds and represents. Rather than allowing inhibition and the cage set around her to silence her, to silence
105 Carl Gustav Jung, Psychology and Religion, eds. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler (New York: Pantheon Books, 1958) 77. 106 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 74-75. 107 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 20. 108 Ibid, 20. 51 the Beast, the embodiment of what is made silent through the boisterous construction of the society and the world that would relegate her to the other-world, she embraces the beast and finds that its heart is tender, only longing for expression. “We have uncovered the lie,” of the beast, and embraced the monstrous for the power that it holds.109 “There is a rebel in me—” proclaims Anzaldúa, “the Shadow Beast.”
It is a part of me that refuses to take orders from outside authorities… refuses to take orders from my conscious will…threatens the sovereignty of my rulership….that hates constraints of any kind, even those self-imposed. At the least hint of limitation on my time or space by others, it kicks out with both feet.110 The Shadow, that which is repressed, that which is not talked about, which is silenced, gains power in the world of those privileged to compose their cacophony of language. The Shadow-
Beast is the embodiment of the silent, the power of silence accumulated within the signified and oppressed, those who inhabit the other-world.111 The Beast is a radical form of protesting subject, a power and self-permission to rise “against the patriarchal constructions of power… defying what culture, religion, and the conscious mind have labeled as taboo.112”
To close this section I would like to introduce something which falls in the realm of the power of the silenced, what would appear to be an outward manifestation of the Shadow-Beast’s power, showing a trend toward the divine, beginning to blur the lines of Anzaldúa’s undivine- divine dichotomy. This blurring constitutes a theme which will continue to present itself in subsequent pages.
109 Ibid, 20. 110 Ibid, 16. 111 For an approximation of what is meant here by the idea of “silence,” see Charles H. Long, Significations. (Aurora: CO: University Press of Colorado, 1999), 61-70. 112 Erika Aigner-Varoz, “Metaphors of a Mestiza Consciousness: Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S. 25, no. 2 (2000): 59. 52
I would like to discuss la facultad, literally, “the faculty,” or “the capacity.”113 La facultad is broadly the faculty of experiencing the otherworld, it is a sixth sense, “the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface.114” What is most interesting to me is that Anzaldúa describes la facultad as a sense that is more likely to manifest in those who live in constant fear, the marginalized; those relegated to the other-world are most likely to develop this sense for the otherworld. This is because of the dire straits that the marginalized, the female, the homosexual, the dark-skinned, the one-that- does-not-fit-in find themselves in. The marginal other-worlder is “forced to develop this capacity so that [they’ll] know when the next person is going to slap [them] or lock [them] away.115”
This is instinct manifesting beyond standard human capacity, this is the realm of the undivine gaining superhuman power. Just as the one possessed of the Shadow-Beast gains strength from confronting the Beast and embracing it, the other-worlder is more likely to acquire this otherworldly power, this sixth-sense in the face of fear. Initiated through loss of innocence, through losing the ability to believe that the world is safe, by witnessing intensely that it is not, the undivine animal instinct becomes a superpower of sorts, with sensitivity to danger as only the tip of the iceberg. Anzaldúa would seem to present la facultad as a capacity for self-awareness, not just awareness of danger.116
Ultimately the identity is constructed in large part by what is out of conscious control.
The other-world is a creation of the cultural language of the institutions. Rationalism and religious sensibility, perpetuation of culture, create a cage in which to chain the other, they create
113 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 122. 114 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 38. 115 Ibid, 38-39. 116 Ibid 39. 53 borderlands to which they relegate the other117, in a zoo-like construct which reinforces the condemnation to less-than of the identity of those who inhabit it, the other-world. The other- world is a tool of the institutions, “white rationality”, “organized religion”, “culture”, whatever your stand-in for the marginalizing force upon the marginalized.118 In this same way, the individual’s otherness, the uncouth aspects of the identity, the dirty, sexual, and survivalistic, relegated to the form of the Shadow-Beast, where it cultivates itself in protest, ready to lash out, to become more-than. This is the power of the animalistic, supposedly less-than, undivine.
In the next section I will explore the divine, in the form of Anzaldúa’s goddesses. I invite the reader to keep a watchful eye peeled for connections to the undivine in these divine ladies, these powerful imaginal figures which for Anzaldúa, provide a powerful means of self- construction and self-release.
3.2. Goddesses
Coatlicue da luz a todo y a todo devora. Ella es el monstruo que se tragó todos los seres vivientes y los Astros, es el monstruo que se traga al sol cada tarde y le da luz cada mañana.119
---- Coatlicue gives light to all, and devours all. She is the monster that swallowed all of life and all of the stars, the monster that swallows the sun every evening and gives back its light every morning.
--Anzaldúa on the goddess Coatlicue Anzaldúa uplifts many goddesses over the course of her writing, far more than writing space allows me to do justice to. That said, there would seem to be a common theme among her use/experience of goddesses: the experience/use of the superhuman, the god in us. There is the
117 Ibid, 3. 118 Charles H. Long, Significations. (Aurora: CO: University Press of Colorado, 1999), 90. 119 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 46. 54 hermaphroditic Goddess, who is her repeated sexual partner over the course of several mystical encounters,120 and Coatlicue, the Aztecan Earth Goddess.121 These are two figures which may or may not be the same entity (it is genuinely difficult to tell with the way that Anzaldúa speaks of
Goddesses). For purposes of this paper I will refer to the Hermaphrodite Goddess and Coatlicue, substituting the proper noun “Goddess” here and there for ease of prose. Both the Hermaphrodite
Goddess and Coatlicue represent and provide an outlet to release Anzaldúa from the tribulations of the world.122 The Hermaphrodite Goddess would appear to be a more erotic partner in this to the point of recreation, while Coatlicue appears to be more therapeutic. However, I would argue that accounts of both goddesses contain both erotic and therapeutic elements.
In an interview with Christine Weiland in 1983, Anzaldúa describes a “meditation which became a sexual fantasy.123” In this “fantasy,” which quickly becomes mystical reality, Anzaldúa describes an encounter with a goddess figure, one that confuses her, because it has a penis, one with which it penetrates her in what she initially interprets as a “heterosexual fantasy.”124 Having worked hard over the course of her life to come to grips with a complex sexuality and the cultures of both her Mexican and American heritage that were unwilling to accept it, eventually coming to identify as a lesbian, this troubles her.125 She is initially emotionally resistant to this encounter, but ultimately the goddess, our Hermaphrodite Goddess’ “penis [is] womanly,” and
Anzaldúa decides that it probably doesn’t matter. “I don’t know what the divine is, but I’m sure
120 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 108-111. 121 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 46. 122 Charles H. Long, Significations. (Aurora: CO: University Press of Colorado, 1999), 39. 123 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 108. 124 Ibid, 108. 125 Ibid, 115. 55 it’s not a man. And if it’s not a man, why should it be a woman? Maybe it’s both. So that was really weird.”126
Over the course of many meditations, and even outright masturbation sessions, she is visited by the Hermaphrodite Goddess several times, wherein the Goddess changes size, shape, and features but maintains a distinct phenomenological character, a distinct presence.127
Anzaldúa consistently refers to these encounters as “fantasies,” but describes them with great intensity and detail.
It was like I was fucking: the Goddess was fucking me and I was fucking the Goddess.
She took me in her arms, and I was sucking her tits.128
Anzaldúa seems to have developed a loose system for her initiating visitation with the
Hermaphrodite Goddess, either through visualization, where she has some control over the form the Goddess takes for their encounter, or by use of a mantra recited in thought. She doesn’t care if her experience is imagined or not. Indeed, not caring whether or not this or any other experience is fantasy or reality, assuming it is both, seems to have given her an ability to invest more fully in these experiences. In fact, with these experiences, despite constant description of the experience as fantasy, Anzaldúa insists that “it was physical.”129
This physical unity with the imaginal echoes the unity which Anzaldúa describes with the entirety of “the cosmos—the spirit, or whatever you call it” during the encounters with the
Goddess.130 This force, she says, is “like a fist” or a beating heart, which she feels in her own
126 Ibid, 108. 127 Ibid, 109. 128 Ibid, 109. 129 Ibid, 109. 130 Ibid, 109. 56 heart and also in her genitals. “The cosmos, my heart, and my cunt are in unison, in one rhythm.”131
This connection between the cosmos and the genitals, between the more-than-human and the animal, carnal, less-than-human, is something that Anzaldúa comments on separately from her sexual exploits with the divine. In an interview with Linda Smuckler in 1982, she says that the primary symbol of cosmic motion, creation, and unity is the heartbeat.132 She offhandedly comments that there are three hearts available to a person: The physical, the sexual, the meditative, and then the universe itself as a sort of fourth heart, which connects to the physical heart.133 “When you can get the three [hearts] synchronized, it’s wonderful…When I meditate, I can synchronize the three.134” This unification of sexuality and mysticism through the
“heartbeat” comes up in Anzaldúa’s account of our next Goddess as well.
Coatlicue is presented as a central aspect of reality that is at once deep within the psyche and permeates the natural world. Her body is a merging of eagle and of serpent in the visage of a human, a merging of the underworld and the sky world in the vestment of the human world. She is at once benevolent and cruel, wishing the best for those who would propitiate her, but cares exactly none for the appeal of those who would disagree with her judgement. She is Creator and
Destroyer. This is Coatlicue, or if one prefers, La Tonantzin, the Great Mother. While there are certainly greater and lesser goddesses which Anzaldúa propitiates in her system, and which act as various reflections of philosophical and cultural inquiry, Coatlicue is, for lack of better terms,
The Goddess.
131 Ibid, 109. 132 Ibid, 68. 133 Ibid, 69. I assume the physical heart, at any rate. The interview actually refers to, “this one,” with no clarification. 134 Ibid, 68-69. 57
The Goddess in this case is one term for a primordial, metaphysical, and existential chaos.135 The Goddess represents dissolution of the self by her very nature. She controls and is the connection of all things. In tapping into this power one becomes more than human, but in the process the self dissolves,136 or rather, one lets go and allows the power of the god in the human to take over, relinquishing control of the identity, pushing the ‘I’ aside.137
This relinquishing of control is the case in one of Anzaldúa’s account of her own susto.138
After a long period of malaise, insecurity, headaches, unwillingness to interact with people, unwillingness to think about herself,139 she describes suddenly falling into the underworld, sinking in darkness, until reaching the bottom. Here she is forced to confront a vision, to confront the visage of the monster goddess, reflected back at her in a mirror:140
I don’t want to see what’s behind Coatlicue’s eyes, her hollow sockets. I can’t confront her face to face; I must take small sips of her face through the corners of my eyes, chip away at the ice a sliver at a time. Behind the ice mask I see my own eyes. They will not look at me. [I look like I’m pissed off, look at this resistance141]—resistance to knowing, to letting go…I am afraid of drowning. Resistance to sex, intimate touching, opening myself to the alien other where I am out of control, not on patrol.142 Anzaldúa is working through her own personal damages, staring Coatlicue in the face, at the power that is “greater than the conscious I.”143 Locking eyes with La Diosa Antigua, the Ancient
135For an of Goddess worship in relation to the ideas of creation, destruction, and chaos which would seem to mirror Anzaldúa’s take on Coatlicue, see Tanya Luhrmann, Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 92-99. 136 Ibid 1989, 94. 137 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 50. 138 Ibid, 48. See also Rubel et al. 1984, Knab 1995. 139 The astute reader will recognize symptoms of depressive disorders. Anzaldúa’s framework treats these as inherently tied to susto, loss of portions of the soul. 140 Notice the return of mirror imagery here. 141 Miro que estoy encabronada, miro la resistencia 142 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 48. 143 Ibid, 50. 58
Goddess, she pleads that Coatlicue take control of her identity and put things right, setting aside the conscious ‘I’ in an effort to cure her condition.
Following this, she describes a transformation of some intensity. “I’ll take over now,” the
Goddess tells her.144 Another set of teeth in her mouth, the breath being pulled out of her, “the heart in [her] cunt starts to beat.” She is surrounded by light. She collapses in on herself, and sees an opening in the rock face upon which her spirit stands: Coatlicue has been released. “Someone in me takes matters into our own hands—over my own body, my sexual activity, my soul, my mind, my weaknesses and my strengths. Mine. Ours. Not the heterosexual white man’s or the colored man’s or the state’s or the culture’s or the religion’s or the parents’—just ours, mine.”145
The pieces of her soul rush back, completing her being. “I am no longer afraid.” Yet, she describes something more, she describes, after this encounter, a presence which grows stronger,
“thicker,” every day, a thousand sleepless serpents’ eyes, staring out into the night. She describes this as her “vigilance,146” an awareness.
The astute reader will have noticed several points of merging between the categories of undivine and divine per Anzaldúa’s description. Both goddesses are identified with the sexual. In the case of the Hermaphrodite Goddess, this is explicit (she is a sexual partner), but at the same time, she represents a unification with the greater whole, which Coatlicue does as well, and
Coatlicue’s connection to sex is treated with much more subtlety. The sexual heart, the “heart in
[Anzaldúa’s] cunt,” beats with Coatlicue as well, but Coatlicue is a therapeutic figure which
144 Ibid, 51. 145 Ibid, 51. 146 Ibid, 51. 59
Anzaldúa fears interaction with. This isn’t a pleasant cosmic union, but rather a necessary one, echoing shamanic dismemberment to be remade into something greater.147
And yet, in both cases there is a synchronization of the sexual hearts with the bodily and meditative (and one assumes the universal as well). The goddesses represent a unification of the person with the universe, freedom of definition and freedom to transcend definition. As imaginal inner figures they are the greater-than human to the undivine Shadow-Beast’s less-than human, and access to their power is therefore uncontrollable by the human, earning their place in the other-world, despite, and indeed because of, the transformative release they offer.
And yet, references to both the sexual and the animal abound in Anzaldúa’s conception of these goddesses. Sexuality is not simply misplaced as undivine. The animalistic is also meant to be undivine¸ and yet the divine makes use of it. Coatlicue’s serpentine eyes are both the eyes of an animal and the eyes of a goddess. If the divine has access to the undivine, and the undivine would seem to have access to the divine, as in my section on the Shadow-Beast, then is there a divider? Perhaps not. The supernatural is, after all, a cage of a category designed to hold the uncontrollable and incomprehensible, perhaps what is signified by the concept of the supernatural, the cage which constructs the boundary of the other-world, is just that, signified, and the sign of the supernatural makes silent its truth.
3.3. Ambiguity, the Nonhuman, and the human as Nonhuman
Whatever we choose to call the two poles—body and soul, sex and spirit, Shakti and Shiva, Corpus and Mysticum—they appear to be two poles of a deeper super-reality.148 -- Jeffrey J. Kripal
147 Mircea Eliade 1989, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (London: Penguin Books, 1989) 108-109. 148 Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 61. 60
Undeniably, Anzaldúa connects the erotic with the mystical, and the animal with the divine, and thusly the undivine with the divine. One will undoubtedly notice that although the undivine figure of the Shadow-Beast is meant to contain the sexual, the divine Goddesses are an outlet for sexuality, and encounters with them for Anzaldúa are erotic in whole or in part. The connection between these two spheres of experience, in the form of specifically the sexual and the mystical, is nothing new. With some hesitation, for, in the words of Jeffrey Kripal, “I do not really claim to understand how these two poles of human experience…might be related…I am only convinced they are connected,”149 I would posit that in Anzaldúa’s system the two are intrinsically interlinked, with an exchange of power, or perhaps even exchange of existence.
In support of this, Anzaldúa describes a three-tiered cosmos which those studied in shamanism will find familiar. This cosmos is represented by a tree, with the trunk representing the middle world, our world, the human world. Represented by the roots of the tree is the underworld, and the branches of the tree representing the sky world.150 In the underworld one can find “earth energies, animal spirits, and the dead who have not moved on to the next level of existence…” while in the sky world, one may find “noncorporeal energies, spirits who are gods and goddesses, spirits of the dead who have progressed beyond the land of the dead.”151
Furthermore, Anzaldúa comments that the underworld itself is the soul’s perspective of the world, and that one journeys to the underworld in order to retrieve the pieces of the soul that may be lost, as they would be through susto.
149 Ibid, 61. 150 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 25-26. 151 Ibid, 25-26. 61
But wait, one might be inclined to think, Anzaldúa’s soul is retrieved by a goddess, a sky world spirit! Correct! The worlds exist in interconnection, and indeed “are the same place.”152
What has this interconnected world tree to do with the link between the undivine and the divine?
The tree reaches deep within the psyche, to the imaginal, and outward into the cosmic, to the deep reaches of the less-than, the animal, the undivine (the underworld) and far out to the more- than, the cosmic, the divine (the sky-world), and yet it all happens simultaneously. Here we see ann erasure of the perceived boundaries between self, other, and world; these boundaries are arbitrary.
Enter the nagual, the shapeshifter and the shape. The term is derived from indigenous
Nahua belief structures, representing the ability to shapeshift into one or more animals. Mexican neoshamanic author Don Miguel Ruiz, whom Anzaldúa cites in constructing her shamanism, uses a metaphor describing nagual as the source of the light which comprises tonal.153 The term is often used to refer to some kind of deeper unconscious transformative power or spirit which is more magical or extraordinary, shamanic,154 than the standardly visible expression of life, tonal or tonalli. Anzaldúa is given to translate this term as totem spirit or guardian.155 Anzaldúa acquired this naguala156in the form of a snake, the primary shape that she associates with shapeshifting experiences. More specifically, she experienced la víbora, the viper. As a child, on a cotton ranch, she was bitten by a rattlesnake.
I barely felt its fangs, Boot got all the [poison157]…my animal counterpart…since that day I’ve sought and shunned them. Always when they cross my path, fear and elation
152 Ibid, 26. 153 Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, ed. Janet Mills. (San Rafael, CA, 1997), xvi. 154 James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2014), 38. 155 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 27. 156Anzaldúa’s feminization of the term 157 Veneno 62
flood my body. I know things older than Freud, older than gender. She—that’s how I think of la Víbora, Snake Woman. …Forty years it’s taken me to enter into the Serpent, to acknowledge that I have a body, that I am a body and to assimilate the animal body, the animal soul.158 Snake Woman. Serpent Woman. These two titles are used to name Coatlicue in Anzaldúa’s writing at various points, as well as the title Serpent Goddess, and the serpent itself bears a heavy connection with Coatlicue, as the reader will surely have noticed from various pages. Coatlicue translates roughly to serpent skirt in Nahuatl, and the most famous image of her reflects this theme, showing her with two giant snakes in place of her head, two more snakes for arms, and a literal skirt of snakes, a serpent skirt. Additionally, a cursory glance at the index of Anzaldúa’s books will reveal a web of cross-references between the terms Coatlicue, Snakes, and Nagual.
However, one must also note that the snake has a connection to the Shadow Beast as well. Anzaldúa refers to her Shadow-Beast as a human-serpent thing with “lidless serpent eyes…cold clammy moist [hands] dragging us underground, fangs barred and hissing.” Further, when seeking reconciliation with the Beast, she asks, “How does one put feathers on this particular serpent?”159 This shows the undivine nature of the nagual, connecting it not only to the undivine as an animal, but to the ultimate expression of undivinity in humans, the monster dwelling within One will also recall that the Beast itself shares much symbolism with Coatlicue in its depiction, particularly the need to face its visage in the mirror, and the unmistakable imagery of “serpent eyes.”
158 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 26. 159 Ibid, 20. This is a reference to Quetzalcoatl, the Aztecan god of life, and clearly a plea to create divinity from the undivine. 63
The nagual cannot be categorized as wholly divine or undivine, and simultaneously cannot be excluded from either. This would seem to be supported in Light in the Dark/Luz en lo
Oscuro by her description of the power of her shapeshifted form:
I’m aware of my breath and my heartbeat, but nothing else. Time collapses. My body shifts gears. [My body160] becomes part of, merges with, “disappears” into my surroundings. When my consciousness flows out into an animal, it becomes my vehicle, to feel, touch, hear, taste, and smell in the underworld and otherworld. This real/imaginal animal initiates me into these worlds via its perspective and “language.”161 The key here is the use of the term otherworld. This term further problematizes dichotomy between the undivine and the divine, the underworld and the sky world. While the underworld is the realm of the undivine and basic, and the sky world is the realm of the divine, and complex, the otherworld exists in association with both.162 La Víbora, the nagual, the power to shapeshift, and the shapeshifter itself, inhabits the otheworld. Inherently of the underworld as an animal, but inherently powerful in both worlds. The dichotomy that Anzaldúa sets up within the category of the supernatural does not hold, and never did.
I ask the reader to kindly put a pin in this notion, and recall the notion of la facultad in my discussion of the Shadow Beast and the undivine. Recall that Anzaldúa in her earlier writing explains la facultad as a heightened sensory capacity stemming from trauma, and recall my assertion that this capacity was the beginning of the undivine, instinct-driven animal developing into the divine. In later writing, la facultad is not merely a sixth sense, but the capacity to carry/be nagual, to be a shapeshifter.163 Further, one of the powers of the nagual, is to sense the otherworld. Undivine animal instinct makes way for superhuman (divine) perception and power.
160 Mi cuerpo 161 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 27. See Long 1995, 51 for an approximation of what is meant here by “language,” Anzaldúa is describing a code-shift in her subjectivity. 162 Ibid, 27. 163 Ibid, 26. 64
In the way that the “radio was made for the radio signal, and vice versa” there would seem to be a made-for-ness in the relationship between the animalistic undivine and the superhuman divine, they are inseparable and cannot be understood without the other.164
Certainly the nagual cannot be understood as simply a manifestation of animal instinct or a non-animalistic superhuman feat. Especially as the nagual is absolutely not described as an animalistic sense, but a transcendence of the body. The consciousness “flows out into an animal.165” Further, Anzaldúa describes the ability of the Nagual to leave the body.166 Anzaldúa describes leaving the body in trance, traveling. “I become the serpent, I become the eagle. I have this visionary experience where I’m flying in the sky as an eagle…I gather information from looking down at the ground. Now, how did I get that information if my body is just here?”167 She cheekily asks this of her interviewer, AnaLouise Keating, toward the end of the 90s.
Further, she boldly claims that while she does not believe we can change our physical bodies now, we might be able to eventually, and some people might already be able to. “Right now such transformations are limited to the beliefs of the majority of the people and they don’t believe it can be done.”168 Echoing the sentiment of Ruiz, that we are domesticated by particular beliefs which restrain us, but that do not describe real potentialities.169 This would seem to echo, whether or not one believes it is literally possible to change shape into a jaguar (or command the weather, summon spirits, or demonstrate any other such ability for that matter,) the very real
164 Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 63. 165 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 27. 166 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 284. The Nagual may even get lost, resulting in Susto. See also Knab 1995. 167 Ibid, 284. 168 Ibid, 285. 169Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements, ed. Janet Mills. (San Rafael, CA, 1997), 5-6. 65 meaning construction of the other-world. Ruiz and Anzaldúa both are criticizing the cultural language, belief, coding of the majority, which artificially binds the possibilities of the other, that others the other in the first place, and makes it play by rules. The role of the nagual is to circumvent those rules by uniting the undivine and the divine, by erasing category altogether.
66
Conclusion: Bolt Cutters for the Cage
I seek la diosa darkly awesome. In love with my own kind, I know you and inspirit you. All others flee from me.170 --Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa, excerpt from Canción de la diosa de la noche
Charles H. Long uses the term “rupture of myth” to refer to the point in a myth wherein an a-priori, unexpressive and basal world suddenly begins to change.171 Rupture is a key feature of creation stories; however I think it has a use in commenting on the nature of Anzaldúa’s concept of the supernatural, particularly as it relates to humans. Oppression, silencing, caging, builds a need to express, to prove one exists, to escape the cage. Spirituality is the “ultimate resort for people who are extremely oppressed172” for Anzaldúa because it provides escape from the cage of a hostile world.
Anzaldúa does not believe that simply reversing oppression would be the answer, even if it were possible, but that one must move forward from the present. One cannot get the old world back, after the clash of two worlds, nepantla, liminal space, a new world forms.173 The other has already been othered. The monster has already been placed in its cage, and the shadows are already beasts, and gods denied significance. Denied any reality by the dominant cultural
170 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 196. 171 Charles H. Long, Significations. (Aurora: CO: University Press of Colorado, 1999), 34. 172 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 288. 173Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 28. See also Long 1999, 6. 67 language of anything but the empty space of a cage, and that cage used to vilify its inhabitants and artificially strengthen the language and perceived reality of the dominant, the monstrous, weird, and supposedly impossible become the ally of the oppressed. The otherworld and the other-world become, in effect, identical.
Language, meaning, is pliable, and monsters become heroes when heroes lose their meaning. Anzaldúa’s less otherworldly writing contains repurposings of gods and monsters against their original formulation, revisionist myths to rewrite and reinvent cultural language so that it fits the people to which it refers, to rewrite myths so that they are useful to the people that must use them.174 Many know her for her reclamation of la Llorona, the child-murdering ghost of Mexican folklore. Instead of drowning children, she mourns her own children in Anzaldúa’s writing175. She cries, wails, as la Llorona does, because she has no other recourse, a ghost in mourning, protesting unjustly taken children. She herself becomes a supernatural figure, identified with Cihuacoatl, another “Snake Woman,” the original Llorona in Anzaldúa’s mind.
Cihuacoatl, a traumatized woman, with everything taken from her, is said by Anzaldúa to possess la facultad, and carry with her the nagual.176 Through trauma la Llorona has transcended, and she is the loudest of those things which are silenced. Fusion of the undivine and divine, having obtained for herself, from herself, permission and courage to be.
Anzaldúa laments that experiences which are in one way culturally very normal to those of her cultural upbringing, experience of the spiritual or otherworld, are demonized as
174 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas, ed. AnaLouise Keating (New York: Routledge, 2000), 219. 175 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 33. 176 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 26. 68 superstition.177 In quite another way, we in the box of proper society “are not supposed to remember such otherworldly events.”178 What she attempts to show the reader in recounting at one moment experiencing the voices of spirits on the wind, and at the next explaining that the these experiences are supposed to be forgotten, is the heavily curated nature of the accepted model of experience, that is, the white rational mode of what is supposed to be. I would ask the reader to consider whether the two models of otherness, supernatural and borderland, are all that different? When the position of the goal posts is in the hands of the principal Us, the principle
Them is powerless to score. Subjugation of the foreign, the female, the rebellious, and the unwieldy are easy, as these can all be lumped into the same category of other.
Her philosophy is one which, instead of attempting to destroy these identities, seeks to strengthen these identities. This is the goal of the Coyolxauhqui imperative: to bring the multiself, the complex of identities that is itself the identity, to greater cohesion from the ashes of its constant destruction.
The Coyolxauhqui imperative is to heal and achieve integration. When fragmentations occur, you fall apart and feel as though you’ve been expelled from paradise. Coyolxauhqui is my symbol for the necessary process of dismemberment and fragmentation, of seeing that self or the situations you’re embroiled in differently. Coyolxauhqui is also my symbol for reconstruction and reframing, one that allows for putting the pieces together in a new way. The Coyolxauhqui imperative is an ongoing process of making and unmaking. There is never any resolution, just the process of healing.179 Integration of the various identities and experiences is important; for the new identity to form, and it always must, previous experiences must be allowed to play a part in the process.
Conocimiento, deeply connected with the Coyolxauhqui process, is a deep awareness of the self
177 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Borderlands/LaFrontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), 36- 37. 178 Ibid, 36. 179 Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, ed. AnaLouise Keating. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 19-21, emphasis mine. 69 and the world, or rather, the process of working toward this.180 However this should not be interpreted as some romanticized ideal state of oneness with the world and an elimination of all woes. Again, the Coyolxauhqui process never ends, the Coyolxauhqui imperative is ever present.
Deep awareness of the self and the world should be interpreted here as the capacity and agency to be, to grow, and to experience. Our natural state, if we accept Coyolxauhqui imperative, is to be able to experience dismemberment and to reintegrate that experience, and the ability to have the identity affirmed.
If pain is that which destroys, that which shuts down, that which fractures and suppresses, perhaps pleasure is that which creates, activates, constructs and affirms, and in this scheme that is conocimiento.
Dismemberment, soul loss, susto is necessary, but the human being is meant to destroy and create itself, over and over and over. The world is both hostile and nurturing in its natural state for Anzaldúa, but problems arise when we construct societies which destroy without creating. The identity is an unstable thing whose only fixed nature is to be unfixed, constantly rebuilding itself from itself. Self-knowledge, and knowledge itself, for Anzaldúa, is a struggle between conocimiento, knowledge of deep truth, and desconocimiento, deep spiritual ignorance.
Conocimiento can only truly take place by way of an awakening of some form of facultad.
Through susto, we lose ourselves so that we may find ourselves, and perhaps it is entailed that we find pieces that were never lost. I offer that flourishing and actualization lies within self- creation through conocimiento within Anzaldúa’s metaphysics, a self-creation that can only be understood through susto, what I encourage the reader at this stage of this meditation to think of as loss of the self. We will always come to harm in some sense, and indeed we must, but as
180 Ibid, 18-19. 70 always, human systems are to be considered, and should always be scrutinized, lest they be allowed to make a bloody example of those who would step outside the cage and see the rest of the world. La Facultad, the capacity of perception, the ability to know, is not just navigating some spiritual otherworld, but un-alienating oneself from the world.
There is, of course, a lot of and a lot to the rest of the world. The “supernatural” which breaks through the conceptions of reality supported by the cage is a catch-all for the living world of motion that we inhabit, most of which we don’t interact with or understand. Much of, if not most of the time this lack of interaction stems from a lack of ability to interact, but what I aim to draw attention to at the close of this thesis are the parts of this living world that we seem to have inherited a deeply ingrained refusal to understand or interact with. What I am specifically referring to is the movement of nonhuman selves.
In his monograph, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral lore and practices, Claude
Lecouteux embarks upon a study of land claiming practices and customs for dealing with the nonhuman, often supernatural denizens of wild, untamed space in medieval Europe. In his research of the practices and beliefs surrounding territory markers in Nordic and Germanic societies, he comes across a chapter in the Anglo-Norman Romance Gui de Warewic (Guy of
Warwick) wherein Raimbrun, the son of the titular hero finds himself dealing with a Fairy
Knight (read: a nonhuman entity, whose ends are not aligned with those of human society by default) who “…dwells in [the] forest around which he had placed enchanted and deadly boundaries.”181 These boundaries, Lecouteux explains, represent an interesting narrative reversal.
Once a human has crossed these boundaries, that human may not leave unless the lord of the land
181 Claude Lecouteux, Demons and Spirits of the Land: Ancestral Lore and Practices (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2015), 106. 71 in question allows it, and it is made clear in the story that many men have disappeared beyond these boundaries. When humans construct these boundary markers, they are “enchanted and deadly” for nonhuman entities.. For humans, the practices and beliefs surrounding claimed land, and boundary markers specifically, generally center around keeping out not only “natural” entities, but nonhuman creatures that we might now call supernatural as well, creatures which for
Anzaldúa would unquestioningly be supernatural, both for their nonhumanity and their state as unrepresentative of human normalcy. Supernatural denizens, nonhuman intelligences, the influences of the land before it was claimed, are beaten into shape by the practices of land claiming, and the nonhumans of the outside world are intended to be harmed by the barriers that territory markers represent. This element of Guy of Warwick that Lecouteux focuses on is rooted in very real beliefs and practices centering around land claiming and barrier building, but the story shows a nonhuman forest dweller using the magical properties of land claiming to secure its own territory. The fairy knight, a nonhuman supernatural, uses human magical rituals against humans, to protect his own land from invasion, or at least that’s how Lecouteux frames it.
Lecouteux does very little with this story or its implications, simply citing it as a representation of land claiming practice in medieval literature, with the contextualizing themes around the specific story lying outside the scope of his book. It’s rather telling that Lecouteux spends some 180 pages on the interactions between humans and nonhumans, the anger of the archetypal Nature Spirit at human invasion, and properties (especially fragility) of the artificially created human box of safety, and yet has very little to say about the idea of such a nature spirit
(for what else is a fairy knight who lords over a forest?) turning the practices he has written about upon humans. He has filled a book with thoughts and analyses of the historical, cultural, and perhaps even literal natural importance of nonhuman being and agency, and yet, there is 72 nothing to be said about effective, and intentional retaliation of the nonhuman against the human, using technology available to humans, using principles that humans believe themselves to understand and to be in control of. The fairy knight in the story so described is interesting to us because it describes a self which is not human acting in its own interest. It shows a nonhuman entity behaving in a way that is not accepting of humans but is nonetheless recgognizeable.
Similar steps have been taken in framing the narrative of human-nonhuman interaction in the present day. We have set up our boundaries and land claims in some both literal and figurative senses, declaring ourselves physically and metaphysically separate from the world, in lockstep with human behavioral tendencies spanning multiple thousand years. The European traditions of land claiming and the ideas surrounding them were not new in the 1200s, and we can find ideologies of separation of humans from the world not as survival, but as metaphysic, going back to the beginnings of not only European civilization, but most of the world’s major civilizations to some degree.
Scholar of American Indigenous philosophy Brian Burkhart points out that the archetypal mode of western thought is a teleological one which necessarily assigns value in varying degrees to all of the various things which are seen to exist.182 These frameworks then arrange these bevalued things into hierarchies, seemingly necessarily placing humans at the top of any hierarchy. When building ethical systems, then, the human is what will receive consideration above all else. When building epistemologies, human knowledge will be privileged, both in its mode of acquisition and its result. Further, to decenter the human is to invite accusations of misanthropy.
182 Brian Burkhart, Indigenizing Philosophy Through the Land: A Trickster Methodology for Decolonizing Environmental Ethics and Indigenous Futures (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2019), 207. 73
I would suggest further that decentering the human narrative is to invite the consideration that the nonhuman might be in control, that we may rest upon a precarious balance that by one comparison we may have earned, but by another we have been allowed because we have not disrupted anything too large. It is, after all, not possible to truly violate the laws of Nature, it is not possible to do anything that is not possible, and decentering the human invites consideration of a quite reasonable anxiety: we do not know what is possible, and if we do not know what is possible, we are not in control of it. Even if we were to by, our own agency destroy the habitability of our environment, that environment would necessarily become uninhabitable, we are not the most powerful force in this scenario, limitations are placed upon us by our circumstance.
Here I propose a larger conception of Nature that includes all nonhuman and unknown
(or partially known) forces, with all its power to undo human land claiming practices. This is not merely for the purposes of being ecocritical, not to head off the climate apocalypse, for I stress that such an apocalypse would first and foremost be an apocalypse for those things that die, or perhaps more loosely cease to exist in their present configuration, and Nature as a whole simply will not do this. This may seem counterintuitive to some, as the concept of “nature” is often considered in a narrow, planetary scope. It is also true that, comparatively speaking, the average list of things that can die by virtue of being alive in the first place is relatively short compared to the quantity of objects in reality which are traditionally considered to be inanimate. I invite the reader to consider the second half of Maffie’s definition of Aztecan animism:
Things change, move, and affect both themselves and other things by dint of their
animating energy. Since all things possess power to make things happen, all things may 74
be said to possess agency. The ongoing agency of all things contributes to the ongoing
transformation of the cosmos.183
This is a conception of life wherein all things are possessed of agency, and therefore alive.Those things which possess life and agency, by implication, do not derive these from developed human brains, neurological structures, or even biotic cellular structures that we normally associate with the things we consider conscious and living. Life is not a thing which ends in this model, but a thing that is transformed. When something “dies,” its component parts continue living in the way so described. Life conceived in this way is impossible to extinguish, and is extended far past the planetary level. Life, existence, motion, energy, constantly reconfigures, developing new systems and clusters of systems, in the same way that the human self does. By Maffie’s definition, these systems are alive, and have agency of their own. Even if this agency does not always resemble human agency, human agencies are merely a subset of this form of agency, since humans are formed of the churning, fluctuating world of motion just as everything else. We participate in and interact with these systems constantly, as all things immersed in the world of motion do.
Self-motion is not always human self-motion.
Implied by this sort of vitalized dasein attributed to literally all things would seem to be an ecosystem that is, then, invested in itself, even as its parts are invested in themselves…or perhaps this is the wrong idea entirely. By this scheme is, there even a separation between the parts and the whole of this ecosystem? The ecosystem itself is the collective of things which exist or, more accurately to Maffie’s definition, the ecosystem in question is the collective of things which happen. Nature in this case, if its conception is to be based in this definition of
183 James Maffie, Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion (Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2013), 114-115. 75 animism, must be thought of as those things within the existensraum184 (lit. existence room, the space in which things exist and may exist), and the existensraum itself. This means that Nature extends far past the planet, no matter how habitable or inhabitable it may be, through to the entire solar system, galaxy, throughout space, and anything that exists. Again, Nature is the existensraum and those things within it. A broad definition to be sure, and it would seem to render both Nature, and by extension life, trivial and obvious truths.
Yes.
Nature and life are trivial and obvious, where what is natural is what exists, and to exist is to exist in motion, which is itself to live. All things are natural and alive.
What we conceive of as unnatural is supervenient upon the natural, and is still beholden to the principles of the existensraum. In this way, things which are unnatural are simply things which would not exist without some other causal agent that has deemed itself to be outside of
Nature. If what is natural is what is in the existensraum, then all things which emerge from things which emerge from anything else within the existensraum are natural, as Nature is simply the emergent, properties and content of the existensraum in motion. The properties of things which are brought about by any arbitrary combination of another thing’s properties, which are themselves emergent, are no less natural than the properties from which the supposed generator of would-be unnatural properties comes from. All this to say that human-created or human- influenced is not unnatural. It is impossible to be unnatural.
I use the term “properties” with great reluctance, as what I truly mean to refer to are the ways in which agency, so defined through Maffie, is exercised. The understanding that what
184 For a fuller explanation of the logic behind the existensraum, see Galen Strawson, “Real Naturalism v2,” Metodo, International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy 1, no. 2, (2013): 103-107 76 exists in the existensraum is alive, possessed of agency, is just as important to the conception of
Nature as I use it as the inherent naturalness of the contents of the existensraum. The basic requirement of life, by Maffie’s definition is the agency afforded by activity and reactivity, and this is basic to all things within the existensraum. In this way, the human existence is possessed only of a particular configuration (or, more accurately, multiple particular configurations) of agency, and even the reality of the human as a cellular being only consists of a particular kind of being, and therefore a particular kind of being alive.
This is certainly the assumption present within the philosophy of Anzaldúa, wherein not only are trees, rocks, oceans, the ground, etc. alive, but possessed of their own motivations and modes of living, and that there what look to be exchanges of vital energy, and transfers of smaller living beings between larger ones which are composed of systems of these smaller beings. I would argue that what is indicated by Anzaldúa’s mystical experiences of merging with other living entities is that there is ultimately no metaphysical separation between living beings, and that perhaps there are only geographically separate points on a map of a big mass of living- ness.
This would seem to fit with the logical implications of Maffie’s definition of Animism, as when to exist is to live, and any individual “thing” one could point to is composed of smaller and smaller extant things, and wherein even the energy measured by contemporary physics would fall under this definition of “living,” there is a sense in which there are both infinitely many living things, and also one infinitely (to our perception) gigantic one.
This animism she expresses is extremely reflective of James Maffie‘s description of
Aztecan Animism, as mentioned before, wherein all things which exist are alive, in which all things are possessed of agency, even if it does not resemble what we understand as life or 77 agency. But then, if everything is, in a manner, ensouled, then what do we make of the human?
For Anzaldúa, our makeup is just as blurry as the nature of life itself, and this is perhaps why our vital energy goes every which way in the manner that it does.
Back to the fairy knight in the example story. The reader, familiar with territory marking practices, as the reader of Lecouteux’s work will be by the time they encounter this story, will have something of a particular image in their head about the properties of territory markers, of what it is that the sacralization of claimed land can accomplish. By this point in Lecouteux’s text reader will also know that the claiming and taming of land, the establishment of fences, installation of lighting structures, all makes the claimed land a sort of bubbled-off ecosystem that is specifically and uniquely favorable to humans, wherein humans are dominant and in control, wherein they can assert what they may believe to be absolute influence. The fairy night, however, is not human. The fairy knight, moreover, is not only nonhuman, but a nonhuman who has learned human tricks, or more likely had his own tricks to begin with. Human technologies are not superior in this story, the human is decentered and shown a world wherein even our precious, fragile practice of claiming land is not something done by dint of capabilities unique to us. Our powers are not under our own control, and the motivations of protection and establishing ourselves in the world are not unique to us. Nature in this story establishes its own agency.
Lecouteux has much to say about the fragility of the human claim to land, and the potential hostility of the denizens of the land we would usurp as well as the land itself.
I will not frame this anxiety as unreasonable, land claiming, and the establishment of human-controlled space is an instinct that is to be expected from a creature that finds itself as part of a world where survival is necessary, where denizens of that world eat other things, and themselves wish to survive, but we are not the only animal that does this, and are not the only 78 animal that finds itself in a position where it must exist alongside land. That said, Cihuacoatl becomes a goddess by becoming what is outside. She becomes the serpent, she becomes the snake woman, and in doing so, joins the realm of that which is outside of the human.
We are called by the example of Cihuacoatl to become something other than human, a merging of human with the rest of nature. Anzaldúa’s supernatural can be read as placing humans in between the beastly and the godly, and as we have examined, spiritual development, for Anzaldúa at least, stretches us toward both of these.
79
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