Bog Synchronicities
A New Workshop from Peat and Repeat
The Department of Preservation and Reuse at Peat and Repeat is launching a series of workshops emerging from our creative and interior practice of ecological kin-making — or “oddkin,” to use Donna Haraway’s term from Staying with the Trouble.
Kin is a wild category that all sorts of people do their best to domesticate. Making kin as oddkin rather than, or at least in addition to, godkin and genealogical and biogenetic family troubles important matters, like to whom one is actually responsible.
Who lives and who dies, and how, in this kinship rather than that one?
What shape is this kinship, where and whom do its lines connect and disconnect, and so what?
What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance? (from Staying With The Trouble)
The ecologies that inspire this workshop series are psychopomp ecologies: places of preservation, transformation, saturation, and forgetting — peat bogs, marshes, buried waterways, wetlands, ruins.
The Dead
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung writes about his fascination with peat bog bodies. For him, the unconscious becomes a kind of land of the dead: a preserving field where psychic material remains suspended.
The bog is the collective psyche.
The dead do not disappear there. They persist and call us.
Bog / God / Dog
In Proto-Slavic, bog (bogъ) means “god.” The Indo-European root, with cognates in Sankrit and Avestan, the liturgical language of zoroastrianism, is associated with wealth, apportionment, and share — what is distributed among a people.
God as Bog as what is preserved, as the land of the dead.
Jung often described his descent into the unconscious as a his wealth.
The bog stores what history attempts to discard
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Jung writes of the double self: the everyday self, tangled in neurosis and routine, and another self — the self of the unconsious.
Jung names this figure for Nietzsche as Zarathustra, per Nietzsche’s famous work “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”
The prophet Zoroaster descends from solitude carrying transmissions from elsewhere, proclaiming most famously: God is dead.
But perhaps the statement means something else entirely.
God is Bog, God as apportioning and sharing is that which is preserved in the land to be resurfaced and integrated in life once again.
Zoroaster says go find true meaning amongst the ancestors, go find your inspiration within the bogs.
Mummies
Last week I dreamt of the dead.
I was searching for someone when a gravedigger unearthed two bodies wrapped tightly in duct tape — accidental mummies.
Egyptian imagery has followed me since childhood. Temples, gods, burial chambers, preservation technologies — they recur constantly in dreams.
Bodies preserved in peat bogs become mummified too. Hollowed out. The surface remains while the interior transforms.
There are traditions of the hollow oak in Druidic practice, and the hollow bone in shamanic traditions.
Hollowness is not emptiness, it is to create space for transformation, memory or daimon to move through.
Ecological Oddkin
Walking through the woods feels decadent these days — purposeless movement.
I wondered what my ancestors did in these woods.
Were they once searching for shelter? Hunting? Escaping? Mourning?
Or did they also sometimes walk purposelessly and decadently like me.
I tried to clear my mind. To become hollow. To become surface.
Then my beloved turned to me and said:
“Everything comes to the surface eventually.”