By Dr. John White, PhD, IHS Board of Directors
I believe I have won this year’s award for the strangest title for a Voxhermes post, though admittedly the year is still young. The term “goofy” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) – which is the standard for English words and English etymologies – says that the word is of relatively recent origin and first appears (in writing) in 1921, though it is unlikely that it would appear in published writing if it were not already in relatively wide use previously. The OED does not give an etymology for “goofy,” so the origin of the word must be obscure historically. Since it can’t be contradicted by the OED, I’m going to step well outside the boundaries of good scholarship and feel free to invent an etymology. I’m going to suggest that “goofy” somehow derives from “GVP” or “Guph,” the transliteration of the Hebrew word for the human body, and that if we understand it this way, we may need in a certain respect to become a bit goofier.
In my experience, the word “goofy” is less used than it was when I was a boy, yet its meaning does not seem to have changed much. There are two related and overlapping meanings, similar to words like “crazy,” “silly,” and the like. Such words are sometimes used descriptively, indicating a genuine mental state or, on the other hand, are used metaphorically, as when someone is acting “as if” they are in that mental state. So, a person can actually be “goofy,” somewhat silly, weird, or idiosyncratic, or perhaps a bit mentally dull; or they act “as if” they are the latter, as when a person gets off a rough day at work and just acts goofy to let off some steam. Particularly important here is the connection between being goofy and being mentally dull or mentally asleep. This connection is expressed in the original Disney character, the dog “Goofy,” who is both silly but also portrayed as mentally dull and sleepy. Connecting this to my etymology above, it suggests that when one is too embedded in one’s body, too controlled by bodily and instinctual impulses, one becomes “goofy” or mentally asleep.
Maturation
There is an important but partial truth in all this. No doubt a person living primarily from instincts and for instinctual satisfaction alone is in some measure asleep, indifferent to higher and distinctly personal aspirations. But by calling this mental state “goofy,” it suggests that one’s body is the problem here, though the problem is not so much the body as the attitude toward the body.
Assuming a generally Hermetic conception of human nature, the arc of personal development and maturation occurs in something like three steps. It begins (1) from acting and living primarily as a mammal, as when one is a child and is governed largely by instinctual needs. As one gets older and closer to adulthood, (2) one develops – hopefully – more properly personal characteristics such as personality, agency, responsibility, personal goals, self-discipline, and some ability to manage the more negative consequences of instinctual life. If as a physical adult one hasn’t moved much outside the realm of purely instinctual life, one will indeed appear somewhat asleep and goofy, because one is not yet a psychological adult, whatever one’s physical age.
Ideally, however, the maturation process does not stop with the second step. Beyond developing psychological maturity, we are also (3) meant to reconnect to our bodily and mammalian nature from the standpoint of the Higher Self, the inner divine spark. And whatever else that attitude might consist in, it would include a fundamental respect and love for one’s body, including the cultivation of the body’s latent spiritual capacities. In this way, our spiritual and physical aspects can become cooperators in the ultimate project of human life, the Great Work.
In our time, we are often lucky if we get very far into Step Two and live responsibly as mature human beings, governing and molding our instinctual life in a way that makes us truly human and able to function adequately in society. But the further goal and third step is even less often attained: reconnecting to animal nature is a new and spiritually awakened way, in a way that spirit and body co-create the New Person. Yet getting to Step Three is one of the central goals of the Western Mystery traditions. A chief reason people do not get to that third stage, it seems to me, is that they never quite learn to love and respect their animal organism sufficiently to enter the third stage outlined above and appreciate the inherent dignity of the human body.
Practicing as a Jungian psychoanalyst, I find that patients often take the fact that they are living bodies for granted, not really noticing – or still less marveling at – the fact that they are living flesh. Often, they only notice their bodies when they are ill or in pain or, to a lesser extent, when they are exhausted, when something is felt to be “wrong” with the body. Oddly enough, noticing the body beyond minor pleasures is often a function of negative experiences, such as pain or exhaustion, outside of which, someone will generally identify with their mind and experience their body as something like a mere tool or instrument of the mind, without any independent worth or dignity of its own.
The body in history
There is a long history of this issue that I am raising – the denial or at least indifference to the intrinsic value and dignity of the body – though the form it takes often changes throughout history. In fact, given the fact that this is such a long-standing cultural issue and takes on often more subtle forms in history, one might conjecture that these negative attitudes toward the body are at least in part produced by darker occult forces: something in the recognition of the body’s dignity is being purposely obscured.
For example, in the late Middle Ages and early Modern period in the West (1400s-1600s), there were a number of robust Christian mystical traditions with extreme ascetic practices. Rather than seeing bodily discipline and asceticism as a technique useful to spiritual development, they treated the body as an enemy to the spirit – an attitude difficult to find in the teachings of Jesus. In contrast to older Christian traditions, such as the Desert Fathers, which, though often more demanding ascetically than these later movements, nonetheless aimed to make the body an apt partner for spiritual practices, these later traditions (which we can generally term “puritanical”) saw neither Nature nor the body as an ally to spiritual life. This trend is evident in Christian iconography, as images of the Devil over time take on the attributes to the great nature deity, Pan, as if Mother Nature and the Devil are in the end one and the same. Yet one’s attitude toward the body and attitude toward Nature generally correlate, since it is by virtue of our animal, bodily aspects that we are a part of Nature: we cannot simultaneously and reasonably love our bodies and hate Nature or vice versa. Since those of us who are Hermetic practitioners are called to be “philosophers of Nature,” we can see how problematic this attitude can be.
In later modernity, the devaluation of the body arises from more secular cultural forces, such as scientific materialism in the 17th and 18th centuries and industrialization in the 19th century. In each of these cases, first Nature generally is denigrated – for example to mere “resources” for human consumption – and then the human being, insofar as it is bodily and a part of Nature, also becomes a mere resource for social and industrial processes. Operations research and time-motion studies in the early 20th century similarly aim to treat the body as an inanimate physical tool, to get the most out of “it.” Psychoanalysis’ emphasis on sexuality and instinct was a reaction to the reduction of our bodily and animal nature to a mere inanimate part in an industrial machine. It is no accident of history that esoteric figures like MacGregor Mathers, Aleister Crowley, and Dion Fortune all wrote and publicly performed Rites to Pan, as a counter force to the crushing denigration of the dignity of the body so characteristic of modern, industrial society.
Consumerism
While these cultural forces are still present in varying degrees, the bigger obstacle to respecting the body nowadays is consumerism, a broad cultural attitude, often implicit, in which consumption is considered the only measure of value. Without burdening the reader with the philosophy and psychology behind these issues, let me just say that it is part and parcel of consumerist attitudes that they undermine the idea that some things have intrinsic value, that some things are good, worthy, noble, or important in themselves, independently of their value for consumption. In such a context, virtually all moral conceptions of value, including human dignity and with it the dignity of the body, cannot really be preserved, because value relativism is the only ethical system consistent with a society that measures value solely in terms of consumption.
How does this affect one’s experience of the body? Consumerism values only what can be commodified or, in other words, can be turned into a purchasable object. This being the case, the inherent dignity of the body is just one more thing that must be rejected: the body must be conceived as a commodity like any other commodity. While there is some popular consciousness of this problem, for example in the recognition that the advertising industry puts unrealistic expectations particularly on women’s bodies simply to sell more products, the full extent of this denigration is rarely recognized. The human body is in no sense merely a commodity.
As esoteric conception of the body
Perhaps nothing makes this point plainer than the Qabalistic Tree of Life. The Tree of Life, though often used as an organizational tool (which is one of its functions), is also a symbolic story of the descent and ascent of the divine. The Tree describes dynamic action on the part of the divine, whereby the divine enters what is only partially divine and draws back to itself all that can in some manner “become divine” in the process.
As students of Qabalah, we know that Malkuth, the physical world and, with it, the human body, is at its core just as divine as any other sephirah on the Tree. For, though the body is in some of its aspects mortal and will pass away, it is also the prima materia pregnant with the divine spark that is in everything. The famous Qabalistic story of the shattering of the vessels and of the shards of the vessels carrying the divine reality into all physical entities is fittinghere: everything that is, including all material things, have a spark of the divine, according to their nature. Those of us who practice the Mysteries are meant, above all, to release that shard, that spark of the divine, embedded in every being, in every situation, in every stratum of being, through our esoteric and magical work.
What I am suggesting here is in sharp opposition to any commodification of the body. Insofar as we treat our bodies as anything but an entity to whom we are responsible for releasing its divine spark, we are acting in a way less than we are called to act. The point of course is not that we can’t participate in a world of commodification in order to get what we need, whether health care, aesthetic aids, or anything else for our body. Yet it is of crucial importance spiritually that our attitudes toward the body never reduce it “merely” to a commodity. There’s no way to avoid commodification, insofar as we live the current form of American life. But it is inconsistent with our esoteric calling if we permit ourselves to treat anything bearing the divine spark as if it is “nothing but” a commodity. If this is true of all entities generally, it is far more so with respect to our own bodies. Please note, I am not telling anyone what to do with their own body. I am saying that, whatever one does with one’s body, it should be consonant with the body’s dignity and with the recognition of the divine spark present in it.
The great Renaissance alchemist, Thomas Vaughan (“Philalethes”), wrote a book entitled “Aula Lucis,” Temple of Light, a title which refers in part to the destiny of the body. According to Vaughan, the goal of our embodied life includes transmuting the body into a temple of light, a statement consistent with traditional teachings on the “body of light” (see, for example, Mark Stavish’s, Between the Gates). Part of the Great Work, traditionally conceived, is to produce a body of light, to extract Mercury from Saturn, the subtle from the gross body, as one of the steps toward immortal life. How must such a conception of the body alter one’s experience and conception of one’s body? And to what extent is that understanding of the body present in the lives of current day practitioners? It is at least an important question to ask, whether we have a clear answer as yet or not.
Conclusion
We began by pointing out that a certain conception of “being goofy” consists in recognizing that a person can be too little differentiated from their instinctual life to be fully conscious and awake, a point that should not be rejected. However, it should equally be noted that that mental state does not arise because one is “too bodily” but rather because one has not yet learned the proper attitude toward one’s body, as described as Step Three above. Taking this attitude can be transformational and is a worthwhile exercise, whether getting a haircut, getting a tattoo, or contemplating cosmetic surgery. In all cases, keeping in mind that the body is not merely a commodity but has a dignity of its own is a central and esoterically significant attitude, conducive to our best decisions.
Malkuth is the end of the process of involution, but it is also the beginning point of evolution: it is only from Malkuth, from the bodily basis of our being, that we can pursue the Great Work. I suggested above that darker occult forces may be behind the centuries-long battle to preserve a sense of the body’s dignity and here one can see why that might be. If one gets derailed at the beginning, it is all too likely one will be inhibited in trying to get back to the Path.
If “being goofy” means we are too enmeshed in our bodily and instinctual life, then it is time for us to mature as human beings. But the enemy here is not the body but the attitude we take toward the body. Spiritual unfoldment requires that we love and respect the intrinsic value of the body and cultivate its being, life, and innate powers into a fit partner for the Great Work. If we are not doing the latter then, in that sense, we are not being goofy enough. Unless we free ourselves from the widespread commodification of the body characteristic of our current society, we might find ourselves thwarted in the Great Work from the very beginning of our journey.
John R. White, Ph.D., LPC (Pittsburgh PA) is a Jungian psychoanalyst and Coordinator of the C. G. Jung Institute Analyst Training Program of Pittsburgh. He was a philosophy professor for twenty years, prior to becoming a psychoanalyst. His research interests include many aspects of psychoanalytic practice, Christian mysticism, the history and practices of New Thought, alchemy, and various links among psychology, parapsychology, philosophy, and esotericism. He is an initiate into several esoteric traditions. White currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Institute for Hermetic Studies, and is the author of Adaptation and Psychotherapy: Langs and Analytical Psychology (Rowman & Littlefield 2023).
Thank you for this valuable perspective _/\_