As we move into 2021, with the hope of new beginnings, a story upon which I’ve been reflecting is that of the Rainmaker. This was one of Carl Jung’s favourite stories, originally told to him by the sinologist Richard Wilheim. Jung loved to tell it in his lectures. It is a simple story, yet given the disturbed and disturbing times in which we find ourselves living, I believe it has a profound and salutary message for us all.
The story goes like this:
In the ancient Chinese province of Kiaochou there was a drought so severe that many people and animals were dying. In despair, the citizens called for an old rainmaker, who lived in the mountains nearby. Richard Wilhelm saw how the rainmaker was brought into town in a sedan chair, a tiny little gray-bearded man. He asked to be left alone outside the town in a little hut, and after three days it rained, and even snowed!
Richard Wilhelm succeeded in being allowed to interview the old man and asked him how he made the rain. But he answered, “I haven’t made the rain, of course not.” And then, after a pause, he added, “You see it was like this – throughout the drought the whole of nature and all the men and women here were deeply disturbed. They were no longer in Tao. When I arrived here I became also disturbed. It was so bad that it took me three days to bring myself again into order.” And then he added, with a smile, “Then naturally it rained.”(adapted from Von Franz, Psyche and Matter, p. 161)
There are many ways to interpret and find meaning in this story. For example, what does the drought signify? In mythic traditions, drought symbolises an absence of feeling, flow, connectedness and vitality. It suggests a state of being out-of-balance with the divine nature of life. Coming to the drought-stricken village, the rainmaker observed that “the whole of nature and all the men and women here were deeply disturbed”. Is this not reflective of the collective situation in which we find ourselves today?
At one level this story speaks to the importance of composure – of ‘bringing oneself into order’. However, the composure of the rainmaker goes deeper than persona or outward appearance. Indeed, others are not even aware of what he’s up to when, feeling himself becoming agitated and disturbed, he asks simply to be left alone in a hut for three days.
During the pandemic, and especially for those of us who have endured lockdowns or who live in areas where the virus has taken a heavy toll, I know of no one who has not had significant personal ‘stuff’ arise, whether that be around money and work; close relationships with partners, siblings, children or parents; or a heightened awareness of their own mortality. Considered from the perspective of psychological type, such psychic disturbances are often related to the activation of our ‘inferior function’, connected with the shadow aspects of our personality, and our gateway into the unconscious...
[By the way, if you're interested in depth psychology and personality type, you might like to read my paper 'Sex, Madness and Spirituality: The introverted intuitive and individuating with the inferior function'. This is a piece I originally wrote in 2012 and revisited for publication during lockdown last year. ‘Personality Type in Depth’ is an open access journal featuring articles by many of my talented Pacifica Graduate Institute students.]
... Yet even if one remains outwardly composed, strong emotional affect (such as fear, grief, anger and shame) signifies that archetypal dynamics have been activated.
From an archetypal psychology perspective, all archetypes are bi-polar. The emotional affects associated with archetypes also have a bi-polar configuration. For example, shame/humiliation and disgust/contempt is an archetypal coupling, depending upon whether you are on the giving or the receiving end – both have to do with alienation and rejection. However, because it is not easy for the human psyche to bear the tension of polarities – the highest and the low, as Jung said, the good and the evil – what happens is that one pole of the archetype gets repressed and continues operating in the individual’s unconscious, where it is often projected onto the ‘outer’ world.
The rainmaker’s story is an invitation to become conscious of and hold the opposite poles of archetypal dynamics as we experience them activated in our psyches, instead of projecting them into ‘inner and outer’. Not calm versus chaos, for example, but calm and chaos. For those who are fond of adopting the new-age sign-off ‘love and light’, this may be a challenging invitation to become more conscious and inclusive of one’s own anger, one’s own darkness.
To compose ourselves (as with composing a piece of music, a painting, a photograph, or a poem) means to bring disparate parts or elements together with awareness into a novel creative form. Our capacity expands to hold the dynamic relationship of opposites, to sit with the dualistic nature of being human. This quality of conjoined opposites allows unknown depths to find a channel through which to flow into life. After enduring a time of drought, it is the moist mercy of what Jung called the 'Transcendent Function'.
“Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between contradictions ... for the god wants to know himself in you.”
~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~
(Image: Wedge-tailed Eagle in Flight by Lisa Fahey)
Lastly, and most mysteriously, The Rainmaker story suggests something fascinating about synchronicity (which Jung defined as an acausal connecting principle) and the relationship between psyche and matter.
There is no linear ‘cause and effect’ relationship between the rainmaker’s retreat and the arrival of the rain. Indeed, the old man specifically denies any responsibility for making the rain. Yet he saw there was no separation between his inner chaos and the outer chaos of the drought. In committing to the humble action he took, to bring himself into order, the rainmaker touched upon the collective psyche, that which extends to everything.
Jung considered that this archetypal realm of the collective unconscious is eternal, outside time and outside space. This suggests that something that happens at one point, which touches the collective unconscious, happens everywhere simultaneously. When the rainmaker touched the Tao – the psychic centre of highest intensity in the collective psyche – the restoration of the Tao simultaneously manifested itself everywhere. The rainmaker was the only man who took his inner disturbance seriously, and thus unintentionally saved the entire province!
In the tradition of the Rainmaker, may your own practice of dynamic and creative composure bring abundant blessings for the restoration of community and country in 2021.
with love,
Suzanne
Dr Suzanne Cremen
Founding Director | Life Artistry Centre | Melbourne, Australia
Adjunct Faculty | Pacifica Graduate Institute | Carpinteria, CA
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