Numinous is The Doors’ song, Peace Frog. Doors’ guitarist Robby Krieger has described the imagery of abortion as an important part of the song. (Background: Indians Scattered On Dawn’s Highway, Ersjdamoo’s Blog, January 29, 2019.)
The lyrics for Peace Frog were adapted from a couple of Jim Morrison’s poems, one being entitled “Abortion Stories”. [1] That poem cannot be found yet by me, so here is what – maybe – one of the lines in Peace Frog might mean.
“Blood is the rose of mysterious union,” are the closing lines of Peace Frog. The “mysterious union,” I surmise, means an extra-marital affair.
From the “mysterious union” comes an unplanned pregnancy. Which leads in turn to an abortion: the bloody rose.
You may not agree with my interpretation, but the point is, the line – Blood is the rose of mysterious union – is numinous.
“Numinous” I encountered decades ago, while reading in the collected works of Carl Jung. That word suddenly came back to me while pondering the Wolf Moon Incident. Jung deals in archetypes, such as he found in studies of Alchemy. The alchemical images were numinous: they evoked powerful uprushings from the unconscious mind. And so does the main image from the Wolf Moon Incident provoke powerful uprushings from the unconscious. We see, in the main image, a Native American elder being seemingly smirked at by a supposedly privileged white youth wearing a MAGA hat. (Later, further investigation showed the image was misleading.) The numinosity of the image caused powerful uprushings from the unconscious, so powerful that “reason” was overwhelmed and people made what later were to be proved embarrassing statements.
Other numinous images, besides abortion and the Wolf Moon Incident, are “The Wall” and MAGA hats. The student in the image wore a MAGA hat. He was there, in Washington, DC, with his high school classmates. They had attended a pro-life (anti-abortion) march. The MAGA hat the student wore symbolizes pro-Trump, and President Trump favors “The Wall.” All these archetypes are so powerful now that “reason” is overwhelmed.
In Auld England, during the time of King Henry VI, there were two houses: Lancaster and York. Lancaster (as I recall) was symbolized by the White Rose; York by the Red Rose:
The red rose and the white are on his face,
The fatal colours of our striving houses.
(Henry VI, Part 3, Act II, Scene 5)
Our striving houses: the Blue Rose of the Democrats now strives with the Red Rose of the Republicans. Where shall it lead? To the Rose of Mysterious Union? The Red Rose and the Blue Rose intertwined? The Tudors had a badge: the double rose of the rival houses of Lancaster and York, the red and the white united, or intertwined. [2]
——- Sources ——-
[1] “Peace Frog”, Wikipedia. Accessed January 28, 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_Frog
[2] The Watchers: A Secret History of the Reign of Elizabeth I, by Stephen Alford. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2012.
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