Silent Hill
Silent hill. An invented hell
A living hell. A quiet hell
Heightened emotions.
No one to tell.
Blame somebody else
Forced. compelled
By blindness, pain and the
Idea of revenge.
Darkness. No help.
by inventing a perpetual enemy the crowd holds a better reality at bay
Or maybe the whole town is an accidental metaphor for the psyche of the primary victim. And its not the daughter that’s the victim. It’s the story of Rose, the mother and Silent Hill can be considered a metaphor for her subconscious. Her daughter is actually her soul. And her soul keeps running off. And her soul needs to get back to Silent Hill, to carry her awareness back there, to Silent Hill, where there are things to remember / fear / tremble over / but most importantly just to witness and process. She returns with daughter/soul in hand, to the image of a man whose not even there. Rose is the mother and Chris is the child’s father. The Rosicrucians would be impressed. Especially since they borrowed and barely changed the Rosicrucian cross to make the Silent Hill cross. The name Sharon though. I don’t get it. Unless she is like Cheron, the one who transports her mother Rose to the land of the dead. She releases her own darkness in the middle of a church, honors it, acknowledges and experiences its basic natures. She gathers up her daughter/soul and returns home, restored. But her husband unable to see her, ever, as if stuck in a different dimension. And yet its because they are one and the same now? I don’t understand, obviously. But he’s sleeping when she returns, maybe the fact that she can’t see him anymore, and he can’t see her, merely shows they’re operating on different levels now. He’s back in the everyday ordinary world, and she’s deep in the world of gnosis and spirit still.
--------------
All of the following are quotes from The Allure of Gnosticism... Quotes from Singer are in regular font. Quotes from Gnostic text “Exegesis on the Soul,” that she’s referencing throughout her work are in italics….
Wise men of old gave the soul a feminine name.
Indeed, she is female in her nature as well; she even has a womb.
As long as alone [in heaven] she was virgin and, in form, androgynous.
But when she fell down into a body and came to this life, she fell into the hands of many robbers.
The wanton creatures passed her from one to another, some took her by force, others seduced her with a gift.
They defiled her and she lost her innocence.
She prostituted herself, giving her body to one and all; each one she embraced, she considered to be her husband.
Even when she turned her face from those adulterers, she ran towards others.
They compelled her to live with them and render service to them upon their beds, as if they were her masters.
Out of shame, she no longer dared to leave them, while they decieved her, pretending to be faithful as if they greatly respected her.
After this, they abandoned her, and went away. - Exegesis on the soul
In this text, the soul is described as feminine; she even has a womb. But when she was with her father in heaven, she was androgynous.
What can this possibly mean for us? Heaven is the metaphor for Wholeness, for the Unity of all things. It is the dwelling place of the divine and in a certain sense is the divine. Jung understood this when he spoke of the archetype of the Self as the inner image of wholeness or completeness, in which everything exists along with its opposite: good and evil, light and dark, and all the rest, including the masculine and the feminine.
But when the Gnostics speak of soul, they speak in metaphor. The soul is not really female. The soul has qualities which liken it to a female, regardless of the sex of the actual person in whom the soul dwells. The soul is feminine because she is vulnerable in a particular way. She can be not only misused and abandoned but also entered into, raped, and contaminated.
The soul becomes a poor desolate widow, without help…
From the adulterers she gained nothing except the defilements they gave her while they had sexual intercourse with her,
And her offspring by them are dumb, blind, sickly, and stupid.
But when the Father who is above looks down upon her and sees her sighing, with her suffering and disgrace, and repenting of the prostitution in which she engaged,
And when she begins to call upon him, that he might help her, crying out with all her heart:”Save me, Father! I will repay you for abandoning my home. Restore me to yourself again!” - Exegesis on the Soul
Gnostics did not mean, literally, a patricarchal father-god, not at all. They thought of the one whom we call “god” as utterly unknowable and mysterious, one whom we cannot really say anything about because our words are limited and the mysterium tremendum which we would like to describe is beyond description. So “father” here means the invisible world of “otherness,” the world of the unknowable.
The terrifying state of the lost soul calling out to God in fear and trembling is a precondition for becoming whole again. She realizes as we all realize at one time or another: I absolutely do not know who I am, yet he absolutely knows. It is the sunken feeling of wanting with all your heart not to exist at all. Having descended into the darkest depths of the shadow, the soul returns, not so much to experience the mercy of God as to find out who she now is.
As long as the soul keeps running about everywhere, copulating with whomever she meets and defiling herself, she exists in suffering, and justly so.
But when she perceives the straits she is in and weeps before the Father and repents, the Father will have mercy upon her.
He will make her womb turn from the external domain and will turn it again inward, so that the soul will regain her proper character. - Exegesis on the Soul.
The task of the soul is to complete the divine program that is established for those who live in the world. It is a sort of life plan--an archetypal pattern, Jung would say: to find the lost fragments of Spirit, to know them for what they are, to liberate them and thereby to regain a state of wholeness with them. To do this the soul reaches out to her brother, the Logos. If the Logos, which appears in masculine form, represents an expression of the word or the light, then Sophia, the soul in its feminine form, represents that which receives the word or the light.
Then the soul must be purified and renewed before she can be restored to the condition of wholeness. In sacred myths, this is called the condition of “virginity.” It refers to a person who is one with herself, and not dependent upon the approval of others for identity or support. The process of the soul’s descent into the depths of the unconscious, its awakening into awareness, and its emergence into the light of consciousness is what I believe Jung meant when he spoke of the “individuation process.” Though such a process can never be adequately described in words, the metaphor of the soul’s journey reveals the agony and the glory that attend the experience.
For transformation to take place it is necessary to turn the womb inward. This is surely a strange metaphor! The text reads:
When the womb of the soul, by the will of the Father, turns itself inward,
It is baptized, and cleansed of the external pollution which was pressed upon it, like dirty garments which, when put into water and turned about until their dirt is removed, become clean.
In this way, the cleansing of the soul is to regain the newness of her former nature, and to turn herself back again . - Exegesis on the Soul
When we are ignorant of her presence, the soul runs about aimlessly like an orphan child to whom no one pays attention. She explores all sorts of places. Since there is no longer a connection with the inner Self to warn her where danger lurks, she knows neither fear nor caution. She solicits affection from any likely source. Easily decieved by flattery, she goes to whoever offers her the appearance of pleasure; yet she finds no pleasure in intimacy with strangers. Since she does not know where she belongs, she looks everywhere for a place to call home, not knowing that “home” is not a place but a manner of existance.
When we feel guilt or shame over what we have done or what we have allowed to be done to us, the first step toward healing is to turn inward. The womb turned outward suggests turning ourselves inside out to please others, to adapt to situations which are not right for us, to relinquish our autonomy for the sake of peace and quiet, to relinquish our deeply held beliefs for the sake of an immediate gain. To turn the womb inward is to give up the psychological prostitution that makes us feel compromised.
The text tells us what this process is like in a totally feminine expression:
The soul will begin to rage at herself like a woman in labor, who writhes and rages in the hour of delivery.
But being female, she is powerless to beget a child by herself.
The Father sends her man to her, her brother, the firstborn; the bride-groom comes down to the bride.
She has given up her former ways and cleansed herself; she is renewed so as to be a bride.
She adorns herself in the bridal chamber; she fills it with perfume.
She sits in waiting for the true bridegroom.
No longer does she run about the marketplace, copulating with whomever she desires.
She continues to wait for him, saying, “When will he come?”
She fears him, for she does not know what he looks like.
She no longer remembers, since she fell from her Father’s house.
By the will of the father, she dreams of him like a woman in love with a man. -Exegesis on the Soul
He descends to meet her, he who is that other aspect of her wholeness which she had forsaken, the one who is her brother, the first-born, the archetypal Man. Indeed, this first-born son of the alien and unknown God has been known by many names in diverse cultures. In human experience he appears in the psyche as the counterpart of the soul. Sometimes he is called “the Logos,” sometimes “the Christ.” In this context, Jung has called him “the symbol of the Self.” In our Gnostic narrative, he appears as the true bridegroom, with the soul as his bride.
The soul as bride is cleansed, renewed, and restored to her virginity; all that she had suffered is like a horrific dream that vanished in the light of dawn. She prepares the bridal chamber for herself and her bridegroom, making herself as lovely as possible. Who does not know the excitement of anticipating the lover who is the first true love of one’s life? The soul waits with such an impatient patience, longing for him yet wishing for the torturous rapture of her desire to be prolonged. She waits in delicious fear, savoring her curiosity about the unknown mate who will fulfill her and make her complete. She knew him once, when she was in the realm of the Father, but she no longer remembers him. And so she dreams, as we all dream, of the lost paradise, of the lost innocence, of that time that never was.
The ritual of the Sacred Marriage speaks to the archetypal union of heart to heart that surpasses every individual act. Entering that bridal chamber means to take that step into the hidden place and to lay aside all that belongs to the rational world. Here the opposites may join together in the most tender of relationships. Here boundaries dissolve, or we break through boundaries. Aspects of ourselves that were unknown to one another now become known in the fullest sense. All feelings of seperateness vanish.
But this happy reunion is not the end. So often when we attain a level of spiritual or pyschological development, we feel a new peace, a new energy, a sense of fulfillment. This is a very dangerous time, because we are tempted to fall back into the delicious sleep of unconsiousness. Were we to give way to the temptations that taunt us from every side, we could easily lapse into the former state. This would be all the more painful because now we have had a glimpse of what we could be, or what we might have been.
So now we find ourselves face to face with the greatest test of the soul’s evolution: the necessity of sustaining our new level of consciousness. We cannot get away with simply accepting a new state of being and putting the past away. We must look carefully at where we have gone astray and take personal responsibility for our part in bringing about what has happened to us.
How much suffering must we endure before we can begin to know our true selves? The allegory suggests that life requires that we submit to many kinds of experiences so that we may come to know what kind of stuff we are made of. In order to gauge our strength, we have to be tempered by fire. It is an easy thing to praise the gods when they shower us with blessings. But when we have lost everything, or our virtue, our pride, even our sense of who we are, it is not so easy to cry out for help to an alien God. The unknown God, like the absent mother, is far away from us and we are not even sure that God exists. Yet the very act of calling out to God leads us toward an awakening of consciousness.
Although we are whole at the moment of our birth, our lives become more and more fragmented as we live in the world. Each moment demands something else from us, and we are pulled away from our center. We lose our sense of the natural rhythms of life and of the Light that empowers their harmonious actions. We become like automatons, going where we are led by the information that is fed to us, by the fashions of the times, and by the words of those whose wisdom we fail to question. We become as the living dead. This used to be called “loss of soul,” but in our time it is termed depression, ennui, or complacency.
When the soul emerges at last from this darkness and is able to see with new eyes, we are free to move of our own accord. We need no longer remain captive in the web of senses and emotions but can move as the Spirit moves in us, with greater freedom. This as I see it, is the meaning of “resurrection.” When consciousness is enlightened, it happens in the here and now. The upward journey, the ascent into heaven, is a practice in which we can engage day by day--not an end that we must seek. Renewal is not “being born again.” It is an ongoing process that, like a garden, requires continuous hard work to bring forth an abundance of excellent flowers and fruit.
End of quotes.
----------
Silent Hill is filled with Gnostic themes. And if its themes were arrived at by accident, that is even better. Meaning that if the game designers or script writers deny knowingly adding gnostic elements, that is even better proof because it means the themes are immediate and instinctive. They’re probably not consciously trying to re-mythologize the story of “The Holy Prostitute” from the Exegesis of the Soul, but it’s certainly an interesting and oddly potent variant of the story. I’m starting to wonder if the woman cop isn’t meaningful as well, as if she represent the self-policing agent that normally would prevent Rose from going on a spiritual journey at all and that finally, for the sake of the child, sacrifices herself in order to help.
Silent Hill = The English Patient + Hell Raiser + Pitch Black + Exegesis on the Soul
Silent hill. An invented hell
A living hell. A quiet hell
Heightened emotions.
No one to tell.
Blame somebody else
Forced. compelled
By blindness, pain and the
Idea of revenge.
Darkness. No help.
by inventing a perpetual enemy the crowd holds a better reality at bay
Or maybe the whole town is an accidental metaphor for the psyche of the primary victim. And its not the daughter that’s the victim. It’s the story of Rose, the mother and Silent Hill can be considered a metaphor for her subconscious. Her daughter is actually her soul. And her soul keeps running off. And her soul needs to get back to Silent Hill, to carry her awareness back there, to Silent Hill, where there are things to remember / fear / tremble over / but most importantly just to witness and process. She returns with daughter/soul in hand, to the image of a man whose not even there. Rose is the mother and Chris is the child’s father. The Rosicrucians would be impressed. Especially since they borrowed and barely changed the Rosicrucian cross to make the Silent Hill cross. The name Sharon though. I don’t get it. Unless she is like Cheron, the one who transports her mother Rose to the land of the dead. She releases her own darkness in the middle of a church, honors it, acknowledges and experiences its basic natures. She gathers up her daughter/soul and returns home, restored. But her husband unable to see her, ever, as if stuck in a different dimension. And yet its because they are one and the same now? I don’t understand, obviously. But he’s sleeping when she returns, maybe the fact that she can’t see him anymore, and he can’t see her, merely shows they’re operating on different levels now. He’s back in the everyday ordinary world, and she’s deep in the world of gnosis and spirit still.
--------------
All of the following are quotes from The Allure of Gnosticism... Quotes from Singer are in regular font. Quotes from Gnostic text “Exegesis on the Soul,” that she’s referencing throughout her work are in italics….
Wise men of old gave the soul a feminine name.
Indeed, she is female in her nature as well; she even has a womb.
As long as alone [in heaven] she was virgin and, in form, androgynous.
But when she fell down into a body and came to this life, she fell into the hands of many robbers.
The wanton creatures passed her from one to another, some took her by force, others seduced her with a gift.
They defiled her and she lost her innocence.
She prostituted herself, giving her body to one and all; each one she embraced, she considered to be her husband.
Even when she turned her face from those adulterers, she ran towards others.
They compelled her to live with them and render service to them upon their beds, as if they were her masters.
Out of shame, she no longer dared to leave them, while they decieved her, pretending to be faithful as if they greatly respected her.
After this, they abandoned her, and went away. - Exegesis on the soul
In this text, the soul is described as feminine; she even has a womb. But when she was with her father in heaven, she was androgynous.
What can this possibly mean for us? Heaven is the metaphor for Wholeness, for the Unity of all things. It is the dwelling place of the divine and in a certain sense is the divine. Jung understood this when he spoke of the archetype of the Self as the inner image of wholeness or completeness, in which everything exists along with its opposite: good and evil, light and dark, and all the rest, including the masculine and the feminine.
But when the Gnostics speak of soul, they speak in metaphor. The soul is not really female. The soul has qualities which liken it to a female, regardless of the sex of the actual person in whom the soul dwells. The soul is feminine because she is vulnerable in a particular way. She can be not only misused and abandoned but also entered into, raped, and contaminated.
The soul becomes a poor desolate widow, without help…
From the adulterers she gained nothing except the defilements they gave her while they had sexual intercourse with her,
And her offspring by them are dumb, blind, sickly, and stupid.
But when the Father who is above looks down upon her and sees her sighing, with her suffering and disgrace, and repenting of the prostitution in which she engaged,
And when she begins to call upon him, that he might help her, crying out with all her heart:”Save me, Father! I will repay you for abandoning my home. Restore me to yourself again!” - Exegesis on the Soul
Gnostics did not mean, literally, a patricarchal father-god, not at all. They thought of the one whom we call “god” as utterly unknowable and mysterious, one whom we cannot really say anything about because our words are limited and the mysterium tremendum which we would like to describe is beyond description. So “father” here means the invisible world of “otherness,” the world of the unknowable.
The terrifying state of the lost soul calling out to God in fear and trembling is a precondition for becoming whole again. She realizes as we all realize at one time or another: I absolutely do not know who I am, yet he absolutely knows. It is the sunken feeling of wanting with all your heart not to exist at all. Having descended into the darkest depths of the shadow, the soul returns, not so much to experience the mercy of God as to find out who she now is.
As long as the soul keeps running about everywhere, copulating with whomever she meets and defiling herself, she exists in suffering, and justly so.
But when she perceives the straits she is in and weeps before the Father and repents, the Father will have mercy upon her.
He will make her womb turn from the external domain and will turn it again inward, so that the soul will regain her proper character. - Exegesis on the Soul.
The task of the soul is to complete the divine program that is established for those who live in the world. It is a sort of life plan--an archetypal pattern, Jung would say: to find the lost fragments of Spirit, to know them for what they are, to liberate them and thereby to regain a state of wholeness with them. To do this the soul reaches out to her brother, the Logos. If the Logos, which appears in masculine form, represents an expression of the word or the light, then Sophia, the soul in its feminine form, represents that which receives the word or the light.
Then the soul must be purified and renewed before she can be restored to the condition of wholeness. In sacred myths, this is called the condition of “virginity.” It refers to a person who is one with herself, and not dependent upon the approval of others for identity or support. The process of the soul’s descent into the depths of the unconscious, its awakening into awareness, and its emergence into the light of consciousness is what I believe Jung meant when he spoke of the “individuation process.” Though such a process can never be adequately described in words, the metaphor of the soul’s journey reveals the agony and the glory that attend the experience.
For transformation to take place it is necessary to turn the womb inward. This is surely a strange metaphor! The text reads:
When the womb of the soul, by the will of the Father, turns itself inward,
It is baptized, and cleansed of the external pollution which was pressed upon it, like dirty garments which, when put into water and turned about until their dirt is removed, become clean.
In this way, the cleansing of the soul is to regain the newness of her former nature, and to turn herself back again . - Exegesis on the Soul
When we are ignorant of her presence, the soul runs about aimlessly like an orphan child to whom no one pays attention. She explores all sorts of places. Since there is no longer a connection with the inner Self to warn her where danger lurks, she knows neither fear nor caution. She solicits affection from any likely source. Easily decieved by flattery, she goes to whoever offers her the appearance of pleasure; yet she finds no pleasure in intimacy with strangers. Since she does not know where she belongs, she looks everywhere for a place to call home, not knowing that “home” is not a place but a manner of existance.
When we feel guilt or shame over what we have done or what we have allowed to be done to us, the first step toward healing is to turn inward. The womb turned outward suggests turning ourselves inside out to please others, to adapt to situations which are not right for us, to relinquish our autonomy for the sake of peace and quiet, to relinquish our deeply held beliefs for the sake of an immediate gain. To turn the womb inward is to give up the psychological prostitution that makes us feel compromised.
The text tells us what this process is like in a totally feminine expression:
The soul will begin to rage at herself like a woman in labor, who writhes and rages in the hour of delivery.
But being female, she is powerless to beget a child by herself.
The Father sends her man to her, her brother, the firstborn; the bride-groom comes down to the bride.
She has given up her former ways and cleansed herself; she is renewed so as to be a bride.
She adorns herself in the bridal chamber; she fills it with perfume.
She sits in waiting for the true bridegroom.
No longer does she run about the marketplace, copulating with whomever she desires.
She continues to wait for him, saying, “When will he come?”
She fears him, for she does not know what he looks like.
She no longer remembers, since she fell from her Father’s house.
By the will of the father, she dreams of him like a woman in love with a man. -Exegesis on the Soul
He descends to meet her, he who is that other aspect of her wholeness which she had forsaken, the one who is her brother, the first-born, the archetypal Man. Indeed, this first-born son of the alien and unknown God has been known by many names in diverse cultures. In human experience he appears in the psyche as the counterpart of the soul. Sometimes he is called “the Logos,” sometimes “the Christ.” In this context, Jung has called him “the symbol of the Self.” In our Gnostic narrative, he appears as the true bridegroom, with the soul as his bride.
The soul as bride is cleansed, renewed, and restored to her virginity; all that she had suffered is like a horrific dream that vanished in the light of dawn. She prepares the bridal chamber for herself and her bridegroom, making herself as lovely as possible. Who does not know the excitement of anticipating the lover who is the first true love of one’s life? The soul waits with such an impatient patience, longing for him yet wishing for the torturous rapture of her desire to be prolonged. She waits in delicious fear, savoring her curiosity about the unknown mate who will fulfill her and make her complete. She knew him once, when she was in the realm of the Father, but she no longer remembers him. And so she dreams, as we all dream, of the lost paradise, of the lost innocence, of that time that never was.
The ritual of the Sacred Marriage speaks to the archetypal union of heart to heart that surpasses every individual act. Entering that bridal chamber means to take that step into the hidden place and to lay aside all that belongs to the rational world. Here the opposites may join together in the most tender of relationships. Here boundaries dissolve, or we break through boundaries. Aspects of ourselves that were unknown to one another now become known in the fullest sense. All feelings of seperateness vanish.
But this happy reunion is not the end. So often when we attain a level of spiritual or pyschological development, we feel a new peace, a new energy, a sense of fulfillment. This is a very dangerous time, because we are tempted to fall back into the delicious sleep of unconsiousness. Were we to give way to the temptations that taunt us from every side, we could easily lapse into the former state. This would be all the more painful because now we have had a glimpse of what we could be, or what we might have been.
So now we find ourselves face to face with the greatest test of the soul’s evolution: the necessity of sustaining our new level of consciousness. We cannot get away with simply accepting a new state of being and putting the past away. We must look carefully at where we have gone astray and take personal responsibility for our part in bringing about what has happened to us.
How much suffering must we endure before we can begin to know our true selves? The allegory suggests that life requires that we submit to many kinds of experiences so that we may come to know what kind of stuff we are made of. In order to gauge our strength, we have to be tempered by fire. It is an easy thing to praise the gods when they shower us with blessings. But when we have lost everything, or our virtue, our pride, even our sense of who we are, it is not so easy to cry out for help to an alien God. The unknown God, like the absent mother, is far away from us and we are not even sure that God exists. Yet the very act of calling out to God leads us toward an awakening of consciousness.
Although we are whole at the moment of our birth, our lives become more and more fragmented as we live in the world. Each moment demands something else from us, and we are pulled away from our center. We lose our sense of the natural rhythms of life and of the Light that empowers their harmonious actions. We become like automatons, going where we are led by the information that is fed to us, by the fashions of the times, and by the words of those whose wisdom we fail to question. We become as the living dead. This used to be called “loss of soul,” but in our time it is termed depression, ennui, or complacency.
When the soul emerges at last from this darkness and is able to see with new eyes, we are free to move of our own accord. We need no longer remain captive in the web of senses and emotions but can move as the Spirit moves in us, with greater freedom. This as I see it, is the meaning of “resurrection.” When consciousness is enlightened, it happens in the here and now. The upward journey, the ascent into heaven, is a practice in which we can engage day by day--not an end that we must seek. Renewal is not “being born again.” It is an ongoing process that, like a garden, requires continuous hard work to bring forth an abundance of excellent flowers and fruit.
End of quotes.
----------
Silent Hill is filled with Gnostic themes. And if its themes were arrived at by accident, that is even better. Meaning that if the game designers or script writers deny knowingly adding gnostic elements, that is even better proof because it means the themes are immediate and instinctive. They’re probably not consciously trying to re-mythologize the story of “The Holy Prostitute” from the Exegesis of the Soul, but it’s certainly an interesting and oddly potent variant of the story. I’m starting to wonder if the woman cop isn’t meaningful as well, as if she represent the self-policing agent that normally would prevent Rose from going on a spiritual journey at all and that finally, for the sake of the child, sacrifices herself in order to help.
Silent Hill = The English Patient + Hell Raiser + Pitch Black + Exegesis on the Soul