"The Magic and Alchemy of Marriage"

"The Magic and Alchemy of Marriage"

From the book: SOULMATES: Honoring the Mysteries of Love and Relationship by Thomas Moore, (c) 1994.

Chapter 3, Adapted by Gary L. Clendenon, 2024-25.

Dedicated to all my married family and friends, with Love

Marriage is one of life’s greatest mysteries, the weaving together of many different strands of soul. Because marriage touches upon issues charged with emotion and connected to absolute meaning, it is filled with paradoxical feelings, far-flung fantasies, profound despair, blissful epiphanies, and bitter struggle—all signs of the active presence of soul.

In the midst of all these contradictions, its easy to be cynical about marriage. It’s more difficult to look at marriage as we actually experience it, taking note of its deep fantasies, its hidden emotions, and its place in the life of the soul; not looking for perfection, but asking what the soul is doing when it entices us towards such a demanding form of relationship.

The distance between our intentions and expectations of marriage on the one hand, and the reality it presents on the other, indicates how far removed from consciousness and reason marriage can be. Marriage has less to do with conscious intention and will than with deeper levels of soul. The soul always reaches deeper than we expect, especially in marriage. We approach its soul when we understand that marriage is a mystery, a sacrament, as some religions say—a sacred, symbolic act.

The soul is com-plicated, a word whose literal meaning is “woven together”. Marriage itself is a kind of weaving, not only of two individuals, but of every aspect of personal, social, and even cosmic life. We may learn that we can’t enter marriage soulfully without first preparing ourselves, by being in the world creatively and weaving the tapestry of our own talents and destiny.

An essential part of becoming marriageable is to be a maker, a person who cultivates a life of beauty, rich texture, and creative work. If we understand marriage only as the commitment of two individuals to each other, then we overlook its soul, but if we see that it also has to do with family, neighborhood, and the greater community, and with our own work and personal cultivation, then we begin to glimpse the mystery that is marriage.

Marriage is accomplished not only by human design and will, but also by grace and magic. All intimate relationships require some degree of magic, because magic, not reason and will, accomplishes what the soul needs. Every marriage has both an external life and an internal dimension. The externals may be dealt with by reasonable means, but the interior requires myth and magic.

When we marry, we are not only linking our lives to another individual, we are also entering a myth that reaches far into the most meaning-giving areas of our heart. The person we marry offers us an opportunity to enter, explore, and fulfill essential notions of who we are and who we can be. In this sense marriage is an entry into destiny—the potential life that lies hidden from view until evoked by the particular thoughts and feelings of marriage.

We are drawn into intimacy by possibilities rather than realities, by the promise of things to come rather than by proven accomplishments, and perhaps by seductions that are darker than the bright reasons we admit.

It is the primary task of the marriage partners not to create a life together, but to evoke the soul’s lover, to stir up this magical fantasy of marriage and to sustain it. It isn’t enough to make a human marriage. Every soulful marriage requires a vivid sense of its own mystery and an awareness that purely human efforts to keep it alive and thriving always prove insufficient.

Oddly, the attempts of many married people to create an affluent environment might even be the cause of marital failure, because the point in marriage is not to create a material, human world, but rather to evoke a spirit of love that is not of this world.

One should protect and feed the deep fantasies that surround the other’s imagination of love and marriage. This is one way to understand the “solitude” of the other. Getting to know our partner’s soul, we may discover what charms his or her imagination.

As a marriage partner, I could ask myself, “What simple, but not necessarily obvious things stir her heart and feed her notions of love? What can I hold in my subtle left hand to charm her, as my right hand goes about the mundane business of making a living and building a home?”

The realm of soul sometimes appears small and insignificant in comparison to the “big world out there,” but to the soul the most minute things can be crucial. The soul of marriage is no exception: it is created by small acts, small words, and small, everyday actions.

How do we keep soul dancing in our marriage? Marriage works best by doing and saying things that touch the feelings and the imagination, not just the mind. “The magic has gone out of my marriage,” a person says, knowing intuitively and precisely that marriage, like all matters of the soul, works by means of magic rather than effort.

This is not an easy idea for an enlightened, technologically and scientifically sophisticated person to accept, yet it is crucial. In matters of soul, a well-conceived ritual act, well-chosen words, an inspired gesture, a symbolic gift, even a well-modulated tone of voice can achieve the desired effect. Often a very small gesture or action will have great consequences—this is one of the traditional rules of magic.

Over and over again as a therapist I have seen remarkable changes take place in a marriage when some more intimate, more raw expression of the heart finds its words. Words, and sometimes the mere sounds of words, have a powerful effect. This is certainly true of the magic needed to keep soul in our marriages.

Genuine though they may be, the problems of mundane life are not always identical with the concerns of the soul. The soul of a marriage asks for intuitive insight into its ways and needs. It demands wisdom, the kind of knowledge that lies far deeper than information and understanding. Sometimes the demands of the soul are paradoxical, so that it may ask for something that on the surface may look contrary to a “good” marriage, but soulful marriages are often odd on the surface.

As the soul does not generally conform to the familiar patterns of life, the soul of marriage is a more mottled weave than the plain, sentimental, structural image of marriage that we often try to maintain. A particularly soulful marriage may look oddly individual, its forms and structures contrary to accepted patterns. When soulfulness appears in any human institution, it asks of us unusual tolerance and broad imagination.

The Shadow Side of Marriage

We bring a degree of innocence to marriage, hoping that in spite of statistics about divorce we will find in marriage a meaningful and fulfilled life. While innocent hope and expectations are a natural part of getting married, they invite experiences that are wounding, that bring us unwillingly and usually unexpectedly into the crucible of marriage. We need some innocence to enter into marriage in the first place, and then we discover that marriage is not unadulterated happiness, but is rather another of life’s initiations.

Excessive innocence about marriage can breed trouble. The more that we are aware that marriages can be hell, the more frivolous will be our conscious presentations of it.

On the other hand, humor is one of our best ways of acknowledging the shadow aspects of our lives, and so jokes, comic movies, funny greeting cards, and many family stories poke fun at marriage. Through humor we can admit that marriages are not entirely made in heaven, that the devil has a role as well.

A realistically rounded view of marriage might allow us to restore some human dimension to our very idea of what marriage is. Ideally, it needs to be broad enough to include much shadow and many difficulties.

According to the Swiss Jungian analyst Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig, marriage is not a route to happiness but rather a form of the individuation process. Individuation is Jung’s term for the lifelong process of becoming an individual, of working at the stuff of one’s soul so as to be less identified with collective images and more a unique person.

The value of this analysis lies in taking us away from the sentimental image of marriage as instant happiness, reminding us that it is an arena in which the soul matures and ripens. At one level marriage is about relationship, but at another it is the creation of a vessel in which soul-making can be accomplished. At the same time, of course, marriage is much more than an opportunity for each individual to suffer his or her way toward individuality.

Marriage is an Athenic weaving together of families, of two souls with their individual fates and destinies, of time and eternity—everyday life married to the timeless mysteries of the soul. (1) Cultures, ideas, politics, emotions, are all being woven together by means of marriage, and each marriage in a community affects all of its members.

Marriage in its fullness is a soul institution and as such necessarily carries the weight of life. There can be satisfaction in the grittiness of marriage and dissatisfaction in its being sentimentalized. Merely working hard at having a “good” marriage may not be enough to make it work. Wallace Steven said, “A man and a woman are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird are one.” The dark animal figure always has an important role to play, for no profoundly affecting human institution is without its challenging mysteries that visit us as from another species.

Jung learned from alchemy an important yet easily avoided truth about the life of the soul: its presence and thriving depend upon mortifying experiences—mortification, which means “making dead”. The keystone of Jung’s insight is realizing that these mortifications are necessary in the making of a soulful life.

Insofar as it serves as an initiatory structure in the service of soul, marriage can be expected to provide all kinds of mortifications, and it does. Through intimacy’s very difficulties, our personhood deepens, and the marriage relationship becomes more solid. The source of our pain isn’t just that our partner is “impossible”. Marriage itself places us in impossible situations, impossible because they can’t be resolved by human ingenuity.

Marriage requires of us the slaying of our initial ideas and values—about marriage, about our partners, about ourselves. How do we do this without developing a cynical view of marriage? Perhaps if we widened our image of relationships to include their being occasionally blissful and occasionally mortifying, with a mixture of all possibilities between, we might not be so surprised when challenging difficulties appeared.

Still, it isn’t enough to be prepared for trouble. What is required is an appreciation for the profundity of the ghostly beast we conjure up with such apparent innocence in a wedding ceremony. The intimacy we pledge at the wedding is an invitation to open the Pandora’s box of soul’s graces and perversities. Marriage digs deep into the stuff of the soul. Lifelong, intense, socially potent relationships don’t exist without touching the deepest, rawest reservoirs of soul. Few experiences in life reach such remote and uncultivated regions of the heart, unearthing material that is incredibly fertile and frighteningly primordial.

Marriage may look like an arrangement of persons, but at the deepest level it is a profound stirring of souls. Marriage rearranges the emotions and one’s view of life itself, often with painful stretching of the heart and the imagination. Often people who expect to find bliss in the arrangement (2) discover bitter confusion in the re-sorting of feelings and thoughts occasioned by marriage, not realizing that they have evoked a maelstrom in the soul through the “simple” process of “two becoming one”. (3)

In the soulful marriage cynicism and disillusionment are replaced by an appreciation for the impersonal powers at work in what we imprecisely call human relationship. In a marriage cognizant of soul, the partners find a brand of intimacy that is deeper than personal trust and mutual understanding. Oddly, it is rooted in mistrust and lack of understanding, in a distance that allows the soul of the other and of the marriage to be unpredictable and inexplicable. Oscar Wilde once said, “Only the shallow know themselves.”  The same could be said about marriage partners.

Caring for the Soul in Marriage

If we are going to care for the soul of a marriage, we may want to keep in mind a saying of Heraclitus that I have been using as a guide: “The soul is its own source of unfolding.”  At the beginning of any form of life the soul is in a raw, undeveloped stage; it makes sense that the marriage will be significantly different in a few years into it than it was at the start.

HONORING FATE

We can honor the fateful spirit that brought us together at the beginning. From the viewpoint of soul, nothing happens by accident. The fatefulness that surrounds the beginning of a profound relationship suggests an intentionality far beyond the ken of the people involved. In acknowledging this turn of fate, we may find some peace and grounding, and also some humility as the relationship continues to offer unexpected challenges.

Couples sometimes spend a great deal of energy and time arguing over choices that have been made, whereas they might be better off examining together, with a degree of humility and receptivity, the mysterious elements that have entered their lives.

A couple can lay the foundation for genuine spirituality as an ingredient in their love. By reacting not only to the partner’s choices and reasons but also to deep impersonal factors, they reach down into their soul and establish a kind of intimacy that is more profound than the kind that mutual analysis can generate. Then the relationship can be founded on ground not fully human, on a bedrock that is much firmer than anything human ingenuity could create.

Our conscious intentions are often colored by neurotic material and may have underlying mechanisms and purposes that serve more to resist than to respect the soul. But when we express ourselves so as to reveal less conscious material, we approach the realm of fate and providence where a spiritual attitude respecting destiny and other transpersonal factors creates a much deeper intimacy. If we are going to tend the soul in a relationship, we have to use means that match the soul’s sacred dimensions.

HONORING THE GENIUS OF THE MARRIAGE

Something deeply mysterious and profound keeps a marriage moving, changing, and shifting. This is what the Romans called the genius—an influential yet hidden presence that is impervious to our explanations and rationalizations.

When we respect the genius of our marriage, we focus as much on its own creativity as on our intentions for the relationship. In getting married, we lay ourselves open to the influence of the genius, not just to hold the marriage together, but to make something out of it. In this way, we tend the character of the marriage instead of our abstract ideas of what a marriage should be.

I once worked with a very sincere couple. The man told me that the reason their marriage was stagnant was that he had been raised in a home that was cold and unloving. The woman’s idea was that she needed freedom in her life, more than her husband did, and so she was feeling tied down. Both explanations, though subtle and convincing to an extent, were rationalizations, protecting both people from looking more directly at their marriage itself and noticing what it was now asking of them. I suggested that they read the changes they were sensing as expressions of the marriage’s genius, and turn their focusing away from treating each other as psychologically abnormal.

This appreciation of genius could enrich our married lives. Recognizing that every marriage has its own autonomous spirit could help us with the problems that inevitably appear, and also give marriage its own personality and deeper value.

TECHNIQUES FOR TENDING THE MARRIAGE SOUL

In marriage we need ways to keep the soul in mind. One simple way to glimpse the genius is to tell each other one’s dreams, not for the purpose of interpretation, but to just notice and appreciate the less predictable aspects of our partner’s soul life. Simple talk about dreams might introduce partners to the idiosyncratic imagery and themes of each other’s souls, and toward a more poetic style of reflection.

We can be alert to the genius in ourselves and in our partner. We might take seriously our partner’s intuitive, unreasoned, but strongly felt desires or inhibitions, giving them even more weight than she does. A life sensitive to the genius is overall based more on intuition than reason, allowing ephemeral inspirations a place of prominence, and inviting excursions into the unknown and unpracticed.

This soul-centered image of marriage I am advocating respects the less subjective, less intentional elements in a relationship. The result may be a life in which the individual has room to play out his or her eccentric potentialities. We may honor a marriage’s soul by discovering what it wants. Some marriages ask for distance, others for closeness; some for children, some for the life of the couple. Some want frequent changes, some get into a mold and want to stay there. Some accent emotions of bliss, some pain. Some are flat, others are peaked or gulched. Some marriages prefer sentimentality, others like pragmatism. We can find out these preferences only by bringing to our own marriage a spirit of openness and inquiry that will cut through preconceptions and society's models. Only through many small acts of trial and error will we learn the flavors of our own, unique marriage.

Precisely because fate is unpredictable and by definition doesn’t reveal a chain of causes or offer explanations, it can throw a couple into confusion. At this time, the first thing a couple can do is talk from the heart so as to meet life exactly as it presents itself. We all have a tendency to defend ourselves first and look for justifications for our actions. Fate asks for some loyalty from us, so that we may find a way of talking about it that is suited to its mystery. Without evading responsibility, we can express our wonder at the progress of events, speak for what feels unexplainable, and acknowledge that the life fate is creating in us is something we are able to take on and for which we have responsibility.

Sometimes the only way to open a path to soul is the negative way—by noting ways in which we are unconsciously protecting ourselves from the sting of life’s intentions. We could explore what is painful and challenging in certain developments, where we feel most resistant, and ways we have of evading or fleeing the challenge. Without berating ourselves or looking for sympathy, we could reveal the impact of the soul on us, and in that way show our partner with unusual candor what is shaping us and influencing our lives. This kind of objective honesty about oneself may be more revealing than subjective, personal confession.

Another way to care for the soul in marriage, a way that seems to have been understood better in ancient times than today, is through praise and celebration. This can be done in obvious ways—anniversary dinners and gifts—or through less common ways. We could find occasions to write letters or poems to our mates, even though we live with them every day. (4)

Yet another way is to take opportunities when they present themselves to praise and celebrate our partners, either expressing our feelings to them directly or to others. It’s easy to overlook such opportunities and end up speaking about the problems. There is something in modern culture that distrusts praise; one often hears judgments about being selfish, self-centered, and narcissistic. This concern about narcissism is a modern problem in itself, wrapped up certainly in our equally difficult task of being genuinely humble. It has harmful results, because the heart craves recognition and appreciation; only a neurotically puritanical mind would deny the soul these graces.

Sometimes the soul wants something not quite as strong a praise, but more like interest. We could all take more interest in our marriages, becoming more sensitive to what they ask for every day, noticing how each is unique, and day by day discovering what marriage in general is all about. Our standard ideas about marriage may be dull, but the lived relationship subjected to wonder may present an altogether unstandardized view of marriage.

Marriage and the Sacred

Tradition teaches that the soul has an important spiritual dimension, so that living soulfully, even in marriage, entails a spiritual life that emerges directly from the relationship. In many of his writings, Jung talked about the hieros gamos, or “sacred marriage,” which is a union at a far deeper or higher level than personalities and lives.

It is not surprising that in the New Testament the first miracle of Jesus is set at a wedding, in Cana. There Jesus transmutes water into wine, the flat necessity of life into the active substance of spirit. All marriages take place Cana, for in all marriages the necessary raw material of life (water) is changed into a sparkling, tingling, inspiriting element of the soul (wine).

Marriage is holy not only because it is a precious and revered way of forming human lives, but also because it is a form of religion in itself, a special way in which spirituality pours into life.

Marriage is by nature miraculous and magical. We do not need to understand it and cannot know where it is headed. To care for its soul, it is more important to honor its mystery than to try to outwit its intentions for what we, with our small minds, may think is a better outcome. For all of us, marriage is a sacrament. To care for its soul we need to be priests rather than technicians, and to draw from the wellspring of ordinary piety rather than from theory or formula.

FOOTNOTES (by Gary)

1. Athena was the Greek Goddess of wisdom and strategy.

2. In 12-step, they say “Expectations are premeditated resentments!”

3. This phrase is an allusion to Genesis 2:24.

4. This book was written before the dawn of emails and texting (Hotmail = 1996!), so one can use their imagination for applications today!