The Book of Symbols

An ordinary man of ancient Egypt named Bai, shown in an attitude of prayer, dedicated an ear stele to the god Amun-Re, the “beautiful ram” of the sun, whose three pairs of ears in different colors signify “one who harkens to supplications.” Inscribed with a single pair or many pairs of ears, Egyptian votive ear stelae made their appearance with the rise of personal devotion during the New Kingdom (1570-1070 B.C.E). “The god who listens comes to him who calls, splendid of mien, and rich in ears,” says a hymn of the time.

Antiquity suggests how important it is for us, not only the gods, to listen, especially to the soft-spoken “sounds” that religions hint at through their metaphor of the ear, and which are also a psychic reality. The spiritual intimation of unseen realms, subliminal or supernormal, led to an ancient culture of intuitive hear-kening, as gods and humans entered into direct conversation with one another. Hebrews and Christians sought God’s word, propitiating him to incline his ears to theor individual cries (Psalms 88), while Jeremiah (6:10) blasted the “uncircumcised” ears of those who failed to comprehend the deity0s subtleties. Long before, to put one’s “ear to the ground” of nature was one of the surest means, as it is for many animals, of discriminating the landscape, receiving warning, finding direction, water, prey, knowing what was ahead or behind. Particularly in her solitary precincts, nature’s sounds have ever been experienced as responses to questions and longings, and such auditory guidance seems also to express itself (silently) out of the wildernesses of psyche in fantasies, dreams, visions and , both helpfully and dangerously, in hallucinations.

Sound, the movement of waves of air molecules in the atmosphere, travels inwardly through the complex labyrinth of the human ear, in direct reversal of Plato’s theory of sight as an outward projection of fire. As intricate as a winding seashell, the ear gathers these waves into its cartilaginous auricle (the outer ear, or pinna), conducts them along spiraling coils formed by the shape of vibrating sound and stimulates the eardrum (or tympanus) to send waves through three of the body’s hardest and tiniest bones -the hammer, anvil and stirrup. These bones amplify air pressure within the eustachian tube, which applies pressure to the fluid inside the innermost chamber, the snail shaped cochlea. The sensation of sound then travels to the auditory cortex via acoustical nerves inside tiny hairs (the Organ of Corti) suspended in the fluid, each hair corresponding to a different frequency. Whether responding to a sneeze or to a sonata, this remarkable act of heating “bridges the ancient barrier between air and water, taking the sound waves, translating them into fluid waves, and then into electrical impulses” (Ackerman, 178). Since the inner chamber did not fill with fluid until animals evolved from sea to land creatures (Schwenk, 86), we can better understand the ear’s other vital function of maintaining our sense of balance once we lost the support of seawater.

Hindu cosmology refers to a primordial humming sound -the mantra om- that existed before the creation of light and remains audible to sages through profoundly introverted concentration. Medieval Christinas claimed that Christ (as the Word of God) was conceived in his mother’s womb after a dove entered her ear, while Rabelais wildly boasted that Gargantua was somehow born from his mother’s ear. The more sober Egyptian stele-artisans insisted that only the right ear received by the left ear, consistent with the widespread notion that the left side is that of the “sinister” -which, for alchemy, nevertheless seemed which with possibility. The psychoanalyst Theodor Reik, who once claimed that “the intangible that is invisible as well as untouchable can still be audible” (p.12), suggested in his classic text, Listening with the Third Ear, that we truly hear through greater use of our intuition. Alchemy understood “meditation” as a creative inner dialogue with “someone unseen”, what is enacted in psychic process as “a living relationship to the answering voice of the ‘other’ in ourselves,” by means of which, ear to ear, things unconscious and potential pass into consciousness and manifestation (CW 12:390)