THE MASCULINE MYSTERIES AND THE QUEST FOR
THE WHITENESS
by
Bernard X. Bovasso
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About the Author Bernard X. Bovasso is essentially
a painter and a poet and a onetime art and
drama reviewer for the Woodstock Times of
Woodstock, N. Y. His interest in the work
of C. G. Jung of Zurich goes back to his
student days at the Cooper Union Art School
(1948-'51). Prior to that he served with
the U. S. Maritime Training Service and then
on active duty in the U. S. Merchant Marine
at the close of World War II (1945 to
1949). In September of 1946 he was signed
aboard the USAT E. B. Alexander when it exploded
in the North Sea and foundered. After release
from service he he often found it necessary
to take a sea voyage during college summer
recess to support himself at school. During
the summer of '49 he nearly did not make
it back for the Fall Semester when he was
assigned to an LST loaded with giant snow
plows and headed for Thule, Greenland for
the construction of the early warning base
just 500 miles south of the North Pole. "Operation
Blue Jay," as the mission was called,
was composed of U. S. Army supply ships in
the company of a U. S. Navy task force that
included an aircraft carrier. The trip cured
him of ever going to sea again. But he was
also cured of Academia when, after Cooper
Union, he turned down a fellowship to the
Yale University Art School. He was perhaps
much influenced by Herman Melville's claim:
"The whaleship was my Harvard and Yale."
Soon after he was in analysis with Frieda
Stern of NY City, a protegé of Toni Wolff
of Zurich. After that his interest in the
Analytical Psychology of C. G. Jung became
intensive and eventually led to a study of
philosophy. At the New School for Social
Research in NYC, he studied pre-Socratic
Philosophy with Prof. Hans Jonas and Ernest
Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms with
Prof. Eugen Gadol (1963). During 1972 he
retired from NYC and moved to a small upstate
village along the Hudson River where he reconditioned
an old factory building for use as a studio
and residence. His children include Christopher,
a lead guitarist with his own NYC RocK Band,
Gregory, a Professor of Psychology teaching
in Philadelphia, and the youngest, Nina,
an internationally acclaimed painter, now
resident in Amsterdam. Two years ago Gregory
and his wife Michele produced twin daughters,
Francesca and Isabella, that are now the
joy of his life. The girls have the big blue
eyes of their now deceased Aunt Julie, actress,
playwrite, director and producer who pioneered
off-Broadway theater in NYC.
The present work recapitulates much of this
more so that it was accompanied by a cluster
of synchronicistic experiences that by no
means diminished his often contentious relation
to neo-Jungian psychologists and their theoretical
affectations. In effect, the writting of
The Masculine Mysteries preceded the recently
published (2005) Polyimagical Realm and its
critique of "Archetypal Psychology."
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The Masculine Mysteries
and The Quest for the WHITENESS:
A Synchronicity Workbook
Glossy Hardcover (6x9) ISBN 1425935613 $
20.72
Bernard Bovasso
ORDER FROM: http://www. authorhouse. com/BookStore/ItemDetail~bookid~37431.
aspx
Paperback $15.97 ISBN 1425935605
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THE MASCULINE QUEST FOR THE WHITENESS
The telestic nature of the Masculine Mysteries
served as the medium for The Whiteness which,
in its generality, points directly to a representation
of Death and the masculine drive to achieve
union of the Self at the last stop in life:
the divine after-life unity otherwise known
as God or Allah, or, as Jung psychologically
paraphrased it, the Unus Mundus . For Freud
this unity was called Eros, as simply "life
drive," in his distinction between Eros
and Thanatos. For Jung it included the Unus
Mundus as final and everlasting Oneness.
For Goethe it was perhaps a return to the
All and which, of course, is no-place at
all, i. e., u- topos. For Herman Melville
it was expressed through his Capt. Ahab who
was joined in final unity with the great
white whale. Today we may recognize as much
in the suicidal martyr. In all cases the
quest for The Whiteness expressed a haste
to prematurely achieve final perfection.
Such drives, for the most part were, at least
typically, fit for men except for its feminine
demeanor exemplified by the animus of the
feminine psychology, a woman's inner and
largely unconscious "maleness."
In all cases, the color of all color and
exclusively male quest for Final Perfection
I must treat with regard to its form as only
inferentially metaphysical and theological.
But the content in fact addressed what Jung
referred to as the imago dei: God as the
psychological rather than the metaphysical
Self. From this less than theological standpoint
the Deity, as Melville noted in his Moby
Dick, was concealed beneath the veil of Whiteness.
The above polarities I have generalized as
The Whiteness, the heroic masculine thanatic
trieb (death instinct) and The Blackness
as Eros and the creative feminine proclivity
for "life" and endopsychic perception.
In the first part of this work, however,
I start out with a more naive and narrative
approach. I then move on to more complex
metapsychological speculations and not the
least of which is my notice and notation
of word and number synchronicties.
Bernard X. Bovasso Saugerties, New York.
Front cover design by the author
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