Valentin Tomberg's Concept of True Death as a Way to Understand Trauma
I apply Tomberg's articulation of true death (death itself) as the stagnation of time in space to the understanding of the embodied nature of trauma as feeling stuck in a past horrific experience.
I have recently started reading Christ and Sophia: Anthroposophic Meditations on the Old Testament, New Testament, and Apocalyse by Valentin Tomberg. This book was written right before his official conversion to Christianity from the Anthroposophical foundation (spearheaded by Rudolf Steiner), and it contains the first seeds of what will become his magnum opus, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. I’m only a little way in, but thus far, it is certainly fascinating.
In Chapter 2, under the subsection “The Moon Mystery,” Tomberg makes a distinction between decay and death, noting that what we commonly call “death”—the progress whereby an organism ceases all bodily functions and decays back into the earth—is not yet quite death in its pure form, given that there is still movement and recirculation within the ecosystem. As a side note, I would personally add that, of course, this event can still be quite traumatic. No one who has lost a loved one would be much comforted by thinking about how the loved one’s corpse is decomposing into organic material that helps the soil. Rather, I think Tomberg’s point is that such decay is still not the most horrendous force of death. Instead, the truest form of death is a type of ontological stagnation. As Tomberg says:
“[…] death is revealed only in rigidity. When a part of cosmic history is torn away from the flow of time and becomes a rigid portion of space, then we have a truly dead body, or corpse. Life is space with time flowing through it; death is rigidified time in space. […] If we view the cross as indicating time grown rigid in space, then we have formed a true idea of bearing the cross. Cross carrying is connected with a dead portion of the past—a bit of the past grown rigid-that must just be carried because, in itself, it is incapable of movement.” (Tomberg 2011, 16).
Here is the image he gave along with the statement. Notice that it makes the shape of a cross.
What Tomberg wrote is a pretty decent encapsulation of trauma. Trauma is an event in one’s life that is so horrific—so overwhelming in manifesting terror—that one’s psyche refuses to integrate into the self. To use metaphorical language, the brain chops up the traumatic experience in smaller pieces, and then hides those smaller pieces throughout the body (i.e., repression). The smaller pieces still manifest themselves as symptoms within the individual’s life (such as triggers, PTSD flashbacks, nightmares, anxiety, or panic attacks). But these symptoms are—according to regulating principles within the psyche—easier to manage than the full horror of the original traumatic experience. It’s as if some regulating principle within the psyche sees the traumatic experience as holding the potential to cause a total ‘system shutdown’ if one were to integrate that experience into one’s psyche. Thus, trauma is a type of experience or phenomenon that the psyche refuses to integrate. Instead, it remains hidden in the unconscious and the body, where it seethes and grows like thorny vines.
The above description shows a type of stagnation, similar to what Tomberg wrote. A traumatic experience is a past event that stagnates itself within the space of the body, resembling what Tomberg regarded as the true essence of death. As an implication, it would mean that the cross—as the truest symbol of death—is likewise the traumatic event par excellence.
However, according to the paradox at the heart of the Christian faith, the cross is also the very means by which death itself is defeated. The stagnation and trauma of the cross are broken by the unyielding life of Christ, whose divine nature cannot be bound by the shackles of death. This is also one reason why the doctrine of the harrowing of hell is so important. In the Apostles Creed, Christians declare that Christ was “crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell.” The original word for hell is “hades” which refers to the realm of the dead. It is there that, according to Christian tradition and 1 Peter 4, Christ brought salvation to those who were held captive by death in the underworld.
I have written before about this doctrine and its relationship to trauma (link), but I will briefly summarize my perspective again. Carl Jung emphasized that many mythologies and stories about a descent into the underworld are excellent analogies for understanding the descent into the unconscious. Following this lead, we might say that Christ’s descent into hell is also a representation of Christ’s descent into the ‘hellish’ places of one’s unconscious in which trauma seeks to grow its roots. The places within the psyche that seek this stagnation—where past trauma grows rigid in the space of the body—can be defeated through the power of Christ. Likewise, one might also view one’s trauma therapy or post-traumatic recovery/rebuilding as an archetypal participation in Christ’s descent into hell.
If trauma holds a negative cruciform embodiment as shown above (time’s stagnation in space), and if the cross is the traumatic event par excellence, then Christ’s redemption also shows how the cross itself can be healing. In Tomberg’s magnum opus, Meditations on the Tarot, he talks about how the “vertical” (divine truth, revelation, the divine archetypes, spiritual reality, etc.) manifests within the horizontal (our everyday reality). The horizontal world’s telos is to correspond and harmonize with the vertical world. As the famous hermetic saying states, “As above, so below.” One can picture this alignment as another cruciform shape, whereby the vertical is piercing through the horizontal.
Bringing oneself into an archetypal participation with Christ’s conquering hell can be seen as the the vertical of Christ’s divine redemption manifesting within the horizontal of one’s body. Post-traumatic recovery is thus very much like a crucifixion, in which one moves from the cruciform embodiment of stagnation and death, through the harrowing of the unconscious, and into the cruciform embodiment of Christ’s redemption, pushing forward to the resurrection.